Patheos was purchased by the Mormon Church

[Rivendale]

Apparently Patheos was purchased by the Mormon church. The Thinking Atheist was a subsidiary of them. That should make Gemli mildly amused and Louis Midgley a contributor to atheist propaganda. https://youtu.be/aGrR8_Qpz0c?t=573 There seems to have been a shake up when contributors found out. It seems the original owners sold it to Radiant. A branch off from Bonneville communications. Apparently the church still owns Patheos.

[Marcus]

Apparently Patheos was purchased by the Mormon church. Apparently for a full year, The Thinking Atheist was a subsidiary of them. That should make Gemli mildly amused and Louis Midgley a contributor to atheist propaganda. https://youtu.be/aGrR8_Qpz0c?t=573 There seems to have been a shake up when contributors found out.

Can you summarize this? Or provide a transcript? YouTube stories are really tedious to sit though

[Rivendale]

Apparently Patheos was purchased by the Mormon church. Apparently for a full year, The Thinking Atheist was a subsidiary of them. That should make Gemli mildly amused and Louis Midgley a contributor to atheist propaganda. https://youtu.be/aGrR8_Qpz0c?t=573 There seems to have been a shake up when contributors found out.

Can you summarize this? Or provide a transcript? YouTube stories are really tedious to sit though

The video is timestamped and only lasts a minute or so.

[Dr Exiled]

Wow, what a revelation! An actual revelation no less! Anyway, I'm not surprised the LDS Church would want to flex its financial muscles in this area. Big brother controlling the message is the right move for a $multi billion to do given the utter lack of proof for the truth claims.

I find it really amusing that an atheist program was under their control. It's not surprising though. 2 Nephi 2 gives away the game plan. The Devil and Mormon God need to be in cahoots for the nonsense opposites plan to work because if the Devil truly were in conflict with Elohim, then he wouldn't play along and destroy the plan that way.

[Dr Exiled]

DCP and his politics thing last year comes into focus. At least now he can admit he gets paid for apologetics?

[drumdude]

--BACKGROUND ON THE SPEAKER--

So honored to have my special guest, his name is Dale Mcgowan. I met dale a long time ago and dale I don't really know exactly how to slate you or introduce you because you have so many titles. You've done so much so I'll just let you take that baton who are you dale mcgowan?

Well at the moment I am chief content officer for "Only Sky" for this this new media venture. But in the past I wrote books for about non-religious life. I've been a college professor. I founded a humanist foundation. So it's a checkered career. But at the moment it's heart and soul into "Only Sky."

Yeah we talked in the past about secular parenting. This is probably a subject we're gonna have to cover again. A lot of people are like "how do I keep from indoctrinating my child into atheism" right "how do I teach a child how to think instead of what to think" and you've done a lot of work on that. I know that you've written- what was the title of the book? I know I titled the show similar to the book and I don't want to get it wrong. What was the book title?

Well there was "parenting beyond belief" and then also "raising free thinkers." And what is the difference? I mean someone's already gonna like try to pin me down- what's the difference between indoctrinating and educating if you are an atheist trying to keep your kids shielded from religious nonsense? How do we avoid those pitfalls?

Oh absolutely. Indoctrination is actually harder to do if you are opening your child up to making their own decisions about things. And if you are really owning that as as a high value then you're not going to indoctrinate. If you say out loud to your child here's what I believe you know "I've thought about it and come to this conclusion," "it's what I think is true but you get to make up your own mind and I will not I will love you no less no matter what you decide" that's not indoctrination. The moment that you open that those possibilities up you're doing something much better for the video viewer in the podcast.

So let's talk about this "Only Sky" transition. This is not a commercial for "Only Sky" even though I would gladly do a minute commercial for "Only Sky." I love you guys but this is a product. It's one of the end results of some other things that took place and and this is relevant because I think it speaks to how media affects us. The things we don't know about our sources of information and why there has been kind of a seismic shift among many columnist activist authors etc within the free thought movement.


--END OF BACKGROUND--


Can you start me at square one with the Patheos thing and kind of what happened and just take your time with that.

Yeah sure Patheos was a multi-belief website that was started now gosh it's been eight years ago nine years ago. I think that they actually launched it and it was launched by these absolutely fantastic people Leo and Kathy Brennick. And the intention was to host the conversation on faith and they had writers bloggers from all different traditions. Buddhist and Catholic and Evangelical and Mormon and so on.

