That could make me laugh, and I think that's what we need in this
very serious world. So with us Jay Dyer, author of Esoteric Hollywood One
in two, Welcome Jay, Thanks for being here. Yeah, thank you.
I think we had to talk a few months ago about gnosticism and Hollywood.
That was a good chat. We went on for a couple hours.
I really enjoyed that, so I'm glad to be back. Oh well,
great, Yes, it was a great interview and very enlightening with old Hollyweird
and with us too. We've also got Scott Smith, author of God Reconsidered.
How you doing Scott, hailing from West Hollyweired. There you go,
you are in the middle of Hollyweird. I forgot about that. Wes Hollywood
so awesome. And as always with us helping out, we've got the Moondog
Vans. How you doing, Vans. I'm fine. I'm gonna be watching
this with great interest in If anybody is not friendly, I'll start parking.
Yes, events will take care of the chat room well wonderful, And I
have just a few notes again, this will be available for all. It
will be of course, it will be on YouTube. After we're done.
I will put the audio version on iTunes and iHeartRadio and all those good places.
There will be no member section because this is a special show. I
want to put the entire thing there for you for everybody's well benefit. And
please, but please, of course, always support support this show anyway you
can, Patreon, PayPal of course, please support Jay and Scott us independent
broadcasters and researchers and writers. We are much better than the alternative out there
in the mass media, regardless of what stance you might take. And it's
great that we can have civilized, friendly conversations on the internet. Also too,
we will have super chats. If you do a superchat, Vance will
take your question and write down your question. At the end of the debate,
we will address your question. Please address it to either Scott or Jay.
Please keep it on topic and as I talked to both Scott and Jay
will the money will be split in half for super chats. I don't know
how much is going to be, but we'll give it to charity because I
feel we need to give a little bit back to the world and those who
are definitely in a much more need than all of us. Here, so
and any other house cleaning notes here, No, yeah, please stay civilized
in the forum. And yeah, the format today will be simple. We
will start with opening statements. I'll try to keep time ten minutes, and
after that we will move on to the Odyssey five minutes unless a guest wants
to rebut the other guests, and then we'll move on to my notes.
My notes. Then we'll move on to the nature of Christ for five minutes.
Again, we can go a little off topic if the guests so decide
no says versus faith five minutes and then audience questions. Of course we can
go longer if everybody feels they still need some had some points to address.
So with that in mind, why don't we start with Jay, Jay,
please give us your opening statement on where you stand orthodoxy or why gnosticism is
wrong or both. Go ahead, Flora is yours? All right? And
it's for how long? Ten minutes? Ten minutes more or less you're gonna
go less or you a little bit over. We're fine, We're loose here.
Yeah, well, I would say that I'm definitely on the side of
Orthodoxy. I affirm Orthodox Christianity. That would be the canonical Russian, Greek,
Serbian, et cetera. Orthodox churches throughout the world, found also obviously
in America. I've been Orthodox for several years now, and I find Orthodoxy
convincing for many reasons. I think that it's the faithful, historic, biblical
presentation of Christianity. I think orthodox Christianity is what we see throughout the first
millennium of the Church before it splits into the East and the West, and
so therefore the papacy I see that as an aberration. I see the papacy
as something that is a political and anti Christian development, and I see Orthodoxy,
therefore, in the second millennium really being faithful to the Christian vision of
the first millennium. Thus, I do believe that Christianity in the first millennium
is a coherent whole. I don't believe that Constantine created a church. It
was significantly different than the church after the Council of Nicea in three twenty five.
So I think we look at, for example, the post Apostolic fathers.
I know that this is not a proof against gnocissism per se, but
I just want to kind of debunk the prevalent idea that constantly created some sort
of new imperial church or Catholic quote unquote church, it didn't exist prior to
three twenty five. So if we look at say Justin Martyr, if we
look at the post Apstock fathers, Saint Ignatius his letters, we look at
Saint Clements letters, if we look at Saint Cyprian, if we look at
the writings of any of these pre Nicene era fathers, they back up all
of the what we might call Orthodox doctrines. So they believed in the real
presence of Christ and the Eucharist. They they're citing the same Biblical canon text
that we cite today. They have a liturgical worship that we still use today.
Many of these ancient liturgies were actually instrumental in how the canon came to
be and was chosen. It was not something that say Constantine to sort of
randomly picked at the Council of Nicea. It was a long process that involved
many centuries actually, and even up into the eighth century century with the famous
eighth century church father John of Damascus, who's known for his exhosition of the
Orthodox faith found of none and defense of Holy icons. The canon was still
being debated even in his day, and for us as Orthodox, that's not
really a big issue, because it's it's something that we're not Protestants, that
we don't actually base the entire practice of the church on having a specific,
perfect canon to have the church. The canon does come to be, it
is closed. There's no new books or anything like that. So when we
look at that canonical collection of texts, when we look at I'm speaking of
the Orthodox canon here, when we look at the Creeds and Confessions prior to
Nicea and after Nicea into those next seven eight councils, we see a consistent
doctor. We see the same Christianity being presented. It has the reverence of
saints, it has relics, it has prayers for the dead, it has
all these elements that many Protestants consider Catholic, and many Catholics well, who
knows where Roman Catholicism is today. But regardless, Orthodox Christianity still teaches those
same things. Nothing has changed. We don't have innovations, we don't have
any of these new, weird ideas, and we actually believe, and this
is going to sound pretty shocking, I think to this audience, perhaps we
actually believe that our theology is in continuity with the Old Testament. And this
is I think a big point and probably the point of departure in this debate,
which is that when we look at the revelation of God in the Old
Testament, the way that God reveals himself. Say to Moses in Exodus twenty,
when Moses goes up on the mountain and God says, you may see
one of my attributes. You may see my goodness, but you can't see
me directly, because to see me directly would be for you to die.
And so Moses sees God's goodness. If Orthodox Christianity, that means Moses saw
one of God's energies. For us, energies are not new age things or
not created things. They're the uncreated, real presence of God within time and
space. We see in all of these logos of the Angel of the Lord,
or these manifestations of the logos in the Old Testament. That's how we
view it. We view those as Jesus present in the Old Testament. It's
Jesus who's present at Mount Sinai. It's Jesus who's in the burning bush saying
I am that I am. And we see those as personal statements. So
our order theologias is called the beginning of our order theology begins with the personhood
of God. We don't believe in God as an impersonal force. He's not
a giant algorithm. He's not a mathematical principle per se, or simply,
he's first and foremost personal and therefore covenantal So, these many manifestations of the
logos, to these many Old Testament saints who by the way they worship,
they worshiped as logos. We see that as a second personage. We also
see in many Old Testament texts the presence of the whole trinity father, son,
and Spirit president. In the Old Testament, for example, in Zechariah
one, two and three, all three persons of the Trinity are present,
and they're given divine personhood later on. Yes, it's true the Church utilized
aspects, terms and ideas and concepts that were in use in Greek philosophy,
from Aristotle, from other Church fathers. You do have the idea of the
essence introducedinction. You do have the usage of the idea of houpostosis. In
these different terms like logos right in John one, we see those as the
appropriating of terms. But those terms are given a new meaning in our theology
that's in perfect harmony with the Old Testament revelation. In fact, if we
were looking at something like Dionysius the Areopagite in the Divine Names, he's often
cited as a source for something like Neoplatonism. Actually, the majority of the
citations in Dionysius's Divine names are actually from the Old Testament and from the New
Testament. So we see that as again a harmony. Here, he's not
principally a quote Neoplatonist. He's actually rejecting the formative central thesis of Neoplatonism and
Greek Hellenism, which is that the RK first principle is absolutely one and absolutely
simple. We don't believe that. We believe that God is both one and
many in a perfect harmony. God is not more one than he has three,
and he's not more three than he has one. And that's how the
trinity is. That's how the Trinity exists in the Old Testament, in that
revelation, in the Old Testament, in many places, again, the Angel
of the Lord is present many times throughout the Old Testament. He's worshiped.
Jesus identifies himself in the Gospels as that Angel of the Lord, that messenger
the Lord. This doesn't compromise the unity of God because we believe that it's
revealed to us that God's unity is something that the Father conveys to the Son
in the Spirit. Right, so the Father is the beginning of the God.
He transfers that unity of divinity to the Son and to the Spirit.
