https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=TG7j094MrB0
Alright folks, here we are, July Q&A. So I decided to do this public again because it was a lot of fun last time and so we’ll see how it goes this time. So before we start, I want to reiterate something that I talked about. I’m going to start making patron only videos once a month. I’m going to do it on fairy tales. I did it on a video on Jack and the Beanstalk and now I’m going, the next video I’m going to make will be probably on the Princess and the P. And so I’m hoping to go through a lot of the stories that interest me, fairy tales and traditional stories, legends. I might also ask for the patrons to vote for which stories are interesting to them. And the reason why I’m doing that, I’ll be totally honest with you guys, is because since the flood I’ve been really struggling to be able to carve. I don’t have a workshop for a while. I didn’t have my tools. Now I kind of have my tools, but I’m working outside under a tent. So it’s kind of iffy when it rains. I can’t really continue. I have to go back in. So it’s been really, I feel like I’ve kind of adrift, let’s say. The one thing I can do is make videos. As you’ve seen, I’ve been putting out more content and I intend to kind of try to keep that up as long as my carving, as long as I can’t totally get into the carving properly. It seems like possibly a workshop will be able to be saved that I won’t have to tear down and rebuild it, that I can just decontaminate and hopefully go back to my workshop when we get back to our house. So in order to kind of thank the patrons and encourage people who are on the verge of maybe becoming a patron, I’m going to do these extra monthly videos. So all right, guys. So besides that, I had a talk with Paul VanderKlay today. It was one of the best talks we had. I think usually we go for an hour. Usually I don’t like to go over an hour for a conversation, but this conversation went out for like an hour and 45 minutes. So I’ll be putting that out in the next few days, maybe next week. Not sure. I had another conversation with someone, an expert on René Girard. A lot of people didn’t tell me about René Girard, so we’re putting that out soon as well. So there’s a lot of stuff coming down the pipeline that I’m excited to share with you guys. So I’m going to start the questions with my website. So here we go. And what we’ll do is this time, last time I really struggled to, if those who wanted to do the super chat thing, I kind of really struggled with it, but I figured out how to keep track of these super chat things. So if people want to do the super chat thing, I will try to stay on top of it. And when I’m done with all the patron questions, then I’ll go into that. So all right. Here we go. Let me just make sure that I got the right question. All right. So Belize1234 asks, Hi Jonathan. I wanted to know what you thought of Jordan Peterson’s understanding of individualism and how Jesus is seen as the ultimate example of the individual. The more that I try to understand the Bible and different writings and discussions, it is not the individual that I believe is at the forefront, but rather the family, which I believe is partly at the heart of the Trinity. So rather than just being called to be an individual, we are called to be a part of a family in order to bring life into the world like God brought life into us. Thanks. And I hope you were able to understand my question. Yes, I totally understand your question. I think that part of the problem is words. A lot of Orthodox thinkers and a lot of traditional mind thinkers have tended to separate or oppose the notion of the individual and the person, you could say. The way we could separate it is the individual is seen as this core, as this one core, this kind of isolated core, which has to develop and then the world is built on that. The freedom of the individual, responsibility of the individual, all of that seems to define the person as this atomized core, you could say. But I want to be careful because it’s not necessarily that. The notion of the person in the Orthodox tradition is a lot more like your own notion of the family, which is that you could say in a way that the person is on the one hand, the particular of a nature, but it is that the particular of that nature to the extent that it is also capable of being in communion with other beings. And so the person is the particular, just like the individual is the particular, but seen as a part of a whole, seen as being in communion with others. So in that sense, that’s why the Trinity is the ultimate image of the infinite in that sense. But there is definitely a theology of the person in Orthodoxy and traditional Christianity. And there are some aspects of the theology of the person which could be used to move into what we now call the individual or individualism. And I think we also have to be careful and I might have fallen into that trap as well. I think that a lot of people have said that Jordan’s vision of the individual is a kind of individualism in the sense that the modern world understands it. But I think that Jordan, the fact that Jordan sees the individual instead of seeing the individual as, let’s say, the one on which all rights are put, you know, that we all have these rights and everything, he tends to view it more in terms of responsibility. And the idea that you as an individual, you have to take upon yourself responsibility for everything, for all the evils of the world. And although it’s funny that some people have criticized him for that, and I’ve seen Christians criticize him for that, for example, like Vox Dei criticized him for that. But if you read the Church Fathers and if you read the saints, you will find the saints doing that all the time, that they actually take the sins of the other onto themselves. They take the blame of others onto themselves. They accept blame when there’s no blame to be had. And that is seen in a certain manner as imitating Christ. But there’s also something metaphysical about it where this idea of accepting all the blame when you’re innocent. It’s hard to talk about this because there’s something very contradictory about it. But the idea of accepting blame when you’re innocent, what it shows is your freedom. It shows to what extent you’re actually free from the pull of the outside world because your tendency would be to defend yourself. Why do you want to defend yourself? You want to defend yourself because you hold on to this idea of who you are. You could be defending yourself. I’m not saying we shouldn’t defend ourselves in the world, but in terms of spiritual realization, if you’re able to accept blame without defending yourself, it means that ultimately you don’t care what the others think of you. You care more to know that you’re innocent than to prove your innocence to others and to depend on their perception of you. And so there’s something very powerful about that which is found in Christianity which seems to have some echoes in what Jordan is talking about. But I do think at the same time that there is a difference between the way that Jordan Peterson talks about it and the way that the Church Fathers have talked about it. And so Pat Shire asks, good evening. This is a really long thing. I’m not sure this is a question, Pat Shire. So Pat kind of tells his story. I’m not going to read the story. He kind of tells his basic story of moving into angsty atheism in high school, like a lot of you guys that have followed me and a lot