Blurry Creatures - EP: 469 Rat Temples, Mormon Gods, and a Death Cult on the Ganges with Jeremy Jenkins

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

Here is the uncomfortable thing nobody in church wants to say out loud. The spells work. The witch doctor heals. The rituals deliver. Jeremy Jenkins has spent years studying the world's religions and standing inside their holiest places, and he is done pretending the power is not real. A world religions expert, pastor, and professor, he sits down with Luke and Nate to explain why everything that works is not good, and why that single idea changes how you read every faith on earth.From the Hindu death cult of Varanasi, where bodies burn on the Ganges around the clock, to the rat temples, to what Mormons truly believe about a man becoming a god, Jeremy traces the same pattern through all of it. Every system runs on a transaction, a treadmill of works and offerings to something on the other side that wants to be worshiped. He ties it to the divine council, the principalities and powers, and a night in India when something holds him down and chants over him until he calls on Jesus. If you have ever wondered what the church is actually fighting, this is the map. Jeremy Jenkins is a regular contributor to Stranger Theology, the theological project from Blurry Creatures and Dr. Joel Muddamalle that digs into the deep end of the Bible the church tends to avoid. If this conversation scratched an itch, that is where the itch gets scratched every week. Subscribe to the Stranger Theology Substack for essays, deeper dives, and more from voices like Jeremy, and join the community thinking seriously about the supernatural world Scripture actually describes. This Episode is Sponsored By: http://blurrygold.com/ - Get a FREE Gold & Silver Kit while supplies last! https://preborn.com/blurry - Visit the PreBorn! website or dial #250 and use keyword BABY to donate today. https://homechef.com/blurry - Get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box & free dessert for life! - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you're like us, you're out there looking for that story, that true story. You're down that rabbit hole. You want something that's authentic, one of a kind, and you don't want to be fooled with things that are just knockoffs. No, you want the real deal, and you want the best you can get. You want a cashmere sweater that's like the chest hair on Bert Reynolds. That's right. Where can you find that, Nate? Quinn's. It focuses on high-quality, wardrobe staples and premium materials like 100% Mongolian cashmere,

organic cotton, or merino wool. The styles are timeless, versatile, just like back in the 80s when everything was iconic. And the weather's changing, right? A lot of us you start thinking about, hey, we've been wearing shorts and teas all summer. It's time to get into the fall wardrobe. A lot of us are looking and saying, hey, I don't want to wear that same thing I wore all last fall. I want some 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters to start at 60 bucks. That's right.

I want premium pants, fitted teas and polos. All these things we found at Quinn's. That's right. Everything at Queens is 50 to 80% off from other similar brands. And they worked regularly with ethical factories and they cut out the middleman. So you're paying for high quality, no brand markup. It's like you're in a time machine. going back to the days when they made things really good.

You know, I love what I've gotten. They've got some amazing staples, some really good 100% cotton teas I wear all the time. And there's a merino sweater that I'm about to break out here for the fall weather. So find your next fall favorites at Quinn's. Download the Quinn's app for app exclusive offers or go to quins.com slash blurry. You get free shipping on your order in 365 day returns, Nate. It's now available in Canada. So if you live in America's hat, you can get it as well.

And the UK. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com. Quins.com slash Blurry. There's this place in India called Varnasi. In Hinduism, they believe in Samsara, which is reincarnation, the cycle of life, death, and rebirth over and over and over again. What dictates your standing in Samsara is karma. What you put out will return back to you in this life or in life to come.

Everybody in Hinduism is cremated, nobody's buried. And there's a belief, if you're cremated there and your ashes are spread in the Ganges of Varnasi, that you achieve Moksha, which is the release from the cycle of reincarnation. We went and saw it. I don't mean to trivialize it. I promise for listeners who don't know me personally, like I don't normally say things like this, but if you're familiar with Lord of the Rings,

like we still talk about it as if it's Mordor. You kind of feel the same way when you walk into Barnasi. It's like, oh, man, you know, should we even be here? Going down to the river, you're seeing bodies being burned at these cremation gats right down the river. All day. All day, all night. At night, you can take boats out on the Ganges.

You can just see the flames all night. We talk often about the principalities of powers, Thrones, Dominions, connected to world religions. So we're bringing in a world religion expert. Why do Hindus have a death cult where they burn bodies 24 hours a day and what do they believe about the afterlife? Why do certain religions do crazy things like worship rats? What do Scientologists actually believe? What does it mean to go clear?

And what makes Christianity different than the rest of the world religions? All this and more with our friend from Stranger Theology, Jeremy Jenkins. We're getting into world religions. Stay tuned. The history of our earth is so different from what we can imagine. Enjoy to journey. The Smithsonian, that if they found out, found out about a large skeleton somewhere was to go get it.

I'm going to assume at least one person is right, because if one person's right, it bust the paradigm. It all goes back to the fallen chair. And the problem with the modern day church, they have a very truncated view of the supernatural. This backdrop that's just pregnant with all kinds of meaning associated with this Mount Hermon event. And this guy defects. from the kingdom. That's a big deal. Welcome back to blurry creatures. We're excited to be in the basement today, our in-house theologian at Stranger Theology. If you don't know what we're doing over at Stranger Theology camp, we're trying to put some wheels on the weird blurry verse and give up space

for theologians to come in and talk about all things that Heiser kind of started. And we got Jeremy Jenkins in the house. You help contribute to that. You're also a world religions expert. And a new member of the tinfoil hat club, here it is, boom. Yeah, I'll wear it proudly. All your EMF is blocked. Yeah. Make sure that. So that's better than the tinfoil hat at home.

It lets the blurry thoughts in, but keeps your mind clear. And Jeremy, we were talking, you know, these last few days about. You have to put it on, though. Oh, do I? Do I have to wear it the whole time? No, we don't have to wear it. Don't let Nate push you into thing. He's bullying you into it.

Hey, we want to see if it fits for the people out there. You got a beautiful bald head. Let her roll. Look like a cancer patient. There we go. No, dude, you look like you're ready for the like. Nothing like a beanie in June. A blurry fight, dude.

Yeah. I'll wear it though. It looks like a beanie in June. If it gets cold in here because Ben likes to keep the AC a little too high. So we have our EMF beanie's for that. Sorry, but I derailed you. As you do. That's what I do.

No, but Jeremy Jenkins is our new friend. Obviously, it works for strange theology. Founder and executive director of all things, all people. Yeah. Pastor, lead pastor at the element church in Forest City, North Carolina. the adjunct professor of religion, Garner Webb. You went to Liberty University. You were aflame.

Just like our favorite Miami Dolphins quarterback Malik Willis. Yeah. And also Dr. Brian Litvin, our new friend. Was getting text messages from friends about blurry creatures early on. Yeah. So he knew. Yeah. Yeah.

You've got a podcast, uh, into the dark. And this is fun because I think it's really, tell us his thoughts on Bigfoot. No, we're not there. I'm getting there. No, but I think this is really fun because this is, this ends up being a crossover for us between our stranger theology project, which of course, as Nate said, one of the things we're trying to do with blurry creatures is we have theological conversations. We have conversations

that are not necessarily theological, but have a theological basis to it. And a lot of what we've done here and the reason this show exists has to do with the work of Dr. Michael Heiser in Unseen Realm. And is it time for something? It is. Okay. It's 2 o'clock. But obviously the space that was we created with Dr. Joel was meant to be sort of what are the what's the underpinnings of theology that really hold up this idea of the unseen realm what Nate calls or people have called the blurry versus this idea of a supernatural and this is going to be a really fun conversation we dive into your expertise which is world religions right and cults especially we did we did a cross of a project a long time ago with the guys from cultish love those dudes but much of understanding

the Pauline paradigm, right? This idea of principalities and powers is understanding that a lot of these world of religions, whether it be Islam or Hinduism, things like, you know, neo-paganism in Wiccan, and also going into places like Scientology or the Mormon church and Latter-day Saints all operate in this realm. And so you're not only a person who studied, but also been on the ground to go to those places. We're going to go to some of those places today. But we're with had some of Bigfoot.

Yeah. Before you guys came along. I mean this, seriously. So as you mentioned, Nate, like, so there's guys in my church. So specifically two guys, Nathan, Fulton, and then Butch Hobson. Shout out Nate and Butch. Yeah, they are huge, blurry guys. And really, once I started all things, all people and doing a lot of things on podcasting

and social media, people would ask me about Bigfoot all the time or, you know, aliens especially now aliens is like the huge thing right now but all things all feral people yeah so like 10 years ago I probably were like laughed it off yeah but then between coming up to you know the Heiser stuff which I'm sure we'll talk about yeah and then you know like I said getting sent every episode of blurred creatures I'm sorry you know I don't I don't know exactly where I lie but at the same time when we start talking about like Genesis 5 and 6 Nephilim we start talking about the fact that there is a very real spiritual component to this reality.

Sometimes like, you know, Dr. Mike called an unseen realm. I usually talked about it and say, you know, it's the spiritual component to this world. It's not a different world. It's so interwoven into our day-to-day lives that when I see something like Bigfoot or aliens or something like that, you know, not only am I comfortable saying, you know, I don't know, but I'm not surprised anymore to find out that there's parts of our world that don't seem to fit into, you know, my, like, concrete box paradigm. So when I see stuff like that, I just go, yeah, I don't know. But at this point, I mean, should anything really surprise us?

