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Ep. 227 – The Bible Says So w/ Dan McClellan
266 Plays4 days ago
This week we’re joined by Biblical scholar and author, Dan McClellan! We first became familiar with Dan’s work on social media where he posts some really thought-provoking videos delving into things like commonly misquoted scripture, bad doctrine, and misconceptions about Biblical translation. He is an absolute authority on these subjects and has the scholarly accolades to back it up. His new book, The Bible Says So: What We Get Right and Wrong About Scriptures’ Most Controversial Issues is the perfect reference to some of the most commonly raised debates about the Bible, and we can’t recommend it enough! Follow Dan on YouTube, Instagram, X, and TikTok (@Maklelan), and pick up a copy of The Bible Says So, available everywhere April 29!
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Themes
00:00:00
Speaker
But yeah, the the weaponization of the Bible is really the main, um the bugbear I was really trying to exercise with with this book. and And hopefully, you know, it gets the point across for some folks. i'm I'm sure that it will be, I've heard from people who said they're going to give family and friends copies for Christmas because they, um you know, they need them to read it so that they can overcome some of their prejudices or or their their dogmas and And so I'm sure my book will get thrown in the trash or or in the fireplace a bunch of times. but
00:00:32
Speaker
I'd say that's too bad, but I do recall getting a daily devotional one year from my parents that I did, in fact, never crack open. Hey, bigot money spends just like good people money. The check's still cash, huh? Yeah.
00:01:07
Speaker
Hey everyone, quickly jumping in here before we get to the episode because in the and the excitement of the moment, we forgot to do ah some proper plugs.
Introducing Dan McClellan
00:01:20
Speaker
um And ah just wanted to get those to you at the top of the episode here, so this will only take a minute.
00:01:26
Speaker
um Our guest today is Dan McClellan. He's a scholar of religion and the Bible. He's I don't know, have the data to support this, so I might disappoint him a little bit with this claim, but um he's one of the most, as far as I know, and have seen public...
00:01:44
Speaker
um public scholars um when it comes to social media use. He uploads videos regularly. His whole mission there is to combat disinformation around the Bible and religion um and ah incredibly accessible, easy to follow, well articulated work. So um you can check him out there on Instagram. He's also huge on TikTok.
00:02:11
Speaker
um I've really appreciated his work. So having the opportunity to talk to him here was super exciting. um He also has a podcast called data over dogma. I would highly recommend checking that out if this kind of stuff interests you.
00:02:27
Speaker
um It's funny because the more, excuse me, the more I shift out of, you know, uh, feeling particularly tied to Christianity. Uh, I'll, I've always and continued to find the Bible and incredibly fascinating book.
00:02:42
Speaker
And Dan kind of pulls, um, it, it, his His work is aimed at providing the academic consensus um and you know where he includes his opinions, he lets that be made known. But um as the name of his podcast indicates, data over dogma, ah starting from the point of data versus some...
00:03:06
Speaker
preconceived ideas or inherited beliefs that you're trying to, or dogmas that you're trying to, uh, prop up, uh, over data is kind of what he's pushing back against there. So, um, check out his podcast. He covers an array of interesting topics. Um, and then he has, uh,
00:03:24
Speaker
ah born And most importantly, his new book comes out on April 29th. His book is called The Bible Says So, What We Get Right and Wrong About Scripture's Most Controversial Issues.
00:03:40
Speaker
ah It's an incredible book. I had the privilege of being able to read it um prior to this interview, and it's fantastic. A lot of the topics that he has covered in his book,
00:03:54
Speaker
Instagram or TikTok, YouTube, uh, podcast, um, you know, make it, but he he kind of takes some of those most popular ones to start. Um, and puts them here. it's It's wonderfully written, again, as is all of his other work is, it's just accessible and makes it very, provides a lot of information without over-inundating you and getting too much in the weeds on stuff that, you know, lay people like us are never going to remember anyway.
00:04:25
Speaker
um It's... ah You know, he may cover some of these topics like in his, like I said, social media accounts. But diving in deeper um with each chapter of this book is it was great. ah Like I said, I can't speak highly enough about it. If these topics interest you, if you're looking for... um
00:04:55
Speaker
On a personal level, great. If you want to be that guy or gal who sits at the family gatherings, the dinner table, um and wants to pull some of this cool information out of your back pocket, that's always fun too.
00:05:10
Speaker
um it's It really is ah it gives ah ah helpful overview of a lot of the most important most controversial issues, the most challenging topics, the ones that are the most societally prevalent, the ones that come up at family gatherings, the ones that are...
00:05:29
Speaker
politically relevant right now. um So yeah, I, I, again, highly recommend it. ah Christian, non-Christian, atheist, theist, wherever you fall. I think this book, it has value for every single person who lives in this country because we are constantly dealing with these conversations and these kinds of issues. So um yeah, that being said, I'll go ahead and cut this out and you can listen to our episode with Dan McClellan. Yeah.
00:05:57
Speaker
check out his book April 29th.
Relating Across Generations
00:06:00
Speaker
The Bible says so listen to his podcast data over dogma. Um, and, uh, enjoy our conversation here with Dan McClellan.
00:06:11
Speaker
Hey everybody. We are back with another episode of growing up Christian. I'm Sam. I'm Casey. And we are joined today by a very special guest. Someone I'm very excited to to talk to. Some of of you have been following for quite some time, maybe longer than me.
00:06:26
Speaker
Um, And his name is Dan McClellan. What's up, Dan? Hey, everybody. Hope but y'all are doing all right out there in podcast land, if that's what the kids are still calling it. I don't know.
00:06:36
Speaker
Sure. It's hard to relate to kids these days. Oh, jeez. I can't quote stuff. Every time I quote something in front of my 16-year-old daughter, I'm like, ha, ha, ha. And I feel like I don't know what you're talking about.
00:06:49
Speaker
It's like, that's you never saw a gladiator or something like that. And yeah, if you can quote, I think you should leave. You'll be in pretty good shape for the next few years. Well, I took my I took 12 year old to.
00:07:02
Speaker
the final show of the Aras tour. So I've got a little bit of cachet with her. And particularly because this was in Vancouver, we were coming out of a cafe the day before and somebody ran out to stop me, say, hey, are you Dan McClellan?
00:07:18
Speaker
And um I was like, yeah, hey, what's going on? He's like, I don't mean to name drop or anything, but I'm Taylor Swift bassist. And my daughter's eyes went boong. And then...
00:07:29
Speaker
Now she has a handful of picks that that he uses on the Eros tour ah that she gives away to friends. and so Those are kind of fun experiences.
00:07:44
Speaker
Also, what is ah it's hard to think of a better gig than Taylor Swift's bassist because you're not going to get bothered often, but your life's going pretty good. Yeah, yeah, he's he's doing okay.
00:07:55
Speaker
and And we just, um and and you he was talking about playing bass a little bit. And and I was like, I'm still mad about Jason Newstead. And he's like, we're all still mad about Jason Newstead. So um like he he was like, i recorded a, i went he went through and like recorded him playing bass ah over a bunch of songs and and Justice for All.
00:08:19
Speaker
as like a tribute to Jason Newstead. So we were geeking out about other stuff. But yeah, he he came down to, we had floor seats and he came down to chat a little bit before the show. And there was a ah small crowd that gathered on the other side waiting for for us to stop chatting. and And so he was taking pictures and stuff like that. but but yeah he's he probably doesn't he uh travels in relative uh obscurity i'm i'm sure much of the time but um has huge fans um if they do recognize him i'm sure you uh you'll you avoided the low-hanging fruit of any slap in the bass jokes and saved face and social capital with your daughter
00:09:02
Speaker
uh yeah i she doesn't know a whole lot about um about bass and yeah there's not she doesn't have any of that uh that social memory or knowledge so i let that one slide but yeah she was i scored a lot of points for that trip um and uh so yeah with her at least i'm i'm cool my 16 year old couldn't couldn't be less cool she doesn't like your comic book collection she ah She appreciates that I'm a nerd.
00:09:32
Speaker
um So she like today i was like, i need to I need to see what's been going on with the Punisher. So I ordered a handful of Punisher comics, and one of them came today, and I was supposed to take her to Joanne's with a friend of hers.
00:09:48
Speaker
My 16-year-old likes to hang out at Joanne's Fabrics. I was going to ask if that's the same Joanne. They're closing. Yeah, they they they're doing it going at a business sale. And that's why my daughter was like, my friend and I want to go hang out.
00:09:59
Speaker
So I took her and I was like, I'm going hang out in car because I got a new Punisher graphic novel and I'm going to rip through this whole thing. and ah And she's like, oh, dad, you're such a nerd.
00:10:11
Speaker
Okay. but i I know she loves it. Like when people come up and recognize me in public, she's like, oh, it's another one of your fans. And secretly I know she loves it. Yeah. it's a ah Okay. So here's a, here's a question for you then.
00:10:29
Speaker
um as a big comic book fan, did you buy the Harley Quinn fart fetish comic? I did not. i don't i don't know I don't think I've even heard of that. I don't know when that came out. It's a thing, disturbingly.
00:10:45
Speaker
It doesn't surprise me. There are some weirdos out there, but yeah, that was something that was not on my radar. I did have like three or four. Everybody Google it.
00:10:55
Speaker
it's It's out there. It's a new thing. And it's pretty gross. I can imagine. it's Is it official DC, huh? Yeah. Yeah. i um This sounds insane, but it actually is.
00:11:10
Speaker
It doesn't really surprise me that much. the I ordered some of the Garth Ennis Punisher runs, which are like all rated r okay And it was like explicit content, and I was like, I'm down. And it was I was like, how much fun was this artist having?
00:11:29
Speaker
because Yeah, that's one of the things I i i don't, I'm not a huge comic book person. i was x i did X-Men for a long time. um Read, you know, the first 30 years of it.
