Speaker 1: U h as I look through your village, high plunder
and pillage, taking all the booty for my pagan trove.
Speaker 2: Ah wow, lobbers off the bloody lobbying knights, A major
wizard and a witch made lobbing knights, lombers off the
round table.
Speaker 3: I was gonna sing a whole song, but I can't
use them. Shot up charge that work.
Speaker 4: LARPing knights, lords of the round Table, LARPing knights, pagans
made of him metal LARPing knights, k n I g
t h S not n I g t h s
LARPing knights, Pagans of the round cha or Swords from oblivion,
Swords of magical powers that glow, Swords that strike your soul.
Speaker 1: Alright, the song is right.
Speaker 3: I do have an idea metal, You're gonna take all
the pages. I want to sing a song if I
can get it right. Man, is it still playing? I
can't tell anyway. Welcome LARPers of the round t p
bu hair metal knights, a wizard of Maige and a
winch mage to LARPing knights. Let's take down some paganism dot.
It would be really funny, but I can't figure out
how to listen to the song as I say, all right,
let me say if I can play the song at
the same time, but that it won't be funny because
I don't have them dumb wig on. Let's see, let
me play the metal song.
Speaker 1: Alright.
Speaker 3: Pause.
Speaker 5: That LARPing nights.
Speaker 4: Him out alone.
Speaker 3: The round table LARPing nights a a wire wizard and
a witch Maige too. I just made up a new character,
a Wench made. She's a fagan medieval.
Speaker 5: Thought, the witch mage who gonna steal on me?
Speaker 6: Wench maides for meself. Bring it on, Christian.
Speaker 7: Cook Christian cooks cowering and fear from the swords, Christian
cooks full of temptation, Christian.
Speaker 1: Cooks, Christian feel the edge of my plead. I run
through your village and I pillage poor Christian cook. You
feel like Donald Duck as I slice through your bones.
I eat your flesh cannibalism on an altar of stones yaw.
Speaker 3: That was a pretty good rhyme. I was some good
freestyle right there, Wizard, warrior and woodsmage.
Speaker 1: As we pillage through your village, give me more hit points.
Merrow gives me hit points. Dropping reiselts fair law, dude,
did you ever notice a sword is an inverted cross?
That is so hair metal.
Speaker 5: Pagan wizards and warriors gather around my staff.
Speaker 3: Uh, I wanna get flagged anyway.
Speaker 6: Welcome, Gay of Thrones, the Gay of Thrones, young liege,
then over young and learn the Pagan ways.
Speaker 3: Uh anyway, welcome. No, I'm not gonna clean my countertop.
Clean your mouth out, you wash your mouth out. You
heard techno, It's not techno. It's a fart song. I
was gonna use it in one of the dumb videos.
See see damn son. We'll pack rise up all right?
That wig grows my nose crazy. What are we doing?
We're doing Aristotle. We're gonna talk about this debate as
we fool around. Super chats are welcome. We're gonna cover
Aristotle in some pretty good depth here, and the pagan
challenge from our opponent last night. And I'm really sorry.
Speaker 2: That our.
Speaker 3: Discord connection was so shitty last night. We're not ready yet.
We're just gonna We're gonna let people roll in because
I'm a little early. I know, I'm always late. Today,
I'm a little early. Pop lock and bang it pop,
lock inhead bang It Pop, lock inhead Bang it pop,
lockinghead bang it.
Speaker 1: Gother around, got around my stiff sword, young Liege, For
tonight we raid the Christian village in honor of four
time and God of all made up God's fourteen, young
Leege Benova, I have manly things to teach you of
the ancient ways.
Speaker 4: Wizards and lawyers, wenches, mages and wench mates to wizards
and lawyers.
Speaker 3: Oh, I'm feeling the vibe. Now I'm getting it. I'm
getting rhythm. Wizards and warriors, titties and wench mages to.
Speaker 1: Wizards of warriors, titties and wench mage titties and wench
mage titties and wench maids, wizzardsand warriors, teaching all the
young lieges all of the mysteries Rendova and run the mysteries.
Speaker 3: Ghouls and goblins one hundred and six. Come on, now,
where is their buddy.
Speaker 8: Let's get this, Let's get this party started, young lees. Dude,
that's a great rapper name.
Speaker 1: Winch made.
Speaker 3: All right, there we go, Wizards and knes and she yachts.
Speaker 8: Don't believe in thum. Boy's got a short, but it's
gonna take you to school. Call me olden one Kenobi
the Steve Brewle of Thule, feeding all my pagans gruel
while all them christ cuts drew, Ain't it cool?
Speaker 3: Woa tan.
Speaker 9: Whoa tan? Oh damn oh damn mhm h bog Lord
Dave living in a cave. Charles Martel.
Speaker 8: Pagan as Hell, Franco Marrabingian Heathen Core, Holy Vehemists.
Speaker 3: H went rhymes with barg whoa tan damn.
Speaker 10: A sigh true or peek at you a sad true
or a peek at you wolden damn son, wold damn son. H.
All right, we're almost.
Speaker 3: There, got a couple more minutes before it actually starts.
Y'all want to hear that metal song again? Okay, everybody
likes this metal song.
Speaker 4: Okay, h.
Speaker 1: Free, ain't nothing but a hole where my demons at?
Speaker 3: What my demons at?
Speaker 1: Yeah, bend over, Christian cook, I have something to teach
you there, h.
Speaker 3: H h.
Speaker 1: Christian you taste like soy?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, all right, that's enough of that nus, all right,
that's just some royalty free Viking pagan medal. Hendrick's gonna
come after me after this. He's gonna try to kill me.
Gotta there's gonna be a fat law from Hendrick and
ah ah an army, A tribe of the whole tribe
is gonna come after me, come cut my head off
with a with an axe. Would They ain't even gonna
ask a question, just gonna ax my head. Let's see,
thank you, super chats rolling in. We're gonna get started
if you if you missed the first ten minutes of
complete nonsense. I really should have put that into more
of a planned musical presentation because it could have been
pretty funny. It's okay, all right, let's talk about last night.
It's really lengthy debate. It was good. I wish that
the sound had been.
Speaker 1: Well.
Speaker 3: The sound was fine. It was that the Internet was
glitching in and out, so we didn't really have a
presentation that makes a whole lot of sense. After the
second hour mark, after hour two is when it really
starts going downhill. You can kind of make out the
majority of the arguments. I was asking people today what
they thought, and they felt like it was you know,
I still came out on top. I don't think there's
any doubt about that. But whether or not you can
really make out the arguments I'm making because every time
I set a sentence the last part of the sentence
was cut off because Discord was acting weird. So any
debate that I do is posted at the website. It's
posted on all my social media. So if you follow
my website or any of the social media as you
will see last night's debate posted. So yes, I'll add
it to the description. Unless Joe the Boomer has made
the debate behind a paywall, I don't know if he's
done that or not.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: So, but because a lot of people couldn't even hear
the debate, it's why we're doing this. So and hopefully
this won't take too long because I'm not going to
rehash the entire thing. It was so kind of arduous
and a lot of circular stuff and a lot of
rehashing the same argument multiple times over. It was it was,
It was worth it, but it was very draining. So
if we think about the Aristotelian perspective we want, and
he was roughly you know, Aristotelian. Yeah, the audio on
Discord was pathetic, dude. I mean, from now on, we'll
have to do this on my channel because I'm not
gonna waste three hour debate with a bunch of audio nonsense,
and then if he wants to have it on his channel,
he can put it up. Yeah, I cut out every
five seconds after two hours, it was it was pitiful,
all right. So what was what we're gonna see in
this is the similarity between the pagan conception the Aristotelian conception.
And ironically, when I listened to the previous discussions that
Tweetefon had had on that Daily Brat, they had discussed
all of the similarities between Aristotle and the Tonus that
we're on there, And Yeah, that's kind of the thrust
of the argument I've been making for a long time,
isn't it. So what I did was I kind of
just listed all of these ideas, and I only got
to about half of them in the debate because it
ended up being so wordy in circular. But what we
want to keep in mind is there some basic principles
that are going to be true in most of the
Pagan the most of the philosophic and most of the
Far Eastern worldviews. Now I believe that this is still
true for Islam and even arguably Judaism, but we're going
to set aside the monotheistic views for the time being,
and we want to focus on again the Pagan conceptions,
the Platonic, Neoplatonic, Aristotilian, the Greek conceptions, and the Far
Eastern conceptions, because basically they're all monistic, and I think
when you have a system that's monistic, you're gonna be
in the same dilemmas. And this is why we can
use arguments like critiquing absolute deviind simplicity, yes, and synergy distinction.
Those arguments are still applicable to these other religions as well.
Now that's a little more abtuse, perhaps, and there are
simpler ways to critique those worldviews as well. Man, it's
goning hot up in here, dancing and playing metal and
both demons or something. They turn the air condition and
I'll be right back. And so yeah, the furry demons
were the furry demons that run Discord Ward messing with
my audio chat Alison. I got his my notes on
his worldview two. Okay, So basically, yeah, and this is
gonna be a half and half talk. Now, there is
an old talk that I did for subscribers, which is
a pretty lengthy discussion of Aristotle. We'll be touching on
some of that material, but the majority of this material
is new and it's specific to this guy in the
worldview that he presented because it's kind of piecemeal, very
similar to Boggle or Dave and his approach. And you know,
most of the people that are in these perspectives, that's
what's going on. It's a piecemeal thing that they're kind
of just putting together. Now, they don't see that as problematic,
but I think it is pretty evident that the root
of all this, as we'll see connected to the position
of monism, is that these positions end up still still relativistic.
