What’s The Real Truth About Religion? - Alex O’Connor

three two one what you laugh it's really funny the way he's like the only person g face on it's not like someone else doing it's not someone else going 3 two one right right it's like you just you sort of like right you stay like deep into the soul three two one well you don't have a soul so easy for me to do it yeah so I'm told anyway Alex OK Conor welcome to the show Chris will X how are you I'm good man I'm good are we seeing a Christian Revival at the moment what's going on gosh I love this this is something I've adopted too the sort of just straight in with the question you know none of this none of this Gallivan thing around how are you how's your day been tell us about yourself you've been in Austin for a week I don't need to know how you are yeah I mean the these these Fair people don't know how I am but they also don't care so you've struck a sort of Perfect Balance there I I'm writing an article about this at the moment which should be out by the time this episode's out who knows not not I not this reviewer but um I'm opening with this quote from the Gospel of Thomas the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas one of those ancient gospels that didn't make it into the New Testament and yet is filled with these wonderful and bizarre stories about Jesus and at one point in this apocryphal gospel he condemns some of his followers he says you've become like the Jews who either love the tree and hate the fruit or love the fruit and hate the tree some similar imagery in the canonical gospels of like by their fruits you shall know them you know a good fruit doesn't produce bad uh a good tree doesn't produce bad fruits but interestingly here you know people get this criticism all the time like you claim to be a Christian um but you don't really act in accordance with it you're like nominally a Christian but you know you're not displaying the sort of radical compassion of Jesus or something like that it's a very common crit criticism that you're not acting in in accordance with your beliefs but we've we've been seeing this strange reverse phenomenon emerging where you've got people who like the fruits but don't even believe in the existence of the tree so usually the criticism is like look you love the tree but you you're not producing the right fruits but in this case you've got an emerging class of thinkers who are unwilling to say that they believe in the actual truth of Christianity and yet are at least Christian adjacent or sympathetic to Christianity or kind of a bit depressed about the fact that everyone isn't Christian anymore this is your Douglas Murray's Constantin kissen um Jordan Peterson to to some degree Andrew huberman um I suppose but then he does say he actually believes in God right okay these maybe he likes the tree but the fruit is yeah yeah I mean I don't know if I mean I don't listen to much hubman but maybe his fruit is is is is is fine is very Christian I I don't really know um but but in in the case of these thinkers the reason they're interesting is because people talk about them all the time in this Christian Revival phenomenon I've got a friend Justin Bry who just wrote a book called The surprising Rebirth of belief in God why new atheism grew old and secular thinkers are considering Christian it again or something like that and it's very hopeful um but I think a bit too optimistic because the case studies it points to are the people that I've just mentioned people like this um Tom Holland the historian who um well as as I as I write in this article Tom Holland not the actor but in a sense an actor because he sort of likes to pretend that Christianity is true even though it's not the interesting thing about these guys is that they won't say that it's true they're unwilling to say that it's true and they call themselves cultural Christians Richard Dawkins you know Arch archetypal atheist also I mean recently called himself a cultural Christian he's been doing it for years but it got a lot of attention recently when it did it on on on LBC and it's kind of interesting you know so so you're going to spend your entire career just lambasting this religious tradition and undercutting the truth value of it and then getting depressed when the cathedrals are empty and being turned into mosques which is what's happening in England like you may have sort of shot yourself in the in the foot a little bit but it's there's nothing inconsistent strictly speaking with saying that you like going to even song but you don't think any of it's true so what we're seeing is an emergence of people who are more sympathetic to the Christian ideal or what they perceive as the Christian ideal um which is a whole another kind of worms but without actually believing in the truth of it I mean most believing Christians will say if you do not believe historically that a man called Jesus died on a cross and rose from the dead then your faith is futile and your still in your sins as St Paul put it to the Corinthians um famously so these people sort of can't be counted among a Christian Revival but I think Christians have a lot to celebrate that at least now the culture is shifting from a sort of new atheism Christianity is evil and terrible and wrong to yeah might be wrong we'll sort of brush that bit under the under the carpet but try to display the The Virtuous ethics of Christianity although in my case they're not actually advocating for a Christian ethic they're advocating for a sort of right-wing traditional conservatism which is not same thing just to tie a bow on your previous analogy when you talk about tree and when you talk about fruit what are you referring to the tree is the belief in God the the sort of Christian religion as it were and the fruit is the fruit of that belief so if you're to be a good Christian you believe that Jesus rose from the dead and because of that you believe in a sort of radical philosophy of forgiveness and compassion and charity and asceticism and you live that life out to the best that you can in the knowledge that there will be inevitable failure that you can then apologize for um so a lot of people will say I'm a Christian but they do none of that they don't go to church they don't pray they don't act like a Christian they don't show any charity or compassion to the to their brother or sister so what do they do or whatever else um they well they could be selfish and and of course everybody is selfish to some degree but a Christian likes to regularly remind themselves of that and apologize for it and repent of it and make efforts to try to avoid it but a lot of people you know like if someone barges past me on the street then I will always just think it is it is possible that person you know their wife's going into labor and and yeah it's like they say don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity like also what can be attributed to you somebody having some kind of excuse or or justification um something that you would understand it's like have I not ever barged past someone called the fundamental ATT tion era sure yeah that this this is why I love you Chris you always have a have a have a label to to perfectly stick on all of these Concepts it's wonderful um yeah I mean I I if I experience that and think to myself well I'm going to be charitable here because you know but for the grace of God there go I I think well that's a very Christian sentiment Alex you know um and if if you if you met someone who's a Christian and you said what do you like about Christianity and they said oh I just love this figure of Jesus who would just go around forgiving people and even when people deserve punishment let him without sin cast the first stone that's the most incredible like that I mean it is just the most based part of the entire gospels man that's just unbelievable unfortunately it's not in the earliest manuscripts of John so it's probably added on at a later point and Jesus probably never actually said that um not that that really matters in my view um but then if somebody said that they liked that and then you know somebody like accidentally spills a drink over them and they get up and just like deck them you'd be like well hold on a second I thought you were sort of embodying this Christian ethos and they'll sort of talk the talk but won't walk the walk and so in that case I think they love the tree but hate the fruits um that might not be the correct interpretation of Jesus is saying in the Gospel of Thomas there but I think it's a worthwhile analogy to to sort of abstract and and us in the context that I'm I'm putting forward here also it makes a good opener for for an article so I'm going to do it anyway why is this happening what has occurred recently that's caused Christianity cultural Christianity this sort of Revival of it utilitarian Christianity if you want to call it that which I quite like as a term yeah there there are a few things um for this you know functional utilitarian practical Christianity that isn't an affirmative set of Truth claims but rather a sort of protective cloak to be worn it's more like stoicism it's a cultural thing yeah the cultural Christian I mean think of Richard Dawkins loves going to even song likes a cathedral thinks that God doesn't exist and that the Christian stories are ludicrous fantasies this is your cultural Christian why are they beginning to reemerge in droves for a few reasons first new atheism either creates or describes this vacuum of of you know spiritual ungrounded um you don't need any of this religion stuff I know that it's obviously evolved in the human psyche for some reason and every single Human Society we find doesn't matter where we look they all have some kind of sense of the numinous some kind of distinction between the profane numinous the sort of uh you could say the Transcendent the something that sort of sits above and beyond a little bit sort of mystical a little bit sort of out there you know when you ask somebody if they're religious and they say no I'm not religious but I'm spiritual and you're like what the hell does that mean and they're like I just sort of believe in I believe in like something well I believe in I believe in this microphone you know I believe it exists what do you but they're sort of getting at this this sort of ethereal other this something right and every society wherever we look you know society's developed this feeling and that there's clearly something intrinsic to human nature that drives us towards this religious impulse but the new atheists come along as the old atheist did before them uh but the new atheist did it more more fervently in saying no not only is this untrue not only in the sort of you know where Sigman Freud says that your belief in God is I don't know the result of some kind of childhood repression trauma whatever um okay like but he's still going to think that it's an intrinsic part of the human psyche right new atheist come along and say well I also think it's false but you also don't need it you know you don't need this Celestial dictator telling you what to do oh you only do right and wrong because you're scared of upsetting the the big man in the sky well that's a terrible source for ethics and and everyone goes yeah you know damn right yeah yeah I believe and it's sort of like a rally and cry like it was really some of these speeches especially in the case of Christopher Hitchens you know they they sort of make you want to stand up and give a give a round of applause I mean it's just amazing right and part of it is appealing to this this human um this sort of like Humanity this common Humanity oh like are you not good enough yourself to to sort of stand up and and live a good life and all of this kind of stuff and everyone's like yeah yeah absolutely but we've seen the fruits of this as people begin to sort of throw off religion and societies begin to throw off religion what people have perceived happening is the creation of a spiritual vacuum and if it is the case that human beings are naturally religious they have a an Impulse towards the the most fundamental thing I think we have an Impulse towards is the idea of the Sacred the idea of something which is separate and Untouchable that that shouldn't be mixed with the profane that shouldn't be um that that usually has a sort of attached to it a set of Dogma uh about rules what you're allowed to do with it what you're not and and those rules aren't entirely justified by reason alone it's sort of considered to be self-evident just this this separate thing that we treat as as totally sacred so that's that's your God right and the idea is that if you remove the god something else has to fulfill that uh that place something has to fill it in and so the the right-wing conservatives will say that environmentalism veganism um gender ideology all of this kind of stuff has become a new religion and although it's maybe a bit of a lazy phrasing you know what they mean you know exactly the kind of thing that they're talking about right and um the left will criticize you know nationalism as filling that role um you know populism and populist leaders people get religious about Donald Trump which they do it's it's amazing um to to sort of see the the power and influence that that that man has it's it's almost spiritual you know um so to cut a long story short or to append a long story with a conclusion I should say um I think what's happening is a bunch of right-wing thinkers are seeing what is fulfilling the vacuum that new atheism created woke ISM islamism um few other things which it's it's there's someone in particular that I should mention but and they're saying I don't like this and they're realizing that the kind of secular humanism that's promised by the new atheists just kind of isn't cutting the Mustard Seed as I like to say it's um it's not doing it you know so I recently was in New York and I watched Richard Dawkins and aan hery Ali have a discussion aan hery Ali was supposed to be at the meeting in Washington DC in 2007 that created the Four Horsemen of new atheism Hitchens Dawkins Daniel dennet and Sam Harris and it becomes this huge cultural Moment The Four Horsemen they still talked about today as a group she was supposed to be there she was a a incredibly successful new atheist writer speaker debater and earlier this year or last year she announces in an unheard article that she's a Christian now wow a like incredible just just like absolute like headline news in this in this Niche yeah it well this is the this is the thing it's sort of like how predictable was it well you know she'd been hanging out with the Jordan Peterson and stuff and she's sort of quite I think she's got her footing in the sort of right-wing cultural space and so it's kind of not surprising if you knew that this kind of Christian Revival thing was was happening anyway um but her entire article for unheard I mean it mentioned like Vladimir Putin and it talks about wokeism and China and it talked about islamism and it it mentioned Richard Dawkins more than it mentioned Jesus it's the story why I'm now a Christian I think the article was called and it it had nothing theological no spiritual experience no no philosophical argument just you know I'm not happy with the way that that our culture is going you know I'm suspicious of the the rise of wokeism and islamism in China and Russia and Christianity is sort of a best defense against that so a lot of people criticized it and said well what do you mean you're a Christian Richard Dawkins response to her was in his article was to say seriously I am a Christian you're no more Christian than I am which is really interesting because a lot of people look at Richard Dawkins and say he's basically a Christian and a lot of people look at aan and said she's basically an atheist so they're both sort of making the same criticism in in the opposite direction so they got together in New York and I was there and I watched it and to everyone's surprise I think I and did actually affirm belief in the truth claims of Christianity so she's not just fruit she's tree as well it seems that that's now the case but the interesting thing is when Dawkins because Dawkins was ready to show up to this discussion and say and tell her why she's not really a Christian like because of the tree the LA tree you know I know you like the the the stories and all of this kind of stuff but like you're not really a Christian and it was it was actually at the beginning aanne told her story of conversion where she really opened up about depression suicidality just utter despair being not strong enough to commit suicide but not wanting to stay alive anymore and then she tries praying you know some some therapist after hundreds that she'd seen tells her that she's got like a spiritual poverty and she should try praying and it works right and eventually she gets sort of lifted out and she's got this her her sort of her the thrill of life is back you know and everyone's applauding because they're so happy for her they they cheered at that you know and it was almost comic the way that Dawkins listens to the story and goes well that's very moving aan but but do you think that Jesus was bornn of virgin you know but interestingly basically said if I'm not mistaking her she said that she chooses to believe these things she chooses to believe that Jesus is born of a virgin that he rose from the dead which seems kind of weird and a bit obscene how can you just choose to believe something and a lot of people will say well I can't I can't choose to believe something you can't choose to believe