Crop Rotation - 011 - Heiser - The Unseen Realm

A discussion of Dr. Michael Heiser’s book The Unseen Realm.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Let us pause in life's pleasures and count its many tears while we all subsor with a song that will linger forever in our use. Hard times come again. Tis the song the side of the week. Hard times, hard times come again. Many days you have lingered around my cabin door. Oh hard times come again.

SPEAKER_03 0:47

Welcome to Crop Rotation, a discussion podcast. A good farmer doesn't grow the same thing every year. For the soil to thrive, there needs to be variety. We're a group of friends who found that we missed the life of the mine that we were able to live together when we were at St. John's College in Annapolis two decades ago. This podcast is an opportunity to explore and discuss works of art and of intellect that we've each discovered in the intervening years. Before each meeting, one of us gives the group an assignment. The leader is also responsible for asking an opening question to begin the discussion. This meeting's leader is Sir Robert.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Hey! Tonight's reading is The Unseen Realm by Michael Heiser, Extended Edition. Let me summarize it this way. There's a couple of different directions you could summarize this from. It does a couple of things. But in a nutshell, it makes a set of claims from a popularized scholarly perspective that attempt to argue for a more mystical or perhaps spiritual perception of the world than the modern mind tends to on its own in modern context. In particular, it does this by addressing elements of the Bible that the author claims are commonly misinterpreted in a way that denudes them of their spiritual reality. And he would like us to reframe them. His bias in this is that he says that a proper understanding, this is not a direct quote, this is my paraphrase, but that a proper understanding of the biblical text, and I think he would say really any text has to be made in the context of the understanding of the author and audience of the time. So if you're reading the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Bible or Canivary Tales, whatever it is, if there's a certain bias towards presentism where we want to understand the text from our perspective, and this is true of everybody. And so there's a bit of work to do to get into the perspective of the original audience, original author, and understand what they meant. The principal mechanism by which you can see that kind of thing, he would argue, is it's visible in things like idioms. So we have idioms that have a different meaning than their literal meaning. And someone from a different culture or 300 years from now may read it literally and take the wrong things if they don't know the idiomatic use. There are other things too we can talk about that I'm happy to go into that aren't the critical points here, but it's not just idiom, it's also familiar context. If uh I were writing a short story, I might say things like phone and assume that the audience knows that I mean a cell phone or a mobile phone and all of the weight that goes into that. And an audience that's not at all familiar with such a thing might you know have to speculate on what a phone is and come up with sometimes wrong systems of thought that are close enough that they could mean something meaningful. Okay. So I want to make one other note about this in particular. He has one primary assertion, I think I would say, about the unseen realm that seems the most important to him. Again, the book is called The Unseen Realm, and he's referring to spiritual things that way. Is that he uh has a certain kind of concreteness to the spiritual realm. And notice that I don't say physicality, he's not talking about a physical aspect of spiritual things, but there is a concreten to it that isn't simply conceptual and uh unlocalized. He talks about spirits as being in places and you know doing things and interacting with the material world. And I would even say, and I think he would say this too, having a something akin to matter called spirit. And when I say akin to it, parallel to is probably a better way to say it. A way of a substance, yeah, thank you. Some kind of substance that we would call an immaterial substance, but real. And he makes his arguments from the Bible. Okay, there we go. That's his broad argument, and I want to focus in on a couple of things, but my core question to start us off, I'm gonna say my core question, it'll be no surprise to any of you, and then I'll give a couple of different projections of that question into this text and into the world. But my core question is let's say that his general assertions are true, give or take, you know, maybe some random it's not quite accurate or something, fine. Let's grant him his general premise how shall I then live? So another way of saying that would be so what? Who k who cares? What what does it matter to me if Michael disputed with Satan over the body of Moses in some kind of actual verbal way? What what does that affect? How do how do I use that something like that? So that's one rendering of it, one projection of that thought into this. Another projection of it is he talks at one point, and I can't remember if it's in the introduction or early on, about the creeds, and he refers to himself as not a creedal Christian. I also am not a creedal Christian. I respect them, and I think I don't differ meaningfully from them in any way. I I have never heard a creed that I thought, I'm out, you know, or anything like that. But they're not particularly important to me, in as much as, from my perspective, they are derived works from the source. One of the values of a creed to me is that people who have proven themselves trustworthy by a completed life in Christ came to these creeds as solid articulations of core elements of scripture. It's that means they're a kind of ballast for me. If I go to interpret the scripture on my own and I come up with something wacky, I can go, hey, that doesn't match the creeds. I should be cautious. Something like that. Okay. Generally speaking, I believe what he's saying. Some of it is a lot more detail on things that I had come to on my own, having just read the scriptures. I do not have his scholastic expertise in Hebrew or you know, Aramaic or whatever. So he, you know, he went to a lot a lot of detail. There's a few things where I thought, I don't think that that sounds quite right. I'm happy to talk about those if those are relevant. But by and large, he basically articulates a view that I am comfortable with. So, in listening to this book, he reasons about the scriptures significantly more closely to the way I reason about the scriptures than almost anybody else I've heard. And that is to say, rather than taking a syllogistic approach, like a purely syllogistic approach, building ex nihilo, he seems to take an additive and subtractive view, where he'll say, This text means that of all the ways we some particular passage, of all the ways we could take this, this one can't be one of them. That'd be a subtractive view. An additive view would be, well, we have some hypothesis, what do we do with it? Well, here's a text that gives us some, you know, additional way we can understand it.

SPEAKER_06 8:53

So it's like Sudoku.

SPEAKER_00 8:55

That's not how I framed it, but sure. I in my mind it's very tactile. So anyway, all that to say, I find the way he reasons about scripture very comfortable to me, even though I don't necessarily agree with every single bit. In particular, I take the serpent, for just as an example, I take the serpent in the Genesis account as being literally a snake, although I do acknowledge his great point about things being literal and also more than literal. I think that's an interesting point. Okay, so all that said, if this is all true, or you know, enough of it, basically, what good is it to me? How does that help me be a better father? Or actually, what does it help me do?

SPEAKER_03 9:41

That's funny that that's your opening question, because the whole time I was reading it after sort of feeling like I maybe grasped something in it, I was like, huh, Sir Robert likes to ask how then shall we live? I wonder what his answer to that is, because it does not seem to affect me at all if any of this is true.

SPEAKER_00 10:05

Quick spoiler, it has affected me a lot over the past 20 years, not just this book, but some similar things, but I'm curious and I want to get some out of their crops.

SPEAKER_02 10:16

I think that you thought, by asking us to to grant his premise, and then asking, how then shall we live, that you could prevent me from sinking my needle-sharp teeth into Michael Heiser's neck. Actually, not at all.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

I don't mind talking about problems or concerns.

SPEAKER_02 10:39

I will answer your question in a way that makes it a reductio ad absurdum.

SPEAKER_06 10:44

I was gonna say, Matthew, we have to prop Mr. Heiser up and pretend to believe in him before you go lay into him like this. Uh so he's he's past and he's with the Lord. So he will lend you his personage, and you may do as thou wilt to him in virtual mind space.

SPEAKER_00 11:02

So I do not want to believe something untrue, obviously. And to the best of my knowledge, I don't. Um however, I liked his position, which is that people don't need to be protected from the Bible. Yeah. I think he would say, you know, let's get into it, and anywhere he's wrong, let him be wrong. Let's tear it apart.

SPEAKER_06 11:24

Well, before Matthew tears Mr. Heiser apart, I'm gonna go ahead and go stand with him downrange. I'm gonna go stand with the Michael Heiser dummy, so Matthew, just know you'll be hitting me too. I think that this is incredibly practical. And I think that Dwight, you know, you were at college with us. There were people that were doing Wicca in the dorms, and there was demonic activity in the dorms, right? And so that was practical engagement that we had to do with literal unseen entities that were literally doing things and affecting things in the physical realm visibly and palpably and in terms of spiritual discernment. So if Michael Heiser would you go to to reference to Michael Heiser, I would say the whole Deuteronomy 32 Mount Hermon Pentecost thing to me, that's one of the most important points where it hangs of practicality, is when we read the passage of Peter and Jesus at Caesarea Philippi, and Jesus says, the gates of hell will not stand against my kingdom on this rock. I'm gonna build my kingdom. There's an argument for the reading that says that that rock is, hey man, I'm taking back Mount Hermon. I am taking Peter to Mount Hermon, and at Mount Hermon, I am verbally anointing and calling and placing this mantle on him. And if your theology is small, then you might, as a and Presbyterians and everybody else, everybody's so susceptible to proof texting a passage. This happens to be the place where Catholics could easily stumble and simplify this moment to a proof text of, oh, Peter's in charge, Peter's the rock, everybody's got to be Catholic because the rock on, well, that might not even be the good read of it, because the first and highest read, in my opinion, is to look at it in terms of Christ and his ministry, the same way that when Joshua shows up to the land of Canaan, he shows up and is like, hey, whose side are you on? Uh no, no, no, no. Neither. I'm the commander of you know, Yahweh Sabbath, all of his stuff. That's what I head up. And you're here to fight that battle with me. And Christ shows up and he dies on a cross where the skull of Goliath is interred in at in like the bowels of that rock. There's a whole bunch of ways in which like Christ's death has all these layers of counterassault to the kingdom of darkness and to big, big stuff. But the Pentecost one, Pentecost is where he's giving back out in blessing in the form of the Holy Spirit, the inverse of everything that got stripped away and taken away at Babel. Well, Babel was the great winnowing, judging, collapsing of God had all this global blessing over the earth that at Babel things collapsed. Things got real bad. There was, you know, the fracturing of language itself and civilization. That's coming back together and in terms of oneness and wholeness of the kingdom. So Pentecost is no longer a thing that Presbyterians and Pentecostals should fight about. It's a thing that all Christians should come to recognize. Oh, crud, Pentecost is the call to global warfare to take back and reunify the planet with the kingdom in the inverse way that Babel and the separating of tongues broke the planet into division. This is Pentecost is a call to unification at a global martial level. And anything less than that reading is a selfish, human, lazy reading that is disobedient to God and it is an affront to the scope of intent of the kingdom of God. So what's at stake? Well, are you really trying to see the kingdom of God as being as big as God wants it to be? I think Michael Heiser's thing is nobody wants the kingdom of God to be as big as the kingdom of God wants to be because everybody wants it to be small, manageable, easy to maintain. And for me, I experienced that in this generation when I realized, oh crud, the whole divine counsel thing. I'm from a tradition that has just ignored that. And so he's followed the rabbit trail and he's seen that the world is so much bigger. And that's the nature of the deception of Revelation is that everybody's gonna not see that there's so much more happening and they're gonna have blinders on and think that the world is not as weird as it is. That's what Revelation says. So I think Michael Heiser's argument is reread Revelation and realize it's happening to you too, uh biblical, scholarly wise, you know, whatever. So sorry, I got a little heated there in the middle. All right, Matthew, you think he's so wrong. Josh, you never and like how do you any of that have to do with because it opens your eyes to the fact that you live in a world of spiritual war. Literally, God wants this world, he wants the people, the souls, the location, he wants this place. Like you should have your eyes open to the fact that if you go through your day and interact with 10 people, one of those people has some amount of direct demonic influence in their life. If you're not thinking that way, I mean, we don't let burglars into our homes. We think about whether or not people trespass into our homes, but for some reason we think that it's okay to just pretend like there aren't demons in the world because it's not, it's a stupid one, but it's a really bad one. He says that that's where we're starting from.

