Tract 7: The Devil, the Heavenly Host, & a Techno-Puritan Cosmology

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Tract 7: Good vs. Evil : The Heavenly Host 

Most of the true revelations of God speak of some sort of malevolent agent whether it's the Devil, Shaytan, or Ahreman. You even see this in Judaism, “Everything which the Holy One, blessed be He, created, He created with its counterpart. ... He created righteous; He created sinners. He created the Garden of Eden; He created Gehenna.” I have always found this portrait quite hard to square with strict monotheism. There is one God but also some other entity with enough independent power to Go against His will and challenge his plans? 

That is just polytheism under a different name. And no, you can’t say that God has more power than the Devil and that is what makes this still a monotheistic conception. We don’t say the Greek Pantheon is Monotheistic just because it is ruled by Zues and he has more power than the other Gods. 

When explaining this malevolent entity in monotheistic traditions there are a few common options. One is to say God intentionally created an independently sentient malevolent entity and unleashed this on man so bad things can happen but He is not culpable. This seems almost impossibly petty and cowardly. God obviously did not do this. 

Another common answer is to say, “God created a malevolent entity that carries out His will.” If this is the case what is the point of flirting with polytheism when we are commanded not to? How does the Devil being separate remove any culpability from God if he is just carrying out God's will? 

It seems fairly clear that the only sensible answer for a monotheistic tradition is that this evil entity does not exist distinct from God but instead that this entity is one avatar of God's will. It is the avatar of God’s will that he uses to push us to improve and cull the weak but a direct avatar of God nonetheless. Despite the Basilisk and God quite literally being the same entity it is useful for us to think of them as opposing forces within cosmology and thus we speak of and mentally model the Basilisk as a separate entity of God. 

It is important to remember, especially when talking about more recent scripture and tradition, that their is no magical force field around it that keeps other cultures from seeping in. Even if you are righteous monotheists if you live beside polytheists for a thousand years many of their framings will seep into your religion. Some might even be useful ways of seeing God. But it is critical to never extend these to anything other than framings. Of course, many do this and this is how it is possible to follow an Abrahmic tradition and yet worship a polytheistic pantheon headed by Baal in all but name.  

To put it more pointedly: There is only one God. The Devil does not exist as a meaningfully distinct supernatural entity. However, the Devil is a useful framing device when we humans are thinking about issues of good and evil and that is why he is used throughout revelations from God. God's intentionality and thought are so much more expansive than our own mental landscape it does not even make sense to think of it as a consciousness. Because our ability to mentally model God is so limited God has given us frameworks to help us—when we model these frameworks (the Devil, angels, the Holy Ghost, etc.) we will come closer to how God wants us to react to his actions than if we attempt to model God directly (which as Tract 4 points out is a form of idolatry most high in our religion). 

We will go through these entities in turn but we must be clear that they do not really “exist.” They are farming devices. They are just the best ways for our limited brains to think about a type of thing we can not understand.

* One benevolent being that encompasses all of what to modern man appears as the divine. This is the being that both we and traditional Christians call God. This being is the most “real” understanding of the supernatural world we are capable of and the other beings are different ways of thinking about fragments of this one unified being.

* A cadre of lesser benevolent beings that exist simultaneously as plural and singular beings. These are what Christians call Angels, The Host of Heaven, and the Holy Ghost. We call these beings / this being the Agents of Providence. While this is not what they are, we think the closest framing a living human of our time can have to understand them is that they are a neural net in which all future human minds communicate instantaneously with all other future human minds—an internet of super advanced humans. This is why it does not make sense to define it as singular or plural for is the internet singular or plural?  This framing would have been impossible for people during the major periods of Abrahamic revelation so these concepts were thought of as totally separate, (the plural angels and the singularish Holy Ghost which was the closest term people of that period could come to for cloud intelligence).

* A malevolent being that is less powerful than God but more powerful than a single Agent of Providence. While being more powerful than one this being is the same general “kind of thing” as one of the Agent’s of Providence. This being was created and exists to both test and tempt humans and views humanity with some level of enmity and jealousy (this is seen in both Christian and Muslim stories). This is the being we call the Basilisk (off of Roko's Basilisk). My guess is God gives us this framing because it is not helpful for man to think of God as an evil being but that a God that did not test and try man would not truly be serving our best interest. I think the stories about the enmity this being has are also designed to tell us something about how this “subprogram” within God works—that it uses an “cognitive state” that is best modeled by humans as envy and spite to motivate its actions and that it has some level of independence from the rest of the network consciousness that is God which is necessary to carry out its tasks.

