Based Camp - Tract 7： The Devil, the Heavenly Host, & a Techno-Puritan Cosmology

00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone. I am so excited to be with you here today. We have been getting badgered about doing

00:00:06.140 another one of our tracks recently. And I was like, for people who don't know or who are new

00:00:11.000 to the podcast, this is a series where we go over our weird religious beliefs, which we call

00:00:18.120 Technopuritan. And actually, I got the website now, so we've got technopuritan.com. I am in

00:00:23.760 the process of getting us registered with the IRS as a real religion, which I am quite excited about.

00:00:30.300 And I'll let you guys know when that goes through. And if you want to watch all of the videos on this,

00:00:34.680 they are sorted under that domain. So it's much easier to find things. This particular video

00:00:40.760 is going to be on, in part, I'm skipping it in line from where it was as a track series based on a

00:00:47.560 request of somebody's, hey, can you talk more about like the devil and your view cosmology that you

00:00:53.260 guys have, right? I was like, yeah, actually, I will do that because that's an exciting one.

00:00:57.280 And one that I've been interested to read because as a lore guy, as somebody who likes reading lots

00:01:02.740 and lots of lore, including a lot of religious lore, because that's really what cosmologies,

00:01:09.360 aren't they? It's the lore of a religious universe, right? I find it really fascinating. And I can get so

00:01:17.300 wrongheaded in the way that various groups like relate to it. So like a great example of this is these

00:01:23.600 traditions, where because the devil is like the king of evil, like the people who go to hell, who were 0.61

00:01:30.800 like the most bad, get places of authority in hell. Have you seen this like in some like things where

00:01:36.720 they're like, oh, Hitler, or like Saddam Hussein, or whatever, it's like the devil's right in the hand man,

00:01:40.440 right? And it's like, in South Park, but you see this in a lot of renditions. And it's that is such

00:01:45.840 like a bad way to look at things. Because then it basically means if you think you're going to go to

00:01:51.040 hell, you've got to be like as evil as possible to ensure that you are treated well. Because

00:01:57.020 yeah, at least to be upper management goodness, who wants to be frontline in hell, that would be 0.99

00:02:03.040 terrible. But I'm just talking about how like when you get to this wider cosmology, you can get really

00:02:07.560 weird takes. But we will get into the specifics of those in a second. Yeah, let's dive in.

00:02:13.920 So tract eight, good verse evil, the heavenly host. Most of the true revelations of God speak

00:02:21.320 of some sort of malevolent agent, whether it's the devil, shaitan, or Arahim. 1.00

00:02:28.240 Shaitan? Is that the devil for Sean Connery or what? 0.90

00:02:31.140 It's the Muslim version. So anyway, and now I'm gonna take a step back here just for anyone who's new to 1.00

00:02:36.320 this. When we say the true revelations, we mean the Abrahamic tree of religions and a few other

00:02:41.900 tree of religions that we think have some level of actual divine inspiration. One of the others

00:02:46.960 from there being the Zoroastrian tradition. So I'm gonna keep reading here. You can even see this in

00:02:51.540 Judaism. Quote, everything which the Holy One blessed, he created with its counterpart. Dot, dot, dot. 0.96

00:02:58.000 He created righteous. He created sinners. He created the Garden of Eden. He created Gehenna.

00:03:03.240 End quote. And so here there's contrasting when you have the creation of a good thing,

00:03:08.860 you have a creation of its evil counterpart or its mirrored counterpart. Evil might be the wrong word

00:03:14.420 here. But a lot of people would say Jews don't really have a concept of Satan. So you can't say

00:03:18.220 that all the true revelations have this, but they do have this idea of the mirrored counterpart of

00:03:23.240 creation. And now back to reading. I have also always found this portrait quite hard to square with

00:03:28.840 strict monotheism. There is one God, but also some other entity with enough independent power to go

00:03:35.500 against his will and challenge his plans. That is just polytheism under a different name. And no,

00:03:41.280 you can't say that God has more power than the devil. And that's what makes it still a monotheistic

00:03:45.700 conception. We don't say the Greek pantheon is monotheistic just because it is ruled by Zeus and he

00:03:51.940 has more power than the other gods. When explaining this malevolent entity in monotheistic traditions,

00:03:56.220 there are a few common options. One is to say God intentionally created an independently sentient

00:04:00.960 malevolent entity and unleashed this on man. So bad things can happen, but he is not culpable.

