The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Interview With Darryl Cooper (AKA Martyrmade) Part I - Christianity and the Jews

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

First of two parts. Intro is repeated on both

There he is! Hey man, how's it going? I'm okay. Oh wow. Two minutes later I was like, oh shit, is he not gonna come? Oh, I'm so happy you came. Oh yeah, of course. How you doing? I'm still a little bit

sick. So if I have to cough every once in a while, try to remember to hit the mute button. Nah, I can cut it out too, because I want to take it slow, and so if there's any like pauses and stuff like that i won't cut out anything anybody says but i'll i'll cut out like you know dude that's a pretty sick library you got back there oh that's that's a that's a green screen oh okay i would have lied about i would have totally lied about it if i were you but i do i do have a bookshelf pretty much like that in my living room, except that the books

had been handed down, the books my father had. I didn't really become a reader or anything academic until my 50s. My whole early life, I was a smart guy, but my whole early life was just guitar and you know trying to get women and um i was just i i never could connect with my academic side until uh much much later in life which is well i think that's uh that's probably the path that a healthy person should follow. Yeah, were you always like this? Yeah, like I went to something like 35, maybe 40 different schools from kindergarten to 12th grade. So I was just moving sometimes every two, three months,

just all the time. And so with the change of environment, I just ended up being kind of a bookworm and that would be my continuity from place to place you know and uh yeah i've always been that way you were a military brat no just single mother who had some problems and um you know we were poor moving around kind of shacking up with whoever we could for a few months until we got evicted and moving on again well that's interesting i mean i didn't know that and that's probably it's probably plays a part it must play a part in the way you see the world right and also the emotional intelligence uh um so it i'm probably gonna

talk a little too much at the top but uh bear with me because i i just think it's important so and also i want to i want to be able to cut in a couple of not things like evidence of the prosecution, but like things of yours that you've said that I've liked and that have moved me that I've seen of yours. So I might refer to some of them, but I might then later go and replace them with an action in your own words, if that's okay. All right. Yeah, and I don't mind if you've got to ask some hard questions, man. I get it. Like, I had this plan way back, like this was like 2016, 2017, when I was first starting a podcast. And I had this great idea with all the political polarization and stuff going on. I was going to

go out and I was going to, I knew these people so I could go do it, but I was going to interview a white nationalist, a black nationalist, an Israeli settler, and a Palestinian activist, like a hardcore Palestinian activist and just talk to him. Right. And so the first one I was able to set up was the white nationalist dude. And he was like the most polite, nice, friendly person ever. And I'm just having an agreeable personality that when somebody's nice to me i'm just nice to them and the whole thing came off like i was just his best friend and everything and people still give me shit about it so like uh i understand like you gotta you know i don't i don't mind you to do what you gotta do well okay um yeah i like you're kind of putting yourself as it as the you're the you're the white nationalist in that analogy, but I don't think you mean to do that.

I think to some of your viewers. Yeah, yeah. The grief that I'll take. That's how they're going to see it. Yeah. And I wanted to ask you about this. Greg Johnson says, that's his name. Greg Johnson, right?

Yeah. Oh, you know about that. Okay, yeah. Yeah, exactly. That was a lesson, man. That was like when I learned that interviewing is not just like, oh, you sit down and chat with somebody. Like it's an actual skill that you have to develop and acquire. Yeah, that was a hard lesson. I'm going to ask you the questions that I've really spent a lot of time wondering about.

And I'm not – well, let me just start so i'm going to start here by um reading something and maybe i'll actually get the actual version of you saying it that you said which i think nicely um uh sets up the interview with something that i uh listened to yesterday you said the following many of us have had experiences reading novels where we think that the author must have been writing this as a personal letter to us it gets to us so well, or some aspect of us. It may even be something that we didn't see or understand about ourselves before, or something we vaguely felt but hadn't been able to articulate well. Nietzsche had no problem articulating himself.