And also because of what parent caureesis, that is that the three persons in
dwell on another perfectly. So the perfect indwelling and the perfect origin of the
person of the Father is our beginning point for theology. By extension, then,
when we look at the New Testament, we see that Jesus many many,
many times, consistently cites the Old Testament as his foundation. The Father
of the Old Testament is his father. Jesus says to the woman at the
well in John four, that you will be worshiping the same father that I
have, the Father from the foundation of the world, who is the father
of the Jews the Old Testament. He says that the Jews had the legitimate
worship right. So in Jesus's mind, at least in the Gospel of John
and many other places I can go to many many more, he consistently cites
the law. Jesus consistently cites Genesis. Jesus consistently cites Adam and Eves as
real historical personages. Paul says the exact same thing, and when he goes
throughout Romans and Romans five, he cites Adam and Eve as historic instances.
He such Christ as the new Adam in his in first Grade Das fifteen.
None of that would make any sense if the Old Testament were purely allegories,
if it wasn't viewed as historical. In our theology. It is, and
so what we say is a consistent harmony of the Old and New Testament,
totally in perfect harmony. For example, in Matthew five, when Jesus says
that you've heard him, you know you shall love your enemy, he believed
that Jesus is actually citing Leviticus nineteen. Did you know Leviticus nineteen says you
cannot hate your enemy. So we don't think that Jesus is giving some new
law like Marcian thought, that's in contrast to this evil, mean god of
the Old Testament. Actually it's in perfect harmony. What Jesus is doing is
rebuking the phariseical misunderstanding. Of the law, and this Pharisaic tradition is what
would become the rabbinical Talmudic tradition. So in our review, there's a perfect
harmony. Another way to understand this from our perspective is to look at the
Biblical covenants. The New Testament will actually cite all the Biblical covenants to the
Old Testament as a perfect linear harmony. They're not viewed as a total discontinuity.
Now sometimes, yes, Paul will use terminology and language to contrast the
Old Testament sinai to the New Testament. He does this Singalatian spot. But
the allegory of Spore is actually based in the historical presentation that Paul presupposes.
In other words, he assumes that Hagar and Sarah and Abraham were actual historic
personages. That's the basis for the allegorical level of interpretation, and in fact,
throughout the history of the Church fathers, this modus operandi of hermaeutics,
or how to interpret the scriptures, it becomes a pattern of four layers,
the four levels of what would be called medieval hermauticts. Right where we have
the historical, we have the anagogical, we have the tropological and we have
the allegorical right these four layers of hermeneutical interpretation of the Old Testament. They're
never set out of accord with one another. And eventually, by the way,
the Church rejects the originist interpretation at the sixth Ecumenical Council. This is
the confessional Saint Sophronius which was accepted at the sixth Council, and it completely
refutes and rejects from our perspective originism. So that's my ten minute opening sit
Well, thank you very much, Jay was Scott please give us your opening
statements. First of all, just to set the stage here, I've read
the Bible many times. I was a missionary. I believed in intelligent design
for evolution. I'm not a philosophical or theological or even political liberal, but
over time I became aware of what I felt was very sound biblical scholarship that
did not support the fundamentalist point of view. Now these are not just wild
liberal opinions. If you want to look at two scholars who I think are
very fair as well as informed, Art Ehrman's Jesus Interrupted and also the more
recent Richard Smoley's How God Became God? They go into considerable detail about the
problems with both the Old and the New Testament. Those of us who grew
up believing the Bible literally understand and that effectively we are so culturally brainwashed that
the contradictions and the problems in the Bible are not really obvious. We grow
up, let's say, as my family did, having little Nativity scenes in
the home on Christmas, and the wise men and the shepherds are there at
the same time, and so forth. So you know, there have been
efforts to kind of smooth things out, and the most sophisticated evangelical and fundamentalist
scholars have tried to come up with answers. But I would challenge anybody who's
neutral, as I was back in my uninformed days, to look at Airman's
comparison of the first week of Jesus' life and his last week. The contradictions
between the different gospels. Radical contradictions are very obvious once you put these things
together. It's just that they're not lined up in a way where it becomes
obvious the details. You can take anything from the lineage of Jesus back to
David, or what happened after the crucifixion, during the resurrection or any of
these things. There are so many just logical problems and evidential problems. Obviously,
the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses. That becomes very apparent. Paul,
who wrote probably the earliest books from fifty to sixty AD, well before
the Gospels were written, he doesn't even mention them, so apparently they weren't
even known. But he barely mentions Christ's life before. Gospels are really obsessed
with and focused on jesus life or John Warsaw about his death. But Paul
basically doesn't say much about his life, and he only quotes Jesus twice.
One of the times is about divorce, which I think modern Christians have conveniently
ignored. I frankly don't think if Jesus came back today that he would recognize
modern Christianity. But let's just take an example of the doctrine of the Trinity.
It's really not to be found in the New Testament. This notion that
Jesus and God and the Holy Spirit are one is really confusing what it actually
says. Now in John seventeen twenty and twenty one it's explained what they're referring
to when they talk about oneness, where he says they may all be one,
as he's talking to the disciples, as you and the Father in me
and I am one, may they be with be in us. And he's
talking about in love and spirit. Obviously he's not talking about the apostles becoming
part of the Godhead. And throughout the New Testament is very clear from the
Lord's prayer that he's praying to God the Father. Matthew, Mark and Luke
the young man comes and talks to Jesus and calls him good Master, and
he says they're none good but God. So the bottom line is that many
things, including the Trinity, but also the whole concept of the atonement,
the notion that somehow, because of the sin that Adam and Eve committed,
you know, we're all entering into mortality and we were sinners, and why
should Christ die. Well, there's half a dozen theories for that. Christianity
has evolved, and in the early years the early Church, so called Church
Fathers, the Winning faction, were alarmed by the number of Christians who did
not follow their point of view. So you can say early Christianity is represented
in Orthodoxy or Catholicism or Protestantism today. But if you go back and see
the differences on faith and works and some of the other debates, it's really
hard to find modern Christianity in the New Testament. Now with regard to the
Old Testament, there you know obvious, I would say the majority of Christians
today do not take the Old Testament literally. I think one would have to
dispense with the evidence for evolution to do that, and I think that if
you look at the progress of evolution, there's no evidence for intelligent design.
On the contrary, where the Gnostics had their first insight had to do with
the nature of the Creator who put us into these bodies. And David Bracki,
the religion scholar you've had on before Miguel said, keep is convinced that
there really was this idea the Gnostics had of gnosis or insight, because it's
hard to believe Jews would have come to the conclusion that the God of the
Old Testament, or Jehovah, the demi Urge, whatever you want to call
him, was incompetent or evil. But if you look at prehistory and history
going back five hundred million years, the amount of purposeless suffering and innocent suffering
is hard to explain using the basis or the rationale of orthodox religion. I
mean that in the broadest sense or East or West mainstream religion. The black
deaths, wallpak, malaria, cancer, Alzheimer's, the four hundred types of
emotional and mental disorders, the birth defects, differences in IQ. If you
go back and read Jared Diamonds, guns, germs and steel, you get
a little sense. Even at that late date in the Middle Ages and after
that, just how many people died in childhood about a quarter of the one
hundred and eight billion people who ever lived. So then one has to ask,
if God is all powerful and all knowing and benevolent, you know,
why would he hold the knowledge of germs and ANESTHESIATI the late nineteenth century,
and I think that Gnostics had this flash of insight, this gnosis that the
God of this world, the creator of this world, was not the high
transcendental God. Now gnosticism recognizes there are contending forces. On the one hand,
we have the Marian visions, we have the miracles that the saints performed.
You know, there is a divine intervention. I think you can get
help from the eons or the angels, or whatever you want to call them.
I'm a believer in healing, miracles, divine intervention, the power of
prayer. There's that side. On the other hand, there's a tremendous amount
of evil. Obviously the forces of good don't seem to be able to stop
it. But this fits with what gnostics say about the dualistic nature of this
dimension. So what I did in book God Reconsidered is I shared my journey
over the last fifty years forty eight years to be exact, I'm sixty nine
now, and how I finally went through all these different religions and finally decided
the gnosticism was the only path that really made philosophical sense. Well, thank
you, Scott Jay. Would you like to have a rebuttal? I know
we said five minutes. If you need longer, then we'll just match.
I'll have Scott match the timeline so everybody can say what they want. I
would definitely like to rebut to that. So I noted several points I think
in his opening statement. Obviously he is free to give the open statement that
he wants, but the opening statement kind of ignored pretty much all the points
that I made, most of which actually covered his responses or his points.