00:11:41
Speaker
Because I, you know, back when I was in college, torrenting was very popular. So I did not pay anyone for them. I'm sure... I just don't appreciate that. And I do apologize, but I also don't really care.
00:11:53
Speaker
And ah then spawn was something I was get, I got into a bit later and still slowly make my way through those and pick them up here or there where I can. And, um,
00:12:06
Speaker
Not the best writing, but the art style for those is what I've just, I loved. I fell in love with ah with Todd McFarlane and with Greg Capullo. And now I subscribe to the new Wolverine Revenge miniseries only because Greg Capullo is doing Wolverine.
00:12:23
Speaker
Oh, that's sick. and And he's phenomenal. But yeah, Spawn was great. I had the first 50 issues of that. And then i I went away to college, got kicked out. We moved. Everything ah went upside down and and I um kind of lost track.
00:12:36
Speaker
of what was going on with spawn and i have not been able to get back into it it does it doesn't wherever they are right now i have not been able to find it interesting yeah i'm not definitely nowhere current um i've just picked up the uh the graphic novel collections of old ones and slowly making way i need a hobby i'm you know getting too close to 40 to to not have anything like that to do um But I need some stuff to put on your walls.
00:13:04
Speaker
Yeah, well, I'm in a temporary place right now. I'm selling my house. I used to. It is embarrassing. I do not like my background. um I'm selling my house. I'm having another kid. i'm in I'm doing a million things all at once. Congrats.
00:13:17
Speaker
Thanks. we ah i have I have nothing cool behind me. My lighting is terrible. You get
Dan's Journey into Biblical Scholarship
00:13:22
Speaker
to look. this is the This is actually the it' it the Gen X, Gen Z look. everyone just what All the kids now, just my foster son's 22, and they just he walks around his phone at chest level looking up at him all the the time. Oh, gosh. Yeah. Those great angles.
00:13:39
Speaker
I can't stand it. and the The worst is doing FaceTime or something like that. And they're yeah at the bottom of the screen and you're just seeing. Looking up their nose. Oh, yeah. um But let's get into ah some of your story, some of your life. I'm sure we'll rabbit trail here and there, but ah you already said one thing that I'm interested in. It's pulling the thread of, ah but we do like to get a little background on, as we do call it, growing up Christian. I don't know if growing up,
00:14:07
Speaker
Christian was your background or if you found it later. But um why don't you give us a quick snapshot of your childhood experience with ah ah with religion? I didn't really have much of ah a childhood experience with religion. I know that I was born into a fundamentalist Christian commune in West Virginia, but we left when I was ah five or six, and I don't really have any memory of of that at all. um And so I was kind of, and after that, my parents ah just kind of ah left it alone.
00:14:43
Speaker
So I would say I probably grew up uh closest to being an agnostic um or didn't think about it it too much didn't have much concern for it it's something that i became interested in later in life uh and so it uh you know i read i read the bhagavad gita before i read the bible oh yeah and yeah and and much of the quran as well and And so my interest in it was primarily academic. And then I came to religion when I was 20 and became baptized as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
00:15:21
Speaker
And then a year later, ah spent two years in Uruguay doing a proselytizing mission. And so, yeah, then came back and and hit the ground running, trying to get started on ah a career studying the Bible for a living because I didn't in getting to know the Bible and having to read it every single day as a missionary, I just fell in love with a lot of the stories, with the the history to the degree that it is historical, the the literature, the languages.
00:15:51
Speaker
i was just fascinated by it all. And and I thought as ah I came home, i was like, I need to go back to school. I'd already been kicked out of the University of Northern Colorado. I had a ah muscular 0.29 GPA that was waving around.
00:16:06
Speaker
under the noses of all the the universities and nobody was nibbling. What were you studying at the time, but you got kicked out with? um i was i was there to do graphic arts.
00:16:17
Speaker
um That was the closest I could get to any kind of program that would allow me to be a comic book artist. that's That was my my dream and all through high school was either to be a pro golfer or a comic book artist. and um and So failed artist, you went biblical scholar instead of fashionist. That's cool. and i'm i'm um I'm actually glad that it turned out that way. I've i've become friends with a number of um of comic book artists, and I've seen what kind of schedules they keep. and
00:16:49
Speaker
I that is not for me. I would have I would have crashed out real quick if I had gotten into that um line of work. So, um yeah. and And now, you know, I argue with people on the Internet about the Bible for a living, which is like about the coolest thing in the world for me.
00:17:06
Speaker
And so um I decided I wanted to to study the Bible, to teach the Bible for a living when I was living in Uruguay and came back and It took a while to get things rolling. You know, the the universities weren't exactly banging down my door.
00:17:21
Speaker
um It took a few tries. And then ah in the meantime, I got a yeah ah vocational degree. I thought it might help me pay for college if I had an actual skill. um And so I went and got a massage therapy degree and did that for a little bit, um supplementing my my um borrowing.
00:17:39
Speaker
And um it didn't really help pay for school much at all. Yeah. But I managed to- You have strangest resume. You just bounce all over the place. it's not It's not the classical arc.
00:17:51
Speaker
um But yeah, i ah managed to weasel my way into BYU, Brigham Young University. And I did a bachelor's there in ancient Near Eastern studies.
00:18:04
Speaker
And then went away to Oxford for a master's degree in Jewish studies. And then did another master's degree in Canada in biblical studies. before um finally doing my PhD through the University of Exeter in theology and religion, which is just the name of the department. like i i tell I don't ah ah assert the title of a theologian.
00:18:27
Speaker
i tell people i'm not a theologian, and they're like, well, your degree is in theology and religion. i'm like, that's the awarding department from the university. That's why it's called that. my My dissertation was on the cognitive science of religion, and the conceptualization of deity in the hebrew bible i'm not a theologian but which i think i appreciate that you make the distinctions a lot uh despite the accusations of people on the internet because we live in a world now um where anyone if someone could be a you know their phd could be in um you know brain surgery and they're commenting on the
00:19:06
Speaker
They might even be commenting on areas within medical science, but not their area. And they get to walk around and people just go, oh, well, this doctor said it. And it's been – titles are incredibly – can be incredibly manipulative and misleading. when like on a ah Like when a chiropractor posts a video claiming the benefits of, like, club soda over COVID.
00:19:30
Speaker
Yeah. And they've got doctor in their name. So people are like, well, he's an expert. He owns scrubs. Look at him. Well, and that and that's something that I bring up from time to time. um there's ah There's a book called God's Word in Human Words by Kenton Sparks.
00:19:47
Speaker
And it's the subtitle is An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship. But ah the beginning of the book is talking about how evangelicals approach biblical scholarship. And it's a critique.
00:19:58
Speaker
of evangelical approaches to critical scholarship. And one thing that Sparks notes is that um evangelical scholars who want to position themselves as apologists, as defenders of the faith, will frequently go get PhDs in fields that are peripheral to the actual things they want to critique.
00:20:17
Speaker
So they'll get something in Assyriology or a textual criticism or something like that, where they're not compelled to um engage directly with things like the documentary hypothesis or Deutero-Isaiah or the historicity of the Exodus narrative or anything like that.
00:20:32
Speaker
But then once they have that piece of paper, they go wave it around and say, I'm an expert in the historicity of the Exodus narrative. So you got to listen to me. And it's like you. Right. You didn't take any classes on that. You didn't write any papers on that.
00:20:44
Speaker
You are not an expert in that. You're an expert in something else. And and um I think a lot of people are concerned that a lot of that seems intentional. It seems like we just need the piece of paper. And so study whatever you've got to study to get at the piece of paper. And then your authority is established.
00:21:01
Speaker
And i I think it's intentional to a degree. So i i Casey and I met attending Liberty University. um And we are theologians. Yeah, definitely. i I claim to be right about everything on this podcast, and I ask people to quote me whenever possible.
00:21:17
Speaker
But i I got a biblical studies degree there. um And a lot of my friends ended up going on to get some sort of Masters of Divinity and At the time, i mean, I wasn't aware of it at the time, but um you know I knew what lane they were in, i just traditional evangelical, conservative evangelical trajectories to become pastors of traditional evangelical churches in an area that just frankly didn't need many more of them. But it was, I knew that there's this idea that like you already know the right thing. You just need to know better why it's the right thing.
00:21:58
Speaker
Yeah. So you're getting these degrees to be able to better or explain why you're right. And obviously their motives have very little to do with outcomes. So the motive, we know what the motive is, um their belief that people need to believe and think like them.
00:22:14
Speaker
And then they go, how how can i come up with some more persuasive arguments? But that was one of the things that i didn't love about, even though I was still – firmly seated in traditional evangelical Christianity as Liberty University would have presented it at that time. i was not interested in a higher education degree like a graduate program from them because I was at that point pretty aware that it was just further entrenching people in belief and and not having them deal with the action, like not deal with, it was like, here's one of the problems to what we believe. So here's how we can explain it away.
00:22:56
Speaker
Yeah, i've I've seen that. I've seen people be like, no, I took classes on this. And then they'll present a a a critical response to like the fundamentals from the early 20th century.
00:23:09
Speaker
And it was like, you were trained how to undermine critical scholarship and not well. um you were not You were not trained on the... I've i've seen professors approach it like,
00:23:22
Speaker
here's an issue we don't like dealing with, here's how you respond to it. And it's like, that's not that's not training, that's ah that's something else entirely. So, um but yeah, and and I'm sure that happens in a lot of different traditions, not just the evangelical, but they're the easiest to pick on right now because they're um probably causing the most damage to our republic.
00:23:43
Speaker
Yeah, it feels that way. What was, are there parallels? So, um and one of my degrees was from Trinity Western University, which was an evangelical university just outside of Vancouver, BC in Canada. So that was the one I did in Canada.
