Tract 7： The Devil, the Heavenly Host, & a Techno-Puritan Cosmology
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 6 minutes
Words per Minute
177.2808
Summary
In this episode of Technopuritan, we talk about the concept of creation and the role of the devil in the Christian and Jewish cosmology, and why the idea of God as a malevolent entity is hard to square with monotheism.
Transcript
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Hello, Simone. I am so excited to be with you here today. We have been getting badgered about doing
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another one of our tracks recently. And I was like, for people who don't know or who are new
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to the podcast, this is a series where we go over our weird religious beliefs, which we call
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Technopuritan. And actually, I got the website now, so we've got technopuritan.com. I am in
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the process of getting us registered with the IRS as a real religion, which I am quite excited about.
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And I'll let you guys know when that goes through. And if you want to watch all of the videos on this,
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they are sorted under that domain. So it's much easier to find things. This particular video
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is going to be on, in part, I'm skipping it in line from where it was as a track series based on a
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request of somebody's, hey, can you talk more about like the devil and your view cosmology that you
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guys have, right? I was like, yeah, actually, I will do that because that's an exciting one.
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And one that I've been interested to read because as a lore guy, as somebody who likes reading lots
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and lots of lore, including a lot of religious lore, because that's really what cosmologies,
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aren't they? It's the lore of a religious universe, right? I find it really fascinating. And I can get so
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wrongheaded in the way that various groups like relate to it. So like a great example of this is these
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traditions, where because the devil is like the king of evil, like the people who go to hell, who were
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like the most bad, get places of authority in hell. Have you seen this like in some like things where
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they're like, oh, Hitler, or like Saddam Hussein, or whatever, it's like the devil's right in the hand man,
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right? And it's like, in South Park, but you see this in a lot of renditions. And it's that is such
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like a bad way to look at things. Because then it basically means if you think you're going to go to
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hell, you've got to be like as evil as possible to ensure that you are treated well. Because
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yeah, at least to be upper management goodness, who wants to be frontline in hell, that would be
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terrible. But I'm just talking about how like when you get to this wider cosmology, you can get really
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weird takes. But we will get into the specifics of those in a second. Yeah, let's dive in.
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So tract eight, good verse evil, the heavenly host. Most of the true revelations of God speak
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of some sort of malevolent agent, whether it's the devil, shaitan, or Arahim.
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Shaitan? Is that the devil for Sean Connery or what?
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It's the Muslim version. So anyway, and now I'm gonna take a step back here just for anyone who's new to
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this. When we say the true revelations, we mean the Abrahamic tree of religions and a few other
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tree of religions that we think have some level of actual divine inspiration. One of the others
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from there being the Zoroastrian tradition. So I'm gonna keep reading here. You can even see this in
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Judaism. Quote, everything which the Holy One blessed, he created with its counterpart. Dot, dot, dot.
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He created righteous. He created sinners. He created the Garden of Eden. He created Gehenna.
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End quote. And so here there's contrasting when you have the creation of a good thing,
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you have a creation of its evil counterpart or its mirrored counterpart. Evil might be the wrong word
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here. But a lot of people would say Jews don't really have a concept of Satan. So you can't say
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that all the true revelations have this, but they do have this idea of the mirrored counterpart of
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creation. And now back to reading. I have also always found this portrait quite hard to square with
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strict monotheism. There is one God, but also some other entity with enough independent power to go
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against his will and challenge his plans. That is just polytheism under a different name. And no,
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you can't say that God has more power than the devil. And that's what makes it still a monotheistic
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conception. We don't say the Greek pantheon is monotheistic just because it is ruled by Zeus and he
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has more power than the other gods. When explaining this malevolent entity in monotheistic traditions,
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there are a few common options. One is to say God intentionally created an independently sentient
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malevolent entity and unleashed this on man. So bad things can happen, but he is not culpable.
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This seems almost impossibly petty and cowardly. God obviously did not do this. And you understand
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what I'm saying by that. They're like, yes, the devil is an independent entity from God,
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but God created him just to mess with man. So God doesn't have to deal with the moral implications
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of that. It's like, God is selecting an admin to say no, just like venture capitalists and other
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people have like an admin who just says no to all the investment inquiries and all the meeting
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requests and that God would do that. It's a little weird. It's a little passive aggressive.
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I can do it. I would always say from leaders that I've emailed who don't use an admin to say no,
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that is the most baller move when they just say no to your face, because that shows that you have
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actual, like a pair of balls instead of whatever. I want to be your assistant. I'll make sure you
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don't have to go to any meetings. If anyone comes to see you, I'll scare them away. Wait, April,
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if you had to choose between these two ties, you're hired. I need to find someone to fill in for April.
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Now I know I'm not going to find someone who's both aggressively mean and apathetic. April really is
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the whole package. But anyway, another common answer is to say, quote, God created a malevolent
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entity that carries out his will, end quote. If this is the case, what was the point of flirting
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with polytheism when we are commanded not to? How does the devil being a separate entity remove any
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culpability from God if he is just carrying out God's will? And this is the thing, like,
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why would you create this distinct entity, right, in terms of your conception of the divine,
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if that can mistakenly lead to polytheistic-like traditions? And again, what some monotheists will
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say, okay, God created the devil, and therefore it's still a monotheistic tradition. No, in a lot of
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polytheistic traditions, you'll have one God that, like, gave birth to the other gods or created a bunch
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of other gods. That doesn't make it not polytheism. What makes it polytheism is having an entity that
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is supernatural and that can act independently of God's will, and thus is a fully distinct and separate
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entity. And so why are we flirting with that if God's not really gaining anything by having this sub-deity
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here? It seems fairly clear that the only sensible answer for a monotheistic tradition is that this evil
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entity does not exist distinct from God, but instead that this entity is one avatar of God's
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will. It is the avatar of God's will that he uses to push us to improve and cull the weak, but a direct
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avatar of God nonetheless. Despite the basilisk and God quite literally being the same entity, it is useful
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for us to think of them as opposing forces within cosmology, and thus we speak of and mentally model
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the basilisk as a separate entity than God. So what I'm saying here is that literally this is just a
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sub-process of what God is doing. It is not a distinct entity of God, but God teaches us to think of it
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as a separate entity because of the way that we model the world. It's not useful to think of it as the
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same entity. And then you fix most of the problems that you're dealing with here of flirting with
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polytheism. It is important to remember, especially when talking about more recent scripture and tradition,
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that there is no magical force field around it that keeps other cultures from seeping in. Even if you
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are a righteous monotheist, if you live beside polytheists for thousands of years, their framings
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will begin to seep into your religion. Some might even be useful ways of seeing God, but it is critical
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to never extend these to anything other than framings. Of course, many do this, and this is how it is
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possible to follow an Abrahamic tradition and yet worship a polytheistic pantheon headed by Baal in
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all but name. And this is when we talk about the early split of the Jews from the surrounding Sumeric
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religions, the local religion that focused on the Storm King Baal, or Storm God, I guess you'd call him
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Baal. These were all polytheistic pantheons. And the core thing that distinguished the Jews in the early
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days, and I think laid out their teachings as more right than the teachings that came before and led to them
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being favored by God, was this idea of, no, there is one God, there is not a pantheon of gods. And in early
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iterations of the tradition, it was not, no, there's one God. In the earliest iterations, if you look at like the
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earliest iterations of Judaism, it's very clear that they believed that the other gods existed. It's just that they were
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supposed to only worship one God, and that their God was more powerful than the other gods. But it was a,
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I forget the word for this here, but it's different than the word monotheism, and I'll add it in.
