Tract 8: Is Baalite Worship Being Mistaken for Christianity? (How Techno-Puritans Define Good)

In this compelling episode, we dive into the reinterpretation of Christian beliefs and ancient religious practices through a techno-puritan lens. Explore the redefined concepts of the kingdom of God, heaven, and sin, and understand the ethical debates between deontological and consequentialist systems. Our journey takes us through the intriguing intersections of polytheism and monotheism, revealing how rituals like sin transference and animal sacrifice have transitioned from their polytheistic origins to modern faith practices. Delve into the implications of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, the shifts in spiritual and moral understandings, and uncover the critiques of figures like Maimonides and Ramban in interpreting sacrificial traditions. Join us as we rethink spirituality, individual responsibility, and the evolving role of technology in God's overarching plan.

[00:00:00] Of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, . What is the kingdom of God? That's heaven. That's what's being described here. Heaven is a time.

 You don't become one flesh with someone by having sex with them. Is that two people having a child together does literally make two people one spirit. That makes a lot more sense. Yeah. What is being talked about here isn't Sex. It's the creation of a new person, . That just, like, when I read it with the techno puritan framing, it makes so much sense to me.

When I read it with the traditional Christian framing, it makes so much sense to me. It makes a bunch of weird claims where you need to like get all metaphorical and everything and yeah, it feels like you're bending over backward to make it work. And this is just correct. It just seems correct. Of course.

Real worship is not done through [00:01:00] masturbating emotional states. Even if they include feelings of grandeur and awe, they are still basal emotions.

Of course they feel good. That is what masturbation does. It makes you feel good. That is not a sign that it is good. As a side note here, people will use the story of the gold used in the tabernacle from Exodus as an excuse to worship in luridly decorated buildings.

However, it is important to remember that we believe , some polytheistic stories and tales worked their way into the religious texts like the Bible. especially when you're talking about older texts like Exodus, but that God loudly and explicitly marks where this has happened, so anyone paying even the littlest bit of attention will notice. what's being done in this tabernacle

Imagine you go up to a place of worship, and you saw this ceremony being carried out. Quote, He must kill the young bull and priests must bring its blood and sprinkle it on all sides of the altar It must be a dove or young pigeon. the priest will bring it to the altar and pull [00:02:00] off its head, which he will burn on the altar.

The bird's blood must be drained out of the altar. the side of the altar. Then he must tear the bird open by its wings

end quote. It is not like any of this is subtle , but it does mean that God expects you to actually be paying attention when you read it, and use the smallest amount of discretion when doing so. It's like someone saw that scene

Siva, Om Nam S to

and they walk away and they go, Yeah, that was definitely a bunch of good Christians . that's what this story is meant to teach us, is what ball light worship looks like

 that this bull light sin transference, virtual doesn't work. It's also recorded for us in the Bible Eve. It did work both Moses and the other Israelites would have been able to go into the promised land. when I look at Christians who pray to a God of [00:03:00] precious metals and animal sacrifices, the God that gets off to humans ripping apart birds as an act of worship, I am reminded of

 All will be well, and you will know the name of God. The one true God. Behemah Coital. Behemah what? Behemah Coital. He's here. He's everywhere. He's coming. Come,

he's talking about a bug. He thinks God is a bug? He's got religion. Maybe we should kill him. Why? Because he believes in God like you?

It's the wrong God!

 Would you like to know more?

Hello, Simone! We're going to be doing another Tracked episode. For people who are new watchers and not familiar with these, we marked them with a different color gear logo, just so you know that you're going to get into some real weirdness. It's on our personal religious beliefs and re engaging.

With the [00:04:00] abrahamic tradition for us and finding an iteration of it that I think is true. And you can take a bit like an outline for another denomination of christianity that we call techno puritanism And i'm just gonna jump right in because I like that. I like the active theological conversation But there's also some risk with that because when you're having an active theological conversation about what you believe That really opens you up to criticism and can make you look kind of foolish, especially if it includes well, any sort of religious component, right?

If you don't have a big community to back you and you say something like, oh, well, this guy was walking on water, people are like, oh, you must be in a cult, you know? So as Nigel says in the opening scene of The Devil Wears Prada,

All right, everyone, gird your loins. Did someone eat an onion bagel?

All right. How do technopuritans define good?

Although this one could also be called the new covenant. I saved this tract for later because I suspect it is going to anger more people than our other tracts. Most because it has much more radical reinterpretations of [00:05:00] classical biblical stories than we have gone into before this. Like the,, the tabernacle, as well as Nebuchadnezzar's dream, and it regards sin and telling people that they are sinners, which is never popular.

