The Secret History of Biblical Giants, Demons, and the Advanced Civilizations Before the Great Flood

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:29Tucker Carlson?

  Thank you for doing this.

• 0:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 0:31Tucker Carlson?

  I have read Genesis, like, you know, I don't know if most of my life, never noticed the first part of chapter six with the Nephilim until about four years ago, someone mentioned it to me. In the subsequent years, I must have had 15 conversations, 25 conversations about the Nephilim. So it seemed worth talking to someone who understands exactly what the Nephilim are. What are the Nephilim and am I pronouncing it correctly?

• 0:57Speaker 02

  I mean, good enough. Yeah. That's, I mean, yeah, I mean, it's, it's the, the, I am at the end. The, the em is the plural in, in Hebrew.

• 1:08Tucker Carlson?

  Okay.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  But yeah, so there's, there's a little bit of debate about where exactly the word comes from. Uh, because uh, there's, it's, it's not a regularly used Hebrew word in the Hebrew Bible, which, which isn't all that odd either. There are a lot of words that are only used once in the Hebrew Bible. But uh, people have tried to do different things with it. So there's a, there's a Hebrew verb to fall, which is the verb to fall. So some people have wanted to say, well, it's the fallen ones. But in Hebrew, Nephilim is reflexive, so it would be the ones who are fallen upon, which is a little more difficult, but it seems pretty clear.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Most people agree now because there's an Aramaic word, uh, Nephilim, it ends with an N, that just means giant.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  And so it seems pretty contextually clear that this is just the Hebrew form of that word. And this is talking about giants. It's translated in the Greek Old Testament with Yontes in Greek, which means, which is where we get the English word giant. But a lot of people, when they hear the word giant now think phi phi fo fum, right? Yes. That's, that's not the core of the idea. So the word, all of the words used for giant not only refer to a tall person, but could also be used to mean a thug or a bully or a tyrant.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  And the example I use is, and you're old enough to remember this, when, when we went into Panama after Noriega, they're always referring to him as Panamanian strong man. Yes, always. And that wasn't talking about his awesome bench press. No. That was, you know, that he was a dictator, right? Yes. Authoritarian. And so it's the same kind of idea, right? That, that it's characterizing these people as that sort of thuggish, brutish kind of, kind of character. And referring to them as tall or referring to them as giants is meant to symbolize and suggest that. Okay.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  And so in, in Genesis, at the beginning of Genesis, at the beginning of the flood story, in Genesis six, we have to understand that the flood story is not a new story when Genesis is telling it, right? This is, everyone had a flood story in Hesha Neeris. So the text of Genesis is not primarily claiming, oh, there was this flood. It's talking about the flood that the original audience all sort of knew had happened. Yes.

• 4:05Tucker Carlson?

  And which it did happen, I think.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Right, there was, there, there, yes, there is a historical event, right?

• 4:10Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 4:10Speaker 02

  This is referring to, but you could have asked anybody from Greece to Mesopotamia to Egypt. They would have all agreed at that point that yes, there was this advanced civilization. There was a flood that destroyed it. Current civilization is rebuilt after that.

• 4:30Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Uh, now the key, one of the key differences in Genesis six, you already have in those first four verses, is Genesis recasts what that civilization was like. So in the pagan sources, that pre-flood world was this golden age

• 4:49Speaker 02

  of, for the time, high technology, right? And technology in the ancient Near Eastern mind included magic, magic was a sort of spiritual technology.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  And all of these things happened over the, and that sort of, uh, losing that world was sort of this great tragedy.

• 5:07Tucker Carlson?

  But everyone agreed it was a more advanced world than the world they lived in.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, that there was knowledge there that had now been mostly lost.

• 5:16Tucker Carlson?

  Interesting.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  And so you find, um, the civilizations that grew up after that, and exhibit A of that is the, the original Babylonian empire. So like Hammurabi's.

• 5:28Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Babylonian empire at the height of the Bronze Age.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  People don't understand how, how powerful the global structure was in the Bronze Age. It's called the Bronze Age because they were smelting bronze. They were getting the copper from Cyprus and the tin from what's now Afghanistan.

• 5:47Tucker Carlson?

  Wow, that's quite a distance.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  And bringing that together, it's about bronze.

• 5:52Tucker Carlson?

  In Iraq.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and Hammurabi had a preference for a particular style of sandal from Crete. So he was importing those. There was sort of this global economy in the Bronze Age going on and, uh, Hammurabi himself was from a group of people called the Amurru who took over Mesopotamia. Amurru means an Akkadian Westerners because they had come from what's now Syria. And those are the same people who are called Amorites in the Old Testament.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  And we'll probably come back to them as we go forward, but.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Uh, Hammurabi and the other Babylon emperors attributed their success or their ability to establish this empire to the fact that they had access to this secret wisdom from before the flood.

• 6:41Tucker Carlson?

  Do we have any sense how much earlier the flood took place? What's the timeline roughly?

• 6:49Speaker 02

  It's so Genesis doesn't really give us a time. There are people out there who want to like add up the years and the genealogies. That doesn't really work.

• 6:58Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Cause different textual traditions have different numbers. They didn't have, there aren't numerals in Hebrew or Greek. And so you're using letters to code numbers.

• 7:09Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  And so numbers get a little slippery in translation and copying and things.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  So a lot of people will attribute it to the, uh, the earth changes that happened at the end of the last ice age.

• 7:25Tucker Carlson?

  Yes. So.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  So talking roughly.

• 7:27Tucker Carlson?

  10,000.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  10,000 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. Um, other people are more literalist and want to add up those ages will say, uh, that it was more like six.

• 7:36Tucker Carlson?

  But from the geologic record, cause there is record of a flood.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And, and there are massive, I mean, there, there are villages at the bottom of the Black Sea from that period, 10,000 years ago.

• 7:52Tucker Carlson?

  There are.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  That are submerged. Yeah. They're the remains of villages. Um, the, the, the glacial ice that melted created a lot of large body of waters that were not there.

• 8:05Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  And sea levels rose a great deal.

• 8:08Tucker Carlson?

  So do we, do we think the flood came from melting glaciers?

• 8:11Speaker 02

  That, that's probably, that's probably the, the historical event that's connected to that.

• 8:18Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  That, that when that ends, there's this massive shift, right? And, and places where there used to be civilization are now underwater, literally.

• 8:28Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, all those changes happened and, and there's this massive disruption.

• 8:36Tucker Carlson?

  So the villages currently at the bottom of the Black Sea were built during this golden age that preceded the flood.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  Previous to that, yeah.

• 8:43Tucker Carlson?

  And when we believe that that, and do we believe, just as modern people, that that civilization was more technologically advanced than the ones that followed it?

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, i- if we're talking about, there is some evidence, sort of Bronze Age, I mean, you can't go completely Graham Hancock on this.

• 8:59Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, that's actually exactly the question.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And Graham Hancock, if you get into his stuff, he starts getting into some little new agey crystal.

• 9:09Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Technology, psychic technology stuff. Um, that's a little iffy, but.

• 9:15Tucker Carlson?

  But we know that there were.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  There was definitely, you look at places like Gobekli Tepe and these things, there was definitely a level that was reached. There was a collapse. There was another move forward. At the end of the Bronze Age, there's another collapse.

• 9:29Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 9:30Speaker 02

  Right. And then rebuilding after that.

• 9:32Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, but there are ancient structures, stone structures, so we can't radiocarbon date them, but we don't, even now can't say how they were built, right? I mean, how would you?

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Not, not exactly, yeah.

• 9:45Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  We don't know exactly. We don't know, because there's no, we're, we're dealing with pre-literacy.

• 9:51Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  Right? So we're, we're making conclusions and guesswork. You go to Gobekli Tepe, you see the carvings of animals, you see the way they had skulls displayed in certain way. You know, we could, we could do guesswork, but nobody left, left us a text.

• 10:03Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 10:05Speaker 02

  To frame any of it.

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• 13:17Tucker Carlson?

  But big picture, the pre-flood civilization, we think, reached some kind of apogee, some high point technologically, and then post-flood had to rebuild.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Right. And then, yeah, and then as Bronze Age civilization, they're attributing... Now, they're not saying, "We have some texts or something that survived the flood." They're saying that they're in contact with spirits who were active before the flood.

• 13:51Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  And that it's the same spirits who are now revealing this wisdom to them. So you have this, Genesis 6:1 through 4, this Nephilim phenomenon before the flood. And Genesis 6 says, "At this time and afterward." Right? And that "and afterward" is pointing to this sort of recurring or continuing or happening again.

• 14:14Tucker Carlson?

  So the physical world changes, but the spiritual remains constant.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Right. Right. And so, part of that recasting of this pre-flood civilization, this isn't a golden age, this is actually an age of incredible wickedness.

• 14:28Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  And evil is that... The, uh, there are sort of these great kings from before the flood. Uh, you have Sumerian kings list. Other texts like this later that list the ages of the kings before the flood and people, people tend to think that the, uh, the ages of people in Genesis and the genealogies are kind of ridiculous with people living to be 950. Sumerian kings list, you have people living hundreds of thousands of years in their, uh, list. So.

• 14:59Tucker Carlson?

  Hundreds of thousands of years?

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Yes. Genesis is, is reserved. Sort of in comparison.

• 15:06Tucker Carlson?

  What is that, do you think?

• 15:08Speaker 02

  A lot of that, so there, there's a little bit of a code to it. And this is true in, in Genesis also.

• 15:17Speaker 02

  So Babylonian mathematics was all base 60. Our math, we do base 10, right? Yeah. Decimal system. There's this base 60 and the, the survivors of that are, are, we have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, right? 24 hours in a day. That's the, the leftover from sort of that Babylonian mathematics.

• 15:37Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:40Tucker Carlson?

  I didn't know we had Babylonian minutes.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  So, um, but yeah, that, that, um, the basics you math, and if you, if you look at those ages as sets of 60, there are sort of certain things encoded about the different kings and the different generations that way.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Nobody's totally cracked the code in Genesis, but to give you an example, in the Sumerian kings list, the seventh king in the list is the one who creates the solar calendar.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  Seventh person in the list. And if you look at Genesis and the epistle of Jude, which is like a paragraph in the New Testament, he refers to Enoch as the seventh from Adam.

• 16:26Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  If you go to Enoch in the genealogies of Seth in, uh, Genesis, he lives for 365 years.

