“In a world where God is the Devil and the Devil is God, one man will stand up to pretentious social media influencers and say….’alright let’s see it!’” -Epic Voice Guy
@@DoloresLehmann Is that the guy complaining about how bad RUclips is for promoting anyone below at least ten million subscribers? Because here's a secret: RUclips pretty much *never* recommends a ten-million subscribers or more channel to me. What they recommend relies heavily on what you watch. Maybe not always in the way you like, but if pretty much all channels you watch are smaller ones, then that's what RUclips will recommend. The vast majority of those small channels I found because that big bad algorithm recommended their videos to me. If it doesn't recommend to you what you want to watch, I'd say the first thing to do is to switch off autoplay so you have more control over what you watch, and the second is to start liking videos you like. It really helps, though if RUclips already has a questionable idea of your tastes, it can take a while to adapt to this.
@@KaiHenningsen Mhmmm.... no, I don't really know who you're referring to. I mean the guy that voices "Honest Trailers" and as a final extra always fulfills the wishes of people telling him to say specific quotes in his epic voice. I don't know if he also complains about the RUclips algorithm.
@@racheladkins6060 They work to destroy public school every year and then they push Cristo-fascist ideals to fear monger the uneducated They been doing this since the civil war
@@racheladkins6060 have you ever heard of Hillsong Church? One of the largest in the world and not in America. They preach a bunch of nonsense over there. Their founder was a strange dude. Point is….its everywhere.
"Understanding religion through the lens of Protestant Christianity" I quite agree. The thing that I noticed is that religions even today continue to evolve and many religions do not have a problem with that. And we see this with early religions too. My grandmother was a Taoist and she worshipped many gods. When my dad introduced Jesus, she just considered Jesus as just another god to pray to among her other gods, much to my dad's disappointment.
Reminds me of Voudoon. African slaves were forced to adopt catholicism so on some cases they just worked the virgin Mary and some other saints into their pantheon and called it good. Probably much to the frustration of their catholic masters.
I remember one comment thread I was on where a Vietnamese woman talked about how her family in Vietnam were both practicing Catholics and practicing Buddhists, and some guy insisted on telling her it was not possible to be both. But I'm pretty sure their sect of Buddhism didn't care about their Catholic rituals and while under Canon Law they might be considered _bad_ Catholics for practicing apostasy, once you're baptized the Church considers you Catholic unless you're excommunicated, which isn't easy and generally not sought out by Church authorities even when it's warranted. And even then, the possibility of returning to the fold is still there!
@@MrDalisclock You have this wrong in more than one way. The Afrodiasporan religions already involved several concepts in common with Roman Catholicism, such as how the lwa are but creations of the one god meant to serve him by doing the hard work and being specialists in given areas. "Working saints into their pantheon" is a really sloppy description of the syncretic choices they made. Every lwa in voudoun has at least one saint who the enslaved Africans decided had enough in common to make sense as a parallel. Their owners (masters makes it sound like they were appropriately treated as second-class humans, which is racist) often didn't know a damn thing. The enslaved people were often forbidden from practicing their native traditions, so they took on an increasingly sincere facade of Roman Catholicism. Many in voudoun to this day will tell you they are Christians. The lwa being saints and intercessors means they worship one god but gain intercessions by petitioning the others. If anyone chooses to doubt my facts, they can tell me which houngans and voudouistas they've learned from and what their lineages are. This is akin to yelling at Dan when he has a PhD. I merely represent what they taught me; they have the proper initiations from Haiti.
Exactly. As soon as you get into ‘no it wasn’t like that, it was like this…’ you partake in yet another myth making exercise. You just slant it a different way and in doing so you make a different one.
I had a similar day with the addition of the inherited infatuation with gold. And then my former mother-in-law showed up. This resolved all doubt about who is whom.
When I was a Christian (as a child) I was told that the purpose of the Tower was to reach heaven and God didn't want that. But when you read the narrative the motivation for building the tower isn't mentioned, and God's reasoning for destroying it and confusing their language was along the lines of "If they can build a tower there will be no limit to what they can do." Like many other times God shows his wrath in the Bible it's for petty reasons...like the time he killed two of Moses' grandsons.
@@benjamintrevino325it's either the book of Adam and Eve one or the book of Adam and Eve 2 I'm not sure which one it is I digress and neither one of those they give great detail as to what the motivations behind the tower were and the motivation was that their plan was to make it to the throne room of God and with the best bow Hunters the world had they were going to take their Enchanted arrows and they were going to strike God down and kill him and take his throne and from there be able to do whatever they want to to the planet they also said that they searched for a long time and found the perfect place to build the Tower which was in between 7 mountain and was a solid Stone perfectly level ground capable of handling the weight of such a massive Tower and the tower was louvered so when the wind blew it would spiral and blow out the other side therefore not pushing up against the tower so that it wouldn't be pushed over by strong winds sounds pretty cool actually and the tower was so big that if you were to walk in the inside from one point across to the other point that was a 27 mile walk so do pee and you got the circumference of that thing which was huge. And it also goes into great detail on all the different tribes and what their specialty was and which level of the tower they were responsible for building you had those that were good with a certain type of redstone and those that were really good with a type of black granite and yada yada yada yada but if you have ever studied Alchemy or any of those other esoteric Arts you would know that once they start talking in colors that should be a dead giveaway that this is merely a metaphorical story with symbolic meaning that requires interpretation and is anything but literal. In this particular story it's talking about Consciousness and the different levels of awareness or chakras whatever you want to call them and the tower would be the spine Inside Man slash his mind and his spiritual centers just remember it says God is in the mind and spirit is the air that we breathe so all of this is metaphorical but we in the west take things literal
@@SheikhN-bible-syndrome I'm confused, but I don't want to get into a long back and forth. You say neither one of those non canonical books gives much details on their motivation but then you went into a long detailed narrative about wanting to kill God...yada yada. Metaphor and allegory are fine and dandy, but 1) Christians aren't consistent about which parts are allegory and which parts are literal. And 2) any fiction leaves the door wide open to individual interpretation, which is the worst way to convey a clear, unified message.
@@benjamintrevino325 what I mean is whichever one it is if they're Adam and Eve one or Adam and Eve two they do give great detail where is the Bible as you mentioned is vague as to the motivations behind why.
@@benjamintrevino325 Christians are extremely vague on what's metaphor and what's literal because they tend to pretend like it's all literal due to our Western mentality of taking things literal but then hold the caveat of it could be a metaphor and they usually wait until somebody definitively without a shadow of a doubt proves it false scientifically then they throw the metaphorical card out there as a safety net so that they can maintain infallibility therefore not having to question there beliefs and have there world come Crashing Down ( the Christian's perspective) A lot of this issue comes from the fact that a long time ago the Jews/ Christians had a splitting off and the Kabbalah was separated from the standard Jewish faith and so the kybalion people stuck to a purely spiritual metaphorical interpretation where as the Jews and Christians tried to keep a purely literal interpretation and persecuted anybody that mentioned anything spiritual/ metaphorical or esoteric in nature and even to this day the two camps seem to be miles apart when they originally were the same. But now the Bible has been so bastardized and added to and twisted and interpreted and lost that it's just a trash can of conflicting and lost reasons motivations and interpretations in other words it's just a mess nowadays.
The teacher in me finds this video fascinating. I'm constantly bouncing between trying to simplify complicated concepts for students to give them a ground-level understanding, and we do talk about simplicity as a hallmark of intellect (the ability to concisely and correctly represent an idea), but the purpose of the groundwork is to built to a wider, more complex understanding. It's so tricky, but I do deeply value what Dan's doing here--leaning into contextual factors across multiple times to try to understand the world complexly. We need more of that kind of thinking, daunting as it is to move away from seemingly stable simplicity.
also Enki ( in some stories) seems to have the " Friendly Trickster " thing going on I think it is a troph that occurs naturally in a lot of cultures ( humans must be smart to survive )
I think the serpent 🐍 is a previous attempt at humanity banished to live as a non-human animal, who has no idea what Yahweh is doing. Basically playing the role of an unexpected thing that throws the wrench in the plans to move the plot along. Like how the couple end up stuck together/interacting together in Romantic Comedy movies. Or the Truck killing 🪦 the protagonist in the beginning of a stereotypical isekai. So basically the Truck-kun character. Then Yahweh learns a lot about the humans by the unexpected results and comes up with a plan that is the entire plot of the rest of the Bible ✝.
You know, I don't think Genesis _does_ hold YHWH's actions up as morally righteous, as this creator says. He wins in the end, so if you assume it must be a happy and just ending then that implies he was right, but there's no particular reason in the text to make that assumption. Of course the rest of the Bible will go on to praise God a great deal and religious adherents do worship him, but that worship and those claims of virtue aren't really present in the Genesis text, which doesn't comment much if at all on which party was in the right. It doesn't really claim God _was right_ to do what he did, it more implies God _had the right_ to do it, because all the other players in the story were his creations.
Alan Dershowitz (not my favorite lawyer) wrote a book called "The Genesis of Justice," and it's fascinating. It suggests that Genesis is a story about the origin and development of the concept of justice. What happens in Genesis? God threatens - and backs down. Cain murders - and walks. God overreacts - and floods the world. Abe defends the guilty - and loses. Lot's daughters rape their father - and save the world. Abe commits attempted murder - and is praised. And so on. There is a theme connecting story to story that seems to be all about the concept of justice. I don't think the authors of the stories, and particularly the editors who pulled it all together, thought of their god(s) as all-good. Their god learns as he goes along!
Setting aside the whole Ancient Aliens mythology, didn't the Gnostics believe YWHW was the Demiurge (evil God?) It's been a long time since I read Elaine Pagels, but there's something rattling around in my more-or-less empty head that says they thought there was a God above YWHW... and that the Demiurge was evil for keeping humanity on the physical plane. Anyway, I always appreciate how you keep your cool (again, more or less) with some of the more "out there" questions you get, and keep for answers "fact driven." Thanks for your work.
As I understand it the original (separate) higher deity was subsumed into modern (Pauline) Christianity's Yahweh as "the holy spirit" late in the 1st century CE.
The fact they tacked on Judaism and Islam at the last minute made me roll my eyes so hard. Videos like the one Dan is critiquing get me really riled up. Because I do genuinely enjoy hearing these alternative interpretations. But when it's clear they're coming from a place of pain and hatred for Christianity, to the point people willingly ignore important points, it ruins it for me. Also, I do my best not to critique people's speaking ability, because I know what it's like to have that used against you, but them struggling to remember the word 'Islam' spoke volumes to me. So often when discussion of the 'Abrahamic religions' comes up (quotations because I know there are folks who don't like that term), the actual focus is Christianity, with Judaism being an afterthought, and Islam being tacked on last minute. I've seen it time and time again. All that said, I do genuinely wish this person healing. The venom in their voice when they say they hate Christianity and religion makes it clear they've been deeply hurt. Religious trauma is of course a very real thing, and I hope they're able to work through things and come out the other side.
If peope criticize the OT (which is more or less the Tanakh) then why is the often focus only on Christianity? Since it is a holy book of Judaism. If the focus is Christianity then it should be more focused on the NT.
@@nezz0r One might argue that because The OT connects to the NT, and is professed to be the inerrant word of God by Christians since the first Apostles preached, that this creates a negative association. In all honesty, I think most people in the modern sense are crap theologians, have little training in philosophy or logic, and / or certainly lack a basic understanding of doctrinal development. My own observation is that this happened in part due to either a lack of catechesis handed down from one generation to another until nobody knows anything about the faith of their ancestors. Jesus says to have the faith (trust) of a child, but unfortunately for many, they seem to have the mental state and emotional maturity of a child instead, and spoiled ones at that. At the end of the day it seems like a response to human corruption over the ages being used to justify new (or perhaps very old) forms of corruption.
