The Tucker Carlson Show - May 29, 2026


The Secret History of Biblical Giants, Demons, and the Advanced Civilizations Before the Great Flood


Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 47 minutes

Words per minute

155.88152

Word count

16,741

Sentence count

386

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

47

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

When you travel well, your KLM Royal Dutch Airlines ticket takes you to more than just your destination. It takes you through winding streets, spontaneous detours, and the realisation that neither of you are actually good with directions. And when the final shortcut taken isn t exactly short, our crew is here to give you a trip home that goes just as planned.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 When you travel well, your KLM Royal Dutch Airlines ticket takes you to more than just
00:00:04.960 your destination. It takes you to winding streets, spontaneous detours and the realisation that
00:00:11.800 neither of you is actually good with directions. And when the final shortcut taken isn't exactly
00:00:19.320 short, our crew is here to give you a trip home that goes just as planned. KLM Royal Dutch
00:00:27.280 Airlines. When you travel, travel well. Thank you for doing this. Yeah, absolutely. I have
00:00:37.540 read Genesis like, you know, on and off most of my life. Never noticed the first part of chapter
00:00:43.280 six with the Nephilim until about four years ago. Someone mentioned it to me in the subsequent
00:00:48.860 years. I must've had 15 conversations, 25 conversations about the Nephilim.
00:00:53.600 um so it seemed worth talking to someone who understands exactly what the nephilim are
00:00:58.540 what are the nephilim and and am i pronouncing it correctly i mean good enough yeah that's i mean
00:01:05.460 yeah i mean it's it's the the the i am at the end is the the im is the plural in in uh hebrew okay
00:01:14.220 um but yeah so there's there's a little bit of debate about where exactly the word comes from
00:01:21.200 because it's not a regularly used Hebrew word
00:01:29.280 in the Hebrew Bible,
00:01:30.540 which isn't all that odd either.
00:01:32.880 There are a lot of words that are only used once
00:01:34.760 in the Hebrew Bible.
00:01:37.760 But people have tried to do different things with it.
00:01:42.420 So there's a Hebrew verb, nefal,
00:01:45.560 which is the verb to fall.
00:01:47.280 So some people have wanted to say,
00:01:48.700 well, it's the fallen ones.
00:01:49.900 but in hebrew nephilim is reflexive so it would be the ones who are fallen upon
00:01:54.700 which is a little more difficult but it seems pretty clear most people agree now because there's
00:02:01.260 an aramaic word uh nephilim ends with an n that just means giant and so it seems pretty
00:02:12.500 contextually clear that this is just the hebrew form of that word and this is talking about giants
00:02:18.200 it's translated in the greek old testament with uh yontes and in greek which means which is where
00:02:24.520 we get the english word giant um but a lot of people when they hear the word giant now think
00:02:31.620 right yes that's that's not the core um of the idea so the word all of the words used for giant
00:02:41.360 not only refer to a tall person uh but uh could also be used to mean a thug or a bully
00:02:48.860 or a tyrant uh and the example i use is uh and you're old enough to remember this when when we
00:02:56.460 went into panama after noriega they're always referring to him as panamanian strong man yes
00:03:01.760 always and that wasn't talking about his awesome bench press no that was you know that he was a
00:03:09.040 dictator right yes an authoritarian and so it's the same kind of idea right that that um
00:03:15.520 it's characterizing these people as that sort of thuggish brutish kind of kind of character
00:03:24.100 and referring to them as tall or referring to them as giants is meant to symbolize and and suggest
00:03:31.540 that okay um and so in in in genesis at the beginning of genesis uh at the beginning of
00:03:39.200 the flood story in genesis 6 uh we have to understand that the the flood story is not a
00:03:46.480 new story when genesis is telling it right this is everyone had a flood story in the ancient
00:03:54.460 near east so the text of genesis is not primarily claiming oh there was this flood it's talking
00:04:04.360 about the flood that the original audience all sort of knew had happened yes and which it did
00:04:11.600 happen i think right there was there there yes there is a historical event right yeah this is
00:04:16.200 referring to but you could have asked anybody from greece to mesopotamia to egypt they would
00:04:23.220 have all agreed at that point that yes there was this advanced civilization there was a flood that
00:04:30.220 destroyed it current civilization is rebuilt after that yes uh now the key one of the key
00:04:38.620 differences in genesis six that you already have in those first four verses is genesis recasts
00:04:44.540 what that civilization was like so in the pagan sources that pre-flood world was this golden age
00:04:52.200 of for the time high technology right and technology in the ancient near eastern mind
00:05:00.660 included magic magic was a sort of spiritual technology um and all of these things happened
00:05:06.920 and that sort of uh losing that world was sort of this great tragedy but everyone agreed it was
00:05:14.200 a more advanced world than the world they lived in yes yes that there was knowledge there that
00:05:19.500 had now been mostly lost interesting and so you find um the civilizations that grew up after that
00:05:28.440 and exhibit a of that is the the original babylonian empire so like hammurabi's yes
00:05:33.720 babylonian empire at the height of the bronze age uh people don't understand how how powerful the
00:05:41.140 global structure was in the bronze age it's called the bronze age because they were smelting bronze
00:05:46.280 they were getting the copper from cyprus and the tin from what's now afghanistan
00:05:51.360 well that's quite a distance and bringing that together it's about bronze in a rock yeah and
00:05:59.100 and hammurabi had a preference for a particular style of sandal from crete so he was importing
00:06:05.060 those there was sort of this global economy in the bronze age going on and uh hammurabi himself
00:06:13.940 was from a group of people called the Amuru who took over Mesopotamia. Amuru means an Akkadian
00:06:20.380 Westerners because they had come from what's now Syria. And those are the same people who are 0.97
00:06:25.860 called Amorites in the Old Testament. Um, and we'll probably come back to them as we go forward.
00:06:32.660 But, uh, Hammurabi and the other Babylonian emperors attributed their success and their
00:06:38.080 ability to establish this empire to the fact that they had access to this secret wisdom from before
00:06:43.740 the flood do we have any sense how much earlier the flood took place
00:06:51.420 what's the timeline roughly it's so genesis doesn't really give us a time there are people
00:06:57.800 out there who want to like add up the years and the genealogies that doesn't really work
00:07:02.900 yeah because different textual traditions have different numbers they didn't have there aren't
00:07:07.900 numerals in hebrew or greek and so you're using letters to code numbers yes and so numbers get
00:07:16.060 a little slippery in translation and copying and things um so a lot of people will attribute it to
00:07:26.380 the uh the earth changes that happened at the end of the last ice age yes so so you're talking
00:07:32.220 roughly 10,000 years ago yeah yeah um other people are more literalists and want to add up those
00:07:38.700 ages will say uh that it was more like six but from the geologic record because there is record
00:07:44.660 of a flood yeah yeah and and there are massive i mean there there are villages at the bottom of
00:07:51.860 the black sea from that period 10,000 years ago um there are that are submerged yeah there are
00:08:00.360 The remains of villages.
00:08:03.580 The glacial ice that melted created a lot of large body of waters that were not there.
00:08:10.360 Yes.
00:08:10.760 And sea levels rose a great deal.
00:08:13.200 So do we think the flood came from melting glaciers?
00:08:17.140 That's probably the historical event that's connected to that.
00:08:23.480 Yes.
00:08:23.740 That when that ends, there's this massive shift, right?
00:08:27.360 And places where there used to be civilization are now underwater, literally, right?
00:08:35.240 And so, yeah, all those changes happen and there's this massive disruption.
00:08:41.920 So the villages currently at the bottom of the Black Sea were built during this golden age that preceded the flood.
00:08:47.420 Previous to that, yeah.
00:08:48.040 and when we believe that that and do we believe just as modern people that that civilization was
00:08:54.540 more technologically advanced than the ones that followed it um i mean if we're talking about there
00:09:00.460 is some evidence in sort of bronze age i mean you can't go completely graham hancock on this
00:09:04.440 yeah that's actually exactly the question yeah yeah and and graham hancock if you get into his
00:09:11.060 stuff he starts getting into some little new agey crystal right technology psychic technology stuff
00:09:16.740 um that's a little iffy but but we know that there was definitely you look at places like
00:09:23.740 gobekli tepe and these things there was definitely a level that was reached there was a collapse
00:09:30.160 there was another move forward the end of the bronze age there's another collapse yes right
00:09:35.420 and then rebuilding after that i mean but there are ancient structures stone structures so we
00:09:41.860 can't radiocarbon date them but we don't even now can't say how they were built right i mean how
00:09:48.240 would you not exactly yeah right we don't know exactly we don't know because there's no we're
00:09:53.660 dealing with pre-literacy yes right so we're we're making conclusions and guesswork you go to go
00:10:00.320 beckley tepe you see the carvings of animals you see the way they had skulls displayed in certain
00:10:05.060 You know, we could do guesswork, but nobody left us a text to frame any of it.
00:10:11.640 Yes.
00:10:12.360 You know what's really rare these days?
00:10:14.400 A company that makes things in America, not just designed in America, conceived in America,
00:10:19.280 assembled in America, but actually made in America, start to finish, in a factory with
00:10:24.060 American workers.
00:10:25.760 Brooklyn Bedding is that company. 0.96
00:10:28.100 Every mattress from Brooklyn Bedding is built in their Arizona factory.
00:10:32.380 No middlemen, no cut corners to boost the margins.
00:10:36.040 The founder started with nothing, no degree, no corporate backing, just learned the craft,
00:10:41.840 built a factory, created a product that is awesome.
00:10:45.900 That's the American story that we support.
00:10:48.160 We think you probably do too.
00:10:50.240 At TCN, we love the Thermo Balance mattress collection.
00:10:52.980 It's made a huge difference in the quality of sleep for a lot of people who work here.
00:10:56.340 If you've ever woken at 2 a.m. sweating for no reason, well, you don't have to anymore.
00:11:01.680 the cooling technology actually works
00:11:03.340 and your back feels better in the morning.
00:11:05.780 They're endorsed by the American Chiropractic Association,
00:11:09.180 so it's real.
00:11:11.540 They also give you 120 nights to try out the product.
00:11:14.980 If you don't like the mattress,
00:11:16.420 they'll take it back or swap it out, no hassle.
00:11:18.740 That's how confident they are in the products they make.
00:11:21.960 Visit brooklynbedding.com,
00:11:23.780 use the promo code TUCKER at checkout
00:11:25.160 for 30% off site-wide.
00:11:27.340 This offer is not available anywhere.
00:11:29.800 A safer Ontario means more police and prosecutors
00:11:32.380 making sure my car doesn't get stolen.
00:11:34.940 It means building new jails to keep criminals behind bars.
00:11:38.420 And it means there's no need to worry when I play at the park.
00:11:41.780 We're making every corner of Ontario safer
00:11:44.120 to make all of Ontario safer.
00:11:46.460 That's how we protect Ontario.
00:11:48.480 For all of us.
00:11:50.540 Learn how at Ontario.ca slash Safer Ontario.
00:11:53.660 Paid for by the Government of Ontario.
00:11:59.200 Got PC Optimum points? Visit Shopper's Drug Mart for the bonus redemption event and get more for your points.
00:12:06.300 Friday, May 29th to Wednesday, June 3rd. Valid in-store and online.
00:12:13.460 But big picture, the pre-flood civilization, we think, reached some kind of apogee, some high point technologically and then post-flood had to rebuild.
