Julie Rowe on Year of Polygamy Podcast

[_Kishkumen]

Just wondering whether anyone else has taken the time to listen to this. I had never spent any time listening to Julie Rowe before. What amazes me more than anything, I suppose, is just how modern her theological metaphors are (incorporating modern technology, video game concepts, etc.). Moreover, it sounds to me like she is drawing on popular Christian practices of our time, such as being a spirit warrior against demons, and the like. The stuff about multiple mortal probations is interesting to me, and I don't have a particular issue with it. But some of the other stuff that Julie and her prophetic peer Chad Daybell incorporate in their teachings just sounds kinda New-Agey and bogus to me.

Add to that the fact that Julie so often does not actually respond directly to Lindsay's questions. She sounds like kind of a flim-flam artist or cold reader. She talks in such a mighty stream of logorrhea that you kinda start to forget what the discussion was about in the first place.

From a feminist perspective, Julie's prophethood and popularity are kind of refreshing. For me, however, once one gets past the novelty of a prophetess, it is hard to ignore just how unappealing the whole package is.

Visit https://www.yearofpolygamy.com/uncatego ... ulie-rowe/

[_Grudunza]

I recall her pronouncing several dates for when earthquakes and destruction would descend on SLC, and well, they totally didn’t. That’s enough for me to say “nah.”

I didn’t listen to the interview and probably won’t. But wasn’t her prophetess thing begun via a NDE? NDEs are always going to seem super powerful and meaningful to those they happen to, and many want to glom onto that as seeming to be proof of the divine. But really, they’re just that one person’s experiences and thoughts filtered into an intense time when they nearly died. We should be past the point of believing that anyone’s NDE is somehow representative of what might happen universally. Good business for books, though.

[_Dr Moore]

I am intrigued when someone claims to be a prophet — how do their ideas originate and flow? Are they internally consistent, and do these ideas sound like things that would make my life and the word a better place.

Hadn’t listened to Rowe much before, but after giving this two part interview a go on 1.5 speed, I came away with mostly the same takes as you articulated, reverend. The coupling of Joseph Smith’s innovations on Christianity with new age spiritualism and reincarnation, I guess the only thing missing is a definitive answer on multiverse theory. Her obsession with Satan is a red flag, as my own lived experience leads me closer to a belief that Satan is just an imagined source of evil to fear people into compliance with this or that religion.

[_Gadianton]

Daybell has a book on the afterlife from an NDE he had, right? Wonder why SeN isn't all over that.

[_Kishkumen]

I recall her pronouncing several dates for when earthquakes and destruction would descend on Salt Lake City, and well, they totally didn’t. That’s enough for me to say “nah.”

I didn’t listen to the interview and probably won’t. But wasn’t her prophetess thing begun via a NDE? NDEs are always going to seem super powerful and meaningful to those they happen to, and many want to glom onto that as seeming to be proof of the divine. But really, they’re just that one person’s experiences and thoughts filtered into an intense time when they nearly died. We should be past the point of believing that anyone’s NDE is somehow representative of what might happen universally. Good business for books, though.

Yeah, she was a central figure in the Prepper Movement, If I recall correctly. That is already a huge red flag for me, and it is a big reason I didn't pay her much mind in the past. I did not come away from the podcasts feeling like I was missing anything except a couple of hours I would never get back.

[_Kishkumen]

I am intrigued when someone claims to be a prophet — how do their ideas originate and flow? Are they internally consistent, and do these ideas sound like things that would make my life and the word a better place.

Hadn’t listened to Rowe much before, but after giving this two part interview a go on 1.5 speed, I came away with mostly the same takes as you articulated, reverend. The coupling of Joseph Smith’s innovations on Christianity with new age spiritualism and reincarnation, I guess the only thing missing is a definitive answer on multiverse theory. Her obsession with Satan is a red flag, as my own lived experience leads me closer to a belief that Satan is just an imagined source of evil to fear people into compliance with this or that religion.

Indeed. Anyone who spends too much time talking about Satan is to be avoided, in my opinion. And Julie has expended quite a bit of mental and spiritual enemy on the Dark One and his minions. Honestly, Satan and demons are among the worst innovations of Christianity. Although I probably should not speculate in this way, and please feel free to take this with a huge grain of salt, the evil characters of Hellenistic Jewish and then Christian mythology are probably borrowed from elements of Zoroastrian theology and owe a lot of their staying power to resentment over Macedonian and Roman imperialism.

