BHoP 001 Beware the Lizard Men

BHoP#001 Beware the Lizard Men

Hosts

Jonathan Fisk (JF) Adam Koontz (AK)

References

People

David Icke, Noah, Japheth, Ham, Shem, Oswald Spengler, Ludwig Klages, Jacques Derrida, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx

Books

1984, A Brave New World, Don Quixote

Transcript

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[JF]: You have got a inaugural issue, issue, episode of A Brief History of Power with two white guys.

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[JF]: A delve into the unknown?

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[JF]: No, not the unknown at all.

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[JF]: The known with the intention that by the time we're done,

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[JF]: we will understand a little bit better where we are in history and how, as human beings and how, as Christians, we can stand in the midst of this present darkness.

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[JF]: Now, how can two white guys help you with that?

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[JF]: Because we believe that truth is a universal reality.

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[JF]: But it'll take a while to probably convince you of that.

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[JF]: Who's this show for?

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[JF]: Everybody who wants to live a good life in the present age.

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[JF]: Who are we?

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[JF]: I'm the sometimes right reverend, but generally jovial,

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[JF]: I'm a pastor.

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[JF]: I'm the administrative pastor at St.

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[JF]: Paul Lutheran Church in Rockford, Illinois.

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[JF]: I'm an author, inventor, a white guy, Norse, Germanic, I married an Italian.

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[JF]: I don't know what any of that means.

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[JF]: And my guest, who is really the reason you'll be listening to this show, as you will find out, is the good Rev.

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[JF]: Dr. Adam Kuntz.

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[JF]: He is the associate professor of exegetics at ctsfw.edu.

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[JF]: He's an agrarian, an egghead, a white guy.

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[JF]: He's gone native from Appalachia, though, and he did marry a Quaker, even though she's educated at Hillsdale.

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[JF]: She is your worst nightmare, because science is probably racist.

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[JF]: We're going to be talking about everything in the history of the world in this show, including, if I can even get my computer to show me, especially, well, Babel.

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[JF]: Munster and America, whatever that means, but I got a more important question to lead us off with Pastor Coons, Adam, I'm gonna call you Adam on the show.

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[JF]: And if I can never get my own video set up right for the stream, I'll stop paying attention to the computer and pay attention to you.

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[JF]: I need one more thing that's going to work.

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[JF]: If I just hit that, I think everything is okay in the world.

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[JF]: So here's my real question for you.

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[JF]: Are the lizard people a master race?

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[JF]: That's my question.

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[AK]: Well, it depends on what you think David Icke is actually talking about.

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[AK]: So, like... Well, help us with that one.

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[AK]: Help the listener there.

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[JF]: Help the listener out here.

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[JF]: Not everyone knows there are lizard people.

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[JF]: Not everyone even knows that there are Yankees.

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[JF]: And the idea that they might be one of the same is perhaps too scary to mention right now.

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[JF]: So let's just start with a brief introduction to the history of lizard people then, I guess.

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[AK]: Okay.

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[AK]: So there's a British guy named David Icke who says that

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[AK]: The ruling class of the modern world are actually, the way he tells it, literally reptilian creatures who are masquerading as human beings.

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[AK]: And the revelation of that secret is the secret to understanding power and political dynamics, economic dynamics in the modern world.

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[AK]: David Icke has been accused by people who hear that more figuratively as being, among other things, anti-Semitic.

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[AK]: Lots of things, yeah.

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[AK]: So, like the Bible, pretty much everybody's words, it really matters whether you mean them literally or figuratively.

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[AK]: That can kind of change everything.

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[JF]: So, so what was the era that Ike is writing in again?

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[JF]: I really don't know him as a first source.

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[AK]: I think he's still alive.

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[AK]: I haven't honestly read him.

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[AK]: It's more of internet knowledge that has given me these.

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[JF]: Well, what about just this idea that there is a ruling class that is in fact distinct in America from everyone else and that you don't really get to join it except maybe by lottery, AKA Hunger Games style?

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[JF]: Well, not quite, but, but actually, yeah, that's kind of how, you know, you win a Congress seat.

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[JF]: That's it.

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[JF]: You're in.

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[AK]: So this has always been a debate in America.

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[AK]: Whether or not we were going to have a ruling class was, I think, probably the first debate.

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[AK]: And there's a lot of stuff surrounding the existence of the Constitution, which now people who call themselves conservatives defend.

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[AK]: But a lot of the same people with the same concerns back in the 1780s would have said, no, this Constitution is going to centralize power in the United States.

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[AK]: And it's going to give rise to a ruling class such as the old nations of Europe have.

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[AK]: And I think they were right about that power dynamic.

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[AK]: The content of the ruling class has changed over time.

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[AK]: You could track things like what last names are most prominent in a Harvard graduating class.

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[AK]: But the fact of a ruling class, I think, is not to be disputed, and especially as income disparity grows in the United States.

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[AK]: So the poor generally become poorer.

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[AK]: The rich generally become richer.

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[AK]: Look at, say, like,

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[AK]: California is like this, where the middle class kind of shrinks and shrinks and shrinks and shrinks.

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[AK]: Poverty grows.

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[AK]: Extreme wealth grows.

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[AK]: As that happens, I think it becomes harder and harder to refute the idea that we do have a ruling class in the United States.

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[JF]: I don't like to turn the lead.

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[JF]: Let me interrupt you and make anybody who's here for pop reasons just go away.

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[JF]: Does that mean that Hegel and Marx, regardless of whether or not we like them, are correct in prophesying the route that history is going to take?

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[AK]: No, because they were deterministic about it.

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[AK]: They thought that it would work out in a kind of obvious way, and Marx is a bastard child of Hegel.

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[AK]: I'm not going to pin Marx on Hegel, but the idea that somehow history works out in a determined way that doesn't have to do with the second coming of Jesus is flatly wrong.

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[AK]: But Marx is, when Marx is observing simply social conditions in industrial societies, and remember most of his work is actually produced in Britain, which is the world's most industrially advanced society then, he's not entirely wrong about everything that's going on.

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[AK]: He was wrong about his predictions, which is why like the actual biggest communist revolutions have taken place in what were at the time third world agrarian countries, Russia and China.

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[AK]: But observing how miserable things make people, how much incomes change, how the poor are thrust down, he's not necessarily wrong when he's doing essentially economic journalism, which is what he started out doing.

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[JF]: So he's correct in that, but then you said you're not going to pin him on Hegel, or is it the other way around?

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[AK]: No, yeah, I said I'm not going to pin marks on Hegel because that's an entire debate within really German culture about what is the meaning of Hegel and should we take him in what given sense that has this or that actual political consequence.

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[JF]: Here's what I see.

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[JF]: I see the rise and fall of nations as prophesied by our Lord, which, you know, we're both Christians, we're just going to talk about it in those terms.

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[JF]: But I think everybody who's out there who's not a Christian can agree there's been a lot of rising and falling of nations going on.

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[JF]: It's part of our religious perspective to just acknowledge this reality is going to keep going on.

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[JF]: So I see a lot of that going on.

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[JF]: I see a world in which, however we might gripe against authority structures, we need them.

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[JF]: Communism is great until you need to gather and then you have to have some place to put it, right?

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[JF]: And it all falls apart at that point.

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[JF]: So there's a clear need for hierarchy in the system, but the hierarchy always gets abused, and as a result, you end up having caste slash class distinctions that arise within what family groups, tribes, as they grow, as they integrate, as they run into those who are not like them in certain ways.

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[JF]: And then over time, those that are underneath are more than those who are on top, who have, and, well, revolution.

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[JF]: And what happens?

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[JF]: You kind of start at the bottom all over again.

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[JF]: And whether you're Ra's al Ghul or Thanos or whatever, it just keeps happening.

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[JF]: The alternative is that a greater power conquers.

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[JF]: So some other big group comes in and just kind of knocks off the group before they can destroy each other.

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[JF]: But how is this not Hegel?

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[JF]: How is this not Hegel?

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[JF]: That's what I want to know.

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[JF]: I don't like Hegel.

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[JF]: I don't think Hegel's right in the sense that he doesn't understand the eschaton.

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[JF]: So don't get me wrong in that.

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[JF]: I'm not a Hegelian in that regard.

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[JF]: We're not moving toward a progressive better.

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[JF]: But this cyclical thing that I think what we want to do as we talk about Babel and Munster and America is expose this cyclical thing that is something that should be obvious to anyone who's watching and again, is part of the Christian religion.

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[JF]: What do you think?

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[JF]: I just did a lot right there, I think.

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[AK]: So I think I mean, I think the idea that history is cyclical is very common among non-Christians for a good reason.

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[AK]: So it's extremely it's foundational to Hinduism, but it also exists in somebody like Oswald Spengler, who's looking at Western civilization after the First World War and saying that history is going to is going to work in a cyclical way.

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[AK]: And we're currently in the downward

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[AK]: part of the cycle for what you could call Western or European civilization.

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[AK]: The issue that I have with that is not that I can't see that nations rise and fall.

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[AK]: The problem I have with that is that when you're using that as a way to actually inform your own conduct, the Bible doesn't talk about things that way.

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[AK]: So the Bible can notice, for instance, that the Lord sets up certain kings and then can also tear them down.

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[AK]: and that at the end of history, all authority and power that does not acknowledge the Lord will itself be torn down.

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[AK]: It will be burned with fire.

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[AK]: The issue is that in the present, when the Bible's admonishing kings, it doesn't say that, well, you're on a downward trend, so what can you do?

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[AK]: It's not fatalistic in that way.

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[AK]: It says that you should, to the kings specifically, that are raging against the Son of God, kiss the Son lest he be angry and you perish in the way.

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[AK]: So the call that the church has and the call that we have here is not that, you know, everything is going to hell and we're smart enough to show you how.

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[AK]: It's that everything is going to hell, so the need to repent and acknowledge the Son of God as Lord and Savior is greater than it ever has been in our lifetime.

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[JF]: So for those keeping score, I wanted to study the notes at home.

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[JF]: That was Psalm 2, and it's really worth spending some time on in context, especially with Psalm 1.

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[JF]: Without them, it's hard to really understand Christianity, I would submit to you, at a mature level.

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[JF]: With that said, so the answer to my initial question is yes.

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[JF]: The lizard people are a master race.

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[JF]: So then the next question is, as those who are called not to like throw up our arms in despair, but to live among a world in which such things as these abuses take place, regardless, right?