But even the most clear thinking and articulate among us are often unclear and inarticulate when thinking or talking about ourselves, at least when we're trying to be honest. A good novel can give us deep insight into ourselves precisely because we're often not honest with ourselves about ourselves. Early in Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky writes that, quote, every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself,

and then only in secret. But there are other things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself. And every decent man has a number of such things stored away in his mind. That's a very powerful thing that you said there. It's true to anybody who wants to be honest. And with you, you know, I wonder if we see glimpses from time to time of the things that you're struggling with that you might be of two minds about. So let me just read my little notes here. They're probably pretty well written. I want to avoid as much as

I can getting into any factual debates with you. Not that it wouldn't be great fun to have an Israel-Palestine debate but I don't think that's what will be of interest to people. Also I'm tired of those debates so that you know I mean I've had enough of them. It's crucial to me that you register in real time anything you think I'm leaving out or anything I say that's not fair. No matter how this conversation goes, your followers on Twitter and YouTube are going to come at me in an awful way. So if you think I need correcting, please don't hold back. Meaning like, you know, don't feel like you have to say, you know, be quiet about anything, right? Because this is going to go out there and this is forever. The internet's forever. So if you think,

believe me, it wouldn't be in bad faith that I'm doing this. But I'm not an expert on you. And I may be leaving out something that's totally relevant to it that only a monster would have left out. A totally dishonest person would have left that out. But I really don't know about it. So you correct it. And I think you know me well enough by now to know that's not my style.

100%. The question that most people are wondering about you, me included, is what makes you tick? What is the ideology and worldview from which your tweets and interpretations of events, historical and otherwise, percolate? I've taken tremendous tongue lashings from people, and boy, this is true, Daryl, tremendous tongue lashings from people for having stuck up for you and for the obvious obvious struggle i've had turning on you as it were despite various things that you've said and i've struggled to explain it even to myself i was like like what's what's going on

with me like he says this he says that you know like um but then the heart of the matter heart of the answer occurred to me and i think I texted you at this time. I heard someone on a podcast, Jewish, talking about how deeply they admire and appreciate Dostoevsky's work, despite the fact that he wrote an anti-Semitic screed, or in my view, a screed, called The Jewish Problem. Now, I didn't know about this stuff.

I say in my view because I since found out that Dostoevsky is your favorite philosopher, and I didn't know that either. Not author, not novelist, but favorite philosopher. So perhaps you might disagree that it was anti-Semitic, but we can get to that. Anyway, the point is that there are tremendous feats of insight in your work. I don't know if they're all yours, if they're original or not, but they are things I hadn't heard before. They're things that you're able to, even if you did take them from somewhere, you apply them in a very, very clever way. And that's what smart people do.

They make connections. Things about human nature, about honor cultures, about what makes paranoids and narcissists tick. Other things that aren't coming to my mind at the top. I'll just give you one quick example. It's such an unrelated to the kind of thing you might think I'm going to bring up, but it stuck with me. And I went and looked it up this morning. Mark Andreessen, the famous tech billionaire or whatever, he had tweeted out, organizations that don't have to be competent aren't of course like i'm a businessman i'll say oh yeah damn right that's exactly the problem i face all the time especially my business is very successful and you know you think whatever and you answered or you

retweeted the worm in the apple of america's unipolar moment like this is so smart like like like immediately it occurred to you that when we when we had everything going for us we didn't have to be competent anymore and and the degradation followed from that and this is an example daryl like when somebody is that smart and and somebody can write crime and punishment like you know that which is the book that i read during colvin it hit me like no other book ever has then when they go and they say other stuff you can't just dismiss them like you you you you wonder like what's going on why am i diverging from this guy and maybe it's me like maybe i'm diverging because he's the guy that's right, and I'm the one with blind spots here. So, all right, I have my own personal suspicion

that you see and interpret the world primarily through the lens of Christianity as you see it. And you see it quite differently than modern evangelicals, who I don't know about this stuff, but I'm gleaning it, who see a religious obligation to support Israel and the Jews so I want to start with get right into it with his tweet exchange that you and I had somewhere on Twitter somebody was discussing the book of Matthew and for those who don't know the book book of Matthew is this part of the New Testament which has been weaponized

against the Jews for i don't know how many thousands years um it has things like for i tell you you will not see me again until you say blessed is he who comes in the name of the lord and it also says and this was the part of the passion of the christ mel gibson's movie part of the controversy there because he insisted on leaving it in all the people answered and said his blood be on us and on our children i also saw it translated on the internet as the crowd answered we'll take the blame we and our children after us so when i asked you about that some of those i don't know which specific quotation it was you had a very nice answer you said um brother that's a long chat best left to whenever we can coordinate that drink together