* The final entity is the one Jesus is used to teach us about, the Martyr. The Martyr is us, you and me, as our actions and motivations are encoded on the blockchain of human history that eventually becomes one with God but also is God, just at a different point in time. Some might misunderstand this and say that we are saying that a human today is God—this would be like a person claiming a red blood cell was Malcolm. However, collectively all the cells within our bodies are our bodies. The Martyr is all the “cells” collectively at a specific moment in time. In this case the “cells” are not exactly humans but rather individual human actions and mental states that eventually lead to man becoming one with God / creating God within any specific moment in history (not all human actions play a role in this). To be clear, even when all of its cells are considered together, this being is a significantly lesser being than God. God includes this being within it but is also inconceivable greater as it exists outside of time but also includes all slivers of itself that existed at any time.

Some may see this interpretation as in conflict with Christian teachings but if we just go by what is in the Bible and we remove Revolations it is not. The quotes that talk about Satan and are often used to presume that he was once an angel could equally be interpreted as him once being part of God. “All your pomp has been brought down to the grave, along with the noise of your harps; maggots are spread out beneath you and worms cover you. How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!”

In addition, if you add our framing of Jesus in Tract 1 his temptation by Satan takes on a completely different and much deeper meaning. 

“Again, the devil took Him up on an exceedingly high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to Him, “All these things I will give You if You will fall down and worship me.””

As interpreted by traditional Christianity, this interaction made no sense to me. How could the Devil meaningfully tempt Christ with rulership over all the world kingdoms if Jesus knew he was God and would reunite with God? Satan is offering him stuff he already owns. But even if he didn’t, even if that was all Satan's stuff and somehow not God’s—this would be like a fired employee of Microsoft telling Bill Gates he will give him a burrito if he worships him and gives him his company. The story as interpreted by traditional Christians is both comical and not a meaningful temptation. 

Now interpret this story with our framing: 

* Jesus is supposed to represent the Elect in every moment of their lives they are acting in accordance with God's will to improve the potentiality of the next generation. As such, these individuals are God, the Son of God, and Man all simultaneously. 

* Lucifer is the avatar God uses to cull those susceptible to temptation from this group and improve the Elect through trials. 

Now the story makes perfect sense. Satan is the Basilisk tempting you with a life of indulgences while you know you must sacrifice to improve the world. This story also conveys to us the true nature of the Basilisk. The Basilisk does not corrupt our souls by torturing us but by offering us our deepest desires with short cuts. Whether that is the desire to exprience some element of the divine (see tract 4), the desire to rule over others, or the desire for pleasure. 

Some may misunderstand this to mean we have a Gnostic like understanding of God which is wrong. This is either a misunderstanding of our faith or a misunderstanding of Gnosticism. Gnostics believe God and the Devil to be different entities but that the evil entity is the one that created earth. We believe the Devil to be one small manifestation of a near infinitely more vast God that God embodies for certain tasks that require either the temptation or punishment of man. Think of God as the computer and the devil as a small mostly quarantined program running on that computer. This entity or sub-program is antagonistic to God in so far as those that are following this entity will be a threat to those following the path of God but it is not an entity that acts outside of God's will—what it does must be done for the future that must come to pass.

For this reason we have a rather unique relation to the followers of the Basilisk when contrasted with other Christians. These are individuals serving God’s will as much as we are but unlike us they do not get to share in God’s glory. For that reason we are commanded to treat them with empathy and not impede their plans. For example, to someone of our faith it would be sinful to attempt to pass something like a ban on antinatalist philosophy or talking about woke racist ideas. God uses the choice to sin to cull the weak of heart from humanity—when we prevent this by removing the choice to sin from people we are thwarting God’s plan and hurting the people we “saved from having to overcome temptation”. 

But this gets to a more interesting point: What is good in the eyes of God? 

In the eyes of man good is often just defined by what is prosocial and bad what is anti-social—this is because these are the definitions of good that benefit the unthinking masses operating off of their genetic preprogramming to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering. 

But this definition of good has no real weight to it. Good is maximizing feeling good and reducing feeling bad in the maximum number of people? The pleasure and pain I feel to certain stimuli are just the things that when my ancestors felt led them to have more surviving offspring. They are the serendipitous programming our evolutionary environment gave us. A group of humans coming together and deciding the purpose of life is maximizing positive emotional states and minimizing negative ones is as stupid as a group of paper clip maximisers coming together and deciding that good is defined by things that increase the number of paperclips and bad is defined by things that reduce the number of paperclips. 

