In this episode of Stay Free With Russell Bran, we discuss religion, sacred cows, golden cows, and false idols, and why God loves you even if you don't believe in Him. We also discuss George Carlin's stand-up routine about hell and damnation.
00:00:18.000Thanks for joining me for Stay Free with Russell Bran, watch along.
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00:00:26.000We're going to be talking about religion, religiosity and sacred cows, golden cows, and false idols.
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00:01:42.000Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day.
00:01:54.000And the Invisible Man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do.
00:02:00.000And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever till the end of time.
00:02:23.000Right, I got a problem with this because I love George Carlin, but I actually think he's doing a lot of straw man stuff with one of the great parts of Exodus there.
00:02:32.000Like, in a way, the thing is with mosaic law is that you can't really dispute it and have human rights or civil rights, although George Carlin does do a brilliant bit about human rights that kind of acknowledges that paradox.
00:02:47.000And also, I feel like even his use of hell and damnation is clums, comedically brilliant.
00:02:56.000Like when I did a whole bit of stand-up about covet your oxen, like when I was, before I was a believer.
00:03:01.000And the thing was, is I knew that, you know, it meant oxen in a general way, but I thought it was funny to think, pretend that I believe it's just covet your oxen in a literal way.
00:03:13.000That's a lovely, you know, I did all sorts of camp silly stuff.
00:03:17.000Anyway, but the truth is that if you are not prioritizing God, i.e.
00:03:24.000the sublime principle, then you're kind of already in hell.
00:03:28.000It's not like you're thrown into hell as a punishment because you didn't, although there is, you know, I know eschatology a little and damnation and stuff.
00:03:36.000But anyway, look, I hope this video is not going to be hard because I'm actually quite tired.
00:03:39.000I've got a little bit of a cold and I don't want to spend the whole time arguing with heroes of American comedy over the one thing I disagree with them on.
00:04:34.000He died in a sadly in a ridiculous way.
00:04:36.000I think he died like dropped a toaster in the bath, like levels of stupid comedy death.
00:04:42.000Like, you know, like he was a really, he was like a Buddhist and then a Catholic priest and he really describes things really well and then he died in a stupid way.
00:04:51.000That's like, oh, and what happened to Thomas Merton?
00:04:54.000Oh, like he got his dick trapped in an escalator and it dropped.
00:04:57.000You know, I mean, it's like sort of a kind of death that ruins a eulogy.
00:05:01.000That's like, was that movie Lawless, where he doesn't die?
00:05:04.000Tom Hardy's character, he like never gets killed, and then he just slips and falls in a pond at the end of the movie, and he gets a cold, and that's how he dies?
00:05:30.000Thomas Merton said that sacrifice needn't include suffering, even though the ultimate image of sacrifice, the image of Christ on the cross, is undoubtedly an image of suffering.
00:05:40.000What sacrifice means is that you're acknowledging there's a portal to another reality, And in order to access that, to demonstrate that, you would be willing to sacrifice your son if God tells you that's what you should do.
00:05:59.000You would be willing to sacrifice anything in order because you know and understand that that reality is supreme.
00:06:06.000and absolute and the sensory realities are secondary.
00:06:10.000So Thomas Merton argues suffering is not a necessary aspect of sacrifice, although it's usually a component precisely because we are so glommed on to material and sensory reality.
00:06:23.000So some people think Thomas Merton was killed by the CIA.
00:07:15.000Let's get back to the shit always needs money He's all powerful all perfect all knowing and all wise somehow just can't handle money Religion takes in billions of dollars.
00:07:29.000They pay no taxes and they always need a little more.
00:07:33.000Now, you talk about a good bullshit story.
00:08:54.000As far back as 108th century BC, history is abundant.
00:08:58.000Oh, the sun, and when they talk about the sunrise on the 21st, there's a constellation of stars.
00:09:04.000abundant with carvings and writings reflecting people's respect and adoration for this object.
00:09:11.000And it is simple to understand why, as every morning the sun would rise, bringing vision, warmth and security, saving man from the cold, blind, predator filled darkness of night.
00:09:21.000Without it, the cultures understood the crops would not grow and life on the planet would not survive.
00:09:27.000These realities made the sun the most adored object of all time.
00:09:34.000Likewise, they were also very aware of the stars.ars allowed them to recognize and anticipate events which occurred over long periods of time, such as eclipses and full moons.
00:09:46.000They in turn cataloged celestial groups into what we know today as constellations.
00:09:54.000This is the cross of the zodiac, one of the oldest conceptual images in human history.
00:09:59.000It reflects the sun as it figuratively passes through the twelve major constellations over the course of a year.
00:10:06.000It also reflects the twelve months of the year, the four seasons, and the solstices and equinoxes.
00:10:13.000The term zodiac relates to the fact that constellations were anthropomorphized or personified as figures or animals.
