Lean Not on Your Own Understanding (and Other Conversation-Enders)

This week we're taking on the thought-stopping cliché to end all thought-stopping clichés: "trust in the Lord, and lean not on your own understanding." Is "reading with the Holy Spirit" a special line to God that us dirty scholars just can't access, or is it John Lennox's red Ferrari parked right next to an invisible dragon nobody else can see? Then we wade into the online cottage industry of "secret" Hebrew letter codes—the ones that supposedly smuggle Jesus into the very first word of the Bible—and explain why Aleph-Tav, the Eth Cepher Bible, and every last appeal to Strong's tells you a lot more about the decoder than it does about the text. Support Data Over Dogma and get every episode early and ad-free, plus exclusive bonus content — become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/DataOverDogma Get your Data Over Dogma merch at our online store: https://data-over-dogma-shop.fourthwall.com/ Watch every episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dataoverdogma Follow us: Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/dataoverdogmapod TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@data.over.dogma.pod Threads — https://www.threads.com/@dataoverdogmapod X — https://x.com/data_over_dogma Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/DataOverDogmaPod Get Dan McClellan's New York Times bestselling book, The Bible Says So: https://static.macmillan.com/static/smp/bible-says-so-9781250347466/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:40Speaker 01

  I can play this game with their stuff, too.

• 1:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  You know, bear sheets, a house controlled by leaders who claim divine authority, consume and mark their own violence as a covenant.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. Or you could just say, "Does a bear sheet in the woods?"

• 2:00Speaker 00

  Affirmative.

• 2:08Speaker 00

  Hey everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  And I'm Dan Beecher.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  And this is Data Over Dogma, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things today, Dan?

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Uh, the world's on fire. Um, literal fire.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  How about yours?

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Here, yeah.

• 2:28Speaker 00

  That's the way I like it. Um, anyway.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  Don't sue us.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  I don't know. I don't know if you've ever, if you've gone out for a walk. I don't know what it's like. You know, you and I live 20 miles apart or something like that. And, uh, here in my neck of the woods, uh, it's smokey.

• 2:45Speaker 00

  You've got a, like a thousand square, uh, something fire burning just up the hill from you.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Yep. So that's not fun. It's a, it's a, it's, you go outside and it smells like camping. So that's kinda nice.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  But not the good kind.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  Not the good kind, yeah.

• 3:03Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, it is, it's not great. The air quality is, uh, trash. The vibes are in shambles, basically. It's, uh, I, like this morning, my, my daughter came down and she let, we have two dogs, let them out of the kennel. They're pretty big dogs and they can get, hmm, what's the word? Smelly. Um, they're particularly if they've been given treats or something like that. Like I could smell their breath from my, from my office. And I was like, ugh, the dogs stink. And I went and opened the back door and I was like, ugh, smells like, smells like a forest fire. And, uh, my wife was like, why does it smell like that? And came down and was like, hey, you gotta shut that. Um, so yeah, it's, it's not great.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  I, I wanted, I'm, I would like to go for a run tomorrow, but I don't know if, if that's gonna be in the best interest of my survival.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, I, I might wanna find an indoor track if you're gonna do that.

• 3:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I could, I can go to the gym. I got a gym nearby that I can go to, but I just, I prefer to run outdoors.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's nice, but, uh, not now. Anyway.

• 4:08Speaker 00

  And I like to see the mountains when I do. Right now, you cannot see the mountains because of...

• 4:12Speaker 01

  They've been erased. They've been, it, it... It is nice for our world to have a metaphor for how things have felt recently. Just the world does feel like it's on fire. So yeah, it's cute that that now it's actual fire that we're dealing with.

• 4:28Speaker 00

  Instead of just the fascism and all that kind of stuff.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  Exactly. So.

• 4:33Speaker 00

  The world's on fire. I'm sorry. I keep interrupting and you keep trying to move things along.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  I'm trying to do a show here, Dan. We're, we have promised the people that we're gonna do a show. Today's show is gonna be kind of fun. We got a twisted scripture where we are going to be talking about the ways that people use certain scriptures to make sure that, that you're always wrong and they're always right. And then we're gonna move on to a watch your language. And this time the lang, we're gonna, we have talked before about how ancient Hebrew letters

• 5:12Speaker 01

  can be thought to have their own meanings or what. Anyway, we're gonna get to it, but it's a, we're gonna get back into some, some Hebrew letters and what they, what, what words in Hebrew really mean? So a lot of fun coming up. Let's dive in with twisted scripture.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  And for today's twisted scripture, we're going to one that was sent into us by one of our listeners. But it's some, one that I've actually been seeing out in the wild, deployed quite a bit. And this is from Proverbs, not from Proverbs. Yes, from Proverbs three.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Verse five and six. And that's the one that you've probably heard it before. I, we, you know, we normally do the NRSVUE, but I'm going to read from the King James Version because that's where I first, that's the language that I got used to, that I had heard, which is, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he shall direct your paths." And, uh, you know, the listener who wrote into us with that, wrote in to say, hey, uh, when I, you know, when I used to go to church at the, you know, as I was growing up, anytime I had a question, anytime something in the Bible didn't seem right or didn't work

• 6:42Speaker 01

  from how I was seeing the world, my pastor would just whip this one out and say, I don't get to have an opinion about it. And I think that that's a, I think that's a fair thing. You know, I saw on threads just, just the other day, someone posted a thing about, you know, they were an atheist because they read the Bible, uh, which, which has been known to happen from time to time.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  And even, even Pew has said that atheists know the Bible better than virtually every other religious group.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:16Speaker 00

  In no small part because the atheism is frequently the, the outcome of, of seriously taking a look at things.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, anyway, uh, one of the responses, multiple people had sort of the similar response, which was just, this happens when you lean on your own understanding, but I read the Bible with the Holy Spirit. So, ha, ha, ha. So I, you know, I just wanted to talk about this idea of kind of stopping the conversation and, uh, and, and the idea that reading, you know, the whole idea of just reading with the Holy Spirit versus

