Former Astrologist Explains Danger of New Age Practices | Angela Ucci
A former astrologist finds the truth and gives a clear warning against new-age practices. Angela Ucci spent 10 years dabbling in many new-age arts from tarot cards or yoga before her life was changed forever when she was saved by Jesus Christ.
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The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.
And sometimes in the stars.
Specifically when we look to the stars and compromise our free will and start doing a dance with the devil.
That is what happened to Angela Ucci, who dabbled in astrology, hosted a very popular astrology podcast, To the Moon and Back, And then got into all sorts of weird, new-agey, occult things.
Reiki, manifesting, crystals, tarot cards, all the rest of it, until she realized it was all really, really bad and gave it all up.
Here with me is Angela Ucci, now the host of the Heaven and Healing.
Thank you for coming on the show.
Thank you for having me.
Happy to be here.
We chatted a few weeks ago on my member block at the Daily Wire, and I said...
This needs to go way, way longer.
I want to know way more about what's happened.
Because people write into me all the time, and I even have just friends ask me in my regular lives, Michael, what do you know about the law of attraction?
Michael, what do you know about the secret?
What do you know about the crystals and Reiki and astrology and all this stuff that I say seems really, really kooky and weird, but I don't know anything about it?
You do, and you say it's not all just fun and games.
It gets pretty, pretty dark.
Mm-hmm.
So, I was involved with occult practices for almost a full decade.
I had an extremely tragic death in my family in 2014.
We touched on this briefly when we spoke.
My grandmother died.
I was on a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean when it happened, and she was like my best friend in the world.
I grew up with a single mom, did the best she could, love her to death, but she could only do so much.
So, Grandma really kind of stepped in and took over.
With after-school care, things like that.
So we were very, very close growing up.
She was my everything.
Kind of in hindsight, she was my god.
And when she died, it was absolute tragedy for me.
It was the worst thing that's ever happened.
Once that occurred, I was desperate for any way to connect with her, to talk to her again, to experience her again.
And I didn't know any better.
All I knew was my pain.
And I know now that Satan kind of capitalizes on trauma.
Everyone I talk to that's coming out of New Age doesn't have the same story as me, but often there is a pinpoint traumatic moment where they've started to go down this rabbit hole.
And so I went to see a medium.
I consulted a psychic medium after she passed.
And the medium knew things that she just really had no business knowing.
It was astounding at the time.
And I was hooked.
I was just 100% all in from that point forward, and it just was a domino effect from there.
So the medium had cards, angel cards, oracle cards as she called them, and I bought that same deck.
I went on and bought that same deck by Doreen Virtue, who...
About five to seven years ago actually came out and said, I'm not selling these cards anymore.
God told me that these are demonic.
I can't do this.
I want to pull back all of my inventory.
She had books out.
She was like traveling the world.
She lived in Hawaii making so much money from doing this stuff and just denounced all of it when Christ came to her.
And so when I had heard that years ago, this is when I was really deep into all of it, I thought, well, she lost her mind.
But it's kind of a full circle moment.
I went out and bought those cards.
Now you realize you had lost your...
Right.
I had lost my mind.
I was the kooky one.
And so...
After I got into cards, I wanted to learn how to develop my own psychic medium skills, so I would buy books about that.
And this is all kind of alongside of self-help, getting into the self-help kind of culture that just teaches you off the bat, you know, you are your own best asset.
You, you, you, you, you.
It's all essentially narcissistic therapy.
I'm doing that alongside learning about psychic mediumship and learning about tarot cards and things like that.
That spiraled into yoga practice and Reiki because I had also, after my grandma passed, decided I was going to take control of my health because I was very overweight at the time.
I was only 20, 21 years old and I weighed over 260 pounds.
I was Not well.
And I realized I was kind of setting myself up on the same path as my grandmother because ultimately it was her health that did her in.
So I don't want to do that anymore.
So I'm learning about self-help.
I'm losing weight, getting healthy, developing this nice relationship with food and exercise, and also getting into spirituality.
So this is all these moving parts.
But the yoga was originally...
Physical wellness, like a way to kind of supplement my weight loss process.
But that very quickly became spiritual the more I read about it.
And then I became a yoga teacher years later.
And that, as I learned about the history of yoga, that just brought me right into Hinduism and all those concepts.
Well, of course, because people think yoga is just stretching or something, you know, but really it's a religious liturgy.
Not just...
The kind of liturgy of liberal white girls in the suburbs, which is what it has effectively become in America.
But it goes back much further, and it's a Hindu spiritual practice.
The word yoga literally means yoke.
And so in that context, it's to yoke spirit.
So it's an invitation for the Hindu gods to kind of come into your body.
And a lot of the poses are specifically reenactments or paying homage to I have to pause you.
For people who are going to say, well, that's crazy.
That's insane.
You think you're inviting all these spirits in.
It's just yoga.
I guess I would have to ask those people, hey, don't you think it's a little weird that in your physical stretches, as you are presenting these things to be, That you regularly chant and invoke ancient Vedic or Hindu utterances.
Isn't that a little weird that you go into poses that are explicitly and intentionally spiritual?
Which of us is the crazy one here?
Because I'm just reading into this long-standing tradition what it has always presented itself as doing.
Right.
And that's kind of a misconception a lot of people have.
Even Christians that I talk to now say, well, what's so bad about yoga?
I challenge you, go into a yoga studio and try and say God's name.
You can't.
It doesn't fit.
You can feel it.
When I was a yoga teacher, toward the end, I tried doing it.
You can just feel from the class.
It's like...
You're not saying you physically can't utter the word God.
You're just saying no one in that class is.
People don't want it.
I was even told, because I used to put yoga videos on YouTube as well, and I would try and say, let's let God's presence come into the room.
When I was trying to straddle the fence of both at the time, this was about a year ago, so I would get comments, people saying, I don't like that word, could you say universe?
I don't like that word.
Can you say Moloch, please?
Right.
So the yogi concept of God is very much source, universe, we are all God mindset.
And alongside with what you were saying, with the chanting and things like that, It's not just the chanting, it's the poses themselves.
They're very unnatural.
It's very different than just stretching.
If you want to stretch, you can do Pilates, right?
There's no ohms and ahs in Pilates.
And so I always say that yoga is not a physical practice with spiritual benefits.
It's a spiritual practice with physical benefits.
So you got into yoga, you're a yoga teacher.
You mentioned Reiki.
I've heard this word before.
Again, from my kind of white girl liberal friends, and I, to confess my ignorance, I have no idea what it is.
It's energy healing.
So the idea is, and when I say these things now, I feel like I just sound absolutely insane for having believed it so much.
So it's essentially...
You are able to, allegedly able to, tap into the universal energy, universal consciousness and how that energy is supposed to be all love and healing and so you are kind of the vessel for that energy to enter in and you lay your hands over somebody Usually like a massage table and you facilitate that energy through their body and you move through their chakra system,
which again, that kind of ties into yoga.
So the idea is that we have these seven energy channels in the body, in the throat, in the heart, and they all operate different things for us, like where our insecurities are and our self-expression, our creativity, sexual energy, things like that.
And so, for instance, someone might say, I'm having kind of really bad cramps.
Can you clear that energy for me?
Deduct from that, based on where the pain is and the chakra associated, that, oh, you are probably having some sort of creativity block.
Yeah, I'll clear that out for you.
So that's the idea, and you could use crystals to help facilitate that, because all the crystals, of course, have their designated healing qualities, supposedly.
I gotta ask.
Sure.
Does it work?
Or even...
Does it do anything?
It does.
It definitely puts you in an altered state of consciousness, and that's not just for the person receiving.
It's also the facilitator as well sometimes.
I would have really intense, because I would facilitate it and also receive.
When I would facilitate, I would get moments where my hands would get very hot if I was over someone's throat or something, and that was my cue that needed extra attention.
Do you think there's a physical, natural explanation for that, or no?
My understanding is that it's supposed to just be the energy accessible to all of us.
So we all, in a way, experience...
If you're having a creativity block, in a way, I am too.
So that's why I'm able to recognize it, because we're all one kind of mindset.
And to answer your question in regard to does it work...
It is a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.
It works until it doesn't.
And you need more.
It really, for me, would alleviate...
It's like taking Tylenol.
It would just alleviate the symptoms but not necessarily fix the problem.
It's like taking heroin.
Right.
And I always say these things are spiritual narcotics because that's exactly what they are.
You get addicted to it.
You get addicted to the highs.
You leave a Reiki session.
Wow, I feel great.
I feel so refreshed.
I'm cleansed.
And then two weeks later, you have a mental breakdown, and you're like, well, I guess this chakra's still kind of clogged, or I didn't cut these cords from my past life, sort of thing.
There was always an excuse to justify why you needed more.
You believed in past lives?
Oh, yeah.
I believed a lot of crazy things.
I was from the yoga and the Reiki...
I was at this point where, again, I'm studying self-help, I'm getting healthy, I'm finally at a place where I don't hate myself when I look in the mirror because I had lost over 100 pounds.
And this was about six years ago, so I'm still sad.
I thought I had worked through the grievances of my grandmother the best that I could by getting healthy.
I thought, I'm eating well.
I'm working out.
Why am I still so depressed?
I'm reading all these self-help books, like so many self-help books.
You should have seen my show.
It was ridiculous.
Why am I not getting better?
I'm journaling every day.
I'm doing yoga every day.
I'm getting Reiki done.
I find the people who get into New Age and Reiki and who are really into yoga, they always seem to read a ton of self-help books.
Yeah, there's a correlation.
What's that about?
A savior complex, a self-savior complex.
As opposed to a savior-savior complex.
Right.
Everything is counterfeit gospel.
Everything.
All these practices in one way or another is a counterfeit gospel.
And that is where I'm going to get into probably the weirdest part of my story, where I'm up maybe 2 or 3 a.m.
one night googling why do I feel...
Why do I feel like I don't belong?
Why do I feel like I'm almost like an alien on this planet?
And so I find information, journals from people saying, well, actually, it turns out you are an alien.
So yeah, I literally believed I was an alien.
They're called starseeds.
Mm-hmm.
And the idea is that starseeds come from another dimension, another star system, another planet, another galaxy.
Like, I was mentally ill, if you couldn't tell.
But were you mentally ill in, you know, I don't know, some part of your brain was firing the wrong way?
Or...
Or were you just diluted?
I was diluted.
You diluted.
I mean, it was not as though you pop a pill and it fixes a chemical imbalance.
You had just gone so far down this rabbit trail that it compounded on itself.