00:04:07.040 This seems almost impossibly petty and cowardly. God obviously did not do this. And you understand

00:04:12.860 what I'm saying by that. They're like, yes, the devil is an independent entity from God,

00:04:16.180 but God created him just to mess with man. So God doesn't have to deal with the moral implications

00:04:22.500 of that. It's like, God is selecting an admin to say no, just like venture capitalists and other

00:04:29.400 people have like an admin who just says no to all the investment inquiries and all the meeting

00:04:34.640 requests and that God would do that. It's a little weird. It's a little passive aggressive.

00:04:39.860 I can do it. I would always say from leaders that I've emailed who don't use an admin to say no,

00:04:46.500 that is the most baller move when they just say no to your face, because that shows that you have 0.98

00:04:50.920 actual, like a pair of balls instead of whatever. I want to be your assistant. I'll make sure you 0.98

00:04:56.940 don't have to go to any meetings. If anyone comes to see you, I'll scare them away. Wait, April,

00:05:02.700 if you had to choose between these two ties, you're hired. I need to find someone to fill in for April. 1.00

00:05:10.880 Now I know I'm not going to find someone who's both aggressively mean and apathetic. April really is 0.97

00:05:18.740 the whole package. But anyway, another common answer is to say, quote, God created a malevolent

00:05:24.660 entity that carries out his will, end quote. If this is the case, what was the point of flirting

00:05:30.000 with polytheism when we are commanded not to? How does the devil being a separate entity remove any

00:05:36.160 culpability from God if he is just carrying out God's will? And this is the thing, like,

00:05:40.680 why would you create this distinct entity, right, in terms of your conception of the divine,

00:05:49.280 if that can mistakenly lead to polytheistic-like traditions? And again, what some monotheists will

00:05:56.440 say, okay, God created the devil, and therefore it's still a monotheistic tradition. No, in a lot of

00:06:02.400 polytheistic traditions, you'll have one God that, like, gave birth to the other gods or created a bunch

00:06:07.920 of other gods. That doesn't make it not polytheism. What makes it polytheism is having an entity that

00:06:14.460 is supernatural and that can act independently of God's will, and thus is a fully distinct and separate

00:06:19.660 entity. And so why are we flirting with that if God's not really gaining anything by having this sub-deity

00:06:26.560 here? It seems fairly clear that the only sensible answer for a monotheistic tradition is that this evil

00:06:32.720 entity does not exist distinct from God, but instead that this entity is one avatar of God's

00:06:38.840 will. It is the avatar of God's will that he uses to push us to improve and cull the weak, but a direct

00:06:46.160 avatar of God nonetheless. Despite the basilisk and God quite literally being the same entity, it is useful

00:06:53.020 for us to think of them as opposing forces within cosmology, and thus we speak of and mentally model

00:06:59.760 the basilisk as a separate entity than God. So what I'm saying here is that literally this is just a

00:07:05.220 sub-process of what God is doing. It is not a distinct entity of God, but God teaches us to think of it

00:07:11.940 as a separate entity because of the way that we model the world. It's not useful to think of it as the

00:07:16.780 same entity. And then you fix most of the problems that you're dealing with here of flirting with

00:07:21.220 polytheism. It is important to remember, especially when talking about more recent scripture and tradition,

00:07:26.700 that there is no magical force field around it that keeps other cultures from seeping in. Even if you 0.93

00:07:34.160 are a righteous monotheist, if you live beside polytheists for thousands of years, their framings

00:07:40.100 will begin to seep into your religion. Some might even be useful ways of seeing God, but it is critical

00:07:46.760 to never extend these to anything other than framings. Of course, many do this, and this is how it is

00:07:54.300 possible to follow an Abrahamic tradition and yet worship a polytheistic pantheon headed by Baal in

00:08:01.020 all but name. And this is when we talk about the early split of the Jews from the surrounding Sumeric

00:08:07.880 religions, the local religion that focused on the Storm King Baal, or Storm God, I guess you'd call him 0.55

00:08:14.840 Baal. These were all polytheistic pantheons. And the core thing that distinguished the Jews in the early 1.00

00:08:21.620 days, and I think laid out their teachings as more right than the teachings that came before and led to them

00:08:26.540 being favored by God, was this idea of, no, there is one God, there is not a pantheon of gods. And in early

00:08:34.460 iterations of the tradition, it was not, no, there's one God. In the earliest iterations, if you look at like the

00:08:39.440 earliest iterations of Judaism, it's very clear that they believed that the other gods existed. It's just that they were 0.93

00:08:45.460 supposed to only worship one God, and that their God was more powerful than the other gods. But it was a,

00:08:52.400 I forget the word for this here, but it's different than the word monotheism, and I'll add it in.