You know, like it seems like there's a new conspiracy theory proven true, like every day in the last two years. It was the unseen realm. Now it's the blurry realm. The blurry realm. It's getting a little more in a focus, but we still don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, like the kaleidoscope is starting to focus in. Just kind of like, oh, there are all this other stuff's out there. Yeah, I mean, it's weird. I mean, I think that, you know, Heiser for a lot of us kind of started us out to make sense of these things. We grew up hearing and thank God for him. I think he gets a lot of praise, but there's also a lot of trolls to try to turn them down just because stuff he was saying was ahead of his time. Yeah. And that's usually what happens with theologians who venture to try and put some focus on.

on some of these things that we just skip over. Well, and it's funny because he was well known. And I had the opportunity to have one conversation at length with him before he passed away, which was amazing. And then having Dr. Lutomali, Joel, as a good friend, I feel like I'm continuing to have those conversations. Nothing that Dr. Mike brought up was new, you know, and I know you guys know that. It's really just, we can get into this later, but just during the Enlightenment, you know,

a lot of amazing things happened, but one thing that really plagued the church back then and still today is, you know, a Western empiricism that dictates that something can't be seen, taste, touch, smelled, or tested, that it's not real, or it's a matter of faith. And so what happened is angels, demons, you know, spiritual power, spiritual warfare, all these things that are unexplainable. You see in the pages of scripture, but you can't test. You can't see. You can't see. You can't. You can't see. You can't. You can't. touch, people have sort of nestled it into, well, that's a matter of faith. And in all reality, and a lot of what I do is through teaching about world religions, through exploring world religions, is showing people that's like, hey, like, through these other religions,

these people are interacting with that spiritual component to reality. And it's the same spiritual realm that you're interacting with, right? But different deity. Yeah, different deities, different powers, different forces at play. And so, so, yeah, so Dr. Mike, I'm, I'm just as indebted to him as you guys are. And so it's cool to be here with you guys because I think we've sort of been running parallel roads for a long time. We could kick it off with that religion question. Do you think they're actually talking to some deity through their religion? Because you would think over time, if we weren't, if human beings weren't spiritual, eventually we'd outgrow.

the religion thing. But we seem to go harder into it. Oh, man. Yeah, man. So early on, so I graduated my undergrad degree in religion, but I joke all the time that it was just one religion. It was Christianity. I did almost zero coursework on quote unquote world religions or anything like that. And so I ended up in youth ministry in Western North Carolina, where I still live today. And, you know, it didn't care about other religions, didn't care to know. about other religions until I was by vocation. I was working in a school and a young man sat across from me. I was an IT guy and his family was Hindu and he had been born in India and we struck up, you know, a good friendship, you know. And I really felt a desire to share the gospel with him.

But I really quickly figured out that like the way I see the world, the way I interpret reality, the way I interpret truth and morality and the way he sees the world interprets truth. truth reality, morality was completely and utterly different. And I was not equipped to have that conversation. And so it started me down a journey of studying just Hinduism. Hinduism was really the first religion that I started studying seriously. And it was just to be able to reach this one kid. And but before I knew it, it was like a snowball going down a hill.

Like I was laying up at night thinking about Islam and these cults and things like that. And man, what do they believe? Like, how do they answer these huge cosmic level questions? Like, nobody had ever told me. And I can remember I grew up outside Chicago. My day was a truck driver. And driving around with him in the summertime, we would pass the Church of Scientology in downtown Chicago like two, three times a week. And I was always like, man, I want to go in there. But I felt like, and nobody had ever said this to me. Maybe you guys have had this experience. but like I became a Christian my freshman year high school, but it really quickly shaped my life. And I felt like good Christians don't go into those types of places, like even if their intentions are noble and evangelistic.

So going through this process as a young adult now, learn about these religions. It was very academic at first. It was purely evangelistic at first, but then started traveling and starting to go see these places. So spending time in India, and I don't know if you guys have ever been, but like it's one of the most deeply spiritual places you all ever go. And Nate, to get to your question, I remember being in a hotel, and right outside my hotel room,

there was a woman made who was lighting incense to the Indian deity, Ganesh, the elephant god. And I walked out, and I mean, I had seen that. From the moment you land at the airport in India, you see that stuff, you know, it's everywhere. But I just remember having this moment of clarity where I was like, forgive me for the double negative, but that's not going, no way.

Like that adoration. Yeah. That's not going nowhere. And that night actually I had a, to this day, what's probably the worst like spiritual warfare experience I had. What happened? So people who try to explain these things away would say it was sleep paralysis, but I was laying in bed. I had a roommate, a pastor friend that I really respect. And I wake up and I hear chanting outside.

my hotel room door and I thought it was Telugu, which is the local language in this part of South India. And but I got up or tried to get up and couldn't get up and the chanting started getting louder and louder and louder and louder. And I realized like, oh, that's not Telugu. And couldn't move, felt just a huge dark presence come over me. And of course I was terrified. Like I'm not going to pretend like I wasn't scared. But it was so loud and my buddy Randy sleeping in the same room like he's not waking up and couldn't talk, couldn't move, but began just had to have been the Holy Spirit because I'm not wise enough to just start internally saying the name of Christ, Jesus, like Jesus, Jesus. And eventually it stopped and I was able to move and I got up. And of course,

I was terrified, but by the grace of God, I was able to go back to sleep. And I woke up the next morning and my buddy was already up and I sprung out of bed and was just like, hey, what I'm about to tell you actually happened. And so, go downstairs and I'm, you know, pretty shaken, but, um, start sharing it with some of my Indian friends who are all believers. And, and you know, it's funny, like, when you share that with, like, maybe an American is you'll get a very diverse range of reactions ranging from like explaining it away or sleep paralysis or like, you ate something funny to spiritual food. Yeah, yeah, but, uh, all those guys were like, yeah, that was a demon, you know, and, and, uh, I wish I could say, like,

you know, going to that question of like, I don't think I necessarily, I'm embarrassed to say that already being in pastoral ministry, I did not have the parameters to deal with that, which is why I love what stranger theology is doing. I think it's giving, and going back to Dr. Heiser and Joel, what they're doing is it's giving people parameters and paradigms to interpret biblically what's happening to them in a day-to-day basis, which I, for some reason, even after like a solid education and a couple years of pastoral ministry had not developed yet, to get back to the question, they're like, I believe that the world's religions in various different like permutations, right? Like they're not all one and the same. At best are man's feeble

attempts to reach God. We look at Acts 17, Paul at the Ariopagus, and he looks at the Athenians, the Stoics and the Epicureans, and he says, I can tell that you're a deeply spiritual people and you're trying to grope your way to God. And that's what the world's religions are. At worst, though, these religions are ways in which the enemy and his forces are robbing God, Yahweh, of the glory that is only due to him. And in actually the most sinister part, and the saddest part perhaps, is that people, I don't want to say fall for it,

because of course, many of these religions have very long and rich histories that, you know, go far beyond just somebody falling for something. But sure is because these things work, oftentimes people in the West at least, where we sort of have more of like a golden corral view of religion. Sure. Is that we look at Hinduism or we look at Wicca paganism and we say, well, hey, it works for them. And what I've really over the last seven or eight years been just shouting from the rooftops is, hey, not everything that works is good. And if it is true that there's dark spiritual forces behind that, that worship, that's receiving that. And all they have to do to get you to continue to worship them is to give you something that you want, then, you know, they're just leading you astray.

And scripture says the enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy. And so that's where those things are heading. We've kind of made that point, I think, on the show a few times that, like, there's this, like, there seems to be this some pervasive idea that, like, more ancient peoples were just kind of dumb, like, worship a rock or a stone or a tree. But I think somewhere in the show, I don't even know if it was Hauser or not, was talking about how with any of this,

there's a transaction. As you just said, and I think it's important to reiterate, there's this transaction of power or of getting something in return because people aren't stupid. Even the ancients are dumb. No. You don't do something without having a return, right?

Whether it be the horrific stuff where people were sacrificing their children to Moloch and burning their infants alive in order for to have heart. harvest or fertility. Yeah. These things were all gross, demonic ways, but they were getting to return. Yeah.

Right. And I think that's what, I think as you pointed out at the top of things very, very pertinent, like this idea of our imperialistic view of things, right? Would say that's absurd. Yeah. Right? That a modern man, a thinking man would know better. And yet we know that this is, throughout history, this is what has happened.

And that's why people continue to follow these religions. Yeah. action and I'm reminded too that like of animistic societies where you have a witch doctor. Yeah. And you go and people get healed. We talk about the show. They get healed. Yeah.

Right. Not always. Not always, but it happens. Otherwise they're the guys out of a job. Right. Yeah. So. Yeah.

There's like a dysfunctional relationship, but sometimes it's functional. Yeah. There's a miscellologist named Paul Heber. He's passed on now. But in Christian misiology and anthropology, Paul Heber was the man and still is. And he wrote an article called The Flaw of the Excluded Middle, which I think all of your listeners, just by the very nature that they're listening to the show, should listen to it. And he said that one of the greatest secularizing forces of the 20th century was American missionaries, was that they were exporting a version of Christianity that didn't have room to deal with the witch doctor. Because what would happen is the American missionary for a long time.

And he had grown up a missionary kid and had been a missionary himself in South Asia. and he gave the example of a missionary who had gone to a place with the gospel and with medicine and was doing the things that missionaries do even to this day, but that somebody came to him and it was sick and the medicine wasn't working or something like that. And the man kind of sent him away without sort of exercising James where it says that the prayer of a righteous man is a powerful and effective thing as it's working, right? And so that man went back. to the witch doctor. And in this missionary example that Paul Hebert gives

is like in the 20th century especially, but of course going all the way back to the Enlightenment is not that science is a bad thing, but of course we just have allowed it to become our dominant interpretive vehicle for truth and experiences that. Like we have the high realm, which is God high and lifted up angels and demons,

but that's distant. That's kind of how for a long time we viewed it as, hey, that's distant, that's not near to us. That's not my day to day life. And then you have the low realm, which is the natural realm and physical, the things that can be seen, taste, touch, smelled tested. But there in the middle is this huge gap, Hebert said, that we've excluded this middle where there's the intersection of these two, quote unquote, worlds. Heiser would later say realm, right? And I think that what Hebert makes the point of saying is like, if you look at the scriptures, those two realms are never dissected.