SPEAKER_02 18:01

He does say that your government is probably controlled by an evil Elohim.

SPEAKER_06 18:06

Yes, and that is an important point to know because as Christians, we should be praying about this stuff. And if you think that it doesn't matter.

SPEAKER_02 18:15

I'm trying to give you your answer to Dwight's question.

SPEAKER_06 18:18

Sure, sure.

SPEAKER_02 18:19

Which is practically speaking, the place where what Heiser is writing actually impacts your lived life is that the governments of the world are given over to evil gods to control them at this present age. That's like the most he doesn't say anything about exercising people or doing spiritual warfare. That's not in this book. But the nations, the nations and the governments are in this book all over the place.

SPEAKER_06 18:45

My answer that you couldn't have read from Heiser is wake up and smell the coffee. This is we live this. This is our lived experience, and the nature of the battle is the deception that you're not. So I think he's pointing at something that's real. Like now, day to day.

SPEAKER_02 19:05

My answer to Josh is that while Heiser makes the world weirder than a modern thinker will want to make it, I think that he misses by not making it nearly weird enough. He is not and because he has not gone far enough in understanding how weird it is and how mystical the world is, he goes in for making really bad arguments that he doesn't even have to make. And well, actually, I have no idea why he makes the bad arguments. He makes some really real stinkers in this book that are like, wow, either he thinks I'm an idiot or he's an idiot, or some idiot convinced him to put this in this book. Hang on, hang on.

SPEAKER_03 19:53

I kept thinking that he was arguing against someone that he talked to academically that doesn't share any of my views. There was some of that his largest arguments around those, and then he would like real quickly be like, Oh yeah, in Genesis 1, that's not the Trinity, that's the council. No proof, no argument, just yeah, that that because of this other argument that I made.

SPEAKER_02 20:21

The full argument for that is some complete verbal sophistry about ordering pizza. That's not even true in English. Maybe it's true in Hebrew, but he doesn't say that.

SPEAKER_06 20:32

Okay, so he points out in his text that some of his points will be good points, and some of them you are welcome to disagree with, and he makes the point that his overall argument should be able to be maintained, even if some of them are disagreeable or maybe even wrong. So the real question is, Matthew, did you see any places where you disagreed with him that undermined or were contrary to the larger, more load-bearing point of the argument? Okay, so so can we address those that you found most load-bearingly compromised first?

SPEAKER_02 21:14

Yeah, so I mean, I have a laundry list of not the list. I need signal the noise and what's your top hitch. But I won't start with that. I I I will I will address the overall problem and I'll frame it as an answer to Sir Robert's question because I want to uh respect Sir Robert at least that much.

SPEAKER_06 21:42

Matthew, I'm warning you this level of SAS, I'm gonna require an indie insult ramp riff at the end of this to really land all of your vitriol for Mr. Heiser, but go ahead. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 21:53

Well, anyway.

SPEAKER_06 21:54

All right.

SPEAKER_02 21:56

So how then shall we live? If Heiser idea about what Elohim are is correct, then they are beings like Baal, Athena, the detestable god Moloch, etc. El. Right? Our society currently does not care what El thinks. Or Baal or Moloch or Athena. We don't know who they are. We care very much and we idolize something that we treat exactly the way those ancient societies treated those beings. But ours are called our sacred democracy. They even put the word sacred in it when they're invoking it to you know justify some action. Things like progress or big ones big gods astride the world now are capitalism and socialism. There are smaller gods like you know Romanticism or Hegelianism. But this country is you know a battleground between competing gods and a pantheon and the pantheon is progress, conservatism, capitalism, socialism, etc these are the altars that we worship at justice versus progress.

SPEAKER_06 23:28

So this would be roughly akin to a Roman worshiping at the altar of T all capitals the greatness of Rome. They would have a slightly different set of yeah same thing.

SPEAKER_02 23:38

Yeah I mean Rome's probably an interesting case because Heiser might think that Zeus is real but the greatness of Rome is imaginary. Like Heiser might give different ontological categories to things that in Rome were worshipped in the same way by the same person. But for us now in America, all the stuff that we idolatrously worship, Heiser seems to give the ontological category of fantasy. In fact, even going so far as to say that it would be insulting to God to say that he is greater than one of these made up imaginary gods. So he's arguing against a place where people are saying that in one of the Psalms the gods are fake gods. He says they're real gods and he says it would actually be insulting to God to compare him to something that's not real like an idol that people just made up and imagine exists. Right? And I thought well okay but we made up democracy. Democracy was not here in the beginning it was invented by like Locke or somebody or or some Athenian and um Rousseau Rousseau and it is not insulting to God. I think it's actually quite meaningful and significant to say Yahweh is more powerful than democracy. Like if somebody says you know you can't do that because it threatens our sacred democracy you can't let your God get in the way and the things that you believe get in the way of democracy well the answer to that is Yahweh is more powerful than democracy. Democracy is fake and Yahweh's real the same way the same way that one of the prophets would say you know Yahweh is more powerful than Baal. Baal is fake and Yahweh is real. So I think that if you really take Haiser seriously in his ontological categories then that puts our current culture in a historically unique position where we're like idolatrous in a special and different way that the Greeks and the Akkadians were not idolatrous. We're not as idolatrous as them because we're not worshiping real Elohim. We're worshiping like imaginary ideas I think actually our idolatry is the same. That's the biggest picture that I can go that's my biggest picture disagreement with him.

SPEAKER_06 26:12

And actually I think sorry just put it finely what is it that you disagree with what are you saying he sees differently from you I maybe you have some source from him that I have not read but in this book he seems to give Elohim an ontological category very distinct from something like democracy or capitalism which is what we worship. Okay I think it let me say this I'm sure that Sir Robert and Dwight will have helpful things that will improve but I I would go back and look at the way that he talks about what an Elohim is he addresses this and says it's not a matter of ontology from the perspective of the Hebrew writers an Elohim is any being that is in this location. And then he argues that very clearly right because there are from multiple different perspectives they all triangulate the same interpretation of an Elohim being a being that is in the location of God and that's how you get messengers next to God and presumably that would mean that things like cherubim seraphim whatever the different emes are those are all Elohim when they're in the presence of God and standing in a divine council it's like they're they're appropriate to the heavens the way that fish are appropriate to water right and that's their place so that's why they're Elohim.

SPEAKER_02 27:53

He says it's not anything that they're able to do or any quality that they possess but rather the place that they're from.

SPEAKER_06 28:01

And it's the council thing they're from the council and the word council is a word that means either there is one person with power who is extending that power to the others in whose presence he's invited them or as a function of their collection or some other hybrid whatever by coming together they have this authority in their meeting. That's what a council is and so that's how you get something like a lowly messenger angel or a seraphim or a cherubim becoming an Elohim because he's in the council of God. So that's the divinification that then causes great ambiguity later because people are like well wait wait wait wait he just said that that thing is a God. No, he said that it was a thing that came from the divine presence and that from the Hebrew perspective it divinifies the thing.

SPEAKER_02 28:58

Presence divinifies it yeah div divinizes it whatever okay deifies it yeah but yeah democracy was not present in that original council and yet somehow it is the force which our nation is under is being ruled and organized by as though it was our Elohim.

SPEAKER_06 29:21

Well you're saying that as a sentence and it's a blunt one I would say that that is one of the several demiurges that is defining us as a civilization but others include real fallen angelic beings that are principalities over this country. Like there are real angelic principalities of a fallen and divine nature that have authority in this country.

SPEAKER_02 29:48

Yeah but if somebody speaks to me in their name it means nothing. But if somebody successfully speaks to me in the name of democracy or rule of law the police can come.

