 Hey everybody, tonight we're debating, who is, or was Jesus, or did He even exist? And we are starting right now. For another Epic Debate, if this is your first time here at Modern Day Debate, I'm your host, James Coons, and at Modern Day Debate, our goal, our vision is to provide a neutral platform, an equal playing field, so everybody can make their case on that level playing field. We host debates on science, religion, and politics, so we want to let you know, no matter what walk of life you come from, we hope you feel welcome, we're glad you're here. And also, if you haven't yet, consider hitting that subscribe button as we have many more Epic Debates to come. So for example, you'll see at the bottom right of your screen, we are thrilled as Pastor Doug Wilson, who co-starred in the Documentary Collision with Christopher Hitchens, will be here to debate Dr. Ben Burgess later this month. So do remember to hit that subscribe bell and that little notification, I should say subscribe button and little notification bell as well, so you don't miss that one live. It's going to be a great time. And regarding science debate, it's going to be great, folks. You guys, I'm really excited about this. We've been waiting a long time for it, and so we appreciate you being here. We appreciate our guests, and I want to let you know right away, folks, they're linked in the description. So if you'd like to hear more from our guests at any time during that debate, they're conveniently linked in the description so that you can hear more from them. And for our format tonight, it's going to be pretty easy going. So it's basically eight-minute opening statements followed by kind of a flexible 45 to 55-minute open conversation and then Q&A for about 25 minutes. So if you happen to have a question, feel free to fire it into the old live chat. And if you tag me with at-modern-day debate, it makes it easier for me to get every question in that Q&A list. So very excited to introduce our guests. It's going to be a blast. And especially since those links are in the description, we want to give them a chance to share about their links. And so, David Fitzgerald, we're thrilled to have you on. It's very exciting. We know you're a season debater, to say the least. And so thanks for being with us. If you'd like to share, what can people expect to find at your link? And thanks for being here. But thanks so much for having me. It's so funny you say that because I've been telling people lately I'm sick of debates. I'm not a debater. I don't enjoy them. I like to have discussions. And the thing I'm very excited about this is because these two guys seem like they're the perfect guys to have a great discussion with. And so I'm looking forward to that. Less gladiatorial WWE-style talk. And more, let's just put it out there. Absolutely. Well, thank you very much, David. And we'll kick it over to CJ, who you are seeing in the center of your screen, folks. CJ, glad to have you back. I think if I remember right, maybe it was your last debate with Richard Carrier here. I can't remember, but that was an epic one we enjoyed. And so CJ, thrilled to have you back. What can people expect to find at your link? And thank you for having me. I think the very last one, that's the last one I had with you, but there was one in between that and this, which is with T-Jump, actually. But that was kind of a little bit of a dumpster fire, not really a good conversation. Nonetheless, so my name is CJ Cox. And you can find me at the Cinecog C-Y-N-I-C-O-G-U-E here on YouTube. I do two podcasts on the Cinecog. One is political in nature, talking about mainly news overseas, but sometimes talking a lot about news that's happening here as well. Mainly from a constitutionalist perspective, think like Ron Paulian. And I also do a podcast on apologetics called Unapologetics, which includes a light version that's more of your traditional YouTube style video. And so that's the kind of things I typically find there. I don't post a whole lot of my debates, but I'm going to start doing that because it's just a way to get subscribers. I don't really know why I didn't in the first place. But nonetheless, that's the kind of things you find on my channel. In the future, we'll have some history and philosophy stuff. But I appreciate letting me plug myself, by the way. Absolutely. Thank you very much, CJ. And then Brenton, glad to have you back. You've had many epic debates here, and we appreciate you being with us. So what can people expect to find at your link? Thanks for being here. Hey, so for those of you who don't know me, my name is Brenton Langell. I am a poet, playwright, author of Seven Plays, and the writer-creator of the comic series Snow White Zombie Apocalypse, which James just backed on Kickstarter to support the creation of The Third Issue. Really, really excited. That's picking up a huge amount of steam. I have two new series starting. One is a comedy about the lives of non-player characters and role-playing games, and the other is a historical biopic on Buena Ventura de Rudy, who is essentially the anarchist Che Guevara. And I'm going to be sharing a comic about that with him fighting fascists in Spain very soon. If people want to go to my YouTube channel, they're going to find my debates. But they'll also find a lot of philosophical videos, a lot of arts. I talk about arts, philosophy, Buddhism, and I also do radical literature. There's a seven soon-to-be eight-part series on George Orwell fighting in Catalonia and politics, as I was very active in Occupy Wall Street. But I am here tonight to debate Jesus and hopefully add a unique perspective. So very much looking forward to it. Absolutely. Thank you very much, Brenton. And also, I want to bring it up. Yes, absolutely. I have backed Brenton's Kickstarter. So excited about that. Brenton has opened my mind to more creative ideas and so exciting stuff. And also, want to let you know, folks, if you love podcasts, I forgot to mention this. Modern Databate is on podcast. And we're working to get on every podcast that you happen to use out there. So if you pull out your phone right now and you can't find us on your favorite podcast app, let us know. And I will work to get on there so that Modern Databate can be available to you to listen to on the go via podcast. And so with that, we're excited for tonight's debate. We're going to start with the Christian, CJ, who's in the middle of the screen. And then we'll kick it over to Brenton as our middle speaker. And then we'll kick it over to David Fitzgerald as cleanup. So he'll speak third. And then we'll have that open conversation. It's about eight. It's a flexible eight minute, as I had mentioned, eight minute opening statement. And so we'll kick it over to CJ. Thanks so much. The floor is all yours. All right, Ian, thank you. And again, shalom all, and blessings to you all in the name of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I'd like to, of course, once again, thank Brenton and David for being here with me, offering this opportunity to me, as well as, of course, James, for hosting this debate. I've got to be honest, James is like the single biggest boom for my YouTube channel I've ever had. So I appreciate that for sure. So the thesis before us today is who was Jesus. And I do intend on defending for you today the position that Jesus not only was, but is the promised Messiah, the risen Lord whose name is Jehovah, in the flesh who died, excuse me, and was raised for the remission of sins, so that we as sinful man might be saved and might have relationship and communion with him, specifically Almighty God, right? To get a little bit less preachy, my position is that Jesus was indeed, as the scriptures say, born of a virgin whose name was Mary, betrothed to Joseph, excuse me. Between the years five and one BC, that he was baptized roughly 30 years of age by the prophet John the Baptist, his cousin, that he ministered to Israel for roughly three, three and a half years, traveling primarily with 12 Jewish apostles, that he was crucified in roughly 33 AD, and so on and so forth. So basically you could boil down my position to, I am a fundamentalist, I believe that the scriptures are literally true. And I happen to think that these scriptures alone, by which I mean the New Testament in particular, actually offer pretty substantial evidence for this on top of extra biblical sources. In the New Testament, we find 27 separate works, which are not indeed the same work, but separate from each other, from at least eight separate authors, four of whom are claimed to have been eyewitnesses and three of whom are claimed to have been apostles. One is even claimed to literally be the brother of Jesus, literally flesh and blood, right? All would have been alive, all eight, right? Or potentially more, would have been alive adult and in the same area as Jesus when he lived. So in other words, all would have be contemporaries, even if all weren't necessarily eyewitnesses. And perhaps most notably, all but one, namely John, is said to have died a horrible, torturous death for this message, which each could independently verify personally, because five claim to be eyewitnesses, eight claim to, or eight are claimed contemporaries at the bare minimum, and each of the three who are not claimed to be eyewitnesses at the bare minimum do have claims, well, at least one of the three, I guess I can't say each of the three, but at least Paul and I believe Jude as well have claims of having personal visions that they themselves saw, right? Seeing a risen Lord. So none of them is lying, at least according to what we saw. And of course it wouldn't make very much sense for them to be lying because as many Christian apologists have pointed out before me, liars make very poor martyrs. Why would you go to your torturous, horrible, gruesome death when you get absolutely no gain whatsoever when you yourself can verify for sure that these events did not take place because you're the person they took place to, right? So bare minimum, they're either lying, which doesn't make any sense, or they at least believe that they literally experienced the risen Jesus Christ. Extra biblical sources do seem to confirm at bare minimum that this story was the one immediately propagated and that no other story of Jesus existed. For example, we have from Josephus that Jesus was the brother of James and that he was called the Christ by his followers. Both Tastus and Pliny the Younger confirmed for us that he was the Christ as well. Pliny the Younger confirmed for us that he's executed by Pontius Pilate, by crucifixion. We see from Papias by Eusebius that Matthew and Mark wrote his story down and in the first century, Papias himself claims to have gotten this information from direct eyewitnesses such as John and would be writing himself in the late first century. And many other sources abound from the first and second century. Indeed, there's 22 separate sources that I personally know of, which mentioned Jesus within the first hundred years after his crucifixion, which is a pretty amazing feat considering the fact that he's not a member of royalty, right? Or at least royalty's any power or a general or something along those lines, right? But rather is for all intents and purposes a kind of a nothing burger at the time, right? He only had 12 serious disciples. He was executed as a common criminal, so on and so forth. And yet we seem to have this abundance of resources talking about it. These sources include what are not limited to Christians like Clement of Rome, Justin Marder, Ignatius of Antioch, Barnabas, Polycarp, Papias, and so on, as well as some of the non-Christians I already mentioned like Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny of the Younger, there's belief about Marabar's therapy on, excuse me, and Thalus referencing him as well. There is even some writings preserved by future historians that come from people we would consider today to be cultists like Valentinius and Marcian. The point being that there is an abundance of resources which confirm bare minimum that this was the story immediately propagated after the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. And each of these stories confirm only this and nothing more. In fact, the earliest sources that seem to try and refute Jesus are refuting this story and not some other story or claiming that the stories are fabricated or something along those lines, right? But are actually trying to address this story in particular, such as the Pantera claim, right? The Pantera was actually Jesus's father and that was adultery, so that's why they claim the virginity, so on and so forth. But none of them are claiming, oh, there's actually a different story, there's a different Jesus, so on and so forth because this is the only story anyone knew. And this again is even immediately after his own time. Now, there are references to of course another Jesus, right? As we see in Paul, right? And you see some other references of this throughout not only the scriptures, but early Christian writings. I think that personally the mythosist and a lot of other secular scholars will read a lot, excuse me, will read way too deeply into this particular statement. There is no evidence whatsoever that suggests that they were preaching a different Jesus in that. They were preaching a different person or somebody who lived a different life, but rather they were interpreting his teachings in a different way. And we see this happening, in fact, numerous different times throughout numerous other movements. For example, Socrates has a Plato, has also Xenophon, has also Antisthenes, all of which will come to different conclusions despite having the self-same teacher. And though there are those who will claim Socrates did not exist, for the most part, we do not claim that Socrates did not exist or that the Socrates that we know is not indeed the true Socrates, right? Rather, we understand that these people may or may not have had different interpretations of what he actually taught. And in this case, even three people who were taught directly by him. There's examples of that that are even much more recent. For example, the minister William Branham from the 1950s and 60s. There are those who take a modalistic view of William Branham's teachings. There are those who take a, like Lee Vail, for example, who take an adoptionist view of William Branham's teachings. There are those who believe that William Branham is literally the second coming of Christ. And that was only in the 1960s, right? And a lot of these people, direct eyewitnesses are alive today. So in other words, just because we have people who may have different interpretations, in other words, another Christ, right? That does not mean that the person or source of these teachings is in any way different from the story which we have or is in any way somebody who does not exist as a fictional character, right? Rather, it simply means that these people have taken these teachings to mean different things. And with that, I would basically conclude my position. I don't want to attack strong men. So I'll wait for people to make positions that I haven't made yet or that I haven't gone over yet, right? But basically my position is that the Bible accurately describes for us who Jesus was and is. And that is the Messiah of the Old Testament scriptures who died for our sins, risen on the third day. So that we might have communion with the Almighty God. I believe that the New Testament is accurate and there I would concede. Thank you very much. We will kick it over to Brenton for his opening statement as well. Got the timer set for you, Brenton. The floor is all yours. The question of who is Jesus Christ is one that looms surprisingly large for me. I say surprisingly because as many of you who have followed my debates, literary and philosophical work already know, I'm a practicing Buddhist. However, I'm also a Westerner who was raised in the Catholic church and