Tract 6: Why we believe in a TechnoPuritan God
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 32 minutes
Words per Minute
183.79329
Summary
Tract 6: Humanity's Manifest Destiny: Why We Choose to Believe in God. Why do we choose to believe in God? What does it mean to be a Christian? What is the role of religion in the modern world? Why does Kabbalah exist? Is it a new religion?
Transcript
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this is a track that was actually supposed to be track three but i delayed it because i was like
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oh this is one of the crazier ones because this is the things we believe you've got to imagine
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like you as a viewer when you're like why did he really believe this stuff i thought i had made all
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of this up okay i like imagine you made up this theology and then you find it in an old book in
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your house and then on top of that the book made a bunch of predictions and they all came true
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like this may not convince you but it convinces me the traits that they're making fun of them for
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are traits i want to re-establish within our civilization and i think that we are lesser
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for having lost and the puritan vision of this utopian city on a hill i think it's something
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that we can bring back you know combine the victorian scientists it was this endless hope
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for the future with strict puritan ideals and aesthetics would you like to know more
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hello simone today we are going back to the tract series this tract is called tract six
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humanity's manifest destiny slash why we choose to believe in god so recently we were at this
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conference called manifest and largely speaking i had decided not to do the tracks anymore they were
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taking up a lot of time they require a lot more editing than a standard episode and for people who
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don't know what they are it's us talking about our religious framework why we believe the things we
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believe what we believe theologically and sharing this with you not with the interest in converting
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anyone but just so you can get an idea of well i think for a lot of people it's just interesting like
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theological speculation they find interesting and when we were at this conference every single person
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like every one of our fans and we met a lot of them there i'd say like 50 of them it was like a lot
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wanted us to do more tracks like that was the core thing do more tracks why did you stop the tracks
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but it's not just them for example a quote that from a letter we got from one of the fans i've been
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listening to the tracked episodes of the pod and i've heard you both make statements suggesting that
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there may be exceptionally boring too far out etc in light of that i wanted to express clear and
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emphatic encouragement of you presenting these episodes so much of your content has been engaging and
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actionable to a degree i basically never encountered in a podcast let alone one that
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publishes daily and yet i find the tracked episodes to be valuable and penetrating at a
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totally different level i say penetrating because as someone who recently tried to rejoin
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the christian congregation via catholicism and found the experience uninspiring what you're
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presenting strikes me as something that advances my own view of religion in a way that does feel
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inspiring and prescriptive for this moment in history whereas the modern state iterations of
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antiquity traditions do not in any case please keep up these efforts i suspect there are many among your
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listeners who value these episodes in the utmost so that really meant a lot to me and i understand that
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the tracks are going to be uniquely grading to individuals who have really strong christian faith
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via catholicism or orthodoxy or something like that because uh what we are putting out there is an
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alternate view now i will say as we think about this more a few things that i would note here i no
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longer really think about this as a new religion but rather an iteration of christianity maybe you
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could say christianity the judeo-christian branch of religions that is probably as distant from
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christianity as something like mormonism and interestingly some mormons don't think
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differentiates from mormonism that much but that we do throw out some books that they would keep and
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add some books that they would not keep but i'm going to go over like books that we throw out at
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the end of this examples would be like the book of revelations i do not think is inspired by god i
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don't think kabbalah is inspired by god we'll go into like why we have these weird views but there is
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an additional book that we add to everything which is the martyrdom of man and actually really
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interestingly paul vander clay he was going through our videos and he was pointing out that
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people who start new sex or new religions are so very likely to fail but how often do people try
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and those people who try how many of them are doing it not just to create a sex cult or get people to
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worship them specifically or make money but to try to make other people's lives better this is a
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the type of a project that you really see people trying once in a generation if that now there are
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a few people trying it right now with the mystic path but that's also really interesting because
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normally when people try this they do it down the mystic path sorry when people don't know what i'm
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talking about when i talk about the mystic path i'm talking about mystic perennialism meaning that they
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believe that there is some truth to all religious traditions that there is some super true substrate that
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reality is written on and this super true substrate that we can only access through altered states of
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mind is the real god and our goal is to rejoin we do not believe that don't have any antagonism really
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against people who do but it's just we don't but most of the let's try to make people's lives better
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what they really mean by that is let's try to make people's mental states more expansive like it's
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make them better in the mystical theological sense instead of the way that we mean when we say make
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them better which is to make them more mentally disciplined to make them more mentally healthy like
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to not have the same amounts of anxiety and depression everything like that and to give them a
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sense of purpose and to help them build a good sense of moral values and to help them through this
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unique challenge that our species is going through right now and i did finally settle on a name for the
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religion that i'm excited about before i start the track here which is techno puritanism
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and another really interesting thing is this idea of founding this new sect when i really don't think
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we did found it it's a bit like saying darwin founded evolution when he had the idea a lot of
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people were having very similar ideas during that time period and what i've noticed when i put these
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videos out there is when they connect with people it's people who are saying oh yeah i had a
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lot of ideas like this i just maybe hadn't fully systematized them in the way that you did or
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something like that i do not think um that this is unique information or that i have any direct path
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to to what's true and what's not true yeah i think it cannot be understated how often people write
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into us saying it's so exciting to see that someone else has articulated the same conclusions that i have
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drawn based on and this is typically people who come from a more protestant background or looking at the
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primary sources the people who tend to find these tracks most grating like malcolm said and who tend
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to find also these views most defensive are from people whose cultures involve a sort of filter and
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between the primary source and the ultimate faith priests or analysis or some kind of organization
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yeah the final thing i'd like to note because this is a track that was actually supposed to be track
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three but i delayed it because i was like oh this is one of the crazier ones because this is
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the things we believe but it also elevates the additional book that we add to biblical text which
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nobody else adds to biblical text as it's divinely inspired works which is the martyrdom of man by
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winwood reed and the way that we relate to theology like even if you look at the tracks i would generally
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recommend that somebody who was born a muslim and identifies as muslim first and foremost go to the
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koran for their religious learnings somebody who was born a jew and raised a jew i would say go back
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to conservative jewish values study your books same with christian however i would say for people who
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were born atheists or are pure techno puritan like just pure this branch that we are creating
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the core book of ours is the martyrdom of man of all of the faith background books so that's another
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thing to note it's what if i'm coming into this and i don't have a theological background or my family
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does i don't feel strongly like a christian or a jew or muslim then the martyrdom of man is the the
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default because i think it's the most uh recent and clear of the revelations from my perspective and
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we'll get to why we think that all right so i'm gonna get started let's do it anything you wanted to
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say someone before i do i'm excited you had me crazy those who are familiar with us know that we
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crafted this set of beliefs because we believe it is both what is psychologically healthiest for our
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kids and allows for religious fervor while being resistant to conflict with science they laugh and
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say can you really expect a set of practices to carry itself with fidelity and fervor intergenerationally
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just because people think it helps kids you really think that you could compete with traditional
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religions here we have to take our turn to chuckle gesturing at santa pummeling traditional religion
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to the dirt in the public mindshare or the easter bunny or solstice events the alternative religious
