Jay Dyer, thank you very much for
doing this. I have a lot of
questions to ask you, but I want to
begin with
orthodoxy.
You are one of the most
visible and maybe effective
evangelists for orthodoxie,
Christian orthodox,
certainly in your age cohort, maybe
in the country.
You're orthodox. Why are you
orthodox? What is orthodoxies?
I'm Orthodox because I
went through a long journey trying
to figure out what authentic
Christianity is.
And so I was raised Baptist.
That took me eventually into
Catholicism when I was about 20,
21, I think.
I read St. Augustine's City of God.
I read a bunch of his other works
and I thought, well, Baptist
isn't right because I'm finding in
the Church Fathers all these
teachings that are not Baptist.
And so that kind of
gradually took me in the realm of
Traditional Roman Catholicism did
that for a long time.
And as you get into, I think
the more recent problems of
Vatican two post Vatican
two theology that led me
to the question of
how do I reconcile this with what
I know the first thousand years of
Christianity teaches.
So long story short, uh, it took me
about eight or 10 years.
I finally came to the Orthodox
church about 10 years ago.
So that's
the simplest quickest reason is
cause I think
I think to most modern
Christians, certainly American
Christians, that's like a black
hole. What does that even mean, the
first thousand years of
Christianity?
It's an area that we're not taught.
I know that when I went to
college, the only thing that we
talked about from that whole period
was like Augustine's confessions
and maybe, maybe one other
book or two, we have something
called the dark ages and nothing
happens. Nothing about Byzantium.
And then like these people called
the Medici's make a ton of money in
Italy and start funding beautiful
art and that's the beginning of
civilization
So I, and I remember at
college, I was like pressing
the department, like, why don't we
study some medieval stuff, some
Byzantine stuff.
And they were like, why should we,
we don't care about that Christian
stuff.
So, um, yeah, I think there's
probably a little bit of an
intentional desire to suppress
that, uh, for, I mean,
American education, I think it's
pretty much brainwashing.
So, but one sentence
this might take between
Constantine in the 4th century and
the Renaissance, you had
Christian civilization.
The most successful empire
in history is the Byzantine Empire,
from Constantine all the way up
until the fall of Byzantium II
to the Muslims.
So, um.
Why do you say it's the most
successful?
Uh, that's a common sort of academic
assessment, just in terms of
their, they flourished on a gold
standard for a really long time, um,
they started clipping the gold,
money clipping, like the, uh,
Roman empire in the West had done
before them and other empires.
So they, they fell prey to usury as
well. Yep.
Uh, so they fell to a lot of
the same.
Issues that empires tend to fall to
human weakness and weakness
recognizable stuff degeneracy
all of that also
rabid nationalism had a tendency to
Break down empires as well Um,
I like spangler and I think if you
read oswald spanglar, he talks about
how there's kind of a life cycle But
I think the unique aspect of the
business the empire was that it was
Explicitly christian based on
orthodox christianity
And so in many metrics of what it
is to be successful or flourishing
it flourished, um,
but, uh, it did fall.
I think again, I'm
not trying to measure Christianity
just on worldly success, but I do
think it does play out in that
way at times, right?
If you're, if you're really
based around Christ, if your, if
your theology or civilization is
logo centric, then it's going to
play out that way, you're just going
to prosper because you're aligned
with what's true.
You're aligned that transcendent
source. So, um anyway,
for me, that journey
ended up being eventually Orthodox
Christianity.
So, but just really quick back to
the Byzantine Empire.
Did you know it existed before?
How many people are aware that there
was a Byzantine empire and know
anything about its outline?
Not many people in the West.
Again, there is a very
clear, especially if you take
humanities courses, you know, the
way they're constructed in, in
college and, and maybe even
younger private type schools.
Like you go from,
you do the pre-Socratics, you
do Plato and Aristotle.
And then you do Augustine,
maybe a stoic or two, and then you
jump to Descartes, so you skip that
whole period.
And not just to say Byzantium, but
also, you know, the latin west was.
Uh, you know, explicitly Christian
as well. I think that's it's
intentionally overlooked.
Um, they don't want people reading
what brilliant
thinkers were doing in the middle
ages, because that's where we get
universities, universities come out
of Byzantium, they come out
of the West, um,
soda hospitals.
So some of these very fundamental
science itself actually comes out of
that whole period, so, but we are
taught, we think that No,
these are all post-enlightenment,
you know, post-scientific revolution
developments. They're not.
They're medieval developments.
So a lot of that's suppressed.
A lot of the, I had to kind of just
read and learn on my own.
Is an adjective, but also
an epithet that's
medieval by design, drawing and
quartering somebody.
These dark ages, they were dark like
that's all Voltaire.
That's all sort of an atheistic, uh,
French revolutionary attack on
what came before, uh
by design.
When did you learn that?
Well, I was really interested in
medieval thought, scholastic
theology in college in my
twenties. And so I was reading
Aquinas and reading all these guys
as I had all these atheist
professors who were
constantly debating with
them.
I even did a public debate my
sophomore year with the atheist
professor. So I would be reading
all those guys, studying philosophy
and history and then debating with
those guys and then coming to
my own conclusions about that stuff
through just reading, so.
Interesting.
I keep interrupting.
So that led you to orthodoxy.
Pete Slauson Long story short, yeah,
roundabout way, I went from
traditional Catholicism in my
20s to eventually,
I took about eight to ten years to
study orthodox stuff pretty
intensely. So that would be, because
I'd put a lot of time into reading
the Latin Church Fathers.
So I was reading Jerome and Ambrose
and a lot Augustine's
works. And then I realized I've
never actually read the Eastern
Church Fothers.
And if you get into church history
and that first millennium that he
talked about You realize that
all of the seven slash eight
ecumenical councils of that first
millennium, they're actually all had
in the East, they were all called by
the emperors, the Byzantine emperor.
They're not called by The Pope.
Certainly The Pope was either there
or had legalized there.
So the West was represented, but
it was in its ethos.
It was essentially Eastern
and Eastern in its Orthodox
theology.
So I just decided to go on a long.
Reading track of reading all of
those guys as best I could for many,
many years. So that would be like
the Cappadocians, that would be a
Basil, the two Gregorys,
St. Cyril of Alexandria, St Maximus
of Confessor, St John of Damascus.
Those are some of the key figures in
that milieu of the first thousand
years that set the
tone of all of Christianity in
terms of its most fundamental
doctrines of Trinity and
Christology, right?
That's, that's what Christianity is.
Those two doctrines are the key sort
of linchpin that it all hangs on.
So the first thousand years is
dominated by those topics
and that in
a roundabout way, a lot of people
don't realize this either that
actually conditions what
type of Christianity you're going to
have, how it's going to affect
society, how it's gonna affect your
life.
Um, so for example, you have a very
truncated version of say
evangelicalism that's only based
around just how you're
saved, right?
That's not going to effect society.
And so those types of Christianities
or...
I would say deviations.
They're also very susceptible to
being used by other groups.
I know you just had a, you had a guy
on talking about evangelical
Zionism and this dispensational
theology because that
theology is sort of
based around an eminent, you know,
into the world type scenario,
you sort of retreat and you're not
able to create a vibrant
cultural effect of Christianity.
That's by design.
People figured that out.
They were very cunning.
A few centuries ago, they realized
that that's the kind of Christianity
that can be useful.
That theology, which I'm not an
expert in, but have heard a lot
about in the last couple of years is
so totally
incompatible with what the New
Testament actually says
that it makes you wonder, like what
kind of church could fall for
that? And it would be a church with
a pretty thin theology.
Exactly. Right.
And a structure that
couldn't do anything about apostasy.
And it's also antithetical to
the Christianity of the first
thousand years, and the reason I
keep saying the first 1000 years is
that that's not just where we get
these doctrines of the Trinity
and who Jesus is formulated, but we
also get the Bible.
The Bible itself comes out of
decisions of church fathers
centuries after the apostles.
So if we're going to have a church
or a religion based
on the Bible,
we really already truncate
Christianity because the Bible
itself In our
ethos is a liturgical document.
It's actually part of a liturgy.
It's not a personal devotional
book primarily.
So divorce it from that context,
divorce it from the community that
produced it.
Is what produces sort of
aberrant truncated versions of the
religion that make it susceptible to
princes, foreign governments,
NGOs, think tanks, foundations, they
become essentially tools of
saw power, which is what I think
much of the evangelical Protestant
world today.
Not indicting the individuals, but
the groups, the
denominations, they're very
easily bought off.
For example, very wealthy
families in the West, about a
hundred years ago, were able to buy
off many of the mainline Protestant
denominations and turn them into
effectually NGOs.
Just one example, the Rockefellers,
and they're not the only family, but
they're one of the families that
invested very heavily in not
just the UN, but also the World
Council churches to create a sort of
a supra.
International version of the UN that
would be for religions.
And they were very explicit in their
biographies about how this was to
basically make it kind of an
NGO. So make Christianity into
kind of a form of soft power for
American interests, really
oligarchical interests.
And that's one of the
weak points, I would say, of
Protestant theology, evangelical
theology is that it's very
susceptible to that.
Not to say that the Roman Catholic
church, or even amongst the Orthodox
church, there aren't people that are
susceptible to the same types of
subversion, but I think it's a lot
more difficult when
you have an ancient historic type of
church that has certain
structural, structural integrity and
normativity to it that,
you know, Billy Bob strip mall
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Because unlike Billy Bob's
strip mall church,
2,000 year old church can say,
wait a second, we've never believed
this, we've never done this,
why would we be changing?
There is a sense of continuity.
There is, there's also
like, if
you have the attitude of a
standard sort of Protestant
evangelical person,
there is nothing in history is
settled because every generation
kind of has to reinvent the wheel,
they have to redo all the same
controversies and crises all
over again, because they could have
all been wrong.
Nothing is settled, right?
Because for Protestant evangelical
Christianity, the Bible and
the apostles are kind of like the
end.
I know that a lot of Protestants
would say, well, we like Athanasius.
We like, you know, Santa Gustin or
whoever, but when you actually go
and read them, they have
bishops, they have relics, they have
the Eucharist, they have all these
elements that don't align
with Protestant reformation.
So I was an avid Calvinist.
I was super into John Calvin and all
that stuff when I was a younger guy.
And it was, it was
a unsettling.
You know, to read these guys and
realize, well, they don't teach
Calvinism.
So what am I going to do here?
I either not be a Christian or I can
align myself with whatever
the first thousand years of
Christianity actually is.
And I say the first thousand years
too, because
Catholics and Orthodox share that,
that first thousand of years.
So we both have that in common.
So I think that narrows it down.
It's either going to be Roman
Catholicism or it's going to be
Orthodoxy because.
But what about orthodoxy
struck you as non-Calvinist?
Like what are the differences, the
big differences?
So, you know, Calvinism is not just
predestination and the sort
of, um,
strict, uh, soteriology
or salvation doctrines.
It's also iconoclasm,
which ends up, I think, affecting
one's view of art
and esthetics.
Idol smashing.
Correct. Um, and I
was a very avid sort of iconoclastic
Calvinist when I was young.
Um, um it's also very, um.
Rigid in terms of its view of
Social structure, church and state,
uh, I, the more I read the church
fathers, the more I got into that
kind of a theology.
I realized that like Calvinistic
sort of Republicanism doesn't really
match up with Byzantine
imperialism or monarchy.
You know, the, the traditional views
of the church's
take on governance.
The Byzantine Empire is a theocracy.
Yeah, well, yeah, pretty much.
What's interesting is that there
are spheres, right?
So you have basically, if you think
about the Byzantine double-headed
eagle, that symbol is
one body of the people,
but church and state as two
separate heads, so there's spheres
of authority, but one body
that they share, which is the
people.