• 16:35Speaker 02

  So you have the number of days, right? The solar calendar year as his age, he's the seventh person, the seventh person in the Suberian Kings List creates the solar calendar. So there are some sort of coded, encoded connections going on with those, with those numbers.

• 16:56Tucker Carlson?

  Is there any evidence that human lifespan was much longer at one point than it is now?

• 17:02Speaker 02

  That's, that's debated by a lot of people.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Certainly not, I don't think anyone thinks in the thousands of years, right?

• 17:11Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 17:12Speaker 02

  And part of the difficulty with that is that people think that, people hear life expectancy statistics, you know, like you hear that in, at the beginning of the 20th century, the average life expectancy of the US was 35. And people think, oh, people were living to 35 and then dying. It's like, well, no, a lot of people were dying. There's a high infant mortality rate. There's a lot of people died before 35, but people who made it to 35, a lot of them, you know, made it to 100, 120.

• 17:42Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  So when you're, when you're doing kind of archaeology and stuff, yeah, you find a lot of young people because, you know, there's no antibiotics, there's no, right?

• 17:50Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  You have a very high mortality rate. It's hard to tell how long, exactly how long the truly elderly people were living.

• 18:01Tucker Carlson?

  Right? Yes.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  So, but yeah, I don't think anybody would frame that in the thousands of years.

• 18:06Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  So it's more about them saying something about these people. And like I said, the seventh one has the solar calendar. All of them have, in the Suberian Kings List, have associated with them sort of the things that they discovered, but the discovery is always, it was revealed to them by this spirit.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Came and this divine spirit revealed to them this and that and the other and and it's technological things like metallurgy, it's ancient technological things like sorcery and divination and it's things about the natural world like the solar calendar.

• 18:48Tucker Carlson?

  But the ancients believed that technological advances came to them from the spiritual realm.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Right, right, that's where that's where it's coming.

• 18:56Tucker Carlson?

  But that doesn't happen at all anymore.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Well, this is so this is this is.

• 19:02Tucker Carlson?

  Sorry.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, this is part of this is part of the larger discussion and this is.

• 19:07Tucker Carlson?

  But nuclear technology definitely didn't come from the demonic.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Well, this is this is this is exact so.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Within the framework of how the ancients understood it, and this is the ancients going all the way late antiquity, and this is frankly maintained in the Orthodox Church. So the mind in the Greek word that's usually translated mind is nous, it's transliterated N O U S. And we're used to thinking of our mind as our brain.

• 19:39Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  And it's sort of this computer in our skull.

• 19:41Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  That churns and processes. But that's not how they thought about it. They thought about the mind more as a sensory organ. Like your eye.

• 19:52Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  So you'll see it referred to as the eye of the heart or the eye of the mind.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  And that the mind sort of perceives the spiritual realm. And so ideas are like sights or sounds or smells. They're not produced by the brain.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  Right? They're not produced by the.

• 20:15Tucker Carlson?

  They're received by the.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  They're received by the mind.

• 20:17Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Right? And so they come from outside.

• 20:21Tucker Carlson?

  But that's the experience of people who are paying attention now even like who hasn't had that.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Right? And and I've never met anyone who had the experience of generating a thought. Right? Like one of the steps from not a thought to a thought. Right?

• 20:37Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, it's such a deep point.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, yeah. And so these things, these things come from from outside. And so this is in the genealogy of Cain in Genesis, right? It's it's Cain's descendants who invent metallurgy and use it to make weapons.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  Right, and who discover divination and who discover music? And use it for seduction and right for for these other things, right? Because and the idea is that these these demonic spirits that are antithetical to humanity bring knowledge to humans before they're ready for it. Right, that a time would come when humanity had reached a level of spiritual maturity, when they could receive this knowledge.

• 21:27Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  And and put it to proper use. And so it gets revealed early. Right, and that and that begins with the serpent in the garden. Right, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not itself evil. Right, so Adam is created, humanity is created innocent, right? But innocent like a child is innocent. And created for this purpose, created in God's image in order to grow into his likeness.

• 21:57Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 21:58Speaker 02

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

• 22:12Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  He knows what what good and evil are. And this is the way the phrase, the knowledge of good and evil is used throughout the Old Testament. It's used to refer to a child coming to sort of what we would call the age of accountability, coming to the age where they understand good and evil, right and wrong. And so the serpent comes and promises, the devil comes and promises, you know, no, God doesn't want you to have this because he doesn't want you to be like him. Here's the shortcut. Get this knowledge now before you're prepared for it. And that brings about destruction. So, yes, the the atomic bomb is revealed to man. We don't use it as a carbon neutral source of electrical energy. Right, we use it to make a weapon. And

• 23:00Speaker 02

  I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan.

• 23:04Tucker Carlson?

  I'm highly aware of it. I'm highly aware of it.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  And it's one of the first things it gets used for.

• 23:09Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Is to wipe out.

• 23:10Tucker Carlson?

  I'm fixated on it, actually.

• 23:12Speaker 02

  Wipe out most of the Christian population of Japan.

• 23:14Tucker Carlson?

  So they zeroed in on a church.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:16Tucker Carlson?

  Yep. So, um, and that infuriates people when you, when you say it, but it's true.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that, that's a, that's a pattern, right? And so, um, yeah, that, that is the understanding. And so they're not, uh, the, the promise is always, oh, I'm going to give you the secret knowledge. This is going to give you power. This is going to give you control. This is going to give you influence. This is going to give you X, Y, Z, right? But ultimately it ends up being toward humanity's destruction.

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• 26:05Tucker Carlson?

  So, to go back to the Nephilim, Nephilim.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:12Tucker Carlson?

  The passage in Genesis we're referring to, which is just a couple of sentences long, I think, is explaining why God sent the flood. Why does all of this have to be destroyed? Why does peak civilization, peak technology have to be destroyed? And those two, can you summarize what it says?

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it refers to the Nephilim as the men of renown.

• 26:34Tucker Carlson?

  Men of renown.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  So it's referencing these kings, these ancient kings.

• 26:38Tucker Carlson?

  The people in charge.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Who are looked at as heroes, as divine heroes by these post-flood pagans. Look back to them as, these were the leaders of the golden age. These are the great figures. These are the spirits we want to emulate, right? These are the people we want to be like, the great heroes. And instead, Genesis casts them as these evil, wicked tyrants and thugs who are leading people to destruction, to chaos, right? Genesis says that it gets to the point where every thought of humanity is always evil all the time. That's, and these people are actively...

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Leading humanity in that direction. It's not just coincidence, right? They're, they're teaching this, they're embodying this, right? And so when you, when you have a person who are calling a, a giant or an Nephilim, we're talking about sort of a fully demonized human. So in the way the church has traditionally talked about sin related to what we were just talking about with the mind, there's sort of these stages. First stage is thought comes into your mind, right?

• 28:02Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  You can't control that, just like you're walking down the street and you see something or hear something, right? Thought comes into your mind. That's not really sin yet, right? But then we start to entertain that thought. Start to dwell on that thought. We start to let that thought take root. Start to let that thought turn into a plan, right?

• 28:24Tucker Carlson?

  Been there.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Then we let that plan turn into action, right?

• 28:27Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 28:28Speaker 02

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

• 29:00Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Or lust.

• 29:01Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  Or, you know, addiction, right?

• 29:03Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  All these things. So it gets to the point where it takes control. And then beyond that, you get what we call demonic possession, where there is this sort of spirit that is now driving full time. You're not even really making your own decisions anymore. You're kind of lost to it. And then sort of the furthest you can go in terms of being lost, when we're talking about these Nephilim and these giants is that spirit isn't in control of you anymore. You just agree with it. You're on board. With that sort of demonic spirit deliberately, you know, you're rejoicing and enjoying, right? Sort of the chaos of the destruction and the and the wickedness. And by the grace

• 29:47Speaker 02

  of God, there's relatively few of those people, right? But they do exist.

• 29:52Tucker Carlson?

  Do you mind if I just pull up the passage?

• 29:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:55Tucker Carlson?

  There's one part of it I want to ask you about, which you haven't addressed, which is just how different the Nephilim, I mean, they're substantively different. They're genetically different from people. And I think this is the most evocative, the most interesting, the weirdest. This is, I think this is NIV, whatever, it's a version of the Old Testament. "When human beings began to increase in number in the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, 'My spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal, and their days will be 120 years. The Nephilim were on the earth in these days and also afterward,

• 30:40Tucker Carlson?

  and the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children with them. They were the heroes of old men of renown.'"

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:49Tucker Carlson?

  So that's describing mating between spiritual entities, sons of God, whatever that means.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:57Tucker Carlson?

  And human women, really the rape of them, whoever they choose suggests rape.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah.

• 31:04Tucker Carlson?

  So what is that?

• 31:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, "sons of God" is used, for example, in Job. This is referring to a group of, and what we would call angelic beings.

• 31:16Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  So the ancient texts, including ancient Jewish texts, will use small g gods to refer to them, but that makes us really uncomfortable. The modern world is so.

• 31:29Tucker Carlson?

  As monotheists, yes.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  Angelic beings works a little better.

• 31:33Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  But even that, we think of angels and we think, you know, oh, you know, kind of effeminate guy with wings, right? And that's not really what what angels are. Angels, angelic beings are sort of vast cosmic intelligences.

• 31:51Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  And so we have to sort of think about that a little differently, like what a spirit is.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  But yes, this is talking about them having intimate relations with with human women and that that is involved in the production of these people, right? Of the giants who we were

• 32:15Tucker Carlson?

  The Nephilim.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Talking about, right? And their sort of reproduction, right? On the earth.

• 32:21Tucker Carlson?

  And Okay, so that's a different genetic profile. They're not fully human.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Right, right. And so this is

• 32:30Tucker Carlson?

  Now we're getting freaky.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is, this is also an inversion, right? Because of course, the, the, from the pagan perspective, they would say these people are part divine. Right? So the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is two thirds

• 32:49Speaker 02

  divine and one third human.

• 32:52Speaker 02

  According to, to the Epic of Gilgamesh. And there's a text called the Book of the Giants that we found among the Dead Sea Scrolls.

• 33:00Tucker Carlson?

  Huh.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  It's not part of the Bible, but it includes a list of the giants, a list of the Nephilim. And Gilgamesh is one of the names.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  That's listed there. So this was a very deliberate, right? This is just incidental.

