#22 From Faith to Freedom: MythVision’s Derek Lambert’s Search for Truth

[Music] I haven't met many men that scare me like my own father. >> Your dad pointed a gun at you. >> I'm getting clean. I'm at an AA meeting cuz that's what my dad was at, Alcoholics Anonymous, before I was 21. You're not even allowed to drink till you're 21, right? If I believe this, most the church is wrong. I got on my knees and they prayed over me and I accepted the Lord and I felt a euphoric changing experience and my whole experience that day was like this is home. We're now in a public school. I'm the nut job Jesus freak and I'm okay with it. So Jesus was like the perfect thing for me because he knew suffering. He understood trauma. He knew what it meant to feel for those who are weak. Every Christian that's going to watch this will go, "That's why. That's why you're down the dirty path you're on." Pastor of the church that they went to, yeah, called me up to go in there and do a meeting in front of five elders. >> It was like a court case type thing. I felt like Martin Luther. They silenced me and they corrected and told me, "You stop." They wanted to shut me up. >> It was punitive. >> And it it felt like I wasn't at home. So, I was on a path and I always have. I still am. I'm struggling with addiction. And I thought to myself, what if I'm wrong? What if I can't get my life together because what I believe is wrong? And I started to realize comparative mythology. I went back into looking into this, but I looked at it like in a good way, not as a gotcha, not as an anti-apologist. I looked at it going, you know what? If God, whatever that is, is expressing itself in different culture. >> I kind of feel like you're actually more saved now. >> Do you know what I mean? That's the question I always have for people is, you know, is it if you in the spirit of good versus evil, are you thinking God's on the good side and Satan's on the evil side or is God above the entire game? Buckle up everybody. The next three episodes of the Austin and Matt podcast are about to be barn burners. First up, we have Derek Lambert of the Myth Vision YouTube channel. He's got about 300,000 subs. Second, we have Neil Senlac of the Gnostic Informant. And third, we do a campfire sitdown with all four of us where we get to kick it for a little while and some some crazy stories come up. So, all of these episodes are standalone. You could listen to one, two, or three. It doesn't matter. But if ancient Christianity and ancient texts is kind of an interest for you, I think you're really going to like all three. And the reason that I like these guys, spoiler alert, they're not Christians any longer, but they were Christians before. And I found that if you grew up in a Christian household and you find out about somebody who was a Christian and now no longer is a Christian, there's this cognitive dissonance that hits where you tend to other them. You tend to say there must have something must have happened. What happened? Right? And so I wanted to ask him what happened because to me, my God of the universe takes on all comers. He's not afraid of information. He's not afraid to find out what happened. In fact, if you're the champion of the universe, you say, "Go steal man everything. Go learn all the information you can. Why? Because I created all of it and I'm in charge of all of it. He doesn't say, "Don't look behind the curtain, Dorothy. Don't listen. Don't look there. I'm Oz the Great and Powerful." It's very insecure. And honestly, to me, it's tanamount to book burning, which has been done in the past. And I disagree with I think that more information is always better in these kinds of situations. And these guys know some information. They fall asleep reading ancient scripture on a regular basis. They've been studying it for over a decade and they read in Greek, they read in Hebrew, um they know all the church fathers like their pen pals. Like it is unbelievable to hear their stories. And so I was fascinated. I was riveted. I didn't know 90% of the stuff that they're talking about. And also it gets what gets interwoven is their story. They're both former drug addicts. Derek is 10 years sober and now he's married with a kid and he's loving life and he's doing a great job, I think, at pursuing truth. So, I really hope that you enjoy these episodes. I certainly enjoyed talking to these guys and I think they're wonderful people. Welcome to the Austin and Matt podcast. >> You're kind of taking Islam on head on right now. Does that give you any pause or like is is that is that scary at all to you? Cuz I've seen a lot of guys online right now that are actually trying to say you shouldn't be scared of Islam because well, for one, you need to be a grown man and have some balls, I guess. But, you know, like that's that's the thing you're afraid of is Islam. I guess you'd be afraid of Islamic guys that have balls that are going to come invade your court and so you're not being afraid of that. Like how do you think about that? >> Well, uh my dad was a Green Beret in the special forces and so he's crazy. So I I'm scared of him. Okay. But I haven't met many men that scare me like my own father. And so I have a good >> I can imagine >> I'm baptized in fire, so to speak, but he also went to combat against the Taliban. He was over in the Middle East when 911 happened. He was active in these combat situations. He's a medic, Halo instructor, hand to hand combat, all these types of things. He was he's really badass, right? So, um I've been raised to fight, to defend myself, to not let bullies run over you, that kind of stuff. And I'm not afraid to critique Islam. Um, if anything, the biggest thing I'm hesitant on is not trying to offend them because I do have empathy that my dad doesn't have. >> Uh, and that came from, I think, my Jesus years in Christianity of humble, meek, turn the other cheek. These kinds of uh, lessons that I did absorb have made me try to empathize because I do try to put the shoe of whoever >> on that I'm that the other person. I mean, if it's political, if it's religious, I literally try to understand it pisses people off because they want you to choose. You need to either this or that. But uh you actually you guys are interviewing me at a time where I literally just decided I've done content on Islam in the past, but I've decided it's time now to actually get into examples and show the data of the very specific legends or myths that are in the Quran that are you got two options. A real Gabriel angel in a cave gave this material to an illiterate prophet. They love to die on the hill of him being illiterate. And I'm like, man, I'd like my prophet to be, you know, literate. You know, I they don't see how that doesn't look good, but it's a defense mechanism, I think, for them to have an excuse for how he came up with this information. So, it's divine revelation. And for me, I'm like, your neighbors already had this material centuries prior. So why would you claim divine revelation when like the guy down the street and your own Quran I think in surah 18 or somewhere off the top of my head I'm not sure it they literally thou do protest too much because the Quran itself says that people were accusing him of being taught by human by a guy and their excuse was well he couldn't have because that person spoke a different language and didn't speak Arabic. That's your excuse that the guy has a foreign language and Syriak is in a way very close to the Arabic tongue of the time that Muhammad is on the scene and the legends of like dual cornine which is in the Quran the two-horned one that stuff is like literally coming from the Alexander romance in the Syriak Alexander romance material. >> Wait, walk me back. So which So you have Muhammad who Yeah. just walk me through like the foundation of Islam, what language he spoke and what the argument that you're saying. >> Well, he was Arabic. He was a Muslim or he was like the first uh if you will prophet, the last prophet really, but the first one that is put in the Quran together. He's the long he's the last on a long line of prophets. They claim the Bible as their pedigree. So, they say, you know, Adam was the first, then Abraham and all these guys, and they were all Muslims. Jesus was a Muslim. Okay? Uh he God had no son. these kinds of things, right? So, you're talking a seventh century debate when Christians had already been at each other's throats for 700, 600, 700 over did God, it was the son equal to the father. When Jesus died, since you claim he's God, did God die? Cuz when he died as God, did God die? Like there's these debates that were going on for a long time, >> right? So here is this this Arab man in Arabia who is in conversation with Christians and Jews. They are living down here. They are brushing shoulders. And of course you have Mecca and Medina and you have the various tribes, the Arab tribes that were there that he was part of and they're having their quarrels. So Christianity and and Judaism are no doubt pivotal and primary in how we should understand Islamic origins. Even though Zoroastrianism which are the Persians and such and other Arab probably mythologies and stuff are playing a role in the origins of the Quran and and their religion but primarily Jewish and Christian sources. This is why Jesus is talked about so much in it. Mary, Moses, various figures from the Bible. Now he comes along. He has a very strict monotheistic view. He wants to get rid of God having a son. There's all sorts of interesting stories that show up in the Quran that aren't in your Bible, but they are in known legends in Syriak and they're known stories like the infancy Gospel of Thomas, which had Jesus as a baby. One of the stories has him kill another boy and then bring the boy back to life. The badass Jesus. Okay. Like clearly didn't make it in your cannon, but you know, it's a cool, interesting, fun story. Another one has him turn clay birds into living birds. And you go, that's a very unique attribute in a story. Where did that come from? Well, we have very old second third century gospels and materials from Christians where they had Jesus as an infant turning clay birds into living birds. So, it's like, did the angel Gabriel need to really tell the guy or was this material passing along? And I work under a philosophy like Scooby-Doo. I personally go into every episode. You think demons, ghosts, monsters, humans tend to think all of these gods, demons, you know, spirits, angels, aliens, all of the things that are fantastic to me. Okay? And I come at it with the operation of going, "All right, I'm going to unmask." >> And at the end of every episode, Scooby-Doo, it's always a human. So, if you ever rewatch Scooby-Doo, consider that they always unmask and figure out who's really behind it. >> And for me, I'm always looking for that human fingerprint. Who is behind this? Because to me, God specifically in all of this literature is a reflection of the author that pinned the material. It's a mirror. If you want to know about the ancient people, you're you hear, "Well, thus sayeth the Lord," right? But really what you're getting is the man who wrote this down. You're getting his thoughts about what he perceives the world to be and he perceives the God or God's to understand. And often times if you take that approach, you'll realize even when you get to the Bible and we can get into some of this material that the God's environment is much like the human environment. God has a council. Heiser, Michael Heiser's point. So, I like to quote Christian scholars first before I get into the controversial ones that I prefer most of all because I think they're more consistent at the end of the day. But Heiser is a really bright guy. I interviewed him on my channel before he passed. >> Oh, yeah. He talks about the council, right? Well, that's exactly what the ancient near east and the ancient world had. King surrounded by a council of people on earth. Now, we don't live in a kingdom anymore. So, how do we perceive God? Is he still a king surrounded by a council? That would be easily something a human would write because that's how they had the world where they lived. And if you read about gods that are in regions that didn't have kings, they don't have councils, >> right? >> Okay. Well, what why is that? >> It always reflects the culture. >> Thank you. So, man is the measurement of all things as we talked about the the perception. That doesn't mean that like the cupid of your arm is the measurement of the universe. You can find interesting things in numbers. But it means everything that we know and do is all from our perception. Everything we absorb, everything we do is just going to be filtered through us. That's the only way to know and measure everything. It's the only way for us to try and ascertain anything. Divine revelation tries to go beyond that. Can we get back into right before we started this, you were telling us a story about how you got into YouTube and some of your Jesus years, but we cut it off really quickly because uh we thought I just thought this was such a cool I so I don't know how it ended. But will you will you go over that how you kind of talk about your Jesus years a little bit and then how you got on YouTube a little bit? >> Yeah. Uh I'll make it as quickly as possible because I know we would never leave this room with all the information today. Okay. like we you'd have to hit me up and we'd have to do this often. >> I was born in a family with my mother being Pentecostal. So, she was speaking in tongues, >> charismatic Christian. >> I grew up charismatic church >> and that was the house church that I eventually ended up in my first like real serious Christian church that I decided to go to. It was a house church, charismatic. Uh the the second coming is going to happen. Like there was vivid visions. We were casting out demons, speaking and praying over each other, laying on of hands, >> signs and wonders. >> Signs and wonders. >> Do you ever do you ever miss that? Do you ever miss the passion that comes from the Pentecostal church? >> Yeah. I mean, but I also >> there's something invigorating about it, isn't it? >> There is. I think it's more for me now. It's like there's a time when you're a kid where you're like, I miss those days. I didn't have responsibility. In a sense, Christianity was like um is like a naive state for me to be comfortable going, you know what? Everything's good. I felt like I had a force field on me. I felt like death wasn't going to bother me. Like you almost like feel like everything's just going to be okay. Once you start getting outside of that and you you start to think I don't think this is true and I don't think any of this it's a scarier world, right? >> How did how did that happen for you? >> Well, we maybe we travel to Jesus, right? And then kind of explain because yeah, you for you to get there, you kind of have to walk with me a little. >> Let's go. Yeah. >> Okay. So mom's a Pentecostal, dad's Catholic, but he's not like serious Catholic. Like he show up, you know, father, son, holy ghost, and did mass once in a blue. But then he met my mom and uh they had me. Dad was working at Boys of Cascade. He was in a factory and paper mill. And then he ended up joining the Rangers. He was at a house party and he saw uh military soldier Rangers jumping out of a aircraft of some sort. I think a helicopter in Grenada, Grenada, something like that. And he said, um, the commercial was something like, "You want to be the best of the best?" And of course, the narcissism tugs at all of us, right? Yeah. And he said, "I want to be the best." So, dad joined the Rangers, and he became a badass, airborne ranger. And then he uh we ended up moving from Washington State to North Carolina, Fort Bragg, and um I spent most of my life there, military brat. We I skipped Texas, but we can get into all these different places I live, but it's not relevant to the story. So I'm a young kid, dad's deployed somewhere in South America because he was seventh group and they they were Spanish speaking in that particular sector of his military career and uh he'd leave and we knew he was going to engage cartel. I we knew there was some dangerous stuff going on in V Venezuela. You being in Mexico City understand a little bit that there's some dangers that go on down there. Well, he's in South America and this is before modern times. This is like 90s into the early 2000s but mainly in the '9s. And um mom would take us to church and bribe me with golden corral cuz I'm an eater. And I remember listening to this boring guy behind the pulpit. I didn't care. But when we went to the little kids area, I'd hear this story about a guy on an ark with animals and you know Noah's Arc stories, but I didn't really take it serious. And my dad was an alcoholic, like severe alcoholic. So he's already extreme and he's already like he walks in the room and the oxygen gets sucked out and attention is always turned and you see him. So dad being that kind of person and then going into werewolf mode every night drinking and being derogatory and and sometimes violent but mostly derogatory and abusive that way. He'd black out. He'd say and do things. We're talking pistols going off the whole nine. Aimed at foreheads, the whole nine. like pretty insane radical stuff that went on throughout my childhood. I knew Trump >> Dad pointed a gun at you. >> Oh yeah. >> Black and he was blacked out. He didn't even know. So anything could have happened. But I was I had the Lord. Okay. So I stood in front of that that gun that he had at my mom at the time. This is youth my very very young young years. >> How old is >> I was probably 13. >> Okay. Maybe maybe 12, maybe somewhere around there. I don't know. But I was young and I was standing in front of mom and I was like, >> "You're gonna have to get me, dude." >> You know, uh there was one time he blacked out and he like fake committed suicide. Gun went off, lay down on the ground and walked in the garage and I saw dad on the ground and I thought to myself, "This is it. Now I'm losing it." Like there there was some trauma there, bro. There was some deep trauma. So Jesus was like the perfect thing for me because he knew suffering. He understood trauma. He knew what it meant to feel for those who are weak, who have no power. I didn't have power. My dad was powerful, right? And there was something about that philosophy that grabbed me. And mom put me in private schools cuz some of the schools were just not good school. She didn't want me to be raised, getting jumped, all sorts of things. >> Fville is not known to be the most safe of the places in North Carolina. >> Exactly. So, I'm in middle school and I go to this uh private school, Cornerstone Christian Academy. I think it's still called that today. >> And uh I remember a sermon by the pastor talking about, "You've told a lie. You're going to lie about that lie. And then you got to lie about that lie to keep that lie." And he's like, "I'm feeling guilty. Okay, now what?" And he's like, "Those are sins. and those can be paid for because you've committed crimes against God that Jesus can die and take away those sins for you so that you can be freed from the guilt and those things that you've done. Right? And there was something about it that tugged at me that day. And then he said, "There's a father in heaven who loves you unconditionally and he'll never let you down. He'll never do you wrong. He loves you like you have no clue. I went down. I met that father that day. I got on my knees and they prayed over me and I accepted the Lord and I felt a euphoric changing experience in my whole experience that day was like this is home and I have found my father. This is it. He'll never let me down but my dad my my earthly father will and I still forgive him. and it's okay. You know, he struggles, but it's okay. And uh years of that went on, but I had Jesus and I tried to convert dad. I had like all sorts of stuff was going on over my youth years. I'm reading the Bible. I was a King James only for a while. >> Oh man. >> I'm at my school reading and and we're now in a public school, so it's not private. I'm the nut job Jesus freak and I'm okay with it. And I end up going through these phases where I would drink to escape. I would, you know, play with girls and escape and come back to Jesus and then do the drinking and