Dr. David Skrbina isn’t afraid to go where other academics dare not go… like the Unabomber, panpsychism and Jesus.

Click here for the Dr. David Skrbina’s website

Click here for forum Discussion

 

skeptiko-510-david-skrbina

So I was getting ready to publish this interview that I have coming up with Dr. David scrubbiness, who. Actually co-wrote a book with the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. And I was wondering, does anyone even still remember that whole thing and what that’s all about? And then I found this.

Ted Kaczynski was part of the Harvard LST studies. Let’s see.

Yeah. They cooked his brain. And then he disappeared, worked as a professor to earn enough money. So he could buy a cabin and implement his plan to kill everybody who was involved in technology.

So he’d stop this takeover of the human race, which probably is true. That’s one of the things that’s disturbing. It’s just like, well thought out.

And also the argument is sad. Technology will inevitably lead to better technology, which inevitably leads to artificial intelligence, which is inevitably going to take over the world.

(—)

Okay. So if it’s good enough for a Joe Rogan, the grand master of alt media, and one of the most popular and important media figures of our age, you know, certainly if you ever look at the stats, Much more important than anyone on CNN, CNBC, Fox, any of that? Just higher rating, more influence.

Especially with the important demographic, but I digress because I’d go further and say, I think.

Like a lot of people, Joe kind of misses the point regarding Ted Kaczynski. Here’s a clip from the upcoming interview.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:01:27] , the pushback, isn’t your intellectual interest in technology or the ill effects of technology it’s that you kind of promoted a serial killer in the process of doing it.

Dr. David Skrbina: [00:01:40] Well, yeah, absolutely. And I was always sensitive to that, you know, um, I mean, I’ve always spoken against it. It’s not like I’m endorsing what he did. But on, on sort of on the one hand, we have that situation on the other, you know, we have. We have to deal with the arguments in the manifesto. And there are very strong arguments against industrial technology.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:00] Yeah, but David, there’s a hell of a lot of room between throwing the baby out with the bath water and promoting Ted Kaczynski.

Who, again, I keep saying serial killer and you keep saying Unabomber or whatever. I mean, he would have killed, he would have gone on killing. He planned on, you know, bombing a commercial airliner.

Dr. David Skrbina: [00:02:18] If we’re gonna, you know, not going to promote people, who’ve killed innocent people. Okay. There’s a long list of people who’ve killed far more innocent people than Ted Kaczynski has. We don’t even know the statistics about how many innocent people got killed by our military strikes, implicitly going to our president. So no one really gives that a second thought and we just respect them and we salute them and so forth where you like them or not.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:40] So one of the things I brought up to you in email was the link between Ted Kaczynski and MK ultra, and again, uh, you know, there’s an interesting link here that people will find is the gifted child thing.

Dr. Alexander Moreira-Almeida is a leader in the scientific study of spirituality and health.

Click here for the Dr. Alexander Moreira-Almeida’s website

Click here for forum Discussion

skeptiko-509-Alexander-Moreira-Almeida

Video Clip: And if any of you were troubled, I encourage you to speak out testify.

I’m hoping you can pray for us. Um, we’re soldiers home on leave. And my friends here at troubled Cheever has a very bad back and a broken marriage and he wants to take his own. And Teekay’s wounded in the private parts, which is why he’s lying to his fiance about going to horse.

That’s a scene from the movie, the lucky ones with Rachel McAdams, where she’s seeking a spiritual healing. Which is a topic we touch on with today’s guest, the extraordinarily excellent Dr. Alexander Mordana Almeda,

who is a world-class Brazilian doctor and expert on spirituality and health.

He’s an MD university professor researcher.

And one of the big takeaway messages that he has is that even though we’re conditioned to immediately apply the crazy tag to any connection between spirituality and health. The actual science leads us to the verified fact that there is a connection. Here’s a clip.