• 33:15Tucker Carlson?

  And this was in Qumran.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And so this is, you know, a millennium later. But they still have Gilgamesh in mind as one of the

• 33:25Tucker Carlson?

  This is right at the turn of the last millennium.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  There, yeah, yeah.

• 33:30Tucker Carlson?

  Around the time of Jesus.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  So that, of course, was part of why they were so great and so good and so admirable and why they had this secret knowledge. And so this is turning that around and saying, no, they're two thirds demon, essentially. They're two thirds unclean spirit. They're two thirds.

• 33:53Tucker Carlson?

  But this idea, just like the, the fact of it, that entities from the spiritual realm, non-human entities, whatever they are, however we're going to describe them, lower G gods, angels, demons, whatever, that they can mate with human beings and produce not fully human replicas of human beings who can walk among us. And rule over us like this is a biblical principle?

• 34:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, yeah, but what this what this sort of corresponds to, right? If we had a time machine and a right, a GoPro is that there were these particular rituals that were happening that were involved in the production of the the next king. And this happens after the flood, too. And what one of the big clues to this that's in the Old Testament is there's this figure who shows up after the flood, after the Exodus, Og, the king of Bashan, who is described as the last of the Rephaim in scripture and who exactly the Rephaim were? We sort of weren't sure.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  The word pops up a few places, other places in the Old Testament in Isaiah. The text that's traditionally understood to talk about the fall of the devil from heaven talks about as he's thrown down into the underworld, the Rephaim rising up to meet him.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  So there are these few places. There's Psalm 88 talks about will the Rephaim arise and praise you when it's talking about in the underworld, talking about would they praise God? The answer being assumed no.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  But we now know exactly who they were because in the mid 20th century, we discovered the city of Ugarit, which had been destroyed in the Bronze Age collapse around 1200 B.C. and lost. Nobody knew it was there. What do you do existed? It was discovered and we discovered a library of texts there in a language that we can now call Ugaritic after the city.

• 36:01Tucker Carlson?

  Where is it? Pardon me.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  It's it's it's in Western Syria, just above Lebanon.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  Uh, just north of Lebanon and Raschamra is what it's called now.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  And we found this library of texts. Ugaritic is a Semitic language. So it's like Hebrew or Aramaic in terms of the vocabulary and the grammar. But it's written in cuneiform on tablets. And so those tablets survived because those clay tablets are very difficult to break, even if you try.

• 36:35Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 36:37Speaker 02

  And in there, we shed a lot of light on the Old Testament. Because as I mentioned earlier, there's a lot of words that only appear once in the Hebrew Old Testament, but we now have cognate words in Ugaritic that help us understand some of these things. But one of the texts there is a ritual text for when the king died.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  And when the king of Ugarit died, they did this funerary ritual where they offered sacrifices and did what is essentially magic, right? Ritual magic to try to ward off the Rephaim, who were the spirits of these dead ancient kings.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  So that the king who had just died could pass by them safely to get into the underworld. And so that then showed us, oh, okay. Well, so that's what Isaiah is talking about. That's what the Psalms are talking about. The spirits of these dead kings. And so Og being the last one, right? He was alive at the time of the Exodus. He's one of these giants. Deuteronomy describes his bed.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  It randomly says, you know, talks about Og, talks about Og being slain by the Israelites. Him being slain is talked about in Numbers and Deuteronomy and in two different Psalms. They sing about how great it is that Og, king of Bashan, was slain by by God through the Israelites. And they say Og's bed, he's had this iron bed and it gives the dimensions. And you're sort of like, well, that's a random fun fact, you know, Og slept here.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  And the dimensions are huge. You're like, okay, he's a giant, right? But we, we found a ritual bed of the same measurements in the great Ziggurat of Edmonanki in Babylon.

• 38:28Tucker Carlson?

  A rock.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, in the city of Babylon. And that ritual bed was used in the sexual rituals to produce the next king.

• 38:43Speaker 02

  So this is not just saying Og was tall. This is saying Og came out of this sort of sexual ritual. And this would involve what were called at the time shrine prostitutes. These were enslaved women who were sort of used as vessels for, they would be seen to be possessed by

• 39:05Speaker 02

  the spiritual entity. And then there would be sexual relations with the king at the time. So the king at the time was seen to be as part divine and part human. We have this woman who's possessed and then she is human. And so that's, you get the two thirds, one third, there's sort of three parents.

• 39:26Tucker Carlson?

  So the, the temple prostitute would be the mother of the new king.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 39:30Tucker Carlson?

  And the idea was because she was possessed by spirits, those spirits would infuse the new king.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Right, right. And that's sort of, and so birthed by, by that, right? So it's the son of the previous king who was divine and the son of this lower G, lowercase g, god, right? And, and so that, that ritual,

• 39:56Speaker 02

  it was common throughout the ancient world. After the rise of Christianity, it was still common. You see it in places like Asia.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  The Khmer Empire in Cambodia had a version of this.

• 40:08Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 40:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then the most recent example is Japan, right? Where

• 40:14Tucker Carlson?

  The most civilized, technologically advanced, rational country in the world, really?

• 40:18Speaker 02

  That's

• 40:19Tucker Carlson?

  In ancient Japan?

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Well, up, up, technically still currently on the, when a new Japanese emperor succeeds to the throne, he ritually and ceremonially spends the night with the sun goddess.

• 40:38Tucker Carlson?

  Up until when?

• 40:39Speaker 02

  As part of the coronation ritual. Well, they, they still do it, but the Japanese government says that the sexual element of it was removed after World War II.

• 40:48Tucker Carlson?

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• 42:50Tucker Carlson?

  So up until World War II, the Japanese emperor was having sex with a sun goddess?

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Yes. So Hirohito would have been the last one.

• 43:05Tucker Carlson?

  Who was the sun? Goddess.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, this is there. He would go into a chamber with a number of concubines.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  Were embodying. Right. The sun goddess. So this is exactly this kind of ritual still going on.

• 43:22Tucker Carlson?

  So how did, okay, so this is Japan, which is an island in. East Asia.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:29Tucker Carlson?

  And this is a like precise replication of what was happening in the Near East.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:35Tucker Carlson?

  It was a long way away.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:37Tucker Carlson?

  How, and then also in Indochina, among the Kemmers.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:42Tucker Carlson?

  So also far from Japan and even farther from the Middle East. So like, how are these totally different cultures, languages, geographic locations, all doing exactly the same weird thing?

• 43:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, and, and, and I mean, this is where we get to the idea of a demonic spirit.

• 43:58Tucker Carlson?

  Cause maybe it's real.

• 43:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, we just. We, we, we have to accept this and, and we, we.

• 44:04Tucker Carlson?

  Is that the answer?

• 44:05Speaker 02

  We know this. Well, yeah, we, we know, we know this, right? There, there, we've seen sort of mass evil arise within living memory in the world. That can't be explained by a large group of people all making the same bad decisions simultaneously. By coincidence, right?

• 44:23Tucker Carlson?

  This is what brought me to God was this exact. Understanding, it's very obvious observation, which somehow I missed, but yes, that's right.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and we've all been on the less negative side, right? We've all been in crowds. We've been in groups. We've been in stadiums. We've been in a place of worship with a group of people. Where we've had the experience of sort of acting together. Right. Of participating in something together. Right. And that's, that's ultimately what a spirit is. A spirit is a sort of collective consciousness. At a level of sort of above. Human. Right?

• 45:09Speaker 02

  It's hard to understand, right? But if we work.

• 45:12Tucker Carlson?

  But it's not hard to recognize.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Back a little bit, right?

• 45:14Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  So our human body, right, is is made up of, there are actually suborganisms within our human body, right? It's kind of gross to think about, but chemically, right now, my gut flora and your gut flora are having chemical conversations.

• 45:32Tucker Carlson?

  I'm sorry?

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Right? As we sit here, the bacteria, our digestive bacteria communicate chemically.

• 45:43Tucker Carlson?

  With one another?

• 45:44Speaker 02

  With one another. Yeah. When when humans get together, right?

• 45:51Speaker 02

  There are all of these functions going on within our bodies, right, that have their own kind of low level consciousness. And then we have our human consciousness, which is sort of over the top of that, which is the summing up of all of that. And so when we talk about angelic beings or demonic beings, we're just talking about a level of consciousness that's then above the individual human.

• 46:16Tucker Carlson?

  But they're not projections of the individual human. They exist separate and apart from the.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  They exist separate and we participate in them.

• 46:23Tucker Carlson?

  Right. But we don't create them.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  We sort of embody them in the world, right? We kind of, this is, this is what God created humanity for originally. Right? So we said earlier, Adam is created sort of innocent at the beginning of this journey to grow into the the likeness of God. The way he would do that is by functioning as God's image in the world. So in Genesis one, the six days of creation, the first three days, before that starts, God says, the problem is that the earth is formless and void. In Hebrew, it's tohu abohu.

• 47:05Tucker Carlson?

  Tohu, tohu abohu?

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Tohu abohu. Yeah, it rhymes and, and it means basically it's formless or chaotic, it's disordered, and it's empty.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  And so in the first three days, God sets it in order. Right? So he separates the light from the darkness. He separates the sky from the sea. He separates the dry land from the sea. So he places everything in order. And then in the second set of three days, days four, five and six, they correspond. Right? So day four, he's already separated light from darkness, sun, moon, stars.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  Right? Sort of the bodies. Uh, he's already separated the sky and the sea. Fifth day, he fills the sky with life. He fills the sea with life.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  Sixth day, he creates, um, land, animals and man. Right? Cause yeah, on the third day he had separated. So he's taking care of those, but then he says to man, when he's been created, fill the earth and subdue it.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  And what is that two-part command? Subdue means to put it in order.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  Right? And fill it, fill it with life. And so humanity is created to sort of continue that work of God in the world.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  That's the purpose, to continue to participate in what God is doing in the world.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  That then trans transforms humanity. So positive example of this, God is at work continually in the world, loving

• 48:41Speaker 02

  every human person. When I go and I show love to my neighbor, that love's not coming from me. Right? I'm participating in God's love. God is loving them through me, but that transforms me.