received a reasonable education in theology, at least compared to most of my peers. As such, the figure of Christ is one that I am intimately acquainted with. I still remember the first time I saw a crucifix and registered it for what it was. My reaction was to remark quite loudly during a particularly quiet part of the mass. Mommy, why is that man hanging from the letter T? And for the record, by the way, my mother was afraid to answer because she was worried that quainting me at such a young and impressionable age with the story of the crucifixion might actually cause me to develop an irrational fear of the letter T. It didn't happen, mom. One cannot be raised in the modern world and not encounter the icon of Christ nor can we avoid reckoning with the story and what it all means. Jesus, quite frankly, is bigger than the Beatles. And so, let's dive into him and the history and mythology that surrounds him and hopefully discover something new because if there is one thing I am an expert in, above all else, one thing that I have devoted my life to, it is stories. And I have it on good authority that the story of Jesus of Nazareth is the greatest story ever told. If you want to know what this story, these gospels, this good news is actually about, you have to understand the divine and to understand the divine you must understand the temporal. Or as Jesus put it, if you know me, you know my father. So we have to look at who Jesus was and what kind of a society surrounded him. Even if we assume that the Christ story is 100% whole cloth, an invention of the poet with his rolling eye just glanced from heaven to earth and earth to heaven and gives to airy nothing, a local habitation and a name, it is still a story that has endured longer than virtually any other. And it does so because it speaks to people. And as any writer knows, the only reason any story speaks to anyone at all is that at its core, the story contains a great truth. I am an artist and an artist is the opposite of a magician or a propagandist. The latter two use truth to tell lies. Artists, writers, painters, poets use lies to tell the truth. As such, I'm not so interested in the historicity of the Bible. And for the life of me, I cannot see what the good news is about the regular interpretation of the four gospels. Congratulations, Brent, great news. Everyone who lived and died before now for the first 248,000 years that our species has been on this planet, yeah, they all got thrown into a lake of fire to burn for all eternity. But just now, some 2,021 years ago, the omnipotent, omnipresent and omnibeneficent being that set that whole system up took the form of a man, made himself of no reputation and became obedient onto death. And when he suffered that death in the most horrific way imaginable for that time and place now and only now are our sins abolished and our souls exempt from an eternity of torture. But actually only if you become a particularly enthusiastic fan of his. If you haven't heard of it or hear, but don't believe yet, you still get set on fire for forever. Yeah, that's great news. Thanks, Ted. But again, let's think about this because the instinct here is to either accept it out of fear or guilt or to throw the whole thing out. But let's think about this for real. This is the gospel after all. This is supposed to be good news. So obviously we are misinterpreting something. And to understand what it is, we have to look at the writings and traditions of someone that Jesus was entirely unaware of, specifically Shakyamuni Buddha. And the fascinating thing is if you read the 16th chapter of the Lotus Sutra held to be the beating heart of Mahayana Buddhism, Shakyamuni's final and ultimate teaching, there is this passage. If there are living beings who come to me, I employ my Buddha eye to observe their faith and to see if their other faculties are keen or dull. And then depending upon how receptive they are to salvation, I appear in different places and preach to them under different names. Sometimes when I make my appearance, I say that I am about to die to enter into extinction. Why do I do this? The thus come one perceives the true aspect of the threefold world. There is no ebb or flow of birth and death. There is no existing in this world and later entering extinction. It is neither substantial nor empty, neither consistent nor diverse, nor is it what those who dwell in the threefold world perceive it to be. Because living beings have different natures, different desires and different ways of thinking, I employ a variety of causes and conditions, similes, parables and phrases and preach different doctrines. All this is a Buddha's work that I have never for a moment neglected. So what are we to make of that? Is it mere religious syncretism? Well, I don't think so. Buddhist and Hindu scriptures are different from Western ones. They are not intended to be taken literally. Rather, their intent is to use lies to tell the truth, to bring about a change in consciousness in the mind of the practitioner. And it is when the consciousness changes that the actual truth of existence can be revealed. You see, evolution does not favor organisms that experience reality directly. Rather, it favors organisms that experience it in a way that is most conducive to our survival and or reproduction. The everyday world of individuals, the centered reality of I, where each of us is an isolated consciousness wrapped up in a bag of skin, is an illusion. One that we know from modern psychology can and does sometimes shatter through the use of psychedelic chemicals, through particular meditation techniques and sometimes for reasons that no one can identify. We have records of this phenomenon happening again and again and again. Dostoevsky experienced it just before he was set to be executed. The Zen Buddhists call it Satori. You, everyone listening here, you have all experienced it, though you don't remember. It happened when you were babies. The psychoanalysts call this stage the oceanic feeling. It is the state of consciousness where the individual in question makes no delineation between themselves and the outside world, nor between what they do and what happens to them. It is a state neither consistent nor diverse, where individuality and the ebb and flow of birth and death cease to be. It is, in a word, nirvana. So what might someone like Jesus of Nazareth do if they experienced this state as an adult? If they saw the truth, the real truth of existence, why they might say something like, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. He who has seen me has seen the Father. Do you see what's happening? Jesus is trying to express what happened to him, what can't be put into words. The veil has been lifted from his eyes. He has become enlightened. He has become a Buddha, or more correctly, a bodhisattva. That's what a bodhisattva is. It is a Buddha who returns and provides a teaching for the purpose of saving and emancipating living beings. When he preaches his Sermon on the Mount, he is doing a Buddha's work. This is the good news. This is the real gospel, not the supernatural salvation, but a true means of overcoming death. This means so much more of what Jesus said, or this makes so much more of what Jesus said and did, make sense, because if your true nature is not a tiny vulnerable individual, but in fact, the whole universe, the ground of being, or to borrow a metaphor from the ancient Near East, God the Father, then there's really nothing to worry about is there. You, we literally can't die, not forever. We can't lose anything, or any one. We don't have to endure everlasting fire or non-existence. We truly can take no thought for tomorrow for consider the lilies of the field. If God so clothed the grass, which is to this day in the field and tomorrow cast into the oven, how much more will he clothe you, O ye of little faith? So Tolstoy was right. The kingdom of God is within you. Jesus said as much when he said, the kingdom of God is within man. It is within all of us. That's what Jesus meant when he said he was the son of God and the son of man. Son of, in this dialect means of the nature as in son of a bitch, or in the Arabic, son of a dog. That's what he was trying to express. And that's why they killed him. Because this news is incredibly subversive, particularly within a society like the one he inhabited where God, the ultimate reality, is equated with the king in the ancient Near East. I hate to break it to people, but that's why we kneel in church, because you bow to a king, so you can't get up and attack a king. Similarly, Catholic churches are based upon the medieval courts and Protestant churches, I'm sorry, medieval kings courts and Protestant churches on more modern courts. The point is, is that when Jesus said, I am the son of God, what people took it from him to say was, I am the boss, or I am the boss's son. And people are not going to react well to that in this context, because when everyone thinks you're saying you're the boss, the boss is gonna start getting very, very nervous. Because you're saying to him, you're not the boss, I'm the boss. And you know what? That's not gonna go well for you. And it didn't go well for Jesus. But the fact is, it did, because ultimately he was right. We are not, and consciousness wrapped up in a bag of skin. The ego is an illusion. And therefore the gospel, if you read this as the esoteric teachings, is yet one more continuation in a long line of spiritual and philosophical thought stretching back from before recorded history. 30 second warning. This right there is the gospel. Thank you very much, Brenton. And we'll kick it over to David Fitzgerald. Want to remind all of you folks, our guests are linked in the description. We appreciate them. And so, friendly reminder out there, please, we encourage you to attack the arguments rather than the people. And so, we're excited to have David here. David, the floor is all yours. Thank you, sir. Again, I wanna thank you all for having me here. And I'm not being hyperbole when I say I'm sick of debates. I really hate them. They don't seem to go anywhere for me for the most part. That doesn't mean I haven't been in dozens of them. I probably will be for the rest of my career. But in a very real sense, and I don't mean this in any patronizing, condescending sort of way, if you being Christian or Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim makes you a better human being, enriches your life and the life of people around you, I'm all for it. I'm all for it. And I think most of my Christian friends, and I'll keep punting to Christian, even though I'm talking about all kind of religious people. So, Britain don't take offense. But most Christians are Christians for reasons that are good, rational, and make sense, and have absolutely nothing to do with Christianity being true or rational or making sense. If you wanna talk about an atheist perspective on Jesus, you're gonna run the whole gamut because when I was growing up as a Southern Baptist and became an atheist, I had a very different idea of who Jesus was than I do now. And in fact, when I'm coming to the point where I am now freaked me out so much 20 years ago that it almost felt like I was losing my religion all over again when I first started questioning what Jesus was about. For me, I felt like I had a good grasp on who Jesus the person was, the real Jesus. And I think when you talk about the atheist perspective on Jesus, you're talking about too many different things. For instance, if you ask any biblical scholar on any side of the theological debate who Jesus is, immediately, instantly, you're gonna get two different camps. And that's the Jesus of faith and the Jesus of history, the so-called real Jesus. And everything we know as secular historians and secular students of history about the real Jesus completely debunks any Jesus that's on the other side. And it's not as though there's a Jesus of faith and a Jesus of history. Those are just umbrella groups, if you will. Those are figures that help a whole family tree of different Jesuses. From every sort of religion you can ever think of that has anything to do with Christianity or involves Jesus in any way to every single historical perspective on what we can know and can't know about Jesus. I've spent four books in the last 20 years talking about what we can know and can't know about Jesus, what we do know and don't know about Jesus. And I mean, there's no, as Daniel Dennett says, there's no polite way to say it, but I'm just gonna put it out there. Every single thing CJ told us tonight about Jesus is not just debatable, but I would argue that it's actually wrong and not true. And that is a whole lot of info to unpack. But just to focus on a few things, it was very uncertain why he started out what he said. He said, I believe this, the laundry list of what he believes that Jesus was. And they were all for theological reasons. Those are the reasons that he has to believe in Jesus. Those are the reasons that he cannot not believe in Jesus. As an atheist, it's no skin off my nose if there was a real Jesus or not. And we've got all kinds of ideas on what that person was, but what we think we know about Jesus all depends on A, who's telling us this? Can we trust them? Did they know what they were talking about? Were they real people themselves? And that's a much way to your question than just, oh, would they have died for a lie? Well, do we know they even existed in the first place? Who told us this? What's our sources? I'm very touchy about the idea that we have all these independent sources of Jesus, not only because I've gone through every single one of them in great detail and talked about what's problematic about them, but even if we ignore that and just talk about what Christians said about Jesus, for the first 150 to 200 years, we don't know what Christians said about Jesus or the simple fact that all our earliest Christian texts, none of them are older than the second century. And even though Christians love to point to P52 and say, oh, look, that was a text of John that comes from 125 or younger, no, it doesn't. It comes from the late century or the second century or the third century. Our oldest New Testament text, I should say our oldest gospel text is from a gospel that's not one of our four canonical gospels, but it is yet another Christian gospel that didn't make the cut. And there was tons of these around the second century. We just know the tip of the iceberg. We know the names of the groups that were included in the anti-Harris-y manuals of the second century and the third century and later. But there's absolutely a blackout from the first century to the second century at the very least, meaning we don't know if what we have in our gospels is what was originally written in the first place. We don't have any way of knowing. If somehow they magically preserved Paul's very writing and gave it to us, you know, he put it in a box and we just found it just now, we wouldn't know that it was the original. We just say, well, here's a weird, interesting variant of Paul's writings. Our first complete New Testaments don't even come about until the fourth century. And we only have two of them, Codex Saniandicus and Codex Vaticanus. They don't agree with each other. They each have books that the other doesn't have. They have books we don't have, we have books they don't have. So the problem of saying what we know for sure about who Jesus was is Thornier right out of the gate, whether Christianity is true or not, whether there was a Jesus or not, our historical evidence for him is amazingly problematic. And we can and have and I have done written books and books examining that in great detail. And that's as a good a place for me to kick off the ball as any, I think. Thank you very much and that we will do. So we'll jump into open conversation. Folks, if you happen to have questions, feel free to fire them into the old live chat, tagging me with at modern day debate, just