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Dec. 25, 2020 - RadixJournal - Richard Spencer
01:24:48
Myth, Symbol, & Religion: An Introduction to REM

Mark Brahmin and Richard Spencer discuss the the intellectual background of REM theory, Apolloism, and their interpretive methodology. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe

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Let's nail some of these big categories, like myth itself.
I would say that the most common use of the word myth in contemporary parlance is something that is false or wrong, that it is just a myth or something like that.
Or perhaps in a more benign form, it is viewed as some...
Heroic story, heroic and implausible and perhaps fantastical and magical story from long ago.
But obviously I'd like for us to go a lot deeper than just those rather trite definitions.
So just to start out the conversation, how would you define what myth is and how it has functioned historically and continues to function?
Well, let me start with a definition that I think is very interesting that Aristotle developed about myth, and he called it mythos, and he was talking about theater at the time.
But there, mythos means, really, it means plot in the context of theater.
So in other words, if you think of mythos or myth as being plot, and you apply that to our understanding of myth, and this would include films like Star Wars or kind of salient myth.
that exist in our civilization, in our society, an idea emerges that in a way, a myth is kind of setting a plot or it's a narrative.
That's another term that we like to use, right?
We like to talk about the media setting the narrative.
So myth is, I think that that is kind of one way of looking at myth.
It's a kind of definition of myth in the sense that it's directing.
Human thought and human behavior, ultimately.
It's setting up a kind of model for human behavior, and it's directing human behavior.
And the other thing that Aristotle develops to is the word ethos.
Now, we're all familiar with the word ethos, and in our understanding of it, it's a reference to kind of the morals or attitudes of a time or society or a place.
The way that Aristotle uses it in the context of theater is that ethos is character, but not just...
You know, a person's character, a person's moral character, but actually like the character in a play, right?
So ethos, and that has a way of kind of crystallizing the idea that a character in a play becomes a kind of moral paragon or becomes a model for people to follow, right?
The way the mythos becomes the plot becomes sort of the trajectory of the character or the ethos.
So, I mean, I think those are kind of interesting ways to look at myth.
But more generally, myth, you know, I argue that myth and art and religion are all kind of of the same, are all essentially, ultimately the same phenomena.
And that is a kind of, it's one of many sort of...
Manifestations of a kind of human mating call, as it were, right?
So especially if it's cultivated in a kind of intelligent and conscious way, or that's when it's kind of at its most effective, that myth, religion, and art are mating call.
Yeah, mating call.
Anyways, I have a sense that you're about to say something.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I want to talk about the mating call, but I...
I want to go back even deeper.
I mean, one thing that you recognize when you have children in particular is the power of story and how even a child as young as two or three or four Something that must be built in, must be hardwired.
This isn't just something that is bequeathed to them by their parents or by schools or by television or anything like that.
They have this hardwired desire or way of functioning through stories.
And there's a beginning, a middle, and an end to something.
They want to hear stories.
They understand the world very often in terms of stories.
of stories.
Very young children, again, in two and three will tell stories and the stories actually have a bit of a plot to them, even if they're silly and a bit ridiculous.
They'll have a beginning, middle, and end.
And this is something, again, that I've seen among my own children who are quite young.
And so I don't believe this is something that I educated them to believe.
I think this is actually a deeply human trait in the sense that we understand information through story.
We understand our own life as a story.
We understand relationships to other people and institutions, et cetera, as a story.
And that this is a kind of primal way of conveying information, particularly in a pre-digital age and particularly in a pre-literate age.
In the sense that, you know, we're not altogether too different from ancient hominids or at least early versions of ourselves, say, five or six thousand years ago.
In the sense that we...
We didn't have the printing press or, in most cases, wide-scale use of written material where you could look something up and find information.
No, information was conveyed to you through a narrative.
And so, you know, the oral tradition precedes all other traditions and the basic story I think we should recognize the power and importance of that.
That we desperately need this.
I think, you know, one...
You know, I'm not a clinical physician, but I would say one impulse towards suicide is the fact that you can't tell a coherent story about your life.
And you just want to gain control of it however you can, and that is a drive towards death.
And I'm using an extreme example here to make a point, is the sense that we crave stories.
When you read a...
An article in a newspaper is going to tell a story.
Even an argument tells a story.
A photographic essay tells a story.
A news that tells a story.
And that's why it captures your imagination.
And it's how you are able to understand it.
And so myth is a part of that.
In a pre-literate, certainly pre-digital world, the...
Mythic story was how you were able to understand yourself and how you were able to understand the world.
And in fact, you couldn't understand both of those things without the narrative.
Stories become the most effective way, I would argue, of conveying morals and imbuing ethos and presenting models for people to follow, for example.
So in other words, there's a reason.
I'm not someone who believes, for example, the stories in the Bible, the Hebrew Bible, are true stories.
I think it's a kind of work of genius, and these are parables that are being told.
And they're parables that are conveying morals and conveying ideas, and they're these sort of riddles that are describing how one should behave and conduct themselves, whether it's vis-a-vis adversaries or friends, right, or allies, as it were.
What I would say is that that becomes the most effective way of imbuing morals.
So let's imagine someone...
You know, conducting a sermon at a church and telling people, you know, you've got to not cheat on your wife.
You've got to not, you know, be a drunk or an alcoholic.
In some ways, that is a kind of cruder form of moralizing that's less effective, ultimately, in the sense that what's really appealing about storytelling and conveying morals through story is that it's appealing to one's vanity, right?
Because you're not commanding or ordering someone to do something.
Right?
So in other words, if we imagine that we have a society, a kind of, let's say, a more moral society where, you know, I guess it's a kind of presumptuous thing to say, but where people more like us are in charge of the society and we're the ones kind of regulating what kind of media that's being developed and is being disseminated to the population.
We do that through stories, and that becomes the more effective way of creating a moral population by showing them good models and showing good models succeed in stories.
You know, there are some distinctions that are usefully made between, say, ancients and moderns.
And I think here we should make a distinction between what you could call Ronchean history and contemporary ethics involving journalism and the way that the ancients understood a narrative.
You know, and I'll just use Ronca as a kind of placeholder for a general trajectory in terms of historiography.
So there was a...
Major point in the 19th century when there was the development of history writing as we know it today.
And that actually coincided with basically a textural critique of the Bible, in fact.
But it was a notion of using the facts, using facts to convey an argument, not reaching a conclusion that is based on facts and data and...
And so forth.
It's an almost kind of legalistic way of making an argument about history.
You see this in contemporary, or at least what people say contemporary journalism is, in the sense of, you know, just the facts.
