30 Years Later: The Sept Six (1 of 2)

Here’s a throwback episode with Paul Toscano. I thought it would be great to re-visit our previous interview from January 9, 2023 since we discusses Paul Toscano so much with the Janice Allred interview. Enjoy!

It’s been 30 years since six intellectuals were excommunicated all in the month of September from the LDS Church. This is why they’re know as the Sept Six. News spread quickly and sent a chill in the academic community. Paul Toscano looks back on those events from 30 years ago, and tells what happened, why, and who was involved. Check out our conversation…

Gospel Tangents

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GT 00:32 Welcome to Gospel Tangents. It’s been 30 years since the September Six. And so in [remembrance] of that, I have one of the original September Six. Could you go ahead and tell us who you are?

Paul 00:45 I’m Paul Toscano. And I was and am one of the September Six.

GT 00:51 This is going to be fantastic. We’ve already gotten Mike Quinn. Unfortunately, Mike passed away, so we won’t be getting him. But we’re going to try to get as many of the others [on] as we can. For those who aren’t familiar with the September Six, can you give us a little brief definition and then a little summary, as we get started here?

Paul 01:12 Yes, I’d be happy to do that. The September Six; September is referring to September of 1993. So, that’s 30 years ago, coming up soon. And the six [people] are Lynne Whitesides, who was disfellowshipped on September 12, 1993. She was supposed to be excommunicated, but her bishop couldn’t do it to her, but it wound up that she’s permanently disfellowshipped. So, I don’t know the difference between that and excommunication. I think they’re probably very close. Avraham Gileadi, who does not like to think of himself as a member of the September Six, for whatever reason. He was excommunicated on September the 15^th, which was the following Wednesday. And then Maxine Hanks was excommunicated on Sunday, September the 19^th in Salt Lake City. It so happens that on the same day. I was excommunicated in Cottonwood, which is south of Salt Lake City in the Murray/Cottonwood area, and that was on the 19^th. And then on the 23^rd, which was, I think, a Thursday, if I recall, of September. Lavina Fielding Anderson was excommunicated, although she did not attend her High Council or her bishops court or whatever it was that they held on her. And then, on the 26^th of September, which was a Sunday, Mike Quinn was excommunicated. Memory does not serve me as to where he was. I know that he could have been in Salt Lake. But I think he might have been in Rancho Cucamonga in California. That’s where he lived later and where he died last year. Well, it would be 2021 he died.

GT 03:16 Right.

Paul 03:18 And so I’m going to introduce you and the audience to two books. One is this book by Philip Lindholm. And I hope you can catch it on camera. And it’s called Latter-day Dissent. And this, it contains interviews with the September Six and some others. My wife is interviewed because, actually, Boyd Packer went after her before he went after any of the six and it was because he went after her that I got involved. And then he went after me through Kerry Hines, our stake president who was an old friend of his. That was because Margaret is just a nice person, and I’m much more obstreperous and obnoxious, much more suitable for excommunication fodder. But, anyway, this book, it’s a really good book. It has a great introduction to the things that led up to September of 1993. And it has the interviews, and it also has an interview from Dean Jesse who talked about the Church’s position, and why they did what they did. I’m not sure it’s as candid as it should be. But there it is, in the book.

GT 04:24 It seems like I remember Philip, because I read that book, and he said that most interviews were generally unedited, except for Dean Jesse, or the last one there. His was edited quite a bit, quite highly.

Paul 04:38 Yes. Yes. I don’t know that. But I don’t have any doubt that Lindholm was telling you the truth. The other book I could introduce is a book that I wrote called, Road to Exile: Conversion and Excommunication of a Mormon Misfit, that’s me. And that caricature was done by my daughter, Mary, who’s an artist. And in this book, it’s really not about all of the others. It’s not about the September Six. It’s about how I got excommunicated. But I get converted from Catholicism to Mormonism in 1963. And then 30 years later,1993, I’m excommunicated. And so, after 30 years in the Church, I’m booted out. This tells about how that happened, and about my personality that would lend myself to being excommunication material.

Paul 05:42 I’m proud of the part at the back. I put a lot of copies of letters and we didn’t have the email. So, they’re just letters back and forth. And there are articles from the Salt Lake Tribune that covered this. And they’re all in, I got permission from the Salt Lake Tribune to republish them. So, they’re in this book. But this is a memoir. And this is really more of an interview book. But together, with his introduction in this book, I think you get a pretty good idea of what happened.

Paul 06:15 So that’s who the September Six are. And it was a purge. The Church says it wasn’t a purge. But there’s evidence that it was a purge.

Boyd K Packer’s Role in Sept Six

Paul 06:32 And it was, I think, orchestrated mostly by Boyd K. Packer, who’s no longer with us, he’s gone to his great reward.

GT 06:40 So, we won’t be talking to him.

Paul 06:41 We won’t be able to talk to him, although the veil is thin. He may show up and defend himself. But the reason why he was able to do this, not in the First Presidency; he was in the Council of the Twelve. He was a senior member of the Twelve. But he wasn’t the senior member. It was because Ezra Benson was, I think he fell off his horse or something. And after that, he was non-compos mentis, and he was mostly comatose, or in and out of that. You can get a better picture of that, from going to Steve Benson’s website. If you look up Steve Benson September Six, or I can get that information to you. You can put it into the transcript, but he tells about how his grandfather was not functioning as President of the Church.

Paul 06:41 So, when that happens, when a president is not functional, the way that Church governance happens is that the first and second counselor to President Benson, who were then Gordon Hinckley and Thomas Monson, in that order, and those two joined with the Twelve Apostles to create 14 people that become the apostolic interregnum. That is, they, as the Council of the First Presidency of the Council of the Twelve, they run the Church. And that gives the members of the Council of the Twelve a lot more say so, because they’re actually functioning as in the First Presidency, so to speak, in this temporary situation. Because of that, Boyd Packer was able to convince the others, because he’s very convincing, and he bullied people, certainly.

GT 08:43 Howard Hunter was the President of the Twelve, at the time, wasn’t he?

Paul 08:46 I believe so.

GT 08:47 Because he was the next president of the Church.

Paul 08:48 Well, I think you’re right. I think he was President of the Twelve. But he wasn’t a counselor in the First Presidency.

GT 08:53 Right.

Paul 08:54 So, he was the President at Twelve. Incidentally, I have a story that I got about the time I was excommunicated in about October of ’93. I had a law partner who was very close to the Hinckleys and the family leadership of the Church, the Huntsmans. And she told me that she was at a party right after I was excommunicated with some of the Hinckleys and the Huntsmans and some other people. And I don’t want to be that any more specific than that, which is specific enough. And Gordon Hinckley was there with Marjorie, and he didn’t participate in the conversation, but he was listening to it. And his son said, “Well, if Paul and Margaret had been in our stake, they’d never been excommunicated. Because they didn’t do anything that was apostate.” And Huntsman said that he was the stake president for Howard Hunter.

GT 10:09 Is this John Jr. or John Sr.?

Paul 10:11 Senior.

GT 10:12 Okay. He recently passed away.

Paul 10:14 Yeah, he recently passed away. He was the stake president for Howard Hunter and Howard Hunter [was at the party.] He [Paul’s friend] told the story at this party. He said that Howard Hunter calls me up periodically to give him a blessing, because he has such negative feelings and depression and general dark feelings whenever he’s around Boyd Packer. So, I derived from the stories that I was told by my law partner, who was present at the party, that the decision to excommunicate the people in September of 1993 was not a unanimous, revelatory decision of the leaders of the Church.

GT 11:09 Well, it’s funny to me because Packer was probably middle of the Quorum of the Twelve, back in ’93. Right?

Paul 11:17 He always overextended himself. When he was a junior apostle, a junior apostle, he managed to get Harold B. Lee to make him in charge of the Adult Correlation Committee, to make Hinckley in charge of the children’s program, the Primary, because he was such a bully. I mean, I remember when I was at BYU, and Scott Duncan was the editor of the yearbook when I was a senior, or maybe I was a graduate student.

GT 11:55 Did you grow up in Utah?

Paul 11:56 No, no, I was born in Brooklyn, New York and grew up in Southern California.

GT 12:00 You don’t sound like you’re from New York.

Paul 12:02 Well, I can sound like that. Anyway, if you get me off, I can’t get back. I don’t know what I was talking about.

GT 12:14 (Chuckling) We were talking about somebody at your school that was this student body president.

Paul 12:19 Oh, gosh, I was going to tell a good story.

GT 12:21 Sorry.

Paul 12:22 That’s okay. I can’t remember what I was going to say. What was I talking about? I was talking about Boyd Packer. And I think you asked me a question.

GT 12:34 He was in the middle of the pack of the Quorum of the Twelve.

Paul 12:36 He was in the middle of the pack. And I was saying that he bullied his way to get into the leadership. He had more authority than his seniors in the Council of the Twelve, because he was very good at positioning himself. He just was that way. He was tough. He wanted to punch homosexuals in the face. And he made these statements to missionaries about that he wasn’t averse to violence under certain circumstances. He’s no longer with us. So, anyway, I got myself derailed and I can’t get back on. So, I will let you ask me the next question. What were we talking about talking about?

GT 13:26 So, it’s just funny because, basically, you said the President Benson was incapacitated. So, Hinckley and Monson kind of went with the Quorum of Twelve.

Avraham Gileadi

Paul 13:40 Right. And so one of the things that Boyd Packer engineered, I think it was a month or two before September, was that Avraham’s stake president, who think was his name was Randall Gibbs down in Salem, Utah. He [the stake president] wouldn’t excommunicate Avraham. He was told by Malcolm Jepsen, who was the area president of that area where Salem is and Utah County and San Pete County.

