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July 19, 2017 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:25:12
Lecture VIII Background: Abrahamic Stories, with Matthieu & Jonathan Pageau
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So it's July 18th, Tuesday, July 18th, 2017.
And I've been working for the last few days on the eighth lecture in my series, The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories.
And I'm planning to talk about the Abrahamic stories that immediately follow the stories of Noah and the Tower of Babel.
I'm not as familiar with Abrahamic stories as I am with the stories, the earlier stories in Genesis, say from the beginning of the Bible through the stories of Noah and the Tower of Babel.
And I'm not as familiar with Abrahamic stories as I am with the stories of Moses that begin with Exodus and continue in the succeeding chapters.
So I've had to do a lot of reading and a lot of thinking and some conversing as well.
And as part of that process, I spoke once again with Jonathan Paggio, a carver of stone icons and an Orthodox Christian and student of religion.
And also this time, who I did a video with a while back, you might remember, called The Metaphysics of Pepe, where we discussed The psychology of the stranger and also some of the stories, the Abrahamic stories, involving Lot and Sodom and Gomorrah.
And I also had the opportunity to meet his brother, Matthew Pajot, who's been working on a book on the Bible for the last three and a half years.
And so we spent 90 minutes talking about the Abrahamic stories and the conceptual background that's necessary to understand them.
And that's what I want to show you today after this introduction.
So I hope it's useful.
So I'm going to introduce both of you.
So Jonathan is a carver of icons and I've spoken with Jonathan a number of times already and he now has his own YouTube channel as well where he discusses issues that are similar to the ones that we're going to discuss today and Matthew is his brother who I haven't met before this day and Matthew has been working on a book for the last how long?
Three and a half years.
Three and a half years and do you want to tell everyone very briefly about the book?
Well, it's a book about symbolism, but it's basically I'm trying to rediscover the worldview that was present in the time of the Bible, or at least actually not that long ago because modern interpretations of reality, materialist interpretations of reality aren't that old.
The worldview that was there when traditional societies were still there and So I'm trying to rediscover that worldview and basically there are basic patterns, heaven and earth, time and space, things like that.
So it's like a cosmology that's been completely lost as far as I'm concerned.
Some people have glimpses of it, I think.
A lot of people do, but...
It's very general patterns that we have to re-understand so we can understand the Bible, for example, and other stories.
So why did you get interested in this?
Like, what is it that's compelled you to do this?
Oh.
I don't know where to start.
I mean, my whole life has been about that.
So, I mean, you read the Bible, you can take it literally, you can take it figuratively, or you can take it both ways, and I'm trying to take it both ways.
I'm trying to get rid of that dichotomy, the dichotomy of symbolism and factual description.
I think there is no such dichotomy.
If you understand what the words mean, if you have the right perspective, there's no more metaphors in the Bible.
There are none.
But it takes a while to get there because you have to adopt a completely different perspective than a materialistic one, obviously.
You can't be a materialist and a Christian or We've got to be a religious and a materialist.
That's what I think.
And one of the things we're hoping is that, you know, I've been getting a lot of questions, and I know you've probably, Jordan, been getting a lot of questions about this question of metaphor.
And a lot of people have been asking me, how do I reconcile metaphors with what's in the Bible?
How do I reconcile these metaphors with how I'm supposed to live in the world?
And I think that what Matthew is writing, and I'm reading it right now, Is that he's really able to answer that question in a way that I think will be one of the most satisfying answers that we've seen in a while.
So we're pretty excited to see how we're going to get that out to people.
So let me start by telling you what I've been thinking about just briefly, and then you guys can comment.
And I'd like you to do most of the talking if we can manage that, although I'm so damn talkative it's hard to imagine that'll happen.
So, I've been reading this book called The Disappearance of God, and I've been using it by a guy named Richard Friedman, and it was published, I think, in 2005.
I think that's right.
It might have been earlier than that.
But he makes a couple of interesting points about the writing in the Old Testament, and they're parallel points.
And so the first is that The closer you are to the beginning of the Bible the more God is present and and as you progress towards the end of the Old Testament God sort of vanishes in stages until he only manifests himself if at all in prophetic visions and at the same time The parallel development is that the stories of individual human beings become more and more well developed.
So it's like as the idea of the individual personality emerges, or the fact of the individual personality emerges, the presence of God as a detectable entity, like an external entity even, seems to decline proportionately.
And so I'm trying to puzzle that out in a variety of different ways, partly Neurologically, because there's some evidence that the domain of experience that you might associate with the divine is a consequence of suppressed left hemisphere function and augmented right hemisphere function.
And then I'm trying to also consider that in relationship to the effect of chemicals like psilocybin, which obviously can produce powerful mystical experiences, so experiences of consciousness that are really of a different type than normal waking ego consciousness.
And I've also been reading Jung's, mostly commentaries about Jung's Red Book and his attempts to use active imagination as a As a means to explore the contents of different forms of consciousness, which is something that modern people just really never do.
Although he did it for years and the consequence of that was the Red Book.
Also, the Black Books, which haven't been published yet, but the Red Book, which was, I think, published two or three years ago.
It was a collection of visionary experiences and his continuing discussions with figures of his imagination, which he regarded as the most important work he did in his life.
So what does that all boil down to?
It's definitely possible for people to have non...
To have experiences outside the domain of their normal consciousness that produce the intimation of the divine.
That seems to be factually indisputable.
We're not exactly sure how those experiences manifested themselves in the periods of time that are associated with the early biblical stories.
The Bible talks about those sorts of experiences very forthrightly in the earliest Abrahamic stories and also in the story of Noah and obviously in Adam and Eve and all of that.
God's very present.
And then he disappears over time.
And one of the things that the guy who wrote The Disappearance of God, Friedman, one of the things he pointed out was that The fact of the disappearance of God in the Old Testament, the fact that that's a continual, like it has narrative continuity, that fact.
And he really remarked on both those things because, of course, the books were written by different people and then they were aggregated.
But out of that came two elements of narrative continuity.
And one was the gradual disappearance of God and the other was the gradual rise of the increasingly well-defined and powerful individual.
So...
Anyways, associated with that is the idea that as God withdraws, he also starts to manifest himself more through the idea of a covenant, and that the covenant is something that's established with an individual.
It's obviously also with a nation, in the case of Israel, but it's mediated through individuals.
And so, well, that's a brief wander through the sort of Cloud of associations that make up my thinking about the topic at the moment.
So...
Well, what you described sounds a lot like what you see in the Bible.
I'm not so sure about the God is more distant part and further on it goes.
From what I understand, there are two kinds of consciousness in the Bible.
One of them is...
It's called inhabiting the land.
That's when...
Reality fits the theory.
So the principle and the fact agree.
So there are laws and people follow the laws.
Or there's an idea and reality fits with that idea.
So that's called inhabiting the land.
So it's familiar space.
So when you live in that space, things make sense because your ideas match what's happening.
And then you can fall away from that That's the covenant, okay?
A covenant is an agreement between theory and practice.
That's what a covenant is in the Bible.
So God gives laws, and the people have to agree to follow laws, basically.
So the law is an identity.
It's not just, like, you do this, you do that.
It expresses God's identity in practice.
So when the facts match that identity, that's like a soul and a body that agree.
