SPEAKER_05: Say more about it.
SPEAKER_00: Me?
SPEAKER_05: Both of you did.
SPEAKER_00: Um the message in so far in in the disciples is um both and and I I just like the way that the poetry aspect of it, but I also like the way that the message is um God loves us, and I'm enjoying trying to figure out where the Jews and the Gentiles both have a covenant.
SPEAKER_00: And he just said something very interesting about breaking the covenant with the Jewish people, which I've never heard that that covenant was broken.
SPEAKER_00: So that that kind of confused me.
SPEAKER_00: But I I find it refreshing and rewarding that um particularly in today's environment where you can get wrapped up in the politics and the where are we going in the world?
SPEAKER_00: Um person at a time to turn it around.
SPEAKER_00: And I get that inspiration from the project.
SPEAKER_00: We're not too small that we can't do something.
SPEAKER_04: Okay, yeah, we're not too small that we can't do something in love.
SPEAKER_04: I love that.
SPEAKER_04: So I just love this chapter six where I desire studies love and not sacrifice.
SPEAKER_04: The knowledge of God rather than offering is pretty clear.
SPEAKER_04: So I I just find that lovely.
SPEAKER_04: I find that lovely.
SPEAKER_04: And the uh they're breaking the covenant, at least certainly symbolically, and I think more than symbolically, was so alarming that he doesn't comes back around.
SPEAKER_04: I I thought this is a bipolar God, not to be making light of it, but it's like he's killing babies and then he's uh coming back to not pity and one translation read no mercy and mercy.
SPEAKER_04: Mercy is kind of a hot word for me and non-mercy.
SPEAKER_04: We saw this like when we studied songs.
SPEAKER_04: So it it's really kind of winding.
SPEAKER_04: The indictment of the priesthood, by the way, that came out a couple times.
SPEAKER_04: I thought it'd be mine.
SPEAKER_04: Thank you.
SPEAKER_04: And there is beautiful poetry in here.
SPEAKER_04: I love this part about Jacob in chapter 12.
SPEAKER_04: In the womb he took his brother by the heel and his man home.
SPEAKER_04: He strove with God, he strove with the angel and prevailed, he wept and saw his favor and met God at Bethel.
SPEAKER_04: I'm not really sure how that fits in here.
SPEAKER_04: So I also found myself kind of having some sympathy with the farmers when I was reading this part about the nature of religion.
SPEAKER_04: And I think my grandparents were farmers here in Texas.
SPEAKER_04: And you know, that's why I went to college.
SPEAKER_04: It's really hard, and it's not substantially farming here more like it is the holy land where the brain doesn't come here in the star.
SPEAKER_04: So I myself have any sympathy for that.
SPEAKER_04: Let's cover all of our bases sometimes.
SPEAKER_04: Also the I mean I think I've certainly done that in my personal history, and we see it on the news all the time.
SPEAKER_04: We see it in this dynamic in our world, but it's certainly the thing that like you're in your integrity, but then you get a little stressed, and you say, well, you know, maybe it wouldn't be so bad if I just ran by the Bale Temple and a couple of years.
SPEAKER_00: Just in case just in case they control the wind and the rains.
SPEAKER_00: I've been done something here and I can't remember a cross room to a person can be near the things of God without recognizing the grace of God saying and doing the right things without action.
SPEAKER_00: That strike me as how do you I mean they're living a lot of question, like I guess doing the right thing is concerned about people that they don't really know God.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that they would have to know God.
SPEAKER_04: That part of my work is uh daily awareness of God.
SPEAKER_04: Where am I?
SPEAKER_04: Where are you?
SPEAKER_01: I wrestle with something.
SPEAKER_01: And that's um this God that um whether they be the the God uh that is uh the, if you will, father of Jesus, or whether it be the God that the Israelites are their God.
SPEAKER_01: Um Russell because as a physicist, you might appreciate this.
SPEAKER_01: There was an article not too long ago, back last week, about redefining the um Hubble constant and the fact that uh the they're saying now that there are those that they they recalculated it and determined that instead of 13.8 billion years old, the universe is really 11 billion years old.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, that's splitting hairs in a way.
SPEAKER_01: But I think that, I think, okay, here's this God that created this universe that's expanding, um, and and as big as it is, it's also as little.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you can go the other way, not only big, but you know, how small is matter?
SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean, we're talking quarks and what have you, but is there something smaller than that?
SPEAKER_01: Does it go down further than that?
SPEAKER_01: So I'm looking at this God, and then I look, and then I read it in the in the old, you know, frankly, in in like um Deuteronomy and and some of the Torah text about a God who wants you to burn lamb's fat so he can smell it and it smells good.
SPEAKER_01: Uh and I get the covenant.
SPEAKER_01: I get that.
SPEAKER_01: Because I don't think you can live without following certain covenant rules, but I'm thinking, boy, for a God that's created all this, this is kind of petty.
SPEAKER_04: And violent.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: And it's all about us.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, there how many of us are there out there in other other other other worlds, other planets?
SPEAKER_01: You know, clearly, I mean, they've just defined they've just found a planet that is in, we'll call it the good zone, in another, around another star that could have water and could probably have life and what have you.
SPEAKER_01: So I sometimes it's very confusing to me to think about this and then think about yeah.
SPEAKER_05: There's this interesting thing, interplay, right, between an expanding universe and that being um in some ways crippling to the meaning of human life, particularly our own, and um the opposite side, gratitude with that awareness, right?
SPEAKER_05: I mean, yeah.
SPEAKER_05: I don't know if you feel that way.
SPEAKER_05: Sometimes life is so big that it doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_05: And sometimes because life is so big, it really matters.
SPEAKER_04: Life is so eternal, so it does matter.
SPEAKER_05: I think we live in the middle of those, though, and depending on the day, I could go either way.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, we we've been talking a lot about the writers, but at no point that we really delved into God.
SPEAKER_05: Well, this is good that you this is good, and let's do that now because you mentioned the word covenant, and I want to know what you guys think about covenants and whether or not they're different than contracts or commitments.
SPEAKER_05: How so?
SPEAKER_05: Can you break covenants and what happens?
SPEAKER_05: So, what are covenants?
SPEAKER_05: Where how do we use the word covenant now?
SPEAKER_05: In what context?
SPEAKER_05: There's neighborhoods.
SPEAKER_05: There's covenanted neighborhoods.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, yeah, how we use it, how we use it.
SPEAKER_05: What else do we use it for?
SPEAKER_01: In some ways.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, you've got a covenant with your with your neighborhood association, you know, you pay whatever, and they keep the lights on in the streets, and they make sure the streets are are taken care of and and and such.
SPEAKER_01: So there's that.
SPEAKER_05: Do we use it any other way?
SPEAKER_05: Can you think of?
SPEAKER_01: I don't use it.
SPEAKER_05: Covenant of marriage, maybe?
SPEAKER_01: But that's very similar to this, I think.
SPEAKER_00: Think of it as a contract.
SPEAKER_00: I think a covenant, the word covenant to me means uh mutual agreement.
SPEAKER_00: It's like a marriage without the contract.
SPEAKER_00: Um I think once you have that life for someone, it never goes away.
SPEAKER_00: So it's more like that.
SPEAKER_01: It is God's covenant.
SPEAKER_01: I brought you out of Egypt.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to give you Canaan, but here are the rules.
SPEAKER_01: Is that how we view and now in terms of the rules, I don't have a problem with them.
SPEAKER_01: I think that in my mind, if not all of the rules, are how society survives almost itself.
SPEAKER_01: If you do these things, society will survive.
SPEAKER_01: If you don't do these things, you do certain things, things are going to happen that are not good.
SPEAKER_01: So, but so God said to the Israelites, here's Canaan.
SPEAKER_01: Follow these rules.
SPEAKER_01: And they didn't.
SPEAKER_02: There's a difference maybe between rules and laws of nature.
SPEAKER_02: And, you know, when you say, well, God made these rules, but these rules were there.
SPEAKER_02: Those are laws of nature.
SPEAKER_02: If you do these certain things, bad things are gonna happen.
SPEAKER_02: You know, there's gonna be hate and karma built up.
SPEAKER_02: People are gonna despise you.
SPEAKER_02: I mean, and if you really have God in your heart, which is what he put into the Israeli people, they were his people because they were part God.
SPEAKER_02: They had that in them.
SPEAKER_02: Because there are people who don't have it.
SPEAKER_02: They think nothing of murdering millions and millions of people.
SPEAKER_02: They don't care.
SPEAKER_02: Those are not God's people.
SPEAKER_02: That's what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_05: That's an interesting thought.
SPEAKER_05: So maybe I can tell you a little bit more about covenants biblically, because that was the first thing he mentioned that caught my eye.
SPEAKER_05: So covenants are never made in the Bible, they're always cut.
SPEAKER_05: This may sound funny, but in Hebrew you can't make a covenant, you cut one.
SPEAKER_02: What's that?
SPEAKER_02: Oh, you mean it's already there?
SPEAKER_05: No, no, you can never make a covenant, the verb is always cut.
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
SPEAKER_05: And so the first covenant actually we see is when God makes this covenant with Noah, and Noah kills the animals, right?
SPEAKER_05: On the altar.
SPEAKER_05: This is after the flood, and God says, I have cut a covenant with you.