That's the pattern that we tend to see in these
pagan guys again, over and over and over, the positions
become cafeteri stall subjective things that some guys just kind
of piecing together. And ironically, again, if we set a
sight of Satru and the different pagan movements, if we
think about other religious movements in our last century, when
we think about all the people, for example, that studied
under Crowley, what did they do, not all of them,
but many of them, Well, they went out and started
their own religion. Right, So what did Gerald Gardner do?
He creates Wika and he creates it as a blend
of Druidism and all this jibber jaba that he learned
from Crowley and all this kind of stuff. Other guys,
oh Ron Hubbard, he goes through the ranks of the
Crowley school, goes out starts his own cult. A lot
of these guys have this pattern. Now, I'm not saying
that all the pagan guys are the equivalent of Joe Gardner, Croleier,
l Roon Hubbard. I'm just making the association, the connection
of the fact that these are people who just kind
of try to piece it together. And he says, well, yeah,
I'm a reconstructionist. In other words, I'm reconstructing what the
ancient rights must be. And what we tend to see
is that this is a fool's enterprise. I remember when
I was looking into Orthodoxy initially, and I was really
trying to grapple with all the criticisms of neoplatonism. This
is neoplatonism, you're neoplatonic. And what about the similarities between
Augustine's doctrine of the philioque and Plotinus's discussion of the
Diad and the triad, and how the third principle between
the two is love.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: And yes, Augustin absolutely got that from from Platonis. It's
in the Eneids. I think it's in ned five off
the top of my head. Now, initially this is kind
of applausible. You start to think, well, yeah, there's a
lot of similarities there, right, and it's kind of it's
it's beyond the zeitgeist tier of stuff, but it's it's
in that vein of stuff.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So you're a little more it's more academic than the
basic bitche zeitgeist crap, zeitgeist crap. And so you're wondering,
how do we distinguish neoplatonism from what Dionysius talks about
in the Divine Names? How do we distinguish neoplatonism from
the Trinity in the way that the Cappadocians formulate it,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 3: And what you eventually come to realize if you go
down I think hopefully the right path, the path that
I think is right, is that there's not really a
neoplatonic system. Okay, this is an assumption that's often made
aid on the part of scholars. But then when you
realize that at the end of the nineteenth century scholars
we're kind of arguing this Christianity's neo platonism, that they
don't believe that anymore. That's kind of been ditched in scholarship.
It's older scholarship that was trying to make that argument
about Christianity being neoplatonic. But you see that, for example,
reflected in Nietzsche's day where he says it's just another
version of Platonism. And certainly many of the Christians over
the years, especially in the West, have been absolutely platonic,
especially a lot of the Calvinists and the Thomas, no
doubt about that. But what you realize is that between
Iamblicus and between Platinis Neoplatonism is two completely different approaches.
Is it me mentally recognizing these things or is it
a bunch of ritual magic leading to theurgy? You see,
which one is the real neoplatonism and so all, And
it's the same thing in the rights of the constructed
made up religions of paganism or any other cult. It's
completely subjective.
Speaker 1: It is not.
Speaker 3: Historically authenticated, and just because something's old doesn't mean it's true,
even if you could reconstruct it.
Speaker 1: So what.
Speaker 3: Doesn't mean it's true. I mean, for example, if the
Rosetta Stone was the means by which hieroglyphics were deciphered,
then the gobbledegook of masonry and their egyptology before the
Rosetta Stone probably is wrong in a lot of areas,
don't you think? Yeah, exactly. So what you start to realize,
and this is what I realized, when you get to
a certain point in the researching, maybe like esoteric guys hermeticists,
and you realize, oh wait a minute, like Manley P.
Hall's big book, he's just doing He's just piecing together
things from comparative religion, and they're just looking for similarities.
And I'm not saying you can't find similarities. But what
I'm saying is that a lot of these cult leaders
they're just making it up, dude. They're making it up
as they go. They're starting their own shit, right, They're
not really passing down mysteries. There might be some truths
and mysteries contained and what they're constructing, but they're not
the part of some lineage of the true Druidic tradition.
Get that out of here, bullshit, Because there's a lot
more about the anti world that we don't know than
we do know. Now, that doesn't mean that there's absolutely
no traditions that are passed down. I'm not saying that.
I'm just saying that the resurgence of paganism I don't believe.
And this is we're gonna see this now all over.
This is what all these people are gonna They're gonna
go into it just like sheep. They're being primed for
this because of the collapse of Evangelicalism, the collapse of
Roman Catholicism. They're all just piling into neopaganism. But let's
talk about whether or not logic and reason and philosophy
can actually coincide with paganism and all this stuff, because
I don't think it can. I think actually we'll find
that they are self refuting and inconsistent. So let's look
at the basic outline of what the dude last night
said Twitter. And I'm not intentionally trying to misrepresent him.
If I misstate him, I'm sure we'll have a future
interaction he can correct me. But what I understood him
to be saying is that he starts with this metaphysical
assumption that that we It's not exactly clear where he started. Then,
That's why I kept pressing him on this, because he says, well,
we look out at the world and we see that
there was at one time a one. There was a hyperussia,
beyond being, super existence, a monad emmonism, some kind of
great unity, and then it split into the diad. Okay,
this is what all the ancient Greeks taught. Basically both
I agree in Plato the diad then is the beginning
of multiplicity, and then the Dad kind of splits into
all of the particulars of our experience that we see
out there in the world, all the hylomorphic matter form
instantiations or particulars out there. Now, let me see if
he said anything else. Theology, then he says, is understanding
the gods and the principles behind things. There is the good,
and there is what ought to be. And these are
derived from reasoning about these principles, which he said were
independent but present in this world, and ultimately they derive
from the one in the monad world in the perfect unity.
But also somehow there were there are many unmoved movers.
So the I'm looking at my notes on his view,
the lesser humans have a lesser morality. I'm not sure
what he meant by that, but and so this is
what he's derived from reading seventh century BC to third
century BC Greek and Confucian philosophy. Okay, so it's kind
of a little bit of Aristotol and a little bit
of the far easier stuff and a little bit of Plato.
Because he said he believes in divine idea or ideas.
There's no mind for these ideas, so that doesn't even
make any sense. But he says there's ideas that are
independent of material form and existence, and he says we
need to look to Permenides. So go back to the
Presocratics and the Ionians and look to Parmenides. Permendes taught
us that everything that is will always be. And again,
the logical conclusion of that is that change is illusory.
I mean, if the here and the now is eternal
and it's always just going to be happening again and
again and again, then it doesn't it stand the reason
that the alterations in time and space that we experience
that they are illusory, because it means that every single
point in time is eternal. So this is really just
a deifying of the here and the now right. This
is all The monistic systems can either be dualistic and
nonsensical or monistic and nonsensical. They can collapse either way.
This is always true of any monistic system, he says.
He says his system is monism. It's always one. The
fundamental unifying aspect of all reality, the fundamental structure of
all reality, or the ultimate reality is just one all
things that are are. So he starts his system off
with this statement, everything is or isn't. Isn't doesn't make sense,
So therefore everything is okay, this is number one. This
is not a coherent starting point like he thinks. He
thinks a starting point is theory neutral, that he can
just start with this reasoned out assumption of what existence
and being and all things are. No, you can't. I'm
not saying you can never have a starting point. I'm
pointing out that that is not the neutral starting point
that you think it is. And so that was a
about forty minutes of stressing that point, and I don't
think that he ever grasped it, or if he did,
I don't know. Then when we started against this discussed
time and change, and then when we moved into the
last part of the debate where my audio was cutting
out pretty heavy, and I was asking him how he
came to these conclusions and how he had episomic certainty
about all these claims. How did he go from these
general instantiations to universals, from the particular to the universal,
which is again a big problem in the Arisitilian system.
I don't think we got a coherent answer. I think
what we got was him saying, well, I experienced it.
Let me just go back to my individual personal experience
and I look out and I see change. So change
is real, but it's not ultimate. The debate is everything
I do is on my website and my social media.
So it debate was last night. It'll be linked in
the thing. If Joe the Boomer hasn't made it, it
was on the Daily Prap, if Joe the Boomer hasn't
made it behind a paywall. So all right, So let's
start with these things that he's laid out, and let's
take them now again. Monastic systems. And this is why
I kept hammering this home and he didn't get it,
and he didn't answer it. Any fundamental critique from the
time of the Presocratics and the Ionians up through Plato,
and it still applies to Aersol too, even though Ersol
tried to solve this problem in Plato, and it's applicable
to all the far Eastern monastic views. Is the fact
that in this realm of the ideal, in this realm
of the one and of the monad, if everything is
perfectly simple and unified, then it shares no similarity or
likeness to this realm. Okay, but if we think about Plato,
for example, Plato wanted the world that we inhabit to
be a kind of a rough phantasm mirror of that realm.
