00:00:24.000Hello and welcome to Stay Free with Russell Brand.
00:00:27.000Wherever you are in the world, I hope that you are free and liberated and not tyrannized.
00:00:31.000If you're not watching this on Rumble, come over and watch us on Rumble right now.
00:00:35.000We've got some fantastic guests on the show today.
00:00:37.000Joining me now is my guest, Michael Peters.
00:00:41.000Michael is here to talk about his book, Beyond World Religions.
00:00:45.000Here's a clip to help you conceptualize Michael Peters right now.
00:00:49.000The gravity of owning reputation, owning possessions, owning anything.
00:00:54.000If we let go of that, then he's able to fill us.
00:00:57.000Take up your cross, deny your very self.
00:01:00.000You know, these are concepts that just aren't normal for humans, for mammals.
00:01:05.000I've had some pretty famous Christian authors fly into where I live to talk about this over the last 25 years, and they came up with circling up a bunch of trailers in a field in Minnesota and said, okay, now we'll have two cars and we'll share them.
00:01:21.000We'll call that community, and all your money goes into one pot, and blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:02:13.000Now, what in particular during our conversation did you focus on for this book, mate?
00:02:17.000Well, there were a couple of things that kind of stood out that we didn't quite finish.
00:02:21.000Like we discussed some of this in the green room, but some of what we talked about was how Jesus was cooking fish on the shore, and the guys that he'd walked around with for three and a half years said, Oh, that must be the Lord.
00:03:13.000Because he is the life, the truth, and the way, and there is no way to the source but through him.
00:03:17.000But I remember asking you last time, Michael, if we're talking about an ever present, eternal, ubiquitous, God, how likely is it that the hermeneutics of one particular geographical region are exhaustive?
00:03:30.000In short, isn't it likely that God is present in other places and in other cultures?
00:03:34.000One of my mates, sorry, it's weird, isn't it?
00:03:36.000Because this is like a proper show, but I still use things like one of my mates says, anyway, one of my mates said that when the conquering Europeans that came to this land first encountered native people, there were tribes that had crucifixes and crosses.
00:03:52.000Of course, the cross appears in many places, even down, right down in our Genomes and our genetics crosses can be found.
00:03:59.000So, what is this, this Christ, this absolute Christ, this absolute King and Master?
00:04:07.000In the beginning, he was God, he was with God.
00:04:11.000How can we start to look at other religious traditions and their veracity?
00:04:16.000Because, indeed, prior to his urgent return, we're going to have to learn a new type of hermeneutics and a new type of discourse because what we are being opposed by is significant and powerful.
00:05:07.000Where in the Quran, I'm assuming that's Quran rather than Hadiths, where is that?
00:05:12.000And what is it specifically, even if you can't, you know, I don't want to be on the spot with that, but can you tell me what that specifically, Muhammad defends Christ and the integrity and authenticity of Christ?
00:05:26.000So there's, you know, the exact placement of that, I don't have that memorized, but I can connect you with the people who told me that they're PhDs.
00:05:33.000You know, when it's on my mind because I guess I watched some content about it earlier, when he says, Before Abraham was, I am, and when Meister Eckhart says, The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me, and when Brother Lawrence says, We practice his presence, and when St. Teresa says, There are interior castles, and when Enoch visits these sort of transcendent places in the Ethiopian Bible, early books of Enoch, there,
00:06:00.000it seems to me that somehow within our Individual personal experience of consciousness, there is access to supernatural power and realms that are beyond what we would call ordinary sensory reality.
00:06:16.000I think one of the mistakes that we have collectively made as humanity is we've tried to bottle, franchise, profit from control.
00:06:25.000We put in intermediaries that are, I refer to it in the book as Grand Hypoobas, you know, people that really want to be the person in between us and God.
00:06:37.000And what that lacks, and it shows up in all of the Christian world as well as the rest of the world, is kind of a Rosetta Stone way of looking at it, is that Jesus didn't come to start another world religion beyond worldreligions.com.
