They're as buried as anybody else.  But we'll show you. Just say that. What you often say is that people who are religious aren't smart. They're dumb.  No, no. Right? And that's like three quarters of the United States still. It's still 75% of the country if 25% is unaffiliated. But that's not what I say. Still prescribed. OK, what do you say? In fact, the movie Religious starts with the question, how can otherwise intelligent people believe in a talking snake? The question is, how can you just wall, I think, all of your intelligence? And I guess you're all religious. I don't know how people can. I don't know how people can wall off a part of their mind and believe in something that's an obviously deep bones bronze age myth. That's, of course, Bill Maher having a quasi-debate on atheism with a panel that shall remain unnamed. Interesting to note that this dialogue has more or less been pushed to the side of the public forum. You don't hear these kind of debates anymore. And I think part of the reason for that is, as we've covered on this show, when you have spirit cooking, occulted rituals, satanic rituals connected to virtually everybody in Hollywood and certainly many higher ranking political or royal family kind of connected people. Well, it's hard to keep a straight face about the evils of belief in the supernatural or, as I would say, extended consciousness realm. Then again, I think the debate still has merit. That's why I keep bringing it up. And that's why I decided to connect with Derek Lambert of the very excellent Myth Vision podcast. Now, I have to say that anyone who's familiar with that podcast or with the mythicist position that is kind of a scholarly apologetics approach to the idea that Jesus was a myth, well, if you go down that path, then you would expect somebody like Derek to be more aligned with the Bill Maher Sunday School atheism kind of thing. And, well, he is. But as we'll explore in this interview, I think that's only half the equation. I mean, half the equation is Bill Maher's right. Like, how do we wall off our mind? But the other half of the equation is, well, let me play a clip. So I look at science and I say, the preexisting social engineering position would be, I want you to be the same way that religion wants you to be afraid. It wants you to feel guilty. It wants you to be controllable. That's what religion wants out of you because you're just more susceptible to what they're saying. Science wants the same thing. Science wants you to think that you are that biological robot, that there is no really no meaning in the universe or if you want to believe Sam Harris kind of, it's a social construct. It's whatever we make. Well, consider the alternative that you are somehow more that your consciousness is somehow more and don't go any further. Don't start selling me God or anything like that. Just take it the next step beyond sciences. Oh, you can't be anything more. I don't feel like that's the pressure of the guys that I'm researching on this. I feel like what they're trying to do, like when I read The Believing Brain by Michael Schermer and I listened to him explain agenicity, patternicity, try to explain what's going on. Why do we believe anything at all? Like what would be the evolutionary product for why someone would want to trust in things? And how does that help us survive? Why people believe weird things kind of thing. Yeah, or anything at all really? Cause like the mechanism that causes us to believe. So I'm looking for a natural phenomena. Why? Why are you starting with that? Well, I'm starting with what I can test and what seems most plausible to me based on proving the nine times out of 10 when I thought it was Yahweh or God or it was some being that did it, the earthquake, the water floods, diseases, famines, the way nature is consuming one another and just the destruction that I see constantly that happens in life. I go, well, damn, which makes better sense that a consciousness actually created this and that we constantly viciously run into these things or a natural world view. And so that's why I'm considering looking into the natural world view and saying, does this answer these questions? Of course the second half of the question that I just alluded to in that clip is even more interesting. And I double down on the interesting, interesting part with Derek's last point and that is, we want a natural explanation. The only problem with that is we're living in a post-materialistic scientific world that demands we factor in consciousness at the most fundamental level, which of course brings us to the conclusion that there is no out there to measure. There is no naturalism other than maybe as a kind of consensus reality approximation of what's going on. Well, if I've lost you already with too much philosophical bullshit, then this might not be the episode for you. But if you're into stuff like how Bart Ehrman, who is essentially an atheist, has hoodwinked Christians into buying all those books or how and why atheists still don't understand why an investigation of extended consciousness might be relevant to their position, then stick around for my interview with a guy who's done some really good interviews with top-notch experts on the topic of mythicism and the origins of Christianity, which is a topic that I continue. The further I dig into it, I think is just super relevant to everything we've ever talked about here on Skeptico. Stick around, I hope you enjoy my interview with Derek Lambert from the Myth Vision podcast. Welcome to Skeptico, where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I'm your host, Alex Sikaris, and today we welcome Derek Lambert to Skeptico. Derek is the creator and host of the Myth Vision podcast. And if you're into religious history, particularly alternative religious history or apologetics or stuff like that, you're gonna find that this is really kind of a go-to show if you haven't heard about it already. It's an interview-based show, and as I was just chatting about with Derek, he's really landed, especially lately, some just heavy hitter interviews. Bart Ehrman, Elaine Pagels, Joe Atwell, Bob Price, and on and on, literally anyone who's everyone kind of thing. So if you've been following along this show, and I've gotten into this first century Roman kind of history until a lot of you, I seem to not be able to get out of that. And I don't wanna apologize for that because I think it's super-duper important and relevant to a lot of things that are happening today. But I ran across Derek's work. I've been listening to a bunch of his interviews. They're really fantastic. So I wanted to have him on and kind of swap stories. We have interviewed a lot of the same people at some point, and I just wanna kind of see if he can help guide me a little bit. So Derek, welcome to Skeptico. Thanks for joining me. Thank you for rolling out the red carpet. Absolutely, yeah. Like I just said, I've been leaning on these interviews, man. You're knocking it out of the park lately. I appreciate it. Yeah, I don't know if I'll be able to help you. I think I need help myself too. There's just so many ideas out there. And what I'm actually doing now is I'm trying to find out why consensus scholarship, why academia thinks the way they do. People like randomly will pop up on the internet and they run across flat earth stuff, for example. They'll just run across the flat earth video. And next thing you know, they're going in these loops. And all they know is the science that the flat earth guy's telling you. But they really have never actually said, huh, I wonder what actual scientists have to say about this topic. I've never delved into the complexity of the science behind these things. I wonder what that is. And I kind of came from the fringe. And as I've been coming out of the fringe, I'm like looking at the scholars and saying, whoa, what do they say? What do they teach? And why do they disagree with each other? What are the issues? So that's pretty much what I'm doing now is like, you can use me analogous to a flat earther. And call me what you want. I wasn't ever a flat earther, but I'd make that analogous to say, I used to just go with the fringe ideas. And like, if it sounded cool, I went with it. But now I'm actually considering what actual experts in the field are saying and wanting to see why they think that way and maybe why they disagree with some of the fringe ideas. Yeah, there's a lot there. And we should go into the flat ear thing because I think it's super interesting. But tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background. How you got into this? I was a young boy who had a, I had a great family, but an alcoholic father who struggled with addiction to alcohol.  You feel kind of a little bit left alone in the world. And someone introduced me, because I went to a Christian private middle school. They introduced me to Jesus and told me, have you ever told a lie? Yeah.  And next thing you know, I accepted him in my heart. Everyone like patting me on the back made me feel like a million bucks. I became saved. I was born again. I can't tell you how many times I've been born again. But anyway, years of this going to this house church that was teaching speaking in tongues and prophesying.  