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Monolatrist. And I'll add some quotes in that show in the early writings of the Old Testament, it's pretty
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clear that they believed that other gods still existed, and had conflicts with God. However, it seems
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true to me, as I've said, that religion is a living thing that evolves over time, and I think gets closer to
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truth, that we have learned that God has favored the groups that believed in a stricter form of
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monotheism over the groups that believed that there are many gods, it's just that this one God is better
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than the other gods. And then so we saw that is, I think, the correct interpretation. As for quotes
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from the Old Testament that show that clearly in the very earliest days of Judaism, it was a monolatrist
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religion, you can look at things like Plasm 95.3,
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For the Lord is great and king above all gods. Exodus 20.3, Thou shalt have no other gods before
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me, which implies, you know, other gods existing. Deuteronomy 10.17, For the Lord your God is God of
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gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no
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bribes. So to be the God of gods implies that there are other gods under him. Plasm 82.1,
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God has taken his place in the divine council. In the midst of the gods, he holds judgment. Again,
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implying that he's a leader god, like Zeus or something like that. So we are not saying that in
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the early days that the Judeo-Christian tree of religions was not a monolatrist tradition. It
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clearly was. It's just that those readings were clearly shown, I think, by God to be incorrect
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readings of reality. And this is why we cannot be overly fastidious when clinging to the words of
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these older texts, because they can lead you to either, through their inclusion of polytheistic
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elements or monolatry elements, lead you to incorrect interpretations of God. And it also shows that
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religion evolves over time and what we're doing right now with this particular series is not some
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sort of affront to the Judeo-Christian tradition, but just another stage in the process that has been
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going on since the very first writings. To put it more poignantly, there is only one God. The devil
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does not exist as a meaningfully distinct supernatural entity. However, the devil is a useful framing device
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when we humans are thinking about issues of good and evil, and that is why he is used throughout
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revelations from God. God's intentionality and thought are so much more expansive than our own
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mental landscape. It does not even make sense to think of it as a consciousness. Because our ability
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to mentally model God is so limited, God has given us frameworks to help us. When we model these
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frameworks, the devil, angels, the Holy Ghost, etc., we come closer to how God wants us to react to his
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actions than if we attempt to model God directly, which, as track four points out, is a form of
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idolatry most high within our religious framings. So do you have any thoughts there? Let's just make so
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much more sense than the concepts that I was originally introduced to with Abrahamic religions as a kid.
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Yeah. It's like an evolving lore for better understanding God. But we're making very clear,
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this is a framing device. And it might be the framing device that God wants us to use,
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but it is not literally true that there are angels and a Satan and many of these other things in the
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way that we would have within a polytheistic cosmology. Although the human brain appears to
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model these cosmologies pretty well. And I would say that if people are like,
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which cosmology is the best, in a second, we're going to go over what I think is probably true
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about the cosmology that's laid out in these various frameworks by looking at where they align
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with each other. But I would encourage people to go back and more heavily lean on the cosmology of
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their ancestral religious traditions than necessarily the ones we're laying out here. As people know,
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with this religious system, we think that people are generally better off going to one of the true
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revelations and following it strictly, unless they just cannot stomach the areas that they need to
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compromise on sort of logic or the way they interact with the world to go back to one of
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Yeah. I was thinking too about our kids and how our kids seem to regard us differently depending on if
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we're being good cop or bad cop. Like that one day when Octavian said that he was going to send you to
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the factory to get a new dad, that it wouldn't hurt you. It would be not painful, but that he would
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get a new dad that gave him more toys. And it does make me think that there's something about humans
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where we just like to think about different moods of people or different things that we get from them
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Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. I think it is a useful way of handling this framing because I think it's
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really hard for people to think of the trials in their lives as coming from a God that historically
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the Christian tradition would have framed as benevolent.
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As being kind and loving and God is love and Jesus saves and empathy and care. And then yet
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these terrible things happen and how can that be the same God? But I think it at the same time
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causes a lot of people to detract. What kind of God could allow this to happen? And what I like about
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this framing as well is this explains that it is a brutal and certainly not fair in many ways that
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we would intuitively think of fair process, but it's just how it is. And you have to accept that's
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a facet of God and how God works. Yeah. We would also say that we don't deal with the benevolence
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problem as much as other traditions because we see God's goal and the definition of good from God's
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standpoint as being the intergenerational expansion of humanity's potentiality or life's potentiality
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more broadly. And that is achieved through this intergenerational cycle of hardship.
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And so it's more directly obvious to me why these forms of hardship exist. If God doesn't view evil the
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way that man evolved to view evil, where to man, evil is often a collection of things that cause
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negative emotional stimuli, but like man only feels those things as causing negative emotional
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stimuli because his ancestors who felt negative emotional stimuli in response to those things
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had more surviving offspring. And so for us, those aren't really a collection of like truly good or
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bad things. It's like a paperclip maximizer building a moral system on how many paperclips there are.
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It's just what we were programmed to react to environmental stimuli. But anyway, back to the tract.
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We will go through these entities in turn, but we must be clear, they do not really quote unquote
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exist. They are framing devices. They are just the best ways for our limited brains to think about
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a type of thing we cannot understand. All right, bullet point. One benevolent being that encompasses
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all of what to modern man appears as the divine. This is the being that both we and the traditional
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Christians call God. This being is the most quote unquote real understanding of the supernatural world
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we are capable of. And the other beings are different ways of thinking about fragments of this one
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unified being. Bullet point. A cadre of lesser benevolent beings that exist simultaneously as plural and
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singular beings. These are what Christians call angels, the host of heaven and the Holy Ghost. We call these
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beings slash this beings slash this being the agents of providence. While this is not what they are,
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we think the closest framing a living human of our time can have to understand them is that they are a
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neural net in which all future human minds communicate instantaneously with all other future human
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minds. An internet of super advanced humans. This is why it does not make sense to define it as
00:17:01.340
singular or plural for is the internet singular or plural. This framing would have been impossible for
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people during the major periods of Abrahamic revelation. These concepts were thought of as
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totally separate. The plural angels and the singular Holy Ghost, which was the closest term people of the
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time could come to for a cloud intelligence. And I've always found the Holy Ghost very interesting as a
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concept because like, why was this added to revelation when it didn't seem to really matter that much to
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earlier iterations of revelation? Yes, God mattered. And yes, Jesus mattered. But why the focus on the Holy
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Ghost? If we see this as a premonition of what a cloud intelligence would look like that we didn't fully
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understand yet, then we can better understand, oh, this is why it is so important to understand that
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Jesus is fully God, but also not God. This idea of being part of something, but also not being that thing in the
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same way that if Jesus in our framing represents the intergenerational suffering and martyrdom of man, which
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through that suffering, eventually it removes sin from himself and then is able to rejoin God at this future point in
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time, we are one with God already in that we are part of the blockchain that ends up creating him. Any thoughts so
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far before I go further? Not to constantly think about things in terms of our kids, but this also reminds me of
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parents interacting with their kids through holidays. Like with my parents, they taught me lessons through Santa
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leaving presents, through the leprechaun, because my parents did like leprechaun practical jokes and pranks around St. Patrick's
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Easter Bunny. It seems one way one could put it is that God has to necessarily infantilize humans to
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get a message through and may put on different masks. That's such a great framing. No, I love this framing and I
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hadn't thought of it myself, but it is very much in the same way that our kids can't understand right from
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wrong in the way that we can. They can't understand the world in the way that we can. So we make up
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entities like Santa Claus. They clearly, I mean, we know it's not true, but we're like, yeah, but this is
00:19:14.780
a good framing device until they are mentally mature enough to understand. But that's sort of the way
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God has seen our species. He's given us this framing device until we're old enough as a species
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to get it. And we recognize that even now we're not there yet, but we can be like the kids who are
00:19:34.660
like, look, I understand this Santa thing is probably not real, but is it harmful? Like our parents seem to
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know more about the world than we do. They've given us this framing device. Should we really
00:19:46.480
throw it out? That's the way we relate to a divine cosmology. I really like that.