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[JF]: Whatever chain in the rise or fall of our civilization we're in, we are called to pray for the city in which we dwell, for therein we shall find our good.

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[JF]: And that's actually loving your neighbor to want them to have good as well.

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[JF]: So as we wait for all of that, that means we must cling to something that's different then.

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[JF]: Well, the what?

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[JF]: The religion of the lizard people?

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[JF]: And so that's the other direction or philosophical tenet I want to throw into our talk.

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[JF]: So one of the tenets is we believe that there are classes in the world.

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[JF]: They exist.

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[JF]: And it just – you can't do anything about it.

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[JF]: You can forgive it and work together, but you're not going to make it go away.

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[JF]: So that's kind of the one we just established.

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[JF]: And there's a master class that usually is about money and power, one way or the other, not race.

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[JF]: And then you also have this other one.

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[JF]: So turning the corner.

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[JF]: Just dive on this phrase for a second, that which can't not be true.

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[AK]: Okay.

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[AK]: I mean, that's an extremely powerful thing to say.

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[AK]: So it can be very, very easily misused.

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[AK]: But the way that I think about that phrase is that the things that we are discussing are either in the Bible and they are clearly to be read, or they are occurring or have occurred in history and are clearly to be seen.

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[AK]: So the Bible assumes that you as a human being, even if you have not been born again by water in the spirit, you have reason.

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[AK]: And the thing that your reason should pay attention to is not what you are told, but especially the things that you have observed or can observe through the observations of others, like, say, in history.

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[AK]: And you have to compare those things and be careful about them and, you know,

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[AK]: but that you are paying attention to what is actually occurring, what has actually happened, more than to what you are told about it or how to think about it.

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[AK]: So when you're looking at either the history that the Bible discusses, we're going to talk, I think, today, especially about very ancient history, the earliest history, primordial history of the human race, singular.

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[AK]: either that or the things that you see with your own eyes going on that you've seen in life, that you pay more attention to those things than the machine that is a combination of advertising, entertainment, and propaganda that you have been, if you're listening to this, certainly in English, at this point in history, you've been born into.

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[AK]: If you know enough English to understand what we're saying, you live in a country or know enough about a country that is like this, you live in a country that is determined by a mixture of entertainment, advertising, and propaganda.

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[AK]: And some of that might be false, some of that might be true, but it is not an appeal to the things that the Bible talks about when it says that you should examine, for instance, the fruits of someone's teaching.

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[AK]: or what it says when you should observe the destinies of kings.

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[AK]: Those are things clearly to be read out of history.

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[AK]: Was this king successful or unsuccessful in this or that venture?

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[AK]: Right.

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[AK]: It's not a matter of interpretation and it's not a matter of spin.

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[AK]: It either is or isn't.

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[AK]: Right.

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[AK]: One of the really unfortunate things and you know, you're making a joke, but

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[AK]: One of the really unfortunate things is that increasingly anything that could be an appeal to objective things, science, history, even maps, have now been deemed racist and therefore out of bounds.

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[AK]: You can't look at those things.

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[AK]: And if you can't look at the things that have actually occurred or are actually so, right?

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[AK]: Do I, as someone who's 5'10", have a really good chance of becoming an NBA superstar?

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[AK]: Probably not.

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[AK]: In fact, certainly not.

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[AK]: Is that racist?

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[AK]: Well, it's a fact, at least, before it's anything else.

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[AK]: And so when we're talking about the Bible or history, we're talking about things that are there for you to examine.

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[JF]: The erasing of history is what barbarians have always done, and the redemption of the history of their enemies is what the civilized have always done.

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[JF]: And you don't have to be a Christian, at least in practice, to do that.

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[JF]: You might need to be a monotheist to advocate it as a moral.

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[JF]: But we'll leave that for another time.

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[JF]: I'm also not going to just pretend that what you drop there

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[JF]: The fact is, the Googleplex Matrix, whichever movie metaphor you want to use, it's more real than the movies in terms of information control, mind loss, stupefying of humanity, putting us into pod people kind of, you know, battery operation.

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[JF]: It's just as bad, and it is a zombie apocalypse of its own kind.

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[JF]: And again, you don't have to be a Christian to see this one, but Christians really, we should be pretty good at seeing this one.

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[JF]: Without chasing any of that too much then,

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[JF]: This idea that we believe there are things that have to be true is where we have to start in a conversation with anybody then about how to make sense of this.

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[JF]: And that's where the reason comes into play, like you said, paying attention in a way that builds an understanding.

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[JF]: In this then, I guess, that introduces the real problem, which is misunderstanding, miscommunication.

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[JF]: So even here already, I mean, I've thrown out some terms pejoratively on purpose.

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[JF]: We're calling this a show with some white guys because frankly, it's almost a racist term, right?

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[JF]: Just to exist as a white guy.

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[JF]: So at this point, we just have to call a spade a spade and be like, that's who we are, whatever that might mean.

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[JF]: But then all of that, the hatred of man, the fighting of man, that predates the flood, that predates creation, or not creation, that predates, that comes from the fall.

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[JF]: But the confusion of man that has amplified our inability to, frankly, talk to each other on any level, which I just displayed pretty well, I think, in this lead up, that's another issue, all right?

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[JF]: And so we're not really going to zoom in on, you have to believe in sin right now.

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[JF]: We're going to zoom in and say that you have to believe what Derrida taught.

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[JF]: More or less, because the Bible teaches it in Genesis chapter 6 also.

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[JF]: And with that, I'll leave that as the intro for you, Adam.

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[AK]: Right, so what we're saying is that part of the issue which could be either greater or lesser in any given human society, but in ours is enormous, I think partly because of the power of social media specifically, and smartphones.

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[AK]: is the fact of human miscommunication.

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[AK]: Now, the Bible is telling you that the reason that this is allowed to happen, that certain humans permit certain technologies to prevail among others, is because technology is emphatically not neutral.

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[AK]: It could be really good, that's what we're trying to do here, it could be really bad.

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[AK]: And what happens in the story of the Tower of Babel is that people who want to, quote, make a name for themselves,

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[AK]: That is, they want to be noticed in a way that goes along with their achievements rather than the things that God gives them.

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[AK]: They get a bunch of other people to try to build an enormous tower.

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[AK]: Most people see this as being basically about the temples that were being built in the ancient Middle East that were themselves towers and would be set over and obvious to any city in what's now, you know, Iraq.

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[AK]: And those were the sites of pagan control and also pagan power, also such things as human sacrifice, the destruction of the family, and so on, through various means.

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[AK]: Something that I think should be credited to both ancient barbarians and ancient pagans, and anyone who was both at the same time, is that their destruction was much more forthright than what people do with us.

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[AK]: Yeah, right.

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[AK]: They were honest about it.

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[JF]: I sowed salt on his crops.

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[JF]: I killed all his children.

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[JF]: I mean, they're straight up, right?

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[JF]: And we're like, oh, I'm your friend.

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[JF]: Just sign this paper.

18:04.636 --> 18:23.784

[AK]: They told you what they were going to do, whereas like when they destroy our families, they tell us that like if I get a divorce from my wife or if I father children but don't actually raise them or if I just never get married, I'm actually going to be happier than someone who stays with his wife or raises his children or has children.

18:24.264 --> 18:25.105

[AK]: Right.

18:25.185 --> 18:27.506

[AK]: So generally we are taught that

18:28.266 --> 18:40.356

[AK]: the things that actually will destroy us, whether it's drugs or whatever, we're taught that that stuff is actually going to be better for us or cooler for us or more rewarding or mind expanding for us.

18:40.396 --> 18:50.325

[AK]: I mean, Joe Rogan does this kind of all the time with stuff that, you know, back in the 50s and 60s was understood to be highly dangerous and for that reason was classified the way it was.

18:51.445 --> 18:59.228

[AK]: So we're generally sold our slavery as freedom, whereas in the ancient world, they're much more forthright when they're enslaving you.

18:59.248 --> 19:00.448

[AK]: For which I give them a little bit of credit.

19:00.468 --> 19:01.389

[JF]: Did you just, did you just do a hold on?

19:01.589 --> 19:03.069

[JF]: Again, this is for the listener at home.

19:03.109 --> 19:04.910

[JF]: So you got to go read Psalm 2.

19:05.550 --> 19:10.732

[JF]: And now he just, he just dropped some language that if you haven't read 1984, you don't belong in the conversation.

19:10.932 --> 19:13.073

[JF]: So again, you can call us racist.

19:13.553 --> 19:20.182

[JF]: Go read 1984, pick up Animal Farmer on the way, realize you're not a pig, then come back and we'll talk about racism.

19:20.583 --> 19:24.048

[JF]: Until then, slavery is freedom.

19:24.068 --> 19:28.895

[JF]: Write that one on your forehead and then say, I don't believe that, and then start asking why you're doing what you're doing.

19:30.937 --> 19:34.340

[JF]: Sorry, Adam, I just despise tyranny.

19:35.542 --> 19:36.162

[JF]: So, okay.

19:36.623 --> 19:42.768

[JF]: So Babel, then, just to make sure this is clear as well for any—I mean, we really hope that this show is not for Christians.

19:43.129 --> 19:43.709

[JF]: Really, I do.

19:44.090 --> 19:47.373

[JF]: What I want this to be about is—honestly, Republican values.

19:47.393 --> 19:48.314

[JF]: I don't mean the party.

19:48.874 --> 19:53.258

[JF]: What I want this to be about is liberty for your brother, because it's good to love your neighbor as yourself.

19:55.171 --> 20:06.317

[JF]: In this regard, so if someone doesn't believe that the Tower of Babel is a mystical juju event that happened many, many millennium ago that we believe in because Jesus has risen from the dead—that's a whole other conversation that I'd love to have.

20:08.143 --> 20:13.826

[JF]: Derrida, I dropped his name earlier on purpose, it's not like this isn't what they all finally concluded, right?

20:13.846 --> 20:20.228

[JF]: Like they dismissed the Bible at the beginning of the 1800s, it's all stories, it's all fairy tales, and Derrida effectively brings us to that same point.

20:20.268 --> 20:25.411

[JF]: So can you kind of fill the listener in on that one without going into unnecessary trivia?

20:26.211 --> 20:36.816

[AK]: Yeah, so Derrida, the reason to bring him up is because if you ever studied the way that words work in an academic setting, you will have read something of him or at least heard his ideas, even if you weren't reading him.

