Jon and Jordan Sitting on Porches Discussing Queer Theory

you're listening to the thank god for nostril podcast all right welcome to another episode of the thank god for nostril podcast

My name is John, a.k.a. HODLBOD, and with me in the flesh is Jordan Bush. Hello, sir. How are you? I am excellent. We're sitting on our front porch. I'm smoking a cigar. And did I say our front porch? We're sitting on my front porch. Jordan and I are not in a civil union. I almost said it, but you could use the royal we, you speaking on behalf of your family. That's my habit. My wife and I, we're a unit, and so anything I do, we do. Yeah, it's great to be here.

I'm thrilled to be able to be here. It's my first time up here and doing lots of cool stuff. I can't believe you haven't been here before. I know. I wanted to have lots of friends who live up here, but this is the first time in person. Yeah, and you've been reformed for, what, two years or something? Oh. Yeah, depending on how you consider reformed. I've actually met membership. Oh, yeah. If you can't reform bad, it's not real. If you can't reform bad, it's been 2000.

2010? That was 11 somewhere. Okay. Yeah, but if you're talking full boat, Calvin is my homeboy. Yeah, it's been more recent.

We don't have too much of a topic to talk about today because Jordan hasn't finished the reading. That's right. Yes, we are reading a book called Bulwarks of Unbelief. What's the subtitle? Do you remember it offhand? Belief in an Age of Technology? Yeah, Skepticism in the Age of... Something like that. It's a really good book. It's written by an acquaintance. Joseph Minich and who has already agreed to come on the podcast after we do our evaluation of it.

I'm glad. I'm excited for that. It's another one of those books that I've underlined a large portion of it. I was going through and pulling the quotes out this morning for reference and I've written down a hundred paragraphs from the book. Wow. I'm basically just copying the entire book into the text file on my computer. Yeah. It's bulwarks of unbelief,

atheism, and divine absence in a secular age. The purpose of writing the book is trying to account for why is it that where in past times you have people like Bavink, who's a present-trained theologian, who 400 years ago said something to the effect of atheism is just completely, it was unthinkable to him to imagine an atheistic world. And there would have been many people who agreed with him. How is that we've, in 400 years, have gotten to a point where we now see

atheism. There's many people who cannot imagine the world as not being the product of atheism. And so he just is trying to account for that change. It's real easy to start to be like, oh, that's just technology, or that's just, we now know more about the world, and so we don't believe the way that we used to be. We used to believe with all the skepticism and stuff like that.

And he just basically reigns all over that parade and just says, no, it's something more complex than that, which we'll get into. Yeah, it's good. We could go on, but it's an interesting angle because he takes the angle of saying, what is it about the world in its particularities that makes it hard to believe in God rather than what's the history and provenance of ideas? Which, that's how people think because we think in abstractions.

Those are abstractions. In a sense, abstractions are the product of that technologized world. In the first place, it impacts things and that's pretty helpful. I enjoyed it. Yeah. So we'll get there. It'll be on our next episode. Actually, it might not be the next when you guys hear, because John's got a couple. You recorded with Pastor C.R. Wiley. Who else did you record with that has yet to go live? Let's see.

Eliza Blue. Eliza Blue, yeah. By the time you hear this, all of these will be out. Yeah, exactly. Alistair Roberts. Alistair Roberts. Second appearance on the podcast. Yeah, my first time interviewing him. He's the only one, I think, that you did by yourself. Yep. Yeah. Is that really true? Tell me. I thought I did maybe one more. I don't know who's pulling the weight around here. It was great. It was great to talk to him.

But yeah, C.R. Riley especially helped me to put a couple of different puzzle pieces together. So he was not a disappointment. And I've been wanting to have him on for a long time. I finally caught him in person. He was walking down the street and you accosted him, didn't you? Yeah, he grabbed the nape of his neck and dried him in. Okay, so the thing we talked about doing on this episode. So I saw this article. The title is controversial and so it grabbed my attention.

And then I promptly, after reading, I believe less than the first paragraph, I immediately sent it to John. So this article, it's in First Things. First Things is this incredible publication, really thoughtful. I believe it's funded by Peter Thiel, among other people. There's a lot of really good and really thoughtful people who write for this thing. This particular article is written by Carl Truman.

He wrote a book a few years ago called The Rise, Something Rise of the Modern Self, something like that. But it's a great book. It won for whatever this is worth today. Christianity Today's Book of the Year. We are recording the few days after Christianity Today, which has historically been this really influential Christian publication, posted an article casting doubt on whether or not Jesus was nailed to the cross. Always a good thing to do around Easter. Exactly.

I'm like, you people are insane. It was a horrible justification. It was a miserably pathetic article. responded and people responded in deserving manner. But anyhow, so they named Truman's book of the year a few years ago The Rise and Fall of the Modern Self or something like that. Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. So anyhow, so Truman wrote for First Things, wrote an article entitled, Are the Tech Bros Worse Than Queer Theorists? And the answer is yes.

