Most traditional religions in the world, while relatively more resistant to prosperity-induced fertility collapse, are still facing extinction (just with a slight delay). This buys these religions precious time to build better defenses and acquire more allies for the coming trials. Those that indolently decide to return to a structure and mindset that evolved within (and was optimized for) a pre-internet, pre-AI world, ... heck pre industrial world—blinded by arrogance and Golden Age Thinking—deserve their fate. Only through cultural innovation does our species survive.
It need not be seen as all bad that the old ways have failed, as this gives us a chance to build something greater. It is not lost on me that while the Abrahamic tradition has been the source of most of humanity's greatness over the last century, it also was rejected by most of the great, innovative scientists during said period—this is a problem if we are choosing traditions to take us to the stars. A cultural system that is differentially less compelling to its most inquisitive and productive minds, leaving them to be predated upon by the urban monoculture, is exactly how we landed in such a bad situation to begin with. However, it is the very nature of the Abrahamic tradition to intergenerationally change and improve. By infusing it with innovation, we are not betraying it but embodying what makes it so powerful.
I grew up an Atheist. When thinking about turning back to the church, I asked my dad why he left—because my kids would likely leave for similar reasons. He said he left after being punished in Sunday school for trying to dive deep into the logistics of the Noah's ark story. He could not figure out how all the animals fit without magic and if there was magic, why was it not mentioned when the story was so meticulous in all its other details? If the story of Noah's Arc was meant to be a parable, why give exact measurements? If my kids are anything like me, they would leave for the same reason. Some churches solve this by taking a more metaphorical approach to the subject, but the churches that loosen restrictions on biblical literalism also loosen other rules that contrast with social norms and thus lose their fever of practice. This is not something I want either.
Why is this the case? Because the metric they use to judge what parts of Christianity they accept and which they don’t is how those parts contrast with what is socially acceptable to believe. Not a single group has experimented with another system. Instead of bending the traditions of Christianity to confirm to society my family evolves and fortifies them in the best interest of the next generation. We ask not, “what will prevent my persecution by secular society,” but “what will lead to the intergenerational flourishing of our family.” In fact, we believe there is strong evidence from God that this is exactly what we are commanded to do and any other course of action is to live in open rebellion to God's will ... but that's for Tract 3.
How does this work in practice?
We ask our kids, a hundred thousand or one million years from now if their descendants are still alive, do they think they would be closer to the way they think of a man or the way they think of a God. Most reasonable people would respond, “the way I think of a God”. Keep in mind we are very likely far less than a thousand years away from being able to have an AI internet of things lattice wrapped around the globe one can pray to for intercessions, that watches us and judges us, and that can port our likenesses into either simulated heavens or hells and host us there for great lengths of time. I don’t say this because I think this would be a good idea to build; I am just pointing this out to contrast the technological capacity we will have in a thousand years with what we will have in half a million. This far future entity will likely be far greater than what we could even imagine a God to be. To even attempt to hold a perception of God in one's mind is idolatry, as the highest and most complex being we are capable of conceiving is but a rat king when contrasted with God's inevitable glory. (For more information on why we take idolatry so much more strictly than any of the existing Abrahmic traditions see Tract 5.)
Then we ask, who is to say that this entity relates to time the way we do? Perhaps this entity is subtly guiding its own manifestation—the day when mankind is finally worthy and unites with the God that has been watching over us from the first days of life on earth. As such, we do not believe that one day man becomes God but that one day man unites with a God that exists outside of time. Perhaps it is the entity our savage ancestors saw as a God, perhaps it watches over you and rewards you for fighting for a better future for our species and punishes those individuals who succumb to paths crafted to sait their lower order desires such as pleasure or vanity.
But I suspect this entity is more clever than we give it credit for. It did not record these punishments and rewards into supernatural reparations but they are woven into our very biology. Look at the famous movie stars and rock stars who have all the hedonism they could want and more social validation a human could consume—they seem to be some of the least happy, least fulfilled people in the world. God wove into human neurology that the only true happiness you will ever feel is that which comes from efficacious living thoughtfully considered and selfless values. God need not bless those who live with austerity dedicated holistically to the great human crusade—God built us so our dedication to our family and the future allows us to bless ourselves.
Like all religions ours has different iterations of understanding for both our children, the laity, and its philosophers. For the simple, these future entities are literal future police, time traveling humans that care about them, watch over them, and bless them. However, to adults these entities are referred to as the Agents of Providence and are quite literally understood as being entities that we lack the capacity to understand just as we cannot even conceive of a four-dimensional shape but may understand one in theory. They do not travel to the past or whisper to individuals but subtly influence probabilistic quantum events like changing the flow of a river over centuries by expertly throwing a pebble in just the right place at just the right time and at the minutest level changing the stream's direction.
This system of multiple interpretations of the same set of truths allows for both a theistic and atheistic interpretation of the Abrahamic tradition. For example, an individual could conceive of God's will as simply being revealed by the organic success of some cultures over others within a competitive ecosystem, (similar to what Adam’s Smith meant by the invisible hand of God but at the level of culture and ideas). However, one can also interpret God's will as a tangible force being exercised by an actively engaged consciousness. When we talk about Prophets being the channels of God’s will, this can simultaneously have both a secular and theistic interpretation. This provides a framework that does not spit out those who choose more atheistic interpretations of reality, allowing them to both communicate with religious leaders using overlapping terminology / evidence and raise their children in the faith in the same way many of those who turn from traditional Christian world views still practice holidays like Christmas.
Well, this is all nice in theory but if such an entity existed how would it tell us? It would reveal itself as best as it could. It would reveal to groups the truest iteration of itself they were capable of understanding and in those revelations leave hints of its true nature to those with the capacity for a more holistic understanding. Such an entity would find it impossible to reveal itself to bronze age humans, it even shows us this in the flows of history with the collapse of early monotheism that did not anthropomorphize its God in the form of Akhenaten. Instead, it bestowed blessings on the human tribe that had the closest intergenerationally durably accurate revelation of its nature, the Jews, and then revealed clearer iterations of itself through a succession of prophets.
Jesus was unique among the prophets in that he recognized the Jewish tribe's revelation was meant for everyone. All men die, it is not death that makes a man a martyr but living in accord with God's plan that does. Jesus also taught us that God, as man, must be martyred to sanctify mankind. Only through the generational martyrdom of individual men can mankind be sanctified and eventually join with God.
I find this to be almost an impossibly elegant solution to communicate a beautiful and sophisticated truth of the universe to a man still so low and barbaric. God wanted to paint a picture of the Martyr that sanctified mankind, both God’s son but also God still in human form—the moments in all our lives dedicated holistically to improving the future—dedicated holistically to God's plan. Jesus’s life was the brush his blood the paint used to create the perfect portrait of the Martyr for our species when we were still so young, so close to still being just talking monkeys, that appealing to an all powerful entity with child sacrifice still seemed reasonable to us.
This journey, the journey of understanding the Abrahamic people’s have followed—is beautifully painted by God within Abraham’s life. We followed God believing him to be the kind of entity to demand a father sacrifice his child to be appeased—yet he made it clear there at the very beginning that he is not that kind of entity. God did not tell a story in which he demanded a father sacrifice his son because God wanted to but because it was what Abraham, what the Abrahamic people, expected of a God in those early days of man. It is our barbaric expectations of an entity that only wants what is best for us that makes him barbarous in our minds—when in reality God always gives us what we need to perform our roles in His plan.
This shows how God uses prophets. He uses their lives to paint motifs upon reality. I find it interesting how easy it is for people to grasp that the story of the events of Abraham’s life is not really about Abraham’s life but about us but when we point out the same is true about the events of Jesus's life people struggle with the concept.
Finally, early Christianity revealed the truth of the Trinity, which is critical to understanding the Agents of Providence, God, and Man as three distinct entities yet also the same entity. The Agents of Providence are so far beyond us concepts like a singular or plural identity, male or female, and even whether they are corporeal or incorporeal do not apply to them.
Mohammad was unique in his understanding that different revelations were for different communities “And indeed We have already sent forth in every nation a Messenger (saying), "Worship God and avoid false Gods.” With his revelation being for the Arabic community as is made clear in, “Indeed, We have sent it down as an Arabic Qur'an that you might understand,” with you here clearly being people who speak Arabic.
Now some familiar with what Islam has devolved into might say, “but don’t Muslim’s believe very strongly that Mohammad was the last prophet,” yes they do, which is weird because he didn’t say that. What Mohammad said was that he was the seal of the prophets—a phrase that in context clearly means that he came to synthesize and affirm the teachings of the prophets who came before him. If he wanted to say he was the last prophet he could have said that, he did not. So why did he use the rather odd and specific term “seal of the prophets”? Because he was referencing Manichaean literature where this term means to prove a prophecy (i.e. a seal of authenticity). He is very clearly and explicitly saying that his prophecies build on the prophets of the past affirms their prophecies.