SPEAKER_06 29:59

Uh you picked I think you picked an arbitrary standard by which to fail it. If I shoot you with a gun and you don't see it, you don't know what brand it is but it'll still kill you you're describing not knowing the brand of the gun. There's still real spiritual factors that are unknown. They're mass right it's hidden right we're back to the same argument. Heiser's argument with you is you're talking about democracy.

SPEAKER_03 30:22

Now they're not hidden they're revealed well it's it's a combo what is what is it John what is the thing that you're saying oh there's this thing up there in the over a demiurge what what is it what is it what's it doing?

SPEAKER_06 30:38

Well it's scheming and it's collaborating with the other demiurges at parallel to it and under it and they're collaboratively attempting to defy the kingdom and the forces of God.

SPEAKER_02 30:49

Okay so I can literally today I could go on Twitter and do this. I could make a Faustian bargain with progressivism. Literally I could give over my loyalty to this great God of our country and I would get benefits from it. I could do this with conservatism as well. I could give over my own authority I could give my allegiance to conservatism in a way that betrays my ethics or that betrays Yahweh and conservatism would reward me for it. Progressivism would reward me for it. It would give me material riches in return for my soul. Baal or Hermes or El or Ashtareth they cannot do that in the United States of America Montfrere the number one killer of human beings is women killing their babies so that they can continue to live their life to sacrifice kids to bail.

SPEAKER_06 31:53

Are you saying that progressivism is Moloch? I'm saying that any political choice that terminates a human life as a good for a policy change is a demonic policy that is a demonically motivated demonically conformative policy. I'd like to weigh in on that let me just say I think all Canadian euthanasia policies are also demonic so I think the nation of Canada has a lot of high level demon infestation to the I don't think Heiser thinks that I think he does I think that Heiser recognizes that there are mass scale ritual sins that are participating in demonic ritual at a cultural level. Is that in a different book well he doesn't get into sociology in this book right he the question here's the logical question if Michael Heiser were here. So that was the thing that governed all of known human culture that we talked about all across all of it fast forward a couple of thousand years do you think it stopped no does Michael Heiser give any indication in his book that it would stop no so Michael Heiser would probably say yes that'd be my argument.

SPEAKER_00 33:08

All right so Sir Robert let me tell a short story and let me do it in a way that is uh I this is off the cuff. So pardon me if there's a little bit of flaws in it. Are y'all familiar with Alistair Crowley like generally broadly okay and y'all are familiar with the idea of what a working is in like Satanism witchcraft? Something like that. Okay. Doesn't matter a whole lot but I just to touch on the concept of it there are the there's the idea of casting spells or doing evil rituals and stuff like that. If you do a broader evil ritual over time where you're building up I'm gonna put this in really coarse terms coarse grained terms for the sake of saying this quickly but if you do it where you do a whole bunch of bad things over time you kind of build up points or power and then you can spend that all at once on some bigger thing than you could do with an individual act. That's called a working. So you you do something over a long period. So Alistair Crowley's thing he was trying to do was he's trying to do a working to effectively summon the Antichrist into the world. That was like his big project it was called the Babylon working. And I say that that's from his perspective that's not me saying what he was trying to do. He was trying to do that. Aim small missmal I get it and that was a similar thing to what Stalin was hoping for. Stalin was if you read his stuff was hoping to be the Antichrist that was his like aspiration. Super quick story one of the things you have happening a hundred and something 150 years ago is this turn towards modernism which is a denial of you know spiritual things spiritualism right in general and a move towards atheistic type of things materialistic type of things. So around the turn of the previous century you have these attempts to do large scale workings like Stalin. This will go somewhere in a minute I promise most of the way that you do bad stuff and most of the way that you do good stuff is with life and with blood. So bad magic is blood magic you kill innocents and things like that babies whatever and good things are also blood which is like why Jesus's crucifixion matters and there's power in his shedding of his blood it's the shedding of his own for the sake of the other that's why Tim Keller points out that abortion is a kind of black sacrament of communion it is saying to an innocent person, this is your body broken that I might live. That's Tim Keller's framing of abortion as opposed to the opposite obviously this is my body broken that you might live. And so for him it is a specific perversion I'm gonna speak for Heiser you know I'm gonna do the best I can from that perspective and say that that is Moloch influencing the world and perverting taking the truth of Christianity that's been brought into the world by Jesus and has so much power as a concept and becomes easy to pervert right they're not taking it and just ignoring it. You can't really ignore communion as it has brought communion with us to God. So what they do instead is they allow people to make that deal and pervert it and go, this is your body broken for me, your blood spilled for me all that stuff. So that's number one that would be a Moloch situation. Number two would be sorry hold on yeah um can you clarify whether you are saying that the thing that planned parenthood has committed itself to which it thinks of as feminism and progressivism those are its names for that thing whether you are saying that that is the same thing as the Moloch of the ancient world it is Moloch of the ancient world has been forced into in some manner of speaking has been forced into different defensive postures because whereas Moloch previously in again in the ancient world previously had free dominion over some places right that's the whole Exodus 32 whatever he was geographically free to do some things. However when Jesus sent his disciples out not just the 12 but the 72 when Paul went out and did his things he planted dissident groups in the territories that were given to those people because he was reclaiming them Moloch among others I'm just going to use him because we're talking about him Moloch is put on the defensive and he has to be on the defensive because the gates of hell will not withstand what Jesus is doing. And so one of the ways he goes on the defensive is he makes himself available through obscurity to more people in different ways but it's still him doing his same basic trick.

SPEAKER_02 38:24

Sure and and the ancient gods were known by different names in different places it is absolutely well understood by the ancient people to be the case. Would you say then that the thing which we Americans know as feminism and progressivism had a seat on the Divine Council before the beginning of the world when the morning stars sang together for joy I don't think so and I will tell you why if unless you want to say something first.

SPEAKER_00 38:53

Please do no this is I think this is where I think you're departing from Heiser but I think you're coming closer to me so please keep going I great I think I might be accurately representing or maybe extending Heiser's position and but let's see I'm obviously going to be inferring and also I guess actually importing my own understandings as well so you know whatever. I want to talk about not just Moloch because for feminism it'll be helpful to talk about a couple of other things as well I mean I don't need to draw the particular genealogy of any particular philosophy andor Elohim. I'm interested in the ontological categories I want to make this illustrative so I'm gonna draw that out a little bit for this I'm gonna use some language that is prevalent in a particular strain of churches. I don't actually know they're kind of charismatic y it doesn't matter to me they refer to some biblical types among the many two of the ones they refer to are an Ahab spirit and a Jezebel spirit and what they mean when they say that is just for anybody who might listen Ahab and Jezebel were a king and his queen who ruled over Israel Ahab was I'll say evil but he was not evil in the way that Jezebel was his wife Jezebel was overbearing and overshadowed him and used him as a pawn to accomplish her power lust and evil through him he went along with it because of all the benefits he got out from it he also was evil but it was an interesting situation where the male female roles got inverted and not like simply inverted but that was a common thing. So when the present-day churches often will talk about a Jezebel spirit and ahab spirit one of the things they'll say is that a man who has an Ahab spirit isn't being strongly masculine. He's giving himself over to the way of some particular spirit and that a woman who has a Jezebel spirit is overstepping and doing some evil by oppressing or whatever for her husband or her kids or something like that. I'm gonna say those are probably literal Elohim that Ahab and Jezebel were influenced strongly by slash knowingly or unknowingly worshiping something like that. We saw that same set of spirits happen a lot around for us the Great Depression and World War II had a huge influence. I'm not going to talk about other parts of the world right now I don't know as much about them but about the US one of the things we saw happen when we saw so many of our husbands and sons and fathers being sacrificed in World War II to by the way Hitler's wild occultism trying to bring about a Babylonian style rule. Remember the Third Reich I just I'm just gonna I'm not gonna go too far off it's called the Third Reich. It's called the Reich a Reich is a rule a reign it's because it was supposed to be the third great empire of man the Nebuchadnezzar Empire the Roman Empire and now the sort of Heso-Prussian Empire. That's the point of it being the third one. That's why the Reich was the third one. And he was doing it through occultism he was trying to do that. Total tangent I personally believe that when Hitler was more or less a nobody he also made a Faustian style deal with Satan himself and that's why he was so hellbent on getting rid of the Jews and he got so much power in exchange for that particular thing whatever. Anyway there's other things I could say about it doesn't matter but well it kind of actually matters because I do think that the Satan Satan right the Satan Elohim was involved there World War II. Another thing that happened though when so many men died is there was this ripe opportunity for women to have to step up which they in many ways they did right which is great that they did that. But we were ripe then for things like an overarching cultural Ahab and Jezebel thing to happen which it has in feminism. So at that point what we have is men and women getting inverted roles and doing perversions of good things right men are not being the force that we should be women are not being the force that they should be that's through the 20s 30s 40s 50s it starts going in there. We try to reset a little bit but there's all this stuff happening. That's the Jezebel Ahab spirit I think actively playing a role in our world you've got the Moloch spirit coming in taking advantage of that working with the Jezebel and ahab spirits doing a thing. One of the things that happens with the gender confusion is you got a whole different spirit who just started doing a whole bunch of stuff for the past 30 years which is the Baphomet spirit. Baphomet's big power domain is androgyny, gender confusion, all that kind of stuff he's he, she, it whatever always in ancient cultures was a transgenderism and androgyny spirit all that I think we just saw that peak in the 2015 to 2018 era. I'm using a broad brush really fast and I want to say this then in answer to your question Matt, I think that what we call feminism is an emergent phenomenon Phenomenon, probably with directed emergence, I think, but it's an emergent phenomenon of the cooperation between a number of Elohim who, while on the defensive, have created these structures. And when I say structures, I mean patterns of law and worship that they can create in people. And they are hiding behind feminism, capitalism, socialism, you know, whatever the things are. And I say hiding it, I just mean the structures themselves are what they're using to present deals to the world. And they're carving up the world by saying, if you will sell your soul, your children, your whatever for feminism, capitalism, it doesn't really matter to me. What they, as a triad, to use Moloch, Ahab, and Jezebel, but it could be other ones too, they as a triad don't care that you're worshiping one or the other of them, more or less. The three of them have you.