• 7:57Speaker 00

  Right.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  being in a, a dirty, dirty scholar like you.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  Like, like moi. Yeah. No, I, I, and I get that all the time. People will just, uh, they'll just comment that I cannot understand the Bible because you can only understand the Bible adequately if you have the Spirit with you.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Which is, which is kind of funny. It, it strikes me as a kind of special pleading that, um, that there's-

• 8:22Speaker 01

  It's the definition of special pleading.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  That they, they have some kind of special access to, uh, to an epistemological level that, um, you know, we just cannot achieve. They've leveled up because, because they have, uh, yawn spirits with them. But, and, and what baffles me is like, we, we-

• 8:45Speaker 00

  We study this kind of stuff, particularly within psychology of religion, cognitive science of religion, related fields. We study what's going on with this. And even within the Latter Day Saint tradition, you get a lot of this, the burning in the bosom kind of idea and reading under the influence of the Spirit. And it strikes me that, well, one, let's take a look at Proverbs. You've got, did you go through and read it?

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Yes, you went through and read it. And the idea here, a lot of people think this means, you know, whatever the Word of God says goes. And that's simply not true, because we don't have any access to what God says, or what Adam and I or the Lord says, independent of our own understanding.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  Like, we have to

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Whose understanding am I supposed to use then?

• 9:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's not like, you know, Big Hero 6, where you've got a chip and you can just take out my understanding and plug in God's understanding. Like, if by the understanding of the Lord, you mean what's in the Bible, as we've talked about many times on this channel, it has no independent inherent meaning of its own. Like, just the meaning itself is something that we create in negotiation with it. And we frequently overrule it. Like, as we've talked many times in the past, there are lots of parts of the Bible that are, you know, non-grata now. We don't like those things. We have overruled them. We've come

• 10:16Speaker 00

  up with rationalizations and with interpretive lenses and hermeneutic maneuvers to decide that we're past it. Slavery is the parade example, the easiest one to go to. Like, if we're supposed to lean on the Lord and not onto our own understanding, slavery should be A-OK.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  But, you know, and I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that countless times abolitionists were told to trust in the Lord and lean not on their own understanding. When they were arguing, this is, what we're doing is bad. This is wrong. This is immoral. This is evil. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, they were frequently told to trust in the Lord and lean not on their own understanding. And there's a

• 11:07Speaker 00

  It's kind of silly. There's a commentary in the Hermonia series that I really like, and there's a volume on Proverbs, but there's this paragraph that just says, "One should not interpret Proverbs 3:5 as a general disparagement of intellect and understanding. Rather, this verse has to do with a fundamental question: Is human insight the point of departure for sapiential reflection, or does wisdom ultimately come from, I don't know? Proverbs 3:5 is unequivocal here, and thus resembles a line of thought that is fully expressed in the critical wisdom of the book of Job and in the book of Cohelates," which would be Ecclesiastes, which we've talked about in the past, which shows around the time that this dates to. This is probably Persian period,

• 11:48Speaker 00

  maybe even Hellenistic period. But yeah, I get kind of frustrated with the notion that there's some special kind of access to God's understanding, to which I do not have access, because I'm using my brain.

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Well, maybe that's the problem, Dan, is that you're using your brain and you're not, you know, there's Matthew 11 and Luke 10 that says, "That extols the virtue of things that are hidden from the wise and the intelligent and have been revealed to the infants." So what about that, Dan?

• 12:30Speaker 00

  Well, I think here we're talking about, and this is kind of similar to a lot of attempts to suggest that there is, that that kind of epistemological leveling up is something that only happens once you take, you know, step a foot in the dark, or something like that. After the leap of faith, the trial of your faith, you will be endowed with this super-secret, special understanding that nobody else has access to, or can measure, or can test, or scrutinize in any way, shape, or form whatsoever. And really, what people are just talking about is their intuitions.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  They're just talking about their intuitions.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Well, and the way that I demonstrate that, or try to with people who's who start to use this line of reasoning is just to point out that like, yes, you think you're reading using the Holy Spirit. That person over there thinks that they're reading using the Holy Spirit, and you've come to differing conclusions.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  So either one of you doesn't actually know how to read with the Spirit and is doing it wrong, which I know you're about to say that that's the other guy, but come on.

• 13:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Or you're just using your own, you're leaning onto your own understanding.

• 13:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Like, that's exactly what you, you have no option but to do that.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's, there's not really any other way to, to engage in any kind of cognitive activity. We've, we've talked about how there's a spectrum from intuitive cognition to reflective cognition. And sometimes you can get something from your intuitive cognition where you're like, where did that come from? And that is frequently held up as, oh, that's the Spirit. I was given this. This is a revelation from God. It's your intuitions. It's, it's the same thing that is responsible for optical illusions and for the way cartoons work. It is your brain doing its default settings. And that gets, and because so many, so many of our intuitions are rooted in our identity politics

• 14:35Speaker 00

  and the worldviews that, that we have become accustomed to and have been conditioned to, that they confirm a lot of the features of our identity politics and our worldview is not God telling you it's true. It's just your intuitions doing intuition things.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  And that's not to say that intuition is bad. Like, our intuition is vital to how we live our lives. We, we have to operate on some level using our intuitions. It's not the only thing we should be using.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  Right. Obviously, we, we need to bring our reflective cognition into play frequently. And, and when there's conflict, the frequently the reflective cognition overrules the, the intuitive cognition. And that helps us to better understand ourselves, the world around us and our place within it. Our, our intuitions are really there to help us survive long enough to mate. And, and people will, I see this a lot where Particularly among creationists and people who are arguing against evolution, they'll be like, well, the, you know, materialism, if you're a materialist, if you believe in evolution, then you believe that our brain is unreliable.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  And should, don't you want something that's reliable? It's like, well, we can't step outside of our unreliable brain. And somehow still access knowledge like our brain is the only way we can get to anything. And yes, it is absolutely unreliable.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Anyone who has observed their brain for, in any honest way, will recognize there have been moments of unreliability.