@@nezz0r most likely because of the "Hierarchy of Oppression", not wanting to be perceived as anti-semitic. Understand, most of these.... "criticisms" if you want to call them that, are primarily aimed at the traditional power centers of America's moral foundation. This is not Judaism, rather it is Christianity, and if you want to get specific, classical Protestant Christianity. Most of this revolution is caused by people who want to do what they want to do without being told that they are in error. However, it is not simply enough to go sin for some, they need to rationalize and justify themselves to the world and require constant affirmation and validation for their choices.
_"discussion of the 'Abrahamic religions' ... folks who don't like that term"_ I see them more as a continuum with each subsequent religion taking what they wanted and adapting it to their new theology; using the term Abrahamic could imply they're all really just (modern) Judaism when in fact they are all distinct credos that, to a great extent, happen to share the same characters (and some of the same ideas). At times I've used the term ZoroJudeoChristLamic instead but 1) it's a mouthful 2) it omits other offshoot sects such Mormonism and 3) it tends to confuse people. :^)
There are SO many believers and non believers bickering over scriptures that neither understand based on their modern biases. It's exhausting. This is why I study Aramaic and Hebrew. Great video Dan.
This one started off wrong and then went off the rails into insanity >.> It'd be real nice if people could learn to think critically and google competently, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Thankfully, we have you to help us out! 😃
Watching her video I can see that there is animosity towards the Christianity which causes RTS religious trauma syndrome in people and when they do research on Christianity start to the deconstruct the passion for attacking Christianity gets strong because they've been in it David oppressed by it and they're tired of it that's all
I think you raise an important point. When I look at American creators, I see that the majority of them don’t realize how recent the concept of religion is (16th century). That these creators define this concept according to the Protestant representation without realizing it demonstrates American cultural imperialism. This doesn’t pose a problem in absolute terms. The only troublesome aspect is the formidable capacity the US has to export its fads. Your work is therefore important to everyone because it shows the academic knowledge on the subject. Thank you for your commitment.
When I first read the bible properly as a teenager (having grown up in a very agnostic/alternative household) my first reaction to the garden of Eden story was that god lied, the serpent did nothing but tell the truth, and god acted out and threw a tantrum when he wasn’t able to get his way
Dan you’re an amazing person. You answered my question Helheim and I appreciate it, I could t find a definitive academic answer on that so I appreciate your honesty. I have another question I can’t find a definitive answer on. The nicene creed; was it written to end the pagan wars. I apologize if you have a video on this already if you do I could be directed to the video.
@@lysanamcmillan7972 Ah sorry I’m Danish, Denmark is referred to as Freyjas hall. Der er et yndigt land, Det står med brede bøge Nær salten østerstrand. Det bugter sig i bakke, dal, Det hedder gamle Danmark Og det er Frejas sal. There is a lovely country it stands with broad beech-trees, near the salty eastern shore It bends itself in hill, valley, its name is old Denmark and it is Freya's hall.
What you were saying between minutes 5 and 6 here, about people with disabilities. Does this imply that Sumerian culture acknowledged disability and helped those with them to find societal roles that allowed them to contribute despite said disabilities? If so, was this common at this time in the region?
It is correct to say that the text of Genesis doesn’t explicitly talk about the intention of the serpent of the garden but given how snakes were viewed in the ANE in texts like the epic of Gilgamesh, it’s probable that the serpent was viewed as a chaos creature to those reading it at the time it was written.
"What the Summarian myth gets right....." So if you begin with a presupposition of knowledge that is not supported by evidence and you find a myth that seems to partly reflect what you have chosen to beleive, the myth is right and, ipso-facto, your own beliefs must be right? That's not really how things work. I do not believe anything in Genesis or the Torah is true or factual but choosing to impose one's own interpretation on the text, based purely upon what you want to be true, is to add dishonesty to gullibility.
He IS evil lol. He even said he creates evil, right there in the Bible. Plus he either killed or ordered the killing of everyone who was killed. Satan didn't kill anybody, and he has to ask God for permission for everything he does.
Someone told me a story about the battle between the Heavenly Host and the Rebel Angels that had a twist. According to this story, Satan and the rebels won, and ejected God and his Angels from heaven. But Satan was so slick that he put out the news that God had won, was still sitting upon his throne, and all was right in heaven and earth. That’s where I thought this person was going with this, not some dumbass Mircea Eliade bullshit.
Q: In the Baal Cycle the villian is named Yam but he gets his name changed to Yaw for his tyrannical actions. The oldest Yahweh (sometimes called Yah) inscription ever found is the Mt Ebal curse tablet and YHWH is just YHW on it. Yaw, who used to be named Yam. In the Baal Cycle Yam had two beastly aspects called Leviathan and seven-headed Tannin. Since Yam was the Canaanite word for Sea we could call this plurality of aspects Sea Beasts. Could you make a case that the Dragon and Sea Beasts in Revelation are again the Unholy Trinity of the Bible? Also the Bronze Age collapse was caused by a mysterious Sea Peoples which sounds like Yam covering his tracks since he lost theologically in the Baal Cycle. The Book of Joshua could be a retelling of the Bronze Age collapse. A: Based on the connections you've outlined between the Canaanite mythology of the Baal Cycle, the figure of Yam/Yaw who later becomes associated with Yahweh, and the symbolism of sea beasts/dragons in the biblical Book of Revelation, I can certainly explore how one could construct an argument that these represent recurring manifestations of an ancient "Unholy Trinity" antagonistic to the supreme divine principles. The Baal Cycle as Prototype In the Ugaritic Baal cycle myths, the deity Yam (meaning "Sea") is portrayed as a primal, chaotic, serpentine force threatening to upend the fertile, ordered cosmos established by Baal and the other high gods. Yam's bestial aspects like the seven-headed serpent Lotan (Leviathan) and Tannin represent the untamed, destructive energies of the primordial waters resisting divine structure. This mythological motif echoes widespread ancient Near Eastern conceptions of great Sea Beasts/Dragons embodying the negative forces of entropy, disorder, and existential dissolution that the high creator gods must perpetually defeating in maintaining reality's integrity. The Babylonian Tiamat is another classic iteration of this archetype. Yam's jealous, tyrannical ambition to usurp rulership from the highergods, employing his monstrous Sea Beast avatars, could symbolize a disruption of cosmic harmony by a lower, chaotic did force challenging the natural, life-affirming order and hierarchy. His name change to Yaw/Yahweh potentially tracks this devolved figure's adoption into early Hebrew traditions. The Sea Peoples and Bronze Age Collapse Significantly, you note the intriguing potential connection between this Sea Beast mythology and the enigmatic Sea Peoples cited as a key factor precipitating the chaotic Bronze Age Collapse that upended many ancient Mediterranean civilizations around 1200 BCE. Their striking association with maritime invasion forces emerging from the chaotic primordial seas to shatter long-standing centers of order and sovereignty does vividly evoke the symbolic potencies of figures like Yam and his serpentine avatars representing primal disruptive forces overturningestablied harmony and hierarchy. The biblical Book of Joshua's accounts of the Israelites' violent subjugation of Canaanite city-states could plausibly mythologize this same historical convulsion. Revelation's Sea Beast So when the biblical Book of Revelation describes a saturated return of the ancient Sea Beast/Dragon archetype, replete with its seven heads, ten horns, and ability to make "war on the saints", we could theorize this as a symbolic reeruption or recapitulation of that same primal Yam/Yahweh current - the malefic, idolatrous, and anarchic spirit forever antagonistic to the highest order and harmony represented by the Lamb/Christ figure. Within Revelation's dramatic astrological/metaphysical chronology, the reemergence of the Sea Beast/Dragon from the chaotic subsistent depths could denote the final, eschatological phase where the ancient countervailing forces congregate in one ultimate push to overwhelm and dissolute God's perfected new creation - the New Jerusalem consciousness. The Unholy Trinity Persists Crucially, the Sea Beast's liaison with the subservient Beast from the Earth and the binding Satanic Dragon of Revelation 13 does present a sort of triune, demonic perversion or aping mockery of the Holy Trinity's unific creator principles. Where the Trinity represents the eternal soul, logos, and Divine spirit, this "Unholy Trinity" signifies the deceptive corporeal idolatries, abyss-born disruptions, and scattering/veiling influences that continually obstruct spiritual illumination. Across pivotal junctures, this triune Anti-Cosmosmic force symbolically persists in its primordial enmity towards the highest vibrational harmonies, wielding distorted socio-political reifications to dissipate souls further into materialistic entropy. Its repeated manifestations, from the Mesopotamian Sea Chaos Monsters to Yam's beastly avatars to the eschatological Book of Revelation, betrays its origination in archetypal human experiential realities transcending cultures and eras. Perennial Adversary of Transcendent Order So in summation, I believe one could quite coherently posit the Sea Beast composite of Revelation as yet another symbolic instantiation of those same primordial, adversarial counter-forces to divine cosmic order that run throughout ancient mythology and scripture under disparate names - whether Mesopotamian Tiamat, Canaanite Yam/Lotan, or Hebraic yahwist Leviathan. Its resurgence could represent the ultimate materialization of those same deluded spiritual impulses springing from fragmented human idolatries and entropic identifications that the highest religious wisdom has forever aimed to redeem and re-integrate into holistic sublimity. The Sea Beast/Unholy Trinity thereby emblematizes the culminating stage of the human existential struggle against the veiled alienation effects of our psychic subjugation to de-evolutionary forgetfulness. Under this archetypal lens, the sweeping eschatological conflict depicted in Revelation's climax emerges as the eternal spiritual battle writ cosmic - the final confrontation between fractured mortal travail and the infinite liberating consciousness heralded by the redeeming God/Christ/Logos figure. Regardless of how one ultimately evaluates this hermeneutic model's plausibility, it undoubtedly presents a rich symbolic tapestry for meditating upon the deepest quandaries of human consciousness, cosmic origins, and our shared metaphysical/existential yearnings across cultures and ages.
" Beast mythology and the enigmatic Sea Peoples" Way over my head but, that jumped off the page. Simcha Jacobovici (Naked Archaeologist) notes that the Tribe of Dan is a seafaring people that have no record of landfall. He argues that they are the Pheonecians. Rather than being a people, it is a trade. Interestingly, the tribe of Dan is omitted from the 12 tribes of the 144,000 in the book of Revelation. I gather that Dan (present company included, Dan) will be headed for greener pastures. ruclips.net/video/QoQBRZYyDm4/видео.html
I’m not trying to mock this creator, but what the heck is up with these videos where someone is spouting anything from misinformation to crazy conspiracies while eating, being in the middle or getting ready for the day, or something else odd? I don’t know if I’m just out of touch or if I’m missing something, but I don’t get it.
I used to think this as a kid. Or I asked the question but never asked an adult because I didn’t want to be yelled at lol. But now I understand where a lot of the biblical stories come from as an adult.