Let's get to the truth of the matter, the objective, indisputable truth, and then let's kind of reach conclusions or tell a story, you could say, on top of that.
And look, we can deconstruct that and say that even within supposedly objective journalism or objective history writing, there are mythic elements and there are biases and hopes and dreams that the author is not willing to...
That's all fair, but it is a different type of ethic in terms of history writing.
For ancients, you know, expecting someone in the ancient world to give you just the facts or to write like a journalist piece, to expect, say, the Gospels to be pieces of objective journalism, is to...
Misunderstand them entirely.
And that's not to say that facts and real-life characters aren't involved.
I'm not a specialist in this field, but I tend to think that there, in all likelihood, was a historical Jesus Christ, and that many of the episodes in the Bible are references, however oblique and however twisted, to things that might very well have happened.
I think there is a historicity to...
To myth of all kinds, including Jewish and Christian myths.
But to expect...
Say, the Gospels or any ancient writer to think in the way that a contemporary journalist thinks is ridiculous.
There was a fabulous element to everything.
You don't just simply collect facts.
You put them in an order.
You give the reader a sense of time and of development.
You tell a tale.
You tell a story with a moral.
That is how they conceived of things.
A, I think there's a little bit of blindness.
I think there's also a blindness to again projecting these ethics onto Ancient people.
They conveyed information.
They conveyed real-life things, no question.
But they had no concept of an objectivity that was separated off or segregated from...
From fabulous tales and that need to channel people's dreams and hopes and lives.
And that all of these things were one.
And they didn't buy into the kind of, I could say, myth of objectivity that we buy into now over, say, the last 200 years or so.
of post-Enlightenment history writing and journalism.
Let's talk about symbol.
I think this is another term that people will frequently use.
They're probably using it a little more accurately when they'll say, you know, this is...
You know, when the baseball player struck out on his last at-bat, that was symbolic of the failures of the entire season, just to use a quick example.
That we have a notion that encapsulated in one instance, or perhaps one image, Or one object, there is a whole story and narrative encapsulated in it.
I think that is the contemporary notion of the word symbol, and it does connect back with how ancients would conceive of it.
I think much as with myth, where you'll say something is just a myth, and that means that it's in fact false, I think you would kind of...
We also would tend to say something, oh, that's merely symbolic or something like that.
It's almost a dismissive way of thinking about it.
But just as story is deeply important in terms of life on this earth, in terms of our ability to understand the world, I think symbol is also equally important.
Yeah, no, I would agree.
In the context of parable and myth, symbol...
You could think of symbol as almost sort of the words, almost of myth or parable, or a kind of smaller element that is used to construct myth and parable.
So symbol and myth and parable are very closely related.
I think that what we find most strikingly or what we find strikingly is among the kind of more salient and important myths that come down to us from the ancient world is that there are some very clear kind of similarities and there's a clear sort of heritage between these different myth bodies going all the way back to Sumer or going back to Egypt.
And that what you see is it's a myth and parable, and these myths actually have more durability than the civilizations.
So in other words, you see civilizations develop, but they're not sort of reinventing a kind of symbol or myth language.
They're actually importing a symbol and myth language from earlier civilizations in many cases, right?
So what develops, you see, is a kind of, I guess...
Campbell might have referred to it as a monomyth, and I'm not even sure if that describes the phenomena in a kind of perfect or complete way.
I would argue that what you do see ultimately is a kind of shared symbol language, right?
One that is carried through successive civilizations.
So in other words, the Greeks are not suddenly inventing a whole new myth system, whole cloth out of nothing.
Rather, they're...
They're bringing in myths from older civilizations into their civilization, and they're reinventing them as they were.
So they're creating new myths, but often in these new myths, you're seeing references to earlier myths, to earlier myths developed in earlier civilizations.
So I would argue what you see ultimately is a shared symbol language, and that it is ultimately that meanings in these symbols...
Or much as words have meanings, that they are these kind of definitive meanings, that they actually mean something specific.
And they can't just, like just interpreting them in a kind of willy-nilly fashion is not the correct way to look at symbols.
That symbols actually can be decoded and do have meanings in many cases.
Well, let's get into that then.
Do you want to go to a Greek myth, or do you want to go to a Christian myth, like the symbol of the cross or the symbol of Jesus Christ, or do you want to go to a, you know, Venus arising out of a clamshell or something maybe a little more friendly?
Sure, let's start with Venus.
So Venus is this goddess of love that appears in Roman myth, and she has an earlier Greek precedent, who is Aphrodite.
Probably everyone listening to the podcast is familiar with Venus or Aphrodite, who are essentially the same figure.
They have earlier precedents in the Near East, in Mesopotamia.
We have Ishtar.
Inanna, who are essentially the same figure, going all the way back to when myth develops in Sumer.
So in other words, Venus, Ishtar, they ultimately are the same figures.
So when Venus or Aphrodite develops in Greece, it's a reference to Ishtar.
It's the same character, the same figure.
And this is something mythographers understand.
Do you think that would have been recognized by...
An average Joe?
In the sense of...
Because you are making an important claim, and I just want to put a little pressure on it.
In the sense of...
You know, again, you know, maybe a contemporary, somewhat ignorant notion of myth might be that, you know, they're just these crazy characters, you know, Zeus and Aphrodite, and she was the goddess of love and blah, blah, blah.
But you're making an important claim, which is that, you know, Aphrodite herself had a history and she was evoking other myths, even myths that could have arisen in a different context.
And we're not claiming, or you're not claiming, I don't think, some kind of Jungian, you know, archetypal...
There are these deep categories in our minds of certain gods.
But you're making a more historical claim that there's thousands of years of myth history and that these are developed, they are adopted in different contexts by other cultures.
Their meanings can transfigure a little bit, although...
You're also claiming that they do have a core meaning that remains.
But do you think that Aphrodite's history in that way would have been...
Would have been recognized in that way by an average Joe in the ancient world?
Well, I don't know about the average Joe.
I wouldn't necessarily claim that the average Joe would be able to make these connections.
So the demos, for example, would everyone understand that Aphrodite was derived from Ishtar?
Well, so what I would say is that both in the Roman and Greek system...
We have this idea of Greek interpretation or Roman interpretation.
So in other words, the Greeks are consciously looking at other cultures and other civilizations and seeing their gods among these other civilizations.
So one example would be Ishtar, right?
So they would say Aphrodite is Ishtar, effectively, through a Greek interpretation.
Now, a kind of more Jungian understanding of this would be...
I know exactly what you're saying.