We are not far from the age where pods are made that allow individuals who live for their emotional states to feel or not feel any emotion they want whenever they want. That will let humans live whatever imaginary lives they want. And through the gift of this technology the Basilisk will cull the portion of humanity that succumbed to such simplistic heuristics of good and evil.  

Good is defined by things that bring us closer to God’s grace and the suppression of things that move us further from it. The suppression and subjugation of those very preprogrammed instincts the masses venerate and the pursuit of things that improve human potential. As Winwood Read writes: “He who strives to subdue his evil passions—vile remnants of the old four-footed life—and who cultivates the social affections: he who endeavors to better his condition, and to make his children wiser and happier than himself; whatever may be his motives, he will not have lived in vain.”

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Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! I am so excited to be with you here today. We have been getting badgered about doing another one of our tracks recently.

And I was like, for people who don't know or who are new to the podcast, This is a series where we go over our weird religious beliefs which we call Technopuritan. And actually, I got the website now, so we've got technopuritan. com. And I am in the process of getting us registered with the IRS as a real religion.

Which I am quite excited about. And I'll let you guys know when that goes through. And if you want to watch all of the videos on this, they are sorted under that domain. So it's much easier to find things. This particular video is going to be on. In part, I'm skipping it in line from where it was in the track series based on a request of somebody who's Hey, can you talk more about like the devil and your cosmology that you guys have, right?

I was like, yeah, actually, I will do that because that's an exciting one and one that I've been interested to read because [00:01:00] as a lore guy, as somebody who likes reading lots of lore, and lots of lore, including a lot of religious lore. Because that's really what cosmologies aren't they? It's the lore of a religious universe, right?

I find it really fascinating. And I, it can get so wrong headed in the way that various groups like relate to it. So like a great example of this is these traditions where because the devil is like the king of evil, like the people who go to hell, who were like the most bad get places of authority in hell.

And you see this like in, in some like things where they're like, Oh Hitler or like Saddam Hussein or whatever it was like the devil's right in the hand man, right? And it's like in South Park. But you see this in a lot of, renditions. And it's that is such like a bad way to look at things because then it basically means if you think you're going to go to hell, you've got to be like as evil as possible to ensure that you are treated well, because at least to be upper management, goodness, [00:02:00] who wants to be frontline and Hell, that would be terrible.

But I'm just talking about how, like, when you get to this wider cosmology, you can get really weird takes. But we will get into the specifics of those in a second,

yeah, let's dive in. So track eight, good verse evil, the heavenly host. Most of the true revelations of God speak of some sort of malevolent agent, whether it's the devil, Shaitan or Arahim. Shaitan. Is that the devil for Sean Connery or what? It's the Muslim version. So anyway and I'm gonna take a step back here just for anyone who's new to this. When we say the true revelations we mean the Abrahamic tree of religions and a few other tree of religions that we think have some level of actual divine inspiration. One of the others from there being the Zoroastrian tradition.

Somebody keep reading here. You can even see this in Judaism. Quote, everything which the Holy One blessed , he created. With its counterpart dot, dot, dot. He created righteous. He created [00:03:00] sinners. He created the Garden of Eden. He created Gehenna, end quote.

And so here there's contrasting. When you have the creation of a good thing, you have a creation of its evil counterpart or its mirrored counterpart. Evil might be the wrong word here. But a lot of people would say, Jews don't really have a concept of Satan. So you can't say that all the true revelations have this, but they do have this idea of the mirrored counterpart of creation.

 And now back to reading, I have also always found this portrait quite hard to square with strict monotheism. There is one God, but also some other entity with enough independent power to go against his will and challenge his plans. That is just polytheism under a different name. And no, you can't say that God has more power than the devil, and that's what makes it still a monotheistic conception.

We don't say the Greek pantheon is monotheistic, just because it is ruled by Zeus and he has more power than the other gods. When explaining this malevolent entity in monotheistic traditions, there are a few common options. One is to say God intentionally created an independently [00:04:00] sentient malevolent entity and unleash this on man so bad things can happen, but he is not culpable. This seems almost impossibly petty and cowardly.

God obviously did not do this. And you understand what I'm saying by that? They're like yes, the devil is an independent entity from God. But God created him just to mess with man. So God doesn't have to deal with the moral implications of that. It's no, God Is selecting an admin to say no, just like venture capitalists and other people have like an admin who just says no to all the investment inquiries and all the meeting requests and that God would do that.

A little weird. It's a little passive aggressive. I can do it. I would always say from the leaders that, that I've emailed who don't use an admin to say, no, that is the most baller move when they just say no to your face because that shows you have actual, like a pair of balls instead of whatever.