so i mean i got more here but why don't you start there like what do you see a divine hand in what's happened to the Jews since that day, since the crucifixion? Well, since before the crucifixion, sure, of course. If what you mean is, has what's happened to the Jews since then been like a divine punishment, then no, I don't mean that. I don't mean like Nebuchadnezzar being sent to Babylon or something, but there's always a divine hand on the Jews. And I think any Christian has to believe that. Anybody who wanders away from that idea is doing something other than Christianity. I can't remember what the context of that coming up was. Maybe you have it there. But just some guy on Twitter tweeted something about Matthew. And I don't know if the context of that coming up was maybe you have it there but um or just some some guy on twitter tweeted something about matthew and i don't know if the context is is that important i'm not taking

it like grossly out of context i'm sure yeah no no no i'm just trying to remember what prompted the conversation because it might it might give me an idea of what was in my mind at the time like you know maybe one of the things I've seen from some evangelical Christians on Twitter is they'll just put out, they'll say that the Jews didn't kill Jesus, which is like an argument that it's one of those things that like, you see it and you're like, that's just factually wrong if you're a Christian and you read the Bible and believe it. But this is really not an argument that I should be involved with. And yet I'm on Twitter and I have the personality makeup I do. So I'm going to get in this argument,

right? So, um, you know, and so as a factual point, like a counterpoint to, to, to, to that, um, you know, maybe it came up that way. Um, I don't know. I mean, look, my Christianity is basically this, and this was, as far as I know, this was basic Christian theology until, you know, 150 years ago in America and to a certain extent, Britain, and it's still basic Christian theology throughout the world. You know, the Jews were the chosen people. They were chosen for a special task and marked off and kept separate from the rest of mankind through the law and through these boundaries that they set up between themselves and others because they had this mission, right? If you're a Christian like I am, it's the most important mission. It was the central mission in all of the history of the

universe, right? They were going to bring forth the Messiah into the world. God was going to come down to earth in the form of a man and experience the suffering and the fear and the abandonment that we have all suffered. Go through that with us. Die, suffer, die with us. And then be able to understand us, I think, in a way that altered his relationship to humanity, right? Obviously, there's glimmers of mercy and things in the Old Testament, but there's a whole lot of wrath. And in the New Testament, you have mercy and you have compassion. And in my mind, that's because God came down here and found out what it was like for us, right? What it was that he'd been putting us through this

whole time. Because if, you know, just like you can't, God maybe can't create a weight too heavy for himself to lift, you know, the logical contradictions are a limitation on God's power, right? So if he's infinite, he's perfect, he's all-powerful so that having a thought is the same thing as that thing happening in the world, like just unlimited power and eternal, then he's never watched his child die of leukemia. He's never worried what it was going to be like if he couldn't find food tomorrow for his family. He's never gone through anything. He's never suffered, almost by definition. If you're suffering, that's a weakness that's being picked at or something.

So it was something that was not available to him. And I think in the Old Testament, you have a God who I I think, is learning it about mankind through his relationship to us. You see, like, the book of Job, which I think is the most, I mean, it's to me the most, it's the most important book in all religious literature, period, anywhere in the world, like, to me. I think it, but you see there that God is confronted with this human being that is presented, if you take it on its face, at face value on the terms it's presented to you, you know, he's presented with this human being who is just broken and destroyed out of, on a whim, basically, just out of spite, right? And if you take the values that the rest

of the Bible, and obviously the author of the book of Job didn't know he was writing a part of the Bible. He was just writing, you know, a story about this guy, Job, got put together later. But if you take the values that are presented as they're given to you, and you look at that, you say, this guy was innocent, and God behaved unjustly toward him. And that's the central conflict of the book, right? And, you know, Job's friends come and talk to him and they all offer reasons why, no, God's not acting unjustly. That's impossible, therefore. And Job stands up to all of them until the very end when he's overwhelmed with just the power of the presence, right? So, but still,

there was a confrontation with the possibility that he wasn't really, he didn't know what he was really doing to Job when he killed his family, you know, like what that really meant to him, because he'd never experienced that before. And so, to me, like, that's the reason God came to earth was to go through, go through what we go through. You know, the nature of the world can't be changed. Like, he can't make it so there's no death or no loss because there would be no life, right? You know, life requires change, and we experience change as suffering most of the time, you know? So it has to be this way in order for us to exist at all, and He can't change that, but what He can do is come down and say, I know what you've gone through,