• 48:55Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  That love transforms and changes me more toward God's likeness.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  And the reverse is true. Right? And in that way, I'm sort of embodying the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit in the world.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  But the flip side is true. That means humanity can also embody other spirits in the world.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  And when you do that and you bring that into the world and make it concrete, that also changes you.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  And it's not just a spiritual or a psychological transformation. It's even a physical transformation. We've seen that you can see someone who has gone down a dark road in life. A photo of them.

• 49:35Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  They repent, they change, they come back. You see a photo of them out, you could physically see it.

• 49:41Tucker Carlson?

  Well, there's no question about it.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  That transformation happens in both directions.

• 49:47Tucker Carlson?

  You can read it in their faces.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so as humans, we're gonna participate in something. There are things larger than us at work in the world. Right? God being the most important one. And we're either gonna participate in what he's doing in the world and be formed and shaped by that, or we're gonna participate in something else and be formed and shaped by that. And the end of that is our destruction.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  Right? Of ourselves and each other.

• 50:16Tucker Carlson?

  There are, um, the, the reason I was lingering on the creation of the Nephilim.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:25Tucker Carlson?

  Is because it suggests this idea that sounds really radical when you first think about it, that there are hybrids.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:32Tucker Carlson?

  Spirit, human together. But then as you talk about it a little bit and you realize that every culture has always believed this. In fact, Jesus is described as the, as the union of God and a human woman. It's like, actually, it's a central concept everywhere, all the time. Like, it's not shocking.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:51Tucker Carlson?

  Right? Right?

• 50:52Speaker 02

  Not in a sexual way in that case. Yeah. Be clear, yeah.

• 50:55Tucker Carlson?

  Right, not in a sexual way, right?

• 50:56Speaker 02

  But, but yes, yeah, yeah.

• 50:58Tucker Carlson?

  This baby is the product of God's spirit and a human woman.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  And Christ is the express image of God, right? He is the fullness of the image.

• 51:07Tucker Carlson?

  Right. And the Greek myths tell

• 51:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:09Tucker Carlson?

  Different but related stories about people being. So why is it crazy? And I think people have, you know, lived in the world for a while. Why is it crazy to someone have a feeling when you're talking to someone that this is not, that there's something else going on here? That this person's not, you know? Does this still happen?

• 51:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think.

• 51:33Tucker Carlson?

  I have felt that way really strongly about people in charge a couple of times. Not just I disagree with them, I just, you know, I think you're a bad person. It's not even that. It's like, what is this?

• 51:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. No, I have, I have only

• 51:49Speaker 02

  kind of thankfully met a person like that once in my life. It was in a part of my pastoral training in a, in a forensic psych ward. I met a person who had, I won't describe what, cause it's hideous and you won't be able to get it out of your head, but had done horrific things to a child and that's how he ended up there.

• 52:05Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  But who enjoyed bragging about it and describing it in detail to people and watching the look on their faces. Right? Like that level of gone. So there, there are people like that.

• 52:18Tucker Carlson?

  And did you feel as you talked to this person or listened to this person that there was, this was not fully human or this was some kind of hybrid?

• 52:26Speaker 02

  You could look in his eyes and see that there was something inhuman there.

• 52:32Tucker Carlson?

  I've had that same experience with people, not, not quite as cartoonish and obvious as that, but still like, what is this?

• 52:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 52:39Tucker Carlson?

  So what is this?

• 52:40Speaker 02

  It's, well, I mean, I mean, that's, so we would say in the church that, that to become like Christ, to be formed in, in the likeness of God is to become truly human. That's what it means to be human.

• 52:54Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 52:55Speaker 02

  And so to the degree which you go down the other road, you become something inhuman.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  St. John Christostom in one of his homilies is talking to, so he's, he's preaching in Constantinople to just regular people.

• 53:13Tucker Carlson?

  Fourth century.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. End of the fourth, beginning of the fifth. Yeah. And he, he says to his people, he says, so you believe that if someone dies a violent death, they become a demon. Right? So we kind of had that cultural idea too, right? Somebody dies some kind of violent or horrible death. They come back as this vengeful ghost or whatever.

• 53:32Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Murder victims haunt the house where they were killed.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they apparently had that kind of idea too. And he says, uh, that's incorrect. He says, it is people who live like demons who become demons.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  So in the same way that there is an actual transformation of humanity, as, as we're formed in the likeness of God, there is an actual transformation of humanity into something else.

• 54:04Tucker Carlson?

  Of course, then it's obvious. You become how you live, for sure.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  When you go, when you go down that other, it's an actual metaphysical transformation of who you are, even to the point where, so a big part of the understanding of what's going on with the Nephilim before the flood is that a lot of the demonic spirits that are talked about later in scripture and after the flood are understood to be the spirits of those Nephilim, of those dead Nephilim. This is explicit in like the book of Jubilees, which is a Jewish text from the period in between the, the Old and New Testaments, but a very important one. If you read like Josephus's Jewish antiquities, he's cribbing

• 54:48Speaker 02

  from the history in Jubilees all the time. He just accepts it as historical. And it talks about, at the time of the flood, the Nephilim are wiped out, they all die, and they have sort of a leader who's named Mastama. And Mastama comes to God and wants to strike this bargain with him. "Don't, don't send us all into the abyss. Don't send us all into, into like a fire. Let some of us stay on the earth. We promise if you let us do that, we'll only torment bad people. We'll only torment wicked people." And in, in the

• 55:30Speaker 02

  book of Jubilees, God agrees to allow 10% of them to remain, to torment wicked people, but it says that God's motive is he wants to use that to bring wicked people to repentance. Right? So there's sort of a, a theodicy going on there, right? Just a question of God, why does God allow these demonic?

• 55:48Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  Spirits. But you see reflections of that story even in like the Gospels. Right? Because they're the the spirits are told at that time, you're going to be uh,

• 56:02Speaker 02

  you're allowed to honor until the last judgment and then you're going to the lake of fire with everybody else, but you get this sort of reprieve. So for example, when when Christ comes to the demoniac man and the demons say to him, have you come to torment us before the time?

• 56:16Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  Like, hey, wait, we had a deal.

• 56:18Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 56:20Speaker 02

  That's and then uh, he ends up casting them into the pigs and the pigs run off the cliff. And it says they run off the cliff into the abyss, which is the place where those other demonic spirits were imprisoned. And there's a dynamic going on there where the name Jesus is actually the name Joshua. Right? Of course, Joshua in the book of Joshua goes and battles these giant clans to sort of reclaim the land and pure heart them from evil. That's paralleled with Christ is sort of the true Joshua comes into the land to purify it from evil and he's dealing with the spirits of these same these same beings.

• 57:01Speaker 02

  And so the the idea that how does that become a spirit? Well, I mean, we've seen this, right? You you can point to men in history who were wicked men, right? Who are long dead, but their spirit has lived on.

• 57:17Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, no doubt.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  People have continued to participate in that spirit and embody it, right? And and bring it forward. Same is true on the other side. Those are the people we call saints. Right? They live a lived a life embodying the spirit of God, being formed into his likeness. And even though they've died, sort of their spirit lives on. They become the patrons of people and nations and families and people groups. And continue to have this life, right?

• 57:46Tucker Carlson?

  As so you're describing the process of becoming that every person experiences. You're becoming something. But Genesis 6 is describing an act of creation.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:57Tucker Carlson?

  Saying that these beings were different from the very start because they didn't have two human parents.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 58:05Tucker Carlson?

  So that's a very different thing.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  Well, and there's, so that we also have to understand what it means to be part of a people in the ancient sense. We have concepts like ethnicity and DNA and

• 58:18Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 58:18Speaker 02

  And these kind of things that of course they had no idea about those concepts. So being part of a people was about two things, participating in their initiation rituals.

• 58:30Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  And then participating in the ongoing ritual life of the community. So biblically, you look at ancient Israel, what made you an Israelite is if you were male, you were circumcised. If you were female, you were either the daughter or the wife of a circumcised male. And you ate the Passover, right? You participated in the festal sort of year. Within Christianity, right? It's your baptized initiation, right? And then you participate in the Eucharist and the ongoing sacramental life of the church. So the same was true on this other side, right? So what we've been talking about is essentially the initiation ritual. Right?

• 59:17Speaker 02

  The beginning, right? And then there was an ongoing ritual life. And according to the Book of Wisdom or the Wisdom of Solomon, that depending on where you land, Christianity may or may not be part of your Old Testament.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  That makes this explicit, other texts outside of the scriptures make this explicit that the ongoing ritual life of these people involved human sacrifice. And human sacrifice involved cannibalism.

• 59:47Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  We have a very skewed view of sacrifice. We haven't done a lot of animal sacrifice and seen a lot of it. So we have kind of a skewed view that it's about killing the animal. It's not really about killing the animal. It's about eating the animal.

• 59:58Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  Part of it being offered to God or a God. And then part of it being consumed, right? And so cannibalism, either at the level of you see in Mesoamerica, right? Blood drinking. Right, that's why blood drinking is forbidden throughout the Bible.

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  And so there was cannibalism involved in, in this human sacrifice. And so that was sort of renewed. You have this initiation, you have this beginning, and then there is this ongoing ritual participation.

• 1:00:33Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, and I mean, not to disagree with you, but I just have to ask, like, if so, if ancient peoples had no sense of genetics, why were genealogy so important?

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  Well, that's, that's descent.

• 1:00:47Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, but it's genetic descent.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that could be broken. Right? So let me give you an example. Caleb, there are sort of two, there's, there's the episode after the Exodus where the spies, one spy from each of the 12 tribes of Israel is sent into the land. And 10 of them come back and say, no, there's Nephilim there, we can't do it.

• 1:01:10Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  And it's gonna be too tough, right? You don't want to mess with them, right? And two of them, Joshua and Caleb.

• 1:01:17Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Come back and say, no, you know, yeah, we can't do this by ourselves, but God's on our side. God's gonna win the victory for us.

• 1:01:25Speaker 02

  Put your faith in him, we can do this. Caleb is identified in the text as being a Kenazite. A Kenazite is not only a Canaanite, it's one of the Canaanite tribes they were supposed to wipe out.

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  It's one of the giant clans. It's one, these people. He's technically one of them genetically or by descent. Right? But he's listed as an elder of the tribe of Judah in the Old Testament. Because he was incorporated.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  And when you're incorporated, they would have said about him, no, Judah was his father. He was a descendant of Judah. Right? Now, we would say, well, not genetically.