GT 14:10 He was a Seventy.

Paul 14:11 He was a Seventy and he was told to get Avraham excommunicated by, he said the First Presidency and the apostles, that’s how he put it in his journal. But really, I think it was Boyd was taking the lead on that. And Randall Gibb wouldn’t do it. So, they changed stake presidents and got a BYU religion teacher by the name of Leaun Otten. And Leaun Otten. he spells his name like Leaun and he did it. He excommunicated Avraham. And Avraham, within 18 months got rebaptized. And he never wanted to do interviews. He never wanted to participate in anything related to the September Six, because he was humiliated by the whole experience and felt like he had never done anything wrong.

GT 15:14 Well, the five of you were more left wing, right? And then he was more of a right-winger? Is that a good way to say it?

Paul 15:22 I suppose. We’re not talking politically.

GT 15:24 Right.

Paul 15:25 We’re talking religiously, Avraham is very conservative. He not only observes all the Mormon holidays and federal holidays and state holidays, but all the Jewish holidays. And I wouldn’t be surprised if he just lives his life by the liturgical calendar. I mean, I knew him. But that’s over 30-35 years ago.

GT 15:52 So, you think he participates in Lent, as well?

Paul 15:54 I don’t know. I can’t answer for him. I think that he moves more toward fundamentalism, than– I wouldn’t say polygamous fundamentalism, but he’s more fundamental in his thinking. I mean, I can tell you what I think he taught. He taught about Isaiah. He presents himself as an Isaiah scholar. I am not qualified to make a judgment on that. I don’t know how he would be received among credentialed Isaiah scholars–schools of theology, but he may know more than they do, for all I know. Because I understand what credentials are actually worth. It depends on the person, not really the school and their firepower. And I think Avraham had considerable firepower, it wasn’t that. I think one of the things he may have said that got him crosswise, to be honest with you, is that throughout the Book of Mormon, and in some places, in the Old Testament, there is a phrase that the Lord will set his hand, again, the second time. This is repeated in several places in the Book of Mormon, the Book of Ether, Nephi, Alma. There’s this phrase about how the Lord will set his hand, again, the second time. Well, you can interpret that to mean, Mormons can interpret that to mean the Restoration, Jesus came, and then the Restoration of the gospel happens through Joseph Smith. And that’s again the second time. But you can also interpret it to mean a second, second time.

GT 17:29 A third time.

Paul 17:29 A third time, right. If Avraham was giving that idea out, there isn’t going to be yet another restoration because Mormonism failed. Right? If some people were picking that up from whatever– I’m not saying he presented that. I’m saying if that was picked up, then it could have led to a misunderstanding that would have led to his excommunication. I am not saying that’s what happened. I’m just saying that, as I recall, if memory serves, that was one of the things that I’d read in his book on Isaiah. But my memory isn’t that great.

Causes of Trouble

GT 18:15 All right. So, tell us what precipitated the whole problem. Because it sounded like your wife was kind of the one who was headed off, right?

Paul 18:24 Well, yes. In a way, the fuse was lit over her, although the explosive had been being stacked up for a year before it. Lindholm does a great job of talking about this. And my memory isn’t good enough to remember all the details. But if you go back to ’91, I believe it was before the Sunstone Symposium of ’91. There was some kind of a memorandum or I can’t think of the right word, about symposia.

GT 19:06 Statement Against Symposia.

Paul 19:07 That’s it! Statement Against Symposia. Oh, I’m so glad you’re here to help me. But it came out in 1991. Now before the Salt Lake Sunstone symposium, which happened for many years, beginning in the 1970s, it was called the Theological Symposium. It is not that anymore. Theology is nowhere to be found; I think. But back in those days, it was called the Salt Lake Sunstone Symposium. And BYU professors would come to it. People from the other universities in the state, teachers, PhDs, researchers, historians, Church employees from the Church Historian’s Office would come and they put on quite a show. It was quite a show. I never really attended Sunstone until 1985, which was the year the Hofmann bombs went off in October. But I went to the Sunstone Symposium that year. I made my first presentations, then. And then I made two presentations a year, right up until the time I was excommunicated, and I think maybe in 1994. And then [I] took a hiatus until about 2003. Margaret made her first presentation a year before mine, in 1984. So before that, I wasn’t really aware of what was going on. But when I went the first time in ’84, when I went to hear Margaret, I mean, when I went first time to hear Margaret’s in 84. And then made my own presentations in ’85. Everybody came to Sunstone. It was not considered off limits until 1991, when the Church issued a statement on symposia, putting it off limits.

GT 21:12 And that was in 1991, that they issued that statement.

Paul 21:14 Yes, 1991, when they did that. That kind of got things–there was tension, the intellectuals began to feel tension.

GT 21:25 See, I can remember because I was in college, and I remember being like, “What are they talking about?” Because I don’t think I’d even heard of Sunstone in 1991.

Paul 21:34 And then somewhere along the line, Dallin Oaks, who was made an apostle in 1984. In ’84, I actually went to see him because I was his research assistant, briefly, for a few months when he was president of BYU. And so, in ’84, after he became an apostle, I think we had an exchange where he was worried about something that I had written and published in a book called Gospel Letters to a Mormon Missionary, where I had said that you can be ordained to the priesthood, but not have the Spirit. Or you can have the Spirit, without the priesthood. I said, “Optimally, priesthood bearers should have the office and the charismatic gifts, but they don’t necessarily come.” That’s what the Section 121 says, “The powers of the priesthood are inseparably connected to the powers of heaven. But if they aren’t, amen to the priesthood of that man,” which means that if you don’t have these charismatic gifts, if you’re not connected to the Godhead through the Spirit, your priesthood, I mean, your official functions are going to be valid, but you’re not really going to be functioning in the priesthood in any significant way.

Paul 22:51 Well, he was all worried about this. Dallin Oaks is telling me, “Don’t you think this is dangerous?”

Paul 22:59 I said, “Well, you’re worried about people who have charisma, but you haven’t appointed them. That’s what you’re worried about. I don’t see that happening a lot. What I see happening a lot is you ordain people who don’t have the spirit. You’ve got mission presidents who see the missionary program as a sales program.” I mean, that’s why you had baseball baptisms in England. That’s why this kind of stuff happens. You send boys on mission, and you send men. You get them out of business, and you think somehow their business experience is going to translate over into being mission president, a spiritual leader, a priest of the Most High God and they’re not there. They’re just not and you don’t seem to worry about this.

Paul 23:51 And he said, “Well, we’re doing our best.”

Paul 23:53 I said, “I don’t see that. I don’t see that you’re doing your best.” And I may have told this story before. But I said to him, “I’m not saying you’re not apostles. You’re just the worst apostles we’ve ever had in the history of Christianity.” He was so startled at that statement, because no one addresses the apostles as equals, which is the reason, really, I was excommunicated. I was insubordinate, by which they mean, I treated them as equals, and they cannot tolerate that. And so that really was the root of my excommunication.

Paul 24:31 Margaret’s excommunication, which came seven years after 1993, on November 30 of 2000. She was excommunicated for advancing the priesthood promises that were made by Joseph Smith to women, and that’s why she was in a pickle. Mike Quinn was in a pickle because he [wrote about] post-manifesto, polygamy but, also, because he was a homosexual and so they were all upset at this, and they can’t think through these things very well. Because they grow up marinated in privilege. And they’re marinated in a certain set of ideas, especially Boyd Packer. Now, this was not true of some of the other apostles. I mean, it was certainly not true of Howard Hunter. And there are other apostles, I think, even like Jeff Holland, he makes mistakes. But you can see he’s not marinated in the sense of elitism and privilege. But some of them are. Certainly, I think Russell Nelson is, and it’s hard to know what Henry Eyring was thinking about anything. He’s balancing the books and counting the money that’s in the Ensign Peak account with 124,000 millions of dollars. You know, he’s got his hands full. And they’re building temples all over. So, they’ve got their hands full managing the Church. They think I’m an enemy of the Church, even now, because I’m so frank. But the Church does a lot of good things. It’s just not good when it comes to theology, and when it comes to the gospel. It’s not good at that. And I would say these things, this was all for 30 years I’ve said them and then for the years before. So, yes, the symposium was shut down. So, now who’s going to the symposium? Only people like me, who have complaints. The people who are defending the Church, don’t go to the symposium anymore. And that was good. We could talk to each other, and we would listen to each other. I mean, when I was complaining, then, about the Church, I was…

GT 24:31 In the 1980s, you’re talking about.

Paul 25:37 In 1991, and 1992, in that period of time, when I was complaining, which I started in 1985. So, eight years, from ’85 to ’93, I’m complaining. And my complaints are getting more hysterical, because no one’s listening. I’m telling them foundational things.

GT 27:07 When you say no one, are you saying the apostles are not listening?

Paul 27:10 Yeah, I mean, the people at Sunstone, listen, and I wrote essays that people don’t read, and you get the sense that no one was paying attention to you. I think they do listen. They do listen, but they don’t hearken. Like, for example, they wouldn’t have needed to excommunicate me. Boyd Packer could have picked up the phone and said, “Come up here,” and I would have come up to his office. He would be yelled at me, and I would have talked to him. And I said, “Look, why don’t we have a truce and just talk about this. Because I think your problem is that you take the gospel, and you take the theology of Mormonism, very seriously. But you’re not a close reader. So, you don’t know when you get up in conference, you don’t know how to straighten things out. Like, you take that statement that’s very ambiguous in the Book of Mormon,” you can help me, where it says, “We’re saved after all we can do.”