you know? I've watched my son die. I've been on the cross, like in the person of Christ. And, you know, he says, Abba, Abba, why have you forsaken me? And this is like feeling the abandonment by God that you read in so many of the Psalms, right? Which is, you have these, you have the Jewish people who have gone through these cycles of suffering, and there's these just heartfelt laments of, why have you abandoned me? Why have you forsaken me? And he went through that. or his relationship to us was the central hub that all of human history and the history of the universe turns around, as a Christian, that's what I believe. I think that

especially as you get past the Second Temple period, you have, this is a strain that always existed in Judea and Samaria back, you know, pre-Second Temple, and you have to put together sources. It's difficult to do, but like, this is a strain that always existed. But after the Second Temple period, the people who came back to Jerusalem and rebuilt it after the Persians freed them from the Babylonians, You know, it wasn't as if all of the Jews who'd been exiled to Babylon moved back to Jerusalem. There's a reason that, you know, Iraq had more Jews in it than Jerusalem did at the time of Christ, right? There's a huge Jewish population there that goes

back 2,500 years. Most of them stayed there. Some of them went back, and those people were hardcore true believers. Those people were the religious settlers in the West Bank who went out there for a reason. And you see that in Ezra and Nehemiah, where so much of those two books is them returning and finding that the people who'd been left behind had started to intermarry with their neighbors and they're making them divorce all their wives if they've done that and so on and so forth, right? And so these are people who are coming back with this like very strong sense of like maintaining those boundaries against the rest of the world. And that's sort of,

I mean, you see in the subsequent history, like through the Maccabean revolt and then their relationship to the a priesthood that's not of the correct line and various things. So you have to figure out what is it we're doing here. And that sense of separateness had to be the Jews to bring the Messiah into the world, the reason only they were capable of understanding. You know, if Christ would have been born as a Roman, he would have been born, he would have been executed, and everybody, every single person would have celebrated, and that would have been the end of that. Because they didn't have the capacity to understand what they were looking at. The Jews understood because they figured out that if we keep a record of this and we keep telling our story, then we can get conquered and get exiled and come back. And so you had these people who knew what it was like to be the one that lost, knew what it was like to be the one that was on bottom and suffered. And only those people were going to be able to recognize the Messiah when he came.

Which is a hard, you know, again, like, and Jews know this too. I know that Jews will talk about this, that, you know, that being chosen is, you know, it's a gift, I guess, in a way, but it's a burden, you know, it's a burden. And all the suffering that's happened has been, you know, has been a part of that. It's because that suffering, again, was indispensable if these people were going to be able to recognize the Messiah when he came, again, from a Christian perspective. and so um throughout the entire period i mean really like the exile ends in you in the early 500s bc but um really it doesn't it doesn't end not for any like real period of time right they go back they're still under the suzerainty of the persians they're just nicer rulers than the babylonians were uh then the gree Greeks come through and they're under the Greeks. And that gets really ugly.

The Maccabean Revolt happens. But then, you know, they have like, I'm sorry, I always do this. Let me just let me just get to the point real quick. Please do. Please do. So over the course of all these sufferings and all these things that have happened, and this attempt by the outside world to stamp out the identity and stamp out that separateness that you see again and again, that's why those ancient empires used to do those exiles. It wasn't just like, we want to get them out of there. We want to scatter them around so they'll assimilate with everybody else and stop being whatever they are. And so as they go through all of this, the exile's never really ended.

The Maccabean revolt happens. The priesthood is not of the correct line, which is obviously central to the Israelite religious custom back then. You get up, and now they're conquered by the Romans, and then that's when Christ comes. And they're awaiting a Messiah. a messiah and for understand for human reasons right the same way we would all at least struggle with on some level the messiah they're waiting for is the one that's going to you know be a be a military leader or a rebel leader that's going to overthrow the system of power that they're laboring under and place them above their enemies and basically get revenge on these people who have done these things to them. And that's the most human response in the world.

So the Messiah did come and he was going to end the exile, just like he said he was going to do. But ending the exile meant it didn't mean rising up against your enemies and overcoming them. It meant opening your arms and kneeling down next to them as equal children of God, which is another way to end the exile, right? It's a way maybe of backing out of the exile and smashing through it, but that's what it is. And so it did end the exile. And for the people who were in Jerusalem at the time, like the cadre that was there. And again, even at the time, the Jews in Alexandria and Babylon and, you know, in Rome and a lot of the Greek cities, they kind of looked at the Jerusalem Jews as like a little bit extremist, which is understandable.

