Original subtitles

Thank you for doing this. Yeah, absolutely. I have read Genesis like, you know, on and off most of

my life. Never noticed the first part of chapter 6 with the Nephilim until about four years ago,

someone mentioned it to me. And in the subsequent years, I must have had 15 convers 25 conversations

about the Nephilim. Um, so it seemed worth talking to someone who understands exactly

what the Nephilim are. What are the Nephilim? And and am I pronouncing it correctly? I mean,

good enough. Yeah, that's I mean, yeah. I mean, it's it's the the the I am at the end. The the

the em is the plural in in uh Hebrew. Okay. Um but yeah, so there's there's a little bit of

debate about where exactly the word comes from. uh because uh there's it's it's not a regularly used

Hebrew word in the Hebrew Bible, which which isn't all that odd either. There are a lot of words that

are only used once in the Hebrew Bible. Uh but uh people have tried to do different things with it.

So there's a there's a Hebrew verb nefall, which is the verb to fall. So some people have wanted

to say, well, it's the fallen ones. But in Hebrew, nephilim is reflexive. So it would be the ones who

are fallen upon which is a little more difficult. But it seems pretty clear. Most people agree now

because there's an Aramaic word uh Nephilim ends with an N that just means giant. And so it seems

pretty contextually clear that this is just the Hebrew form of that word and this is talking about

giants. It's translated in the Greek Old Testament with uh yantes in in Greek which means which is

where we get the English word giant. Um but a lot of people when they hear the word giant now think

fifi faux fam, right? Yes. That's that's not the core um of the idea. So the word all of the words

used for giant not only refer to a tall person. Uh but uh could also be used to mean a thug or a

bully or a tyrant. Uh and the example I use is uh and you're old enough to remember this. When when

we went into Panama after Noriega, they're always referring to him as Panameanian strongman. Yes.

Always. And that wasn't talking about his awesome bench press. that was, you know, but he was a

dictator, right? He was an authoritarian. And so it's the same kind of idea, right? That that

um it's characterizing these people as that sort of thuggish, brutish kind of kind of character.

And referring to them as tall or referring to them as giants is meant to symbolize and and

suggest that. Okay. Um and so in in in Genesis at the beginning of Genesis uh at the beginning

of the flood story uh in Genesis 6 uh we have to understand that the the flood story is not a new

story when Genesis is telling it right this is everyone had a flood story in the ancient nearer

east. So the text of Genesis is not primarily claiming, oh, there was this flood. It's talking

about the flood that the original audience all sort of knew had happened. Yes. And and which

it did happen, I think, right? There was there there Yes. There is a historical event, right,

that this is referring to. But you could have asked anybody from Greece to Mesopotamia to

Egypt. They would have all agreed at that point that yes, there was this advanced civilization.

There was a flood that destroyed it. Current civilization is rebuilt after that. Yes. Uh

now the key one of the key differences in Genesis 6, you already have in those first four verses is

Genesis recasts what that civilization was like. So in the pagan sources that pre flood world was

this golden age of for the time high technology right and technology in the ancient neareastern

mind included magic magic was a sort of spiritual technology um and all of these things happened

before the and that sort of uh losing that world was sort of this great tragedy and but everyone

agreed it was a more advanced world than the world they lived in. Yes. Yes. That there was knowledge

there that had now been mostly lost. Interesting. And so you find um the civilizations that grew

up after that in exhibit A of that is the the original Babylonian Empire. So like Hammurabi's

Yes. Babylonian Empire at the height of the Bronze Age. Uh people don't understand how how powerful

the global structure was in the Bronze Age. It's called the Bronze Age because they were smelting

bronze. They were getting the copper from Cyprus and the tin from what's now Afghanistan. That's

quite a distance. And bringing that together bronze in Iraq. Yeah. And and Hammurabi had a

preference for a particular style of sandal from Cree. So he was importing those. There was sort

of this global economy in the Bronze Age going on. And uh Hammurabi himself was from a group of

people called the Amuru who took over Mesopotamia. Amuru means in Aadian Westerners because they had

come from what's now Syria. And those are the same people who are called Amorites in the Old

Testament. Um, and we'll probably come back to them as we go forward, but uh, Hammurabi and

the other Babylonian emperors attributed their success, their ability to establish this empire

to the fact that they had access to this secret wisdom from before the flood. Do do we have any

sense how much earlier the flood took place? I what's the timeline roughly? It it's so Genesis

doesn't really give us a time. There are people out there who want to like add up the years and

the genealogies. That doesn't really work. Yes. Um because different textual traditions have

different numbers. They didn't have there aren't numerals in Hebrew or Greek. And so you're using

letters to code numbers. Yes. And so numbers get a little slippery in translation and and copying

and things. Um so a a lot of people will attribute it to the uh the earth changes that happened at

the end of the last ice age. Yes. So so you're talking roughly 10,000 years ago. Yeah. Yeah.

Um other people who are more literalist and want to add up those ages will say uh that it was more

like six. But from the geological record because there is record of a flood. Yeah. Yeah. And and

there are massive I mean there there are villages at the bottom of the Black Sea from that period

10,000 years ago. Um there are that are submerged. Yeah. Are the remains of villages. Um the the the

glacial ice that melted created a lot of large body of waters that were not there. Yes. And sea

levels rose a great deal. So, do we think do we think the flood came from melting glaciers? That

that's probably that's probably the the historical event that's connected to that. Yes. That that

when that ends, there's this massive shift, right? And and places where there used to be civilization

are now underwater, literally, right? Um and so yeah, all those changes happen and and there's

this massive disruption. So the villages currently at the bottom of the Black Sea were built during

this golden age that preceded previous to that. Yeah. And and we believe that that and

do we believe just as modern people that that civilization was more technologically advanced

than the ones that followed it? Um I mean if we're talking about there is some evidence sort of

bronze age. I mean you can't go completely Graham Hancock on this. Yeah. Um that's actually exactly

the question. Yeah. Yeah. and and Graham Hancock if you get into his stuff he starts getting

into some little newagy crystal right technology psychic technology stuff um that's a little iffy

but we know that there was definitely you look at places like Gobeckley and these things there was

definitely a level that was reached there was a collapse there was another move forward the end of

the bronze age there's another collapse yes right and then rebuilding after that I mean but there

are ancient structures, stone structures. So, we can't radiocarbonate them, but we don't even now

can't say how they were built, right? I mean, how would you some not exactly? Yeah. Yeah. We don't

know exactly. We don't know because there's no we're dealing with pre literacy. Yes. Right. So,

we're we're making conclusions in guesswork. You go to golette, you see the carvings of animals.

You see the way they had skulls displayed in certain way. You know, we could we could do

guesswork, but nobody left a left us a text to frame any of it. Yes. You know what's really

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This offer is not available anywhere else. But big picture the pre flood civilization we think

reached some kind of apogee some high point technologically and and then post flood had to

rebuild right and then and then yeah and then his bronze age civilization they're attributing now

they're they're not saying we have some texts or something that survived the flood they're

saying that they're in contact with spirits who were active before the flood. Yes. Um and that

it's the same spirits who are now revealing this wisdom to them. So you have this in Genesis 6 1-4

this this Nephilim phenomena before the flood. And Genesis 6 says at this time and afterward,

right? And that and afterward is pointing to the this sort of recurring or continuing or

happening again. So the physical world changes but the spiritual world remains constant. Right.

Right. Um and so part of that recasting of this pre flood civilization, this isn't a golden age.

This is actually an age of incredible wickedness. Yes. Right. And evil is that the uh there are sort

of these great kings from before the flood. Uh you have Samrian Kings List, other texts like this

later that list the ages of the kings before the flood. And people people tend to think that the um

the ages of people in Genesis and the genealogies are kind of ridiculous with people living to be

950. Samrian Kings list you have people living hundreds of thousands of years right in their

uh list. So hundreds of thousands of years. Yes. Genesis is is reserved sort of in comparison

uh to what is that do you think? A lot of that. So there there's a little bit of a code to it and

this is true in in Genesis also. Um so Babylonian mathematics was all base 60. Our math we do base

10, right? It's decimal system. Theirs is base 60 and the the survivors of that are our we have 60

seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, right? 24 hours in a day. That's the the leftover from

sort of that Babylonian mathematics. Really? Yeah. Um I didn't know we had Babylonian minutes. So um

but yeah that that um basics you math and if you if you look at those ages as sets of 60 there are

sort of certain things encoded about the different kings and the different generations that way. Um,

nobody's totally cracked the code in Genesis, but to give you an example in the Sumerian Kings list,

the seventh king in the list is the one who creates the solar calendar,

um, seventh person in the list. And if you look at Genesis and the Epistle of Jude, which is like a

paragraph in the New Testament, he refers to Enoch as the seventh from Adam. Yes. If you go to Enoch

in the genealogies of Seth in uh Genesis, he lives for 365 years. So you have the number of days,

right? The solar calendar year as his age. He's the seventh person. The seventh person in the

Samaritan Kings list creates the solar calendar. So there there are some sort of coded encoded

connections going on with those with those numbers. Um, is there any evidence that human

lifespan was much longer at one point than it is now? I that's that's debated by a lot of people.