It just spiraled, right.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I'm reading all this stuff, and it made sense to me because it said, you know, you've always felt like an outsider because you are an outsider.
You don't belong, and you came here to help Earth.
So the starseed gospel, as I call it, is that...
You are kind of a light worker that has observed the state of our planet.
And because, coming back to this idea that we're all one energy, the universe is all one energy, It's like, well, if this planet is out of whack, then that's going to ripple throughout the universe and create chaos throughout the universe, so we need to find harmony amongst ourselves.
And so the lightworkers from different galaxies come in to Earth to ascend the collective.
That's the narrative.
And we do that with our healing powers.
Reiki and astrology, we teach these things to help.
So it's obviously very esoteric.
Indeed.
But I guess I'm only half having trouble, because I've gone kind of down weird rabbit holes, too, which we can get to a little later.
I've never thought I was an alien, but I've gone down pretty weird rabbit holes.
But in that moment, so you're looking this up, and this website says, oh, actually, Angela, you're an alien.
Yes.
How did you persuade yourself of that?
How would that have worked?
It justified my sadness and it gave me a purpose because I felt like I was meaningless.
I didn't know why I was here.
I wanted to die, to be quite frank.
I was very suicidal, flirted with suicide in high school, on and off, in college, self-harm.
I did all the things.
It never got better.
You know, I was like 25 feeling the same way that I did when I was 15 despite all the work I was doing and despite how hard I was trying every single day to just pull myself up by the bootstraps and feel good.
And just wasn't ever really hitting in what I was really looking for, which I know now was God.
But yeah, when I was first learning about the Starseed thing, It was like, wow, okay, this makes sense.
So I chose this life.
I chose to be here.
I chose this suffering because it's teaching me something.
It's my karma that I'm working through because when I work out that bad stuff, it helps the universe with its bad stuff.
It kind of doesn't make sense because it's not real.
And it's all kind of self-refuting because it's like, well...
We're the mess, but we're also the cleanup crew.
Like, it just doesn't really match up.
Like, you're the knot, but you also have to untangle the knot.
It doesn't make sense.
So you're not in control at all, but you're totally in control of everything.
Exactly.
Right.
Exactly.
And with the whole Starseed thing, that just got me obsessed with space.
Wanting to find my star family.
I would do meditations and walk through things to try and connect with those beings.
The star?
The star people.
Did you connect?
I had experiences where I felt like I saw things and felt things in my room.
They were always blue.
Yeah, really, really strange.
Did they have a shape?
Long, like the typical kind of alien that you see in a sci-fi movie, but not scary, like light.
What do you think that was?
Just a hallucination?
To be perfectly honest, a demon.
That's my understanding of ghosts, anything of that kind of sort.
You don't believe in ghosts?
I don't.
There's a ghost in the Bible.
Is there?
So when Saul goes to the Witch of Endor, Saul has outlawed necromancy, all the stuff that we're talking about right now.
Right.
And he goes to the Witch of Endor, and he says, summon up a ghost.
And she says, no, I can't do that.
Saul outlawed it in the land.
And he goes, don't worry about Saul.
Him being Saul.
And so she does.
And it's a really curious moment, because she says, oh my gosh, you've deceived me, because she calls up the ghost of Samuel.
And It's a very interesting moment because it seems as though the Witch of Endor is actually sort of surprised by what she's done.
So it raises the question, was she sort of just a fraud, like a dime store boardwalk psychic, you know, who is just selling nonsense to people?
And then all of a sudden she conjures a ghost.
But regardless, she does conjure Samuel, and then Saul talks to Samuel.
So we have at least one example of a ghost.
So I don't know.
A lot of times when people...
Say they've seen a ghost, which has happened many, many times.
It happened to me, too, when I was little.
It did.
I wonder if they're hallucinating, if it's a demon, but I'm not totally sure there aren't ghosts, too.
Yeah, it's not a hill I'll die on.
Because then you might become a ghost.
Fair.
I just, with the alien thing specifically, I think that's the demonic kind of realm that we shouldn't really have any business playing with.
And, I mean, the Bible says the verse that sticks out to me most coming out of New Age is that Satan himself disguises as an angel of light.
And that was always what I thought was coming to me.
That was my spirit guides.
That was my star family.
That was my grandmother.
You know, it's actually interesting because I had something attached to me for the past, since she died in 2014, because I would call on it.
I would say, please come, please come, please come.
Like, hug me.
Like, I would feel hugs.
I would feel something near me.
And after my conversion, if you will, I was in the kitchen by myself and I felt it come up next to me and I said out loud, I said, God, whatever this is that's been posing as grandma for the past seven years, in Jesus' name, get it away from me and never let it come back.
And it hasn't been back since.
So...
You said you saw something like a ghost when you were a kid.
Was that the thing that you...
No, I saw when I was a kid what I thought was my great-grandpa.
I was very, very young at the time.
And then I kind of...
That really spooked me.
It would.
I kind of blocked that out.
But I always grew up...
With this interest in the paranormal.
So there's something there too.
I always sought out scary movies for some reason.
Now I kind of want no parts of them.
Why would I entertain it even?
But I always sought out scary movies and was so big on haunted houses, wanting those thrills.
And when I reflect on that, I wonder what that was.
Why was I so interested in terrifying myself, essentially?
Or being interested in demons, but...
Anyway, the starseed thing led me to space, which led me to astrology, which was really my niche.
I fell in love with astrology because it kind of explained why I was the way I was, that alongside the starseed explanation.
Because it was, you know, oh, I'm such a sap because when I was born, the planet Venus was in the constellation Cancer.
That explains it.
Okay, great.
I started to have answers for why I am the way I am.
Why am I so sad?
Why am I more prone to these patterns?
Why do my relationships play out in this way?
Things like that.
Astrology was starting to give me the answers and just...
Just going in and in, just deeper into myself, which was deeper into the occult, essentially, because I just couldn't get enough of what astrology had to offer me.
So correlating that with my starseed thing, I would tell people on Moon and Back podcast, I would tell the audience that we all chose to be here.
It's the karmic journey, of course.
We all chose to be here to help the collective ascend, to help Earth rise into 5D consciousness and out of this stagnant 3D. And so, we thus chose our birth chart.
We knew that these planets would influence our lives and we chose that because we wanted to learn specific lessons.
And we wanted to be able to teach specific things and help other people in certain areas and foster these sorts of relationships, whether it be with money or with people or with anything.
So it gave me, again, that savior complex.
That's what I always say.
It's just...
So you chose it, but you don't remember choosing it, and apparently you chose a kind of crappy alignment of everything.
Yeah.
So it just made me feel better about my suffering, essentially.
It was like, like I said, it was a band-aid on a gunshot wound.
I was miserable, but at least I... Oh, okay.
It makes sense why I'm miserable.
I'm supposed to be.
I'm working through it.
It's the process.
And, you know, it's like that interesting...
Again, it doesn't make sense.
It's self-refuting because it was always...
What's taught with these practices...
Is that everything is a process all the time, but also you're going to achieve enlightenment eventually.
So which is it?
Next week.
It's going to be just the day after tomorrow.
That's when you're going to achieve it.
And it's just, when I look back, it's crazy how I've just never grasped any of this in a logical, rational mindset.
And it's ironic because now people think I'm crazy.
I was going around saying I'm an alien, and that was fine.
But now I love Jesus and I've lost it.
You're totally nuts.
I'm a clown.
Were you at the time into any of the New Age guru types?
I don't know anything about these people, but I'm thinking of Deepak Chopra.
Yeah, I was.
You were?
I was.
Who were you into?
I was into Deepak Chopra.
I was into Louise Hay.
There's a teacher on YouTube, Yoga with Adrian.
And no disrespect to her, but she was my yoga guru.
Eckhart Tolle, who wrote The Power of Now and actually A New Earth.
A lot.
I had a lot of names on my shelves, for sure.
The Four Agreements is one of the books.
Who's that by?
I can't remember the name of the author.
There's another interesting book called Conversations with God by Donald Walsh or Wells something along those lines.
Donald something.
He wrote this book that he claimed He was channeling God, and God was talking through him.
And essentially the entire book is refuting the Bible.
And it's funny because it's Bible thickness.
And God just, through this man, said, actually everything else was wrong.
He said, this was wrong, this is how it is now.
Yeah.
Wow.
And I liked it because it was all about honoring your truth, which is...
The biggest thing with New Ageism is honoring the self.
And, you know, this has...
I've realized that New Ageism is everywhere.
It's in politics.
Yeah.
Everyone is self-obsessed.
That New Age lady, that explicitly New Age lady, Marianne Williamson, ran for president in 2016.
She was talking about astral forces and all this kind of really specifically New Age lingo on presidential debate stages.
Yeah, that's insane.
I think Nancy Pelosi said something recently about Mother Earth and how powerful she is.
Yeah.
Nancy, who pretends to be a practicing Catholic, though she doesn't accept church teaching on non-negotiable central issues, but pretends to be, at least.
Right, and I was thinking in the context of even abortions, because people, it's all my body, my choice, it's my truth, it's mine.
There is no right or wrong, because I am the author of what's right or wrong in my life and in my body, and that is everything that New Ageism is about.
And transgenderism, too, right?
Yes.
My true self has nothing to do with...
Objective reality.
It's just whatever I say it is.
And I've seen how kind of the culture's obsession, culture by the way, the culture's obsession with honestly just kind of dismantling God's order.
Like, why is that?
Like, there's got to be a reason for that.
And Hollywood's obsession with the devil and how Jesus Christ is the only name we blaspheme.
People never scream out Buddha when they're upset.
You know what I mean?
Like, no Buddha.
Like, it's never that.
Buddha, damn it.
Yeah, exactly.
No one says that.
And no one gets triggered when you say anything about Muhammad.
But the name Jesus Christ, people flinch.
It's almost like there's something to it.
You know what I mean?
There is a group of people that gets a little triggered when you say negative things about Muhammad.
But broadly...
In a broad context.
There's one above them all that is most mocked.
I saw Kendrick Lamar recently with the...
I don't think I've ever seen Kendrick Lamar.
I saw something on Instagram where in one of his music videos he's walking on water, he's on a cross, he has a...
Crown of Thorns.
Wow.
Or Little Nas X. He did the whole video where he's basically having sex with the devil.
And everyone said people were being extreme for that.
But look, it's not extreme because this stuff gets into mines and it's just a slow drip.
Well, there was a guy, he's the deputy monkeypox coordinator at the White House now.
And he's taken photos of himself wearing leather pentagrams on his chest.
And apparently seems to have a pentagram tattoo on one of his pecs.