00:23:58
Speaker
Had a wonderful time there, but every now and then I would go to the collegium, which was located yeah within the seminary. And so would have very different conversations that I would hear going on alongside me that I would have to bite my tongue about. But but I was on the university side and had a wonderful time.
00:24:16
Speaker
Are there parallels? No, that's fine. I was wondering if there are, because so the first place you went to study the Bible was Brigham Young. Did you study, it was studying the Bible there, you said? So are there parallels there? I know there's, I feel like I mean, to the degree that you want to get into it, will we do have ah some questions around that because we were – evangelicalism, you're raised to believe all Mormons are in a cult.
00:24:40
Speaker
I'm sure you're quite aware of that. um Now I don't even think it's a cult. I just don't think you guys are going to heaven. Yeah. ah And then you realize you were kind of raised in something that was cult adjacent. And then you go, I don't know. Another thing really matters at this point anymore.
00:24:55
Speaker
ah But no. So was that was there similar pattern at Brigham Young with studying the Bible? And were you when you wanted to study it, looking to learn more about it from that perspective and the way that I was it like Liberty?
00:25:08
Speaker
So um I think there was. there were the seeds of something parallel, but there were different structures in place. Cause you can go get you can get a bachelor's degree, a master's and a PhD all within schools run by evangelicals.
00:25:24
Speaker
ah You cannot do that within schools run by Mormons. You can get a bachelor's degree, but there's no master's degree in biblical studies or anything like that at BYU. And they don't have a PhD in any relevant field.
00:25:35
Speaker
So the, the Latter-day Saints who want to go get a PhD have to go find something else. It's some of them go the evangelical route in order to kind of skirt things the way that ah that many evangelical scholars do in order to try to stay within an education that is oriented towards faith.
00:25:55
Speaker
but were not incredibly popular among ah evangelicals and their universities. So that's not the easiest route. um I was the first Latter-day Saint to get a degree from Trinity Western University.
00:26:10
Speaker
ah There was a student. Yeah, there was ah a friend of mine who who went there the year before I did, but actually had to ah take a few years off and um I got my degree before he came back.
00:26:21
Speaker
um But it was one, I was mainly there because I wanted to study under Peter Flynn and Marty Apeg, who are two huge Dead Sea Scrolls scholars. and And I wanted to know the Dead Sea Scrolls more. but But when I was coming up, the concern was that Latter-day Saints who go on to get PhDs lose their faith.
00:26:40
Speaker
and And the intellectual leadership at BYU and with evangelicals have that concern with people who just go to college sometimes. Yeah. um And and the but I wanted to.
00:26:56
Speaker
Because I didn't want to go just be an apologist for Mormons. I wanted to be a scholar in general. I wanted to address the Bible to a broader audience. And so I wanted a legitimate education. I didn't care about being challenged.
00:27:10
Speaker
and and And I don't talk about my faith at all. But one thing that I will say is that I came into the LDS church having spent 20 years growing up basically agnostic, fairly well educated, the grades don't show it, but you just got to ignore those, an intelligent person.
00:27:27
Speaker
i came into the church with a lot of ideas about how the the universe and the world and and people operate. I was never disabused of any of that. So I came in, i was not raised with all the black and white, very brittle, fragile ideas about the world and God and people and all that kind of stuff.
00:27:46
Speaker
And so when I got into this, I was just kind of like, teach me, I'm i'm a sponge. let me Let me soak up the knowledge that we have acquired over the last 2000 years of studying this collection of books.
00:27:58
Speaker
And um I was not picking and choosing um what I was going to accept because of my Mormonism and what I was going to reject because of my Mormonism. And so and and this is ah a battle that a perennial battle for me online. I just had a comment from somebody.
00:28:13
Speaker
I never read the comments, but every now and then, for whatever reason, YouTube, like one percent of the comments that get posted, they'll send me an email about it. I don't know why. But one of my just it was like, I love your channel. I just found out you're a Mormon. I don't know what to think anymore. What is why are you doing this? What is your mission? What what are your goals?
00:28:32
Speaker
And it's like, hey, you can just take that out of the equation, the Mormonism, because it does not matter to my scholarship. It does not matter to the positions for which I advocate. It does not matter regarding how I understand and represent the scholarly consensus, because I got into this because I wanted to know the Bible the best I could.
00:28:52
Speaker
And I was not under any misapprehensions about Mormons understanding the Bible better than anybody else. um So I have always been in this to learn it the best I can rather than train myself to be an apologist for any religious tradition.
00:29:07
Speaker
I think that's hard for people. Again, speaking to my own experience and the experience that I share with many other posts or ex evangelicals is it's hard. I think people find it it hard and I do too, um to wrap.
00:29:23
Speaker
so It's hard to wrap your mind around that position because We didn't grow
Challenges in Public Scholarship
00:29:29
Speaker
up. None of the evangelicals that I grew up with experienced a a world where they could have those views and argue for them and still fit within their religious community and benefit from it to the degree that they do.
00:29:46
Speaker
and leave the faith aspect of it off the table. Everything you're saying is so foreign to people that when you explain it to them like that, they just go, yeah, but I'm going to need you to tell me what what I need to hear or make it work.
00:30:01
Speaker
like to it's the It's almost a paradox what you're saying to a lot of people's experience. And I think this is a symptom of a lot of the the ways that folks approach like social media content about the Bible and the study of the Bible is we don't go into things usually our...
00:30:20
Speaker
with our with the intent of learning new things. We usually go into things with the intent of incorporating things into our existing worldview. And so we want to validate our worldview.
00:30:32
Speaker
If something is a little odd, a little off, we want to try to reorient it to make it fit in that, you know, that square hole so that our worldview is just constantly affirmed. and And yeah, I think what I say is ah does not compute.
00:30:49
Speaker
for a lot of folks. there's not a as There's not a slot for me in most people's worldviews. yeah And so they just, they they imagine I must be lying and I'm yeah um a sleeper agent.
00:31:01
Speaker
I'm ah' a secret Mormon apologist. um and And so, yeah, that's I think that's the the closest conclusion to which they can reach that fits within their worldview. And- but Yeah, because of their paradigm, if- if you wouldn't be allowed to maintain yourself with it.
00:31:23
Speaker
Like, if if what you're saying... It can't be true because if you weren't that, the sleeper agent, the the so whatever whatever side mission, side quest you have going on here is like... it...
00:31:39
Speaker
if it Based on their experience and based on the understanding of the LDS church that um I think we have culturally ah is that you wouldn't they would not recognize you as one of their own.
00:31:54
Speaker
They would like you should have been excommunicated from them is I think the idea that people have. Yeah, yeah, an awful lot of people have that idea, even within the the LDS church, there are an awful lot of people like how aren't you and excommunicated yet and and I'm sure the the local ecclesiastical leadership.
00:32:12
Speaker
um And I know them personally because I interact with them and stuff like that, but I'm sure they're sick of hearing complaints about me.
00:32:21
Speaker
but but but something i've always i've said is like this is my job like you wouldn't tell a doctor hey you're not that's what told my wife when i started only fans okay yeah you you wouldn't uh you wouldn't tell somebody okay most of your job is just fine but once you do this part of your job and you're kind of encroaching on our territory then you know you've got ah You've got to back off.
00:32:44
Speaker
and And I know there are folks who don't they don't see it that way. They don't agree with that. And but but, yeah, I've I've never had any kind of ecclesiastical discipline of any kind whatsoever threatened or um implemented. So um much to the chagrin of a lot of folks on Twitter. um Yeah, I am a member in good standing.
00:33:06
Speaker
do you ah So you don't read the comments. Do you ever watch any of the like response videos that people do to you? um From time to time, for the most part, I don't take them very seriously. And I've already addressed like most of the stuff that they've they've brought up before.
00:33:23
Speaker
ah But yeah, if i if I responded to every response video on on YouTube or or whatever that that came across ah my desktop, um I would not be able to make videos because I'd be spending all my time doing that.
00:33:39
Speaker
um You have one in mind? just caught one.
00:33:44
Speaker
today that was like and i don't know exactly the context that he was referring to but it was something about like you were you were talking about in a video how like there's no historical record of like stars and falling and the sun burning out or something some some reference to like old testament prophecy or something and this guy's like dan mcclellan doesn't understand ezekiel such and such it's like the vote It would would take the most literal interpretation of what you were saying and the most like ah impractical and unfair you know interpretation of like your your understanding of it, which is just very funny.
00:34:23
Speaker
And that's one of the reasons I have to ignore all that crap, because so much of it is somebody going, you don't understand Hebrew grammar. and then they'll go off on on something where I was like, you you you didn't bring up grammar once.
00:34:37
Speaker
You just said that interpretation is wrong and my interpretation is right. And you didn't explain how or why. And um like, you know I ah that would just be a gigantic waste of my time to to have to swat at those those flies all day long. So.
00:34:53
Speaker
So, yeah, i I learned very early on as I started to gain attention, I was like, well, ah this is going to bring a lot more negative comments, a lot more responses and stuff like that. And I and I learned to pick and choose my battles. And so these days.
00:35:07
Speaker
When somebody responds to me, I really only engage if I think I can um get views from it, basically. it's That's not unfair. That's a good marriage form a reasonable perspective to have because if you can't, it has to responding to them.
00:35:26
Speaker
Because of the amount you get, it has to serve your goals in some way, well shape or form. And the other thing is the kinds of folks who make response videos to me, they're not operating on um on the level of critical scholarship. They're operating on the level of of apologetics.
00:35:43
Speaker
And the the scope of their influence is not going to touch like the the ah the scholars or it's not it's not going to affect me personally or professionally ever.