• 16:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Every brain.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and this is going back to the optical illusions. Like we can, we can demonstrate beyond a, like demonstrably, this is very clearly not the image that your brain is telling you you're looking at.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:34Speaker 00

  And it's because your brain is unreliable. And we've been able to figure out many of the different ways that our minds are set up and, and the way they assume the world around them is functioning and is not isometric with the actual world around us, but it is good enough for us to do the things that we need to do to survive. Human language is the same way. This is why people misunderstand each other all the time is because human language is not intended to most accurately communicate, transfer information from, from one mind to another. Human language is primarily intended to, the foundation of human language is the forming and the nurturing and the curating of social bonds.

• 17:19Speaker 00

  And so we can do that adequately. And, and then, you know, there are a lot of ways that human languages is not perfect, not isometric with whatever is going on in our head. And so I'm, I'm baffled by the notion that something that is only accessible to us through our human cognition is somehow transcending human cognition. It doesn't, it doesn't work like that.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, even, even if the spirit told me something, I would still have to lean onto my own understanding to know what the heck it means.

• 17:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Like, like you, you still at some point have to get your own understanding of the thing.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, you, it's all contingent on our ability to understand. If something transcends our human understanding, we're not understanding it.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't understand that.

• 18:10Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And, and I think a lot of people will confuse, they'll, they'll try to retreat to the notion of qualia. Have you heard that word before?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  No.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Qualia is a way to refer to experiential things that you can't really transfer. Like, you know, teaching a person who was born blind, what the color red is like.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  That's a qualia. You can't really transfer that understanding. You don't know what a symphony sounds like until you have heard one in some way or another. There are a lot of ways that, that these experiences can be talked about, but you can't really have the experience. You know, the Good Will Hunting, you know, the, the famous scene where, where Robin Williams finally gets his, where he's like, ah, you're just a kid. And, you know, you, you don't know what it's like to look up at the Sistine Chapel. And you don't know all this stuff. And you can, you can read it in a book, but you don't, you haven't had those experiences. So, a lot of times, people will appeal to qualia, as if that

• 19:19Speaker 00

  is what's going on with spiritual experiences. That, that there is something there that is not accessible unless you actually commit and are sincerely devoted to the, the particular ideology. And I, and I think that is special pleading as well.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  That, uh, no, it's just quoting 1 Corinthians 2, where it says, "Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God's Spirit, for they are foolishness to them." So, there you go. Uh, I'm, I'm just not spiritual enough to, uh,

• 19:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, you gotta, you gotta read the rest of it. They are unable to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

• 20:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, which is, you know, going back to the Latter Day Saint burning in the bosom thing, or and, and we, I mentioned it to you earlier, this mathematician, John Lennox, who, a very folksy British scholar, was on the Diary of a CEO podcast, and he was talking to Stephen Bartlett, who asked about how he, as a non-believer, could approach, you know, trying to develop belief in Christianity and Jesus. And Lennox gave this analogy. He was like, "Imagine I tell you there's a red Ferrari parked outside, and it's just for

• 20:43Speaker 00

  you. You just have to go get in it. We can sit on the couch and argue about it all night long, and you will not know whether or not it's out there. You just have to get up and go look." And the idea is, once you actually sincerely commit to trying to find out, you're going to find out that it's true. But this, but this is a, this is an acquisition of knowledge that is only accessible if you actually sincerely try to believe. And, and when I heard this, it reminded me of this thing from Carl Sagan's, I think it's from his Demon Haunted World, talks about the dragon in my garage. And the dragon in my

• 21:23Speaker 00

  garage is another analogy. He says, "Imagine I tell you I've got a dragon in my garage. You want to see it? Sure. Okay, we get into the garage. I don't see a dragon. That's because it's invisible. Well, I don't, I don't feel it anywhere. I can feel all the space in the garage. There's no dragon." Well, it's also immaterial. Okay, does it, does it make any noise? No, it doesn't make any noise. And, and the point is, when it comes to ideas about God and things like that, it's always unverifiable, unfalsifiable. It's, every, every question is sidestepped. We're not providing evidence. We're telling you why you don't get to have any evidence. And, and, you know, the biggest problem is

• 22:07Speaker 00

  this is unverifiable, unfalsifiable. And in my opinion, what Lennox is talking about is the exact same thing. And fundamentally, the claim is,

• 22:17Speaker 00

  You don't get to know it's true until you choose to believe.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  Because we have all kinds of people out there who have left tradition, faith traditions. And even the very same faith traditions that Lennox or other apologists might identify with. And they would say, oh, I've, I've gone outside. There's no Ferrari out there. And, and what, what's the response going to be every single time?

• 22:40Speaker 01

  You didn't really do it. You didn't really look for the Ferrari.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  Yeah. If you did, you would have found it. And, and what's that doing? It's doing the exact same thing. Oh, the dragon's invisible.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 22:52Speaker 00

  And I have had people tell me, oh, you don't know Lennox would say that. He would, if he, if you said you sincerely looked and it wasn't there, he would acknowledge that. And I was like, that would make him one of the worst apologists I have ever heard of.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  He can't acknowledge that because otherwise his whole thing doesn't work.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  It falls to the ground. It falls to pieces. And he's a smarter man than that. However, it does mean that he's doing the same thing. I got a dragon in my garage. And you don't get to believe it's true. You don't get the evidence until you choose to believe it's true. And that's when we get back to the intuitions. And that's when we get back to, I feel it's true because I'm getting this collective effervescence of truthiness that is really just my intuitions being tickled by my, my membership in this community. And now I have this new thing that is good, this worldview that makes me feel good about myself.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Makes me feel good about the future. Makes me feel good about questions I have not had answers to. And that, striking the tuning fork in the loins of your dogmatism or your identity politics is precisely what Lennox is imagining is this magical evidence that only manifests itself once you have chosen to believe.

• 24:15Speaker 00

  So Dan, you've heard me talk ad nauseam about the fact that we've got construction going on at the house. We are-

• 24:21Speaker 01

  I've heard the construction.