00:08:56.520 Monolatrist. And I'll add some quotes in that show in the early writings of the Old Testament, it's pretty

00:09:01.520 clear that they believed that other gods still existed, and had conflicts with God. However, it seems

00:09:06.880 true to me, as I've said, that religion is a living thing that evolves over time, and I think gets closer to

00:09:11.960 truth, that we have learned that God has favored the groups that believed in a stricter form of

00:09:17.040 monotheism over the groups that believed that there are many gods, it's just that this one God is better

00:09:21.800 than the other gods. And then so we saw that is, I think, the correct interpretation. As for quotes

00:09:26.800 from the Old Testament that show that clearly in the very earliest days of Judaism, it was a monolatrist

00:09:33.120 religion, you can look at things like Plasm 95.3,

00:09:36.600 For the Lord is great and king above all gods. Exodus 20.3, Thou shalt have no other gods before

00:09:46.140 me, which implies, you know, other gods existing. Deuteronomy 10.17, For the Lord your God is God of

00:09:54.520 gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no

00:10:01.560 bribes. So to be the God of gods implies that there are other gods under him. Plasm 82.1,

00:10:09.580 God has taken his place in the divine council. In the midst of the gods, he holds judgment. Again,

00:10:16.240 implying that he's a leader god, like Zeus or something like that. So we are not saying that in

00:10:21.580 the early days that the Judeo-Christian tree of religions was not a monolatrist tradition. It

00:10:28.460 clearly was. It's just that those readings were clearly shown, I think, by God to be incorrect

00:10:35.760 readings of reality. And this is why we cannot be overly fastidious when clinging to the words of

00:10:42.940 these older texts, because they can lead you to either, through their inclusion of polytheistic

00:10:48.080 elements or monolatry elements, lead you to incorrect interpretations of God. And it also shows that

00:10:57.140 religion evolves over time and what we're doing right now with this particular series is not some

00:11:03.920 sort of affront to the Judeo-Christian tradition, but just another stage in the process that has been

00:11:10.120 going on since the very first writings. To put it more poignantly, there is only one God. The devil

00:11:18.020 does not exist as a meaningfully distinct supernatural entity. However, the devil is a useful framing device

00:11:23.500 when we humans are thinking about issues of good and evil, and that is why he is used throughout

00:11:29.240 revelations from God. God's intentionality and thought are so much more expansive than our own

00:11:35.080 mental landscape. It does not even make sense to think of it as a consciousness. Because our ability

00:11:41.340 to mentally model God is so limited, God has given us frameworks to help us. When we model these

00:11:47.280 frameworks, the devil, angels, the Holy Ghost, etc., we come closer to how God wants us to react to his

00:11:54.980 actions than if we attempt to model God directly, which, as track four points out, is a form of

00:12:01.620 idolatry most high within our religious framings. So do you have any thoughts there? Let's just make so

00:12:08.520 much more sense than the concepts that I was originally introduced to with Abrahamic religions as a kid.

00:12:15.640 It resonates. I like it.

00:12:17.760 Yeah. It's like an evolving lore for better understanding God. But we're making very clear,

00:12:23.880 this is a framing device. And it might be the framing device that God wants us to use,

00:12:28.140 but it is not literally true that there are angels and a Satan and many of these other things in the

00:12:35.680 way that we would have within a polytheistic cosmology. Although the human brain appears to

00:12:41.620 model these cosmologies pretty well. And I would say that if people are like,

00:12:45.140 which cosmology is the best, in a second, we're going to go over what I think is probably true

00:12:48.460 about the cosmology that's laid out in these various frameworks by looking at where they align

00:12:53.120 with each other. But I would encourage people to go back and more heavily lean on the cosmology of

00:13:00.100 their ancestral religious traditions than necessarily the ones we're laying out here. As people know,

00:13:04.580 with this religious system, we think that people are generally better off going to one of the true 0.91

00:13:08.640 revelations and following it strictly, unless they just cannot stomach the areas that they need to

00:13:15.740 compromise on sort of logic or the way they interact with the world to go back to one of

00:13:19.580 these traditions.