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systems that people have chosen seem to be out competing specifically for their kids oh let's do
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what's right for our kids the traditional systems but i also know that what i believe about god is true
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how i am not a man of faith i don't believe things without evidence even if god started talking to
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me i would just assume i was having a psychotic break i created this system and framing for my kids
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along with the holidays and mandates in an effort to save our species not because i thought it was
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true then one day i thought if it was true how would god communicate that to someone like me and
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because he couldn't communicate it with me by talking to me if god just directly talked to me
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i assume you probably feel this way to simone you'd be like oh i'm going insane my initial thought
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wouldn't be oh this is affirmation of my beliefs by the way this is such a cal like a classical
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stereotypical calvinist view if you go back and read a christmas carol about evaneser scrooge the first
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thing that happens when he starts seeing the ghosts it he is he says that he must have eaten some like
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off food he he assumes he has food poisoning and he is seeing ghosts it's great all right
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first i started going through the books i had tried to flippantly include in my religion as
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earlier revelations religions i had included to preserve and create continuity in western history
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the abrahamic tree of prophets as i studied them i started to see lines and interpretations of what was
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written that supported this weird religion i thought i had invented lines that directly contradicted
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the most commonly practiced iterations of those traditions c tract one but while weird that was
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hardly enough to convince me the human brain can easily pick up patterns where they don't exist
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as an example of this are the lines in the quran that explicitly state all of the major abrahamic
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religions are true religions and that god sends different prophets for different people with different
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all true yet seemingly contradictory teachings and i'm going to butcher the pronunciation here but surah
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al-mahdi 47 to 57 and surah al-nal 36 and that islam was the revelation meant to be followed by arabic speakers
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surfa yusuf 2 and just as a quick aside here some people have been like muhammad it says muhammad was the seal of
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the prophets except this phrase is directly taken for manichean literature the seal of the prophets because they
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commonly use phrase in manichean literature like almost as common as almond and other literatures or something like that
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and what it means is a seal of verification not the last of but like a seal of proof that it's the twitter blue check of
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religion yes and and he verified interestingly like do the opposite of what a lot of muslims want to believe
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and it's pretty clear if you read the quran that this is what was meant that the christian tradition is 100%
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true and the jewish tradition is 100% true and islamic laws should not be forced on these populations
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because while it may seem that their traditions are different and people can look at our tesseract god
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concept to see where this aligns with our understanding here okay so i realize that because we
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haven't done a tract in a while you may not remember what our thoughts are on are about islam what was
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what muhammad was actually trying to say so i'll just quickly go over some of these passages that i
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cited here one here we have we surely sent a messenger to every community sometimes this is
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translated nation so to every community saying worship allah and shun false gods but some of them
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were guided by allah while others were destined to stray so travel throughout the land and see the fate
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of the deniers so this tells us a few interesting things first it tells us that there are multiple
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prophets and keep in mind that like a nation or a community the nations that are in for example the
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middle east today are not the nations that were there in the long past this means that you are
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getting multiple iterations of messengers for different basically cultural groups and it means that you can
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tell which are the true iteration and which are the false iteration by god's favor and as i say you know
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when you look at history you will see god favoring individuals like the early jews and then he removes
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his favor or the or you know the early christians or during the protestant reformation you know god's
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favor returned to the christian community or during the islamic golden age and so when we're looking for
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okay where is god's word in the world we need to look at the fate of the deniers essentially you can tell
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the truth of the word by how healthy a community is so if we see periods in world history where you see a
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unique amount of cultural explosion for example like victorian britain you can imagine that something
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about their mindset of that time period is inspired by allah or by god and we can also see the fate of
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the muslim community after i believe they turned their back on god and turned to and were influenced
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by the well we'll call them sufi mystics they god removed his favor from the islamic community and the
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community crashed muhammad's second important revelation from our perspective is the understanding
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that these different prophets teach different and to the human mind mutually contradictory lessons about
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how to get to god and the best way to do it is to follow the lessons that were taught to your community
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so for some lines from the quran here surely those who believe in allah and those who are jews and
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christians and sabians whoever believes in allah and in the last day and does good deeds all such
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people will have their reward with the lord and there will be no reason for them to fear nor shall
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they grieve or as another quote and we have revealed to you oh muhammad the book in truth to each of you
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we prescribed a law and a method had allah willed he would have made you one nation united in religion
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but he intended to test you in what he has given you so race to all all that is good so here and
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this adds some bits like he intended in united religion but anyway one nation one religion etc
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is what was been here or at least that's that's what i take it to mean what i read this to mean is
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that if you are of the jewish group and i believe that god will tell you in your heart you know which
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group is really your group or the christian group or the muslim group this is why i said earlier at the
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beginning of this tract you should predominantly if you consider yourself like a techno puritan
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you are first and foremost a muslim or first and foremost a jew but a techno puritan jew or first
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and foremost a muslim but a techno puritan muslim however if you don't have a birth tradition or turned
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your back on your birth tradition then your core text is the martyrdom of man which we will be going
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over here i should probably also here elaborate on the seal of the prophets point i made because
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it's one of these points that'll be obvious to people who study religion but if you don't study
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religion you'll be like wait what that's not what it means but that's what all the muslims say it
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means so here is and i'm quoting from oxford academic this abstract here this chapter explains
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that the concept usually perceived to be first used in relation to muhammad and meaning the end of
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prophecy was actually first used in manichean literature there it referred to mani's disciples
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and meant that they were the proof of mani's prophecy again the results have a significant impact on the
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importance of prophecy in late antiquity the concept of quote-unquote seal in hebrew and other
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semitic languages was certainly common in ancient societies and is well attested from the bible on
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on a letter or on a sheep the seal clearly confirms belonging now research shows that also in early
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islamic texts seal referred to prophets coming after muhammad and confirming his prophecy this is then an
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old idea which goes like a thread through the ages in near eastern religious history so this is a like
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mainstream concept it's well known the the term seal of the prophets was borrowed from manichean
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literature when muhammad was writing it he would have known this it was changed by later muslim
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scholars to mean something else uh to fit their means because you know it's easier for a religion
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to spread if you can't if it doesn't keep updating itself but it was built into islam to be able to
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update itself and this is not some sort of a fringe theory another example would be lined in the bible
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where jesus warns us of future prophets to come matthews 23 to 34 then paul gives us criteria for
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vetting the revelations cessalonians 5 20 and 21 if you want to see us doing a detailed breakdown of
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this phenomenon we kept running into c are we mormons episode of the base camp podcast which
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investigates how similar our system appears to early mormon writings and i would also recommend
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people here go check out the adam and eve episode of base camp because that was one of the most shocking
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things i have ever done is actually i was like this standard reading of adam and eve that god
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did not want mankind to know good from evil and we are punished for that felt stupid to me i was like
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this cannot be a true religion that's not a god i want to follow if that's what it actually says
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then we went and we read it and that is not at all what it says and not only that but it had like
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weird supernatural elements when i say supernatural i was like reading the story and i go this seems to be
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the story about the first city and when man first started making his own rules and weirdly i had
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been told we didn't know where the garden of eden was and yet it says very clearly in the story that