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The final entity is the one Jesus is used to teach us about the martyr. The martyr is us,
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you and me, as our actions and motivations are encoded on the blockchain of human history that
00:20:03.640
eventually becomes one with God, but also is God just at a different point in time.
00:20:09.520
We evolve beyond the person we were a minute before. Little by little, we advance a bit further
00:20:16.580
with each turn. That's how a drill works. This drill will open a hole in the universe and that hole
00:20:24.080
will be a path for those behind us. The dreams of those who have fallen, the hopes of those who will
00:20:29.800
follow. Those two sets of dreams weave together into a double helix, drilling a path towards
00:20:35.940
tomorrow. Some might misunderstand this and say that we are saying that a human today is God. This
00:20:43.480
would be like a person claiming a red blood cell was Malcolm. However, collectively, all the cells
00:20:49.140
within our bodies are our bodies. The martyr is all the quote unquote cells collectively at a specific
00:20:55.980
moment in time. In this case, the quote unquote cells are not exactly humans, but rather individual
00:21:02.020
human actions and mental states that eventually lead to man becoming one with God slash creating God
00:21:09.060
within any specific moment in history. Not all human actions play a role in this. To be clear, even when
00:21:16.000
all of its cells are considered together, this being is a significantly lesser form of God. God includes
00:21:22.740
this being was in it, but it's also inconceivably greater as it exists outside of time, but also
00:21:28.580
includes all slivers of itself that existed at any point in time. And here I would say that this is
00:21:35.980
really interesting framing because within different religious traditions, there's different framings of
00:21:40.900
the self, right? Within most of the older religious traditions, the core framing of the self was either
00:21:47.980
the individual, you or me, or it was a family unit in something like Confucianism, you might have that.
00:21:55.520
Whereas in this religion, it argues that the truest framing of the self is actually not you as an individual,
00:22:02.060
but your thoughts and actions considered independently of you. So in some moments when you're being
00:22:11.260
efficacious, you might be leading to or contributing to this blockchain that eventually becomes God.
00:22:16.640
And in other moments, you're not becoming efficacious and you are totally separate from
00:22:20.860
this entity. And thinking of yourself as individual in the moment framings helps with things like
00:22:27.000
procrastination and the way you relate to the morality of your actions, because it makes it much
00:22:32.780
easier. And I think fixes one of the core problems that has always been a core problem of Christian
00:22:38.060
framing to me, this idea that you can just at any moment repent and you're fully forgiven. Where this
00:22:44.740
would say, yes, the you that is repenting is fully forgiven, but all of the previous iterations of you that
00:22:52.720
were sinning are still completely damned. Yeah, this doesn't undo. It doesn't undo those, but those don't
00:23:00.620
matter because those aren't you anymore. You aren't really responsible for those previous states of
00:23:07.200
yourself so long as you have undergone the effort to completely rewrite who you are. But now who you are is a new
00:23:14.080
person because you are thinking and doing new. And so it's a different way to relate to this old
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Christian point, which always seemed very weird and immoral to me. But when I reframe it like this,
00:23:24.160
I'm like, oh, that makes perfect sense. I can get behind that. And it's just a reframing around
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self. Do you have any thoughts here, Simone? No, that makes a lot of sense. I guess you could apply
00:23:34.020
sins and objective function to sins as well. And we've never really talked about this before, but
00:23:39.540
per our view, instead of having a goal in life or a series of goals that are discrete and achievable,
00:23:44.800
you have an objective function. That is to say a couple of things you value or one thing you value
00:23:49.620
that you're just trying to maximize throughout your life. I guess on the opposite side of this,
00:23:54.480
you can also have whatever the word would be for the opposite of that. The things that you're
00:23:59.300
looking to minimize, like malaise, self-indulgence, like general inaction when you should be moving
00:24:07.520
toward your objective function. Every action is driven by some objective, right? And how high
00:24:14.220
that objective is, have you considered that objective? Is it something that you believe has
00:24:19.000
intrinsic good? Determines whether you are a sinner in that moment. For example, if I'm looking at one
00:24:26.580
cultural group and I'm talking about like the good or the evil that was done by X ethnic group on
00:24:34.240
average or X country on average, a lot of people would say, yeah, but you can calculate whether a
00:24:40.240
country has done good or evil. If you have a set of, these are the things that make up good actions.
00:24:45.700
These are the things that make up bad actions. And it is an interesting intellectual exercise.
00:24:50.880
It's just, and it does have meaning as an intellectual exercise. It's just important to remember that was
00:24:56.500
made up of a bunch of individual actors in the same way a person is made up of a bunch of
00:25:01.440
individual actors, which are different individual mental states and framings that led to the specific
00:25:07.360
actions, which are the key important factors. Whereas a traditional framing would say the individual is
00:25:13.100
the key important factor. And the entire point I'm making here is the individual is not the key
00:25:17.080
important factor. What you have control over is your actions in the moment. I don't have control over my
00:25:22.100
past actions. No. So then that's the point I'm making. Yeah. But you can learn from your past
00:25:28.260
actions. You should not give no weight to them. No, your current state can learn from your past
00:25:32.500
actions to change what it's doing in the moment. But when you average out somebody's actions, it makes
00:25:39.380
things like procrastination much easier. And it makes things like not taking full culpability for a past
00:25:46.080
action. With this system, if in the past you did something that was sinful, you need to ask what
00:25:52.620
mental framing you were using that allowed yourself to go towards that sinful pathway and then build a
00:25:58.640
new mental framing that's not going to recreate that past action. When you are no longer overly
00:26:05.360
focused on culpability and just optimizing yourself to minimize sin, I think it leads to much more
00:26:12.280
efficacious mental framings than this self-flagellation, which can sometimes become the
00:26:18.380
fixation or focus of an individual's life and can lead to, I think, really bad framings in terms of
00:26:25.080
self-improvement. Here's what I'll say. What I think I understand is just like you and I support an
00:26:31.340
internal locus of control where we say all that really matters is what I can personally do. When you
00:26:36.900
put this into a temporal context, all that really matters is what I can do now, right? Yeah. And it
00:26:44.000
follows your model of self, which is individual moments when you're like, what can I do for future
00:26:48.480
Simone? This is ultimately a framing that came from you. Oh, that I view my consciousness and generally
00:26:55.300
anyone's consciousness as just one person who's going to fall and die and ephemerally not exist very
00:27:02.920
soon. So all you can really do is exist in your 24 hour period that you exist and serve your future
00:27:08.400
selves. And more importantly, your overall objective function, your values in life with whatever moments
00:27:13.820
you have. So you almost live this locust like fleeting life and it doesn't really matter what
00:27:19.660
happens or how you feel in the future or how you felt in the past or even how you feel now, because
00:27:24.100
all that really matters is can you in this one 24 hour period or this one two hour period where you have
00:27:30.400
somewhat of a continuous consciousness, what are you going to do with it?