SPEAKER_06 44:56

And in case you're in any doubt as to whether or not that is empirically quote unquote real, it's the same month and has been for thousands of years.

SPEAKER_05 45:06

Literally, gay pride month is the same month that has been occultically celebrated across multiple different continents and civilizations for a long time. And that's for reasons.

SPEAKER_02 45:21

I think you and Heiser don't go far enough.

SPEAKER_00 45:25

Okay, tell me where. When you tell me, which I would totally love to hear, I don't want to stop short of something real and true because that's how I'll know how to live. Right?

SPEAKER_02 45:35

So let me hear. I want to go to Deuteronomy 4, 35. And if you look, it's page 35 in the book when he talks about this, and I think this is illustrative. This was initially one of my laundry lists, chapter 4, God Alone, in the No Gods Besides Me section. So Deuteronomy 4 is very interesting. Moses is giving this speech, right? And Heiser is trying to interpret this verse, Deuteronomy 4.35. Moses is saying, Have you ever seen an Elohim like Yahweh? Have you ever seen an Elohim take a people out of slavery and make war against their enemies and by signs and wonders bring them out? These things were shown you so that you would know that besides Yahweh, there is no Elohim. That's the literal Hebrew, is Yahweh is Elohim, besides him, none. Right? So Hiser's trying to explain this because all the Trinitarians who don't like his council language are like, look at this. Moses says that the only Elohim is Yahweh, right? So Hiser has to explain away this passage and say, oh no, no, no, no. Moses isn't saying there are no Elohim but Yahweh. It's this, it's just like somebody saying of you know, New York City, there's no city like New York, right? But that's the exact same move that his enemies pull on his Psalm 82 reasoning, where he's saying, like, oh no, actually, where Elohim is plural in Psalm 82, it's literally plural, and we have to take it literally. Well, you don't get to pull that move one place and not another place. Like, if the Hebrew is literally true when it says something of Yahweh and Elohim, then it's literally true when it says something of Yahweh and Elohim. And we have a difficulty when it comes to the nature of Elohim. Because Moses, Moses seems to think that there are lots of Elohim.

SPEAKER_06 47:48

But there's no problem because it's literally just a matter of context. In one of those places, you're talking about Elohim being a plurality of gods with respect to there being more gods outside of them versus the plurality of one versus more than one. Those are two different kinds of ways of talking about plurality, but you equivocated them.

SPEAKER_02 48:12

In Psalm 82, he's saying, you know, they have you are all gods, I have you are all sons of the most high. Like my translation has gods in quotes. Because the translator thinks that that he's being metaphorical. And what I'm saying is that Heiser denies that move and insists on a literalism, and so I can insist on a literalism here in Moses, which he denies.

SPEAKER_00 48:38

He's not sorry, I don't think he's denying that literalism. I think he specifically cites Babylon in Isaiah and Nineveh in Zephaniah, right?

SPEAKER_02 48:51

Right, which is why I talked about New York.

SPEAKER_00 48:54

Yeah, but he's not saying that it has to be literal because the words are literally true. Instead, is he's doing a literary analysis and saying that phrase, everywhere we see it, means that it doesn't mean only, it means peerless.

SPEAKER_02 49:14

But it it's all over the place and where it means only. Like you can just do the word search in the Old Testament, and there's a bunch of places where it's like ah there's some law that's like this only and no other.

SPEAKER_06 49:27

But that's it. That's just it. You just said it. It's about law. The only ness is how you relate to it. It is peer list in its respect to you.

SPEAKER_02 49:39

This is not the worst of his philosophical sins. I only pick this particular difficulty because I think because wait a minute, back up, back back up.

SPEAKER_06 49:48

You just said that there was a logical fallacy introduced by this whole, oh, look at who else has done this, there's only one God. You what you're overlooking is that in that moment, the argument is. I'm not saying it's a logical fallacy.

SPEAKER_02 50:04

Um, well, okay, fine. You're getting ahead of me, bro. Okay, that's not what I'm saying. Okay. I think that Heiser thinks that there's a contradiction there. And so he has to resolve it because he's still modern in his thinking. He thinks that you can't say, look, there's an Elohim, and there's another Elohim, and there's another Elohim, and then also there is no Elohim but Yahweh. But I think if you have understood the mystical nature of the universe, and if you have understood the omnipotence and omniscience of God, it is not a contradiction to say this is an Elohim and that is an Elohim and this other thing is an Elohim, and there's tons of Elohim everywhere. Also, there is no Elohim but Yahweh.

unknown 50:48

Right?

SPEAKER_02 50:49

Yahweh is the only Elohim. I don't think that's a contradiction.

SPEAKER_06 50:53

I don't think it is. But that already is resolved in the whole divine council thing. You don't get to be an Elohim unless you're part of the divine council, which means that God let you be there and let you show up, and he included you in his presence.

SPEAKER_00 51:14

I want to hear from Matt what's an other resolution. I'll tell you. Thanks.

SPEAKER_02 51:19

I'm ready to tell you. Appreciate it. I think it follows directly God's omnipotence. I think if you have an omnipotent God, a class of beings of this type is inevitable. And I'm gonna call them Elohim because we're talking about Heiser, but I there may be a better name for them. I'm gonna use a metaphor. It's not 100%, but with regard to omnipotence, it is. So with regard to many other things, this is gonna be wrong. This is not gonna follow, but with regard to the specific things that I'm talking about, it does. Shakespeare writes a play called Hamlet, right? Shakespeare is omnipotent and omniscient over the world of Hamlet. There's nothing that goes on in Hamlet that he doesn't know. There's nothing that happens in Hamlet that he's not in charge of. If we take the word Elohim to mean something like cosmic organizing principle, something like natural law of the cosmos. Maybe not like gravity, but something like markets, or plants like to grow, or thunder is scary, right? Floods are bad, like things that organize the world that we experience, right? Hamlet has a lot of these. Like there's a lot of organizing principles that make Hamlet what it is. So one of these, for instance, is romanticism. Hamlet has a romantic turn of mind. Another of these like cosmic organizing principles for Hamlet is tragedy, the structure of the tragedy, right? Another one would be iambic pentameter and rhyme. Like if you want to know how people's speech is organized in Hamlet, you know, there's this principle rhyme, right? So if Hamlet wants to think about why are things happening to me, and he wants to be correct, it is correct to say, this thing happened because Romanticism. This thing happened because tragedy. Shakespeare is using romanticism and tragedy to create the structure of Hamlet's world around him. It is also true for Hamlet to say, There is no organizing principle for my world but Shakespeare. So for Hamlet of these literary Elohim, his gods, something like comedy, tragedy, romanticism, iambic pentameter, real things too, because it's supposed to be a real-world sociology, religion, nature, philosophy, history, all this sort of stuff. So Hamlet could say, along with Moses, there's an Elohim over there, romanticism, that's making my world be how it is. That I could give myself to it in a Faustian bargain and I would get something out of it by going really hard into romanticism, but I would lose something even worse. Or tragedy. Or comedy, or irony. Hamlet's very ironic. There's sort of an ironic controlling spirit in Hamlet. And so it's not wrong for him to point out lots of different Elohim in his world, and it's also not wrong for him to say, there is no Elohim but Shakespeare. Those two are not incompatible for this class of beings, which is to say, the organizing principles that an omnipotent god uses to construct reality. Something like Josh's uh what's the word that he used before? Demiurge. Demiurge. Yeah, like something like demiurges. So the difficulty that I have with Heiser, where he seems like he's being a jerk, where he's being like super literal about some passages and then having to pretend other passages don't mean what they obviously mean, vanishes if you say they all mean if you take his principle, which is just let the Bible say what it says, and say they're all right. It's plural and it's singular. This is the mystical plane of existence where all these things coexist simultaneously and are not in contradiction with each other. So I think lots of the problems I have with him would resolve if he would be like, yeah, democracy is an Elohim.

SPEAKER_00 55:47

I hear what you're saying, and I don't agree. But I do, I think, understand your frame, your perspective. What you're saying is the way that you're using it is approximately the same as the Iliad, right? Like uh rumor walked blazing among them.

SPEAKER_02 56:04

Yeah. And frankly, part of the reason that he comes off to me as like not going far enough is that ancient writers writing about their religion have basically this understanding of what's going on, and he hasn't seemed to have picked that up.

SPEAKER_00 56:21

So, a couple of things. Questions, comments. Well, actually, first, I defer to Dwight if you have anything you'd like to say.

SPEAKER_03 56:30

No.

SPEAKER_00 56:30

Okay. Okay. So first, I think that I grasp very much the organizing principle way of thinking about this. It's not my way of thinking, and I don't like object strongly. I wouldn't call it heretical or anything like that, right? It just is different than how I perceive the world. A couple of questions. What in your framing of this, what is or where does personhood or personality or something reside, or what where what is it in the way you're framing?