You have to wonder, you say, okay, if I'm the crazy one because I'm noticing this, because I'm observing these really weird specific satanic symbols, That guy's got to be way crazier for putting it on his body, right?
How come I'm the crazy one for noticing, he's not the crazy one for doing it?
Right.
Right.
It also makes me feel better that even though I thought I was an alien, I was never the deputy of monkeypox.
You never want to.
You don't want to be coordinating monkeypox.
Yeah.
It's just everywhere.
And I think it's really important to talk about for that reason.
And a lot of people think I'm extreme.
I lost a lot of friends when this happened because...
Ultimately, the common denominator of our relationship was sin, all practicing divination constantly together, whether it would be a moon circle or Reiki or tarot cards.
What's a moon circle?
So, my obsession with astrology was really centered around my fascination with the moon.
A lot of the time, I just said in my old podcast, I was enamored with the moon.
Because the new moon was always supposed to represent new beginnings and setting intentions, and then the full moon was always what I would say on my podcast, the time when the moon is in its full illumination, so it's kind of shining a light on everything that's blocking us from our intentions that we set at the previous cycle.
And so now with the full moon, we can release that.
And so the moon always falls in...
It might be a new moon in Aries, and so Aries is supposed to be the sign of...
Beginnings and initiation.
So if it's a new moon in Aries, that's a really good time to start a new business venture.
So it just always, it gave like a criteria for my life, sort of patterns to follow.
Again, kind of instilling purpose in me because I felt like I didn't have any.
And just a scheme.
Okay, I do this this month and I do this next month.
Exactly.
It's escapism.
So the moon circles, we would gather, me and a group of girlfriends, we would gather every new moon and every full moon and we would do just that.
Set intentions or release and...
This sounds to me like witchcraft.
Like a coven, right?
Is that what that is?
Essentially.
We would never call it that because it's really interesting how even in the realm of New Ageism, you understand that there's negative energy and demonic influence.
You know, why is it that every time we did Reiki or every time we did a moon circle, every time I practiced with my crystals or my tarot, every time I did yoga, why is it you always have to pray for protection?
Why is it you always have to call in an angel team?
Why is it you always have to set up pillars of light around the room?
Why do you have to prepare yourself for the worst with all these practices?
It's kind of like the same thing with psychedelics, because that's also mind altercation.
Kind of the same thing.
And you kind of have to set your intentions with that, too.
It's all these things that you have to be really, really particular with.
You have to follow all these steps, or you could do it wrong.
Sage the room.
Because demons are scared of smudge.
Definitely.
For people now who are going to call you crazy for criticizing all this stuff, people call me crazy for saying, you know, actually people do practice witchcraft.
And they say, Michael, you're crazy.
What an insane thing to say.
You did it.
You did it.
You saw it.
You participated in it.
So, again, it's one of these where I go back to, why am I crazy for noticing it, but they're not crazy for doing it.
They're actually doing it.
Well, the Bible has the answer to that, because Satan blinds the minds of unbelievers, and because Satan is the prince of this world.
Right.
And so, you know, that's something else that kind of started to wake me up to the idea that there is a theistic God, specifically the Christian God, Because in 2020, when everything went down, I was also, I was a seething liberal at the time as well.
So, I mean, it's all connected.
It really is because you go to an abortion rally, I guarantee that girl who's naked giving the middle finger that says, F you, my body, my choice.
I guarantee you go into her bedroom, there's a mandala on her wall.
What is that, by the way?
It's just like a...
You've seen them.
They're tapestries with the circles with all the flowers.
Yeah, I have seen them.
And it's weird.
Yeah.
But I never knew what it was called.
They're just like sacred geometry, kind of.
So, it's funny, though.
When you said it, just from the sound of it, I thought, yeah, okay.
I kind of get the idea, and I'm sure she does.
Because...
People try to be conciliatory and nice and say, listen, you know, a person's religion has nothing to do with their politics, and you can be a total demon-worshipping, pagan, you know, conservative, and you can be an orthodox Christian liberal.
But in practice...
That just doesn't happen.
Yeah.
Right?
Yeah.
And that's what I mean, because in 2020, when everything went down, I obviously had nothing but time on my hands when I was in quarantine.
And I hit rock bottom, another flirtation with suicide in that time.
But something that I did with that time was I started for the first time in my life begin to research things and like this is when the George Floyd thing happened too so that kind of sparked something in me where I was recognizing inconsistencies Following a lot of Candace Owens at the time, and it's actually when I learned about the Daily Wire around that time.
And so I got curious about things and why the world is the way it is and what's going on in the government, what's going on in Hollywood.
Oh, maybe Trump isn't crazy, mean, orange man after all, you know?
And I got really hungry for the truth.
And so I started to be more vocal about that online, like exposing things as I saw them come up and sharing really unpopular narratives, but true narratives.
And that thirst for truth, you know, I've always been someone who asks questions.
I've always been someone who wants to know more.
It's It's what led me to self-help.
I wanted to get better.
It's what led me to New Ageism.
I wanted answers.
I wanted healing.
And when my politics began to shift, my spirituality did kind of shift as well, where I understood, you know, everyone's obsessed with Satan for some reason.
Like, what's that about?
If Satan is their obsession, there's got to be a reason, because there's a counter to that.
It's actually God.
And so...
There's something there.
And this is when I began to understand that there's a spiritual warfare.
So understanding biblical concepts, but still with the backdrop of Hinduism, where I thought it was just duality.
It's just the state of the universe is good and evil, and it's kind of like a battleground for who's going to win, you know?
Is it going to be this 5D ascension that I talked about earlier, or is it going to be like we just Get worse and worse and worse because the evil energy, and that's the word I would use, the evil energy was winning, whereas the good energy was losing.
Because I didn't subscribe to what the Bible says, you know, at the time.
I at least began to understand things a little differently, understand that God was there.
And that, again, truth search, I tell people a lot that if you are hungry for the truth, you're going to land on Jesus eventually.
Because he's truth.
You can go down all these different paths, but you're going to find inconsistencies everywhere else.
And that's all I did for 10 years.
I took the long way, too.
I was an atheist for about 10 years.
Atheist kind of weakened to a sort of agnostic by the end of that.
And so I attest to that.
A lot of parallels, actually.
I mean, I never was a part of any covens, worshipping the moon or anything.
But I got into some pretty weird stuff and went down weird intellectual paths.
And I would say, basically, it was kind of 13 to 23.
That was my real period of apostasy, atheism, agnosticism.
You mentioned your grandmother dying.
That was a big moment when you started to explore these things.
I remember my mother died.
I was 17 years old.
I so wanted to talk to her that I googled it.
I said, how do you talk to dead people?
I know that you can't talk to dead people.
That's what I thought then.
Now I wonder if you can talk to dead people, or at the very least, you can talk to demons masquerading as dead people, as has been attested to throughout all of human history.
But I started Googling it, and it's very tempting.
When you're so vulnerable and you're so desperate for something, you'll reach at anything.
You'll go to any kind of crazy length at all.
On that particular path, I never...
Didn't go nearly as far as you did down it.
I probably just gave up after not being able to hear spiritual voices and things like that.
But you can really get into some really weird stuff.
The fact that you mention this obsession with Satan is so interesting to me.
Because sometimes you'll...
If I point out, hey, why is that government official wearing a pentagram?
Oh, Michael, that's no big deal.
It's just a symbol.
I think, well, right, but the whole point of a symbol is that it symbolizes something.
And so that's a symbol of the devil, which seems to me to imply...
That there is such a thing as a devil, or at the very least, that this guy thinks that there is such a thing as the devil.
And either way, it's pretty weird that he's wearing that symbol, isn't it?
And people are just very quick to write it off.
Just like now, you know, it's seeping into schools and into kids' curriculums and even into their playtime.
There's like yoga Barbies and things like that.
And my one friend works at Target and she was showing me pictures.
It's like My Little Pony witch thing.
Cast your spells.
It just seems so innocent.
But it's not.
And that's the point.
And again, it's that Satan masquerades as an angel of light.
It's a deception.
And that's the state of being deceived.
Yeah.
We still haven't gotten to the part where you get out of it.
Right.
That's how you get out of it.
Great point.
So, it's actually really funny.
It started to happen around this time last year, around October of 2021, late September.
So this is very recently.
Very recent.
It's been a really wild year.
I actually saw you guys at Backstage Live...
Last year at the Ryman, and I messaged you something about...
You messaged me?
Yeah, I messaged you something about how great it was, and then I was like, oh, it's a shame that Mercury Retrograde made all the equipment bust, because your mics kept going out.
And I was like, oh, it's because Mercury's in retrograde.
Anyway, well, to regress a little, I was, like I mentioned, you know, at this point I'm 27.
This time last year I was 27, and...
I'm just sad.
I am so sad still.
I'm doing everything still.
It's just like pattern after pattern after pattern.
Just things not...
I'm just never healing.
Like I'm getting these little spurts of...
It's getting better, but then crash and burn worse.
And it's just a hamster wheel that I'm on at this point.
Not understanding what even the point is anymore.
So I had this total breakdown moment in my kitchen.
Crawled up on the floor...
Like, ready to just say, like, this is, like, what am I going to do from this point forward?
Like, I don't want to feel like this in another 10 years, because I'm, like, rationalizing how, again, I'm 27, and I've been feeling depressed since I was 13.
Like, that's, something's wrong.
That's a lie.
I don't want to do this anymore.
I'm just ready to die at this point, and I'm bawling my eyes out, and, like, you can tell I get emotional when I think about this, but...
I don't know why I knew to do this, how I knew to do this.
No one's ever told me to do this.
But I just said out loud, Jesus, save me.
And something happened when I said that.
Things just started to change, like, overnight.
And it sounds bizarre, but that's God.
My heart started to change almost immediately.
And I want to mention this because I don't want to forget it, because I want people to remember how important it is to pray for people.
My best friend, since we were babies, she's been Christian, and I've known her since, I don't even remember meeting her, we were so small.
She's been Christian our whole lives, and she's been praying for me the whole time.
Two decades of prayer that she finally saw come to fruition.
So I like to share that with people because I'm told a lot that it's very encouraging because there's people that others know who they just never see coming out of whatever hell they've entrapped themselves in and finding God.
So I just wanted to touch on that.
In the background, I have someone praying for me the whole time.
Now, after I called out to Jesus, I can't explain it.
I just wanted to know more about him because I felt different inside.
It wasn't 100% yet, but it was something.
It was something that was tangibly different than everything else.
It didn't feel like...
A high, like everything else did.
