Camp Gagnon - Not ALL Good People go to Heaven

Episode Date: September 27, 2026

Today we’re diving into one of the most debated realms in Christian history: Purgatory. We’re going beyond pop culture clichés and fiery stereotypes to trace how the idea of a purifying afterlife evolved over thousands of years—from mystical visions and burned handprints to Dante’s iconic mountain and Martin Luther’s Reformation. Is Purgatory clearly laid out in Scripture, or is it a complex doctrine stitched together across centuries? WELCOME TO RELIGION CAMP! 🏕️ Shoutout to our sponsors: Mars Men -Visit https://mengotomars.com and get 50% Off FOR LIFE, Free Shipping, and 3 Free Gifts with Code 'CAMP' at Checkout. Want the even WILDER theories? SIGN UP TO THE PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CampGagnon ✝️☪️✡️🕉️☦️ Religion Camp Merch: https://camp-rd.com 🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets Here: https://markgagnonlive.com 🏕️ Get Today In History Email Here (Free): https://www.dailytodayinhistory.com Timestamps: 00:00 Welcome to Religion CAMP 03:10 What Is Purgatory 08:07 Origins of Purgatory 12:00 Purifying Fire 16:15 Museum of Burned Handprints 18:24 Visions of Purgatory 20:43 St. Patrick's Gateway to Purgatory 22:28 Purgatory Becomes Doctrine 24:06 Paying to Escape Purgatory 27:22 Martin Luther and The Reformation 30:23 Protestants Rejection of Purgatory 37:00 Aerial Toll Houses 41:48 Dante's Mountain of Purgatory 47:09 Why People Believe in Purgatory 52:20 Growing Up Catholic 55:42 Christos on Aerial Toll House 56:34 Drop Your Thoughts! #religion #purgatory Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Discover coffee plus on nispresso.com. When you die, where are you going to go? Well, maybe you think if you're good, you're going to go to heaven, and if you're bad, you're going to go to hell. But what if you're not a saint, but you're not a monster, and you wake up in purgatory? Well, purgatory is the mysterious place where your soul goes to wait and to be cleaned in a flame that burns, but it doesn't kill you. And the family that you left behind, well, they're praying you out of it in real time while

you're still there and over a billion people today claim to believe in it in Christian theology, but there's just one problem. That word purgatory isn't really in everyone's Bible. Well today we're walking through this idea that helped tear Christianity into. It funded one of the most beautiful churches on earth and was actually part of igniting the Reformation. Some people see it as a waiting room. Some people see it as like a mini version of hell and others describe it as a divine highway, a hike up to heaven. So where do Catholics get this idea of purgatory? And what is it really supposed to be and what actually happens while you're there? Well, today, we're going to find out. So sit back, relax, and welcome to religion camp. What's up, dude, and welcome back to religion camp. My name is

Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single Sunday we explore the most interesting, fascinating, and controversial stories from all religion, from all time, forever. Yes, that is what I do here in this very tent as I try to figure out what everyone believes. Everyone on this planet's got a different relationship with God. Some people have none. And it's crazy to me that I walk around all day meeting people and not knowing how they orient their lives.

What do they understand about ethics, about morality, about where we came from, or about where we're going. And that's what I do here is I try to figure out what's brilliant and interesting and fascinating about every religion around the world. On top of that, I try to find all the cool stuff that I like and apply it to my own life. In this episode, well, we're going to get very personal.

because this as a Catholic, someone that grew up Catholic, certainly, and went to a Presbyterian school, I had many arguments and debates about this word, purgatory. Now, before we jump in, I want to say a few things. First, I want to say thanks to you, dude. Yeah, I want to say thanks for tuning in. Every time you click, comment, like, interact with the content in any way, you tell the Instagram slash YouTube slash Spotify slash Facebook gods that we're good guys. And we're doing good stuff over here.

And we're trying our best. And you help the show grow, you know, you help guests come on. on. You help keep the lights on at the tent and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. Now, I also want to say thanks to the pal right beside me. He's the Greek freak. He's the Orthodox legend. And his name is Christos Kalamaika Becadavastos. How are you? Are we on Facebook? I think we are. I think I saw some clips there. I don't know if we're posting them. It might be one of the good camp folk here at the campsite. Hey, God bless them. Right? Now, Christos, you completely diverted me there. Okay? I was planning on talking about purgatory. Now you got me

thinking about algorithms and business. Okay? So this is the kind of stuff I'm talking about. You always get me off track. I'm just joking Christos. I'm glad you're here. Now, let's talk about purgatory. All right?

People have heard the word before, and a lot of people get it wrong, including a lot of Catholics, let the record show. Because no one really, if you talk to like the average person, they don't really know what it is. Like all the Protestants of the world

would be like, yeah, this is like non-biblical. Catholics are completely out, you know, doing what Catholics do, not reading the Bible, making stuff up. And if you talk to Catholics, they're like,

No, it's mini hell and it's in the Bible, but the books got taken out by Martin Luther. It's a whole thing. So let's just try to break down line by line to understand everything that's going on with this word. Now, if you are not Catholic, maybe you are Catholic. You probably hear this and you're like, okay, hell, light, right? It's like a waiting room where you're basically waiting and just kind of chilling until judgment day. Technically, neither of these things is what the Catholic Church teaches at all. Here's the actual definition according to the catechism of the Catholic Church,

which if you don't know, that's basically like the church's official like rule book. Again, it's like pulling elements of the Bible and explains the church's doctrine all into one specific book. It's called the catechism. And it basically calls purgatory the final purification of the elect, which is entirely different from the punishment of the damned. So that last part is pretty important. Entirely different from the punishment of the damned. So what does that mean? What is entirely different?

Well, it means that everyone in purgatory is saved. Yeah, that's good news. right give it up for us hit the sounds Christos thank you I thought you would a soundboard but that'll work also everyone in purgatory is going to heaven every soul in that place is a guaranteed ticket to heaven they made it all right the verdict's in

their name is in the book of life and the gates are open they're just they're just not ready for it no and so don't think of like a prison or like a waiting room you gotta you could picture it like this imagine you spend your whole life covered in mud all right you're not evil you're not a monster

you're just dirty. You're covered in the grime of being a flawed human being. And now you're standing at the door of a room that is perfect. It is blindingly clean. So clean that you can't walk in while you're still filthy. If you walk in there covered in mud, you're going to track in dirt. Purgatory is like the mud room of heaven. Up in the northeast, we have a lot of these things.