• 24:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, you heard the construction too. We're finishing our basement. We're actually adding on to the house. We're doing some stuff in the backyard. And I was thinking the other day about how nice it was to be able to do this because we, I wanted to get a new car and I wanted to do these, these improvements to the house, but we had to pay off our old car and that took actual planning, which you know I hate. And so I really had to shift my thinking quite a bit when it came to my finances and we had to set dates and we had to create a budget and it was so satisfying to actually make a plan. And then even though it took some discipline and

• 25:07Speaker 00

  there were some bumps in the road, we actually succeeded and were able to pay off a car, got a brand new car. And it feels so relieving to know that if we actually set these goals and plan for them and stick to them, it goes from, oh, this will never end, actually feeling like you have control over stuff. And that has made a huge difference to me and to my family.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  Well, you know, you can try to do that on your own, or you can use a phenomenally useful tool like Monarch to do something like that. Monarch is set up exactly for that kind of financial planning. They have things like their debt pay down simulator and visualizer to help you track your progress, which I, this is brilliant. The fact of the matter is that all of these concepts are so ethereal, it's hard to sort of wrap your head around it a lot of the time. And with this visualizer, you can see how that debt is going to go down. You can actually simulate your freedom occurring in front of your very eyes. And I think that is

• 26:15Speaker 01

  an amazing thing. Monarch has other things like- You can watch your timeline move. You can play out the options. You can choose the fastest way to alleviate your debt. Most apps just tell you what you've spent and how much debt you're in. Not Monarch. Monarch even has an AI assistant that will tell you, help you with anything to do with your finances. You can ask, how much did I spend on travel last summer? Or can I afford the vacation that I want to do? And it'll walk you through it all. It's super easy. It's super useful. I love it.

• 26:48Speaker 00

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• 27:34Speaker 01

  Well, and it's so weird to me because I, every time I hear someone make an argument like that, you have to point out that people have that same experience entering into Muslim belief. Oh, yeah. Or entering into Buddhist belief. They have the same, you know, exactly that same experience of like, oh, I feel like I've been, you know, the veil has been lifted from my eyes. I see, I like, I had a spiritual understanding of the truth of this thing. And then it's just like, oh, well, that didn't count.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, cuz you know, you have a lot of folks who will say, well, Mormons are doing it wrong.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:18Speaker 00

  So they're like, oh, I felt the, I felt the burning in my bosom. I know what's going on there. They're like,

• 28:24Speaker 00

  that's actually, that's actually the devil.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:27Speaker 00

  You're being, you're being possessed by Satan.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:32Speaker 00

  Even though it's exactly what I said you should be looking out for. It's a different, it's a different tradition. You know, the devil can disguise himself as an angel of light. Which is like, he knows this.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Which is hilarious because, you know, at what point, what do you, what can you offer me then? That is the distinguishing factor?

• 28:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  What can you give me? Because unless, because if the only way, and unfortunately, the distinguishing factor, the way that they will say, the way that you know for sure whether you're being led correctly or falsely, is if you land on my

• 29:10Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  exact conclusions.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  And then I, then we can verify that, yes, you were actually led by the Spirit.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. And what's funny is on the, in this interview, I think it was before he brought up the red Ferrari analogy, but Bartlett actually challenged him on that. Was like, you, you talk about evidence and, and you take, you know, happiness and you take a sense of fulfillment and you take a, all these different qualia that, that people report when they become Christian. And he's like, and we've got research that shows that the exact same thing happens with other traditions all around the world. And so what's special? And that's where, again, Lennox got into, well,

• 29:59Speaker 00

  the dragon's invisible. Can't you see? It's not, you can't actually see it. And, and had to just dodge.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:06Speaker 00

  And it was, it was so ironic because he begin, he began the, the interview by saying that, that he expects evidence that Christians who are, who are out there doing apologetics need to be able to provide evidence. And he's a skeptic and he demands evidence. And then he spent the rest of the interview dodging questions about evidence and explaining why you don't get any evidence. Again, until you choose to believe. Not pursue an understanding, but actually choose to believe, which, which I found.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  Remarkably sophomoric for someone who's supposed to be the number one expert on Christianity, I think is how the interview was was titled on YouTube.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  The big, the big intellectual about it. And yet, and yet, there's this conversation ending cliche.

• 30:59Speaker 00

  Thought, thought stopping cliche.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  Which it, which is what it is when people pull that out as a trump card. It's just a thought stopping cliche. It's, I'm not having this discussion.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Right. And it's also, I'm right and you're wrong.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:14Speaker 01

  The end.

• 31:14Speaker 00

  Yeah. If, if, and, and what I find it so funny is I also get this all the time. I don't need no scholar to understand the Bible. You would not understand a single letter of the Bible if it were not scholars who went before you and did all this work, used their brains, used critical thinking to help you understand what's going on in the Bible. Just translating it.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:38Speaker 00

  Is something that requires scholarship and requires critical thought.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  How's your ancient Hebrew?

• 31:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Cause otherwise you, you got nothing.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I, yeah, I, I agree with you. And when people try to pull that out as a thought stopping cliche, oh, boy, that gets my hackles up because.

• 31:56Speaker 01

  I'm just going to remind everyone, Dan's the believer. I'm the not believer.

• 32:02Speaker 00

  In case it was unclear.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  They might've gotten it confused during this segment because.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  And I get this a lot too, but what people are like, you, you criticize people for beliefs. No. I criticize people for harmful beliefs. I don't care what you believe on your own. If you want to go into your house or into a place of worship and believe things that make you feel good, blast off, man. I am not going to stop you because you know what? I do the same.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  But, once you get on social media, once you start getting into legislatures, once you start affecting how other people are living their lives, once you start spreading misinformation or these claims publicly, you're in my house. And, and as much as I am a person of faith privately, when it comes to what's going on publicly, I have very, very different feelings about things and about what is in bounds and what is out of bounds. So that, that's the biggest distinction. That's when people, when people. Imagine that I am putting every last thing that I believe onto social media. Nine.