SPEAKER_02 57:13

I take what I think is Kierkegaard's terms here. A spirit is what knows what it is. And I think that's something like what you mean by personality. So does democracy know what it is? Yes. I know what I am also, but there are people who have lost their spirits and no longer know what they are. And there are school spirits. Those are real spirits. Sure. They're just strangely distributed embodiments.

SPEAKER_00 57:42

So I'm just gonna do a quick for anchor point for me, because I'm not as familiar with Kierkegaard. This feels similar to Hegel's approach to spirit. Does that seem fair? Yeah, I think it's pretty close. Okay. Pretty close to a Hegelian sort of dialectic to it. That's what it seems like. And I say that as neither positive nor negative. I'm just trying to anchor my understanding. But tell me if this is us being aligned or not, Matt. But there is a in your framing that you're saying right now, the particular point of like reification as person is in the recursion that happens of self-awareness. Does that seem fair? There's a sort of dynamo there.

SPEAKER_02 58:28

I don't have a particular desire to pick the word person for that, but I'm happy to take it.

SPEAKER_00 58:34

Okay. That's fine with me. I feel like that helps me to know that I'm like significantly aligned with your understanding. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 58:40

Which, by the way, dynamos like that, like electrical circuits that create sound, function on the basis of paradox.

SPEAKER_00 58:50

I'd like to hear more about that sometime. And then just as a quick note here, that there's this thing I've been mulling over and writing for a long while, the title of which is Themes of Recursion and Spirit. And one of the core premises, I've said, I think I might have said this in one of our previous things, but one of the core premises is that a key differentiator between things that are good and not good is that things that are not good, when you get down to the foundation of what they are, are not recursive and they dissipate. That's dead things, and things that when you get down to the fundaments of what they are are recursive or self-referential and they expand and grow, and those are living good things. But okay. So that helps me. What do you make of the particular verse that Heiser points out? I do have some notes about how I think this affects how I live, by the way. But what do you make about the particular verse Heiser points out in 1 Samuel when the Witch of Endor conjures dead Samuel and he's an Elohim?

SPEAKER_06 59:55

If Elohim is a definitional status determined by location, then Samuel came from the other side.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:03

That's a count, Josh. Yeah, Matt had a particular different take on what Elohim are, and I wanted to understand this verse in that context.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:12

Yeah. So I would say people like me and you are like Elohim in that we are the organizing principles of a very small little area. I'm the Elohim of this house. Whatever organization it has is from me knowing what it is and maintaining it. Something like that. Maybe a correct translation of Elohim would be not cosmic, because Samuel's probably not a cosmic organizing principle. Maybe disembodied organizing principle or organizing principle not embodied in flesh. And maybe the greater Elohim who are on the council are cosmic Elohim, and Samuel is only a lesser Elohim.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:57

Matt, that you have this part of what you're saying that I like when I say like, I mean something like is cooperative with the way I view spirit, which is something like that in the account I gave before of Mammon. I'm sorry, I didn't not Mammon. Mammon's in America too, baby. Yeah, but the account I gave before specifically was Moloch, the Ahab and Jezebel spirits, and Baphomet, right? Sure. And Mammon too, absolutely. But I referred to these emergent phenomena of capitalism, feminism, socialism, whatever, as not being the spirits of the Bible. And I actually would depart from Heiser because I go further than Heiser in this sense. I would call them, and I'm going to use this word this way on purpose, I would call them spirits. I don't know that they're Elohim, if depending on what that means, and I don't know technically for what Heiser would say or something. If that means positional, if there's something positional, then maybe, maybe not. But I would say that they're spirits, uh, capitalism, feminism, whatever. And I also would say one of the things that happens in the physical world, the physical world refers to the spiritual world in a lot of ways, is you have things like electricity in motion creates magnetism, magnetism in motion creates electricity. That that you have these feedback cycles. And I think that happens in spirit. I think spirits doing things beget spirits in a certain way.

SPEAKER_06 1:02:34

Flux in one spiritual field constitutes emergence of being in another field.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:39

Maybe something like that. I would still say that I think there's room for a new organizing principle or something like that, capitalism or whatever, to come into being without being like. I probably spoke too strongly when I said begotten, because I don't want it to sound like they're having a kid. But it's more like there's a real spiritual effect. And I'll just, just as a side note, and I hope this is a part where I'm gonna go out on a limb and say something I don't know, hopefully not heretical or anything, but I think that's actually the nature of the Holy Spirit, is the Holy Spirit's the relationship between the Father and the Son and this the eternal, forever loving He is perfectly them, representing them and so forth. And I think that's an example of spirit from spirit, because God the Father is spirit. My point is to say I don't disagree with you there. I do think that there is a kind of imminence that I think might be missing from your articulation, maybe not, in which there's localization, and I actually think substance with form to, you know, Moloch. And when I say substance with form, I wouldn't bet my life on it, but you know, arms and legs and head type of form, like something in the neighborhood of shape.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:04

Yeah, I mean, then this is where I think that I get way weirder than probably most people would be willing to go, but I don't see why democracy couldn't be embodied.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:17

Yeah. Let me tell you a story. Bear with me. This will be a super short one. I have on a few times in my life had spiritual attack in which I physically felt something and sometimes saw things, and some of the things I saw were there and not there. Like I was clearly seeing something that wasn't in the physical space, but it was occupying space. Hasn't happened a whole lot, has happened a few times, it's been a little freaky. One of the particular times I saw some things that the only correct way that I could refer to them would be animals, um, which by which I mean like dumb things in spirit. One of them in particular was very large, and I could feel it shaking things, and nobody else around me could, and I was not having some kind of episode. But it was real. And I don't know what to say about that or do with it, except that it was certainly a different lower order of thing. I can't point to that in scripture. That's not something I would use as an argument for things in general, but that informs my bias towards predispositions towards a perspective of immanence of spiritual things. And by the way, I have no problem thinking that democracy or whatever could be, maybe is embodied, maybe could take on some kind of embodiment.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:39

So this is where I'm gonna unfortunately mention Heidegger, who I do not understand, but I think there's a false dichotomy between imminence and transcendence. Okay. Where you think a being like an Elohim must either be a transcendent being the way that. That tragedy is to Hamlet, or it must be an imminent thing the way Polonius is to Hamlet. You have to choose between those two things. Sure. But I think I don't think that, by the way, just for whatever it's worth. Right. I think that the point of Christianity is for us lowly, imminent, time-bound beings, to be our actual transcendent selves through the blood of Jesus Christ, the transcendent God, imminently coming to the earth and being killed on the cross and imminently to return again. But also, you know, I think Heidegger would say, or ChatGPT would tell me that Heidegger would say that self, like what personhood is, is this like synthesis between an imminent being in the world and a transcendent being towards self or being towards death or something. I don't understand Heidegger, but you know, footnote. Ask ChatGPT about Heidegger if you want to read more about this that I can't explain.

SPEAKER_06 1:07:18

My footnote to that is I think, Matt, that what Heidegger describes there is what I more narrowly point to as, but I think we're describing the same phenomenological region, is this experience of being a being of spirit consciousness fundamentally, whose consciousness is being filtered down to the level of thought and cognitive existence that your brain meat tissue tunes it down to. But really, inherently, at a raw level, your consciousness is the consciousness of your spirit being existing. And I would point to the fact that out-of-body experiences happen, right? And people come back with memory of facts that they derive from perspectives and from quote-unquote virtual experiences they had no way of having while they were under, right? So there are ways to literally set up scientific double-blind experiments to prove that your memory and your conscious existence are that of your spirit, not that of your brain, conscious, mind thought, blah. Well, you know, string a bunch of words together and try to pretend like we just said what it is. But those are the two categories, right? Is it there or not there?

SPEAKER_02 1:08:42

So those studies for us sometime, bro.

SPEAKER_06 1:08:44

Right. Yeah. The US uh Air Force has medically has published documents. So get them, but let me land the plane. Make those that is happening, but at the same time, we have brains that gestalt snap resolve information down, and we think that we know something. And so there's this tension between having a spirit of continuously resolved experience, but a brain that's constantly trying to shrink down, snap down, and make distilled experiences of time and space for us to experience in our consciousness. That tension is the tension that he's framing with two different words, but I think that that's the same problem. It's terrifying. You have to find ways to put words to it and wrestle through it because you feel the unease of the inaccuracy of it, I think.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:32

I thought I'd mention some ways that I have found this perspective affecting my living. Good. Sounds great. All right. First, I would say, Matt, I think if I understand you well, which I think I have a pretty decent understanding of your perspective, I don't disagree with it, but I find it something like incomplete or not not incomplete. It feels to me like a projection of some higher dimensional concept into a lower dimensional concept and being a little bit lossy. That's all. And also mine might be too. I mean, I don't know, right? I'm just doing the best I can. The lossiness that it feels like is that you and Heiser, me, whatever, seem to be making statements that have the same kind of relationship to each other as like physicists who erroneously speak of things like light being, quote, both a particle and a wave. And then, but more correctly, they manifest behaviors that are of both kinds of thing. And so they might be a third thing, right? That that considered one way does one thing, considered another way does another, projection into a smaller space. I will say also, Heiser seems to me to be doing something that I generally don't like, which is literary analysis of the scriptures in a certain way. But I do like he's given me a less of a bitter taste for it. Most of the literary analysis of the Bible that I've seen seems to me to complete completely too. Yeah. So he at least takes it seriously. I liked his framing that we don't need to be protected from the Bible. I am very willing, and I'll think about it quite a bit, Matt, what you said about his mindset being too modern in his analysis.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:27

I don't know what y'all are talking about for a long time, but that sticks out. I also don't know anything about Heidegger. Probably the second yellow flag I got on Heiser was him saying that the only way to understand the Bible is from the perspective of the people who wrote it. And he specifically says that we need to not find Jesus in Old Testament passages and things like that. And I would say that the original author's viewpoint is a interesting and useful way to read the Bible, but it is not the primary in that the Bible is the Word of God. The Bible is Jesus, and so finding Jesus in the Old Testament is not something you have to stretch to do. We live at a different time from the people who originally wrote it down. Jesus has died and come back from the dead and given us his Holy Spirit to poured out, you know, the Pentecost has happened. And I think he is that was a thing that when he said it, I was just like, what? What are you talking about?

