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Jan. 4, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:40
40 Fleeing Eden

An analysis of the power of the Genesis myth

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Good morning, everybody.
It is Wednesday, the 4th of January at the horrendous time of 8.45 in the morning.
Christina had an interesting dream this morning, which, of course, is much more fun to chat about than to head off to work in the sly sort of driving rain.
And for a variety of reasons that I'll get into probably in about a month, it's not too important that I get to work on time.
So I wanted to chat a little bit.
I've been getting some emails about, you know, One gentleman did the complimentary, but I imagine somewhat arduous, task of listening to my podcast for 16 hours straight on a drive, which I appreciate.
Of course, if I'd actually been in the car with him, as my wife will sometimes attest, he might have had a very similar experience of me talking for 16 hours straight without barely taking a breath or stopping for questions.
But he said that of the ones that he was listening to, the most interesting were the ones on religion.
And I was sort of puzzling about this last night, because religion isn't that interesting a topic to me, except insofar as it's still of interest to others, I guess you could say.
I mean, I think that religion is an interesting topic from a sort of anthropology standpoint, or a sort of analysis of an idea structure standpoint, but religion is so far from a sort of living force within me, or any kind of systematic way of looking at the world that, you know, it's very hard for me to really think of it as something that's very important.
You know, I mean, if you look in your own life, you probably don't think about, you know, Apollo and Dionysus more than once every couple of years.
Now, it's not true that I only think of religion once every couple of years, but for me, things like Judaism and Christianity and Islam have about as much force in my mind as, you know, something like, you know, Ragnarok and the Norse mythology, because it is just a species of mythology.
Now, I'm not saying that that's been an overnight process and I woke up after, you know, after I read something like a great book I read when I was younger was Atheism, The Case Against God.
I'm not saying that I sort of woke up from reading that with no sort of, no deific hangovers and just I mean, gee, I'm trying to think of the last time that I really thought of God as any kind of living presence.
I was put in boarding school when I was six years old.
My brother went a year ahead of me, and then I went to boarding school when I was six years old.
My mother was a secretary when I was young, and we had no money.
Well, not much money.
I mean, no car or anything like that.
But my dad had gone to boarding school, and since boarding school had turned my dad into such a paragon of rationality, he felt it was important to send Hugh and I to the same warm and cuddly embrace of a sort of cold-water British boarding school.
So I went when I was six, and I had a lot of religious instruction.
I mean, we went to church all the time, and I dozed off quite a bit when, you know, someone's up there droning about, so-and-so, baguette, so-and-so, you know, and then every now and then we had this real sleepy-voiced preacher, and every now and then he would just sort of stab up about, Mr. Molyneux!
And sort of my head would jerk up with this spindle of drool from my chin to the pew.
Because I was in the choir.
I've always enjoyed singing and I was in the choir.
And so I was sort of front and center to some degree.
And that's sort of where I got the idea that if you're prominent to even a tiny degree within a movement, you're kind of a little more disciplined than everyone else, which is what I was talking about yesterday.
So I mean, I had a lot of religious instruction, kind of understood the whole thing.
But what I got was sort of what I call picture book Christianity or coloring book Christianity or storyboard Christianity.
You know, where you get some sort of broad themes, but nobody ever gets into any details, and you never really... you never read the original text.
I mean, the way that it worked in my boarding school, and maybe it was the same if you had any religious instruction, was, you know, when they read from the Bible, they'll either read, like, very... they'll read two sentences, and then go off on a long, windy passage.
Oh, wait, sorry.
I shouldn't really be complaining about long, windy passages, should I?
So they go off in a long, windy passage about these two sentences, right?
For instance, I remember reading when I was in graduate school, I read a lot of Luther.
Not the I Have a Dream Luther, but the I Have an Even Nastier Dream Luther, who translated the Bible into the vernacular and founded Protestantism, split off from Christianity, and didn't like indulgences so much, and plunged Europe into religious wars for about 150 years.
So that Luther took a passage, sort of contrasting passages.
One was an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, you know, retribution and vengeance is all.
And he said, well, how do we reconcile that with, you know, if your enemy does evil to you, turn the other cheek.
I mean, Luther was an absolute evil genius of the first order, you know, in terms of his intellectual life.