Um, certainly not I don't think anyone thinks in the thousands of years, right? Yes. Um, and part

of the difficulty with that is that people think that people hear life expectancy statistics, you

know, like you hear that in at at the beginning of the 20th century, the average life expectancy

in the US was 35 and people think, oh, people were living to 35 and then dying. It's like, well, no,

a lot of people were dying. There's a high infant mortality rate. There's a lot of people died

before 35. But people who made it to 35, a lot of them, you know, made it to 100, 120. Yeah. So

when you're when you're doing kind of archaeology and stuff, yeah, you find a lot of young people

because, you know, there's no antibiotics. There's no Right. Right. You have a very high mortality

rate. It's hard to tell how long exactly how long the the the truly elderly people were living,

right? Yes. Um, so but yeah, I don't think anybody would frame that in the thousands of years. Yes.

Um, so it's more about them saying something about these people and and like I said, the seventh one

has the the solar calendar. All of them have in the Samrian kings list have associated with

them sort of the things that they discovered. But the discovery is always it was revealed to them

by this spirit came and and this divine spirit revealed to them this and that and the other and

and it's technological things like metallurgy. Um, it's uh ancient technological things like sorcery

and divination and it's things about the natural world like the solar calendar. But the ancients

believe that technological advances came to them from the spiritual realm. Right. Right. That

that's where that's where it's coming from. But that doesn't happen at all anymore. Well, this is

so this is this is Yeah. No, this is part of this is part of the larger discussion and this is but

nuclear technology definitely didn't come from the demonic. Well, this is this is ex this is exact.

So, um within the framework of how the ancients understood it and this is the ancients going

all the way late antiquity and and this is frankly maintained in the Orthodox church. So, the mind in

the Greek word that's usually translated mine is noose. It's transliterated N O U S. And we're used

to thinking of our mind as our brain. Yes. And it's sort of this computer in our skull, right,

that churns and processes. Um, but that's not how they thought about it. They thought about the mind

more as a sensory organ like your eye. Yes. So, you'll see it referred to as the eye of the heart

or the eye of the mind. and that the mind sort of perceives the spiritual realm. And so ideas

are like sights or sounds or smells. They're not produced by the brain, right? They're not produced

by the mind. Received by the brain. They're received by the mind. Yes. Right. And so they come

from outside. Right. But that's the experience of people who are paying attention now even like

who hasn't had that. Right. And and I've never met anyone who had the experience of generating

a thought, right? Like what are the steps from not a thought to a thought, right? Um Oh, that's

such a deep point. Yeah. So, yeah. And so these things these things come from from outside. And

so this is in the genealogy of Cain in Genesis, right? It's it's Cain's descendants who invent

metallurgy uh and use it to make weapons, right? and who discover divination and who discover

uh music and use it for seduction and right for for these other things, right? Uh because and the

idea is that these these uh demonic spirits that are anothetical to humanity bring knowledge to

humans before they're ready for it. Right? that a time would come when humanity had reached a level

of spiritual maturity when they could receive this knowledge. Yes. And and put it to proper use. And

so it gets revealed early. Right. And that and that begins with the serpent in the garden. Right.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not itself evil. Right? So Adam is created, humanity

is created innocent, right? but innocent like a child is innocent and created for this purpose,

created in God's image in order to grow into his likeness. Yes. And so a point of maturity would

have come where humanity could have had the knowledge of good and evil and been able to

make right uh good choices because God has the knowledge of good and evil. He knows what what

good and evil are. And this is the way the phrase the knowledge of good and evil is used throughout

the Old Testament. It's used to refer to a child coming to sort of what we would call the age

of accountability. Coming to the age where they understand good and evil, right and wrong. And so,

uh, the serpent comes and promises. The devil comes and promises, you know, no, God doesn't want

you to have this cuz he doesn't want you to be like him. Here's the shortcut. Get this knowledge

now before you're prepared for it. And it brings about destruction. So yes, right, the the the

atomic bomb is revealed to man. We don't use it as a carbon neutral source of electrical energy,

right? We use it to make a weapon. And I don't know if you're aware of this or not,

but Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan. I'm highly aware of it. I'm highly aware of it. As

the one of the first things it gets used for, yes, is to wipe out I'm fixated on it actually. wipe

out most of the Christian population of Japan. So they zeroed in on a church. Yeah. Yep. So um

and that infuriates people when you when you say it, but it's true. Yeah. So that that's a that's

a pattern, right? And and so um yeah, that that is the understanding. And so they're not

uh the the promise is always, oh, I'm going to give you the secret knowledge. This is going to

give you power. This is going to give you control. this is going to give you influence. This is going

to give you XYZ, right? But ultimately, it ends up being toward humanity's destruction. Yes, cost

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or visit americananfinancing.net/tucker. So to go back to the Nephilim Nephilim. Yeah. Um the

passage in Genesis referring to which is just a couple sentences long I think uh is explaining

why God sent the flood. Why does all of this have to be destroyed? Why does peak civilization peak

technology have to be destroyed? And those two ver can you summarize what it says? Yeah. So

it refers to the Nephilim as the men of renown. Men of renown. So it's referencing these kings,

these ancient kings, right? The people in charge who were looked at as heroes, as divine heroes by

these post flood pagans, right? Look back to them as these were the leaders of the golden

age. These are the great figures. These are the spirits we want to emulate, right? These are the

people we want to be like. um the great heroes and instead Genesis casts them as these evil,

wicked tyrants and thugs who are leading people to destruction, to chaos, right? Um Genesis says

that it gets to the point where every thought of humanity is always evil all the time, right?

That's Yeah. Um and uh these people are actively leading humanity in that direction. It's not just

coincidence, right? They're they're uh teaching this. They're embodying this, right? And um so

when you when you have a person who we're calling a a giant or a nephilim, we're talking about sort

of a fully demonized human. So in in the way the church has traditionally talked about sin related

to what we were just talking about with the mind, there's sort of these stages. Uh first stage is

thought comes into your mind, right? Yeah. You can't control that. Just like you're walking

down the street and you see something or hear something, right? Thought comes into your mind.

Um, that's not really sin yet, right? But then we start to entertain that thought, start to dwell

on that thought. We start to let that thought take root, start to let that thought turn into a plan,

right? Been there. Then we let that plan turn into action. Right? Yep. Then that action turns into a

habit, a repeated action over time that we fall into. As it becomes a habit, it starts to take

control of us. So we talk about the sins as the passions because they make us passive, right?

They're acting upon us at a certain point. Um, and you can see that with, you know, anger, right?

You reach a point where it's now driving the bus, right? Or lust. Yes. Or, you know, addiction,

right? All these things. So, it gets to the point where it takes control. And then beyond that, you

get what we call demonic possession where there is this sort of spirit that is now driving full-time.

You're not even really making your own decisions anymore. You're kind of lost to it. And then sort

of the furthest you can go in terms of being lost when we're talking about these Nephilim and these

giants is that spirit isn't in control of you anymore. You just agree with it. You're on board

with that sort of demonic spirit deliberately. You know, you're rejoicing and enjoying, right,

sort of the chaos and the destruction and the and the wickedness. And by the grace of God,

there's relatively few of those people, right? But they do exist. Do do you mind if I just pull

up the passage cuz I there's one part of it I want to ask you about which you haven't addressed which

is just how different the Nephilim are. I mean, they're substantively different.