They're in the holy city, right? Like people who live in Mecca are extremists, you know, to Muslims in Lebanon or something. And so, but they were unwilling to, and I think this is just, again, you go through all the four gospels, the central conflict that's there is, you know, is between this call to open your arms and welcome the Gentiles as equal children of God, that they're now part of the covenant and that's the end of the exile. We're all brothers now. And the people who are saying, you know, after what these people have done to us, like you want us to, like, we're not going to do that. Like to them being chosen meant that, you know, that we're special, just that we're different and special and the best, you know, somehow. Like, that's the argument that John the Baptist has.

It didn't mean we have an obligate—I don't know anything about this stuff, but it didn't mean we have an obligation to do what we were chosen for? Yeah, well, so, like, again, this is obviously, like, I'm coming from a Christian perspective. Like, I think what it became for the religious leaders in Jerusalem by the time of Christ was they were put on earth to obey God's law. Like, that was the point, like, of them being chosen and put on earth was to obey God's law. And they lost sight of the question of obey God's law for what? Like, where's this going? What is this leading to? And if you're a Christian, it was leading to this. Let me just, because, but I get what you're saying, but for instance, you also

tweeted out, God sent the Romans, that is sent, the Romans didn't decide. God sent the Romans to destroy the leprous temple and put an end to the Israelite religion for all time. Yeah. And that to me meant that there is a divine hand. If God sent the Romans to destroy the leprous temple, how come the other people who decided to destroy the leprous temple weren't also sent by God I mean did God just say oh I gave it a good shot we failed and now uh I'm on to other things or was he thwarted forever or is he is he still uh uh after that goal I think that um a leprous temple I mean that, that's, that's quite a, yeah, that look, man, like, I'll tell you this. Um, yeah, I came up on the internet, uh, in like the late nineties,

early two thousands on message boards and stuff where it was just absolute chaos. And, you know, we, we, I still sort of post on Twitter to hundreds of thousands of people as if I'm in a closed, you know, message board with 80 people who've known me for years or something. And, you know, but what would the people what would the people who've known you for years overlay on to that to understand? Well, you got to understand, Daryl, you know? Yeah, well, they would understand. There's just there's an element of uh using provocative language now but at the same time i don't want to back out of this though because look again from a christian perspective from my christian perspective yeah um i think that and again if you're if you're you read through the gospels i mean you read

through the words of Christ. I mean, you maybe can find ways to talk your way around this, but I think Christians have to confront this. Is that, you know, Jesus, he makes clear over and over and over that the religion had lost its way by the time he came and that uh it was well actually let me let me back up a little bit because the first question was about like god sending the romans and when i say that i don't God sent the Roman. That's in the context of the larger question of where you see God's hand. And let me put a few other quotes into it. Like you tweeted out a quote from Rene Girard, Satan's power is to make false accusations so convincing that they become the unassailable truth of entire communities.

There's just many times that you quote, I think what's the clear interpretation is that... Well, how are you taking that? What's your... Well, that when we see entire communities, and you can take it also in defense of the Jews. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I didn't mean it also in defense of the Jews. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, I didn't mean to imply otherwise, I'm sorry. I just meant that what we see playing out on the world stage, God is putting His finger on, and He's expressed His desire in the past to destroy the Jews' leprous temple. And look, by the way, I know as i know a lot of christians believe this stuff and i i struggle to call it anti-semitic because

it's a different if it is anti-semitic it's not it's not um the same kind of bigotry that um normally concerns me but as you said when you when you when you said i look i don't want to back away from this stuff yeah i i suspect that you do believe that that that god is not happy with the jews he's tried to to destroy them in the past i don't think that's the case anymore no you don't think i don't i don't think that's okay well no no i don't think that's the case. Okay. Well, no, no, no. I don't mean I've changed my mind. I mean, I didn't say that. Of course. Yeah.

God has revised. I don't want to be flippant about it. You know, I'm talking about God, but however you want to put it. His relationship to the Jews changed when Christ came and the covenant was opened up to the rest of the world. Right. Because at that point, you know, you got to remember, like all the early Jews, of course, were all early Christians were all Jews. It wasn't as if there were just 12 disciples who then went out to the Greek cities and recruited a bunch of Greeks. And that was it. It was a big movement, you know, big enough movement to spark like a major reaction