I mean, that man could just do amazing things with logic, which he despised.
But he could do amazing things with logic to further justify the power of the state.
Don't think of him for a moment as someone who rebelled against authority.
Whatever you do, right?
I mean, rebelling... If one mafia group splits away from another mafia group and engages in a turf war, we don't call that person suddenly... The person who splits away doesn't become moral.
He just doesn't like the mafia group who has power and wants his own.
And maybe he wanted to finally sleep with someone who knows, because he did end up doing that.
So he had this passage about... He contrasted these two passages and said, well, how can we reconcile them?
And he said, well, this is how we reconcile them.
And this is like the amazing genius of Luther.
He said that the governments that are above you, the kings and queens that are above you, are placed there by God.
Right?
Which is, it's sort of by the by, that's the payoff, right?
That's why religions get state protection, right?
Because in return they give the state moral justification to the people, right?
So he said that the states that are above you, the kings and queens that are above you, are placed there by God.
And so it is to them, it is to them that the commandment, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, is enjoined.
I'm not reading anything as I'm driving, but this is sort of the language that he used.
So the governments, through the justice, the law courts, the prisons, the police, the military, and all that, the governments are the ones that God enjoins to perform an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, right?
So if you go and kill someone, the governments, the agents of the state, the agents of God, right, through the divine right of kings, the agents of God are enjoined to punish whoever, to punish you if you commit a crime or whatever, blaspheme, speak out against God, think that the earth goes around the sun, any of those horrendous crimes, then you are to be sort of tortured and killed by the state, and that's what an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth means.
However, when, in your capacity as a citizen, then obedience to the state is obedience to God, right?
I mean, that's the central premise of
sort of pre-enlightenment or pre-industrial revolution Christianity that the state is put there by God and obedience to the state is obedience to God and just as God acts in mysterious ways or seemingly capricious ways or you know you're a you're a great guy but you get like rotting leg disease or something or you're a great guy but you know somebody you know bludgeons you and puts you in a coma or whatever just as the Lord acts in mysterious ways well you know so does the state
And so, you can't rail against God, and you also cannot rail against the state.
So, because the state is put there by God, and motivated by God, and is basically of God, if the state does something to you that seems unjust to you, then you can't fight back, because it's the will of God.
So that's where turn-the-other-cheek comes from, and that's so the turn-the-other-cheek is applied to the citizens and the eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-tooth is applied to the state.
And so you are never ever allowed to question, disobey, or heaven forbid, overthrow or criticize the state.
The state is placed there by God and obedience to the state is obedience to God.
But if you are a king or a queen or a member of the state militia or the police or whatever, Then you have to follow the eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, because you're, you know, acting on the will of God, right?
So it's the George W. Bush argument, right?
I invaded Iraq because a voice in my head told me to.
And so that is sort of, and he, sort of the last thing, he sort of took this other quote of Christ, right?
One of the questions that was going on in early Christianity was, you know, the state is persecuting us, oh Lord, geez you, So what are we supposed to do, right?
I mean, we are a church and we have a secular power called the Roman Empire, which obviously is not Christian because, you know, he's just kicking around at this point.
So what is our relationship to the state going to be, given that we are a sort of holy, you know, religious church and we have this secular power that's, you know, killing us and stealing and throwing us to the lions and crucifying us and torturing us and so on?
And so, how are we supposed to deal with it?
And Christ's sort of famous answer is, render unto God what is God's, and render unto Caesar what is Caesar's.
You know, which is one of these wonderful statements that it seems to be saying something, but the moment you pick it apart, it's saying nothing, because it doesn't define what is owed to either.
So that's sort of one aspect of Luther's thought, and one aspect of religion.
That I find very interesting, that, you know, they do find a lot of things within the Bible which you can pick and choose, right?
I remember having an argument with a young gentleman who was, you know, very Christian and very devout, you know, and a nice guy until we had a number of conversations, right?
Then he became a not-so-nice guy and kind of like a snarky nitpicking kind of jerk.
But, you know, at the beginning he was saying, you know, you don't want to take the Bible out of context.
You know, one thing you don't want to do is, you know, the Bible says, there is no God, right?
But then you read back a little and it says, the fool in his heart has said, there is no God, right?
So you've got to take the Bible in its entirety.