SPEAKER_05: I will never again destroy the world with water, and here will be the sign of my covenant.
SPEAKER_05: I will put my bow in the sky.
SPEAKER_05: We used to think that rainbow is being a cute thing.
SPEAKER_05: It's actually God's weapon.
SPEAKER_05: It it shoots arrows, lightning.
SPEAKER_05: So Zeus is similar.
SPEAKER_05: The rainbow is God's bow.
SPEAKER_02: Did you see that on television?
SPEAKER_05: No, I read it in like 19 books.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, I had a picture of it.
SPEAKER_05: As a bow?
SPEAKER_02: It was a bow.
SPEAKER_02: It was a photograph.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Of a bow.
SPEAKER_02: Maybe you saw it, and lightning was in the middle of the blue.
SPEAKER_02: Oh.
SPEAKER_05: So they thought Baal, people in the Canaan thought Baal was the Lord of the sky and the rain, and and it would have been Baal's weapon as well.
SPEAKER_01: Can we come back to the very first thing you said?
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
SPEAKER_01: So Noah sacrificed an animal and God smelled it.
SPEAKER_01: God.
SPEAKER_01: What is that all about?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: So uh so good, great question.
SPEAKER_05: So in the ancient world, people understood, and this is a good thing coming back to covenant, is that there's mutual obligations between parties.
SPEAKER_05: Now, I will tell you in the ancient world, there's multiple kinds of covenants.
SPEAKER_05: Kinds.
SPEAKER_05: One is the kind that says, I'm the king, you're my subject, here's what you'll do, I'm the king.
SPEAKER_05: A large swath of Leviticus reads like that.
SPEAKER_05: It says things like, You will not make garments and two kinds of fabric, I am the Lord.
SPEAKER_05: There's no, in exchange, I will do this.
SPEAKER_05: There's you won't, I'm the Lord.
SPEAKER_05: You will give me a tenth of your props, I'm the king.
SPEAKER_05: So this is because I said so, and I'm bigger than you.
SPEAKER_05: This suspects one kind of covenant.
SPEAKER_05: There's other covenants in which you do this, I'll do this.
SPEAKER_05: So there's a mutual obligation, and there's sort of this promise.
SPEAKER_05: If you keep this, I will keep this.
SPEAKER_01: So that's transactional.
SPEAKER_05: It's a transactional covenant, and those do also exist between lords and thieves, essentially, but a lord didn't have to do that.
SPEAKER_05: Right?
SPEAKER_05: By virtue of being lord, you've got the biggest stick, so you may do what you like.
SPEAKER_05: Most uh ancient Near Eastern religions in fact believe that uh covenants are transactional.
SPEAKER_05: I would say most people believe that today too.
SPEAKER_05: Right.
SPEAKER_05: So, where did the animal bit come from?
SPEAKER_05: Well, I think it comes from this idea, and we find it.
SPEAKER_05: I can't really tell you why we got this idea, but it's very, very old.
SPEAKER_05: And you can read it in plenty of mythologies, whether they're Greek, you know, in the Greek mythology, um, the gods are tired of the world because it's noisy, and they decide to kill all the people.
SPEAKER_05: And then they realize that they're hungry.
SPEAKER_05: Because the people are feeding them, and gods are pretty lazy actually, and they don't like doing work.
SPEAKER_05: So there's these two folk that they save and they throw rocks over their shoulder, and when a rock hits the ground it becomes a person, and then the people then go about cultivating animals and they sacrifice them to feed the gods.
SPEAKER_05: Now you and I both know that the gods don't devour a carcass.
SPEAKER_05: So you have to think that the gods feed off the essence of the animal, if I could put it a different way, the life force or the qi.
SPEAKER_05: So what would happen is you would go to an altar and you would kill an animal to feed a god, and in return you could be nourished at the god's table because the truth is you ate that.
SPEAKER_05: So the god ate the life force, but you ate the meat.
SPEAKER_05: So almost all killing in the ancient world is given to a god, and then you dine off the god's table.
SPEAKER_05: And we hear a bit about idols, but people are not dummies.
SPEAKER_05: You know, you hear, oh, you're bowing down and worshiping the wood.
SPEAKER_05: No, no, no.
SPEAKER_05: The wood is just a representation.
SPEAKER_05: So it is true that priests would wash the idols and clothe them and dress them.
SPEAKER_05: This happened in ancient Greece, but they didn't really think they were clothing and dressing the god.
SPEAKER_05: It was a symbolic act of caring for the gods, life force.
SPEAKER_05: So we just have to think about life force.
SPEAKER_05: The Enlightenment kind of got us away from that, but we're coming back where we realize there kind of is something to life force.
SPEAKER_05: You know, chi, chakras, you know, that sort of idea.
SPEAKER_05: Um so I think that's where you get it.
SPEAKER_05: Now there's only one time, really, there's only two times God smells stuff.
SPEAKER_05: Really.
SPEAKER_05: The one is when Noah sacrifices that animal and God cuts that covenant, God smells the thing, and it's really pleasing.
SPEAKER_05: You that's one of the oldest parts of the Bible.
SPEAKER_05: It is.
SPEAKER_05: Because nowhere else does God smell sacrifices.
SPEAKER_05: The other part, interesting enough, is in Jonah, when God sends the word to Jonah and says, Call against the Ninevites, their evil has arisen up before me, like God smells their evil, which is a different kind of odor.
SPEAKER_05: Um, these tactile, very tactile bits for God represent really old stories, most people would tell you, and in that sense, puts God in very strong parallel with the Canaanite deities, who again smell the flavors and their mouths water.
SPEAKER_05: You can read this in the Epic of Gilgamesh as well, where the gods smell and they eat and they consume sacrifice.
SPEAKER_05: So we don't really quite know.
SPEAKER_05: This is an interesting thing.
SPEAKER_05: I was teaching class the other day to fifth graders, and I was telling them about the difference between transubstantiation and consubstantiation.
SPEAKER_05: And I said, here's what Catholics believe about this.
SPEAKER_05: And she said, wait, what do Catholics believe?
SPEAKER_05: And I realized there's a difference between what a Catholic person believes and the official teachings of the Catholic Church.
SPEAKER_05: See, what we've got might be the official teachings, but we have no idea what the average person believed.
SPEAKER_05: In the official teachings, you go to the temple and you offer up these animals because the life does not belong to you.
SPEAKER_05: The life belongs to God.
SPEAKER_05: Now, is God nourished?
SPEAKER_05: Does like God consume it?
SPEAKER_05: Well, the text isn't exactly clear.
SPEAKER_05: So it didn't say yes.
SPEAKER_05: Maybe not.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, at the at the at the most granular level, you can't drink the blood of an animal because you can't have the animal's qi.
SPEAKER_05: You can't have it.
SPEAKER_05: It's God's qi, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_05: It goes back to God.
SPEAKER_01: So when they when they pour it out, pour it out or splash it against the altar.
SPEAKER_01: That's essentially taking the life force back to God.
SPEAKER_05: Now, we don't we don't have an image of God dobbling it up, but we have this idea people can't have it, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_02: Something that splashed into my mind, not to interrupt anything you're saying, but I thought about this earlier when we were talking about not the blood.
SPEAKER_02: We do organ transplants, and people anecdotally report that they find themselves taking on the characteristics of the person who received the transplant from, you know, one guy develops a liking for certain foods, he starts carrying the purse around.
SPEAKER_02: I I mean, I can't recall exactly, but we have stuff like that.
SPEAKER_02: So, you know, obviously, you know, you and remember too, you know, in the flatworm experiments, where they fed certain flatworms who had learned the maze to other flatworms and then they knew the maze.
SPEAKER_02: So maybe taking on characteristics that you maybe as a holy person ought not to be taking into yourself, I'm just saying.
SPEAKER_05: So interesting thought.
SPEAKER_05: Interesting thought.
SPEAKER_05: No, no, no.
SPEAKER_05: I think we're coming back to a more holistic idea in which there are things you know, I don't want to call it the ghost in the machine, but there are some levels of mechanics, call them quantum or not, that we don't seem to really have our head focused around.
SPEAKER_01: Drugs to keep to ensure that it doesn't still the same thing.
SPEAKER_01: That's a different genome than mine, right?
SPEAKER_01: And you might be picking up some of that that might make its way into the whole body at some point.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and so we we decided we're just cogs and we have interchangeable parts, and and maybe not, right?
SPEAKER_05: Um maybe not.
SPEAKER_02: Maybe not, because he has his hands full trying to protect these people that have a seed of God in them that he's trying to preserve into perpetuity, living in a world where they are constantly surrounded by things that trying to destroy that in them.
SPEAKER_05: You're getting where I want to go, but I'm meandering more slowly.
SPEAKER_05: And I'll try to I'll try to speed up.
SPEAKER_05: No, no, Abraham cuts a covenant with God.
SPEAKER_05: And the way that works is there's a heifer and Abraham cuts it in half.
SPEAKER_05: And then Abraham passes, and it gets very dark and gloomy, because apparently God's presence in that episode is really dark.
SPEAKER_05: And Abraham walks between the two halves of the animal with a torch.
SPEAKER_05: And God says, This is what you do when you cut a covenant in the ancient world.
SPEAKER_05: You cut an animal in half, and both parties walk between it, and you say, if you don't keep the covenant, you will be like this.
