The Secret History of Biblical Giants, Demons, and the Advanced Civilizations Before the Great Flood

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38:35Paleovalley.com, code Tucker, 20 % off your first purchase. So up until World War II, the Japanese emperor was having sex with a sun goddess? Yes. So Hirohito would have been the last one. So within living memory. Yeah. Hirohito would have been the last one. Yeah. Who was the sun goddess? Well, I mean, this is, he would go into a chamber with a number of concubines who are embodying, right, the sun goddess. So this is exactly this kind of ritual still going on. So how did, okay, so this is Japan, which is an island in East Asia. Yeah. And this is a precise replication of what was happening in the Near East.

39:24Yes. It was a long way away. Yes. How, and then also in Indochina among the Kemmers. Yeah. Also far from Japan and even farther from the Middle East. So like, how are these totally different cultures, languages, geographic locations all doing exactly the same weird thing? Yeah. Well, and I mean, this is where we get to the idea of a demonic spirit. Because maybe it's real. Yeah. We just. Maybe. We have to accept this. And we. Is that the answer? It's real? We know this. Yeah. We know this, right? Right there, there we've seen sort of mass evil arise within living memory in the world that can't be explained by a large group of people all making the same bad decisions simultaneously by coincidence.

40:13Right. This is what brought me to God was this exact understanding. It was very obvious observation, which somehow I missed, but yes, that's right. Yeah. And we've all been on the less negative side. Right. We've all been in crowds. We've been in groups. We've been in stadiums. We've been in a place of worship with a group of people where we've had the experience of sort of acting together, right? Of participating in something together, right? And that's ultimately what a spirit is. A spirit is a sort of collective consciousness at a level of sort of above human, right? it's hard to understand, right?

41:00But if we work back a little bit, right? So our human body, right, is made up of, there are actually sub-organisms within our human body, right? It's kind of gross to think about, but chemically right now, my gut flora and your gut flora are having chemical conversations. I'm sorry? Right, as we sit here. the bacteria that our digestive bacteria communicate chemically with one another with one another yeah when when humans get together right there are all of these functions going on within our bodies right that have their own kind of low level consciousness and then we have our human consciousness which is sort of over the top of that which is the summing up of all of that.

41:57And so when we talk about angelic beings or demonic beings, we're just talking about a level of consciousness that's then above the individual human. But they're not projections of the individual human. They exist separate and apart from the human. They exist separate and apart, and we participate in them. Right, but we don't create them. We sort of embody them in the world. Right, we come to be, this is what God created humanity for originally. right so he said earlier adam is created sort of innocent at the beginning of this journey to grow into the the likeness of god the way he would do that is by functioning as god's image in the world so in in genesis 1 the six days of creation the first three days before that starts God says, the problem is that the earth is formless and void.

42:51In Hebrew, it's tohuwabohu. Tohuwabohu? Tohuwabohu, yeah, it rhymes. And it means basically it's formless or chaotic, it's disordered, and it's empty. And so in the first three days, God sets it in order. So he separates the light from the darkness. He separates the sky from the sea. He separates the dry land from the sea. So he places everything in order. And then in the second set of three days, days four, five, and six, they correspond, right? So day four, he's already separated light from darkness, sun, moon, stars, right? Sort of the bodies. He's already separated the sky and the sea. Fifth day, he fills the sky with life.

43:41He fills the sea with life. sixth day he creates um land animals and man right because on the third day he had separated so he's taking care of those but then he says to man when he's been created fill the earth and subdue it and what is that two-part command subdue means to put it in order right and fill it fill it with life. And so humanity is created to sort of continue that work of God in the world. That's the purpose, to continue to participate in what God is doing in the world. That then transforms humanity. So positive example of this, God is at work continually in the world loving every human person.

44:32When I go and I show love to my neighbor, that love's not coming from me, right? I'm participating in God's love. God is loving them through me, but that transforms me. Yes. That love transforms and changes me more toward God's likeness, right? And the reverse is true, right and in that way i'm sort of embodying the spirit of god the holy spirit in the world the flip side is true that means humanity can also embody other spirits in the world and when you do that and you bring that into the world and make it concrete that also changes you and it's not just a spiritual or a psychological transformation it's even a physical transformation And we've seen that.

45:21You can see someone who has gone down a dark road in life, a photo of them. Yes. They repent, they change, they come back. You see a photo of them out. You can physically see it. Well, there's no question about it. That transformation happens in both directions. You can read it in their faces. Yeah. And so as humans, we're going to participate in something. There are things larger than us at work in the world. Right. God being the most important one. And we're either going to participate in what he's doing in the world and be formed and shaped by that, or we're going to participate in something else and be formed and shaped by that.

45:58And the end of that is our destruction of ourselves and each other. there are um the reason i was lingering on the creation of the nephilim yeah is because it suggests this idea that sounds really radical when you first think about it that there are hybrids yeah spirit human together um but then as you talk about it a little bit you realize that every culture has always believed this in fact jesus has described as the as the union of god and a human woman it's like actually it's a central concept everywhere all the time like it's not shocking yeah right right not in a sexual way in that case yeah let's be clear yeah right not sexual right but yes yeah yeah this baby is the product of god's spirit and a human right and christ is the express image of god right he is the fullness of the image right and the greek myths tell different but related stories about people being so why is it crazy and i think people have you know lived in the world for a while why is it crazy to someone have a feeling when you're talking to someone that this is not that there's something else going on here that this person's not you know does this still happen yeah i i think i have felt that way really strongly about people in charge a couple of times, not just, I disagree with them.

