Asatru Folk Assembly - September 21, 2023


You're in a Cult？ (from VNS Episode 2)

Hosted by
Steve McNallen
Mentioned
Shinto Matt
That's Where the Magic Happens! (from VNS Episode 2) Becoming a Whole Person (from VNS Episode 3)

Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

145.1

Word count

1,610

Sentence count

36

Harmful content

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, we discuss the difference between Mythos and Reality, Mythology and Mythology, and why Mythos should be treated as the same as Reality. We also discuss the benefits and drawbacks of Mythos vs. Reality, and how Mythos compares to the other religions we are familiar with.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 so we got another question here and i think i understand this one um what would you just
00:00:15.200 say to someone who has only met with christianity like jehovah's witnesses or ww
00:00:23.280 WCG, Buddhism, Wicca, and Northern myths were, as the Greek myths, just that.
00:00:35.500 And by the way, you're in a cult.
00:00:40.560 So I'll take a stab at it, I suppose.
00:00:43.820 um first uh trying to think because there's a number of angles on this
00:00:55.040 first and i think cliff would agree with me on this you start with your ancestors
00:01:00.740 there's no debate your your grandparents were real they existed um most people who have any
00:01:09.240 degree of spirituality and even people who would claim to be atheists often will speak to their
00:01:16.040 ancestors in times of you know times of trouble they'll go before you know whatever whatever
00:01:22.200 they do in the privacy of their own home maybe we go before an ancestor's altar and they don't
00:01:27.320 your ancestors are real and i'd build it from there well you know your grandparents are real
00:01:32.760 certainly their parents were real and if their parents were real then your family was real all
00:01:37.960 the way back to the beginning and we believe that our gods are that beginning so i think
00:01:43.160 connecting organically through your ancestors is a really good way to start on on those kind of
00:01:48.600 things um i'd also point out that myth doesn't equal not true i think that's taken on a colloquial
00:01:59.080 meaning that does a disservice to the word um there's mythos to all faiths if they were
00:02:06.200 jehovah's witnesses or other sects of christianity buddhists wicca any of the things you mention
00:02:12.840 they all have myths and i think that your myth that our myths should be treated like their myths
00:02:20.200 in the sense of you know to their practitioners those speak of profound truths if the other
00:02:26.680 faiths that they are familiar with can be based off of those mythos then certainly ours can as
00:02:31.720 well and we take ours just as seriously and i think i'd also go on to differentiate there's
00:02:37.080 a difference between taking it seriously and taking things literally as some of the faiths
00:02:43.080 you mentioned do um one of the other disservices to mythos is to try to force it in the box of
00:02:51.640 historicity myths were never meant to be historically accurate um
00:02:57.240 glimpses of historical events they were ways to tell profound truths in ways that we can best
00:03:06.920 comprehend and understand and yeah so but i think i would demand the same respect of your faith
00:03:13.320 as the faith that they are comfortable with or that they have the past experience to
00:03:17.360 and it also goes to what cliff was saying about be also true every day the conversation is going
00:03:23.020 to go a lot better if you're a successful, upright, right acting person, and you link
00:03:30.400 your faith to that character that you are, to the character that you've built. That's a huge
00:03:37.740 testimony to the fact that we do take our gods and our beliefs very, very seriously. Cliff,
00:03:43.980 what are your thoughts on it? Well, you're absolutely right about if you're able to link
00:03:50.480 you're being a good um righteous happy strong person to us true it makes a big difference my mom
00:04:01.800 um she really didn't understand at all what i was doing and like i mentioned i kept it secret
00:04:08.020 for a while so my family had some reason some some valid reason to be suspicious at first that
00:04:12.640 i was joining some crazy cult um and we're not technically a cult by the way um cults make you
00:04:19.680 cut off your family we're never going to ask anyone to do that so there you go if they want
00:04:23.960 to know why we're not a cult because i'm talking to your mom um but um she she my mom said to me
00:04:31.660 you know i don't know what's going on in your life exactly but i know that in the past few
00:04:37.520 years you've been stronger and happier than i've ever known you to be so something must be going
00:04:42.920 well and that you know let me explain um why also sure was important and you know she she doesn't
00:04:51.640 get it at all for a while she called it ostrich like the bird um which i don't know if she was
00:04:57.640 trying to be funny or not but it kind of pissed me off but um you know it it helped her to see
00:05:05.320 and then the the fruits of that it took a few years but once you know i met katie and had a