SPEAKER_03: Oh dear.
SPEAKER_05: Um covenants are different from contracts in the ancient world because a contract you have to enter in individually.
SPEAKER_05: So, like if my son is going to have a contract with you, he has to make it.
SPEAKER_05: A covenant goes forward.
SPEAKER_05: Contracts are limited to geography, covenants are not.
SPEAKER_05: So the covenant holds in Egypt just as much as it held in Canaan.
SPEAKER_05: So contracts would not work that way.
SPEAKER_05: Um, funny thing is, we talk about the covenant of marriage because two people make vows, and the question is, can you ever break the marital covenant?
SPEAKER_05: I'm gonna tell you, I think so.
SPEAKER_05: Personally.
SPEAKER_05: Even though I think there's remnants of covenant that maybe know never go away at a deeper level than contracts, which is what I heard you say.
SPEAKER_05: But for me, the first time you abuse your spouse, the con the covenant is over.
SPEAKER_05: You might decide to be reconciled.
SPEAKER_05: So fine, but that's essentially another cut another another covenant.
SPEAKER_05: I don't know if that was.
SPEAKER_01: One ended the other, a new one began.
SPEAKER_05: Yes.
SPEAKER_05: Or you rededicated it, or whatever you want to call it, but but when you break your vows, you broke them.
SPEAKER_05: Right?
SPEAKER_05: Um, funny thing about marriage, though, in this world, remember, women are property.
SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, that's an interesting because in this in this reading, you know, women are whores, right?
SPEAKER_01: Certain women are whores.
SPEAKER_01: Um men go in and do the same thing, they sacrifice.
SPEAKER_01: It's which to me was like, this isn't fair.
SPEAKER_05: So part of the context here is really, really important, which is, remember what the guy said in the video is it's really abhorrent when a wife offers her sexuality to other people.
SPEAKER_05: The reason that's abhorrent is because the wife belongs to the husband.
SPEAKER_05: So she's taking his stuff and giving it away.
SPEAKER_05: And that's why it's a problem.
SPEAKER_05: If a man has sex with a woman, he just has to buy her.
SPEAKER_05: This is how the Torah reads.
SPEAKER_05: If you have sex with a virgin, you don't have to keep her, but you do have to pay for her.
SPEAKER_05: You have to pay for her like you married her, which meant you bought her from her dad.
SPEAKER_05: Now, she can still live with the dad as long as you paid for her.
SPEAKER_05: So marriage is really different from what we think.
SPEAKER_05: There's no chuppa, and there's no stepping on a wine glass.
SPEAKER_05: We're not really even sure if there's much of a marital ceremony.
SPEAKER_05: It really depends.
SPEAKER_05: We don't have any marital ceremony in the Hebrew Bible at all.
SPEAKER_05: There's a wedding at Cana in which there's a big party and a lot of wine drinking.
SPEAKER_05: We don't know how normalized that was.
SPEAKER_05: We really don't.
SPEAKER_01: So back to this possessing, possess possessive thing.
SPEAKER_01: So if the father, if the virgin is has sex with a man, the man pays the father.
SPEAKER_01: Now the man owns her forever.
SPEAKER_05: Well, it's a great question.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, because once a woman has had sexual relations, uh any children she produces will be of questionable origin.
SPEAKER_05: So she's damaged goods.
SPEAKER_05: And see, that's why you have to pay for her.
SPEAKER_05: This is a very, very, I don't want to say like primitive society, and this is not even that long ago that in 50 years like bastard was a very bad word.
SPEAKER_05: Now we kind of don't use it much and people don't realize actually what it meant, which is being born outside of a of a celebrated covenant.
SPEAKER_05: But even a hundred years ago, fathers, and this still happens today, fathers give the bride away, and of course, that's an image showing daughter belongs to father who is now transferring his goods to husband.
SPEAKER_05: You can say it doesn't mean that, but that's why we do it.
SPEAKER_05: It is why we do it.
SPEAKER_04: Um or why we don't.
SPEAKER_05: Or why we don't.
SPEAKER_05: I didn't do that.
SPEAKER_05: I say who's come forward to bless the marriage.
SPEAKER_05: And I wouldn't say anything about giving away.
SPEAKER_00: Um so the prostitutes in the temple were virgins.
SPEAKER_00: Where'd they come from?
SPEAKER_05: Well, initially they probably were virgins, and you can read this in James Mitchner's book, The Source.
SPEAKER_05: They probably were taken uh during um skirmishes or wars.
SPEAKER_05: Um preferably they were virgins, and the sort of the prize is to be the first man to visit the virgin priestess.
SPEAKER_05: Now, priestess really is diminutive status.
SPEAKER_05: But remember the idea in this is that a man has sex with this priestess who represents the goddess Asherah or Estart, and in so doing he represents the god Baal or El or somebody else, and the idea is you're encouraging fertility.
SPEAKER_05: So think about when you eat this animal, you're also giving the you're feeding the gods.
SPEAKER_05: When you couple in the temple, it's not like regular sex or red light district sex.
SPEAKER_05: You're you're you're sort of doing this to ensure fertility in the heavens.
SPEAKER_05: You're you're trying to get the gods to do in heaven what you're doing on earth.
SPEAKER_05: Now that may sound strange.
SPEAKER_05: It's very masculinely convenient, let's be honest, which is exactly why the people keep doing it.
SPEAKER_02: Very, very popular.
SPEAKER_05: It's very popular.
SPEAKER_02: They don't designate these places as uh they do designate them.
SPEAKER_05: They designate the temples of temple.
SPEAKER_05: If you worship if you worship a sky deity, they're at high places, relative maxima.
SPEAKER_02: What countries?
SPEAKER_05: All of them.
SPEAKER_05: Oh hilltops.
SPEAKER_05: If you worship an earth deity, they're at nedir's relative minima.
SPEAKER_05: So valleys.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm I'm just so you're thinking it's happening today right now.
SPEAKER_05: Oh, I don't think so.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's what I thought I thought you meant you were.
SPEAKER_05: No, no, no, I didn't think so.
SPEAKER_02: I was like, yeah, where is that?
SPEAKER_05: Because we kind of changed our understanding of.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: It's hard for us to grasp this mentality.
SPEAKER_05: It's hard for us to grasp this, but it seems to be a base assumption that this is, again, how it is that you not only encourage the gods, but actually how you care for the land.
SPEAKER_05: So in in Israel at this time, Israel is mostly up on the Trans Jordan Plateau, and 90% of your diet comes from a two-pound loaf of bread every day.
SPEAKER_05: So the Atkins diet, you nobody was paleo.
SPEAKER_05: They were all eating two pounds of bread a day.
SPEAKER_05: And without rain, I mean, this is like San Diego, honestly, you will not have bread, which means you'll die.
SPEAKER_05: Animals were not a daily fare.
SPEAKER_05: Animals got eaten on festival days or when there was some kind of sacrifice.
SPEAKER_05: It was very expensive to kill a a a calf or a sheep, you'll forego all the milk and all of the wool.
SPEAKER_05: So it's really expensive to kill an animal.
SPEAKER_05: When they ate veal, it's because it was miscarried, not because they terminated a pregnancy, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_05: That was still happening in the Middle Ages.
SPEAKER_05: So when you hear about vellum, things are written on vellum.
SPEAKER_05: That's a veal skin.
SPEAKER_05: Enormously expensive to produce a book out of vellum because you you'd you'd lose the future goods from that from the animal.
SPEAKER_00: Um what happened to the children prostitutes?
SPEAKER_05: Well, it's a great question.
SPEAKER_05: Probably they were slaves of some sort.
SPEAKER_05: Now, if they were girl slaves, then they're also prostitutes.
SPEAKER_05: Um if they're boy slaves, hard to know.
SPEAKER_05: Slaves weren't like African slaves, but they could have been.
SPEAKER_05: You may or may not have been born into slavery depending on the culture in which you lived in.
SPEAKER_05: And you may or may not have been allowed to have been whipped and beaten and all of that business, depending on where you lived.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, there's a lot, there's a lot, but by and large, the images we have of terrible, oppressive African slavery are probably too harsh.
SPEAKER_05: And and honestly, they're probably too harsh for this country as well.
SPEAKER_05: Most slaves were not treated in the most oppressive, brutal ways we see in movies like Roots and Twelve Years of Slave.
SPEAKER_05: That did happen sometimes, but that wasn't the norm.
SPEAKER_05: Nonetheless, right, these were people who had essentially no rights.
SPEAKER_05: They were dependent upon the whims of their overlords to be kind or not.
SPEAKER_05: Um so covenants are really hard to know because if you cut a covenant, you'll be like the animal.
SPEAKER_05: And essentially, oh, that kind of happens.
SPEAKER_05: The Israelite people break the covenant and then they are wholesale slaughtered, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_05: But then you get this image that God says, Well, I'm gonna come back for you.
SPEAKER_05: So what you said is you kind of get this bipolar image of like killing and coming back.
SPEAKER_05: Now, some Jewish folk, there's a rabbi Emery who says God is essentially an abusive parent who gets really mad and then makes up.
SPEAKER_05: This is typical abusive behavior.
SPEAKER_05: You abuse and then you go back and you're really sweet.
SPEAKER_03: Very much right.