have fun with the guys at the bonfire bonfire and then Jesus. And I had these like two extremes where I would like all in on Jesus or all in on doing this other stuff. And it I've always been that. It's just been my whole life. So I end up going and I can't tell you how many times I've been saved. Can't tell you how many times I've been laid on hands-on. I've been baptized many times. I've gone from denomination, it was charismatic, then to Calvary Chapel. Then I was like, "Look, I got to get my together, okay? I am dying from addiction." At this point, I went from partying on ecstasy and shrooms and drinking to taking opioids, percoetses, and Vicodin to Oxymorph and Oxycottton when they were crushables back in the day till they changed the formulas. And I'm on the streets. I'm dealing with drug dealers. I'm selling drugs myself. I'm using I'm I'm in this vicious pattern. I'm going to AA meetings. I'm getting clean. I'm at an AA meeting because that's what my dad was at. Alcoholics Anonymous before I was 21. You're not even allowed to drink till you're 21, right? So, I'm in there going, "Hi, my name's Derek and I'm an alcoholic and I'm under the age that you're even supposed to drink alcohol and hey, welcome." You know? So, I'm going through this this life and there's so much more. I meet my wife. She gets pregnant very early on. I do the Jesus the Christian thing, become the father and marry her. And I'm lucky. I'm lucky. I got a very good wife. Um because I could have been that could have been another problem. >> That's right. >> So then I go to a church one day and >> Yeah. You have any tips for anybody? How how do you pick a good one? >> Look, man, that was all providence. Okay. >> So that was Jesus. That part was >> It had to be, bro, cuz I was not making good decisions in my life. Okay. So, I'm at church one day and I'm hearing this pastor give a sermon and the pastor says in the Gospel of John, it says that Jesus said, "Tear down this temple and I will rebuild it in three days." I'll never forget. These are moments I remember, right? There's much more in life, but these stick out to me. And he said, "The Jews responded, "It took us 40 years to build this temple." And I remember going, "Doesn't say that. It says 46 years. I don't know why I was being pedantic, but like I was not looking at my Bible. I just knew from reading how much I read of my Bible, was so absorbed and obsessed with it that I knew it was 46 years and not 40. The reason I had known that is I started looking into what's called gamatria, which is that numbers and words, like letters and numbers have symbolic meanings sometimes. And part of me thought that 46 was actually a a coded way of saying Adam because in Hebrew the name Adam is the number 46. So when he said you see how we just went deep just now for a second went whoa what I never thought about that 46 years. Why did you say it took them 46 years for this temple to be built? What if that first temple Adam was what would needed to be taken down and a last Adam needed to be brought up? So, I went into deep weeds all the time and I was like, "Yeah, I think you missed something there." But I approached him after and I said, I didn't mention, "Hey, man, you made a mistake." I was just like, "Hey, where do you go to become a pastor?" I thought, "I I have a calling clearly to teach and to learn and help others." So, I went to this Carolina Bible College, which they renamed now Carolina College of Biblical Studies. >> Here we go. >> Sounds so much more sophisticated. And I went for a couple years. I got two years, got associates, and I wanted to go further, but I relapsed. >> I became a Calvinist in the process before I relapsed because one of the professors there and online, my interactions with a lot of people debating Christian chat rooms at the time, >> they pointed out some stuff, man, that's kind of hard to deny that something's up with this, something's up going on here, that, you know, God does what he wills. Um, like Romans 9 has some elements about it that seem to be kind of undeniably in the vein of predestination. >> Real predestination. >> Real predestination. >> Romans specifically in general. Yeah. >> Yeah. Romans. I would like really you can really nail that down in Romans 9. Like very very obvious. And then Ephesians 1 of course. And I did a whole thing in the college about this one long diet tribe by scholars think it's pseudo Paul now. I don't think it really was Paul that Ephesians wrote, but either way, it's in the vein of Paul in school and it's arguing that, you know, before everything, God had planned, purposed all of this. So, I started going down and became a caged Calvinist and I'm debating professors at this college. I'm arguing with the students in the during our breaks, you know, like we're having Christian brotherly arguments, but I'm like, dude, you guys are missing something here. Then I go to a new church because I was at Calvary Chapel and I go to a Presbyterian PCA reformed church because they didn't have a Baptist reformed church and I I join them. >> What What's the significance of the reformed part? >> Well, Calvinistic. I mean there's a tradition from like John Calvin, John Knox, several reformed Calvinist kind of Christian Protestants. So there's his history behind these churches. And I would look back to their commentaries. is you know we read some of their commentaries today when we are trying to understand the meaning of a text. These guys spent their whole lives digging. So I started digging. I studied the history of my faith. I went there was something dry about it. There was something missing. These guys were like totally about like textual exoggetical argumentation, but there was lacking of like that spirit uh charismatic joy and and and living this kind of like exciting thing. >> It was that Pentecostal those Pentecostal roots. >> It's those roots that were coming out saying >> missing it, >> dude. And I was still jamming to like worship music and and these more like charismatic songs, you know, you name it. Uh going back to was it Third Day and and uh I mean there's hard DC Talk. >> Jars of Clay, dude. >> Jars of Clay. My God, I think. Isn't that song? My God. >> Uh I don't remember. >> Jars of Clay. There's a really good song that I would listen to this stuff while I'm in this church and we're reading from 1700 hymns. this like reformed faith. We had all of these like weird stipulations that I wasn't used to. And while I was there, I initially I was a priest. Uh I was a I believed in the rapture. So esqueatologically speaking, I believed in the you know soon near second coming of Jesus. And I was a I'm want to say presuppositionalist, but that's not I was I was that too, but escatologically I'm trying to think of the term. My brain's gone kind of off here for a second. But I moved from that kind of form of esquetology to amalennialism. >> I read. >> So amillennialism is like trying to explain Christians are trying to explain how do we understand what the end times is >> by the Bible. Yeah. Right. Amalennialism goes to the book of Revelation and it says, "Look, some of this stuff is kind of metaphor, so to speak." God is the god of a cattle on a thousand hills. Is that all that God is the God of? >> Well, literally, it said a thousand hills. What if we found a 101 hills? >> Clearly, it's more. It's a It's a saying. It's a phrase that isn't meant literally, but it meant it means all-encompassing. It's just a something >> hyperbolic. Hyperbolic. A lot of this language is hyperbolic. Amalennialism shows like thousand literal years of reigning. Jesus says he's going to reign for a thousand years, right? So they find a way to say that doesn't mean literally a thousand years. I thought it was okay. >> Then I became a nominalist because they showed certain texts in scripture that are meant to be not taken literal. And then they apply that and say, "Well, we think that's what's going on here." Then I read RC Sproul, Kenneth Gentry, Gary Demar, and these guys who come from a postmillennialist. So that's right, premillennial. I was a premillennial went to amillennial became a postmillennialist, which means it depends on the particular postmillennialist by the way. But it's this idea >> subcultures of pre of postmillennialists. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. There's other partitions. >> There's always always and different premills. There's different ams. But in this one, it was this idea that a golden age is going to come. The earth might actually get better over time, not worse in the end times. It's going to start getting better. And they had an interesting thing is they tried to anchor the Bible in history. So a lot of these prophecies that people are waiting for today in the New Testament, they already happened. And that's called partial predism. Predtoism meaning past fulfillment. something that is predicted has already happened. And when I realized, holy crap, what's Jesus talking about when he stands on the Mount of Olives and he says, "This generation will not pass away before the son of man comes and these will be the signs." And he describes these signs. What are these signs? Well, immediately you have certain Christians who say, "Well, generation means race and this means the race of the Jews." Then you have others who say no no no it means those people who hear this message when these signs happen and that's sometime in the distant future. Partial predtoists just make it really easy. I was very convinced by right out the gate they were like not one stone will be left upon another he literally in chapter 23 of Matthew right before he does the speak the speech he was walking through the city of Jerusalem pointing at the temple and all the stuff. Then he tells you this generation will not pass away and these are the signs. The armies will surround Jerusalem which we know Josephus talks about with the the temple's demise and rumors of war and war and famine and all these things right which every generation experiences. So you can't really know what generation he's talking about. But when he says army surrounding Jerusalem and Josephus actually tells us that the Roman army literally surrounded the city and temple of Jerusalem and and starved them out for over a year and a half scholars saw those connections and went Christian scholar not where I'm at now they saw it and went he's talking about the Jerusalem temple's demise right >> and no wonder he says tear down this temple all the time and he says I will rebuild he is talking about 70 AD so as a Christian I couldn't I couldn't deny the facts in front of my eyes. I saw it. I said, "Jesus meant then." So, I became a partial predtoist and I started to follow that logic and realize that what was supposed to happen for the most part was back then, but we're still waiting. We're still waiting for the final resurrection and the final judgment. Those things, I got to hold on to those. And for several years, I was a reformed Calvinist and I was a post mill. Then I saw this YouTube video. Then I saw this YouTube video. Holy shoot. Okay, now we're getting into weeds. As you know, I'm a weed kind of guy. Not that kind. I used to be. Okay. >> Yeah. I used to have my fair share. Trust me, man. And then that stopped working for me. I tried to quit pills, went back to smoking, and I had this crazy experience just derailing for a second. >> What happened? >> I was at a Walmart try. Dude, I was sucking, man. I was miserable, bro. I mean, I'm withdrawing every other day. I'm chasing drugs. I'm stealing and lying and everything I can to keep my habit going. I have no money. I'm broke. I'm miserable. And I cried to my wife one day and I said, "Babe, my life is is terrible. I'd rather go back to smoking pot, be addicted to that like I was than ever doing these pills. Let's buy a 20 bag. I'll withdraw. We'll we'll smoke and like we used to and enjoy Biggie and Tupac and and the speakers in the car and, you know, get the vibes." We bought a 20 bag. We went in the car. I rolled it up. Old memories. Put the jams on. And I'm doing like I I'm just smoking like I used to. She hits it like, "Yeah." >> And she's like, "I'm good." And I'm like, "All right." So, I'm I have no clue what I'm doing to myself right now, bro. It's so bad. It's so bad. I don't even realize it. And I'm like, "All right, I'm starting to feel pretty high." So, I get in the car, start driving. I turn on to Ramsey Street. For those who are from Fagatville, you know what I'm talking about. And then I turn on a country club road and all of a sudden I'm like, "Dude, I'm so high. It's not This isn't cool." And I look over at my wife and she is not there. I see myself in the passenger seat looking at myself and I'm like, "Oh my god." And she's like, "What's wrong? You're scaring me." And I'm like, "We got to get home. We got to get home." home and I'm crying to God in the bed saying, "If you just please let me survive this, I know I'm going to hell, but if you let me survive this, I will never do this again." And uh I had to get in a bathtub trying to sweat it out. I was trying to I was I hallucinated. I was It was so strong. >> Dude, that was some good weed. >> Yeah, but I hadn't done it in like seven years. So, like the first time back, you take a whole 20 bag blunt to the head except like, >> you know what I mean? Like >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, >> you got that clammy skin. Yeah. >> Yeah, that that was an experience. I've had several >> So, weed drove you back to Jesus. It sounds like >> that's it, man. I've had several moments where >> Yeah., >> you know, struggling through addiction drew me back to either Jesus or going to the gym and trying to get in shape and and get addicted to taking care of my body and stuff. There's all sorts of >> Well, when you say you're on pills and you went to your wife and said, "I think I should get back on weed just to like chill chill it down a It's cool that your wife was cool with that. >> Well, she The sad part about the story is that she had no control over me, >> right? >> She had she loved me too much to let me go, but she couldn't control because I was wild. Yeah. >> There was no stopping me. And I would take money from her. She'd work as >> dude, I was miserable. I was at the lowest point of my life. I'd take a 20 if she'd made 40 bucks that night from the, you know, restaurant, I'd take 20 of it. Now, she would most of the time just give it to me. But there were times I'd sneak out of her purse. Most often she would I'd beg her and she'd I'd find a way to manipulate her and she'd give it to >> Wow. What a good wife. >> Yeah. But I mean >> loyal. >> Very. And >> yeah, she had to put up with a lot to get the man you are now. >> A lot. I couldn't stand myself in my own skin. Right. There's a part of that that also applied to my Christian beliefs. Now, I do want to get back to what I saw on YouTube, but to make this comment, Paul teaches about the flesh. And there's many texts like First John talks about love not the world for the flesh. They're talking about actual flesh. You have to go back to understand the philosophy of the time from stoicism to middle platonism to Platonic thought. And there are levels to heaven. There are levels. And we are at the lowest. Maybe you could say hell might be even lower, but we're at the lowest of the totem pole. The highest is ether. It's like it's like your light. There's no weight. So, we almost think, you know, in cartoons, we see someone dies, Bugs Bunny passes away, and they just start floating up because they've shed off >> this layer, >> this layer. They shed off this this tent that we're wearing. >> Okay? And Paul talks about hate the flesh, don't love the flesh. He constantly struggled with his own issues it seemed with the flesh and I could relate to that. But there was a point in which I had to hate this body. This is a temporary thing I'm taking. I need to hate this world. This this experience and uh eventually I'll escape it and go real to my real home. That philosophy might work for some, but it's actually for me a horrific one because I needed what I really needed was to be comfortable with my flesh. >> That's right. I needed to find a way to love myself, not hate, not hate this. I needed to love this even with its warts at all. >> Yeah. Healthfully love yourself. Yeah. >> Yeah. And that philosophy Paul taught might have worked if you thought the end the end was literally about to happen. What Paul would tell people, don't even marry. Don't sue each other. Don't even get married. The end is about to take place. >> It does feel hard if you feel guilty about being a human. If that's sort of the message is just you got to feel guilty about that, but don't worry because later on you'll go to somewhere else where it's better. But like you still have to live this second and this second and this second as a human. And that's that's a tough message to believe. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. >> Very tough. But I just I I saw it clear as day in Paul and I just that was something that I don't know if it was my experience that helped me see the the problem with it for me over time. I don't know if most Christians are recognizing what is going on in Paul's mind, what Paul's saying in those texts and what he means by that about this. And uh that's fine. they've reinterpreted the meaning in their head to make it work for them. But I I like to know what they meant. What did the author mean? I wanted to get down to what the truth is. I've always been that way and I still am. That's why Myth Vision is what he is. It's controversial, but I'm like, what is the answer? What really was said? What did it really mean? And sometimes we're never going to know. Period. You got to accept your fate. But this gets back to the YouTube video I saw. And that is this crazy old man, but he's he was standup guy. You can tell he's a gentleman, Don K. Preston. He came from a Churches of Christ background, which already put me at odds a little because I'm Calvinist. But then he started talking about Jesus coming back, the second coming, which I was interested in. He said that Jesus came back in the first century. The second coming already happened. And I was like, "Dude, this guy's smoking drugs like I used to." Okay, there's no doubt this guy's on something, right? >> Yeah. >> Click the next video. And I'm watching him again. Click the next. I hold on. Opening my Bible. I'm like, "Dude, hold on. Hold on. What in the world? I never saw some of this stuff." So, I started noticing stuff that I never noticed, but I read a million times. It was right there. And I'm like, I never would have caught that if someone didn't point that out to me. Really, ultimately, he covered all these time statements. And a time statement is simply like, I came over here to interview you guys, right? If I said to you, hey, I'm coming to your house, and when I do, I'll come over quickly. Did I say when I'm coming to your house? >> Not at all. >> I just said when I'm on my way, I'm going to come quickly. Right? But if I said, "Hey, I'm coming over soon. What would that mean? >> Yeah, there's an expectation. It's happening soon. >> Yeah. >> Well, a lot of theologians who see this problem try to interpret Jesus's words as the first example. Behold, I come quickly when I come, >> right? >> Not he's coming soon and it's going to happen very quickly. Like >> there's been a lot of conversations around these prophecies that Jesus made and and why we are here and they don't seem to have come to pass yet. >> Not yet. And this is why most Christians still are waiting. >> Right? >> This is the the reason the term is called futurism, that Christians believe in a future redemption, a future judgment, a future resurrection, is because look around you. The world is full of suffering and death and bad. >> It's obviously not here yet. >> Obviously, the problem of evil exists and it needs to be resolved. And the belief is that one day it will. The King of Kings and Lord of Lord will come in. He will remove all evil. He will punish the wicked. And he will reward the righteous. And it's going to fix all problems. There's something cool or at least some hope there, especially if you have no power. >> And so this guy says Jesus already came back in the first first second century. >> He said he already returned in the