My favorite portion of either mythos has to be the reasoning behind the Sumerian gods wanting to wipe out humanity for being too loud. I can understand that. 😂
Nice. I think it would help if people stopped referring to the creation/Adam and Eve account in Genesis as a story. In today's terms, the amount of content doesn't come close to what we would consider a short story. We're talking 3 chapters, 2 minutes a piece to read out loud. A total of 6 minutes reading from the beginning of creation to Adam and Eve being driven out of the garden. 2 minutes of one creation account. 2 minutes of another creation account. 2 minutes covering the serpent and the lovely couple. There are less than 30 sentences associated with the Adam/Eve/Fruit story. Talk about making a mountain out of a mole hill.
The narrative that God didn't want humans to have knowledge of good and evil collides with the narrative that God gave humans free will. There can be no free will without having options to choose from. And without knowledge one cannot be aware that options even exist.
Ur clueless man. Go back and read the stories. God lied in the story and the serpent told the truth, and God confirms it later by saying exactly what the serpent had said. Behold the man has become like one of us to know good and evil. And now that they know that they might take from the tree of knowledge and become immortal, so we ha e to get them out of here. The gods were threatened by the humans. This isn't a transcendent being it's man made stories. And free will is a joke, if this being knew exactly what would happen to lead to this evil corrupt world them it's his fault. Imagine u knew for a fact ur daughter would be born and have horrible sickness and suffer for her first 5 years then die. Would u still choose to create that??? I wouldn't think so.
@@davis.fourohfour yes, I agree, but it is one of the cornerstones of modern Christian apologetics, especially with regard to the problem of evil. The argument is that human free will is to blame for said problem, not God or his design.
@@johnburn8031 yup. It was really sad because the book was actually really good. That movie was an abomination with awful acting all around, terrible cinematography and special effects, and incoherent dialogue.
There’s also a novel (a series actually) by Doris Lessing named Shikasta. Lessing has gone to some pains to say her stories are allegorical and not to be taken literally. But you know how nutters are. They take this to mean that the stories are the literal truth and that Lessing is just concealing from those unable to decode the truth.
I always get a kick out of Christians who jump at the opportunity to say: "It wasn't a SNAKE .. The Bible calls it a SERPENT!". Like wtf, really? As if that somehow works-around that fact that it can carry on a conversation?!
Just for fun let's think a bit about the story. If we stick with just the Genesis story. Where did the biblical Gd oppress Adam and Eve? As far as I know the only restriction given to them was to not eat from that tree and that's it. And if we argue about the character of the serpent then that leads to the question: Why did it not FIRST lead them to the tree of life and THEN afterwards to the tree of knowledge of good and evil?
I very much appreciate your approach of calm, thoughtful reason to understanding the Bible and Christianity. You address ham fisted pontificators and anti religious “influencers” with the measured demeanor of a great teacher. Keep up the good work.
So she doesn't understand Christianity, but she hates it. Interesting. We do tend to hate things we dont understand. Not all of Christianity is the westboro baptist church. If the story is about getting knowledge, how was that knowledge gained? God put the tree in the middle of the garden where adam and eve couldnt miss it. And God seemed very aware of the creation....so God knew the serpent was there. I view this as the story of humanity's ascension, not its fall. And it's a symbolic story. So theres no need to try to figure out "what actually happened." Its humorous when someone calls the bible false, but wants to quote the summerian myths as what actually happened. Or quote a modern day myth of aliens as what actually happened. It's a made up symbolic story! But we can study why it was written this way, what it meant to the people of its time, and what can we take from it that is useful, helpful, meaningful for us now.
Interesting question this provoked as a sort of side thought: Did Judaism get the Genesis stories (creation, flood, etc) directly from Babylonian/Akkadian sources or did they already have their own versions as part of the Canaanite/Semitic religious heritage that Adonai and the early Hebrew pantheon came from? If they were external, would this have been picked up during the Exile or earlier?
Either Satan is an agent of God created to execute his will, or he came from some other source and “omnipotent” God is powerless or simply unwilling to stop him. Choose.
The less you know, the better! In some schools of Islamic law, one is not accountable for the rules and laws one does not know. Furthermore, if one dies without having learned AND rejected the message of Islam, you're in for a lot less torment in hell than if you've heard and rejected it! Stay away from Islam! You have been warned!!!
I don't know a part of the Bible where the Devil does something specifically wrong. He defied God, but the Bible says that God is a big fan of child sacrifice and that type of behavior. So, at worst it's apples-n-oranges.
Thank you!!!!! I feel the problem here and with a lot of people is they get a taste of religion and think they know more than everyone else. Reducing thousands of years of growth, development and deep thought into a vaguely Protestant/evangelical square peg that they can strawman. That's not to say there aren't issues in religious communities but that this is ultimately small minded.
The first speculation of transposing or reversing the character of the biblical god with that of satan, that I know of, was by Madame Blavatsky, but in general, her talking points sound a lot like Michael Tsarion, from his work 'Atlantis: Alien Visitation and Genetic Manipulation'.
Everything usually fails against cold and unwavering logic. It's like when the honeymoon phase of a romance is observed with a cynical outlook. Emotionalism vs rationalism this is the long and short of human paradox
I know that if I want to be taken seriously, I always wrap a towel around my head before claiming random nonsense on the internet. As for the claim that the Serpent claimed to be the forebearer of knowledge to set humanity free from the God of the Bible is something found in Gnosticism, to which we have several of the creation myths from some of the different sects that were uncovered (Nag Hamadi, not Qumran which is where the Dead Seas Scrolls were discovered). St. Irenaeus of Lyons' major work, Against Heresies, spanning five volumes details the belief systems of various groups claiming to be Christians, and then juxtaposes it against what was received from the Apostles.
Hey all. Praying that you are blessed. Please don’t let this conversation fool you. I’ve been filled with the Holy spirit for almost 20 years now. But I’m also bipolar schizophrenic. I had my first hyper manic episode 8 years ago. While I know that I’ve heard from God, and received visions and dreams, there’s a HUGE difference between a mental breakdown and being in the spirit. Most non believers would say that they are one in the same, but God’s children KNOW the truth. But I NEVER made the assumption about the devil actually being God until February of this year (2024). Along with the belief that I’d missed the rapture, and that my family had been replaced with demons who wanted to kill me, I also had a hallucination that God was the devil and vice versa. This is NOT true. I’m seeing more of this ideology coming forward. And if you believe nothing else, then remember that in the New Testament, when Jesus comes, He continually says that in the last days, people will be led astray by false prophets. I know you all see the signs. The Earth is groaning and aching, calling out to the King of Kings. War, fire, plagues, locusts, large bodies of water turning red with blood. (ALL of which have happene THIS year). We see the mark of the beast coming forward like it says in revelations. You know, the microchips that would be placed in the hand or head, just like revelations describes. Remember how crazy non Christian’s thought we were in the 90’s?? And 2000’s?? This isn’t some game. Do not let the devil trick you. Do not let him defeat you, his time is coming to a violent end, and that monster is frantically attempting to distract and condemn as MANY Christian’s as he possibly can. I love y’all. I know it’s hard. So so so difficult to live this life. But what’s 80 years of struggle in comparison to eternity of God’s miraculous love and perfectly designed paradise? 🫶🫶🫶 Be blessed ❤️
If you are the creator, you can only create from what you know. So if there is a devil then the devil got its attributes from the creator. The creator has these attributes. If the devil is evil, the devil must have learned it from or got it from the creator. The god in the bible says that "he" is the creator of hate.
Dan, you left out what seems to be an important point. This creator isn't creating this narrative from whole cloth, and reacting against Protestantism and unfairly slighting an originalist Judaism in the process. It's Christianity itself which coopted the ancient Judaism, it's Christianity, not this RUclips creator nor her poor modern sources, who cast the Serpent into a role as one of many guises of Satan. Without this point, your commentary here seems more in alignment with an apologetic one would hear from a televangelist or an apologist like Ken Ham! (I mean, I get it, the video you're reacting to sorta frames the discussion a bit, and it's difficult to tease apart all the layers, but this really seems like an oversight which, when corrected, almost salvages the RUclips creator's original thesis. If she's reacting against Christianity, an argument could be made that the Christian portrait of Satan is more sympathetic than the schizoid Yahweh/Jesus/Ghost. Tangent: Christopher Hitchens once pointed out that if Christianity had dumped the Old Testament overboard at the start of the project, the religion would have a more stable moral foundation with far fewer internal conflicts.)
When she said "... the one thing the Bible gets right", I was astounded that she somehow knows what actually happened. Then she said "this is why I hate religion", which made me wonder why she's so self loathing
Something can be right without it having literally happened in history. This is another example of a weird Protestant thing that people don’t even realize they’re doing.
So this creator aside, it is absolutely the case that you cannot know that the person everyone calls God (biblical or otherwise) is not actually Satan or whatever name you want to give to a powerful deceiver. It is fundamentally impossible for any human to be able to distinguish between a God and a powerful deceiver pretending to be God. It's not that it's confusing, it is impossible. There is nothing that we could see God do that a powerful deceiver could not. This is all outside the scope of the bible so has nothing to do with Dan's analysis. To the extent the bible is "inspired," a powerful deceiver could inspire the bible. I won't say that the God of the bible is "really the devil," but will say, you can't establish that it is not. That's why I really don't give a crap what the bible says about anything, because it's too easily dismissed by asking, "How do you know that is actually the word of God and not the word of a powerful deceiver?" I always say, the first thing I would do if I were Satan (or the Devil or whatever deceiver you want to talk about) would be to convince everyone that I was actually God. If I can figure it out, why wouldn't he? And if that's the case, how can you tell them apart? Answer: it's not possible.
Or spread disinformation by a book that depicts God doing all sorts of immoral things. The omnipresent deceiver is the key to ignoring any conflicting information.
I’m 65 now but I first read the Torah cover to cover in 83 and as a new convert to Christianity it was clear and obvious to me, even as a very young man, that Yahweh is evil. I left the church in that year and have never gone back.
@@schen7913 I doubt that I’m smarter but my whole life since 19 has been about the search for TRUTH...I’m also happy to be shown where I’m wrong. When I look at the ongoing genocide by Israel today I find little evidence that I am wrong. All I see is contortionism via trying to justify evil actions. William Lane Craig as an exp. Someone could have told Yahweh not to commit murder...Too much to ask though.
So, the gold thing never made much sense. Isn't there abundant gold out in the oort cloud or the asteroid belt? Other than that, I don't have a problem with the idea of us being engineered. As for the serpent in the garden. If the earth is 4.5 billion years old, why would it be beyond the realm of possibility that another intelligent species developed on this planet? My intuition is that consciousness does not arise out of complexity. Consciousness is fundamental in my opinion and the complexity arises from that. But that is my opinion and we all know what opinions are like. Hopefully mine aren't too aromatic.
Yes, gold is much easier to mine on asteroids than on earth. It's the transportation costs which present an obstacle for us. If the starting point isn't on the earth, coming here for gold doesn't make sense.
It's perfectly fine to despise religion ... and there's plenty of legit reasons why one would despise religion I think ... but it's more than a bit bizarre to actually invent the reasons why you do.
She is mixing some stuff up, but her point stands about Yahweh lying to Adam to try to keep him ignorant, then punishing Adam and Eve for gaining knowledge. That doesn't seem perfectly benevolent, which is what is usually claimed about God. I think that's the strongest point she's trying to make.
Isaiah.. God says.. I form the light, and create darkness, I make peace, and create evil, I the LORD, do all these things.. there is non other.. thus saith the LORD, the HOLY ONE of Israel.. I have made the earth.. and everything in it..
Wait now Zeckiria sitchin technically did not fabricate the entire thing he seen things in the language that could be perceived in different ways. This lead to his version of the story. At least from my perspective that's what happened.