00:12:27.880 right and then and then yeah and then his bronze age civilization they're attributing
00:12:32.200 now they're they're not saying we have some texts or something right that survived the flood
00:12:39.200 they're saying that they're in contact with spirits who were active before the flood yes
00:12:48.960 um and that it's the same spirits who are now revealing this
00:12:52.520 wisdom to then so you have this in genesis 6 1 through 4 this this nephilim phenomenon before
00:12:59.440 the flood and genesis 6 says at this time and afterward right and that and afterward is pointing
00:13:06.220 to the this sort of recurring or continuing or happening again so the physical world changes but
00:13:11.960 the spiritual remains constant right right um and so part of that recasting of this pre-flood
00:13:21.860 civilization this isn't a golden age this is actually an age of incredible wickedness yes
00:13:25.880 right and evil is that the uh there's sort of these great kings from before the flood
00:13:31.900 uh you have the sumerian kings list other texts like this later that list the ages of the kings
00:13:39.400 before the flood and people people tend to think that the uh the ages of people in genesis and the
00:13:46.520 genealogies are kind of ridiculous with people living to be 950 sumerian kings list you have
00:13:50.960 people living hundreds of thousands of years in their uh list so hundreds of thousands of years
00:13:57.920 yes genesis is is reserved sort of in comparison uh what is that do you think a lot of that so
00:14:06.660 there's a little bit of a code to it and this is true in in genesis also um so babylonian
00:14:15.340 mathematics was all base 60 our math we do base 10 right decimal system there's this base 60 and
00:14:22.060 the the survivors of that are we have 60 seconds in a minute 60 minutes in an hour right 24 hours
00:14:28.900 in a day that's the the leftover from sort of that babylonian mathematics really yeah um i didn't
00:14:37.620 know we had Babylonian minutes. So, um, but yeah, that, that, um, that basics of math. And if you,
00:14:46.460 if you look at those ages as sets of 60, there are sort of certain things encoded about the
00:14:53.340 different Kings and the different generations that way. Um, nobody's totally cracked the code
00:14:58.840 in Genesis, but to give you an example in the Sumerian Kings list, the seventh King in the
00:15:04.980 list is the one who creates the solar calendar um seventh person in the list and if you look
00:15:14.220 at genesis and the epistle of jude which is like a paragraph in the new testament
00:15:19.000 he refers to enoch as the seventh from adam yes if you go to enoch in the genealogies
00:15:26.220 of seth in uh genesis he lives for 365 years so you have the number of days right in the solar
00:15:36.380 calendar year as his age he's the seventh person the seventh person in the sumerian kings list
00:15:42.020 creates the solar calendar so there are some sort of coded encoded connections going on with those
00:15:49.560 with those numbers um is there any evidence that human lifespan was much longer at one point than
00:15:57.680 it is now i that's that's debated by a lot of people um certainly not i don't think anyone
00:16:05.660 thinks in the thousands of years right yes um and part of the difficulty with that is that
00:16:13.900 people think that people hear life expectancy statistics you know like you hear that in
00:16:19.240 at the beginning of the 20th century the average life expectancy of the u.s was 35 and people
00:16:24.840 think oh people were living to 35 and then dying it's like well no a lot of people were
00:16:29.820 dying there's a high infant mortality rate there's a lot of people died before 35 but
00:16:34.580 people who made it to 35 a lot of them you know made it to 100 120 yeah so when you're when you're
00:16:40.420 doing kind of archaeology and stuff yeah you find a lot of young people because a lot you know there's
00:16:46.320 no antibiotics there's no right right you have a very high mortality rate it's hard to tell
00:16:51.520 how long exactly how long the the truly elderly people were living right yes um so but yeah i
00:17:01.400 don't think anybody would frame that in the thousands of years yes um so it's more about
00:17:06.740 them saying something about these people and and like i said the seventh one has the solar calendar
00:17:12.200 all of them have in the sumerian king's list have associated with them sort of the things that they
00:17:19.920 discovered but the discovery is always it was revealed to them by this spirit
00:17:25.200 came and and this divine spirit revealed to them this and that and the other and and
00:17:31.860 It's technological things like metallurgy, it's ancient technological things like sorcery and divination, and it's things about the natural world like the solar calendar.
00:17:45.800 But the ancients believed that technological advances came to them from the spiritual realm.
00:17:50.340 Right, right.
00:17:52.080 That's where it's coming from.
00:17:53.600 But that doesn't happen at all anymore.
00:17:57.100 Well, this is, so this is, this is.
00:17:59.520 Sorry.
00:17:59.800 yeah no this is part of this is part of the larger discussion and this is
00:18:03.180 but nuclear technology definitely didn't come from the demonic well this is this is this is exact so
00:18:09.440 um within the framework of how the ancients understood it and this is the ancients going
00:18:18.640 all the way late antiquity and and this is frankly maintained in the orthodox church
00:18:23.780 so the mind in the greek word that's usually translated mind is nous it's transliterated n-o-u-s
00:18:30.660 and we're used to thinking of our mind as our brain yeah and it's sort of this computer in
00:18:37.640 our skull yeah exactly that churns and processes um but that's not how they thought about it
00:18:43.120 they thought about the mind more as a sensory organ like your eye yes so you'll see it referred
00:18:50.180 to as the eye of the heart or the eye of the mind and that the mind sort of perceives the
00:18:58.760 spiritual realm. And so ideas are like sights or sounds or smells. They're not produced by the
00:19:09.260 brain, right? They're not produced by the mind. They're received by the brain. They're received
00:19:13.520 by the mind. Yes. Right. And so they come from outside, right? But that's the experience of
00:19:19.340 people who are paying attention now even like who hasn't had that right and and i've never met anyone
00:19:24.440 who had the experience of generating a thought right like one of the steps from not a thought
00:19:30.300 to a thought right um oh it's such a deep point yeah so yeah and so these things these things
00:19:38.140 come from from outside and so this is in the genealogy of cain in genesis right it's it's
00:19:45.440 Cain's descendants who invent metallurgy and use it to make weapons, right?
00:19:51.900 And who discover divination and who discover music and use it for seduction and for these
00:20:01.560 other things, right?
00:20:03.340 Because, and the idea is that these demonic spirits that are antithetical to humanity
00:20:10.780 bring knowledge to humans before they're ready for it.
00:20:15.440 right that a time would come when humanity had reached a level of spiritual maturity when they
00:20:22.480 could receive this knowledge yes and and put it to proper use and so it gets revealed early
00:20:28.400 right and that begins with the serpent in the garden
00:20:31.880 right the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not itself evil
00:20:36.060 right so adam is created humanity is created innocent right but innocent like a child is
00:20:44.560 innocent. And created for this purpose, created in God's image in order to grow into his likeness.
00:20:54.640 Yes.
00:20:55.040 And so a point of maturity would have come where humanity could have had the knowledge of good
00:21:00.520 and evil and been able to make good choices because God has the knowledge of good and evil.
00:21:09.780 Yes.
00:21:10.020 He knows what good and evil are. And this is the way, the phrase, the knowledge of good and evil
00:21:14.400 is used throughout the old testament it's used to refer to a child coming to sort of what we
00:21:18.760 would call the age of accountability coming to the age where they understand good and evil right and
00:21:23.360 wrong and so uh the serpent comes and promises the devil comes and promises you know no god doesn't
00:21:30.200 want you to have this because he doesn't want you to be like him here's the shortcut get this
00:21:35.680 knowledge now before you're prepared for it and it brings about destruction so yes right the the
00:21:43.460 atomic bomb is revealed to man we don't use it as a carbon neutral source of electrical energy
00:21:51.040 right we use it to make a weapon and i don't know if you're aware of this or not but nagasaki was
00:21:59.300 the most christian city in japan i'm highly aware of it i'm highly aware of it and it's one of the
00:22:03.960 first things it gets used for yes is to wipe out fixated on it actually wipe out most of the
00:22:10.320 population of japan so they zeroed in on a church yeah yeah so um and that infuriates people when
00:22:17.460 you when you say it but it's true yeah so that that's a that's a pattern right and so um yeah
00:22:27.760 that that is the understanding and so they're not uh the the promise is always oh i'm going to give
00:22:35.640 you the secret knowledge this is going to give you power this is going to give you control this is
00:22:38.820 going to give you influences is going to give you xyz right but ultimately it ends up being toward
00:22:45.320 humanity's destruction yes cost of living is already making it hard to live here and it's
00:22:50.940 not getting any better unfortunately it's likely to get worse and a lot of americans fill the gap
00:22:55.320 with credit cards not just for fancy dinners but to cover things like groceries and bills
00:23:00.420 that is a disaster it's understandable but don't go down that road because there is a tax in effect
00:23:07.180 a survival tax of 20% interest or more. Why would you do that? Why would you hand money to the big
00:23:12.760 banks when you can keep it for your family? Our friends at American Financing have a better way.
00:23:18.200 If you're looking to buy your first home or refinance your current one, they're helping
00:23:21.700 Americans achieve the dream of home ownership with monthly mortgage rates currently in the fives.
00:23:27.620 American Financing saves its customers an average of 800 bucks per month. That's nearly 10 grand
00:23:32.280 every year back to you.
00:23:34.740 This isn't just a loan.
00:23:36.020 It's a total financial reset.
00:23:38.920 So debt is tough,
00:23:39.960 but there's a smart way to do it
00:23:41.380 and a reckless, self-destructive way to do it,
00:23:43.940 credit cards.
00:23:45.140 And so we recommend American financing.
00:23:46.900 They're salary-based, not commission-based,
00:23:48.700 which means they actually work for you,
00:23:50.300 not the banks.
00:23:51.700 They're called America's Home for Home Loans
00:23:53.500 for a reason.
00:23:54.400 Call 800-685-5696.
00:23:59.300 800-685-5696 or visit americanfinancing.net slash tucker so to go back to the nephilim nephilim
00:24:10.400 yeah um the passage in genesis referring to which is just a couple sentences long yeah i think uh
00:24:18.500 is explaining why god sent the flood why does all of this have to be destroyed why does peak
00:24:23.760 civilization pick the technology have to be destroyed and those two can you summarize what
00:24:29.100 it says yeah so it refers to the nephilim as the men of renown men of renown so it's referencing
00:24:35.860 these kings these ancient kings right the people in charge who are looked at as heroes as divine
00:24:41.300 heroes by these post-flood pagans right look back to them as these were the leaders of the golden
00:24:48.020 age these are the great figures these are the spirits we want to emulate right these are the
00:24:52.500 people we want to be like um the great heroes and instead genesis casts them as these evil
00:25:03.220 wicked tyrants and thugs who are leading people to destruction to chaos right um genesis says
00:25:11.820 that it gets to the point where every thought of humanity is always evil all the time right that's 0.92
00:25:18.200 Um, and, uh, these people are actively leading humanity in that direction.
00:25:27.840 It's not just coincidence, right?
00:25:31.060 They're, they're, uh, teaching this, they're embodying this.
00:25:34.900 Right.
00:25:36.220 And, um, so when you, when you have a person who are calling a, uh, a giant or a Nephilim,
00:25:44.060 we're talking about sort of a fully demonized human.
00:25:48.200 So in the way the church has traditionally talked about sin related to what we were just talking about with the mind, there's sort of these stages.
00:25:58.260 First stage is thought comes into your mind, right?
00:26:02.840 You can't control that just like if you're walking down the street and you see something or hear something, right?
00:26:06.620 Thought comes into your mind.
00:26:08.740 That's not really sin yet, right?
00:26:11.320 But then we start to entertain that thought.