first century in 70 AD at the Jerusalem temple's demise. The Lord came on the clouds. And I'm like I'm thinking, well, he didn't come on the clouds. He's like, yeah, he didn't come on the clouds. coming on the clouds meant judgment. And then he'd quote an Old Testament passage where Yahweh was riding on clouds when Babylon was being destroyed. And he's like, "See, the Lord, the day of the Lord happened back here with Yahweh on Babylon." And I'm like, "Yo, I had no clue all of this stuff that you're talking about. I never thought about these things." So I kept listening because I knew this position put me outside of my tradition. If I believe this, most the church is wrong. That means 99.9% of every Christian on the earth is wrong because they all think he's coming back in the future. Well, I had to really dig into this and I spent about a year looking into this and I became a full predtoist. I can't. >> That means that you thought he came back in the first century. >> He had to is what I believe. >> That means all the all the prophecies have already been fulfilled. >> All prophecies have already been fulfilled. Full >> there's none less fulfillment. We're not waiting. No resurrection in the future. No judgment. >> It's already done. >> It's already done. >> Yeah. >> Now, how do you go from that to that? There's a lot in between. But suffice to say, Jesus from that experience as a young boy and walking down to that altar that I had was as real as you and me. And I felt like I was convicted. Like I had some amazing experience. That moment I attributed that experience to Jesus. He's real. His words are real. The text of the Bible is God's word. Let all men be liars. Let the word of God stand forever and be true. So when the word of God says something and all men are saying something else, I did not give a I was going with Jesus. I was going with God. What it seemed the text actually is saying, I didn't care what pastors and preachers were saying. I wanted the facts. I'd still listen to that. But I knew they were missing something here because Jesus said. And when you get into these arguments, and I spent many years debating Christians about this stuff. Yeah. But Jesus said, >> right? And I quote and I get into these texts. For example, this generation. Well, that means race. No, dude. That means this generation. And in fact, the earlier text in the same gospel, Mark, Matthew, and Luke, all repeat this. But some of you standing here, he says, will not be death. Right. >> Yeah, that's right. >> I know all of the apologetic responses from, "Oh, that's actually the great commission or that's actually the transubstantiation when he's on the mountain 6 days later." problem is it can't be that because six days later nobody died not even Judas. Some of you will not taste death meaning some of you will. So the expectation is that someone's got to die but not all of them will die. Then you get to the Gospel of John and I'm skipping ahead to more my critical thinking today but in the Gospel of John I read this as a full predtoist. Now, I kind of read this differently, but at the end of the Gospel of John, we remember the scene. They're fishing and Jesus on the boat tells them throw the net and then they realize it's him and Peter like freaking throws his clothes off and dives in the water and goes to the shore and there's a campfire and he says, "Do you love me?" "Yes, I love you." We always say fileo, we always like to talk about the Greek and that's right, you know. Yes, feed my sheep. that scene where right after that he turns to Peter and says, "Look, dude, in a nutshell, you're gonna be suffering and going to a place you don't want to go and pretty much you're going to die in Rome." It seems to be hinting at a a death in Rome by Peter. And then Peter goes, "What about the beloved? What's up with this guy? How's he going to die?" And Jesus responds and says, "If it be my will that he remains until I come, what is that to you? Feed my sheep." You know, don't worry about what's going to happen to him. But what's weird is he talks about till he comes. >> And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's esqueological. That's the second coming. What if he remains doesn't die till I come? John seems to be fixing a problem in the earlier gospels because the gospel is saying some of you are going to die but some of you are going to be alive and then he repeats it and he says if it be my will that he remain meaning when you get into the Greek now I realize he's saying >> maybe maybe not it's whatever I want it's not sticking to the promise before that some of you standing here will not taste death >> he left it open >> he left it open in sense like well all of you could die and I still don't have to come >> right >> that fixes Jesus's words from the earlier gospels and I went, "Oh, snap." Now, I didn't realize that as a full predtoist, but I did realize it was speaking to the same thing that Jesus's second coming and the death of the apostles and stuff like that or the disciples >> because the gospels use the term disciples, Paul uses apostles. But >> I got into the weeds here and realized every time you turn around, you know, Paul writes, "The night is the night is far spent. The the dawn is about to arise." You know, we are at the last moment. This is the last hour, brothers. It's at the cusp of the end. The opening of the book of John or the apocalypse of John, book of Revelation opens with, "Write these things down for these things must take place soon." Melo in Greek, meaning quick. It's going to happen very soon. Write these things down. And at the end of the gospel or the uh the apocalypse of John, he literally repeats what he said at the beginning. And he says, "Look, do not seal up the words of this prophecy, for the time is near. It's about to happen." When you read the book of Daniel, he tells the angel Gabriel tells Daniel, he says, "Sill up the words of the prophecies in this book, for the time is far off." Well, if he's seing up the words and the time is far, and then John's saying, "Don't, the angel is telling him, don't, >> it's soon, >> we have a problem here. It's a huge problem and that's why almost every critical scholar that is not stuck in the theologian box that needs this to be true or is trying to reconcile faith to explain it. They all agree that these prophecies failed or if there's some that pass they think they were written ex nilo or not is it exilo xventu sorry so it's called exeventu uh vaticanum I believe where they write the story after the events took place but there are some that are just left hanging that are obviously never took fruition the final resurrection what pred said happened I believed it because Jesus said it not because they make words not mean words anymore. You know, it talks about no more tears and suffering in the book of Revelation. That doesn't mean that they make the words mean something else. So that it did happen. So what's this doing to you personally as you're learning this and you see this YouTube video and you know, you're starting to see, oh, maybe John was correcting. Is this where does that take you? Like how is that affecting both your relationships with other Christians? cuz now you know 99.9% of them believe Jesus is coming in the future. >> You're starting to see these in the texts. Is this what's happening here for you personally? >> Good question. I mean I'm at the Presbyterian church and I start to have men's fellowship with guys that I knew growing up that are also part of the church and we're talking about this and I'm explaining to them why full predtoism seems to be the the most likely answer, >> most logical explanation. >> Yep. makes the best sense of the data and all your esqueological list. This takes Jesus's words to the bank >> and it lets him be right >> and not wrong because you you really run into this pickle. >> He's either right or wrong. >> There's been a lot of writings for thousands of years over these prophecies that don't seem to have happened and they all seem to indicate in the writings that they're going to happen soon and they don't. And there's been that's it's a really uh hard one to explain as is evident by how many writings have been done about it for thousands of years. Well, that's because I would say most the writings were done by Christians, >> right? >> So, you know who else has this problem? Islam. >> Oh, yeah. >> Okay. And I'm not We can get into that, but I just want to point this out that you're going to read Muslim theologians. If you're a Christian and you're reading them, you're going to see what I see Christians are doing. >> And I'm just being consistent and saying both are doing. So, I'm just like saying they're all doing it. If you look at any apocalyptic cult, they're all doing the same thing. >> They have to explain why it's not happened yet. cognitive dissonance. Your wife, as I said before, of pretending that, you know, I saw your wife making out with a guy at the gas station and you're like immediately gut-wrenched. It's it hurts because it's your worldview. It's what matters. It's what you believe. It's sacred to you. It's valuable. You can't that can't be true. >> You want to explain it away. >> You want to explain it away. >> Cognitive dissonance. >> Always can. >> Yeah. >> So, we need to explain away the failed prophecy. We need to explain away these things. So, I'm talking to these guys and they go back to the pastor of this church. >> Do you think they experienced cognitive dissonance when you're bringing these things up? And do you think that cognitive dissonance is something that occurred in sort of like your conversations with all your friends around this? >> Well, a lot of them were persuaded. >> Oh, okay. >> And then others were not. The pastor of the church that they went to Yeah. >> called me up to go in there and do a meeting in front of five elders. >> It was like a court case type thing inside like this room. And I was like, I felt like Martin Luther, >> the the reformer. >> And I was like, let let the scripture in my conscience be the what what gives me something to stand on here. I will not lie. I'm going to tell you what it looks like. They wouldn't let me talk. They silenced me and they corrected me and told me, "You stop at all." Like they wanted to they wanted to shut me out. It >> was punitive. >> And it it felt like I wasn't at home. I didn't feel like these were men that could really be on a path of trying to figure out what's going on. they had their answer and I did not have any say and I walked out of there and I felt like yeah, yep, you guys really let me know, you know, you clearly aren't working with me and trying to wrestle this issue out. It was important to me and they were the ones who first encouraged me to look at amillennialism and pushed me down the path of getting away from premillennialism. So, I was on a path and I always have been. I still am. >> Yeah. >> And that's where where it led me, man. So I I started listening to stuff that was outside of the Christian bubble. I was a Christian then. I was not not a Christian. That was another path that a journey that slowly happened. I landed the air aircraft. I didn't crash and burn. I was able to land it. And how that happened is another story if we want to get into leading to that. >> Sure. >> I'm on drugs again. Okay. >> Okay. >> So I'm on drugs again. I'm struggling because it's just my life. I got clean for two years going to that church. I'm doing good. Became a full predtoist. Went to New York. Gave my testimony at a church in New York. I'm like literally defending full predtoism, highlighting interesting patterns that really show that the end had to be in the New Testament. Had to be there. You got Moses and Joshua, Elijah and Elisha, Jesus and the church. and the patterns of 70 and numbers and elements and all this stuff that showed they're like and then Jesus is at the peak and there's Moses and Elijah the law and the prophets at the transfiguration and this is the peak this is the one this is the end you know I'm doing all this >> beautiful >> yeah well I struggled with addiction and there were moments where I'm like years in this now I'm like injecting heroin I'm I'm dying dude I'm doing crazy stuff I'm skinny I'm miserable uh I'm in legal trouble I'm a felon now or lararseny. Um, >> how is your involvement in the church and your drug use going? Like, do they go together or do they go complete opposite? >> Okay. Yep. >> One goes up, the other goes down technically. Yeah. >> Is the I know that the church loves uh former drug addicts because it it speaks to the power of Jesus. Like if if and it's it kind of makes sense. It's like if Jesus can help you get out of heroin, that is a real power. That must be real. >> Yeah. But like h how does that how was that working for you? I guess because if if was it drawing you back out of drugs, the the idea of going and saving people, was that a high that was pulling you out? Is that what was happening? >> I don't think I got high off of like converting people. I think I was very much into the study and the research and the theology and the deep insights. >> Okay. >> That's how I got high in talking about this >> the nuance uncovering a new nugget, uncovering a new connection, a new Yeah, a new mystery solved. Yeah. that it's obviously gets I mean obviously that gets you going these the way you've been talking so far. >> Yeah. I love figuring out what seems to be the case. And so that I think I went back and forth and the best way I could look at it now looking back was that it was another methadone. It was another placebo. It was another form of a temporary fix. Jesus was a temporary fix for me. The same way when I was on methadone, it was a temporary fix. When I was on Suboxin and Subutex, it was a temporary fix. I went through these various temporary fixes where they were like band-aids, but they didn't cure the sickness. Even though we would preach about Jesus will cure the illness and take out the cancer and all that kind of stuff. Today, it's been October the 25th will be 10 years since I've touched anything. >> Wow. >> As a non-believer. >> Congrats. >> Thank you. Thank you. But it was it was finding myself that did it. >> So you came to a realization that your pursuit of Jesus was similar to the different solutions that you were doing for drugs as well. He was metaphorically at least another fix, but it was temporary. >> Yeah, it was a temporary fix. It was Jesus gave me a warm, deep, euphoric experience. The same way that when you inject heroin into your veins, it feels like God comes down from heaven and wraps his arm around you and literally says, "Everything's going to be okay. It feels exactly like that." And I was like, "Okay." So, uh, now I have found a way to live where I don't I don't need any of that. All I need is just me. I'm okay. Uh, I don't need this or that God. I don't need >> Do you remember the moment that you felt that? >> I believe it was a gradual thing. >> Okay. >> Because I was recovering from heroin, too. And I was still a theist at the time. Still believed in God. We are skipping to this spot. So, maybe I should give a little fill in here. I'm withdrawing one day and I'm watching this YouTube video and everyone will go, "Haha." Every Christian that's going to watch this will go, "Haha, that's why. That's why you're down the dirty path you're on." And you went off this stupid conspiracy stuff. Zeitgeist. There's a YouTube video called Zeitgeist. >> I remember Zeitgeist. >> I did, too. Yeah. >> Such a fun, cool, interesting watch. >> Yep. >> Okay. And it parallels all the gods and it shows every god had three penises and 14 nipples. And I'm just kidding. Um, it talks about, you know, they they're all born on December 25th and they all die and resurrect. They all have 12 disciples. They all have a mother. All of this overexaggeration parallels. Okay. I don't know I don't know the scholarly sources. I've never read about Dian Isis and Isis and you name it, all the various gods. So, I have no way of knowing. The closest I ever came was reading Ravi Zachcharias and his book Jesus among other Gods. And I heard about him only filtered through an apologist. He was one of my favorite Christian apologists. And I had no clue about the scandal till after he I was already deconverted that he was doing massage stuff and all that. But it was him and William Lane Craig were the two head honchos of my Christian intellectual drive. And so I watched this zeitgeist and there was a moment in me where was like is this true? Like is there a chance that Jesus is like these other gods and that they are before him? And then I watched the debunk videos and there's series of those and I'm like I almost thought Jesus was like other gods. I'm going to say this right now. He is okay. They just went way overboard paralleling him. And in fact, even Christians should recognize this. It's unfortunate they are allergic to it. And I think that's cognitive dissonance as well. But it's it's unfortunate because in order to dominate a pagan world loaded with many gods, your guy needs to do better in the same areas as theirs. And that's one of the reasons it's obvious that Jesus would have to check off those boxes in order to win over the Roman world. And Christianity eventually ran over won the Roman world full of Dianisis and Heracles and you know, Eskeipius. Essipius was the healing god. Dionis was the one who had the water into wine motifs. I mean, and there's so much of this I didn't know. Now I do. So, I ended up questioning, but then threw it away. It was still in the back of my mind, but I heard the debunks and I was comfortable with that. And then I'm struggling with addiction. And I thought to myself, what if I'm wrong? What if I can't get my life together because what I believe is wrong. I'm dying. I'm so miserable from this addiction. I'm literally calling up rehabs. They have no seats. They only take good insurance. I don't have insurance. America's full of it when it comes to insurance, dude. >> Yeah. If you don't have good insurance, you can't save your own life. >> No. >> That's how sad things are in America when it comes to addiction. >> And I'm desperate. I'm desperate that I'm actually at a bottom willing to literally consider something more than Jesus. And let me tell you that you don't do that without something has to break for you to be willing to do something like that. And I wasn't willing to do that my whole life. I was strong defender, armor of God, Christian defender, apologist type Christian. And it was when I was broken that I was willing to go, whatever this is, I believe isn't working. So then at that point, I decided I would investigate and consider listening to more things like what do the Hindus say? What do Buddhists say? Like let me look beyond because I still believed in God. And I went to AA meetings and there were these interesting sayings like you can have a god of your own higher understanding higher power. It doesn't need to be this or that make it more than the doornob but even the door knob might work. Right? We had these little slogans and it gave me freedom outside of being stuck under a pastor which you must come to and they must correct you and keep you on the Christian path. I was in a different arena and environment that allowed me to question and allowed me to experience a god that was my own understanding that was a power that was bigger. And I started to realize comparative mythology. I went back into looking into this. But I looked at it like in a good way. Not as a gotcha, not as an anti-apologist. I looked at it going, you know what? If God, whatever that is, is expressing itself in different culture, not a us versus them competition, but like what if Samson, the strong man of of the Hebrews, with his tearing the lion in half with ripping open the mouth bare-handed, by the way, is God reflection in the Jewish or Hebrew Bible the same way Heracles and his 12 labors also bare-handed, ripped open the mouth of a lion. The same thing. And we have statues of Gilgamesh and the older Babylonian ripping the mount the lion you know he's holding a lion in his statue literally by his side or Melart the Phoenician strongman god who also carried a club and he had the same kind of strengths that Heracles did. And I went what the heck is going on? Plus he also died by a fire and