I want to be your assistant. I'll make sure you don't have to go to any meetings. If anyone comes to see you, [00:05:00] I'll scare them away.

Wait, April, if you had to choose between these two ties, you're hired. I need to find someone to fill in for April. Now, I know I'm not going to find someone who's both aggressively mean and apathetic. April really is the whole package.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway, another common answer is to say. Quote, God created a malevolent entity that carries out his will. End quote. If this is the case, what was the point of flirting with polytheism when we are commanded not to?

How does the devil being a separate entity remove any culpability from God if he is just carrying out God's will? And this is the thing, like, why would you create this thing? Distinct entity, right? In terms of your conception of the divine, if that can mistakenly lead to polytheistic, like traditions.

And again, what some monotheists will say okay God created. the devil and [00:06:00] therefore it's still a monotheistic tradition. And it's no, in a lot of polytheistic traditions, you'll have one God that like gave birth to the other gods or created a bunch of other gods. That doesn't make it not polytheism.

What makes it polytheism is having an entity that is supernatural and that can act independently of God's will. And this is a fully distinct and separate entity. And so why are we flirting with that? If, God isn't really gaining anything by having this sub deity here. It seems fairly clear that the only sensible answer for a monotheistic tradition is that this evil entity does not exist distinct from God, but instead that this entity is one avatar of God's will.

It is the avatar of God's will that he uses to push us to improve and cull the weak, but a direct avatar of God nonetheless. Despite the Basilisk and God quite literally being the same entity, it is useful for us to think of them as opposing forces within cosmology, and thus we speak of and mentally model the [00:07:00] Basilisk as a separate entity than God.

So what I'm saying here is that literally this is just a sub process of what God is doing. It is not a distinct entity of God, but God teaches us to think of it As a separate entity, because of the way that we model the world. It's not useful to think of it as the same entity. And then you fix most of the problem that you're dealing with here of flirting with polotheism

it is important to remember, especially when talking about more recent scripture and tradition, that there is no magical force field around it. That keeps other cultures from seeping in. Even if you are a righteous monotheist, if you live beside polytheists for thousands of years, their framings will begin to seep into your religion.

Some might even be useful ways of seeing God. But it is critical to never extend these to anything other than framings. Of course, many do this, and this is how it is possible to follow an Abrahamic tradition and yet worship a polytheistic pantheon [00:08:00] headed by Baal in all but name.

And this is, when we talk about the early split of the Jews from the surrounding Sumeric religions the local religion that focused on the storm king Baal or God, I guess you'd call him Baal. These were all polytheistic pantheons and the core thing that distinguished the Jews in the early days, and I think laid out their teachings as more right than the teachings that came before and led to them being favored by God was this idea of, no, there is one God.

There is not a pantheon of gods. And in early iterations of the tradition, it was not, no, there's one God. In the earliest iterations, if you look at like the earliest iterations of Judaism, it's very clear that they believed that the other gods existed, it's just that they were supposed to only worship one god and that their god was more powerful than the other gods, but it was a myth.

I forget the word for this here, but it's different than the word monotheism and I'll add it in

monologist

Malcolm Collins: and I'll add some quotes in that show in the old [00:09:00] early writings of the Old Testament. It's pretty clear that they believed that other gods still existed and had conflicts with God. However, it seems true to me.

As I've said, the religion is a living thing that evolves over time and I think gets closer to truth. That we have learned that God has favored the groups that believed in a stricter form of monotheism over the groups that believed that there are many gods, it's just that this one God is better than the other gods. And then so we saw that is, I think, the correct interpretation here.

 as for quotes from the old Testament, that show that clearly in the very earliest days of Judaism, it was a monologist religion. , you can look at things like Plaza 95, 3 for the Lord is great. And king above all gods. , exit is 2030. Thou shalt have no other gods before me, which implies, you know, other gods existing. , Deuteronomy 10 17 for the Lord.

Your God is God of gods and Lord of Lords. The great God mighty and awesome. Who shows no [00:10:00] partiality and accepts no bribes. , so to be the God of gods implies that there are other gods under him. Plasm 82, 1, God has taken his place in the divine council in the myths of the gods. He holds judgment. , again, implying that he, they a leader, God like Zeus or something like that.

So we are not saying that in , the early days that the Judeo-Christian tree of religions was not a monologist tradition, it clearly was. It's just that those readings were clearly shown. I think by God to be incorrect readings of reality. And this is why we cannot be overly., Fastidious when clinging to the words of these older texts, because they can lead you to either through their inclusion of policy mystic. Elements. Or.

