Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - A Conversation with the Armoured Skeptic

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May 16, 2015 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

01:31:47

A Conversation with the Armoured Skeptic

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	Hello, everyone.
	I am having a conversation with the Armored Skeptic.
	And you all probably know him.
	But if you don't, there is a link to his channel in the description after this chat.
	Feel free, well, please check him out.
	So, Skeptic, how are you doing?
	Excellent.
	Yourself?
	Really well.
	Really well.
	It's a gorgeous day here, actually.
	So yeah, everything's been going great.
	So how exactly did you get into the whole being a skeptic on YouTube?
	What compelled you?
	Well, I have a video about it where I kind of dance around the subject a bit.
	I used to be quite theistic.
	You could even say that the group I was involved in was kind of culty.
	And over time, obviously, I realized through watching some of the more popular YouTube videos like Thunderfoot and The Amazing Atheist, Cult of Dusty, stuff like that.
	I started realizing that it's not only okay to question that stuff, but it's okay to not believe it as well.
	And excuse me.
	Eventually, I ended up becoming what I thought was an atheist.
	And the first atheist group that I found was the Atheism Plus.
	And they spouted ideas like equality and social rights and everything like that.
	And I thought that sounded great.
	And then I didn't realize until being in that group for about six months or so.
	And after they doxed me and publicly humiliated me, that it too was kind of a religion, almost like a cult.
	Sorry, just to clarify, we're talking about Atheism Plus here, right?
	Yes, correct.
	And they doxed you and harassed you.
	Correct, yes.
	Jesus Christ, these people.
	Sorry, I've heard that sort of story from so many people regarding the, I guess, we'll turn social justice worries that I don't know why I'm surprised.
	I don't know why I'm surprised.
	Well, I didn't realize, I didn't realize how much power these people had until one day my boss at work asked me about these accusations of me being a rapist.
	And that came completely out of left field because I have literally only had sex with three people in my entire life and they were the pushy ones.
	So anyways.
	That is, I mean, what you were at work and your boss was just like, so are you rapist then?
	Yeah, kind of.
	Yeah, so he dropped me in his arm.
	I didn't hear that, man.
	Yeah.
	He threatened to fire me.
	And I said, I literally have never heard anything about this.
	So I looked into it and realized that I had been doxxed.
	And all these people said that because I had questioned some of their ideas, not like the thesis of their concepts, but just one or two little key ideas in whatever blogs they've written, that that must mean that I'm a terrible human being.
	And I noticed that there was a pattern of this.
	Anybody who questioned even the smallest faction of some of some of the bigger names in the group would end up getting harassed for not agreeing with things that they said.
	So I started to realize that being an atheist doesn't mean being a skeptic.
	In fact, most skeptics, most atheists aren't skeptics.
	So I kind of adopted this idea where I put on, I mean, I've got metaphorical armor up now.
	So every idea that's ever come to me, I think about before I jump on board with it.
	And that's kind of how I came to it.
	And I actually ended up creating this account, the Armored Skeptic account, to kind of combat some of these atheism plusers.
	And that's not exactly the direction that this channel ended up going in.
	I didn't realize I would end up so popular.
	So I ended up just doing some fun stuff instead.
	That's really interesting, actually.
	I had no idea that there was so much to it.
	I just assumed that you had been someone who had, you know, just had a lot of experience of religious types in your day-to-day life and were just sick of their shit.
	Yeah, actually, most of my interactions with super religious types were online.
	Like I said, though, I was part of kind of a cult, but there aren't a lot of local members.
	Most of the members are actually in the United States, and most of the correspondence is over the internet for that as well.
	Right.
	Okay.
	Well, can I ask you about this cult?
	That sounds interesting.
	Yeah, it's kind of a cult.
	They don't really have a name or anything.
	They just call themselves Messianic Jews.
	They're people who believe that both the Old Testament and the New Testament are valid.
	And they cherry pick a lot less than normal Christians do.
	But they still don't go as far as to stone and things like that.
	But they still do animal sacrifices.
	And some of them actually live in the mountains in like the Ozarks to avoid society, live in off-grid communities so that they can follow their belief system without being oppressed.
	And some of these people take it to absolute extremes.
	But the leader of the group is the actual only blood-born Jewish person that's in the entire cult.
	Wow, this is quite a surprise.
	Okay, that's and I mean, what was it like?
	What were they like?
	They're actually really nice people, just extremely deluded.
	What do they believe?
	Well, they believe that they have to grow beards because the Bible says not to cut the corners of your beard.
	They believe that...
	I can support that.
	Yeah, me too.
	That's the one thing that I held after I left.
	But yeah, and they believe that they're supposed to observe the real Sabbath, which is sun down.
	Oh, am I right?
	Sun down on Friday to sun up on Friday to sundown on Saturday is the Sabbath, I believe.
	And they follow the cycles of the moon.
	Most of it's actually just kind of innocent stuff.
	But the overall, the overall theme of the cult, though, was to remove yourself from the world.
	So anything that was entertaining, like movies or music and stuff like that, we couldn't have any part of.
	Basically, we end up becoming very mentally detached from society and from culture as a whole.
	Right, okay, that's really interesting.
	I mean, there are a lot of historical precedents for that sort of thing.
	You used to get in early Christianity, used to get these people called the stylites who would literally go and climb a pillar in the desert and sit there for years.
	It was a really bizarre thing.
	I think Saint Simeon was one.
	That's a pretty extreme example, but I think Christians have always had kind of a persecution complex.
	And I mean, for the most part, they were right over history.
	The Romans and the Greeks and the Jews and all sorts of groups absolutely loathed them and wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with them.
	So they kind of developed this persecution complex and they'd live in communities of their own so they could avoid persecution.
	But, you know, after the religion became popularized by the Romans, it was kind of hard to develop this persecution complex anymore.
	But then, you know, nowadays in modern society, it's a free idea society.
	And I guess I think the persecution complex is starting to come back in a big way now.
	Yeah, I've noticed that a lot in American media, American Christians, Republicans, I suppose, most accurately.
	They definitely seem to think that there is a war against Christians.
	Oh, Fox News certainly perpetuates that.
	Yeah, and yeah, obviously, yeah, it's very advantageous for Fox News to drum up the fib.
	But the thing is, I mean, I suppose you could make that argument if you were heavily religious and then suddenly everyone was like, well, gay people should get married.
	I mean, that, you know, I can see why they would think that was abhorrent because they are heavily religious and it's a dictate from God that that's a bad thing.
	So, and you know, all of society kind of seems, well, I suppose a large part of society seems kind of geared against, well, them personally almost.
	So I could kind of see where they're coming from.
	I don't agree that there's a war on Christians, obviously.
	But, you know, just to play devil's advocate for a moment, I can kind of see what they're saying.
	Oh, yeah, I can't say that I entirely disagree, but a lot of it has been blown completely out of proportion.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, no one's going to stop them from being Christian, I think is the issue.
	And I hate to sound like the fucking young Turks because I feel like I'm sounding like the Young Turks saying that.
	But I really don't think anyone, even like, I don't think we're on the road to stopping people from being Christian, which I think is what they would, what they would probably argue.
	Sorry, go on.
	Oh, yeah.
	There's a very, very small, ineffective faction of militant atheists who are trying to abolish Christianity or at least Christianity's control and influence on society.
	But the kind of things they go after are so superficial and their success rate is very small.
	Like getting a Christmas tree out of the town square or no, more specifically, getting a nativity scene out of a town square.
	They take great offense to this.
	Yeah, I hate that sort of thing.
	I mean, I'm obviously not Christian.
	I don't have any particular love for anything like that.
	But nativity scenes, come on, for fuck's sake.
	Oh, yeah, they're very benign.
	We have one out in front of the city hall here in my city and oh, during the Christmas season.
	And I actually kind of like it because it puts me in the Christmas spirit.
	And I see it as nothing other than a symbol of Christmas as itself.
	That's very much cultural, isn't it?
	Yeah, there are also militant atheists who have gone after people who put crosses on the side of the road to mourn children that died in car accidents and things like that.
	I find that absolutely abhorrent.
	I don't enjoy that at all.
	I think people go way too far when they interfere with somebody's mourning process like that.
	Yeah, it's totally unnecessary, isn't it?
	Okay, so is there anything about Christianity specifically that you feel compelled to criticize over other religions, or is it just the closest one, I suppose?
	It is the closest one.
	It's the one that I have the most experience with.
	I was raised as a Christian.
	And in my part of Canada, at least, there's nothing but really Christians around here.
	The Muslim population is very, very small.
	And I'm not even sure that there's even a mosque in the area.
	Wow.
	That is a small Muslim population.
	There's a mosque in pretty much every city in England these days.
