https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=SSUj7P07Wrg
ancient peoples understand, you have to understand history to understand apocalypse and vice versa, right? Because the history is here’s the way that the pattern manifested itself before us, you know, this is where we’re from, this is how we fit into the story. But then the apocalypse is that same thing looking forward. Yeah. Right. And even, okay, so I grew up in basically the same kind of culture that you did, right? Right. Fundamentalist, Baptist, evangelical, right? And so you’ll know that there’s a deep obsession in that culture with the end times, with the book of Revelation, etc. And of course, one of the things now this may not have been an issue for you because you’re from the land of Canada, I think. I think that’s how you guys say it, Canada. The land of, I’m actually not, I’m from the land of Quebecia. Quebecia, okay. Because you don’t identify with those other people. Okay, yeah. But in America, in American evangelical culture, there’s a deep obsession with trying to find the nation of America in the book of Revelation. It’s really important that Americans, like, I’ve got bad news for you. If it’s there, it’s the whore. He’s like, okay, stop, stop. I don’t disagree with you, but it’s, but it’s like, I don’t know. I don’t know about you, but it’s, but it’s like, so actually, so a good example of this would be there’s this moment when the virgin who bears the child, you know, is it the church or is it Mary? I mean, it’s both. It’s not hard people. It’s both. But anyway, she’s born up on the wings of an eagle to a safe place. And so they will say, the wings of the eagle is the United States Air Force. Oh my goodness. I’ve sat in. Stop. Like I had, I was a, I was a, I mean, part of my story too is I was a Baptist pastor before I became Orthodox. And so I’ve sat in theology classes teaching where they were teaching eschatology. And that’s what they said in the class. The wings of the eagle are the United States Air Force carrying the chosen people, chosen people of God to safety. So see, there it is. America is part of the story. Now that’s. And you wonder why there are so many atheists. Like you just wonder. So it’s okay. But it’s wacky. Yes. But it’s actually also a pretty normal impulse. Yeah. To try and find where is, what’s your place in the pattern? Like what, you know, in the story that’s being told and the pattern that’s manifesting, like where do my people fit in? Yeah. And that’s, that’s kind of what a universal history is about. And part of the loss that we’ve had as a result of the loss of the medieval model, the part of the loss that we felt has been not having universal story that we can plug ourselves into. And so that’s actually been been replaced. We think we’re so cosmopolitan, but it’s actually been replaced by much more parochial narratives. Yeah. Like, like the, the sort of, you know, evangelical American conservative narrative, you know, is America’s the new Israel or, or like even, even things like the 1619 project. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Their desire, a desire to read, to, to restate the, the origin. Ideologically. Yeah. Yeah. There are ways of doing mythology, but they’re not universal. They don’t actually, you know, they’re actually ironically deeply non-inclusive. Yeah. All right. Becky Baumgartner asks, says, In your conversation with Richard Rollin, you characterize the US as Babylon and the US West Coast as the ultimate margin. Born and raised in the Seattle area, I can attest to the freakish strength of the principalities here. Can you discuss what role the US West Coast might be playing in the strange apocalypse of time we live in? So this is actually an opportunity for me because someone wrote me, I forget his name. Sorry, I forgot your name. But someone wrote me also in private and it was someone who was a member of the military and who had spent many of his life, much of his life defending his country. And he was a little bit taken aback to the fact that I said that the United States is the whore in, in Revelation. And I understand that. I actually, I felt sympathetic because as soon as I said that, I regretted it. Like I was, you know, it’s one of those things where you say it, it’s too late and then you kind of regret it a little bit because I feel like it was too easy for me to just say it that way. But that I probably should have been able to explain it a little more. And the US is the edge of the world. And if you want to understand the West Coast, it’s the edge of the edge of the world. It’s the end of it’s the Western point in civilization. It’s the place where the sun goes down. California is the end of the world, folks. I don’t know what to tell you. So I can use the image of California maybe as an example of why I think, why I said that, you know, and I