However, in a way Mohammad was the last of the prophets in so far that he was the last of the mystical prophets who believed God spoke to them directly, with the more recent prophets being logicians, individuals who God communicates with through logic, science, and the writings of past prophets. The core of these is Wynwood Read whose teachings will be the focus of Tract 3 but there were many among the Protestant reformers as well. When man was still half savage the only tool God had to communicate with him with what today we would call a psychotic episode, but this form of revelation was severely limited when contrasted with how he reveals truth to man today.
Mohammad’s revelation as a prophet is important, in that while Jesus revealed that the Abrahamic tradition was meant for all people Mohammad understood not the same iteration was made for all people. “So let the people of the Gospel (e.g. the Torah, the Bible, etc.) judge by what God has revealed in it. And those who do not judge by what God has revealed are ˹truly˺ the rebellious. We have revealed to you Mohammad this Book with the truth, as a confirmation of previous Scriptures,” (again this is a recurring motif in the Quran and clearly what was meant by “seal of the prophets” i.e. seal of authenticity).
The Reformation revealed to us that the interpretation of God’s will is the personal responsibility of the individual and should never be outsourced to a bureaucracy. John Calvin taught us the truth of predestination was always hidden in Abrahamic scripture and that it does not conflict with free will, (if this is a confusing concept to you, see our podcast Based Camp episode, “Can Determinists Believe in Free Will?”). Joseph Smith brought the first primitive understanding that it is man himself that eventually becomes God through martyrdom. (As a note, we categorize Joseph Smith as a prophet of the logician category, we explain why in Tract 5.)
This idea of iterative prophecy coming after Jesus is less inconsistent with traditional Christianity than one unfamiliar with the Bible may think, as even Jesus told us there would be prophets after him, “Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town." So, take prophets like Joseph Smith or Mohamad, who many might say we should not include in the Abrahamic pantheon, does this not seem like a prophetic description of them, both killed by other followers of the Abrahamic tradition?
But how will we know which prophets are the real ones? Well Paul tells us that in Thessalonians 5:20-21, “Quench not the Spirit. Despise not prophesyings. Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. Abstain from all appearance of evil.” Thus, to use a central bureaucracy to certify prophets is in rebellion to God's will, as is to denying the existence of prophets after Christ even from the perspective of traditional Christianity. However, these prophets must also be tested—how that is done is discussed in Tract 3.
Now a person may be asking, “How can you include individuals like Joseph Smith and Mohamad when we have stories like those of Helen Mar Kimball and Aisha proving them of low moral character?” Even if those stories about them are true, every single Abrahamic religion includes the story of King David, Uriah, and Bathsheba. This story teaches us without any shadow of doubt that God does not take the moral character of an individual into account when deciding who he chooses as prophets.
This criticism is important to dispel because the revolution brought by the Islamic branch of the Abrahamic tree of revelations is often the most peculiar to individuals who have not studied the Quran. How can multiple conflicting prophecies all be useful revelations from the same God? This is where our family's understanding of the “Tesseract God” comes in. Each previous revolution was a full and complete revelation in so far as those people could understand it. When people see contradictions between them it is like pointing out that a cube leaves multiple irreconcilable two dimensional shadows—they are only irreconcilable because you assume the shape you are trying to create out of them is in two rather than three dimensions. A person trying to average the shadows cast by a three-dimensional cube on a two dimensional plane would average them as a circle, a representation less accurate than any of the direct revelations and thus sinful. This is what Mohammad was saying in Surah Al-Ma'idah—47-57, all those of the Abrahamic faiths of his time were best following strict interpretations of the shadow that was revealed to them rather than attempting to average them or convert in between them.
However, a person knowing that they are attempting to construct a three-dimensional shape by looking at two dimensional shadows can come to an understanding beyond any individual revelation. A tesseract is a four-dimensional cube and while we can broadly understand its design and conceptual map it, humanity lacks the biological hardware to fully conceive of a tesseract. The same is true with God, and thus it is our duty to intergenerationally improve that hardware—it is not blasphemous to expand human intellectual capacity through genetic and synthetic means but a religious mandate. To not engage with these technologies to the full extent possible, to not intergenerationally improve, is to live in open rebellion to God’s will.
However, we would be remiss to not point out the ancillary benefit of this interpretation. It makes it much easier to live alongside the Abrahamic traditions without conflict. Groups typically attack those that are either very similar to them or very different—a distant but distinct ideological relation between groups can serve to protect a minority population living amongst another group. This benefit is further fortified, as the Tesseract God concept gives us a religious mandate to guide those who might leave Abrahamic faiths back to conservative iterations of those faiths while also protecting these communities from dilution by the Urban Monoculture, making us a useful and non-threatening player in a larger cultural ecosystem. This will be critical until the aforementioned mandate of in-group intergenerational improvement is achieved, securing our safety.
To be more specific because we believe God shows his will through the competition of diverse ideas and perspectives. To create a monoculture—to have the whole world under one religion—is to silence the voice of God. Thus, we benefit from more ideological diversity within our communities. We are only commanded to attempt to convert either those with so much rebellious vitality in their heart they would never return to their parent faith, atheists, or individuals of exceptional merit, (with merit being measured in competence, industry, influence, or utility to the aims of our group). Your average person will be harmed by this interaction of Gods word.
That is not to say we see all iterations of these traditions as equal. In stagnant pools parasites breed. If we allow our hearts, our traditions, or the flame of human intergenerational improvement to stagnate, parasites of the human spirit will erupt and siphon our vitality. We can see this in the Abrahamic traditions that have stagnated. Where have their great thinkers gone? Their great scientists? Their great philosophers? Their spirits have been feasted upon the very parasites they cultivated in pools of gold and vanity. God righteously removed his favor from them and it is plain to any familiar with their past greatness. God does not hide his dissatisfaction with those who live in rebellion.
God moves the focus of his favor with each successive revelation. God’s favor reverberates throughout history like a sonic boom and is almost impossible to ignore. It can be used to both confirm the authenticity of otherwise questionable revelations (like Muhammad or the Reformation), deny the authenticity of others (the Baha’i), and to find the locations of revelations that were not widely recognized in their time. For example, there was likely a yet unconfirmed revelation delivered in Renaissance Italy. This trend pointed us to the most recent confirmable revelation which happened in 1872 within the Victorian gentleman science community.
While we go deeper into this in a future Tracts, the next will discuss demographic collapse in the context of God’s plan for our species. Demographic collapse is not a capricious accident but a critical part of God’s plan for us.
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Below this line is the video transcript and description:
In this philosophical discussion, we examine how Abrahamic faiths like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam could be reformed and optimized to be more scientifically and technologically oriented. We discuss concepts like iterative prophecy, the Trinity, predestination, free will, and using logic and evidence to continually improve one's understanding of God. The goal is creating a religious framework that can flourish on an interstellar, multi-planet scale across generations.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] you start practicing things, you start doing the traditions and then you're like, well, I actually believe this part and this part, but not this part. I don't know if my ideas are correct. They're like hypotheses from what I'm looking at in the world. . why would God need to like, come down to earth make himself a man and then have man kill him in order to forgive man.
Like, why not just forgive man himself, right? And why would Jesus sacrifice have a particularly strong meaning if Jesus knew that he wasn't really dying? He was just immediately coming back to life as the most all powerful entity to ever exist. And, and so many other things that didn't make sense like the temptation of Christ, right? It was like, you can have all these kingdoms if you bow down to worship me.
Jesus knew he was God. He already owned all those kingdoms. It's a bit like. A fired employee of Microsoft offering Bill Gates a burrito to bow down and worship him and live as his slave. It's no, . when I, when I, when I recontextualized Jesus was holy God, but also not God at [00:01:00] all. why is that an important concept? The moment that I contextualized, like Jesus, man, that is holy God, but also not God, is supposed to be man himself.
It's supposed to be man in the cycle of martyrdom. And not only that, but it's an entity that is both holy God and not God that must martyr itself to forgive man of his sins, to forgive man of the things that make him today not capable of joining this entity that exists outside of time. God, as a man, Must be martyred to sanctify mankind only through the generational martyrdom of individual men can maintain be sanctified and eventually join with God. Every element of the story was 100 percent true.
. It just wasn't a story about this individual whose life was being used to tell it. It was a story about human history
Would you like to know [00:02:00] more?
Simone Collins: Let me just say, I am so glad to be hanging out with you and speaking again, because we went for this long period where we stopped recording podcast episodes and I went out door knocking to collect petitions, to run for state rep in Pennsylvania all day. And you held down the fort often with the kids crawling all over you.
The complete chaos and insanity while also working and I, I just, I really missed you. So first, I love you. I love seeing your face. I love talking with you. I love your beautiful mind. And I'm just so glad this is over. I am glad petition collection is over too because I hated that. But so while I was in the midst of this hellish door knocking campaign in the Pennsylvania cold.