47:28I just, you know, I think you're a bad person. It's not even that it's like, what is this? Yeah. Yeah. No, I have, I have only kind of thankfully met a person like that once in my life. It was in a part of my, uh, pastoral training in a, in a forensic psych ward. Uh, I met a person who had done, I won't describe what, cause it's hideous and you won't be able to get it out of your head, but had done horrific things to a child and that's how he ended up there yes but who enjoyed bragging about it and describing it in detail to people and watching the look on their faces right like that level of gone so there are people like that and did you feel as you talked to this person or listened to this person that there was this was not fully human or this was some kind of hybrid you could look in his eyes and see that there was something in inhuman there i've had that same experience with people not not quite as cartoonish and obvious as that but still like what is this yeah yeah so what is this it's well i mean i mean that's so we would say in the church that that to become like christ to be formed in in the likeness of god is to become truly human that's what it means to be human yes and so to the degree which you go down the other road you become something inhuman uh saint john chrysostom in one of his uh homilies uh is talking to so he's he's preaching in uh constantinople to just regular people fourth century yeah into the fourth beginning of the fifth yeah and he says to uh his people he says so you believe that uh if someone dies a violent death they become a demon right so we kind of had that cultural idea too right somebody dies some kind of violent or horrible death they come back as this vengeful ghost or whatever yeah exactly yeah murder victims haunt the house where they were killed yeah so they apparently had that kind of idea too and he says uh that's incorrect he says it is people who live like demons who become demons.

49:40So, in the same way that there is an actual transformation of humanity, as we're formed in the likeness of God, there is an actual transformation of humanity into something else. Of course, and it's obvious. You become how you live, for sure. When you go down that other, it's an actual metaphysical transformation of who you are, even to the point where, so a big part of the understanding of what's going on with the Nephilim before the flood is that a lot of the demonic spirits that are talked about later in scripture and after the flood are understood to be the spirits of those Nephilim, of those dead Nephilim.

50:21This is explicit in like the book of Jubilees, which is a uh, uh, Jewish texts from the period in between the, the old and new testaments, but a very important one. Um, if you read like Josephus's, uh, Jewish antiquities, he's cribbing from the history and Jubilees all the time. Uh, he just accepts it as historical. Um, and it talks about, uh, at the time of the flood, the Nephilim are wiped out. they all die and they have sort of a leader who's named uh mastima and mastima comes to god and wants to strike this bargain with him don't don't send us all into the abyss don't send us all into into uh like a fire let some of us stay on the earth we promise if you let us do that we'll only torment bad people we'll only torment wicked people um and uh in in the book of jubilees God agrees to allow 10 % of them to remain, to torment wicked people, but it says that God's motive is he wants to use that to bring wicked people to repentance, right?

51:32So there's sort of a theodicy going on there, right? Sort of just in case of God, why does God allow these demonic spirits? But you see reflections of that story, even in like the gospels, right because they're the the spirits are told at that time you're going to be uh you're allowed to honor and tell the last judgment and then you're going to the lake of fire with everybody else but you get this sort of reprieve so for example when when christ comes to the demoniac man and the demons say to him have you come to torment us before the time exactly like hey wait we had a deal. Yeah. Right. And then he ends up casting them into the pigs and the pigs run off the cliff and it says they run off the cliff into the abyss, which is the place where those other demonic spirits were imprisoned.

52:22And there's a dynamic going on there where the name Jesus is actually the name Joshua. Right. Of course, Joshua in the book of Joshua goes and battles these giant clans to sort of reclaim the land and purify them from evil. that's paralleled with Christ as sort of the true Joshua comes into the land to purify it from evil. And he's dealing with the spirits of these same, these same beings. And so the, the idea that how does that become a spirit? Well, I mean, we've seen this, right? You can point to men in history who were wicked men, right? Who are long dead, but their spirit has lived on. oh no doubt people have continued to participate in that spirit and embody it right and bring it forward the same's true on the other side those are the people we call saints right they live a lived a life embodying the spirit of god being formed into his likeness and even though they've died sort of their spirit lives on they become the patroness of people and nations and right families and people groups um and continue to have this life right as so you're describing the process of becoming that every person experiences you're becoming something but genesis 6 is describing an act of creation yeah saying that these beings were different from the very start because they didn't have two human parents yes so that's a very different thing Well, and there's, so we also have to understand what it means to be part of a people in the ancient sense.

54:04We have concepts like ethnicity and DNA and these kind of things. Of course, they had no idea about those concepts. So being part of a people was about two things. Participating in their initiation rituals. Yes. and then participating in the ongoing ritual life of the community. So biblically, you look at ancient Israel, what made you an Israelite is if you were male, you were circumcised. If you were female, you were either the daughter or the wife of a circumcised male. And you ate the Passover, right? You participated in the festal sort of year. within Christianity, right? It's your baptized initiation, right?

54:53And then you participate in the Eucharist and the ongoing sacramental life of the church. So the same was true on this other side, right? So what we've been talking about is essentially the initiation ritual, right? The beginning, right? And then there was an ongoing ritual life. And according to the book of wisdom or the wisdom of Solomon, that depending on where you land, right? Christianity may or may not be part of your Old Testament. Makes this explicit. Other texts outside of the scriptures make this explicit that the ongoing ritual life of these people involved human sacrifice and human sacrifice involved cannibalism.

