I usually like to wait till we've got about 20 people on board before we start. So SDA Q&A started out as a podcast about 18 months ago and now it is still a podcast but we've been running it live from our Facebook group as well which started off with only about 200 members but since the start of this series that we began live we've grown from 200 to about 900 people in the group now and it's very active it's a private group and I like the interaction that people have people often comment and you may get some questions a little bit later as well but people often comment and the thing I like about social media is that there can be ongoing conversation as well. So let me just pause for a minute so I've got an edit point and then we'll officially start. Hi and welcome to SDA Q&A I'm Peter Dixon your host for today and with me today is Luke Ford nice to have you here Luke how are you? Good day mate I'm good. When we just chatted before we came online and I was running a bit late so we only had a few minutes I noticed you still have your Australian accent so that's that's a good thing. Yeah a little bit. A little bit. Yeah actually the more you talk I can hear that it's more of an echo of your past than the current kind of currently with you all the time so to speak my wife's Irish and she has you know kind of a cosmopolitan Irish accent until her parents and sisters and brother all the visit and then it becomes this very rich cork accent very strong accent. So thanks for joining us today Luke I thought we'd kick off before we talk about your experiences with glacier view and your memories of that time I thought we'd talk a little bit about your adult life kind of things that you've been involved with you did you ever officially leave the Adventist Church because I understand you've you know you've taken on some other modalities in your time tell us about if you did or didn't or I don't believe technically I was ever a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church I was baptized by my father when I was 16 or something that was important to my parents and when you're 16 you're old you just go along with it till I was 18 I didn't really think there was any other way to live but but Christian but I don't believe I was ever officially a member of the SDA church and wow I I've been been back maybe three times since I was 21 there probably been three instances when I've walked inside a Seventh-day Adventist Church and you're 54 years old now yeah now you mentioned earlier too because you did go to Avondale Primary School did you go to Avondale High School as well or just primary now I went to Avondale Primary School I left midway through fifth grade then I came to the States came to California went to Pacific Union College Primary School 6 6 7th and 8th grade the school system is a little different in the States and then I went to a non Adventist evangelical Christian school the 9th grade and then from 10th grade on it was public school okay because you mentioned that you were in class with Gavin Hughes and he's a very good friend of mine and he lives literally just two stone throws away from this actual studio right now so I'm due to catch up with him very soon now that the restrictions because of COVID are gradually lifting just double-checking that we're in the actual group here I'm getting a few comments from people saying that I may not be so just hold one second no we are so that's that's good so do you have some other memories of some people you could just talk about from that time period you were young I remember leaving Avondale Primary School halfway through grade 5 myself actually and we went to Fiji and but because of that moving and it was such a like important time for me I I often reflected back and remembered you know Peter Lindsey and Phil Lindsey and the whole Lindsey family and Leonard Hoken and the Magnussons and what about you if you got some memories of childhood friendships that you had there oh yeah I remember a lot of people I don't know what if I want to actually drop names they may or may not want to be sorry Gavin Hughes sorry for mentioning Gavin then he feels the same way but would you say that those years at the Primary School were quite happy years I think do you mind me asking when your mother passed yeah my mother died before I turned four so she died in April 1970 I believe I would not describe my years at Avondale as happy they went they went dreadful but my life didn't really work and so I'll just give one one little anecdote that kind of sums up those years my parents were very busy preparing for a lunch that they were gonna have a lot of guests over and so they just wanted me to stay out of the way so that they could do their work I remember I sat in a chair and I just told myself stories for like two hours and they were just so thrilled because I was completely out of their hair I was out of the way and I was thrilled too because I was having a great time I was just like making up all these stories in my brain going on all these you know wonderful adventures in my head and it was such a beautiful thing that I kind of stumbled into this technique for making all my problems go away I could just start daydreaming and that time it worked amazingly but somebody doesn't want to find like some shortcut to make all their problems go away unless they're fundamentally miserable at heart so I discovered all sorts of shortcuts over the next four decades for making all my problems go away but the reason that I was always looking for shortcuts to make my problems go away is because I was fundamentally miserable it's interesting around that exact same time when I would have been associating with that same group of friends that you had though we were a few years apart there was quite a community there in Avondale of of lecturers kids from the patricks to the as I said the Hokens and the Magnussons and they won't mind I'm generalising just family names and the Drewers and the lenses of course and the Irvine's and so I too had this mixed feeling because I was enjoying the cricket and the riding our bikes through the bush walks and jumping off the swing bridge into the Dora Creek and that kind of thing but often I remember finding myself going to sleep at night doing a little bit of what you are talking about there not realising that around the same time you were probably trying to do it as well just escaping from and for different reasons no doubt but links to Adventism for sure where I would go to sleep at night worried about probation closing and this kind of thing did you suffer from any of those Adventist unique kind of things for those time like wearing it at the end of time? Not very much I'm probably exaggerating it so maybe moderately but I don't recall any of that I think from the earliest ages by primary concerns were non Adventist you know Adventist was the only thing I knew all my friends were Adventist and I didn't in those early years understand that there are any other ways to lead a life none of my concerns were Adventist that I can recall so I wanted to be a missionary but that's just because I read so many amazing things about missionaries and I don't recall ever worrying about probation closing probably had a little bit concerned about the end of time and Jesus coming back and having to flee to the mountains and a little bit but I don't even recall it I'm sure it had to be there mildly or moderately but my primary concerns were with politics with war with with things really their power things that are outside of Adventism so I love to read books about Winston Churchill and the American Revolution American history love to read books about World War I World War II the American Civil War so I liked reading the Hebrew Bible because I liked reading about the battles that went on King David and those kind of conflicts were interesting to me but I didn't have very many specifically Adventist concerns yeah okay so that's that's good in a way because I think you obviously have you know an inquiring mind and and not only were you able to kind of go into your own mind to maybe think about other things you're able to research and read and actually understand a lot of stuff I think as a young boy I took on way too much from the Adventist kind of thing and can we just jump forward to adult I'm just getting some more messages that it's cutting in and out well luckily I've got a clean audio on my end so I'll be able to eat it yeah I do too um but people that are watching I've had almost everyone is saying that it's stopping all the time but you can upload it later so that's right yeah yeah we can um so just a note to everyone that is watching I apologize that it's cutting in and out we will upload it later on for everybody to watch a non cut out model but both both Luke and I have very strong wi-fi good audio so we apologize for that and we will soldier on and we can we can upload it a bit later on so um sorry about that it's very annoying I'm getting all these messages of that it's throwing me a bit um so tell us a little bit now we'll just leave that for a bit come back to it and tell us a little bit about you as an adult so you've you've uh tell us about leaving home getting employment and how you kind of started exploring some other modalities okay so as a preacher's kid so I think perhaps one reason why I perhaps did not suffer from you know an excess of Adventist concerns is because I was a preacher's kid and I had to listen to thousands of hours of my father's sermons oh this is crucial so I I would I got hit quite a bit as a kid um I don't want to identify who I don't need to point any fingers but you know I got I got more than my share of corporate punishment and so to try to avoid it I developed the habit of telling lies and so the lies would get found out and so as a punishment I would be kept away from my friends say over lunchtime and I'd have to come home for lunch which royally sucked I mean who wants to come home from your mates now to eat bloody lunch with you with your mom I mean that sucks and but I had to do that for years and then I had to read about 40 pages of densely written Christian apologetics every day and type of one-page summary so that my dad understood that I understood what I had read and so I probably went through 30 books of Christian apologetics in this regime and I learned all the reasons rationally why Christianity was truth and I viscerally emotionally hated Christianity for taking me away from my mates for forcing me to read these these dense books having to spend like what my friends were out playing I was reading these bloody works of Christian apologetics and typing a one-page summary this this went pretty much through second grade through through fifth grade so I think that's where I developed a visceral hatred for Christianity and I kind of took into my adult life usually without even realizing it just a visceral hatred for anyone who reminded me of