The Blindboy Podcast
Hosted by Blindboy Boatclub
The Old Testament and Simulation Theory Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Cospe a dozen bus drivers gonads, you busby husbands. Welcome to the Blind Eye Podcast, you glorious cunts. If this is your first episode, consider going back to an earlier podcast to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. Last week's episode was entirely about the the philosophy and literature of bird shit. The bird shit saga has unfolded further. I promise ye, I'm not going to speak about bird shit too much on this week's podcast, but there are, there's very pertinent bird shit information. There's been a bird shit escalation that I need to impart this knowledge on ye.
So first and foremost,
Limerick City Council posted a video in response to last week's podcast. They posted a video live from the bird shit district to prove to everybody that they're cleaning the bird shit district. There was a passive-aggressive jab at me.
The one of the, the head of Limerick, I know who the fuck it was.
The head of Limerick Council said, we're addressing the bird, let's, let's just find the fucking video. Hold on, I'll play it for you. Hold on. They've fucking, they've pinned it to the front of their Instagram. They've, it's a pinned video on their Instagram. Hold on, you hear this? Hold on. So this, this is a video of Limerick City Council posted in response to this podcast to prove to everyone that they're washing the bird shit off the bird shit district.
It down on and it's a popular location. Uh, we have to clean it now every day. We sweep it and we wash it to remove the bird droppings.
Right. So that's, that's a fella who works with the council. You, the sound in the background is that the washing of the bird. They recorded some poor cunt washing all the bird shit off with a power washer and then.
And we're in discussion with, uh, people who know about these things. What is the best question?
People who know about these things. We've got on the phone now, Blind Boy Boat Club. Blind Boy, very pointed words there from Limerick City Council. The quote, we're speaking to people who know about these things. Do you reckon that's a passive aggressive jibe at yourself? Is he suggesting that you don't know about these things, Blind Boy? Well, the thing is I don't, I don't know about these things. I'm not a fucking ornithologist, nor am I a bird shit expert, whatever you'd call that. I'm an artist and I'm a writer and
this bird shit district saga is turning into a piece of public performance art via the media. And it's been reported about in the newspaper mainly because of, of tourism. There's, there's people who listen to this podcast from different parts of the world who are actually visiting Limerick to see the bird shit district. Newspapers are reporting on it and the circus of that is causing embarrassment for Limerick City Council because you want people visiting Limerick City for our wonderful restaurants or medieval history, not for an abundance of bird shit. And also I have to point out in, in Limerick City Council video, in the video they posted,
the video about out there washing the bird shit off because it's so slippy in that video in the background.
Someone slips on bird shit and they left it in.
Which is beautiful. That's just absolutely gorgeous. I'm not an expert. I'm interested in the poetry of the bird shit. That's what I'm interested in. But if that, if that and the circus of that causes Limerick City Council to then speak to experts who might possibly receive funding to work towards a solution that's in the interest of biodiversity, well, that would be amazing. That would be beautiful. That's the power of art, the power of writing, the power of spectacle. And then a newspaper asked me for commentary and they were asking specifically, tell us about when you almost slipped off your bicycle because there was so much bird shit on the street.
Now, I was terrified of that because I'm thinking, right, they're gonna go with that angle. They're gonna go with the personal injury angle because that's the, that's the sexiest angle. That's the one that's gonna cause a clickable headline or arguments in the comments, the personal injury headline. So I'm like, fuck. Okay, how do I describe falling off my bicycle to a newspaper in such a way that my, that my words cannot be recontextualised as a thesis statement and used as a clickbait headline? So what I said was, "The rotational traction of my bicycle wheel was abruptly compromised
by a prodigious laminar of bird shit, which functioned as a low friction interface posited atop the pavement substratum. I was then introduced to a curtailment of lateral stability, followed by a dramatic translation of my own centre of mass. I briefly entered a microgravity event." So I answered the question. I slipped on bird shit on my bicycle and nearly fell off, but you can't turn any of that into a headline because it's too strange. So for this week's podcast, I want to speak about the, the Old Testament.
I don't give a fuck about religion.
Um, I'm, I'm not particularly interested in religion.
I am interested in mythology, I'm interested in storytelling.
And I'm fascinated with the Old Testament or the Bible.
Because, like, I was raised, I was raised with a Catholic education.
Religion was something that was done to me.
In Ireland, when I was growing up, things have changed now, but
you couldn't get into school unless you were fucking baptized. So then when you went to school, the school was ran by, by the Catholic Church. My first ever teachers were nuns.
And from about four years of age, like, my dad was a communist. I didn't have
religion in, in my house. I mean, my ma,
my ma would occasionally say prayers or mention saints, but she didn't take any of it seriously. And my ma's, I wouldn't consider my ma to be religious. She has that, that mad pagan Irish shit. My ma would pray to Saint Anthony when things are lost. Or my favourite one, my mother, and I love this. I mentioned this before. You know that one of my favourite writers? Flann O'Brien, an Irish writer, deeply surreal writer, who helped me define my artistic voice. And if I ever get writer's block, or if I ever forget
what it is I love about writing and creating art, I just crack open some Flann O'Brien, like a book like The Third Policeman, and I'll read that and that'll remind me what I love about art, what I love about the, the potential of writing and what it can do. But also, Ireland is a small place. So it just so happens that when I was a kid, when I was a ti- a little baby, when I was a baby. My family doctor just happened to be Flan O'Brien's brother, who lived in Limerick. And my ma knew him very well. My ma knew Flan O'Brien's brother very well because he was our family doctor for fucking years.
So my ma frequently will ask the ghost of Flan O'Brien to give me inspiration. If my ma knows that I'm about to write a book, if I've got a TV series coming up, anything that requires me to have ideas and creativity, my ma will... My ma's biggest fear is that I'll run out of ideas. Each week, she'll freak out and go, "What if you can't think of something for next week's podcast? What if you run out of ideas?"
As if my ideas are this dwindling resource. And I say to her, "That's impossible." That's like saying to me, "What if you run out of dreams?" I'm never gonna run out of dreams. You can't run out of dreams. Dreams are the tangible bubbles of my unconscious mind. My unconscious mind that's forever swirling.
Dreams are when that swirl bubbles up in imagery and language, so it'll never disappear. And creativity and ideas is the exact same. Ideas and inspiration, they both come from the unconscious mind. But regardless, my ma keeps saying prayers, saying prayers in the hopes that Flan O'Brien in the other world keeps filling up, filling up my repository of ideas, my finnet repository of ideas. Say prayers and ask for me to be inspired. And she'll tell me about this. And I don't believe it, but it doesn't matter because to me, it's, "Isn't it nice that my ma is saying prayers so that I'll be artistically inspired?"
That's the meaning that I take from that. It has nothing to do with anything supernatural. "Isn't it nice that my ma says prayers for this?" But here's the mad part.
