https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Dt8iaK5hAJo
So let’s start there. From your point of view, do dragons actually exist? Well, I think they almost exist. That’s what I said, right? I think they almost exist. I mean, I think that dragons, because they are this chaos, right? Because they are this idea of this. And you mentioned it so well in your essay, this immeasurable force, which can, if it is untamed, if it is idolized, of course it becomes evil. But there’s also something inevitable, just like the chaos of the heaven and earth, the first earth is not necessarily evil, though it becomes an image of evil later, after the fall. There’s something of that in dragon, is this kind of chaotic potential, this kind of unknown that is there, that hasn’t been touched by light yet. And even in scripture, I think it’s important, even the Leviathan, although it’s clear that there are some places where the Leviathan is called the great, the Satan, the opposer, who is then the tannin. This dragon, sea dragon is then is killed at the end. But there are places in Job, for example, where the Leviathan is more presented in his kind of untamable strength, this unmeasurable chaos. And so in that sense, when I say the dragons almost exist is that they, because they are that chaos and potential, they can’t properly exist. They always remain out of our reach because they are the place where the categories break down. That’s why the manner in which a dragon is represented is usually a hybrid character of a mix of a lizard with different other animals, because there is no species of dragon in a purely materialist, botanical sense. The dragon is the ultimate hybrid, the ultimate monster that is that doesn’t have a category. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Like some people, for instance, might try to, you know, again, if they’re trying to be sort of charitable to the biblical record to say, OK, well, we’ve got Leviathan in there. Let’s say that that represents a real thing that people saw. Maybe they saw dinosaurs. That’s what they were seeing was dinosaurs. Are dragons and dinosaurs, I mean, are they the same thing? I think that they’re related in the sense. I think they’re related narratively. And I’m not talking about a kind of weird scientific interpretation of this. They’re related narratively because they are that ancient thing that is no longer around, that you only have broken traces of and you can’t identify. And you have these spread giant bones all over the ground and these skulls that that you don’t recognize. So this kind of unrecognizable, huge monsters that you find in the ground, if you want to understand what dragons are, then that can help you understand what dragons are. They are these ancient beings that are no longer connected to our story, but they nonetheless have a presence on the edge of our of our reality. And they’re they’re still dangerous, right? They can still they’ll still kill you if you’re not careful. Yeah. And it’s interesting to think about dinosaurs because the way that they’re presented to us in the modern world, you know, you go to a museum, a natural history museum, and you go in there and you see dinosaurs. Right. And you don’t see dinosaurs. You see whatever it is that they’ve they’ve these these. I mean, you never see a dinosaur. You always see some taxonomical recreation. Exactly. And that’s like that’s exactly my point. Yeah. Dragons exist way more than dinosaurs. That’s for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Maybe maybe that should be the title this episode. Dragons exist way more than dinosaurs. No, it’s it’s I think it’s true. Like, right. So what we get in the kids books and if you go to the natural history museum or you watch Jurassic Park, right, is it’s it’s an extrapolation based on bones, fossils, not even bones, but fossils, right, which aren’t quite bones. Yep. There’s something sort of left behind by bones sort of. Right. You know, it’s extrapolation based on fossils and and then making a whole bunch of assumptions. And they don’t tell you this. They don’t you know, when you when you when you encounter the dinosaur at the natural history museum, it doesn’t say on the plaque. Look, we have no idea what its skin was like. We think it might be like lizards we encounter now. And so we basically put lizard skin all over it. Yeah. Now they put when now they have now they all give them feathers now. Right. All of a sudden they found feathers on some thing that they dug up in the ground. And they’re like, hey, that’s great, because now your dinosaurs look a lot more like my dragons. Feathery dragons. Yeah, it’s so it’s interesting. I mean, it’s, you know, not to not to like ridicule paleontology or whatever. But there’s so much that is not actually known and is being assumed. And a lot of gaps are being sort of filled in based on these materialist assumptions such that in the modern world, in many cases, I think dragons are reduced to dinosaurs and dinosaurs are not even like we don’t know what they actually looked like and actually behaved like and so forth. We don’t know. There’s some very smart people who are making some probably good guesses. You know, I’m not saying they’re bad guesses. I don’t know. I don’t have I’m not a paleontologist. You know, yeah. But but nonetheless, it’s a lot of conjecture. And I think it’s interesting this idea that you put forward that dragons are more real than dinosaurs. So so you might ask, well, why if someone asked me that, like, as I’m trying to work out that wonderful statement, what does that mean? I know it’s true. But let me figure out how it’s true is I would say that dragons, because of their reality as number one, in many cases, having a demonic association. Right. So we’re actually talking real spiritual beings that are being encountered in various ways. But also the experience of forces of chaos. Right. You know, as an example, we talked earlier about the protests that have been happening. It’s interesting. They’re not simply a sum of a bunch of people doing violent, angry things. There’s something there’s a sort of a spirit to them. Oh, yeah. That’s more than that. Right. I think in your in your essay about dragons almost existing, you gave the example of correct me if I’m misremembering here. You gave the example of friend. Right. And is a friend something that exists? Well, we all know, I mean, you know, if you’ve ever had a friend, you know that friendship is real. But there’s no way to measure it. Yeah, it’s a different form of category, which is completely real and completely objective in the sense that it’s a universal category. It’s just not a taxonomical category. Right. So my argument is that a dragon is more akin to the category of stranger than it is to it’s like it’s the strength. It’s the category of stranger in the animal world. That’s that. That’s what a dragon is. It’s not so much a another. It’s not like a it’s like a dog, but it’s just it has this DNA, you know, or it’s not it’s not a scientific category.