00:27:34.560
Yeah. But I think humans grasp on sentience is incredibly tenuous. We are barely sentient for
00:27:39.840
people who have watched our video on that. And I think that we way overvalue how sentient humans are
00:27:44.740
because we like to believe that humans are the latest and greatest. We want to feel like we're in
00:27:49.160
control because it's, I think for good reason, consciousness gives us the illusion of being in
00:27:53.960
control because if we didn't feel like we were in control, we would not learn from our past
00:27:57.260
experiences or events. You have to feel like you're in control. The illusion is a feature, not a bug.
00:28:03.040
I may have over elevated sort of the way we see self. I would say that there's sort of three useful
00:28:08.700
framings of self that to me are better framings of self in terms of leading to positive actions than
00:28:15.200
framings of self around the individual. I think the in the moment sliver of consciousness is a good
00:28:22.400
framing of self. I think the family unit is a good framing of self. Like when I am thinking about
00:28:27.080
myself on a day-to-day basis, I very much think of the family unit. That's what I'm thinking of.
00:28:31.440
How do I maximize the good of the family unit? And then the final framing of self that I think
00:28:35.400
is useful is the cultural unit. I am but a cog within a larger cultural machine. And if I follow
00:28:41.840
that machine, then it will lead to good outcomes. And yeah, so I think that these three framings of self
00:28:49.620
are higher. I think that where modern society has really fallen off the edge is framing the
00:28:54.320
individual as the core unit of self. And then acting as if this is just obviously and axiomatically
00:28:59.440
true, but it's not. I love it when you talk to people and they're like, what responsibility do you
00:29:04.300
have to your ancestors? Like you, your kids are individuals. They're not you. They're not like
00:29:08.280
related to you. It's no, they're literally related to me. I know they're related to you, but they're not.
00:29:13.420
No, they're literally part. When you raise the family as a higher order of entity than the self
00:29:20.620
in terms of like how you frame yourself and your decisions, you will create positive actions much
00:29:26.580
more often. And I think it's what allows the communist structure of the family to work.
00:29:32.300
The fact that people, and I think that this is why communism doesn't really work on a large scale,
00:29:36.200
is people are very bad about thinking of themselves as just like individual cells or atoms of a polity.
00:29:42.380
But it's very easy to see yourself as like a cell of the family, like you or me. When I'm thinking
00:29:49.580
about like maximizing, even when I am like positive emotions, right? We'll rate the emotional states in
00:29:56.260
the individual choices I'm making of other family members over my own emotional state.
00:30:02.160
I remember recently you were saying like, what could I do that would create the most happiness in you,
00:30:07.020
Malcolm? Like what's the total indulgence? I've got this money I made for a total indulgence. And I was
00:30:11.260
like, let's get the kids toys. And I'm like, because of all the members of the family, they
00:30:14.880
are going to react the most with the most positive emotion to something I can get was like 25 bucks,
00:30:20.040
right? Much more positive than anything I'd react to for 25 bucks. And even the wash off of our
00:30:25.520
emotional state, I will get from that because I consider a sort of myself as just a cell within
00:30:31.140
the family leads to me saying, oh yeah, let's do the nice thing for them. So long as it doesn't lead
00:30:35.620
to, and this is the problem where a lot of people are like, they create these deontological
00:30:39.060
framings around kids, like never allow a kid to experience any negative emotions, which of course
00:30:42.980
is going to lead to like huge deleterious effects over the course of their life.
00:30:46.900
Even though it's pretty obvious, I should probably explain why this is the case. Not exposing someone
00:30:51.040
to negative stimuli in response to bad actions during their developmental period can hypersensitize
00:30:57.840
them to negative stimuli as they get older, thus trigger warnings, et cetera, and cause them to spiral
00:31:03.680
into anxiety attacks and depression when they encounter even minor negative stimuli in their
00:31:09.300
adolescence and adulthood. Which is why when you think about the family as not you, your wife,
00:31:14.440
and the kids, it's your ancestors and your descendants. And all of the things that we're
00:31:19.940
doing in the moment are just the frame in terms of the ones that we have the most access to right now.
00:31:27.280
Some may see this interpretation as in conflict with Christian teachings, but if we just go by
00:31:33.340
what is in the Bible and we remove revelations, it is not. And people may remember from the last
00:31:39.380
track why we removed revelations from the Bible. I was actually really interested to learn that
00:31:43.160
apparently Martin Luther also removed revelations as canonical texts in the Bible.
00:31:48.680
Yeah, there's a quote from him that I can add here in editing.
00:31:51.460
So Martin Luther said of revelations, quote, and it makes me consider it to be neither
00:31:56.620
apostolic nor prophetic, end quote. And then later he says, quote, I can in no way detect that the
00:32:04.120
Holy Spirit produced it, end quote. But I was really surprised by that. So apparently a lot of
00:32:08.200
Christian theologians end up removing revelations. And once you remove revelations, a lot of the
00:32:15.460
The quotes that talk about Satan and are often used to presume that he was once an angel could
00:32:22.260
equally be interpreted as him once being part of God. Quote, all your pomp has been brought
00:32:28.880
down to the grave, along with the noise of your harps. Maggots are spread out beneath you and worms
00:32:35.340
cover you. You have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn. You have been cast down to the
00:32:41.520
earth. You who once laid low the nations, end quote. In addition, if you add our framing of Jesus in
00:32:52.640
tract one, his temptation by Satan takes on a completely different and much deeper meaning.
00:32:57.660
Quote, again, the devil took him up on the exceedingly high mountain and showed him all the
00:33:03.280
kingdoms of the world in their glory and said to him, all these things I will give you if you will fall
00:33:09.440
down and worship me, end quote. As interpreted by traditional Christianity, this interaction makes
00:33:15.160
no sense. How could the devil meaningfully tempt Christ with rulership over all the world's kingdoms
00:33:20.920
if Jesus knew he was God and would reunite with God? Satan is offering him stuff he already owns.