	Yeah, I believe if I was English like you, that I would be much more focused on Islam as a whole.
	I don't know as much about it because I have less experience with it.
	Well, it's basically, I personally think that Islam is informed by a lot of Christian Apocrypha.
	In the sort of fourth century, you had various councils that basically codified the Bible.
	You probably know this, but they codified the Bible.
	And a lot of stuff kind of got pushed outside of the Roman Empire, which Arabia is, you know, outside of the Roman Empire, but very close to it.
	And so you've got interesting things in the Quran.
	Now, in chat, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but because I'm just pulling this off the top of my head.
	And I haven't read anything about the Quran for quite some time, so I just haven't needed to.
	But I'm pretty sure that one of the main things that the Muslims think is that Jesus didn't die on the cross.
	Now, correct, they did a body swap.
	Exactly.
	They think, yeah, exactly.
	They think he did body swap.
	Now, I think it was Saint Augustine of Hippo who wrote that if Christ didn't die on the cross, then all of Christianity is undone.
	None of it means anything if Christ didn't die on the cross.
	So needless to say.
	Somewhat true.
	Modern Christianity.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So you can imagine how necessary it is that some of the tenets of Islam are not correct for Christians.
	People think they are, they're all probably just the same, you know, but there are some pretty sharp dividing lines there.
	Yeah, and it's kind of funny because the parts of the Bible where it says that Jesus's death was actually important weren't written until well after the Gospels.
	The Gospels say nothing about his death meaning anything other than it just being a tragedy.
	Yeah, they were just sad to leave.
	I suppose to lose their cult leader.
	Yeah, and then it wasn't even Mark, the first gospel, where he ends up coming back to life.
	They kind of retconned that and rewrote the ending of the Bible so that the people or the person that Mary saw at the tomb was Jesus alive again.
	And then they kind of do a fade to black after that.
	You know, it's interesting as well.
	With Islam, Muhammad isn't mentioned for about 100 years after the inception of Islam.
	I think it was, I read this a while ago, so I'm probably wrong, but I think it was the Abbasid Caliphate, where they started circulating coins with Muhammad written on these coins.
	And that's where the sort of meme of Muhammad being God's messenger comes from.
	It was literally like 100 years after the inception of Islam, which kind of suggests that in the beginning of Islam, I mean, it probably was a guy called Muhammad because, like Jesus, it was a common name.
	Oh, very common, yes.
	Yeah, exactly.
	You know, there were dozens of prophets called Jesus, you know, so it's not did Jesus exist, it's which one was the Jesus.
	But that's the thing.
	In the beginning of Islam, Muhammad wasn't really that important a figure.
	It's a strange thing, isn't it?
	It gets completely retconned to be insanely important.
	And I think it's just like with Jesus, there were dozens of prophets roaming around Dark Ages Arabia, you know.
	So they've got one.
	It's quite interesting.
	I can't remember the guy's name, but it's someone, the liar.
	I can't remember the name.
	And literally, he was a competing prophet in pre-Islamic Arabia.
	And he was almost preaching the same sort of stuff.
	But obviously, Muhammad and one, it was due to this general called Khaled Ibn al-Walid, who was a really great general.
	And he basically kicked a load of ass.
	And that's why the other guy is known as the liar, effectively.
	And Muhammad is known as the prophet of God.
	Oh, that's really interesting.
	Now, the concept of the Quran, if I'm correct, is that the Jewish Torah and scriptures and the Christian scriptures were all corrupted over time and with liars, and that God spoke the one true Bible, as it were, to Muhammad who wrote the Quran.
	Is that correct?
	Okay.
	That is how I understand that their opinion of it is.
	Muhammad is the seal of the prophets because, yeah, everyone keeps fucking up God's precious religion.
	Well, you know, maybe he's just not saying it right.
	I don't know.
	So that's why there are so many biblical stories in the Quran then.
	Basically.
	It's all, I mean, they all think they're worshiping the same God.
	It's all the God of Abraham.
	And so it really is all the same, just biblical stories lifted.
	And it's just, it's funny.
	It just seems to be changing the accent.
	So the spelling is just slightly different, but it's almost exactly the same story.
	That's interesting.
	Right.
	But they don't believe that they followed.
	They believe that they followed his other son, Abraham's other son, Cain.
	Is that correct?
	Or is that a Christian concept?
	I think that's probably a Christian concept.
	I don't think they think that.
	I mean, they used to be called the Ishmaelites because you had Israel, which is the presumable progenitor of the Jews.
	And they've got Ishmael, who is the progenitor of the Arabs in biblical fucking genealogies.
	And so it's after that.
	I mean, they think they're, you know, they think everything's pretty much hunky-dory until that sort of position where they split.
	But again, I think that's probably Christian propaganda.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, it sounds like it for sure.
	Yeah, I don't know why people would admit that they're the descendants of Abraham's rejected son.
	Yeah, I don't think they would.
	I don't think they would.
	I'm sure that they think they're the descendants of Ishmael.
	I should have checked, really.
	I'm sure the chat's going crazy.
	I don't know what the fuck are you talking about?
	So what do you think of non-Abrahamic religions then?
	I find them overall less offensive to my intelligence.
	People constantly ask me about Buddhism because I have said critical things about Buddhism.
	Again, it's probably one of the least offensive of all the religions.
	If people even go as far as to say it's not a religion, but it is, obviously.
	It's interesting, isn't it?
	It's a religion that can accommodate other gods.
	It is, yeah.
	It's kind of just an open, free, hippie-like religion where, you know, you go with what feels good and go with what kind of confirms your own bias.
	And there's good ones, especially, you know, they don't eat meat because they love animals.
	And that's all very commendable concepts.
	But there is obviously a lot of praying and a lot of meditating and stuff.
	And those are very religious acts.
	They are, but I mean, aren't they supposed to be good for you as well?
	Oh, meditation is.
	Yeah, it is.
	I think prayer effectively had the same sort of effect.
	You know, you'd get people who would spend a lot of time praying.
	And I imagine it's probably the same sort of thing, really, isn't it?
	I mean, what's the difference?
	No, I suppose you're correct.
	Yeah, I suppose they'd have about the same effect.
	Yeah.
	No, actually, no, I do remember seeing a study where they did an active MRI scan of somebody who was praying and watching different lobes and portions of the brain basically being affected and activated and causing endorphins and things like that to spread throughout the body.
	And yeah, so I guess it is about the same thing.
	I don't know if I've never seen an MRI scan of somebody who is meditating, but I can propose a hypothesis that it probably has about the same effect.
	Yeah, I imagine it's all pretty much the same bloody thing, isn't it?
	Yeah, don't Buddhists believe in, isn't it some sort of the great wheel or something that everything's on this wheel?
	And the whole point of Buddhism is to step off the wheel.
	I believe that's Buddhism.
	They believe in reincarnation and they believe that you're stuck in this constant cycle where you're born and you die and then you're born and you die.
	And you have to basically become a Buddhist monk every single time you come back to get closer and closer to the achievement of, as you said, stepping off the wheel and ascending to Nirvana.
	And they said, I can't remember which Dalai Lama was, if it was the most recent one or the one before, where he was asked if anybody's ever ascended.
	And he says that it's possible, but he doesn't think so.
	So even they even they see it as a next-to-impossible achievement.
	I thought that the point was that Buddha was the only person to have actually done it or something.
	Yeah, maybe.
	It's possible.
	Though people have claimed that they are the reincarnation of Buddha and there have been people that have believed it.
	Of course, you know, you're always going to get these sort of fucking people there.
	But I always figure that if you're the one person you're like, you know how I can, I've figured out how to step off of the wheel of existence.
	Even the gods are in this sort of wheel of existence.
	And I've stepped off it.
	It's like, isn't that lonely?
	You know, you're the only person to have done this.
	Well, if the gods aren't even past that level, then yeah, that would be quite lonely.
	I thought I, yeah, most other religions, their idea is that when you've ascended, you ascend to be with the gods.
	So yeah, I guess that makes it a quite unique religion in that respect.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I mean, if we talking about Eastern religions, some of my favorite are the Indian ones.
	Yeah, Hinduism.
	Yeah.
	My sister bought me the Ramayana and a Bhagavita.
	I can't remember how it's pronounced.
	Yeah, Bhagavad Vita.
	That's it.
	Yeah.
	It's some crazy shit.
	It's neat, though.
	It's kind of like ancient superheroes, if you want to look at it like that.
	It's like a science fiction version of the Iliad.
	It's fucking amazing.
	The neat thing about Hinduism is that every village and every group of people, depending on the region that they're from, they have different patron gods that they follow.
	And they all kind of recognize the mosaic of however many hundred gods there are, but they kind of focus on one that is specific to their lifestyle.