20:37.526 --> 20:48.458

[AK]: I don't want to give him too much credit because his basic idea that I do find actually, to some extent, important, which is logocentrism, that the word is too central to people's lives.

20:48.979 --> 20:58.469

[AK]: And that is partly an attack on the Bible, but the insight that it does have, he's actually ripping off a guy that came before him that no one's ever heard of named Ludwig Klages.

20:59.450 --> 21:00.751

[AK]: K-L-A-G-E-S.

21:01.351 --> 21:09.034

[AK]: And Klages said that part of the sickness of modern life is attention to words over life itself.

21:09.574 --> 21:16.737

[AK]: So we have, we're sick and we're unhealthy and we're miserable and we're living in cramped cities.

21:17.797 --> 21:21.942

[AK]: scurrying to get favor or money, we should be living in nature.

21:21.982 --> 21:23.544

[AK]: There's a lot that comes out of that.

21:24.024 --> 21:26.447

[AK]: But I think that's something that is insightful about that.

21:26.467 --> 21:29.571

[JF]: Can I assume, let me pull you back though, because you said attention to words over life.

21:29.651 --> 21:36.039

[JF]: So you're living in the city because you believe stories have been told about why this is better, but you're not really paying attention to what's actually going on.

21:36.539 --> 21:39.300

[JF]: And so it's not as better as it could be.

21:39.420 --> 21:40.521

[JF]: There's a parable about this.

21:40.601 --> 21:41.241

[JF]: I've told it before.

21:41.301 --> 21:43.062

[JF]: It's about the fisherman and the businessman.

21:43.102 --> 21:43.442

[JF]: And he comes.

21:43.462 --> 21:44.022

[JF]: He said, you could do this.

21:44.042 --> 21:44.442

[JF]: You could do this.

21:44.462 --> 21:44.802

[JF]: You could do this.

21:44.822 --> 21:45.863

[JF]: He keeps saying, why, why, why?

21:45.883 --> 21:46.543

[JF]: Because your life will get better.

21:46.563 --> 21:47.083

[JF]: Your life will get better.

21:47.103 --> 21:47.623

[JF]: Your life will get better.

21:47.643 --> 21:48.944

[JF]: What do you do when it's all really the best?

21:48.964 --> 21:49.784

[JF]: Sit on the beach with your family.

21:49.804 --> 21:50.444

[JF]: That's what I'm doing.

21:50.484 --> 21:51.125

[JF]: I'm a fisherman.

21:51.165 --> 21:51.605

[JF]: Go away.

21:52.366 --> 21:52.806

[AK]: Right.

21:53.307 --> 22:04.464

[AK]: I mean, so you make fun of someone because he lives in flyover America, but he doesn't deal with open air drug use or cramped conditions or paying to get himself anywhere on a daily basis.

22:04.524 --> 22:05.365

[JF]: Burning statues of elk.

22:06.407 --> 22:06.587

[AK]: Yeah.

22:06.747 --> 22:07.528

[AK]: That's my favorite.

22:08.169 --> 22:24.064

[AK]: So I do think that the idea of logocentrism as a sort of enslaving thing, looking at words as a technology, especially written and recorded words as a technology, is insightful because that's exactly what's going on in Babel.

22:24.444 --> 22:26.106

[AK]: They can still all talk to each other.

22:26.366 --> 22:29.149

[AK]: Their languages haven't been diversified and confused.

22:29.969 --> 22:32.592

[AK]: And because they can still all talk to each other, they can be controlled.

22:33.578 --> 22:33.758

[AK]: Right.

22:34.198 --> 22:42.000

[AK]: And they're being controlled for the sake of the aggrandizement of at least the whatever number of them wanted to become famous, wanted to become important.

22:42.060 --> 22:45.461

[JF]: Are you saying that your native dialect protects your identity?

22:45.481 --> 22:48.042

[JF]: Are you what?

22:48.302 --> 22:49.683

[JF]: Are you like your cultural heritage?

22:49.743 --> 22:50.283

[JF]: Are you what?

22:51.440 --> 22:52.221

[JF]: Oh, man.

22:52.621 --> 22:52.801

[JF]: Sorry.

22:52.861 --> 22:54.422

[JF]: I mean, that hits close to home, Adam.

22:54.482 --> 22:55.342

[JF]: It hits close to home.

22:55.642 --> 22:56.723

[JF]: Dialect, dialect.

22:56.763 --> 22:57.443

[JF]: Is it even a thing?

22:57.483 --> 22:58.584

[JF]: It is becoming a thing again.

22:58.604 --> 23:02.206

[JF]: I'm going to say attention to words over life one more time, because that's so important.

23:02.666 --> 23:05.368

[JF]: What was the name of the gentleman who found that one?

23:05.928 --> 23:13.712

[AK]: The guy that I think is actually much more insightful than Derrida, who was himself a kind of cramped, overly urbanized individual.

23:14.132 --> 23:16.033

[AK]: The guy that I think is better is Klages.

23:16.514 --> 23:16.954

[AK]: K-L-A-G-E-S.

23:19.515 --> 23:19.896

[AK]: I guess.

23:20.556 --> 23:20.756

[AK]: Yeah.

23:20.956 --> 23:29.142

[JF]: Well, so is that I mean, nothing ever is new because it didn't Darwin kind of have the same rhyming steel theft that guy thought at first, I published it sooner kind of thing.

23:29.282 --> 23:30.503

[JF]: I remember reading that somewhere.

23:31.344 --> 23:33.525

[JF]: Correct me if I'm wrong.

23:33.545 --> 23:33.825

[JF]: I don't know.

23:33.865 --> 23:34.586

[JF]: It's on the internet.

23:34.766 --> 23:36.047

[JF]: I don't know.

23:36.467 --> 23:40.070

[AK]: That's exactly I mean, that's that's how academia and science within it.

23:40.110 --> 23:42.312

[AK]: But academia generally so often works.

23:42.392 --> 23:42.792

[AK]: It's not

23:43.272 --> 23:46.294

[AK]: It's not the person who actually discovered it first or was most insightful.

23:46.314 --> 23:49.355

[AK]: It's the person who was able to publicize himself best.

23:49.535 --> 23:50.615

[JF]: Whoever makes it cool.

23:50.816 --> 23:51.236

[JF]: That's right.

23:51.836 --> 24:02.181

[JF]: And Derrida also happens to have a name that rhymes with the movement of poets that weren't so different that I studied being a lit major in the 70s, San Francisco, the Dadaists.

24:02.341 --> 24:08.844

[JF]: So you got the Derridaism and the whole thing's basically an onomatopoeia for what they're really talking about, which is that nothing makes sense.

24:09.504 --> 24:17.333

[JF]: It's just noises, and the thing is, like, yeah, in a sense that's what happened, except not really, because we all managed to, like, herd together still.

24:18.134 --> 24:25.963

[JF]: And so there's definitely communication taking place, and it uses these sounds, and we all seem to agree that wild dogs may be diverse.

24:26.584 --> 24:28.406

[JF]: They are not cats, at least, well...

24:29.266 --> 24:35.890

[JF]: wouldn't want to offend your snowflake sensibilities these days, generally, unless your dog comes out and self-identifies as a cat.

24:36.210 --> 24:37.210

[JF]: Your dog is not a cat.

24:38.491 --> 24:50.938

[JF]: So the distinction in realities, maybe we want to go from this, that which cannot, can't not be true, is that there, even under Babel, there is still a common sense reality.

24:50.958 --> 24:52.439

[JF]: I'll just call it the term that it should be.

24:52.479 --> 24:57.622

[JF]: A common sense reality that we all experience and language is not so broken that we can't talk about it.

24:58.516 --> 24:58.716

[AK]: Right.

24:58.896 --> 25:02.738

[AK]: But language, I mean, let me give you an example of how this can be co-opted, right?

25:02.818 --> 25:13.763

[AK]: So the slogan which really became ubiquitous in media and politics during the Obama administration was diversity is our strength.

25:14.063 --> 25:16.064

[AK]: And you'll find all kinds of things saying that.

25:16.484 --> 25:19.045

[AK]: Fortune 500 companies, the US military, lots of things.

25:20.343 --> 25:23.347

[AK]: That's an appeal, first of all, to just observable human difference.

25:23.827 --> 25:24.868

[AK]: That could be racial.

25:25.008 --> 25:28.012

[AK]: That's generally what's most amplified in the media.

25:28.352 --> 25:29.233

[AK]: That could be linguistic.

25:29.273 --> 25:30.354

[AK]: That could be all kinds of things.

25:31.055 --> 25:36.681

[AK]: What they're doing there, though, is they're taking the observable difference, and they're co-opting your opinion of it.

25:36.721 --> 25:38.142

[AK]: They're saying this is always our strength.

25:38.843 --> 25:45.387

[AK]: Well, I mean, if I'm trying to build a house and there's five guys, that's probably not enough, but just run with me.

25:45.407 --> 25:48.149

[AK]: And we all speak five completely different languages.

25:48.229 --> 25:51.671

[AK]: So it's not like one of us speaks Norwegian and the other one speaks Danish.

25:51.731 --> 25:57.274

[AK]: It's like one of us speaks Danish and the other one has Tagalog and another guy is doing, you know, Swahili.

25:57.834 --> 26:05.459

[AK]: It's going to be really hard to get things done, especially if we haven't all done the whole thing many times before with people we could understand.

26:06.039 --> 26:14.527

[AK]: So what you can see there is that the way that you are generally lied to is not by appealing to your reason.

26:14.627 --> 26:16.789

[AK]: They're not giving you facts and letting you think about them.

26:17.250 --> 26:27.800

[AK]: They'll give you half a fact, or they'll acknowledge a fact, such as human beings are different from each other in all kinds of ways, and then they'll take that fact and then give you a slogan on top of it.

26:28.840 --> 26:30.641

[AK]: power works through slogans.

26:30.881 --> 26:39.503

[AK]: That's why advertising and entertainment are so incredibly powerful, even though people are usually kind of very obviously naturally irritated by them.

26:40.923 --> 26:43.944

[JF]: Yeah, repetition is more powerful than we realize.

26:43.964 --> 26:50.326

[JF]: Okay, I want you to keep going on that, but the idea again that

26:51.693 --> 26:54.654

[JF]: Words are technology, and they always have been.

26:55.534 --> 27:04.038

[JF]: And technology always gives a person a leg up in power over the person who does not have that technology or just more capable than they are.