And they had a non-religious section as well. And I was the managing editor of the non-religious section for seven years. We had the largest non-religious presence online. The bloggers that we had there at one point we had nearly 50 writers including "friendly atheist" and "j.t eberhardt" and just a really wide range of phenomenal writers. And then pathos was sold to an evangelical company and then the fun began. Because it was a little less of a um comfortable fit. They were much more uncomfortable with the open dialogue that we had had for so long. And they were certainly uncomfortable with the non-religious blogs.

I mean if I can jump in the question then becomes why were they uncomfortable? What was the rift there?

Yeah it was um really a difference between Leo and Kathy's vision of the place which was, "hey let's talk" you know "let's get all these ideas out there" and when you have an evangelical company they are really well it comes down to advertisers is what it ultimately came down to. For them a business decision they had a lot of evangelical advertisers including liberty university was about a third of the advertising income for the site. And we didn't want to advertise next to the non-religious blogs and we were half the site traffic so that was a problem. The biggest advertiser didn't want to advertise by their biggest blogs and so we wrestled with that for ages. We had - I lost a lot of stomach lining trying to stand between the writers and the um and the staff. Jay Sekulow is a um a board member for the company. So one of Trump's lawyers and um (he was apparently infuriated by some of the things that we would write) and there would be, you know, a phone call or, you know, an attempt to say you know "can you take that Ed Brayton used to really um tear secular a new one and you know we always refused.

And so I was there in the middle well. About a year, a little over a year ago now everything changed. Everything shifted and Patheos began saying you're no longer going to be able to criticize other world views. We want you to just stick within your own world view and talk about your own worldview. And we also don't want you talking about politics anymore. I mean what else is going on right now in the world?? I mean you know what is that yeah that's the thing is that it was not only um what we did it was it was something that just rendered anything else that we could do close to meaningless you know and and the fact is they have they have another website that pretty much does that. "Belief Net" is a site that's much more sort of "how you can be the best you" and "here are some interesting things you might not have known about Judaism."

And just very substance free in my opinion. Most of the time that's just not what we did. And so I went to the writers and said "are you comfortable with these new guidelines?" and they mostly said "no, I've got to get out of here." Well it so happened that I was already talking to Sean Hardin who is the CEO and founder of "Only Sky" about this new venture. And we had started putting this together before this happened with Patheos.

So then we sort of changed the plan and um decided to bring aboard the writers who expressed an interest in doing that and who fit with the new vision of what we were doing which is different from Patheos. Non-religious. So we wanted to create this all secular space then we had this transition over the course of a year that was aggravating and painful.

And it was only once we were all transitioned into "Only Sky" that we learned the reason for that sudden change of policy at Patheos. Patheos had been acquired by the Mormon Church. They had actually been bought by the Mormon church. And that was the the shift. And they didn't tell us.

I didn't know so for a year. Friendly Atheist was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day saints. That is just the kicker to this. And it just really underlines the fact that this was the right thing to do to get out of there.

[Marcus]

Can you summarize this? Or provide a transcript? YouTube stories are really tedious to sit though

The video is timestamped and only lasts a minute or so.

Ok, then. I don’t do videos so I’ll read drumdude’s take.

[Doctor Scratch]

DCP and his politics thing last year comes into focus. At least now he can admit he gets paid for apologetics?

Indeed. He admitted some time ago that he receives payment for his blogging, though he insisted that it was quite a small amount—e.g., enough to treat his wife to a night out at Chik Fil-A. Well, now the LDS Church will be paying for that night out.

And yes: I have little doubt that certain “strategic actions” were taken once the Church stepped in and assumed ownership.

[Res Ipsa]

I did a little research to try and confirm the ownership. Pantheos is owned by BN Media LLC. BN Media LLC has its operating headquarters in Virginia. Its Virginia registration says it is a Delaware Corporation, which is bad because Delaware keeps information like who owns an LLC private. But, the Virginia registration includes the certificate of formation for the Delaware LLC. And that lists the member/manager as Jeff Barton. Jeff was the CFO for Deseret Digital Media, a wholly owned subsidiary of Desert Management Company, the Church’s for-profit holding company.

A little circumstantial, but Delaware is tough.

[Doctor Scratch]

I did a little research to try and confirm the ownership. Pantheos is owned by BN Media LLC. BN Media LLC has its operating headquarters in Virginia. Its Virginia registration says it is a Delaware Corporation, which is bad because Delaware keeps information like who owns an LLC private. But, the Virginia registration includes the certificate of formation for the Delaware LLC. And that lists the member/manager as Jeff Barton. Jeff was the CFO for Deseret Media, a wholly owned subsidiary of Desert Management Company, the Church’s for-profit holding company.

A little circumstantial, but Delaware is tough.

Thanks very much for confirming, Res. This is a staggering revelation and has major implications for Mopologetics.