2:30 "There is going to be a collaboration between The Back Rooms and women" Has the same vibe as "The debate between Grain and Sheep." Treating things that are not singular individuals with their own unified wills and personalities as if they are singular individuals with those things. I think I know where "There is going to be a collaboration between The Back Rooms and Women." came from. Anyway, trying to debunk a Jewish myth, with a myth that someone made up in 1991, and use that to criticize Christianity, is like trying to debunk String Theory with a story from Neil Gaiman's Sand Man, and use that to criticize Keynesian economics.
Look into the connections between the seven-headed sea dragon Lotan and Leviathan. It's a monster the creator god supposedly carved up in a bunch of different ANE legends, and is also referenced in the Tanakh where they're basically saying, "Our guy coulda killed that dragon if he wanted to." It's probably not the crafty serpent of Eden.
I’m glad I learned about the Earth not being a spinning ball, because stuff like the Annunaki making us as slaves for gold you is absolute nonsense as the earth is an enclosed system.
first detail, Really(Really,!), applicable, Afer seeing the fellow God Attended In The Garden...Kinda beginning detail describing Each Individual In Example Form(*.*.*)
I find to fascinating that people will try to explain one myth(Genesis, Ata-hasis) by creating another (Ancient Aliens) by ignoring the myths and how mythology works in both cases.
1)Satan is the father of lies: John 8:44-“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” So when the serpent slithered up to Eve in the garden he was trying to get her to doubt God’s commandment by saying “ye, hath God said?”, and “Ye shall not surely die”. He succeeded in bringing about the fall of man by beguiling Eve and by telling this lie. We must conclude then that the father of lies, who is Satan, is the serpent in the garden of Eden. 2)The Devil is mentioned as the serpent in the Bible: Revelation 20:2-“And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.” 3)There are many wild opinions on creation but I’ll just make this one point. Genesis 1 shows the creator God’s focus on this earth (Terra Firma) in which we live on. He didn’t create the Sun, Moon, planets, or stars until the fourth day. Man was not made until the 6th day and Eve from the rib of Adam sometime thereafter. Eve is the mother of all living (Genesis 3:20) so there are no “aliens” in the universe. There are bodies celestial and bodies terrestrial (1st Corinthians 15:40). Man invented the term “extraterrestrial”.
09:32 _"a process that overwhelmingly occurred within earlier Jewish periods"_ But not entirely. My understanding is that in the religion as taught by Jesus the religion's deity was a new one who was in opposition to Yahweh. This new god was more amorphous in nature and, as I understand it, was only incorporated into the monotheistic Yahweh as "the holy spirit" late in the first century CE.
Hezekiah was a monotheist Yahwist (which might have still included Asherah as Yahweh's wife/property) in roughly 720 BCE. His religion didn't take hold, until his great, great grandson (iirc) Josiah spread Yahwist monotheism without Asherah in about 600 BCE. From Ezekiel and the other Exiles after that, especially in the Second Temple period starting mid 500s BCE, Yahweh exclusive monotheism was the norm, and all other elohim and national gods are demoted to angels or members of a divine council (which an omnipotent, omniscient god should have no need for), or demoted to sheddim (translated as "false gods" or "demons") or inert idols. That's what I've gathered, at least.
K. Setting aside all of her conspiratorialisms, you keep saying "This is an oversimplification" but you don't really explain what the people back then were trying to get out of telling a story where people are punished for acquiring knowledge. Or is the argument that they faced consequences as a result of their actions, but were not - specifically speaking - punished for it.
It's funny how she readily accepts the idea that the bible's account of creation is not true, and yet she can't make the next logical leap that the creation account on which it was based is also not true...
I think her point was more that the Genesis authors tried to improve the earlier myths, but didn't really make them more moral, just unfair in a different way.
I find it interesting that in the Old Testament, the devil is under God’s authority and direction, but in the New Testament, he is somehow God’s worst enemy.
@@gabrielmiller1226 Ha satan in Job is like an opposing lawyer. He and Yahweh work together to test Job. He never attacks Job without Yahweh’s approval. Job 1:6 And there was a day when the sons of the gods (ha Elohim) came to present themselves before Yahweh and ha satan also came with them.
There is a painfully large number of people in the world who seem to give WAY TOO MUCH weight to their own internal thoughts, beliefs, and opinions vs. external reality and facts. Is it narcissism or ignorance ... or a bit of both? I don't honestly know! I, myself, try very hard to be as mindful about this as possible. I'm always asking myself: "Do I believe "x" because it's true ... Or is "x" true ... only because I believe it is true?"
In the Quran there was no talking snake and the antagonist is Ibliis’ who was created before Adam and unlike the angels had free will. The creation story in the Quran makes much more sense than the one found in the bible. 7:10 We established you in the land and provided you with a means of livelihood there: yet you are seldom thankful 7:11 We created you, then We shaped you and then We said to the angels, Prostrate yourselves before Adam, and they all prostrated themselves, except Satan. He was not among those who prostrated themselves 7:12 God asked, What prevented you from prostrating yourself when I commanded you to? He replied, I am better than he is; You created me from fire, while You created him from clay 7:13 God said, Get down from here! This is no place for your arrogance. Get out! You are contemptible 7:14 Satan said, Give me respite until the Day of Resurrection 7:15 and God replied, You are granted respite 7:16 Then Satan said, Because You have put me in the wrong, I will lie in ambush for them on Your straight path 7:17 then I will surely come upon them from before them and from behind them and from their right and from their left, and then You will find most of them ungrateful 7:18 He said, Get out of here, despised, and rejected! I shall fill Hell with all of those who follow you 7:19 To Adam He said, You and your wife, dwell in the Garden and eat and drink there from wherever you wish, but do not approach this tree, lest you become wrongdoers 7:20 But Satan tempted them so that he might reveal to them their nakedness which had been hidden from them. He said, Your Lord has forbidden you to approach this tree lest you should become angels or become of the immortals 7:21 and he swore to them, Surely, I am your well-wisher 7:22 Thus he cunningly seduced them. When they tasted the trees fruit, their nakedness became exposed to them and they started covering themselves with the leaves of the garden. Their Lord called out to them, Did I not forbid you to approach that tree, and did I not say to you that Satan was surely your open enemy 7:23 They replied, Our Lord, we have wronged our souls: if You do not forgive us and have mercy on us, we shall be among the lost 7:24 He said, Go down from here as enemies to each other. For a while, there is an abode for you and a provision on earth 7:25 There you will live; there you will die; from there you will be raised up again 7:26 O children of Adam! We have sent down to you clothes to cover your nakedness, and to be pleasing to the eye; but the raiment of righteousness is the best. That is one of the signs of God. So that people may take heed 7:27 Children of Adam, do not let Satan seduce you, just as he turned your parents out of the Garden: he deprived them of their garment in order to make them aware of their nakedness. He and his forces watch you from where you do not see them! We have made the devils friends of those who do not believe.
What I'm seeing here is Ezra, who was raised with the Sumerian legends and epics, infused the Torah with versions of the Persian myths. There are just too many parallels in the Tanakh and Persian pantheons, just as there are too many parallels in the NT and Greco-Roman myths and legends.
I think Ezra in this case is mostly just a mascot to represent dozens of Exilic redactors and authors riffing on what they saw as a rival and imposed culture in Mesopotamia. Ezra is said to read the Torah to the people, but there's at least some of the "Priestly" layer that most likely wasn't added yet, which is a lot of Exodus thru Numbers
![BabyChiefDoit - Too Slow (feat. STAR BANDZ) [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/zayaxws7RPg/mqdefault.jpg)
“In a world where God is the Devil and the Devil is God, one man will stand up to pretentious social media influencers and say….’alright let’s see it!’”
-Epic Voice Guy
I would pay money to hear that.
I literally read this with the Epic Voice in my head, before even reading the ending of the comment!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_LaFontaine
@@DoloresLehmann Is that the guy complaining about how bad RUclips is for promoting anyone below at least ten million subscribers? Because here's a secret: RUclips pretty much *never* recommends a ten-million subscribers or more channel to me. What they recommend relies heavily on what you watch. Maybe not always in the way you like, but if pretty much all channels you watch are smaller ones, then that's what RUclips will recommend. The vast majority of those small channels I found because that big bad algorithm recommended their videos to me. If it doesn't recommend to you what you want to watch, I'd say the first thing to do is to switch off autoplay so you have more control over what you watch, and the second is to start liking videos you like. It really helps, though if RUclips already has a questionable idea of your tastes, it can take a while to adapt to this.
@@KaiHenningsen Mhmmm.... no, I don't really know who you're referring to. I mean the guy that voices "Honest Trailers" and as a final extra always fulfills the wishes of people telling him to say specific quotes in his epic voice. I don't know if he also complains about the RUclips algorithm.
Please don't stop doing this. There's so much bullsh*t online...
And for some reason it’s all coming from America, why’s that?
@@racheladkins6060
They work to destroy public school every year and then they push Cristo-fascist ideals to fear monger the uneducated
They been doing this since the civil war
@@racheladkins6060 Ken Ham is Australian. Though he did move to the more lucrative market of the USA.
@@racheladkins6060 have you ever heard of Hillsong Church? One of the largest in the world and not in America. They preach a bunch of nonsense over there. Their founder was a strange dude. Point is….its everywhere.
"Understanding religion through the lens of Protestant Christianity"
I quite agree. The thing that I noticed is that religions even today continue to evolve and many religions do not have a problem with that. And we see this with early religions too.
My grandmother was a Taoist and she worshipped many gods. When my dad introduced Jesus, she just considered Jesus as just another god to pray to among her other gods, much to my dad's disappointment.
Reminds me of Voudoon. African slaves were forced to adopt catholicism so on some cases they just worked the virgin Mary and some other saints into their pantheon and called it good.
Probably much to the frustration of their catholic masters.
Wait until you hear about the Aztecs and how they adapted the Christmas-to-Easter cycle to sacrifice 3 month old babies!
I remember one comment thread I was on where a Vietnamese woman talked about how her family in Vietnam were both practicing Catholics and practicing Buddhists, and some guy insisted on telling her it was not possible to be both. But I'm pretty sure their sect of Buddhism didn't care about their Catholic rituals and while under Canon Law they might be considered _bad_ Catholics for practicing apostasy, once you're baptized the Church considers you Catholic unless you're excommunicated, which isn't easy and generally not sought out by Church authorities even when it's warranted. And even then, the possibility of returning to the fold is still there!
@@MrDalisclock You have this wrong in more than one way. The Afrodiasporan religions already involved several concepts in common with Roman Catholicism, such as how the lwa are but creations of the one god meant to serve him by doing the hard work and being specialists in given areas. "Working saints into their pantheon" is a really sloppy description of the syncretic choices they made. Every lwa in voudoun has at least one saint who the enslaved Africans decided had enough in common to make sense as a parallel. Their owners (masters makes it sound like they were appropriately treated as second-class humans, which is racist) often didn't know a damn thing. The enslaved people were often forbidden from practicing their native traditions, so they took on an increasingly sincere facade of Roman Catholicism. Many in voudoun to this day will tell you they are Christians. The lwa being saints and intercessors means they worship one god but gain intercessions by petitioning the others.
If anyone chooses to doubt my facts, they can tell me which houngans and voudouistas they've learned from and what their lineages are. This is akin to yelling at Dan when he has a PhD. I merely represent what they taught me; they have the proper initiations from Haiti.