00:10:22.000In other words, the early civilizations did not just follow the sun and stars, they personified them with elaborate myths involving their movements and relationships.
00:10:31.000The sun, with its life giving and saving qualities, was personified as a representative of the unseen Creator or God, God's Son, the light of the world, the Savior of human kind.
00:10:42.000We cannot make this content without the support of Jesus and our sponsors.
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00:12:47.000Likewise, the twelve constellations represented places of travel for God's Sun and were identified by names usually representing elements of nature that happened during that period of time.
00:12:57.000For example Aquarius, the water bearer, who brings the spring rains.
00:13:08.000He is the Sun God of Egypt of around 3000 BC.
00:13:12.000He is the Sun, anthropomorphized, and his life is a series of allegorical myths involving the Sun's movement.
00:13:18.000I'd like to get in the fact that he's a real alien and he's got a serpent on his head and a circle around it.
00:13:23.000Like, I like this, and I remember when I watched this, this definitely went right in the mix of my understanding of agricultural gods and if you need plants to come you need to sacrifice the god and put the god into the soil and you want the god to rise again like you want the plants to rise again and agricultural societies usually have a death and resurrection god and the comparisons that can be made between Osiris and Christ and Dionysus and Christ and also perennialism the theories and ideas of Aldous Huxley that sort of myths are reiterated
00:13:53.000throughout the world and Jung's work within consciousness that suggests there are themes in folklores and in dreams that are so recurrent that they refer to certain archetypes but here is where I would refer you not to Joseph Campbell the great American storyteller who so deeply influenced George Lucas, but to Jake Smith, the worship leader and producer of this show, who said that Christ is a storyteller who creates meaning and story.
00:14:21.000And the reason these archetypal preludes and echoes are found throughout history, myth, and storytelling is because there's an absolute truth in it.
00:14:30.000Drew Mbonne, you explained that to me the other day.
00:14:32.000Yeah, it sounded just like how I told you.
00:14:42.000Because what's required, see, one of the people, like, say Jordan Peterson, he's pretty clever, isn't he?
00:14:46.000And when Jordan Peterson sort of was, like, I was talking to him once about the Old Testament and the New Testament and some of the sort of things like that.
00:14:53.000Like, I think these are points that are made in the New Testament, like when Moses holds the serpent up on a stick in order to inoculate the Israelites from the toxins of them serpents.
00:15:08.000This is echoed when Christ is held up on the cross to inoculate us from sin.
00:15:15.000the sacrifice of isaac or the sort of unfulfilled sacrifice of isaac by abraham and the actual sacrifice in the same location as christ but Like these, I think what's challenging for people, and in fact it's a conversation I've had with someone quite recently, is people's rationalism is a barrier to faith.
00:15:35.000And like this kind of stuff, it's really good.
00:16:07.000Not everyone agrees what these constellations are, where they begin, where they end, what they typify, what they represent, where they even are.
00:16:13.000So there's a lot of things that are presumed in that little brilliant, lovely looking montage.
00:16:18.000And where I got to is, see, it's like there's waves of it.
00:16:22.000You needed George Carlin to sort of come along and go, institutional religion is bullshit, and we're being lied to, and we're being ripped off.
00:16:29.000And he's saying this before we learn how many paedophiles there are lurking in them institutions.
00:16:37.000The power of the church ain't the biggest threat to the world.
00:16:40.000It's the power of global imperialism and corporatism and institutional bureaucracies that sort of are masked, not behind great, well, they are masked behind great myths, the myth of progressivism, the myth of technology, and the myth of mankind's supremacy.
00:16:53.000These are the myths now that I think pose the biggest threat Are you willing to turn away from worldliness, mental activity in the flesh, and accept a new way of life?
00:17:17.000It's not like get out there and hustle.
00:17:22.000It's astonishing that that message has succeeded.
00:17:24.000It's astonishing that that message is obfuscated by institutional churches.
00:17:28.000It's going to be an interesting watch for me, this, because it's got a perspective that I agree with, you know, deconstructionism, general scepticism towards institutions, but I disagree with its core claim that Christ...
00:17:45.000Well, even when you see the pictures of the zodiac and you see the stars and all the things that lie, people be like, I'll give my life for that.
00:18:15.000Like, I have these conversations, because this is like a pretty patriotic part of your country, the reason I wouldn't desecrate a flag or disparage America is out of respect for other people and out of respect for what those situations are.
00:18:33.000But from where I am, a country is a construct, whether it's North Korea, America, England, they're all constructs and those constructs benefit the elites that are at the top of the hierarchical structures.
00:18:44.000So like, and but I don't, I recognize they're successful and I recognize that.
00:18:48.000And I like the endeavor of this documentary.
00:18:50.000The endeavor is you shouldn't just accept what you're told.
00:18:54.000You should investigate it and look at the idea.