A couple of things.
People are aware of myths being imported.
The myth of Adonis, for example.
That's a Phoenician import to Greece, and that was understood as a Phoenician import to Greece.
But then you also have this phenomenon of Greek interpretation where they're looking at other civilizations and, you know, what someone might argue is that, well, what they're doing is the Greeks are looking at a goddess that has developed independently and they're assigning, they have also developed a goddess independently and they're saying, well, this goddess is like...
You know, the goddess that we've developed independently.
The process, though, is more like this, I would argue.
It's more, what's happening is you're, as civilizations are, you know, Greece is forming in a later way than civilizations, or at a later date than civilizations developing in the Near East.
And myth is being developed as references to these earlier goddesses, right?
And in some cases, there were veiled references, effectively, right?
So in other words, Ishtar, for example, is a goddess that you could argue developed a kind of bad reputation in Mesopotamia.
It became associated with sacred prostitution, for example, right?
So as myth is developing in Greece, artists who are trying to tell stories in a kind of esoteric way want to reference Ishtar, and so they develop a goddess like Aphrodite.
You know, this is kind of one theory that might explain it.
And so this becomes a reference.
Aphrodite becomes a reference to Ishtar, as it were.
And through a Greek interpretation, the Greeks are aware of this, right?
They understand that this is the same goddess.
And they understand it as the same goddess.
Regardless of how Aphrodite arrived in Greece, they understand it as the same goddess with the same significance and having the same meaning.
But, you know, I mean, this is something mythographers have long recognized, is that there is a kind of lineage, there's a heritage of myth where these myths have earlier precedences.
And they're not, I would argue, much as artists are developing myth in a conscious way, you know, if we use the example of comic books, for example, they're consciously making romances.
They are consciously referencing these earlier myth figures.
I do want to talk about, you know, how we can understand Jewish and Christian gods in this context.
But before that, I mean, one striking thing about your general thesis and work is that you put stress on the cultivation of these myths.
And I think what I'll often hear in a kind of new age context or even among Right-wingers or white nationalists or what have you, is that these myths will kind of, much like Athena came out of Zeus's head, these myths will just kind of pop out of our collective soul.
And that, you know, this is the white man's religion or something like that, is that I've heard.
This is the all-human religion, and it's all the same from a kind of more traditionalist or New Age.
But I think what you stress, and this might come from your own artistic background to a degree, but what you stress is the deliberate conscious cultivation of myths and a symbolic and, to a large degree, esoteric language by sophisticated artists and myth makers.
And that, you know, yes, there's...
There probably are some kind of primal urges going on there with this stuff.
But if we're going to really understand it and criticize it and attempt to, you know, transfigure it in a way that is productive for our people and civilization, we have to understand it as cultivated.
Most things in terms of culture come top down.
And this seems to come from priestly and artistic orders down to But they are not just, you know, burping up.
No, they are consciously crafting something that is pushing society and individual people in a particular direction.
Yeah, no, you know, I and I think I yeah, and I threw in it in You know, I come to this conclusion through a kind of careful analysis of myth and, you know, and making and trying to figure out what sort of reference is being made in this or that myth.
And often it is something that is sort of clearly discoverable.
And I apply this especially, I mean, obviously there can be an organic.
Myth formation, for example.
Let's think of the myth of Sasquatch or Bigfoot, right?
So this could have been just an instance of, you know, I don't know.
I'm actually not very familiar with how that myth developed.
Maybe, and so I haven't studied Bigfoot, but maybe it could have just been, you know, some guys saw like a mountain man out in the woods, and he was an especially shaggy guy, and that was actually sort of the origin or the first formation of that myth, is that they saw a guy that was especially hairy, and they came up with a myth called Bigfoot.
And maybe it wasn't called Bigfoot at the time, but it evolved into this myth called Bigfoot.
And then it entered pop culture and all, you know.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's not to say that it doesn't have some greater Jungian significance as well.
Because obviously then at some point, to use a kind of internet term, at some point that myth or that meme went viral, as it were.
And people were like, oh, there's this guy named Bigfoot.
So something pre-existing in the human mind became fascinated by the...
And Bigfoot kind of became almost a fantasy of like an earlier version of ourselves, a little more connected to nature.
You could do a Freudian, Jungian reading of it like that.
And I think that's actually probably pretty accurate.
That's why, you know, when we were walking around in Whitefish today, you could easily have bought a Bigfoot t-shirt or a mug if you went to.
It's entered the pop culture.
It resonates for some reason.
But it's, I don't think that one, and again, I don't know a tremendous about it either, but I don't think that one was consciously crafted.
And it is rather benign or neutral in the sense that...
You know, there aren't a lot of consequences to, you know, believing that Bigfoot exists or just kind of thinking that he's a fun pop culture image.
There are no real consequences to your life.
There are no political consequences.
There are no really religious consequences.
It's just kind of a benign fantasy.
But obviously, religion is not this.
Benign individual thing where we just happen to believe in Bigfoot or a spaghetti monster, whatever the atheists say.
No.
Religion is a collective exercise.
It is an inherently political exercise.
The notion, the liberal or modern notion of the separation in church of state would be unthinkable.
To someone in the ancient world, it would be almost as unthinkable as atheism.
The idea that you had just a private experience with a god is also equally unthinkable.
Religion is inherently collective.
And just to kind of evoke Ed Dutton here for a little bit, religion is a way of...
Making a society conform, channeling energies in a society, giving a society an up and down and a right and left through, you could say, non-physical means.
Not supernatural, because it's very natural, but outside of ordering someone at the point of a gun or a knife to do something, to beating them over the head with some...
Religion is this ability to make the tribe conform, make the tribe do things that it might otherwise not.
Channel who in the tribe is marrying whom.
It's a kind of non-physical means of doing this.
And those tribes that had better religions, let's just put it that way, that had more powerful, group-oriented, even domineering religions, are going to I think all
religions are kind of different.
I mean, the...
There are different versions of good and evil and up and down and right and left among different ethnicities and races and regions, etc.
But all of these religions do share something in common in the sense that they are channeling the people towards an end.
And that is how they are powerful and actually essential in world human evolution.
Rome and Greece, the religion is a public and civic religion.
So it's not a personal religion.
It's actually a kind of collectivist religion in that regard.
And that's a very important point, and that makes it distinct from Christianity in a lot of ways.
Christianity is a personal salvation cult, right?
So the emphasis is on the salvation of the individual soul.
And it's not alone in being in this category.
Earlier myth bodies, earlier cults rather, from which Christianity is evidently derived in my view.
