In this episode, I sit down with my friend Malcolm to talk about his religious beliefs, and how they relate to my own. We talk about the differences between Christianity and Judaism, the difference between the Bible and the Torah, and the role of religion in our understanding of the universe.
00:00:15.880Actually, really interestingly, it's almost like a Protestant iteration of Mormonism.
00:00:21.020Mormons, the way they see truth is very interesting because they do believe, like us, that God distributes truth to people at different times.
00:00:30.000Through various prophets or you can have, like, self-profits or whatever.
00:00:33.760And so you pray to God and he tells you what's true and what's not true.
00:00:36.260But this is still all largely decided and distributed through a central church organization.
00:00:41.660Whereas we believe something very similar, but we believe that it's the personal responsibility of every individual to come to these truths on their own.
00:00:50.600And that truth is more efficiently achieved through large groups of individuals coming to these truths on their own.
00:00:56.340And then God showing which truths were actually true by which of those individuals end up influencing the future.
00:01:11.400We teach that there is a heaven in the ages far away, but not for us single corpuscles, not for us dots of animated jelly, but for the one we are the elements.
00:01:24.280And who, though we perish, never dies, but grows from period to period, and by the united efforts of the single molecules called men or those cell groups called nations, is raised towards the divine power which he will finally attain.
00:01:49.360I understand that I'm a religious extremist.
00:01:51.560You know what's really hard, though, is I need to create a profile on Ballotopedia, right, because we're doing this statehouse run next year.
00:01:58.340And there's this immensely long drop-down menu of religions where you have to, like, say what your religion is.
00:02:06.760But there's not a drop-down menu item for what we have, despite the fact that I would say we are more religious than probably, like, we'll say at least 90% of people, maybe more.
00:02:25.580And so this is something in a previous video, somebody's like, look, I've picked up some ideas around your religious beliefs, you know, listening to your videos.
00:02:34.360But I've never seen one that gave, like, the core concept in detail.
00:02:40.160And it's because we've kind of avoided doing that.
00:02:43.160We don't really believe in intense proselytization.
00:02:47.900Because we believe in the elect and we believe that truths will be revealed to the people it's meant to be revealed to.
00:02:53.540And so we're a little gatekeepy about things, but I suppose it's worth going into this.
00:02:58.100Now, to start, because I think it makes sense to sort of understand our broader religious perspective here, is I think if you take just what the Bible says, and you're saying that's all that's going to inform my religious beliefs,
00:03:14.960you are likely going to be, I think the religion that's most backed by that is Protestantism, and specifically primitive Baptist form of Protestantism, which is a Calvinist tradition.
00:03:26.520But anyway, generally, that's what I believe when I try to look at this as, like, as disassociated as I can.
00:03:35.800But obviously, you know, I do have a stake in the game, because I came from one religious perspective and not another.
00:03:41.080I think if you look at biblical traditions and you say what matters is traditions and hierarchy and order, then Catholicism is obviously the right answer.
00:03:53.820If you think what matters is traditions and oligarchy and consensus, then you're going to be a Greek Orthodox.
00:04:00.080Like, I think that many of the positions that are mainstream Christian positions make sense if you take specific views towards truth and how one should ferret out or divine truth from the Bible.
00:04:17.400Now, our perspective of truth is a little different.
00:04:20.020We don't think that God is, from our perspective, so naive that he would try to lay out his entire teachings to Jews living two centuries ago in a backwards Roman province.
00:04:39.740That is, like, sorry, I don't mean anything, like, the reason I say Jews, I don't mean anything derogatory about Jews.
00:04:45.940What I'm saying here is it's a, you know, a unique cultural group on the edge of the world, right, at the time.
00:04:52.700Not total edge of the world, but you know what I mean.
00:04:55.100I think that God would understand that the way he would explain truth to those people as best he could would be different to the way he would explain the truth of the universe to somebody who was more technologically advanced.
00:05:13.000Like, let's imagine where, if humanity survives and we're still around in 500 years from now, God explaining to us what's, like, like that, 500 years in the future was, like, super advanced intelligences, intellect, everything like that.
