Asatru Folk Assembly - February 01, 2021


Focus on the Folk part 4 October 2007

Topics
self-reliance in context
Hosted by
Steve McNallen
Mentioned
Steve McNallan Krishna Steve Jehovah Stefan Helga Fehu
AFA Great Northwest Freyfaxi 2014 Twelve Days of Yule Day 10 December 2008

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

162.74

Word count

1,387

Sentence count

83

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

2

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, I sit down with my good friend Ed and talk about what it means to be a religious leader in the 21st century. We talk about how we can become more like the other religions, and the habits we should be breaking in order to become better leaders.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Steve, going off of that, how can we acquire some of the resources and such that these 1.00
00:00:08.140 other religions have? I've got Jehovah's Witness, they've got their kingdom hall around the 0.99
00:00:13.460 corner from where I live, and I'm going, those weirdos can do it, why can't we? Why
00:00:19.200 can't us weirdos do it? We're weirder than they are. Really? I think we've got some
00:00:28.800 habits to break. One of those habits is the recurrent theme that we don't need
00:00:33.680 no stinking leaders. You know it's we're all equal we're all just as good as one
00:00:38.520 another and we're all we all of us can do everything we don't need in each other
00:00:42.240 and we don't need larger organizations we don't need anybody setting standards we
00:00:48.780 don't need national organizations we don't need to pay attention to the state
00:00:54.000 of the faith as a whole I think we must refocus on that we've got to understand
00:01:02.160 that we're all in this together for better or for worse we've got to
00:01:06.480 understand that national organizations do in fact have a role to play we've got
00:01:11.880 to understand that the the state of the faith is of concern to us even if we
00:01:18.080 ourselves are single practitioners off somewhere else. That's one. We've got to
00:01:24.580 get over the idea that poverty is a cool thing. We got to get over the idea that
00:01:29.360 we can't make any money and that we've got to be poor and by golly we'll just
00:01:33.440 sort of scrape along and and that's somehow more ennobling than than having
00:01:38.260 wealth and power. I say to hell with that. Look at the three functions. You know we
00:01:44.180 all want wisdom, inspiration, spiritual expansion. Bingo. You know, right up there at the top.
00:01:50.760 We all want power in our lives. The power that we need to work our will. That good old Thorian
00:01:58.260 will to action and might. And down there, third function, right down there running with the
00:02:03.840 banner. We all need pleasure, joy, prosperity, wealth. Poverty sucks. And we've got to get
00:02:14.760 over the mindset that poverty is the way to go.
00:02:18.120 Helga, what do you think?
00:02:19.860 I think that wealth was very important to our ancestors and something that they weren't
00:02:24.120 ashamed to ask for. I noticed I was in a ritual once and I was wishing I wasn't poor anymore.
00:02:30.800 and I was trying to think of how to phrase this wish
00:02:34.000 that I wasn't asking for much
00:02:36.520 that I just wanted to know that I could make my rent every month
00:02:40.200 and afford a few luxuries that I wanted
00:02:42.720 and then I kind of had this epiphany
00:02:44.600 sitting there and looking at this slip of paper
00:02:46.600 I was going to write my wish on that
00:02:47.680 there is nothing wrong with asking for wealth
00:02:50.780 hey who is the first one
00:02:52.520 just for wealth
00:02:54.600 it's not a dirty word
00:02:55.960 it doesn't make us Paris Hilton
00:02:58.820 or whatever comes to our mind when we think rich people.
00:03:03.640 And I think Stefan has a very good point of attracting people.
00:03:06.980 We do tend to attract the down-to-earth people,
00:03:09.700 the people whose values are such that it's not that we'd mind money if it fell in our laps,
00:03:14.900 but we prioritize other things so much more that we don't put the effort in our lives
00:03:21.860 into generating the wealth that we want.
00:03:24.880 And I also think that this is where some form of agreement between the groups across the country of what are our core things that we can agree on, no matter what flavor we practice, what are we that will unify us, that will allow us to work together.
00:03:44.940 because I can't think of a single faith that one person built a temple or a large church.
00:03:53.420 It was always people working together and pooling their resources,
00:03:56.960 and I think cooperation is vital.
00:04:00.380 The value of self-reliance that we all put so much weight on,