So, uh, and then the West to a
degree had this until the middle
ages, when you get sort of a rise
of, um, the
11th century papacy, which becomes
also the state.
So you get a Papal States and a
sort of under
Pope,
Dictatus Papi is the famous document
that says the church is
also a state now.
But until that time, the norm was
church and states were working in
unison. Symphonia is what it's
called in the Greek.
So that's what I had
to grapple with, but
Calvinism really doesn't see
it that way. It's more like a
It more, it favors Republicanism.
There were, there were famous
battles between in
England, for example, the
Presbyterians, uh, and the
monarchists. So they actually had a
huge fight within the history of the
English Reformation as to whether
they would be Anglican
sort of monarchists or whether they
will be Presbytarian Republican
Calvinists.
So that was a famous, uh reformation
battle. Um, but long story short
again, like, you know, Calvinism, I
think is just, it's antithetical
to.
The first thousand years of
Christianity, not so much because of
those esthetic or cultural issues.
It's also Christologically
errant in that the whole
idea of what salvation is,
is ultimately one's legal standing
in terms of what's called
justification by faith alone or
penal substitutionary atonement.
This idea that you're justified by
God through a sort of
notional acceptance of a set of
ideas and then God's
attitude towards you changes.
So it's dispositional but
it's not focused on an actual
ontological change in the person.
Orthodox theology is very different.
God's disposition is based not
on purely a legal stance,
but on your actual
ontology change.
So a metaphysical change in you
versus a dispositional attitude.
So I don't, maybe we don't get too
heavy on the philosophy, but I do
want to.
What's the difference between the
two?
Basically, uh, there's an idea in
the middle ages called nominalism.
Have you heard of that? Yes.
Okay. So nominalism is the idea that
there are only names
to things, not essences,
so there's no human nature.
There's no dog nature.
When we talk about natures or
classes or sets of things, we're not
giving a, an ontological
metaphysical status.
We're just simply classing things
together linguistically in a set.
The Middle Ages in the ancient
world, the time of Paul or the
church fathers, they thought very
differently. They thought that
things have natures, they have
essences, and so the words aren't
just terms or nominal,
name-ism.
They actually describe what's really
there in them metaphysically,
okay? So there is human nature.
And in orthodox theology, Christ
assumes- deny that.
In the middle ages, it begins with
people like William of Occam.
So Occam is the first nominalist.
And the man with the razor, the
exactly, he's known for that.
Um, and he challenges some
kind of established ideas of like
essential. It's called essentialism
that things have essences.
And so he also goes up against
this idea of universal.
So there's no such thing as a
universal class or essence
of a thing.
And that had been kind of the norm
since Plato and Aristotle
as well. But.
So you get a denial of
essentialism and essences, and then
you get another
guy named Gabriel Beil, and he's
very influential on Martin Luther.
And so when the Reformation
kicks off, there's this debate about
how could you be
called righteous if you're
not in fact righteous?
So if as a human being you are,
you know, menstrual rags, as Isaiah
says, as the Reformers said, then
how could God call you righteous
without being a liar?
What enter in nominalism and
nominalism is able to say, ah,
because things don't have actually
have essences. They just have names.
And so if God calls you that,
you are that legally,
even though in actual fact you're
wicked.
So that was, yeah, that was in
Luther was very happy to
utilize that nominalistic approach.
And by the way, this is not just my
theory. This is famous Lutheran
scholars. There's a book called
harvest of medieval theology by
Heiko Obermann and the whole thesis
of that book by a Lutheran is that
Yeah, Luther had to use nominalism.
So, so we're also the moving away,
not just from theological squabbles,
but the idea that things have
natures.
And that's just, this is how we get
to David Hume and Kant
and these enlightenment figures,
which give us the,
you know, scientific revolution.
Supposedly this is, how we to,
there's no male and female.
So you can see kind of the logical
train here. If things don't have
essences, well, then they don't
actually have
genders, right, objectively,
because everything is just a name.
So I can just name myself
he, him, Zer, Z.
I'm not trying to go too fast or too
far in the sense of like technology,
but I'm saying there's a, there is
an ideological sort of progression
that you can get from nominalism to
where we are now with postmodernism
and then with essentially,
you know,
interesting that an adult could
believe in something like that.
I mean, having lived your life,
known people, known animals,
seen nature, and arrive
at the conclusion that nothing has
an essence.
Everything is just what we call it.
Like that, that flies in the face of
your experience.
It has to.
What's that saying that you
have to be an academic to be really
stupid? Yeah, I guess that's right.
To be indoctrinated into believing
something. I remember Terrence
McKenna, do you remember the cycle?
Not Terrence McEnna.
I remember reading it one time,
and...
He says something like,
this is all just magical thinking,
you know, this, if you take the
shroom, you're going to see that
things don't have essences,
that things just have names and you
just change the name.
And I'm like, that's the gender idea
right there.
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Yeah. And that's just, it's kind of
Apogee, you know, the, you
know, gender insanity is just the
most obvious, but it has a
precedent in this.
Right. Theology, this theology
debate.
That's amazing.
I've never heard that before.
Huh?
I'm sorry to hear that about Luther
who I've always loved.
There's a lot to love about Luther.
He's a character for sure.
You would actually chase the devil
away with farts, which I think is
great.
Quite a robust man and a happy
family life and everything about him
I like, but that is
impossible to defend,
just flies in the face of reality.
Yeah. And even modern scholarship
in the Protestant world is a great
book by, uh, Alistair McGrath
out of England.
Uh, I think he's Anglican is called
Eusticia day and his
book was kind of a landmark in
Protestants coming to the table and
saying, okay, look Luther's
doctrine of salvation is not in the
first 1500 years.
Unfortunately, so so
this the understanding
of salvation that preceded the
Reformation was that people had to
be changed on in their essence.
In order to be safe.
So there's an actual participation
in what orthodox theology
calls the uncreated energies.
So we believe that God has
infinite divine energies and
operations, attributes, as it's
called in the West.
And for orthodox theology, and this
is the patristic teaching as well,
we participate in that.
So we're not just changing a
legal status, we're actually
participating in the life of
God Himself, which, as I have said
before, is the only way for us to be
able to see the
When you go back and you read the
New Testament, you're like, Oh,
actually, well, that makes more
sense. Cause Jesus says in John 17
that he came to give us a share in
the glory that he had with the
father before the foundation of the
world.
So divine glory can't be a creature.
And so Jesus is equating grace with
divine glory.
So unless you think God has created
parts, which would be polytheism
or some form of ideology uncreated
grace has to be a
reality.
That's a participable thing.
Well, Jesus promises that the
Holy Spirit will flow
into people.
Change them.
And that happens. Spirit's not a
creature, because then you would be
antitranitarian.
So absolutely this is why Peter says
in his epistle, right, that we
become partakers of the divine
nature.
So very strong language in
the New Testament and the epistles
for what we call theosis
in the Orthodox Church.
Paul says, for example, in
Thessalonians that it is
the dunamis or the power of God
that is at work in him.
So the actual power of
God, which can't be a created thing
or created grace.
Which unfortunately even
a Latin Roman Catholic church in
middle ages created grace becomes
a normative thing where what you're
getting is just another form of
created the orthodox church
saying no no the incarnation itself
tells us that the
uncreated united itself to
human nature and incarnation and
that Jesus deified the
human nature that he assumed with
his own immortality grace
and uncreated energy.
The role of the Bible, um,
in the Protestant world versus
the Orthodox world, you described
it this way.
I think you said in
Protestant Christianity, the Bible
is seen as like a, a tool
as a, what's a guide, of course,
the guide, the only guide really,
and it is a
devotional, but in
the Orthodox, uh,
church, it's a
liturgical document.
What does that, what does that mean?
The Torghos has to do with the
Greek word of offering or
offering of thanks, offering of
praise, but it's also
in the Hebrew tradition,
we think that that was
proto-Christianity, the ancient
Hebrew texts.
It was part of, for
example, David's Psalms.
Those were Psalms that David wrote
to be sung at the temple liturgy.
So, liturgy is a sort of structured
form of worship that...
Orthodox, you know, Roman Catholics,
Anglicans, Episcopalians, they have
a very structured form of worship
that is called liturgy.
But originally it just means sort of
offering, and even in
Pauline epistles like the book
Hebrews, you know, towards the end
of it in chapter 13, Paul talks
about.
Christians have an altar that
they eat from that the Jews
that serve at the tabernacle have no
right to eat from Because our
altar is the true altar Which
is thus a liturgical altar that
very chapter he discusses the
liturgical thanks and offering at
that altar So from the earliest
days christianity had this sort of
altar based form of
worship Again, another Reformation
distinctive is that they began to
move away from the idea of an altar
towards a table, right?
So you have a sort of a
desacralizing of the worship
space to not be
a Eucharistic offering but a shared
meal, which, and
we're not totally opposed to the
idea of it being a shared meals, but
it's first and foremost a
worship offering.
If you go back to Abraham, Abraham
built an altar.
God is always worshiped
at an altar, at least the
biblical God.
So for us, the Reformation
then represents a form of
turning away from that as a form
of sort of Judaizing, it's a
form returning to a form a
rabbinical theology.
And many of the reformers were
actually very influenced by rabbinic
theology, by the Talmud even.
So, the reformation has
a stream of influences, Renaissance
humanism, all those things play into
that.
And it's just very- Luther was not
in that category though.
He was not interested in rabbinic
theology, but he was influenced by
what's a text called the Theologia
Germanica, which was a neoplatonic
text. And so there was also some,
there's also some evidence that
scholars have pulled up that
suggests that Luther might have had
an interest in hermeticism.
I'm not saying that that dominates
his idea, but more so with
Calvin and some of the
Swiss reformers,
they were a little more directly
influenced by rabbinical theology
Talmudism.
But not so much Luther, no.
Luther was very anti, I mean, he
didn't even like Moses.
He said, I like to punch Moses teeth
out.
So, so Luther didn't like the old
Testament at times, but again, he's
a boisterous sort of, you know,
satire, satirical character at
times. So, uh, it's hard to know
exactly the most hilarious
theologian in history was very
hilarious.
Uh, um, so it's, it hard to exactly
when he's always being literally
might just be joking around, but no,
I don't mean to mischaracterize
cause I know Luther wrote about
the Jews and their lives.
That's a famous text that he wrote.
So I'm aware of that, but Just in
terms of the general, you know,
trends of the Reformation outside
of Luther with Calvin's
Wingley, Melanchthon,
even later Lutherans were
very involved in the founding of
Rosicrucianism.
Johann Andre is believed by some
scholars to be the author of the
Rosicrution Manifesto, I forget
exactly what it's called, but so
that is there and a lot of that has
to do with, with Kabbalistic ideas.
Who are the Rosicrucians?
Uh, this was an enlightenment era
secret society of sorts,
uh, which in
the 1600s, 1700s, there, there was a
lot of these that were popping up
everywhere. Cause you still had in
Protestant countries, you had
certain laws that would for any
Catholic countries as well, they
would forbid participation in
secret societies, they wouldn't
forbid, uh you know, practicing
of the occult and varying various
ways.
But you also had court alchemists
and people that would kind of, uh.
Like John Dee, he was the, you know,
court astrologer to the queen.
So they would kind of do these
things in, on
the, in the download secretly.
And so you get a rise of these
secret societies. This is where some
of the first speculative Masonic
lodges start to pop up in the 1500s,
1600s in Europe.
Uh, but you also had a very
interesting confluence of
hermetic and Kabbalistic groups that
were popping up.
Particularly Spanish rabbis that
were very popular in Spain seemed
to be involved in some of the,
the rise of Kabbalistic influence in
the West.