So, for example, he sets what he calls fundamentalism over against whatever gnostic
version of Christianity that he has, I would actually say that, you know,
this is really a mischaracterization because any position, any worldview, actually has
its own version of fundamentalism. You could say, in fact, I've even
heard mister Smith critique scientism as being a kind of fundamentalism. So really any
position could fall into quote fundamentalism, because any position will have fundamental starting points
and presuppositions that it won't actually question. It's actually impossible to have no starting
point, no foundational assumptions, and complete neutrality. So I would actually have
to disagree that he may believe that he's philosophically neutral, and he may have
striven or may strive, we may strive to be neutral, but actually neutrality
is fundamentally impossible to achieve. There's no perfect neutral position because we're all conditioned
in some sense by our worldviews. All of our views are theory laden in
other words, is what I'm trying to say. So the fact that he
has cited bart Ehman, that he's the site of these people who talk about
Bible contradictions. There are many competent scholars who have replied to bart Erman and
others in many competent scholarly works, such as doctor Craig B. Lomberg's book
The Reliability of the Gospels. I've done talks on the amazing historical veracity and
testimony that we have in five thousand plus manuscripts of the first, third,
three and fourth centuries of the Church. That's a tremendous attestation that's much higher,
magnitudes higher than what we have for Plato's dialogues. And as a grad
student in philosophy, I know a lot about Plato, and I can tell
you that the latest document about that we have a Plato is Oxford manuscript be
of the Middle Ages. That's the earliest, excuse me, the earliest document
that we have of Plato's writings. So we have within the first three or
fourth centuries over five thousand manuscripts even back to the first century that are largely
in harmony. There's something of a ninety five ninety seven ninety eight percent of
harmony in the different textual collections and manuscripts that we have. So now that
itself doesn't prove the religion. I'm just saying, when it comes to the
textual issues, it's a bit of sleight of hand to talk about fundamentalism,
to throw in barn ermin when it's actually a lot more complicated than that.
So are there difficulties in texts, Yeah, there's difficulties in text but actually
there's difficulties in any religion. So as if this constitutes some sort of fundamental,
like destructive argument to our position, I don't think it does, because
any position, any religion, any worldview, is going to have difficulties.
Right, He's going to bring up the problem of evil. He's kind of
already hinted at that. That's I mean, I'm going to give you an
argument for the problem of view. Well, when we get to that question,
when we get to the Odyssey. But actually pointing out these kinds of
problems itself isn't an argument. We can point out fundamental problems, it can
point us in a direction, but just talking about problems in a position itself
isn't that strong an argument in my view. He says that Paul doesn't say
much about Jesus's life. Well, this just assumes that Paul wasn't being chosen
by Christ to be an apostle to the Gentiles, and that there wasn't,
in God's providence, already going to be gospels written about Christ's life. In
other words, it's assuming the thing that is kind of one thing that we
need to be proven from the outset, which is that Christianity is false whatever.
He's assuming that Christianity is false in order to argue against the Gospels.
But we need to know why Christianity is false in order to disprove the Gospels.
That's the thing that he has not yet shown. So just because Paul
doesn't talk about Jesus's life assumes that there must be a standard by which he
will accept Paul's writings only if he talks about Jesus' life. Well, maybe
Jesus didn't commission Paul to talk about his life because there's already four gospels that
are going to be written talking about Paul's or talking about jesus life. When
he talked about the Atonement, he gave a Protestant definition of the atonement,
which is not held by Orthodoxy. You could read Saint John Damascus's book Exposition
of Orthodox Faith, where he goes into great depth in the book. In
book three, discussing how we don't believe in the idea that Christ's death was
like one person had to be damned by another person in the trinity or something
like this that paid off God. That's the Western and Sealmian and then later
Protestant doctrine orzox Christianity does not believe in the doctrine, as it would necessitate
a form of Nostorianism. He says that we would have to dispense with the
evidence for evolution. Actually, I debate evolutionists all the time, and there's
not much evidence for evolution. There's evidence for adaptation, sure, but adaptation
is not the same thing as this grand scale narrative of Darwinian evolutionary theory.
So I'll be happy to debate any of the points that relate to the grand
scale narrative of Darwinian theory, and we'll be happy to dispense with them.
So he talks about pointless suffering. I imagine we'll get to that when we
get to the Odyssey, because the Odyssey actually presupposes a standard by which to
judge right and wrong, good and bad suffering. Why suffering is bad,
and what we need is justification for why there are those standards, and of
course I believe that the Orthodox philosophy gives a justification for that. When it
comes to New Testament citations for the deity of Christ, I actually I already
gave one. Christ says many times in the Gospel John I Am. He
identifies himself with the I am. This is why the Jews want to stone
him, right Isaiah. In John eleven, John cites Isaiah six or Isaiah
sees the majesty of the seraphim covering the face of God. It's identified as
God. John specifically identifies that as Jesus, So the so called gnostic Gospel
John, many people thought John in the early Church might be a gnostic gospel,
ironically identifies Christ as God. John one begins with in the beginning was
the Word. The logos of the Word was with God, and the Word
was God. In John one eighteen it says that he is the only begotten
of the Father. So we believe that Christ quite literally is God. And
there's many many other case. I did a three hour talk just on citations
from the Old and New Testament. You can find that the whole talk if
you want to go into that. I'm obviously I have talk about that.
Now it's called is Jesus God? Is God? A trinity? And it's
a response to Rocking Mystery, the well known YouTuber. So lastly, as
my winds down here, trying to fit this sin as quick as I can,
he says that he why would God withhold knowledge of germs? Well,
this is a bizarre argument because really, again this will be an argument that
I think would befall any position, as in other words, it's a kind
of an unanswerable question for anybody's worldview. It's like saying, why would we
would we not have knowledge of you know, why did Jesus not talking about
computers? I don't find that a very convincing argument, because if Christianity is
true, then in God's providence, God knows and has a delineated period within
which he does lead man to certain levels of knowledge. Again, depending upon
God's foreknowledge and God's providence. There's nothing within the Christian worldview where that's inconsistent.
So I'm not sure why that's a suitable argument, because it just assumes
that God is evil or bad for not letting people know about germs a long
time ago. But again, now we have to know why on what standard,
on what basis he's going to judge things evil and badness. Leads me
to my final point, which is that when he says that he is a
believer in divine intervention, how does he know or by what standard does he
have an ability or a way to judge whether these divine interventions, these mystical
experiences, these ideas of why he should or should not do this thing,
are absolute, or maybe they're not absolute, and they're not absolute and they're
relativistic. Then on what basis does this mystic position that he has give him
any better standing, any better philosophical stance than any other position than atheism or
than Christianity at all. It seems that it would just reduce to pure relativism.
Thank you, Jay. Yes, it looks like Evans. Everybody's behaving
in the chat room. Can I make a comment, Yeah, I'm gonna.
I just wanted to interject, Yes, we'll let you. I just
wanted to check everybody's behaving. I'm amazed the reaction of my vaping is getting
from people. But I only smoke crack outside, so but that's where we
are. So everybody's behavior. Yeah, I'm amazed how the word Boomer has
become such an insult. I'm gen x. I'm gen x. But anyway,
Scott, please give us your rebuttal. Jay went about seven minutes,
so please seven minutes. I don't have a lot to say, except that
I wanted to clarify a few things. First of all, when I say
fundamentalism, I'm distinguishing that somewhat from the evangelical point of view. I'm not
saying that none of us have some presumptions I explained in God Reconsidered how I
came to my decision. People can read it and they will either agree with
my logic or they will decide that I'm wrong. I'm simply saying that Jay's
position is a very conservative one within Christianity. There are lots of other faithful,
scholarly Christians who would disagree with him on many of these things. The
second point is with regard to the manuscripts. I didn't say anything about the
manuscripts. Yes, there's great consistency between the manuscripts. What I'm talking about
are the dramatic contradictions that are obvious to anybody once your eyes are opened.
And I think anybody who wants to understand this should read Richard Smolly's How God
Became God, in which he addresses why Christ was crucified. He says it's
because he probably did convey the idea that he was the Messiah, and he
explains what the Jewish concept of the Messiah was, and bart ehrm Jesus interrupted,
I think makes a very very clear case. There's not a book that
has ever been written that doesn't have its critics, and people can choose their
sides. But I'm very confident that most people who approach this subjectively will realize
that the New Testament and the Old Testament are not infallible. Now, with
regard to the Atonement, I didn't say what. I didn't get into any
details about which theory. There's half a dozen theories of why Christ had to
die, But as far as Paul's does not lack of discussion or even reference
to Christ's life. Paul, if you just take the seven letters that everybody
agrees or the legitimate ones Paul had opinions about, everything wasn't always clear.
But what is clear is the only sites Jesus twice, and he barely makes
any reference to his life, which, again the contrast with the Gospels is
enormous, But the gospels don't agree among themselves. The contradictions are garmous,
and rather than go any further into where we have some disagreements here about suffering
and so forth, believe that when we get on to theodicy, so let's
move on, all right, Well, then let's move on to theodicy.