It's like a boot room. It's like, okay, you got the house and you got the outside. And then right before you go into the house, there's like a room that's kind of attached to the house that, like, you take your boots off. that way you don't track mud in everywhere. And it's basically where you go to get cleaned up before you're allowed inside. Now, let me just be clear.

Not all Christians believe this. This is specifically like Catholic doctrine, okay? And the technical word for this cleanup is a process. It's called sanctification. The idea is basically this. God saves you. Jesus Christ saves you, but that doesn't mean that you are immediately made perfect,

and that is the whole journey. And nothing imperfect can survive standing right in front of a perfect and holy God. It'd be like staring into the sun. So first you have to be made ready and that getting ready, the final scrubbing of the soul, that is purgatory. Now the name itself comes from the Latin Pugare. It literally means to purge, to cleanse. And now to be clear, it's not like a separate final destination. Your destination is still heaven, okay?

But it's like the hallway. It's like the walkway before you get to heaven. Nobody is born there. No one stays there forever. And this is pretty key. No one in purgatory can slip up and fall into hell. There's only one exit, okay? and it opens into paradise.

That's pretty good. That sounds nice, right? But the church teaches that not everybody has to go to purgatory. So, saints, like truly holy people who have died in a state of purification, they go straight to heaven. And on the other end, the damned who never accept Jesus Christ, they blasphemed the Lord, they commit unforgivable sins, so to speak. They're going not to heaven or purgatory. No, they're probably, unfortunately, going to be damned to hell.

I'm sorry. Pergatory is for everyone in the middle, right? The people who died in friendship with God, but with a little bit of dust and dirt still on them, not clean enough to walk right in, but not nearly too far gone or lost to be damned. So purgatory is for everyone who dies in this kind of middle state. That needs purification.

Now, how many people is that? The church never claims to know. But at the very beginning, purgatory wasn't the name of a place at all. The whole concept was more of like, it was like an adjective. And here's what I mean. The early Christians talked about a purging fire, getting you ready for heaven, a purifying flame.

Purgatory was a process. It was a thing that was going to happen to you, not the place that you go. And it would take more than 1,000 years of church history before the adjective would then become like a noun, like a literal place. So for a process to be, you know, understood as a place takes a lot of time and that leaves a lot of questions. So the word for this place technically isn't in the Bible, probably not the Bible, especially if you're evangelicals. nowhere even found in like the the protestant bible so where does this idea come from how does the church land on this and why do catholics to this day still believe it now there are a couple core kind of impulses behind this idea of purgatory and i don't want to be like up here evangelizing

for the catholics okay obviously you know shout out to all my catholics out there but i'm trying to give this in the most like unbiased sort of neutral way that i can and uh i'm going to try to lay it out the good and the bad okay the first idea behind purgatory is that the soul needs to be that the soul needs purification. And we kind of talked about that. We'll go into more detail in the second. But the second is the idea that the living can do something to help the dead. And both of these concepts, mind you, are actually older than Christianity. So before the church, the Greeks and the Romans were already praying for their dead relatives and were already imagining them in some type of like in between zones. So Plato, for example, you've heard of him, right? He's a philosopher.

And he wrote about souls being purified after death. And another Greek thinker described a kind of like holding area in the sky for these departed souls. So this notion that death might not be like an instantaneous thing and it's like die bang heaven hell, that idea that there's like a middle step before eternity is already kind of floating around. And so then by the late second temple period, Jewish scripture also gives us something crucial. In the last few centuries like BC before Christ, some Jewish thinkers were imagining an intermediate state for the dead as well. And this is where you get the single most important text that we're going to be drawing from the entire. episode. And it comes from a book found in my Bible. Let me put it that way. We'll get into more

of this and how all of this came to be. But in the Catholic Bible, there's a book called Second Maccabees. And in it is a really important story from Jewish history about a battlefield. And this is sort of how it goes. There's a Jewish army led by a commander named Judas Maccabias. And he had just won a pretty brutal fight. Now they're walking the field, collecting their own dead to basically, you know, bury them. These are devout men. They died fighting for God. And as they are lifting the bodies, they find something horrifying tucked under their tunics.

They find pagan amulets. Oh, they've got pagan idols, little idols, tokens of forbidden gods, looted from an enemy temple, and they're secretly being worn by these men who are supposed to be faithful only to one God. Now, these soldiers had died basically, like, with the sin still on them. like a hidden sin. So what does their commander do? Does he say like, oh, man, we got to curse these men.

We got to leave them in the field. We got to write them off. These guys are pagans. We thought they were fighting for us. We thought that they were fighting for the one and only good monotheistic God. But turns out they're pagans. Get rid of them. That's not what he did.

Judas Maccabias took up a collection from his surviving soldiers, like a big collection. And he sent the money to the temple in Jerusalem to pay a sin offering. An offering for men who were already dead. And the text spells that exactly why. so that the dead might be delivered from their sin. What? So pause on that for a sec, because we'll think about what that actually means. It literally gives a prayer and a sacrifice offered for the dead on the assumption that this idea can even still benefit them. It means that the living can do something like pray, give offerings, etc., that can actually reach a person who's already gone. So,

if the dead can be helped, then there has to be somewhere that they go, right? Like, are these people go into hell and then they're getting pulled out of hell through these offerings, like, how exactly does that work? And it's that seed that plants this idea of purgatory. And remember, this comes from a Jewish text, which for Catholics is inspired scripture. And we'll talk about the discrepancy in a second. But once early Christianity starts to show up in like the 100s, the 200s, the greatest thinkers of the time start building on the idea. So, for example, in the 100s, 200s, early church fathers like Tritulian imagined the martyrs going straight to bliss while everybody else is waiting in a realm of the dead that stages, that basically has like a staging area to pass through.

And then came a guy who really lit all of this on fire, and his name is Origin of Alexandria. And around the year 230, he took the Old Testament's imagery of divine fire and fused it to a line from the Apostle Paul about being tested by flame. And basically out of that synthesis, he became one of the most influential early Christian thinkers to develop this idea, the idea of spiritual fire that doesn't destroy you but actually cleanses you. So this is going all the way back to like the early church fathers. And this idea basically being that it burns off the dirt and the junk that leaves the real you standing there the way that like fire would purify gold. And it's a really like kind of beautiful, low key, terrifying image. And it becomes the foundation of how the early church

understands purgatory going forward. Now we'll pause for a minute and give a second for the skeptics point of view. Origin obviously was a genius, but the church eventually decided that some of His ideas were perhaps too creative. Some ideas, like the notion that, you know, eventually everybody gets saved. Even the devil. Later, you know, that got branded as like, you know, like a formal heresy. Some other ideas associated with like origin were condemned for centuries after his death. But the church kept this idea, this idea of like the refining fire, that purification theme endured.