of people have gone through, and this vague spirituality. And he’s moving towards, okay, so he says, I can maybe read a little bit of it. He says, since my two years in grad school as a physical oceanography student, two bad trips on marijuana cataclyze my curiosity about God. So he kind of moved in that direction, read Jordan Peterson’s biblical lectures, and for the first time I saw a glimmer of light in these stories. I’ve been consumed with curiosity after finding your channel and your brother’s book. This has been one of the most difficult struggles in my life as I saw used to thinking materially. I’ve tried to satisfy this aspect of myself by reading books such as The Language of God as scientists present evidence for belief. My confusion may be due to the perplexing amount of denominations, let alone other religious claims. It all seems arbitrary in some sense, although I don’t feel completely capable of differentiating. So what wisdom would you grant me about my struggle with faith and God? It looks like I can’t find God from an intellectual perspective that I’m used to. Is it necessary to find God personally in order to come to faith? Are there some stories similar to my journey that may help? Words can’t convey how helpful you have been thus far. Thank you. So thanks, Pat, for that kind of little testimony and your question. Yes, it is confusing to notice all the different denominations. It can be frustrating to see that. You cannot totally find God intellectually. You can have glimmers of it. But in the end, there is something, there is an interesting thing that Bishop Barron talked about when he was talking to Jordan Peterson, when he talked about how, I think it was Orjan, who when someone came up to him and asked a lot of these questions about the faith and everything, and he said something like, give alms, and that’s how you’ll find God. Give alms and you’ll find God. So there is an aspect to which to enter into, to take that little glimmer, to not, let’s pretend, don’t lie to yourself. Don’t pretend something. But there is, for example, something about worship, this idea of expressing gratitude, expressing gratitude for the things in your life. And to kind of approach God, let’s say, just in that way, to just thank God for the things that you see that are good around you. To then try to help those that are in need. All of these little things are also part of finding that experience or discovering the connection with the divine. So I think that those are things that you can do, that you kind of can start to do in order to move forward. And I know it’s tough in terms of denominations. I would say, I do believe that orthodoxy offers the most complete vision of Christianity, but I know that that’s not available for everybody and it’s difficult for a lot of people. And I would say to just move step by step with open eyes and with your mind open. Go to a church that’s nearby. If there’s no orthodox church, go to a Catholic church. Go to a church that looks not too wacky, not too crazy, that it looks kind of, you know, and just move step by step. Continue to read. Continue to ask the questions. Try to be grateful. Try to be grateful to God for the things around you. And that’s just going to move you step by step. And I think that just kind of hoping that it’s all going to come together for you in one thing, that’s not going to happen. I mean, it has happened to people before, but you can’t expect that to happen. So I wish you the best on your journey. All right, here we go. So joser733 asks, Hi Jonathan. Could you talk about the symbolism of disability, both physical and mental, and how that might relate to Jesus’ miracles? For example, the healing of the man born blind and the exercising of the demoniac. So what Christ comes to do, part of what Christ comes to do is to restore things. He comes to make things right, to bring things back to what they should be. And you can see it in a lot of the way that he talks about things. One of the reasons why Christ attacks hypocrisy so much is because hypocrisy is a break between heaven and earth. It’s a break between the meaning and the actual manifestation. So healing a person is part of that. The fact that Christ heals people means that he’s uniting heaven and earth. He’s showing to a certain extent that he’s the creator. And there’s this interesting idea, like the idea that the man born blind, especially where you ask people, ask Christ, you know, who sinned? Who sinned in order for this man to have been blind? And it’s not a stupid question to ask in the sense that when we see someone who has a disability, we immediately understand that there’s something lacking, that this person has something that is lacking, that is not working properly in their life. To deny that is to lie to the person and to lie to reality. And so the idea is that that is a part of sinfulness. Remember that sinfulness is missing the mark. And so this is what a person is. And so then you have someone who, for one reason or another, can’t use their legs. And so they’re missing something human. They’re missing the mark of what it is to be a person, a full human person. And the question of the disciples is, like, who’s to blame for this? Did he sin? Did his parents sin in a moral sense for that this situation, this kind of sinful result comes about? And Christ’s answer is the most amazing answer. Christ’s answer is the answer that I’ve been telling you guys from the beginning. Christ flips it, you know, and he sees in this person the results of death. You can see it that way more than sin itself, that in their body they have the result of death. The wage of sin is death. The wage of missing the mark is this lack, is this decomposition, this breaking apart of what a person is. And so Christ takes that lack and he says, no, this person has been born blind so that God could be glorified. So he turns it into glory. He flips death into glory. And then he returns light to the person and heals that person, makes them whole. And then that you can imagine something like that person in being made whole by Christ by being by their blindness being being taken away, they’re at a higher place than they than they would be if they had never been blind in the first place. And that’s the surprise of salvation. But that’s the surprise of the flip where death can be changed into something even higher than than what was before. So I think that that’s something that you see. And interestingly enough, you see in the Orthodox faith, you see something about that in the sense of some of the saints are considered, they’re kind of simple people. And some of the fools for Christ, for example, they seem to have been mentally handicapped. They seem to have been people who were somehow mentally, you know, that they didn’t have all their means, you could say. But the Orthodox see in them a kind of purity and a kind of something manifesting itself in that person that actually shows us the kingdom of God, you know. And it’s interesting because you if you meet sometimes people that are that are mentally handicapped, not everyone, but sometimes you meet those people and they have a kind of inalienable joy, you know, this kind of simple joy that is is actually very beautiful and is very powerful. And it is something that we would be good to learn to develop this kind of simplicity and this capacity to to find joy in the smallest thing and to find joy in the world. There’s these stories of these Russian saints of a man who would who would who would