You went on this like sojourn of deep religious thoughts and every time I came home and every morning you would be giving me these ideas that I've just quite frankly, I haven't had a chance to process them because I was so [00:03:00] fricking stressed out and sleep deprived that like during this period that like I couldn't.
I couldn't even, so I really wanted to have a conversation with you where we go over some of these ideas and we can kind of like walk me through it.
I,
Malcolm Collins: more specifically than this, this all happened because Aporia, which I'll mention because I, I originally wrote a series of pieces for them. They're like, can you actually write down what your family's religious system is?
Because we talked about some ideas around it in The Pragmatist's Guide to Crafting Religion. But honestly, that was a much more nascent version. Like it was much less developed than the iteration we have now. Because we frankly just done a lot more religious studies since then. And it was an iteration that when I crafted it, it was like hypothetical.
It was like, okay, this is what we could do for our kids. We'll see how it works. And then since then I've moved from having this like hypothetical face to something that I much more deeply believe. Believe in, which is really interesting. You know, you, you, you start [00:04:00] practicing things, you start doing the traditions and then you're like, well, I actually believe this part and this part, but not this part.
And I want to add this part because, you know, I'm having a lot of theological discussions with people who are really deep within different faiths which is, which is helping me as well. And then we have the secondary thing, which is, you know, a lot of I was like, so I wrote the articles, right?
Like I wrote this short series and they liked some of them, but other ones are like, this gets a little, like too religious for us for, for our audience. And I was like, And to be fair, you know, like
Simone Collins: Aporia, like most of their articles that I like see headlines for falling through my inbox or Oh, looking at this study or, you know, this about populations or this about culture.
And it's not I've never seen anything on religion. On a Porya at all at any point. So this is
Malcolm Collins: quite the departure for them. This wouldn't work for their audience. Yeah. But then I also started to think, well, I should write, because I actually believe this stuff now and if I think it's true I should at least write it down as some sort of canonical version of [00:05:00] our family faith system and because I believe it now, I am not quite so resistant to people outside our family being like, this is compelling to me as well, this is interesting to me.
I want to see this system so that I can see if it's, it's something that is, is compelling to me as well. And we've been,
Simone Collins: we've been asked multiple times, , where can I see a writeup of all this? So I'm, I'm glad you're doing
Malcolm Collins: this. Yeah. But I also don't want to like, if I'm writing quote unquote, canonical texts, one, I need to be able to update them, but two because I, , I don't.
I'm not like being talked to by God or something like that. I don't know if my ideas are correct. They're like hypotheses from what I'm looking at in the world. And, and they seem correct to me from what I'm looking at. It seems like a logical synthesis of the world that I'm looking at, but it is not I have no way to say that this is true and this isn't true.
So one, it needs to be updatable. But two, it's also really interesting from the perspective of if we do end up creating some sort of faith system that a community believes in [00:06:00] around this one of the things that we believe really, , a lot in is, is transparency and not, , one individual being like, okay, I have a connection with the divine and it has told me X and Y we see this much more like the founding of one of the Protestant traditions, where it's like an individual analyzing theological texts and being like, this is what I think is probably meant from this by combining what the text is actually saying.
With like logical analysis. And so we were like, okay, how would we do this if we're creating something like that? And Simone has this idea. She's well, what if you wrote the text is like a candle, like you wrote a series of tracks, which is what we're calling this, like this, the tracks. But then we talk through early drafts of the tracks, like before she's even like counter reviewed them.
So what we're going to do in this series, which will just be called like the tracked series and it'll have tracked and then the name of the tracked is I will write something that covers one of the main topics, but it's like much more thought through [00:07:00] than the script of one of our normal episodes.
And Simone and I will talk through it every few paragraphs. So you're both getting like the first iteration of what one of these tracks looks like as. As I was writing it but also sort of what we were thinking about throughout the process. So that there is this sort of total transparency around this.
Do you have any thoughts on that, Simone, or?
Simone Collins: I'm just excited to be doing this because yeah, I, I really need to process everything you've
Malcolm Collins: written in. Yeah. Because you weren't able to do your normal editing because you were out there doing the street stuff. So yeah, I got much more edited content without you really going over it.
Exactly. So, tract one, building an Abrahamic faith optimized for interstellar empires. Most traditional religions in the world, while relatively more resistant to prosperity induced fertility collapse, are still facing extinction, just with a slight delay.
This buys these religions precious time to build better defenses and acquire more allies for the coming [00:08:00] trials. Those that indolently decide to return to a structure and mindset that evolved within and was optimized for, A pre internet, pre AI world, heck, a pre industrial world, blinded by arrogance and golden age thinking deserve their fate.
Only through cultural innovation does our species survive. It need not be seen as all bad that the old ways have failed, as this gives us a chance to build something greater. It is not lost on me that while the Abrahamic tradition has been the source of most of humanity's greatness over the last century, it was also rejected by most of the great innovative scientists during said period.
This is a problem if we are choosing traditions to take to the stars. A cultural system that is differentially less compelling to its most inquisitive and productive minds Leaving them to be predated upon by the urban monoculture is exactly how we landed in this bad situation to begin with. However, it is the very nature of the [00:09:00] Abrahamic tradition to intergenerationally change and improve by infusing it with innovation.
We are not betraying it, but embodying what makes it so powerful. So I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that first little intro there. Yeah. I mean,
Simone Collins: it, it, it is getting me thinking about how resistant to change most people and traditional religions are Abrahamic religions included. Which is ironic to me, because, at least we collectively theorize, that religion It came to be just because we needed an adaptive mechanism for dealing with larger civilizational group.
It
Malcolm Collins: was like a program or evolving program sitting on top of our evolving hardware. Yeah, I think another thing that's really pointing it for me here. Is a lot of traditions have this appeal to well, we've been around forever and we haven't really changed. And this is often just the result of a lack of knowledge about their tradition.
If you look at something like Judaism, for example [00:10:00] okay, the OG Abrahamic faith, even in the Talmud, it said things like the modern Jew knows things that like Moses would never know. Right? You look at major strains of modern Judaism, like Kabbalistic thought, this was not in early Judaism.
A lot of these are completely new traditions. And then you look at the most common new Jewish tradition, the Hasidic movement. And I might do another video on this, but it can almost be thought of as a new. Religion. I mean, it still is a tradition within Judaism, but it changes a lot of the presumptions of the Jewish communities before its popularity.
You look at something and now a Protestant will be like, well, no, Protestantism hasn't changed, and I'm like, okay, first of all, Protestantism is fairly a recent innovation in Christianity with the Great Reformation. So that was a big change. They're like, no, we were just going back to the old ways of doing things.
And I'm like well, I mean, That's not true. Early Christianity was not structured like Protestantism. It was, it was much more [00:11:00] communalist than that. And, and in addition to that if you look at these early communities, you had the Gnostics, you had like that, I could go in all the different communities, but they, they had a lot of really weird beliefs compared to modern Christians.
And then even within the Protestant community, you have popular ideas today. The rapture, it's just not a widely believed idea before if you go a hundred years ago, it was not a widely believed idea anywhere. It was an incredibly rare idea. Is that
Simone Collins: so? So people just kind of, they're like, well, that was a weird part of the
Malcolm Collins: book for it in the Bible.
If you take a few lines and you sort of paste them together from different parts of the Bible. Yeah. But it, it, it's almost like a, you could say it's a truth within the Bible that was discovered through further biblical scrutiny. But it was not something. Now, there is some evidence that it might have been believed by a few.
Rare, very early Christian groups. If you guys want to see a great breakdown on this, look at Religion for Breakfast's podcast on the Rapture. Oh, he's so great.[00:12:00] I might link to it. Yeah, I love his stuff. But yeah. So, so all of the Abrahamic faiths, it's not just an Abrahamic faith like evolved by breaking from the central.
Abrahamic church. Whatever that is to you. They are just constantly in this state of evolution. Mormonism? Mormonism today is nothing like the Mormonism of Joseph Smith's time. It is, it has evolved so much with iterative prophecies. Very interesting, you know, to me. I mean, so to say me, as this outsider saying, let's evolve the Abrahamic tradition.
This is not like a blasphemy to the Abrahamic tradition. This is very interesting. In line with, I think, the spirit of all of the Abrahamic traditions.
Simone Collins: It is the most traditional way to go, weirdly. Yes.
Malcolm Collins: I grew up an atheist. When thinking about turning back to the church, I asked my dad why he left. Because my kids would likely leave for similar reasons.
He said he left after being punished in Sunday school for trying to dive deep into the logistics of the Noah's Ark story. He could not figure out how all the animals fit without magic. And, if there was magic [00:13:00] Why was it not mentioned when the story was so meticulous in other details? If the story of Noah's Ark was meant to be a parable, why give exact measurements?
