Episode 125 - A Burning In Your Bush

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The gang is back from hiatus, a little crusty but ready to dive into The Pearl of Great Price. Moroni kicks things off with the Son of God Sour, a divine little mix of bourbon, amaretto, lemon juice, and honey (or simple syrup, if you fear God less). The drink is meant to “know its divine worth,” which it does—bold, sweet, and just a little tart, much like the hosts themselves. The crew then recaps their cursed break: Abish’s nightmare Disney trip, Abigail’s and aaaAAAaaa’s southern misadventures at a vow renewal and pole-dancing class, and Moroni’s Ohio rollercoaster’s both literal and emotional. It’s a fittingly unhinged welcome back to the scriptures.

Scriptures: [00:54:19]

Abish breaks down Moses 1 and the cosmic fever dream that is Joseph Smith’s “translation” of Genesis. Set in 1830, Joseph’s new baby church is barely two months old when he decides to write a prequel to the Bible—because, apparently, God needed a director’s cut. The revelation introduces a God who creates “worlds without number,” tells Moses “you are my son,” and lets him see all creation in a dramatic lightshow. Moses promptly faints like a Victorian lady, wakes up to find Satan asking for worship, and tells him to piss off. Abish walks us through how this text flips Calvinist theology on its head: instead of depraved worms begging for grace, humanity is divine—“ants with potential,” as she puts it. The crew jokes about Moses as God’s exhausted intern, Satan as an emo theater kid, and Joseph Smith’s flair for turning blasphemy into branding.

Church Teachings: [01:13:20]

aaaAAAaaa digs into what the church officially says about Moses 1 and the Pearl of Great Price, pulling from an online church lesson manual. The emphasis is on “divine identity”—that all people are literal children of God—which the church manages to make simultaneously comforting and hierarchical. They discuss how this concept feeds into Mormon exceptionalism (“you’re divine, but only our kind of divine”) and the endless pressure to be godlike by next Tuesday. The conversation spirals into musings about eternal potential, weird church art depicting pre-mortal Moses, and whether “divine identity” still counts if you’re late on tithing.

History: [01:43:57]

Abigail takes us on a wild, bird-filled tangent before diving into the history of the Pearl of Great Price . Between discussions of ravens, ducks, and horrifying bird anatomy, she explains how this grab-bag scripture came to be. Originally compiled in 1851 by Apostle Franklin D. Richards in Liverpool, the Pearl was a scrapbook of Joseph’s “miscellaneous bullshit”—snippets of the Book of Moses, the Book of Abraham, a few hymns, and leftover revelations stapled together for British converts. Orson Pratt later padded it with fragments from the RLDS archives, and by 1880 it was canonized—essentially turning Joseph’s napkin doodles into holy writ. Abigail calls it “the bottom of the Mormon purse,” full of gum wrappers, half-translations, and divine side quests. She caps it off by gleefully pointing out all the things left out of the canon—Joseph’s most chaotic edits, contradictions, and hallucinations that even 19th-century Mormons thought were too weird.

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