They're genetically different from people. And I think this is the most evocative or the most

interesting, the weirdest. Um, this is I think this is NIV whatever it's a version of the of the

Old Testament. When human beings began to increase in number in the earth and daughters were born to

them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful and they married any

of them they chose. Then the Lord said, "My spirit will not contend with humans forever,

for they are mortal and their days will be 120 years." The Nephilim were on the earth in these

days and also afterward. And the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children with

them. They were the heroes of old men of renown. Yeah. So that's describing mating. Yeah. Between

spiritual entities, sons of God, whatever that means. Yeah. And human women really the rape of

them which whoever they choose suggests rape, right? Yeah. So what is that? Yeah. So um sons

of God is used for example in Job this is referring to a group of and what we would

call angelic beings. Yes. Um so the the ancient texts including ancient Jewish texts will use

small G gods to refer to them but that makes us really uncomfortable. Yes. The modern world as

monotheistic angelic beings works a little bit right for people. Um but uh even that we think

of angels and we think you know oh you know kind of affeminite guy with wings right and that's not

really what what angels are angels angelic beings are sort of vast cosmic intelligences. Yes. Um and

so we have to sort of think about that a little differently like what a spirit is. Um but yes,

this is talking about them having intimate relations, right, with with uh human women

and that that is involved in the production of these people, right, of the the giants who

we were talking about, right? And their sort of reproduction, right, on on the earth. And okay,

so that's a different genetic profile. They're not fully human. Right. Right. And so this is this is

now we're getting freaky. Yeah. This is this is also an inversion, right? Because of course the

the uh from the pagan perspective, they would say these people are part divine, right? So the epic

of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is twothirds uh divine and one-third human, right? According to to the

epic of Gilgamesh. And there's a text called the book of the giants that we found among the

Dead Sea Scrolls. Huh. That's not part of the Bible, but it includes a list of the giants,

a list of the Nephilim. And Gilgamesh is one of the names uh that's listed there. So this was a

very deliberate, right? This is just incidental. And this was in Kuman. Yeah. Yeah. And so this is,

you know, a millennium later, but they still have Gilgamesh in mind as one of the So this is right

at the turn of the last millennium. Yeah. Around the time of Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. Um so and that of

course was part of why they were so great and so good and so admirable and why they had this secret

knowledge. And so this is turning that around and saying, "No, they're twothirds demon. Essentially,

they're twothirds unclean spirit. They're 2/3. Uh, but this idea just like the the fact of it

that entities from the spiritual realm, nonhuman entities, whatever they are, however we're going

to describe them, lower G gods, angels, demons, whatever, that they can mate with human beings and

produce not fully human replicas of human beings who can walk among us and rule over us. Like

this is a biblical principle. Yeah. Well, yeah. But what this what this sort of corresponds to,

right, if we had a time machine and a right, a GoPro, is that there were these particular

rituals that were happening that were involved in the production of the the next king. Uh,

and this happens after the flood, too. And what one of the big clues to this that's in

uh the Old Testament is there's this uh figure who shows up after the flood uh after the Exodus.

uh Og the king of Bashan who is uh described as the last of the Refahheim in uh scripture and and

who exactly the Refim were we sort of weren't sure um the word pops up a few places other

places in the Old Testament in Isaiah uh the text that's traditionally understood to talk about the

fall of the devil from heaven talks about as he's thrown down into the underworld the Refim rising

up to meet him. Uh so there are these few places there's uh Psalm uh 88 talks about uh will the

Refim arise and praise you and it's talking about in the underworld talking about would would they

praise God? The answer being assumed no. Um, but we now know exactly who they were because

uh in the mid 20th century we discovered the city of Ugarit which had been destroyed in the Bronze

Age collapse around 1200 BC and lost. Nobody knew it was there. Nobody knew existed. It was

discovered and we discovered a library of texts there in a language that we now call Uggeritic

after the city. Where where is it? Pardon Bank. Uh it's it's it's in uh western Syria. Okay.

Just above Lebanon uh just north right of uh of Lebanon. And Rash Shamra is what it's called now.

Um and we found this library of texts. Uritic is a Semitic language. So it's like Hebrew or Aramaic

in terms of the vocabulary and the the grammar, but it's written in Kuneao form on tablets. Huh.

And so those tablets survived because those clay tablets are very difficult to break even

if you try. Y um and in there we it shed a lot of light on the Old Testament because as I mentioned

earlier there's a lot of words that only appear once in the in the Hebrew Old Testament but we

now have cognate words in Ugaritic that help us understand some of these things. But one of the

texts there is a ritual text for when the king died. And when the king died of Ugarit died,

they did thiserary ritual where they offered sacrifices and did what is essentially magic,

right? Ritual magic to try to ward off the Refim who were the spirits of these dead ancient kings

so that the king who had just died could pass by them safely to get into the underworld.

And so that then showed us, oh, okay, well, so that's what Isaiah is talking about. That's what

the Psalms are talking about, the spirits of these dead kings. And so Og being the last one, right,

who's alive uh at the time of the Exodus, he's one of these giants. Deuteronomy describes his bed.

It randomly says, you know, talks about Og. Talks about Og being slain by the Israelites. Him being

slain is talked about in Numbers and Deuteronomy and in two different psalms. They sing about how

great it is that Og, king of Bashan, was slain by by God through the Israelites. Uh, and they

say OG's bed, he had this iron bed and it gives the dimensions. And you're sort of like, well,

that's a random fun fact. You know, OG slept here. I uh and the dimensions are huge. You're like,

"Okay, he's a giant, right?" But we we found a ritual bed of the same measurements in the great

ziggurat of Edmani in Babylon, Iraq. Yeah. In the city of Babylon. Um and that ritual bed was used

in these sexual rituals to produce the next king. So this is not just saying Og was tall.

This is saying OG came out of this sort of sexual ritual and this would involve um what were called

at the time shrine prostitutes. These were enslaved women um who were sort of used as

vessels for they would be seen to be possessed by uh this spiritual entity and then there would be

sexual relations with the king at the time. So the king at the time was seen to be as part divine and

part human. We have this uh woman who's possessed and then she is human and so that's you get the

2/3 one-/ird there sort of three parents. So that the temple prostitute would be the mother of the

new king. Right. And the idea was because she was possessed by spirits those spirits would infuse

the new king. Right. Right. And that that's sort of and so birthed by by that. Right. So it's the

son of the previous king who was divine and the son of this lower G lowerase G god right and and

uh so that that ritual was common throughout the ancient world after the rise of Christianity. It

was still common. You see it in places like Asia. Uh the Chimera Empire and Cambodia had a version

of this. Really? Yeah. And then the most recent example is Japan, right? Where the most civilized,

technologically advanced, rational country in the world. Really? That's um in ancient Japan. Well,

up up technically still currently um on the when a new Japanese emperor uh succeeds to the throne,

he ritually and ceremonially spends the night with the sun goddess. um up until when as part of the

coronation ritual. Well, they they still do it, but the Japanese government says that the sexual

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20% off your first purchase. So up until World War II, the Japanese emperor was having sex with a sun

goddess. Yes. So Hirohito within living memory. Yeah. Hirohito would have been the last one.

Yeah. Um who was the sun goddess? Well, I mean this is there he would go into a chamber with

a number of concubines who were embodying right the sun goddess. So this is exactly this kind of

ritual still going on. So how did Okay. So this is Japan which is an island in East Asia. Yeah.

And this is a like precise replication of what was happening in the near east. Yes. Was a long

way away. Yes. How and then also in Indochina among the chemmers. Yeah. Also far from Japan

and even farther from the Middle East. Like how are these totally different cultures, languages,

geographic locations, all doing exactly the same weird thing? Yeah. Well, and and and I mean this

is where we get to the idea of a demonic spirit cuz maybe it's real. Yeah. We just maybe we we

we have to accept it and and we we Is that the answer? We know this. Yeah. We we know we know

this right there. there. We've seen sort of mass evil arise within living memory in the world that

can't be explained by a large group of people all making the same bad decisions simultaneously by

coincidence. Right. This is what brought me to God was this exact understanding. It was very

obvious observation which somehow I missed. But yes, that's right. Yeah. And and we've all been

on the less negative side, right? We've all been in crowds. We've been in groups. We've been in

stadiums. We've been in a place of worship with a group of people where we've had the experience of

sort of acting together, right? Of participating in something together, right? And that's that's

ultimately what a spirit is. A spirit is a sort of collective consciousness at a level sort of above

human, right? Um it's hard to understand, right? But if we work but it's not hard to recognize back

a little bit, right? So our human body, right? Is is made up of there are actually suborganisms

within our human body, right? It's kind of gross to think about, but chemically right now,

my gut flora and your gut flora are having chemical conversations. I'm sorry. Right.

As we sit here, right? Uh the bacteria that our digestive bacteria communicate chemically

with one another. With one another. Yeah. When when humans get together,

right? Um there there are all of these functions going on within our bodies,

right, that have their own kind of low-level consciousness. And then we have our human

consciousness which is sort of over the top of that which is the summing up of all of

that. And so when we talk about angelic beings or demonic beings, we're just talking about a

level of consciousness that's then above the individual human. But they're not projections

of the individual human. They exist separate and apart from the They exist separate apart

and we participate in them, right? But we don't create them. We sort of embody them in the world,

right? We come to be this is this is what God created humanity for originally, right? So he

said earlier Adam is created sort of innocent at the beginning of this journey to grow into the

the likeness of God. The way he would do that is by functioning as God's image in the world.