So when you fall away from that, you fall into exile.
That's the other mode.
And it looks like that's what you were talking about before.
I'm not so sure until you talked about a covenant.
But that's when the meaning and the facts do not match.
Okay, so let me ask you a couple of questions about that.
Yeah.
So, you know, I've been describing the cosmology in the Bible as mappable onto the domains of order and chaos.
And I actually think the best way to define order is order is the place you are when what you're doing matches what's happening.
Yeah, exactly.
So it's very, very, very similar to the idea that you just expressed.
That's exactly it.
Okay, okay.
And yeah, there's a state of harmony between preconception and actuality.
And that's also, I think, the circumstance under which people's emotions remain regulated.
And I've thought about that neurologically, too.
I think that what happens is that under those conditions, your left hemisphere stays in charge.
And there's some evidence for that kind of thing, too, especially from the writings of this neurologist...
I think he's a neurologist.
His name is Ramachandran.
He's quite a famous brain scientist.
And another neuropsychologist named L. Conan Goldberg who's also talked about hemispheric function in the same way.
And so when things are going according to plan, let's say, you're in order.
And then the individual ego consciousness that's focused and specific stays in charge.
But that also keeps negative emotions Regulated.
Because there's no need for them.
Because everything is working properly.
And so then you can fall out of that.
And you called that exile.
No.
When you fall away from it.
Yeah.
When you fall away from it.
So that would be equivalent to...
It's also the flood.
It's also the flood.
Yeah.
Fine.
Okay.
And so the exile is like the wandering in the desert.
Yeah.
The idea of exile is...
It's exactly just what we said.
It's about serving strange things.
So you're not in charge anymore of the facts.
Something else is.
But you're in that.
You live in a world where you're not in charge or your identity is not in charge of the facts.
And they don't fit with reality.
So that means something else is in charge.
And so you're serving that.
So the idea of serving strangers in exile...
It simply means your identity doesn't match reality.
Oh, that's really good.
I never thought about that idea of serving strangers in exile.
So, okay, so I'm going to branch off that a couple of different ways.
So, one idea there is that there's an idea from Jung which is paraphrased something like, if you don't act out your own myth, then you serve a bit part in the myths of others.
Okay, so that would be in keeping with that idea of serving the stranger in exile.
And then the next part would be when you're in a chaotic state and your emotions are dysregulated, your personality fractionates and the fractionated personalities, sub-personalities fight for control over behavioral output.
So you dissolve from a unity, you might think about it as a pyramid, a pyramid with a unifying conception at the top, That disintegrates.
That would be like the Tower of Babel to some degree.
That disintegrates and then sub-entities, you could think about them as spirits or think about them as psychological entities, regulate your behavior.
And that would be equivalent, I think, to a movement from the left hemisphere to the right, because I think the right is dominated by subcortical structures.
I think that's how animals exist.
It's sequential domination by subcortical structures rather than some overarching conceptualization from the top down.
I think that what you call the left and the right is exactly the opposite of the traditional left and right.
I'm not so sure yet, but when you say left hemisphere, what do you mean?
The left hemisphere governs the right hand.
Okay.
So the left hemisphere is the one that's when it's in charge and when everything works?
Yes.
Okay.
It's the right hand.
It's exactly the opposite of the traditional imagery.
Usually it's the right that's, well...
Yeah, because they're using the hands, they're not talking about the brain.
Yeah, exactly.
So the right would be mapped onto the left hemisphere.
Okay.
So that's fine.
So that's fine.
And the traditional imagery, I think, is associated with the hemispheric specialization as well.
Because the idea of right, you know.
Now, I want to ask you a question about that.
You said that the living, what was it, you contrasted exile with what was the other conceptualization?
Inhabiting the homeland.
Inhabiting the homeland, sure, absolutely.
Working on the homeland.
Working on the homeland is another way to say it.
Okay, now tell me again how you conceptualized the relationship between God and His people, let's say, in the homeland.
Well, God, like I said at the beginning, the idea of heaven and earth is at the basis of everything in the Bible.
So heaven is meaning and earth is fact.
So in that relationship, there's God.
It's always the name of God, by the way, if you look in the way it's described in the Bible.
They're talking about the name of God.
So that means the meaning of God.
So God is not just meaning, but when they talk about it in the Bible, it's always about the name of God.
So the name of God is an identity.
It's like a principle, an axiom or something like that.
And it has to embody itself in physical reality, in flesh or in matter.
So the role of the nation of Israel is to embody that identity.
And it's also to embody it in reality, not just in themselves.
So basically, they're a mediator between heaven and earth.
Right.
They're trying to make God's identity practical or concrete.
That's why it's all about laws, because it's like mathematics.
You take an abstract principle that's really extremely simple.
It doesn't seem like it...
It contains much information, right?
If you take an axiom in mathematics.
But then you have to derive all the implications.
So that's making it practical.
That's making it concrete.
That's bringing heaven into the earth.
So that's their job.
It's like a cosmic mediator.
Okay.
Okay.
Follow you so far.
So, alright.
So, the...
It looks like there's two ways, maybe, in the biblical...
Narrative that that will is instantiated in in reality and one would be as a consequence of individuals aligning themselves with the Word of God and the other is the instantiation of the Word of God into the state of Israel.
Okay.
Seem reasonable?
Okay, and that seems to begin that that has its origin in the in the first Abrahamic story.
So Abraham talks to God and or God talks to Abraham and tells him that He's going to be the father of a nation, essentially.
And then...
He's going to inherit the land, too.
That's important.
It's the same thing, actually.
Those two things are the same.
He's going to inherit the land, and he's going to become the principle of a great many people.
So that's like he's fleshing out an identity.
And it gives a nation instead of just an individual.
He's going to become the identity of a nation.
Okay, and so how do you understand the description of that in the biblical narrative?
Because one of the things I find very strange about the Abrahamic stories is that immediate presence of God.
And God shows up to Abraham and tells him this, and then Abraham makes an altar, if I remember correctly.
Once he gets to the land where he's supposed to be, he makes an altar, and then And then God appears to him again.
Yeah, not again.
Not again.
He appears to him.
The first time he doesn't appear, I think, I'm pretty sure.
The first time God speaks to him.
Okay.
See, that's important.
Okay, why is that distinction important?
Well, because he's just word.
He's just...
He's not physical.
He's not into practical reality yet.
It's invisible.
So God speaks.
He's not manifest.
It's just an idea, a principle, a word, okay?
An unmanifest word, or it's like the minimum of manifestation.
It's like just language, just word.
And then, so what he says is, go to this place, go to this land, and you'll inherit the land.
And then he goes there, and then he says, God appeared to him.
I see.
Okay, so there's a progressive appearance of God, and it's partly a consequence of Abraham's original obedience to the initial idea.
Yeah, which was very abstract.
I mean, go here.
You can't be more simple than that.
Go there.
So it's like, it doesn't mean anything, but it means everything.
It's a very, everything we do is a go there.
Go there and do something.
So it's like the principle of all things appeared to Abraham saying, just go there and you'll inherit.
That doesn't really mean anything.
It contains everything humans do.
Yeah, okay.
That's an interesting observation because, you know, I think of human beings as, well, they're very directional.
