https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=8DEJpp8VSU8
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 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 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 a 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 Yahuas 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 Yahuas 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 Yahuas version uses the name YHWH which apparently people didn’t say but we believe was pronounced something like Yahuas 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 when and 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’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 for 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’ve 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 that’s important to know so it’s like a collective it’s a collective story and Okay now to understand the first part of Genesis I’m going to turn Strangely enough to Something that’s actually part of the New Testament and this is a central element of Christianity and It’s a very strange idea and it’s going to take a very long time to unpack But the idea this is what John said about Christ He said in the beginning was the word and so that relates back to Genesis 1 in the beginning was the word and the word was With God and the word was God some Well, you know three sentences like that take a lot of unpacking because well none of that seems to make any sense whatsoever Really right in the beginning was the word and the word was both with God and the word was God So the first question might be what in the world does that mean in the beginning was the word that’s the logos actually and The logos is embodied in the figure of Christ So there’s this idea and John that whatever Christ is the son of God is not only Instantiated in history say at a particular time and place as a as a carpenter in some backwards part of the world But also something eternal that exists up outside of time and space that was there right at the beginning And as far as I can tell what that logos represents is something like modern people It’s something like what modern people refer to when they talk about consciousness. It’s something like that. It’s more than that It’s like consciousness and its capacity to to be aware and its capacity to communicate It’s something like that and there’s an idea underneath that which is that being especially from a phenomenological perspective So the being that is experienced cannot exist without consciousness It’s like consciousness shines a light on things to bring it into being because without consciousness What is there? No one experiences anything? It’s like is there a is there anything when no one experiences anything? That’s the question and the answer that this book is presenting is that no you have to think about consciousness as a Constituent element of reality. It’s something that’s necessary for reality itself to exist now Of course it depends on what you mean by reality But the reality that’s being referred to here I told you already is this strange amalgam of the subjective experience and the world But the question is deeper than that too because it is by no means Obvious what there is if there’s no one to experience it in the whole notion of time itself seems to collapse at least in terms of something like felt duration and then the notion of size disappears essentially because there’s nothing to scale it and Causality seems to vanish and so and and we don’t understand consciousness not in the least we don’t understand what it is that is in us that gives illumination to being and what happens in the Old Testament at least in part is that that consciousness is associated with the divine now you think well is that a reasonable proposition and That’s a very complicated question, but at least we might note that there’s something to the claim Because there is a miracle of the experience and existence that’s dependent on consciousness I mean people try to explain it away constantly, but it doesn’t seem to work very well And here’s something else to think about I think that’s really worth thinking about people do not like it when you treat them like They’re not conscious Right they react very badly to that and then you don’t like it if someone assumes that you’re not conscious And you don’t like it if someone assumes that you don’t have free will you know that you’re just Absolutely determined in your in your actions, and there’s nothing that’s going to repair you and that you don’t need to have any responsibility For your actions it’s like our culture the laws of our culture are predicated on the idea Something like people are conscious people have experience people make decisions and can be held responsible For them that there’s a free will element to it and you can debate all that And fine But the point is is that that is how we act and that is the idea that our legal system is predicated on and there’s something Deep about it because you know You’re subject to the law But the law is also limited by you which is to say that in a well-functioning properly grounded democratic system you have Intrinsic value that’s the source of your rights Even if you’re a murderer we have to say the law can only go so far because there’s something about you. That’s divine Well, what does that mean well partly it means that there’s something about you That’s conscious and capable of communicating like you’re a whole world in unto yourself And you have that to contribute to everyone else and that’s valuable I mean that you can learn new things you can transform the structure Society you can invent a new way of dealing with the world you’re capable of all that It’s an intrinsic part of you, and that’s associated with this It’s associated. That’s the idea there is that there’s something about the logos That is necessary for the absolute chaos of the reality beyond experience to manifest itself as reality It’s an amazing idea because it gives consciousness a Constitutive role in the cosmos