Prior to the Common Era, the dominant way of thinking about spirits was that there were all kinds of entities populating the world. Thanks to the influence of Zoroastrianism on Judaism, and then the stress of occupation of Israel by foreign powers after the return from Babylon, a dualistic evil/good spiritual schema takes hold and then, later, all of the various entities get thrown into one of two moral categories. The vast majority of named entities get consigned to the category of evil demons (these are the pagan gods and spirits). This stark moral-existential dualism has been one of the most pernicious and destructive ideas in human history.

In later Judaism and Christianity it created a world in which many believers were continually on the look out for invisible, evil entities that were "out to get them." What a wonderful way to manipulate believers! The world is a dangerous place, and evil is always on the prowl. And instead of focusing on the real-world problems that we can do something about, people construct these imaginary battlegrounds where they live out their own epic struggles against fictitious enemies. It is paranoid, counterproductive, and a huge waste of time. It is what people do to avoid reality when reality is too dull or painful to handle. It is what leaders use to scare their followers back into line.

This is what we see in this movement. A lot of people fussing and worrying over imaginary warfare with imaginary entities and dreaming of mortal probations past and future. It is like being the author of one's own series of fantasy novels in which one can be the protagonist/hero.

[_Kishkumen]

Daybell has a book on the afterlife from an NDE he had, right? Wonder why SeN isn't all over that.

I think you are right, Gad. This is another phenomenon that I steer clear of and pay little attention to. I have known a couple of people who published their NDEs in those collections sold in Deseret Book back in the '80s. In both cases, the person in question was either ethically dodgy, mentally unstable, or both. Sorry to say that one was a relative who has since passed away. It instilled in me a lack of interest in the phenomenon. I just can't take it all that seriously.

[_Symmachus]

Indeed. Anyone who spends too much time talking about Satan is to be avoided, in my opinion. And Julie has expended quite a bit of mental and spiritual enemy on the Dark One and his minions. Honestly, Satan and demons are among the worst innovations of Christianity. Although I probably should not speculate in this way, and please feel free to take this with a huge grain of salt, the evil characters of Hellenistic Jewish and then Christian mythology are probably borrowed from elements of Zoroastrian theology and owe a lot of their staying power to resentment over Macedonian and Roman imperialism.

Prior to the Common Era, the dominant way of thinking about spirits was that there were all kinds of entities populating the world. Thanks to the influence of Zoroastrianism on Judaism, and then the stress of occupation of Israel by foreign powers after the return from Babylon, a dualistic evil/good spiritual schema takes hold and then, later, all of the various entities get thrown into one of two moral categories. The vast majority of named entities get consigned to the category of evil demons (these are the pagan gods and spirits). This stark moral-existential dualism has been one of the most pernicious and destructive ideas in human history.

In later Judaism and Christianity it created a world in which many believers were continually on the look out for invisible, evil entities that were "out to get them." What a wonderful way to manipulate believers! The world is a dangerous place, and evil is always on the prowl. And instead of focusing on the real-world problems that we can do something about, people construct these imaginary battlegrounds where they live out their own epic struggles against fictitious enemies. It is paranoid, counterproductive, and a huge waste of time. It is what people do to avoid reality when reality is too dull or painful to handle. It is what leaders use to scare their followers back into line.

This is what we see in this movement. A lot of people fussing and worrying over imaginary warfare with imaginary entities and dreaming of mortal probations past and future. It is like being the author of one's own series of fantasy novels in which one can be the protagonist/hero.

Or perhaps this is just human psychology?

I do take this all with a grain of salt, as you prescribe us to, since there is a great deal lost when you flatten on the anvil of history the millions of multitudinous experiences of human beings, all from wildly disparate cultures over millennia, with a few big hammers like Roman imperialism and Zoroastrian theology. And I'm sure you would agree that what might seem as manipulation of followers in the ancient world on a superficial level might actually have been attempts to "deal with real world problems that we can do something about" (e.g. Gregory the Great or any number of ascetics, to pick some easy examples). What would you have expected them to do instead? These were societies where a few weeks of severe or unexpected weather could fatally disrupt the food supply. None of the mechanisms that have solved any of the real-world problems they faced were even thought of, let alone able to be implemented. In such an environment, I find it understandable that people cast those problems in terms they could understand and that offered them something that seemed like a solution. Supposing that dualism developed along the course you trace here, it's not as if the pre-dualistic world you presuppose was any better at solving those problems. I'm not sure, in any case, the Melians would have taken any comfort from the fact that the Athenians were more sophisticated in their analysis than a Zoroastrian priest might have been.