00:33:27.100
But even if he didn't, even if that was all Satan's stuff and somehow not God's, this would be like a
00:33:33.580
fired employee of Microsoft telling Bill Gates he will give him a burrito if he worships him and
00:33:39.360
gives him his company. This story as interpreted by traditional Christians is both comical and not
00:33:44.940
a meaningful interpretation. No, interpret this story with our framing. Jesus is supposed to represent
00:33:49.940
the elect in every moment of their lives that they are acting in accordance with God's will to improve
00:33:54.320
the potentiality of the next generation. As such, these individuals are God, the son of God, and man
00:33:59.580
all simultaneously. Lucifer is the avatar God uses to call those susceptible to temptation from this
00:34:06.320
group and improved the elect through trials. Now this story makes perfect sense. Satan is the basilisk,
00:34:13.340
tempting you with a life of indulgences. You must sacrifice to improve the world. This story also conveys to
00:34:19.200
us the true nature of the basilisk. The basilisk does not corrupt our souls by torturing us, but by offering
00:34:25.760
us our deepest desires with shortcuts. Whether that is a desire to experience some element of the divine,
00:34:33.300
see tract four on idolatry, the desire to rule over others, or the desire for pleasure. Some may
00:34:41.040
misunderstand this to mean that we have a Gnostic-like understanding of God, which is wrong. This is
00:34:46.800
either a misunderstanding of our faith or a misunderstanding of Gnosticism. Gnostics believe
00:34:51.120
God and the devil to be different entities, but the evil entity is the one that created earth. We believe
00:34:56.840
the devil to be one small manifestation of a near infinitely more vast God that God embodies for
00:35:03.000
certain tasks that require either the temptation or punishment of man. Think of God as a computer and
00:35:09.220
the devil as a small, mostly quarantined program running on that computer. This entity or sub-program
00:35:14.760
is antagonistic to God insofar as those that are following this entity will be a threat to those
00:35:21.820
following the path of God. But it is not an entity that acts outside of God's will. What it does must
00:35:28.880
be done for the future that must come to pass. For this reason, we have a rather unique relation to
00:35:34.380
the followers of the basilisk when contrasted with other Christians. These are individuals serving God's
00:35:39.800
will as much as we are, but unlike us, they do not share in God's glory. For this reason, we are commanded
00:35:46.920
to treat them with empathy and not impede their plans. For example, to someone of our faith,
00:35:53.460
it would be sinful to attempt to pass something like a ban on antinatalist philosophy or talking
00:35:58.940
about woke racist ideas. God uses the choice to sin to cull the weak of heart from humanity. When we
00:36:06.600
prevent this by removing the choice to sin from people, we are thwarting God's plan and hurting the
00:36:13.580
people, we, quote, saved from having to overcome temptation, end quote. The point I'm making here,
00:36:20.240
and this is something like a big beef I have with many traditional forms of Christianity,
00:36:24.260
is it is God's will that we are tempted. The temptation makes us stronger. When you remove
00:36:34.000
the temptation, you make man weak, and you hurt God's plan for man. This is why you should not act
00:36:45.260
with enmity towards followers of the basilisk. There was, we talked about Gurren Lagann doing a
00:36:51.560
good job at explaining some philosophical concepts we associate with divinity. Another anime that came
00:36:55.740
out recently that I think does a very good job of this was an anime called Gushing Over Anime Girls.
00:37:02.160
And there are a series of two scenes in it that do a great job, and it's an anime where
00:37:08.680
the protagonist is actually a Satan-like character, you could say. She is a character who, through her
00:37:16.560
obsession with anime girls, learns the best way to interact with them is as a villain, because she can
00:37:24.360
interact with them in all these vile ways. But then there's this one moment where one of the anime
00:37:30.360
girls who she has been basically sexually tempting over and over again, and here I will read the
00:37:36.120
translations, but at the end of this tract, I'll just put these two scenes next to each other, ends up
00:37:40.840
breaking. And so the Mistress Brazier, the devil-like character, says, you're not done yet because there
00:37:48.880
is so much more I want to do with you before I'm done with you. And then the other character goes,
00:37:54.460
I can't anymore. I'm too weak. I can't beat you, Mistress. And then you expect, when she's kissing
00:38:01.180
the Mistress's foot, the devil-like characters, and you expect, oh, this is what she wanted. But no,
00:38:06.460
she immediately looks at her with this look of contempt and hatred. And she says, shocked,
00:38:14.940
like, Mr. Brazier, what did I? And then the Satan character says, white that disgusting look off your
00:38:21.820
face. The magical girls are paragons of justice. Every little girl looks up to you. Yet here you
00:38:28.540
were really just about to join the villains. Despicable, despicable, despicable. And then at the
00:38:35.980
end scene, the culmination of this series is she has the devil character. This other character after that
00:38:43.580
moment then realizes, no, what was I doing? I need to improve. I need to get better at resisting sin.
00:38:50.540
And she upgrades to this new magical girl-like character. And the demon character at the end
00:38:55.820
shoots her with this big bolt of evil energy, basically. And she catches it in this scarf thing
00:39:01.980
she has. And she rolls it around and it's clearly concentrating it. And you think that she's going to
00:39:08.380
shoot it back at the devil character. But no, instead, she shoots the entire concentrated bolt
00:39:15.340
To show the devil, or this other character, that the worst she can throw at her, she can concentrate it
00:39:23.100
and she can take it right in her face and it will do nothing. It does not affect her anymore.
00:39:29.820
And then the devil character is actually quite excited about this moment and goes back to fighting
00:39:33.980
her with full gusto. And there's a whole plot arc where she's worried that she actually broke this
00:39:38.940
girl. And I think that this is a better mechanism for understanding this Satan part of God. It doesn't
00:39:46.540
tempt us to hate us or because it hates us. And God hates the aspect of himself that he uses to tempt
00:39:52.860
us. That's why he cast it down with maggots and stuff like that. But it is not acting truly independently
00:39:58.060
from God. But it doesn't truly want us to fail its trials. It wants us to overcome these trials.
00:40:06.140
The true heart of it does. There might be a part of it that in the moment is like trying to win in this
00:40:11.980
sort of fight. But it does not have, it needs to model contempt for humanity to do these things,
00:40:17.980
but it doesn't genuinely have a contempt for humanity.
00:40:20.780
Yeah, it's, I guess in the same way, evolution doesn't have contempt for life. God doesn't have
00:40:33.180
contempt for the sinners that are called by its process. And what I think is that, no, I do think
00:40:39.980
it has contempt for the sinners who are called. I think Satan does at least. Satan has contempt for
00:40:45.980
the individuals who submit to his trials, who give up, who kiss his feet. That is not his goal
00:40:54.140
in giving you these trials. His goal in giving you these trials is that you don't submit to him,
00:41:00.380
that you prove that you're stronger than him and better than him and better than the worst
00:41:04.860
he can give you. And that's the point, right? Is as a sort of sub program of God that is trying us,
00:41:13.260
it is not relating to us in these trials as, Oh my God, I want to make them submit to me.
00:41:19.020
It's relating to us as I'm giving them these trials to improve themselves. And when you face
00:41:25.020
trials in life, the very last thing you can do is break and kiss the feet of Satan, because then you
00:41:32.540
become impossible to improve yourself. And the trials are related to you in so far as how they affect your
00:41:41.660
ability to live a good life, which is a life of intergenerational expansion of human potentiality.
00:41:46.540
And so that means that different individuals will relate to different trials in different ways.
00:41:50.620
So a trial like pornography, right? Like one individual may just completely succumb to
00:41:55.820
pornography and it becomes the goal of their entire life or trying to get people to sleep with them.