just come and he would just ring the church bells and he would just be completely fascinated by this church bell and could just ring it over and over and would find this immense joy just ringing the church bell. You know, and that person, you know, was declared as a holy man. And so but there’s something about that. There’s something about the possibility also of that. Lack in a person that it can show us something higher if you see it in the proper manner, hopefully that that answers that. All right. So West Gilbert asks. Hi, Jonathan, could you talk a little about the concept of news in the Christian tradition, what it is and the role it plays in our understanding, God and the world. So the notion of the news is is very simple. It’s not simple. The notion of the news is the idea is spirit is something like when St. Paul talks of the body, the soul and the spirit, you could use the word news for that. That is it is the it is the super rational capacity. And it’s difficult because people in the modern world don’t don’t think that we don’t we don’t believe that it exists. Most people don’t believe that it exists. And it’s the capacity to be in direct contact with reality. You could say it that way or to. It’s the intellect, it’s the intellect in in the the the highest sphere. And so it’s the capacity to intuit reality, something it’s hard to give to give words, but the news is that which can contemplate God to the extent that that’s possible. You know, and so. And so we have that. And so the way that I try to try to help people kind of get a sense of the news, because, like I said, we don’t we don’t have we struggle to have access to that. But I think that we do sometimes like sometimes you have a. An intuition, an aha moment, an intuition that no rational method has brought you to, you know, when you glimpse something. And I think everybody has those scientists have those, you know, artists have those the hunch that this this this this thing that flips and it’s like you can’t explain. There is you weren’t you didn’t do this. This like rational process to get to this this intuition. And this intuition is like a flash of light. It’s like this flash of light. And I think that that’s the way that the modern person still has access to the news. And so one of the things that I try to do and you probably so if you kind of know what the news is, that’s something that I’ve been that I’ve been trying to to do, which is to. Say things in a way to bring patterns next to each other in a little dance. And what I’m hoping to do is that the place where those patterns come together, I don’t I don’t explicitly talk about it, but I’m like looking at you and I’m thinking, OK, can you make that jump? Can you jump? And then that jump, that intuition, which like your eyes flash, you see it in people’s eyes when it happens, you know, like this flash, this understanding that I think is a little contact with the news. But I think that I think that, of course, the church fathers develop their develop the news, you know, they purify the news, you could say, until reducing distraction. You know, this idea of paying attention, of paying attention to yourself, of attending to your sins, attending to your heart, attending to God, all of these images of of attention are there to reduce our the reduce the chaos on the fringe and move in, move in, move in to this point, the spark, which is the news, the spark of light. You could call it something like the image of God in you or the Christ in you. All of those things have to do with with the news. So but it’s hard to talk about because I don’t live in the news. You know, I mean, I have glimpses of it like most of you do. And I think that I think that that’s just, you know, it’s the it’s the disease of the modern world. It’s very difficult for us to to purify the news. All right. So David Flores asks, What is the symbolic meaning of stags in stories? They often seem to be being killed by hounds or other small predators. Is it a pattern of revolution? So the stag is obviously not a pattern of revolution itself. The stag is usually a flash. It’s usually that sign. You know, you have these images of the white stag, for example, in the story of St. Eustache, St. Eustache, we say in French, I don’t know, St. Eustache in English. I don’t know how you say it. The story of St. Eustache who sees a white stag in the forest with a cross in its antlers, you know, and there are several stories of several saints, but not only saints, but in mythical different mythical stories, you have this idea of the white stag, which appears, you know, and becomes like a beacon or a sign or something that wake awakes you to something deeper, to to your identity, to some longing to something. And so I think that the that that in that sense, the white stag or the stag, because it because of its horns, which is like a crown, has something to do with that royal spirit or the the the perceiving of the meaning, the perceiving of something dignified, something high, something elevated, you know. And so the image that you mentioned, which I don’t know examples of those, but this image of the stag being killed by hounds or small predators, ganging up on the stag and bringing it down, that is definitely a pattern of revolution. That is definitely an image of a revolution of the of the earth, you know, kind of coming up and grabbing the monster from below, which comes and takes down the hides, the glimmer of light, you know, kind of concealed in the earth is definitely that’s definitely right. So hope that answers that. All right. So we are done with the the website. Let’s go to Subscribestar. All right. So Christian Chad asks, how’s your graphic novel coming along? Very excited to see Christian art that is not over the top and preachy like many Christian movies. What do you think religious artists or creator creators get wrong when they are making products like that? So the graphic novel is coming. It slowed down a little bit a little bit because Kord Nielsen, the artist who is working on it, just had a baby not very long ago. And so obviously that will slow him down because he’s doing it in his spare time. And so and so, you know, I mean, I’m hoping that it’s going to come back. We have the first 15 pages finished and inked and the whole graphic novel is about 120 pages. And so hopefully we’re going to just keep moving, moving. And, you know, I don’t know when it’s going to come out, but what we’ll probably do is, you know, kind of comic skate style when we get in the production where we’re close to the coloring or, you know, the binding or whatever, then we’ll probably do it as a crowdfunding. And then people can order in advance and that can give us the funds to print it, to do all that we need to do in order to get that to people. So the thing is what do religious artists or creators get wrong when they make the preachy Christian movies? I think I’ve talked about this before. It’s that they don’t understand Christianity. They don’t understand the depth of Christianity. They don’t understand the patterns of Christianity. They only see Christianity as exactly that, as a message that has to be preached, that you have to accept in order to be saved, whatever that means, that you go to heaven. I don’t even know what those words mean anymore. I mean, I know what they mean. I don’t know what they mean when people use them so that you don’t go to hell and you go to heaven. So there’s a large swath of the North American church which believes that the only function