SPEAKER_05: But I think there's another possibility for understanding this, which is that the prophet sort of gets caught up in this extreme feeling.
SPEAKER_05: And I think the best thing I can think of is if you deeply love somebody, be that a spouse or a parent or a child, and someone does something to hurt them, then you may not be like me, but if someone does something to hurt them and they don't take care of it themselves, I often find myself caught up in vengeance, fuming, fuming, because I love them so much and they are too good to get their own revenge, so I will do it for them.
SPEAKER_02: So the relation the the comparison between God as a parent and you as a parent is the same thing.
SPEAKER_05: Well, so I think uh what's interesting is even though the person I love may not want the revenge because of my love for them and want to protect and vindicate them, I might want it for them.
SPEAKER_05: So what I want to suggest, and I'll tell you this story, when when when my dad was drafted to Vietnam against draft codes, his draft number was really high, and his father drafted him anyway because he wanted him to go.
SPEAKER_05: His father was on the draft board, so he pulled his number.
SPEAKER_05: This is how the story goes.
SPEAKER_05: I never really know if the stories are true, but this is an old one.
SPEAKER_05: So my dad went, even though he'd only been married for a couple of months, and as soon as he arrived, his twin sister had some birth complications, and he came back and she was dying.
SPEAKER_05: And he got back, I think, to see her in a coma for a couple hours, and so she died.
SPEAKER_05: And this was his his twin sister, arguably the brightest light in the family.
SPEAKER_05: So on his way back to Vietnam, having just done that, he was wearing his fatigues, and the the May Lai baby incident had just happened, and so a woman came out in the airport and spat in his face.
SPEAKER_05: And I didn't remember who told me that story.
SPEAKER_05: I think it was my mother.
SPEAKER_05: I don't know my dad would ever tell me that story.
SPEAKER_05: And he didn't do anything.
SPEAKER_05: But you know, that's one of those stories where no matter how complicated the relationship you have with your parents, there's this like extreme grief, and this like pathos, I think is the right word.
SPEAKER_05: But pathos doesn't have to just be compassionate, it sometimes can map straight to fuming fury.
SPEAKER_05: So what if that's what Hosea does?
SPEAKER_05: So I think there's this really great question.
SPEAKER_04: It's really interesting.
SPEAKER_05: Does God feel stuff?
SPEAKER_05: Is feeling human or is it divine?
SPEAKER_05: It could be both, but we don't know.
SPEAKER_05: So is Hosea getting caught up in this experience of God and what it must like to be God, and then taking that pathos and wrapping it to rage?
SPEAKER_05: I don't know if that makes sense what I'm saying.
SPEAKER_01: It makes sense.
SPEAKER_05: The reason I suggest it is because that's what I do when I get wrapped up in pathos.
SPEAKER_05: I either just really, really hurt, and I will tell you, as a man, we're trained culturally to take sadness and turn it to anger.
SPEAKER_05: I don't think women are trained to do that.
SPEAKER_05: Of course, you know what happens is it shortens our lifespan in general.
SPEAKER_05: We live shorter lives than women do, right?
SPEAKER_05: And men don't really know, I would say, how to grieve things.
SPEAKER_05: Because we're not allowed to.
SPEAKER_05: We're supposed to be angry.
SPEAKER_05: A sad man is a loser.
SPEAKER_05: An angry man, well, that's understandable.
SPEAKER_05: Anger can be productive, sadness can be debilitating.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, these are the sorts of things we worry about.
SPEAKER_05: So I think that's part of what you see.
SPEAKER_05: Hosea's actually experimenting with, no, God's not just angry, like God carries grief and does something redemptive that's even still productive.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, it's sort of interesting to think how Hosea pushes God along.
SPEAKER_05: Make no mistake, the people definitely believed God to be more masculine.
SPEAKER_05: We still do, sadly.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_05: We still do that.
SPEAKER_02: Hmm.
SPEAKER_02: Men are protectors.
SPEAKER_05: I would tell you this: having seen a mother raccoon lay babies in my attic, she became like a mutant when her children were involved.
SPEAKER_05: I can't even imagine a she bear in a cub.
SPEAKER_02: Women can be quite that that anger, but I'm just saying this overriding disease to protect the family is something I see in in men.
SPEAKER_02: You can't replace that.
SPEAKER_02: You can't replace that with people of other sexes.
SPEAKER_02: It's encoded in them.
SPEAKER_02: That's what I think.
SPEAKER_05: We these are these, I think, are analogies we have to sift through when we try to think what is God really like.
SPEAKER_05: And the question is, is God like us?
SPEAKER_05: Or can we?
SPEAKER_05: Not are we like God, can we be like God?
SPEAKER_01: If Genesis is right and we are made in God's image, why would we why would you not feel as you do?
SPEAKER_05: Well, it's an interesting thing you say that, because you know in geometry you can you can take a shape and you can do a lot of things with it.
SPEAKER_05: You can reflect it and dilate it and all that sort of business, right?
SPEAKER_05: And when you're done with all that, it's called the image.
SPEAKER_05: What you start with is called the pre-image.
SPEAKER_05: So perhaps we're in the image of God, which means we've been dilated and reflected and rotated and all that business, right?
SPEAKER_05: So it's hard to get back to the pre-image not knowing the transforms.
SPEAKER_04: So you don't need to know the transforms to get natural.
SPEAKER_05: Well, I wonder about that.
SPEAKER_05: Well, dilation is kind of important because the scale, the scale is unknown.
SPEAKER_05: I'm not saying you even need to go back.
SPEAKER_05: What I'm suggesting is it may be the other way around from how we typically think about that.
SPEAKER_05: I don't know the answer.
SPEAKER_04: So, how are we made in the image of God, right?
SPEAKER_04: How am I made in the image?
SPEAKER_01: Or are we making God in our image?
SPEAKER_04: Right.
SPEAKER_05: Well, I think we usually do, and that's where I want to go with idolatry.
SPEAKER_05: I do think it's really interesting though to make sure we hit these names.
SPEAKER_05: Hosea means essentially salvation, like it's the root of the word Joshua, but it's just the short.
SPEAKER_05: His wife Gomer means complete.
SPEAKER_05: And in this case, apparently means complete like iniquity or complete adultery.
SPEAKER_05: But keep in mind, Gomer's a pawn.
SPEAKER_05: Talk about that more in a second.
SPEAKER_05: Jezreel is the firstborn.
SPEAKER_05: God will sow.
SPEAKER_05: Jezreel is an extremely lush valley.
SPEAKER_05: It's like the Chesapeake Bay of the land before pollution.
SPEAKER_05: It's really plenteous.
SPEAKER_05: The way the topography goes, it has a rain advantage.
SPEAKER_05: Of course, you know, Lo Aami means not my people, and Lo Ruma means really not pity, but I think no compassion.
SPEAKER_05: No compassion is better than pity.
SPEAKER_05: These names are really interesting because Hosea gives the names.
SPEAKER_05: And in the Bible, your name is who you are.
SPEAKER_05: So Hosea represents salvation, Goma represents complete infidelity.
SPEAKER_05: And then think about the name to the children.
SPEAKER_05: Jezreel, God will sow.
SPEAKER_05: Which one?
SPEAKER_05: Because Jezreel is not Hosea's biological child.
SPEAKER_05: Or might be, we don't know.
SPEAKER_05: So is he the fruit of temple prostitution in which Baal sowed that seed?
SPEAKER_05: Not my people.
SPEAKER_05: Interesting to call your son not my son.
SPEAKER_05: Because he may not have been Hosea's son.
SPEAKER_05: He might have been born from a prostitution relationship, uh, same with no compassion.
SPEAKER_01: Do we do we may I?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's a question because I don't know the answer to this.
SPEAKER_01: In reading this, was Gomer a prostitute or was Gomer just a loose woman?
SPEAKER_05: Temple prostitute.
SPEAKER_01: She was a temple prostitute.
SPEAKER_05: Most prostitution is done in temples.
SPEAKER_05: Like, don't think we have like districts outside of religious shrines.
SPEAKER_01: So was she a temple prostitute before he married her?
SPEAKER_05: Seems like maybe.
SPEAKER_05: Take yourself a wife of Horden.
SPEAKER_05: So what happens is she belongs to the temple, and then Heisei buys her from the temple.
SPEAKER_05: Now she goes back, and by the way, she has children of Horden, right?
SPEAKER_05: Which seems to suggest those kids really are not his kids.
SPEAKER_05: Hence, they've got ambiguous names.
SPEAKER_05: What's interesting is I will tell not my people that you are my people.
SPEAKER_05: So essentially, God adopts.
SPEAKER_05: It's an interesting metaphor.
SPEAKER_05: Adopt.
SPEAKER_05: We can talk about that more, because it's crazy.
SPEAKER_05: It's a little crazy.
SPEAKER_05: She goes back to the temple.
SPEAKER_05: So how that works, we we we we don't really know because she doesn't have agency.
SPEAKER_05: She doesn't own herself.
SPEAKER_05: She can't transfer her deed to the temple.
SPEAKER_05: So how that happens is weird, but essentially Hosea does redeem, this is right, buys her back, not just from ownership, but essentially takes her away from this idolatrous system again.
SPEAKER_05: So she wasn't, she's born into an idolatrous system, Hosea takes her, she returns to idolatry, Hosea takes her back again, and this is this sort of analogy.