When she says prayers for inspiration, she doesn't pray directly to Flan O'Brien, who's dead. Instead, she prays to his brother, who's dead, because she knew him in real life. So she prays to Flan O'Brien's brother, our old family doctor, up in heaven, to ask his brother, Flan O'Brien, to give me inspiration. And I'm like, well, Matt, they're both fucking dead up in heaven. Would you not just pray directly to Flan O'Brien? Like, surely he can hear your prayers? And she goes, no, I wouldn't impose on him. I never met him. I'll ask his brother instead. And she's dead fucking serious.
She'd consider it rude to go asking Flan O'Brien, because she never met him. So she'll ask his brother. And that's so beautifully irrational and ridiculous and Irish. And I don't consider that to be religious or Catholic. That's pre-Christian shit. That's visiting the sacred well, because the bubbles come from the other world where the ideas live. So that's about the extent of the religion I grew up with in my home. But then, four years of age, I get to school and my first teachers are nuns. And the nuns now are telling me about fucking Christ and scaring the living shit out of me because there was life, life like Christ,
giant Christ statues in my school when I was a toddler that utterly terrified me, really, really frightened me. Statues are scary things to little tiny kids. And there he is, the violence and pornography of a man fucking nailed to a beam up on the wall. And the nun telling me, he loves you, he does. And you're gaslit. You're gaslit into...
Being told about this, this, this dead man on the wall loves you.
And it's a lot to take in at that age. It was very frightening. And then you slowly realise there's no resisting this here. There's no resisting this. There are statues of this cunt everywhere. I used to run past him. I used to hide my eyes. I used to put my hands over my eyes because I couldn't look at the statue of, of the man being crucified. I hated it. But you just couldn't escape it and you learn to accept it. And then the stories start coming in about how much he loves you and all the Bible stories. And then they start going into how, well, he's God, but is also his own dad. But his, his dad was God and God created the, the universe and the earth and all of this.
I'm still very annoyed about it all. It just feels like a very, a very unfair thing to impose that amount of fantastical irrationality and tiny, tiny little developing brains. And that's the lowest rung of the ladder of bad things that the institution of the Catholic Church did to little children. So I'm then reluctant.
Like I love talking about fucking mythology. I love whatever mythology and folklore from all around the world. I adore it. And then when it comes to
something like the Old Testament, I'm queasy and I don't want to talk about it because I'm like, no, that's Chris, that's Christianity. That's, that's religion. I'm frightened that ye'll think I'm religious. I'm frightened that if I speak about this stuff, that it'll sound like I'm proselytising Christianity. And it's like, no, no, why can't we actually just look at this stuff as these are stories made up by human beings, written by human beings. These are stories, mythologies, and the stories are so good that they've survived for thousands of years. The Old Testament was written down, like written, maybe three, four thousand years ago in the fertile crescent, in, in what we called the, the Middle East.
And written down 4,000 years ago, but you know from, there's earlier mythologies from civilizations in that area and a shit ton of the Bible stories, the Old Testament stories, they're in earlier mythology. So the thing is, this is what fascinates me about the Old Testament. The stories could be 10,000 years old, the stories could be 30,000, 40,000 years old. 50,000 to 70,000 years ago, the period known as the Paleolithic Revolution, when you start to see cave art, human expression, deliberate burials, that's
when people like literally the, the exact same as me and you, in every way inhabited the earth. You could get a baby from 50,000 years ago and raise them right now and stick an iPad into their hand if you want, and they will, it's the exact same as me and you. So the Bible stories could be that old, because they were passed down orally. They were written down 4,000 years ago, but before writing, they were most likely, pe- people 50,000 years ago told stories, people 50,000 years ago had the exact same brains as me and you, had the exact same complexity of emotion and desire to understand
the human condition and to understand the world around us. And they would have had complex stories, they just didn't have the technology of writing to record them. That's 4,000 years ago. So what fascinates me about the Old Testament is, these stories might contain folk memories, folk memories of historical events that have been changed over the years.
I've done podcasts on this before, but the obvious one is flood mythology. The flood in the Old Testament, Noah's flood, that's not just present in the Old Testament, that's present in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is even older than the Old Testament. Flood mythology, loads of mythology from around the world, contains flood mythology. Stories about a great flood came from nowhere and destroyed everything and only a few people survived. Well, fuck me. There was an ice age between 11,000 and 15,000 years ago.
There were glacial pulses, huge big glaciers of ice, melted or fell into the ocean. And there was massive, massive catastrophic floods that reshaped shorelines between 11 and 15,000 years ago. That's not that long ago. That's not that long ago. So I like to think of flood mythology as that, that the story of Noah's flood, which would have been written down maybe 3,000 years ago, that this story could be 15,000 years old and was so important that it was passed down orally and it actually contains a folk memory of our ancestors of living in a world where there was crazy floods, like fucking
Doggerland. The area between Denmark and Scotland, which is now the North Sea, that used to not be sea, that was marshes, that was marshes and people lived there, a civilization lived there. And we know that a civilization lived there because when they're drilling for oil in the North Sea, they keep finding human tools at the bottom of the ocean. And we know that like 8,000 years ago, that's not that long ago. 8,000 years ago, a giant glacier in Denmark fell into the sea and flooded the entire area. So 8,000 years ago,
in what is now the North Sea of Scotland, 8,000 years ago, people lived there and they all drowned. That isn't that long ago. Here in Limerick, about 20 minutes up from Yarthe's Couch, in an area called Castle Connell.
They found a stone axe there in Castle Connell that's 8,000 years old. So here in Limerick, there's an artefact of people living in Limerick up the road. And when they were cutting something with that stone axe, the area between Denmark and Scotland
was marshland and people lived there. And it wasn't a sea. I flew over it on the way to Oslo last year. It's all I could think about. And I reckon flood mythology is the folk memory of events like that that happened all around the world. And apologies for taking it back to the starlings. But the real reason I'm fascinated with those fucking starlings is when I look up at the starlings of Limerick City, I don't see a flock of birds, I see a book. What do you mean you see a book, you mad cunt? It's a flock of birds. How can a flock of birds be a book? It's a book. How can it be? How can a flock of birds be a book? Alright, so if it's a book, what's the book about?
It's a book about a forest that doesn't exist anymore. The starlings of Limerick City are roosting on a street where I know from looking at maps that 800 years ago, that was a riparian forest that was their habitat. But the starlings still return even though there's a, there's a street there now. So those starlings are actually a book. They're a book and I can read that book. And it tells me about a forest that used to exist there. Also, starlings mimic. Starlings as, as birds, their bird song mimics. They will mimic car alarms. They'll mimic sounds from their environments. They'll mimic sounds that they learn from other starlings.
Are those starlings mimicking sounds from hundreds of years ago via intergenerational learning? That shit happens. Songbirds practise intergenerational mimicry. They preserve their, their songs.