55:37Yes. We have a very skewed view of sacrifice. We haven't done a lot of animal sacrifice and seen a lot of it. So we have kind of a skewed view that it's about killing the animal. It's not really about killing the animal. It's about eating the animal. Yes. Part of it being offered to God or a God and then part of it being consumed, right? And so cannibalism, either at the level you see in Mesoamerica, right, blood drinking, right? That's why blood drinking is forbidden throughout the Bible. And so there was cannibalism involved in this human sacrifice. and so that was sort of renewed you have this initiation you have this beginning and then there is this ongoing ritual participation yes and i mean not to disagree with you but i just have to ask like if so if ancient peoples had no sense of genetics why were genealogies so important well that's that's descent right yeah but it's genetic descent yeah yeah but that could be broken right so let me give you an example um caleb there are sort of two there's there's the episode after the exodus where the spies one spy from each of the 12 tribes of israel is sent into the land and 10 of them come back and say no there's nephilim there we can't do it yeah it's gonna be too tough right you don't want to mess with them right uh and two of them joshua and caleb come back and say, no, yeah, we can't do this by ourselves, but God's on our side.

57:12God's going to win the victory for us. Put your faith in him. We can do this. Caleb is identified in the text as being a Kenizzite. A Kenizzite is not only a Canaanite, it's one of the Canaanite tribes they were supposed to wipe out. It's one of the giant clans. It's these people. He's technically one of them, genetically or by descent. Right. But he's listed as an elder of the tribe of Judah in the Old Testament because he was incorporated. And when you're incorporated, they would have said about him, no, Judah was his father. He was a descendant of Judah. Right? Now we would say, well, not genetically.

57:57Right. But from their view, now that he's been ritually incorporated, you didn't just become an Israelite in general. You became a member of a particular family that was part of a particular clan that was part of a particular tribe. Right? And those are now his people, and the Kenizzites are not his people. He is now not a Kenizzite. So that's the difference, is that that was malleable. That was changeable. So when did the requirement emerge that in order to be Jewish, he had to be the son of a Jewish mother? That was after the exile. Destruction of the temple? Yeah, that was after the return from exile.

58:35So if you read Ezra and Nehemiah, they're talking about that. They're talking about that's when they ban, uh, Israelite men marrying foreign women. Right. And the matrilineal descent is a way of ensuring. Right. Genetics. Just guaranteeing that. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Because everyone knows who your mom is. So that's a later thing. If you look at in the Torah and Deuteronomy, there's a whole ritual setup for if you want to marry a woman from one of these other groups where she shaves her head and there's this sort of ritual thing where she's, her old life is put away and her new life. Now she's an Israelite.

59:09right so that they had a way of incorporating is there any fossil record that supports uh the idea of giants striding the earth actual yeah tall people no yeah i mean i don't know how tall but taller than well yeah so they're just a lot of times so when we have visual depictions are usually depicted as 15 foot foot tall but that's that that's a sort of deliberate coding so uh In the ancient Near East, they believed that their gods had a ritual body that was about 15 feet tall. And if you look at, we've got excavated temples of Baal, for example, where they have footprints that are supposed to be Baal's footprints.

59:57As he was walking in to be sort of enthroned in his temple was the idea. And if you measure the stride, it's based on him being about 15 foot tall. Do we think they're real footprints? Well, these are clearly carved by people to represent that. But the idea is that's how tall the gods were. So that's how they usually depict the Nephilim as being 15 foot tall. Goliath is sort of one of the last stragglers. At the end of the book of Joshua, it says that sort of the last of the Anakim, which is another word for the Nephilim, fled into Philistine territory. and so then when David comes as king, he sort of roots out the last of them, right?

1:00:38Goliath being one of them. How tall he is, again, numbers, there's not numerals, so things go weird places. According to the Greek Old Testament tradition, he was six foot six, which is like two inches taller than me, right? But which in the early Iron Age would have made him gigantic, right? Yes. average the average man was i think like five foot five yeah right at the time in that area um in uh the hebrew text he's nine foot nine which is more clearly a sort of supernatural kind of height yes right to sort of to sort of convey this um so certainly there were people who were abnormally tall like in the six foot six six foot seven range right some of them who who were these people uh we do not have and given we don't have a lot of skeletal remains from that period either right that are there are a million reports from the 19th century in north america in the u.s of people finding nine foot tall skeletons in some cave in nevada etc etc etc they were all destroyed by the Smithsonian, any of that true?

1:01:52Not as far as we could tell, not as far as we could verify. And some of those were proven to be, the Cardiff giant stuff, those were proven to be hoaxes. So I think a lot of that came out of, there was very much in the anti-modernist movement, right, what became evangelical Christianity, there was very much an idea that we need to scientifically prove that everything in the Bible is literally true. Yes. And, and that led to some of that grasping. But as far as you know, there have never been found on earth fossils of human beings. Not verifiably. Not verifiably. Okay. Yeah. Do you believe that since Genesis six says this process of the sons of God impregnating the daughters of man is still ongoing?