You look at Acts, like read Acts and tell me that like, you know, these witches that were in these villages where Paul was preaching the gospel, like it said, like they were doing miracles too. You know, these people who were just merely using the name of Jesus without any faith, they were doing miracles too. And so I think that one of the biggest things that, and I think you guys have been a big part of it and so many others who have conversations like this is it's confronting the modern American Church with the notion that like, what do you do when you see other religions,

whether they're animistic or something else or neo-pagans, new age, what do you do when you see power in those things, right? And unfortunately, for a very long time, I think that that's shaken the faith of many Christians because unfortunately they've been led to believe that if something works, then it's inherently good. Yeah. And that's a problem. There's a problem. Yeah. I mean, I think it starts with like going up the church and throwing out ideas like idols, idol worshiping. And they don't really have the ancient understanding what an idol was. Your phone's an idol.

That's true. We're watching football on Sunday as an idol. You better be in church. You're going to watch that night coast guys. So you're like, you don't watch that 9 o'clock game. That's your idol. You're not in church. You're watching 9 o'clock football. And then you read about the gods of Egypt and Prince of Persia. Yeah. And there's territorial spirits that are given names, right? do you think that the religion matches the territorial, like sometimes these spirits have a personality. Yeah.

And then that country adopts sort of. Right. Because I do think they're all, all these religions go back to a deity. Yeah. And usually there's some sort of supernatural transaction between how they got the, their Bible or their book or their rules. Yeah. And it's always like some, like Joseph Smith story. Yeah, you know.

I couldn't draw you a map, you know, and obviously that's not what you're asking. Like, I feel like sometimes when people hear me talk about this stuff. But we view it as like they're not real religion. They're just false religions. Right, yeah. There's nothing behind it. Yeah. Yeah.

So I do think that predominantly when we look at the world of religions is that there is a moment in time where demons, there is a moment in time where some power principality set these things in motion. You use Joseph Smith. That's a really fascinating example because it's so recent. We have a very well-documented history of what that process looked like, and it fits the bill exactly, right? Angels appeared to him and deviated the gospel message, which the last words in Revelation were, hey, that's going to happen. So you think about that, like, a lot of Christians don't realize that. They're like, hey, the word even says, even if it comes from the mouth of angels, don't add or remove. anything to this word. So do you think like maybe God put those words in the scriptures because

that is something that these enemies do? And I would say absolutely. And we have a long, long history of the world's religions as examples of that. Yeah. Angels love to mess with humans and we talk about that since the beginning. And it's not always good. Right. Most of the time, it's not good. Can you take us back to India because you started there and kind of do some stuff on talk a little about Hinduism. Yeah. For that example, because this is a religion that,

I mean, you have the second most populous nation in the world. And as far as like documentation goes, it's the oldest religion on planet Earth. They had the most babies last year, by the way. Did they really? Yeah.

Yeah, I believe it. Yeah. Yeah. So like I said, Hinduism was for me the gateway into studying this, but from an early point, it was always like studying it, studying the worldview to better,

in my sociology, we would say is contextualized the gospel. And so it led me to start traveling in India and seeing it for myself. You know, I think that for most people, like I've taken some friends with me before. And I would say that almost every single one of them, like, they feel it. You know, like there is a feeling of like you talk about idol worship, but just it's not a, it's not a sanitary place physically, but it's also not a sanitized place spiritually either.

Like you are aware that there is worship to this vast pantheon of gods. You smell it. Like I'm to a point now where like the smell of incense sort of turns my stomach because I've been around it in so many different settings. I mean, I've been there many times. A few years ago set out to,

there's this place in India called Varnaasi. Joel loves this story. but I took a group of guys from my church to Varanasi. In Varanasi, so in Hinduism, they believe in samsara, which is reincarnation, the cycle of life, death, and rebirth over and over and over again. And what dictates your standing in samsara is karma. So the idea that what you put out

will return back to you in this life or in life to come, or in lives to come. And so there's a belief, though, everybody in Hinduism is cremated, nobody's buried. Really? Yeah. And so there's a belief, though. I'd imagine that there's probably some logistical reasons for that.

Yeah. There's probably some logistical reasons for that. But also there is the idea that like, you know, your soul or what they would call ottman, right, the physical doesn't matter. You know, it's not like in Christianity, there's going to be a reunification of this body. and your soul at the end of days. Yeah. Right.

So you see a great length in Christian burial to preserve the body. There's no such belief in Hinduism. So everybody's cremated, and there's a belief that if your ashes are spread in the Ganges River in Varanasi, which the Ganges River is like the holiest site in all of Hinduism, and in Varnasi is the holiest city,

that if your ashes are, if you're cremated there and your ashes are spread in the Ganges and Varnasi, that you achieve Moksha, which is the release from the cycle of reincarnation. And so it's the most sought-after way to die, essentially. And so I had always wanted to see it and took a group of guys with me from my church, some of them pastors, some of them just friends of mine who are just as adventurous as me. And we went and saw it. And I mean, it was, yeah, it was crazy.

Like me and my friends, I don't mean to trivialize it. I promise for listeners who don't know me personally, like, I don't normally say things like this, but if you're familiar with Lord of the Rings, like, we still talk about it as if it's Mordor. Like, oh, we're familiar. You know, but like it was just a really dark place. One does not simply. Yeah. Well, it's kind of, yeah.

Casually mentioned. You kind of, you kind of feel the same way when you walk into Barnaisie. It's like, oh, man, you know, should we even be here? Yeah. And, you know, going down to the river, you're, you're seeing bodies being burned at these cremation gats right down the river. Was it all day? All day, all day, all night. 24 hours. The footage, you know, we have footage both from day and night, but at night you can take

both out on the Ganges. You're not supposed to record, but I mean, we do. But like, you can just see the flames all night. And so we, you know, we were down there and trying to talk to people. The big thing for me is like, I can learn about you in a book. Yeah. But I want to, I want to talk to you. Like so as best as we were able to, of course, a huge language barrier, but English is present all over India, is just trying to talk to people like, hey, why do you believe this? You know, what's happening here and just getting that? You know, but it was, yeah, it was a really, really difficult thing to see with our own eyes, not just because, of course, it was death, but then just this belief that like, okay, that this

is their freedom, you know? How much is it is like? culturally a thing, you know, like the South is culturally Christian, right, versus people who actively practice. Yeah. I mean, it, it would be foolish to say that all like 1.2 billion Hindus are devout. Yeah, that's obviously not true. Just like, you know, however many two billion Christians there are. I would say that when you get to the point where you're in a place like Varan,

And you're seeing, you know, not everybody who's paid this money, because it's very expensive, which is why there's not, it's not everybody going up there to do it. There's probably a large variance of the people who are participating in it as like, hey, my loved one has passed away. But what's not a variance is the people who are there all the time is like you'll see members of like the Domcast, which is the group of people whose job it is to perform the cremations. right and you know you see people who you know you were talking about idols like we were standing essentially in a crematorium looking down at the cremations as they were happening and there was a

a man who had covered himself in the ashes and was sitting there you know meditating or praying as bodies were being burned and that's what he does all day so just like any other religious group it's a huge spectrum but i'd say that there is is a jarring amount of like deeply seated spiritual belief in practice in places like this. And like I said earlier, you know, I walk around places like that and continue to remind myself.

Because I'm, by the grace of God, I've not been, people ask me all the time, they're like, hey, you must experience spiritual war for all the time. And I really don't, I really haven't. And I attribute that to just a grace from God to be able to do this kind of work. which is always why I love to bring people with me

because I have friends who are, man, they're prayer warriors. Like they're more sensitive to that kind of stuff than I am. And we just constantly remind ourselves like, hey, this isn't going nowhere. It's interesting how like world travel changes here no matter what. Like you grow up Christian, you go to another country. Yeah. Like when I went to Japan, I was like,

this is so different than anything I have ever experienced. Yeah. It's almost like I'm in another. Oh, yeah. Like flew off. of Earth and went to another planet because it was so different how they operate. How much, and I think this is a big part of why people deconstruct. They grow up Christian, they go to another country and they see like, well, all, like,

billions of people just go to hell. Right. And then they can't put together the difference between what's cultural and what's spiritual. Yeah. What do you, what would you say is like the one thing that all religions have in common? That's different than Christianity? I think, well, probably the one that I'm confronted with the most, like, you know, people who follow me on Instagram, like, they'll see I'm doing a project. And even if they're believers, like, the big one for me was latter day saints.

Like, when I really began to talk a lot about latter day saints or Mormonism, that seemed to be like a golden calf for a lot of evangelicals because they had, they had friends who were Mormons. And they would be like, you know, hey, like they're just trying to be good people just like us. And you hear that kind of stuff all the time. You look at, you know, maybe a Buddhist or something like that. And it's just like, man, like they're not bigots. They're not hateful. They're super nice. You know, same thing.

Yeah, you go to like, if you guys have been to Utah, like, man, it's like, Salt Lake and Provost, like the cleanest places. The businesses are great. Everybody's super nice. And so I think that when we talk about the commonalities of all religions, what you find is usually if somebody is a devout religious person in almost any faith, like they're, there is a sense of morality of becoming like an upstanding person in some form or fashion, depending on, you know, different views. I think though what's interesting, like you brought up

deconstruction, and I completely agree. I think not that, not that churches need to be teaching world religions. I don't know if that necessarily, like, what's funny is like there's people at my church who don't even know that I do stuff like this because I don't talk about it from stage that much, right? But we make it available on the outside. But I do think that, one huge failure that the church has done that's led to what you're talking about is that we have forgotten the transcultural nature of the gospel you know it's it's difficult to be hindu and not be indian it's it's difficult to be buddhist and not be south asian it's difficult to be um you know if you're if you're a muslim and you you're white you're from america you still like you're

you're going to read the Quran in Arabic, right? But early on in the lives of the apostles and Acts, we have the Jerusalem Council, which was as the gospel left Jerusalem and went out to the Gentiles, they stumbled on the notion that's like, oh, we need to figure out just how Jewish, a Christian needs to be.