You can't just sort of take a little bit and say, well, this doesn't make sense.
You've got to look at the whole package.
Well, you know, first of all, that's not true at all.
I mean, if you look at any scientific theory or any moral proposition or any sort of A mathematical theorem or, you know, any complex logical structure, you know, the parts do have to hang together, right?
You can't have, you know, a deficiency, an illogical thing over here that is matched by an extra logical thing over there.
Like, logic is a binary proposition.
It is or it isn't.
And a deficiency in one area can't be filled up by an excess in another area.
So it's certainly not true that you have to take the Bible as a whole In order to understand religion, or to understand theology.
If there's one part that contradicts another part, then the whole system falls apart.
You don't have to find a thousand instances of it, though I'm sure there are more than that in the Old Testament alone.
But you dismiss a theory just by proving parts of it illogical, and it doesn't have to be a whole lot of parts.
The real difficulty with logic, the real challenge, what makes it such an exciting pursuit, is that everything has to hang together.
No part can contradict another.
So, that's not true that you have to take the whole Bible as a whole.
And also, it's impossible, right?
I mean, the book is huge.
I think it even dwarfs Atlas Shrugged, right?
So, I mean, it's a huge book.
You can't hold all of the contradictory, crazy premises in your head at the same time because your head would explode or you'd sort of pop into another dimension or something.
So, you can't sort of take The Bible as a whole, what that is, is a mantra that people who are religious use when you sort of point out a contradiction.
Then they say, well, you know, you have to take it in context, you have to look at the Bible as a whole, which they know is impossible, right?
I mean, it's sort of like saying you have to simultaneously see every single human being's actions on earth at the same time, which is impossible, right?
Even if you could rig up six billion video cameras, you couldn't look at them all at the same time.
And so, you know, all they're doing is saying, In order to understand it, you have to, you know, look at everything in context.
And then let's say that you were magically able to look at everything in context, then they'd say, well, in order to understand it, you have to, you know, look at it in the original, and the original is 16 different ancient languages, and, you know, so basically they just keep raising the bar, and then you can't, you know, you sort of, they try to exhaust you with impossibility, which is sort of what Christians try and do.
So I'd like to sort of talk about a couple other things about religion that are sort of, I think, interesting, more from a psychological standpoint than a logical or philosophical standpoint, because I think we had a good go at that the other day.
But some very interesting things about Christianity, and I'm using the term Christianity when I'm really talking about the Old Testament, so I just don't want to have to keep, say, Judaism and Islam at the same time.
So if you're from either of those groups, feel free to also get as offended as Christians do when I'm talking about this stuff.
But let's have a look at the story of Adam and Eve, the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
So for those who may not remember the coloring books from lo those many moons ago, the story is God creates the earth, God creates the animals, God creates Adam and Eve.
And he puts them in the Garden of Eden, which is a beautiful place where food falls into their lap and they don't have to do anything and they don't have to go anywhere.
So it's kind of like a well-foliated coma.
And in the Garden of Eden, he puts the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
And, you know, there is a snake in the Garden of Eden, and one day the snake goes up to Eve and says, you know, Lady, you know, this tree of knowledge of good and evil will make you like a god.
I mean, it's the thing.
It's the source of God's power.
It's where you want to be.
It's the whole scene.
It's where it's at, man.
And Eve says, you know, maybe, maybe, and then eventually says, sure, no problem, and then she goes and uses her evil feminine wiles.
Ah, those evil feminine wiles.
Aren't they wonderful?
She uses her evil feminine wiles on Adam, and then Adam takes a bite of the tree.
She eats, I think.
She eats first, then she gets Adam to take Abide from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
And then they are thrust out of the Garden of Eden.
God gets very angry.
You've disobeyed me.
There was this big commandment.
I gave you one thing.
One thing I tell you to do, which you can't even do.
And, I don't know, he may have thrown a couple of oives in there as well.
So he throws them out, and they're thrown out into the wilderness.
And he curses Adam with labor, and he curses Eve with childbirth.
And he puts a flaming sword to bar their way back in the Garden of Eden.
They can never find their way back, and so on.
Now, I mean, this is just a fascinating myth.
There's a reason that it's endured for so long, because, you know, the best myths are those which psychologically approximate the truth while obscuring it in its narrative.