Um, and that I think
contributes in part to the
Rosicrucians who, according to
there's a great book by a Dame
Francis Yates called, uh,
Rosicruchian enlightenment.
She actually argues that the
enlightenment itself was
heavily influenced by Rosicretion
ideology.
So, um, they were.
Neoplatonists, they were into magic,
alchemy, so they were really
interested in the idea of
transmuting metals into
the philosopher's stone, which
some people thought was
a real thing you could do and others
thought, well, that's just an
allegory for how to
undergo transformation into your
better self or to become God in
a literal sense, not
in the sense of orthodox theology.
So all of these, there's sort of
different strains and strands in
the hermetic world. Craft.
Yep, you could say that, yeah.
Huh. A form of it, but
again, that's all very diverse.
Uh, I mean, I think in the case of
John D for example, he's the first
007.
Did you know that?
No. Yeah.
So the, the zero zero seven,
which is two balls and a cane,
which is two bull cane, that
how John D would sign his
secret letters to the queen, um,
because he was one of the influences
on James Bond.
So that's where we get 007 from.
That's. And, and Ian Fleming
consciously took that from,
uh, John D,
but I, my, my thesis and other
people think this as well is that
when he created this sort of magical
angel language that he called
Enochian after Enoch,
it was just a way to do spy codes
and ciphers wasn't, I mean,
he might've actually done some
rituals, but it was
also very useful as a tool for
sending messages to
Elizabeth that other people couldn't
decode.
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So in the Orthodox tradition
in the church, the
Bible is read aloud.
Are Orthodox encouraged to read
the Bible on their own?
Sure. I mean, St. John Chrysostom
actually said famously that the
laity have more need
of reading the scriptures than even
the monks or the priests,
because monks and priests live
in the liturgy, which for those that
don't know, in the Orthodox Church,
basically every aspect of the
liturgy and the liturgical calendar
is Bible.
It is scripture, constantly.
It's like every aspect of it.
And so Chrysostom's argument was,
laity need to be in the Bible more
than they do because they live it.
So if you're not in the liturgy all
the time, like those people are,
the best substitute is
the little church, which Chrysosom
calls the house. So the household
is, in the Orthodox idea, kind of a
little mini church.
So absolutely we got to be on the
Bible all the time, and
that shows that we're not
anti-Bible, like a lot of sort of
Protestant evangelicals think.
So one of the reasons there was a
Reformation in the first place is
because the Catholic Church over
time began to hide the Bible from
Christians,
and it was not published in
the local language in
Europe.
It was in Latin, it was the Vulgate,
and Luther's great breakthrough was
to publish it in German, to
translate it himself into German.
Did the Orthodox Church do the same.
Yes, in fact, this is one of the
differences between the
pre-Vatican to Roman church and the
Orthodox churches. The Orthodox
always put in the vernacular,
everything. The liturgy, homilies
are supposed to be in the vernicular
of the people. In fact, the Vulgate
itself was originally the
vulgar Bible.
It was the Bible of the People.
And so, yeah, I think there was an
element to where the Latin church,
the Roman church to just sort of
solidified into a kind of a
tradition that.
And it's not inherently wrong to
maintain that linguistic
heritage, but it's,
it's also possible to put it
in the vernacular for the people.
Uh, I mean, that's the whole idea
behind translating the Bible into,
you know, the languages of the
people so that they can understand
it. Uh, but that is one of
the differences pre Vatican two,
but interestingly, after Vatican two
there were both Protestant and
Orthodox influences on the reforms
of the Roman Catholic church.
And thus Rome then became.
Emphasizing, they began to emphasize
the vernacular after Vatican II.
What is, you said you're an
iconoclast, a smasher of idols.
Orthodoxy famously incorporates
icons, paintings on wood
into its worship.
What is that?
This is again, a huge
misunderstanding that we
would argue we believe is
part of a
proto Christianity, it's part of
Hebrew proto Christianity.
So when you go back to the book of
Kings, when you go to the Book of
Exodus and you see the way
that the tabernacle and then later
the temple are described,
they are tremendously ornate.
You've got gold images of angels
and you've got the Ark of the
covenant with, you know, angelic
imagery on it.
So we don't believe that
real Old Testament Christianity
or Old Testament Judaism, you
could say, not rabbinic Judaism, we
think that's something different
that developed in the fourth and
fifth century. What is something
different? Yeah.
But proto-Christianity or the
Hebrew tradition was not
iconoclastic. They were against
idols, but not all imagery.
In fact, and this is something that
really changed my mind when I was
Calvinist, if you think about it,
the Bible is a book,
but words are just
iconographic versions of images.
They're a type of image.
Of course.
And so the more I thought of written
word, yeah, the more I thought about
that. It's like, well, you can't
actually say all images are
bad because
capital F a T H E
R. That's a type of an image
in the Orthodox church.
We don't typically image God,
the father. We think that as Jesus
says in the book of John to the
Pharisees, no one has seen the
father at any time.
And he's quizzing the Pharisees
there because he's saying, so who do
you think Moses was
interacting with on Mount Sinai?
If.
No one saw the father because it
says Moses saw God face
to face. Jesus is basically saying,
I was talking to Moses, I'm
God. That's why the Pharisees want
to stone him in that chapter.
Cause he's saying he's the face of
God that was interacting with Moses.
So this is, this is why the book of
Colossians, the book of Hebrews call
Jesus, the icon, I
K O N in the Greek, the image
of the father, this enrages
the Pharisee's. So,
we think that
iconography directly flows out of
the incarnation, the Son being the
image of the Father.
Thus, throughout the early church,
you have the development of the
liturgy, even in the first
and second century.
And this has been shown through
archeological evidence, through
people who study liturgery, they're
called liturgists.
Even Protestant Anglican liturgist
note that the early Church had
altars, they had imagery,
even synagogues in the in the first
and second century.
Uh, one of the famous cases is the
Dura Europa synagogue in Syria.
I think it's from the early two
hundreds. Uh, it's
lined with images, paintings of
old Testament scenes and imagery.
So the Orthodox church,
if you look at the Dora Europa
synagogue is the most natural
development of if
Christianity was going to open up to
the Gentiles, it was coming
out of the temple and synagogue
liturgical system.
Is exactly what it would look like.
It would look like an Orthodox
church and lo and behold, that's
what Orthodox churches look like,
and by the way, I remember uh,
20, 23, uh,
my, my priest who's a great Russian
Orthodox priest, uh Father Vladimir,
we, he took us on a pilgrimage to
Italy and I was like,
why are we going to Italy?
That's not Rome.
Well, there's a thousand years of
Christianity, you know, prior to
the rise of the medieval papacy in
Italy.
There's tons of Orthodox places that
you could go to, right, in Italy.
And so we went to the catacombs in
Rome and lo and behold, when the
Christians were persecuted and
they're underground in the
catagombs, the first, second, third
century, by the way, you can never
see all the catacoms, like we spent
a whole day just in one of the
catacooms in Rome.
There's altars, there's images that
they painted in the first second,
third century. So even the catachome
church had liturgy,
had imagery.
Plenty of examples of this, the
Church Fathers also write about it
as well.
So, those are huge, I would say,
differences between.
And remember, the people couldn't
read back then.
Most of the Roman Empire was
illiterate, so when
they would go to these services
in the catacombs or wherever, they
would be hearing the Word of
God. That's why Peter says,
this is the Word God which was
preached to you.
Paul says to Timothy, pass on all
the things that you heard from me in
the presence of many witnesses.
So that oral
teaching that.
Oral hearing of the liturgical
worship was the norm.
And then one of the things that
really cracked it for me as a
Protestant, when I left Protestantism
was when I learned that, by the way,
I learned this from evangelical
scholars.
One of the thing that developed the
canon of the scripture itself in
terms of like how the
church decided what books go in and
which ones don't was
what's called the lectionaries.
Lectionaries are the daily
liturgical readings in the churches.
So when the church fathers were
having these councils and they were
meeting kind of
scripture doesn't actually get
solidified, at least for the
Orthodox church until the sixth
and seventh century, they
would say, uh, okay, which
ones do we have a tradition that
says Paul wrote or Matthew wrote,
which ones are in the daily election
areas? And if you're a Protestant,
you believe in soul scriptura,
the idea that liturgy and liturgical
tradition play this huge
role in the determination of the
Canon, make it very difficult
to say that, you know, we're
based on scripture alone,
soul scripture.
So orthodoxy is not based on
Just the Bible.
No, we would We
would say the Orthodox Church is
based on the
idea of apostolic succession that
the Apostles appointed successors
in various Bishops,
bishops and sees throughout the
Roman Empire It's
based on the tradition which
could include the lives of the
Saints. It could include
Liturgy it could include all kinds
of the rights of the Church Fathers
Canons of the Councils.
Those are traditions Uh, and
the Bible. So all, all of those
elements go into what
the basis of the Orthodox churches,
whereas, you know, in the Protestant
world, you, you have elected elders
or something like that, but you
don't have this sort of three
tiered stool of apostolic
succession, tradition, and Bible
altogether.
What are the practical differences
as a
weekly communicant in an Orthodox
church? How is that different from
being a Catholic or Protestant?
Um, well, certainly we would have
more similarities to
a Roman Catholic than most
Protestants or evangelicals.
You know, there might be a high
church Protestant or Anglican
communion that would have some
similarities with Orthodox church,
but I think, uh,
you know, for the Orthodox world,
um,
Fasting is a lot more
integrated into what
we do than most fasting.
Yeah, there's, there, there there's
a lot of fasting days in the
Orthodox church calendar.
What does that mean for you?
Oh, just abstaining from certain
foods. Lent is a little more
rigorous for the Orthodox than it is
for.
Why fasting?
Well, we think that
Jesus and the apostles
and people like John the Baptist
kind of set
the tone for
retaining an element of asceticism
in the church.
So obviously, some people could take
that to the extreme.
We're not Hindu yogis, you know,
sitting out under a tree trying to
roll around and poop or whatever.
But we do
think there is virtue
in.
Training the body to be subject
to the will so that the body's
desires and passions don't control
us So that's
why fasting has an important role
Basically learning to control the
passions is what that's part of
I'll offend you fast.
I am not the best at fasting because
I have a really weird, uh,
gut biome issues,
so I don't fast as much as I
should. Uh, it's very, it was very
challenging, but there's also people
that there's nuances for
medical issues.
Um, but the orthodox church fasts
quite a bit, usually from
various meats and stuff like that,
but.
It's not just fasting.
That's different. I think for the
Orthodox church, it's not just about
food, uh, fasting is also
almsgiving.
Cause you're sort of
it's self denial.
That's not just about diet.
It's also you,
for example, during Lent, it would
be appropriate to
confess more, uh it would
appropriate to give
more than you normally would.
So we make a pretty big deal about
things like almsgiving, whereas,
and I'm not saying that other groups
don't give, but I think that's
stressed a lot more in the Orthodox
church than it is perhaps in
Protestant churches or
other domains.
Um, but, I mean, these are
just kind of, there's immense
differences, I would say between
just, just the, uh,
I mean, communion is a lot more
serious in the Orthodox Church.
You don't commune unless you're
Orthodox. You can't.
Like, we don't have what's called
open communion, so Roman
Catholic can't come or Protestant
can't just come and commune.
Most churches are way more open
about that.
It's very strict in the orthodox
church in terms of communion,
and usually within the liturgy the
priest says, you know, all who are
baptized Christians who have
themselves through confession
may approach the table.
Um, because we take it very
seriously. We think it is actually,
you know, the body, blood, soul and
uncreated energy of Christ.
So we don't, we don't want to treat
that lightly.
And I'm not saying that Protestants
don't have a reverence for their
version of the sacrament, but it's,
it's just a lot more serious.