And of course, Peter and these guys get together and they're arguing, and Peter stands up and says, brothers, let us not make it more difficult for someone to follow Christ. And early on in the church, we see, a great effort to make sure that as the gospel is brought to places, we're not bringing Israeli culture, American culture with it. The gospel is transcultural, meaning it supersedes all the cultures that it exists in. And actually, the gospel becomes the most integral part

of your identity. And it produces a new culture in the cultures that it exists inside of. And so I think one of the great failures of the modern church is that people do, people are able to travel. And they see and experience these things in other places. And they go, you know, hey, man, when you go to Asia, people are super hospitable there and they're super generous, maybe even more hospitable and more generous than we are in the West. So Christianity has produced a faulty culture and Taoism or Shinto in Japan or Buddhism in Japan or Confucianism or Hinduism or Buddhism produced this beautiful thing. And it's like, well, no, this, all humans are created in the image of God. And our cultures reflect different parts of that image, right? Yeah. But the gospel

can go into any culture in bloom because the gospel is not dependent on human culture. And so, like, when I began to see that, travel did continue to change me in a huge way. But more than anything, it was like, oh, man, like, I'm not an American Christian, you know, like, or at least when I go to the other places or I'm talking to somebody from a different, I'm not trying to make them more like an American evangelical. I'm trying to introduce to them the interpretive lenses, like the gospel, when we talk about worldview,

the gospel is a way to see and interpret the world. And my belief is that what other religions provide, what other philosophies provide, what other systems provide is a lens, but each lens is shaded differently and they do different things. What I believe that the gospel is, is corrective lenses.

I believe that the gospel, is a way to see the world the way God has always intended for you to see it. It's weird because it's like every single world religion feels like you're picking up a heavy backpack and you're putting it on. And in Western culture,

we just look at, and we go, all backpacks are stupid. Or they're all the same. Yeah, or they're all the same. They're all jansports. So we want the freedom of Christ without Christ, whereas they want the burden. And some of these, you're like,

why would some of these countries, do these things. Like, correct if I'm wrong with, isn't there a religion that protects rats? Well, there's a temple in India that it's called the rat temple. So there's a rat god in Hinduism. Master Splinter.

And so you could look it up. I mean, it's probably, you know. There's a sewer and there's a green news. Yeah, there's turtles who hang around that temple. There's a rat temple. Yeah, but so yeah, there's this rat temple. I've not been there. And I'll be honest.

I have no problem with rats. My wife, I think, would disown me if I ever went to this spot. She would just die. But yeah, so, you know, and this is a great example, too. And it's easy for us to look at and be like, how stupid. And for your listeners, I would just say, like, I understand that reaction. And I'd be lying if I said every once in a while I didn't look at some stuff and be like, how dumb do you have to be?

But at the end of the day, when we're talking about religions, when we're talking about beliefs, when we're talking about worldviews, we're talking about the things that people usually consider to be the most important thing about them. And so the sooner we can get to the point where we're not shaken by that and we're able to say, tell me more. I want to get down to the heart of who you are and how you see the world because I want to begin to speak the gospel. And Andy Bannister is a great apologist from the UK.

He does a lot of work with atheism and Islam. And I had the privilege of talking to him a few years ago when, you know, I mean, as much protests as there are right now, 2020 and 2021. the Western world was just filled with protests. And he said, you know, honestly, like, I think a lot of Western Christians make a huge mistake when they see those things and they get angry and just try and explain it away.

He said, man, the questions these people have, the things that they're angry about, that's a cry from the heart. And I believe that the gospel is the only answer to the questions they're asking. So I love when people do that. What do you think that is? What do you think those questions are?

I think when we study like worldview, when I did my, you know, graduate level work, I got down to just like the nitty gritty of what worldview is. What I think is that everybody wants to know where everything comes from. Everybody wants to know where things are going. Everybody wants to know what does it mean to be successful? Who is my daddy? Yeah, yeah.

What does he do? What does he do? You know, everybody wants to know what it means to be successful. Everybody knows, everybody wants to know what it means to be good. Everybody wants to know, is there a problem that humanity is facing. And I think, and I'm just parroting anybody who's familiar with Christian miscellology knows that's like day one of your worldview class. And I'm just so firmly convinced that at our core, we all are on a search for the answers to those types of

questions. And what's interesting about Western society is, you know, there's two things you're not supposed to talk about, politics and religion. Just so that goes to happen that those are the two things we're the worst at, you know, like, because we don't know how to talk about them. But I have found that when I talk to people from other faiths and I ask questions about, like, so where, you know, what do you think of everything? That's all they want to talk about. And they're so interested, you know, if I could convince your listeners, you don't, I'm not a great evangelist. Like, I work with men and women in Christian ministry who are phenomenal evangelists. I approach evangelism like anthropology. Like, I want to get to know the heart of this person that I'm

talking to. I had a professor Dave Cashin at Columbia International who he would tell me that he would go to the Y every day and whichever clerk or not clerk, whichever person was checking him in at the desk. He would ask him a worldview question. He'd be like, where do you think everything comes from? And in like, like you think like it's kind of, sounds corny, but then you're like, dude, that's, that's an amazing thing. If you can get somebody to have that conversation with you, like, you're only a couple steps away from being able to really, because what are they going to do, they're going to say, well, this is what I think? Or I don't know.

What do you think? Right. And man, it's a beautiful bridge. So what you were saying is like, what are those questions? Not to trivialize and not to reduce it, but to talk about these things, you have to do those things. You have to reduce it. It's like, I think there's two branches of religion, really, is that, you know, you have

people who were born into Hinduism. They've never questioned it. People who were born into, you know, whatever religion. Islam. Islam, right? But then what we experience here in the West, the most, is the most. is people choose their religion. And I think that a huge motivator in our culture

is people want to know where they come from. People want to know what success is. And they also want control. I think that a big part of like what we were talking about, spiritual power is we see things like neo-paganism and the New Age on the rise. And I was talking to a woman in Asheville, North Carolina, which is about an hour from where I live.

And Asheville is like the Portland and Southeast. It's very deeply spiritual. And this woman is, I mean, she's an important. important person in like the neo pagan movement in the southeast. And I just asked her, it's like, you know, I've noticed a huge uptick in young people, um, believing in this kind of stuff. And, you know, I have old people in my church who think it's Harry Potter and think it's, you know, anime. But what do you think it is? And she just, man, she just was like, I think people are looking for control. And I think that this is one way that they feel it. And I, and I was like,

or guilt and shame. Yeah. Oh, yeah. That's a huge. You heard about Upwork. I haven't heard about about Upwork. Yeah, Upwork gives businesses, like Blurry, fast access to highly skilled specialists with deep expertise. You can fill critical skill gaps. You can launch projects fast, and you can scale support up or down. Upwork is the place to find it. With Business Plus, you can access the top 1% of talent on Upwork. We've got AI-powered shortlisting, and you can create a curated shortlist of top freelancers matching our goals. Thousands of growing businesses, Nate, are using Upwork to hire highly skilled freelance professionals for everything from one-off projects to ongoing support.

And there's over 170,000 freelancers holding five-star ratings you can hire with confidence right now on Upwork. That's right. So if you have a project, you have a business, if you have a company and you're trying to find somebody that can help you, Upwork is the place to go. And it's free to sign up. That's right. And posting a job is easy.

So visit Upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That's Upwork.com to connect to top talent, ready to help your business grow. That's Upwork. Upwork. Upw-O-R-K-com, Upwork.com. Why do you think some religions lead people towards, like, peace and self-sacrifice and others lead to, like, butchering people in the streets? Well, so, like, if we look at, like, Buddhism, say, like, you know, I think if you

ask most people, or even me, like, said, like, on the surface level, which religion seems the most peaceful, you'd probably end up saying Buddhism, right, or something like that where it's like it's very introspective it's very much about me self yeah um and um i would say some religions lead you down that path some religions you know we see horrible examples of islamic terrorism and you know child sacrifice by the ancient you know mollat cult and things like that i don't i couldn't tell you why one does one and the other does the other but what i would say is that the sooner we can realize that both of those things, however grotesque, one looks over more so than the other, are leading to the same spiritual destruction. And what's interesting,

I would actually say, like, interacting with Buddhism, studying Buddhism is what's been fascinating to me is the level of, when I say selfishness, I don't mean like greed, but just like a consumption with you, you know. And it's, and there's, which is funny because classic Buddhism, like Theravada Buddhism as taught by like the Buddha, there's actually no belief in the self. Like there's no immaterial part of you, or there's no soul.

So you don't have an identity? So they would say in Taravada Buddhism, which is like the most like loyal to the Buddhist teachings, is they would say that there is no soul self on Ottoman, whereas Hinduism teaches Atman, which is like the self. And they would say, say that what goes from life to life on the cycle of reincarnation is your karma. And so the more you detach from desire, like desire is the biggest word in Buddhism, is the less and less that

you desire and renounce the self, which looks very peaceful, right? Like what you were saying, it's like somebody looks at that and they go, how admirable. But really, it's a withdrawal. Whereas what's interesting to me about Christianity, one thing I think that it's, we could put Like a repression. Yeah. And with Christianity, though, there is, in true, like, biblically rooted Christianity, there is the opposite of withdrawal. There is, we want to be the salt and light of the world.

And so there's a moving towards other people. And there's a moving towards suffering, you know. Whereas in South Asian religions specifically, we see suffering that we're, we're kind of trying to get away from, you know. Yeah, I was, this is what I was going to ask, too. Like, what, as a survey of world religions, and you can look at all the ones we've discussed so far, how does that contrast with the message of hope in Jesus as opposed to?