my father a visceral hatred for anyone who I thought abused religious authority so my father never abused religious authority in the traditional ways that people think of like I'd my father never came even close to any kind of sexual or financial misconduct he was he was a very ethical man but my father was a self-made man with a phd in rhetoric so he would just you know blow you up over the dinner table or the breakfast table like any kind of dispute he would use his rhetorical abilities to absolutely crush you and he also was it was the man of the house so I had to listen to thousands of hours of his sermons so I was like thoroughly inoculated in his point of view on life and did not really like it now until I was 22 I still regarded my father as heroic and and then at age 21 I went away to UCLA and I came back nine months later and instead of regarding my father as heroic I regarded him as an emotional cripple now my father did not change in those nine months obviously I was exposed to a whole new ways of life I was exposed to all these multiple points of view I came to I thought what I thought were more profound understandings of reality of my father but I never really shifted from that realization that I had at UCLA at age 22 so I went there seeing my father as a heroic figure and I came away from that experience seeing my father as an emotional cripple and not wanting to do anything that would in any way repeat his life because I saw my father as being a fundamentally unhappy man particularly after Glacierview very lonely and unhappy while prior to Glacierview he would speak to hundreds of people routinely after Glacierview he'd speak to a dozen or two dozen people so he we moved from living on Seventh-day Adventist college campuses where you feel part of a community to living a much more isolated disconnected life so I saw that the toll that my father's choices took on him and yet in my own bizarre fashions I could not help but replaying my father's choices so so just as my father replayed some of his own choices in both passionately joining a community which he did is to join Seventh-day Adventist at around age 15 and then passionately finding a way to get thrown out of the community in 1980 so I too would repeat this where I passionately want to join some kind of community or connection and then I would unconsciously find ways to destroy it and I would continually feel the great pain of abandonment but I had abandoned myself I've created the conditions where I would continually feel abandoned I would choose people who would abandon me I would act in a ways that communities would want to be rid of me and so I kept living out my my father's pattern I remember once I was asked to leave a particular synagogue and I kind of doubled up in pain and I said to the rabbi I quoted from the bible the sins of the father shall be shall be dealt upon the sons for a thousand generations and the rabbi says that that only applies if you continue that the sin of the father but anyway I just kept kept replaying situations where I would join join communities and find ways to destroy my life in those communities and get exiled from those communities so I kind of kept replaying the worst parts of my dad's life over and over and over again wow that's big did did you have knowledge that your father had repeated that kind of thing in previously um was it a loop in his life or is it just that the um the way he went into glacial view and was um defrocked from the church and you're suggesting that maybe subconsciously he was wanting to remove himself from communities as well did he have a a paternal kind of history from his father who does father as well and did he have other signs of doing it as well well he had a father who abandoned him pretty much and he had a mother who would traveling all over Australia chasing various men having affairs with with married men and so he grew up deeply humiliated and ashamed of his mother she was a horrible mother his father was largely absent from his life and he didn't he didn't really have relations and normal level of human connection and so my father has never been fundamentally at ease around other people the the way that he learned to deal with it is by preaching at them he he was always at his best when he was preaching the larger the crowd the better he was the more human the more open the more vulnerable he was but as far as like normal human interaction he was fundamentally ill at ease unless it was somewhat of an equivalent level of learning as himself and if they could discuss either evangelical christian theology or the health message if my father could not discuss those two topics with someone of similar levels of learning as himself so that would be no at most a dozen people in the world that were in his life or if failing that then the only interest he had in human interaction was if he could preach to people if you put him in a room where people were just chatting he was just fundamentally ill at ease and would want to get out of there unless unless he was the center of attention he had virtually no use for human interaction um so i i'm not discounting that at all i i that's your experience and that's that's that's valid we can only go by what we've experienced ourselves whenever i met him and it was only um face to face i guess on a few occasions um and maybe because he was older that wasn't my experience and i'm certainly not one of the people that would fall into the academic equivalents or people on the same page with him health wise how much of that experience do you think um others would have felt as well and how and do you think there's others like me that actually had quite amicable discussions well let's let's just probe probe your your discussions with my father how interested was he in your point of view how deeply did he hear you i think quite well um mainly because um maybe he was interested in my choices in life um i was about to leave the church i guess when i first met him i'd left the church when i met him again later i've met him as a young person um so i can only go on my experience and maybe that's more to do with um this kind of maybe a laid back vibe about musicians that kind of um we're used to engaging with people in kind of different ways and maybe we we change their um we can shift their focus unintentionally maybe um but i i would say he he seemed quite interested in in um you know in in me and what i was doing and things and i didn't feel any hidden i think the interesting thing about humans is that we're multifaceted and um you know i've got a six-year-old and a seven-year-old and i'm i'm thinking boy what if down the track my girls you know like already i can i can tell that they get annoyed with me um you know for various things i i wonder how much is a is someone's experience based on them seeing a certain facet of someone and therefore thinking that it's a bit duplicit um i try very much to be exactly as i am talking to you as i would to your father as i do to my girls as i do to friends um but i'm an older dad and i'm a i'm someone that's kind of perhaps used to speaking lots of people from lots of different walks of life um but i and i'm very lucky that my dad is the kind of person that what you saw is what you got but i think maybe you're kind of referring to seeing a bit of two sides of someone perhaps and and that that's hard for a kid to see that i guess because that then forms a narrative for your life of i can't really trust the people that are closest to me maybe uh i don't know what to say to that i saw a man who was a preacher and i saw a man who dedicated everything he had to preaching and uh and i i knew a man who was fundamentally ill at ease with other people who whose favorite saying was from Jean-Paul Saad, hell is other people that was my father's attitude he thought that other people were health with with a few exceptions and uh there was some people he loved after my father died i checked in with some of his friends so i wanted to see if there are other facets to my father that i didn't realize and uh i wanted to check what were the topics that my father loved to talk about aside from evangelical Christianity and the health message and yeah my father liked to talk a little bit about politics a little bit about philosophy but he had very narrow interests and so unless really you shared with him evangelical Christianity or the health message he was not going to be able to sustain his attention very long um i think i think what i was saying is that people that had i'm not saying he had multiple personalities but people are both good and bad like in your um not bad but people are have shades um in your experience with life you know you you know that people have those um the the public person the person are with family the person are with kids are you saying it's a bit like that or you're saying that what you saw is this is just who he was and um that was not conflicting for you from that perspective uh that the people are shades of is a truism of course so i i don't really know what you're asking i i don't talk about people as being good or people being bad people are what they are everybody's a mixture of different things that different people you talked about how you try to be the same person with everyone you talked to i think that's a delusion you bring a different part of yourself to every person that you interact with you are not the same person talking to your wife for sure as you are to your kids to talking to your audience now to talking to your mates in the band they're talking to your best mates from from childhood to talking to the grocer you're going to bring completely different sides of yourself to all these different conversations that's for sure and that's why i use the word try i know i don't succeed i have a mission in life to try and bring that down purely because of my girls one of the reasons i left the church was because i thought when the girls grow up they'll say why are you an adventist when at home you obviously don't believe that so i've come late to life on this journey of trying to but you're right it's impossible i've now come to my my dying days and think well that was impossible but maybe you know you don't have to be that as well but i think we all seek some kind of authenticity i guess what i'm trying to dig into is is the narrative that formed your you were saying that you'd come into a situation where you were kind of connecting with people and you would try and sabotage it i'm trying to work out if that's because of an assumption you made or because of the experience you had is it a unique thing to your experience and i think too that your dad was a bit of a equivalent to a rock star kind of person and a lot of you know from Mick Jagger to to any famous kind of person they seem to often have kids that are reflecting the same kind of story that you're sharing this there's a drive and a passion and a