00:04:05.140 and it's one of my favorite of the virtues,
00:04:07.720 came about in a culture that already valued communal efforts and working together.
00:04:13.360 Good point.
00:04:13.920 And we tend to, because we come from a culture where we're more spread out, see self-reliance and think, that means I don't ever need anyone.
00:04:22.320 But they were valuing self-reliance from within a household that had 20 to 30 people of all generations who were already working together, or else they didn't survive the winter.
00:04:32.920 So self-reliance in its context, I think, allows each of us to use our strengths towards a goal that none of us could accomplish by ourselves.
00:04:41.080 Stephen, what do you think? How are we going to get these
00:04:44.620 institutions? We're going to get these institutions by raising money
00:04:48.240 and that's really the bottom line. The first rune, like Ed said, is
00:04:51.960 Fehu and in the Havamol it says the first
00:04:56.080 is called help and help it brings to those in need.
00:05:00.700 We as a folk are in need. We need
00:05:04.060 financial help. We need to raise money.
00:05:07.400 The Krishna movement started in 1964
00:05:11.600 Stephen McNallan started the Ossetru movement in 1969.
00:05:17.340 They're five years.
00:05:18.820 They're five years older than we are, yet they just opened up their 41st temple.
00:05:24.380 What are they doing that we're not doing?
00:05:27.880 Why is it that they can find people to put on orange robes, finger symbols,
00:05:34.920 and chant in airports and raise funds by selling Krishna literature
00:05:41.680 and beads and little trinkets
00:05:45.380 and are so devoted that they'll stand there at the airport
00:05:48.160 or on a street corner and take verbal abuse
00:05:51.120 and take ridicule and be the butt of late-night comedians' jokes.
00:05:56.360 And yes, they've done all that.
00:05:57.780 Yeah, we walked past them and said, 0.97
00:05:59.420 wow, what a bunch of crackpots. 0.96
00:06:01.060 Why they build their temple. 0.99
00:06:02.760 Because they've got the money to do it.
00:06:04.920 And we've got to get that same mindset.
00:06:07.640 We've got to not only dedicate ourselves spiritually,
00:06:11.000 but we've got to dedicate ourselves financially.
00:06:13.700 And it goes back to what Steve said about becoming part of large organizations.
00:06:19.480 By becoming members of organizations,
00:06:22.740 we can contribute and work towards that goal of getting a temple,
00:06:29.180 building a big community center, an education center.
00:06:32.180 And that's important for the folk.
00:06:34.280 And we've got to get that, we've got to wrap ourselves around that idea and really promote it.
00:06:40.340 When I fly out of Oakland Airport, as you come up in the Southwest Terminal,
00:06:45.460 you come up to the top of the escalator and right there is a kiosk.
00:06:48.820 And it says, your Black Muslim Bakery.
00:06:52.040 And I've been flying out of Oakland for 12 years.
00:06:56.060 And that's how long that kiosk has been there.
00:06:58.640 We need the Ossetru kiosk selling fruit juice, water, travelers' necessities,
00:07:08.460 things that people are going to say, you know what, I'm going to need a little box of Kleenex.
00:07:11.700 I may need a bottle of water or a bottle of juice or a sandwich.
00:07:17.720 And, wow, this literature looks pretty interesting, too.
00:07:20.300 I'll pick up some of that because that brings in money.
00:07:24.200 And we need people to do this.
00:07:26.040 We need people.
00:07:26.740 When I was up in Portland a few months ago, on every single corner, they had blanketed the city where young people with clipboards raising money and signing people up to join Greenpeace.
00:07:38.720 And I thought, wow, we need dedicated, spiritually aware individuals who are that dedicated enough to take a clipboard, some literature and say, let me tell you about the AFA or some other Asatru organization.
00:07:54.880 but are doing this to bring this consciousness to people
00:07:59.460 and to raise the funds we need.
00:08:01.540 We've got to have buildings.
00:08:02.820 We've got to stop the silliness about,
00:08:04.680 boy, if I win the lottery,
00:08:06.700 I'm going to build a great big temple and all the folk can come to it.
00:08:10.200 Well, you know what? You're not going to win the lottery.
00:08:12.600 The chances of that are nil.
00:08:14.280 But we have the lottery within us.
00:08:16.520 And we can win the lottery if we just put ourselves,
00:08:19.620 dedicate ourselves and put the work into it.
00:08:22.280 And we can't win the lottery.
00:08:23.880 Everyone can win.
00:08:24.700 Everyone can win.
00:08:25.780 I'm going to ask one more question of our panelists,
00:08:27.540 and then I'll open it up if there are any questions or comments
00:08:30.060 that anybody else wants to make.