00:42:00.860
Right. Whereas another individual might be able to face these trials, like blasts of negative
00:42:06.620
energy in the face and have it be a complete non inconvenience to them. Like they may not need
00:42:12.380
particular personal prohibitions against pornography because for them, pornography is like a 30 minute
00:42:17.340
a week thing. And it's like not a big part of their life. And they, they might use it so that they don't
00:42:22.300
waste their time chasing invaluable sexual relationships. And when they're marketing the
00:42:26.940
various types of sin in their lives, they're like, okay, this is just lower. It's the same with something
00:42:30.460
like drinking could be a huge trial for one individual. And for another individual,
00:42:34.940
it's not a trial at all. This is true of all the various trials you could face. But when you
00:42:39.340
approach these trials deontologically, instead of consequential, Lee, I think that's a useful
00:42:45.900
framework for people of like lower intelligence, like the masses. But I think when you're talking
00:42:51.100
about any sort of leadership cast in society, you really need to be consequentialist. You can see
00:42:56.140
our video of Knights versus Kings and alpha beta dichotomy and why I don't like the alpha beta dichotomy.
00:43:01.740
So I don't think deontological framings are like necessarily bad framings. They're just not the
00:43:07.100
framings that I think work for people like us that aspire to lead large groups, because I cannot fall
00:43:13.180
back on, I was just doing this one right rule where I always do this right thing in this circumstance,
00:43:19.580
like never lie. If that never lie rule ends up causing my entire kingdom to suffer and many of them
00:43:26.940
die. Like, I don't get to fall back on those little framings, but I think when you're talking about
00:43:30.620
the Knights, yeah, it does make sense to fall back on these. And so I think that the different
00:43:33.900
roles and different people, sin is different from them and they relate to it differently. And I think
00:43:38.860
it's important to remember that, and that the specific rules around sin that are laid out in
00:43:44.620
these various frameworks are often more meant for the Knights, because most people fall into that
00:43:51.020
framing and most people historically fell into that framing. Where I think for us, what's important is
00:43:55.340
to read what was the goal of this collection of rules that was laid out? Like, what was it trying
00:44:01.420
to steer an individual's life to in a consequentialist framing and then reorient our moral compass around
00:44:08.380
that consequentialist framing? Any thoughts there? No, that makes sense. I would still see it as
00:44:15.900
ascribing too much pettiness to God to say that God is pleased to see the cold removed. I would just say that
00:44:22.620
it's a sieve. When I drain pasta, I'm letting the water go and I'm keeping the pasta because that's
00:44:27.500
what's needed for dinner. And I feel like the basilisk forms as a sieve, a useful tool.
00:44:34.220
Yeah, that's probably right. Although I think what you're saying is right in an absolute circumstance.
00:44:39.820
I think that when humans are trying to model this entity, it is more useful for us to see it
00:44:45.900
with petty human emotions. I don't think God has any emotions that are comparable to human emotions.
00:44:50.300
For sure. I'm just saying, like, when we're modeling this entity, this is probably a more
00:44:54.620
useful modeling of it. Okay, any other thoughts, sir? No, keep going. Okay. But this gets to a more
00:45:02.940
interesting point. What is good in the eyes of God? In the eyes of man, good is often justified,
00:45:10.140
good is often just defined by what is pro-social and what is anti-social. This is because these are the
00:45:16.620
definitions of good that benefit the unthinking masses operating off their genetic pre-programming
00:45:21.820
to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering. But this definition of good has no real weight to it.
00:45:27.420
Good is maximizing feeling good and reducing feeling bad in the maximum number of people.
00:45:33.660
That was meant to be a question. The pleasure and pain I feel to a certain stimuli are just the things
00:45:39.260
that when my ancestors felt them, led to them having more surviving offspring. They are the serendipitous
00:45:45.740
programming our evolutionary environment gave us. A group of humans coming together and deciding the
00:45:52.300
purpose of life is maximizing positive emotional states and minimizing negative ones is as stupid
00:45:58.700
as a group of paperclip maximizers coming together and deciding that good is defined by things that
00:46:05.180
increase the number of paperclips and bad is defined by things that reduce the number of paperclips.
00:46:10.780
And I had mentioned this earlier, but it is like a really important point to me.
00:46:15.660
What we are programmed, the way we are programmed to relate to our environment with negative and
00:46:21.420
positive emotional stimuli is completely a serendipitous, basically accident of history.
00:46:27.820
Like God may have played a role in that, but I think that he expects that we are now at a state of
00:46:32.300
our evolution that we can see through. Like our evolutionary environment is not our current
00:46:37.580
environment. And that's our emotional stimuli reactions to those settings is not true,
00:46:42.380
good and negative. And we had mentioned this in the previous track, but the way I would,
00:46:46.380
because people were like, well, what then do you want to remove human emotions entirely?
00:46:49.420
And I'm like, no, I think that the way that the tech priest and like Warhammer have handled it
00:46:53.660
is probably better where you have a choice. You can be like, insert one of the quotes here.
00:46:57.260
He says, I returned sorrow and despair from my emotional cores, but I see they lack the logic
00:47:02.860
to determine decision-making. Instead, I choose to quarantine them and adjust our approach.
00:47:08.620
The word of the Omnissiah teaches us that when one method fails, another must be sought until all
00:47:14.780
are exhausted. To be like, I can tell that my brain is attempting to output an emotion.
00:47:19.180
Is it useful for me to feel this emotion in the moment or is it not?
00:47:24.620
Yeah. Similar to how it's handled among humans in the culture, in Ian Banks' culture series, where
00:47:30.540
you have the ability to override, but you still know that it's happening.
00:47:33.900
I think that we're actually already there in terms of like mental and social technologies. And this
00:47:38.780
is in this religion is designed as one of these social technologies where you can feel an emotion
00:47:43.660
like grief or something like that. And then ask yourself, is this grief useful right now? Should I
00:47:47.900
be indulging and feeling it? And if it's not, then you can actually turn it off. As Simone knows,
00:47:53.580
like when my mom died, I did a pretty good job of turning the grief off. I was just like,
00:47:56.780
this isn't useful for anything right now. So why indulge in this particular unefficacious emotion?
00:48:04.700
And I, and other cultures have good cultural technology around this as well. If you look
00:48:08.700
at the Jewish tradition, they have windows on when you're supposed to be indulging in grief
00:48:13.500
after the death of a loved one. And once the window is done, that's over. That's a very useful
00:48:17.820
cultural technology because we actually have a lot more control than the urban monoculture.
00:48:22.860
If I'm saying the biggest sin of the urban monoculture, it's telling people that they
00:48:26.060
don't have control over their emotional states. Well, yeah. And that it is endless and untreatable.
00:48:30.700
I do think there are exceptions here where sometimes you do need pharmaceutical or like mechanical
00:48:37.900
intervention. And I would also argue that sometimes you have a situation like that where
00:48:44.060
we technologically are not yet at a place where that pharmacological or mechanical intervention works.
00:48:51.260
So that's such a good point. I want to focus on this point you just made,
00:48:55.100
because it's brilliant. And I hadn't thought of it before. And I'm so glad to be married to you.
