Asatru Folk Assembly - September 26, 2023


Being a Better Person (from VNS Episode 7)


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

137.99

Word count

690

Sentence count

18

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we discuss what it means to be a good person in the modern world, and why we shouldn't need a religion with no so-called "10 commandments" to teach us how to be one.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
00:00:00.000 um don asks as a religion with no so-called 10 commandments how can modern alsatru help someone
00:00:18.000 be a better person in daily life today katie go ahead and take a swing at that one
00:00:23.520 um i feel like being a good person is sort of a universal thing uh we know what it means to be a
00:00:33.920 good person whether or not people follow through with that is a whole other thing but we shouldn't
00:00:37.900 need anybody to command us to know that it's not cool to go kill someone or that it's not cool to
00:00:44.180 take things from other people that don't belong to us um obviously i know our viking ancestors you
00:00:50.280 know went out and biked and stuff but back then it was a lot more of a
00:00:55.440 necessity than it was not because they didn't have the things we have or access
00:01:01.440 to the things we have I also know that the AFA is forward-facing and as a
00:01:07.200 forward-facing faith that means we also follow the laws of the land we live in
00:01:11.760 so if something you want to do breaks the law don't do it it's probably not
00:01:18.480 good for you it's definitely not good for your reputation or for the way people will know you
00:01:25.680 and if people know you as a bad person then that sort of makes you a bad person at least in the
00:01:30.200 eyes of the people you want to see you as not a bad person and like we want to matter and we want
00:01:38.660 our names to be remembered when we die and would you rather your name be remembered because you did 0.99
00:01:43.440 stupid stuff and were bad? Or would you like your name to be remembered because you were awesome 0.98
00:01:48.420 and did great things for our folks? You know, I think that's a really important point. And it's
00:01:56.780 a point of contention I have with a lot of the faith community. And specifically, I've heard a
00:02:04.240 lot of Christian faith leaders propose that their religion is the only thing that, you know,
00:02:11.400 would help mankind know the difference between right and wrong. And I think that, you know,
00:02:17.540 I would like to, I would like to, and it'd be a cool selling point to say that, you know,
00:02:24.020 you need Alcetru or else you have to be a terrible person. But I think that human experience and
00:02:29.900 common sense tells us that's not the case. I think Alcetru does a lot to maximize being a
00:02:35.340 good person, but on basic things, we have an inborn sense of right and wrong. And specifically us as a
00:02:43.860 folk have an inborn nobility to recognize good and bad behavior. And unfortunately, and Katie brought
00:02:52.640 this up a little bit too with the different historical situations, context is everything.
00:02:58.400 And what may have been a good thing to do in 750 is not necessarily a good thing to do in 2022.
00:03:07.280 It's the challenge of our folk to be able to use wisdom to pick the right action in the right time.
00:03:18.480 That so much of the rune Rido, which is the rune of our priesthood, is the right action at the right time.
00:03:24.660 There's much in Ausitru to teach you how to be a good person. And, you know, I'd say there's much in Christianity that goes beyond, you know, just 10 commandments that teaches you a way of living.
00:03:37.040 Certainly in Ausitru, the example of our ancestors, the wisdom of our Gotharan, our leaders, the counseling of our Gotharan leaders, and thousands of years of our history inform us very well on actions that are noble hearted and actions that aren't.
00:04:00.040 And Alistair True does a good job in emphasizing those because the values are eternal, whereas the actions, you know, have a lot of situation to them.
00:04:10.080 But because Alistair True is a traditional faith, that tradition, these values have been eternal since the dawn of our folk and will continue into the future.
00:04:20.100 It's a matter of interpreting the situation and how to enact those in the situation that we're in.
00:04:30.040 We'll be right back.