of the church is to evangelize, that the church’s reason to exist is to evangelize to other people in order to save them from hell and get them to heaven. And so because of that, that will taint everything. It’ll taint everything. There’s no sense of the communion of the saints, no sense of the mystical union of the bride and the groom, no sense that the church is the, let’s say, the light of the world in the sense that it is that communion, that liturgical life, that sacramentality is actually the glue which binds things together and that without that, things scatter and break apart. And so none of that is perceived. And so that’s why the stories are horrible. And that’s why on the other hand, someone like Dostoevsky or Tolkien who won’t necessarily make explicitly Christian books or Christian texts, but because they understand the deep patterns, they understand the stories and the structures and they’re immersed in it, then they can write stories in that world and they end up being good. And so, yeah, I hope that my story is going to be like that. It’s not preachy, that’s for sure. I just hope it’s a good story. All right. So here we go. All right, so it seems like we have a spammer here. Let’s see. All right, so let’s just block them. There we go. That was done. I block them permanently. All right. Okay, so here we go. So, all right, next question. So Christian Chad again asked, Hi, Jonathan, I’ve heard your nuanced position on postmodernism and find it interesting. My problem with postmodernism was expressed by ZeroHPLovecraft on Twitter. He says, postmodernism is the attempt of men, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida to articulate and systematize a fundamentally feminine way of being. Once I read this, I spoke to something deeply true to me, like how the feminine behaves nonlinearly and unconsciously as opposed to masculine linear rationality and conscious. What are your thoughts? I think that… We still have a… Do we still have some kind of annoying spammer here? All right. All right, guys, if there’s a crazy spammer again, just tell me. I’ll try to pay attention to the chat a little more. This is new to me, guys, this whole thing. So let’s hope that we won’t go into hell in the comments section. All right. Okay, so I’m going to go ahead and start with the question. I think that’s an interesting way to portray it. There’s a funny trope about Jacques Derrida, which is that he named his sons, their last name, their family name, he named his sons after his grandmother’s name. So his grandmother’s surname, that’s the name that he gave to his sons. And it’s a weird move, because it’s still a masculine name, but it’s like he tried to just go back a few generations in order to break the patriarchal system. And so there is something that is quite true about that. And I think that that is also a problem. The mystery of the feminine, like you said, cannot be systematized, cannot be articulated fully. And the attempt to do that is going to look something like deconstruction, is going to look like a systematization. Like deconstruction is going to look like something that Jacques Derrida would do. Lacan, I don’t know so much, but for sure, Derrida, I would say he kind of had that drive, I think, as well. And so, yeah, I think that’s a good way. It’s one way to kind of understand it. And I think that it can be helpful to think of it that way. All right. Okay, so I’m going now to Patreon. Here you go. So Anjo Terpstra asks, what are your thoughts on the on numerology? When does the meaningful numerology become obscure? How do you regard numerology in relation to grammar? And so he gives me an example of numerology, a very complicated one, which I won’t read. Okay, what do I think of numerology? Man, you guys, these questions. All right. So I think that numerology can be appropriate and can be helpful. The problem, I think, with numerology is that at some point people can start to get fascinated with the pattern itself and not be interested in the meaning. All right. I think it’s going out of control in this chat section here. Man, what is going on? All right. So I’m just going to let this go because I don’t have no idea. It’s getting out of control in this chat section. Is there someone in the chat that I trust that I could put as a moderator? Let’s see. It seems like it’s just all the same people that are. All right. Is Jacob there? Jacob, are you in the chat? I don’t know who you are, Intribuner. Not sure who you trust, he says. All right. Is Christian Chad there? All right. I don’t recognize any of you guys. Is it Christian Chad? All right. There’s Christian Chad. Hey, Christian, would you be moderator here? I know it’s annoying, but I’m putting you moderator. All right. You have absolute power. All right. At least for the worst cases. All right. Let’s do it. Let’s do this. All right. So let’s be talking about numerology. That’s what I’m supposed to be talking about. All right. So numerology. So the problem with numerology is when numerology is not pointing towards meaning. And so you can make the patterns are there. I don’t think that it’s not true. They’re there. So you can add up words and you can if you use gematria, which is this equivalence between, especially in the Old Testament, because Hebrew, the letters in Hebrew are also numbers. And so if the letters and, you know, that let’s say in Hebrew, the actual letters, the way that you would count would be to write letters. Like if you would be doing math, you would be using letters to do math because the letters also work as numbers. And so because of that, there seems to be the possibility that there are also numerical patterns in the text because of that reality, which is that in Hebrew, both of those function together. And so it gets trickier in Greek because although Greek uses a Semitic alphabet, like a Phoenician alphabet, there’s no relationship between the alphabet that it’s using and the word. It’s like it’s a transcription. And so in Hebrew, for example, the ancient Hebrew was almost hieroglyphic. And so the letters and the words could almost have sometimes a hieroglyphic meaning that the words, each letter has a meaning in terms of what it’s a little drawing of something. And so those little drawings are also part of the meaning of the letters and ultimately possibly even the meaning of the words. But in Greek, you have this language, Greek, which lost its writing and then adopted a Semitic writing in order to, both Latin and Greek, they adopted a Semitic language in order to recover a written language. So there’s no connection between the written word and the oral word. And so it’s complicated, but the early Church Fathers do it anyways. You know, you read Irenaeus, you read the very early Church Fathers, and they do these types of calculations in the text. So I’m not saying that it’s impossible, but I would say that it’s important to focus on, if you’re going to focus on numerology, I would say start by understanding the first numbers. Like start by understanding what one means, what two, three, four, I could say up to, 12 maybe. If you can understand the first 12 numbers, for example, and understand what they mean metaphysically, you know, or cosmologically is a better word maybe to say, you know, that one is also in terms of geometry. So you can understand it like one is a point, right? Two is a line or that connects two points, then three is a triangle, four is a square, five is, you know, and so to understand that as well, then you can start to