The Tucker Carlson Show - The Secret History of Biblical Giants, Demons, and the Advanced Civilizations Before the Great Flood

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

Genesis 6 describes the Nephilim as demonic hybrids who occupy positions of authority in human society. They’re entirely real, says Father Stephen De Young.  (00:00) What Are the Nephilim? (03:40) The Advanced Civilization Before the Flood (15:55) Was Technology Given to Us by Demons? (36:38) Is Japan Still Producing Nephilim? (46:09) Are the Nephilim Still Among Us? (59:11) Is There Fossil Evidence of Giants? The V. Rev. Dr. Stephen De Young is Pastor of Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church (http://stgabriellafayette.org/) in Lafayette, Louisiana. He holds Master's degrees in theology, philosophy, humanities, and social sciences, and a Ph.D. in Biblical Studies from Amridge University. Fr. Stephen is also the host of the Whole Counsel of God (http://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/wholecounsel/) podcast from Ancient Faith and author of six books: The Religion of the Apostles, God is a Man of War, The Whole Counsel of God, Apocrypha, Saint Paul the Pharisee, and the Baal Book. He co-hosts the live call-in show and podcast Lord of Spirits (https://www.ancientfaith.com/podcasts/lordofspirits/) with Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick. Find Fr. Stephen De Young’s books here: https://store.ancientfaith.com/stephen-de-young-books/ Paid partnerships with: Brooklyn Bedding: Get 30% off sitewide with promo code TUCKER at https://brooklynbedding.com American Financing: NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org. APR for rates in the 5s start at 6.327% for well qualified borrowers. Call 800-685-5696 for details about credit costs and terms. Visit http://www.AmericanFinancing.net/Tucker. Paleovalley: Use code TUCKER & get 20% off your first order at https://paleovalley.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thank you for doing this. Yeah, absolutely. I have read Genesis, like, you know, on and off most of my life, never noticed the first part of Chapter 6 with the Nephilim until about four years ago. Someone mentioned it to me. In the subsequent years, I must have had 15 conversations, 25 conversations about the nephalum. So it seemed worth talking to someone who understands exactly what the nephalum are. What are the nephalum?

And am I pronouncing it correctly? I mean, good enough. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's the I am at the end, the eam is the plural in Hebrew. Okay. But, yeah, so there's a little bit of debate about where exactly the word comes from because there's, it's not a regularly used Hebrew word in the Hebrew Bible, which isn't all that odd either. There are a lot of words that are only used once in the Hebrew Bible. But people have tried to do different things with it. So there's a Hebrew verb, Nefal, which is the verb to fall.

So some people have wanted to say, well, it's the fallen ones. But in Hebrew, Nephilim is reflexive, so it would be the ones who are fallen upon, which is a little more difficult. But it seems pretty clear. Most people agree now because there's an Aramaic word. Nepheline, and ends with an N, that just means giant. And so it seems pretty contextually clear that this is just the Hebrew form of that word, and this is talking about giants. It's translated in the Greek Old Testament with Yantes in Greek,

which is where we get the English word giant. But a lot of people, when they hear the word giant, now think Fifi, Fofum. Right. Yes. That's not the core of the idea. So the word, all of the words used for giant not only refer to a tall person, but could also be used to mean a thug or a bully or a tyrant. And the example I use is, and you're old enough to remember this, when we went into Panama after Noriega, they're always referring to him as Panamanian strong man. Yes, always.

And that wasn't talking about his awesome bench press. No. That was, you know, that he was a dictator, right? Yes. And so it's the same kind of idea, right? That it's characterizing these people as that sort of thuggish, brutish kind of character. And referring to them as tall or referring to them as giants is meant to symbolize and suggest that. Okay.

And so in Genesis, at the beginning of Genesis, at the beginning of the flood story, in Genesis 6, we have to understand that the flood story is not a new story when Genesis is telling it. Right. This is everyone had a flood story in the ancient Near East. So the text of Genesis is not primarily claiming, oh, there was this flood. it's talking about the flood that the original audience all sort of knew had happened. Yes. And which did happen, I think.

Right. There was, yes, there is a historical event, right? Yeah. This is referring to. But you could have asked anybody from Greece to Mesopotamia to Egypt, they would have all agreed at that point that, yes, there was this advanced civilization. There was a flood that destroyed it. current civilization is rebuilt after that.

Yes. Now, one of the key differences in Genesis 6, you already have in those first four verses, is Genesis recasts what that civilization was like. So in the pagan sources, that pre-flood world was this golden age of, for the time, high technology, right? And technology, in the ancient Near Eastern mind included magic, magic, was sort of spiritual technology. And all of these things happened over the light.

And that sort of losing that world was sort of this great tragedy. But everyone agreed it was a more advanced world than the world they lived in. Yes. Yes. That there was knowledge there that had now been mostly lost. Interesting. And so you find the civilizations that grew up after that, and Exhibit A of that is the original Babylonian Empire.

So like Hamarabi's Babylonian Empire at the height of the Bronze Age, people don't understand how powerful the global structure was in the Bronze Age. It's called the Bronze Age because they were smelting bronze. They were getting the copper from Cyprus and the tin from what's now Afghanistan. Well, that's quite a distance. And bringing that together, smelt bronze. In Iraq. Yeah.

And Hamarabi had a preference for a particular style of sandal from Crete. So he was importing those. There were sort of this global economy in the Bronze Age going on. And Hamarabi himself was from a group of people called the Amuru who took over Mesopotamia. Amaru means an Acadian Westerners because they had come from what's now Syria. And those are the same people who are called Amorites in the Old Testament. and we'll probably come back to them as we go forward.

But Habirabi and the other Babylonian emperors attributed their success of their ability to establish this empire to the fact that they had access to this secret wisdom from before the flood. Do we have any sense

how much earlier the flood took place? What's the timeline, roughly? So Genesis doesn't really give us a time. There are people out there who want, to like add up the years and the genealogies. That doesn't really work. Yes. Because different textual traditions have different numbers. They didn't have, there, there aren't numerals in Hebrew or

Greek. And so you're using letters to code numbers. Yes. And so numbers get a little slippery in translation and copying and things. So a lot of people will attribute it to the earth changes. that happened at the end of the last ice age. Yes. So you're talking roughly 10,000 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Other people who are more literalists and want to add up those ages,

we'll say that it was more like six. But from the geologic record, because there is record of a flood. Yeah, yeah. And there are massive, I mean, there are villages at the bottom of the Black Sea from that period 10,000 years ago. There are. that are submerged yeah are the remains of villages um the the the the the glacial ice that melted created a lot of large body of waters that were not there yes and sea levels rose a great deal so do we

think do we think the flood came from melting glaciers that that's probably that's probably the historical event that's connected to that yes that when that ends there's this massive shift right and and And places where there used to be civilization are now underwater, literally. Right. And so, yeah, all those changes happen, and there's this massive disruption. So the villages currently at the bottom of the Black Sea were built during this golden age that proceeded to flood. Previous to that, yeah. And we believe that that, and do we believe, just as modern people, that that civilization was more technologically advanced than the ones that followed it?

I mean, if we're talking about, there is some sort of Bronze Age. I mean, you can't go completely Graham Hancock on this. Yeah. Let's actually exactly my question. Yeah. Yeah. And Graham Hancock, if you get into his stuff, he starts getting into some little new agey crystal technology, psychic technology stuff. That's a little iffy.

But there was definitely, you look at places like Gobeckley-Tepi and these things. There was definitely a level that was reached. there was a collapse, there was another move forward. At the end of the Bronze Age, there's another collapse. Yes. Right. And then rebuilding after that. I mean, but there are ancient structures, stone structures, so we can't radiocarbon date them.

But we don't even now can't say how they were built, right? I mean, how would you? Not exactly. Yeah. Right. We don't know exactly. We don't know it. Because there's no, we're dealing with pre-literacy.

Yes. Right. So we're making conclusions in guesswork. You go to Go Beckley-Tepi, you see the carvings of animals, you see the way they had skulls displayed in certain ways. You know, we could do guesswork, but nobody left us a text to frame any of it. Yes. You know what's really rare these days, a company that makes things in America, not just designed in America, conceived in America, assembled in America, but actually made it America, start to finish, in a factory with American workers. Brooklyn Bedding is that company.

Every mattress from Brooklyn Bedding is built in their Arizona factory. No middlemen, no cut corners to boost the margins. The founder started with nothing. No degree, no corporate backing. You just learned the craft, built a factory, created a product that is awesome. That's the American story that we support. We think you probably do too. At TCN, we love the thermobalance mattress collection.