that Australia doesn't exist it doesn't work like that but interestingly I began to notice that if somebody becomes convinced that Christianity is true like through philosophical argumentation historical argument for the resurrection of Jesus okay Christianity must be true and then you hear all these moral claims that it makes about family values gender roles stuff and you think well I don't know about all of that but I'm I mean I've just become so convinced that Christianity is true that like it must just be that this is the moral way and I I I choose to just believe that right no one really bats an eyelid they might think it's it's wrong to do that but they don't think it's like illogical they don't think it's like a an a sort of an illegal chess move as pet reversing the stack and going in the other direction is something where people go hang on second yeah so soan obviously just like deeply resonates with the Christian Story the Christian ethic the Christian Community she said that when she was going around criticizing and mocking religion for years and years and years um islamists would send her death threats Christians would send her a letter saying that they're praying for her you know and and she thought that was the difference between those those two religions um so it's a really interesting story from her something's obviously deeply resonated so she says well whatever that is that's that's realer than real that's the most important thing in my life and so yeah I choose to believe the factual stuff as well and that seems like a much more like intuitively it seems more illegitimate to go that way but you know I think people do it in the other direction all the time in other news this episode is brought to you by eight sleep I have been using my eight Sleep mattress for years and I cannot imagine living without it during the summer I find it difficult to sleep because I'm a warm boy and eight sleep is the ultimate fix I don't need to worry about how low I can crank the air conditioning because my mattress is literally temperature controlled and now eight sleep have launched their newest generation pod the Pod 4 ultra pod 4 ultra can cool each side of the bed individually up to 20° below room temperature keeping you and your partner cool and for those who snore heavily it can detect your snoring and automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve air flow and stop it eight sleep is clinically proven to give you up to 1 hour more of quality sleep every night best of all they ship to the United States Canada the United Kingdom Europe and Australia right now you can get $350 off the Pod for Ultra by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to 8sleep.com wisdom using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's EIG ghts sleep.com wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout is it possible to choose to believe in God not like naively not like well try it try it for yourself you don't believe in God or do you maybe you're an agnostic I don't know what you what you what you think about this stuff Chris you're probably sort of what agnostic atheist or yeah agnostic so just try it out like believe in God for for a second good it go I don't know what that would mean right exactly it's sort of like what like how do you even begin to like no you can't do that but what you can do is It's Complicated by the fact that I don't believe in free will but you know shelving that for a moment like okay so like assuming that there is some like libertarian Free Will and you can like have authorship over your actions and choose when to raise your hand and stuff um you can choose to do things which will which will knowingly affect your beliefs it seems a bit disingenuous and maybe it is but like if you only read Christian literature only spoke to Christian guests and did so without going into the conversation with an attitude of I'm going to sort of criticize and object but like I'm just going to listen and learn if you did that for like three years and only hang out with Christians and went to church every day Christian worship music you'd probably become a Christian like it probably would happen you did it with vegans yeah I mean but but that's actually another good example is that if you if everyone know is a vegan everyone you know is a vegan and you only listen to like vegan speakers and they're always talking about how immoral everybody else's and all this kind like you're going to become a vegan chances are you know so you can choose to surround yourself in a community and with certain literature that will at least sort of open you up I suppose so you can choose to do that interestingly as an atheist like aan was or Dawkins uh even though you are there in opposition you are actually surrounding yourself a lot of the time with people who talk about religion who think about religion who think about the Transcendent and God and ideology and dogma and stuff like that that's right and so a lot of people criticize me for being soft on Christianity um I I accept the charge I am um because I quite like Christianity you know i' call myself one of these cultural Christians if I could make a bit more sense of the concept like I get what they're driving at they're like look I I like the the message of Christianity I like it's it's ethos I like it ethic I like this figure of Jesus and I can see societal benefit for people believing in in God in religion and having a unifying moral and all this kind of stuff like yeah sure that's that's great and maybe that is a result of me spending too much time with Christians it's possible you know um you lived with some for a while that's right yeah yeah I lived with with Christians and a lot of my my closest smartest friends I talked about philosophy and and definitely theology with the their Christians um and it's it's great it's it's incredibly edifying have a have a wonderful time but it it's you know I try to spend time with with with different people from different backgrounds with different ideas all the time um but but yeah I mean you can you can choose to sort of adopt your surroundings and the thing is that is disingenuous in the sense that you're you're essentially just aesthetically deciding which will view you want to like put on um sort of irrelevant is the the truth claims that it makes but I totally understand it especially if you're someone like Ian if you're someone who I mean imagine what it's like to actually suicidal for months for years to to to literally have hit rock bottom and have nowhere else to go and suddenly you discover this thing you discover this thing which after years and years of struggle with the with the with the deepest and darkest struggle that a person can go through you get this sort of hand you can grab hold of and it just lifts you out of this brings you back to life you know and then just as you're sort of there and thinking oh my goodness this is I've been waiting for you tears streaming down your face you got Richard Dawkins going like yes but do you actually believe in the Virgin birth why do you keep bringing that bit up because it shows a difference in what people care about the cultural Christians care about the the the ethic and the society and what it does for people it's sort of a sociological project whereas for um I would say theological Christians but also like atheist critics it's more about the truth claims of a religious worldview so a lot of people you know if you look at the comments on this discussion that they had a lot of people will be like oh so I am just done a Jordan Peterson basically she's just sort of sort of done this wishy-washy well the truth kind of doesn't really matter by the way this approach of like it doesn't really matter you know did Jesus rise from the dead you know I don't really know what I really care about is just like how it feels man that's the kind of like attitude that would get you condemned as a heretic in the early church you know like oh you don't affirm the belief in the resurrection of Jesus you know it it would be bad so the reason I bring it up is because there two different approaches one is one is very left brained one is very right brained you know honestly like like the it's sort of what about the the the facts the science you know and the other side is sort of what about the narrative and the sort of feeling in the ethic and the poetry and that's the left brain and the right brain battling it out right in front of you yeah has Christianity gone soft we've spoken about how sort of the atheist side coming in is assessing religion specifically Christianity with perhaps less of a fine tooth comb in order for Christians to say with open arms we permit you person who does not have an active belief in God yeah in the resurrection of Jesus in many of the things that are important M to Faith and you just said that would have been heretical is this are both sides nerfing the uh bar that they need to get over one in order to believe and the other in order to accept maybe um there's also the difference between like the Christian religion as practiced in the history of the Christian church with a particular emphasis on like modern Christian Europe and how it behaved um there's that kind of Christianity and there's a kind of Christianity which is like emulating the figure of Jesus which is I think the important thing so for example um has Christianity gone soft well consider the Christianity of the Crusades versus the Christianity the sort of lukewarm halfth people don't believe like less than like 1% of the the population are going to church of England churches you know like yeah that's definitely gone soft but arguably the kind of either military or strong armed Christianity that emerges in the history of the Christian church is itself an inappropriate hardening of the Christian message the figure of Jesus Christian relativity like what what is base Christianity and and religion is always famously just used used to um buttress political aims and functionally how can we uh have this ideology this Dogma to be able to drive us forward perhaps if we wanted to invade some other country yeah or like how can we motivate people to believe that we're on the right side here I mean famously Adolf Hitler that people debate all of the time whether he was a Christian who knows I mean he was a Roman Catholic but he and he never renounced it but like you know he wasn't acting very Christian let's say but he did have the belt buckle of every Nazi Soldier have God mitun God With Us written on the written on the belt buckles um atheists weren't allowed to join the SS didn't want them um didn't think they could be trusted I suppose um Hitler says explicitly in my camp that in standing guard against the Jew I'm doing the handiwork of the Lord so he's using this religious terminology and a lot of people like to point out to me like I'll hear Christians say yeah but he was actually an atheist I mean he was just pretending to be a Christian surely and I'm like well why would pretending to be a Christian make it easier for him to be a fascist you know what I mean it it's it's sort of a bit of a confusing thing um yeah because people use religion in in this way and so there's there's the question of like well you know was Adolf Hitler a Christian right well maybe he would maybe if you ask him let's say you know we discovered some some text or some bit of the table talk that that we didn't otherwise know about and and and and he says yes I'm I still very much believe in God and Believe I'm Doing Christ's work there's a sense in which you could could say ah see he was a Christian that's what the atheist might say but the Christian would say I don't care what he claimed to be being a Christian is doing the work of the Lord being a Christian is is is enacting the will of the father right so interestingly maybe without fruit maybe you don't even need to believe in God per se to be a Christian you just sort of need to do the will of the father it's hard to know what what counts as being a Christian um but I think sort of the two approaches that clash in this aan Dawkins you know um Rumble is the difference between the approach that says the thing that matters is that you live the right kind of life and have the right kind of ethics and the other side which says the thing that matters is that you get the right theology that you have the right truth claims um to me that seems a lot less human it seems a lot less um in in accord with the way that Jesus spoke and behaved and acted I mean he's not going around like settling theological disputes really you know he's responding to theological disputes and and people are trying to test him theologically but he always responds to them with a sort of vague classiness that sort of transcends the dispute it almost makes nonsense the the the disputes um so yeah I I don't know okay has Christianity gone soft like yes politically like clearly it doesn't it just doesn't have the political power anymore um a lot of ninal Christians don't really believe in what they're saying they sort of go to church because they feel like they have to but don't actually have the same kind of passion that you'd like to see in a in a in a sort of firmly spiritually convicted Christian population sort of doesn't exist at least in Britain I don't know about America it's probably much more enthusiastic here but in Britain the interesting thing about America I spent uh Easter Sunday at Austin Ridge Bible Church uh this is the first American Service that I've been to the only of the time that I've been to a service recently was at ripping Cathedral on Christmas Eve uh ripping Cathedral Christmas Eve 245 year old woman with a c-shaped spine playing the organ uh everybody singing hymns brief talk in between uh very sort of um cobwebby classic sort of British Christmas thing I go to Easter Sunday Austin Ridge Bible Church I pulled up behind a 150 Grand Corvette superar that had God now as the number on the back that was the first thing I went in the lady that was the warm-up act for the main person that was giving the the sermon for the day uh started using religious language and I was like oh God we you know straight into it and she said um guys please uh we must remember to have patience and forgiveness uh and we must give Grace when turning right out of the car park onto bave Road and I thought oh wow okay this is an interesting use of sort of semi Christian language here to direct traffic and then the opening act was a six-piece rock band complete with 20 person back in choir yeah uh fireworks uh a full LED wall that would have made my nightclub career look poultry with the lyrics up behind so that everybody could sing along even me who didn't know the words uh lead singer very charismatic playing the guitar dude on the drums black guy playing saxophone set of glasses on uh they come up they do an ENC call they leave another lady comes on introduces stuff and then a guy comes out and with a mic and you know there's sort of background music that swells when it's important and kind of stays quiet when it's not and then he leaves and then the band comes back on and they do maybe one or two more songs and then everyone goes outside and Starbucks coffee and stuff and then they asked for your money they didn't ask for my money actually they were Rich enough yeah um not once was the word religion used not once nobody in that room thought of themselves as religious yeah they have a direct relationship with Jesus and with god oh sure it's all about it's just jesuses like super super Jesus stuff uh and that I was like what is that what's Christianity when you kind of rip much of the ideology side out of it I don't even know is that what is that missing what is it that they've done what have they taken out of what I would be more familiar with from what I would have learned in school in so far as they're doing that they're probably getting something right which is that Christianity is not so much a set of Truth claims a religion as we'd use the term today as it is a relationship with a person Christianity is a relationship with Jesus that's what it is um so I mean the word religion is is famously very difficult to Define uh and also kind of doesn't exist as a concept until relatively recently in like religious study and comparative religion because you know like you you find religious communities from a thousand years ago and religion isn't this like thing that they do they don't have like work family religion you know like get myot it doesn't it doesn't like box off like that it just is permeates it's it's the air that you breathe and and the water that you swim in it sort of doesn't really make any sense I mean like it's like a a fish trying to Define water which it I'm sure the fish can do but it only wants you take it out of the water and sort of show it what it was swimming in before but it wouldn't consider itself to be swimming in water you know um I I think Emanuel K had this image of a of a of a bird or Dove like flying through the sky and sort of thinking like feeling the the wind resistance and thinking gosh if only I could get rid of this wind I could fly so much faster get rid of the air and that's kind of what what like people are doing with religion you know if only I could if only I could get rid of this this resistance but you sort of throwing out the baby with the holy water um so they're probably getting that right I'm not sure about the whole mega church situation um having said that I've never been to one and pretty cool I know people comy I've had you know a friend of mine recently told me that