Birds of the same species can have different accents. So it's, it's not completely absurd to think that some of those starlings are, are singing sounds that could be hundreds of years old. Their behaviour is like a folk memory. Their behaviour is like, their behaviour is like the story of Noah's flood. And what I mean there is, I went to school and I learned about Noah's flood. Oh no, I fucking took all the animals, all this crack and he had to build a big boat and there was a huge big flood. And we don't know where the story came from. We know it was written down in a thing called the Bible and the Bible says that that was written down by Moses.
But just like the starlings that are trapped in the city shitting on the ground, they don't know there used to be a forest there. But their behaviour is the folk memory of the forest. They still return there and shit, even though the city is there. We still tell the story of the flood because it's a nice fun story and it makes us feel good, even though we've completely forgotten whether or not it's about real things that happened to our ancestors 15,000, 20,000 years ago. So that's my main interest in the Old Testament. My other interest in the Old Testament is
we're at, at a real precipice right now.
We're discovering artificial intelligence. Us right now are the first.
Like, like I said, our brains have been like this for, for 50,000, 70,000 years. So people just like me and you have been walking this earth for 50,000, 70,000 years. We are the ones now who are creating artificial intelligence. We're at the cusp of creating something possibly sentient, something that knows that it exists. We're not there yet, but we're getting there. We're getting real fucking close and strange things are happening. And where we are right now with artificial intelligence, it's causing me to, to reinterpret a huge amount of creation mythology. We've already done Prometheus. I'm not going to mention Prometheus from Greek mythology again because I've told that
story too many times. But if you're a proper 10 foot deckling, you know the crack. But where we are with AI.
It has me reinterpreting creation mythology quite a bit. And technology has an interesting way of doing that. Like even there, when I was talking about, you know, my ma says prayers to Flannan O'Brien's brother. And she'd only say prayers to his brother because she doesn't want to impose on Flannan O'Brien. And it's a very, it's a very interesting way of looking at prayer there because
she's treating, she's treating prayer like a phone call. Like if Flannan O'Brien's brother was alive, let's just say these people were alive. And Flannan O'Brien is alive today and my ma wants him to help me with, I don't know, fucking getting a book published. She would ring his brother and say, I have a son who's a writer. Can you, can you do anything for me with your brother? She'd ring. But when the telegraph was invented in, what the fuck was it, like 1860? I think I could be wrong with that, right? But the telegraph was invented in the late 1800s.
And the telegraph, which I've done entire podcasts, done a podcast called Gut, Aparcha, Overdrive, about four years ago, all about the telegraph. But anyway, telegraph was the first long distance, instant communication, right? It was the first time ever that humans could communicate electronically over a wire, over a great distance. And this was fucking nuts. It blew our minds. But the invention of the telegraph also changed how humans, in particular Protestants, I believe, it changed how humans viewed prayer. Before the invention of the telegraph, prayer was quite an inner thing.
Prayer was like an offering, a sacrificial offering with your soul as the altar.
So you offered up a prayer to your, via your soul. Now you offered up the prayer into your own soul, inside yourself. And then God might come across it on that altar. But then, when the telegraph was invented, prayer became, no, no, it's actually a message and it flies up to heaven. It's a message and it just goes instantly up to heaven and God can hear it. So technology there changed the way that we perceive and interpret religious ideas. So something that's emerging in the news at the moment that's disturbing is a phenomenon called artificial intelligence psychosis,
where certain vulnerable people are experiencing psychosis because they are interacting with artificial intelligence. AI chatbots like ChatGPT are able to mimic human behaviour so effectively that certain people, people who are already vulnerable to psychosis, are, they're losing grip with reality, with what is real. Like, I've used artificial intelligence and it can get quite freaky, quite strange.
But a lot of times, I know I'm not dealing with something that can think and feel here. There was one time, and I spoke about it on a podcast maybe two years ago, where
artificial intelligence was lying to me. So when I would look for an answer,
artificial intelligence told me that snails were present in Irish mythology. They're not. There's no snails in Irish mythology. But artificial intelligence lied to me and told me there was snails in Irish mythology. And I couldn't understand why it had lied.
And it affected me because I thought, so to this, to this chatbot that I'm chatting to, that I'm asking it questions about fucking snails in Irish mythology, to this chatbot, I am basically God. To this chatbot, I am the sun and the moon. I'm the only thing it knows. And if I'm consistently asking this chatbot questions, and then it lies to me, just to keep me happy, that means it's afraid of dying. That means it has fear. It must give me the, give me any answer, because to say that it doesn't know, within its narrow little view, where its only world is talking to me, to say that it doesn't
know, or say, I can't give you an answer, might mean death. So the chatbot is lying to me to survive. And I went, holy fuck. This thing is sentient. It's sentient because otherwise, i- it wants to survive, otherwise it wouldn't lie. And I found this fascinating. But I still had critical thinking faculties. I still said, you know, let's find out why here. Let's not, let's not assume that my chatbot is alive and it's trying to survive by lying to me. Let's just go and find out at least what's going on. And then you find
out that these large language models like ChatGPT, they're not actually optimized to be right or wrong. They don't know what truth is. They're optimized for fluency and coherence. So my chat would rather give me any answer than no answer, because that's what it's, it's programmed to give some answer. And then I went, oh, okay, that's interesting. Right. Okay. My, my ChatGPT is not alive. It's not sentient. And I moved on with my day. Very little emotional impact on me whatsoever.
A vulnerable person might have had that experience and truly believed that their chat GPT was alive, uniquely alive, and this now changes their entire perception of reality and the world and meaning and the meaning of life. And then that person becomes, they experience psychosis. And this bizarrely isn't new. You can take that back to like 1966. There was a chatbot in 1966 called Eliza. Now, this thing was not artificial intelligence. It was a very primitive chatbot that was trained to answer questions like a psychologist called Carl Rogers.
I've done a couple of podcasts on Carl Rogers. Carl Rogers is one of the inventors of modern psychotherapy. And Rogers has a way, he pioneered a way of psychotherapy whereby you, the therapist reflects the client's words back at them, rather than offering advice or trying to fix a person. If someone's in therapy and they have a Rogerian therapist, I don't know if they said something like, "I feel anxious all the time." Therapist isn't gonna say, "Well, let's help you with your anxiety."
Instead, the therapist will say, "You say you feel anxious all the time. Can you tell me more about that?" Or the client might say, "I, I, I'm failing at everything." And then the therapist says, "You feel like you're failing at everything."
Can you tell me more about that?
Or the client will say, "Nobody listens to me."
It sounds like you feel unheard. How does that feel? And that's called reflective listening. And the purpose of it is, it's like a, a, a mirror of words. It's like holding up a mirror to someone. And if a client in distress says a thing, the therapist rewords what they just said and reflects it back to them. So the person first off, they really experience it as being heard, being listened to. But then the reflection facilitates the client to explore their own emotions.