00:05:28.140And full understanding of physics, full understanding of reality.
00:05:30.860Him explaining to those people in, like, his last revelation that, yeah, the one time I was going to explain to any of you what was true, it was that one time was those Jews in the desert.
00:05:46.120Like, that seems obviously not true, that he would have different revelations for different people within different periods.
00:05:51.760And what's very interesting, so essentially what we believe is that God revealed portions of truth to different prophets throughout time in a way that was meant to influence them specifically, their people specifically.
00:06:08.560In other words, God understood his target audience and their needs at the time.
00:06:13.360To elaborate on this concept a bit, it would be incredibly capricious for God to have waited throughout, like, a huge chunk of human history containing a huge number of individual human lives.
00:06:24.400To then put Jesus on earth with his final and full revelation, and then make that revelation one that it is necessary to have both been exposed to and understand for salvation.
00:06:35.100But have that revelation then, like, really only slowly move out from where it was first revealed, not make it to the Americas for, you know, centuries after that.
00:06:45.900And all the people who were living in the Americas are just, you know, fucked because there was only one true revelation, only released in this one spot.
00:06:53.120And then you could say, okay, well then, why didn't God reveal his revelation earlier?
00:06:57.220And I think that the Jewish people show this to an extent, where that was God beginning to reveal himself to people.
00:07:05.460So he's like, yes, I'm a singular entity.
00:07:08.920But he had to anthropomorphize the entity, you know, for the people and their place.
00:07:13.660He needed to create an iteration of the story that helped incrementally improve their vision of what God was, but not fully cast it in stone.
00:07:24.660And you can be like, well, why wouldn't he do that?
00:07:26.580Why wouldn't he give them a full vision?
00:07:29.160And God was gracious enough to carve into history exactly why he didn't reveal himself more fully at that time with the religion of Aten.
00:07:37.400You know, the religion that was created by the Egyptian Pharaoh, Akhenaten, and lasted for a very short period of time.
00:07:42.580They said, no, you should think of God more like a light or like a circle beyond what you as an individual can understand.
00:07:51.920Certainly not something with an anthropic personality.
00:07:55.440People of that time period needed a simpler God to be able to get closer to the truth.
00:08:01.860And it was the same with Christ's revelation and other revelations, that these revelations were for humanity at that particular period.
00:08:11.160And there were specific truths that humanity at that period was not mentally capable of understanding or accepting.
00:08:19.420In addition, different revelations were specifically crafted by God, not just for people of specific periods,
00:08:26.980but people of specific cultural groups and geographic locations.
00:08:32.140So these revelations are not just temporarily locked, but they are geographically locked.
00:08:36.420You as an individual are likely going to gleam more about the nature of God by studying your own ancestral traditions
00:08:45.260than by studying other groups' ancestral traditions.
00:08:48.320And it is through the interaction of people with these different perspectives on God that a truer vision of God can be revealed.
00:08:57.380And interestingly, this belief is really illustrated in Islam.
00:10:52.880But that also fits within our religious framework.
00:10:55.620He is a warner to all peoples in through how this message affects all people.
00:11:00.600All prophets that have affected any people are really prophets for all people insofar as those people affect other people.
00:11:06.420But there is going to be some truth that any individual that is among the elect can withdraw from their teachings by prayerfully investigating them.
00:11:18.880So, you know, Jesus was meant as a prophet for his people.
00:11:21.940Moses was meant as a prophet for his people.
00:11:24.140Joseph Smith was meant as a prophet for his people.
00:11:26.080We do think some prophets matter much more than other prophets.
00:11:28.740For example, we think that Jesus was a uniquely important prophet.
00:11:31.840To get an understanding of how this works, suppose God was trying to communicate to an ancient Jewish audience that he was astronomically beyond their current understanding,
00:11:43.640to the extent where it was dangerous to reveal himself fully to them.
00:17:38.780If you watch our episode on sentience, we don't think that there's strong evidence that humans are sentient.