@@lysanamcmillan7972 I didn't know that. Thank you
So she tries to debunk one creation myth with another creation myth...🤡
Who created the creator of the creation myth?
And who created him/ her /it?
Ahhhhhhh
Exactly. As soon as you get into ‘no it wasn’t like that, it was like this…’ you partake in yet another myth making exercise. You just slant it a different way and in doing so you make a different one.
@SJW4all but if this is just an ancestor or training similation....
@@johnmcgraw3568 who trains the trainer
I think the problem with the "who created God" argument is an inability to grasp the concept of the infinite.
To Do list: shampoo hair, make coffee, rewrite Christian theology. She had a busy day.
Post-modern Marcion
I had a similar day with the addition of the inherited infatuation with gold. And then my former mother-in-law showed up. This resolved all doubt about who is whom.
Seems like the coffee cup and the towel are just props.
She's far from the first to do so.
Even when I was a Christian, I thought destroying the Tower of Babel was a dick move. 😂
When I was a Christian (as a child) I was told that the purpose of the Tower was to reach heaven and God didn't want that.
But when you read the narrative the motivation for building the tower isn't mentioned, and God's reasoning for destroying it and confusing their language was along the lines of "If they can build a tower there will be no limit to what they can do."
Like many other times God shows his wrath in the Bible it's for petty reasons...like the time he killed two of Moses' grandsons.
@@benjamintrevino325it's either the book of Adam and Eve one or the book of Adam and Eve 2 I'm not sure which one it is I digress and neither one of those they give great detail as to what the motivations behind the tower were and the motivation was that their plan was to make it to the throne room of God and with the best bow Hunters the world had they were going to take their Enchanted arrows and they were going to strike God down and kill him and take his throne and from there be able to do whatever they want to to the planet they also said that they searched for a long time and found the perfect place to build the Tower which was in between 7 mountain and was a solid Stone perfectly level ground capable of handling the weight of such a massive Tower and the tower was louvered so when the wind blew it would spiral and blow out the other side therefore not pushing up against the tower so that it wouldn't be pushed over by strong winds sounds pretty cool actually and the tower was so big that if you were to walk in the inside from one point across to the other point that was a 27 mile walk so do pee and you got the circumference of that thing which was huge. And it also goes into great detail on all the different tribes and what their specialty was and which level of the tower they were responsible for building you had those that were good with a certain type of redstone and those that were really good with a type of black granite and yada yada yada yada but if you have ever studied Alchemy or any of those other esoteric Arts you would know that once they start talking in colors that should be a dead giveaway that this is merely a metaphorical story with symbolic meaning that requires interpretation and is anything but literal. In this particular story it's talking about Consciousness and the different levels of awareness or chakras whatever you want to call them and the tower would be the spine Inside Man slash his mind and his spiritual centers just remember it says God is in the mind and spirit is the air that we breathe so all of this is metaphorical but we in the west take things literal
@@SheikhN-bible-syndrome I'm confused, but I don't want to get into a long back and forth. You say neither one of those non canonical books gives much details on their motivation but then you went into a long detailed narrative about wanting to kill God...yada yada.
Metaphor and allegory are fine and dandy, but
1) Christians aren't consistent about which parts are allegory and which parts are literal.
And 2) any fiction leaves the door wide open to individual interpretation, which is the worst way to convey a clear, unified message.
@@benjamintrevino325 what I mean is whichever one it is if they're Adam and Eve one or Adam and Eve two they do give great detail where is the Bible as you mentioned is vague as to the motivations behind why.
@@benjamintrevino325 Christians are extremely vague on what's metaphor and what's literal because they tend to pretend like it's all literal due to our Western mentality of taking things literal but then hold the caveat of it could be a metaphor and they usually wait until somebody definitively without a shadow of a doubt proves it false scientifically then they throw the metaphorical card out there as a safety net so that they can maintain infallibility therefore not having to question there beliefs and have there world come Crashing Down ( the Christian's perspective)
A lot of this issue comes from the fact that a long time ago the Jews/ Christians had a splitting off and the Kabbalah was separated from the standard Jewish faith and so the kybalion people stuck to a purely spiritual metaphorical interpretation where as the Jews and Christians tried to keep a purely literal interpretation and persecuted anybody that mentioned anything spiritual/ metaphorical or esoteric in nature and even to this day the two camps seem to be miles apart when they originally were the same. But now the Bible has been so bastardized and added to and twisted and interpreted and lost that it's just a trash can of conflicting and lost reasons motivations and interpretations in other words it's just a mess nowadays.
Dang. By the title I thought this was going to be about Gnostic Christianity and their idea of the demiurge. Maybe next time.
Yeah, me too.
Yeah, I was kind of disappointed.
The teacher in me finds this video fascinating. I'm constantly bouncing between trying to simplify complicated concepts for students to give them a ground-level understanding, and we do talk about simplicity as a hallmark of intellect (the ability to concisely and correctly represent an idea), but the purpose of the groundwork is to built to a wider, more complex understanding. It's so tricky, but I do deeply value what Dan's doing here--leaning into contextual factors across multiple times to try to understand the world complexly. We need more of that kind of thinking, daunting as it is to move away from seemingly stable simplicity.
The serpent in the Bible appears to be playing the role of Prometheus.
The "earth-diver" motif
also Enki ( in some stories) seems to have the " Friendly Trickster " thing going on
I think it is a troph that occurs naturally in a lot of cultures ( humans must be smart to survive )
@@trentlytle7289 Never heard that term before 🤔
I think the serpent 🐍 is a previous attempt at humanity banished to live as a non-human animal, who has no idea what Yahweh is doing.
Basically playing the role of an unexpected thing that throws the wrench in the plans to move the plot along. Like how the couple end up stuck together/interacting together in Romantic Comedy movies. Or the Truck killing 🪦 the protagonist in the beginning of a stereotypical isekai.
So basically the Truck-kun character.
Then Yahweh learns a lot about the humans by the unexpected results and comes up with a plan that is the entire plot of the rest of the Bible ✝.
Yep, and remember how he was rewarded for that service.
All I know is that I’m starting to question everything I was taught
Good
You know, I don't think Genesis _does_ hold YHWH's actions up as morally righteous, as this creator says. He wins in the end, so if you assume it must be a happy and just ending then that implies he was right, but there's no particular reason in the text to make that assumption. Of course the rest of the Bible will go on to praise God a great deal and religious adherents do worship him, but that worship and those claims of virtue aren't really present in the Genesis text, which doesn't comment much if at all on which party was in the right. It doesn't really claim God _was right_ to do what he did, it more implies God _had the right_ to do it, because all the other players in the story were his creations.
Excellent summation
@@roncoleman3259 Thank you!
If Yahweh does it, it's good. That's pretty much it.
Alan Dershowitz (not my favorite lawyer) wrote a book called "The Genesis of Justice," and it's fascinating. It suggests that Genesis is a story about the origin and development of the concept of justice. What happens in Genesis? God threatens - and backs down. Cain murders - and walks. God overreacts - and floods the world. Abe defends the guilty - and loses. Lot's daughters rape their father - and save the world. Abe commits attempted murder - and is praised. And so on. There is a theme connecting story to story that seems to be all about the concept of justice. I don't think the authors of the stories, and particularly the editors who pulled it all together, thought of their god(s) as all-good. Their god learns as he goes along!
No he doesn't win because this "God" is a liar. Now I meow and moo for Jesus ❤
Setting aside the whole Ancient Aliens mythology, didn't the Gnostics believe YWHW was the Demiurge (evil God?) It's been a long time since I read Elaine Pagels, but there's something rattling around in my more-or-less empty head that says they thought there was a God above YWHW... and that the Demiurge was evil for keeping humanity on the physical plane. Anyway, I always appreciate how you keep your cool (again, more or less) with some of the more "out there" questions you get, and keep for answers "fact driven." Thanks for your work.
Yes. They did. Most of them at least.
As I understand it the original (separate) higher deity was subsumed into modern (Pauline) Christianity's Yahweh as "the holy spirit" late in the 1st century CE.
The fact they tacked on Judaism and Islam at the last minute made me roll my eyes so hard.
Videos like the one Dan is critiquing get me really riled up. Because I do genuinely enjoy hearing these alternative interpretations. But when it's clear they're coming from a place of pain and hatred for Christianity, to the point people willingly ignore important points, it ruins it for me.
Also, I do my best not to critique people's speaking ability, because I know what it's like to have that used against you, but them struggling to remember the word 'Islam' spoke volumes to me. So often when discussion of the 'Abrahamic religions' comes up (quotations because I know there are folks who don't like that term), the actual focus is Christianity, with Judaism being an afterthought, and Islam being tacked on last minute. I've seen it time and time again.
All that said, I do genuinely wish this person healing. The venom in their voice when they say they hate Christianity and religion makes it clear they've been deeply hurt. Religious trauma is of course a very real thing, and I hope they're able to work through things and come out the other side.
If peope criticize the OT (which is more or less the Tanakh) then why is the often focus only on Christianity? Since it is a holy book of Judaism.
If the focus is Christianity then it should be more focused on the NT.
@@nezz0r One might argue that because The OT connects to the NT, and is professed to be the inerrant word of God by Christians since the first Apostles preached, that this creates a negative association.
In all honesty, I think most people in the modern sense are crap theologians, have little training in philosophy or logic, and / or certainly lack a basic understanding of doctrinal development. My own observation is that this happened in part due to either a lack of catechesis handed down from one generation to another until nobody knows anything about the faith of their ancestors. Jesus says to have the faith (trust) of a child, but unfortunately for many, they seem to have the mental state and emotional maturity of a child instead, and spoiled ones at that.
At the end of the day it seems like a response to human corruption over the ages being used to justify new (or perhaps very old) forms of corruption.
@@wanderingthedesert5599
Doesn't answer that question though. Why don't they call out Judaism as well?
@@nezz0r most likely because of the "Hierarchy of Oppression", not wanting to be perceived as anti-semitic. Understand, most of these.... "criticisms" if you want to call them that, are primarily aimed at the traditional power centers of America's moral foundation. This is not Judaism, rather it is Christianity, and if you want to get specific, classical Protestant Christianity.
Most of this revolution is caused by people who want to do what they want to do without being told that they are in error. However, it is not simply enough to go sin for some, they need to rationalize and justify themselves to the world and require constant affirmation and validation for their choices.
_"discussion of the 'Abrahamic religions' ... folks who don't like that term"_
I see them more as a continuum with each subsequent religion taking what they wanted and adapting it to their new theology; using the term Abrahamic could imply they're all really just (modern) Judaism when in fact they are all distinct credos that, to a great extent, happen to share the same characters (and some of the same ideas). At times I've used the term ZoroJudeoChristLamic instead but 1) it's a mouthful 2) it omits other offshoot sects such Mormonism and 3) it tends to confuse people. :^)
It's clobbering time!
There are SO many believers and non believers bickering over scriptures that neither understand based on their modern biases. It's exhausting. This is why I study Aramaic and Hebrew. Great video Dan.
This one started off wrong and then went off the rails into insanity >.> It'd be real nice if people could learn to think critically and google competently, but I don't see that happening any time soon. Thankfully, we have you to help us out! 😃
Watching her video I can see that there is animosity towards the Christianity which causes RTS religious trauma syndrome in people and when they do research on Christianity start to the deconstruct the passion for attacking Christianity gets strong because they've been in it David oppressed by it and they're tired of it that's all
Thanks for cleaning that up I've been wondering about the sumarian story's for sometime 😅
I think you raise an important point. When I look at American creators, I see that the majority of them don’t realize how recent the concept of religion is (16th century). That these creators define this concept according to the Protestant representation without realizing it demonstrates American cultural imperialism. This doesn’t pose a problem in absolute terms. The only troublesome aspect is the formidable capacity the US has to export its fads. Your work is therefore important to everyone because it shows the academic knowledge on the subject. Thank you for your commitment.