• 1:02:08Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  But from their view, now that he's been ritually incorporated, you, you didn't just become an Israelite in general. You became a member of a particular family that was part of a particular clan, that was part of a particular tribe. Right? And those are now his people, and the Kenazites are not his people.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  He is now not a Kenazite. So that's the difference is that that was that was malleable. That was changeable.

• 1:02:33Tucker Carlson?

  So when did the requirement emerge that in order to be Jewish, you had to be the son of a Jewish mother?

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  That was after the

• 1:02:42Tucker Carlson?

  Destruction of the temple?

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was after the return from exile. So if you read Ezra and Nehemiah, they're talking about that. They're talking that that's when they banned Israelite men marrying foreign women.

• 1:02:53Tucker Carlson?

  Right. And the matrilineal descent is a way of ensuring

• 1:02:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:02:58Tucker Carlson?

  Genetics.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  Just guaranteeing that. Yeah.

• 1:03:00Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:03:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:00Tucker Carlson?

  Because everyone knows who your mom is.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  But so that's a later thing. If you look at in the Torah and Deuteronomy, there's a whole ritual setup for if you want to marry a woman from one of these other groups where she shaves her head. And there's this sort of ritual thing where she's her old life is put away and her new life, now she's in Israelite. Right. So that they had a way of incorporating.

• 1:03:21Tucker Carlson?

  Is there any fossil record that supports the idea of giants striding the earth?

• 1:03:27Speaker 02

  Actual 15 foot tall people?

• 1:03:29Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, I don't know how tall, but taller than

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, so they there's a lot of times. So when we have visual depictions, they're usually depicted as 15 foot tall.

• 1:03:38Tucker Carlson?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  But that's a that's a sort of deliberate coding. So in the ancient Near East, they believed that that their gods had a ritual body. That was about 15 feet tall. Um, and if you look at, uh, we've got excavated temples of Baal, for example, where they have footprints, they're supposed to be Baal's footprints. Right. Uh, as he was walking in to be sort of enthroned in his temple was the idea. And if you measure the stride, it's based on him being about 15 foot tall. So they're

• 1:04:17Tucker Carlson?

  Do we think they're real footprints?

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  Well, these are clearly carved by people.

• 1:04:22Tucker Carlson?

  Okay.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  Right. To represent that. But the idea is that's how tall the gods were. So that's how they usually depict the Nephilim as being 15 foot tall. Um, Goliath is sort of one of the last stragglers.

• 1:04:34Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  At the end of the book of Joshua, it says that sort of the last of the Anakim, which is another word for the Nephilim fled into Philistine territory. And so then when David comes as king, he sort of roots out the last of them. Right.

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

  Goliath being one of them, how tall he is, again, numbers, there's not numerals, so things go weird places. According to the Greek Old Testament tradition, he was six foot six, which is like two inches taller than me, but which in the early Iron Age would have made him gigantic. The average, the average man was, I think, like five foot five, right at the time in that area. In the Hebrew text, he's nine foot nine, which is more clearly a sort of supernatural kind of height.

• 1:05:24Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:05:24Speaker 02

  Right. To sort of, to sort of convey this. So certainly there were people who were abnormally tall, like in the six foot six, six foot seven range, right? Some of them who, who were these people, we do not have, and given we don't have a lot of skeletal remains from that period either, right? That are.

• 1:05:46Tucker Carlson?

  There are a million reports from the 19th century in North America, in the U.S. of people finding nine foot tall skeletons in some cave in Nevada, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They were all destroyed by the Smithsonian. Any of that true?

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  Um, not as, not as far as we could tell, not as far as we could verify. And some of those were proven to be the Cardiff Giants. Those are proven to be proven to be hoaxes. Um, so I, I think a lot of that came out of, there, there was very much in the anti-modernist movement, right? What became evangelical Christianity. There was very much an idea that we need to scientifically prove that everything in the Bible is literally true.

• 1:06:27Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  And, and that led to some of that grasping.

• 1:06:33Tucker Carlson?

  But as far as you know, there have never been found on earth fossils of human beings.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  Not verifiably.

• 1:06:40Tucker Carlson?

  Not, not verifiably. Okay.

• 1:06:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:42Tucker Carlson?

  Do you believe that since Genesis six says this process of the sons of God impregnating the daughters of man is still ongoing? Do you think that happens now?

• 1:06:54Speaker 02

  I mean, it certainly could. Yeah, it certainly, it certainly could. Like we said, it was 80 years ago, we were doing a similar sort of thing with the Japanese emperor. There's no reason it couldn't. There's no reason the attendant later rituals with human sacrifice and things couldn't be going on.

• 1:07:13Tucker Carlson?

  Because they're just glimpses of it. I mean, what's, what's interesting about the Epstein files, for example.

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:18Tucker Carlson?

  Which, to a extent, I have read them, are only hinting at various things, and you have no idea exactly what it means. It is like reading an esoteric text. It's like, you're not read in, so you don't really interpret it clearly. But there is a fixation on blood, on genetics. And there seems to have been that for, well, since the time that we're talking about, like.

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:41Tucker Carlson?

  Blood, human sacrifice, sex, not just for pleasure, but, or reproduction, but as a ritual. Like, these are ongoing motifs through human history, right?

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  Aleister Crowley is a real person. Yeah.

• 1:07:51Tucker Carlson?

  100%. But I mean, the Incas were doing the same thing that, I don't know, some remote African tribe was doing, the Canaanites were doing. It's like, everyone's doing the same thing, is fixated on the same four or five themes.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  I am by no means a flat-earther, but early NASA, there was some weird stuff with some of those scientists.

• 1:08:09Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, big time.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, yeah. So that's definitely right. That, and, and.

• 1:08:16Tucker Carlson?

  Well, so, but I guess what I'm saying is if different cultures at different times throughout history are focused on exactly the same kind of non-obvious ideas, like, the spirit world breeds with people, technology comes from the spirit world, blood is somehow magical, human sacrifice is like the source of power, like, who would, who would think of these things? Like, nobody.

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  This isn't a coincidence that just randomly they all have the same bad idea.

• 1:08:45Tucker Carlson?

  They're rooted in some kind of reality that.

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  Right. And it's, and it's, it's a, like I said, that you're, you're going to embody and participate in something, right? Spiritually. And as.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  Christianity has receded and been lost in quote unquote, Western countries. Right? We should expect more and more of that to come intruding back in because that's the other option.

• 1:09:11Tucker Carlson?

  No, you would expect something brand new and like people would think of like a new religious expression that isn't based on human sacrifice, but they never have.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  Right? Well, if it was just humans making it up.

• 1:09:21Tucker Carlson?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Tucker Carlson?

  So it's obvious. It's obvious to me. I mean, I'm not a priest unlike you. So maybe this like, I'm just figuring this out, but like clearly human sacrifice does bring dark power to the people who commit it.

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:09:37Tucker Carlson?

  Like duh.

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  Yes. They, they, yeah, they weren't doing this stuff because it didn't work. They were having some kind of experience. They were having some kind of, right? Something was happening there.

• 1:09:49Tucker Carlson?

  So witchcraft is real.

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and, and when you read just purely pagan sources, right? They're kind of honest about it. Right? And, and this stuff is, so we've, we've received the classics through the enlightenment, which means we purge all the, not just anything quote unquote supernatural, but even religious elements. There are still people publishing books talking about how Plato and Aristotle were not religious. You know, they represent these sort of, because the, the figures of the enlightenment sort of recast the ancient philosophers as versions of them. You know, and since they had rejected the religion of their time, well, clearly someone

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  like Plato or Aristotle can't have accepted the religion of their.

• 1:10:39Tucker Carlson?

  They were like enthusiastic polytheists.

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah. Aristotle's school was in a temple of Apollo. Right? They were on board. They nuanced things, right? But I mean, in Plato's dialogue, Socrates talks about how he has this, this demon, this demon, this spirit that dwells within him and whispers wisdom to his soul.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:11:02Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02Speaker 02

  There's no, you know, it's Christians who come along and say that's a bad thing. Right? And then post-Christian enlightenment, people say, oh, well, that's silly. So we'll just.

• 1:11:12Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, it's not a thing.

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  But they're very honest about it. Right? Ancient authors are very honest. What's happening at the Bacchanalia? The actual Bacchanalia is people are being possessed by the Bacchae, by these spirits. And participating in, in drug and alcohol induced orgies, right? In, in public. At these feasts.

• 1:11:35Tucker Carlson?

  Again, the point of it is not just sex for pleasure. Let's go get laid. The point of it is to commune with, with demons.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  Right, right. It is part of the, yes, these spirits are possessing them. Right? Taking possession of them, taking over their body and participating in these things. That's what they say they were doing.

• 1:11:53Tucker Carlson?

  Well, that's, I think of the remaining world religions that we know about that are practiced in public. Only Haitian voodoo and African voodoo is honest about that.

• 1:12:02Speaker 02

  Talks that openly about it.

• 1:12:03Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, talks that openly about it.

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  Some forms of Hinduism, but yeah.

• 1:12:06Tucker Carlson?

  Okay.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  They aren't prevalent in the, the West, right? Outside of India. Right? Yeah.

• 1:12:10Tucker Carlson?

  But certainly in Haiti, like there's human sacrifice. It's denied in, in the United States media for whatever reason, but it's, talk to any Haitian about it.

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  It happens. Yeah.

• 1:12:20Tucker Carlson?

  Oh, it's the center of their religion.

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:22Tucker Carlson?

  Right. And, but the point of it is not just to kill kids for its own sake. The point of it is to receive spiritual power.

• 1:12:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I'm down in Southern Louisiana, so I'm not that far from.

• 1:12:35Tucker Carlson?

  And that still goes on.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  I mean, of course it does. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:39Tucker Carlson?

  So.

• 1:12:42Tucker Carlson?

  What are, like, what are we to understand about the Nephilim now?

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, I, I think it is. This possibility that's at the end of that chain of yielding to sin and wickedness. Right? This is the, the anti-saint.

• 1:13:01Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:13:02Speaker 02

  Right? This is, this is what happens when we not only don't find our full humanity in, in Christ, but give up our humanity in favor of something else.