• 33:13Speaker 00

  That's, that's not accurate. But yeah, I think, I think we can, we can be adults about this. We could talk about this like adults, using critical thinking, using proper methodologies, using the evidence that is available to us and, and we can be adults about this.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Well, and I think that, I think that your, your point is well taken that the,

• 33:34Speaker 01

  that you can still have what you interpret to be a spiritual understanding of an idea, of a concept or whatever, but the second you try to export that to another person or to, you know, to everybody.

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Impose it on, yeah.

• 33:50Speaker 01

  This has to apply to you as well as me. Then, then you're going to get into some problems. And that's when, yeah, I, I think anytime you say, it is definitely X because the spirit told me it was X. You're in trouble because someone else is going to have a spiritual experience that points them in the opposite direction.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  And now you're just denying their spirit, spiritual experience in favor of your own.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  I, I think one of the, one of the funniest ways this happens within the LDS community, which, which is also part of the, the patriarchal, the fundamentally patriarchal nature of the LDS community is, is when guys say the spirit told them they were supposed to marry some girl.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  That is one of the most cringey parts of, of the LDS thing. I don't, I hope it doesn't happen as often as it used to.

• 34:43Speaker 00

  Oh gosh.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  But yeah, BYU is just overrun with guys thinking that they can, that they can just skip courtship by saying.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:52Speaker 01

  The Lord told me that we're supposed to be married or whatever.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  And, and I know that it happens outside of the Latter Day Saint tradition as well. I've seen on, on social media examples of, of, you know, the wording is different. The concept is dressed up a little differently, but, but fundamentally the idea is the same. Somebody's trying to leverage the notion of, of their spiritual authority or insight or acumen. And to to control someone else.

• 35:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. And and I think it's the same with the the appeals to Proverbs three, five and six. It's it's just an attempt to to draw the scriptures out as a trump card because you don't want to talk about it.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  Yeah. You don't want to communicate about it. You don't want to use that language that we developed in order to curate personal relationships. You would just rather get the other person to shut up. And, uh, yeah, unfortunately, it's it is profoundly misguided.

• 35:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  And where the you you came up with Matthew and Luke, a couple of verses there, first Corinthians two, 14, you had, uh, you had Proverbs three. Did you? Did you have any other thought stopping passages that, uh?

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, there's, there's first John two that says, you do not need anyone to teach you. Which is like, okay, I guess not.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  It's nice to be taught some things, though.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, revelation is how you is how you learn how combustion engines work.

• 36:23Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, exactly. Plumbing is fine. You can just sort of, the, the, the spirit will teach you.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  I mean.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  How to connect pipes.

• 36:32Speaker 00

  I've seen, I've seen phenomenon. Uh, even he had to get a book on Portuguese in order to learn the Portuguese language on the way over to the place.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, see.

• 36:41Speaker 00

  Like, you, you, you gotta, you gotta have the data.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Gotta have the data.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  The data's gotta be there somehow. You can't just say, no, no data, we're, we're only dogma here. That's, uh, we're, we're full up on data, so.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  As, as the hat, uh, should have already made clear.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yes, indeed.

• 37:00Speaker 00

  The official position of the data over dogma podcast is data over dogma.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right. Uh, and by the way, if you're listening at home and not watching this on the YouTube, I'm wearing a data over dogma hat, which you can get on, uh, data over dogma pod.com. So go do that. Uh, and then, and let's move on to.

• 37:19Speaker 00

  It's a lovely bowler's cap, so.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  It is not. It is not at all, but, oh.

• 37:25Speaker 00

  I think they call that a trilby, right? That's what that is?

• 37:28Speaker 01

  This is, this one is a snack, a snapback, uh, embroidered baseball cap. But I think we should definitely get logo, uh, trilbies and and bowlers. That sounds amazing.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Some, some lady caps, yeah.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  Something to doff to a to a to someone as they pass by.

• 37:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, in a tasteful way.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  All right, let's move on to watch your language.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Okay, so for watch your language, we have done, we have talked, I'm going to sort of bring us back up to speed because on older episodes.

• 38:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  We have talked about the Hebrew alphabet.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  And the way in which it evolved from probably Egyptian hieroglyphic sort of imagery. And, and, you know, the way that that happened. And then we're good. And then we also on another episode talked about, we talked about this, this big magic meaning that each of the letters in ancient Hebrew has, because someone just made it up. Where, you know, we, the first word of the Bible, Barashit. It has special meaning. Everything has special meaning.

• 38:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. Because Jesus is there in the very first word.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 38:56Speaker 00

  Just like, just like Jesus is in all the names of Genesis five and, and Jesus is everywhere you look as long as you don't know what you're talking about.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Or, or as long as you make something up, make up a code. So the code that they made up. They took all the letters in Barashit, Bait, Resh, Aleph, Shin, Yod, Tav. And then they turned it into bait means house and Resh means head or son and Aleph means God or strength and Shin means destroy and Yod means hand and Tav means cross. And so it means that Jesus was crucified, God was crucified by his own hand or God was destroyed by his own hand on the cross or something like that.

• 39:43Speaker 00

  Yes. And this is, this still gets shared every single day on social media. I can find the person who's read this. Having their videos shared.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  So maybe you should talk a little bit about the ancient. Just let's also do a quick recap.

• 40:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Of the alphabet and where they're coming up with this.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  A quick last time on. We'll go, you cannot skip the recap this time. Well, I guess you could, but anyway. So Hebrew has what's called an acrophonic script now. And what that means is beginning sound. And it comes from idiographic scripts. Or script where the characters actually communicated or indexed entire ideas and concepts and words and things like that. Now, it came from that script. It does not preserve the features of that script. Once it get becomes an acrophonic script. Then the character just indexes or represents the sound

• 40:48Speaker 00

  that used to start the word.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  That the character represented. So for instance, byte. That means buh in Hebrew. That's all buh. Now, it came from a character. That meant byte, which meant house.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  But it does not contain, it does not index the entire concept of house. Now, the problem with with folks who argue that, you know, the Christian gospel is in the first word of the Bible. Is that they're not actually basing their understanding on the characters these things actually came from.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:25Speaker 00

  Because like shin does not mean to destroy. And tav does not mean covenant.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  Or, or the cross, like a crucifix or anything like that. They had very different meanings. And so the, the folks who argue that, one, they're totally misunderstanding how Hebrew worked. Nobody wrote the word barashit. And then guess what? I hid all this extra stuff in there.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  And you will only know about this if you speak the language it was written in. Ha ha. So that way only the people who read the text will actually know what is going on.