1:02:41Do you think that happens now? I mean, it certainly could. Yeah, it certainly could. Like we said, it was 80 years ago. We were doing a similar sort of thing with the Japanese emperor. There's no reason it couldn't. There's no reason the attendant later rituals with human sacrifice and things couldn't be going on. Because they're just glimpses of it. I mean, what's interesting about the Epstein files, for example, which to the extent I have read them are only hinting at various things. and you have no idea exactly what it means. It is like reading an esoteric text. It's like you're not read in, so you don't really interpret it clearly.

1:03:20But there is a fixation on blood, on genetics. And there seems to have been that since the time that we're talking about. Like blood, human sacrifice, sex, not just for pleasure, but or reproduction, but as a ritual. Like these are ongoing motifs through human history. Aleister Crowley is a real person. Yeah, 100%. But I mean, the Incas were doing the same thing that, I don't know, some remote African tribe was doing, Canaanites were doing. It's like everyone's doing the same thing. It's fixated on the same four or five themes. I am by no means a flat earther, but early NASA, there was some weird stuff with some of those scientists.

1:03:59Oh, big time. Yeah. Yeah. So that's definitely right. right that and and well so but i guess what i'm saying is if different cultures at different times throughout history are focused on exactly the same kind of non-obvious ideas right the spirit world breeds with people technology comes from the spirit world blood is somehow magical human sacrifices like the source of power like who would who would think of these things like right no this Is it a coincidence that just randomly they all have the same idea? That's what I'm saying, that they're rooted in some kind of reality that— Right. And it's a—like I said, you're going to embody and participate in something, right, spiritually.

1:04:45And as Christianity has receded and been lost in, quote-unquote, Western countries, right, we should expect more and more of that to come intruding back in because that's the other option, Frank. No, you would expect something brand new and like, people would think of like a new religious expression that isn't based on human sacrifice, but they never have. Right. Well, if it was just humans making it up. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. So it's obvious. But if not. It's obvious to me. I mean, I'm not a priest unlike you, so maybe this is like, I'm just figuring this out. But like, clearly human sacrifice does bring dark power to the people who commit it.

1:05:26Yes. Like, duh. Yes. Yeah, they weren't doing this stuff because it didn't work. They were having some kind of experience. They were having some kind of, right, something was happening there. So witchcraft is real. Yeah. And when you read just purely pagan sources, right, they're kind of honest about it. Right? And this stuff is, so we've received the classics through the Enlightenment, which means we purge all the, not just anything quote-unquote supernatural, but even religious elements. There are still people publishing books talking about how Plato and Aristotle were not religious. Right? You know, they represent these sort of, because the figures of the Enlightenment sort of recast the ancient philosophers as versions of them.

1:06:21You know, and since they had rejected the religion of their time, well, clearly someone like Plato or Aristotle can't have accepted the religion of their time. They were like enthusiastic polytheists. Yes. Yeah. Aristotle's school was in a temple of Apollo. Right. Oh my goodness. They were on board. They nuanced things. Right. But I mean, in Plato's dialogue, Socrates talks about how he has this demon, this demon, this spirit that dwells within him and whispers wisdom to his soul. Right? Yeah. There's no, you know, it's Christians who come along and say that's a bad thing. Right? And then post-Christian Enlightenment people say, oh, well, that's silly.

1:07:01So we'll just ignore it. Yeah, it's not a thing. But they're very honest about it. Right? I mean, ancient authors are very honest. What's happening at the, the bacchanalia, the actual bacchanalia is people are being possessed by the bacchae, by these spirits and participating in, in drug and alcohol induced orgies, right. In, in public. So these feasts. Again, the point of it is not just sex for pleasure. Let's go get laid. The point of it is to commune with, with demons. Right. It is part of the, yes, these spirits are possessing them. Right. taking possession of them, taking over their body and participating in these things.

1:07:40That's what they say they were doing. Well, that's, I think of the remaining world religions that we know about that are practiced in public, only Haitian voodoo and African voodoo is honest about that. Talks that openly about it. Talks that openly about it. Some forms of Hinduism, but yeah. Okay. They aren't prevalent in the West, right? Outside of India. Right. Yeah. But certainly in Haiti, like there's human sacrifice. it's denied in in the united states media for whatever reason but it's to talk to any haitian about it it happens yeah oh it's the center of their religion yeah right and but the point of it is not just to kill kids for its own sake the point of it is to receive spiritual power yeah yeah and i mean i'm down in southern louisiana so i'm not that far from and that still goes on i mean of course yeah yeah so um what are like what are we to understand about the nephilim now yeah i mean yeah i i think it is this possibility that's at the end of that chain of yielding to sin and wickedness right this is the the anti-saint right right this is This is what happens when we not only don't find our full humanity in, in Christ, but give up our humanity in favor of something else, um, that, that twists and distorts our humanity.

1:09:15um and so yeah it is it is this dark possibility and there are people out there who have gone that that far i sometimes get asked as someone who is that far gone can they repent right can they turn back and it's sort of well with god all things are possible right like i don't i don't see how but with god all things are possible right um but an awareness that that that is a dark possibility and that it is something that happens there are people doing this i said not long after the full epstein files got released i said uh on my podcast i said well we now know that the world is is uh run by demon worshiping pederast sort of like it has been since the roman empire yes or before right And Christians were able to operate during that time in a world that was how it operated.