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it's at the mouse water that the tigress and the euphrates and we absolutely know where that is so i
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just decided to do a google search i was like where is the earliest city that we know about and it was
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right there like exactly in the region where the garden of eden story takes place which given that
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the story was written 5 000 years after the city that feels almost like supernatural providence to
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me that it would know that it given the theme of the story and i um this basically happens whenever
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i go through one of these biblical stories so i'm like this is like the muslim stuff this is not what
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muslims tell me islam is but this is what's written in the quran this is not what christians tell me
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this story is about but this is what seems to be written in the bible this is not what jews tell me
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the stories about this is what i'm reading like how is this true is this some sort of mandela world
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where somebody switched out the bible and everybody created their religions off of some other text
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i don't know but to me like that is a really powerful i could say supernatural signal which is
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to somewhat fortified a not faith i have because it's not faith right it's based on evidence i cannot
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explain through other mechanisms so and evidence that other people can check and verify i'm with you on
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this i like do you feel sometimes like it's weird that this all like the religions that were told
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what the bible and quran say isn't what we read when we read it yes and i experienced this first in high
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school when they had us read the bible i was pretty shocked by a lot of it because i expected to find a
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bunch of things that i'd been told about and they weren't there so this has always been something that i
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wonder at but i also wonder if this is something that comes directly from our protestant heritage
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or that people who tended or were drawn toward protestant-based faiths were also more likely to
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be the types of people who question these things and want to go directly to the primary source and be
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like where's your where's your well yeah i also feel that a lot of people are like how dare you add
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things to like biblical interpretations and i'm like one biblical interpretations have heavily evolved
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over time yeah and we even see this captured within the biblical interpretations with the snake
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staff of moses as we've mentioned this was the staff he used to heal people who had been when he was
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going to israel for the first time who had been bitten by stakes and then it got placed in the temple and
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then some like 500 600 years later still captured within the bible people had started worshiping it and had
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been doing it for hundreds of years and committing idolatry and then the staff had to be broken and
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discarded because that had entered the temple and what that story teaches us is that antiquity
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or the antiquity of a tradition is not proof that it is approved by god yeah which is important to
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remember that what we're doing and then a lot of people are like oh yeah i just follow the bible and
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then they believe stuff like the rapture which isn't like that supported biblically or like in a satan that's
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like a red guy was like hooved feet and horn and i'm like that is like pure biblical fan fiction
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yeah i really expected to find that in the bible though i was very confused or hell yeah where was
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hell where was everything we believe about hell the bible doesn't mention hell and fires of hell but like
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nothing really beyond that and yet we have all these ideas about it me to be drawing ideas from other
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places doesn't distant me that much from other christian groups yeah okay now back to the text
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in this hypothesized metaphysical system i believed i created in the best interest of my kids god is
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what humanity is destined to become millions of years from now an entity so powerful it lives outside
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of time and guides its own creation an entity that has attempted to give human groups throughout history
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the closest to true revelation they can understand if those things were actually true the first time god
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would have tried to give this revelation to man would not have been with me but with someone during the
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victorian era likely soon after humanity discovered the theory of evolution and this is because mankind
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at that kind had all of the science they needed to understand a concept like this so i would very
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unlikely be the first time god revealed this to somebody and not revealed it through any sort of
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revelation just through just studying things and thinking okay what might god actually look like
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given the physical boundaries that we know and given that it appears to me that this judeo-christian
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god is a real entity he could have attempted to prove the author of the story was his emissary
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through giving him the capacity for somatological performances miracle working but someone like me
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would just read victorian reports of miracle workers as con artists so what i'm saying here is that okay if
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god had actually revealed to somebody through their intellect this understanding of him he could have
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proved it by having them be a miracle worker but i wouldn't take that as proof right which is also
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interesting it's also it's almost like and this is why i believe in god so much these days that all of
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the evidence was specifically crafted just to cater to my standard of evidence and so then i write no the
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only way he could prove to me the text was actually directly inspired by him was to include something
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totally unfakeable that anyone could independently verify like a detailed prediction of future events
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in a widely printed yet somehow almost entirely forgotten victorian work then i was reminded of
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an old book i had picked up in a collection of antique scientific literature the martyrdom of man by
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winwood reed written in 1872 that and my kids were playing with it at the time the book is meant to be a full
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history of man but weirdly it does not stop recording history when it was written in 1872 but keeps going
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it keeps going until quote man then will be perfect he will therefore be what the vulgar
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worship as a god end quote in this old dusty antique book not only did i find the exact copy of
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the belief system i thought i had invented whole cloths but a set of predictions about what technologies
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would be invented over the next two centuries what order they would be invented in and the social
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impact they would have now if you were like me you are skeptical either the system he developed
00:24:54.720
must have had more differences to ours than i am admitting or his predictions are not really that
00:25:01.240
impressive here is an example of reed's writing three inventions which and i should note this was
00:25:09.920
written in then it was published in 1872 so it was written in like the late 1860s okay yeah this is
00:25:15.140
before people have light bulbs in their homes this is before so many things three inventions which
00:25:23.320
perhaps may be long delayed but which possibly are near at hand the first is the discovery of a
00:25:29.220
motive force which will take the place of steam with its cumbrous fuel of oil or coal secondly the
00:25:35.960
invention of aerial locomotion which will transport labor at a trifling cost of money and time to any part
00:25:42.520
of the planet and which by annihilating distance will speedily extinguish national distinctions
00:25:48.380
which we have seen from like an ethnic perspective and thirdly the manufacture of flesh and flour from
00:25:56.060
the elements by a chemical process in the laboratory similar to that which is now performed within the
00:26:02.160
bodies of animals and plants if this prediction is not shocking to you i suggest you look up images of what
00:26:07.980
other people were predicting the future would be like in the second half of the 1800s even early
00:26:13.720
genius science fiction writers born well after reed died like george orwell came nowhere close to such
00:26:22.080
an accurate description of the future and it's not just his writings of the future that have already
00:26:27.380
come to pass that are uncanny his writings about what happens next could have easily been written
00:26:34.480
by an effective altruist last week and then here's a quote from him these bodies which now we wear
00:26:42.140
belong to the lower animals our minds have already outgrown them already we look upon them with
00:26:47.780
contempt a time will come when science will transform them by means which we cannot conjecture
00:26:54.300
and which even if explained to us we could not now understand just as the savage cannot understand
00:27:00.300
electricity magnetism or steam disease will be extirpated the causes of decay will be removed
00:27:08.260
immortality will be invented and i would note on the disease will be extirpated line that has happened
00:27:14.100
from the perspective of somebody living in the 1860s with the advent of vaccines and all of that
00:27:18.700
remember half of infants used to die in childbirth and stuff and then the earth being small mankind will
00:27:25.540
migrate to space and will cross the airless saharas which separate planet from planet
00:27:30.240
and sun from sun the earth will become a holy land which will be visited by pilgrims from all
00:27:35.900
quarters of the universe finally men will master the forces of nature they will become themselves
00:27:42.080
architects of systems manufacturers of worlds man will then be perfect he will be a creator he will
00:27:52.400
called it yeah i love things like this i love it when people seem to be able to model out how the
00:28:02.540
future is going to be and and what i love too is that he is one of the few people that could go ahead
00:28:11.060
and extrapolate into the future and think through the implications of technology that was already in
00:28:16.760
development at that time and the incentives that would be present i i'm gonna go further i think
00:28:22.180
that his predictions were supernatural like they were divinely inspired when you read other quote
00:28:28.700
unquote like prediction people it's like nostradamus or something like that like stuff that you could
00:28:33.800
interpret in a few different ways he's explicit he's saying we will be able to fly we will be we will
00:28:41.260
be able to eat other than synthetic meat and other synthetic food lab yeah there is like no vagueness in
00:28:49.580
his predictions and that is the only thing that i would trust also i wouldn't trust it if this was
00:28:54.220
like some rare text that somebody just found today but no like this text is incredibly well recorded
00:29:00.260
during the time period this is not a modern fabrication he really predicted the future in a way that no other
00:29:07.940
person i have seen and no other text i have seen was this accurate and this uncanny to me so to go
00:29:15.260
further the way he talked about the goals of his religious system and the nature of god also mirrored
00:29:19.460
ideas i thought i had crafted for the best interest of my children quote here we do not wish to extirpate
00:29:25.260
religion from the life of man we wish him to have a religion which will harmonize with his intellect
00:29:29.760
and which inquiry will strengthen not destroy we wish in fact to give him a religion for now there are many
00:29:36.040
who have none we teach that there is a god but not a god of the anthropoid variety not a god who is