00:06:51.000He didn't come to start another world religion, and none of the other religions even claim that they have anything like he had.
00:06:58.000He said, You're a teacher of Israel and you don't understand, you must be born a second time.
00:07:13.000Just as I came to a woman who was a mammal, a 15 year old little peasant girl named Mary, Miriam, and God put his seed in her, and she did not have a human second part.
00:07:27.000Well, that's what Jesus was saying years later, 30 years later, to all of us.
00:07:50.000You know, it seems that from the beginning there have been cultural appendages applied that are inaccurate.
00:08:01.000Indeed, we only need to look at how much of his time he devoted to opposing Phariseeism, which I suppose there's going to be no perfect template, but that amounts to cultural authority and legalism.
00:08:18.000And the sort of one might call it the institutional sovereignty of Judaism.
00:08:25.000Now, like in Acts, which you've referred to already, and in Galatians, it's clear that Paul, in particular, helped navigate the difficult territory that comes when you say, This is that Messiah, this is Him.
00:08:41.000Now, like, and of course, our Hebrew brothers and sisters and contemporary Jews, one might say, do not accept, of course.
00:08:50.000Christ as the prophesied Messiah, they do not.
00:08:55.000Though this cultural problem of Phariseeism is an ongoing one and might, I wonder, Michael, be yet reiterated in American church culture, also our own forms of Phariseeism, our own forms of legalism, our own, as you just said, attempts to bottle and merchandise Christ.
00:09:15.000Because now that I've been in the game a little longer, two years of learning about him more directly and explicitly, I see that.
00:09:23.000There is the cultural Christ that you get from the culture, which can be sort of derisory, reductive, superficial, obviously, to a degree, blasphemous.
00:09:31.000Then there is the church Christ, which again, reductive.
00:09:35.000So, to you know, like our tendency to make him in our image rather than the appropriate charge of that dynamic.
00:09:43.000So, this work that you are doing, and like some other people that I know too, actually, in fact, they're the kind of guests that I like, are people that are focused on ensuring that nobody says, We own him and this is the only way to him.
00:10:01.000How do we, I mean, now, I mean, but in a way, aren't you in a moment there?
00:10:05.000Offering a hand of friendship to all, you're making sort of enemies with everyone because you're sort of going to the Catholics, you're not doing it right, to the Protestants, you're not doing it right, to the Jews, to the Muslims, to the Buddhists, to the secularists.
00:10:14.000There's like you're laying down a pretty serious gauntlet right there.
00:10:18.000Yeah, it's a bigger gauntlet than a belief system, and that's a good thing, not a bad thing.
00:10:23.000George Barna and a lot of the leaders of the Christian world have said 90% of the Christian church world does not have a Christian worldview.
00:10:32.000They don't live it the other six days out of the week.
00:10:49.000So if the line of demarcation is to be born a second time and have the spirit, and 90% don't have the faith of Abraham, they just don't care that much.
00:10:59.000It's a cultural framework, it's a construct of we live in North America, so therefore we.
00:11:14.000Those are people that have a familiarity with his teaching, his doctrine, but they don't have the Holy Spirit, and therefore they're none of his, according to Paul.
00:11:22.000So, the nature of Christianity and the rest of the world at that point is will you have the faith of Abraham?
00:11:29.000Abraham was not a Jew, Abraham was a guy.
00:11:59.000You're a bunch of pawns on my chessboard.
00:12:01.000Now, when you don't have the Holy Spirit and a group of people that show up for a meeting, 90% of them may not even share his DNA, well, then you got a little problem on your hands.
00:12:12.000But if, in fact, From the least to the greatest, they all know him.
00:12:16.000I'll put my spirit in them and cause them to keep my commands and decrees.