Jay, would you like to talk about that or rebut any of Scott's points,
The one thing I would say is that again, I mean, the
alleged contradictions have been dealt with to appeal to what is an obvious contradiction or
what should be obvious. It's very similar to the way that higher critics approached
the Book of Genesis. For example, they would argue things like, well,
if you look at the fact that there's two different names of God being
used, say in one chapter Genesis as opposed to another chapter, or the
way that the Leviticus texts utilize a different name, the presupposition there is that
that had to have been different authors, and therefore we could deny Moaic authorship
or deny later redactions by Joshua, and therefore or the whole manuscript tradition would
fall apart into the documentary hypothesis and so forth. But the problem is that
the documentary hypothesis rests on presuppositions. And what's ironic is it? In the
twentieth century, the latter half of the twentieth century, the documentary hypothesis about
the Old Testament itself is no longer in favor. The hypothesis of Q that
there was this mystical, mythical Q document that was served as the basis for
perhaps Marke's earliest gospel, for what mark being the earliest gospel, and so
forth, Q is no longer in favor. Favor. You can go watch
a Yale University's YouTube channel, the latest lectures at Yale. They'll tell you
that this is no longer in vogue. And when it comes to textual scholarship,
so actually, textual scholarship of bart Erman and the liberal variety is a
shifting sand. It's always changing, much like Darwinism is a shifting sand that's
always changing. In fact, think about something like junk DNA. Junk DNA
according to you, say Richard Dawkins fifteen years ago, it's the strongest proof
of Darwinian theory and evolution. And then there's a clip of Dawkins not too
long ago, saying that junk DNA is one of the strongest things that he
now rejects. He never supported junk DNA. In fact, there is no
junk DNA, and people have put the two clips of him side by side.
Now, I'm not trying to say that a tribute to mister Smith Dawkins's
position, but I know that he is a critic of scientism, as I
would be as well. But I would just simply point out that this accusator,
this critique about the alleged disharmony in the Gospels, has been dealt with
since the beginning, right the church fathers have dealt with this. Augustine wrote
a whole book about the harmony of the Gospels, and this partly gets into
again difficulties when it relates to textual traditions. He says he wasn't interested in
talking about different textual manuscripts, but it's actually relevant because there's a distinction that
we would make between the autographa, which is the text that the apostles and
the disciples actually penned, and then the later copies or manuscripts that come to
us in these different textual codex's codeses right, Codex about Ecanus, Conaticas,
et cetera, et cetera, the received texts and so forth. So that's
a big difficult issue. I don't deny that. But setting aside that question
of presuppositions, when it comes to textual manuscripts, there's an amazing again connection
between countless Messianic prophecies that Christ specifically fulfilled. How would Christ have fulfilled those
prophecies if I mean none of that's what we would expect if these were inspired
documents. And again Christ himself refers to himself as the fulfillment of those many,
many many prophecies. So again I have a whole talk on that.
I know we're not going to get into fulfilled prophecies, but you can look
at Daniel seven, Daniel nine. Daniel talks about the exact empires under which
the Messiah would be born, the temple would be destroyed, the sacrifice will
be done away, and of course in seventy eighty that's exactly what happened.
Christ dies, right, and then seventy eighty the temples destroyed by Titus west
Asian, the temple administration is taken away. Daniel says, this is wo
happened when the final era comes upon us. We live in that Church era
which all of the prophets of the Old Testament, almost all of them said,
what would mark that Messianic era would be the Gentiles worshiping the God of
the Jews, the God of the Israelites. And that's exactly what's happened.
In the last two thousand years. The apostles and their followers have gone out
and converted the gentile nations to worship the One True God. And that's what
we say, Jesus is now when it comes to the Odyssey, what I
would say is that this is where I think it's going to get very hairy
for the opponent, because I listened to many of his talks, actually most
of the ones that I could find on YouTube, in preparation for this debate.
So I don't want to be unfair to him, but I noticed many
times where when he laid out his worldview, what he said was something to
the effect of, for example, he said, we can have a Hindu
Boodh shaman conception of a religion that we kind of formulate like a cafeteria.
We can kind of put it together the way that we want to do it,
and he says, then we can somehow get like a version of good
and evil. And I would just simply say that number one, his position
cannot give any coherent explanation of what good and evil is. And so therefore,
when he would attempt to critique Christianity on the basis of O Jehovah is
a mean god of the Old Testamer or something like the all Debay off right,
the demiurge, or whatever, I would actually say that he has no
grounding and no fundamental basis by which to critique good and evil at all,
because in his worldview good and evil, as best I could tell from the
many many lectures and interviews of his that I listened to, it's purely subjective.
If it's purely subjective, then there's no basis it's objective to critique our
god on. You need some kind of metaphysical absolute, the concrete absolute,
The good or something has to be objectively a transcendentals necessary category. And if
you don't have that, if you don't have a philosophical justification for that,
then your position is just relativism. It is pure subjectivism, and it actually
can't say anything at all, all right, thank you, Scott. I
think Jay went about seven minutes. If that's which won for the rebuttal on
theodicy, I must say somebody did mention in chat that you look like a
thin Bruce Dern. I think that's a compliment as far as I'm concerned.
But well, that beats the person who posted on Facebook that I've already converted
them to Orthodoxy from my currently just bylf okay, I am not a relativist.
I am a believer in evil. By profession, I'm a journalist.
I've written extensively about Hitler, Stalin malt stay Tune, all the great evil
leaders in the world. I've studied prehistory and history, and what I'm defining
as evil or let's say bad, is not subtle. I lived in Germany
for a while. I've been to a death camp. I would call the
Holocaust evil. I think that any god who created a reality where a quarter
of the children would die in childhood for all the suffering and the innocence and
the grief of the families. A god who would create a world where there
is famine, where people weren't even literate until recent where nobody had any idea
what the Black Death was caused by forty percent of Europe in the Middle Ages
died of that and it was an excruciating, horrible ebola like death, cancer
is not proportionate. Both religions East and West, in their desperation to justify
a god or a power like karma that would have us come into this world,
they try to blame the victim, and they try to say one of
several things. Either it's all relative. How can you say that you know
there's good or evil, which is what the liberals usually do. Or they'll
say, well, it's a mystery. You know, we don't we can
we can learn things from our suffering. You know, they've done studies and
it shows that in three months almost everybody can on average, bounce back from
adversity, whether it's being in a death camp or a divorce or you know,
getting a cancer prognosis, whatever it is. And human beings are very,
very resilient. And I'm an expert on adversity. My my day job
is very mundane. I write about I interview c and find out how they
succeeded, and you know, resilience is part of that formula. So what
I'm saying is that if you in order to understand whether Genesis is correct.
When God rests on the seventh day and said that his creation is good,
you have to see what that means. Now, if you believe in the
dinosaurs who were around for one hundred and fifty million years, it's a little
hard to understand why God or the aliens or whoever was in charge of the
creation process, if it didn't happen six thousand years ago, why they hung
around for so long? Did God finally say, well, you know,
after one hundred and fifty million years, this doesn't seem to be leading to
human beings, who kind of modern humans really only appeared about sixty thousand years
ago. You know, what was the purpose of this long, long,
very very slow creation by any definition? And then he brought in the asteroids?
How do we explain the purpose of volcanos, hurricanes, tsunamis what it
looks like is exactly what we see day to day accidents, chaos from the
quantum level up to industrial accidents. The fundamental problem with all mainstream religions is
this notion that and this is in the East too, is that you know,
we get born here for a purpose, let's say, to learn how
to learn the truth, and you know, Christians don't even agree on what
that is. Obviously, bart Airman and his critics don't agree on what the
New Testament is saying, or whether you know, there are certain doctrines like
divorce should be ignored. You know, is abortion should abortion be a major
principle of modern Christianity or is it should it be a minor one? The
bottom line is that it's very, very hard for people to find the truth.
And this is after people have become literate. What about the tens of
thousands of years when most people spent their entire lives farming. The irony of
this notion that God places us here in order to exercise our free will is,
first of all, it completely denies the fact that God is responsible for
creating us, that we are largely products of genetics and environment. If you
read a book like Harvill Hendrix's Getting the Love You Want, you learn very
convincingly that it's in the first months of life, certainly the first year of
life, that we largely get programmed and we end up picking inappropriate spouses and
we are subconscious. Even Paul said, I do things that I don't really
want to do. Well, we don't understand ourselves. Very few people have
been through psychotherapy to become more self aware, be more objective. And the
bottom line is that somehow God waives this magic land that says you have free
will. Therefore, whatever you do, you're going to be held accounts accountable
for. And yet nobody can really hardly even find the time to search for
truth if it were easy to find. I mean, our lives are a
third taken up with you know, commuting, work, study, third is
taken up with sleep, a third with games and eating and you know other
things. Very very little of anybody's life, especially if you go back sixty
thousand years, is taken up with any opportunity to quote unquote exercise free will.