They're always going from point A to point B. They're always aiming.
They're like archers, right?
And it's definitely the case.
Like, I had someone write to me.
No, I was doing a Patreon interview with one of the people who've been supporting me, a young guy.
And we were talking about the idea of Christ as Redeemer and Judge.
And he was, this young man was unredeemed, let's say, for a long period of time because he didn't have any direction.
And to have direction you have to know what's good and what isn't because to have direction you have to go towards what's good.
And so the judge is what helps you figure out what's good.
And if you don't know what's good, then you can't be redeemed.
Because to be redeemed is to be moving towards the good and away from, let's say, evil.
And so the judge and the redeemer have to be the same thing.
And that fits in with what you're saying because the judge is the thing that makes qualitative distinctions, let's say.
And you need to make a qualitative distinction before you can move ahead.
Okay, and so your point is that the principle that Abraham encounters to begin with is the principle of directionality itself, qualitative directionality.
It's something like that.
Is that correct?
Yeah, well, it's the positive identity of anything.
It's like a seed.
It's like the seed of a tree.
That's the traditional way to understand it.
It's just a seed.
It contains everything in it, but in itself, it's just something like, go there.
Go there.
Okay, so one of the things that's been interesting...
I think for me to learn personally as I've moved through my life was that if I ever actually did anything, it was worthwhile.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Is that something would come of it.
It wouldn't necessarily be what I expected to come of it.
But the act of going and doing did bear fruit.
Yeah.
And that's pretty much the story of Abraham in a nutshell, actually, what you just said.
Because...
God says, go here, you'll inherit the land.
Abraham doesn't inherit the land.
I mean, he could have been right away.
He could have gone there, and it's yours.
But no, that's why it says, as soon as he gets there, it says, there's already people there.
The land is already owned by other people.
Right, and then there's a famine.
Yeah, exactly.
And that means, it means, like what I was saying before, the facts support the theory, okay?
And here he's going to the land.
That's the theory.
You'll inherit.
That's the theory.
And the facts don't support it.
That's a famine.
Okay?
The earth doesn't support you.
The earth doesn't give you sustenance to make it reality.
It doesn't give you matter.
Yeah.
Yeah, when he ends up in Egypt and I mean his wife is separated from him essentially because he lies about her.
But then it's so strange because so he tells the Pharaoh and the Pharaoh's men that his wife is actually his sister.
That's Sarai.
Sarai?
Is that how you say that?
Yeah.
Before she changes the name.
Yes.
Is actually his sister.
And that's to protect him.
And so the Pharaoh takes Sarai.
Okay, can I explain something?
You bet.
There's a meaning to all those things.
There's a meaning to it.
So the idea is that when facts support the theory, when the flesh supports the identity or the matter, heaven, earth supports heaven, things are square.
That's just a traditional way of understanding it.
That basically means that what you see is what you get.
It's truth.
Things are true.
That's the definition of Meaning matches fact.
It's true.
Okay, fine.
That's a good pragmatic definition.
Yeah.
When the other side happens, then things are round.
They're cyclical.
Okay?
And essentially, it's time.
It's space and time.
That's what it is.
Okay?
One of them, you're falling into time.
Things are not square.
That means the meaning doesn't match the fact.
That's why it's all about lies.
Okay?
When they go into exile, it's all about lies.
It's all about dreaming.
Because they're in that domain.
They're in a domain where meaning and fact doesn't match.
So everything happens through lies and deception.
And even the whole idea of saying my wife is my sister, that represents a cyclical paradox.
It's not supposed to happen.
Well, why cyclical?
A parent has a son and a daughter and they get married.
It's like a regression.
It's like you're producing different things and then you're joining them back together.
You're not supposed to join them back together.
Because when you join them back together, it's like you're regressing.
When you build something, You start from principle and you develop it.
You make specializations of that principle.
When you start to mix them up again, it's like a regression.
You're going back to something more primitive than before.
Does that make sense?
How do you see that in relationship to Abraham's insistence that Sarai is his...
Sister?
Sister, yeah.
Because you're not supposed to marry your sister.
And I'm not saying that as a moralistic thing, even though it becomes one.
But the reason you shouldn't marry your sister is because you're undoing the work, the specializations that your father or your mother have created.
It's like going back.
It's like regressing.
So, like, if you marry your father or your mother, depending, you're going back.
It's a cycle.
You're not supposed to do that because it's like you're annihilating something that was specified.
Okay?
I'll give you an example, like an imagery of that.
That's pretty important.
In the story of the flood, there are traditions that the giants created hybrids.
Okay?
Yep.
Yep.
One of the things that giants like to do is create hybrids.
They are hybrids themselves, but they created hybrids.
They took the species and they confused them back into who knows what.
And that's very significant because it actually means that you are regressing in a confused manner.
There's a connection between the flood and what I just said.
Making hybrids and causing the flood It's actually considered one and the same thing.
Does that make sense?
Makes some sense, yeah.
It's about returning to confusion.
Yep.
Look, look, I'll say it this way.
Adam names the animals.
Adam names the animals.
Okay?
God asked Adam to name the animals.
It's his first job in the universe.
So he's asking him to specify different things, okay, that all have the same source.
Right, to depreciate them.
Yep.
Differentiate.
That's the idea of incarnating a principle into practice.
Things get differentiated.
Now, if you reverse that process, you're going back to a more primitive level.
You're going back to the flood because the flood is the most primitive thing in that cosmology.
It starts with a flooded world.
That means everything's in confusion.
So what you have to do is specify things out.
But if you go back...
Does that make sense?
Okay, so let me reformulate that and tell you what popped into mind.
Alright, so God gives Abraham the word and then Abraham follows it and God manifests himself more completely to Abraham and then what happens to Abraham is twofold.
He ends up in a barren land so nature rebels and he also ends up in a tyranny Because not only does the land not produce, so it's in a famine, but Egypt is, generally speaking, a symbol for tyranny throughout the initial parts of the Old Testament.
I mean, you see that with the Pharaoh, for example, and the symbolism in the Mosaic story of Egypt always being associated with stone instead of water.
And so you could say that God gives Abraham the command to move forward, but he has to contend with the intransigency of nature, which rejects him because there's a famine, and then he becomes subject to both tyranny and to deceit.
Okay, deceit and tyranny are...
Look, okay, I'll say it this way.
It's more about deceit than tyranny, okay?
The thing is, when you're not in charge, I mean, there's your tyranny.
That's it.
When you or whoever you identify with is not in charge, you're a slave to some other principle.
Right.
You're embodying some other will that's not you.
I mean, that's tyranny, right?
Right.
In that sense, it's directly related to the idea of tyranny.
You're serving strangers.
Right.
It says it all, actually.
Well, that also motivates...
That also motivates Abraham's deception, right?
Because he's terrified that the strangers that he's serving will kill him.
Yeah, for his wife.
For his wife, and that's why he lies.
He's afraid that he's going to be treated very badly.
Yeah, because he doesn't want strangers to have his wife.
His wife is like the earth.
His wife is how he will incarnate himself or express himself in the world.
He's like the seed and the wife is like the earth.
Something like that.
So she is like his earth.
It's like a miniature version of heaven and earth.
The male is the heaven and the female is the earth.
