In this deeply personal and thought-provoking episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into their evolving religious beliefs and introduce the concept of Techno-Puritanism, a new sect they believe is an iteration of Christianity. Malcolm shares his journey of discovering uncanny parallels between the belief system he crafted for his children and the writings of Victorian-era thinker Winwood Reade, particularly in his book "The Martyrdom of Man."
The couple explores the core tenets of Techno-Puritanism, including the iterative nature of prophecy, the mandate for intergenerational improvement, and the importance of living a life of sacrifice and service to the future of humanity. They discuss their approach to canonizing and rejecting specific religious texts, such as the Book of Revelation and the Kabbalah, based on their adherence to monotheistic principles and the elegance of their teachings.
Throughout the conversation, Malcolm and Simone grapple with the challenges of crafting a religious framework that is both logically consistent and spiritually fulfilling, drawing inspiration from the irreverent passion of early Puritan traditions while embracing the boundless optimism of Victorian scientists. They emphasize the role of choice in faith and the transformative power of evidence-backed belief in improving one's quality of life.
Tract Text:
Tract 6: Humanities Manifest Destiny / Why We Choose to Believe in God
Now those who are familiar with us know we crafted this set of beliefs because we believe it is both what is psychologically healthiest for our kids and allows for religious fervor while being resistant to conflict with science. They laugh and say, can you really expect a set of practices to carry itself with fidelity and fever intergenerationally just because people think it helps kids? You really think that could compete with traditional religions? Here we take our turn to chuckle, gesturing at Santa pummeling traditional religion to dirt in the public mindshare.
But I also know that what I believe about God is true. How? I am not a man of faith—I don’t believe things without evidence. Even if God started talking to me, I would just assume I was having a psychotic break. I created this system and framing for my kids along with holidays and mandates in an effort to save our species, not because I thought it was true—then one day I thought: “If it was true how would God communicate that to someone like me.”
First, I started going through books I had tried to flippantly include in my religion as earlier revolutions—religions I had included to preserve and create continuity in western history—the Abrahamic tree of profits. As I studied them, I started to see lines and interpretations of what was written that supported this weird religion I thought I had invented, lines that directly contracted the most commonly practiced iterations of those traditions, (See Tract 1). But while weird, that was hardly enough to convince me, the human brain can easily pick up patterns where they don’t exist.
An example of this are the lines in the Quran that explicitly state all of the major Abrahamic religions are true religions and that God sends different profits for different people with different all true yet seemingly contradictory teachings (Surah Al-Ma'idah—47-57 & Surah An-Nahl—36) and that Islam was the revolution meant to be followed by Arabic speakers (Surah Yusuf—2). Another example would be lines in the Bible where Jesus warns us of future prophets to come (Matthew 23:34), then Paul gives us criteria for vetting their revelations (Thessalonians 5:20-21). If you want to see us doing a detailed breakdown of this phenomenon we kept running into, see the “Are we Mormons” Episode of the Based Camp podcast which investigates how similar our system appears to early Mormon writings.
In this hypothesized metaphysical system, I believed I created in the best interest of my kids, God is what humanity is destined to become millions of years from now, an entity so powerful it lives outside of time and guides its own creation. An entity that has attempted to give human groups throughout history the closest to true revelation they could understand. If those things were actually true the first time God would have tried to give this revelation to man would not have been to me but to someone in the Victorian era likely soon after humanity discovered the theory of evolution.
He could have attempted to prove the author of the story was his emissary through giving him the capacity for thaumaturgical performances (miracle working) but someone like me would just read Victorian reports of miracle workers as con-artists. No, the only way he could prove to me the text was actually directly inspired by Him was to include something totally unfakeable that anyone could independently verify, like a detailed prediction of future events in a widely printed yet somehow almost entirely forgotten Victorian work.
Then I was reminded of an old book I had picked up in a collection of antique scientific literature, The Martyrdom of Man by Winwood Reade written in 1872, (well that, and my kids were playing with it at the time). The book is meant to be a full history of man but weirdly it does not stop recording history when it was written in 1872 but keeps going—it keeps going until, “Man then will be perfect ... he will therefore be what the vulgar worship as a god.” In this old dusty antique book not only did I find an exact copy of the belief system that I thought I had invented whole cloth but a set of predictions about what technologies would be invented over the next two centuries, what order they would be invented in, and what the social impact would be.
Now if you are like me, you are skeptical, either the system he developed must have more differences to ours than I am admitting or his predictions are really not that impressive.
Here is an example of Read’s writing:
Three inventions which perhaps may be long delayed, but which possibly are near at hand ... The first is the discovery of a motive force which will take the place of steam, with its cumbrous fuel of oil or coal; secondly, the invention of aerial locomotion which will transport labor at a trifling cost of money and of time to any part of the planet, and which, by annihilating distance, will speedily extinguish national distinctions; and thirdly, the manufacture of flesh and flour from the elements by a chemical process in the laboratory, similar to that which is now performed within the bodies of the animals and plants.
If this prediction is not shocking to you I suggest you look up images of what other people were predicting the future would be like in the second half of the 1800s. Even early genius science fiction writers born well after Read died, like George Orwell, came nowhere close to such an accurate description of the future. And it’s not just his writings of the future that have already come to pass that are uncanny. His writings about what happens next could have easily been written by an effective accelerationist last week:
These bodies which now we wear belong to the lower animals; our minds have already outgrown them; already we look upon them with contempt. A time will come when Science will transform them by means which we cannot conjecture, and which, even if explained to us, we could not now understand, just as the savage cannot understand electricity, magnetism, steam. Disease will be extirpated; the causes of decay will be removed; immortality will be invented. And then, the earth being small, mankind will migrate into space, and will cross the airless Saharas which separate planet from planet, and sun from sun. The earth will become a Holy Land which will be visited by pilgrims from all the quarters of the universe. Finally, men will master the forces of Nature; they will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds. Man then will be perfect; he will then be a creator; he will therefore be what the vulgar worship as a god.
The way he talked about the goals of this religious system and the nature of God also mirrored ideas I thought I had crafted for the best interest of my children:
We do not wish to extirpate religion from the life of man; we wish him to have a religion which will harmonize with his intellect, and which inquiry will strengthen, not destroy. We wish, in fact, to give him a religion, for now there are many who have none. We teach that there is a God, but not a God of the anthropoid variety, not a God who is gratified by compliments in prose and verse, and whose attributes can be cataloged by theologians. God is so great that he cannot be defined by us. God is so great that he does not deign to have personal relations with us human atoms that are called men. Those who desire to worship their Creator must worship him through mankind.
So what does he say the purpose of human life is? What are we commanded to do? Here again I find the way he lays out these concepts to be ideologically identical to the framings I thought I had crafted:
You blessed ones who shall inherit that future age of which we can only dream; you pure and radiant beings who shall succeed us on the earth; when you turn back your eyes on us poor savages, grubbing in the ground for our daily bread, eating flesh and blood, dwelling in vile bodies which degrade us every day to a level with the beasts, tortured by pains, and by animal propensities, buried in gloomy superstitions, ignorant of Nature which yet holds us in her bonds; when you read of us in books, when you think of what we are, and compare us with yourselves, remember that it is to us you owe the foundation of your happiness and grandeur, to us who now in our libraries and laboratories and star-towers and dissecting-rooms and work-shops are preparing the materials of the human growth.
And as for ourselves, if we are sometimes inclined to regret that our lot is cast in these unhappy days, let us remember how much more fortunate we are than those who lived before us a few centuries ago. The working man enjoys more luxuries to-day than did the King of England in the Anglo-Saxon times; and at his command are intellectual delights, which but a little while ago the most learned in the land could not obtain. All this we owe to the labors of other men. Let us therefore remember them with gratitude; let us follow their glorious example by adding something new to the knowledge of mankind; let us pay to the future the debt which we owe to the past.
All men indeed cannot be poets, inventors, or philanthropists; but all men can join in that gigantic and god-like work, the progress of creation. Whoever improves his own nature improves the universe of which he is a part. He who strives to subdue his evil passions—vile remnants of the old four-footed life—and who cultivates the social affections: he who endeavors to better his condition, and to make his children wiser and happier than himself; whatever may be his motives, he will not have lived in vain.
Intergenerational improvement is not a preference or an inclination but a mandate. All men die, it is not death that makes a martyr, it is how one lives, how one spends this one life we each are gifted. The story of Jesus is misinterpreted, it was God trying to gift primitive man a truth of reality he could not yet decipher. It is not God who as a man martyred himself for the salvation of man but instead God while still in the form of a mankind who martyred himself for the salvation of mankind—for it is only through choosing martyrdom, choosing lives of service to the creation of a future not meant for us and that we are undeserving of entering that we can give meaning to our lives. It is this truth that the story of Moses was meant to communicate to the child like Bronze age man.
I give to universal history a strange but true title—The Martyrdom of Man. In each generation the human race has been tortured that their children might profit by their woes. Our own prosperity is founded on the agonies of the past. Is it therefore unjust that we also should suffer for the benefit of those who are to come? Famine, pestilence, and war are no longer essential for the advancement of the human race. But a season of mental anguish is at hand, and through this we must pass in order that our posterity may rise. The soul must be sacrificed; the hope in immortality must die. A sweet and charming illusion must be taken from the human race, as youth and beauty vanish never to return.
It was fascinating how stories I had learned in my youth but made no sense now came into crystal clarity. I could not understand why God would need to sacrifice himself in the form of a man to forgive man for his sins. Why not just choose to forgive man? Why would the sacrifice mean anything if immediately afterwards he knew he was going to be brought back to life and rejoin God? How would man in an act of foolishness (crueling killing the earthly manifestation of God) somehow cleanse himself of his sin? But when I examine the story with this new farming it now seems almost impossibly elegant in how it described a concept man was centuries from having the capacity to grasp.
But it’s not just this story, all over the Christian tradition things that had seemed like non sequiturs suddenly had meaning. As another example the temptation of Christ never made a lick of sense to me. How could Satan tempt God with things that God already owned? Why would Jesus bow to Satan if he knew he was God? And how could Satan act outside of God's will and tempt his own master in a monotheistic tradition? However, if I reframe this story as not one about Jesus as traditional Christians understand him but the Martyr as we understand him the story comes into Crystal clarity. (For the full context of this story see Tract 6.)
As another example, what's the point of the Trinity? Why was it so important to understand God was three completely separate entities but also one entity? And for that matter what's up with the Holy Ghost—why not just explain Jesus is fully God but also not God if that is the point the Trinity is supposed to explain? Because the Trinity was attempting to explain the concept of the Agents of Providence (the Holy Spirit), God (The Father), and the Son (Mankind) to an earlier iteration of man not yet capable of understanding or accepting a fuller revelation. God is a plural entity, a singular entity, and the fraction of humanity willing to live as martyrs destiny—these are completely distinct manifestations of the same entity. In the old Christian tradition the concept of the Trinity provides little additional information in terms of the nature of God or how to worship but with this additional information it becomes critical.