Dr. Alexander Moreira-Almeida: [00:01:04] Sometimes of course, there is the dark side of the spirituality, but it’s not the average. On average the use of religion, spirituality is positive, and even has an impact on mortality. Just one example, professor Tyler VanderWeele, he’s a chair of public health at Harvard University is one of the best that statisticians in the world. He has several studies following up on 70,000 to 80,000 people for 10 to 15 years. And showing for example, that the people who attended a religious service at least once a week died 50% less in this 14 year follow-up, or died six times less from suicide. So that is a strong impact.

But now I think the challenge is first to disseminate this information to general population and also in the training of physicians, nurses, and psychologists, because sometimes this knowledge has not been translated into the actual clinical training of health professionals.

And the second challenge, I think perhaps is more even of interest to Skeptiko audience is okay, but what is the meaning of spirituality, because of course we understand that church attendance can be related to social support can be relate to beliefs, but does actually have any ontological reality to this spirituality. Is there something actually beyond the matter? So I think these studies, for example, trying to understand the ultimate source of it, and the meaning of these experiences. I think it’s one of the most interesting challenges we have nowadays.

(—-)

So, this is obviously a very complicated issue. So it’s good to know that it’s being tackled by somebody who can handle the complexity. I mean, this is someone who actually earlier in his career.

Researched John of God, you know, the now exposed sex, trafficker rapist, cult leader, murderer, Who was friends with Oprah Winfrey and bill Clinton until an investigative reporter who later was suicided revealed that the whole thing was about.

Sex traffic and other evils that we can only imagine. And that’s something we get into a little bit in this interview, but imagine this worst of the worst,

Mitch Horowitz is an expert esoteric mysticism and the occult who happens to be a Satanist.

Click here for the Mitch Horowitz’s website

Click here for forum Discussion

skeptiko-508-mitch-horowitz

Ben Stiller: [00:00:00] There were times, when I was doing Jack that I actually felt retarded, like really retarded. I mean, I brushed my teeth retarded. I rode buss retarded

Robert Downey Jr.: [00:00:10] Damn.

Ben Stiller: [00:00:11] In a weird way, I had to sort of just free myself up to believe that it was okay to be stupid or dumb.

Robert Downey Jr.: [00:00:17] To be a moron.

Ben Stiller: [00:00:18] Yeah!]

Robert Downey Jr.: [00:00:19] To be moronical.

Ben Stiller: [00:00:20] Exactly, to be a moron.

Robert Downey Jr.: [00:00:22] An imbecile.

Ben Stiller: [00:00:22] Yeah!

Robert Downey Jr.: [00:00:23] But simple Jack thought he was smart or rather, didn’t think he was retarded, so you can’t afford to play retarded, being a smart actor. Playing a guy who ain’t smart, but thinks he is, that’s tricky.

Ben Stiller: [00:00:33] Hmm, tricky.

Robert Downey Jr.: [00:00:34] It’s like working with mercury. It’s high science, man! It’s an art form. You an artist.

Ben Stiller: [00:00:40] That’s what we do, right

Robert Downey Jr.: [00:00:41] Yeah

Ben Stiller: [00:00:41] Yeah

Robert Downey Jr.: [00:00:42] Hats off of going there, especially, knowing how the Academy is about that shit.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:46] That’s, of course, Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr. from Tropic Thunder. And it’s a clip that has become somewhat of a touchstone cultural icon because of the full retard thing, which is part of the clip that we’re going to get to in a minute, but I wanted to start with this long way around the barn clip on the first part, because what he slips in there, Robert Downey Jr. does in a very interesting way is, the reference to the academy that being the Academy Awards, which in our case, serves as a very good stand in for culture and our popular culture, and what we think of it and how we process it. And if this intro is a long way around the barn, which I assure you it is, then you will have to stay with me for its linked to today’s guest, Mitch Horowitz, who is self-described historian of alternative spirituality, and one of today’s most literate voices of esoterica mysticism and the occult, and he also happens to be a Satanist. Now, I’m not hating on him, because he’s a Satanist. As a matter of fact, I like Mitch Horowitz. At least I like him well enough, but I’m not sure I trust Mitch Horowitz. I’m not sure I believe Mitch Horowitz. And I guess my doubts stems from this character that we touched on a couple episodes back named Colonel Michael Aquino, who it turns out is somebody that Mitch identifies as one of his greatest sources of inspiration.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:20] In that same article, you’re asked who are some of your greatest inspirations, and you mentioned Satanist Michael Aquino. I mean, Mitch, this guy is one of the worst of the worst Pedophiles…