It's made a huge difference in the quality of sleep. for a lot of people who work here. If you ever woke in at 2 a.m. sweating for no reason, well, you don't have to anymore. The cooling technology actually works, and your back feels better in the morning. They're endorsed by the American Chiropractic Association, so it's real. They also give you 120 nights to try out the product. If you don't like the mattress, they'll take it back or swap it out, no hassle. That's how confident they are in the products they make.

Visit Brooklynbetting.com. use the promo code Tucker at checkout for 30% off sitewide. This offer is not available anywhere else. But big picture, the pre-flood civilization, we think, reached some kind of apogee, some high point technologically, and then post-flood had to rebuild. Right. And then, yeah, and then his Bronze Age civilization,

they're attributing. Now, they're not saying we have some texts or something. Right. that survived the flood, they're saying that they're in contact with spirits who were active before the flood. Yes. And that it's the same spirits who are now revealing this wisdom to then. So you have this, in Genesis 6, 1 through 4, this nephal phenomenon before the flood.

And Genesis 6 says, at this time and afterward, right? And that and afterward is pointing to this sort of recurrentialum. or continuing or happening again. So the physical world changes, but the spiritual remains constant. Right, right. And so part of that recasting of this pre-flood civilization, this isn't a golden age,

this is actually an age of incredible wickedness. Yes. Right, and evil is that there are sort of these great kings from before the flood. You have the Sumerian Kings list, other texts like this later, that lists the ages of the Kings before the flood. And people tend to think that the ages of people in Genesis

and the genealogies are kind of ridiculous with people that need to be 950. Samarian Kings list, you have people living hundreds of thousands of years in their list. Hundreds of thousands of years? Yes, Genesis is reserved sort of in comparison. What is that, do you think? A lot of that.

So there's a little bit of a code to it, and this is true in Genesis also. So Babylonian mathematics was all base 60. Our math, we do base 10, right? It's a decimal system. There's this base 60, and the survivors of that are, we have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, right, 24 hours in a day. That's the leftover from sort of that Babylonian mathematics. Really?

Yeah. I didn't know we had Babylonian minutes. But yeah, that that basics and if you look at those ages as sets of 60, there are sort of certain things encoded about the different kings

and the different generations that way. Nobody's totally cracked the code in Genesis, but to give you an example, in the Sumerian kings list, the seventh king in the list, is the one who creates the solar calendar, seventh person in the list. And if you look at Genesis and the Epistle of Jude,

which is like a paragraph in the New Testament, he refers to Enoch as the seventh from Adam. Yes. If you go to Enoch in the genealogies of Seth in Genesis, he lives for 365 years. So you have the number of days in the solar calendar year. as his age, he's the seventh person, the seventh person, and the Sumerian Kings list creates the solar calendar. So there are some sort of coded and coded connections going on with those

numbers. Is there any evidence that human lifespan was much longer at one point than it is now? That's debated by a lot of people. Certainly not. I don't think anyone thinks in the thousands of years. Right. Yes. And part of the difficulty with that is that people think that people hear life expectancy statistics. You know, like you hear that at the beginning of the 20th century, the average life expectancy of the U.S. was 35. And people think, oh, people were living to 35 and then dying. It's like, well, no, a lot of people were dying. There's a high infant mortality rate.

Right. There's a lot of people die before 35. but people who made it to 35, a lot of them, you know, made it to 100, 120. Yeah. So when you're doing kind of archaeology and stuff, yeah, you find a lot of young people because, you know, there's no antibiotics, there's no, right? Right. You have a very high mortality rate.

It's hard to tell how long, exactly how long the truly elderly people were living. Right. Yes. So, but yeah, I don't think anybody would frame that in the thousands of years. Yes. So it's more about them saying something about these people. And like I said, the seventh one has the solar calendar. All of them have, in the Sumerian Kingslist, have associated with them sort of the things that they discovered.

But the discovery is always it was revealed to them by this spirit came. And this divine spirit revealed to them this and that and the other. and it's technological things like metallurgy, it's ancient technological things like sorcery and divination, and it's things about the natural world like the solar calendar. But the ancients believe that technological advances came to them from the spiritual realm. Right. Right.

That's where it's coming from. But that doesn't happen at all anymore. Well, this is, so this is, this is, sorry, yeah. No, this is part of the larger discussion. And this is... But nuclear technology definitely didn't come from the demonic. Well, this is exact... So, within the framework of how the ancients understood it,

and this is the ancients going all the way late antiquity, and this is frankly maintained in the Orthodox Church. So the mind, the Greek word that's usually translated mind is noose. It's transliterated, N-O-U-S. and we're used to thinking of our mind as our brain. Yes. And it's sort of this computer in our skull box, right? The churns and processes.

But that's not how they thought about it. They thought about the mind more as a sensory organ, like your eye. Yes. So you'll see it referred to as the eye of the heart or the eye of the mind. And that the mind sort of perceives the spiritual realm. And so ideas are like sights or sounds or smells. They're not produced by the brain. Right?

They're not produced by the mind. They're received by the mind. Yes. Right. And so they come from outside. Right. But that's the experience of people who are paying attention now, even. Like, who hasn't had that?

Right. And I've never met anyone who had the experience of generating a thought. Right. Right. Like, one of the steps from not a thought to, a thought, right? Oh, it's such a deep point. Yeah.

So, yeah, and so these things, these things come from outside. And so this is in the genealogy of Cain in Genesis, right? It's Cain's descendants who invent metallurgy and use it to make weapons, right? And who discover divination and who discover music and use it for seduction and, right, for for these other things right uh because and the idea is that these these uh demonic spirits that are antithetical to humanity bring knowledge to humans before they're ready for it right that a time would come when humanity had reached a level of spiritual maturity when they could receive this knowledge yes and and put it to proper use and so it gets revealed early right and that and that begins with the

serpent in the garden. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not itself evil. So Adam has created. Humanity is created innocent, but innocent like a child is innocent. And created for this purpose, created in God's image,

in order to grow into his likeness. Yes. And so a point of maturity would have come where humanity could have had the knowledge of good and evil. and been able to make, right, good choices because God has the knowledge of good and evil. Yes.

He knows what good and evil are. And this is the way the phrase the knowledge of good and evil is used throughout the Old Testament. It's used to refer to a child coming to sort of what we would call the age of accountability, coming to the age where they understand good and evil, right and wrong. And so the serpent comes in promises, the devil comes in promises. you know, no, God doesn't want you to have this because he doesn't want you to be like him. Here's the shortcut, get this knowledge now before you're prepared for it. And it brings about destruction.

So, yes, right, the atomic bomb is revealed to man. We don't use it as a carbon neutral source of electrical energy, right? We use it to make a weapon. And I don't know if you're aware of this or not, But Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan. I'm highly aware of it. I'm highly aware of it. And it's one of the first things it gets used for.

Yes. Is to wipe out. I'm fixated on it, actually. Wipe out most of the Christian population of Japan. So these zeroed in on a church. Yeah. Yeah. So, and that infuriates people when you say it.

But it's true. Yeah. So that, that's a pattern, right? And so, yeah, that, that, that, is the understanding. And so they're not, the promise is always, oh, I'm going to give you the secret knowledge. This is going to give you power. This is going to give you control. This is going to give you influence. This is going to give you XYZ. Right. But ultimately, it ends up being toward humanity's destruction. Yes. Cost of living is already making it hard to live here,

and it's not getting any better. Unfortunately, it's likely to get worse. And a lot of Americans fill the gap with credit cards, not just for fancy dinners, but to cover things like groceries and bills. That is a disaster. It's understandable, but don't go down that road because there is a tax in effect of survival tax if 20% interest or more. Why would you do that? Why would you hand money to the big banks when you can keep it for your family? Our friends in American financing have a better way. If you're looking to buy your first home or refinance your current one, they're helping Americans achieve the dream of home ownership with monthly mortgage rates currently in the fives. American finance,

savings saves its customers an average of $800 per month. That's nearly 10 grand every year back to you. This isn't just a loan. It's a total financial reset. So debt is tough, but there's a smart way to do it and a reckless, self-destructive way to do it, credit cards.

And so we recommend American financing. They're salary-based, not commission-based, which means they actually work for you, not the banks. They're called America's Home for Home Loans for a reason. Call 800-6-8-5-5-50. 56-96, 800, 685, 5696, or visit American Financing.net slash Tucker. So to go back to the Nephilim, Nephilim, the passage in Genesis referring to, which is just a couple sentences long, I think, is explaining why God sent the flood.

Why does all of this have to be destroyed? Why does peak civilization, peak technology have to be destroyed? and those two, can you summarize what it says? Yeah, so it refers to the Nephilim as the men of renown. Men of renown. So it's referencing these kings, these ancient kings. The people in charge. Who are looked at as heroes, as divine heroes by these post-flood pagans.