00:26:16.120 Start to dwell on that thought.
00:26:17.780 we start to let that thought take root start to let that thought turn into a plan right been there
00:26:24.320 then we let that plan turn into action right yeah then that action turns into a habit
00:26:31.820 a repeated action over time that we fall into as it becomes a habit it starts to take control of us
00:26:41.220 so we talk about the sins as the passions because they make us passive right they're acting upon us
00:26:48.800 at a certain point um and you can see that with you know anger right you reach a point where
00:26:57.400 it's now driving the bus right or lust yes or you know addiction right yes these things
00:27:04.020 so it gets to the point where it takes control
00:27:06.860 and then beyond that you get what we call demonic possession where there is this sort of spirit that
00:27:13.300 is now driving full time you're not even really making your own decisions anymore you're kind of
00:27:19.600 lost to it and then sort of the furthest you can go in terms of being lost when we're talking about
00:27:25.720 these nephilim and these giants is that spirit isn't in control of you anymore you just agree
00:27:32.060 with it you're on board with that sort of demonic spirit deliberately you know you're rejoicing and
00:27:40.120 enjoying right sort of the chaos and the destruction and the and the wickedness and by the grace of god
00:27:47.340 there's relatively few of those people right but they do exist do you mind if i just pull up the
00:27:54.180 passage because i there's one part of it i want to ask you about which you haven't addressed which
00:27:58.360 is just how different the Nephilim are.
00:28:01.940 I mean, they're substantively different. 0.99
00:28:03.640 They're genetically different from people.
00:28:06.740 And I think this is the most evocative or the most interesting, the weirdest.
00:28:14.440 This is, I think this is NIV, whatever.
00:28:16.840 It's a version of the Old Testament.
00:28:18.640 When human beings began to increase the number in the earth and daughters were born to them, 0.92
00:28:22.280 the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful and they married any
00:28:27.240 of them they chose.
00:28:28.360 then the lord said my spirit will not contend with humans forever for they are
00:28:34.360 mortal and their days will be 120 years the nephilim were on the earth in these days and 0.56
00:28:39.620 also afterward and the sons of god went to the daughters of humans and had children with them
00:28:45.380 they were the heroes of old men of renown yeah so that's describing mating between spiritual
00:28:53.520 entities sons of god whatever that means yeah and human women really the rape of them which 0.93
00:29:01.080 whoever they choose suggests right rape right yeah so what is that yeah so um sons of god is 0.82
00:29:09.000 used for example in job this is referring to a group of and what we would call angelic beings
00:29:16.060 yes
00:29:16.800 so the
00:29:19.480 ancient texts including ancient Jewish
00:29:22.440 texts will use small g gods 0.85
00:29:24.340 to refer to them but that makes us really
00:29:26.040 uncomfortable
00:29:27.180 in the modern world
00:29:29.180 angelic beings works a little
00:29:32.240 better
00:29:32.640 but
00:29:34.960 even that we think of angels
00:29:38.060 and we think you know oh
00:29:39.300 kind of effeminate
00:29:42.080 guy with wings right and that's not
00:29:44.320 really what
00:29:46.060 what angels are angels angelic beings are sort of vast cosmic intelligences yes uh and so we
00:29:53.660 have to sort of think about that a little differently like what a spirit is um but
00:29:59.540 yes this is talking about them having intimate relations right with with uh human women and that
00:30:08.560 that is involved in the production of these people right of the the giants who we were
00:30:15.700 talking about right and their sort of reproduction right on on the earth and okay so that's a
00:30:22.800 different genetic profile they're not fully human right right and so this is this is now we're
00:30:30.860 getting freaky yeah this is this is also an inversion right because of course the the uh
00:30:37.820 from the pagan perspective they would say these people are part divine right so the epic of
00:30:42.540 gilgamesh gilgamesh is two-thirds uh divine and one-third human right according to to the epic
00:30:53.880 of gilgamesh and there's a text called the book of the giants that we found among the dead sea
00:30:59.380 scrolls huh that's not part of the bible but it includes a list of the giants a list of the nephilim
00:31:04.900 and gilgamesh is one of the names uh that's listed there so this was a very deliberate
00:31:12.500 right this is just incidental and this is it in kumran yeah yeah and so this is
00:31:18.820 you know a millennium later but they still have gilgamesh in mind as one of the so this is right
00:31:26.220 at the turn of the last millennium around the time of jesus yeah yeah um so that of course was
00:31:37.840 part of why they were so great and so good and so admirable and why they had this secret knowledge
00:31:43.180 and so this is turning that around and saying no they're two-thirds demon essentially they're two
00:31:49.560 thirds unclean spirit they're two thirds but this idea just like the the fact of it that entities
00:31:58.880 from the spiritual realm non-human entities whatever they are whoever we're going to describe
00:32:03.580 them lower g gods angels demons whatever that they can mate with human beings and produce
00:32:10.200 not fully human replicas of human beings who can walk among us and rule over us like this is a
00:32:16.860 biblical principle yeah well yeah but what this what this sort of corresponds to right if we had
00:32:22.660 a time machine in a right a gopro is that there were these particular rituals that were happening
00:32:28.700 that were involved in the production of the the next king uh and this happens after the flood too
00:32:35.300 and what one of the big clues to this that's in uh the old testament is there's this uh figure
00:32:43.020 who shows up after the flood, after the Exodus, Og, the king of Bashan, who is described as the
00:32:52.380 last of the Rephaim in scripture. And who exactly the Rephaim were, we sort of weren't sure.
00:33:00.460 The word pops up a few places, other places in the Old Testament. In Isaiah,
00:33:06.660 the text that's traditionally understood to talk about the fall of the devil
00:33:10.820 from heaven talks about as he's thrown down into the underworld, the Repha'im rising up to meet 0.64
00:33:16.980 him. So there are these few places, there's Psalm 88 talks about, will the Repha'im arise and praise 0.93
00:33:26.920 you? And it's talking about in the underworld, talking about would they praise God? The answer
00:33:31.600 being assumed no um but we now know exactly who they were because uh in the mid-20th century we
00:33:41.380 discovered the city of ugarit which had been destroyed at the bronze age collapse around 1200
00:33:47.100 bc and lost nobody knew it was there nobody knew existed it was discovered and we discovered a
00:33:55.320 library of texts there in a language that we now call ugaritic after the city where is it pardon
00:34:02.180 my uh it's it it's it's in uh western syria okay just above lebanon uh just north right of uh of
00:34:12.280 lebanon and rosh shamra is what it's called now um and we found this library of texts ugaritic
00:34:19.880 is a semitic language so it's like hebrew or aramaic in terms of the vocabulary and the the
00:34:25.560 grammar but it's written in cuneiform on tablets and so those tablets survived because those clay
00:34:31.640 tablets are very difficult to break even if you try yeah um and in there we shed a lot of light
00:34:41.380 on the old testament because as i mentioned earlier there's a lot of words that only appear once
00:34:44.680 in the Hebrew Old Testament, but we now have cognate words in Ugaritic that help us
00:34:50.080 understand some of these things. But one of the texts there is a ritual text
00:34:54.000 for when the king died. And when the king of Ugarit died, they did this funerary ritual
00:35:02.800 where they offered sacrifices and did what is essentially magic, ritual magic, 0.99
00:35:10.080 to try to ward off the Rephaim who were the spirits of these dead ancient kings 1.00
00:35:16.500 so that the king who had just died could pass by them safely to get into the underworld 0.99
00:35:23.020 and so that then showed us oh okay well so that's what Isaiah is talking about
00:35:28.980 that's what the Psalms are talking about the spirits of these dead kings and so
00:35:33.860 Og being the last one, right, who's alive at the time of the Exodus, he's one of these giants.
00:35:43.900 Deuteronomy describes his bed.
00:35:46.700 It randomly says, you know, talks about Og, talks about Og being slain by the Israelites.
00:35:53.220 Him being slain is talked about in Numbers and Deuteronomy and in two different Psalms.
00:35:57.780 They sing about how great it is that Og, king of Bashan, was slain by God through the Israelites.
00:36:03.860 uh and they say aug's bed he's had this iron bed and it gives the dimensions
00:36:09.140 and you're sort of like well that's a random fun fact you know aug slept here
00:36:13.700 uh and the dimensions are huge you're like okay he's a giant right but we we found a ritual bed
00:36:22.020 of the same measurements in the great ziggurat of enemonki in babylon a rock yeah in the city of
00:36:30.500 babylon um and that ritual bed was used in these sexual rituals to produce the next king
00:36:41.620 so this is not just saying aug was tall this is saying aug came out of this sort of sexual ritual
00:36:49.940 and this would involve um what were called at the time shrine prostitutes these were enslaved
00:36:55.780 women um who were sort of used as vessels for they would be seen to be possessed by
00:37:03.480 uh the spiritual entity and then there would be sexual relations with the king at the time
00:37:11.360 so the king at the time was seen to be as part divine and part human we have this uh woman who's
00:37:19.120 possessed and then she is human and so that's you get the two-thirds one-third
00:37:23.380 they're sort of three parents so the the temple prostitute would be the mother of the new king 0.90
00:37:29.020 right and the idea was because she was possessed by spirits those spirits would infuse the new king 0.96
00:37:34.540 right right and that that's sort of and so birthed by by that right so it's the son of the previous
00:37:43.320 king who was divine and the son of this lower g lowercase g god right and and uh so that that
00:37:53.480 ritual it was common throughout the ancient world after the rise of christianity it was still common
00:38:01.280 you see it in places like asia uh the khmer empire and cambodia had a version of this really
00:38:08.220 yeah and then the most recent example is japan right where the most civilized technologically
00:38:15.520 advanced rational country in the world really that's um in ancient japan well up up technically
00:38:23.660 still currently um on the when a new japanese emperor uh succeeds to the throne he ritually
00:38:32.720 and ceremonially spends the night
00:38:34.600 with the sun goddess.
00:38:38.200 Up until when?
00:38:39.300 As part of the coronation ritual.
00:38:40.880 Well, they still do it,
00:38:42.360 but the Japanese government says 0.97
00:38:43.860 that the sexual element of it
00:38:45.560 was removed after World War II.
00:38:47.840 You go into the grocery store
00:38:48.920 and there are endless snacks
00:38:50.840 and protein bars.
00:38:52.820 Paleo Valley superfood bars
00:38:54.260 are, we think, the best.
00:38:56.220 Most nutrition bars seem healthy,
00:38:57.800 but then you read the labels
00:38:58.800 and it turns out they're packed
00:38:59.840 with all kinds of bizarre stuff,
00:39:01.540 processed syrups, ingredients you can't pronounce. They're essentially candy masked by marketers
00:39:08.220 pretending they're healthy. I've eaten a lot of them, I would know. Paleo Valley superfood bars
00:39:13.080 are different though. Paleo Valley makes its products with real ingredients like organic
00:39:17.080 fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, or no seed oils, soy, gluten, other weird additives.
00:39:22.640 And you know when you finish eating one because you're not bloated and you feel good. And that
00:39:29.440 is the measure. These bars are sweet, filling, genuinely good tasting. Flavors include red
00:39:35.880 velvet, apple cinnamon, chocolate chip, plenty more. They're all great. If you're trying to
00:39:40.380 clean up your diet but need something convenient to grab, these are a solid option. Give them a
00:39:45.360 try at paleovalley.com. Use code Tucker at checkout for 20% off your first order. paleovalley.com,
00:39:51.720 code Tucker, 20% off your first purchase.