In that case, that's the whole idea.
He's not in charge of facts anymore.
That includes his wife.
That includes...
So he doesn't want other men, other principles to control his wife.
Right.
Does that make sense?
Yes.
Well, it also seems to me that because the land isn't fruitful for him, and because he's serving strangers in a strange land, he's also correct to be afraid for the loss of his wife.
Yeah.
And how does he get out of it?
By being deceitful, because he's in this cycle.
He's in that...
I mean, are you supposed to be truthful with your adversary?
Usually, no.
Especially when your adversary is hostile.
I mean, if you're in enemy territory, your morality changes because all of a sudden, it's not about being truthful.
It's about surviving.
It's about, it's like the most primitive existence there is.
Right.
Yeah.
It's an advanced state to talk about truth.
It's when we all agree, you know, we all agree on at least something.
But before that, it's every man or woman from him or herself.
And it's all about deceit.
It's all about survival.
Okay, so now the next thing that happens essentially is that the Pharaoh gets plagued and he's wondering why.
So the story indicates that the Pharaoh has broken some natural law, let's say, or some divine law.
And things go very badly for him, and then he discovers, I don't remember how, he discovers that he's taken Sarai.
I think it doesn't say how.
Yeah, I think that's right.
And he discovers that he's taken Sarai, but that Sarai is Abraham's wife.
And so then the Pharaoh gives Abraham all sorts of goods, and sends him on his way.
Okay, so that's also quite confusing.
So Abraham is rewarded for His deceit, essentially.
Ill-gotten goods, yeah.
Right.
Ill-gotten goods.
Yeah, it's part of the story.
It's interesting because you also see, I think, in that account some of the complexity that's embedded in the Old Testament accounts is that it's not a simple morality tale by any stretch of the imagination.
You especially see that in the Abrahamic accounts because it's Jacob who Who's so deceitful with Esau?
I mean, Esau comes off...
I mean, he's kind of unconscious, Esau.
Yeah.
He gives things up too easily.
He's too easily deceived, and I guess he's a bit too primitive and a bit too naive, something like that.
But Jacob and Rachel play some really nasty tricks on him, and yet they come out ahead.
Yeah.
And so that's also a very difficult thing to contend with.
Well, there's this idea, at least in traditional interpretation, there's this idea that Esau is actually supposed to be the king.
He should be.
The only reason he isn't is because there's something wrong.
That's pretty much described the whole Bible in its entirety.
There's the theory and the fact.
The fact is supposed to be king, okay?
Do you know what I mean by that?
Matter is king.
That's what it's supposed to be, but it's not.
And all the stories are about redeeming that problem, taking care of that problem.
It's like the facts don't match the theory.
We have to redeem the facts.
That's pretty much all the stories in the Bible are about that.
And that's pretty much what Lot represents in the story of Abraham as well.
He represents material reality.
He represents facts.
But there's something wrong with it.
Let's go into the Lot story now.
Okay, so Abraham leaves, and I believe he leaves with Lot.
And Lot also becomes quite wealthy.
And they go back to where Abraham had built the altar initially.
But Lot's men and Abraham's men start to fight.
So they decide they're going to separate.
And they basically do that somewhat arbitrarily.
It could have gone either way, but Lot ends up going to Sodom.
Well actually...
There's something you should be aware of.
Well, that's the thing.
A lot of the stories in the Bible are based on a really ancient way of thinking that we don't really follow anymore.
But, I mean, in the Bible, there is a reason why the directions of the travels, they're not just random.
Like, Egypt represents the earth.
And what's the name of the city?
What's the name of the place above Egypt?
Haran, I think.
The place where he goes to meet Laban, it's in the north, okay?
I'm not sure I remember the name of the sea.
I think it's Haran.
That represents heaven, okay?
And there's a reason.
It's not just arbitrary.
It's because Egypt is south, and south is going down.
Right?
We still say that.
When you say that someone's gone south, we say that means that they've gone to seed, or they've gone down.
Yeah.
So, in the Bible...
Especially in Genesis.
The south represents the earth and the north represents the heavens.
And like I said, it's not arbitrary.
It corresponds to the geography of the region.
One of them goes uphill, the other one goes downhill.
In the north there's mountains, like snowy mountains, and in the south there's Egypt, which is like a low place.
Right, so north literally is up.
Yeah, it's not a metaphor.
It literally is getting closer to heaven and the other one going into the earth.
So when they go in exile into Egypt, it actually means they're going into the earth.
It's like a descent into the earth.
So it's like death.
It's death.
And they say it a few times in the book of Genesis.
It's like dying going to Egypt.
It's like a death.
Okay, so then we move to the story of the strangers, right?
Wait, Matthew, you were going to say why the separation of the land with Lot and Abraham.
Oh yes, right.
The idea is that Lot takes the south, right?
And then Abraham takes the south.
Yeah, that was the whole point of that, yeah.
Lot, there's a reason why he takes the south.
It's the lowest place on earth, Sodom and Gomorrah, that place.
It's the lowest place.
Okay, so Lord ends up in the lowest place.
I think it is literally the lowest place on earth, right?
I'm not sure about that.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I think that region actually is the lowest place on earth.
But in the story, that's what it means.
It means it's the lowest place you can go.
So it's the place that's farthest away from heaven.
Yeah, it's the bottom of the earth.
Okay, so that's sort of like the idea that Milton develops with regards to Satan when he's thrown from heaven, because the hell that Satan inhabits is the furthest possible away from heaven.
That's how it's defined, essentially.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's like a journey into the earth.
It's the same as, it means the same thing as falling asleep.
Exile and sleep are the same in the Bible.
Sleep is a form of exile.
So the next thing that happens is that we get the first warning about Sodom and Gomorrah.
Yeah.
That's just a very brief sentence.
It's like a foreshadowing.
And then the next thing that happens is that there's an episode where there is a war among kings and the kings If I remember correctly, it's the king of Sodom takes Lot.
And Abraham has to go rescue him.
And he does that successfully.
I think it's the other way around.
I think it's kings from the north that come down and take Sodom and Gomorrah.
And Lot is part of that.
And so is the king of Sodom and Gomorrah.
They have to flee.
That's what I remember.
Okay, do they flee with Lot?
No.
Lot is taken by these kings from the north, and the king of Sodom, I think, hides or something like that, flees.
And then Abraham...
The king of Sodom at the end gives gifts to Abraham to thank him that he rescued him.
Yes, that's right.
So what happens is that, yeah, it says, and it came to pass in the days of Amraphel, king of Shinar...
That these made war with Bera, king of Sodom, and with Bersha, king of Gomorrah, etc.
And these were all joined together in the Vale of Siddim, which is in the Salt Sea, which is the Salt Sea.
So I presume that would be the Dead Sea and that would be the low point that you're describing.
The lowest point on earth is the Dead Sea.
So that's pretty interesting.
And the Vale of Siddim was full of slime pits and the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fled and fell there.
And they took away all the goods of Sodom and Gomorrah and all their victuals, and they took Lot, Abram's brother's son, who dwelt in Sodom and his goods and departed.
So, you can really see this whole geography that Matthew's talking about when they say that Sodom and Gomorrah, they had to flee and fall into slime pits.
