Undoctrinate Yourself - #56 - Dr. Joseph Farrell

Episode Date: April 26, 2026

Dr. Joseph Farrell holds a PhD in patristics from Oxford University. He's a historian, classically-trained organist, and scholar of Christianity, science, music, mythology, mathematics, and beyond. ResourcesDr. Farrell's website and membership portal: www.gizadeathstar.comDr. Farrell's books: https://gizadeathstar.com/purchase/Follow Dr. Alexis on Instagram ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@dralexisjazmyn⁠⁠: https://www.instagram.com/dralexisjaz...Follow Dr. Alexis on X @dralexisjazmyn: https://x.com/dralexisjazmynSupport the podcast on Patreon:https://www.patreon.com/c/UndoctrinateYourselfPodcast/homeJoin QuantumU:https://dralexisjazmyn.thinkific.com/courses/quantumuJoin ⁠The Incubator⁠ Book Club and Think Tank:https://dralexisjazmyn.thinkific.com/courses/theincubator

Hello everyone. Welcome back to Undoctrinate Yourself. Today I'm joined by a repeat guest, the incredible Dr. Joseph Farrell, who was on recently a couple months ago. And we got into some really incredible topics. And today I'm super interested to speak with him about maybe some current events because it is, what day is it? April 8th, 2006. And we're going through some crazy stuff globally that I'm excited to kind of get into a little bit about some thoughts about what's going on there. exactly, but I also really want to focus on the history of religion to a certain extent, especially Christianity and the Trinitarian model, which are things that Dr. Farrell has fleshed out in multiple of his books, including the, I think is a three-part series God History and Dialectic? Four.

Four part, yes. So lots to read on this topic. Obviously, we can only cover so much in a podcast, but definitely check out Dr. Farrell's work if you feel compelled and interested by this conversation. But, you know, just to start off, thanks so much for coming back again. Thanks for having me. Yes, it was such a pleasure last time and I'm excited to get into it again today. Maybe let's start a little bit about your thoughts around what's going on in like the global political mess that we currently find ourselves in.

Well, I'm in a position of extreme ambivalence about this. because on the one hand, that regime in Iran is absolutely brutal. And in my opinion, given its track record of support for just every sort of radical Islamic terrorist organization you can think of, sooner or later it had to go. My problem is, number one, it appears to me, given the same, given the same, sequence of events that we saw with Prime Minister Netanyahu, or as I like to call him, Nadiyehu, and his visit to this country

and then bang, all of a sudden we're bombing the daylights out of Iran. My first problem is it appears that the foreign policy of this country has been colonized by Israel. I don't know how else to put it. Yeah. My

second problem with this is if you look at the timeline of the announcements of what our objectives were in doing this, they have changed. It seems to me like once every two days. First, it was regime change. And then when that didn't really work out the way it was supposed to, well, we had to go in and get rid of their nuclear capability, which I thought we got rid of last year. Yeah, that's interesting.

Yeah, that's interesting how that came back so quickly. And when that didn't work, oh, we've got to prevent them from ever having the infrastructure to rebuild any of this. And now we've got to reopen the straits of, so the goalpost keeps shifting. And at one point, and this to me is very telling that we have not only a jackass in charge of our foreign policy, but the advisors around him are, as far as I'm concerned, just a bunch of neocon geopolitical shills. Because at one point, Mr. Trump came out and said, well, we want unconditional surrender.

Well, I'm sorry, Mr. Trump, but the only way you get unconditional surrender is with boots on the ground. And, you know, let's look at boots on the ground of World War II. It took the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and at various times, France, to

put down Nazi Germany with enough boots on the ground to say, that's it war over. You know, you guys surrender, and they did, and that's it. So, that's my first problem. And then two days or so later, the unconditional

surrender thing was completely forgotten. And Mr. Trump said, well, the war will be over when I feel like. Well, you know, okay, since when has a leader's personal feelings been an operational military objective in an operation? So in other words, four years ago, it was no more forever wars, no more regime change operations, and now what are we involved in? Well, we're involved in another forever war with a regime that has not collapsed, and there's no way we're going to force it to collapse. So what was all this for?

So, yeah, I'm... It's very confusing because there's no way that he thought that he could do the same thing that he did with Maduro in Iran. Like, there's no way. So, like, who's advising him on this? Is this all part of, like, the plan? Like, so I know there are people talking about, oh, you mentioned this, about like Israel colonizing our foreign policy. And I'm wondering also how long that's been the case

in a more covert way, perhaps. But people will talk about like this is kind of part of the greater Israel project. Like they have countries they would like to take over in the Middle East to restore that prophecy, so to speak, and that Iran is like on the list of one of their obviously biggest adversaries to that mission.

And you know, it's kind of crazy because obviously, you know, from my understanding at least, Israel has, nuclear weapon capabilities that and I think they actually took uranium from us during JFK's presidency if I remember correctly they did they did um I don't know if they're crazy enough to take it to that level if they are yeah it's it seems like they are so it's like we're in a very very sticky kind of position and it just makes me wonder like how much of this is part of the plan versus just absolute chaos that's coming out of like just bad decision making well

part of me thinks it is part of the plan because you you know Zionism as a phenomenon is not simply a Jewish phenomenon it's also an evangelical Christian phenomenon and that's interesting there's a there's a certain school of quote theology unquote I don't like to justify the doctrine with with the term theology because it's totally screwy but there is a certain doctrine out there of dispensationalism, which is what many evangelicals in this country are taught to believe is the historical Christian position. And it is not. It just absolutely is not. It emerged during the 19th century. And as a result of it, there's a kind of template of certain events that have to happen in a certain sequence before the second coming. That's according

to dispensationalism. And what it has always appeared to me, Alexis, is that there are enough people in positions of power or influence that believe in that theology that they could orchestrate events on the geopolitical stage in such a way that they think they're helping to bring all of that about. So in other words, we've got a bunch of religious nut jobs in Tehran and we've got a bunch of religious nut jobs in Swampington, D.C. Okay. And that's part of the problem here. And the unfortunate part of the problem is that the religious nut jobs in Swampington, D.C.

in Tel Aviv have their hands on the nuclear trigger. And they think that all of this is correct theology. It's not. It's not. But what I'm getting at is they are using that theological template in order to drive events and keep people on board. This is the key thing. Look at the break in the MAGA movement in this country since the assassination of Charlie

Kirk. Yes. Because what that did, I think it totally caught them by surprise, the fallout from that event. The fallout has been, you have a certain group of people that as a result of delving into the complete sham of a narrative that the federal government has. put out about his murder they are also implicating Israel and that whole theology as part of the problem because mr. Kirk apparently was breaking with that whole point of view shortly before

he was murdered and it seemed like they were trying to skew it like yes his murder would be like a way to bring more people to the side of Israel but it did the opposite it did exactly it yes it's made it's made the discussion of this evangelo zionism not only popular, but it has broken the taboo on people being able to discuss Zionism as a political movement. And that they cannot put back in the, I mean, the landscape of discussion in this country has completely changed in a way in the last eight months that I never thought, you know, I've been waiting for this ability to, for people to start questioning that whole theory. and that whole politics and its influence in geopolitics all my life. And it's literally happened in the last eight months just like that. So, you know, we're, yeah, we are living in interesting times.

But I don't think, I don't think as a result of this that the old, the old Reagan coalition, which has been dominant in Republican politics up to that point, is going to survive. It's being completely remade. And neither political party really has caught on to the extent that it's being remade. So, you know, where it goes from here? I don't know. Pardon me. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. My sinuses have been going ballistic. That's spring for you. It's spring. One thing that I was thinking about is that I think as part of, in Judaism, part of their prophecy for restoring greater Israel and everything like that, is that the whole world needs to turn against Israel at some point. And like, so that makes me think, is this like 5D chess where it's like they're trying to make people dislike them?

