Faith and Certainty: A Conversation on Mormonism, Authority, and the Hope of Transformation
Thomas Abshier and Isak Gutierrez — 21 October 2026
A discussion essay written from the recorded conversation. Notes marked Note add references or corrections where the discussion left something out or got a detail wrong.
The Occasion
Before the recording began, Thomas read Isak the second installment of a column by Scott Lively titled “Part Two: The Birth of Mormonism.” The conversation that followed ran for about three hours. It began with the column’s claims about Joseph Smith, moved through race and the Latter-day Saints, the place of Israel in Christian thought, and Isak’s misgivings about organized religion, and ended with an extended exchange on faith, knowledge, the necessity of deception and confusion in a real creation, and whether the transformation Isak has undergone can be passed on to others.
The Column: Lively’s Argument
Lively opens by saying he has worked alongside Mormons whom he regards as exemplary people and reliable allies in defending marriage and the family, and that his quarrel is with the institution rather than its members. He then sets the scene: early nineteenth-century America was a frontier nation, aflame with the Second Great Awakening, with no settled means of checking extraordinary claims. Into that vacuum came a series of hoaxes — the Cardiff Giant, Barnum’s Feejee Mermaid, the Kensington Runestone, Piltdown Man, the Cottingley fairy photographs, and the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Each was eventually exposed.
Lively’s thesis is that one fraud of the period did not collapse but scaled. Joseph Smith published the Book of Mormon in March 1830 and organized the church the following month with six members; it now claims more than seventeen million. Lively points to the 1826 hearing before Justice Albert Neely in Bainbridge, New York, where Smith was charged as a disorderly person in connection with treasure-seeking by seer stone, and to a neighbor’s affidavit describing Smith’s use of the stone to locate a box on the hill where the golden plates were later said to be found. He acknowledges that the sources are contested — the trial account is a recollection published decades later, and the affidavit was collected by a hostile former member — but argues that independent neighbors describe the same stone-gazing. His conclusion is that Mormonism survived where the others failed because it built a world inside its story, with social costs for leaving and rewards for staying, and that the only time the law reached Smith was before he had anything worth defending.
Note: Several details in the column need correction. Barnum exhibited the Feejee Mermaid in 1842, not 1872. The Willard Chase affidavit was taken in 1833 and published in E. D. Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed (1834), not in 1830. The 1826 complaint was brought not by Josiah Stowell but by his nephew, Peter Bridgeman; Stowell himself testified in Smith’s favor. Although no transcript of the hearing survives, Justice Neely’s bill of costs and the constable’s bill, discovered in 1971, confirm that the proceeding took place. The Kensington Runestone claims a date of 1362, about 130 years before Columbus. The Cottingley photographs were taken in 1917; Conan Doyle publicized them in 1920.
Why Mormonism Took Root
Isak said that the story did not read to him like a man who found religion and changed. It read like a man who had been scheming all along and found a scheme that paid. He asked what made the time and place susceptible. His answer was that the American frontier was fresh ground: people who already thought of themselves as Christian, often with little religious education, were moving west in search of community and leadership, and there was no established church — no Vatican — to hold the field. The land had its indigenous beliefs, but among the European settlers it was, in his phrase, fair game.
He then described Orson Scott Card’s Alvin Maker series, written by a Latter-day Saint, which is set in a folk-magic version of early America where people are born with “knacks.” The protagonist is the first Maker in a century, a figure with allegorical echoes of Christ, and his adversary is the Unmaker, the force of decay in all things. The books introduced Isak to practices such as dowsing, which Thomas identified as water witching. Isak asked whether such folk magic was real, or snake oil, and whether, if Smith’s seer stone did reveal anything, its source was God or an evil spirit. He said that he does not believe in seer stones or reading tea leaves, that he believes in the Spirit of God, and that he believes demons exist without knowing what they are like. If Smith’s claims were a lie, Isak said, then they were an evil spirit of some kind, in the sense that a lie is itself a spirit that clouds reality.
Is Jesus Another Joseph Smith?
Isak raised the objection he has heard from skeptics: that Jesus was doing the same thing Smith did. The charges laid against Jesus — heresy, claiming to be the Son of God — are the same charges one would lay against Smith. Isak wondered what would have happened had the Pharisees not succeeded in having Jesus killed and had the Jews believed him; he compared this to Smith, who was also killed, but only after his movement was established. Any new movement, he observed, will be opposed by the establishment it challenges. He added that the religious leaders of Jesus’ day had become so ensnared in their own laws that they forgot the way of life the laws were meant to serve.