It's almost like they're laying it out for us, that they had to almost kind of go even further down into the earth to hide from these invaders of the north that are coming to take their land.
Okay, so Abram goes and rescues Lot, and he does that successfully.
And also there's kings that he frees, as far as I can tell.
Yeah, probably.
And then the kings want to reward him.
And Abraham says to the king of Sodom that he doesn't want any reward, and the reason he doesn't want any reward, except for what his men have eaten, he doesn't want any reward because I will not take anything that is thine, lest thou should say, I have made Abraham rich, save only that which the young men have eaten, and the portion of the men which went with me.
And it looks, see...
God has already promised Abraham everything, in some sense, and it looks like he doesn't want to take anything, and that Abraham doesn't want to take anything from anyone else, because what would it do?
Would it interfere with the purity of his accomplishments?
Something like that?
Yeah, well, I don't know for certain, because that's just a line, I guess, but in the story, I mean, it's not that much of a big part of the story, but the way I see it is, I think he says, I don't want to take even a shoelash from you, okay?
So there's a reason why he says that, because the shoe is the lowest part, is the lowest clothing, right?
It's on the feet.
So it's all related to the idea that the earth needs to be redeemed, needs to be rectified.
And in that situation, it's not.
It's like he's not allowed to accept.
It's the same thing as not eating the forbidden fruit.
There are things in the world that are poisonous to humans.
We can't eat them because they don't agree with our patterns, our mind.
So if you eat poison, you go into that place where things don't agree.
Your mind and your body don't agree.
I mean, if you drink alcohol, That takes you into the realm where your mind and your body don't agree.
The theory doesn't match the fact and then you go into that whole confusion.
Yeah, so could it be that when Abraham...
He doesn't want to take from Sodom because Sodom is already what we know Sodom to be.
I mean, it already represents kind of the land that can't hold and will be burned off.
Yeah, it's something he can't integrate.
Right.
That's why I said the forbidden fruit.
You don't want to eat, you don't want to accept matter that you can't handle, that you can't integrate.
So there's something in that place that...
He doesn't know how to deal with, what to do with it.
And he doesn't want his riches to come from that place.
Right, he doesn't want his riches to come from that place.
Yep, because it would compromise him.
Because he doesn't know how to deal with it.
Yet, maybe someday he will.
I think that's the whole idea.
And actually, here's an interpretation.
Lot represents that place that will one day be redeemed.
Okay?
The reason why they talk about Lot so much in the story of Abraham is because he represents King David.
He's the ancestor of the nation that will give rise to King David.
It's like a secondary story within the story, but it's meant to be interpreted in terms of a future redemption of that place that Abraham couldn't handle at that time.
And that place will be redeemed.
I'm giving you a lot of tradition here, but this is what I've learned.
It's King David.
It's the future king.
So the whole story of Lot is about King David.
Well, and of course, Lot is Abraham's descendant as well, because he's his nephew.
So Abraham's nephew descends into the lowest place, essentially.
Yeah, well look, the story starts out pretty clear.
It starts out, there's three sons to Terah.
One of them is Haran, the other one's Nahor, and the other one's Abraham, okay?
Haran dies.
That's how the story starts, okay?
That's like the beginning of the story is Haran dies, and he has a son called Lot.
See?
That's what I was...
The idea is...
It's the same idea.
The son of this Haran, he represents death.
He represents the thing we can't handle.
He represents the material facts that we can't explain with our theories or with our identity.
He's the matter we can't handle.
And that's why the story starts with he dies.
The father of Lot dies.
It means Lot represents some fact that we cannot correctly integrate into our universe.
This could be interpreted in so many different levels, but I don't know if that makes sense.
I think we need to see it.
The idea is that an orphan or a widow That's what they always represent.
They represent something that have lost their principle that unifies them.
They're disconnected from the hierarchy of the family.
So Lot losing his father, the fact that Lot's father dies, means that he loses the thing that gives him identity.
And so he's like a piece of earth that has lost attachment or lost meaning.
Well that reminds me of what happens to Noah's son who sees him naked.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
And laughs.
Because to see, it seems to me, I want to talk about this a little bit tonight, that to see Noah gets drunk and then which son is it?
Ham.
Ham, yeah.
Really first sees him, but doesn't respond properly.
The other sons, when they see Noah naked, they cover him up and they don't look.
And so it's like they're not exposing their father's weakness, his mortality, his insufficiency, right?
They retain respect, but Ham doesn't do that.
But there's also more, what Matthew was talking about before, in that story, there's two things that are implied of what Matthew was talking about before, this idea of wine that brings you into this cycle where causality ceases to be direct, and then what Ham, the fact that Ham sees his father naked, he discovers his nakedness is also a kind of suggestion of incest as well.
The same type of Of inappropriate causality that you see in the story of Abraham's sister marrying his sister.
Yeah, and of Lot with his two daughters.
Yeah, and Lot with his two daughters.
So it's transgression against some fundamental boundary.
Yeah, against the hierarchical relationship of a family.
You're not supposed to make loops.
It's a tree.
You're not supposed to make loops in a tree.
You can say it like that.
It's really simple.
You're not supposed to regress.
You're not supposed to...
You produce things.
You're not supposed to turn back on yourself.
Okay.
You're not supposed to go back on yourself.
Okay.
So maybe that's why Lot's wife is turned into a pillar of salt.
Because she looks back, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, it has to do with looking back for sure.
She's sentimental and pines for something that was terrible, that shouldn't have been.
And she's commanded not to look back.
Once you escape from that catastrophe, you don't get to be nostalgic for it.
The same thing happens in the story of Moses, because what happens to the Israelites when they're out in the desert is they start to become nostalgic for Egypt, for the tyranny.
Yeah.
And that's also, I think, when God starts to send poisonous snakes among them.
Because they start to pine for Egypt and complain about Moses.
And then they start to worship other idols.
So that's part of that confusion that you were talking about.
And then God gets irritated and throws a bunch of poisonous snakes in there to give them a good chomping.
The snakes come as a result of them wanting to go back.
Yeah, well, right.
That makes perfect sense.
So, and you see that nostalgia for tyranny, you know, you see that in the Soviet Union or in Russia right now with regards to Stalin.
And so the question is, I think this is one of the things that the guy who wrote The Disappearance of God mentioned is, do you want to be well fed as a slave or hungry in freedom?
Something like that, and the choice well fed as a slave is not a good choice.
Yeah.
So, okay, now, so Jonathan, you and I had talked a fair bit about the story of Abraham and the strangers before, so God decides to reward Abraham, and he tells him that, just like he told him before, but he repeats it, that he's going to be the...
The founder of a nation.
And he...
And he tells him that Sarah is going to bear a child.
And Sarah, of course, is not...
doesn't believe that.
Let's see.
Let me just find this here.
Yeah.
Yes.
Okay, so that's what happens.
Is that God...
God's word comes into Abraham in a vision.
So it's the word again, saying that his reward will be great and that he's going to be the father of nations.
But he doesn't have any children.
And so isn't that when he takes...
He takes Sarah's servant.
Hagar.
Yeah.
And that gives rise to Ishmael.
And it isn't until later that Sarah is informed that she's going to...
Here is what I found.
Sorry, Sarah.
Sarah is listening.