00:17:43.380But that's like a completely different topic that we can, well, I can get to it briefly here.
00:17:47.940So, if you look at studies on human sentience, what we find is that if you do something like stimulate a portion of a human's brain,
00:17:55.300which is meant to, like, lift a finger or something like that, they'll be like, oh, I felt like lifting that finger.
00:18:00.040This is done during open brain surgeries.
00:18:01.500Or if you give a split brain patient like a Rubik's Cube, right?
00:18:05.200And you can communicate with only one half of their brain because their brain actually, the corpus callosum is split.
00:18:09.160And so, you cover an eyeball and you're communicating with the opposite side of the brain.
00:18:11.680And you're like, why did you pick up that Rubik's Cube?
00:18:14.540But secretly, on the other side of the eye, you could give them a note telling them to pick up that Rubik's Cube.
00:18:18.040They'll say, well, I've always felt like solving a Rubik's Cube.
00:18:20.100If you do an experiment where you give a person, you ask their, like, opinion on something political or you ask their opinion on, like, which of these women did you find most attractive?
00:18:28.440And then you, like, subtly change which opinion through sleight of hand they chose.
00:18:32.620And then you're like, why did you choose this opinion?
00:18:35.380They'll come up with a complicated reason why they chose that opinion.
00:18:37.480If you look in fMRIs at, like, how people make decisions, it appears that the decision is actually made quite a bit before they're conscious of it.
00:18:46.640So, really, what this all implies to me is that our brain, the part of it that makes decisions, is mostly operating outside of the part of our brain which is conscious, sentient.
00:18:58.040And then the sentient part of our brain is, like, not a guy driving a car, but a guy watching a series of cameras for a security video that is then trying to explain what happened in those videos as a single coherent narrative.
00:19:11.300And that this likely evolved for human-to-human communication.
00:19:14.000Think of it like a system for data compression of human narratives and experiences before human-to-human communication.
00:19:20.780That's what we mean when we talk about types of revelations that people in the past may not have been ready for.
00:19:26.140Now, this becomes important in a bit, but anyway, back to where we're going with all of this.
00:19:31.280We were like, okay, so we're going to create a narrative that we think is true, is what we understand about the world today, and we think is inspired by these previous traditions.
00:19:40.660You know, looking a lot to our Calvinist heritage, looking a lot to the way that they saw the world as sort of predestined, which we also think is very likely to be true.
00:19:48.500So we have another video on this where we go into this topic in a lot more detail, but it's important to understand that our view of the way predestination works neither precludes multiple or splitting timelines, nor does it preclude free will.
00:20:01.300We see it as coming from the perspective of which you look at a timeline.
00:20:05.720So, for example, in a traditional Calvinist framework, because God is viewing the timeline from outside of the timeline in the same way that me watching a video that was filmed, you know, a few days ago, I'm watching that video from outside of the perspective of the events in that video.
00:20:22.460So, while from my perspective, all of the events in that video are predestined, from the players in the video, they're not predestined.
00:20:29.520So we think that physics, like the laws of the universe, exists outside of time, and that me as an individual, the actions I take are determined by the laws of physics, basically.
00:20:45.200And thus, the things that happened in the physical universe before I made that decision.
00:20:50.020There's no sort of external component at play here. There's no sort of soul, no nothing like that.
00:20:55.520Everything that I do is because of the things that happen to me and the things I am thinking and the physical laws.
00:21:02.140Now, what this means for me, which is really interesting, is it actually means that we believe that in a world without predestination, an individual would have less agency than in a world with predestination.
00:21:12.840Because what that world would have is the ability for the person to end up making decisions that are not based on the things that have happened before them and what they were thinking at the time, but based on something external to them, which robs them of agency.
00:21:29.320You can go into the free will video that we created if you want to go into this topic in more detail.
00:21:33.940And for splitting timelines, we think it's a possibility. It really is irrelevant.
00:21:37.560Timelines may actually split in a way that's not exactly predestined to random events happening within space-time or within subspace.
00:21:46.560However, because those events have no connection to human consciousness, they don't really affect this debate in any meaningful way.