Mitch Horowitz: [00:02:37] No, that’s not true.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:39] But hold on. If you say it’s not true, okay, I get it.

Mitch Horowitz: [00:02:43] It’s not my saying. That’s grotesquely inaccurate. He died recently. He had no involvement with pedophilia whatsoever. I’m surprised to hear you say that.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:52] Okay, back to Tropic Thunder.

Dr. Elaine Pagels is a religious scholar, but that didn’t prepare her for personal grief.

Click here for the Elaine Pagels’ website

Click here for forum Discussion

 

skeptiko-507-elaine-pagels

Alex: [00:03:00] That’s a clip from the series Dead to Me, bringing a little dark humor to the very real and very heavy topic of grief. It’s a topic that I cover in today’s interview with the extraordinary Dr. Elaine Pagels, who if you don’t know a couple years back won, what is essentially the Nobel Prize for the Humanities. And kind of went to the White House and had Barack Obama put the thing on her neck and that whole thing. In the field of religious studies, she’s kind of a superstar. Everything she writes is instant New York Times bestsellers. But the last book she wrote is more personal. And it touches on this topic of grief and her loss of both her young child and then her husband. And just because she studies religion as an academic doesn’t mean that those religious texts were able to comfort her. But then her story takes kind of even more interesting turn and one that I picked up on, and that’s that Dr. Pagels had some extraordinary experiences associated with those tragic losses. And that’s something we also cover in this interview. And of course, because this is kind of what I’m interested in, tied it back to what we really might be able to understand about those experiences and why we sometimes seem unwilling to, I guess, go there all the way.

Dr. Elaine Pagels: [00:04:21] I had had a couple of experiences. I don’t call them mystical, because I don’t know what they were. I just call them experiences I can’t explain.

Alex: [00:04:29] That’s not good enough. It’s not. I heard an interview with you, and your being totally honest, just like you are now. And first of all hats off for you for writing about those experiences. But you were explaining the process, [and] you’re explaining going through the book, and you were saying, “Gee, I was trying to decide how much I should write about that.” And you’ve made this [Crosstalk 04:49]. Of course, as a scholar of religion, you have to be careful about what you say. As you say that we all know exactly what you mean. But isn’t that the problem? Don’t we want more? Don’t we want more from academia? Don’t we want more from scholarship than to be running and hiding from things that we cannot say?

Dr. Elaine Pagels: [00:05:11] Exactly. And so people have unusual experiences. I was at a conference actually held in California by the founder of Esslyn Institute there, who I’ve known for a long time, and he had psychiatrists and poets, and all kinds of people coming together, 15 of us, talking about what we call the experiences, I cannot explain. Some kind of coincidences, some kind of people who say they saw someone who wasn’t there. They saw someone who had died, who was actually present or seemed present. What’s going on here? Is it a hallucination? Is it an actual message from another world? I mean, when I was in a situation like that, I thought, I can’t tell. I can’t tell whether I’m hearing the voice of somebody who’s died, or from another world, or whether I’m just making it up.

Alex: [00:06:08] And I’m not totally sure what...

Derek Lambert has interviewed some of the top religious scholars, and a bunch of atheists too.

Click here for the Mythvision Podcast website

Click here for forum Discussion

Audio Clip: [00:00:00] But I mean, just the fact that a person is faithful or a person goes to church doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re an asshole. There as [Inaudible 00:00:08] anybody else.

[00:00:13] Well, what you often say is that people who are religious aren’t smart, right? They’re dumb. They are stupid.