Right the ideas in that realm are reflected into this
realm in pale ways. So all the chairs that you
see are pale lesser being and stantiations of the ultimate
chairness that exists in the realm of the ideas. Now
there's a problem right off from the outset. If the
one is absolutely simple, then there aren't multiple different forms
within it. And again this is what I critiqued intomism
to classical theists, because it's true because they adopt absolute
demond simplicity, and they adopt the actus purest view. Now
there can't be multiple ideas and a real distinction in
an absolute unity of this nature of this kind. But
if you're going to say that all the things that
exist in this realm are grounded in the ideas in
that realm, in the monad out there, in the One,
in the great Unity, in the great Beyond, whatever, wherever
you locate, it doesn't matter, then you need there to
be multiple different things, because if there's not, then what
you end up having to say is that, in fact,
distinctions themselves are all also illusory. Because if there's not
a form of a chair and a form of a
man in the one, because that's where you've said it's located,
that's where it's in. The ideas are in the form.
By the way, how do ideas subsist in an impersonal,
abstract realm doesn't make any sense because the word idea,
the whole conception of idea, is itself analogous to his
mind having ideas, so it's retarded from the outset. But
setting that aside, if there's not a separate form of man,
in a separate form of chair in the Great One,
then it can't be the ground of your epistemic certitude
in this world. This is the fundamental problem of all
monistic systems because they try to relate that world to
this world, and it doesn't work because this world is
in perpetual flux and change and is constituted by many, many,
many different distinct things. There are many particulars everywhere in
this world, many many, many distinctions. And what we see
is that when we try to ground it in this
abstract nonsense thing, what happens is that all again dissolves.
What seemed like it might be a coherent basis right, basically,
what Plato says, in fact does not work. It completely dissolves.
Now I'm not just making Aristotle's third man argument. That's
not what I'm saying. Don't misunderstand me. This is not
basic bitch stuff. We're beyond that. What I'm saying is
that there's an even better critique, and ultimately it applies
to Aristotle too, because Aristotle doesn't actually ever get from
the particulars to the universal. It doesn't make any sense
to say, well, there's universals, but they're just in every particular.
And that's why later down the road, the empiricist philosophers
who followed that train of thought out consistently rejected universals
and became nominalists. They said, yeah, exactly, if we're going
to start with empirical sense data, guess what we don't
ever actually empirically sense a universe. We since this event,
this event, this event, this event, or this collection of matter,
this collection of matter, this collection of matter. That's not
getting you to a universal if you believe in empiricism
and the Aristotilian system, although it is a realist system,
it is certainly more empirical than the a priori speculative
platonic view. But it doesn't matter because he grounded his essences,
his ideas, his forms, the divine idea or the ideas
as he called them, which have an independent existence. He
grounded them as I understood in relationship to the unmoved
movers which exist in the realm of I guess lower
degree particularity. And he said, ahha, that's a good question.
When I asked him, is there one unmoved mover or
fifty five? Because Aristotol contradict himself, and he admitted, Arisotle
contradicts and says both at one and one in metaphysics
that there are fifty five movers, and also in the
on the celestial heavens, he speaks of one unmoved mover. Well,
this is a problem with the one in the many, okay,
and you can't solve it by saying that there's a
fifty five different unmoved movers. Oh wait, there's only one
unmoved mover. So he didn't really give an answer to that.
He kind of spoke early on in the debate about
the different principles that are unmoved movers, and then later
in the when I really honed in on that, he said, oh, well, no,
there's just one unmoved mover. So that was a pretty
devastating blow, I would say to his to his argument,
and it really illustrates the higher level critique and principle
that I was making about the one in the many.
You're always gonna have a dialectic in your system between
one and many when you start with this absolutely simple, impersonal, unknown,
unknowable monad and super essential oneness, right, which is, by
the way, hyper ussia, beyond being a pyrone, beyond being
wholly other. If it's wholly other and wholly beyond being
in your view, then it doesn't relate to the many particularities.
It doesn't act as a platonic grounding for the many, many,
many particularities and particulars that we experience in this world.
And then of course I made moving beyond that, the
point about any of those systems, whether it's the Presocratics,
the Ionians, whether it's Plato, or whether it's far Eastern thought,
is that if you follow that through, then it leads
to the logical conclusion that in this world. And he
even appealed to Parmenides, and I said, well, if you
have a legitimate defense of parmenities, I'm willing to hear it.
But he just said no, I mean, I agree with promenities,
but you're just giving a basic bitch critique of permenities. Okay,
I said, so defend permenities then, because if everything that
exists is pure permanence, truly speaking, and the world that
we experience is flux and change, doesn't it stand to
reason that the world of flux and change isn't really real.
So the far Eastern philosophies, Buddhism, hindu whatever that follow
through with that line of reasoning and ultimately come to
the conclusion that oh wait a minute, yes, this world
is like a giant demiurge tricking me, and he even
brought that up. He even said, well, how do you
know it's not an evil demon tricking you? Right, the
Descartes critique, And I said, well, first of all, that's
really easy to refute, because if that view is true,
then it's completely destructive to all rationality and logic and
argumentation period. And so therefore it's not true because it's
so fundamentally destructive to the possibility of reasoning. What how
could that be? Well, let me give you an example.
If it is true that everything that I learn in
this realm, in this world is ultimately illusory, and if
it's true that there's no change ultimately, then I didn't
really progress from a state of not knowing that truth
to knowing that truth. And when I did possess from
a state of being of not knowing that truth to
then knowing this supposed great truth, then isn't that also
part of the great illusion? Why? Yes, it is.
Speaker 1: So.
Speaker 3: This sillipsistic, gnostic nonsense view is immediately self destructive, just
as self destructive and stupid as relativism. And I'm sure
that our friend, tweeted, fond would not be a relativist.
He would critique that surely. And then from there we
understand that guess what these pagan views, the gnostic view,
the ancient far Eastern view, and the presocratic Platonic view,
Why they're all really similar, aren't they. So while all
of this apologetic discussion and debate sounds really obtuse and
it's really abstract, it's really really simple because the founding
points where these systems try to start building are very similar,
and they're almost always the same, and it always starts
with the individual's reasoning and rationality, constructing something that ultimately
ends up in subjectivism or pure relativism every time, and
so ultimately, now it doesn't matter whether it's the atheist,
whether it's the complete rank materialist, or whether it's the
dude in your college class who's like man, and like,
what if we're in a simulation, it's the same thing
Plato's demiurge a gnosticism. This world is a trick. Got
to flee it, flee the body. Same doctrine for Eastern religions.
You got to like meditate yourself out of existence, destroy
your ego man to become one with usness. Same basic argument.
Now he didn't say that he's like I don't believe
this Hindu style stuff of you know, trying to destroy
your ego whatever. But it doesn't matter because at root
all these positions are monistic, and then they have the
problem of relating that world to this world, which becomes
a problem of dualism. The perfect ideal world to this world,
how does it relate? And we all know Plato's answer
to this question, which is retarded and laughable. Well, I guess,
at one time in our in our pre existent eternal lives,
in our ur before we reincarnate stages back, we were
in the ideal realm, and so that's how we were
just remembering what was in that perfect realm. That's a
retarded ad hoc answer, and Aerosol is correct to say, no,
that's a retarded adholc answer. But guess what. Aristotle's smushing
of the ideas of the forms, of the essences, of
the of the universals into the particulars doesn't work either.
So Aristotle's right to critique Plato and his answer is
also retarded. So what Aristotle does? Guess what? Here's let
me blow your mind. Remember that all the arguments about
absolute divine simplicity. Well, guess what hilomorphism. It just takes
all the problems of absolute divine simplicity that we critique
in the theology and it applies them to particular objects.
It's smushing the accidents as not really what constitutes the object.
It's just smushing the universals into the particulars. And holomorphism
ends up with absolute simplicity for objects.
Speaker 1: Boo. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And holomorphism doesn't work for the human body, obviously. It's
one percent contradictory to our Christology and to our anthropology. Obviously.
Now let's get more precise about Aristotle, because he's so
lauded and praised by all these people. And by the way,
the Thomas today on Twitter, and the Augustinians and the Romanchallics,
they just got Saint John Damascus this book that includes
the philosophical chapters, and they're like, haha, he talks about
Aristotle and substance and accidents. We got Jay, we got him.
Speaker 1: Bro.
Speaker 3: I've been lecturing on that book for three years. Where
you been. I knew years ago that's what's in that book.
And the reason I did that lecture three or four
years ago is because he doesn't use Aristotle in the
same way as Thomas, because in defense of the end
of the Orthodox Faith, he teaches the essence inergistinction from
books one through three, and multiple times over, Aquinas rejects
the essence centergus thinction. This is not even in debate.
Catch up, dudes, it's time to catch up. Any basic
Tomistic work will tell you that Thomas Aquinas rejects the
essence energy distinction. Thomas teaches Actus purists. That means there's
no essence energy distinction. It's not hard to figure out.
You can confuse yourself and get lost in all this stuff,
but it's not hard to figure out if Thomists and
Roman Catholicism accept or reject the essence entergy distinction. It's
not hard to figure that out. And so guess what.
Speaker 1: We have.
Speaker 3: Plenty of uses for Aristotle. We have plenty of uses
for logic. Do you see me here debating all of
these atheists and utilizing logic. If I didn't think Aristotle
said true things, I wouldn't be utilizing a transcedental argument,
which he uses in the metaphysics. When Saint John Damascus
goes through the philosophical chapters and cites Aristotle, he uses
a transcendental argument against the soface. He uses that from Aristotle.