00:29:42.880
gratified by compliments and prose and verse and whose attributes can be categorized by theologians
00:29:48.720
god is so great that he cannot be defined by us god is so great that he does not deign to have
00:29:55.720
personal relations with the human atoms that are called men those who desire to worship their creator
00:30:02.540
must worship him through mankind and by that what he means is through the improvement of mankind not
00:30:08.620
through as he said in other places our goal is to move from the pre-coded four-footed and you'll hear
00:30:16.280
this in some of the quotes i read from instincts that we have not through like sex or through gratification
00:30:21.820
but through the things that differentiate mankind from animals our logic the parts of ourselves that we
00:30:28.740
choose to choose to be do you have thoughts yeah i appreciate how weirdly you could say transhumanist or
00:30:38.440
non-carbon fascist he is as well like he clearly is somewhat disgusted by the human condition and
00:30:44.040
really does want to rise above it and i love that about him because yeah i feel like this intro here
00:30:50.540
from the moment i understood the weakness of my flesh it disgusted me
00:30:58.540
i craved the strength and certainty of steel i aspired to the purity of the blessed machine
00:31:08.700
your kind claim to your flesh as if it will not decay and fail you
00:31:18.140
one day the crude biomass that you call the temple will wither and you will beg my kind to save you
00:31:29.400
yeah it's being uniquely a theme uniquely weird in our time i think is a romanticization of
00:31:46.300
devolved humanity oh wouldn't it be great if we lived like pre-civilization humans i feel like
00:31:54.620
these people really predated this idea of i guess i'd call it the chimp man like they want to go
00:31:59.980
back they want to devolve and posing and everything like that and i'm like this is not the elevation
00:32:06.700
of humanity that i think is pretty clear god intended and we can go into what or adam and eve
00:32:11.380
interpretation and the idea of the punishments that we were given in the garden of eden largely
00:32:15.800
being removed we are no longer um cursed to work the land for our food the days of our lives
00:32:23.940
we are no longer in a society where women are ruled by men and are forced to lust after men we are
00:32:30.160
no longer deal with pain and childbirth you're able to take epidurals now if you want to and what we
00:32:35.180
learned when these and a lot of people think that one of the curses for leaving the garden was death
00:32:41.160
it actually very clearly is not he said you will until death be cursed to work the land now the way
00:32:48.500
that line is actually written you could read it either way maybe we were cursed was death maybe we
00:32:53.860
weren't cursed was death and it was just a time duration but you can actually tell that we were
00:32:58.000
not cursed was death from another line where it says i had to expel man from the garden because and
00:33:04.660
i'll read in the exact lines here because if he ate from the tree of life he would live forever
00:33:10.300
so for a few different translations here we have the new international version that says he must not be
00:33:16.820
allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever so the lord
00:33:22.800
god banished him from the garden of eden to work the ground from which he had been taken here we
00:33:27.280
have the new catholic bible which has now we must prevent him from reaching out and taking the fruit
00:33:32.720
of the tree of life lest he eat it and live forever and now we have the christian standard bible here
00:33:38.140
which says he must not reach out take from the tree of life and eat it since man has become like one
00:33:44.680
of us knowing good and evil he must not reach out take from the tree of life eat it and live forever
00:33:50.440
so you can see there's really i find it hard to get any other interpretation of this than if you
00:33:56.540
had ever eaten from the tree of life you would live forever meaning man never did eat from the tree of
00:34:02.980
life meaning that man was mortal in the garden of eden and in addition just in case you're wondering
00:34:09.480
why i say that it was a duration the from dust to dust thing i'll just be reading from just the
00:34:14.660
christian standard bible to not bore you here but it says the ground is cursed because of you you will
00:34:19.860
eat from it by means of painful labor all the days of your life it will produce thorns and thistles for
00:34:25.940
you and you will eat the plants of the field you will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you
00:34:32.080
return to the ground and note this line until you return to the ground since you were taken from it
00:34:38.360
for you are dust and you will return to dust okay this is not a curse it's a statement for you are dust
00:34:44.480
and you will return to dust and it's describing a length of duration here you will eat bread by the
00:34:50.200
sweat of your brow until you return to the ground until you return to the ground okay which implies
00:34:55.860
that you only needed to eat from the tree of life once to live forever meaning that man had never eaten
00:35:02.060
from that tree meaning that man wasn't immortal in the garden um so that means that death was not one
00:35:09.940
of the curses and this is actually important if you look at an environment now where most of the
00:35:14.040
curses have been lifted which brings us to a time when people are like why would there be a new text
00:35:18.300
why would there be this new addition of theological law for people of our age and this is because we
00:35:25.360
are entering a new covenant based on these curses being lifted and us realizing that they were not
00:35:31.180
curses but they were blessings they allowed us to be high fertility when you put man into the trial of
00:35:36.540
lotus eaters which we talk about in our first tract you're actually putting them in a harder situation
00:35:41.100
yeah so anyway and go check our adam and e video if you want to get a deep dive into that what does
00:35:50.120
he say the purpose of human life is what are we commanded to do here again i find the way he lays
00:35:57.160
out these concepts to be ideologically identical to the framings i thought i had crafted you blessed
00:36:03.160
ones who shall inherit that future age of which we can only dream you pure and radiant beings who
00:36:09.040
shall succeed us on the earth when you turn back your eyes on us poor savages rubbing in the ground for
00:36:16.160
our daily bread eating flesh and blood dwelling in vile bodies which degrade us every day to a level with
00:36:24.000
the beast tortured by pains and animal propensities buried in gloomy superstitions ignorant of nature
00:36:31.480
which yet holds us in her bonds when you read of us in books when you think of what we are and
00:36:38.800
compare us with yourselves remember that it is to us you owe the foundation of your happiness and
00:36:44.700
grandeur to us who now in our libraries and laboratories and star towers and dissecting rooms and workshops
00:36:51.460
are preparing the materials of the human growth and as for ourselves if we are sometimes inclined to
00:37:00.520
regret that our lot is cast in these unhappy days that let us remember how much more fortunate we are
00:37:06.780
than those who lived before us a few centuries ago the working man enjoys more luxuries today than did the
00:37:13.940
king of england in the inglo-saxon times and at his command our intellectual delights which but a little
00:37:20.960
while ago the most learned in the land could not obtain all this we owe to the labors of other men let us
00:37:27.960
therefore remember them with gratitude let us follow their glorious example by adding something new
00:37:35.920
to the knowledge of mankind let us pay to the future the debt which we owe the past all men indeed cannot be
00:37:44.320
poets inventors or philanthropists but all men can join in the gigantic and godlike work the progress of
00:37:52.060
creation whoever improves his own nature improves the universe of which he is a part he who strives to
00:37:59.800
subdue his evil passions vile remnants of the old four-footed life and who cultivates the social
00:38:06.400
affections he who endeavors to better his condition and to make his children wiser and happier than himself
00:38:13.320
whatever may be his motivations he will not have lived in vain
00:38:17.060
yeah this is a man who again does not like being human as he is and two is deeply inspired in
00:38:25.800
servicing future in serving future generations and making them better in improvement and not accepting
00:38:31.860
humanity as it is if you think about so this line right here i think the really important line
00:38:37.380
especially when you contrast it with our thoughts that i thought i had crafted and you've got to imagine
00:38:41.900
like you as a viewer when you're like why did he really believe this stuff i thought i had made all of
00:38:46.480
this up okay i like imagine you made up this theology and then you find it in an old book in your house
00:38:53.900
and then on top of that the book made a bunch of predictions and they all came true like this may
00:39:00.100
not convince you but it convinces me okay and gives me not face but like evidence-backed face which is
00:39:08.560
such a weird thing to happen what do you what do you say in rebuttal to those who say you're just
00:39:16.120
searching for faith in random places and connecting dots where it seems convenient and you're no better
00:39:23.160
than the people that you scoff at completely implausible to me it seems completely implausible
00:39:30.260
yeah but the other people are like oh isn't it crazy that this bird pooped on my head this one day
00:39:35.520
when i just said this and then they just connect the dots they choose to find the meaning where it
00:39:40.140
yeah but i'm not doing that i'm not reading from current things that other people can't verify
00:39:44.720
i'm not reading from anecdotal events i am pointing to somebody who anyone can verify in history okay
00:39:51.680
who seems to predict things i have no other way of explaining how he predicted this many things
00:39:59.140
and when you contrast us with even great thinkers of his period like george orwell or something like
00:40:03.680
that who literally wrote after this guy died george orwell's predictions are infinitely less accurate
00:40:10.120
than his and then given how well he predicted all this given how widely he was known as his time as a
00:40:16.520
great thinker why was he forgotten why was it to me to find this book and how did i even find this
00:40:22.880
forgotten book like all of this is just too impractical to me and when i look at the specifics
00:40:28.600
like the specifics of his theology when you hear about simona and i talking about ideas like what
00:40:34.300
makes a human are not the pre-coded genetic predilections like love lust happiness etc but the
00:40:42.080
things we choose for ourselves the things we choose with our human brain and then you read what he
00:40:46.460
writes more beautifully than i could ever put whoever improves his own nature improves the universe
00:40:51.560
of which he is apart he who strives to subdue his evil passions vile remnants of the old four-footed
00:40:57.960
life and who cultivates the social affections he who endeavors to better his condition and to make his
00:41:03.060
children wiser and happier than himself whatever may be his motives he will not have lived in vain
00:41:07.780
he very clearly points out what he means when he says subdue his evil passions vile remnants of the
00:41:15.260
old four-footed lives these pre-evolved things and he is literally having these ideas while charles
00:41:21.440
darwin is still alive he is literally building this infrastructure as early as a human could given when
00:41:29.620
we say that revelation is given to man as early as it can be as our civilization progresses and gains
00:41:37.480
new understanding this is literally as early one of the things that one would read was actually known
00:41:42.500
most for was being one of the main evangelists of darwin and going out and debating people about
00:41:47.680
darwin i didn't know that that's crazy yeah i he actually communicated with darwin uh winwood reed
00:41:54.720
corresponded with darwin during the writing of the descent of man and is considered one of its
00:41:59.440
contributors so some of his ideas are in this book where he proposes that these evolutionary forces
00:42:03.780
affected man as well which also like when i contrast weed winwood reed to other prophets this guy is
00:42:10.200
like actively known as an anti-racist crusader he's actively known as like a which we'll see from
00:42:15.940
other passages he's actively known as a he called evolution early on when i look at other prophets
00:42:22.540
they just don't inspire me the same way this guy is never written as doing like an unethical thing in
00:42:28.980
his life and i really like that because it's it's it's in some way easier for me to look up to him as a
00:42:36.700
prophet and i don't know if i'd be able to if the same things are recorded about him as we have
00:42:41.540
recorded about some of the other prophets in terms of the things that they did now i still think that
00:42:45.200
they're divinely inspired i don't think that somebody needs to be a good person to be a prophet
00:42:48.900
i think we or to have god's favor i think that this is recorded in all of the judeo-christian
00:42:53.420
traditions with david and the story of basheba that you can be a total douche canoe and be a prophet
00:42:58.700
sorry for people who aren't particularly like religiously read and don't know the story of david and
00:43:03.240
basheba david who god favored saw a guy's wife like naked on the roof of her house from his high
00:43:11.680
roof he wanted to sleep with her so he sent her husband who was a faithful shoulder to the front
00:43:17.440
lines to be killed so that he could sleep with this guy's wife like that is douche canoe high
00:43:23.040
tier status you know whatever you blame i don't know whether it's muhammad or joseph smith for like
00:43:28.960
it i don't know if you get much worse than that and yeah we are pretty clearly told if you're in
00:43:34.180
any of the judeo-christian traditions that david did have god's favor i just like that they read
00:43:39.440
but i also like that i can look to somebody else that i'm not like this is my ideas i can look to