Because that's how they're behaving. Perhaps because, perhaps, because that is also part of that dispensationalist theological point of view that literally the whole world turns against the nation state of Israel. Yeah. But it's important to know that as far as traditional Christian doctrine goes, all of the business about the destruction of the temple and the abomination of desolation, that does not apply to Israel as far as the church is concerned. It applies to the church. Interesting. And the blessings. The reason why is we take very seriously the implication of the doctrine of the incarnation.

that whole that whole business of the death and resurrection of christ that is the new covenant the old one and all of his blessings and cursings have no relationship as far as we're concerned to the political state of israel everything applies to the church so in a certain sense you're you're living in two different worlds between you know traditional christianity and this american evangelical Zionism as i like to call it for want of a better expression. In other words, what I'm telling you is traditional Christian doctrine, if you're a Roman Catholic, a Lutheran, an Anglican, Episcopalian, Methodist, Eastern Orthodox, Coptic, Nestorian, Armenian. In other words, everything except the modern American Baptist

civil religion, all of their traditional doctrine is absolutely one on this point that this dispensational theology and the template that it has set out of these events have to follow in this sequence before the second coming it's not to say that they're not going to try and stage it this has been my big concern yeah is they're going to try and fake it exactly and a bunch of people will buy it and a bunch of people will buy it yeah you know and i you know i i have to warn people about something these people are masters at spotting Bible verses. Yes. And giving you the idea that, well, they really know their stuff.

Well, here's the problem. Remember in the gospels, the devil comes to Christ and what's the devil doing? He's quoting Bible verses. So in other words, yeah, the devils can quote Bible verses too. The real question is, is the interpretation they're giving to them correct or not? That's the problem here. That's the problem. So, you know, I don't care if Mr. Huckabee or Senator Ted Cruz can quote Bible verses, I can too.

What I've disagreed with is their interpretation of those verses. And that's where you've got to go back and check the track record, the history, and find out, well, is this in fact what the early Christians believed or is it not? Right. And that's why, I mean, this is all tying in perfectly to the conversation that I wanted to have with you today, regardless. because I'm now curious when like that American style Baptist approach or worldview was started. Do you think that it was started as a way by which to, I mean, maybe as a mechanism of control? Or do you think to like already seed Zionist like propaganda or like ideology from even back then? I don't even know what time scale we're talking about here. Like all right.

What was this Baptist revolution started? All right. the Baptist doctrine itself, the doctrine that infants cannot be baptized because the scripture says believe and be baptized. So that's the older you've got to do it. That's the mentality. That doctrine starts during the Protestant Reformation with the Anabaptist. So in other words, the Baptist doctrine itself is about 550 years old. If you look at the modern American version, the dispensationalist version of it, that starts in the 19th century. And there are two places you've got to look at very closely.

One is a fellow by the name of Darby in Great Britain. Now, if you know anything about the history of the Church of England, you'll know that Darby was one of the few people that the Church of England ever excommunicated. Okay. It takes a lot of doing to get excommunicated from the Church of England. And he somehow managed to do it. The other guy that you have to look at very, very closely is an American fellow by the name of Cyrus Schofield. You've probably heard of the Schofield reference Bible.

All right. Well, this is the guy that came up with it. But once you start digging into him and his reference Bible, which is, is really a Bible that trains you in how to read the Bible with dispensationalist blinders on, okay? The Bible itself was sponsored by a bunch of, and you have to dig into the history of it, was sponsored by a bunch of California and American oil men. Oh, my God. Yeah, and it gets worse.

it was actually published, and this is the real shocker. The Schofield Reference Bible was first published by here it comes, the Oxford University Press. Now, that should tell you the fix is in, because at that time in the 19th century, at Oxford, the high church movement was in full swing. I mean, you could walk into an Anglican church and not tell the difference between it and a Roman Catholic church

because the ritual was so high church. The only thing that would tell you that you were in a church of England church was they were using English and not Latin. I mean, that was about it. Okay. So you've got the high church movement going on. And then you have a Bible, which is clearly heresy. After all, they've already excommunicated Darby,

which is clearly heresy from the Church of England's point of view, and yet the university press is publishing it. Now, that takes some juice. Okay. I don't know how else to put it. That takes some real political pull and clout. I don't know exactly where that clout is coming from. My guess, it's pure 100%.

I have no evidence for this. whatsoever. But my guess is it's coming from a certain family in England that's very powerful and very rich that begins with Roth and ends in child. Okay. I was still really thinking that. That's my guess. So yeah, the dispensationalist idea, the modern American version of it really gets started in the 19th century. That said, there are, adambrations of that whole, you know, we've got to chart out the Bible map of the ages and draw all these intricate diagrams. That gets its start in the Middle Ages around the 13th century with a fellow by the name

of Biochim of Fiore. And again, I talk about him in that four-volume quite a bit because he plays a major role in the rise of this whole mentality of thinking that, you know, we've got these events and they're going to happen in this order. And this is what we look for for the coming of the Antichrist, you know. And what do you think the motivation behind that was? Did you think they genuinely believed this to be important? Or do you think there was something like that they were trying to tee up for later? Well, I think it's both. I think I think on the part of the vast majority of, you know, innocent people that just want to follow God and read their Bible.

And, you know, it's perfectly innocent. And they think that this is what they're doing. They're honoring God by following this teaching. Because there is a, there's a certain patina of sophistication about it. You have to be able to not only quote scripture, but do it and argue in a certain way. and this whole school of theology teaches you how to do that. It's part of the indoctrination. But at a deeper level, I think some of the people involved in promoting that doctrine, like the California oil man.

I think they have in their noggin not only the idea that this is true, but if we just kind of help things along by using this as our template, we'll get all sorts of power, we'll get all sorts of money, and lo and behold, we can help out with the second coming of Jesus. Two birds once. Yeah, yeah.

It's, you know, we can do all of this and just prove that we're really good people, you know. There's a kind of, I don't know what else to call it. There's a kind of virtue signaling mentality about it. And so maybe let's contrast the, like the dispensationalist perspective

with the one that the early church fathers had and that you've studied, you know, very intensely to kind of understand the differences in ideology and where the differences are rooted in. Well, the biggest root is that dispensationalism is, is when you get, it right down to a denial of Christ. Because what dispensationalism tells you is that at a certain point the church is taken out of the world, that's the rapture. Notice, notice that the church doesn't have to go through any of the suffering of the tribulation. Now, let me take you back to St. Ignatius of Antioch,

who is a personal disciple of the Apostle, St. John. So he's right. writing circa the year 110 AD. All right. And this is pretty much what he says in one of his epistles. They, certain heretics, abstain from the Eucharist and prayers and issue martyrdom because they allow not that the Eucharist is the flesh and blood of our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ. So in other words, to him denial of the unwillingness. to participate in martyrdom.

And by the way, he also said they don't like to give alms to the poor. Why? Because all of that stuff, incarnation, so on and so forth, all that stuff was the world of matter. And matter was evil. Therefore, God the Son would never become incarnate into the world of matter. So in other words, this is all of a peace to the ancient Christian. So to them to say the church is being taken out of the world to avoid the suffering of standing up and witnessing for Christ, to them would have been incomprehensible. That would have been denial of Christ.

So when you look at what dispensationalism says, it says that the entire sacramental system, by the way, they don't believe in those things either, sacraments, that whole system is taken out of the world. and the way that you approach God is through the rebuilt temple and the re-institution of the Jewish sacrificial system. That's exactly the implication of what they're saying. I mean, it's just crazy that they would even identify as Christians at that point. Like, how? No. That is precisely the problem, and they don't see it. Wow. But, you know, I just put it to you this way.

can you actually tell me that you can see a modern 21st century Manhattan Jew getting on an airplane to go over to Jerusalem buy a couple of turtle doves and have them their next rung as part of the sacrifice in a rebuilt temple? That's what they're saying. I don't know about you. I've had Jewish members of my family. I have a great deal of difficulty picturing them being involved in anything remotely close to that. Okay, I just, I don't see it.

But that's exactly what dispensationalism is saying, and that's exactly what some of the extreme Zionists are themselves saying, both the Jewish and the Christian version thereof. So, yeah, it's not that these things aren't going to happen. happen. It's not that they're not going to try and rebuild the temple, but any attempt to do so as far as the church is concerned is really a denial of Christ. And you are setting things up for Antichrist. That's exactly what the position is. I see, I see. And how does the Trinitarian model fit into this? Is this also part of the dispensationalist doctrines or is this separate? Boy, that's a very good question. And it's an extremely subtle one.