And as the kids might say, them's fighting words, okay? Because a lot of us are in the last few years, we've been tempted to believe that we obviously, especially in Christian circles, but even outside of Christian circles, there's been a lot of people who've seen that something called like total tolerance from these, from the alphabet people talking about how they're intolerant and so demanding that you accept them and that you approve of them, that you

celebrate with them all these things that they want to do. And so it's become easy for people of all stripes to see that, man, these guys are just totally going overboard. This is insane.

and part of the temptation though is is been because a lot of these tech bros folks who could we include in this somebody like the usual culprits are elon musk yeah elon peter teal ironically who's funding this which is it's interesting that they still publish this but oh yeah teal funds first oh yeah oh yeah big time funder but the rest of this article are the tech bros worse than queer theorists and so then he just compares these two things and what you what you really start

to take away is that these are not very different actually they're two expressions that the expressions are very different. The above ground fruit is very similar or very, the above ground fruit manifests very differently. But the reality is that there's actually the root of these two things is very similar. So I don't know, what were your thoughts? And then we can dig into some of the specifics. Yeah, it's definitely something that was brought to my attention by James Poulos. I'm

pretty sure I cite pretty much every episode of this podcast in his book, Human Forever. He talks about like the swarm and instrumentalization and what you do when you're in this on a quest for meaning, but you already view yourself as essentially meaningless as a bunch of interchangeable material parts. Whether you're swapping out your

penis or your brain is really no difference. You're looking at yourself as a collection of mechanical devices that work together to form some kind of inner experience, maybe, but without any kind of metaphysical justification for that. And so, yeah, the two are very closely related. their cousins. I don't think it's a new idea, but it's definitely enjoyable to look at this

particular angle. The article is predicated on a book that has come out called A Queer Lectionary, Improper Readings from the Margins, Year A. And he points out that queer theory is all about, it's a war against categories. It dissolves the God-given categories of male and female and potentially adult and child and heterosexual and not heterosexual. And, and it erases those distinctions by creating new pronouns, creating new genders, all this kind of stuff.

And, but it's an interesting juxtaposition with electionary because what is electionary Jordan? I, yeah, you probably explained it better than I can. I don't think I can. I know you've got a reform of reading. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so it'd be like readings of certain different topics that are forming your beliefs about certain things.

You read them at church, right? Yeah. So it's like readings that are designed to unite the people around. I'm trying to give a more broad reading. Obviously, a Christian lectionary is going to be in Christian readings. But yeah, this is something very different than that.

It's glorifying queerness and the kind of making this a central rallying point around which to think and appreciate rather than, like you said, the normal context of a lectionary is Christian scriptures and other practice, things like that. Yeah, so he says a lectionary and liturgy is an example of... It's a balloon. It's a balloon. My kids are making noise somewhere.

but lectionary and liturgy are structured forms of worship and modes of living as christians and so combining that with something that seeks to dissolve categories yeah and structure and form is ironic yeah but i also think it makes sense that queer theorists would want to co-opt this both for a culture war tactics sort of stuff but also a while ago i was looking at the statement of

faith for some Unitarian church. And it was, I was looking for it earlier. I couldn't find it, but it was really revealing because in Orthodox Christian theology, God is the source of being. He creates out of nothing, a contingent reality, which we call nature and plants man in it. And man has to live to God's standard, fails, and then God sends his son to deliver grace and redemption to man. And then man is then conformed into the image of God in Jesus, becoming, being

drawn into the life of God himself, ultimately in heaven. That's what glorification is. In other words, that we could mention that we were having a conversation about, but I'm not going to open that can of burns and this unitarian church their statement of faith was almost an exact inversion of it like it was so on point it felt really satanic yeah because it was perfectly because process theology is that is the idea that god is not complete and it's through through history that

god becomes fully god matures grows up i don't know exactly what the origin story is for that whether it's evolutionary Big Bang or what. It's not exactly the same as Jungian archetypes, but it has some of that same flavor to it. And it's basically that we, through our imagination and will, are creating the conditions under which God is perfected. And so in that theology, God conforms to the image of man. Yeah. And that is a scary inversion.

Yeah. It's effectively the inversion of, so when Jesus' disciples come to him, they ask him, teach us to pray, and Jesus teaches them to pray, Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done. It's basically the inversion of that. It's mankind saying, my kingdom come, my will be done. It is this scary thing.

And the other thing too is, this is important, is it's really easy to just presume that the framework presented by the Christian gospel is like this unique thing that can just be flatly rejected. but as one of your own prophets is known to have said, it's never whether, but which. And so you have this thing where, again, this lectionary has an understanding and an idea of

what is real and good and true. And so in their mind, this is a way to train their trained minds in accordance with the real good news, which to them, like, this is good news that there are no categories in that. Like we're all just making this thing up. You can be, it's like good news to an individual that you can create your own reality based on your own perceptions. And

all these kinds of things. It's not, this is, these are religious, this is actually expressed more explicitly, but like this is religious dogma that we're coming into contact with. And we cannot help, but do this. There's some people who, in some groups and factions who are more explicit about this idea than others, but it nonetheless, it doesn't mean that those who do not are any less, are any less doing that actual thing. And yeah, I just think that there's a lot

of really interesting things that he gets into here. He says, he talks about queer Christianity. He says, queer Christianity, rather like atheistic theism, is a contradiction in terms. It's about desecration, not consecration. The language of queer pity cannot hide this simple

fact. And so I think one of the things that I wanted to get into in this is just this whole, like the queer theory stuff, it has a completely, again, antagonistic understanding and deficient understanding, I would say, of language, of what language is and the purpose for which it exists.