And then around the year 400, one of the most famous church fathers in Western theological history comes onto the scene. And his name is Augustine of Hippo. Some people say Augustine, I get it, I'm going to go with Augustine. Anyway, Augustine helped crystallize the distinction between two kinds of fires. So a fire that consumes you, you know, a fire that consumes the wicked forever, the bad fire, and a fire that saves you. The fire that purifies the ordinary, the decent but, you know, flawed believer. Because Augustine's point was that most people aren't saints and most people aren't monsters. Most of us kind of land in like the mediocrity of the middle.

You know, we do some good stuff, we do some bad stuff, we die. And in Augustine's words, neither so good that we should shoot up to heaven or go to hell forever. We die maybe good but dirty. And so he says that the prayers of the living still count for those who are not beyond all hope. So by the year 400, all the ingredients are kind of on the table. We got purifying fire. We got a population of dead people that are helpable based off of the second book of Maccabees. and you have like the in-between state.

It's all there. There's just one thing missing, and it's a concept. No one has actually built the process or the place yet. Hey, guys, we're going to take a break really quick because I want to talk to you about getting old. I turned 30 this month. Yeah, it's sad. And my body is not responding the way that it used to.

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free gifts at checkout. And after you purchase, tell them the Mark and Christos sent show. Now, let's get back to the show. So, this all takes us to a room in Rome. This is just like a few minutes from the Vatican. You can still go see it. And this is where the dead have continued to leave their fingerprints, so to speak. It's like this little museum, and there's one display case. And inside of it are a bunch of kind of ordinary objects. You got like a prayer book, an old, like wooden tabletop, like a scrap of like a nightcap.

And every one of them is burnt. And the burns aren't random. They are shaped like hands. Like you have like five fingers. You have a palm. All this kind of stuff pressed into the wood. like something on fire reached out of the dark and like touched it. Now, the priest who collected these things believed that he knew exactly what they were.

He believed that they were messages. He believed that they were burning messages, left by souls trapped in the in-between, reaching back across the divide to beg the living for help. Now, that museum that you can still go to, it's modern. It's barely a century old, but the instincts behind it are pretty ancient. Because for a thousand years, people didn't just want to believe purgatory was real. They wanted it to be a place, something like you could put a flag in almost. somewhere like with an address, somewhere you could point to, maybe even somewhere you could touch.

What was the name of the place, Christos? It's called the Museum of the Holy Souls in Purgatory. The Holy Souls, yes. Museum of the Holy Souls of Pergatory. And you can see like these burn marks. I'm sure we have some of them off on the screen right now. You can see it. And in the early Middle Ages, people started drawing maps to try to understand where this place was.

And there was a transitional figure that was really brought all of this into the mainstream. and it was a Pope, actually, Pope Gregory the Great, around the year 600. And in his writings, Gregory connected the penance that you do here on Earth to a purification

that keeps going after you die. He also taught that there will be a purifying fire for smaller sins that you have to go through before the final judgment. So Gregory gave the Western tradition one of its most influential early formations, basically tying earthly penance,

prayer for the dead, and then purification after death altogether. So the church would formulate the doctrine much more fully later, especially at the councils of Florence and at the councils of Trent, or rather the council of Trent. And then after that, visions began. Yeah. So for the next several centuries, Europe got flooded with what scholars were calling visionary literature. And in it was basically detailed first person like I was there. I saw this like from different monks and saints who claimed that they

died or perhaps dreamed that they died and then got yanked in spirit across the other side and then came back to tell everyone what they saw, kind of like near-death experiences. And the things that they described were what make purgatory feel terrifying. So, for example, there's an Irish monk in like the 600s. His name is Saint Forza. And he described being chased through the afterlife by demons, through a purifying fire that, and this is how he describes it word for word, stretches out each one according to their merits. So literally, a fire that is perfectly adjusted and fit for your sins, a customized torture just for you. And around the same time, a scholar slash monk known as venerable Beattie gave what might be the

first, like, real geographic description of the place. So he saw an actual landscape, a place split by a giant wall, and on one side were roaring flames and unbearable cold, where souls were suffering. And on the other side, over the wall was a meadow where there was light and rest. And you have two zones, a border, and the first map of this in-between. And it's over these years with these teachings and these visionary experiences that cause purgatory to slowly turn into a real place with terrain and weather and with borders that you could hypothetically walk across.

And then around the turn of the millennium, the West got a day in the calendar to literally sort of commemorate this, All Souls Day, November 2nd. And the observance spread outward from monastic centers like, Clooney, and then eventually across the entire Western Church, an entire day set aside to think about the souls that are gone, but not yet in heaven. And some of which are in heaven, but some of which that are in purgatory, literally it's all the souls. So purgatory in this sort of framework isn't a theory. It was being treated like a official and accepted part of a soul's journey. But keep in mind, even at this point, it's not fully defined in church theology. People are

just treating it that way. And now that basically was, you know, being treated the like a real place, humanity is now looking for a door, right? Like medieval Christians become convinced that there was like a real physical entrance to purgatory hidden somewhere on Earth. The most famous one of all sat on a tiny island in the middle of like a cold lake in Ireland. And it's literally called St. Patrick's purgatory. You can go to it.

It's on a place called the, I don't speak Gaelic, so forgive me. It's Loc derg. Now, according to the legend, Christ himself showed St. Patrick a cave on the island. and basically like a pit in the ground that was the literal gateway to the other side. So if you climbed into that dark, as the story goes, you would see the souls being purified with your own eyes. And as a result, it became one of the most, like,

grueling, most feared pilgrimage sites in all of medieval Europe. People would come from all over Europe, like Hungary and Italy and France, across entire continents in a time where travel is extremely difficult to basically go inside a cave for 24 hours. And they would fast and they would pray, and they would just be in there alone, in the black, just like darkness of like this cold cave.