There is a connection to the Trinitarian doctrine, and it goes back to that fellow by the name of Joachimafiori in the 13th century. Because when you look at him, and again, I'm going to sound like a broken record, Yoakima Fiore is basically a codifier of dispensational thinking that arises and gets a kind of codification once again with St. Augustine of Hippo. Well, St. Augustine of Hippo is also the guy that formulated that different Western model of the Trinity that comes to be adopted by the Western Church. So in other words, there is a connection here, but it's very subtle. In Yoakima Fiore, remember what Augustine does with the Trinity. Instead of God the Father being the locus of unity in the Trinity, he actually makes it the Holy Spirit.

Why? Because if you look at that Trinitarian shield that you find so often in Western churches as an attempt to explain the Trinity, You have the father's not the son, the son is not the father, and the father and the son aren't the spirit. So the spirit is actually, according to Augustine, what? Well, take the words father, son, and holy spirit out of that little diagram. And now I'm going to substitute three new ones for you. And they're going to recognize them right off the bat, and you're going to see exactly what's going on. Let's call it thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Hegel. Okay. So in Augustine, he says, as the father is holy and the son is holy, and the father is spirit, and the son is spirit, so he is given to the son that the Holy Spirit should proceed from him also. And that Holy Spirit turns out to be what, the consubstantial love of both the Father and the Son. And therefore the Holy Spirit becomes the new locus of unity in the Trinity. So you've got these two up here and they've got that guy down here. So the spirit's the synthesis. The spirit's the synthesis.

And you'll notice something else. He's also been reduced in significance. How oftentimes do you hear a Western Christian praying through Jesus Christ, our Lord? Period. Amen. Yes. I was just talking about this on Easter because we went to a family gathering and everybody.

It's that. It's that. Yeah, it's a beneditarian prayer, and I'll tell you why it happened. In the service books, you will often find a little abbreviation. So you'll find a Glory B, period, and then you'll find another statement as it was, period. So if you're a literalist, you're thinking, okay, glory B, that's what we're supposed to say right there. No. No, it's just a liturgical shorthand.

for glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. And then as it was, as it was, sister, no, as it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be unto all ages of ages. Amen. That's a little liturgical shorthand. So it's just telling you that's what you say at that point. Instead of writing it all out there just saying you say this at this point. That's what through Jesus Christ our Lord was in the service books. It's a liturgical.

shorthand for through Jesus Christ our Lord who liveth and reigneth with thee, meaning the Father, and the Holy Spirit ever won God unto all ages of ages. Amen. Period. That's when you stop. Okay. Big difference. Big difference. But why did through Jesus Christ our Lord come to be accepted? Because of that demotion of the Holy Spirit in the formulation of St. Augustine of Hippo. So just make the sign of the cross and you got it all covered. Okay. All right. So what you now have is the spirit is lacking a certain sign of divinity that the father and the son have, namely being able to cause another divine person. Notice that little logical problem now. So what Joachimafiori says is okay, we can see or trace out the liniments of this doctrine of the Trinity in history. So in other words, it's Joachim and Fiore

that gives you the essential historical, logical link between Augustine of Hippo and Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel. Wow. Because he's saying all of those Trinitarian dialectics are discoverable in history. So what do we have in Joachim? Well, we have an age of the father. This is where Western Christians get the idea

that the person of the Trinity being talked about in the Old Testament is the person of the father. If you read the fathers of the church, no, they're going to tell you it's the son. So there's yet another divorce or disconnect from the mental world of the church via Augustine's reformulation of Trinitarian doctrine. I keep telling people, this affects everything. not just nothing this affects everything that a Western Christian thinks they know because they've absorbed it just kind of by cultural osmosis without realizing they just think it's making no sorry go ahead well then you have you hawkins says then you have the age of the sun that's that's the church age that's the age in which you have the clergy and you have all of these rituals and so on, that's the church age, that's the age of the sun. There will be, he says, a coming age of the spirit. And listen to this.

Because if you don't think this is ecclesiastical Marxism, you've got another thing coming. The coming age of the spirit will abolish. It will be the perfect monastic age in which all the ranks of the clergy are abolished. and yeah there it is there's your there's your classless society yeah there's your classless society so in other words you know what i'm telling you is hagel and marks are just latecomers all of this doctrine is traced out in the middle ages the only thing that haigle of marks do is they just toss out the christian terms and keep the dialectical structure well it makes me wonder I think we talked about this briefly last conversation about either or versus both and thinking.

And perhaps they were indoctrinated into this dialectic. And then, of course, they're going to see the world in that way. And then they're going to do their own doctrines as a result of that. Yes, absolutely. Augustine, again, what Augustine does is he picks up the neoplatonic philosophical dialectical structure. and attempts to Christianize a whole cloth. And in doing so, he creates massive amounts of problems

for the West. We're still dealing with them to this day. To this day. So he sets up this dialectical structure, and if you look at it in a certain way, that dialectical structure is bound with inevitability to lead to all of the, these problems. And, you know, our cultural history is an attempt to constantly try and resolve

these problems, but no one goes back to the real core central issue. Is his formulation correct or not? And when you compare his formulation to that of his own Latin contemporaries, Hillary of Poitier or Ambrose of Milan or his Greek counterparts, you'll see galloping massive differences. They're subtle. they're nuanced, you know, this is high doctrine, after all. This is kind of the theological equivalent of calculus. But nonetheless, if you make a mistake in the derivation of your equations, it's going to affect everything else. And this is exactly what happened.

Yeah, even small errors can propagate and become massive issues. Right. Yeah, I'm just thinking about, I mean, you mentioned the fallout. We're still, honestly, you could probably argue that we're dealing with it now more than ever. with just the levels of vision and black and white thinking and tribalism that is kind of born from this kind of ideology. Yeah, I think so. I, you know, I think we're watching, in a certain sense, I think we're kind of watching the last hurrah of it. Because one of the, one of the implications of this way of thinking is that you can solve everything by paying attention to the

mirror process. Right. Well, the problem, you know, the United States is a process country. When this country was founded, we had essentially two very basic, very different and very contradictory cultures. You know, we had a free culture and we had a slave culture. And the current constitutional mechanism was an attempt to solve that cultural tension through process. Well, mirror process, you know, this is the problem, Mr. Global Loan. has realized, you know, in the last 20 years or so, mere process can never paper over cultural, cosmological differences.

You know, look at Europe. They thought, well, we can bring in all these refugees from a civilization and culture that is absolutely 180 degrees contradictory to our own. Yep. And assimilated. And everybody will get along because it's the process, you know. We know how well that's working out. Yeah, exactly.

And I mean, this is kind of at the root of, like, communism and Soviet Union and all of this, like this process worship. Yes. Yeah. It's exactly what broke down in the Soviet Union. And look at what Russia is doing to fix the situation. Well, they've turned back to their cultural tradition and are vigorously, openly, with government families. financing trying to reinvigorate that cultural tradition. So, you know, this is what I think we're in store for in this country.

I, you know, I hate to say it, but Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, but that was just version 1.0. I think we're headed for something much bigger culturally. Yeah, and I think maybe that plays into this idea that we're moving from like unipolarity into multipolarity as well. Yes. Yes. Which you can kind of, I mean, people will talk about, I've heard this kind of rhetoric lately online that like we're moving away from Pax Americana and then like where that goes exactly. I mean, some could argue if Israel is really pushing for the greater Israel project that it becomes like this Pax Judaica type situation. I don't know if that's actually going to be able to come to fruition or not. But yeah, I guess how do you see how do you see this shift playing out between like the kind of the, this epaq's. Poc of America as like the global power structure and how that shifts into

multipolarity. What does that look like in your mind? Well, it looks very dangerous to me and I'll tell you why. I don't think the, I think the leadership of China, I think the leadership of India, Indonesia, Russia, those countries, I think the leadership really. realizes that the world has turned some sort of cultural corner. You know, those are the countries that have been talking and promoting the idea of multipolarism the most. Russia, Russia more so than even China, although China, if you look, if you kind of strip away the communist veneer and look behind that veneer, what you're seeing is, is Han Dynasty.

Confucianism at large that's that's what you're seeing it's it's talking Marxist talk but the structure is is much older Russia is is returning in a major way to its it's orthodox cultural roots and what I don't see happening is this is not being realized the cultural aspect of this is not being realized at all in Western Europe or North America. I thought at one time that Mr. Trump kind of understood that, but given his behavior, you know, the second administration, I don't even think he gets it. Now, there are people within the MAGA movement that are challenging Mr. Trump, I think,

do get this cultural shift in a major way. But it has not penetrated to our leadership class, certainly not in Canada, certainly not in France, or Great Britain, or as I like to call it, the United Kingdom, D-U-M-B. It certainly has not penetrated there.