probably don’t even have to tell you. You know what California is like, everything that it’s related to in terms of Hollywood, in terms of music, entertainment, pornography, all of that. It’s all California, right? And so, but there’s something else going on. And this is also the something else going on in the United States as well, which is that I also believe that just like in Revelation, I’m going to tell you something here that I’ve never said, I guess, maybe publicly. So in Revelation, the best way to understand it is that the beast, the whore, and the New Jerusalem, they’re all images of the city. They’re all images of Rome, you could say. There’s something of Rome in all of those three. And the idea that Rome becomes Christian, it’s something like the founding of a Constantinople, where it’s the first Christian, the great Christian city, becomes an image, a little image of this New Jerusalem. And so it’s not the New Jerusalem, but it’s like an image, a fractal image of this change, this kind of beast killing the whore. If you can imagine someone like Diocletian, right, clamping down on the Roman decadence. And then after that, you have this change where you have a conversion and then finally the arrival of Christian Rome and the founding of Constantinople. So I think that in the United States, something like that is going to happen as well. That the United States is not just the whore, but is in a way the whore, the beast, and possibly the place or the potential out of which something like the New Jerusalem will occur. And you can already kind of see it because you can see that on the one hand, Christianity is dying and most visibly attacked. At least ideologically right now in the United States, but it’s also the place where it still has one of the strongest bastions and one of the most authentic bastions. And so someone in the chat is mentioning Father Seraphim Rose. Father Seraphim Rose and his monastery are in California too. And in California, you have everything. You have all the worst and you have all the best. And that’s the strangeness of the end. That’s the strangeness of this final moment where you can’t completely separate the wheat from the tares and you know that it takes Christ to return, let’s say, in order to do that and to be able to separate one from the other. And so hopefully that will help to at least mitigate a little bit my comment about the United States. But I for sure I think the United States is going to play one of the most important roles in how all of this moment plays out. All of this, whatever it is, break down whatever it is, it’s going to happen. It’s going to happen in the US guys. A lot of it’s going to happen there. Okay. So yeah. Okay. So let me give you an example, for example, of the difference. So imagine a whore. Right. So whore is a place where all the nations come onto this, you know, all the, she shares her body with all the nations. And so she is not, she doesn’t discriminate. She just, she trades with all the nation. That’s the whore. Right. And so she’s completely, she’s full of wasted seed of everybody. Right. And so that’s what the whore is. Sorry, it sounds explicit and everything, but it’ll help you to understand. Right. And so that’s the whore. It’s a place of mixture. Right. Where all the seeds just kind of mix in her. Right. And so, but then there’s the image of the New Jerusalem. And the image of the New Jerusalem, it says in that image, read it in scripture, it says that all the glory of all the nations will be gathered into the city. So what’s the difference? What’s the difference between the whore, which is the place of mixture and breakdown of identity, and the, and the, the, the New Jerusalem, which is the place where all the glory of the nations get gathered into one place. And so it’s the difference between mixture and synthesis. It’s the difference between chaos and hybrid and a kind of synthesis which gathers all things into them hierarchically. Right. And so you can imagine that the New Jerusalem is above and gathers all the best things of the city into itself. Right. And so it’s the opposite of a whore. But you can understand how they’re related because they’re opposites. And the idea that one can flip and become the other, that Rome can become Constantinople. Right. That that’s part of that’s part of the mystery of Christianity. So, so yeah. So sorry, symbolic means, symbolic means says I’m on no fap. I’m not going to, I’m not going to imagine a whore. Sorry about that. If I’m, if I cause you to sin, I am very sorry. That’s not, that’s not my purpose. I just want you to understand this because it is important. Like it is important to understand the difference between mixture and synthesis. If you, if there’s a problem right now in the world, it’s that people can’t tell the difference between a hybrid and a truly synthetic being, you know.