00:35:55
Speaker
Like I'm still um getting ah awards, professional recognition from international bodies and stuff like that. And um getting invitations to edits, international scholarly journals and stuff like that. And so like whether or not I respond to so and so who's got, you know, six thousand subscribers on YouTube and made an hour and a half long video responding to me like it it doesn't matter to me professionally.
00:36:21
Speaker
And they're not going to engage in good faith. Because if they say, well, he doesn't know the Hebrew grammar. come And I can come in and say, well, and I've and i've done this before. Like there was a there's a sock puppet account on TikTok.
00:36:36
Speaker
It used to go by debunking Dan, like their entire identity. was responding to my videos. That's when you know you've made it though. When you hit a point in which which other content creators' life revolves entirely around responding to you, yeah you're doing it. That's a relative that secretly doesn't like you.
00:36:56
Speaker
it's It's somebody who obviously has um ah some graduate education in biblical studies, but they're like, oh, well, you got this all wrong about Genesis 2.17 and wants to try to get into the grammar and about the paradigmatic infinitive. And I'm like, okay, well, we've got 56 examples of the paradigmatic infinitive in either the active or the passive form of the the verbal root moat. And every single one of them, and you know I can get deep into it. And then they're just kind of like,
00:37:23
Speaker
but and No, you're not. And um and mendo like I'll cite scholar. I'll say a scholar who wrote like their dissertation and and their their big monograph is about the paradigmatic infinitive.
00:37:35
Speaker
And I go in and they cite the very verse I'm talking about and agree with me. And then they'll go find an interview that that person did where they said, um you know, the serpent deceived Eve in the Garden of Eden. And they're like, I gotcha.
00:37:49
Speaker
And It's like, this is not engagement in good faith. And so every time I respond, they're going to come back at me with garbage, with um you know a lot of fallacies, a lot of misinformation, and a lot of appeals to the authority of other apologists.
00:38:05
Speaker
um And and like its what can i what am I going to do? I can't help them understand they're wrong. And their audience certainly is not going to be able to think more critically than than they are. And so it's it's just a giant waste of time.
00:38:18
Speaker
ah But some of them are entertaining and some of of them I'm like, i I can probably get some mileage out of responding to this doofus. Covenantsburg 777 disagrees.
00:38:29
Speaker
We always talk about like the the classic like youth youth pastor move of ah like teaching a sermon on ah on a piece on a verse in scripture that sort of goes against the like the conventional wisdom of like your church on what, you know, whether it's predestination or whatever it is, you know, and ah the the classic youth pastor move is to go like, well, if we, ah if we take this back to the original Greek and we interpret it this way, then we can see that actually it doesn't contradict.
00:39:01
Speaker
this other stuff here yeah yeah that's which is and you know that's the that's the nuts and bolts of a lot of the the the pastoral terminal degrees is is little little nuggets of of apologetic wisdom uh that are usually entirely misguided and misinformed and when you start dealing with dead languages that no one in your church has knows anything about like you don't i mean you could Because you were likely given that information from somebody else, your're you're operating the assumption that you've been given the best possible information about the way something's interpreted, and you're repeating
Books and Misconceptions
00:39:42
Speaker
it.
00:39:42
Speaker
And no one in your congregation is going to challenge you all on that because they don't know a dead language. I took two semesters of Greek at Aquinas Community College before it closed.
00:39:53
Speaker
Before closed. So, Dan, and you're obviously ah you're promoting a new book. um I am, yes. It is your graphic novel rendering of Chad Daybell's bestseller.
00:40:09
Speaker
Yes, it's explicit material. It's quite graphic. There's a lot of gore. um No, it's ah the Bible says so what we get right and wrong about scriptures, most controversial issues.
00:40:20
Speaker
And i ah I did not pick the subtitle, but um i'm I'm to the point I'm now to the point where I don't have to look at it to read the subtitle. I now have the subtitle memorized.
00:40:31
Speaker
I'm proud myself. Good. Step one. I had the privilege of getting able being able getting being able to read it um prior to this. and the funny It's funny. I have all i wrote i have wrote down tons of questions. I was reading it. No time to get to all of them.
00:40:50
Speaker
um It's funny also going back and reading through my thoughts and like writing down things you said. I'm like, I wrote down on what he said in my question, and i now I'm like,
00:41:02
Speaker
I don't know what I was talking about and some of those. I just clearly was in a different headspace. I was like, oh, when you say the thing about this thing, I'm like, I don't even know how to pronounce the word.
00:41:13
Speaker
And that's what I'm realizing doing an audio format interview. I've got a couple of questions for you. Yeah. This is a two parter. Okay.
00:41:25
Speaker
Part one. Who do you think you are? Part two Where do you get off?
00:41:34
Speaker
ah Lots of... ah i You pretty much... All the chapter titles, I was like, all right, lot of these are the they're the most... predominant, popular questions.
00:41:46
Speaker
The one that I thought was missing. And I'll let, I'm just offering this up. There are a bunch missing. I I've already, I've got a list that could be ah a volume two already. and Oh, what it what are some of the top that ah you wish you could have addressed that you didn't get to it?
00:41:58
Speaker
um I did not talk about women being pastors. um I did not talk about immigration. ah That's a big issue. Yeah. um I did not talk about ah like atonement theories. There are a bunch of things like that. At least nine of them, right? Yeah, there's it's a lot. um i I could have talked about a bunch of contradictions ah in the in the Bible.
00:42:24
Speaker
I could have talked more about creation. i could have talked ah more about things that Jesus was supposed to have said. Yeah, there's there's just a long list. I've got it ferreted away somewhere. I don't even remember everything that was on it. Prophetic allusions to Bitcoin.
00:42:42
Speaker
Well, I had. Oh, what did I have a reference to? Oh, there was there was something I had something in there about Bible code stuff. um And well, and there was a I had one about did the did God hide the Tetragrammaton in our DNA or something like like that. But um for the like a month after I submitted the manuscript, I was like, oh, could have said this. I could have done this and that in the other. and But I was I went over my word limit already as it is. So, oh, yeah, but there was no room left. Yeah.
00:43:11
Speaker
i ah One of the things that came to mind was ah but what the what the conversations around ah what it means for Jesus to be coming back. I feel like that... Oh, yeah, yeah. could Did Jesus say he would be back before the people he was talking to died or something like that? That's a very long chapter title. But but yeah, in that vein, that would have been a great one to cover. I think that's probably on the list that I made.
00:43:33
Speaker
Yeah, I ah just... That was... Such a big, ah the amount of, it's so funny to think of the amount of dorm room conversations at Liberty you have about the most inconsequential things, but boy, are they important at the time.
00:43:49
Speaker
um but But there were a lot of things outside of you just, um outside of you just like reiterating stuff that you discussed in the book because people can read it.
00:44:00
Speaker
ah it's It really is fantastic. A couple of quick things I loved about it is, It's one, you do make a lot of references in it. And I think that just kind of pulls it into, um it just feels like you're listening to a real person.
00:44:17
Speaker
um And I think that's what you do well with your, you know, your online presentation too. It's like, there's a real person here. It's not i just like wrote information ah for people who want to,
00:44:29
Speaker
ah say things to sound smart later, um ah which is a part of of what I listened to you for. I appreciate that. couple of of ah um I'm like, oh, I can't wait to say that next time I have a family dinner.
00:44:41
Speaker
um And then I forget it. I particularly enjoy, I had fun doing the ah the section titles. And this is something that I've done at like academic conferences. I'll have a PowerPoint and each slide I'll have a title for the slide. And it'll usually be like song lyrics or song titles or something like that.
00:44:58
Speaker
um So like there's one I yeah i gave a ah paper several years ago at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature on on the Moloch Adonai, the messenger of the Lord, the angel.
00:45:09
Speaker
and um And so all of the ah slide titles were song lyrics related to angels like your um In the Arms of the Angel from good old Sarah McLachlan. And I had a bunch of them. Girl, you're my angel.
00:45:24
Speaker
um So cowboys and angels, cowboy Walmart song. And, and so like, you know, I've got like a ah section title, nothing compares to you.
00:45:37
Speaker
And then I have a little footnote that says with, with apologies to the artists formerly known as Prince Sinead O'Connor and Chris Cornell. So, um and I i was going to do, I was going to read those for the narration of the audio book, but I decided against it. And now I'm kicking myself. I should have, because like there's,
00:45:56
Speaker
One chapter is about does the Bible say that the Messiah would be born of a virgin? and The first section is like a virgin? Question mark. um But I got worried that ah like one of them, it was a the section title is even Ezekiel thinks that my mind is gone. And and the...
00:46:15
Speaker
My my I forget if he's ah an engineer or the director, what he was. But I was like, did I kind of sing that a little like, am I going to get in trouble for singing lyrics in an audio book? And he was like, o um because, ah yeah, my first book, I had a ah Taylor Swift lyric in the in the introduction.
00:46:40
Speaker
And they were like, you got to take that out or paraphrase it or something like that. That's wild. Yeah. So for this one, I was yeah your boys with a ba i'm sure he'd kind them is like, i yeah, certain certainly that they're going to look, ah they're going to let that one slide.
00:46:54
Speaker
um ah More human than human is another one with apologies to to Rob Zombie. um So yeah, it was, that was a lot of fun. I love little, little Easter eggs in there. I use the word cromulent in one part the book.
00:47:09
Speaker
I appreciate all that. and So something that I was thinking about while while reading it, and it's a thought that's kind of crossed my mind the more I've as the armchair enthusiast of ah smart people disseminating information to people who are kind of mid is. So.