GT 28:04 Saved by grace, after all we can do.

Paul 28:05 It’s 2^nd Nephi, “We’re saved by grace, after all we can do.” Well, that either means we’re saved by grace, in spite of all we can do. After all we can do, it doesn’t amount to anything, what we’ve done, because we have to be saved by grace, it can mean that. Or it can mean we are saved by grace, only after all we can do. So, works matter. Well works always matter in the sense of horizontally, as we relate to other people, works matter. If I punch you in the face, that’s a bad work. And if I serve you free dinner, it’s a good work. Right? I mean, it’s horizontal. But works don’t matter on the vertical between us and God. We cannot do a sufficient amount of good works on this planet that will be enough to earn heaven. Heaven is so great and wonderful that nothing we can do on this planet, in this reality of entropy, where everything is always falling apart…I’m a perfect example of that. You can’t can’t earn your way. So, you’re saved by grace. And it there’s a prevenient grace that we’re born with, and we’re encouraged to seek truth, and the other thing is, if you fail in this regard, it doesn’t mean you’re going to go to hell, because Mormons don’t believe in hell. Let me remind you, folks, the big selling point, Mormonism doesn’t believe in Hell, we believe in degrees of glory. Even the worst people go to the incomprehensible kingdom of glory. See, I did that. They don’t do that. It’s a big selling point, but they kind of bury the lead. So, what are you going to do with these people? So, the saved by grace or the fact that we don’t believe in Hell is not the things they’re talking about. What are they talking about? They’re talking about silly things like birth control, which is none of their business. Or they’re talking about body piercings. Jesus had body piercings.

GT 30:09 Oh really?

Paul 30:10 Yeah. {Paul points to Jesus’s crucifixion wounds.} Jesus had body piercings. Some believe he had tattoos when he came out of Egypt. We don’t know. He was a little. Our leaders are not good religious leaders. I have to give them credit. They got the church out of debt. In the 1950s, they were in debt and now we’ve got huge tons of money. I don’t know what they’re going to do with it.

GT 30:41 I don’t know what your original charge of apostasy was. But wouldn’t this be considered speaking ill of the Lord’s anointed?

Paul 30:48 Yeah, it is speaking ill of the Lord’s anointed, but it’s also true. Speaking ill means untruth, lying about them. Saying they’ve done something, that they’re running a child molesting thing out of the pizza place in Washington D.C. or some crazy thing like Hillary Clinton was accused of. That’s slander or libel. Yes, that’s evil speaking. But when you tell the truth, how do they? They don’t self-correct. I mean, when the Prophet in the Old Testament was going astray, he was spoken to by Balaam’s ass. Well, if Balaam’s can correct a prophet, so can I. The thing is, it tests their humility. I’m not saying that I’m the prophet of God. I’m not saying I get revelation, I’m just pointing out that there are serious they don’t [discuss.] I mean, if you listen to their conference talks, they’re horribly boring. I think Mormonism is one of the most interesting religions on the face of the planet. But they, somehow, if you go to sacrament meeting and the High Council is speaking, he may choose or may be required to give a speech on the name extraction program. And if you happen to have brought an investigator to that meeting, that investigator is going to wonder, “Where’s Jesus in all of this?” And it’s true, he’s on the Book of Mormon cover and on the chapel logos. But if you get into Mormon theology, you find that he’s the messenger of the Father. And I’ve said this in the last interview I did with you on the Serpent and the Dove. There’s nothing in Mormon scripture that would suggest that Jesus has a superior deity, or that the deities go back infinitely. That’s just kind of a Newtonian nonsense that we made up in the 19^th century. It’s silly. But what is true is that between ’85 and ’93, I was becoming more hysterical, because I could feel like the Church was doing things that was going to cause them to lose their membership.

Paul 33:16 So, in 1992, I and a number of other people, I think, I can’t remember all their names now. But we organize the Mormon Alliance. Janice Allred, Margaret and I, some other people. We all got together, and we formed the Mormon Alliance, with the idea of defending the Church from defamation from without, and also from abuses by leaders from within. So, the idea is that we don’t want to be abused, either foreign or domestic. We don’t want either one of those things. We want the saints to be able to think freely and express themselves without fear or favor, and that we can stand up to the people outside the Church who are getting the wrong idea about what kind of religion we were. Well, one of the things that the Mormon Alliance trustees took on, they took on two things that I can recall that were controversial. You can get still get these case reports about physical, sexual abuse by bishops on younger people. And we were collecting those reports and giving a voice to those people and trying to get the Church to respond to those and defend itself. But they wouldn’t. They never responded. “We don’t apologize,” says Dallin Oaks. They don’t apologize.

GT 34:55 He also said something about, “Don’t criticize leaders, even if it’s true.”

Paul 34:59 Yeah, “Don’t criticize leaders, because we’re appointed by God. You can’t criticize us.” Well, then why in the Doctrine and Covenants, is there a whole section about how to excommunicate the President of the Church? Why is that there? Why did Jesus criticize the Sadducees and Pharisees? Yeah, he’s the Supreme Being, but not when He was on earth. He was just that Rabbi from Galilee that Podunk place up north. It’s crazy. Of course, you have to be able to bring your leaders to account, because if you don’t bring your leaders to account– and Joseph F. Smith, the sixth president of the Church, gave discourses about, “Don’t just be followers. You have to stand up to the leaders and don’t be cowed by us” Well, we bury that. They bury a lot of things. So, yes, don’t criticize your leaders. So, the two things I was talking about were the things that the Mormon Alliance did. One was the case studies, which were about mostly bishops because they have the interviews with children and with young people. And there were cases where the bishops were sexually abusing. This is not about satanic stuff. It was just actual reports. And there were cases that went to court, and they were all sealed. And the Church settles these quietly. But these leaders have to be brought to account, because they’re not perfect people. They make mistakes, some of them commit crimes.

Paul 36:40 The other thing we did was that in early 1993, it was in April and May of 1993, so just a few months before the excommunications happened. The trustees of the Mormon Alliance got together at my house, and sometimes at a conference room somewhere. I can’t remember where it was. We were putting together a letter to the leaders of the Church, which we completed. It took six weeks of meetings where we would all meet together, editing this thing, working, so we could all agree on the language and on the content. And it was a wonderful letter. It’s in my book here, I’ve included it. And it was a wonderful letter that outlined what we felt the leaders needed to avoid doing. We weren’t telling them what to do. We were telling them what to avoid. One of the things that we told them to avoid was you can’t hold disciplinary church courts on people in the stakes that are being engineered from Salt Lake. You’re pulling the strings. I mean, if the Doctrine and Covenants says that a Melchizedek priesthood bearer has to be tried by the High Council, you can’t have the Quorum of the Twelve, instigating this from Salt Lake and pulling the strings. Because these high councilmen will lose all their independence. So, you can’t pretend. You can’t hide that you can’t do it. Stop doing that. Stop using the…

GT 38:18 They haven’t stopped now, have they?

Paul 38:20 No, they haven’t. I said you can’t use the bishop’s endorsement at BYU as a way of controlling kids. Their religion is separate from their education. You can’t threaten to throw them out of BYU and waste all that money in education. Even though a lot of it is paid by tithing, that’s not a reason. I mean, you complain about the federal government extorting us by handouts. You know, we won’t give you the federal money unless you obey us. That’s kind of what you’re doing. Stop. Because the kids will remember, and they will lose their faith. You cannot coerce morality and you cannot coerce spirituality and you cannot coerce devotion. But they love coercion. They do it to each other in the Council of the Twelve. The Council of Twelve isn’t this way [horizontal], the Council into Twelve is this way [vertical.] And every junior apostle has his nose planted firmly between the buttocks of the apostle on the ladder ahead of him. Yes, I know you don’t like it because it’s vulgar. What they do is much worse than vulgarity.

GT 39:35 Except Packer.

Paul 39:37 Well, Packer wouldn’t do that. That’s exactly right. He bullied his way around that a lot of the time but in the end, I mean, he was having arguments…

GT 39:46 And Lee was another one.

Paul 39:47 Oh, Lee was just very upset at everybody all the time he was there.

GT 39:56 It seems like J Reuben Clark, Harold B. Lee and Boyd K. Packer…

Paul 40:00 It started, really, with J. Reuben Clark, because J. Reuben Clark never went to church for 40 years and then was in the First Presidency. Here’s the guy who invented Family Home Evening, but never met with his own family. I’m not saying he couldn’t have a good idea. I’m just saying that when this stuff comes out, you begin to doubt how sincere [they are.]

How Paul Deals with Mormon Issues

Paul 40:33 Now, there’s still Mormonism in me. It’s 30 years after I’m excommunicated. And I know all the problems with the Book of Mormon and the translation and the Book of Abraham and all of that, the Pearl of Great Price. But I look at it like parables. I look at it like–historians are trying to find out, was Shakespeare written by the guy in Stratford, or was Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford. Who was it?

Paul 41:12 And I’d say, “Well, okay, I really don’t care.” Because I’ve actually read the plays. There’s value in the plays, regardless of who wrote them. Now, of course, people like John Dehlin, and others are going to say, “But Paul, the book presents itself as a history.”

