https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=92smG8yr0L0
We have our domain of experience you know and it’s this is a hard thing to To get a grip on even though it should be the most obvious thing for the phenomenologists everything that you experience is real and So they’re interested in the structure of your subjective experience And you say well you have subjective experience and you have subjective experience So do you and there’s commonalities across all of those like for example? You’re you’re likely to experience the same set of emotions You know we’ve been able to identify canonical emotions and canonical motivations without that We couldn’t even communicate because you wouldn’t know what the other person was like you’d have to explain infinitely There’s nothing you could take for granted, but you can you know and Phenomenology is the fact that in the center of my vision my hands are very clear and then out in the periphery they get they disappear and Phenomenology is the way things smell and the way things taste and the fact that they matter and so you could say in some sense that Phenomenology is is the study of what matters rather than matter and it’s a given from the Phenomenological perspective that things have meaning that it and even you know even if you’re a Rationalist saying a cynic and a nihilist and you say well nothing has any meaning you still run into the problem of pain Because pain undercuts your arguments and has a meaning so there’s no escaping from the meaning you can pretty much Demolish all the positive parts of it, but trying to think your way out of the negative parts man Good luck with that because that just doesn’t work so Phenomenology is and now the Bible stories, and I think this is true of fiction in general is phenomenological and It Concentrates on trying to elucidate the nature of human experience, and that is not the same as the objective world But it’s also a form of truth because it is truth that you have a field of experience And that it has qualities the question is what are the qualities now ancient? Representations of reality were sort of a weird meld of observable phenomena things that we would consider objective facts and Subjective truth the projection of subjective truth, and I’ll show you for example I’ll show you how they’ve Mesopotamians viewed the world and they had a they had a model basically the world was a disk You know if you go out in a field at night. What does the world look like? What’s a disk? It’s got a dome on top of it Well that was basically the Mesopotamian view of the world and that view of the world that the people who wrote the first stories In the Bible believe too and on top of the dome there was water well obviously it’s like it rains right where does the water come? From well there’s water around the dome, and then there’s land. That’s the disk and then underneath that there’s water How do you know that well drill you’ll hit water? What’s under the earth obviously because otherwise? How would you hit the water and then what’s under that this freshwater? And then what’s under that well if you go to the edge of the disk you hit the ocean it’s salt water, so it’s Dome with water outside of it, and then it’s a disk that the dome sits on and then underneath that there’s fresh water And then underneath that there’s salt water and that was roughly the Mesopotamian world and you see you see that’s a mix of observation and Imagination right because that isn’t the world, but it is the way the world appears. It’s a perfectly believable cosmology From and the Sun rises in the sun sun sets on that dome It’s not like the thing is bloody well spinning who would ever think that up It’s obviously the Sun comes up and goes down and then travels underneath the world and comes back up again There’s nothing more self-evident than that well. That’s that’s that strange intermingling of Subjective fantasy let’s say right at the level of perception and actual observable phenomena and a lot of the the cosmology That’s associated with the biblical stories is exactly like that. It’s half psychology and half and half And half reality although the psychological is real as well so so that and to know that the biblical stories have a phenomenological truth is really worth knowing because You know the poor fundamentalists. They’re trying to cling to their moral structure, and you know I understand why Because it does organize their societies, and it organizes their psyche So they’ve got something to cling to but you know they don’t have a very sophisticated idea of the complexity of what constitutes truth And they try to gerrymander the biblical stories into the domain of scientific theory you know Promoting creationism for example as an alternative scientific theory It’s like this just that just isn’t going to go anywhere You know because the people who wrote these damn stories weren’t scientists to begin with there weren’t any scientists back then There’s hardly any scientists now. You know it’s it’s really it’s hard to think scientifically man It’s like it takes a lot of training and even scientists don’t think scientifically once you get them out of the lab And hardly even when they’re in the lab you know you got to get peer reviewed and criticized and like it’s hard to think So and however the people who wrote these stories thought was more like dramatists think more like Shakespeare thought But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t truth in it It just means that you have to be a little bit more sophisticated about your ideas of truth, and that’s okay You know there are truths to live by Okay, well fine, then we want to figure out what those are because we need to live and maybe not to suffer so much so So and so if you know that what the Bible stories and stories in general are trying to represent is the lived experience of conscious individuals like the structure of the lived experience of conscious individuals then that opens up the possibility of a whole different realm of understanding and eliminates the Contradiction that’s been painful for people between the objective world and and let’s say the claims of religious stories So okay Okay, so let’s let’s let’s take a look at the structure of the book itself So the first thing about the Bible is that it’s a comedy and a comedy has a happy