She wants to answer your question.
I'd be curious to know what she has found.
Maybe you should look.
I closed her down.
Yeah, I know.
It was a pretty strange intermission there.
Okay, so Abraham has to take kind of a detour in order to have a child.
and he lays with Hagar and Hagar we don't know much about her but she gets haughty right away and starts to despise Sarai and Sarai actually beats her as far as I can tell it says Sarah dealt hardly with her and then Hagar flees and she ends up by a well where an angel appears to her and the angel tells her that Her
son her child is going to be the father of a nation as well So So the first question might be Why is it that Abraham at this point in the story?
Why is it necessary for the story that Abraham takes a detour and has a child with Hagar?
What do you think that signifies?
It's always the same problem in the Bible.
It's always...
It starts with confusion, and it has to develop towards something that is clear.
So, you're saying it yourself when you say detour.
Yeah, it's a detour.
Exactly.
That's exactly what it is.
It's a detour that's not necessary, but it happens.
Does that make sense?
That's what detours are.
Detours are things that are not necessary but happen.
There's something also in that detour, the fact that he gives birth to Ishmael, which has to do with this turning because God kind of promises that Ishmael is going to come back and he's going to be a big problem for you.
He's going to be a father of a great nation, but he's going to be a big problem for you later.
There's going to be fighting between your sons, basically.
There's that idea, yeah, of course.
I don't know if it's in that story, but...
Yeah, well, it also seems to be associated with an idea that you might think about as successive approximation to an ideal.
You know, so one of the things that I've conceptualized sort of visually is, and this is associated with the idea of Geppetto wishing on a star, you know, so...
What Geppetto does when he wants to facilitate the transformation of Pinocchio is lift his eyes up to the highest thing that he can conceive of and orients himself with that.
But the thing is that as you move through life, let's say you're oriented by the highest thing you can conceive of, but as you move towards it, you transform and your conceptualization of what's the highest shifts as you transform.
So you're aiming at the highest thing, but you're Perhaps your ability to conceptualize what's the highest thing develops as you move towards it.
And so, but what that means in practice is that you do take detours, because you aim at something, but your aim is off, and you move towards it, and then you get to a point where you can correct your aim.
And so it's not like you've made a mistake exactly.
It's, you're farther ahead than you were, and you've corrected your aim, but your aim wasn't, you weren't aiming at exactly the right thing to begin with.
And so...
I think...
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, maybe that's what's happening to Abraham, is that, you know, you could almost say, I don't know, that Ishmael's a practice run, something like that.
Well, so, all right, so then, Matthew, you were going to say something about that.
Yeah, I was going to say that exile in the Bible, there's always a reason for it, But it's not necessarily a logical reason.
It's just like what you described.
You think you know something.
You think you know what you're aiming at.
You think you know what you want.
You think you know what you're doing.
Something happens that you didn't plan.
And that doesn't look like it's part of what you were aiming.
It makes you take a detour.
Well, this site is all about detours.
It's all about turning around.
You don't know where you're going.
You're lost.
But in the end...
It brings about something that maybe you weren't even aiming at in the first place.
Yeah.
But might be better than what you were aiming at in the first place.
So it's not all bad.
So I think that's the idea.
The whole idea of exile is that it renews your plans.
Right.
If you don't die.
Yeah, if you don't die.
Yeah.
Even if you do die, it renews your plans.
Okay, so now the next thing that happens is that the strangers come to visit Abraham and he treats them hospitably.
And so now we might say that that's an indication of his increasing alignment with the good.
Maybe that's one way of thinking about it.
Because he does right by the stranger.
And one of the consequences of that is that the angels, I guess we find out that they're angels, tell him that Sarah is going to give birth to someone.
And Abraham finds that very difficult to believe.
And Sarah finds it so difficult to believe that she actually laughs about it.
She overhears it.
She laughs about it.
But he has the strangers...
He feeds them and he has them wash their feet, if I remember correctly.
Anyways, he treats them hospitably and well.
And there's a blessing as a consequence of that.
And that's something we talked about a fair bit, Jonathan, when we were talking about the thing that doesn't fit in categories.
The stranger, yeah.
Which is that invitation to chaos as well that you were talking about, Matthew, because the stranger is, well, the thing that you can be subjugated to, but also something that will bring something New and potentially disruptive, but also potentially beneficial.
And so then the idea there is whether or not the stranger is disruptive or beneficial depends to a large degree on how you treat the stranger.
And that strikes me as very, very possible.
I mean, that's one of the things that has really entered my imagination as a clinician.
Now, if you're approached by someone who's very in chaos, The consequence of that is very dependent on how you interact with them.
Because it can go any way.
And they're not really in control because they're so chaotic.
And so if you're careful and awake, you can keep things moving in the proper direction and maybe even benefit from it.
And that's kind of like the idea of Noah walking with God because one of the reasons that Noah gets through the flood is because he's oriented properly.
He's walking with God.
And so you could say that exile can, it's something like exile can expand you if you stay properly oriented while you're in exile.
It can fix your mistakes.
That's part of it.
It cleans you.
It renews you.
Because you make mistakes and they become part of you.
And if you're stuck with your mistakes, you're rigid about your own mistakes, you need something outer.
To something that you don't know, something that you don't understand, to clean your mistakes away.
Yeah, well that's like the gold the dragon hoards, or the virgin that the dragon hoards, right?
If the dragon represents that chaotic, let's say, exile state, the gold and the virgin both represent that which can be assimilated as a consequence of being in that situation.
The funny thing is, is in the hero myths, going into exile Well, can I say something about the part you were describing?
The whole story of Abraham, if you look at the big picture, it's really about progressively knowing something.
So, it starts with just the voice of God, Go here.
Doesn't mean much.
Goes there.
Then he becomes a little more precise.
I will give you this land.
So now he's more specific.
And then, the further he goes, the more it becomes explicit what's going to happen.
So, I'll give you a son.
When?
I don't know.
Someday.
It doesn't say.
Later on, it becomes more and more explicit, okay?
And he says, like in the part you were talking about, he says, three men come.
These are angels, as it becomes clearer later.
So, this is God.
It's God sending his message in a clear manner.
And it's more specific than before.
He says, this time next year you will have a son.
Okay, so a couple of things about that.
So, one of the things that...
See, one of the ways that I've conceptualized the relationship between the Old Testament and the New Testament, and this is kind of a classic Christian conceptualization, I think, and it's also...
It's also analogous to what happens to Moses, because Moses doesn't get to the promised land.
So there's this idea, Christian idea, that the reason that Moses can't get to the promised land is because he only represents the law.
Now, but then I thought about that.
I thought, well, one of the...
I've got to say about four stories at the same time here to get the parallelism right.
So the first is, it's not so easy to speak the truth, but it's fairly easy to stop lying.
And so...
As you stop lying, you get better, you get to approximate speaking the truth.
But the way you start isn't by speaking the truth.
The way you start is by stopping lying.
And then a lot of the rules in the Old Testament are prohibitions.
Here's a bunch of things you shouldn't do that you might be inclined to do.
And so the idea there would be, if you stop doing all the things you know you shouldn't do, then you can, your head clears up enough so you can start to see the things that you should do.
And so then in the Abrahamic story, maybe it's something like this.