I've been here for years, citing Saint John Damascus's use
of the transcendental argument from Aristotle. Bro, catch up, dude,
that wasn't it. That's not a gotcha moment. They don't
understand that the gotcha moments are actually just making them
look goofy, because I've already covered all this for years. Anyway,
these are young guys. These are guys who are like
twenty one. They don't they don't know what they're talking about.
All right, So let's get into Aristotle because again, what
we want to stress here is that Plato and Aristotle
are wrong in a very fundamental way, and Plato Aristotle
are right in insightful ways. Does that make sense? Can
we grasp that? So, first of all, what we want
to understand when we can trast this, We're going to
look more in depth at the Aristotilian view as an
example here, because again with this guy, it's a very
good bridge between the Tomists and the Pagans, because this
guy was interested in Aristotle very heavily, or a good
bit of ariostol. He liked a lot of aerosol, and
Aristotle is the bridge between Hellenism and you know, tomistic
Rome Catholicism in a big way. And I'm very aware
that Aquinas cites Augustine, and he cites Dionysius and the
divine names many many, many, many many times in Assumer.
In fact, I believe he cites Dionysius more than he
cites Ariostol. I'm aware of all that. But regardless, it
doesn't really matter. It's not what we're here to talk about.
Let's critique the Aristotilian perspective, because what we want to
see is that Aristotle's system fundamentally is not at all Christian.
And if the fact that there's similar terms, it doesn't matter.
If I say unmoved mover, I say, I believe that
the world was started by a first cause an unmoved mover,
And you get all excited and you start jumping around,
Oh bro, you believe the same thing we do. We
just differ on who it is. And then I say, yeah,
the unmoved mover was Satan. Doesn't that really illustrate the
absurdity of just because he speaks of the unmoved mover
as if, as if I could, in apologetics join with
a Joeah's witness and join with an arian, and join
with a scientology proponent, and join with whoever else. It
doesn't matter Islam. Oh we're all going to argue for
the same common God. No, we don't have the same
common God, because we have the training God, and that's
the only god that's ever existed, not a generic theism
that all the religon Jens know about. All right. So
position A that we want to talk about, this problematic
and contrasts is once again because this position that Arisola
would outline fundamentally can't interpret nature correctly. So one reason
we can't do natural theology, and why in our theology
it's more properly called natural revelation, is because you can't
properly interpret the external world, the natural world as it
is now, without the doctrine of the fall, because if
you do try to do that, you will come to
the conclusion, you will reason to the faulty conclusion as
the Deists and the Enlightenment guys did that. Whoever constructed
this world, if I just look at at the natural world,
is a psychopath, because that psychopath has made death and
life just as important in the natural world. Yes, natural
theology leads to to atheism, because the God of natural
theology is the god of natural rights in the natural world,
who naturally has put death into practice to feed on life,
and life feeds on death. Right when a body decomposes,
outcome the microbes and the whatever that feed on the
death and the decay. Now that's not the natural state
of things. That's not natural. It's natural in a limited sense,
but that's not the way God intended the world to be,
because this world is fallen, and the decay and death
and destruction that are in the world, any form of death,
is a result of Adam's fall. Romans eight makes us
abundantly clear. So again, as I did in the philosoph
traditional philosophy and metaphysics lectures already covered this. We covered
why natural theology doesn't work. They don't get it, they
can't grasp it. They can't understand that you can interpret
the natural world without the fall. But the doctrine of
the fall is presupposing the doctrine of creation, and the
doctrine of creation and the fall presupposed revelation Genesis. So
you can't properly interpret the external world without supernatural revelation
contained in Genesis and by Extension and the rest of
the scriptures. This is why, as Father Stanneloy says in
Volume one or Orthodox Dogmatics, for us, there is no
natural theology. There's natural revelation. So you could see why
Aristota looks out at the world and he says, well,
death is just a natural process. The Seventh Actumenical Council
condemns those who call death a natural process. Right, because
the Seventh Ecumenical Council accepts the Trollo synod decrees and
the Canons of Trollo accept the earlier canons that speak
of condemning anybody who says that death is a natural
process and that death would have happened had not Adam sinned.
You have to believe. This is why theistic evolution is
impossible in any Christian system, Orthodoxy especially obviously that's the
only one that's truly Christian. You can't believe in theistic
evolution because it denies that the canons of Trollo, which
are accepted at and I see it too. I've cited
this hundreds of times. I get tired of citing this
and every time, and now that I do this, somebody
gonna say, where is that? Where is that again. I'm
gonna have to put it on my Twitter again. Pay attention.
So death is unnatural. This is fundamental to Orthodox theology.
That's why in the Harrowing of Hades Icon, Christ is
destroying death. And you say, well, is it spiritual death
or physical death? It's both because they're both intertwined. Because
man is a whole. He's a holistic being, body, soul,
and spirit. And so when we speak of death, it's
the It is intermittently linked. It is linked in the
body and in the spirit and into all creation. That's
why when Adam sends as the steward and covenant head
of the of the cosmos of creation, when he sinned,
it affected the entire world, the entire universe. It introduced
decay and destruction into the entire universe. And that's why
we can't look out at the world as it is
now and reason back to a creator. If you listen
to Neildagrass Tyson, if you go listen to the talks
that I did on the Cornelius Hunter book about Darwin's God,
I talk about this in depth, and I explain how
Neildagrass Tyson is right when he says, if you think
that the world out there teaches you natural theology, then
to me, it seems like it teaches a psychopath god,
because the psychopath god necessitates predator and pray relations for
life to exist and subsisting to continue. But guess what,
that's not the natural state of things. We live in
an unnatural state of things because of the fall. So
nature and being natural is a very vague and loose term.
It's a theory laden term. It doesn't come to us
with uninterpreted brute meaning. It's not a brute fact. We
don't know what nature means apart from the rest of
some philosophical or theological system. So this is another easy
point to contrast Christianity from Arisitilianism or any of the paganisms,
is that we're the only position that teaches creation x nilo.
We're the only position that's going to interpret the world
in a certain way, ultimately the correct way, but in
a certain way where we see death as an enemy,
and where as a result, death and sin are intimate,
are intimately connected, and thus man's problem is moral. This
sets us off against all the other positions because all
those far eastern monistic positions they start with man's problem
being metaphysics. They don't start with a sin in the
garden that's moral that leads to metaphysical problems and ontological
decay in the universe. They start with a metaphysical problem
of the one, and somehow movements changed things and it
split the one, and then that diad split into a
triad that split into the multiplicity and infinity. Fractal nonsense, right,
I'm not saying fractals aren't true, but that scheme is
immediately contrasted with our redemptive scheme. In our scheme, creation
is good. It's done x nelo out of nothing. It's
not a pre existent matter that God forms into something.
It's not co eternal with God. History thus is linear
beginning middle end. This, by the way, is a presubsitional
category for understanding all of experience beginning middle end. No
human being experiences the world in reverse. No human being
experiences reality from the middle to the beginning to the end. No,
it's We are constituted as beings to experience everything in
our lives beginning, middle and end. And so you could
argue that this means of experiencing the world itself is
one of the transcendental categories. In fact, I think I
think Kant himself even argues that that's a transcendental precondition
for understanding anyway. Regardless, the point being is that our
view of history is then linear, not cyclical. The world
comes to be at a specific point in time. It
wasn't eternal, it's not a part of God, it's not
an emanation. God freely created. This is why we can't
believe in absolute divine simplicity, because that would mean that
the action of creating is also co eternal with God's essence.
And thus creating was always eternally an action of God.
God eternally created, and then the creation ultimately becomes eternal.
It takes on one of the properties of divinity, takes
on an eternal, uncreated state. But creation is not uncreated.
That doesn't make any sense. So so creation has to
be freely done. This is the whole point of the
Fluorosky essay on Athenasius and Athanasius's arguments with the Arians.
You have to make a distinction between God's nature and
God's will and counsel, and so ultimately, Father Fluorowsky demonstrates
without any shadow of a doubt, the Sant athenacious against
the Arians, is arguing the essence s energy distinction. That's
the whole point. If he's not, then his whole argument
with the Arians falls apart. So we see a system
then where creation begins. It's ex nilo. It's not out
of God or part of God. It's from nothing. And
that doesn't mean that there was nothing and then God
and creation came into existence. No, it means that God,
forevery for all eternity was there, and he would have
been there had he not created. But when he created,
he created into nothing. We say, just to spec fi
and to set off against these pagan and eternal return,
eternal recurrence type systems, cyclical systems. And again, cyclical history
relativizes history. It makes change within history meaningless. And because
change within and development within history is meaningless, what we
get is the next dialectic that I contrasted in the
debate is that of stasis and change. Now, this dialectic
is interesting because it's overlooked when we critique absolute divine
simplicity and when we understand what Origin taught. So again
we go back to Genesis. What Origin is teaching a
similar doctrine to Plato and the Platonists a pagan gnostic doctrine.
He doesn't believe in creation. The Confession of Saint Sophronius
accepted that the Sixth Council extensively condemns Origin for his
rejection of Eden and the doctrine creation, and he allegorizes it,
just like all the Darwinists and the theistic evolutions do.
They allegorize Genesis. They allegorized Eden. They said wasn't real,
it was just some mythical, allegorical thing. Well, you're condemned
by the Six Council for saying what Origin says, because
actually the Six Council is very explicit in the Confession
of Saint Sophronius about the errors of origin. It's not
a general condemnation of origins of Pocketstasus, It's a very
specific condemnation of origins doctrine of allegorization of Genesis and Eden.