[00:00:19] No. No.

[00:00:20] And that’s three quarters of the United States still. It’s still 75% of the country if 25% is unaffiliated.

[00:00:25] But that’s not what I am saying.

[00:00:27] So what are you saying?

[00:00:27] Okay. The movie [Inaudible 00:00:28] starts with the question, “How can otherwise intelligent people believe in a talking snake?” But the question is, how can you just [Inaudible 00:00:34]? I think all of your intelligent and I guess you’re all religious.

[00:00:42] I don’t know how people can wall off a part of their mind and believe in something that’s an obviously [Crosstalk 00:00:48] age myth.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:50] That’s, of course, Bill Maher having a quasi-debate on atheism, with a panel that shall remain unnamed. Interesting to note that this dialogue has more or less been pushed to the side of the public forum. You don’t hear these kind of debates anymore. And I think part of the reason for that is, as we’ve covered on this show, when you have spirit cooking, occulted rituals, satanic rituals, connected to virtually everybody in Hollywood, and certainly many higher ranking political or royal family kind of connected people, well, it’s hard to keep a straight face about the evils of belief in the supernatural, or as I would say, extended consciousness realm. Then again, I think the debate still has merit. And that’s why I keep bringing it up. And that’s why I decided to connect with Derrick Lambert, of the very excellent myth vision podcast. Now I have to say that anyone who’s familiar with that podcast or with the mythicize position, that is kind of a scholarly apologetics approach to the idea that Jesus was a myth. Well, if you go down that path, then you would expect somebody like Derek to be more aligned with the Bill Maher Sunday school atheism kind of thing. And, well, he is. But as we’ll explore in this interview, I think that’s only half the equation. I mean, half the equation is Bill Maher’s right. [Inaudible 00:02:29] wall off our mind. But the other half of the equation is, well, let me play a clip. So I look at science and I say, the pre-existing social engineering position would be, I want you to be the same way that religion wants you to be afraid. It wants you to feel guilty, [and] it wants you to be controllable. That’s what religion wants out of you, because you’re just more susceptible to what they’re saying. Science wants the same thing. Science wants you to think that you are that biological robot. That there is no really no meaning in the universe, or if you want to believe Sam Harris, kind of, it’s a social construct. It’s whatever we make. Well consider the alternative, that you are somehow more, that your consciousness is somehow more and don’t go any further. Don’t start selling me God or anything like that.

Subliminal Jihad podcast is the ultimate deep dive into parapolitical culture shaping.

Click here for the Subliminal Jihad on Twitter Click here for forum Discussion

Skeptiko-505-Subliminal-Jihad

Audio Clip: [00:00:01] Do you think you can elude us forever Carlos? Wait, you got the wrong guy, my name is Simon, look just let me go, there’s no need to kill me, I haven’t seen your face, don’t do it, I didn’t see it. The game’s over, your career as a international terrorist has been well documented. No. Oh yeah. I sell cars that’s all, good bye, I’m not a terrorist. I’m actually a complete coward, if I ever saw, oh God help. Please don’t don’t, don’t.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:32] Yes, yes, a throwback movie to the good old fun days. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tom Arnold, Bill Paxton yucking it up in True Lies about a fun covert intelligence operation not at all scary, where the terrorists are really just used car salesmen. Oh, the good old days. Maybe they weren’t so good, here’s what was really going on.