Basically, according to their testimonies, like facing purgatory, but while they were still alive. And it was so famous that for a while, it was the only site in Ireland marked on some of the maps of the whole world. Now, St. Patrick himself, he doesn't really mention the place. The whole legend latched onto the island in like the 1100s, rate as the Latin word, purgatorium was being written in theological texts in Paris. But for the pilgrims, it didn't matter. To them, the door is real.

and they wanted to experience purgatory, at least see it. And they kept on going for like a thousand years. I mean, some people are still going there to this day. But now, at this point, purgatory has a theology, it has a name, and in many ways it even has a door. Now, the only thing that's left is official church teaching. And the church is about to make it so,

right before the entire thing kind of blows up. So for about a thousand years, purgatory was kind of growing wild, right? There was visions from monks, and there was poems and folklore and pillory. to go to a cave in Ireland to go see it. Now the church had to basically make a decision, like, what are we doing? And they did it with a series of councils.

And this is literally where, like, all the big dogs of the church come together and go, okay, what do we all believe? And they basically hammer out what it means to be Catholic. Now, the first big one was the second council of Lyon in 1274. And by this point, post-mortem purification and the ability of the living to assist the dead had received a major formal conciliar formation, so to speak. Basically, like, you know, like, hey, we believe this. And at Florence and at the Council of Trent, they would go on to define the teaching

even further. And they came to a few points. So point one is the idea that some souls can get purified after death. Point two is that those souls can be held by the prayers and the good works of the living. And that second point is going to become a very dangerous sentence for Christians. And here's why. You can see how people are drawing this logic. Okay, if purgatory is temporary, if it is an after-death sentence that you measure in time, right? It is based on this time scale, based off of how much purification you need. And if the living can shorten that time with prayer and good

deeds, I mean, that's great. Is there a way that you can actually help your loved ones to get out of purgatory early? Can you do something, something concrete that you can actually measure to help the souls out of this purifying fire even faster? And here's where doctrine in practice got unfortunately kind of tangled up. The church taught that certain acts of devotion could remit what it called the temporal punishment due to sin. So punishment for sins whose guilt had already been forgiven. So, you know, prayers and pilgrimages and good deeds, all these things could be applied to the dead. And that remission kind of had a name and they called it an indulgence. And some indulgences

kind of, you know, worked with almsgiving. So donate. So in theory, and, you know, this is unfortunate, but kind of wrapped in very careful theology, an indulgence was never meant to be buying forgiveness or buying salvation, right? The guilt is already forgiven by Jesus Christ. This was about the leftover purification, right? Like, you were saved by Christ, but there's still an element of you that needs to be purified. But in practice, human beings ruined it. Fundraising campaigns made that very careful theology look to very ordinary people terrifyingly close to kind of buying time off of purgatory. And it turned into, I guess you could call it a racket within like the medieval Christian church.

Now, this is where a villain will actually come into the story. His name is Johann Tetzel. He was a Dominican friar in Germany in the early 1500s. And he was sort of like a traveling salesman, so to speak. The church needed enormous piles of cash. You see, Pope Leo X was trying to fund the rebuilding of St. Peter's Basilica in a Rome. which is one of the most ambitious, most expensive. New from Nespresso.

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Let your morning change you. Discover Coffee Plus on Espresso.com. Churches that you could even dream up at the time. So they kind of sent guys like Tetzel out to promote indulgences to the public. And Tetzel didn't preach about them with like a nuanced, you know, sort of down the middle theological kind of framing. He sold them kind of like a carnival barker. So he would roll into town, gather up a crowd and just get to work. So he would, you know, talk about their dead parents.

He would talk about their mothers and their fathers. And he'd be like, your father's screaming in the flames of purgatory. and he would look at their kids and the kids would, you know, cry out. And, you know, the kids in purgatory are saying, why won't you help me? Like, you have the money in your pocket. Why are you leaving me here to burn? And so then, of course, all the people that are watching this are like, wait, we got to do something. This holy man, a Dominican friar standing in front of me telling me that my family members are burning in purgatory.

We got to do something. And then there's a slogan traditionally associated with this campaign, one that historians are still quoting like 500 years later. as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs. So like you drop a coin in the box, you hear it clink, and in that instant, that's what the pitch was basically promising,

that their loved one's soul would fly up out of the fire and into heaven. Now, don't get me wrong. As a Catholic, this is not good, okay? I don't know any Catholics that are like ardently defending the practice of like manipulating people's emotions and grief and trying to turn into a business model,

but it worked. And as a result, money poured in, but not for long because in a German town called Wittenberg, there was another monk. He was intense and anxious and very devoted to theology. And he was getting sick of watching Tetzel and others basically praying on the poor and on the desperate and on the grieving people of the world, selling them paper promises about their deceased family. And his name is Martin Luther. Not King Jr. That's a different guy. Martin Luther. And on October 31st, 1517, Luther took a document that he had written a bunch of complaints and arguments

and hammered them to the, basically the door, according to the story, it's difficult to verify how true this is, but the story is that he nailed it to the door of the church in Wittenberg. Now, keep in mind, Martin Luther is effectively a holy man. He's a priest at this point, and he has 95 complaints. These are known as the 95 Theses. And by all accounts, he's not trying to start a revolution. he thought he was basically kicking off like a debate, like, hey, the church is doing something wrong, and this is what I think we got to fix.

And his words basically tore across Germany in a matter of weeks and across the rest of Europe in a few months. The fight that he had picked, starting with whether you could even pay cash to shorten someone's time in purgatory, amongst many other things, did not stay an academic argument. It became the spark of what they call the Protestant Reformation. And, you know, indulgences were the spark. fire that followed became a much bigger argument about justification, about scripture and tradition, about how much authority the church has, how much authority the pope has, and ultimately who has the authority to define Christianity itself. Now, decades later at the Council of Trent, in direct response to Luther, the church dug in. And it reaffirmed that purgatory is real. It is a real thing

and that praying for the dead is good and true, but it also ordered its own bishops to basically knock it off with like the you know the specific detail so no more tetzel no more carnival style like fire and brimstone sales pitches no more manipulating people with you know their dead relatives and after basically like a thousand years of monks piling on you know these vivid horrors of purgatory the church basically was like hey guys this is crazy we got to rein it in but unfortunately by that point the damage was done a huge portion of christianity had already kind of walked out the door they've been disillusioned they'd seen what martin luther was saying they had gotten aware of his theses due to the printing press coming into

coming into vogue right around the same time and now people are reading for themselves they're like wait a second I gave the last like hundred bucks I had whatever amount of money you get what I'm saying I gave the last hundred bucks I had to help my father and my mother get out of purgatory and it turns out like that wasn't exactly true like they felt like oh I got I was manipulated and at that point thousands of people had already walked out the door just become Protestants which leaves the obvious question, the money thing was the spark, but what did Luther and the other reformers find so deeply wrong with this idea? Like, I mean, Martin Luther at this point, he is a Catholic priest, right?