Right. Look back to them as these were the leaders of the golden age. These are the great figures. These are the spirits we want to emulate, right? These are the people we want to be like. the great heroes and instead Genesis casts them as these evil wicked tyrants and thugs who are leading people to destruction to chaos right

um Genesis says that it gets to the point where every thought of humanity is always evil all the time right that's yeah um and uh these people are actively leading humanity in that direction. It's not just coincidence. They're teaching this, they're embodying this. And so when you have a person who are calling a giant or a nephalim, we're talking about sort of a fully demonized human.

So in the way the church has traditionally talked about sin related to what we were just talking about with the mind, there's sort of these stages. First stage is thought comes into your mind, right? Yeah. You can't control that just like if you're walking down the street and you see something or hear something, right? Thought comes into your mind. That's not really sin yet, right? But then we start to entertain that thought, start to dwell on that thought. We start to let that thought take root, start to let that thought turn into a plan, right? Been there. Then we let that plan turn into action, right? Yeah.

Then that action turns into a habit, a repeated action over time that we fall into. As it becomes a habit, it starts to take control of us. So we talk about the sins as the passions because they make us passive, right? They're acting upon us at a certain point. and you can see that with, you know, anger, right? You reach a point where it's now driving the bus, right? Or lust. Yes.

Or, you know, addiction, right? Yes. So it gets to the point where it takes control. And then beyond that, you get what we call demonic possession, where there is this sort of spirit that is now driving full time. You're not even really making your own decisions anymore. you're kind of lost to it and then sort of the furthest you can go in terms of being lost

when we're talking about these nephalim and these giants is that spirit isn't in control of you anymore you just agree with it you're on board with that sort of demonic spirit deliberately you know you're rejoicing and enjoying right sort of the chaos and the destruction and the wickedness and by the grace of God there's relatively few of those people, right?

But they do exist. Do you mind if I just pull up the passage? Because there's one part of it I want to ask you about which you haven't addressed, which is just how different the Nephilim, I mean, they're substantively different, they're genetically different from people.

And I think this is the most evocative, the most interesting, the weirdest. This is, I think this is NIV, whatever, it's a version of the, of Old Testament. When human beings began to increase a number in the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that

the daughters of humans were beautiful and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, my spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal and their days will be 120 years. The Nephlem were on the earth in these days and also afterward, and the sons of God went to the daughters of humans

and had children with them. They were the heroes of old men of renown. Yeah. So that's describing mating between spiritual entities, Sons of God, whatever that means, and human women. Really, the rape of them, whoever they choose suggests rape. Right. Yeah. So what is that? Yeah. So Sons of God is used, for example, in Job, this is referring to a group of, and what we would call angelic beings. Yes.

So the ancient texts, including ancient Jewish texts, will use small G gods to refer to them, but that makes us really uncomfortable. Yes. It's a modern world. As monotheists, yes. Angelic beings works a little bit. Yeah. But even that, we think of angels and we think, you know, oh, you know, kind of a feminine guy with wings, right? And that's not really what angels are.

Angelic beings are sort of vast cosmic intelligences. Yes. And so we have to sort of think about that a little differently, like what a spirit is. But yes, this is talking about them having intimate relations with human women, and that that is involved in the production of these people. Right, of the giants who we were... The Nephlam. ...talking about, right.

And their sort of reproduction, right, on the earth. And... Okay, so that's a different genetic profile. They're not fully human. Right, right. And so this is... Now we're getting freaky. Yeah, this is also an inversion, right?

Because, of course, the... From the pagan perspective, they would say these people are part divine. Right? So the epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is two-thirds, divine and one-third human, according to the epic of Gilgamesh. And there's a text called The Book of the Giants that we found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. That's not part of the Bible, but it includes a list of the giants, a list of the Nephilim.

And Gilgamesh is one of the names that's listed there. So this was a very deliberate, right? This is it just incidental. And this was in Kumeron. Yeah. Yeah. And so this is, you know, a millennium later. But they still have Gilgamesh in mind as one of the.

So this is right at the turn of the last millennium around the time of Jesus. Yeah. Yeah. So that, of course, was part of why they were so great and so good. admirable and why they had this secret knowledge. And so this is turning that around and saying, no, they're two-thirds demon, essentially. They're two-thirds, unclean spirit. They're two-thirds. But this idea, just like the fact of it, that entities from the spiritual realm, non-human entities, whatever they are, whoever we're going to describe them, lower G, gods, angels, demons,

whatever, that they can mate with human beings and produce not fully human replicas of human beings who can walk among us and rule over us. Like this is a biblical principle? Yeah. Well, yeah. But what this sort of corresponds to, right? If we had a time machine and a, right, a GoPro, is that there were these particular rituals that were happening that were involved in the production of the next king.

And this happens after the flood, too. And one of the big clues to this that's in the Old Testament is there's this figure who shows up after the flood, after the Exodus, Og, the king of Bashan, who is described as the last of the Refaim in Scripture. And who exactly the Refaim were, we sort of weren't sure. The word pops up a few places, other places in the Old Testament. Isaiah, the text that's traditionally understood to talk about the fall of the devil from heaven talks about, as he's thrown down into the underworld, the Refaim rising up to meet him. So there are these few places. There's Psalm 88 talks about, will the Refaim arise and praise you? It's talking about in the underworld.

Talking about would they praise God? The answer being assumed no. but we now know exactly who they were because in the mid-20th century we discovered the city of Ugarit which had been destroyed at the Bronze Age collapse around 1,200 BC and lost. Nobody knew it was there. Nobody knew existed. It was discovered, and we discovered a library of texts there in a language that we now call Ugaritic after the city.

Where is it? Pardon my. It's in Western Syria, just above Lebanon, just north of Lebanon, of Lebanon. And Rosh Sharmra is what it's called now. And we found this library of text. Ugaritic is a Semitic language, so it's like Hebrew or Aramaic in terms of the vocabulary and the grammar, but it's written in Kuneiform on tablets. And so those tablets survived because those clay cataphymed.

tablets are very difficult to break, even if you try. Yeah. And in there, we shed a lot of light on the Old Testament, because as I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of words that only appear once in the Hebrew Old Testament, but we now have cognate words in Ugaritic that help us understand some of these things. But one of the texts there is a ritual text for when the king died. And when the king of Ugarit died, they did this fear. funerary ritual where they offered sacrifices and did what is essentially magic,

right, ritual magic, to try to ward off the Refaim, who were the spirits of these dead ancient kings so that the king who had just died could pass by them safely to get into the underworld. And so that then showed us, oh, okay, well, so that's what Isaiah is talking about. that's what the Psalms are talking about the spirits of these dead kings and so Og being the last one who's alive at the time of the Exodus

he's one of these giants Deuteronomy describes his bed it randomly says talks about Aug talks about Aug being slain by the Israelites him being slain is talked about in numbers and Deuteronomy and in two different Psalms

they sing about how rated is that Og king of Bashan was slain by by God through the Israelites. And they say, Aug's bed, he had this iron bed and it gives the dimensions. And you're sort of like, well, that's a random fun fact. You know, Aug slept here. And the dimensions are huge. You're like, okay, he's a giant, right? But we found a ritual bed of the same measurements in the great ziggurat of Edamananke in Babylon, Iraq. Yeah, in the city of Babylon. And that ritual bed was used in these sexual rituals

to produce the next king. So this is not just saying Og was tall. This is saying Og came out of this sort of sexual ritual. And this would involve what were called at the time shrine prostitutes. These were enslaved women who, were sort of used as vessels for they would be seen to be possessed by the spiritual entity. And then there would be sexual relations with the king at the time. So the king at the time was seen to be as part divine and part human. We have this woman who's possessed and then she is human.

And so you get the two-thirds, one-third. There's sort of three parents. So the temple prostitute would be the mother of the new king. Right. And the idea was because she was possessed by spirits, those spirits would infuse the new king. Right, right. And that's sort of, and so birthed by that. Right. So it's the son of the previous king who was divine and the son of this lower G,

God. Right. And so that ritual was common throughout the ancient world. After the rise of Christianity, it was still common. You see it in places like Asia. The Khmer Empire and Cambodia had a version of this. Really? Yeah.