The word I was using before I even knew that in the Bible it says, God does not give us a spirit of fear, but of sound mind.
The word I was using was sound.
I was saying to people around me, I can't explain it, but I feel sound.
It's not static all the time inside.
So you had been, with all of these other kind of flights of fancy, you'd have this intense high.
You're describing it with Reiki.
You'd have this real high feeling.
But what you're saying with this conversion to Christianity, you felt normal.
Normal.
That's the difference.
Right.
One makes you feel elevated and wild and kind of crazy.
The other one, the craziest part of that is, finally you feel normal.
Just normal.
Which was probably a rare feeling for those 15 years.
It was.
It was so rare.
And I wanted to read the Bible because, you know, oh, that's the one thing I haven't done.
I've read every other book in the world, and I'm seeking out more books to read, but this one's finished, and it has all the answers.
But that's the one I would never touch because, oh, that's the patriarchy.
That's...
That's man, you know, convoluting it.
Like, you know, I believed all the myths without ever even researching them about the Bible.
I just, whatever anyone said about it, I'm like, yep, that's BS. Don't want to go there.
Paperback trash by Deepak Chopra.
That's the truth.
That's the word.
But the enduring font of all culture.
Like, we have more documentation of the New Testament than, like, Plato and Homer, but that's not true.
Yeah, right.
This thing that this guy wrote 10 years ago while tripping on acid.
This must be it.
This must be the answer to my life.
My millennial friend who went to Burning Man.
I'm sure he's got way more insight than Isaiah, right?
It's just insane, the things I believe.
I feel so sorry for that version of myself.
I tease and we laugh.
My heart breaks for people that are deceived by this.
People that might watch this and think, that girl's a lunatic.
Probably have turned it off by now.
But...
You say, no correction, I was a lunatic.
Exactly, because I was there.
I used to think my best friend, for instance, she's too rigid, she's too this, she's too that, she's boring.
She'd come to a party, maybe she'd have a drink.
I'd want her to drink more.
I'd always get us in these bad situations growing up.
I'm the one thrill-seeking.
I'm the one wanting to do all the bad stuff.
She's the one wanting to...
Be normal.
Moderate.
And moderate and conservative.
Anyway, I got my hands on a Bible.
I got two on the same day, actually.
It was kind of funny how that happened.
I went to church with my best friend.
She took me for the first time.
It was very unlike the church I had remembered growing up, because I went to church a couple times, Catholic, when I was very small.
I went to Catholic school for a little bit when I was younger.
Nothing landed.
I was bullied.
A priest screamed at me.
It's a long story.
Many such cases.
I always like to say that, especially from the era that we grew up in, I think it was a great blessing that I didn't go to Catholic school, because I'd almost certainly be an atheist to this day, rather than I went to all these kind of liberal public schools, so of course now I'm a Catholic.
That's the way it works.
That's funny, yeah.
I went to this church with her, and I was just enthralled with the way the pastor was speaking.
He was saying things I had never heard kind of a religious, if you will, figure say before.
He was talking about the state of the world.
He was talking about everything that we were just talking about, how the corruption is the way it is because everyone's serving.
You can only have one of two masters.
It's either God or the other guy.
There's no other option.
Because even if it's yourself, well, if you're a slave to your flesh and your desires, you're thus a slave to sin.
And we all know who loves sin.
Right.
So it's just...
Yeah, it's something that I think even a lot of conservatives, and especially libertarians, Flavored of the conservatives kind of misunderstand.
Because we talk about freedom these days.
It's just you do whatever you want.
But that isn't...
It's certainly not the Christian understanding of freedom.
The Christian understanding of freedom is that it is not the ability to do whatever you want, but the right to do what you ought.
Because, as you cite, the man who sins is a slave to sin.
And so if you use your freedom to shoot heroin or look at porn or do whatever, any kind of vice that there is...
You're going to lose steadily your ability to resist that temptation, and you become a slave.
And it's just so interesting, that paradox that you mentioned, because I had thought, again, the misconceptions about the Bible, oh, it's controlling.
Why would I ever want to follow a God that tells me what to do?
Why would a God that is love ever do that?
Because my understanding of God was this pantheistic God of source, and we're all God, and we all have God within us.
So I didn't like it.
It's really what it was.
It's never the basis of, is this true?
I didn't like it because it didn't make me feel good.
And that's what New Ageism is.
It's, I want to feel good now.
Well, everything you're talking about You're focusing on the subjectivity of it all, on just how you're feeling, and I think you're rightly observing, that it's all just total self-obsession, and the reason everyone who's into all these things, they always have a ton of self-help books, because they're much less interested in the truth than they are in themselves.
And it's narcissistic spirituality.
Yes, but my question is, and it gets right back to Mercury being in retrograde, why our microphones didn't work.
Is there an objective reality to these things?
Whether we're talking about the Reiki heat or whether we're talking about Mercury being in retrograde and screwing up my production equipment.
Is there something to that?
Even outside of our own delusions and the narratives we tell ourselves?
I think yes.
I don't think it would be in the Bible if it weren't.
If God didn't know what the dangers would be...
There wouldn't be a warning label on it.
He's not saying don't consult astronomers and necromancers because it's just a dumb, stupid waste of time.
I think he's saying don't consult astrologers and necromancers because there's an actual danger here of compromising your free will or whatever, talking to demons.
It's real.
And that's the draw to it.
I say this all the time, is that there's just enough truth to get you hooked on the lies forever.
So where is the distinction?
If you are saying that there is something to the placement of the stars into how things are working on Earth, which we know is true in as much as we know that the moon has certain physical effects depending on its placement on tides or on the Earth.
And we know that's a very literal physical example of something in a very limited way.
But then even from the Christian perspective, we believe in providence.
We believe in history.
We believe in a divine order to the universe.
We believe in coincidence and in coincidence very often not being mere happenstance, but in being part of God's plan.
Things happen for a reason in God's good time.
That's a very Christian perspective, but there's a ton of overlap between that and the way the stars are positioned.
So what's the distinction between the truth of astrology and all the rest of it, and the lies that go along with it?
Well, ultimately, it's all kind of determined by man, by fallible man.
I mean, the whole backdrop of astrology is really heavily based in Carl Jung's psychology.
Astrology is astro-psychology.
Thank you for calling out Carl Jung.
I hate it when conservatives get really into Carl Jung.
No, he was an occultist also.
Could you give a little background?
People know the name.
I don't have much, but I know he was an occultist, and he had...
There is Helena Blavatsky, she was kind of like one of the mothers of New Ageism, because New Ageism isn't new, that's just kind of like the rebranded term for Satanism.
But she herself was a Luciferian, and she said that Lucifer is kind of like the pinnacle of liberation.
Yeah.
Solowinski said the same thing.
So these are the people that are all connected with one another.
And so astrology is taking Carl Jung's teachings as a man who's connected with these kinds of people or these kinds of people are following his beliefs and vice versa.
So you have to look at the source, first of all.
And I always like to go back to that because people try and fight me on it.
Because I tried to do this too.
When I first started to come around to Jesus, I wanted to so badly keep my astrology.
And so I was like, okay, well, exactly what you just said.
Well, God put the moon there.
God put the stars there.
God put the sun there this way.
God made me born this way.
Because I was at that point able to let go of this narrative that I came here to do it.
It was, oh, okay, God gave me my birth chart.
So I was trying really hard to reframe Christianity.
And so you can see it's still like self-obsessed narcissism because I think I have the answer still.
I'm going to rebrand Christianity as an astrologer and bring God into the forefront.
Like, my intentions were good, but I tell people all the time that saying is true.
The road to hell is paved in good intentions.
And I had that.
I mean, for the record, I think most people in New Age do.
I was a sad girl, just wanted to feel better and help other people feel better, too.
And that's...
90% of the people I knew, that's the same thing.
They're not bad people.
They're just...
Heavily deceived and thus children of wrath, unfortunately.
So I wanted to be the Christian astrologer and start teaching through that lens.
But the thing is, you either believe what God says or you don't.
And it got to a point where I was in Isaiah 47 where it talks about astrologers, you know, bring them forth.
If you think they can save you, go ahead.
burning their own fire because they can't save themselves.
So how are they going to save you?
And when I read that something, because the Bible's alive, it speaks to you, it convicts you like nothing else can.
And when I read those words, it just, the Holy Spirit just came over me and it was like, I can't do this anymore.
I can, but it's not what God wants me to do.
He's warning me against it.
He doesn't want me to practice divination.
That's exactly what it is.
It says in Deuteronomy 18 that you're an abomination in the Lord's eyes if you're doing that.
I don't want to be an abomination to God.
It just made me feel so ungrateful and disobedient.
It was kind of like, you know, when you're like a teenager and you rebel against your parents and then one day you're in your 20s and you're like, oh, they were kind of right.
It's like that same sort of feeling.
It's exactly like that.
Right.
It's like, oh, they weren't letting me out past curfew not because they hated me or wanted to bully me, but because they wanted to protect me.
And so coming around to that idea of God, kind of like that roundabout way that we talked about earlier, Of how all these rules are there, and I don't like the rules, but I recognize now that true love has boundaries, and that's why God tells us to stay away from certain things and to embrace other things, because His love for us has boundaries, and He knows how we are, obviously, because He made us.
So He had kind of...
It sets us up with the perfect manual for life, honestly.
You think about marriage, which is the fullest sacramental expression of love that you and I can find in this world, right?
And marriage is nothing if not limits.
Antonin Scalia made this point jokingly about the Obergefell decision that created same-sex marriage, and he mocked Anthony Kennedy's opinion, which established same-sex marriage, because Kennedy had said that same-sex marriage was this important...
Liberty that would expand the right to intimacy.
I don't know where the right to intimacy is, but he says he found that somewhere in the Constitution.
And Scalia said, I don't know where the right to intimacy is, but even if we had one, I assure you marriage constricts rather than expands the right to intimacy.
Ask the nearest hippie.
Meaning, when you get married, you say, okay, I'm not going to sleep with other people.
I'm only going to sleep with this person for the rest of my life.
And so it seems like a restriction, but really it is a liberation.
Indeed.
It is a liberation from your base desires and a liberation from your kind of feeding of the appetite constantly.
and it really does allow you to elevate and to pursue other things and to share your love and to will the good of the other person and to give entirely of yourself to your spouse.
And so this struggle with liberation I find so interesting because the catechism says that the reason that you shouldn't consult astrologers and necromancers is because it is an attempt to gain power over time and history and history.
And ultimately other people.
That when you are going, you're trying to find out the future and the stars.