That's a heavy pill for a lot of these normy
docs to swallow, and they won't swallow it. They will
choose anything but what Genesis says. Any give me anything
but what scripture actually says anything about that? What did
we see here? The pride of man, the pride of
man of just not submitting to the scriptures. Whether it's
the Pagans or whether it's the normy docs, all of them.
It's just human pride and autonomy and not wanting to
submit to what scripture says and what all the church
fathers taught. And you say, well, yeah, but I found
a church father who didn't believe. And it doesn't matter
because by the Sex Council it's already settled. You can't
pick out one church father who got something wrong and
say well, I don't have to accept that, because right
now you can't do that, and everybody knows you can't
do that. If you could do that, the whole system
would be chaos, nonsense, it would all collapse, It wouldn't
make any sense. Everybody could just it would be like Protestants,
like everybody could just pick out which saint that they
want to fallow. So nature can't be interpreted without understanding
the doction of creation in the fall. And since we
see change in nature, we have a problem of relating
this unchanging, eternal, timeless, a temporal realm of impersonal whatever essence,
to this realm of change and flux. So this is
a dialectic between being and becoming, and the Church Fathers
encounter and debate the dialectic between being and becoming, and
it's specifically encountered in the encounter with Origin. And this
actually it's Saint max when he corrects Origin. It's Saint
Maximus that fixes a lot of this, because this originistic
error kept floating around and it kept popping back up.
And if you read Saint Maximus, he's very explicit about
how to correct and condemn this. And what he says
is that in actually Saint Gregor a Nissa had already
done some some groundbreaking work in this arena, and he
points out that the problem with man and man's fall
wasn't being in a perfect state of unity and willing
in some way to look to some other created good
or some other thing to turn its gaze, its perfect
intellectual gaze away from the One. Okay, And in the
in the originistic scheme, the pre eternal, pre existent souls
fell because they wield something other than the One and
the good, and so then they fell into being in
a created state, and they fell into bodies. This is
totally heretical, totally gnostic, totally platonic garbage, garbage nonsense, anybody
trying to resurrect Origin is either a fool or demonic,
all right, so you can't there's no you can't import
any of this into orthox Christianity. It's nonsense when you
really understand the Origin is scheme. So the fall then
for Origin is that. And then what happens in redemption
is that the mind, the intellect you know, makes its
way back through the created images, is very platonic to
the one, right, and then when you get back to
the one, Origin says, if we have free will, it
stands to reason that you can always choose between good
and evil. So as a dialectical definition of free will
meaning either the choice between good or evil, and since
everybody believes that you do retain free will in the afterlife,
you could see Origin's reasoning process here. He says, well,
then in the in the afterlife, if you have free will,
then you have to be able to will something other
than the super supreme essence the monat And if you
can will something other than the super supreme essence monad
in the afterlife, in the next life in eternity, then
you can fall again. So he has a weird mix
of absolute divide simplicity, but also stressing free will. But again,
if you understand that, then you understand that it's actually
the Roman Catholics and the Tomus that are inconsistent because
in the Beatific Vision doctrine they want to say that
the will is forever focused on the essence of God
and seeing all things in the essence of God. But
the essence of God is one. It's absolutely simple, and
there aren't really many things in it, so there aren't
really different things to will. And every church father agrees
that free will involves an actual choice. So if there's
only one thing in the afterlife and there's not a
real distinction between things, because you're all, everything is being
seen and known through the essence of God, which is
total blasphemy. You guys, are blasphemous, then again we're at
the problem of absolute divine simplicity, where there's not real
distinctions in the one. And I brought this point up
to Classist and I brought it up in the first
time being on the Daily brap to the Thomas, and
I tried to stress this point because this is why
the Atific Vision doctrine is just platonism. Now in our view,
Saint Maximus has a great chapter in the If you
read the Selected Writings version of Saint Maximus, there's a
chapter where he talks about seeing God in the afterlife.
There's also a one of the theological orations of Gregory Nazianzus,
he talks about seeing God. So we have a problem
of seeing God because, as you know, we say that
we already see God in this life and then it
becomes the fullness of that in the afterlife. But what
these fathers are very clear about is that we're not
seeing the essence of God. The seeing of God is
seeing directly the energies of God. So there you go.
That's the solution. Also the forms of things, if you
want to call him that, the essences of the universals,
if you read ambiguous set of Saint Maximus, they're uncreated energies.
They're not the essence of God. This is where we
differ from the Roman Catholics. They're not exemplars in the
essence of God.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 3: So, as we're moving through the Pagan system's come back
to this. The dialectic between stasis and change, between being
and becoming is present in all the systems, just like
the dialectic of the one and the many. Just like
the dialectic of monism and dualism, there's also a dialectic
between being and becoming. And these guys laugh and they
make fun of talking about dialectics. They are you not
aware how prominent this is in the Church Fathers. How
constantly they're talking about the heretics being caught up in dialectics.
It's in all of them. Athanasius rebukes the Arians for it,
Basil rebukes the Eunomians for it. Nissa rebukes the Eunomians
for it. Saint Maximus rebukes the Monothelites for it. Nestorius
gets rebuked for it. Because they're obsessed with either or
dialect So in our review, and if you read Father
Steine Eelloyd, if you read Orthodox Dogmatics Volume one, then
you know that he has an awesome chapter on not
just the problems of absolute simplicity, but the problems of
the dialectic between stasis and change. That's why for us,
the afterlife is different. There's not just stasis. There's real
change in the afterlife because we're not playing this bro.
And there's an extensive section where Father steinyeloin and Volume
one just completely annihilates this stupid argument. Now, that's going
to be true for Origanism, and it's also true for
all the paganisms, because are you are starting to see
how a lot of these systems are because they start
with the same errors and problems. So nature can't be
interpreted without creation. The fall, death becomes natural history becomes
cyclical and meaningless and illusory. Ultimately, I would argue, if
you're consistent in this system, perfection in this scheme is
perfect unity. Why is perfect unity somehow perfection? All these
dumb philosophic systems, all the systems based on chain of being,
they all have this assumption that perfection is somehow a
perfect unity or monad. Well, that kind of introduces a gradation,
and the Trinity, doesn't it, Yes, it does. But Basil says,
God is not more one than he is three, and
he's not more three than he is one. So there's
the perfect balance of the one the many in the
Trinity according to the Eastern Fathers. So we don't want
any of this gradations of being, We don't want any
gradations of nonsense.
Speaker 5: In God.
Speaker 3: There is perfect unity. In perfect change is not a
lesser onto logical status. Somebody saying, why don't you do
a talk on why death isn't natural? I already did one.
It's in the natural theology talk. No Greeks ever taught creation.
No Greeks taught creation x neilo. No Greeks teach or
taught or ancient philosophers taught that man's problem is primarily moral.
If they taught that man's problem is a lack of
facts in education, no, that's not man's problem. Do you
see that at each point our system doesn't work with
the Greeks. Now, the Greeks might have read Isaiah, they
might have read Moses. We don't know. Many church fathers
thought maybe they did. Doesn't really matter. The point being
is that ours is the true system, and whatever truth
they have is from us, dude, not the other way around. Now,
if they say something true and they didn't learn it
from our system, it's still from us, because it's from
the logos that they have, from the logos of God.
All right. So the next as we move up then
to history. History for us is not a historical and
meaningless and a prison to escape from the God of
Creation stepped into history. History is meaningful if you go
listen to the talk I did on Genesis versus atheists
and Pagans, I talk about this. If you listen to
the talk I did about Aaron Aus's anti Gnostic work
against heresies. If you go listen to my against Gnoscissism talk,
I outline like ten things that set us off against
the world religions and against the Pagans and the Gnostics.
So the zeitgy shit doesn't work, dude, because literally we
havemultiple distinctives that no other religions have. And just saying that, well,
there's another religion that has a similar idea of the
God's birthing a world out of sexual intercourse. That's not creation.
We don't teach that, and that's not similar. Well, there's
a there's a kind of weird triad in some religion.
I heard one time. The Vedic texts have a try
that triad is nothing like what we teach. What we
teach is nothing like a triad in Plato, it's not
anything like it. As Basil says, the one is he
not it?
Speaker 1: All? Right?
Speaker 3: Next we see that again, this dialectic of perfection being
unity is a philosophic assumption that is not there's no
self evident truth to that it's not self evident that
unity is somehow some higher ontolage go better state on
what basis. But as you see, with all these guys
who are especially Aristitilian, they've never thought to question paradigms
and presuppositions. They don't know what I mean. You would
think Aristotilians might know about what a transcendental argument is,
given the fact that the metaphysics makes a transtal argument,
but they don't actually know about presubpositional thought and questioning presubositions.
And that's why they never win these debates, and they
never will unless they start learning what I talk about.
So we see the assumptions of neutrality, the assumptions of
the idea that well, we all know what existence is, right,
so I can start by talking about everything exists, right,
everything that is exists? Oh do we really now? In
my worldview? Everything that exists in this world is created
in your worldview? It's not so existence itself is completely
different from your view to mind, they're not unifical terms
just because it's the same vowels coming out of our mouths.