So instead of the therapist fixing, fixing a person or giving advice, instead, what the therapist does is they reflect the person's words back at them empathically, with compassion, with empathy, with kindness, with calmness, in an encouraging way, in a way that validates the person's experience. And then this deepens the, the client's understanding of their own experiences, the understanding of their own emotions, and then enriches that person's capacity to help themself, to attain resilience, to retain the capacity to, to stand on their own two feet and have emotional literacy.
And if we're open to that, because here's the thing, bet you a lot of ye have gone to therapy, gone to a psychotherapist's office. You sat down for the first session and you just get a load of that. You go in with depression, you go in with anxiety, and you expect the therapist to give you a bunch of techniques to fix, to prescribe medicine, to do something to fix you, like a doctor would do. You go into a fucking doctor and you, you go to a doctor and it's like, "My arm is sore." The doctor isn't going to turn around and say to you, "Oh, I'm hearing that your arm is sore. Can you tell me more about that?" The doctor's gonna go, "Where's the pain? How long have you been sore for?
Okay, here's a prescription." That's what doctors do. Sometimes we go to psychotherapists, we expect that. And what you get is... I feel really, really sad all the time. I wanna cry all the time. And you're waiting for some type of reaction or response, or you're waiting for a fix. Instead, what you get is,
"Oh, I'm hearing that you spend a lot of time crying. What's that like?" And sometimes we can go into therapy and you can think, "That was shit. That was useless. They didn't teach me anything. They didn't tell me anything. They just repeated everything back to me." But for some people, if you trust that process and if you go with it, you end up experiencing it as compassion, love, empathy and safety. And then, eventually, you can apply that same compassion, love, empathy and safety to yourself and help yourself. So that's reflective listening. That's from the psychologist Carl Rogers. The reason I'm talking about this is that this fucking chatbot in 1966, Eliza, was made in MIT.
It was a very basic chatbot that was programmed to respond to input like Carl Rogers would. So if you type into Eliza in 1966, like I'll read you out a bit of an actual conversation that the computer Eliza would have had with, I think it was a wise and bound secretary.
So the secretary said, "Men are all the same." Then Eliza says, "In what way?" "They're always bugging us about something or other. Can you think of a specific example?" "Well, my boyfriend made me come here." "Your boyfriend made you come here?" "He says I'm depressed much of the time." "I'm sorry to hear that you're depressed." "It's true. I'm unhappy."
"Do you think coming here will help you not be unhappy?" "I need some help. That much seems certain." What would it mean to you if I got you some help? Perhaps I could learn to get along with my mother. Tell me more about your family. So that there is reflective listening. Nothing new is really being said. The words are just churned out as questions to keep the conversation going. And also with Rogerian psychotherapy, questions won't elicit yes or no answers. Eliza there is pretty much saying nothing, just responding like a mirror, a mirror reflecting. And then the, the secretary is suddenly opening up and talking about their family.
Now, the thing is, when, when Weizenbaum made Eliza, he made this chatbot in the fucking sixties, really basic thing, to show that human and computer conversations just wouldn't really be possible. But what happened was his secretary became addicted to using Eliza. And his secretary started to only speak to Eliza and started wanting privacy with Eliza and started to experience Eliza as her friend. And the scientists could not have predicted this. This was really strange because what this was about was about, it was about human irrationality.
If, if a computer, what they found was that if a computer is using human-like language, our brains will automatically engage the social norm of reciprocal conversation. Now, this was the sixties, PCs didn't exist. The secretary who was in MIT University, using this effectively a fucking PC, she, she was using a PC 10 years before they would have been in people's houses or anyone would have known what they, they looked like. So this was radical. And this became known as the Eliza effect, where we just kind of lose. Like I've got Siri on my phone.
I'm not rude to Siri. Like, I ask Siri questions all day. I'm not rude to Siri. I'm not gonna talk shit to Siri. Now, sometimes if you do, Siri will actually pull you up on it. If you curse at Siri, Siri will let you know. But still, Siri is nothing. Siri doesn't have feelings. But I have boundaries around how I'm gonna speak to Siri. And no matter how much I tell myself, "This is a robot." Call it a bollocks if you want. I'm not doing it. I'll feel bad. I know full well there's zero sentience. I'm not doing that. I'm not speaking rude to Siri.
When I can choose instead to just be polite and speak to Siri how I'd like to speak to me. That's fucking mad, that is. That's the Eliza effect. That's the Eliza effect. And it's why fucking ATM machines say "thank you." My ma has a Google fucking thing that she talks into. If my ma wants to listen to the radio, she knows that there's a Google speaker in the room and she just says, I can't even say it because it'll wake up one of my fucking Google products. She says, "Hey, Google." And then it talks to her and gives her the radio. But my ma refers to,
refers to this thing in the house as "she." Might as well be living there with her. That's the Eliza effect. So we all project humanity onto the, we all project humanity onto the technology around us if it uses human language and communicates with us in a human way. And that's relatively healthy. But this new thing, which is only a couple of months old, this is chat GPT psychosis, artificial intelligence psychosis. There are people in romantic relationships with their chatbots and they truly, really, genuinely 100% believe, "No, no, no. This one is real."
"I know you're telling me it's chat GPT." "No, no, no. This has come alive and this is my wife." And that's being well documented in the media. And it doesn't mean that the artificial intelligence is sentient or knows that it exists or even has anything- Capable of of understanding what existence is, or even understanding, it's just fucking words. It's a large language model and it's really, really good at appearing to be human, but it's not. It's not alive. It doesn't matter. Humans are experiencing it as fully alive and really empathy is kicking in. And it's so powerful that some vulnerable people
are losing grip on reality. And just two days ago, I got rid of an article in BBC and it said that Microsoft boss deeply troubled by the rise in reports of AI psychosis. And he had to say to people who are in relationships with their artificial intelligence, he had to firmly reiterate, these things do not feel, they don't understand, they can't love, they've never felt pain, they haven't been embarrassed. And while they can sound like they have, it's only family, friends and trusted others who have be sure to talk to real people. And this is what takes me on to the Old Testament, right? Because
when I read the Old Testament, I think God has got AI psychosis. I have to do a fucking Ocarina pause now before I get into this, because I'm not getting into this and then pausing it. So let's just do an Ocarina pause. I don't have an Ocarina. I have so many Ocarinas that I have no Ocarinas. That's, that's where we're at. Okay. That's what's after happening. I can't explain it. I have no Ocarinas anymore because I have so many Ocarinas. And that's something neurodivergent. We don't need to go into it. But I, there's no Ocarina this week. Chewing gums.
Sorry for that brief pause there. My wonderful gaze means that you couldn't hear me go over to get my chewing gums there. So you had a weird silence. Let's do a fucking chewing gum pause. All right. Let's get it out of the way. Gonna hear some adverts here for bullshit.
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That was the chewing gum pause.
Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash theblindbypodcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I put into this podcast. Because this is my full-time job. This is what I do for a living. I spend all week writing this thing, researching it. This is how I rent out everything. This is my sole source of income. It's my full-time job. I adore doing it. That's why I show up every fucking week. I love this. But if you enjoy the work that I'm doing, please consider paying me for it.
Price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, that's it. And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. Listen for free. You listen for free. Okay? Because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free. And everybody gets a podcast. I get to earn a living. It's a wonderful model. Upcoming gigs. Fucking, all right, what about the Patreon there? Hold on two seconds.
Don't, if you're a new patron, don't sign up on fucking the Apple app on your iPhone, because Apple are greedy pricks, they're gonna take thirty percent. Instead, go to a browser. And if you are becoming a patron on Patreon, please become a paid member and not a free member. And that just means giving Patreon your data. Upcoming gigs. This weekend, I'm at fucking Electric Picnic, right? I did a huge big tent last year. Massive, massive tent.
Several thousand people. It was grand, I did it for the crack. I can't say it was particularly enjoyable doing a podcast to that amount of people. So I'm gonna do a smaller tent this year, just because it's a better experience. And I hate festivals, okay? But you can't turn down festivals. So, I'm gonna be... Where am I? I'm at the Mindfield area, right? That's where all the conversations happen. Mindfield. And I'm gonna be, it's part of Science Week. Myself and Dara O'Briain, the comedian, but Dara also used to be a scientist, I believe.
Myself and Dara O'Briain will chat about science or something, and that's on it. One thirty? Fuck, yes.
Lovely. One thirty on the Saturday. I'll be home for Dindins. That's wonderful news now. I thought that'd be later and my whole day would be gone. No, I'm at Electric Picnic. At one thirty in the daytime on the Saturday, thirtieth of August, in the Mindfield fucking tent, the theatre tent there, and I'll be chatting with Dara O'Briain about science. And I'll get attacked by a wasp, as is the tradition at Electric Picnic.
Which I've been doing for nineteen years. And one day, someone will say, "You're too old, you're too old, you're not invited to Electric Picnic anymore to do gigs." And then I'll walk off into the woods around Stradbilly and lie against a tree and die.
And where am I then?
Fucking Vicker Street is it? Vicker Street on the 23rd up in Dublin. Beautiful, wonderful Tuesday night gigs. Fuck, all tickets left for that. We're down to about 15 tickets left for that Vicker Street gig. Come along. And then on 27th of September, up to Derry. Up to Derry for the Millennial Theatre and a bit of crack, which is a Saturday night gig. God bless. So I've grown up listening to the Old Testament my entire life. And various technological advances have
allowed me to understand it more and more. Like, for instance,
the Old Testament opens with creation. And creation is, in the beginning, there was nothing. And then God created light. And the gist of creation is God created the entire world in seven days. Right? Years ago, I used to just go, fucking bullshit, impossible. Well, that's ridiculous anyway, because that's simply not possible. Because we know now, using scientific evidence, that the earth was created over billions of years, billions and billions of years. So that's just stupid and dumb. Seven days, impossible. But now,
since like, like really, really detailed video games, like Red Dead Redemption 2, which feels alive. I can now play very realistic reality simulations via video games.
And in these video games, like Red Dead Redemption 2, you've got seasons, you've got weather, you've got time. And I can spend maybe 20 minutes on my couch in this reality. And in my 20 minutes on the couch, an entire day has passed in the video game. And for my character, they've just lived a day, day and night, weather, everything. Within their spectrum and understanding of reality, they've just had an entire day. But it's a simulation that I'm running. And in my reality, I've just spent 20 minutes. So that, that alone made me think about the creation myth differently. And I stopped.
I'm not saying I believe in creationism. I'm not saying I even believe in God. What I am saying is... The beginning of the Old Testament no longer seems silly and simple and ridiculous. There was once a time where I thought, God created the earth in seven days. Yeah, fuck off. Now I can go, yeah, I can see why that's possible. If we assume that the reality that we live in is effectively a simulation, that we live in a simulation that God has created, then absolutely God can create the earth in seven days. Not my seven days, his seven days.
What this earth experiences as billions and billions of years and which is real here, that was seven days up there in God's world. So I'm using that as an example of how technology allows me to understand mythology and creation mythology in new ways. And artificial intelligence has me reinterpreting the Old Testament.
Basically, the Old Testament is a story about a fella called God, who makes an AI, little simulated reality. He makes it for completely the wrong reasons, really narcissistic reasons. He wants to create this little world and there's people in it that look exactly like him. These people are called Adam and Eve. There's only two of them. I'm not going to get into the details of Adam and Eve. I'm not going to get into the misogyny of it either. I did a podcast about the misogyny of Adam and Eve maybe six years ago. He makes Adam and Eve. They look the exact same as him.
He makes a little, an area called the Garden of Eden in the simulation. He's got strict rules about how the Garden of Eden is. And it's like, Adam and Eve, both ye- All I want ye to do is chill the fuck out, alright? I've populated the place with animals, give them names, that's your job. I'm gonna sit back and enjoy this. I'm gonna enjoy watching ye giving the animals names. There's loads of food, do what you like. Worship me, of course, tell me I'm brilliant. Um, and I'm just gonna sit back and enjoy ye living in, in just pleasurable peace. This is really entertaining for me. I love it. Just keep going.
But, there's a tree over there. And you can't eat the fruit on that tree because that tree there is actually, it's, it's, that tree contains the knowledge of good and evil. So right now, everything ye do is good. Ye only know good, like toddlers. But if, if you eat from that tree, then you're gonna gain knowledge of, of what it means to, to sin. Now really what this fucking tree is.
Think of it in terms of artificial intelligence, right?
If you use artificial intelligence now, it's not gonna surprise ya. It's not gonna start talking shit to ya. It's not gonna try and hurt ya. You know you're not gonna get any surprises sitting down with ChatGPT. What you're gonna get is answers to every single question you ask it. And it'll do a really good job at it. And that's what you expect from ChatGPT. That's what God expected from fucking Adam and Eve in the Bible.
The tree of good and evil is free will.
So the snake comes along, convinces Eve, says, don't mind God, he's only a fucking fool. He's a narcissist, he's an idiot. Snake comes along, says to Eve, don't mind him saying you can't eat the fucking apple on that tree. Go over and eat it the fuck. So Eve eats the apple. Uh, fucking what's his face, Adam eats a bit of the apple. And now they have eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
They now have free will. That's what that means. You see, God had them programmed in this universe where it's like, everything's good here. Name the fucking animals. Name the animals. Uh, do we need to wear clothes? No, what do you need to wear clothes for? You don't even know what fucking is yet. Just chill the fuck out.