I think the Orthodox church and it
is elsewhere.
Um, but we
do have some of the Sacramento
principles like confession
to a priest that Protestant don't.
Have.
So again, there's a whole milieu
of wide
scope of differences between.
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How was it since the
religion you described was
originally tethered to a government,
an empire, How is...
Becoming Orthodox changed your view
of government and its role.
Um, that's an interesting
question. I, you know, I was, when I
was a Calvinist, I was more like a
sort of a libertarian, you know,
get the state out of everything.
It is the religion of libertarianism
isn't it
Um, but as I got more
into historic Christianity, I sort
of realized that, well, maybe
Republicanism isn't like the highest
form of government.
Like, maybe it's not necessarily the
best. So, and I'd never read any
critiques of, you know, Republican
governance and whatnot, but it turns
out there've been, you know, quite a
few people,
especially after, uh,
scientific revolution.
There were, there were conservatives
and right-wingers who were writing
pretty, I would say substantial
critiques of Republicanism.
Nothing. Even members of royal
families were writing pretty good
critiques of, um,
well, naturally, you know,
that they have a vested interest in.
No, but there were liberal
in the best sense minded people,
people who believed in inalienable
rights, who argued that
a Republican form of government,
self-government democracy
would devolve into tyranny.
True. I Plato wrote
even back in his day
that, and he was of
course, a proponent of
Republicanism, but he wrote that the
more decentralized in
the sense of democracy,
he didn't like democracy at all.
He thought that that would
eventually lead to mobocracy and
the rule of the passions because
the oligarch in that type of
a democratic setting has the
incentive to appeal to
the biggest number at the
lowest.
Basis, lowest common denominator.
And then it becomes incumbent upon
him to really play on the passions
of the mob.
So why not debase the people because
they're easier to control the mob?
So there's an incentive that even
Plato noticed back then.
I think he writes in the republic,
if this happens, they're going to
legalize weed.
They're going to legalize
everything to do with butt stuff,
so it becomes fake and gay.
So he sought, I think,
in various ways, even as a pagan
philosopher, to try to figure out
some way to have a society
based on sort of objective,
almost mathematical principles.
By the end of the Republic, it's
sort of like, you get the impression
that he thinks So you need to go
study.
Mathematics on the top of a mountain
for 20 years. And then you come back
and then you sort of instantiate
mathematical forms into the
society.
And it's interesting because later
on, by the end of his life, he seems
to progress towards more of like a
secret society type of governance.
Cause he has this, um,
I guess I'm going from memory, maybe
the symposium or the other one, but
he, he argues that there's this
council of night in IGHT,
which is a governance board of like
spy chiefs.
Yep.
And so they meet at night because
the public's too stupid to know
what's going on.
So, uh, which is just weird.
Cause it reminds me of like, I
remember reading something about
Kissinger talking about the wise
men. And like, it's like, he's a
Plato's talking about like Henry
Kissinger's form of like
secret, like secret government.
And then we devolve to the level of
Jeffrey Epstein from Coney Island.
Yeah, but it's all
the same thing.
It's just a, I mean, Jeffrey
Epsteine was an idiot, which no one
wants to say, but he was, obviously,
when you read his writing.
And so it's sort of our version of
that.
So I noticed that the
enthusiasm for liberal democracy,
whatever that is, but our system of
government that has produced our
culture.
Enthusiasm is waning for that.
Like, I don't know many people who,
I don't know anyone who wants
dictatorship,
just to be clear, but I don't know
anybody, I literally don't anybody
who thinks the current system is
working.
So that suggests it probably won't
last.
So what comes next and what
should come next?
Yeah, there's no easy answer to
that. I mean, I think again,
when you look at Christian history,
even in the West or in the Orthodox
East, you have a
pretty normative tradition of Kings
and Queens, preferably Kings,
but, um, and that happens
through a semi-sacramental
service called a coronation service.
So, you know, the Orthodox Church
always coronated emperors,
czars, kings, some of the most
famous, you know, kings
in the history of the Orthodox
church, you fought
massive battles, they went
to war.
So I think one thing that ties into
this idea of a decryptionizing
of the state, which is part
and parcel with that sort of
a tendency in the Calvinist,
uh, you know, libertarian type
of tradition, the classical liberal
ethos is there was
a famous Russian statesman, a public
Nazi. I've, he wrote a book, uh
reflections of a Russian statesmen
around 1890s.
And he said, when you decrystianize
the state you don't get liberty.
You get another cult that runs
the state. Exactly.
And he noticed that when the-
I have too.
Before the Bolsheviks, right?
Really? Yeah, he had looked at the
French Revolution and prior examples
and he said, you just get another
call that steps in and runs
things.
And I- So you're always gonna be
governed by religious fanatics.
So the question is,
which religion? Do you want some good
ones, or at least some nicer
ones?
I've noticed that just from knowing
people who run countries, like
they're all deeply
religious people.
Most won't admit it.
You think Macron is not religious?
Oh, he's very religious.
It's just not your religion.
It's some other religion.
I don't know what, um,
yeah. So, yeah, I think the, the
reformation, whether it intended to
or not, ultimately kind of
severed the relationship
that the church
had already sort of normalized
between church and stay that
symphony that we talked about,
and then you get, and
it's a confluence of interests.
It's not just ideologues
like Martin Luther or whatever.
In fact, many of the reformers had a
very powerful.
Look, for example, Luther's
Reformation wouldn't have exceeded
without, uh, the German princes
being behind it.
So he's sick. He, of course they
were resentful cause they didn't
want to spend the money. They didn't,
and they didn't want to be under the
Pope. They were tired of.
Of course, and Germany was emerging
as the great power in Europe.
And like, why would you want to be
ruled by...
By Italy.
So there was a lot of resentment,
papal stuff going on, same with
Henry VIII, he didn't want to be
under the Pope's rules about his
ladies.
So those combinations of
interests, by the way, there's also
a Jewish influence on the
Reformation as well.
In fact, there were, according to
Carol Quigley, even Protestant and
Jewish banking interests funded
the French Revolution
massively.
Um, and he's got, he's gotta great
chapter on the rise of the party
boss system in France, which is
the Rothschild banking system.
Um, And then I just read in the
Rothchild's biography, uh, the
fact that they had a long-term
vendetta with
the.
Zaris attitudes towards Russians,
uh towards Russian Jews and, uh.
Lord Rothschald wired 1
million Rupals to be I linen.
I knew about other, like the
Warburgs and the shifts they'd
funded a Lennon and Trotsky, but I
did not know that according to the
Morton, they'd actually wired Lennan
a million dollars, so to
speak, and he was supposed to pay it
back, but he never did.
Well, I think the Bolshevik
revolution was ideological, but I
think it was also ethnic conflict to
some extent.
The Lord Rothschild said that, he
said we've got to, we will make
the Russian Christians pay
for what they did for
many centuries in his mind.
And they did, they made them pay,
uh, no one's
paid more dearly actually.
Um, so orthodoxy,
I mean, a lot, you just said I
didn't know because I know so little
about orthodox, I knew nothing
about it three or four years ago.
Now it seems,
I don't know ascendant, but it
certainly seems popular.
Why is that?
Uh, the internet, you know, has an
interesting positive and negative
effect that can have on all these
domains. So I think in one way,
what, you
know, I started looking at
apologetic stuff around 2000,
2001. And back then it was,
you would listen to people's
cassette tapes.
You would listen.
And then a little MP3 on windows,
media amp or whatever.
Uh, but now it's everywhere,
you know, the
debate sphere, which is something
that kind of grew, not just from
me, but I mean, other people like,
well, you know, Crowder used to go
do this sort of come convince
me debate people and then Ben
Shapiro would go debate the, you
know, college kids, the purple
haired weirdos.
So that's a lot of low-hanging fruit
that like Ben Shapira would do, but
they're also sort of
accidentally almost came about
a pretty intense tenure
or so of online religious
debating, uh, which
Again, it just sort of happened.
It wasn't something that I planned
to do or anyone planned.
It was just, I remember years ago,
somebody said, Hey, would you debate
this atheist guy?
It was a libertarian guy.
Yeah, sure. So we did it on a whim.
Then another guy, Hey would you
debate? This other, you know, French
Canadian ate this guy.
Yeah, Sure.
And then it sort of snowballs into,
you know, a pretty regular
thing of doing online
religious political debates,
uh, it's gotten very popular
throughout many outlets.
And I think that is a
huge contributor because especially
if you're a young guy who's
interested in ideas, you want to
debate your ideas, you want have
them challenged.
You want to know if your position is
solid or if it's weak.
Um, the older you get, the less you
want do that.
And people tend to be, you know,
sort of solidified into their views,
but younger guys are more interested
in that. So I think you buy a cable
package.
But I think that it's,
it's very, um,
It's very natural.
I think to people in the West to
do that, to debate their ideas.
It's not a feature necessarily
of every other society to debate.
That's for sure and increasingly
it's not a feature of our society.
Exactly. We're talking in breakfast.
You were a debate
participant champion in
School. Mm-hmm.
I was too that was normal.
I don't normal but it wasn't as
we're seen as weird No now
I don't even know that that exists
It exists on the internet so people
are
The kids in schools are not
encouraged to do it.
To debate, right?
No, in fact, I think I remember
years ago when I was doing undergrad
and then grad school, they were
already sort of trying to phase that
out because we had a debate team
when I wasn't undergrad.
And then by the time I was in grad
school there was no debate team
anymore. It didn't exist.
Right. Cause the premium was on
obedience at that point.
Yeah.
Because they don't want you
critically thinking through your
positions. Cause then you might
notice patterns, which are not
amenable to the status quo.
Nicely put that's absolutely
right so but but people have
been on the internet debating
religion and orthodoxy's
gotten a hearing for the first time
maybe ever in American history
And the result is I think,
I mean, it's not the only
contributor, but it did play a
huge role in the rise of Orthodox
converts in the last five, six,
seven years for sure.
Um, and again, it just, all of that,
I would, I guess is providential
because again, nobody in
our sphere, our circles plan
to do this.
We thought it would be fun to do.
I do a lot of different things.
I don't just debate.
So it was just sort of one of the
side things I enjoyed to do at
times.
And that ended up
for whatever reason being a lot more
popular than I would have expected.
So, uh, you know, we've debated many
of the top atheists,
Muslims, Jews are not huge on
doing apologetics.
It's not, they don't evangelize.
So there's only been a few Jewish
guys that even want to debate.
Um, we'd done a lot of political
debates, feminist debates that have
Pretty, pretty big, I
mean, in terms of viewership.
So I think that- Who were the most
fun, if you had to pick a Muslim
atheist feminist?
They actually have a lot of
similarities, believe it or not,
Muslims
are not very fun
to debate. I wouldn't say that
they're the most fun.
I mean, atheists can be fun
because they get really
triggered with certain, uh,
entailments, but probably the
funnest debates are some
of the more.
Idiotic cult types of people.
They actually ended up being very
comedic.
So I do a lot comedic stuff.
So when we debate cult leaders,
which we've debated several.
Those tend to be really funny, so
they're the most entertaining.
Are there any atheists left in the
United States? Is that there was?
You know, there was
that was very popular in
2000s and
I kind of think they
ran out of steam as
the worst things got in the West,
the less appealing atheism was
because it has no explanatory power.
So when people start, especially
after COVID and all that, so I up
like people notice.
Okay. There's some really evil shit
going on in the world.
Yeah. I mean, like we need some
explanation and these guys are
basically saying there is no
explanation. Nothing means anything.
Right? So atheism kind of loses
steam.
Um, a lot of the YouTube atheists
that were big YouTubers just kind
of.
Petered out. One of them was
sticking bananas in his butt and
they just like, who cares?