Yeah. And then secondary to that, what do you think that says about the entities behind those systems? So there's a book by a very famous theologian named John Stock called the Cross of Christ. And it's amazing. And he has the, he, he talks about this. He talks about how, you know, going into the Buddhist temple and seeing the peaceful look on the Buddha's face as he meditates, you know, renounces himself from the world and, um, distances himself from, from suffering. And he said, you know, I can never believe in a God

without wounds. And he, and he quotes this, this poem. I believe it's by a man named Edward Stiletto, you know, where it basically says, could never believe in a God without wounds and no God has wounds, but thou alone. And I believe, going back to what you're talking about, like, what are the questions people are asking? Like, you know, it's probably in our time and place in the world, whether people realize it or not, one of the biggest questions they're asking is, like, the problem of evil and the problem of suffering. Like, what do we do with suffering? and I think Christians for too long have just sort of pretended that suffering isn't there. Yeah.

You know. Like the rich kids. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And that's our struggle is that when you come from the one king of kings and the true God, then there's going to be more wealth in his kingdom than anybody else's.

Yeah. But what's interesting to me is that when we look at, let's start with like South Asian religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, where there's this belief in karma. Just to put it bluntly, if I see someone suffering on the side of the road in India, they deserve it. Right? They've done something in a past life that has dictated that this is their standard. That's what they believe. That's what they would believe.

And now it's hard to, and I'm a big believer that when we're engaging with other religions, like, I'd never want to set up a straw man. There's a listener who just heard me say that. And they go, well, that's not true. But my belief is, hey, let's follow these belief systems to their logical conclusions. So is that a reason why they would want to not hurt a problem? a rat or something. Yeah, but it's also a reason why when they see suffering on the side of the road, they might not help you. Because it's deserved. It's deserved. And so when we see suffering in a in a carmic faith is it's not unjust, right? It's, that's just suffering. Right. His grandpa was a

real, hey hole. Well, or in a past life, he was, he did something. Even weirder. You know, he did something horrible that, that, that, to where he needs to live this life, you know, And then we could go through the whole gamut. Are they getting this from like familiar spirits that are telling them like stories of past lives and get kind of re-inventing this life? Scripture is an interesting thing in South Asian religions. It's not as integral as like you look at Islam and it's like, okay, Muslims are very familiar with the Quran. You look at Christians, hopefully. We all have multiple copies of the Bible in our house.

We have it on our phones. It's scripture in most South Asian religions, Hinduism and Buddhism especially, they're not sitting around reading it and studying it, at least not most of them. It's stories that are passed down from ancient times. And all throughout those stories, going back especially to like the oldest Hindu scriptures, the Vitas are stories of men and women who I'm reminded there's one very famous one, the Ganesh Pryana, which is a story of this king. And he was a righteous king.

Like he was a great king, but one day he started to get boils all over his skin and horrible things started happening to him and very Job-like kind of thing. And when he went and found this priest in the middle of the woods to ask, why are these horrible things happening to me? I'm a great king. My people love me is the man said, because in a past life, you did horrible things. And so it kind of leads, at least me, I think people are free to come to their own conclusions that when I see what that, that religious grouping believes about suffering, but then I see what Christianity believes about suffering. It's like, hey, we live in a broken world. And we are all born into sin. And we are all born into suffering. But A, there's hope. Paul tells us that suffering produces good things.

Yeah. But that also, above all of that, you can be sure, you know, when you're in Christian ministry and you start learning about counseling, you're told, hey, never tell somebody I understand what you're going through because you don't understand what they're going through. But I can rest assured that when I am suffering, there is someone who understands what I'm going through. And it's Christ because on the cross, we are told he became sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Galatians tells us that he became the curse. I believe that in the gospel Luke, when like it says that the sun's light disappeared and it became dark in the middle of the day, You know, I think, I think this goes back to Stott.

You know, he depicts that, hey, maybe it was at this moment that he became sin. So in that moment, each and every one of us can rest assured everything that you've suffered through, he has suffered through too. And he offers you victory because, right, he rose from the dead. And these things like, so you think about your, so when I'm talking to somebody from another faith, or even just somebody maybe who grew up in the church, maybe deconstructed or whatever. And I start talking about that. And I'm like, hey, listen, I can't rescue you from your suffering.

I can't make you feel better. And I don't know that you really want me to. But what I can tell you is that Christ took that suffering on the cross and he bore it. He became it so that in him you might become his righteousness, his goodness. And you are never alone in your suffering. So going back to Buddhism and Hinduism and Islam and these other faiths, like, I love when I get the opportunity to share that with somebody who comes from a background where they are told, whether, you know, actively told or just passively been led to believe because of the culture they grew up in, that suffering is something you can't be, that can't be redeemed. You know, it's something you need to just go through and that you need to work your way out of it. And I think that the Christian message, you know, obviously somebody could say,

I'm biased, which of course I am, but I can be fair, even in my bias. I think that to the listener who's hearing this, and maybe they've never talked about religions, they've never thought about this way, I think at their core levels, Christianity provides a type of hope that by itself is supernatural. Like, it's not human and its origin. Because I think that when you, like, if you locked up humanity in a room for a thousand years and said come up with a religion, I think it could come up with. Hinduism. I think it could come up with Islam. I think it could come up with Buddhism.

Even on its own and then you throw in these spiritual forces that I think are dictating those processes as well, I don't think humanity could have come up with Christianity on its own because it's so counter to our flesh. What ways you say? I think the idea, like when I look at all the other religious groups and I see gods or spiritual forces, the idea that God, God came himself and gave himself as a ransom for us. And that, you know, now we are identified not by our sin, not by our flesh and our struggles and our suffering,

but we are identified in and through him and him alone. I think that if somebody's listening to this and they're going, well, I think I could have come up with that. What I would say is we have, for the last 2,000 years, been born on third base, so to speak, like in the sense that it's very commonplace to us, because we've heard that message for our entire lives, even if we weren't Christians. But I think when we really, really begin to think about humanity and the nature of humanity, I think that what we prefer is legalism in some form of fashion, transaction, power.

If I do this, then this happens. And when we look at Christianity, that's missing. There's not a transaction, right? And that's the interesting thing about control, going back to that woman in Nashville. Like, you want to know what a lot of people struggle with in Christianity is God's sovereignty. You know, the idea that like, so you're telling, because what's funny, you were talking about animism earlier and you said, well, the, the witch doctor doesn't always heal. Well, it's like, my prayer doesn't always bring about healing either. Yeah.

You know, and we are entrusted to the sovereignty of a God who is king over all the cosmos. Yeah. And so. Well, there's this independence. that comes with Christianity too. Like Adam and Eve are created and then... It's like freedom. Yeah.

Like do something. Here you go. Here's a garden. Here's paradise. Do something. And I think that seems like a one you describe me in other religions. There's this top down mentality. Usually.

Christianity flips it. God comes down here below us. Elevates us. What other religion would do that? Or it says that happens. Yeah. And I mean, of course, you could probably, you know, there's people who.

probably would bring up examples. I hear all the time about, yeah. Oh, this Egyptian God was resurrected or this Egyptian God gave himself as a sacrifice. And usually it's never, it's never actually as plain as people like to make it. Yeah. But really, I think what we see in Christianity is, is something that just we see the intervention of God and his creation in such a way that I just think it provokes the mind and the heart to mystery in a way that I don't see in other faiths. And it feels like the other faces like this, it's workspace. And the Bible's pretty specific. Like it feels like that like in the southeastern religions, in Islam, in the LDS church.

Yeah. In some sex of Christianity. Yeah. It's like you got to work, work, work, work, work and hope that you're good enough. And I feel like it's like this enslaving, right? And it feels like if we're talking about the Pauline powers and the divine counsel and this Heiser worldview, that these entities behind these religions want slaves. Yeah. Right? Slaves to themselves. And yet Christ is the opposite. Paul says he's a slave to Christ.

Yeah. In his vernacular. Well, they're insecure. The deities are insecure. But my point is that like you're not, and the people are even more insecure. God wants you to love him and you can't, and you can't enslave someone and force them to love you. So he had to free humanity and say, yeah, now you have a choice. Paul, Paul and Colossians is, you know, riding to the church at Colossé. And he had heard that they had started like the, the Gentile believers. even some of the Jewish believers, they had started to turn back towards, you know, I think he gives the example of like, you know, the phases of the moon, you know, and, you know, you see in a Greco-Roman

world something that really is not that dissimilar to like modern neo-paganism, but even in the Jewish world, you see like, we have to keep the feasts and we have to give these certain offerings. And in the church at Colossé, this had been happening. And Paul said, you know, don't you know that Christ through the cross and the resurrection put the elemental spirits stoichi on which is I'm going to go ahead and give Joel minimally credit this is like his home run but the stoichi on he put them to open shame like you just said that they're insecure like I don't think we talk about that enough like this is not a yin and a yang this is not no battle of good and evil I use I use that language a lot to illustrate it but at the end of the day what we see is that these elemental spirits through the

cross and then the victory of the resurrection were put to shame. And so Paul says, so why would you go back to that? And Mike Winger, who of course, I think most people know, I heard him give it a great example of like what's happening in the spiritual world is he said, hey, when you're a kid and you're at the pool with your friends and one of your buddies pushes you into the pool, what's the last thing you do before you hit the water is you grab him and say, well, if I'm going, you're going with me. And And I think that, you know, the question of going back, Nate, to the very beginning of our conversation is like, hey, are there spiritual forces behind these other religions? Well, yes. And they're behind all sorts of things, not just religions. It's like, well, why? Like, why do they do it? They know, they can probably read, they've read Revelation just like us. Right. They're trying to bring as many of us with them. And they want to rob Yahweh of what is due to him, which is glory and worship and praise and adoration. And so what do these other religions give them? Yeah. And I think Salmody too, too, right? Like, I mean, it's his inheritance, right?