from the Jewish leadership and then the Romans themselves. And so a lot of Jews became Christians. And it's too much to say that the religion split at that point. You know, it was definitely a minority sect, but it was a significant movement. And so, you know, to say, if you look at it like that, the Jews who did split off and become Christians, like, they believed that they were, they didn't think they were starting a new religion, you know? They thought that they were continuing the Israelite religion itself. Like, that's what they thought they were doing. This is what we've been waiting for, and now it's here, and now we're going to go in this direction. And all of those passages in the New Testament are basically ways of saying that the people who didn't

follow that path, the Jews who didn't follow Christ, were rejecting the true path of israel right that's that's what that's what the message of the gospels is are there are there consequences are there consequences what does it mean when the consequence happened in 70 a.d yeah the temple i mean are the consequences his blood be on us and on our children i'm i'm the child right is there yeah look i'm not like here's the thing man like i'm not i'm not like, here's the thing, man. Like, I'm not one of these fundamentalists who thinks that, like, you know, if you pull a random verse out of the Bible, like, you have to take this as some literal truth that, look, these people were in conflict with the Jews when these books were being written, you know, and you see it develop,

like, in the oldest gospel, Mark, they really they will talk about the people. They'll when they're talking about the people, the crowds and stuff, they'll say the people. And then by the time you get up to the book of John, which is the latest one, they don't say the people anymore. They say the Jews, they're separate. And so there's this conflict that's been developing. And that's the context in which these people are writing these things. And so, uh, yeah, I like, you know, to, to me that could be a, um, like, I don't think it's a, I don't think it's a historical, uh, you know, like recording of what some Jewish leader said, you know, during the crucifixion period or something. Like, it doesn't have to be that at least for me. Now, the thing is, before that period,

when God's relationship was to the Jews, I mean, the Old Testament tells us, the Hebrew Bible, if you like, God did send the Babylonians. He did send the Assyrians. He then sent the Persians. All of these things that happened were acts of will by God. Once Christ came and the covenant was opened up and the temple was destroyed. At that point, I think that, you know, and again, like Jews hear this and they don't like hearing it. But I'm just telling you, like, I always tell people, like, just imagine you're a Hindu and I'm a Christian saying that I don't believe in Krishna. Because, like, these are, it's a different religion, man. And obviously, that's not a perfect comparison. Because these two things are interrelated in a way that the others never could be.

But is that after that, the Jews who remained outside the covenant, the expanded covenant, you know, the Christian understanding, that God's hand was no longer over those people, that they were just people now who needed to find their way to the Messiah like everybody else. And they were part of the rest of humanity who needed Christ. Like, that's it. And the idea that God is still, that he still has his hand over them and the sufferings that have befallen them in medieval Europe or whatever, the acts of God. I don't believe that. I just, I don't think that's true. So let's take it from then, because there was another tweet somewhere, and I didn't put it because I don't want to pile on,

but at some point you tweeted something about, you know, there being consequences for rejecting God. But so then what are the, other than in the afterlife, are there any consequences to a human being who rejects God? So to an individual human being? Individual or a group of the Jews? Well, historically speaking. It's irrelevant to their history that they've, you know, that they maintain their leprous temple? Well, I mean, the temple's no longer there. I mean, that's, but anyway.

Oh, you know, I could be inaccurate. I assume the temple is also a metaphor for just Judaism, but. Yeah. If that's not the case, then... I mean, yeah, it's an interesting discussion, but I think it's also consequences in the sense that, like one of the things I find is when I talk to American Jews, right. That in a lot of ways there, especially like,

you know, you listen to like a conservative American Jew like Dennis Prager or something, and you listen to him. And to me, his values are Christian values. They're values that he absorbed from growing up in America in a mostly Christian country and absorbed these things. And I'm talking about things like you know look the hebrew bible um doesn't leave a whole lot of room for uh forgiving outsiders who have wronged you things like that right these are values that were brought in by christianity dude i agree with you 100 my father would say that he was not sin cast the first stone and and he would say it with an irony because of course that's not jewish but it spoke to him.