But free even free will becomes subject to the acts of the world.
The chaos in the world is everywhere. So I'm innocent. Person a mile
away gets killed by a bullet, a person who didn't know that a building
was going to collapse is killed, and so forth and so on. There
just really isn't any rhyme or reason for the notion that this world was created
by a benevolent God. Well, thank you, Scott. Well Jay,
would you like to rebud I think we're on the odyssey, but I think
free will might be another. Why we gravitate to religions? Why is there
evil? And do we have a free will at all? Or go ahead?
Tell us what you go ahead? Well, the first thing I noticed
was that when he responded on the matter of the odyssey, he basically responded
that, well, children die, God lets a lot of people die,
and therefore that's just not nice. That's so you can make an emotional appeal.
But in debate, and emotional appeal is fallacy, is not actually a
valid argument. So I would again reiterate the point that I asked before,
because I know that he says he does believe that there's evil, he believes
that there is some way to adjudicate between these. But what I was asking
for is what precisely is the means by which we adjudicate between good and evil?
How does he know when such and such mystical experiences. Maybe it was
in a demon and maybe it was an evil spirit, maybe in ARCon deceived
him into believing that this experience that he had, his mystical experience, is
talking to whatever entity. How does he know that it wasn't an ARCon deceiving
him. In other words, he needs a standard by which to judge between
the good and evil. I specifically asked what that standard is, and I
didn't hear one, even though I said, even though I did hear him
say he believes that there is evil, I would like to know what the
epistemic justification is for whatever his standard of good and evil is. When he
says he's not a relativist, so that's good. I'm glad to hear that,
but I'd like to know how he's not a relativist. Next. I've
heard him say, and I could be wrong. Maybe it wasn't him,
but there was other people talking in different interviews. But I did hear somebody
mentioned in one of the anviyte shows that we could look at reality as being
grounded in mind. I actually make this argument quite often. I don't Again,
it may not have been his arguments, so forgive me if it wasn't.
But if it was his argument, I would reiterate that I agree that
reality does seem to have mind at its fundamental basis. And in fact,
this is a classical argument that many Church of Authers made to Maximus, a
confessor made this argument that reality manifests logos, the logie of reality, the
essences of things. You could think about this kind of like Plato's forms the
essences of things right. And numbers could be another example of this. In
material invariant abstract entities like numbers, they seem to go beyond the mere physical.
Where are they though? How are they interacting in this world? But
also beyond this world? Right, also outside of the fluxa space and time.
Well, the Church of Authers and many theologians in the Orthodox tradition have
said, well, the answer to this is the divine mind. Right,
the logos is the fundamental basis of all reality, and therefore reality is at
base personal. And so the reason I bring that up is that this is
not just an abstract thing about trying to prove arguments for math problems. It's
actually pointing to the fundamental nature of reality being personal, and not just humanly
personal, but divine personhood, and that's unique to Christianity. You could read
Father stein Eloy's great books Orthodox Dogmatics. This is the central apologetic argument he
makes in that work, which is to demonstrate that the fundamental grounding of reality,
contrary to most world religions and orthodoxy is that God is personal. This
is again this sets us off against Protestantism and Roman Catholicism as well. So
he mentioned the fact that free will doesn't seem to make sense in the way
that perhaps God put us in this garden and so forth. I would actually
flip that around and say that really, the Christian worldview is the only worldview
that can give an account for free will, and not just free will,
but a host of other fundamental philosophspical things and ideas and principles and transcendentals and
categories and metaphysical realities that we absolutely have to have within a worldview to have
a coherent worldview, such as, for example, the idea of archade,
the idea of the beginning point to things, the idea of telos, the
idea of things having a purpose, the idea of causality cosmology, things having
causal relations, the idea of change, the idea of identity over change,
identity over time, the idea of meaning, the idea of also chaos.
How can we make sense of both order and chaos in reality? And I
know he says that, well, I don't see any basis for their being
designed in reality? Well, to be able to say sentences presupposes that there
is some degree at least of design and meaning in reality. You couldn't say
sentences if there was no design in meaning an order in reality at all,
if it was all pure chaos, right, which is, to deny that
there's any tels in reality, would be to resort to some worldview of pure
chaos, which would then negate the pass ability of debate at all. So
the fact that you came to a debate would show that you don't actually believe
there's no tilos in the world, no design, no logic, and no
purpose. So that would be I would say, a fundamental tension presuppositional conflict
within his worldview. Now within the Christian worldview of Christianity is true, which
is the transcendental argument that I argue, it makes perfect sense why there's telos,
It makes sense why there's arca at beginning point. It makes sense whether
there's logos, law or patterns in reality, how mathematical objects can interact into
a world of flux without being blended into the world of flux. He mentioned
dualism in a world in his worldview, a fundamental dualistic problem. I would
just simply say that. Well, if you're familiar with Plato, you would
know that one of the chief problems in the Platonic worldview is precisely the dualism,
the fact that a realm of the immaterial, the realm of the spiritual,
the realm of ideas. How can that relate, How can it interact?
How can we have any bridge between that world and this world, which
is flux change, right, constant motion, et c. This is the
ancient problem that plagued the Greek philosophers. I would say that that's a fundamental
problem for any worldview that's dualistic, and it's so fundamental that it's actually destructive
to that worldview as a whole, for it even being coherent at all.
There's no possibility of coherence in a worldview like that, and that's why we
can't be Platonists. Now, I know he doesn't believe or he thinks that
there's a good critique of reincarnation. I would agree, because that was Plato's
only way to relate the realm of the ideas to this world was a transmigration
of the souls, and that you were perhaps remembering an ancient world, an
ancient for primeval foregone, you eternal before, and that's how we have knowledge
of reality. That doesn't work all right, So again, Christianity is neither
Platinium. It's neither Ariskitilian, it's not neil Platinian. It might have terminology
that comes from those different world views, but actually it gives a basis for
reality being fundamentally personal reality, having the possibility of free will. I would
say, if God, if we're made in God's image, we can have
free will. And free will is necessary to a coherent worldview. This is
why we hold people accountable for their actions and why we have ethics. We
couldn't have ethics that there was no free will. This is actually a fundamental
refutation of materialism and determinism, right. It's called the determinist fallacy. Right.
So I would say that this is one of the strongest arguments for Christianity.
In fact, is that all of those principles that I listed, those
transcendental categories, they're coherent within a Christian worldview. But if we have the
kind of worldview that I get from the opponent, I don't see how any
of those things are coherent at all. Thank you, Jay Well. Scott
would you like to rebut perhaps I think I have a couple of comments.
First of all, evil is debatable. We're not going to all agree on
what is evil. But I take a common sense approach to it, as
I explain in the book and my lecture and the interviews on Eon White,
which anybody can look up. And for example, I'm willing to go on
record to say that now Setune murdering forty five to seventy million of his own
people is evil. I think torture for any reason is evil. Abortions controversial.
You can find people on both sides. I don't think it should be
the big issue it is among evangelical Christians, but it certainly is an important
ethical issue that should be debated. So don't I think most people can agree
on ninety percent of what is evil? What you should do about evil?
Do you give somebody the death penalty, a life sentence, you know that
sort of thing? How do you decide how much free will they had?
Were they victims? Those are different things. But I do believe that there
is evil, and much of it, most of it can be now the
problem. And incidentally, I go into some of these things on my Facebook
page for God Reconsidered. I go into some detail about these points. I
would say that with regard to how do you know that you're not being deceived
by a demon? Yes, we're all aware of the problem. You know,
how do we how do we get to the point where we can make
a decision about what is true for us? So the whole point of God
Reconsidered is to take people through the journey that I went through looking at Eastern
religions, Western religions, Islam. I spent quite a bit of time in
Muslim countries. I've talked in New Age advocates and all kinds of cults.