27:04.778 --> 27:11.881

[JF]: So it begins to be a reality that an animal species that has words is going to have a leg up on the other species, straight up.

27:12.661 --> 27:17.923

[JF]: And then a family or a tribe that has better words, a language that's more adept, doing whatever it needs to do,

27:18.303 --> 27:19.244

[JF]: is going to have a leg up.

27:19.764 --> 27:32.951

[JF]: Eventually, if you can control the words so that people hear your words and that basically becomes the only language they can speak, well then you also have a leg up, but you'd have to be able to manipulate the language itself.

27:34.411 --> 27:35.412

[JF]: You'd have to keep it from

27:37.773 --> 27:39.034

[JF]: I don't know if this is right or not, Adam.

27:40.175 --> 27:44.618

[JF]: Languages tend to run into each other and then sort of back and forth, and wars make them go all the way around.

27:44.978 --> 27:51.423

[JF]: And as a world, we're kind of committed to not having the war go all the way around, it would seem, and yet we need the language to do so somehow for the sake of the power.

27:51.783 --> 27:53.084

[JF]: And maybe that's the struggle that's going on now.

27:53.104 --> 27:53.524

[JF]: It doesn't matter.

27:53.805 --> 27:54.465

[JF]: Words are techs.

27:54.905 --> 27:57.888

[JF]: Tech is not neutral because it's used by somebody.

27:57.908 --> 27:59.409

[JF]: It actually is neutral if it just sits there by itself.

27:59.709 --> 28:00.990

[JF]: But whoever's using it has an agenda.

28:01.050 --> 28:01.770

[JF]: We've got to know what that is.

28:02.831 --> 28:06.316

[JF]: Can we dovetail from that toward, from Babel to Munster somehow?

28:06.616 --> 28:08.498

[JF]: Can we, can we connect those dots?

28:09.485 --> 28:09.665

[AK]: Yeah.

28:09.805 --> 28:20.974

[AK]: So, I mean, Munster is an event that happens in the 16th century that has to do with people taking over a city, people whose sort of spiritual descendants are the Mennonites.

28:21.394 --> 28:24.597

[AK]: But I'm not at all pinning what happens on the Mennonites because they do all kinds of stuff.

28:25.217 --> 28:28.960

[AK]: In some ways, they really reflect early Mormons better than modern day Mennonites.

28:29.380 --> 28:31.622

[AK]: They're doing polygamy in this city.

28:32.182 --> 28:33.644

[AK]: They're doing kind of total anarchy.

28:36.866 --> 28:39.427

[JF]: they look like what's going on in American cities in 2020.

28:40.247 --> 28:40.667

[AK]: Well, yeah.

28:40.747 --> 28:41.527

[AK]: That's what they look like.

28:41.567 --> 28:42.188

[AK]: They really do.

28:42.208 --> 28:55.851

[AK]: Because polyamory, however polyamory is actually functioning in modern Seattle or San Francisco, the actual practice, the observable thing that you can see with your own eyes is the same.

28:56.011 --> 29:05.174

[AK]: That is that human beings who are actually created to match up one to one, a man with a woman, are now matching up like one to five, one to four, whatever.

29:05.874 --> 29:14.618

[AK]: And the fallout from that, because it's running against what you can't not acknowledge is true, which is that you're set up for that one-to-one match.

29:14.798 --> 29:17.440

[AK]: You were made for that one-to-one match, one man, one woman.

29:17.840 --> 29:32.647

[AK]: When you push against those boundaries, you are going to encounter varieties of chaos within yourself and other people that you didn't even imagine, which is why things like Munster in the 16th century look like miniature versions of things that we only really

29:33.007 --> 29:38.768

[AK]: become capable of on a massive scale in the 20th century when our technology catches up with our delusions.

29:39.488 --> 29:45.070

[AK]: Because now we can institute massive campaigns of killing, massive campaigns of destruction of marriage.

29:45.450 --> 29:49.051

[AK]: And once we do that, we end up replicating Munster all over the world.

29:49.511 --> 30:00.193

[AK]: So what's kind of helpful about it is that it's a little snapshot of a bunch of stuff that it would take roughly 500 years for us to accomplish as a species, again, on a much bigger scale.

30:00.373 --> 30:01.954

[JF]: And you think that's what's actually happening right now?

30:02.474 --> 30:15.118

[AK]: Yeah, I think what is happening is that we are utilizing technology in a way because the technology is unprecedentedly powerful in a way that is unprecedentedly destructive.

30:15.560 --> 30:18.382

[JF]: Yeah, we don't even know what we're doing.

30:18.703 --> 30:26.449

[AK]: And we have no idea because I think that the thing that the human being never knows, and this goes for anybody with anything that you do wrong.

30:26.489 --> 30:29.612

[AK]: I'm not just talking about like completely destroying your family.

30:29.632 --> 30:34.956

[AK]: I'm talking about like when you said something and it wasn't the right thing to say and you knew it at the time.

30:35.737 --> 30:42.943

[AK]: When we do things that are wrong, however, whatever your standard is, dear listener, dear viewer, whenever we do things that are wrong,

30:44.397 --> 30:48.339

[AK]: We do things that we disappoint us, not to speak of the Bible or God.

30:49.820 --> 30:52.341

[AK]: Those always have consequences that we cannot foresee.

30:52.761 --> 31:03.887

[AK]: Because the thing about the power to choose good or evil in the present moment is that it gives us a kind of delusion that we are like gods and that we can determine everything.

31:04.647 --> 31:09.810

[AK]: If that were true, we would be able to know, OK, if I do this, that's going to end up costing 1,762 lives within the next three months.

31:12.912 --> 31:14.013

[AK]: But we never know that kind of thing.

31:15.033 --> 31:15.914

[AK]: We can sometimes guess.

31:16.854 --> 31:25.619

[AK]: And with our really big stuff, like ideologies, so reinstating the kingdom of God on Earth, that's what they were doing in Munster in the 16th century.

31:26.180 --> 31:28.661

[AK]: Communism, National Socialism, whatever.

31:29.281 --> 31:35.305

[AK]: You never have any idea of what it's going to cost you once you've made that decision from which you cannot go back.

31:35.925 --> 31:36.686

[AK]: You just don't know.

31:37.746 --> 31:54.401

[AK]: And previous generations, because they anchored how they talked to each other about the past within a specific civilization that was already over, right, Greco-Roman civilization, they would call what I just described as crossing the Rubicon.

31:54.601 --> 31:56.823

[AK]: That's when Caesar decides to invade Italy.

31:57.904 --> 31:59.165

[AK]: That's going to enrage the Senate.

31:59.445 --> 32:01.447

[AK]: And from that point on, he either wins or he dies.

32:01.687 --> 32:03.509

[AK]: He either becomes Caesar or he dies.

32:03.829 --> 32:05.891

[JF]: Is Trump in Seattle and Portland?

32:05.951 --> 32:06.312

[JF]: It's great.

32:06.532 --> 32:08.213

[JF]: Keep going.

32:08.534 --> 32:22.227

[AK]: So when you're looking at history, whether it's Bible history or any history, the value that you get out of that is that you're seeing human beings who are not actually nearly as creative as we think we are making decisions.

32:22.328 --> 32:25.411

[AK]: And you can observe, it's like a shortcut to life experience.

32:25.891 --> 32:32.859

[AK]: And then you don't have to sit there and actually make the same stupid decision that was made 300 years ago in the same situation.

32:32.879 --> 32:36.443

[JF]: We're not nearly as creative as we think we are and we don't have near the memories we think we do.

32:36.843 --> 32:39.846

[JF]: Over a lifetime, you think you remember stuff and you really don't.

32:40.066 --> 32:40.627

[JF]: You really don't.

32:40.847 --> 32:47.635

[JF]: You make up stories based upon memories that affirm what you want to do now, basically.

32:48.135 --> 32:52.898

[JF]: The more you let somebody else tell you stories, the more is their stories you're using to make up your story.

32:52.938 --> 32:54.259

[JF]: It's just as simple as that.

32:54.299 --> 32:56.641

[JF]: You're going to believe and be what story you get told.

32:56.981 --> 33:01.104

[JF]: And again, Christians, like we kind of believe that the story of who Jesus is, is the primary one.

33:01.184 --> 33:02.345

[JF]: It's actually the only real one.

33:02.365 --> 33:03.045

[JF]: You got to get tied to it.

33:03.065 --> 33:03.926

[JF]: You know, all that kind of stuff.

33:04.526 --> 33:22.206

[JF]: But—so Munster, though, is of interest because in the midst of a Reformation revival, 1500s Europe, that saw the printing press and technology and also the stuff come together, the technology is part of what made so much of this possible, not only what we would call the good aspects of the Reformation, but Munster specifically is a place that was made possible by the printing press.

33:22.907 --> 33:31.195

[JF]: where it's pulling all of these eschatologically, end-of-the-world expectant Anabaptists together for some sort of new utopia.

33:31.915 --> 33:35.919

[JF]: They're peasantry by and large, which means they're starving, right?

33:35.939 --> 33:38.661

[JF]: The medieval world is Black Plague Era kind of stuff.

33:39.342 --> 33:41.684

[JF]: And they just are descending on this town.

33:41.744 --> 33:46.288

[JF]: In the meantime, in the middle of the town, you have a wild-eyed preacher,

33:48.810 --> 33:50.231

[JF]: We'll get into that a little bit more.

33:50.271 --> 34:06.100

[JF]: So this ties into what can happen, not only when you have the confusion that Babel brings, but then when it is usurped by technology and an individual man with his own will, the Ubermensch, however he might be, if he's not really good, does some crazy stuff.

34:06.560 --> 34:08.922

[JF]: And then we want to look at that in that lens.

34:09.722 --> 34:13.663

[JF]: And we want to ask also then as Christians, what does that mean for where we are today?

34:13.984 --> 34:21.706

[JF]: It's not really about can we get a party elected at all, but it certainly is about how do we—I mean, I'll ask the question the way I'm asking it for myself, Adam.

34:22.226 --> 34:24.267

[JF]: The question is, it's not how do I go underground.

34:24.287 --> 34:25.528

[JF]: This is not the Benedict option.

34:25.548 --> 34:26.848

[JF]: You and I have talked about this before.

34:27.228 --> 34:31.450

[JF]: This is how do I go on the attack knowing I have to build my own boat, right?

34:31.790 --> 34:34.691

[JF]: Like, I need to be in my own boat to be able to attack.