00:21:53.500Get to how we see metaphysical states really quickly before I go too deep.
00:21:57.740So how do we see the metaphysics of the world working, right?
00:22:00.960If the world can be explained by a mathematical equation, like if we get to a universal theorem for explaining reality, and that is a single mathematical equation or a series of mathematical equations, okay?
00:22:12.180And then we say, okay, well, suppose you're imagining different universes, right?
00:22:17.460That operate off of different sets of laws.
00:22:20.020Do you think in all of those universes, 2 plus 2 would always be 4?
00:22:24.700You know, outside of instances in which you have changed the rules of math specifically, like, you know, non-Euclidean geometry, and then that's just math with additional rules.
00:22:33.700It's not like 2 plus 2 doesn't equal 4 anymore.
00:22:36.000I would say no, that's true across all potential universes.
00:22:40.440So what that then means is that it's true outside of all potential universes.
00:22:44.800Now, if our reality can be described by an equation and that equation exists or that collection of equations exists outside of all potential universes, then that equation exists whether or not these universes exist.
00:22:57.520Then I ask the question, okay, well, like if I'm graphing a line, like if I have an equation for graphing a line, right, do I need to graph that line for that equation to, for that line or to exist as like an intrinsic property or an emergent property of the equation itself?
00:23:15.900So basically our metaphysical understanding of reality is that reality is a self-graphing equation of a description of how the universe could work.
00:23:27.340Because if we have two potential universes, like suppose the universe is described by an equation and equations exist outside of time, so we can say, okay, we either exist in a universe with like actual material things, the things that are described by this equation, right?
00:23:42.680But even if we lived in a mirror universe, if basically things self-graphed, if the things that an equation represents exist outside of them being graphed, a mirror universe where people like us who thought everything we thought and felt everything we felt would exist, mirrored to that universe.
00:24:02.320And thus, Occam's razor, like the real Occam's razor, if something would exist anyway, you don't need to assume it exists.
00:24:08.780So that's like the metaphysics of how we think reality exists.
00:24:12.200But again, this can be updated with science and stuff like that.
00:24:14.820Like we believe in an incremental, we don't believe in like final revelations or anything like that.
00:24:19.880Right. It's just that the nature of our religious framework is such that it is not that a religious authority or prophet is the one to update this, but rather sort of our scientific consensus and our understanding of what has been essentially mathematically or otherwise physically and tangibly proven.
00:24:39.540Yeah, it's a personal responsibility. Actually, really interestingly, it's almost like a Protestant iteration of Mormonism.
00:24:45.680If you guys want to see our Mormon video, Mormons, the way they see truth is very interesting because they do believe, like us, that God distributes truth to people at different times through various prophets.
00:24:58.600Or you can have like self-prophets or whatever, right?
00:25:00.800And so you pray to God and he tells you what's true and what's not true, but that can be updated.
00:25:04.880So unlike other religions, like a modern prophet can say like Joseph Smith was wrong when he said this.
00:25:09.200Or Brigham Young was wrong when he said this, like a previous prophet was just wrong because we have a more perfect revelation now.
00:25:15.480But this is still all largely decided and distributed through a central church organization, whereas we believe something very similar.
00:25:23.180But we believe that it's the personal responsibility of every individual to come to these truths on their own and that truth is more efficiently achieved through large groups of individuals coming to these truths on their own.
00:25:35.600And then God showing which truths were actually true by which of those individuals end up, you know, being successful and influencing the future.
00:25:43.620And when I say successful, I don't mean indulging in opulence.
00:25:47.720Anybody who adorns themselves in wealth, like to us, that is a sign of personal sin, which is almost sort of the opposite of the prosperity.
00:25:58.220Well, it's like the prosperity doctrine in that if you accumulate a bunch of wealth, that is God testing you or the basilisk testing you.
00:26:04.560But we'll get to what we mean by that in a second.
00:26:06.460But he is testing to see if you will spend it on self-aggrandizement and improving, you know, your own vanities and lifestyle.