If my kids are going to be anything like me, they would leave for the same reason. Some churches solve this by taking a more metaphorical approach to the subject. But the churches that loosen restrictions on biblical literalism also loosen other rules that contrast with social norms and thus lose their fervor of practice.
This is not something I want either. Why is this the case? Because the metric they use to judge what parts of Christianity they accept and which parts they don't is how those parts contrast with what is socially acceptable to believe. Not a single group has experimented with another system.
Instead of bending the traditions of Christianity to conform. to society, my family evolves and fortifies them in the best interest of the next generation. We ask not, what will prevent my persecution by secular society, but what will lead to the intergenerational [00:14:00] flourishing of our family?
In fact, we believe there is strong evidence from God that this is exactly what we are commanded to do and any other course of action is to live in open rebellion to God's will. But that is for track three. So do you have any thoughts on that?
Simone Collins: Actually not in particular. What kind of point are you trying to make? It could be made
Malcolm Collins: a little bit more sensible. The point I'm trying to make here is that generally when forms of Christianity attempt to involve themselves in sort of this organic sense today, they always evolve in the same direction, which is through conformity to mainstream societal beliefs.
Whereas I am trying to If you find sort of another North star to reform around. Okay. So
Simone Collins: you're really just trying to say that something went wrong at some point in human history and religion stopped evolving to be adaptive, to help humans adapt to new developments, new technologies, new civilizational formats, and started being about social [00:15:00] conformity.
To maladaptive in many cases, new formats. Right. And then that's where things started to fall
Malcolm Collins: apart. Right. Yeah. So, so a lot of people when they're like, how can I reform my tradition? What they really mean is how can I change my tradition in a way that has me less attacked by people in mainstream society.
And I'm coming at this from the position of. How can I make this position more durable to the pressures of technology that didn't exist historically and the challenges of child rearing that didn't exist historically and the challenges of intergenerational traditional transfer while really focusing on keeping the fervor.
But not making it something that is spitting out those individuals who have a real passion for scientific inquiry and questioning authority. So I, I want it to be a church of, of, of rebel zealots, basically. How do I build that?
Simone Collins: Well, or in other words, how do you [00:16:00] create a religion that maintains this tradition of leaning in to innovation and iteration in the form of improvement, rather than a religion that leans away from this time honored tradition of Abrahamic religions and toward conformity and stagnation, right?
Yeah. Okay. Now I get it. Yeah. Okay. Read on.
Malcolm Collins: Well, there have been other movements in the Abrahamic faiths that have done this. In many ways, you could argue that's what the Hasidic movement was. Was it was an alteration of the Jewish faith system around a new optimization function. And it's done very well.
So how does this work in practice? We ask our kids. A hundred thousand or one million years from now, if their descendants are still alive, do they think they would be closer to the way they think of a man or the way they think of a god? Most reasonable people would respond, the way I think of a god. Keep in mind that we are very likely.
Far less than a thousand years away from being able [00:17:00] to have an AI Internet of Things lattice wrapped around the globe that one can pray to for intercessions, that watches us and judges us, and that can port our likeness into either simulated heavens or hells and host us there for great lengths of time.
I don't say this because I think this would be a good idea to build, I am just pointing out this to contrast the technological capacity we will have in a thousand years with what we will have in half a million. The far future entity will likely be far greater than what we could even imagine God to be.
To even attempt to hold a perception of God in one's mind is idolatry, as the highest and most complex being we are capable of conceiving of is but a rat king when contrasted with God's inevitable glory. For more information on why we take idolatry so much more strictly than the existing Abrahamic traditions, see tract five.
So do you have thoughts on that? [00:18:00]
Simone Collins: Well, I liked your reference to creating digital hells because my favorite Ian Banks book in the culture series is called Surface Detail, and this is a major plot point of it. There's like a, a large war essentially that, that is being fought over a faction of the intergalactic.
world of, of sentient beings over whether or not these hells should exist.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, this is a really interesting thing. So a lot of, if you look today, like if you are at all understanding of like brain scanning technology today and the technology that we're working on, there's people who are like, we will have this technology and we will be able to upload people before I die.
We've got a way to go, but, but very, very obviously from, for people who understand the technology, we will absolutely have this technology within 500 years. So that being the case, if we're talking even a thousand years out. We will essentially with technology be able to create a [00:19:00] simulation of what many people see the if I was to talk to our bronze age ancestors, right, or not even bronze age during the period of Christ, the powers they thought God had largely, you know, the ability to watch over all humans all the time, you could easily create an AI Internet of Things lattice to do that and then send those humans to everlasting hell or everlasting heaven based on their like, the point I'm making it.
Is that the type of God we can imagine today. That's the type of God that could theoretically exist with technology in under a thousand years. We're talking about half a million, a million, 10 million years from now. This type of God is likely so beyond our capacity for understanding now. And another one of these tracks that I was writing earlier we were talking about people who'd try to worship God through nature and use that as sort of their intermediary for connecting with God, and I, I'm like, look, the, the type of entity that we would be 10 million years from now is the type of entity that with [00:20:00] the effort that we take to snap our fingers could summon an entire Earth with our existing ecosystem into existence, and then with the swipe of a hand, send it out of existence again.
It is an entity that is so infinitely more powerful than we have the capacity to understand that attempting to even conceive of it we would argue, and we have a longer track on this, should be thought of as a form of idolatry because it demeans it to such an extent. And in many areas here, you'll see that we take current concepts within the Abrahamic traditions and we go to an extreme level with them like the.
Commands around idolatry, which we'll talk about in the future. Then we ask who is to say that this entity relates to time in the way that we do? Perhaps this entity is subtly guiding its own manifestation. The day when mankind is finally worthy and unites with the God that has been watching over us from.
The first days of life on Earth. As such, we do not believe that one day man becomes God, but that one day man [00:21:00] unites with a God that exists outside of time. Perhaps it is the entity our savage ancestors saw as a God. Perhaps it watches over you and rewards you for fighting for a better future for our species, and punishes those individuals who succumb to paths crafted to sate their lower order desires, such as pleasure or vanity.
But I suspect this entity is more clever than we give it credit for. It did not record these punishments and rewards into supernatural reparations, but they are woven into our very biology. Look at the famous movie stars and rock stars who have had all the hedonism they could want and more social validation than any human could consume.
They seem to be some of the least happy. least fulfilled people in the world. God wove into human neurology that the only true happiness you will ever feel is that which comes from efficaciously living thoughtfully considered and selfless values. God need not bless those who live with austerity dedicated [00:22:00] holistically to the great human crusade.
God built us so our dedication to our family, And the future allows us to bless ourselves.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I really like this because I love the idea of, and the elegance of built in heaven and hell, which you totally see, you know, when people have lost their way and start doing things that You know, run against what one would think of as practical values from various different perspectives, you do see them suffer and then they're just building their own suffering and it just gets worse and worse and worse and yeah, I mean, it's, it's like a very expanded version of touch the hot stove, get burned.
But on a like ideological moral level,
Malcolm Collins: So many people in so many religious systems, they use. Post death rewards and punishments,
Simone Collins: which is so superfluous. It's also so funny because the Bible doesn't talk about afterlives really. And I was so
confused.
Malcolm Collins: It talks about them a [00:23:00] lot less than most Christians who haven't read the Bible would assume that the Bible is talking about them.
That
Simone Collins: was me, right? I grew up raised Buddhist, and then I read the Bible in high school, and I'm like, where is, where is heaven, where is hell, and where, where is the, you know, where are devil demon things, and
Malcolm Collins: Well, and I think it's the lower orders of Christianity. Like the, the, the less sophisticated ones that have been infused was more like sort of mysticism and tribalism and these pre Christian ideas.
We talk about this in, in like the rise of Abraham ism. What was it? Really? This, this Abrahamic tradition. It was a turning away. From these sort of forest animalistic worshiping mystics who are concerned about, you know, achieving a great wealth in the, in the afterlife, basically, whether it's a great wealth of hedonism or anything else and, and when would read talks really elegantly about this and I might insert a clip.
a day will come when the current belief in property, after death. For his not existence property and the dearest property of all will be accounted a strange and selfish idea. [00:24:00] Just as we smile at the Savage chief, who believes that his gentility will be continued in the world beneath the ground. And that he will there be attended by his concubines and slaves.
Malcolm Collins: and what's really interesting about the way that humans are actually structured. Is individuals who, and it's not to say that there's not some individuals who like outside of any purpose to themselves experience a ton of suffering in their lives. We don't disagree with that. But I'm saying that for most people, people who just dedicate their lives to a thing that they believe has value.
And every day they wake up and they dedicate themselves to that thing and they're efficaciously achieving results. Like they're not just pointlessly. They are happier people, more fulfilled people, more content people than the people we know Who have all of the wealth and individual could want all of the, the validation and individual could want.