00:18:56.000And it's also done a pretty good job of rendering, you know, like these, when I first heard and read these things, I was like, this is cool, man.
00:19:05.000There's bits in it, like Three Kings, like, oh, man, oh, cool.
00:19:08.000You know, there's stuff like where the Margie and the Virgin Birth and all sorts of archetypes.
00:19:26.000But what, I had this today, man, I was at a 12-step meeting.
00:19:31.000Our understanding of reality is negligible, negligible, but because it's increasing, ostensibly, because of our ability to observe reality through instruments, We don't really know anything.
00:20:01.000In the end, you have to enter into a kind of contract of faith to survive ontologically.
00:20:08.000You have to sort of go, well, I'm a body.
00:20:10.000I've got this kind of hardware that I've got to live with, but it's not going to be enough.
00:20:14.000I'm continually looking to depend on something.
00:20:23.000how do we get into these knowledge sets, it won't be good on ontology, the nature of being.
00:20:28.000It will, like, why would you want to believe a thing?
00:20:31.000That's what I'd be interested in movement in the sky from the ancient hieroglyphics in Egypt we know much about the solar messiah for instance horror I want to know what your thought is on kind of how religion evolved throughout the ancient world in a sense because Jews we don't believe in like hell like traditionally but during the Hellenistic period is when the idea of like Shoal and Gehenna kind of came in That obviously came from Greek influence and their underworld,
00:21:01.000And I feel like from what I heard of Christianity kind of spreading down even through Egypt into the Coptic Christianity kind of vibe, that I feel like the ideas that were there, like the underworld Hades, things like that, kind of evolved into what would be like hell as a way to kind of allow people who believed something else to kind of ascribe to their version.
00:21:27.000They're like, oh, well, you have your gods.
00:21:32.000they're just have a different name so they're actually the same god right as a way to kind of bring people into the fold without kind of ruining their cultural understanding of what, you know, heaven or hell or whatever was at that time.
00:21:47.000I heard that in our Christianity., although there are competing ideas of how this happened, when Christianity came to the UK, they grow ew trees outside of churches because that was a sort of a pagan symbol of death and rebirth.
00:21:59.000they sort of co-opt and reiterate existing symbols and the pan there are aspects of pan in christ there are access of dionysus in christ all these things but what this is my My personal experience of Christianity has been testing my own previous New Age personal idolatry and pantheon against Scripture.
00:22:21.000And one of the times where I've, like, having only been reading the Bible for a year,
00:22:49.000ultimately because I've seen stuff like this when I was much younger.
00:22:52.000And I didn't realise the sort of metaphysical potency and depth of scripture until I actually read it, which is sort of obviously ridiculous.
00:23:01.000If you don't read it, you don't know what's in there.
00:23:04.000And there's a kind of concussive awe that comes from reading the Bible, where I am forced to recognize that there is nothing that I'm coming up with that's original.
00:23:17.000Indeed, even that notion is in the Bible, there's nothing original under the sun.
00:23:21.000Like, you know, it's sort of, it's all contained within it.
00:23:25.000And then things I do know a lot about, like sort of recovery in 12 steps, and sort of how, you know, alcoholism really is a way of focusing the...
00:23:36.000tendency to worship on an object that can indeed alter your state and once you remove the alcohol you're confronted with the consequences of your false idolatry.
00:23:46.000I've seen how all of it has roots, correlatives and deeper understanding available through scripture.
00:23:56.000There are things like But even that, I'm like, I'm not judging nobody.
00:24:09.000Everyone can just crack on and do what they're doing.
00:24:20.000Because it would have said, don't have sex outside of marriage.
00:24:22.000If you do, you're know, so sorry Messi.
00:24:28.000So would theirs be improved, gay people?
00:24:30.000I don't know, and it's just I'm not gay and I just don't have a, like, it's not my gig, man.
00:24:36.000But that's the thing which I have a major issue with religion is like, my book says this and you're doing it the wrong way, and then a bunch of other people say, my book says this and you're doing it the wrong way, and if we're honest about it, we think, hey, I love you, you're amazing, Christ loves you, but you're going to hell because this is how you have an orgasm.
00:25:03.000dealing with hypotheticals where it's like, what happens if I have a friend who believes this and they're going to hell?
00:25:10.000When you have specifics, that automatically makes it more interesting.
00:25:14.000So a lot of arguments are, you know, what ifs and what ifs are tough because in the actual, if it's a friend that you actually have and they want to have a genuine conversation about it and it's not to prove who's right.
00:25:29.000And it's not to make somebody feel like they're not on the right side of the truth or whatever the argument it is, but it's just a genuine, let's get down to the bottom of it.
00:25:39.000I still feel like God is the only one who can judge and decide those things.
00:25:45.000So like at the end of the day, I can read the Bible and I can say this is what I believe and this is what I feel like is the truth and I can rest easy at night.