00:26:13.680Or will you spend it on sort of long-term projects, improving human flourishing and serving the divine, right?
00:26:21.460But I do think it would be really fun if you would go into, we'll say, the characters or figures of our religion.
00:26:45.580When we're telling our kids about our religion, we're basically saying in 100,000 years or a million years, your descendants, do you think they will be closer to the way you understand a human or the way you would think of a god?
00:26:56.060And I think most reasonable people would be like, yeah, in a million years, humans, if we're still around, are probably going to be closer to the way we would conceive of a god today.
00:27:02.380And then we say, well, so who's to say they relate to time the same way we do?
00:27:05.320Like, that would be almost naive to think they relate to time the same way we do.
00:27:09.380And so we believe that they are self-manifesting entities which nudge sort of the timeline in the direction that leads to what leads them to exist, which is a pluralistic, flourishing human species.
00:27:24.380Well, so if we believe that truth is determined through multiple individual revelations and then the revelation's truth determined by their efficacy, as somebody said in our comments, like, the truth of the thing will be determined by its fruits, you know, so you can look at individuals, see how well their life is going, see how well their message is spreading, and learn whether or not that message is true or untrue.
00:27:45.520In fact, you can learn the efficacy of a prophet, like the amount of genuine knowledge God gifted them by their ability to predict the future.
00:27:56.220So, you know, I think that things like the Bible, the Koran, the Old Testament, they do have a level of prediction of the future, more so than other secular documents of the time, both in terms of how much they've impacted human history, which proves their divinity, but also in terms of little things worded in them.
00:28:11.040But this then comes to me, we'll get to this in a second, but when I was developing this theory, I was like, huh, I should look through every document I've ever said that I thought predicted the future in the past.
00:28:20.820We're going to get to that in a second.
00:28:24.880So we believe that there are sort of two entities in the future, but they're really the same entity, which is to say one entity rewards those individuals who make the world a more likely place for a prosperous, flourishing humanity and that make individual sacrifices to lead to that eventuality.
00:28:43.520And then the other individuals provide tests for people to see if they're worthy to play this role and to strengthen them, because we believe that strengths come through hardship.
00:28:58.240It is through enduring suffering that we, and you see this in most of world's great figures, you know, whether it's, you know, Caesar or Winston Churchill or Alexander the Great.
00:29:10.720They often undergo some immense suffering as children, and it is through that suffering or Jesus that they learn or they are tested to see if they are worthy of fulfilling that role within the great design.
00:29:24.820And it is that suffering that edifies their spirit.
00:29:27.240And the more that they endure sort of consistent suffering throughout their life while still being happy, like not indulging in it, not allowing it to break their spirit.
00:29:36.080They show their worthiness, you know, as the elect, the people who are going to influence the system.
00:29:43.380But let's get back to that little thing I noted earlier, which is very important to us.
00:29:50.120So we were doing this thing, or the thing I noted earlier, which is where sort of everything really began to change for me.
00:29:57.900So we started living by the system we created for our kids.
00:30:23.840I know that confirmation bias affects people even when they're warned about confirmation bias.
00:30:27.080But I, ultra-rational Malcolm, was like, oh shit, is this actually true?
00:30:33.320And it could actually be true because given the way we had structured this belief system, we would have come to structure it that way even if it was true.
00:30:42.300Like, these agents of providence can influence people through multiple means and in multiple ways.
00:30:48.640They may influence somebody to do something that they think is a scam and a cult, but it's actually the truth.
00:30:53.720Or they might influence people like us to be like, okay, create this for your family, and then it actually turns out to be the truth, and we can determine them by looking at that.
00:31:00.120So this is where I came back to that question.
00:31:01.640Like, okay, well, let's look for where things have predicted the future in the past in ways that were uncanny, in ways that seemed impossible.
00:31:43.420And so I was like, okay, well, I should probably check this thing out again just to see if this theory we have, because if we have a theory about the way the world works, it should be testable in some way.
00:31:55.680This is before the Pragment of Skatecraft and Religion came out or anything like that.