This would include the cult of Dionysus.
The cult of Adonis, for example.
These are also personal salvation cults, especially in the case of the cult of Dionysus or Bacchus.
So they're personal salvation cults.
The interest is in the salvation of the individual soul.
Now, from a Roman or Greek perspective, these are degenerate cults.
They're thonic degenerate cults.
And one of the reasons we can imagine, and I'm sure that ancients probably highlighted this specifically, The idea that there were personal salvation cults as opposed to the sort of celestial public cults where you have chieftain gods like Jupiter or Zeus or Apollo who are gods of the public, of the assembly, as it were, of the people, and you can understand them.
They were ancestral gods.
That makes these other cults distinct, these cults arriving from the Near East, which include Christianity, you know, the Adonis cult.
And I guess there's some debate as to whether or not the Bacchus or Dionysus cult arrived from the Near East.
I would argue...
Put myself on the side of the Orientalists on that one.
Because he's clearly...
In fact, in the myth of Dionysus, the name Dionysus means Zeus of Nysa.
And Nysa is a mythical realm that is either somewhere in the south in Africa or in Arabia.
So it's in the east or south.
Right.
So he's understood as especially essentially a Zeus of the East or a Zeus of the Would you say, in terms of understanding Greco-Roman religion, if we're looking at these structural components, there seem to be two things that you're stressing.
The first is that these are ancestor gods in the sense that the Olympians are a family.
They are a big family, and Zeus is at the head of it, and he's...
You know, either symbolic or even kind of literally at the head of our family.
So it is an ancestral tribal god at its deepest level.
But it's also a celestial god.
It is a solar deity.
I mean, particularly in the case of Apollo.
But Olympia itself is on a mountaintop in the heavens.
It is something that is up.
And, you know, pointing upwards and so on.
And there are elements of that in Christianity or at least those have been kind of...
Syncretically added to Christianity.
A very important aspect, you know, both of the Greek and Roman world is this idea of family, right?
So in Rome, you have the idea of gens, which means race, actually.
And you also have the idea of familia, which means family.
And these become ultimately the way of organizing the society, not just culturally, but also politically.
The patricians are descended from 100 men who became Romulus Romulus basically appointed 100 men as the patricians.
And the patricians in Rome were effectively the aristocracy, and they were the good families that were at the kind of center of the society.
So the whole structure of the society is based on family, and it's based on race ultimately, right?
Because we're talking about...
Ultimately, we're talking about Arians in Rome.
But among the gods, we essentially see a family that represents this Arian family as well.
The words gens and familia are sometimes used interchangeably.
In other words, in Rome, we have the idea that race is also family.
I mean, this is a kind of very profound point that we sometimes miss, you know, in other words.
You know, I'm certainly not the first one to say it, but other nationalists have come, you know, have said the expression, for example, that race is one's extended family, right?
So this was something that was just kind of understood in Rome.
The gods are themselves a family, right?
they represent a family now um and you know and there are what happens in I don't know if it's correct necessarily to call them corruptions, but maybe it is also correct to call it corruptions.
But there are obviously examples in Roman myth and in Greek myth where we see...
You know, effectively degenerate behavior among the gods, as it were.
And this would especially be the case with figures like Bacchus or Dionysus.
But in that case, though, we understand effectively we're talking about a thonic god, and I would argue a Semitic god.
And there's many reasons, actually, to believe that.
In fact, Dionysus was—or Bacchus, I should say—in the Roman world was widely understood as the same figure of Yahweh.
I mean, this is—I mean, it was just kind of— That was an understanding in Rome, right?
So Yahweh and Bacchus are understood as the same figure.
People listening to this podcast should understand this is a very profound point, right?
So the hero deity in the Old Testament, Yahweh, is Bacchus.
So that becomes a kind of new lens to look at the Old Testament, right?
And he is a kind of, you know, when you read the Old Testament, he is this kind of tricky character, right?
He's a kind of dishonest, tricky character.
So that would be one example.
But then you also see examples of degenerate behavior from these ostensibly celestial gods, like Jupiter, for example.
I mean, Jupiter is not necessarily the biggest family man, as it were, right?
But again, you can see these as kind of corruptions, because there are artists, and in some cases, I argue, you can see some examples of degenerate behavior among gods in the myths, and you can say, well...
Part of the reason there might be because the civilization on some level is degenerating, so the morals are becoming looser, so that's reflected in the gods as well.
Another answer to that as well, which I think is a kind of important answer to it, is that what you see in the Roman world as well as this phenomenon of what I call proto-Jews, right?
So in other words, proto-Jews...
I'll give you an example of a proto-Jewish cult, one that was identified by Tacitus, for example, or was relayed, rather, by Tacitus.
The idea is Judaism, or Jews, emerged from the Saturn cult, and this is something that Tacitus says, for example.
And then I already gave you the example of Bacchus.
So Bacchus or Dionysus would be another example of a proto-Jewish cult.
And Vulcan, I think, is also another kind of clear example of a proto-Jewish cult.
When you look at the myths with that understanding, they become much more...
Kind of interesting and comprehensible because then you start to actually understand, yeah, Vulcan is kind of this Jewish character.
He's a character that's interceding.
He's coming between Juno and Jupiter in arguments and siding with the woman, siding with Juno.
And this is what causes Jupiter to throw him out of Olympus.
So in a way, he becomes a kind of proto-feminist figure, as it were.
And Jupiter, as this Aryan god, becomes irritated or frustrated with him and throws him out of Olympus.
Examples of where you see kind of degeneracy or decadence with Jupiter outside of the idea that he's kind of this philanderer and he's always cheating on his wife, or he's ultimately a kind of polygamous figure.
One example would be he impregnates Maya, who is the mother, you know, who I identify as a Semitic goddess.
Is the mother of Hermes, or Mercury, who is another god that I identify effectively as a Semitic god.
So you see the myths become a way of also describing a kind of, you could argue, a kind of degeneracy that's occurring in the civilization as well.
I think there's also a level at which the myths are acknowledging history.
They're acknowledging their own...
I mean, the Greco-Roman myths have a concept of agriculture.
So these aren't...
You know, extremely ancient myths where that concept was unknown.
That is integrated into their myth body.
And then even within the Olympians, there is a notion of time and overcoming other gods.
So, I mean, with Zeus himself, they are overcoming the old Titans, including Kronos or Saturn, most especially.
So just to...
Remind you of this myth.
Saturn was a...
He is not a god.
He is a titan.
And he was...
There was a prophecy that his sons would overcome him.
That they would...