	So, you know, people who are farmers, for example, I can't remember the name of the god.
	I'm not as well versed in the religion.
	Oh, yeah.
	They follow the god of creation and fertility and stuff like that.
	Or there's people that get attacked by elephants on a regular basis and they worship the god of elephants to try to appease him and stuff like that.
	Aren't there supposed to be like millions of gods in Hinduism?
	It's possible.
	I think they kind of took the Greek effect and they have a god for literally every single thing that's possible.
	Like I think that if doorknobs existed in Rome, there would have been a god of doorknobs.
	Yeah, they were literally a god for everything.
	Which, you know, I would have thought that that was, you'd get people looking around and going, you know, are we not kind of maybe we're just making this up as we go along.
	You know, maybe, maybe if we've like got we've got a god of like the hearth or something, it's okay, why does my fireplace have a god?
	Yeah, that's that's a that's I'm sure that there were people that were quite skeptical of the gods of grass and the gods of seagulls and things like that.
	But I mean, I think it was it was a really important thing specifically for the, for the military to have a god that they all followed um, because militaries that had uh a patron god, specifically gods of of war, uh tended to do better uh, morale wise um, I think my favorite example of that is is the?
	Uh, the Scandinavian god Thor, where they believed Thor was the best and strongest warrior and uh, his hammer Milnir, was the best weapon there was, and uh and uh yeah, there was uh quite, quite a lot of passion in those people.
	Uh, you can tell, because they they wanted to ascend to Valahalla to be with Thor on the, you know, the Great Banquet Hall Of Of vanquished warriors.
	Yeah the the, the whole, the whole um, afterlife was just a continuous battle, wasn't it?
	They'd fight during the day and then uh feast during the night and then, you know, anyone was dead, was resurrected, weren't they?
	Yeah, it's quite an alien concept to us in our modern Western society but um, back in the day, in the uh, in the early to late Iron Age and well into the medieval age uh, that's all people knew was war.
	You're either fighting the Romans or you're fighting the Barbarians.
	You're fighting the english.
	You were uh, fighting the uh, you know anybody that was in a competing village.
	It was just war, was just the way of life.
	People were dying constantly by the sword.
	You know what's interesting though, is it?
	You're right it.
	You know it was a lot more endemic, but it was also the scope was a lot smaller.
	This is one thing that I think, after the sort of uh Napoleonic, uh Wars, everyone kind of forgets, is that war grew really really big with the advent of the nation state.
	Before then it was always really small.
	So you know, like you know I mean, like you know, the king of England might invade France, but people in England, what difference that made to them?
	You know that didn't even make a difference to the people in the south of France.
	So you know it was, it was.
	It was a lot smaller but, as you said, it was a lot more endemic, and you know it was a lot more uh, common.
	Yeah, I often wondered um, what it was like for people Who, you know, the Christians who lived in the forest, which, for those of you who don't know much about English history, forest didn't literally mean the woods.
	A forest was a region that was in control by some sort of a king or a monarch-like figure.
	And what people that lived in the forest basically had to pay homage and pay taxes to whatever king was the most powerful person in that region.
	And when this king would go to war, he would conscript people that lived in the forest in the region around that he controlled.
	And he would take people who were hunters and he would give them armor-piercing arrows and then take them across the river to battle whatever other king or whatever other forest or even other nations.
	And then if they ended up winning, they might end up occupying that space for years.
	So you could be just minding your own business, tending to your farm.
	And then the king comes along and takes you off to France.
	And all of a sudden, now you live in France for the next 10 years because you've won that battle.
	And that was kind of the way of life back then.
	Yeah, broadly speaking, I mean, you did have, I mean, it depends who you were.
	That's the thing.
	It depends who you are and where you were.
	I mean, I think that's probably a lot more true for the continent than it would be in England.
	I mean, after the Norman Conquest, pre-Norman Conquest, it probably was very similar to that.
	But after the Norman Conquest, a lot of the English kings tended to use mercenaries.
	They tended actually pay their troops.
	So they ended up with quite small, but pretty elite armies of yeomen, effectively.
	Yeah, this is back to the age of chivalry, before the English basically abolished the practice.
	All right.
	So why the helmet and the suit then?
	That's something I've been wondering for a while, actually.
	Okay, well, there are people online that have been nicknamed white knights for blindly defending people who hold popular opinions and clearly show that they have no faculties of their own to be skeptical.
	And there's very derogatory uses of the term white knight, but I kind of just saw it as somebody who didn't think things through.
	So I wanted to portray myself as a black knight.
	And I thought, well, that's kind of cliché.
	So I thought, okay, I'll be a black Thai knight then.
	And so that name was already taken.
	So I just kind of came up with a bunch of names until I found one that wasn't already taken.
	But I'm kind of a medieval geek.
	I'm really big into the 17th century specifically, when gunpowder had basically been employed in the battlefield, but people were still wearing armor and people were still jousting and things like that.
	And I'm really big into jousting specifically.
	One thing that a lot of people don't realize with early gunpowder and armor is that the early guns didn't actually penetrate well-made armor, did they?
	No, the earliest handheld guns were basically a tube with flint at the end.
	And then the early cannons were, they must have been extremely dangerous to use.
	But they had more luck of taking down somebody in armor.
	But you're right.
	They didn't end up penetrating armor.
	It wasn't until well after the War of Roses, which I think I could be wrong, but it's the first historical war that's been recorded that has a use of gunpowder in it in the West.
	And anyways, it wasn't until well after that that the rifle technology improved to the point where it not only penetrated the armor, but it would make a breastplate almost explode on somebody's chest.
	And then they ended up employing larger, thicker armor for people, and it became so heavy that knights just refused to wear it.
	Some of them would wear a chess piece, but for the most part, they just refused to wear it.
	Yeah, I remember seeing a documentary about they were showing basically going through cuirasses, and you'd see them with a dent in, and that was called the proof, which is apparently the proof that it could resist a shot.
	Right.
	Right.
	Just an interesting thing that I remember off the top of my head.
	So what do you just like medieval or late medieval Europe that you're mostly interested in then?
	Yeah, I'm big into jousting specifically.
	And jousting was always popular, even in the chainmail era.
	But it was more deadly back then.
	It was less of a sport and more of a showcase of who was the deadliest knight.
	But then eventually, I mean, people who were allies would kill each other for sport in front of crowds of people during peacetime.
	And it was because, like I said before, that's all they knew was war.
	If they weren't fighting the French or if they weren't fighting the Germans, they were fighting each other.
	All they wanted to do was put their blade through somebody else's chest.
	That was their entire purpose in life.
	It was almost, yeah, they were raised from birth to be knights.
	They would be a squire until they reached a certain age and then they were sworn in as a knight.
	All they ever knew was steel and blood.
	This was their life.
	But eventually, when that kind of practice was turned into more of a friendly sport, it was still pretty dangerous, but way, way less dangerous.
	They started doing sport jousting.
	And I've never done it myself, but it's very expensive to do, especially here in Canada.
	Yeah.
	The armor alone can cost you upwards of $50,000 if you want a really good suit.
	Yeah.
	And there's a lot of different schools of thought as to which armor is best.
	Some of the people around here wear stainless steel, but I feel it kind of has a tendency to explode if it's hit correctly.
	So I kind of like high-carbon rolled steel.
	And that's the really expensive stuff.
	So you have a suit of armor, is what you say.
	I have pieces, but not an entire suit.
	No, I couldn't afford an entire suit.
	Yeah, and then, but King Henry, I think he was really big into jousting, and he wanted his entire life to joust.
	And his father wouldn't allow him.
	And then as soon as Daddy died, he had the armorers build him a suit.
	And there's a lot of history to suggest that he had new suits of armor built constantly.
	We're talking about Henry VIII here, aren't we?
	Yes, yes.
	Henry VIII.
	I tell you what, if you, I'm just going to Google Henry VIII's armor because it's the funniest armor in the world.
	Well, it depends on which suit you're talking about.
	There were some extremely funny suits.
	There was one.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	Yeah, the one of the one of the most famous ones.
	I'm just going to do a screen share quickly so you can see it because it's not that there's anything wrong with the armor or anything like that.
	It's just got a massive cod piece.
	Oh, yes.
	Yes.
	You want an arrow to deflect off of that spot first, for sure.
	I just love that.
	It's so useful.
	Come on, Henry.
	That was one of his later armors.
	But you see, as time progressed, the stomach area got bigger and bigger and bigger over time.
	And you can't really blame him because a king was expected to eat bread and beer and meat.
	Yeah.
	So everyone else is scrawny and starving and you're fat and happy.
	Yeah.
	And diabetic.
	Don't forget diabetic.
	Yeah.
	So yeah, Henry, Henry VIII did enjoy his jousting, didn't he?