SPEAKER_00 1:12:50

Yeah. If it helps, I don't think he was saying that the Jesus stuff isn't there. I think he was, and I could be wrong, I think he was saying that it wasn't generally speaking the point that the writer was making, except in the case of prophecy. In the case of prophecy, it could be. That whole long bit where he talked about the mosaic and you can't understand the picture until you have the pieces together was I think what he was saying that. And so the by the way, I was cautious about that too, because the road to Emmaus is like a proof text for me. Yeah. He showed himself to him in all the scriptures. Also, Revelation 19, 10.

SPEAKER_02 1:13:30

I think he was he was saying less don't look at Old Testament passages according to the story of Jesus. He was more saying, Don't tell me that my interpretation of this passage is wrong, because actually it's only about this Jesus thing. I think he's preempting a certain line of attack where somebody will read a passage that he's saying and say, Oh, it's not about that. It's actually only this a type of Christ, and that's all it means.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:04

Something he mentioned minorly. I agree with you, Dwight. I agree with you very much. I I agree too, Dwight. He mentioned this as a small part. I think it's around chapter 17 or so. When I was re listening, it caught me a second time, which is he pointed out that his critics criticize him for being too evangelical. Do you remember that part? And it's just a bit in there. It was the part where he talks about the predominant literary criticism of the Bible takes the assumption that the Jews were polytheists and through progressive revelation became monotheists. And he said he rejects that view. And but his critics say, you reject that view because you're importing evangelicalism into it. And his counter was no, I reject that view just because I just disagree with it on the literary grounds. I think it's wrong and not supportable by the text. My reason for bringing that whole thing up is this work at large is a response to his critics in some it was significant veins of it saying, no, that he's preemptively defensive against his peers, his like academic peers. Just throwing that out there. I think that that's why a lot of it felt defensive, because it was defensive.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:25

So I would say that the first yellow flag for me, that was the second. The first yellow flag was I read this verse and it exploded how I viewed the Bible.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:37

You know, this one verse changes everything that you'll ever read, and then that's just followed immediately by actually it's all a mosaic, and you have to take many, many, many verses together. Yeah, I yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:15:52

I I remember him talking about a mosaic. No, he's like, no, you're right.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:54

It's both of them. He's like, Psalm 82 is like the main one, and then also he's try he's trying to have his cake and eat it too on that one.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:03

He was saying it was catalytic.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:05

No, but he actually does lean a lot on his particular reading of Psalm 82. He comes back to it a lot.

SPEAKER_06 1:16:12

Well, Sir Robert, you said, How then shall we live? For me, this is my tiny little one square meter soapbox. This happens to be where the craziest thing is that I care about the most. I'm literally happy that Donald Trump is president in every way that he does anything good or bad, as long as it's disruptive, because I see so much of a system that is infiltrated by and has developed long-standing, deeply entrenched control within our federal government. And I think that that t-t-t with a T trillion dollars that just disappears into the Pentagon every year, I think literally a lot of it is going to programs that are legacy programs that are furthering the efforts that Hitler and his scientists started and that we have picked up and that we are carrying on, and that a lot of the trillion dollars of I think electro-gravitic quote-unquote alien craft that we're working on are Mount Herman-esque continuations of a relationship of perversion between interdimensional entities and humans and power and occlusion.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:40

If I grant you that, how does that change how you live?

SPEAKER_06 1:17:44

Well, that would mean that existentially, right now, as Americans in 2026, the greatest existential threat to us is one, human trafficking, because I think that where the greatest number of us are in peril is where we as a species are most in peril. And then two, in terms of something that you can't immediately do something about, but is the most significantly spiritually impactful, existentially impactful, is this issue of literal demonic entities are trying to occludedly take up positions of authority and influence the people in our power structures through government, through money, through commerce, through businesses, all of it. And until you see that, I'm not saying see Illuminati, I'm saying until you see demonic power structures everywhere, even in your federal government, you are not accurately judging the danger of the world around you. You're being irresponsible in the way that a tiger is loose in your woods and you don't know it's there.

SPEAKER_03 1:18:50

Before I read this book, I woke up, I prayed, I went to work, I came home, I read my Bible, I went to sleep. What changes after I read this book?

SPEAKER_06 1:19:05

Now you pray differently. Now you lay hands on people and you pray for them differently. You see situations differently. Like, yes, right now your life has I'm saying that's fine. Your life has been fine. I'm saying there's more at stake, and you need to live a life open to seeing it. That doesn't negate live such good lives among the pagans and blah blah blah. There's still more, there's deeper, and right now we're at it.

SPEAKER_03 1:19:36

Every Christian needs to read this or else continue to be sheeple, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:42

I have I want to hold on. I'm sorry. I need to officially distance myself from the view that the US federal government, particularly uh military appropriations, are satanic in any way. I do not believe that. I do not say that publicly. Josh is being crazy.

SPEAKER_06 1:20:01

I love locking markets here, and I love Raytheon, and I love all of the I love all the companies that support our ability to do what we need to do.

SPEAKER_02 1:20:09

On this podcast, we believe in free speech and debate, and Josh is saying some crazy stuff that I do not believe, which should not affect my uh security clearance with the US government in any way.

SPEAKER_06 1:20:22

Fair enough. Black ops projects happen inside of companies full of good people doing great work at whose bottom line should not be affected. I love Ray I love Raytheon, even if they're making secret alien chips.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:37

You and Miss Dr. Heiser have not convinced me to change anything in my life.

SPEAKER_06 1:20:43

That's only because I agreed with him.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:45

I have a practical couple of things. Dwight. Sweet. But they're not prescriptive, they're just descriptive of my own self. Gotcha. So maybe they'll be helpful or not. I don't know. I would not say that everybody needs to read it. I think that it was helpful to me in some ways. And also There you go. We all have our different places and roles. The times we were put on the earth. Over the past year and a half, God has made a couple of things really helpful to me, verses. One of them is Joshua 1.9. Have I not commanded you be bold and courageous, don't be discouraged or afraid, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go. And that verse comes up many times. That's actually the most commonly repeated thing. I've said that before, most commonly repeated kind of framing in the Bible. I have had some ability to live with that presently in my life, in the past part of my life. That's actually the first verse I ever memorized. My mom had Joshua 1.9 hanging on the wall in our house, and I saw it again and again and again when I was like five years old. And I've known it forever, basically, and have not known exactly what to do with it. Like sometimes, right? But should I literally never be discouraged or afraid about anything? Or is it only when I'm going to go into the promised land where the clusters of grapes are huge? You know, whatever. But the children of God thing, the sons of God thing was helpful to me because it connected me to a lot of things I've thought about in the Bible a lot. One of them is the verse in the New Testament in John chapter one, that to those who received him, he gave the right to be called children of God. I haven't really known what to do with that children of God thing. Not just that verse, but other verses. And this helped me because this gave me something concrete that it might mean, and that I think it does mean in that we will judge angels. What does that mean? That God walks with me in some kind of metaphorical sense. It means something to me that was not super useful, but in the sense that he's given us an already but not yet position of authority, allows me to say things like, instead of saying, you know, God, please this, please that, and yet not my will but thine, which is a good thing to say, you know, like it's a good framing in my heart. But Jesus only did that the one time he knew it wasn't God's will. I thought that's I think that's really interesting. Most of the time he said to the sickness, go get out of here. He's or the apostles, he gave them authority to heal. Sometimes they use the authority and it didn't work. Like, why didn't this one come out? Well, this one can only come out by prayer and fasting, right? And so there's this transition. For me, it has helped me to concretize the favor that I think I have, the position that I think I'm trying to understand. And I'm praying differently, and the way I'm praying differently is when I'm praying for my kids, feeling sick, doing whatever, when I'm evangelizing to somebody, when I'm out in the world, I am thinking of myself as someone appointed to a position and in the process of taking it already, but not yet. Now, that may not be different than other people, but it has changed for me. Go ahead.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:24

I like that. How did you get there from his mini chapters on the sons of God is not us, the sons of God are Elohim that are having sex with women and creating Nephilim.