SPEAKER_01: Does she return to the uh idolatrous system by choice?
SPEAKER_05: See, this is a great question because again, women don't have the agency.
SPEAKER_05: Is it that the temple comes and puts a bag over her and brings her back?
SPEAKER_05: It's possible.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, it really is, because again, having paid for her, she belongs to him and she does not belong to herself.
SPEAKER_05: It's really important.
SPEAKER_05: Well, now let's there's a lot of ambiguity here, and it can really influence the analogies that we make.
SPEAKER_01: But but back coming to the analogy, I mean, do we have Israel owned by God, if you will?
SPEAKER_01: They go to the temple, if you will, the temple.
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
SPEAKER_01: God brings them back out.
SPEAKER_01: Then they either somehow are sent back to the temple or choose to go back to the temple.
SPEAKER_01: And then God would bring them back out.
SPEAKER_01: That is the temple being maybe they're the Assyrians taking them and spreading them off, the twelve tribes all over, and then God brings them back to Assyrians.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, is that the kind of thing I think that's real possible?
SPEAKER_05: I think there's an end possibility to consider.
SPEAKER_05: So I don't think we're born sinners, but I do think we're born in sin, Capital S, as in the world is full of forces like racism and sexism, ageism, etc.
SPEAKER_05: And that exists, and we're born into that.
SPEAKER_05: And then there is the hope that God will draw us out from that.
SPEAKER_05: However, we find ourselves time from time re-entering that world, bidden or unbidden, and here comes God pursuing us once again.
SPEAKER_05: Sort of an interesting thing.
SPEAKER_05: Doesn't claim there's something inherently wrong with us, does claim that there are forces bigger than ourselves at work in the world in which we are formed.
SPEAKER_05: And how does God feel about that?
SPEAKER_05: It's an interesting question.
SPEAKER_05: And how does God relate to that?
SPEAKER_05: I don't know if it's helpful to hear that Gomer's father to blame, it means two cakes.
SPEAKER_05: And there's a couple times we read about raisin cakes.
SPEAKER_05: A raisin cake is like a fertility party food.
SPEAKER_05: I don't know why, but just it is.
SPEAKER_05: So raisin cakes has to do with Canaanite fertility rituals.
SPEAKER_05: And they show up in other prophets too, and you might be thinking, those raisin cakes have got to be pretty good for people to run away from God taste-wise.
SPEAKER_05: But again, they're just there's this image of that something that happens at fertility festivals.
SPEAKER_01: And a fertility festival is is a is a uh ULA bales system festival.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: So a raise so raisin bread is back then.
SPEAKER_01: Right now it's just raisin bread.
SPEAKER_01: I love raisin bread.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: Um there's okay.
SPEAKER_05: There is an interesting thing in the first three chapters, which says that God is going to punish the people and essentially remove all the apparent benefits of their idolatry.
SPEAKER_05: So you're pursuing relationships with the king of Assyria and Egypt and all these other gods because you think that's going to be beneficial.
SPEAKER_05: I'm going to remove all those benefits from you so that you know that's not working, and then I'm going to allure you back to me.
SPEAKER_05: So the punishment isn't quite right.
SPEAKER_05: It's to teach them that actually there were no benefits from pursuing those things.
SPEAKER_05: Make that point clear, and then now that you get that, I'll have you back.
SPEAKER_04: There's no safety there.
SPEAKER_05: There's no safety there, and I'll have you back.
SPEAKER_05: Now, this is very different from punitive action from God.
SPEAKER_05: This is like teaching a child, uh, hey, you think that touching the stove gives you power, I'm going to allow it to burn you, and then I'm going to dress your wound.
SPEAKER_05: Which is what Native Americans do.
SPEAKER_05: They let children near the fire, and guess what?
SPEAKER_05: It takes one time and they don't do it again ever.
SPEAKER_05: Right?
SPEAKER_05: I think the psychological term is random positive reinforcement, which is sometimes a behavior seems to work.
SPEAKER_05: Dogs struggle with this, apparently.
SPEAKER_05: Uh children who lie and get away with it might think it works, even though it sometimes doesn't work, so they will keep trying it.
SPEAKER_05: Um I have to admit, I'm a low tolerance with lying, so I try to make sure it never works in my presence anyway.
SPEAKER_05: But if somebody already thinks it does, my intervention will not be effective, I can tell you now, because deep down they think, ah, this probably is going to work.
SPEAKER_05: Even if they're not good at it.
SPEAKER_05: I I don't know if I'm making any sense.
SPEAKER_01: We all do it when you go through our stocks, right?
SPEAKER_05: Hopefully, our children go through it when they're at the age of six or seven, and we teach them it's not an effective behavior by and large, so that they don't fundamentally think lying is the way to go.
SPEAKER_05: Now we all tell little lies or shade truths here and there.
SPEAKER_05: Still, it's a white lie.
SPEAKER_05: Well, and hope and sometimes you tell bigger ones too, but hopefully at this developmental stage, we try to teach our children not to rely on that as a way of interfacing with the world.
SPEAKER_05: It's like a stopgap behavior, not a primary behavior, right?
SPEAKER_05: Now, if they get it as a primary behavior, then we get this random positive reinforcement thing where people will choose to tell lies primarily.
SPEAKER_05: I don't know if you've ever known a liar.
SPEAKER_05: We call that pathological.
SPEAKER_05: I don't even know if that's helpful.
SPEAKER_05: What it means, I think, is that lies worked for them long enough that they adopted it as a primary behavior, not a secondary.
SPEAKER_05: And it's really frustrating because you can tell that person, stop lying, it doesn't work, but they've been formed to do it.
SPEAKER_05: So reformation is really, really hard.
SPEAKER_05: I don't want to be an expert on that, but unfadvy I am.
SPEAKER_05: Um the the thing you said, Lila, that's really interesting.
SPEAKER_05: This is another vocabulary that's really, really, really important.
SPEAKER_05: Most of us have gone to church long enough where we've heard the word agape, and it means like unconditional love.
SPEAKER_05: The Hebrew word for that is isid.
SPEAKER_05: I can write it over, it doesn't matter to spell it in Hebrew, but um, this is the most recurring word in the Psalms, and it also means unconditional love.
SPEAKER_05: So essentially it's not that um it's not that knowledge of me is greater than birth offerings, it's this kind of knowledge, this unconditional love, is better than that.
SPEAKER_05: And then you see, right, what this is, the book is testing the ultimate conditions of love.
SPEAKER_05: Because if you think through the ten words that we usually call the Ten Commandments, right?
SPEAKER_05: Don't covet your neighbor's stuff, don't have adultery with your neighbor, they actually mean the same thing.
SPEAKER_05: Your neighbor's wife is his property, not yours.
SPEAKER_05: And it's telling you the worst kind of wanting your neighbor's stuff, so don't steal, don't even covet, no adultery, don't take your neighbor's wife, has to do with his female property.
SPEAKER_05: And here is a female piece of property being passed around.
SPEAKER_05: So this is really testing the conditions of love.
SPEAKER_04: And the priests are murdering.
SPEAKER_05: The priests are murdering, and as a result, but see, priests is also the cipher for the whole people, right?
SPEAKER_05: God says, you can no longer be my priest.
SPEAKER_05: You can no longer be the people who directly interface with me.
SPEAKER_01: Well, you have a whole bunch of kings being killed right in the middle of the Israel's kingspan, if you will.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, being murdered, and then the murderer becomes the king.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, I mean there's an awful lot of that going on.
SPEAKER_05: There's a whole lot of coups, and part of that is because the country is so destabilized.
SPEAKER_05: It might be helpful to know that when the kingdom split, the northern kingdom is actually much stronger than the southern.
SPEAKER_05: In fact, the biggest land boundaries ever held were by King Omri, father of King Ahab, so bigger than David ever made it.
SPEAKER_05: Um but then what you have is Assyria gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and so that becomes weaker and weaker and weaker.
SPEAKER_05: You know, Samaria starts to become a little stronger.
SPEAKER_05: We notice Samaria uh ends up plundering um under um Shatham anyway.
SPEAKER_00: Samaria Israel?
SPEAKER_00: I know it was one time in the capital.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, one time it was.
SPEAKER_05: So really what you mean to think is um here's the modern country of Israel, basically, and there's the Galilee, and so down here is Judah, and then all up here is Israel, and then here is Syria, which is equally small, and then there's like um Moab, no, I'm doing that wrong, but that's Ammon, and then there's Moab, and then there's Edom.
SPEAKER_05: And they all share borders.
SPEAKER_05: See, these three sometimes border here, it depends how much they come up and down.
SPEAKER_05: But Syria is here, and there's like Damascus, and sometimes Israel has Damascus, and sometimes it doesn't, and then there's a town, Samaria, ultimately they get called the Samaritans because Assyria comes from way out here and doubles all that up.
SPEAKER_05: But these essentially are king, like two small kingdoms.
SPEAKER_05: Assyria is an empire, these are little kingdoms.
SPEAKER_05: It's probably more helpful to think of being these as like like counties, because that's kind of the size of them as a big county.
SPEAKER_00: But Samaria was also a territory, wouldn't it use synonymously with Israel?
SPEAKER_05: After well.
