https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Bk1QjSx53uw
I want to talk a little bit about heaven. So I talked to Matt Ridley a while back and Bjorn Lomborg and I’m interested in their thinking because they’re trying to plot an optimistic course for the future. One where at the highest levels of social integration we decide how human society should look. At least insofar as we conceptualize how it might look if we address some of the major problems that beset us. But it’s an attempt to make things better. It’s an attempt to bring about something increasingly resembling heaven on earth. I mean, heaven is generally conceptualized. You can conceptualize it as a state of being. It might be the state of being that those people that you described live in. I’ve had paradisal experiences where everything transformed itself into something that was perfect, that appeared perfect, and I was unable to stay in those frames of mind. The heaven, is that something we build? Is that something? I don’t understand the relationship between the heaven that awaits us, let’s say, after we die. That’s the idea and what we build here on earth. Do those touch? Is that the doctrine? There’s so much of this doctrine I don’t understand. I think a way to see it has to do with attention again, and it has to do with a hierarchy of attention. If you try to build heaven, you’re going to fail. You’re going to fail miserably because you’re not aiming high enough. You’re aiming and then you get stuck in this weird world of opposites that you don’t even understand the side effects of what you’re doing. For one person, heaven will look like if everything could be perfectly ordered then, and then we know what that looks like. Another person will look at heaven and think if everything could be free, we could all just be free, and then we know what that looks like. The idea is to look higher. There’s a story that I’ve been… Well, we have to strive for something better, but then we end up in… Which is what you’re saying, is that we end up with the Tower of Babel or we end up with the flood or we end up with the catastrophe, continual catastrophe of unintended consequences. But as you yourself said, we are aiming for something better. So the question is how do you pursue utopia while avoiding the pitfalls? And that’s a theological question, I would say. It is. And I think it… I know people are going to hate that I say this, but it has to do with worship. It has to do with what you worship. So if you worship those things that you’re aiming towards, the lower things, if you worship the making a safer society, if you worship the making a freer society, if you worship making a stronger society, all of these things are going to go off the rails because they have unintended consequences that you don’t understand because they’re a fragment of reality. They need to be encompassed together in order to reach something higher. And so… That’s the danger of ideology. It’s the part takes the place of the whole. So the idea is that if you worship God, then those other things will kind of lay themselves out slowly and you won’t be able to force them. They’ll kind of lay themselves out slowly and they’ll start to manifest progressively. And as you… but you have to attend to the highest or else, like I said, you know, and there’s even like… there’s an image of Antichrist, which is related to this problem. You know, in scripture, you could… one of the first Antichrists you could say was Judas who betrayed Christ. Well, there’s a story with Judas, which is very fascinating because Christ doesn’t talk to Judas very often. But one of the places where Christ talks to Judas is when a woman comes in and wants to anoint and wash Christ’s feet with a very expensive perfume. And then Judas says, what are you doing? Like, why are you doing this? You need to… why don’t we give this to the poor? Right. And Christ says, you know, the poor will always be with you. But the bridegroom, Christ, the Messiah is there for a short time. Yes, that’s the other kind of story. It’s very difficult to understand how anyone could have invented that story. Like, it’s not the story of propagandists. No. It’s in fact, it’s the opposite. Yeah. But that story has to do with attention. So Christ obviously isn’t saying you shouldn’t help the poor. Christ is said to help the poor. He said it many times. You have to help the poor, give to the poor, of course. But he’s saying, get your hierarchy in order. And you’ll help the poor more effectively that way than any other. That’s the case. That is the case. And it starts with worship and the acts that she’s doing. If you look at what she’s doing, she’s first of all, she bought something expensive. She’s sacrificing it. She’s sacrificing it to bow down and to wash the feet, to submit, to sacrifice to and to worship. So those three things, like when I talk about the aim, how you end up having to submit to that aim. And so this is what Christ is saying. First comes worship, then the world lays itself out below that in an appropriate way. That’s what the Sermon on Mount says too. Yeah. And those that are saying help the poor as their ultimate goal. In scripture it says that Judas didn’t even want to help the poor. He wanted to take the money for himself, really. Like he was a thief actually, and he was taking the money out of the purse. And so those that just want to reduce… I suppose the truth of the matter is that the genuineness of your desire to help the poor is precisely proportional to the degree that you embody Christ. That’s right. And it can’t be otherwise. It cannot be otherwise. I see that clearly. Because otherwise things will go astray. So that’s one of the problems with the modern projects of Utopia is that they’re babblesque in their attempts. And you can see the type of gestures that the world authorities are posing in terms of safety, extreme… With COVID and everything, this desire to create absolute safety, this desire to create absolute identification and tracing and all of these weird… These kind of weird gestures that show that they think they can control reality is leading us towards a very dangerous place. Well, one of the things I noticed… I did some work on a committee at one point that was advising the UN in relationship to the establishment of its millennial goals. And there was hundreds of goals not rank ordered. And so it was a tower of babble. Because you can’t have hundreds of goals that aren’t rank ordered and have any goals at all. Because to have a goal means a hierarchy. Something has to be more important than something else. And there isn’t anything more important than getting your act together, so to speak. Well, I’m going to have to think about all this a lot. Thank you.