understand what the numbers can mean all the way at least up to 12. So I would say it’s better to do that first rather than get into the really complicated calculations because I would say that, although I do believe it’s possible and I do believe that you can get some insight from that, I’ve also seen a lot of wackiness in people who try to interpret numerology in the biblical text. You know, they go off on crazy tangents and those tangents are not sometimes not helpful because they’re not pointing you towards meaning. They’re not helping you, like they’re not helping you move towards something meaningful. So I would say start with that. So maybe one day I could do a video on that, kind of do a basic video on the meaning of one, two, three, for example. You know, that’s a great thing to understand. So maybe I’ll do that. I won’t do that here because that would take a while, but that might be an idea for a video. So, Andrew, I hope that answers your question. I’m sorry I didn’t read out your answer, but it would just, if I read it out, it would just be gibberish to people because it would just be a bunch of numbers. I don’t think people would be able to follow in oral terms your example. All right. So Robert Smiths asks, In your video about ice cream licking, you spoke of the problem of bringing the margins into the center. The lectionary for this week included Leviticus 23-22. When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. That’s a really important text, by the way. One might think that farmers could most efficiently gather the gleanings and be required by the law to perform the charity of giving to the poor. But the law leads the gathering of the gleanings to the sojourners themselves. Is the law recognizing the inherent reflex that if the farmers gather the gleanings, they might be tempted to keep it themselves? Does this say something about the efficiency of government versus private charity? I don’t know if it says something about the efficiency of government versus private charity, but what it does definitely say, talk about is the problem of accounting for everything. The problem of trying to account for everything. And so, you could see in this text, you could see the, what is it, the, how’s it called, the uncertainty principle or whatever. This idea that, I talk about the fringe and I talk about how you need to leave a fringe. In order for the world to exist properly, if you try to account for everything, you try to fit everything inside, right? So it’s like you have a field and you try to bring all the grain into your barn. Then you will not feed the sojourners. You will not feed the strangers. You will not feed those that are aliens in your land. And then that’s a problem, right? That’s a problem because the marginal needs to have a space in the fringe. And it needs to, there needs to be some things that are left in the dark because if you don’t leave room for them, they’re going to build up and then they’re going to attack or they’re going to take over. It’s not going to work. And so the principle of leaving the corner of the field is the same principle as having a narthex in the church. It’s the same principle as people as a Persian rug, that they leave a fringe on the edge of the Persian rug. It’s the same principle as the fringes on the vestments in the, described in the Bible as well. The idea of leaving a fringe on the edge. And that’s really important. I’ve talked about this before. One of the reasons for, let’s say, the Pride movement is that early modernism was the very opposite of that. Early modernism was castrating gays, was chemically castrating gays, were incarcerating, pursuing people, going into their private life and revealing them and then trying to put them in asylums, all that type of stuff. They weren’t leaving margins on the fringe. And in America, people don’t realize that America is this weird pendulum that goes back and forth, that only in America would there be, on the one hand, what was it called? Now my mind is blank. When alcohol was illegal, prohibition. Then on the one hand, there would be something as insane as prohibition. And then on the other hand, there would be the 1960s and drug culture and Jimmy Garcia and the Grateful Dead. That’s America. Because it’s swinging back and forth. You have to leave room for the fringe and just leave it as the fringe. As long as it doesn’t try to come in, then it’s fine. Just leave it. And that’s part of the idea of leaving the edges of your field for people to glean. All right. So XRD says, you mentioned your mention of area on a grande in the ice cream, like liquor’s video. That comment just, man, I said that just at the top of my head and then everybody made comments about that thing. But anyways, got me thinking about a recent song by her, God is a Woman, and the spread of these goddess cult movements. Yes, which is a regression from all I know. Have you done any talks or written anything about the resurgence of these, if not any thought? So I haven’t talked about this, but I think that just like the problem of, just like the problem that I mentioned before in terms of pride, for example, it’s the same problem. The modern enlightenment world is an exclusively masculine idea. It’s an exclusively masculine manifestation. It’s science. It’s reason. It’s conquering nature. It’s conquering, it’s colonizing the world, bringing science and rationality to the ends of the world, mapping the entire universe, mapping, you know, making, mapping the human genome, you know, all that mapping is a masculine action, dominating mapping, all that. And so, the, first of all, feminism, and then God is a woman type of thinking, the resurgence of Wicca and all these weird kind of pseudo-feminine religious movements are a reaction to that. They’re a reaction to the over-masculine and the same thing with the postmodernism. We talked about how Derrida is trying to formulate a feminine mode of being and the answer is that’s true. Doing that is dangerous and it actually can fragment society, but you can at the same time understand the urge to do it because of the over-masculine, the masculine overreach of the enlightenment and modernity. And so, you know, and my, I think that it starts with the Reformation, I’m sorry to say, it starts with the Reformation and the demonizing of the Virgin Mary and the casting aside of the Virgin Mary within the story of the church, within the practices of the church, leaving no room for the feminine has, I think, is what sparked this problem. Moving and then moving up to today. And so on the one hand, you know, I’m not obviously not justifying this nonsense. It’s all nonsense. These Wicca and all this baloney, I’m not justifying it, but we need to understand the patterns by which even the things we don’t like, we need to understand that they don’t come about arbitrarily. You know, revolutions don’t come about arbitrarily. We can be against revolutions, but we have to understand that they’re part of a pattern. If we don’t understand that, then we’re going to be slaves to that pattern. All right, so Mark Peters says, Hello Jonathan, in the last Q&A, you made a statement that in the West, there’s a tendency to think of God as stasis versus in the East as a dynamic community of love. Immediately, the static God notion came out of the West and one reaction to it was the process theology of Alfred North Whitehead, where God is in the process of becoming along with the West. The process of becoming along with us. However, I’m much more familiar