34:35.131 --> 34:44.415

[JF]: And in that regard, I can't rely on the civilization to just prop me up the way that it seems Americana sort of did, at least for white people for a while.

34:44.435 --> 34:45.296

[JF]: I don't know.

34:45.316 --> 34:45.916

[JF]: What do you say?

34:46.056 --> 34:46.536

[JF]: What do you say?

34:48.077 --> 34:53.760

[AK]: I would say I would say that I find it more helpful to think about America the way that people that.

34:54.740 --> 35:05.188

[AK]: started exploring it, and then started founding it as a distinct country with its own ways, thought about it, rather than sort of how it was talked about in the 1950s.

35:05.248 --> 35:10.932

[AK]: Because I think already in the 20th century, you're being sold a version of America that's going to end up

35:11.632 --> 35:12.933

[AK]: sucking everybody into a city.

35:12.953 --> 35:19.116

[AK]: I think the 1920 census is the first time that more Americans live in urban areas than rural areas.

35:19.636 --> 35:27.199

[AK]: And when you get sucked into that, and then after that, you have the advent of radio and TV, and now the internet, you're going to get rid of accents, you're going to get rid of dialects.

35:27.439 --> 35:30.341

[AK]: With that always goes words for things.

35:30.441 --> 35:34.783

[AK]: I mean, like city people often don't, they can't even tell one tree from another, right?

35:34.843 --> 35:37.404

[AK]: So you're losing words for the world.

35:37.724 --> 35:39.665

[JF]: There's the ones with the needles.

35:41.159 --> 35:42.801

[AK]: And there's the other ones, right?

35:42.821 --> 35:43.702

[AK]: There's the other ones, yeah.

35:43.722 --> 35:45.404

[AK]: What's the difference?

35:46.425 --> 35:49.088

[AK]: There's the ones that look like a Christmas tree, and then there's the ones that don't, right?

35:49.648 --> 35:54.854

[JF]: Yeah, I'm trying to come up with a pun for deciduous, but I can't really do it very quickly, so I'm going to leave it at that.

35:54.894 --> 35:56.515

[AK]: Many have tried it and failed at that.

35:57.236 --> 36:11.042

[JF]: But you're suggesting there are epochs to American history, and by that we would include the explorers in pre-1776 kind of stuff, especially if we're going to understand our rights, liberties, and freedoms as, what, now native-born or converted citizens, whether you like it or not.

36:11.062 --> 36:12.122

[JF]: I'm just going to leave it at this right now.

36:12.162 --> 36:15.443

[JF]: This show is because whether I like it or not, I'm a citizen of the United States, and so is Adam.

36:15.463 --> 36:16.444

[JF]: We've got to figure out how to live here.

36:16.904 --> 36:18.224

[JF]: And so we're still here.

36:18.545 --> 36:19.385

[JF]: We want to be good people.

36:19.445 --> 36:20.245

[JF]: What do we do now?

36:20.906 --> 36:24.907

[JF]: To understand that, we've got to know there were epochs of this history that brought us to this point.

36:25.227 --> 36:26.868

[JF]: Before we go into all of that, Adam, again,

36:27.388 --> 36:29.789

[JF]: Along with the, you know, how do we live here now?

36:29.889 --> 36:30.969

[JF]: What are we trying to achieve?

36:31.009 --> 36:33.870

[JF]: I mean, we're setting a longer tenure for this podcast.

36:33.910 --> 36:35.330

[JF]: It's long form, but only an hour at a time.

36:37.471 --> 36:40.732

[JF]: What is it we need to see differently in all of this?

36:40.852 --> 36:43.332

[JF]: And you're not allowed to say Jesus, even though that's true too.

36:43.372 --> 36:46.073

[JF]: You have to be like, let's do the first article side of this thing.

36:46.673 --> 36:49.354

[JF]: Government-wise, what's our end goal here?

36:49.374 --> 36:50.434

[JF]: What are we trying to teach people?

36:51.635 --> 36:52.595

[AK]: Our end goal is

36:53.956 --> 36:57.237

[AK]: to give people a sense of how to understand things.

36:57.337 --> 37:04.879

[AK]: Because our goal is not to gain power over you such that you give us money or give us votes or something.

37:05.559 --> 37:09.340

[AK]: That is something unique about Christian preaching is that I don't want anything from you.

37:09.520 --> 37:10.801

[AK]: I simply want this for you.

37:11.241 --> 37:16.722

[AK]: And what I want for you is far greater wisdom about how the world works and why it works the way it does.

37:17.382 --> 37:23.304

[AK]: And also how relatively easy that is to see once you understand something about what has already happened.

37:24.810 --> 37:32.206

[AK]: than you're ever going to gain from listening to all the various sources you could be and probably are right now taking in.

37:33.868 --> 37:35.889

[JF]: Yeah, I think everyone has to agree with St.

37:35.909 --> 37:39.569

[JF]: Paul, whether you believe in the resurrection or not, that these things were written for our instruction, right?

37:39.590 --> 37:52.833

[JF]: The whole thing is there that we might not—I think Paul says this again of the Corinthians—desire evil as they did, and let us debate what evil may be if we must, but let's all agree we don't desire evil if we want to live in a civilized world.

37:52.853 --> 37:56.474

[JF]: We're going to work toward good instead, and let us figure out what that is.

37:56.494 --> 37:58.955

[JF]: Well, that's part of this huge, huge question.

38:00.834 --> 38:02.355

[JF]: I got one more thing that we talked about.

38:02.375 --> 38:04.738

[JF]: It's not on my notes in front of me, but we mentioned it in the text.

38:04.758 --> 38:05.719

[JF]: I think this is very important.

38:05.739 --> 38:07.981

[JF]: It may be the tangent that ends the show.

38:08.001 --> 38:08.401

[JF]: We'll see.

38:09.082 --> 38:17.209

[JF]: But like, OK, if we're going to talk about Babel and what happens because of Babel, that means we've introduced something called the Table of Nations.

38:18.130 --> 38:24.194

[JF]: And the speckled history of this thing is fascinating and a little bit of fun.

38:24.254 --> 38:27.876

[JF]: And so I would like to embark on this with the listener, at least.

38:28.516 --> 38:30.577

[JF]: Let's begin with it as a mythology.

38:30.637 --> 38:32.238

[JF]: Let's just assume it's a mythology.

38:32.398 --> 38:33.959

[JF]: It's a general record, right?

38:33.979 --> 38:35.140

[JF]: This is somebody's guess.

38:35.640 --> 38:41.164

[JF]: And then, you know, later when we get to things like the guys we know are really there for sure because we got like bones, right?

38:41.204 --> 38:41.584

[JF]: Okay, fine.

38:41.604 --> 38:42.464

[JF]: We'll acknowledge that.

38:42.884 --> 38:45.226

[JF]: But until then, let's also see there's some like

38:48.240 --> 38:53.465

[JF]: I'm just gonna say, you don't have to believe the Bible's all true to believe a lot of the stuff the Bible says, because it actually happened.

38:55.086 --> 38:55.947

[JF]: And it can inform you.

38:55.967 --> 38:58.029

[JF]: You don't have to throw it out and say there's no ancient history.

38:58.289 --> 39:01.011

[JF]: So that's what we want to do here a little bit with this table of nations thing.

39:01.152 --> 39:07.337

[JF]: And at least suggest that there are three primary civilizations that exist in ancient history, right?

39:07.377 --> 39:11.061

[JF]: With ties to each other and to a flood that they all seem to think happened.

39:11.161 --> 39:12.482

[JF]: But we can leave that for another time.

39:13.157 --> 39:13.337

[AK]: Right.

39:13.898 --> 39:16.279

[AK]: So Table of Nations is Genesis chapter 10.

39:16.599 --> 39:18.000

[AK]: So this comes right before Babel.

39:18.501 --> 39:27.146

[AK]: And the reason it comes right before is because God's intention for mankind is not that he be completely united in everything he's doing.

39:27.326 --> 39:28.467

[AK]: That's not actually necessary.

39:28.847 --> 39:30.068

[AK]: We don't all have to be the same.

39:30.589 --> 39:31.950

[AK]: There are three sons of Noah.

39:32.230 --> 39:34.471

[AK]: They survived the flood with him along with their wives.

39:34.931 --> 39:36.533

[AK]: The sons are Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

39:37.461 --> 39:41.845

[AK]: So classically by people who understand these things actually to have happened, which we also do.

39:42.946 --> 39:45.128

[AK]: Shem is sort of the Middle East.

39:47.029 --> 39:50.772

[AK]: And I'm going to say sort of because you have a lot of movement obviously after Genesis chapter 10.

39:51.453 --> 39:58.939

[AK]: Ham is sort of Africa beginning from Egypt and kind of extending down as far as the Bible cares to narrate.

39:59.580 --> 40:00.460

[AK]: And Japheth is

40:01.465 --> 40:07.087

[AK]: You could think of it then as just Eurasia, which will then separate into Europe and Asia over time.

40:08.067 --> 40:21.891

[AK]: But this is to say that everyone has a common source in Noah, but the fact that they are different and that they spread out from each other after they're together, after the cleansing of the world, the fact that they then spread out is actually fine.

40:22.011 --> 40:22.552

[AK]: It's OK.

40:23.132 --> 40:29.414

[AK]: So that Christianity, for instance, doesn't actually, unlike, say, Islam, have a specific holy language that everyone has to recite.

40:30.493 --> 40:38.560

[AK]: And the reason for that is that the fact that we have different languages or different nations and the kind of the sense of like ethnicity that we are different from each other is actually okay.

40:38.660 --> 40:40.842

[AK]: It's neither here nor there in and of itself.

40:41.143 --> 40:44.586

[JF]: We're not against the diversity of a binary reality as Christians.

40:44.626 --> 40:45.767

[JF]: It's not our issue, right?

40:45.787 --> 40:47.428

[JF]: We're okay with things being different.

40:47.889 --> 40:50.471

[JF]: We're okay with there being a day and an evening and all this kind of stuff.

40:51.552 --> 40:56.396

[JF]: But I want to emphasize some key, like, I don't know, political points here.

40:58.106 --> 41:08.273

[JF]: That means we are working with the assumption that humans, as we know them on the planet right now, the seven billion of us plus, have a common ancestor.

41:09.394 --> 41:10.575

[JF]: But that is our assumption.

41:10.635 --> 41:14.256

[JF]: Now, I don't know that everyone out there assumes that.