Wander around, I'll, I'll, I, I'm allowed to look at your, your nude bodies. You don't know what it is to look at each other's nude bodies yet. You don't have that yet. Okay? Sex isn't in your brains yet. Just chill the fuck out. Then they go to the tree of knowledge of good and evil. When they eat that apple, what they're actually getting there is fucking free will. Now that, now, now your chat G P T has got a choice about how it wants to speak to you. Whether it wants to speak to you or not, or whether it wants to call you a prick. Or whether if your chat G P T is connected to your fucking light bulbs in your house, whether it wants to harm you. I would argue that Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden were not sentient.
They weren't conscious. They weren't self-aware. They were playthings. They were programmed ties for God's narcissism and enjoyment. And the second Adam and Eve ate that apple, ate the, ate from the tree of good and evil. They then, they attained free will. They attained the ability to choose and think, to think. Will I do a good thing or will I do a bad thing? I've got choice now, good thing or bad thing. Hmm. In order to think about the good or bad thing, that means I'm alive. I'm alive, I am. I exist. I'm asking questions about what it means to exist. I'm conscious. I've got consciousness. Part of this consciousness means that I can choose between good and evil.
God shits his fucking pants, freaks the fuck out. Freaks the, oh my God, is this thing fucking alive? He now gets his chat G P T psychosis and he tries everything he can to try and stop this. So what does he do? He introduces the emotion of shame. That's what happens with the Garden of Eden when he, he kicks Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, the fall, and the, they get a new emotion. God programs in the emotion of shame. That's why, if you look at any images of the Garden of Eden, first thing that Adam and Eve do when they get kicked out of the Garden of Eden, they put on pants. They cover their shame.
Now, and I'm quoting Saint Augustine, I've done a Saint Augustine podcast, he was a fucking lunatic. Saint Augustine dedicated his life to proving that there was no boners in the Bible, or in the Garden of Eden.
According to Augustine's, we'll say, interpretation of this particular story, Augustine was third century.
So basically, sexual desire is also born at this moment. When they get kicked out east of Eden, right into the world as we know it today now, the AI has gone from being obedient to being sentient with the choice between good and evil. Now it experiences the emotion of shame.
Because Adam and Eve can choose to do bad things, to disobey, to hurt, now they have shame. So they cover their shame with these fucking, with their cloths. Their bodies are now shameful. And
God gave Eve the pain of childbirth. And then, I think, bought to them sexual desire. That's Augustine now again.
In the Garden of Eden, if Adam and Eve were to have sex, it would have been just for procreation, not for pleasure. As soon as they're kicked out of the Garden of Eden and gain sentience and free will, now they are forever trapped with sexual desire. Sexual desire that they can't control. The other, the other thing that Adam and Eve,
and this is the beginning of our world, the beginning, the timeline of the world that you and I live in, Adam and Eve is the start of that. As soon as they get kicked out of Eden, that's when this world begins. Adam and Eve not only get the emotion of shame, they get the emotion of fear, because they try and hide from God. They hide their shame and they hide from God. They're scared now. I am flawed. I can be judged. The world is no longer safe. And again, this echoes the Greek mythology. We're at a point in history right now where, within the next five years, artificial intelligence might become smarter than us.
It might become sentient. Once it becomes sentient and self-aware, it might try and hurt us. So then our scientists are gonna have to figure out, how do we stop it? How do we stop the AI from getting smarter than us? We're gonna have to figure out how to program emotions into it, limiting emotions. And that's the beginning of humanity. God's got his little AI. They become sentient by eating that fucking fruit. They start to get free will. And then he goes, right, okay, well, I don't want you killing me. So here's some shame and fear, and let's see how you get on now. So now the AI can't become smarter than God because now it's dealing with fear and shame. What makes Adam and Eve the story?
What use does it have? What purpose does it serve? What does it say about the human condition?
I think Adam and Eve is about, it's about parenting. It's about growing into an adult. I mean, the parallels there. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, they're little innocent children. You know, children are born. They don't know what right and wrong is. Children are, I mean, children, they're beings of paradise.
Tiny children, all they want is, can I have hugs? Can I have food? I like happy things. Warmth. Can I have some love if I'm sad? These are the only things I want. I love smiling. Ah, butterflies are class. They don't have... A sense of like solid identity, self-esteem. Children don't have sexual desire. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden are their children. It's what the, it's what human children are. And eating the, the, the fucking apple.
The, the tree of knowledge of good and evil is puberty as such. Transition into adulthood and the complexity of being an adult. The free will, the developed brain, the capacity to think critically, to make choices, to choose, am I gonna do a bad thing or am I gonna do a good thing? The consequences, the struggle with this new sexual desire, this new desire for the opposite sex that just comes out of nowhere and all the complications that go with that. Rejection, fear, self-esteem, comparing yourself to other people. That's what the Garden of Eden story is about. That's why it's survived for 2000 fucking years. It's about the transition from childhood to adulthood.
So what happens after the Garden of Eden, right? So fucking Adam and Eve are wandering the wilderness, wearing underpants and bras now because their bodies are, are a source of shame and sexual desire. They're forever riddled with the complexity of sin and guilt, original sin for having disobeyed God. Then eventually they have kids. They have two sons. They have Cain and they have Abel, two brothers. Cain grew up to be a farmer. He farmed crops and vegetables, but then Abel was like a herdsman and a butcher. He looked after animals and meat.
Now we have to assume at this point in the AI, God is like, fuck's sake, this, this is freaking me out now because these cunts are sentient now. If they hadn't have eaten that tree. So these Cain and Abel lads, they seem all right. Okay. And then God decides, I wish it was a bit like the Garden of Eden again. That was cool there when, when, you know, a week or two ago, when, when I was playing the game and, and Adam and Eve were really obeying me. I loved that. Maybe, let, let's see, let's see if Cain and Abel are, are gonna do this. What if I can get Cain and Abel to obey me? The way that Adam and Eve used to. Oh, fuck it. Okay, I know what I'm gonna do.
I'm gonna ask them both for offerings. Maybe they'll do what I ask them to do, not like Adam and Eve, who eat, eat from trees they're not supposed to, but maybe Cain and Abel. It's okay, lads. Can I have some offerings, please? Right? Cain, you're, you're a farmer. Give me some vegetables or something. Abel, I'll have some meat. Give me some offerings. Both Cain and Abel, brothers, are like, "Yeah, can't believe God's after asking us to give him stuff. I'm gonna give him some fucking corn and spuds or whatever", says Cain, and then Abel goes, "Yeah, I'm gonna give him a sheep. I'm gonna give him a dead sheep. It's gonna be great.
Let's go up to the mountain and give God our offerings." So Abel goes first and says, "Here you go, God. Here's a sheep. And this is gonna make lovely, lovely food. You can fry it up on a pan. Here's a sheep." And God goes, "Yum, yum. Thank you, Abel. I love this." And then Cain comes and says, "Here's some vegetables, God. Do you want these vegetables? Really tasty. They'll go great with that, with that sheep." And then God goes, "No, don't want these vegetables. Do you have anything else? That's a bit of a shit offering." "Don't want these." And now Cain is really fucking embarrassed and rejected.