I was having dreams of the rapture and the end of the world. Like just a lot of very intense modern dispensational, non-denominational Christianity. And then I struggled with addiction. Girls in addiction played a huge part in my life. So I'd go back and forth like, let me get my life back. I'll get my life together. I'm going to go to Jesus and get right. I got right and then boom, I was so extreme. I'd go so deep into wanting to study that and get addicted. And then I'd go back and I'd struggle back and forth to kind of skip ahead. I wanted to know more about the Bible because this guy who was preaching at the church misquoted something. He didn't have the Bible in front of him, but he misquoted it. And I thought to myself, hey dude, I actually know what that text says. And you just misquoted what that text says. Maybe I know more than this guy. That's what I was thinking in my head. So I went up to him and he's a pastor at the time and said, how do I learn more about the Bible?  You should go to college and learn more. It's fundamentalist evangelical Christian college. But I went and I got my bachelor's degree in biblical studies and theology. I felt like I learned more reading actual books than I did actually going to this college. But either way, I took it serious, became a Presbyterian Calvinist. Okay, at this time I'm serious about the book, serious about church history. Like that should matter if you were in 2020, what's the church been doing all along? I need to get in the loop of figuring out what's been going on. And I did, I started learning the history. And then at the end, I took the Bible so literal and serious, Jesus promised some of his disciples wouldn't die before the end, before the Parasea, before he would repay each man according to their deeds in Matthew chapter 16 verse 27 to 28. So I found this group called full preterism. The end is past. The second coming of the Lord already happened which fits into Atwell's thesis. But anyway, I started to believe in that and excommunicated me from the Presbyterian PCA church and I ended up realizing the whole church is wrong, but me, that's a bad spot to be in by the way. But a good starting point, a bad spot to end, but a good point to begin. That's exactly right. And it was arrogance on my part to think that I had all the answers though. And I struggled again with addiction. And I'm actually thankful that I went through all those trials with addiction. At the end, it was heroin. I was dying. I was killing myself. And we can get into that. That's a whole nother thing. But regardless, it really humbled me.  And when that happened to me, I realized I didn't have the answers. Like maybe why is my life not better by my beliefs? My beliefs didn't make a difference about what I was doing at the time. It just, they had no solid impact. And this atheist friend of mine called me, wanted to have a conversation. She started to talk about comparative religion. Jesus looks like this other guy. Have you ever read the story of Hercules? Have you ever read these narratives? And I'm like, oh no, I haven't. And then I found out there's other books by other people, with other cultures, with other beliefs who claim that they have true gods that really did these miracles or even if they're not miracles, supernatural things or their gods in control of lightning and thunder and this and that. And it really made me realize what shell or rock have I been hiding under to think my arrogant, lucky to live in America, Christian life was the truth and everyone else was wrong. And I had the answer. I said, man, maybe I need to stop acting like I have answers and investigate. Just consider what all the critics are saying and go back and listen to the guys I used to skip when I'd listen to the Christian debates with William Lane Craig with debate, Richard Dawkins or debate, these guys. I'd skip the bad guy and listen to, you know what I'm saying? Like let me listen to these guys and consider it. And I did. And when I did, I started coming away with a better balanced perspective and realized, oh my gosh, what if this is the six wise men of Hindustan? Everyone's going to the blind. They're all blind men. They all go to the elephant and they're all trying to describe God, the elephant. Oh, look, that's a pointy tusk. Oh, God is very much like a spear and the other one comes and it's a ear and another one says it's a tail and they're all arguing at the end about the elephant and they're all saying they're right. But all of them, though, they're partly in the right are all in the wrong about an elephant that they've never seen. And so this is where I ended up going is, well, God's bigger. He's in everything. He's in every culture. He's showing himself through these cultures. Then I started to get more critical. And I said, hold on, is it possible? This is where I'm at now. And you want to poke at me, poke at me. If you have problems with where I'm at now, I'm willing to hear what you have to say. I wonder if there's a natural explanation to everything. Yeah, so we'll definitely talk about that because I spent a lot of time, hundreds of shows on that. But I don't want to clutter the interview with that. Your inner, your story there is fantastic. Love it. And you're so open and honest about it. And it's such a story that I think so many people can relate to in all sorts of different ways because I think addiction comes in many different forms. And you obviously went hardcore on it. You went hard in the paint, as my buddy Sam likes to say, but other people do it in much more subtle ways, but it still interferes with their life. But you brought up, what I thought we might do as a way to kind of launch into this in a way where I can maybe clean something out of it, learn some things that fill in my gaps, is kind of go through some of the people. Like you mentioned Joe Atwell. Joe is one of my go-to guys.   Yes. And I love, he's not just about mythicism and the mythicist position. And we'll talk more about that when we talk about Bart Ehrman. But Joe is such a cool guy. And I love the contrarian and the guy who's able to be kind of this one man standalone iconoclast. I don't care what everyone says. I'm gonna kind of go down this path. And there's so many things about him that are irrefutable. I don't buy into his whole thing. I think he takes it a little bit too far. And I think it actually weakens his position a little bit. But I like, I really love what you did with Bob Price. Where you did the interviewing and said, hey, you seem to be warming up to Atwell's ideas a little bit. And you were very critical. So we're gonna talk a lot. If you haven't noticed, folks, we're gonna talk a lot of inside baseball here. So that's not gonna let up. We really can't stop and explain all this stuff. It's a couple of guys talking inside baseball, inside baseball, Joe Atwell, what do you think? So sorry, everybody. If you're not caught up to speed. Joe's a good friend of mine. I talk to Joe all the time on the phone. Well, I won't say all the time, but periodically I give him a phone call, check in on him and everything. We try to do a show from time to time. I don't rule out possibilities here. I'm with you on that sense of saying, let me put it this way. I saw the view and I said, whoa, this fits right into full preterism. Because as my story tells you, the end was the past. And that Jesus predicted it would happen in the first century. It had to happen then. Joe connects that with Titus. He connects the end with the Roman emperor who brought the destruction on Jerusalem and says, you know this prediction, the son of man? That's Titus. Important distinction here. And I think this is gonna come up when we talk about Irmin. Joe talks about that as a social engineering project because Joe has, he's done that deep dive, which is I really what I think he appreciated about him. And what I think he brings this conversation that doesn't always work its way into the traditional kind of myth, vision kind of thing. I don't think you're averse to it, but it doesn't take front and center position as I think it should. Joe is the guy who's gonna tell you Gloria Steinem was CIA not just to be part of the women's movement. She got a fricking fellowship from the CIA to go to school. They had her as a kid in a dysfunctional family. They engineered her all the way and put her in. So social engineering is always in play and as we understand the Romans who were all about social engineering, who were all about co-opting religion because it's another tool. You can send a couple legions or you can just build a temple over there and hey, that does almost as good. Save all those soldiers walking all that way. Joe is totally dialed into that. He's totally dialed into that. Also in the whole thing he did with the dead head stuff and all that, he gets that in a way that I think a lot of people in this field don't and that I think is important. So I'm with you on that, but that's the flavor I get from Joe. Yeah, Joe goes into things I don't and I don't think I ever in particularly gonna be focused on, for example, anti-vax stuff. He gets into modern stuff, the oligarchs that are in charge, all that kind of stuff. I don't actually get into that. I'm looking at the history of this particular first century stuff. He sees it relevant to today's context, whereas I'm still trying to figure that stuff out back there, right? I don't really get into this stuff here and the now in terms of the different conspiracies that might be going on. For me, Joe's position, ultimately you've got two options. Top down, bottom up. Either the Romans were involved in co-opting a position that was gonna pacify rebels in some sense, or even in his view as a dark humor, mock the Jews as a destruction and it's very anti-Semitic and it's a mockery of the Jews for their attempt to think they were gonna overthrow Rome and Rome's able to do the final laugh on them with the construction of the gospels in the New Testament, or the bottom up. And the bottom up is the idea that these were Jewish fringe movements within the, I don't know if you can call them fringe, but within the Jewish apocalyptic ideas that were going on in Second Temple Judaism and it arise through a Hellenistic