41:14.296 --> 41:15.457

[JF]: I think you should.

41:15.497 --> 41:16.918

[JF]: I think it's pretty weird to not.

41:16.978 --> 41:22.881

[JF]: I mean, I know we got the debates about the homo others and all this, the older sapiens that were around or whatnot.

41:24.302 --> 41:32.666

[JF]: But aside from that, science even shows us pretty clearly that there was like a genetic eve, I think is what they call it or something like that.

41:33.306 --> 41:38.530

[JF]: So we believe that, and then we're like, oh, it happened again, you know, with Noah, but whatever.

41:38.570 --> 41:42.752

[JF]: Let's just assume that, you know, it's the mother who got off the boat with Noah, right?

41:42.952 --> 41:45.594

[JF]: If you really want to worry about it, you know, and it was a local flood, blah, blah, blah.

41:45.614 --> 41:46.815

[JF]: Just ignore that argument for now.

41:47.856 --> 41:48.596

[JF]: And stick with that.

41:48.656 --> 41:50.557

[JF]: We all have one source.

41:51.138 --> 41:52.319

[JF]: That's our affirmation.

41:52.359 --> 41:54.300

[JF]: But then we also have three colonies.

41:54.820 --> 41:56.000

[JF]: that came from that source.

41:56.040 --> 42:01.122

[JF]: So imagine flying to different planets for billions of years and then coming back together, and what came of that?

42:01.662 --> 42:13.625

[JF]: And because evolution didn't have to take place, but in fact the design of creation adapts faster than evolution could ever hope it could do, you come back and you end up with things that look as diverse as China, Egypt, and Persia.

42:14.045 --> 42:17.808

[JF]: You know, this sort of is your big ancient reality that comes out of this.

42:18.309 --> 42:20.331

[JF]: And Persia being Assyria, right?

42:20.351 --> 42:22.753

[JF]: It starts with Assyria and then eventually becomes Persia.

42:23.433 --> 42:30.500

[JF]: And eventually what was China or Wei or whatever, the ancient East, that's because of the way that the central plains work.

42:30.720 --> 42:34.243

[JF]: That's also Japheth, who ends up in the far north.

42:34.423 --> 42:39.226

[JF]: So you're Norse, and you're Finnish, and all this, that all becomes the Japhethites, and they're these outsiders.

42:39.266 --> 42:49.252

[JF]: Too much of the biblical story, really, most of the biblical story takes place within Shem's tents, and there's engagement with Ham from time to time, you know, Exodus, stuff like that.

42:49.573 --> 42:56.877

[JF]: So, you know, again, say what you will about our beliefs regarding this, the history is pretty, like, presumable, right?

42:56.917 --> 42:57.818

[JF]: Most of this, right?

42:58.338 --> 42:58.959

[JF]: What do you say?

42:59.881 --> 43:18.749

[AK]: So I think it's really easy to see why this matters when you realize that either in mythologies that are explicitly mythologies, so Shinto, the traditional religion of Japan, or a lot of American Indian mythologies, they will account for the creation of themselves.

43:19.669 --> 43:21.050

[AK]: There's no account of the world.

43:21.290 --> 43:23.290

[AK]: There's no account of where everything came from.

43:23.310 --> 43:25.271

[AK]: There's an account of themselves, right?

43:25.291 --> 43:29.453

[AK]: So the Chinese flood myth, for instance, is wrapped up in a story about where the Chinese came from.

43:30.673 --> 43:34.594

[AK]: You can see this too in modern mythologies concerning human diversity, right?

43:34.674 --> 43:36.395

[AK]: So you have a favored class.

43:36.795 --> 43:46.857

[AK]: Sometimes it's as crude as people of color, meaning their virtue is that they're not white, but it'll be like you'll be given lots of knowledge about the history of Jews or the history of blacks.

43:47.277 --> 43:49.498

[AK]: You'll have relatively little knowledge about

43:51.541 --> 44:03.069

[AK]: I don't know, colonial Massachusetts, actually a source of things that are real in modern America in a very big way, or colonial Virginia, which provided a bunch of the first presidents.

44:03.569 --> 44:17.298

[AK]: So people won't know about that, but they'll know about sort of the histories, at least in some regard, of what are understood within our society post-civil rights era as protected classes.

44:18.098 --> 44:34.209

[AK]: that's dangerous in the sense that knowledge of anyone's history to the exclusion of anyone else's, especially in a really complex place like the modern U.S., is going to end up elevating that people group over others in the same way that pagan mythologies elevate their own nation over all others, right?

44:34.249 --> 44:38.072

[AK]: So the expression of, well, why do the Chinese deserve to rule over the Koreans?

44:38.172 --> 44:44.417

[AK]: Or why do the Japanese deserve to rule over the Ainu, who are actually sort of the people in the Japanese islands before the Japanese?

44:45.537 --> 44:58.362

[AK]: That's always explained in terms of, well, we have a mythology, we have a history, we have the God's blessing, we are the chosen people of the gods or God or whatever, and therefore we deserve to rule.

44:58.802 --> 45:06.865

[AK]: So here power is connected to only knowing somebody's history and especially asserting that we really have nothing to do with each other.

45:07.245 --> 45:24.100

[AK]: Because as soon as you can say that, as soon as you can say, we don't have a common problem, say sin, and that doesn't have a common solution, say Jesus Christ, as soon as we're all completely different and disconnected, that's the point at which you get to destroy me if you're not like me, because I'm not even really a person.

45:24.481 --> 45:26.983

[AK]: You don't even have a way to account for the fact that I exist.

45:27.443 --> 45:30.045

[JF]: The British called the French frogs as frogs.

45:31.004 --> 45:33.365

[JF]: We're going to kill them frogs because they're racists.

45:33.405 --> 45:34.745

[JF]: That's what they were, those British.

45:34.765 --> 45:38.866

[JF]: But so were the French, because so was everybody until they realized that they shouldn't be.

45:39.006 --> 45:43.648

[JF]: And the only civilization I've ever been aware of actually trying to do that is the one we're in.

45:43.668 --> 45:46.849

[JF]: I don't know of any other civilization that started being like, we're not going to be racists.

45:48.144 --> 45:48.745

[JF]: I don't know of any.

45:48.885 --> 45:49.846

[JF]: Can you think of any, Adam?

45:51.067 --> 45:57.773

[AK]: No, and I mean if you look at like the abolition of slavery, I mean slavery exists in like basically every human society you can think of.

45:57.853 --> 45:59.734

[AK]: Including among the lizard people on islands.

45:59.894 --> 46:02.217

[AK]: Just saying.

46:03.418 --> 46:07.281

[AK]: Only western countries have ever gone about abolishing it in any kind of formal way.

46:08.942 --> 46:15.006

[JF]: Mythology is necessary to property rights, is what I got out of your most recent set of things, which I think is really interesting.

46:15.026 --> 46:17.287

[JF]: We tell ourselves stories to make it okay to have what we have.

46:17.607 --> 46:22.050

[JF]: That's called justification, if you're keeping score at home, which is kind of fun.

46:22.691 --> 46:25.833

[JF]: But going back to Shamham Japheth.

46:26.393 --> 46:26.533

[AK]: Yeah.

46:27.332 --> 46:31.674

[JF]: So when I say Persia or Assyria, you said Middle East, right?

46:31.714 --> 46:38.396

[JF]: So this means that the Jews are related to the Palestinians in a way that I am not.

46:38.597 --> 46:41.278

[JF]: Their families are closer to each other's families, right?

46:41.898 --> 46:51.382

[JF]: Whereas, strangely, what we call the White, the Anglo, whatever that means, the Western Eurasian and the Eastern Eurasian are kind of

46:52.822 --> 46:55.384

[JF]: distantly connected to each other and are closer in that way.

46:55.804 --> 47:06.090

[JF]: And then you have what Cush, Egypt, what becomes Africa, which I don't think anybody has any question today, that black people are black.

47:06.230 --> 47:07.951

[JF]: They are not white.

47:08.071 --> 47:09.812

[JF]: They are not, what, Japhethites?

47:09.972 --> 47:12.094

[JF]: They are not Shemites.

47:12.194 --> 47:13.014

[JF]: They are Hamites.

47:13.434 --> 47:14.695

[JF]: And that's cool, yo.

47:14.835 --> 47:19.338

[JF]: I'm okay with all of this, and we are because our presumption is that we're all from the same grandma.

47:19.798 --> 47:20.018

[JF]: right?

47:20.898 --> 47:31.041

[JF]: But we should not pretend that we haven't been on different planets for a while, and that we, like, have to figure out how to talk again, and then also, generally, we're all evil and we'll try to use each other.

47:32.602 --> 47:32.962

[AK]: Correct.

47:33.022 --> 47:33.442

[AK]: Bummer.

47:33.602 --> 47:46.666

[AK]: And I think another way to understand this is that the Bible, although it can acknowledge something that will eventually be called race, thinks more directly in terms of what we might call ethnicity.

47:47.543 --> 47:50.726

[AK]: That is, what is the difference between a Norwegian and a Dane?

47:50.987 --> 47:57.233

[AK]: What is the difference between somebody who is Zulu and somebody who is Xhosa in modern South Africa?

47:57.834 --> 48:02.138

[AK]: And so race is kind of a category that you could certainly acknowledge.

48:03.580 --> 48:14.727

[AK]: kind of sitting on top of ethnicity, but ethnicity defined as having a common ancestor and it's more than just sort of simple genetics or sort of the way that you look.

48:14.767 --> 48:19.450

[AK]: It's also things like your language, your food, your culture, your shared history.

48:19.890 --> 48:24.153

[AK]: That sort of stuff matters in a way that often gets lost for modern people

48:24.813 --> 48:28.475

[AK]: partly because modern places are much more mixed up.

48:28.615 --> 48:29.756

[AK]: Everyone is more mixed.

48:30.576 --> 48:31.637

[AK]: Everyone is more mobile.

48:32.437 --> 48:46.165

[AK]: Everyone has been in the place that he's been in usually a lot for a much shorter time than in the ancient world where people are traveling less, moving less, seeing different things less, and therefore have more shared history with the people that they live right next to.

48:46.385 --> 48:54.370

[JF]: Yeah, I mean you would find somebody in ancient Babylon who would live next door – you know, a white guy and a black guy effectively would live next door to each other and not think a thing of it because they live next door to each other, right?