Paul 41:36 Yes, it does. But what if it isn’t? Then the fact that it presents itself as a history is part of the charm of the book. You have to figure out that it’s not a history. And why would God present us with a book that presents itself as a history, for which we can find little or no historical evidence? Why would he do this? It’s because we’re all trapped in a Newtonian view of reality. We all think that our perceptions are true. We all think that the world operates in one thing after another, cause and effect or even if not cause and effect, chronologically. One thing happens after another, because that’s how we experience it. Our sentences are one thing happen after another, subject, verb, predicate. Right? We’re trapped in this. Even the Chinese with their–they think logically. But what if it isn’t exactly like that?

Paul 42:41 One of the great investigators of UFOs is the astrophysicist and one of the guys who invented ARPANET, a very great scientist by the name of Jacques Vallee, whose books everyone should read, now that the Navy has admitted that the UFOs are not hoaxes, and not the product of deranged mental thinking. People should go back and read what Jacques Vallee has been saying for 50 years. They’re not extraterrestrials. They’ve always happened. And we’ve never taken the time or the money to find out what’s going on here. But one of his conclusions is that that these phenomena are happening to break us out of this perceptional trap that we have, that we understand that our perceptions are telling us the truth about reality, when, actually, it’s a partial reality. What we see is only a part. We’re seeing the elephant’s trunk and think it’s a snake, but there’s more to it. There’s an elephant there somewhere. And we get this when we–scientists are telling us that the universe is only, we only see 4% or 5% of it. 96% of the universe is beyond the electromagnetic spectrum. It’s not something that we can even examine. And, how can we have the arrogance? How can we have the arrogance to believe that our perceptions and our science with this–it’s a great methodology. I believe in science. I love science. It’s silly to say you believe in science, because it’s not a religion. It’s a process. I believe in observation and experiments and quantifying evidence and getting the bad evidence out. I believe in all of that. I think that works, that works fine, but it doesn’t work for 96% of the universe, which we can’t observe.

Paul 44:44 And so, the Book of Mormon is in the tradition of sacred texts that are not susceptible to historical or scientific inquiry, nor should they be, because we should be looking at the content. We should not be looking around Denmark for Elsinore, and where did they bury Hamlet? Or trying to figure out where Rosencrantz and Guildenstern landed on the shores of England. We should be reading the play for what it tells us about human nature. And so, we should be reading the Book of Mormon for what it tells us on the frontispiece. What does it tell us about the Supreme Being Jesus Christ? That’s what it’s for. It’s not to prove we’re right. That’s why we want to find Zarahemla, so that we can say to all the other religions, “God’s talking to us and not to you.” But the Book of Mormon isn’t there to be about us. It’s there to pull us out of our conceptual bubble. In politics and in the secular world, if you want to know what’s going on, follow the money. But in religion, when it comes to consciousness, when it comes to the spiritual world, you have to follow the anomalies. And if you follow the anomalies, if you follow out of body experiences and near-death experiences, and remote viewing, and open your mind to the possibility that they’re not just hoaxes, and the product of mental illness and delusion. And you start looking at the studies that have been done almost for 120 years, by very competent people, you realize that the Book of Mormon falls in the tradition of that. It’s not a roadmap to certainty. It is, in fact, to break our lust for certainty, and to force us to live–like the man in the New Testament who said to the Lord, “I believe. Help my unbelief.”

Paul 46:51 You know, we have peaks and troughs. We have to negotiate the fact that certainty, you can’t have it. The more the island of your knowledge grows, the more it borders on the sea of the unknown, the more questions you have, and the less you think you know. People with a tiny island of knowledge are always certain, because they don’t have any cognitive dissonance. They don’t have enough Island. But if you have a big enough island of knowledge, you’re going to always feel like you don’t know anything. And your criticism of others has to be based on that. So, I’m reluctant to dismiss Mormonism just because Joseph Smith made mistakes or to dismiss the Egyptians’ religion because they seem to be heavily involved in very large blocks of limestone, and very physical. The pyramid was very physical. I can’t get in their mind. It’s too long ago. But I might be able to get into the mind of Joseph Smith and to Manuel Swedenborg. I could get in Joan of Arc and Mechthild of Magdeburg and Hildegard von Bingen, these mystics and Joseph Smith, I can think is like that. And soon as you get a mystic, the first thing they want to do is have sex with somebody. It’s like those camp revivals that they used to have in the south. All the kids would come and then they hear the preacher and then they go out and they’d have sex in the woods. What can you do, a human being? But that doesn’t mean, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t value. Right? Just because the gold mine is under a pig farm and you’ve got to dig through a lot of manure to get to the gold, doesn’t mean there isn’t a there isn’t gold down there. And there is, but nowadays, we are so concerned about the history of Mormonism that we have completely abandoned the theology.

Paul 49:02 So those are the kinds of things I was saying, between 1985 and 1993. I have books of essays, a couple of them republished by Signature Books, and a couple of them I self-published, because I wanted to have the copyright. And you can look those up on Amazon. You put Paul Toscano in Amazon books, and you can see the 14 or 15 books I’ve written. Most of them are–there’s a couple of novels. And there’s mostly essays, because I wanted to keep a record. And that’s why I wrote this book. It wasn’t really to combat the Church, but I wanted to leave my record of what happened to me. And I’m glad that Lindholm wrote this book, because it tells what happened. In 1992, we created the Mormon Alliance, and then in ’93, we wrote the letter. And then a lot of things were happening at BYU. There were BYU professors who were up for tenure, and they didn’t get tenure. I think David Knowlton was one of them. And then there was another professor, I forget.

GT 50:08 Rob Rees, Bob Rees.

Paul 50:10 I don’t think it was Bob Rees. It was a woman. It’s in the introduction of Lindholm’s book. He talks about it. And before that there was, in ’79, there was Sonia Johnson and then Fawn Brodie and Dale Morgan. There were other historians who got crosswise with the Church. But because the leaders of the Church have this linear idea that everything about the Church has to be perfect. This obsession with perfection–I’ve taught my daughters and my granddaughter, that perfection is the enemy to goodness. This obsession with being perfect destroys goodness. And this cancel culture, woke culture that we’ve got, now. If you make one mistake, you’re canceled. Well, that is a tiger you have by the tail, because it’s going to come back and eat you. You know? So, I think we tried to say these things. There was a writer, a Mormon scholar, who I like, I had conversations with him. He’s a good chap. He wrote Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy. I forget people’s names.[1] They slip out of my mind. Do you know who I mean?

GT 51:29 I do not.

Paul 51:30 Mormon Neo-Orthodoxy–well, I can’t remember his name offhand. Maybe it’ll pop into my mind. He lumped me and, I think, Dan Rector and other people who had written, Margaret, he said [that] we’re like Evangelicals. We’re not like Evangelical, we’re the opposite. We’re not fundamentalist, Christian fundamentalists. We’re not Mormon fundamentalist. But he listed us in the same category with Ernest Wilkinson, the President of BYU, which made me laugh. Because I met President Ernest Wilkinson, and he was a very lawyerly guy with almost no religious knowledge or experience whatsoever. The most religious thing is that that he died on April 6^th.

GT 52:21 (Chuckling)

Paul 52:23 I felt that was well-timed. I wish him well, wherever he is.

Mistakes of Leaders

Paul 52:28 So by ’93, a lot of stuff was brewing. There was a lot of tension. I mean, I think that Dallin Oaks gave a talk about Alternate Voices, and how we can’t have any alternate voices. And you’ve always got to sustain your leaders, even if they’re wrong, that kind of thing. When the..

GT 52:50 Which is what happened in both Mountain Meadows and the Willie handcart disaster. Right?

Paul 52:57 Yeah, I mean, it’s a dictators, jackpot, “Don’t say anything mean about me. So, I can proceed to do all the mean things that I do.” It’s absurd. It has nothing to do with whether you’re called. A person who has the Holy Ghost, I believe who has the spirit, who is anointed, and is trying to do the will of God is going to welcome that. It’s unpleasant. No one likes to be criticized. I’ve had criticism. I don’t like it either. But I wouldn’t silence the person. Sometimes it’s very difficult to deal with people who criticize me, because they don’t let you defend yourself. Or they criticize you. I don’t want to–if somebody says I’m racist, I want to think about that, because I try not to be. And I admit, I might be, because I didn’t grow up with black people. I don’t have that benefit of having that kind of contact. Just, my life didn’t go that way. But I don’t want to be told I’m racist, just because I’m a white male that’s 77. Because I don’t think that’s fair. But I know that there are some people who believe that’s true. I would engage with them, if they would engage with me about it, because I think then we’d have to talk about nuance. But, if going to attribute to an individual person, the worst elements of the class to which he belongs, I think that’s bigotry. And I don’t want that to happen to me.

Paul 54:47 By the same token, I don’t want the apostles of the LDS Church, because they’re in the Quorum of the Twelve and First Presidency, to feel like there’s they are immune from [criticism.] They should be inviting criticism and have a mechanism to deal with it. Jesus never insulated himself from criticism. And notice they don’t criticize. They excoriate young people and their members in closed meetings, but they’re not speaking against inflation. They’re not speaking against the Starbucks guy that won’t let his workers unionize to get $15 an hour, which is not a living wage. They won’t speak and they won’t quote Amos 8, where the Lord says, “I’m done with you, because you tip the scales, and you rob the poor.” I don’t see our apostles inflamed with the desire to help the oppressed. I see them with 124,000 millions of dollars in Peak Ensign and not spending any of it. Of course, that’s not in a bank. Where is it? Mobil Oil, Enron. It’s invested. Invested with whom? I don’t know. They don’t tell you. They’ve got to repent. I don’t feel called of God to call them to repent. I just pointed out, you’re losing members because you get on the wrong side of nearly every single social justice issue in the 20^th and 21^st century. And of course, you’re going to look bad, and you can’t hide behind Jesus’s robes like they did. They blamed racism on the Lord. I can’t tell you how that infuriated me. They’re going to blame racism on the Lord or homophobia on the Lord or xenophobia on the Lord or misogyny on the Lord. Isn’t that crucifying him again, and putting them to open shame by blaming him for their sins?