00:39:54.640 visit bet mgm casino and check out the newest exclusive the price is right fortune pick
00:40:01.600 bet mgm and game sense remind you to play responsibly 19 plus to wager ontario only
00:40:07.040 please play responsibly if you have questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to
00:40:11.240 you please contact connects ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge
00:40:18.360 bet mgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with i-gaming ontario
00:40:22.620 want to see your rewards go further now at shell scene plus members can fill up on points at the
00:40:30.820 pump on snacks car wash and more plus scotia bank and tangerine card holders can get up to 10 cents
00:40:37.780 per liter in value with a linked card new rewards partners new ways to save and earn at shell
00:40:43.540 get more go further at participating shell locations conditions and limits apply
00:40:49.340 Actual value may be lower.
00:40:50.860 Visit shell.ca slash loyalty for full details.
00:40:55.080 So up until World War II,
00:40:57.420 the Japanese emperor was having sex with a sun goddess? 0.92
00:41:01.240 Yes. 0.97
00:41:02.740 So Hirohito would have been the last one.
00:41:04.100 So within living memory.
00:41:05.360 Yeah.
00:41:06.460 Hirohito would have been the last one.
00:41:08.640 Yeah.
00:41:09.900 Who was the sun goddess?
00:41:12.540 Well, I mean, this is, 1.00
00:41:13.880 he would go into a chamber with a number of concubines
00:41:17.960 who are embodying, right, the sun goddess.
00:41:23.160 So this is exactly this kind of ritual still going on.
00:41:26.800 So how did, okay, so this is Japan,
00:41:29.820 which is an island in East Asia.
00:41:33.400 Yeah.
00:41:34.020 And this is a precise replication
00:41:37.120 of what was happening in the Near East.
00:41:39.420 Yes.
00:41:39.880 It was a long way away.
00:41:41.040 Yes. 1.00
00:41:42.020 How, and then also in Indochina among the Kemmers. 1.00
00:41:46.340 Yeah. 1.00
00:41:47.260 Also far from Japan and even farther from the Middle East.
00:41:50.960 So like, how are these totally different cultures, languages, 0.93
00:41:54.820 geographic locations all doing exactly the same weird thing?
00:41:58.780 Yeah.
00:41:59.060 Well, and I mean, this is where we get to the idea of a demonic spirit.
00:42:03.140 Because maybe it's real.
00:42:04.120 Yeah.
00:42:04.300 We just, we have to accept this.
00:42:07.880 And we, we.
00:42:08.940 Is that the answer?
00:42:09.800 We know this.
00:42:10.840 Yeah.
00:42:11.180 We know this, right?
00:42:13.100 We've seen sort of mass evil arise within living memory in the world that can't be explained by a large group of people all making the same bad decisions simultaneously by coincidence, right?
00:42:28.240 This is what brought me to God was this exact understanding.
00:42:32.940 It was a very obvious observation, which somehow I missed, but yes, that's right.
00:42:36.740 Yeah. And we've all been on the less negative side, right? We've all been in crowds. We've been in groups. We've been in stadiums. We've been in a place of worship with a group of people where we've had the experience of sort of acting together, right? Of participating in something together, right?
00:42:59.580 and that's that's ultimately what a spirit is a spirit is a sort of collective consciousness
00:43:04.620 at a level of sort of above human right um it's hard to understand right but if we work
00:43:16.480 but it's not hard to recognize a little bit right yeah so our human body right is is made up of
00:43:24.540 They're actually sub-organisms within our human body, right?
00:43:28.760 It's kind of gross to think about, but chemically right now, my gut flora and your gut flora are having chemical conversations.
00:43:36.760 I'm sorry?
00:43:37.740 Right.
00:43:38.260 As we sit here.
00:43:40.860 The bacteria, our digestive bacteria communicate chemically.
00:43:48.240 With one another?
00:43:49.360 With one another.
00:43:50.660 Yeah.
00:43:51.880 When humans get together, right?
00:43:54.540 there are all of these functions going on within our bodies, right, that have their own kind of
00:44:01.800 low-level consciousness. And then we have our human consciousness, which is sort of over the
00:44:07.100 top of that, which is the summing up of all of that. And so when we talk about angelic beings
00:44:14.120 or demonic beings, we're just talking about a level of consciousness that's then above
00:44:18.880 the individual human. But they're not projections of the individual human.
00:44:23.600 They exist separate and apart from the human.
00:44:25.720 They exist separate and apart, and we participate in them.
00:44:28.240 Right, but we don't create them.
00:44:29.780 We sort of embody them in the world.
00:44:32.420 Right, we come to be, this is what God created humanity for originally.
00:44:39.240 Right, so he said earlier Adam is created sort of innocent at the beginning of this journey
00:44:43.860 to grow into the likeness of God.
00:44:47.720 The way he would do that is by functioning as God's image in the world.
00:44:53.600 So, in Genesis 1, the six days of creation, the first three days, before that starts, God says, the problem is that the earth is formless and void.
00:45:05.920 In Hebrew, it's tohuwabohu.
00:45:10.560 Tohuwabohu?
00:45:11.620 Tohuwabohu, yeah, it rhymes.
00:45:13.180 And it means, basically, it's formless or chaotic, it's disordered, and it's empty.
00:45:20.820 and so in the first three days god sets it in order right so he separates the light from the
00:45:30.540 darkness he separates the sky from the sea he separates the dry land from the sea so he places
00:45:36.280 everything in order and then in the second set of three days days four five and six they correspond
00:45:42.580 right so day four he's already separated light from darkness sun moon stars right sort of the
00:45:50.320 bodies uh he's already separated the sky and the sea fifth day he fills the sky with life he fills
00:45:57.020 the sea with life sixth day he creates um land animals and man right because on the third day
00:46:06.520 he had separated so he's taking care of those but then he says to man when he's been created
00:46:13.380 fill the earth and subdue it and what is that two-part command subdue means to put it in order
00:46:19.400 right and fill it fill it with life and so humanity is created to sort of continue that
00:46:27.200 work of god in the world that's the purpose to continue to participate in what god is doing in
00:46:34.040 the world that then trans transforms humanity so positive example of this god is at work
00:46:43.000 continually in the world loving every human person when i go and i show love to my neighbor
00:46:50.080 that love's not coming from me right i'm participating in god's love god is loving
00:46:56.980 them through me but that transforms me yes that love transforms and changes me
00:47:02.960 more toward god's likeness right and the reverse is true right and in that way i'm sort of embodying
00:47:12.540 the spirit of god the holy spirit in the world the flip side is true that means humanity can
00:47:18.620 also embody other spirits in the world and when you do that and you bring that into the world
00:47:25.680 and make it concrete that also changes you
00:47:28.440 and it's not just a spiritual or a psychological transformation it's even a physical transformation
00:47:35.120 we've seen that you can see someone who has gone down a dark road in life a photo of them yes they
00:47:40.760 repent they change they come back you see a photo of them out you can physically see it well there's
00:47:46.020 no question about it um that transformation happens in both directions you can read it in
00:47:53.060 their faces yeah and so as humans we're gonna participate in something there are things larger
00:48:00.740 than us at work in the world right god being the most important one and we're either going to
00:48:06.440 participate in what he's doing in the world and be formed and shaped by that, or we're going to
00:48:10.720 participate in something else and be formed and shaped by that. And the end of that is our
00:48:15.780 destruction of ourselves and each other. The reason I was lingering on the creation of the
00:48:29.060 Nephilim is because it suggests this idea that sounds really radical when you first think about
00:48:34.300 it that there are hybrids yeah spirit human together um but then as you talk about it a
00:48:42.040 little bit you realize that every culture has always believed this in fact jesus has described
00:48:47.200 as the as the union of god and a human woman it's like actually it's a central concept everywhere
00:48:54.060 all the time like it's not shocking yeah right right not in a sexual way in that case yeah
00:48:58.940 Let's be clear, yeah.
00:49:00.220 Right, not asexuate, right.
00:49:01.640 But yes, yeah, yeah.
00:49:03.160 This baby is the product of God's spirit and a human world.
00:49:07.500 Right, and Christ is the express image of God.
00:49:09.820 Right, he is the fullness of the image.
00:49:12.380 Right, and the Greek myths tell different
00:49:14.980 but related stories about people being.
00:49:17.920 So why is it crazy, and I think people have lived
00:49:23.120 in the world for a while, why is it crazy
00:49:25.860 to someone have a feeling when you're talking to someone
00:49:27.800 that this is not that there's something else going on here that this person's not you know
00:49:32.680 does this still happen yeah i i think i have felt that way really strongly about people in charge a
00:49:41.120 couple of times not just i disagree with them i just you know i think you're a bad person it's
00:49:45.140 not even that it's like what is this yeah yeah no i have i have only kind of thankfully met a person
00:49:55.480 like that once in my life it was in a part of my uh pastoral training in a in a forensic psych ward
00:50:01.060 uh i met a person who had i won't describe what because it's hideous and you won't be able to get
00:50:05.960 it out of your head but had done horrific things to a child and that's how he ended up there yes
00:50:10.480 but who enjoyed bragging about it and describing it in detail to people and watching the look on
00:50:16.400 their faces right like that level of gone so there are people like that and did you feel as
00:50:24.560 you talk to this person or listen to this person that there was this was not fully human or this
00:50:29.900 was some kind of hybrid you could look in his eyes and see that there was something in inhuman
00:50:35.160 there i've had that same experience with people not not quite as cartoonish and obvious as that 0.61
00:50:41.840 but still like what is this yeah yeah so what is this it's well i mean i mean that's so we would
00:50:48.920 say in the church that to become like Christ, to be formed in the likeness of God, is to become
00:50:56.980 truly human. That's what it means to be human. And so to the degree which you go down the other
00:51:03.000 road, you become something inhuman. St. John Chrysostom in one of his homilies is talking to,
00:51:13.480 So he's preaching in Constantinople to just regular people.
00:51:18.000 Fourth century.
00:51:18.620 Yeah.
00:51:19.720 Into the fourth, beginning of the fifth, yeah.
00:51:21.240 And he says to his people, he says, so you believe that if someone dies a violent death, they become a demon, right?
00:51:30.320 So we kind of had that cultural idea, too, right?
00:51:32.920 Somebody dies some kind of violent or horrible death, they come back as this vengeful ghost or whatever.
00:51:37.500 Yeah, exactly.
00:51:38.240 Yeah, murder victims haunt the house where they were killed.
00:51:40.400 Yeah, so they apparently had that kind of idea, too.
00:51:43.480 And he says, uh, that's incorrect.
00:51:47.180 He says it is people who live like demons who become demons.
00:51:53.660 Uh, so in the same way that there is an actual transformation of humanity as, as we're formed
00:52:02.960 in the likeness of God, there is an actual transformation of humanity into something
00:52:08.440 else.
00:52:08.960 Of course, and it's obvious you become how you live for sure.
00:52:11.460 When you go down that other, it's an actual metaphysical transformation of who you are, even to the point where, so a big part of the understanding of what's going on with the Nephilim before the flood is that a lot of the demonic spirits that are talked about later in Scripture and after the flood are understood to be the spirits of those Nephilim, of those dead Nephilim.
00:52:36.240 This is explicit in like the book of Jubilees, which is a Jewish text from the period in between the Old and New Testaments, but a very important one.
00:52:48.680 If you read like Josephus' Jewish antiquities, he's cribbing from the history in Jubilees all the time.