1:10:17So I think it's good to be free of some of our delusions in this regard. And not being aware of the spiritual world or ignoring it or denying it doesn't make it stop existing. Yes. It's sort of like walking through a minefield under fire and just denying that there's a war happening. Yes. You're just going to end up being a casualty of sort of the spiritual warfare and things that are going on all around you that you refuse to see. It also seems to have, I mean, the world that you described pre-flood is a world that's just given itself over to rule by demons. Yeah. And the manifestations. Everyone has come on board.

1:11:02Everyone's come on board. There's no meaningful resistance to it. Technology has reached its, you know, kind of impossibly high place. That technology itself was a gift from demons. It's anti-human. It's anti-God. And then God destroys the world. I mean. It starts over. Yeah. Yeah. So what does that have implications for the moment we're living in on the brink of AI? Well, I mean, everywhere in the Second Temple Jewish literature, but it's true in the New Testament, when they're talking about the end, right? The end of the world, Christ's glorious appearing, right? When that ends, it's always compared to the days of Noah.

1:11:51Yeah. Right? It's always referred to as, and when St. Peter responds, why is he taking so long to return? right with all the suffering and all the evil in the world uh saint peter's answer is that the the god is being patient and giving time the maximal time for repentance but the world has reached a point and can and will reach a point again where no one's interested in that opportunity anymore right and that's when the end will come because there's no point in delaying it at that point. But I think it's important that people understand that the way salvation, even in Christian circles, gets talked about a lot is it's salvation from the world, right?

1:12:41And I don't want someone to take from this conversation that, oh, okay, well, you know, I could die and go to heaven and get away from all this. Yeah, the world's Yeah. Going to hell. The great escape. But the salvation begins here, right? You can be saved from that now. That sort of spectrum of sin we talked about, right? You don't have to ride it all the way to the end. You can be set free from it at any point, right? That slavery. in this world, this is the purpose of Christ's church, right? Is to offer the other answer, right? The other way, the way toward becoming truly human, being set free from that, right?

1:13:23In this world, and then, right? Enjoying a world that's free from that beyond this life in eternity. But both of those are included

1:13:36in what salvation is and what's on offer. So, I mean, how does it make you feel personally as you see the world moving in a way that's just more explicitly evil and the leadership of the world becoming just sort of openly demonic? Yeah. Does that strike fear into you or? um not it doesn't strike fear to me because i think i think it's honest now i don't think it's different i think it's honest i think it's revealed yeah now right because i don't think any of this just suddenly restarted no like in 1968 no no that's there is this sort of popular narrative that everything was beautiful from the end of World War II until about 1968, and that's just not true.

1:14:30At all. And so it being now out there, right, now provides a number of opportunities for helping people, right? I deal with actual individual people, individual lives every day, right, in the church. And being confronted by the fact that spiritual evil is real can be the shock that brings someone to, oh, God is real. Yes. Salvation is something I need to find. I think that's often the case. These patterns in my life aren't just bad habits that I could kick anytime I want, but there's something going on in my life that I need to be set free from, right? And that's going to require some things of me.

1:15:20right and require some changes and require some healing from god beyond myself right and and so there is this now opportunity here that when everybody sort of thought everything was okay and they were okay and everything was fine right you had to try and convince somebody that there was a problem you don't have to do that so much now no right um and so so i think there's an opportunity for a lot of people to help be helped, to find freedom, right? To find salvation, to transform their lives. So I choose to look at it that way, right? Yes. Rather than the other. I think that's the right way to look at it.

1:16:00Yeah. So what is your advice when someone comes to you in bondage? Like what is the process for being set free? Yeah. So I think the very first part is you have to become part of something and submit yourself to something bigger than yourself. Right? So in my case, obviously, that's the church. Right? Because again, you're not just an individual out there. Right? Your brain is not just closed in this box and you're just doing your own thing. You're participating in these spiritual realities, whether you like to or not. Right? And so you have to submit yourself to something, to being transformed by something.

1:16:41and that involves becoming part of a community right sharing bonds with other people that community brings accountability right it brings a change of life right because you you can't live a life in isolation aristotle said for someone to live alone they have to be either a beast or a god yeah um so you know you have to find this life in community it's as i was talking about you find this transformation through participating in what God is doing in the world. Well, God is loving someone. I have to be with that person and love them, right? God is having compassion. I have to be with that person, have compassion for them and be kind for them.

1:17:28It's not something you could practice off by yourself. Definitely not something you could practice on the internet, right that's um but and so you need to you need to become a part of that and then within that you need to form spiritual relationships with within the orthodox church that we have the idea of spiritual fatherhood that's very important where you have a person who you trust deeply right who you sort of open up and bury your soul to right who you uh someone other than yourself who you say this is what I think I should do. Am I right? Should I? Where you can get feedback and have this ongoing relationship of guidance as you work through these things.

1:18:13Because this isn't a snap, it isn't you say a prayer, it isn't even you get baptized and now everything's great. This is a long process of working your way back down that road and then getting onto the right road. and moving in a positive direction. But it's available to everyone, right? If you're willing to, right, come and participate in it. But it's not as simple as an altar call during a church service. Yeah, and we know that, right? That's why I had a friend who was an Assemblies of God pastor, and I asked him once, did you write the day you got saved, the date in front of your Bible? He said, oh, yeah, I wrote all of them.