GT 57:05 You know, Paul, I was talking to somebody recently, and he said, “Do you think Paul and Margaret would ever get rebaptized?” Maxine Hanks did and who was the other one? Oh, it was Avraham.

Paul 57:18 I would. I would get rebaptized. I would get be rebaptized if they’d let me say these things. But they won’t. They said that to me. They said [that] you can’t come back unless you say you’ve been wrong about everything, wrong about your attitude, wrong about the things you’ve said. We’re right, and you’re wrong. And I say, “Well, we’ll see. Death comes for us all.” Even for apostles it comes. Even for me, an apostate, it comes.

GT 57:47 So, you would get rebaptized if you didn’t have to change anything and didn’t have to…

Paul 57:52 Yeah, if they’d let me speak. If they let me go on the circuit like Fiona and Terryl Givens and give my version of what it is. Yes, I would.

GT 58:00 Wow.

Paul 58:01 But they’re never going to do that, because it undercuts their authority. But their authority isn’t based on truth. All authority has to be based on truth, or it’s a shambles. It’s the truth. And Jesus says I’m the WAY the TRUTH, and the life, I think. And if you move off the foundation of truth, you’re on sand and mud, and your building is going to collapse. And it’s going to collapse, like that building did in Florida. And you’re going to be paying billions of dollars in reparations, whether you do that metaphorically or actually, is what’s going to happen. Because it’s like in science. You can’t craft the evidence to fit the model. You have to follow the evidence and change the model. And scientists have a really hard time doing that. And like science, scientists, they’re very vain. And they like to be reminded of all the good they’ve done. But it’s the scientists who made fracking possible. It’s the scientists who made the oil companies as successful as they are at damaging the planet. It’s the scientists who perceive the ice shelf breaking off in the Antarctic, who have contributed directly to that happening. Science is the one who creates the antibiotic, but they also do the testing of the viruses, what they call the gain. There’s a name for it where they tried to make the virus more virulent, so they can find an antidote for it, but potentially that can escape. They still have smallpox virus. I remember reading that in Russia they have it in a refrigerator that has a padlock on it. Oh, that just makes me so happy. And so yeah, scientists want to be thought of as the good guys but when you look past that and you remember Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the hydrogen bomb, things that they blew up and the downwinders that they damaged in southern Utah, because they said, “Oh, that cloud’s not going to [hurt anyone.] Yeah, it’s fine.” Or what is it? The reactor in Japan, Fukushima. I can’t remember. I’m terrible with remembering names. Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, I remember that one.

Paul 1:00:51 So, you have these examples of mistakes. Who did it? Scientists, technicians, and engineers. We rely on them for our comforts and for our civilization, and they should be honored for that, but we must not forget. And the same with the apostles. The same with the LDS Church. The LDS Church is not an instrument of salvation, it is the thing from which we must be saved. Our families are not instruments of salvation. They are the thing from which we must be saved. How do I know this? Because in the 23^rd chapter of Matthew, Jesus condemns the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the church leaders, because the religion of the Jews was killing them. And with the idea of the family, I mean, Jesus said, “You have to leave father and mother.” You have to leave father and mother. It’s not your father and mother that you–yeah, I believe in family sealings, but those family sealings were supposed to be sealings of cohorts of like-minded people, spiritual family. But it changed after a certain time, and it became the exaltation of the biological family. That’s why people are so worried. They’re worried that their kids who go out and have illicit sex or take drugs, they’re not going to be in the Celestial kingdom with them.

Paul 1:02:25 Well, they’re attributing to God, their own fear and their narrow-mindedness and their refusal to realize that people are on earth in order to experience things. And as heartbreaking as it can be sometimes, you’re not going to be able to march arm in arm akimbo, goose-stepping into the Celestial kingdom, under orders. That isn’t what happens. That was exactly what Jesus was against. I mean, he made whips, one whip, I think, and booted the chickens and pigeons every direction, and was yelling at the Pharisees because they were so certain. They were the first Calvinists, at least as presented. And I don’t know how the Jews would see their own religion, because I’m not a Jew. But at least as it’s presented in Christianity. And I’m not saying that that’s an historical reality about Pharisees. I don’t know. But I do know that the idea of Pharisees is real, even if the Pharisees didn’t exist at the time of Jesus in the way it’s presented. And I’ve seen Pharisees. I’ve met Pharisees. I’ve heard Pharisees in the Mormon Church stand up and bear their testimony on fast Sunday. I know that they exist. There are Pharisees in the Council of the Twelve. Boyd Packer was a Pharisee. And a bigger Pharisee than him was Harold B. Lee, and a bigger Pharisee than him was J. Reuben Clark. And Brigham Young was a Pharisee. Because they believed that you could mandate righteousness. But you can only mandate a kind of corporate self-righteousness.

Paul 1:04:14 Real righteousness isn’t something that is imposed on someone. It comes out of them by kind of a grace. The grace of God brings it out, it unfolds. And it may take years for it to unfold. These are the kinds of things we tried in the ’80s to ’93. And when I got excommunicated, Kerry was very angry at me, my stake president. He said, “It’s like parents and children. I’m the parent, I set the rules. You obey.”

Paul 1:04:48 I said, Kerry, “First, you’re not that much older than I am. Second of all, you are a dumb real estate agent. I didn’t say dumb. I said you are a real estate agent. You don’t know anything about theology. Stay out of this. Because I can tell you what’s going to happen. You’re going to do the will of Boyd Packer, your old friend. You’re going to excommunicate me. And then he’s going to throw you away like an old newspaper, because you will have done your duty and then it’s over.” And that’s what happened. Because, in a corporate structure like the Church’s corporate, the worker bees are like worker bees going to the hive. Hive is not, it’s a bad metaphor, but accurate. In a corporation, the owners treat the workers like machines. And when they break down, they get rid of them. And if they have to have more profits at the top, they squeeze them at the bottom.

Paul 1:05:58 And I ask you, the Church is built like that. The women do a lot of the work in the Church, but a woman, outside the home where she might, husband might be henpecked. But out in the structure, no woman can ever give a directive to any man, even a 12-year-old boy, really. And the 12-year boys know that. They have more authority, more power and more status than their mothers. That’s misogyny because it has no basis in scripture. Section 76 where it talks about the priesthood, and people lining up to go to the Celestial kingdom, does not put it in terms of men. The temple ceremony says with the robe on the right shoulder, you can do any ordinance of the Melchizedek priesthood. And that’s said to women at the same time, it’s said to men. If it means nothing to women, it means nothing to men. If it means what it does to men, it means the exact same thing to women. And because this will be aired, and the leaders of the Church will hear it, they’ll change that in the temple.

Paul 1:07:10 So yes. We said all these things, and because I did, I was excommunicated.

Events Leading up to Sept 1993

GT 1:07:16 One of the things I’d like to do, could we jump into the timeline a little bit closer?

Paul 1:07:20 Sure. You ask. I’ve done my thing. You’re going to cut and edit this however you want. And that’s right. Tell me what your question is. Lead me. Guide me. Walk beside me.

GT 1:07:33 We’ve got a good sense for the things that you’ve advocated and leaders had problems with. So, let’s talk about the timeline. About when did you first learn you were in trouble? Talk about the events that happened leading up to September of ’93.

Paul 1:07:50 It was in August. Well, first of all, on June 17, Margaret, my wife had a…

GT 1:08:00 This is in ’93?

Paul 1:08:01 In 1993. On June 17 of 1993, Margaret went down to BYU at the invitation of a woman’s group called Voice. It wasn’t a sorority, it was just a group of BYU coeds. And she was asked to give a presentation not on the mother in heaven. It was on images of the female divine. I’m going like this, folks. This means a slide projector. That’s what I’m indicating here. I carried the slide projector down and set up the screen and I would work the slides. That was my job. And she had a gazillion slides of artwork all over the world that showed images of female divinities. And that’s what her presentation was, female divine images from across the world and what they might look like and what they might mean. At the end of this presentation, the girls who are very perspicacious. They’re not dumb by any means. They said, “Well, what do you think about the heavenly mother?”

Paul 1:09:21 And she says, “Well, I think Mormonism has a heavenly mother.”

Paul 1:09:24 “And why don’t we hear about it?”

Paul 1:09:26 “Well, the Mormon doctrine of the Heavenly Mother has been repressed, but it’s there,” and all of that. And they had a conversation that would then get out of the way. It turns out, though, that there was a reporter from the Daily Universe, the school paper there. And it also turns out that the faculty advisor to the Daily Universe newspaper, which incidentally, I had that job once in the past. I was on the communications faculty at BYU and was in charge of the student body papers when Dale Van Atta and others were there, that eventually became regular journalists.