They probably don't want to believe it either. I mean, obviously they've gotten super rich and powerful as the system stands. So, you know, they've gotten super rich. Yeah, they've gotten super rich and powerful. and they've committed a kind of cultural suicide that I don't think they're ever going to be able to put the toothpaste back into the tube.

So I don't think the West gets it yet. And that frightens me because to me, to me, the analogy is to the antebellum period prior to the war between the states and this country. You had these two increasingly divided cultures, and they were both increasingly moving to extreme positions where they were no longer capable of working out any sort of compromise with each other.

And then bang, Lincoln's elected, and it all blows up. You know, literally blows up. And then you had reconstruction after that, which only served to exacerbate some of the tensions that may have been resolved, had both sides sat down, talked to each other instead of fighting.

Right. You know, it was a mess. It created a mess. So I think we're in that kind of situation now. I don't, I don't honestly see anybody on the political stage that realizes we're in a cultural mess, not merely a political or process mess. The one kind of interesting silver lining maybe to Israel. actions is that I feel like it is bringing the far right and left together and shared opposition to their conduct, which is good to be able to find any points of common ground, you know, is, is progress and that's well, it's progress. And I'll tell you something else that I think is, if that, if that alliance continues and and you have that abilities to start talking to each other, those. those two groups are going to find out they have a lot more in common.

Yeah. And once that happens, and this is why I think the reaction against, you know, people like Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson, you know, with the Charlie Kirk thing, is so, I mean, you talk about over the top. And this is what really kind of got me into. I was never a follower of Charlie Kirk ever. Me either. I heard him say Shabbat Shalom once on his Friday radio show, and that was it for me.

And then come to find out that he was moving away from that. And I thought, oh, well, this is interesting. Let's pay attention. Well, as it turns out, the whole thing began to melt down. And as they're getting hysterical over people talking about Charlie Kirk and the influence of Zionism within Turning Point USA, say the whole thing is now entered the mainstream political discussion. And oddly, as you say, that has cemented the right and the left in a way that no one anticipated. So what they cannot allow happen now is for that dialogue to continue.

Because if it does, guess who's in trouble? the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee Our lovely power structure Our lovely power Yeah our lovely binary power structure You know one or the other Those parties might just collapse

And give rise to a third party You know it happened once before In this country with the Whigs So it's not impossible That's how the Republican Party was born so you know it's happened before and it happened again with the Republicans for for cultural means

and motivations because there was a segment of the abolitionist north that was just tired of all the talk and all the negotiation let's get on with it and get rid of the slavery and force the Southerners into our tariff system that's exactly what happened So I think we're approaching a similar stage. I hope that cooler heads will prevail culturally.

But at this point, I have to be honest, Alexa, at this point, I think some sort of crack up along cultural lines is more or less inevitable. Because I don't see anybody on the political stage in either party that thinks beyond mere politics. so long as they're thinking of your process, they're not going to get it. That's what brought down the Soviet Union. Totally. And I think, but it's interesting to think about it in the context of today because I feel like people are so, obviously I focus a lot on health and how the environment impacts the body and that bioenergetics.

And I'm just thinking like how sick and lack, like people just lack energy. And they're kind of apathetic. And even when something terrible happens, it's like people just are numbed out at some level. So I wonder what that looks like. Like, do you envision the potential of like an actual kinetic civil war? Or what does it actually look like if it were to come to a like sort of breaking point? You know, I've played out virtually every scenario in my head that I can think of. And I don't have an answer to that because I think it could go any number of ways.

It could be a collapse of the economic system and regional compacts between. the states that increasingly ignore the federal government so that the federal government over time becomes about as effective in administration as the Holy Roman Empire. It was there in name, and the emperor had a title of lots of fancy clothes, but no power, because it was all the little kingdoms and duchies that were running the show. So that might happen. It might be a full-scale crack up along the lines of the Civil War. It could be economic reality setting in and the federal government just implodes.

And states have to say, I don't know. You know, it could be any number of things. Well, that's like a major concern, right, with this conflict in the Middle East is that obviously Iran wants, if there were to be a ceasefire, they want us to pull all of our military bases out of the Middle East, which would lead to the collapse of the petro dollar, which our economy relies on fundamentally. So, I mean, our economy looks like it's kind of doomed, regardless of which perspective you look at it,

but maybe it also kind of needs to be right because it's a house of cards, right? It's just this fiat system that's so bloated and inflated. Well, the petro dollar system of Richard Nixon and the one that obtains now are two different things. And the reason why is America now is much less dependent on Middle Eastern oil than it was under Richard Nixon. In fact, if you sweep aside all of Mr. Trump's geopolitical gunsling over in Iran and look at just what he's been doing with North America, it looks to me very much like he is attempting. to retrench the power base into this hemisphere. And that, I guarantee you, is not his doing.

That is the deep state at work. Cementing American hegemony in this hemisphere and making sure that our energy and so. And the other thing we see as a result of that is we see this very deliberate decoupling from Europe. Yep. like it or not Europe's going to have to step up and assume and when we say that what we're already saying is like it or not Germany is going to have to step up and be Germany again you know

yeah that's true I mean they have way more resource access right and like in North America we're going to I mean we have access to tons of natural resources like we're basically going to be fine in that department obviously we need to bring manufacturing back and you know ramp up our own access to our own oil reserves but when it comes to Europe, I feel like a lot of the countries are kind of devoid of important resources they would need to survive. So they would need to work together, obviously. And like you said, well, they, yeah, they lack resources. You know, the problem in Europe is is the same problem that's always been there.

They lack the resources, but they have an enormous market, number one. And number two, particularly in the case like a Germany, you have an enormous manufacturing base. of heavy industry, you know, it's not making dolls and toys. It's heavy industry. So you've got that problem there. So like it or not, Europe is going to be playing a very different game because they're going to have to. And it's a game, you know, it's going to be, it's almost a schizophrenic game that they're going to have to play because they're going to, on the one hand, they're going to have to be subservient as far as energy. And on the other hand, they're going to have to, they're going to really have to beef up their military and assume a much more muscular

posture with their military. So it's going to be very schizophrenic. Yeah. You know, it's going to be Europe, Europe, uh, circa 1914 again, uh, which was very schizophrenic for the same reasons. Their lives would be made much easier if they made nice with Russia, right? Well, they're, of course they would. Of course they would. And, and this is, this is the other, you know, I mean, glad you mentioned that because this is the other part of the narrative that makes no sense. Russia, I don't care what anybody says, Russia today is not the Soviet Union. The reason the Soviet Union collapsed is they were trying to run all those other countries that, you know, they really didn't want to run, but Stalin made them run.

I just don't see Russia having any interest whatsoever in wanting to reestablish any. kind of Warsaw pact relationship with Eastern Europe, much less Western Europe. They do have legitimate concerns about the countries on their periphery. And for Russia, they are existential concerns. And we in the United States better really caught into that, pardon my southern there, but the reason why is we forget that Russia has been invaded twice in the last century by Germany. And the first time they lost. You know, we forget Russia surrendered to Germany in World War I

and came about that close to having to do it in World War II. So, you know, this is not a relationship that I think the Russians want to see be repeated. and this is why their reaction to the Ukraine was so strong because they saw Germany playing in that in that playground once again you know that's that's a history that goes back to World War I look at the treaty of Brestatovsk that Russia signed at her surrender and Germany and Austria carved out the Ukraine and said okay there's our line of military occupation so Russia knows exactly

exactly, you know, what the game was. But I don't think, by the same token, they have any, any will. And I don't think really even the ability to put troops on the ground and maintain those garrisons that they had under the Warsaw Pact. That's just not going to happen. Do you think that Mr. Globeloni over the past, like, decade was kind of trying to suss out whether, like, the globalist regime could actually be fully enacted? and then basically when that option,

when people started being more critical of Wef and everything like that, that they had to kind of change gears and push towards multipolarity instead, where they're now bringing resources back to the different hemispheres and like reindustrializing America, for example, and trying to get like Venezuela, Greenland, like, do you think it's all part of that? Yeah, I, that is an excellent question, and it's a very nuanced one and a very subtle one. for years.