00:49:01.420
A lot of people are like, aren't you interfering with God's plan for an individual if you are using
00:49:08.060
some sort of pharmacological intervention to change or some sort of technological intervention
00:49:12.700
to change what they're feeling? But it's come on people where you might know people with
00:49:15.740
schizophrenia or you might know people with a major depressive disorder. Do you really want,
00:49:20.460
like when you have schizophrenia, your brain actually has some level of permanent deterioration
00:49:24.220
with every psychotic break you have? Because a lot of people think dogenous chemicals don't
00:49:28.540
hurt people's brains. Only the ex dogenous like drugs that we take in this. No, if it's not a natural
00:49:33.580
chemical state in the brain, it will do damage to the brain. Even people who've undergone too many
00:49:37.740
major depressive episodes will have some damage to the brain because the brain is just not supposed to be
00:49:42.380
in those psychological states with that amount of certain chemicals basically floating around in those parts
00:49:46.940
of the brain firing that much. This is actually Do Zebras Get Ulcers book is a great example of this.
00:49:53.020
For people who aren't familiar with the theming or the core question asked in this book, it's that in
00:49:57.580
animals, we had these sort of panic responses we could get when we thought, oh my god, we might see
00:50:02.620
a lion or something and I need to go into panic mode and it changes like the way your body chemistry
00:50:06.780
works for you to be running. But humans aren't zebras. And humans can send ourselves into panic
00:50:13.660
mode by creating virtual lions, i.e. a test that's coming up or the judgment of society around us.
00:50:20.300
And we're still reacting as though there's literally a lion stalking us. Whereas a zebra
00:50:24.700
only experiences that for 30 seconds every three weeks. We're experiencing that for four hours a day,
00:50:31.420
every single day. And our biology hasn't fully evolutionarily adapted to this yet.
00:50:35.580
Exactly. This is by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, right? Same guy.
00:50:39.180
Yeah, I think so. So it can cause these negative outcomes in humans where you are experiencing
00:50:45.660
way more of certain emotional states than your body is really designed to handle. And it can lead
00:50:51.180
you to die at a very young age. Managing your emotional states is, I believe, a biblical mandate,
00:50:57.260
much less spitting in the face of God or something like that. If somebody is in one of these major
00:51:02.460
depressive episodes and they can't get out of bed in the morning and they're just stuck in bed
00:51:05.500
24 seven, I think it's pretty clear from the research that you can't just religion your way
00:51:10.060
out of this always. Or a schizophrenic episode, you can't just religion your way out of a schizophrenic
00:51:14.700
episode. Or bipolar one, you can't always just religion your way out of bipolar one.
00:51:19.260
Sometimes you need a form of pharmacological intervention. And these pharmacological
00:51:23.580
interventions didn't exist historically. This is a gift that God has intergenerationally gifted
00:51:29.500
us through humanity's own endeavors. That is this intergenerational cycle of martyrdom.
00:51:35.580
We don't get to decide. I think that there is no higher sin than God gives you a miracle and then
00:51:42.060
you go back to God and you're like, eh, that miracle's not good enough. Screw it. I don't like it.
00:51:46.460
And I think that's what people are doing when they're saying, oh, you're going against the will of
00:51:49.740
God with something like IVF to get pregnant or with something like depression medication or with
00:51:55.900
something like deeper integrated AI constructs within your mind that are meant to quarantine
00:52:01.260
specific emotions that are not useful to whatever task you're carrying out in the moment. And as
00:52:06.780
technology improves, I think God gives us these more powerful technologies as we as a species are
00:52:13.820
better able to use them. And I think that humans of the past and even humanity right now, like humanity
00:52:18.860
right now, I do not think is philosophically mature enough to use sort of AI constructs that can
00:52:24.940
quarantine emotions. And that's why we haven't been gifted these technologies yet. And one thing I
00:52:30.300
always mention when people are talking about going against the will of God, it always really reminds
00:52:34.220
me of the two boats and a helicopter story. Just quickly for people who don't know it, I won't do
00:52:38.060
the full story here because I've done it in other tracks, but I think it's a really important story
00:52:42.460
for when you're relating to God. Like the sermon is just a great sermon because it so uniquely lays
00:52:47.020
this out where there's this guy and a flood's coming and all of the warnings have said, you
00:52:51.100
need to get out of your house. You need to get out of your house. A flood's coming. And then he's,
00:52:54.220
no, I'm very devout. I believe in God. And so then he ends up on the roof of his house and a boat
00:52:59.420
comes and he goes, no, I'm waiting on God. And another boat comes and he goes, no, I'm waiting
00:53:02.220
on God. Like you wouldn't, God wouldn't send a boat. Like a boat's not natural, right? Like a boat's
00:53:06.860
this human technological invention. God's going to save me with some like really awesome miracle.
00:53:11.340
It's going to look super miraculous and cool. Basically is what I hear from this guy. And then
00:53:15.820
the helicopter comes, you know, helicopter is not natural. Get away. And then the guy ends up dying.
00:53:20.060
And he goes to heaven and he's like, why didn't you save me? And he goes, what do you think the
00:53:24.140
two boats and a helicopter were for? And it's very much the same way with an individual who prevents
00:53:29.020
their children from living, you know, from, from experiencing life by not engaging in IVF or who allows
00:53:36.060
their child to die because they don't do like blood transfers or illegal in some Christian sex.
00:53:40.780
And I think when they get to heaven and God's like, why did you kill your kid, man? They're like,
00:53:45.500
I wanted you to give a special miracle to me, like an extra fancy one, not the off the shelf miracle
00:53:50.380
they had at the hospital. Um, you know, it's, it's, it's, I don't think that God's going to be super
00:53:56.540
impressed with that answer. And I really cannot elevate how seriously I mean this when it comes to
00:54:01.740
things like IVF. Uh, if, if, if something's not alive, what is it? It's dead. Uh, I think that people
00:54:10.140
often are like, well, you know, if it never really came to exist and it's not really dead.
00:54:14.540
And it's like, no, if you had made other decisions, your child would have had the chance
00:54:19.860
for a full life. God gave you the option to create a child. Yes. It may have required
00:54:25.780
more sacrifices than the lucidiousness of sex. It would have, it would have given you less pleasure,
00:54:33.700
but it would have allowed a human being to come into existence. But you, because you didn't like
00:54:40.640
the form of God's miracle, because it wasn't to your aesthetic preferences, killed your kid or
00:54:47.520
prevented them from coming into existence. That is not the moral thing. Oh, forgive me,
00:54:53.140
material, please. It wasn't my fault. Not your fault. Tell me, Marius, how was it not your fault?