But as Galatians 1 10 says,

 For do I now persuade men or God, or do I need to please men? For if I pleased men, I should not be the servant of Christ. Modern Christians have narrowed their concept of sin by focusing on the sins of others that cause disgust in them. They say, that person has gay sex, that's a sin.

And that person masturbates, that's a sin. And it's like, yes, that is true, but you should be more focused on your own sins than those of others. What does the Bible tell us about how we should live our lives? Let's go over a few lines here. Corinthians 10 31 instructs, Whether therefore you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God, end quote. Corinthians 5. [00:06:00] 10, which states, and he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves, but for him who died for them and was raised again.

Colossians 3. 23 states, and Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men, Romans 14, 23. But if you have doubt about whether or not you should eat something, you are sinning.

If you go ahead and do it for you are not following your convictions. If you do anything that you believe is not right, you are sinning. The Bible is pretty clear about what is sin. Sin is anything you do not for God, whether that's listening to music, watching a sports game, playing video games, looking at art, or gay sex.

If your response to this is, no one can live a sinless life then, congratulations, you just found out you're not a God. In this tract, we will focus on technopuritans conceptions of good and evil. But we talk about what I think [00:07:00] the traditional interpretations of Christianity get wrong about sin, let's talk about what broader society thinks about good and evil, and how it got there.

So, what are your thoughts so far on, like, what the Bible says sin is? Does that sound right to you, or? I mean, it, I like, I like the focus, at least in the quotes provided. On the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law, though I imagine that there's plenty in the Bible that could probably shove people toward the letter of the law.

Instead, you know, how people select things from the Bible very advantageously toward their goals. , I think you are right, but I also think clearly and repeatedly throughout the Bible, as I have shown here, it states sin is anything you do not for God.

So while there's a bunch of specific rules that are mentioned in the Bible, I'll go over why I don't think those are as relevant in modern times. And this broader, stricter definition of sin is probably right, but then you need [00:08:00] to consider, which we'll go into later in this, Well, if you're doing it for God, what does that mean?

Like, what is the nature of God? How do you know you're not doing it for a false God? Right. So, now we're going to go into the way sin is conceptualized in secular society. I would just add though, I really love that passage about if you think of food, isn't right to eat. then don't eat it. Like if you, if you, I think let's just convictions.

Yeah. Let's put it this way. Sinning, I think is a lot like porn, you know, when you see it. So if you're like, well, this seems a little sinful, it probably is. And so what is sinful can differ between individuals in that line shows that because not everyone's going to have the same reaction to something.

And I think that the strength of your reaction to something is correlated to your individual susceptibility to that form of sin. When I talk about susceptibility to a form of sin, it's how much is that sin going to pull you away from God? And so you think of something like drinking, right? Like drinking, To one individual, drinking [00:09:00] might not be much of a sin at all because they can drink and it doesn't affect their ability to work or to worship or anything like that.

Right. Another person, they engage a little bit with a drink and now all of a sudden it's the entire focus of their life. Yeah. Or it's the same thing with certain types of sexuality. Some people can engage with it without consuming their entire lives, and for them it's less of a sin. Well, for other people it's more of a sin because of the temptation involved in it for them.

Like pain, sin is very context dependent. Yes. To your average member of society, good and evil are determined by what, if widely believed, would help the average person maximize their own emotional state, e. g. general utilitarianism. However, general utilitarianism, maximally distributing positive emotional states among humans, is on its face stupid as those emotional states are just the things that when felt in response to certain environmental stimuli led to some of our ancestors having more surviving offspring than others.

They are things that we were serendipitously pre coded to react to based on environmental conditions that haven't existed for thousands of [00:10:00] years. As we have said ad nauseum, humans coming up with a utilitarian value system is like a society of paperclip maximizers coming together and building an ethical system based on the number of paperclips in the world.

Your programming is just that, your programming, not a sign of intrinsic value. However, society does not tell us that utilitarianism is a politically correct value system to signal because most people genuinely hold it as their value system.

It chooses to follow it because most people are at their core hedonists. And when you ask a hedonist what you should value, it is in their best interest to tell you not to be a hedonist, but to be a utilitarian. The secular world is a world of hedonists trying to maximize a combination of their emotional state and their self perception as a good high status person, all while trying to reduce any in the moment suffering.

However, because perceived status and being a good person. are in part determined by an individual's ability to loudly signal they hold a utilitarian value set. The secular world has become a world of hedonists [00:11:00] constantly signaling to each other that they are utilitarians. It's a pathetic masquerade. Yeah, checks out. Consequentialist ethical systems are those systems interested in the consequences of one's actions with some goal in mind. Deontological ethical systems are those based around a set of rules. In a broader sense, deontological ethical systems are kind of dumb.