Not just be his, you know, offspring, but actually create a new order that didn't involve him.
And so he was, in fact, eating all of his offspring.
There are, you know, very famous paintings involving this.
And Goy's the most famous, so there are others.
And it is actually a rather terrifying notion, to be honest.
But his...
Zeus' mother felt for him and loved him, and she actually gave, as opposed to giving Kronos the infant body of Zeus, she gave him a rock, which he swallowed, and Zeus later saved his siblings, who became the Olympians, when he overthrew Kronos.
So there's almost a built-in or embedded history to different cults.
In competition with each other and kind of overcoming one another, but also being derived from one another to some degree within the Greco-Roman body itself.
There's kind of like a mythic narrative within all of the narratives.
That is probably the most prominent in the sense that the Olympians wouldn't exist without that.
But it's about, I mean, it seems to indicate that there was an older god system involving Titans and involving maybe Semitic deities.
Kronos.
From which the Olympians are derived to some degree, but which they also overcame and engaged in competition.
I mean, there's other examples of Apollo, I believe, is defeating Python by descending upon this fiery scene with a horrifying snake-like figure in a golden chariot and covering it in arrows.
there's an almost kind of explicit reference to other cults, you know, again, from which these are derived to a degree, but also which they overcome and supplant in creating a new Yeah, no, that's absolutely the case.
And I mean, I think that the other thing I would say, too, because sometimes people become irritated with the idea that, like, Vulcan is a Semitic god or that Mercury is a Semitic god.
Like, people in the DR, let's just say.
Become irritated with this idea because they're kind of...
And maybe it's because they're sort of attracted to these figures.
Or they like this idea that Greece was this sort of just racially homogeneous society.
Yeah, which it was not.
As we know, it was not, right?
And it was influenced by all these other civilizations.
But what are...
And all these other peoples.
And it was...
Yeah, so...
But what I would say is the following is that...
Those examples, because what you do see in the myth, you see examples of these Semitic gods effectively collaborating with Aryan gods.
You see a Vulcan supplying the lightning bolts to Jupiter, for example, to fight the Titans.
You see Mercury serving as the herald of the gods, as the messenger and the herald of the gods.
So we can still identify these as kind of Semitic figures within a kind of hierarchy or pantheon of gods.
And really the key there is that what the Greeks or what the ancients and the Romans were doing is that they were establishing a hierarchy of gods and also a hierarchy of races implicitly within those societies.
So we might understand, for example, Jupiter is a god that would represent the Patricians, for example.
He represents the Arians.
So you see, and one of the reasons something like this becomes valuable, and this is what I argue, is that, so it's describing effectively Semitic figures in servile roles to Arian figures.
You know, someone in the DR will be like, well, you know, the perfect society is when all the Semitic elements are basically expelled and we have a homogeneous society.
Well, you know, and I think that there were probably certainly cases in the past and certainly in the future where a kind of racial separation is desirable among, you know, different elements.
And we see examples of that in myth, for example, where we see Vulcan being expelled from Olympus and landing in Lemnos, which I argue is a proto-Jewish, you know, site where the cult of Vulcan develops, right?
So, but I think that the problem, though, really ultimately with this interaction between the Aryan and the Semite and between, and I think it's actually...
Clearer to say Jews or proto-Jews, because they become sort of the most powerful and sophisticated element of this other, as it were.
I think the key is that there is an element of crypsis, effectively, among Jews or proto-Jews, whereby they are able to kind of effectively infiltrate or insinuate themselves.
into a society that is Aryan.
And I think that the Greek and Roman myth and religion system understood this.
So even if you were to kind of, for example, expel Jews from Rome or from Greece, that because of this cryptic element and the idea that basically Jews can...
They can pretend not to be Jews.
They can pretend to be Aryans to varying degrees of success.
And they are kind of along a racial spectrum that allows them to do that.
They're these kind of more white-looking Jews, as it were.
Because of that cryptic element to Jews, the value of the religion of the ancient Greek and the ancient Roman, the Greco-Roman religion, is that you're establishing hierarchy, right?
And this becomes a kind of moralizing aspect to the Aryans in the society and allows them to dominate in the way that their sort of representative gods are dominating other sort of lesser Semitic gods, if that makes sense to you.
So Roman religion, I argue that one of the geniuses of the Greco-Roman religion system is that it establishes racial hierarchy.
And it does it in...
It does it in an explicit way in the sense that, you know, to the people that do understand the myths, who understand Roman interpretation, for example, you know, know what's being conveyed there, but also on a kind of subliminal and implicit level, you know, in the way that art or in the way that religion operates on the subconscious or on the psyche, right?
So it has a moralizing effect to the Aryans who are kind of moralized to rule the society and has a...
Demoralizing effect on the Semites who are put in a kind of servile role to the extent that they're permitted within the society at all.
And again, I don't think that you can control to the extent, in a lot of cases, to which they appear in the society.
So religion becomes a solution to that problem of Krypsis and this idea that every society is ultimately infiltrated.
There's always going to be some element of...
I mean, Aryans are always going to have this other element that's crowding in on them because we are an exceptionally productive and...
Yeah, we're a very productive race in the sense that we create these very desirable civilizations that are very rich and productive, and they create all this sort of additional wealth that people want access to.
And also, you know, people want access to our genes as well.
I mean, and this is another aspect of Judaism, which I argue is ultimately a kind of bridegathering cult, as it were, in the sense that Jews are very interested.
In the best genes, you know, wherever those genes lie.
And that there is always, of course, a kind of Semitic element to Judaism.
And that's something that the religion accounts for.
But that they have a way of essentially, you know, through their religion, you know, accessing desirable genes in non-Jewish civilizations.
But, you know, in particularly Aryan civilizations.
Well, we can talk about the impact, really, of the adoption of Christianity.
And I think we probably should understand it as Judeo-Christianity in the sense that it is...
Not to say that there aren't hot conflicts between Judaism and Christianity or that Judaism hasn't in some ways rejected Christ as a Messiah, but even the notion of a Messiah, which is the literal translation of Christ, is a Jewish notion.
It is a Jewish vision that Christianity is born from, and it is a fulfillment of that vision, one that is rejected by Jews.
No question, but it is a I mean,
one can, you know, moving from, say, a solar deity, you know, worshipping the most primal kind of originary religion, which is the sun, as what...
That gives us life and allows us to be productive.
And this, you know, beacon out there that is untouchable and bright and light, that shines light into darkness, that is ultimately a kind of source of truth.
And adopting a dying god on a cross as its most fundamental symbol.