But with the salvation communicated in this understanding is also a commandment. Man must live as a martyr to be sanctified. A man that stagnated technologically, genetically, or in one's personal self-improvement is living in the highest order of sin possible. To claim that you are good enough as you are whether that is culturally, genetically, or personally is to claim oneself as perfect and is an affront to God.
Persons with feeble and untrained intellects may live according to their conscience; but the conscience itself will be defective. To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty; and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted, and that it should be subservient to faith, will inevitably fall.
Every moment of your life that you spend on something other than the improvement of yourself or mankind is a moment you are living in rebellion to God. But to aspire to not sin at all, to think oneself capable of living a sinless life, is in itself a sin. Only those yet to come and whom we will be instrumental in creating are capable of living a sinless life or deserving the rewards of one. Instead, it is enough for us to not glorify our sin. We are to use sin like meat to tame the animal that still lives inside us, an evolutionary scar. A beast that still craves sex, luxuries, and status. But because the more we feed the beast the stronger it will become; we must feed it only just enough to prevent it from distracting us from our purpose within these short lives. The efficacy of a preacher is shown though how little meat he must use to tame his beast.
Whoever improves his own nature improves the universe of which he is a part. He who strives to subdue his evil passions—vile remnants of the old four-footed life—and who cultivates the social affections: he who endeavors to better his condition, and to make his children wiser and happier than himself; whatever may be his motives, he will not have lived in vain.
Fascinatingly, when I examine the life of Winwood Read in this new context it is almost blindingly obvious he was meant to be a prophet.
He completed trials which showed that he was a paragon of the values our faith teaches. While in Africa he was captured and made a slave of King Seedwa of Falaba. King Seedwa put Reade under conditions of unimaginable physical and mental hardship, giving him four grueling tasks every day. He completed these tasks with aplomb showing King Seedwa such mental fortitude and self discipline that he was released.
He showed an ethical understanding far beyond his time. In writing what the fate of the newly freed American slaves in America should be, “Experience has shown that, whenever aliens are treated as citizens, they become citizens, whatever may be their religion or their race, It is a mistake to suppose that the civilized black American calls himself an African, and pines to return to his ancestral land. If he is born in the States, he calls himself an American he speaks with an American accent; he loves and he hates with an American heart.”
Almost in direct contrast to Mormon profits like Joseph Fielding Smith who said "If evolution is true, the church is false," Winwood Read corresponded with Darwin during the writing of the Descent of Man and is considered one of its contributors.
Finally you might say, if Winwood Read is so smart why was he not recognised as such in his time? To which I would direct you to a quote you yourself may have read if you have read the Sherlock Holms books, in which Sherlock says to Watson, “Let me recommend this book,—one of the most remarkable ever penned. It is Winwood Reade’s ‘Martyrdom of Man.” Yes, canonical The Martyrdom of Man is Sherlock Holmes' favorite book.
So this is a system that sees prophesy as iterative with each generation having a religious duty to expand their mental capacity for comprehension? But if intergenerational improvement is our mandate how can such a religious system stay intergenerationally stable? How we overcome this seeming impossibility is something we will be discussing in the next Tract.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] this is a track that was actually supposed to be track three, but I delayed it because I was like, Oh, this is going to be crazier ones. Cause this is the things we believe and you've got to imagine like you as a viewer, when you're like, why did you really believe this stuff?
I thought I had made all of this up. Okay. I like, imagine you made up this theology and then you find it in an old book in your house. And then on top of that the book made a bunch of predictions and they all came true. Like this may not convince you, but it convinces me
. The traits that they're making fun of them for are traits I want to reestablish within our civilization.
And I think that we are lesser for having lost. And the Puritan vision of this utopian city on a hill, I think it's something that we can bring back, you know, combine the Victorian scientists, it was this endless hope for the future with strict Puritan ideals and aesthetics.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: hello, Simone! Today, we are going [00:01:00] back to the Tract series. This Tract is called Tract 6, Humanities Manifest Destiny, slash Why We Choose to Believe in God.
So recently we were at this conference called Manifest. And largely speaking, I had decided not to do the tracks anymore. They were taking up a lot of time. They require a lot more editing than a standard episode. And for people who don't know what they are, it's us talking about our religious framework.
Why we believe the things we believe, what we believe theologically, and sharing this with you, not with the interest in converting anyone, but just so you can get an idea of, I think for a lot of people, it's just interesting, like theological speculation, they find interesting. And when we were at this conference, every single person, like every one of our fans, and we met a lot of them there, I'd say like 50 of them, it was like a lot wanted us to do more tracks, like that was the core thing, do more tracks, why did you stop the tracks?
But it's not just them, for example, a quote that from a letter we got from one of the fans.
[00:02:00] I've been listening to the tracked episodes of the pod and I've heard you both make statements suggesting that they're maybe exceptionally boring, too far out, etc. In light of that, I wanted to express clear and emphatic encouragement of you presenting these episodes. So much of your content has been engaging and actionable to a degree I basically never encountered in a podcast, let alone one that publishes daily.
And yet I find the tracked episodes To be valuable and penetrating at a totally different level. I say penetrating because as someone who recently tried to rejoin the Christian congregation via Catholicism and found the experience uninspiring,
Simone Collins: what
Malcolm Collins: you're presenting strikes me as something that advances my own view of religion in a way that does feel inspiring and prescriptive for this moment in history, Whereas the modern state iterations of antiquity traditions do not.
In any case, please keep up these efforts. I suspect there are many among your listeners who value these episodes in the utmost. So that really meant a lot to me. And I understand that the [00:03:00] tracks are going to be uniquely grading to individuals who have really strong Christian faith via Catholicism or orthodoxy or something like that.
Because what we are putting out there is an alternate view. Now, I will say, as we think about this more, a few things that I would note here I no longer really think about this as a new religion, but rather an iteration of Christianity. Maybe you could say Christianity, the Judeo Christian branch of Religions.
That is probably as distant from Christianity as something like Mormonism. And interestingly some Mormons don't think differentiates from Mormonism that much. But then we do throw out some books that they would keep and add some books that they would not keep. And I'm going to go over like books that we throw out at the end of this examples would be like the book of revelations.
I do not think is built inspired by God. I don't think Kabbalah is inspired by God. We'll go into like why we have these weird views, but there is an additional book that we add to everything, which is the martyrdom of man. And actually [00:04:00] really interestingly, Paul Vander Klee, he was going through our videos and he was pointing out that people who start new sex or new religions Are so very likely to fail.
How often do people try and those people who try, how many of them are doing it? Not just to create a sex cult or get people to worship them specifically or make money, but to try to make other people's lives better. This is a, the type of a project that you really see people trying, Once in a generation if that now there are a few people trying it right now with the mystic path, but that's also really interesting.
Because normally, when people try this, they do it down the mystic path. Sorry, when people don't know what I'm talking about. When I talk about the mystic pass, I'm talking about mystic perennialism, meaning that they believe that there is some truth to all religious traditions that there is some Super true substrate that reality is written on and this super true substrate that we can only [00:05:00] access through altered states of mind is the real God.
And our goal is to rejoin. We do not believe that don't have any antagonism really against people who do, but it's just, we don't, but most of the let's try to make people's lives better. What they really mean by that is let's try to make people's mental states more expansive, like it's make them better in a mystical theological sense instead of the way that we mean when we say make them better, which is to make them more mentally disciplined, to make them more mentally healthy, like to not have the same amounts of anxiety and depression and everything like that, and to give them a sense of purpose and to help them build a good sense of moral values and to help them through this unique challenge that our species is going through right now.
And I did. Finally settle on a name for the religion that I'm excited about before I start the track here. , Which is techno puritanism. , and, And another really interesting thing is this idea of Founding this new sect when I really don't think we did found it. It's a bit [00:06:00] like saying darwin founded evolution when he had the idea a lot of people were having very similar ideas during that time period and what i've noticed when I put these videos out there is when they connect with people It's people who are saying Oh, yeah, I had a lot of ideas like this.
I just maybe hadn't fully systematized them in the way that you did or something like that. I do not think that this is unique information or that I have any direct path to what's true and what's not true.
Simone Collins: Yeah, I think it cannot be understated how often people write into us saying, It's so exciting to see that someone else has articulated the same conclusions that I have drawn based on, and this is typically people who come from a more Protestant background and are looking at the primary sources.
The people who tend to find these tracks most grating, like Malcolm said, and who tend to find also these views most offensive are from people whose cultures involve a sort of filter in between the primary source and The ultimate faith priests or analysis [00:07:00] or some kind of organization.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The final thing I'd like to note because this is a track that was actually supposed to be track three, but I delayed it because I was like, Oh, this is going to be crazier ones. Cause this is the things we believe. But it also elevates the additional book that we add to biblical texts, which nobody else adds to biblical texts.
As it's divinely inspired works, which is the martyrdom of man by Wynwood Reed. And the way that we relate to theology, like even if you look at the tracks, I would generally recommend that somebody who was born a Muslim and identifies as Muslim first and foremost, go to the Koran for their religious learnings.
Somebody who was born a Jew and raised a Jew, I would say, go back to conservative Jewish values. Study your books. Same was Christian. However, I would say for people who were born atheists or are pure techno Puritan, like just pure this branch that we are creating, the core book [00:08:00] of ours is the martyrdom of man.
Simone Collins: of
Malcolm Collins: all of the faith background books. So that's another thing to note. It's what if I'm coming into this and I don't have a theological background or my family does I don't feel strongly like a Christian or a Jew or Muslim, then the martyrdom of man is the default because I think it's the most recent and clear of the revelations from my perspective.
And we'll get to why we think that. All right. So I'm gonna get started. Let's do it. Anything you wanted to say Simone before I do?
Simone Collins: I'm excited. You had me crazy.
Malcolm Collins: Those who are familiar with us know that we crafted this set of beliefs because we believe it is both what is psychologically healthiest for our kids and allows for religious fervor while being resistant to conflict with science. They laugh and say, can you really expect a set of practices to carry itself with fidelity and fervor intergenerationally just because people think it helps kids?
You really think that you could compete with traditional religions? [00:09:00] Here we have to take our turn to chuckle, gesturing at Santa pummeling traditional religion to the dirt in the public mindshare, or the Easter bunny, or solstice events. The alternative religious systems that people have chosen. Seem to be out competing, specifically for their kids oh, let's do what's right for our kids, the traditional systems.