SPEAKER_05: Assyria and Samaria can sometimes show interchangeable, but then when the Assyrians come and take these people and spread them out, then this be called comes the whole thing be called becomes Samaria.
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
SPEAKER_00: Because Israel is written off the Samaritans or that mix of.
SPEAKER_00: The Jews hated each other, but the Samaritans were from Israel.
SPEAKER_05: But they represented this cultural stew.
SPEAKER_05: Okay.
SPEAKER_05: Do you notice that God says, I'll be a lion?
SPEAKER_05: Same in the in the Hebrew Bible, there's nothing stronger than a lion.
SPEAKER_05: That's important.
SPEAKER_05: Nothing is.
SPEAKER_05: And uh I'll sort of gobble you up and maul you.
SPEAKER_05: Um God says, I'm going to kill you with the words of prophets.
SPEAKER_05: So this is important, is that sticks and stones may break my bones, and words will do much worse.
SPEAKER_05: This is this is the the true saying here.
SPEAKER_05: So when the prophets say you you keep doing this, God will destroy you, like just saying that is not something you can laugh at, saying it kind of creates the reality in which that's going to happen.
SPEAKER_05: I don't know if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_01: Did God let Assyria take uh Israel, or did God was Assyria God's hand?
SPEAKER_05: Depends which prophet you read.
SPEAKER_05: You hear both.
SPEAKER_05: One suggests that every everything in the world that happens happens for a reason, so that even unholy people can be God's instruments.
SPEAKER_05: Some other people say, I will just allow it to happen.
SPEAKER_05: And I think what's important to recognize is it's not like there's one or the other.
SPEAKER_05: I think people are trying to understand where is God to be found in world events, just like we are today.
SPEAKER_01: Well, in a sense, God, Assyrians the Assyrians were God's people.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think every people is God's people, they were as well.
SPEAKER_05: I think that's right.
SPEAKER_05: And that becomes really, really critical.
SPEAKER_05: It's not a mess, it's not a message that many people like, because many people still like to bifurcate the world into good people and bad people.
SPEAKER_05: And if you're good, you're God's people, and if you're bad, you're not.
SPEAKER_05: The question is, you can find that in some places, but in other places you can't.
SPEAKER_05: In other places you find the opposite, which is that all people are God's people, and we choose to live into that or not.
SPEAKER_01: It comes back kind of the question that that has absolutely no answer.
SPEAKER_01: And that's is this all free will or are we being directed by a higher by God?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, it it's fate for real, or is it is it not?
SPEAKER_05: It's an interesting question.
SPEAKER_05: I don't know if you've read War and Peace.
SPEAKER_05: No.
SPEAKER_05: So Tolstoy, it's it's terrible.
SPEAKER_05: I think it's a difficult to read because every character has 19 different names, and you don't know that because you didn't speak Russian.
SPEAKER_05: And in Russian, Dmitry can also be called Igor, which can also be called, you know, Celestina.
SPEAKER_05: So, like, if you don't know that, you're like, who is that?
SPEAKER_05: Um But Tolstoy was an interesting philosopher who sort of said in that book essentially history is predetermined, is predetermined by your personality.
SPEAKER_05: Because of your personality, you given choice A and B, you will always pick A, or because of your personality, you'll always pick in the other case, you'll pick B.
SPEAKER_05: So everything's predetermined in that sense because choice is just an illusion.
SPEAKER_05: It's interesting.
SPEAKER_05: If you if if you when you know your children, I know exactly in situation X what they're going to do.
SPEAKER_05: And I can give them the apparent choice and run that trial over and over again, but I know exactly what's going to happen.
SPEAKER_05: By and large, I'm pretty right.
SPEAKER_05: That's sort of what he's saying.
SPEAKER_01: But then it comes back to an interesting point.
SPEAKER_01: Let's say that you said uh if they if they do it a hundred times, man, I got it.
SPEAKER_01: What if the one the hundred and first time they don't do it?
SPEAKER_01: Then all of a sudden it's like the whole premise that I know what they're gonna do is out the window.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, and that's an interesting question, and so that's on the other side.
SPEAKER_05: And I and I think um I think there's some truth to the idea that by and large, by and large, this tracks we take that should not be surprising, based on who we are.
SPEAKER_05: But I think what we hope for is the element of positive surprise.
SPEAKER_05: Now, where is God in all of that is a really great question.
SPEAKER_05: Directing, is God the one pushing the positive surprise?
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I think it's just really uh interesting uh questions to think about.
SPEAKER_05: Um the the the the thing I think that becomes really important when we think about this book again is idolatry.
SPEAKER_05: So as a kid, what that I learned in churches that's worshiping an idol.
SPEAKER_05: So worshiping that's something that isn't God.
SPEAKER_05: And you know what?
SPEAKER_05: That's a snap.
SPEAKER_05: Like I don't bow down to any statues, I don't have any statues in my house.
SPEAKER_05: So I think it's really easy to think, aha, like I am not guilty of idolatry.
SPEAKER_05: Then, you know, sometimes we say, well, you might be because the question is where do you ultimately put your value?
SPEAKER_05: Value, not necessarily with your money, although money is an indicator, right?
SPEAKER_05: Where do you put your value?
SPEAKER_05: Is it on God or on money?
SPEAKER_05: As if God is anything like money.
SPEAKER_05: It starts to become really hard to make comparisons like that.
SPEAKER_05: I think the thing that the book is pushing us to consider is idolatry is essentially us putting value on particular things that don't lead to larger life.
SPEAKER_05: Now, why would we want to do that?
SPEAKER_05: Well, I have to be honest with you, um, I don't know why I want to do that, but I know that I do.
SPEAKER_05: And um, you know, I think we have these sorts of things.
SPEAKER_05: I've you can talk to people like this all the time, and they'll say things like, I really should lose 10 pounds, or I'd probably shop too much.
SPEAKER_05: But they don't.
SPEAKER_05: Stop shopping or lose weight, or stop smoking.
SPEAKER_05: I don't know if you've ever known a smoker.
SPEAKER_05: I really want to stop smoking, but they don't.
SPEAKER_05: And as a non-smoker, it's really easy for me to say, why don't you just quit smoking?
SPEAKER_05: And I think that's the kind of relationship that this really has in mind.
SPEAKER_05: The relationship between a smoker, who knows, maybe perhaps they ought not continue smoking, is idolatry.
SPEAKER_05: It's really darn difficult for them to break.
SPEAKER_05: Now listen, as a non-smoker, it would be really easy for me to stop smoking.
SPEAKER_05: I could start to smoke a cigarette and put it out and never smoke again.
SPEAKER_05: So that's not my thing.
SPEAKER_05: But I do think there are like self-defeating behaviors we all engage in, and we're sometimes very aware that we engage in those behaviors, but we keep doing this.
SPEAKER_01: And so that's almost you weigh, well, when it comes to things like, I'll say things like like like smoking, drinking, doing drugs, I think there is a, I'll call it a it's it it is either pleasant or you're doing it to feel normal.
SPEAKER_01: I think that's a heroin addict, doesn't take heroin to get high.
SPEAKER_01: They they simply take it so they don't feel bad.
SPEAKER_01: Hey, that's like our relationship with caffeine.
SPEAKER_01: Well, okay, but the point is that's a chemistry thing.
SPEAKER_01: In some ways, that's a chemical thing that's going on inside of you.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, okay.
SPEAKER_01: But then there are other things that aren't.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I think you do because they just feel good.
SPEAKER_01: And it's not the feet Those are chemical things.
SPEAKER_01: Well, they are, absolutely you're right.
SPEAKER_01: They certainly are.
SPEAKER_05: Pornography is a chemical thing.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: And just like heroin, the normal level doesn't push it anymore, so you have to push it.
SPEAKER_05: Same with adrenaline seeking.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: Jumping after out of the plane after a while doesn't do it.
SPEAKER_05: So now you've got to figure out if I'm just doing it for the adrenaline, I'm going to have to start base jumping.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
SPEAKER_05: Because that's different from a plane.
SPEAKER_05: Now, I don't know that there's this sort of bit, but I do know people, and I listen, I maybe I should name some of my own, but I I know people who, you know, shopping is something that they do, and there's something called retail therapy, but when you do it every day, it's no longer therapeutic, it's addictive.
SPEAKER_05: Um, relationships with money.
SPEAKER_05: I know lots of folks, and I have lived in this sometimes myself, where I say, look, I'm not gonna be a slave to my money.
SPEAKER_05: Here's, you know, I can buy something, and then when I see my credit card bill, which I can always pay, I can.
SPEAKER_05: I always think, boy, money's really tight.
SPEAKER_05: So I have this double thing going on.
SPEAKER_05: Hey, I'm not supposed to be a slave to money, and then, oh my gosh, I spent all my checking on my credit card bill, and now what about this other thing I want to do?
SPEAKER_05: And I find myself living under that tension sometimes.
SPEAKER_05: And I'm gonna tell you I think that's what idolatry means.
SPEAKER_05: Not bowing down to wooden statues, but being essentially enslaved in our own behaviors.
SPEAKER_05: I'm I'm not uh seeking temple prostitutes, and then sometimes that's so foreign to us we could dismiss the book.
SPEAKER_05: But prostitution is really an image about seeking property that goes nowhere.
SPEAKER_01: So, consumption of food, okay?