Like, he is like a member of the church. So what did he see that everyone else at the time was kind of missing? Like, did they just not like how the Catholic Church was treating purgatory, or did they disagree with the idea altogether? Now again, this is not going to be an entire episode just on the Reformation. We should absolutely do that episode, but talking specifically about purgatory. Protestants believe in something that they call grace alone. In Latin, this is called sola gratia. This is the idea that, I mean, you can't earn your way into heaven. You can't be good enough. You can't buy it. You can't work for it. You don't deserve it. The, what do they say? The wages of sin are death. Like, salvation is a free gift paid for completely, totally, and finally

by Jesus Christ dying on the cross for your sins. The bill is settled in full and forever. Nothing you can do can change that. It is just a free gift. gift given by Jesus Christ. Now that teaching, you know, you kind of hold that up with purgatory. And purgatory says like, yeah, you're saved, but you're not cleansed. You still have to go through purification. You can't just go straight into heaven with all the sins still on you. And to a Protestant, that little condition, that little like purification thing goes against their entire grace alone teaching. So to the reformers, purgatory quietly insults the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The literally,

the biggest moment in all of Christendom. They say this purgatory thing is undermining the power of Christ. It implied that Christ's death was like a down payment, but not the whole price. So it got you most of the way there. And if you were doing the right stuff, you could go all the way. But, you know, for most people, you have to cover the rest yourself in this mini sort of refining fire. And that, they said, is just not true. It's just unchristian. Now, a Catholic would reject that description completely. Catholics also teach that salvation is a gift of grace. And it is from Christ alone and it can't be purchased or earned. And to them, purgatory isn't the sinner paying off the unpaid part of Christ's bill. It's Christ's grace finishing its work in you. Not you

completing what Jesus failed to finish. Christ already paid the whole thing. Purgatory is that price being fully applied. Luther, though, put his side about as bluntly as someone can. In his catechism, he leaned hard toward praying for the living. Pray for your enemies and away from the elaborate Catholic system built around, you know, like guilt and trying to pray the dead out of purgatory. So the reformers sharply rejected the whole, like, apparatus of purgatory and satisfactions. Though Luther's own comments on praying for the dead were actually more complicated than just, like, a universal ban. Luther had a lot of stuff that are more in line with, like, Catholic teaching.

You can look into him. Again, we should do a whole episode of Martin Luther. But regardless, there's a second problem here, and this is a scriptural one. Remember how we talked like, hey, praying for the dead and, you know, offering things for the dead is biblical. It's in Second Maccabees. The story where the guy offers up the prayers and the payments for the dead soldiers that have like the pagan sort of, you know, like idols on them. Well, that book isn't in every Christian Bible. Yeah. The reformers rejected what is called the Deuterocanical books. Sometimes the Protestants will call this the Apocrypha.

And this includes Second Maccabees. And so they said that this was actually not equal. canonical scripture. Early Protestant Bibles often printed them separately as this apocrypha, and Catholics, on the other hand, continue to receive and read them as divinely inspired scripture. And this means that the single most important proof for the entire doctrine of purgatory isn't even in the Bible. So again, well, half the people that identifies Christians, the evangelical Christians will be like, hey, we don't have any context of this because the reformers basically said that these books were never supposed to be in the Bible in the first place. Now, Catholic, will read and be like, hey, this is in my Bible. So you have a fundamental disconnect about which

books are even canonical due to the Reformation. Now, the reformers continue to hammer away at that point relentlessly. So, for example, John Calvin argued that purgatory wasn't supported by ancient writers. It wasn't supported by scripture or any solid argument. And it snuck through on a technicality, on a custom, on tradition, but not truth. So for example, the Church of England's official articles of faith wrote it off in a phrase that's pretty harsh. They say it is a fond thing vainly invented. Basically saying like, hey, this whole purgatory thing, it's made up. It's human beings trying to grab onto something, and it's not in the Bible. And they had one proof text of their own that they pointed to. It's the scene of Jesus on the cross dying between

two criminals. And you probably know the story. One of them repents at the very last second and asked Jesus to remember him. And Jesus answers, truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise today not in a couple weeks after you've been scrubbed down and you go through a purification today a convicted criminal a guy with a lifetime of sin and up until that point about zero hours left to make up for any of it he goes straight to paradise no waiting room no fire no layover no purgatory so to protestants that one line defines their whole argument salvation is immediate you ask christ to you know save you to remember me in paradise and jesus says hey today you're going with me you're dying saved, you're going home. Now, as you can imagine, Catholic defenders will have an answer for all of this.

They argue that certain things that Jesus said about the age to come imply that some sins can still be dealt with after death. So they point out that praying for the dead is ancient, that you can find it scratched into Christian tombs from like the 100s A.D. long before any of the medieval kind of guilt or money grabs came in. And they insist that purgatory doesn't insult the cross at all. They'd actually, see it as the cross finishing its work. Now, it's also worth noting that the book of James also mentions faith and works. And so, for example, in James chapter 2 verse 17, faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead. And then it goes on to say, you see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone. So again, Catholics will look at this and say, well,

faith and works are important. Of course, Jesus Christ saves you, but the work that you do still on earth is a manifestation of that and even pulls on Abraham and says Abraham truly lived his faith. He was doing what God was asking him to do. He brought Isaac up onto the mountain to sacrifice him and then didn't. But it was this faith. It was this action. It was the manifestation of his faith. It was the works that go along with the faith that ultimately prove that he was doing the work of God. Now, again, this is just what a Catholic would say. Wherever you land on this, at the end of the day, the point of purgatory was never to be a squabble over cash or indulgences. it was a genuine disagreement about what Jesus's death actually did and how much works are

even important, if any of them at all, and what you could expect to see after you died. But here's what almost no one outside the church realizes. The deepest split over purgatory isn't even necessarily Catholic versus Protestant. There's an entire third giant branch of Christianity that we haven't even talked about yet. And they have a version of the afterlife that is so different and vivid and in some ways frightening, that it kind of makes the Western concept look like, you know, a day at the park. So while the Western Church is busy building, you know, the purifying fire, the Eastern Church, the Eastern versions of Orthodox Christianity, like my good pal Christos over here, of the Greek affliction,

they had a totally different sort of direction. Now, officially, the Orthodox Church rejects the Western word purgatory outright. They, of course, don't like the whole Latin thing, right? It comes from Rome. And, you know, like the legal ledgers, the sin accounting, the idea of, like, a physical fire with like a count. New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with a coffee plus range infused with functional

