I do not believe that the top 15 men of the Church are nothing more than 15 older men behind the times and making serious mistakes. I am willing to concede that an outside observer could look at them and arrive at that conclusion, but that is not the same thing as arriving at that same conclusion myself.Isaiah wrote of the Messiah that “he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him.” (Isaiah 53:2) His point was that outside observers and even believers would look at the Savior and see nothing particularly remarkable. If that was true of the Son of God, then it shouldn’t come as a surprise that anyone can look at the First Presidency or Quorum of the Twelve and only see human beings, not demigods.As for being “behind the times” or “making serious mistakes,” those kinds of conclusions require greater context to understand. We are not a church that believes in infallible leaders, as infallibility would require an extraction of agency. I was more than willing to concede that leaders of the Church, as fallible humans with agency, are capable of error and being influenced by the faulty mores of their times, but the discussion did not provide enough focus on the fact that they get far more right than they get wrong. The teachings and actions of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have brought millions of people to Christ and blessed the lives of innumerable people in and out of the Church. To conclude that any mistakes leaders have made define the totality of who they are is a gross distortion of the truth, and it certainly does not represent what I believe.They are not completely wrong on the LGBT issue, as they now recognize that people do not choose which gender they will find attractive, which is something I consider to be a huge, huge step in the right direction.I find it interesting that LGBT issues were not addressed at all in the CES Letter reply, but they became the main focus of our last two podcast discussions, as Bill recognized that this is one area where Jim Bennett and the Church are not in full agreement, so it would be helpful in efforts to tear down the Church to highlight my discomfort. I’m deeply frustrated that my individual struggle to come to terms with this issue is being used to discredit the Church. On this subject, the Spirit has personally counseled me to be as patient with the Church and with its leaders as I hope them to be with me.I also tried to point out that I do not believe that the leaders of the Church are callous or unfeeling on these issues. I believe that they have arrived at their current position in good faith, and Bill Reel’s conclusion that they’re just old men who couldn’t care less about LGBT people is not supported by anything I said. I didn’t advocate temple sealings for homosexuals and even pointed out the doctrinal obstacles to homosexual sealings where eternal increase is the greatest of all blessings promised in the next life.It’s true; I wouldn’t. I don’t think that answer, however, means what Bill is implying it means. Bill constantly tried to frame Joseph Smith’s practice of polygamy as predatory and possibly pedophilic, and I pushed back hard against that interpretation. Yet by getting me to agree that I wouldn’t be eager for my daughter to work in a circumstance where she might get a polygamous marriage proposal, he seems to be suggesting that I agree with his entirely negative assessment of Joseph Smith’s practice of plural marriage. I do not.Key words there are “in a vacuum.” I kept coming back to the Book of Mormon as the anchor of my testimony and as the best evidence of Joseph’s gift of divine translation. I readily conceded that if the Book of Abraham were the only evidence of Joseph’s abilities as a seer, I would likely be unimpressed. But it isn’t the only evidence, and not even close to the best evidence. Critics who want to consider the Book of Abraham in a vacuum are trying to pretend that the Book of Mormon doesn’t exist.In the podcasts, I referenced the following statement ( https://www.fairmormon.org/conference/august-2012/book-of-abraham-i-presume ) by Dr. John Gee, a Latter-day Saint Egyptologist who has written more about the Book of Abraham from a faithful perspective than just about anyone else in the Church. His statement is reflective of the position I was trying to take.“It will probably come as a surprise to many that I do not have a testimony of the Book of Abraham. That is, I have never received a spiritual confirmation of the truth of the Book of Abraham. I do not need one. I have those for the Book of Mormon, the restoration of the gospel, the calling of the Prophet Joseph Smith and the continuation of those keys and authority through the present day. If you have these things confirmed to you, you do not need to get a cold from every wind of doctrine that blows. It does not matter what some Egyptologist says about the papyri. You might be perplexed for the present, but you have already proved God in days that are past.”This discussion kept coming up in the form of some kind of “statistical analysis” of the effectiveness of healing rituals used by different religions. I readily admitted that such a “statistical analysis” would prove nothing and be pointless, because miracles require interpretation, and what a believer calls a miracle can almost always be dismissed by a skeptic as something else.I provided the specific example of my daughter’s skiing injury where she suffered a spinal cord injury, and I gave her a priesthood blessing promising that she would walk again. That blessing was fulfilled, despite the fact that her surgeon predicted she would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. I consider that a miracle, but there is no way that its designation as such would survive any kind of objective statistical analysis. Miracles require faith, both to perform them and to believe in them. The Lord seldom produces miracles that scoffers are incapable of dismissing.Bill also kept trying to get me to make judgments about miracles that take place outside of the workings of the priesthood. What do I say, for instance, to someone who claims that they were healed by a Catholic priest? My answer, then and now, is to applaud the faith of any who see God’s miraculous hand in their lives. I do not think the validity of the priesthood or the miracles performed therewith require me to invalidate someone else’s miracle.Bill pressed very hard on this issue, and I interpreted that as an attempt to get me to admit that Joseph had committed adultery in the practice of plural marriage. I do not believe that. “Fidelity” is a charged word, and I wouldn’t want anyone to think that my concession that Joseph was not always honest with Emma about plural marriage was an admission that Joseph was engaged in adultery. The Church’s essay about Plural Marriage in Nauvoo admits that “Emma likely did not know about all of Joseph’s sealings,” which would mean they have conceded the same ground that I conceded. This gets back to the idea of prophetic fallibility that both I and the Church have conceded on multiple occasions.