It's gross. Weird stuff.
So, and then other ones end up like
marrying dudes that
are women. And so, uh,
People begin to see like this has
nothing to
offer.
I remember vividly, someone
telling me that Sam Harris,
the famous atheist was like really,
really smart. He's really smart.
And I listened to Sam Harris once.
I think it's not smart at all.
Like if that's your, like our
standards, I think have changed,
maybe. And then I think they've
gotten higher.
Yeah.
Well, I see when people said Sam
Harris was smart.
Oh, yeah, in fact, I mean,
I think that the tail end of
that period was those
debates with Jordan Peterson and
Peterson was really critiquing
atheist presuppositions.
I think I felt like he could have
even gone harder on those guys
because they were already sort of
losing the ground publicly.
But even Jordan Peterson is just
sort of simple lines of questioning.
Well, how do you know that?
What's that mean? You know?
I even, even that wasn't enough
really to like help.
Like the atheist didn't have even
enough response to sort of
basic internal critiques,
which is a very effective way of
debating and doing, doing worldview
debates is to do an
internal critique where you show the
fundamental contradictions within
another person's worldview.
That is one of the most devastating
ways to go about debates.
And, um, I think Peterson was, was.
Aware enough to do that with those
guys, whether it's Sam Harris or,
uh, Matt Dilla Hunter into the
atheist that that was kind of the
nail in the coffin for the atheist.
Then we had COVID and then people
were just like, all right, we need
an explanation for fricking demons.
Yeah. These guys say there aren't
demons. Obviously there's Epstein
demonic level shit going on.
So probably God exists, right?
I think that's literally the path
for a lot of people.
I don't think that, I mean, I think
that's actually what happened for a
lot of people.
And isn't it interesting that some
of these high-level so-called
atheists are flying with Jeffrey
Epstein and going to...
So sure, and have religious level
devotion to all kinds of stupid
causes. So like they're the most
religious people of all.
Exactly. But I also, I even wonder
at times like, are they even
atheists? Maybe they have other
kinds of commitments.
Of course not.
I mean, I look at Sam Harris
infrequently, but whenever
I run across Sam Harris, he seems
like a full-blown religious fanatic
to me. His religion is whatever it
is, humanism or Zionism
or whatever, but his commitment to
it is
instantly recognizable as religious
faith to me, right?
Yeah, I think, you know, the, the
approach that I take to all those
debates is
worldview based and that what
that means is that it's
not primarily one
side stacking up evidences versus
the other side stacking evidences
and which one you know way it's
more so analyzing our
fundamental commitments or our
paradigm through which we interpret
the world that's a lot more
effective. If you can destroy the
person's paradigm.
For getting them to actually change
their mind.
So one of the threads that connects
everything or, well, first I would
say you've been thinking about
faith in a serious way, much longer
than most people your age, I think
this was a pretty secular country or
I thought it was.
Um, but you were thinking about this
stuff early and maybe that's why
you have an advantage over a lot of
us. But, um,
I've now concluded that like
everything is a manifestation
of religious faith.
And it just goes by different names.
And so we, we missed it.
We thought we lived in a secular
country. We actually live like all
countries. It's a very religious
country.
You wrote a book on
what called esoteric Hollywood,
which is basically revealing,
analyzing and revealing the
religious symbolism within
popular art.
Yes. What, what is,
tell me the thesis, tell me why you
wrote it and give me some examples.
Uh, well, when I was doing
undergrad grad work, I had
multiple interests, not just
philosophy and, you know, religious
stuff, but also I've always
been interested in film, love
movies, um, grew up in
a small town, so we didn't have much
to do other than drugs and
movies.
So, uh, so I always gravitated
towards that, towards the arts.
Um, I enjoy, you,
know, performing, doing comedic type
stuff. I've always wanted to.
Be involved in some way in media.
So it was only natural, I think,
to also take a lot of film classes,
study a lot lit and then, you
know, sort of bring them all
together, synthesize all these
ideas.
And, uh, just for a long
time, I was just blogging for fun.
As I was doing undergrad grad
school, I would blog about movies I
was watching.
And I was also studying like
propaganda, psychological warfare.
Uh, how that overlaps with
intelligence agencies and how that
overlaps, with Hollywood.
So, uh, the book ended up
being the product of just a lot of
college and grad school research,
particularly, uh about figures like
Ian Fleming.
How he would take sort of his own
personal experiences
in black ops and intelligence,
and then put that into the character
of James Bond.
I mean, he's not the only influence,
but he's one of the main influences
on his character.
And then how bond was such a
powerful iconographic
image to
do Cold War propaganda.
So I just always found that
relationship fascinating between all
these domains. You've got
literature, you've got movies, you
got intelligence stuff and all kind
of playing together and how they
use that as a kind of
tool of Western propaganda during
what I think is a dialectical, you
know, false cold world war
dialectic, but it's very
instructive.
On many levels, how, you know, we
were talking about icons earlier,
but bond is a kind of icon of
sort of Western, uh,
nihilistic, uh you know Nietzsche
and Uberman, right, that
was used in the cold war
to contrast against Soviet
ideas of the
collective man, the new man, you
uh, you know, versus the individual
man.
Um, you've got
capitalistic sort of self
gratification on one side.
And then over here, you've got
decided
that you are a property of the
state.
Both of these are dialectical
opposites, right?
And usually the way dialectics work
in terms of big term strategy
is to synthesize these.
So, uh, I was also studying Hegel
and Hegelian dialectics in
college and how that that's, and he
does say that there's thesis into
the synthesis.
There's a good academic.
Research, which I think demonstrates
that Hegel was also influenced by
Kabbalistic ideas.
So you have the two pillars of mercy
and severity, and then you have the
synthesis of those two extremes.
That can be a way of managing and
controlling.
Um, and people have got this down to
the science. It's not just my
speculation. You can read like
global elite writers like Jacques
Attali. He'll talk about Cold
War being two pillars, of two,
two sides of the dialectic that you
sort of manage the middle ground and
you can synthesize and bring them
together. Soap.
Essentially what I argue in that
book is just through a lot of
different essays that I wrote
analyzing Kubrick and
Spielberg and David
Lynch and Hitchcock,
a lot different directors in the
first book, not all negative,
just sort of doing analysis, I'm not
saying that everybody's involved in
a grand conspiracy, it's
more of a concentrated essays
on different themes and topics.
Relating to sex cult and
symbology and film and how powerful
at least in the last century
Hollywood was for giving us
our religiosity whether we knew it
or not, you know, we mentioned
Myth-making and we mentioned Plato
and you know Plato talking about the
noble lie and the Republic We
thought we were in a secular society
We were actually given an entire
religious mythology through
Hollywood You know But ever Bernays
said Hollywood is the greatest
engine of propaganda the world had
ever seen at least up into that time
And that was obvious to me, even as
a child in the 70s, what was not
obvious was that it was religious
propaganda. I didn't realize this
was our religion.
I mean, maybe not overt, but it's
there, right? It's, it's a subtle
way to indoctrinate
people into
various types of
basically just anti-Christian
ideology.
I mean the book is not just like a
low tier thing saying that
Hollywood's evil and it's
anti-christian. Everybody knows that
it's, this is more of an analysis
of analysis of like, you
know, was
eyes wide shut perhaps.
A window into something like
Epstein before we knew about
Epstein, that kind of stuff, I think
that that's fascinating to me.
I'm not saying that that was
Kubrick's intention.
Um, but sometimes
the arts, this is really, really
crucial with like Dostoevsky, like
the arts can predict things even
ahead of time.
I'm not with such.
Recurring Freak
that you think is this, what is
this?
This is almost
of a prophetic spirit.
Almost.
Yes, or, you know, it suggests
that, like, we're just acting in a
drama whose script has been written.
I don't know.
I mean, I've literally no idea.
But it's outside,
just a statistical matter, it's
outside the realm of chance, for
example, how many times The Simpsons
predicted coming events.
Like, what is that?
I have known writers on The
Simpsoms. They're not
yogis.
They are not mystical figure.
I mean, so I have no idea what that
is, but I just noticed that it's
It's happened. It does happen.
Phenomena that for one, like if you
read Osiefsky and some of his
novels, he would write almost with
precision, I think
not because he was in on it, but
because he was actually kind
of a
genius. Like he would write about
years
before what the Bolshevik revolution
would do and what the socialists
would do in Russia and almost with
accuracy in terms of like the number
of skulls that would be mounted up.
Um, that I think is prophetic in
the case of a lot of what went on in
Hollywood in the last, you know,
several decades, that's more so
propaganda. That's intentionally
conditioning us, um,
especially with a lot of like tech,
uh, gadgetry.
You know, the bond films actually
introduced a lot of people to
sort of spy world gadgetry
that would then become.
Day-to-day normal American
living, right?
I mean, even cell phones.
Like the internet itself is just old
school cold war cryptography that
turned into everybody's
form of communication.
Um, you know, a lot of the spy
surveillance gadgetry or whatever
that you see going on in James Bond,
this begins to be a thing that
conditions people to getting used
to, you know, being surveilled,
getting used to having all their
lives on the internet live stream.
I'm saying that there's broader
components to
these types of stories that
do condition us.
I don't mean to go full schizo here.
I'm not saying that like everything
all I would just plan.
I'm just saying that the deeper
that you go into it, you do realize,
for example, that, uh,
the CIA is consulted on movies
forever, forever, like all
the way back to even before, uh
you had famous actors and actresses
that were spies.
I mean, a lot of people don't know
this stuff. That's just kind of
level one of this stuff, but It even
gets more sophisticated into like
studying the effects of early
slasher films that are had on
people. It would put people in like
a catatonic state to make them more
suggestible.
Everybody's probably heard about
subliminals. Like all of that is
related to or adjacent to the type
of things that we're discussing
here. Like this is, it's a very
niche but well
studied branch of how to
use fiction to
condition people.
And one element that might be a
little more accessible to people is
that.
If you go back to the turn of the
century, last century in the UK,
um,
especially as they eventually had
the Official Secrets Act, you
couldn't say what
you did when you worked for British
intelligence or whatever, but you
could write fiction novels that
kind of loosely told those stories.
And so a lot of British authors
that are now famous, you know,
formerly wrote or
formerly worked in British
intelligence.
And then like William Somerset
Maugham and these different
characters, Graham Green, Graham
Green. Exactly.
They would go on.
And then, of course, Ian Fleming,
they would, they would write into.
The stories, what they'd actually
been up to. You could write our man
in Havana, but you couldn't actually
write what you did in Havanna.
Exactly.
Um, and then you'll,
and you'll find these fascinating
nuggets, you know, Joseph Conrad
is the secret agent, which was one
of the first, uh,
there was one revolutionary era
spy story.
I forget the name of it, but his is
sort of the most well-known, the
secret agent, um, and he's got like
the States using anarchists, there's
a false flag event, like, you've
got these principles in these
fiction stories, which seem to
match up to reality.
So I just found that fascinating
that, that you would have all this
in fiction.
And then that sort of, that sort of
blurs the line between reality
and fiction sometimes
intentionally, because audiences
will watch things and it
will sort of embed in
the subconscious and
I'm not trying to be, again, I'm not
being schizo about it.
Like you're getting programmed.
Whether you know it or not,
but I don't think all plays
and fiction are bad.
I'm just saying people don't
go to Argo to realize they're
watching propaganda, but they're
washing propaganda.
Does that make sense?
Of course. And that's why it's
effective.
So one question
that appears in
fiction and
raises speculation in real life, and
it's a very specific question, and
you may know the answer.
Is there evidence that intelligence
agencies of any country have used,
or criminal organizations in any
country have ever successfully
carried out assassinations
using crazy or suggestible people
who don't know they're participating
in it?