Quote, lying slash stealing slash cheating are bad and always evil, end quote. Quote. Okay, well, what if someone has a gun to a kid's head and will shoot if you don't lie slash cheat slash steal? End quote. Almost every deontologist I know caves in this scenario about what their right thing to do is.

Because they are really consequentialists who are just using deontological systems to make daily decisions. So while it is dumb to believe deontological systems are absolutely right or wrong, it is actually quite smart to build a deontological system to follow for your daily life, as it is easier to create a set of rules about right and wrong than [00:12:00] thinking through the long term consequences of every little decision you make.

This is especially true if you are of average or below average intelligence. Thus, at the level of a population, it would always make sense for God to reveal deontological ethical systems, especially to the philosophically less sophisticated man that existed thousands of years ago.

If God was operating on a consequentialist ethical system, he would have revealed varying deontological value systems to early man, . tailored to that iteration of man's time and context. This is exactly what he did. Most of the true Abrahamic traditions have a collection of varying deontological ethical frameworks given to them by God based on their time, technology, and social circumstances.

This is why many of the true revelations of God have prescriptions around things like slave treatment, even though we know that owning slaves is wrong. In a world where slavery was the norm, God was able to ensure more mass good action for his people by giving specific prescriptions on [00:13:00] how to treat slaves than outright banning slave ownership.

Because if he had done that and the harsh reality of our ancestors, his people would have been outcompeted by their neighbors. However, we can clearly see that God is not a deontologist through the fact that the deontological ethical systems he gifted man across time differ.

If God was using these systems because they were his actual ethical framework, he would not have varied them. But If he was using them to drive specific consequentialist outcomes, then he would have. And let's be honest here. Anyone who claims God really believed those earlier deontological value systems has to bite the bullet and admit that God thought slavery was a good or okay thing.

, so before I go further, do you have any thoughts? I think about things analogously with children a lot. So when I think about deontological. Rule following sets.

I think of parents saying, because I told you so, but then I also think about how that degrades really quickly with our children, if we just give them a [00:14:00] rule and they don't know why the rules there, they're just going to break it. And I kind of feel like that happens a lot. Sometimes with religions, like Catholicism, there are rules that are almost expected to be broken, but then you just ask for forgiveness, but then just please keep following the rule and asking for forgiveness.

And I just personally much prefer explaining to our children, for example. Here's what's going to happen if you do this thing, here's the consequence, here's in general, what we value and hoping that they'll make the right decision, but it doesn't always work. And I can, I can understand why sometimes trying to explain to our children why, for example, like their safety or being nice to a sibling and learning how to share is important because they're just not going to get it.

So sometimes we just have to say, you have to do this thing because I said so right now. And they're just not going to be able to, they have to follow the letter of our law. And I feel as though you could say, God is doing the same thing. Sometimes he [00:15:00] wishes he could explain to us why something is in our better interest.

But we just don't have the capacity at that time. I, yeah, I completely agree with you. And for people who don't know how bad these deontological systems are within a modern time period, you can go to our Why Are Catholics Going Extinct video, but in that you can see things like Catholics which have strong religious prohibitions against things like terminating fetuses use things like Plan B at almost the same time.

The same rate as a secular person does or non Catholics do and, and, you know, uses other types of contraception and abortion related things at very similar rates to the secular world. So it just doesn't hold that. Well, I don't feel like this was true historically. I mean, if you look historically, like.

And when I say even recent history, like 70s, 60s these deontological value systems in Catholics really did keep them from using early contraceptive techniques and did keep their fertility rates really high. And I suspect that this is just an evolving society thing in the same way that like kids mature over time and need a different explanations for why they need to do something.

If you're going to actually have them follow it, [00:16:00] humanity has sort of grown up. And I think these deontological ethical, ethical systems are actually, Probably not hard for people of our distant past to follow. They're just hard for people of this era to follow, given our philosophical maturity and the level of information that we have access to just do it because X book says so isn't as strong a motivation for people anymore.

And so it's not driving the, the outcome, you know, so you talk about something like. Prohibitions on contraception. You know, these are probably made to increase the number of kids people are having. And if you create arguments like, well, you know, you're preventing a human being from coming into existence.

That is a more powerful argument than because I said so these days. Well, I also think deontological systems or following the letter of the law really only works in societies where enforcement is very strong, either through social shaming or through like a caliphate. Yeah. That is capable of enforcing those values when you can't enforce [00:17:00] some kind of punishment for rule breaking.