00:47:29
Speaker
so you You talk a lot about how concepts evolved up until the point that they were, you know, things were codified into the canonization of the Bible. So you have like what, thing what what how this might have been understood immediately to the immediate audience who was written to, um who was really written by, and over time how maybe Hellenization hellonization changed,
00:47:56
Speaker
understandings of it. And then you're a couple hundred years removed from the original writings. And now, um you know, you're having this council, that council and how cultural influence changes the the way that we they understood the Bible, all that. And then you fast forward 1800 years and we're just digging shit up everywhere that tells us us why people have been getting it wrong.
00:48:22
Speaker
the more information we get. When I think of like the value of the Bible and what it means to people, the the reoccurring thought I have is like for 1800 years, there is like There was a period of by which they were far enough removed from the original authors and new cultural identities and constructs had taken precedent.
00:48:43
Speaker
And the Bible was kind of used to to like kind of a scaffold some of that, maybe, be or even push against some of it, depending on the parties involved. And then you have like so with that long period of...
00:48:58
Speaker
Was it just like a free for all? Like, was there any was there any way that any of these people could have meaningly gone back to certain understandings based on lost documents that like could have ah allowed them to come to different conclusions? Or this kind of like a a ah what's the word I'm looking for? Like it's a.
00:49:21
Speaker
Like a multiverse kind thing. Like, it's just, this is, we were destined to go in this direction without having that information and have this book be used a certain way by certain people inevitably. I think there's a degree of inevitability um and also...
00:49:38
Speaker
When I say that, I think I'm talking about in like broad strokes, like this book was written for ideological communities that were pretty insular for a long time and were pretty marginalized and and oppressed for a long time as well, ah particularly with Judaism, not so much with Christianity, which quickly became precisely the power that they were struggling against for a long time.
00:50:03
Speaker
but I think it's inevitable that the text be leveraged to serve the interests and the identities and the boundary maintenance of the the groups doing the leveraging.
00:50:15
Speaker
And so... I like that term a lot. You use it here and there, but boundary maintenance, I feel like... yes Yeah, yeah. That's an awful lot of what's going on with with the Bible. And I think that's what the reason that the book of Revelation is in the Bible, because this dude named Athanasius of Alexandria...
00:50:31
Speaker
um felt it was a very handy ah rhetorical bludgeon for his theological enemies, whether it was the Aryans or those pesky monks out in the desert who who weren't listening to the the institutional church.
00:50:46
Speaker
um Because like monasteries were originally the rebels. They were the radicals. They were the ones who were out in the desert reading their you know Gnostic texts And um not caring what the church said. And it was after Athanasius that they were kind of brought under the wing of the the institutional church and turned into just another organ of the church.
00:51:05
Speaker
um But you you do see some some critical thinkers here and there who are saying, you know, we've kind of been going about this all wrong. But few of them have had the technology or the resources or the accumulated knowledge to be able to go back and interrogate what it was, um you know, what the authors and earliest audiences were thinking. You had to develop ah the intellectual history had to be there.
00:51:35
Speaker
The, ah you know, the technology had to be there. It was like biblical archaeology had to mature so that we could do it well enough to be able to support the critical the theoretical critical scholarship that was going on and the two dovetail very nicely and and support each other in a lot of different ways.
00:51:53
Speaker
So i I think it's it's clear they were they did not have the resources available to them in the earliest years of the church to be able to overcome that and be like, wait a minute, we got to think critically about this.
00:52:04
Speaker
um I don't think it's inevitable that We actually arrive at ah critical approach to the Bible. I think that's kind of an accident of history as well. um But but yeah, because it is such an effective tool of identity politics and boundary maintenance, I think that's the main reason it survives it and perseveres as long as it does.
00:52:26
Speaker
And so. I think that's what facilitates its survival long enough for people to begin to question its foundations and and begin to turn entire fields of study into interrogating what's going on with with the Bible. if it If they had done that early on, again, I don't think they had the resources, um but if they had done that, it would not be what it is today.
00:52:51
Speaker
And so, yeah, I think there are a bunch of ah bunch of different influences and and excuse me factors converging on the way it all kind of shook out. Makes me think of ah the book of Eli.
00:53:05
Speaker
And we talk about that from time to time here because it feels more and more relevant the way that we see people within our political systems and societies weaponizing the Bible.
00:53:18
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. and that And that was one of the things that I wanted to... i If I had to write had it to write over again, I think I would do the conclusion. i think I would belabor the point a little more in the conclusion. but But yeah, the the weaponization of the Bible is really the bugbear I was really trying to exercise with with this book.
00:53:40
Speaker
and, and hopefully, you know, it gets the point across for some folks. i'm I'm sure that it will be, I've heard from people who said they're going to give a family and friends copies for Christmas because they, um, you know, they need them to read it so that they can overcome some of their prejudices or, or their, um, their dogmas. And, and so I'm sure my book will get thrown in the trash or, or in the fireplace a bunch of times, but, um, I'd say that's too bad, but I do recall getting a, um,
00:54:08
Speaker
a daily devotional one year for my parents that i did in fact never crack open hey bigot money spends just like good people the yeah the the check's still cash huh casey i'm getting one for you and everyone in your family perfect we need it your mom honestly it it could you could almost argue based on ah ah the information dense writing, it almost feels, you know, like conspiratorial in a way. And maybe if you spin it in that way, maybe that will make it more attractive. Yeah. but Love it.
00:54:43
Speaker
Well, and ah and I use the, well, I don't use the F word in the book. I quote a a TikTok video where someone used the F word. And then I realized that I was going to have to do that with narrating the audio book. So that's one of the things I've been like,
00:54:58
Speaker
Buy the audio book. I never use profanity. Well, I used ah use fuzzy profanity on on social media, but i don' I don't use the hardcore stuff. And you'll get to hear me use the F word.
00:55:09
Speaker
And you'll have a recording of it. You can post it on, ah turn it into, what's what's the equivalent of an audio GIF? I don't know. Yeah. The hardcore stuff's my favorite. i's ah It's funny because I don't i don't notice. you know I guess it's the ah evangelical equivalent of code switching where you're like, I go into certain environments and really do change. with I don't think about It just happens yeah around family and I...
00:55:37
Speaker
act of so i don't say certain things i clean up a certain way and then we record this uh i think and it happens like like if we have guests i think about it more i just go like i'm used to that where i'm like around whenever i'm around people i i don't know personally it just decreases without question and then yeah occasionally i'll go go back and listen to stuff that we record without guests where we usually like on this show do find something funny to hark on um And we will get to that at the end. and Don't worry. I have something to read you and I need your expert opinion on it.
00:56:09
Speaker
Awesome. but ah Sometimes I listen back and dude, you sound so dumb the way you talk. It's a little embarrassing for me sometimes. Well, yeah, I tell people, um they ask me for the formula for success on social media as ah as like a Bible scholar. And I was like, I have no idea.
00:56:30
Speaker
um Ask Donald Trump. It's not this. um But i I still recall the first time I actually hit play or record on the phone, I was like, ah Like it took a while for me to finally hit that record button because the last thing I want to hear is my own voice.
00:56:46
Speaker
And particularly as I'm watching my own face. Yeah. I, I still don't like it. It's not a bad face, Dan. Don't get, don't get too hard on yourself. You sound like my mom.
00:56:57
Speaker
um And, and I don't really listen to my podcast either. Like um people are like, Oh, you said this on the podcast. man I said that. Oh, yeah it's all we have a discord and people will reference things we talked about.
00:57:12
Speaker
And I go, what are you even talking about? They're like something you actually said like less than 24 hours ago. um All right. Another question I have, because I've all, I shouldn't say always, ah that would make me sound more cognizant of the development of the Bible than I have always been. But The pastoral epistles.
00:57:38
Speaker
oh We did episode reading through those because I think they sound really dumb in their terrible books.
00:57:46
Speaker
And it does it didn't click. like when i you know i remember you know reading through like I remember reading through the Bible in college and just you go through it you're like, this all sounds the same, all sounds good, all sounds right.
00:57:57
Speaker
like The older you get, the more you read, you go, you'll read one book and then be like, you read the other, another, and you go, oh, that's wildly different writing in construction. um And i ah reading, you know, by the time I'm in my thirties, mid thirties, I'm reading the pastoral epistles. And I go, this is not, this sounds wild. And some of the bold statements in it are wild.
00:58:22
Speaker
And then reading your book, I go, they're, when they were canonized, there was a lot of a lot. A lot of people were bringing up that they didn't think that they were written by who they claimed to be, that there were forgeries and they still got canonized.
00:58:39
Speaker
um And I thought about what you talk about with. How to some degree. ah well, you're about your point about boundary maintenance, power structures, things like that all come into play. what is and Did that have anything to do? what was Why do you think that those got canonized despite the criticisms about them being what they supposedly said they were?
00:59:05
Speaker
um I think there's... it is you know In terms of the institutional structure, it's ah that's some of the earliest guidance that the the Christianity has. So I think that's valuable in that regard.
00:59:21
Speaker
In terms of the the patriarchy, I think there are some things that that was probably a period when Christianity the authority of women was probably heavily debated because I think you start out with an awful lot of women in Christianity and an awful lot of women with power and particularly the women who are um patrons of churches where they're they're lending their homes for congregations to meet in and stuff like that.
00:59:49
Speaker
and And I'm sure that that ah chafed an awful lot of the men who are coming into the church from the Greco-Roman world where that kind of egalitarianism, which is it's not total, um like it was still deeply patriarchal, but it was- Are you saying it was more egalitarian in the Jewish communities?
01:00:06
Speaker
um In early Christianity, yeah, before it might have been distinguished from Judaism. Yeah, I think there was. In fact, you have early accounts from Roman authors saying that this new movement is a religion for ah for women and slaves.
01:00:22
Speaker
And so it's kind of dismissed as...
01:00:27
Speaker
And so I think the ah it was probably leveraged in order to um arrogate Pauline authority to keeping women quiet and um taking their power. I think that probably played a role as well.