And besides, I wonder if you would agree that the explanation as you lay it out comes close to replicating the effect it decries: on the one hand, there are those who are simply trying to solve "real-world problems that we can do something about" and who don't use their worldview as a mechanism for manipulating followers, and on the other hand there are people trapped in a "moral-existential dualism" whose views are "fictitious," "paranoid," and "counterproductive," and all their activity involving their views a "huge waste of time" that is "avoiding reality."

Not that I am charging you with anything: human beings naturally reduce complexity into more manageable parts, 2 parts being the second easiest to manage behind 1. Maybe that is just the necessity of the format here, but on the other hand the form of dualism you decry seems pervasive to me and seems to appear even in denunciations of it. There are great number of Americans who view themselves as people who are just trying to solve "real-world problems that we can do something about" yet who characterize anyone who disagrees in exactly the same kind of terms you put here: people trapped in a "moral-existential dualism" whose views are "fictitious," "paranoid," and "counterproductive," and all their activity involving their views a "huge waste of time" that is "avoiding reality" (that stance practically describes Vox and every Elizabeth Warren supporter I ever heard talk, yet they sincerely believe they're just problem-solvers; it's just they can't solve the problems until they fend off the forces of evil). And for every Trump supporter who thinks masks are a conspiracy to suppress the MAGA vote to benefit China, I'll show you a PhD trying to beat up a gaudy bronze statue of someone who's been dead for more than 100 years and who they couldn't tell you two facts about, all in order to exorcise some demon that is supposedly all around us.

And yet I don't think one could make a real argument that Macedonian imperialism and Middle Zoroastrianism is lurking behind any of it.

[_Kishkumen]

Or perhaps this is just human psychology?

What in human affairs doesn't come down to human psychology to one extent or another? I don't spend my time writing posts that say, "Well, that's human psychology for you," because, well, that is banal, obvious, and boring, although it is wonderfully accurate much of the time.

I do take this all with a grain of salt, as you prescribe us to, since there is a great deal lost when you flatten on the anvil of history the millions of multitudinous experiences of human beings, all from wildly disparate cultures over millennia, with a few big hammers like Roman imperialism and Zoroastrian theology.

OK, and yet describing things this way ignores the fact there was a kind of hotspot of cultural creativity in a more limited time and space wherein these elements came together that is arguably pertinent to what I am perhaps clumsily trying to convey. It is not like I am simply saying, "Wow, that Zoroaster and old Augustus have a lot to answer for here!"

And I'm sure you would agree that what might seem as manipulation of followers in the ancient world on a superficial level might actually have been attempts to "deal with real world problems that we can do something about" (e.g. Gregory the Great or any number of ascetics, to pick some easy examples). What would you have expected them to do instead? These were societies where a few weeks of severe or unexpected weather could fatally disrupt the food supply. None of the mechanisms that have solved any of the real-world problems they faced were even thought of, let alone able to be implemented. In such an environment, I find it understandable that people cast those problems in terms they could understand and that offered them something that seemed like a solution. Supposing that dualism developed along the course you trace here, it's not as if the pre-dualistic world you presuppose was any better at solving those problems. I'm not sure, in any case, the Melians would have taken any comfort from the fact that the Athenians were more sophisticated in their analysis than a Zoroastrian priest might have been.

I would like to think that you are reading the wrong things into my post. Just because I said that the theological strategy of transforming countless gods, demigods, and other entities into evil demons was probably useful for manipulating people does not mean that I believe this is an explanation of the cause of that kind of theological move. Nor am I interested in casting blame on the "ancients" for doing this kind of thing. Furthermore, far be it from me to judge harshly the peoples of antiquity for doing their best to deal with reality as they understood it. What I am doing here is making a casual, retrospective judgment based on how all of this seems to have turned out. It comes from my modern bias and my own viewpoint as it conflicts with the views of my contemporaries who put a lot of stock into the existence of all-righteous and all-evil invisible entities, apocalyptic prophecies, and the like.

Now, I do not doubt that people today also believe they are engaged in the serious business of dealing with reality when they become prayer warriors to cast out demons and prepare for their advancement to the next mortal probation in which they hope to be a step closer to godhood. The story is a little different, but it is definitely a reception of past ideas, and I don't think it is out of bounds to draw connections between the reception of antiquity in religion today and the cultural and historical factors that informed certain developments in the past, even with a broad brush and on a public message board. Obviously I don't, since I am doing it.