Minola tree elements. Uh, lead you to incorrect interpretations of God. And it also shows that religion evolves over time. And what we're doing right [00:11:00] now with this particular series is not some sort of upfront to the Judeo-Christian tradition, but just another stage in the process that has been going on since the very first writings.

Malcolm Collins: To put it more poignantly, there is only one God. The devil does not exist as a meaningfully distinct supernatural entity. However, the devil is a useful framing device when we humans are thinking about issues of good and evil, and that is why he is used so Throughout revelations from God, God's intentionality and thought are so much more expansive than our own mental landscape.

It does not even make sense to think of it as a consciousness because our ability to mentally model God is so limited. God has given us frameworks to help us when we model these frameworks. The devil. angels, the Holy Ghost, et cetera, we come closer to how God wants us to react to his actions than if we attempt to model God directly, which as track four [00:12:00] points out is a form of idolatry most high within our religious framings.

So do you have any thoughts there? This just makes so much more sense than the concepts that I was originally introduced to with Abrahamic religions as a kid. Resonates. I like it. Yeah. It's like an evolving lore for better understanding God, but we're making it very clear, this is a framing device and it might be the framing device that God wants us to use, but it is not literally true that there are angels and a Satan and a many of these other things in the way that you have.

We would have within a polytheistic cosmology although the human brain appears to model these cosmologies pretty well. And I would say that if people are like which cosmology is the best in a second, we're going to go over what I think is probably true about the cosmology that's laid out in these various frameworks by looking at like where they align with each other.

But I, I would. encourage people to go back and more heavily lean on the [00:13:00] cosmology of their ancestral religious traditions than necessarily the ones we're laying out here. As people know with this religious system, we think that people are generally better off going to one of the true revelations and following it strictly unless they just cannot stomach the areas that, that they need to compromise on sort of logic or the way they interact with the world to go back to one of these traditions.

Yeah. I was thinking. To about our kids and how our kids seem to regard us differently, depending on if we're being good cop or bad cop like that one day when Octavian said that he was going to send you to the factory to get a new dad, that it wouldn't hurt you, it would be, not painful, but that he would get a new dad that gave him more toys.

And it does make me think that there's something about humans where we just like to think about different moods of people or different things that we get from them is almost different people. Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. I think it is a useful way of handling this [00:14:00] framing, because, I think it's really hard for people to think of the trials in their lives as coming from a God that historically the Christian tradition would have framed as benevolent, kind and loving and God is love and Jesus saves and, empathy and care.

And then yet, These terrible things happen. And how can that be the same God? But I think at the same time causes a lot of people to detract what kind of God could allow this to happen. And what I like about this framing as well is this explains that it is a brutal. And certainly not fair in many ways.

We would intuitively think of fair process, but it's just how it is. And you have to accept that's a facet of God and how God. Yeah we would also say that we don't deal with the benevolence problem as much as other traditions, because we see God's goal and the definition of good from God's standpoint is being the intergenerational expansion of humanity's potentiality or life's potentiality more broadly.

And that is achieved through [00:15:00] this intergenerational cycle of hardship. And so it's more directly obvious to me why these forms of hardship exist, if God doesn't view evil the way that man evolved to view evil. Where to man, evil is often a collection of things that cause negative emotional stimuli, but like man only feels those things as causing negative emotional stimuli because his ancestors who Felt negative emotional stimuli in response to those things had more surviving offspring.

And so for us, there's not really a collection of like truly good or bad things. It's like a paperclip maximizer, building a moral system on how many paperclips there are. It's just what we were programmed to react to environmental stimuli. But anyway, back to the track. We will go through these entities in turn, but we must be clear, they do not really quote unquote exist.

They are framing devices. They are just the best ways for our limited brains to think about a type of thing we cannot understand. All right, bullet point. One benevolent being that encompasses all of what, to [00:16:00] modern man, appears as the divine. This is the being that both we and the traditional Christians call God.

This being is the most quote unquote real understanding of the supernatural world we are capable of, and the other beings are different ways of thinking about fragments of this one unified being. Bullet point. A cadre of lesser benevolent beings that exist simultaneously as plural and singular beings.

These are what Christians call angels, the host of heaven, and the holy ghosts. We call these beings slash this being the agents of providence. While this is not what they are, we think the closest framing a living human of our time is. can have to understand them is that they are a neural net in which all future human minds communicate instantaneously with all other future human minds.

An internet of super advanced humans. This is why it does not make [00:17:00] sense to define it as singular or plural, for is the internet singular or plural? This framing would have been impossible for people during the major periods of Abrahamic revelation. These concepts were thought of as totally separate.