	Yeah, he went really overboard with it.
	He iconicized some of his more contemporaries, like, oh, what was his name?
	Not Maximus.
	I'm trying to remember his name now.
	There was a Holy Roman Emperor.
	No.
	I'm trying to remember.
	It was a German.
	He ended up actually gifting.
	He ended up gifting Henry with a suit of armor.
	And it's one of his funnier suits because the face was actually supposed to be his.
	Oh, man.
	I feel like an idiot for not remembering the name.
	But he had his own face basically engraved on the helmet.
	And then he gave it to Henry.
	And it has like a mustache and glasses on it and horns.
	And it's very flamboyant and it's quite hilarious.
	But I'm sure Henry would have been quite excited to see that.
	I actually Maximilian the first.
	Yeah, no, Maximilian.
	That's right.
	Yes.
	I think he was probably a Holy Roman Emperor.
	Oh, okay.
	A German Emperor, basically.
	Now, Maximilian had some impressive armor.
	Some of the pieces are some of the more unique pieces that there are.
	I'm not really sure how practical it would have been as jousting armor, but it had really interesting lines on it.
	And the helmet that he wore was definitely one of the more iconic pieces.
	And Henry, he was one of Henry's heroes growing up, one of his icons for sure.
	So I'm sure Henry would have been very excited to get this armor from him and would have worn Maximilian's face on his own face quite proudly at first until he came into his own and wanted to become more famous for being Henry the Jouster.
	Yeah, I tell you, that's honestly, it's awesome.
	What I love about this, I mean, it can't have been brilliant to have been ruled by these people, but to look at them in retrospect is hilarious, I think.
	Oh, yeah.
	They're quite hilarious characters.
	And, you know, it'd be nice to go back in time just to observe their behavior.
	I'm sure that we would gut bust laugh at some of the things they would say and do.
	But you're right.
	Having to live under these people's rule, I'm sure, was absolutely terrible.
	Well, you know what?
	There's kind of a double-edged sword, I suppose, because on the plus side, they probably didn't really give a shit what you did.
	That's the other side.
	You pay whatever amount of taxes you have to pay, and then they probably fuck off and leave you alone.
	It's not like governments today where they're legislating every tiny aspect of your life.
	So they're just, you know, I mean, yeah, they might ride through your village with a horde of knights And like burn everything, but um, on the you know, on the plus side, when they weren't doing that, they were probably quite tolerable.
	But, um, one thing that people, a lot of people don't realize is that the sort of early tournaments that Jousting grew out of were just like mock battles that would that would kind of take place like in a village or near a village, and like you know, that you just have all these knights uh fighting, you know, they'd form two teams and fight.
	And but you know, it was a proper fight, you know, people would die in this, it wasn't a battle, but yeah, they were there were peacetime peacetime tournaments, and yeah, they would basically be mock battles that would end with either surrenders or deaths.
	And there were most people were surrendering, yes, yeah, the deaths were not unusual.
	Um, and a lot of money could be made from this as well, from ransoming um uh a noble bank, you know, rich noble.
	So, but for the average peasant, it must have been a fucking nightmare, you know, just all these crazed knights fighting in your village.
	Oh shit, you know, yeah, but you could see that even later on, the war was just a game to them, and that's what kind of that's what the law of chivalry was all about: was knights would only fight knights but wouldn't kill each other, they would ransom each other, but everybody else would be killing everybody else.
	Um, so you could tell that there was absolutely uh no regard for human life.
	Uh, if you weren't a noble, your life meant nothing to them, it was all just part of the game.
	That now, that that's an important point that I think a lot of people, again, don't remember.
	Um, it, if you weren't a noble, you would just be killed, you know, on the battlefield.
	They had no regard for your life whatsoever, correct.
	And I wonder how much of it is just you know, linked to just well, you're not worth any money because that's uh, the main reason for capturing someone in battle was to get rich, yeah, exactly.
	And um, yeah, um, I lost my train of thought, but yeah, the every war, um, they would they would follow the law of chivalry.
	Uh, knights would never kill each other.
	In fact, oh, I remember what I was going to say, there was a very famous uh battle where a knight ended up getting a sword through the eye slot, and he got a couple more whacks in before he collapsed and fell off his horse.
	And all the other knights were so upset that a knight died, they ended the battle.
	All right, no, sorry, everyone, we're gonna have to just call it off.
	Look, someone's been injured, you know.
	Can you, if you can believe it, yeah, they had a funeral for him, all the knights from the opposing sides got together and mourned his death, and I'm sure that there were hundreds of bodies all over the place.
	Oh, no, I know, I realize that your brother just died, but but look, there's a knight, he's been injured.
	Um, you're a peasant, nobody cares.
	Exactly, exactly.
	See, now that that's one of the things, um, in the Hundred Years' War, that the that kind of drew um drove the French knights so crazy is that you know, the English were primarily um peasants, yeomen, you know, they were free men, but they were they weren't noble, and you know, that that was uh one of the things because everyone always asks, you know, why did they just charge them, you know, that charging them repeatedly, you know, they keep losing battles horribly doing this, and so yeah,
	but they were really enraged by the English these fucking upstart peasants have come along and they're just firing arrows like cowards.
	Yeah, that was when the uh the English abolished the practice of chivalry and the uh the English the English king basically decided, you know what, I don't want to play this game anymore, I want to own France, so let's take over hundreds of archers and just mow down everybody in armor that comes near us, and that's exactly what they did.
	And the first battle, the French were so surprised that the English were actually killing their knights, they probably didn't believe it at first.
	Thought, okay, maybe that was an accident.
	Let's send in some more knights, and then they mowed them down too.
	And they made them travel across a muddy field on horseback.
	The horses, I'm sure, were sinking into the mud.
	And yeah, that was the first time ever that knights had been killed on the battlefield intentionally.
	Yeah, it's a funny, funny world, isn't it?
	You know, when you look back, and just it's strange, just complete different attitudes to things.
	Because if you if you talk to like, like you said, it was a game, and I think that's, I think a lot of them did view it very much as I don't want to say game necessarily because it kind of's a bit flippant, I think, but I think sport is a lot for a lot of the knights, it probably was very close to sport.
	Yeah, I'm sure that that's quite accurate.
	Um, they probably only saw casualties as a statistic and not as anything more than uh you know a statistic towards the likelihood of winning the battle or winning the war.
	Yeah, I mean, well, casualties of non-knights, I suppose, but uh, but like you say, most knights didn't actually get killed on the battlefield, did they got captured?
	You know, that was the thing, and that that that's um one of the things that uh a lot of people think with like um Agencourt and Cressy is um the a lot of the knights were probably trying to surrender to the peasants, um, and a lot of the peasants just murdered the knights.
	I mean, obviously, you would try and take a knight prisoner, but you know, a lot of them, you know, they would like a couple of peasants just grab a knight and like you know, jab him through gaps and stuff.
	It's like I can see why the knights found it dishonorable, and it doesn't sound very honorable when I say it, you know.
	No, um, yeah, it would have been like gangs of New York pretty much, pretty much.
	Um, you know, what's interesting is, um, have you have you ever about the Crusades?
	Yeah, I assume so.
	Um, because I always, you know, I actually always feel bad for the Christians because like Obama the other day was like, oh, you know, religion, blah, blah, blah.
	Remember the Crusades?
	And I always feel kind of bad for them because the Christians were totally justified in going on these crusades.
	You know, I'm actually, yeah, I'm going to defend the Crusades.
	So, you know, Jenny McDermott and all that, get ready.
	Hashtag crusade apologist.
	Exactly.
	But the thing is, the Crusades were fundamentally defensive wars.
	You know, the Christians had lost a vast deal of territory across the Middle East, across Africa, across Spain.
	And they had to do something.
	You know, that was the thing.
	They absolutely had to do something.
	The only place the Crusades really weren't justified is in the Baltic, where that was a war of conquest over people who were pagans.
	But it was really interesting because the Turks had never really encountered knights before.
	They'd never really encountered people who were armed and armored and trained like the medieval knights.
	And they just called them men of iron because they were just invulnerable almost.
	And you've got like Richard the Lionheart, the Battle of Jaffa.
	He's there with, I think he had about 50 knights, about 2,000 crossbowmen.
	And he's fighting like, you know, 10,000 Muslim horsemen.
	And he's like running around the battlefield on his horse, studded with arrows, just cutting people up.
	And it's got to the point where Saladin's troops refused to engage Richard because he's just there studded with arrows, you know, covered in blood.
	And they're like, look, he can't be killed.
	He's like some blonde-haired demon.
	And, you know, Saladin's like, you know, go and engage him.
	And they're like, you go and engage him.
	You know, these people were trained from a very young age and they were fucking well armed.