I think non community based enforcement weakens a religion over time. This is what we've seen in governments that try to Oh, no, sure. Outsourcing is, is totally broken. You need a person's community to do the shaming. So like when you get a divorce, you need Nobody to want to marry someone who's gotten divorced before, and then people don't get divorced again.

But if you create like government laws around this, people always find a right way around it. I mean, that's what we learned from the prohibition, right? Like you cannot enforce morality and prohibition is a great example of this because it was during it wasn't really a religious thing. You know, Jesus turned water to wine.

You know, he's not intrinsically against alcohol. So, this was the government trying to enforce morality. And it. Cause more immorality of the type it was trying to enforce. But the point I'm making also is that when people don't understand the spirit of the law, they'll only follow the letter of the law.

If they know that they have to, if they're being punished very consistently and severely [00:18:00] punished in terms of status, not punished by a governing entity, because the punishment that people actually react to is status punishment. So for example people didn't react to prohibition by drinking significantly less.

They actually started drinking more or at least the individuals who are susceptible to that individual sin. And, and we'll go over this in other sins where you see people actually doing it more when it's prohibited on a top down level. But if drinking decreased the status of an individual, Then they would stop drinking.

People are very sensitive to community enforced status norms, which is what these deontological systems used to have on their side. And that armor has sort of been removed from humanity. And you need to figure out ways to enforce this yourself, even though it's not. Following the rules may even hurt your status.

Same with your kids. How do you, how do you pass this down to your kids when the rules that you're passing down to them may hurt their status? You don't sleep around with a lot of girls while you're in high school. That's certainly going to lower a kid's status. How do you pass that down to them? If that's an option for them?[00:19:00]

How do you address the conundrum of erotic material consumption then in conservative states, for example, where it is, it is shamed to consume, but it's not shamed. It's not shamed because people don't know about it. It's, it's, it's a sin that someone can do in private the top down. So what she's referring to, we actually get this to this later in the track.

But in, if you, if you look at the U S like which state consumes the most porn, Utah, the state was the highest prohibitions against pornography.

Mormons are not supposed to masturbate at all. If you look by zip code and you look at the level of religiosity of zip code, you see more engagement with pornography in those districts.

Why is this happening? I think it's because there isn't actually a social consequence to these people for masturbating. So that's another thing is it can't be a sin that someone can do in private. I remember, you know, in, in Muslim countries, one of the things I would always find like walking down the streets was like hidden hard alcohol And like alcoves and stuff like that, it doesn't prevent somebody, you know, social [00:20:00] shaming around drinking doesn't prevent somebody from not drinking.

It prevents them from not drinking at home. It prevents them from not going to bars to drink, right? Which may make it harder for them to drink overall. But the way people relate to sin, it's important to like, psychologically understand this and build. Self mastery over sin. But that's what a lot of this tract is going to focus on.

All right. These systems were given to man to achieve some consequentialist outcome. But what, what is the thing we see in the communities around the world that followed one of God's true revelations? A period of technological and cultural flourishing. For more on this, see tract six. God's deontological ethical systems were gifted to man in order to help us intergenerationally expand humanity's potential.

And I really want to note here that people can be like, no, God's about you. Happiness, but those regions didn't really have more happiness in their neighbors, so that couldn't have been what he was motivating for. It's about peace, but those regions weren't more peaceful than their neighbors. So what? What did those regions have that [00:21:00] their neighbors of other types of face systems?

Incorrect face systems? I believe not have. It was unique periods of technological and cultural flourish. Now that we are under the new covenant, we are expected to accept responsibility for thinking through the consequences of our actions ourselves.

What do we mean by the new covenant and what signal man's transition into it?

We categorize God's revelation with man existing in three stages that we know of so far. These stages are, one, primordial man. Biblically speaking, this is before man was cast out of the garden,

which as we go over in this video on the Garden of Eden, we believe to be a story about man building the first temple.

Permanent settlements and ethical systems man created in opposition to God's ethics to govern those settlements. God did not really have a connection to man at this stage of history, given that we were too developmentally simplistic to understand him or intergenerationally transmit that understanding.

To transitional man, [00:22:00] transitional man is marked by the quote unquote curses. God gave man as he transitioned into the age of settlements and early civilization, having to work the land for food. pain in childbirth, and women existing beneath men slash having an irrepressible attraction to men. Again, death was clearly not one of these curses, see tract six.

God built very simplistic deontological frameworks to help the flourishing of civilization for this natal version of humans and largely related to the transitional man in the way we now relate to children, as you were saying earlier. The religions God gave to this form of man are analogous to us giving our children stories of Santa.