00:25:58.000The Bible is what brings the conviction to people to go, well, I want to do this with my lifestyle or you're saying I'm going to hell.
00:26:19.000I don't need to work all this shit out myself.
00:26:21.000And I tell you, as a parent with my six-year-old, with my, excuse me, my seven-year-old and eight-year-old daughters, and I'm thinking, oh, man, you've got older teenage kids, daughters.
00:26:31.000I think the idea that, like, I'm able to, like, Dad, what our relationship?
00:26:35.000I'm like, well, this is what we believe.
00:26:37.000We believe you don't have sex outside the covenant of marriage.
00:26:41.000I'm like, oh, that's, wow, what a relief.
00:26:48.000we believe that we don't do that that's what we believe and here's some personal experience from old papy serious challenges coming down the pipe if you try that shit, like, you know, because, you know, never mind STDs, rumors, allegations, like, you know, there's so much stuff that can happen.
00:27:03.000If I'd have, like, surrendered my version of how reality should be to what it says in there, I would have been better off.
00:27:10.000Now, when it comes to the people that I love that are in same-sex relationships, I'm just like, I'm happy to put that on the long list of shit that I don't know.
00:27:23.000Well, for me, it kind of goes back to that idea of that originally,
00:27:34.000So the way I kind of see it is, I think it's more of just a standpoint of if you have a same-sex relationship you will not have children like you cannot multiple be fruitful and multiply right so i think that's kind of where potentially it was trying to go originally right which is like if you want to have children and family and whatever you don't do same-sex relations even though it was common at the time in greek and roman you know culture to do that stuff but
00:28:02.000that didn't allow for the multiplication of the human race yeah that does seem like a good strap breeding strategy to you know to combine sperm and ovum but like also sort of morally and ethically the idea that sex that sexual pleasure is a supplement to the act of union and the act of creation rather than an end in itself is an interesting pivot for someone that's put sexual pleasure at quite a high priority in my own life.
00:28:32.000If I'd have gone, it doesn't matter that that's pleasurable for you.
00:28:35.000How is it making you, do you not consider that this may be having a harmful impact on these women that you're sleeping with and your future?
00:28:44.000I mean, like, my God, what a brilliant and helpful insight that would have been.
00:28:49.000And then you can apply, I can apply that to everything.
00:28:52.000And because of my particular tendencies, I'm..
00:28:55.000not going to sexually objectify Jake most days but like but like I might just think of Jake as only having a value as to how he can serve me and when I start thinking like that which I do sometimes that ain't good that's a kind of hell actually I'm trapped in an inferno of the flesh when I look at things as only existing for me but when I'm like oh I'm supposed to be helping people it's better to be and I think there's I mean there's consequences for actions always.
00:29:25.000And we understand that as people, and we have a hard time thinking that a perfect God is We give consequences when people don't live up to our expectations.
00:29:38.000There's, you know, when they harm us, when they do something wrong to us, when, you know, they manipulate us or whatever it is.
00:29:46.000We can take on the part of the judge, but we have a hard time allowing God, who actually is perfect, be the judge that he can be because he would know.
00:29:56.000He actually knows what's right and wrong, not just what he thinks.
00:30:00.000from a societal standpoint or from a preference, but he is God.
00:30:06.000Yeah, that Exodus scripture, like I am, I am, like that there's an assertion somehow, even when it's put into English, that there is something outside of time, some generator of life that doesn't require inception and is immune to demise.
00:30:26.000This part of my brain that got turned on by zeitgeist is still operating when I'm reading scripture.
00:30:31.000When it says Moses left the people and entered the thick dark.
00:30:44.000I feel like if you want to approach God, you're going to have to leave the people and you're going to have to enter the thick dark cloud otherwise you're not going to get the code you'll never receive the code unless you're willing to enter now i spoke to a biblical scholar you were there like and he was saying yeah but the you know the the old testament is a very specific history of the israelites and these sort of edicts are towards israelites but there's quite a lot of stuff in the new testament that suggests that you know what that teleology becomes and that it becomes ancillary and that it does include the gentiles
00:31:15.000in fact that's sort of significant part of the ministry of the early apostles is the inclusion of the gentiles as well as advocating for the conversion would you call it even the conversion of jews probably not in that context context.
00:31:27.000I don't know how you would describe it.
00:31:28.000But what I feel is that there are the kind of, this is talking about archetypal truths that could be derived from movements of the planets and indeed the stars, but we're talking about something that's beyond that.
00:32:00.000There's something else in here with you and it's God.
00:32:02.000And what happens is I think that when I try to take on board the preposterous suggestion that God came to earth in the form of his own son and lived a perfect human life and then somehow through his unjust death, he's able to take on my sin and absolve my sin and yours and through his resurrection guarantee his eternal life.
00:32:22.000That's so outside of the purview of like, if I do this, I'll get that.
