 again it made its Chinatown just wanted to say that such a quintessential Aussie sentiment so I make my way here through Chinatown so Australia didn't have an exclusive white Australia policy in 1780 or 1805 only developed it around the turn of the 20th century beginning the 20th century so this would be a lot more Chinese and Japanese here and after we've got the exclusionary white Australia policy steadily implemented in the first 70 years of 20th century a number of Chinese and Japanese in the country steadily declined but we've always had a Chinatown here in Sydney at Wackston at Wayne and now about turn 15 to 20% of Australia's population is Asian and I was listening to Bridget Spencer here he did an interview with philosopher named David Skirbina. Let's play some of this. I think that seems to be how the early critiques went it was just you know this was a cultish weird group that were rebel rosters and troublemakers that we just don't like them that was kind of what the Roman do you think it spoke to a bit of a different perspective on divinity in the ancient world and in the sense that in my reading of ancient tax you don't get a kind of skeptic version of the word that we know today you know attack on Zeus you know where is the evidence where is you know so I think yeah so what it means to be divine definitely changes depending on time and place so David Skirbina is an atheist and he's presenting his understanding of the mythology of the origins of Christianity probably spoke to just a different perspective on what the gods were and in some ways you know fundamentalist of today are more rigorous demanding a kind of historicity I mean I remember when I went to in a last Easter decrease yeah there's no sense of historicity in the 13th century thousand years ago 1500 years ago 2000 years ago people weren't talking about historicity so that's relatively post-enlightenment concern credit I would I would say you have to believe this isn't just some narrative that you can draw from you actually have even the very notion of belief is different so the ancients experience the world differently so it's not just a matter of the conservatives and liberals believe different things they experience different things to be conservative so have more of a traditional medieval mindset obviously some so there's a more medieval than others but to be liberal is to have a more modern mindset what do you mean by modern we get down to here different understandings of the self right the liberal modern conception is the self is buffered the strategic autonomous basically good rational and the traditional sense of the self is that it's porous right what's going on outside of it affects it and tends towards wickedness and so we have these two very definitions various definitions in the self and so conservatives experience the world differently from liberals right there's more magic in the conservative or traditional world view there's a higher role of the sacred all right and so it's not so much a matter of belief but conservatives have experienced the divide and differently than modern liberals and so the ancients too experienced divinity differently they experienced divinity in a thunderstorm right they experienced divinity in an earthquake all right so they are much more mindful of sacred spaces sacred peoples than moderns who increasingly live in a less magical mystical world why so not only drive on the left side here in Australia you also walk on the left side that you know did Zeus really come down and you know father of course the other this was kind of noticing the whole point and we're kind of projecting our own you know view points backwards yeah that's a very modern scientific way of thinking right to ask for evidence to construct logical arguments right to ask for evidence to construct logical arguments right this is uh this is a different way of thinking than what the ancients or the medieval experience so in the ancient world if your country won in a conflict or your people won in a conflict like your god won and the conquered peoples accepted your deity there wasn't so much a matter of belief it was a matter of real life experience people experience in that world and they experienced the divine in a whole different way than we do now yeah so that is somewhere where Judaism Christianity different that these are religions that make historical claims that god entered human history and then it does have a tendency which i think is really powerful and important to it but then it's also you know reviving other myth systems and kind of spinning them and and so on and i think maybe that maybe that doesn't allow us to kind of see mythicism correctly or the myth of mythical quality and Christianity correctly um because there is something kind of so you know if you understand your religion you're not really religious all right like if you understand spirituality you're not really spiritual all right for a genuine religious a spiritual person this is a realm of mystery and you only get the intimations about how it works so to why don't you stand outside of religion and try to understand it using the secular rational terms you have left the religious experience a somewhat poor carpenter who came out and spoke and told moral lessons it's something that can kind of appeal in a way to a more modern sensibility but that kind of blinds us to the mythic quality and the essence of Christianity as well right okay you know keep it right and i mean the New Testament does read like kind of like a transcript of points about what Jesus said it's like you're actually sort of there that was kind of the idea but of course you know that general idea had been around for a long time and we can go back to Plato's apology which is basically a transcript of what sovereignty said in his own defense and it was 500 years 400 years prior to the time of Jesus so so everything has similarities with what went before it and differences right so there are similarities between Judaism and the cultures and religions that surrounded it and in which it was embedded there are similarities and there are differences there are similarities between Christianity and the cultures from which it arose and differences but just because you notice things that are similar in Judaism or Christianity or Islam and the cultures from which these religions arose doesn't mean that you deny that there