You are trying to cheat.
You're trying to get an unfair advantage to give yourself more power.
And self-importance.
Something you mentioned that I really wanted to talk about actually is how...
Because you said the right to intimacy for gay marriage, right?
Yeah.
People that are unbelievers, and now that I'm on the other side of it, I see it so clearly the way other people try and converse with me or the things that people say to kind of push back on what I'm now talking about is, well, we have rights to this, that, you know, believe what you want, believe what you want, you know, whatever, morals and things like that.
So what's interesting with unbelievers is that they kind of have to borrow from the Christian worldview in order to make their claims.
Yeah.
Why is that?
It's just because if you want to talk about rights, well, if there are things that we are kind of entitled to, thank you.
If we're entitled to certain things, if we're prescribed certain things, then there's someone prescribing that.
Where do the rights come from?
Where do the rights come from?
They don't come from me.
That's written on your heart from someone.
Great points.
Yeah, it's something that I see a lot is how they have to borrow from the Christian worldview in order to make their claims true.
But yet they then wish ultimately to liberate themselves, not only from the moral law, but from the moral law giver.
It reminds me, when you talk about this liberation babble that keeps going around, in the acknowledgments of Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, who is one of the most famous leftist organizers in American history.
He dedicates his book to all sorts of rebels.
And then he has a little acknowledgement at the end of this.
And he says, and I can't forget to acknowledge that first rebel, Satan, who lost himself heaven but won for himself his own kingdom.
And you see that language of liberation.
I mean, you actually even see it in Paradise Lost, right?
When Satan falls from heaven, he's in hell, and he says, well, forget about that.
Forget about heaven.
The mind is its own place and can make a hell of heaven and heaven a hell.
That's something else with New Ageism, is that we've created our own hell.
So, it's kind of our job to get out of it.
But then, it goes back to lacking logic because if we're all God and God is love and the universe is love, then how do we also have these issues that we have to work through to get back to love?
Right.
If everything's totally perfect, there's no such thing as original sin, it's all good, man.
But we know that the world is fallen and broken.
And we are part of the world and we are fallen and broken.
So how are we supposed to fix it?
Because I get the original sin version of the world.
I get that before the fall, the whole Christian story, before the fall, the world was perfect, and then man, because he has freedom, exercised that freedom in an incorrect, wrong and abusive way, and this led to sin and death pervading the world, and man's kicked out of the garden, and we inherit that, this broken nature, as a part of original sin.
This is just an observation.
Find me the man who does not have this, and I'll I'll show you a liar.
I'll be pointing right at you.
So we just observe this fact of the world, and therefore man is in need of a savior, and this creates a basically unsolvable problem unless God himself sends his only begotten son to die such that those who believe in him might not perish but have everlasting life.
I can get that.
You might say, I don't believe any of that crap, Michael, but that story makes sense.
Yes.
To me, the really outlandish accounting of it all is that, no, actually, secretly everything's perfect.
You just got to get your chakras a little bit more at the right angle, man, and then it'll all be fine.
That, to me, seems far more laughable than the previous story.
Yeah, and I agree with you, especially with the new eyes to see that I have, because going back to what you said, the man saying it's our, you know, our right to intimacy for gay marriage.
Okay, so what you're acknowledging, therefore, is that there is a truth.
You know, it's not only like the moral lawgiver, but you're acknowledging that there's a truth that we have a right to live within.
And so in that context, someone might say, well, yes, but it's my truth.
And so this is a very popular dialogue amongst New Agers is my truth, my truth, my truth, my truth.
And again, that seeps into politics.
My truth, my truth, my truth.
So it's relativism, it's subjectivity, like you mentioned, and it's self-refuting because, well, there is no truth.
Okay, is that true?
My truth is just as true as your truth.
Okay, well, what if my truth is that that can't be true?
You're already excluding by saying that all truths are true.
You're excluding people who don't believe that.
So it's logically inconsistent, and it doesn't make sense.
None of it makes sense.
I noticed, I remember in college, some of my liberal friends were quite culturally relativistic, and they say, there's no such thing as a bad culture, and you can't point to those Aztecs slaughtering 80,000 people.
You can't say that was a bad culture.
How dare you?
That's so racist.
All the cultures are just to be judged on their own terms.
By the way, never Western culture.
They would seem to exclude Western culture.
But okay, putting that aside, we have to accept and embrace all of the cultures.
And also, there's a rape culture going on on college campuses, and we need to stop the rape culture.
I said, hold on.
You're telling me we have to accept all the cultures.
And then there's this rape culture.
No, okay, obviously we have to not accept certain cultures.
So if that's the case, then don't we have to come to certain decisions about these things?
Don't we ultimately need to say, okay, do this, don't do that, this good, that bad, God good, devil bad, go to church.
Exactly.
Don't we have to say that?
Exactly.
At some point, but no one's doing that.
And this push to kind of eliminate...
Objectivity is just, it's just the unraveling of scripture before our eyes, essentially.
I, you know, I really, for that whole ten years, just really believe that I had an understanding of God, but I wanted it to be the God that was in my mind.
I created an idol of God in my head.
And a lot of New Agers will do that because they do understand that God, good, devil, bad sort of thing, but not in the context of what the Bible says about it.
It's in the context of what they want it to be or whatever New Age book you're reading says it is.
And it really is all these...
Essentially, it's all Hinduism because Hinduism is sort of like the...
It's marriage of all religions in one, essentially excluding Christianity.
And Christianity is really unique because it's the only worldview that God reaches down to man.
Everything else, it's man reaching up to try and get to God.
It's all about doing the work, doing the work, doing the work, doing the work.
And, you know, salvation, or the Bible does say, like, work out your salvation, but that's not, it's not work for, it's work out, like, exercise, practice it, right?
So it's a cooperation with God's grace.
Sometimes how it's described is God's grace comes all the way down the mountain, and you have the right, well, you don't have the right, but you have the ability to turn away from God's grace.
Yes.
Or to cooperate with God's grace.
And so obviously there is an action that is entailed by that.
Faith without works is dead.
But it's not an action to earn your salvation.
Right.
It's an action to cooperate with God's grace.
Right.
And when you love someone, I say this a lot, like when you love someone, you want to commit to them and make them happy.
And that's...
We're in relationship with God.
You kind of want to do that for someone that you love more than anything.
But back to the whole Hinduism thing, how it's all relative.
It's all you-do-you sort of mindset.
It's all karma.
It's all reincarnation.
So, you know, if you mess up in this life...
You got the next one to figure it out because your soul is just going to keep cycling through and through and through until you eventually reach nirvana, which is basically Hindu heaven, enlightenment, if you will.
And it's just insane.
When I talk about these things now, like when I hear these words come out of my mouth, I can't believe that I subscribed to it for so long.
And it makes me sad, but I'm very, very grateful for how I came out of the other side.
So from the time of late September to December of 2021, I was teetering on the edge of Christianity and New Ages.
I'm thinking I could do both until I began to read the Bible more and it began to really convict me.
And there was this moment when I went to church, pastor did an altar call, you know, come down to be saved if you don't want to do it alone anymore.
You know, there's a father in heaven that loves you, sent his son to stretch out his arms on a wooden cross and die for you.
And I'm just like weeping.
I go down, everyone claps, it was really nice.
But my pastor came over, I told him a little bit about me.
He had actually come out of the New Age movement, like back in the 70s.
Wow.
Yeah.
What sort of denomination is there?
Or is this a non-denominational?
It's non-denominational, yeah.
I'm not really...
I'm not...
I don't think the denomination thing is our hills to die on necessarily.
I think if you just do what the Bible says and love Jesus and work through what the Bible tells you to do.
I don't know.
I think in a way denominations are another way that man has tried to control God or play God.
But don't we...
If the denominations disagree...
Don't we need to...
Work out the disagreements.
There are denominations, truly.
Well, I don't think they're Christian, but they identify as Christian.
And we live in a trans age, so everyone identifies as well.
But there are denominations that deny the divinity of Christ.
There are denominations that deny the Nicene Creed.
And so they might call themselves Christian, but we as Christians would say, no, you're manifestly not Christian.
And so doesn't that then, on matters of who Christ is, what he wants, how to interpret scripture, you know, 30,000 various denominations around the world, Isn't it our responsibility to figure it out?
Or wouldn't it at least be good for us to figure it out?
I think it's our responsibility to just continue to preach what God says in that sense.
But how do we know?
Reciting, you know, just what the gospel says.
Because what I've come to just really believe is just what the Bible says is true and that it's not going to contradict itself and God's not going to contradict himself.
And the Holy Spirit's not going to contradict itself.
You know, people will say like, oh, God told me to do this.
But if you cross-reference it with scripture, did he really?
You know, like, oh, God told me I should still be doing astrology.
Did he really?
No.
What does the Bible say about it?
But what about ambiguous verses?
For instance, Christ says, call no man father.
Christ says, in the same set of verses, suggests that we shouldn't call people master or teacher.
But, presumably, you don't call your father by his first name, or your grandfather, whoever.
When you meet someone on the street, you probably call him Mr.
Smith or Mr.
Jones.
Mr.
just means master.
You go see the physician, you probably call him Dr.
Smith, whatever.
So are you contradicting what Christ tells you to do?
- I would say that's more so in the context of perhaps a sense of authority over you or over your sovereignty.
Like in that context, like say, don't call someone else father, maybe if they're claiming to speak through me or same thing with master, like, you know, cult masters don't.
Right.
So, my only point on this is not the meaning of that verse, but my point is, reasonable people could interpret that in completely different ways.
So then, as you are pursuing the truth, don't you feel an obligation, or at least a sort of urgency, to figure out, one, what it really means, what God really means to you, and two, Right.
Right.
So, I agree.
I mean, I always hate sort of internecine squabbling between, you know, I don't know, the like liberal Methodists and the less liberal Methodists or whatever.
I mean, I think a lot of that is very silly.
But it comes from a serious place, which is we want to know God and know what God wants for us.
Yeah.
And that makes sense because he created us to need him.
We all kind of have this God-shaped hole and that's why we try and fill it with porn, drugs, sex, empty relationships, astrology.
And I think we are, once we really know God, we do want to know as much as we can because we understand it's the greatest gift we've ever been given and the greatest love we've ever had.
But, I mean, the Bible does say that No man will know God's mind.
Of course not.
So I think, ultimately, there are questions that we won't be able to answer until we're talking to Jesus.
Right.
We could never comprehend God inasmuch as if God could fit in our little heads He wouldn't be God, right?
Because he would fit into our kind of finite, not particularly expansive minds.