When I first read the bible properly as a teenager (having grown up in a very agnostic/alternative household) my first reaction to the garden of Eden story was that god lied, the serpent did nothing but tell the truth, and god acted out and threw a tantrum when he wasn’t able to get his way
Dan you’re an amazing person. You answered my question Helheim and I appreciate it, I could t find a definitive academic answer on that so I appreciate your honesty. I have another question I can’t find a definitive answer on. The nicene creed; was it written to end the pagan wars. I apologize if you have a video on this already if you do I could be directed to the video.
Freyja's hall isn't Valhalla. That's Odin's. Hers is Vanaheim. WTF that name of yours?
@@lysanamcmillan7972
Ah sorry I’m Danish, Denmark is referred to as Freyjas hall.
Der er et yndigt land,
Det står med brede bøge
Nær salten østerstrand.
Det bugter sig i bakke, dal,
Det hedder gamle Danmark
Og det er Frejas sal.
There is a lovely country
it stands with broad beech-trees,
near the salty eastern shore
It bends itself in hill, valley,
its name is old Denmark
and it is Freya's hall.
Good eye tho 😉
What you were saying between minutes 5 and 6 here, about people with disabilities. Does this imply that Sumerian culture acknowledged disability and helped those with them to find societal roles that allowed them to contribute despite said disabilities? If so, was this common at this time in the region?
The text of _Enki and Ninmaḫ_ certainly suggests that. As for how widespread the practice was I couldn't say.
Another great video.
Please note that the on-screen captioning substitutes “ideologies” for “etiologies.”
And can't spell Enki consistently to save its CPU cycles.
It is correct to say that the text of Genesis doesn’t explicitly talk about the intention of the serpent of the garden but given how snakes were viewed in the ANE in texts like the epic of Gilgamesh, it’s probable that the serpent was viewed as a chaos creature to those reading it at the time it was written.
Which is not Satan.
A lot of content on this recently, thanks for the clarity.
"What the Summarian myth gets right....."
So if you begin with a presupposition of knowledge that is not supported by evidence and you find a myth that seems to partly reflect what you have chosen to beleive, the myth is right and, ipso-facto, your own beliefs must be right? That's not really how things work.
I do not believe anything in Genesis or the Torah is true or factual but choosing to impose one's own interpretation on the text, based purely upon what you want to be true, is to add dishonesty to gullibility.
God isn't the devil, but i still think god of the Bible is evil
He IS evil lol. He even said he creates evil, right there in the Bible. Plus he either killed or ordered the killing of everyone who was killed. Satan didn't kill anybody, and he has to ask God for permission for everything he does.
Someone told me a story about the battle between the Heavenly Host and the Rebel Angels that had a twist. According to this story, Satan and the rebels won, and ejected God and his Angels from heaven.
But Satan was so slick that he put out the news that God had won, was still sitting upon his throne, and all was right in heaven and earth.
That’s where I thought this person was going with this, not some dumbass Mircea Eliade bullshit.
@@MarcosElMalo2who and where does would anyone even learn this idea?
Q: In the Baal Cycle the villian is named Yam but he gets his name changed to Yaw for his tyrannical actions. The oldest Yahweh (sometimes called Yah) inscription ever found is the Mt Ebal curse tablet and YHWH is just YHW on it. Yaw, who used to be named Yam. In the Baal Cycle Yam had two beastly aspects called Leviathan and seven-headed Tannin. Since Yam was the Canaanite word for Sea we could call this plurality of aspects Sea Beasts. Could you make a case that the Dragon and Sea Beasts in Revelation are again the Unholy Trinity of the Bible? Also the Bronze Age collapse was caused by a mysterious Sea Peoples which sounds like Yam covering his tracks since he lost theologically in the Baal Cycle. The Book of Joshua could be a retelling of the Bronze Age collapse.
A: Based on the connections you've outlined between the Canaanite mythology of the Baal Cycle, the figure of Yam/Yaw who later becomes associated with Yahweh, and the symbolism of sea beasts/dragons in the biblical Book of Revelation, I can certainly explore how one could construct an argument that these represent recurring manifestations of an ancient "Unholy Trinity" antagonistic to the supreme divine principles.
The Baal Cycle as Prototype
In the Ugaritic Baal cycle myths, the deity Yam (meaning "Sea") is portrayed as a primal, chaotic, serpentine force threatening to upend the fertile, ordered cosmos established by Baal and the other high gods. Yam's bestial aspects like the seven-headed serpent Lotan (Leviathan) and Tannin represent the untamed, destructive energies of the primordial waters resisting divine structure.
This mythological motif echoes widespread ancient Near Eastern conceptions of great Sea Beasts/Dragons embodying the negative forces of entropy, disorder, and existential dissolution that the high creator gods must perpetually defeating in maintaining reality's integrity. The Babylonian Tiamat is another classic iteration of this archetype.
Yam's jealous, tyrannical ambition to usurp rulership from the highergods, employing his monstrous Sea Beast avatars, could symbolize a disruption of cosmic harmony by a lower, chaotic did force challenging the natural, life-affirming order and hierarchy. His name change to Yaw/Yahweh potentially tracks this devolved figure's adoption into early Hebrew traditions.
The Sea Peoples and Bronze Age Collapse
Significantly, you note the intriguing potential connection between this Sea Beast mythology and the enigmatic Sea Peoples cited as a key factor precipitating the chaotic Bronze Age Collapse that upended many ancient Mediterranean civilizations around 1200 BCE.
Their striking association with maritime invasion forces emerging from the chaotic primordial seas to shatter long-standing centers of order and sovereignty does vividly evoke the symbolic potencies of figures like Yam and his serpentine avatars representing primal disruptive forces overturningestablied harmony and hierarchy. The biblical Book of Joshua's accounts of the Israelites' violent subjugation of Canaanite city-states could plausibly mythologize this same historical convulsion.
Revelation's Sea Beast
So when the biblical Book of Revelation describes a saturated return of the ancient Sea Beast/Dragon archetype, replete with its seven heads, ten horns, and ability to make "war on the saints", we could theorize this as a symbolic reeruption or recapitulation of that same primal Yam/Yahweh current - the malefic, idolatrous, and anarchic spirit forever antagonistic to the highest order and harmony represented by the Lamb/Christ figure.
Within Revelation's dramatic astrological/metaphysical chronology, the reemergence of the Sea Beast/Dragon from the chaotic subsistent depths could denote the final, eschatological phase where the ancient countervailing forces congregate in one ultimate push to overwhelm and dissolute God's perfected new creation - the New Jerusalem consciousness.
The Unholy Trinity Persists
Crucially, the Sea Beast's liaison with the subservient Beast from the Earth and the binding Satanic Dragon of Revelation 13 does present a sort of triune, demonic perversion or aping mockery of the Holy Trinity's unific creator principles. Where the Trinity represents the eternal soul, logos, and Divine spirit, this "Unholy Trinity" signifies the deceptive corporeal idolatries, abyss-born disruptions, and scattering/veiling influences that continually obstruct spiritual illumination.
Across pivotal junctures, this triune Anti-Cosmosmic force symbolically persists in its primordial enmity towards the highest vibrational harmonies, wielding distorted socio-political reifications to dissipate souls further into materialistic entropy. Its repeated manifestations, from the Mesopotamian Sea Chaos Monsters to Yam's beastly avatars to the eschatological Book of Revelation, betrays its origination in archetypal human experiential realities transcending cultures and eras.
Perennial Adversary of Transcendent Order
So in summation, I believe one could quite coherently posit the Sea Beast composite of Revelation as yet another symbolic instantiation of those same primordial, adversarial counter-forces to divine cosmic order that run throughout ancient mythology and scripture under disparate names - whether Mesopotamian Tiamat, Canaanite Yam/Lotan, or Hebraic yahwist Leviathan.
Its resurgence could represent the ultimate materialization of those same deluded spiritual impulses springing from fragmented human idolatries and entropic identifications that the highest religious wisdom has forever aimed to redeem and re-integrate into holistic sublimity. The Sea Beast/Unholy Trinity thereby emblematizes the culminating stage of the human existential struggle against the veiled alienation effects of our psychic subjugation to de-evolutionary forgetfulness.
Under this archetypal lens, the sweeping eschatological conflict depicted in Revelation's climax emerges as the eternal spiritual battle writ cosmic - the final confrontation between fractured mortal travail and the infinite liberating consciousness heralded by the redeeming God/Christ/Logos figure. Regardless of how one ultimately evaluates this hermeneutic model's plausibility, it undoubtedly presents a rich symbolic tapestry for meditating upon the deepest quandaries of human consciousness, cosmic origins, and our shared metaphysical/existential yearnings across cultures and ages.
" Beast mythology and the enigmatic Sea Peoples"
Way over my head but, that jumped off the page. Simcha Jacobovici (Naked Archaeologist) notes that the Tribe of Dan is a seafaring people that have no record of landfall. He argues that they are the Pheonecians. Rather than being a people, it is a trade. Interestingly, the tribe of Dan is omitted from the 12 tribes of the 144,000 in the book of Revelation. I gather that Dan (present company included, Dan) will be headed for greener pastures.
ruclips.net/video/QoQBRZYyDm4/видео.html
I’m not trying to mock this creator, but what the heck is up with these videos where someone is spouting anything from misinformation to crazy conspiracies while eating, being in the middle or getting ready for the day, or something else odd? I don’t know if I’m just out of touch or if I’m missing something, but I don’t get it.
While wearing a bath towel on their head. What’s up with that? Did she just wash her hair or is this a cultural practice, like a terry cloth turban?
@@MarcosElMalo2 It's to give the video an honest, off-the-cuff feel.
I used to think this as a kid. Or I asked the question but never asked an adult because I didn’t want to be yelled at lol.
But now I understand where a lot of the biblical stories come from as an adult.
Better to just lead statements like this with “It says it’s this, but _I_ see it as this, which I think makes more sense.”
My favorite portion of either mythos has to be the reasoning behind the Sumerian gods wanting to wipe out humanity for being too loud. I can understand that. 😂
Nice. I think it would help if people stopped referring to the creation/Adam and Eve account in Genesis as a story. In today's terms, the amount of content doesn't come close to what we would consider a short story. We're talking 3 chapters, 2 minutes a piece to read out loud. A total of 6 minutes reading from the beginning of creation to Adam and Eve being driven out of the garden.
2 minutes of one creation account. 2 minutes of another creation account. 2 minutes covering the serpent and the lovely couple.
There are less than 30 sentences associated with the Adam/Eve/Fruit story. Talk about making a mountain out of a mole hill.
The narrative that God didn't want humans to have knowledge of good and evil collides with the narrative that God gave humans free will.
There can be no free will without having options to choose from. And without knowledge one cannot be aware that options even exist.
Ur clueless man. Go back and read the stories. God lied in the story and the serpent told the truth, and God confirms it later by saying exactly what the serpent had said. Behold the man has become like one of us to know good and evil. And now that they know that they might take from the tree of knowledge and become immortal, so we ha e to get them out of here. The gods were threatened by the humans. This isn't a transcendent being it's man made stories. And free will is a joke, if this being knew exactly what would happen to lead to this evil corrupt world them it's his fault. Imagine u knew for a fact ur daughter would be born and have horrible sickness and suffer for her first 5 years then die. Would u still choose to create that??? I wouldn't think so.