 We see that these stories delight them and help teach them valuable lessons, but also that one day they are going to have to grow out of them. Three. Thank you. Realized man. Realized man is marked by a period after which God, through humanity's ingenuity, lifted the curses he placed on transitional man.

In relieving these [00:23:00] curses, he marked the coming of a new covenant and revealed that they were never in fact curses, but more like training wheels. As without them, most of humanity lacked the will to resist temptation And continue the species realized man is expected by God

to seek understanding himself rather than be told right from wrong. To keep himself disciplined without simplistic rules. And master his own nature without the assistance of fairytales. In the transition from the era of primordial man to transitional man, many human groups were unable to make the leap.

These groups were called were to use a euphemism outcompeted by transitional man, because transitional man was different from primordial man, as primordial man is different from the beast. The same is true for realized man. When looking at use deconversion rates to the urban monoculture, it is easy to see those who cling to the transitional frameworks as being like an overly sentimental captain going down with his ship.

But this [00:24:00] too is too harsher reading. They are simply not like realized man. They are the bronze man in an iron world. Their traditions cannot save them from the temptations of the valley of the lotus eaters. In the final stages of the transition from primordial man to transitional man, we were told a story of God sending a flood to clean the world of those not ready for the age, those too sinful for it.

After this act, God promised he would never again genocide humanity in. flood. And that is why the genocide we are living through represents a perfect inversion of the last. It is done not by God, but by man himself. In this cleansing of the earth, it is the unworthy themselves who possessed by their own passions, do not drown, but march with lifeless eyes to burn in a bonfire of their own vanity.

And. This is one of the things that gets me. It's almost like, you know, we're living in a society right now where people are like randomly running off and [00:25:00] stabbing themselves in the neck with like scissors. Genetically speaking, at least. It's like a world of mass suicide. It's like we're living through that movie, The Happening, where like everybody starts randomly killing themselves and people like don't see this as like a cosmic or biblical event.

Christ, men! Amen!

They're like, Oh yeah, this is normal. It makes sense for people to be like, throwing themselves into genetic woodchippers right or left, and then the mainstream society being like, that's good, way to go. I mean, what do you, like, do you feel the weight of this, this, this period of history? Don't, well, we, we don't.

I think we, we can logically [00:26:00] know it and not feel it. And this isn't along the lines of a very common human fallacy that I think is never discussed, which is that I think we feel the need to get permission. Or to get a very clear sign to do a lot of things. Now, if we, you keep talking about the demographic collapse apocalypse, essentially, as it's going to play out, everyone is picturing road warrior.

And what you're trying to tell everyone is that no, really what you can more expect is what South Africa is like today. These things will happen, or there could be an American revolution or a complete failure of democracy, but it's not going to look like that. Like that it's going to look like, you know, election sort of losing integrity and we won't really know it necessarily.

So I think what's happening is that we expect. War. We expect mass death. We expect all sorts of crazy, dramatic things to be happening. We [00:27:00] expect cinematic drama. And because we don't see it, we're assuming that, okay, well, the alarms haven't gone off. Like the fire alarm isn't going off and therefore we don't need to take action.

And this was, this was something else, like when people are thinking about, should I have kids? Or when you and I were doing our search for a company and trying to decide what company to acquire, we expected someone to kind of come out of the bushes and say, yes, buy this one. As, as though one of our investors would say, yeah, go ahead, buy it.

I think it's a good thing. Instead of them just saying, well, who else is invested? I don't know. What do you think? In the end, it is the responsibility of each individual person. To recognize a threat or an opportunity or their capacity to take something on and then to do it. And I think the biggest risk to many people, especially people with privileged backgrounds who are lucky enough to be born in developed nations like the United States, like many European countries, like many Asian countries all over the place.

Now the responsibility falls to [00:28:00] them to recognize these things. No one's going to give you a warning or give you permission. And it's very hard to know what's true and what's false these days. You have to judge for yourself and you have to make that call because no one's going to make it for you. Yeah, no, I actually think that you're right about this.

And I would say that. Some events in biblical history, I believe, are meant to foreshadow other events that are going to happen and teach you lessons about it. You know, as I've said, like the story of Abraham about to sacrifice his kid and then God saying, like, it's not the type of God I am. I think reflects you know, the misunderstanding of the story of Jesus as we see it, and you can read about this in like track two or one, we go over this.

But I think that this is what the story of Noah is, you know, it's a story about man going through a specific era, a transitional era, you know, transitioning from the primordial to the transitional man. And it's being mirrored in this new transition, and you are experiencing, I believe, our generation is experiencing the events that the [00:29:00] story of Noah being recorded was supposed to warn us about.