we know that Heracles also died by a fire as well. Uh he died on a p. His wife was thought that this potion that a centaur gave him, half man, half horse, was going to make him only fall in love with her because he's a womanizer. He liked women and and he's attracted to beautiful women. And next thing you know, she pours it on his cloak. He puts it on and this will never go away. There's no cure. And he knew it. So, she kills herself in the story because she felt so guilty just wanting his full devotion for her. And he builds a p and burns jumps on the pen put the flames to it. And when the flames have all gone down to ashes, they searched the ashes and they couldn't find his bones. His bones had disappeared. And you might go, "What do you mean? It burned up. Not in a fire that's by wood." You might in a in a like extreme high temps. Bones don't burn in wood fires. They don't. The bones would remain, but they're missing. His body is missing. >> And so when you realize that, they then said he is in Olympus. And there are moments where he visits people. They know that he's alive in Mount Olympus. He's a god seated up there in Mount Olympus. Eskeipius, there's stories where Eskeipius, the god of healing, who's the son of Apollo and a mortal woman, just like Mary was a mortal woman, just like Heracles, his mom was a mortal woman and Zeus is the father. Eskeipius was healing people. We have tablets of stone, four remaining. There were 12 in the ancient world. We have four. And on those four, there's 140 miracles listed of what Eskeipius did. Get this. This guy was born without eyeballs in his sockets. No eyeballs. He comes to the Eskeipius temple. Okay? No eyeballs in his socket. Goes to sleep, wakes up the next morning, eyeballs in a socket, walks out and can see again. These, it was at the Epidaris temple. We call them the Epidorian tablets. Okay? He'd done that 500 years before Jesus. What I'm saying is one didn't necessarily have to borrow from the other because if I mention Batman or Superman right now, everyone in the culture knows what that is. I you almost don't even need to read a comic book. You can watch it in a movie. You can read a comic book. You can see it on stickers on walls and hear stories people just tell and pass around. If a new comic book series comes out and we can bank on it happening with a new superhero, he's not exactly like Superman. He's not exactly like Batman. He's not exactly like these figures. But there are elements that show he's a superhero. He either wears a cape, he's fighting crime, or he is a criminal. Um there's elements that you see in these myths that you go, "Oh, okay. That's obvious." The body goes missing. Eyewitnesses said they saw them after they died. Well, what do apologists build their entire empire on? There were eyewitnesses who saw him and eyewitnesses who wrote these texts. And it's eyewitnesses. We have proof. They're eyewitnesses. What if I showed you texts from the Romans that the emperors themselves died on and they were ascended to heaven and they appeared to people on roads after they died. And there were people who swore in court that they saw the Roman emperor alive on a Roman road. Would that make you think of the road to Emmas in Luke 21 when the two disciples are crying and they're upset at the Messiah died? They thought he was more than that. And random guy comes up. It's Jesus, but they don't know. And they're like, we thought he was the Messiah. What do you mean? What? Well, he said he was. And and he's explaining how we thought he was going to be the guy. And Jesus goes, "Don't you know that that's what the scriptures say?" And the guy's name is Cleopus, by the I'm going into weeds here for a second. >> Yeah, it's cool. >> Cleopus is the disciples name. The other disciples unnamed. There's two of them in Luke 21. Cleopus means glory of the father. His name literally means glory of the father. And the guy is saying, "And we he was supposed to do this. We thought he was the one, but clearly wasn't the one." And Jesus, who he doesn't know is right in front of him, is saying, "Dude, don't you know that the scriptures say that he had to do these things to go to for the glory of his father, to go to the father, in his glory, Mr. glory of the father?" It's a pun. The guy's name is a joke inside of the story about him having to be doing these things for the glory of the father. that there's a scholar named Bruce Louden who points out that that's in a dialogic relationship with Odyssey chapter 1. In Homer's Odyssey, Odysius goes off to war the the Trojan War. His son Tmicus is at home facing suitors who are trying to take his mom. They're trying to take her and make her marry him because they think that Odysius is dead. Ticus is on the run. He's on a ship. He's crying. He's upset. Why can't the gods have my back like they do for my father who went off to the Trojan battle? And in front of him is a goddess in disguise. He doesn't even know that it's Athena, but disguised as a male mentor. And she says to Timacos, Tymicus, which means fighter from afar. Mr. Fighter from afar, you know the gods can protect you from afar. It's a pun. When you see the myth, when you see the story, you see that it didn't matter that it happened, >> right? There's a message. >> Thank you. >> There's a real message there. >> I went from chip a I was hardcore fundamentalist, literalist, finding out myth, finding out that this cannot have happened. This it's there's it's why would you special plead this? Why would you say this happened and all the others didn't? Why are we dying on that hill? When the power of the myth, the power of the story is getting beyond that. And when you grow up beyond that, you can also poke fun at it. You can go, "No, no, no. They're wrong. It, yeah, they got the prophecies wrong, but there's something about they're still sacred. There's something powerful about them, right? There's bad in some of it. There's good in some of it. like all things in my opinion. And I can go on and on about these mythic parallels and mythic tropes and elements and his birth from virgin birth to his ascension into clouds like Romulus was also seen ascended in clouds. He appeared in clouds. Like there's all sorts of stuff, man. And these were the popular stories. And to assume if a new let's make up a hero right now out of nowhere named um North Carolina man. Okay, we made up a myth. I'm just making it up. Terrible terrible example here. North Carolina man came up out of nowhere and he had something to tell everybody. Okay. And uh he's modeled in many ways like these other guys. >> NC on his chest. >> He had NC on his chest. He wore a cape. Uh rebel flag cape. Um totally kidding. >> Carolina blue there. Yeah. >> Oh no. >> Okay. >> Just turned south. >> I know. Real south, didn't it? >> Yeah. They had a twisted origin story. >> I had to. I had to. So the >> Wait, sorry. Can I stop you? Sure. Once you started realizing there was power in the myths, did that help start to help save you in a way though? >> I think I've always thought that there were power in the stories. >> Yeah. Because you had that conversion moment where you really like the first time when you said you felt home at the church. Yeah. >> Something about the words that they were saying whether Jesus existed or not. You felt that and it and it did have some power in your life. >> 100%. And that's why I wanted to give the viewer who might be watching this who's a Christian, they could feel what I'm saying. I'm not BSing. That was real and it always will be. However, I still have those. I just don't have to have Jesus to have those. I still have those. It's still profound. And I know it's hard for us because we I imagine all three of us were raised in America and Christianity was our was the oxygen. We're like we're like fish in water and don't know we're swimming in water. Okay. So, when you hear So, you mean to tell me you breathed outside of this thing? Yeah. Because if you went to India for one moment, they are totally content with Krishna, Vishnu and the billions of other gods. If you go to Muslim countries, they are absolutely content with their philosophy and their final prophet Muhammad. Wherever you go, they are going to have experiences and profound ones at that. What I found to be true was that humans have experiences. what they apply or try to attach those experiences true may be fictive and are likely just the imagination of the beholder. So you can apply it to anything and have that experience be profound and say that is true. And that's why you can watch a Muslim who will die go to the grave fighting for the truth of his faith and you can look at it to the outside and go dude I see so many holes in your faith. I don't see this is true. I don't see he's the final prophet and they can't see it, but you can and they believe it and they experienced it. So, I want that to be like front and center that that experience I had was real. And if anyone wants to see a profound video about this, there's a guy named Michael Brown or Darren Brown. Darren Brown, he's a mentalist. He does magic, magician. He's been all over TV and stuff. You guys might have seen some of his stuff. He convert converted an atheist on per on like purpose. He invited these atheists and he wanted to test which one had the most critical thinking skills. He chose the one that seemed to be less superstitious out of all of them. He put them in this dark underground like 1500's church. There's no lights. And some of them were like something's behind me and like freaking out and stuff. This woman was like, "I'm comfortable." Like no batting an eye. She said before this, "I'll never become like a theist. I'm anist. I'm a scientific thinker." Next thing you know, he's in the church and he's talking to her and he's got like a father thing going on, you know, the little like neck collar thing going and he tells everyone before give me 15 minutes she will believe in God. By the way, he's an atheist. Okay. >> Okay. >> That's a what the he wanted to do this as an experiment to show people. >> He talks to her about her father and her mother. He talks to her about her life, her real things. We got to get concrete first before we can go beyond that. He does that. Then he just makes a small leap. Just a small leap in it. And he's like, "Sometimes it's just he like hits the wood and he's like, "It's right in front of you." And he looks at her. I'm going to go get some water. You want water? Sure. He walks away. And then out of nowhere, she stands up and she's looking at the cross. that's right in front of her and Jesus and she's just balling her eyes out. This is this is real. This is not a joke. You can tell that this is like not an act. He comes back and he talks to her. Boom. Later in the show, he brings her on to explain to her what he did. You can see that she's so like almost like she doesn't care if it was fake. It was so good of an experience. It was so profound that she wanted it. So, it's I don't expect everyone to be like me and be skeptical and not believe because I know how difficult it would be to get someone to even rationalize their way into something like this. We're all going to have experiences again, like I said, but it's the beliefs that I don't think are the reason for the uh the experience. I think the experience is something more realistic and we all have. It's a real experience. It reminds me of I've seen a bunch of the documentaries on cult leaders and they all fall apart because they always do and then they interview these people who were in the cult for 20 years and they go they're actually kind of sad that it broke apart because they had this exper obviously the terrible things they didn't want to happen in whatever cult this is but then but the experience they had in the beginning the belief in the thing was that like salvific moment for them and they can't deny that feeling. Even after it all fell apart and the guy's convicted and he's a terrible person and all these things, they these people will still go, "But what I experienced that day was real." Well, it's like that's my high of choice. Like, don't take my drug away from me. I was getting along. I had my drug and I was okay. Like, leave me alone, you know? >> Yeah. >> Don't break it. >> Yeah. I mean, again, it's uh we build we build our beliefs out of these experiences, I believe. And it shouldn't be that you shouldn't have your beliefs be so um solidly based as if your experience is somehow attributed to the belief is all I'm saying. Your belief should be able to move and be fluid. And a lot of people are comfortable being complacent with I was raised Baptist, you know, I'm going stay Baptist. My mom and dad were Baptist, their mom and dad, you know, and I'm not that kind of guy. I'm like, they used to accuse me of being to and fro with the wind of doctrines and all that kind of stuff. And I'm like, so like I'm trying to figure it out. >> Right. It It's a great You had a good intention behind it. You weren't here just trying to throw rocks. You were trying trying to turn over rocks looking for what's real. >> Looking for what's real. And I think at the end of the day, what kept me clean and what keeps me, I think, complacent in in not needing to abuse myself is I found myself. We talk about the power of myth, power of story. And I and now I am interpreting these texts as mythic. Okay? I'm not reading the gospels as if this is history anymore. Not saying there aren't kernels of verimilitude. They call it verimilitude. Sure, >> it has realistic tendencies like a real geography or a real person or a real place. You know, Pontious Pilot's real. John the Baptist is mentioned in Josephus. There's a good chance that guy existed. Clearly, it's when you're writing fictional myth, if you will, you you want elements often. It just depends on the writer, but most often in the ancient world, they wrote legends and myths with real people, real places, real things often times sprinkled throughout. And um the power myth really there's a story I heard when I first got clean. There's two of them. Tell you both cuz they're really good. This this was one of those wo. So God's going to go make man and he's planning on creating humans and he's speaking out loud and Satan can overhear him. By the way, this is not written in any holy book. God says man will be ambitious, driven, intelligent, motivated, loving. Every attribute that I am, man will be. Satan appears this and he I man, whatever this man is, I have to hide God from. So he decides he's going to take God and he's going to hide God under the mountains of the earth. He goes, "Man's never going to find him there. Man's going to be ambitious, intelligent, motivated, determined, all the attributes of God. He'll find a way to remove that dirt. Remove the rock and he will find God. Where can I hide God? I'll put God underneath the ocean, beneath the sands of the sea. Man will never find him there. Motivated, driven, intelligent, determined, inquisitive. Man will find an apparatus and he will find a way to get beneath the water, under the sands of the sea, sweep them away and find God. Can't hide God there. So where he thinks long and hard, what can I do to hide God from man that man will never find him? and a light bulb went off and he said,"I will hide God inside of every human and they will be born into a world where they'll constantly be looking and seeking and trying to find him. Never stop, pause and look inside and say, "He's in me or it's in me or it is." And when I heard that, I was like, whoa. Something powerful about that story. Something conveyed there that I'm important. I have all the meaning I need in me. I don't need to go down there. I don't need the car to be happy. I don't need the house. I can be broken. But if I have me, it's okay. That was the powerful message I needed to hear cuz Derek, you are worth something. You are worthy. You are great. Your flesh is not horrible. Your flesh is human. And it's okay to be human. And it's okay to have warts. Yeah, you want to do better. You know what right and wrong is. You're on your path. You're going to make mistakes, but don't don't beat yourself up. And don't live like you're trapped in this prison, which is platonic. Neoplatanism talks about this stuff. Aseticism, all of that. Like monks in a cave trying to escape. Dude, for me, no thank you. I'm good. I'm okay. I know I'm a good person. You don't have to tell me that I'm filthy rags in the presence of a holy God. My righteousness is Get out of here with that. I don't buy it. They might have thought that. I don't think that. I think if there is anything, it's laughing going these little ants, uh, what the hell are they thinking? Like, they're just nuts. You know what I mean? Like, what? Like, if there is anything, I'm cool with it. I promise you. But I'm not persuaded. But it is. Look, I can't. No, there isn't. So, that's one of them. The other one I'll make quick. >> So, we're going to use your name. Okay. Matt. Is it Matt? >> Yeah. >> So, okay. I don't want to like give your wrong name here, but I always tell the story and I use the person's name or a person's name to involve them in it. There was a wise man named Matt and he's journeying through the wilderness and he's pondering his past, his present, and his future. And as he's in deep meditation, pondering in the wilderness, he hears behind him a lion is coming after him. He begins to run and he's looking back and this lion is chasing him. And every time he looks back, the lion's getting closer and closer. And he's panicking thinking at any moment this lion's about to consume Matt and he's going to die. And as he looks back, last time that lion is literally about to grab boom, he starts sliding over the edge of a cliff. And he's reaching for dear life to grab a hold of something to keep him from falling down and dying. And he grabs this thing hanging out. It was a vine out of the side of the cliff. So he's hanging for dear life, looking up, and the lion is prowling at the top, looking down at Matt, ready to eat him. So he knows, I can't go up. That lion will eat me. So he looks down and there's a lion underneath looking at him, ready to devour him at the bottom of the cliff. >> Stuck. >> He's stuck. And all of a sudden he feels a sharp pain in his hands. And he looks and the the vine has sharp prickly thorns that have literally pierced his flesh. And he's got blood dripping down his arms that are coming from these vines. And it hurts. It hurts. And at that moment he looked on the vine and he saw a blackberry and he ate the black and it was the best blackberry he ever had. The end. And when I first heard that I was like hold on what the hell just happened to Matt, man. You know what I mean? Like where's the Matt story at? >> The lion that chased him was his past. The lion at the bottom was his future. And while it it sucks sometimes, you got to be in the moment in the now. And there's always a blackberry if you're looking for it. >> Very zen. >> Very zen. Very eastern. That philosophy that that story combined with the other story were things I lived with for several years in my mind. And when it sucked at moments and it did, I faced it. I used to dodge it. I used to numb it. I faced it and when I faced it, I overcame it. I conquered it like Heracles in his 12 labors. I went and I faced the lion and I tore its mouth open. What's next? And at the end, he suffers and dies like we all will. So, in a sense, Heracles is as real to me as Christ is real to me as any of these stories come to life for me. That makes sense. That's where I'm at today. And it was a it was a comfortable landing of the airplane. You could see it wasn't just ah it's all I mean I went through a little bit of that but I found meaning still you know. Well, one of the things that I think uh you can see from someone who has uh if if you've deconstructed a faith, there's two way two outcomes I've seen and you are either angry at Christians for being you were a Christian and now you flipped to the other side and those people who who are now it's like they just put on the other jersey and now they're still fighting that same fight but they just went to the other side. That is one way, but to almost transcend it and to be look look at it to your point and have a soft landing and not be angry with Christianity or angry at Christians, but it's almost