he went to one of these like mega church um experiences in in England actually and was just sort of overcome with emotion tears streaming down his face uncontrollably like like sort of unbelievable experience and I thought wow that I mean that's that's amazing but then I've I also have a a friend who we recently sort of accidentally stumbled upon like a sort of traditional I think it was a Catholic service there's four guys singing some Coral songs and we were holding candles it was a concert they said free concert and we went in and they gave us candles after going through the metal detectors you know um they gave us these candles and we sat there and there was this there were these four guys singing this this sort of Latin Christian music and my friend had used to be a sort of um like a like a real American style Christian uh Christian you know and said like wow I've never experienced anything like that that was amaz like just that was really amazing and I thought gosh it's just because you it's not what you're used to you know the person who's who's used to that will be amazed by the mega church the person who's used to the mega church oh my goodness this mega church stuff is ridiculous but it's sort of yeah I think it's got eating one meal for the entirety of your life and then going oh my God because what it shows you is that like you you can separate out you know this idea of being a Christian or worshiping God from all of the the trimmings that you think necessarily go with it you know standing in this like drafty old building with a bunch of elderly people going we believe in one God the father and like doing the nyine Creed and like and going up and getting in queue for communion and the sort of the the the trembling priest like putting a bit of bread on your on your on your mouth and you think gosh this is this is a bit lame um and it is so then you go to like a mega church and you think oh goodness right like you can isolate the Christian bit put it in a new context and Suddenly It's amazing again maybe Christianity isn't so bad after all so it's got a lot of utility for that reason um but yeah I mean my my understanding of what the mass should be of what church should be is a meal um you know Jesus last supper you know breaks the Bread drinks the wine says do this in memory of me it's it's the Passover meal well it's the Passover meal in uh in the in Matthew Mark and Luke in John's gospel Jesus dies uh before the Passover meal uh maybe the other way around well because John's trying to say that Jesus is the Passover Lamb who's being slaughtered and so there's a kind of biblical contradiction there as whether Jesus dies before the Passover or after the Passover um that's kind of a side point um so I think that like what the mass is supposed to be Jesus says you know I mean the whole reason the mass exists the Eucharist is the in the sort of the the the Zenith of the mass it's where you eat the bread and drink the wine because that's what Jesus did before he died and he said do this in memory of me but it was a meal it was a it was a feast and I have a feeling that in early Christian communities the mass was a uh was a meal but then they stopped doing that because it became too much about the meal people used to just show up to like eat married but then why not you know why not because you know it should be yeah probably um but so I I I don't think there should be like hard and fast rules exactly on how to do it but I am a little bit suspicious of the whole I don't know you know people have made this criticism of mega churches and I don't like the money I don't like the sort of Fame the celebrity the fact that you used the term warm-up act in a in a church environment just seems wholly inappropriate um but like the criticism that's often it's often made that it's too like um it tries to get you sort of in a state of vulnerability by using like musical tricks and stuff I've seen some some people tweet this it's a social media thing that that crops up every now and again people say oh I used to think that I I really like loved God and I was like really into like worship but turns out I actually just liked you know music oh turns out I actually was just like really into drums it's kind of a joke because they're like oh it it was just the music but like yeah like hold on just just take a step back and ask the same question again well why does that music Move you in that way you know sure Coldplay can do it too but then arguably Cold Play are sort of approximating the same kind of spiritual openness that that people are trying to achieve at church the only difference is that when they do it at church they then use that state to to sell you God rather than sell you merchandise you know we'll get back to talking to Alex in one minute but first I need to tell you about momentus trust really is everything yep when it comes to supplements a lot of Brands may say that they're top quality yeah uh but few can prove it that's why I partnered with momentus they make the highest quality supplements of anyone on the planet two fundamental parts of recovery are Sleep Quality and proper hormone levels which is why I trust M's sleep packs and their tonat allei plus their entire range is NSF and inform Sports certified meaning that even Olympic athletes can use it that is how highly it is tested what you read on the label is exactly what's in the product and absolutely nothing else best of all there is a 30-day money back guarantee so if you are uncertain about either of these products you can buy it completely risk-free if you do not like it for any reason they will give you your money back and they ship internationally you can get a 20% discount sitewide by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to liv.com slod wisdom using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's l i v m o m n t us.com slod wisdom and the code modern wisdom a checkout well what about when you walk into you've been to the Vatican oh yeah right what about you walk in there you walk through the doors it's the best front end of a funnel I've ever been into well look the Vatican is a is a look if you if you go to St Peter's Basilica wait you've been um I mean it is just like breathtakingly huge um the the the sort of the scale of the thing is is enough to sort of make you like and and it's actually so big that you kind of your eyes aren't like you know parallaxing properly so it's kind of difficult to even tell how big it is um until for anyone who's ever been there there's writing big gold band that goes all the way around and there's writing and I there with the priest and I haven't verified this but he told me that each of those letters was 2 m tall yeah I heard that on the two other and I I genuinely I was like I don't I don't believe you I literally I'm looking at it right now I'm staring at it I don't believe you I just don't and the the the statues on the top level are built bigger than the ones on the bottom so that they look the same size this it's a strange illusion I kind of wish they hadn't done that because it would give you a better idea of Des but anyway okay yeah amazing or inspiring but at the same time it's designed pretty poorly um from the outside I mean you've got Michelangelo's dome which is like at the back of the Basilica which you can't see from the front which is just poor design uh because of the fact that you've got like three different architects who all had different ideas of what to do and were planning things separately and they all just sort of got shoved together and so you get this this great big Frontier but imagine if you could see that Dome from the front it would be spellbinding um also the fact that the St Peters was built um off the back of sale of indulgences so the Catholic church say give us money and we'll shorten the time that you spend in purgatory and you get to heaven quicker and they use that money to find the building of the church so it's a little difficult to be you know theologically inspired when you start to realize what kind of building you're walking into and the kind of history that that surrounds it God now yeah I mean but but then there is still but then it's exactly the same thing as the the God now thing is the Mega chur where there's I mean like if you start thinking about it you think well this isn't right this is bad you know you might go into a mega church and say well this is terrible CU they're just trying to make money and then you know you go into St Peters basilic and you think well this was raised on the sale of indulgences but there's still something amazing about it there's still something that that inspires or and that's the that's the important bit um I think so so so yeah so I mean that's I mean it's amazing an amazing place to be um but like every human attempt to approxim make the a of God will will necessarily be be beholden to our failures as immoral creatures talk to me about the political dimension of this Christian Revival yeah it's just a bunch of right- wiers getting upset about Islam and wokeism basically in my view um I mean Douglas Murray you know goes to church on Christmas and sort of likes to be I mean Justin Bry talks about Douglas Murray as one of his examples of people who's sort of very like Christian friendly you know like sort of cultural Christian type I don't know how true that is I I I haven't sort of kept up with Douglas's like writing on this stuff but say it were true it's like why is that is it because Douglas has sat in a church prayed deeply you know for an inward sign of like the the sort of True Religion of the universe or is he just upset with the way his country is going I think it's more likely the latter um Constantin kissen recently called himself a cultural Christian um in in like a video and it was the same kind of thing like it's not a theological thing you know they'll say I'm an atheist but I'm a cultural Christian Russell bran got baptized Russell BR got baptized but again this is this is slightly different because he says he actually believes it right actually I don't know I mean I haven't I again I haven't kept up with Russell Brand I don't I don't listen to him but I I presumably he'll actually believe in the resurrection of Jesus and stuff to have been actually baptized um so I think that where somebody has actually sort of developed a Christianity and a truth claim I believe Jesus rose from the dead I don't think that's just is that a Christian Revival yeah I mean sure that would be an actual Christian Revival but I don't think the way the thing that people are pointing to and saying but look at this upswing I don't think that's happening as much I I don't know I don't know what the stats are on like baptisms and stuff but it wouldn't surprise me you know if there's a non-zero number of people who start to look at the fruits sure and it is possible to her Al it and kind of go back up to the tree yeah you think well yeah it's going to it's going to work both ways yeah in a way like if you can't see the tree you can just sort of like start picking up the fruit and following the trail and it will sort of lead you to discover the tree for some people for sure and again you're around the people you're going to mass you're going to service these are your new friends they're talking about it all the time I got to read this I've got a study someone gifted me a study Bible know what this is so there's two there I wasn't sure what your position on this was whether you think that it's a up in utilitarian functional Christianity as opposition to certain movements that a number of people have got a problem with or just conservatism uh wrapped in uh religious uh talking so is it does it exist as a Revival of conservatism with a new bow put on it or in opposition to push back against uh other things that people concerned about that was why I think it's the conservatives who are pushing out uh who are pushing against this stuff right like so new atheism what's new about new atheism the sort of political Dimension you know it it's it's as much like a movement a sociological movement like I say more so than it is a theological one um it's much more it's the reason that new atheism found its way onto like the national press it's on Fox News you know people debating and now in the way that now it's like you you know um I I don't know what it is in America like like you know gender studies in schools or whatever it used to be like evolution in schools that's what you turn on the TV in fact like imagine that you know like you would turn on the TV and you'd find your tuckle Carlson and people like just going on and on and on about like Evolution and God and religion and Christianity I mean it's it's amazing it did it was doing exactly what like the you know the woke social justice stuff is is doing now in that in that space um so that was sort of the the like the new atheism thing sort of was was was this cultural phenomenon talking about politics you know um it it did the theology stuff a little bit as well but but you know it was it was social movement and so okay what kind of social movement was it well broadly speaking it was leftwing it's an interesting subset of like YouTube atheists who went on to be like anti- sjw reactionary types but broadly speaking The Atheist community that that sprung up Christopher Hitchens the Socialist um Richard Dawkins very leftwing more recently sort of gender critical and you know suspicious of Islam all that kind of stuff which puts him more on the on the on the right same thing with Sam Harris but these guys are like traditionally left-wing people right and it's all very you know Christian nationalism is suppressing gay rights and gay marriage and abortion and all of this kind of stuff and contraceptives and divorce laws and all of that right so new atheism is is quite leftwing so whatever like space it creates culturally the people who are going to sort of say we don't like this we don't like what's happening we want to react against that are going to be conservatives um so like in other words it's like it's both I think it's it is in many ways a reaction against this vacuum but the people who are reacting against that vacuum are going to be probably more or less conservatives they used to call uh the Church of England was was known as the Tory party at prayer what they called them the fact that the fact that nobody is now going to church of England churches means it feels like a a sort of waste of a good label and I think like the cultural Christianity movement could be called that you know the the Tory party at pray not the Tory party because the Tory party is probably about to cease to exist in England have you seen this I think right now as we're speaking Yeah it's got to be about like you know half past or quarter two yeah be like right now um there's a seven party debate happening on the BBC Nigel farage is currently stood at the podium like probably shouting at a bunch of other people um and it's amazing like reform UK are two points behind the conservatives at the last poll I checked um I remember hearing that well look I mean we're in we're in store for either another sort of 1997 like super labor success or or the actual um sort of it's like a it's it's an existential moment as Andrew Mah has put it for for the for the for the conservative party it's sort of amazing to see so maybe not the Tory party at prayer but the English rights conservative people you know at at prayer even if they don't know quite who they're praying to isn't it interesting though you know one of the things I noticed since moving over to America is that there is no equivalent of the Christian right in the UK or there wasn't right you know that you know what I mean Bible belty like you know it's for God it's country it's patriotism and the constellation of beliefs kind of right themselves I mean what what religion by what religion is our prime minister you know and and also like if you are like K St Christian I literally don't know I have no idea and if he was I wouldn't know what kind of Christian he was and also I don't care and nor does any of his party and nor do any of the the population you know like genuinely it's so it's so strange I think our prime minister is a Hindu as far as I'm aware um but I'm not sure how like religious he is in in that but can you imagine like it being a serious part of the conversation in Britain your American listeners might not be fully aware of just how absolutely ludicrous it would to be sort of on the campaign Trail and somebody asking you know what's your favorite Bible verse you know and and when like Donald Trump can't think of a Bible verse you know what is it he said when he was asked for his favorite Bible verse he goes oh there are just there are just too many there are just so many I love it all I love them all um that that can that's a bit of a scandal it's like the leader of the Republican Party do you know like in the UK it just it just doesn't so not Salient and and so maybe I think what people sort of noticing is that the the right in America is quite it's quite strong got a presence do you think that do you think that this could be a potential angle for a future British political party to tap into I don't think they can tap into Christianity at least not yet I I don't think it's it's nearly strong enough but I think a lot of people in the UK are getting desperate because their country is going down the pan uh there is no such thing as a sort of small SE conservative party because the the Tory party two left wing for the right Wingers and two right wing for the left Wingers that's