And we are his inheritance. And so they're in the same way trying to rob Christ of what is his, which is the nations and those people on those nations, which is a vindictive, it's a vindictive, you know, total collateral damage plan. Yeah. Like, I mean, this is what it is what it is. But again, like, I mean, the point of the whole conversation is that like,

Of course there's power there. You're talking to the neo pagan Wiccan person. There's no, the reason they do that is there, it's work. It's control. And some of it works. So we've had enough ex-witches on the show that have been like, yeah. I mean, all these spells and stuff I cast, yeah, it worked. But she's like, they would say that you just, you had to do more work and more work and more work.

Yeah. And it didn't work then more work. Become a slave. Yeah, become a slave. Yeah, you have to keep trying harder. It never, it never works. And then you're wrapped into something you can't really escape. So then you mentioned earlier, like Paul, you know, talks about like, I'm a boncer of Christ.

So people, I think sometimes like, probably all over the world, but especially in our moment in time and in our culture, like people hear that kind of language. And they go, I don't want to be a slave to anybody. Yeah. But it's like, no, no, listen. Like imagine pledging your allegiance to a master who's never domineering. Who loves you. Yeah. who gave, going back to like that supernatural.

Yeah. Aspect of Christianity. Who's like, who has all the power, who has all the control, but just love you. It's funny because like, I mean, we're both Northern California kids and I just keep thinking and growing up and driving around the Bay Area and seeing those coexist stickers. Yeah, right. Yeah. And there's nothing that's more oblivious to the, I agree. The phenomenon of religion than saying, we can just all coexist.

Right. Do you understand what these religions are asking and requiring? I was in. So Baha'i is a South Asian religion, and it's becoming somewhat popular. So Rain Wilson, the guy who played Dwight Shrewt, he's Baha'i, and he's probably their most famous person. They believe that most religions all come from God and that Jesus, Muhammad, the Buddha, Saddam, Saddam, you know, all these people, all were prophets. and interesting.

Yeah, and it is interesting. And I was in, it's like the universalist religion. Yeah, all of them guys. Yeah, pretty much. And they,

they very much. It's the Neapolitan of the, yeah, you can have everything. Yeah. No one likes it. So they are essentially universalist. Like,

I mean, there's certainly caveats stuff. But I was at the Lotus Temple in Delhi in India. And so I went to like this little information kiosk that they had. And I found a guy who spoke English who like, I guess was volunteer at the, temple and I was just like, have always wanted to know. Like, what do you do when you see things

in Islam and see things in Christianity and then see things in some other religion that like, they just contradict each other, right? God is loving, right? Yeah. And that's not in the Quran, right? And this man was just like, oh, no, it's fine. And I was like, no, no, okay. So I'm assuming like a language barrier. So I continue to go like, what do you do, though, when you see contradictions when you see like a squared circle in these faiths. How do you reconcile that? And he just kept shaking his hands. He's like, no, it's fine. It doesn't bother us. It doesn't bother us. And like, I realized I was like, oh, he just doesn't care. And once again, we can point at that guy and go, how stupid, how foolish. But at the end of the day, like, we could probably

walk out of this studio and find 20 or 30 people who have that same. It's almost like an epistemological dam in their heart to where they know that these questions are out there and they never come to face to face with them. And so it's like our deference are, oh, it doesn't matter. It's just holding back that weight of just not being able to answer those questions. So we just never ask them. And we refuse to talk to anybody who asks us of those questions. And so the I, the co-exist thing has always been funny to me because I'm like, if you read all those books side by side, they can't coexist. Yeah. Well, I just saw a funny video.

But that's the modern. But that's the mired of a shirt, co-exist shirt. And he was beating somebody up. And I was like, isn't this all irony? He's wearing a coexist shirt and like punching some dude in the face. And you're like, here we are. But that's like the upper educated, rich, middle class. Very entitled.

Understanding of world religions. Yeah. And that's what we grew up around. And then. Well, even, so it's funny, even the title world religions is funny to me. Because when American Christians talk about world religions, we talk about them as if Christianity isn't one of them. Like that they're another, there are other places, they're other peoples.

And, you know, we've all been brought up in this postmodern society where like the greatest sin of postmodernism is to tell somebody they're wrong. And so when we are, like, it's not just that. I disagree with Hinduism, right? It's that, man, for me to disagree with Hinduism is greatly offending this person's culture, and we can't do that. And to me, it's like, I understand that notion,

but at the end of the day, like, if I believe Christianity to be true, then how long does it take me to love somebody enough to begin to introduce them to the ideas and the beliefs and the experiences and the God who so radically changed and rescued me. I'm going to offend their culture.

But my culture was offended. Even as a freshman in high school, I was told, no, the way you're living your life is flawed, and it's going to send you down a path that you don't want to go. Somebody took the risk of offending me. It's like growing up in the church,

you know, you're here to have a relationship with Jesus. Right, or he's my personal savior. Yeah. Oh, personal. Jesus. But like having a relationship with Jesus is, makes more sense now. And when you think about these other religions

and the burdens that they carry, sometimes it's kind of like, well, the king's locked up in a castle somewhere and you can't get to them. Whereas Christianity is like the king came down, born in a manger, born in, you know, in a cave underground and like lived a humble life to ultimately get to a certain age to then.

Yeah. What what religions like try to mimic Christianity in that in that relational sense? Because it feels like if I'm a fallen deity and I'm prideful, I'm going to make it all about me. Yeah. Because I know that's interesting. The father-son relationship is something that I'll never ascend to. So I can trick a bunch of these little dummies over here.

You know. So I would give two answers. And one, I think, you know, to your listeners is always, I find that Latter-day Saints, Mormonism is always really fascinating for people. That's where I was going to ask you to. It was going to go there. You know, so when I think about global, like, religious beliefs that you see, you guys remember Hari Krishna's? Oh, yeah. They're dancing around, their little bells, a little tambourines?

So they're like the charismatic of Hinduism. Okay. And they have a very close relationship with Krishna in a way that very much resembles a Christian's relationship with Jesus. I would say, I would also say that that in a lot of ways was borrowed from Christianity. But to make it even more understandable, I would say that the best examples are the pseudo-Christian cults is that you see in Latter-day Saints, you see in Jehovah's Witnesses. An ability to, like, I don't know if you guys have ever talked to Latter-day Saint missionaries. Tons.

They go to great lengths at using language that makes you think, oh, we're the exact same. You know, so I have a relationship with Jesus too. But what's interesting, and like a lot of the language even you've been using about, like, there's a spiritual component propping up some false beliefs in these religions. I think there's no better example than the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter-day Saints, because what you see is an absolute criminal level of co-opting Christian language. But when, like, so talking to an LDS missionary, like, I have a belief in Jesus too. It's like, okay, tell me about your Jesus.

because it's not the same as mine. Tell a story. I know you've got a story about two missionaries. Yeah. Because I think it explains a lot of like, and I've seen this all over, it's so fascinating to have the discussion right now because I've seen this all over social media,

especially with some of our representatives in the house who got mega offended because LDS Mormon church came off the list of religions. Christian, yeah. Christian religions. And these people, Mike Smith was one I saw. went nuts online saying, we're just like you. We are you.

We are Christians. Well, that intrigues me as well, but I'll talk about that in a minute. Like, so I think I wrote this article for Stranger's Theology. So if a listener is not subscribed to Stranger Theology, you should check it out. But so any chance I get to hang out with LDS missionaries I take. And I would say that the two, there's always two, you know, in an area. my church has done a great job at like those two missionaries usually know our church pretty well and it's not just because of me.

Look at a bunch of people in my church who are just passionate about, hey, we got two Latter-day Saints in the area. We're going to make sure that they know somebody from Element Church. But we're sitting with two young men, me and a buddy of mine who's also the youth pastor at our church. And we were just talking and he began to use that same kind of language about like, hey, you believe in God, I believe in God. You believe in Jesus.

I believe in Jesus. You believe in the Bible. I believe in the Bible. And I was just kind of like, hey, hold on. And I went up and I got a napkin and I was drawing on it or I started to draw on it. And for listeners who aren't familiar, so just like drinking out of a firehouse. So Joseph Smith began to teach what would become the Book of Mormon and doctrines and Prologer Great Price and what would become the undergirding of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or Mormons. And he gave this sermon called the King Follett discourse of the King Fawlett sermon. And in it, he introduced the idea that God, Heavenly Father, is actually a man with flesh and bone who lived a past existence, a past life on a different

sphere of existence. So we actually get into some multiverse type stuff, weirdly enough, because it's not this universe. He wasn't on a different planet. It was like a different existence. and he lived a faithful life, he and his wife. And because he lived a faithful life and a loyalty to the Heavenly Father of that sphere of existence, he was exalted to the highest level of heavens, the celestial kingdom and was made a God and was allowed to populate this sphere of existence

with spiritual children, he and Heavenly Mother, his wife, and we are those spiritual. spiritual children and Jesus is just merely the first born of those spiritual children. Satan is the second born. And it's crazy because, you know, just to pause for a second, they don't talk, I'm like, that's well known. Like you can, that's not hidden. It's not like, we're not talking about esoteric stuff that, like in Scientology, Scientology is like the best cult because it's like so textbook. You have to be in Scientology for a long time to find out the really weird stuff. It's like being a Mason. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's so much like being a Mason. But in, in Latter-day Saints, like, this is on their website.

But they'll tell you we believe the same thing. Yeah. And it's ludicrous. And so I'm sitting there with these guys and just so people know my heart, like, I'm not trying to got you them. I'm not trying to make them feel stupid. Like I just want these guys. Like I might be the only person.