1:18:58because he'd go forward and then he'd go back to his life and be like oh i don't think that took let me go do it again right and so it is this ongoing thing right it is uh adam was created to begin right this life of growth toward god right that that doesn't just happen throughout this life but stretches on into eternity um because god's infinite so we're not going to get to the point where you know uh now i know everything about god now right it's it's sharing in god's life forever has there ever been any other society at scale that didn't put god at the center or gods at the center put its religious practice at the center of its civilization no no it always happens right so they've recently covered that with a veneer of science oh no we're insisting this isn't a religion it's a secular ideology okay you know but but there's you know there's an ideology there's ritual activity there are sacred texts there are all the things religions have right you know that's yeah so that's never happened but but has there ever been a society that was as dishonest about it as ours.

1:20:16No. No, I think that's the, there's a lot of spiritual delusion and self-delusion. And that comes out of, there was a move in the 18th and 19th centuries where sort of deliberately spiritual iconography, religious iconography, religious symbols and practices were taken over by the state. I noticed. Happened in Europe first. I mean, you could go to the Capitol, see the, the, uh, deification of George Washington and sort of all of these things. All the weird Masonic symbols and our currency. Like, what is that? Being attributed to this political stuff. Right. And sort of the formation of, you know, we're not going to be, we're not going to be, uh, Sola Scriptura Protestants talking about the original text.

1:21:13We're going to be all about the constitution and what did the framers have in mind, right? We're just going to switch this all over into the, the political realm. And then as politics is kind of devolved, it's, you know, become even more sort of ephemeral than that. Right. Um, and so we're not willing to admit that our rituals are rituals. were not willing to admit, you know, the way most people talk about the economy is essentially the way ancient people would talk about a god. What do you mean? Flesh that out, that's fascinating. The economy makes decisions, right? The economy favors this group over that group.

1:21:58We need to do this and that to sort of appease the economy, right? Make sacrifices, right? So there are all these, you know, we don't call it mammon, you know, but it's the same kind of, it's fulfilling the same kind of, the same kind of idea, right? And other for war, right? We don't call it Aries. We don't talk about a war god, right? But we talk about national events. It needs to be fed. It needs to be supplied with, right? Sacrifices need to be made, right? And so it's all the same ways of thinking because they're built into what it means to be human. Yes. And so if you remove overt religion, you just get covert.

1:22:46Yes. Religion. Which is, but always a species of like what the Canaanites practiced and what the Mayas practiced. It amounts to the same thing. It's paganism. It's human sacrifice. once again whether it's abortion or war whatever it's killing people in order to get peace and prosperity and power right right what do you i mean how should christians approach that well it's it's a lot of them seem to ratify it a lot of the leaders seem to be like yeah no this is a good thing unfortunately yes yeah that's and a lot of religion has been secularized it's a bizarre phrase right but in the united states it kind of has i mean it's it started with the more leftward-leaning religious bodies yes becoming sort of just overtly political and oriented toward this world um and but it has now gradually come to include a lot of the more rightward leaning religious bodies where sort of the especially the eschatology of christianity the ultimate goal of blessedness is removed from sharing in the life of God himself or the life of the world to come and it's made very this worldly so it's prosperity now and whether it's a mainline liberal protestant denomination saying prosperity now in the sense of we need to help the poor and raise their standard of living or whether it's because that's what the gospel is, right?

1:24:32Or it's a prosperity preacher, right? In a more socially conservative church saying, you know, give your seed and, you know, you'll get back 10 times, you know, the money and you'll have all this, well, this, right? It's taking that and moving it all, right? Don't build up treasures in heaven, build them up here on earth. uh that's that's sort of that's sort of the goal right and uh that is secularization in the in the true sense right the the first sort of thinker to talk about uh the the seculum was uh saint augustine in city of god and he was using that city of god famously where the title comes from He's living at the time of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, which from their perspective was the end of the world.

1:25:23Yes. Certainly the end of the world as they knew it, right? And saying, him saying, so yes, there is this city of man, right? There is this empire. There are these kings. There is this government. There's also the city of God, and the city of God exists eternally and is steadfast, right? And he described what was going on outside as the secular, the secularum, which included in it not just the world, but also the idea of an age, as in it's constantly shifting. There's sort of this cyclical pattern, nations rise and fall, all these things happen. There's a sort of churn, but that's outside of the place where God is.

1:26:13And so a lot of these formerly sort of overtly religious movements have just become engaged in that cycle. And you can watch them. It's like they're virtually in the news cycle now, right, in terms of what they're quote-unquote preaching, right, and coming out and weighing in on. It's just sort of whatever's going on in the news cycle right now, right? And this constant sort of churn, and they're making these prophecies that don't come true, and oh well, don't worry about that, here's the next one. And it just continues in this never anything, but it's divorced from the actual spiritual reality of who God is, who Christ is, what God is doing in the world.

1:27:00Those questions aren't even asked. right it's more about um asking god to bless what i'm doing in the world or just asserting that god is blessing it is behind what i'm doing in the world um what do you think of that well there's there's a famous quote from abraham lincoln during the civil war where a reporter asked him if he thought god was on the side of the union yeah and he said the question isn't whether god's on our side the question is whether we're on god Exactly. And that's the core question, right? The core question that anybody who's going to call themselves a Christian should be asking is, what is God doing in the world right now?