focus that that the the famous person has and you're mentioning you know you're a pastor's kid but it's magnified if you're a famous pastor's kid i wonder uh sure i mean my father felt most alive when he was preaching in front of a large audience when he get together with other evangelists they would talk about how many souls that they saved for for evangelists like my father everybody they met was father for christ so they're looking to save souls to baptize people everyone they meet just father for for christ so that's that's kind of the the price of the profession so yeah my father was like the the equivalent of a rock star in the seventh-day Adventist church so um yeah he yearned for for that kind of status like no one accidentally becomes a rock star type of people who become stars people who yearn for that degree of attention and they do whatever it is that will bring them that attention so i was just reading a book on an Australian doctor and academic and names Claire Weeks name of the the new book about her as the woman who cracked the anxiety code so she wrote these popular bestsellers on how to deal with your nerves so first one was published in 1962 self-help for your nerves anyway she received a lot of acclaim in great britain and in the united states of america and she was kind of bitter that she didn't get the same acclaim in australia so she gave an interview talking about how this was just a visit that she was on to australia that in britain and the united states they gave her great acclaim but in in her own country she she didn't really matter and she was being very very human there because people grow towards the sun people angle towards wherever they are best liked wherever they receive the most adulation love love and care so my father was the same way he he got the most adulation for preaching the gospel of jesus christ compared to doing that nothing else would bring him one one hundredth of that adulation so therefore he oriented his entire life to preaching that which brought him the most adulation now this isn't unique to my father this doesn't make my father a bad man my father grew up without a functioning family so he didn't learn how to relate to people very comfortably so i mean this this applies to to rabbis as well there was a rabbi who survived the holocaust his name is rabbi heel yakov weinberg orthodox jews noem is a three-to-eighth and when he survived the holocaust he was thinking okay where will i go now and he couldn't go to any of the major orthodox jewish institutions because if he went there he would become the number one guy and the guy who is currently there who is number one would not want to be supplanted to be number two now some people might think oh rabbis they're they're beyond ego or you know preachers of the gospel they're beyond ego or you know truly dedicated priests that they're beyond ego or that's nonsense they're filled with ego just like plumbers and air conditioners and musicians and tv performers so none of the rabbis who are number one at their institution wanted to be supplanted by this guy who just survived the holocaust at the same time this guy just survived the holocaust he would not go anywhere where he would be number two so he ended up going to this very tiny community in switzerland montrose switzerland where there are only about 20 orthodox families because he would be number one there and so this isn't unique to my dad this isn't unique to rabbi weinberg this is pretty much the rule of human nature people grow towards that which gives them the most love i agree 100 i agree i can i can see that even in my own life where you you know you try different things and and being a one thing i learned early on as a young man i i wanted to make a living as a musician and pretty soon i realized that to make a living as a musician i'd be doing weddings mitzvahs parties anything to survive and so i do understand the you gravitate towards the light particularly if you're trying to kind of put food on the table it's a human condition isn't it and and i don't i'm not saying that you are thinking your father was unique in that way i'm trying to work out if it's unique in the way it has affected you in that if you're the son of someone that is in this you know manifesting this kind of um what you call it a personality type or a human condition or more magnified than the average person does that affect their children more than it affects a family where the the father's not um like that it's interesting i converted to orthodox Judaism a couple decades ago and there's no such phenomenon as rabbis kids so growing up adventists you certainly knew about preachers kids they were much more likely to be rebellious there's no such a phenomenon with the rabbis kids and i i think what what's uh what has far more effect on both my life and on my father's life and on your life and on the life of the person who's listening right now are the genes so people are born with certain genetic predispositions there there are five basic tests for personality whether someone's like high in agreeableness or low in agreeableness well both my father and i are low in agreeableness we don't just go along to get along we're quite happy to stand apart from the crowd uh neuroticism so pretty much anyone who converts to a new religion is going to be high in neuroticism so neuroticism means that you love to experience uh negative feelings that you love to bathe in them so both my father and i converted to a new religion we both uh quite well above average in neuroticism then uh conscientiousness so i'd say my father and i are kind of average with regard to conscientiousness and then i'm trying to think what oh openness to new experience so both my father and i are probably high in openness to new experience in that we both like learning and we both converted to to a new religion and there's one other but i think five personality let me just look it up so yeah we we all have these uh yeah extraversion or introversion so i think both my father and i were kind of even uh even there between extroverted and introverted so you're saying that with the you know it's like a a swiss army knife we have these genes within us and the certain um blades and whatever are going to come out um and maybe that if we have a certain combination that's going to affect us a little bit more than uh than other combinations in perhaps a detrimental way i it's not necessarily about detrimental and not detrimental we're just born with predispositions and we essentially become who we're genetically programmed to be so let's say i was let's say i was raised in a roman catholic home or if i was raised in in a secular home well religiosity does tend to be environmentally induced so i've lived pretty much all my life in a fairly religious community so that is environmentally produced but predispositions personality predispositions those are just hardwired in so you'll find if you look at identical twins raised apart that they tend to have very similar life outcomes they'll tend to like the same food the the same movies they'll tend to dress the same way they'll have the same personality types so all these basic personality traits are essentially hardwired in via genetics now some things are environmentally caused and uh that's that's religion for example i was raised at something the Adventist and i i was predisposed to living a highly religious life because that is what is normal to me is that why so you're just on the not not detrimental you're just saying this is just how it is yeah this is just how it is these are the cards you were dealt this is the life you've lived um i tend to agree i i'm the kind of person that thinks the environment has less of a role to play in our story than um than the genes do we uh we dealt certain cards and i see it in my girls again i keep referring back to them because it's been impactful being an older father um i can see them reacting in certain ways that i thought had been ways that i'd learned to react and they're just reacting identically without seeing me exhibit those kind of certain anxieties and things that that exactly what i had as a little boy so yeah i agree with you on that and and you're saying and i think um if people have said to you um because i know when i said i was going to interview you some people have said oh you know it might come across as a bit negative towards your dad but i think what i'm trying to tease out is that i you're not actually being negative to your dad you're saying this is the the cards he was dealt these are the cards i was dealt and there's a certain cause effect response to to how your life unfolds after you've been given those cards would that be a little bit yes exactly like my you think my father chose to be fundamentally ill at ease with other people no way did you think he liked that you think my father liked that he was so predisposed to create a schism everywhere he went you think he enjoyed that that strain you think my luck my father enjoyed having sleeping problems since his 20s hardly ever getting a decent night's sleep since his 20s do you think he enjoyed that do you think he enjoyed all the the tension that was you know in him and around him and constantly dealing with people who are angry at it you think he enjoyed that no he didn't he didn't choose that he didn't choose to be schismatic he didn't choose to be a stirrer he didn't choose to be ill at ease with other people he didn't choose to be someone who couldn't relate to his sons like that was a great pain to him that he could not relate to his sons that yeah he was wracked by guilt that he was a bad father he was he felt terrible that he didn't have any relationship with his two sons he didn't choose that that it wasn't his fault he he had no modeling for how to be a father like considering where he's came from he did a damn good job i was raised with a very clear sense of right and wrong i was raised with an encouragement to follow my my intellectual interests i was raised with food on the table i never went hungry i never went lacking i never saw my father stray either sexually or financially my father was an upright righteous man he was excellent role model in in that department and my father's shortcomings were overwhelmingly not things that he chose to inflict on himself anymore do you think i chose to be a sex addict you think i chose to be a porn addict you think i chose to be a debtor you think i chose to be an under owner you think at age 54 i chose to be a bachelor you think at age 54 i chose to never have any kids you think i chose to keep getting thrown out of communities you think i chose to go through enormous periods of isolation and self-loathing you think i chose to spend my 20s in bed no i didn't choose any of those things and nor do i beat myself up that uh there was one time when i directed a porn movie i i don't you know i don't beat myself up every day it's like oh my