00:05:11.480 family and everything um that's come from me being in the afa um you know it's really
00:05:22.200 given some confidence that you know whether they think it's a real religion or not you know they
00:05:28.040 they know that it's good for me and that's that's good enough for me i think um you know
00:05:34.280 if you're trying to explain it to somebody who doesn't get polytheism you know if you're you're
00:05:41.960 talking to an abrahamist and all they know about is christianity judaism and islam and that's all
00:05:48.440 the religion they've ever heard of in their whole life um you can remind them that you know every
00:05:56.040 people on the face of the planet earth through all of time has had a natural religion
00:06:04.280 the only one that was Abrahamic was the Israelite religion. 0.54
00:06:08.820 Everyone else, and theirs is, I would say, a folk religion, 0.65
00:06:12.400 and everyone else has a folk religion, an ethnic religion, 0.83
00:06:15.480 that their people had before they can remember time.
00:06:21.600 It's just always been there.
00:06:23.980 The, you know, Shinto, Yoruba, the various Native American religions,
00:06:29.740 every people that you can think of has something that they did natively before some christians or
00:06:38.880 muslims came along and changed that in almost all cases um and if they can understand native
00:06:46.580 american religion or if they understand shinto even you know not deeply just that it exists and 0.84
00:06:52.340 it's a real religion then you can kind of explain what you're doing it's like what's
00:06:58.480 Kind of like that, but different, of course, and with a European-Germanic context to it.
00:07:08.220 And like Matt said, starting with your ancestors is really important.
00:07:14.480 In two words, if you have to describe Asatru, ancestor worship is a good go-to.
00:07:21.380 They may not understand why you're doing it, but they'll at least conceptually understand what it is.
00:07:25.840 you know i found that that's really interesting it's kind of to the point and kind of an aside
00:07:31.420 i always love when i go into asian restaurants or asian businesses because very often right at
00:07:38.400 their front counter they'll have an ancestor's altar they may have an altar to one of their
00:07:44.000 native gods they have an altar to their ancestors a thai restaurant down the road the guy has an
00:07:50.560 altar also to the king of Thailand. So what I've seen the most acceptance from to our stuff,
00:07:56.500 and I've seen this when Asians have, you know, there was an anecdote, a friend of mine had,
00:08:01.540 he had his family altar right by his doorway. And when Asians came and delivered his, I think he was
00:08:08.360 getting some Chinese food, they looked over at, at the altar and this, ah, ancestor. And they
00:08:13.740 absolutely understood what that was going forward. And I think people that are more connected with
00:08:20.380 their indigenous faith would understand it easier. But I always thought that was kind of a cool story
00:08:25.480 and a cool, I don't know, point of understanding. If I might add something before we move on,
00:08:32.380 something not to do when you're talking, you know, with a Christian in particular, especially
00:08:38.820 if, you know, a Christian that's your family member that you love and want to keep that
00:08:42.800 relationship positive don't go on a rant about how awful christianity is even if you know all
00:08:51.340 the reasons why that might be and can list them and you know that's a great conversation to have
00:08:56.880 with other people who are also true or who have uh have moved away from you know monotheism like
00:09:06.980 that but all it'll do is insult the person that you're talking to you want to be respectful
00:09:12.540 And most of the time, people aren't ready to hear that something that they care about is, you know, maybe not good for them or not as good as something else might be.
00:09:25.720 I mean, for me, when I, you know, left Christianity, that was a traumatic experience.
00:09:30.780 It was a really big deal.
00:09:32.780 It wasn't a triumph on my part.
00:09:35.400 It was something that was devastating to me.
00:09:38.380 So, you know, don't crush them.
00:09:41.420 You don't have to win the argument. It's not something that should be approached as an
00:09:45.980 adversarial thing like that, I don't think. Well, that's a really good point, Cliff,
00:09:49.640 and I'm glad you brought that up. In the question, the question kind of presupposes that
00:09:54.600 these people don't have a respect for your faith.
00:10:00.540 It's fundamental if you're feeling that these people are disrespecting and not taking what
00:10:05.760 you believe seriously, it does you a disservice to then treat their faith with disrespect or not
00:10:12.760 taking it seriously. I think that's going to, you know, only push them further from you rather than
00:10:17.740 bring you to any point of understanding. Yeah. Your God was nailed to a hammer or your God was
00:10:23.240 nailed to a cross and my God has a hammer. It doesn't win any arguments. It's a funny meme,
00:10:27.140 but that's all.
00:10:35.760 We'll be right back.