Paul 1:10:06 And anyway, that advisor was on vacation, because it was in June. And so, I think I got the wrong date. I had to be on June 16 that we went down. Because on June 17, the very next day, the Universe appears, and Margaret’s picture is on the front page. And on it, it says, “Mother God repressed,” scholar says, something like that. I have a picture of that. Here it is. You won’t see it see it very well, because it was a very poor reproduction. But you can, here it is. I’ll show you that it’s June 7, and it says, “Mother God repressed, Voice told.” Voice being the name of this student group. Well, Boyd Packer reads it. I think he may have only read that newspaper back then. And he was furious. So, he finds out who the stake president is of Margaret and me. And it turns out to be Kerry Hines. And Kerry Hines was an old friend of his who worked in the Seminary and Institute program in Brigham City, before he became a general authority, before Boyd Packer became a general authority. And one of their buddies was Melvin Hammond. Melvin Hammond was in an area presidency in Mexico at the time. And Kerry was our stake president. And Boyd is in Salt Lake presiding, being an apostle. So, he doesn’t call Kerry directly. Because he knows he shouldn’t.

GT 1:12:03 Because that’s what the D&C says.

Paul 1:12:05 Thou shalt not influence the stake president over judicial matters, apostles. So, he picks up the phone and calls Melvin Hammond and triangulates. He said, “Well, why can’t Kerry keep her quiet? Why can’t he control that woman?” That woman is what he said. We learned this much later, in October of ’93 is when I learned about it. But what happened on June 17, was that.

Paul 1:12:38 Well, that day, Melvin calls Kerry and says, “Elder Packer called me, but he says, ‘Why can’t you control that woman?'” And so Kerry immediately calls Margaret, and calls her in for the next Sunday to meet with her.

Paul 1:12:51 And I said, “Well, I’ll go with you, Margaret.”

Paul 1:12:57 “No.”

GT 1:12:59 Did she know why she was being called in?

Paul 1:13:01 I don’t know what he said. He said he was concerned about some of the things she had been saying publicly. I think we knew that. And she didn’t want me to go. Well, the reason why, I guess I can say this, “Margaret, and I had an argument.” I said, “Well just give in, just tell him. I mean, if I went there, I’d just kind of give in and say that I’d do it, but then go on, and do what I want. I think you should maybe do that.”

Paul 1:13:34 And so she’s putting her hair up. And I’m watching her. She’s putting her hair up in the mirror. And she said, “You know, Paul, I’m not comfortable with that.”

Paul 1:13:47 I said, “Well, sometimes you have to just find a way to make things work” and then I said, “Of course, if it were me, I wouldn’t do that. I’d just confront them.”

Paul 1:14:02 She turned around and she says, “What makes you think I won’t confront them? I can confront them.” I may be remembering it [wrong.] If she were here, she might correct me in exactly how I tell the story.

GT 1:14:13 I’ll have to get her side of the story.

Paul 1:14:15 Get her side of the story, but that’s how I remember it. I shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t have thought that she should have acted, that she should do something that I wouldn’t do. That was wrong how I did it. I did it wrong. I’ve done a lot of things wrong in my life. And I said, “Well, no, no, then don’t do that. Just tell him what you think.”

Paul 1:14:37 And she did. She met with him. And he said [that] she wasn’t to speak publicly, write, publish, get in the newspapers, speak at Sunstone, publish in Dialogue. He wrote it all out, nothing. He wanted to put her in the pumpkin shell like, Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater, had a wife couldn’t keep her, put her in a pumpkin shell. And there he kept her very well.

Paul 1:15:04 She said,” I’m not going to do that. You don’t have that authority.” And she was nice to him. But she says, “I’m just not going to obey.”

Paul 1:15:09 Well, then he called me in, not immediately, but, eventually. I think Wilson Martin, who was our bishop, got involved somehow, and I can’t remember all the details now. But we were talking to him, and he was interfacing with the stake president, but, eventually, I met with him around August 5. This was just before the Sunstone symposium, which was held at the end of August, then. And he called me in, and I think he thought he was going to be able to tell me, “Get your wife into control.” I think that was his kind of overarching hope.

Paul 1:15:43 And I said, “Well, I can’t do that. I wouldn’t do that. And I can’t do that. And that’s not how our marriage is. I don’t…”

GT 1:15:52 You don’t tell her what to do.

Paul 1:15:53 “Ours is not a patriarchal marriage.” So there it is. And he didn’t know what to do. And then, the conversation got worse.

Paul 1:16:10 He said, “Well.” this is where he said, “It’s like parents and children. I’m like your parent.”

Paul 1:16:15 I said, “That isn’t true, Kerry.” And that’s when I told him, “You’re a real estate agent. Stay out of this because you’re going to get hurt.”

Paul 1:16:24 And he said, “Well, you’ve got, you don’t obey. Your problem is that you’re a troublemaker, and you don’t obey your leaders.”

Paul 1:16:33 I said, “Well, you don’t obey your leaders, either.” And he looked very stunned. And there was the head of what I thought was a deer on the wall. I said, “You once told me that you shot this deer.”

Paul 1:16:45 He said, “It’s not a deer. It’s an elk.”

Paul 1:16:50 I said, “Well, what do I know? But it’s an elk. But you shot it. And President Kimball said, hurt not the little birds, he gave a speech about how you’re not supposed to be killing the animals. And you violated that. So, you don’t obey the Prophet, either.”

Paul 1:17:10 And he said, “Well, that’s not controversial now.”

Paul 1:17:18 I said to him, “It’s no use talking to you, Kerry. It’s no use talking to you because you’re slippery. It’s like trying to put your hands on the barrel of eels. You don’t stick to it. You want me to obey a rule that you don’t have to obey. I mean, come on. I’m going to give the speech that I’m going to give at Sunstone.” And I told him that I was going to give a speech called, “All is not well in Zion, False Teachings of the True Church.” And that was the speech I gave. And that was the speech that they used in my High Council trial to excommunicate me. They focused only on that one speech. It wasn’t based on Strangers in Paradox, which is a book that Margaret and I had published in 1990. It wasn’t about any of the speeches I’d given at Sunstone. It wasn’t the fact that I had supported a couple of missionaries on their missions. They didn’t look at my whole life in Mormonism. They just looked at that one speech. It was like pre-woke days. I mean, cancel culture. This was going to be canceled, one thing. Well, there was more than one thing, but they didn’t look at those things. And they certainly didn’t look at the content of what I said. And what was most offensive to them was a couple of quips or jokes I made at the apostles’ expense, in my speech.

GT 1:18:44 Evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed.

Paul 1:18:45 Evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed. I said, Russell Nelson had said, when an apostle enters the room, we should all stand. And I said, “Maybe we should all stand and leave.” And it was funny at the thing. But, when they played the tape, it wasn’t funny before the High Council. They didn’t find any humor in it. I also said, “Well, Moses said, ‘Take off the shoes of thy feet.'” And I said, “Maybe we should just take off.” And so, they didn’t like my humor, because it’s sarcastic and mean, and it is. But, telling truth to power when power doesn’t want to listen to you, you sometimes have to resort to– it wasn’t ad hominem, exactly. But you know, these rude remarks, try to wake them up. They don’t wake up. They just get very, very angry. And the High Council was very disturbed by this. And even though I had some character witnesses, they didn’t let Margaret in there until she came in as a character witness and then they let her stay. I was in there alone. My daughters, there was a vigil going on outside that I didn’t really know about. [There were] lots of people with candles and things. And this was at six in the morning. I set it for six in the morning because I didn’t want to start it at six at night and be there till three in the morning. I’d rather start at six and be there till three in the afternoon on Sunday the 19^th. And my three eldest daughters are out there. My youngest daughter, Sarah, who was nine, would not leave. She wanted to come in with me. But they said she couldn’t. So, she sat on a little couch outside the door for the whole time I was in. She’s downstairs now.

GT 1:18:46 So, this was on a Sunday. You were there from 6am until 3pm.

Paul 1:19:58 We got up at five in the morning. Now, I will say something that happened a week before, on the 12^th of September, the prior Sunday. I don’t sleep through the night anymore. But then I did, but for me to wake up at four in the morning would be very, very unusual. And I woke up at four in the morning. And I had just awakened from a dream. And it was like a presentment. It was a little stronger than a dream, but not a vision. And I saw, at the foot of my bed, it seemed like there had just been four very elegant beings, oddly suave, in strange robes. They reminded me of the elongated statues of kings and queens that appear on the western portal of Chartres Cathedral. That’s what they reminded me of. But they didn’t quite look like that. They were very–and I could tell that these were somehow messengers of some kind. And I remembered what they just told me. It was very clear. And they told me that I would be served my summons that day, and that I would be excommunicated the next week.

GT 1:22:00 This is in your dream.

Paul 1:22:02 It must have been in my dream because I awakened from the dream and remembered that they had just told me that and that they had just been standing there, but they weren’t there anymore when I awoke. They weren’t there they but they had [left.]

GT 1:22:17 Now, who were these people?

Paul 1:22:18 There were four. There were two males and two females.

GT 1:22:21 But you didn’t know who they were.

Paul 1:22:22 Well, I wasn’t told who they were, I assume that they were angels or some kind of divine beings. And they had just told me that I would get my summons that day. And I remember they just said it. And they had said that I would get excommunicated the next Sunday. And I woke Margaret up and I told her. And so, I wrote about it in greater detail in this book. The full story of that is there. And, so that day, there was a meeting of the Mormon Alliance at our house, just the trustees to talk about some things. And in the middle of that meeting, there was a knock on the door, and two men in suits came and delivered the summons on the 12^th. And the excommunication was set for the 19^th. And even though I thought, “Well, maybe I can talk him out of it.” Even though I was told I would be excommunicated, and not to worry about it. They said, “Don’t worry.”

GT 1:23:20 The dream said, “Don’t worry about it.”