I knew many of scientologists very well. I tried to look at everything with
an open mind, and I take people through all these issues like free will,
whether there's intelligent design and evolution, et cetera, and I show how
I arrived at these conclusions. So it isn't simply based on a mystical experience
where some alleged angel appears to me. I mean, obviously, if you
believe the Virgin Mary's apparitions, then you're supposed to be Catholic. All I'm
saying is there are many manifestations of the saints or the angels. And I
think that one thing that I admire about Orthodoxy is the use of icons and
chanting and meditation and some other things in constant prayer. I think that these
are techniques where somebody can bring some inner peace and arrive at a spiritual path
for them. I'm all for whether it's Buddhism or Orthodoxy. I know the
har Krishna is very well. If people find something that resonates for them and
works for them, that's a good thing. And I have actually a forewarning,
not a forward to God reconsidered, where I say, you know,
don't read this book if you're not really seeking for another path. But I
do think that you can use logic. My training and journalism helped me kind
of try to sort conflicting sources out, and there is a way to do
it. And you know, we could Jay and I could spend the eternities
debating some of these things and going back and forth and you know, getting
into the menu shape. But I do think that you can make some common
sense decisions that you can become more aware of your biases. Certainly, earlier
in my life, before I discovered gnosticism, I was becoming more desperate because
every time I looked at a religion in depth, I started seeing what the
flaws were. For example, we've talked just about in a passing way about
reincarnation, and I'm probably the most controversial thing I've ever talked about on Eon
Byte, based on all the stones thrown at me on the virtual reality is
reincarnation. I've argued against it. Now. I had no bias against it
when I started, but I feel kind of like I'm a lone voice on
that point, and I you know, if people want to believe in it
and they think that that makes sense, great, but I give my arguments
against it and then people can decide whether they want that or not. I've
been a missionary in my life. I'm trying to hold back and attract people.
As Jesus said, let he who has ears here, And we do
these podcasts, all of us because we want to share something. And obviously
the listeners can post their comments, their criticisms, their agreement, and nobody
is going to agree with everybody else, so we have to, you know,
a little room for disagreement within shall we say, the Christian fold or
the spiritual groups? Well, thank you Scott, Well, Jay, why
don't we move on to the idea of noses versus faith. Obviously really comes
down to what salvation is in your view versus Scott and other religions. And
of course, if you want as we can keeping it loose. If you
want to rebut anything Scott has said, go ahead. I'll time it and
then give Scott the same amount of time to be fair. Right, So
I noticed in the response there he said that murder and torture he would agree
are evil. I would agree with the murder and torture evil. Of course,
I have a basis as to why I think murder and torture evil,
and that's of course the holistic perspective of the Christian Orthodox worldview, which again
man accept that, y'all mean it, accept that, but at least gives
a coherent basis as to want. Now, when I heard him give his
response, he said, most people can agree on what's what evil is,
or society can come to an agreement about evil. That's actually the appeal to
massive fallacy. So that would be the appeal to consensus fallacy. Then he
later said something about appealing to common sense. That's also a fallacy. So
I keep hearing the logical fallacies, And as a philosopher, I'm not trying
to be rude. It's just my job as a philosopher to call out the
logical fallacies. So I don't think that those are coherent arguments as to why
his position should be accepted. Now, again, we may not like the
Christian argument, we may not think that God is what we want him to
be, but that's precisely what we would expect in a position where we are
required to be humble. We're required to submit ourselves to what's revealed, and
that's actually the path to true So Saint Maximus actually has a work where he
talks about true nosis. And I think if a person was a Gnostic,
they might find Saint Maximus appealing as maybe an entry way into Orthodoxy because he
combined in such a mystical way, you could say rationalism or scholasticism in a
proper way, academia, mathematics, logic with the mystical. For in his
mind, those things were not in opposition, they were not in dialectical tension.
So he was very excellent at doing both apologetics showing inconsistencies, being trained
in Riscyitanian logic, as was Saint Gregor Polo laws as well as being grounded
in mysticism, and so we don't see those things as out of a chord.
So if I were to transition into talking about faith versus nosis, I
would actually say that that orthodoxy is the perfect synthesis of faith and nosis.
In fact, we would say that the only way to true nosis is faith,
and we don't think those things are out of a chord, because number
one, we wouldn't necessarily accept the modern Western post Schleiermacher post Kantian idea that
faith is accepting things merely on the base of authority, and then reason is
logical and so forth. In fact, that doesn't make any sense when we
understand that philosophy shows us and has shown us. I think in all modern
philosophy since con has shown us that all perspectives are theory laden. So classical
foundationalism hasn't. Epistemology is not really workable anymore. We have to get rid
of that. It doesn't work. We can't just appeal to common notions,
common sense ideas, common philosophical categories. There are no common philosophical categories because
all those categories and conditions are Excuse me, transcendental categories, et cetera.
They're all theory laden, they're all interpreted within our paradigm, within our worldview.
So therefore what we need is a worldview, a theology that makes sense
of philosophy. Maximist Confessor, for example, wrote many treatises on Aristotle.
In fact, he utilizes Ariostota a lot in his Centuries on Theology. That's
a book. He wrote Centuries on theology, two hundred chapters on theology,
and he goes in depth into analyzing logic, analyzing rkat, all these great
principles, and then he goes into talking about virtue and mysticism and union with
God. So in his mind those things were not intention There's nothing wrong with
logic. What we say is that the realm of logic, the realm of
mathematics, the realm of what you might call the noetic realm, the realm
of the mind. There's nothing wrong with that realm. But sometimes, as
humans, we get tricked into thinking that, yes, there is a higher
realm, and so we're right to not believe in pure materialism. But sometimes
we get tricked into thinking that that next level up, that next dimension,
is itself God, and this is what we would say is the eraor that
the Pythagoreans and the Platonists fell into. There's actually a great essay that the
Perennialist, he was kind of orthodox, sort of orthodox perennials philosopher doctor Philip
Tirard wrote against Platonists. Neil Platonists were saying, why would you got orthodox
and not neo Platonists, And so he wrote an excellent essay that if anybody's
interested in Perennialism or neil Platonism, I would say read his I say,
logic and the Absolute, where he shows that we have to understand that God
is even beyond just numbers, right, And I know that Gnostics would say,
well, yeah, but that's the ultimate high God. Perhaps it's beyond
you know, that level of reality. That's fine, I understand that.
But I'm just trying to make a point that for us, in our in
our deepest theology, right, whether it's Maximus a Confessor whoever, he's probably
our deepest theologic we don't see a fundamental disharmony or tension between understanding mathematics and
numbers and that realm, that noetic realm, and God, who is even
beyond that and that that noetic realm can still image to us aspects of the
divine mind without totally encompassing the divine mind. We don't. We don't equate
the divine mind with numbers and geometry. So there's there's there's there's a sense
in which we will always be. For example, Saint Gregor and Innissis says
moving up into God, learning God right for all of eternity. I'm just
making the point that if a person it was a Gnostic or interested in Gnosticism,
they might actually find a great pathway into Orthodoxy through Saint gregort Nissa or
Sat Maximus, and particularly Maximus on the doctrine of the logos and the logi,
because I think what gnostics are looking for in terms of a deeper sense
to reality into metaphysics, they would actually find in the metaphysical structure of logos
and logi. All right, well, thank you, Jay Scott. Would
you like to rebut about seven minutes? Okay, So, first of all,
I did not say that I'm using some kind of elevated logic to argue
for being good or you know, on good behavior. I would point out
that the Gnostic mass movements that the Church, early Church file others were so
worried about, like the Marcianides and the Valentinians, and then the later Manicheans
and Cathars. They were noticeably praised by even their religious enemies for what we
would call their good behavior. And all I'm saying is the Gnostics do not
have a dogma about which commandments to obey. Okay, but I think when
you get the sense of inner peace that comes with accepting that maybe there is
a transcendental God, because you feel that connection, which Gnostics claim that it
leads naturally to better behavior, It's not something that can be argued at an
ultimate level because Christians don't agree on the big issues. Should you have big
tax cuts? Will that create prosperity? Should abortion be treated as murder?
I mean, you can go through the whole gamut and you get left wing
and right wing points of view about issues that are very, very important from
any point of view in terms of public morality and private morality. So since
we don't have a set of commandments to follow, what I think leads to
what I would call a somewhat Saint Francis type of life in its ideal state,
or certainly a fairly gentle. The Gnostics have a fairly gentle track record
compared with the Catholic Church, for example, on any measurable level. From
the records that we have, they didn't go around persecuting people killing people.
Were generally known as quote unquote good Christians. So I simply pointing out that
most Christians of any faith would agree about probably ninety percent of you know,
the appropriateness of murder and torture and incest, and you know, many many
other things. But it's true, you can't really Christians among themselves can't seem
to prove morality. From my point of view, the evangelicals are really proof
texting and trying to develop a modern morality based on, you know, half
a sentence from Paul or the Old Testament or something like that. But it's
subject to debate. And that's the point. We're left in this world with
a tremendously difficult task, even for those of us who are actively involved in
trying to figure out what the truth is. So the bottom line is that
four Gnostics we claim to have come to the insight one way or the other,
whether it's mystical experience or study or listening to somebody who words resonate,
whose message resonates. We don't have diaries from the Manichean ordinary followers, we
kind of know the public record, and the bottom line is that it's led
to what I would call, for most historic Gnostics, a life that would
be compatible with what Jesus taught in the broadest sense. But we feel a
connection, a divine connection, a direct divine connection. We see Jesus as
an enlightener. Now, the ancient Gnostics disagreed about exactly who Jesus was,
and I think Richard Smooley's How God Became God goes through the whole gamut of
who the Jews and the early Christians thought he might be, and of course
Jesus was famously cryptic about who he was. But that revelation, while we
can't prove that it comes from God, does give each of us who experience
it a sense and an insight that puts us on a different path. And
in my blogs on my God Reconsidered Facebook page, I go into some greater
detail about why I think this form of Christianity makes a lot more sense.