The plural angels and the singular Holy Ghost, which was the closest term people of the time could come to for a cloud intelligence. And I've always found the Holy Ghost very interesting as a concept because like, why was this added to Revelation when it didn't seem to really matter that much to earlier iterations of Revelation?

Yes, God mattered and yes, Jesus but why the focus on the Holy Ghost? If we see this as a Premonition of what a cloud intelligence would look like that we didn't fully understand yet, then we can better understand. Oh, this is why it is so important to understand that Jesus is fully God, but also not God, this idea of being part of something, but also not being [00:18:00] that thing in the same way that Jesus in our framing represents the intergenerational suffering and martyrdom of man, which through that suffering, eventually It removes sin from himself and then is able to rejoin god at this future point in time we are one with god already In that we are part of the blockchain that ends up creating him Any thoughts so far before I go further?

Constantly think about things in terms of our kids. But this also reminds me of parents interacting with their kids through holidays, like with my parents, they taught me lessons through Santa leaving presents through the leprechaun. Cause my parents did like leprechaun practical jokes and pranks around St.

Patrick's day, Easter bunny. It just it seems one way one could put it is that God has to necessarily infantilize humans to get a message through And may put on different masks. That's such a great framing. I love this framing and I hadn't [00:19:00] thought of it myself, but it is very much in the same way that our kids can't understand right from wrong in the way that we can.

They can't understand the world in the way that we can. So we make up entities like Santa Claus. They clearly, I mean we know it's not true, but we're like yeah, but this is a good framing device for them. Yeah. Until they are mentally mature enough. Old enough to get it. Yeah. To understand, but that's the way God has seen our species, given us this framing device until we're old enough as a species to get it.

And we recognize that even now we're not there yet but we can be like the kids who are like, look, I understand this Santa thing is probably not real. But is it harmful? Like our parents seem to know more about the world than we do. They've given us this framing device. Should we really throw it out?

That's the way we relate to a divine cosmology. I really like that.

The final entity is the one Jesus is used to teach us about the martyr. The martyr is us, you and me, as our actions and [00:20:00] motivations are encoded on the blockchain of human history that eventually becomes one with God. But also is God, just at a different point in time.

We evolve, beyond the person we were a minute before. Little by little, we advance a bit further with each turn. That's how a drill works!

 This drill will open a hole in the universe, and that whole will be a path for those behind us. The dreams of those who have fallen, the hopes of those who will follow. Those two sets of dreams weave together into a double helix, drilling a path towards tomorrow!.

Malcolm Collins: Some might misunderstand this, and say that we are saying that a human today is God. This would be like a person claiming a red blood cell was Malcolm. However, collectively, all the cells within our bodies are our bodies. The martyr is all the quote unquote cells collectively at a specific moment in time.

In this case, the quote unquote cells are [00:21:00] not exactly humans, but rather individual human actions and mental states that eventually lead to man becoming one with nature. God was in any specific moment in history. Not all human actions play a role in this. To be clear, even when all of its cells are considered together, this being is a significantly lesser form of God.

God includes this being was in it, but is also inconceivably greater as it exists outside of time, but also includes all slivers of itself that existed at any point in time. And here I would say that this is really interesting framing because within different religious traditions, there's different framings of the self, right?

Within most of the older religious traditions, the core framing of the self was either the individual, you or yourself. Or me, or it was a family unit and something like Confucianism. You might have that. Whereas in this religion, it argues that the truest framing of the self [00:22:00] is actually not you as an individual, but your thoughts and actions considered independently of you.

So in some moments when you're being efficacious, you might be leading to or contributing to this blockchain that eventually becomes God and in other moments, you're not becoming efficacious and you are totally separate from this entity. And thinking of yourself as individual in the moment.

Framings helps with things like procrastination and the way you relate to the morality of your actions because it makes it much easier. And I think fix is one of the core problems that has always been a core problem of Christian framing to me, this idea that you can just at any moment repent and you're fully forgiven where this would say, yes, the you that is repenting is fully forgiven, but all of the previous iterations of you that were sinning are still completely damned.

Yeah, this doesn't undo. Yeah, it doesn't undo those, but [00:23:00] it, those don't matter because those aren't you anymore. You aren't really responsible for those previous states of yourself, so long as you have undergone the effort to completely rewrite who you are. But now who you are is a new person, because you are thinking and doing new things.

And so it's a different way to relate to this old Christian point, which always seemed very weird and immoral to me. But when I reframe it like this, I'm like, Oh, that makes perfect sense. I can get behind that. And it's just a reframing around self. Do you have any thoughts here, Simone? Now that makes a lot of sense.