00:52:57.440 He just accepts it as historical. 0.85
00:52:59.140 um and it talks about uh at the time of the flood the nephilim are wiped out they all die
00:53:06.280 and they have sort of a leader who's named uh mastima and mastima comes to god and wants to
00:53:14.460 strike this bargain with him don't don't send us all into the abyss don't send us all into
00:53:19.080 into uh like a fire let some of us stay on the earth we promise if you let us do that we'll
00:53:26.700 only torment bad people will only torment wicked people um and uh in in the book of jubileys god
00:53:35.720 agrees to allow 10 of them to remain to torment wicked people but it says that god's motive is he
00:53:43.620 wants to use that to bring wicked people to repentance right so there's sort of a a theodicy
00:53:49.480 going on there right yeah sort of justification of god why does god allow these demonic right
00:53:53.920 spirits but you see reflections of that story even in like the gospels right because they're
00:54:00.700 the the spirits are told at that time you're going to be uh you're allowed to honor and tell
00:54:07.700 the last judgment and then you're going to the lake of fire with everybody else but you get this
00:54:11.500 sort of reprieve so for example when when christ comes to the demoniac man and the demons say to
00:54:19.300 him have you come to torment us before the time exactly like hey wait we had a deal yeah
00:54:23.780 right that's and then uh he ends up casting them into the pigs and the pigs run off the cliff and
00:54:30.500 it says they run off the cliff into the abyss which is the place where those other demonic
00:54:35.480 spirits were imprisoned and there's a dynamic going on there where the name jesus is actually
00:54:41.040 the name joshua right of course joshua in the book of joshua goes and battles these giant clans
00:54:47.700 to sort of reclaim the land and purify them from evil.
00:54:52.820 That's paralleled with Christ as sort of the true Joshua comes into the land
00:54:58.620 to purify it from evil, and he's dealing with the spirits of these same beings.
00:55:06.280 And so the idea, how does that become a spirit?
00:55:09.560 Well, I mean, we've seen this, right?
00:55:11.460 You can point to men in history who were wicked men, right?
00:55:17.580 who are long dead but their spirit has lived on oh no people have continued to participate in that
00:55:25.020 spirit and embody it right and bring it forward the same is true on the other side those are the
00:55:31.420 people we call saints right they live a lived a life embodying the spirit of god being formed
00:55:37.420 into his likeness and even though they've died sort of their spirit lives on they become the
00:55:41.820 the patron sense of people and nations and families and people groups um and continue to
00:55:49.360 have this life right as so you're describing the process of becoming that every person experiences
00:55:55.540 you're becoming something but genesis 6 is describing an act of creation yeah saying that
00:56:03.180 these beings were different from the very start because they didn't have two human parents yes
00:56:09.940 So that's a very different thing.
00:56:12.000 Well, and there's, so we also have to understand what it means to be part of a people in the ancient sense.
00:56:19.680 We have concepts like ethnicity and DNA and these kind of things.
00:56:24.580 Of course, they had no idea about those concepts.
00:56:28.140 So being part of a people was about two things.
00:56:33.300 Participating in their initiation rituals.
00:56:35.620 Yes.
00:56:35.880 and, uh, then participating in the ongoing ritual life of the community.
00:56:43.040 So biblically, you look at ancient Israel, what made you an Israelite is if you were male,
00:56:49.600 you were circumcised. Uh, if you were female, you were either the daughter or the wife of a 0.79
00:56:55.160 circumcised male and you ate the Passover, right? You participated in the festal sort of year, 0.93
00:57:02.380 uh within christianity right it's you're baptized initiation right and then you participate in the
00:57:10.040 eucharist in the ongoing sacramental life of the church so the same was true on this other side
00:57:16.640 right so what we've been talking about is essentially the initiation ritual
00:57:20.260 right the beginning right and then there was an ongoing ritual life and according to
00:57:27.520 the book of wisdom or the wisdom of solomon that depending on where you land right christianity
00:57:34.980 may or may not be part of your old testament um makes this explicit other texts outside of the
00:57:41.440 scriptures make this explicit that the ongoing ritual life of these people involved human
00:57:45.360 sacrifice and human sacrifice uh involved cannibalism yes we have a very skewed view of
00:57:54.520 we haven't done a lot of animal sacrifice and seen a lot of it so we have kind of a skewed
00:57:58.600 view that it's about killing the animal it's not really about killing the animal it's about eating
00:58:02.480 the animal yes part of it being offered to god or a god uh and then part of it being consumed
00:58:09.180 right and so cannibalism either at the level you see in mesoamerica right blood drinking
00:58:14.820 right um that's why blood drinking is forbidden right throughout the bible um and so there was
00:58:23.760 cannibalism involved in in uh this human sacrifice and so that was sort of renewed you have this
00:58:31.660 initiation you have this beginning and then there is this ongoing ritual participation yes and i
00:58:38.980 mean not to disagree with you but i just have to ask like if so if ancient peoples had no sense
00:58:44.600 of genetics why were genealogies so important well that's that's descent right yeah but it's
00:58:53.080 genetic descent yeah yeah but that could be broken right so let me give you an example
00:58:58.720 um caleb there are sort of two there's there's the episode after the exodus where the spies
00:59:05.680 one spy from each of the 12 tribes of israel is sent into the land and 10 of them come back and
00:59:12.400 say no there's nephilim there we can't do it yeah and it's gonna be too tough right you don't want 0.98
00:59:17.220 mess with them right uh and two of them joshua and caleb yep come back and say no you know yeah
00:59:25.020 we can't do this by ourselves but god's on our side god's going to win the victory for us
00:59:28.660 put your faith in him we can do this caleb is identified in the text as being a kennazite
00:59:35.780 a kennazite is not only a canaanite it's one of the canaanite tribes they were supposed to wipe
00:59:40.980 out. It's one of the giant clans. It's these people. He's technically one of them genetically
00:59:48.660 or by descent, right? But he's listed as an elder of the tribe of Judah in the Old Testament
00:59:56.580 because he was incorporated. And when you're incorporated, they would have said about him,
01:00:04.420 no, Judah was his father. He was a descendant of Judah, right? Now we would say, well,
01:00:10.500 not genetically. But from their view, now that he's been ritually incorporated, you didn't just
01:00:17.920 become an Israelite in general. You became a member of a particular family that was part of
01:00:23.700 a particular clan that was part of a particular tribe. And those are now his people, and the
01:00:29.000 Kenizzites are not his people. He is now not a Kenizzite. So that's the difference, is that that 0.99
01:00:35.840 was that was malleable that was changeable so when did the requirement emerge that in order to be
01:00:41.580 jewish you had to be the son of a jewish mother that was after the destruction of the temple yeah
01:00:48.460 that was after the return from exile so if you read ezra and nehemiah they're talking about that 0.51
01:00:52.900 they're talking that's when they banned uh israelite men marrying foreign women right
01:00:57.920 and the matrilineal descent is a way of ensuring right genetics just guaranteeing that yeah right
01:01:05.180 because everyone knows who your mom is. 1.00
01:01:06.900 So that's a later thing.
01:01:08.060 If you look at in the Torah and Deuteronomy,
01:01:10.100 there's a whole ritual setup for 0.98
01:01:12.480 if you want to marry a woman
01:01:14.240 from one of these other groups 0.95
01:01:16.200 where she shaves her head
01:01:17.440 and there's this sort of ritual thing
01:01:18.840 where her old life is put away
01:01:20.960 and her new life,
01:01:21.720 now she's an Israelite.
01:01:24.180 Right, so they had a way of incorporating.
01:01:26.480 Is there any fossil record
01:01:27.920 that supports the idea of giants striding the earth?
01:01:32.160 Actual 50-foot tall people?
01:01:34.680 No.
01:01:35.180 I mean, I don't know how tall, but taller than me.
01:01:37.800 Well, yeah, so a lot of times, so when we have visual depictions, they're usually depicted
01:01:41.900 as 15 foot tall, but that's a sort of deliberate coding.
01:01:47.680 So in the ancient Near East, they believed that their gods had a ritual body that was
01:01:58.000 about 15 feet tall.
01:01:59.340 um and if you look at uh we've got excavated temples of bale for example where they have
01:02:07.760 footprints they're supposed to be bale's footprints right uh as he was walking in to be
01:02:14.220 sort of enthroned in his temple was the idea and if you measure the stride it's based on him being
01:02:19.520 about 15 foot tall so they're do we think they're real footprints well these are clearly carved by
01:02:26.300 people okay right to represent that but the idea is that's how tall the gods were so that's how
01:02:32.040 they usually depict the nephilim as being 15 foot tall um goliath is sort of one of the last
01:02:37.460 stragglers yes at the end of the book of joshua it says that sort of the last of the anakim which
01:02:42.660 is another word for the nephilim fled into philistine territory and so then when david
01:02:47.380 comes as king he sort of roots out the last of them right um goliath being one of them how tall
01:02:54.760 he is again numbers there's not numerals so things go weird places according to uh the greek
01:03:01.160 old testament tradition he was six foot six which is like two inches taller than me right but which
01:03:08.420 in the early iron age would have made him gigantic right the average the average man was i think like
01:03:15.460 five foot five yeah right at the time in that area um in uh the hebrew text he's nine foot nine which
01:03:24.480 is more clearly a sort of supernatural kind of height yes right to sort of to sort of convey this
01:03:32.000 um so certainly there were people who were abnormally tall like in the six foot six six
01:03:40.520 foot seven range right some of them who who were these people uh we do not have and given we don't
01:03:47.300 have a lot of skeletal remains from that period either right that are there are a million reports
01:03:52.680 from the 19th century in north america in the u.s of people finding nine foot tall skeletons in some
01:03:59.480 cave in nevada etc etc etc they were all destroyed by the smithsonian any of that true um not as not
01:04:08.000 as far as we could tell not as far as we could verify and some of those were proven to be the
01:04:12.120 cardiff giant of course those were proven to be hoaxes um so i think a lot of that came out of
01:04:19.540 there was very much in the anti-modernist movement right what became evangelical christianity
01:04:26.820 there was very much an idea that we need to scientifically prove that everything in the
01:04:30.880 bible is literally true yes and and that led to some of that grasping um but as far as you know
01:04:38.860 there have never been found on earth fossils of human beings not verifiably not not verifiably
01:04:46.160 okay yeah do you believe that um since genesis 6 says this process of the sons of god impregnating
01:04:53.980 the daughters of man is still ongoing do you think that happens now i mean it certainly could
01:05:00.100 yeah it certainly it certainly could like we said it was 80 years ago we were doing
01:05:06.400 a similar sort of thing uh with the japanese emperor um there's no reason it couldn't there's
01:05:12.580 no reason the attendant later rituals with human sacrifice and things couldn't be going on because
01:05:17.940 they're just glimpses of it i mean what's what's interesting in the about the epstein files for
01:05:22.080 example yeah which to the extent i have read them are only hinting at various things and you have no
01:05:28.340 idea exactly what it means it is like reading an esoteric text it's like you're not read in so you
01:05:32.420 don't really interpret it clearly but there is a fixation on blood on genetics and there seems to
01:05:41.700 have been that for a well since the time that we're talking about like yeah blood human sacrifice
01:05:47.400 sex not just for pleasure but or reproduction but as a ritual like these are ongoing motifs
01:05:53.380 through human history alistair crowley is a real person yeah 100 but i mean the incas are doing the
01:05:58.340 same thing that i don't know some remote african tribe was doing with canaanites were doing it's
01:06:03.540 like everyone's doing the same thing is fixated on the same four or five themes i am by no means
01:06:09.880 a flat earther but early nasa there was some weird stuff with some of those scientists oh big time
01:06:14.500 yeah um yeah so that's definitely right that and and well so but i guess what i'm saying is if
01:06:23.260 different cultures at different times throughout history are focused on exactly the same kind of
01:06:31.020 non-obvious ideas right the spirit world breeds with people technology comes from the spirit world
01:06:37.880 blood is somehow magical human sacrifice is like the source of power like who would who would think
01:06:45.820 of these things like right this isn't a coincidence that just what i'm saying that they're rooted in
01:06:50.340 some kind of reality that right and it's and it's a it's a real like i said that you're you're going
01:06:57.080 to embody and participate in something right spiritually and as christianity has receded
01:07:04.320 and been lost in quote-unquote western countries right we should expect more and more of that to
01:07:11.940 come intruding back in because that's the other option frame no you would expect something brand
01:07:18.000 new and like people would think of like a new religious expression that isn't based on human
01:07:22.760 sacrifice but they never have right well if it was just humans making it up that's what i'm saying
01:07:26.960 yeah so it's obvious it's obvious to me i mean i'm not a priest unlike you so maybe this like
01:07:33.920 i'm just figuring this out but like clearly human sacrifice does bring dark power to the people who
01:07:40.640 commit it yes like duh yes they they yeah they weren't doing this stuff because it didn't work
01:07:46.740 they were having some kind of experience they were having some kind of right something was
01:07:53.380 happening there so witchcraft is real yeah and and when you read just purely pagan sources
01:08:00.820 right that they're kind of honest about it right and and this stuff is so we've we've received the
01:08:09.340 classics through the enlightenment which means we purge all the not just anything quote-unquote
01:08:18.020 supernatural but even religious elements there are still people publishing books talking about
01:08:23.300 how plato and aristotle were not religious right you know they represent these sort of because the
01:08:29.920 the figures of the Enlightenment sort of recast the ancient philosophers as
01:08:34.880 versions of them,
01:08:36.440 you know,
01:08:36.840 and since they had rejected the religion of their time,
01:08:39.960 well,
01:08:40.260 clearly someone like Plato or Aristotle can't have accepted the religion of
01:08:44.040 their time.