Boy, there's a bumper sticker for you, isn't there?
I'll see if I can tease that apart a little bit.
If you want to make a great myth, what you want to do is include the truth about the lie that you're telling.
But you want to put it in such an outlandish fashion that people don't suspect it.
And what happens then is it has a sort of deep resonance for them because, you know, the part of every human being that recognizes the truth, right?
The reality processing that we all have.
I mean, assuming we're not schizophrenic or dead.
The reality processing that we have grabs onto that.
The truth that's buried in the metaphor and yet our defenses focus upon the metaphor and forget about So you get it at sort of both levels, right?
So you get a deep emotional appeal, but you also get, you know, it's so outlandish that nobody ever thinks of applying it to what it's describing.
So to give you an example of what I mean by that, the tree of knowledge of good and evil is sort of interesting.
I mean, first of all, there is no evil, right?
I mean, God has created everything, and it's good, and he's created Adam and Eve, and the snake is not evil.
What they do have is free will.
But there is no evil, so the tree of knowledge of good and evil doesn't really make any sense.
Now, the interesting thing is that it's very hard to imagine why God would get angry at Adam and Eve, right?
Because he's told them to do something, but they have no knowledge of good or evil.
And let's just say, for the sake of argument, that disobeying God is evil.
Well, since they're sort of like retarded children in the Garden of Eden, how are they going to know That disobeying goddess is wrong if they don't know good and evil yet, right?
So that's a very interesting sort of moral question and there's lots of reasons in terms of like abusive parenthood why you'd want your children to obey you and yet not know good and evil.
And the main reason why you'd want people to obey you and not know good and evil is that the moment they know good and evil you're kind of revealed, right?
Like if you say to people obey me because I am great and powerful, which is sort of the parent to the toddler transaction, evil parent to a toddler transaction, then you are obviously going to be somewhat nervous if your children ever discover good and evil, right?
Because good and evil is you should not threaten toddlers, right?
You shouldn't give them irrational commandments followed by, you know, physical brute punishment and, you know, expect to be considered good if they ever understand anything about morality.
So, what is interesting about this myth is that once they eat the apple from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, then God gets very angry at them.
Which is also quite fascinating.
I mean, if God is supposed to be all good, and God likes to be worshipped, as we're constantly being told, and God is so supremely intelligent, then we would assume that God would like to be worshipped.
For virtue, because he's virtuous, right?
I mean, you can't just worship God because he's powerful, because then you're just worshipping power, which is amoral and therefore doesn't, you know, it's like a slave to a master, right?
You don't say, I love my master, you say, my master has power over me, and therefore I obey him.
But it's got nothing to do with morality.
And the moment you can get away, you do, right?
Christianity has this problem with power, right?
They create God as all-powerful, but then they create God as all-good, and then they have this paradox wherein God, who likes to be worshipped, gets angry at Adam for eating the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Well, not the whole tree, just the apple.
But that doesn't make any sense.
I mean, if Adam knows the difference between good and evil after eating the apple, then he should appreciate and love God all the more And he should actually obey God all the more because now he knows good and evil.
He knows that what God is telling him to do is the right thing or the wrong thing so he's gonna further be reinforced in his understanding of good and evil and he's going to love God all the more and be a better person and so on.
So you would think that if God was good and God wanted to be appreciated that having someone worship him who knew the difference between good and evil would Makes sense.
And you'd also expect that you wouldn't get mad at someone who didn't have any understanding of good and evil.
You wouldn't get mad at them for disobeying you because how would they know that was wrong?
So, sort of, what happens?
Well, God gets very angry and casts them out of the Garden of Eden.
Right?
So this little sort of human lab he's got going in the Garden of Eden He kicks them out and he curses, as I said, he's got this double curse for Adam and Eve.
And that to me is also interesting because God curses Adam with work and Eve with childbirth and those are two things that occur pretty much as you become an adult, right?
So you can't have kids when you're a baby or a toddler or a young woman, a young girl.
And you really don't do much labor when you're an infant or a young boy.
So, to me, I'll tell you what I think of this metaphor, and then we'll sort of close off the Garden of Eden as an analysis.
The metaphor is about religion, right?