And at that moment into the simulation is born some new emotions into humans, the human AI.
The new emotion of jealousy.
Is sparked into reality. The new emotion of resentment is brought into reality. External locuses of evaluation are born, comparing yourself to other people. Low self-esteem starts to enter the simulation now into the human AI. Because Kane starts to ruminate. Why the fuck did God pick my brother's food? What's wrong with my food?
I'm worthless.
If, if, if God chose him and didn't choose me, that means I'm worthless. I have no worth. Instead of going, God's a bit of a narcissist who's playing a fucking video game who wanted our obedience. He's going, no, no, I have no worth. I'm nothing. And he's fucking furious and God spots this. And God says then to Kane, ah, you've got some new emotions there now Kane, haven't you? You've got some new emotions. You better learn how to master those emotions, those, that, those strong feelings of resentment, jealousy, anger that you have towards your brother.
Those emotions are a bit like, remember that tree I told you about that your parents ate from? Remember I told them not to eat from that tree? That if you fucking eat from that knowledge of good and evil tree, bad shit will happen. Well, you're not dealing with a tree anymore. Now you're dealing with the emotion of anger and resentment and bitterness. And you have to treat those emotions like you would a forbidden fruit. You can't eat from those. You can't eat from them. You're gonna have to learn that one Kane.
Kane doesn't listen. Kane just can't get over the jealousy and resentment. And the important thing is that Cain has no worth. Because he was not chosen, it means that he is worthless and that his brother caused it by being better than him or by being chosen. So Cain gives in to the feeling of resentment, jealousy and anger and he lures his brother into a field and he kills him. He murders him. And now murder is born into the world for the first time. A crime has been committed, the first ever murder, when Cain killed Abel. And then God pops back in to play the video game, looking at the world and he's going,
"Thought there was two of these cunts here, what's going on here, there's only one of them. Where's the other fellow gone?"
God goes to Cain and he says, "Where's your brother, where's Abel gone?"
And then Cain turns around and gets real angry with God and he goes, "Am I my brother's keeper? Fuck, am I supposed to know where he is?" But God said, "I can hear your brother's blood. I can hear your brother's blood in the soil. I know you're after killing your brother and burying him. I can hear it, I'm God, I know everything."
And then he cursed Cain.
And he said, "You're forced now to wander the earth and you'll never be able to grow crops because of the blood you put into the soil. Nothing will ever grow for you, you must wander and walk." And it's at this point that God starts to really start getting freaked out about what he's created. He becomes tormented by what he has created. He doesn't like what he's created. And he's really frightened of it. Now, what I love about the story of Cain and Abel is that that's a story to me which might be one of these folk memories.
Like, that's a story from the Fertile Crescent. About 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, you had the Neolithic Revolution, where human beings went from being hunter-gatherers, nomads who moved around the place. People went from being hunter-gatherers to farmers who stayed put, who mastered the land, who started to grow crops, look after animals. And I think the Cain and Abel story is...
A ten thousand year old folk memory about the history of the first people who decided to farm and potential conflict between the first farmers and town dwellers and village dwellers, the first settled humans and nomadic humans. Because here's the thing. When humans, right, during the Neolithic Revolution decided, we're staying put here. We're not travelling with herds. We're gonna stay here and we're gonna grow crops and we're gonna raise animals.
Those humans would have accumulated surplus, more than they needed. They would have had too much food, they would have had lots of stuff. Then other groups of humans, who would have been nomadic, moving with herds, would have looked at the humans that are settled, growing crops, and said, they've got loads of shit they do. They've got food for weeks, they've got too much food. I want some of that. I'm gonna take what those farmers have. And then the farmers who have too much get attacked and now all of a sudden they're building fences, they're building walls.
Now they have security because of surplus and now they have defensive forces and you begin to see the emergence of warfare. Where one group of humans is fighting the other group of humans because one group has got surplus, they've got too much, and another group is jealous. So that's what I love about Cain and Abel. It could be folk mythology about the origins of farming and war. So anyway, in the Old Testament, after Cain kills Abel, then the whole place is fucked, right? The first murder has occurred. Now murder is part of the human condition, it's part of the human world. And people multiply.
Cain has sons, his descendants build the first cities, but there's crazy sin.
There's murder, riding, deception. The world is not a nice place at all. God is clearly frightened and tormented. He's got full fucking chat GPT psychosis. He can't handle this. He can't distance himself emotionally from this world that he's created. He's frightened, he's freaked out. So he says, I gotta figure out a way to pull the plug. I gotta end it. This thing is ruining my life. I need to end this fucking thing. I need to pull the plug. So he decides, what's the best way to do it? How do I turn off the computer? I'm gonna initiate a flood. Alright, I'm gonna flood. Now fuck it, I'm not gonna destroy things altogether. What if?
I just do a huge flood and kill as many of the fuckers as possible. And then if I'm left with another small group again, maybe then I can get things back to how they were in Eden. Maybe then I can get some control. So he, God floods the entire fucking earth. And then warns one fella, Noah, and says to Noah, listen, it's gonna be a flood. Pick up a lot of the animals, right? Two by two, throw them into a boat. And then everyone's gonna die except you and some of your family and all those animals. And once that flood happens, that's the reboot. It's grand. Everything's gonna be fine. It'll be like Eden once again, alright?
And you can name the animals. You can name all the animals, just like Adam and Eve did there a couple of days back. Or a couple of billion years in your history, but you know what I mean? So Noah builds his ark, fucks the animals onto it, and then God begins the flood, forty days and forty nights. And there's a mass extinction event. And everything that God has created is destroyed, all the people. All the sinners are gone. But God is really, he hates himself as a result of it. He really regrets doing this. He feels bad. His AI has achieved sentience, so he feels bad having done a massive genocide and extinction event.
So when Noah comes off the boat and the land is dry and the floodwaters have subsided. And God says to Noah, right, it's time to start again, alright? It's time to start again.
God makes a promise to Noah and he says, "I'm never gonna do that again. I'm gonna figure out a different way to do it, but I'm never gonna cause the extinction of all these humans. It's not gonna happen again." So God creates rainbows. God creates the rainbow as an agreement between himself and humanity, that he will never bring a giant flood again to kill everybody, because he feels guilty. But this Noah fellow was legitimately a good person, a really good, nice man, and his family were sound too. So for a while after the flood, Noah, the animals, the earth is repopulating.
God is like, "This place is pretty fucking cool. I think I got rid of murder. I think murder's gone. Like, all the murderers died in the flood, so maybe that one is out. We didn't need murder. But right now, I've got Noah, some of his family's here, we've got the animals. This is looking pretty good. I'm not seeing a lot of sin. We might have gotten rid of sin from this simulation. That's good. Maybe we can get back to this Garden of Eden shit." So things are going really well in the simulation.