00:12:54.000Wycliffe and Tyndale got, you know, one of them, their bones burnt, and the other one got actually strangled and then burnt at the stake because they dared to translate the word ecclesia as a relationship, wherever you are.
00:13:09.000And the powers that be wanted it to be a place.
00:13:12.000They killed him because of that and about six other words that he translated that didn't work for them, it didn't propagate their system.
00:13:21.000They keep trying to replace eternity with permanence, but these are different concepts.
00:13:26.000Eternity is ever moving, ever I aming, ever I aming, ever flowing, ever moving, impossible to contain or control, available only in the present because all else is conceptual and already within the framing, the separate tabernacle of sin, the separate, his counterfeit kingdom within the counterfeit kingdom of the Prince of the Air there.
00:13:51.000I see, I want to say then, I want to say, mate, excuse me, Michael, I want to say that what I feel is.
00:14:01.000When it like the 72 come back and you know, we cast out demons and we moved among you know, we were casting them out, they're all blown away.
00:14:10.000The 72, many of them are going to clear off later and lose their bottle when it gets a bit tasty.
00:14:16.000When it gets proper on top, when it gets proper on top, when it gets like, oh no, people are coming, the government's here, oh no, no, the government's here, the government's come.
00:14:25.000I don't know, I've never even met him, I don't know who he is.
00:14:27.000I don't, I think I heard about someone with that name, but I'm not sure it was that.
00:14:32.000Guy, though, yes, that's in well, I'll get back to you.
00:14:37.000Um, like, uh, you know, when the 72 come back, and uh, he said, like, this thing I it was split my head was uh, uh, I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning because that's a reference to a reality that's um, beyond sort of human comprehension.
00:15:00.000And Michael, I've been mean to ask you about this since I started thinking about it.
00:15:03.000Part when in Luke we see the encounter, but no, maybe it's not Luke because that focuses more on Joseph.
00:15:11.000The one where it focuses on Mary and Gabriel, like she's terrified.
00:15:16.000I think phase one terrified, oh no, supernatural being.
00:15:19.000I think phase two terrified, what do supernatural beings generally do when they come down and encounter women based on what we know from Genesis, based on what we know from Enoch, and what does he redeem and reverse a non carnal?
00:15:36.000Non carnal creation, non carnal, non sexual inception.
00:15:42.000So, what I suppose I'm saying is it's very hard for us to live in this celestial material, this celestial miracle, this celestial reality that's more powerful, more real than an orgasm, more real than a bag of chips, more real than an iPhone or whatever it is that you're using to somehow ameliorate the anguish of being separated from him.
00:16:07.000More real than any of those things, but somehow only very delicately held.
00:16:15.000And as soon as you try to make it about yourself, it's gone again, huh?
00:16:30.000The Big Bang Theory, if you don't want accountability, you're going to lean into some of these definitions or descriptions, even if they don't have scientific background.
00:16:40.000To the nth degree that you would expect out of something that we stake our whole life on.
00:16:45.000But if it's required that we have the faith of Abraham and we have this man be king over us in order to be born a second time, to have the DNA from heaven come to live inside of us, remember he couldn't do anything until he was glorified, right?
00:16:59.000I have to leave you that I can scale myself in all of you, right?
00:17:04.000So the nature of being born a second time and having the DNA of God inside of us.
00:17:10.000Solves a lot of those problems because we don't need the answers anymore.
00:17:12.000Matthew 10 20, don't consider what to say or how to say it.
00:17:21.000If it's really God welling up from the inside, rivers of living water gushing from the abdomen, which is the Greek word, and I know you identify with that, that if that's really it, then that explains Barnett's problem with 90% of the attendance based world isn't even saved, and they think they are, so they're not even looking anymore, right?
00:17:41.000But if it's heaven DNA, a second birth that defines my existence, then I will grow, and the spirit and the flesh wage war with one another.
00:17:49.000I now have mammal DNA and God DNA, and there's a war going on.