• 42:04Speaker 00

  It's it's pretty silly, but and and there's another one you've you've seen the one with the etramaton, the divine name Yodeh Vavhey, right?

• 42:11Speaker 01

  Right. Well, there there are a few. There are actually a couple that

• 42:15Speaker 00

  Oh, you found a few different?

• 42:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, because there's the one. There's the one that we have talked about where it's like, uh, one means breathe in, or it's like, like, like, there's the breathe in and breathe out.

• 42:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Like yaw and way somehow like mean breathe in.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's the sound of natural breathing.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  If you have never heard somebody naturally breathe.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that it doesn't work at all. But this one was an interesting one, which was uh, the divine name, uh, broken into its letter symbols. Yod is meant to mean hand.

• 42:50Speaker 00

  Right.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Uh, hey, there's two hayes in it. So hey, is behold.

• 42:55Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Uh, and I believe it's because, and you know, I saw a thing where it's like, they took the not the actual um, Hebrew letters, but like old pictographic versions of those letters.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Right.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  And uh, and Yod looks like a an arm with a hand on it.

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Well, it's it's kind of um, so Yod is is like the the lower arm, the forearm and the hand. And and there's, it kind of looks like uh, the claw or something like that in some of the the early depictions, but

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 43:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's it's the hand. Wait, did you say Yod or hey?

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Yod Yod is that and then hey is like a dude.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, with arms up, yeah.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  A dude with his arms up.

• 43:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, and sometimes it looks kind of like uh, the genie from the bottle because the bottom is just like a squiggle.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 43:42Speaker 00

  But yeah.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  It looks more like surrender than behold, but they interpret that as behold.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  Uh, which is not what it comes from. It it came from ho or hoy or something like that, which was basically hey, it's an interjection. It's just somebody getting somebody's attention. Uh, or somebody, ah, um, uh, you know, just exclaiming.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:06Speaker 00

  So that's where where it comes from.

• 44:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:09Speaker 00

  Behold, meaning look, see is is not really what's going on there.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  Right. And then Vav, they say, is a nail.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  Which is also not quite right. Vav is, uh, it's based on a word that refers to a hook. Specifically, a hook that might hold up a curtain.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 44:31Speaker 00

  That's where we see it used in, in Exodus. And, uh, and you, you really have to squint at it. Pretty hard to get it to get fuzzy enough that you can say nail.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Well, so they, they did say, so, so what they said was Yod, Yod hey vav hey, hand behold, nail behold, which then they flip it around and say, look at, behold the hand, behold the nail.

• 44:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  But I mean, that, you're stretching in so many ways on that.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  And, and you're like, but, and word order, that's just a suggestion. We can actually put these in any order we want.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:10Speaker 00

  Um, which is, which is silly, but yeah. And, and that again is like,

• 45:15Speaker 01

  It's the crucifixion.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  And, and this is as silly as saying that our DNA has the divine name inscribed upon it.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Well, there's that too. Talk about that. Walk us through.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  Oh gosh. There's, um, there is a, a claim that I think originates, the idea is that, um, there was a, a scientist that were like, an Israeli scientist discovered that there are these, uh, what did he call them? He called them something, something bonds.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  No, it wasn't nucleotides, uh, because that act, that's actually accurate. It was definitely, it was definitely entirely false. But, but basically it was like, if you, if you, um, take apart DNA, there are these, uh, gaps or sequences where you get, uh, 10, five, six, five. And they call them. I would have to look it up, but they, but they call them, it's not a hydrogen bond. It's some kind of bond, but anyway, it's something that doesn't actually exist. There's no such thing in DNA and there is no sequence of 10, five, six, five.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  But if there were, they would say the 10th letter of the Hebrew alphabet is Yod. The fifth letter is Hey. The sixth letter is Bob. The fifth letter is Hey. And so provided you just arbitrarily say, we're gonna start and stop here. You would get Yod Hey, Bob Hey.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  And, and it's all entirely false. It's entirely made up. But yeah, so, so anyway, there, there are a lot of attempts on the part of otherwise, I'm being charitable and saying well-meaning Christians to try to read features of the gospel, particularly features of the Christian gospel into ancient Hebrew, because it makes it sexier.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, it, it's not, I get the impulse, like, yes, you, you want, you, you know, you've got this New Testament thing and you want the, the other part, the part that came before to point to that, because then it confirms your beliefs and that, that feels good.

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  To feel like your beliefs are being confirmed. But then you make up a bunch of stuff about Aleph Tav and, and things go. So I think we do have to get into the Aleph Tav thing.

• 47:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, obviously we've got to get into Aleph Tav.

• 48:00Speaker 03

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• 48:29Speaker 00

  So aleph and tav are the first and the last letters of the Hebrew alphabet. So you already know where this is going.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  First and last letters. That's your alpha and omega right there, baby.

• 48:40Speaker 00

  Alpha and omega, baby. First and last.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:43Speaker 00

  So aleph tav is, um, there are two different words and he, there are actually a few different words, but the two main ones that occur the most that are spelled aleph and tav are one, what's called a definite direct object marker, which is a syntactical particle that is not translated into English. You basically put that before the direct object of a verb. You don't have to, but you can if you need to clarify. Cause in Hebrew, you know, in English, we use word order to determine, you know, what's the subject, what's the object and things like that.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:18Speaker 00

  In case based languages, you would use cases. So you would, um, you would decline a Latin word differently if it is in the nominative verse, verse the accusative.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:29Speaker 00

  In Hebrew, Hebrew used to have cases. There are some vestiges of the case system, but in order to indicate the direct object, you, you have et. And that goes right before the word. And then et can also be a, a preposition that means with.