understanding it. It get that's actual grace. And I think that that's that is a better way to do it if you're going down. It shows that you've actually to your point, you still see scriptures as sacred and as meaningful and maybe even more meaningful than they used to be in some ways. But to not be angry at Christianity for the road that it brought you down, maybe it makes you thankful for the road that you've been on to get to where you are. >> Yeah. I mean, even with addiction, you know, I I guess the other thing it does is while I find value in a lot of these stories, I can also look at bad things and I couldn't do that when I was a Christian. Can't like for my version of Christianities that I came out of, we're not allowed to say, "Yep, this contradicts that. That's a problem. Nope, this was failed. Nope, that's wrong." Nope. Slavery is not okay, you know, and we've been owning humans since the beginning of time. And the Bible does endorse this. I know Christian apologists will say it's not that kind of slavery. Okay, now we're going down another path. And I mean, ubiquitous slavery was all over. Um, yeah, there was lessons to be kind, to try and be kind to your slave, but you owned people often. There was cattle and sex slavery and of course indentured servitude. But as the experts I've interviewed over the years say, indentured servitude was not as common as cattle and sex slavery was. So there's all sorts of moral things we've evolved to come to realize about ourselves and say, you know, it's not good to do that, you know, and treating people equal and things like that. We're coming we're coming to a place where I think we're starting to realize a lot of this stuff needs to be implemented. Um, there's some people recently now, especially if you go on Twitter, who don't believe that. And it's pretty ugly some of the stuff I see, uh, like pure straight Nazi stuff. And I've never seen anything so openly anti- that idea that I do think we need to have. Can't help. You're born to be the color you are, that you are born to be the sex you are. You can't help that you are these things. And for that reason, there are certain people who view certain people that just had no choice in the matter less than. That's unfortunate. >> Well, to me, it just lacks grace. Because the thing that I think about grace is that if I think take any person, you think that you judge them or you think they're doing great or you think they're doing poor. If if I breathed, every atom of oxygen that you've ever breathed, the exact same ones, and if my neural network in my brain fired exactly all the same ways that your neural network in your brain fired at the time they all fired, and I had exactly your parents and exactly your life, and I ate all the same food that you ate, and I thought all the same thoughts that you thought right now, I'd be you. So, how can I look at you and go, I would have done it differently, >> right? >> It gives you such grace for everyone. >> Yeah. >> Because if I was you, I'd be you. Not if I was you, I would do this and that because you wouldn't. If I was you, I would be you. That's empathy. That grace that you're talking about, that empathy is important. Like, imagine you were born that color, that sex, that person from that place. Uh, just would you want someone treating you? It's the golden rule. And it goes way back. And I think that's the wisdom that humans have noticed and we're trying our best to get there. There have been systems that be including slavery that we just didn't have. We didn't try to work out getting rid of. And there were groups that did vocalize this. I just did an interview the other day with a scholar that pointed out that Jesus in some of his parables uses slavery as an example where they come back in the field. He goes, you know, the slave serves your food first and then uh it's some example where he's like in line with now it's in Luke, so it may be the author of Luke. I tend to think it is not really Jesus, but if there was a Jesus, he probably would have. I don't know. Um but you can go to the Essenes, the Kuman community, and many of them were against slavery. They saw it as inhumane and and against God. So there were groups that spoke against it throughout history and some didn't. and Christianity. I know that they like to interpret some of this stuff. There's neither male nor female, free nor slave. They ah see slavery, they don't believe. But no, like in those same letters, they're literally telling you uh obey your masters. There is a sense in which they're cooperating along with it. And in fact, the very language of Lord means that's your master. And so I just did a like several interviews about this over the past few years where sla like the theology of Christianity at its roots in the Bible is literally infused with slavery. It would lose its meaning and it's and its teaching if slavery was not a foundation from which it was built. So calling lord or servant serving God like is to be as obedient as a slave. You don't own yourself. God owns you. these kinds of things like it it made better sense in a time where people lived in slavery than we do today when it >> was ubiquitous. >> Yep. Yep. >> That's amazing. >> So, there's a lot there's a lot here, but I personally love that parallel stuff. I really enjoy finding out before Jesus there were several gods, several heroes who performed miracles, who did very similar things to what we see Jesus do. And for me, that really let me let go of Jesus as the only one. >> Well, I think sometimes it actually makes God bigger than the God you thought of. If it's representative in all these in all these different texts, in all these different geographies around the world, it actually makes God bigger than the thing you're focusing on, which isn't that by nature what a God would be is bigger than what your focus is. So that was my initial my deprogramming my decon conversion started was God is bigger because I saw how much overlap these stories carried with one another and when I went through that path you can see how you'd go you know what that's not pagan and Christian it made me let go of this very narrow very exclusive the only way to the father is through the son teaching that only Christ only Jesus is the only way and that no other way is it. And when I was able to see now come on, the whole picture started to show that everybody's got these things going on in their stories and it goes way back into Mesopotamia. Ancient Sumer and Egypt have elements of this Osiris of resurrecting God and stuff. I started to realize there's an evolution and all of this stuff is there. So God got bigger. When God got bigger, the stronghold that God had on my daily actions, my behaviors, my thoughts of heaven and hell, all of these things started to dissipate. And God got so big. I know that Christians go, "God is big. He's big as you can get." It's like, you're not quite understanding what I'm saying. Like, like he's bigger than your Bible puts him out to be as this exclusive, narrow, only path God. this God was so big that he's bigger than that. He's accepting or revealing through all of these cultures. And when you get to that place, the power it has over you goes away. So if you have an exclusive God that is very narrow, it has a lot of power over you. When your God gets expanded and big and more like, hey, all cultures, all people, all humans, there's so much more freedom and less pressure and less control. >> And when God, >> yeah, less guilt, less shame, less all of that. You must do this, you must do that. And it's like, >> hey, no, God's bigger than that. Once God got bigger than that, I had freedoms. When I had freedoms, I started looking at science more. Evolution, I didn't believe that as a Christian. started looking at evolution. I started talking to scientists and I interviewed them on my channel and there were some interesting people with interesting ideas and a lot of science that I didn't know. And that led me down a path of even questioning whether or not there's a God and if all of this was really just human concoction and our perception of the world. So God becomes a reflection of simply you that really you are that. But then you have to ask the question where did all things come from or whatever. Right? >> That's the next question. >> That's the next question you would go to. But when you follow that question, >> you're going to run into a wall no matter what path you take. >> Because the philosophers I've talked to get into this whole like >> the cosmologists and stuff that are into this. They say you got two options. God did it. And then you have to ask, okay, so God created everything. Where did God come from? And always the gotcha for Christians is God never had a beginning. Okay, you say that. Got it. No evidence for any of this. It's literally an assertion because you have to try and explain it. And there's no way to know that that is or isn't the case. You can't prove it's wrong, but you can't prove it's right. There's no reason to necessarily assert that it is. All right? You should be doubtful is all I'm saying. Well, then the other option is that the universe, whatever this this is, is eternal, too. Mhm. >> And the question then becomes either you have a God that's eternal and he creates all things or maybe all things are eternal too. I don't know if you could have maybe have a model where both God and the universe are both simultaneously but usually the typical model is God creates all things but God is eternal or the universe is always been and this is a weird matrix we were born into and we're looking like fish in his pond like what is this and we just don't know how far or if it just goes on and on and we don't understand what this is like God. So you have two mysteries, right? Two choices of a mystery. God made everything or the universe is eternal and somehow it just keeps going. >> Well, it's sort of the same mystery in a way. >> In a way, >> I mean, >> no one knows though >> because you don't know either. >> Exactly. >> Neither one actually explains what happened. How did these atoms get here? Neither one actually gives you the the mechanics >> of all of it. Right. >> Of all of it. So, so if both models, you know, you can take or leave, then is there a way to look at one of these models using what we do know and being able to go what's more likely? And for me, I did this and it started to make me question. So God, the whole idea of God, when you read history, when you read the ancient myths, you read the stories and how humans have engaged with divine gods, God, when you see the evolution of how humans have interacted with gods and before that animism, you see how gods developed in the minds of humans. So, it doesn't falsify a god, but it makes me realize that humans have been interpreting and engaging the world, crafting what makes sense for the mysteries they don't understand. The volcano erupted. Why? Well, Vulcan was pissed or whatever the god's name is pissed. Why is it the thunderclap strikes? And modern anthropologists actually in in uh Africa are noticing chimpanzees after the thunderclap, they go to the lightning. They assume there's an agent of some sort that wants to get them, but it's pure electricity. So, there's agency in nature when really now we look at it and we go, we have no reason to suppose that in that volcano is an angry god or when earthquakes happen, it's the titans in the underground chamber that have been trapped by the gods of of Olympus and that the earthquake is from them bumping into the wall because it's dark and they can't see down there. Which is more likely, the Olympians or earthquakes from tectonic plates now that we know better and some things we're never going to know. I took that natural approach. The natural approach seemed to make the most sense when I approached gods. Xenophanes, the ancient Greek philosopher once said he was he was also a geographer. So he traveled the world. He saw all the cultures. And he says, "I I've seen the world. I've seen the cultures." And what's ironic is every culture has a god that looks like them. In Africa, they have the snout nose and they have the the wool hair. Uh in um Germany, they have the red hair and they have the their gods look like Nordic people. Uh you go to India and they have the and every god looks like every people. And he said if horses could draw images of their gods, they look like horses. And if dogs could draw images of their gods, they look like dogs. His point is is that all the gods of the earth, his point is that all the gods of the earth are literally only reflections of the people who are perceiving them. Now, he did it to ultimately say they aren't really really God. The only real God is something that is beyond that, that is not humanlike, that is immaterialike. The philosophers, the Greeks were already doing this before everyone else. These were the guys that were the pioneers of this kind of idea philosophizing and they were they were scientists protoscientists in the prescratic period. They were already doing scientists examining the world trying to understand how it came to be and all of that. My purpose in using that is to say why should we take his leap and then go but there has to be something beyond that because once you start using these natural tools and understanding volcanoes and all these things in a natural way we no longer need to say demons ghosts or gods for earthquakes or for volcanoes or thunderclaps or any of that. We can look at the world and say there's a natural order to things I don't understand but there's no reason to say there's an agent or a being that is doing it. And that's when I started going, well, I'm not just going to believe things that I don't have evidence for. So, you could call me a strong agnostic or even an atheist in some sense that I don't I think God's and God in general is an idea that humans concoct because we don't understand. We don't get how the universe operates fully. Therefore, and it's a form of God of the gaps. And there's always going to be a God of the gaps argument cuz we evolved on this rock and we're trying to make sense of it and we're never going to know all the answers. >> We will always have gaps. >> Always have gaps. Always have a thing that will outdo it. But in the ancient world, they weren't arguing for out outside space and time and who crafted and started the universe arguments like we are. They were arguing like why did the lightning strike and why did the earthquake? Well, and we're hitting points with quantum physics and I've seen a bunch of YouTube channels where they cover people with NDEs where they die and what happens after that. And we're getting into plasma consciousness with the universe uh being 99.9% plasma and how that seems to create the atomic structure of our entire world. And like we're always getting but there's always the next gap. There's always the next okay that's that's what we're figuring out. And we can ascribe it to God but we don't know. I mean we keep we keep chipping away. >> That's the thing. And the more we chip away, the less we usually give credit to a god usually on these examples I'm giving. Now the NDE thing is a whole another rabbit trail of like how do you address someone who had these experiences? >> Well, it's the nature of consciousness cuz that you can't that's an experience as well is consciousness. And so yeah, I mean having NDE and people remain conscious somehow. >> Well, they're near death. And my my personal argument would be first of all what we talked about before we recorded here is that you have been taking in images and you're going to have experiences that are going to reflect what you know and have seen. Memories are typically what we dream. So when you take dreams for example, you're literally and there's a lot of science behind this, a lot of people who've like studied dreams and they point out that they are memories kind of discombobulated and reworked in your mind in your imagination while you're dreaming. Often times it's only for five minutes but it feels like 5 years sometimes you're dreaming right and that that when you're having a near death it's you're not dead dead. You might have been flatlined. Your brain is still working. um when you die there, you don't call it a near death, you call it a death and they're dead. And there's something still functioning that allows your cognitive faculties to still operate. And in that position, in that place, there are a lot of testimonies. I always tell this my brother, he gets my brother gets frustrated with me really, really quick because I'm super skeptical of all of this, including the UFO sightings, abductions, the whole nine. Some of them have to be real. And I'm like, I'm not denying that some people experienced things, but humans experience things. And the the mind is a powerful tool that can easily send you into a hallucinogenic state or some alternate type of conscious reality that you think is real that isn't. Women have been a you know what I'm saying by men >> and they thought they were visited by angels. When they recall the experience, they had a visitation by an angel. They don't even remember the experience of the guy abusing them. They don't even remember any of it. They had an angel actually, you know, there. The mind is a powerful tool. I I saw one guy, an Air Force guy who was under like Geforce, and you probably seen those videos where their face is like and they like go unconscious for a second. And I loved watching him cuz one guy goes goes unconscious, right? He's like eight freaking G's. It's like insane as he looks 900 years old. And then all of a sudden, he just like starts swinging out of nowhere. And then he he wakes up and the guy who's like recording the whole thing goes, "Did you win? Did you win the fight?" And he's like, "Dude, I really was fighting somebody." Now he's right there in this chair. He just went unconscious for a moment and experienced something. Now I've heard the testimonies. Oh, well, they saw the number on the other side of the ceiling fan and that only the serial. I've heard all of that. And bro, I call BS until I am empirically able to actually test and see these things because it sounds fantastic. Sounds like you ascribe more to the idea of the chemical soup version of where consciousness comes from where it's reactions in the brain as opposed to the brain is a radio and it's getting conscious waves and it's the the consciousness isn't created from within the brain. It's sort of projected through the brain. >> Is that true or what how do you see that or do you see it as a different way? >> I mean I tend to go more along the naturalist route of explaining consciousness. So rather than it being necessarily some outside frequency, I know there's a there's a book called um um the hidden spring by Mark something I can't remember. He's a he's brain scientist and uh he describes how he came to figuring out what consciousness seemed to be and how it is derivative of the brain um based on his brother who fell off a two-story house and hit his head on the ground and they had to do a lot of brain work on him. He became a brain surgeon by the way. This guy who's like a brain expert and whatnot. Um and he realized that he did all these studies and through the book he explains how people without an entire frontal lobal cortex are still conscious. There's still consciousness there. And of course this goes into animals as well. But >> um how really ultimately he believed that the consciousness come came from the brain stem, >> the reptilian part of the brain, the very lowest base level of our brain, the cortex. you know, you're talking millions upon millions, hundreds of millions of years of evolution that leads to this entire cortex that we have, which gives us that higher upper rationale and all that. So, I tend to take the approach someone like Daniel Dennett would probably argue this uh coming from a strict more of a I would say a more materialistic uh view about consciousness being derivative of of our >> neros and brain. >> It's generated internally. >> Yeah, I think it would be internal. Yeah. And that it goes away when you die. Uh when you're dead dead, you I don't I have no reason to suppose you have this uh invisible soul that that that floats off into another thing. I wish Now, let me just give you what I wish. I I wish it was true. I