That's why it's so powerful, because it's a self-describing metaphor of humankind's need and the consequences of fighting their way free of this self-induced phantasmic coma of religion.
So you can live in this easy paradise of no effort as long as you just blindly obey and don't think.
But the moment that the serpent comes along, right?
And I would be the serpent in this metaphor, or one of them.
The moment that the serpent comes along and says, you know, you need to wake up from this dream.
This is not how to live.
This is just blind obedience.
You are living in a psychologically immature and, at best, amoral state.
And, you know, more likely an immoral state.
So you need to wake up and you need to start thinking for yourself, for the sake of your children, for the sake of your own soul and happiness and what it is to be human.
And the fact is that, you know, reality is logical and rational and you need to think for yourself.
And so you need to stop being a parasite and you need to Start thinking for yourself and become an individuated and fully formed human being, which is sort of the point of being alive.
Or words to that effect.
That may not be exactly what the snake said to Eve, but he did say, you shall become as God, right?
And so that is people coming along to people who are in this sort of effortless fantasy land Effortless and ineffectual, right?
I mean, Adam and Eve are going to live, but what are they going to do?
They're not going to create, they're not going to love, they're not going to have children, they're not going to work, they're not going to achieve, they're just going to sort of live in this vegetative existence, you know, deep in the foliage, you know, rooting around for fig leaves.
Oh no, sorry, the fig leaves came after the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and we'll get to that also.
So, when you start to think for yourself, when you take a bite of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, you know, which is basically Reality because you know good and evil exist in reality and evil is generally is discovered By people who start to think and we're all not we're all taught not to think we're all have Endless injunctions against thinking as children.
I mean there may be three people in the world who are raised rationally I certainly wasn't one of them and I've never met any but we're all taught not to think so we're all in the Garden of Eden just sort of blindly obeying the prejudices of those around us when we're very young and Then we eat the tree of knowledge of good and evil and God is revealed as vengeful and punishing and kind of evil, right?
Like he blames us for disobeying him.
He blames us for learning about good and evil.
Well, you know, a good person isn't going to get mad at you for learning about good and evil.
An evil person, a corrupt and domineering person, is going to get very angry at you for learning about good and evil because they're going to lose out in that transaction.
I mean, my My parents certainly weren't happy when I began to really think and learn about good and evil because I never see them anymore and I never will see them and they can call me on their deathbed and I'm not going to go and see them because they're stone evil.
So I can understand why God wouldn't be too happy since he was a domineering dictatorial and kind of crazy God who gave stupid moral commandments to people who didn't understand morality and then got angry at them For learning about good and evil, which he's supposed to represent good in its entirety.
So, when you eat the tree of knowledge of good and evil, God is revealed as a wrathful, arbitrary, evil figure.
And he doesn't like that.
And what is your curse?
What does an evil person curse you with?
Well, a career and children.
He didn't curse Adam and Eve with running pustules and exploding head syndrome.
He cursed Adam with labor and he cursed Eve with childbirth.
So the reason that you get cursed with labor when you grow up is that when you're a kid you're a benevolent parasite on your parents.
They feed you, they clothe you, they shelter you.
And then when you get older you have to work for yourself.
You have to leave the home of your parents and you have to go out into the big bad world and you have to make a way for yourself.
And so this is sort of another example of how the Garden of Eden talks about growing up, right?
If you grow up, when you grow up and start to think for yourself and learn a little bit about truth, right and wrong, and good and evil, then God is revealed to you as an evil entity.
A vengeful, wrathful, punitive entity.
You know, someone we'd at best call a jerk, and at worst, something worse, which I won't say to keep my iTunes rating.
But not a nice guy.
And... So, I mean, if you tell your two-year-old, don't eat the cookies, don't eat the cookies, and then they eat the cookies, you're not going to throw them out of your house in the snowbank and say, go make a living for yourself, right?
With no skills, no experience, and it wasn't like Adam knew anything about work, right?
He'd lived in the Garden of Eden, what did he know, right?
Didn't even have to farm.
So, you know, a parent who did that we would call evil and abusive, and so we understand that about God after we understand the difference between right and wrong and good and evil.
And so we are put out into the world and, you know, the curse that we get is productive labor, i.e., we become an adult and we recognize the facts of reality that it's not up to any God or anyone else or any government to provide for us, but it's up to ourselves to provide for ourselves, which is sort of being an adult, being a rationalist, and also being a capitalist, right?