00:55:05.200
You can try to dress that up in morality all you want, but it is clearly snubbing your nose at
00:55:11.880
God's miracles. People are like, oh, you're, you're playing God. You think God doesn't control
00:55:16.180
the technologies that we have access to? I'm not playing God by using the technologies that he
00:55:22.580
gifted us. You are denying God's miracles because they weren't fancy enough for you, because they
00:55:30.240
didn't include sex and fun and orgasms. Once technology has advanced enough, I imagine that
00:55:37.140
some sects of Christianity will begin to see sex with the same level of repugnancy that sex today
00:55:46.160
of Christianity see sexual interactions that don't lead to reproduction, like, you know,
00:55:52.320
gay sex or masturbation or oral sex, because reproduction that comes from sex will be less
00:56:01.240
healthy than reproduction that comes from IVF with certain genetic augmentations. The children will
00:56:08.480
be more likely to die, more likely to have a bad life, and it would just be seen as irresponsible and
00:56:14.660
selfish. And I think that that's just obviously where the species is going. And the people today
00:56:19.920
who cling to this older model of humanity will be seen with the same level of contempt that you might
00:56:26.360
view one of the Christian sects that allows their kids to die because they don't get a blood transfusion
00:56:31.880
or something like that. Okay, sorry, I gotta keep going here. Good is defined by the things that bring us
00:56:40.640
closer to God's grace and the suppression of things that move us further from it. The suppression and subjugation
00:56:47.200
of those very pre-programmed instincts the masses venerate and the pursuit of things that improve human
00:56:54.320
potential. As Wynwood Reed writes, quote, he who strives to subdue his evil passions, vile remnants of the old
00:57:02.180
four-footed life, and who cultivates the social affections, he who endeavors to better his condition
00:57:08.800
and to make his children wiser and happier than himself. Whatever may be his motives, he will have not
00:57:15.260
lived in vain. But yeah, what do you think of that particular tract here?
00:57:23.200
I like a discussion of sin that is not judgmental and that doesn't call out specific behaviors also,
00:57:30.540
because I think a lot like with the DSM, a lot of talk about sins is more an indication of culture
00:57:39.660
at the time and less an indication of what is good or bad. That sinning is very context dependent.
00:57:50.100
Yeah, and I will say in this tract, do you have any other thoughts or...
00:57:53.540
Because you've had some really good ones in this tract, really good interjections.
00:57:57.820
Oh, you're so kind. I don't have much else to add. I like these tracts. I like that. I just can't wait to
00:58:06.860
see what our kids say about them, because they have a lot of opinions about things like this.
00:58:11.160
Yeah, I'm really excited too. Yeah, I expect them to tweak and change things. That's the point of this,
00:58:16.160
right? Like I want to be in a living religious tradition and not a dead religious tradition. And when a
00:58:20.780
religious tradition stops having an active theological conversation, I see it as a dead tradition.
00:58:25.500
But I see those traditions often, we view God's favor by how much a cultural group is like culturally
00:58:31.520
prospering in the moment. God doesn't seem to favor dead traditions. He seems to favor the locations
00:58:36.400
in history where we have active theological discussions, but within and where our understanding
00:58:42.280
of him is evolving. And I like that. And one of the things I always mention for people who haven't
00:58:47.080
watched our other tracts, it is very clearly shown in the snake staff of Moses story, that antiquity
00:58:54.140
of a tradition or a practice does not mean that God approves of it. And so don't come to me with
00:58:59.260
like, oh, this, because that staff was broken after 500 years of being in the temple under God's
00:59:04.080
orders. And you can't say, oh, this has more antiquity than your beliefs. Therefore, it's right.
00:59:10.220
God will show us who he thinks is right in terms of which groups he allows to spread
00:59:16.040
in which groups he ends up culturally favoring.
00:59:22.300
Anyway, I love you to Desimone. This is a lot of fun. Let's go down and hang out with your parents
00:59:27.680
and the kids. And I will play the anime clip at the end of this episode, because it will have
00:59:31.980
subtitles. That's why I didn't want to interject it into the show this time. But it really helped me
00:59:37.000
when I was watching it reframe, even from low culture. And I'll add a little quote here from the
00:59:43.480
Bible, because I think that people really miss this. They think God talks to man through high
00:59:47.240
culture, through the grandest things. And I'm like, no, that's how man signals to man
00:59:52.200
that one man is better than another man. God talks to us through the lowliest of things.
00:59:58.320
Corinthians 128, God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things and the things that
01:00:04.640
are not to nullify the things that are so that no one may boast before him, end quote. And so here you
01:00:11.140
can see that God doesn't just choose the lowly things, but the things that cannot be used to
01:00:16.880
boast, i.e. to status signal to other humans. The art that God communicates to humans through
01:00:23.580
is the art that cannot be used for status signaling. When this was seen, I think it's seen
01:00:29.880
throughout the Bible, is that God is not a God of the elite. He's not a God that thinks that the
01:00:35.640
elite in our society are better than the meek. Okay. And I think that causes a lot of problems
01:00:42.640
when people are like, oh, don't look to anime for descriptions or like better metaphors,
01:00:47.160
especially not pervy animes like gushing over magical girls. And I'm like, and I actually think
01:00:52.260
that this framing fixes a lot of problems in Christianity. When you are not afraid of like
01:00:58.100
the pervy world and stuff like that, then that's not a back door that the urban monoculture can use to
01:01:04.500
get to your kids. Here's the thing about anime, just to add to what you're saying.
01:01:09.580
What's great about sci-fi is you, in an ideal world, get really smart people taking information
01:01:16.740
that we know about the future and about technology and walking it through to its logical conclusions.
01:01:22.940
What happens when you add this development that we find probable or likely to human society and
01:01:30.280
culture? What are the, what will life be like? What will the world be like? And sci-fi is really
01:01:35.320
helpful in that it has inspired a lot of technological development on its own. I think
01:01:40.340
similarly, anime does something along those lines, but for culture, what if we explored this particular
01:01:49.360
fascination or social dynamic or cultural eddy or current to its logical conclusion and most extreme
01:01:57.660
end, what do we get? And that's what you get. And that's what's so interesting about all the
01:02:02.700
different anime genres that emerge at different times in our history, like izakai anime and what
01:02:07.160
it reveals about where people are mentally and where culture is mentally. It just takes things further
01:02:13.440
and says things that we cannot articulate in other medium. And just to close this out, like what does
01:02:18.860
all this mean for a sin, say sexuality or something like that, where it would be genuinely and deeply
01:02:24.100
sinful to, for example, allow your sexuality to control you, allow it to take up a vast majority
01:02:29.160
of your time, allow it to occupy a large portion of your personal identity, but it would not be
01:02:35.800
sinful because it's often not something that you personally chose. It's just a trial, right? But it
01:02:41.500
would not be sinful to engage, learn about sexuality or engage in things that you find arousing so long
01:02:47.860
as it's not a huge portion of your time or disrupts your ability to create a family. And I think that
01:02:52.460
this is really important because a lot of the Christian framings that have gone to something
01:02:59.220
like sexuality and just say, okay, we're going to ban interacting with it at all. They're getting
01:03:03.020
massacred out there in terms of deep conversions right now because their kids don't have a memetic
01:03:08.500
framework for the way their sexuality works. And so during the years where they're going through
01:03:13.800
puberty are also the years where they're most likely to deconvert 15 to 23. And these feelings are
01:03:20.080
coming online. The religion didn't build a framework for interacting with them. And now these other
01:03:24.800
groups are coming on with these sort of self-perpetuating nanite frameworks. They can
01:03:28.940
get through this back door you left by not building a sexual framework for them or not building a sexual
01:03:34.320
framework that didn't make more sense when they first heard it than these alternate secular sexual
01:03:38.520
frameworks that then allow for like entirely new religions to get through this back door.
01:03:43.080
And this is why this framing can be higher utility in terms of intergenerational fidelity for an
01:03:49.940
individual, even though it allows people to get closer to some forms of sin.
01:05:06.880
What is that? I don't know what that looks like!