so I don't miss any of those questions in the live chat. Thank you gentlemen, the floor is all yours. Brenton, can I just start out by saying, I love what you said and I am super excited about Snow White Zombie Apocalypse. That sounds awesome to me. I don't know if you know who my wife is, Dana Fresdie, but she's also a zombie fan and a zombie writer who's written two different series about zombies and about Zombie Apocalypse. Oh, well, that's great. Well, you and I should connect after this and we'll talk later. We'll talk later. We'll talk later, yeah. Be excited to look into your wife. I'm not familiar, but I'm sure I'm, I'm sure I'm gonna find great stuff. Yeah, so I suppose to get us started off. Well, I'll hold off for now because I feel like your opening was more directed at CJ. I think so, yeah. If CJ wants to go. I think so too. Excuse me, kind of just choked on my coffee there. So there's a couple of things that I absolutely would want to say. First off, I do just want to point out there are a couple of things interestingly enough that I do agree specifically with David on namely that most Christians are indeed Christians for reasons of pragmatism or philosophy. They're not Christians for theological reasons. I would totally affirm that. In fact, the vast majority of them find the term fundamentalist to be insulting. I personally believe fundamentalism is the only legitimate way to follow a religion. If you're not following the fundamentals, what are you even doing? And when I was just, I felt the exact same way. I was totally with you. Well, that's kind of cool to believe. I also agree that, you know, that when you say that I have to believe that historical Jesus is true, I totally affirm that. Paul himself says that in scripture, right? If this didn't happen, if the resurrection didn't occur, then we are to be pityed by all men. Now, of course, I think he was talking about kind of humans in general because of death, but I do think that, you know, kind of hyper applies to the Christian for sure, because if Jesus is not literally resurrected, then the gospel message is false. At least it presented the way it's presented, right? So even though there are some things I agree with you on though, there are definitely some things that I think I have a pretty heavy disagreement on for sure. For example, you make the claim that you say, well, we don't have any of the originals, right? Which is a pretty common thing that people say. But the thing is we don't have the originals for virtually anything at all. We don't have the originals for the Gaelic Wars, right? We don't have the originals for Josephus Flavius's texts. We don't have the originals for Tacitus, anything that Plato wrote. In fact, and I could be wrong about this, but outside of stones, right? Like the the Stellas of Imhotep and things like that. I don't think we have the originals of anything at all before the 1500s. And so I don't understand why that's something we would all of a sudden expect of the gospels, especially when the gospels have much earlier witness. For example, the Gaelic Wars, our earliest text of the Gaelic Wars is copied in 900 AD. It's not even in Latin. Let's stop for a second because you've brought up a good point. I wanna take them point by point. Part of the reason that it's important is, A, we do have originals of things, but the more important thing is we have textual evidence that shows that what we have that survives today is not the original and as there's variants that have been tampered with. In fact, Art Ehrman's written two really good books, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, Forgery and Counter Forgery and his book Forged. It's three books, I suppose. That I'll talk about how one of the remarkable things about early Christian writing is the amount to which it is forged. When you're saying things like Paul tells us, James tells us, you mentioned that James makes the claim that he is Jesus's brother. Actually, he doesn't. Neither does Jude. Both of them claim to be each other's brother. Neither make any claim to be Jesus's brother. Be that as it may, the degree to which Christian writings are forged and tampered with. And it's easy to say that no two Christian texts are alike. And that is true. That ignores the fact that we're talking about, we're ignoring grammatical mistakes, spelling mistakes. That's not important. That's not special. What I'm talking about is when they specifically made alterations to say the opposite of what a text says or indeed when we have the margin notes where they're giving instructions to change it to read something else than what it is. And we have that in abundance still today. Texts still survive. So we know that that's a problem for Christianity. We don't think that any early religion was trying to make a religion out of the Gaelic Wars or many other religious texts, sorry, non-religious texts. We do have a problem when we're talking about a religious texts because there is a definite bias to sell a religion. In fact, our four gospels, of our four gospels only Luke even claims to be writing history. And that's clearly a lie because most of what he's written is based on Mark and Matthew. And he even claims right out of the gate that so many people are writing gospels now. It seemed good to me to get, investigate the story that was handed down to our generation and get to the truth. Which he was not doing. I was not aware of that, but that's awesome. It actually kind of reminds me of the sutras because every sutra begins with this is what I heard. Because they were originally, before people had writing, they were passed down an oral tradition. So there's a couple of things that I wanted to bring up here that I felt were kind of interesting by this debate because the debate seems to be around, did these events described within the gospels actually occur as they are said? Now, one of the things that I wanna point out I had an argument with another Buddhist who was a Theravada Buddhist. It's kind of Catholics versus Protestants or some people might say Jews versus Christians. But this particular Theravada Buddhist, we were talking about a series of prophecies that are in the Lotus Sutra and in several other sutras as well. Where the Buddha essentially says that the teaching will be given out from this Buddha and this Buddha land and the true teachings will endure for ex-kalpas. Kalpas meaning a very long point of time and the counterfeit or false teachings will endure for ex-kalpas. Now, he said to me on this, Mahayana is a false teaching. It's a lie and the true teaching is Theravada to which I responded, no, no, no, which you're not getting something here. And it's because you are attached to a temporal time and place and you think that something can be taken from the past and simply moved into the future. But the fact is the teachings themselves aren't what changes. What happens is that the world changes around them and they become less and less true, less and less applicable because teachings, religious teachings, philosophical teachings are created by people at a specific time and place for people in that specific time and place. And the more the world changes, the more this stuff gets distorted either through history or science or whatever. So what I think we may be missing, I guess, the more I suppose interesting question here as opposed to did these teachings, did what these events as they are described happen more, what are these events talking about? How do they relate to our lives right now and how can we use them to improve ourselves and improve the world? I really think that that often is the, that seems to me to be the goal of religion if we put it to give us purpose and clarity and move us towards a say no more compassionate world. Now, other people may disagree with me but I just wanted to remark on that because I'm not sure the historicity and the fact that these events happened or didn't happen really even matters as much, particularly when you consider the fact that let's say imagine if an alien came down and part of its life cycle was it was able to resurrect itself after death, that could happen or someone else invented technology that allowed a body to rise from the dead. Is that person God? Is that alien? No, it's a miraculous happening that we don't understand. But beyond that, it's not evidence of anything in particular in and of itself other than, whoa, that was weird. So again, I think what we need to do is we need to look beyond the exterior, beyond the, I suppose, the trappings of this and look at what is this faith trying to accomplish? That's my feeling on the thing. Now, others may disagree with me. One thing I like about what you're saying there is you're coming from a Buddhist perspective but it's also a very humanist perspective saying, these are humans trying to make sense of the world. They're doing it through this thing. It's a religion. Here's what their wisdom gives us. And one thing, I mean, I'm not a Unitarian by any stroke but I do like Unitarianism to a point in the fact that their compassion and their recognition that we're all humans and we're all doing the best we can. What, it's weird for me because I came out of the fundamentalist background and that's what I feel most comfortable with Christianity. This loosey-goosey, oh, let's all be hippies. That really, that's the kind of stuff Jesus would spit out his mouth because you're neither hot nor cold. But I don't know, Jesus walked everywhere. Why don't you say so, CJ? Why don't you say so? Yeah, and not only that, but I would say, interestingly, Brenton, if your position on the point to these religions were true, I do believe the David's argument would actually make a whole lot of sense but it's explicitly because it's not true that I think, and let me explain what I mean by that so I don't just sound like I'm making blanket statements but it's explicitly because of that that I think it isn't likely that these major changes have taken place over time because what we actually end up seeing is complete, all pragmatism aside, the religiously devout stick to what it is they believe. I mean, to the point of sometimes causing religious warfare or denying things that are blatantly in front of their face and of course I don't believe those sorts of things like for example, I don't think that the earth is flat and I don't think the Bible teaches the earth is flat but when people thought the earth was flat they were willing to kill you and or die over that, right? All logic, pragmatism and humanism thrown to the wind because that's the nature of these kinds of beliefs and especially in the Abrahamic tradition. Well, Abrahamic, that particular area was a particularly brutal place to live at the time. So again, do you have the equation and again of God the father with human political conventions which I think is definitely a bad and toxic way to think about God, whatever you wanna call it as I said, the ground of being is a good term as philosophy, Alan Watts says the works but the deep down stuff that there is within the universe. Now, I will agree with you that people get pulled in by our more animalistic natures. In fact, that's one of the major parts of Samsara in Buddhist philosophy and psychology. The world of animals is one of 10 life states and particularly one of six, the six evil pads that we find ourselves in frequently. So you can get pulled into that kind of a headspace very, very easily. I don't think it's so much by religion or belief more, I'm gonna quote Karl Marx here but man makes religion, religion does not make man in the sense and also Sartre with existence precedes essence. I think people tend to interpret and interpolate their religious scriptures and their religious beliefs based upon how their own internal states are. I don't believe that there is anyone who cleaves to absolutely everything within the Bible or within their scriptures. Everybody picks and chooses but lots of people like to think and claim that they do otherwise. I mean, when was the last time a Christian took their moldy clothes to a priest even though that's explicitly a law within the Bible? Nobody does that, you take it to the cleaners. So I would say that there are definitely people who have a very like hard-nosed, hard-minded black and white view of the world that this is the law and we've gotta follow this but I think that's a product of their environment as opposed to a product necessarily of their ideology which is where I differ from people like Sam Harris who seem to think or Jordan Peterson who seem to think that ideology is more or less a mind virus that inhabits a human and controls their actions. Well, and I tend more to take that view honestly. I think that for the most part societies are made by, and even individuals a lot of times are made by the cultures and doctrines that might surround them. I think a perfect example which Jordan Peterson himself has used often is how the penalty for being a German and not being a Nazi was actually relatively light and yet virtually everybody did it because that's the way that the society and the culture at large expected. He's actually not to direct about that though. Even at the height of their power the Nazis never had a majority of the vote like not once. You don't need a majority of the vote to have a majority of people doing what you want them to do. Right? You still have people in the army fighting your wars and collecting your Jews and all that other sort of stuff. You know what I mean? Yeah, fair enough. But to be fair, those Germans who did explicitly push back on Nazism, they did not want it. The white rose, they were got taken out. Yeah, also that's a very good point. Also any anti-fascist activity when they say like first they came for the trade unionists they're referring to the anarchists. When they say they came for the socialists it's the communists, it's the people who are directly in the streets fighting and resisting fascism. And I love, boom, God went, God went's law. And so I guess though one of the reasons why I think that such a point is important though is because when it comes to these religiously devout, right, I mean come hell or high water they, you're right, just think of some of the certain scriptures not one jot or tittle to even add or take away, right? Certain things like this, you just see and we see this play out throughout history. Like for example, David you mentioned some of the differences that we know existed. Personally I happen to be pretty well, not of course too well familiar, I am only 22 years old but I happen to be pretty familiar with a lot of these things. And it's interesting the things that we find that are provable differences, number one we can't prove if they were added or taken away. Most people do tend to think that virtually nothing has been taken away but there is stuff that has been added. That's at least what James Weigand-Barterman have suggested. And that's just a historical maxim that people tend to insert stuff in more than. If I'm not mistaken, we have direct evidence in them. I think it's the King James, I'm not sure if that's the right, but there is, Jesus says in one of the scriptures, I am a son of God and the actual says what it says in the Bible in this particular thing is I am like the son of God and the is in italics. And a lot of people thought that that was in there for emphasis, but it is actually in there because a editor came in and removed the A and put V because he was thinking this is what Jesus was really saying, not A but D. Well, there are certain instances of things like that. Now for the most part, to be fair, virtually all translations that add brackets and things like that, they do so because they believe it'll better communicate something into their language. Like this is an example, nostalgia is a pretty uniquely English word. You have words like Heimweh, which means homesickness in German, right? But for the most part, I mean homesickness isn't the same thing as