In order to consume, you have to produce, or somebody else has to produce for you.
And so, you know, that being cursed with work is recognizing reality.
It has something to do with the free market and capitalism, and it particularly has to do with just sort of being an adult and leaving your parents' house, right?
Becoming an adult.
So, in that myth, you get quite a lot that's packed in.
You know, the last and not least is that Eve is, you know, cursed with With childbirth, which is also quite fascinating because that's being an adult, you know, in a biological sense.
That's one of the definitions of being an adult for a woman, right?
That you get your period and that, you know, your belly can become big with child.
So, you know, that is the curse, right?
And the curse is that, you know, biology enters the world, right?
I mean, that God isn't just going to snap his fingers and turn dust into Jennifer Aniston, The biological imperative, like reproduction, enters the scene, right?
So, you know, you get the sort of two basics of biology and reality that in order to consume you have to produce, which is Adam's curse of work, and also that, you know, for life to exist it has to be created biologically, which is Eve's curse for disobeying God.
So, you know, it's called being an adult, recognizing reality.
And you're moving from a sort of abstract fantasy world of the God in Eden to a more real, tangible, material, biological world.
Now, of course, I fully understand that the Christians have put this myth together to explain why, you know, if God is all good and all powerful and God created the world, why, at least when Christianity was around and for, you know, fifteen or eighteen hundred years afterwards and almost two thousand years afterwards, why life was such a pile of crap.
It's kind of hard to explain why you should worship a God who's all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-benevolent when you're kind of living in squalor and getting beaten up by your Lord every other Thursday.
So, you know, they have to sort of explain, well, you know, it's Adam's fault and you've inherited that sin, right?
We're being punished because Adam disobeyed God and that's original sin and that's why your life is so terrible even though God is so good and all-powerful.
He's punishing you because Adam was bad and Christ came down to redeem us and all this and that.
So I understand that there's sort of a practical aspect to, you know, why they need to explain, you know, why labor is so hard.
And, you know, of course, in the medieval era and even in the Roman era, why it was so enormously unproductive, right?
I mean, 90% of people were farmers because, you know, it was really hard.
It was 18 hours a day to be a farmer.
And, you know, even then you had like a 40% chance of starving to death in your lifetime.
And you had, like in the Roman era, the average life expectancy was like 22.
I mean, that includes infant mortality, so if you made it past the age of five or eight, you were probably pretty good.
But life was just unimaginably bad.
We simply can't conceive of how bad life was to these people.
And so they needed an explanation for that.
And the explanation was, well, labor and work.
And labor, of course, was particularly terrifying for women, because so many of them died during it.
So why are these evils in the world?
Well, because of the Garden of Eden, blah, blah, blah.
So, like all great myths, it serves a double purpose, right?
It genuinely does explain something about reality that's important for the Christians, right?
Which is why is life so bad, even though God is so good.
Why should you worship someone who created a world that's just terrible?
But it also has a deeper truth that speaks to people's unconscious, right?
To the reality processing part of our brain that helps us not walk into a hole.
It also speaks to that part, because it kind of whispers a story of liberation from religion, even within the founding myth of religion.
processing part that gets that material reality is objective and rational.
It also speaks to that part because it kind of whispers a story of liberation from religion, even within the founding myth of religion.
So when you learn the good and evil, God is revealed to you as evil, and you are then free to leave this fantasy land of religion, and your reward is labour and children, a productive career, work and children.
And And of course Christians do have children, but they don't have children and understand children in the way that children should be understood, right?
Because for them children are objects to be programmed and minds to be crushed in one form or another.
And again, you know, we don't have to get into the debate about whether this is conscious or not, but, you know, children are not there to be enjoyed and understood and learned about and explored as individuals and You know, there's no intimacy because, you know, they're always threatened by, you know, the children eating the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and then both God and themselves as parents being revealed as evil.
So you really can't be intimate with people that you're always paranoid they're going to learn something about you that is true and not very flattering.
So I hope this has been helpful for you.
I do find the mythology at the foundation of the Old Testament to be quite fascinating, and it may be worth talking about this a little bit more on my drive home this afternoon.
I hope you're doing well.
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