Isak said that he would regard Christianity as a fraud — one more figure, like Smith or Muhammad, revising an older faith — were it not for the good it does in people: the change of heart and the spirit that appear when a person encounters Christ. He added that Mormonism drew strength from a population that already believed in Christ and had been promised a Second Coming, and so was waiting for more of the story. He asked how one answers a person who says the two are the same.
Note: The conversation returned to this question later under the heading of authority (below). One historical difference was not raised: the earliest Christian testimony to the resurrection, the creed Paul cites in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, is generally dated to within a few years of the crucifixion and names living witnesses, whereas the Book of Mormon rests on plates that only Smith’s chosen witnesses were said to have seen and that were not available for examination. The New Testament also anticipates the specific form of Smith’s claim — an angel bringing a different gospel — in Galatians 1:8 and 2 Corinthians 11:14.
Race, Slavery, and the Latter-day Saints
Isak said that he had been thinking about a passage in the Book of Mormon in which God curses a people with dark skin as a sign of disfavor, and that he grew up hearing his father call the book racist — white, or light-skinned, propaganda. He compared it to the use of Scripture in the antebellum South to justify slavery, and asked whether religion is sometimes simply an instrument for wielding power over others. Nothing Jesus said endorses slavery, Isak said; the Old Testament’s regulations of slavery may have been concessions to how things were then done, while Jesus points toward freedom, including freedom from sin.
He then read search results on the history of the church and race. Brigham Young, who led the church from 1847 to 1877, legalized slavery in Utah Territory and taught that Black people were cursed descendants of Cain; the church barred Black men from the priesthood and Black members from the temples. During the civil rights era the church defended the ban with folklore, including the idea that Black people had been neutral in a premortal war in heaven, and Ezra Taft Benson, later church president, called the civil rights movement a communist plot. The church opposed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1976, lifted all racial restrictions in 1978, and in 2013 formally disavowed the earlier racial explanations, stating that dark skin is not a sign of divine disfavor. Joseph Smith, by contrast, opposed immediate abolition yet ran for president in 1844 on a platform to end slavery, and allowed Black men to be ordained.
Isak asked whether the dark-skin passages might be aimed at Semitic, Middle Eastern peoples, or at the native inhabitants of the land where the story is set.
Note: The “skin of blackness” curse is in 2 Nephi 5:21 and the phrase “dark and loathsome” in Mormon 5:15. In the book’s narrative the cursed Lamanites are descendants of Laman, a son of the Israelite Lehi, so the curse falls on one branch of an Israelite family, not on Semitic peoples as such. In LDS tradition the Lamanites were long identified with Native Americans. The ban on Black members drew instead on the separate “curse of Cain” and “curse of Ham” folklore. Smith’s 1844 platform proposed ending slavery by 1850 by compensating slaveholders from the sale of public lands. Elijah Abel, a Black man, was ordained to the priesthood in 1836. The 1852 Utah statute was titled “An Act in Relation to Service.”
Note: Isak recalled that Lively had called the Book of Mormon full of anti-Semitic language. The column does not make that claim; the only antisemitic text it names is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Philo-Semitism and Its Critics
Isak then read a summary of the debate over the Latter-day Saints and the Jews. The Book of Mormon and official LDS teaching are generally favorable to Jews: 2 Nephi 29 rebukes Gentiles who despise the Jews from whom the Bible came, and 3 Nephi 29:8 forbids mocking them. LDS theology rejects the idea that the Church has replaced Israel, holds that the Jews remain a covenant people who will be gathered, and records that Smith studied Hebrew with a Jewish tutor and that early leaders supported a Jewish return to Palestine. Critics point to the Book of Mormon’s stated aim of convincing Jew and Gentile that Jesus is the Christ, to an eschatology in which Jerusalem suffers a final siege before surviving Jews accept Jesus, to remarks by some leaders about Jewish hardship as divine chastisement, and to members’ posthumous proxy baptisms of Holocaust victims against church policy.
Israel and the People of God
From there Isak turned to a question about Christians and Israel. If Jesus is the Messiah who sent his followers to Jew and Gentile alike, he said, that does not erase Jewish history; it is the next chapter and a fresh start — a turn from stoning and mutual judgment to loving God and neighbor, from which everything else follows. Yet many American Christians hold that Israel is God’s people, that its enemies are God’s enemies, and that Israel can therefore do no wrong. Isak said that history and the Bible both show that this is not so. The gospel was received by the Gentiles as an expansion of God, not of Israel, and Israel remains bound to obey God’s commands.