Paul 1:23:22 The dream said, “Don’t worry about it. It’s part of a larger series of events. It doesn’t have any effect on, it won’t have any real effect,” in my relationship, I guess, to God. Although it certainly did have an effect in the horizontal sense. I think what they meant is they can’t cut off your relationship to God. They can’t, the excommunication is not going to be valid. Mike Quinn used to say this. He said, “I don’t think my excommunication has been sealed by the Holy Spirit of promise. And I agree with him that I don’t think you can wrongly excommunicate someone and I think that it may cut you off from fellowship from the ecclesiastical organization. But I don’t think it necessarily has any effect on your relationship, your spiritual relationship.

Paul 1:24:22 But, of course, now 30 years later, I don’t think Mormonism has an exclusive claim on salvation like it claims. I don’t think its claim is what they say it is. I think if you join Mormonism, and accept the Mormon revelation on some level, and you participate in the narrative arc of ordinances that go from baptism, confirmation, the temple ordinances all the way to the second anointing, even. It’s a narrative arc. It’s a metaphorical arc that is talking about your journey in mortality. I think that if you are converted to Mormonism and believe in it, you should carry through on it. Because I think it’s efficacious. I think you have to, in a way, be able to see beyond it. But I think that journey, eventually, does lead you beyond this set of metaphors. And you begin to realize that in the Irish tradition in the Russian Orthodox tradition, and in the Coptic tradition of Christianity, in the Jewish tradition, and other traditions of Hindus and Buddhists, and there are ordinances that are like this. There are rituals that serve the same purpose, not in the same way, not with the same symbols, not necessarily with the same background as we have in Western culture. But you have to open your mind to the fact that God does His work and doesn’t report to the Twelve.

GT 1:26:00 So, this Sunstone speech you gave in August, that was the whole basis for your excommunication, and it was basically, evil speaking of the Lord’s anointed. Is that what is was?

Paul 1:26:14 No, well, yes, they didn’t say that. But what they said was that I was an apostate because I was insubordinate, and I wasn’t obedient to the leaders of the Church. My friend Fred Voros was a member of the High Council. But he was at a funeral of his mother-in-law in Canada, and so he wasn’t there. But when he came back, he talked to the members of the High Council. They admitted to him, some of them said, “Well, we didn’t think Paul was an apostate. But the way they worded to our instructions, we had to follow the stake president.” I can’t remember exactly the wording that Fred told me, but they felt that they couldn’t do anything else but reach the conclusion that I had to be excommunicated. That was the gift of it.

GT 1:27:14 And so the idea was this had been orchestrated from Salt Lake?

Paul 1:27:16 Oh, yes.

GT 1:27:17 And I mean, how do you know that?

Paul 1:27:20 Well, Steve Benson has written a long article. Steve Benson who was the grandson of Ezra Taft Benson, in September of 1993, Ezra Benson was still alive, but comatose mostly. And Steve Benson resigned from the Church and his wife did, too, in part over my excommunication, because Steve had been taken into a meeting with Dallin Oaks and Neal Maxwell. He had been told that they were aware that Boyd Packer had interfered my excommunication and probably the others, too. I think the others, too, and they admitted that to Steve Benson. But when the reporter, Paul Brinkley Rogers, who was fairly famous reporter, who was then, 30 years ago, working for the Arizona Republic. He was later a war correspondent, but he was working for the Arizona Republic. He called Dallin Oaks and asked him. A series of things happened, where Dallin Oaks, basically, told Paul Brinkley Rogers a different story than he had told Steve. And when Steve learned about this from Paul Brinkley Rogers somehow, he wrote a letter saying, “You have to correct the public record. You cannot tell me something in private that’s true and then lie to the press. You correct it or I will expose you.” And he tells all about that in his…

GT 1:29:19 Steve Benson.

Paul 1:29:20 Steve Benson. In fact, here on my phone, I looked up the, it’s called The Mormon Curtain, the Mormon Curtain folks. Steve Benson. It’s on the internet. It’s called, “Inside Confessions and Outside Cover-ups: Excommunicated Mormon Intellectual Paul Toscano Exposes the Intellectual and Moral Dishonesty of the LDS Highest Leaders.” And he published this on February 8, 2007. And you can look it up. He has a long, detailed explanation of Steve’s, involvement with Dallin Oaks. The other way I know it’s because I asked Kerry Heinz, before I was excommunicated, in my August 5 meeting with him. I asked, I said, “Kerry, did Boyd Packer direct you to excommunicate me?”

Paul 1:30:23 He said, “No.”

Paul 1:30:24 I said, “Kerry, was the unmistakable import of his expression to you, did it indicate to you that I should be excommunicated without a directive from him?”

Paul 1:30:47 And he said, “Yes.” I don’t think the wording was exactly that way. Because like, as I say, it’s 30 years ago, and I can’t remember what I wrote in the book, but the book was written, I went back through all my notes. I’d kept notes. “Was the fair implication,” that’s what I said, “Was the fair implication of what Boyd Packer told you was that I should be excommunicated? That’s what he wanted you to do.”

Paul 1:31:16 And he said, “Yes, that’s true.” So Kerry told me. And, eventually, it came out that Boyd Packer had been interfering, and also Hartman Rector told me that he knew that it was true. Hartman Rector, Jr. was a Seventy, a general authority of the LDS Church. And he was aware of it. he was terribly upset about the fact that I was excommunicated. He looked into it. And he told me that his understanding was that Boyd Packer was behind it. So, yes, I had fairly good evidence.

GT 1:31:56 So how come they didn’t excommunicate Margaret at that time, too?

Paul 1:31:59 I think they were. Kerry was exhausted with it. And I think that Boyd Packer believed that if he broke the sealing, by excommunicating me, he felt like he broke the sealing between me and my wife and my children, and dissolved my baptism, and my endowments, and all of that, that she had been punished. But, not quite, because she kept going, writing and publishing and speaking and being more influential. I mean, she’s a tenured professor at the University of Utah. right? and he got around to it. I think part of the reason, he couldn’t find a bishop that would do it. He had contact. we now know that he had contacted a bishop in another, a couple of bishops or something, where he would try to get–they wouldn’t do it. So, Margaret was actually excommunicated by a high council, because he finally found a stake president, who was more than enthusiastic about doing it.

GT 1:31:59 So, it was the same stake president?

Paul 1:32:04 No, a different stake president excommunicated Margaret, although Kerry Hines appeared as a witness. Because she was excommunicated for not obeying Kerry Hines’ letter that says she shouldn’t publish. That’s why she was excommunicated, for disobedience to her former stake president. you could tell he didn’t want to testify against her. But he was required to. Yeah, I can’t quite figure out what the fear is that motivates all of this despotism. I can’t figure it out. If God is for us, who can be against us, but they don’t believe that, apparently. They don’t believe in freedom. They don’t believe in answering questions. Remember the missionary lessons? If you have a religious question, go and ask a prophet. We have a prophet that you can ask. Well, that’s not true.

GT 1:33:58 I think your discussions were different than mine. Was that something in your missionary discussions?

Paul 1:34:03 Yeah. Well, I went on a mission in ’66. So, now here it is, according to the tape, 2023. on March 15…

GT 1:34:23 So, it should have been the September 7. right?

Paul 1:34:26 Well, technically, Avraham really didn’t want to be in it. He was in and out like a revolving door. So, Margaret, it really was the September seven.

GT 1:34:35 Yeah.

Paul 1:34:37 Technically speaking.

GT 1:34:38 It just took seven more years to get Margaret.

Paul 1:34:39 It just took a while for him to get somebody to do it.

Paul 1:34:46 So, I was baptized in ’63 and excommunicated in ’93. And here ’93 to 2023 is another 30 years. So, on March 18^th of 2023, I will have been excommunicated for as long as I was a member. Well, that’s not quite true because I was excommunicated in September. But in let’s just look at it less detailed. in 2023, it’ll be it’ll be 30 years since I was exed. And I was in the Church for 30 years. So, I don’t know how long I’ll last. I might not last until you’ve edited this and gotten it posted.

GT 1:35:35 I hope you last that long. That happened to me with John Pratt. He passed away before I could post the interview. I don’t like it when that happens.

Paul 1:35:42 I remember John Pratt.

GT 1:35:44 Yeah.

Paul 1:35:45 He looked a little more frail than I do.

GT 1:35:50 COVID got him.

Paul 1:35:51 When your number is up, your number is up. Afterwards, the aftermath, here was a part of the aftermath was calling out Dallin Oaks for lying to the press. And I wrote an editorial that hurt him badly, I think, because I had said a true statement. I said, “Look, he’s a special witness of Christ. When a witness lies, they destroy themselves as a witness.” Because when they’re on the stand under oath, if they lie, the question is always going to be, are you lying now? Or were you lying then? Right? You’re a liar. So just tell us. Or are you lying again? I mean, how do you trust the person who lies. That’s why lying for the Lord doesn’t work. The idea that they can cover up things or tell an untruth or half-truth? No, because then nobody is going to believe them. Who will believe your report, says the scripture, “If the trumpet given uncertain sound, who will prepare for the battle?” That’s how St. Paul puts it. Well, you can’t lie. You can say, I can’t answer that question right now, because I have to keep it confidential. Because if I tell, other people could be damaged, so I’m not going to comment. You can do that. But you can’t advance a fallacy. And you can’t cover up things that embarrass you because you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing. And you have to expose yourself to critique.