So in in Genesis 1, the six days of creation, the first three days before that starts, God says,

"The problem is that the earth is formless and void." In Hebrew, it's toou a boho. Um, toouhoo.

Yeah, it rhymes. And and it means basically it's formless or chaotic. It's disordered and it's

uh empty. And so in the first three days, God sets it in order, right? So he separates the

light from the darkness. He separates the sky from the sea. He separates the dry land from the sea.

So he places everything in order. And then in the second set of three days, days four, five,

and six, they correspond, right? So day four, he's already separated light from darkness, sun, moon,

stars, right? sort of the bodies. Uh he's already separated the sky and the sea. Fifth day he fills

the sky with life. He fills the sea with life. Sixth day he creates um land, animals, and man,

right? Cuz on the third day, he had separated. So he's taking care of those. But then he says to

man when he's been created, "Fill the earth and subdue it." And what is that two-part command?

Subdue means to put it in order, right? And fill it fill it with life. And so, humanity is created

to sort of continue that work of God in the world. That's the purpose to continue to participate in

what God is doing in the world. That then trans transforms humanity. So, positive example of this,

God is at work continually in the world loving every human person.

When I go and I show love to my neighbor, that love's not coming from me, right? I'm

participating in God's love. God is loving them through me, but that transforms me. Yes, that

love transforms and changes me more toward God's likeness, right? And the reverse is true, right?

And in that way, I'm sort of embodying the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit in the world. But the flip

side is true. That means humanity can also embody other spirits in the world. And when you do that

and you bring that into the world and make it concrete, that also changes you. And it's not just

a spiritual or a psychological transformation. It's even a physical transformation. We've seen

that. You can see someone who has gone down a dark road in life. A photo of them. Yes. They repent,

they change, they come back. You see a photo of them. You could physically see it. Well, there's

no question about it. Um, that transformation happens in both directions. You can read it in

their faces. Yeah. And so, as humans, we're going to participate in something. There are

things larger than us at work in the world, right? God being the most important one. And we're either

going to participate in what he's doing in the world and be formed and shaped by that, or we're

going to participate in something else and be formed and shaped by that. And the end of that

is our destruction right of ourselves and each other. There are um the reason I was lingering on

the creation of the Nephilim. Yeah. Is because it suggests this idea that sounds really radical when

you first think about it that there are hybrids. Yeah. Spirit, human together. Um, but then as

you talk about it a little bit, you realize that every culture has always believed this. In fact,

Jesus has described as the as the union of God and a human woman. It's like actually it's a

central concept everywhere all the time. Like it's not shocking. Yeah. Right. Right. I mean,

not in a sexual way in that case. Yeah. Be clear. Yeah. Right. Not in a sexual way. Right. But

but yes. Yeah. Yeah. This baby is the product of God's spirit and a human, right? And Christ is the

express image of God, right? He is the fullness of the image, right? And the Greek myth different but

related stories about people being. So why is it crazy and I think people have, you know, lived in

the world for a while. Why is it crazy to someone have a feeling when you're talking to someone that

this is not that there's something else going on here? That this person's not, you know, does this

still happen? Yeah. I I think I have felt that way really strongly about people in charge a couple of

times. Not just I disagree with them, I just, you know, I think you're a bad person. It's not even

that. It's like what is this? Yeah. Yeah. No, I have I have only kind of thankfully met a person

like that once in my life. It was in a part of my uh pastoral training in a in a forensic psych. Uh,

I met a person who had done I won't describe what because it's hideous and you won't be able to get

it out of your head, but had done horrific things to a child and that's how he ended up there. Yes.

But who enjoyed bragging about it and describing it in detail to people and watching the look on

their faces, right? Like that level of gone. So there there are people like that. And did you feel

as you talked to this person or listened to this person that there was this was not fully human or

this was some kind of hybrid? You could look in his eyes and see that there was something inhumid

there. I have had that same experience with people. Not not quite as cartoonish and obvious

as that but still like what is this? Yeah. Yeah. So what is this? It's well I mean I I mean that's

so we would say in the church that that to become like Christ to be formed in in in the likeness of

God is to become truly human. That's what it means to be human. Yes. And so to the degree which you

go down the other road you become something inhuman. Mhm. Uh St. John Chrissum in one of

his uh homalies uh is talking to so he's he's preaching in uh Constantinople to just regular

people fourth century yeah end of the fourth beginning of the fifth yeah and he he says to

uh his people he says so you believe that uh if someone dies a violent death they become a

demon right so we kind of had that cultural idea too right somebody dies some kind of violent or

horrible death they come back as this vengeful ghost or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Murder

victims haunt the house where they were killed. Yeah. So, they apparently had that kind of idea,

too. And he says, uh, that's incorrect. He says it is people who live like demons who become demons.

Uh so in the same way that there is an actual transformation of humanity as as we're formed

in the likeness of God, there is an actual transformation of humanity into something else. Of

course, and it's obvious you become how you live for sure when you go when you go down that other

road. It's an actual metaphysical transformation of who you are even to the point where so a big

part of the understanding of what's going on with the Nephilim before the flood is that a lot of

the demonic spirits that are talked about later in scripture and after the flood are understood

to be the spirits of those Nephilim of those dead Nephilim. is explicit in like the book of Jubilees

which is a a a Jewish text from the period in between the the old and new testaments but a very

important one. Um if you read like Josephus's uh Jewish antiquities he's cribbing from the

history and Jubilees all the time. Uh he just accepts it as historical. Um and it talks about

uh at the time of the flood the Nephilim are wiped out. They all die and they have sort of a leader

who's named uh Mastima. And Mastima comes to God and wants to strike this bargain with him. Don't

don't send us all into the abyss. Don't send us all into into uh like a fire. Let some of

us stay on the earth. We promise if you let us do that, we'll only torment bad people. Okay? We'll

only torment wicked people. Um, and uh, in in the book of Jubilees, God agrees to allow 10% of them

to remain to torment wicked people, but it says that God's motive is he wants to use that to bring

wicked people to repentance, right? So, there's sort of a a theodyssey going on there, right? Sort

of justification of God. Why does God allow these demonic, right, spirits? But you see reflections

of that story even in like the gospels, right? because they're the these spirits are told at

that time you're going to be uh you're allowed to honor until the last judgment and then you're

going to the lake of fire with everybody else but you get this sort of reprieve. So for example when

when Christ comes to the demoniac man and the demons say to him, "Have you come to torment us

before the time?" Exactly. Like hey wait, we had a deal. Yeah. Right. That's and then uh he ends

up casting them into the pigs and the pigs run off the cliff and it says they run off the cliff into

the abyss which is the place where those other demonic spirits were imprisoned and there's a

dynamic going on there where the name Jesus is actually the name Joshua right of course Joshua

in the book of Joshua goes and battles these giant clans to sort of reclaim the land and purify them

from evil that's paralleled with Christ is sort of the true Joshua comes into the land to purify

it from evil and he's dealing with the spirits of these same these same beings. And so the the

idea that how does that become a spirit? Well, I mean, we've seen this, right? You you can point

to men in history who were wicked men, right, who are long dead, but their spirit has lived on. Oh,

no doubt. people have continued to participate in that spirit and embody it, right? And and bring it

forward. The same's true on the other side. Those are the people we call saints, right? They live

a lived a life embodying the spirit of God, being formed into his likeness. And even though they've

died, sort of their spirit lives on. They become the patron saints of people and nations and right

and families and people groups um and continue to have this life, right? as so you're describing the

process of becoming that every person experiences. You're becoming something. But Genesis 6 is

describing an act of creation. Yeah. Saying that these beings were different from the very start

because they didn't have two human parents. Yes. So that's a very different thing. Well,

and there's so that we we also have to understand what it means to be part of a people in the

ancient sense. We have concepts like ethnicity and DNA and Yep. and these kind of things. Of course,

they had no idea about those concepts. So, being part of a people was about two things.

Participating in their initiation rituals. Yes. And uh then participating in the ongoing ritual

life of the community. So biblically, you look at ancient Israel, what made you an Israelite

is if you were male, you were circumcised. Uh if you were female, you were either the daughter or

the wife of a circumcised male and you ate the Passover, right? You participated in the festal

sort of year. Uh within Christianity, right, it's you're baptized initiation,

right? and then you participate in the Eucharist and the ongoing sacramental life of the church.