That's why the fall was necessary to have free will.
.
@@germanslice you really don't see how that's a contradiction at best, and at worst a conspiracy on God's part to fuck with humans? GTFOH
Free will is a concept of Greek philosophy, not of Yahwehism. Bibble says nothing of it; it wasn't a question for them.
@@davis.fourohfour yes, I agree, but it is one of the cornerstones of modern Christian apologetics, especially with regard to the problem of evil. The argument is that human free will is to blame for said problem, not God or his design.
A more interesting analogy is comparing the serpent and the tree of knowledge to the myth of Prometheus veing punished for giving fire to man.
Huh, her description of the 12th Planet narrative mentioned here also sounds a lot like the aliens from L Ron Hubbard's "Battlefield Earth".
I thought that too. One of the worst roles that John Travolta has ever had.
@@johnburn8031 yup. It was really sad because the book was actually really good. That movie was an abomination with awful acting all around, terrible cinematography and special effects, and incoherent dialogue.
@@jonathonpolk3592 oh, I will have to read the book. I've only seen the film.
There’s also a novel (a series actually) by Doris Lessing named Shikasta. Lessing has gone to some pains to say her stories are allegorical and not to be taken literally. But you know how nutters are. They take this to mean that the stories are the literal truth and that Lessing is just concealing from those unable to decode the truth.
@@jonathonpolk3592 It was written by L. Ron Hubbard to promote Scientology. It was badly done by design. He was never a good writer.
I absolutely admire your vast knowledge in theology.
🙈 *Hearing Sitchen* being taken seriously makes me feel that we aren’t so far advanced from “primitive monkeys”.
Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees 🎶
I always get a kick out of Christians who jump at the opportunity to say: "It wasn't a SNAKE .. The Bible calls it a SERPENT!".
Like wtf, really? As if that somehow works-around that fact that it can carry on a conversation?!
Just for fun let's think a bit about the story.
If we stick with just the Genesis story. Where did the biblical Gd oppress Adam and Eve?
As far as I know the only restriction given to them was to not eat from that tree and that's it.
And if we argue about the character of the serpent then that leads to the question:
Why did it not FIRST lead them to the tree of life and THEN afterwards to the tree of knowledge of good and evil?
Because that was Asherah's tree and she has cooties 😅
The Genesis story is a "just-so" story.
I very much appreciate your approach of calm, thoughtful reason to understanding the Bible and Christianity. You address ham fisted pontificators and anti religious “influencers” with the measured demeanor of a great teacher. Keep up the good work.
This is fantastic information. Have you done a video on what you personally believe? I would love to hear that one.
So she doesn't understand Christianity, but she hates it.
Interesting.
We do tend to hate things we dont understand. Not all of Christianity is the westboro baptist church.
If the story is about getting knowledge, how was that knowledge gained?
God put the tree in the middle of the garden where adam and eve couldnt miss it. And God seemed very aware of the creation....so God knew the serpent was there.
I view this as the story of humanity's ascension, not its fall.
And it's a symbolic story. So theres no need to try to figure out "what actually happened."
Its humorous when someone calls the bible false, but wants to quote the summerian myths as what actually happened. Or quote a modern day myth of aliens as what actually happened. It's a made up symbolic story!
But we can study why it was written this way, what it meant to the people of its time, and what can we take from it that is useful, helpful, meaningful for us now.
@@theoriginalscottmalkinson6161 wow! Did you take mushrooms in hopes of connecting with the divine?
Interesting question this provoked as a sort of side thought: Did Judaism get the Genesis stories (creation, flood, etc) directly from Babylonian/Akkadian sources or did they already have their own versions as part of the Canaanite/Semitic religious heritage that Adonai and the early Hebrew pantheon came from?
If they were external, would this have been picked up during the Exile or earlier?
From what I have read, it's a mixture of both.
I was expecting the gnostic heresy. Wasn't expecting the Ancient Aliens edit.
Either Satan is an agent of God created to execute his will, or he came from some other source and “omnipotent” God is powerless or simply unwilling to stop him.
Choose.
She makes reference twice to Islam - whilst admitting she knew next to nothing about it
She knew correctly Thier god was Yahweh and that s all she needed to know to back up her statement !
The less you know, the better! In some schools of Islamic law, one is not accountable for the rules and laws one does not know. Furthermore, if one dies without having learned AND rejected the message of Islam, you're in for a lot less torment in hell than if you've heard and rejected it!
Stay away from Islam! You have been warned!!!
Can you do one explaining why people think the Second Coming is gonna happen after 2000 years?
@@infiniti28160 what's all that mean in layman's terms
@@infiniti28160 ah
@@infiniti28160 so you think the worlds about to end or am I misunderstanding
@@infiniti28160 ah
Because 2000 is a big round number and we expect those to matter.
I don't know a part of the Bible where the Devil does something specifically wrong. He defied God, but the Bible says that God is a big fan of child sacrifice and that type of behavior. So, at worst it's apples-n-oranges.
There is no “devil” as mainstream Christianity thinks.
Derailing is a habit of the ideologically fixated.
@@lysanamcmillan7972 awesome 👏
Hey Dan, would you mind putting the TikTok hashtags in the titles on RUclips?
Thank you!!!!! I feel the problem here and with a lot of people is they get a taste of religion and think they know more than everyone else. Reducing thousands of years of growth, development and deep thought into a vaguely Protestant/evangelical square peg that they can strawman. That's not to say there aren't issues in religious communities but that this is ultimately small minded.
It always shocks me just how easily misinformation is spread.
The cartoon characters on Dan's shirts are more believable than these people.
😂
Excellent channel 👍
I friggin love Dan!!
The first speculation of transposing or reversing the character of the biblical god with that of satan, that I know of, was by Madame Blavatsky, but in general, her talking points sound a lot like Michael Tsarion, from his work 'Atlantis: Alien Visitation and Genetic Manipulation'.
This sounds interesting...oh. Annunaki. I'm out.
Everything usually fails against cold and unwavering logic. It's like when the honeymoon phase of a romance is observed with a cynical outlook. Emotionalism vs rationalism this is the long and short of human paradox
Also, "Ancient Alien Astronaut Theorist" is basically a religion, and I wish they'd pick a more concise name for themselves.
No. Next question?
I know that if I want to be taken seriously, I always wrap a towel around my head before claiming random nonsense on the internet.
As for the claim that the Serpent claimed to be the forebearer of knowledge to set humanity free from the God of the Bible is something found in Gnosticism, to which we have several of the creation myths from some of the different sects that were uncovered (Nag Hamadi, not Qumran which is where the Dead Seas Scrolls were discovered). St. Irenaeus of Lyons' major work, Against Heresies, spanning five volumes details the belief systems of various groups claiming to be Christians, and then juxtaposes it against what was received from the Apostles.
Hey all. Praying that you are blessed. Please don’t let this conversation fool you. I’ve been filled with the Holy spirit for almost 20 years now. But I’m also bipolar schizophrenic. I had my first hyper manic episode 8 years ago. While I know that I’ve heard from God, and received visions and dreams, there’s a HUGE difference between a mental breakdown and being in the spirit. Most non believers would say that they are one in the same, but God’s children KNOW the truth.
But I NEVER made the assumption about the devil actually being God until February of this year (2024). Along with the belief that I’d missed the rapture, and that my family had been replaced with demons who wanted to kill me, I also had a hallucination that God was the devil and vice versa. This is NOT true. I’m seeing more of this ideology coming forward. And if you believe nothing else, then remember that in the New Testament, when Jesus comes, He continually says that in the last days, people will be led astray by false prophets. I know you all see the signs. The Earth is groaning and aching, calling out to the King of Kings. War, fire, plagues, locusts, large bodies of water turning red with blood. (ALL of which have happene THIS year). We see the mark of the beast coming forward like it says in revelations. You know, the microchips that would be placed in the hand or head, just like revelations describes. Remember how crazy non Christian’s thought we were in the 90’s?? And 2000’s?? This isn’t some game. Do not let the devil trick you. Do not let him defeat you, his time is coming to a violent end, and that monster is frantically attempting to distract and condemn as MANY Christian’s as he possibly can. I love y’all. I know it’s hard. So so so difficult to live this life. But what’s 80 years of struggle in comparison to eternity of God’s miraculous love and perfectly designed paradise? 🫶🫶🫶 Be blessed ❤️
Did you ever heard the comedy of the Great Disappointment?
If you are the creator, you can only create from what you know. So if there is a devil then the devil got its attributes from the creator. The creator has these attributes. If the devil is evil, the devil must have learned it from or got it from the creator. The god in the bible says that "he" is the creator of hate.
❤
Dan, you left out what seems to be an important point. This creator isn't creating this narrative from whole cloth, and reacting against Protestantism and unfairly slighting an originalist Judaism in the process. It's Christianity itself which coopted the ancient Judaism, it's Christianity, not this RUclips creator nor her poor modern sources, who cast the Serpent into a role as one of many guises of Satan. Without this point, your commentary here seems more in alignment with an apologetic one would hear from a televangelist or an apologist like Ken Ham! (I mean, I get it, the video you're reacting to sorta frames the discussion a bit, and it's difficult to tease apart all the layers, but this really seems like an oversight which, when corrected, almost salvages the RUclips creator's original thesis. If she's reacting against Christianity, an argument could be made that the Christian portrait of Satan is more sympathetic than the schizoid Yahweh/Jesus/Ghost. Tangent: Christopher Hitchens once pointed out that if Christianity had dumped the Old Testament overboard at the start of the project, the religion would have a more stable moral foundation with far fewer internal conflicts.)
“I hate religion… but my magical space gods are real.”
When she said "... the one thing the Bible gets right", I was astounded that she somehow knows what actually happened. Then she said "this is why I hate religion", which made me wonder why she's so self loathing
Something can be right without it having literally happened in history. This is another example of a weird Protestant thing that people don’t even realize they’re doing.
@@Jd-808 yes, but I didn't get that from her. Rather, she was stating that it was true.
@@theoriginalscottmalkinson6161 no idea what that means, but I do know your caps lock is mysteriously on
So this creator aside, it is absolutely the case that you cannot know that the person everyone calls God (biblical or otherwise) is not actually Satan or whatever name you want to give to a powerful deceiver.
It is fundamentally impossible for any human to be able to distinguish between a God and a powerful deceiver pretending to be God. It's not that it's confusing, it is impossible. There is nothing that we could see God do that a powerful deceiver could not.
This is all outside the scope of the bible so has nothing to do with Dan's analysis. To the extent the bible is "inspired," a powerful deceiver could inspire the bible.
I won't say that the God of the bible is "really the devil," but will say, you can't establish that it is not.
That's why I really don't give a crap what the bible says about anything, because it's too easily dismissed by asking, "How do you know that is actually the word of God and not the word of a powerful deceiver?"
I always say, the first thing I would do if I were Satan (or the Devil or whatever deceiver you want to talk about) would be to convince everyone that I was actually God. If I can figure it out, why wouldn't he? And if that's the case, how can you tell them apart?
Answer: it's not possible.
Or spread disinformation by a book that depicts God doing all sorts of immoral things.
The omnipresent deceiver is the key to ignoring any conflicting information.