I don't know if you are familiar with interviews I used to do on a show called The Bight Show, a friend of my name, George Ann Hughes. She's dead now. I heard. Years and years ago on her, probably on her show, I said something to the effect that

as Mr. Global One, it gets closer and closer to the goal of a global governmental structure, you're going to see much more fractured. because each faction is going to be like a mafia. As they get closer to their goal, this family wants to be the family in charge of running it all. So as they get closer, the divisions multiply.

It's a paradise. So this is in part what I think happened. But the other thing that happened was as they got closer and started to experience the troubles that they saw emerging in Europe, they realized we cannot govern without a cultural route. And to do that, we have to acknowledge that, you know,

Samuel Huntington divided the world into basically six large civilization types or areas. Whether that's true or not, I don't know, but at least he's thinking along cultural lines. well what that means to the globalist is we're going to have to pull back and rethink how we're going to do this so i think their current game i think you're always going to have a a hardline david rockefeller zbignyaf brisinski type of globalist who says well we need global government right now everybody on board and it's all going to be process and we bankers and technocrats are going to run it okay you're always

going to have that type. I think for the moment, they've kind of stepped back and said, okay, we can't leapfrove directly under globalism. We're going to have to do it through regional compacts and so on. That's what I think is happening right now. I think as a result of it, I've discussed this idea with Catherine Fitz, and we've toyed with it a little bit, that as a results of that, you might see regional reserve currencies rather than just the dollar. And I think you're seeing a few indications of that already. You're going to see regional clearing systems. That has already been an accomplished fact. Russia has its own internal clearing system that's not dependent on Swift anymore. We saw them try to make the first steps to a build out of a much more

regional clearing system with Japanese help. So this is this has all been going on quietly under the surface. Where it's going to go, I don't know. So long as you have the purest globalist process people in in the West and in this country in particular that think they're going to be able to run everything through pure process, artificial intelligence and technocracy. and cashless society, I don't think it's going to work. No, I mean, especially not with our current energy infrastructure. And I think we touched on this last time because we were talking about this paradox of like,

okay, let's say there is free energy technology and there were, that physicist was recently killed when we chatted last time, but they can't roll it out because of the existential threat. But if they roll out the surveillance date first, then maybe roll that out. But it's kind of a paradox because in order to get a surveillance state at that scale, you really need enough energy to be able to actually. To do it. Exactly. Exactly. They are, they are caught in a lot of these vicious circles. Yeah. And there really, there really isn't a, there really isn't a good way out for them. So what we're seeing, you know, as a consequence, we're seeing a lot of theater.

Yeah. We're seeing, you know, this business of the downpire. and his weapons officer being miraculously covered after three days, and it just happens to be during Easter week. You know, they're resorting to this obvious theater as a way of, oh, isn't that nice, distraction? And to me, it's amazing that the theater is so obvious, but what that says to me is they're in a desperate situation.

Yeah. They're getting very, very desperate. You think the moon orbit situation was also part of the theater to create? Oh, yeah, I do. Sure, I do. I do. Just, you know, come on, Artemis. On April Fool's Day?

On April Fool's Day. And they're going around the moon on Easter weekend, and they're going to splash down after Orthodox Easter on Monday. So, hey, they managed to cover both Holy Weeks with that one. and just the idea of Artemis, you know, this whole Egyptian connection that that name conjures. Yeah, the theater is obvious. And, you know, thanks to Richard Holman for pointing it out decades ago that NASA's been playing this celestial magic game, you know, ever since Project Mercury, you know. And they haven't changed. They haven't changed.

Yeah, I saw some videos of people online that were like crying out of like the happiness of seeing like this, you know, rocket taking off and like how miraculous it is. And anyway, it's the materialism. It's just like a certain point. You've got to just say no. Well, yeah, you know, shooting off a bottle of rocket is no great feat. You know, getting people to survive the attempt. Yeah, I'm happy that they survive that. but it just I go back to something else I've said many times okay we've we've gone around the moon again and I'm not one of these people that thinks that that whole thing was hoaxed I don't think that at all

but what I'm concerned about is is that now they're they're reviving all this talk about the Artemis moon base and all this stuff and I really want to know how they're going to accomplish all of this with chemical rockets and robots. Yeah. I'm waiting for that one breathlessly, Alexis. Do you think the rocket technology like for Artemis 2 and in general is strictly chemical, or do you think they're using some other advanced propulsion that are just not talking about it? It looks to me to be strictly chemical. and that's also a good question because I'm one of those who believes that the Apollo missions, particularly the lunar excursion module, getting down to the lunar surface and then back off of it.

Yeah. I've advanced the hypothesis that all of that was accomplished through hidden exotic technology. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I did not see anything like that from what little I saw and watched of the Artemis II mission in evidence. What always made me think that there was an exotic technology involved with the lunar excursion module during Apollo was the way they took off from the surface of the moon. you know a rocket accelerates geometrically per unit of time so it starts out slow and it gradually speeds up and travels much further per unit of time that's not what we saw taking off from the moon it's like it's like the same speed yeah it's just like up it goes okay and and the other thing was there there was very little dust from the burn there was very little um there was very little

vibration that you could see that would be typical for a rocket taking off starting out slow and moving up you know none of the signature looked right to me and you know I was a kid at the time and I remember very vividly turning around look at my dad sitting in his armchair and reading the paper and I said that's not a rocket and my dad grunts and you know ignore the kid but but no um Time will tell with the art of us missions if there is an exotic technology involved. If there was, let's put it this way, if there was, it was not going to be used during the boost phase of the mission. They're going to use it during the transit to the moon and even more particularly probably behind the moon as they're going behind it. that's when they're going to trot out the good stuff. But we'll see. You know, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, I'm interested in seeing what happens once they start talking and, and, and seriously planning more lunar surface missions, because then my hypothesis is either going to be confirmed or disproven or left with a big question.

What's your thoughts on the notion that we kind of, kind of lost the technology or the blueprints to be able to go to the moon and had to regenerate. What's up with that? It always seems kind of weird when we hear this. Well, I think there may be something to that because in the way I presented it in my books that deal with the Nazi component of American technology, we obtained just an enormous amount. of technology from Nazi Germany after the war. In fact, you could easily argue that it was the largest technology transfer in human history. Wow.

Easily. And part of that was obviously we got all those German rocket scientists and aerodynamics and so on and so forth. And I think we got a considerable insight into their Bell technology. And that's what I think was the hidden bargain. And I've always argued the scenario that we needed an exotic technology, not so much to get us to the moon, but rather onto the moon. And once we were on it, back off of it. Because in the way I've tried to reconstruct the Apollo missions, I think the other big hidden secret of that era was that the moon was more mass. than they had calculated it to be.

And therefore, if it's more massive, you're going to need a much bigger rocket to get off the thing. And if you can't put a rocket that big on the moon, then you're going to have to have another technology to do that and get you off. And as a result of that, I've argued that we made some sort of deal with that Nazi group to get access to that prototypical. technology. And in return for that access, they had full access to whatever we found up there. Okay. As a result of that, and you see as a result of this hypothetical deal, you see a lot of strange things happening in NASA, like Dr. Kurt Davis. He was a very good friend of Verner von Brown. He's that guy you often see in pictures from NASA at that

period of history. You have Kennedy and have Dr. Front Brown. And then there will be this guy with a big Mansura scar on his face. And that's Dr. Kurt Davis. All right. Well, Davis, if you, if you examine him, was one of the scientists involved with the Nazi bell. He was not a rocket scientist. He was a plasma physicist. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. And by the way, he ended up in charge of the scheduling and in charge of all the Apollo flights at Cape Canaveral during Apollo.

Interesting choice. Interesting choice, especially when he was investigated by the U.S. Army for two times after he was brought over here, the second time when the army became aware that he had denounced one of his fellow scientists in Germany to the Gestapo. Okay. So this guy is a little bit of a piece of work. Well, Dr. Davis, it turns out when he retires, just before he retires, he becomes the head of NASA's UFO disk. Oh, interesting.

