https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=6QItXcGUlTQ
All right, Jeffrey Muter asked, the Bible being a story composed of many stories, what exactly is a story? What is the purpose of a story? Whoa, why can’t we replace moral story with scientific facts? Such as the story that porcupines for other quills has truth in it, but it is functionally a lie. And should it be replaced by a fact about porcupines? Why shouldn’t we do this about the Bible? Well, first of all, I’ve been wanting to go after this question for a long time. First of all, this story, this whole Bret Weinstein thing, it’s just, Bret Weinstein, he’s a very smart person. And when he talks about the little Finch and this strange behavior in certain animals and whatnot, I think that he’s rather genius and he’s very interesting. But when he talks about human structures and hierarchies and stories and morality and especially religion, I think that he doesn’t understand, he doesn’t understand what’s going on, I’m sorry. So the purpose of a story is to, okay, see it this way. Stories are ways to fine tune and to give you a taste of the pattern of reality. Okay, and so think of a story as a reduced, think of the pattern of reality as so big and so encompassing and so overwhelming that it’s very difficult to access it. And only saints, only people who reach spiritual illumination will access that. So think of a story as a condensed version of something which gives you a flavor, a taste of a certain pattern, okay? And it sounds very esoteric, but not necessarily. So think of a, think of a story that you’ve heard, not necessarily. So think of a joke that you’ve heard. Think of any little story that you tell. It’s there to kind of condense some. And so it doesn’t, so the thing is that stories don’t necessarily have to be moral. They don’t necessarily have to have a moral. And that’s, I think, one of the problems with the reducing of the Bible to ethics, because there are stories in the Bible that don’t have a moral directly in the sense that they kind of embody, they show you a certain pattern and the consequences of certain behavior and certain interactions, and they show that to you, but it’s not necessarily always that it’s trying to tell you what’s right and wrong, whatever. And so it’s the same for all kinds of stories. Stories don’t necessarily have to have morals. The reason why you can’t replace a story with just scientific facts is that, what scientific facts? And so in the case of the porcupines who throw their quills, that’s not a story. Porcupines, the idea of porcupines throw their quills is not a story. Porcupines throw their quills is a statement of a fact. And it’s a fact which, it’s a way of describing, it’s just a description of reality, which is important because it’s there to protect you, description of reality, which has a certain effect, which is to make people stop touching porcupines, okay? Now, that’s not a story. And I think that it shows us that Bret Weinstein doesn’t understand what stories are. He also doesn’t understand what the Bible is when he uses this silly example about porcupines and their quills to talk about religious stories. What does this have to do with Christ talking about, Christ going to see John the Baptist and then being baptized in the Jordan and coming out and the bird landing on his head? What does that have to do, what does this have to do with porcupines throwing their quills and how it’s a heuristic way of talking about some factual thing that is not totally factual in a scientific way? It just doesn’t, it just doesn’t help me. You can tell stories, you can tell stories today that would use only scientifically proven facts and you could tell stories that would fit the patterns that traditional stories have. You could do that, totally, if you wanted to, that’d be fine, but because the stories are not meant to be scientific descriptions of reality, then I don’t really see why we would do that. I don’t see what use it would have.