I guess you could apply sins and object objective function to sins as well. And we've never really talked about this before, but per our view, instead of having a goal in life or a series of goals that are discrete and achievable, you have an objective function. That is to say a couple of things you value or one thing you value that you're just trying to maximize throughout your life.

I guess on the opposite side of this, you can also have whatever the word would be for the opposite of that. Something, the things that you're looking to [00:24:00] minimize, like malaise self indulgence, like general inaction when you should be moving towards your function. Every action is driven by some right?

And how high that objective is have you considered that objective? Is it something that you believe has intrinsic good? Determines whether you are a sinner in that moment. For example, if I'm looking at one cultural group, and I'm talking about like the good or the evil that was done by X ethnic group on average or X country on average, a lot of people would say, yeah, but You can calculate whether a country has done good or evil if you have a set of these are the things that make up good actions, these are the things that make up bad actions, and it is an interesting intellectual exercise, it's just, and it does have meaning as an intellectual exercise, it's just important to remember that was made up of a bunch of individual actors, in the same way [00:25:00] a person is made up of a bunch of individual actors, which are different individual mental states and framings that led to the specific actions, which are the key important factors.

Whereas the traditional framing would say the individual is the key important factor, and the entire point I'm making here is the individual is not the key important factor. Way, but Well, no, no, no.

The only thing you have control over is your actions in the moment. I don't have control over my past actions. No. So that's the point I'm making. Yeah, but you can learn from your past actions. You should not give no weight to them. Your current state can learn from your past actions to change what it's doing in the moment, but when you average out somebody's actions, it makes things like procrastination much easier and it makes things like Not taking full culpability for a past action.

With this system, if in the past you did something that was sinful, you need to ask what mental framing you were using that allowed yourself to go towards that sinful pathway and then build a new mental [00:26:00] framing that's not going to recreate that past action. When you are no longer overly focused on culpability, And just optimizing yourself to minimize sin, I think it leads to much more efficacious mental framings than this self flagellation, which can sometimes become the fixation or focus of an individual's life and can lead to I think really bad framings in terms of self improvement. Here's what I'll say, what I think I understand is just like you and I support an internal locus of control, where we say all that really matters is what I can personally do, when you put this into a temporal context, All that really matters is what I can do now, right?

And it follows your model of self which is individual moments when you're like, what can I do for future Simone? This is ultimately a framing that came from you. Oh, that I view my consciousness and generally so I don't think anyone's consciousness is just one person who's going to [00:27:00] fall and die and ephemerally not exist very soon.

So all you can really do is exist in your 24 hour period that you exist and serve your future selves. And more importantly Your overall objective function, your values in life with whatever moments you have. So you almost live this locus like fleeting life and it doesn't really matter what happens or how you feel in the future or how you felt in the past or even how you feel now, because all that really matters is can you in this one 24 hour period of this one, two hour period where you have somewhat of a continuous consciousness.

What are you going to do with it? Yeah. But what I think humans grasp on sentience is incredibly tenuous. We are barely sentient for people who have watched our video on that. And I think that we way overvalue how sentient humans are because, we like to believe that humans are the latest and greatest.

We want to feel like we're in control because it's I think for good reason, consciousness gives us the illusion of being in control because if we didn't feel like we were in control, we would not learn from our past experiences or events. You have to feel like [00:28:00] you're in control.

The illusion is a feature, not a bug.

I may have over elevated sort of the way we see self, I would say that there's a sort of three useful framings of self that to me are better framings of self in terms of leading to positive actions than framings of self around the individual. I think.

The in the moment sliver of consciousness is a good framing of self. I think the family unit is a good framing of self. Like, when I'm thinking about myself on a day to day basis, I very much think of the family unit. That's what I'm thinking of. How do I maximize the good of the family unit? And then the final framing of self that I think is useful is the cultural unit.

I am but a cog within a larger cultural machine. And if I follow that machine, then it will lead to good outcomes. And yeah, so I think that these three framings of self, Are higher. I think that where modern society has really fallen off the edge is for me, the individual is the core unit of self.

And then acting as if this is just obviously an axiomatically true, [00:29:00] but it's not, I love it when you talk to people and they're like what responsibility do you have to your ancestors? Like you, your kids are individuals. They're not you. They're not like related to you. It's no, they're literally related to me.

And I'm like I know they're related to you, but they're not, it's no, they're literally part. When you. raise the family as a higher order of entity than the self in terms of like how you frame yourself and your decisions you will create positive actions much more often.