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down clock, all that stuff. So when East and West actually sat down together and tried to reunite at the Council of Florence in 1439, part of a story that we actually told in the episode on the Great Schism, this concept was actually one of the deal breakers. The Greek delegation fiercely contested the Latin formulations. One of the delegates, a guy by the name of Bessarion, eventually became one of the strongest voices for reunion and later became a Catholic cardinal. But the best known opponent was a man. named Mark of Ephesus and basically refused to sign on to this whole reunification thing at all because the East had its own idea about what happens to your soul and the hours after you die. And it might be one of the most terrifying afterlife beliefs in all of Christianity. They call them the aerial toll houses. So here's how it goes. And again, I'm not Greek Orthodox. I'm not any type of Orthodox.

So if I get some of this wrong, forgive me. But my understanding is that the second you die, your soul doesn't peacefully just go towards the light. Instead, angels arrive to escort you, and your soul starts to rise up through the air, up through the sky, basically climbing towards heaven. But the sky in this belief is not empty. It is occupied, and it is full of demons. Yeah. So as your soul rises, you get stopped again and again at a whole series of checkpoints, like literally toll booths, roughly 20 of them, stacked one on top of another all the way up. And at each one, a specific crew of demons is waiting for you.

because each toll house is assigned to a specific sin. There's a toll house for lying, one for theft, one for gluttony, for pride, murder, adultery, on and on, basically in a rising ladder of accusation. And at every single station, the demons produce their evidence against you. They read your record aloud, every lie that you've ever told,

itemized at the lying booth. Basically, it's like an interrogation. They accuse you, and they try with everything they've got to drag your soul out of the sky and into hell with them. Now, the most detailed account we have of this comes from a text from the 900s describing a woman named Theodora, who supposedly died, passed through all these toll houses, and came back to describe every terrifying level of the climb. Now, this belief is genuinely contested within the Eastern Orthodox churches themselves. This is not a settled, universal, every Eastern Orthodox Church believes this. Some Orthodox saints and theologians defend the tollhouse idea fiercely as authentic, and they say it's very ancient teaching handed down from. the founding fathers of Christendom, but other major Orthodox thinkers reject them basically with the

same ferocity. They call the whole thing superstitious or non-biblical or even heretical. So if you ask, do the Orthodox believe in like these aerial tollhouses? The answer is some do passionately and some absolutely do not. And it is still a very live argument to this day. But here's what's fascinating. If you pull back the imagery, right, the demons, the booths, the tear in the sky, and you look at the bare idea underneath it all. It's a soul after death in a state that's not heaven and isn't hell. It's being sorted and tested and tried and accounted for sin by sin before it's allowed to enter paradise. So it's similar in a way to purgatory. One Orthodox writer put it this way. He described the Toll House ordeal as basically the Byzantine cousin of the

sort of Latin Roman purgatory, just in his words, minus the fireworks. So even setting aside the fact that these toll houses are a contested tradition rather than official Eastern doctrine. It's pretty striking that two enormous branches of Christianity and up until the Reformation, really the holders of Christendom, they have this kind of overlap, right? They're split apart for a thousand years at this point, but yet there's imagery that keeps circling the same haunting kind of feeling that between this life and eternity, there's something in the middle, which finally brings us to the most beautiful version that anyone ever thought of because one man took the whole dark, terrifying idea and turned it into one of the greatest poems

ever written. So everything that we've covered this far has been pretty dark, right? You got fire and demons and caves and screaming souls and the whole thing. But in the early 1300s, there is this exiled Italian poet named Dante Allegheri. And he basically looked at purgatory and saw something that no one had really thought about before. He saw hope. So in his masterpiece, divine comedy, Dante takes an imaginary journey through the entire afterlife. And he goes down through hell, up through purgatory, and then finally into heaven. And his vision of that middle part, the, as he calls it, Purgatorio. The basically rewired how the whole world pictured this place. And he didn't just do it for Purgatory. I mean, Dante's version of hell is kind of how all,

I shouldn't say all, but most medieval Catholics, like, understood hell. It was really from this one work known as the divine comedy, like the layers of hell, all that stuff comes from Dante. Now, Dante, maybe more than any pope or counsel or any theologian, painted the picture that's still in our heads today. And here's the thing. Almost none of it is church doctrine. Dante just kind of made it up, right? Like, he didn't picture a cave or a pit or a dungeon buried under the earth. He pictured mountains, like enormous mountains rising up out of the sea on the far side of the world. And here's the genius of all of it. Hell, in Dante's telling, is a descent. So you spiral down into the dark level after level, each of them getting worse and worse.

But purgatory is the opposite. It is a climb. You go up. Every single step gets you closer to the light. So this mountain that he's describing has seven terraces, ringing it basically like these stacked rings. And each terrace is dedicated to purging one of these seven deadly sins. So as the soul climbs, it works through each of them one at a time.

The heaviest sins are dealt with down at the bottom and the lightest sins are dealt with at the top. And the soul is basically getting lighter and full. freer and cleaner and more purified with each level that it climbs. But here's the most profound idea that Dante puts forward is that on this mountain, the suffering isn't punishment. It's not torture just for the sake of torture like God or the angels or no one's taking glee in this torture. It's like rehab.

He pictures it like a physical therapy. Like even just like therapy. He basically is just like each terrace is a place where the soul faces and reflects and corrects a specific flaw, specific sin that. you were dealing with. And it's maybe uncomfortable. It's probably painful in the way that rehab or therapy probably is. But Dante saw a sin as like a kind of like love gone wrong. It was like a love or is a good intention aimed at the wrong thing or maybe too much of one thing or maybe too little. He saw purgatory as a place where the broken basically finally gets set straight. So yes, the

souls on the mountain are suffering. But they're suffering the way that you suffer through an injury, right like if you pull your shoulder you got to heal that you know and it hurts to do the work but every ache is basically putting you back together and what astonishing is that dante says that the soul actually wants to be there the soul embraces the pain maybe they can feel that it's healing maybe they know that they're on their way to an eternity in paradise maybe it's like working out when like you know after you work out if you're not doing it for a while like you feel really sore but it's almost like a good kind of sore and the longer you stick with it the more you start to see the gains and the pain doesn't stick around so much.