00:43:44.360
somebody from antiquity and say this is their ideas and so the level to which i can go crazy
00:43:48.980
is really constrained by a previous thinker and the level to which he can do terrible things by today's
00:43:55.720
social standards is really constrained because we can look and see the way he lived his life
00:44:00.540
so intergenerational improvement is not a preference or an inclination but a mandate all
00:44:07.840
men die it is not death that makes a martyr it is how he lives how one spends this one life we are
00:44:15.420
each gifted the story of jesus is misinterpreted it was god trying to gift primitive man a truth of
00:44:21.900
reality he could not yet decipher it was not god who as a man martyred himself for the salvation of
00:44:29.220
mankind for it is only through choosing martyrdom choosing lives of service to the creation of a
00:44:37.880
future not meant for us that we are undeserving of entering that we can give meaning to our lives
00:44:44.540
it is this truth that the story of moses was meant to communicate to the childlike bronze age man
00:44:51.900
and then here's a quote from the martyrdom of man i give to this universal history a strange but true
00:44:58.520
title the martyrdom of man in each generation that the human race has been tortured that their children
00:45:03.920
might profit by their woes our own propensity is founded on the agonies of the past is it therefore
00:45:11.160
unjust that we also should suffer for the benefit of those who are to come famine pestilence and war
00:45:18.100
are no longer essential for the advancement of the human race but a season of mental anguish is at hand
00:45:24.620
and through this we must pass in order that our posterity may rise the soul must be sacrificed the hope in
00:45:33.260
immortality must die a sweet and charming illusion must be taken from the human race as use and beauty
00:45:40.580
vanish never to return and here i want to elevate when he's talking about but a season of mental
00:45:47.180
anguish is at hand this was written before world war one and world war two so he was not wrong in
00:45:53.080
that prediction in in saying that a lot of people at the time believed that wars were basically over
00:45:58.180
but anyway it is fascinating how stories i had learned in my use and this is me talking again
00:46:04.520
but made no sense now came into crystal clarity i could not understand why god would need to
00:46:11.120
sacrifice himself in the form of a man to forgive man for his sins why not just choose to forgive man
00:46:16.940
why would the sacrifice mean anything if immediately afterwards he knew he was going to be brought back to
00:46:22.500
life and rejoin god how would man in an act of foolishness cruelly killing the manifestation of god
00:46:29.220
somehow cleansed himself of his sins but when i examined the story with this new framing it now
00:46:36.200
seems almost impossibly elegant in how it described a concept man with centuries from having the capacity
00:46:43.960
to grasp but it's not just this story all over the christian tradition things that had seemed like
00:46:49.900
non-sequiturs suddenly had meaning as an example the temptation of christ never made a lick of sense to me
00:46:56.280
how could satan tempt god with things that god already owned why would jesus bow to satan if he
00:47:03.620
knew he was god and how could satan act outside of god's will and tempt his own master in mon in a
00:47:11.240
monotheistic tradition by that what i mean is if there is only one god or at least an all-powerful
00:47:16.560
god satan should have no ability to realistically challenge him so why is he able to challenge god in
00:47:22.040
this instance and how could satan act outside of god's will and tempt his own master however if i
00:47:28.460
reframe this story as not one about jesus as traditional christians understand him but the
00:47:34.360
martyr as we understand him the story comes into crystal clarity and i say for context of the c track
00:47:41.060
six but it's one of the future tracks where i'm going to talk more about this context when i talk about
00:47:45.400
satan the rule of evil and temptation which will be a future tract as an example what's the point of the
00:47:51.440
trinity why was it so important to understand god with three completely separate entities but also
00:47:56.380
one entity and for that matter what's up with the holy ghost why not just explain jesus is fully god
00:48:02.080
and also not god if that is the point the trinity is supposed to explain because the trinity was
00:48:07.760
attempting to explain the concept of the ages of providence the holy spirit god the father and the son
00:48:13.180
mankind to an earlier iteration of man not yet capable of understanding or accepting a fuller revelation
00:48:20.120
god is a plural entity a singular entity and the fraction of humanity willing to live as martyrs
00:48:26.820
destiny these are completely distinct manifestations of the same entity in the old christian tradition the
00:48:33.320
concept of the trinity provides little additional information in terms of the nature of god or how to
00:48:38.900
worship but with this additional information it becomes critical that's really interesting to me all
00:48:45.480
these ideas where i've been like what's the point of that what's the point of the holy ghost
00:48:48.340
why what's the point of satan's temptation of god like jesus who's going to immediately become god
00:48:53.300
what's the point of the sacrifice why did god being killed unjustly by man clear man of his sins
00:48:59.640
but now if all of a sudden makes sense to me was this new framing and it's like an impossibly elegant
00:49:04.920
explanation of a concept i thought i had invented and keep in mind i thought i had invented oh god the
00:49:10.560
future entity and mankind intergenerational is aggravated themselves and now i go back to these
00:49:14.520
religious texts which i grew up with and didn't know they said the things they say and i'm like
00:49:18.660
whoa i did not expect this do you think that you had subtly grown up with these core messages and
00:49:29.800
just not known it and had them set in and then intuitively no you just weren't exposed to these
00:49:36.560
primary sources at all to start i never read them seriously
00:49:41.120
yeah i'm just wondering where it could have come from it's not like i read the martyrdom of man
00:49:48.220
yes yeah this was not primed by something but with the salvation communicated in this understanding is
00:49:56.880
also a commandment man must live as a martyr to be sanctified a man that stagnated technologically
00:50:03.080
genetically or in one's personal self-improvement is living in the highest order of sin possible
00:50:08.100
to claim that you are good enough as you are whether that is culturally genetically or personally
00:50:14.260
is to claim oneself to be as perfect as god and an affront to god and then from the martyrdom of man he
00:50:22.920
says persons with feeble and untrained intellects may live according to their conscience but the
00:50:28.740
conscience itself will be defective to cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty and when
00:50:35.160
this truce is fairly recognized by men the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted
00:50:41.960
and that it should be subservient to faith will inevitably fall every moment of your life you spend
00:50:48.280
on something other than the improvement of yourself or mankind is a moment you are living in rebellion to
00:50:54.740
god but to aspire to not sin at all to think oneself capable of living a sinless life is itself a sin
00:51:02.760
only those yet to come in whom we will be instrumental in creating are capable of living sinless lives or
00:51:10.380
deserving the rewards of one instead it is enough for us to not glorify our sin we are to use sin like
00:51:17.680
meat to tame the animal that still lives inside us an evolutionary scar a beast that still craves sex
00:51:25.720
luxuries and status but because the more we feed the beast the stronger it will become we must feed it
00:51:33.320
only just enough to prevent it from distracting us from our purpose within these short lives the efficacy
00:51:40.520
of a preacher is shown through how little meat he used to tame his beast and then from the martyrdom of man
00:51:48.660
whoever improves his own nature improves the universe of which he is a part he who strives to subdue his evil
00:51:55.100
passions via remnants of the old four-footed life and who cultivates the social affections he who endeavors
00:52:00.440
to better his condition and to make his children wiser and happier than himself whatever may be his motives
00:52:05.500
he will not have lived in vain and here i would note what i'm talking about to to think yourself
00:52:10.620
incapable of sin uh or or to live a life incapable of sin is in itself a sin and what you need to do
00:52:17.900
and what's commanded of us is to attempt to improve the next generation attempt to improve ourselves but
00:52:23.740
also to never ever glorify sin as not sin so for example i drink alcohol this has no efficacious point
00:52:33.340
in my life it is a sin okay drinking alcohol is a sin but i do not aspire to live a sinless life i
00:52:45.580
simply aspire to be better every day and when i look at the aspects of my life that i could improve
00:52:51.660
this is one of the aspects that if i endeavor to improve it would distract me from other aspects i am
00:52:57.640
working to improve right now but it is very important because mankind has within him the desire to do this
00:53:02.980
to take things that are sinful and turn them into status signs whether it's an addiction to exercise
00:53:09.220
for example where you have worked out far more than you need to for your health and have started using
00:53:14.260
it as a social signal or people who brag about being able to drink someone else under the table
00:53:19.060
these are the true and highest form of sin because here you glorify your sin instead we don't need to be
00:53:27.460
perfect we just need to know that sin is or we just need to admit to our sins and i think that this is
00:53:34.020
something that the catholics i really like about their tradition with confession is this idea that god
00:53:39.940
doesn't command us to never ever sin that's an impossibility for man as he exists today but he does command
00:53:48.580
us to take responsibility for our sins and to not glorify them do you have thoughts on this simone
00:53:53.460
no that just it seems so much more practical than other interpretations of sin that i've seen just
00:54:03.220
don't do it ever or if you do it you'll be paying it off for hundreds of thousands in all sin that you
00:54:10.980
have because that means people to build these cognitive dissonance where they're like i'm sinless or i don't
00:54:16.260
sin therefore if i'm doing something it must not be a sin yeah or there's no point in trying
00:54:22.660
to not sin or i'll just ask for forgiveness later none of those systems seem to make sense in the
00:54:28.660
same way of always sharpening oneself in the direction of one's inherently deepest values and
00:54:35.380
especially this orientation toward building a better future it's such a better north star than just here
00:54:40.660
are all these various rules don't do this don't do that yes i like that about this alcohol is a sin
00:54:46.100
exercising too little is a sin exercising too much is a sin playing video games is a sin so many
00:54:52.660
things can be sins right and you should expect to do them because you are human right but just don't
00:55:00.500
glorify them don't be like i'm amazing because i'm so good at video games right yeah if it's not
00:55:06.260
making the world better heating heating your house in the winter is a sin if you can live without it and your
00:55:09.940
kids can be healthy without it it's a sin and uh the left loves to demonize because they demonize us
00:55:16.260
for all the areas in which you practice austerity any form of uh austerity they're like how dare you
00:55:22.500
live without here or here i should just note that people think we don't heat our house at all that's
00:55:28.660
literally not possible for you to do if you live in a region that freezes because your pipes will burst so
00:55:33.860
we just don't we don't go excessively high with our heat like most people do but we do actually
00:55:38.980
have to heat our house a little bit yeah fascinating and i hear i talk a little bit about
00:55:45.700
this i think that this is psychologically healthy for kids i don't come when i'm thinking of an idea
00:55:50.100
like i i would not choose any theological idea that i didn't think also had a secular motivation for
00:55:55.700
it turns out that the secular motivations are always backed by the theology that that austerity
00:56:00.580
is commanded of us by god but and you can find thousands of lines from any of the true revelations
00:56:06.260
that that will talk about this but i also think that it's psychologically healthy for kids i think
00:56:11.060
when you don't expose kids to negative stimuli growing up whether that's discipline like corporal
00:56:15.780
punishment or austerity like heating then they become hypersensitive to negative stimuli and i think
00:56:21.220
that this is where you get things like trigger warnings and stuff like that where they spiral into
00:56:25.220
depression where they can't handle their anxiety and where they have it's like someone who
00:56:30.020
has never been sick before uh you then get the tiniest cold and instantly die because
00:56:39.300
exactly the way maybe a people group that had no immunity to something but yes yeah i'm thinking
00:56:43.620
more of when europeans came to north america brought a bunch of diseases that no one had ever been exposed
00:56:49.300
to i think that the human body when exposed to anything that it is not used to yeah with like
00:56:55.380
for example if you um suddenly lift something that you've never lifted before and you're using a set of
00:56:59.620
muscles you don't know how to use you're gonna pull out your back whereas someone who's regularly
00:57:04.020
lifting things say they're moving for sorry say they're working for a moving company their muscles
00:57:08.340
are accustomed to this they know how to lift the thing they can deal with that stressor so the human
00:57:12.660
body works like that with mental things too and i love that about the yeah well and we have found
00:57:18.660