nostalgia. So you'd have to explain that term, right? And so the way you explain it might be different from various places because you can't literally translate the word unless you just make up the word nostalgia. And by the way, I'd recommend people go look up, Google translate, how do you say nostalgia in like, you know, Hebrew, for example, it'll actually say nostalgia because they just borrowed the word, they don't have it, right? Point being that that kind of thing does happen very frequently, but for the most part, we can actually not only find these specific changes, but we can even determine, you know, whether or not they were accurately changed. And I, to the best of my knowledge, the only things that we cannot prove for a fact, you know, what was the original reading or if these were things were added and or not is the last 12 verses of Mark, Father forgive them from Luke and the pericope adultery from John. Now the interesting thing is specific. I gotta stop you CJ, because there's far more than that, far more than that. And again, let me refer you back to the Bart Ehrman book for just one book, orthodox description of scriptures where it actually goes into, you can trace out the different factions that are changing their texts, which we also have today to go from this direction to that direction. Again, it's not just grammatical errors, not just spelling errors, just the deliberate, deliberate theological changes. Really, to be fair though, we do see, sorry, Brenton, I'll be very quick. There are two things I would point out on that. The first thing, and I do say this in all respect to Bart Ehrman, but he himself has admitted that when he debates fundamentalists and has challenged on those books that he loses, for example, James White and Metzger, right? He is the first one to tell you that he does not do a good job in those debates because his position isn't right when he publishes those books. And in fact, in his scholarly works, he argues against the position that he tends to publish in his popular works. And for the example there. Because orthodox description of scripture is one of his scholarly works. But forgery and counter forgery in Christianity is scholarly work. I'm not talking about forged or misquoting Jesus or any of others' books. I love all his books, but yeah, we're not just talking about his popular books. Well, and that's fair. And I'll certainly concede that perhaps, because obviously he is an atheist, right? He's not gonna agree with me completely because I'm sure if he did, he probably. I think he considers himself an agnostic, but it's tomato at this point. But, you know, so like just as an example, because this is one that we can specifically name, right? With the Pericope adultery, right? We do see a clear example of theological disputes, right? Even with outside of manuscript evidence, because we do have manuscripts where the Pericope adultery is missing and other manuscripts even where it's in a different place, right? Exactly, exactly. And it's our oldest text that it's generally missing, which is why they take that later. Exactly, exactly. But interestingly enough though, we actually have record from around the same time that Vaticanus, Sinaticus, things like that exist where people are saying that this text, this Pericope adultery is indeed being taken out by certain groups specifically in North Africa, which is interestingly enough where we find Sinaticus because they believed it was going to make the culture at large softer on adultery. We see numerous disputes about this from the church fathers who existed in the time of Nicaea. So in other words, there are proven theological disputes, and this is a perfect example, where certain groups are removing scriptures, but it actually turns out to argue from my case, the removing scriptures that we believe, right? That we hold in our scriptures today. Here's the thing though, I think we're agreeing violently because yes, they were making these arguments and they're making all kinds of changes, not just in that period, but before that period and after that period. And I don't think that helps your case. I think the opposite is true. I mean- So why is it then that we wouldn't have a record of the opposite of that, right? Why would we not have a record of the same? We don't have a record because we don't have any Christian texts that old. We have other texts of other things that are that old, but for Christianity, there is a weird 150 to 200 years blackout where we have nothing that survives. Well, I'm not actually- Fragments, then later towards the second center, we get full books of the New Testament, but not until 400 years that we actually get full on New Testament. And not till later than that, that we get a text of the New Testament looks like our New Testament. Well, so I'm not actually talking about the manuscripts here per se, right? But more my thing is like, so for example, when you have Augustine, right? Talking about the people in North Africa. So sorry, CJ, I had myself on mute on Zoom yet. But what I meant to say was, I promise to give you a chance to respond, CJ. I can see you've got a round in the chamber, ready to fire out, but I do also, I wanna quick see, Brenton I think was gonna jump in really quick and then we'll give you a chance to respond to David too. So go ahead, Brenton. Yeah, I had, there was a thread in the conversation that I felt might be lost, that I wanted to address. I wanna give CJ a chance to, I don't wanna completely lose this, but this was mentioned specifically when you talked about like martyrs, liars make poor martyrs. That's not actually the case because you look at people are being martyred today for lies. Like not to, I mean, just look at QAnon, the woman that died in the attack on the Capitol. And similarly, even if you don't look at QAnon, you look at stuff like when prophecy fails. We had, I remember in New York, we had the May 21sters who believed that the world was going to end, absolutely believed it sold all their possessions and hung out and bothered me in the subway, about how the world was gonna end on like May 21st, 2012. When these things don't happen, the power of a lot of these stories and a lot of these lies really pulls people along with them. And it's like the ego can't handle it and just continues to live in its own world as opposed to acknowledge what's happened. I'm not saying that that's necessarily happened with regards to the stuff, but I wanted to bring that up. The other thing here is you talked about fundamentalism and like, what are you doing? Now, and I think this kind of cuts to the core of what we're talking about here. So I admire your candor there, but a lot of the talk that I've been hearing now about this sect and that sect really doesn't mirror a lot of disagreements that have happened in Buddhist communities now and in the past. Nitrin and I shown in the originator of our sect who they tried to kill twice, put out in the year 1200 for precepts for whenever religion becomes unbalanced, specifically an over-reliance on precepts and standards, which makes sense because again, people are fallible. And so when someone says I follow my scripture 100%, no, you don't, you made a mistake at some point, you're not perfect, it's just vanity. Over-reliance on internal perception of just yourself, navel gazing. A reliance on supernatural aid by an absolute being, which is the opposite of navel gazing where you put yourself down and you reach out to something else beyond you. And then the final one is a reliance on occult rituals to improve one's own life. These are the four things that damage and unbalance a religion and prevent it from carrying through its purpose. So your candor towards, I'm going to take my belief seriously, very much as admirable. And I think that is how people should approach beliefs. But at the same time, what I'm going to say is, is again, because we are fallible and because everyone who wrote the Bible was a fallible human being, even if they were. And everyone who follows the Bible is a fallible human being. If you try to cleave and become attached to that, you ironically push yourself further away, specifically because it's like static in a radio. The more you try to hold on to it, the stiffer you make yourself, the more difficult the actual task becomes. So I just wanted to remark on that before we continued into the minutia essentially of this discussion. Gotcha, go ahead, CJ, on those two points. Well, real briefly, Brenton, if you wouldn't mind, could you remind me of the first point? I kind of lost it a little bit. Yeah, and that was the most important one. The first precept from Nietzsche and Dyshtonin was an over-reliance on meeting precepts and standards. So there was a school of Buddhism called superior practices and their inherent obsession, the way they tried to reach enlightenment was to read the sutras and try to follow specific set rituals, eat at this time, live this way. And obviously it failed from Nietzsche's point of view, specifically because we are fallible. But that's the quick thing out. Each of these is a criticism of a separate Buddhist school. So a couple of things. I wanna answer that first, and then the lawyer's paper we make poor martyrs point after. So I don't necessarily disagree with everything that you said in that interestingly enough. In fact, I would argue that the whole point of having a holy text is that texts do not change. They can be changed by outside sources, but they themselves are not changed. And in fact, we'll always say what they always say, provided no outside influence affects them, right? So for example, when you see, just I don't know an example, God made the heaven and earth in six days, right? Provided nobody actually goes out of their way to alter that text. That will be what that text says now and forever until it's gone, right? I don't necessarily know that it's been altered because it's in English. Well, right, but I mean, not altered in that sense, but I mean, altered in the sense that they actually changed the idea of being communicated, right? Because of course, if somebody speaks in Hebrew that God created the heavens and the earth, I believe if I'm not mistaken, that'd be better sheet Elohim Barah Eretz, if I'm not mistaken. I don't know. I'm learning Hebrew. We're not here to ask that. Yeah, you're dead on. Thank you. But at any rate, the point being that that actually I think that over-reliance on precepts and on human minds, that's actually the entire point of having a scripture is that you have to consistently go back and check yourself against, and this is the same point of having a constitution, by the way, for those who are interested politically, you have to constantly go back and check yourself against the written law that was written at that time and in that context. Now, of course, people may not always do that sort of thing. They may want to alter it. They may pick and choose. The Bible in particular sort of presupposes that nobody can follow the book entirely, which is the whole point of Jesus, right? But to an extent, that isn't a fault of the text itself or of the words itself or of the fundamentalism, right? But actually it's more of a over-reliance on man that the Bible tries to squash by having such a reliance on scriptures. And in fact, this is the main debate, I think, between Protestants and Catholics, because Catholics do end up putting that interpretation in the hands of fallible man. Protestants, on the other hand, ironically because of the fact that they're so hyper-individualistic, kind of prevent that from ever happening, because when 15 different guys, each have different opinions, they come together and they discuss it, right? Well, none of their opinions can be made into canon number one and number two. You start to kind of weed out, all right, well, 14 guys believe this and the 15th guy believes this. So maybe he's got an misinterpretation on this particular point of his theology, right? And so on and so forth. And that's a point I want to jump in real fast if I can. Because that's something, every time you talk about, you know, the impermanability of texts and the, we're talking about the interpretation of the texts, because we could even agree that this is what it originally said, this is what it says, these are the words that it says, what they mean gets taken all out of the place. Even if it seems to be very clear, it's like, well, was that literal? Was that allegorical? Was he really saying that? Did he mean that? Was he being sarcastic? You know, was Paul just being facetious here? Was Jesus just making a joke, you know? It seems to be that, I mean, I like, it seems to be an attempt to overcome human fallibility. But again, this is a book written by humans, interpolated by humans. So there isn't a fix for that problem in much the same way that there isn't a fix for the problem of entropy. Change is constant. That's the, seems to me to be the only universal law is impermanence and permanent change. Well, only if the text is not what it claims to be though, because if it is what it claims to be, sure Ezekiel wrote to Ezekiel, but he did so under the inspiration of the creator of everything. But how would you know that? How would you know if that wasn't the case? Well, and I guess that's even an interesting question. It might depend from text to text in a way. Like for example, Esther, I accept because it has come down via tradition, whereas Genesis, I believe actually has accurate prophecies in it. I think I could prove that. I won't go into it too much today but I mean, I mean, for anything we say, you know, it's one thing to say, oh, this was inspired by God, but how do we know that? How would we know if that wasn't the case? Because the things that they say, well, you know a prophet is of God, if he tells the truth, he doesn't tell the truth, he's not of God, that kind of thing. By their fruits, you shall know them. What kind of tests do we have to even know that what this verses say is what is true, full stop. Even if we can agree on what they're saying. And so often, especially in early Christianity, but I want to make it clear, Judaism's on no better footing either. The Old Testament is just as in bad shape as the New Testament when it comes to that. You know, it's funny, this takes me back to the original debate that I did with me and Caleb Mopin versus two Nazis. And Caleb actually quoted that, beware false prophets and by their fruits, you shall know them. There's also something Shakyamuni said directly related to this problem, but it's gonna take me a second to look it up. So you guys continue, because this, I think cuts to this issue. Well, and I think that, you know, a lot of these things do kind of depend, I guess to a certain extent, it's an interesting question for sure. So like, you know, when you say, how do we know these things actually come from God? I think the first thing that is established is things like the signs and miracles and stuff like that. For example, I'm going through Exodus right now, as it turns out. When you read Exodus, it is clear from the writer's perspective, the signs and miracles that Moses worked were as a witness for the people at that time, which is actually my opinion. Wait, stop, stop. What do you know about the writer of Exodus? Well, I was actually just about to say that that's part of the reason why I believe that Exodus was actually written by Moses, because the writer assumes that these things actually were seen and that this can be passed on as a testament for generations. Like that's just a given fact that he feels like he doesn't even need to bet. But to jump in on the Moses thing, I mean, you can go and Google Earth, like Cairo to Jerusalem like right now, it is a six day walk. How in the heck did Moses wander in the desert for 40 years if Exodus is the case? Like if it's a six day walk. Well, the scripture actually, believe it or not, answers that question quite plainly. It's not that the Israelites didn't