00:17:54.000So that's why Paul said, Who amongst you is tempted that I don't inwardly burn?
00:17:57.000He said, I'll remove this thorn in the flesh, this messenger from Satan.
00:18:01.000And God said, No, you need the humility to be able to identify with your brothers because you feel the pain too.
00:18:07.000The spirit and the flesh wage war with one another.
00:18:37.000What does it look like in Malaysia or in Bolivia?
00:18:40.000What does it look like in these places where God comes to dwell inside of a culture and a people and a race and it has nothing to do with a Sunday service per se, which isn't even a biblical concept.
00:18:52.000I know that's offensive to a lot of people, but I've been in.
00:19:16.000But like, you know, freedom to, like we think of it as like freedom, like the right to bear arms or to marry someone of the same sex or to whatever it is.
00:19:24.000But in fact, the freedom is to be who you are in Him.
00:19:30.000To capture with the constant distraction frequency, the loud carnival of bizarre demonic clown noise all around us everywhere, their relentless circus of salt and sugar,
00:19:46.000their relentless circus of pornography and endless flesh, defibrillating us, charging us with false frequencies out of our state, contaminating the water, the crystal water of His eternal presence, with their simulacrums, with their synthetic systems.
00:20:02.000And it kind of takes some serious gear, ain't it, mate, to oppose that stuff.
00:20:06.000I mean, just keep looking at the early ones.
00:20:07.000The early ones do get their heads cut off or stoned to death in the street or crucified upside down.
00:20:14.000I mean, it's not much of a retirement package.
00:20:17.000Yeah, but it's not a retirement package.
00:20:19.000It is the butterfly breaking out of the cocoon.
00:20:26.000C.S. Lewis, he said, I like it when C.S. Lewis goes, and this is C.S. Lewis, who, like many of the people you're naming, is from England, like Tindale.
00:20:52.000The Green Dragoons are doing so well, and then they foolishly, as a result of Mel Gibson's brilliant guerrilla tactics, just take their eye off the ball.
00:21:27.000Well, on one hand, he goes, there's this like death, our repugnance at death, even a kind of, but it will smell, Lord, kind of outside Lazarus's tomb.
00:21:37.000That kind of death don't seem right, he says.
00:21:40.000And then the other example he gives, I'm afraid to say it in front of you Christians, you like farts and hard ons.
00:21:46.000You know, he's like, we laugh at bodily functions.
00:22:06.000There's something else here that I am.
00:22:09.000There's something else here that I am.
00:22:11.000There's something else here that I amming.
00:22:13.000Like, you know, that's why you're not supposed to, when you take powerful hallucinogens, stare in the mirror because you start going, Oh, wait.
00:23:53.000Like, you know, like, sort of like, turn it into, and I'm not dissing St. Peter there, but like, you know, it's, uh, It cannot be, it's not place because place is an attempt to materialize, instantiate, and then institutionalize the very thing that never can be.
00:24:08.000That's why the only authority can be his authority.
00:24:10.000Outside of that, he removes limited liability from the category of neighbor and from the category of love and from the category of brother.
00:24:18.000There is no limit on who is your neighbor, there is no limit on who is your brother, there is no limit on who we must love because the deepest truth is the eternity in him and his eternal family, isn't it, Michael?
00:25:03.000As humanity, from the first person ever born that ran to the tree of knowledge so they could be a God, Jesus came as the second Adam to bring us to the tree of life.
00:26:00.000And basically, the whole point of what we were.
00:26:02.000So when you read Paleo-Hebrew pictographs, usually it gives a.
00:26:07.000Like you're watching TV from black and white to color.
00:26:10.000And it gives more meaning and a sense of dynamic of who Abba is and why he's created things.
00:26:15.000And as we discussed earlier, that this whole part of.
00:26:21.000Like the space was referred to in the scriptures as mime, as water, which basically represents chaos.
00:26:30.000And that's exactly the opposite of Abba's kingdom.