1:27:42Where is he active in the world right now? I need to get on board with that. I need to become a part of that. Not what do I want, what do I think should happen, and I'm going to try and get a whole bunch of people to try and pray. and convince God to do, you know, or I'm going to claim and assert that God is going to do what I think he should do. Right. Um, that's, that's not only kind of a, a gross inversion of Christianity, but it's essentially the way ancient magic and sorcery worked. Really? Right. That's what separates sort of your, when you're talking about ancient religion, right, in the, in the pagan world, where you're talking about the Greco-Roman world or the ancient Near East, the division between magic and just sort of pagan religion, right, is that in pagan religion, they thought that the gods, the spirits they were worshiping sort of remained free.

1:28:42So you could make a sacrifice, you make an offering to them, you try to cajole them into doing what you want, but they could say no. They could decide they don't favor you, right? You read the Iliad, the gods could just decide to switch sides at the middle of the war. They sort of remain free with magic the idea of ritual magic is that you get by doing the ritual in the correct way saying the correct things doing the correct things you get the spiritual entity to do you kind of compel it or command it to do what you want it to do that makes you god god of god of those right demons yeah and so even when someone identifies as a christian if they're out there trying to say, well, if you do X, Y, Z, right?

1:29:31If we get X number of people praying, if we do it, then God will, that's essentially magic, right? The whole idea of Christian prayer and worship and the Christian life is that God is transforming me. Not that I'm changing God or if God to change it'd be different or do something he wouldn't do otherwise or bossing God around so how much genuine Christian practice do you see I mean I don't want to be mean

1:30:12I think if you go to the level of the average person the average Christian person regardless of what Denomination, what church, what group they identify with, right? Or are part of or where they go on a Sunday morning, right? I think the average Christian person is trying to follow Christ as best they know how. Sometimes they're wrong, right? We get things wrong, right? They're misled. They've been lied to by leaders, right? All that happens. But in their heart and in their soul, that's what they're trying to do. So that level of Christian practice, there's a lot, I think, right? Yeah. If we're looking top down, that's where things get a little more troubling, right?

1:31:07In terms of leadership. Now, obviously, I mean, I can't sit here as an Orthodox priest and pretend I'm not, you know, biased toward the Orthodox Church. Yes, of course. That's on the table. Let me frame it differently. When was the last time? How do you experience God, like actual God's work day to day? Yeah. Well, so there's both within the services of the church, right? Because I see God very much working in that way. And it's not just the actual quote unquote worship service, but the time spent afterward in fellowship together, the life of the community, right? I see that continuously, right?

1:32:00I also, I mean, I hear people's confessions, and confession is done a little differently in the Orthodox Church than the Roman Catholic Church because we have this, as I said, spiritual fatherhood tradition. And so I've seen people come through and come back from some really difficult and terrible things um like what well i mean i i don't want to divulge anything no i mean not yeah yeah yeah specifics no names but like what kind of things you're talking about people who have had the kind of traumatic childhoods that you see as the origin of a villain in a movie yeah yeah like for real yeah yeah um that And people who have gone down really dark roads of addiction and violence and come back from that.

1:32:54Committing violence. Yeah.

1:32:59And marriage is being saved, right? After things that should have destroyed them. You've seen that. Yeah. And so that all happens, right? It really does. You've seen marriages totally blown up that are saved. Yes. Yes. And it takes time and it takes a lot of work. Both of the people have to be on board. But there is healing there on offer from God. Part of the failure of a lot of Christianity broadly is that an environment has been created, I think, unintentionally. where people are afraid to open up and even talk about things like that with anyone. It's sort of, we go to church on Sunday, we put on our Sunday best, we all act like everything's fine when it's definitely not fine.

1:33:58Right. And, you know. This is why AA meetings are so wonderful. Yeah. Because there's no pretense like that at all. And I say to people about confession, because especially if they've come into the Orthodox Church and they're from a background that doesn't do it. There's a lot of trepidation and what is this? And I'm scared. And how can I tell you these things? And you're a priest. I respect you. I don't want you to know these things. And I try and tell them, I'm like, each of us walks through life thinking we're the most disgusting, perverted, weird, disturbed individual to ever walk the planet.

1:34:38And if you're actually willing to open up with other people about that, you find out that most of them are dealing with the same stuff. Yeah. And struggling with the same things. And the power of opening up about that in a place that's designed to bring you healing. Right? When we say over and over again in the Orthodox Church that the church is a hospital, not a courtroom. Yeah. It's not about finding who's guilty of what. Right? It's about helping people in various stages of woundedness, some of them almost dead. Right? Trying to help them find healing and restoration to life. There's incredible power to that, to just that honesty of telling someone, finally, this thing that I've been hiding from everyone, even myself when I had managed it for decades.