Dimitri Poshlost: [00:01:01] Well, you cut his teeth in Vietnam I mean, doing this very, very spooky operation called wandering soul. He developed these recordings known as ghost tape number 10 and basically what they would do is they would play these sort of eerie sounds and wailings. The idea of this was to sort of suggest then to play off what they imagined as being the Vietnamese belief in wandering ghosts and spirits. It’s very Sam Harris had this sneering thing where it’s like oh, we can manipulate these savages beliefs. Even to bring it up to the 80s to Michael Quinn is very odd performances on Oprah and The Geraldo show, when he went on to you know, basically defend the temple of set and satanic practices and stuff during the height of the so called satanic panic, you could almost see a parallel between operation wandering soul and what he was doing there, because he was going on TV in such a provocative way, where it’s like he knew he was going to basically trigger all of the kind of conservative Christian types that were being terrified by what Oprah and Geraldo and all these other people were saying about how there’s these evil cults. But then he was also sitting there and going like, that is actually not true. I am you know, I might have devil eyebrows and have this like you know, like very witchy wife and stuff and seem very sinister. But you know, actually there’s nothing to see here. It’s almost like it in the sense of the real goal of the recording of Wandering Soul was to get the Vietcong soldiers to get angry and reveal their position and expose themselves. And it was all about eliciting a psychological reaction that was actually not exactly what the kind of extensible goal of the operate of the psyop.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:43] So I got this interview coming up with the guys from Subliminal Jihad, which is a fantastic podcast that I discovered and I’m with you to check out as well. We cover so many topics in this interview, but one of the focus points is this guy Michael Aquino, who is a Satanist pedophile, probably murder of children almost for sure. And a guy who was legitimately embraced by our military and intelligence organizations. I mean, he was totally embedded. He was highly, highly regarded for his knowledge and insights for mind control and ...

Dr. Eben Alexander is a leader in advancing knowledge of near-death experience science.

 

Click here for the Eben Alexander’s website 

Click here for forum Discussion

Skeptiko-504-Eben-Alexander

Audio Clip: [00:00:01] I’m so bored of living. I wake up every morning in the same bed, I get dressed and I eat the same breakfast and then take the same commute to work. I’m 28 years old and I’m terrified, this is all there is.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:19] That’s a clip from the Amazon series Undone, about this woman who has this after death experience. I actually like it, I think it’s kind of interesting. Of course, it doesn’t really follow near death experience science. But then why would we expect it to. I mean we have all these really good accounts like the one from Dr. Eben Alexander, the Harvard neurosurgeon but of course, we have to attack those people, take down those people, smear those people, and then substitute and entertaining and well done account of what after life experiences are. Well, no big, the afterlife is a big tent. There’s room for all. But if we want something closer to the truth, listen to people like Dr. Eben Alexander.

Auido Clip: [00:01:08] And getting back to your original question about the attacks on me. I will also say it’s a very good thing that three physicians not involved in my care. And of course, one of them was Dr. Bruce Grayson, who spent more than 45 years studying NDEs, but they wrote up a case report on my medical records and that came out in September of 2018, in the Journal of nervous and mental diseases. And that case report went a very long way towards painting the picture, I tried to paint in proof of heaven, I actually go much further than I did, I had a lot more time to look at my medical records, three of them did it independently, objectively and I think they were even more shocked than I was that when my brain was so demonstrably offline, given my neurologic exams, given the lab values, given the CT and MRI scan showing all eight lobes of my brain affected, that I could have had the most robust, profound experience of my life in that setting. And in fact when the peer reviewers had Journal of neurosis and mental disease, ask them how do you explain this case? They said it’s because he had an NDE. There really shouldn’t have been any controversy because this manufactured controversy, I just wanted to kind of put an exclamation point on that because there are still these lingering doubts which there will be because the effectiveness of smearing somebody of taking somebody down culturally, is very well understood, you will carry that forever, It just never comes clean because they’re really, really good at that. I just pull up short when we start talking about doing and we have to do and we got to reduce that plastic thing in the in the ocean. Of course we do but we just have to be, we have to be with each other. I would say you’re absolutely right on the beam and you know early on in all these discussions after my NDE is always trying to come to a deeper understanding of it all, trying to explain to people trying to come up with a shift and worldview that made sense. I remember, Karen pointed out to me very brilliantly, that really all we are here to do is to be the love that we are.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:03:26] Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science and spiritual...

David Mathisen on the connection between star myths, Roman cults, and our parapolitical reality.