why they're ceasing to exist they've sort of Fallen between two two pews um and and they're gonna they're going to possibly you know have to have to hang up the Hat um so I think people in the UK are quite sort of especially right Wingers in the UK are quite desperate so like we don't have a we don't have a a movement we don't have a home we don't have a party that we can vote for like we don't we don't have a way to get ourselves represented in Parliament so what are we going to do and there sort of trying out different things and one of these things is like well what if we all just become Christians again you know maybe that will do something but it means that if you if you pay ption on like Twitter to the kinds of account CU it's not just the the thought leaders but also like you begin to notice in in the comments you know there's more PE there's just more people there are more people who are who are fervent there's more people with little uh display pictures of like a a crusader you know with the with the with the with the Sword and the and the helmet on and stuff and and you realize that if there is sort of a Christian Revival happening it might be a Revival of the sort of strong armed um like we're not going to take this kind of Christianity rather than the meek and Mild I've heard you talk about the difference between strong armed Christianity and meek and Mild Christianity is the reason for the get that in go on uh is the reason for the strong armed Christianity that this revival is coming in opposition to a bunch of things that seem quite aggressive that seem quite militant whether it be rising threat from China Russia Islam gender ideology wokeism whatever yeah um I mean I think a lot of people are for those who are I'm not I shouldn't you know this is all hypothesizing and I can't say that whether most people who are sort of considering Christianity again are doing so for theological or political reasons but of the people who are doing it for political reasons arguably you know the politics comes first that their their primary concern is having a sort of a strong ideological um and this is the culture this are the people who will say I don't believe in God but I sort of like the Christianity stuff like what do you like in Christianity well for many of them they say it gives them a it gives them this this sort of protective layer against these ideologies that they don't like or the vacuum of no ideology how does it give them a protective L well that's the question to ask right like and and I'm kind of the wrong person to ask there because I'm I'm not sort of part of this crew but if you did ask them I mean I know it's a little bit vague and and a little bit difficult to pin down but it to to any extent that it does offer a protective layer against ideologies you don't like it has to be a bit more strong armed it has to be defend it has to put up a shield right and so it it really depends on who you ask right but but let's just hypothesize for a moment what is it that you get from utilitarian Christianity in opposition to secular liberalism what does it provide you that you can't arrive at without the Christianity bit content secular you know secularism doesn't have content secularism is just like a a sort of rule a political rule that says that you're not allowed to like let religion um have any sort of any particular religion have any hand in like political Affairs you just got to sort of have a hands-off approach to religion right it doesn't actually provide anything it's not a world view Christianity is a is a world viw it allows you to say there are things that are right and wrong wrong right so in in like a like a secular liberal government you might say you have this opinion you have this opinion and because we're a secular liberal Society even though I think you're wrong I think you should be in Parliament I think you should become the Prime Minister if that's what the people want all of this kind of stuff where if you have an ideology that just says no there are right things in wrong things and our country is one that believes in these right things and if you believe the wrong thing like no you know you're not going to become the Prime Minister you're not going to like so I think it it sort of provides you this ability to safeguard your worldview in other news news this episode is brought to you by Mando Mando whole body deodorant will have you smelling great it's powerful enough for the toughest body odor but gentle enough to use everywhere on your body you've probably heard that some deodorants have some dodgy chemicals in that you probably don't want to be putting on your skin every single day Mando is 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well that's that's to me is still a bit of a mystery it tells me that we're not in so far as people are specifically when they're talking about political issues like like China and Russia I would ask that same question I think the only answer you can give is that it's somehow tied to a uh a sort of a political um yeah like a political uh sort of what's the word here like like what's what's the word what am I looking for I don't know like I don't know like a forceful restatement of your political commitments you know um and and and the fact that that's tied to Christianity is is a bit of a mystery to me I don't really know is it that it's something that seems more steeped in ancient Western values so that's that's the other thing is is that it's like it's it's Western but this to me seems quite contingent this is why I'm I'm separating out like Christianity as what Jesus teaches and what Christianity is and Christianity which is like like I said earlier spe with a specific emphasis on on the history of you know Western Europe um people think that Western Civilization is a result of Christianity that's in fact yeah I think that's what's going on here so you get Tom Holland the historian who has popularized this idea in his book Dominion that all of Western Civilization is essentially Christian without realizing it so you know we've taken what were once non-obvious controversial ethical contingent statements you know things that a lot of people thought were true a lot of people thought we're false we're quite radical quite controversial and they've so successfully embedded themselves into our culture because of the rise of Christianity that we now describe them as self-evident truths you know it's just self-evident that every person has worth that you know slavery is wrong all of this kind of stuff it's just self-evident and so we don't need Christianity to teach us that anymore because it's self-evident and Tom Holland thesis is is something like well what we don't realize is that it's actually come from Christianity even though you now don't realize it so if you cut off the Christianity you cut off the basis for this entire Western ethic in the first place so people who care about Western ethics people who care about um well preserving the west and preserving the Western ethic might buy into this Tom Holland thesis and say oh okay so I really care about Western ethics and Western ethics is Christian therefore if I care about Western ethics I should care about Christianity and upholding Christianity who cares about upholding the West at the moment the political right so particularly in Europe you have this right-wing Christian sort of um you know friendship merer what about its usefulness as a prophylactic against wokeism yeah it's kind of the same thing right because it's still it's still like I mean what's woke culture trying to do is trying to sort of undermine Western Civilization you know the history of Western Europe trying to sort of rewrite the books he's trying to say that a lot of uh a lot of the West is is evil and patriarchal and white and racist and all of this kind of stuff this is this is what like people dislike in the So-Cal woke movement if you ask someone like Douglas Murray you know what what what's the big trouble with Woks what don't you like about them what will he tell you he'll say they're undermining Western Civilization so it's still this sort of let's save Western Civilization approach and I think that this has come at the same time as the popularization of the CIS that Western Civilization is Christian therefore to save the West we save Christian like an equation yeah yeah sure well how do you mean like an equation like you sort of add them together yeah that's how an equation usually works yeah yeah like as in they're treating them as the same correct yes that you can if it is or the enemy of my enemy is my friend right like yeah it's it's um I don't know it's a bit like I'm trying to think of an of an example here of like where else people just sort of go a bit they sort of they they cozy up to an ideology because it it's sort of I know it helps and I don't mean that to be sort of cynical cuz we're not always conscious that we're doing this but we we become attracted to this ideology become attracted to this religious tradition and think oh yeah like I I like Western civilization and the people who are talking about this Christianity thing they seem to care about it they seem to recognize that you know there's a lot of importance in western civilization and so they suddenly find themselves becoming more attracted to it but but but it's it's important to stress that like I don't think this thesis is correct I mean I'm not I'm not sure you know I I I still haven't actually read through Dominion by Tom Holland I really need to to do that with the amount that I talk about that's why I'm always very careful to to talk about his thesis um but like I think Western Civilization you know what's it defined by free speech freedom of religion um capitalist economy um you know like basically all of these things which I mean you can say that nominal Christians have like established these historically but if you actually flip open from the scripture there's no way that that you can describe this as Christian or judeo-christian especially with the judeo part when it comes to like the abolition of slavery I'm told that this is oh it's essentially Christian Movement the abolition of slavery like as if as if the Bible which explicitly condones and teaches you how to take slaves how to uh be them as inheritable property to your children um you know if you if you march up to a city to attack it and you see a beautiful woman I'm not misquoting if it says if you see a beautiful woman uh among them this is in Deuteronomy I think 20 I think it's like Deuteronomy 21 but I might be wrong about that then you can take her as your wife and if you want to do that then you take her home this bizarre ritual you shave her head trim her fingernails give her exactly 30 days to mourn her parents who you might have just killed and then you can take her as your wife okay so now we're told that despite all this sort of scriptural um endorsement and instruction that well the Abolitionist Movement was essentially Christian oh and the women's rights movement is all Christian it's all Christian ethics secretly cropping up I'm like okay so maybe it's the case maybe that God was always against slavery and always sort of proom and social justice and all this kind of stuff it just took us literally thousands of years to work it out and this just so happened to coincide with the enlightenment it's possible or maybe actually no maybe this isn't a Christian message and and like when I when I ask specifically how is this Abolitionist Movement or whatever how is it Christian it's like well Christianity teaches the worth of the individual the emphasis on um sympathizing with the victim this is the big thing it's like the idea that Jesus comes down everyone's expecting the Messiah to be this great military leader who's going to you know liberate uh the Jews from Roman occupation and instead you get this man who is like poor athetic and is crucified I mean we're so used to the crucifixion narrative that we forget how embarrassing it is and shocking it is for your Messiah to die a slave's death I mean it's it's an extraordinary story it's what makes it such an attractive one and so we're told well you know this this idea of you know um Sympathy for the victim is is like uniquely Christian and that's where we get like the care that comes in social justice social justice movements are all about like caring about the victim like yeah okay but the Bible does explicitly tell you you're allowed to own other human beings as private property so how do you square that one so in other words Tom Holland might be right that like the sort of nominally Christian Western ethic has like built up well or the nominally Christian sort of system and religiosity has built up this Western Society but it can't actually be like scriptural in my view I mean I might just be wrong about this but but so it's a little bit confusing to me that's why I find it difficult to answer the question like you know why are right-wingers attracted to Christianity well are they are they attracted to Christianity as in are they attracted to the message of the Gospel or are they attracted to what the sort of Christian church and Christian religion has historically been able to politically provide you know I wonder how much is that it provides a more stable and sophisticated sounding by virtue of how long it's been around push back against something that in comparison is flimsy contemporary uh Less steeped in Nostalgia and and um less stable in that way like if you were to create a thing that would act in opposition to Super Progressive very new very contemporary very quickly changing uh you would choose the most Lindy story that you can what's the one that's been around for as long as possible and you know we can kind of we get that bit we don't need to really worry about shaving the head and cutting the fingernails and we don't really need to worry about the slaves and passing them down to your children and stuff like that and I suppose that with Christianity because it is as Sam Harris said it's a relatively low te religion uh they're quite prepared it seems to me like they take less offense at people um playing fast and loose y with the literal interpretation it's h it's okay that he admitted that thing I get the sense that the Islamic faith would not be so okay with you peace mealing your way through their particular Doctrine yeah it's what I was about to about to say or bring up well I mean because you're quite I said it first I'm not sure I think Sam Harris said it first right [ __ ] okay so I'm the middle of the human centipede between Sam and you yeah I suppose so yeah why not yeah you can put it in those terms if you like and another reason I love speaking with you Chris um I think yeah as as I like to put it Islam is more High te and Christianity is more like high tea if you know what I mean like tea why is there not an Islamic Revival because um well no sorry there is is is this is the other thing I this is what I was about to bring up actually was was the fact that like okay a bunch of like you know our political establishment the Civil Service have just been totally taken over by this woke culture man um and everyone's a bit like come on seriously like really um you know on on the the anniversary of dday we've got Pride flags flying over Regent Street like instead of the British flag I think that's true might not be true but you get the point of making people are like I'm fed up Fed Up of all of this nonsense and so you just said like you know you need something that's that's old tried and tested you know and can stand up against this and so you get a bunch of like particularly I think disaffected young men who you know the like Islam is very attractive to them attracted to them because it because it says well look you don't believe in all this crap do you you don't believe in that you believe in you believe in certain kinds of values you believe that you should stand up for yourself you believe in gender roles you believe in this right yeah I do actually it's like well this is Islam can give you this and it can justify it and it can give you the the strength and the community behind you to assert those values and not have to worry about being some kind of like Outcast or condemned or whatever no because like we we all believe the same thing as you and we're growing and we're popular and nobody wants to criticize us because we stand up for ourselves you know okay yeah sign me up for that whereas the Christians are still very much like sort of yeah like like you say that they well they have the message of turning the other cheek yeah this is the Jesus figure so and their belief as well is that you will be judged eventually not necessarily right now yeah it's it is a different sort of message of of of Salvation I mean Christianity has the sacrifice of Jesus for your sins and and Islam doesn't have that Islam doesn't believe that that Jesus died on the cross again because we forget how radical it is that killing a prophet like God wouldn't allow that to happen so the idea of Jesus dying on the cross is a is a is a total anathema to the to the Islamic understanding of who God is and because again Islam is much more sort of like proud and sad up for yourself kind of thing having having this this embarrassing slave death for their Prophet like it doesn't run so Jesus doesn't die on the on the cross in in Islam um whereas in Christianity yeah he dies on the cross and he sort of pays your sin and all this kind of stuff it's a much more like I'm going to sort of throw myself on Christ you know woe to me and my sin um and so and that's