01:08:44.120 They were like enthusiastic polytheists.
01:08:46.060 Yes.
01:08:46.360 Yeah.
01:08:46.660 Aristotle's school was in a temple of Apollo,
01:08:48.900 right?
01:08:50.400 They were on board.
01:08:52.000 They,
01:08:52.120 they nuanced things,
01:08:53.460 right?
01:08:54.180 But I mean,
01:08:55.360 in,
01:08:55.620 in Plato's dialogue,
01:08:56.600 Socrates talks about how he has this,
01:08:58.620 this demon,
01:08:59.320 this demon,
01:08:59.920 this spirit that dwells within him and whispers wisdom to his soul
01:09:03.800 right yeah there's no you know it's christians who come along and say that's a bad thing 0.84
01:09:12.160 right and then post-christian enlightenment people say oh well that's silly so we'll just
01:09:16.760 yeah it's not a thing but they're very honest about it right i mean ancient authors are very
01:09:23.040 honest what's happening at the the bacchanalia the actual bacchanalia is people are being
01:09:28.540 possessed by the backing by these spirits and participating in in drug and alcohol induced
01:09:35.760 orgies right in in public so these feasts again the point of it is not just sex for pleasure
01:09:42.880 let's go get laid the point of it is to commune with with demons right it is part of the yes 0.98
01:09:47.740 these spirits are possessing them right taking possession of them taking over their body and
01:09:54.140 participating in these things that's what they say they were doing well that's i think of the
01:09:59.200 remaining world religions that we know about that are practiced in public only haitian voodoo and
01:10:04.620 african voodoo is honest about that talks that openly about talks that openly about some forms
01:10:09.560 of hinduism but yeah okay they aren't prevalent in the west right outside of right yeah but
01:10:15.680 certainly in haiti like there's human sacrifice it's denied and in the united states media for
01:10:20.640 whatever reason but it's to talk to any haitian about it it happens yeah oh it's the center of
01:10:26.060 their religion yeah right and but the point of it is not just to kill kids for its own sake the 0.51
01:10:31.380 point of it is to receive spiritual power yeah yeah and i mean i'm down in southern louisiana
01:10:37.980 so i'm not that far from and that still goes on i mean of course yeah yeah so
01:10:44.180 um what are like what are we to understand about the nephilim now
01:10:50.740 yeah i mean yeah i i think it is this possibility that's at the end of that chain of
01:11:00.100 yielding to sin and wickedness right this is the the anti-saint right right this is this is
01:11:09.220 what happens when we not only don't find our full humanity in, in Christ, but give up
01:11:19.240 our humanity in favor of something else, um, that, that twists and distorts our humanity.
01:11:29.280 Um, and so, yeah, it is, it is this dark possibility and there are people out there
01:11:37.200 who have gone that that far i sometimes get asked as someone who is that far gone can they repent
01:11:44.400 right can they turn back and it's sort of well with god all things are possible right like i
01:11:48.640 don't i don't see how but with god all things are possible right um but an awareness that that that
01:11:56.560 is a dark possibility and that that it is something that happens there are people doing this i said
01:12:03.200 not long after the full epstein files got released i said uh on my podcast i said well we now
01:12:08.560 know that the world is is uh run by demon worshiping pederast sort of like it has been
01:12:16.840 since the roman empire yes or before right and christians were able to operate right during 0.65
01:12:24.040 that time in a world that you know was was uh that was how it how it operated so
01:12:32.380 um i i think it's good to be free of some of our delusions yes right in this regard and
01:12:39.960 not being aware of the spiritual world or ignoring it or denying it doesn't make it
01:12:46.140 stop existing yes it's sort of like walking through a minefield under fire and just denying
01:12:51.080 that there's a war happening yes you're just going to end up being a casualty right of sort
01:12:57.980 of the spiritual warfare and things that are going on all around you that you refuse to see
01:13:03.760 it also seems to have i mean the world that you describe pre-flood is a world that's just given
01:13:11.320 itself over to rule by demons yeah and the manifestation everyone has come on board
01:13:17.260 everyone's come on board there's no meaningful resistance to it
01:13:21.180 technology has reached its you know kind of impossibly high place that technology itself
01:13:28.640 was a gift from demons it's anti-human it's anti-god and then god destroys the world
01:13:36.980 i mean it starts over yeah yeah so what does that have implications for the moment we're living in 0.73
01:13:44.000 on the brink of ai well i mean every everywhere in uh this is true in second temple jewish
01:13:51.800 literature it's true in the new testament when they're talking about the end right the end of
01:13:56.560 the world uh christ's glorious appearing right when that ends it's always compared to the days
01:14:04.780 of noah yeah right it's always referred to as and when saint peter responds which why is he taking
01:14:14.980 so long to return right with all the suffering and all the evil in the world uh saint peter's
01:14:20.460 answer is that the the uh god is being patient and giving time the maximal time for repentance
01:14:26.180 but the world has reached a point and can and will reach a point again where no one's interested in
01:14:34.120 that opportunity anymore. Right. And that's when the end will come because there's no point in
01:14:40.840 delaying it at that point. But I think it's, it's important that people understand that
01:14:47.160 the way salvation, even in Christian circles gets talked about a lot is it's salvation from the
01:14:53.640 world. Right. And I don't want someone to take from this conversation that, oh, okay, well,
01:14:59.940 you know i could die and go to heaven and get away from all this yeah the world's
01:15:04.340 yeah going to hell and the great escape but the salvation begins here right you you can
01:15:12.780 be saved from that now that sort of spectrum of sin we talked about right you don't have to ride
01:15:20.140 it all the way to the end you can be set free from it at any point right that slavery in this
01:15:26.180 world, this is the purpose of Christ's church, right, is to offer the other answer, right,
01:15:32.000 the other way, the way toward becoming truly human, being set free from that, right, in
01:15:38.400 this world, and then, right, enjoying a world that's free from that beyond this life and
01:15:44.780 eternity.
01:15:45.720 But both of those are included in what salvation is and what's on offer.
01:15:53.760 so i mean how does it make you feel personally as you see the world moving in a way that's just
01:16:03.360 more explicitly evil and the leadership of the world becoming just sort of openly demonic yeah
01:16:10.100 does that strike fear into you or um not it doesn't strike fear into me because i think
01:16:20.480 i think it's honest now i don't think it's different i think it's honest i think it's
01:16:29.260 revealed yeah now right because i don't think any of this just suddenly restarted no like in 1968
01:16:36.460 no no that's there is this sort of popular narrative that everything was beautiful from
01:16:41.500 the end of world war ii until about 1968 and that's just not true at all that's um and so
01:16:48.860 So it being now out there, right, now provides a number of opportunities for helping people, right?
01:16:59.240 I deal with actual individual people, individual lives every day, right, in the church.
01:17:05.080 And being confronted by the fact that spiritual evil is real can be the shock that brings someone to, oh, God is real.
01:17:20.660 Salvation is something I need to find.
01:17:22.860 I think that's often the case.
01:17:24.140 These patterns in my life aren't just bad habits that I could kick anytime I want, but there's something going on in my life that I need to be set free from.
01:17:31.880 Right?
01:17:32.360 And that's going to require some things of me.
01:17:35.080 right and require some changes and require some healing from god beyond myself right and and
01:17:41.560 so there is this now opportunity here that when everybody sort of thought everything was okay and
01:17:48.380 they were okay and everything was fine right you had to try and convince somebody that there was
01:17:53.480 a problem you don't have to do that so much now no right um and so so i think there's an opportunity
01:18:00.540 for a lot of people to help be helped to find freedom right to find salvation to transform
01:18:06.460 their lives so i i choose to look at it that way yes rather than the other i think that's
01:18:13.800 the right way to look at it yeah what so what is your advice when someone comes to you in bondage
01:18:19.680 like what what is the process for being set free yeah so i i think the the very first part is you
01:18:27.000 have to become part of something and submit yourself to something bigger than yourself.
01:18:33.260 Right? So in my case, obviously that's, that's the church, right? Because again,
01:18:38.520 you're not just an individual out there, right? Your, your brain is not just closed in this box
01:18:44.800 and you're just doing your own thing. You're participating in these spiritual realities,
01:18:49.140 whether you like to or not. Right? And so you have to submit yourself to something,
01:18:53.920 to being transformed by something and that involves becoming part of a community
01:18:59.720 right sharing bonds with other people that community brings accountability
01:19:04.360 right it brings a change of life right because you you can't live a life in isolation aristotle
01:19:12.900 said for someone to live alone they have to be either a beast or a god yeah um so you know you
01:19:21.680 You have to find this life in community.
01:19:24.400 It's, as I was talking about, you find this transformation through participating in what
01:19:30.280 God is doing in the world.
01:19:31.380 Well, God is loving someone.
01:19:34.180 I have to be with that person and love them, right?
01:19:37.240 God is having compassion.
01:19:38.720 I have to be with that person, have compassion for them and be kind for them.
01:19:43.560 It's not something you could practice off by yourself.
01:19:46.760 Definitely not something you could practice on the internet, right?