And then the most recent example is Japan. Right. Where... The most civilized, technologically advanced rational country in the world, really? That's... In ancient Japan? Well, up, technically still currently, on the... When a new Japanese emperor...

succeeds to the throne, he ritually and ceremonially spends the night with the sun goddess. Up until when? As part of the coronation ritual. Well, they still do it, but the Japanese government says that the sexual element of it

was removed after World War II. You go to the grocery store and there are endless snacks and protein bars. Paleo Valley superfood bars are, we think, the best. Most nutrition bars seem healthy, but then you read the labels

and it turns out they're packed with all kinds of bizarre stuff. Processed syrups, ingredients you can't pronounce. They're essentially candy, masked by marketers pretending they're healthy. I've eaten a lot of them I would know. Paleo Valley Superfood bars are different, though. Paleo Valley makes its products with real ingredients like organic fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, are no seed oils, soy, gluten, other weird additives. And you know when you finish eating one because you're not bloated and you feel good.

And that is the measure. These bars are sweet, filling genuinely good tasting. Flavors include red velvet, apple cinnamon, chocolate chip, plenty more, they're all great. If you're trying to clean up your diet but need something convenient to grab, these are a solid option. Give them a try at paleovalley.com. Use code Tucker at checkout for 20% off your first order. PaleoValley.com, code Tucker, 20% off your first purchase. So up until World War II, the Japanese Emperor,

was having sex with a sun goddess? Yes. So Hirohito would have been the last. Yeah. Hero Hito would have been the last one. Yeah. Who was the sun goddess? Well, I mean, this is there.

He would go into a chamber with a number of concubines who were embodying, right, the sun goddess. So this is exactly this kind of ritual still going on. So how did, okay, so, This is Japan, which is an island in East Asia. Yeah. And this is a, like, precise replication of what was happening in the Near East. Yes.

There's a long way away. Yes. How, and then also in Indochina among the Kemmers. Yeah. Also far from Japan and even farther from the Middle East. So, like, how are these totally different cultures, languages, geographic locations, all doing exactly the same weird thing? Yeah. Well, and I mean, this is where we get to the idea of a demonic spirit. Because maybe it's real.

Yeah, we just. Maybe. We have to accept this. And we, we, is that the answer? We know this. Yeah, we know this, right? There, we've seen sort of mass evil arise within living memory in the world that can't be explained by a large group of people all making the same bad decisions simultaneously by coincidence, right? This is what brought me to God.

Was this exact understanding? It's a very obvious observation, which somehow I missed. But yes, that's right. Yeah. And we've all been on the less negative side, right? We've all been in crowds. We've been in groups. We've been in stadiums.

We've been in a place of worship with a group of people where we've had the experience of sort of acting together, right, of participating in something together. right and that's that's ultimately what a spirit is a spirit is a sort of collective consciousness at a level of sort of above human right um it's hard to understand right but if we work but it's not hard to recognize back a little bit right so our human body right is is made up of there are actually suborganisms within our human body. Right? It's kind of gross to think about,

but chemically right now, my gut flora and your gut flora are having chemical conversations. I'm sorry? Right. As we sit here. The bacteria, our digestive bacteria communicate chemically.

With one another? With one another. Yeah. When humans get together, right? there are all of these functions going on within our bodies, right, that have their own kind of low-level consciousness. And then we have our human consciousness, which is sort of over the top of that, which is the summing up of all of that.

And so when we talk about angelic beings or demonic beings, we're just talking about a level of consciousness that's then above the individual human. But they're not projections of the individual human. They exist separate and apart from the human. exists every part and we participate in them right but we don't create them we sort of embody them in the world right we come to be this is this is what god created humanity for originally right so he said earlier adam has created sort of innocent at the beginning of this journey to grow into the the likeness of god the way he would do that is by functioning is god's image in the world

So in Genesis 1, the six days of creation, the first three days, before that starts, God says, the problem is that the earth is formless and void. In Hebrew, it's Tohuabohu. Tohu, bohu? Tohu, yeah, it rhymes and. And it means basically it's formless or chaotic, it's disordered, and it's empty. And so, in the first three days, God sets it in order. Right? So he separates the light from the darkness. He separates the sky from the sea.

He separates the dry land from the sea. So he places everything in order. And then in the second set of three days, days four, five, and six, they correspond. Right. So day four, he's already separated light from darkness, sun, moon, stars, right? Sort of the bodies. he's already separated the sky and the sea. Fifth day, he fills the sky with life.

He fills the sea with life. Sixth day, he creates land, animals, and man, right? Because on the third day, he had separated. So he's taking care of those. But then he says to man, when he's been created, fill the earth and subdue it. And what is that two-part command? Subdu means to put it in order. Right?

and fill it, fill it with life. And so humanity is created to sort of continue that work of God in the world. That's the purpose. To continue to participate in what God is doing in the world. That then transforms humanity. So positive example of this. God is at work continually in the world loving every human person. When I go and I show love to my neighbor,

that love's not coming from me, right? I'm participating in God's love. God is loving them through me, but that transforms me. Yes. That love transforms and changes me more toward God's likeness. And the reverse is true, right?

And in that way, I'm sort of embodying the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit in the world. The flip side is true. That means humanity can also embody other spirits in the world. And when you do that and you bring that into the world and make it concrete, that also changes you. And it's not just a spiritual or a psychological transformation. It's even a physical transformation. We've seen that. You can see someone who has gone down a dark road in life, a photo of them. Yes. They repent. They change. They come back. You see a photo of them out.

You can physically see it. Well, there's no question about it. That transformation happens in both directions. You can read it in their faces. Yeah. And so as humans, we're going to participate in something. There are things larger than us at work in the world, right? God being the most important one. And we're either going to participate in what he's doing in the world and be formed and shaped by that, or we're going to participate in something else and be formed and shaped by that. And the end of that is our destruction, right, of ourselves and each other. There are, the reason I was lingering on the creation of the Nephilim is because it suggests this idea that sounds really radical when you first think about it, that there are hybrids, spirit, human, together. But then as you talk about it a little bit, and you realize that every culture has always believed this.

In fact, Jesus has described as the union of God and a human woman. it's like actually it's a central concept everywhere all the time like it's not shocking yeah right right not in a sexual way in that case yeah let's be clear yeah right not a sexual way right but yes yeah yeah this baby is the product of god spirit and a human one right and christ is the express image of god right he is the fullness of the image right and the greek myths tell different but related stories about people being so why is it christian crazy, and I think people have, you know, lived in the world for a while. Why is it crazy? Does I don't have a feeling when you're talking to someone that this is not, that there's something else going on here, that this person's not, you know, does this still happen? Yeah, I think. I have felt that way really strongly about people in charge a couple of times, not just I disagree with them. I just, you know, I think you're a bad person. It's not even that. It's like, what is this? Yeah. Yeah. No, I have.

I have only kind of thankfully met a person like that once in my life. It was part of my pastoral training in a forensic psych ward. I met a person who had done, I won't describe, because it's hideous and you won't be able to get it out of your head, but had done horrific things to a child and that's how he ended up there. Yes. But who enjoyed bragging about it and describing it in detail to people and watching the look on their faces. Right. like that level of gone.

So there are people like that. And did you feel as you talk to this person or listen to this person that there was, this was not fully human or this was some kind of hybrid? You could look in his eyes and see that there was something inhuman there. I've had that same experience with people, not quite as cartoonish and obvious as that, but still like, what is this? Yeah, yeah. So what is this?

It's, well, I mean, that's. we would say in the church that to become like Christ to be formed in the likeness of God is to become truly human. That's what it means to be human. Yes. And so to the degree which you go down the other road, you become something inhuman. St. John Chrysostom in one of his homilies is talking to, so he's preaching in Constantinople to just regular people. Fourth century. Yeah. Into the fourth, beginning of the fifth. Yeah.

And he says to his people, he says, so you believe that if someone dies a violent death, they become a demon, right? So we kind of had that cultural idea, too, right? Somebody dies, some kind of violent or horrible death. They come back as this vengeful ghost or whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, murder victims haunt the house where they were killed. Yeah.

So they apparently had that kind of idea, too. And he says, that's incorrect. He says, it is people who. live like demons who become demons. So in the same way that there is an actual transformation of humanity, as we're formed in the likeness of God, there is an actual transformation of humanity into something else. Of course, then it's obvious.

You become how you live, for sure. When you go down that other world, it's an actual metaphysical transformation of who you are. Even to the point where, So a big part of the understanding of what's going on with the Nephilim before the flood is that a lot of the demonic spirits that are talked about later in Scripture and after the flood are understood to be the spirits of those Nephilim, of those dead Nephilim. This is explicit in like the Book of Jubalies, which is a Jewish text from the period in between the Old and New Testaments, but a very important one. if you read like Josephus's Jewish antiquities, he's cribbing from the history in Jubilee's all the time. He just accepts it as historical. And it talks about at the time of the flood, the Nephilim are wiped out, they all die.

And they have sort of a leader who's named Mastema. And Mastomah comes to God and wants to strike this bargain with him. Don't send us all into the abyss. Don't send us all into like a fire. Let some of us stay on the earth. We promise if you let us do that, we'll only torment bad people. We'll only torment wicked people.