hope I'm wrong. Let me put it another way. I want there to be a party when the party ends. Okay, guys. I'm not the guy who goes, "When this ends, that's the end and we're done." And then just shut your damn mouth. Like, bro, no. Please let the party keep going. I want to be with my loved ones forever. I want to >> be in a better place, but I'm just being honest. What I think might happen is when I go to sleep and I rest in peace, that resting in peace will be forever. >> I go to sleep and that's it. I tend to believe that's what's the case. Um yeah, cuz even if you go on, you're not going to have your body, which means you're not going to have your brain, which means there's going to be a bunch of stuff about you that won't go on with whatever does go on. So it still won't be you. So the you as you identify right now, as I see you, as we're talking, that you dies regardless, right? Even if some aspect goes on, it's not the you that we're all thinking about goes on. This is a good point because if you take Eastern philosophy of reincarnation in mind and suppose that's true just for the sake of argument. If we do think that we come back and there's another person entering a new body and they're recycling this them whatever them is. Uh you don't seem to be the same them as the earlier them that thousand years ago that you were when you were ruling a kingdom. Now you're this servant over here and you don't act seem all the attributes of you are different. So if there is some reincarnation or some cyclical case here for soul spirit transferring or recycling um I I just don't know what goes on right and >> where does it start and stop what goes on and what ends and what's what does that mean >> and I guess where I'm at and I'm just speaking where I'm at you might go that's hyper skeptical I can't do that um is if we don't have data to show that that is the case and I'm not talking testimonies Because humans are quick to error in their perceptions and tell you experiences and they saw I was abducted by a green alien. Someone will tell you sincerely they mean it >> and they probably believe it. >> They probably believe it. But do you believe they were really abducted by a green alien? Right? So there's a reason you shouldn't if even if they're telling you they mean it. You know you you can accept that they believe that about and you can accept that they experienced something. Either they're lying or they experience something, right? can come up with reasons. Um, but I just don't find any reason to necessarily say that something about you and I um that is an essence of some conscious state, an awareness or something goes on as a soul or a spirit. Um, and I say that to say that's not to say that we aren't made up of molecules that the universe has that that's being recycled no matter what. I just don't think that they are having necessarily thought. They aren't a being or a conscious essence. I'm not seeing ourselves as like consciousness, you know, like like all of the universe is conscious or um we have this unique thing that is special that continues and recycles. I tend to think the natural world ended up spawning a lot of these things and they are often derivative I think of taking that approach of the evolution of consciousness through life on earth through surviving through finding food and trying not to get killed and reproducing. So whatever the hell ticks that okay I don't know if you say it's God because we don't know or don't understand. Go for it. I'm just saying >> that's how you see it. >> I tend to see it this way. If we can roll backwards and we can find almost to the point of aiogenesis, but we can't get a bio. We don't know exactly how the molecules came together. I don't leap from there. Put God in that spot or put magic or anything that seems beyond the natural order of things. Don't do it. I tend to go, we just don't have it figured out yet, but it's probably somehow in water. Maybe comets brought certain chemical compounds from outer space. Somehow I ended up here and under the right circumstances in the right environment somehow things with billions of years to pass this happened. Now we get all this to the end of the road and my mind tells me so what? Now I go, "Okay, cool, dude. But now what? Am I going to be a chemical robotic con? Like, let me explain the world and natural order and all that." Like, yeah, maybe that be maybe that's the facts. But I don't live my life communicating with people and enjoying it, talking like that. I'm much more of a storyteller. I like to live in myth. So, it brings me to the life of Pi. I don't know if you saw that movie. >> Oh, yeah. Uhhuh. >> One of my favorite parts of the movie is at the end. >> Yep. And he's he's telling the Chinese who are not convinced of his story just like the reporter journalist. He says, "I had to tell them a different story." He told them the story about the cannibalism and his mom being killed by the ba the cook and all that kind of crazy stuff that happened. Not the animals on the boat, but the >> the real story. They took it back and the guy's crying, journalist and him. >> And he's like, "So sorry." He's like, "Well, which story do you believe?" And he's like, >> you know, nob brainer. And then he goes, "Yeah." He's like, "Uh, you prefer the animals though, right?" And he's like, "Yeah, I'd prefer the animals, but I know this story is the real one." And he goes, "The same is true with God." So, in a sense, it might be worth to think there's something more out there. If it Another way to put this, where I'm at in my mind right now is this. If I'm right, it's almost like, so what? Because if we are animals and we evolved on this planet and thinking there's something greater out there can help us to be better civilized humans even if God was a coaxing mechanism to help us to become better to do better um then that might be what whatever it is you call God you call it spirit you call it whatever if that can help us if it has application because we're not rational robots we're animals on a planet trying to make sense of it. We need myth. Then I would say, you know, fake it till you make it if you need to like like get in, do it. If it has, if the outlook and the the statistics point to that being a better life, if a better life can be achieved, do that kind of thing. Even if I'm right, I'd rather be wrong. That's kind of where I'm at with this. >> Yeah. I use cause and effect to sort of paint that picture. Like if the effect is that you're going to have a good life and the cause was you believed in God, then that cause is real. You know what? And why is that not good enough? >> Yeah. >> You know what I mean? >> Yeah. Cuz the whole guys on the other side, I've been part of the team of like trust me, like Aaron Raw and all these guys like they're big atheist guys and they're buddies. I mean, I've been friends with them. Some of them aren't my friends anymore. Uh but that's okay. And they are all about like we want the facts, we want the data. And I think a lot of it is more activism. So it gets more into politics than it does more so just about critical thinking about what's true and what's not true. There's a tendency when you lose religion to kind of fill it in with activism and politics because these are real world things that people are dealing with. And so they do that. Um I don't want to get political, but I do want to bring that up to make the point that for me I want I don't like I want to know the truth, but you almost get to this wall where you go, you might be right, dude. So, how do we go from here? Like, >> what do we do now? >> Yeah. Because like would my solution, my explanation, like what solution could I bring that would better all humanity with this conclusion? And do we need um a noble lie? Do we need a myth? Do we need that in order for us to unify and to come up with a philosophy that works? Christianity is trying to do that. It's trying to put everyone under one umbrella and be saved under Christ and see everyone as brothers and sisters in Christ. It's it's a philosophy that's goal is to get everyone to convert and be in so they don't go to hell depending on the version of Christianity most of them but also so that everyone is brother and sister under one it's a political/social kind of thing and it has worked quite well with many people within Christianity but it also has been quite damaging in a lot of ways to things that happen in the world and other philosophies and there's just pros and cons right like I don't No, I mean can what if I'm right and we could scientifically prove I'm just hypothetically like scientifically prove it's all material that we evolved it's all nature in the sense that I'm not saying there isn't beyond material that there there are things like quantum level >> things we don't understand yet because we don't have the tools yet to >> that's all I mean people go you mean like this and I'm like no dude I'm trying to say like I'm counting quantum level stuff too I'm saying like stuff exists somehow It always has. If I'm right, what's the utility of all this? Okay, how does this help you, Mr. Ape? Your cousin's a chimpanzee. How are you going to not murder your neighbors? Or how are you going to find fulfillment in your life and treat your kids and wife good and be a good human being and get along with the rest of civilization? So what if you knew all this stuff? It doesn't mean nothing if you're not living this life because it's all going to go away when you die. What's the point? It's it's just we're dude we're gonna do this forever, bro. You see what I'm saying? >> It's kind of I always get to this point and then you're like, well, should we what do we want to get for lunch? >> You know, >> so what do I do with my hands? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, that's right. >> It's like uh Yeah. All this is great and we got to go eat lunch. So, or that kind of idea where you're like, "Oh, yeah. Let's get back to living." >> Yeah. >> Because this these are great, but how does it how does it transfer back? >> Yeah. I think there's some freedom you can find in the ideas that you know get you away from harmful theologies that don't have good ideas. But there's a point in which you go if this is all that there is. For some people, they need that hope for something more. I think we all kind of want to look forward to tomorrow being better than today. You don't know. You don't know that you have tomorrow, but you live hoping you do. and tomorrow's not true. Not till tomorrow comes. And so, like, man, we could take this stuff down to like a level where, >> you know, I got I went down this this scientific route. I saw these things and it kind of made me not like question God, but then it's like, what is God? You know, like, you know, where do you want to take this D? Because if you want to call God your consciousness because we don't fully understand that. I don't have any problem with that. And I think we should try to talk more across the aisles and not be so antagonistic to people who hold to ideas that atheists would call faith factors, faith categories. Because I think if there was more conversation and they could hear the atheists explain themselves on why they have problems with certain views, I think more theists would actually go, "Yeah, yeah, you know what? I'm going to reject that, too. Let's find common ground and sing kumbaya and get along." Because I think that a lot of atheists do mean well. They mean very well with what they're trying to do. Uh but they there's the meaning factor and where does that come from? So there's a lot here. >> How could they mean anything? How could an atheist come with any sense of meaning? >> Because everything you have that you've experienced whether Krishna, Vishnu, Zeus, Jesus or no God is still what it is whether we say there is a God or not a God. Uh another way of putting it is this. Why do you think let's use animal kingdom or observing the animal kingdom because some question whether they have consciousness or not I tend to think they do just like us the way that they behave and even the emotions they express. Um but there's a lot of science there too to back that up. But look at the animal kingdom and think does that mother care for her children? Do you think that that cheetah is thinking Jesus is real? You know, if the cheetah doesn't think Jesus is real, but loves their children because their children are part of them. And that's just the natural order, then meaning has derived from their existence and what their environment is and everything that they've lived. You didn't need to go that thing that using the conversion of that atheist woman, he used her father and mother to convert her god. And he explains it after that it was his real her real mom and her real dad that she actually knows and tangibly knows exist. And unless we get to the idea that we're all brains in a vat, I don't go down that path. But nonetheless, >> more questions. >> More questions. But you see what I'm saying? Like I don't This is the same thing with morality. If there's no God, then there's no morality. How can you base your life? How can you have morality as an atheist? And I'm like, dude, like you still got to drink water. You still got to eat. Whether there's a god or not a god, we're all circle jerking in our head here on if there is anything. You still got to live. And I think our environment shaped these things. How we live, uh, what our customs are, all these things affect how we behave, what we think is right and wrong. I was born in a Muslim country. I'd probably think it was right to to cover girls in burkas. I live in the West. My values tell me, do not put women in trash bags and cover them up. They should have the same freedoms that we do. And I believe that. Now that was a law, something that we have constructed as a society in America and many things through the founding fathers and in our constitution that we have constructed. Now unless you want to go to the level of saying that that's divine revelation. I mean I just don't I think we humans saw enough to go enough of the slavery enough of these problems. You can find in our tradition things that said screw that. You can find things in the New Testament that encouraged the don't have a slave even though they lived in that model. You can find things, right? And I think we humans have grown to realize these are wrong. Let's stop doing them. I tend to think some things I'm not getting into them, but there's some things I think we go too far on. And the pendulum swings as it always has, man. Yeah, that's nuts. I I wrote a paper to get a AP credit in high school about how uh slavery was ended because the cotton gin was invented and there was no more economic function. the North didn't need slaves and they knew they'd make a killing selling cotton gins, you know, and the whole thing. And they gave me a college credit. They loved the idea. And it really just made me think like, wow, did we never morally get over slavery. Was it never even It was never even really part of the equation. It just became a financial decision, an economic decision, more than a moral decision. >> And we we just feel like we overcame this hurdle and none of it had anything to do with morality. If it did have to do morality, why did why were we doing it in the first place? You know, it didn't make like it really feels like if if we were going to have that emotional like moral waking up moment, we would have done it while we were doing it. But I think a machine got invented and was like, we don't need this anymore. That's a very interesting way of looking at it. I wouldn't rule out cuz everything has multiple layers. I guarantee you emotions did play roles, but that goes through all history. So you can find stories about masters of slaves who are empathizing with the slaves or even people back in history who thought this was immoral. It never ended slavery. The system was there like you said until innovations come in and can actually replace the human efforts. Man, this goes back to ancient Babylon because if you go to Mesopotamia prior to the Adam and Eve story, we're talking the original, I would say the foundation stories for Genesis. There's so much there to look at. serpent, the the man made from clay, the whole nine, right? In Mesopotamia, the gods create, they have lesser gods. I think they're called the egu eigu gods or something like that. The lesser gods are doing the work for the big gods. They're digging out the trenches. They're planting the vineyards. They're doing all the work. And one day, they revolt. They they actually fight back. Many slaves have done this through history. Spartacus is one. Okay? Like there's a lot to this. Well, the gods fight back. Enlil in his wisdom realizes this isn't going to work. The person who led one of the gods, the lesser gods that led the revolt, they killed him and sacrificed him and took his blood and clay and they created humans. And when they created humans, they created them so that they would do the work for the gods. They would feed them with sacrifices. They would till the lands. They would create all the water avenues. This is in Mesopotamia right there near the Euphrates and Tigris. Well, later mythologies come up and one called Adam and Eve. Adam was made to till the garden for God. He was a worker. He was a slave of God. And of course, he was disobedient. So, I mean, you get the mythologies of this all the way back from slave work for the gods. Now, alien people like to go, "No, they came, they wanted to mine the earth for gold and like they took the DNA and genetically created, you know, all that stuff." I'm just making a funny jab. But >> sure, >> getting to your point about this, I do think that now that we realize we don't need that to be successful and it's a lot of work. >> A lot of good people are realizing there's this struggle I think that did take place morally, but I would say the innovations probably the industrial revolution exceeded helped us get past that. And there's a scholar Richard Carrier that actually is coming to my house in 5 days who's written a lot about ancient science from the Greek world all the way through. He argues that Christianity sent us often into the dark ages. A lot of the forms of Christianity were causing them to not read the ancient Greek literature. >> They were getting away from the classics, getting away from the arts, getting away from the sciences and more about just scripture. Read your Bible. You know, you know that they had like chained the Bible to the pulpit and people stopped reading it because it was in Latin and they stopped knowing Latin. All of this stuff was like the dark ages of knowledge for a long time. And he believes that we were on such an advanced state from the Romans with aqueducts going thousands of miles to massive advancements in technology. We would have been he believes we would have already exceeded that industrial revolution way earlier if it weren't for religion. Now I'm sure there's other factors but like you can see how controlling cultlike behavior can be and it could keep us from progressing. >> So you got to interview him. I could hook you up. >> Yeah, I think I've uh Yeah, I'd love to. I think I've He's He has a few different books, doesn't he? And he has a lot of Yeah, I think I've read a few of his books. He's great >> on mythicism, Jesus existing is a controversial. >> Very controversial. >> Very. >> Yeah. Yeah. But interesting. Good read. >> Yeah. >> Well, can I ask you? I know some Christians who would say, "Without my Christian worldview, I wouldn't know what to teach my kids." Like that's that's a really big thing. And you have you have kids, right? >> Yes. >> So, where do you I know you've obviously spent a lot of time thinking about worldviews. like what sort of foundation do you lay for your kids if there is no foundation to lay for your kids? I I think a lot of Christians would think that. >> Yeah. Yeah, I get it. I think uh we keep using this foundation or like where does morals come from or where does meaning come from if you don't believe there's a God? And I think it's hard for us. We're the fish swimming in water. It's really hard for us to think like there could be any meaning outside of our little our little pond. Like our pond is it. And like how could you possibly have if you don't have God? You have eliminated