00:32:27.000And it's so beyond it that I have to sort of, Russell has to sort of die a bit to even receive it.
00:32:33.000And in a way that's what faith is, a kind of letting go and unclenching of my grasp, but an understanding that I need to cling on to something, dependency, the idea of dependency.
00:32:43.000And the only person that can take it, my wife can't take it, my kids can't take it, heroin can't take it, fame, drugs, none of these things can take it, but Christ can take it when I go, I don't know what to do.
00:32:57.000I take all that to him and he can handle it.
00:33:00.000nothing else can nothing else does nothing else has and it's weird because that's not a theological proposition or an academic or a rational proposition.
00:33:10.000There's something underneath all this shit that I think of as being myself that I can't reconcile or absolve through my own will or power.
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00:33:40.000This Horus, being the Sun or the Light, had an enemy known as Set.
00:33:44.000And Set was the personification of the darkness or night.
00:33:49.000And, metaphorically speaking, every morning, Horus would win the battle against Set.
00:33:54.000While in the evening, Set would conquer Horus.
00:33:56.000It's kind of weird as well that all of like the Israel's antagonistic relationship is with this culture prior to its emergence and then subsequently with, as our man says, Hellenism subsequently that it's trapped between the sort of Gentile world and its culture worship in the form of the Hellenistic world and this weird paganism of Egypt, that's what Israel comes out of, and send him into the underworld.
00:34:23.000It is important to note that dark versus light or good versus evil is one of the most ubiquitous mythological dualities ever known and is still expressed on many levels to this day.
00:34:35.000Broadly speaking, the story of Horus is as follows.
00:34:38.000Horus was born on December 25 December of the Virgin Isis Mary.
00:34:43.000His birth was accompanied by a star in the east and upon his birth he was adored by three kings.
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00:35:51.000At the age of twelve he was a prodigal child teacher.
00:35:54.000At the age of thirty he was baptized by a a figure known as Anup and thus began his ministry.
00:35:59.000Horus had twelve disciples he traveled about with performing miracles such as healing the sick and walking on water.
00:36:05.000Horus was known by many gestual names such as the truth, the light, God's anointed son, the good shepherd, the lamb of God, and many others.
00:36:14.000After being betrayed by Typhon, Horus was crucified, buried for three days, and thus resurrected.
00:36:23.000These attributes of Horus, whether original or not, seem to permeate many cultures of the world, for many other gods are found to have the same general mythological structure.
00:36:33.000Attis of Phrygia, born in the Virgin Nana on December 25, crucified, placed in a tomb and after three days was resurrected.
00:36:42.000Krishna of India, born of the Virgin Devaki with a star in the east signaling his coming.
00:36:48.000He performed miracles with his disciples and upon his death was resurrected.
00:36:54.000I've thought quite a lot, not quite a lot, a bit about how like sort of Christ may be reiterated through cultures.
00:37:00.000Have you heard like, these are some apocryphal, forgive the word, tales like that someone told me, You know, there are weird sub-myths like his too.
00:37:14.000Like people are always trying to tie their country to Jesus, you know, like your country with Mormonism and stuff.
00:37:21.000Then, you know, the Nephites all showed up in America.
00:37:24.000So we're the, you know, there's a lot of that kind of stuff.
00:37:27.000But I do wonder more sort of profoundly, I mean profoundly in the literal sense, if Christ is present in all things.
00:37:37.000this, you know, like, because a lot of Christians will say that when Moses is hitting the rock and stuff, our Lord is present.
00:37:42.000And like some of these angels that are turning up in Sodom and Gomorrah, that's our Lord.
00:37:46.000And like, you know, so I'm wondering how scripture tackles.
00:37:50.000And indeed, Thomas Merton would be the very person to ask about this because he's a studied Eastern mystic.ism and buddhism and he would be interested in how these archetypes align with the christ archetype as well as the historical because it's like in a way the the central claim of christianity is god is realizing himself in man like so all of these god types that's would all come into it and this is not a contradiction it's affirmation yeah it's a it's a thread you know it's throughout history this idea and
00:38:20.000it's made flesh God became flesh in Christ.
00:38:31.000And so I do sometimes wonder, yeah, it's very interesting because I've got a lot of friends that are part of Krishna Consciousness.
00:38:38.000I've got, you know, and when he talks about like the cross would cover Abraham, the cross would work backwards, it's a temporal.
00:38:48.000I'll think about my friend Sandy Pan and how he raises his family and how loving and how beautiful he is in the Krishna Consciousness movement and think these people are in Christ.
00:38:56.000Like, you know, they're in Christ, and that for them would be sort of, I guess, a heresy, because they are, Krishna is their supreme godhead.
00:39:03.000But in terms of what they're actually doing and how they're living, they're living devotional lives of love.
00:39:10.000They're doing nothing outside of, you know, without getting into the nitty-gritty.