He reasoned that if a Christian believes Muslims need conversion, he must likewise believe Jews need it, along with Mormons and Hindus — but that this is harder to say in America, where many regard Israel as already holy. He said that he does not believe anti-Semitism is right, but that criticism of the state of Israel is routinely labeled hatred of Jews. He compared it to his own criticism of America, which is not hatred of Americans but of the way evil corrupts people. He left open whether particular Israeli actions were despicable or were self-defense. His question was whether, if Christ is real, Christians should still regard Israel as Zion and the place set apart, or whether God’s people are now all who have met the God of the Israelites, who turns out to be the God of everyone.
Note: Paul addresses both sides of Isak’s question. He writes that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek (Galatians 3:28) and that not all who descend from Israel are Israel (Romans 9:6), and he also writes that God has not rejected his people and that the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable (Romans 11:1, 11:29). Christians who hold opposing views of the modern state of Israel generally build their positions from these two strands of Romans 9–11.
What Problem Are You Trying to Solve?
Thomas asked Isak what problem he was trying to solve. Isak said that he had talked himself in a circle. His starting question was whether Mormonism was racist and where that had led it. His larger question was whether every religion that follows Christ ends up doing what the religion Christ rebuked had done — writing a rulebook and producing more separation. He said that he did not know whether that was right, nor quite what his question was.
What Isak Believes
Thomas asked whether there was anything Isak did believe. Isak said that he believes Christ’s words are powerful and good, that Christ is who he said he was, and that people ought to be good and seek God for their goodness. He said that he finds it hard to see organized religion as a lasting force for good, though he believes a force of good lies underneath it. He believes that most people who believe in a higher power mean the same one — the Creator, the being who is or holds all beings — and that this God is less like a man in the sky than many are taught. He said that he has met people who emulate God’s character, which persuades him that there is a goodness people can grasp that is not their own, though they can make it their own.
Isak described the Mormons he knows as good and well-rounded people and contrasted them with what he called the clutter of a church: a history of radical positions and views that have not aged well. He said that he enjoys connection more than religion, and that his favorite conversations are with friends trying to work out how to be good and how to bear the suffering of being human. When religion works smoothly, he said, it can become a well-oiled machine of control that moves people in the wrong direction without their noticing. A true connection with God should make a community inclusive, but churches tend toward us-and-them, until members quietly come to believe they are right and better. He said that this was his own view, shaped by his experience and not the whole picture, and that he believes in Jesus and does not know what else to believe in.
What Isak Believes About Jesus
Asked what about Jesus he believes, Isak said that he goes back and forth but holds that Jesus was God embodied on earth and a savior who allowed himself to be sacrificed, taking on the sins of everyone and the wrath of God — something that, having talked it through with Thomas, he now believes made sense. He described Jesus as countercultural: a king who did not act like a king, who taught that the first will be last and that the greatest must be the least, and who showed the humility of the heir of the world.
Isak said that he has known God since childhood and sometimes wonders whether that was only a child forming his own picture of God. But he has had encounters with God that changed him, and he attributes to God the sense of wrong that comes when he does, or is about to do, or sees someone else doing, something wrong. He believes that through Jesus past evil no longer binds a person, provided he keeps seeking God and trying to do what Jesus said, and that this is the way to real community. Jesus, he said, revealed a family deeper than race, culture, or inherited religion — the family of the Father, of whom a human father is a kind of metaphor — but human divisions make that one family hard to imagine.
He compared himself to Peter, who denied Christ out of self-preservation, and asked whether he would hold up if questioned, or whether he had been a Judas. He called himself a very imperfect disciple, but a disciple. He said that he is trying to find his role in not denying Christ and also in not becoming a Pharisee who turns Christ’s words into a code instead of seeing that the kingdom of heaven is at hand. He noted that Jesus told different people different things: the rich young ruler, who had kept the commandments since boyhood, could not sell his possessions and follow. Isak said that his own version of those possessions is usually ego — the life he has planned in his head — and that letting it become secondary to God’s plan is hard.
He said that the world is full of voices that sound alike, and that without the words of Jesus he could not tell them apart. He compared himself to someone who sees, as Jesus did, parasites in the temple but, lacking Jesus’ authority to drive them out, simply concludes that he cannot trust everyone who claims the moral high ground. He wondered whether, if he is a Peter, the “other Christs” he denies are the many religions and churches whose views he hesitates to stand beside — many of which he thinks are good — and said that he is trying to be wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove in deciding which voices to heed.
Note: Peter’s denials (Matthew 26:69–75) are followed in John 21:15–17 by his restoration, in which Jesus asks him three times whether he loves him and three times commissions him. The parallel the discussion did not draw is that Peter’s failure did not end his discipleship. The rich young ruler is in Matthew 19:16–22; “wise as serpents and harmless as doves” is Matthew 10:16; “the kingdom of heaven is at hand” is Matthew 4:17.
Thomas’s Reading: A Muddle
Thomas summarized what he had heard. Isak believes in Jesus but thinks little of how those who call on his name behave. Every interpretation and every prophet seems to offer something and to contain something wrong, so there is no one to follow, and those who claim to have found the foundation do not live by it. Thomas said that Isak did not seem to have committed his heart to a direction because he lacked a view of the long run: he could see that Jesus is good, but beyond that point everything was a muddle — colors, sounds, and movement without a clear sense of what to trust, whom to ally with, or who is good and who is bad. He asked whether he had caught it.
Isak said that it was probably more of a muddle than he would admit. But he has an understanding of good and evil that shapes how he lives, and he tries to emulate Christ, not to earn a prize but as an experiment: does doing good improve people’s lives, his own included, and change his heart? He has found that it does, and that small acts have wide effects, which tells him that he is connected to something larger than himself. He said that his role is to be present and to care for people, recognizing that everyone is trying to survive and that survival is not only physical. The muddle comes from the billions of competing voices: deciding whom to welcome and whom to turn away — which he does not think is contrary to God — and whether to help by feeding people or by telling them the gospel, when such telling may no longer be heard. He said that he finds Thomas’s view of the world beautiful, and that perhaps he lacks faith.
Faith in What?
Thomas asked: faith in what? Isak said faith that God can do anything, that faith can move a mountain. Thomas distinguished between faith that God can move a mountain and faith that God will — because of prayer, desire, or grace — and said that he did not believe Isak doubted God’s ability. Isak agreed and said that the matter is aligning oneself with God’s will, which Thomas restated as the belief that such alignment has an effect. Isak cited Jesus cursing the fig tree and the power of life and death in the tongue, and said that he sees such power working gradually rather than miraculously. His lack of faith, he concluded, is not in God or in Jesus but in a group of people coming together and getting it right.
Thomas asked whether Isak believed that he himself could get it together and have an effect. Isak said that he could. Thomas restated: so you could ally with others, but others won’t. Isak said that he finds it hard to imagine the world’s religions and cultures uniting under Christ, or simply as one people, because although many are close to the truth, histories of conflict and division keep them apart.
Note: Matthew 17:20 and 21:21 tie mountain-moving faith to prayer; 1 John 5:14 adds the condition Isak named — that God hears what is asked according to his will. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” is Proverbs 18:21. The fig tree is in Mark 11:12–14, 20–24.
The Impossible Dream and the Data Point
Thomas put Isak’s doubt in his own words. The vision Thomas pursues, including through his presidential candidacy, looks like Don Quixote tilting at windmills: people are formed by their early teens and stay that way; individuals change now and then, but mass conversion does not happen; even a voice from the sky would be dismissed the next day as a bad tamale. Isak agreed that he sometimes rejects the dream and then returns to it, and that he has trouble picturing it as real. But, he said, he knows that he has changed — through talking with Thomas, with God, and with his mother, and through the Sunday meetings.
Thomas proposed taking that as a data point. The combination of what they had done together — physics study, group meetings, long conversations, and applying all of it to business and money — had produced a change. Isak said that it had given him a more holistic and more accurate view of the world, and also an awareness of how little he knows, how vast the world is, and how many views conflict. His own views now lean toward doing good, finding God, and treating others as part of God and as his brothers and sisters, but they come with despair that people will not learn to live together.
Thomas said that he regards Isak as someone who “made it.” It took about a year and a half of conversation, which shows that such conversation can change a person. He then asked whether God wants that transformation for everyone. Isak said that he probably does.
The Hat with a Screen
Thomas said that he cannot conceive of a God who wants joy, peace, and love for some people but not for others whom he dislikes; the idea is absurd enough to be comic. The question, reduced to its simplest form, is whether God wants everyone to experience peace, joy, love, happiness, and uncertainty; relationship with him; love and hope for others; a moderate life with appropriate highs and lows; and the knowledge that all of us live inside God’s heart, mind, and consciousness. God is experiencing all of it and wants to experience us appreciating him for it. That, Thomas said, is the whole message. Getting along is a small consequence of it: God is the whole, feels the pain of our discord, and therefore wants us to get along. Disputes over Sharia, the Mahdi, the Buddha, Kali, Brigham Young, and Joseph Smith come from looking too small.
He offered an image: a person wearing a hat with a screen hanging in front of his eyes, so that wherever he looks he sees only his own movie. By ten or fifteen years old the hat is so firmly on that he does not know he is wearing it and will scoff at any suggestion that reality is other than what he sees. Removing it requires showing him the holes in the story on the screen.
His example was matter. Mass is made of atoms, atoms of protons and neutrons, those of quarks — and there the account stops. Asked where quarks came from, the answer is that they arose from nothing, which has to be taken on faith. Thomas said that this sounds like myth, no more credible than Apollo or Venus, and that stopping at quarks is like the falling studio light in The Truman Show — a sign that the scenery is incomplete. He noted that Millikan’s oil-drop experiment established the electron’s charge and that Murray Gell-Mann inferred quarks with fractional charges from patterns among particles, and asked whether such a pattern justifies calling quarks the foundation of everything.
Against this he set the conscious-point account: everything can be described in terms of conscious points; quarks and electrons are built from them; and conscious points come from the mind of God. Where God came from remains unknown — the same mystery the materialist account ends in — but the story is a level deeper and of far higher resolution, like 4K compared with 640 by 480, and it derives space, time, energy, and entropy from one source instead of leaving them as unrelated pieces that one trusts experts to understand.
Note: Mainstream physics does not quite say that quarks came from nothing. In quantum field theory, particles are excitations of fields, and the vacuum is a state of those fields, not nothing; cosmological accounts of the early universe begin with fields and laws already in place. Where the fields and laws themselves come from is not answered within physics, which is the gap Thomas is pointing to. Millikan’s oil-drop experiments ran from 1909 to 1913; J. J. Thomson had identified the electron in 1897. Gell-Mann and George Zweig independently proposed quarks in 1964, with charges of +2/3 and −1/3.
Why There Is Anything: The Loneliness of the One
Thomas said that the conscious-point story also supplies a purpose: God was alone in the beginning. Recalling Three Dog Night’s song about one being the loneliest number and two being little better, he said that the Father created the Son, but two is still lonely, so the Son was sent to make everything, that there might be many to be in relationship with. The multiplicity distracts from the fact that there is ultimately only One. Each being has needs, and the loneliness is painful, but the pain is met when we ease one another’s burdens, and the experience of loneliness is what makes companionship good. We cannot walk together forever, Thomas said, but we can enjoy walking together now, and that is the best available. He called it a sad story, but the only one we have.
Isak agreed that it is sad and said that the work is to make the walk shared — to bring more people into walking with God, becoming like children, and treating each other well, so that no one is alone, just as God did not want to be alone. People are already living a version of that life, he said, only with less awareness.
Note: The New Testament describes creation as made through and for the Son (John 1:3; Colossians 1:16) and describes God’s own nature as love (1 John 4:8), which is the theological basis usually given for creation as relationship rather than necessity. Thomas’s account frames it in terms of the loneliness of the One.
The Necessity of the Liar
Thomas referred to The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes,” whose narrator is a misunderstood, hated man whose life is given over to lies. He said that this describes the life of Satan. It had to exist because it was one of the polarities of possible existence — one that God chose not to be, embodying instead love of the other and appreciation of being. Thomas said that this figure was probably one of the points of consciousness Christ created, one of the possibilities that had to be lived out for creation to be complete. A real creation, he said, cannot be a game in which some possibilities are left out; it must contain everything, including the liar.
It follows, Thomas said, that those who want only goodness will be told lies, that some will believe and follow them, and that colonies will form around lies, which become more believable as more people hold them. A liar’s most effective message is the closest possible replica of the truth with the smallest imperfection in it.
Thomas said that he believes this is what Mormonism is: an almost perfect copy, not invented by Smith but told to him by a demon. Taking the best case for argument’s sake, everything in it might be true except the claim that it came from God. That single false claim, he said, is enough to lead people away from God’s revelation as transmitted over four thousand years and toward gold plates, Moroni, and a translation said to be without error. Even if every word were true, following it would mean following a demon’s revelation instead of God’s.
The further consequence, Thomas said, is a precedent: once a new revelation has been accepted from one man, the next man’s revelation can be accepted too, and a church can be built on the latest word of its leader, who declares earlier revelation corrupted. Truth then comes to be established by a man’s say-so. Isak named it: the authority had changed. Thomas agreed that this was the word he had been looking for.
Note: Galatians 1:8 warns against an angel from heaven preaching another gospel, and 2 Corinthians 11:14 says Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. 1 John 4:1 instructs believers to test the spirits. The “Urim and Thummim” Smith described as his translation instruments take their name from the priestly lots of Exodus 28:30.
The Question of Authority
Isak developed the point. In Christianity, he said, authority rests in Christ, the one the Scriptures of both Testaments describe and the one who read them in the synagogue as their author and spoke as one having authority. In Mormonism, Smith’s name runs through every sentence of a conference, and whatever the prophet says becomes binding; people hear “he says Jesus said” instead of hearing Jesus. The separation that was abolished when the temple veil was torn is restored, and the organization grows stronger the longer it stands, with money and unpaid labor sustaining it. Isak said that this is a root of his distrust of organized religion, and he noted that other Christian bodies have also revised doctrine over time, leading people to ask which version of the Bible is right.
Thomas said that the question is not which version but what truth the Bible points to, and that the answer is Christ — which he called Isak’s mother’s mantra, and said she is right. Denomination, translation, and interpretation are secondary. He invoked Leonard’s teaching that each person is to be a prophet: each is to go to the throne, ask God to speak, and receive revelation from the Holy Spirit. Because no one can be sure whether he is hearing the Spirit or, like Smith, a demon, believers must counsel together — “What did you hear, brother? What did you hear, sister?” — and accept what is confirmed by two or three witnesses.
Applying that test to Smith, Thomas said, shows a man bringing a new gospel by an angel of light, which is what the New Testament warned of. He said that the converts’ transformation is real and that the Mormons he has known live out the light of Christ, but that they then submit to a prophet whose demands consume their lives — a point he credited to Isak’s father. He described the beehive, a Latter-day Saint symbol, as an apt image: workers and drones serving a queen in a hive that is not the kingdom of heaven. Missions and obligations, he said, feel like slavery, not the freedom of Christ, and a promise that it will be good someday is the same promise the Mahdi made. He said that the freedom in Christ is for today.
Thomas concluded that disputes over denominations and Bible versions, and even the claim that every word of the Bible is true, are distractions. The Bible is an imperfect instrument pointing at something perfect, and finding it is each person’s part in a drama — a game in the sense of a meaningful drama, not a trivial one — that makes the best of a world made of nothing that came out of nothing.
Note: Jesus “taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (Matthew 7:29); his reading in the Nazareth synagogue is Luke 4:16–21; the tearing of the temple veil is Matthew 27:51, interpreted in Hebrews 10:19–20 as opening access to God. “In the mouth of two or three witnesses” is Deuteronomy 19:15, repeated in 2 Corinthians 13:1. Leonard’s point about every believer receiving revelation echoes Joel 2:28 and Acts 2:17, and Paul’s instruction that prophets speak two or three at a time while the others weigh what is said (1 Corinthians 14:29) is the scriptural model for the communal testing Thomas described. Freedom in Christ is Galatians 5:1.
Confusion, Entropy, and the Pearl of Great Price
Thomas said that the many hypocrites — each saying “follow my way” while living badly — tempt a person to conclude that all are false and to resign himself to confusion. Instead, he said, one should recognize confusion as part of the drama. Just as the liar had to exist, confusion had to exist; without it, every pronouncement would be accepted at once and there would be no struggle, no victory, no overcoming. He said that science calls this entropy, which he described as the number of ways things can happen, and characterized something that happens often as low entropy and something that happens rarely as high entropy.
Note: In standard statistical mechanics this is reversed. A state that can be realized in many ways — and so occurs often — has high entropy; one realized in few ways has low entropy (S = k ln W). Thomas’s underlying definition, that entropy counts the ways things can happen, is the standard one.
The universe, Thomas continued, had to be confusing and the truth hard to find in order to be worth living in. Truth is a pearl of great price, for which a person sells everything; having found one, he looks for another, and each costs a great deal. A world in which everyone comes along is possible, he said, but its price is almost beyond imagining. God wants it and knows the cost. Thomas distinguished hope from faith: hope wants the outcome; faith pays the dues and holds on until it is real, even when the odds look long.
Isak said that giving up out of cynicism helps no one. Thomas voiced the cynic’s position — that he himself found the truth only after a long search, that others do not care, and that they are lost causes — and Isak replied that this was not the answer he wanted: he wants others to experience what he has, and more.
Note: The pearl of great price is Matthew 13:45–46. Thomas’s distinction between hope and faith can be compared with Hebrews 11:1, which calls faith the substance of things hoped for, and Romans 8:24–25, on hoping for what is not seen and waiting for it with patience.
Testimony and Transmission
Thomas said that Isak’s wish for others to experience what he has is a testimony, and the foundation of real transformation. His own change came forty years ago; Isak’s perhaps a year and a half ago. Either way, a testimony says that it is not theory or statistics — it happened, and if it happened to one person it can happen to another, because people differ only in their programming. Thomas said that he took off his own hat-screen after wearing it a long time and found that he did not have to keep wearing it.
What drives him, Thomas said, is certainty that this change is possible for everyone. The method is trial and error: find what works for which type of person, then develop strategies, a school, a book, social-media channels and videos, speeches, groups, an explicit picture of the goal and the way there, devices that change how people think and see, and historical context. Teach twelve, who teach twelve. He said that what changed for him was Isak’s remark a few days earlier — “I think I got it.” Whatever its degree of certainty, it showed a change, and that showed that the approach was good enough to have an effect on someone else. A method that moves a person in the right direction can be followed further, and refined — concentrated, clarified, better illustrated, made more appealing — until a seed becomes something that transforms everything. The key point, he said, was that it was transmissible and made a difference.
What Has Changed in Isak
Isak said that he sees the change in his conversations with others. Around Thomas he has more questions; with others he has more answers, and ordinary conversations turn into conversations about God, introducing and questioning ideas in the way he and Thomas do. He sometimes hears Thomas in his own words — not exactly what Thomas would say, but close enough to what he thinks God would say that it comes naturally. He said that he brings more life to people and is no longer someone others should avoid.
He described his mind as a constant battleground, with every view on the internet as accessible as any other and the chaos of the world pressing the question of what to feel without becoming numb. Yet he feels more at peace than before, and sobriety comes more easily. When friends ask how not drinking is going, it affects them, and some drink less. He said that this feels more real than his youth in church, when he went through the motions and tried to look and act like a Christian — though he thinks he did good then too. Then he thought he knew everything; now he thinks he knows nothing and is working back toward knowledge he can hold without second-guessing. What never goes away is the effort to weigh right and wrong and live accordingly. He described it as a painful awareness of how limited his knowledge and faith are, but one possible only for someone who has some faith and knowledge of God. The God he knew as a child feels the same inside as the God he knows now, and that continuity sustains him.
Isak told Thomas that he regards his mission as noble and apologized if his cynicism ever discourages him. He said that he wants to keep questioning without undermining what he already knows to be true, and without becoming so cynical that he does nothing. His usual prayer, he said, is for wisdom like Solomon’s — not for glory, but to know what is right for others, to weigh everything, and to judge right and wrong well.
Note: Solomon’s request for an understanding heart to judge between good and evil is 1 Kings 3:9. The sense of knowing less as one learns more echoes 1 Corinthians 13:12.
Fairness and the Bad Bounce
Thomas said that what seemed to trouble Isak was a generic question — “What about this group?” — applied to people of other sexual practices, gods, customs, books, revelations, politics, economic classes, and conditions of birth. Each functions as a showstopper: if God were fair, how could it be this way? He asked whether he was on track.
Isak said partly, but that he has come to terms with whataboutism, since it can be raised against anything. He said that he regards life not as fair by human judgment but as balanced: what goes up comes down, and there is an upswing to every downswing. He cited Jesus’ answer about the man born blind — that neither the man nor his parents had sinned, but that God’s works might be shown in him. Isak said that God is often seen most clearly in those who have been beaten down and still proclaim themselves children of God, and in the weak who need food and shelter — present in the one who gives a cup of water, but especially, as Jesus taught, in the one who receives it. He said that a world without unfairness would be perfect, easy, and dull, and would leave no room for character; that unequal experience should not be imposed, but is part of life; and that people mostly fend for themselves and, if they do it well, help others do the same.
Thomas agreed that unfairness cannot be used as evidence against God, the Bible, or Jesus. A created world must contain difference, and difference means a spectrum of experiences, some good and some bad, with an element of chance. He said that arguments such as “I was born with same-sex desire, so there is no God, or God is evil, or God made me this way” are theories that fail to fit the whole picture. The principle that fits everything is that whatever can happen probably will: the pachinko ball sometimes takes a bad bounce. The right response is to acknowledge the hardship, offer what help one can — even a glass of water — and encourage the person to endure, because everyone carries a cross, including those who seem to have none. He said that Isak sounded grounded in his faith.
Note: The man born blind is John 9:2–3. The cup of water given in Christ’s name is Matthew 10:42, and Christ’s identification with those who receive help is Matthew 25:35–40. Carrying one’s cross is Luke 9:23.
Faith and Knowledge
Isak said that he believes he is grounded most of the time, despite wavering thoughts. He values the world as something beyond his control, sustained by God’s power. He expects that much of what Thomas says is correct, but said that he cannot yet know it; he trusts that understanding will come — through God’s guidance, the right books, or life itself — starting from the knowledge that we exist and that this is God’s.
He said that his faith is stronger than his questions suggest. Living in the internet age, he constantly sorts competing ideologies, and what he voices is often that sorting, not his own position. He feels more secure in his faith about God and Christ than in his knowledge of politics and the world, which is only beginning to open up. He described himself as a faithful, optimistic person with questions that need answering.
Thomas said that more faith than knowledge describes everyone, himself included: his knowledge is small compared with his faith that everything will work out and that everyone will come to the knowledge of Christ. He uses what knowledge he has to fill gaps in others’ knowledge where a question is keeping them from faith. Faith requires some knowledge as its object, he said, but faith is by nature not yet manifest, hope not yet present, and knowledge always limited.
He described the conversation as mapping a terrain of people moving toward God. Isak represents the questioner — the person who says “I don’t know; I’m searching” — in contrast with those who are certain of their own system, whether Mormon, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, or cult member. Thomas stated his own standard: that Jesus is Lord and the creator of all, that God is all and came from an unknown source, and that Christ came through the prophets and Israel to the disciples and from them to the world.
Windows onto God
Thomas said that he is not a multiculturalist: he does not believe all cultures are equally valid, though each contributes a perspective. He recalled Huston Smith’s account of Hinduism, in which each of the many gods is understood not as God but as a window onto God, and said that this is how he looks at everything. Some windows open onto a shallow world; others onto a vast one. Christianity in its purest form, he said, encompasses all of them, because Christ is the source of everything created, including Gautama, Muhammad, and Krishna (if Krishna was historical).
He said that the Buddha probably saw something deep and transcendent — that everything is connected and that life must be lived in balance — and that the Eightfold Path teaches kindness, sexual morality, good treatment of others, and reverence. The Buddha did not emphasize God. Thomas said that, having studied Buddhism extensively, he has found nothing in it that is evil, only teachings that go part of the way in the right direction and stop short; he said that the same is true of almost everything, even individual Bible verses, which lead on to something further.
He tied this to what he said the previous Sunday about the yantra, a meditation symbol: God stands behind everything one might focus on, and the question is what to focus on in order to see the Father. Christ is the shortest route, he said, because everything came from him; the Buddhist path to the Formless One passes through teachers and incarnations and reaches Christ along the way. He said that the Buddhists he has met are sincerely trying to be good, but that he feels sorry for them because they are not aiming at the highest point, and much of their practice, though it may aid focus or discipline, is unnecessary beside following Christ and loving one’s neighbor. The path of the liar, he added, is also a portal one can take, but a hard and sad one, with many rituals to pass through before reaching Christ and the One. He said that he feels for those on it.
He closed the theme by recalling a line from Canned Heat’s “Refried Boogie,” heard in his youth, to the effect that love can be found anywhere, even in a guitar.
Note: Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions was first published in 1958 as The Religions of Man. The claim that all things were made through Christ rests on John 1:3, Colossians 1:16–17, and Hebrews 1:2. The Eightfold Path comprises right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. “Refried Boogie” appears on Canned Heat’s Living the Blues (1968); the wording of the line Thomas recalled has not been verified.
Closing
Thomas said that the conversation could become another story, book, witness, and video, and that he felt very hopeful after it and believed they were on the right track. Isak thanked him for hearing his viewpoints and walking him through his questions, which he said he did not expect to be easy, and called the conversation enriching. Thomas said that the point of all of it is to take it to the world. Isak said that they would make it happen, and Thomas said he knew they would.