time where now you have these diaspora Jews that are now making contact with Gentiles and they're bringing them into a movement and they're either ass kissing the Romans or the Romans are involved in some way and it depends on what scholar you go to. Some of the actual serious, like actual academic scholars have said in history, they think Rome's involved. Others say it looks that way it could be or it's Jews butt kissing Rome because they know they don't want any trouble. So it's like, I wrestle with these ideas and I enjoy learning from these people about them. Yeah, so we'll dive into that maybe later because I think it's really, Joe put me on this trail of Josephus and I found a little nugget there and I continued to bounce it off of all these religious scholars I talked to and I expect them to kind of spit it back in my face with you idiot, you haven't read this and you haven't read that, but they haven't and I just talked to Steve Mason. I'm in an email conversation with Steve Mason who was obviously one of the experts, world experts on Josephus and lame. His pushback is extremely lame in my opinion. They're all looking under the lamp post because it's nice and comfortable over here when we lost the keys over in the alley, buddy. So you can look over here all you want but that's a little bit too far inside baseball. Let's skip from Atwell to Bart Ehrman because you did just publish an interview with Ehrman which is really great credit to you for getting him but Derek, I thought you were a little bit soft on him. I mean, for one thing, tell people who Bart Ehrman is in case they don't know and what's your take on him. So Bart Ehrman is a textual critic of the New Testament and for the longest time as a mythicist I was, I'm not a mythicist anymore and we could discuss that too. I can give you my insight on what has pushed me over the edge to leaning towards the historicist angle. This goes back, I gotta say something, I gotta push you on this why I didn't push with Dr. Ehrman because I always have the answer. Remember that, I was always right. And at this point, I'm now wanting to know getting the best out of these scholars to allow them to come on and present their views. So Bart Ehrman is a prestigious New Testament scholar that is well-known in the academic circles on New Testament studies, the historical Jesus, all these different things he writes on the failure of the apocalyptic Jesus in the New Testament. He talks about forgeries and he shows that people didn't who say they wrote them, didn't actually write them, all that stuff. But go ahead and tell me your criticisms. And then I'd like to give you my personal response.   If you want Bart Ehrman's Jesus to be at the center of your thing, some puny little guy who's just one of a dozen guys who's out there talking in the desert, it makes no difference to me. Doesn't change Joe Atwell's interpretation of that top down as you called it history. So I think mythicist and historicists really are on the same side fighting the same fight. If you really look at it and say, okay, was this guy a myth? Yes. How are you defining that? There was a guy that was mythologized or was he complete myth invented and then you hemorrhized? It just depends on the angle, but they're on the same side. I did not like the way that Ehrman approaches this. This is why if you watch that interview again, I followed up trying to get more out of him. By the way, that was a donor's question. That wasn't my actual question. The whole episode was donors, but either way. I said to him, yeah, but wouldn't you at least not include the scholars, right? Cause he's a scholar guy. Wouldn't you at least not throw Bob in there and a carrier in this as Holocaust deniers? Like, cause I've heard on record him saying something like mythicist are equivalent to Holocaust deniers. So I'm like, you know, it's almost like you're slapping that on there. Wouldn't you take that away at least and say these guys are academic? And he kind of, well, I guess somewhat he kind of responded like that. I didn't have time before we hit record show was ready to end. And I'm not gonna nail him down. I've read his books. I know what he thinks about Jesus. I know why he thinks it, but I wish there was a not as dogmatic approach to this and he was like, look, it's most plausible that there was a guy. I think, like he says, I think mythicists do themselves a disservice, but it's most possible there's a guy. I kind of am not trying to be so hard on them, but they really aren't seeing the picture. That would be better than them going with the way he kind of just mocks the whole thing. It doesn't really help the conversation. You see what I'm saying? Totally, I see what you're saying.  I mean, Ehrman is a Wheaton College guy. These are the Noah's Ark still kind of people, creation without compromise, you know? They're not all like that, but they're certainly warm and open to that. And he doesn't, he's still friendly with the Wheaton College kind of fundamentalist Christian kind of thing. Not that he hasn't moved past that, but I guess my point is that to me, I don't feel like he's completely going through the un- indoctrination process that is Christianity. And I think, you know, when we were talking about, when you were talking about your story, that is a big part of it, I think. And that leads us back to Atwell in a way. And it also leads us to another guy, Jeffrey Daugherty. What's his one sermon that I love that I love? Is he an- Jesus was an MK ultra-murder victim, Merry Christmas. Oh my gosh. That to me, that's where we, that's un- indoctrination. To me, that's full frontal un- indoctrination. You've been mind controlled. This is my position. Right, right. Fully embrace the mind control, fully embrace how hard it is to un- indoctrinate. I was brought up in the Greek Orthodox Church, which is kind of a different tradition, you know, than the Protestant, but enough the same, but I gotta tell you, man, how long it took me to, how long it took me to where I could say, I'm not a Christian, and not have kind of lump in my throat, kind of, oh my, kind of thing. A lot of time. And I guess I don't get that from Bart Ehrman, from Dr. Ehrman. I don't get that he's fully come to grips with how he got mind-fucked into going to Wheaton College and believing all that stuff, and then still believing it at an age when most people had go, well, no, it ain't true in that way. I don't know what is, but it ain't that. What do you think about all that?    And that big cross hanging up there with that carved wooden sculpture of that guy who died, who was killed, and the guilt and the fear and the whole thing, and program that in at a young age.  And I think if we don't really acknowledge that on a level of a kind of, if you're not willing to kind of go, okay, let's really deconstruct that, find out what that means, then you're gonna wind up just talking about textual analysis like Bart Ehrman does because it's safe and it's friendly and it's like, we're all okay anyway. Yeah, so I think that in the vein of what you're describing here, the MK Ultra thing I don't know about. And personally, I don't even need to, in my opinion, in order to realize that what we're believing in is fiction. We've been told a narrative. Every religion has these same things. So Ehrman tiptoes this really kind line in many ways and he isn't pushing back hard on those people who've been indoctrinated. A lot of people have been harmed by the church. A lot of people have been molested or abused or even killed or were killed or committed suicide because of the beliefs and such things. And so he isn't necessarily pushing hard on the people that are still propagating these things that are causing harms for so many people. Whereas like Bart or Dr. Baum, he's also kind of believers. He is best friend as a Christian. The thing is, I think that trying to engage that world, he wouldn't do very well if he was doing that. If he was bashing and going out hard and saying you guys are all blind, you have no clue and he did that boldly, he wouldn't have any audience to really engage with that in a sense or at least not in the academic world because most people who go to this are probably religious. Most, I'm not gonna say some aren't but if you were raised an atheist, you probably aren't gonna take interest in textual criticism on the New Testament. Most likely you come from the background you and I come from but as far as what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to create a bridge for people to walk over. I want people who are in the believer side to listen to what I'm saying at the same time to tell them I was duped. I believed this narrative of a story that really is irrelevant to me. It's relevant in the history. Look at what it's done. It's impacted us but what I'm saying is I have freedom now. I don't have this religion in a sky daddy or fairy tale over my head watching my every move wondering if I'm good or bad or feeling guilty if I do something or say something or think something. No, I don't have those boundaries anymore and I think it's important we free people especially in the 21st century because religion is not, it's not pushing us into the future. It's not pushing us in a better place. It's that freedom I believe in being able to explore areas that we weren't but I'm also very cautious. You bring up some of these ideas. I'm not really sure of some of them but I'm very cautious on going too far and wondering if there's this hidden agenda and the Illuminati and you start getting into these other things that I need concrete evidence of. I'm a skeptic rightfully so on biblical stuff and all these things and like show me a God and I'll believe in one type stuff but at the same time when it comes to these what people call conspiracy theories I want to look at these things from the skeptical angle and observe and consider is there really a conspiracy with the vaccines? Is there, and I can go into like various veins of conversation with this. So I want a tiptoe. I don't want to go in because I've always just believed what I've been told if it sounds good or if it's something that appeals to me all of a sudden I'm believing it.  