And he realized, you know, how can you argue with that? You know, so there are forgiveness, turn the other cheek and not cast the first stone. I think these are the three things which any Jew is embarrassed to admit that he doesn't believe in. Right. And so. Pretends it's in our religion when it's not. I agree. right and so pretends it's in our religion when it's not i agree and and so in that sense i think that you know that that does damage to your soul to not believe that and to not you know sort of

conduct yourself and think let me just stipulate i i don't know enough about my own religion to know that these concepts are also foreign to the old testament entirely i should clear that up but and also like obviously it's from the yeah yeah you can't just talk i mean the thing of course about judaism is like if you see these anti-semites sometimes online how they love to like bring up lines from the talmud that are offensive you know and they're like can you believe this look and i always try to tell people to no avail like most of the time but like this book was written over like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years by countless, countless people. What you're doing is literally taking like one issue of Cosmopolitan magazine from like 1948 or something and opening it up and finding something offensive and saying, look at what the Americans believe. Like, it's just, you know, for every for everything that is said in one direction, you can usually

find another rabbi who is saying something else because that's what it is. It's a dialogue and a discussion and debate, you know, that's sort of a living thing. And so there's probably look, there's probably a lot of stuff that has developed in the Jewish religion, especially since, you know, that, that just, yeah, I think those are Christian values. And I think that to the extent you don't embrace those things, that it does corrupt your soul. Um, but again, that doesn't necessarily mean to me that, uh, you know, you don't go to church and you don't profess Christ or whatever, like with your lips that somehow you're incurring the wrath of God or something like, I, like, I, you know, I think we have to be adults about this kind of thing. And, um, the, the, um, you know, I've, I read a book

by a rabbi many years ago. I can't remember what it was called now, but it was a fantastic book. And it was talking about how, if you read through the Old Testament, especially in the order that the Hebrew Bible presents them, and I use those terms interchangeably, so everybody just relax, that from the beginning, you know, in the very beginning, God is like literally walking next to Adam in the garden. When he kicks them out of the garden, he literally makes their clothes for them, right? He's like very intimate, very like right there with the people. And then eventually over the course of the thing, you know, now he's only speaking to one person, you know, he's speaking or first he's only speaking to one people and

that's the, you know, Abraham and his children. And then he's only speaking to one people, and that's Abraham and his children. And then he's only talking to one person, and that's Moses, and then the prophets, and the rest of the people. Even King David has to go to the prophet to find out what God is saying, right? And then eventually, you get up to the book of Job and the Hebrew Bible ordering that appearance to Job at the very end is God's last statement to humankind, like directly, if you read it that way. He doesn't speak directly to anybody after that. And so if you're a Christian, the next time God does speak to humankind is, you know, when he arrives on earth. But there's this process of like stepping back, you know, and almost taking your hands off the steering wheel as if like through the process of history, mankind is maturing.

And he's letting us more and more, you know, he's not walking right next to us holding our hand. He's more and more letting us know, he's not walking right next to us, holding our hand. He's more and more letting us, uh, figure things out for ourselves and to get to the point where eventually, um, you know, like a parent doesn't mean you're not there or something, but that you stand back and you watch your children live their lives. Right. And, uh, and I think we're pretty, we're pretty deep into that process at this point. You know, I think when you go back to the Book of Chronicles and, you know, and it's talking about if only my people will call out my name and return to me, then I'll save them. You know that we're not in that we're not in that mode anymore. Like, you know, we're adults and he's watching us live our lives, you know.

And so. That's yeah, that's how I live our lives you know and so that's yeah that's how i look that's how i really look at that all right so all right i mean maybe it's a good thing that people write out of their religion the inconvenient quotes that are unbearable to uh uh you know a standby but he did say blood on us and our children and um you know like the there's some there's some rule of constitutional interpretation and the the assumption is that nothing is in there for no reason that they wrote it it meant something and if uh so i've just always suspected that this seeps into you in some way well look and i wasn't going to hold it against you i yeah no i understand but i i just i really want to like try to explain because I'm not doing a great job of it, but try to explain how I understand this stuff from a historical and religious perspective. Which is, you know, they put it in there for a reason.

Like, no question about it. They put it in there because, and again, to me, like, they put it in there because the Christians were in violent conflict with the Jewish religious authorities at that time. And they wanted to make it clear that these people – because, I mean, look, you go to like the Book of Acts, right, which is the four gospels. And by the way, it doesn't indicate forgiveness or turning the other cheek or any of those Christian values. Well, that's true. That's true. But, and I, look, the on our children part, that's a hard thing to, you know, that requires, Christians should spend a lot of time thinking about. Now let's get on to something else, because unless you have something book of Acts, which is the apostles, Paul, and all the disciples going out into the world and starting the early church. And you have the first martyr, which is like in chapter 7 or 8. It's right near the beginning of the book, and it's Stephen.