	Yeah, i'm sure it would have been like meeting aliens for the first time.
	I would have loved to have seen Salahudin's face the first time he saw someone in armor.
	Uh, they would have had absolutely no training.
	Uh, they would have.
	Their arrows wouldn't have even been designed to penetrate uh chainmail, let alone steel.
	Um well they, they did have armor.
	I mean they, they had um much lighter armor, they had scale and stuff like that.
	But you're absolutely right, the arrows really weren't as powerful, as I mean, they didn't really have massive amounts of plate at this time.
	What they kind of had was um chain with a lot of padding underneath.
	So i'll tell you what they must have been baking out in the desert.
	Oh yeah, actually there's um, there's some science to suggest that um uh, that they, there would have been a piece of armor called uh, a coat of uh, what was it called?
	A coat of steel?
	Uh, what are they called plates?
	Is it coat of plates?
	Yes um, now the there.
	Not a single one has been recovered, but there are statues where you can see hints of a coat of plates underneath.
	Yeah, i've seen that in the jersey.
	They're like um great uh funeral monuments, aren't they?
	Yeah, lying on the thing and you can pick correct.
	You can see yeah right, where the jersey, uh kind of uh, lifts up a bit, you can see some uh, some steel uh plates underneath there and uh, it would have been much more penetrate uh, much more easy to penetrate than than um, you know the, the later breastplates, but uh again, compared to the weapons that the, the Muslim armies had at the time it they, it would have been just impossible to get through.
	Well, that was, that was the thing.
	I mean they, they didn't, they just didn't have weapons designed to go through all that.
	And I mean you they they, the.
	The chroniclers at the time literally described the um, the western knights, and uh, just like pincushions, you know arrows just sticking out of them.
	You know dozens of arrows sticking out of them.
	But the, you know I, I just can't imagine the conditions that the actual knights must have been enduring, though a getting hit by an arrow, even if it doesn't penetrate your armor, it's gonna hurt.
	Oh yeah, you know a dozen arrows have hit you in the gut and you're like, how can that hurt?
	Stains, a bit, exactly.
	You must have been pissing with sweat.
	Oh yeah, I mean oh.
	And the footwear they had back then.
	There were no soles on their sandals, they were basically just leather wrapped around their feet.
	Sometimes they would have been walking for for days at a time across rocky deserts and then uh, they'd be attacked and their feet and legs, i'm sure, would have just been in absolute pain before the battle even started.
	That that's um, the battle of Hattin.
	That's.
	That's actually exactly how the uh uh, Saladin uh, defeated the?
	Um kingdom of Jerusalem.
	Um he, basically they, they'd gone away from a water source and Saladin surrounded them and then just waited them out until they were like well, we've really got to attack, because otherwise we're going to dehydrate and all die.
	And it was all season there, they were all basically so yeah, it's I just horrible conditions.
	Think about it, you know.
	And then you, you know, like I, i'm singing my last job where I sit in my office and you know, I I enjoy a cup of tea and maybe i'll send an email.
	It's like shit.
	Yeah, and a lot of people don't realize that it was more about just the battle for Jerusalem.
	I'm sure the battle of Jerusalem, I'm sure, was the end goal.
	Owning and controlling Jerusalem was extremely important to both sides because both sides see it as the holiest of holy lands.
	Wow.
	You know what?
	The Muslims don't actually.
	The Muslims, they actually don't.
	It's the third most important city.
	Oh, yeah, that's correct.
	That's right.
	Is Mecca the first?
	Yeah, Mecca and then Medina.
	Medina, okay.
	I think Jerusalem, honestly, right?
	It seems really cynical the way that Islam sort of adopted Jerusalem as an important place because nothing important to Islam happened in Jerusalem.
	Well, actually, yeah, there's no connection even to there's nothing to suggest that what's his name, Muhammad himself actually even visited the city.
	Of course not.
	He never went anywhere near it.
	But they said that that's where he is going to return, right?
	He's going to return on the majority.
	Well, that's what that's why they said he ascended into heaven.
	It's like, yeah, okay.
	I would believe you, except we know where Muhammad's grave is.
	So, you know, it just seems like a cynical attempt to sort of cash in on existing fame, you know?
	But I mean, maybe that's me being way too cynical.
	And maybe he did ascend to heaven from Jerusalem and they do have a legitimate claim.
	I mean, well, the Catholics say the same thing about Mary, but then there's other Catholics that say that they have part of her skeleton.
	So, you know, you can't really have it both ways.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Well, apparently they found the tomb of Jesus, didn't they?
	Oh, of course they did.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, yeah, I know exactly.
	So they may well have found the tomb of someone called Jesus.
	Yes.
	But this is another interesting thing.
	The name Jesus is incredibly common.
	And it's actually the name Joshua, isn't it?
	Yeah, it's Joshua or Yahshua or Yahushua because there was a prophet before that named Joshua.
	And there's actually this funny thing in one of Paul's writings where they said Jesus ascended the mountain or something like that.
	I can't think of the exact quote, but if you look at it, he says that Jesus did something that Jesus never did, at least not in the Gospels.
	But if you look at it, it was something that Joshua had actually done.
	So that's the proof right there that Jesus or this person named that we call Jesus today was actually named Joshua at the time.
	Well, I mean, without that, and that's interesting.
	Like you say, Joshua is a figure from the Old Testament.
	Correct.
	Jesus's life resembles greatly.
	Yeah.
	It's really not, it's not unsimilar in a lot of ways.
	And so there's, you know, the whole, are we just confusing two characters?
	But not only that, Paul, mentioning him, that's an he's an interesting guy because if you look at he used to, that was Paul of Tarsus, isn't it?
	We're talking about the guy who was called Saul and on the road to Damascus had a vision of Jesus.
	He never met Jesus.
	And so no, in fact, there's yeah, it's actually suggested that the Gospels didn't even exist at the time and that he was just pulling the entire thing out of his ass.
	I was about to go down that road because he claims to have seen Jesus in a vision on the road to Damascus.
	And then he goes, you know, to Asia Minor and then to Greece.
	And what he, the way he describes Jesus is very different to the sort of very earliest, you know, the way he describes Jesus is very difficult, different to the Jesus who rushes into the temple and starts whipping the moneylenders.
	You know, it's the complete opposite.
	He's a complete pacifist.
	He's, you know, Jesus was like, you know, I don't come here to bring peace.
	I come here to bring the sword.
	And then Paul of Tarsus gets his hands on the narrative.
	And suddenly Jesus is a fucking hippie.
	And it's like, that doesn't make any sense.
	You know, it makes more sense if Jesus is a revolutionary figure against the Romans, which is a lot more likely given how you had the Maccabees against the Seleucids and whatnot.
	Jewish revolts and all this sort of stuff happened after Jesus' lifetime, ending with, yeah, it was Hadrian who ended up calling the whole area Palestine and banning Jews from going to Jerusalem and stuff like this.
	So for him to be a wild pacifist who, you know, that would be unlikely and very unusual.
	Yeah, plus he went to Greece and he went to Rome and to Asia Minor to spread the word of this Jesus that he had created.
	He took the word to places where there was already kind of a free market of ideas for gods.
	They were worshiping new gods all the time.
	So he thought he would start there.
	And it wasn't where there weren't Jews.
	Right.
	He never spread the word of Jesus to actual Jews.
	And they retconned it into the Bible where they said it was because he was the 13th disciple and that he was tasked with going to the rest of the world.
	But a lot of what he says contradicts the gospels and it contradicts the later writings of the people who are supposedly the disciples.
	And it doesn't make a lot of sense.
	And actually the cult I was in, we didn't believe Paul was a prophet or that he was a disciple.
	We thought that he was a liar because everything he said contradicted the gospels.
	But I didn't realize until after I had left the cult that I had it ass backwards.
	He was the one that started the whole thing.
	He was talking about an ethereal Jesus and everything he did happened in heaven.
	They believed there were different levels of heaven.
	And so he believed that Jesus was doing all of this stuff in heaven, that he had sacrificed himself in heaven to appease God and he had done all of these things on an ethereal plane.
	And the fact that people believed him at all is surprising, considering there was no blood Jesus, no physical Jesus that he was actually talking about.
	Yeah, I mean, it very much seems to be a character that Paul made up.
	That's the thing.
	I mean, there was undoubtedly, you know, real Jesus.
	Of course, there was plenty of real Jesuses.
	But yeah, the Jesus of Nazareth.
	And even then, you know, saying of Nazareth is an interesting thing because, you know, he wasn't born in Nazareth.
	And Nazareth was a place where there was a cult who were known as the Nazarenes, which implies that he was already part of some sort of sect.
	So, you know, and the Nazarenes weren't, I'm just going to check.