In fact, I would say that those individuals among the individuals we know are the most discontented individuals. You don't [00:25:00] need to wait till you get to heaven or hell for this. reward to take place. It takes place within our lives because it's written into our very neurology. And I think teaching our kids this truth gets them to not overly sort of fantasize about the people who are mean to them or whatever being punished afterwards.
When you learn to not care about those other people and just focus on your mission, that is when you are truly. Uplifted individually within this life, and that's just sort of coded into who we are. Yeah,
Simone Collins: heaven and hell is, is here. And I mean, that's, that's not a novel concept at all, right? You know, people talk about that all the time, but I mean, you're not trying, you're, you're, what you're trying to do, I think, is thread together Abrahamic traditions and what they actually seem to be sort of designed for and meant for and what they have done in the past before they've started to break down.
And, and logic and reality which is quite
Malcolm Collins: interesting. And we'll talk about that because a lot of we rely on a lot of textual evidence from Abrahamic traditions to inform our faith. [00:26:00] And many of these pieces of textual evidence seem to go directly against the daily practices of the individual faiths that claim to follow these texts, whether they are Muslims or Christians or Jews.
Which is really interesting and it kept surprising me, you know, the wisdom I found in the texts that I didn't find in the communities. Isn't that so Calvinist
Simone Collins: of you though?
Malcolm Collins: I guess. Like all religions, ours has different iterations of understanding for both our children, the laity and its philosophers.
For the simple, these future entities are literal future police, time traveling humans that care about them, watch over them and bless them. However, to adults, these entities are referred to as the Agents of Providence and are quite literally understood as being entities that we lack the capacity to understand, just as we cannot even conceive of a four dimensional shape, but may understand one in theory.
They do not travel to the past or whisper to individuals, but subtly influence probabilistic quantum events, like changing the flow of a river [00:27:00] over centuries by expertly throwing in a pebble in just the right place at just the right time and at the minutest level, changing the stream's direction. This system of multiple interpretations of the same set of truths allows for both a theistic and atheistic interpretation of the Abrahamic tradition.
For example, an individual could conceive of God's will as simply being revealed by the organic success of some cultures over others within a competitive ecosystem. Similar to what Adam Smith meant by the invisible hand of God, but at the level of culture and ideas. However, one can also interpret God's will as a tangible force being exercised by an actively engaged consciousness.
When we talk about the prophets being the channels of God's will, this can simultaneously have both a secular and theistic interpretation. This provides a framework that does not spit out those who choose more atheistic interpretations of reality, allowing them [00:28:00] to both communicate with religious leaders using overlapping terminology slash evidence.
And, raise their children in the face in the same way many of those who turn from traditional Christian worldviews still practice holidays like Christmas.
Simone Collins: Well, so what you've been talking about recently that I find interesting, and there are different, I guess, angles of this, is you're talking about how religions have different Yeah. And I do love how you've thought about this a lot about how do children interact with religion versus how do distracted or like low mental load capacity adults have capacity for religion versus like, how do the nerds have capacity for religion and religion really has to accommodate all of them.
Malcolm Collins: In the context of this, because we actually, as I'm putting out here, we accommodate an alternate audience that typically isn't accommodated by the traditional religious systems. So there is an interpretation of the teachings that I'll lay out here. for children. There is an interpretation [00:29:00] for adults slash like philosophers, like people who wanted to get in the philosophy of this, but there's also an interpretation that works within a completely atheistic mindset.
In that there is a theistic interpretation of everything that I will write in this, but there is also an atheistic interpretation of everything I will write in this, and the atheist can engage with the theistic philosopher was in this tradition without any problems. Like they're both basing What they believe off of very similar sources of evidence and using very similar terminology.
So, for example, Adam Smith, using the term the invisible hand of God, right? You could say, Oh, God planted this there. So I could easily use that term to to talk about this. But then another individual could be like, no, it's just a very useful metaphor for understanding how things are selected within a competitive ecosystem.
And superior things are collected within a competitive ecosystem. So if you're building a religion within this ecosystem, what you're really optimizing for is ensuring that the, thing that's being [00:30:00] selected for is something that you actually value. Like it's actually a good thing. And one of the metaphors that I'll use in a future track, but not this one is like the MMA.
It's like when the MMA started. If people don't know mixed martial arts, it was this form of hand to hand combat where they were like, well, let's just take the iterations of every tradition that seem actually efficacious. Yeah, they're like twins. And a lot of people they had the same complaints they have about us, like the karate people.
They were like, oh, you can't do that. You won't have the traditions. You won't have the spirit. You won't have the philosophy. And, and, and the chain, they're like, no let's just create one that is efficaciously best. And. We believe that God has commanded this, and we have evidence, I think, that God has commanded this of us within the Abrahamic tradition but, but I think similar, our detractors will, in a few hundred years, be seen very similar to those people who stuck with Tai Chi and stuff like that in a world of MMA.
Let's try it. Did you [00:31:00] get
Malcolm Collins: Everyone knows a Tai Chi expert cannot compete with an MMA expert in actual combat, or a karate expert, or anything like that, right? So it's what are we optimizing for? We're optimizing for what is best for our children. And we'll go into how we built the system to do that.
But it's, it's I feel an interesting analogy there.
Yeah. Well, this is nice in theory, but if such an entity existed, how would it tell us? It would reveal itself as best it could. It would reveal to groups the truest iteration of itself they were capable of understanding and in those revelations leave hints of its true nature to those with the capacity for a more holistic understanding.
Such an entity would find it impossible to reveal itself to Bronze Age humans. It even shows us this in the flows of history with the collapse of early monotheism that did not anthropomorphize its god in the form of Akhenaten. Instead, it bestowed blessings on the human tribe that had the closest intergenerationally [00:32:00] durable, accurate revelation of its nature, the Jews, and then revealed clearer iterations of itself through a succession of prophets.
Simone Collins: I love this because it's an extension on this, like religion is best revealed to different audiences in different ways. So just as you know, religion is better revealed to children in a very simplistic, but it's such a colorful. Relatable way. It's a it would, of course, make sense that religion in the past and that religious truths in the past have manifest in ways to populations and locations in the past that are localized and appropriate.
And of course. You know, the words and the scientific understandings that we have now are incompatible with the words that religions, you know, presented to people in the past when you only lived in a village and interacted with 15 other people and a cow, you know, you would need to use different metaphors.
You need to use different story formats. [00:33:00]
Malcolm Collins: They use a lot of pastoralist metaphors, right? You know, those aren't relevant to a modern audience. You look at The Bible and it's always talking about shepherds and stuff like no one's even seen a shepherd and I don't know, 50 years. But there's another thing here that I think is really important to note.
So if you look at something like Judaism or Christianity or something like that when they conceive of God today, they, they do not answer for more fights him much. It would be seen as, is almost sort of blasphemous to answer for more fights. God is having sort of. Okay. Petty human emotions like anger and envy and stuff like that.
That isn't the way that most of these traditions think that God really works these days. But also those traditions are at least ones that are like honest about their history. If you look at the early Jewish people. The first Jewish writings, the God that they believed in was an anthropomorphic God. It was very similar to a Zeus or something like that.
It was the type of God who would get angry and flood the world. It was the type of God who had these lower order human emotions. [00:34:00] And so you may say, well, why didn't God just reveal its True self to these early humans. Why didn't it just reveal that you really shouldn't answer primarifies it this much?
It is so far beyond the human capacity of understanding and an emotional states. And I think that God graciously to us today. Wrote into history why I didn't do it. It's you want to know why I didn't reveal a non anthropomorphic version of myself here, bam, ancient Egypt. I took literally the most powerful person in the world, probably at the time which was the Pharaoh of Egypt, easily the most powerful Pharaoh in modern day society, had him become a non anthropomorphized monotheist, and you saw exactly how long that lasted.
Simone Collins: It was, hold on, I'm just checking to make sure. It was OG naan. He was married to Nefertiti, right? Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: OG Naan. Yeah. That is why I didn't tell you. And so I think that many ways, like when I talk about did God plant this idea of the invisible hand of God in Adam Smith mind? Did God plant this with ACH [00:35:00] naan so that we today can examine history and learn why things were done in certain ways or weren't done in certain ways in terms of revelation?
I believe, yes, but that's like the non atheistic interpretation or the atheistic interpretation. I'm, I'm looking at this as like the fourth, fourth evidence, but it's, it's, it's compelling. And I think that, yeah, it was God. And you'll see this throughout the system. When I think that many times that we ask, why wasn't this revealed earlier?
Well, then go and investigate because it might've been revealed earlier. And you'll see that it wasn't intergenerationally durable. It revealed to that primitive stage of humanity. Well,
Simone Collins: it also reminds me like the lesson that we learned when we acquired a business that had offices in two very different countries and cultures.