god look you you directed a porn movie therefore you're a horrible human being how can you ever look anyone in the face no i i don't beat myself up because i directed a porn movie i don't beat myself up because i was sexually promiscuous for a few years i don't beat myself up because i used women for a period i i don't deny it i i try to make amends for all the things that i've done wrong i i didn't beat myself up for having a schismatic personality like my father's i don't beat myself up for having very strong narcissistic tendencies i didn't choose those i didn't choose to to be a wanker i didn't choose to be a hateful person i didn't choose to be a lonely person i didn't choose to be someone whose life would seem pathetic from from many different angles my father didn't choose to have a life that from certain angles would look pathetic so it all depends on the angle that you are used to approach either my father or me so from certain angle my father looks like the most righteous heroic godly man who ever walked the earth after jesus you know absolutely with fidelity to the facts you can you can look at my father and see this is a wonderful man this is a great man this is a rock star of his his community equally with the fidelity to the facts you can look at him and say oh this is a sad man this is was an emotionally broken man so you can look at you can look at me you everyone with complete fidelity to the facts and just depending on the angle it can be flattering or it can be embarrassing it can be pathetic or it can be inspiring yeah i i hear you i um and i think it's i think it's admirable that you're like i'm trying to be that kind of authenticity and and the way you've just spoken there shows that you're achieving that kind of authenticity you're you're speaking your mind you're facing your demons you're accepting yourself as you are you're you're acknowledging that the cards you adult helped to kind of create this narrative of your life with its ups and downs its ebbs and flows and you're examining the human condition and um i think one of the the things that's shining out is you're not saying you're a victim i i really don't like when i hear people say well this is the the cards i've been dealt and then they start blaming everyone else you're you're highlighting a human condition and then grappling with how to to live your life in a world with humans that have all these conditions including yourself yeah there's nothing i've done that's more embarrassing than directing a porn movie that that's the most socially embarrassing thing that i've ever done and you can tell when someone is dealt with something if they can talk about it without their voice breaking without their voice getting strangled without their voice getting tight without their body language changing without them physically collapsing without them getting tighter and getting all these distorting tension patterns so that's how you can always know if you've dealt with something can you talk about it particularly can you talk about it publicly so like i can talk that i'm 54 and i've never had a romantic relationship lasting longer than a year so i can talk about that without my voice going all weird because i've worked that through i can talk about i i didn't really have a relationship with my father the last 30 years of his life and i can talk about that because i've i've worked that through i've had 10 years of therapy i've had 10 years of various 12-step programs so if if you encounter a topic and then your voice starts cracking and changing and you get these weird tension patterns on your face then then it's something that you haven't dealt with and that's a gift to you then then you know that you've got something that you need to deal with but if you've worked something through if you've done the bloody work then you can talk about anything i don't need to pretend to be anything that i'm not i don't have to try to make you believe that i'm a good person i have no need to convince you that i'm an upright man i don't need you to follow me in anything i don't need you to take my perspective on my father on the seventh day adventist church it it doesn't matter to me that's that's the ultimate freedom because you you get to be yourself a lot of people go to their graves living a life of just acting exactly um and i acknowledge that that's also confronting to to some people i won't mention a name but there's someone that we that we haven't mentioned um that was around kurembong around the time you and i were were um young kids and i ran into him the other day and um he had that kind of um ability as a young boy to to be that he would just say stuff and be really you know the the cards that were dealt to him afforded him the luxury of just um and and when i saw him at bunnings you know and he's he's a grown man now he'd be 56 something like that and he's just exactly the same he looks young and light-hearted and um so i kind of felt a bit of envy um but it kind of highlights that we're in many ways all of us want to get to a point where we can be true to ourselves we can be ourselves to others because it does give us that sense of freedom and i certainly don't want to go to my my grave especially with the people closest to me um just realizing that my life was an act but a lot of people don't have that kind of um desire to to um search for that kind of very raw freedom why do you think that is well gosh uh when people people know how to change because because doing this kind of work that i was just talking about is very very painful so people don't want pain so people will keep doing what they've always done until the pain of continuing to do that exceeds the pain of what it would take to change so people for example don't usually enter psychotherapy or take it seriously until their 40s at least until they've been broken by life only when people encounter collapse only when people essentially collapse when when their way of doing things doesn't work do they then uh think about changing so my father for whatever his flaws he he never reached uh collapse he his way of life worked and you can argue with my father you can be tracked from my father you can say he was wrong about this or that but he had fundamentally a way of living that worked and uh i did not have that luxury i did not have a way of living that worked and so from the earliest age i was always looking to escape from life and do you think people lack a courage to change because there's something genetically wide within us to conform to the group and if we look if we look like we're kind of admitting weakness admitting shameful things that we like demonstrably can be uh ostracized from the group and it's seen when you when you analyze sociologically and anthropologically speaking um how societies and humans function with each other i've just listened to the book sapiens and it's fascinating it seems to be genetically wide within us to toe the line not try and look uh like we're kind of presenting our true selves to the rest of the group because it's important for those groups of mammals to huddle together and survive do you think that plays a part in in what we're talking about yeah that i mean your relationships with other people that essentially equates to your your success and happiness in life your happiness level is measured by the quality of your relationship so i speak to you now with the with the understanding that uh the whole world could hear it meaning particularly my my religious community i primarily live my life within orthodox Judaism so i i do 20 hours a week of live youtube shows but when i'm doing your show i do it with with the the mindset that everybody knows everything so i used to always try to get away with stuff this is kind of a recent development in my life so i was always thrilled to see how much i could get away with and that approach to life did not work so now i'm embracing the attitude that everybody knows everything so i'm not speaking to you in a way that i would be ashamed to have heard by everybody that i could meet in life from my uber driver to clients to potential employers to co-workers to girlfriends you know the potential you know mother of my children you know if she's she's out there if i be to be so lucky or you know whatever professional personal opportunities come along uh i i approached this microphone and i approached my life with the attitude that everybody knows everything yeah that's good and and that's what i'm saying i'm i'm aspiring to be as well um what i'm saying though is in a genetically speaking because we're talking about cards that are dealt to us um most people don't do that most people don't get to that point and i'm saying that when they when they don't is it valid to call them out on that or is that no no i mean they're not gonna they're not gonna be able to hit you yeah there's there's no reward for taking other people's moral inventory it's not gonna help them no one's gonna go oh you're right peter boy i'm so glad you pointed that out that's never gonna happen they're just gonna hate you i learned a long time ago that um no one wants your advice and that's where the the the story of you know shooting the messenger comes from because so um yeah i i get that um i'm i'm just saying that i think it's the norm though it's the norm for people to keep their head down to pursue the things that will make them appear to be courageous and um shining examples of being a pillar of the community and i think it's wired within people to do that do you why why do you think um your path has been a bit different to that why is my path potentially trying to be different to them oh it is a combination of genetics and environment and then if you have a religious point of view on life then you believe that there's a free will but if you're not religious then it's just genetics and environment but even if you are religious then genetics and environment play play a huge role and i'd have to say like looking back on my life i think that my my freedom freedom of will was considerably more constrained than i experienced it at the time so as i speak to you now i feel you know complete freedom of will to say anything i feel completely free but when i look back on my life i see that my options were considerably narrowed by the combination of my genes and environment yeah yeah i get it um and you're a bit of a conundrum to me in that uh you you're presenting um this and this is not a judgment it's just like it's just interesting that you're presenting a really profound awareness of uh anthropology sociology genes how mammals kind of live and where they've come from and how they cope with with life but you've also found yourself a modality that is a spiritual modality and i don't really know much about Judaism at all um how do you marry those two together like do you think that some people who are having the awakenings and the life that you've had often become