00:39:36.000I mean, you could say, I can understand the argument that, okay, if there is one God and Jesus is his son, and maybe he's come again many times to many different people over thousands of years, that he would come in different forms and it would be similar but similarly I go yeah but that's also just people interpreting the sun which makes the most sense to me I find that more beautiful than the idea of any god that the thought of how humanity has created stories based on truths the sun brings good harvest light all that kind of stuff I
00:40:30.000As an atheist, that doesn't make me live a better life.
00:40:33.000Whereas as a Christian or everything apart from maybe one or two religions, it does make you live a better life, you know?
00:40:40.000So that's why you say, oh, it sounds, I can say it, I'm from there.
00:40:42.000Even though you say, oh, this other religion, he's walking in Christ.
00:40:46.000It's like, well, that's because you guys are all living a good life based on this belief, which I think comes from the sun, but I'm not therefore going, well, I need to live a good life because I need to respect the sun.
00:40:59.000So you guys have the truth there, but you also are using it in a way which really helps your life.
00:41:05.000Even though I think that technically, you're wrong overall i don't think you're wrong because it all comes from the sun anyway i i really like i bought into this theory because i just think there's far too many coincidences and you know my friend um is a there's a coin from england that he's found and it's got a medusa head on it and it's from he dates it back to like I think it's like 45 BC.
00:41:28.000It's like Caesar coming to England or something.
00:41:34.000Obviously, it didn't say that on the coin.
00:41:36.000But that, when you see that coin, it makes you realize, oh, Jesus was 2,000 years ago.
00:41:41.000But before that, there was all this other stuff.
00:41:44.000And that breaks it for me and I wish I could believe it because I, you know, done drugs as well.
00:41:53.000And whenever you feel that awe, that entheogenic thing, you're like, wow, but for me, I go, wow, this is why people believed in God, you know.
00:42:04.000I'm actually envious of people who have that belief, but I'm just too, I can't, it's just, I'm just too rational for my own good, I guess, when it comes to this stuff.
00:42:12.000In the end, though, rationalism creates its own deities.
00:42:16.000It ends up with the same principles because rationalism, without borrowing from divinity, ends in nihilism.
00:42:25.000Because if there is no God, there is no purpose, just patterns within chaos.
00:42:29.000Then there is no reason not to dedicate your whole life to pleasure at all costs because that's all there is.
00:42:40.000To derive ethics and I think it's another straw man argument.
00:42:46.000argument to say I don't need a God in order to behave morally that's not the argument you need a God to say there is such a thing as morality without God there's no women's rights there's no ecology there's no anything you there is no difference between wandering out in the street with a knife chopping someone's head off fucking it and then throwing it in the trash and, you know, giving $100 to Oxfam or the Red Cross.
00:43:16.000Then the argument from Christ, you know, is obviously better made.
00:43:21.000somewhat by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity where he takes that idea of our own embedded sense of morality like that you know it ain't right to steal you know it's not and if you do steal you will justify it but in justifying it you're acknowledging that there is a law.
00:43:37.000Most laws, the laws of the universe like the law of gravity, you don't have a choice whether or not to obey the law of gravity.
00:43:44.000You are going to obey it whether you like it or not.
00:43:48.000But this other law of morality and ethics, as Cecilia points out, there are some countries where a man might take five wives and some countries where a man will take one wife.
00:43:56.000There are no countries where a man will be applauded for running away during battle.
00:44:05.000And indeed, these arguments, these archetypal arguments are suggesting a divine and sublime pattern as surely as a triangle, a fractal, or a spiral, or the molecular ballet that we discover when intrepidly devouring the subatomic world.
00:44:18.000world that suggests divine intelligence, order, telos, a plan.
00:44:24.000And it's interesting because when you, there is a kind of collapse, I've experienced it, and going, well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put aside all of my, not put aside, I'm going to gradiate the priorities of my order, my devotion to Christ and my understanding of Krishna, my understanding of Nietzsche or whoever, I'm going to say, this is it.
00:44:49.000And I've got to tell you, there is something mysterious about it, the way that it happened as well.
00:44:54.000It didn't happen, although I know why people would suggest it did because i was you know publicly accused of rape and you might think well this is a good way to get around that i love jesus but actually what happened simultaneously is like my son was you know we had the challenges with little herbie god rest he's not god rest he's so god celebrate his eternal perpetual devastating beautiful two-year-old yesterday soul um and yeah he's too um like and in when this stuff was simultaneously happening
00:45:38.000Christ in a way that's so sort of outside of logic, it might as well have been acid.
00:45:45.000It might as well have been some sort of gentle hallucinogen of like surrender.
00:45:50.000And it came together with sort of such concussive and beautiful ease.