But I also know that what I believe about God is true. I am not a man of faith. I don't believe things without evidence. Even if God started talking to me, I would just assume I was having a psychotic break. I created this system and framing for my kids, along with the holidays and mandates, in an effort to save our species, not because I thought it was true.
Then one day I thought, if it was true, how would God communicate that to someone like me? And he rushed it out because he couldn't communicate it with me by talking to me. If God just directly talked to me, and I assume you probably feel this way too, Simone, you'd be [00:10:00] like, oh, I'm going insane. My initial thought wouldn't be, Oh, this is affirmation of my beliefs.
Simone Collins: By the way, this is such a Cal like a classical stereotypical Calvinist view. If you go back and read a Christmas Carol, about Ebenezer Scrooge, the first thing that happens when he starts seeing the ghosts is he is, he says that he must've eaten some like off food. He assumes he has food poisoning and he is.
Seeing ghosts. That's great.
Malcolm Collins: First, I started going through the books I had tried to flippantly include in my religion as earlier revelations. Religions I had included to preserve and create continuity in Western history. The Abrahamic tree of prophets. As I studied them, I started to see lines and interpretations of what was written that supported this weird religion I thought I had invented.
Lines that directly contradicted the most commonly practiced iterations of those traditions. See tract one, but while weird, that was hardly enough to convince me the human brain can easily pick up patterns where they [00:11:00] don't exist. As an example of this are the lines in the Quran that explicitly state all of the major Abrahamic religions are true religions and that God sends different prophets for different people with different all true yet seemingly contradictory teachings.
And I'm going to butcher the pronunciation here but Sarah, I'll muddy. 47 to 57 and Surah Al Nahl 36. And that Islam was the revelation meant to be followed by Arabic speakers. Surfa Yusuf 2. And just as a quick aside here, some people have been like, Muhammad, it says Muhammad was the seal of the prophets.
Except this phrase is directly taken from Manichaean literature. The seal of the prophets because they commonly use phrase in Manichaean literature, like almost as common as amen and other literatures or something like that. And what it means is a seal of verification, not the last of, but like a seal of proof.
It's the Twitter
Simone Collins: blue check of religion.
Malcolm Collins: Yes. And he [00:12:00] verified interestingly like to the opposite of what a lot of Muslims want to believe. And it's pretty clear if you read the Koran that this is what was meant that the Christian tradition is 100 percent too. And the Jewish tradition is 100 percent true.
And Islamic laws should not be forced on these populations, because While it may seem that their traditions are different and people can look at our Tesseract God concept to see where this aligns with our understanding here.
Okay. So I realized that because we haven't done a tract in a while. You may not remember what our thoughts are on. Are about Islam what was what. Muhammad was actually trying to say. , so I'll just quickly go over some of these passages that I cited here. , one year we have, we surely sent a messenger to every community. , sometimes this is translated nation.
So to every community saying worship Allah and shun false gods, but some of them were guided by a law. While others were destined to stream, so travel throughout the land and see the fate of the deniers. So this tells us a few interesting things. First. , it tells us that there are [00:13:00] multiple profits and keep in mind that like a nation or a community. , the nations that are in, for example, the middle east today are not the nations that were there in the long pass.
It means that you are getting multiple iterations of messengers for different basically cultural groups. And it means that you can tell, which are the true iteration and which are the false iteration by God's favor. And as I say, you know, when you look at history, , you will see God favoring individuals like. The early Jews.
, and then he removes his favor or the ER. You know, the early Christians or during the Protestant reformation, you know, God's favor returned to the Christian community. , or during the Islamic golden age, , And so when we're looking for, okay, where is God's word in the world? We need to look at the fate of the deniers essentially. , you can tell the truth of the word by how healthy a community is.
So if we see periods , in world history where you see a unique amount of cultural [00:14:00] explosion, , for example, like Victorian Britain, you can imagine that something about their mindset of that time period is, uh, inspired by a law or by God. And we can also see the fate of the Muslim community after I believe they turned their back on God and turned to, , and were influenced by the. Well, we'll, we'll call them Sufi mystics. They got removed his favorite from the Islamic community and the community crashed. Mohammed's second important revelation from our perspective. Is the understanding that these different prophets teach different and to the human mind, mutually contradictory lessons about how to get to God and the best way to do it is to follow the lessons that were taught to your community. , so for some lines from the Qur'an here. Surely those who believe in our law and those who are Jews and Christians and Sabians whoever believes in the law and in the last day and does good deeds, all such people will have their reward with the Lord.
And there will be no reason for them to [00:15:00] fear nor shall they grieve. Or as another quote. And we have revealed to you. Omahamed the book in truth to each of you, we prescribed a law and a method, how to allow willed. He would have made you one nation United in religion, but he intended to test you in what he has given you.
So race to all, all that is good. So. Here and this add some bits like he intended and United religion. But anyway. One nation, one, religion, et cetera. He's been here. , or at least that's, that's what I take it to me.
Uh, what I read this to mean?
Is that if you are of, , the Jewish group, and I believe that God will tell you in your heart, you know, which group is really your group or the Christian group or the Muslim group. , this is why I said earlier at the beginning of this track, you should. Predominantly, if you consider yourself like a techno Puritan, , you are first and foremost, a Muslim are first and foremost, a Jew, but a techno irritate you or first and foremost, a Muslim, but detect out Puritan Muslim. , however, if you don't have a burst tradition or turned your back on your birth tradition, [00:16:00] then your cortex is the martyrdom of man, which we will be going over here.
I should probably also hear elaborate on the seal of the profits point I made because it's one of these points that will be obvious to people who study religion. But if you don't study religion, you'll be like, wait, what? That's not what it means, but that's what all the Muslims say. It means. , so here is, and I'm quoting. From Oxford academic, This abstract here.
This chapter explains that the concept usually perceived to be first used in relation to Muhammad and meaning the end of prophecy was actually first used in a keen literature there, it referred to Manny's disciples and mint. They were the proof of Manny's prophecy. Again, the results have a significant impact on the importance of prophecy in late antiquity. The concept of quote-unquote seal in Hebrew and other Semitic languages.
What's certainly common in ancient societies and is well attested from the Bible on, on a letter or on a sheep. The sealed clearly confirms belonging. Now research shows that also in early Islamic texts, seal referred to prophets coming after Muhammad and confirming his prophecy. This [00:17:00] is then an old idea, which goes like a thread through the ages in your Eastern religious history. So,, this is a mainstream concept.
It's well-known that the term seal of the prophets was borrowed from Manichaean literature. When Mohammed was writing it, he would have known this, , it was changed by later Muslim scholars to mean something else. Uh, to fit their means because you know, it's easier for religion to spread.
If you can, if it doesn't keep updating itself. , but it was built into Islam to be able to update itself. , and this is not some sort of a fringe theory.
Malcolm Collins: Another example would be lines in the Bible where Jesus warns us of future prophets to come, Matthews 23 to 34.
Then Paul gives us criteria for vetting the revelations. Thessalonians 21. If you want to see us doing a detailed breakdown of this phenomenon, we kept running into C, Are We Mormons? episode of the Base Camp podcast, which investigates how similar our system appears to early Mormon writings. And I would also recommend people here go check out the [00:18:00] Adam and Eve episode of Base Camp because that was one of the most shocking things I have ever done.
It's actually I was like, this standard reading of Adam and Eve Did not want mankind to know good from evil and we are punished for that. Felt stupid to me. I was like, this cannot be a true religion. That's not a God I want to follow if that's what it actually says. Then we went and we read it and that is not at all what it says.
And not only that, but it had like weird supernatural elements. When I say supernatural, I was like reading the story and I go, this seems to be the story about the first city. And when man first started making his own rules, And weirdly, I had been told we didn't know where the garden of Eden was.
And yet it says very clearly in the story that it's at the mouse water that the Tigris and the Euphrates, and we absolutely know where that is. So I just decided to do a Google search. I was like, where is the earliest city that we know about? And it was right there. Like exactly in the region where the garden of Eden story takes place, which given that the story was written 5, 000 years after the city that Feels [00:19:00] almost like supernatural providence to me that it would know that it given the theme of the story and I This basically happens whenever I go through one of these biblical stories.
So I'm like this is like the Muslim stuff This is not what Muslims tell me Islam is but this is what's written in the Quran This is not what Christians tell me this story is about but this is what seems to be written in the Bible It's not what Jews tell me the story is about. This is what I'm reading Like, how is this true?
Is this some sort of Mandela world where somebody switched out the Bible and everybody created their religions off of some other texts? I don't know. But to me, like that is a really powerful I can say supernatural signal, which is to somewhat fortified a not faith I have because it's not faith, right?
It's based on evidence. I cannot explain through other mechanisms.
So an evidence that other people can check and verify
Simone Collins: no. I'm with you on this. I like,
Malcolm Collins: do you feel sometimes like it's weird that this all like the religions that were told to What the Bible and Koran say isn't [00:20:00] what we read when we read it,
Simone Collins: yes. And I experienced this first in high school when they had us read the Bible. I was pretty shocked by a lot of it because I expected to find a bunch of things that I'd been told about and they weren't there. So this has always been something that I wonder at. I also wonder if this is something that Comes directly from our Protestant heritage or that people who tended or were drawn toward Protestant based faiths were also more likely to be the types of people who question these things and want to go directly to the primary source and be like where's your.
Malcolm Collins: I also feel that a lot of people are like, how dare you add things to like biblical interpretations? And I'm like, one biblical interpretations have heavily evolved over time. And we even see this captured within the biblical interpretations was the snake staff of Moses. As we've mentioned this was the staff he used to heal people who had been when he was going to Israel for the first time who had been bitten [00:21:00] by stakes.
And then it got placed in the temple. And then some like 500, 600 years later, still captured within the Bible, people had started worshiping it and had been doing it for hundreds of years and committing idolatry. And then the staff had to be broken and discarded because that it entered the temple.
And what that story teaches us is that antiquity or the antiquity of a tradition is not proof that it is approved by God. Which. Is important to remember that what we're doing and then a lot of people are like, oh, yeah I just follow the by and then they believe stuff like, the rapture which isn't like that supported biblically or like in a satan.
That's like a red guy was like Hooved feet and horns. And I'm like, that is like pure biblical fan fiction.
Simone Collins: I really expected to find that in the Bible though. I was very confused. Or hell. Yeah. Where was hell? Where was hell? Everything
Malcolm Collins: we believe about hell. The Bible doesn't mention hell and fires of hell, but like nothing really beyond that.
And yet we have all these ideas about it. Me to be drawing ideas from other places, doesn't distant me that much from other [00:22:00] Christian groups.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. Now back to the text. In this hypothesized metaphysical system I believed I created in the best interest of my kids, God is what humanity is destined to become millions of years from now.