It reminds me of, there's a legend about St.
Augustine when he's riding on the Trinity.
And Augustine's walking on the beach, and he sees this little kid.
And the kid has got a clamshell, and he's scooping up water and putting it into a hole.
And St.
Augustine says, hey kid, what are you doing?
And the kid says, oh, I'm going to put the ocean in the hole.
And Augustine says, you stupid kid, you can't fit the ocean into that hole.
And the kid looks up at Augustine and says, right, and you cannot fit the Trinity into your mind, Augustine, and then is transformed into an angel and flies away.
Now this is a legend, obviously, but makes a very good point.
You're never going to comprehend God.
However, I don't think then we necessarily have to fall into a quietism and shrug our shoulders and say, well, who can know whatever?
When Christ says to Peter, here are the keys to the kingdom of heaven.
What you bind on earth will be bound in heaven.
What you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.
Hey, fellas, you have the power to forgive sins, and whose sins you are forgiven, and whose sins you retain are retained.
And go make apostles of all the nations.
He is giving them a real charge and a real place and a real world, founding an actual charge.
And so...
I just wonder, with that kind of authority, when you'll become Catholic?
I guess is what I'm saying.
I don't know.
I've looked into a lot of Catholic apologetics.
I don't know if you've heard of Mike Winger.
I don't have him.
He was Catholic, turned Christian, and he...
He uses, like, all the scripture as to why that's so, but then he'll have debates with people that will also use scripture to say, oh, well, this is true, though.
So, I don't know.
All I know is that I love Jesus, and I love the Bible, and I want to do what it says.
And you'll figure it out along the way.
Yeah.
This is what happened to me.
I'm still a baby.
I know.
You know, I was thinking about this, because my reversion happened...
I guess about 23, 24 was sort of the culmination of it.
And like when Hemingway talks about going bankrupt and he says it happens gradually and then suddenly, that was like that for me.
And it was a lot of reading and a lot of thinking.
And the reason I keep coming back to these sorts of questions on the nuances of this belief or that belief is because providentially, astrologically perhaps, one of the first people to...
What would make me think about God again?
It was actually my roommate, randomly assigned roommate in college, who was a cradle Catholic, fell away.
His family became kind of a more megachurch, Protestant-type family.
But he was sort of agnostic, and he introduced me to a Calvinist philosopher who was at Notre Dame, a Catholic university, who was presenting a version of an argument for the existence of God that goes back to St.
Anselm of Canterbury, who's obviously a Catholic saint, But whose argument was rejected by St.
Thomas Aquinas, one of the most important doctors of the church, so incredibly complex.
And that would be the ontological argument for God.
And so I really went through this period where I was reading Calvinists, I was reading Anglicans, I was all of these people.
Even Chesterton, who Catholics love, and he became Catholic.
But Chesterton, when he wrote Orthodoxy, he was Anglican.
John Henry Newman, who's now a Catholic saint, he wrote all these arguments against the papacy and how he hated the Catholic Church.
That period of my life, it's like a whirlwind because I just felt like the gates had been opened.
After so much time in the wilderness, this rush of truth, some of which there was some confusion in there.
I was getting hit with some kind of contradictions.
It was messy, but ultimately it was a kind of...
Rush of truth that was coming on me, that I'm still working out.
Right.
And it's honestly really fun.
It's a fun process.
After I went down to be saved, if you will, although I feel like at that point I already was, it was just kind of...
The symbol of it.
Right.
Thank you.
You know, he prayed with me for a couple minutes, and back with the moon rituals and things like that, I would always feel this ache in my chest, like this emptiness, this hole, this anxiety, this crushing...
Weight of, I don't even know, I can't even explain it.
It just was like pressure.
Like I was going to have a heart attack, but my heart wasn't beating fast.
Really, really intense pain whenever we would meditate.
And I would try and kind of avoid meditation because of that reason.
It would happen when I would do yoga.
It would happen when I would pray, which back then was praying to the pantheistic God.
What was that like?
Like what did you say?
Essentially praying to myself, you know?
So strange.
I would, it was never like, you know, asking for, it was kind of, I'm going to do this.
Like, I'm going to make this happen because I have God's power in me because I am a part of Source and that is what God is.
So it wasn't just a prayer, which is a request or an act of worship and adoration.
It was a declaration.
It wasn't, please, Lord, let this happen.
It was, I'm going to do it, whether you want me or not.
Right.
And that's what the law of attraction thing is with manifestation.
It's all, I am, I am, I am, I am, which is, again, counterfeit gospel, because we know who says I am who I am.
And so it's, in a way, claiming authority over God or saying that you know better than God.
That's what all the New Ageism is.
I know better than God.
And it's just not true.
If it were true, we would have figured it out by now.
Wow.
Let's be honest.
Even just that declaration that it centers around, I am, I am, I am, seems coincidental.
Right.
A little too much.
Yeah.
And a lot of it's like that.
You know, Reiki, laying hands in Scripture.
Right.
There's all these counterfeits.
Right.
Because who lays hands in Scripture?
It's Christ and His apostles.
Right.
And who lays hands in Reiki?
Like, you.
Like, yeah.
Me.
Like, me worshiping...
My aliens, you know?
What authority do I have?
And that's the thing about Satan, though, is that he's not very creative.
He's crafty.
He's not very creative, and he can't really make anything.
He just kind of mimics things.
That's what all the New Ageism is.
He's just kind of mimicking godliness, and that's why we're drawn to it, because we are inherently made to need God.
And so when something looks like God, And we don't really have the foundational understanding of what that is.
We get drawn to it and we kind of want more of it.
And then we fall down rabbit holes when we don't have a Christian foundation or any sense of biblical theology at all.
Because I really didn't.
This point on mimicry is so good.
It's such a good point that Satan doesn't create anything.
He just kind of apes other things in a way that is distorted and perverted.
But even, you know, human beings are...
Memetic creatures.
We imitate other people.
When we spend time with our friends, we take on the attributes of our friends.
This is why people popularly say that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
I could point to aspects that have now become part of my personality.
I don't know the way I speak, or the way I dress, or the way I walk.
I can say, oh no, I think I first got this from this guy when I was seven.
Teenagers are always taking on new personalities.
Mercifully, most are discarded at some point, but obviously part of it stays because you have a personality.
So then I wonder, if we are in a position now where public Christianity is on the decline, traditional religion writ large is on the decline, and all this weird New Age stuff is on the increase, for people who don't have much of a foundation, they're very often just going to...
Copy what they see, what their friends do.
I suspect this is behind the transgender explosion.
Now, more than one in five Zoomers say that they're LGBTQ. Either Alex Jones is right and there's something in the water, or turning the frogs gay, or it's a social contagion.
Maybe it's both, but I suspect it's more the latter.
And that's why, when I say it's dangerous and it needs to be talked about, that's why.
Because we are...
We're complementary beings and we just do that.
And so, you know, if you're in school and This girl's walk around, she looks cool because she has on a Zodiac t-shirt and maybe she brings out her tarot cards at lunch.
You get drawn and you think, that's cool, I want to do that too.
So it's important, I think, to really teach about these things and expose these things.
The Bible says expose darkness.
So like you said, yeah, you can't sit back and shrug your shoulders.
You do have to That you do have a responsibility to understand to the best of your knowledge what the Bible says and what that means, I believe.
Especially with kids.
Kids are so malleable.
Exactly.
It's just so funny how we can have Gay pride festivals and drag queen shows and drag queens in kindergarten classes, and that's fine, that's not indoctrination, but taking your kid to church, teaching them what the Bible says is true, that's indoctrination.
That's not okay.
It's not even just that you can have these pride parades and the drag stuff and everything in elementary schools.
It's that you have to.
We now have to have all this stuff.
And you are not allowed to teach the Bible.
It's the one book you're not allowed to teach in public schools.
You can teach The Secret.
You can teach some weird occult stuff.
You can teach Mein Kampf, actually.
You just can't teach the Bible.
That might offend somebody.
It's kind of weird.
That might offend somebody.
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah, and I've been told that a bunch now, too, is that, oh, I'm offensive now.
I'm a bigot now.
I'm mean now.
I'm not tolerant anymore.
And it's crazy, first of all, how many people preferred the me that wanted to die every day.
And it's also crazy how, again, you're yelling at me about tolerance while deploying incredible intolerance to what I now believe.
So thank you for not being consistent with what you're saying because it just further makes me really see that I'm on the right path now.
Based on all the inconsistencies from people in their, like, the pitfalls of their logic and their belief systems, and how just Christianity really is just, it just makes sense.
It makes sense.
It answers all the questions.
Well, this is the point of theology.
People seem to think that theology is just pie in the sky, you know, scholastic, the schoolmen just arguing over nonsense.
Theology is faith-seeking understanding.
And I guess you could say a similar thing about the New Age stuff without the understanding.
Theology is applying rigor and logic to our intuitions and to our faith.
The New Age stuff completely discards logic and rigor and reason.
And it just says, well, man, if you feel the heat, then it's probably your chakras acting up.
And it's all you do you.
I'll do me.
Why do people...
YOLO. Which is a whole thing in and of itself, you know.
Aleister Crowley is like the father of modern Satanism, essentially, who's also behind...
People don't want to hear this...
The inspiration of all classic rock and roll.
They loved him.
He's on Led Zeppelin covers, Beatles, all of it, Kiss, all of them.
David Bowie loved him.
And this is a guy who just loathed Christianity.
He had devout Christian parents.
Have you ever heard of him?
Oh, of course.
So you know all about him.
And what was his rule?
He said there's one commandment.
Do without will.
Yeah, do whatever you want.
Do whatever you want.
And that's in music.
That's in culture.
So that's what I was talking about earlier, how it's like all the mainstream things are all obsessed with following the doctrines of these people that hate God and love the liberation of Satan.
Right.
So, that alone is just something to really be curious about if you're an unbeliever or if you doubt Christianity, if you think it's just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.
That's something to really take a look at and ask why.
Because you could at least observe, even if you're on the fence or you're skeptical of all of this, you could say, you know, at least it's kind of weird, right?
It's kind of weird to wear the leather harness.
I mean, even sometimes people will say, especially on the transgender issue, but you could say it about the crystals or the Reiki or the astrology, you say, oh, who cares?
Oh, come on, who cares?
And I always flip that question back and I say...
You're asking why I care.
I guess my question is, why do you care?
Why do the people pushing this stuff care so much?
If the debate over transgender bathrooms comes down to, oh, why do you conservatives care?
I say, well, Why have you cared so much that you invest time and effort and resources and national political campaigns just to let boys go into the little girls' room?