01:00:42
Speaker
um But yeah, once. Once it becomes popular, and and it could have become popular for a variety of additional reasons as well, i think it's kind of it's a hard bell to unring, and particularly if it's supporting institutional authority and and hierarchies and things like that. so You do have, um you know, it's omitted from some early manuscripts. You do have Marcion, who's you know widely condemned as a heretic, who omits it from his first canon list. And you do have some other Christians who are like, well,
01:01:16
Speaker
Maybe not First Timothy, but Second Timothy is probably OK. Or or you know maybe not First and Second Timothy, but I like Titus. They like the sequel better. Yeah, it's the only time that's ever happened.
01:01:29
Speaker
um And so i think the ah I think there are, again, a confluence of of factors involved. But once it became key to structuring power ah for those who either needed it in order to structure the church the way they wanted with their um overseers in there and their apostles and and evangelists and all that kind of stuff, or someone who wants to structure power over and against the the interests of women, once it becomes a tool for structuring power, it now becomes an identity marker and it becomes a ah lot harder to uproot.
01:02:07
Speaker
And so I think that's likely why it ended up in the canon. That's why Revelation ended up in the canon. And because like Revelation, you had a lot of early Christians who were like, that's not John. It's not the dude who wrote. like That's not the beloved disciple. This guy's a moron.
01:02:25
Speaker
um You know, and and the... the imagery is entirely distinct and the uh like the greek is entirely distinct so but because it was a useful tool for structuring power it uh it's slithered into the canon um through the back door i would argue
01:02:44
Speaker
we uh i'm trying to think we got i'm looking at my time here making sure we're good i uh because i have a couple more but i don't want to yeah I have a few things I also want to get to. We had a couple of questions from people in our discord.
01:02:56
Speaker
so um And then I do have to read you a very important piece of biblical literature um that I got from the help of ah possibly chat GPT, but we'll see how you feel about it. Okay.
01:03:12
Speaker
So, ah okay. I think I got like two more, and then we'll just get to the Discord ones. ah Enoch is quoted so much and referenced so much. And when you talk about um its influence on Genesis, in... um ah the whole like i the the watcher's idea comes from like Enoch and that slips its way into Genesis. It's so prevalent and it's quoted within the context of the biblical writers frequently. Why, how that how did that not make it, was that, was it not known as a, but how did that not get canonized?
01:03:52
Speaker
I guess is what I'm wondering. um It was, it was considered inspired in authoritative ways. literature by by early Jewish folks and even by early Christians, you have, for instance, Tertullian toward the end of the second century, who's got a whole chapter in one of his books where he's like, you clowns don't know what you're talking about.
01:04:10
Speaker
First, Enoch is quoted in in the epistle of Jude. First Enoch is definitely inspired scripture. And like that was his afterthought that it was quoted in Jude. He went on for a bit about all the other reasons that should be accepted. And so a lot of folks accepted it.
01:04:24
Speaker
You know, we found there were more ah manuscripts of First Enoch discovered at Qumran. than any other book of the Bible except like Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Exodus, and Psalms. So it's like number five or six um of all the books of the Bible at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
01:04:45
Speaker
But it's also very bizarre and internally inconsistent. You have the same stories being told over and over again with different names, ah You know, like the you have an angel with ah ah the head angel with 200 angels coming down. Another time and it's 20 angels that are coming down. And, you know, they have different names every time. Over here it's Shami Hazel. Over here it's Azazel. Over here it's Asael.
01:05:09
Speaker
And huh there's a it is even more grotesque in its apocalyptic imagery. than revelation. And so by the time you get it into the second and third and fourth centuries CE, you've got some folks who are like, hey, this would have had to have survived from before the flood.
01:05:27
Speaker
And that just doesn't seem likely. And it's so internally kind um inconsistent. And there's some weird theology in it and this and that. And so by the time you get to the fourth century, when you start to have actual debates about canon, it's on the, you know, it's making its way out.
01:05:47
Speaker
So um but it is part of the a some version of the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible that gets taken by Christians down to the kingdom of Aksum.
01:05:59
Speaker
which becomes Ethiopia, which is why First Enoch, as well as Jubilees, are in the biblical canon of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahkado Church to this day.
01:06:10
Speaker
Oh, no way. and Yeah, and that's actually one of the reasons we know about the Book of Enoch is because it was preserved in Ethiopic manuscripts, um mainly medieval and later Ethiopic manuscripts. ah So that's that's why we have a full edition of the book that... I only recognize the King James Version, so...
01:06:28
Speaker
Well, there's ah it wasn't in the King James Version. The Apocrypha was in the King James Version, but not First Enoch. So but by the time you get to the fourth century and discussions about this, a lot of the intellectual leaders of Christianity don't believe it's genuine.
01:06:43
Speaker
and And then one of the main things was... does it exist in Hebrew or is it only in Greek? and that's And I think it was only known in Greek, maybe some Aramaic to early Christians, but certainly wasn't known in any Hebrew.
01:07:01
Speaker
and And so they were like, well, it probably wasn't written anciently like the other texts of the Hebrew Bible. It was probably written within the last few hundred years. That's where all the Greek texts are coming from.
01:07:13
Speaker
Which of those like extra biblical or whatever you want to call them texts are like the the most... called upon and quoted and stuff by like wing nuts?
01:07:27
Speaker
ah First Enoch, definitely. Because i you know all the conspiratorial Anunnaki people and who want to talk about all these ridiculous end times prophecies, they always bring up ah First Enoch because...
01:07:45
Speaker
that That's kind of the one. It's the origin of concepts of hell. It's the origin of concepts of Satan. ah It's the origin of some concepts of heaven. I think it's probably the origin of um concepts of purgatory.
01:07:59
Speaker
ah There's so much that it influences and then they just abandon it. That's so crazy. yeah that's ah so fascinating. But there's so many links to it. it become It resonates so much with people who are familiar with the rest of the tradition that they just can't help but you know treat it as this ah you know lost, banned book of the Bible that they that they got rid of because they didn't want you to know. when The Nephilim. Conspiracy theorists really love the Nephilim.
01:08:28
Speaker
oh yeah oh don't yeah i i've heard more about kandahar than i ever wanted to know because of these these idiotic there were there were real giants the government knows about them uh conspiracy theories i love it uh all right maybe a couple flash questions we'll see how quickly they go um all right you're a very online man you hear a lot of people say a lot of things um What were, this is a question from someone on our Discord. What were, what do you, eight from your perspective, some of the most misunderstood or misinterpreted, I know those can be different things, um despite the maybe having a lot of overlap, but misunderstood, misinterpreted verses or applications of verses in the Bible that you come across constantly.
01:09:16
Speaker
I see so many of them. It's hard to, it's hard to isolate. Yeah.
01:09:23
Speaker
I think the ah the first two creation accounts in in Genesis, Genesis 1 and then the the separate creation account in Genesis 2 and 3, folks want them to be the a single creation account so badly that they just have to twist everything in knots to try to make it all fit.
01:09:42
Speaker
um But I would actually say Genesis 1-1. um So the traditionally, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. As I've repeatedly stated, that's probably... A mistranslation. It's most scholars these days agree the idea is probably, or a better translation would be when God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was.
01:10:04
Speaker
formless and void and and so on. And so it's actually it's not saying here is the absolute beginning of time, space and everything. it is saying when God started creating things, here's how things already were.
01:10:18
Speaker
And then God began to create from this material. And so it's not teaching creation next nihilo. And then you know, I discussed that in one of the chapters of the book. But um among of the many different outrageous sensationalist things that I say in videos,
01:10:34
Speaker
um among the ones that I know will infuriate a disproportionate number of of viewers of my channel is when I say that that Genesis 1-1 shouldn't be translated in the beginning.
01:10:49
Speaker
um and And I don't understand how people can feel so strongly about it. Because once once you know Hebrew and once you get a look at it, it's like it's pretty clear that that's in the construct state and that that's not what it's saying.
01:11:03
Speaker
Some of the things I thought were really interesting, um you know, if I've watched a lot of your videos. So some of like... within most of the chapters, a little bit of each of those I've picked, you know, concepts that I would be familiar with. The one that I was not familiar with at all um that I found incredibly fascinating was um your discussions on the Leviathan and its connection to um ah being like the God of the world when it was formless and void. And then how all...
01:11:40
Speaker
It's kind of fit together with like God defeating the Leviathan. The Leviathan really showing it up throughout a lot of Hebrew texts. Had no idea about any of that. I thought the Leviathan was like a quick reference in Job that evangelicals argued about whether or not it Loch Ness monster. Sometimes.
01:11:56
Speaker
and Oh, gosh. yeah Yeah. There are dinosaurs in the Bible. It's in Job 42. Yeah. yeah And I love that, man. I thought that was some of the coolest, most interesting shit. I love the way, like, I love, I think that's what I like learning most about now is the way that ancient story and tradition influenced the writings of the Bible, but it was repurposed.
01:12:16
Speaker
And yeah. And I think I fucking love that stuff. Yeah. I, and I think it's so fascinating. It, once you set aside like the the blinders and the interpretive lenses where all you're trying to do is prove it's true.
01:12:30
Speaker
Like once you're not making that your first priority, it can become so fascinating and it can become transformative and life changing. I think there is some phenomenally good ah moral teachings and and ethical principles in there.
01:12:48
Speaker
Once you set aside, I have to prove it's all true um as your rhetorical goal. And yeah, ah like, and, you know, the mythological stuff is just so cool. And i I feel bad for folks who are stuck in that rut of,
01:13:04
Speaker
always till the end of their lives doing nothing other than trying to come up with more sophisticated arguments ah to make it sound like it's all got to be true. um Because they don't i don't think they really learn much, and I don't think they really get anywhere. I think they're just just on a wheel, just running in circles.