An entity so powerful, it lives outside of time and guides its own creation. An entity that has attempted to give human groups throughout history the closest to true revelation they can understand. If those things were actually true, the first time God would have tried to give this revelation to man would not have been with me or with you.
But with someone during the Victorian era, likely soon after humanity discovered the theory of evolution. And this is because mankind of that kind had all of the science they needed to understand a concept like this. So I would very unlikely be the first time God revealed this to somebody, and not revealed it through any sort of revelation, just through just studying things and thinking okay what might God actually be?
look like given the physical boundaries that we know and given that it appears to me that this Judeo Christian God is a real [00:23:00] entity he could have attempted to prove the author of the story was his emissary through giving him the capacity for somatological performances, miracle working.
But someone like me would just read Victorian reports of miracle workers as con artists. So what I'm saying here is that, okay, if God had actually revealed to somebody through their intellect this understanding of him, he could have proved it by having them be a miracle worker.
But I wouldn't take that as proof, right? Which is also interesting. It's also, it's almost like. And this is why I believe in God so much these days, that all of the evidence was specifically crafted just to cater to my standard of evidence. And so then I write, no, the only way he could prove to me the text was actually directly inspired by him was to include something totally unfakeable.
That anyone could independently verify, like a detailed prediction of future events in a widely printed yet somehow almost entirely forgotten Victorian work. Then, I [00:24:00] was reminded of an old book I had picked up in a collection of antique scientific literature, The Martyrdom of Man by Wynwood Read, written in 1872.
That and my kids were playing with it at the time. The book is meant to be a full history of man, but weirdly it does not stop recording history when it was written in 1872, but keeps going. It keeps going until, quote, Man then will be perfect. He will therefore be what the Vulgar worship as a god, end quote.
In this old, dusty, antique book, not only did I find the exact copy of the belief system I thought I had invented, whole closs, but a set of predictions about what technologies would be invented over the next two centuries, what order they would be invented in, and the social impact they would have. Now, if you are like me, you are skeptical.
Either the system he developed must have had more differences to ours than I am admitting, or his [00:25:00] predictions are not really that impressive. Here is an example of Reed's writing. Three inventions, which, and I should note this was written in it was published in 1872, so it was written in like the late 1860s, okay?
Yeah, this is before people have
Simone Collins: light bulbs in their homes, this is before. So many things.
Malcolm Collins: Three inventions, which perhaps may be long delayed, but which possibly are near at hand. The first is the discovery of a motive force, which will take the place of steam with its cumbersome fuel of oil or coal.
Secondly, the invention of aerial locomotion, which will transport labor at a trifling cost of money and time to any part of the planet. And which by annihilating distance, will speedily extinguish. national distinctions which we have seen from like an ethnic perspective. And thirdly, the manufacture of flesh and flour from the elements by a chemical process in the laboratory, similar [00:26:00] to that which is now performed within the bodies of animals and plants.
If this prediction is not shocking to you, I suggest you look up images of what other people were predicting the future would be like in the second half of the 1800s. Even early genius science fiction writers, born well after Reed died, like George Orwell, came nowhere close to such an accurate description of the future.
Malcolm Collins: And it's not just his writings of the future that have already come to pass that are uncanny. His writings about what happens next could have easily been written by an effective altruist last week. And then here's a quote from him. These bodies which now we wear belong to the lower animals. Our minds have already outgrown them.
Already we look upon them with contempt. A time will come. When science will transform them by means which we cannot conjecture, and which even if explained to us we could not now understand. Just as the savage cannot [00:27:00] understand electricity, magnetism, or steam. Disease will be extirpated. The causes of decay will be removed.
Immortality will be invented. And I would note on the disease will be extirpated line, that has happened from the perspective of somebody living in the 1860s with the advent of vaccines and all of that. Remember half of infants used to die in childbirth and stuff. And then, the Earth's being small, mankind will migrate to space and will cross the airless Saharas, which separate planet from planet and sun from sun.
The Earth will become a holy land, which will be visited by pilgrims from all quarters of the universe. Finally, men will master the forces of nature. They will become themselves architects of systems, manufacturers of worlds. Man will then be perfect. He will be a creator. He will therefore be what the vulgar worship as a god.
Simone Collins: Do you have any thoughts on this? Yeah, I love things like this. I love it when people [00:28:00] seem to be able to model out how the future is going to, The, and what I love too is that he is one of the few people that could go ahead and extrapolate into the future and think through the implications of technology that was already in development at that time and the incentives that would be present.
I,
Malcolm Collins: I'm going to go further. I think. That his predictions were supernatural, like they were divinely
Simone Collins: inspired
Malcolm Collins: when you read other quote unquote, like prediction people, it's like Nostradamus or something like that, like stuff that you could interpret in a few different way. He's
Simone Collins: explicit. He's saying we will be able to fly.
We will be able to
Malcolm Collins: eat synthetic
Simone Collins: meat and other synthetic foods. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: There is like no vagueness in his predictions. And that is the only thing that I would trust. Also, I wouldn't trust it if this was like some rare text that somebody just found today. But no, like this text is incredibly well [00:29:00] recorded during the time period.
This is not a modern fabrication. He really predicted the future in a way that no other person I have seen and no other text I have seen was this accurate and this uncanny to me. So to go further, the way he talked about the goals of his religious system and the nature of God also mirrored ideas I thought I had crafted for the best interest of my children.
Quote here, We do not wish to extirpate religion from the life of man. We wish him to have a religion which will harmonize with his intellect, and which inquiry will strengthen, not destroy. We wish, in fact, to give him a religion, for now there are many who have none. We teach that there is a God, but not a God of the anthropoid variety, not a God who is gratified by compliments in prose and verse, and whose attributes can be categorized by theory, Theologians, God is so great that he cannot be defined by us.
God is so great that he does not deign to have personal relations with the human atoms that are called men. [00:30:00] Those who desire to worship their creator must worship him through mankind. And by that way, he means is through the improvement of mankind, not through as he said in other places.
Our goal is to move from the. Pre coded, four footed, and you'll hear this in some of the quotes I read from him instincts that we have, not through like sex or through gratification, but through the things that differentiate mankind from animals. Our logic, the parts of ourselves that we choose to be.
Do you have thoughts?
Simone Collins: Yeah, I appreciate how weirdly you could say transhumanist or Non carbon fascist he is as well. Like he clearly is somewhat disgusted by the human condition and really does want to rise above it. And I love that about him. Because yeah, I feel like
Malcolm Collins: Mechanicus intro here.
Simone Collins: Yeah, it's being uniquely a theme uniquely weird in our time, I think, is a romanticization [00:31:00] of devolved humanity.
Oh, wouldn't it be great if we lived like Pre civilization humans. I feel like these people really predated
Malcolm Collins: this idea of, I guess I'd call it the chimp man, like they want to go back. They want to devolve and posing and everything like that. And I'm like, this is not the elevation of humanity.
That I think it's pretty clear God intended. And we can go into what, our Adam and Eve interpretation and the idea of the punishments that we were given in the garden of Eden, largely being removed, we are no longer, um, cursed to work the land for our food the days of our lives, we are no longer in a society where women are ruled by men and are forced to left after men.
We are no longer deal with pain in childbirth. You're able to take epidurals now if you want to and what we learned when these, and a lot of people think that one of the curses For leaving the garden was death. It actually very clearly is not. He said, you will, until death [00:32:00] be cursed to work the land.
Now the way that line is actually written, you could read it either way. Maybe we were cursed with deaths. Maybe we weren't cursed with death and it was just a time duration, but you can actually tell that we were not cursed with death from another line where it says, I had to expel man from the garden.
Because, and I'll read in the exact lines here, because if he ate from the tree of life, he would live forever,
So for a few different translations here,
we have the new international version that says he must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat and live forever. So the Lord, God banished him from the garden of Eden. To work the ground from which he had been taken. Here we have the new Catholic Bible, which has now we must prevent him from reaching out and taking the fruit of the tree of life. Lest he eat it and live forever. And then we have the Christian standard Bible here, which says.
He must not reach out, take from the tree of life and eat it. Since man has become like one of us knowing good and evil, [00:33:00] he must not reach out, take from the tree of life, eat it and live forever. So you can see there's. Really, I find it hard to get any other interpretation of this then. If you had ever eaten from the tree of life, you would live forever. Meaning man never did eat from the tree of life.
Meaning that man was mortal in the garden of Eden. , and in addition, just in case, you're wondering why I say that it was a duration, the, from dust to dust thing, I'll just be reading from just the Christian standard Bible to not bore you here. , but it says. The ground is cursed because of you, you will eat from it by means of painful labor. All the days of your life, it will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.
You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground. UN. And note this line until you returned to the ground, since you were taken from it. . For you are dust and you will return to dust. Okay, this is not a curse. It's a statement for you are dust and you will return to dust. And [00:34:00] it's describing links of duration here.
You will eat bread by the sweat of your brow until you return to the ground until you returned to the ground.
Okay.
Malcolm Collins: which implies that you only needed to eat from the tree of life once to live forever, meaning that man had never eaten from that tree, meaning that man wasn't immortal in the garden. So that means that death was not one of the curses.
And this is actually important if you look at an environment now where most of the curses have been lifted, which brings us to a time when people are like, why would there be a new text? Why would there be this new edition of theological law for people of our age? And this is because we are entering a new covenant.
Based on these curses being lifted and us realizing that they were not curses, but they were blessings. They allowed us to be high fertility. When you put men into the trial of the lotus eaters, which we talk about in our first tract you're actually putting them in a harder situation.
Anyway and go check out our Adam and [00:35:00] Eve video if you want to get a deep dive into that. What does he say the purpose of human life is? What are we commanded to do? Here again, I find the way he lays out these concepts to be ideologically identical to the framings I thought I had crafted. You blessed ones who shall inherit that future age of which we can only dream.
You pure and radiant beings who shall succeed us on the earth. When you turn back your eyes on us poor savages, grubbing in the ground for our daily bread. Eating flesh and blood, dwelling in vile bodies, which degrade us every day to a level with the beast, tortured by pains and animal propensities, buried in gloomy superstitions, ignorant of nature, which yet holds us in her bonds.
When you read of us in books. When you think of what we are and compare us with yourselves, remember that it is to us you owe the foundation of your happiness and grandeur, to us [00:36:00] who now in our libraries and laboratories and star towers and dissecting rooms and workshops are preparing the materials of the future.
The human growth, and as for ourselves, if we are sometimes inclined to regret that our law is cast in these unhappy days, that let us remember how much more fortunate we are than those who lived before us a few centuries ago. The working man enjoys more luxuries today than did the king. England in the Anglo Saxon times, and at his command are intellectual delights, which but a little while ago the most learned in the land could not obtain.