more attractive to some and less attractive to others but it it it sort of means I think that also is why you get more like Christian churches who are sort of like oh we're totally open and we're like Pro pride and we've got a transgender priests and all of this kind of stuff when you don't see that happening in Islam at least not as much to the same degree a lot of people like I'm not I'm just not quite working out why that has resulted in churches Christian churches or Christian belief that permits people to be more peac well that's actually I think a slightly separate thing which is which is important to to spell out a lot of people say simply that Islam is like you know uh half a millennium younger than Christianity right because it sort of it crops up later than Christianity and therefore Christianity you know has its sort of Enlightenment Revival Reformation 500 years ago and Islam is like 5 six 700 years behind so it just hasn't got there yet right and and like a lot of people do this line I don't think it's right because it sort of treats Islam as a religion like it's sort of still a baby or something and and that it's like it's like not connected to the world in some way that it that it's like oh give it 500 years and for some reason it will just happen in the same amount of time as it like maybe but I I don't think that's true I think it's it's got more to do with the way that the scripture and and the and the and the prophets are treated like in Islam the Quran is the word of God which has sort of existed for all time um and you know the Quran you you you hold in in in your hands the Musa the the copy um the written copy is is a copy of a message which is eternal right which is which the final word of God is Quran means recitation so it's just you know Muhammad receives and Muhammad is illiterate he can't read he can't write and and God um sort of speaks to him in in a cave and says you know says write or recite or something like to that effect and Muhammad is sort of like well I'm I'm a literate I I can't I can't do it and he just commands him to do it anyway and Muhammad is is is so sort of freaked out by this that I think According to some reports he considers suicide he goes to like throw himself off a cliff and then he goes home to his first wife who is the first person to encourage him that he's actually heard the word of God and that you know he should submit to it so she's known as like the first Muslim she's the first person to sort of you know recognize the message and and accept its truth um so this word of God comes to Muhammad and is at some point at a later Point like written down recorded and there are there are various copies floating around and then califf uthman he decides to to put together a sort of an official codex and this is where we get our our Quran that we hold in our hands but the actual message itself is eternal and comes directly from God in Christianity unless you're speaking to like a Biblical fundamentalist who are quite a relatively new and and quite American phenomenon um they don't treat scripture in the same way scripture is written by men particularly the gospels I mean the letters of Paul are letters written by a man to a bunch of churches to settle sort of theological and practical disputes this isn't like the word of God in the sense that this isn't like the the exact words that of that that you're reading in the Bible are the words that came out of the prophet's mouth that God you know put into the it's not the same thing in Christianity in Islam the word becomes a book in Christianity the word becomes flesh and dwells Among Us that's the the opening of The Gospel of John you know um in the beginning was the word and the Word was with God and the Word was God and then later on and the word became flesh and dwelt among us so you have the word of God being Jes Jesus in Islam the word of God is the Quran and so a lot of people think the Quran in Islam is what the Bible is in Christianity I think that the Quran and Islam is what Jesus is in Christianity and the gospels are more like the Hadith literature in Islam which is sort of these reports of of the sayings and doings of Muhammad which some are better attested than others you know there's sort of dispute over which ones are sound which ones aren't but no one disputes the Quran but the some of the Hadith you could say well this one maybe didn't happen this one did happen we know we're not really sure um but no one disputes the Quran in the same way in Christianity with the gospels yeah maybe they said this maybe they said that maybe that's a later interpetation maybe that was wrong maybe blah blah blah but no one disputes Jesus you couldn't you couldn't have Jesus sat in front of you and argue with him about what's what's true in Christianity right and so this is why in Islam well in Christianity if you want to say look I know the Bible says all that stuff about women speaking in churches but actually you know Paul probably didn't write that letter and he probably didn't mean this and that particular verse moves around our early manuscripts and maybe he didn't really say that I mean that like whatever and so you end up with this sort of yeah okay fine play in the system would Jesus be okay with it yeah it feels like Jesus might be okay with it kind of thing and so there's a bit more room to maneuver you can't do that with Quran you can't say oh well maybe that verse isn't true maybe that was a mistake maybe that was you know a later interpetation because the Quran is the word of God what's an interpolation oh like a later Edition so something so something that's added uh later into the text so like earlier I mentioned the stoning of the adulterous woman which is my probably well it's one of my favorite stories in the in the gospels um where Jesus says he who is without sin cast the first stone it's a religious test because you've got this Jesus peaceful figure and as a woman who's committed adultery and the law is quite clear that the woman should be stoned and Jesus is just like writing in the sand and the Pharisees are like okay come on then Jesus what are you going to do here it clearly says that she should be stoned that's what the law says he's like writing in the sand he's kind of ignoring them and they say Jesus you know what should we do here you know the law is quite clear we need to Stone this woman and they're testing him what's he going to do and he says sure yeah okay go ahead but he who's without sin casts first stone oh man it's brilliant it's awesome it's like ethical genius it sort of undercuts at the same time as not contradicting the the truth of the law or the Justice you know it's this it's This brilliant moment but unfortunately it's not in our earliest manuscript and so most scholars believe that it's it's a later interpretation in other news this episode is brought to you by Factor if you're 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meals.com mw50 and mw50 a checkout plus Gnostic Gospels which is like the DVD extras sort of the behind the scenes Vlog the director's cut yeah yeah it is the extended edition the nostic gospels are a fascinating uh Corpus of texts which we've only very recently in the grand scheme of things been able to ReDiscover and read for ourselves we knew of the existence of a bunch of gospels that weren't in the New Testament um because early church fathers were writing about them um we knew about the existence of a Gospel of Judas a Gospel of Thomas fascinating you know but we didn't have the texts until in 1945 uh some guys digging in the desert and accidentally crashes into this big jar at least this is one of the like the stories are disputed um and just like opens this jar at first doesn't want to open it because he's scared there's like a demon in it uh but turns out it's got a bunch of ancient manuscripts which he takes home and keeps by the fire where is it in nomadi near nomadi in Egypt so Egypt is has the perfect climate for the preservation of of Papyrus so it's we're not entirely sure but it seems that like these tchs were buried in this cave in the desert and that could be uh because athanasius comes up with the Christian canonical New Testament as these are the four gospels all of the other ones you know we're not we're not we're not going to read They're not part of our tradition so they end up getting sort of destroyed so they get they get sort of buried in in the ground to either protect them because they don't want to be destroyed or just to bury them to sort of get rid of them um it's also possible that it was a a burial site some people have suggested that like it's it was uh some significant figure with a lot of you know a lot of texts to his name when he was buried he was buried with these texts and so that's why some people think that the story of the discoveries true because it was actually a grave robbing some people have thought maybe it was just a simple grave robbing but the person who then discovers these texts doesn't want to admit that he's robbing a grave have these been carbon dated have they been verified authenticated y so there's been there's been a lot of work done on this um we you can you can date the actual Papyrus but you can also I mean the extraordinary thing about these gospels is so I think so the Gospel of Judas for example which is not found in that collection it's not found in the nomadi collections it's it's found at a at a later point and fascinatingly when people began to realize what it is there's this huge scramble because it's worth a lot of money right and people are like trying to smuggle it people are trying to uh because because you can't just sort of take really expensive ancient manuscripts across the border you know countries want to keep them for themselves they want them for their museums they want them for their researchers uh but the people who find them want to sell them so this Gospel of Judas is discovered and it finds its way all over the place it actually spends something like 15 years in a safety deposit box in Long Island in New York which like almost destroys it because you go from like humidity the perfect climate of of Egypt to like New York city so it was just like absolutely ludicrous it's finally National Geographic who buy the Gospel of Judas they sent a bunch of Scholars I think including Bart Man to go and like verify it and they give them a bit of the text but they can't give them too much because they can't just let them read it because they haven't bought it yet but they need to give them enough to like verify the text right so there's carbon dating and all this kind of stuff but also I mean we can we can so we carbon date the the Papyrus and we know that it sort of dates you know I I don't know what the exact numbers are but between like 80 ad and like 400 ad it's like give will take like a few hundred years but we also know that um that uh irus writes in against heresies about the Gospel of Judas so we know that it existed and we know that this is dated to around that time and we're like this must be the Gospel of Judas but because erus writes about it in like 180 ad we know that the top end for how late it can be there are lots of different ways to get to triangulate exactly right so you can date a Tex by you know carbon dating the Papyrus um also it's been referred referred to we can do it textually like what are its textual dependence what what does it have knowledge of you know does it have knowledge of the the so a lot of people date the gospel of Mark after 70 AD because it mentions the the the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple so the Temple's destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD and Mark's gospel mentions this and so the secular storian looks at that and goes well that means it was written afterwards the Christian might look at it and say well Jesus talked Jesus predicted the destruction of the temple because he was Jesus it was a miracle he knew it was going to happen so it could be earlier you know so so there's there's sort of theological dispute as well interestingly there was one gospel um the gospel of Jesus's wife which was discovered relatively recently and was was particularly famous because it was this tiny it was a fragment and it talked about Jesus's wife and it mentions Mary Magdalene so the presumption is that it's it's describing Mary Magdalene as Jesus's wife which has been a sort of theory Da Vinci codes thing going on for a while and we have this Ancient Ancient Papyrus and at first Scholars are sort of like they think this might be this think this might be real they carbon date the Papyrus and it it's it matches perfectly yeah like this is this is like dat this is an early ancient text um then some like red flags start being raised and the the sort of final nail in the coffin this is a forgery we we know now this is like a complete forgery and one of the ways to prove this is that it quotes um another gospel in Aramaic I think it it might it might quote the Gospel of Thomas actually but it it quotes this Aramaic translation so so it's it's it's got like this this text that's been translated into a different language but there's a there's a translation error in in the Papyrus on this fragment there's an error in the translation and there's one other place where the exact same translation error occurs which is a typo on a website that translates this gospel into Aramaic so it looks like the guy who's forged this this this bit of Papyrus has used an Aramaic translation of an old gospel from a website to then like on Old Papyrus genuinely old Papyrus and then written out and also like the the formatting of the of the text like where the line breaks are all of that kind of stuff is the same as on this website which like the the chances of that are just like astonishingly small especially with the typo and so we're like oh okay yeah that's a a shame that's a forgery what is interesting in the Gnostic Gospels how does it contribute or what are the big reveals well for a start it tells us what um what what Christian Traditions were being opposed at the time of the formation of the New Testament Cannon so you know we're very familiar with stories of the New Testament with stories of the resurrection and this kind of stuff there are Gnostic Gospels which tell us all kinds of different things so we know that there are communities who believe things and when we get to grips we can read for the first time what early Christian communities believed that eventually got sort of condemned as heretical but now from their own maths because we we knew that there are heretical sects that believe all kinds of different things but we've only ever heard about them through the writing of their opposition so irenaeus is against heresies is this huge volume that writes about why all of these heretical beliefs are wrong so you know it tells us what people believe but we're hearing it through a Critic now we can read it through you know from the from the horse's mouth as it were and so it's all kinds of stuff in there some of them are older some of them are newer some of them are obvious sort of fakes some of them are a bit more like sort of interesting the Gospel of Thomas might be the most famous um CU it's possibly quite old I mean Scholars have dated it it's some Scholars radically date it to like really early like 0 ad which is around the time that the canonical gospels were being written um some date it later but it's still very early it's like second century ad so so pretty early um and about half of it I think contain quotes it's just a list of sayings of Jesus it's a socalled sayings gospel so no narrative no crucifixion no Resurrection none of that just a list of sayings from Jesus and about half of them I think are also in the synoptic gospels half of them aren't and they say really weird Mystic things like if you bring out what is within you then what is within you shall save you but if you do not bring out that which is within you then you know what you keep inside you will destroy you or something like that which is like a bit sort of esoteric and and weird and you sort of have to Grapple with it and figure out what he's what he's going to going to be called and there's another one in there that where and again these are just sayings like out of nowhere it says something like whoever comes to know the father and the mother he shall be called the son of a prostitute and then just moves on to the next one you're about to ask me what that means I don't know no one knows like it's so strange and the most famous part of the Gospel of Thomas is the ending the very last quote Simon Peter goes to Jesus and says what about Mary Magdalene you know she should leave us because women are not uh worthy of of of life meaning like you know eternal life Christian communion you know women aren't worthy of this so Mary Magdalene should leave us now you would expect Jesus here to say no no Peter women are perfectly you know capable of inheriting eternal life no he says I will draw her close to me to make her a man so that she can enter the kingdom of God for all women who make themselves into men will enter the kingdom of God the Gospel of Thomas that's where it ends that sounds pretty woke yeah it's like the sort of earliest sort of trans um trans account and of Mary magdalin in particular God knows if you'll pardon the phrasing what that means um I've heard all kinds of different theories um a lot of the Gnostic Gospels seem to emphasize Unity bringing together making two one and a lot of time this is framed in terms of gender so the male and the female are to