with the philosophy and theology that helped develop the idea of person from explications of the Trinity, that God is immutable does not mean that God is static. Here’s where we get this notion of the person. Mark, you’re a right on target with what I was talking about before. So that doesn’t mean that God is static, that he is concrete as the creator and sustainer of all beings. So he’s intimately present to each of us in a most perfect way. I do see what you see, however, my instinct is not to place static distinction between East and West since unfortunately, distinctions like that tend to calcify into separations and we need each other. Yeah, I mean, sure, that’s fine. I think that I think for sure that the Alfred White Northhead response or his solution to the problem, I don’t think it’s a good solution. And it’s like I said, I think that the static nature of the interrelationship of the persons in the Trinity should not be seen as change in the way that we understand change in a finite world. We shouldn’t we shouldn’t confuse that there are no there are no Christian like Orthodox small old Orthodox Christian theologians who who think that God is in is the process of change or something like that. All right. So Drew McMahon asks during the Better Left Than Said documentary interview, you were are asked about strange seeming contradictory aspects of Christ like him saying I came to bring fire, pick up your sword, Peter, but then tells him not to use it, etc. And when interviewer asked you what those mean, you said you wouldn’t answer those mystical questions. What’s mystical about it? Can you answer it here? Why the hesitancy? So for that’s the first part. And then similar to that topic in the same interview, you talked about I know I talked about that in the shared inheritance conference about knowing people have tried hesychasm on their own rather than with a church father, but when crazy, can you talk about that more? I guess I mean that so the first question, what’s mystical about it? There are some things about Christ that are very difficult to talk about. And I usually I’ll tell you, you know, it’s like the crucifixion is really hard to talk about. Especially the crucifixion or just the whole story of the crucifixion is very difficult to talk about because it seems like like Christ is is jamming the entire cosmos into one event. And so all the contradictions are being brought into the story. All these things are kind of being played against each other, being resolved. And so, you know, it’s really hard to to to talk about it because, you know, on the one hand, you have I talked about this before you have Christ on the cross dying, but there’s this image that he’s above, he’s above others. And he’s also it says on his on the writing above his head that he’s the king, but it said mockingly, but then it actually is true. And so it’s like this weird inversion upon inversion upon inversion, which actually kind of brings everything together. The same when he’s beaten and they put the crown of thorns on him and they beat him and they say they bow before him and they say that he’s the king. And so it’s like they’re actually manifesting his kingship in the mocking in the fact that they’re mocking him as a fake king. They’re inadvertently it’s flipping on them and they’re actually manifesting his royalty at that while he’s also still going to the bottom. So it’s like he’s going to the bottom, going to the top at the same time. And that’s the cross. Like it’s the lowest and the highest brought together. You know, he goes into the Holy of Holies and then goes down into Hades. And so those things are really hard to talk about. And so I can kind of point you in the direction, but I’m not encompassing the whole mystery because the mystery is in the mystery. It’s like I can point you to the two opposites and tell you, you know, Christ says, bring a sword. And then he says, don’t use it. Christ, you know, Christ, you know, Christ, like I said, Christ is crucified as a thief, but he’s also the king. He’s all this is going on at the same time. So I can show you the opposites, but I can’t show you how it comes together. I can’t because that’s an invisible thing. It’s like this invisible place where all these things are pointing to and they’re saying this spark, this invisible mystery. I can’t say it. Not because I don’t want to, because I can’t because it’s not, it’s beyond saying, but I can show you all the things that point to it. And so it’s in that sense that when I say things like, you know, Christ says this, and then you said the opposite. One of the craziest examples that I can think of is in the Bible is Christ says to Peter, he says, you, Peter, you’re the foundation. You’re the stone on which, you know, I will build my church. And it’s like, then the next verse he says to Peter, get behind me, Satan. And it’s like right next to each other. It’s like one verse, next verse. Like, how do you deal with that? How do you deal with that? You can’t deal with that. So Christ does that all the time. He does these things where he’s showing you it’s not, it’s obviously not arbitrary. It’s not a, it’s not an accident. It’s not a contradiction in the simple sense where it’s like he says something and he says the other thing and he doesn’t know. Like he’s presenting you these two things and in this weird, in these two extremes, and he’s like, you need to see where they come together, but I’m not going, I can’t show that to you. So hopefully that’s a good answer. In terms of hezikasm, you know, it’s mostly that hezikasm is a very intense practice of continual prayer. And so what you’re doing is you’re actually rewiring your entire being so that it becomes this one prayer. And so the idea is that you repeat the prayer so much, you time it with your breath, with your heart, with your movements. You know, there’s all these stories of like the fathers, they’re, let’s say they’re digging a hole and they’ll dig the hole with the prayer. It’s like when they make this movement, this other movement, it’s like, you know, inhale, exhale, all of that is kind of coming together. They’re basically trying to rewire their being. And so if you’re not, if you’re not being guided, you can just become schizophrenic. I mean, because it’s a dangerous thing to do. Like to actually rewire your entire being, it’s very dangerous. And if you do it also without someone, if you don’t connect yourself to a hierarchy to a certain extent and you’re on your own doing it, you don’t have the protection of a hierarchy. You don’t have someone who’s responsible for you taking the responsibility away from you, saying, this is, I’m telling you to do this. This is not you. It’s not pride because I’m the one telling you. And I could tell you to stop doing it and you would have to obey. So it’s not pride because the problem is you do it in pride, then you will fall into all kinds of excesses and you can lose control. Now, it doesn’t mean that you cannot say the Jesus prayer. You can say it, you can do the Jesus prayer for 15 minutes in the morning. You can do it, you can say 100 times or 500 times or whatever. You know, it’s useful to do that. You can also use the Jesus prayer when you’re being attacked by thoughts or attacked by certain desires. You can use it to kind of center yourself and come back into an attentive prayer for mode. All those things are fine. That’s not the problem. The problem is only the… The only problem is the constant prayer, is really giving yourself over to doing it