It's vastly different existence in Aristotle, not the same thing
is what it means in Christian theology. For us, all
that exists is made by God. And what is Paul
say and Colossians. It's held in being. It subsists in
the logos. It's not pre existing eternal matter. It's not
premia material. It's created matter, created forms that have their
meaning and their grounding in the logi, the logo, the
logi in the logos. Why is that? Because everything that
exists in the world is triadic from the Father, through
the Son and the Spirit. Everything the world was created
that way, redemption happened that way. That's basal dictum. So
being and existence are not self evident terms that don't
come theory laden. They're not neutral terms that are self interpreted.
They are theory laden terms and claims, he says being,
I say, what do you mean created? Uncreated? They're not
unifical terms. But every attempt to approach these goofy philosophical
systems and import too much of them makes this mistake.
I need to do a talk just on this and
hammer at home. I'm going to call it Jerusalem versus Athens.
So no Greeks taught creation, No Greeks taught that creation
was a free act by a personal God. No Greeks
taught that God is personal for them. It's ultimate reality
is impersonal. Now, once any has made this concession that
ultimate reality is impersonal, they've already lost a debate. It's
over because it means that chaos ultimately is what rules
and reigns. And you could say, well, it's not. Chaos
is a bunch of abstract principles. A bunch of abstract
principles can't string together all the different abstract principles to
be coherent. How does law? How does the law of
logic relate to the principle of love in the world?
How does the How do those two different things relate
to the concept of a soul or a self? How
do those three things relate to the concept of past, present,
and future? They don't. They're just abstract categories that are
placeholders in the system that don't really have any real
relation to one another, unless we just assume that they do.
But if there's an all knowing, provident God who's omniscience,
then he's the one who strings all these things together
and holds them in being, as Paul says, and makes
sense of all these different categories and gives us the
possibility for them all relating in a meaningful way. The
divine mind is needed then in this system to hold
these categories together and to make sense of them. Now,
as we move on to a little more difficult concepts
in this Now, by the way, we've come all the
way up from the beginning of creation to man and
the incarnation, let's talk about the end of history as well,
because the coming of Christ's and history and the resurrection,
that's the definitive signaling of the meaning of all history, past, president,
and future. So it's an aschatologe. When Christ is resurrected
is an eschaological event. I'm not saying there's not an
end of the world. There is, but we are now
living in the Church age, the Messianic age, right, and
that same covenant has been open to the Gentiles. Point being,
the body is good, you know all these dumb Greek systems.
The body is not good. Now, Aristotle trusts to temper this, right.
Aristotle doesn't have a problem with the body, so he
departs from Plato's gnostic nonsense. He says, they know the
body is not that bad, right, There's not eternal life
in the body. You just kind of die, and then
your monad soul seeds. They go off into another being
that forms again, you know, maybe something cyclical. Right, we
don't exactly know how this works, but you know, you
go back into nature and then nature forms another kid
down the road. So there's no eternal life in this system,
and there's not a god in this system that actually
relates to the world. The God of Aristotle is thought,
thinking itself. Now pause for a minute. Thought thinking itself, self, referential,
abstract thought is the ultimate good in God here. Well,
that sounds a lot like Greek philosophy, doesn't it. So
Aristotle's God is just the personified Greek It's just the
ultimate idea of Greek philosophy. What's the highest possible goal? Well,
it's like thinking, man, well, what could be higher than
thinking thought thinking itself? Which is total nonsense. So anyway,
so again, it's a god who's not related to you.
He's unknowable. He doesn't have any direct interaction in this world.
He's either a one unmoved mover or fifty five unmoved movers.
What similarity is? Does that bear to Exodus three fourteen
I am that I am none? Is it true that
God is the first cause in an unmove mover. Yeah,
but it's true because Christianity is true and that God
is personal, not an impersonal abstract force. Now, why do
all these pagans do this? I'm gonna get you here's
the real secret to this. That's because, guess what, you're
not accountable to a number. You're not accountable to gravity.
You don't have to give an account of your life
to gravity, to the number seven. So that's why they
love abstract principles. But if there's a personal God, you've
got to give an account to your life, and you
have duties and obligations and so forth, and there's a
moral law that you have to follow to take commandments matter.
In other words, it would require repentance, it would require
a change of mind, metanoia, and a change of worldview.
In this view, although it makes a big hubub about Tilos,
there's actually not an overriding Tulos. There's tilos in objects.
The acorn becomes the tree right in Aristotle in the
four causes. But actually, in reality that's just from the
human vantage point. Do we know that an acorn really
possesses tilos in the overall universal scheme of things? No,
we don't. So really, tilos is a purely subjective human
advantage point category for things. It's not a thing actually
in things, because there's not an overriding Telos to the universe. Now,
later on the you know, like Thomas, they will try
to take the telos argument and make it into a
teleogical argument for all of reality. If I mean, if
you understand, you could make an an a transcendental tilos argument.
A transcendental form of the teleological argument would be valid.
But the problem with just making a bare teleological argument
assumes that tilos is a self evident, neutral, uninterpreted term,
just like we saw earlier with being in existence, And
it's not.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 3: Remember when I started quizzing, if you heard the debate,
I started asking him, now, wait a minute, so tell
me how you got to this conclusion on your self
evident maxims? Which ones did you kind of build up on?
Where does it start? And how do you start building
this system? And what does he do? He appeals to
things that he thinks he thought were just obvious and
self evident. Oh, but they are not. And that's the key.
So when you start talking about oh well, I look
out at the world and I start reasoning about the
world no reason, and you look out at the world
so experience sense data, and then you start talking about
how the hylomorphisms out there.
Speaker 9: In the world.
Speaker 3: Oh wait a minute, now you're bringing in new terms
and ideas that you thought were just self evident and obvious.
But these are actually other ideas that are not yet
vindicated or justified. So then he starts bringing in I'm
trying to remember the other things he started repealing to.
He appealed to all these Oh, he says, well, it's
just part of being a human. Really human. You think
that's a neutral term that doesn't come as in a
theory laden way. Human doesn't come to us as part
of a worldview. It's a self evident term and idea. No,
what does human mean to me? It's completely different than
what it means to the Aristilian. To him, it's just
a vegetative form that comes from natural processes and then
disintegrates into dirt. For us, human means made in the
image of God, a nature restored by the incarnation and
destined to live in all eternity with God. So completely
different ideas about what human means. So human is not
self evident and that's the root of this problem here
of all of these systems that are classical foundationalists, is
that they all assume neutrality, and they assume that ideas, concepts,
terms are theory neutral and system neutral and don't require interpretation.
They're interpretively neutral. They're not none of them are. Can't
you see that again? Nature, it's not self evident to
everybody what nature is, because it's going to be dependent
on the rest of my worldview what nature means. So
he immediately starts on the spill of all of these
different categories and concepts and very abuse metaphysical baggage things
that he acts like, we're just well, it's obviously we
know what existence is, right, it's the things that exist
what No, it's not obvious, right, And so what happens
if he had been more schooled in philosophy in the
history of philosophy, he would realize that actually, as philosophy developed,
people begin to question those assumptions. Now I'm not saying
that Hume and these different enlightened characters are ultimately correct,
but they are ultimately correct to on the basis of
classical foundationalism start to question assumptions and start to ask, hey,
wait a minute, do we really know if existence is
a neutral term? It seems to kind of go along
with a bunch of other baggage and your philosophy. Oh, absolutely,
of course it does. This is why you can't appeal
to some kind of generic being argument for God. You
can't appeal to some generic Tilos concept, because Tilos is
only possible if the God that we believe in exists.
That's why this apologetic is better. It's a much stronger
argument than the weak SOI tomist arguments, the five ways
of SOI. Those arguments are weak because they assume neutrality.
They assume that beliefs and terms aren't theory laden. But
guess what they are. So being, human, nature, all these
things he thinks he's a apeealing to that are self evident. No,
they're not. And I absolutely nailed him on that in
the debate. In fact, he wasn't ready for that. He was,
all right, let's see being as not unifical, existence, human
These terms are not self evident, he says, change in motion. Yeah, okay,
So it doesn't make sense to say, oh, I remember telos,
that's what we're talking about. So telos isn't theory neutral. Well,
it just means purpose. Yeah, purpose is not theory neutral obviously,
And this is a key criticism of Aerosol himself. We're
not talking about this guy, but let's look at Aerosol himself.
If change and motion are eternal, well, actually, this is
a good critique of the unmoved mover first cause argument.
So if you reason back to why there has to
be a first cause, no, there doesn't. And Aristotle's first
cause is not the same thing as the Christian ex nilo,
So really it doesn't work because of change in motion
are eternal, then there is no beginning. Aristol didn't think
that the world had a beginning. It's eternal matter that's
formed into the forms that are here presently. And so,
in other words, you can't utilize Aristotle's for causes because
in Aristotle's system, when you reason back to the unmoved mover,
there's no efficient cause. So Aristotol's ugmentation is awful for apologetics,
it's terrible. There's no efficient cause in the beginning on
the part of the unmove mover. Now why do we
say that, because again, what are the four causes material?
And this would be like matter premia, materia, the substance,
the stuffiness, right, the formal cause, all right, this is
what impresses the form that an object has. So we've
got the clay, we stamp it with the rectangle square.
It's a brick. It becomes a brick, all right, that's
formal cause. The efficient cause is me doing it. The
final cause is the telos. Now, the unmoved mover isn't
really an efficient cause. I know that the Thomas want
to make him that, but he's not really because there's
not a beginning in this system, because it's not creation
x neilo. It's eternal matter being formed into something that
doesn't make any sense, eternal matter being given form. That's
a change in things. If there's a change in things,
then there's not a beginning. There's not a beginning because
it's eternal. You see, eternal matter is changed. It's nonsense.