The world is flooding. Everyone is dying around you. You have people out there warning you and everyone is scorning them for warning you, you know, they look like crazy people to everyone else, even though we can all see the rain, we can all see the lowlands filling with water at this point, you know, I think that we're beginning to get to that point in the Noah story where people are whispering like, hey, you know, maybe we should be building boats to people aren't.

Right? And also you can think of the story of Noah. Like, what was it meant to signal to us? The importance of maintaining diversity through the flood. That, that's what the story is. You only need to maintain one family from each tradition to maintain that tradition. But you should make an effort to maintain as many traditions as you can.

That is what the story of Noah is telling us. If we are trying to take lessons from it in this modern context, if we believe that it was meant to warn us about the world we're going into right [00:30:00] now any thoughts on that before I go crazier, I love it. When you go crazy, just go straight into that.

As an aside here, let us speak of the dream of Nebuchadnezzar as interpreted by Daniel. For context, the king had a recurring dream he believed was a vision and decided to kill all the wise men in the kingdom because they could not guess what the dream was and interpret it. And here I'm going into, but I said we're transitioning from the age of bronze into the age of iron.

And I mean this biblically speaking, I mean this from the dream of Nebuchadnezzar. So Daniel replied, No wise man, enchanter, magician, or diviner can explain to the king the mystery he asked about. But there is a God in heaven who reveals many mysteries. He has shown King Nebuchadnezzar what will happen in the days to come.

Your dream and the visions that pass through your mind as you are lying in bed are these. First, it's important to note here that he clearly laid out how prophecy is meant to be done. Magic. Witches, rituals, chanting, et cetera, [00:31:00] are not the way God communicates and should be avoided. So it's very good here on like how to do like true interpretation of things.

Don't, none of the rituals, none of the chanting, everything like that, just like get into it immediately. As your majesty was lying there, your mind turned to things to come. And the revealer of mysteries showed you what is going to happen. As for me, this mystery has been revealed to me. Not because I have greater wisdom than anyone else alive, but so that your majesty may know the interpretation and that you may understand what went through your mind.

Your majesty looked, , and there before you stood a large statue, an enormous dazzling statue, awesome in appearance. The head of the statue was made of pure gold, it's chest and arms of silver, it's belly and thighs of bronze, it's legs of iron, and it's feet were Partly of iron and partly of baked clay.

While you were watching, a rock was cut out, but not by human hands. It struck the statue on the feet of [00:32:00] iron and clay and smashed them. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold were all broken to pieces and became like chaff on a threshing floor in the summer. The wind swept them away without leaving a trace, but the rock that struck the statue became a huge mountain.

And filled the whole earth.

This was the dream, and now we will interpret it to the king. Your majesty, you are the king of kings. The god of heaven has given you dominion and power and might and glory. In your hands, he has placed all of mankind and all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the sky. Wherever they live, he has made you ruler of them all.

You are the head of gold. After you, another kingdom will arrive, inferior to yours. Next, a third kingdom, one of bronze, will rule over the whole earth. Now, this line is often bizarrely misinterpreted. People are like, oh, the bronze kingdom was Greece, or Rome, or any number of other ancient kingdoms. But it clearly was [00:33:00] not as it stated the kingdom of bronze ruled over the whole world and none of them did the first culture to ever rule over the whole world was the urban monoculture the kingdom of Inferior to the High Classical Age was Rome and the Dark Ages, a period of human history that mostly just copied the Classical Age.

 So right here, just as a note, what we're saying is the Gold Age is the Classical Age.

Then you have the Silver Age, which is the Dark Ages, Rome, that general period of history. Then you have the Bronze Age, which is the lead up to the Urban Monoculture in the Urban Monoculture, one group that's ruling over the entire world. So what happens after the Urban Monoculture conquers all of Earth?

That is when we move from the world of transitional man to the world of realized man. Finally, there will be a fourth kingdom, strong as iron, for iron breaks and smashes everything. And as iron breaks and smashes things to pieces, so will it crush and break all the others. [00:34:00] Just as you saw the feet and the toes were partially of baked clay and partially of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom.

Yet it will have some of the strengths of iron in it. Even as you saw iron mixed with clay, as the toes were partly of iron and partly of clay, so this kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle. And just as you saw the iron mixed with baked clay, so the people will be a mixture and will not remain united any more than iron mixes with clay.

The kingdom of iron in clay is describing the covenant of the sons of man, a kingdom made up of multiple types of man living among each other, a world of AI and augmented I would note here that the primary component of clay is silicon. If I wanted to describe a world of silicon to a king in the classical age, how would I do it?