Obviously you care a whole lot.
And I care because, one, it's unjust and it's based on a false anthropology and lies.
But two, the other reason I care...
Is because these people care so much.
So obviously, there's something important at stake here, even if it's a little hard to pick up on at first.
And from towards the beginning of our conversation, how I mentioned New Ageism is in culture and politics.
That's a great example is transgenderism because, yes, they want all-inclusive bathrooms.
And ultimately, this is all to validate the self.
Whatever you're feeling is true.
Right.
Whatever you want...
It's all just constantly affirming self, self, self, self, self.
Nothing outside of self matters.
Self matters.
But at the same token, while everyone else needs to accept that, We need to honor that.
We need to honor each other's truths as the one big cohesive truth.
So it's not about the selves individually.
It's really just about yourself.
Exactly.
It's about you get to do whatever the hell you want and everyone else has to indulge yourself.
You don't want to offend people.
You want to be inclusive.
You want to be loving, which, like, I understand the mindset, especially because I used to have all those beliefs.
Like, I'm not someone who's just been—I wasn't raised a conservative Christian.
You know, I was living for a really long time.
I had Feel the Burn t-shirts.
You know, I was— I was practicing all the new age stuff.
I can confidently say I understand those mindsets and I know that a lot of it comes from a genuine place of care for other people, care for wanting to make the best of your life.
Of course, that comes from making other people feel good, so validating them.
In a way, that's even still narcissism because you just want to validate other people.
You don't want to make anyone feel uncomfortable.
Why would we ever do that?
Since being Christian, that's a huge contrast that I see versus back then.
Again, I'm crazy now, but I wasn't then.
My beliefs offend people.
Right.
Because I'm telling them, essentially, I'm holding them to the fire and essentially saying, you're wrong.
And people don't want to be told that they're wrong because then that makes them accountable to something.
And that's...
Going back to this whole backdrop of Hinduism, I think that's why people are so drawn to religions like that and to these New Age practices as a whole is because there's no accountability for any of it.
You can never be wrong.
It's all you.
It's all on you.
It's your karma.
It's your life.
Just do the best you can, whatever that means to you.
So there's something that seems comforting there.
And when you get back to that word comfort, you had been indulging all of these practices that were supposed to comfort you and solve your despair and angst that had been going on for years and years and years.
But at the end of it, you still wanted to kill yourself.
And now you're doing something that's less Comfortable by the standards of our culture.
And you're at far greater peace.
Yes.
That's a little strange.
Isn't it?
I really do find it fascinating how people react to me now when I put things out there like this is what Jesus says.
Again, I really just believe what the Bible says.
The Bible says you'll be persecuted.
If they hate me, they're going to hate you.
You have to remember that Jesus himself...
Made pretty radical claims.
I mean, they killed him.
Saying that he is God.
Right.
They killed him.
So, why would they like you for, you know, it just kind of makes sense in that aspect.
In as much as we endeavor to imitate Christ, we're probably a rather pale imitation most of the time.
Indeed.
And, you know, so you figure, well, that's what they did to him.
The more we imitate Christ, probably the more suffering and Persecution we'll endure in this world.
Probably.
Again, it's not that it's a certain thing, but probably.
And that's the way it goes.
Because you referred earlier to the devil as the prince of this world.
And the Bible refers to the devil as the prince of this world.
But on the point of the relationship, so you lose your friends.
Did you lose all your friends?
No.
Actually, one of them came with me out of the New Age, which was really cool.
I was really glad not to lose her.
We go back and forth all the time in texts.
Even this morning when I'm driving in the airport, she's like, the moon looks so pretty right now.
I feel like I can see every crater.
She's like, it's really cool to just appreciate the moon as God's creation and not as some idol that's controlling my life.
I was like, totally agree.
On that point, because you say that the thing you shared with all these people and why you lost a lot of these friends is just sin.
You just sinned together.
You give that up.
But sin is very tempting.
Even after you give it up.
Especially after you give it up.
It's very tempting.
Do you find yourself tempted to pull out the tarot cards or anything?
Never.
No.
I'd say the first couple months when I first knew of Jesus, after I called out to him for the first time, because I was tempted to stay in that world, that's why I was trying to do both for so long.
And then It just came that point one day reading Isaiah in December.
I called my best friend, the devout Christian, our whole lives, and I was like, I can't do it anymore.
I'm going to give up my podcast.
I don't know what's going to happen with that.
I'm going to stop teaching yoga.
I can't do any of this anymore.
It's not that I couldn't.
I physically couldn't.
My hands were tied.
It's just that I didn't want to.
Your heart's not in it anymore.
My heart was changed.
My mind was renewed.
And the hardest part was just doing it.
But after I put out my final episode of Moon and Back where I said those same words, I don't want to do yoga anymore.
I don't want to do astrology anymore.
And I was saying for the first time, I know this sounds crazy, I've really met Jesus and I know that you guys can tell that I've been talking about it with the astrology and trying to make it work, but it's like You know, round hole, square peg.
It just doesn't work because they don't belong together because this is a sin.
And I feel so bad for what I would tell people because I was like a self-proclaimed self-healer and was teaching others about self-healing even though I would cry myself to sleep at night.
Wow.
How many self-healers, so-called, probably do that?
Exactly.
But it's okay because it's the process.
Wow.
Yeah.
It's your healing.
It's your shadow work.
It's a very popular term.
The idea of shadow work is literally to integrate your demons, like your inner demons.
So this is like the dialogue is used.
It's, you know, integrate your demons, fight through your demons, make friends with your demons so that you can understand.
Yeah, this is like stuff I used to teach and believe and preach.
Make friends with your demons because they're teaching you something.
But it's all in that guise of, again, Satan is liberating.
So if you make friends with the demons, they're not some scary monster in the corner.
You can kind of face it and work through it.
So it's good intentions, but it's garbage, honestly.
Yeah.
If I had to give three pieces of advice, that's all I could ever give to anybody.
Certainly one of them would be, don't make friends with demons.
Even your own.
Especially your own.
Especially your own, actually, yeah.
Because again, it's like a justification of all things that are wrong with you.
Or all things wrong that you do, kind of thing.
Like, I had really bad patterns in my relationship, you know.
And we've worked through all of this.
In your romantic relationship?
My romantic relationship, because I was...
I'm lusty and just wanted to go do my thing because, you know, I was heavy before.
I want to go do the sexual movement.
Like, I'm having these conversations with this guy.
So your wild oats.
Yes.
Like, saying, like, I never had a hoe phase.
Maybe I should try it.
Maybe that will make me feel better.
So you're saying this to your boyfriend?
Yeah, like, when he was my boyfriend at the time, when I'm saying this to him.
This is because I'm going through all these crazy things.
I'm just sad, grasping at anything that I could.
This is an amazing moment.
You're saying you're getting physically healthier, at least, and you're losing weight, and you're exercising.
You're saying, man, I used to be really fat, and now I'm really hot.
Listen, boyfriend.
I want to go sleep around.
Kind of.
That was essentially my mindset.
Oh, man.
But this is who I am.
And again, because I'm not accountable to anything.
I'm just living for what makes me feel good.
Right.
Right.
So if you're not accountable to God, you're certainly not accountable to your boyfriend.
Yeah.
Right.
And when I found...
This is part of the testimony I don't talk about a lot, but he and I have really gotten into this recently, so I know I can share it more, but...
Part of my testimony, a big part of it, is God really saved me from wrecking that relationship.
I was so tempted by really bad situations repeatedly.
Never like, oh, maybe it's a good guy that could be something.
It's not like a red flag, it's like a red boat of a man.
Just like the worst.
Just the worst and terrible guys.
I'd just be so tempted by it.
That was one of the very first ways that Jesus showed me that he was in my heart because he turned that off immediately and actually let me, for the first time, really fully love this person and not wonder what it would be like to seek out pleasure outside of that It was really incredible.
I remember in my single days, in my atheistic days as well, I similarly was sowing my wild oats and, you know, have red blood, sure liked the pretty girls.
And I remember there was one time after, I don't know, the 7,000th girlfriend, let's say, I woke up one morning and I thought, What's the point?
I thought, not only is this probably wrong to be just kind of casually seeing all these people and engaging in all sorts of things I shouldn't do, but it's just such a waste of time.
Obviously, it's a perversion of my soul and someone else's soul, but even before I got to that, I just thought, what a huge...
None of this is going to lead to marriage.
None of this is going to lead to anything.
This is just a...
Kind of brief titillation.
And then, I don't know, wake up and do it again.
Do it again.
Yep.
And it's crazy because in all that time, too, I always knew what I really wanted.
And I would question, why do I sabotage this?
When I know what I really, really, really want is just to be in a monogamous, unconditionally loving, trusting, loyal, lovely relationship like my grandma and grandpa had.
They were married 18 until she passed.
You know, like...
That kind of relationship.
That's what I want, so why am I going after these things?
It just ties back to sin, ultimately, because I was a slave to what my flesh just wanted, not what really my spirit wanted.
I was a slave to it, and so I continued to justify it.
Oh, back to the astrology.
Okay, my...
Mars is in...
I don't even remember anymore, which feels really good to say.
My Mars is in...
Mars is like the planet of sex.
Like, who decides that, by the way?
Men are from Mars, I've been told.
Right.
So, my Mars is in whatever constellation.
That's why I'm so lusty.
Fine.
You know, it's just...
So that's fine.
It's fine because this is how I am.
It's in the stars.
Exactly.
And it's something just for me to work through, which is my own karma, my own BS. So if you don't mind my asking, when you bring this to your then-boyfriend, what does he say?
Like, uh, no?
Yeah, literally.
Like, verbatim, uh, no.
Because I, like, I tried to, like, open up the relationship.
He was like, uh, I'm not doing that.
No thanks, yeah.
No.
So...
That's good.
A lot better these days.
Guys are such wimps that they'll...
I know men who have...
Their girlfriends say, I want to go sleep around.
Friends of mine have said, well, that's okay.
You've got to explore.
That's exactly what people are saying to me.
That is cuckoldry.
When people say, you're a cuckoldry, that's literally what that is.
And it destroys, again, the paradigm that God intended.
My heart totally transformed around what sex means, around what relationships mean, around what marriage means.
Before, I was like, marriage is just a piece of paper.
Don't see it that way, even for a second now.
The piece of paper symbolizes something.
It's crazy how much has changed in a year.
That's something else that's very important to my whole story.
People that have been watching me, I don't want to talk to me, but they watch me kind of thing.
Don't follow me, but are in my story views.