And the kind of hierarchy that is implied in that, as you were saying, moving away from a fundamentally solar family of gods to a dying god that has a different origin, ethnically, tribally, racially, than the people who worship him.
Yeah, it's a kind of direct inversion of the Roman system, as it were, and it certainly was consciously devised, in my view, with that intention of effectively inverting the Roman system, right, and placing a Jewish god or a Jewish deity above...
You know, Arians, effectively, right?
So inverting the hierarchy that I just described.
You know, one example we can think of is...
So we have this, you know, again, I argue, a Semitic messenger god in the form of Mercury, and he's subservient to Jupiter, who is the chieftain god, the king in the Greco-Roman system.
And in Judaism...
We see, you know, because Judaism, part of Judaism, or rather, not in Judaism, Christianity, rather.
But, you know, though I think Christianity is best understood as a kind of tendril of Judaism, for example.
And the Old Testament has always been important to Christianity.
You know, it's referenced throughout the New Testament.
It's part of Christianity.
And there is a common God as well.
You know, through the Old Testament into the New Testament as well.
So what I would say is, let's look at the figure of the archangel Michael.
He becomes a subservient figure to Yahweh, the Lord.
And I would argue that that, you know...
There's many reasons to believe that Michael is kind of a form of Apollo, as it were.
He's a dragon slayer in Revelations, for example.
He's fighting a dragon.
And there are more kind of esoteric reasons why you might believe that, for example.
The Kabbalah, I believe it's called the Tiferet.
Michael is associated in esoteric Kabbalah.
Michael is associated with the Tiferet, which is kind of the sixth sphere of the Kabbalah, which is also associated with the sun.
So you could argue that that's another indication that he's a kind of Apollonian figure.
He's understood as solar.
Michael has understood as solar.
So you see an inversion there, right?
So the word angel means messenger.
So now Yahweh is the master, and the Arian is the messenger, is the servant.
So that would be one example.
But in general, of course, in Christianity, you're bowing down to a Jewish God in Jesus Christ.
Yeah, we see an inversion, and I think that ultimately the goal there is to demoralize the Aryan race and to, through parable and religion, express a Jewish superiority over Aryans in the sense that, you know...
You know, however you interpret or view that parable, not only, you know, I argue that the Jewish God ultimately represents Jewry collectively, and I make the argument for that, and I think that that is the case.
But even if you take a kind of more literalist view of Christianity and you say that, well, Jesus was a Jew, right then, you know, Arians understand that...
Their God is a member of the Jewish race, right?
So in other words, you know, how can we not understand that as demoralizing on some level or understand ourselves as inferior to Jews if that is the case?
In other words, if they're able to, from their race, generate our God, right?
So doesn't that make them on some level, if not a race of gods, a race capable of producing gods?
So that has, I would argue, a deeply kind of psychological, psychologically depressive effect on Aryans vis-a-vis Jews.
And I think that that is something that Jews I think that there's a lot of evidence that Jews understand that, that understand that to be a way of psychologically dominating areas.
It leads to a kind of deeply ambivalent relationship towards Jews on behalf of Christians as well, in the sense that there is this kind of schizophrenic ambivalence, mixed bag of feelings, absolute admiration and hostility That is simply pathological.
That a Christian...
In some ways can't see Jews and the Jewish tradition straight.
They can't look upon it objectively and criticize it objectively due to the nature of their own religion and mythic structure.
Someone who has extracted himself from Judaism and Christianity can look...upon Jews straight.
He can objectively examine them and reach certain compromises and mutual understanding in a way that a Christian simply cannot.
Jews are, to a degree, the villain.
Of their story in the sense of the rejection of the Christ Messiah and the execution of the Christ Messiah.
At the same time, the fact that they have even a notion of the word Christ, which is Messiah, it is coming from an Old Testament Jewish myth of, you know, if you look at a famous passage from Isaiah of the lion lying down with the lamb.
And this...
Egalitarian, topsy-turvy, even kind of communistic-type situation where the child will lead the lion and the lamb into a new age of peace and perfection and the end of predator and prey and the seeming end of all hierarchy, even though that's obviously not the case.
And so the...
I think a Christian nationalist or a Christian who is critical of Judaism or even critical of, say, Zionism and so on is kind of left in this fundamental ambivalence.
And you can kind of see this with a lot of American fundamentalists who want to convert the Jews to Christianity.
Who imagine world history as leading towards a coming apocalypse, which of course has a lot of precedence with Jesus Christ and his message, but a coming apocalypse based around Jews.
You know, gaining control once again of Israel and that land.
And so they're often viewed, these Christian fundamentalists or the evangelicals, they're often viewed as anti-Semitic.
And why not?
After all, they want to convert them all to Christianity.
They are, you know, urging on the apocalypse.
They want to bring it upon more quickly.
It's at the very least, it's a deeply important aspect of their religion and their view of the world.
In fact, right now.
At the same time, you have to understand Christians in general, and evangelicals and fundamentalists in particular, or especially, as a Jewish phenomenon.
Their entire religion is based on this.
Their entire religion is based on this ambivalence about Jews, to the point that any...
The perspective they have on the Jewish race is just schizophrenic and pathological and has huge blind spots and is just twisted due to the very nature of their belief.
And I think in some ways there is an opportunity with the gradual decline of Christianity, which has been happening for some time, and it's even led to a rather...
Not-so-attractive kind of atheist movement and so on.
But also through this...
...new look at religion, a Roman perspective on religion, for us to kind of extricate ourselves from the Christian mythos and be able to look at the Jews properly, to see them straight, and to actually reach a kind of proper understanding of them, even a mutual understanding, you could say, and a better hope for peace that is divorced from...
Christian anti-Semitism on the one hand, and a kind of Jewish apocalyptism on the other, that we need to understand them and these crucial issues from another lens than Christianity, which is itself a fulfillment of Judaism.
Yeah, and I think that one of the things that—well, I'll just call them Christian anti-Semites.
One of the things that they'll point to as to a reason why Christianity is not pro-Jewish, as it were, and that's kind of a simplification of what we're saying, right?
One of the reasons that they, I mean, ultimately it is, I would argue, pro-Jewish in the sense that it becomes a way of, again, of dominating Aryans psychologically vis-a-vis Jews.
And I think this was the intention of that religion.
This is something that Nietzsche also suspected.
But what I think that one thing that they get caught up on is that there are these kind of Jewish villains.
That appear in the Gospels, for example, the Pharisees.
So, in other words, we see kind of evil Jews, as it were, and there are, in the New Testament, there are kind of striking passages where, you know, Christ is describing them as, you know, the children of Satan, as it were.