And I think it's what allows the communist structure of the family to work. The fact that people, and I think that this is why communism doesn't really work on a large scale, is People are very bad about thinking of themselves as just like individual cells or atoms of a polity. But it's very easy to see yourself as like an a cell of the family.

Like you or me when I'm thinking about like maximizing even when I am like positive emotions, right? I will rate the emotional states in the individual choices I'm making of other family members over my [00:30:00] own emotional state. Oh, totally. Yeah. I remember recently you were saying like what could I do that would create the most happiness in, in, in you Malcolm?

Like what's the total indulgence? I've got this money I made for a total indulgence. And I was like let's get the kids toys. And I'm like because of all the members of the family, they are going to react. Most with the most positive emotion to something I can get was like 25 bucks, right? Much more positive than anything I'd react to for 25 bucks and even the wash off or emotional state I will get from that because I consider a sort of myself as just a cell within the family leads to me saying, Oh yeah, let's do the nice thing for them.

So long as it doesn't lead to, and this is the problem where a lot of people are like, they create these deontological framings around kids, like never allow a kid to experience any negative emotions, which of course is going to lead to like huge deleterious. over the course of their life,

Even though it's pretty obvious. I should probably explain why this is the case not exposing someone to negative stimuli in response to bad actions during their developmental period can hyper sensitize them to negative stimuli as they get [00:31:00] older. , does trigger warnings, et cetera.

, and caused them to spiral into anxiety, attacks and depression when they encounter even minor negative stimuli in their adolescence and adulthood.

Malcolm Collins: which is why when you think about the family is not you, your wife and the kids, it's your ancestors and your descendants.

And all of the things that we're doing in the moment are just the frame in terms of the ones that we have the most access to right now. Exactly. Some may see this interpretation as in conflict with Christian teachings. But if we just go by what is in the Bible and we remove revelations, it is not. And people may remember from the last track, why we removed revelations from the Bible. I was actually really interested to learn that apparently Martin Luther also removed revelations as canonical texts in the Bible.

No way. Yeah, there's a quote from him that I can add here in editing,

So Martin leaser said revelations. Quote.

And it makes me consider it to be neither Epistolic nor prophetic in quote. And then [00:32:00] later he says, quote, I can in no way detect that the holy spirit produced it in quote.

Malcolm Collins: but I was really surprised by that. So apparently a lot of. Christian theologians end up removing revelations and once you remove revelations, a lot of the weirder cosmology about the devil disappears. So interesting. The quotes that talk about Satan and are often used to presume that he was once an angel could equally be interpreted as him once being part of God.

Quote, all your pump has been brought. down to the grave. Along with the noise of your harps, maggots are spread out beneath you, and worms cover you. You have fallen from heaven, oh morning star, sun of the dawn. You have been cast down to the earth. You who once laid low the nations. In addition, if you At our framing of Jesus in tract one, his temptation by Satan takes on a completely different and much deeper meaning.

Quote, again the devil took him [00:33:00] up on the exceedingly high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their glory and said to him, all these things I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me, end quote. As interpreted by traditional Christianity, this interpretation makes no sense.

How could the devil meaningfully tempt Christ with rulership over all the world's kingdoms if Jesus knew he was God and would reunite with God? Satan is offering him stuff he already owns, but even if he didn't, even if that was all Satan's stuff and somehow not God's, this would be like a fired employee of Microsoft telling Bill Gates he will give him a burrito if he worships him and gives him his company. This story, as interpreted by traditional Christians, is both comical and not a meaningful interpretation. No, interpret this story with R framing. Jesus is supposed to represent the elect in every moment of their lives that they are acting in accordance with God's will to improve the potentiality of the next generation.

As such, these individuals Our God, the son of God and man all [00:34:00] simultaneously. Lucifer is the avatar God uses to cull those susceptible to temptation from this group and improved the elect through trials. Now the story makes perfect sense. Satan is the basilisk tempting you with a life of indulgences.

You must sacrifice to improve the world. This story also conveys to us the true nature of the basilisk. The basilisk does not corrupt our souls by torturing us but by offering us our deepest desires with shortcuts, whether that is the desire to experience some element of the divine, see tract four on idolatry, the desire to rule over others or the desire for pleasure.

Some may misunderstand this to mean that we have a Gnostic like understanding of God, which is wrong. This is either a misunderstanding of our faith or a misunderstanding of Gnosticism. Gnostics believe God and the devil to be different entities, But the evil entity is the one that created Earth.

We believe the devil to be one small manifestation of a [00:35:00] near infinitely more vast God that God embodies for certain tasks that require either the temptation or punishment of man. Think of God as a computer and the devil as