Right. Like, and that's one thing like, yeah. I want your listeners to know is like, somehow we've been led to believe that all of these people have heard the gospel. And statistics and my experiences and y'all's experiences probably too have led me believe, most of them have not. And so I start drawing almost like a tick-tac toe table on this napkin. And I'm kind of like depicting to him, be like, hey, you correct me when I start talking about something that you don't believe. Right. And I kind of had to throw a caveat in there

because in Latter-day Saint theology, one thing that's really frustrating is that there's not official church doctrine on some of this. Like there's not been a president of the church. and the president of the church is seen as like an apostle, a living apostle. So they haven't come out and said all of this. But it's, it's there. It's the natural conclusion, right? If the implications of theology. Yeah, if Heavenly Father lived a past life on a different sphere of existence called

Colob and was given, right, then it's only logical that he wasn't the only one and that that had happened before. So I'm drawing this out and I'm kind of just giving these guys an opportunity like, hey, you believe this, right? And they're like, well, yeah, but not all of this is like all in church teaching. I get it. And I just kind of casually said, like, hey, if, so there are other spheres of existence right now with other heavenly fathers, with other gods who've been gods longer than your heavenly father. So when the scriptures say that there is none like him, that he is perfect, I struggle with that.

And I would just ask if it was possible for us to tear down the wall between this sphere of existence and another sphere of existence and another God was more perfect than yours. Would you worship him instead? And to his credit, this young man just kind of sat there thinking and he just put his hand on the Book of Mormon. And he said, all I know is that I believe this to be true. And I was like, okay. But I just want you to know, like, we don't believe in the same thing. You know, and going back to like the military thing, it's so interesting to me. And sometimes it can almost be frustrating because I do think there's a disingenuousness to it. Is that I go, hey, I'm not the only one saying this. I saw this all over social media is that, hey, your religion started with the notion that the rest of us aren't Christian.

Yeah. Right. And so why do you, why do you contend so hard to be included with us when you don't think that we are true? You know? Yeah. And so it's just funny to me. but yeah, but that kind of goes along with that same notion of like, sort of an anthropological type of evangelism that I don't,

I'm not a great evangelist, but I just go, I want to, I want to, what do you really believe? Like, don't gloss over it. Sure. And then when we kind of get to some of those hard issues, say, hey, I want to tell you what the gospel says about those things, you know. Yeah, either there's like an impossible infinite regression of these things, right? Which is that, that's the problem logically. Or that there's a terminal being who doesn't match someone who was exalted, right?

It has to be the. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's an infinite regression and an infinite progression, which I'm not a physicist or a cosmologist or anything to that liking, but an actual infinity can't exist in this creation. And so it just leads to some very serious, like, cosmological issues.

And there's actually some people in the Church of Jesus Christ's Latter-day Saints beginning to talk about these things. And some of them are saying it in a sense of where like, hey, this should be official church teaching. And then some of them are actually saying, hey, this is actually a problem. Doesn't it also create like basically an overarching or like a meta morality problem as well? Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Where did the morality that dictates what it means to be a faithful Latter-day Saint come from? Right. I mean, you can't, you can just slice it. It's the classic Frank Turich. You know, it's like Frank Turich would just have a field day with that, right? because all he ever does is talk about the moral argument. And I'm like, this is the best example of like, hey, there can be no metamorality without a terminal being, without the morality giver.

And I would encourage you like, hey, if the Latter-day St. missionary is talking to you or you have a Lattery St. Friend, like, ask him those questions in love and gentleness because they've probably never thought that way before. Yeah, I spent a lot of time in Logan, Provo, Salt Lake, St. George, back in my music days. Yeah. And we had a big fan base there. and always talking to kids after shows. And those conversations would go late into the night.

Usually, and you were kind of like, well, this is interesting. Kind of like a pair of fake Jordans. You know, looks like the real deal. It looks like Nike's a lot of the same types of, you know. And I think that there are probably some spirits out there that know, well, we can create something completely different and distract a lot of people and gain a lot of. of allegiance or we can literally just take a slice of this pie throw a few extra you know toppings on it and say hey we're just as good as christianity come over here um you know a counterfeit version is sometimes easier to pull off if you want to start a cult yeah then to invent your own

brand new religion yeah for sure well it's like you know we do have a lot of Mormon listeners actually really yeah we do we have quite a few and so for people listening if you've gotten this far. I know this is going to be a hard one. Obviously, we haven't taken any direct shots at anything particular. We're just always out for like the truth and trying to understand the cosmic realm above the human realm because I think that in that impacts our politics and what countries exist and why and where and more than I would say just the geopolitical three-dimensional human-on-human decision-making. And I think our heart is the same as yours. It's like if we have a Hindu, someone who's a Hindu listening or a Mormon or a Scientologist or a Wiccan, someone who's coming, who's in the new age.

Our hope is you just encounter the gospel, not the, you know, and that's really it. And I think this is why it's, I think this is why this is why this conversation is so important. It's because ultimately, you talked about Frank Turk, ultimately understanding the mechanisms by which these world religions operate gives us better insight into how to best present the apologetics that we want to, best present the gospel. You just say, I'm an anthropologist. I want to understand your heart. And I think that's such a noble way to do that, right? I think it's easy to come in with a battle axe and be like, well, you're wrong here and you're wrong here and you're wrong here.

And while they are, that's really a tough conversation for all people to swallow, right? And all people will not react in an openness. I'm not looking to play chess with anybody. Right. Partly because I'm not very good at it, like both chess and like that brand of apologetics that you see like on YouTube. And I also question sometimes it's, it's effectiveness, like, quote unquote, like on the streets. I'm like, hey, it makes for great debate.

Yeah. But I think those are tools. You know, like, I think apologetics are phenomenal tools. But if that's the only, it's the old, like, everything's a nail. If the only tool in your belt is a hammer. And it's like, if all you are is an apologist, which let's give like guys like Frank Turk and, you know, John Lennox and those guys credit, like, that's not all they are by any means. But for me, I just learned really quickly because I'm also a pastor. Yeah.

Is that if I don't come about this with a ministerial heart, I might win a lot of conversations, but I won't win very many souls. Yeah. And so, yeah, just, you know, and then also, too, you know, talking about obviously such a diverse realm of belief is I think what we all need to realize is that, you know, the new atheists were wrong, you know, the Dawkins, the Hitchens, the Sam Harris. 50 first dates. is, you know, I've yet to really meet a true materialist atheist, somebody who believes that

the physical is the only thing that's real. They exist. But when I was coming up in undergrad, you know, man, that's what we thought. That was the only non-Christians there were. And then now I've found in statistics show as Pew and Barna are telling us every day that it's like, no, everybody is deeply spiritual. And that goes back to... Except for the nihilists. Except for the nihilists. They believe in nothing. But I can really respect. I can really respect. We believe in nothing.

Like, I remember, like, yeah, the big of boss. Yeah, there you go. My God. It fits in the basement theme too. But like, I can respect somebody who just comes out and says like, oh, no, I actually don't believe in anything. Because that's the logical conclusion of the new atheist worldview, right? It's nihilism.

But like, like, for your listeners who maybe they're sitting here and they're like, man, that sounds really cool. Like, I want evangelism and mission to be an adventure. But I'm terrified. You know, it's like, man, no, listen, like those people, most people, not only are they cool with talking about spirituality and belief, they've never met somebody like you. They've never met somebody who could actually tell them about Christianity in a way that makes what they believe about the spiritual world makes sense. I think that we have a lot more in common with the neo-pagan than

we do the materialist. But the problem is that for the last 200, 300 years, the Western Church has said, no, we actually have more in common with the materialist atheists than we do the neo-pagan. But that's not true. Like, they believe in a spiritual world. They believe in spiritual power. They believe in those things. But they're just wrong. And they've been deceived. Yeah. And the church by and large has gone away, more materialist. Absolutely. Very secular. Very secular. And I think we're sort of eating the fruit of that right now is that we wonder, you know, man, why is, and I hate to use this word, but like, why is the gospel sometimes in our culture so impotent? Like, why is it just so unable to affect the culture? And it's

like, because it's a gospel that gives you salvation, but doesn't, but nothing else, right? It's a gospel that gets you to heaven. But, you know, NT Wright, he always said, our faith is a now and not yet faith. Yeah. Like, I am radically changed now. And like the kingdom of God through me, through us, through conversations like this, through our churches.

The kingdom of God, you know, Joel and Mike Heiser talk about reclaiming cosmic space. And like, so evangelism and church planting and even Christian podcasting and all these other things are our participation with God in his reclaiming of what was his. and so when Christianity just makes it about, well, now I get to go to heaven, you know, that's escapist. Yes. And we're not an escapist faith. And going back to like, what's the difference between us and other faiths?

There are faiths out there that are like, well, in the next life, things will be good. And it's like, no, man, Jesus says like, things can be, even when things are bad, things can be good here. Yeah. And I want to contend for that. His prayer is your door. Yeah. Your kingdom come.

Yeah. Here now, you know. Well, I, I did. to think that humans are also the same in the sense that, you know, it didn't take long for Moses to go up the mountain and come back and be like, what are you doing? Yeah. You already forgot. We're very foolish. Yeah. Yeah. Or even just, hey, you've got, you know, you got food falling down from heaven. Yeah. And we're just like ungrateful. Oh, man. Well, and so we can, even in the midst of miracles and God's love being, him physically providing for us, we can still. And so, we can still,

lose the whimsy and the wonder. Yeah. I think it's funny, you know, I won't throw you guys under the bus, but I'll volunteer myself and sacrifice here. If somebody said, hey,

tell me about miracles that you've seen or tell me about like really clear answers to prayer that you've seen, like I'd have to, like, it's kind of criminal that like, there are times where I'm like, hold on, let me think about it.