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  That twists and distorts our humanity. And so, yeah, it is, it is this dark possibility. And there are people out there who have gone that, that far. I sometimes get asked, as someone who is that far gone, can they repent? Right? Can they turn back? And it's sort of, well, with God, all things are possible. Right? Like, I don't, I don't see how, but with God, all things are possible. Right? But an awareness that, that, that is a dark possibility and that, that it is something that happens. There are people doing this. I said, not long after the full Epstein files got released, I said, uh, on my podcast, I said, well, we now

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  know that the world is, is, uh, run by demon worshiping petter ass. Sort of like it has been since the Roman Empire.

• 1:14:13Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, or before.

• 1:14:15Speaker 02

  Right? And Christians were able to operate, right? During that time in a world that, you know, was, was, uh, that was how it, how it operated. So, um, I, I think it's good to be free of some of our delusions.

• 1:14:32Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  Right? In this regard. And not being aware of the spiritual world or ignoring it or denying it, doesn't make it stop existing.

• 1:14:42Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:14:43Speaker 02

  It's sort of like walking through a minefield under fire and just denying that there's a war happening.

• 1:14:47Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  You, you're just going to end up being a casualty, right? Of sort of the spiritual warfare and things that are going on all around you that you refuse to see.

• 1:14:59Tucker Carlson?

  It also seems to have, I mean, the world that you described pre-flood is a world that's just given itself over to rule by demons.

• 1:15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:10Tucker Carlson?

  And the manifestations.

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Everyone has come on board.

• 1:15:12Tucker Carlson?

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

• 1:15:34Tucker Carlson?

  I mean,

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  it starts over. Yeah.

• 1:15:36Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah. So what does that have implications for the moment we're living in on the brink of AI?

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, everywhere in, uh, this is true in the temple Jewish literature, it's true in the New Testament. When they're talking about the end, right, the end of the world,

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  Christ glorious appearing, right? When that ends, it's always compared to the days of Noah.

• 1:16:01Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  Right. It's always referred to as, and when Saint Peter responds with, why is he taking so long to return, right? With all the suffering and all the evil in the world. Saint Peter's answer is that the, uh, God is being patient and giving time, the maximal time for repentance.

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  But the world has reached a point and can and will reach a point again where no one's interested in that opportunity anymore.

• 1:16:32Speaker 02

  Right? And that's when the end will come because there's no point in delaying it at that point. But I think it's, it's important that people understand that the way salvation, even in Christian circles gets talked about a lot is it's salvation from the world.

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  Right? And, and I don't want someone to take from this conversation that, oh, okay. Well, you know, I could die and go to heaven and get away from all this. Yeah. The world's

• 1:16:59Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:00Speaker 02

  going to hell.

• 1:17:00Tucker Carlson?

  The great escape.

• 1:17:01Speaker 02

  But the salvation begins here, right? You, you can be saved from that now. That sort of spectrum of sin we talked about, right? You don't have to ride it all the way to the end. You can be set free from it at any point. Right? That slavery in this world, this is the purpose of Christ church, right? Is to offer the other answer, right? The other way, the way toward becoming, toward becoming truly human, being set free from that. Right? In this world and then, right? Enjoying a world that's free from that.

• 1:17:39Speaker 02

  Beyond this life and eternity. But both of those are included.

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  Right? In, in, uh, what salvation is and what's on offer.

• 1:17:51Tucker Carlson?

  So, I mean, how does it make you feel personally as you see the world moving in a way that's just more explicitly evil and the leadership of the world becoming just sort of openly demonic?

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:18:06Tucker Carlson?

  Does that strike fear into you or?

• 1:18:12Speaker 02

  Not, it doesn't strike fear to me because I think

• 1:18:18Speaker 02

  I think it's honest now. I don't think it's different. I think it's honest. I think it's revealed now, right? Because I don't think any of this just suddenly restarted.

• 1:18:30Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

  Like in 1968.

• 1:18:32Tucker Carlson?

  No, no.

• 1:18:34Speaker 02

  There is this sort of popular narrative that everything was beautiful from the end of World War II until about 1968, and that's just not true.

• 1:18:40Tucker Carlson?

  At all.

• 1:18:43Speaker 02

  And so it being now out there, right?

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  Now provides a number of opportunities for helping people, right? I deal with actual individual people, individual lives every day, right? In the church and being confronted by the fact that spiritual evil is real can be the shock that brings someone to, oh, God is real.

• 1:19:13Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:19:16Speaker 02

  Salvation is something I need to find.

• 1:19:18Tucker Carlson?

  I think that's often the case.

• 1:19:19Speaker 02

  These patterns in my life aren't just bad habits that I could kick anytime I want, but there's something going on in my life that I need to be set free from, right? And, and that's going to require some things of me, right? And require some changes and require some healing from God beyond myself, right? And, and so there is this now opportunity here that when everybody sort of thought everything was okay and they were okay and everything was fine, right? You had to try and convince somebody that there was a problem. You don't have to do that so much now.

• 1:19:51Tucker Carlson?

  No.

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:19:54Speaker 02

  And so, so I think there's an opportunity for a lot of people to help, be helped, to find freedom, right? To find salvation, to transform their lives. So I choose to look at it that way.

• 1:20:06Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:20:06Speaker 02

  Rather than the other.

• 1:20:08Tucker Carlson?

  I think that's the right way to look at it.

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:11Tucker Carlson?

  So what is your advice when someone comes to you in bondage? Like, what is the process for being set free?

• 1:20:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think the very first part is you have to become part of something and submit yourself to something bigger than yourself. Right? So in my case, obviously, that's the church. Right? Because, again, you're not just an individual out there, right? Your brain is not just closed in this box and you're just doing your own thing. You're participating in these spiritual realities, whether you like to or not. Right? And so you have to submit yourself to something, to being transformed by something. And that involves becoming part of a community. Right? Sharing bonds with other people. That community brings accountability.

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  Right? It brings a change of life, right? Because you can't live a life in isolation. Aristotle said, for someone to live alone, they have to be either a beast or a god.

• 1:21:12Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:15Speaker 02

  So, you know, you have to find this life in community. It's, as I was talking about, you find this transformation through participating in what God is doing in the world. Well, God is loving someone. I have to be with that person and love them, right? God is having compassion. I have to be with that person, have compassion for them and be kind for them. It's not something you could practice off by yourself. Definitely not something you could practice on the internet. Right?

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  But, and so you need to, you need to become a part of that. And then, within that, you need to form spiritual relationships with, within the Orthodox Church. That, we have the idea of spiritual fatherhood that's very important, where you have a person who you trust deeply, right? Who you sort of open up and bury your soul to, right? Who you, someone other than yourself, who you say, this is what I think I should do. Am I right?

• 1:22:15Speaker 02

  Should I, right? Where you can get feedback and have this ongoing relationship of guidance.

• 1:22:22Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:22:22Speaker 02

  As you work through these things. Because this isn't a snap. It isn't, you say a prayer. It isn't even you get baptized and now everything's great. Right. This is, this is a long process of, of working your way back down that, that road and then getting onto the right road and moving in a positive direction. But it's available to everyone, right? If you're willing to, right? Come and participate in it.

• 1:22:50Tucker Carlson?

  But it's not as simple as an altar call during a church service.

• 1:22:52Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and we know that, right? That's why I, I had a, a friend who was a, um, Assemblies of God pastor. And I asked him once, did you write the day you got saved? The day in your, in front of your Bible? He said, oh yeah, I wrote all of them.

• 1:23:08Speaker 02

  Because you go forward and then you go back to his life and be, oh, I don't think that took. Let me go do it again. Right? And so it is this ongoing thing, right? It is, uh, Adam was created to begin, right? This life of growth toward God, right? That, that doesn't just happen throughout this life, but stretches on into eternity.

• 1:23:32Speaker 02

  Cause God's infinite. So we're not going to get to the point where, you know, uh, now I know everything about God. Now, right? It's, it's sharing in God's life forever.

• 1:23:44Tucker Carlson?

  Has there ever been any other society at scale that didn't put God at the center? Or gods at the center? Put its religious practice at the center of its civilization?

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  No, no, it always happens.

• 1:23:57Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:23:57Speaker 02

  Right. We've recently covered that with a veneer of.

• 1:24:00Tucker Carlson?

  Science.

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  Oh no, we're insisting this isn't a religion.

• 1:24:05Speaker 02

  It's a secular ideology. Okay. You know?

• 1:24:09Speaker 02

  But there's, you know, there's an ideology, there's ritual activity, there are sacred texts. There are all the things religions have.

• 1:24:15Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:24:16Speaker 02

  You know? Yeah.

• 1:24:17Tucker Carlson?

  So that's never hap- but, but has there ever been a society that was as, um, dishonest about it as ours?

• 1:24:27Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:24:29Speaker 02

  No, I think that's the, there's a lot of spiritual delusion and self-delusion.

• 1:24:38Speaker 02

  And that comes out of, there, there was a move in the, the 18th and 19th centuries where sort of deliberately, uh, spiritual iconography, religious iconography, religious symbols and practices were taken over by the state.

• 1:24:55Tucker Carlson?

  I noticed.

• 1:24:56Speaker 02

  And in Europe first, I mean, you could go to the Capitol, see the, the, uh, deification of George Washington and

• 1:25:05Speaker 02

  sort of all of these things.

• 1:25:07Tucker Carlson?

  All the weird Masonic symbols on our currency, like what is that?

• 1:25:10Speaker 02

  Uh, being attributed to this political stuff, right? And sort of the formation of, you know, we're not going to be, we're not going to be, uh,

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  sola scriptura Protestants, talking about the original text, we're going to be all about the constitution and what did the framers have in mind?

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  We're just going to switch this all over into the, the political realm. And then as politics is kind of devolved, it's, you know, become even more sort of ephemeral than that, right? And so we're not willing to admit that our rituals are rituals. Uh, we're not willing to admit, you know, the, the way, the way most people talk about the economy is essentially the way ancient people would talk about a god.

• 1:25:57Tucker Carlson?

  What do you mean?

• 1:26:00Tucker Carlson?

  Flesh that out, that's fascinating.

• 1:26:01Speaker 02

  The, the economy makes decisions. The economy favors this group over that group. Uh, we need to do this and that to sort of appease the economy, right? Make sacrifices, right? So there are all these, you know, we don't call it Mammon, you know, but it's, it's the, the same kind of, it's fulfilling the same kind of, the same kind of idea, right? And, uh,

• 1:26:29Speaker 02

  Other for war, right? You can't, we don't call it Aries. We don't talk about a war god. Right? But we, we talk about national events that needs to be fed. It needs to be supplied with sacrifices need to be made and right. And so it's all the same ways of thinking because they're built into what it means to be human.