morals. You've eliminated meaning you've eliminated how to train or read re read your children. You know, I'm one of those guys as I've gotten older, I'm like, "Hold on, I'm a dad. Dude, I'm a dad." I have to remind myself sometimes. I'm like, "Dude, I'm a dad." And I realized my parents didn't know what the hell they were doing either. Like, we're all We really don't know what the hell we're doing often, okay? Like we're all I don't know if that makes sense. >> Oh, it makes sense. >> Yeah. So, we're still like >> once you have kids, you know, you have no idea what you're doing. >> You realize you're like, dude, this is like someone's life. Like, I can't even control the strings that help them become whatever they're going to become. >> That's right. I mean for me I this might be my upbringing in my Christian environment but the same would be said of some ex-Muslim or ex whoever from a different culture who they don't believe that women should go and do crazy stuff with men and solicit themselves or whatever. Like different cultures handle these things differently and they have ethics. They have ethics. They attribute it to a different god or or no god at all. There are atheist societies. There's Buddhist societies that don't believe in God. They literally don't believe in a god. And they're some of the most moral like walking the line good people that you can meet. So it's hard. I think when these questions come up, it it reminds me of like what I felt when I was a Christian looking outside and going, if I if I don't have this, how do I raise my children? Well, that's an interesting question. But I would also research how ancient philosophers thought about the world and make your own philosophy as you go. I really think it's important that we reason ourselves and we're not told what to think, but we learn how to think. And then we teach our children how to think, not what to think. For me, I don't tell my kids what to believe. If that were the case, they'd all be atheist, and they're not. My youngest son is a Christian. He believes. Daddy doesn't mind. Daddy encourages him to be okay, to let him know, don't let anyone tell you that you can or cannot. Don't discourage or anything. like I am not, you know, going to then not believe and therefore I have all the answers and I'm going to figure it all out. One thing I do know that I think we all intuit it along the way is don't hit that kid. He didn't deserve that. >> Yeah, pain seems to be universal. >> Universal. >> Let's avoid pain. >> Let's avoid pain >> for ourselves and for others. >> Yeah, >> pain avoiding pain seems to be a pretty good one. >> That's a good I think that's a good indicator that going down that path is going to hurt you, so you shouldn't do it. And I think that would have been intuited by anyone in any culture at any point. And there would find ways to get around that. And uh yeah, but there are weird things humans have believed through history that find ways to still do the pain part. Sacrificing their own children literally. >> And I mean, this goes from Native Americans to the Bible. Abraham sacrificing Isaac is actually a reflection of an older well-known practice that seems to have at least been practiced at some point in time in their past. And why would a human, why would you your firstborn son who's supposed to be your heir, why would you kill them for God or a god, whatever culture, what would drive a human to think that's okay? And we're talking from the Bible. So when the Christian goes, you know, hey, without Christianity, you have nothing to stand on or nothing to teach your children. I must use Christianity. I would say you're got to read far and wide. There's much, much more in the world than just Christianity. And even the building blocks of Christianity come out of Greco Roman philosophy. You can see the golden rule, eye for an eye stuff that you see Old Testament, but golden rule, do unto others as you'd like done unto yourself. That's already being taught by Greek philosophers before Jesus says it. So, did you need Jesus in order to know not to do to others that you want done to yourself kind of thing? No. He just has a different philosophy and he's teaching an interesting, I would say, apocalyptic mixed in with philosophy moral lesson. So, a lot of the stuff Jesus teaches, you might not want to teach. And we can get into examples of like hate your mother and father and your son and your brother and your sister and all that kind of stuff. And then Christians come along and go, he didn't mean that. But when you read the actual cynics, the philosophers of the time who had no home, no place to lay their head, they had no belongings, they were also neglecting their family ties and going and becoming aesthetic and followers of the divine. So when you see an example contemporaneous to Jesus that is doing the same thing that Jesus is saying to do, but we in our modern context can't have Jesus say that. We get up in arms and we defend Jesus and we have to make sure Jesus didn't mean to actually hate your mother and your father and your brother and sister and cut ties with your family and join and follow him cult. That's too much. That's too extreme. And we would not allow our Jesus to do that. Albert Schwitzer once said, "Every generation, every epoch sees Jesus in their own image." So when you're looking for Jesus, you're always finding a reflection of yourself. But when you read that and you try to place it in that context, >> do you want your children to like cut ties with you to follow Christ or something? I'm just making an analogy. If you want, you know, >> but yeah, there's there's so much here that I would just say um research and do your best to understand. You don't want to hurt people. I think that's a important thing. And I don't think hurting yourself is a good philosophy. >> So find a philosophy that works for you. If for whatever reason Christianity doesn't work for And I encourage people, last thing I'll say on that is this. If you're struggling for meaning and you're hurting and whatever you know is going on in your life that isn't working, find something does. I know atheists that have hit that wall, like I said, who just are just depressed. They just have nothing. They just feel like this isn't it. And they converted to Christianity. Apostate Prophet's one of them, for example. I wrote him a message. He's a friend of mine. Hey man, get it. And I hope that, you know, you don't feel like judged by me or anything like that. And I just said, if it gives you what you need and it helps you in your life and it helps you become a better person, I encourage that's my thing. Yeah. I met this guy Ray Yousef. He's on Twitter. He's a He's kind of big in the alternative crypto space. He's a crypto guy. Lives in Dubai. Wild man. And I was hanging out with him for a few days at a at a Monero conference in Mexico City recently. And he had converted to Islam recently. And so he was he was leading prayers and he was trying to convert people at the conference and his passion I could see that whatever he didn't have in his life before Islam, it was filling a huge hole that he had. And I kind of felt like it was a healthy thing for him. I mean he was getting up. He was pushing decentralized currency. For some reason that's how Ala was speaking through him, you know. I mean, it always takes a weird unexpected road when you when you get instilled with the divine, I suppose, but it was it was good. And I I just thought like, good for you, man. Like, stay Islamic for as long as that's working for you. But it also it also and and you know, Ray's a cool guy. I I don't know if he'll ever watch this, but it also felt like it was a drug that will burn out eventually for him. The way that they were just trying to get everybody hurrah this and that and stuff. I thought like, yeah, I've seen that before. That will burn out. And I hope you find something else that keeps you going because it's tough. And you know, when you get a psychological win, take it because those are tough to get in life. But if it burns out, that's too bad, too. You'll have to go back to the drawing board and go back to the well. And I think God will pick you up. Like I I kind of feel like you're actually more saved now. >> Do you know what I mean? >> Does that ring a bell at all? Like it feels like you got >> many Christians say, "Dude, you're still like you God is in you, bro, and he's using you. You have no clue." And I'm like, "Ah, man. I know they mean well." You know what I mean? Like I can't like I'm praying for you to possibly compliment they could. >> Exactly. >> Absolutely. It seems true. >> Yeah. Well, that's it's interesting, you know, because there's there's you chew the meat and you spit out the bone for me, you know? I don't I've got to a point where I'm like, hold on, there's there's utility here. There's usefulness. There's wisdom. There's depth. the story of Job. There's some real deep interesting ways of like if all hell breaks loose and my friends come to me, what kind of secret sin do you have, dude? And it's not based on sin, you know, it's just the way the world is. They they attribute it to God and then God comes along. Do you feed the leper in the line? Takes you out of your own for a moment that you have to, you know, think about the whole everything beyond just you. It's not the world isn't just about you, bro. That's kind of what God's story is about in Job. The world's not just about you. And he accepts his he accepts his place. Just a human. I'm just here. Like there's deep meaning you can gain. You can poke at it. You can go what the hell is Satan walking up to God in chapter 2 going God's going touch my dude. What are you doing God negotiating with the bad guy? Are you kidding me? Based on a Christian interpretation of Satan because Jews Jews don't have the same perception of Satan, >> right? And neither do Calvinists. Calvinists tend to see Satan as a pitbull of God, not an enemy because God controls everything. Um, depends on the kind of Calvinist. >> Yeah. Like is God That's the question I always have for people is, you know, is it if you in the spirit of good versus evil, are you thinking God's on the good side and Satan's on the evil side or is God above the entire game? Like that's the question. Where does he actually sit? And which one's more powerful if he's all powerful? And it seems sort of bizarre to me to pit him against anything. Like it's like saying a computer software engineer that made Mario Brothers is against Bowser. And I'm like, uh, I don't know if God is Mario or Bowser in this situation for Mario Brothers. I think the computer software engineer is the god of Mario Brothers. And I think that there's again, it makes God bigger actually in my mind to think of it that way as opposed to good versus evil. It does make God bigger, but it creates other problems. >> Oh, it it does. >> Yeah. Because I went down this path where I believed in absolute free will, you know, like I was a Christian who believed God wanted everyone to be saved because there's texts that imply that he wants everyone to be saved, right? >> Seems to be a whole faith built on it. Yeah. >> Yeah. I mean, there's a systematic theology that kind of tries to pull the strings of text that imply that. And then there's these texts that sound different. They sound and so you have compatibilists who come in and try to go it's free will and predestination and they try to make it work. >> It's the mystery. >> It's the mystery. Right. That's right. >> But the problems arise as soon as you say God's the one pulling all the strings. He's the one in charge. >> Oh, >> he's pulling all >> all the strings. He's pulling the bad strings, too. >> And I can't for for the sake of YouTube and your podcast platform. I just think of the worst possible things that humans are doing right now. >> Yeah. >> And then you just go and God is behind that. God's doing that. >> It's not just behind that. If you take this down to a >> to the real literal level at what I'm trying to describe when I was like hardcore Calvinist is that >> he causes it. >> He's not like I allow things. >> He's active in it. >> He's making it happen. >> Yeah. >> He's allowing the atoms that are partaking in the event to exist in the first place. >> He's literally making it happen. >> Yeah. >> It's almost like that guy pulled the trigger. God pulled the trigger. >> God made him pull the trigger. >> Yeah. or even did the do. So every action is being caused by him. >> So every evil problematic >> and then you get the Isaiah passage. >> I create light. >> I create darkness. I create good. >> I create evil. I the Lord do all these things. >> That's right. >> When I was a Calvinist, I saw that and I was like I was arguing with Christians, man. And like he creates good and evil. Well, that's that's that's really really tough pill to swallow. >> It's hard when you see people going through, you know, you had you've struggled with uh addiction in the past and to tell somebody in the middle of that that or to imply even somebody in the middle of a struggle to go, God, you know, God wants you to do this, right? Like God's making this happen to you right now. That's that's that's hard to go, yeah, I think that's what's happening here, too, in some ways, right? Like that is challenging. You just hit one of the central things I hit a wall on in Calvinism when I was in that phase. The Calvinists like to call they they like to talk about the two wills of God. >> Mhm. >> They like to differentiate what happens. Just think about everything that happens and has happened is one will of God determined. That's what absolutely had to happen. But then you have the prescriptive will. God says, "Thou shalt not. Thou shalt. He tells you not to do things, but he's pulling all the freaking strings, >> right? >> So, >> he has a left hand and a right hand. >> They say there's two wills, right? When I was a Calvinist, I went down that rabbit hole so deep that I was just like, "No, there's only one will of God. There's only one will. It's not two wills. Yeah, there are laws here, but the laws are there kind of in this way where those aren't really what God wants." And the reason why we know that's not what God wants, I would argue, is because when Pharaoh was told by Moses that God said, "Let my people go in secret." The text says that God hardened his heart so that he wouldn't let >> So he said, "Let Pharaoh, let my people go to Pharaoh." God told Moses to tell Pharaoh. God said, "Let my people go." And then text goes, "And God hardened his heart so that he did not let the people go." God clearly did not want Pharaoh to be let go. And sure enough, that same echoes in Romans 9. So, I'm sitting here going, "Bro, God only wants what happens. He causes everything." Which gave me encouragement as a believer because I'm like, "For the good of those who love him, >> right?" >> You know, and and if if I'm called and I'm elect and I'm chosen, I'm destined and all that. >> Feels good when you're on the winning side. >> Yep. I mean, you know, >> it it just sucked when I had to think about some of these things because I went, "You mean there's there's people God doesn't love?" Because when you go to that level, you realize he doesn't love every Jacob I loved. Esau, I hated. And I know Christians get around this. They try to at least >> he hated before they were even born. He called one and not the other. And when I went, "Oh, God hates people." Well, yeah. Uh, I abhore workers of iniquity. Psalm 5:5. God says, I abhore workers of iniquity, sinners. He hates them. He abhores them. There's different voices. And so, I started to try to systematize this and went, "Okay, you mean to tell me that there are family members of mine who aren't gods that I love more than God?" >> Right? >> I had problems, bro. >> I had problems trying to wrestle this stuff as a theologian in my mind. And these were issues that never got resolved. And when I exited and realized, oh my god, hold on. Now you might go, "Well, how do you look at it now?" Right. >> Yeah. >> Well, I realize these are different authors with different text with different theologies. They don't agree. Psalm 55 isn't saying what Romans is. >> Yeah. It doesn't It doesn't fit together. >> It doesn't go together. It wasn't meant to be read as like they tried to do some of this. Christians did go, "Well, this psalm says this and that's talking about Christ." You know, there was some of that, but like these are different people, different men at different times, under different experiences dealing with different Let's keep it real because you can go to one prophet Isaiah and he has a glorious, very optimistic look on the the nations, the Gentiles, the Guim. You can go to another one in the Old Testament and they will say, "In the end, the Guine will be dominated and they will be crushed and all the nations will be destroyed. only the few that will come and actually grab the coattell of the Jews and you'll lead them to show them the laws of Israel. Those are the ones that'll be saved, but everyone will be enslaved or killed in the end. Which is it? In the end, the nations are going to come and be blessed and everything's good and glorious at Mount Zion or we're going to crush and kill you. Well, if you're a Jew living under a very bad ruler at a certain time, you might look at the nations in a negative light. And scholars have studied this in the Mishna and the Talmud with Jews through history. Certain Jews at times were talking about the goim were like animals. They weren't real human. They had negative things to say about non-Israelites. And you have to ask yourself why because Christians persecuted the out of Jews throughout history. And then there were some Jews who had a very positive view because during that time they had a good leader. They had good goim, good Gentiles. They weren't Jews. Peace. So they didn't have the same animosity in their text or the same vision because oftentimes these these prophecies reflect. It's going to sound kind of weird but they reflect a sense of justice that you hope for that person. You know someone kills your children, you want them to burn in hell. You want something needs to happen. If they get away scot-free in this life, >> justice. >> You want justice. And if justice doesn't happen here, it needs to happen there, right? >> So hell is almost another way of saying it's got to happen and justice is coming no matter what. >> But it's been abused and used uh to control people too and all that. So I I rabbitrolled off. But the point is is um I think we should not systematize these texts and try to force them to fit. >> Where do you stand on free will? Is there such thing as free will? Does man have any ability to decide or is it all materialistic functions running at a quantum level and it's it's all just going to happen how it's going to happen? >> Well, this is where I sympathize with compatibilist in a sense where I want to say the utility of free will is useful. I don't know if have it. So, it's like God uh in a sense if it is >> believe we have free will >> even if you think we might not. >> We function as though we do. We we act as though we do. We we make decisions in our minds that make us feel and think that we do. >> Kind of makes me think of AIS right now because LLM's chat GBT will put stuff out and it sounds like it thinks it's thinking that. >> Yeah. >> And I prompted it to say something, >> but it really thinks it thought it, right? >> And it really came up with that idea, but I prompted it and I know that from a different It's almost like when you look down, we are you could almost analogously say we are the gods of AI. We created them. They're a little bit in our image. We modeled LLMs after neural networks, which is our brains. Uh, all of the math is done on our brains and how we know neurons fire. So, it does seem like a creation of ours and we are in charge of it and we tell it what to do and we, you know, it starts to look starts to be really parallel after a little while. So, do they have free will or not? But they wrote whatever they wrote. And I didn't choose all the words that it wrote. I prompted it to write something or ask a question, but it picked the words kind of, but we wrote the equation that made it pick the words. It's It's complicated. >> Extremely complicated. So that I guess my