00:00:00.000The tone of our gods being somehow personification of natural phenomenon and like a poetic way of describing the natural world, I think when people say that, sometimes they mean something deeper.
00:00:15.080On the surface of it, it appears to a lot of us that practice our religion in a very devotional way, like a form of atheism, like it's a suggestion that gods are not real, they're just a poetic way of describing natural circumstances.
00:00:30.000And that's the way that scholars have traditionally related to non-Abrahamic faiths is by suggesting that our ancestors are these primitives that grunt and beat on sticks and make up magic spirits to explain things they don't understand.0.85
00:00:47.020Yet the Jews and the Arabs and the Christians are able to magically, you know, their God's the real one, but everybody else is just a confused savage.0.52
00:00:57.680our ancestors were incredibly smart people. They had the same brain capacity that we do as modern
00:01:03.160humans. They don't need to make offerings and devote worship and temples and hoffs to pretty
00:01:11.540ways of describing natural things. So I would challenge you to what would it look like if our
00:01:17.700gods are real entities that have been part of the gift cycle with our folk since the dawn of time?
00:01:24.780And if our ancestors grew to understand them by relating them to natural circumstances that highlight their power or highlight their glory in a certain way, the directionality of that's really important.
00:01:39.160If your starting point is that the Isir must and do exist, therefore let's understand how our ancestors related to them.
00:01:46.920Certainly, we see, like your point about Balder, we understand the similarity between Balder's return and the sun as being a beautiful expression of that.0.79
00:01:59.120But it's not because Balder is the sun, it's because we see that natural thing as a beautiful reminder or symbol of Balder.
00:02:10.180Balder is not a symbol of the sun, the sun is a symbol of Balder.
00:02:13.860And the directionality of that matters tremendously.
00:02:16.920Thor isn't an explanation for thunder.
00:02:19.680Thunder helps us understand the majesty