He gets that, got a cushy little position. And then when he retires, he becomes a member of the board of a West German company called Ohtrog, which is Orbital Rakhaten-on-T-Sport-A-Shauschaft, O-T-R-A-G, which is a company that set up shop in the Congo. Oh, my gosh. And it became this West German area 51. one. Yeah, that was researching cruise rockets and bio-weapons and everything else. And the only reason that I or anyone else ever heard of O-Trog in America was because Mikhail Gorbachev was the one that raised the alarm about it.

So, you know, this is kooky crazy stuff. But, yeah, all of that to say that I think there's a lot of circumstantial indicators to indicate that some sort of deal was made between America and the powers that be that had all this German connection. Now, why do I mention all that? Well, two reasons. Reason number one, Ellen, reason number two, Musk.

What's his ancestry? Oh, yeah, he's South African. What's his ancestry in South Africa? Oh, wait, is he... Is he from the same area that that base was or the O-Trak? His family is German. His family is German. Okay.

So, yeah, I think he has, I've suspected that he has some sort of inside track into O-Trog. Because O-Trog, you know, Germany's atomic post-war, atomic bomb project involved, too, South Africa. Okay, so, you know, there's all these connections, corporate connections and so on and so forth that to me indicate, okay, yeah, Ellen Musk can put a big rocket up into the air and get a bunch of people to ride on top of it safely. We can't, but they could. You make a good point. So, you know, to me, I realize I'm talking about a completely circumstantial case, but, you know, to me, it's just looking a little too fishy. And it's, it's too much of a coincidence theory for me to have much confidence in it. Yeah, the dots are definitely connecting there.

Did I hear Shiloh? Did I hear Shiloh? Is that going to go? Yeah, she was over here on the bed. She jumped up. Yeah. What is the living room? So this has been great.

I have a couple questions not to give people whiplash, but I want to circle back to theology really quick because there's a couple things I didn't get to ask that I just want to help people understand better. So you practice Eastern Orthodoxy, correct? Yes. And maybe can you just highlight like the broad differences between, let's say like evangelicalism and Eastern Orthodoxy

as it relates to their theology? And we covered some of it already. But just to make it clear, also how the Trinitarian model doesn't fit within the Orthodox perspective? Well, the Trinitarian model, the Orthodox Church definitely believes in the Trinity.

Yes. It's just, it doesn't believe in the Western version of Right. Okay. And the reason for that is there is in the original version of the Nicene Constantinopoulitan Creed, the section on the Holy Spirit says,

and I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who proceedeth from the father, who with the father and the son together is worshipped and glorified. Okay, that's the original creed. Every version of the creed in the West, be it Roman Catholic, Methodist, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Dutch reform will say, we'll have a version of the creed with the filioque clause. And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life, who precedeth from the father and the son. Okay, that little and the son is in Latin filiocque, all right. Okay.

Okay. So in other words, you've split the monarchy of the father. You've split the causality of the father and allowed the son to share in it. That's Augustine's doctrine. Okay. In the Orthodox Church, we say there's one God, not simply because there's one divine essence. We say there's one God because there's one monarchy. There's one father.

And, you know, the word patriarch in Greek means the father's source. So in other words, the Orthodox talk about the monarchy of the father being the personal seat of unity in the Trinity, as well as the divine essence and abstraction. So it's a very different doctrine, and it's a very different way of thinking about it. as for the primary difference between orthodoxy and evangelicalism that would depend on the kind of evangelicalism you're talking about for example you can go back to the 17th century methodists who would be very evangelical

but if you look at the methodism that the wesley's practiced it was not only evangelical it was also very sacramental you know they were kind of a a century ahead of the high church movement in the 19th century. So you would have perhaps a difference with that kind of evangelicalism over the hierarchy, over apostolic succession. In other words, the idea that the bishops trace their authority from the apostles. You would have perhaps a disagreement over the role.

of liturgical prayer to some degree. If you contrast orthodoxy with modern American evangelicalism, the difference is very, very profound because, number one, orthodoxy is not revivalist. American evangelicalism is, in fact, that is their sacrament, as far as I'm concerned, and it's their only sacrament, except Jesus is your personal Lord and Savior, and then go out and evangelize. That's your sacrament. And that's your worship.

I would say American evangelical worship is, and I hope I'm not offending people here. I'm going to be very blunt. Even when it's, even when it's pious and reverent, it's still like listening to piano in a piano bar in a nightclub. It's not real reverence. Yeah. They really have.

have not a clue what reverence is and why it's essential. It's not essential. God doesn't need it, but it's essential to us. It's part of our, I think, our makeup as human beings, that we need it, that we need to be reverent and that we need to have spaces and protocols of behavior and so on that are designed to inculcate and communicate that. So I would say that that is the chief, big, huge difference between orthodoxy and evangelicalism. You go into an Orthodox church. You know, number one, you're in a church. The other thing that will be immediately apparent is it will look very different than a typical,

even a typical Western church because there are icons everywhere. You are literally surrounded with depictions of all the saints in history all the time. So you have this you have this kind of subconscious historical awareness that you don't have

even in Roman Catholicism, I would say. That would be another difference. A third, very telling difference would be in orthodoxy there is within the church, will not see women exercising positions of authority. In other words, they're not going to be

giving sermons and they're not going to be giving lessons outside the church. They're going to be doing that. But if you go to an evangelical church, you're going to see women at the pulpit, giving sermons, you know, acting in roles of authority and so on. That's another difference. yet another difference would be when you celebrate Easter. You know, that's the one that people think of, you know, right off the top of their head. Because typically the Orthodox Church celebrates Easter about a week after the West does.

Sometimes they fall. They happen to fall on the same date, but oftentimes they don't. And the reason for that is simply that if you go back to the Council of Nicaea, one of the canons that was passed at the Council, was that Easter and Passover should never fall on the same date. Now, what the reasoning was for that, I don't recall right off the top of my head, that that, you know, I'm just giving you an example of yet another difference. So there's lots of differences.

One thing about orthodoxy that is a palpable difference between that and an evangelical is in an Orthodox home, I have a little icon corner in my home where I have all my icons. I have my candles. I have my little home sensor. You burn incense at home, just like you do in the church service. So you've got the idea that the home is kind of the little church. In fact, that's what the Orthodox call it. The family is the little church.

So, you know, there are little. and indicators like that. I mean, that may seem small to some people, but I feel like that completely changes, like, the ethos around the way you live in life. Like, if you're only really Christian when you go to church on Sunday, like, are you practicing? Like, do you actually have a spiritual practice that, like,

you're putting into effect daily and, like, having reverence in your life? And this is actually something I think about quite a bit as it relates to, like, the technologization of our world and the fact that, like, all of the light at night is blocking our ability to see the, cosmos and the stars and how missing that is completely divorcing us from like the acute awareness of divinity in the world oh yes absolutely absolutely you know every night uh every night when i go to bed and say my prayers i give shiloh blessings i actually sign her with the cross give her blessings and you'll see this too is is you know it's it's a little pious custom but you'll see

monks in Russia blessing their animals and so on. It's it's just it's just a different it's a different life. I don't know quite how to put it. You know, it's it's very similar to to the idea that occasionally, you know, if you if you encounter a Roman Catholic monk or not traveling, you know, on a bus or an airplane, you might see them pray their breviary. You know, they're supposed to pray their monastic hours regardless of where they are or what they're doing. you know, it's a similar kind of mentality. You're taking it out with you into the world. And the reason for that is, again, very simple.

It's because the world is sacramental. You know, every material thing can be used as a way of communicating and conveying God's grace. That's just kind of that, again, that's the implication of the doctrine of the incarnation. that's where it's all coming out of. And I feel like the Western view or version of Christianity like demonizes the flesh and like I think we talked about this a little bit. It kind of is the difference between like the original sin being seen as like we're bad inherently and we're sinners versus like we are now aware that we can die.

Like the difference there is pretty large and I think I've heard you talk about this. But do you want to do you want to riff on that a little bit? Well, the doctrine of original sin in the West is essentially to one degree or another. It depends on who you talk to, what the church is, how informed the person is that you're talking to. But you get this idea, and you find this a lot with evangelicals, you get this idea that what you inherit from Adam and Eve is a sin nature. Okay. And they will use those terms. In other words, the idea is that at some point you come into the world,

to some degree guilty of someone else's sin. You are a, in that sense, you are a child of wrath. And that's what they mean by, and how they interpret that verse. And when you have that idea, please hear me now, when you have that idea as the template in your head, you're going to read certain verses in a certain way, like children of wrath. In sins, did my mother conceive me? And on and on, you go. All right.