ending right? So that’s a strange thing because the Greek God stories were almost always tragic now the Bible is a comedy It has a happy ending everyone lives. There’s a heaven so now what you think about that is a completely different issue I’m just telling you the structure of the story. It’s something like there was paradise at the beginning of time And then some cataclysm occurred and people fell into history and history is limitation and mortality and suffering and self-consciousness But there’s a mode of being or potentially the establishment of a state that will transcend that and that’s what time is aiming at So that’s the that’s the idea of the story now. It’s a funny thing that The Bible has a story because it wasn’t written as a book right it was assembled From a whole bunch of different books and the fact that it got assembled into something resembling a story is quite remarkable And what the question is then well what is that story about and and how did it come up as a story? And then I suppose as well is there anything to it it constitutes a dramatic record of self-realization or abstraction We already mentioned that it’s like the idea for example of the formulation of the let’s say the image of God is it an abstraction That’s how we’re going to handle it to begin with I want to say though because I said I wasn’t going to be any more reductionist Than necessary I know That the evidence for genuine religious experience is incontrovertible But it’s not explicable and so I don’t want to explain it away I want to just leave it as a fact and then I want to pull back from that and say okay Well, we’ll leave that as a fact and the mystery and but we’ll look at this We’re going to look at this from a rational perspective and say that the initial Formulation of the idea of God was an attempt to abstract out the ideal and to and to consider it as a Abstraction outside its instantiation. So and that’s good enough. That’s amazing. That’s an amazing thing if it’s true, but I don’t want to Throw out the baby with the bathwater. Let’s say it’s a collection of books with multiple redactors and editors So what does that mean many people wrote it? There’s many different books even and they’re interwoven together, especially in the first five books by people who I suspect took the traditions of tribes that had been brought together under a single political organization and tried to make their accounts coherent and So they took a little of this and they took a little of that and they took a little of this and they and they tried Not to lose anything because it seemed valuable or it was certainly valuable to the people who had collected the stories They weren’t gonna you know tolerate too much Editing but they also wanted it to make sense to some degree so it wasn’t completely logically contradictory and and and and completely absurd and so many people wrote it and many people edited and many people assembled it over a vast stretch of time and We have very few documents like that and so just because we have a document like that is Is sufficient reason to to look at it as a remarkable Phenomena and try to understand what it is that it’s trying to communicate Let’s say and then I said it’s also the world’s first hyperlink text which is which is that again and very much worth thinking about for quite a long time All right, there’s four sources in the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible Four stories that we know came together one was called the priest list There’s a source called the priestly and it used the name Elohim or El Shaddai for God And I believe L is the root word for Ella as well so And that’s usually translated as God or the gods because Elohim is Utilized as plural in the beginning books of the of the of the Bible and it’s newer than the Yahweh’s version Now the reason I’m telling you that is because Genesis 1 which is the first story isn’t as old as Genesis 2 Genesis 2 contains The Yahweh’s version contains the story for example of Adam and Eve and that’s older than the very first book in the Bible but they decided to put the newer version first and Well, it isn’t and I think it’s because it deals with more fundamental abstractions. It’s something like that It’s like it deals with the most basic of abstractions how the universe was created and then Segues into what the human environment is like and so that seems to be the logic behind it The Yahweh’s version uses the name YHWH which apparently people didn’t say but we believe was pronounced something like Yahuwah And it it has a strongly anthropomorphic God so one that takes human form it begins with Genesis 2 4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth win and it contains the story of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and Noah and the Tower of Babel and Exodus and Numbers along with the priestly version it also contains the law in the form just the form of the Ten Commandments Which is like a truncated form of the of the law. There’s the Elohis Source it contains the stories of Abraham and Isaac it it’s concerned with a heavenly hierarchy that includes angels It talks about the departure from Egypt and it presents the Covenant Code Which is this idea of that you know that society is predicated this was Israeli society was predicated on a covenant with God And that’s laid out in a sequence of rules some of which are the Ten Commandments But many of which are much more extensive than that and then the final one is the Deuteronomist Code and it contains the bulk of the law and the what’s called the Deuteronomic history And it’s independent of Genesis Exodus Leviticus and numbers and so we know that at least four now There’s debate about this like there is about everything you know so I’m brushing over a very large area of scholarship But people generally assume that there were multiple authors over multiple periods of time and the way they Concluded that is by looking at textual analysis You know trying to see where there are chunks of the stories that have the same kind of style or the same Reference and people argue about that because you know obviously it’s difficult to recreate something ancient But that’s that’s the basic idea so it is an amalgam of viewpoints About these initial issues and and that’s important to know so it’s like a collective. It’s a collective story