So the same was true on this other side, right? So what we've been talking about is essentially the

initiation ritual, right? The beginning, right? And then there was an ongoing ritual life and

according to the book of wisdom or the wisdom of Solomon that depending on where you land, right,

Christianity may or may not be part of your Old Testament. um makes this explicit. Other texts

outside of the scriptures make this explicit that the ongoing ritual life of these people involved

human sacrifice and human sacrifice uh involved cannibalism. Yes, we have a very skewed view of

sac we haven't done a lot of animal sacrifice and seen a lot of it. So, we have kind of this skewed

view that it's about killing the animal. It's not really about killing the animal, it's about eating

the animal. Yes. part of it being offered to god or a god uh and then part of it being consumed

right and so cannibalism either at the level you see in Meso America right blood drinking right um

that's why blood drinking is forbidden throughout the Bible um and so there was cannibalism involved

in in uh this human sacrifice and so that was sort of renewed you have this initiation you have this

beginning and then there is this ongoing ritual participation. Yes. And I mean not to disagree

with you, but I just have to ask like if so if ancient peoples had no sense of genetics,

why were genealogies so important. Well, that's that's dissent, right? It's genetic descent. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But that could be broken, right? So, let me give you an example. Um, Caleb, there are

sort of two there's there's the episode after the Exodus where the spies, one spy from each of the

12 tribes of Israel is sent into the land. And 10 of them come back and say, "No, there's Nephilim

there. We can't do it, right? It's going to be too tough, right? You don't want to mess with them,

right?" Uh, and two of them, Joshua and Caleb, yep, come back and say, "No, we, you know, yeah,

we can't do this by ourselves, but God's on our side. God's going to win the victory for us.

put put your faith in him. We can do this. Caleb is identified in the text as being a Kennzite.

A Kennzite is not only a Canaanite, it's one of the Canaanite tribes they were supposed to wipe

out. It's one of the giant clans. It's one these people. He's technically one of them genetically

or by descent, right? But he's listed as an elder of the tribe of Judah in the Old Testament

because he was incorporated. And when you're incorporated, they would have said about him,

"No, Judah was his father. He was a descendant of Judah." Right? Now, we would say, "Well,

not genetically." Right. Right. But from their view, now that he's been richly incorporated,

you you didn't just join become an Israelite in general. you became a member of a particular

family that was part of a particular clan that was part of a particular tribe, right? And those

are now his people and the Kennesites are not his people. He is now not a Kennzite. So that's the

difference is that that was that was malleable. That was changeable. So when did the requirement

emerge that in order to be Jewish, you had to be the son of a Jewish mother? That was after the

destruction of the temple. Yeah, that was after the return from exile. So if you read Ezra and

Nehemiah, they're talking about that. They're talking that that's when they ban uh Israelite

men marrying foreign women, right? And the matrinal descent is a way of ensuring genetics,

just guaranteeing that. Yeah. Right. Because everyone knows who your mom is. But so that's

a later thing. If you look at in the Torah in Deuteronomy, there's a whole ritual setup for if

you want to marry a woman from one of these other groups where she shaves her head and there's this

sort of ritual thing where she's her old life is put away and her new life now she's an Israelite,

right? So that they had a way of incorporating that. Is there any fossil record that supports

uh the idea of giants striding the earth? Actual 50 foot tall people? No. Yeah. I mean,

I don't know how tall, but taller than Well, yeah. So, they they disagree a lot of times. So,

when we have visual depictions, they're usually depicted as 15 foot foot tall. Mhm. But that's a

that's a sort of deliberate coding. So, uh in the ancient near east, they believed that that their

gods had a ritual body. Mhm. That was about 15 ft tall. Um, and if you look at uh we we've got

excavated temples of Baal, for example, where they have footprints that are supposed to be Baal's

footprints, right? Uh, as he was walking in to be sort of enthroned in his temple was the idea. And

if you measure the stride, it's based on him being about 15 foot tall. So, they're doing You think

they're real footprints? Well, these are clearly carved by people. Okay. Right. To represent that.

But the idea is that's how tall the gods were. So that's how they usually depict the Nephilim as

being 15 foot tall. Um Goliath is sort of one of the last stragglers. Yes. At the end of the book

of Joshua, it says that sort of the last of the Anakim, which is another word for the Nephilim,

fled into Philistine territory. And so then when David comes as king, he sort of roots

out the last of them, right? Um Goliath being one of them. How tall he is. Again, numbers,

there's not numerals, so things go weird places. According to uh the Greek Old Testament tradition,

he was 6'6, which is like 2 inches taller than me, right? But which in the early Iron Age would have

made him gigantic, right? The average the average man was, I think, like 5'5. Yeah. Right. At the

time in that area. Um in uh the Hebrew text he's 9'9 which is more clearly a sort of supernatural

kind of height. Yes. Right. To sort of to sort of convey this. Um so certainly there were people who

were abnormally tall like in the 6'6 6'7 range right some of them who who were these people.

uh we do not have and given we don't have a lot of skeletal remains from that period either right

that are there are a million reports from the 19th century in North America in the US of people

finding 9 foot tall skeletons in some cave in Nevada etc etc etc they were all destroyed by

the Smithsonian any of that true um not as not as far as we could tell not as far as we could verify

and some of those were proven to be the Cardiff giant stuff those were proven proven to be hoaxes

Um, so I I think a lot of that came out of there there was very much in the anti-modernist

movement, right? What became evangelical Christianity, there was very much an idea that

we need to scientifically prove that everything in the Bible is literally true. Yes. And and that led

to some of that grasping. Um, but as far as you know, there have never been found on Earth fossils

of human beings. Not verifiably. We notifiably. Okay. Do you believe that um since Genesis 6 says

this process of the sons of God impregnating the daughters of man is still ongoing. Do you think

that happens now? I mean it certainly could. Yeah, it certainly it certainly could. Like we said it

was 80 years ago. We know they were doing a similar sort of thing uh with the Japanese

emperor. Um there's no reason it couldn't. There's no reason the attendant later rituals with human

sacrifice and things couldn't be going on cuz they're just glimpses of it. I mean what's what's

interesting in the about the Epstein files for example Yeah. which to the extent I have read them

are only hinting at various things and you have no idea exactly what it means. It is like reading an

esoteric text. It's like you're not read in. So you don't really interpret it clearly. But there

is a fixation on blood on genetics and there seems to have been that for since the time that we're

talking about like yeah blood human sacrifice sex not just for pleasure but or reproduction

but as a ritual like these are ongoing motifs through human history right Alistister Crowley

is a real person yeah 100% but I mean the Incas were doing the same thing that I don't know some

remote African tribe was doing Canaanites were doing it's like everyone's doing the same thing

is fixated on the same four or five themes. I am by no means a flat-earther, but early NASA

there was some weird stuff with some of those scientists. Oh, big time. Yeah. Um, yeah. So,

that's definitely right. that and and well so but I guess what I'm saying is if different cultures

at different times throughout history are focused on exactly the same kind of nonobvious ideas like

the spirit world breeds with people technology comes from the spirit world blood is somehow

magical human sacrifice is like the source of power like who would who would think of these

things like this isn't a coincidence that just all rooted in some kind of reality that right and and

it's and it's a it's a real like like I said that you're you're going to embody and participate in

something right spiritually and as Christianity has receded and been lost in quote unquote western

countries right we should expect more and more of that to come intruding back in because that's the

other option frankly no you would expect something brand new and like People would think of like

a new religious expression that isn't based on human sacrifice, but they never have. Right. Well,

if it was just humans making it up, that's what I'm saying. Yeah. So, it's obvious it's obvious

to me. I mean, I'm not a priest unlike you, so maybe this like I'm just figuring this out,

but like clearly human sacrifice does bring dark power to the people who commit it. Yes. Like,

duh. Yes. They they I Yeah. They weren't doing this stuff because it didn't work, right? They

were having some kind of experience, they were having some kind of right, something was happening

there. So witchcraft is real. Yeah. And and and when you read just purely pagan sources, right,

that they're kind of honest about it, right? and and this stuff is so we've we've received

the classics through the enlightenment which means we purge all the not just anything quote

unquote supernatural but even religious elements there are still people publishing books talking

about how Plato and Aristotle were not religious you know they represent these sort because the

the figures of the enlightenment sort of recast the ancient philosophers as versions of them,

you know, and since they had rejected the religion of their time, well, clearly someone like Plato

or Aristotle can't have accepted the religion of their time. No, they were like enthusiastic

polytheists. Yes. Yeah. Aristotle's school was in a temple of Apollo, right? They were on board.