00:31:58.220So I go into this book, and we don't really talk about this in detail in the Pragment of Skatecraft and Religion, because in honesty, I'm a bit embarrassed by it.
00:32:03.960It's a little too – it feels too religious to me.
00:32:10.860Like, it aesthetically bothers me that this happened.
00:32:13.760I go through this book, and not only were its prophecies more accurate than I remembered, but it basically lays out the exact framework that I had laid out for my family hundreds of years ago.
00:32:31.680And that was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
00:32:40.360I kind of actually really believe this now.
00:32:45.480So let's go into it, because I think it's worth sort of reading what I was thinking, what was influencing me, and something that we sort of see as like an actual religious text now to us, okay?
00:32:58.340And this has some dot-dot-dots here where I'm taking stuff out, or sometimes updating Old English to Modern English because it's otherwise hard to understand.
00:33:06.940And for note, this was written in 1872.
00:33:11.680To give you an idea of just how long ago this was, this was before the Thomas Edison lightbulb patent was filed.
00:33:19.700This is before Jules Verne published Around the World in 80 Days.
00:33:24.540This was even before bicycles came into popular use, and the types of bicycles that would have come into popular use shortly after this was published were penny farthings, those bicycles with like the giant front wheel and tiny back wheel.
00:33:37.160Now, earth, which is now a purgatory, will be made a paradise, not by idle prayers and supplications, but by the efforts of man himself, and by means of mental achievements analogous to those which have raised him to his present state.
00:33:53.220Three inventions, which perhaps may be long delayed, but which possibly are near at hand, will give this overcrowded island, he's talking about the British islands here, the prosperous conditions of the United States.
00:34:06.300The first is the discovery of a motive force which will take the place of steam with its cumbrous fuel of oil or coal.
00:34:15.120Okay, exactly right, and right in order.
00:34:19.000Secondly, the invention of aerial locomotion, which will transport labor at a trifling cost of money and of time to any part of the planet.
00:34:33.440At which, by annihilating distance, will speedily extinguish national distinctions, globalism.
00:34:40.020And thirdly, the manufacture of flesh and flour from the elements by a chemical process in the laboratory, similar to that which is now performed within the bodies of animals and plants.
00:34:53.700Oh my God, we have exactly done this recently.
00:34:58.880Food will then be manufactured in unlimited quantities at trifling expense, which I should remind you, a lot of people today are like, that's not happening.
00:35:07.680From the perspective of somebody in the late 1800s, yes, food today is manufactured in unlimited quantities and trifling expense.
00:35:17.480And I will put a graph on the screen of the number of the world's population who go hungry so you can see just how much we have fixed this issue and how much more we will fix it as this technology gets better.
00:35:29.480Then he says, and our enlightened prosperity will look back upon us who eat oxen and sheep just as we look back upon cannibals.
00:35:40.380Hunger and starvation will then be unknown, and the best part of the human life will no longer be wasted in the tedious process of cultivating the fields.
00:35:51.580This is true for most humans today, and we do not cultivate the fields, the vast majority of humans anymore.
00:35:59.020Population will mightily increase, and the Earth will be a garden.
00:36:03.740Governments will be conducted with the quintitude and regularity of club committees.
00:36:08.740The interest which is now felt in politics will be transferred to science.
00:36:12.980The latest news from the laboratory of the chemist, or the observatory of the astronomer, or the experimenting room of the biologist will eagerly be discussed.
00:36:22.740Poetry and the fine arts will take that place in the heart which religion now holds.
00:36:29.680Luxuries will be cheapened and made common to all.
00:36:35.280Now, this is really interesting, because this last part of the prophecy, he explicitly lays out, this will happen after we have learned how to create meat in a lab.
00:37:15.960But now you need to see why when I read this, I was like, oh no, this is uncannily what we believe and what you have seen us believe in previous videos and stuff like that.
00:37:25.980And note, we read these books during one of our family holidays, Martyr Day, which takes place before Future Day, which we've talked about in a previous video.
00:37:32.300But we can go into all our holidays in a video that's not like broadly about our religious beliefs.