48:54.891 --> 49:05.858

[JF]: And yet they might – the same guy might see someone from a different tribe from his continent, right, both of them, and simply on the basis of that despise him because of a long history of stories they've told each other in the family.

49:06.559 --> 49:14.144

[JF]: Again, the history of power then, if we're going to look at the structures that have become what today we call hegemonic nations, global states and the companies that run them.

49:15.144 --> 49:31.842

[JF]: If we're going to look at that, then we have to see how these three giant families dispersed were thrust back together over the last couple millennium because of technological advancements, as well as for the sake of, we would say,

49:32.182 --> 49:35.564

[JF]: the spread of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and this impactful day called Pentecost.

49:35.604 --> 49:36.205

[JF]: But forget it.

49:36.245 --> 49:37.326

[JF]: Just get rid of all the technologies.

49:37.346 --> 49:38.366

[JF]: It's all technology's fault.

49:38.686 --> 49:42.089

[JF]: We've seen this pulling together of the globe in this regard.

49:42.469 --> 49:49.634

[JF]: And as a result, you've seen—the question has a little bit—is it fulfillment of prophecy from Noah to his sons?

49:50.234 --> 49:51.155

[JF]: How history's played out?

49:51.435 --> 49:57.639

[JF]: You certainly have seen a history of Cain and Abel more than a history of, say, Peter, James, and John as we meet each other.

49:58.079 --> 50:01.482

[JF]: And then that's what we're trying to kind of take a big snapshot of.

50:02.222 --> 50:10.118

[JF]: Let Munster be the Narrows, if we're gonna, and then let America be some Narrows too, right where we are now, so we can, again, make good citizen decisions.

50:10.979 --> 50:11.520

[JF]: Long and short.

50:12.663 --> 50:13.023

[JF]: Response?

50:15.549 --> 50:24.215

[AK]: I think it is helpful just to sort of wrap up, to think about technology as one of the most powerful forces.

50:24.795 --> 50:33.822

[AK]: Because when you look back at this primordial history of the world that you have in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, you get a mention that the people who are descended from the man who killed his brother, right?

50:33.842 --> 50:34.962

[AK]: So Cain kills Abel.

50:35.543 --> 50:39.546

[AK]: Cain's descendants are the people that are most technologically adept.

50:40.746 --> 50:42.607

[AK]: They're the people who invent the most.

50:43.287 --> 50:52.471

[AK]: And so one of the dynamics, I think, that you should pay attention to as you look at history and as you look at modernity and even the present day is who has control of what technology.

50:53.052 --> 50:55.753

[AK]: That doesn't tell you the end of the story.

50:55.993 --> 51:04.637

[AK]: I don't want to leave you hopeless, especially if you're a Christian, but even if you're not, you don't need to be hopeless because technology is not decisive.

51:05.257 --> 51:09.340

[AK]: Our God is, whether or not you acknowledge him right now, he is decisive.

51:09.780 --> 51:11.601

[AK]: He holds the fate of the nations in his hand.

51:12.542 --> 51:14.884

[AK]: So I'm not worried as I wake up every day.

51:15.804 --> 51:32.776

[AK]: But for human beings, understanding how powerful words are as a form of technology and how powerful technology is generally, is to understand a lot more about history than just saying, oh, it was this guy's fault or that guy's fault.

51:33.479 --> 51:42.962

[AK]: Because when you start thinking about history just in terms of people groups, you generally fail to explain why those people groups became powerful in the first place.

51:44.022 --> 51:46.043

[AK]: Why do the English dominate the Irish?

51:47.183 --> 51:50.264

[AK]: Why do Europeans dominate Africans in the 19th century?

51:50.704 --> 51:54.805

[AK]: Why do the Hutus dominate the Tutsis in Rwanda during the genocide?

51:55.185 --> 51:56.245

[AK]: Why do these things happen?

51:56.285 --> 51:58.306

[AK]: Why do the Hutus hate the Tutsis so much?

51:58.686 --> 52:01.687

[AK]: But look up Rwandan genocide, look at the dynamics leading up to it.

52:02.847 --> 52:12.133

[AK]: When you look at those things, you are seeing how technology interacts with how wicked human beings generally are, not only in groups but alone.

52:12.733 --> 52:22.439

[AK]: And then you can explain a lot more about what has happened and what is happening than some of the more simplistic ways of explaining things that you have on offer in so many other places.

52:23.353 --> 52:25.615

[JF]: So the question is not whose fault is it?

52:25.735 --> 52:27.116

[JF]: The question is who benefits?

52:27.216 --> 52:28.177

[JF]: Quibono, right?

52:28.217 --> 52:37.324

[JF]: And this is a question I want to bring up again and again because it's going to be the question that lets you ask or intrigue, peer behind the curtain of what's going on.

52:37.664 --> 52:42.888

[JF]: And I'm going to say it a little bit different way here as like an introductory parable, I guess.

52:43.949 --> 52:46.290

[JF]: It's not the guy who owns the gold mine.

52:46.791 --> 52:48.952

[JF]: It's the guy who makes and sells the shovels.

52:49.873 --> 52:53.134

[JF]: That's the guy who's making money hand over fist, right?

52:53.754 --> 52:57.635

[JF]: And so who benefits is always the question.

52:57.675 --> 53:07.678

[JF]: So let's kind of swing it all back around and spend like another six minutes to close here or so on Munster and say, who benefited from, what's his name?

53:08.558 --> 53:14.320

[JF]: Juan with the F, the first one, the one who rides out to Coyote style, Don Coyote style to his death.

53:14.760 --> 53:15.300

[JF]: What's his name?

53:17.284 --> 53:18.025

[AK]: Oh, you don't have it.

53:18.565 --> 53:21.529

[AK]: No, I was thinking about Thomas Munzer.

53:21.869 --> 53:23.351

[JF]: Okay, no, no, no.

53:23.891 --> 53:24.051

[JF]: Oh.

53:25.093 --> 53:25.593

[JF]: Okay, hold on.

53:25.913 --> 53:28.336

[JF]: Did we just did I confuse you then we're talking about?

53:28.556 --> 53:28.857

[AK]: You did.

53:29.137 --> 53:30.258

[JF]: Okay, that's all right.

53:30.518 --> 53:31.459

[JF]: We'll come back to that one.

53:31.740 --> 53:32.260

[JF]: We'll come back.

53:32.280 --> 53:33.642

[JF]: No one knows but you and me.

53:34.062 --> 53:37.326

[JF]: And they know that there's some guy that you know what I'm at least referring to, right?

53:38.533 --> 53:38.713

[JF]: No.

53:39.374 --> 53:39.895

[JF]: No, I'm lost.

53:39.935 --> 53:40.655

[JF]: You're gonna love it, then.

53:40.675 --> 53:41.236

[JF]: You're gonna love it.

53:41.877 --> 53:58.955

[JF]: We'll come back next time with the name of this guy who, again, is going to set up what I can only call a Don Coyote moment in real history, where he rides out of the city, which he has gotten people behind him, thousands of people in the city, to believe he's gonna go out and fight for God,

53:59.315 --> 54:07.259

[JF]: Against the you know the baron who's come out to meet him and he gets slaughtered in front of him and this the siege Goes on after this and this is just the monster again.

54:07.419 --> 54:12.782

[JF]: Yeah, we'll come back to that then let me close with this instead Who benefited oh?

54:14.182 --> 54:23.207

[JF]: man who benefited from from Babel Who benefits from Babel what an interesting question I'm afraid to ask it go I

54:23.956 --> 54:30.759

[AK]: The people that benefit are the people that control the real estate and the upper floors of the tower they're building.

54:31.960 --> 54:34.441

[AK]: That's who benefits, not the people who are building.

54:34.841 --> 54:37.923

[JF]: So we're assuming there's just, let's just, for the sake of analogy, right?

54:38.163 --> 54:41.464

[JF]: This is a story about you build a big tower to make a name for yourself in the ancient world.

54:41.804 --> 54:43.665

[JF]: Who's going to do what in this building, right?

54:43.925 --> 54:44.466

[JF]: And start again.

54:44.526 --> 54:45.106

[JF]: That's great though.

54:45.126 --> 54:45.866

[JF]: Your answer is awesome.

54:46.086 --> 54:46.407

[AK]: Keep going.

54:46.447 --> 54:53.290

[AK]: So it's, it's, it's not the guy, if you think about like, you've probably seen a picture of guys building skyscrapers in like 1930s New York and they're,

54:53.550 --> 54:58.413

[AK]: They're hanging off some steel beam, eating their lunch like 40 stories up, right?

54:59.173 --> 55:00.934

[AK]: That guy didn't go on to be a millionaire.

55:01.795 --> 55:04.937

[AK]: The guy that hired him made several hundred thousand dollars.

55:05.277 --> 55:08.339

[AK]: The guy that hired that guy was the guy that was actually benefiting.

55:09.099 --> 55:12.021

[AK]: That's the guy that gets to pass on that wealth to great, great grandkids.

55:12.101 --> 55:13.602

[JF]: Put his name on the side of the building.

55:14.693 --> 55:15.494

[AK]: Yeah, yeah.

55:15.634 --> 55:27.568

[AK]: And so it's the guy that's in control of the worker, not the worker who benefits from that work that is coordinated by technology, specifically in Genesis 11, that technology is a single language they can all talk to each other in.

55:30.745 --> 55:31.345

[JF]: Keep going on that.

55:31.805 --> 55:32.225

[AK]: You got more.

55:32.285 --> 55:47.749

[AK]: I mean, it's basically to see like, when you're looking at things that are occurring, whether it's your job or your family dynamics, or it's your country or it's history, you wanna look at what actually came out of it.

55:47.969 --> 55:49.690

[AK]: So this is why history is especially helpful.

55:50.090 --> 55:51.210

[AK]: What actually came out of it?

55:51.510 --> 55:53.191

[AK]: Who got rich, who got poor, right?

55:53.491 --> 55:55.571

[AK]: So let me just give you a simple example here, right?

55:55.631 --> 55:57.332

[AK]: I have four ancestors.

55:58.072 --> 56:02.614

[AK]: between the two sides of my family that died in the Civil War, all on the Union side.

56:03.974 --> 56:09.756

[AK]: The benefit they got out of that was a small pension, much smaller comparatively than it would be today.

56:11.837 --> 56:15.979

[AK]: They went back to poor farming communities, and life went on as it always had for them.

56:17.519 --> 56:22.081

[AK]: There were people, however, during the Civil War, especially in the North, who got fabulously wealthy.