They they nuanced things, right? But I mean, in in Plato's dialogue, Socrates talks about how he

has this this demon, this demon, this spirit that dwells within him and whispers wisdom to his soul.

Right. Yeah. There's no, you know, it's Christians who come along and say that's

a bad thing, right? And then post-Christian enlightenment people say, "Oh, well that's silly,

so we'll just ignore it. It's not a thing." But they're very honest about it, right? I mean,

ancient authors are very honest. What's happening at the the Bakadanelia, the actual Bakanelia,

is people are being possessed by the Bach by these spirits and participating in in drug and alcohol

induced orgies, right, in in public at these feasts. Again, the point of it is not just sex for

pleasure. Let's go get laid. The point of it is to commune with with demons, right? Spirit is part of

the Yes. These spirits are possessing them, right? taking possession of them, taking over their body,

and participating in these things. That's what they say they were doing. Well, that's I I think

of the remaining world religions that we know about that are practiced in public, only Haitian

voodoo and African voodoo is honest about that. Talks that openly about it. It talks that openly

about it. Some forms of Hinduism, but yeah. Okay. They aren't prevalent in the West, right? Outside

of India, right? Yeah. But certainly in Haiti, like there's human sacrifice. It's denied in in

the United States media for whatever reason, but it's talk to any Haitian about it. It happens.

Yeah. Oh, it's the center of the religion. Yeah. Right. And but the point of it is not just to kill

kids for its own sake. The point of it is to receive spiritual power. Spiritual Yeah. Yeah.

And I mean, I'm down in southern Louisiana, so I'm not that far from And that still goes on. I mean,

of course it does. Yeah. So um what are like what are we to understand about the Nephilim now? Yeah.

I I mean yeah I I think it is this possibility that's at the end of that chain of yielding to sin

and wickedness. Right. This is the the anti-saint. Right. Right. This is this is what happens when we

not only don't find our full humanity in in Christ, but give up our humanity in favor of

something else. Um that that twists and distorts our humanity. Um, and so yeah, it it is it is this

dark possibility and there are people out there who have gone that that far. I sometimes get asked

as someone who is that far gone, can they repent, right? Can they turn back? And it's sort of, well,

with God all things are possible, right? Like I don't I don't see how, but with God all things are

possible, right? Um, but an awareness that that that is a dark possibility and that that it is

something that happens. There are people doing this. I said not long after the full Epstein

files got released, I said uh on my podcast, I said, "Well, we now know that the world is is uh

run by demon worshiping pedarass." Sort of like it has been since the Roman Empire. Yes. Or before,

right? and Christians were able to operate right during that time in a world that you know was was

uh that was how it how it operated. So um I I think it's good to be free of some of our

delusions. Yes. Right. In this regard and not being aware of the spiritual world or

ignoring it or denying it doesn't make it stop existing. Yes. It's sort of like walking through

a minefield under fire and just denying that there's a war happening. Yes. You're just going

to end up being a casualty, right, of sort of the spiritual warfare and things that are going

on all around you that you refuse to see. It also seems to have I mean the world that you describe

pre flood is a world that's just given itself over to rule by demons. Yeah. and the manifestations.

Everyone has come on board. Everyone's come on board. There's no meaningful resistance to

it. Technology has reached its, you know, kind of impossibly high place. That technology itself was

a gift from demons. It's antihuman. It's anti- good. And then God destroys the world. I mean,

it starts over. Yeah. Yeah. So what does that have implications for the moment we're living in on the

brink of AI? Well, I mean ev everywhere in uh this is true in second temple Jewish literatur is true

in the New Testament when they're talking about the end, right? The end of the world

uh Christ's glorious appearing, right? When that ends, it's always compared to the days

of Noah. Yeah. Right. It's always referred to as and when St. Peter responds with why

is he taking so long to return right with all the suffering and all the evil in the world

uh St. Peter's answer is that the the uh God is being patient in giving time the maximal

time for repentance. But the world has reached a point and can and will reach a point again

where no one's interested in that opportunity anymore, right? And that's when the end will

come because there's no point in delaying it at that point. But I think it's it's important that

people understand that the way salvation even in Christian circles gets talked about a lot is it's

salvation from the world, right? And and I don't want someone to take from this conversation that,

oh, okay, well, you know, I could die and go to heaven and get away from all this. Yeah,

the world's Yeah. going to hell and the great escape. But the salvation begins here, right?

you you can be saved from that now. That sort of spectrum of sin we talked about, right? You don't

have to ride it all the way to the end. You can be set free from it at any point, right? That slavery

in this world. This is the purpose of Christ's church, right? Is to offer the other answer,

right? the other way, the way toward becoming toward becoming truly human, being set free from

that, right, in this world and then right enjoying a world that's free from that beyond this life in

eternity. But both of those are included, right, in in uh what salvation is and what's on offer.

So, I mean, how does it make you feel personally as you see the world moving in a way that's just

more explicitly evil and the leadership of the world becoming just sort of openly demonic? Yeah.

Does that strike fear into you or? Um, not it doesn't strike fear to me because I think

I think it's honest now. I don't think it's different. I think it's honest. I think it's

revealed. Yeah. Now, right. Because I don't think any of this just suddenly restarted. No. Like in

1968. No. No. That's there is this sort of popular narrative that everything was beautiful from the

end of World War II until about 1968. And that's just not true at all. Um and so it being now out

there, right? Uh now provides a number of opportunities for helping people, right? I

I deal with actual individual people, individual lives every day, right? in the church and being

confronted by the fact that spiritual evil is real can be the shock that brings someone to,

oh, God is real, right? Yes. That uh salvation is something I need to find. I think that's often the

case. These patterns in my life aren't just bad habits that I could kick anytime I want,

but there's something going on in my life that I need to be set free from, right? and and that's

going to require some things of me, right? And require some changes and require some healing

from God beyond myself, right? And and so there is this now opportunity here that when everybody sort

of thought everything was okay and they were okay and everything was fine, right? You had to try and

convince somebody that there was a problem. You don't have to do that so much now. No. Right. Um,

and so, so I think there's an opportunity for a lot of people to help be helped, to find freedom,

right? To find salvation, to transform their lives. So, I I choose to look at it that way,

right? Yes. Rather than the other I think that's the right way to look at it. Yeah. What So,

what is your advice when someone comes to you in bondage? Like what what is the process for being

set free? Yeah. So I I think the fir the fir very first part is you have to become part of something

and submit yourself to something bigger than yourself, right? So in my case obviously that's

that's the church, right? Because again you're not just an individual out there, right? Your your

brain is not just closed in this box and you're just doing your own thing. You're participating

in these spiritual realities whether you like to or not, right? And so you have to submit yourself

to something to being transformed by something. And that involves becoming part of a community,

right? Sharing bonds with other people. That community brings accountability, right? It it

brings a change of life, right? Because you you can't live a life in isolation. Aristotle said,

"For someone to live alone, they have to be either a beast or a god." Yeah. Right. Um so you know you

have to find this life in community. It's as as I was talking about you find this transformation

through participating in what God is doing in the world. Well God is loving someone. I

have to be with that person and love them. Right? God is having compassion. I have to be with that

person. Have compassion for them and be kind for them. It's it's not something you could practice

off by yourself. Definitely not something you could practice on the internet, right? That's

um but and so you need to you need to become a part of that. And then within that you you need

to form spiritual relationships with within the Orthodox church that we have the idea

of spiritual fatherhood that's very important where you have a person who you trust deeply,

right? Who you sort of open up and bear your soul to, right? who you uh someone other than yourself

who you say this is what I think I should do am I right you know uh uh should I right where

where you can get feedback and have this ongoing relationship of guidance right as you work through

these things because this isn't a snap it isn't you say a prayer it isn't even you get baptized

and now everything's great right this is this is a long process of of working your way back down

that that road and then getting onto the right road and moving in a positive direction. But

it's available to everyone, right? If you're willing to, right, come and participate in it.

But it's not as simple as an altar call during a church service. Yeah. And and we know that, right?

That's why I I had I have a friend who was a um Assemblies of God pastor, and I asked him once,

"Did you write the day you got saved, the date in your in front of your Bible?" He said, "Oh, yeah.

I wrote all of them." Because he'd go forward and then he'd go back to his life and be, "Oh, I don't

think that took. Let me go do it again." Right? And so, it is this ongoing thing, right? It is

uh Adam was created to begin, right? This life of growth toward God, right? That that doesn't

just happen throughout this life, but stretches on into eternity. Um because God's infinite. So,

we're not going to get to the point where, you know, uh, now I know everything about God now.