more agnostic or atheist as they go down the path um how is it that you've found solace within another religion okay so i i turned to Judaism because i thought uh it was divine truth and because i also thought that it helped my life to work but uh in the final analysis all the demons that i thought uh converting to Judaism would deal with didn't deal with any of them none zip zero zilch my fundamental problems of poor moral character my fundamental problems of selfishness self-seeking dishonesty uh overwhelming fear lack of consideration all these these prime character defects were not affected at all by my conversion to orthodox Judaism my sex addiction not affected at all my love addiction not affected at all the reckless uh way that i did all sorts of things in my life not affected at all my constant desire to escape from reality to take a shortcut from my problems not affected at all so the way that i deal with these different modalities is to recognize that they each have their place orthodox Judaism is a wonderful way of life i'm very happy to have converted to orthodox Judaism i feel very much at home very uh comfortable and and pleased with belonging to the orthodox Jewish community but uh don't seek more from orthodox Judaism than it can give you if i wanted to deal with my porn addiction i had to go outside of orthodox Judaism and so i went to therapy and guess what therapy didn't even shift it a tiny bit my inability to earn money not shifted at all by 10 years of therapy so i had to start going to 12-step programs but i don't look to say 12-step programs for truth about biology so if it comes to biological truths i want to hear from biologists if it comes to historical truths i don't want to hear from rabbis or pastors i only want to hear from trained historians from elite universities i don't even want to hear from historians from the university of walla malou i want to hear from people who went to oxford cambridge harvard yale or berkeley if it comes to economics i want to hear from someone who is trained from an elite university in economics if it comes to music i want to hear from a musician if it comes to spirituality uh generally speaking i want to hear from someone who's had addictions like mine and and overcome them if it comes to psychology then i want to hear from an elite uh psychologist so i don't seek more from any modality than it can give yeah i love hearing that because you're not saying that you're joining the ranks of something to fix all your problems and then turning around and proselytizing everyone to that well look what it's done to me like a lot of people do you're actually just saying you know maybe you thought that was going to happen and then it didn't happen and you still had all these issues that you were dealing with so why not go to the specialists that can help in regard to the all the different areas that you've talked about that makes sense to me yeah yeah you'll know if your approach to life doesn't work you'll get humiliated so if not getting humiliated your approach to life works if your life is smooth if you feel like you're gliding through life i feel like i'm gliding through life for several years now i can't even remember the last time i was humiliated so it seems like my approach to life which is not something that i came up with but that i borrowed from other traditions and other programs it seems to be working but as soon as i start getting humiliated then i'll know that i need to change my my approach change the tack a bit yep so so what is it about judaism that um like i totally i i totally agree and and i like i love that idea like i i love the idea of going you know what i've got the problem here i'm going to go and really talk to people that can help with that um why what what is it that draws you to judaism what what what is it doing to um bring you that that important ingredient that um you might have been missing without it okay so i i told you that i never really had much of a relationship with my father so i've lived my whole life seeking out substitute father figures and i was often closer and more interested in talking to my mates fathers than i was even my mates from from school and eventually i encountered this jewish talk show host in los angeles named denis prager who became a huge father figure uh for me i've watched lots of his um youtube clips yeah so so i was seeking a father figure and prager became a father figure and then orthodox judaism on top of that became even more of a father figure it's a very uh patriarchal religion so it just spoke to my soul then second thing that drew me to to judaism which in my head was primary this father figure thing i didn't fully understand till later but in my head what was primary is that i was always looking for a way to make a better world and so i thought that judaism was a step-by-step detailed system for making a better world by morally improving people through a system of action judaism as a religion primarily focused on action rather than on belief so that excited me and now just living in orthodox judaism what i love is that there's very little emphasis or concern with how you believe so i don't recall ever having a rabbi ask me what i believe about god instead i've had rabbis ask me if i needed a job if i needed a doctor did i have a good place to live did i have a place to eat for shabbat was i taken care of for russia shana was i looking looking for a sheddock a match so those were the things that rabbis would talk to me about i love that it's so practical and you can you have such a wide range that you can believe or discuss you know i could just if i want to discuss something i can find people in orthodox judaism to discuss it with i can talk to orthodox jews or atheists not many but there are some i can talk to orthodox jews or into evolution i can talk to orthodox jews who are fascinated by the alt right i can talk to orthodox jews who are fascinated by english 16th century literature like anything that i want to discuss i have orthodox jewish friends that i can talk to about it and so i love the intellectual openness of my orthodox jewish friends you know we can sit around and talk about okay if there's a god if there's not a god what are the implications for this for that it's uh nothing is off the table now i'm not saying with every single orthodox jew i can talk about every single thing no there are some people i can talk to about x there are one or two people i can talk to about y there may be three people that i can talk to about c there may be six people i can talk to about d and so i've become in my old age much more sensitized to who i can talk to about different topics but i can pretty much take care of everything that i want to talk about i can find it within my orthodox jewish community hmm that sounds great sounds great because um you're you're finding a sense of camaraderie there and since leaving the church i've struggled with finding camaraderie because i have many friends within adventism and from outside of adventism and within the music community that i can actually discuss all of the topics you just mentioned and know that i'm still very much appreciated and not judged and cared for um sorry are you there are you there yeah i'm here just keep going just taking care of something that sorry um so yeah and i think what i miss is that there's something about like you're using the term orthodox jew it's it's nice to be able to put an umbrella around the variety of people that you can talk to and find that camaraderie with um i know that with my various groups of friends i can't put an umbrella around that because some are still Adventists some atheists some uh you know musicians that uh you know might be into uh the rustiferian lifestyle or the new age lifestyle whatever but within all those different groups i i find people that i can connect with but i can't put an umbrella over it like you've been able to do with um with uh having a group that you find that connection with that are actually called orthodox jews so maybe what i'm trying to find is is um a name for the the group of friends that i kind of connect with in a way because that kind of helps to draw attention to the camaraderie yeah orthodox Judaism is a way of life so there are certain certain codes that you you need to live by you live by those codes then you're part of the community you violate the codes then you're outside the community so that's that's how i roll yeah yeah uh and it makes sense um and like you say what what works for you where you're finding yourself in situations where you're feeling uh a lower level of um oh what was the word you used before um where you've not shamed um uh gonna edit this pause out later not humility not vilified not shamed what was the word you used before that you seek as soon as someone finds that they're getting the levels of that rising they should oh humiliation humiliation yeah as long as you're not getting humiliated then your life probably that's right you're not yeah and so that works for you and that's that's great and i think on my journey in i instead of trying to join um an official group i'm just trying to find a collection of people that have a like mind and it'll be a fairly small group but um i've got people that i know that i can contact and have coffee with and and share you know i can talk about sam harris and the idea of do we actually have freedom of will and i've got others that i probably wouldn't talk about that with um but they are still under a collection of of my friends and and you've maybe found a bigger collection that you're calling your your group your comrades would that be true i mean i don't know if it's bigger or smaller i belong to a tribe and so not not everyone in a tribe is born into it most people are but occasionally tribes adopt outsiders and i was lucky enough to be adopted by this tribe and i'm very glad to be here yeah cool now that when uh your your dad kind of has had a tribe grow around him like people are even called fordites um so let's just jump back to glacier view you're a young boy what what um cognizant memories do you have that you can share about the actual build up to glacier view maybe were you aware of the the famous forum meeting where yes yeah yeah i attended the the meeting that the forum meeting i remember there was a lot of excitement about it uh my my my my mother and meaning my stepmother and my my father were cognizant that this was going to be a big deal that uh my father was going to blow up some of the the traditional teachings of the church you felt the excitement in in the air i was there and i stuck around for i think the first like 90 minutes of my father's lecture then during the q and a section i was just outside the meeting now hanging out with with people but uh yeah i felt the excitement in the air and then shortly thereafter my parents moved to washington dc so my dad could prepare a defense of