00:26:32.000So if we step back and we read the storyline, I'm sure you know all of this, in terms of like that one third of Abba's kingdom had fallen, which means basically that there was chaos, which is the opposite of Abba's order.
00:26:47.000And Abba was invading that space of chaos, which is mime, water.
00:26:51.000With his agents, as you say, like Russell said, colonization, a form of colonization, into this basically, but reclaiming territories that was taken to chaos from order.
00:30:29.000And meanwhile, all of us, every time that it goes up a degree or two, the air conditioning immediately breaks and you're still on the bread line, paycheck to paycheck.
00:32:45.000Listen, what I'm thinking, Nicholas, if we were able to generate.
00:32:48.000I mean, look, if we started a simple GoFundMe page, a link for which could be on the bottom of the screen right now because we're playing this in the future.
00:33:44.00020 grand, then we could pay for your wedding, we could, and then you would be married, and at least some of the, let's call it what it is, filthy sin in the world would have been reduced.
00:33:54.000So why don't you, if you click this GoFundMe page, which you can see on the screen right now, we will fund Nicholas's wedding, and then I'm assuming, I mean, I'm in the UK right now, who knows, but hopefully I could be attending that wedding at some point.
00:35:51.000You have to have the pipe fall in order for that waste to go somewhere.
00:35:54.000Otherwise, it's going to be coming back in your house.
00:35:57.000When we set up our own communities and systems that are fully independent, energy independent, and food independent, we're going to need good plumbing, aren't we?
00:36:08.000Without it, it's going to be a nightmare, to put it simply.
00:36:12.000It's going to be simply an expensive nightmare.
00:36:14.000Mind you, I've noticed with you, whether it's weddings or utopian communities, I think that you work on a high margin and trying to, I think you're.
00:36:22.000Trying to drum up some extra money for yourself.
00:38:56.000By the time you've gone through whatever institutions, academic and social, that lands you in the position of a journalist, you already think what they need you to think.
00:39:07.000For some of us, this process began at school when you're first expelled and thrown out of schools.
00:39:11.000That's when you first recognize you're not a person that's going to be in keeping with the institution.
00:39:15.000Or you might be a military veteran who went into the army because you nobly and bravely believe in defending your nation and its inhabitants.
00:39:23.000And then after having served a few tours in Afghanistan, Iraq, Northern Ireland, whatever, you realize, wait a minute.
00:39:30.000I'm actually serving the interests of powerful institutions that use as a guise, you know, look after the vulnerable, but is in fact serving the interests of the powerful.
00:39:40.000So the people that are in the throng, the paparazzi and the various journalists, right?
00:40:32.000It would be like the actors in the Truman Show also believing that they, yeah.
00:40:36.000I mean, it's funny, we do keep coming back to these points, and I think that probably the reason this relates to, I think it's very easy to feel jolted in the world, jolted out of whatever, you know, like if you're, for example, what, you know, why do we keep talking about these different realities?
00:40:55.000Because you talk a lot about that, you know, you talk a lot about the deeper.
00:41:01.000What I mean by it is that, you know, a couple of weeks now, at least, we've talked about the feeling of, When you're living your life and things don't feel, things go weird, like things don't feel real.
00:41:14.000And ultimately, that does bring us back to the point about God because, you know, when I, for a moment in the sort of silence walking out of the court the other day, thought, oh my, I'm surprised at how sort of silent this is.
00:41:28.000It's making me feel nervous that it's not loud.
00:41:31.000So I suppose you've been in paparazzi positions.
00:41:33.000I've been in those environments before and I've never liked it when it's shouty eager, to be honest.
00:42:05.000My point is this I know that the calmness could be jarring.
00:42:13.000And it could be weird and it could feel like eerie, or the calmness can feel exactly what it is meant to feel, which is calm and still and sort of holy.
00:42:26.000When you walked slowly into court that first time, you said you took it slowly and you felt God with you walking every step, didn't you?