I read a verse in the Bible of predestined, I believed it but now we have this desire since we've been duped and there's been a hood over our head the whole time to go off maybe too far on the other side and say hey, there's this, we need to go over here. There's a secret conspiracy. Everyone's been planning and tricking us. I'm with you in that control of the masses used by religion is there. I just need more evidence if we start going beyond to saying there's secret organizations doing these secret things that are particularly doing it. I'm not saying there aren't. I'm not saying there aren't. I'm saying I need good evidence. So I'm very skeptical of the skeptics as well. You see what I'm saying? I do hear what you're saying and that's really why Derek I've been so interested in this first century Roman history because I think it leaves all the fingerprints that are harder for people to see. I actually think that more and more people are just open to the idea that this parapolitical perspective what some people call conspiracy is just it's been revealed. It's been obvious. Like I continue to use the glorious diamond example. People get so tired of it on the show. You can go right now if you want and you could know everything you needed to know about it but like I'm telling anyone can go look at it and in her own words she says I work with the CIA. But the point is and if you don't know about it you should know about it really because it's an important part of our history. Just like JFK assassination is an important part of our history. It's 60 years old now. There's 200 books written. You know a lot of people don't even realize that the second phony baloney government panel beyond the Warren commission, the second one that they sat, concluded that it was a conspiracy. So officially the government acknowledged that it's a conspiracy. Well there's something going on. I mean period. Well hold on, hold on but there's something going on. I don't even like to go there. So finishing with the glorious diamond thing the question is not whether the CIA had their foot in the door in terms of that.  I'm getting off target here though. I'm getting digressing. I think you're trying to say, what you're trying to say is that the powers that be from the Roman all the way to the contemporary times are playing the masses, using things like religion to control and try and keep everyone under control or to their own advantage to make the rich, richer, the poor, poor and just keep using humans kind of like slaves so to speak. Agreed, only that sounds a little bit too conspiratorial for my liking. The way I put it is it from a parapolitical standpoint. Well of course you would do that. Of course, you know I'm a business guy come from a business background. When you want to, when you want to win, you kind of do whatever you can within the rules but you're willing to stretch the rules to win. The Romans did this, we have history recording the Romans doing this over and over again.  We can get along and then they do the divide and conquer the divide and rule thing. Hey, this group, that group, let us get in the middle of it. So they're playing this thing over and over again and now we run across the Christian thing and they're doing it again. And but yet we want to get sidetracked into Bart Ehrman talking about the textual kind of, how about looking at the social engineering part and the quote that I keep coming back to in Josephus and this quote has been brought up in your show. So I don't know if you know about this or not but Josephus and War of the Jews actually kind of spills the beans when he goes, look these Jews of which of course he's won the reason they were so upset is because they thought the Messiah, they had prophecies that the Messiah would come from the soil of Judea. And you know what? They just got it a little bit wrong because it turns out Vespasian was on the soil of Judea when he was made emperor. So he is the emperor. You guys can kind of forget about your religion and give it up for Vespasian.   He's suicide packed but he's the only survivor, you know, all that stuff. But that to me is social engineering. There is no other way to interpret that. Yeah, I've heard of it. And one of the things that I think of right now because I thought the whole Joseph Atwell position was like solid rock and it was the only position that I knew. The reason why I get Bart Ehrmans, like I said at the opening in this video, the reason why I entertain various scholars from various fields is there might be something I'm missing. Like if I jumped to the conclusion, it's like asking someone, is the earth round? Is it flat?   There's probably an ice layer around the corner. We can do that all day long with these ideas. And I say, well, what do experts say and why? We have to assume everything is not trustworthy or worth looking at because a lot of that context can come to support ideas of what we're trying to consider. So for example, if Josephus is a Jew and a lot of this is probable, if Josephus is a Jew and he's using the Hebrew Bible as a lot of his own prophetic backing to support what he does, he's Hellenistic. He's in the emperor's house, so to speak. He's now adopted. He's got the Flavian name. Why did he get it? Why do you suppose he got adopted? Oh, I ask Kissen, probably for making predictions about him for all we know. I don't think that gets you, I don't think that gets you the villa with 200 of your friends. I mean, we can think about whatever, but we don't have solid evidence for sure. We don't have solid evidence either way, but what we have and what we understand from a modern perspective, if you look at the copper scroll, the copper scroll is a treasure map, right? It says 2000 pounds of silver, five steps from this. And the bottom line says, and this is a copy. So if you're Josephus and you're of this elite family, which is really pro-Roman family, what do you potentially have to trade with Josephus, to win the villa that he used to own and the free trip for 200 of his friends?  Because the other thing we forget is that, if you were in charge, if Turk was in charge of defending the treasure and you're sieged for 90 days, do you leave it all kind of out in your living room and say, gee, I just hope they don't knock down that door?  You go bury it, that's what everyone has done throughout time. When you asked me about Josephus, like why would he potentially be put in this position to be adopted into the family? The way he puts it is he was able to predict things, supposedly. And Josephus, and I know that you don't accept that, but let me just feel you know why. But does that sound logical to you?  It's potential that- If you're Vespasian, is you're Vespasian, is that what you do? Is that what you do some guy predicts?  I apologize. No, no, no, you're fine. But it's important to just kind of know a different angle, even though I like, look, I love this, this is fun. Like I like the ideas that are floating, but if you're Vespasian and you need a representative head of Israel and you know that not all of these guys are rebels, not all of them are trying to destroy the temple. In fact, you potentially have connections with a lot of the Hasmoneans. You have a connection with a lot of the Jewish people and you need someone who's not only intelligent, but could potentially be a speaker on behalf of this coordination between Rome and the Jews, then what you might have is someone that's good leverage to use to coordinate with these people.  So the idea that he is the actual Jewish messiah, I see that as the same way that Cyrus in the Old Testament was also the messiah in Persia over the Jews and he also helped them go back to build their temple and such. The problem is the Romans didn't allow them to go back and build their temple. After this, that was game over. Domition even persecuted the Christians and such if you take this as history, but the idea that I was getting at was what leads us to think that these Romans disappeared and went with this money, this whole legion and went to America? What leads us to think that's the case? Well, first of all, that's Brody's hypothesis and he's got- What's his name? Dave Brody and the book is Romerica. Romerica. Great, you should have them on it. Let me kind of address your question. How does he know that? So one of the hard pieces of data that they have are coins, these second century Roman coins that wash up in New England, close to where he lives sometimes, like after a big storm, which the logical conclusion is there's a ship out there. It shouldn't be out there. It shouldn't be dumping second century, only second century Roman coins. And here is kind of the little tidbit that I found that was really interesting. So he tells me this whole thing. He tells me the carbon dating of foundry pits in Tennessee, the map from the Army Corps of Engineers that is shaped just like a Medora, the fourth that they uncovered under the ground and stuff like that. He has real archeological data. He has about a hundred pages of it in his book. So I'm talking to Dave and I'm like, man, fuckin' A, this is exactly what I hear about how phony some of these fuckin' scholars, quote unquote scholars are.  