You know, it's like you start to see the results. Now, for Dante, near the very top, right before a soul can reach the summit, there is a final barrier. This is a literal wall of fire that every soul has to walk through, literally walking through the fire. And Dante says that in this flame, there may be pain, but there is no death. And it's kind of a last echo of all the old imagery, all the stuff we've been talking about, this purifying fire that we mentioned.

But now it's not a place where you stay. it is the doorway, it is the threshold into paradise. And then at the summit, Dante says there are two rivers. The first one is called Lethe. And when a purified soul drinks from it, it forgets. It forgets every sin and all the shame and the pain of every wrong thing that it ever did. It's just completely washed away. But Dante believed that erasing the bad isn't enough. That would just basically kind of leave you empty. So then he added a second river. Now again, let me just be clear. This is not in the Bible. This is not like something that's in the Catholic Catechism. This is Dante's interpretation. But Dante adds this second river, one that's entirely his own invention. He calls this river

Aeu Noe. And it's basically when the soul goes to drink from it, the soul remembers. Not the sins and not the pain of reality, but the good. Every kind act, every moment of grace, every good thing that the soul ever did, and all of it is restored. So one makes you forget, the other makes you remember all the good things. So the soul finally steps into heaven whole. It faced all of its sins. It corrected all of the worst. And it basically filled itself back up with all of the best.

All the shame gets emptied and now it is full of light. That is Dante's version of purgatory. It's not a place where your soul is to burn. It's a place where you go to heal. It is a hospital to get better. It is a rehab facility. And at the very end, only the good gets, basically remains with you. you, right? The best that was with you the whole time, that's what stays. And it's a very gorgeous

picture that kind of makes you like forget where we started, right? Like the place in Rome, like the burnt handprints behind the glass, all that stuff. You see this version, you're like, oh, that's actually pretty nice. You can see why Dante was popular in his time and even to this day. Now, before we close it all out, let's go back to those places, right? Because those two visions of purgatory, the terrifying one and the beautiful one have kind of been at odds with each other for like thousands of years. And this is like, you know, the real reason that the idea survived at all, every schism, every scandal, like all of it comes down to these two visions and kind of which one you reach

for. Because at the end of the day, the word purgatory, as we know it, is not like perfectly laid out in any scripture, right? It's not like just right there. Like there's elements that people pull onto, some of which might not even be in your Bible. But the most important sort of illustration found in scripture, was rejected by many Christians after the Reformation, and it got so tangled up in greed and

corruption and kind of human beings ruining stuff that it actually really changed how the church saw itself and really caused the Reformation in many ways. But yet, over a billion people still believe that there is a version of it today. And I think there's probably many reasons. I think one, you know, purgatory is an answer to a question that can't just go away, right? Like a question that every single one of us, whether you're a believer or a skeptic, you have to face is that okay i think about someone that i lost like you know they were a good person they liked jesus but they also did a lot of terrible things like are they worthy of heaven and then of course you think about your own death right you're like okay was i perfect on earth i did a lot of terrible

things but i love jesus like is that good enough and of course no one's good enough right like no one is perfect like we're all flawed but human we're all dirty and we want to you know have some type of eternal life with jesus christ if you're a christian so that's constant constantly with everyone. So when you try to picture where your loved ones are right now, you kind of run into this problem that purgatory is trying to solve because it feels wrong to imagine like a good, ordinary person getting, you know, damned to hell for eternity just because maybe they didn't know the name of Jesus Christ. Like that seems not fair. But also maybe... New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with a coffee plus range infused with

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completely unchanged, still dragging all the dents and like flaws that they have with them. And purgatory in many ways kind of solves it, right? It kind of bridges the gap, kind of literally. It says, hey, you don't have to be a saint. You don't have to be a monster. But it also doesn't mean that you were merely like almost good enough. In Catholic theology, if you're in purgatory, Christ has saved you. The verdict is in.

Purgatory is the final work of grace that makes you perfectly ready for heaven. There's a place where the saved but not yet spotless, finally can get cleaned up and rehabilitated. But there's also another reason why it's lasted this long. And the reason is that it really gives comfort to grieving people for thousands of years. And it still does. because purgatory means that the dead are not beyond your reach, that, you know, heaven and hell, those are sealed, those are final, nothing can go in or out. But purgatory has like a little bit of a crack, a little bit of a highway to heaven. And it says that your love still matters after

someone's gone, that there's a prayer that can still cross the divide, that there's still something that you can do while on earth to help your mother or your father or your child. And you can still somehow reach them and help. And that's why those people in Rome, that's why they were participating. That's why they were doing this in many ways, right? Like they were, you know, they weren't just cataloging like spooky things. They were desperate to believe that their mothers or their fathers or their husbands or wives were still out there, close enough to reach back, close enough to, you know, in the case of this one museum, the, you know, the Museum of Souls and Purgatory could literally burn a hand in our actual world and leave a mark. It makes you go like, oh, wow, they're still there. And what I'm doing on earth is actually worthwhile in helping them.

And, you know, I think all of us kind of understand this because if you don't believe a word of this theology, maybe you're not even Christian, there's a version in this that we all kind of do, right? Like, we keep like a deceased relative's watch in a drawer. And it's something that, like, you would grab if your house caught on fire. Like you would, you know, visit a grave and talk out loud to someone that passed away just because it makes you feel good. And you don't have any idea how that, you know, these words could reach that person or if it even matters. You might keep a voicemail of your grandma, the last voicemail she ever left you. And you listen to it because it just makes you feel close. And none of that survives like a skeptical cross-examination, but we all kind of do it. Because love and the love and the grief that we all feel doesn't accept that it's just done, that the door is closed. Like we want to believe that there's something else and that there's a way that what we're doing on Earth can matter, you know? And maybe it's Dante's version. Maybe it isn't. Maybe it's in the catechism. Maybe it's not. But the question underneath all of it doesn't change, right? Like what happens to the people that we love when they were good people and we know that they were good, but they weren't perfect.