And in the Book of Jubilee's, God agrees to allow 10% of them to remain to torment wicked people, but it says that God's motive is he wants to use that to bring wicked people to repentance. right so there's sort of a a theodicy going on there right yeah so it's a case of god

why does god allow these demonic spirits but you see reflections of that story even in like the gospels right because these spirits are told at that time you're going to be you're allowed to want to tell the last judgment and then you're going to the lake of fire

with everybody else but you get this sort of reprieve so for example when when Christ comes to the demoniac man and the demons say to him, have you come to torment us before the time? Exactly. Like, hey, wait, we had a deal. Yeah.

Right. And then he ends up casting them into the pigs and the pigs run off the cliff and it says they run off the cliff into the abyss, which is the place where those other demonic spirits were imprisoned. And there's a dynamic going on there where the name Jesus is actually the name Joshua. Right?

And of course, Joshua in the book of Joshua goes and battles these giant clans to sort of reclaim the land and purify them from evil. That's paralleled with Christ as sort of the true Joshua comes into the land to purify it from evil. And he's dealing with the spirits of these same beings. And so the idea that how does that become a spirit? Well, I mean, we've seen this, right? You can point to men in history who are wicked men, right, who are long dead, but their spirit has lived on. Oh, no doubt. People have continued to participate in that spirit and embody it, right, and bring it forward.

Same is true on the other side. Those are the people we call saints, right? They live a life embodying the spirit of God being formed into his likeness, and even though they've died, sort of their spirit lives on. and they become the patroness of people and nations and families and people groups and continue to have this life, right? So you're describing the process of becoming that every person experiences. You're becoming something. But Genesis 6 is describing an act of creation.

Yeah. Saying that these beings were different from the very start because they didn't have two human parents. Yes. So that's a very different thing. Well, and there's, so that we also have to understand what it means to be part of a people in the ancient sense. We have concepts like ethnicity and DNA and these kind of things. Of course, they had no idea about those concepts.

So being part of a people was about two things, participating in their initiation rituals. Yes. And then participating in the, ongoing ritual life of the community. So biblically, you look at ancient Israel, what made you an Israelite is, if you were male, you were circumcised, if you were female, you were either the daughter or the wife of a circumcised male, and you ate the Passover, right? You participated in the festal sort of year. Within Christianity, right, it's you're baptized initiation, right, and then you participate in the Eucharist and the ongoing sacramental life of the church. So the same was true

on this other side, right? So what we've been talking about is essentially the initiation ritual, right, the beginning, right? And then there was an ongoing ritual life. And according to the Book of Wisdom or the Wisdom of Solomon, that depending on where you land, right, Christianity may or may not be part of your Old Testament, um, uh, mixed. this explicit other texts outside of the scriptures make this explicit that the ongoing ritual life of these people involved human sacrifice and human sacrifice involved cannibalism. Yes. We have a very skewed view of sacrifice.

We haven't done a lot of animal sacrifice and seen a lot of it. So we have kind of a skewed view that it's about killing the animal. It's not really about killing the animal. It's about eating the animal. Yes. Part of it being offered to God or a God. And then part of it being consumed. Right. And so cannibalism, either at the level you see in Mesoamerica, right, blood drinking, right? That's why blood drinking is forbidden right throughout the Bible. And so there was cannibalism involved in this human sacrifice. And so that was sort of renewed. You have this initiation. You have this beginning. And then there is this ongoing ritual participation.

Yes, and I mean, not to disagree with you, but I just have to ask, like, so if ancient peoples had no sense of genetics, why were genealogy so important? Well, that's dissent, right? Yeah, but it's genetic descent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that could be broken, right? So let me give you an example. Caleb, there are sort of two, there's the episode after the Exodus where the spies, one spy from each of the 12th tribes of Israel is sent into the land. And 10 of them come back and say, no, there's Nephilim there.

We can't do it. It's going to be too tough. Right. You don't want to mess with them. Right. And two of them, Joshua and Caleb, come back and say, no, you know, yeah, we can't do this by ourselves, but God's on our side. God's going to win the victory for us. Put your faith in him. We can do this. Caleb is identified in the text as being a Kenazite. Akenazite is a Kenazite. Aken is not only a Canaanite, it's one of the Canaanite tribes they were supposed to wipe out. It's one of the giant clans. It's one, these people, he's technically one of them, genetically or by descent, right? But he's listed as an elder of the tribe of Judah in the Old Testament because he was incorporated. And when you're incorporated, they would have said about him,

no, Judah was his father. He was a descendant of Judah. right now we would say well not genetically right right but from their view now that he's been richly incorporated you you didn't just join become an israelite in general you became a member of a particular family that was part of a particular clan that was part of a particular tribe right and those are now his people and the kennezites are not his people he is now not a kennezite so that's the difference is that that was that was malleable that was changeable So when did the requirement emerge that in order to be Jewish, he had to be the son of a Jewish mother? That was after the...

Destruction of the temple? Yeah, that was after the return from exile. So if you read Ezra and Nehemiah, they're talking about that. They're talking about that that's when they ban Israelite men marrying foreign women. Right. And the matrilineal descent is a way of ensuring genetics. Just guaranteeing that. Right.

Because everyone knows your mom is. So that's a later thing. If you look at in the Torah in Deuteronomy, there's a whole ritual setup for if you want to marry a woman from one of these other groups where she shaves her head. And there's this sort of ritual thing where she's, her old life is put away and her new life now she's in Israel. Right. So they had a way of incorporating. Is there any fossil record that supports the idea of giants striding the earth? Actual.

Yeah. If feet foot tall people. No. Yeah. I mean, I don't know how tall. taller than... Well, yeah, so they're disagree. A lot of times, so when we have visual depictions,

they're usually depicted as 15 foot tall. But that's a sort of deliberate coding. So in the ancient Near East, they believed that their gods had a ritual body that was about 15 feet tall. And if you look at, we've got excavated temples of Bale, for example, where they have footprints, they're supposed to be Bail's footprints.

Right. As he was walking in to be sort of enthroned in his temple was the idea. And if you measure the stride, it's based on him being about 15 foot tall. So they're to think they're real footprints? Well, these are clearly carved by people. Okay. Right. To represent that.

But the idea is, that's how tall the gods were. So that's how they usually depict the Nephilim as being 15 foot tall. Goliath is sort of one of the last stragglers. Yes. At the end of the book of Joshua, it says that sort of the last of the Anakim, which is another word for the Nephilim, fled into Philistine territory. And so then when David comes as king, he sort of roots out the last of them, right? Goliath being one of them, how tall he is, again, numbers, there's not numerals,

so things go weird places. According to the Greek Old Testament tradition, he was 6'6 foot 6. which is like two inches taller than me, right? But which in the early Iron Age would have made him gigantic, right? The average man was, I think, like five foot five. Yeah. Right at the time in that area. In the Hebrew text, he's nine foot nine, which is more clearly a sort of supernatural kind of height.

Yes. Right. To sort of convey this. So certainly there were people who were abnormally tall, like in the 6'5-7 range, right? Some of them who were these people. We do not have, and given we don't have a lot of skeletal remains from that period either, right? There are a million reports from the 19th century in North America in the U.S. Of people finding nine-foot-tall skeletons in some cave in Nevada, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

were all destroyed by the Smithsonian, any of that true? Not as far as we could tell, not as far as we could verify. And some of those were proven to be, the Cardiff Giants stuff, those were proven to be hoaxes. So I think a lot of that came out of, there was very much in the anti-modernist movement, right, what became evangelical Christianity, there was very much an idea that we need to scientifically prove that everything in the Bible is literally true. Yes. And that led to some of that grasping.

But as far as you know, there have never been found on earth fossils of human beings. Not verifiably. Not verifiably. Okay. Yeah. Do you believe that since Genesis 6 says this process of the sons of God impregnating the daughters of man is still ongoing, do you think that happens now? I mean, it certainly could.

Yeah. It certainly could. Like we said, it was 80 years ago. We know they were doing a similar sort of thing with the Japanese emperor. There's no reason it couldn't. There's no reason the attendant later rituals with human sacrifices things couldn't be going on. Because there are just glimpses of it. I mean, what's interesting about the Epstein files, for example, which to the extent

I have read them are only hinting at various things and you have no idea exactly what it means it is like reading an esoteric text. It's like you're not read in so you don't really interpret it clearly. But there is a fixation on blood, on genetics. And there seems to have been that for, well, since the time that we're talking about. Like blood, human sacrifice, sex, not just for pleasure, or reproduction, but as a ritual. Like these are ongoing motif through human history. Alistair Crowley is a real person. Yeah. 100%. But I mean, the Incas are doing the same thing that, I don't know, some remote African tribe was doing, with Canaanites were doing, it's like everyone's doing the same thing

is fixated on the same four or five themes. I am by no means a flat earther, but early NASA, there was some weird stuff with some of those scientists. Oh, big time. Yeah. Yeah, so that's definitely, right, that and... Well, so, but I guess what I'm saying is if different cultures at different times throughout history are...

focused on exactly the same kind of non-obvious ideas. Right. The spirit world breeds with people. Technology comes from the spirit world. Blood is somehow magical. Human sacrifices, like the source of power. Like, who would think of these things? Right.