01:19:49.360 um but and so you need to you need to become a part of that and then within that you you need
01:19:57.420 to form spiritual relationships with within the orthodox church that we have the idea of spiritual
01:20:02.380 fatherhood that's very important where you have a person who you trust deeply right who you sort of
01:20:09.100 open up and bury your soul to right who you uh someone other than yourself who you say this is
01:20:15.060 what i think i should do am i right you know uh uh should i right where where you can get feedback
01:20:23.120 and have this ongoing relationship of guidance right yes as you work through these things
01:20:28.340 because this isn't a snap it isn't you say a prayer it isn't even you get baptized and now
01:20:33.840 everything's great right this is this is a long process of of working your way back down that
01:20:41.440 that road and then getting onto the right road and moving in a positive direction but it's
01:20:47.620 available to everyone right if you're willing to right come and participate in it but it's not as
01:20:55.340 simple as an altar call during a church service yeah and and we know that right that's why i had
01:21:01.260 uh i have a friend who was uh um assemblies of god pastor and i asked him once did you write the
01:21:06.920 day you got saved the date in your in front of your bible he said oh yeah i wrote all of them
01:21:11.440 because he'd go forward and then he'd go back to his life and be like oh i don't think that took
01:21:17.340 let me go do it again right and so it is this ongoing thing right it is uh adam was created
01:21:25.400 to begin right this life of growth toward god right that that doesn't just happen throughout
01:21:33.480 this life but stretches on into eternity um because god's infinite so we're not going to
01:21:38.860 get to the point where you know uh now i know everything about god now right it's it's sharing
01:21:45.760 in god's life forever has there ever been any other society at scale that didn't put god at
01:21:53.700 the center or gods at the center put its religious practice at the center of its civilization no no
01:22:00.280 it always happens right so they've recently covered that with a veneer of science oh no
01:22:06.020 we're insisting this isn't a religion it's a secular ideology okay you know but but there's
01:22:14.860 you know there's an ideology there's ritual activity there are sacred texts there are all
01:22:18.900 the things religions have right you know that's yeah so that's never happened but but has there
01:22:24.740 ever been a society that was as um dishonest about it as ours no no i think that's the
01:22:35.540 there's a lot of spiritual delusion and self-delusion um and that comes out of there
01:22:44.640 there was a move in the the 18th and 19th centuries where sort of deliberately uh spiritual
01:22:54.080 iconography religious iconography religious symbols and practices were taken over by the state
01:23:00.100 i noticed happened in europe first i mean you could go to the capital see the
01:23:04.000 the uh deification of george washington and yeah sort of all of these things all the weird masonic
01:23:13.000 symbols and our currency like what is that being attributed to this political stuff right and sort
01:23:18.580 of the formation of you know we're not going to be we're not going to be uh sola scriptura
01:23:25.480 protestants talking about the original text we're going to be all about the constitution and what
01:23:31.400 did the framers have in mind right we're just going to switch this all over into the the
01:23:37.560 political realm and then as politics is kind of devolved it's you know become even more sort of
01:23:45.080 ephemeral than that right um and so we're not willing to admit that our rituals are rituals
01:23:51.160 uh we're not willing to admit you know the the way the way most people talk about the economy
01:23:57.380 is essentially the way ancient people would talk about a god what do you mean that's
01:24:04.000 flesh that out that's fast the the economy makes decisions the economy favors this group over that
01:24:12.980 group uh we need to do this and that to sort of appease the economy right make sacrifices right
01:24:20.020 uh so there are all these you know we don't call it mammon you know but then the it's it's the
01:24:26.500 same kind of it's fulfilling the same kind of the same kind of idea right and uh other for war
01:24:34.840 right we don't call it aries we don't talk about a war god right but we we talk about national
01:24:41.820 events it needs to be fed it needs to be supplied with right sacrifices need to be made and right
01:24:48.520 And so it's all the same ways of thinking
01:24:51.680 because they're built into what it means to be human.
01:24:54.020 Yes.
01:24:55.080 And so if you remove overt religion,
01:24:59.420 you just get covert.
01:25:01.040 Yes.
01:25:01.780 Religion. 1.00
01:25:03.860 Which is, but always a species of like 1.00
01:25:06.820 what the Canaanites practiced 0.96
01:25:07.980 and what the Mayas practiced. 0.81
01:25:10.180 It amounts to the same thing.
01:25:11.280 It's paganism. 0.86
01:25:12.300 It's human sacrifice once again, 0.87
01:25:14.200 whether it's abortion or war or whatever,
01:25:16.220 it's killing people in order to get peace and prosperity and power right right what do you i
01:25:23.060 mean how should christians approach that well it's it's a lot of them seem to ratify it a lot of the
01:25:29.940 leaders seem to be like yeah no this is a good thing unfortunately yes yeah that's and a lot of
01:25:37.560 religion has been secularized it's a bizarre phrase right but in the united states it kind
01:25:45.360 of has i mean it's it started with the more leftward-leaning religious bodies yes becoming
01:25:51.600 sort of just overtly political and oriented toward this world um and but it has now gradually
01:26:00.540 come to include a lot of the more rightward-leaning religious bodies where sort of the
01:26:07.060 especially the eschatology of christianity um the the the ultimate goal right of blessedness
01:26:16.740 is removed from sharing in the life of god himself or the life of the world to come
01:26:23.980 and it's made very this worldly right so it's prosperity now yes right and whether it's
01:26:30.820 It's a mainline liberal Protestant denomination saying prosperity now in the sense of we need to help the poor and raise their standard of living or whether it's because that's what the gospel is, right?
01:26:46.900 Or it's a prosperity preacher, right, in a more socially conservative church saying, you know, give your seed and, you know, you'll get back 10 times, you know, the money and you'll have all this, right?
01:27:01.820 It's taking that and moving it all, right?
01:27:04.760 Don't build up treasures in heaven, build them up here on earth.
01:27:08.600 That's sort of the goal, right?
01:27:12.580 and uh that is secularization in the in the true sense right the the first sort of thinker to talk
01:27:21.400 about uh the the seculum was uh saint augustine in city of god and he was using that city of god
01:27:29.700 famously where the title comes from he's living at the time of the collapse of the western roman
01:27:35.280 empire which from their perspective was the end of the world yes certainly the end of the world
01:27:39.580 as they knew it, right? And saying, him saying, so yes, there is this city of man, right? There
01:27:47.540 is this empire. There are these kings. There is this government. There's also the city of God,
01:27:52.800 and the city of God exists eternally and is steadfast, right? And he described what was
01:28:00.440 going on outside as, as the secular, the secularum, right? The, which included in it's not just, uh,
01:28:09.180 the world, but also the idea of an age as in it's constantly shifting, right? There's sort of this
01:28:16.960 cyclical pattern, nations rise and fall, all these things happen. There's a sort of churn, right? And
01:28:22.720 that's but that's outside of the place where god is and so a lot of these formerly sort of overtly
01:28:32.980 religious movements have just become engaged in that cycle and you can watch them it's like the
01:28:38.460 the the virtually in the news cycle now right in terms of what they're quote-unquote preaching
01:28:45.280 right and coming out and weighing in on it's just sort of whatever's going on in the news cycle
01:28:50.960 right now right and this constant sort of churn and they're making these prophecies that don't
01:28:55.500 come true and oh well don't worry about that here's the next one and it just you know continues
01:29:02.680 in this in this never anything but it's not it's divorced from the actual spiritual reality of who
01:29:11.420 god is who christ is right what god is doing in the world those questions aren't even asked
01:29:17.160 right it's more about um asking god to bless what i'm doing in the world
01:29:23.620 or just asserting that god is blessing it is behind what i'm doing in the world
01:29:28.100 um what do you think of that well there's there's a famous quote from abraham lincoln
01:29:33.800 during the civil war where a reporter asked him if he thought god was on the side of the union
01:29:39.540 yeah and he said the question isn't whether god's on our side the question is whether we're on god
01:29:43.380 exactly and that's the core question right the core question that anybody who's going to call
01:29:52.240 themselves a christian should be asking is what is god doing in the world right now where is he
01:29:58.020 active in the world right now i need to get on board with that i need to become a part of that
01:30:04.160 not what do i want what do i think should happen and i'm going to try and get you know a whole
01:30:11.800 bunch of people to try and pray and convince God to do, you know, or I'm going to claim and assert
01:30:17.100 that God is going to do what I think he should do. Right. Um, that's, that's not only kind of a,
01:30:26.340 a gross inversion of Christianity, but it's essentially the way ancient magic and sorcery 0.52
01:30:31.080 worked. Really? Right. That's what separates sort of your, when you're talking about ancient
01:30:37.780 religion right in the in the pagan world where you're talking about the greco-roman world or
01:30:42.640 the ancient near east the the division between magic and just sort of pagan religion right is
01:30:48.720 that in pagan religion they thought that the the gods the spirits they were worshiping sort of
01:30:55.680 remained free so you could make a sacrifice you make an offering to them you try to cajole them
01:31:00.540 into doing what you want but they could say no they could decide they don't favor you right you
01:31:05.700 read the iliad the gods could just decide to switch sides at the middle of the war um they
01:31:11.960 sort of remain free with magic the idea of ritual magic is that you get by doing the ritual in the
01:31:20.080 correct way saying the correct things doing the correct things you get the spiritual entity to do
01:31:26.180 you kind of compel it or command it to do what you want it to do that makes you god god of god
01:31:32.200 of those right demons yeah and so even when someone identifies as a christian if they're out
01:31:41.460 there trying to say well if you do xyz right if we get x number of people praying if we do it
01:31:49.580 then god will that's essentially magic right the the the whole idea of christian prayer and worship
01:32:00.960 And the Christian life is that God is transforming me.
01:32:05.080 Yeah.
01:32:06.080 Not that I'm changing God or God to change it'd be different.
01:32:10.920 Right.
01:32:11.180 Or do something he wouldn't do otherwise.
01:32:12.720 Or bossing God around.
01:32:13.720 Yeah.
01:32:14.540 Yeah.
01:32:16.760 So how much genuine Christian practice do you see?
01:32:22.320 I mean, I don't want to be mean.
01:32:23.720 Um, I, I, no, I think on, on, if you go to the level of the average person, the average
01:32:33.160 Christian person, regardless of what denomination, what church, what group they identify with,
01:32:42.180 right. 0.74
01:32:42.560 Or are part of, or where they go on a Sunday morning.
01:32:45.700 Right.
01:32:46.480 I think the average Christian person is trying to follow Christ as best they know how.
01:32:53.080 Yes. 1.00
01:32:53.720 sometimes they're wrong, right?
01:32:56.700 We can get things wrong.
01:32:57.820 We get that, right?
01:32:58.580 They're misled.
01:32:59.940 They've been lied to by leaders, right?
01:33:01.840 All that happens.
01:33:03.260 But in their heart and in their soul,
01:33:05.260 that's what they're trying to do.
01:33:06.900 So that level of Christian practice,
01:33:10.240 there's a lot, I think, right?
01:33:13.660 If we're looking top down,
01:33:16.320 that's where things get a little more troubling, right?
01:33:22.080 In terms of, in terms of, in terms of leadership.
01:33:29.280 Now, obviously I'm, I mean, I can't sit here as an Orthodox priest and pretend I'm not, you know, biased toward the Orthodox church.
01:33:36.380 Yes, of course.
01:33:37.000 That's, you know, on the table.
01:33:38.300 Let me frame it differently.
01:33:39.540 When was the last time, how do you experience God, like actual God's work day to day?
01:33:45.620 Yeah, well, so there's both within the services of the church.