	I can't remember.
	I think they were fairly violent.
	Well, if you look at where Israel was, and more specifically, Jerusalem was at the time that the historical Jesus supposedly lived.
	They were basically overrun and occupied by the Romans.
	They had some religious freedom, but only to a point.
	And they wanted to be free from Roman rule.
	And the only person that could do this was a blood descendant of David.
	And unfortunately, David had no blood descendants.
	So they said, oh, well, you know, this guy is, this Jesus guy is.
	And, you know, if this person really existed, I'm sure he was used as a way to rally the Jews to the Israelites, more specifically, to press back and run the Romans out so they could have control of their nation again.
	And I'm sure that they romanticized the idea.
	But unfortunately, the ruling class of Israelites, the temple people who ran the temple.
	The priests, the judges, basically the priests.
	Yeah, they, I'm sure, were given celebrity treatment from the Romans and they pressed back.
	Absolutely.
	I mean, we know like Herod was given a king's welcome in Rome.
	Right, yes.
	So they would have given them, they would have stopped whatever rebellion, whatever Jesus led or idea of Jesus led rebellion in its tracks and they would have sided with the Romans because the Romans gave them tons of power and I'm sure tons of wealth.
	Absolutely.
	I'm just, I just checked on Wikipedia.
	Apparently, Paul of Tarsus is accused of being a ringleader of the Nazarenes.
	So that's an interesting thing.
	Maybe I've got it backwards and the Nazarenes were pacifists.
	I'm not sure.
	It's interesting how he'd be connected to them, though, isn't it?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	It makes sense, though, if you look at the idea of Jesus being started as a roadside tale that spun out of control.
	If Jesus was of Nazareth, I'm sure that the people who first came up with the idea of Jesus would have been Nazarenes themselves.
	Yeah, that's a very interesting idea.
	And one thing that I always find interesting is the release of Barabbas rather than Jesus.
	Basically, I wonder if this is where the Muslim Apocrypha of Jesus not dying on the cross and being replaced comes from.
	Because you would think the narrative of Barabbas is that he was a murderer, but he was actually a rebel against the Romans.
	And Barabbas itself is an Aramaic word that means son of the Father, which would presumably mean God.
	Yeah, most names back then had God in it.
	Exactly.
	And so you've got, but his name was Jesus, son of the father.
	And then you've apparently got him side by side with Jesus, the anointed one.
	And it's just like, fucking, how many people called Jesus are claiming to be the fucking son of God at this point?
	You know, see, he's literally claiming to be the son of God, and he's wildly popular with the crowd.
	You know, Pontius Pilate's like, oh, which one do you want free?
	And they're like, give us Barabbas.
	And it just kind of makes me think that maybe Jesus Christ was the imposter.
	And everyone was like, well, we want, you know, the other Jesus.
	But I don't know.
	It's me, you know, shooting the shit out.
	If that Jesus existed at all, that Jesus Christ won.
	He could have been a compilation of all the other Jesuses or even all the other figures at the time who were trying to rally, trying to rally the Israelite population to press back against the Romans.
	Well, that is the most likely thing I would have thought because there were plenty of rebel leaders.
	But it's kind of hard to find evidence towards that.
	And you can assume the reason for that is because eventually the Romans adopted Christianity and would have probably scorched the earth of any kind of language that suggested that Rome was anything but the best thing to happen to Christianity.
	Well, I think first century Romans would have done, but I think fourth century Romans probably wouldn't.
	Because by the time the Council of Nicaea, I think the hadn't they moved to Constantinople at that point?
	Well, there would have been a capital there, yes.
	Yeah, I can't remember off the top of my head.
	But yeah, and I think if you've got people who are heavily Christian, they probably would have.
	I'm thinking sort of university students in America now.
	You know, they might see themselves of having committed a sin of some sort.
	Right.
	You've got an awful lot of university students these days who are very anti-the white supremacist catalyst patriarchy that's imperialist and all this sort of stuff.
	And so, you know, maybe it was a, I'm not saying exactly the same, obviously, but maybe it was a similar sort of event where they were more critical of Rome.
	Well, history tends to repeat itself.
	So I wouldn't be surprised if there was a, you know, a similar sort of concept behind that.
	Yeah.
	I wouldn't either, actually.
	And you know what, you know, I find interesting is analyzing the, I really like looking at the sort of social context of the emergence of religions.
	I always find it really interesting because they're always very much reacting to the sign of the times.
	I mean, and I suppose that's probably why these ones, you know, why the most popular ones of their era gained traction or something like that.
	Because, I mean, if you look at Dark Ages Arabia, it was pre-Islamic Arabia is fractious, brutal.
	You know, there was, I mean, as regressive as I think Islam is, compared to what came before it, it's surprisingly enlightened.
	And there is a good argument, you know, that Muhammad is actually a forward-thinking and very enlightened man for his time.
	And for now, that's not true.
	But for then, that probably was.
	And so there's a very good, you know, there's a very good chance that, you know, Islam is so militant and imperialist because there's a good chance that people of the time wanted some sort of stable, orderly society that they didn't have to constantly be on guard against, you know.
	Yeah, banned it.
	Islam as we know it today, it appeared in the 7th century.
	Am I correct?
	It was 650-ish.
	Oh, yeah, but modern-day Islam is very much a sort of 17th, 18th century sort of thing.
	Islam throughout the ages has been very, I mean, it's not like it is now.
	You know, that's the thing.
	It's very much open to science and inquisition and inquiry.
	And realistically, it had been tolerant of other faiths, you know, so because Islam, it was, you know, one of the things that Islam has always got is an inferiority complex.
	You can see it when you're reading about how they talk about the people of the book.
	You know, they know that they're trying to follow in the footsteps of Christianity and Judaism.
	And so they always do have a certain amount of deferential reverence for these older and more established and presumably more credible religions.
	But the thing is, it's more like the sort of hegemonic nature of Islam.
	You can tell that there was probably a social need for this sort of thing in Dark Ages Arabia.
	And then if you look at Christianity, it's the absolute opposite.
	Christianity seems designed to endure the occupation of a hegemonic power.
	Well, the Romans, incidentally.
	It romanticizes the concept of enduring and being persecuted, yes.
	Absolutely.
	You know, render unto Caesar that which Caesar's render unto God that which is God's.
	It's except that there is going to be a, well, I would say secular, but not obviously they weren't secular, a non-Christian governing authority that you can't challenge.
	You know, God has put them there to test your faith, presumably, and get used to it.
	And if you look at like, you know, the under the Seleucids, you had various revolts that were put down, and then you've got the power of the Romans, and no one was going to beat the Romans.
	You know, they weren't going to beat the Romans.
	There was no situation where that was the case.
	And so, you know, there needed to be a way for the poorest and most subjected of society to endure that.
	And not even just to, you know, for the Jews, I imagine, to explain to themselves why, if they were the chosen people and they were God's principal people, why they were being kicked around by these disgusting pagans.
	Yeah, that's absolutely really interesting, but that's a very important point, I think, that you've made there is that when you look at the birth of a religion, it's easy to point out today why it has no place in modern society, why the concepts that they perpetuate are absolutely detrimental to modern society.
	But if you look at the mindset and the conditions that these religions were born out of, you really have no choice but to kind of respect why these religions were born in the first place.
	Just like the Roman rule basically created Christianity, the Roman thumb over the Middle East is, and Arabia is definitely where Islam came out of too.
	and yeah that's that's an that's an interesting point as well it's It's the Eastern Roman Empire very much informed a lot of early Islam.
	Yeah, you're right.
	There were proponents of the Christian and Roman faiths that, yeah, you're right, absolutely informed the earliest writings for the Islamic faith.
	You're right.
	Yeah, it's just an interesting thing that, like, and you know what's interesting as well is the origins of Judaism, which obviously go back into the dark mists of time and nobody really knows.
	And obviously.
	But it's interesting how like you had a pharaoh called Arkhenaten, which was Tutankhamun's father, and he was pretty much the first monotheist.
	The first Egyptian one, yes.
	Yeah, yeah, well, well, the first one really that we know of as far as yeah, I suppose that's correct, yeah.
	You know, I think about 1300 BC or something like that.
	Yeah, first one recorded, at least, yeah.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And he would, you know, he had the names of various gods carved off of temples.
	And, you know, the only god was the sun, and everyone had to worship it.
	And that was, you know, all well and good, except you had like whole structures and priesthoods and temples.
	And one thing that people have to remember is that the temple was one you had what was in the ancient Near East, everything basically ran on what was called a palace economy.
	And that, that means you would have two structures, two institutions in the state.
	You'd have the palace and you'd have the temple.
	And the temple would deal with social issues.
	They would be the ones feeding the poor.