I said, Dave, you told me how these Roman coin thing, how scholars have kind of given this ridiculous explanation that, well, maybe a guy had a coin collection and he went to the beach and he dropped the coins.  You can't tell me that some scholar wrote that. So I emailed Dave and I said, Dave, you know, can you back that up? Can you tell me? And he goes, because the other one they have is that maybe birds flew by and dropped him. He said, well, I can't really lay my hand really quickly on the bird one, but here's the one on the coin collector. Lo and behold, he sends me this, you know, published peer reviewed in some phony biblical scholarship journal, whatever those guys do, the coin collector, the coin collector dropped his coins, you know, every five years when there's a storm, I mean, it's just absurdity and yet we have to kind of take it seriously because that's an expert from Michigan State University. It really, it really makes no sense. And I'm gonna go on and on here, but I'll try and wrap it up with, so Josephus, what most moderns would say is that the prospect that Josephus had access to all that frickin' gold that you see in the Arch of Titus that still stands there today and was used, and here's the interesting part. So they used it to build the Colosseum, you all hear that, but what it was really used for, if you trace that history, Vespasian is kind of in the running for emperor, but he doesn't run to Rome.  And he gets his army together and then he goes to Rome. That's the part that we don't, we know that part, but we don't know where he got the money. We don't know where he got the gold. It makes a lot more sense. So, Bray- Yeah, that could be.  You're useful. So what I'm saying could be true on top of the fact that there's a gold thing here. I mean, why get rid of an ambassador who could speak between the Jews and of course- And write this history. That's potential, yeah. I mean, I look, I'm not an expert in anything. I'm a jack of all trades, but one thing I would do, like for example, with our friend here, Romerica, I wouldn't go to one scholar from Michigan State to try and explain these things, right? I don't know, and I'm pushing back on purpose to say I'm a skeptic. So like at heart, I want to challenge the, like any position that comes up, it sounds pretty, it sounds cool, cool. Let me see what scholars say about this because I won't have the time in my life running a show that I do and everything to literally say, you know what I think I'm gonna do? I'm gonna become a coin expert, figure out how to discern the metals and how we can find out dating of all these things and like where they come from and like go to college for eight years, learning all this stuff. Like I don't have the expertise on that and I don't plan on doing that. That's not my drive. I like communicating. But I just don't have the time to delve into a lot of this stuff. So a lot of what we rely on is scholarship, but I would be interested before I call them phony baloney scholars. Cause sure, there are some. Don't get me wrong. I'm sure some of them that I would look at and go, did he's as wrong as I, there's nothing else I can compare to. That's how wrong I think this guy might be. But then there are other scholars who don't agree with them and I might have a different position. So I want to look around and see what's out there. Cause before I used to go to what sounds interesting, what sounds like, oh snap. There's a secret story here. And this is what's really going on. And it does sound cool cause we like stories, but is it factual? Is it actually history? And look, I just, I just want to find that out myself the best we can. Cause a lot of it's been lost and there's no way to know with certainty in many respects. Totally, totally agree. And we ought to stay on that topic for a minute. You said you have an interview coming up with Schirmer. I already did, yeah. Michael Schirmer, you've already done it. You're going to publish it. I've had them on the show several times because when I say phony, baloney scholars, you know, where I really started with this thing, Derek, for me is with, you know, I just kind of saw the skeptic kind of atheist community as being kind of jumping from one cult to another in a way that you're not talking directly about, but my interpretation of it is kind of a lot of that. So I was looking at parapsychology as, because the skeptics were coming down really hard on the parapsychology. And to do that, you really have to dig into the science. You have to look at the peer reviews and the meta-analysis and you have to do all that. And I guess what I come across with sometimes is I was just surprised at the amount of bullshitters that I found even within the quote unquote hard sciences. And the means that they use to kind of advance a certain narrative. And Michael Shermer, and again, he is like one of my favorite enemies, frenemies, right? Frenemy. I love them, I love them. I love talking to him.  Like when I had him on the show here. He probably thinks you are, huh? Well, no, I don't think he held up very well. I mean, you can go, but he wrote a book on afterlife kind of stuff. And I just so happens, I've done about 50 interviews with some of the world's leading experts on near-death experience science. So I've talked to all these experts, including like the leading resuscitation expert in the world, Dr. Sam Parnia. He's not just a, he's not a Christian trying to sell near-death experience. He's just the guy who's researched it. I just interviewed Dr. Bruce Grayson from the University of Virginia. Another highly esteemed, presents at the UN kind of, all these guys all saying the same thing. And Sherma writes a book and he misquotes them and misrepresents them. And that's what I pointed out. I said, Michael, you're not only misrepresenting these people, but you're doing it so badly that people like Dr. Penn von Lommel in the Netherlands is having to write to the scientific Americans saying, this guy is totally changed what I said. He's reporting on my science and he's completely misreporting it. And I called Sherma on that and he goes, you know, typical Sherma, well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree or that's my interpretation.  And then you can differentiate and said, here is my difference of opinion based on what I've done. So anyone can go watch that interview, but no, he's not, he really isn't playing by the rules of science. He has a different agenda and he's trying to advance that agenda. Well, if you want me to comment on it, I can't speak on that. I don't know. Yes, right. Look, look, here's the thing, everyone has an agenda. Everyone, I don't care who it is. Everyone has biases. Everyone has an agenda. It's your team that you wanna support and that's really what seems to be the most. That's what I'm trying not to do as much as possible when I go into this, but I admit, like I say this openly on my channel, I don't believe in the supernatural, right? That doesn't mean it's not there, okay? I'm not saying it can't be. I'm saying at this point from my own experience and from everything that I've been doing, when people talk about near-death experiences, when people talk about these experiences they've had, I've hallucinated, I've done drugs that have made me see things and go places and all that kind of stuff. And I now equate those experiences down to the phenomena that goes on in my brain. I understand other people wanna say it's more or they wanna say this and that. I'm looking for an answer that's natural. I purposely say that because I've never actually honestly explored open-mindedly and said, could this all be the brain? Could this all be my mind giving me these experiences and causing these things? Some people say no, no, no. They're more open to those ideas and they think the experiences are kind of the evidences that we need in order to prove these things are true. And for me, I've had quite a bit of experiences and they've been kind of false alarms or fake experiences that I thought were legit. And it's like, hold on, was that just serotonin? Was that endorphins in the brain being released? So like, for me, man, I'm extremely cautious on jumping to people can telepathically do things or they can remote view or like any of that stuff, is it possible? Maybe I just, it's possible dead people rise from the dead and people walk on water. It's possible that like, where do we draw the line and how do we know what is myth and what is reality at those? You know, there's so many things that I now like, start with, I don't think they're true, but if you approved it to me, I would believe it. You see what I'm saying? If I had- What you're saying, but see that to me is the Flat Earth Science, what I call Flat Earth Science, because what the Flat Earth Science guy always says is prove it to me. I'm an Uber empiricist. That's what the Flat Earth guy says. I see the sun out there. I see the Earth is flat. Prove to me otherwise. Right. I suggest that that's not a very good starting point. What I suggest is that there is this- So, did you start with skepticism? No.   Science is so cool. Science answers everything for me. It's like, well, just make sure you're not jumping from one cult to another. But like when people say skepticism is an important part of science. Oh man, science is designed to avoid the whole idea of skepticism in terms of do the freaking experiment, apply the controls, apply the methods, and it doesn't matter your biases.  