But you know, we're not going to be able to win debates about exactly
you know, what good and evil are and which commandments dovey because frankly,
most Gnostics do their best, in my opinion, to try to be good
people. But we're not hung up on the commandments. You know, we
don't have churches that have dogma and tell us what to believe. I don't
believe in astrology, but you know a lot of the ancient Gnostics did.
So we're free to believe pretty much whatever we want. But the track record
of narcissism in the so called real world is really good when it comes to
ethical behavior by any standards. I mean, the Catholic priests praise the cathur
leaders for their behavior. So the bottom line is if somebody, in my
opinion, the key to gnosticism or gnosis is not necessarily a mystical experience,
it's coming to the insight that, as David Brackie said, that the creator
God is not the same as the trendental God. And you know, we
could spend all night talking about the problems in the Old Testament and stuff,
and we're not going to resolve them in this discussion. But I explain,
and God reconsidered how I came to this conclusion, and people are free to
disagree with it and hopefully they find something that works for them. Well,
thank you well, Vencea. Do we have any questions from the audience.
I think I saw one about three hundred people, but nobody super chats or
questions. A lot of shit talking over there. There's a lot of stuff
going on. I got involved in it too. I'm saying a few things,
but nothing that I can report right now. Okay, Actually I had
one question from a super the individual Jazz Maine. She wrote it down,
but she didn't address it. She said, I'm new to Gnosticism and I
often find myself wondering why did gnostic tie themselves so much to the Christian narrative?
Is? What is the source? Jay? Do you do you see
narcissism as a pre Christian Do you think it just came out of Christianity in
its early days? Second century, third century? What? What would you
say? Then? Scott can answer is give his take right Well, I
did a video critique of narcissism a couple of years ago to a fair amount
of views. I would say, if anybody's interested in a fuller treatment of
my critique of the systems of narcissism, I would said they could watch that
video just type been Jake higher gnocissism, it'll come up. But my central
issue would be that there's not really a singular gnosticism. There's many gnostic systems,
and so I think actually Iran Ais and Against Heresy's would be vindicated insofar
as that was one of the chief points he made was that there's not really
a gnosticism, there's a there's a whole bunch of different systems, and so
it's kind of just a cafeterias mortess board type of thing. And I'm sure
that you would you would disagree perhaps, or you would say, well,
Christianity has all these same problems. I don't agree with that, but I
would just simply say that it has a lot of influences. It seems to
have an influence from Platonism for Eastern thought, as well as a lot of
maybe the sectarian movements within the Roman Empire, all kind of converging. And
so when we read like the first three hundred pages of Against Heresies, we
see all kinds of different gnostic groups, and some of them were radically ascetic,
some of them were more like eyes watch shut meetings. I mean,
it seems to be all over the place, So I don't really think there
is a singular Gnostic system. I mean, is it the Pisto Sophia,
is it the Gospel of Judas, is it the Ogdoad? I mean,
it's all over the place. And so to me that just suggests that,
as with many cultic type of movements, sectarian movements, they're a smortus board
of people piecing together different ideas. Thank you, What about you, Scott?
What would be your theory of why Gnostics were so attached to Christianity and
Jesus. Yeah, I think that Stephen Heller Ecclesiagnostica, and you can see
what there is available about him and that at gnosis dot org makes the case
that there are things binding many of these movements together. There were differences between
them. They did have in common the notion of a creator God or really
kind of like a demi God called the Demiurge, or an angelic power involved
in the formation of the world. That is kind of central. Not all
of them believed in a mystical experience where you find that direct connection with God.
Most of them seem to have had that. There were differences between them,
but by and large they rejected the Old Testament, and the Christian Gnostics,
who can continue today in that tradition and has laid in the Middle Ages
with the Cathars, did view Jesus as the enlightenment Bringer, and they had
different ideas about, you know, whether he was really crucified on the cross
or not. But again, when you go back and you look at the
mishmash of the New Testament, even before it was formed, Christians had lots
of disagreements on on you know, what the core of Christianity was according to
the early Church fathers. Apparently a majority did not adhere to what became the
Catholic faction. Or you might say, Jay would say the Orthodox action goes
back to the early Church Fathers. But I think if you if you read
the Gnostic literature. For example, I'm reading right now Burger Pearson's Ancient Gnosticism.
He shows all those early strains and influences. Now, the point of
God Reconsidered is to say, how do we, as modern mystics and Christians,
how can we adapt those ancient streams of different early groups that felt that
the Creator God was not the transcendental God. How can we adapt that to
our belief system now, and I think there is I go to Ecclesiagnostic and
Los Angeles, and there are others. Because I value the mass. I
think there is value and ritual and prayer and meditation and other things. And
I think many Christians would find some of the modern Gnostic churches very traditional in
terms of their ritual and the way that they carry on Christian tradition that's recognizable
is at least a cousin of mainstream Christian Did you have something, Oh,
yeah, there's a question from the chat room, which is do you see
narcissism as embracing the alternative holy feminine, the love of the collective rather than
individual, which was written out. I'm much already met by that exactly,
but that I guess the gist of it is that the feminine is celebrated more
in narcissism. We're talked about more than in orthodox Christianity, and so I
guess for Scott and j One, you yeah, I would say there is
a sensem which I think that's true. I think that the rise of feminism
is tied to the rise of gnocissism. Theist the Sofia principle, is it
an attempt to give the idea of con sort to God or something like this.
I mean, we definitely think that, you know, Mary is the
queen of Heaven, she is the Theo Toko, She's she's you know,
chosen by God. But she's always and will always remain a creation. She's
never going to be a fourth person of the Trinity or something like this.
So there's always a limitation. We don't believe that that God the Father is
identical to biological uh, masculinity, but there is an imaging of you know,
obviously Christ did come as a as a male. Christ will always be
incarnate in that same body that he came into human into into time and space
with, so he will never lose that. He doesn't shed his humanity or
anything like that. And that's why we actually believe in the goodness of creation.
So we see male and female as symphonia harmony. We don't see them
as dialectical tensions, and we we just simply think that God has the right
and the authority to establish relationships between male and female. And when those things
get out of balance, when you get the inversion of things, that's when
you start to see the decay of society and civilization is when things get inverted,
and so for us there is natural law, there is moral law.
The Ten Commandments are good. All religions need and have to have some kind
of binding doctrines or dogmas. It's impossible to have no dogmas. I mean,
I think he said something like, you know, we don't have any
dogmas. I'm just wondering, is it a dogma that there's no dogmas?
I mean, it's impossible to have no dogmasm to be totally sort of in
up in the air. All right, Scott, do you want to answer
this about the divine feminine? Also? Yeah, Emil gave ten dollars,
and I'm assuming this question is for you because Jay's already talked about the prophecies
of Isaiah and Daniel. But he'es are there any prophetic revelations that can be
attributed to Gnostic writings? For example, Christians will frequently point to prophetic writings
of Isaiah, Daniel Exeta, improving Jesus Christs. I would say, first
of all, partly due to the fact that the Gnostics were driven out of
business and because of the tremendous loss of the ancient manuscripts, we don't have
a lot of the Gnostic writing, so it's impossible. But because the Gnostics
didn't look back on the Old Testament is something that was part of their tradition,
and because they had a different understanding of God's interaction in the world,
they never got into the business of prophecy and trying to interpret. I think
certainly all of the interpretations of the Old Testament, prophets, or the New
Testament are debatable. So no, we were not in the prophecy business.
But I will say one of the problems is that if you believe God is
all knowing, then it goes back to the scripture that talks about how God.
I think it's in revelation God God knows you know who is going to
be saved, and certainly Calvinism and to some extent other aspects of Christianity believe
that God knows who will eventually be saved. And I don't think that allows
for free will, because if you know something at advance, whether it's a
prophecy or whether you know somebody's personal faith, that means there cannot be any
other outcome. So what you might think is free will is actually baked into
the cards because the end result is inevitable, and this is not something that
is easy to understand. And I have been very critical of these new age
quantum theory interpretations that basically say, you know, we've got time travel,
and you know we can go to these multiple futures and stuff like that.
I am a believer in the material reality that science has shown, and I
don't think we're going to time travel. I mean, even the great physicist
Leslie Smullen said there is a timescale. The universe's fourteen billionaires old, roughly
the end of the universe is not going to come before the beginning of it.