and people think that like when we're giving our kids austerity or we're giving them some form of
00:57:22.180
controlled hardship that this is lowering their quality of life and yet these people
00:57:26.740
are on however many drugs just to get through the day they are seeing a psychologist regularly they
00:57:32.500
are barely mentally holding it together and i'm like i am pretty certain having started my career
00:57:37.540
in neuroscience that we are actually causing our kids to experience less overall suffering in their
00:57:42.740
lives by not shirking from our responsibility as parents which is to not just give them a perfect
00:57:49.780
childhood existence but to discipline them and give them trials and give them hardships and
00:57:54.740
expose them to hardship so that they do not become oversensitive to it as adults and spiral out of
00:57:59.700
control when they experience it so next fascinatingly when i examined the life of one would read in this
00:58:09.620
new context it is almost blindingly obvious he was meant to be a prophet he completed trials he was a
00:58:15.940
paragon of the values our faith teaches while in africa he was captured and made a slave of the king of
00:58:22.420
sidwa of falaba king sidwa put reed under conditions of unimaginable physical and mental hardship giving him
00:58:32.980
four grueling tasks every day he completed these tasks with a plum showing king sidwa such mental
00:58:40.100
fortitude and self-discipline that he was released he showed an ethical understanding far
00:58:45.700
beyond his time in writing what the fate of the newly freed african american slaves in america should
00:58:51.780
be experience has shown that whatever aliens are treated as citizens they become citizens whatever
00:58:59.620
may be their religion or their race it is a mistake to suppose that the civilized black american calls
00:59:06.660
himself an african and pines to return to his ancestral land if he was born in the states he calls himself an
00:59:14.900
american he speaks with an american accent he loves and hates with an american heart that's
00:59:20.980
that's so modern sounding like imagine like joseph smith saying something like that i really admire
00:59:27.220
when would read as a person for what he fought for in his time period almost in direct contrast to
00:59:32.580
mormon prophets like joseph fielding smith who said quote if evolution is true the church is false
00:59:39.300
in quote i know that is not uh when would read corresponded with darwin during the writing of
00:59:46.100
the descent of man and is considered one of its contributors finally you might say if one would
00:59:51.460
read is so smart why was he not recognized as such in his time to which i would direct you to a quote
00:59:57.940
you yourself may have read if you have read the sherlock home books in which sherlock says to watson
01:00:03.860
let me recommend this book one of the most remarkable ever penned it is when would read the
01:00:08.660
martyrdom of man end quote yes canonically the martyrdom of man is sherlock home's favorite book
01:00:16.260
or at least one of his favorite books so this is a system that sees prophecy as iterative with each
01:00:23.140
generation having a religious duty to expand their mental capacity for comprehension but if intergenerational
01:00:29.300
improvement is our mandate how can such a religious system stay intergenerationally stable how we
01:00:36.340
overcome this seeming impossibility is something in the next tract which discusses the updated index
01:00:43.780
system which is quite updated from the system that we discussed in the pragmatist guide of crafting a
01:00:47.780
religion so what are your thoughts there's nothing new to comment i can give you some other so when i
01:00:55.060
think about what we're trying to create here right i want to create a theological tradition that is
01:01:01.940
like irreverent and fun but also strictly logical and ordered i think people might think that this is
01:01:08.580
impossible when i read something like one would read in his boundless enthusiasm it really reminds me
01:01:15.220
of gurren laggin which we have noted as having like religious significant in this concept of spiral and
01:01:19.460
anti-spiral energy in many stories logic and industry and science are always cold they are vulcan like in
01:01:29.300
nature but they don't need to be in fact i would say by nature they are not if we look at the victorian
01:01:36.900
scientists with this boundless optimism for the future you can see this yeah like the pioneers of science were
01:01:44.420
curious irreverent sometimes dangerously and enthusiastic about the potentiality of reality
01:01:51.060
and even god yeah and i also want to talk here because it's weird that we have added and removed
01:01:58.020
books and people might be like why have you done that like why do you believe that judeo-christian
01:02:02.820
traditions are true but you see some books as theologically inspired and some books as not theologically
01:02:09.380
inspired and there's a few criteria we use to do this so you can look at something like the book
01:02:14.580
of revelations and one uh it was on the edge when they were confirming which books to put in and which
01:02:21.060
books not to put in in fact one group which i'll add in editing here didn't even include it i was
01:02:26.180
thinking of the ethiopian orthodox toledo church and the oriental orthodox church and actually the eastern
01:02:34.500
orthodox church while it is considered canon it is not considered part of the liturgy within the church
01:02:40.980
one mainstream christian sect doesn't even include it in their canon religious texts on top of that the
01:02:46.900
greek in it is very bad it's written by a fairly uneducated person when contrasted with the other
01:02:52.180
scriptures and this is something that was noted like by people who study the bible they're like this
01:02:56.580
is written by a dumb person but then on top of that also just you read it and it doesn't feel true
01:03:04.260
like when i read the story of adam and eve and i was like oh my god like this explains so much this
01:03:10.180
feels so deep and when i read parts of the torah i feel that way but when i read the and i think for
01:03:16.420
people like why you dismiss the kabbalah so regularly given that it's a late edition only about a thousand
01:03:20.900
years old within the jewish text for the same reason i dismiss revelation it's not like distinct to you so
01:03:25.540
i'll read some passages from revelation and you'll see what i mean when i'm like when something like
01:03:30.420
genesis can feel very awe-inspiring to me when i read it yeah so really the book of revelation feels
01:03:35.940
like a schizophrenic yelling at people in the streets so this is revelation 12. okay a great
01:03:41.380
sign appeared in heaven a woman closed with the sun was the moon under her feet and a crown of 12 stars
01:03:48.100
on her head she was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth then another sign
01:03:53.940
appeared in heaven an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns oh boy seven crowns
01:04:00.740
on its head its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and flung them to earth the dragon stood
01:04:07.380
in front of the woman who was about to give birth so that it might devour her child the moment he was
01:04:12.580
born she gave birth to a son a male child who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter and her
01:04:20.260
child was snatched up by god and to his throne the woman fled into the wilderness to play to a place
01:04:26.900
prepared for her by god where he might be taken care of for 1260 days then a war broke out in heaven
01:04:36.020
michael and his angels fought against the dragon and the dragon and his angels fought back but he was
01:04:41.140
not strong enough and they lost their place in the heaven oh the great dragon was hurled down that
01:04:47.780
ancient serpent called the devil or satan who leads the whole world astray he was hurled to earth
01:04:53.860
and his angels with him when the dragon saw that he had been hurled to earth he pursued the woman who
01:05:00.260
had given birth to the male child the woman was given so i think a lot of people they don't know
01:05:05.220
that this is where like the satan being an angel and going to war with god and then they're like oh that
01:05:11.620
sounds yeah michael and his angels fighting satan they're like whoa whoa there's a pregnant woman and
01:05:17.220
the satan's a dragon and he's like chasing her around and when you take out these ideas of satan
01:05:23.540
being an angel and then being cast to hell which you know you get solely from revelation which we'll
01:05:27.940
talk more about later satan makes a lot more sense of the character which we'll talk about in future
01:05:32.340
tracks but anyway when the dragon saw that he had been hurled to earth he pursued the woman who had
01:05:36.660
given birth to the male child the woman was given the two wings of a great eagle so that she might fly
01:05:42.100
to the place prepared for her in the wilderness where she would be taken care of for a time time
01:05:47.060
and half a time out of the serpent's reach then from his mouth the serpent spewed water like a river
01:05:52.580
to overtake the woman and keep her away with the torrent but the earth helped the woman by opening its
01:05:58.740
mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of its mouth then the dragon was enraged at the
01:06:05.140
the woman and went off to wage a war against the rest of her offspring those who kept god's
01:06:10.660
commandments and hold fast their testimony about jesus this is imbrov gone terribly wrong there is
01:06:18.580
way too much yes ending going on here please prove to say something to me not here to talk to them
01:06:26.500
you are the hand chosen by the master yours is the sword of michael you have an art tract when we
01:06:35.620
talk about the three faiths like policyism mysticism and monotheism and i'm like sometimes you can see
01:06:40.980
that accidentally of course it would happen but you have a true face sometimes they accidentally
01:06:45.300
confirm a book that's from another tradition this is very clearly policyist this is like popol vu people
01:06:51.860
don't know when i'm comparing things with popol vu it's like the mayan bible you can read it if you want
01:06:55.700
to get a good it's a very good example of what policyist traditions are like but you'll also
01:07:00.820
get stories like this if you read like ancient sumerian myths or if you read uh a lot of early
01:07:06.660
native american myths where it's like the next insane thing happened or like ancient greek myths oh
01:07:11.860
that god's head was hit and then it split open and then his daughter came out and then they made friends
01:07:17.300
and then he was chased by a dragon and then she hit the dragon and from his head split water and like
01:07:24.740
it's very clearly polytheist and not nature and i think that if you are monotheist and you read from
01:07:31.060
a policyist tradition that's not based on logic and order and god's what you're like oh this is
01:07:35.540
clearly something different and that's what i use when i am disconfirming certain judeo-christian texts
01:07:41.860
in a way that people might and keep in mind we're not saying everyone in our faith has to do this you get
01:07:45.940
to choose your own canon within this system when i think that the correct canons will be chosen by god
01:07:51.060
in the groups that succeed in the groups that fail however i think that we need to be more uh
01:07:57.060
questioning of the staff that had been in the temple for hundreds of years we need to say
01:08:03.060
sometimes i know that this tradition has antiquity and i know that the traditional turk body say that
01:08:08.580
this is okay but this looks like idolatry this smells like idolatry and i think this is idolatry and
01:08:14.580
that we know from the tradition like our traditions that we are commanded to do that sometimes and i
01:08:19.780
read something like the book of revelations and i'm like oh this is a crazy person yelling at people
01:08:24.500
on the streets i mean and if you grew up in the christian tradition you may not feel that way you
01:08:28.660
may read this and be like oh yeah of course i knew about the pregnant woman and the numbers and the
01:08:34.020
a thousand two hundred and sixty days and the but i think that this leads to the temptations
01:08:40.100
of things like neurology and other forms of trying to divine the future using god's message instead of
01:08:50.260
which can lead to hugely deleterious outcomes when it's not just plainly laid out when people use this
01:08:55.460
and they're like oh the bible is true because i can find like x correlations here and then i'm
01:08:59.220
contrasting it with what like when would read who's oh yeah here this is exactly what's going to happen
01:09:03.460
this is going to be he even goes into oh once we can create meat in a lab we're going to and i'll
01:09:08.420
include the quote here we're going to look down on the people who used to eat meat but people should
01:09:12.740
not look down on us for eating meat uh because they're living with the technology that we didn't
01:09:17.540
have access to so they can't fully understand why we lived life the way we live life yeah the line
01:09:22.420
here is in specific reference to that you blessed ones who shall inherit the future age of which we
01:09:27.300
can only dream you pure radiant beings who shall succeed us on earth when you turn back your eyes on
01:09:32.260
us poor savages grubbing in the ground for our daily bread eating flesh and blood dwelling in
01:09:37.780
vile bodies which degrade us every day to a level with the beast tortured by pains and by animal
01:09:43.940
propensities buried in gloomy superstitions ignorant of nature which yet holds us in her bonds when you
01:09:49.860
read of us in books when you think of what we are and compare us with yourselves remember that it is
01:09:55.460
to us you owe the foundation of your happiness and grandeur to us who now in our libraries and
01:10:00.820
laboratories and star towers and dissecting rooms and workshops are preparing the materials of the
01:10:06.020
human growth and keep in mind he's saying this in the context of the prediction and thirdly the
01:10:11.620
manufacture of flesh and flour from the elements by a chemical process in the laboratory similar to that
01:10:16.980
which is now performed within the bodies of animals and plants and so we would say if there is a