Paul 1:37:34 Jesus did. Let’s take this woman to the master. See what he has to say. She was caught in the very act of adultery. What do you say? Do you follow the law of Moses? Are you going to come up with something violating the law? Yeah, it’s tough. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone is kind of a saying that, yeah, how’s that working, the Law of Moses for you guys? Is that working really well for you? It’s keeping you out of trouble, is it? You want to stone her because she’s in trouble. But how’s it keeping you guys out of trouble? That’s what he’s saying.

Paul 1:38:27 Our leaders don’t want to be questioned, like Jesus allowed himself to be questioned. They want to be called Elder, Elder in the marketplace. And we call Jesus by his first name. They have been seduced by corporatism and elitism and insularity. And the belief that because they have these offices, that they have all the gifts. But the gifts don’t necessarily go with the office. They go to people who happen to be born with those gifts. And they don’t like people like were in the September 6, any of us or any of the other people, the many other people that have challenged them, the many other people who have not been excommunicated, but who have resigned or struggling to figure out how to get rid of their membership, or who have been disfellowshipped or whatever. I mean, there are good reasons to be excommunicated: if you’re blowing up the chapels of the Church with actual dynamite, yes. Or if you’re defrauding people, yes. But if you’re just questioning authority, no. Because the entire religion is based upon a person who questioned authority.

Lessons of Sept Six

GT 1:39:49 As you look back on these last 30 years, are there any lessons that you that you can take from this?

Paul 1:39:56 Yes, I’m not sure I can tick them off. One of the lessons that I know is true is that God loves people I don’t like. He tolerates a great deal, which is why people don’t like God. They hate him because he doesn’t interfere in Afghanistan. He doesn’t stop earthquakes or tsunamis. He doesn’t stop volcanoes. He doesn’t stop viruses. He lets people starve in Africa. He lets oligarchies take over Russia [and] America to a certain extent. He lets the CIA put Pinochet in power in Chile on September 11, 1973. He does all these things or doesn’t interfere. And I understand why people get very angry and want to become atheist because of it.

Paul 1:41:03 But I think that unless we go, either directly or indirectly, through all the suffering people, through our empathy or even, personally, go through these terrible things, we will become or remain very arrogant. We will not have empathy unless we experience it for ourselves. Some people don’t have to experience very much bad to become good. But some people have to experience an awful lot of bad before they realize that they’re bad, and that they have to repent. It takes a horrible experience. But in the grand scheme of things, mortality is a short dark tunnel. And everybody goes through it. It’s a train that’s going through this tunnel is a train full of monsters. There are monsters on the train. They’re not always monsters. That’s the problem. Putin is being a monster now. He wasn’t always a monster. Hitler was a monster. He wasn’t always a monster. Oftentimes, monsters are made by just how they respond to the evil in the world. They become evil, fighting evil.

Paul 1:42:26 That was Hamlet’s problem. Hamlet was a prince who had his patrimony taken away by an uncle who shouldn’t have inherited, but married his mother. And he comes back from the university, and he knows something’s wrong. And his big problem was, “How do you rid yourself of evil without becoming evil? How do I get rid of Claudius, without becoming like Claudius, the evil king who had taken the throne?” So, the ghost tells him and he says, “Well, can I rely on a ghost? What if this is the devil coming as an angel or coming as my father in disguise? How can I trust the ghost? The play is the thing with which I’ll catch the conscience of the king. Maybe the play, maybe psychologically, the king will reveal himself. But if I kill the king while he’s praying, I’ll send him to heaven and me to hell.” And then he goes with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to England, and it’s got the secret messages, “As soon as Hamlet steps on the shores of England, kill him.” So, he changes the letter, so that he doesn’t have a chance to do anything else. He changes the letter so that they kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and he goes back to England. And then he says that Ophelia is dead. And then he fights her brother Laertes. Laertes sword is poisoned. Because Claudius convinced Laertes that Hamlet was evil. He poisons the tip of Laertes sword, so all that Laertes has to do is touch Hamlet, break the skin, and he’s a goner. But in the scuffle, the swords get exchanged. And just to be sure, the evil king poisons the drinks, so that when Hamlet, during the recess from the sword fighting, he takes a drink, that secures his death. But the Queen, his mother, takes the cup and drinks it instead. And the switched swords, Hamlet hits Laertes.

Paul 1:44:53 Where does this all go? What am I going toward. I’m going toward the end of the play. It’s only when Hamlet, himself, has been touched with the sword and is poisoned and Laertes is also poisoned. It’s only then, when Hamlet knows that he cannot benefit from the king’s death. It’s only then that he kills Claudius. It’s only when he knows he cannot profit from the regicide. Well, what’s my point? My point is the struggle of life is how do we deal with evil without becoming evil? And sometimes the only answer is kind of Sherlock Holmes’ answer. You take Moriarty with you over Rickenbach Falls and you both die. You don’t profit from the death of the evil.

Paul 1:45:51 And Mormonism isn’t there yet. Mormonism still wants to triumph. People disaffected, the ex-Mo’s, people disaffected from Mormonism, “I’m going to prove that it’s wrong by, Joseph Smith couldn’t translate anything.” Well, I could have told you that. And the Book of Mormon isn’t history. Well, I could have told you that. And therefore, the whole thing is false. Well, you can only reach that conclusion, if you’re absolutely certain about the reality in which we exist, of which we can only see 4%. Maybe these things that happen, the sacred texts, these anomalies, UFOs out of body experiences, remote viewing all these weird things that happen, are here to break our sense of certainty that our reality is as linear as we think it is. And maybe we have to be a little bit more respectable of mystical experiences, even when the mystics themselves, are not particularly reliable bankers, reliable city builders, reliable pioneers, reliable managers, of ecclesiastical organizations. Maybe we have to pull back and take a broader view. That’s what I would have. That’s the lesson I’ve learned.

Paul 1:47:23 So where I was very Mormon at one time, I’ve become more ecumenical. Jesus is not a Catholic. He’s not a Mormon. He’s not a Jew. He’s not a Hindu. He’s not a Buddhist. But he’s, in a way, all of those things and some. He’s the truth that’s in all of those things. That’s how I look at it. So maybe the excommunication was necessary for me. I wish they hadn’t excommunicated Margaret. But I think, in a way, it hurt her family, because she’s got Mormons all the way back to Kirtland and the Colesville Branch. And so, that’s why I interfered. I thought, “Well, maybe if they get rid of me, it won’t…” But it worked. I mean, Boy Packer, his plot worked. He did silence us and, of course, a lot of intellectuals won’t quote us. Or if they quote us, they don’t attribute the quote. Because we’re stained. Excommunication, if its purpose is to stigmatize, it works very well, still.

Hero & Pariah

GT 1:49:02 So, Paul, can you talk a little bit. I think you’re both an ex-Mormon hero for some, and you’re an ex-Mormon pariah for others. Because I know you call yourself an agnostic; it depends on the day of the week, whether you’re a believer or not. But you strike me, especially when we think about some other people, Sonia Johnson and John Dehlin and people like that, that have just gone away and said, “I don’t believe at all.” But you’re still a believer. Right?

Paul 1:49:40 I believe that Joseph Smith was a genuine mystic. And like mystics, he led a very conflicted life between his spiritual life, his mystical experiences and the physical reality of his mortal existence. I think there was great conflict. I think that’s why he was told he would be known for good and evil. Because I think when he operated in the physical world and the political world in the real world of flesh and blood, he made mistakes and he cast a shadow. He did things that maybe he thought were right, but people are going to judge very severely. I don’t think that affects what he said about his mystical revelations. I don’t think if you read the Book of Mormon, not in its history–Margaret once did a study of what the Book of Mormon has to say about war. And if you just pull out of it just the war ideas, things related to war, it’s a wonderful anti-war text.

GT 1:51:04 As we look back on the last 30 years, I’d like for you to address two types of critics: Your orthodox Mormons/active Mormons, and then your ex-Mormon critics. Let’s go with the Orthodox first.

Paul 1:51:22 Well, the orthodox critics are just saying, “You must have done something bad if Boyd Packer threw you out. I mean, he’s the apostle. You’re not. We follow. We obey. You didn’t obey.” It’s Kerry Heinz telling us they are the parents. We’re the children. We obey, and they set the rules. What’s wrong with you? Well, my answer is that is that I didn’t get baptized in the name of the Twelve Apostles. I didn’t swear allegiance to them. I have days when I have a hard time believing in God. But at heart, it tips in favor of the existence of the Lord. And so, I say, “Yes. I’m His creature, not their creature.” And they are no more His creature than I am. There’s Jesus and all the rest of us. There’s the Holy Ghost and all the rest of us. There’s not a hierarchy like the Council of the Twelve has. It’s not a seniority system. They’ve invented that. And it’s wrong. Succession to the presidency should be by revelation. We should not progress by funerals. So, to the ex-Mo[rmon]s who are not orthodox, the critics who have left the Church…

GT 1:52:59 They said, “Why do you continue to believe, Paul?”

Paul 1:53:01 Because I’m not a scientific materialist. Because I don’t believe the universe is simply one flat plane of molecules. Beneath the Periodic Chart is the standard model of subatomic particle, which is incomplete. And beneath that is the wave field theory. And beneath that, there has to be something that is like consciousness. I don’t believe that the brain produces mind. I believe that brain is more like a radio that’s getting a transmission from somewhere else, rather than like a tape recorder that is playing back something that’s inside of it. For that reason, I understand that mysticism is difficult. A mystic like Joseph Smith or somebody like Hildegard von Bingen is going to get all kinds of things coming through. When they try to present it, it’s going to look goofy.

{End of Part 1}

[1] It was written by O. Kendall White.

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