The orthodox understanding, the patristic understanding, is that what Adam and Eve bequeathed to their progeny is death. In other words, when they sinned their human nature was split apart. Okay? The soul of the body began to split apart immediately. And that consequence can be passed down to your progeny because it's a part of your nature. Their guilt cannot be passed down. Nature's don't sin. Persons do. When you start toying with the idea that nature's sin, then you get into the idea, well, some races can be better than others. We might, because we're white, we might owe a lot of money to people who are

black. You know, it's this, it's this whole mentality that you inherit a culpability, a moral legal responsibility for someone else's misdeed. What you inherit is the consequence of their misdeed. You're inheriting a nature that's falling apart, that's dying. And by the way, yes, for most of us, because of that imbalance in our nature, we go on to sin. We add our own to theirs. Right. That's true. We're weak.

We come into the world and we come into the world. We're already dying. Okay. So that's the fundamental difference. Now, look how it plays out. If your fundamental problem is that you're going to croak, what is the event in the life of Christ that your church will focus on? POSCA, Easter, yeah, the resurrection.

So if you go to Eastern Europe, the focus liturgically is always on POSCA, which is what we call Eastern in the Orthodox Church. If, on the other hand, your primary problem is the inheritance of sin and moral guilt and that you're a children of wrath, what's the primary event that you start to focus on? Well, Christ dying for our sins. The cross, Good Friday, the sacrifice. So in other words, again, it's not so much that the individual items of the faith have changed, but the emphases that you're laying on them do. And therefore, the template by which you read the scriptures also changes.

So in other words, I can still accept that I'm a child of wrath and that my mother conceived me in sins, but I will mean something completely different by it. than a Western Christian completely. So this is the problem that people have. You know, they always want to spout Bible verses at me. Well, what do you do? And my response is always the same. Show me in history where your interpretation comes from,

from an approved doctor or teacher of the church, excluding Augustine. One exception. with that exception because that's the problem that's the problem you know you get to the point where where if you inherit sin

from Adam and Eve and you are you die unbaptized what happens in Western theology well off to hell with you and even that was too much for the medieval scholastics to stomach so they had to figure well what do we do now that's that's kind of an embarrassing doctrine

Well, let's come up with a place that's kind of hell, but it's not really that bad. And we're going to call it limbo. Yeah, heard that one? Well, that's precisely why they came up with it. The problem is, is that is not what you inherit. And by the way, the last time I checked was that the resurrection of Christ happens to all human nature. everybody is affected by that just like everybody was affected by the fall of Adam so there's a difference even in the way you understand salvation and who gets it and why they get it okay so again folks

I say this to everybody all the time when you when you start looking at Eastern Orthodoxy or for that matter looking at the church fathers be prepared to unlearn everything you think you know about Christianity, because I haven't one bit of sympathy for any of the Western formulations of doctrine. Now, does that mean I'm against Western Christianity? No, much of Western Christianity is very beautiful, was very beautiful and was hijacked by that whole system of doctrine. So, you know, it's not that I'm unsympathetic for it. On the contrary, I grew up in the West.

I grew up in the Methodist Church. I was baptized Roman Catholic. I was an Anglican for many years of my life in college. So I'm very, very sympathetic to Western Christianity. That's where my Christianity was formed. But at the same time, I realized that, hey, all my friends in college, all these evangelical Baptists and Charismatics and Pentecostals, why is the only church father that they are really interested in reading St. Augustine of Hippo?

Seems kind of why. Yeah. Well, it's a clue. Yeah. It's a clue that much of their theology is coming out of his system. That's true. The system creates the rotten fruits. the system created the rotten fruits that's precisely so and it's it's you know i i've most of my life has been

has been revolving around trying to get people to see that there's another christianity other than that of augustine and it is as ancient if not more ancient than his system it's as ancient if not more ancient than the Pope and his outfit. It's as ancient and as evangelical, as anything the Wesley's or Luther or Calvin or Arbinias ever came up with. So, you know, take that for what it's worth. Now, I've heard you talk about how, and I could be wrong, but correct me if I'm wrong,

that orthodoxy is kind of like the decentralized version of Catholicism. I mean, obviously, there's no one. Pope and one power structure and that kind of situation. So can we compare and contrast Catholicism and Orthodoxy real quick, just so I can get a better understanding differences? There's a problem by saying that there's no, there's no Pope figure because in the last, I'd say, 200 years, you have seen the acumenical patriarch of Constantinople coming out with increasingly neo-papal claims. Wow. Yeah, it's very disturbing to those of us in the Orthodox Church. fact, many of us don't have anything to do with the ecumenical patriarchate.

I'm one of them, okay? So that's why my canonical status is a little iffy, but I, you know, I've, I've seen what papal claims did in the West. We don't need them reiterated in the East. They're a major part of the problem. But in, in theory, in practice, orthodoxy is a deep. centralized mechanism in that the the authority in the Orthodox Church is basically two things. It's the local bishop who is the chief liturgical steward of the mysteries of the church and

because of that is responsible for maintaining the purity of doctrine within his jurisdiction. That is to say within his diocese. That means that the other authority, at a more regional level is a synod of bishops, a council of bishops. Okay, that's why you have a Romanian Orthodox Church and a Bulgarian Orthodox Church, a Russian Orthodox Church, a Ukrainian Orthodox Church. You've got all these little national churches that have their own independent hierarchies, but you'll discover that what binds them together is the liturgical practice

is the same. The doctrinal content is the same. The hierarchical ministries and so on. The ranks of the clergy are the same and so on. So you get a much more decentralized structure, which has helped in the past. It has helped orthodoxy. At the Council of Ferrara Florence,

which was a big reunion council that Pope, I think Eugene IV, called with the east, to try and get the two churches back together. Of course, the council was a ramrod of nothing but Latin formulations that the Greeks were to sign and consent and surrender to, which most of the Greeks that the council did, with the exception of one archbishop.

And his name was Mark of Ephesus. He went home, he said, no, I'm not signing this. He went home back to the east, and the Pope's comment was, Mark of Ephesus has not signed, all is lost. Because he knew he had to get every last Orthodox bishop in the world to go along with and submit to the papers. And it just ain't going to happen. It just is never going to happen. You know, recently I had a friend tell me that, oh, look, Pope Leo the 14th dropped the filiope from the creed when he was over in Constantinople.

Wow, isn't that wonderful? And their unions right around the corner. I said, no. Because you've got to understand that doctrine had 1,000 plus years to work out its effects in the West. You don't want it. Yeah, we don't want it. Yeah, we don't want it. He can drop all the things he wants in the creed.

We still don't want to have any communion with the guy until we see that he's genuinely trying to repair the damage that theology is done in his own church. Right. And I'm not seeing it. Sorry. I'm sure Leo's a nice guy. I say prayers for him. But communion? No, sorry.

Ain't going to happen. That's the big difference. The other differences between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism is you will never find, and it is not Orthodox ever to find an icon of. the mother of God without the presence of her son in that icon. Interesting. We will never allow a stat, well, statues themselves are forbidden. But we will never have Mary apart from Christ.

Ever. To have Mary apart from Christ is really to miss the point of who she is and what she did. You know, it's kind of that simple. So that's another, that's another huge difference. difference. As a result of that, we don't need all of those terms that you find in Roman Catholicism of mediatics of all graces and so on and so forth. Because we understand that she has all of those things by virtue of being Christ's mother. It's just kind of that simple. We don't have a doctrine of purgatory, although some Orthodoxes will tell you that we do. Is the doctrine of purgatory and Catholicism rooted in anything that's actual, like,

theologic from the early church fathers? Yes, yes. No, it is. It is rooted in something. But you'll find when you study that particular doctrine, there are kind of three layers to it. There's three periods to it. You've got an early period where you have a doctrine that, you know, just because somebody dies doesn't mean they quit growing in grace.

You can find verses in the New Testament to that effect. In Ephesians, for example. And then you have a layer that comes a little later that begins to be coupled to the doctrine of original sin, coupled to the doctrine of inherited guilt, coupled to the doctrine of merit and satisfaction. So that begins to enter the picture around the 4th to 5th century and most particularly in the Latin West. And then you get the full-blown post-sismatic doctrine of the treasury of merit and indulgences and all of this stuff. That looks more like the Egyptian doctrine of the scales and the feather than it looks to be anything Christian. So yeah, there is an early doctrine of this idea that you continue to progress and grow.

