https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=bv2JybEuUbw
All right, so Ramal asks, hi Jonathan, what is the symbolism of monkeys, apes in the medieval worldview? My guess is that it does have a little relationship with the Cynoscephaly, but it seems a little limiting. Also, what are the symbolic aspects of the more modern trends of human evolution? And so I think that it’s interesting, there are some medieval legends that are interesting about monkeys and apes, for example. So you can see there’s a legend, for example, in the Nativity Gospels that talks about Christ in Egypt who encounters a slave. And this slave is bothering, it’s a really weird story, so don’t be surprised. So this slave is bothering Christ for some reason when he’s a baby, and because he’s all powerful, he changes her into a monkey. And then the mother of God, she tells him that you can’t do that, basically, you shouldn’t do that, and so he turns her back into a human. But there are legends like that, for example, there are weird Jewish legends from the Middle Ages that talk about how the descendants of Cain became apes. And there’s also a whole idea of, like you said, the notion of the Cynoscephaly, that there’s a possibility that one of the encounters that brought about the stories of the Cynoscephaly was people from the North, Europeans or whatever, that encountered apes and were not able to discern whether or not what they were dealing with was human or not. And it’s just because they weren’t used to seeing apes, and apes stand up and they have features that are similar to ours. And so there’s a sense in which they are this kind of weird in between space, between humans and other animals, and that they could be perceived that way. But what’s interesting mostly is to understand how in the medieval mind, they see it ontologically, they don’t see it as the evolutionists think of it in terms of a progress of mechanical and physical causality. They see it ontologically as apes are lower than humans. And so the idea that as Cain degrades and goes down into the body and loses the higher aspect of him, then he would become a monkey, like he would become an ape. And that type of thinking is still there today. When someone suggests that someone, in evolutionary thinking there’s a whole mythological thinking. So for example, when a progressive talks about how someone is like a caveman or someone is retrograde, he’s from the past, what they’re suggesting is that that person is more like an ape than I am. That’s what they’re suggesting. So what a medieval person might have suggested ontologically in terms of someone who is more animalistic would have been more like an ape, more like a monkey. The progressive does it in time and tends to talk about the dumb hick or whatever that’s almost like a caveman or almost like an ape. So you can see that a lot of these things are still around, like the same way of thinking, it’s just framed a little differently, but it ends up being very similar. So I actually talk about this in the article that I wrote for the Secrets of God’s Dog, for our comic book. I wrote about the relationship between this kind of progressive thing. And even there’s a video about that. I think it’s called How We Dehumanize, where you can watch that video and get a sense of how different people dehumanize in terms of seeing others as animals. So Annie Crawford says devolution. Yeah, exactly. There’s a sense, there really is a sense that that’s more of the medieval way of thinking. But it’s interesting to understand. So like when the evolutionist says something like the origin of the humans is apes, they’re saying a lot about what their worldview really is. Because their worldview is based only in like physical phenomena and physical changes, then they tend to, they will tend to say something like the origin of man is an ape, which is crazy if you really think about it. It’s like the origin, I mean, and it’s as stupid as saying something like, you know, the origin of Michelangelo’s David is a quarry. It’s like instead of looking at the intelligent part of it, they look at just the physical characteristics and they see that as the origin. But that’s because they don’t understand, right? They don’t understand how they can’t see how things come together into purposes and things come together into identities. And those identities are higher than the, you know, it’s like when morons, these morons you hear, sorry, I’m being a little aggressive here. But when you hear these people say something like, you know, you’re 99.9% the same as a monkey and you’re like, okay, dude, what does that even mean? That doesn’t mean anything. You could say something like, I’m also 99% the same as anything you want to, depending on how you calculate it. You could say, I’m not compared to, you know, compared to this, I’m 99% the same as a blade of grass. Like these types of comparisons are so silly and absurd. It’s like qualitative difference is what is the real difference, not these quantitative differences. You know, the difference between an ape and a human, if you can’t see the difference between an ape and a human, you know, you’re in serious trouble, my friend, because the difference is very qualitative. It’s like, it’s the difference between someone who can name the other and the other that can’t name back. It’s like, that’s the difference between a human and an ape. It’s like, I can tame an ape and an ape can’t tame me. It’s pretty simple. It’s pretty simple. All right. I can put an ape in a zoo and a zoo can’t put an ape, an ape can’t put a human in a zoo. It just, that’s pretty much a good way to understand the difference between a man and an ape. Anyway, sorry, I don’t want to go too hard on the poor, the poor evolutionists. All right, here we go.