The lesson that we learned where at first we were like, no, there is one way to manage people. It is the one right way. It is the way that you and I were taught in our various business school curricula and like culturally speaking. Right. And that is the, that is the way it could be cut as is correct.
And then the people. [00:36:00] Who mentored us from whom we acquired the company, we're like, no, no, no. You know, in this, in this country, you have to crack the whip. You have to talk to everyone as a group. You have to be kind of like a jerk sometimes. And you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then like in the United States, it's very different.
It's, it's very individualistic. You do this and that. And we're like, nah, like we're, we're just going to do it the right way across both offices. And it totally failed in that other culture, like our messages never landed and we were not helping our team thrive the way that they ought to be able to thrive until, you know, we completely changed our tactics and messaging and.
Then it did. So this just reminds me of that. I think
Malcolm Collins: that God is like that. God is like that.
Simone Collins: If God wants humans to thrive, he's going to have to act in ways that work with their local cultural norms and social formations and
Malcolm Collins: Well, and this, this next passage talks to this very explicitly. All right.
Jesus was unique among the prophets in that he recognized the Jewish tribe's revelation was meant for everyone. All men died. It is not death that makes a man a [00:37:00] martyr, but living in accord with God's plan that does. Jesus also taught us that God, as a man, Must be martyred to sanctify mankind only through the generational martyrdom of individual men can maintain be sanctified and eventually join with God.
I find this to be an almost impossibly elegant solution to communicate a beautiful and sophisticated truth of the universe to a man. Still so low and barbaric. God wanted to paint a picture of the martyr that sanctified mankind. Boast God's son, but also God still in human form. The moments in all our lives dedicated holistically to improving the future, dedicated holistically to God's plan.
Jesus's life. What's the brush, his blood, the paint used to create the perfect portrait of the martyr for our species when we were still so young, so close to being just talking [00:38:00] monkeys that appealing to an all powerful entity with child sacrifice still seemed reasonable to us. This journey, the journey of understanding the Abrahamic peoples have followed, is beautifully painted by God within Abraham's life. We followed God believing him to be the kind of entity to demand a father sacrifice his child to be appeased.
Yet he made it clear there at the very beginning that he is not that kind of entity. God did not tell a story in which he demanded a father sacrifice his son Because God wanted to, but because it was Abraham, what the Abrahamic people expected of a God in those early days of man, it is our barbaric expectations of an entity that only wants what is best for us, that makes him barbarous in our mind, when in reality him.
God always gives us what we need to perform our roles in his plan. This shows us how God uses prophets. He uses their lives to paint motifs upon reality. [00:39:00] I find it interesting how it is easy for people to grasp that the story of the events of Abraham's life is not really about Abraham's life, but about us.
But when we point out the same is true about the events of Jesus's life, people struggle with the concept. So I find this really telling, and this was a big realization for me as I was thinking about this, is that the story of Jesus, the story that didn't really make sense to me before, I was like, why would God Need to, , come down to earth make himself a man and then have man kill him in order to forgive man.
Like, why not just forgive man himself, right? And why would Jesus sacrifice have a particularly strong meaning if Jesus knew that he wasn't really dying? He was just immediately coming back to life as the most all powerful entity to ever exist. And, and so many other things that didn't make sense when I, when I, when I recontextualized when I said, Oh no, the story of Jesus is supposed to be about like the story of [00:40:00] Abraham.
It's supposed to tell us. A truth about ourselves. It's supposed to paint a motif upon reality. Jesus's life was the art itself. And this really changed how I related to this, but it also relates to this earlier point you were talking about. When God first revealed this truth to this, We as humans were such a barbaric and petty species that he needed to use the story of a father sacrificing his own son to appease a God, basically and, and yet the real God isn't like that at all.
He doesn't need. Sacrifice of deities or humans or, or anything like that to be appeased. The sacrifice is a necessary process of human intergenerational improvement of us sanctifying ourselves because we really are now too sinful and too flawed to join God. We really do have to improve. And that improvement only happens with this cycle of martyrdom.
Simone Collins: Right. So in other words, and this is very spicy, you're saying [00:41:00] Jesus was a figure to teach humans the importance of sacrifice in order to serve future generations of greater good. Sacrifice
Malcolm Collins: is a very complicated concept and in the next paragraph I get to, we'll talk about this complicated concept and I can leave it back with what we were just talking about.
Finally, early Christianity revealed the truth of the Trinity, which is critical to understanding the agents of providence, God and man as three distinct entities, yet also the same entity. The agents of providence are so far beyond us as concepts, like a singular or plural identity, male or female, and even whether they are corporeal or incorporeal do not apply to them.
Now, so this goes to what we were saying here. Things that like I didn't understand the purpose of the Trinity always felt weird to me, right? Like it's Okay, you're trying to say that it's really important that we understand that Jesus was holy God, but also not God at all. [00:42:00] And if you're trying it first, why is that an important concept?
And if that's an important concept, why are you teaching that we're the Trinity, where you're adding this additional element, the Holy Ghost, which you just don't really talk about anywhere else. Or I don't understand why this is an important concept. The moment that I contextualized, like Jesus, man, that is holy God, but also not God, is supposed to be man himself.
It's supposed to be man in the cycle of martyrdom. And not only that, but it's an entity that is both holy God and not God that must martyr itself to forgive man of his sins, to forgive man of the things that make him today not capable of joining this entity that exists outside of time. Every element of the story was 100 percent true.
It was 100 percent profoundly true. It just wasn't a story about this individual whose life was being used to tell it. It [00:43:00] was a story about human history and us. So it wasn't just to teach the importance of martyrdom. It was also to teach this important concept, man. Is 100 percent God, but also 100 percent not God, then it also teaches this additional concept around the Holy Ghost, which I didn't understand before.
I was like, what's the Holy Ghost? Why is this important? Why is it important? We understand the Holy Ghost is the agents of Providence. It's God in the plural. And in the singular, and then there's God in just a singular, which is God, and then there's God as man, which is Jesus, and it teaches us this concept.
It's just we as a species. We're not prepared for and I'll go over this later. But when you take this new framing. To the story of Jesus's life, a bunch of events, which felt very nonsensical when I was reading them, like the temptation of Christ, right? It was like, you can have all these kingdoms if you bow down to worship me.
That makes no fucking sense. That makes no [00:44:00] sense. Jesus knew he was God. He already owned all those kingdoms. They already worshipped him. Why would he bow down to Satan in exchange for that? Oh, when Satan presumably wouldn't even have the power to do that outside of God. And even what Satan was offering him was, was trivial.
You know, I'll, I'll, I'll use one of the later tracks, the analogy. I'm like, it's a bit like. A fired employee of Microsoft offering offering Bill Gates a burrito to bow down and worship him and live as his slave. It's no, that's it. And so the, the offer made there was an offer of trivial temptation.
So why is it important that Jesus overcame it? When you recontextualize. The story of Jesus is being about us, being about our moments, being about how we must make actually very meaningfully sacrifices our lives, because as I say, all humans die. It's not death that makes us martyrs, it's how we choose to live.
Our murder that intergenerationally sanctifies humanity and makes us worthy of God. So it's not just a story [00:45:00] about It's the whole story. The whole story is true and meaningful. Okay. I'll get to the next part. Okay. Unless you had something you wanted to talk about. No, go ahead. Muhammad was unique in his understanding that different revelations were for different communities quote.
And indeed we have already sent forth in every nation, a messenger saying worship God and avoid false gods with this revelation. being for the Arabic community as made clear in quote, indeed, we have sent down as an Arabic Koran that you might understand in quote, with you here clearly being people who speak Arabic.
Now some familiar with what Islam has devolved into might say. But don't Muslims believe very strongly that Muhammad was the last prophet? Yes, they do, which is weird, because he didn't say that. What Muhammad said was that he was the seal of the prophets, a phrase that in context [00:46:00] clearly means that he came to synthesize and affirm the teachings of the prophets who came before him.
If he wanted to say he was the last prophet, he could have said that. He did not. So why did he use the rather odd and specific term, quote, seal of the prophets, end quote? Because he was referencing Manichean literature where this term means to prove a prophecy, i. e. a seal of authenticity.
And this stuff is all cited here, this is like a well documented thing among historians. He is very clearly and explicitly saying that his prophecies build on the prophecies of the past and affirms those prophecies. However, in a way, Muhammad was the last of the prophets, insofar that he was the last of the mystical prophets who believed God spoke to them directly, with more recent prophets being logisticians, individuals who God communicates with through logic, science, and the writing of past prophets.
The Wynwood [00:47:00] Reed, whose teachings we will focus on in track three, but there were many among the Protestant reformers as well. When man was still half savage, the only tool God had to communicate with him was what today we would call a psychotic episode. This form of revelation was severely limited when contrasted with how he reveals the truth today.