• 1:26:49Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  And so if you, if you remove overt religion, you just get covert.

• 1:26:56Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:26:57Speaker 02

  Religion.

• 1:26:59Tucker Carlson?

  Which is, but always a species of like what the Canaanites practiced and what the Maya's practiced.

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  It amounts to the same thing. It's paganism.

• 1:27:07Tucker Carlson?

  It's human sacrifice. Once again, whether it's abortion or war, whatever, it's killing people in order to get peace and prosperity and power.

• 1:27:15Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 1:27:17Tucker Carlson?

  What do you, I mean, how should Christians approach that?

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  Well, it's, it's.

• 1:27:23Tucker Carlson?

  A lot of them seem to ratify it. A lot of the leaders seem to be like, yeah, no, this is a good thing.

• 1:27:27Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, yes. Yeah. That's, and a lot of religion has been secularized. It's a bizarre phrase, right? But in the United States, it kind of has. I mean, it's, it started with the more leftward leaning religious bodies.

• 1:27:46Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  Becoming sort of just overtly political and oriented toward this world.

• 1:27:53Speaker 02

  And, but it has now gradually come to include a lot of the more rightward leaning religious bodies. Where sort of the, especially the eschatology of Christianity.

• 1:28:08Speaker 02

  The, the, the ultimate goal, right? Of blessedness is removed from sharing in the life of God himself or the life of the world to come. And it's made very this worldly. Right, so it's prosperity now.

• 1:28:24Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:28:25Speaker 02

  Right, and whether it's a, a mainline liberal Protestant denomination saying prosperity now in the sense of we need to help the poor and raise their standard of living, or whether it's,

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  because that's what the gospel is, right, or it's a prosperity preacher, right, in a more socially conservative church, saying, you know, give your seed and, you know, you'll get back 10 times, you know, the money and you'll have all this, well, this, right, it's taking that and moving it all, right, don't build up treasures in heaven, build them up here on earth.

• 1:29:05Speaker 02

  That's sort of, that's sort of the goal, right, and that is secularization in the, in the true sense, right, the, the first sort of thinker to talk about the, the seculum was St. Augustine in City of God, and he was using that City of God famously, where the title comes from, he's living at the time of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, which from their perspective was the end of the world.

• 1:29:33Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:29:34Speaker 02

  Certainly the end of the world as they knew it, right?

• 1:29:37Speaker 02

  And saying, him saying, so yes, there is this city of man, right, there is this empire, there are these kings, there is this government, there's also the city of God, and the city of God exists eternally and is steadfast, right? And he described what was going on outside as, as the secular, the secularum, right, the, which included in it's not just the world, but also the idea of an age, as in, it's constantly shifting, right, there's sort of this cyclical pattern, nations rise and fall, all these things happen, there's this sort of churn, right, and that's, but

• 1:30:19Speaker 02

  that's outside of the place where God is. And so, a lot of these formerly sort of overtly religious movements have just become engaged in that cycle, and you can watch them, it's like the, the, they're virtually in the news cycle now, right, in terms of what they're quote unquote preaching, right, and coming out and weighing in on, it's just sort of whatever's going on. In the news cycle right now, right? And this constant sort of churn and they're making these prophecies that don't come true. And oh, well, don't worry about that. Here's the next one. And it just, you know, continues in this, in this never anything, but it's

• 1:31:00Speaker 02

  not, it's divorced from the actual spiritual reality of who God is, who Christ is, right? What God is doing in the world. Those questions aren't even asked, right? It's more about asking God to bless what I'm doing in the world, or just asserting that God is blessing it is behind what I'm doing in the world.

• 1:31:25Tucker Carlson?

  What do you think of that?

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  Well, there's, there's a famous quote from Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, where a reporter asked him if he thought God was on the side of the Union.

• 1:31:34Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:35Speaker 02

  And he said, the question isn't whether God's on our side. The question is whether we're on God's.

• 1:31:38Tucker Carlson?

  Exactly.

• 1:31:40Speaker 02

  And that's the core question, right? The core question that anybody who's going to call themselves a Christian should be asking is, what is God doing in the world right now? Where is he active in the world right now? I need to get on board with that.

• 1:31:58Speaker 02

  I need to become a part of that. Not what do I want? What do I think should happen? And I'm going to try and get, you know, a whole bunch of people to try and pray and convince God to do, or I'm going to claim and assert that God is going to do what I think he should do. Right? That's, that's not only kind of a gross inversion of Christianity, but it's essentially the way ancient magic and sorcery worked.

• 1:32:27Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 1:32:29Speaker 02

  Right? That's what separates sort of your, when you're talking about ancient religion, right? In the, in the pagan world, where you're talking about the Greco-Roman world or the ancient Near East, the, the division between magic and just sort of pagan religion, right? Is that in pagan religion,

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  They thought that the gods, the spirits they were worshiping sort of remained free. So you could make a sacrifice, you make an offering to them, you try to cajole them into doing what you want. But they could say no, they could decide they don't favor you. Right? You read the Iliad, the gods could just decide to switch sides at the middle of the war. They sort of remain free with magic. The idea of ritual magic is that you get by doing the ritual in the correct way, saying the correct things, doing the correct things, you get the spiritual entity to do. You kind of compel it or command it to do what you want it to do.

• 1:33:26Tucker Carlson?

  That makes you God, God of, God of those demons.

• 1:33:29Speaker 02

  Right. And so even when someone identifies as a Christian, if they're out there trying to say, well, if you do X, Y, Z, right? If we get X number of people praying, if we do it, then God will. That's essentially magic.

• 1:33:52Speaker 02

  Right? The, the, the whole idea of Christian prayer and worship and the Christian life is that God is transforming me.

• 1:34:00Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:01Speaker 02

  Not that I'm changing God or getting God to change would be different, right? Or do something he wouldn't do otherwise.

• 1:34:08Tucker Carlson?

  Bossing God around.

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:12Tucker Carlson?

  So how much genuine Christian practice do you see?

• 1:34:18Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't want to be mean.

• 1:34:22Speaker 02

  I, I, no, I think on, on, if you go to the level of the average person, the average Christian person, regardless of what, denomination, what church, what group they identify with, right? Or are part of, or where they go on a Sunday morning, right? I think the average Christian person is trying to follow Christ as best they know how.

• 1:34:48Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:34:50Speaker 02

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

• 1:35:08Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:09Speaker 02

  If we're looking top down, that's where things get a little more troubling, right? In terms of

• 1:35:22Speaker 02

  in terms of, in terms of leadership. Obviously, I'm, I mean, I can't sit here as an Orthodox priest and pretend I'm not, you know, biased toward the Orthodox Church.

• 1:35:31Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, of course.

• 1:35:32Speaker 02

  That's, you know, on the table.

• 1:35:33Tucker Carlson?

  Let me frame it differently. When was the last time, how do you experience God, like actual God's work?

• 1:35:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:40Tucker Carlson?

  Day to day?

• 1:35:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, so there's both within the services of the church. Right? Because I see God very much working in that way. And it's not just the actual quote unquote worship service, but the time spent afterward in fellowship together, the life of the community, right? I see that continuously, right? I also, I mean, I hear people's confessions. And confession is done a little differently in the Orthodox Church than the Roman Catholic Church because we have this, as I said, spiritual fatherhood

• 1:36:22Speaker 02

  tradition. And so I've, I've seen people come through and come back from some really difficult and terrible things.

• 1:36:35Tucker Carlson?

  Like what?

• 1:36:37Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I don't want to divulge anything.

• 1:36:40Tucker Carlson?

  No, I mean, not in specifics, no names, but like what kind of things you're talking about?

• 1:36:45Speaker 02

  People who have had the kind of traumatic childhoods that you see as the origin of a villain in a movie.

• 1:36:52Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, like for real.

• 1:36:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. That, you know, and, and people who have gone down really dark roads of addiction and violence and, and come back from

• 1:37:04Tucker Carlson?

  Committing violence.

• 1:37:04Speaker 02

  From that, yeah.

• 1:37:08Speaker 02

  And, uh, and marriage is being saved, right? After things that should have destroyed them.

• 1:37:16Tucker Carlson?

  You've seen that.

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  You think, yeah. And so

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  that all happens, right? It really does.

• 1:37:25Tucker Carlson?

  You've seen marriages totally blown up that are saved.

• 1:37:28Speaker 02

  Yes. Yes, and it takes time and it takes a lot of work and both of the people have to be on board. But, but there is healing there on offer from God.

• 1:37:40Speaker 02

  Part of the, part of the failure of a lot of Christianity,

• 1:37:48Speaker 02

  broadly, is that an environment has been created, I think unintentionally, where people are afraid to open up and even talk about things like that.

• 1:37:59Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:37:59Speaker 02

  With anyone. It's sort of, we go to church on Sunday, we put on our Sunday best. We all act like everything's fine, when it's definitely not fine.

• 1:38:11Speaker 02

  And, you know.

• 1:38:12Tucker Carlson?

  This is why AA meetings are so wonderful.

• 1:38:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Tucker Carlson?

  Because there's no pretense like that.

• 1:38:16Speaker 02

  And, and, and I, I, I say to people,

• 1:38:21Speaker 02

  about confession, especially if they've come into the Orthodox Church and they're from a background that doesn't do it.

• 1:38:27Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:28Speaker 02

  Where there's a lot of trepidation and what is this? And I'm scared and how can I tell you these things? And you're a priest, I respect you, I don't want you to know these things, right? And I try and tell them, I'm like, each of us walks through life thinking we're the most disgusting, perverted, weird.

• 1:38:43Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:44Speaker 02

  You know, disturbed individual to ever walk the planet. Right? And if you're actually willing to open up with other people about that, you find out that most of them are dealing with the same stuff.

• 1:38:55Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:56Speaker 02

  And struggling with the same things.

• 1:39:00Speaker 02

  And the power of opening up about that in a place that's designed to bring you healing. Right? When we say over and over again, the Orthodox Church of the Church is a hospital, not a courtroom.