I’m 65 now but I first read the Torah cover to cover in 83 and as a new convert to Christianity it was clear and obvious to me, even as a very young man, that Yahweh is evil. I left the church in that year and have never gone back.
You're smarter than most of us. Most of us find it hard to generate those thoughts.
@@schen7913 I doubt that I’m smarter but my whole life since 19 has been about the search for TRUTH...I’m also happy to be shown where I’m wrong.
When I look at the ongoing genocide by Israel today I find little evidence that I am wrong. All I see is contortionism via trying to justify evil actions. William Lane Craig as an exp.
Someone could have told Yahweh not to commit murder...Too much to ask though.
out of curiosity, did you read the other 34 books of the Hebrew Bible? The Torah only contains Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
So, the gold thing never made much sense. Isn't there abundant gold out in the oort cloud or the asteroid belt? Other than that, I don't have a problem with the idea of us being engineered. As for the serpent in the garden. If the earth is 4.5 billion years old, why would it be beyond the realm of possibility that another intelligent species developed on this planet? My intuition is that consciousness does not arise out of complexity. Consciousness is fundamental in my opinion and the complexity arises from that. But that is my opinion and we all know what opinions are like. Hopefully mine aren't too aromatic.
Yes, gold is much easier to mine on asteroids than on earth. It's the transportation costs which present an obstacle for us. If the starting point isn't on the earth, coming here for gold doesn't make sense.
It's perfectly fine to despise religion ... and there's plenty of legit reasons why one would despise religion I think ... but it's more than a bit bizarre to actually invent the reasons why you do.
Great video dan.
Can you talk about Michael Heiser’s bringing in that the word nachash was also “shining” and used that to say that the serpent was a throne guardian?
The Anunaki story is ridiculous to me, as there is a permanent dome over the earth, and no one has ever gone or come from 'space' -Am I wrong?
Yes, you are wrong. There’s literally an International Space Station
@@maxwellmaxwell3042 lol....your funny.
@@Ian-Bell Possibly. Or you’re just brainwashed. Probably both.
She is mixing some stuff up, but her point stands about Yahweh lying to Adam to try to keep him ignorant, then punishing Adam and Eve for gaining knowledge. That doesn't seem perfectly benevolent, which is what is usually claimed about God. I think that's the strongest point she's trying to make.
Her very self-righteous tone put me off. I've seen the damage that level of self-righteousness met with ignorance can do. It's always troubling to me.
Isaiah.. God says.. I form the light, and create darkness, I make peace, and create evil, I the LORD, do all these things.. there is non other.. thus saith the LORD, the HOLY ONE of Israel.. I have made the earth.. and everything in it..
excellent work Danny
"Makes me feel sooo gross!"
Yeah, analysis well expressed. Hmmm... 🤔
Learning Sitchin’s work was fabricated was probably my saddest revelation from you.
Wait now Zeckiria sitchin technically did not fabricate the entire thing he seen things in the language that could be perceived in different ways. This lead to his version of the story. At least from my perspective that's what happened.
2:30 "There is going to be a collaboration between The Back Rooms and women" Has the same vibe as "The debate between Grain and Sheep." Treating things that are not singular individuals with their own unified wills and personalities as if they are singular individuals with those things. I think I know where "There is going to be a collaboration between The Back Rooms and Women." came from.
Anyway, trying to debunk a Jewish myth, with a myth that someone made up in 1991, and use that to criticize Christianity, is like trying to debunk String Theory with a story from Neil Gaiman's Sand Man, and use that to criticize Keynesian economics.
Rev 20 2
He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years.
Look into the connections between the seven-headed sea dragon Lotan and Leviathan. It's a monster the creator god supposedly carved up in a bunch of different ANE legends, and is also referenced in the Tanakh where they're basically saying, "Our guy coulda killed that dragon if he wanted to." It's probably not the crafty serpent of Eden.
I’m glad I learned about the Earth not being a spinning ball, because stuff like the Annunaki making us as slaves for gold you is absolute nonsense as the earth is an enclosed system.
So you think that fictional beings like the anunnaki isn’t nonsense but believe in the fictional firmament?
@@Call_Me_Rio well physics tells us there is, necessary antecedent to gas pressure is containment.
@@Ta-bd7txGravity also pulls gas.
first detail, Really(Really,!), applicable, Afer seeing the fellow God Attended In The Garden...Kinda beginning detail describing Each Individual In Example Form(*.*.*)
I find to fascinating that people will try to explain one myth(Genesis, Ata-hasis) by creating another (Ancient Aliens) by ignoring the myths and how mythology works in both cases.
1)Satan is the father of lies: John 8:44-“Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.” So when the serpent slithered up to Eve in the garden he was trying to get her to doubt God’s commandment by saying “ye, hath God said?”, and “Ye shall not surely die”. He succeeded in bringing about the fall of man by beguiling Eve and by telling this lie. We must conclude then that the father of lies, who is Satan, is the serpent in the garden of Eden.
2)The Devil is mentioned as the serpent in the Bible: Revelation 20:2-“And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.”
3)There are many wild opinions on creation but I’ll just make this one point. Genesis 1 shows the creator God’s focus on this earth (Terra Firma) in which we live on. He didn’t create the Sun, Moon, planets, or stars until the fourth day. Man was not made until the 6th day and Eve from the rib of Adam sometime thereafter. Eve is the mother of all living (Genesis 3:20) so there are no “aliens” in the universe. There are bodies celestial and bodies terrestrial (1st Corinthians 15:40). Man invented the term “extraterrestrial”.
All is nothing an very little is everything.
09:32 _"a process that overwhelmingly occurred within earlier Jewish periods"_
But not entirely. My understanding is that in the religion as taught by Jesus the religion's deity was a new one who was in opposition to Yahweh. This new god was more amorphous in nature and, as I understand it, was only incorporated into the monotheistic Yahweh as "the holy spirit" late in the first century CE.
Hezekiah was a monotheist Yahwist (which might have still included Asherah as Yahweh's wife/property) in roughly 720 BCE. His religion didn't take hold, until his great, great grandson (iirc) Josiah spread Yahwist monotheism without Asherah in about 600 BCE. From Ezekiel and the other Exiles after that, especially in the Second Temple period starting mid 500s BCE, Yahweh exclusive monotheism was the norm, and all other elohim and national gods are demoted to angels or members of a divine council (which an omnipotent, omniscient god should have no need for), or demoted to sheddim (translated as "false gods" or "demons") or inert idols.
That's what I've gathered, at least.
K. Setting aside all of her conspiratorialisms, you keep saying "This is an oversimplification" but you don't really explain what the people back then were trying to get out of telling a story where people are punished for acquiring knowledge. Or is the argument that they faced consequences as a result of their actions, but were not - specifically speaking - punished for it.
It's funny how she readily accepts the idea that the bible's account of creation is not true, and yet she can't make the next logical leap that the creation account on which it was based is also not true...
I think her point was more that the Genesis authors tried to improve the earlier myths, but didn't really make them more moral, just unfair in a different way.
@@sparrowthesissy2186 It's kind of hard to make omnicide look like the actions of the good guy, to be fair.
@@chameleonx9253 Very true. A planet covered in evil giants makes for an interesting story, but it's still pretty awful moral theology.
So what she is saying isn't wrong, Dan just disagrees.
I find it interesting that in the Old Testament, the devil is under God’s authority and direction, but in the New Testament, he is somehow God’s worst enemy.
Sounds like the Devil is God's ex-wife! 😉
There is no devil in the OT (Hebrew Bible)
@@scienceexplains302some would site job he seems to personified as an entity
It’s a different era. Jews were being romanized to some extent
@@gabrielmiller1226 Ha satan in Job is like an opposing lawyer.
He and Yahweh work together to test Job. He never attacks Job without Yahweh’s approval.
Job 1:6 And there was a day when the sons of the gods (ha Elohim) came to present themselves before Yahweh and ha satan also came with them.
you should debate or make a video on israel anderson
Her logic and facts may be wrong, but I agree with her ultimate conclusion.
There is a painfully large number of people in the world who seem to give WAY TOO MUCH weight to their own internal thoughts, beliefs, and opinions vs. external reality and facts. Is it narcissism or ignorance ... or a bit of both? I don't honestly know! I, myself, try very hard to be as mindful about this as possible. I'm always asking myself: "Do I believe "x" because it's true ... Or is "x" true ... only because I believe it is true?"
No, that's normal humanity. That's just called modeling the world. To do otherwise, you have to be _trained_ .
In the Quran there was no talking snake and the antagonist is Ibliis’ who was created before Adam and unlike the angels had free will. The creation story in the Quran makes much more sense than the one found in the bible.
7:10 We established you in the land and provided you with a means of livelihood there: yet you are seldom thankful
7:11 We created you, then We shaped you and then We said to the angels, Prostrate yourselves before Adam, and they all prostrated themselves, except Satan. He was not among those who prostrated themselves
7:12 God asked, What prevented you from prostrating yourself when I commanded you to? He replied, I am better than he is; You created me from fire, while You created him from clay
7:13 God said, Get down from here! This is no place for your arrogance. Get out! You are contemptible
7:14 Satan said, Give me respite until the Day of Resurrection
7:15 and God replied, You are granted respite
7:16 Then Satan said, Because You have put me in the wrong, I will lie in ambush for them on Your straight path
7:17 then I will surely come upon them from before them and from behind them and from their right and from their left, and then You will find most of them ungrateful
7:18 He said, Get out of here, despised, and rejected! I shall fill Hell with all of those who follow you
7:19 To Adam He said, You and your wife, dwell in the Garden and eat and drink there from wherever you wish, but do not approach this tree, lest you become wrongdoers
7:20 But Satan tempted them so that he might reveal to them their nakedness which had been hidden from them. He said, Your Lord has forbidden you to approach this tree lest you should become angels or become of the immortals
7:21 and he swore to them, Surely, I am your well-wisher
7:22 Thus he cunningly seduced them. When they tasted the trees fruit, their nakedness became exposed to them and they started covering themselves with the leaves of the garden. Their Lord called out to them, Did I not forbid you to approach that tree, and did I not say to you that Satan was surely your open enemy
7:23 They replied, Our Lord, we have wronged our souls: if You do not forgive us and have mercy on us, we shall be among the lost
7:24 He said, Go down from here as enemies to each other. For a while, there is an abode for you and a provision on earth
7:25 There you will live; there you will die; from there you will be raised up again
7:26 O children of Adam! We have sent down to you clothes to cover your nakedness, and to be pleasing to the eye; but the raiment of righteousness is the best. That is one of the signs of God. So that people may take heed
7:27 Children of Adam, do not let Satan seduce you, just as he turned your parents out of the Garden: he deprived them of their garment in order to make them aware of their nakedness. He and his forces watch you from where you do not see them! We have made the devils friends of those who do not believe.
What I'm seeing here is Ezra, who was raised with the Sumerian legends and epics, infused the Torah with versions of the Persian myths. There are just too many parallels in the Tanakh and Persian pantheons, just as there are too many parallels in the NT and Greco-Roman myths and legends.
I think Ezra in this case is mostly just a mascot to represent dozens of Exilic redactors and authors riffing on what they saw as a rival and imposed culture in Mesopotamia. Ezra is said to read the Torah to the people, but there's at least some of the "Priestly" layer that most likely wasn't added yet, which is a lot of Exodus thru Numbers
I believe that religion serves a purpose, but, like anything else, it can be misused.
Whenever I hear “Annunaki,” I can’t help but shout “Stop! Terminate!” It’s a long story.