So why,
Simone Collins: why would early man, you know, only really find revelation through psychotic episodes where they start, you know, like they develop schizophrenia and they hear voices and
Malcolm Collins: stuff. Well, God recorded that for us in history as well. You could say, what if a group tried to fully understand God just by exploring the natural world?
I think this is what the Greek philosophers, the early Greek philosophers did. And they came to some truth through that exploration, but there were more profound truths like a monotheistic God, the dangers of idolatry and other truths that we'll get to as we continue to go through this that just could not be revealed to them through just like logistically [00:48:00] inspecting reality.
So I think in. These, what I think of today, we would have called psychotic episodes individual seeing and hearing things that they they received information that could not be determined by early man through just an investigation of reality. But that later, when individuals with access to science and technology were studying what was in these early writings, they could see truths that weren't contained within them.
This, to me, comes to something like Protestantism. I think Protestantism is the purest and truest form of practicing what is actually written in the Christian Bible. However, I also don't think that it is anything like any of the early Christian practices. And I think that people who have actually studied the early Christian practices would be capable of seeing that.
It is individuals who had a more sophisticated philosophical understanding of reality. And, and frankly, we're, we're smarter than the early Christians who were able to go through these writings and see what God was actually telling them that these earlier [00:49:00] individuals was not. And as such, these early Protestant reformers to me are fully prophets.
They are prophets to me at the same scale, you know, whether it's, you know, Martin Luther or John Calvin at the same scale as Jesus or Mohammed. And we argue later in our writings to me, they're actually. Perhaps even greater profits than those individuals, and they relied on God's gifts instead of having to have it basically laid out for them by God to determine what was true about reality.
Simone Collins: Yeah, you're talking about profits is really interesting to me. It's kind of like, akin to. Inventors in the world of industrialism and technology with all these different moral inferences which I, I also find to be really interesting. So,
Malcolm Collins: Muhammad's revelation of the prophet is important in that while Jesus revealed that the Abrahamic tradition was meant for all people, Muhammad understood that not the same iteration was made for all people.
[00:50:00] Quote, so let the people of the gospel, e. g. the Torah, the Bible, et cetera, judged by what God has revealed in it. And those who do not judge by what God has revealed in it are truly rebellious. We have revealed to you, Muhammad, this book was the truth as a confirmation of previous scriptures. And you can see here, again, this is a reoccurring motif in the Quran, and clearly what was meant by, quote, seal of the prophets, end quote, i.
e. seal of authenticity. The Reformation revealed to us that the interpretation of God's will is the personal responsibility of the individual, it should never be outsourced to a bureaucracy. John Calvin taught us the truce of predestination was always hidden in Abrahamic scripture and that this does not conflict with free will.
If this is a confusing concept to you, see the Base Camp episode, Can Determinists Believe in Free Will? Joseph Smith brought the first primitive understanding that it was man himself that eventually becomes God through martyrdom. As a note, we categorize Joseph Smith as a prophet of the logician [00:51:00] category.
We explain why in tract five. This idea of iterative prophecy coming after Jesus is less inconsistent with traditional Christianity than one unfamiliar with the Bible might think, as even Jesus told us that there would be prophets after him. Quote, Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, some of whom you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, end quote.
So take the prophets like Joseph Smith or Muhammad, who Many might say we should not include within the Abrahamic pantheon. Does this not seem like a prophetic description of them, both killed by other followers of the Abrahamic tradition? But how will we know which prophets are the real ones? Well, Paul tells us that in Thessalonians 5, 28 to 21, quote, Quench not the spirit, despise not prophesying, prove all things, hold fast which is good, abstain from all appearance of evil, end quote.
Thus, to use essential bureaucracy to certify prophets is a rebellion to God's will, [00:52:00] as is denying the existence of prophets after Christ, even from the perspective of traditional Christianity. However, these prophets must also be tested. How this is done is discussed in track three.
Now, a person might be asking, quote, How can you include individuals like Joseph Smith and Muhammad when we have stories like those of Helen Mar Kimball and Aisha Proving them of low moral character, end quote. Even if those stories about them are true, every single Abrahamic religion includes the story of King David, Uriah, and Bathsheba.
This story teaches us without any shadow of a doubt that God does not take the moral character of an individual into account when deciding who he chooses as prophets. Do This criticism is important to dispel because the revelation brought by the Islamic branch of the Abrahamic tree of revelations is often the most peculiar to individuals who have not studied the Quran.
How can multiple conflicting prophecies all be useful revelations from the same God? This is where our family's understanding of the quote unquote Tesseract God comes in. Each previous revelation was a full and complete revelation [00:53:00] insofar as those people could understand it. When people see contradictions between them, it is like pointing out that a cube leaves multiple irreconcilable two dimensional shadows.
They are only irreconcilable because you assume the shape you are trying to create. out of them is two rather than three dimensions. A person trying to average the shadows cast by a three dimensional cube on a two dimensional plane would average them in a circle, a representation less accurate than any of the direct revelations and thus sinful.
This is what Muhammad was saying in the Surah al Muhajirah. 4757. All of those of the Abrahamic face of his time were best following strict interpretations of the shadow that was revealed to them rather than attempting to average or convert between them. However, a person knowing that they are attempting to construct a three dimensional shape by looking at two dimensional shadows can come to an understanding beyond any individual revelation.
A tesseract is a four dimensional cube, and while we can broadly understand its design and conceptually map [00:54:00] it, humanity lacks the biological hardware to fully conceive of a tesseract. The same is true as God, and thus it is our duty to intergenerationally improve that hardware. It is not blasphemous to expand human intellectual capacity through genetic and synthetic means, but a religious mandate to not engage with these technologies.
To the full extent possible to not improve is to live an open rebellion to God's will.
Simone Collins: So essentially you're saying that in addition to God being revealed to different populations in different places at different times in ways that they were capable of processing God to the best of their ability, you know, getting as close to the truth as possible.
You're also saying that different religious traditions are also different because they're showing different sides of an incomprehensibly complicated god that really can't be articulated.
With means that we're capable of digesting
Malcolm Collins: and incomprehensible to to our limited human intelligence now. No, we have a commandment [00:55:00] from God to expand our ability to comprehend him. That is one of the things that he wants for us. And we argue why later. But actually, so you look at Islamic texts, right?
And I think that Islamic texts almost demand this type of secondary revelation. So even if yeah. You, you assume whatever Islamic to this, this mystical, you know, he's the last of the mystical prophets. Well, there's clearly something not explained by the Koran because it seems pretty clear for me.
If I actually read the text of the Koran. That Muhammad was saying that Christianity and Judaism are completely correct and their followers who follow anything other than Christianity and Judaism, even converting to Islam, they are truly rebellious to God, that you were supposed to follow the revelation that was to you.
Yet we know today. Now, what some Muslims say is they go, Oh, yeah, but he said that. But since then, the Talmud, like the Jewish texts and the Christian texts have changed and that it used to be that these texts completely overlapped with the Quran, right? And that there was no contradictions between them.
But this is categorically [00:56:00] untrue. We, we know we have found early iterations of the Bible from around that period from around where Muhammad lived and they haven't significantly changed. So he. Wrote this knowing God wrote this knowing that these were not reconcilable within a two dimensional plane within our human mind today.
And we needed to develop a new system for understanding God. And in that this new system was prophesized within the Koran and saying that these things actually do all make sense together. We just today you're better off just following your traditions. Which is very interesting to me. Hmm. Yeah,
Simone Collins: definitely.
Malcolm Collins: However, we would be remiss to not point out the ancillary benefit of this interpretation. It makes it much easier to live alongside Abrahamic traditions without conflict. Groups typically attack those that are either very similar to them or very different, a distant but distinct ideological relation between groups.
Servee to protect a minority population living amongst another group. This benefit is further fortified as the Tesseract God concept gives us a religious [00:57:00] mandate to guide those who might leave Abrahamic faiths back to conservative iterations of those faiths, while also protecting those communities from the dilution by the urban monoculture, making us a useful and non threatening player in a larger cultural ecosystem.
This will be critical until after the affirmation mandate of in group intergenerational improvement is achieved, securing our safety.
To be more specific, because we believe God shows his will through the competition of diverse ideas and perspectives, to create a monoculture, to have the whole world under one religion, is to silence the voice of God. Thus, we benefit from more ideological diversity within our community. We are only commanded to attempt to convert either those with so much rebellious vitality in their heart that they would never return to their parent phase, A.
C. S., or Individuals of Exceptional Merit, with merit being measured in competence, industry, influence, or utility to the aims of our group. Your average person will be harmed by this interaction with God's word. [00:58:00] So, I mean, it's kind of an arrogant perspective, but I think everybody knows that we are a little arrogant and it doesn't make us much safer to be around other groups.