aren't innovations and changes you could list off you know five ways that are different from the Pontius that doesn't mean that there aren't 15 ways that were similar so Christianity is explicitly claiming to be grafted on to the to the religion of the Jews but it's not explicit in Christianity are as profound roots in Hellenic mystery court religion that's not made explicit but it's just under the surface so Christianity throughout its history is kind of oscillated from the Hellenic mystery court pagan ritual sacrifice coats and it's Jewish elements interesting um so why don't what do you talk a little bit about your version of criticism so as you lay out at the beginning of your book there are there are a number of people who have taken this up really that in the 19th century particularly with German criticism they were kind of dissecting the Bible for the first time in a way that this was the origin of the documentary hypothesis of different authors that were blended together into these texts and there are obvious contradictions in the Bible where did this derive from this so during the course of the 19th century it appeared that biblical criticism was just going to completely destroy Christianity but then Christianity took a turn away from historical criticism through other forms of textual criticism that weren't as threatening to its fundamental theology and then there was you know figures like Bruno Bauer who Marx got into various disputes with but there was a there was a kind of atheism brewing out of the Hegelian tradition um you could say as well but maybe talk a little bit about that tradition because I actually find that interesting you know we sometimes seem to be reinventing the wheel of you know new atheism or you know Richard Dawkins was the first man in different languages and that's actually kind of ridiculous that this is a very long tradition maybe talk a little bit about that I find that intellectual history really interesting and then also how your your version of this is um is quite different in fact yeah all right so skepticism about the gods I mean you're right that goes way way back and you know I would go back again to the ancient Greeks you know because you know socrates talked very little about the gods or just sort of in a little hand waving kind of way you know Plato talked about in Demiurge you know it's you know the world's soul but this is sort of very distant abstract things and Aristotle kind of had this world mind that was kind of turning the cosmos but again very abstract philosophical kind of being um so so you know they in no sense were those like sort of modern gods which is like a personal being that you can kind of talk to and you pray to him and you know gives you forgiveness and so forth so I mean that's those those are very old ideas right to sort of be skeptical about gods that look like humans the anthropomorphized kind of gods that we have traditionally associated with religions and that kind of comes and goes over over the years of course with science right that gave gave it a whole new book books right in the 1700s in particular scientific reasoning you know starts and says well look we don't even need these these mythological tales anymore we can just talk about materialistic explanations of things and then they look at the Christian story and they say oh by the way there's a lot of weird contradictions in that story and things don't don't seem to make sense at the same time the German anthropologists are digging up you know ruins and hunting for evidence in the Middle East and they're finding that things aren't where they're supposed to be and they're not finding evidence of cities that are mentioned like what makes that city never actually existed you know maybe this thing is a lot newer than it would seem to be or maybe a lot older than it seemed and they were starting an actual data that was conflicting with the story the story had internal distrust who really kind of really started to press hard on the Christian story like hey this is just don't fly there's major problems you know internal and external so what are I guess just kind of picking up on instances in Nietzsche of focusing on Paul and I I think you actually laid out your book quite well where you're saying okay you know there is a lot of you know mythical criticism of of the Bible and so on but we actually need to get to intention and motivation and this wasn't just some accident or or honest mistake in the sense that people doing this really believed it at some point they were consciously creating a myth that they wanted to have uh that they wanted to have an effect on the world and so yeah credit when we're looking back in history you always have to use some informed speculation you can know things for sure but you actually so in politics you often see people lying there for a noble cause so and Republicans say that Joe Biden's not the legitimately elected president of the United States they're lying for what they see as a noble cause of rallying the Republican base and crusaders against this of that will often exaggerate the harms of whatever it is that they're crusading against so lying or exaggerating in service of a noble cause or in service of your people very common human phenomenon it's not just restricted to religion uh a certain intent and motivation uh in people's minds yeah absolutely and I mean I think there's a very clear motivation I think Nietzsche was maybe one of the first to pick up on it although it wasn't really very clear because just the way Nietzsche writes it's from Seattle there's some pieces and writing it takes a lot of work to pull this rest together yeah but you know I mean Nietzsche had the right to write basic fiction pictures are good you got Jewish power structure Jewish tribes who were in Congress today in Samaria until 63 BC when the Romans come marching in and throw them out of power the Romans take over in the Jews like anybody else would have been highly insistent and these were true okay so that's important we're understanding the origin of Christianity but uh there wasn't a Jewish power structure running Palestine at the time of Jesus the Romans were running it was the Romans who would crucify people this picture was not something that uh Jews practiced right there's a picture of something that uh Jews found horrific so Romans are kind of shadowy characters in the New Testament