But not Jews, but the language is used in a very kind of careful way.
So he's not describing all Jews, and that's something that needs to be pointed out to people who bring up, you know, quotes like that.
He's not pointing to all Jews, and he doesn't say all Jews, but he's talking about particular Jews that are opposing his ministry, for example, right?
But I think that the Gospels and Christianity is a kind of genius myth.
In the sense that it does create these characters who are effectively Jewish villains.
So both the greatest hero of the New Testament, Jesus Christ, is contained in this parable, but also in this parable are these villainous Jews, right?
This is actually a way of making the cult saleable, as it were, to Gentiles, who are kind of the ultimate audience of the myth.
I mean, early Christians are Jews, but then the goal is actually to spread the cult to Gentiles.
I mean, that's kind of the purpose of Christianity, as it were.
Paul becomes the apostle to the Gentiles.
Peter is understood as the apostle to the Jews.
The myth becomes, because we have to understand, in Rome, people are very wary and don't like Jews, generally.
And they're understood as very troublesome, and these revolts are put down in Judea.
The popular view in Rome is not to join a Jewish cult or to trust Jews, as it were.
So we can imagine what we would call today as highly sort of anti-Semitic conditions in Rome.
So how do you sell a cult to the Romans?
Well, one way of doing it is basically having these Jewish scapegoats or throwing Jews under the bus, as it were, in the cult.
I mean, that becomes almost a kind of necessary...
Or that becomes almost requisite as a point of entry, right?
You have to kind of concede that there are these bad Jews, as it were, right?
So I think that that's something that people get caught up on.
And, you know, the term that I've come up with to describe this phenomena in Jewish religion and art is the caducean, right?
It's also a term that you can apply to politics as well.
But this idea that there is effectively a false opposition.
And I argue that Christianity and Christ represents that false opposition.
So Christianity represents something that is...
Maybe it's not as ideal as a kind of Gentiles becoming completely bacchanal or liberal, as it were, but it becomes a kind of controllable opposition in the sense that it's not that bad.
Jews can deal with Christianity, and they've dealt with Christianity for a very long time.
And people talk about...
You know, sometimes people in the DR will crow about how Jews have been kicked out of 109 countries and 110 is coming up.
Well, you know, that's a very kind of terrible record.
I mean, that's not something that people should be proud of.
It's not, you know, first of all, you know, the sort of kind of human suffering that causes in general, whether to Jews or Gentiles, is undesirable, of course.
But the other thing is, well, you know, how is it that...
Jews have persisted among Europeans for so long if Christianity is actually really that anti-Semitic.
The truth is Christianity has not been historically anti-Semitic.
It's often been a kind of sanctuary, as it were, for Jews.
And I mean, that's something that, you know, guys like Joyce will write about, for example.
So it is not the case that Christianity is anti-Semitic in any real kind of meaningful way.
And this is outside of the fact, obviously, that the God, the Savior there, is Jewish, which by definition makes it not anti-Semitic.
You know, the other aspect of Christianity is it seeks to convert both Gentiles and Jews, right?
So the Christian answer ultimately to the Jewish problem, as it were, is conversion.
This is what Michael E. Jones talks about.
But, you know, conversion is not, you know, this is the design of the religion.
I mean, Jews are not disinterested in intermarrying with Arians.
But they're interested in intermarrying with them on their own terms, right?
So in other words, ideally, necessarily and certainly, they're remaining Jews, but they're bringing in desirable stock from the Aryan gene pool.
And the genetics show this very clearly, that Jews are...
Roughly 40% European, and most of that is from a female line, right?
So it means that Jewish males are marrying desired Aryan stock among Aryan populations and often gaining very desirable genes because they're in a somewhat advantageous position in those societies, whether it's through their wealth or their cultural sophistication or whatever the case may be.
You have said that religion is an answer to many of these issues.
And, you know, again, one of the frequent criticisms that I've heard, and these have all come before we've published the book, but I think many people have at least a vague grasp on where we're going with this, but that religion is the proper, it's the ultimate solution to a lot of these problems.
And that isn't just a...
Say, Jewish question, but it is the question of channeling our civilization in a proper direction, resisting demoralization, or what Nietzsche would call nihilism, and so on, valuing life and actually actively cultivating higher levels of life, cultivating human flourishing and our flourishing especially.
And that religion is the solution to this.
Well, how do you address kind of one of the common critiques, which is that, oh, you're just another new age guy out there inventing a new religion, like Scientology or one of these kinds of things, and that no one actually believes in Apollo or something.
It's an almost kind of cynical interpretation of what you're doing.
I think that there at least is a little bit of plausibility to the fact that, you know, we're trying to change directions on a civilizational level and that such a project is so huge that it's, you know, it's rightly criticized.
But how can we kind of...
Understand religion in a new term, understand even things like faith in a new way, that we can find ultimate solutions to these problems of nihilism writ large, but then also just the Jewish question writ small, as it were.
The criticism that I'm inventing a new religion...
Well, first of all...
Religions are at some point invented.
At some point, religions come into being.
I mean, that's just, you know, ostensibly this happened with the birth of Jesus Christ, right, if we're taking a literalist interpretation of Christianity.
Or it happened, you know, some 70 years later or 60 years later when they're writing the Gospels, right?
At some point, religion is developed, and it is an invented thing.
It's a consciously invented thing, and that's what I argue, and that's based on my analysis of myth and religion and world history, is that I see these myths as consciously developed with coherent symbolic meaning.
So that becomes...
To Richard's point, this is the way of organizing societies.
This is the way of cohering people to a goal in a direction.
It's a way of giving people and a civilization a direction and a goal and forming them ultimately, forming them into something, ideally something better than their ancestors, ideally.
And I guess the other part of this question, too, is that, well, no one believes in it, right?
So no one believes that Apollo is this god that's in a chariot in the heavens, right?
Well, I would say the following is that I think that, again, I argue that these myths are developed cynically.
So one of the critiques against me, or one of the arguments against me, which I think ultimately comes from...
You know, it comes from a place of people who are actually not really that familiar with myth and actually haven't really studied it in any sort of like long and consistent manner in the manner that I have.
They argue that, well, these myths just arise kind of mystically, right?
And you might even argue, you know, they might even be kind of taking a Jungian view of myth development, though this is not, I don't think that that is kind of the fairest characterization of Jung's views on myth development, but this idea of a collective unconsciousness.
So, you know, even if, you know, what I would call the Christ myth, even if Christianity...
Is untrue.