Which is to say like,
lone gunman shoots public figure
lone gunmen is actually a tool of
some other organization doesn't know
he's a tool the organization he
committed the murder but he did so
maybe unbeknownst to him at the
urging of some of the groups Sirhan
Sirhan for example is
there any evidence do we know that's
actually happened ever.
I think it's very
obvious that it has happened.
I don't know what the standard
of evidences would be to
say with absolute certainty in a
specific case, you know, people talk
about Maria's vendor lube
that he was used, you know, for the
right, for that. Or I should, uh, we
people talk about, as you said,
sir, hon. I mean, you could say
Oswald perhaps was.
Uh, there is such a thing as false
flag recruitment, which is where
people are recruited into thinking
that they're working for this group,
but they're actually working for the
Southern
group.
So that does occur.
Um, and I think that if
you study assassinations and
how they're conducted, they don't
happen often, but.
They do tend to use, you know,
uh, crazy people or,
or people that are very suggestible.
So I think, that's definitely
probably 100%
goes on. I mean...
We had what was Shinzo Abe was
one of the most recent, uh,
other than Charlie Kirk, obviously,
you know, assassinations that there
was some weird, weird things with
that in terms of usually political
ideologues or religious ideologs are
very useful for these types of,
of operations.
Um, so yeah, I think, I
think, especially with JFK, even
you've got significant
evidence.
If you look at the person of
Angleton, if you look at what came
out of the JFK files.
Like he was.
Literally just passing all kinds of
information to the Mossad in
the JFK files.
There was like four pages were about
his secret relationship with the
Mossad.
I think there was a confluence of
interests, as you said, with the
organized crime CIA and
Israeli interests, all sort of had
the motive in regard to
JFK, but I think that's
a recurring pattern is to absolutely
contract it out to either organized
crime. I mean, Murder Inc
began as a Jewish assassination
squad that was used by
not just Sicilian mafia,
but also at times the
U S would contract out and use these
people for operators.
If you want to get rid of somebody,
just use the gangsters.
You're not going to do it yourself.
So yeah, that's, that well known.
I think if you look at operation
underworld where the CIA was
using organized crime for many
years.
How much evidence is there that the
CIA do you think has an active
role in American politics now?
Uh,
my research has mostly
been past decades
of that relationship.
So I'm not.
The most up-to-date on President,
but I would imagine I would have
passed his prolog, how certain are
we that the United States, U.S.
Politics has been influenced by?
I mean, I think when people
talk about the deep state, we're
talking about a sort of breakaway
national security apparatus that
has a tremendous amount of influence
and control on domestic
and foreign policy.
Absolutely. 100%.
I think that superstructure
that is international, that is,
you know, people talk a lot about
the five I's and all that kind of
stuff. I think they do coordinate.
I think it's very clearly.
When you get up into that level,
even above intelligence and CIA,
when you get up into the level of
like steering committees and
the CFR, the trilaterals,
like it's not accidental that
Epstein was literally David
Rockefeller's legate on the
trilateral commission.
He was a commissioner for it.
I mean, that's that they created
that for Brzezinski, right?
It was Kissinger who went to David
Rockefellers and said, we did this
guy, Brzezynski would be great for
trilateral.
They created it for him.
And so for Epstein
to essentially be at that level,
which is not, I don't think we knew
that until that, you know, Bannon
interview came out and
Jeff rips it out with
David Rockefeller.
That's yeah, that's one of those
details. That's I mean, do you ever
suspect that the sex the
sexual components of the Epstein
story? Which I don't want to
minimize because they're awful But
do you every suspect that maybe
they're also a distraction from
bigger?
It's much bigger than that.
Yeah. I mean, in a lot of those
emails and text messages and things
that came out, you've got like,
uh, there's so many crazy
examples, like you've got, I
mean you got high level finance,
money laundering is part of that
you've, got weapons trafficking is a
huge part of, that, um,
because if you read Whitney Webb's
book, right, like it's the Adnan
Khashoggi, uh operation, which
also included like filming people on
that yacht, uh that becomes
kind of a pattern See ya.
Also the way that Epstein would do,
uh, his stuff.
So you've got weapons trafficking.
You've got the high level blackmail.
You've.
Human trafficking.
You've got, um,
money and finance, and you've also
got, uh.
Planned chaos in certain areas
that you move money to prior
to the chaos to benefit from
the destruction, which is something
that Ian Fleming had specter
doing all the time.
I suspect the in Fleming was talking
about the sort of,
uh, Epstein level Rothschild level,
uh gaming
of different markets, cause that's a
huge part of what they were doing
where he's basically emailing
our end to Rothschuld.
And he's saying, there's going to be
a huge conflict over here,
move in early, buy out resources,
et cetera, because the conflicts,
the chaos is coming, they did it
about Kenya, uh or
excuse me, Somalia, there was emails
about.
How to do this with the Greek debt
crisis. When that happened to buy
up after it collapsed, right?
So that's a huge
component. And we know that
that's nothing new because the
Rothschild's biography that I was
just finished reading by Morton
brags about how they did the same
thing at Waterloo, they, they
crashed the
London stock market on the basis of
false information and then bought it
up when it crashed, when they
out that the information was false.
It's exactly what the same thing
that Jeffrey Epstein was doing in
the emails with, uh,
are going to draw.
It's funny that they
called the, you know,
the thousand years after the fall of
Rome the Dark Ages as compared to
this.
It's also crazy too, that we think
that there's no religious component
to the world today when we
seem to have all kinds of very
demonic activities going on,
which suggests, you know, secret
societies, cults, you
name it.
So I think that the world really
operates in this way
versus the sort of secular
mythology that we were taught.
Yeah, I mean, I don't see anything
secular happening really in the
United States at all.
And if you, I just
first noticed this on the
LGBTQ, I can barely
pronounce it, agenda question where
the commitment to that was like more
than just compassion
for, you know,
discriminated against gays.
It was like this religious fervor.
Yeah.
And that was the first sign to me
that actually, I think we're dealing
with a faith here.
Yeah Yeah, and
you know, there's a the you find
elements of these types of ideas in
various Talmudic texts For example
the idea of aliens.
I'm not saying that there might not
be unexplained phenomena I think
there is I think a demonic component
to it, but the idea specifically of
There's one of the tractates that
discusses the 18,000 worlds.
So it's it's an older Talmud idea
that There are these other
life forms and I think that
this you know recent films like
Disclosure Day
Spielberg's ethos, that kind of, I
think that plays into that idea
that no, there's not demonic stuff
because if you watch the movie, the
whole thing was like, no, they're
actually your friends.
They, they, they sort of alien
saviors makes that case.
Yeah. It's kind of like,
don't think it's demonic.
This is more of a salvific type of
thing.
Um, so I think.
That's propaganda.
So we welcome our new alien
overlords much like
childhood Zen. And if you've read
childhood Zen, you know that Arthur
C. Clark, who was buddies with
Crowley.
Right. They're actually promoting
this idea that Carolyn, who's
this, he looks like a demon.
Right. But he's our alien savior.
And he comes to earth and gives like
medical advances and technological
advances. And then he
says, Oh, by the way, I need your
first generation of your children.
And then.
He takes them off and nukes
earth. So it's like, I'm
going to save you by taking your
kids and destroying the rest of you
because you're all going to kill
yourselves.
Uh, if we just let you be, and I'm
just giving that as one example,
like famous, you know, propaganda
and sci-fi.
HG Wells was a huge propagandist
about the same, the stuff too.
He was a high level, uh,
he described himself as a
Luciferian. He says in his book,
God, the invisible King, he says,
you might think that in the coming
technocracy, brave new world, you're
going to be atheists.
No, no, no.
So we have a different deities named
Lucifer.
Uh, he will be the deity of the
future.
So he's a Promethean, you could say,
um, But he was also like
one of the chief propagandists for
the sort of Rothschild,
Milner, Fabian circles that were
promoting a socialism and
technocracy back, you know, in the
1800s, late 1800s early 1900s.
What are the consistent lies that
this propaganda tells?
Like what connects all of the, one
of them, I'll just start by saying
one of the main lies
that they're committed to convincing
you of is that all of this is
secular, it's all science-based,
it's materialism, like nothing,
there's no spooky supernatural,
like I noticed that.
Yeah.
Uh, one of the things I've done on
my, my YouTube channel last 10 years
is, uh, what I call the global
elite book series.
And all we do in the last 10, years
is like, we pick various.
Present ski, HG Wells,
Jacques, out to Lee, Carol Quigley.
I mean, you just go down the line
and we read through the texts and
then I do a talk on them.
And what we've noticed, we've done
dozens of these is there's
a consistent pattern of, I say
there's like, you know, five or six.
Commandments of the, of the elite
that you have to be on board with.
And there seems to be recurring
pattern of, um,
because humanity is overpopulated,
we must have global governance.
We must have a, a United
world religion.
Eventually we must, uh,
full spectrum dominance control of
area of life.
Everything's surveilled all the way
up to, we did, even did, uh remember
Klaus Schwab's, uh fourth industrial
revolution book, that whole book
they came out right before COVID was
about how the
coming crises will bring about
this sort of globalized
one world order ruled over by
internet of things, you know,
Skynet type stuff.
And that leads to rationing
and, uh, you know, austerity,
all that kind of stuff that we've
seen pushed by these people for so
long.
But I think, you know, some of the
most telling books are
like Jacques Attali's book, Brief
History of the Future.
That book was written in 2006 and he
was the sort of Kissinger to, You
know, uh...
The presidents of France, Macron and
people like that.
Maybe even Mithirana, I forget who
he was consultant to, but he was the
Kissinger of France.
Huge neocon type person.
And in that book, he says
towards the end of it, he says,
we've progressed to the point where
we're going to have a global brain.
It's the golem because
of the golems.
We're all going to be linked in.
You'll lose your individuality when
you're linked into the global brain,
And he says, At the spearhead of
all of this is the transhumanists
transhumanism is as Julian
Huxley coined the term, the
future that we're going into.
And so those are the elements,
one world religion, one world
currency, uh, one-world
brain.
Uh, everything's sort of unified.
And if you read Huxly, I read a
bunch of Huxleys books.
He says, not just in brave new
world, but he wrote another book
people don't know about called the
perennial philosophy. And he says,
people don't realize that any.
Theology or ideology that allows you
to have a significant degree
of individuality has to be erased
so that we can create the blob,
the big amorphous blob where
we're all sort of blended into one
giant thing that's controlled,
it's the exact same thing that a
hundred years later, almost Jacques
Attali says in his books,
uh, about the global
golem, like that's
the goal is to create this sort of
homogenized controllable.
And of course,
and that's the point of
mass migration,
eliminate distinctions.
But the goal of all of that is
what? The destruction of people?
Uh, I do think that there's a pretty
consistent pattern
of belief amongst a lot of
these people who are
technocrats and trans humanists,
they think that technology will
even to go back to Arthur C.
Clark, like everybody remembers 2001
space Odyssey and he co-wrote
that, uh, and helped, you know,
that come to, to the, to the
big screen, but they also wrote
another book that was also
a movie, which is very enlightening
called 2010.
It's not as good of a movie.
But. In 2010, it becomes
more explicit that the cold war
was about producing a dialectical
synthesis where the scientific elite
from the Soviets and the
West come together and they
create the technocratic
scientific priest class that rules
us, that allows us
to achieve apotheosis.
And then in 3001,
that apotheoses happens through
union with AI
and tech.
So basically the idea is presented,
I think in those books that we
become God through technology, Ray
Kurzweil, or he's even said this
kind of stuff.