SPEAKER_01: You consume food to survive.
SPEAKER_01: There's a point at which when you at which you have enough food or you're consuming enough to survive, and then you go beyond.
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
SPEAKER_01: That point is that idol.
SPEAKER_05: Could be.
SPEAKER_05: But I think there's eat there's other people who are eat as much as they want and are skinny.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I know those beats.
SPEAKER_05: So what what we call that is high functioning alcoholics.
SPEAKER_05: Because there's some alcoholics that are high functioning.
SPEAKER_05: You'd never know it, right?
SPEAKER_05: And there's people who are exercise bulimics, right?
SPEAKER_05: And what we say is because you're not fat, there's nothing wrong with you.
SPEAKER_05: But when you start to show symptoms we don't like, there's something wrong.
SPEAKER_05: Now that person exercised bulimia in the addictive family, is actually the same addictive switch in your brain, alcohol abuses.
SPEAKER_05: It just has different consequences.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna, in the interest of self-disclosure, okay, I can pretty much eat what I want.
SPEAKER_01: And since I retired, I eat more than I used to.
SPEAKER_01: Also, since I've retired, my glucose level's gone up, my A1C has gone up, and my triglycerides have gone up.
SPEAKER_01: And it's all because I do have what's it called, endomorph or exomorph, whatever it is.
SPEAKER_01: I don't gain a lot of weight when I eat, but I do overeat.
SPEAKER_01: And the consequence of that has been that my blood chemistry has not gone in the good direction.
SPEAKER_01: So I think there's this interesting thing, right?
SPEAKER_01: So I maybe I'm I'm sorry, please.
SPEAKER_05: Well, no, I I think I appreciate your self-disclosure, and I would say, you know, without me being like an armchair philosopher and no critique, right, is that we can be paralyzed between, well, I know it's probably not good to me, and then I also enjoy it.
SPEAKER_05: I know people who pursue their health religiously to the point of it being idolatry.
SPEAKER_05: As then it removes them, quite frankly, from their own body.
SPEAKER_05: They're so health conscious that they're no longer even present in themselves.
SPEAKER_05: It's confusing.
SPEAKER_05: It's really confusing, don't you think?
SPEAKER_05: Wait, the question how do you know what I'm saying is confusing?
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean this whole cycle, huh?
SPEAKER_05: I think I but I think what we usually do is we make idolatry so easy to avoid when it's like this system.
SPEAKER_05: I'll tell you, once upon a time, I used to be all organic.
SPEAKER_05: I even made all of my own bread and I made sourdough and I had a co-op uh farm share.
SPEAKER_05: So everything I ate was great.
SPEAKER_05: And then I would go to someone's home and they would serve food, and I was like, I don't think I can eat that because it's not organic or whatever.
SPEAKER_05: And it is true, if I did, I would feel bad.
SPEAKER_05: Like my body would feel bad.
SPEAKER_05: And they would come to my house and they weren't quite sure they wanted to eat what I was serving either, because it wasn't normal.
SPEAKER_05: Now, I want to say somebody could do that and be totally present in themselves, but for me it was obsessive.
SPEAKER_05: It was it became this obsession thing, and what I noticed is it was dividing my ability to eat with other people.
SPEAKER_05: So I had to ease it up, and it takes work for me to do that.
SPEAKER_05: And um there's a difference, I think, between eating what you want and enjoying what you eat when you do it.
SPEAKER_05: I don't know if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_04: And Anne, could would you add knowing what's actually Healthy for you?
SPEAKER_05: Well, I think I think there's this weird thing about health where we assume it's all about things like caloric intake or salt.
SPEAKER_05: And then there's this other thing where we actually listen to our body.
SPEAKER_05: Not to our id, not to our Freudian like pseudo-self, but like our real self.
SPEAKER_05: Usually, people say, if you can listen to your body well, you pretty much eat what you want and then you enjoy it, right?
SPEAKER_05: But sometimes you say, no, I just really want a milkshake because it does, and it does chemically, it does something to you.
SPEAKER_05: I know I sound nuts.
SPEAKER_05: And if you're listening on tape, but I think this is the difficult thing with idolatry, honestly, is trying to like get out of this enslavement and sort of, I don't want to say be natural like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but I mean actually kind of to just be to be present, which may not even be natural for some of us.
SPEAKER_01: It's so hard sometimes to live.
SPEAKER_01: Because I mean just recently, so I'm having this meal, I think it is, and I've I am I'm full.
SPEAKER_01: I am full, but there's food left on the plate.
SPEAKER_01: And so my thought is if I don't if I don't eat this, it's gonna go into the landfill.
SPEAKER_01: And when it goes into the landfill, it's gonna generate methane.
SPEAKER_01: And that methane's gonna go up and it's gonna create more carbon.
SPEAKER_01: Warm weather.
SPEAKER_05: But if you eat it, you're gonna generate the methane.
SPEAKER_01: I know that.
SPEAKER_01: But still, but still, you know, so I I wrestle with all that kind of stuff, you know?
SPEAKER_01: Um, I save straws.
SPEAKER_01: When I finish something, I take a straw and I put it in a container and I save it, and I still don't know what I'm gonna do with them.
SPEAKER_01: But I'm gonna cheer and not gonna throw it into a lens.
SPEAKER_05: These, I think these are the kinds of I mean the toughness of life, I think, is really part of the idolatry system.
SPEAKER_05: I know that sounds crazy.
SPEAKER_05: Because you might say, hey, I don't actively, I didn't choose life to be hard like that.
SPEAKER_05: Well, these people didn't choose life to be hard either.
SPEAKER_05: Right.
SPEAKER_05: Nor did we choose, frankly, to be Christian people.
SPEAKER_05: Because if we were born in Saudi Arabia, I can tell you right now, we would not be.
SPEAKER_05: In some ways, there is some of this predeterminism going on.
SPEAKER_05: And how do we interface with it?
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I think again, we can read this and it's like, oh, well, you didn't seek after me, and I'm really mad about that, and you made your own kings, you didn't ask about it.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, boy, well, we sure believe in democracy, don't we?
SPEAKER_05: Right?
SPEAKER_05: Like, that's a cultural value.
SPEAKER_05: We make our own president.
SPEAKER_05: Like, this doesn't say anything to us.
SPEAKER_05: This is that's what we do, right?
SPEAKER_05: Oh, you go around cutting yourselves, we think, oh, that's crazy, who would do that?
SPEAKER_05: And really what that means is you're letting your life out for something that's not going to give it back to you.
SPEAKER_05: But we do that in so many ways.
SPEAKER_05: I'll just say I do.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I do too.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I knew a cutter once, and it was really sad.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, me too.
SPEAKER_05: And it has nothing to do with suicide, and that's why it's really important.
SPEAKER_05: It really actually has to do with this way of getting back into your own body because you're so living in your head, and the pain takes you to your body, and the pain also releases adrenaline.
SPEAKER_05: So it becomes this ultimate adrenaline urge to hurt yourself.
SPEAKER_05: I'll tell you this really weird thing.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, again, I've told you before that some of this, it I say it jokingly, is mental illness, but I'll tell you at the time, that person is completely keyed in on me.
SPEAKER_05: It's like a massage where the person doing it is thinking about you.
SPEAKER_05: It hurts a little bit, but that's not what I look forward to.
SPEAKER_05: But it is there is this experience about it, you know.
SPEAKER_00: Um for you or for the person doing it?
SPEAKER_05: For me.
SPEAKER_05: I don't know what the person experiences doing it, but I know I have 100% of a concentration.
SPEAKER_05: And it's on my body, not like my preaching or my cooking or something like that, you know.
SPEAKER_05: Um, I'm not gonna say that's the only reason, but I've decided that's part of it.
SPEAKER_05: And hey, when I get a massage, it's similar.
SPEAKER_05: Um, I mean, in fact, if the masseuse is aloof and not paying attention, I won't go back.
SPEAKER_05: You know?
SPEAKER_05: Aloof means they use their elbows and they just like grind in and stuff like that.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, that's not being sensitive to me.
SPEAKER_05: That's like I'm paying you to be attentive to me.
SPEAKER_02: That's rough.
SPEAKER_02: Have you been rough?
SPEAKER_05: I've been hurt.
SPEAKER_05: Sounds like and this I think is the really, really hard thing.
SPEAKER_05: So I want to go back to the original thing that well, one of the things you'd said when we think about this metaphor, which is about adoption.
SPEAKER_05: Because I can tell you everybody I know who has done adoption has found it to be challenging.
SPEAKER_05: And part of it is perhaps even as an infant, and I know people who were adopted as infants, there's some when when little ones come to you, there's chemicals where the especially when you're mom, you have those chemicals of attachment.
SPEAKER_05: But even as dad, when you sort of know and you're involved, there's chemicals.
SPEAKER_05: When a baby that's not from your body comes to you, you have no chemicals.
SPEAKER_05: I can tell you right now, you don't have any of them.
SPEAKER_05: So you have to try to create them like serotonin and dopamine.
SPEAKER_05: Meanwhile, um, depending on the age of kid, you're trying to like make attachment and they're like defying you.
SPEAKER_05: They're not meeting your cultural norms.
SPEAKER_05: Imagine having a six-year-old, for example, who does things that really are against your cultural norms, like lies and steals.