Maybe they were good, but maybe they didn't really rock with Christianity. They didn't rock with Jesus. Maybe they were an amazing person of a different religion. Like, are they destined for hell? And I think the most surprising thing that I take away from this and like really deep diving into purgatory and trying to understand something that I was kind of raised to always believe, it's not like the demons or the fire or the sinfulness. It's the hope that it offers so many people at the end. Purgatory means that your journey and the journey of the people you love isn't over. And it means that there's still more to go and that there is a light waiting for you, as Dante would say, at the top of a mountain.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief synopsis of the history of purgatory. It's a fascinating thing. It's something that I dealt with a lot as a kid because you got to understand, I was raised by super Catholic parents. My mom, the most Catholic woman I ever met. So as a result, this is something that I just believed. She was like, yeah, you know, like, for example, like we all have original sin and so like if a child dies an early childhood before they're baptized

they're not able to get cleansed of their sin and so they also are too young to know the name of jesus christ they can't accept christ to be their savior so if they were to die where do they go my mom would always bring this up as a hypothetical where do they go like they're not purified by the you know by jesus christ they didn't accept jesus as their savior so what happens to them and i'd be like well i guess by that logic they go to hell and she's like but that doesn't seem fair right How is it fair that like a two-day old child that doesn't get baptized goes to hell? It seems crazy. I'm like, well, okay, they go to heaven.

She goes, but they're still in a state of sin. They're not purified. So how do they go to heaven? I go, mom, I'm seven years old. I don't know what's going on. What are you talking about? And she'd be like, purgatory. It's in the Bible.

Look it up, second Maccabees. And I'd open up my Bible. It'd be an NIV. And I'd be like, mom, it's not in the Bible. She's like, where'd you get this Bible from? I'm like, oh, my goodness. Because you've got to understand. I didn't go to Catholic school.

was homeschooled and then I went to Presbyterian school. So now I go to Presbyterian school and we're having these debates and I'm like, yeah, you know, they go to purgatory and all the kids are like, what's that? I go, guys, you guys are barely Christian. You don't know about purgatory? And they'd be like, point to it in the Bible and I'd be like, my mom already brought this up. It's not in there. And so it sent me on this big rabbit hole trying to understand what's going on.

And I think purgatory is a helpful, like if I had to pull myself out of, you know, my upbringing and my biases, it's like a helpful thing to, you know, put people into a category where it's like, all right, some guys. lives on a faraway island. No missionaries ever went to him. He never heard the name Jesus Christ. He believes in like his local gods. But he lived a good life. He took care of his family, his friends. He never murdered. He'd try to do what was just. Where does he go? He dies. Maybe in like a horrific, you know, spear juggling accident. He's juggling spears. He gets pierced. Bang, dies. What happens to him? Goes to heaven. He never did Jesus Christ, never repented for his sins. He was

worshipping false gods the whole time. He gets to go to heaven. That seems crazy. But he can't go to hell. I mean, he was a good guy. He tried his best. So I think evangelicals, I think, Protestants, again, I'm kind of assuming here. I think they say he goes to heaven because the covenant's written on the heart. He did what was good based off his own accord, and that's good enough. But it's like, well, if you're saved by Jesus Christ, he didn't know Jesus.

So where does he go? I think Catholics would be like, he goes to purgatory. And most of us probably do go there. Now, the Catholics never say that they know who's in heaven. I think the saints are like their understanding of, like, who was most likely in heaven and all people in heaven are saints, but we only know of a select group that we believe are saintly enough on earth that we have like a 99% confidence that they're in heaven. Anyway, I hope this wasn't too technical. I hope this gets the point across.

And if all the Catholics out there, I hope it didn't have, I did a good enough job of explaining where this comes from and why and how the indulges thing got completely off the rails. And you've never heard of this before. I hope that you understand where Catholics come from and why they believe it based off of Catholic scripture and some of the books that were taken out in the Deuter Canonical texts, as you guys call them, the Apocrypha, which feels like a slur, you know, the apocrypha. Duteronical, I like that better. Cresos, what do you think? Are you ready to go to your aerial toll booths? Well, I was just about to talk about that. So it's not, it's only really accepted by Eastern Orthodox people who go by the

old calendar. Oh, yeah. I didn't know that. So modern ones don't really believe in that. Interesting. Have you ever heard that term before? The Ariel Toll House? Yeah. Not in English. How do you say it? It was pronounced somehow in my Greek school. I just don't remember how. But was it taught to you? It was taught as something that we don't really believe in anymore.

That's hilarious. But it is like an awesome video game mission kind of thing. Yeah, it's like GTA, but heaven. It's like answer to this and then answer to this. How does it know I made that video game? That's pretty cool. It's a great idea. Wait, let's cut this.

Yeah. Yeah, cut this and we're going to get rich off this video game I do. That's right. What do you guys think? If you grew up Catholic, what is your understanding of purgatory? Is there anything I missed in my attempt to try to be unbiased? Sorry if I did, but please correct me in the comments. If you're Protestant, evangelical, the Church of England, Anglican, Lutheran, whatever,

what are your thoughts on purgatory? Does it, like, the hypotheticals I brought up about, like, the guy on an island that never knew Jesus or, like, the child that dies at one day old, where do they go? And how does that sort of fit with your theology? And if you come completely outside of the Christian paradigm, if you're Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, whatever. How do you understand this? Like, does your religion have a similar kind of thing, like sort of like a purification station, so to speak? How does it work for you guys? These hypotheticals like an innocent child that dies? Where do they go? How do you understand it? Is the power of a law great enough that they just get brought in? Have they not done any sins so there's nothing to account for? How do you understand it? I would love to know what everyone's thoughts are. Please drop a comment, YouTube, Spotify. I read all of them. I don't get back to every single one, but I do read them. And if I don't get back, I'm sure someone else will. And also a couple other camp bulletins, let me say. If you like history content, like deep diving on crazy historical stuff, we have history camp. If you like deep dives on mysteries,

conspiracies of the modern day, well, great news, Camp Gagnon, the main channel, that's for you. Also, we have a secret society. Yeah, patreon.com slash Camp Gagnon. It's the place where you can go to hang out with me and the rest of the squad. We do monthly zooms. We do episodes that never got to the public, early release on episodes, and every episode of this show. And all the channels all completely add free. And if you just like to rock with a religion vibe, well, great news. You're in the right place. This is Religion Camp.

We drop these episodes every single Sunday. So thank you guys so much for tuning in. I appreciate you all immensely for being here. God bless. Go to church or Guadwara or mosque or temple. Whatever you do, just believe in something. And I'll see you guys next time. Peace.

Don't you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know the same way you can skip an ad. I get it. I'm Siaia and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't. end up the way I planned. And today I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem.