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So that's probably a good point to then have you lead us down the second set of chain reactions that leads to correlation.

And you point out in your dissertation that that really all starts with a tendency among early church leaders, especially Brigham Young to engage in doctrinal speculation.

And anytime you've got speculation going on, of course, you're going to have inconsistent teachings by early church leaders.

You're going to have some unique eccentric teachings that were very unpalatable amongst non-Mormons then became problematic for them as they were trying to get a bid for statehood.

And that so having these sort of inconsistent, unique, eccentric, sometimes embarrassing doctrines then leads to this need to create a more uniform, palatable, Protestantized version of LDS doctrines.

So why don't you walk us through the beginning there talking about giving us some examples of the sort of doctrinal speculation, that sort of rich tradition of speculation that was among the early brethren.

Yeah, I mean, this is where things start to get probably the nitty gritty or the details anyway in terms of how I explain the changes are probably beyond what we can do here.

But really, you know, I can provide examples and sort of give a sort of thumbnail sketch of what happened.

You know, 1850s, 1860s, you have people like Orson Pratt who are writing really rich, speculative kind of, I wouldn't even call it theology, it's almost like a kind of ethnography of the spirit world.

Where they describe the conception of a spirit in the womb of a celestial queen, the sort of development of the spirit, what kind of food do they eat in the celestial world?

How long does it take them to travel from one kingdom to another kingdom if their bodies are made of light?

You know, what kind of ship did they need to carry all the seeds and animals to this earth if that ship has, you know, certain mass and density because it's a celestial ship.

So, you know, here's Orson Pratt, you know, sort of a mathematician self taught by any standard of genius, I think, really taking what he understood about the physical world

and trying to understand the spiritual world on the basis of really sophisticated but at bottom simple analogies.

You know, we, you know, Mormons went out into the desert, cultivated the desert and made it blossom as the rose.

So, that's what the gods do. They colonize some world of darkness and plant new seeds and new crops and make it grow

and make it, you know, in the image of the kingdom of God. So, Orson Pratt is developing this and the key notion, or the key doctrine here for Orson Pratt is the doctrine of intelligences, which again, you know, there's a lot of disputes nowadays about what he really meant by this.

And my interest wasn't in getting at what Orson Pratt really meant. My interest wasn't getting at how he seemed to view his dispute with Brigham Young over intelligences.

And the dispute seemed to fall on whether there was an asset at the end of the word. Brigham Young uses the word intelligence, or as Orson Pratt is using the word intelligences.

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