01:10:22.020
religious mandate around food for this religious sect i would say it's that once lab-grown meat
01:10:28.900
is widely available that you are mandated to use it rather than factory farm foods and i think that's
01:10:33.860
true about so many things as like technology progresses but do you have any final thoughts
01:10:38.580
do you disagree with me about saying i do not think the book of revelations is inspired by god
01:10:44.100
it just yeah i i really struggle with this because it's so tempting to say that the bible just is the
01:10:57.940
bible but it's not it's not like everything in there has been equally vetted it's not like everything in
01:11:02.820
there is of a good source and just people looking at just people looking at the new testament and looking
01:11:07.220
at stories of jesus can find all of these conflicting reports it's very clear and even
01:11:13.700
biblical scholars will agree that not everything in the bible is accurate and that you're going to
01:11:18.580
get differing accounts of the same events like with jesus riding the donkey in and like sometimes
01:11:24.580
it's one donkey and sometimes it's two donkeys and he's straddling the donkey like two donkeys and
01:11:28.980
all these things are happening and so i i it's hard for me to say we believe in going to primary
01:11:34.020
sources but then it also seems it seems disingenuous to me that people can be like oh i i read the
01:11:39.300
primary source but also i decide what is primary source right that seems wrong but i also know that
01:11:44.980
we have no other choice when the primary source is comprised of corrupted materials so i guess that's
01:11:51.060
what makes me uncomfortable to me the primary source was jesus is jesus and we don't have direct
01:11:57.620
writings from jesus exactly yeah but then what about the old testament we don't have any
01:12:01.620
aside from god so a lot of people are going to turn to the to like personal revelation and and
01:12:07.140
praying directly to god and then god tells you but that's not right to us i think even in the old
01:12:11.540
testament some policyism gets written in i can read some like jewish writings that are quite old and
01:12:16.500
i'm like this is clearly polytheism and i think it's important that we know now that 50 of of early
01:12:22.900
israel dna came from the canaanite pre-existing population so when we hear about the evils of
01:12:30.340
baal and baalite worship and this alternate system of worship that we that we understand that
01:12:39.700
it is likely that it got worked into jewish writings that and and that later when the early christians
01:12:45.780
were around they were not actually primarily converting jews i think as many scholars know
01:12:50.420
they were the early christians were predominantly converted from pagan communities so of course they're
01:12:55.780
going to bring some of these ideas from these early pagan communities into christianity and it's
01:13:00.500
up to us to be vigilant is this a pagan writing or is this a monotheistic writing is this policyism or
01:13:06.740
monotheism is this mysticism or monotheism and i think it's not one of those vague things like
01:13:12.420
when you read it i think it's pretty obvious to me at least oh yeah this is not the same kind of
01:13:17.940
thing of the monotheistic writings i think god further inscribes this for us by making sure that we know that
01:13:25.140
it was written by somebody uneducated who didn't appear to speak greek very well who doesn't appear
01:13:29.300
fully literate so that it's easy for us to be like okay like if god's inspiring something he's at least
01:13:35.540
making sure the language is like good like the person a broad grasp of at least their culture's idea
01:13:43.460
um what something intelligent would look like maybe i yeah i i feel so uncomfortable with any of these
01:13:51.780
things but in the end i think what we've taken away personally and what i feel comfortable with
01:13:58.180
is that we have established our standard of evidence for what we believe and we've received
01:14:06.020
an abundance of evidence encouraging us to lean in a certain direction of faith that fits our particular
01:14:12.260
criteria so we'd be dumb to follow through with it basically and i think everyone has to do that with
01:14:19.140
their own standards of evidence in their own faith and this is the other thing i'd mention for people
01:14:23.860
is that faith is ultimately a choice that's what i think many atheists don't get about faith yeah you
01:14:28.740
can look at evidence and it can confirm the things that you're like i i can't explain this easily in
01:14:33.700
other ways and i find this a unique kind of miracle to me when i look at all of these predictions when i
01:14:40.580
look at finding things in the bible and the quran i didn't expect in the torah i didn't expect because
01:14:45.700
it wasn't the stories i was told to me it feels like such an impossible thing that it is confirming
01:14:52.900
for me right and it leads me to then choose to have faith and that and to believe that the earlier
01:15:01.620
instead of what i had originally done which is saying i'm creating what i thought of as a new
01:15:05.380
religious system it's more of just a different sect of christianity that's like techno puritanism is an
01:15:12.260
evolution of early puritanism and not even that deranged in evolution when you contrast it was
01:15:19.540
like scott alexander's puritan spotting piece and you're like oh like puritans have been doing this a
01:15:24.740
long time the early puritans would always try to rewrite the bible to be more in line with science
01:15:30.100
and i think that they were fundamentally wrong-headed in that endeavor i think that the bible was
01:15:33.460
fundamentally true and any efforts to rewrite it are inaccurate but i i do think that it does need to be
01:15:39.140
like we do need to be scrupulous when we're choosing which texts we think are inspired by god
01:15:43.860
and which are not and which lives are inspired by god and which are not and so that's the way i approach
01:15:49.140
it and it has given me this religion that like i believe very strongly but i think a lot of people
01:15:55.460
don't realize how fanatically strongly i believe this now and it's very easy to for me because it has
01:16:03.300
improved my quality of life so much but i don't do it because it's improved my quality of life and i don't
01:16:08.580
even do it because i think like this evidence i can't explain another way it seems to point to it
01:16:13.060
i do it because i've chosen to do it yeah but all those other ancillary benefits i think help which
01:16:20.180
is how you end up having people who join religions where they start off being very skeptical if not
01:16:28.580
outright non-believers right they're like this is just this is not for me whatever i'm just going to go
01:16:32.820
ahead and do this but then i'm going to choose to lean into it because maybe my spouse has leaned into
01:16:37.540
this or i've just decided this seems to be better for the community and it's better for me and then
01:16:43.700
i don't know there's i think there is a compounding effect like sometimes just surrendering yourself and
01:16:48.500
i think people talk about this a lot with faith it's a lot like surrendering yourself to that doctrine
01:16:56.020
or that religion of letting go then leads to all these ancillary benefits then leads to what either
01:17:03.460
it could be referred to as confirmation bias or finding all the connected dots and realizing that
01:17:10.020
the evidence is actually strong and maybe you really should believe i don't really know
01:17:14.820
i don't think it really matters if ultimately it's correct if you have chosen it from a place of
01:17:23.700
conviction and for good reasons like you've done your work you haven't just randomly chosen a societal
01:17:29.140
default or something that was right in front of you and you choose to surrender to it and it produces
01:17:33.700
good results for your life and those in your life then great like it doesn't matter if it's true or not
01:17:39.380
it matters if all those other conditions are set yeah and i'd also like to at the final here explain why
01:17:46.900
i settled on techno puritanism for the name of this you should probably buy that url before this episode
01:17:52.980
goes live but the reason i decided on techno puritanism is that
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one i wanted to connect it to earlier christian traditions and i think that many people have in
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their mind what a puritan is aesthetically speaking right so it gives you something that
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you can visualize it's not a holistically positive image i look at the uh videos that
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people make to make fun of puritans and i'll put in some here this is just a date not
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a wedding auction what's a date it's where you invite someone to do an activity so you can get
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to know them better you know what that sounds like it sounds like it's not the devil's work
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i was going to say it sounds like a waste of money jedediah women like romance not being compared to
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livestock i see roses are red violets are blue both are useless plant some wheat your views on women are
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extremely antiquated yeah let me guess you'll only be happy if your future wife bears you a son
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actually i would prefer a daughter really yes because suffering is good for the soul you cannot
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tempt an iron heart iron can weaken with the rust of pride for certain
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and what shall i call this embodiment of virtue virtue come again virtue obedience hawkins good name no
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doubt names do not carry us to the golden gates for certain gonna have a bonfire out back eat some
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small your thirst for some more will ultimately give you some less and you will be consumed upon the
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bonfire of vanity i am never alone in the company of men come in silence
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a sage choice which will make our gathering a blessed evening i will be gone by evening those who
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caught when the sun descends caught the devil's design for certain ah yes i could not agree more
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how dare you express enjoyment my deepest apologies the pain purifies my predilection for pleasure
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your alliteration sounds dangerously like poetry my apologies strike me silence
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i apologize for this unholy demonstration of passion this deserves the cleansing ritual of stoning
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will you stone me with the stone of justice no i will use mercy
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you brought your own stone the traits that they're making fun of them for are traits i want to
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re-establish within our civilization and i think that we are lesser for having lost
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and the puritan vision of this utopian city on a hill i think it's something that we can bring back
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you know combine the victorian scientist it was this endless hope for the future with strict puritan
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ideals and aesthetics that's what i mean when i combine these two words and i thought of other
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words like new wave puritanism or neo puritanism and whether either there might be other movements
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that sort of talk about these ideas which i don't like stepping on something else there but they also
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are just too conventional of names and i also wanted the name to be a little silly as i said i want it to
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be irreverent and passionate i want it to be something because i think that's something that
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religion has lost a little bit if you read the old testament there's lots of like sex jokes in it
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talking about like people's feet which were often meant to be on like the side of it is meant to be
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a standard for like genitals and like in various parts there are really like lots of sex jokes in the
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old testament and we've gotten away from that even the bible has sex jokes and a lot of people don't know
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this like dating jokes but like jesus at the well was meant to be a joke there was this convention of
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stories at the time when a husband would meet his wife at the well and when jesus goes to the well and
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meets a woman he gives her the water of everlasting life everyone would have thought that was hilarious
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because it's turning this sexual story on its head and we have forgotten that everything's become
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too solemn and too beautiful and this is what i mean like one of the the fears i have around like
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the aesthetics of beauty in these traditions um drowning out i think the i do think to an extent
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like when you have this grandeur like when you walk in to this great grand cathedral it can feel
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awe-inspiring and it can have you feel minute but at the same time that in a way it makes you feel under