Right. It's it's sharing in God's life forever. Has there ever been any other society at scale

that didn't put God at the center or gods at the center? Put its religious practice at the center

of its civilization. No. No. It always happens. Right. So, this recently covered that with a

veneer of science. Oh, no. for insisting this isn't a religion, right? It's a secular ideology,

okay? You know, but but there's, you know, there's an ideology, there's ritual activity,

there are sacred texts, there are all the things religions have, right? You know, that's Yeah. So,

that's never h but but has there ever been a society that was as um dishonest about it as

ours? No. No. I think that's the there's a lot of spiritual delusion and self-d delusion. Um

and that comes out of there there was a move in the the 18th and and 19th centuries where sort of

deliberately uh spiritual iconography, religious iconography, religious symbols and practices were

taken over by the state. I noticed happened in Europe for I mean you could go to the capital see

the the uh deification of George Washington and sort of all of these things all the weird Masonic

symbols and our currency like what is that being attributed to this political stuff right and sort

of the formation of you know we're not going to be we're not going to be uh solos scriptor

protestants talking about the original text we're going to be all about the constitution ution and

what did the framers have in mind? Right? We're just going to switch this all over into the the

political realm. And then as politics is kind of devolved, it's, you know, become even more sort of

ephemeral than that, right? Um, and so we're not willing to admit that our rituals are rituals.

uh were not willing to admit, you know, the the way the way most people talk about the economy

is essentially the way ancient people would talk about a god. What do you mean? That's you know,

flesh that out. That's fascinating. Well, the the economy makes decisions, right? The economy favors

this group over that group. Uh we need to do this and that to sort of appease the economy, right?

Make sacrifices, right? Uh so there all these you know we don't call it mammon you know but

the it's it's the the same kind of it's fulfilling the same kind of the same kind of idea right and

uh other for war right you we don't call it Aries we don't talk about a war god right but

we we talk about national events it needs to be fed it needs to be supplied with right sacrifices

need to be made and right and and So it's all the same ways of thinking because they're built into

what it means to be human. Yes. And so if you if you remove overt religion, you just get covert

Yes. religion. Which is but always a species of like what the Canaanites practiced and what the

Mayas practiced. It amounts to the same thing. It's paganism. It's human sacrifice. Once again,

whether it's abortion or war or whatever, it's killing people in order to get peace and

prosperity and power. Right. Right. What do you I mean, how should Christians approach that? Well,

it's it's a lot of them seem to ratify it. A lot of the leaders seem to be like, "Yeah, no,

this is a good thing." Unfortunately, yes. Yeah. That's And a lot of religion has been secularized.

It's a bizarre phrase, right? But in the United States, it kind of has. I mean, it's it started

with the more leftwardleaning religious bodies. Yes. Becoming sort of just overtly political and

oriented toward this world. Um, and but it has now gradually come to include a lot of the more

rightward leaning religious bodies where sort of the especially the esquetology of Christianity

um the the the ultimate goal right of blessedness is removed from sharing in the life of God himself

or the life of the world to come and it's made very this worldly. Right. So it's prosperity

now. Yes. Right. And whether it's a a mainline liberal Protestant denomination saying prosperity

now in the sense of we need to help the poor and raise their standard of living or whether it's

um because that's what the gospel is, right? Or it's a prosperity preacher,

right, in a more socially conservative church. Yes. saying, you know, give your seed and,

you know, you'll get back 10 times, you know, the money and you'll have all this wealth,

right? It's taking that and moving it all, right? Don't build up treasures in heaven,

build them up here on earth. Uh that's that's sort of that's sort of the goal, right? And uh that is

secularization in the in the true sense, right? the the the first sort of thinker to talk about

uh the the seculum was uh St. Augustine in city of god and he was using that city of god famously

where the title comes from he's living at the time of the collapse of the western Roman Empire which

from their perspective was the end of the world. Yes, certainly then to the world as they knew it,

right? Um and saying him saying so yes, there is this city of man, right? There is this empire,

there are these kings, there is this government, there's also the city of God and the city of God

exists eternally and is steadfast, right? And he described what was going on outside as as the

secular the secularum, right? the which included in it not just uh the world but also the idea

of an age as in it's constantly shifting right there's sort of this cyclical pattern nations rise

and fall all these things happen there's a sort of churn right and that's but that's outside of the

place where God is and so a lot of these formerly sort of overtly religious movements have just

become engaged in that cycle and you can watch them. It's like the the the they're virtually

in the news cycle now, right? In terms of what they're quote unquote preaching, right, and coming

out and weighing in on, it's just sort of whatever is going on in the news cycle right now, right?

And this constant sort of churn and they're making these prophecies that don't come true and oh well,

don't worry about that. Here's the next one. And it just, you know, continues in this in this

never- ending thing. But it's not it it's divorced from the actual spiritual reality of who God is,

who Christ is, right? What God is doing in the world. Those questions aren't even asked,

right? It's more about um asking God to bless what I'm doing in the world or just asserting

that God is blessing and is behind what I'm doing in the world. Um, what do you think of that? Well,

there's there's a famous quote from Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War where a reporter

asked him if he thought God was on the side of the Union. Yeah. And he said, "The question

isn't whether God's on our side. The question is whether we're on God's." Exactly. Right. And

that's the core question, right? The core question that anybody who's going to call themselves a

Christian should be asking is what is God doing in the world right now? Where is he active in

the world right now? I need to get on board with that. I need to become a part of that. Not what

do I want? What do I think should happen? And I'm going to try and get, you know, a whole bunch of

people to try and pray and convince God to do, you know, or I'm going to claim and assert that God is

going to do what I think he should do, right? Um, that's that's not only kind of a a gross

inversion of Christianity, but it's essentially the way ancient magic and sorcery worked really,

right? That's what separates sort of your when you're talking about ancient religion, right, in

the in the pagan world, when you're talking about the Greco Roman world or the ancient near east,

the the division between magic and just sort of pagan religion, right, is that in pagan religion,

they thought that the the gods, the spirits they were worshiping sort of remained free. So you

could make a sacrifice, you make an offering to them, you try to cajul them into doing what you

want, but they could say no. They could decide they don't favor you, right? You read the Iliad,

the gods could just decide to switch sides in the middle of the war, right? Um, they sort of remain

free. With magic, the idea of ritual magic is that you get by doing the ritual in the correct way,

saying the correct things, doing the correct things, you get the spiritual entity to do,

you kind of compel it or command it to do what you want it to do. That makes you God. God of

God of those demons. Yeah. Right. And so even when someone identifies as a Christian, if they're out

there trying to say, well, if you do XYZ, right, if we get X number of people praying, if we do,

then God will that's essentially magic, right? the the the whole idea of Christian prayer and worship

and the Christian life is that God is transforming me. Yeah. Not that I'm changing God or getting

God to change and be different, right? Or do something he wouldn't do otherwise. Bossing God

around. Yeah. Yeah. So, how much genuine Christian practice do you see? I mean, I don't want to be

mean. Um, that's I I No, I think on on if you go to the level of the average person, the average

Christian person, regardless of what denomination, what church, what group they identify with,

right? Or are part of or where they go on a Sunday morning, right? I think the average Christian

person is trying to follow Christ as best they know how. Yes. Sometimes they're wrong, right?

We can get things wrong. We get it, right? They they're misled. They've been lied to by leaders,

right? All that happens. But in their heart and in their soul, they're that's what they're

trying to do. So that level of Christian practice, there's a lot, I think, right? Yeah. Um if we're

t looking top down, uh that's where things get a little more troubling, right? in terms of um

in terms of in terms of leadership. Now, obviously I'm I mean I can't sit here as an Orthodox priest

and pretend I'm not, you know, biased toward the Orthodox church, right? Yes, of course. That's you

know, on the table. Let me frame it differently. When was the last time How do you experience God?