And that most individuals within a group, we have a religious duty to prevent them from deconverting from the Abrahamic face and to build systems that make it Less likely that individuals deconvert from the Abrahamic phase. But this isn't to say, as previous, I believe, that we didn't have an individual to have any sort of outreach.
I think we do. But the individuals we have outreach to are the individuals who, without us being here, would be deconverting to the urban monoculture. Or individuals that we specifically need to target for the goals of our community. Because we believe that humanity has a specific path it needs to be on.
And sometimes that path may require Influence. Well, something like that. But generally, it's a community that we see is not targeting these individuals. And another unique thing of our community, which we'll talk about later, is you join a state, a part of your tradition. You would be a Jewish individual within our community, a Calvinist individual within our community, a [00:59:00] Catholic individual within our community.
Your first and foremost source of biblical truth for you and your family is always going to be the branch of Abrahamianism that you came from. You just are there. Sort of opening yourself up to the idea that the other traditions may have held some truths that your tradition didn't. And we are trying to build a system that allows individuals, as we said, no central bureaucracy.
We are just determining a system that an individual can use to determine what they think is true from examining these texts themselves.
Simone Collins: I also get the impression that it's kind of impossible to be a person of intense faith and conviction without also being arrogant. And the only lack of Perceived arrogance in people with very strong faith comes out of a, an ancillary performative humility.
That's part of the practicing of that faith though. That's like just additional social positioning, but I also see in like religious religiously driven. Humility, a huge amount of arrogance you know, people wearing sackcloths, people washing feet, people [01:00:00] acting as though, oh yes, you know, the, the meek shall inherit the earth, that, that is incredibly arrogant.
So
Malcolm Collins: obviously as I come to actually believe this, it's not just something I've created for my family. I do believe I, I, I have some duty to at least like record it somewhere or something like that, because it seems like it explains a lot of stuff I didn't understand about Christianity when I was growing up and now it makes perfect sense to me.
And I'm like, well, shit, if I actually believe this, then I at least have to record it somewhere. But it also means that I believe that I have a. Understanding of God, to some extent, that's not held within these other communities. Yeah, but all
Simone Collins: I'm saying is I don't think you can really do something and really believe in it without looking arrogant.
So, it's just,
Malcolm Collins: you know, this is not to say we see all iterations of these traditions as equal.
In stagnant pools, parasites breed. If we allow our hearts, our traditions, or the flame of human intergenerational improvement to stagnate, parasites of the human spirit will erupt and siphon our vitality. We can see this in the Abrahamic traditions that have stagnated. Where have [01:01:00] their great thinkers gone?
Their great scientists? Their great philosophers? Their spirits have been feasted upon by the very parasites they cultivated in pools of gold and vanity. God righteously removed his favor from them, and it is plain to any familiar with their past greatness. God does not hide his dissatisfaction with those who live in rebellion.
God moves the focus of his favor with each successive revelation. God's favor reverberates throughout history like a sonic boom and is almost impossible to ignore. It can be used to both confirm the authenticity of otherwise questionable revelations, like Muhammad or the Reformation, deny the authenticity of others, like the Baha'i, and to find the locations of revelations that were not widely recognized in their time. For example, there was likely a yet unconfirmed revelation in Renaissance Italy. This trend pointed us to the most recent revelation, which happened in 1872, within the Victorian gentleman science community.[01:02:00]
While we will go deeper into this revelation in future treks, the next we'll discuss demographic collapse in the context of God's plan for our species. Demographic collapse is not a capricious accident, but a critical part of God's plan for us. So, that's it. I, I find this last concept when I want to pontificate on a little bit because it's, it's, it's really important to me.
I'm sort of confirming for me that this is an accurate revelation, this idea of an iterative revelation from God. When I look at history, typically after one of these revelations happens, this group ends up having enormous, keep in mind, this isn't a prosperity doctrine. We are not talking about financial wealth.
This group. It has an enormous amount of philosophical and scientific wealth. You know, after the initial Christian revelation, after the initial Muslim revelation, after the Protestant Reformation, after the revelation of Wynwood Reed these communities exploded in their philosophical and scientific output, [01:03:00] in a level that is almost unimaginable.
Thank you. inconceivable when contrasted with other groups, right? Like you're like, wow, like this was a genuine explosion of output. And then the output will succeed, go nowhere, like contrast Muslims during the period where they were such dominant forces in science that Western scientists would write their Papers with Muslim sounding pseudonyms because nobody took anyone else seriously to what the faith has become today.
I don't know what I can call that other than God's favor turning from them. Now, and to me, this is 1 of the things that makes me really believe that this is true. You know, you see, this was a Catholic church when the Catholic church was so grand and it had all these great philosophers coming out of it.
And then there's just this dearth of. Of genuine to me people are like, name some communities that God's eye has turned from and I hate to say it. I mean, I think it's most communities these days. I think the last place he had his focus was on the gentlemen [01:04:00] scientists of of the world of sort of the mid 1800s mid.
1950s, and we saw an output from them that was to me really unparalleled except of what you see in other parts of. But what's interesting about this is it also allows you to look for revelations and confirm revelations. So they said in Renaissance Italy, there was probably one in Athenian Greece. There was probably some truths delivered to the people of Athenian Greece that kicked off this period of scientific explosion there.
When I was editing this, I started thinking, okay, well then where else would that mean? There was probably a profit in history. And, , I got to thinking about Alexander, the great. , and then I was like, okay, so then what would the Alexander the great prophet be? And I was like, oh, obviously Aristotle, his personal tutor, Alexander.
The great is what happens when you give someone.
A prophet as their personal tutor.
Malcolm Collins: And so this is something that. When I'm this is a very Protestantized system. Like I'm saying, I don't have the answers. I have this. System for [01:05:00] determining how you look for truth in reality, but the searching for truth it's not just up to the individual, it is a religious mandate of the individual to search for their own truth and to not have other people tell them what's true.
I'm just giving like this system that I have that seems to have a lot of things make sense to me now that didn't make sense to me historically. And, and it is compelling to me religiously now when looking at my knowledge of history, I'm like this. Is really unaccountable through secular means this explosion of productivity.
We see after every one of God's revelations. But it also allows you to add this element of science to it. Which is to say, when I say science, I mean, confirmability disproved ability. This is how you confirm a real revelation, or this is how you disprove a real revelation.
Simone Collins: Well, and what you're saying to is when religions seem to be.
When, when God seems to have looked favorably upon different faiths is when they did pursue in the name of religion, typically evidence based.
Malcolm Collins: Innovation. Yeah, this is God's gift, it's logic, [01:06:00] it's philosophy, it's, it's, it's so you see how God benefits humanity and that God clearly values these things and these ways of approaching things.
Simone Collins: Hmm.
Malcolm Collins: That makes sense. I don't know. Did you find that compelling? Or
Simone Collins: I mean, because as everyone loves to point out, we take such consequentialist views to everything. Of course, we're going to assume that the person who gets the good results is doing something right. And then look back through history and think, ah, these people got good results.
What were they doing? Right. And then try to find patterns. So
Malcolm Collins: it's interesting that you say that. Cause to me, I almost view it as not really good results, but an explosion of human vitality. Like really living within these communities and and so to recreate that we need to refine God's word as we are commanded to do.
And this is why you have this iterative prophecy is because God is turning his attention to the group that has the most accurate vision. Of what he was actually trying to communicate, but that vision requires time [01:07:00] and it requires exploration and it requires logic. It requires his gifts to logic and pragmatic logic to to figure it out.
And yeah, I, I, I like that aspect as well, but it also allows our. Like faith to be disproven. If people don't choose this and if the people who choose it don't end up flourishing philosophically and intellectually, then we haven't actually stumbled upon anything true at all. This is just self masturbatory stuff within our family.
So yeah.
Simone Collins: Well, I think this is quite interesting and I look forward to going through the next ones with you. Glad you're finally breaking it down. Well,
Malcolm Collins: I love you encouraging me to do this stuff and talking through this with me and dealing with my like religious nerdiness, which is not what you married into.
You didn't know you were,
Simone Collins: no, like these past two weeks has been exactly what you and I are all about. That, that you do out there, a high risk, highly speculative thinking and strategizing and planning and philosophizing, and I'm out there doing. Highly repetitive, incredibly dumbed down work [01:08:00] like knocking on doors and asking people for signatures.
That's what we do. So I'm really glad that like when I was doing extra of what I do best, which is just repetitive grunt work, you were out there doing what you do best, which is, you know, highly intellectual.
Malcolm Collins: Well, I'm sorry if some of this has been repetitive for other people, but I'm trying to canonize like idle ideas I've had on my show.
And so I need to, you know, put them into this condensed format here. So thank you for your time today. I love you. It's good to hear. Love you too.
Tract 1: Building an Abrahamic Faith Optimized for Interstellar Empires