And besides, I wonder if you would agree that the explanation as you lay it out comes close to replicating the effect it decries: on the one hand, there are those who are simply trying to solve "real-world problems that we can do something about" and who don't use their worldview as a mechanism for manipulating followers, and on the other hand there are people trapped in a "moral-existential dualism" whose views are "fictitious," "paranoid," and "counterproductive," and all their activity involving their views a "huge waste of time" that is "avoiding reality."

Yeah, I knew that, if you read this, you would trot out this argument. I give it high marks for being clever, which is probably more than I will get from you for my post. OK, so, I don't view my participation on MDB as "trying to solve real-world problems that we can do something about." I am actually kind of taken aback that you, of all people, imagine me taking that position. My understanding, and correct me if I am wrong because I am working from my recollection of your explanation of why you came to this board, is that you are here partly because you were amused by our fun, silly, and satirical send up of apologetics. Really, I hope that you don't see me as imagining that I am doing serious work here. I am shooting the crap with friends.

Also, while you are indeed perceptive to see that I have created my own crude duality here that breaks the world into the congregation of the serious problem solvers and the congregation of deluded fantasists, I think that, again, you are reading your own assumptions into my understanding of these categories. I have to take the blame for being so careless as to treat this message board as a place where I can let my hair down and share my casual, late-night bar talk about the world. The truth is, however, that I think most of what all of us do, myself included, is indulge in fantasies of one kind or another. Very few of us are actually engaged in real-world problem solving, and most of those who claim to be doing so are full of crap. The wiser among them can be forced to admit this after being pressed by a non-threatening and skillful interlocutor.

That said, I am tempted to hypothesize that indulging in the stark moral dualism of certain theological systems and their accompanying apocalyptic narratives has probably been an aggravating factor in human conflict, even among those who do not believe in spiritual entities or the Bible. I can't prove it, and I will readily confess that it does not take demons or the final anti-Christ to participate in murderous "othering." Given, however, the wide purchase and pervasive influence of these ideas, it is tough to separate them out and imagine what the world might have been without them. I never claimed that my post was an answer to the problems of humanity, however, and I stand by that humble lack of any claim to have provided one.

Not that I am charging you with anything: human beings naturally reduce complexity into more manageable parts, 2 parts being the second easiest to manage behind 1. Maybe that is just the necessity of the format here, but on the other hand the form of dualism you decry seems pervasive to me and seems to appear even in denunciations of it. There are great number of Americans who view themselves as people who are just trying to solve "real-world problems that we can do something about" yet who characterize anyone who disagrees in exactly the same kind of terms you put here: people trapped in a "moral-existential dualism" whose views are "fictitious," "paranoid," and "counterproductive," and all their activity involving their views a "huge waste of time" that is "avoiding reality" (that stance practically describes Vox and every Elizabeth Warren supporter I ever heard talk, yet they sincerely believe they're just problem-solvers; it's just they can't solve the problems until they fend off the forces of evil). And for every Trump supporter who thinks masks are a conspiracy to suppress the MAGA vote to benefit China, I'll show you a Ph.D. trying to beat up a gaudy bronze statue of someone who's been dead for more than 100 years and who they couldn't tell you two facts about, all in order to exorcise some demon that is supposedly all around us.

And yet I don't think one could make a real argument that Macedonian imperialism and Middle Zoroastrianism is lurking behind any of it.

You'll have to forgive me for feeling like you are reacting to my post as though I am an ideological foe who has just unfairly denigrated the benighted conservative gaggle. In other, fewer words, I am being told that, yes, my crap stinks too. You, on the other hand, are wise because you recognize that everyone's crap stinks, and so you are disappointed when you see me apparently failing to get that. Let me assure you that I apply my negative judgments to everyone who imagines that their devils must be exorcised in order to save us all, whether they actually believe in literal devils or not. We might say the same thing of exorcising Mopologists, a favorite pastime of ours here on the MDB. If I were to be so bold as to cling to anything in my earlier post after your criticism, even tentatively, it is that I remain open to the possibility that the belief systems that took hold in the West in the first century CE continue to have identifiable impacts on our world today. I may not have hit on exactly the right ones, or proved to your satisfaction the influences and connections, but, then, as you observed yourself, it's just a damn message board.