SPEAKER_05: You haven't had the attachment happen before that happens to get you through it.
SPEAKER_05: So you're trying to attach to somebody who is rejecting your culture.
SPEAKER_05: And it's maddening.
SPEAKER_05: It's maddening.
SPEAKER_05: And that's where I think that's a really good relation, good understanding here is that it is maddening for God.
SPEAKER_05: And even when the adoptive children that God has invested, God's own self, after all, out of Egypt I called my son, and I taught Ephraim how to walk, right, essentially run away and become whatever is the worst thing in your world, homeless drug addicts who are also incarcerated, God bails them out.
SPEAKER_02: You can't help yourself.
SPEAKER_05: Well, you well, I think there's a difference between God enabling people and God always being there.
SPEAKER_05: This I think is the tough tension about when you hear about consequences, God says, I'm gonna let the natural consequences happen to you.
SPEAKER_05: And it make it breaks my heart because they don't have to.
SPEAKER_05: Now there's this interesting thing, because we're getting ready to do this parenting thing, and it sort of says you try to get your kids to make as many mistakes as possible when they're small and the price tags are low.
SPEAKER_05: And I listened to this silly lecture that actually says these parents, particularly parents, when they give their kids an allowance, the allowance is essentially six dollars a week.
SPEAKER_05: But by the time they took out taxes and withholding, the kid only got two dollars.
SPEAKER_05: And people thought that was nuts, and they said, Well, I remember my first paycheck.
SPEAKER_05: I had already spent the$150 I thought I'd earned, and then I got the check, and with taxes and withholding, I only got two-thirds.
SPEAKER_05: So when they gave their kid an allowance, they took out taxes and withholding.
SPEAKER_05: Because they wanted them to learn at the age of four what adulthood is like.
SPEAKER_05: Now, it's a silly example, but it's an insightful example.
SPEAKER_05: I mean, I don't mean everyone should do that.
SPEAKER_05: I mean the younger kids can learn consequences and adult functioning the better.
SPEAKER_05: And if you say to your kid, goes on, that this kid had gone to an air show and used six weeks of allowance to buy this helicopter that was gonna break immediately.
SPEAKER_05: And um, so one guy's observing this and says, you know, I would never let my kid buy that.
SPEAKER_05: It's cheaply made, it's gonna break.
SPEAKER_05: And the parents were like, Hey, if you got your money, buy whatever you want.
SPEAKER_05: And sure enough, the kid buys it, six weeks worth of allowance, playing with it within five minutes, breaks it, and comes crying.
SPEAKER_05: And the dad says, Come on up here, that's really sad.
SPEAKER_05: And the outsider's like, Well, why didn't you tell them?
SPEAKER_05: Why didn't you tell them it was gonna break?
SPEAKER_05: And the dad said, Well, look, when I bought my first car, I really wanted a good-looking car with speakers, and that's about what I got.
SPEAKER_05: It didn't really run well because I'd never really learned to think about quality.
SPEAKER_05: And I wasn't going to insult my son by telling him what he should have known.
SPEAKER_05: No, no, he was smart enough to figure that out on his own.
SPEAKER_05: What he wanted is connection that I spent a lot of money and didn't get what I thought I was getting.
SPEAKER_05: And the price tag was really low because he was four.
SPEAKER_05: Because he was four.
SPEAKER_05: So it's interesting to think about God relating to us and consequences allowing them to happen, causing them, but that's what we can't really get our heads around.
SPEAKER_02: That's what he's doing here.
SPEAKER_05: I think so.
SPEAKER_05: And then I think the other thing is when when we suffer the natural consequences of our actions, God doesn't say to us, I told you so, you better come back groveling.
SPEAKER_05: God says, Come on up in my lap, my heart's broken with you.
SPEAKER_05: I don't know.
SPEAKER_05: I mean I this is a really interesting bit.
SPEAKER_05: Again, we're we're God can get really mad, but God doesn't stay in anger.
SPEAKER_05: God goes to empathy and redemption.
SPEAKER_00: I just went to uh D okay country for some.
SPEAKER_00: The speaker said you just remember what he said.
SPEAKER_00: He said that when Adam and Eve were in the garden and God expelled them from the garden.
SPEAKER_00: And he was saying, I'm still with you.
SPEAKER_00: I thought that was really touching.
SPEAKER_00: And then Macalandro picture uh creation of Adam where God's reaching to the man and the man's reaching back.
SPEAKER_00: So it's a mutual need.
SPEAKER_05: It gets really messy.
SPEAKER_05: You know, we're gonna hear this well, we you know, we just got to hear the lost sheep and the lost coin Sunday.
SPEAKER_05: We didn't hear the lost son, we heard that six months ago, you know.
SPEAKER_05: And it's I think always that fine the father's always looking for the son, but the father also doesn't go bail him out of jail.
SPEAKER_05: And how we navigate that there's no, I think, tried and true formula to.
SPEAKER_05: It's it's messy.
SPEAKER_05: And in the middle of the mess, I think the mess itself, I think, is idolatry.
SPEAKER_05: We normally like to think we're above, but I think idolatry is the mess.
SPEAKER_04: The mess.
SPEAKER_05: I think I think that's part of the mess.
SPEAKER_04: I was thinking that's just living.
SPEAKER_05: Well, it's part of living.
SPEAKER_05: No, but I think part of why living can be so difficult, honestly, is that and I'll just share one with you that has that's very I mean, I I'll tell you I'm a workaholic and I'm a perfectionist on both of those things.
SPEAKER_05: And they have really uh they're actually socially valued because I get stuff done.
SPEAKER_05: You know?
SPEAKER_05: When I did when I was in college, I didn't spend money on this or that.
SPEAKER_05: I went on trips, I got stuff done.
SPEAKER_05: But it's idolatry because at the end of the day, doing those things in order to justify my existence never works.
SPEAKER_05: There's always more to be done.
SPEAKER_04: Worthiness.
SPEAKER_04: But you know the question.
SPEAKER_05: I think so, and you know, I don't know if you find yourself for me, and you may be different, it depends how you're wired.
SPEAKER_05: Sometimes I find myself, when I do international travel, which I do enjoy for lots of different reasons, finding myself, I've got to make sure I do this and this and this on this trip.
SPEAKER_05: I have to see these places, or I have to eat this cuisine, or I have to, I've got these have-to's.
SPEAKER_05: And where does that come from?
SPEAKER_01: I think you're wired that way.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, not you, but I mean people are completely.
SPEAKER_01: Some people are wired very much task-oriented.
SPEAKER_01: I'm task-oriented.
SPEAKER_01: And if I complete a task, I feel good.
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
SPEAKER_01: If I don't complete a task, or I just don't, I have a task and I decide I'm not going to do it, I feel guilty.
SPEAKER_01: I feel bad.
SPEAKER_00: So what's the difference between idolatry and growth?
SPEAKER_05: Well, I think it's a good question.
SPEAKER_05: And maybe it comes that I complete tasks out of a sense of wholeness that I already have in order to become whole.
SPEAKER_00: So my growth chart probably looks like continuing to grow when you I mean you go to these internet, I want to see this, I want to do that.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, when you do that, is it really idolatry or is it I am so fascinating I want to learn?
SPEAKER_00: Is that idolatry?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, I well, I think not always.
SPEAKER_05: This is and this is why I think it's messy, because everyone's growth plan is different.
SPEAKER_05: And I think um there is such a thing as consuming nice food without really being present in it.
SPEAKER_05: And sometimes I think one can consume travel or books, consume them, not be nourished by them.
SPEAKER_05: I know plenty of people who frankly need to do more tasks.
SPEAKER_05: That's their growth plan.
SPEAKER_05: In general, I don't need more tasks.
SPEAKER_05: I probably need to be a little more present in the tasks I do because I do have satisfaction when I complete, but I also think what's next before I'm even done with the one I'm finishing.
SPEAKER_05: As a party planner, I'm in the middle of party A thinking about party B.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, maintain a d I Well There's certain things for again, self-disclosure.
SPEAKER_01: Um I cannot stand to go to bed without ensuring that everything in the kitchen is clean and put away.
SPEAKER_01: Why?
SPEAKER_05: It doesn't matter at all in my wife.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't matter in my wife.
SPEAKER_01: I'll lay down, I'll lay down in the bed.
SPEAKER_01: I'll lay down in the bed.
SPEAKER_01: And if if there's if there are two glasses out there and I know they're there, I'm gonna get up and put this.
SPEAKER_05: I'm not even waste my time laying down to them in the dishwasher myself, right?
SPEAKER_05: Because I know I would just do the same thing.
SPEAKER_05: It's just I mean this sounds really funny, but I think this is the kind of idolatry, and it really is about idolatry, it really is about not being present.
SPEAKER_05: And sort of being a possession of other things, whether it's nutrition or smoking or consuming, being somebody else's possession.
SPEAKER_05: I don't know.
SPEAKER_04: Enslavement?
SPEAKER_05: It's a yeah, it's a tough word, but I think it's just not being present in the world or in ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: I mean it is self-discipline idolatry?
SPEAKER_05: Um, when it's for its own sake.
SPEAKER_05: Maybe.
SPEAKER_05: Okay, we have exceeded time, so I think this was fun enough.
SPEAKER_05: Um next week we will be Micah.