Yeah. But like I have seen miracles. I have experienced healing myself, like through prayer. And it's crazy. it is crazy that I am not that different than the Israelites fashioning that golden calf that like because God hasn't done a miracle

in my life today sometimes I forget that he has in the past it's like that slow erosion yeah that's what I always I mean I've seen some miraculous things talking about on the show and then you reach a point where you yeah we are like these little little you know short term memory things that are like

oh yeah you know it's what's that movie where the guy has like a 15 second memory with the Oh, Memento. Could be that one. No, that one is, yeah, 51st dates. There's also one where the guy, I think, one of the guys thinks is Jesus and they're all in a, in a psych ward and they get out and go to a baseball game and escape.

I'm trying to remember what that's like an 80s or 90s movie. But I think that that is the case, though, right? It's kind of like we just are so easily forget. As you're explaining all these religions, it almost feels like you've got a variety of treadmills. but you're still stuck on the treadmill, matter what you're doing. This treadmill is going, this, you know, and I think that Christianity offers,

you can get off the treadmill. Yeah. You can get off it for good. What radically changed my life was realizing that Christian mission, Christian evangelism, Christian, whatever, is not me or not us offering an ultimate. alternative viewpoint that might be better is that Christian mission, Christian evangelism is offering

the opportunity to participate in God's world the way he always wanted us to. And it's a restoration of Eden in that. And not just restoration of Eden, but actually that once again, going to that supernatural, counterintuitive nature of Christianity is that there at the fall, when things couldn't have been darker, God looked ahead and saw that he could actually make it better through this darkness, through this suffering than it ever could have been before. And so, like, when you talk about the treadmills, like, yeah, I don't view it as like, hey, my treadmill's better than yours, or, or my treadmill is, they're all. Yeah, it's that they're all, oh, but I think you'd like mine better. It's like, no, listen, like, hey, it's not mine, right? Like, I didn't come up

with it. It's not from my culture anyway. It's it's it's it's it's a participation in a kingdom like a new kind of kingdom with a new kind of king. The world has never seen anything like it before and you actually become a new kind of you. C.S. Lewis of course like he always says everything better than any of us ever could. You know, he talks about how, you know, if if you live in a world where salt doesn't exist. If you heard about salt, you would question how anything with such a strong taste could ever not ruin the taste of the thing that had been applied to. But we in this world where salt exists, we know that salt not only makes things taste better, but it actually sort of draws the real taste of the thing it's been applied to out. And in the same way,

for your listeners who maybe they're not believers, or maybe they've realized through this conversation, like, that they're fairly nominal or have a very tepid relationship with Christ. And part of that fear that's driving them to to not go deeper with Christ is I don't want to lose myself. I like my treadmill. My treadmill allows me to live my way, my life the way I want to live it. Yeah. Right. And C.S. Lewis says that in Christ is the true you. It's the you you are always supposed to be all along. Yeah. And that you don't lose, you lose, you know, there is a dying to self, but you're still you and you're the truest version of you that you ever could be because in him is the true you. And so like I have no interest in debating people from other religions.

I take a great effort and hopefully it's apparent to your listeners. It's like I don't respect other faiths. I recognize that I'm very biased as a believer, but I take great lengths to be fair. But at the core of everything is like, I'm not offering you an alternative treadmill. It's not for me to offer it to you anyway. I'm just telling you that I believe there's something bigger. There's something better. And it's not an alternative. It's the way he had always wanted it to be all along until the world was broken.

And so, so that's kind of just, I mean, the last decade of my life has been exploring those peoples and those beliefs and those things and treating it like an adventure, you know, and trying to have fun with it, too, you know. Yeah. I guess my last question for you would be. You know, all these religions that you've explored, it'd be Hinduism, LDS, something we didn't get to Scientology. Maybe another time, we can talk about Scientology,

Wicah, Islam. Is there a common threat? Like if you were to say there is a common lie at the center of all of these, what would that? The most ancient lie ever told. God doesn't want you to do that because you realize, if you do it, you'll become like him. And we go back to the garden, you know.

He said, you can eat of any tree. Just don't eat of the tree of the knowledge good to evil. Interestingly enough, I think I heard Mackey or somebody talking about, you know, he never said he was never going to let him eat it, right? But there was a reason. And Satan comes and says, you know, has God really said. And, you know, the only reason he doesn't want you to eat of that tree, because if you do, you'll become like him.

And I think that not amongst all religious, because when you look at Islam or things like that, there's a submission aspect in a really big way. But when I look at, especially at the occult, when I look at cults, when I look at any belief system that begins to place me and my desire and my control at the center of it, and that would even go into many of the South Asian religions, especially like Buddhism, where it's very much about me achieving something for myself is that it's the most ancient lie ever told. There's something hidden that if you find you'll become like God. you'll become a god. It's an esoteric nature. Yeah, Latter-day Saints is a great example

because they quite literally become gods. And so I would say that amongst all these things is that mostly what I see is that that woman in that witchcraft shop in Asheville was right. Like people are in a desperate pursuit to be known, to be valued, to have control. And what's unfortunate is that, you know, in Christianity, right, we tell them, hey, you can be known and, man, you'll be never more valued,

but you have to give up control. And that's a hard pill for some people to swallow. It is absolutely scary, you know. Let somebody else drive. Yeah, and so, but yeah, but no, I would say in a, in a really diverse and crazy world, there's not a ton of like, this is in every religion. Although one thing I always point out for people to just kind of chew on is I'm like, you know, hey, long before human migration, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago or however old the earth is, I don't know, is we see demons and angels in every religious group, right?

We see miracles in every religious group. So what that tells me is that going back to Heiser, you know, and of course, I think I said it before we started recording as like he was very quick to say that he didn't come up with anything new. But he just compiled it. He just compiled it. Like is, hey, listen, there is a very real spiritual component to this reality.

And it's full of personages that some of them, some of them want what's best for you. And it's because you're made in the image of God. And they're loyal to the king. But then they're loyal to the king. And some of them hate you because they're disloyal to the king. And I know that sounds so trivial, right? Sounds like a fairy tale. you know, but, yeah, but it's true.

Yeah. You know, and I don't know if it's Chesterton or somebody, you know, said, fairy tales, children don't believe fairy tales because they tell them that dragons exist. They believe in fair tales. They already know dragons exist, but the fairy tales tell them how the dragons could be defeated. And, and, and, I just, those Chester Copper Pot. Yeah. Yeah, it was a different Chester.

Yeah, but I just think that evangelists. And optimism and mission can be a lot more adventurous and can be a lot more exhilarating than we've let it to be in the past hundred years of the American church. And I just think, even though I'm not very good at it, it's exhilarating and it's adventurous. And I would just beg your listeners to get out

and go on mission, like view it as, this is a mission that I'm on. It's not just like an obligation or a burden. It's like, man, we get to participate in this with the king of all creation. I think in a weird way we try to do that. here like you come on you're you're in a different realm trying to explain something that we don't understand and i think a lot of people want a show like this to be very black and white yeah

and we define very strictly what we do and don't believe but somebody will bring on a story that goes i don't know where to file that one and it's interesting with the like the coexist kind of people out there who are so quick to say and laugh at all the other people in the treadmills and i think if they look down, they'd see that they're walking on one too. Yeah. It's just the treadmill. I don't believe treadmills exist. Right.

You know, that's their religion. And we are empty vessels. Yeah. And if we don't fill ourselves up with a false religion, we'll fill ourselves up with politics or sports or something we follow thing. Human beings are designed to, like, worship a thing. Yeah. Yeah.

And it's funny that the ones that are pointing, you guys are idiots for worshiping this. Like, you worship something else too. What I would say is if the world's, it's not just religions, but belief systems, philosophies, if it's all treadmills and people are just absolutely stuck on them, breaking themselves, then what I would say to somebody listening who's curious in some form of fashion is that Christianity isn't just a different type of treadmill, it's walking in the woods with God himself. Yeah. It's going back to Eden.

It's a real walk. Yeah, the moment, the moment of the fall. Yeah. The moment of the fall was like, he, like, think about how beautiful that is. And that's where we want to get back to is, sure. Like, Adam gave up the ability to just go on a walk with God.

Yeah. You know, and so, yeah, that's my heart. Let's go. I'm not perfect at it by any means. But, but yeah, but that's, that's what, that's what we've been doing for the last 10 years or so. Thanks, true. Well, yeah, dude. Tell our listeners where they can check out, like, some of your more in-depth writing some.

Yeah, well, first, the biggest thing is Stranger theology. Yeah. You guys have been a phenomenal voice in this kind of, part of the conversation leading the way. And obviously Joel and Heiser before him. So I write for Stranger's Theology. I'm honored too. People can check out me out on Instagram at all things. Dot all people. I have a couple books. I actually brought a couple copies for you guys. One on Church of Jesus Christ, Latter-day Saints, one on Neo-Paganism and Wicca. Those are through Verity Press, which is an indie publisher. I remember my friend, Felicia Masonheimer. And so they can get those

books there. And then, you know, more than that's just, I love going to churches and teaching people how to do kind of the stuff we're talking about. And, um, it's a very four city, North Carolina. If you're in western North Carolina, yeah, very small, somewhat small town, but we, we believe in a very big God. So we're trying to do big things in small town. But yeah, but appreciate you guys. And like I said, I'm not just saying this because I'm here, but I think that there's a lot of people, and I know some of them who, um, have given Christianity a chance because you guys were willing to say not everything is black and white. Like there's a lot of weird things. And if we come to God and we don't find mystery,

then, you know, is he really the true God? Is he really worth worshiping if there's not mystery to him? And so appreciate for what you guys do and let me come and hang out for a little bit. Thanks for being here, man. Yeah. Thanks. And if you want a little more, Jeremy, we're going to do a short segment for Stranger Theology. or we're going to talk briefly about Scientology. It'll be free. Check out Stranger Theology Head over there.

We're going to have a little mini-veneat with Jeremy where we unpack Scientology briefly and talk about how to talk to Scientologists. How to convert Tom Cruise? We're going to get him. But check us out over there.