And if you believe in that flow of time, then I do believe
that there is at least freedom in the chaos. There are choices that we
can make, and we should try to make better choices by contemplating things,
because they've done some studies that show if you ponder something, you're probably going
to come to a better decision than if you act impulsively. So the bottom
line is prophecy assumes that something is inevitable, and I think there is very
little that's inevitable in our world. Wonderful, wonderful. Well, if there
are no other questions, this has been a really great conversation. I think
for the first one, as I was telling Scott and Vince before the interview,
my wife is migrating from Catholicism into Orthodoxy. I think I told that
to Jay once. So the kids will be raised little Orthodox. So this
is kind of a microcosm of what our household will be, but actually won't
because I'll just keep my mouth shut if I know better, I think,
so this was good to hear this. I can pretend in my head I'm
arguing with my wife while I'm are we going to have a final status because
I had a few yes, yes, says I would, I didn't mention
this apology, so please and then good, please give your final statements before
we sign off. Yeah, I would say, if we think about one
last point I wanted to test on that he covered was that when we look
at the world, we don't see design. I think that for us,
the doctrine of the Fall is very important, and the Orthodox doctrin of the
Fall is different than the Roman Catholic doctrine. There's some nuances that are important.
One thing that we stress along with Romans eight of Paul, is that
the Fall affected the entire cosmos, and so all of reality is subject to
decay, bondage, corruption, as Paul says in Romans eight, because of
man being put in a position of stewardship, and then when he fell that
affected all of reality. So the fall is much more cosmic and metaphysical and
scope for us. And therefore when we think about the result of the fall,
one thing it does for us in our theology, at say Matxmu point
out, is that it puts things into tension that aren't necessarily inherently intension.
After the fall, we see things intention We see a predator praier relationship introduced
into nature that's not strictly speaking natural. It's actually unnatural. Death for us
is unnatural. Death is the enemy, Paul says, and God has allowed
it to be permitted it. We believe in what St. John Damascus calls
God's permissive will, which is different than his pure omniscient fore knowledge. So
he does permit things. We accept that on the basis of revelation. We
can't give you all the exact reasons as to why, because first of all,
we're finite. No world view and no position can give you all the
explanations and answers for all of those problems, it's actually impossible. So to
ask that, or even to expect that of any worldview is really an impossible
task. And I don't think really even much of an argument at all.
So I would say that all beliefs, all religions, all churches, all
sex, all groups, all God, they all have some dogma. Even
if the dogma is that they're total relativists and subjectivist. I'm not saying you
are, but even if they are, there still is a dogma that you
have have to be a relativist. Right, So I couldn't come into a
relativist meeting like a college class and like that, right, a secular college
philosophy class. I had many of those, and I was the one guy
who wasn't a relativist. I wasn't welcome there. They didn't like me there
because you have to believe relativism to be in that class. Right, So
even relativism is dogmatic, and so there's no position that may be again perfectly
neutral. So he said that the majority of the church fathers didn't believe in
Orthodoxy, maybe during one period of the Arian crisis. Otherwise that's I don't
think that's correct. But again, are our theology isn't necessarily always determined by
the majority. So that really had no point that there's nothing I see,
no relevant in that, no relevance in that point. He mentioned Jesus's teaching
in the broadest sense. I mean, if we accept jesus teaching. Jesus
said, you accept all of it right if you if you love him,
you'll keep his commandment. There's no shortening it, you know, cutting off
and boiling it down to you know something where it's always just this unless you
want to say that you know, love God with all your heart, soul,
mind, strength, and keep the commandments right the law Jesus, that
is what sums up the entire mosaic law. Jesus says that following him is
the keeping of all of the law, and all the law the ten commandments
are summed up in love God with all her heart, soul, mind strength.
That means that Jesus is teaching the same thing as the Old Testament.
Jesus is who gave the ten commandments. In our review, so he said
Christians don't agree, so what Gnostics don't agree doesn't that's not an argument.
He says that Gnostics were praised by their enemies. Perhaps he's right about in
the Middle Ages when he talks about the Cathars. Malcolm Lambert has a big,
six hundred page book that's really good on the Cathars. By the way,
it's called medieval heresy. I do recommend that book. But when it
comes to the early Church, no, they were not praised, especially not
by aaron As or any of the other church fathers. Tertullian who did right
against the Gnostics at length. Perhaps Origin was Gnostic and was praised. He
influenced the Cappadocians, but regardless, he's later rejected. By the time of
the Six Council. Explicitly Gnostics were pacifist. Perhaps he seemed to say,
I'm not convinced of that. Maybe some of the Gnostics were. But again,
this is seems that there's a kind of singular body of Gnostics. He
admits that much of the Gnostic runnings were lost, and so now it's what
been restored. I don't know. I'm not sure I believe that the modern
restoration of Gnosticism is legitimate. The Gnostics I don't think agreed amongst themselves.
He mentioned no coherent moral theology from Orthodoxy. I would totally disagree. We
have what's called canon law. For example, most of the canonical Orthodox churches
in the world will believe in something like canon This is a great heritage that's
been handed down. The idea of canon law influenced modern law theory, whether
it's Eastern canon law or Western canon law. Modern jurisprudence is irrevocably influenced by
canon law. The rights of the accusers becuse me of the accused. That's
actually from church canon law. Civil canon law in the history of the West
and the East didn't tend to do that. It was the church that tempered
the state and gave the individual the right to have a fair trial and to
have rights as accused. That's all from church canon law. And these are
well known developments in the history of the West. We founded science. Science
comes out of medieval universities. This may be totally lost on modern people,
but no, Actually, modern science comes out of universities. Guess where universities
come from. Byzantium? What is the theology of Byzantium Orthodoxy? The longest
running empire, the most successful economic empire in the history of the world,
was Orthodox. It was Byzantium, so we give the universities, we a
civilization. All of these things come from the treasures of Orthodoxy. So I
would say that we can prove that our morals are theologists from God. I'm
not saying that just because of history it proves it. I was just rebutting
certain points that he made about history. We've actually built civilizations Canada. Laws
very important in the history of law, the history of law theory. Universities
come from Orthodoxy. So when we reject dialectics and dialectical tensions and the presuppositions
of dialectics, which are the very root of all gnostic systems are all built
on dialectical tensions and the assumptions of dialectics all the way back to Plato.
When we reject that's what we're left with is a unique revealed anthropology and a
unique metaphysic, a unique worldview, a unique ethic that is not just in
theory, it's actually been proved and stamped into history in the longest empire in
the world. All right, thank you, Jay Scott closing statements please.
So I've enjoyed this discussion, and I'm shocked that Jay and I cannot resolve
all our differences in or in forty minutes, who knew that Christians can disagree
on one or two things. I think that at least the people who are
tuning in to this program are seekers who are looking for fresh ideas on whatever
path they've chosen. I think that that's a healthy thing. I would hope
that those who really are interested in these kind of discussions, they would go
to the God Above Good dot com and look at all the other interviews you're
doing, Miguel, because it is tremendously rich, and they should join and
also join the Facebook Inner Sanctum of Gnosis. And I see all the extra
material that you have there. My own website, godreconsider dot com and the
Facebook God Reconsidered really have a wealth of other material, blogs in our and
so forth, and there is a way to contact me if you have questions.
I'm happy to answer them wonderful yes. And for the audience, I
will have Scott and Jay's information in the show notes at the website, their
websites, that their books and all that. Highly recommend you check out both
of their works. Make up your mind again. I've enjoyed both of their
works, and I will continue to enjoy their work as they put it out,
but I think we're at the end. Thank you for the audience who
participated tonight to very lively looked like a whole bunch of little ben shapiros.
I destroyed you. I destroyed you. But there was also a lot of
good conversations. But Evans, thanks for keeping the natives controlled, no problem.
Actually enjoyed hanging out with them. And by the way, the results
are in the Jehovah Hotline. Just called me. They've been watching this and
they say the Jehovah's witnesses are actually they were correct ones. I thought I
was going to become a Mormon. Oh well, we'll just have to wait.
But yeah, Jay, thank you. In second, Jay, really
appreciate you coming here. I forgot. Yeah, I can not plug my
website too, I do know, please do, please do. And now
the YouTube channel, ja do you can come me on YouTube so if you
want to follow my work there, and then I have my books for at
my website and the shop. Thank you awesome. Well, we appreciate you
coming on and keep doing what you're doing. And Scott, thanks for joining
us on this very civilized and fun debate. As always, I appreciate the
opportunity. All right, Well, good night everybody, and uh we will
talk to each other soon. Take care, and yes, I have to
say, the empire never ended. And thank you very much