This isn't a coincidence that just randomly we all have to save that idea. That's what I'm saying. That they're rooted in some kind of reality that. Right. And it's a real, like I said, that you're going to embody and participate in something. right spiritually and as Christianity has receded and been lost in quote unquote western countries right we should expect more and more of that to come intruding back in because that's the other option

frame no you would expect something brand new and like if people would think of like a new religious expression that isn't based on human sacrifice but they never have right well if it was just humans making it up that's what I'm saying yeah yeah so it's I If not, it's obvious to me. I mean, I'm not a priest unlike you, so maybe this is like, I'm just figuring this out. But like, clearly human sacrifice does bring dark power to the people who commit it. Yes. Like, duh?

Yes. Yeah, they weren't doing this stuff because it didn't work. They were having some kind of experience. They were having some kind of, right, something was happening there. So witchcraft is real. Yeah. And when you read just purely pagan sources, right, they're kind of honest about it. Right.

And this stuff is, so we've received the classics through the Enlightenment, which means we purge all the, not just anything, quote unquote, supernatural, but even religious elements. There are still people publishing books talking about how Plato and Aristotle were not religious. Right. You know, they represent these sort of, because the figures of the Enlightenment sort of recast the ancient philosophers as versions of them. You know, and since they had rejected the religion of their time, well, clearly someone like Plato or Aristotle can't have accepted the religion of their time. They were like enthusiastic polytheists. Yes. Yeah, Aristotle's school was in a temple of Apollo. Right. They were on board. They nuanced things, right? But I mean, in Plato's do. dialogue, Socrates talks about how he has this demon, this demon, this spirit that dwells within him and whispers wisdom to his soul. Right? Yeah. There's no, you know, it's Christians who come along and say that's a bad thing, right? And then post-Christian enlightened people say, oh, well, that's silly. So we'll just ignore it. But they're very honest about it. Right. Ancient authors are very honest. What's happening at the bacchanalia, the actual bacchanalia is, People are being possessed by the backing, by these spirits, and participating in drug and alcohol-induced orgies, right, in public. So these feasts.

Again, the point of it is not just sex for pleasure. Let's go get laid. The point of it is to commune with demons or spirits. It is part of the, yes, these spirits are possessing them, right? Taking possession of them, taking over their body and participating in these things. That's what they say they were doing. Well, I think of the remaining world religions that we know about that are practiced in public, only Haitian voodoo and African voodoo is honest about that.

Talks that openly about it. Yeah, talks that openly about it. Some forms of Hinduism, but yeah. Okay. They aren't prevalent in the West, right, outside of India. Right, yeah. But certainly in Haiti, like, there's human sacrifice. It's denied in the United States media for whatever reason, but it's to talk to any Haitian about it.

It happens. Yeah. Oh, it's the center of their religion. Yeah. Right. But the point of it is not just to kill kids, for its own sake, the point of it is to receive spiritual power. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I'm down in southern Louisiana, so I'm not that far from. And that still goes on. I mean, of course it does. Yeah. Yeah. So what are, like, what are we to understand about the Nephilim now? Yeah. I mean, yeah, I think it is this point.

possibility that's at the end of that chain of yielding to sin and wickedness, right? Yes. This is the anti-saint. Right. Right. This is what happens when we not only don't find our full humanity in Christ, but give up our humanity in favor of something else. that twists and distorts our humanity.

And so, yeah, it is this dark possibility, and there are people out there who have gone that far. I sometimes get asked, as someone who is that far gone, can they repent, right? Can they turn back? And it's sort of, well, with God, all things are possible, right? Like, I don't see how, but with God, all things are possible. Right. But an awareness that that is a dark possibility and that it is something that happens. There are people doing this. I said not long after the full Epstein files got released, I said on my podcast, I said, well, we now know that the world is run by demon worshiping Petteras, sort of like it has been since the Roman Empire.

Yes. Or before. Right. And Christians were able to operate, right? during that time in a world that, you know, was, that was how it, how it operated. So I think it's good to be free of some of our delusions. Yes. Right, in this regard. And not being aware of the spiritual world or ignoring it or denying it doesn't make it stop existing. Yes. It's sort of like walking through a minefield under fire and just denying that there's a war happening.

Yes. you're just going to end up being a casualty, right, of sort of the spiritual warfare and things that are going on all around you that you refuse to see. It also seems to have, I mean, the world that you described pre-flood is a world that's just given itself over to rule by demons. Yeah. And the manifestations.

Everyone has come on board. Everyone's come on board. There's no meaningful resistance to it. technology has reached its, you know, kind of impossibly high place. That technology itself was a gift from demons. It's anti-human. It's anti-God. And then God destroys the world.

I mean... It starts over. Yeah. Yeah. So what does that have implications for the moment we're living in on the brink of AI? Well, I mean, everywhere in, this is true, it's second temple Jewish leadership. was true in the New Testament, when they're talking about the end, right? The end of the world, Christ's glorious appearing, right?

When that ends, it's always compared to the days of Noah. Yeah. Right? It's always referred to as, and when St. Peter responds to, why is he taking so long to return? Right? With all the suffering and all the evil in the world. St. Peter's answer is that the God is being patient and giving time

the maximal time for repentance. But the world has reached a point and can and will reach a point again where no one's interested in that opportunity anymore. And that's when the end will come because there's no point in delaying it at that point. But I think it's important that people understand that the way

salvation even in Christian circles gets talked about a lot is it's salvation from the world right and and I don't want someone to take from this conversation that oh okay well you know I could die and go to heaven and get away from all this yeah the world's yeah going to hell the great escape but the salvation begins here right you can be saved from that now that sort of spectrum of sin we talked about right you don't have to ride it all the way to the end you can be set free from it at any point right that slavery in this world this is the purpose of christ church right is to offer the other answer right the other way the way toward becoming truly human being set free from that right in this world and then right enjoying a world that's free from that beyond this life and

eternity. But both of those are included in what salvation is and what's on offer. So, I mean, how does it make you feel personally as you see the world moving in a way that's just more explicitly evil in the leadership of the world becoming just sort of openly demonic? Yeah. Does that strike fear into you? Or? It doesn't strike fear to me because I think it's honest now.

I don't think it's different. I think it's honest. I think it's revealed now. Right? Because I don't think any of this just suddenly restarted. No. Like in 1968. No.

There is this sort of popular narrative that everything was beautiful from the end of World War II until about 1968. And that's just not true. At all. And so it being now out there, right, now provides a number of opportunities for helping people, right? I deal with actual individual people, individual lives every day, right, in the church. And being confronted by the fact that spiritual evil is real can be the shock that brings someone to, oh, God is real. Yes.

That salvation is something I need to find. I think that's often the case. These patterns in my life aren't just bad habits that I could kick any time I want, but there's something going on in my life that I need to be set free from, right? And that's going to require some things of me, right? And require some changes and require some healing from God beyond myself. Right. And so there is this now opportunity here that when everybody sort of thought everything was okay and they were okay and everything was fine, right?

You had to try and convince somebody that there was a problem. You don't have to do that so much now. No. Right. And so I think there's an opportunity for a lot of people to be helped, to find freedom, right, to find salvation, to transform their lives. So I choose to look at it that way. rather than the other. I think that's the right way to look at it.

Yeah. So what is your advice when someone comes to you in bondage? Like what is the process for being set free? Yeah. So I think the very first part is you have to become part of something and submit yourself to something bigger than yourself. Right. So in my case, obviously that's the church.

Right. Because again, you're not just an individual. out there, right? Your brain is not just closed in this box and you're just doing your own thing. You're participating in these spiritual realities, whether you like to or not, right? And so you have to submit yourself to something,

to being transformed by something. And that involves becoming part of a community, right? Sharing bonds with other people. That community brings accountability. Right? It brings a change of life, right? because you can't live a life in isolation.

Aristotle said, for someone to live alone, they have to be either a beast or a God. Yeah. So, you know, you have to find this life in community. It's, as I was talking about, you find this transformation through participating in what God is doing in the world. Well, God is loving someone. I have to be with that person and love them, right? God is having compassion.