all the time, nonstop. You know, that’s crazy. I mean, it’s dangerous. So hopefully that answers that, you know. But I hope people didn’t think that I was telling them not to do the Jesus prayer because you should. You should totally do it. You should just do it in a… You should still do it in the church. You should still not just do it on your own. You should do it with someone kind of guiding you, following you, some, you know, a confessor or someone who’s still your authority. Even if they’re not an actual expert or a monk, an expert on that subject. So, all right, guys. So, all right. So let’s see. I am now… I’m going into the super chat. So now I was able to find them. So, all right. So let’s see. Let’s go and go to the first… All right. This is going to work, guys. Okay. So here we go. So Michelle Alta asks, why was hell created and how? So this is a really problematic question because… Hell… Okay. So what do you mean by hell? So hell means death. So hell is Hades, right? So hell means death. And there’s a difference between death and the river of fire, you could call it. You know, the lake of fire that’s described in revelations or that’s described by Christ at some point. Gehenna, you could call it. And so… Death itself is a product of sin. It wasn’t created so much as a side effect of missing the mark. When you miss the mark, things start to break apart and you decompose. And that’s death. That’s why it’s represented in the ground. You know, that’s why the idea that hell is below, you know, it’s down there. All this imagery is to show you that hell has to do with decomposition. It has to do with breaking apart, losing cohesion, losing memory, losing connection to your body, between the body and the soul, something like that. And so it’s not that it was created, it’s just that it is a side effect of sin. It’s a side effect of missing the mark. So I hope that answers that question. So the idea then of the fire or the fire of Gehenna or the river of fire that comes from the throne of God, that’s more complicated. Because to some extent, there’s an idea that that fire is God or is the presence of God. And it’s the presence of God which is burning. And I’ve talked about this before. It’s that if you let yourself be transformed, you know, if you let go of your animosity, if you let go of your resentment, if you let go and you turn yourself towards love, then the fire that comes from the throne of God will be a deifying fire. That that fire will bring you closer, will consume you in a positive way, will consume you, you know, like the love between two lovers, like that type of consuming. But the fire can also burn you in the, if you refuse to be changed, then that fire is acting like coals on your head. It’s burning you, you know, it’s burning you because you don’t want God to, you don’t want to be transparent to reality. You don’t want to be transparent to God, to the infinite. You want to hold on. You want to hold on to your thing, to your pride, to your whatever, to your little idiosyncrasies. You want to hold on to them. And so then here comes this absolute, you know, this fire that is absolute and is there to open up everything and to show everything. And you don’t want to, so that’s going to burn you. It’s going to hurt. And so that is a different, that seems to be the vision of hell which the Orthodox are adopting mostly. So hopefully that answers that. All right. Can you expand on the vinegar that was offered to Christ on the cross? To me, this is Stephen Anderson, sorry. Stephen Anderson asked, can you expand on the vinegar that was offered to Christ on the cross? To me, it seems like an inversion of wine, but just wondering what you made of it. I don’t know if it’s an inversion of wine in the sense that it is, it’s like, it’s an image of death. It’s an image of wine that you can’t drink anymore. Something like that. Like death taken to the extreme to a point where you can’t drink it anymore. And so that’s what I would say vinegar represents. But I think that there’s probably multiple meanings for vinegar. To be honest with you, I haven’t thought about this so much. All right. I guess I’m supposed to tell the amount. Stephen Anderson gave 3 USD. The Mad Truth 5 US asks, have you ever come across the truth from a metaphor where what happens in the metaphor actually occurs? I really don’t, not sure I understand that question. I have a problem with the word metaphor and I’ve expressed that several times. I have a problem with the notion of metaphor in the sense of, you know, Rhett Weinstein uses it. I don’t think that’s a proper way to view symbolism. If what you mean is symbolism happens, then if you follow my channel, you know symbolism happens. It inevitably happens. And so there are stories which are symbolic, which are that are based on events, you know, or that gather events together in a symbolic story or a symbolic way of presenting. And there are some that can be fictional. You can have a fictional story which is symbolic. You can have a… And so it just depends on the story and it depends on what happened. But reality, the world out there is symbolic. It’s not arbitrary. It’s not random. It manifests itself in orderly patterns to you. That’s how we… And even the disorderliness of it is part of the pattern. That’s why I talk about the fringe, about the edge, about the exception. All of that is part of the bigger pattern of being. So TB AI for another 10, asked me, reconcile the second commandment against graven images versus iconography. So, that seriously is not something that I could do in the Q&A systematically. I can totally do it, but let’s just… I’ll do it in a very short manner, but hopefully I can make a video on that at some point. And the very short way in which I can explain it is the reason why God said in the second commandment not to make images and not to make images of God, because there’s something strange about that. You ever notice that it says in the Bible that human beings are made in the image of God? So, why is it that God says, don’t make images? Don’t make images. And the answer is because God was going to give us an image. God was going to give us an image in the person of Jesus Christ. That is that Christ is the visible image of the invisible Father. And so, you have a problem, which is, if I had a picture of Jesus, like if I had been able to take a picture, like a photo of Jesus, I could show it to you. And if I ask you this question, if I said, can you recognize Jesus? And you say, yeah, yeah, I recognize Jesus. So, is this a picture of God? How would you answer that question? It’s tough. And so, that was the struggle at the beginning of the church, is how do we deal with this problem? Which is that in first century Galilee, you could point and say, hey, where’s God? And you could say, there’s God. You could point to Jesus and his face is the face of God. How do you deal with that? And so, the early church struggled and there was a war. So, the early church struggled and there was a war. There was an iconoclastic controversy where there was a war between factions because it was so important to understand it. And the conclusion is extremely important. The conclusion is not only that it’s permitted to make images of Christ, but that if you do not make images of Christ, if you refuse to do so, you are in some respects denying an aspect of the incarnation. You are saying that Christ did not have an image, that Christ did not have a physical body, that Christ the man who was also God could not be