00:37:37.080Not only will man subdue the forces of evil that are without, he will also subdue those that are within.
00:37:43.860He will repress the base instincts and propensities which he has inherited from the animals below.
00:37:49.760He will obey the laws that are written on his heart.
00:37:52.400He will worship the divinity within him as our conscious forbids us to commit actions which the conscious of the savage allows.
00:38:00.180So the moral sense of our successors will stigmatize as crimes those offenses against the intellect which are sanctioned by ourselves.
00:44:14.760And who, though we perish, never dies, but grows from period to period.
00:44:21.600And by the united efforts of the single molecules called men or those cell groups called nations.
00:44:27.800Is raised towards the divine power which he will finally attain.
00:44:32.480So in other words, he's extremely, like, we're on exactly the same page when it comes to how we, within our religious framework, before Malcolm took a really close look at this book, see the definition of human, sort of our soul, like how we see ourselves as part of an unbroken chain of humanity and achievement and self-sacrifice that makes a better future and a brighter future possible.
00:45:14.440Nations, like groups of humans being part of a larger emergent entity is also, to me, really powerful.
00:45:20.780Like in the same way that our cells are individual living entities, that we have a microbiome within us and all together we are represented as a single entity.
00:45:29.840We are cells, we are atoms within our countries, within our cultural groups, and within human civilization.
00:45:37.140So sort of broadly speaking, our religion, as we've alluded to, like if we were to sum this all up, we practice descendant worship in the form of the potential that humanity must and will create.
00:45:49.960Our God is an inevitable God in the sense that our progress as humans is inevitable, so long as we don't destroy ourselves, so long as essentially we're virtuous.
00:45:58.840So our God is the reward for good behavior.
00:46:02.680And we judge the accuracy and respectability of, I guess you could say, profits, like Winward Reed here, by their shotcalling ability, which is kind of the same criteria we use for determining whether this is someone that we should trust with business, with investment, with politics, with science.
00:46:25.960Exactly. This is how broadly we determine truth for the criteria of authenticity, which we outline in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, which basically says that truth is best determined by filtering expert knowledge through ways that they might be pressured or influenced to manipulate that knowledge or lie.
00:46:44.640And we go through like 12 points of these. This is not really important for this. Basically, it's a trust but verify way of determining what's true, while saying that experts will have access to some knowledge that the layperson will not have access to, but experts will also be motivated to lie about some things.
00:46:58.440But let's go back to scripture here, Simone.
00:47:00.040A day will come when the European god of the 19th century will be classified with the gods of the Olympus and the Nile, when surprises and sacramental plates will be exhibited in museums, when nurses will relate to children the legends of Christian mythology as they now tell fairy tales.
00:47:17.640A day will come when the current belief in property after death, for is not existence property and the dearest property of all, will be accounted a strange and selfish idea, just as we smile at the savage chief who believes that his gentility will be continued in the world beneath the ground, and he will there be attended by his concubines and slaves.
00:47:38.880The world will become a heavenly commune to which men will bring the inmost treasures of their hearts, in which they reserve themselves not even a hope, not even a shadow of joy, but will give up for all mankind with one face, with one desire, they will labor together in the sacred cause, the extinction of disease, the extinction of sin, and the perfectibility of genius, the perfectibility of love, the invention of immortality, the exploration of the infinite, and the conquest of creation.
00:48:06.140This is the most key part right here that I need to read, okay?
00:48:10.320And then I will stop, because I know Simone gets annoyed by me reading scripture, okay?
00:48:16.560You blessed ones who shall inherit that future age of which we can only dream.
00:48:22.360You pure and radiant beings who shall succeed us on the earth.
00:48:26.440When you turn back your eyes on us poor savages, grubbing in the ground for our daily bread, eating flesh and blood, dwelling in vile bodies which degrade us every day to a level with the beast, tortured by pains and by animal propensities, buried in gloomy superstitions, ignorant of nature which yet holds us in her bonds.