answer would be and I don't know for sure. Okay, I'm just average Joe here. He's just taking his path. But if at the end of the day there is no free will, um I think that I've lived in this mindset that there was no free will as a theologian and and I don't think it carries the utility in a good way of of my life. Sure, you go okay depressing. >> It's it's kind of like yeah, it's almost like well it's already happened. It's you almost almost want to apply it to the future, too. And it becomes a bit of it becomes kind of a way of defanging you from from doing something about being active about things because you know even a lot of these Calvinists that go too far, they don't even preach. They believe that God will do it. They they believe if it's determined and he controls it, he'll make it happen. And my dad used to tell me an interesting story that kind of taps into this. He said, "Son, if you lock yourself in a closet and you pray to God for a hot dog and you don't go to get the hot dog, you'll die." >> And I'm like, but you know, in my mind, at one point, as a naive Christian, I believe if I just pray hard enough, God can make a a hot dog appear. >> You know, what a what a kind of naive mindset I had. You know, and it's like um the same is true for the pie stuff, you know, the same is true of God or the same was true of of free will in my opinion. And if we don't feel that we have agency that can do and have control, then I don't know how that would work out in society applicably. Whereas the facts may be that determinism is the case. >> Mhm. >> But can we all live in a world where that is what we believe? >> What kind of world is that? It's almost like you can't escape the duality like uh because to believe in predestination uh and then to if it determines your behavior and you don't do anything you it does feel like you're choosing to do nothing because you believe in predestination but you could also choose to believe in free will and I'm making these but like who's firing those synapses? Like I don't grow my own hair. I don't grow my own skin. I don't pump my own heart. I don't do any of that. And so it's almost like they're inescapable. They're inescapably linked. >> I think so. That's my answer, bro. >> That's fair, man. >> I don't know the answer. I mean, like, it's it's it's it's a deep one, though. And there's a lot of people who wrestle at this at the top, the highest educated that just they they arm wrestle about this. >> Oh, it's been thousands of years. >> Yeah. At least. >> And even like the scientifically advanced are still kind of trying to get their head around it. But yeah, >> and it's like if we humans are sort of meat sacks that live mostly in delusions, you know, like our special skill in nature seems to be creating delusions inside of our head that we can really abstract ones. More and more abstract they are, the better they are for us, the better they taste, that we can just follow and pursue, you may as well pick the delusions that serve you. Like if like you were I really like what you're saying, man. Like if you're hopeless and Christianity is going to give you that passion, that fire to go correct something in your life, like use it. Use that delusion. go that way because it's all it's all myths and you're just choosing which ones run the program in your in your forebrain because most of it's in in the background, right? >> Well, I don't think it's a choosing though. Also, I think that because you can say go choose it, but when we say choose it, what we're not saying is get a chalkboard out, weigh out all the pros and cons, and decide which one you want. Because at the end of the day, we've already shown this even executives at higher levels, they get all these presentations, it's always a gut. It's always something in your gut where you go, you just know what's going to help you. >> Yeah. >> And and that's a knowing. That's not a choice. >> And so somehow you're going to go, I'm going to choose to, but you this welling up within you is a gut. And you go with your gut and that's what you're really if your gut is saying go with Christianity, then pay attention to it. Yeah. Yeah, but I don't think you can get out a chalkboard and just outline the world's religions or philosophical ethic and just rationally pick what you think because if it's not actually emergent within you, it's not going to stick. And I think it's I think it's harder to implement that. >> Yeah. >> Which again is again this this duality of like I don't know where it comes from, but it's somehow harnessing both in a way. >> Yeah, >> I agree with that. I think that what we're trying to say is here's your green light. Don't be afraid. Do what you're feeling you need to do to better your life. You really need to pursue something that you clearly want to do. Don't hesitate. Do it. Don't be afraid. Like, you don't who gives a crap what everyone online thinks about you? Who cares what people around you think if this is really what's going to help you? Um, you know, there is this catch 22 though because some cults >> are once they get their claws in certain people and it changes them and it makes them so psychologically trapped in this stuff. This is the concern the atheists have. Be honest. They see it. They know that you're going to lose control of any potent. Here we are talking about control, right? Free will agency that you seem to have. And how many people there's like Netflix has docuer about these amazing people, very athletic, charismatic, popular social media girls get sucked into this little house church and they won't even talk to their parents anymore and have anything to do with their family. And you go, Derek, are you encouraging that? No, I don't. >> Obviously not. >> Yeah. But you see, there's a harm. There's good and there's harm. And it's like I want to teach people critical thinking skills. Yes. I'm going to be honest. I want people to stop thinking these things literally happened because if you do, you might as well accept the other ones literally happen. You might as well say Sleepius, Dianisis, Heracles, literally. And that literalness, I think, is that fundamentalist that we have in us that mine's true, yours is false. I think if we break down those barriers of mine's true, yours is false kind of model with these ancient stories including Jesus, you could say mine's true and yours is true to you, too. You don't need this exclusive model. And I know that means you're breaking down the bedrock of Christians claim. You're breaking down your own text. But, you know, a lot of people go, "That's cherry-picking. That's not being an authentic Christian. You're not a real Christian. If you don't follow the creeds, you don't do this. You don't do that." Bro, Jesus was a cherry-picking Jew. He found scripture he picked used against his opponents and they used scripture to try and argue against him. He's a cherry picker as well based on his own religion. He was a Torah reformer. He was arguing for his own understanding of these scriptures, ripping apart certain versions of Judaism that were standard and accepted. And there was a broad understanding of the majority of people. >> Yeah. He redefined things. >> Redefined things. be like Jesus, >> redefine it. >> Be like Jesus and redefine his own tradition that people are understanding as Christianity. That's my encouragement because if we go down this path, it's only us verse them mentality. We already have tribalism in everything and it always will be from ethics to politics to to religion. And I think that's one of our biggest enemies is is tribalism with the polar opposites that we carry. If we realize how similar we are, it can usually mitigate that. I think if we see actually, you know what, they're closer to me than I realize. And Freud would call that the narcissism of small differences where they constantly are fighting because they're so close to each other. You know why Democrats and Republicans fight all the damn time? They're closer than you realize. I know it sounds like, no, no, they're different worlds. Yeah, you have these things you argue about, but there's a reason they're so polar opposite. And the same goes for religious groups. The Christians that argue the most are the closest to each other. Southern Baptists aren't arguing against Episcopalians. They aren't arguing confronting the priest of the Catholic Church. They're dealing with those damn other Southern Baptist down the street who say that women can wear their skirts above their knees. Are you kidding me? You know what I'm saying? >> That's a good point. Yeah, it's always the closer, but I want to tear down those walls and try to have us see each other. >> Well, I appreciate that about your channel is that I appreciate the critical thinking and I think that that's something that is healthy and normal and it's an okay thing to ask questions. And I think that it's okay to live in a place where it's it's okay to have questions, more questions than answers. And that's all right. That you know, I think that the first question I would ask is why do you need answers? Why are we relying on answers? Why do what if that answer what happens to you if that answer isn't real? Isn't right? Isn't whatever you think it is? Like are you still going to get Chipotle later today? Are you still going to get guac on your burrito? Like in some ways you got to kind of play that out. And so I appreciate your pursuit of critical thinking in this area because it is very scholarly too. I mean you read so many of the texts. you are not like you go deep and that is very helpful I think because a lot of people don't go there and it's hard to it's hard to learn learn all this stuff and take time to do that. I actually wanted to ask you how do you where do you what do you pick to do next on your channel? How do you as running this YouTube channel for seven years? How how are you meandering your way through like what the next video is going to be? >> I man my gut. Um, yeah, like right now it's it's Islam and I want to I want to do some stuff on that because I've never done a breakdown of that. And I also want to I'm start I started a new channel yesterday >> and hopefully more time gives me Mythvision Reacts. So, I'm actually going to do a reaction channel to the religious sphere of material from the atheists, Alex Okconors and others, uh, to the Christian apologists to Muslims who make claims and statements and >> raw just >> if I hear something stupid, I'm just going to be like, are you kidding me? >> Yeah. >> And if they if I hear something good, hey, that's a good point. You know, they like got to be open. I think humbleness when you're approaching this material is important, too. But that I always had that as a human even before becoming non-Christian was just like >> trying to empathize with the partner that I'm communicating with even if we disagree >> which is also what led me out. It was people I was able to communicate with that I wasn't willing to communicate with um if I was following the rules of what my pastor would have encouraged me to do would have been don't be open to conversation with someone like me which you're having. You're committing a big sin according to some But I I I opened up to friendly people who were not antagonistic, you know, were not angry atheist. They were gentle. They were calm. And they told me, "I don't care if you don't believe or do believe. I just want to talk to you about myths and compar comparisons of the myths." And I stayed a believer in a god, a power. Eventually, it was the science and stuff that made me start going, hold on, what if the whole category is all us just projecting to make sense of the universe, to make sense of things? And it seems that that's what led me down that path. So, yeah. Um, I think anyone needs to try and learn to be that way, have good conversations, and some people don't. I mean, Matt Dah Hunty, probably heard of him, famous atheist guy. Me and him recently didn't see eye to eye. I did a video with Neil. We kind of called out the nonsense of how people call in and it's so abusive. I mean, it's it is the most talk on humans that are probably delusional, a lot of them, and some of them are sincere and >> and they're calling in and he's just being way derogatory, extremely disrespectful. And a lot of the callers are also dishing it out and they are like that, too. I'm not trying to act like he himself is that way. But when you're doing that for 15 years, it's more of like an entertainment show to me. It's not sincere. It's more about let me make these guys look stupid so that we feel justified and why we think their gods are stupid. And you could think their gods are stupid and still treat the person, you know, with respect because I don't see the god and the person as one and the same. They may identify with their faith so much that they feel threatened when you accuse or criticize their religion or their god. And my encouragement to them is to say, "I'm not attacking you. You feel that way. I'm actually just talking about the tradition or the religion behind what you think is true and it's not you as a person." So, if we did those conversations more, I think it'd be helpful. I also don't do debates. I I mean not saying I won't at once some point, but like >> it's a dick measuring contest to me and it's a who can outwit on the spot rhetorical sophistry. >> It's a joust. >> It's a joust. >> It's a game. >> It's a game. >> That's right. >> It's entertainment. >> Sure. >> And you can learn a lot from it. >> But if the other guy is better with words than you are and you're actually factually on the right track, it's also emotional. Very emotional. And it's not a comfortable place I feel like getting into because it's not an honest you're not really trying to learn from the person who's communicating with you. >> Yeah. You're trying to win. >> That's it. >> It's how politics works which kind of sucks. >> They organize our society a lot of ways. >> These debates like these these jousts that makes one person look good in a second and another person kills. >> Yeah. Because to acknowledge anything on the other person's side might be real and true. They may make a really good point, but you're not even allowed to say that because now you might lose the debate >> cuz everyone's going to go, "Well, that guy said the other guy said a good point. So, the other guy probably won." And it's like, "Wait a minute. >> Are we this bad at critical thinking? >> Are we here to win? Are we here to have this this narrative to like like flesh out the nuance of whatever topic we're covering?" But when I'm incented to win, which means don't say anything that that guy said is good or right or a good point, then it's more divisive than helpful. I think >> you have to be like hardcore bipartisan for your view >> and >> or I mean partisan, sorry, not bipartisan. You have to be completely partisan. Totally. And it's not like >> it's not real critical thinking like you said. And if you go back >> where we get the word sophistry from, there was a group that that was identified as sophist. They became very skilled at crafting rhetorical tools in debates and they would even practice arguing for the the the wrong side >> on purpose >> to try and win. >> They had schools in the Greek world where they would practice arguing the wrong argument as if it were true. >> Well, they do that in debate clubs now. >> They do that in debate. >> You just get assigned a side. It's not they don't present something and go, "Which one do you think it is? Pick that side." They just assign you to a side >> and you have to stand your ground and defend the side and argue it. And they did this in court cases and all this stuff. And lawyers of course still practice this to try and win the cases for the guilty or the innocent, right? To try and win them over. And it's sad because it's not really about what you they're trying. It's like our system's trying in a way, but it's got its loopholes and it's got and that goes for debates. And I think to myself, >> you know, I would just have to go on there and be derogatory and just be so partisan. It's like, why would I even want to put myself through that? For me, I am an authentic dude wanting authentic dialogue. And I know I've talked to these people. I've bumped into some of these people and they're They are They want to got us >> and I'm not into it, man. I'm just not into this. I This is real. >> You guys are having like real conversations. I know you're interviewing me, but like this is authentic. This isn't some Let me put on a show and make is my tribe. Okay. Did y'all like how I said he's a dumbass and look at his buck teeth? You know, like, you know what I mean? Like, they want that. Yeah. You got him. You got him, D. It's like, bro, if if I have to be like that, I'm not being me. >> Yeah. >> Cuz I've always got along with everyone as a person at school, everyone. Every group, blacks, uh, you you name it. Like, every group. Cuz in North Carolina, it's like 50/50 where I'm at. Like, I was hanging out with everyone. The nerds defended them against bullies. hung out with blacks. I hung out with the Mexicans. I hung out with every single group. I had friends from everywhere outside my faith and inside my faith. Like, I got along with everyone. And if I can't be that, it. I don't want it. >> Dang. That's a good place to end, I think. >> Yeah. >> This was so awesome. Thanks for coming on the show. Great. It's been awesome to chat with you. you got great stories and I do appreciate that >> like I I said it earlier but if you didn't switch sides to you fell something fell apart and now you're angry on the other side. So you've actually given up the idea of being right in that way to to because the only way you can be right is to make someone else wrong. And so you're more okay with this nuance of uh and I really appreciate that. Thanks for what you're doing. >> Well, thank you. I guess if I'm able to answer that just to say you also have to think about the job it would be for me to then inform and educate everyone to get to where I'm at in my thinking. >> Dude, >> too much. >> It's too much. >> It like it would be cool if everyone just was able to see this this way and then we all were kind of loosey goosey and and and able to function and operate. I don't think I think some people really believe like you've brought up those kind of questions of like some people think they need it. If you think you need it and you don't realize that I know it's a leap of faith in a sense to the dark side you think and that the grass is greener in my view on the other side that you have this freedom to actually explore all the philosophies and enjoy all the good and the bad that they all offer. Um I I just don't think everyone's going to be willing to step outside of that. And there's also a social dynamic because of the the the systems of religions and politics and everything. As soon as you become a conservative or a Democrat in a house that's like that or you become a non-Christian and your whole social upbringing is this, you become the black sheep. You be the pressures that be will not allow for those. Do you imagine? I'd have to be God to change everything. >> And I have to live and realize I can't I'm not able to fix everything and I'm not able to get everyone to see that. I'm gonna accept people where they're at and love them and just be patient and realize like not everyone's ever even see things like I do. That's okay. And but I can see things where they're at. And so if I have to be the bigger man to like kind of go it's all good. And it's not for everyone. Like you're the bigger man. You're able I could see we have like this this mutual bond of realizing each other's differences but yet like we respect it. >> Not everyone can. >> Yeah. And you got to be the bigger man to realize that not everyone can. And that goes for the atheists you might encounter. For me, the Christians I might encounter. >> If I was you, I'd be you. >> Exactly. >> Yep. That's right. >> That's where we should end this thing. >> Yeah. That's right. >> Cool. Thanks for coming in. >> Thank you. >> Yeah. Thanks for letting Christ work through you without knowing it, dude. I really appreciate it. Yeah. >> Well, you know what? I wouldn't know if he was or wasn't, but it's okay, I guess. >> Right on. Let's get out of here. >> Let's get out of here.