SPEAKER_00 1:24:45

Yeah. I love the way that was great. I do have a concrete answer though. First, the sons of God being are somewhat relevant here, but the I but the discussion, the broader discussion of things like the watchers as delegates of God, that he says, I give you authority, domain, dominion over something, you go do it, right? has always been strange and puzzling to me as a person. I used to wrestle in college with why should I pray for something good? If it's good, won't he do it? Whether or not I pray. And if it's not good, why should I pray for it? Right? And that actually hindered my prayer life personally for a long time because I couldn't understand the point. And then some people said things like, well, you're better for praying a prayer, but it doesn't, this is like the sort of that from what I from the people I knew, this was the Calvinist response. It doesn't actually like change God's mind or anything, but it you get to like be on his side as he does stuff. And that is not my reading of scripture. My reading of scripture is that he says it's the fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much, it does stuff, it changes God's mind. This is the first time God listened to a man, stuff like that. So my answer to your question is he gave a framing of the world that, first of all, didn't shy away from the obvious truth to me, that the Nephilim are spirits who did something like have sex with women. Like I that seems clear to me in scripture. Sorry, not the Nephilim, the the Nephilim are the descendants of. Not just that part, but like all of the description of the watchers, all that stuff. He gave a grounded, present interpretation of those that matches my experience of how God works. He has made some creatures, he delegated authority to them, they sinned, he's made us, he delegated authority to us, we sinned. And he gave us this physical realm, this material world to be over in a sort of parallel way that he did to the spiritual ones, the Elohim. We are not Elohim exactly the same way. I think we're actually Elohim living in flesh, right? Peter says, as long as I'm in the tent of this body, and he's referring to Peter the Elohim, the spiritual being in the tent of this flesh. I think he gave us that, and the distinction between us and the pure, the quote-unquote straight pure Elohim, God is like them in that, or they're like God, whatever, in that they're that kind of being, but then God did the weird thing at the incarnation of being like us, Elohim, in a body, and brought us to him, previously a little lower than the Elohim, now we've been made higher.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:36

Does that answer that? No. How are the Elohim sons of God that Dr. Heiser talks about you you're saying they're not embodied and yet?

SPEAKER_00 1:27:50

They're not in flesh, they're not in flesh.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:52

Yeah, but they are creating offspring with the daughters of men.

SPEAKER_06 1:27:58

Yeah. Partly a spiritual nature and partly a fleshly nature. Yeah. And that mixing of kinds.

SPEAKER_00 1:28:06

I would not say they have a fleshly nature. The Nephilim are substantial. Sorry, the Nephilim. This is I'm gonna I happen to have heard more on this same vein, but it's not in the book directly, so I'll throw that in here. But I I mentioned before that one of the things we see, it seems to me, very clearly in scripture, is that a thing's physical kind comes from its mother and its spiritual kind comes from the father. We see that when, for example, God the Father impregnates Mary with the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit comes on her, right? And then they have a child. The child is in spirit God, but fully flesh, fully human and flesh, right? And it's both natures fully all the way. I think that same thing, there's other bits of that.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:51

I understand that Heiser is saying that, oh, Jesus was born by a physical woman and God. So obviously, and you have said obviously, this reading is obviously the correct way, and Augustine was a moron who tried to hide the book of Enoch. I get all of that, but I don't get it, obviously. I get it really obviously on my side of you literally have the line of Cain, and you have the line of Seth, and Cain called on himself, or Lamech said, you know, I am going to defend myself more than God would even defend Cain. I'm amazing. And Seth's line had a is it another Lamech or is it's a similar name, guy, who begins to call on the name of the Lord. And so you have the sons of God start to have relations with the daughters of men. Like that's obvious to me. The thing that y'all are all talking about with this is not obvious at all to me. So at least don't say ob like it's obvious. Say something more than that, please.

SPEAKER_06 1:30:11

But what about the argument of where from whence cometh all major world religions that describe demigods? Like, why is that? Why do all the major world religions describe demigods?

SPEAKER_03 1:30:27

Demigods are Nephilim?

SPEAKER_06 1:30:29

Yeah. In the No.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:34

That's not what Heiser is.

SPEAKER_02 1:30:36

Yeah, demigods, Josh, demigods are definitely not Nephilim because Heiser has all of the Nephilim killed off the city.

SPEAKER_06 1:30:42

Oh no, no, okay. So sorry, sorry. We're over Hercules. We're only making the distinction of dog Labrador. I agreed to an incorrect scale of terminology. The Nephilim are among a group, and then yeah, at a larger scale. So Heiser is saying that when you look at Athena, you're seeing one of these principalities that God is talking about that He has put over the nations.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:10

What are you talking about?

SPEAKER_06 1:31:11

That's one you said who are these people, right? Are you agreeing to the Nephilim and all this stuff? I'm trying to put them in a category. You've got high-level angelic beings that are placed over nations. You've got the watchers, you've got the beings that laid with the women and produced these hybrid offspring, and you've got beings that are left over after the flood that are the disembodied spirits of some of those things that were wiped out in the flood. Those are the only real categories that I know of and could describe. And I think that those are Heiser level categories of things. So that I can describe and defend that those things.

SPEAKER_02 1:31:55

This does not make it more obvious. Yeah. I don't know what you're talking about.

SPEAKER_06 1:32:00

Okay, so in history, there are all of these beings that are a mixture of divine and human stuff. And that's every major world religion that has that in their history. The Bible explains the mechanism for that. So I don't think that we should be quick to dismiss just because, and I agree with you, Dwight, you're right. It is not obvious on the level of reading that you're talking about. So I'm trying to say that there is still another, very obvious way in which this is true and real, namely, in the same way that every other major world religion has a long-term history, has a flood account, the word of God gives the definitive, authoritative, real account of what was happening with that flood. The same thing is happening with the Nephilim and those mighty men of old, those men of renown, those beings that were giants in the land. Like there's tons of global evidence for giants. That's part of the same thing that I think is obvious.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:02

That real even says that the giants were probably just like seven feet tall.

SPEAKER_02 1:33:09

He thinks the giants weren't that big.

SPEAKER_06 1:33:11

Well, he's a chicken and he doesn't know what he's talking about. They're 30 feet tall. They're huge. No, I'm just kidding, whatever. I I don't I'm not going to argue about how tall they were.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:19

The historical argument is an important one to me personally, as much as the scriptural argument. I was generally persuaded by this, though before I encountered this Heiser stuff, I was already persuaded of the Sons of God not being the Sethite view for the reasons that he basically articulated, which are in the reading, in the occurrence of sons of God in the Bible, it is not talking about humans when it whenever it says sons of God. And I think he's right that it's pretty clearly not. I don't know that I would say it's exactly obvious because obvious is about perspective and perception, and we've been, you know, the Sethite thing is very commonly touted. But the Elohim, the sorry, the sons of God, as I just pulled up a list of them.

SPEAKER_03 1:34:10

You were saying that we are sons of God. What do you mean?

SPEAKER_00 1:34:15

Great, great question. So Hosea, I I this is one of the ones I just pulled up. Hosea 110, they will be called sons of the living God. Right? And to those who received him, he gave the right to be called sons of God. Hold on, yep. Hold on. Actually, I don't think Seth did in this way in the Old Testament. I think that the Old Testament, when we see somebody being specifically called the sons of God, except for the Hosea bit, when they're being called sons of God in the Old Testament, it's referring to some kind of spirits, the ones who were there at the beginning of creation, the ones who were the stars in the heavens who shouted with joy when God laid the foundations. All of these different things are happening. That's the groundwork that's being laid. And Hosea talks about people who will be called sons of the living God. I think what happened, and then John says, the context in which John is speaking is that the Jesus came into the world, right? In him was light, that light was the life of men, life, light of men. And he's talking about him coming into the world. And I don't think he means previously right after the fall. I think he's talking about the incarnation, John is. And and he's saying his own rejected him. And I don't think he means the Canaites or whatever. I think he's talking about the Jews and people he came to rejected him. But what he did is he opened it up to any who would receive him, which is all of us. And to us, he be he gave the right to become, to be called, the thing that was throughout the Old Testament known as some kind of privileged place, right? That though we were made a little lower than the angels, we're given the right to be called this for having received him post-incarnation. Now, I will say, by the way, I think it I think a strength of what you're saying, and which is true, is the Hebrews phrase about that we being, I think it's Hebrews, being surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, they all held in faith and didn't receive the promise that they were going to have, that we all were going to get together. I do think that they saw as in a mirror darkly, we also see as in a mirror darkly, and they knew something was happening and received him. I don't think that they in that framing in the Old Testament were what was being referred to as the sons of God. One of the main reasons is it's never said that way again in the Old Testament. I think there's a critical thing that happens at the New Testament where the sons of godness is bestowed. Okay, all of this, I'm not saying you're a heretic if you don't believe. I don't, I'm not trying to say it's obvious, like manifestly true. I just think it's clear to me. But I think it's why Jesus says that what's that dude's name? John the Baptist is the greatest of anybody born of Adam, but the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than him. And I think what he's saying is the Holy Spirit is here with us and in us, right? We're being temples of God most high, and we're being elevated that way. Not simply because the Spirit's in us, because the Spirit, the Holy Spirit of God was in people in the Old Testament sometimes. I think it's more than that. It's saying something's happening in the kingdom of heaven. There's a kingdom of heaven thing happening that makes us all greater than everyone before. And I it okay, hey, maybe it's the Sethite thing. I don't personally have a bone to pick with Aquinas, but I don't care how it starts. But the reading I I had never particularly cared about. I didn't know it was, or Augustine, I mean, I'm sorry. I didn't know previously, I don't care about Augustine, this or that. But my reading of it, it seems plainly true to me. I'm not saying you're stinky if it doesn't seem so to you.

SPEAKER_06 1:38:12

Well, I would fight and I think humiliate Augustine with a mere reading from the concordance of what the phrase Benecha Elohim means throughout scripture. There's only one place out of the twelve where it doesn't immediately hundred percent uncontestably mean the angels of heaven. So from whence cometh this special privileged reading where you get to defy the rules of linguistics as I know them. I think that's what Augustine's doing.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:48

But let's let's say that it's that Augustine's right or whoever's right, I don't care. Let's say the Sethite view is right, and that's what it is, that's fine. Personally, I don't think so. Uh and for that and other reasons, like I've said, one of the really big ones being uh what the unclean spirits are in the New Testament that don't seem to be uh angel type things. But let's say that the Sethite view is correct and so forth. That doesn't to me negate from what I can tell the idea that there is some sons of God thing. Maybe the Sethites were them, but there are plenty of others where, like I said, they're there at the beginning of creation, the host of heaven, they're called all these things. They have some special place, they seem to have been assigned the nations after the Tower of Babel, the Pauline journey to finish out reclaiming. All of that's still there, even if the Sethite view is true. And it has been helpful to me to think of myself as having that concrete meaning to Son of God. I'm willing, I could be wrong, by the way. I wouldn't object to God at the judgment if he says you're wrong about that. And I wouldn't say like, no.