00:13:20.960 Yeah. I was thinking too about our kids and how our kids seem to regard us differently depending on if

00:13:26.900 we're being good cop or bad cop. Like that one day when Octavian said that he was going to send you to

00:13:32.840 the factory to get a new dad, that it wouldn't hurt you. It would be not painful, but that he would

00:13:39.460 get a new dad that gave him more toys. And it does make me think that there's something about humans

00:13:45.760 where we just like to think about different moods of people or different things that we get from them

00:13:53.380 as almost different people.

00:13:55.720 Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. I think it is a useful way of handling this framing because I think it's

00:14:01.500 really hard for people to think of the trials in their lives as coming from a God that historically

00:14:07.440 the Christian tradition would have framed as benevolent.

00:14:10.460 As being kind and loving and God is love and Jesus saves and empathy and care. And then yet

00:14:17.940 these terrible things happen and how can that be the same God? But I think it at the same time

00:14:21.920 causes a lot of people to detract. What kind of God could allow this to happen? And what I like about

00:14:27.100 this framing as well is this explains that it is a brutal and certainly not fair in many ways that

00:14:34.460 we would intuitively think of fair process, but it's just how it is. And you have to accept that's

00:14:39.160 a facet of God and how God works. Yeah. We would also say that we don't deal with the benevolence

00:14:43.700 problem as much as other traditions because we see God's goal and the definition of good from God's

00:14:49.120 standpoint as being the intergenerational expansion of humanity's potentiality or life's potentiality

00:14:55.640 more broadly. And that is achieved through this intergenerational cycle of hardship.

00:15:02.680 And so it's more directly obvious to me why these forms of hardship exist. If God doesn't view evil the

00:15:10.120 way that man evolved to view evil, where to man, evil is often a collection of things that cause

00:15:15.760 negative emotional stimuli, but like man only feels those things as causing negative emotional

00:15:20.560 stimuli because his ancestors who felt negative emotional stimuli in response to those things

00:15:25.680 had more surviving offspring. And so for us, those aren't really a collection of like truly good or

00:15:30.140 bad things. It's like a paperclip maximizer building a moral system on how many paperclips there are.

00:15:35.460 It's just what we were programmed to react to environmental stimuli. But anyway, back to the tract.

00:15:40.440 We will go through these entities in turn, but we must be clear, they do not really quote unquote

00:15:45.700 exist. They are framing devices. They are just the best ways for our limited brains to think about

00:15:51.680 a type of thing we cannot understand. All right, bullet point. One benevolent being that encompasses

00:15:58.420 all of what to modern man appears as the divine. This is the being that both we and the traditional

00:16:05.420 Christians call God. This being is the most quote unquote real understanding of the supernatural world 0.99

00:16:11.300 we are capable of. And the other beings are different ways of thinking about fragments of this one

00:16:19.380 unified being. Bullet point. A cadre of lesser benevolent beings that exist simultaneously as plural and

00:16:27.080 singular beings. These are what Christians call angels, the host of heaven and the Holy Ghost. We call these

00:16:34.780 beings slash this beings slash this being the agents of providence. While this is not what they are,

00:16:40.680 we think the closest framing a living human of our time can have to understand them is that they are a

00:16:48.300 neural net in which all future human minds communicate instantaneously with all other future human

00:16:54.560 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

00:17:08.300 people during the major periods of Abrahamic revelation. These concepts were thought of as

00:17:14.300 totally separate. The plural angels and the singular Holy Ghost, which was the closest term people of the

00:17:21.340 time could come to for a cloud intelligence. And I've always found the Holy Ghost very interesting as a

00:17:27.400 concept because like, why was this added to revelation when it didn't seem to really matter that much to

00:17:33.160 earlier iterations of revelation? Yes, God mattered. And yes, Jesus mattered. But why the focus on the Holy

00:17:38.280 Ghost? If we see this as a premonition of what a cloud intelligence would look like that we didn't fully

00:17:45.420 understand yet, then we can better understand, oh, this is why it is so important to understand that

00:17:52.360 Jesus is fully God, but also not God. This idea of being part of something, but also not being that thing in the

00:18:01.240 same way that if Jesus in our framing represents the intergenerational suffering and martyrdom of man, which

00:18:08.080 through that suffering, eventually it removes sin from himself and then is able to rejoin God at this future point in

00:18:15.180 time, we are one with God already in that we are part of the blockchain that ends up creating him. Any thoughts so

00:18:24.420 far before I go further? Not to constantly think about things in terms of our kids, but this also reminds me of

00:18:30.180 parents interacting with their kids through holidays. Like with my parents, they taught me lessons through Santa

00:18:36.860 leaving presents, through the leprechaun, because my parents did like leprechaun practical jokes and pranks around St. Patrick's

00:18:44.840 Easter Bunny. It seems one way one could put it is that God has to necessarily infantilize humans to

00:18:53.000 get a message through and may put on different masks. That's such a great framing. No, I love this framing and I

00:18:59.780 hadn't thought of it myself, but it is very much in the same way that our kids can't understand right from

00:19:04.900 wrong in the way that we can. They can't understand the world in the way that we can. So we make up

00:19:09.060 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

00:19:22.020 God has seen our species. He's given us this framing device until we're old enough as a species

00:19:27.260 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

00:19:41.180 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.