find Israel. In fact, they found Israel relatively quickly. It's that when they got there, they were scared to actually take the land. And so God told them, I will not help you until this generation is gone. And is that in the Bible or is that in the Bible? No, no, no, no, that's in the Bible. That is in the Bible. That is in the story. That is the story it tells. That story is not borne out by archeology or history. Everything we know about Egypt, everything we know about the Middle East, that did not happen. Well, I'd like to get a debate with you in particular on that issue because I don't want to derail this one, right? Just because, you know, for Jesus and stuff. But I would love to actually have that conversation because I personally am just as fundamentalist on that one as I am this one. I think it'd be a good start. So this is what I wanted to bring up, by the way. I found the quote here. This is from the Kasimudi Sutra. So, and there's several interpretations of this, but essentially in the Sutra, it describes Shakyamuni Buddha comes to this particular village and they come up to him and say, you know, all of these preachers are coming through our village. You know, all these wandering holy men and they all say that their way is the right way and everyone else's way is the wrong way. Like, how do we know what to go with? And Shakyamuni's recitation was actually really, really interesting because he took their question very seriously and specifically he said, do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing. So do not go on hearsay, nor tradition, nor upon rumor, nor upon what is in the scriptures, nor upon what you can surmise, nor upon axiom, nor upon specious reasoning, nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over. So don't get attached to something that you just really like and it's your idea, nor upon another seeming ability. So even if this guy is an expert or something, don't necessarily go on that. Nor upon consideration, this monk is our teacher. So good men, when you yourself know, these things are good, these things are not blameable, these things are praised by the wise, undertaken and observed, and these things lead to benefit and happiness only then enter and abide in them. And specifically, this goes back to something that the Dalai Lama says about religion. Specifically he says that the true test of a religion is its effect on its followers. Does it inspire them to lead better lives? Does it actually build, you talked about humanism, ironically, Daisaku Aketa, the current president of my sect, is a very big, and he calls it humanist Buddhism. But the fact is that we can't rely on scripture because it's fallible, we can't rely on people because it's fallible, we can't rely on ourselves because we're fallible, but we can get as close a picture as possible by combining a number of different perceptions and seeing the effect of this belief system on the world and the people around them. And I think that's really what we've got to look into when we're trying to find what religious and philosophical path to follow. Not to take away from anything you just said, because everything you just said, yes, absolutely. It occurs to me, we haven't been talking about Jesus for a few minutes now. That's actually why I tried to get off of the Moses thing. Yeah. Or have we? But here's the thing though, or have we because Jesus is a very slippery figure to pin down and even the church by the origin said that and Jesus has many things according to the conceptions of him. We haven't had a single Jesus ever, ever. Even from the first gospels, there were already Christians who were talking about Jesus in a completely different way when the first gospel was written. And once that was written, then they was written about in a completely different way too. Well, you know, what's interesting here is again, like going back to Jesus and what might have been going on in his head while he was trying to, you know, expound these specific teachings. You know, if somebody in Western culture comes up to you tomorrow and says, I'm Jesus Christ reborn, you're going to think he's crazy, you know, most of the time or you're gonna join his weird sect. But the fact is, is that we have this singular idea of God and God not simply as, you know, everything that there is not the Brahmin concept, but you know, God as in the boss, the big man that you better mind your P's and Q's around because the boss can have you fired. Right, right. Excuse the pun. No, put it in, yeah. But like the fact is, is that, you know, if a Hindu were to walk up to another Hindu and say, I'm Shiva, they'd say, congratulations, you found out. But also, so is everyone else. So there's no use putting on airs. And you know, in a way we are talking about Jesus, at least in my conception of Jesus as a Bodhisattva, because again, we all are Jesus. Let me ask you something about this because again, I feel very churlish harping on the historicity issue, but that's my bread and butter. That's what I've been fascinated with the last 20 years. So one thing I love about Buddhism is that it doesn't necessarily take Buddha seriously. It, I mean, chapter 15 of the Lotus Sutra which you mentioned, that's basically saying, you know, there's not, you know, maybe I wasn't, you know, Prince Kotha, you know, Siddhartha, you know, maybe I'm, I've always been something bigger. Yeah. How would you, how would it change your belief in Buddhism if it turned out your founder figure did not exist? I mean, it wouldn't really. The way you ask CJ, what would it do to his Christianity if he came to the realization that Jesus didn't exist, for instance? Yeah, I mean, what I would say is it wouldn't really change anything. That's one of the things that I like about Buddhism particularly. Exactly. And in fact, like the Lotus Sutra, again, Central Sutra, a lot of other people will declare it a phony sutra because it came later and some Buddhists said it was kept in the realm of the Nagas. Others says it was just written, you know, later than other sutras and it wasn't, and it really originated outside of Shakyamuni as in Siddhartha Kutama and it may have. But that, again, if you understand Buddhism, doesn't really make a difference because again, ultimately, individuals do not exist. The ego is an illusion. So, you know, like somebody comes up to me says, I'm a reincarnation of Siddhartha Kutama. Yeah, yeah, you are. So am I, no use putting on airs. Yeah, so it ties into Hindu thought, but yeah, I'd be interested CJ. Like, what's your thought on this? Because this does seem to be a very strong divide between East and West and ironically, individualist and kind of more, I hate the term collectivist because it's loaded, but universal views. Right. So I think there's a couple of things I think I would want to say, honestly. So I think the first thing is- We've got just a little bit before, sorry CJ, I'll let you give a response, but we do have a little bit before we go into Q and A. So this might be, if you want to respond to those ideas, then we might have to jump into it CJ. Yeah, well, I'll try to, actually, I'm gonna try and be really quick because I want to address a few hanging points. So I'm gonna be really fast. If I don't go fast enough, just cut me off please. But so thing number one, I would say, I think it's fundamentally different with the Jesus claim than for example, with the Buddha claim because Buddhism, as many have pointed out, doesn't even have to be a religion. You can get rid of all the Nirvana stuff and just make it a philosophy of life. And while you could in theory do that with Christianity, it's not really the same thing. Christianity is centered around the man, it's Christianity, right? It's about Christ. Now, of course, you can say that, well, it's Buddhism, right, it's the same thing, but the thing is there's multiple Buddhas, there's one Christ, right? And so in a way, you have a fundamental difference, I think, in that regard. I do also think to kind of get back to the point of the texts and stuff like that. I wish we might have actually hammered on them a little bit more, perhaps we can have some other conversations at some other point in time. But I do think when you look at the historical record and specifically the historical record pre-Nicaea, because after Nicaea, because of the acceptance of Christianity mainstream, you just see an explosion of texts. But pre-Nicaea, right, those texts are typically going to be a little bit more controlled. There's a few from Justin Martyr, there's a few in the New Testament, things like that. And what you actually find is the large majority of Christians tend to agree on the same things. They tend to have the same general scriptures when they mention scriptures, because a lot of times they just don't have anything to say about it. Origin even lists for us the 27 book canon that we have today in the New Testament, as well as almost perfectly the Old Testament canon. He seems to have forgotten the 12 minor prophets, but we know almost certainly it was a mistake on his part, because there's no dispute as to when the 12 minor prophets were canonized, and it was well before the Dead Sea Scrolls were even written, or at least were considered to be canon, not necessarily canonized per se. Real quickly, by the way, point of correction. Yeah, I was gonna say, I would feel like jumping in on all that too, but go ahead. I'll just go real fast, point of correction. So Nirvana is not a supernatural thing. Nirvana, so Samsara is Nirvana. Nirvana is not a different state that we go to where we stop existing or a heaven realm. It is the state of consciousness and mind that is brought on by perceiving true reality. It is, Nirvana has referred to as the blown out state, as in, phew, because there's nothing really to worry about if we're God, and we can't act. Nothing can go wrong, essentially, and we can go into that, but I just wanted to make sure that that was clear, because that's a big Western misconception. But David. There's one point that was brought up earlier. I think people would get a kick out of hearing CJ if you have an answer for it. I hate to pelt you with, but maybe it was, I don't think it came back up, but maybe you've answered or not the point that Brenton brought up regarding your claim that liars make poor martyrs, and then Brenton bringing up contemporary examples of people who believe in, for example, the thing that starts with Q that Brenton already had to say to draw YouTube's attention. But go ahead, if you want to respond to that, if you have it already. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think the main difference is we have to understand that Ashley Babbitt, for example, or Osama bin Laden, for example, weren't actually liars. They were martyrs, they were not liars. They genuinely believed what it was that was being fed to them, and the difference fundamentally between, for example, Matthew, the apostle, and somebody like Osama bin Laden, is that Matthew can verify for a fact whether or not his lie is indeed a lie, right? He was there talking to Jesus. At least that's the claim, right? So, and I think that's a fundamentally different, to give an example of something that would be better, right? If you could find, which interestingly enough, outside of like mob circumstances where they wouldn't have had a chance to recant, you don't, but if you could find, like for example, witnesses of Joseph Smith, who were willing to go to their torturous demise because they would not refuse that confession, that would be a pretty solid argument, but it's interesting, you almost never do. The closest I personally found is, there was a man who was killed with Joseph Smith, but that wasn't a mob, he never would have had a chance to recant. And- Wait, let me stop you, let me stop you CJ. Not to disagree, but I mean, Mormonism has tons of martyrs. They were dropping like flies throughout the whole early year, but I agree, that doesn't have any effect on the truth of their claims. It doesn't make them liars, it makes them martyrs, I get that. The whole question of whether Matthew was a martyr is a whole different thing, yeah. Right, well, and I think you would probably agree with me, too, that the vast majority of Mormon martyrs, they may have even met Joseph Smith, like the laity who just saw him one time, right? But it wasn't like, for the most part, when you talk about like, for example, the three witnesses of Mormonism, right? I know Martin Harris is the one that comes immediately from Mormonism, right? Right, right, right. Anyway, anyway, it's complicated, yeah, never mind. But you don't see those people martyred, right? The one example you tend to have is, like I said, the person who died in the mob with Joseph Smith, but again, that's mob violence. It's not quite the same thing, right? It's not like they put him in front of a corpse. You must deny Joseph Smith, he says, no, I can't do it. This might also have to do with where we are at this point in human history. I mean, again, they tried to execute Nietzsche and Dyshaunin twice for the Pacific Buddhism that he was preaching, specifically because what he was saying was subversive and the state was not keen on it, you know, because it undermined their power. So it's become, as we have moved further in history, it's become much more difficult to execute someone simply because they speak against you. You know, Nietzsche and Dyshaunin was teaching in the year 1100. Let me just jump in. Let's give David the last word, and then I hate to do it guys, but I think after David has a chance to respond, it's probably a good time to go to Q&A. Yeah, and again, we might as well jump into Q&A, but I just wanna say that the problem with martyrdom in Christianity is did it really happen or not or was it just a propaganda device to sell the religion? And that's a whole different question. Juicy. Let's leave it at that for now. Thank you very much, gentlemen. I know that you guys have always got extra to say, which I would encourage you folks. Their links are in the description. You can hear more from them. And hey, maybe hopefully we love to have them back on in the future. And so thank you guys so much. I'm just so excited that this was a congenial, thoughtful, and rigorous discussion. And so I really positive feedback. Thank you. It's... Thank you. People have really been enjoying it. It's been a real joy because these discussions, as you can imagine, do not always go so lovely and it's been a joy to talk to you both. Yeah. Absolutely. So thank all three of you. And then we'll jump into these questions. Thanks, everybody. Want to remind you folks, we're shifting into... Now it's a good problem to have. We oftentimes have so many questions and responses that we're trying to look for only serious questions. If you send in like a positive comment or anything like that, we'll read it in our kind of after credit scene. But in the meantime, we're just gonna stick with our more serious questions up front. So first, Dean Pinar, thank you for your question. Said, for David, why do we as atheists treat the Bible a collection of stories in parentheses differently to compilations of stories such as Herodotus and others? We seem to accept these as true or at least believable. Yeah, I have one. Yeah. That's a good question. Well, we'll give you David a chance to respond first and then if you want to, we'll hear a quick rebuttal. I'm sorry, I lost my tone, train of thought. Go ahead and say what you're gonna say, CJ. Well, I guess the only, I was just going to sort of ask the same question in a different way, which is why is it that you might accept, for example, I'm sure you don't agree with, everything Socrates ever said, definitely not Plato, because Plato is like, I mean, a straight totalitarian tyrant in political views, but you accept he existed, right? So basically that, right? Why is it not the same thing offered for our team? And why do we accept X, Y, Z and not, right? I'm, thank