So the singularity, all that kind of
ideology, which is not new to
Kurzweile actually, uh,
Hagel had a version of this that he
called the Omega point where all the
dialectical oppositions eventually
synthesize into everything
in his view becoming spirit,
which has everything becoming some
sort of transcendent unified
reality.
It's Huxley's blob.
It's, uh, you know, I
think who's that crazy tear to
shard in the ex-communicated
Jesuit guy.
He talked about the, uh new,
everything becoming the new O
sphere.
And that actually influenced some of
the early developers of the
internet. They talked about creating
this hybridized
merged idea where
everything becomes essentially
the net basically.
So I think that.
That's how they see these things
because they worship this idea of
evolution.
And I'm not saying there's not
degrees of like adaptation and
nature, but this idea that there
is a determined,
controllable priest class that can
steer us towards some sort of,
um, transcendent
singularity omega point.
That's sort of their religious,
that's their eschatology.
So they have, they have like you
said,
It's a competing eschatology, that's
right. It's competing escatology,
that's nicely put,
but the goal, so the
Christian eschatologist is God
returns, and the
pagan eschatologists is I become
God. Exactly.
So, and now some, some of those
writers were actually revised
and reinterpret Christianity.
And you mentioned earlier,
Rosicrucians,
some of those hermetic groups
actually had this idea that
Christianity is just sort of
a allegory for,
uh, immortality
and resurrection through some sort
of gnosis or knowledge or
technology.
Replace man with the God with
yourself
Yeah, Crowley Crowley is a great
example of this because he's a
figure who, by the way, was also
working for British intelligence.
Uh, also Crowley was a, it was a
huge proponent of this idea of man
achieving apotheosis through not
just tech, but through sort of
magical view of tech.
Which Isaac Asimov expresses
in his, you know, three laws of
magic or whatever, magic and
technology, Arthur C.
Clark, same ideology.
He's hanging out with the Crowley
and circle. So I think there's also
an overlooked.
A sort of satanic component
to a lot of this ideology that
people don't think about.
But if you look at, for example,
to go back to like the Milner,
Fabian, Rothschild circles,
they were promoting Madame Blavatsky
heavily.
She was a Fabian socialist and
Crowley was a huge fan of hers.
In fact, he told people to read her
writings to understand-
So, so Theosophy is another great
example of this kind of religion of
the future that Father Seraphim Rose
talked about, in fact, he highlights
Theosphy as one of the key elements
in his famous book, Orthodoxy and
the Religion of the Future, Saint
Serapham Rose now, but very
predictive, very accurate that
this is essentially demonic.
He wrote that in the 70s, basically
saying where this,
you know, H.G.
Wells sort of idea would, would
eventually take us by our day.
And he was spot on and
the book's kind of amazing.
If you read it, um,
literally predicting everywhere that
we're at, but he says, you know,
this Blavatsky satanic type ideology
is what,
for example, popularized
yoga throughout the West.
We wouldn't have yoga everywhere.
Every Instagram chick doing yoga.
If it wasn't for Adam Blavansky and
then Crowley
With respect, Madame Blufatsky
from the surviving photographs does
not look like she practiced yoga.
Uh, I would not want to see her in
yoga pants.
No, sorry.
I couldn't resist.
I am a nasty person.
Um, why yoga?
Well, uh, there's a lot of reasons.
I think that, and my wife just,
she just did a whole bunch of
podcasts on her YouTube channel
about, uh yoga and
tantric Buddhism.
Um, there was a lot reasons why
Eastern philosophy, and
I'm not saying everything about
Eastern
philosophy is necessarily bad, but
elements of Eastern philosophy has a
lot more, uh
collectivists in the way that they
approach who man is and what he is
in the world.
So.
Um, yoga, I think is
a way to, if
you take it seriously, I'm not
talking about like people that just
sort of stretch and do Pilates,
but like the actual process
of yoga is intended to
initiate you and basically
your, you know, the base
of your spine, your chakras
and all that, that's supposed to
like essentially possess
you now.
I'm saying everybody does yoga is
possessed. I'm saying that that's
the purpose of it is you're
invoking entities to.
Begin at your butt stuff
and like, go up and open
up your third eye.
So it's essentially an initiation
process.
What's supposed to be, that's what
it is in the, in the Hindu and the
tantric tradition, but in the
tantrum tradition, it's, it's
actually a lot of really gross
stuff, which people don't know that.
But what does that mean?
Like really gross sex stuff, like
tant, the actual tantric
Buddhism, when you get into like the
depths of what that's
about is
an Probably, absolutely.
Just borrowed this for his whole
process of pushing yoga, you have
to do all of the worst
possible actions to
kind of get beyond good and evil.
So it's kind of a Nietzschean idea
of like, I mean, the worst
thing you could think of, you got to
eat like feces, you gotta do
incest, like you do all the worst
things to
not just balance the good side,
but also the evil side.
So it's the left-hand and the
right-hand path have to be
transcended.
And so their idea, this is a common
idea, not just in, no, this is like
the inner teaching of like tantric
Buddhism. Like if you were to, but
not just tantric Buddhism, I mean,
there are other groups have adopted
the same idea.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Yeah. Um, you can see why Crowley
saw that as.
Or key to sod or exactly.
Cobblistic echoes there too.
But the core idea is you have to
go as far out as you can.
Yes, inversion, the principle
of inversion, and we talk about this
a lot of times,
and you know, people in our sphere,
my buddy Mark Hackard, he's written
a bunch of articles about orthodox
theology and philosophy and Soviet
history, and he's talked about some
of the early, for example,
Bolsheviks, one guy named Gleb
Bokii, he was very interested in
sort of eyes wide shut inversion
stuff as a way to revolutionize
society.
In terms of the Bolshevik
Revolution, there was...
So commit atrocities and,
but not just like killing,
but like also to promote in
society, like degeneracy,
because that has the print that
can revolutionize society.
But that's true.
It is, in fact, one of the key
sixties counter cultural
revolutionaries, uh, Wilhelm Reich
actually had the idea that
in order to have a
successful cultural revolution,
you would have to have total
open sexual
pan relationships because that
would remove patriarchy.
And then with the rise of the
goddess and the feminine principle,
that would allow the actual
socialist revolution.
I was
It's a very common, it was a very
common idea.
So the old fashioned communists,
you know, the Stalinists were
prudish. They were against the gay
stuff. Totally against it.
But the Bolsheviks had been,
the pre-Stalin period had
embraced that Stalin pushed back
against it and then in the United
States in the late fifties and
sixties, a bunch of revolutionary
movements believe that the SLA,
Charles Manson, you know, there was
all orgies
But that ethos
of the sixties counterculture stuff
wasn't just,
you know, Ginsburg and
people like, you know, coming up
with crazy ideas to party.
There was an earlier idea that
some of the key Fabian social,
for example, 1890, some of Fabian
socialist, like be interested in the
web. They actually understood that
if you promoted, for
example, bestiality in public
art, this could
undermine and Troy.
Uh, the UK's sexual
ethos at that time.
So they were way out of the curve,
like in the 1890s,
Bertrand Russell was famously a
pansexual, like, uh, one of the, um,
Terrence McKenna, a big open
relationship. But so they've always
understood that to
remove those boundaries is
actually a way to invert
and then change society on
the mass.
To unleash power, there's a
power that comes from that, from
transgression, it's demonic power.
Exactly.
But they never called it that.
But it's clearly true.
But the tantrics understood that.
They actually understood that you're
actually sort of taking on
sort of more and more demonic energy
versus the, you know, God's
uncreated energy.
But it's still energy. Yeah.
So when Satan promises Jesus
that he can have, you
know, the kingdoms, he could deliver
the kingdoms like he had the power
to bestow on those who worshiped
him.
Like it's, it's real.
There is a real.
Demonic power that can
be tapped into.
So that's what makes it even
more compelling.
I mean, there's a reason people,
it's like cigarette smoking.
Yeah, it's bad, but people do it.
Why? Because they get something out
of it.
There's a that people worship
demons, not just because they're
inherently perverse, but because it
works short-term.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, absolutely.
Um, and again, that's that
that principal inversion is
Well known way back into
you know
I remember reading.
That's why you sacrifice, the Incas
sacrifice children.
So the Mayas and the Aztecs and the
Vikings and like, when you sacrifice
a virgin to the rain god, it
actually rains.
Well, like, uh, you
probably heard of Michael Aquino,
right? Yeah. Yeah.
You know, everybody, you might've
heard of his, he wrote that, uh.
Mine were to Cy war document, which
like the army's doctrine of
psychological warfare back in the
eighties or whatever it was.
And he wrote, that, but he wrote
another book called, um, black
magic.
And the whole book is basically, I
remember reading this years ago.
It's basically taking the
principles of Egyptian sorcery,
but applying it to like
military psychological operations.
So.
Yes, actually people do study
ancient sorcery
and magic and that kind of, even the
CIA even had a whole program, I want
to say in the seventies, kind of
adjacent to Project Stargate, where
they were studying Satanism and the
occult to sort of weaponize and
try to understand these
ideas and see how far they could go
with them.
Where did nuclear technology come
from, do you think?
Uh, I mean, you
Oppenheimer described himself
as to
a degree, sort of engaging
in, I don't know how serious
he took it.
And I've also read some interesting
critiques of Oppenheim or that, that
argue that he was perhaps more
of a propaganda and
an actual scientist.
So in a lot of these domains of
like high esoteric
science, I don't claim to be a
scientist. I'm more of a philosophy
guy, but.
I don't know, but, um,
he could have been much more of a
propagandist than he was an actual
solider.
I think that was true of a lot of
the scientists involved in this.
It's not clear what they were
creating.
It's very clear that they were used
to create the illusion that they
were creating something, but it may
have pre-existed them.
I'm just throwing that out there.
Well, I, you know, what, one thing
that's interesting is that the way
that's some of the early
people involved in those
chemical sciences, you probably
heard of Jack Parsons, he was a, you
Know, Crowley and they would
sometimes describe what they were
doing as a kind of ritual.
So they saw the idea that you could
split the atom as kind of a
ritualistic a
principle of by
doing this, you release energy,
which is the very type of thing you
were talking about with like the
demonic aspect of releasing
and control, trying to control the
energy.
Well, it raises like a question,
which is like, where does the act of
creation come from?
So the act creation is God,
you know, it's God's doing, God
creates. So it's the act destruction.
Right.
And Satan's destruction.
But the act of creation,
like every person who's ever, every
person, really, who's ever engaged
in any creative activity knows
that there's what we call this
moment of inspiration, where the
idea, the notion comes to you, but
where does it come from.
And people don't explore that
question for some reason.
But it's an open question.
Like, where does that come from?
Ideas pop into your mind, thoughts
pop into your mind that you've never
considered before, but that are just
there.
And so you're not really coming
up with them so much as you're
summoning them. I guess that's what
I'm saying. Yeah.
And that's true for good things, but
it's also true for bad things.
Is it not, I mean, does any living
person not know what I am talking
about?
Well, so in the Orthodox tradition,
we have this idea that
your thoughts come from
one of three sources.
It either comes from you and your
own sort of innate spirit and
creativity, which God gave you,
or it comes from God, or comes
from the angelic or demonic
realm. So there's three
possible ways that you could get
that inspiration.
The term that's used in the is
Logithmoid, which is sort of
thought forms that can sometimes
occur.
Usually those are in the Orthodox
tradition spoken of sort of as
demonic influences.
But you're right to
that, I think
that idea of inspiration
and then putting it into your
work, if you look at it from the
evil perspective, that's
the whole thing that Crowley talked
about in magic theory and practice
is that all you're
He says the world and all of his
actions are equalized.
Everything in the world is equal.
There's nothing good or bad.
And the true magician is the one who
takes the matter or
the, the things in the world,
and puts his will and intention into
it, and then affects an
energetic change in the word and
whichever one
is successful and takes on that's
the true Magician.