sort of unite um and so like there's sort of this argument that that's sort of what what's being gotten at here but it's weird that Jesus like specifies women being made into men there's one Gnostic Gospel which I mean remember that in the Genesis story Eve is Created from the rib of Adam she's taken out of Adam it's like a separation so some of these Gnostic texts sort of long for the reunification um saying that you know that was a terrible thing when when Adam and Eve were separated seems to have this like platonic influence if you heard the old sort of um that old like Greek Fable of the of the original creature being this like forearmed four-legged two-headed creature and this this is like the form of the human and then they end up getting cut in half and like you know spread across the Earth and so you know people will then spend their lives searching to be reunify very romantic story right and and there might be some influence there in some of these Gnostic texts where you've got the sort of separation and and desire for reunification interesting that the biological way that humans develop is actually that every human begins female is that right I don't know much about embryology I I have heard things to this effect but which why men have got nipples yeah yeah yeah yeah they start sort of developing nipples yeah no you yeah you're right I haven't man a long time since I've thought about that I mean that that is fascinating isn't it I mean it's funny as well because correct they just got it the wrong way around yeah this this is a thing is is like a lot of people you know I I recently did this debate with Des Souza and he asked me and we were talking about whether the Bible was true and he said did the universe have a beginning I said I don't know like sure maybe I I I think it probably did he said said well how did the Bible know that okay at best a 50-50 guess I I I like okay whatever but the point that I was making is that like people will reinterpret things either way I think that if the universe was infinite there's a way of interpreting Genesis to fit with that but also what I was going to say is that like had we discovered in embryology that all embryos start male and then become female the female is sort of drawn out of that people would go ah see look at the story of Adam and Eve that's what it was getting at like we you know we knew yeah exactly right and and I think people sort of do that all the time there's there's a great Gnostic Gospel called the testimony of truth which is discovered in the nakadi library so that's buried in like 400 ad so it's it's probably like second or third Century ad um and the testimony of truth retells the story of Genesis but interestingly if you read Genesis and I mean like the actual account of Genesis um so so who are the characters in the sort of Garden of Eden story Adam Eve Eve snake snake who's the snake devil right why do you think that which it's just sort of traditionally the snake is the devil but the text never says that the text never identifies the serpent with the devil interesting the concept of the devil Satan the accuser didn't exist at the time of writing of Genesis right this is like one of those things about did the Fruit of the Loom logo ever have a cornicopia in it yeah Amanda effect except this time like yeah the original Mandela effect yeah I I suppose so like like go you know go and read the text it's just the serpent and we're introduced to the serpent we're told it's Genesis 3 it opens now the serpent was more crafty than any of the beasts that the Lord has created and and so Adam and Eve are told um you can eat of any fruit of the of the garden but do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil for in the day that you eat thereof you shall surely die surely die because the Hebrew it sort of says Die Twice It's like you will die die you will die a death um and so the serpent comes in this crafty serpent crafty is an an important word there um the King James translates it as as subtle the word is arum um so the the snake was more subtle or crafty or shrewd than the other beasts and it comes to even says did God say that if you eat of the tree the knowledge good and evil you'll die and he goes yeah and he goes you you're not you're not going to die God just knows that if you if that tree you'll become like him knowing good and evil and he doesn't want that so Eve looks at the fruit sees that it's good for eating takes a bite gives some to Adam and what happens do they die no what happens well God tells us in the Bible in the Genesis count God says now the man has become like us knowing good and evil he must not be allowed to reach out his hand and eat from the Tree of Life and so he's banished from the Garden of Eden What's the Tree of Life tree of well who knows the tree of life and and inherit eternal life so so so presumably in the way that eating from the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil gives you the knowledge of Good and Evil if you eat from the Tree of Life you get eternal life and God says they must not be allowed to do that it should have just gone for the Tree of Life first which wasn't yeah well so there are lots of theological interpretations here because interestingly God doesn't say at the beginning you must not eat the tree of life he just says You must not eat the tree of knowledge good and evil so arguably like if they Gant charted this correctly and they'd worked out Tree of Life live forever yeah you know it's actually really interesting but like what would happen if Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Life first and then well arguably see this is the sort of insight yeah that you need a productivity bro to bring to the theological Ser though it's a great question I I think that the tree of life gives you eternal life and the idea is that Adam and Eve have eternal life in the Garden of Eden when they're created they're just going to live forever in the Garden of Eden they've already got eternal life so eating from the and that's been subtracted from them now that they know good and evil you're not allowed to know good and evil and also etal life so then they're banished and then they're mortal so the the Christian interpretation of the story is like well they didn't die literally but they they died in the sense that mortality entered into the world you know they died a sort of spiritual death they became but their immortality was taken from them yeah ex the fact that you're not going to die now doesn't matter you are at some point yeah it's like there's something about knowing good and evil as a human that means that you are going to die probably because if you sin the price of sin is death and if you don't know good and evil then you can't sin because you can't knowingly do evil but if you know good and evil then because we're humans and we're naturally flawed we're always going to sin and therefore we we need death so death enters the world but here's the thing right that's one interpretation um but it is a bit of a weird story like who is this serpent why is the serpent even in the garden in the first place you know like like what's the serpent doing there in this perfect Eden you know um who who created this this this serpent you why can't they just from the Tree of Life afterwards why does because God doesn't it's not like they they literally just can't eat from the Tree of Life God banishes from them from the garden and then guards the gates of Eden with a cherubin with a flaming sword these stories are extraordinary man it's worth it's worth revisiting them um so this ancient gospel testimony of truth identifies the serpent it tells you who it thinks the serpent is it doesn't identify it with the devil identifies it with Jesus Christ what does I mean like Jesus is the serpent because a great deal of the Gnostic tradition believes that the creator of the material world is an either evil or incompetent or lesser kind of God figure the Demi urge so the material world is created by this evil or incompetent god um there are lots of different reasons to explain why that happened but it's like not not the father that Jesus refers to Jesus being like the true God comes down and when when Jesus says you know my Father in Heaven he's not talking about the creator of the material Universe because that's an evil Demi urge he's talking about the real sort of spiritual God so the material stuff is bad and the spiritual stuff is good um there's so much to it man there's so much to it but but so so the idea is that the god of the Garden of Eden this Gnostic Gospel the testimony of truth says like what God is this what God is this that sort of lies to Adam and Eve says that they're going to die does is jealous a self- admittedly jealous God doesn't want them to become like him now why not become like Gods you know he doesn't want it he's jealous and then the serpent comes in and and tells them the truth says like look you you you're these like material creatures created by this God but there's this like spiritual wisdom there's this knowledge of Good and Evil that he doesn't want you to have because he's this evil God like but I'm going to I'm going to give it to you I'm telling you the truth here um and so this this gospel thinks that Jesus is bringing wisdom there interestingly that word arum the Hebrew word that means shrew or crafty or subtle um also is translated the same word throughout the whole of Proverbs as sensible or prudent so there is a reading of Genesis that says now the serpent was more sensible than any of the other beasts that God has created and he he's the one that comes Eve and says oh like God said you were going to die if you no no you're not going to die you're just going to be like him and he's right so this ancient Gnostic Gospel condemns this Creator God of Genesis identifies the serpent with Jesus uh and says that Adam and Eve did the right thing by eating of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil so there's one way that the Gnostic Gospels totally upend the traditional understanding of Christianity and you can see why it's therefore condemned so that's that's fascinating and also this whole belief in the in the Demi urge and the different and the different also to be clear the word Gnostic a lot of Scholars reject it because gnostics didn't call themselves gnostics what is Gnostic Gnostic comes from the Greek word nosis for knowledge because a lot of these texts are unified by the fact that you're you're saved through knowledge it's not you're not saved through the things that you do the way you behave it's like you got to have the right kind of knowledge you got Whoever has the Gospel of Thomas says you know whoever discovers the correct interpretation of these words you know shall enter the kingdom of God it's about like getting you made them more [ __ ] literal it's like getting the but you can't you can't and in fact in the canonical gospels um the gospel of Mark you can read it like there's this report that when Jesus was with with the big crowds he spok in Parables so that they wouldn't they wouldn't understand properly but when he got back to the disciples he explained everything properly there's this idea even in the canonical gospels that there's like a public teaching of Jesus and a secret knowledge of Jesus and so the Gospel of Thomas opens these are the secret teachings of the Living God so this is the stuff that he said backstage which did him as Thomas Judas wrote down the gospel the the Apostle Thomas wrote down um whether Thomas actually wrote them probably not uh but given the fact that the secret knowledge given the fact that the Bible was uh an editorial decision what goes in what stays in yeah there's interations that edits are made there's uh contradiction in terms of this says this thing here and doesn't say that thing there and also well we there's sort of play in the system that kind of probably didn't say that so we can probably kind of get rid of that yeah where does the authority come from of that Corpus and why has the gospels not completely upended the entire world of Christianity given that the editorial decision is now so plainly evident that it was just laid at the feet of flawed humans like the rest of us well because I mean so so the the the way that these texts are determined are through a mixture of things so like Apostolic succession is important uh as in the the sort of the message needs to be legitimately attributed a bit like how the had of Islam are attributed like if if you read a Hadith um it will have this entire sort of second bit which tells you the line of succession from Muhammad to the person who heard it and this person heard it from this person and this person heard it from this person because the important thing is like is like knowing that it comes from the right source and so the the four gospels that we have I believe to be written by either eyewitnesses traditionally eyewitnesses or like traveling companions to eyewitnesses to the life and Ministry of Jesus um so like Matthew the Apostle um Luke the the traveling companion of uh the Apostle Paul um John traditionally associated with the Beloved disciple of Jesus so so these are sort of like they're believed to be written as close to eyewitness as you can get um also the theological content is important uh like I tweeted out a thread about the Gospel of Thomas a couple of quotes and people misunderstood what I was doing they thought I was somehow trying to like endorse it or something I was just like wow look at this really weird gospel cuz I just done a podcast episode on it so I quoted some of the more bizarre elements to the Gospel of Thomas and Michael NS retweeted it and said reading this is is is just it just makes it so obvious why these texts were condemned in the first place and he's kind of right like the stuff about like turning women into men and and like the son of a prostitute and all this kind of stuff it's just like kind of weird and and and doesn't seem to sort of fit in with what people would have like remembered and known about Jesus at the time and so they're sort of condemned on theological grounds as well like I don't I don't think that these texts I couldn't say that they more closely approximate Jesus's message it's so clear that they just they just completely contradict what the understanding of Jesus was at the time of the formation of the cannon and so they're sort of expelled for that reason too but and you're like oh but now that we can read them you know shouldn't that just totally upend everything for a lot of Christians it's actually done the exact opposite like I say like the Michael NES thing a lot of Christians are now reading these texts and going oh oh yeah I can to yeah oh thank goodness I can totally because if if we discovered the Gospel of Thomas and it was like this really close text that had like a sort of plausible close ethic that was a bit different or something that just denied the Virgin birth but sort of nothing else it'd be really Troublesome like oh goodness but because it's like so wacky and so out there Christians are like oh thank goodness you can get rid of it all because now it's OB now it's totally obvious why it was condemned in the first place obvious yeah the Gospel of Judas is a fascinating one I re people can read this right the Gospel of Thomas you can read it in like 20 minutes the Gospel of Judas is much harder to read because it's just like really really strange but the beginning it's kind of like Eerie it's got that D Vinci Code interest the disciples are praying um they sort of yeah Jesus sort of comes upon them praying and laughs at them and they say Lord why why you why you laughing at me you know like and and and he says well I'm not laughing at you like but by doing that you praise your God like your God as if it's a different God and then he pulls Judas aside and says like do you know where I've come from and Judas goes yeah I know where you've come from you've come from the realm of barbalo and I'm not fit to utter the name of the word of the one who sent you like this some like Dungeons and Dragons type like stuff you know it's like this fascinating and this because the Gospel of Judas is very Gnostic the realm of barbell is like this higher realm that Jesus has been sent from to save us from the sort of material creation and when Jesus says you're worshiping your God he's talking about the evil Demi urge because they're sort of accidentally worshiping the the wrong God you know it's I thought Christianity just had one God yeah well it does but it seems like it kind of didn't always but but they wouldn't have called the gnostics wouldn't have referred to this and again gnostics too broad of a term people who believed in the demoic Creator wouldn't call that demoic Creator like God they call it like the material creator of the universe or something God is why God create the universe huh if that was the case why didn't God actual God create the universe there are again there are lot lots of different ideas and uh it sort of depends which text you read but um some people believe that there's like there are like these sort of lower deities who sort of try to recreate the spiritual realm to govern over and it's sort of a subpar version that's what the material world is um some people think that the the Demi Ur is like evil and so creates the material world to like you know I don't know like trap people and make them suffer or whatever some people think that it's the result of incompetence um the simulation hypothesis for theology yeah basically but the you know the god of the and by the