00:42:36.000Yeah, by God's grace, something like never more than in the concentrated times of these challenges and trials have I. More felt the presence of God in the intensive care unit by our son in the midst of allegations, walking into court.
00:43:10.000As it says here in 1 John, John's first epistle: do not love the world or anything in the world.
00:43:15.000If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them.
00:43:20.000If the word Father is hard for you, consider the word source.
00:43:24.000For everything in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life comes not from the Father, but from the world.
00:43:32.000The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.
00:43:37.000We're looking, of course, to participate in eternity, not to deify the conditions here.
00:43:44.000Check this out from the same letter We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.
00:43:55.000I mean, like before I became Christian, I did not know that that was the Christian position.
00:44:04.000We know that we're the children of God and that the whole world, not nasty countries with swastikas or different colored skin or eye shaped, the whole world is under the control of the evil one.
00:44:19.000We know also that the Son of God has come and given us understanding so that we may know him who is true.
00:44:27.000And we are in him who is true by being in his son, Jesus Christ.
00:44:33.000Dear children, keep yourself from idols.
00:44:35.000Precisely and specifically, he is saying the world is in control of evil, and the way into that is idolatry to worship something other than God.
00:44:45.000Elsewhere, here, this is also from slightly earlier in Romans God did by sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh.
00:44:58.000To be a sin offering, and so he condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us who do not live according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit.
00:45:09.000Those who live according to the flesh have their mindset on what the flesh desires, but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their mindset on what the Spirit desires.
00:45:16.000The mind governed by the flesh is death, but the mind governed by the Spirit is life and peace.
00:45:23.000The mind governed by the flesh is hostile to God, it does not submit to God's law, nor can it do so.
00:45:30.000Those who are in the realm of the flesh cannot please God.
00:45:33.000You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh, but are in the realm of the spirit, if indeed the spirit of God lives in you.
00:45:43.000Realms, you know, we'll go back to your never ending Truman Show fixation.
00:45:50.000The realm of the Truman Show is an artificial construct that exists in order to trap, for the purposes of that film, a kind of a new Adam that you can see out there, Ed Harris, the overlord of that universe, regards himself as the sort. Creator of Truman, and in fact, in a macabre way, loves him.
00:46:14.000Where you see the beautiful Ryan Goslin reach to that alien creature.
00:46:20.000There is a sense that beyond some sort of diaphanous, difficult to detect membrane, there is another reality permanently accessible.
00:46:28.000The alternative is this is all of reality.
00:46:30.000But I'm just watching a video now about, by sort of, I think he's a physicist, theoretical physicist, Framan is his last name at least.
00:46:39.000Saying that our whole understanding of the behavior of light is erroneous.
00:46:44.000Light is not sort of bouncing about or even really traveling.
00:46:48.000And in a sense, that makes sense because if you, when the measurement that light travels at 187 million miles per second, I mean, what am I supposed to do with that?
00:47:57.000Which is, as Frank Skinner, the British comedian, tells an amazing story about after lapsing as a Catholic during his time of fame and revelry, et cetera.
00:48:27.000But he wasn't, that's not the character, but just older priest, you know.
00:48:30.000And like Frank Skinner, a very brilliant and erudite British comedian, articulately described his sort of challenges with the catechism, et cetera.
00:48:47.000Anyway, like, and all these complexity of the challenges the Roman Catholic Church or the Holy Church, the Universal Church, have been going through at that time.
00:48:57.000And like, oh, and was all being reasoned and trying to understand it, expecting a comparable and perhaps Aquinas like argument from the priest.
00:49:05.000And the priest just went, come back, come back.
00:49:10.000I think it's not really, yeah, it's not intellectual.
00:50:37.000Do you know that thing going back to that idea of, you know, it's better just to do things and not expect, you know, do it and don't expect that anything in return?
00:50:45.000And like, you want reliance on God, don't it?