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god right uh not not oppressed by god but you can feel his presence it removes you from the personal
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relationship with faith and life that you can gain from not taking things so seriously um and i think you
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need this absolutely massive rigid seriousness combined with freedomality um which i think is possible and i
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yeah that's something i really want to elevate with these terms and when people are like the puritans
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were harsh the puritans ever punished the puritans and us yeah these are all these things that secular
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society hates it hates having expectations of itself but i think we should as a community have expectations
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of ourselves i have expectations of myself i have expectations of you and my expectations of the
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family and if somebody else decided to to follow this i'd have expectations of them too and i also really outsourcing this to an
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external profit like i really don't want to be seen as somebody who has any sort of special access to
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to revelation or knowledge or anything like that because i think that when you do that with somebody
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who's currently alive you allow for huge potential for negative externality and because who knows what
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i do who knows if i go crazy etc but being able to do that with somebody who's already long dead you know
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the extent of how crazy we can go and we're looking to our profit and trying to interpret from him so i would see
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what i'm doing as maybe a bit more extreme than what some no more extreme than what joseph smith
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did for sure and maybe a bit more extreme than something like calvin or martin luther or a few
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other people did but i still see it as a sect and a sect of christianity specifically even though it
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believes that some of the other abrahamic faiths were correct interpretations or were in some way divinely
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expired specific mormonism islam christianity and judaism oh and of course seroastrianism can't
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forget them i also want to note here that the goal of what we are laying out here is a system that is
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more in line with early puritanism than many of the new religious sects that are created by a single
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individual who like lays out what's true and acts like a prophet so this would be much closer to early
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anabaptism or early calvinism or puritanism which is to say that that no one individual in the movement
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like myself has more access to what's true than other individuals i have just laid out a list of
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sources and the way that i am relating to those sources in a way that starts a conversation of people
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who want to have this sort of vitalist religiously active theological conversation because when i look
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to the other religious communities the conversations i see are becoming nuanced and pedantic and nothing
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like the conversations that we saw a century ago you know whether you're talking about the great
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awakening or you're talking about the protestant reformation or in judaism you're talking about the
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early days of the hasidic movement and even given my reservations about the early days of the hasidic
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movement at least things were happening theologically back then i think that when we look at the
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iterations of the judeo-christian tradition that ended up being important in the future they were
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the iterations where this active and evolutionary conversation was happening and that's what i'm
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looking for instead of you know what i see today in the protestant tradition which is often like
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nuanced semantic and pedantic arguments about like pre-millennialism or post-millennialist
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ideologies which really doesn't even matter at the end of the day uh for most people i mean we're
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either in one situation or the other and isn't really going to inspire people it's just nerds fighting in
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a room as a final note here while we have been asked to bring back the tracks by a lot of people
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there's also a minority yet a vocal and considered minority from our perspective that would prefer we
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didn't the groups that typically like the tracks are people who are culturally from the protestant
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tradition the mormon tradition the jewish tradition or that have left and are angry with a christian
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tradition or that grew up in a new age tradition and have since rebuked that tradition the groups that
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dislike them are typically from catholic traditions and eastern orthodox traditions
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the key difference between these traditions is typically how they relate to truth and i don't
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think that one is is better than the other i mean uh for example the way that catholics relate to
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truth you know when we're talking to them is really nerdy in a way that i can respect they're like oh
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well you know we can't trust this source because you know they mispronounced this went to a protestant
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like mispronunciation means literally nothing it's it's it's an athetic preference or they uh you know
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don't haven't read this book or haven't read this philosopher or don't you know this and and antiquity
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philosopher and uh you know to people the other they're like why would i care about that why why would
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i care what i care about is what's true not like what um fulfills some aesthetic threshold before it
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enters the vocabulary of truth and i think that that's fine that's fine it's it's just not going
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to be appealing to you it's it's not for you and not every theological thing needs to be for every
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person you know as uh winwood reed said our goal is not to replace religion but find something that
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works for the people who today have none thank you for sharing that we're back to the tracks they're
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back guys after so many and i would not have gone back to them had so many people not told me to do
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them so if you like this you really need to encourage us because i am deathly embarrassed
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doing this i do not like when i was little i joked about the idea of oh i'll start like a cult or
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whatever that can help people like unlock themselves and blah blah blah and but i never really wanted the
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responsibility of doing that yeah it's not the person i want to be exactly but i feel called to do it so
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here's how i look at it at the very least we know that we need to give our kids a shot at a culture
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that gives them mental fortitude in this world and none of the existing cultures as they exist now
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as good as many may be are capable of imparting mental fortitude in an age of globalization and skinner
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box based phone apps and games and shows and at the very least i want to give our kids a good shot
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and i want to give them a culture that imparts fitness so i'm glad that at least you're sharing
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this with us in a base level of mental health which is a base level of mental health so i say
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let's go for it i know that they'll iterate on it if they use it at all in a way that makes it a lot
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better and we're depending on that so you have to start somewhere and sucking is the first step of
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getting good at something dude sucking at something is the first step towards being sort of good at
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something yeah that's what we're doing but no you're absolutely right and and i guess it was the
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agents of providence that had me go to this conference that had the people tell me you have
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to create more tracks you have to create more tracks i didn't know that it was what our fans liked
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i'd gotten emails to that extent i'd seen it on the discord but we also get a lot of critical
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emails every time we do one of these so i was just like why bother i think it really comes down to
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whether you are in a religion that is what you'd call the pragmatist guide to crafting religion
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symbiotic or domineering meaning you believe if you're as part of a religious sect or following that
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is trying to save everyone and that believes that those who do not hold your views are going to go
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to hell if they don't change to your views then you're probably going to find this quite offensive
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if you are of a religious subset of chosen people or limited atonement where basically just by design
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not everyone is going to be saved not everyone is going to be special some people just aren't part of
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the group and there's nothing you can do about it then you'll at best or at worst just find us very
01:30:29.140
entertaining as people who are just wrong but wrong in an entertaining way that isn't a problem for you
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because you don't have to save us or intriguing enough to potentially join because maybe this is
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the right club and i think that's what it comes down to everyone who really finds these offensive finds it
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offensive because um we are going to go to hell for not joining the correct group does that make sense
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yeah and i'd also say for people who look at this and they're like oh you've made up these like
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non-biblical holidays and you're like practicing christmas was like santa claus or like easter was
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like an easter bunny you're doing the same thing just because something is culturally normative doesn't
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mean it's biblical and if somebody wants to follow this tradition like while we have made it for
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our kids i've begun to become more okay with the idea that other people who don't really see a
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religion that compels them in the world today might think that this is a compelling system and like we
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have no no problem with that our kids will need people to marry after all and yeah i have no problem
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with that but my goal is absolutely i believe very strongly in limited atonement which we'll talk about
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in other tracks but that is to say that this is a non-proselytizing religious system yep cool thanks
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again malcolm and i love you and i appreciate you willing to embrace the cringe embrace the cringe
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a citizen has the courage to make the safety of the human race their personal responsibility
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attract imitating one of our sons because he likes to crack eggs and he says it cracked
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they're cracked they're cracked how does toasty get all the best lines