way like like I probably botching a lot of what I'm saying here I I've I've been learning a lot about this recently by by speaking to people on my podcast um and you know reading these checks and reading some of the the literature around them and hopefully if I have watched anything too badly people in the comments will be be quick to sure I hope I hope that's the case but I I I really I want to emphasize that you know like this is this is very difficult to pin down and I'm I'm I'm no expert but at least what I hope is getting across is that this is like fascinating I mean it is just incredible because even if it is all obviously just like stupid and ridiculous and the Gospel of Judas is written written way later and obviously is false it's all just fascinating that this text exists and was circulating and was and was circulating with enough prominence that it was you know uh taken seriously by early church authorities enough to officially condemn them because they were sort of having enough influence it's fascinating one of the things that we haven't spoken about with this Christian Revival has been a death of meaning in the modern world I think so far the way that you've spoken about it is sort of functionally like what does it do what can it give people uh as legitimacy and their push back against encroaching secular liberalism and authoritarianism and the East and and woke and all the rest of it how much is this revival a response to a death of meaning in the modern world yeah so that's the other thing which I should have mentioned earlier because take aan her Ali yeah in her unheard article she talks about China and Russia and islamism and whatnot she does also mention nihilism but if you not me like it's you know it's because you rang me yeah four or five years ago while I was in the gym and one of the first things that you said was try nihilism yeah what do you mean I'm trying nihilism as a life philosophy yeah yeah yeah could try on forze man how's that going like it's all right I guess yeah very nihilism sort of is like uh you don't really try on nihilism so much as you take off all the clothes and and you're not wearing anything for a while it's it's it's quite a quite a strange phenomenon and and yeah I don't know I I don't remember saying that to you I don't remember where I was in my life or how tongue and cheek I was being but you know it's worth it's worth really were very vegan at the time which may have been going hand in hand it's worth really like taking it seriously though like what does it mean to live these philosophies what it's not something to just mess around with it's not like oh I like this Christianity stuff like yeah sure what does it mean to actually be a Christian it's not something that you can just like sort sort of if you really want to be a Christian you can't just be like oh yeah cool I'm sort of on that team yeah yeah whatever no it's like you have to you have sort of radically change the way you look at the world you have to turn the other cheek do you do you have to do that why can't I just do it the same way as I do with James clear's Atomic habits James clear's Atomic habits has got four steps to embedding a habit I often miss the fourth one oh sure yeah it's it's okay if you miss it like you don't okay I maybe I misspoke you don't have to do it but you have to sort of try to do it you have to uh be motivated to do it you have to give up so much of of of the way you approach the world you have to adopt a radical forgiveness you have to like you you you you sacrifice your ability to you know if somebody mistreats you at a bar or whatever to be like that guy's a dick no you can't think that that's not a very Christian thought you know you've got to you've got to be forgiven unless they're trying to teach gender ideology in schools yeah but but this is the thing like what's the Christian response to that well Jesus had sort of there were times where Jesus was angry like famously flips the tables at the the temple um because they've sort of turned the temple into a market and they're selling things and he thinks this is inappropriate so you know he he displays anger but generally speaking when it comes to theological disputes he'll he'll he'll know what's correct he'll tell you what's correct but he won't do it in he won't do it in a particularly vicious way except like I mean the one thing he really hated was religious Hypocrites um so a lot of his his most stinging critiques were for the Pharisees who sort of claimed to be these religious authorities but we're like acting pretty poorly how prophetic Yeah well yeah this is like you know everybody yeah that that's that seems that seems to be every the idea that sort of everyone hates a hypocrite that's the that's the thing that Jesus and Jesus did have you know seeming like vital for for a lot of these people called them like a brood of vipers and and and this kind of stuff so you know Jesus does do that every now and again but if you've got like you know teachers teaching gender ideology even if the Christian thinks this isn't very Christlike this isn't this isn't through I think the sort of approach of anger and and and I don't know condemnation let's say of the person uh may or may not be Christian depending on on how it's done but but when you said a second ago yeah I know you were sort of joking like unless it's this but but that that's that's part of it you point out that like oh well here's a place where everyone makes an exception well part of the the struggle of being a Christian is trying to retain that that element of that essence of forgiveness and compassion and charity even at the times that are most trying I think um CS Lewis said you know I forgive the unforgivable in others because God has forgiven the unforgivable in me you know does this show how unra and illogical humans are that we've tried to make arguments and reasoning neat and tidy and mathematical but becoming wise appears to be so hard on your own even with the assist of the scientific Enlightenment and computers that you still need to personify these lessons that you need to couch wisdom and living a wise life inside of a broader narrative which has religion and has a guy from 2000 years ago is it a case that people are saying we've tried it the modern way we've tried to live a life that is determined by I can I know the weather tomorrow in Venezuela uh I can Uber Eats things to my house and look at how [ __ ] miserable I am yeah we need to find something that's older something that's more tried and tested and is working on a different pathway I don't think it's necessarily older especially because there was a time when this message was new and it was still just as radical for people um but yes the fact that it's narrative the fact that it's storytelling um and moral principle rather than like scientific truth claims the the the the gospels don't make scientific truth claims they tell a story they they give an account of a man's life and his moral teachings um I I think you know it's often condemned as this like retreat of rationality but like I think it's it's it's just to do the brain thing again it's just the sort of the reemergence um of the right brain um this way of looking at the world that's that that sort of legitimizes poetry and art and music that are sort of irreducible to argument and syllogism uh that in other context people people think it would be inappropriate to try to understand music just by looking at music theory I mean music theory is very useful and important but like the way to understand music is to actually listen to the listen to the song you know and for a lot of religious people they're beginning to realize that this this microscope approach of trying to sort of analyze the religion for its truth claims misses something of like living like stepping back and then living life of course if it does make truth claims and those truth claims are wrong that's a problem obviously it's a problem but I think people are are beginning to become more forgiving of that because they're beginning to recognize the value of narrative well we spoke about this the last time we talked I'm really fascinated with this idea of things which are uh literally true but functionally false and functionally true but literally false or just useful instead of functionally true um and it it it seems that this is Contin to ramp up look I I feel better when I have faith I feel better when I'm a Christian like religion is the ultimate split test split tested and split tested and split tested into Oblivion uh working on an existing pathway that every human civilization has had in one form or another and we have come up with a way that is pretty good at dealing with the uncertainty of the future and the fact that you're flaw and the fact that you're going to die and difficult things are going to happen and unfortunately Netflix and a bit of like some Ryan holiday books who don't cut the mustard yeah and in so far as they in so far as they do um so Jordan Peterson has described God as the ultimate fictional character uh and he does so kind of tongue and cheek and I think what he's kind getting out there is the the idea that like good fiction approximates truth in a roundabout way like like a good a good work of fiction tells you something true it just doesn't through the through the use of fiction like did you know did the Grinch steal Christmas no not not really but there's sort of a you know an important message symbolic so called moral of the story right um and the archetypal example of this is the Christian scriptural Cannon these are the stories that have best approximated whatever truth is trying to be gotten at and done it in the most effective and um and uh sort of surviving mhm manner um so yeah I mean it's obviously it's obviously doing doing doing something but yeah like like people want their stories to be true the the the difficulty is that like the specific truth claims of Christianity like Jesus rising from the dead for example you like we we can't say like that didn't happen in in the in the sort of scientific sense of like I mean we're doing like historic uh science I mean you can just say Well it breaks the laws of physics and they never break but you don't know that like it could it could have happened logically speaking you know it doesn't break any laws of logic for for man to rise from the dead if if like we discovered the bones of Jesus that would be another matter I mean you'd be able to say well the truth claims aren't really important to me I care about the narrative and all but you'd be like yeah but we have the bones of Jesus we know that he remained dead he did not R from the dead didn't Ascend into heaven like Christianity has got to be undermined there whereas if it's a case of like there's this extraordinary claim which we can't like prove is false that Jesus rose from the dead but like I in some way probably don't think it's true but you can't prove that it's false it it sort of leaves that room for people to be attracted to the narrative and the poetry and the meaning and sort of say well this is a really unbelievable claim to me but like I'm just sort of happy to just to just say yeah sure why not Jesus rose from the dead Okay I I choose to believe it asan her Ali did what I was going to say about her with the nihilism question is that like when she approaches the the discussion with Richard Dawkins we're not talking about Russia and wokeism anymore a little bit you know it comes up but she's talking about her own depression she's talking about her own own sort of feelings of nihilism and despair and suicidality and that's what Christianity afforded and like a way to to get out of for her um so for her it was it was very much seemingly from what I understand of her position a response to this personal nihilism as well I wonder if I kind of had it in my head about that debate and the applauds that people had for her when she said and I found faith and Faith dragged me out of my yeah problems I wonder whether the reason and even to me I can I can feel it inside of myself when you hear a story like that from somebody who has been at a very low place and has been brought out by a thing that they believe in uh and then this guy sat opposite them starts wagging his finger about this sort of weird picity but do do you actually think that Jesus was born from a virgin and you know and I wonder whether the Applause I presume that that didn't get Applause I'm going to guess that Richard Dawkin trying to come in litigiously well it was sort of it was a split it was a split audience in that like Dawkins and I I I might be misremembering I need to watch this back but you know at points he would just sort of say he said like I am I'm sorry but this is bigger than you know Comfort than your personal feelings of what brings you comfort it's quite quite harsh but then you're there to have that conversation and there were a few points where he basically goes look I care about what's true I don't you know I don't care about the narrative and the beauty and the I care about what's true and people yeah okay I just wonder I just wonder whether um you know the ambient meaningless depressive anxiety induced cultural milu that many people feel in the modern world I wonder whether that makes them predisposed to see aan as well good for you look at how great this is for you I'm so happy for you that this thing has happened and who the who's this white guy who's this old foty doing guy coming in shaking his finger at you and and pooing on your parade it'sit it's a bit like the the sort of the father-in-law at the wedding coming along and being and and like a beautiful day you found the person to love your life and he goes yeah well you know he doesn't doesn't make that much does he you know he could could have a better job yeah it's not I'm not saying you're you're wrong yeah okay you fine yeah you're all right mate all right fine you're true yeah correct well done you you you've sort of scored your point on the truth value but you've like totally ruined the whole the whole day you know um and that's how I think a lot of people would feel about that conversation but look I totally obviously understand I mean the way that I'm speaking now I understand why people make this criticism you can probably understand too why people are like I'm soft on Christianity because it seems like I'm like rally endorsing this approach I'm not endorsing it I'm just I I'm trying to explain what I see going on and what I see going on is an abandonment of care for like propositional truth claims and an embracing of of unifying narrative that that sort of gives direction to people's lives and people are more ATT atted to that I'm still like the reason why I wouldn't be able to just call myself a Christian is because I don't believe that it's true like I I think I'd have to believe in the truth claims ah but that's because you are holding yourself to a particular standard due to the fact that you've spent the last decade immersed in it you are also friends with people who do have a very high bar that they hold their own faith to I think if I was to somehow be able to get in and twiddle with the barometer or the thermostat with which you would have to pass in order for you to say Well I'm cult Christian I believe in forgiveness I you go to church you've been to church like you H they're cool you know rock bands they're awesome pyate Technics love that God Corvettes great um all of those things I think you would quite easily be able to I'm sure that there's tons and tons of Christian values you think this is great and maybe if I had a way to identify that uh during times when my life is difficult I would be able to think huh rather than having to axiomatically why is that people come up with you need to have your values do you know your values big personal development thing you have values and then you have principles like what is it that I believe in and then operationally how do I actually act within each of these if that's not someone just recreating their own religion on the back end of some personal development book I don't know what is you wouldn't need to do that you don't need to come up come up with it from first principles because you have your operating manual that's there it doesn't matter about believing in a thing the problem that you have as far as I can see is that your criteria your uh level of uh certainty and the depth of of certainty as well that level of conviction is greater than it is for some people who are able to bate out their belief in the tree versus the tastiness and usefulness of the fruit yeah and there's going to be a lot more hurdles in the way of like to believe in the resurrection of Jesus I don't just have to suddenly become convinced that there's a strong historical case for it because I know that there is I just know that there are a lot of objections to that as well and so now I've got to sort of overcome those objections whereas for somebody else it might not need to go that deep for them to have that conviction uh sort of developed within them so I I think you know they say God meets you where you're at right like it's it would be it would be I mean so many people spend so much time trying to to do theology or philosophy and they they they study intricate arguments of God's existence some of them extraordinarily complicated with like 50 different premises and there's part of you which wants to say well if that's what leads you to God that itself seems like an argument against God's existence like oh yeah so you can come to know God but only if you're smart enough