You're not just waiting around for the resurrection to happen. And then you're going to sit there like good little boys and girls and contemplate the divine simplicity. It doesn't work that way. I'm laughing because when I was a kid, I had this problem. I'd say I was about 9 or 10 years old. I had this problem with heaven because I had in my head I had essentially a medieval scholastic

idea of the vision of God, which was precisely that. You're all sitting around for all eternity contemplating the divine glory and you could never move. Sounds like help. Dingo! Wrong one.

Ding, ding. You can't move. move because if you move what have you done well you've diverted your attention from god and that's a sin and therefore you're off to the bad place no you know it's it's it's it's when you get down to it the doctrine of the vision of god is a problem you know in the west because why well it's a vision of the divine essence where's christ where are the saints what do they do it you know where is the infinite glory that's around the divine essence what are you going to do do there, you know. And does that mean that regardless of where you turn your attention,

you're always going to be confronted with God? Well, yeah, kind of means that. And does that mean you can move? Well, yeah, that too. I mean, it's kind of already like that in this world, too. It's already like that. Yeah, precisely. You know, we, we have this idea that free choice is a choice between must always be the ability to choose sin. That's not free choice. It's part of it in this life. But free choice is the ability to choose amongst a multitude of goods. Yes.

And what's God? Well, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, that's a multitude of goods. Wisdom, justice, holiness, and so on and so forth, out infinitum. Well, those are goods. They're all God. So in other words, again, I'm spitting out all these examples. There is the West's Augustinian cosmology, which I don't adhere to, and there's the rest of it. And speaking of things that are labeled as good and also just like the dialectic of good and evil and how it can be kind of distorted in Western theology,

I wanted to ask you about your perspectives on astrology because I know a lot of people here like in, let's say in America who practice say they're practicing Christianity who don't know anything about it. They say it's devil worship, evil, like no, bad. Oh my. Yeah, I know.

But I'm very interested in astrology because I feel like it's an empirical science that was developed over thousands of years. Well, I have the same view. And again, there are many church fathers that were against astrology. Augustine, very against it. Some others were not so against it.

And that's a key. That's a, perfectly, that's a clue. The reason that many of them, so many of them, pardon me, were against it, was, pardon me, was because they thought it took away from free will. It took a part of the image of God away from mankind. So it's an understandable reason that they were given. yet by the time you get let's say to around the year 1000 you've got all sorts of bishops in the east and the west you know that are consulting astrology i can think of one very famous guy in particular by the name

of patriarch michael carolaris he had astrologers just like the emperor um why did why did it come back well i think it came back precisely for the reasons that you have yourself indicated that it was at one time understood to be an empirical science. And in fact, when these sources would have been known to some of these people, when you look at some of these sources, they will tell you, like I'm thinking of some Egyptian sources that say that these observations were compiled over tens of thousands of years. So in other words, there is the claim right there to empiric. science. Now, the other thing that I think people are missing with astrology and the way that

individual early Christian writers are trying to explain their position on it. And that's because most astrology that we're familiar with, and incidentally the kind that Augustine was responding to, is the modern American little Sun-Sign book in the grocery store, aisle that's going to tell you all about your future. So superficial. Yeah, it's that it's the, it's the astrology for your individual sun sign and you yourself that they're objecting to. But when you look at astrology as it was practiced in ancient times, it was always the

mundane horoscope, which a modern astrologer would call it. And the mundane horoscope was always a horoscope that was cast for a group of people or in ancient times for the king, the monarch in other words, who represents this group of people. So it was always a kind of statistically empirically grounded idea that they were talking about. So that's the difference I think that you also have to bear in mind when you're reading some of these early pronouncements that this Christian is for astrology

and that cushion's against astrology, well, they may be talking about two different kinds of astrology altogether. Totally. At least that's been my impression reading some of those pronouncements. Yeah, and I mean, as a science or even if you think about it as like a tool, I mean, I think you can't really assign morality to a tool. Like you can use a gun to kill somebody, but it doesn't mean the gun is bad. It's just being, it can be wielded in any number of directions, essentially.

Right. Right. I would only add a caveat to that. I don't think that modern astrology is anywhere near the kind of astrology that you might have gotten from, you know, the Magi or in Babylon. Because I think a lot of that has been lost or, if not lost, misconstrued into, you know, the modern grocery store or sunset. signed booklet type of astrology. Uh-oh. Totally.

Oh. Bless you. Yeah, I think the closest thing we have probably today would be Vedic astrology because it's been a tradition that's kind of been maintained over very long swaths of time. Though I know there, obviously, I think there were differences between like the practices and the studies that resulted out of different areas of the world, of course, and how things exactly calculated and whatnot. But I think it's interesting.

And obviously, I don't know about for Orthodox. Easter, but obviously the Easter that we celebrate here, most people do, in the States is what? It's the Sunday after the full moon after the equinox. So it's already based on what's happening in the sky, right? So it's like, this is commonplace. Well, you find, you find those types of prescriptions in church canon law. And I mentioned the Council of Nicaea, and it talks about that sort of stuff. So again, what kind of astrology are we talking about? And And they would not have made at that time the distinction between astrology and astronomy that we make today. Exactly.

It was just one thing to them. Yep. So, you know, I don't get upset. I'm certainly not going to condemn people for looking at a sun sign, but, oh, you're invoking demons. I mean, the cool thing, too, about like this, let's say, the way that astronomy or astrology is embedded into. to a lot of these old texts is that I'm sure that it's not random. Like, I'm sure that they selected these. For very specific reasons, maybe a certain like collective energetic is in place

that allows you to access something more easily. Like, I don't know, but I think it's interesting to think about. There is a whole school out there. I'm sure you're aware of the attempts to interpret everything in the Gospels is nothing but an astrological reference. Well, that's very interesting. Oh, yeah. Yeah, there's a whole school out there.

Now, I don't subscribe to it, but it can be done. There's also a whole school out there that could point to certain verses in certain books of the Bible and say, well, this is nothing but alchemy. And again, I don't subscribe to it, but I don't deny that those things are there. The reason I think that they're there is not demonic. It has everything to do with an ancient patristic doctrine of the incarnation called recapitulation. So in other words, the idea basically is that Christ came not simply to fulfill the expectations that are recorded in the Old Testament scripture. He came to fulfill the expectations of all the lore out there on planet Earth, including all that lore about the dying God. and so on and so forth.

The dying king, you know, Osiris and Set and that whole Egyptian resurrection myth. It's like that famous statement of J.R.R. Tolkien to C.S. Lewis that so disturbed C.S. Lewis, who at the time that Tolkien said it was an atheist. And Tolkien's remark was, well, you know,

all that stuff about the dying and risen corn god, look like it really happened once. So, you know, and that again is part of that early, early Christian mentality that people find so very different once they start reading it. Because far from denouncing Vedic India or things like that, they're going to say things like, well, these mess and so on were fulfilled in the Lord.

And where the myths were untrue, that just came from demons. So in other words, this whole mentality is very different than the modern American evangelical mentality. Very, very different. Totally. It's so interesting. I'm really grateful that we could have this chat today and, like, lay out the kind

of framework as to how we got to where we are, like, intellectually, like, the way that our minds actually work and, like, string ideas together. It's just so, it's so, like, deeply embedded within our culture and our society that I think it's not really, these aren't really questions that people typically ask or topics that people think about. So I think it's really valuable and just super grateful for your time. And we've been going for a while. I don't even know how long I've been going, but it's been a while. But is there anything else you would like to add or are you working on any projects or anything that you want to share about before we sign off? Well, I never talk about projects I'm working on. I'm sort of working on

one, but we'll see if it pans out. Otherwise, I don't have to, I don't have to disappoint people. That's fair. And if people want to check out my website or any of my books, that's www.giza Deathstar.com. That's where my website is. That's where all my books are. Amazing. Yes. I will put a link to that in the show notes as well, along with a link to God History and Dialectics, since that's the one series we referenced a bit today. That is just a wealth of knowledge. And thank you so much for your time. It's always a pleasure. And hopefully we can do it again. Thanks for having me back.

Thank you. Yeah, bye, bye. Bye.