1:35:30Saying that out loud, admitting it, and then talking about, okay, how are we going to work on this? How are we going to make things right? how are we going to start moving toward healing and restoration? A priest for almost 20 years, have the kind of confessions you received changed? Are the problems that people are struggling with different from what they were? And what are the common ones? Again, without being... Yeah. I mean, honestly, they've changed less than you'd think, but there's a pattern when you hear confessions. Usually the first six months to a year, uh you kind of get tested as a priest right yeah so you get a lot of like oh i was stuck in traffic and i cussed at the guy who you know cut me off and it's like i'm sure you did but i'm also sure there's a lot more we'll let it be we'll let it be for now right you get those and so that's that's the confession right yeah and it's sort of those kind of things you know you know oh i was for work and i made up a story you know those kind of things um but they're testing right they're seeing if it's safe yes right they're pushing the limits and then i shot a man in reno just to watch him die yeah and then at a certain point right the real stuff comes out sometimes with tears yeah sometimes with people you'd never expect to see tears from oh um and and and it sort of finally unloads and and a lot of it is the same stuff a lot of people are now it takes sort of different forms like so for example sexual sin used to be a lot more about actually doing things with other people right right and now a lot of it is distortions and things going on due to the internet pornography on the internet and that kind of thing and so and so that's changed that yes you've got people that this is one of the scariest statistics the average age at which a person is first exposed to hardcore pornography on the internet in the united states today is eight yeah i don't know why no one's in prison for that it's so weird yeah so well there's too much money being made off pornography i'm aware yeah that's and again the economy is kind of god now right yeah um but so yeah so that's right and dealing with that has to be dealt with in a different way that's not i went too far with my girlfriend on a friday night right there's that that's got to be unwound in a different way people sense intuitively do you think that there's something disordered and bad about porn or is it something that they learn at your church and they're like oh i guess it was bad no they know they know um a lot of people who are dealing with sexual sin and that kind of thing they will come and when they're ready to talk about it will say yeah i first saw pornography at some absurdly young age yeah and and usually there's an escalation pattern with it yes starts out being sort of quote-unquote normal pornography not that pornography is normal but yes and then moves into darker and darker places more and more uh dysfunctional places um but yeah they can they generally have an idea of that but that that is that is breaking a lot of a lot of people really um you see that a lot yeah yeah and that is a lot of people's issues with sexuality uh with gender identity a lot of it is traceable back to some of that early exposure to really that material i believe it and it creates this confusion yes um because yeah and people's first sexual experiences being divorced from their own body yeah right causes this distortion right that that takes a lot to unwind and part of the unwinding of that is having a community right where they're spending time as themselves right in their own actual body talking to other people who are sitting there in front of them.

1:39:58I mean, it sounds absurd, but for Zoomers, that's a rare experience now. A lot of them socialize completely on the internet. The people they identify as their closest friends are people they only know online. Man, they have boyfriends and girlfriends who they've never met in person. Very common. Gen Alpha it's even more common. and so helping them get out of that and into a community of actual people who care about them who are interacting with them in the real world uh is the is a huge first step in sort of bringing people back to to reality do you find that pornography is a bigger problem than addiction um more common yeah i mean there's an addictive element too right yeah i mean yeah i guess but Yes.

1:40:58Then drugs or alcohol. Then drugs or alcohol, yes. Really? Yes. Is it interesting? So that's a huge part of your ministry, it sounds like. It's... You don't hear people talk about it very often. It's all men and most women. Most women? Yes. Men don't think that, but... Are you ever shocked? I mean, by this part of your job, do you ever hear things that shock you? um so i i can't say i've never heard something that shocked me but when i was shocked it was more the particular person right right um part of part of what you have to do i think as a priest part of what i honestly i think we all ultimately have to do this is we have to become deeply acquainted with the worst parts of ourselves yes i agree with that yes and if you're really acquainted with that and you really know what you were capable of in a negative way, given the right or wrong circumstances, you can understand more.

1:42:08Right. And you don't get that shock reaction. My dad told me the story that stuck with me when he was a kid. He was watching the footage of the Nuremberg trials. and he asked my grandfather, you know, what do you think of these horrible things these people did? What do you think of this? And my grandfather said, there but for the grace of God go I. Amen. And usually people say that to mean like, oh, some bad, you know, unfortunate thing happened to someone. Oh, God preserved me. Yeah, car crash. But he meant without God's grace, I could have done all those things. 100%. I could have gone down that same road, right?

1:42:51And really coming to terms with that, I think is a prerequisite not only for our own repentance and our own getting free of that, but being able to help others and being able to hear where they're coming from and understand how they ended up there and trying to help them, give them the hand up out of the ditch. Amazing. Last question, which is totally unrelated, but it just seems like you might know the answer. There's this, and most people will not be interested in this, but there's this really interesting moment in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus is talking about sin and how it can all be forgiven.

1:43:29But the one sin that can't be forgiven is sins against the Holy Spirit. Yeah, blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Yeah. What does that mean? Yeah, so what happened just before that was that Christ was working miracles and teaching and healing. Yep. And a certain group of his opponents among the Jewish religious leadership accused him of being demon-possessed. Correct. Right. Said that the spirit by which he was doing this was actually one of the names for Baal, right? Yeah, Baal's Bub or whatever, yeah. and so he was casting on demons with demons right and so that's why it's blasphemy of the Holy Spirit because they're calling the spirit of God a demonic spirit right and so if you're not willing to accept and submit yourself to God and to his spirit and what he's doing in the world you can't be forgiven you can't be healed right they were rejecting rather than seeing what God was doing in the world, which was Christ himself, right?

1:44:40And what he was doing in the world, rather than seeing that and trying to get on board with that and be healed from their sin, they were rejecting it. So if you reject Christ, if you reject God's provision, right? For our sin and our wickedness, then you can't be healed from it. By definition. Right. But yeah, definitionally, yeah. Father, thank you for that. That was fascinating. Yeah. And great. Thank you for having me. Thanks.