00:45:54.000image I have is like iron filings coming together in the shape of the cross like all these iron filings are everywhere just going like that all you have to do is surrender and actually the thing that I would have most rejected like a man a man who's sort of a you know about my age younger than me now that I imagine looking somewhat like me and me bowing down and going you are the king you are the Christ I am your servant and before you I'm no better or worse than anybody in this room or
00:46:23.000anybody in the world and I accept it and I embrace it that's so at odds with how I've what I've dedicated my whole life to like no i'm important i'm in charge i have to be in charge what i want is what's important what i'm afraid of is what's important so weird that that happened and the other thing that's important about it or felt important to me um is I suppose I feel like some kind of weird piece with it.
00:47:11.000And it's amazing when you look back over your life.
00:47:14.000People think it was just like that moment he went ahead.
00:47:17.000gave his life to christ but it's been yeah sort of woven throughout your whole life all your spirituality your thoughts and all the things that have gotten you to this point yeah there you are jesus i knew it was you i knew that this wasn't just another story.
00:47:34.000Oh, no, I'm going to have to get over the hurdle that I believe the same thing as my nan.
00:47:38.000And just people that are in churches and stupid people, like, oh, no, I believe what they believe.
00:47:51.000Also, by the way, Massey, the other thing that helps me is from a materialistic and sort of cosmological perspective, it's sort of the infinite.
00:49:05.000And when you read a genius like Paul describing this, that you're dying moment by moment to be reborn with him, it sort of preempts or at least iterates distinctly.
00:49:16.000the principles that Eckhart Toll or any popular educator on Eastern mysticism or Buddhism or theology or not theology because they don't have a God but doctrine would give you that it's about absolutely remaining in the present he is in the present that the uh altar the altar of the present moment is where you might inside you now is that other voice you No one has to tell me to return to my Russell voice of like.
00:49:52.000And to sort of transform that, to transform that as Christ, to have instead the second voice in my head and hopefully one day the primary voice in my head as Christ is like, and I know what it's saying somehow.
00:50:37.000of Greece, born of a virgin on December 25th, was a travelling teacher who performed miracles such as turning water into wine.
00:50:43.000He was referred to as the King of Kings, God's only begotten son.
00:50:46.000God and Son, the Alpha and Omega, and many others.
00:50:48.000And suppose the virgin birth is a trope because you want it to come directly from God and you want it to be outside of the sort of material and biochemical covenant that can exist between any man and a woman and be transcendent of that.
00:51:01.000That's what you want, a virgin birth now.
00:51:04.000I mean, there was a long time I spent in the extraterrestrial Eric von Dunnecken Rail world where I'm like, these are aliens.
00:51:09.000Aliens came down and officially inseminated people.
00:51:45.000But I mean, it's a pretty common trope.
00:51:47.000The ones I hung out with were the Raylians.
00:51:50.000My mate Rail, as he once was known, Rail, he was French geezer, who had been a sort of like a racing car driver.
00:51:56.000He wrote a book called, and it was very good, and I wish I could see the cover of it again now, because it gave me such a buzz, The Messy.
00:52:02.000The message given to me by extraterrestrials, they took me to their planet was the full title of the book.
00:52:10.000When he went up to that planet, Raoul said, he met Jesus up there and Elijah and Moses, as well as having it off with a whole lot of sex robots.
00:52:17.000And I thought, you want your cake and eat it, mate?
00:52:34.000The Anunnaki, Sumerian alien kings, that extraterrestrial beings who created humans to serve them.
00:52:42.000I mean, one thing we could all get into surely is the idea that, you know, the Jungadryas event and sort of fallen civilizations and the Nephilim and are they giants and what the hell's going on and, you know, the pre-deluvian events.
00:54:25.000At the age of 30, he was baptized by John the Baptist, and thus began his ministry.
00:54:30.000Jesus had 12 disciples, which he traveled about with, performing miracles, such as healing the sick, walking on water, raising the dead.
00:54:36.000He was also known as the King of Kings, the Son of God, the Light of the Lord.
00:54:38.000Jesus is the Son of God, the light of the world, the Alpha and Omega, the Lamb of God, and many, many others.
00:54:42.000After being betrayed by his disciple Judas and sold for thirty pieces of silver, he was crucified, placed in a tomb, and after three days was resurrected and sent into heaven.
00:54:55.000First of all, the birth sequence is completely astrological.
00:55:00.000The star in the east is Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, which on December 24, aligns with the three brightest stars in Orion's belt.
00:55:09.000These three bright stars in Orion's belt are called today what they were called in ancient times, the Three Kings.
00:55:16.000And the three kings and the brightest star, Sirius, all point to the place of the sunrise on December 25.
00:55:24.000This is why the three kings follow the star in the east in order to locate the sunrise, the birth of the sun.
00:56:08.000In turn, Bethlehem, in fact, literally translates to House of Bread.
00:56:13.000Bethlehem is thus a reference to the constellation Virgo, a place in the sky, not on Earth.