you for that clarification. And it's a great question. When we talk about the historicity of anybody, religious figure, non-religious figure, and it occurred to me, it blows my mind that I didn't say this at the beginning, I do not believe that Jesus existed. I don't believe that most of the characters around Jesus existed. I'm 50-50 on John the Baptist. It wouldn't shock me either way. Most of our beloved characters in the Old Testament did not exist. Most of the ones we don't give a damn about like Hezekiah and Josiah, yeah, yeah, they existed. Big whoops. But here's the question. Why do we accept anybody except anybody's historicity or even the historicity of an event? It all depends on how much evidence we have and what kinds of evidence we have to support them because every single thing we talk about from history, we provisionally accept it only to the extent that it has evidence backing it up and if it's good evidence and what kind of evidence, and the more lines of evidence it has, the better. And not all kinds of evidence are equal. It drives me crazy when we hear Christians say things like, oh, Luke was an excellent historian because he tells us right in the beginning of his book even by ancient historical standards, it's not some modern chauvinism if that was even a really thing, which it's not, but even by ancient standards, the so-called history and the Old Testament and the New Testament does not hold up even by ancient standards. I might point something out really quickly here. Sure. Oh, no, no, no, just super short. It's the same extends to any other, any other, yeah. Oh, super short. Super short. That's a good ideal to hold up but I will also point out that there are no political ramifications attached to Herodotus as opposed to Christian. If Jesus was real and is as he was presented in the scriptures, that means ultimate reality has some very definite opinions on a lot of stuff including obsessive views of what you do in the bedroom. So it implies a lot more that the stakes are higher. Absolutely. Well, as Stephen Colbert says, and I'd love to say it, reality has a well-known liberal bias. Next up, thank you very much for your question or I should say this is a compliment. I'm gonna read it. It's an exception, but it's just positive. Cystic so strong said, thanks all three of you. And so I wanted to just let you know that people really enjoyed listening to you guys and Tom's chair, thanks for your question, says why didn't Jesus actually write anything? Do you think that he even could write? I guess that's maybe for everybody. So we could start with David and work our way with CJ and then Brenton. Yeah, and I'll just say, I don't think he existed full stop and that's why we don't have anything written by Jesus. Well, and that's not even quite true because we do have later writings that were put in the name of Jesus, the way that we have writings from the New Testament that are put in the name of apostles and writings in the name of Paul, half of which are just forged under his name. Anyway, I'm getting way too down a rabbit hole for that one, so I'll just leave it at that. You got it, thank you. And then CJ. Yeah, so I would say that the reason why we don't have writings directly from Jesus are actually twofold. Number one, I think that God would know that everybody would look at the gospel according to Jesus and basically throw everything else out because he's Jesus. I also do think that there's something to be said about the Old Testament concept of witnesses in the mouth of two or three witnesses shall a thing be declared. And one does not typically witness of themself per se. You can, in fact, that's even in also in the scriptures in John, how Jesus talks about how he witnesses of himself. But for the most part, people tend to like witnesses to come from outside of oneself. So to have two apostles, a disciple of an apostle and a historian right before Gospels might be a little bit better from an evidentiary standpoint, at least from the Middle Eastern perspective of things where they have a lot of reliance on the concept of witnesses and especially in Israel, right? Gotcha, all right. So this is actually really interesting. This reminds me of something that radio host once said to philosopher Alan Watts when he came on, because either before or after the program, he came up and he said, if God existed and was benevolent, don't you think that he would have provided us with an infallible guide for living? And Alan Watts said he would do absolutely no such thing because I don't believe that any benevolent deity would do something to his children that would rot their brains. I'm glad that I have not been provided with an infallible guide for living in much the same way that I'm glad that my grandfather did not leave me a million dollars because then I would never do anything for myself. I would never learn anything for myself. Part of the only way we get better is by engaging with obstacles and overcoming them. That's how spiritual progress works. So in the event, arguably that Jesus was God and could have written a perfect fallible Bible instruction manual that we all just have to follow what the hell is the point of living at that point? Because everything's been spelled out for you and suddenly free will goes right out the window. So I would say, he either didn't write it if he was God and the singular God, the boss, he didn't write it because the point is not to follow the Bible exactly or to know everything exactly and all powerful being would have just made us know everything. And if he didn't write it, I mean, he wasn't a writer probably. He may not have been able to write or just maybe that's just not his strong suit. He's better in front of a crowd. So there's a number of reasons why, but I think it's actually very good that we don't have an infallible guy to support. Gotcha, thank you very much. Dean Pinar has the next question who asks, why do you seem to separate the terms agnostic and atheist where they are not mutually exclusive and address and address different levels of knowledge or belief? Oh, I get this one. You guys can go first, but I only said that I don't think Bart, yeah, I only said that I think Bart Urban considers himself an agnostic, not an atheist. I agree with you that there's no contradiction. You can be both and it's not a problem. Gotcha. And one's not better than the other for that matter. So I'm happy to call myself all of those things. You got it. Brenton, if it's super short. Yeah, super short, agnosticism deals with our ability to know anything about God. You can be a Christian and agnostic or a atheist and an agnostic, whereas atheism deals with a belief in a specific type of God, usually the Christian God. But also people use those words as atheism and atheism light. So as opposed to doubtful as opposed to definitely no. Next up. Thanks, Cigafredo Zorabia, for your question. I prefer the, I'm just gonna say I prefer the definition that atheism is lack of a belief in a God rather than, anyway, that's a whole other show. That's a whole other show. Next up. Sorry, James. No, that's all right. And Cigafredo Zorabia says Brenton using history did the East influence the Western cultures or vice versa? Where does Jesus apply in such a historical time being Buddhist? So Jesus explicitly wasn't Buddhist. He was a Bodhisattva. A Bodhisattva doesn't necessarily expound Buddha's teachings, but like what Shakyamuni is talking about is older and bigger than Buddhist tradition as we understand it. And in fact, if you read the Lotus Sutra, like Buddha's freaking older than the universe, like older than the stars, yeah, this has been going on for aeons, incalculable. So as far as how things were influenced, I don't believe that the historical Jesus knew anything about Hinduism, for instance, or he might have known something about China, but there didn't seem to be the way he spoke and the way he related to religion. Probably he was isolated from those cultures, even though those cultures were present on the earth. It really wasn't until very recently that the world became connected. Ironically, Nam-myo-ho-renge-kyo, the mantra that my sect is really big about, was specifically chosen by Nityurindai Shonin because it represented Japan, China and India, which according to him was the entire world at the time. And that's one of the reasons why it is considered universal and for everyone, not just specific cultures. So who influenced who? There may have been some cultural exchange, but they were more isolated in this particular time and place as far as I know, but they definitely had large impacts on each other since then. And in fact, some people think that the Pure Land School of Buddhism was influenced by Christianity. Well, I'll say this too. I think if Jesus did both exist and also wasn't God, then he was almost certainly influenced by the cynics, like almost guaranteed. But obviously, I don't believe that. I believe he was God, but it's almost impossible that that's not the case if indeed he did exist and was also not God. The cynics were fun. I freaking love the response to Plato with the plucked chicken. Me too, actually. Thank you very much. And thank you, Sidious Freight Oats. Robbie, for your question said, for David, what do you make of every monotheistic religion talking about Jesus, even if in a quote different way? Where does that place him in religious belief? Well, that's a funny thing to say that every monotheistic religion talks about Jesus. Every monotheistic religion now talks about everybody. But for instance, Judaism didn't talk about Jesus before well into the Middle Ages. One of our first quotes about the Jewish response to Jesus, if you will, was in Justin Martyr's book, where he is in a debate with a Jewish character who presents all the Jewish arguments that he was hearing at the time and he presents Christian answers to them. And one of them is that, you know, no one's heard of Jesus if he ever existed at all and he won't appear until Elijah appears anyway. And so the Christians seem to be inventing a Jesus for yourselves and are indiscriminately dying for his sake. We've got it. And we can talk more about the Jewish, mention of Jesus, like for instance, in the Talmud, the later Talmud and other Jewish writings. You got it. And thank you for your question. Dean Pienars has, Brenton, how would you prefer Google explained Buddhism and its core concepts to the layman? So the idea that Buddhism and its core concepts can be explained to the layman by a search engine is kind of hilarious. Because the thing is, is that Buddhism is a dialogue. It's a dialectic. It happens between, you know, mentor and disciple between a teacher and a student. What's really interesting actually, because you'll hear this out of everybody, is they'll say, well, what about, you wanna be free of desire, but what about the desire to stop desiring Gotcha. Yeah. And the thing is, that's the point. That's where the master goes, okay, you're starting to figure this out. Because again, this is a process. Yeah, you've gotta think that, like, you know, a lot of people who entered the priesthood, especially in medieval eras and stuff and went into the Zen monasteries, they didn't have any interest in being monks. They were just sent there by their family in much the same way that, you know, in England, the first son becomes a politician, the second son goes into the military, the third son goes into the priesthood. And so, like, I think that what would be great is if we didn't try to think of Buddhism and in the sense of facts, which can be Googled, but more something that has to be experienced. It is a method, it is a practice, as opposed to something that can be intellectually grasped. Because we're talking about something that, you know, the Nam-yoh-ho-dreng-ge-kyo, the mystic law of the Lotus Sutra, is called mystic because it is specifically difficult for human brains to understand. We're trying to talk about that, which cannot be put into words. Got it. The finger that points to the finger pointing to the moon is not the finger pointing to the moon. Yeah, exactly. You got it. And, I mean, one moment, I just had kind of a little glitch here on my desktop, but I'm loading up the next question. So, let me find my spot. Thanks for your patience. Another short answer is I wish Google would, there's a great video by Alan Watts called, You Are the Universe, and another is called I Am the Sun. I Am the Sun in particular. It's only got like 50 views, but it is phenomenal. And I really wish that was like the first result on Google. Gotcha. And found it. Thanks for your patience. This one comes from Zirafa. Appreciate your question. Said, CJ, why would God need Jesus in flesh? He wasn't the only person to ever shed blood while saving others. If it was his exemplary life, wouldn't it perform the same function even if entirely fictional? No. And the reason is because Christ is our kinsman redeemer who is redeeming those who, excuse me, he is kin too, namely man. The reason he has to be born of a woman is because all men, say for Adam, and I guess Eve, because I mean- And McDuff. Would be born of woman, right? He has to be born under the law because all humans outside of Adam and Eve would be born under the law. The stressing of why he needs to be a kinsman redeemer, I personally think is best laid out in Hebrews, though first John actually goes over it very well as well, why he must be someone who comes in the flesh, in the physical flesh. And basically it boils down to a spirit, number one does not die, number two does not resurrect, and number three is not kin with humanity, and number three is the biggest point. You're not under the biblical system redeeming some other species, right? God isn't here, for example, to redeem goats because he didn't come as a goat, right? He came as a human being. And so that's a, that would be sort of the short succinct answer to that. I would also point out, I don't think God needs anything. I think that that is the way that God decided to save human beings. I would point out that from the biblical perspective, humans are not damned because they do not accept Christ. They are damned because they are sinners. They are saved because they do accept Christ. And I think that's a fundamental point to be made. And it sort of shows what in my belief is the true point of Jesus being here, which is not God's need. It's not anything like that. It's just that he wants human beings to be saved from their sin. Can I throw a follow-up question? Can I throw a follow-up question? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, and I think maybe the need want thing is it, but why is blood involved at all from anybody, dove, goat or savior? A great question, actually. So from a biblical perspective, I can't say 100%, but I can get almost there, what it seems to boil down to is that God is a deontologist. There is a famous quote from the Watchman from Rorschach where he says, there's good and evil and evil must be punished. That phrase, evil must be punished, seems integral to the justice of God. Evil things are punished because they are evil things. And that comes in the Bible through the form of one's own death by sin, death entered into the world. So the atonement, the best way I kind of like to describe it is in the same way where you have somebody in a, what would you call that? Excuse me, on death row, right? This person on death row dies and then everybody figures out that this person on death row was actually innocent. Well, now the whole world starts to have this huge push towards, let all the guilty go because we don't want to kill an innocent man. And it's kind of the same concept there in a way, but it's more so the fact that God does require punishment for sin and he himself was willing to take that upon himself so that men would not necessarily have to experience it. I'm gonna point out as a huge fan of Alan Moore and an anarchist like Alan Moore, you're not supposed to like Rorschach. He is supposed to be a nut. Believe me, I fully understand that, but the thing is, and I think I actually believe because I'm a huge Alan Moore fan as well. I believe Alan Moore did more to prove the deontologist worldview than anybody in the 20th century because he wrote the character with the specific intent of making that character the most hated and he ended up being the only one in the entire story anyone considers a hero. We must think that's very interesting. I don't know, I'm just saying, the point of watchmen is that's not how human morality works. You can't cleave to deontology or consequentialism. It's both at once. We must, I hate to say. Let's see, just to try to get through a few more questions, guys. I hate, maybe what I should do is let it go a little bit further, but. That's amazing. You know what, we'll be here all night, James. We will be here all night. Evan Stein, thank you for your question. This they had asked, should we apportion our credulity to the plausibility of a claim? We know wars happen, so we should be more credulous of war accounts than supernatural. I could not agree more. I mean, to be honest with you though, I would kind of argue that it's interesting because for the vast majority of human history, throughout every single culture that has ever existed, including our own, people have affirmed the existence of the supernatural. So I do think it's pretty odd to ask that kind of a question. Hey, hold up, that's a big no on that one. Well, it's absolutely, name me a single culture or point in time, when we did not have acceptance of the supernatural. Right here, right now, I do not have acceptance of the supernatural. Right, but you're an individual, you're not a society. Everything has Darwin. But I do have acceptance of the supernatural, which almost completely proves your point, right? Here in America, at this point in time, or disproves your point, right? Because here in America, at this point in time, we still have belief in the supernatural. Me and Brenton are examples of that. Well, I guess I don't know if Brenton believes supernatural claims, but I'm at least an example of that, right? I'm more or less of the belief that if the supernatural exists, it's natural, we just don't understand it. Like, for instance, great example here. Somebody once talked to me in our last debate about the afterlife, which is a great one, look up, it's me, T-Jump, and Pastor from, I think Malaysia, which is this great guy. But in this debate, like we brought up the fact that when a person is dying, they get a huge shot of a specific drug straight to the brain, DMT. It's the one of the strongest hallucinogens known to man. And the thing is, is that when you are on a hallucinogen, your sense of time gets messed up. So arguably, if you're God and you're setting up a universe and you wanna transport someone to the afterlife, that's a physical means of doing it, much the same way that you're coding a computer, you have to put in a code into the computer to get it to do the thing that you want it to do. So there is a way to where you can have reincarnation and an afterlife in heaven realms and stuff at the same time. It just happens physically through the chemical DMT. Or perhaps it's being mistaken, DMT is mistaking for those. Yeah, well, it wouldn't make a difference to the person having the experience though. That's the point. If you experience it, it's real to you. Is it a lie? I don't know, I don't care. Right. I don't know. Fair enough. Yeah, this is kind of a Joe Rogan question, so I apologize to James for going into it. No worries. We will jump into the next one from Smokey Sainte, who says, David, if you deny Christian martyrs, do you also deny the H cost? If you know what I mean, there are certain words that I don't like YouTube thing. Smokey, don't you? Or the Crusades or the Inquisitions. Or are you just skeptical about Christian genocide? Oh, you're adorable. Yeah, bless your heart. The reason I have doubts on Christian martyrs, first of all, most of the Christian martyrs stories in the Bible, I have doubts about most of what we get told as history in the Bible, full stop. As far as Christian martyrs in particular, there's a great book that a Christian author wrote working on Christian scholarship. Candida Moss is the myth of persecution, where she goes into the Christian martyrs stories and shows how they don't really have any historical backing for the most part. Not to say that no one's ever been persecuted for Christianity or even is being Christian today for Christianity. That's certainly the case. It's always funny to me, if you express any problems with the problematic historicity of the Bible, all of a sudden you're lumped in with moon landing denials, Holocaust denials, any kind of other climate change denial filled in the blank. Usually I get that from our fellow atheists. And to be honest, I've got that a lot less in the 10 years since my book Nailed came out. But when that first came out, what shocked me wasn't that the Christians hated it because I mean, of course, what else do I have to say about it? But how many atheists thought that these were all established facts of history. And it's been four books later in 10 years. And I think that that opinion is changing, that they're realizing that, yeah, these are not established facts. And in fact, the opposite is true. That's super interesting. I had no idea that you got so much grief from some members of the skeptic community. That's interesting. Oh yeah, big time. Yeah. I'm married to Smoky, by the way, for the record, just bringing up the first point, especially, you know, again, Nazis. Thank you. Thank you. If this channel isn't here tomorrow, you know why. Let's see, we, I think we have gotten two, got those, thanks so much for your questions, folks. And yes, Smoky, Sassy, very, very naughty. Samuel Lilholm says, question for CJ, what are your thoughts on Jay Warner Wallace's view on the New Testament, taking each book as one would in a court case? How each are like witnesses to be cross-examined? I don't think it's a bad idea by any stretch. I think looking at things from the perspective of a, you know, a forensic scientist certainly is gonna give you a unique view. And I also do think that, you know, there's a way, there's a reason, rather, that we do it. It's a very good way to discover things that we may not have been there to see or that we don't have video evidence of and things like that, right? Um, my only problem, I guess, with Jay Warner Wallace is that I have noticed both with him and with Lee Strobel, who I actually even like significantly more than Wallace. You're sorry to say that again? CJ, you do or don't? I really like Strobel. I do like Warner as well, but my problem, or Wallace, excuse me, but my problem with Wallace, which I don't have as strongly with Strobel, but I do have with Strobel as well, is that because of their former profession, it's almost like, like people expect you to read the case for Christ and then never read another apologetics book again, even though I personally believe it's not even in the top 10 for apologetics works. I really like orthodoxy. I really like James White's works. I mean, tons of James White's works, right? I really like The Everlasting Man, C.S. Lewis's, you know, talking about the problem of pain. All these other things that I think I would definitely take before. I mean, even here, I think this is against heresies, is much more useful in my opinion than a lot of the things that you're gonna find from J. Warner Wallace or for Lee Strobel, and that's not an insult against them. It's just simply to say that I think people get carried away with this. Well, he was a forensic investigator, so therefore it's like, well, I mean, therefore nothing really, right? Like he's a good apologist, but let's not pretend that he's like Christ incarnate, you know? Right, and I have a, I mean, let me put this, I've met J. Warner Wallace, lovely guy, terrific guy. I really enjoyed meeting him on a personal level, but his whole approach to me is completely wrong because we're not talking about eyewitness testimony in compatibility. We're talking about literary forgery, and that's a whole different approach that needs to be taken. But even honestly, even if we did approach it as eyewitness testimony, if you just take the three synoptic gospels and John's gospels, there are some serious ass difficulties trying to reconcile those in my humble opinion, and not just mine, of course. Also, didn't they find the gospel of Judas a little while ago? Obviously not really written by Judas, but there was, and unfortunately, a lot of it has been lost, but apparently it was wild. I'm really disappointed that we didn't get a better translation of it. Well, and the thing with that in particular is a lot of those things, sorry, just a brief, a lot of those things, like for example, the gospel of Judas, a big portion of the reason that we know that those came later aren't even because of the manuscript record as much as they are that we know where those kinds of beliefs come from, namely, Marcian of Sinov. And he lived around the late 1st century, he died around the year 100, if I'm not mistaken. No, he was born around the year 100. There's a guy who had similar beliefs to what seems to be expressed by what they have in the gospel. Yeah, and so the idea is that like, if those beliefs come from Marcian, then the gospel of Judas has to be after Marcian actually articulated those beliefs, right? I'll have to look up to Marcian and I wasn't aware of that. There's a whole jungle out there of non-canonical Christian writings that we could talk about. Again, that would be a whole nother night we could spend all day on. Right. A whole other night. I like the expanded universe. We'll talk later. And next up, let's see. I am not sure how to pronounce your name because it's in another language but we do appreciate your question friend. They asked, does Brenton believe in Advita or Da-Ve-Ve-ta? Advita or Da-Ve-ta? Oh, I'm trying to figure this one out because I think I know it by a different term. And I think it means Avidya. Oh, okay, that actually, that probably is right. I think that's right. Yeah, I'm thinking this is something that I know from because Avidya, like that's what video comes from. So that's, I'm thinking, and I may have the specific doctrinal thing confused here. I do that from time to time. So I resolve to, I will answer this in a video later if I get it wrong, but I specifically tend to embrace Anatman with no self, no soul. I think the individual, the eye that we experience is an illusion created by consciousness because consciousness is by its very nature and individual experience. So as far as like the Alan Watts compared it to imagine you have a light that's covered by a black ball and in that light there's pinholes and each pinhole is an aperture through which the light comes out. So each, every one of us is an aperture through which the whole universe looks out and all of that taken together, that's God, essentially. That's the Buddha, that's the universe experiencing itself. It is the universe eyeing. Now, if I have that wrong with a different obscure doctrinal thing, I will fix that on my channel and I will be very embarrassed. You got it. And last question of the night. Tigera Hitman, thanks for your question, said, for David, James was openly skeptical that Jesus was the Messiah. Later, James became a courageous leader of the Jerusalem church, even being stoned to death for his faith. Why is this? Yeah, because you're mixing up James the just, the leader of the Jerusalem church with James the brother of the Lord. We're talking about completely different characters. Gotcha. I would push back on that, but I don't want you too much because I know that that's probably a debate in and of itself to me and David could have to be honest with you. I was gonna say, yeah, we've got a whole chapter. I can say a lot or I can say just nothing and that's, you know, at this point in the game, that's what I would say. Forgive me, I missed one question. Bogdan, dragon, nay, nescu. Thank you for your question, said, CJ, if Christianity is true, how do you see the other religions or spiritual traditions, especially the bigger and older or the big and old ones like Buddhism and Hinduism and the Enlightenment traditions? I'm pretty good question. So it varies from, you know, faith to faith. I have often told people how when I was in middle school and high school, I was what I would consider to be a Jack Buddhist. I didn't know enough about it to claim to be a true Buddhist, but if you would ask me at the time, I would say absolutely I was. I believe the four Vedas, I believe that, you know, the goal of life was to reach a point where you did not actually have attachment to anything. And, you know, there was certain things out there that I'm absolutely sure that I did not understand because I was so young, but nonetheless. So, and I still have that kind of, you know, respect for the philosophies of Buddhism. I think a lot of it is just objectively true. For example, the first Veda that all life is inherently suffering, I think people would be very wise to just accept that and move on. And so, you know, in that case, there's some, you know, positivity there. Although I do still think if you look at it as your religion, I do think it is a path that leads to, you know, damnation really, I just gotta be blunt with it. On the flip side of that, Islam, right? While I might have respect for what Islam does in regards to not necessarily, you know, valuing women strictly for their sexuality, they go the other route so severely that I can't accept them, right? It's too brutal, it's too ferocious. It seems very much based in nothing but hatred, whether it's of the Jews or of the Christians or of the woman's autonomy or things like that, right? And though I may have respect for certain elements of it, I just can't respect the faith at large. You wonder if that's maybe war propaganda? I mean- Well, honestly, I happen to, there was a point in time only a year ago where I could tell you I accurately could quote the Quran better than I could the Bible. I mean, that's one faith I am quite familiar with. And to be honest, I mean, I can even go as far as to say, you know, I earlier said that fundamentalism, in my opinion, is the only legitimate form of religion. If I was a Muslim, I would absolutely be a terrorist because that is just simply what the religion teaches. See, I don't believe you. Again, I don't believe you on that. I believe you believe that, but at the same time, again, Islam as far as a religion is, what is it? It's like 25% of the world's population. If as a religion, it turned people into chaos goblins, I really think that we would have a much bigger problem on our hands than we have otherwise. I think that this particular fundamentalist and actual hobbyist strains of Islam that have been coming after us and after the Western world are a direct result of horrible conditions imposed on those environments by the West in a lot of ways. And also us using them as proxies in our wars against the Soviets. But by the way, I just, I did look up a vidya and this connects to your thing about duke or suffering. So, and by the way, you sound just like me in high school, so we're good, we're not even funny here, I've just looked into it a bit more and become a practicing Buddhist since then. And I was very confused about it. So a vidya, yeah, I was wrong about that. That's titled Ignorance. The reason I didn't recognize it is that in Soka Gakkai, it is fundamental darkness. It is our tendency to forget our connection to other people. So again, with the metaphor of the fundamental light coming through the black ball, fundamental darkness, a vidya is the, it's actually the black ball. It's the thing that makes us think that we're not the light, we're just the speck of it. As far as, so suffering, yeah, I'll just get this in real quick. This