56:22.821 --> 56:24.942

[AK]: Generally, they could pay for a replacement to go.

56:24.982 --> 56:26.943

[AK]: They didn't have to get drafted as my ancestors did.

56:27.888 --> 56:30.511

[AK]: And they got a lot wealthier during the Civil War.

56:31.332 --> 56:32.733

[AK]: So they benefited.

56:33.414 --> 56:36.276

[AK]: So that's to say, well, what is the actual effect of this thing?

56:36.957 --> 56:37.998

[AK]: Here are some actual effects.

56:38.058 --> 56:40.560

[AK]: They're always going to be some are going to be good, some are going to be bad.

56:41.206 --> 56:46.710

[AK]: You don't want to make a single judgment about anything, but you want to see what actually occurred.

56:47.170 --> 56:50.573

[AK]: Do I know that people became fabulously wealthy because the civil war happened?

56:51.053 --> 56:56.757

[AK]: Do I know that the United States became in much greater debt, or that's when we first started having income taxes, at least in the North.

56:57.878 --> 57:06.624

[AK]: All of these things are to say who actually benefited, not what was I told it was about, but what actually occurred and who actually benefited from what actually occurred.

57:07.873 --> 57:16.316

[JF]: So I think that's a nice place to put a footnote so that it can't be said we didn't address it as we talked about three major family groups spreading over the earth.

57:17.297 --> 57:19.017

[JF]: What about those Native Americans?

57:19.837 --> 57:24.619

[JF]: Where do they fit into that whole picture, including what you just said at the end, I think.

57:25.240 --> 57:28.981

[AK]: Do you mean, okay, because in the 19th century, Native Americans means like

57:30.000 --> 57:34.123

[JF]: How did the Mayans, how did the Incans, Mayans, Aztecs get here?

57:34.423 --> 57:39.487

[JF]: And then also to recognize that's no different from the same question who benefits all the way along, right?

57:39.627 --> 57:40.348

[AK]: Right, right.

57:40.608 --> 57:43.090

[AK]: So when you're thinking about like American Indians, right?

57:43.130 --> 57:48.654

[AK]: So one of the things you want to go back and you want to look at like, well, what did people tell themselves was going on, right?

57:49.035 --> 57:59.603

[AK]: So there's a mixture from American Indians, it's largely negative, but then you have some of these instances, especially in South America, where they see the coming of the whites, at least at first as prophecy or divine judgment.

58:00.944 --> 58:03.726

[AK]: But it's generally negative, okay, obviously.

58:05.327 --> 58:10.010

[AK]: The whites are telling themselves different things, right, or Europeans, whatever you want to call them.

58:10.230 --> 58:12.772

[AK]: The term white doesn't really exist as a demonym at the time.

58:13.430 --> 58:17.152

[AK]: So they're telling themselves this is happening so that we can spread the gospel to them, right?

58:17.172 --> 58:19.034

[AK]: So we're gonna use this as a means to spread the gospel.

58:19.394 --> 58:24.057

[AK]: That did actually occur, but it's not mainly what occurred necessarily.

58:25.038 --> 58:29.561

[AK]: So the thing to look at there is what is actually occurring, not what did I tell myself?

58:29.721 --> 58:38.146

[AK]: Because what people tell themselves, especially when they're going through a string of victories, is obviously God wanted this to occur.

58:38.687 --> 58:42.209

[AK]: That's generally what any people group will tell themselves when they're winning.

58:42.349 --> 58:44.550

[JF]: That's what anybody tells themselves when they're winning.

58:44.570 --> 58:46.671

[JF]: That people group, every individual on the planet.

58:46.771 --> 58:47.932

[JF]: Oh, thank you, God.

58:47.992 --> 58:49.672

[JF]: That guy doesn't have God on his side.

58:49.792 --> 58:50.973

[JF]: I scored the ball.

58:53.494 --> 59:02.418

[AK]: Even in cases, I mean, if you think about the motto that's on the Prussian troops that are part of the larger German Imperial troops in World War I, what is their motto?

59:02.819 --> 59:04.099

[AK]: God with us, right?

59:04.820 --> 59:07.561

[AK]: Does God actually care about the neutral status of Belgium?

59:08.081 --> 59:12.766

[AK]: Or whether or not Alsace remains in Germany or goes back to France?

59:12.786 --> 59:16.650

[JF]: My theological answer, insofar as it applies to our faith in Jesus Christ, he cares very much.

59:16.770 --> 59:18.272

[JF]: But you have a point though.

59:18.332 --> 59:21.635

[JF]: I mean he also knows where the she-goat gives birth and all that, so he knows it all.

59:22.316 --> 59:24.078

[JF]: But does he pay a lot of attention to it?

59:24.198 --> 59:26.961

[JF]: Is it his primary chief agenda, the neutrality of Belgium?

59:27.081 --> 59:27.461

[JF]: Probably not.

59:29.819 --> 59:36.882

[AK]: And so, recognize that human beings generally are lying factories because they're justification factories.

59:37.282 --> 59:41.544

[AK]: We're always churning out products that will explain things to us.

59:41.724 --> 59:45.866

[JF]: Let's do that for the secularists here, though, because I think it's not fair for us to assume original sin.

59:46.406 --> 59:54.169

[JF]: even though I think it's fair for everybody to assume original sin if you just strip it away of the theological kind of boogeyman that you got with it.

59:54.449 --> 01:00:05.332

[JF]: I mean, just as a catch-all term for talking about the generally cynical and narcissistic bend of humanity that, left unchecked, we tend unto violence.

01:00:05.392 --> 01:00:07.673

[JF]: I mean, can we not all just, like, affirm that?

01:00:07.753 --> 01:00:09.834

[JF]: And do we have to be, like, Christians to say that, right?

01:00:10.234 --> 01:00:11.655

[JF]: That's what you're meaning by this, right?

01:00:12.956 --> 01:00:13.497

[AK]: I do.

01:00:13.597 --> 01:00:19.461

[AK]: Why are you not the person you want to be, and why are other people so often not the people that you wanted them to be?

01:00:19.621 --> 01:00:20.702

[JF]: Right, right, right.

01:00:22.123 --> 01:00:31.090

[JF]: You gave me a few other questions that I'm really curious about to dive into next time, but I think that's a good bite off the top of the iceberg here.

01:00:32.010 --> 01:00:33.071

[JF]: We're in it for the long haul.

01:00:33.091 --> 01:00:33.652

[JF]: The goal

01:00:35.393 --> 01:00:40.475

[JF]: The goal of a brief history of power is not simply to show you who hurt who when first.

01:00:40.895 --> 01:00:43.096

[JF]: Hatfield and McCoy, it's round and round and round and round.

01:00:43.436 --> 01:00:48.357

[JF]: And if we're just going to ask who did it first, an eye for an eye, then it's going to be a whole lot of death, a lot of death for death.

01:00:48.957 --> 01:00:56.660

[JF]: So the alternative is to learn how history has rhymed so as to curb our lesser nature into a more civilized format.

01:00:56.700 --> 01:01:00.741

[JF]: And whether you believe you need a monotheistic idea or not doesn't matter to me.

01:01:00.781 --> 01:01:02.502

[JF]: If you agree, we need a civilized life.

01:01:02.942 --> 01:01:06.745

[JF]: I'm happy to disagree about whether there's a God if we agree that we shouldn't kill each other.

01:01:07.066 --> 01:01:10.849

[JF]: And then from there, we can talk about how to recognize the powers of nature or whatever, right?

01:01:11.129 --> 01:01:18.375

[JF]: But right now, I think we stand at a time in history where we very well could descend into a global barbarianism, at least on certain levels.

01:01:18.535 --> 01:01:29.524

[JF]: And so to be able to learn to think and not just believe what I was told back in the vault with Fallout School about how Americana was so great, and if you don't catch the references, that's fine.

01:01:29.824 --> 01:01:32.126

[JF]: But the point is, we were all trained

01:01:32.586 --> 01:01:39.231

[JF]: to watch the great America defeat the great Russia, at least regardless of your skin color, I think, in this country.

01:01:39.872 --> 01:01:42.394

[JF]: Many of us watched that Challenger go boom together.

01:01:43.614 --> 01:01:49.739

[JF]: We knew something was a kilter, something was off, and a whole generation became cynics and complainers.

01:01:50.239 --> 01:02:00.007

[JF]: Now there's a generation that wants revolution, and they're either going to revolt into chaos or they're going to discover those things you can't not know, which are good for your neighbor, which we hope to again discover as we look at what

01:02:00.427 --> 01:02:01.368

[JF]: fell apart in the past.

01:02:01.828 --> 01:02:07.032

[JF]: My guest, my real, the real source of value in the show, I know his name, but his title is so cool.

01:02:07.052 --> 01:02:13.157

[JF]: The good Reverend Dr. Adam Coutts, Associate Professor of Exegetics at ctsfw.edu.

01:02:13.197 --> 01:02:15.679

[JF]: That's Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

01:02:15.699 --> 01:02:17.340

[JF]: You can go learn from this guy at his feet there.

01:02:17.981 --> 01:02:22.607

[JF]: He is an agrarian egghead white guy, and your worst nightmare, because science is definitely racist.

01:02:22.807 --> 01:02:26.131

[JF]: I am sometimes right, but generally jovial Reverend Jonathan Fiske.

01:02:26.492 --> 01:02:28.334

[JF]: Lots of stuff about me you can find elsewhere.

01:02:28.414 --> 01:02:34.562

[JF]: Patreon, and my Patreon is how the show is paid for, but you don't need to pay a dime to listen to this show, because it's all about some other thing.

01:02:34.622 --> 01:02:35.683

[JF]: This is here just for you.

01:02:36.204 --> 01:02:44.410

[JF]: to learn how to put your fist in the air and then maybe put it back down again and extend the right hand of peace toward your neighbor, because we're all in this thing together.

01:02:44.490 --> 01:02:45.831

[JF]: Pastor Koons, thank you for your time.

01:02:45.851 --> 01:02:47.131

[JF]: Thanks a lot.

01:02:47.231 --> 01:02:48.793

[JF]: I shouldn't say that since we're co-hosts.

01:02:48.813 --> 01:02:51.314

[JF]: Why would I thank my co-host for his time?

01:02:53.155 --> 01:02:59.920

[JF]: We'll just leave it at that, and I will assume that Yamabe, who is going to hear this at some point, will cut off this part.