00:56:20.000There is another very interesting phenomenon that occurs around December 25, or the winter solstice.
00:56:25.000From the summer solstice to the winter solstice, the days become shorter and colder.
00:56:32.000The sun appears to move south and becomes smaller and more scarce.
00:56:35.000The shortening of the days and the expiration of crops when approaching the winter solstice symbolized the process of death to the ancients.
00:58:01.000I totally understand what you guys are saying.
00:58:03.000But it makes way more sense that this is all based on ancient worships of the sun, I think.
00:58:11.000Hey, I wonder though about utility and like sort of again, so this don't sound super theoretical, but your personal reality How much is it you know you Massey or me Russell or any of us really how much is your personal reality?
00:58:23.000determined by the the machinations of the self, the sort of weird tides of the body.
00:58:46.000There's like a meteorological system inside yourself.
00:58:48.000And also, by the way, this is just observable reality.
00:58:51.000And we all, like, even if we come to absolute conclusions about observable reality, we then have to immediately fold in.
00:58:58.000that 98% of the known, known universe is dark matter and dark energy.
00:59:06.000So everything, the information we have access to is negligible.
00:59:12.000Anything that can sort of somehow bring together the patterns within the observable while giving us illusions and instructions when it comes to the unknowable, whether that's eschatology, what may occur after death, as well as how to navigate human life and the life of our emotions and our spirit.
00:59:31.000I would say more useful than being able to go, oh, you know, like, I mean, it's good to go sort of, oh, Dionysus, Virgin, but these sort of tropes, themes, archetypes, they are interesting, but as Jake says, you can sort of see that as the presence of a holy creator and even if you went like well i'm going to believe in say um osiris or something instead of jesus or i'm going to believe in one of them other ones like you're sort of now you're one sort of station further down the road of like oh there's a divine creator
01:00:02.000there's an intelligent creator and the same like in a sense i think that the presence of god is unavoidable through our inner lives the seemingly unignorable presence of morals and ethics in each of us.
01:00:17.000And I would add to that, this sort of kind of vehement propaganda campaign to dismantle those ethics, like whether it's you Valno Harari or whoever sort of telling you or Dawkins, you know, like, no, no, what it is is it's, what do they call it, biological, like sort of like evolutionary, like this is in order to create relationships, kindness developed as a strategy and tactic.
01:00:40.000It's like a devotion to the idea that you're selfish and you're bad.
01:00:42.000And even that idea, by the way, is baked into the Bible, falleness, the original sin.
01:00:50.000very, very hard to deny the existence of God.
01:00:53.000And I think there must be a reason for that.
01:00:56.000And what, like, I've personally encountered here in this book and in my time of prayer is somehow the encapsulation of all of these principles in one man-god being where before it was diffuse and I remained at the center of it.
01:01:10.000Like at the center of this sort of Hellenistic and astronomical appraisal of reality is me, the observer.
01:01:18.000With the acceptance of Christ, at the middle of it is him.
01:01:23.000And in that, some sort of osmosis takes place, some transformation, some necessary transformation that's akin to being reborn, that's akin to me entering the soil and rising again, me entering the water and being washed clean and rising again.
01:01:38.000The thing is, I think, is that you can't rationally do it if the works of C.S. Lewis and sort of Tolkien and N.T. Wright are sort of insufficient you know then nothing I can say on the internet is going to work but but the experience the encounter is what did it like Literally, I've seen this before.
01:01:57.000So, you know, I've seen this documentary.
01:02:48.000it don't disembark why would you get off the train of meaning yeah at that station right that's it there's a sun why is there a sun why does the sun nourish why is there photosynthesis why is there body why is there life why is there meaning why is there time well it is rational but it's like it's well you're using your rationality now right yeah like if people say i'm being rational they're probably not being rational enough because you got to keep going.
01:03:32.000I don't know yeah one free miracle and we'll describe the rest as it were None of these things can be countenanced through rationalism without a divine principle upon which to hang the reason.
01:03:55.000As our man Sophocles says, reason is God's crowning gift to man.
01:04:04.000You reason your way to a kind of a sort of a psychopathy.
01:04:08.000But with God, reason becomes an acknowledgement of our singular, peculiar irrelevance when it comes to material, but our ultimate significance in the eyes of the creator and i understand this tension because as far as i know i am infinitesimally small so small as to be irrelevant and yet all reality as far as i can prove takes place in my consciousness and that's a sort of extraordinary tension for anybody to carry and we all carry it another crucifix there another collision of the vertical and
01:04:37.000the horizontal and in order for that frequency to be kind of livable i need a saviour i can't do it the resources aren't somehow within me but they are accessible to me yeah i don't understand it it's the piece that passeth all understanding not the piece that's included within understanding we've done 60 minutes we can go home Oh, it's so good.
01:05:02.000But, you know, obviously we didn't do much to the documentary.