	They would be the ones doing various other things.
	And then you'd have the palace, which would be the mechanisms of government.
	And the temples were very, very powerful, needless to say.
	And they were very, very rich, very big.
	They were the center of civic society.
	And so telling a bunch of priests that suddenly actually you've got nothing, your gods don't even exist, it kind of created a lot of people who hated Arkhenaten.
	And when he died, there was a giant civil war, and the Arsenist priesthood were basically expelled from Egypt, as I understand it.
	I might be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's what happened.
	And so it's an interesting thing.
	You know, these the monetheist priesthood are expelled from Egypt by the, I think it was the Amun priesthood, which are the which were the second most powerful or something like that.
	And then lo and behold, you end up with this monotheistic sort of cult in a province of the Egyptian Empire, an ex-province of the Egyptian empire, in Canaan, which is right next door.
	You know, it's just across the desert.
	And it's just like, oh, really?
	So am I to believe that there's no connection here?
	Yeah.
	And even that cult, though, it eventually evolved into pantheistic, but nothing like Greece or Rome.
	Yeah, no, no, no, it did.
	It definitely had times where it slipped in and out of yeah, because there are carvings and statues to suggest that there's both a mother and father goddess in their belief, and one was the moon and one was the sun, and they'd kind of swap back and forth at times.
	Well, yeah, I mean, they used to have these things called Asherah polls because it was a pole to Yahweh's wife, which was Asherah.
	Yes.
	But obviously, there were more, you know, it depended from sort of like, you know, ruler to ruler and age to age.
	But you did have times where they descended into distinctly pagan sort of religions.
	And then you'd have, I mean, I can't remember any of the, I can't remember which Jewish sort of prophet we're talking about.
	But then you'd have, you know, some Jewish prophet coming, oh, no, this is against the Lord.
	And then, you know, he'd rabble rouse and kicked out and stuff like that.
	But yeah, it's an interesting thing, isn't it?
	You know, it's like, you know, you can kind of trace the development of religions.
	So it's like the actual sort of social development of them.
	I always find that really interesting.
	Yeah.
	And the Islamic faith before the supposed prophet Muhammad came along and created it.
	Most of the religions, the pagan religions at the time, saw the father as the moon and then the mother as the sun.
	And they kind of developed into what the Islamic religion uses now as the moon and the star as their symbols.
	Those are where those symbols were born from as the moon literally represented their God at the time.
	Right.
	Okay.
	I wasn't actually aware of that.
	I actually thought it was the other way around, to be honest.
	I can't remember which role was which, if the moon was the mother and the sun was the father or the other way around.
	But for some reason, I was thinking it was the moon that was the father and it was the sun that was the mother.
	It might be.
	It might be.
	I'm not sure on that one.
	But someone just tweeted me to say that Judaism wasn't monotheistic until the Babylonian exile, which is probably true.
	But I think that's to say like code of God.
	Yeah, well, Israel had split into separate factions before the Babylonian, and it was, I can't remember if it was the north or the south had become pantheistic.
	Well, the north had been conquered by the Assyrians.
	And that's where we get the 12 tribes, so the 10 lost tribes of Israel are from.
	Israel was the northern most populated kingdom, and the Assyrians conquered it and just shipped the population or the important people off into slave.
	Well, the entire place probably.
	But yeah, there was a mother.
	There was Yahweh had a wife in the earliest Asherah, correct.
	And there are, I mean, in the Bible, even it's recorded that people were ordered to destroy their Asherah statues and their Asherah idols.
	But again, though, that doesn't mean that the entirety of Israelites were pantheistic.
	It suggested that even some of the earliest Israelites were monotheistic as well.
	And it kind of just depended which tribe or which faction of that belief and which part of Israel you lived in as to whether or not you believed in just one or in a family of gods.
	Yeah, undoubtedly, undoubtedly.
	One of the interesting things as well is that I'm sure you're aware that the Genesis, Genesis itself, and the almost the entire book really is lifted wholesale from Sumerian myths.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	What was the name of the book specifically?
	But yeah, I mean, most there's a lot of Babylonian and Sumerian tales that mirror the Old Testament and Genesis.
	And people have said, said, oh, well, see, that's proof that those things happen.
	Or people like me would say that that's proof that those stories existed before the Bible was written.
	Well, they undoubtedly did.
	There are Sumerian tablets with the tale of the ark on them.
	And the thing is, right, it's shameless.
	It's absolutely shameless.
	It's virtually the, I think I'm just going to check.
	Right.
	So, yeah, is it the Epic of Gilgamesh?
	No, it's not the Epic of Games.
	Yes, yes.
	Epic of that's one of them.
	That's one of them.
	That's one of them.
	It's the Epic of Atrassus, apparently.
	The Epic of Gilgamesh is where the Ten Commandments come from, or one of their earliest inceptions.
	I'm just trying to find it, but I remember reading it years ago now, but it was incredible how shameless it was.
	It was literally like you'd have a passage from the Bible where, you know, God, Noah, you know, bent down to build an altar to God and prayed to God.
	And then you would have the older Sumerian text beside it.
	And it's, I can't remember the name of the guy off the top of my head.
	Oh, I think it's Atrasis is his name.
	But he bent down and built an altar to the gods multiple.
	It's like, well, there we go.
	You know, it's, you know, but it's exactly the same flood story, basically.
	And then the thing is, you think, okay, well, is it any real wonder?
	Because you had Nebuchadnezzar comes down, conquers Judea, and takes off the Jewish elites, the Israelite elites, I mean, the priests, the learned people, into captivity in Babylon, where all of these stories were originally conceived.
	And then when they come back, they suddenly got this whole Sumerian flood myth that's just been kind of ret condensed.
	Jesus, where did that come from?
	Yeah, a lot of the Old Testament, especially the Torah, wasn't actually the first books written.
	I think somebody had this really interesting paper where he suggested that the book of Job is the earliest written work.
	And then later on, there are four traditions: the Y, the J, the E, and then they were all kind of mishmashed together to create the Torah.
	And that didn't happen until they were actually in Babylon.
	So some of these different Jewish sects, they would have had their own writings, they would have had their own specific beliefs, and then they kind of amalgamated them all into one religion while in Babylon.
	And some of it, I'm sure, came from oral tradition.
	If you look at that, at the time, people would have been raised listening to stories.
	And if you're in Syria or in Babylon, you would have heard this flood myth story and would have, you know, your children would have been raised hearing that story as well.
	And I'm sure their children, their children would have been raised hearing this myth.
	And eventually this flood story would have just been considered fact.
	And they would have said, okay, well, you know, if that happened, how does that really fit into the narrative?
	And I'm sure that they retconned it in there just because it was considered something that actually happened at the time.
	And it is kind of hyperbolic to say that it's kind of shameless.
	I'm sure it was more they were just trying to reconcile some of the myths they heard with their with their writings at the time.
	That's true.
	Maybe I'm being cynical.
	You know, I am probably being similar.
	And the Sumerian stories predate the Jewish stories by thousands of years.
	So, and we, you know, we've got clay tablets that show this.
	So we know, and, you know, having the learned Jewish people in Babylon for an extended period of time before returning to Judea, it just, you know, it's, it's, if I was a detective, that's where I'd put money on them learning those stories from.
	Correct, yeah.
	Yeah.
	But as you say, they probably believe them, that they, that, you know, these things genuinely happened.
	And like you said, they were probably just trying to reconcile it with what they believed.
	So that's, yeah, that's probably, yeah, I think, I think maybe I was being too cynical there.
	Well, one thing that makes the Jewish religion quite unique is that at the time, your village and or your nation would have a set of gods.
	And if another nation or another people came in and conquered you, it was tradition to abolish or to stop worshiping your gods and start worshiping the more superior gods of the more superior nation.
	But the Israelis, the Jewish faith, they were told that their God was the God of gods, that their God created other gods.
	And the only way to really reconcile that you could be conquered by another nation is if it was your God was punishing you for doing something.
	And that's where you get into those stories of they were conquered because they were pantheistic or they were conquered because they were sinning.
	No other faith had that at the time.
	They were the only ones that maintained their faith when they were.
	I've actually, the idea that that's the case isn't actually unique to Judaism again.
	The Assyrians very much had the same sort of thing with Asher.
	What they would do when they conquered someone, they would leave them to their religion.
	But the people who had been conquered basically had to accept that their gods sat just below Asher.
	Oh, okay.
	It was exactly that.
	You know, there's nothing new under the sun, you know what I mean?
	So, and yeah, so basically everyone had to be subordinates to Asher.
	But again, that's not really new because that was very much the same thing with Arkhanat and with the sun.
	So, I mean, it's, you know, it's hard to, you know, isn't it impossible to pinpoint where these things actually originated.