• 1:39:12Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:12Speaker 02

  It's not about finding who's guilty of what. Right? It's about helping people in various stages of woundedness, some of them almost dead. Right? Trying to help them find healing. Right? And restoration to life. There's incredible power to that, to just that honesty. Right? Of telling someone. Finally, this thing that I've been hiding from everyone, even myself, when I had managed it for decades, you know?

• 1:39:41Speaker 02

  Saying that out loud, right? Admitting it and then. Talking about, okay, how are we going to work on this? How are we gonna?

• 1:39:49Speaker 02

  Going to make things right? How are we going to start moving toward, toward healing and restoration?

• 1:39:53Tucker Carlson?

  A priest for almost 20 years, have the kind of? Confessions you receive changed? Are the problems that people are struggling with different from what they were? And what are the, what are the common ones? Again, without being?

• 1:40:06Speaker 02

  I mean, honest, honestly, they've, they've changed less than you'd think, but. There's, there's a pattern. When you hear confessions, usually the first six months to a year.

• 1:40:20Speaker 02

  You kind of get tested as a priest, right? So you get a lot of like, oh, I was stuck in traffic and I cussed at the guy who. You know, cut me off. And it's like, I'm sure you did, but I'm also sure there's a lot more. We'll let it be. We'll let it be for now. Right? You get those.

• 1:40:37Tucker Carlson?

  So that's, that's the confession?

• 1:40:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. And it's sort of those kinds of things.

• 1:40:42Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:42Speaker 02

  You know, oh, I was late for work and I made up a story, you know? Those kinds of things. But they're testing, right? They're seeing if it's safe.

• 1:40:50Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:40:51Speaker 02

  Right? They're pushing the limits.

• 1:40:52Tucker Carlson?

  And then I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then at a certain point, right? The real stuff comes out, sometimes with tears.

• 1:41:00Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  Sometimes with people you'd never expect to see tears from.

• 1:41:05Speaker 02

  And, and, and it sort of finally unloads and, and a lot of it is the same stuff. A lot of people are. Now it takes sort of different forms, like, so for example. Sexual sin used to be a lot more about actually doing things with other people.

• 1:41:22Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:41:22Speaker 02

  Right. And now a lot of it is distortions and things going on due to

• 1:41:28Tucker Carlson?

  The internet.

• 1:41:28Speaker 02

  Pornography on the internet and that kind of thing. And so, and so that's changed that.

• 1:41:34Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  You've got people that this is one of the scariest statistics. The average age at which a person is first exposed to hardcore pornography on the internet in the United States today is eight.

• 1:41:48Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, I don't know why no one's in prison for that. It's so weird.

• 1:41:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, well, there's too much money being made off pornography.

• 1:41:54Tucker Carlson?

  I'm aware.

• 1:41:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, and again, the economy is kind of God now, right?

• 1:42:00Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:02Speaker 02

  But, so, yeah, so that's, right, and dealing with, that has to be dealt with in a different way. That's not I went too far with my girlfriend on a Friday night.

• 1:42:13Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:42:14Speaker 02

  There's that, that's got to be unwound in a different way.

• 1:42:17Tucker Carlson?

  Do people sense intuitively, do you think that there's something disordered and bad about porn? Or is it something that they learn at your church and they're like, oh, I guess it was bad?

• 1:42:28Speaker 02

  No, they know. They know. A lot of people who are dealing with sexual sin and that kind of thing, they will come and when they're ready to talk about it will say, yeah, I first saw pornography at some absurdly young age.

• 1:42:44Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:44Speaker 02

  And, and usually there's an escalation pattern with it.

• 1:42:49Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:42:50Speaker 02

  Starts out being sort of quote unquote, normal pornography, not that pornography is normal, but

• 1:42:55Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:42:55Speaker 02

  And then moves into darker and darker places, more and more dysfunctional places. But yeah, they can, they generally have an idea of that. But that, that is, that is breaking a lot of, a lot of people.

• 1:43:14Tucker Carlson?

  Really? You see that a lot?

• 1:43:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. And that is a lot of people's issues with sexuality, with gender identity. A lot of it is traceable back to. Some of that early exposure to

• 1:43:31Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 1:43:32Speaker 02

  That material.

• 1:43:32Tucker Carlson?

  I believe it.

• 1:43:33Speaker 02

  And it creates this confusion.

• 1:43:35Tucker Carlson?

  Yes.

• 1:43:36Speaker 02

  Because

• 1:43:37Tucker Carlson?

  Compulsion.

• 1:43:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, and people's first sexual experience is being divorced from their own body.

• 1:43:44Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:46Speaker 02

  Right, causes this distortion, right, that that takes a lot to unwind. And and part of the unwinding of that is having a community. Right, where they're spending time as themselves, right? In their own actual body, talking to other people who are sitting there in front of them. I mean, it sounds absurd, but

• 1:44:11Tucker Carlson?

  No, it doesn't.

• 1:44:11Speaker 02

  For generate for for zoomers, that's a rare experience now.

• 1:44:18Speaker 02

  A lot of them socialize completely on the internet.

• 1:44:23Speaker 02

  The people they identify as their closest friends are people they only know online.

• 1:44:28Tucker Carlson?

  Man.

• 1:44:29Speaker 02

  They have boyfriends and girlfriends who they've never met in person. Very common. Gen Alpha, it's even more common.

• 1:44:39Speaker 02

  And so helping them get out of that and into a community of actual people who care about them, who are interacting with them in the real world.

• 1:44:48Speaker 02

  Is the is a huge first step in sort of bringing people back to to reality.

• 1:44:55Tucker Carlson?

  Do you find that pornography is a bigger problem than addiction?

• 1:45:00Speaker 02

  Um.

• 1:45:01Tucker Carlson?

  More common?

• 1:45:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's an addictive element, too.

• 1:45:05Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:45:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:06Tucker Carlson?

  I mean, yeah, I guess.

• 1:45:07Speaker 02

  But yeah.

• 1:45:08Tucker Carlson?

  Then drugs or alcohol?

• 1:45:09Speaker 02

  Then drugs or alcohol, yes.

• 1:45:11Tucker Carlson?

  Really?

• 1:45:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:45:13Tucker Carlson?

  Is it interesting? So that's a huge part of your ministry, it sounds like.

• 1:45:17Speaker 02

  It's

• 1:45:18Tucker Carlson?

  You don't hear people talk about it very often.

• 1:45:20Speaker 02

  It's all men and most women.

• 1:45:23Tucker Carlson?

  Most women?

• 1:45:24Speaker 02

  Yes. Men don't think that, but.

• 1:45:30Tucker Carlson?

  Are you ever shocked? I mean, by this part of your job, do you ever hear things that shock you?

• 1:45:34Speaker 02

  Um, so I can't say I've never heard something that shocked me. But when I was shocked, it was more the particular person.

• 1:45:43Tucker Carlson?

  Right.

• 1:45:44Speaker 02

  Right. Um, part of, part of what you have to do, I think, as a priest, part of what, honestly, I think we all ultimately have to do this is we have to become deeply acquainted with the worst parts of ourselves.

• 1:46:01Tucker Carlson?

  Yes, I agree with that. Yes.

• 1:46:02Speaker 02

  And if you're really acquainted with that and you really know what you're capable of in a negative way, given the right or wrong circumstances, you can understand more, right? And you don't get that shock reaction. My, my, um, my dad told me the story that stuck with me when he was a kid. He was watching, uh, the footage of the Nuremberg Trials. And he asked my grandfather, you know, what do you think of these horrible things these people did? What do you think of this? And my grandfather said, there but for the grace of God go I.

• 1:46:43Tucker Carlson?

  Amen.

• 1:46:43Speaker 02

  And usually people say that to mean like, oh, some

• 1:46:47Tucker Carlson?

  Accident. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:46:49Speaker 02

  You know, unfortunate thing happened to someone. Oh, God preserved me.

• 1:46:51Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah, car crash.

• 1:46:52Speaker 02

  But he meant, without God's grace, I could have done all those things.

• 1:46:57Tucker Carlson?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:46:58Speaker 02

  I could have gone down that same road, right? And really coming to terms with that, then I think is a prerequisite, not only for our own repentance, right? And our own getting free of that, but being able to help others. You know, and being able to hear where they're coming from, right? And understand how they ended up there and trying to help them, give them the hand up out of the ditch.

• 1:47:23Tucker Carlson?

  Amazing. Last question, which is totally unrelated, but it just seems like you might know the answer. There's this, and most people will not be interested in this, but there's this really interesting moment in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus is talking about sin, and how it can all be forgiven, but the one sin that can't be forgiven is sins against the Holy Spirit.

• 1:47:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.

• 1:47:46Tucker Carlson?

  Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit.

• 1:47:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:47Tucker Carlson?

  What does that mean?

• 1:47:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, what happened just before that was that Christ was working miracles and teaching and healing.

• 1:47:58Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 1:47:59Speaker 02

  And a certain group of his opponents, among the Jewish religious leadership, accused him of being demon possessed.

• 1:48:07Tucker Carlson?

  Correct.

• 1:48:08Speaker 02

  Right. Said that the spirit by which he was doing this was actually, one of the names for bail, right?

• 1:48:14Tucker Carlson?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:14Speaker 02

  Was actually.

• 1:48:15Tucker Carlson?

  Bales bub, or whatever, yeah.

• 1:48:17Speaker 02

  And so.

• 1:48:18Tucker Carlson?

  He was casting on demons with demons.

• 1:48:20Speaker 02

  Right. And so that's why it's blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, is because they're calling the Spirit of God a demonic spirit.

• 1:48:28Tucker Carlson?

  Yep.

• 1:48:28Speaker 02

  Right. And so if you're not willing to accept and submit yourself to God and to His Spirit and what He's doing in the world, you can't be forgiven. You can't, you can't be healed. Right? They were rejecting, rather than seeing what God was doing in the world, which was Christ Himself, right, and what He was doing in the world, rather than seeing that and trying to get on board with that and be healed from their sin, they were rejecting it. So if you, if you reject Christ, if you reject God's provision, right, for, for our sin and our wickedness, then you, you can't be healed from it.

• 1:49:09Tucker Carlson?

  By definition.

• 1:49:10Speaker 02

  Right. But yeah, definitionally, yeah.

• 1:49:13Tucker Carlson?

  Father, thank you for that. That was fascinating.

• 1:49:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:16Tucker Carlson?

  And great.

• 1:49:17Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:49:18Tucker Carlson?

  Thanks.