I would call it. In the time of kings, the god of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it [00:35:00] be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever. This is the meaning of the vision of the rock cut out of the mountain, but not by human hands

a rock that broke the iron, the bronze, the clay, the silver, and the gold pieces. The great god has shown the king what will take place in the future. , the dream is true and its interpretation trustworthy. Here we see that in the ultra pluralistic world of the covenant of the sons of man, the kingdom that eventually becomes god will be generated because of the conflict between the groups.

But that conflict is necessary for the creation of quote, the kingdom that will never be destroyed, end quote. It also makes it clear that realized man, the men of iron, , will be one of the players in the conflict and is pivotal to setting up the kingdom that will never be destroyed, the kingdom of God.

This is also a reminder that even if we live through times of peace, we should never falter in our advancement of military [00:36:00] technology. As it is through a great conflict yet to come that the kingdom of God is created.

Actually, I'm going to Not going to this yet. I wanted to go into a slight aside here, which is in the Bible, like the way that we interpret the Bible, whenever you read the word heaven, that is traditionally be interpreted as a place. People hear that. And they're like, oh, that's a place. And because we can look out into the cosmos and not see heaven, we assume it's a supernatural place.

IE I think in a big way, less than natural in many ways. Yeah, it says supernatural, but it's like kind of different than the type of things we can study and examine in the real world. And that's why when I call you know, Techno puritanism, a secular religion, what I mean is we don't assume any supernatural things.

We don't need to assume these supernatural places because I think it undermines the message of God, that God is absolutely real, as real as the table I'm touching right now. And heaven is absolutely real, but heaven is not a place, it's a time. [00:37:00] So whenever you read heaven in the Bible, you can read that as in the future.

And it's actually very clear in this prophecy that heaven is a time. So, I'm going to read this last part again. Of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. What is the kingdom of God? What is the kingdom of God that is never destroyed? That's heaven. That's what's being described here. Heaven is a time. But I am going to go to the summary here now. To summarize what we just went over, man is transitioning from his child like transitional state where he understands God through simplistic fairy tales the same way we tell children about Santa and gives them strict rules to an adult like state.

With With adulthood came additional responsibilities, such as developing a clear understanding of reality and taking responsibility for the consequences of our actions. Quote, I was following the rules, [00:38:00] end quote, is no longer an excuse for men of iron. Any thoughts on that? I just, it makes, it's one of those things where it makes so much sense for heaven to be a time and not a place.

And heaven, even when described in very famous pieces, like in Dante's defined comedy as a place, just feels so forced and contrived and not. Also not good that I love finally coming across an explanation for heaven that resonates, but in a very relaxing way. As in, oh, of course. Yeah, it doesn't force me to, to, to, like, swallow, like, big things that, that go against my current understanding.

No faith, no leap of faith is required here. Yeah, and that's also very interesting, because when we talk about this in other things, it's, there isn't, like, I don't have that much faith. Faith in this system. I believe it because it seems logically true and a lot of people consider that to be like a a lesser form of religion one that doesn't [00:39:00] cause you to like bite the bullet on a lot of logical inconsistencies and I think that a lot of people have taken faith to mean that like I'm willing to But, but I like this because it just makes sense.

It explains so much. And then I'll read other parts of the Bible, parts that I haven't read in ages, and I read the word heaven as in the future, and just the passage makes a lot more sense and will seem a lot less insane. Like it's really interesting. Like you will, you will, you know, your ancestors again in the future.

Oh yeah, that makes sense. You know, our bodies will be recreated in heaven in the future. Oh yeah, that makes sense. You know, you, you, you, you see all these lines and they're no longer like insane things. They're like, oh yeah, that seems probable at the current level of technological development.

, but I just find it fascinating that all of this is in the Bible, in the Bible, in that it says the kingdom of God. It's a time. It's a time in the future and it's a time and all of this crazy stuff, the men of iron after the men of iron live alongside the men of silicon, like what? And there will be division between them [00:40:00] because those two things don't go together.

Like, how did they, how did they but they need to try. They need to try to create this kingdom because it is through their conflict that the kingdom of heaven is created. And I believe that it is through their conflict that some better form of the men of iron is created. The post men of iron people.

The transcendent man. So I'm gonna keep going here. So what does the consequentialist life dedicated to the expanding of human potentiality look like? Winwin Reid lays this out eloquently. Up until now, I have been heavily censoring his writing to keep the quotes short and tight, but we'll go long with this one to give you a full context of some of the quotes that we have been using often.