I know that those people can't deny that they've seen changes in me, like just total 180 from who I used to be and how I used to act and behave to who I am now.
And not only that, but all the things that have transpired, like this opportunity, like this is insane that I'm here.
I say it all the time.
You know, this is...
You're welcomed to the Michael Knowles show set.
You've made it!
You're at the top of the heap!
I say it all the time.
But it's funny.
I actually...
I, like, almost kind of funny prayed about this, like, a couple months ago.
I was like, Daily Wire would be really cool, I'm just saying.
Did you really?
Like, seriously.
It's really insane.
Similarly, how I prayed...
And it's like these prayers that aren't really...
I'm like, that's never going to happen.
If it's in your will, I would really like if he could set us up in Tennessee.
Fiance gets offered a job that he didn't apply for in Tennessee, in Franklin, exactly where I want to live.
I love, too, how you phrase that prayer, because it's how I phrase my prayers.
If it's your will.
Yes.
And I don't just do it to be the most pious boy in Nashville.
The other reason I do it is, because have you ever...
I thought you wanted something and really thought, if I get this one thing, then I'll be so happy.
And then you don't get it, and then something else happens, and in retrospect you realize, man, if I had gotten that thing that I thought I wanted, it would have ruined my life.
Exactly.
Because that's happened to me multiple times.
So it's kind of in self-preservation.
I say, if it be your will...
Yeah.
I sure would like this thing.
But if it's not your will, I don't want that thing because it's going to screw up my life.
Yeah, that's how I pray too.
And it's an extra step with me to do that intentionally because coming from new ageism, it's all like self-sovereignty and it's my will.
It's what I decide.
So I make it a point and I'm handing it to you.
Like I... I don't want to make it happen.
I want you to make it happen and work through me.
And he's really been just...
Like the blessings are just...
It's insane.
Just flooding.
Ever since the episode release where I denounced Moon and back that day, it was really funny because I had spent the whole year trying to build this thing, this podcast.
And my audience, it was just struggling.
I was just struggling.
I'm paying for ads.
It would spark, but then it wouldn't pop off.
Yeah.
And so I released the final episode.
Oh, here comes the audience you were looking for.
And that's just how it's been with God ever since.
It's like when I listen to him, and I'm not saying God's a vending machine.
That's not what I'm saying at all.
Just ask him for things and he'll do it for you.
It's that when he is so pleased that you are in his will, he will really show you what his will is all about.
And it's just been incredible.
You know, he brought so many good people to me right away to kind of like scoop me under their wing and like the guys in Cultish I told you about just kind of give me...
Solid theology and good discipleship and just good people because you need to be surrounded by good people that love God if you're going to stay vigorous on your walk because it's so easy to get swept up in all the crap.
Of course.
I was really blessed for that.
God brought so many good people into my life and that He continues to.
It's really incredible.
And that's what I mean.
I'm so honored and humbled that this is what He's decided to be done for me.
And that He saw me in all of the junk that I was in And then he heard me that day, you know?
And I think back to kind of how when my grandma passed and How that felt.
I was mad at God at the time, and I remember writing about that specifically, you know, like saying, like, God wouldn't do this to a good person, but it's like I see, like, all the moving parts of it now.
I see if that never happened the way it happened, I never would have been led down this dark path, and it's like God kind of knew that the only way He would be able, that I'd be able to see His light if I was So far in darkness that at that point I literally had nowhere else to look except up for the first time in my life.
Yeah.
This is the virtue of resignation.
And I remember it too when I was a teenager and had to deal with loss.
I did come to the conclusion that you could either react with anger and a chip on your shoulder.
That would probably never go away and probably only continue to deepen and chippen, or with resignation.
It's very difficult to react with resignation because we always want to be vigorous.
Of the Italian people, we're very keen on vengeance and blood boils a little bit, and so resignation is a tricky one.
It's a virtue for a reason.
It also then raises this question, which I guess brings us entirely full circle to astrology, in a way, in a good way.
Which is, for all my sins, I have 100% confidence in providence.
I am just so convinced of providence.
That I usually don't get too riled when something really bad happens or when something really good happens.
And it's probably going to kill my career because if you want to be a professional conservative, you have to be angry all the time.
And I'm not.
I'm almost never angry.
But that's why.
That's why.
I have...
For every other flaw, I just, I'm, because I've just seen it, you know, I've seen it so clearly sometimes, especially when you're really screwing up, God will just shake you and say like, hey, idiot, you know, I'm here, hey, hey, look, you know.
My priest father, George Rutler in New York, has a great book called Coincidentally, and in the little flap of it, he says, it's a wicked generation that seeks for signs and wonders, but it's a stupid generation that ignores signs and wonders.
Wow.
Yeah, that's good.
Sometimes they're kind of undeniable, you know?
And when you see that, you say, okay, there is a divine order to things.
And so, all right, shake it off.
Yeah.
Keep on going.
And that's why I said at the beginning that my grandmom dying was the worst thing that's ever happened to me.
And it's the worst thing that will ever happen to me because I have that knowing now.
That no matter what happens, like, I'm...
First of all, Romans, I believe it's 818.
It says, you know, the sufferings of this world can't compare to the eternal glory.
And I think of that all the time, if something's wrong.
And ultimately, God's in control.
And it's okay.
So, it's been...
I mean, for me to say that versus what I would have said a year ago, a year and six months ago, totally different.
Like, totally different.
Because I would have believed that all the suffering would be, and in a way I was right, in fact, eternal if we didn't fix it.
If we weren't the ones in authority, if we weren't the ones that were sovereign, if we weren't the ones that were in control.
And now it's just, nope, it's God.
You know, there's a baker down in my favorite neighborhood in the world, I guess, but it's in the Bronx.
It's called Arthur Avenue.
It's the real little Italy in the Bronx.
And this baker, I've been going since I was a kid, and he'd wear this hat, I love Jesus.
And he had kind of a rough early part of his life and conversion experience, goes to daily mass, and he's just a wonderful guy.
And as I was reverting, I was thinking of all these very, you know, Abstract arguments for the existence of God and trying to pursue all this sort of more of an intellectual path.
And I was talking to him about this.
And he was kind of, there was kind of a pivotal moment with him.
He goes, hey, buddy, boy, you know, I do my best, God does the rest.
You know, buddy, I do my best, God does the rest.
I say, oh, that's wiser than pretty much any book I've read in the last six months.
It's not that I'm going to chart the stars and talk to the car dealer and do the necromancy and then I'm going to do it and I, me, my, and I, me, my.
It's not, you know, I'll do my best.
God will do the rest.
And honestly, it's exhausting to be in that lifestyle and those beliefs.
And I actually had someone say to me once, well, it seems like Christianity is the easy way out because of what we're saying.
Like, oh, well, if God's in control, then I'm not, and it's all in His hands, great.
I don't have to worry about anything.
Not like that at all, first of all.
His yoke is easy and His burden is light.
That's what they mean.
Indeed.
But that's probably not what they mean.
That's not what they mean.
They mean that, well, if...
You're saying God's in control.
God is providence.
Then what about you?
Where's your role in it?
It's the easy way out.
Maybe the new age beliefs are all about healing yourself and making yourself better.
But really, that's the easy way out because it comes back to, again, accountability.
You're not accountable to God, so that's the easy way out because if you're not accountable to the creator of the universe, Then you're just accountable to yourself, which is the creator of your chaos, essentially.
When you love someone, you want to make that person happy.
And that carries an obligation.
And the church is traditionally understood as the bride of Christ.
Right.
And is the bride of Christ.
Exactly.
We have an obligation.
God makes it simple, but it's not easy to walk the narrow road every day.
I forget who said it.
Perhaps it was John Piper who said that no one like the Christian understands temptation because people just, whenever they feel tempted, they just give in to it.
Whereas when Christians feel tempted, you kind of got to put your blinders on and just keep going.
Yeah.
And you sometimes give in to it.
Right, because we're going to.
That's why Jesus died for sin, because he knew sin would be the biggest problem.
So, I mean, I fully agree with that, and I see now how...
All that work, that's the mantra, doing the work, you're doing the work, you're doing the work, and that's self-help, too.
It's like, you're doing the work, you're doing the work to heal, you're doing the work to heal.
It's like, okay, but for what?
Because it's all futile, because you can't save yourself.
I would say you can't be your own problem, your own solution.
And it's like self-help, self-love, self-hate.
Like, it's all one and the same.
Because ultimately, what's the root?
It's self.
And so sometimes I get, well, is it wrong to want to better yourself?
And like, absolutely not.
Of course not.
I think that...
In a way, we all want to be better, hopefully.
We all want to be a better person, and I believe that is kind of, you know, the knowing that we have sin, but I digress.
That's the process of sanctification, is becoming holier.
But people outside of it think that, well, if the opposite of self-love, that's self-hate.
But that's not true.
I think the opposite of self-love is self-sacrifice.
And that's really kind of what walking with God is in a lot of ways.
Right.
There's that idea.
I forget which playwright wrote it.
I figured it was Shaw or Moliere.
I don't know.
It was one of those guys.
He said that hell is where you have nothing to do all day but amuse yourself.
And it is.
Everyone knows it.
Everyone knows who's ever had a vacation from school.
By day three, you just want to pull your hair out.
You've got nothing left to do.
You have no sense of purpose.
And so when you were sacrificing...
For others, when you're serving others, you will have far greater love than when you're just trying to amuse yourself.
And that doesn't mean serving others based on if they wake up one day and they'd want to be a boy if they're a girl.
That doesn't serve anybody.
It means serving people in truth and leading with truth, which brings us back to there is an objective reality and there is an objective standard and there is an objective truth.
The definition of truth Is not fluid or wouldn't be truth.
Truth is, you know, unwavering.
Rock solid.
So there has to be a truth, by definition.
You either moor yourself to that, that rock, or you're just floating into outer space next to all your star systems and your old alien buddies.
That's not a great place to be.
Angela, such a pleasure to be with you.
We'll have to have you back into another two hours.
Sounds good.
Where can people find you in the meantime?
So I'm on Instagram.
My full name, Angela Marie Ucci.
It's A-N-G-E-L-A-M-A-R-I-E-U-C-C-I. And then my podcast is Heaven and Healing Podcast.
And that's the actual N symbol.
And that right now is on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
And who knows, maybe I'll be on the Daily Wire sometime.
You're on The Daily Wire right now.
You know what I mean.
You know, I'm on Instagram at Michael J. Knowles, and I'll have to check my DMs more frequently because I apparently missed some of them, but I'm glad that we could get you on the show.