01:13:24
Speaker
um g Agreed. My last one before or we get to my very special reading is, um Myths on the left and the right. The left and the right love to repurpose the Bible and Jesus for their own narratives. Like a quick one would be like, you know, the left is like Jesus is a socialist. um Yeah.
01:13:42
Speaker
But there's plenty on the right. what should ah I don't know which ones you butt up against the most. That's not Jesus is a socialist if there's another on the left and the right. Like just typical myths that people use when they try to co-opt um an entire biblical, ah an entire faith.
01:13:58
Speaker
Yeah, the well, one that i um that I address in the book in the beginning of the chapter on abortion is the idea that that Numbers chapter five is instructions about how to perform an abortion.
01:14:09
Speaker
like that one like and And I explain in the book that you know in at the end of the day, I think it shows that there's not an awful lot of concern for a fetus. um but the But the notion that we could we should leverage this as ah as the defense of ah the pro-choice position is it's problematic in a lot of ways. because like This is still a woman being dragged against her will ah to a place where she's going to potentially...
01:14:37
Speaker
become deformed and perhaps die if the magical elixir works, um you know, and water, ink, and some dust from the temple floor do not in a border fashion make.
01:14:49
Speaker
ah But like, that's that's one, that's that's the kind of thing that i i the I'm not totally comfortable with the way that gets um appropriated by by folks who would identify with my side of the political spectrum.
01:15:03
Speaker
um and and you know there a handful like that i talk about the one about beating your kids uh folks are like no no no no the staff in proverbs is a shepherd's staff which is used to guide these uh or gently guide the sheep it's not used for beating it's no it's quite explicitly for beating people and beating kids and that's what my parents said to me every time i got a spanking that is a weird one people get so strange about that like there's like a religious reference for spanking and it's weird. i don't yeah I don't know if I feel as strongly about it as some people do like against it, it is...
01:15:41
Speaker
it is It is weird the way that like you know like these groups that have like you know a sacred paddle as some sort of disciplinary measure.
01:15:52
Speaker
i don't know. Very strange. Yeah, it it is strange indeed. and And I think one other that I've come across a lot, I don't address it in the book, but there is an argument that ah when it comes to tithing, there are a lot of different ideas about tithing. and And that's another question, i or that's another chapter I could write in ah and a volume too.
01:16:11
Speaker
ah But the the widow's mite story, there are an awful lot of folks, more progressive readers of the Bible, who argue that Jesus is actually condemning the temple tax in the story of the widow's mite, which is ah I think is a pretty pretty complex reading. and I think it's reading quite a bit into there.
01:16:30
Speaker
ah But yeah, I've seen that reading ah pop up an awful lot too. And then... Oh, I was just going to say, if there's, I don't want to, what's the word?
01:16:44
Speaker
just generalize my experience to others. But I will say that after I stopped tithing, I have been much happier and more and a lot more financial enjoyment.
01:16:57
Speaker
I think if someone were to conduct this study, there would be a pretty high occurrence of yeah despite what I was told about how ah my i I'd probably lose my whole family over this. This is why you guys progressive churches are never going to get off the ground. You can't fund. mass yeah Well, that's why mine doesn't exist anymore. Way to go. We just post covid.
01:17:18
Speaker
Well, and yeah, like progressive churches are problematic because they're not. engaged in boundary maintenance and so there's a word it's it's hard to tell who's in and who's out and and you're not really keeping the people who are in in you're letting them uh do whatever they want so um but yeah and then on the right there are there are countless uh yeah conventional readings of uh of the bible where you know he jesus is a capitalist and jesus wants you to be wealthy the the prosperity god dave ramsey is big one oh my gosh yeah they the gospel of ramsey love that
01:17:53
Speaker
I don't own anything because I'm a Christian. God owns it all. So I guess you're calling God greedy. I
01:18:01
Speaker
don't want to store that away for anything. He literally said that. like It's unbelievable. it's I responded to a video of his where somebody was asking how like how they don't consider it greedy for a Christian to own so many houses and how it's affecting this housing crisis.
01:18:20
Speaker
And he went, wow. like he he decided to take it personally and it is the most ridiculous defense of the prosperity gospel i've ever heard and i've heard some doozies so i've got i've got a video on that yeah it's like his kenneth copeland like like public flights are a tube full of demons moments
01:18:46
Speaker
Oh, man. Yeah. the Hey, I did financial peace university when I was 17 years old. In a bridge version, I'm guessing. um And now he lives in front of a folded ping pong table.
01:19:00
Speaker
yeah Yeah, it didn't work out. Oh, that's what it is. yeah I thought it was a cubicle, like a modular wall or something like that. Okay, fold the ping pong tip. well you got You got to have something there. You can't just have the the wall. just That is the natural state of a purchased ping pong table.
01:19:18
Speaker
it's ah It's also a but living in Massachusetts it's trying to sell and buy a house. i'm like the the the average and When I'm looking at like the average house cost for what I need, shouldn't say need because that's a first for world problem, but ah for what I've worked my whole life for and deserve, that's the American perspective, is and minimum $500,000.
01:19:42
Speaker
um Yeah, that's, I think that's actually not as bad as I've seen. know No, I mean, it's more like i ah the ones I really want are pushing six, maybe seven. But like, if you told me 10 years ago that I was going to have to pay half a million dollars for a house,
01:20:00
Speaker
I might have unalived myself then. i don't know I don't know. What part of Massachusetts are you looking in? as Are you in Western? or I'm in Central Mass and outside of Worcester.
01:20:13
Speaker
Okay. Yeah, I've got i've got a a handful of friends and um in Massachusetts. so and I'm going to be in Boston in June for the Old South Church.
01:20:24
Speaker
they ah They got in contact with me said, hey, we want to present you with an award. Is that a public event? or Yeah, it's a public event. okay um And there's going to be a book signing afterwards as well. So, yeah, that was...
01:20:39
Speaker
And then I'm going to New York after that to do a book signing and a little presentation in the ah Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Very cool. both Central Park. So, yeah, i've um it's been it's been interesting.
01:20:55
Speaker
our So you do you do call it Worcester, huh? Yes, Worcester. Okay, you got to keep with the the English origins. yeah That was that was the heart one of the hardest parts of, not the hardest, but one of the hardest parts of moving over to Oxford,
01:21:09
Speaker
Like day one, we I pull into we take the bus from London into um Oxford and they drop me off at this depot, bus depot, something or other.
01:21:23
Speaker
And I'm like, I'm trying to call somebody about how to get the minibus out to the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies where I'm staying. And I'm like, I'm in.
01:21:34
Speaker
Gloucester Green. And they're like, there's no such location in Oxford. I'm like, now I'm looking at it right now. refuse to cater to tourists. And I was like, I spelled it for them. And they're like, it's Gloucester. Gloucester.
01:21:46
Speaker
and We have a Gloucester in Massachusetts. We have so many. Yeah, there's Gloucester. um with There are so many towns in Massachusetts that are named after English towns. English places, yeah. And like the the college, malin Magdalene College, is it's Magdalene.
01:22:03
Speaker
And I was like, it's it. so You're just making stuff up now. yeah But yeah, that was that was difficult for me to get used to that. So that actually cost me like half an hour trying to get my family with my my wife and my nine-month-old daughter but like stuck because I cannot help them understand where I am.
01:22:21
Speaker
um so but that's we will I live in Wichita, which I assume is named after a group of people we genocided. Yeah, I think that's probably accurate.
01:22:32
Speaker
but A lot of those towns probably. Or, no, it's more like they were named in memoriam of them. Yeah, it's the least we could do. ah that's ah That's a good renegotiation of what's going with that.
01:22:46
Speaker
maybe i should get my ah biblical Maybe I should go on to get my Masters of Biblical something or other from Liberty and and make it a make it ah financial gain for myself.
01:23:00
Speaker
Hey, so Catholics have Daredevil, right? ah Evangelicals have Bible, man. is there any ah Are there any Mormon superheroes?
01:23:12
Speaker
Mormon superheroes. ah Well, I think a lot of um Christian nationalists appreciated our Captain Moroni who showed up on January 6th. I don't know if y'all ever heard
Pop Culture and Religion
01:23:23
Speaker
about that.
01:23:23
Speaker
but um hey joe I was watching footage... um I was watching footage of all this going down on January 6 on my computer and it's panning across the crowd and I see a dude with a big flag. It's not a flag anyone would recognize. It's like white and kind of torn and he's wearing like Roman looking military gear.
01:23:45
Speaker
And I was like, holy crap, it's Captain Moroni. Because this is um like this is a figure from the Book of Mormon who's who was ah you know one of the ah one of the heroes of the Book of Mormon ah toward the end of the Book of... Well, not that's a different Moroni.
01:24:01
Speaker
um And in Mormon art, he's kind of represented as this big, huge, ah hulking... Looks like a Roman centurion kind of in in a lot of the most popular art. And so somebody...
01:24:16
Speaker
dressed up the way we depict captain moroni and went to the january 6 insurrection and um i i like pull i was watching like cnn live or something like that and i went back and got a ah screen grab of it and i was like that dude is dressed up as Captain Marona. And I like shared it on Twitter and and a bunch of my LDS friends were like, what the hell? But yeah, there was a there was a, and he became um kind of ah Mormon famous ah for all of the wrong reasons.
01:24:55
Speaker
I don't think there's um like there are there occasionally there are Mormons in in pop culture ah but they're normally kind of crapped on yeah I'm trying to remember the name the movie I don't think it it might have been like a Mike Judge movie there was like Joe Piscopo played a Mormon who like ah lost it and killed a bunch of people or tried to kill a bunch of people in um in some movie and i cannot remember what it was but he like shows up at the end and he's got like a shotgun he's like i'm gonna kill all you guys and um you know couldn't cuss and stuff like that and i think they called him the mormon uh they referred to him obliquely uh in the movie as the mormon um what movie was that i cannot remember
01:25:41
Speaker
ah Yeah, we don't really have anybody more um more prominent than that. You need to team up with one of your comic book artist buddies and get on that. Get back into the art world and, you know. Yeah.