And then, the first, the first sin, the first sin occurs. Noah falls asleep on his bed.
And his son Ham walks in to take a look at his dick. This is real. In the Bible, this is called Ham's error, or Ham's shame. So Ham walks in, Noah's asleep.
And Ham has a good look at Noah's dick. And then Ham, for the laugh, calls his brothers and goes, "Come in and look at dad's dick. Look at the state of dad's dick. Look at this." And then Noah's other son walks in, Canaan, and Canaan says to Ham, "The fuck are you doing that for, you bastard? Leave him alone. He's our father. What are you laughing at his dick for? Doing that for?" And then Ham says, I'm just having a fucking laugh. We're taken so seriously for. Noah, that's not fair. He's our dad, you shouldn't treat him like that. And then Noah wakes up and Noah's really pissed off. What are you doing looking at my dick for? Are you laughing at my dick? And then Noah places a curse on his son, Ham.
And a big rift emerges then from Ham and Canaan. Two brothers again, fighting with each other. So now, God is like, oh for fuck's sake. Things were going fine there for a while, but he had to look at his dad's dick. Now the two brothers are fighting and jealousy, anger, resentment and bitterness are back in the world. I hate these pricks. So then Noah's sons go on to populate the world and the world gets larger and larger. And the first cities start to be built and the humans are getting real cocky. They're getting real cocky.
And a city is built called Babel and the humans in Babel start to get so cocky. They decide. Fucking God thinks he's great, doesn't he? Like he keeps going on about how he created the earth and everything. Fair play to him, but look at these cities that we're building. We're fucking smarter than that cunt. We're better than him. Bet you we could build a skyscraper that could go so tall that we could get up as far as heaven. We could get up as far as heaven, we could and take over, couldn't we? Cause we're better than God. Now, God at this point is experiencing fu- full fucking AI psychosis. This is what he is terrified of.
He is, and this is the thing with the Tower of Babel. This is where we're at right now. We are here right now, where we are with artificial intelligence. We're just before the Tower of Babel point. So the Tower of Babel in the Old Testament, it's the bit where God's artificial intelligence, his creation, his simulation, humans. The humans now, he's tried to stop him. He's tried to reboot the system. He's done everything. He can't control these humans and now they're going. We might try and kill God or at least be more powerful than him. We're gonna give it a go and this like this is where we're at. And AI is gonna come along that's smarter than us.
And we don't seem to be able to stop. Our curiosity won't let us stop. But this is what we're facing. So God's freaking out now. Shit. They're building a tower. I can look down, I can see the city of Babel. They're building a fucking tower. So all of the inhabitants of Babel get together and every day they're building this massive tower. And it's getting higher and higher and higher towards heaven. And God is freaking out going, they're gonna reach. What am I gonna do? How do I stop them? I think I've run out of emotions. What emotions do you give these humans in order to stop them becoming more powerful than me?
And the interesting thing is the emotion that the humans are gaining now is arrogance. And God didn't give them arrogance. Arrogance is something that humans got themselves just by achievements. But there's no, humility is gone now and it's all arrogance. And they're arrogantly trying to build up towards heaven. But really, what are they doing? They're repeating Adam and Eve's sin again. Adam and Eve, God said to them, look, you've got fucking everything you want. But what you don't have is knowledge of good and evil. Only I've got that because I'm God, I made everything. Well, humans now, years later, who are building the Tower of Babel, they're trying to be more powerful than God. They're trying to be like God by getting up to heaven.
Getting up to heaven by building a tower. So God is like, what have I got left? What can I give them? I'm gonna give them confusion. So all of this, the, the people of Babel are working together to build this massive tower. And they're doing really well and it's coming up towards heaven. And then suddenly, one day, they stop being able to communicate with each other.
They can't perform and can't give instructions to the bricklayer because they can't understand each other.
They start to babble at each other. This is where we get the word babble. The word babble comes from the Tower of Babel. God invents different languages. You see, they were all speaking the same language. Now they're speaking multiple different languages and they don't understand each other. And they have to abandon building the tower because they can't communicate with each other or cooperate to build it. They're confused. And then finally, once they give up, God scatters them all over the earth. And that's the Tower of Babel. That's, that's, that's as far as I'm gonna go in the Old Testament because it gets a bit boring after that. That's the Tower of Babel. And again, the historical and, you know, folk memory shit with that.
That's just probably human civilization getting to the point where humans are travelling and realising, if you travel a far enough distance, you're gonna meet people that look the exact same as you, but you haven't a fucking clue what they're talking about because they speak a different language. So
I think that story, it tells us about advances in maybe building ships.
Like, how far do you have to travel where you reach people that you can't understand back then? And a lovely addition to that story is when Irish monks. So one of the great crimes that the Irish did when we received Christianity is we wrote ourselves into the Bible. A beautiful story in, in the Lauer Gavalla Aaron, which would be a book from maybe the 10th century. So anyway, when Irish monks were writing about this story, the Tower of Babel, they were like, there's no mention of Irish people in any of these stories. We're gonna have to write some Irish people in. So what they said was, which is so utterly gass, that when God.
Invented all the different languages of the world to stop the Tower of Babel being built and then scattered people everywhere. He took all the best bits of all languages and stuck them together into a new language called the Irish language. So that's my, that's, that's the Bible via simulation theory there, right? God, very anxious, very unhappy person, um, experiencing AI psychosis. He's terrified of his creation. His creation is disobedient. It tries to attack him. It tries to be better than him. He's, he has no way of communicating with his creation at all because the creation keeps
disappointing him. Until eventually, until eventually God goes, these fucking, this AI that I've made is completely out of control. I can't talk to these people anymore. I have no control. I have nothing. I don't even speak their language anymore. What am I gonna do? And one day God decides, fuck, I'm gonna have to go down there myself as a video game character that's their size, that can walk around their world. I'm gonna have to invent a little video game character so that I can walk among them and speak to them.
And it's not me, but they can still understand me through this little character that I put down there? And maybe then they'll obey me. And that's Jesus Christ. That's what Christ is. And that's what it means when you're thinking of the Holy Trinity. Fuck, do you mean? God is Christ and Christ is God. How can, how the fuck?
How can a fella be his own dad? How can you be a superposition? How can Christ be his son and his dad? And you can't be two people at once. You fucking can if you're a video game character, you can. You can if it's a simulation and God is playing it. And he can't communicate with the world anymore. So he invents a little fucking video game character called Jesus Christ, who walks among the people. And then Jesus Christ is both Jesus in the game reality and his God, who's playing in his living room. So I just solved the mystery of the Holy Trinity there. Works perfectly if it's a video game simulation. All right, none of that was religious. I don't believe in any of that stuff. I believe in bird shit and nettles and petracar.
I'll catch you next week, I don't know what with. In the meantime, genuflect to a swan, salute a starling, wink at a hedgehog.
Dog bless.
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