All this we owe to the labors of other men. Let us therefore remember them with gratitude. Let us follow their glorious example by adding something new to the knowledge of mankind. Let us pay to the future the debt which we owe the past. All men indeed cannot be Poets, inventors, [00:37:00] or philanthropists. But all men can join in the gigantic and godlike work, the progress of creation.
Whoever improves his own nature improves the universe of which he is a part. He who strives to subdue his evil passions, vile remnants of the old four footed life, and who cultivates the social affections, he who endeavors to better his condition, And to make his children wiser and happier than himself, whatever may be his motivations, he will not have lived in vain.
Simone Collins: Yeah, this is a man who, again, does not like being human as he is, and two, is deeply inspired in servicing future, in serving future generations and making them better and improvement and not accepting humanity as it is.
Malcolm Collins: If you think about, so this line right here, I think the really important line, especially when you contrast, it was our thoughts that I thought I had crafted and you've got to imagine like you as a viewer, when you're like, why did you really believe this stuff?
I thought I had made [00:38:00] all of this up. Okay. I like, imagine you made up this theology and then you find it in an old book in your house. And then on top of that the book made a bunch of predictions and they all came true. Like this may not convince you, but it convinces me. Okay, it gives me not face, but like Evidence backed faith, which is such a weird thing to have.
Simone Collins: What do you say in rebuttal to those who say you're just, searching for faith in random places and, connecting dots where it seems convenient and you're no better than the people that you. It seems
Malcolm Collins: completely implausible to me. It seems completely implausible. Yeah. But
Simone Collins: the other people are like, Oh, isn't it crazy that this bird pooped on my head this one day when, I just said this and then, they just connect the dots.
They choose to find the meaning where it is. I'm not doing that.
Malcolm Collins: I'm not reading from current things that other people can't verify. I'm not reading [00:39:00] from anecdotal events. I am pointing to somebody who anyone can verify in history. Okay, who seemed to predict things. I have no other way of explaining how he predicted this many things.
And when you contrast this with even great thinkers at this period, like George Orwell or something like that, who literally wrote, after this guy died, George Orwell's predictions are infinitely less accurate than his. And then, given how well he predicted all of this, given how widely he was known as his time as a great thinker, why was he forgotten?
Why was it to me to find this book, and how did I even find this forgotten book? Like, all of this is just too impractical to me. And when I look at the specifics, like the specifics of his theology, when you hear about Simone and I talking about ideas like what makes a human, Are not the pre coded genetic predilections like love, lust, happiness, et cetera.
But the things we choose for ourselves, the things we choose with our human brain. And then you read [00:40:00] what he writes more beautifully than I could ever put. Whoever improves his own nature, improves the universe of which he is a part. He who strives to subdue his evil passions, vile remnants of the old four footed life and who cultivates the social affections.
He who endeavors to better his condition. And to make his children wiser and happier than himself, whatever may be his motives, he will not have lived in vain. He very clearly points out what he means when he says subdue his evil passions. Vile remnants of the old forfeited lives. These pre evolved things.
And he is literally having these ideas. While Charles Darwin is still alive. He is literally building this infrastructure as early as a human could. Given, when we say that revelation is given to man. As early as it can be, as our civilization progresses and gains new understanding, this is literally as early.
One of the things that Wynwood Reed was actually known most for was being one of the main evangelists of Darwin, and going [00:41:00] out and debating people about Darwin. So I didn't know that's crazy. Yeah, I, he actually communicated with Darwin
winwood reed corresponded with darwin during the writing of the descent of man and is considered one of its contributors
So some of his ideas are in this book.
Where he proposes that these evolutionary forces affected man as well.
Which also like when I can trust weed, when would read to other profits, this guy is like actively known as an anti racist crusader. He's actively known as like a which we'll see from other passages, he's actively known as a, a, he called evolution early on, when I look at other prophets they just don't inspire me the same way.
This guy is never written as doing like an unethical thing in his life. And I really like that because it's in some way, easier for me to look up to him as a prophet. And I don't know if I'd be able to, if the same things are recorded about him as we have recorded about some of the other prophets in terms of the Things that they did.
Now, I still think that they're divinely inspired. [00:42:00] I don't think that somebody needs to be a good person to be a prophet. I think we or to have god's favor I think that this is recorded in all of the judeo christian traditions with David and the story of Bathsheba you can be a total douche canoe and be a prophet Sorry for people who aren't particularly like religiously read and don't know the story of David and Bathsheba.
David who god favored Saw a guy's wife like naked on the roof of her house from his high roof He wanted to sleep with her So he sent her husband who was a faithful shoulder to the front lines to be killed So that he could sleep with this guy's wife like that is douche canoe high tier status, you know Whatever you blame, I don't know whether it's muhammad or joseph smith for like it I don't know if you get much worse than that.
And we are pretty clearly told if you're in any of the Judeo Christian traditions that David did have God's favor. I just like that, that, that read and also like that I can look to somebody else that I'm not like, this is my ideas. I can look to somebody from antiquity and say, this is their [00:43:00] ideas.
And so the level to which I can go crazy is really constrained by a previous thinker and the level to which he can do terrible things by today's social standards is really. constrained because we can look and see the way he lived his life. Intergenerational improvement is not a preference or an inclination, but a mandate.
All men die. It is not death that makes a martyr. It is how he lives, how one spends this one life. We are each gifted. The story of Jesus is misinterpreted. It was God trying to gift primitive man a truth of reality he could not yet decipher. It was not God who, as a man, martyred himself for the salvation of mankind, for it is only through choosing martyrdom, choosing lives of service to the creation of a future not meant for us, , that we are undeserving of entering, that we can give meaning to our lives.
It is this [00:44:00] truth that the story of Moses was meant to communicate to the childlike bronze age man. And then here's a quote from the martyrdom of man. I give to this universal history a strange but true title, the martyrdom of man. In each generation that the human race has been tortured, that their children might profit by their woes.
Our own propensity is founded on the agonies of the past. Is it therefore unjust to that we also should suffer for the benefit of those who are to come. Famine, pestilence, and war are no longer essential for the advancement of the human race, but a season of mental anguish is at hand, and through this we must pass an order that our Posterity may rise.
The soul must be sacrificed. The hope in immortality must die. A sweet and charming illusion must be taken from the human race. As youth and beauty vanish, never to return. And here I want to elevate, when he's talking [00:45:00] about But a season of mental anguish at hand this was written before World War One and World War Two.
So he was not wrong in that prediction in, in saying that a lot of people at the time believed that, wars were basically over. But anyway. It is fascinating how stories I had learned in my youth, and this is me talking again, but made no sense now came into crystal clarity. I could not understand why God would need to sacrifice himself in the form of a man to forgive man for his sins.
Why not just choose to forgive man? Why would the sacrifice mean anything if immediately afterwards, he knew he was going to be brought back to life and rejoin God? How would man, in an act of foolishness, cruelly killing the manifestation of God, somehow cleanse himself of his sins? But, when I examined the story with this new framing, it now seems almost impossibly elegant in how it described a concept.
Man was centuries from having the capacity to grasp not just this [00:46:00] story all over the christian tradition things that had seemed like non sequiturs suddenly had meaning as an example the temptation of christ never made a lick of sense to me how could satan tempt god with Why would Jesus bow to Satan if he knew he was God?
And how could Satan act outside of God's will and tempt his own master in a monotheistic tradition? By that what I mean is, if there is only one God or at least an all powerful God, Satan should have no ability to realistically challenge him. So why is he able to challenge God in this instance? And how could Satan act outside of God's will and tempt his master?
Own master however, if I reframe this story as not one about Jesus as traditional Christians understand him, but the martyr, as we understand him, the story comes into crystal clarity.
And I say for context of the C Track six, but it's one of the future tracks where I'm gonna talk more about this context.
When I talk about Satan, the rule [00:47:00] of evil in temptation, which will be a future tract as an example, what's the point of the trinity? Why was it so important to understand God with three completely separate entities, but also one entity? And for that matter, what's up with the Holy Ghost? Why not just explain Jesus is fully God and also not God?
If that is the point the Trinity is supposed to explain. Because the Trinity was attempting to explain the concept of the agents of providence, the Holy Spirit, God, the Father, and the Son, mankind, to an earlier iteration of man, not yet capable of understanding or accepting a fuller revelation.
God is a plural entity, a singular entity, and the fraction of humanity willing to live as martyrs destiny. These are completely distinct manifestations of the same entity. In the old Christian tradition, the concept of the Trinity provides little additional information in terms of the nature of God or how to worship.
But with this additional information, it becomes critical. This is really interesting to me. All these ideas where I've [00:48:00] been like, what's the point of that? What's the point of the Holy Ghost? Why? What's the point of Satan's temptation of God, like Jesus is going to immediately become God. What's the point of this sacrifice?
Why did God being killed unjustly by man, Caelo, man of his sins. But now if all of this makes sense to me was this new framing, and it's like an impossibly elegant explanation of a concept that I thought I had invented. And keep in mind I thought I had invented, oh God's a future entity and mankind intergenerationalizes, aggravates themselves.
And now I go back to these religious texts, which I grew up with and didn't know they said the things they say, and I'm like, whoa, I did not expect this.
Simone Collins: Do you think that You had subtly grown up with these core messages and just not known it and had them set in and then intuitively no, just weren't exposed to these primary sources at all to start.
Malcolm Collins: I never read them seriously.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I'm just wondering where it could have come from. [00:49:00]
Malcolm Collins: It's not like I read the martyrdom of man.
No. Yeah. Yeah, this was not primed by something. But with the salvation communicated in this understanding is also a commandment. Man must live as a martyr to be sanctified.
A man that's stagnated technologically, genetically, or in one's personal self improvement is living in the highest order of sin possible. To claim that you are good enough as you are, whether that is culturally, genetically, or personally, is to claim oneself to be as perfect as God and an affront to God.
And then from the Martyrdom of Man, he says, Persons with feeble and untrained intellects may live according to their conscience, but the conscience itself will be defective. To cultivate the intellect is therefore a religious duty, and when this truth is fairly recognized by men, the religion which teaches that the intellect should be distrusted And that it should be subservient to faith will inevitably fall.[00:50:00]
Every moment of your life you spend on something other than the improvement of yourself or mankind is a moment you are living in rebellion to God. But to aspire to not sin at all, to think oneself capable of living a sinless life is itself a sin. Only those yet to come and whom we will be instrumental in creating are capable of living sinless lives or deserving the rewards of one.
Instead it is enough for us to not glorify our sin. We are to use sin like meat to tame the animal that still lives inside us, an evolutionary scar, a beast that still craves sex, luxuries, and status. But because the more we think about it. the beast, the stronger it will become.