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  However.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  So et is spelled aleph tav.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  Is spelled aleph tav. Um, and so because you don't translate the direct object marker, it's secret, it's hidden.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  It's a word. Okay. So what you're saying is if you're looking at it in the Hebrew and you're looking at it in the English, there's this one word that doesn't get translated.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  Doesn't get translated.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  That's just hiding in the Hebrew and it's not in the English translations. And therefore something's being hidden from us.

• 50:20Speaker 00

  Yes. And what is it? It's the first and the last, the alpha and the omega. It is. Jesus Christ. And so

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, so Jesus is, is sprinkled as, as this Aleph Tav, uh, formation Yeah. Throughout the Bible.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and a heavy sprinkling, like they didn't open up the, the, uh, the side with all the little holes. They opened up the side that had the spoon on it and just dumped.

• 50:51Speaker 00

  And

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Because there's a lot of direct objects.

• 50:54Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, but you have two of them, just in the very first verse of the Bible. So, so Genesis 1:1,

• 51:05Speaker 00

  And so you've got two et's there and, and there's this, there's this addition of the Bible. I'm not going to call it a translation because it's really just stealing another translation and editing it.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  But it, uh, it's called the Et Sefer Bible. And it was put together by people who did not know Hebrew.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  But what they did, their, their two main things is one, they want to have the Hebrew Aleph and Tav there where there's a, where there's a direct object marker. So that you can see where the Alpha and the Omega is, because you gotta read it in Hebrew. And, and so if you go, uh, look at Genesis 1:1, uh, they, they do that. In the beginning, Elohim, they also want to transliterate all of the names exactly as they imagined they were pronounced in Hebrew.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  And this is another thing they get horribly wrong. The tetragrammaton, they transliterate as Yahua.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I've seen, I've seen videos of people saying Yahua, which just sounds like, uh, it's, it sounds like

• 52:16Speaker 00

  They're Marines.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  Al Pacino from, from that one, uh, from Scent of a Woman.

• 52:21Speaker 00

  Scent of a Woman. Yeah.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Yahua.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  I thought you were gonna say, "She's got a great ass." But I don't think that's, you can't get there from the tetrametan.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  And then they also, they don't translate spirit, they transliterate ruach. And then, and then Jesus is not Yeshua. And it's certainly not Yeseus, they're, they're obviously not transliterating Greek. They're reverting back to Yahushah. That's what they think Jesus's name was, was pronounced as. And by the way, try to tell me the etymology of Yahua. Because if you think it was pronounced Yahua, you just don't know Hebrew. And obviously cannot even begin to pretend you know the etymology. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. But this is a, there are movements that, that like doing this Hebrew roots movement.

• 53:17Speaker 00

  There's some, some messianic Jewish things that do this. But if you, if you get a copy of the Etsefer Bible, it's going to talk in the preface about why they're doing these things. Well, not so much why.

• 53:31Speaker 00

  But they're gonna talk about the fact that they're doing these things.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:35Speaker 00

  But they, they go to like Brown Driver and Briggs. Brown Driver Briggs tells us that this word, and then they'll, they'll transliterate it. And then they'll, then they'll give you the Strong's number. What is the official position of the Data Over Dogma Podcast on appeals to Strong's, Dan? I don't know if it is our official position, but I'm, I'm.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  I think you're allowed to make certain, certain official positions can't come from me. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna defer to you on this, but Strong's, Strong's is bad, okay?

• 54:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, basically, if you, if your argument retreats to Strong's, you definitely don't know Hebrew. And the preface retreats repeatedly to Strong's. Strong's tells us that Kodesh, H6944, is from H6942, Kadash, and means a sacred place or thing.

• 54:28Speaker 00

  Again, if you're appealing to Strong's, that means you don't have access to a resource that was published this century.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:37Speaker 00

  And so it means that you do not have formal training and you do not know Hebrew.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Well, I should be clear. I made a joke about it being bad. It's not that it's bad. It's that it's out of date and that it's and that there is better work.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  Well, and the main thing is that it's when you said Strong's is bad, my understanding, and hopefully everybody else's understanding is that what it what he means is appealing to Strong's is bad.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:01Speaker 00

  Because it's a concordance and a concordance has a specific utility. And if you know how to use a concordance, Strong's is perfectly fine. It's not a lexicon and it's not actually telling you what these words mean overwhelmingly. Strong's dictionary, it's just telling you how the King James Version or some other translation translated this word.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:24Speaker 00

  And it's giving you a gloss based on a specific translation. It's not telling you, hey, by the way, if it occurs with this preposition, or if it occurs with this as the subject, or if it occurs with this as the object, then it means this. It's not really giving you a clear idea of what's if you're looking at a verb, if it's in the heap pile, what does that mean? And how is it different if it's in the hifil?

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  And, you know, the people who are responsible for the Et Seper Bible, I don't think know what those words mean, but, um, but yeah.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  And they're in good company. I also don't know what those words mean, but that's okay.

• 56:03Speaker 00

  And they also, they also, and one of the other indications, they don't have the first clue what they're talking about, is in all their transliterations, they include like an apostrophe to represent the aleph, which is a glottal stop, but they put the apostrophe after. The vowel.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 56:21Speaker 00

  And if you know anything about Hebrew, the glottal stop precedes the vowel. You're supposed to put the apostrophe before the vowel in transliteration. You don't even know how to transliterate accurately. Like, holy crap, this is bad. But you will find people on, on social media trying to, you know, it'll be in their TikTok shop. Get your, get your Et Sefra Bible in the TikTok shop. If you, if you don't know anything about Hebrew and you want your knowledge to get further away from the Hebrew, get yourself an Et Sefra Bible. But, but you know, it's based on this idea that et is, is some kind of magic word because

• 57:02Speaker 00

  it doesn't get translated and, and that's, it's hiding the, the Alpha and the Omega in the, in your very first word of your Bible.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 57:11Speaker 00

  And it's, it's a problem.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  I can see why that, again, I get why this feels compelling. I get why this feels cool. Cause it feels like secret knowledge. It feels, it's Da Vinci Code stuff, right? Like this is what we're dealing with is someone who is, is, is an idea. You know, there's the, there was the Bible code that was, that came out a while back where they just had a computer sort of look at all of the words in the Bible and then cross-reference them in a way that we think we can make. And then, you know, if you, if you look at it just, just the right way, then it's, it says Kennedy's, it predicts Kennedy's assassination and then Nostradamus or something like it's just, it feels cool. Like that's kind of neat.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  It's just, um, they made it up.