	But it's interesting how, you know, it's sort of like, you know, power dynamics, I suppose, with the gods, isn't it?
	Yeah, exactly.
	I mean, a god was, like I kind of said before, it was kind of your superhero.
	It was the icon that you worshipped was more of just a concept of what you expected out of life.
	But if what the God you worshipped could be defeated, then maybe he's not that powerful a god.
	And a lot of these.
	You've got to reconcile that.
	You know, you've got to be like, well, I'm being punished.
	Yeah.
	And that's exactly what the Jewish faith did, especially after they were taken slave by the Babylonians.
	They had to write it.
	They had to reason that their God was punishing them for doing something wrong.
	And they certainly maintained their faith when they got out of Babylon in the end.
	But yeah, but I mean, it suggested that their faith was muddied or saying muddied kind of suggests that it was validity to it.
	Their faith had basically evolved while in Babylon to suit some of the more Babylonic stories.
	Yeah, I definitely think that they adopted quite a lot.
	And the thing is, I mean, Abraham apparently came from Sumer.
	it's not like they didn't have yeah yeah from you know it's not like I'm sure that nobody actually called Abraham he probably didn't exist but Very few of these people probably actually existed.
	But yeah, I mean, you know, they thought that Abraham came from there.
	So it's not a surprise that they would treat the information and mythology from that area with such reverence.
	And I mean, up until like, well, even the time of like the Romans, really, the ancient East was a very powerful place.
	You know, it was insanely powerful.
	I mean, you had like the Assyrian Empire that had been terrorizing everyone for the better part of about 700 years.
	And then straight after that, you have the Babylonians who just essentially just conquered what was the Assyrian Empire.
	And then you have the Persians who came down from Iran and then just took the lot.
	So, you know, the East was a very, very powerful place and it was the home of great empires.
	So it's no surprise that, you know, the Israelites would look at this area and say, well, you know, this is an impressive place.
	You know, it's absolutely no surprise.
	Yeah, I'm sure there's some truth to that for sure.
	Yeah, I was going to say when we were talking about Akhenaten, that's talking of worship or leaders that it would have been terrible to be under.
	The Akhenaten story is quite interesting because he didn't just abolish the old temple system, but he ended up uprooting all of his people and walking them out into the desert.
	And then I'm sure during a hallucination from being hot under the sun, he looked at the sun setting over a mountain.
	He's like, yeah, the God wants me to build the city here.
	And he made all of his people build an entirely new city out in the middle of nowhere.
	Yeah, it was his new, yeah, I can't remember the name of the city now.
	But yeah, he created a brand new capital, brand new city, brand new streets, brand new temples.
	And you can imagine that the people that followed him out there absolutely loathed him for the entire experience.
	So there is no surprise that at the moment of his death that there was a rebellion.
	And there's no surprise that his son, Tutankhamun, died early, because I'm sure he was the last part of that monarchy that needed to be, yeah, the dynasty that needed to be abolished so they could basically go back to the way things used to be because they were quite prosperous, quite prosperous before Akhenaten came along.
	That's an interesting thing as well, because the reason I say that, you know, suddenly in an ex-province of the Egyptian empire, the monotheism turned up is because Akhenaten had been incredibly insular.
	He'd let the empire crumble, you know, absolutely.
	Canaan had revolted, parts of Nubia revolted, and it's just like this guy was shit.
	Well, what had happened is he was physically deformed.
	Yes.
	His statues are the only statues that are anything but perfectly made.
	Ugly as shit.
	He had a condition.
	I can't think of the name off the top of my head, but there are people today that have this condition.
	He, yeah, bloated belly, long, lanky limbs, and misshapen skull.
	I've actually got the Wikipedia article up now.
	I'm just going to share screens quickly.
	Yeah, his son had the same misshapen skull.
	You can see the x-ray of Tutankhamun.
	He had the same elongated skull.
	Yeah, there you go, right there.
	So basically, his parents.
	I'm just going to get some of the images because he's a very effeminate character.
	And if you look at Ramesses the Great or something, he's in the carvings.
	Yeah, even in the carvings, you can see he was elongated.
	And his wife, who supposedly was extremely beautiful, even she would hide her body in a way that was empathetic to his condition to make her head look long as well and make her body look long and misshapen as well.
	So, I mean, obviously, their children had the same condition, but what had happened is Akhenaten, he was raised basically under a rock.
	His parents hid him away.
	They wouldn't take him to ceremonies.
	They wouldn't take him to a temple.
	They wouldn't show him publicly.
	And that he wasn't even meant to be the heir to the throne.
	And his mother basically manipulated the system to get him in charge.
	And because he had been raised under a rock and he wasn't allowed to go to temple or ceremonies, he kind of had a disdain for that whole system because it represented his father and everything his father believed.
	So as soon as he got in power, he decided he was going to make his own god that saw him as the greatest thing ever because he had been raised to believe that the gods of his father hated him.
	So it's really interesting to see what somebody who had been raised to basically loathe everything that existed, what they can do with power that they didn't expect to get.
	And it's a really interesting story.
	It's really neat, the kind of stuff that happened.
	And again, no surprise that the moment he died, it was completely uprooted.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	It's very, it's a fascinating story, you know, a chain of events to have happened, isn't it?
	It's like, you know, absolute chaos.
	And then, and then what's interesting as well is when you compare it to someone like Tutmos or Ramesses the Great, you know, the great, the great conquerors, who are just the complete opposite.
	You know, they are almost, they're almost bland in their predictability.
	You know, oh, you're going to have a giant statue of you looking perfect and amazing.
	Okay, that's original, isn't it?
	Ramesses.
	Oh, was the book you were talking about, the Enuma Elish?
	Yes.
	Yeah, that was brought to us by a fan, Ben Kishlap.
	So thank you, Ben.
	Thank you, Ben.
	Yeah, that's exactly the one.
	Yeah, I find the ancient Near East a very fascinating place.
	And it's so different.
	I mean, the Sumerians used to have beer temples staffed exclusively by women.
	So, you know, sounds like a dream.
	Exactly.
	They have their shit down.
	You know what I mean?
	Okay, so I suppose we've been talking for a while now, so we should probably wrap up.
	Was there anything else you wanted to go into?
	No, I really had no plans going into this conversation.
	Just wanted to see where it was going to go on its own.
	Cool well um yeah, I didn't either.
	Really, I just figured we'd talk about religion.
	Um, we kind of did yeah, we kind of did yeah cool um okay well right okay well, I mean I, i've run out of things to talk about sure yeah, we should do this again sometime, though i'd be more than happy to man, i'd really be more than happy to.
	There's um, if I mean, if you're interested in talking about, like the ancient Near East or you know, medieval history again, i'd definitely be interested in that and i'll i'll actually come better prepared spectacular, because this has all been very much off the top of my head from what i've, from what I read, probably about 10 years ago now.
	So, oh yeah, most this conversation was entirely off the cuff, but that's exactly what I wanted, so that's good, awesome.
	But yeah, I mean if, now that I know the sort of things that you like um yeah, we can definitely do this again.
	I'll actually do some research and get some interesting sources and information together so we can have um a more informed conversation on these things in the future.
	But thanks a lot for coming on, man.
	Oh yeah, thank you for having me.
	I'm quite honored, quite honored.
	Oh no honestly, the pleasure's on mine man, i've i've been following your channel for quite a while now, so thank you.
	No, I very much enjoy your content too.
	Uh yeah, you're much more opinionated than I am.
	Uh, i'm not afraid to go.
	Yeah, much more opinionated.
	Uh, you know I, I i'm not always super on board with everything you say, but I, I definitely respect the hell out of you.
	Well, you know what that's.
	That's basically the one of the things I hear from a lot of people.
	I don't agree with everything he says, but he's okay this, that's fine.
	That's because I would hate it if everyone's just like you.
	Know, everything you say is exactly what I think i'd be.
	Like I, I would be worrying, i'm in it.
	I'm in some sort of echo chamber, you know, if nobody is contradicting anything that I say, that I, I would probably find myself saying ridiculous things just to see how far people are going.
	Yeah no I, I too enjoy I get people correcting things that I say all the time in in my comment section and I enjoy that.
	I love the back and forth, I love being corrected, because it just means that I get to learn Something new.
	I love to learn.
	So I feel exactly the same way.
	I learn so much from my subscribers in the comment section when they're chewing me out for getting something wrong.
	They do.
	They're not shy about it.
	That's because I'm really opinionated.
	So if I get something wrong, then I look like complete twat.
	Yes.
	But no, I appreciate that as well.
	That's good.
	But yeah, thanks a lot for coming on, man.
	And we will definitely do this again.
	Thank you for having me.
	All right.
	And thanks for everyone for watching.

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