Malcolm Collins: We must feed it only just enough to prevent it from distracting us from our purpose within these short lives. The efficacy of a preacher is shown through how little meat he used to tame [00:51:00] his beast. And then from the martyrdom of man, Whoever improves his own nature improves the universe of which he is a part.
He who strives to subdue his evil passions via remnants of the old forfeited life and who cultivates the social affections, he who endeavors to better his condition and to make his children wiser and happier than himself, whatever may be his motives, he will not have lived in vain. And here I would note, what I'm talking about, to, to think yourself incapable of sin, or to live a life incapable of sin is in itself a sin.
And what you need to do and what's commanded of us is to attempt to improve the next generation, attempt to improve ourselves,
Simone Collins: but
Malcolm Collins: also to never ever glorify sin as not sin. So for example, I, Drink alcohol. This has no efficacious point in my life. It is a sin. Okay. Drinking alcohol is a sin, but I do not aspire to live a sinless life.
I simply [00:52:00] aspire to be better every day. And when I look at the aspects of my life, that I could improve. This is one of the aspects that if I endeavored to improve it would distract me from other aspects I am working to improve right now. But it is very important because mankind has within him the desire to do this, to take things that are sinful and turn them into status signs.
Whether it's an addiction to exercise, for example, where you have worked out far more than you need to for your health. And I've started using it as a social signal
Simone Collins: or
Malcolm Collins: you brag about being able to drink someone else under the table. These are the true and highest form of sin because here you glorify your sin.
Instead we don't need to be perfect. We just need to know that sin is or we just need to admit to our sins. And I think that this is something that the Catholics I really like about their tradition with confession is this idea that God doesn't command us to never ever sin. That's an impossibility for man as he exists today, [00:53:00] but he does command us to take responsibility for our sins and to not glorify them.
Do you have thoughts on this Simone?
Simone Collins: No, that just, it seems so much more practical than other interpretations of sin that I've seen, just don't do it. ever. Or if you do it, you'll be paying it off for, hundreds of thousands of lives to
Malcolm Collins: end all sin that you have, because that leads people to build these cognitive dissonance where they're like I'm sinless or I don't sin.
Therefore, if I'm doing something, it must not be a sin, yeah. Or
Simone Collins: there's no point in trying. To not sin or I'll just ask for forgiveness later. None of those systems seem to make sense in the same way of always sharpening oneself in the direction of whence inherently deepest values. And especially this orientation toward building a better future.
It's such a better North star than just here, all these various rules don't do this, don't do that. Yeah. So I like that
Malcolm Collins: about this. Alcohol is a sin. [00:54:00] Exercising too little is a sin, exercising too much is a sin, playing video games is a sin. So many things can be sins, right? And you should expect to do them because you are human, right?
But, just don't glorify them, don't be like, I'm amazing because I'm so good at video games, right?
Simone Collins: Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: if it's not making the world better, heating, heating your house in the winter is a sin if you can live without it And your kids can be healthy without it. It's a sin and The left loves to demonize because they demonize us for all the areas in which you practice austerity any form of austerity They're like, how dare you live without here or here.
I
Simone Collins: should just note that people think we don't need our house at all. That's literally not possible for you to do. If you live in a region that freezes because your pipes will burst. So we just don't, we don't go excessively high with our heat. Like most people do. But we do actually have to heat our house a little bit.
Malcolm Collins: Fascinating. And I hear her talk a little bit about this. I [00:55:00] think that this is psychologically healthy for kids. I don't come when I'm thinking of an idea, like I, I would not choose any theological idea that I didn't think also had a secular motivation for it. And it turns out that the secular motivations are always backed by the theology that, that austerity is commanded of us by God.
But and you can find thousands of lines from any of the true revelations that, that we'll talk about this. Yeah. But I also think that it's psychologically healthy for kids. I think when you don't expose kids to negative stimuli growing up, whether that's discipline, like corporal punishment or austerity, like heating, then they become hypersensitive to negative stimuli.
And I think that this is where you get things like trigger warnings and stuff like that, where they spiral into depression, where they can't handle their anxiety and where they have,
Simone Collins: it's like someone who has never been sick before. You then get the tiniest cold and instantly die because you're immune to this disease.
I don't know if that's
Malcolm Collins: exactly the way, maybe a people group that had no immunity to something, but yes.
Simone Collins: Yeah, I'm thinking more of when Europeans came to [00:56:00] North America, brought a bunch of diseases that no one had ever been exposed to. I think that, The human body, when exposed to anything that it is not used to.
So if you're with like, for example, if you suddenly lift something that you've never lifted before, and you're using a set of muscles that you don't know how to use, you're going to pull out your back or someone who's regularly lifting things. Say they're moving for or sorry. Say they're working for a moving company.
Their muscles are accustomed to this. They know how to lift the thing they can deal with that stressor. So the human body works like that with mental things too. And I love that about the face that we have found.
Malcolm Collins: And people think that like when we're giving our kids austerity or we're giving them some form of controlled hardship, This is lowering their quality of life.
And yet these people are on, however many drugs just to get through the day. They are seeing a psychologist regularly. They are barely mentally holding it together. And I'm like, I am pretty certain, having started my career in neuroscience that we are actually causing our kids to experience less overall suffering in their lives.
Bye. Not shirking from our [00:57:00] responsibility as parents, which is to not just give them a perfect childhood existence, but to discipline them and give them trials and give them hardships and expose them to hardship so that they do not become oversensitive to it as adults and spiral out of control when they experience it.
So next fascinatingly, when I examined the life of one would read in this new context, it is almost blindingly obvious he was meant to be a He completed trials, which showed that He was a paragon of the values our faith teaches. While in Africa, he was captured and made a slave of the King of Sidwa of Falaba.
King Sidwa put Reed under conditions of unimaginable physical and mental hardship, giving him four grueling tasks every day. He completed these tasks with aplomb, showing King Sidwa such mental fortitude and self discipline that he was released. He showed an ethical understanding far beyond [00:58:00] his time in writing what the fate of the newly freed African American slaves in America should be.
Experience has shown that whatever aliens are treated as citizens, they become citizens, whatever may be their religion or their race. It is a mistake to suppose that the civilized black American calls himself an African and pines to return to his ancestral land. If he was born. In the States, he calls himself an American, he speaks with an American accent, he loves and hates with an American heart.
That's so modern sounding, like imagine like Joseph Smith saying something like that. I really admire Wynwood Reed as a person for what he fought for in his time period. Almost in direct contrast to mormon prophets like joseph fielding smiths who said quote If evolution is true, the church is false in quote Correspond, I know that is not good winwood reed corresponded with darwin during the writing of the [00:59:00] descent of man and is considered one of its contributors .
Finally, you might say, If Wynwood Reed is so smart, why was he not recognized as such in his time? To which, I would direct you to a quote you yourself may have read, if you have read the Sherlock Holmes books, in which Sherlock says to Watson, Let me recommend this book, one of the most remarkable ever penned.
It is Wynwood Reed's The Martyrdom of Man, end quote. Yes, canonically, The Martyrdom of Man is Sherlock Holmes favorite book, or at least one of his favorite books. So this is a system that sees prophecy as iterative, with each generation having a religious duty to expand their mental capacity for comprehension.
But if intergenerational improvement is our mandate, how can Such a religious system stay intergenerationally stable. How we overcome this seeming impossibility is something which discusses the updated index system, which is quite updated from the system that we discussed [01:00:00] in the pragmatist guide to crafting a religion.
So what are your thoughts?
Simone Collins: There's nothing new to
Malcolm Collins: comment on. I can give you some other, so when I think about what we're trying to create here, right? I want to create a theological tradition that is like irreverent and fun, but also strictly logical and ordered.
I think people might think that this is impossible. When I read something like one would read and has boundless enthusiasm,
Simone Collins: it
Malcolm Collins: really reminds me of Gurren Lagann, which we have noted as having like religious significant in this concept of spiral and anti spiral energy., in many stories, logic, and industry, and science are always cold. They are Vulcan like in nature. But they don't need to be. In fact, I would say by nature they are not. If we look at the Victorian scientists with this boundless optimism for the future, you can see this.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Like the pioneers of science were curious, [01:01:00] irreverent sometimes dangerously and enthusiastic about the potentiality of reality and even God.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah and I also want to talk here because it's weird that we have added and removed books and people might be like, why have you done that?
Like, why do believe that Judeo Christian traditions are true, but you see some books as theologically inspired and some books as not theologically inspired. And there's a few criteria we use to do this. So you can look at something like the book of revelations and one, It was on the edge when they were confirming which books to put in and which books not to put in.
In fact one group, which I'll add in editing here, didn't even include it.
I was thinking of the Ethiopian Orthodox to lado church and the Oriental Orthodox church. , and actually the Eastern Orthodox church while it is considered Canon. It is not considered. Part of the liturgy was in the church.
Malcolm Collins: One mainstream Christian sect doesn't even include it in their canon religious texts. On [01:02:00] top of that, the Greek in it is very bad. It's written by a fairly uneducated person when contrasted with the other scriptures.
And this is something that was noted like by people who study the Bible. They're like, this is written by a dumb person. But then on top of that, also just you read it and it doesn't feel true. Like when I read the story of Adam and Eve and I was like, Oh my God, like this explains so much, this feels so deep, and when I read, parts of the Torah, I feel that way. But when I read the And I think, for people like, why do you dismiss the Kabbalah so regularly, given that it's a late edition, only about a thousand years old, but it's in the Jewish text for the same reason I dismiss revelation.
It's not like distinct to you. So I'll read some passages from revelation and you'll see what I mean when I'm like, when something like, Genesis can feel very awe inspiring to me when I read it. So I feel like the book of revelation feels like a schizophrenic yelling at people in the streets.
So this is Revelation 12. A great sign appeared in heaven. A woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her [01:03:00] feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head. She was pregnant and cried out in pain as she was about to give birth. Then another sign appeared in heaven. An enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns Oh boy.
and seven crowns on its head. Its tail swept a third of the stars out of the sky and fell. The dragon stood in front of the woman who was about to give birth so that it might devour her child the moment he was born. She gave birth to a son, a male child, who will rule all the nations with an iron scepter.
And her child was snatched up by God and to his throne. The woman fled into the wilderness to play to a place prepared for her by God where he might be taken care of for 1260 days. Then a war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back, but he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in the heaven.
The great [01:04:00] dragon was hurled down. That ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray, he was hurled to earth, and his angels with him. When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. The woman, Was given so I think a lot of people they don't know that this is where like the satan Being an angel and going to war with god and then they're like, oh that sounds yeah, michael and his angels fighting satan They're like whoa, whoa with the pregnant woman and the satan's a dragon and he's like chasing her around and when you take out these ideas of satan being an angel and then being cast to hell Which you know you get solely from revelation, which we'll talk more about later You It makes a lot more sense of the character, which we'll talk about in future tracks.