his views thank god they they were persuaded to leave me behind to finish eighth grade with my mates at pacific union college i loved that pacific union college Adventist community in anguin california adventism is a whole different thing from australian adventism so i was much much happier pacific union college than i was at avondale avondale was a much rougher tougher much more demanding judgmental hard core approach to adventism california adventism is primarily lifestyle adventism people are nice i mean i'd come to california and people would listen to pop music in their cars like my dad had the attitude that pop music was of the devil now like the parents of my mates they they'd listen to pop music in their cars like in california adventism they'll serve coffee at official adventist gatherings like the way i was raised coffee was a tremendous sin i mean people would go to movies the way i was raised in australian adventism you know that's a huge sin people go to theater in the way i was raised in australian adventism that was a huge sin some people ate meat in the way i was raised in australian adventism that was a huge sin so the way that people used adventism at pacific union college and frequently in california was a much more easygoing pleasant liberal accepting you know happy people were happy like happiness is not the the word that i would use to describe avondale and and the dominant ethos people generally speaking did not radiate happiness there were some individuals who did but you would not i would not describe the avondale adventist community as happy that's not the word that comes comes to mind hardcore serious committed argumentative you know brass tax ready to throw down and argue every little theological point ready to you know measure the skirts on on some stranger you bring to church if a skirt is a little too short you know what we'll measure it out and we'll humiliate them right there we'll humiliate you what we'll we'll destroy you if you go against any of our edicts that was my experience of avondale college my experience of pacific union college was people who were happy loving reasonably tolerant just a completely different ethos from from avondale i much much much preferred the california version of adventism particularly the pacific union college version of adventism is a whole different thing anyway i finished got to finish eighth grade and those final six months of eighth grade without my parents around were like the happiest six months of my life all of my happy memories from childhood were far removed from my parents and i could get away from them then life suddenly opened up and i could be i could be normal went back to washington dc and then we went off to glacial view and i approached you very much i was still in the kind of father worshiping hero worshiping attitude towards my father even if i didn't particularly enjoy his company i saw him as a great man i remember once i was playing this baseball game and uh some friend of my friend's mother asked me well why don't you play this game that you love so much with your father it was a game with cards and dice and stuff and i said oh no i would never do that you know my father is you know way too busy to you know play you know these kind of games with with me but yeah i went to glacial view i was there i remember i think that the first day i was there i jumped in the pool and this i think something adventist administrator academics said who are you and i said i'm the son of the man you're burning at the stake so i had a very self-righteous um very much you know my dad's been victimized and i'm being victimized along with it and so i went to all the meetings and it was in a sense it was kind of cool to see my father was the focus of attention it was it was amazing to see how emotional people were getting this was like their whole life was on the line here uh neil wilson was seemed like a very astute administrator he seemed to really know what he was doing he he kind of had everything uh under control no matter what happened it was just uh people were just playing their roles but neil wilson already had it all turned out uh there was a tremendous amount of love and passion and intensity in the air one supporter of my father's came to the cabin and said that if i ever wanted to study medicine he'd pay my my tuition i'd never had any intention of studying medicine but it just shows the tremendous intensity and passion and and generosity of the people there so it was kind of an exciting period it was over the previous six months i decided i wanted to be a journalist when i grew up so i was hoping that they'd be journalists there and there weren't any journalists there uh but i was very eager to hear about my father talking to journalists after the event from newsweek from the los angeles times i'd hear about all these different journalists who are interviewing my father and so i was i was very interested in that but uh when i realized we were never coming back to pacific union college that was just absolutely sickening low i was afraid that we would move to england and my father would pastor a church there that seemed to be in the mix uh when we ended up about two and a half hours drive from pacific union college in orban california north of sacramento uh that was acceptable to me but it was very very lonely because we're now outside the the warm bosom of the church we're no longer living on an adventist college community and so it it was quite an adjustment i failed two classes my freshman year my ninth grade first time in my life that i failed classes uh so i was breaking out in highs i had this huge problem with highs so the aftermath of glacial view was was awful for me it was pretty tough on on my father as well i really missed pacific union college i would get back there every opportunity that i could it's interesting the um conversation i had with william johnson uh who would have been one of the big uh names that was a glacial view as well he in the interview we did a few weeks ago he speaks very highly of p u c as well and uh most most Adventists i talked to that have had the p u c experience um comment how different it is to adventism in other places around the world yeah i think i read something william johnson wrote about my father after he died and i thought it was pretty accurate right right do you recall what it was uh one thing uh i i'll try to try to pull it pull it up but uh he said he said that uh my father was was uh yeah william g johnson yeah he he wrote i thought it was one of the best pieces about my my father because i could understand where he's coming from and it seemed like the most honest and full hearted like when people are speaking honestly you feel the molecules in the air around you change and so what what william johnson wrote it seemed to come completely from a pure place and he was just writing from his heart and and from from the perspective of his experience he wrote uh adespor died and i weep i weep ades and i weep for my church because no reconciliation came about so my father you know devoted his whole life to the church but you could also equally say that my father devoted himself to destroying the church i don't have an argument either way that people want to see it you know i don't care like obviously i'm a convert to orthodox Judaism you know the well-being of the seventh day adventist church is not my concern but i have empathy for people for whom the church is their life and for someone like william johnson the church is is their life and i thought that he had a very accurate understanding of my father and how my how my father worked and he also of course loved his church and he also noted there was never a reconciliation between the church and my father and my father would have played you know at least 50 percent of that that uh my father would rather die than admit to being wrong so for example for decades people would tell my father that he had sleep apnea and my father could never hear suggestions like that it's like no no no no no no no no no no no and then after about four decades of being told that he had sleep apnea and this is the primary reason why he couldn't sleep he finally goes in and gets a test and it shows he doesn't just have sleep apnea he has severe sleep apnea so this is devastating because my father has maintained for decades that he doesn't have it now not only does he have it he has it severely so the way to deal with that is by using a c-pap but if my father was to use a c-pap and to have his life transformed by that he would have to deal with the agony of being wrong for all those decades so my father would rather rather die than admit to being wrong so very quickly he's like oh no i can't deal with this c-pap he would rather die than admit to being wrong and this isn't a criticism of my father there are many wonderful qualities that come with this kind of dedication to to truth so i think my father's final testimony which which was so quintessential of him like when when he was facing death when he had you know nothing left he dictated his final testimony and his final testimony was that he'd only ever pursued theological truth and he dedicated his whole life to theological truth and he'd never compromise in his dedication to theological truth and he'd only ever taught theological truth now i understand that i respect that to me as the most ludicrous thing in the world that there is no theological truth because all theology depends upon a subjective leap of faith but to my father in his dying dying you know dying days that's the most important thing that he wanted people to know that he was right and that he dedicated his whole life to being right and he'd sacrifice everything to being right about something as incredibly subjective as theological truth but that's what what dedicated that's what my father dedicated his life to the the the idea of being wrong was absolutely intolerable for him he would he would rather die than ever admit to being wrong was he in pursuit of theological right and wrong or was he in pursuit of understanding theology my father was in pursuit of being right my father was in pursuit of being right in everything but particularly theology because that's remember that's where he got the most adulation so if my father was right about politics that wouldn't produce you know a lot of adulation but here's the paragraph for William Johnson that really hit me desperate is an Australian tragedy you can't begin to grasp the dynamics of his love-hate relationship with the Adventist church without factoring in the culture Australian culture lacks niceties nuances subtleties theology and politics reduce issues to distinctions of black and white Australians tend to be suspicious of shades of gray election campaigns are no holds barred slam bang brawl lasting only a short time dashboard was a child of the culture both temperamentally and environmentally his proclamation whether oral or written or naturally into a debate into either or mode his clear proclamation the gospel helped thousands to find peace and hope inevitably generated concern at brethren who bitterly opposed him so he was an Adventist tragedy the man of charisma unmatched in debate could not Adventism have found a place to accommodate his many gifts the author says he kept waiting and praying that there'd be reconciliation there's needed it so did the church but there was never going to be a reconciliation the blame doesn't lie wholly with church leaders reconciliation requires action from both sides Des was so sure that he was right that he made reconciliation very difficult so this is true between my father and seventh-day Adventist church it's true between my father and his sons my father could not deal with the possibility of him being wrong if you um look at that were you aware of the was it the the consensus was it the 20 point consensus document there's so many documents in the Adventist church um where he did agree to to go along with that which would have meant he would have had to say well okay well I'll I'll live uh I will agree to disagree but I can live with that um when Neil Wilson apparently realized that your dad was happy to kind of compromise there um he brought in other information and that was released as the 10-point document and I think it had been further drilled down onto some of the key points that he knew your dad would never back down on are you aware of those two yeah vaguely but this is just like you know the arguments between husband and wife about you know why didn't you get the type of milk that I wanted from from the store like what what these arguments you know 10 points 20 points what they're ostensibly about is not what they're really about when people argue it's never about what they're arguing about just like people's problems that never their problems I'm smart enough and you're smart enough that if our problems were our problems we'd solve them but our problems are not our problems our problems are symptoms of things that we don't want to deal with and and so we complain about the problem but the problems are the problem and so you know 10 points 20 points you know seven points here assigning this you know whatever the perspective is you know fun you know it all comes down to ego and to group dynamics every group has to stand for something so if the Adventist stands for they have a distinctive message that was you know revealed by by divine revelation through Ellen White and if the Adventist church was to give up their heavenly sanctuary doctrine they would no longer have be God's chosen people so there's no way the stuff the Adventist church can compromise with what my father declared publicly and my father can never compromise with what he's declared publicly because once he did that the attention directed his way increased 50 times and so for someone like my father who do do a combination of genes of an environment you know this fed him because he could not you know get normal human interaction and enjoy it he yet to get interaction for being the preacher man he's suddenly getting you know a 50 fold increase in what he most wants and so he's not going to back away from from that the church can't back away from its distinctive teachings so it is a tragedy it's a tragedy of a combination of genes environment group dynamics and then you know whatever someone may believe about free will I guess I raised those two documents though to indicate that he was willing to kind of compromise and change to a degree on those initial points that were raised but when Neil drilled down and made it more specific yeah he definitely didn't want to back down on those ones he was never going to back down on anything that uh interfered with his own perception as someone who always put theological truth number one so people for example people won't steal at work to an unlimited degree or steal generally people only steal to the degree that they can still think of themselves as a good person so you know if I just take this I'm still a good person but if I take that I'm not a good person so my father was never going to compromise anything that would interfere with his self image as someone who puts theological truth first because that's that's the whole basis of his meaning in life. You mentioned the sanctuary and how Adventists will not shift on certain things I've found it quite frustrating in some of the interviews and in some of my conversations with people I'm trying to work out what do Adventists currently believe it's the sanctuary doctrine back in those days when you were young but obviously very a very good observer and very astute were you um aware of the difference of what your dad's vision of the sanctuary was and what the church's teaching of the sanctuary was just out of interest? Yeah probably but but you know the people get hung up on on the details of you know of theology what it really amounts to is do you believe that your group is specially chosen by god if you're religious and you don't believe your group is specially chosen by god you're not going to have any enthusiasm for your group so whether or not you understand all the particulars or the different ways that it's framed that's what it always comes down to. Do you believe that your church is the the final most accurate expression of god's will for humanity? If you believe that then you've got to accept you know you can't certainly go can't go public defaming the the heavenly sanctuary doctrine so do you believe that your group especially chosen by god that's what it comes down to and all the other details that they're just like arguing oh you got the wrong brand of milk from the store. Yeah regardless of how your dad got to these positions of not wanting to change on it regardless of the cards he'd been dealt that that formed his story and and and responses and cause and effect reactions that new teaching of the sanctuary brought lots and lots of joy and freedom to people what are your thoughts on that and do you see that as a as a good thing? Well if you stop hitting yourself over ahead with a hammer that's going to bring lots of joy and freedom but you'll notice you know these tens of thousands of people who found lots of joy and freedom through taking on my father's approach to the heavenly sanctuary doctrine that their children by and large don't feel it all right it's not something that can be passed on down the generations there's no sustaining of this feeling this is just a feeling you don't build any institutions or anything on it so yeah if you're beating yourself up you know like you talked a little bit in your childhood you're a bit worried about you know the end of time and probation yeah being judged by god and stuff like that so if you're if you're beating yourself up through the own through the peculiar combination of your personality and the teachings of the church and that results in you beating yourself down and then someone comes along and says you don't need to beat yourself down everything's going to be great then you're going to love that you're going to welcome that you're going to be filled with you know peace joy and love everlasting but it's not something that sustains your children are not going to be filled with you know love peace and joy everlasting or certainly not their children what's happened is you simply beating yourself down and when you cease beating yourself down then you naturally get filled with love joy and peace everlasting but i mean that would be true for a million different things like if you've always beaten yourself down or having a stutter or if you always beaten yourself down because you disappointed your parents or if you've always beaten yourself down because you're not as successful as your mates when you stop beating yourself down you're going to feel a lot of peace love and joy i think for me that's that's the next step to realize that ultimately it's your own abilities of choices and awarenesses and changes and and moves that you're making life to to stop getting beaten down to remove the hammer yourself but there there's a significant moment where someone can point out that the hammer is hitting you on the head and that there are the options so you don't that doesn't necessarily open the path thank you des for doing that now my life will become someone that follows your teachings but he he did a massive shake up for people where a lot of people suddenly went hang on i am being hit over the head with a hammer and then a lot of them a lot of them kind of went on to become the fordites and a lot of them went on to go okay well i actually don't really believe what he's saying but boy i'm glad he shook me out of that you had that experience in some ways with Dennis Prager where he kind of in some ways gave you a new paradigm shift to be able to look at life is there value in people like your dad that come along and help shake things up a bit regardless of of their flaws and faults uh yeah yeah like uh i mean there's value and there's uh whatever the opposite of value so the people who feel like that church was destroyed by my father i i understand where they're coming from from people who feel like uh their life was liberated by my father i i understand where they're coming from too now also there are hundreds of thousands of adventists who held to the heavenly sanctuary doctrine to whatever extent they understood it and they lived completely happy lives like they weren't tormented so it wasn't just the heavenly sanctuary doctrine that was beating people down because the heavenly sanctuary doctrine in combination with a particular personality type that was beating themselves down and then my father came along you know shook things up so when you shake things up uh you know there are going to be winners and losers so i have as much empathy for the for the losers as i do for the winners in that particular interaction i feel no need to beat my father down for his choices nor do i feel any need to praise him he uh he shook the tree and he paid the price and he did the time he did the crime he did the time do do you find any irony in that you you went from one um belief modality that felt that they were the chosen people to another that claimed to be the chosen people i i don't know about irony but i think i i grew up with uh living in high intensity religion and so some of the adventism is high intensity religion when compared to say mainstream Protestantism or pretty much any other version of Protestantism Adventism is high intensity and so that's what was normal for me and so i found in Judaism Judaism of the orthodox variety was a similar level of high intensity and uh i i need that i i like that i'm wired that way and uh it uh it works for me but i i don't i don't feel the need to tell tell you that oh you you need to become Jewish you need to start studying my monities you need to you know give up all this Christian stuff and embrace the the Torah and and you know have you have you read read some Hasidic wisdom lately yeah one thing i like about um the the Jewish friends i have um is there's never any proselytizing it's like it's not even on their table that in fact when you were talking about before you could talk to um you you Jewish friends about atheism or theism and it was quite comfortable a lot of my Jewish friends actually never talk about God as an existing supernatural being even yeah yeah Christians and Jews talk very differently about God the Jews God familiarity with God breeds contempt so because in part because Christians talk about God so much Jews almost never talk about God because it just feels so Christian so so the the the Jewish way of life is primarily centered around actions and and practices while the Christian way of life is Christians approach belief in God as an either or proposition you either believe or you don't believe for Jews however familiarity breeds contempt even among Orthodox Jews there isn't there's very little discussion of theology uh very very little discussion of God in fact i had to had to go to 12 step programs before i started getting that that vibrant talk about God again in my life the the and i love all that that's fantastic i concerns me that that at some point um these modalities and religions do have a unique us and them scenario that they like to put forward is that does that worry you and is it okay because you're kind of in the group and so it doesn't and you're feeling really accepted by the group um does it matter no it doesn't worry me at all because reality does not worry me and reality is that we only care about ingroups like for for everyone who says oh i care so much about those outgroups like you know i i was born and raised seventh day Adventist but you know i really love the Jews i love the muses and you know i love the people in Africa and i really care about the people in China it's either you know it's conscious or unconscious delusion we're all inherently selfish nobody cares about outgroups all right Australians don't care about what happens outside of Australia with very rare exceptions Americans don't give a toss generally speaking about what happens outside of america guess what the chinese don't care about the non-chinese the japanese don't care about the non- japanese by and large jews don't care about non-jews by and large christians don't care about non-christians it's not even just christians seventh day Adventists generally speaking only care about seventh day Adventists and that's how it is black people care about black people white people care about white people uh japanese only care about japanese the the exceptions are so rare and so inconsequential that it's not even worth talking about nobody cares about outgroups that's the reality we're born into a tribe we're born into a group it's unnatural and rare and inconsequential to care about outgroups we all naturally see the world through in-group versus out-group uh glasses and that's just how it is and to try to escape from that is to try to escape from reality it's like hey the laws of gravity they no longer apply to me you know i care about everyone you know i'm just going to jump off this cliff it doesn't work yeah we're all um we're all selfish and i think not only that we all find a lot of comfort with being in an in-group and that's why a lot of people when they leave a group they find it very difficult yeah you feel absolutely lost because you're you're you're wired to belong to a tribe that's how you're wired you're wired to care about a tribe and nobody else should i have stayed within Adventism and uh made it work then uh it's a little more challenging with Adventism because there's that great movie The Nostradamus Kid um yeah Adventists are really good at sniffing out those who no longer believe essentially sending them on their way so it's a bit of a challenge i mean if if you have a personality type where you don't talk to you know people about you know that you don't believe in this and it also depends on the community so Avondale as i recall it was not a community where you could you know not believe and still still get along but in the final analysis like whether i believed or don't believe in orthodox Judaism i'm in the tribe for life you know whatever my feelings or beliefs you know wax and wane on a day is completely irrelevant i'm committed because most of my friends are orthodox Jews that's where my human connection is we're wired to belong to an to an in-group and those who say live their whole life in Adventism like i assume you did and it sounds like you've left it you're going to be so bereft i mean you can tell yourself oh you know i did the brave thing i did the the thing that has integrity i did the the courageous thing i followed my conscience i i have you know these 17 rational reasons for for my you know choice but you're going to be like an infant you're going to be like an orphan who isn't touched like you're going to miss out on that you know that vital connection that comes from belonging in a tribe you're going to be like the ape who gets kicked out of his ape group and he goes wandering you know how long do you think an ape who's expelled from his group how long do you think the ape's going to make it you know now his his connections are just those who share you know certain activities with him uh it sucks to be on the outside and not to belong to an in-group yeah i uh i hear you and they're the things that that i've faced and i think that's why i've um explored so much a variety of connections with friends that i've made over the years who i connect with and they are from many different tribes and umbrellas um one of the good things about music and traveling with music over the years and not just being an Adventist musician um you know i was very much making a living in the secular world is that i have built up you know how you can go out to dinner with someone and they might be from one community and there's three or four people in that group you just get on with and then there's a another group of Adventists over here and you hang out with them and there's a two or three in that group you get on with i feel like i've got two or three people from lots of little groups that are becoming um my tribe but we're not gathered together under an umbrella and and i think a lot of people that leave a tribe yearn for um that sense of camaraderie that you've found with um the with Judaism Orthodox Judaism yeah yeah we're wired to connect yeah i like it maybe if you'd stayed in puc um your things that have been totally different you might have been found that as your tribe and worked within it and absolutely state connected yeah yeah absolutely you know we're wired to connect if i'd like if i'd landed a Sheila at puc like mates of mine they they they met their Sheila by eighth grade that was the only Sheila they're ever with for the rest of their lives they they married her after uni and you know on their way do you think if i'd met my Sheila in eighth grade and she and her family they were the church was very important to them think i would have blown all that up you know just to follow my intellectual interests i i don't think so if you found your new puc yeah yeah and all of us you know through everything that we do in life really that's all all we want to find is that at home i guess yep yep there's a book that my stepmother would often dip into and i've never read the book but i've never forgotten the title by paul turnier a christian psychologist and the title was a place for you we all want a place to feel that's you know at home where we have safety and we have connection and and regardless of your thoughts and feelings on your dad um because you have a blend of positive feelings with with um different shades there um he also yearned for that feeling and in many ways he he found it in a way because um i noticed when i booked him to do a talk for me maybe four years ago now maybe more i'm not too sure um the people that arrived to hear him speak that day i realized that they were a tribe they were they had gathered around your dad's teachings the drama of the defrocking the and and i noticed more than anything that they them over lunch the way they got on with each other and i actually yearned i thought well i wish i was part of that tribe um so he kind of was able to live in a in a in a way where he had that camaraderie that maybe you didn't find till recently uh yeah yeah he he did have a community and and uh he helped to build a community and uh i i did get to experience it because that's what i i grew up in i was 14 when we left the church then he went out and started started a community and so i i got to to be a part of it but it was a pale imitation of the real thing yeah i mean i look across to like avondale we've got college church avondale college we've got the memorial church and they're two separate tribes really and i look across at the um the memorial guys and those that were the we called the concerned brethren you know and they would meet regularly around at george bernside's place and they had a community in a tribe and i've sometimes looked across um at them as well and thought boy i wish i had that too so um there's this pockets of adventism where they all find this kind of thing but like you said they soon uh can sense if you're someone that's not fully believing in uh the dictates of the tribe's beliefs i guess they're dogma and and so in many ways both sides i've felt um at times alienated from and um yeah you want to live in the middle of the herd that's one of the sayings in 12 step programs like live in the middle of the herd people after a meeting are going to dinner go to dinner like live in the middle of the group don't don't stand off to the side yeah yeah um mate we've covered some ground today i really appreciate you taking the time to to talk to to us um have you got anything else that you no mate i'm good put any other pearls of wisdom we've left out uh i mean i made notes as we spoke uh yeah when when people are at ease with themselves they make us feel at ease so that's that's you can usually tell when people are at ease with themselves we like to be around people who are at uh at ease with themselves and uh i remember one thing i learned in uh 12 step programs is that never give people advice more than once so if you think that people should read a certain book just say it once and then let it go you think people should try a certain diet just uh say it once and uh then let it go okay that's it don't clap on it yeah mate uh well i really appreciate you taking the time today thank you very much um and for contributing and adding to this document that we we're putting out there for for better or worse yeah you're welcome mate yeah thank you we'll talk again soon okay cheers mate take care