and have enough time to read through this 50 premise argument that finally can yeah that'll do it for you that doesn't seem like the way that things would be designed but it but maybe it's the case that for those who want to go digging in that depth they'll find God there but for those who don't they'll find God somewhere else such as in you know he does meet you where you're at the pretty waterfall or in the the the the sort of escape from the escape from nihilism so yeah there's that idea that like you'll where wherever you look you'll you'll you'll end up finding God how much do you think this Christian Revival is Downstream from Jordan Peterson um is there a First mover of the Christian Revival hard to say I I don't know about because Peterson's religious convictions bonafides they're so they're so they're so vague and so non-committal that I think it would be difficult to to attribute a lot of it to him although his like friendliness to Christianity and the sort of biblical serious that he does and he must I mean he must have inspired so many people to to revisit the the biblical stories especially Exodus and Genesis Kan and Abel you know everybody's heard of Kan Kan and Abel now I wonder if that was the case you know 5 10 years ago before Jordan Peterson started talking about it in every single podcast he ever does um so that's cool but I don't know if he sort of inspired this movement I think in the UK Tom Holland has a lot to do with it even if uh a lot of people haven't read Tom Holland the people who they listen to have um you know what I mean so like the the actual sort of Genesis of the thought might be in that in that in that Dominion thesis that seeps its way into into a lot of how many times have we heard the term judeo-christian values yeah it's it's a strange it's a strange phenomenon I mean what are judeo-christian values I mean like flip open the Old Testament to almost any page and tell me what you find and tell me if you think that Accords with what people would proudly assert as judeo-christian values of today they seem to they seem to contradict each other who else is perpetuating this wave of Christian Revival um it depend depends what you mean so the people I mentioned earlier there sort of so the Constantin kiss Douglas Murray's they're perpetuating it in the sense that they'll I don't know if Douglas Murray would use the term cultural Christian but but say Richard dorkin and Constantin kissen two guys who will both say I don't believe it's true but I'm a cultural Christian so they they're just asserting the value of like Christian architecture ethic whatever whatever it is aesthetic um which for me is of course the same thing as ethic really um but then on the sort of like belief front uh someone like aan her Ali is is a big player because she's a huge conversion story of someone who actually now believes in God uh Russell Brand maybe I'm I'm sure like even if you don't listen to him he's famous enough that the fact that he's converted is like news um I don't know have there been any other sort of famous conversions recently that I'm that I'm missing out they must have because Al you can dispute whether this Christian Revival thing is happening at all and maybe it's just like a bunch of wishful thinking maybe it's just a bunch of of of people getting excited because one or two people have converted to Christianity again you know like like who knows it would be interesting I wonder when the next census comes out or whatever GSS data if we're going to see some mild Christian Christian light thing coming about uh maybe you would be able to see this in a maybe people won't even identify as Christian but fewer will identify as atheist or agnostic or of no belief um the last sent showed for the first time less than 50% of the population called themselves Christian where in England right so so the big sort of every 10e census so when was this do you know this was um no I can't remember I think it was 2021 maybe so right Rec yeah so like so like recently like 2015 or something yeah they do it yeah something like that and so we'll have to wait for the next one but but it's been steadly declining you know Christianity has been going down down down down down and so the project if you look at any of the statistics the projections are like what the hell are you talking about Christian Revival literally the church is being absolutely decimated no one is showing up for church tenants you know people are calling themselves Christians it's on the it's on the down low you know Islam is growing atheism is growing you know all of this kind of stuff Christianity is completely depleted and yet there's sort of people are just like yeah but I can like feel it in the air man like there's just something happening and so like maybe at the next census we'll see that the the rate of uh the rate of decline slows down maybe it reverses a bit maybe it holds still and that itself would actually be quite significant um I I I always think about that how much is Just internet dgen Edge Lord like terminally online people thinking that their particular Corner their reality sphere is well this happening everywhere I remember before the was what was the last general election 2019 or it was the conservative Landslide oh uh yeah sure maybe I don't know I can't remember anyway I remember uh stormy tweeted out in support of Jeremy Corbin yeah that's right and I remember thinking [ __ ] hell stormy I mean that like and look at how many retweets it's got that's stormy and then Amber that won love Island tweeted out as well and I thought oh my God like you know this all of the polls are wrong this is not going to happen not going to happen not going to happen and then you realize that the internet is not the real world yeah it's the same thing with brexit and the election of Donald Trump I remember when Donald Trump got elected um I must have been what 16 or something and I just remember waking up and just being like surely not surely not because you just because everybody is and it's the same thing with brexit like it was like it's why people are like kind of suspicious of polls now because like everybody was predicting that this wasn't going to happen because and and you again you felt it in the air like everyone you speak to literally everyone you spoke to was like brexit is this nonsense so ridiculous racist and then it actually wins and you're like oh right okay because yeah people have their little Bubbles and I I wonder how much of this like Christian Revival thing is that I mean Christian rev like s like seriously to to the extent that like you know okay it's different in America but in the UK If you just pulled someone off on the street if you went to a pub and say hey man have you been feeling this this Christian Revival like what the hell are you talking about I mean if you ask them hey you know like the rightwing Revival that's happening in the UK they like yeah man it's crazy see how reform UK has come out of nowhere and just like started dominating the polls you asking about Christian Revival no the fact that it doesn't have the cultural force it might be exemplified in the fact that the sort of new rightwing upand comom upand comom reform UK who are doing everything they can to try to take the traditional right from you know who who now disaffected with the conservative party and bring them over to them they haven't tried to use Christianity as a tool to do that they haven't mentioned it again what's even though something close to 50% of the of England is claims to be Christian you would think and and presumably the 50% who claim to be Christian are probably more right leaning I don't know that for sure but you know it's possible if that's the case know why wouldn't nidel farage be like yeah we're a Christian party we believe in Christian principles and Christian values realize imediately got 48% of England yeah because it doesn't work like that because there isn't actually this like upsurge and Christian conviction that's happening in the country maybe we're beginning to see the I think Justin bry's idea is that we're beginning to see it sort of in the ual space some of the important thought leaders are beginning to consider Christianity and it's sort of in its in its infancy and what's going to happen is those guys a bit like the Tom Holland thing where somebody changes their mind and then enough people listen to them and it sort of seeps down and then eventually we might see something like the general population becoming it's not happening yet in my a good example of this I think would be uh Mary eaat L Perry Mary Harrington freyer India Nina power Helen Lewis and in some parts to uh pushing back against the sexual Revolution and that was kind of I mean if you'd said that 10 years ago you'd been like what the [ __ ] do you mean yeah sexual Revolution was bad for women what are you talking about whereas now you start to see this more and more in normal press there is literally a thing called being Perry pilled right um you know I understand the case against the sexual Revolution and I broadly agree with it uh that was precisely the same thing terminally online DJ edgelord internet people [ __ ] posting their way through Twitter and substack to slowly actually get to huh I think and I I it would not surprise me if in 10 years time that's the sort of thing that our parents would bring up it's like oh yeah yes I've been reading a little bit an article in the times about whatever whatever you go like that's the same same as uh Birthright decline George guy that we've been hanging out with all week has got this great question where he says what is currently ignored by the media but will be studied by historians brilliant yeah and I suppose you would say birth rights birth right decline I think impact of hormonal birth control would be another one sure uh I think uh embryo selection and the uh sort of onslaught the coming I would have said AI uh 2018 2017 but but now it's yeah media's got a hold of it um what would you say to that question just trying to think about that I ignored by the media but will be studied by historians I don't know I think I think bir birth rates is not a is not a it's not a bad it's not a bad option especially with how quickly that will presumably like change demographics um I mean yeah like in the in the UK for example a lot of people sort of celebrate the the growth of Islam um and there's this big debate where the debate usually goes I but look how successful we are and then say but that's not because you're converting people that's because you're having more kids you they are also also converting people um but they're also just having more kids and so yeah like people I would imagine that that will be something that will be of sort of Fascination as to why that happened is so would you say the changing demographics of the UK would be one yeah sure but then that isn't the media I mean not yeah well yeah I mean maybe not like a maybe maybe not like a ton but you people people talk about it it comes up usually in the sense of like alarmism usually in the sense of like I mean I saw a thing today on Twitter of somebody sort of going around into VI like reform UK candidates and and them just sort of saying you know we we need to we need to we need to take our country back and the sort of the clever journalists being like from who well you know the the the the and it's that typical Street interview style thing where they don't know what they're saying and they sort of say you know because we we'll be we'll be in we'll be in the minority you know soon you know whatever and the and the journalist doesn't like doesn't deny it or or whatever just sort of is it's it's like a it's like there like people are talking about it but sort of Gonzo style journalism that side eyes thing yeah but usually it's in the sense of sort of like you know get a Lo of these guys but you know it's it's there like the presence of of the fact that people think about that is like in the media whereas like the birth rate thing like I I think if I didn't know you I wouldn't even like think of it as a I wouldn't even like be aware of it as like a concept right even as something to then like condemn as alarmism or whatever like you wouldn't even know it's a thing Steven J Shaw the guy the original Dude that I brought on a year ago as far as I'm aware the best demographer in the world at this uh just redid his numbers for South Korea which went from 0.6 to 0.4 now he messaged me from Korea saying yeah yeah sure the message was kind of short when he he sends long messages when it's a long message it's interesting when it's a short message it's sad and it was basically I think the final sentence was they're done like ker is completely done game over within the next 100 years for every hundred Koreans there will be four great grandchildren wow yeah that's um it's amazing isn't it I mean it's just it's just fasc and and the fact that we if we sort of have I mean the thing about like this kind of stuff is it it's like maths isn't it you can literally demography is Ted this is how many kids are being had you can't make any more Oney olds is how many people there will be right like we know it for a fact and and you're right it sort of doesn't doesn't really get a mention and I think it's because the media the news is is daily the news talks about what's happening now today right and this stuff isn't happening now today it will one day people it's the most unique until it does it's not going to be talked about it's the most unique type of risk it's not an existential risk yeah it's not in the true permanent unrecoverable collapse bust romian sense of the word but uh it it is one of the most unique kinds because it does not Galvanize people to look up and see smog in the sky or forests burning or fish dead in the ocean it it doesn't Galvanize people the same way it is a lagging measure of a lead indicator and just maths man and it's rever whatever the opposite of an exponential like I don't know I it's should be exponential but down that one yeah it goes down it goes down but it goes down increasing no there got be what's the opposite of like X lari introvert people are screaming it into their airpods a couple of mathematics people are dude I want to say before we before we finish up imponen it's an imponen yeah an in rather than an ATI I think that you're perfectly positioned at the moment regardless of how large the breakout of the Christian Revival thing is regardless of how much a threat of rising uh Islamic population is in the UK and the US I think that you're really interestingly positioned I've said this you before but I think you're really interestingly positioned to uh blend uh a few different areas that I don't think many people can so I'm like genuinely genuinely excited to see what happens next few years I think that there's like just so much cool stuff and I love your stuff I love watching your videos so I'm really really excited to see what you do thanks man I'm a fan too as you know um yeah it's exciting to see that potentially at least you know the discussion of Christianity is going to be like back on the table again because I love looking at Christianity studying Christianity looking at the Bible and biblical scholarship and all that kind of stuff it's really fascinating but it's not very like you know it's I'm lucky I'm in a YouTube Niche where people are interested in those kinds of debates and stuff but like it doesn't have a lot of political relevance so if this does become a more talked about you know thing or a movement or or people are right that there is some kind of Christian Revival around the corner then then yeah there'll be wow are you going to be the theology consultant for Nigel farage's new Reform Party is that what you're suggesting I I am definitely not suggesting that um but I think there'll be a lot of interesting commentary to make from the perspective of like well how much of this is political and how much of this is how much of this is theological I don't know is Nigel a Christian do he claim to be a Christian wouldn't surprise me if he does but yeah like we said earlier the fact that we don't even know tells us everything we need to americ Americans the UK right spitting their Gatorade out Alex okano ladies and gentlemen where should people go keep up to date with all of the things that you're doing um they should go well they should go to church they should go to the gym you know they should go to the library oh they'll find you in the gym all the time yeah and they'll probably find me in church every now and again as well I'm one of those sort of Philip Len esque chur you're like a cultural Fitness Enthusiast yeah I'm a cultural Gym Bro I don't actually believe in any of it but I you know I sort of I'm you know I drink a protein Chi jimjon yeah I'm Jim adjacent I'm GNA I'm going to start saying that that's going in my again it's the Twitter bio every single time it just grows and grows and grows um if they want to find my content um then within reason is the name of my podcast uh I've just done a couple of episodes on the Gnostic Gospels and more are coming uh with some fascinating awesome interesting people um but yeah I'm just Alex aonor everywhere else Alex aon.com hell yeah appreciate you man cool you too thank you very much for tuning in I don't think about religion all that much but when Alex talks about it and the history and the different gospels it's pretty cool I find it pretty interesting you can watch my conversation with the one and only Dr Jordan B Peterson right here it's very interesting so go on tap it