Like actual God's work? Yeah. Daytoday. Yeah. Well, so there's both within the services of

the church, right? Because I I see God very much working in that way. And it's not just the actual

quote unquote worship service, but the time spent afterward in fellowship together, the life of

the community, right? Um I see that continuously, right? I also I mean I I hear people's confessions

and confession is done a little differently in the Orthodox Church than the Roman Catholic

Church because we have this as I said spiritual fatherhood tradition. Um and so I've I've seen

people come through and come back from some really difficult and terrible things. Um,

like what? Well, I mean I I don't want to divulge anything. No, I mean not in specific specifics. No

names, but like what kind of things you're talking about? People who have had the kind of traumatic

childhoods that you see as the origin of a villain in a movie. Yeah. Yeah. Like for real. Yeah. Yeah.

um that you know and and people who have gone down really dark roads of addiction and violence and

and come back from committing violence from that. Yeah. Um and uh and marriages being saved, right,

after things that should have destroyed them. Um you've seen that. You think? Yeah. And so

that all happens, right? It really does. You've seen marriage just totally blown up that are

saved. Yes. Yes. And it takes time and it takes a lot of work and both of the people have to be

on board. But but there is healing there on offer from God. Um, part of the part of the

failure of a lot of Christianity, um, broadly is that an an environment has been created,

I think unintentionally, where people are afraid to open up and even talk about things like that

with anyone. It's sort of we go to church on Sunday, we put on our Sunday best. We all act like

everything's fine when it's definitely not fine, right? And and you know, this is why AA meetings

are so wonderful because there's no pretense like that at all. And and and I I I I say to people

um about confession because especially if they've come into the Orthodox church and they're from

a background that doesn't do it. Yeah. There's a lot of trepidation and what is this and I'm scared

and how can I tell you these things and you're a priest. I respect you. I don't want you to know

these things. But right and I try and tell them I'm like each of us walks through life thinking

we're the most disgusting, perverted, weird Yeah. you know, disturbed individual to ever

walk the planet. Right. And if you're actually willing to open up with other people about that,

you find out that most of them are dealing with the same stuff. Yeah. and struggling with the same

things. And the power of opening up about that in a place that's designed to bring you healing,

right? When we we say over and over again in the Orthodox church that the church is a hospital,

not a courtroom. Yeah. It's not about finding who's guilty of what, right? It's about helping

people in various stages of woundedness, some of them almost dead, right? Trying to help them find

healing, right? and restoration to life. There's incredible power to that to just that honesty,

right, of telling someone finally this thing that I've been hiding from everyone,

even myself when I had managed it for decades, you know, um saying that out loud, right? Admitting it

and then talking about, okay, how are we going to work on this? How are we going to going to make

things right? How are we going to start moving toward toward healing and restoration? A priest

for almost 20 years. Have the kind of confessions you receive changed? Are the problems that people

are struggling with different from what they were? And what are the what are the common ones? Again,

without being Yeah. I mean, honest honestly, they've they've changed less than you'd think,

but there's a there's a pattern when you hear confessions. Usually the first 6 months to a year,

uh, you kind of get tested as a priest, right? So, you get a lot of like, oh, I was stuck in traffic

and I cussed at the guy who, you know, cut me off. And it's like, I'm sure you did, but I'm also sure

there's a lot more, but we'll let it be. We'll let it be for now, right? You get those and so that's

that's the confession, right? Yeah. And it's sort of those kind of things, you know? you know, oh, I

was late for work and I made up a story, you know, those kind of things. Um, but they're testing,

right? They're seeing if it's safe. Yes. Right. They're pushing the limits. And then I shot a

man in Reno just to watch him die. Yeah. And then at a certain point, right, the real stuff comes

out. Sometimes with tears. Yeah. Sometimes with people you'd never expect to see tears from. Um,

and and and it sort of finally unloads. And and and a lot of it is the same stuff. A lot of people

are now it takes sort of different forms like so for example sexual sin used to be a lot more

about actually doing things with other people. Right. Right. And now a lot of it is distortions

and things going on due to pornography on the internet and that kind of thing. And so and

so that's changed that. Yes. You've got people the this is one of the scariest statistics. The

average age at which a person is first exposed to hardcore pornography on the internet in the United

States today is eight. Yeah. I don't know why no one's in prison for that. It's weird. Yeah. So,

well, there's too much money being made off pornography. I'm aware. Yeah. That's And again,

the economy is kind of god now, right? Um but so yeah, so that's right. and dealing with that has

to be dealt with in a different way. That's not I went too far with my girlfriend on a Friday night,

right? There's that that's got to be unwound in a different way. Do people sense intuitively? Do

you think that there's something disordered and bad about porn or is it something that they learn

at your church and they're like, "Oh, I guess it was bad." No, they know. They they know. Um,

a lot of people who are dealing with sexual sin and that kind of thing, they will come and when

they're ready to talk about it will say, "Yeah, I first saw pornography at some absurdly young age."

Yeah. And and usually there's an escalation pattern with it. Yes. Starts out being sort

of quote unquote normal pornography. Not that pornography is normal, but Yes. and

then moves into darker and darker places, more and more uh dysfunctional places. Um but yeah,

they can they generally have an idea of that. But that that is that is breaking a lot of a

lot of people really. Um you see that a lot. Yeah. Yeah. and and that is a lot of people's

issues with sexuality uh with gender identity a lot of it is traceable back to some of that

early exposure to really that material I believe it and it creates this confusion yes um because

propulsion yeah and and people's first sexual experiences being divorced from their own body

Yeah right causes is this distortion, right? That that takes a lot to unwind. And and part of the

unwinding of that is having a community, right? Where they're spending time as themselves, right,

in their own actual body talking to other people who are sitting there in front of them. I mean, it

sounds absurd, but no, it doesn't. For gener for for for zoomers, that's a rare experience. Now,

A lot of them socialize completely on the internet. The people they identify

as their closest friends are people they only know online. Man, they have boyfriends and girlfriends

who they've never met in person. Very common. Gen Alpha, it's even more common. And so helping them

get out of that and into a community of actual people who care about them and who are interacting

with them in the real world uh is the is a huge first step in sort of bringing people back to to

reality. Do you find that pornography is a bigger problem than addiction? Um more common? Yeah,

I mean there's an addictive element to obviously. Yeah. I I meant I guess. But yes,

then drugs are alcohol. That drugs are alcohol. Yes. Really? Yes. Is it interesting? So that's

a huge part of your ministry. It sounds like you don't hear people talk about it very often. It's

all men and most women. Most women. Yes. Men don't think that, but are you ever shocked? I mean,

by this part of your job, do you ever hear things that shock you? Um, so I I can't say I've never

heard something that shocked me, but when I was shocked, it was more the particular person. Right.

Right. Um, part of part of what you have to do, I think, as a priest, part of what I honestly I

think we all ultimately have to do this is we have to become deeply acquainted with the worst parts

of ourselves. Yes, I agree with that. Yes. And if you're really acquainted with that and you really

know what you're capable of in a negative way given the right or wrong circumstances,

you can understand more, right? And you don't get that shock reaction. My my um my dad told me the

story that stuck with me when he was a kid. He was watching uh the footage of the Nuremberg trials.

And he asked my grandfather, you know, what do you think of all these horrible things these people

did? What do you think of this? And my grandfather said there, but for the grace of God I Amen. And

usually people say that to mean like, oh, some bad, right? Yeah. Yeah. You know, unfortunate

thing happened to someone. Oh, God preserved me. Yeah. Car crash. But he meant without God's grace,

I could have done all those things. I could have gone down that same road, right? Um,

and really coming to terms with that, then I think is a prerequisite not only for our own repentance,

right, and our own getting free of that, but being able to help others, you know,

and and being able to hear where they're coming from, right, and understand how they ended up

there and trying to help them, give them the hand up out of the ditch. Amazing. Last question, which

is totally unrelated, but it just seems like you might know the answer. There's this, and pe most

people will not be interested in this, but there's this really interesting um moment in the Gospel of

Matthew where Jesus is talking about sin and how it can all be forgiven, but the one sin that can't

be forgiven is sins against the Holy Spirit. Yeah. The blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. Blasphemy of the

Holy Spirit. Yeah. What does that mean? Yeah. So um what happened just before that was that

uh Christ was working miracles and teaching and healing y and a certain group of his opponents

among the Jewish religious leadership uh accused him of being demonpossessed. Correct. Right. Said

that the spirit by which he was doing this was actually one of the names for Baal. Right. Was

actually Bale's bub or whatever. Yeah. Um, and so he was casting on demons with demons. Right. And

so that's why it's blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is because they're calling the spirit of God a

demonic spirit. Yep. Right. And so if you're not willing to accept and submit yourself to God and

to his spirit and what he's doing in the world, you you can't be forgiven. You can't you can't

be healed. Right? They were rejecting rather than seeing what God was doing in the world,

which was Christ himself, right? And what he was doing in the world, rather than seeing

that and trying to get on board with that and be healed from their sin, they were rejecting

it. So if you if you reject Christ, if you reject God's provision, right, for for our sin and our

wickedness, then you you can't be healed from by definition. Right. But yeah, definitionally. Yeah.

Father, thank you for that. That was fascinating. Yeah. And great. Thank you for having me. Thanks.