is the original question was for CJ, but if you want to do it really quick. I'm sorry. So suffering duke, it's not necessarily physical pain. It is an overwhelming sense of unsatisfactoriness, specifically because the world, we as conscious beings crave things to remain the same. And that is in fundamental tension with the world, which is always changing. So existence is duke and the cause of duke is desire, the desire for things to remain, the cessation of desire is the cessation of duke. But again, the foreign noble truth, it's like baby's first Buddhism. And it's the opening salvo in a dialogue and practice that has been going on for centuries. So there's a lot more there, but yeah, cool, I'm glad we got to talk about that. Gotcha, CJ, if you want to give a quick rebuttal, just because the original question was directed at you, then we will wrap up. So want to remind you everybody's links are in the description and go ahead, CJ, if you want to make a last comment. Yeah, absolutely, I appreciate that. So I'd say just two things. The first one, just to be brief on the Islam thing, I understand your point, but the vast majority of most practitioners of religions I think don't actually practice their religion in a fundamental this way. Most Christians you've probably met, for example, probably aren't super huge on the whole gay marriage thing, just as a random example, because modern times have suggested that they go a different route, right? I think that's true generally of faith, not just of Christian faith, but to sort of wrap up with the question, right? To answer the questioner, I do have varying levels of respect for different faiths. It depends on the faith in particular and what they teach. I do, however, believe that all faith that is outside of specifically the Christian, I guess, purview, if you will, is in the end a false faith that leads away from truth, and I do believe that God himself is truth, so therefore it leads away from God. I know that's like the fundamentalist answer, maybe you were probably hoping for something a little less cliche, but it is what I believe. Gotcha, want to say folks, we appreciate all of our guests, they're linked in the description, so you can find more from all of our guests, as I have linked them. Those links are waiting for you right now. So, want to say thanks so much though, David, CJ, and Brenton, it has been a true pleasure to have you guys. Thanks so much for hanging out with us. And by the way, everybody can still pre-order Snow White Zombie Apocalypse, yeah, because we're about to go to print for issue three and just look it up on BackerKit. Thank you. We'll talk. James, thanks so much for this. This has been an absolute delight. My pleasure, it's been all, the pleasure has been all mine, and so thanks everybody. I'll be back with a post-credits scene in just a moment, and we'll be talking about upcoming debates as we just confirmed one earlier today that I'm excited to share about it. So the thumbnail for it isn't even up yet, so stick around, I'll share about that. And in the meantime, folks, keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable. Be right back, everybody. Ladies and gentlemen, thanks so much. That was epic. So I really do appreciate our guests. That was phenomenal. It was just a true pleasure to have these guys on. So David, CJ, and Breton, we really do appreciate those guys. And so if you see them in the meantime, give them a friendly hello, folks. We do appreciate them. And very excited for you guys being here. Just thanks for hanging out with us. The more, the merrier. And want to remind you, no matter what walk of life you're from, for real, we do appreciate you just hanging out here. It's cool to have you. And so thanks for making it a fun party here. And also, folks, really excited. So this Saturday, so I just emailed, here's the backstage info. I had just emailed with Fight the Flat Earth today, as I had mentioned, the original debate with Fight the Flat Earth and Alex Stein fell through the cracks. My fault. Nothing to do with Fight the Flat Earth. Now, something really interesting is I had reached out to Fight the Flat Earth. We have arranged a different debate. New topic, not brand new. We've had it before, but it's at least new in the sense that we've had a lot of Flat Earth debates. Like, it seems like we've had like one each week for like a month at least. So we will be debating whether or not the Earth is at the center of the solar system in universe. So that should be interesting. And so we hope you make it this Saturday to see that with Robert Sanjennis against Fight the Flat Earth. And hanging out with you in the live chat, though. Thanks for hanging out with us, guys. Good to see you. Lily Aja, thanks so much for being super supportive. That really does mean a lot. And so I am glad you were here, Lily. You were honestly like the most positive person. And so I hope you know that that seriously does mean a lot. James W, thanks for your encouragement. Appreciate your kind words. Xerafa, thanks for your kind words as well. Says goodnight. See you next time. Take care, friend. I hope you sleep well. And yeah, I appreciate you guys. Seriously, you make it fun. You guys put me in a great mood. Andrew Kroll says, great, good show. I only have one life rule, be nice. Thanks for your kind words, Andrew Kroll. Glad you enjoyed it. And Lily Aja, thanks for posting the Patreon link in the live chat. We are on Patreon, folks. So if you dig it, I wanna let you know that it's true. And if you have not heard, you should have been living in a cave on Mars with your fingers and your ears. You guys, we are on podcast all over the place. It's gotta be like 20 different podcast apps that we're distributed to now. So wanna let you know. Seriously, really do wanna encourage you. If you have not already checked us out via podcast, now's a great time. And that way you can confirm that we're on your favorite app. Once in a great while, people are like, oh yeah, like you're actually not on mine. It's pretty rare now because we've gotten on so many. But I love when people let me know because that way I can fix it by getting on their favorite podcast app. Because we want it to be convenient if you're gonna listen to it. And we hope it's a joy if you enjoy listening to it. And so, BV, thanks for hanging out with us. Good to see ya. And by the way, folks, I hope you're having a great week. Is everybody having a good week? Any feedback on, I hope you're doing okay. I really do appreciate you guys. Thanks, NET7, for your super sticker. Appreciate your support, friend. That means a lot. We're excited about the future, guys. We are excited about what we're doing here at Modern Day Debate. We have big plans, you guys. I'm telling you, especially this summer. Things are gonna get, I think, wild in terms of modern day debate. We're gonna do some epic stuff this summer in terms of in-person debates. That's what we're shooting for. No guarantees because who knows? Maybe the restrictions will be heavier than ever, I have no idea. But that's our goal, is we wanna do some epic ones. Trying to get big name people in-person in the same room to debate, that would be really fun. But Vesper, thanks for hanging out with us. I see ya there. Nicholas, Proclaimer of Messiah. Thanks for coming by, Nicholas. Bruce Wayne, good to see you again. Randy Rain, glad you're here. Perfect one, good to see you again. Language and Programming Channel is back. They just told me so in the live chat. Don Larson Jr., good to see ya. Robert Page, glad you're here. And what is here as well? It's not a Stone Cold Steve Austin reference, though I've asked before. Also, Munda Skeptical, thanks for hanging out with us friend, hope you're doing well. Dwayne Burke says, yee-haw! I couldn't agree more, Dwayne. Hope you're doing well, buddy. It's been a while since we've had you on. So we really do appreciate you. You are awesome. And let's see, Native Atheist said, I think he gives a thumbs up. We're glad you're here. And thanks, Jamie Russell, for your kind words and positivity. I love it. I seriously, it's true, folks, that once in a while we have some haters. We have some people that are just miserable, nasty, negative people. That's only about 1%, folks. Don't let them get to ya. We have so many people that are positive and excited about the future. As we fulfill our vision, folks, we are determined, dead serious. I'm absolutely all in. I plan on doing modern day debate for the rest of my life. I love doing it. I enjoy it. It's a blast. It's just that we are striving to create an equal platform, a level playing field where people can make their case. And so, those are people from every walk of life. We hope you feel welcome. We appreciate you hanging out with us. It's always fun, friends. And the Cinegeek. Cinegog, thank you for hanging out with us. That's, by the way, folks, that's CJ who is just in the debate. If you see him in the live chat. And MashiM, glad to see ya, buddy. Let's see, King101, good to see ya. Robert Luskum says, I love you. Dragon King, thanks for hanging out with us. Is that grand admiral Thrawn that I see in your profile picture? Cause I'm a huge Star Wars fan. I wanna let you know I'm a monstrous Star Wars fan, for real. Robert Luskum says, great show. Thanks so much, Robert. I appreciate that. King101 says, drink the Haterade. It's true, we got a lot of haters. They're all like sour and bitter and salty and just, they're resent life. They're just all nasty and just, they're angry. But you know what? We got all these positive people that outnumber them and I appreciate those people. So thank you. Mundesceptical said, thanks for keeping it interesting. Peace, everybody. Thanks for hanging out with us, friend. We hope you have a great rest of your day. Wanna remind you guys, folks, this Friday we'll be airing a debate. Technically, you could say it's like, I don't know, I'm embarrassed to say it. I don't know the group that's hosting it, but it'll be in person. So if you want a good old-fashioned in-person debate to watch, this Friday we will be streaming it here live. So it's coming from Georgia. So it should be warm down there, but I think it'll be inside nonetheless, but it's gonna be awesome. And so, Dragon King says, glad to hear, oh yeah, I'm a huge Star Wars fan. Seriously, it would knock your socks off if you were like, whoa, James, you're that big of a Star Wars fan? Yeah, I am. Mandalorian was epic, especially the last several episodes. Episodes with like Ahsoka, episodes with Boba Fett, episodes with, I won't spoil it if you haven't already seen it, but the last episode was off the hook. It was amazing. So that was epic. But yeah, I'm gonna catch up on, I had mentioned during the show what we're trying to do now is we're trying to put in only serious questions. Oh, sorry, Twitch chat, I forgot about you. Brooks Sparrow, good night, I hope you sleep well. Nicholas House of Strode, thanks for your feedback and the Twitch chat tonight. Lilia Ajah, you as well, thank you. And Stripper Licker, hope you're doing well. Thanks for hanging out with us over, both in YouTube and in our Twitch chat. You guys, we're on Twitch. If this is valuable to you, if you're like, I prefer Twitch over YouTube, there's no shame in that, that's all right. I'm putting our Twitch link in the description and I am going to, what is the word I'm looking for? I'm pinning it to the top of the chat. There it is. And so, wanna let you know, you guys, if you enjoy it, wanna encourage you to click on that Twitch link that I have just pinned to the top of the chat. If you prefer Twitch, you can follow us over there and get reminders from when we go live. And especially if you end up in an Amazon Prime account, you have that free subscription that you can use to support us. So, it won't cost you anything extra. If you have Amazon Prime, you get a free Twitch sub that you can choose which Twitch streamer you're gonna use it on, which helps them. It's like, I think it was like $2.50 a month, which doesn't seem like a lot, but let's say we had 100 people who did it. It was like, hey, I think that helps. And Robert Lescom asked, did you cry at the end of Mandalorian? I definitely felt emotional. I did feel sad. I hadn't cried, not like the amount that I cried during Avengers Infinity War. I cry more during that, but it was definitely, it was emotional. And Norman Bates says, my mother's cooking me dinner. I'm 37 and still live with my mom. No problem, Norman. We're glad you're here, buddy. Thanks for hanging out with us seriously. The more, the merrier. And so we appreciate you. And we hope it's a delicious meal because, man, I eat eggs so much and it gets old once in a while. I mean, it's like, do it a lot. But yes, let me catch up on those super chats and say thank you guys for your support for any of the super chats that were more goofy, playful ones. Dave Dahlia Ford, thank you for your kindness. Puts a heart and says, love you, James. Appreciate that, Dave. Seriously, thanks a lot. Cystic to Strong again, said, thanks a lot, all three of you. I read that earlier, but I wanted to read it again because I just thought it was so positive and pleasant. So thanks for being positive, buddy. And then net seven, thanks again for your super sticker support. But yeah, I'm pumped, you guys. Are you guys having a good week? Tell me, give me that feedback. Norman Bates says, good night. Good night, my friend. I hope you rest well. But yeah, anybody else in terms of, let's see. Anybody else in terms of big things that have happened for you? I hope you guys are doing well. Let me know. For real, I'm at moderndatabate at gmail.com. Let me know if there's something I can do to make your life easier. Do want to be here for you and say thank you for making my life more fun because this channel is a blast. It's so fun and I just appreciate that you're a part of it, that you just hang out here. That makes it fun for me. So thanks so much. We are excited about the future. Believe me, folks, we are going to do big things. Very excited and huge thanks to Johannes who has reached out to me, kind of giving me free information and teaching on like, how do you develop like a consistent and clear brand? So we're working on that. So we're really excited about that. So thank you guys so much. But yes, do appreciate all of you guys hanging out. James W. Pumped to see you here. Let's see. James W. said, Mark Reed, Nicholas asked to be demodded. Let's see, Randy Rain. Let's see. Rich and Hyde. Rich and Hyde is like really triggered tonight. They're very upset. That's the one thing I got to tell you folks is that in the chat, I would highly encourage you, if you're going to accuse somebody of being like racist or whatever, you need to bring some evidence. So like Rich and Hyde is like, you're embarrassing yourself when you just claim it, but you have no evidence. You can't just say it and be like, well, people should just believe me. Like, oh, I just asserted it. It's like assertions. It just doesn't get you very far here. So need to have some evidence, buddy. But if you have the evidence, like I'm open to it and so, but it's just amazes me when some people in the chat, they just say like, oh, something's racist. And it's like, where is the evidence? It's like, here's the thing. It's like, if I say this, if I were to say theoretically, Mark in the chat is racist. Like, hey, everybody, Mark is racist. I'm not referring to any particular Mark, but Mark would be like, why James, what's your evidence? And so it's not enough to just make claims. So we do appreciate you folks, though. If you have evidence, though, that's what we're looking for. And so we appreciate you. We hope you have a great rest of your night, folks. Thanks for all of your support. I'm super excited about it. And so we do really appreciate you guys. We hope you guys have a great rest of your night. Keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable, everybody, take care.