seen and touched and in the world. And so, that is why there are icons because in the end, the second commandment is a promise that God would give us that image. To have icons is to answer the second commandment by saying, and this is how they ended up answering it, is that we do not make images of God. We represent the person of Jesus Christ. We do not represent his divinity. We represent his image as a testimony to the reality of the incarnation and to the extent to which we also are in that restored image of Christ. Then that not only opens up, but makes the image part of the revelation that God put in Christ, that the image is part of that, that I can say that’s Christ. Is this a picture of Christ? Yes. And I tell people, even the most iconoclastic Protestant, you have a book with a picture of Jesus for kids and you ask the kid, hey, who’s that? And the kid, what were they going to answer? Oh, that’s Jesus. You have to deal with that theologically. You have to deal with that. And iconography has been the way that the church has dealt with it. So, that’s the short answer for now. And maybe one day I’ll make a longer video on that. So, Christian Chad for 10 asks, I see you have a playlist on mimetic theory. Any thoughts on Girard’s or Eric Gann’s ideas that are ready to articulate? I think they provide a fruitful amendment to your dialogue with neuropsych types. Yeah, I just did an interview with an expert on René Girard. I think if you found that playlist on my YouTube channel, it’s the guy who made those videos. I interviewed him. We had a really great conversation about Girard. And so, I’ll probably be putting that up next week or in a few weeks. I’m not sure. I’ve got videos kind of piling up. And so, either next week, this week or next week, I will put out that discussion. And I think that there’s some interesting things to look at in Girard. I don’t agree with everything that he says, but for sure I think that there’s some interesting things to think. So, TB AI for 5 says, just to follow up, what are the negative consequences of systematizing, articulating the feminine mystery? Why do postmodern thinkers do this? So, the negative consequences of systematizing the feminine mystery is that it will end up being a kind of desacralization. Okay, so there are things which are true which when they are uttered can become untrue. And so, this is the problem. Let’s say, it’s very clear like in St. Ephraim the Syrian and St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Maximus the confessor and all the saints that I espouse and I look at. It’s very true to say that the purpose of creation is so that God would unite himself to his creation and that creation would become God by participation. And so, the purpose of creation is a form of deification. And there’s nothing weird about saying that in a strictly orthodox perspective. But if you say, I am God, that’s not the same. That’s not the same. That’s the devil. That’s Adam’s sin. That’s all that’s wrong about our world. And so, there are some things which cannot be uttered. And there are aspects of the feminine mystery which should not be uttered and should remain a mystery. And we saw that problem even in the orthodox church with a movement called Sofialogy where certain theologians tried to articulate the feminine aspect of the divine and did so in a manner which I think had that very effect. To betray the mystery and to expose something which ended up looking shameful when it was exposed. But is not shameful in its mysterious form, you could say. That’s the only thing I guess I can say about that. So, why do postmodern thinkers do this? Yeah, I mean, it’s a revolutionary move. It’s still a revolutionary move even though they don’t say it is. So, Chloe Goodman for 5, I notice Protestant Church is taking the so-called social justice warrior cause in its contemporary ideological form. Why would this be? This is something, I talked about this discussion I did with Henri Girard. I think you’ll get the answer to that in that talk. I’ll be putting it out soon. It has to do with the fact that in social justice ideology, there is something which on the first glance, people can think looks like Christianity. There is in Christ this notion of the innocent victim and that is part of Christ. And so the social justice mentality takes up the notion of the innocent victim, but then uses it as a club to attack others. And so uses it as a manner to give themselves power in order to destroy. In order to take down the hierarchy, the revolutionary tendency. And so people can be duped into thinking that caring for that which is marginal, giving to the poor, helping the widow, all of that, helping the sick, helping the needy, visiting people in prison, all of the things that Christ told us to do, which is this connection to the victims of society, this capacity to bring them, to give them love and to make them participate in the whole thing. That what they’re doing, they think that that’s what they’re doing. They think that by engaging in political action, by engaging in these demonstrations, by fighting for the rights of all these different marginalized groups, they think that it’s the same. And the difference is maybe too subtle for them to notice the difference between helping the poor and the poor guillotining the rich. Those two things are not the same. That caring for someone who is a sinner, caring for someone who is marginalized, but not, that doesn’t mean that then their marginal identity should redefine the normal world. Those two things are very different. And so I think that we can understand why they fall in that vein, but they’re being duped. So Rob Smith for $4.99 USD asks, opinion on Oedipus complex, totem and taboo. So I’m not sure what you mean by totem and taboo. Like I don’t know exactly what you’re asking. In terms of Oedipus complex, I mean, I don’t know. I find these things very uninteresting. I prefer the story of Oedipus to the Oedipus complex. The story of Oedipus is a very profound story that you could talk about. Maybe I’ll make that one of my Patreon videos. But I think that I’m not saying that there isn’t something in Freud that you can get from Freud. Because in Freud, there is a kind of weird attempt at symbolic thinking, but it’s usually very upside down. And I think that, for example, understanding the question of Oedipus and of incest in the terms that I present them or in the terms that my brother, Mathieu, presents them, gives far more fodder than Freud’s Oedipus complex. It can help you understand problems of causality. If you watch my cannibal babies video, I talk about the problem of cannibalism, incest, sodomy, all these things have to do with self-reference and breaking down of normal causality, which brings about chaos. You can check that out if you want. All right, guys. I think that we’re done. So, yeah. So I think I was able to stay on top of these super chats this time. So I appreciate you guys coming out. We have 165 people, which is cool. Most people, I think, more than even last time. So maybe I will continue to do it this way. And Christian Chad, maybe you can be my official moderator if you show up. Maybe I’ll post on the Facebook group because I trust a lot of those guys and see, who’s going to be there and wanting to be moderator because we didn’t want to keep the crap out of the chat. So, all right, guys. It was great to talk to you. Good questions. Stay tuned for more videos and all that stuff. And I will see all of you very soon. So bye, everybody.