I have to be with that person, have compassion for them and be kind for them. It's not something you can practice off by yourself. Definitely not something you could practice on the internet, right? But so you need to become a part of that. And then within that, you need to form spiritual relationships within the Orthodox Church. We have the idea of spiritual fatherhood that's very important, where you have a person who you trust deeply. right, who you sort of open up and bury your soul to, right, who you, someone other than yourself, who you say, this is what I think I should do, am I right?

You know, should I, right? Where you can get feedback and have this ongoing relationship of guidance, right? Yes. As you work through these things. Because this isn't a snap, it isn't you say a prayer, it isn't even you get baptized and now everything's great, right? This is a long process of working your way back down that road and then getting onto the right road and moving in a positive direction. But it's available to everyone, right, if you're willing to, right, come and participate in it.

But it's not as simple as an altar call during a church service. Yeah, and we know that, right? That's why I had a friend who was assemblies of God pastor, and I asked him once, did you write the day you got saved, the date in front of your Bible? He said, oh, yeah, I wrote all of them. Because you'd go forward and then he'd go back to his life. Oh, I don't think that took. Let me go do it again.

Right. And so it is this ongoing thing, right? It is Adam was created to begin, right? This life of growth toward God. right, that doesn't just happen throughout this life but stretches on into eternity. Because God's infinite, so we're not going to get to the point where, you know, now I know everything about God. Now, right, it's sharing in God's life forever. Has there ever been any other society at scale that didn't put God at the center or gods at the center, put its religious practice at the center of its civilization?

No, no, it always happens. Right. We've recently covered that with a veneer of science. Oh, no, we're insisting this isn't a religion. It's a secular ideology. Okay, you know. But there's, you know, there's an ideology, there's ritual activity, there are sacred texts, there are, all the things religions have. Right.

You know, that's, yeah. So that's never happened. But has there ever been a society that was as dishonest, about it as ours. No. No, I think that's the, there's a lot of spiritual delusion and self-delusion. And that comes out of, there was a move in the 18th and 19th centuries where sort of deliberately spiritual iconography, religious iconography, religious symbols and practices were taken over by the state.

I noticed. Happened in Europe first. I mean, you could go to the capital, see the deification of George Washington and sort of all of these things. All the weird Masonic symbols and our currency. Like, what is that? Being attributed to this political stuff, right? And sort of the formation of, you know, we're not going to be, we're not going to be Soliscriptura Protestants talking about the original.

text, we're going to be all about the Constitution and what did the framers have in mind? We're just going to switch this all over into the political realm, and then as politics is kind of devolved, it's, you know, become even more sort of ephemeral than that, right? And so we're not willing to admit that our rituals are rituals. We're not willing to admit, you know, the way the way most people talk about the economy is essentially the way ancient people would talk about a god what do you mean that's flesh that out that's the economy makes decisions right the economy favors this group over that group uh we need to do this and that to sort of appease the economy right make sacrifices right so there are all these you know

we don't call it mammon you know but the it's the same kind of it's it's fulfilling the same kind of the same kind of idea, right? And other words, war, right? We don't call it Ares. We don't talk about a war god, right? But we talk about national events. It needs to be fed. It needs to be supplied with, right? Sacrifices need to be made. And so it's all the same ways of thinking because they're built into what it means to be human. Yes. And so if you remove overt religion, you just get covert. Yes.

Religion. Which is, but always a species of like what the Canaanites practiced and what the Maya's practiced. It amounts to the same thing. It's paganism. It's human sacrifice, once again, whether it's abortion or war or whatever. It's killing people in order to get peace and prosperity and power. Right.

Right. What do you, I mean, how should Christians approach? that? Well, it's, it's... A lot of them seem to ratify it. A lot of the leaders seem to be like, yeah, no, this is a good thing. Unfortunately, yes. Yeah. That's, and a lot of religion has been secularized. It's a bizarre phrase, right? But in the United States, it kind of has. I mean, it's started with the more leftward leading religious bodies. Yes. Becoming sort of just overtly political and, and oriented toward this world. But it has now gradually come to include a lot of the more rightward-leaning religious bodies,

where sort of the, especially the eschatology of Christianity, the ultimate goal, right, of blessedness is removed from sharing in the life of God himself or the life of the world to come. and it's made very this worldly, right? So it's prosperity now. Yes. Right. And whether it's a mainline liberal Protestant denomination saying prosperity now in the sense of we need to help the poor and raise their standard of living,

or whether it's because that's what the gospel is, right? Or it's a prosperity preacher in a more socially conservative church. saying, you know, give your seed and, you know, you'll get back 10 times, you know, the money and you'll have all this, well, this, right? It's taking that and moving it all, right? Don't build up treasures in heaven, build them up here on earth. That's sort of, that's sort of the goal, right? And that is secularization in the, in the true sense, right? The first sort of thinker to talk about the secular was St. Augustine in City of God. And he was using that city of God famously, where the title comes from,

he's living at the time of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, which from their perspective was the end of the world. Yes. Certainly the end of the world is they knew it, right? And saying, him saying, so yes, there is this city of man, right? There is this empire. There are these kings. There is this government.

there's also the city of God and the city of God exists eternally and is steadfast right and he described what was going on outside as as the secular the secularum right the which included in it's not just the world but also the idea of an age as in it's constantly shifting right there's sort of this cyclical pattern nations rise and fall

all these things happen there's a sort of churn, right? And that's, but that's outside of the place where God is. And so a lot of these formerly sort of overtly religious movements have just become engaged in that cycle. And you can watch them. It's like they're virtually in the news cycle now, right? In terms of what they're quote unquote preaching, right?

And coming out and weighing in on, it's just sort of whatever's going on. in the news cycle right now right and this constant sort of churn and they're making these prophecies that don't come true and oh well don't worry about that here's the next one and it just you know continues in this in this never anything but it's not it's divorced from the actual spiritual reality of who god is who christ is right what god is doing in the world those questions aren't even asked right it's more about asking God to bless what I'm doing in the world or just asserting that God is blessing

it is behind what I'm doing in the world what do you think of that well there's there's a famous quote from Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War where a reporter asked him if he thought God was on the side of the union and he said the question is it whether God's on our side the question is whether we're on God's exactly And that's the core question, right?

The core question that anybody who's going to call themselves a Christian should be asking is, what is God doing in the world right now? Where is he active in the world right now? I need to get on board with that. I need to become a part of that. Not what do I want, what do I think should happen, and I'm going to try and get, you know, a whole bunch of people to try and pray and convince God to do, you know, or I'm going to claim and assert that God is going to do what I think he

should do. Right. That's not only kind of a gross inversion of Christianity, but it's essentially the way ancient magic and sorcery worked. Really? Right? That's what separates sort of your, when you're talking about ancient religion, right, in the pagan world, where you're talking about the Greco-Roman world or the ancient Near East,

the division between magic and just sort of pagan religion, right, is that in pagan religion, they thought that the gods, the spirits they were worshipping sort of remained free. So you could make a sacrifice, you make an offering to them, you try to cajole them into doing what you want. Yes. But they could say no. They could decide they don't favor you. Right? You read the Iliad, the gods could just decide to switch sides in the middle of the war.

Right. They sort of remained free. With magic. The idea of ritual magic is that you get, by doing the ritual in the correct way, saying the correct things, doing the correct things, you get the spiritual entity to do. You kind of compel it or command it to do what you want it to do. That makes you God, God of those demons. Right. And so even when someone identifies as a Christian, if they're out there trying to say, well, if you do X, Y, Z,

Z, right, if we get X number of people praying, if we do it, then God will. That's essentially magic, right? The whole idea of Christian prayer and worship and the Christian life is that God is transforming me. Yeah. Not that I'm changing God or God to change it would be different, right, or do something he wouldn't do other ones. Or bossing God around.

Yeah, yeah. So how much genuine Christian practice do you see? I mean, I don't want to be mean. I think, no, I think on if you go to the level of the average person, the average Christian person, regardless of what. Denouementious to what church, what group they identify with, right? Or are part of or where they go on a Sunday morning, right? I think the average Christian person is trying to follow Christ as best they know how. Yes.

Sometimes they're wrong, right? We get things wrong. We get that, right? They're misled. They've been lied to by leaders, right? All that happens. But in their heart and in their soul, that's what they're trying to do. So that level of Christian practice, there's a lot, I think, right?