You said, you implied, Matthew, that Abraham originally follows something like a vague and ill-defined whim, but he has enough faith to move forward, despite the fact that it's vague and ill-defined.
And then, as a consequence of moving forward, it becomes more and more concretized and And differentiated and clear.
Okay, that's right, man, because that's, you know, it's funny because the future authoring program we've developed is sort of predicated on that idea.
The first thing you do is wander around in a kind of confused daze, trying to find a direction of orientation, and then you clarify that.
And partly you do that by continuing to think about it, but you also clarify it by acting on it.
Okay.
Yeah, and the idea, these three men that Come visit him.
There's a reason why there's three.
It's because it's trying to express the idea that it's more expressed.
It's more explicit.
It's not just a seed anymore.
It's like a branch.
You've got something that looks like a branch.
It's branching out into a more...
Concrete thing.
At first it's just a voice, then it's a vision, then it's actual people.
Okay, so here's another idea.
Let's say if you're beginning to develop morality, you behave so that the people who share your morality can get along with you.
That means you follow the rules.
But if you're dealing with strangers, it's a different issue because they aren't part of your morality.
And so the question then is, how do you act properly when you're not in the domain of your morality?
And I always thought about that as a metamoral domain.
And it seems to me that it's the domain that Christ occupies because he's like the mediator between moralities.
He's in no man's land and is the mediator between moralities.
And if you're If you've oriented yourself properly, then you even know how to act when there aren't any rules.
And that's why Abraham can act properly in relationship to the strangers.
He's awake enough so that when the stranger shows up, he can pay attention to the way they're acting and can act spontaneously as a consequence of paying attention and things go well.
And so the strangers aren't hostile.
They don't kill him.
They don't take his wife.
They don't do any of the terrible things that strangers could do.
And he gets a blessing as a consequence of it.
Does that seem reasonable?
It is, but we have to understand that these strangers come from heaven in the sense that they're bringing a message.
They're not just random strangers.
They're sent.
Maybe he would have acted the same way with a stranger that wasn't sent.
And that's the whole point.
He doesn't know.
That's right.
So he acts in a way that allows for that, for the one that's sent to be received.
Okay, so that's very interesting, too, because one of the things that I think you see happening as a consequence of the transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament...
Is that...
Part of Christ's message is to act in exactly that way.
Is to act in a manner that allows for the possibility of the emergence of the good.
That's something like...
That's something like...
What would you describe it as?
A description of the necessity of faith.
And you know, like let's say you stretch out your hand to someone in trust.
You shouldn't be naive.
But it's a precondition for good things happening.
Like if you're distrustful and you have every reason to be because people are full of snakes.
If you're distrustful...
You foreclose the opportunity for cooperative progress instantly.
You might protect yourself against being bitten now and then.
So there is a dramatic relationship between the manner in which you open yourself up to the world and the way the world treats you.
And one of the things that seems to be really emphasized, it's more implicit in the Old Testament, more explicit in the New Testament, is that The more you open yourself up to the possibility that good things will happen.
And that's partly by accepting your vulnerability, as far as I can tell.
the higher the probability is that good things will in fact happen.
Yeah, I mean, I would definitely say that in the story of Abraham, like we were kind of flirting around that idea before, is that the reason why he was able to receive them as these angels, that they were able is that the reason why he was able to receive them as these angels, that they were able to manifest themselves as these angels, was
It's as if his family, just like Sarah, he was the right ground for that manifestation at that time.
Well, you might even say that they wouldn't have been angels if he wouldn't have treated them properly.
Well, they might have been angry, but they might have done what they did in Sodom and Gomorrah.
Exactly.
That's the whole point.
That's the whole point.
Okay, so now I want to flip ahead a little bit.
This is really what I... This is, I think, of all the things I wanted to discuss with you guys, I think this is the one that's most crucial.
Because...
Okay, so now we're in...
Let's say we're in Sodom with the angels.
And we're in the part of the story where the townspeople of Sodom gather around the house and they tell Lot that unless he throws out the strangers so that they can be raped, well, the townspeople demand that.
And then Lot offers them his daughters, which seems like a hell of a thing to do.
It's like the sacrifice of Isaac to some degree.
That's what it looks like to me because he's willing to sacrifice his daughters to protect the strangers.
Now, okay, so that's a morally, let's call that a morally ambiguous element of the story.
But then the townspeople reject that and they basically tell him that he has no right or power to bargain and that not only are they going to take his daughters, but they're also going to take the strangers.
So it doesn't work.
But, you know, to modern sensibility, the offering of his daughters is a reprehensible thing.
But it seems to me that in the context of the story, it's an indication of how hard Lot is trying to treat the strangers properly in a place where that's essentially impossible.
Yeah, that's the whole point of that story.
That place is impossible.
That's the whole point, I think, what you just said.
There's no way out of it.
Right.
Leonard Cohen said something about that.
He had a line that I remembered quite well.
He said, there's no decent place to stand in a massacre.
And what that seems to mean is that it's something like you can get into a place that's made of such a compound of errors and deceit and catastrophe that no matter which way you turn, there is no good.
I've seen people like that in my clinical practice.
There's no good.
There's no good alternative.
Everything is sin.
That's a good way.
No matter which way you shoot, you're not going to hit the mark.
Because you're not somewhere where the mark can be hit.
Okay, now.
I've been trying to think about the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in relationship to modern sexual confusion.
So this is what I see happening on the social justice front, let's say.
On the one hand, since the 1960s, and probably as a consequence of the birth control pill, but other factors as well, there's been tremendous stress placed on sexual liberation.
And so there's this idea that I think is associated in large part right now with the radical left of total sexual freedom.
But at the same time, there's increasing emphasis from exactly the same sources on restricting sexual So you see this in the campuses, for example, where increasingly, particularly heterosexual contact is regulated by a doctrine that says you have to get spoken permission for every move in the mating process.
I know I'm not expressing myself very well, but there seems to be, in our current culture, there seems to be massive sexual confusion.
It's some weird combination of extreme libertinism and extreme authoritarian attitudes towards sexuality.
And obviously in the story of Sodom, part of what's happening is that Impulse of sexual gratification trumps everything.
It's something like that.
I mean, I know there's more to what's going on in Sodom than that, but there's certainly that.
And so, well, I'm trying to figure out what to say about that tonight.
Because there's a lesson in there.
The lesson is something like, Don't let impulsive sexuality get the upper hand.
It's something like that.
Or all hell will break loose, which I actually happen to agree with.
So one of the things that we haven't been able to talk about in our culture, I think, is let's take the idea, the phenomena of AIDS. AIDS mutated to take advantage of promiscuous sexuality.
And that's just nothing.
You never hear that publicized.
You know, people had associated AIDS with homosexuality and there was a reason for that because it's much more easily transmitted as a consequence of homosexual sex than heterosexual sex because the anus is a much more delicate physiological structure.
It's not as robust and it can be much more easily damaged and with disease resulting as a consequence.
It isn't only the manner of sexual action that's the issue.
It's also the fact that promiscuity provided the evolutionary platform for the AIDS virus to mutate into the form that it finally took.
And it was only by the skin of our teeth that we escaped a totalizing plague.