But anyway. When the dragon saw that he had been hurled to earth, he pursued the woman who had given birth to the male child. The woman was given the two wings of a great eagle, so that she might fly to the place prepared for her in the wilderness, where she would be taken care of for a [01:05:00] time. Time and half a time, out of the serpent's reach.
Then, from his mouth, the serpent spewed water like a river to overtake the woman and sweep her away with a torrent. But the earth helped the woman by opening its mouth and swallowing the river that the dragon had spewed out of its mouth. Then the dragon was enraged at the woman and went off to wage a war against the rest of her offspring, those who kept God's commandments and hold fast their testimony about Jesus.
Simone Collins: This is Imbrof gone terribly wrong. There is Way too much. Yes. And I'm going on here.
Please prove, just say something to him. Not here to talk to them. You are the hand chosen by the master. No! Yours is the wheel of plot. Yours is the sword of Michael. Sonny!
Simone Collins: You have our
Malcolm Collins: tract. When we talk about the three faiths, like policy ism, mysticism and monotheism. And I'm like, sometimes you can see that accidentally, of course it would happen. You have a true face. Sometimes they accidentally confirm a book.
[01:06:00] That's from another tradition. This is very clearly policy is, this is like Popol Vuh. People don't know when I'm comparing things at Popol Vuh, it's like the Mayan Bible. You can read it if you want to get a good, it's a very good, example of what polytheist traditions are like, but you'll also get stories like this.
If you read like ancient Sumerian myths, or if you read a lot of old early native American myths where it's like the next insane thing happened or like ancient Greek myths. Oh, that God's head was hit and then it split open and then his daughter came out and then they made friends. Was chased by a dragon and then she hit the dragon and from his head split water and like it's very clearly polytheist and not monotheist in nature And I think that if you are monotheist and you read from a polytheist tradition That's not based on logic and order and god's what you're like Oh, this is clearly something different and that's what I use when I am disconfirming certain judeo christian texts In a way that people might, and keep in mind, we're not saying everyone in our face has to do this.
You've got to [01:07:00] choose your own canon within this system. And I think that the correct canons will be chosen by God in the groups that succeed and the groups that fail. However I think that we need to be more, uh, questioning of the staff that had been in the temple for hundreds of years, we need to say sometimes I know that this tradition has antiquity and I know that the traditional church bodies say that this is okay, but this looks like idolatry.
This smells like idolatry. And I think this is idolatry. And the. We know from the tradition, like our traditions, that we are commanded to do that sometimes. And I read something like the book of revelations and I'm like, Oh, this is a crazy person yelling at people on the streets. And if you grew up in the Christian tradition, you may not feel that way.
You may read this and be like, Oh yeah, of course I knew about the pregnant woman and the numbers and the thousand 260 days. And the, but I think that, this leads to the temptations of things like neurology. And other forms of trying to [01:08:00] divine the future using God's message instead of which can lead to hugely deleterious outcomes.
When it's not just plainly laid out. When people use this and they're like, oh, the Bible is true because I can find like X correlations here, and then I'm contrasting it with what, like when would read. Who's Oh yeah, here, this is exactly what's going to happen. This is going to be, he even goes into Oh, once we can create meat in the lab we're going to and I'll include the quote here.
We're going to look down on the people who used to eat meat. But people should not look down on us for eating meat. Because, they're living with the technology that we didn't have access to, so they can't fully understand why we lived life the way we live life.
Yeah, the line here is in specific reference to that. You blessed ones who shall inherit the future age of which we can only dream you pure radiant beings who shall succeed us on earth. When you turn back your eyes on us, poor savages grubbing in the ground for our daily bread, eating flesh and blood dwelling in file bodies, which degrade us every day to a level with the beast tortured by panes and by animal propensities, buried in gloomy [01:09:00] superstitions, ignorant of nature, which yet holds us in her bonds.
When you read of us. In books, when you think of what we are and compare us with yourselves, remember that it is to us, you owe the foundation of your happiness and grand jury. To us who now in our libraries and laboratories and Starr towers and dissecting rooms and workshops. Are preparing the materials of the human growth. And keep in mind, he's saying this in the context of the prediction. And thirdly, the manufacturer of flesh and flour from the elements by a chemical process in the laboratory. Similar to that, which is now performed within the bodies of animals and plants. And so we would say if there is a religious mandate around food for this religious sect, I would say it's that once, Lab grown meat is widely available, that you are mandated to use it rather than factory farmed foods.
Malcolm Collins: And I think that's true about so many things as like technology progresses.
But do you have any final thoughts? Do you disagree with me about saying I do not think the book of revelations is inspired by God? [01:10:00]
Simone Collins: It just, yeah. I, I really struggle with this because It's so tempting to say that the Bible just is the Bible, but it's not. It's not like everything in there has been equally vetted. It's not like everything in there is of a good source. And just people looking at, just people looking at the New Testament and looking at stories of Jesus can, find all of these conflicting reports.
It's very clear. And even biblical scholars will agree that not everything in the Bible is accurate and that you're going to get differing accounts of the same events. Like with Jesus riding the donkey and and like sometimes it's one donkey and sometimes it's two donkeys and he's straddling the donkey, like two donkeys and all these things are happening.
And so I, It's hard for me to say we believe in going to primary sources, but then it also seems, it seems disingenuous to me that people can be like, Oh I read the primary source, but also I decide what is primary source, right? That seems wrong. But I also know that we have no other choice [01:11:00] when the primary source.
is comprised of corrupted materials. So I guess that's what makes me uncomfortable.
Malcolm Collins: To me, the primary source was Jesus is Jesus. And we don't have direct writings from Jesus. Exactly.
Simone Collins: Yeah. But then what about the Old Testament? We don't have any, aside from God. And so a lot of people are going to turn to the, to like personal Revelation and praying directly to God and then God tells you, but that's not right.
Malcolm Collins: I think even in the Old Testament, some policy as it gets written in, I can read some like Jewish writings that are quite old and I'm like, this is clearly policy of them. And I think it's important that we know now that 50 percent of early Israel DNA came from the Canaanite. preexisting population.
So when we hear about the evils of ball and ball light worship and this alternate system of worship that we that we understand that it is, It's likely that it got worked into Jewish writings and that later, when the early Christians were [01:12:00] around, they were not actually primarily converting Jews.
I think as many scholars know, they were, the early Christians were predominantly converted from pagan communities. Of course, they're going to bring some of these ideas from these early pagan communities into Christianity. And it's up to us to be vigilant. Is this a pagan writing or is this a monotheistic writing?
Is this policy ism or monotheism? Is this mysticism or monotheism? And I think it's not one of those vague things. Like when you read it, I think it's pretty obvious to me, at least Oh yeah, this is not the same kind of thing of the monotheistic writings. I think God further, it.
inscribes this for us by making sure that we know that it was written by somebody uneducated who didn't appear to speak Greek very well, who doesn't appear fully literate. So that it's easy for us to be like, okay, like if God's inspiring something, he's at least making sure the language is like good.
Like the person has a broad grasp of at least their culture's idea of what something intelligent would look [01:13:00] like.
Simone Collins: Maybe I, yeah, I feel so uncomfortable with any of these things, but in the end, I think what we've taken away personally, and what I feel comfortable with is that we have established our standard of evidence for what we believe, and we've received an abundance of evidence encouraging us to lean in a certain direction of faith that fits our particular criteria.
We'd be dumb not to follow through with it, basically. And I think everyone has to do that with their own standards of evidence in their own faith.
Malcolm Collins: And this is the other thing I'd mentioned for people is that faith is ultimately a choice. That's what I think many atheists don't get about faith.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: You can look at evidence and it can confirm the things that you're like, I, I can't explain this easily in other ways. And I find this a unique kind of miracle to me when I look at all of these predictions, when I look at finding things in the Bible and the Koran, I didn't expect in the Torah, I didn't expect because it wasn't the [01:14:00] stories I was told.
To me, It feels like such An impossible thing that it is confirming for me, right? And it leads me to then choose to have faith. And that and to believe that the earlier instead of what I had originally done, which is saying I'm creating, What I thought of as a new religious system.
It's more of just a different sect of Christianity. That's like techno Puritanism is an evolution of early Puritanism and not even that deranged in evolution. When you contrast, it was like, Scott Alexander's Puritan spotting piece. And you're like, Oh, like Puritans have been doing this a long time.
The early Puritans would always try to rewrite the Bible to be more in line with science. And I think that they were fundamentally wrong headed in that endeavor. I think that the Bible was fundamentally true and any efforts to rewrite it are inaccurate, but I do think that it does need to be like, we do need to be scrupulous when we're choosing which texts we think are inspired by God and which are not in which lives are [01:15:00] inspired by God and which are not.
, and so that's the way I approach it. And it has given me this religion that like, I believe very strongly. And I think a lot of people don't realize how fanatically strongly I believe this now. And it's very easy Two for me, because it has improved my quality of life so much. But I don't do it because it's improved my quality of life.
And I don't even do it because I think like this evidence, I can't explain it another way, it seems to point to it. I do it because I've chosen to do it.
Simone Collins: Yeah. But all those other ancillary benefits, I think help, which is how you end up having people who join religions where they start off being very skeptical, if not.
Outright non believers, right? They're like, this is just, this is not for me, whatever. I'm just going to go ahead and do this, but then I'm going to choose to lean into it because maybe my spouse has leaned into this, or I've just decided this seems to be better for the community and it's better for me.
And then I don't know, there's, I think there is a [01:16:00] compounding effect, like sometimes just surrendering yourself. And I think people talk about this a lot with faith. It's a lot like surrendering yourself to. That doctrine or that religion of letting go then leads to all these ancillary benefits then leads to what either could be referred to as confirmation bias or finding all the connected dots and realizing that, the evidence is actually strong and maybe you really should believe.
I don't really know. I don't think it really matters. If ultimately it's correct, if you have chosen it from a place of conviction and for good reasons, like you've done your work, you haven't just randomly chosen a societal default or something that was right in front of you. And you choose to surrender to it and it produces good results for your life and those in your life.
Then great, like it doesn't matter if it's true or not. It matters if. All those other conditions are set.
Malcolm Collins: And I also like to, as a final [01:17:00] here, explain why I settled on techno puritanism for the name of this you should probably buy that URL before this episode goes live. But the reason I decided on techno puritanism
is that one I wanted to connect it to earlier Christian traditions.
And I think that many people have in their mind what a Puritan is, aesthetically speaking, right? So it gives you something that you can visualize. It's not a holistically positive image. I look at the videos that people make to make fun of Puritans, and I'll put in some here.