SPEAKER_06 1:40:05

I'd like to see the list of contestables, but okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:40:08

I think I also don't, it's not super meaningful to me either way, whether the Nephilim are like half-spirit, half-man giants whose dead souls became the unclean spirits of the New Testament in which Joshua was hunting throughout the promised land. It's the only thing I hunt. I think that the strongest argument against that is that the writers of the Old Testament could have said that in one sentence if they wanted to. Could have said what? They could have said Joshua was hunting giants because they were the Nephilim, evil spawn of spiritual beings and mortals.

SPEAKER_03 1:40:57

It doesn't have secret knowledge to build that.

SPEAKER_02 1:41:00

If it's a really important thread running through scripture that has a big influence on our understanding of like our role in the kingdom of heaven, then it shouldn't be so under the table, and there sh shouldn't need to be so much excavation to get to it.

SPEAKER_00 1:41:18

Heiser's argument against that, if you recall, against that, not that necessarily, but why should God hide what he hide things? You remember that whole thing?

SPEAKER_02 1:41:36

Yeah. Not the thing I was just talking about. Heiser doesn't say that God was hiding that. Okay. I think Heiser's argument would be that it would have been so obvious to anybody writing or reading at that time that you wouldn't even need to say it. But they say plenty of other stuff that was obvious to them at the time. Anyway, I don't, but I think Dwight had I don't know.

SPEAKER_06 1:42:03

Matthew, you're an author. You're very, very intimately familiar with this category of things that we desperately wish that people had said out loud about what was common knowledge versus the things that they do say that was common knowledge. Right? That's a whole thing that authors and historians have to work out.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:24

I don't know. Can I read into the record some of my specific objections to some of his arguments just so that nobody thinks I'm a fool and miss these things?

SPEAKER_00 1:42:34

Yes, but with the note, real quickly, that the some of the objections you've made so far, I think were overstated. That's fine.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:43

I'm okay if all of my objections. I'm just reading that into the record too.

SPEAKER_03 1:42:47

Also, I want to be right in the record that I am a fool and I missed probably all of these.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:53

I want to object to his pizza analogy on page 46. If you are saying, hey, let's go get some pizza, the reason that an individual could pay for the pizza and fetch the pizza and still be honest in saying, let's get pizza, is that everybody is eating the pizza. If you say, let's go for a ride, and then only you go for a ride, and nobody else gets to get in the car, you were not speaking correctly and honestly. In the same way that if God says, Let us create humankind, and then nobody in the council except for him creates humankind, either they were being rebellious, or he offered them to do something and then denied that they would be allowed to do it, or he was not talking to a council, he's talking to himself, the father speaking to the son and the holy spirit. Okay, that's 46.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:55

That's how I talk to my kids when I include them in something I'm doing that they don't have the power to do, and I do it. I say, look, we're going to whatever, and then I do all the work and they benefit from us having done it.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:10

Just to say you're speaking a falsehood into existence. I don't think it's false.

SPEAKER_06 1:44:17

No, that's prophetic. He's just speaking prophetically. It's not a false.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:22

You said, let's do this, and then you said you did the whole thing and they didn't do any of it. That's not it wasn't plural you doing it, it was you singular doing it.

SPEAKER_00 1:44:32

No, no, no, no, no. It's true by inclusion. I made the group of us do it. Yeah, it's not prophetic. I don't know what that maybe it's prophetic, I don't know, whatever, whatever. I'm saying I'm gonna do that in my capacity as one of us.

SPEAKER_02 1:44:45

So what I'm saying is his argument is that absolutely I'm gonna do it. His argument is that this is what's happening in the Hebrew grammar. And my argument is maybe that's true in Hebrew grammar, but you and him are using very exotic, non-standard forms of English to try and convey this meaning.

SPEAKER_06 1:45:08

I think we're speaking at a deeper metaphysical level because what Sir Robert just described is the fundamental co-optive mechanism of Christological satiriology.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:18

If I say, let's go for a drive and then I don't let you in the car, I've said something that's wrong or stupid. Okay, page 52. Why announce something already known? He's saying that God can't be talking to the Trinity because nobody ever says anything to somebody who already knows it. Everything that everybody says is always something that the person they're listening to doesn't know yet. Nobody repeats anything ever, according to Dr. Heiser.

SPEAKER_06 1:45:50

Oh, come on.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:51

This is a ridiculous argument.

SPEAKER_06 1:45:53

But sometimes that does happen and sometimes it doesn't, right?

SPEAKER_03 1:45:58

And he's saying it can't be anything.

SPEAKER_02 1:45:59

And Heiser's saying this can't be the Trinity because I agree with Matt on this one. God wouldn't talk to him. You backed the wrong words. I'm right this time.

unknown 1:46:12

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:13

Matt, this was one of my criticisms too. I couldn't even. This is page 69. He couldn't even anymore. It's so bad. That's how bad it is. Page 69. He cites Job chapter 15. Does any remember who's speaking in Job chapter 15?

SPEAKER_06 1:46:34

Eliphaz.

SPEAKER_02 1:46:34

Do you remember what happens later on in Job? It's Eliphaz. God shows up in chapter 42 and says, I'm angry at you, Eliphaz, because you said stuff about me that was not true. Now, offer the following sacrifices and ask Job to pray for you to me on your behalf, and I'll forgive you for the things that you said about me that were not true.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:57

This is my normal 15. This is my typical criticism of people who quote Job. I agree completely about this, and it doesn't apply in this case.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:07

Well, then Heiser needs to offer, I mean, Heiser needs to offer an argument for why this specific thing that Eliphaz is saying is correct and true because it was something else because he gives the argument for it.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:29

It's the fact that it was common at the time. That's what he's doing with this. Yeah. That's I totally agree with you in principle. I have heard churches say, our prophetic verse of the year is from some random thing that you know one of those three says, and I'm like, dude, you can't what? No.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:43

In this particular case, in this particular case, he doesn't have he does not say that. He does not say that thing here. Sometimes he does say, This is what an ancient reader would have thought, but in this case he is saying, like, this is the thing that is true. Look where Eliphaz says it in Job 15. What's the thing he says is true? What is a human being that he can be clean, or one born of a woman can be righteous? Look, he does not trust his holy ones, and the heavens are not clean in his eyes. Now, maybe, maybe that's right. Maybe that's right. But I'm just saying it is my prerogative to be suspicious of proof texts from Job 15. End of list. Fair, fair, fair. And uh a celebrated biblical scholar, expert in the Old Testament, needs to not just naively cite Job 15 and be like, look at what Eliphaz says. Like, you gotta give us surround it with We already know the book of Job. You gotta tell us, I know Eliphaz was wrong about a whole bunch of stuff, but here's why I think he was right in this case. Okay, I'm done.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:54

Thanks for the discussion. I mentioned at the beginning that I had some points of disagreement with argumentation or something too. Matt, I thought those were some of the list. And uh, but I have found this useful. I generally agree with the content of the book, though I wouldn't venture a percentage, you know, uh 70% or something. I I don't know how much. There's some details I don't care about, the parts especially, that did not prove useful so far to me in encouraging my spirit to walk better with God, though I found some of them did, some of the points in it. Also, I appreciated y'all talking with me. I like the adversarial bit. I wish that we had more time for it. That would be much nicer if we could spend a good, you know, 30 or 40 hours.

SPEAKER_02 1:49:53

But I am looking forward to Me too. Also, I enjoyed this reading. I'm not actually angry. At Michael Heiser or anything like that. I'm having a great time. Good.

SPEAKER_00 1:50:05

I think that this has been an interesting read for me. It wasn't life-changing for me or anything like that, but it did have influence, and I appreciated the influence. And also it reinforced some opinions I already had. And I always welcome in my life anybody who reinforces an opinion I have. So I am looking forward to, I think, Dwight, next time you are doing the next reading. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 1:50:31

Looking forward to hearing something very different. It will be at least a little bit different. Our next work will be Story of Your Life by Ted Chang. It's a short story. I don't know, maybe called a novella. Let me say it is 39 pages. And then also the movie that is based on it, Arrival. Yeah. We will do that in one week. It should be, you know, pretty easy. It's not real deep. Uh I will say, just as a note, I read it again last week, and the experience I had reading it again after almost a decade. It was really cool. If I I think some of you have read it before. If you have, and it's been a while, the experience the narrator is trying to communicate to you, I had that in sort of remembering the story as it was given to me, so that was kind of cool.

SPEAKER_04 1:51:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:51:45

So thank you for joining us for this discussion. You are dismissed with the following valediction from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Now the hungry lion roars, and the wolf behowls the moon, Wils the heavy ploughman snores, all with weary tusk for dune Now the wasted beep brands do glow, Wilst the screech owl screeching loud, puts the wretch that lies in woe in remembrance of a shroud. Now it is the time of night, the graves all gaping wide, every one lets forth his sprite in the churchway paths to glide, and we fairies that do run by the triple Hecates team, From the presence of the sun, following darkness like a dream, now our frolic, not a mouse, shall disturb this hallowed house. I am sent with broom before to sweep the dust behind the door.