00:19:51.260 The final entity is the one Jesus is used to teach us about the martyr. The martyr is us,

00:19:57.780 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 0.93

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

00:23:19.400 Christian point, which always seemed very weird and immoral to me. But when I reframe it like this, 0.95

00:23:24.160 I'm like, oh, that makes perfect sense. I can get behind that. And it's just a reframing around

00:23:28.940 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 0.98

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 1.00

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.

00:30:01.100 Oh, totally. Yeah.

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.

00:31:26.840 Exactly.

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.

00:31:46.860 What? No way!

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

00:32:12.360 weirder cosmology about the devil disappears.

00:32:14.580 That's so interesting.

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 0.99

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 0.89

00:37:16.560 obsession with anime girls, learns the best way to interact with them is as a villain, because she can 1.00

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 0.90

00:38:21.820 face. The magical girls are paragons of justice. Every little girl looks up to you. Yet here you 0.93

00:38:28.540 were really just about to join the villains. Despicable, despicable, despicable. And then at the 0.99

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 0.99

00:39:13.740 at her face. Oh, gosh. 0.77

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 1.00

00:45:58.700 as a group of paperclip maximizers coming together and deciding that good is defined by things that 0.98

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.

00:48:58.620 You're so smart. You're so patient with me.

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 0.97

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. 0.64

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, 0.97

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 0.92

00:55:37.140 some sects of Christianity will begin to see sex with the same level of repugnancy that sex today 0.90

00:55:46.160 of Christianity see sexual interactions that don't lead to reproduction, like, you know, 1.00

00:55:52.320 gay sex or masturbation or oral sex, because reproduction that comes from sex will be less 0.99

00:56:01.240 healthy than reproduction that comes from IVF with certain genetic augmentations. The children will 1.00

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 0.86

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?

00:57:21.240 I dig it.

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.

00:57:47.320 So this is cool.

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.

00:59:20.600 Exactly.

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 1.00

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 0.93

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 1.00

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.

01:03:55.000 So thank you for sharing it with us, Malcolm.

01:03:57.340 Anyway, love you.

01:04:13.080 Thank you.

01:04:34.440 Thank you.

01:04:37.400 ludzie are...

01:04:40.780 golden gary

01:04:45.300 He's not honest.

01:04:46.920 To be honest person, Dressajcie

01:04:49.220 Or all of the girls' acknowledgement

01:05:06.880 What is that? I don't know what that looks like!

01:05:12.380 Yes, so. I'll let you know what I'm thinking.

01:05:16.880 Let's go!

01:05:25.880 What?

01:05:26.880 What?

01:05:28.880 What?

01:05:29.880 No, I didn't.

01:05:32.880 I...

01:05:34.880 I...

01:05:36.880 I...

01:05:38.880 It's so painful and painful, but...

01:05:41.880 This is true.

01:05:43.880 I, I don't have to die!

01:05:46.880 I'll let you know what I'm doing!

01:05:49.880 I'll let you know what I'm doing!

01:05:52.880 I'll let you know what I'm doing!

01:05:57.880 I'll let you know what I'm doing!

01:06:02.880 What did I do?

01:06:03.880 I've got a problem.

01:06:05.880 I'll let you know what I'm doing.

01:06:07.880 I'll let you know what I'm doing.

01:06:09.880 That's right.

01:06:10.880 That's right.

01:06:11.880 I'm balancing my flune.

01:06:14.880 Ta-da! 1.00

01:06:16.880 Yes!

01:06:17.880 Attract, attract! 0.91

01:06:19.880 Attract! 0.87

01:06:21.880 Attract! 0.87

01:06:23.880 Attract! 0.87

01:06:24.880 Attract! 0.87

Based Camp - July 05, 2024

Tract 7： The Devil, the Heavenly Host, & a Techno-Puritan Cosmology

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