This is just a date, not a wedding auction. What's a date? It's where you invite someone to do an activity so you can get to know them better. You know what that sounds like? It sounds like It's not the devil's work! I was going to say it sounds like a waste of money. Jedediah, women like romance, not being compared to livestock. I see. Roses are red, violets are blue, both are useless, plant some wheat! Your views on women are extremely antiquated. Yeah, let me guess, you'll only be happy if your future wife bears you [01:18:00] a son.
Actually, I would prefer a daughter. Yes, because suffering is good for the soul. You cannot tempt an iron heart! Iron can weaken with the rust of pride, for certain. And what shall I call this embodiment of virtue? Virtue. Come again? Virtue, obedience, Hawkins. Good name, no doubt. Names do not carry us to the golden gates, for certain. Gonna have a bonfire out back, eat some s'mores. Your thirst for s'more will ultimately give you some less.
And you will be consumed upon the bonfire of vanity.
I am never alone in the company of men. Come in, silence!
A sage choice, which will make our gathering a blessed evening? I will be gone by evening. Those who court when the sun descends court the devil's design for certain? Ah, yes. I could not agree more. How dare you express enjoyment? [01:19:00] My deepest apologies. The pain purifies my predilection for pleasure. Your alliteration sounds dangerously like poetry. My apologies. Strike me, silence!
I apologize for this unholy demonstration of passion. This deserves the cleansing ritual of stoning. Will you stone me with the stone of justice? No, I will use mercy. You
Malcolm Collins: The traits that they're making fun of them for are traits I want to reestablish within our civilization.
And I think that we are lesser for having lost. And the Puritan vision of this utopian city on a hill, I think it's something that we can bring back, you know, combine the Victorian scientists, it was this endless hope for the future with strict Puritan ideals and aesthetics. That's what I mean when I combine these two words.
And I thought of other words like new wave Puritanism or Neo Puritanism. And whether either there might be other movements that sort of talk [01:20:00] about these ideas which I don't like, stepping on something else there. But they also are just too conventional of names. And I also wanted the name to be a little silly.
As I said, I want it to be irreverent and passionate. I want it to be something because I think that's something that religion has lost a little bit. If you read the old Testament, there's lots of like sex jokes in it. Talking about like people's feet, which were often meant to be on like the side of it.
It was meant to be a standard for like genitals and like in various parts. And they're really like lots of sex jokes in the old Testament. And we've gotten away from that, even the Bible has sex jokes and a lot of people don't know this, like dating jokes, but like Jesus at the well was meant to be a joke.
There was this convention of stories at the time when a husband would meet his wife at the well. And when Jesus goes to the well and meets a woman he gives her the water of everlasting life, everyone would have thought that was hilarious because it's turning this sexual story on its head [01:21:00] and we have forgotten that everything's become too solemn and too Beautiful.
And this is what I mean, like one of the fears I have around like the aesthetics of beauty in these traditions, drowning out I think the I do think to an extent, like when you have this grandeur, like when you walk in to this great grand cathedral, you can feel all inspiring and it can have you feel minute, but at the same time That in a way it makes you feel under God, right?
Not oppressed by God, but you can feel his presence. It removes you from the personal relationship with faith and life that you can gain from not taking things so seriously.
Simone Collins: And
Malcolm Collins: I think you need this absolutely massive, rigid seriousness combined with frivolity. Which I think is possible. [01:22:00] And I, yeah that's something I really want to elevate with these terms and when people are like the Puritans were harsh, the Puritans ever punished the Puritans.
And it's yeah, these are all these things that secular society hates. It hates the expectations of itself, but I think we should, as a community, have expectations of ourselves. I have expectations of myself. I have expectations of you, my expectations of the family. And if somebody else decided to follow this, I'd have expectations of them too.
And I also really outsourcing this to an external profit. Like I really don't want to be seen as somebody who has any sort of special access to to, to revelation or knowledge or anything like that, because I think that when you do that with somebody who's currently alive you allow for huge potential for negative externality.
And because who knows what I do, who knows if I go crazy, et cetera, but being able to do that with somebody who's already long dead, the extent of how crazy we can go when we're looking to our profit and trying to interpret for him. So I would see. What I'm doing is maybe a bit more extreme than what some, no more extreme than what [01:23:00] Joseph Smith did, for sure.
And maybe a bit more extreme than something like Calvin or Martin Luther or, a few other people did, but I still see it as a sect. And a sect of Christianity specifically, even though it believes that some of the other Abrahamic faiths were correct interpretations, or were in some way divinely inspired, specific Mormonism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.
Oh, and of course there are extremism. Can't forget them. , I also want to note here. The goal of what we are laying out here is a system that is more in line with early puritanism than many of the new religious sex that are created by a single individual who would like lays out what's true and X like a prophet.
So this would be much closer to early at a baptism or early. Calvinism or Puritanism, , which is to say that that no one individual in the movement like myself has more access to what's true than other individuals. [01:24:00] I have just laid out a list of sources and the way that I am relating to those sources. In a way that starts a conversation of people who want to have this sort of vitalist religiously active. Theological conversation because when I look to the other religious communities, , the conversations I see are becoming nuanced and pedantic and nothing like the conversations that we saw a century ago, you know, whether you're talking about the great awakening. Or you're talking about the Protestant reformation or in Judaism , you're talking about the early days of the Hasidic movement.
, and . Even given my reservations about the early days. They had said, but at least things were happening theologically back then. I think that when we look at the iterations of the Judeo-Christian tradition, that ended up being important in the future, they were, the iterations were this. Active. , and.
Evolutionary conversation with happening. And that's what I'm looking for instead of, you know, what I see today in the Protestant tradition, which is often [01:25:00] like nuance, semantic, and pedantic arguments about like, pre millennialism or post millennialist ideologies, which really doesn't even matter at the end of the day for most people.
I mean, we're either in one situation or the other. And isn't really going to inspire people. It's just nerds fighting in a room. As a final note here, while we have been asked to bring back the tracks by a lot of people, there's also a minority yet. The vocal and considered minority from our perspective, that would prefer we didn't. , the groups that typically like the tracks are people who are culturally from the Protestant tradition, the Mormon tradition, the Jewish tradition, or that have left and are angry with a Christian tradition, or that grew up in a new age tradition and have since rebuked that tradition, the groups that dislike them. Are typically, , from Catholic traditions and Eastern Orthodox traditions. The key difference between these traditions? It's typically how they relate to truth. And I don't think [01:26:00] that one is better than the other.
I mean, Uh, for example, the way the Catholics relate to truth, you know, when we're talking to them is really nerdy in a way that I can respect. They're like, oh, well, you know, we can't trust this source because you know, they mispronounced did this, went to a Protestant, like mispronunciation means literally nothing.
It's, it's, it's an aesthetic preference or they. Uh, you know, don't D D haven't read this book or haven't read this philosopher or don't, you know, this and, and antiquity philosopher and, uh, you know, two people of the other officers are like, why would I care about that? Why would I care? What I care about is what's true.
Not like what, um, fulfills some athletic threshold before it enters the vocabulary of truth. And I think that that's fine. That's fine. It's just not going to be appealing to you. It's not for you. And not every theological thing needs to be for every person. You know, as, uh, Wynwood Reed said, our goal is not to replace religion, but find something that works for the people who today have none.
Simone Collins: Thank you for sharing that. We're back to [01:27:00] the tracks.
Malcolm Collins: They're back, guys! After so many, and I would not have gone back to them had so many people not told me to do them. So if you like this you really need to encourage us, because I Deathly embarrassed to doing this. I do not like when I was little, I joked about the idea of Oh, I'll start like a cult or whatever that can help people like unlock themselves and blah, blah, blah.
And but I never really wanted the responsibility of doing that. Yeah it's not the person I want to be exactly, but I feel called to do it. So
Simone Collins: here's how I look at it. At the very least. We know that we need to give our kids a shot at a culture that gives them mental fortitude in this world and none of the existing cultures as they exist now, as good as many may be, are capable of imparting mental fortitude in an age of globalization and Skinner box based phone apps and games and [01:28:00] shows.
At the very least, I want to give our kids a good shot and I want to give them a culture that imparts fitness. So I'm glad that at least you're sharing this with us. In a base level of mental health, which is a base level of mental health. So I say. Let's go for it. I know that they'll iterate on it if they use it at all in a way that makes it a lot better.
And we're depending on that. So you have to start somewhere and sucking is the first step of getting good at something.
Dude, sucking at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that's what we're doing. . But no you're absolutely right. And and and I guess it was the agents of Providence that had me go to this conference and had people tell me, you have to create more tracks.
You have to create more tracks. I didn't know that it was what our fans liked most. I'd gotten emails to that extent. I'd seen it on the discord, but we also get a lot of critical emails every time we do one of these. So I was just like, why bother?
Simone Collins: I think it really comes down to whether you [01:29:00] are in a religion.
That is what you'd call the Pride and Disguise of Crafting Religion, Symbiotic or Domineering. Meaning you believe if you're as part of a religious sect or following that is trying to save everyone and that believes that those who do not hold your views are going to go to hell if they don't change to your views.
Then you're probably going to find this quite offensive. If you are of a religious subset of chosen people or limited atonement where basically just by design, not everyone is going to be saved. Not everyone is going to be special. Some people just aren't part of the group and there's nothing you can do about it.
Then you'll at best or at worst just find us very entertaining as people who are just wrong, but wrong in an entertaining way that isn't a problem for you because you don't have to save us. Or intriguing enough to potentially join because maybe this is the right club. And I think that's what it comes down to everyone who really finds these offensive finds it offensive [01:30:00] because We are going to go to hell for not joining the correct group.
Does that make sense?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I'd also say for people who look at this and they're like, Oh, you've made up these like non biblical holidays and you're like, practicing Christmas was like Santa Claus or like Easter was like an Easter bunny. It's you're doing the same thing, just because something is culturally normative doesn't mean it's biblical.
And if somebody wants to follow this tradition like while we have made it for our kids, I've begun to become more okay with the idea that other people who don't really see a religion that compels them in the world today might think that this is a compelling system. And like we have no, no problem with that.
Our kids will need people to marry after all. And yeah, I have no problem with that. But my goal is absolutely I believe very strongly in limited atonement which we'll talk about in other tracks. But that is to say that this is a non proselytizing religious system.[01:31:00]
Simone Collins: Yep. Cool. Thanks again, Malcolm. And I love her and I appreciate you willing to, embrace the cringe.
Malcolm Collins: Embrace the cringe, pass through to the other side.
A citizen has the courage to make the safety of the human race their personal responsibility.
Simone Collins: She's,
Malcolm Collins: Imitating one of our sons.
Simone Collins: Cause he likes to crack eggs and he says it cracked. It
Malcolm Collins: cracked.
Simone Collins: Why does Toasty get all the best lines? I'll,
Tract 6: Why we believe in a TechnoPuritan God