• 58:00Speaker 00

  Yeah. It's, there, there are a lot of people out there who recognize that, that there are a lot of systems of power that, that try to gatekeep all kinds of knowledge and, and. It would be nice to feel like you're not, I'm not a part of your system. Um, I know better. And, and these are, these are the little saccharine ways to try to, uh, to get people to feel like, they know better.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Well, Dan, as, as a fun experiment, uh, I decided with the help of, uh, a, a friend of mine, named Chad GPT. I, uh,

• 58:40Speaker 00

  Chad Gupta?

• 58:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, something like that. Uh, I, I, I developed my own alphabetical, uh, deciphering tool.

• 58:50Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  And now I know how English actually works.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Because I now know what each of the letters of English actually means.

• 59:00Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 59:01Speaker 01

  And I have the ability now to discern what they mean. So for instance,

• 59:06Speaker 00

  Because the English alphabet is based on the Semitic alphabet.

• 59:10Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 59:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  But I, but I, I have, uh, basically I, it, I just associated a bunch of, uh, words with letters, with the letters based on a spiritual understanding and how they looked. Because obviously how they look is important. So, you know, A is for ascent because it looks kind of like a mountain or a ladder pointing upward.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  And I can dig it. I can see that.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. B is, uh, B is breath. It's, it's like lungs. It's like this double sort of humped thing is like lungs.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  I, I have a, uh, there could be other double hump things that are,

• 59:49Speaker 01

  B is for butt. That's, that's the other possibility.

• 59:52Speaker 00

  That's actually not the thing I was thinking of.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. Well, or boobs or whatever, whatever, whatever your pervy brain has decided on.

• 59:59Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, if you just, have you just outed me as, as a boob man?

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  I guess so. I guess so. Uh, I do, I do like that, what it came up with. I, so the word Bible is breath plus incarnation, plus breath, plus, plus law, plus extension, which means the breath made flesh breathed again and again into law and extended outward, extended the law to us.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  So that's really amazing.

• 1:00:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Uh, and now I can,

• 1:00:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, that, that kind of thing can't be faked. Like that's not, that's not a coincidence.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  No. Uh, also, if you look at the word data. That's a door, the door ascends a tree. So A is ascent, T is tree. So data is, you know, the door of ascension leads to the tree of higher ascension. So data, data sends us up. What's amazing about this? And then I, and then I did dogma, but I wanted it, it did dogma, but I wanted it to be a negative idea of dogma.

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  So that was, then, then you can say that like dogma is bad. The,

• 1:01:12Speaker 01

  you know, like the, the, the door of gathered mystery is against ascension sort of thing.

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  But what that pointed out to me is,

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  So that's Peter Thiel, right?

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  Right? Exactly. I can play this game with their stuff too.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  So I can take bait is house and Rish is head or leader or person and Olive is strength or god or authority and Shin is destroy and blah, blah, blah. And I can make that mean a house, you know, ruled by the head of power where destruction is worked by hand under the sign of sacred authority or, you know, or, you know, bear sheets is a house controlled by leaders who claim divine authority, consume and mark their own violence as a covenant.

• 1:02:07Speaker 00

  Yeah. Or, or you could just say, does a bear sheet in the woods?

• 1:02:13Speaker 00

  Affirmative.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  All right. How did I not see it coming? That's what I want to know.

• 1:02:21Speaker 00

  It was right there the whole time, Dan. This is not,

• 1:02:24Speaker 01

  It's been hanging.

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  Can't be a coincidence.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Like,

• 1:02:26Speaker 00

  You think this is a coincidence?

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Like the low hanging fruit in Eden. I did not see it.

• 1:02:32Speaker 00

  Somebody's got to pick that fruit.

• 1:02:34Speaker 01

  You partook of it and now, and now we're all,

• 1:02:38Speaker 00

  Now we are all damned.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  That is the, the original sin.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  All right. Well, there you have it. That's a don't, you know, if you like fun codes, go out and make some, but just don't claim that they're real because people will believe you. And then there, then you have a whole, it just turns into a whole thing.

• 1:02:59Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, and when you wink and say, this is for entertainment purposes only on your video, just mean it. Just, just mean it. Yeah. It's not, you're not trying to get away with some plausible deniability. Just mean it. Have fun with it if you want, but.

• 1:03:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. But actually cop to it being nonsense.

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  All right. Well, this nonsense is over. So I'm glad of that. If you would like to become a part of keeping this nonsense going, we would sure appreciate it if you'd become one of our patrons. Head over to patreon.com slash data over dogma. You can give us a little bit of your coin and, and if you choose to be at one of the levels where you get a reward, there are cool things you can get act early and ad free access to every episode. Comes out a day before everybody else hears it. That's a lot of fun. Or you, for a little bit more, you can get weekly bonus content every week. The after party, you can ask us questions. We will answer them.

• 1:04:03Speaker 00

  Sometimes we repeat them.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Sometimes we repeat them. There's a little bit of a, it's not a perfect system, but we try real, real hard.

• 1:04:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, we have, we have yet to answer a single question two different ways though. As far as I know.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  As far as we know, we, we're stubbornly consistent about things. Thanks so much to Roger Goudy for editing. Thanks to Sam for being our right hand dude. And we will talk to you all next time.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

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