Finally, after this long time of our acquaintance, as narrow as it may be, I do understand that you hate this kind of historical shooting of the crap. I chose to do it anyway, because, well, I enjoy it. Sorry. Maybe that places me in a category with other irresponsible baddies, but so be it. My attempts to follow my better angels (which I do not believe in, but it's still a useful metaphor that has a long history behind it) do prevent me from making a fool out of myself in this particular way on a public blog, in journal articles, or in books published by university presses (smarter, more learned peers have succumbed to temptation!), but I just can't seem to restrain myself from doing it here. Maybe you can rhetorically beat the impulse out of me.

[_Symmachus]

Your prickliness I can detect though not quite understand, and while I probably deserve it, yet I must defend myself from the slander that I have attempted to say anything clever, let alone succeeded, or the virtual character assassination inherent in setting down a challenge to beat you, rhetorically or otherwise. I haven't even figured out to how win at solitaire.

I view any post here as an invitation to respond, and my response is simply that I don't agree firstly with the current orthodoxy among scholars of the ancient Mediterranean that Zoroastrianism was all that influential on Judaism (so few can actually read Zoroastrian texts, which is a significant problem when what few translations there are obscure a lot and are very old, and still even fewer understand that most of the Zoroastrian corpus on which this claim is based come from centuries after the period in question; in any case, it's probably a more technical a discussion than you want to have). One could better make the argument with Manicheism and Christianity, but even there you run into a chicken-egg dilemma. It is an interesting problem, which perhaps doesn't interest you as it does me, but I find an actual discussion of the mechanism of idea transmission to be absent from any of these discussions and from intellectual history in general. Augustine's example is interesting because it offers a glimpse into the thinking, however refracted through a later lens, of someone who moved around the world of these big ideas; and what I see in him is someone whose acceptance of certain ideas (like Manicheism) was conditioned by the kinds of questions he was asking—but why was he asking those questions and not others? It was not the idea alone but the personality involved that determined the reception of the idea.

The mechanisms by which Julie Rowe makes it back to Zarathustra seem unlikely to me, but obviously it's an interpretive question.

Where we most likely disagree is more fundamental: I don't really think ideas are as significant as they appear. That is why I called in my example from Vox, not because I thought you were ignoring conservatives in your critique (as if I even cared about that; I'm sure you enjoyed taking to me task, as a Reverend should, for the pretended wisdom of what-about-ism, but I'm afraid you missed the point on this one). Even the "ideas people" are really moved by their moral convictions or some other passion—or in other words, "boring, banal, and obvious" human psychology. The trick here is that attaching moral value to ideas slips one into a dualist trap, since any idea that is morally good necessarily implies that its opposites are evil. That is what you seemed to be doing with phrases like "most pernicious" and "destructive." I guess you were just letting your hair down, but I only have words to go by here. Anyway I don't know that something like cosmic dualism implies any kind of morality in itself until it is put to use by human beings, when the boring, banal, and obvious are activated and thus better explain the consequences of the ideas, since those are the primary operators. The idea that there is a force like Satan opposing another force like God, and that each has an army of subordinates to enact the will of the one while opposing that of the other—well, that doesn't seem to me to imply anything about morality. It's only when group A starts to assign group B to one camp or the other that you get to the moral questions and the bloodshed, but then the question is why group A assigned group B in the way they did—and again we're back to the boring, banal, though not always obvious. What is obvious, though, is that group A doesn't need any ideas at all to go after group B; certainly no ideas are going to stop them.

It is not to say ideas never matter. I just don't think they are very powerful motivators in general and serve other functions.

I do completely agree, however, with your sage advice to steer clear of people who talk a lot about Satan. I don't really care if people think Satan and his demons exist and I see it as basically harmless as an idea. More dangerous to me are people who are possessed by ideas, whatever the idea might be, because they impose a kind of second reality, which is derived from their numinous obsessions and in which they are the only inhabitant, onto the one derived from the shared experiences of other people, the one which other people inhabit. Those possessed of ideas in this way start by reducing everything to the idea and in the worst cases end by reducing people to it. I don't think the idea that possesses them matters as much as the fact that they are possessed. I know a lot of people, as I'm sure you do as well, who believe Satan is the father of evil and that his evil spirits are out to get us, but they just don't seem to do anything about it. Someone like Julie Rowe, on the other hand, seems rather possessed by the thought.