Yeah. If we're looking top down, that's where things get a little more troubling, right, in terms of leadership. Obviously, I'm, I mean, I can't sit here as an Orthodox priest and pretend I'm not biased toward the Orthodox Church. Yes, of course. That's, you know, on the table. Let me frame it differently. When was the last time, how do you experience God, like actual God's work? day to day. Yeah. Well, so

there's both within the services of the church, right? Because I see God very much working in that way. And it's not just the actual quote-unquote worship service, but the time spent afterward and fellowship together, the life of the community, right? I see that continuable. I see that continuously, right? I also, I mean, I hear people's confessions. And confession is done a little differently in the Orthodox Church than the Roman Catholic Church because we have this, as I said, spiritual fatherhood tradition. And so I've seen people come through and come back from some really difficult and terrible things. Like what? Well, I mean, I don't want to divulge anything.

No, I mean, not in specifics, no names, but like what kind of things you're talking about? People who have had the kind of traumatic childhoods that you see as the origin of a villain in a movie. Yeah, yeah, like for real. Yeah, yeah. That, you know, and people who have gone down really dark roads of addiction and violence and come back from committing violence.

Yeah. and marriage is being saved, right, after things that should have destroyed them. You've seen that. You think, yeah. And so that all happens, right? It really does. You've seen marriage just totally blown up that are saved. Yes.

Yes. And it takes time, and it takes a lot of work. Both of the people have to be on board. but but there is healing there on offer from God. Part of the failure of a lot of Christianity broadly is that an environment has been created, I think unintentionally, where people are afraid to open up and even talk about things like that. Yeah, I know. It's sort of we go to church on Sunday, we put on our Sunday best.

We all act like everything's fine when it's definitely not fine. Right. And, you know. This is why AA meetings are so wonderful because there's no pretense like that at all. And I say to people about confession, especially if they've come into the Orthodox Church and they're from a background that doesn't do it. Yeah. There's a lot of trepidation and what is this and I'm scared and how can I tell you these things?

and you're a priest, I respect you, I don't want you to know these things, right? And I try to tell them, I'm like, each of us walks through life thinking, we're the most disgusting, perverted, weird, you know, disturbed individual to ever walk the planet. Right? And if you're actually willing to open up

with other people about that, you find out that most of them are dealing with the same stuff. Yeah. And struggling with the same things. And the power of opening up, about that in a place that's designed to bring you healing. Right? When we say over and over again in the Orthodox Church of the church is a hospital,

not a courtroom. Yeah. It's not about finding who's guilty of what. Right. It's about helping people in various stages of woundedness, some of them almost dead, right? Trying to help them find healing, right? And restoration to life, there's incredible power to that, to just that honesty, right, of telling someone finally.

this thing that I've been hiding from everyone, even myself when I had managed it for decades, you know, saying that out loud, right, admitting it, and then talking about, okay, how are we going to work on this? How are we going to make things right? How are we going to start moving toward healing and restoration? Even a priest for almost 20 years have the kind of confessions you receive changed? Are the problems that people are struggling with different from what they were? And what are the common ones? Again, without being. I mean, honestly,

they've changed less than you'd think, but there's a pattern when you hear confessions. Usually the first six months to a year, you kind of get tested as a priest. So you get a lot of like, oh, I was stuck in traffic and I

cussed at the guy who cut me off. And it's like, I'm sure you did, but I'm also sure there's a lot more going on. We'll let it be. We'll let it be for now, right? You get those. So that's the confession.

Yeah, and it's sort of those kind of things. Yeah. You know, oh, I was late for work and I made up a story, you know, those kind of things. But they're testing, right? They're seeing if it's safe. Yes. Right? They're pushing the limits.

And then I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. Yeah. And then at a certain point, right, the real stuff comes out, sometimes with tears. Yeah. Sometimes with people you'd never expect to see tears from. Oh. And it sort of finally unloads. And a lot of it is the same stuff.

A lot of people are... Now, it takes sort of different forms. Like, so, for example, sexual sin used to be a lot more about actually doing things with other people. Right. Right. And now a lot of it is distortions and things going on due to... The Internet. ...pornography on the Internet and that kind of thing.

And so that's changed that. Yes. You've got people that this is one of the scariest statistics. The average age at which a person is first exposed to hardcore pornography on the internet in the United States today is eight. Yeah. I don't know why no one's in prison for that. It's so weird.

So, well, there's too much money being made off pornography. I'm aware. Yeah. And again, the economy is kind of God now, right? Yeah. But so, yeah, so that's, right, and dealing with, that has to be dealt with in a different way. That's not I went too far with my girlfriend on a Friday night. That's got to be unwound in a different way.

Do people sense intuitively, do you think that there's something disordered and bad about porn, or is it something that they learn at your church and they're like, oh, I guess it was bad? No, they know. they know a lot of people who are dealing with sexual sin and that kind of thing they will come and when they're ready to talk about it will say yeah I first saw pornography at some absurdly young age yeah and

and usually there's an escalation pattern with it yes starts out being sort of quote unquote normal pornography not the pornography is normal but and then moves into darker and darker places more and more dysfunctional places. But yeah, they generally have an idea of that. But that is breaking a lot of

people. Really? You see that a lot. Yeah. Yeah. And that is a lot of people's issues with sexuality, with gender identity, a lot of it is traceable back to some of that early exposure to that material. I believe it.

And it creates this confusion. Yes. And compulsion. Yeah. And people's first sexual experiences being divorced from their own body. Yeah. Right. Causes this distortion, right?

That takes a lot to unwind. And part of the unwinding of that is having a community. right where they're spending time as themselves right in their own actual body talking to other people who are sitting there in front of them i mean it sounds absurd but no it doesn't for generate for for for for zoomers that's a rare experience now a lot of them socialize completely on the internet the people they identify as their closest friends are people they only know online man they have boyfriends and girlfriends who they've never met in person. Very common.

Gen Alpha, it's even more common. And so helping them get out of that and into a community of actual people who care about them and who are interacting with them in the real world is a huge first step in sort of bringing people back to reality. Do you find that pornography is a bigger problem than addiction?

more common? Yeah, I mean there's an addictive element too. Right. I mean, I guess, then drugs or alcohol. The drugs are alcohol, yes. Really? Yes. Is it interesting?

So that's a huge part of your ministry, it sounds like. You don't hear people talk about it very often. It's all men and most women. Most women? Yes. Men don't think that, but. Are you ever shocked? I mean, by this part of your job, do you ever hear things that shock you?

So I can't say I've never heard something that shocked me, but when I was shocked it, it was more the particular person. Right. Part of what you have to do, I think, as a priest, honestly, I think we all ultimately have to do this is we have to become deeply acquainted with the worst parts of ourselves. I agree with that. Yes. And if you're really acquainted with that and you really know what you were capable of in a negative way, given the right or wrong circumstances, you can understand more. Right.

And you don't get that shock reaction. My dad told me the story that stuck with me when he was a kid. He was watching the footage of the Nuremberg trials. and he asked my grandfather, you know, what do you think of these horrible things? These people did. What do you think of this? And my grandfather said, there but for the grace of God, go I. Amen.

And usually people say that to mean like, oh, some bad, bad, you know, unfortunate thing happened to someone. Oh, God preserved me. Yeah, car crash. But he meant without God's grace, I could have done all those things. 100%. I could have gone down that same road, right? And really coming to terms with that, I think is a prerequisite not only for our own repentance, right, and our own getting free of that, but being able to help others, you know, and being able to hear where they're coming from, right, and understand how they ended up there and trying to help them, give them the hand up out of the ditch. Amazing.

Last question, which is totally unrelated, but it just seems like you might know the answer. there's this and most people will not be interested in this but there's this really interesting moment in the gospel of matthew where jesus is talking about sin and how it can all be forgiven but the one sin that can't be forgiven is sins against the holy spirit yeah blasphemy of the holy spirit blasphemy of the holy spirit yeah what does that mean yeah so um what happened just before that was that uh christ was working miracles and teaching and he and a certain group of his opponents among the Jewish religious leadership

accused him of being demon-possessed. Correct. Right. Said that the spirit by which he was doing this was actually one of the names for bail. Right? Yeah, Balesbub or whatever, yeah. And so...

He was casting on demons with demons. Right. And so that's why it's blasphemy of the Holy Spirit because they're calling the Spirit of God a demonic spirit. Yeah. Right. And so if you're not willing to accept and submit yourself to God and to his spirit and what he's doing in the world, you can't be forgiven.

You can't be healed. Right. They were rejecting, rather than seeing what God was doing in the world, which was Christ himself, right? And what he was doing in the world. Rather than seeing that and trying to get on board with that and be healed from their sin, they were rejecting it. So if you reject Christ, if you reject God's provision, right, for our sin and our wickedness, then you can't be healed from. By definition.

Right. But yeah, definitionally, yeah. Father, thank you for that. That was fascinating. Yeah. And great. Thank you for having. Thanks.