The reason I have been reading around these quotes will become obvious given that many in our audience are traditional Christians. I will note here that as I believe in iterative prophecy, I believe the prophets to be imperfect,

and I think at the time, Reed was unable to see the potentiality of [00:41:00] Christianity to evolve. Oh I should note here for our audience, we see Wynwood Reed as a divinely inspired text, and see it as sort of canonical within our larger biblical canon. If you want to see why, see track six. You blessed ones who shall inherit that future age of which we can only dream. You pure and radiant beings who shall succeed us on the earth. When you turn back your eyes on us, poor savages, grubbing in the ground for our daily , eating flesh and blood, dwelling in vile bodies which degrade us every day to a level with the beast, tortured by pains and by animal propensities.

Buried in the In gloomy superstitions, ignorant of nature, which yet holds us in her bonds. When you read of us in books, when you think of what we are and compare us with yourselves, remember that it is to us, you owe the foundation of your happiness and grandeur to us who now in our libraries and laboratories and star towers and dissecting rooms and workshops are preparing the materials of [00:42:00] human growth.

And as for ourselves, if we are sometimes inclined to regret that our lot is cast in these unhappy days. Let us remember how much more fortunate we are than those who lived before us a few centuries ago. The working man enjoys more luxuries today than the King of England did in the Anglo Saxon times.

And at his command are intellectual delights, which, but a little while ago, only the most learned in the land could not obtain. All this we owe the labors of other men. Let us therefore remember them with gratitude. Let us follow their glorious example by adding something new to the knowledge of mankind.

Let us pay to the future the debt which we owe the past. All men indeed cannot be poets, inventors, or philanthropists, but all men can join in that gigantic and godlike work in the progress of creation. Whomever improves his own nature improves the universe which he is a part. He who strives to subdue his evil passions, vile remnants of the old four footed life, and who cultivates the social affections, [00:43:00] 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.

But, If he act thus not from mere prudence, not in the vain hope of being rewarded in another world, but from a pure sense of duty as a citizen of nature, as a patriot of the planet on which he dwells, then our philosophy, which once appeared to him so cold and cheerless, will become a religion of the heart and will elevate him to the skies.

The virtues which were once for him mere abstract terms will become endowed with life and will hover round him like guardian angels, overseeing with him in his solitude, consoling him in his afflictions, teaching him how to live and how to die. But this condition is not to be easily attained, as the saints and prophets were forced to practice long vigils and fastings and prayers before their ecstasies would fall [00:44:00] upon them.

And their visions would appear. So virtue in its purest, most exalted form can only be acquired by means of severe, long continued culture of the mind. Persons with a feeble and untrained intellect may live according to their conscience, but the conscience itself will be defective. To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty.

And when. This truth is fairly recognized by man, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted and that it should be subservient to faith will inevitably fall. So, I love how much he predicted there, that the religion would look cold and unfeeling to outsiders, but once you, like, get it, And begin to adopt it, you realize it's exactly the opposite.

It is like a constantly warm blanket of angels around you every day. It is your spiritual armor, but to an outsider, they're like, that's an overly harsh interpretation of things. Or [00:45:00] that's an overly what's the word I'm looking for? Like joyless interpretation of things as he, as he points out.

But your thoughts. I find it all incredibly optimistic and encouraging. It's not what makes it more warm and full of love and happy also is how much this is about sacrificing for the future, but also riding the wave, surfing the wave of everyone who came before you. So it's though you understand that everyone who came before you has sacrificed and pushed and participated in this game, this relay race, essentially.

That was very difficult. All the steps before you were way more difficult than your step. And you're just trying to carry the baton to the next phrase. Right. Yeah. And that it's all for a future. This is so much better than the interpretations of heaven or goodness that you get from many other classic [00:46:00] interpretations of Abrahamic religions where it's about you getting into heaven.

I want my hedonic. eternal pleasure in the special place. You know what I mean? Instead of let's bring this vision, let's all be a part of this amazing race toward the perfection of humanity, toward the ascendance. It's cool. However, this concept can be hard to convey to children when contrasted with traditional systems of good and evil.

For that, we are fortunate God crafted perfect child friendly propaganda for this concept in the anime Gurren Lagann and its presentation of the concept of spiral energy and anti spiral energy, an easy to understand representation of good and evil from a techno Puritan religious standpoint. Spiral energy is

represented by a constant spiral expanding, something that increases its size exponentially with each turn, just as human potential does. This anime is also an exemplar of the concept of anti spiral energy, the [00:47:00] personification of God's reflection, of the Basilisk, those forces that would temper and constrain man's spirit and potential.

Spiral energy is the subjugation of reality, what is possible to man's will. Anti spiral energy is the subjugation of man's will to reality. Below is a list of concepts captured in either spiral and anti spiral energy as they relate to each ot