Click here for the David Mathisen’s website

Website Click here for forum Discussion

Skeptiko-503-David-Mathisen

Audio Clip: [00:00:00] Between Bobby and the FBI possess all the time he’s gone fucking crazy. Tell Jimmy I’m sorry for his troubles, the old time is no deal man, they’ll talk to him at some point they’ll straighten it out for him. Yeah but he can’t understand and I gotta be honest with you I don’t understand either, I used to help get those two fucking kenzi pricks elected in the first place, It don’t make no sense to him, that’s for sure. He doesn’t have to understand everything. You know what I’m talking about, sometimes it’s better. So when I see him like that, I don’t you know, I feel bad, I want to help him in some way. Listen, he’s too emotional, like some guy who’s always rushing all over the place and they missed the big picture. Like Cuba. Getting us back in the casinos, getting us back into Havana. Like getting rid of that fucking Castro prick. The old timey spoke to the old man, the old man talked to his son jack and he told them don’t forget who the fuck he owes. He knows who the fuck he owes.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:01:07] That’s of course Joe Pesci and Robert De Niro, a clip from the Irishman. I know it’s a rather long clip but It’s an important clip and it’s history. I think a lot of people, I guess maybe younger people don’t realize it’s of course a fictional account but it’s history, this is what happened. There was this guy who ran the Teamsters union called Jimmy Hoffa in the Union back then was unbelievably powerful, It ran the country, it ran the trucks, if they shut down the union you know, no one got that and all the rest of the stuff, he had a lot of power. And he was very tight with the mob and the mob was taking care of him and he’s taking care of the mob, and he was loaning all the money to build the casinos in Las Vegas, and this was the dynamic and also back then the mafia organized crime was super powerful, much more powerful that we can kind of even imagine today. And what they’re talking about in this scene in particular, is how some people in the mafia felt betrayed by the fact that Joe Kennedy, who was JFK’s father and who amassed all of his wealth by smuggling alcohol from Canada to the US and was tied in with all organized crime. And he’s the one who had gone to the mob and said, hey maybe you can help here with my son. They felt betrayed that now, JFK and in particular Robert Kennedy who was Attorney General was, really going after the mob and was stamping out organized crime all this at a time when the top cop J. Edgar Hoover, because he was compromised because he was a gay man and like to dress up in women’s clothes and because some people in the mob had pictures of that and because human compromise is always in play, is always your number one go to tool, a lot Jeffrey Epstein. So that’s why the top cop in the United States publicly stated that there was no mafia. Again, if you don’t know this history go back and read it because you’re really gonna have to understand it, to understand where I’m going,

Dr. Jeffrey Long has a scientifically solid database of near-death experiences.

Click here for the NDERF.org Website

Click here for forum Discussion

Skeptiko-

Skeptiko-502-Jeff-Long

Audio Clip: [00:00:00] That’s everybody, think of one incident where Katniss Everdeen genuinely moved you. When she volunteered for her sister at the reaping. Excellent example, good, what else? Oh, when she sang that song for little Rue. Oh yeah, we didn’t get choked up at that. You know what, I like you better actually without all that makeup. I like you better sober.

Alex Tsakiris :[00:00:26] That’s of course Woody Harrelson from the Hunger Games, a clip that would seem to be because it is a long way around the barn from an interview with one of the world’s leading near death experience researchers, Dr. Jeff long, who’s compiled the largest searchable database of near death experiences, and who joined me primarily because I wanted to verify because I’ve referenced it so many times, the quality of the data in the database. Here’s a short clip.

Audio Clip: [00:00:52] Are you in any way scrubbing the database? Are you in any way taking out any references that might be offensive to someone? You know If they’re satanic you know, or this and that, I don’t think so because I even do N D E R F aliens, I do N D E R F E T, there are a few entries that come up, It doesn’t seem to me like you’re in there scrubbing the database in this kind of cancel culture shadow banning you know, we don’t know what’s really out there. Great question Alex, the only change that we make to the entirety of what is shared with us, is we remove references, I mean they may just like their doctor that they believe was involved in their life threatening event. So we removed names just to preserve confidentiality, overriding concern is the confidentiality of who shares. We post everything that they share with us, it would be an abomination to us to pull out anything that we didn’t like, or we disagreed with. If they share it with us it goes up.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:01:58] Now I realize that this point which seems so important to me is really not that important to most people who are interested in near death experience. What they want to hear about is all the goodies that come from the experience as well they should because there’s a lot of goodies to hear, as Dr. Jeffrey long will tell you from the data he’s compiled like, fear of death. Here’s a clip on that.