There you go. And this is because, of course, in
Aristotle he wanted to deal with change and identity over change.
That's a central problem in Aristotle. So there's not really
an unmoved mover who can function as the efficient cause
of things at the beginning of time. And there's no
reason to assume by reasoning back through a chain of
causes that there had to be one andover. Maybe there's
fifty five unmoved movers see and Aristotle contradicts himself on
that point. So why anybody would want to try to
co opt this argument? It's beyond me. It's dumb. There's
not really Telos in the world because there's not a
singular divine mind that providentially orders and regulates and relates
all things to each other. Therefore, Telos cannot be applicable
to the universe as a whole. It's a subjective human
predicate of phenomena in their experience. For example, is ninety
degrees a property in the object? For Aristotle he has
to say yes because of islomorphism, because of objects being
basically simple unity, ninety degrees is actually in that object? No,
come on. And then when we think about more abstract
mathematical things like Mandelbrot sets. Oh wait, now, wait a minute,
where are they? Remember we wanted to squish everything in
Plato's ideal realm into the here and the now, into
the objects. Where is a Mandelbrot set out there in
the world nowhere? So that doesn't work. And actually, in
one of my grad classes I had. I had two
grad Aristotle professors who were high high level dudes, doctor
Robinson and doctor Goggins, And under doctor Goggins, I did
a paper and he specialized in a lot of these
ancient mathematicians theories on number and so really high levels
specialist dudes debate this problem in Aristotle in relationship to
number because how do numbers actually only exist in particulars? Yeah, exactly.
It doesn't make any sense because they don't, because this
is wrong. How are numbers only in particulars? Are Mandel
brought sets only in some particular out in the world
that's retarded? Ninety degrees is not just in your head,
and it's not just an angle on an object, and
it's not just a word. There's nothing in your brain
that cars corresponds to ninety degrees when you're speaking, I'm
not talking about ninety eight degrees the band No Boy banter.
It's about ninety degrees on the edge of an object.
So at this point, if we look at numbers in
relationship to aerosol, we're back at Plato. And again this
is a problem because for Aristotle we're just kind of
locating universals and abstractions in the particulars he thought that
would solve the issue doesn't. Another reason this doesn't work
for us is again because of this starting point of
it being classical foundationalism and ultimately appealing to since experience.
And that's why I asked this guy, how'd you come
to the system? Oh, I read Parmenides and Aristotle and
Confucius or whoever. So he, by his since experience, read
these books, and then he reasoned to these things about
all this metaphysical stuff that he thought was self evident.
None of it's self evident. We've shown that very clearly here.
And so at this point the system I think that
he was presenting was just completely dysynthicate, degrading and breaking down.
And I don't think he was even catching the arguments
and the force of the arguments. The next problem that
we could see in Aristotle is ethics. Me and this guy,
we didn't get to the ethical arm of debate. But
I would have made the same type of argument if
he had gone with the golden mean. The golden mean
can't be a basis for ethics because the golden mean
assumes that you have a basis to know what is
in between two extremes, saying you demonea or golden mean
it doesn't work. How do you know what the middle is?
If you don't know what the extremes are, obviously come on.
So it's subjective, it's relativistic. The Arisitilian God is ultimately deistic,
so he's not an efficient cause the Arisitylian God is unknowable.
You don't have a relationship with him because he's thought
thinking itself. He's not related to you. And thus none
of this works for intelligent design because the God in
this system is unknowable, deistic, not related to this world,
and he doesn't actually design this world. How dumb to
try to call opt this for intelligent design? If by
intelligent design you mean not the orthodox douction of creation.
Maybe the one in the many argument we got to.
I argue that the trinity is the only way to
balance the one and the many. The trying God solves
this problem of the one and the many. And he said, well,
how can something be one and many at once? I said, well,
have you seen numbers? Numbers are one and many at once,
and there's nothing about a number that's more one than
it is many or more many than it is one.
A number can constitute a unity and a multiplicity at
the exact same time, in perfect balance. And that's an image,
an analogy to the trendy. It's not exactly the same
as the trinity. Nothing is. But it's an analogy. So
Tilos didn't work. It's a human Oh, that's right. Tilos is,
by the way, in Aristotle, an analogy on the basis
of human architects. Right. So if you have artificial objects
in Aristotol, which would be like if you created a tool, right,
it has a purpose. And so you've taken matter, you've
stamped it with the form of a brick, and it
becomes a tool to build the house, and you build
the house out of the bricks, and so the brick
thus has purpose. Okay, But in aristotle system, the world
as a whole doesn't have that purpose because it's not
created from the mind of a god who is providential,
who directly relates to this world. No, he doesn't believe that.
So Telos does not work on a universal scale. Highlomorphism
is absolute simplicity applied to objects in the world. It
thus breaks down. It doesn't work as an epistemic system
because our epistemology. I got into this with a little
bit with the classical theist when we reason about objects
and we try to make sense of things in the
world in the Ariscitilian scheme and in the platonics are
in the atomistic scheme to a degree, you have the
idea that I abstract from the particular objects the phantasm
in my passive intellect, and then from that I somehow
know or have access to a universal. Doesn't work because
no matter how many particulars you add up, you're not
ever obtaining to universal, because the universals aren't just five, ten,
twenty particulars added up together. And the empiricists were right
to critique this because this system starts with empirical data
and tries to reason up to universals. Not possible on
this scheme. And you could say, well, yeah, but what
about in the tomistic scheme, where the universals and the
forms and the ideas of things are in the essence
of God. Yeah, exactly, But what you're abstracting isn't the
essence of God. And in this world you never have
thats to the essence of God. You only have access
to created likenesses, created analogies and analogy and or created effects,
never to the actual essence of God. So it doesn't
work to ground knowledge in the divine ideas in the
essence of God. It's self refuting because of absolute don't
suppose to say, Okay, I think I've hit I think
I've hit all the problems in Aristotle and how it
applies to dudes made up pagan system. Okay, So I
think that's pretty much most of what I wanted to
get to. There's more areas in Aristotle that we could critique.
My old notes, I've got problems we already touched on.
The problems of a bunch of different trees. Don't get
you in the general form of a tree. Where do
you ever get the general idea? You don't Heilomorphism is
absolute simplicity applied to objects. The ethics are not really
ethics because we don't know what the golden mean actually is.
It's just assumed, and then we don't I don't care
about Aristotle's polus. We're not gonna go into that. So
so these are the problems that really sort of blatant
problems in Aristotle. And although his system didn't have every
aspect of Aristotle. It is good and so relevant to
to critique and point it out. So that's the critique
of Aristotle. In hour two of this for subscribers, today's analysis,
I'm going to continue with a fuller critique of Aristotle
from my notes that are pretty extensive. And what we're
gonna do is go back once again and we're gonna
look at the Presocratics and the Ionians, and we're gonna
trace this up through Aristotle, and we're gonna talk again
about how similar this is to the far Eastern conceptions
of monism and so forth. And I'm going to try
to make it, you know, as accessible as possible for
the subscribers, so it's not too ab tuo s. But
since this is public, I wanted to address all the
different possible objections that are out there. So our two
will again be a revisiting for subscribers, a revisiting of Presocratics, Ionians, Promenides,
and Aristotle and how it can trasts with our worldview.
So if you want access to that, go to Jay's
analysis and you can subscribe at the subscription button there
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big boys. All right, let's get down here to the
super chats. And if you're ready for super chat, to
sens some super chants my super chants. Well, it's just
super chats. So the gods, even in the in the
most philosophic forms, these systems of the gods and we
was vikings. It boils down to these very simple problems
of monism, of dualism, of dialectical tensions, one of the
many these same critiques. That's the point here. These same
criticus are applicable to the Pagans, to the Gnostics, to
the atheists, to the materialists, to the far Eastern mystics
for Eastern religions, and to the goofballs in philosophy one
oh one who think that the matrix simulation theory, it's
all the same argument Rose, It's all the same nonsense.
Hesser mentioned a right Ai Howard five bucks. Hesser mentioned
Carnival the other night. Any analysis on that show in
the future very gnostics shown. Dee, I've heard about it,
and I have to get to it. I haven't thought
about it, though, I'd have to get to that. My
mind is getting tired, so I'm having a hard time talking.
And yes, I'm gonna put the debate. Let me just
put it in there now, since people keep assing minute.
And part of the reason I did this recap was
again because the Discord audio kept cutting out after hour
two when I was making my really nuclear arguments, my
really based arguments, when it was getting pure fire. Is when,
of course Discord started messing up. So let me go
to Daily Prap and let me pull up. It looks
like it's still there. Somebody said they couldn't access it. No,
it's still there. So I'm adding that to the I
think most of it you can hear. I haven't gone
back and listened to all of it, but people were
saying that it's pretty rough. You can kind of make
out now that you know what I'm saying here, and
now that you've heard this, now you know the what
I'm getting at in my arguments, and you'll be able
if you want to go back and listen to the
debate with understanding what I was trying to say, even
though every time I would talk it would get cut off.
Now you could you could probably decipher through this Rosetta
stone what the heck I was trying to argue. So
I put it in there, and then I'll put the debate.