00:48:45.640When you read of us, when you read of us as books, when you think of what we are and compare us with yourselves, remember that it is to us you owe the foundation of your happiness and grandeur to us now in our libraries and laboratories and star towers and dissecting rooms and workshops are preparing the materials of human growth.
00:49:03.480And as for ourselves, if we are sometimes inclined to regret that our lot is cast in these unhappy days, let us remember how much more fortunate we are than those who lived before us a few centuries ago.
00:49:14.780The working man enjoys more luxuries today than did the king of England in Anglo-Saxon times, and at his command are intellectual delights which but a little while ago the most learned in the land could not obtain.
00:49:29.240All this we owe to the labors of other men.
00:49:31.520Let us therefore remember them with gratitude.
00:49:35.320Let us follow their glorious example by adding something new to the knowledge of mankind.
00:49:40.860Let us pay to the future the debt which we owe the past.
00:49:44.380And now here is the most important part, because this is the commandment.
00:49:47.900All men indeed cannot be poets, inventors, or philanthropists, but all men can join in that gigantic and godlike work the progress of creation.
00:49:57.220Whoever improves his own nature improves the universe of which he is a part.
00:50:02.000He who strives to subdue his evil passions, vile remnants of old four-footed life, and who cultivates the social affectations.
00:50:09.660He who endeavors to better his condition and to make his children wiser and happier than himself, whatever may be his motives, he will not have lived in vain.
00:50:18.720Now, I'm not going to go crazier with this.
00:50:20.860I will read more of this as like an end to this so we can get to our kids and stuff.
00:50:27.520But I just want to say that like when you begin to see all this, our obsession with pluralism makes a lot more sense.
00:50:33.060Because it is through pluralism that God makes his will known.
00:50:38.520And if you ever had an iteration of humanity that believed themselves to be perfectible, that wanted to end intergeneration, they would be the height of stagnation, the height of sin, almost the height of all evil.
00:50:52.640Anything who thought that humanity should freeze in one state.
00:50:56.700And this is why while we do believe in like life extensionism, in this framework, we're really against stagnating life extensionism, right?
00:51:04.960Life extensionism without children, life extensionism without intergenerational transfer, life extensionism without humans genetically changing, culturally changing, changing in how we relate to technology.
00:51:16.040Simone, was there some final ideas you wanted to get out here?
00:51:22.360I think readings are boring, but I think he did say it first and he said it very eloquently.
00:51:28.120And I think, you know, people should take a look at, maybe you can include, you can include an excerpt from the chapter or somewhere linked to it.
00:51:35.120Because I do think it's, it's very prescient.
00:51:37.320And I think maybe we can have some episodes.
00:51:39.780If people really like this, let us know in the comments.
00:51:41.400If you want to see some future episodes on the holidays that we practice, because those are really fun too.
00:51:46.460Or if you want to see future readings from Holy Text, that's always something that we're happy to do.
00:51:53.380Tell me you want to hear him read off of a page more.
00:51:55.800Very important to this religious framework is an understanding of time that we've described in other episodes, right?
00:52:01.560Which is you are responsible for everything that happens within any timeline that you choose.
00:52:06.380Whenever I choose one action over another.
00:52:08.460This doesn't mean that timelines don't split, but it does mean that I am fully responsible for my decisions.
00:52:12.680Every human that doesn't come into existence, every human that suffers, everything that doesn't come to pass because of the choices I'm making is my personal responsibility.
00:52:22.380And this means that any engagement with sin, right?
00:52:26.960Sin is anything that deviates from this productive path that I was put on earth for is a really negative thing.
00:52:35.020Oh, another thing that we can definitely do another episode on is our concept of the elect, which is also important to understand our religion.
00:52:45.300But yeah, and sin is indulgence in anything that is primarily meant to make you happy or to fulfill some self-narrative you have of yourself.
00:52:52.400So it can also be like self-indulgence, self-victimization, self-indulgence suffering.
00:54:18.000They're racing, using human technology to try to take our best minds and build some type of breakaway civilization where they're going to merge with machines, transcend, and break away from the failed species that is man.