01:33:52.080 right because i i see god very much working in that way and it's not just the actual quote
01:34:01.280 unquote worship service but the time spent afterward and fellowship together the life of
01:34:08.520 the community right um i see that continuously right i also i mean i i hear people's confessions
01:34:18.320 and confession is done a little differently in the orthodox church than the roman catholic
01:34:23.580 church because we have this as i said spiritual fatherhood tradition um and so i've i've seen
01:34:30.160 people come through and come back from some really difficult and terrible things um like what
01:34:41.180 well i mean i i don't want to divulge anything no i mean not yeah yeah yeah specifics no names
01:34:48.840 but like what kind of things you're talking about people who have had the kind of traumatic
01:34:52.300 childhoods that you see as the origin of a villain in a movie yeah yeah like for real yeah
01:34:58.400 yeah um that you know and and people who have gone down really dark roads of addiction
01:35:04.380 and violence and
01:35:06.520 and come back from
01:35:08.760 committing violence from that yeah
01:35:10.160 um
01:35:11.800 and uh
01:35:14.360 and marriage is being saved
01:35:16.420 right after things that
01:35:18.640 should have destroyed them
01:35:19.720 um you've seen that you think yeah
01:35:22.440 and so
01:35:23.880 that all
01:35:26.960 happens right it really
01:35:28.900 does you've seen marriage just totally
01:35:31.120 blown up that are saved yes
01:35:33.140 Yes. And it takes time and it takes a lot of work and both of the people have to be on board, but, but there is healing there on offer from God. Um, part of the, part of the failure of a lot of Christianity, um, broadly is that an environment has been created.
01:35:58.200 i think unintentionally where people are afraid to open up and even talk about things like that
01:36:03.660 yeah i know with anyone it's sort of we go to church on sunday we put on our sunday best
01:36:08.500 we all act like everything's fine when it's definitely not fine
01:36:13.080 and you know this is why a meetings are so wonderful yeah because there's no pretense
01:36:20.660 like that at all. And I say to people about confession, especially if they've come into
01:36:29.260 the Orthodox Church and they're from a background that doesn't do it. There's a lot of trepidation
01:36:33.860 and what is this? And I'm scared. And how can I tell you these things? And you're a priest. I
01:36:38.900 respect you. I don't want you to know these things. And I try and tell them, each of us
01:36:43.400 walks through life thinking we're the most disgusting, perverted, weird, disturbed individual
01:36:50.520 to ever walk the planet right and if you're actually willing to open up with other people 0.86
01:36:57.000 about that you find out that most of them are dealing with the same stuff yeah and struggling
01:37:02.080 with the same things and the power of opening up about that in a place that's designed to bring
01:37:09.520 you healing right when we we say over and over again in the orthodox church that the church is
01:37:14.840 a hospital not a courtroom yeah it's not about finding who's guilty of what right it's about
01:37:21.140 helping people in various stages of woundedness some of them almost dead right trying to help
01:37:26.540 them find healing right and restoration to life there's incredible power to that to just that
01:37:33.020 honesty right of telling someone finally this thing that i've been hiding from everyone even
01:37:40.440 myself when i had managed it for decades you know um saying that out loud right admitting it and then
01:37:49.480 talking about okay how are we going to work on this how are we gonna gonna make things right
01:37:54.600 how are we going to start moving toward toward healing and even restoration a priest for almost
01:37:59.080 20 years have the kind of confessions you received changed are the problems that people are struggling
01:38:06.120 with different from what they were and what are the what are the common ones again without being
01:38:10.940 yeah i mean honest honestly they've they've changed less than you'd think but there's there's
01:38:17.240 a pattern when you hear confessions usually the first six months to a year uh you kind of get
01:38:25.460 tested as a priest right yeah so you get a lot of like oh i was stuck in traffic and i cussed at the
01:38:32.020 guy who you know cut me off and it's like i'm sure you did but i'm also sure there's a lot more
01:38:37.900 we'll let it be we'll let it be for now right you get those and so that's that's the confession
01:38:44.080 right yeah and it's sort of those kind of things you know you know oh i was late for work and i
01:38:48.920 made up a story you know those kind of things um but they're testing right they're seeing if it's
01:38:54.600 safe yes right they're pushing the limits and then i shot a man in reno just to watch him die 0.79
01:38:59.060 Yeah. And then at a certain point, right, the real stuff comes out, sometimes with tears.
01:39:04.820 Yeah.
01:39:05.400 Sometimes with people you'd never expect to see tears from.
01:39:07.960 Oh.
01:39:10.000 And it sort of finally unloads. And a lot of it is the same stuff. A lot of people are—now, it takes sort of different forms.
01:39:19.260 Like, so, for example, sexual sin used to be a lot more about actually doing things with other people.
01:39:26.940 Right.
01:39:26.960 right and now a lot of it is distortions and things going on due to the internet pornography
01:39:33.740 on the internet and that kind of thing and so and so that's changed that yes you've got people
01:39:39.860 that this is one of the scariest statistics the average age at which a person is first exposed
01:39:47.060 to hardcore pornography on the internet in the united states today is eight
01:39:50.820 yeah i don't know why no one's in prison for that it's so weird yeah
01:39:56.960 so well there's too much money being made off pornography i'm aware yeah that's and again the
01:40:02.580 economy is kind of god now right yeah um but so yeah so that's right and dealing with that has
01:40:13.620 to be dealt with in a different way that's not i went too far with my girlfriend on a friday night
01:40:18.320 right there's that that's got to be unwound in a different way people sense intuitively do you
01:40:24.320 think that there's something disordered and bad about porn or is it something that they learn at
01:40:30.080 your church and they're like oh i guess it was bad no they know they know um a lot of people who are
01:40:37.080 dealing with sexual sin and that kind of thing they will come and when they're ready to talk
01:40:43.480 about it will say yeah i first saw pornography at some absurdly young age yeah and and usually
01:40:52.080 there's an escalation pattern with it yes starts out being sort of quote-unquote normal pornography
01:40:58.260 not that pornography is normal but yes and then moves into darker and darker places more and more
01:41:04.760 uh dysfunctional places um but yeah they can they generally have an idea of that but that
01:41:12.800 that is that is breaking a lot of a lot of people really um you see that a lot yeah yeah and and
01:41:22.540 that is a lot of people's issues with sexuality uh with gender identity a lot of it is traceable
01:41:32.260 back to some of that early exposure to really that material i believe it and it creates this
01:41:39.120 confusion yes um because yeah and people's first sexual experiences being divorced from their own
01:41:48.660 body yeah right causes this distortion right that that takes a lot to unwind and and part of the
01:41:58.280 unwinding of that is having a community right where they're spending time as themselves right
01:42:07.360 in their own actual body
01:42:09.500 talking to other people
01:42:11.460 who are sitting there
01:42:12.480 in front of them.
01:42:14.260 I mean, it sounds absurd, 0.99
01:42:15.780 but for Zoomers,
01:42:18.640 that's a rare experience now. 0.99
01:42:22.900 A lot of them socialize
01:42:24.300 completely on the internet.
01:42:27.680 The people they identify
01:42:29.020 as their closest friends
01:42:29.960 are people they only know online.
01:42:33.060 Man.
01:42:34.220 They have boyfriends
01:42:34.940 and girlfriends
01:42:35.380 who they've never met.
01:42:37.360 in person very common gen alpha it's even more common
01:42:41.840 and so helping them get out of that and into a community of actual people who care about them
01:42:48.700 who are interacting with them in the real world uh is the is a huge first step in sort of bringing
01:42:55.900 people back to to reality do you find that pornography is a bigger problem than addiction
01:43:03.140 um more common yeah i mean there's an addictive element too right yeah i mean yeah i guess but
01:43:12.480 yes then drugs or alcohol the drugs or alcohol yes really yes is it interesting so that's a
01:43:19.940 huge part of your ministry it sounds like it's uh you don't hear people talk about it very often
01:43:24.680 it's all men and most women most women yes men don't think that but
01:43:33.140 are you ever shocked i mean by this part of your job do you ever hear things that shock you um
01:43:39.680 so i i can't say i've never heard something that shocked me but when i was shocked it was
01:43:47.020 more the particular person right right um part of part of what you have to do i think as a priest
01:43:56.840 Part of what, honestly, I think we all ultimately have to do this, is we have to become deeply acquainted with the worst parts of ourselves.
01:44:05.720 Yes, I agree with that.
01:44:06.960 Yes.
01:44:07.540 And if you're really acquainted with that and you really know what you're capable of in a negative way, given the right or wrong circumstances, you can understand more.
01:44:23.220 Right.
01:44:23.860 And you don't get that shock reaction.
01:44:25.060 my my um my dad told me the story that stuck with me when he was a kid
01:44:31.080 he was watching uh the footage of the nuremberg trials
01:44:35.640 and he asked my grandfather you know what do you think of these horrible things these people did
01:44:43.140 what do you think of this and my grandfather said there but for the grace of god go i amen
01:44:48.160 and usually people say that to mean like oh some accident right yeah yeah you know unfortunate
01:44:54.220 a thing happened to someone oh god preserved me yeah car crash but he meant without god's grace
01:45:00.700 i could have done all those things 100 i could have gone down that same road right um and really
01:45:06.920 coming to terms with that then i think is a prerequisite not only for our own repentance
01:45:12.960 right and our own getting free of that but being able to help others you know and being able to
01:45:18.900 hear where they're coming from, right, and understand how they ended up there and trying
01:45:23.900 to help them, give them the hand up out of the ditch. Amazing. Last question, which is totally
01:45:30.740 unrelated, but it just seems like you might know the answer. There's this, and most people will
01:45:35.200 not be interested in this, but there's this really interesting moment in the Gospel of Matthew where
01:45:41.860 Jesus is talking about sin and how it can all be forgiven, but the one sin that can't be forgiven
01:45:46.660 as sins against the Holy Spirit.
01:45:49.620 Yeah, the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.
01:45:50.720 Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.
01:45:51.900 Yeah.
01:45:52.060 What does that mean?
01:45:53.360 Yeah, so what happened just before that
01:45:57.880 was that Christ was working miracles
01:46:02.000 and teaching and healing.
01:46:03.160 Yep.
01:46:03.900 And a certain group of his opponents
01:46:06.420 among the Jewish religious leadership
01:46:09.000 accused him of being demon-possessed. 1.00
01:46:12.400 Correct.
01:46:13.120 Right.
01:46:14.000 Said that the spirit by which he was doing this
01:46:16.420 was actually one of the names for Baal, right? 0.54
01:46:19.100 Yeah, Baalsbub or whatever, yeah.
01:46:22.260 And so... 0.79
01:46:23.580 He was casting on demons with demons.
01:46:25.400 Right. 0.67
01:46:26.200 And so that's why it's blasphemy of the Holy Spirit
01:46:28.780 is because they're calling the Spirit of God
01:46:30.700 a demonic spirit.
01:46:32.740 Yeah.
01:46:33.600 Right?
01:46:33.860 And so if you're not willing to accept
01:46:39.320 and submit yourself to God and to his Spirit
01:46:41.640 and what he's doing in the world,
01:46:43.840 you can't be forgiven.
01:46:45.100 it. You can't be healed. They were rejecting, rather than seeing what God was doing in the
01:46:52.700 world, which was Christ himself and what he was doing in the world, rather than seeing that and
01:46:58.100 trying to get on board with that and be healed from their sin, they were rejecting it. So if you
01:47:05.260 reject Christ, if you reject God's provision for our sin and our wickedness, then you can't be
01:47:13.920 healed from by definition right but yeah definitionally yeah father thank you for that
01:47:19.280 that was fascinating yeah and great thank you for having me thanks