It's like this idea that also, so many people in these atheists cross over to skeptics in a weird way that we've explored in terms of social engineering and stuff like that. But it's like this, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Nonsense, science is about exactly the opposite of that. Science is a- Jesus rose from the dead, right? Christian said they experienced that, they actually saw him, Paul claims that he saw this, right? He rose from the dead. In order for you to believe that, what would you need in order to believe that Jesus rose from the dead? What would convince you that he rose from the dead? Well, again, so yeah, so I'd go back, I'd go back because you've had these people on your show, the apologists, and I think they don't stand up well at all.   So you kind of let these people have their moment and stuff like that. I said, no, I'm not. You're hiding it. You hide it better. I do, yeah, no, I mean, I do. And honestly, I wanna push back on some of the stuff that you are saying, not because I'm right, but I feel like you might be pushing it overboard, in my opinion. But then again, that's your experience and that's the way that your perception of this whole thing has been. No, it's the data. It's the data. It's like you said the thing on Jesus Christ and what I say is when I hear apologists, they're opening, what I feel is lacking sometimes in this discussion because we get pulled into the Bart Ehrman textual analysis because he's figured out a way to sell books to Christians, but I would say, Derek, that if you look at near-death experience, science, and you don't just listen to the Bullshitters like Michael Shermer, the burden of proof is on the person who doesn't believe, and you don't say you've looked into the data. They've looked at DMT. They've looked at chemicals in the blood. They've looked at all that stuff for 30 years. You've just been conditioned to believe that Michael Shermer is holding down the fourth there. I'm not conditioned of anything. And number two, I don't conclude that consciousness goes after death. I don't think anyone can conclude that that is a matter of fact. Well, that's what the scientists conclude. I'm saying that's what the leading scientist in the field conclude. There really aren't any dissenters. If you mean consciousness, experience, right? This idea that people are having experiences during near-death experience, they call it an experience, near-death. What do you understand consciousness to be? Well, obviously we have experiences.  Like I did an interview recently with Dr. Mark Soames. I don't take consciousness in the philosophical round like a non-dualist would and say, everything is consciousness, like panpsychism or some other form. I'm looking, I'm starting here. I'm starting small. I used to be a maximalist who thought all of these ideas are potential and these are true. I'm starting with like you talk about concrete evidence that we need to look at testable observable things. One thing I know for certain is that we all have these brains that have us perceive and experience things. Whether it's Elvis coming back from the dead, Jesus rose from the dead, whatever it might be, it most likely is something that can be explained with our experience. Now whether you wanna say it's real, I think the eye of the beholder of the person experience it thinks it's real. That's my opinion. But Derek, Derek here's the thing and I don't wanna get too far off the track.  But the consciousness question is fundamental. It's the first hundred shows of Skeptico and I wrote a book, why science is wrong about almost everything kind of tongue in cheek. But the point is if you don't get consciousness then you can't get any of this right. The current a paradigm and it's a falsified paradigm over and over again is that consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain. Consciousness is purely brain-based. Consciousness cannot extend. That has been falsified over and over again. As a matter of fact, the whole idea of the observer effect, if you will, contradicts that notion. And then that experiment has been replicated. It's one of the most replicated experiments in history. Give me some sources on who I should look at that absolutely falsifies that consciousness comes from the brain and disproves neuroscience on that topic. Great, well, you know, the best one, first of all, so you can go back and you can read all the quantum physicists, right? And you can look at Schrodinger and Niels Bohr and Mox Planck and they all came to that conclusion after they did the double slit experiment which is really the consciousness experiment. But in modern times, the guys who's done it is a guy named Dean Graydon. He's not a Christian. He doesn't have a... How does he do that last time? R-A-D-I-N.  But his experiment was to take... That's him. Okay, cool. Cool. All right. He's a parapsychologist. Yeah, that's what they call him. I don't know if he totally goes... It's kind of a backwater term that they use. But anyways, the experiment that he did was kind of a replication. You're familiar with basically the double slit experiment? Not really. Okay, so what these guys did back in 1900s, early 1900s, they took a photon beam generator. They had just figured out this technology where they could take these little photon beams and they shot them through these two little slits in these steel plates. And then there's this thing, do they come out the other side as a pattern or a wave? And it gets really dorky quantum physics stuff, but it's very real. And the point that they came to understand is that consciousness, that is whether or not someone is observing the experiment, causes the experiment to come out one way or another way. And the conclusion that they came to this, mox-plank, you know, the plank scale and all that, and deals, Bohr, who was debating Albert Einstein and Albert Einstein eventually had to say, okay, I give up. It is spooky at an action at a distance, I can't, which is another part of the same kind of thing. They came back and said, yeah, consciousness seems to be fundamental. If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there, well then it doesn't make a sound, essentially. Was their conclusion as uncomfortable as that sounds, it's just as uncomfortable as equals MC squared and time and space. It's a very uncomfortable idea, but their best experiments prove that. So Dean Raiden brought that up to speed in modern day and he took his own lab and he took the photo time beam generator and he said there's all this debate about what an observer is and all that, screw all that. I'm gonna put a meditator who says he can do this kind of stuff. I'm gonna put him in a room and say, affect the photon beam. When I tell you, affect the photon beam. When I tell you, when you're out of the room, the photon beam isn't affected. And you run that experiment a few thousand times and you get a statistically significant result. He got a six sigma result, which if you know science and you know statistics, how this stuff is reported, it's like off the charts. It's like nobody gets six standard deviations out of the norm. It's like over the top. That's one experiment, but his other experiment that's been replicated, oh, like probably one of the most replicated modern experiments in time, replicated at labs across the world that don't have any, is the pre-sentiment experiment where people, it's shown that your body is reacting to a provocative image that's put up on the screen before that image is selected by the computer. So you are, it shows that you're outside of space time.  But the thing that I always point out is that there's a conspiratorial part of that in that, like you said you don't know too much about the MK Ultra thing or the remote viewing thing, right? I know of it, I don't really know what it is. No, that's fair and I'll wrap this up because I don't want to like steal the mic entirely. But if you go into that science and like, it's the invisible college thing.  They weren't talking about it, they were doing it and they weren't experimenting with it, quote unquote. They were like finding Russian subs across the world and sending that information to our intelligence agencies. And just in the last five years, they've released another 60,000 pages of documents from the remote viewing program that completely, any skepticism that any would have about the reality of that program is just pure bunk and it just shouldn't be taken seriously. And again, go interview the guys I have. The point of all that, Derek, I'll wrap it up. These guys, they weren't, talk about materialist science.  They were so far past that. They're all their work with Navy Intelligence and CIA and all that presupposed that consciousness extends beyond the brain and that has these extended realms that we can't fully understand. And one of the first guys they did, Joe McMonicle, who became their psychic spy, number one, he had a near-death experience and they kind of saw that near-death experience and entering that extended realm might have something to do with this extended consciousness. So all that stuff is out there. It just is, there's this block that so many people have been given to don't go there. And it's just kind of frustrating for me that so many people in the, in the mythicist camp, if you will, or are willing to explore that in that way that I'm very interested in for a bunch of reasons, kind of have this weird divide about that.  They all know the truth and everyone's right and everyone else is wrong. And it's just the way the internet works. I've obviously got some homework to do because I'm not gonna pretend to know something that I haven't really delved into. So for me, I'm gonna be looking this stuff up. I'd like, if you wouldn't mind emailing me some of this material to look up and to go into. And what I will do, I say this openly on my channel all the time, is I'm gonna look for things that poke holes in any of this stuff. I'm gonna look for, because if someone says that they have these capabilities and powers, I'm a big fan in trying to see, is that really the case? I wanna know, I like to poke. I'm not gonna rest on just these ideas that we can remote view and things like that. I gotta investigate that.  