Now, I mean, Crowley is a liar and a
deceiver. So I'm not trying to give
him too much credit, but that is the
attitude. I think that a lot of
people who engage in
that type of an idea, they have
that.
Principle that they think that
they're doing sort of
magic workings in the world to
affect change and that makes them
the majorist.
Does that make sense? It does make
sense.
I just, as I get older,
I have come to believe that
we're really kind of
a pass through a lot of the time
that we are subject to
all these external forces that
we don't acknowledge.
We don't perceive most of the times,
but that those are really the
defining moments of our lives.
Like we either accept or reject
things presented to us from outside
of us.
I guess that's what I'm saying.
Yeah, I.
Yeah, I mean, really I didn't find
any significant,
deep analysis of this type of a
analysis of like spiritual
psychology, I guess you could say,
until, you know, I got deeper into
Orthodox tradition where they, they
go pretty deep into understanding
this kind of stuff.
Because if you think about it, like,
I don't want to degrade the office
too much, but like a priest,
Orthodox priest, they're masters of
human psychology, that's not all
they are. But if you hear
for decades, people's.
Confessions, you're going to be
a very good psychologist if
you're good at it.
Right. I see you're gonna
understand, um, you know,
not just human weaknesses and stuff
like that, but you're to understand
the, these other influences
and hopefully have the
discernment to know when
the influences might be from the
divine or when they might be, from
something else.
Uh, you, know, one of the things
that father St. Sarah from Rose
talked about in his book,
Orthodox in the religion of features
that he warned about.
Coming mass delusions and what
would sort of
dupe large amounts of people.
And one of the things that he tied
into Hinduism and
new age type stuff was also not
just yoga, but the charismatic
movement. And he was very insistent
that this charismatic
movement will continue to
grow because it
stresses the direct existential
ecstatic experience as
if that's necessarily from
God.
When it could very easily be from
the demonic, I think when you
look at the manifestations in the,
you know, the domain of
charismaticism and how that's now
crept into the Roman Catholic
church, it's crept all into the
Protestant evangelical world,
and it ties it very closely into,
you know ancient sort of Hindu
practices.
That's the type of Christianity
that's growing in Africa,
Latin South America, it is rampant.
It's a massively powerful delusion
because it
replaces traditional Christianity
with the idea that something
akin to voodoo, basically,
if you study voodoe, uh,
it's very, very similar to
charismaticism in the way that
anything that you experience trumps
what's in divine revelation or
what's an church tradition.
Like it's all about the
direct sort of ecstatic experience.
And so it doesn't matter what
happened or came before then
that might sound like it's not that
big of a deal, but take, for
example, and
Lee or the founder of the Quakers
and Lee thought that
her ecstatic experiences were God
telling her that women
should be pastors.
Women should be prophetesses.
Women should run the church sex
is bad. She's a proto-feminist.
She's at proto women, Bishop
pastor person.
She started a cult.
Her cult didn't grow.
It's about to die. I think there's
only three Quakers left shakers
left, but it's
a great example of the
type of delusion that.
Western religionists have fallen
into, which is that- Just
to be clear, it's about the shakers,
not the society of friends.
No, so she comes out of
the, she's a schism out
of the Quaker society of friend.
Shaker.
Yeah, and they were big and mean.
They didn't reproduce exactly.
So that's one of the downsides of
like, uh, not a long choice
strategy, but it's an
attack on not just.
Patriarchy, but also attack on like
good sexuality in terms of
producing.
Yes. Uh, but, it's also like
massive proto feminism.
So it might sound
counterintuitive to say that that's
very similar to the sixties
counterculture revolution, but not
because the whole idea
of.
You know, gay bishops or
gay priests or, uh,
women, bishops, women priests, women
pastors, it's all sterility.
And so the more sterility that you
get, the more your cult dies
out.
That's the end goal of all that is
sterility in fact, in the one of the
minor prophets, I want to say it's
like Amos or Hosea, like there's
actually a mentioning that
the curse that you will
get is the sterility, that you
desire.
Does that make sense?
Yes. So...
What I'm, what I'm saying here is
like you were talking about with
destruction, these actions,
these inversions,
they are a releasing of destructive
power. And the way to do that is to
always invert the
existing natural order.
And that has a powerful effect
in terms of not
just creating instruction, but also
creating a scenario that's then more
easily manageable and controllable
from cutting oligarchical
types of elites.
Yes, and it also infuses
them with dark spiritual power.
There's just no question about it.
It's not just the
desire to get rich or the desire
control other people.
It's that they are filled.
I mean, when Justin Trudeau
systematically destroys his
nation, which he did,
he gets something out of that.
And it's not the consulting contract
that comes after, it's more than
that.
This is what annoys me about con
ink and sort of the fake
conservative side of those
who they're unable to
diagnose what's really going on
because number one, they don't have
like the right spiritual component,
but they're also averse to all
ideas of subversion and conspiracy
call that's all crazy.
But it's like, but isn't that a much
better explanation of
Justin Trudeau or these kinds of
people? They're not just dummies who
are like liberal.
They're actually perhaps consciously
malicious.
Or they're tools of
consciously malicious powers.
Right, but it's not a joke.
It's not that they're just like
stupid, just like lame,
effeminate, closeted
gay guy runs Canada.
The second largest country in the
world with the most natural
resources of any place on planet
Earth.
I don't think that's an accident.
Well, when you read a lot of these
global technocratic
oligarchical elites,
they're a lot smarter than people
think.
And much more faithful,
you know, they're not agnostics,
that's for sure.
So I want to
wrap this up to go back to orthodoxy
and its view of the future, its
eschatology.
So like a lot of, and
this is directly related to the
power I think of Christian Zionism
because that derives from the
Christian Zionist belief about the
end times.
And given recent events,
I think a lot of people are starting
to think about.
History as a linear
track is like, you know, there's a
beginning and end to history.
Like everyone feels that that's true
and there's going to be an end to
all this, who knows when it comes.
But there are a lot of
people who are very focused on that.
I don't know what I think of it.
Probably bad, but whatever, leaving
my thoughts aside.
What is the orthodox view
of the end times?
Yeah, one of the crucial
components to contrast the Lord's
perspective to those sorts of
dispensational Christian Zionist
perspectives is that they've
missed what the first
Advent in our view
did.
So we don't believe that
the kingdom of God is
postponed to the end of the world.
We think that at the first advent,
as Christ says, many times in the
gospel, the kingdom is here, the
kingdoms in your midst, the kingdom
is the presence of the Holy spirit.
This generation will not pass away
before.
And we believe in what's called
partial preterism in the church.
Father, especially Christos, I'm
emphasized in his sermons on Matthew
24 and Luke 21 that
the destruction of the temple in
70 AD was the
finalizing of the
reality of the kingdom coming into
fruition. So in other words, it's
appropriate that the temple
would pass away now that
the, what the temple was a type of,
which is the church is here.
So now that the church which is
the true temple has come
That is the surpassing
of, from type to anti-type,
right? So you wouldn't go back to
types now that the reality has come.
So much of what's in the
old Testament, whether it's the
temple administration with
the showbread and the lampstand
and all that, those things are
fulfilled in, in our view,
what the Orthodox church is, the
Orthodox Church possesses.
Those things in the here and now,
so sometimes in theology, it's
called the already not yet
principle. So the kingdom of God,
the end times are here now.
They began at the first Advent.
So for us, for example, the book of
Revelation,
most people, most evangelicals, oh,
that's into the world and that's
John Hagee and the seven blood moons
of Israel. No, no, it now like
we live in the eschatological
reality. When you go to divine
liturgy, that is heaven on earth.
Now it's not a postponed into the
There is an end to the world, but...
Jesus brought the end of the world
at his first advent and
we one way that we know this is that
most of time when you ask You know
that type of an evangelicals on us
for what when does the reign of
Christ begin? Oh when he comes back,
but every time psalm 110
Which is sit thou at my right hand
till I make your enemies your
footstool every time that's cited in
the New Testament It's cited about
his ascension Which happened
after he died and rose rose
resurrected.
It's not about the end the world.
It is about the ascension So the
church is the kingdom
And if you go back and read the
prophecies in Isaiah, in
the Psalms, the talk about the
conversion of the Gentiles,
that began when Jesus sent
His apostles out throughout the
Roman Empire. You have this prophecy
in Daniel 2 that the empire
under which this Messiah is born
eventually becomes the kingdom of
the Messiah within three centuries,
the Roman empire becomes essentially
the Orthodox Catholic church.
So... We see all of that
as fulfilled when he
ascended and began his reign in
his church.
Thus, there is an end to the world,
but we don't sit around speculating
about news headlines about when
that's coming because we're already
in the end of the world.
Now, when we go to the divine
liturgy, that is the eschaton in the
here and now. Does that make sense?
It does make sense.
It does make sense.
So that, that kind of like
changes your responsibility
as a Christian living in the world.
And it also doesn't make us worship
some atheist nation-state in
the Middle East that was created by
the Rothschilds and the UN in 1948.
Oh, that's not in your liturgy.
No, I'm saying like my,
my duty is not
to John Hagee's shofar
and the blood moons or whatever,
blood moon pies.
What are blood moons?
You know who John Hagee is?
Yeah. Well, uh.
He, I don't, they, he always tries
to play on whatever.
I can never be mad at John Higgie.
Cause he just seemed so lost, sad,
but he's a deceiver.
Yeah, but I mean, he, uh,
he was doing this big thing a
couple of years ago about the blood
moons are visual in times are
signified by the blood moons,
so I just made the joke of blood
moon pies, because if you know
what a moon pie is, it's like, you
know, cause he's a portly.
Fellow. But he is.
Yeah. No, he's at the moon pies.
So does that, but it means
then the orthodox
are not waiting for the
next life. They're like engaged in
this one. Well, it's a both end,
right? So.
It's not that we, uh,
focus all of our time and energy on
the here and the now, or, you know,
politics or the social order,
we have sort of, I guess, tiered
responsibilities.
I mean, obviously, you know, for us
kingdom of God would come first.
The church is, is what comes first,
but that doesn't negate, you know,
the goodness of this life.
So we believe in many goods,
uh not just good or evil,
right? Like You might have in
the history of the, say
middle ages, the Latin church,
this idea that, well, to
be celibate and single is
good, but if you're married, that's
somehow bad or lesser, right?
We would say there's many goods
versus this idea of a sort
of a strict, uh, good or
good or evil.
Uh, that comes out of the dialectics
that Augustine, Augustine had a very
specific idea that just
as an example, he said the marital
sex in his mind, Senegasen
said.
Could never be, even though he
admitted it's a sacrament, he never
understood how it could be a
sacrement because for him, it
always involves some degree of
venial sin. Because in his view,
man's will is either enraptured with
God or with some created
thing. And if it's enrapture with a
created thing, like in the moment of
sexual release, then you're in some
way not focused on God.
So he had a dialectical view of
sin and good
and evil and of the will.
Orthodox view doesn't have that
view. In fact, we think that
there's the possibility of many
different goods.
So married life is good and has
graces.
And there might be certain
advantages to living
a single celibate life, but it's
not inherently somehow holier
than if you're married.
And a lot of Orthodox monastics will
even admit that, that a lot of
married people can achieve a higher
level of sanctity even than some
monastics because
Just sacrifice in itself is not,
I mean, I desire mercy, not
sacrifice, right?
So just sacrificing itself doesn't
necessarily equate to,
um, a more holy
status in the Orthodox perspective.
Uh, although you might be able to do
certain things that you can't do if
you're married, but that's a very
different attitude from sort of like
medieval Roman Catholic attitudes of
like sex and marriage.
What a conversation.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.