Had that emerged a hundred years ago, God only knows how many people would have died.
AIDS was unbelievably fatal.
So, I know that's a mishmash of ideas, and I'm not exactly sure how to see my way clear through it, but there is a clear warning in that story about something, about something to do with sexual iniquity.
In the Bible, sexuality has two poles that define it.
It's pretty clear.
One side is reproduction, and the other side is We could, let's say, recreation.
Okay?
So, those are the two poles of sexuality in a normal world.
So, it's not just for reproduction, and it's not just for recreation.
It's both.
That was the idea.
I mean, it's a natural idea.
Now, if you, if there's a balance there, that should be had.
If you lose this balance, and it becomes just about reproduction, that's a problem.
And if it becomes just about recreation, That's another problem.
It's not that complicated, really, but it's so politically incorrect to talk about these things, even though they're obvious, that nobody dares to talk about them.
The thing is that the most difficult things to talk about are the things that are obvious, because when they're obvious, you don't have to talk about them.
And so then when people start to question the obvious, you don't know what to say.
So, for example, I'm thinking about the slut walks, you know.
And so women go out and they dress very provocatively and they go out and manifest their right to be as provocative as they possibly can be without being interfered with.
And I have some sympathy for that perspective because it seems to me appropriate for women to be the final arbiters in sexual contact.
But on the other hand, it also, that whole exercise is blind to the fact that clothing, for example, has communicative intent and that People broadcast their invitation to sexual congress in a million ways, subtle and not so subtle.
And you can't just say, I have the right to broadcast myself in any manner possible and be completely, um, can be, what, completely immune from the consequences.
There's something wrong with that.
And with regards to basic sexual morality, you know, I've read things about, like, slut-shaming.
The more radical feminist types, for example, claim that women shouldn't be held responsible for their sexual behaviour in some sense.
It shouldn't be held against them, how many men they've slept with, etc.
But then I think, well, you'd never recommend to someone that they lay down naked on the side of the street with their legs spread and invite anybody who walks by to partake of the opportunity.
Everyone would regard that as inappropriate.
I think, without question.
And so, what that indicates is that some degree of sexual propriety is both normative and ethical.
And then, of course, you can start asking yourself about what that degree of sexual propriety should be.
And it does have something to do with getting the balance between reproduction and recreation right.
Yep.
Well, the thing, even in the Bible, there's...
There's the two aspects.
Some stories are about just this aspect.
And there are the most strange stories in the Bible.
For example, the story of Tamar is one of those.
So, I don't know if you're familiar with that story.
Not enough.
It's intercut with the story of Joseph, okay, in Egypt.
And it's essentially, it says that Judah...
Had children with some woman and I think it's a stranger.
It doesn't necessarily say so, but it seems like that's what it is.
And then the sons die off and then there's this woman called Tamar and she disguises herself as a prostitute.
Great.
And she has a kid with Judah himself.
So all the symbols are in that story.
Does she take elements of his clothing?
Yeah.
As a bribe, yeah, essentially.
Well, she wants to indicate later that he's the one who slept with her.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that story is about the need for the recreative part of sexuality.
It's all about that symbolism.
It's all about deceit.
It's all about incest.
It's all about death.
And the idea is it's to raise the dead.
It's not clear in the story, but if you understand the imagery, that's what it's about.
It's about regressing back to an error that was made and raising the dead.
I don't want to get into it, but it's just the idea that in the Bible there's both, too.
There's reproduction and there's recreation.
And the recreation is renewal.
Sexuality is about renewal, too.
But that aspect of the symbolism is pretty...
I don't want to say obscure because it's actually right there if you can see it, but it's...
It's strange.
I'll say it like that.
It's strange.
Okay, so now another element of this might be the fact that in modern identity politics, sexual choice is a canonical identifier.
And that also seems to me to be something wrong about that.
Like, one of the things I've seen happening in Toronto, I'm sure it's the same in Montreal, is that I'm going to do this awkwardly.
I'm going to put this awkwardly because I haven't been able to sort through it properly.
Pride Day has turned into Pride Week and that's turned into Pride Month.
And I think that seems to me to be pushing against some kind of limit because the first question that I have is...
I was reading this book the other day by a friend of mine from Ottawa who's a gay conservative.
And he said he had a lot harder time coming out as a conservative than he had as coming out as gay.
And he talked about the degree to which homosexuals were persecuted in Canada before, say, the 1980s.
And it makes quite harsh reading, let's say.
And so...
And so, fair enough to the...
to the...
Civil rights movement.
Let's say it that that has brought homosexuality into the norm or that into the mainstream Maybe that's one way of thinking about it, but that conversation Still has a tremendous amount of development that's necessary because I don't understand exactly It isn't obvious to me what integration into the mainstream precisely means because a lot there's been a lot of talk so far about Respecting the rights of gay people.
But very little talk about what the accompanying responsibilities might be.
That actually seems to me to be a problem.
And I mean, I just had a letter from a gay guy who has been wrestling with this because he's not sure how to be gay and to be ethical at the same time, you know, because he sees part of normative behavior as taking a wife and having children and that, and can see the value in that, but that's certainly not the direction of his proclivity.
And so he wrote to me asking me what he should do.
And, you know, I don't have an answer for that.
I don't know what the answer to that is.
But I know that it might be something that would be worth talking about.
And it's part of this current confusion about sexual identity and sexual pleasure and, well, even gender identity for that matter.
So, alright, so your idea was, well, the balance between recreation and reproduction had gone...
It was completely absent in Sodom.
It was all recreation.
It was all instant gratification and impulse.
Yeah.
And that's why it's put in contrast with the Abraham bit, because it's the same angels.
But in that case, he says, you'll have a son this time next year.
So it's the reproduction part is there.
But when he gets to the bottom, it's not there anymore.
It's only the recreation part.
Okay?
Yeah.
So...
They're meant to be contrasted, those two stories.
Actually, in the story of Abraham, it's pretty clear.
He goes...
I don't know if this will make sense because...
When the angels come, it says he washes their feet and then he feeds them.
That's actually the recreation and reproduction part.
Not in terms of sexuality, but in terms of meaning.
Renewal, the washing of the feet, is the recreation part, the renewal, the restarting.
And the feeding is the reproduction part.
Not in a sexual way, but when you feed something food and it eats it and integrates it correctly, that's like a reproduction of your identity.
You're staying yourself.
You're reproducing yourself.
So when you eat food, that's what you're doing.
Not, like I said, not in a sexual way, but it has exactly the same meaning.
If you eat something that you can integrate correctly...
You're like reproducing your pattern.
It's like the correct version of yourself.
The other side...
The washing is that...
Little flood.
It's a flood.
It's a mini flood.
It's an acceptable one.
Right.
It's a controlled one.
You're washing the road's dust off your feet.
It means that you're passing from one mode of being into another.
Because you're cleaning off the debris of the past.
It's something like that.
It's about renewal.
So you have to see that when Matthew's talking about the idea of recreation, you have to understand that recreation and rest are basically the same thing.
They basically have the same meaning.
It's sleeping, resting, recreation are all things that bring you into renewal.
Dying.
Even dying.
Even dying.
That's what dying is.
It's...
Passing into...
Another state.
Letting something else have a chance.
That's what dying is.
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