Audio Clip: [00:02:21] I pulled up the response to the question, fear of death. I asked them directly, what about your fear of death? Before the experience, before they’re in N D E, 32.3% greatly feared death. At the current time when they share their near death experience year, typically years later, the percentage that said they greatly feared death down to 3.1%. Remarkably, you go right to that key question that the options to response for their level of fear of death is like greatly feared death and moderately feared death, I slightly feared death, I did not fear death or unknown. So look right directly at that response to that question of I did not fear death. At the time prior to their near death experience, 13% did not fear death. After their near death experience, 76.7% said they did not fear death. Alex, this is dramatic evidence of the power of near d...

Matt Whitman is a pastor and creator of the Ten Minute Bible Hour.

Click here for Matt Whitman’s Website

Click here for forum Discussion

Skeptiko-501-Matt-Whitman

Skeptiko-501-Matt-Whitman

Audio Clip: [00:00:00] Well as a Christian I guess that it would be easy for you to recite the Lord’s Prayer. Is that what we’re resorting to here, Gestapo tactics. I would like to hear that. Would you like to hear me say the Lords prayer? Fine I’m happy to, our father ,art who is up in heaven Aloe Vera be thy name, forgive us for trespassing, and do not lead us to the temptations because we are tired of them and they’re dancing, and deliver us from evil with your mighty sword and falcon forever and ever and ever, amen.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:41] That’s Zach Galifianakis and of course Will Ferrell in the movie, The Campaign and you know, actually my favorite part of that clip, but I wasn’t able to get it comes right after that, when the crowd have kind of stereotyped Bible belt Christians is booing because he doesn’t know the Lord’s prayer and Ferrell protests and says, I got the gist of it and I’ve been working through these shows on Christianity and Judaism and social engineering by the Romans, and I have to wonder to myself am I may be making too big of a deal about this because at the end of the day, I do kind of feel like Christians do get the gist of it, right? I mean, it’s all about love and light and forgiveness and compassion and for the modern, liberal, mainstream, protestant and America, that is what Jesus is all about, that’s what his message is all about, that’s what Christ consciousness is all about. So what’s the big deal? They got the gist of it, right. So and I’ve kind of said this before, but I’ll say it again, I’m trying to go past that, I’m acknowledging that, I’m acknowledging how awesome that is, especially in the context of a society we have that basically denies spirituality at every turn, either through science or through wink and nod Hollywood, Luciferian, Satanism, whatever that thing is. So where I’m trying to go is the next level of saying, okay, what’s beyond the gist of it? If we were going to try and get to some kind of factual thing, like I say and I know that’s slippery and tricky. What would we leave in? What would we throw out? Now, none of that would be a problem as you’ll hear for today’s most excellent guest, Matt Whitman and I have to stress, and this is just straight up the truth. I can’t tell you how far Matt stands above so many of the biblical scholars, religious scholars, comparative religion professors all that stuff, you know I’ve talked to a ton of those people. Matt stands head and shoulders above them in terms of standing up and dealing with the data and sorting through it and being able to push back with a well reasoned, supported argument of his position. So I’m going to play a couple of relatively long clips from this interview because the interview is very long, it goes a lot of different places. And I want to give you, at least as Will Ferrell says, the gist of it.

Audio Clip: [00:03:27] What do you think the chances are that the gospel writers had access to Josephus? I think 100% that Luke had access to at least the early publications of Josephus. I don’t think Mark had access, I think he wrote earlier than that and drew his details from Peter,