Here's the debate in the chat if you want it
that way. Anthony Cavallo ten dollars gibbs for my Warrior
King and she Yat. Thank you, Anthony. We appreciate that.
But yeah, I'll put I'll put I'll check out Carnival
by the way, AI, I end to put that on
the list, and I'll check that out see if it's
worthy of analysis down the road or something. John sand
for ten bucks, Vulcan Prayer, Penguin, tell Lescope, Heart Punch,
Hang ten okay, Wizard five New Zealand's five in Zi's
you have an excellent taste in wigs well, thank you,
of course I do. What would you expect, Wizard in
Zis you have excellent taste and wigs well, thank you
for the extra in zis as a burner. By the way, this,
do you see how much of this is applicable to
tumism of what we talked about tonight spec. Seven eighty
two four nine, watching from sixteen minutes behind, can you
expand on how monism makes change illusory? You may have
already covered it, Yeah, Because again I think if you're consistent,
if everything is truly one, if the real reality that
exists is one, right, this is Plato, many other religions
and philosophies, then when we look at this world that's
not just one, that's many things, and there's change, the
tendency is to say or to try to explain change
and distinction as illusory. It starts by saying, well, if
everything is ultimately one, and then the problems that we have.
Man's problem is distinction is being many, is interacting with
other men. We all need to realize we're all one man.
So the assumption being that the problem of the world
of mankind is metaphysical, and that problem is that being
in a realm of particularity, of distinctions, of differences is
a lesser state of being somehow from this primitive, primordial,
pre eminent one, this pre eminent Unity, this Great Monad,
this realm is typically seen then as lesser uh, a
prison place, a creation of an evil demiurge blah blah
blah blah blah, a simulation, a matrix, dude, whoa. And
so therefore, typically, if that's the case, then what is
this world. Well, it's like a dream state. It's like
an illusion. And if it's a dream state illusion, then
you gotta wake up. You gotta get woke from Bra,
get woke from this dream state.
Speaker 1: Bra.
Speaker 3: If you gotta get woke from the matrix, then the
matrix isn't real, or at least not the really real,
like the perfect Monad.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: This underpins alchemy and her meticism. This underpins bappha met
because the original Great Monad, the Great Unity, is genderless
and sexless. I'm not kidding. The occultists believe that, and
so they actually, many of them actually believed that the
erasing of the genders is now chemical working. That's why
the Bapphamet symbol has both male and female organs. It's
both and and neither. So the great primordial unity was
not male or female. Again, contrasted with Genesis. And guess what,
even some of the Eastern fathers got that wrong. Gregory
of Nissa got that wrong. And Saint Maximus corrects Saint
Gregory Nissa on that point. So even Saint Gregor Nissa,
for all of his amazing insights and argumentation, he didn't
get everything right. That's why we don't go by one
saint right. He got it wrong about Genesis. He thought
the fall resulted in the distinctions between male and female,
but that's not what Genesis says. So he was too
influenced by origin. He wasn't a heretic like Origin, but
he was influenced by origin. But it doesn't matter because
we don't accept the opinion of every single church father.
Nobody does. There's no person on the there's no religion
or or church or system and the face of the
planet that actually does that. Son't, So it's stupid when
people bring that up. Well, well, one I found a
church father who teaches this, so I could still hold
that view. No you can't. It doesn't work like that.
So that's how change ultimately becomes illusory. And it's actually
just a nonsensical statement to say that time is eternal,
that the world is eternal. That doesn't make any sense
because if it had no beginning, middle, or end, then again,
the change that we're experiencing is actually not real. It's
not it's illusory because eternality is in that view static.
If eternality is static and the one is eternal and
we're in the realm of change in flux, always moving,
then change in flux and always moving are not real
because eternality in the monad is what's real. So this
is why the far Eastern religions are more consistent and
they say, yeah, exactly, that's why you got to wake
up from this deceptive dream realm, which is an illusion,
and get back to ultimate absolute, get back to thusness,
get back to the great and personal sea of being
or whatever. Immerse yourself into the great ocean of non
being in the thusness. Orthro Nat twenty dollars, thank you worthnet. Yes, no,
it's fine. I understand that you weren't trying to be
gossipy and no, I'm not in trouble with anybody. I
tend a church in good standing and it is canonical,
and I'm not gonna say anything more than that. And
thank you for the fan art. Appreciate that much much appreciated,
Mario callib Calobic. Five dollars. My grandparents were by Kings.
You are being offensive, Okay, well you could be offended, bra.
I know you're joking, but thank you for that, Mario. Marco.
Jethro told fifteen dollars. Well, I hope you guys are
benefiting from that. Those are some fat super chats, some
super fats P A A T. Misty Earn's one dollar,
thank you, Missy, white Top two bucks, Thank you, white Top.
Lawrence ballinag two bucks. Much appreciated, Lawrence. We always love
seeing our usual friends, Jethro and Misty and white Top
and Lawrence n c rid Jay, you have big brained cracker.
Drew McMahon, thank you, and see Drew McMahon, the father
of Vince McMahon. Seven dollars. I'm a fan of you
and mister Pageot. Why did you too, not, Jill? He
seems to have wanted to. He's I don't think he
wants a dialogue anymore. He at one time he was
open to that, but ultimately I think we just decided
that the approaches are too different. And I think I
critiqued too many of the people that he regards very highly.
Obviously I wasn't intentionally critiquing them to get mad, to
get him mad or anything like that. It was just, uh,
I critique the people that he regards highly, and that
caused a problem. And then I think from there we
just decided that we have different approaches to things. So yeah,
that just kind of fell through the cracks. So I
don't think there's going to be I mean, I would.
I'm open to talking to people, but I don't think
he's interested in having a chat with me. And I'm
not butt hurt. That's fine. I don't have any any
harsh feelings or anything like that towards him. So that's
what's up. Gabriel. Are five dollars our thoughts. Logi pre
existing patterns in the mind of God. Well, if you
read the essay by Father Fluorowski, which is really good,
the logi have a an uncreated and a created aspect
to them. So the logi that are in that are
all one the logos. If you read Ambiguum seven by
Saint Maximus, he goes into depth about this, which is
not very long. I think it's about eight ten pages.
It's a great chapter Ambiguum seven. So there's a created
and uncreated aspect to them, and they are thought wills
of God, they're not the essence of God. And Father
Fluorofsky in his essay Creation and Creature Hood is what
you must read. So read Ambiguum seven of Saint Maximus
and then read Father Fluorowski's Creation and Creature Hood. That's
one of the best treatments of the low boy the
logi I've ever seen, and it actually solved a lot
of problems I had understanding it too. And Tho's other
guys torst Off, Torstein, Talofsun, these guys have written a
lot really fat, lengthy books on logos logi. So they
are pre existing patterns in the mind of God. And
but what's in our minds is not exactly the same
as that, because our thoughts are created, so we have
a created reasoning, we have a created energy. The noetic
energy in our mind is created, but it is tapping
into and it is reflecting something that's an uncreated energy.
And so that's why for us there are analogia. There
are analogies, but the analogies, the analogia, contrasted to the
tomiss to the Roman Catholics, is not the essence of God.
It's the uncreated energies of God. And so Saint Maximus
and Father Florarovsky and any of the Orthodox writers ever
who've written on this will make great pains to point
out that the logoi, the logi are uncreated energies, and
they're not the essence of God. They're not predeterminations that
God had to create. They are thought wills of God
and archetypes and patterns that He willed to do. So
they're not the same as the essence of God, because
if they're the same as the essence of God, then
they must have been created and they are coterminous and eternal,
which they are not. Alright, let's see, Okay, I don't
see any more super chats, anymore questions. I'm only gonna
read super chats because if I read people's questions from
the chats, it's not fair to the people who super chatted.
Some pretty gross questions in the gross Marl Kark's five
dollars an Orthodox church recommendation in Nashville. I don't think
there's a row Core church. There's one in Tennessee somewhere,
but it's a good drive from Nashville. I would not
go to the Greek Orthodox Cathedral in Nashville because I
asked if they accepted Freemasonry and they said they do,
so I would not go there, but I would check out.
You could check out the Antiochian Church in Franklin. Probably
what would be your best bet The Antiochian Church in Franklin, Tennessee,
which is right by Nashville. Franklin is right outside Nasville.
So all right, thank you for that question. There are
Marl Kirks, and thank you guys again. So the debate
is here in the show description. Now good luck. If
you want to try to decipher, you're welcome to The
first two hours I think are fine. So like, if
you listen to the first two hours of the exchange,
my audio is good. It's just that third hour where
it really kind of starts get getting choppy. But with
the Rosetta stone that I just gave you in this talk,
you should be able to decode the argument I'm making
and I think you'll see that it's a pretty strong argument.
All right, thank you guys, God Bless. If you want
to hear more of this talk, I'm going to give
you a more in depth analysis of the presocratics in
Aristotle and monism and dualism in the hour two chat
this week for subscribers. And yes, we will do more
of Julian Huxley. It's just that I got really bogged
down in the Julian Huxley is boring writing, man, It's boring, boring,
boring globalism book. So I had to take a break
this week and we had these debates, so I thought
revisiting Aristotle would be would be fun, more relevant. But yes,
next week next the next talk after this will we
will go back to the rest of Julian Huxley in
the next part of that book will be public, and
then we'll do some more Jillian for the subscribers next week.
Thank you guys for listening. God Bless, have a good night.