That the stories and the parables that are developed there are kind of just arising in a kind of mystical or more sort of intuitive way.
Look, I don't discount that there is a kind of intuitive aspect to the development of myth and art in general, of course, obviously.
And there's some examples of art being developed in an entirely intuitive and creative way and not in a kind of conscious and encoded way in the way that I argue that Christianity is developed.
So here's the difference.
I argue that in religion generally, there are what we call Gnostics.
People are familiar with the Gnostic movement, which was a kind of early form of Christianity.
Which was ostensibly more mystical in nature.
But the word Gnostic actually means knower, right?
So it's referring to someone who has esoteric or hidden knowledge.
That's what a Gnostic means.
So I think that the phenomena of Gnostics is ultimately a phenomena that's as old as religion itself.
So dating back to Sumer, dating back to the origin of religion in Sumer or Egypt.
You have Gnostics.
You have people who understand what the symbols mean.
Right?
And these symbols that have been kind of intelligently and consciously developed.
And then you have a laity or you have a herd that doesn't understand.
And it will experience it mystically or spiritually.
Or another word, the modern word we use today that we should understand as a synonym of spiritual is psychologically.
Right?
They understand it psychologically or they have an emotive reaction to it that's a more kind of visceral response to it.
And that's what people in the DR are thinking.
They're thinking that religion...
And there's a kind of passive aspect to this, where they want us to suddenly be inhabited with this spirit, whether it's the spirit of Christ or the spirit of some Hindu god or whatever the case may be, and that this sort of mystical inhabitation of spirit will motivate us to save the white race or whatever the kind of actual utilitarian goal they're thinking of.
But I think that that is a kind of passive and ultimately incorrect approach because, again, these religions are developed consciously with an understanding of symbol and using symbol as a way of moralizing this group or that group, whether it's being used to moralize Jews or whether it's being used to moralize Aryans.
So in other words, you have a passive approach, which is imagining that we're somehow gonna be kind of mystically inspired to save the civilization or save the white race or whatever the real goal is, right?
Because let's actually talk about the real goal, right?
Get Donald Trump away.
Yeah, exactly.
Let's talk about the real goal.
So we should be taking intelligent and conscious steps toward that rather than being inhabited by this sort of drunk spirit of mysticism.
And we see this when we contrast the Apollonian and the Dionysian, we see this as well.
The Dionysian is connected to this mystical, drunken...
You know, consciousness.
The Apollonian, on the other hand, is connected to a sober, conscious, and ordering aspect of the human mind, right?
And that's the way that we have to approach the future is in an Apollonian way.
We have to be deciding in an intelligent direction.
I mean, it's like anything else you would do in your life.
But the thing that's kind of scary about it is that we're doing it on a much wider collective scale.
But if you were going to build a house, you would have a kind of intelligent, conscious plan of building the house.
You wouldn't be inhabited by some artistic, mystical, spiritual spirit that would allow you to build the house.
So it's similar in that regard.
I think a lot of that sort of resistance ultimately comes from a couple of sources.
One is a fear.
You know, an understandable fear, which is probably related to the disappearance of Christianity and maybe a kind of sadness connected to that as well, that, you know, and maybe even a fear of damnation.
So I think that those objections come from that quarter.
And then I think other objections just come from people who are kind of just...
You know, just kind of shitty people who just don't really, you know, who would rather just kind of, who kind of like the world the way it is and like, you know, being part of this sort of kind of depressive group where people don't feel that they have the spirit within themselves, but rather have to look to, you know, a Jewish deity, for example, to save them.
Or a spirit or some kind of inhabitation that we can anticipate or maybe somehow through shamanistic ritual generate.
But that's not the way forward in my view.
And I mean, I think to sort of logical and intelligent people who...
We'll also come to the conclusion that religion is important, and it is a way of structuring society.
It's both the culture and art of a future society, and religion, culture, art all become ultimately synonyms, in that we have to create a culture that is a non-degenerate culture.
And the root of that is religion, because that is sacred.
The continuance of the white race, the amelioration of the white race, there is nothing more sacred in my mind than that.
Whether we're just considering the white race or we're considering the human species, there's nothing more sacred than that.
Now, if it comes to the question of God, does God exist, or is there an afterworld?
You know, my answer to that is the following.
You know, God becomes a kind of a difficult term even to define on some level.
You know, I mean, people sort of have a different definition of it.
But if God means, you know, us having a purpose on this earth and, you know, living in life being valuable and the improvement of life being valuable and a useful goal, then yeah, I mean, I think that I believe in God if that's how we're defining it.
You know, and the other question, well, is there an afterlife?
Well, you know, there is, we know that there is an afterlife, or at least empirically we understand that there is an afterlife in our children, right?
We have children.
We, you know, we continue through our families.
We continue through our gens, through our familia.
That is an afterlife that we know is a kind of tangible and real thing, at least so far as we can perceive the world, right?
As far as a personal afterlife, will we be thrown into a flaming pit for eternity?
Or will we ascend to heaven for saying the right words during our life or bowing to the right God?
I would say the following.
I just don't think that that doesn't seem to me like a benevolent God.
So in other words...
I think that we were obligated to follow the good gods, as it were, right?
And a god that decides that you're condemned to hell for, you know, not believing in fables that are not believable and not worshipping a foreign god of a people that appear to be largely adversarial to us.
If that's a sort of kind of...
Mindfuckery, like a benevolent God does, it doesn't strike me as a benevolent God.
I mean, you know, so that's what I would say about that.
So I think that to the extent, let's assume that Jesus is real, right?
And that Christianity is real.
I think that I have a kinder and more benevolent view.
I don't think I would be punished for the things that I'm saying.
You know what I mean?
If he is indeed a benevolent and perfect God, right?
And so maybe that's kind of the riddle of the New Testament on some level, right?
I would stress something that I've said as well in some of my speeches.
And I probably did say it.
Through a little bit of concealment, I didn't directly oppose it to Christianity, although it always was in opposition to Christianity and Judaism.
But this notion of eternity and how eternity is achieved on this planet, Yes,
is it achievement of an eternal line on this planet?
And that is the kind of eternity that we should be striving for.
Yes, maybe, Worms will be eating us and there's oblivion after this life.
Sure, and that is deeply terrifying on some level and not to be wished for.
But there is a kind of salvation and solace to be found in continuing our people forever.
And that is a mark of eternity.
I think architecture can sometimes, or sculpture can sometimes achieve that long-lasting achievement, art in general, sometimes your words.
But the ultimate form of eternity is children, and their children and their connection in one line, or one long story or narrative, as it were.
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