And he's giving a long speech that's basically a recounting of the history of Israel up to the point of Christ. And people are listening, and they're not really getting upset. They're just listening to him kind of tell a story. But it's when he gets to the part where he says, but then you people murdered him, you murdered this man, that they took that, he's accusing us of murder and they took up their stones and they stoned him. Right. And so to me, again, you mentioned Gerard earlier. This is a hugely important part of my understanding of Christianity is that the thing that the thing that happened, the thing that really happened when with the crucifixion was that you had 11 of these guys. You know, Judas fell off the path or

was put to a different use but you had this early group of followers of christ who even though peter you know there's a famous story that he's like the tough guy of all the disciples and everything but when the crowd comes to him after jesus has been killed and said you know this man he denies him right he gets cowardly and runs away all of the disciples just scatter and run away at first. The only ones who stayed were the women. And so they scattered. These are people who had witnessed the miracles and been through the whole process with them over all this time. And they scattered and they bowed to the crowd when the crowd got bloodthirsty. But then they came back together and they refused to go along with the story that had developed, which is this is a bad guy, a criminal who deserved what he got. And they

went out and they said, no, no, no, he was innocent and this was unjust and you murdered this man. And having that happen and they died for it, you know, Stephen the martyr died for it. And then they eventually, according to tradition, least, they all died for that. That sort of recognizing that when we do that, because this is the thing, man, like the Jews who are calling for the blood of Christ in the Gospels are, I think, both fundamentalistist type Christians and anti-Semites, they take that as like, this is this unique thing, right? Just like they take like, that's not the point of that at all. Like, it would be like taking the fact that Peter rejected Christ as like some character defect of Peter. It's not about that at all. It's like, no, we're all Peter. And in this case, we've all been the Jews in that crowd yelling, crucify him, crucify him. We've all been that person. And we know what we're looking at and what we're talking about

if we really are honest with ourselves. And so it's a universal that we're witnessing, you know what I mean? And not something that is like a specific evil act done by a group of people. That's very important to me, to understand it that way. And that's why the crucifixion has universal importance in the way that I look at it. So anyway. So I should have put in the list of things that you speak very insightfully about as the dynamics of mobs. Most of the disciples were martyred. Because mobs don't like it when you stand up for the one they're targeting.

So were Paul and many of the other apostles. It's a truism that it was not Christian preachers, but Christian martyrs who spread the early faith by their example. What does it mean to be martyred in a Christian context? Many people say it means that you die for your beliefs, but I've never really thought that made much sense. A lot of people die for their beliefs. Kamikaze pilots and suicide bombers die for their beliefs. I think a martyr is not someone who dies for a cause. It is someone who refuses

to go along with a mob, refuses to join the crowd of persecutors, and instead stands with the victim and then pays for it with his or her life. That's a martyr. Humans are hyper-social mammals, which means we are intensely sensitive to the demands and expectations of our peers and our communities and so the pull of the crowd is extremely powerful i remember times when i was in school you know kid through 12 i remember different times when i would be around when a bully or some group led by a bully would be humiliating or intimidating some other kid. The impulse to persecute is very strong,

and once it gets going, it can run out of control very quickly, and people who were kind and thoughtful 10 minutes ago can tear someone apart. Well, some of the times I stood up for the kid being picked on, but sometimes I didn't. And sometimes I even made a comment to denigrate the kid myself, to be a part of the crowd. And I swear to you that to this day, I'm talking things that happened when I was in third, fourth, fifth grade. To this day, I remember every single one of those times when I was too cowardly to stand with the kid getting picked on. Because I knew it at the time. And when I think about it, it still brings me shame. Jesus doesn't call on us to be martyred for him, but to be martyred with him. For all the people in the world who have been unjustly victimized. If fate happens to put one of them in front of you and you're the only one between them and the mob.

You address that subject in your scholarship in so many different contexts. It's obvious this is something which is you take. You're not faking it. This is something that really you give a lot of thought to and something which really concerns you and something which you think um explains much of human history and that's i i listened to your easter podcast with my son i told you at the time and this story about peter was in there and um this moved my son you know and i wondered if he wasn't even imagining schoolyard dynamics through his fifth grade eyes uh in what you're saying actually i

think he was you're raising a good boy i'm trying that um you know going back to that dust your quote about dusk us every man has reminiscences which he would not tell everyone but only his friends you know others other matters in mind which he would not reveal even to his friends. I suspect that with all religious people that part of them has to be uncertain

as to whether or not the plain meaning of certain words is the truth and it's not the kind meaning of certain words is the truth, and it's not the kind of thing you can talk about in 2024.