But I'm very skeptical. I start out skeptical. I don't believe it just because people say things. If I did that, I'd believe everything that's ever tossed at me because, oh, well, prove it wrong. Well, I can't prove it wrong. Well, then it's true. It's no, I'm gonna start very skeptical and work my way in based on what I investigate. And I am honest when it comes to this investigation. I am truly trying to say what fits the day the best to me. And I can tell you this, I've had a lot of experiences in my life as a Christian and even outside of being a Christian that I tell myself, is this really something more or could it be that the mind is a powerful thing? And of course you say it's bunk, the mind thing. So what I'd like to do is be honest and say no comment on those things and actually investigate this because I'd be a fool to stand here and say, oh, I know, I don't know. Not gonna pretend to say I know. There's a lot that you've looked into that I haven't but one of the biggest things is, I don't know if I'll have the time right now to go into these particular topics with the 30, 40 interviews I have coming up and the books that I have to read preparing but it seems like this is important. Like it's something I'm gonna have to encounter at some point and I might as well get my head wrapped around it and figure it out. You know what I mean? Yeah, no doubt and you need to follow your own kind of sense. I don't have any kind of hidden agenda here because I've listened to your shows, I've profited from them. I have a couple of interviews set up with people that I came across on your show. So I'm in this process because of exactly the reason that I told you. I think that the Roman Cyop is important to really crack the code on the Christian thing once and for all and to better understand the kind of dual mind control that's going on where, you know, because the dual mind control thing to me, it's easy really to see the Christian mind control thing and to see the, especially when we start in the present day and you see what they do to the kids and the Catholic church what they do to the Mormons or what they do, you know, the high tower folks you've had on. And so, I mean, that's just clearly mind control and there's no doubt about that. So then you just trace it back and go, how far back does that go? I would suggest that there's another part of the mind control game on the other side. It's in the science camp and it's convincing you that you are this biological robot in a meaningless universe. Your life is meaningless because that is the message that science tells you. You are meaningless because there is no meaning anywhere in the universe.  It's just a biological reaction. There is no moral imperative. There is no good or bad. So they're taking a very extreme position too that I think a lot of people don't realize they're kind of buying into when they go down that route. Yeah, even though I'm definitely tiptoeing on that route, I don't conclude those things from my own experience. So if we scientifically were able to say these things are natural, I look at the animal kingdom and I see that how animals care for their own and such. I get what you're saying. The overarching, is there a destiny purpose for the universe is something out there that made it and said, had intention and said, here's the purpose. There's meaning to this. I'm giving meaning to this. Whether it's a being, whether it's all in a kind of a pantheistic type thing where we're all within this divine and we're all one, we're all part of it, kind of like Joe Rogan talks about. I still think that we give ourselves meaning in many respects and kind of what we were born with. So one might say, well, that meaning you got came from this or that meaning was from this higher consciousness of some sort. And I understand that why that mindset is, it's kind of like saying we have minds, but since we have minds and you and me both have a mind, there must be a mind above this mind and it's deducing agenicity in that area. So this is why I'm entertaining people like Shermer. I'm entertaining the cosmologist and wondering, can a universe come from nothing and what do they mean by nothing? I'm entertaining all of those natural views to test and see, hey, does this actually answer these questions? Now philosophically or like giving meaning and purpose and stuff? I mean, science isn't going to necessarily give you those answers. I think those are subjective things that we can put on. Like in some countries, it was okay to murder a human or to sacrifice humans to God. It was totally okay probably for the Jews to do that before they canonized their text. At some point, human sacrifice was probably part of their system. I say that because morally, they thought it was okay at some point and eventually the morals evolve. And I think that has a lot to do with nature. I'm looking at this. I don't say that with certainty. I'm saying what I'm trying to do is explore a natural phenomenon to explain these things and I might run into a dead end. I mean, I'm sure I've ran into an epistemological dead end if we go back to the Big Bang. It's like you can't go behind the universe starting. And so we're all clueless on the behind. Now some might say they have some secret special revelation or knowledge. I'm really approaching this skeptical. Skeptically, I'm coming at this and saying, look, but not so skeptical that I'm not considering the idea. So that's why I asked you for names. That's why I asked you for ideas. And while you were writing or you were saying certain things, I was writing certain things down because I am gonna look into these things. And I do wanna see is there a way that these things are true? Are these really happening? The coin idea that the Romans came over to America. It's also possible Vikings who conquered many of the regions in Rome and came in these outsiders also took treasures that they defeated from Rome. Second century?  So who knows if it ends up in a treasury in the fourth, fifth century when the collapse of Rome happens and then these Vikings come over. You know what I'm saying? But then you'd expect to find, and this isn't my theory, it's his, but then you'd expect to find a mixture of coins. You'd expect to find second century, third century, fourth century. You wouldn't just see second century. That's an interesting point. Well, so, you know, and back to your other thing, I really like how you keep going back or is on several times to the flat earth thing. Cause to me, that's, I just did an interview. A guy had me on his show and he was a nice enough guy and we agreed on a lot of stuff. And then he started peddling the flat earth thing, you know? And he tried to engage me in some kind of debate and he was really getting frustrated. He's like, you haven't, you know, you haven't looked into it. You haven't looked into it. And I was like, dude, I looked into it for like 30 seconds. That's all you have to look into it for. You don't, for real. And I sometimes feel like, I sometimes feel like the same thing. What's that?  With your group? No, no. Someone in the crowd is gonna come across this video and they're gonna be like, you haven't checked 30 seconds, that's not enough. You know how people are, man. I'm just saying, someone's gonna come across. I'd say the same thing about, you know, dude, consciousness, if you think consciousness is an epiphenomenon of the brain, it's not as clear cut and it's up a poor comparison.  Just Google who Max Plank is. And he came up with the, I haven't investigated this guy, so.  I mean, these are like the fundamental physicists of quantum physics and they're the partners of, you know, partners in crime with Albert Einstein. I shouldn't have said partners in crime to lead people the wrong way. So you start from there and you can go to Dean Raiden. But the part that interests me, because I do wanna try and get it back, we've taken enough of your time, but see to me, the interesting part is that if you understand the social engineering as a potential part that could be in play, I am fine to go toe to toe with someone who says, like you did, I love the thought process, I respect it. You know, you were like, hey, maybe Josephus was this. And then I put all this stuff down and you go, okay, that's good too. Maybe it was this, maybe it was some combination of both. As long as we're willing to go there and as long as this social engineering part is on the table, then I'm down with it. So I look at science and I say preexisting, the preexisting social engineering position would be, I want you to be the same way that religion wants you to be afraid. It wants you to feel guilty. It wants you to be controllable. That's what religion wants out of you because you're just more susceptible to what they're saying. Science wants the same thing. Science wants you to think that you are that biological robot. That, you know, there is no really no meaning in the universe or if you want to believe Sam Harris kind of, it's a social construct, it's whatever we make. Well, consider the alternative that there is that you are somehow more that your consciousness is somehow more and don't go any further. Don't go, don't start selling me God or anything like that. Just take it the next step beyond sciences. Oh, you can't be anything more.  Just go follow the data to the next, okay, I'm more. Then where does that go? So my question would be, well, first I'd like to just make a statement. I don't feel like that's the pressure of the guys that I'm researching on this. I feel like what they're trying to do, like when I read the believing brain by Michael Schermer and I listened to him explain agenicity, patternicity, try to explain what's going on. Why do we believe anything at all? What would be the evolutionary product for why someone would want to trust in things and how does that help us survive? Why people believe weird things kind of thing. Yeah, or anything at all really, because the mechanism that caused us to believe, I wanna know, he was, I gotta say, Michael was very, very kind in tiptoeing in that book. He didn't, when you read that book, he didn't come out hard swinging and bashing. He was like, I'm very cautious to buy Deepak Chopra or to consider what these guys are saying as fact. I am looking for empirical data to try and support this idea. And then there might be that leap. There's kind of that leap of faith where they will go, look, God of the gaps, I get it. But when we have like, how do I put this? I try to describe this with God in the Bible. When we know that the volcano erupted because Yahweh was mad at Israel. Earthquakes happen and floods happen because God's angry. Homosexuality happening in the land is the cause of the flood and this, this, that. Like all these things that we always attribute to God. We always say it's God doing it. But now we have a natural phenomena we can explain for the reasonings of why tectonic plates, whatever it might be that causes some of these things to naturally happen. One could still say, well, the reason all those natural phenomena occurred is because the consciousness, deity, God, whatever is the one doing it. But it starts to make God become smaller and less of a requirement for this deity that people are posing and more likely that, hey, we can actually explain this. This just happens. It's common. And we drive purpose into those things that aren't necessarily there. For example, in the ancient world, the ancients would look up to the star Venus and say, Venus caused life on Earth. Because every time Venus would come up in the sky during the summer times looking at astrology, then green would come. We'd start getting plants and animals would start mating and next thing you know, you see the earth turns green and life comes. So where's life come from? Venus, Venus brings life. It's the life-giving star or whatever. Well, we gave purpose to that that didn't actually have that purpose. So I'm looking for a natural phenomena. Why? Why are you starting with that? Well, I'm starting with what I can test and what seems most plausible to me based on proving the nine times out of 10 when I thought it was Yahweh or God or it was some being that did it, the earthquake, the water floods, diseases, famines, the way nature is consuming one another and just the destruction that I see constantly that happens in life. I go, well, damn, which makes better sense that a consciousness actually created this and that we constantly viciously run into these things or a natural worldview. And so that's why I'm considering looking into the natural worldview and saying, does this answer these questions? There's some things we don't have answers for. I get that, but I'm considering this. This is what I'm doing. Okay, fair enough. And we've kind of hammered on this a lot, but I can't resist. I can't, I can't resist that. That's really an opening for me to go into another rant on this. To a certain extent. But here's my thing is that, you know, where you're coming from, which is, like you're going a lot further than most people are willing to go just in your whole experience, your whole life experience of, you know, what you described to me is, is mind controlled. You were mind controlled. You were drawn into this Christian cult in a way that is extremely traumatic.  I think that is extremely, extremely powerful at a very, very deep psychological level that was programming to me that made it very hard for me to say, I'm not a Christian. I don't take that lightly. I think that's very serious. It makes you into a slave like, yes, Nietzsche was right. Yes, and I agree with that. So if we're talking about the program before we end this program, I am in agreement with you that the philosophy of these religions are obviously used by leadership, governments, everything even to this day in order to keep slaves. This is slavery. It's slavery. It's been slavery of the New Testament. Paul was a slave of Christ. The same institution of slavery just has adopted a new concept and it's been pushed into the religious world. Yeah, we may not have chattel slavery as a known phenomena, but religious slavery is a thing of the mind, which to me is just as powerful. I, me and my wife get in arguments, bro. And I hate it.  I've told her this. So, you know, it's just a reality that I think we're all trying to free people from even though like me and you have different epistemologies and stuff, like we want people to wake up and realize, think for yourself. Don't stay stuck. Me and you, we may not see y'all on many things. I still got a lot to learn, by the way. I'm not even acting like I know, but we agree that this is harmful. The stuff that we've been taught, this religious system is not helpful. And so, I hope that. I take it, so, and where I was going with that is twofold. One, I honestly, truly respect your process here. Your digging, your wanting to know and wanting to know from all these different angles as a way of doing that, as my friend calls it, un indoctrination, you know?  So, I totally respect that and respect where you're coming from. I just think that our community, if I can be part of your community here for a minute, needs to be more willing to truly dive into the extent to which this mind control aspect is really, really at play.  And not to own. Did you watch my interview with Mike Renderer? Did you see what I said to him during the interview? Well, if you watch that interview, you'll appreciate it because I told, every time he made a really good point, I try not to like consume the interview because it's Mike Frick and Renderer. But nonetheless, I said, hey man, this is the same thing I said as a Christian. This is the same thing Christianity does. So, I always try to bring it back to my experience and how it's relevant to the cult of Christianity. People, Christians hate it when I say that. They go, it's not a cult. It is a cult. So, I was a witness as a cult. This is a cult. The whole thing is a cult. So, I'm with you on that.  That's why Joe Atwell is so important in this discussion. I think he kind of got Josephus wrong a little bit. I think Josephus is first playing a game against the running a Psyop against the Jews. And then it evolves later into a Psyop against the Christians. But big picture, what he understands is social engineering is always in play.  Science is the answer to everything. I'm okay being a biological robot in a meaningless universe. Just tell me what to do. Cause I don't really, I can't really think on my own. I have no willpower. I have no connection to anything greater. So, my life is, you talk about fear. You talk about control. You talk about the deep programming really behind that message. And it's, it's so subtle that people don't get it, but it's a subtle way of still going in that fear thing, in that control thing, cause there's no other way around it. I don't feel that way about it. I don't feel that when I, when I get to this, but then again, my experience is different than yours when it comes to viewing that. I get what you're saying. Like ultimately, if you asked a naturalist, is there meaning to the universe? Do you have meaning? They're gonna tell you, yeah, I have meaning. It's the meaning that I make. It's my, it's from me. But then again, it goes back to that philosophical question. Do the trees make noise in the woods? Well, without, without us observing them, there's no meaning apart from our experience of them. So technically no, there's no meaning until you and I actually experience the thing that makes the meaning. It's kind of like- No, but that's not, that's not scientific materialism insists that the world is out there and that the trees do make a sound. So you, right. So it's kind of one way, you do have to kind of fall one way or another on that. And again, so if anyone wants to go there, all the science, all the really good science points towards a post materialistic kind of explanation for that, but- Yeah, and I'm still getting my feet wet. So look, I appreciate it. I can't thank you enough for inviting me and having this interesting open-minded conversation. I haven't looked into a lot of this stuff. So it's something to investigate and then see what I come out on the other side with. Fair enough, man. Keep doing it. You take care. All right, brother. Thanks again to Derek for joining me today on Skeptico. The one question I tee up from this interview is, do you think Derek is gonna do any of the research, any of the digging into stuff that we teed up? I'll tell you from my experience, the answer is almost certainly no. And it's kind of funny because it, you know, whenever you get into these discussions with either atheists or Christians, a lot of them are well-meaning. I mean, I think they're genuine. And they say, wow, that's really interesting. I'll look into that. But as we all know, most people, not the people who listen to this show, but most people rarely change their beliefs. So what do you think? Are you banking on Derek to come back on or have me on and kind of further this discussion with a new, enlightened, or even just more well-informed point of view? What do you think? You think that's gonna happen? Let me know. Jump on over to the Skeptico forum, drop me an email, connect with me, however. Till next time, take care. Bye for now.


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