01:25:54
Speaker
Steve Young, maybe? I would i highly recommend maybe taking your skill set in some of your comic book ah illustrator friends' skill sets and maybe coming up with a new action Bible.
01:26:09
Speaker
ah Yeah. Yeah. I was approached by someone who writes for a ah a prominent comic book publisher about doing, ah helping out consulting or even writing for some kind of mini series that would kind of present a more critical approach to.
01:26:27
Speaker
king house House of David? House of David? i am not and I am not affiliated with ah with that. but Look, my one request is that you find your way... ah but I've been wanting like a Samuel, not Samson, Samson, like series, like 300 style. Like we're not, we're doing this we're not doing this evangelical style. I, I wanted to end, I want the, like the midpoint, right? That Coleman, I want it just build to him slaughtering a thousand people on a desert dune with a donkey's jawbone. I want. Zerk level.
01:27:05
Speaker
ah you want the The oiled up chests and the loincloth that is just barely doing its job kind of yeah approach to Samson. Occasionally when he's like- stylized to violence.
01:27:16
Speaker
Yeah. Oh my God. I think, I consistently think that that would be the best book of the Bible to make into like a six, seven, eight episode HBO style kind of story.
01:27:30
Speaker
that's That's my hope. So if someone asks you about that, just don't say no. I think... Oh, I i have i have thought about um what like a gritty ah Hebrew Bible ah movie could be like. And Samson is one of the ones that ah that I've thought of because it's kind of ah he's kind of an anti-hero.
01:27:48
Speaker
yeah um and And I think it could be told in a compelling way. ah But i they've made Samson movies recently. In fact, I i recall... I bet it wasn't great.
01:27:59
Speaker
noon noon No, no, no, no, no. It wasn't great at all. It wasn't sexy. i know that Which is why nobody's heard of it. But um um ah I'm trying to think of when it was. it Within the last 10 years, there was ah there was a Samson movie that came out and it was garbage.
01:28:16
Speaker
um i I was on a podcast a bit ago called God Awful Movies. Don't know if you've ever heard of that. podcast. It's kind of like in in the in the vein of Mystery Science Theater 3000 where they don't watch a movie um on the show, but they just kind of ah talk about it and mock it.
01:28:32
Speaker
um And we watched a movie called, I think it was just called The Book of Daniel. And um like Gallagher shows up. he's He's one of Nebuchadnezzar's magicians or something like that.
01:28:45
Speaker
And I'm like, where's the watermelon, man? um ah But there are so many awful, awful Bible movies. Oh, yeah. Speaking of things that ah podcasts like to mock, Casey and I have been...
01:29:01
Speaker
on this journey for a while. We've done some of the Apocrypha. We've definitely done the pastoral epistles. ah We like to find, we just read through it and kind of have a good time with it.
01:29:14
Speaker
We have, we have, since been doing the book of Mormon. Okay. Um, that is a very interesting literary style. I will say, uh, not fun of it myself.
01:29:28
Speaker
The, it came to passes are prevalent. yeah Um, but we were, we were talking and I was wondering like, uh, in our discordant, we thought like, what would like re renderings of stories look like?
01:29:44
Speaker
Um, in in the book of mormon fashion um okay the stylistic writings of joseph smith if you will so So I just in chat, GBVT, I said, tell retell the story of the three little pigs in the stylistic writings of the Book of Mormon.
01:30:03
Speaker
um And I want to know if you think this fares out pretty well. Let me know on a scale of one to ten. One being abysmal, ah ten and being like, yeah, that that actually could have made it. Scripture, the word of God.
01:30:14
Speaker
Straight from Moroni. And I bet you won't be surprised by the first line here. Now it came to pass that there were three brethren, piglets by nature, who, desiring to depart from their father's house, sought to establish their own habitations, and each did determine to build a dwelling according to his own understanding.
01:30:33
Speaker
And it came to pass that the first did build for himself house of straw, for he deemed it sufficient for his needs. And the second did construct his abode from sticks, believing it to be greater strength than straw.
01:30:44
Speaker
But the third, being wise and prudent, did build his house of bricks, laying a firm foundation and forifying fortifying it against the elements. Now in that land there was a wolf, cunning and full of guile, who sought to devour the piglets.
01:30:59
Speaker
And he went up to the house of straw and spoke and spake, saying, Little pig, little pig, let me come in. But the pig answered, Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.
01:31:10
Speaker
That fits quite right. But then the wolf began to rot, did huff and puff, and he did blow the house down. And the first pig fled onto his brother's house of sticks.
01:31:23
Speaker
And the wolf followed after them and came to the house of sticks and likewise spake. Little pigs, little pigs, let me come in. and But the pigs answered, not by the hairs of our chinny chin chins. Then the wolf did huff and puff, and he did blow the house down, and the two pigs fled onto the house of bricks.
01:31:39
Speaker
And the wolf persisted in his design. The wolf, persistent in his designs, came to the house of bricks and spake once again. Little pigs, let me come in.
01:31:50
Speaker
But the pigs answered as pigs answer. Then the wo wolf did huff and puff, but he could not prevail against the house of bricks, for it was strong and well built. Now the wolf, being exceedingly angered, devised a plan to come down the chimney to seize the pigs.
01:32:05
Speaker
But the third pig, discerning in his intent, did kindle a fire and set upon a pot of water to boil beneath the hearth. And it came to pass that as the wolf descended the chimney, he fell into the boiling water and was scalded.
01:32:17
Speaker
Thus the three brethren were saved from the wolf, and they did rejoice and give thanks for their deliverance. And they dwelt safely in the house of the bricks all their days, having learned wisdom and prudence in the building upon a sure foundation.
01:32:30
Speaker
And thus we see that by a small and simple means are great things brought to pass and that wisdom persevere the righteous.
AI, Elon Musk, and Wrap-up
01:32:38
Speaker
What do you think? It's pulling some things quite literally from not just the Book of Mormon, but from some other ah church history stuff, including the temple ceremony.
01:32:50
Speaker
um And there there are some things that I can tell are trying to to sound um kind of forsoothy, but i'm not quite getting it exactly right. So I would say, ah but but it was surprisingly recognizable as as Mormon fanfic. So I would say that that's a good 8 and 1 half out of 10. Hey, I thought, ChatGPT.
01:33:16
Speaker
Yeah, that was pretty good. I was surprised how how well they did that. um or Or maybe just how limited and recognizable the Mormon lexicon is. I might have thrown in one or two more. It came to passes, personally.
01:33:30
Speaker
Yeah, that that kind of is that's like living by an airport where you kind of just ignore the sound of airplanes landing like that. I don't I don't even hear those really anymore.
01:33:41
Speaker
But there's a there's a lot of other stuff. and And the yeah the the end thus and thus we see by plain and simple means, that's that's kind of ah that's almost verbatim taken from um from Mormon literature or so. Oh, yeah. um Yeah. Surprisingly good. I'm i'm like ChatGPT. I've made fun of them on on my podcast a few times because um there was one time we had April LaJoy on ah to talk about her new book, um Star Spangled Jesus.
01:34:13
Speaker
And um my podcast co-host had gone on to ChatGPT right beforehand just for fun and say, what can you tell me about this book? And it entirely misidentified the author of the book.
01:34:24
Speaker
And we we went on ChatGPT while we were recording the show and we're like, that's not the author. um What can you tell me about the book? And then it would come up with a different author and a different author and a different author, all of them men.
01:34:40
Speaker
And um it was like, but it took like five or six tries before we were finally like, the book is by April LaJoy. And it was like, oh, sorry. yeah and Thank you for correcting me. And and so um I've never been a huge fan of Chad GPT.
01:34:54
Speaker
so Surprisingly, I think Grok does a pretty good job. um As much as I hate to admit it. yeah i think and Most people hate to admit anything in association with him at this point. but Yeah. Oh, yeah, definitely. Well, that's why it's hard to keep Teslas on a lot now.
01:35:07
Speaker
Yeah. Well, that's that's domestic terrorism now, according to according to Tesla's newest celebrity spokesperson. One person's domestic terrorist is another person's hero.
01:35:24
Speaker
probably one person Don't quote me on that. I know I say I like to be quoted. I would like that one to just be left alone. and And one person's president of the United States is also um a rapist, but which is true whether you like or not. tomato.
01:35:42
Speaker
On that note, things can be true at the same time. Yeah. A person can be different things at the same time and can stare directly at an eclipse and not know how to read.
01:35:53
Speaker
And be president of the United States. um As long as you're wealthy and white and a man.
01:36:01
Speaker
Those things help. ah I'm glad we got that off our chest. Yeah. We can't go more than one episode without getting into something political. so I won't tell Liberty University because yeah I'm sure they would. That's all right. I have tagged them in stories that they have seen.
01:36:18
Speaker
Okay. I did a lot of Jerry Falwell tagging for a while. It didn't work. I don't think he ever saw anything. but No. No. but Well, Dan, thanks so much.
01:36:32
Speaker
Thanks so much for joining us, Dan. and This is a lot of fun. I really appreciate it. It's ah ah it's been a pleasure to carry on a conversation with you and realize is that you are a regular person and not, in fact, someone who does make everybody look small and dumb by comparison.
01:36:51
Speaker
ah hey Well, I appreciate the kind words. I had a great time, and and thank you so much for your time as well. Yeah, of course. All right, everybody. Well, thanks for listening. We will see you next time.