One of the things that we've talked about a lot is that if we look at the world, we're in this, we're in the middle of this definitional crisis, this crisis of authority. How do we know things? What is the basis by which we, you know, by which we can know things? Part of this is we don't know what we just have forgotten. What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be male, female? What is marriage? What is government? What is money? We get into this in Bitcoin. But like

another one of these things is what is language? To what end does it exist? And so one of the things that you see is like the purpose of language is to enable efficient communication among large groups of people. It is a social thing that enables communication. And there's a lot of people have compared money with language. And that's true in a lot of ways. And so it's designed to facilitate functional, efficient, it's sufficient communication between people.

Okay. So we have words that have general meanings that in context carry more meanings. And so once you constrain yourself within grammatical rules and syntax rules and all these kinds of things, it allows people to communicate, it allows large number of people to communicate in real possible

ways. What the queer theorists and people like them, what they do is they completely, rather than creating intentionally language and viewing language as something to enable communication between large groups of people, they functionally see it as this is a method of self-expression. It's functionally oriented around the individual and is designed to, what it does is it forces every single person to adapt to their individual just understanding of words and pronouns and all of these things.

And so there's a real sense in which the terming this idea, total intolerance, is incredibly an apt description. Because literally what it forces you to do is every single person, imagine you have a group of 20 people hanging together. Every single one of them has the responsibility to maintain and keep track of the pronouns, as one example, pronouns of every single person in there.

And if you don maintain if you don work to maintain and keep straight all these pronouns even if you trying there people who can get offended by these things And so this is just a completely novel and deficient view of language And it destructive towards societies when people fold and give into this supposition about what language

actually is. Yeah. And this is something that Minich in his book, Bulwarks of Unbelief, talks about too, where because the world is disenchanted and stripped of its agency through sort of materialistic idea of what the world is actually, essentially, the people around you lose their agency too and become a substrate on which you can project yourself. So self-expression is not just what's inside of me needs to get out. It's really what's outside of me reflects who I am.

And that's how I see the world. I see the world as me. And so you look around you and all of your deficiencies, you project on other people. All of the things you wished about yourself, you project on other people. And another way to look at this too is that language is not only for communicating between real people, agents with their own inner lives, but also to build stuff and to achieve something in the world. So God spoke and he made the world through speech.

And as sub-creators, we do the same thing. We create literally through speech, fiction and art and stuff, but we also use speech in order to coordinate action. And queer speech is closely tied up with critical theory, which is using speech as a tool to dismantle hierarchies of power. So it's subverting speech itself in order to destroy rather than build up.

And as Christians, we're commanded to edify one another. Edified means to erect the build them up. And what critical theory does is it comes in and it says, all right, where's the power differential?

who's on top let's tear them down so the victims can be elevated and have their victim status vindicated but the next round of that is now the victims are at the top and they need to be pulled down because now they're the ones who have the higher level of power and so it just it really is an entropic process where the second law of thermodynamics forms of energy tend to degrade the lower forms of energy. There's order that's injected into a localized part of that. And

critical theory is just the entropy of power structures. The end result is not justice. The end result is homogeneity. The end result is actually death. It's the destruction of any kind of life because life is predicated on differentials. Like electricity can't work unless you have a

positive and negative terminal. You can't have a circulation or hormones working unless you have blood pressure differentials or chemical differentials stuff your neurons work this way like this queer theory stuff and critical theory are really they go into living systems as a parasite and they start to pull it apart piece by piece intentionally explicitly yeah it's a crazy mentality but yeah yeah people don't tend to see that exactly and then a lot of the again the

a horrible irony is that a lot of those who are advancing these conversations and the helm of trying to, of trying to, you know, perpetrate these revolutions on societies are, you have, again, there are men, there are some men involved in this, but a lot of it, these are women. And a lot of these are white women over overwhelmingly who are, again, you could talk about their, they look at themselves as victims within a certain context within the United States.

But if we're going to, if you're going to actually do this, if you want to have this conversation, Like they are some of the most privileged people on earth with you if you zoom out to a more of a global view. And so, again, it's real easy to paint everyone as a paint everyone who's not you as an oppressor. But again, if you apply this logic at a larger scale, it quickly, their perception of themselves quickly gets dismantled.

What is it about white American women that is so attracted to this ideology? Because like you're saying, they are at the top. They're participating in something which has nothing really to offer them in terms of like power or material gain. Yeah, I would say, okay, so, man, there's so many things. That's okay. One of the things, if you look at where have women been able to rise to the top, like, again, a large scale. You're like, okay, the academy is one of these places.

Again, there's physical constraints that prevent women from rising in certain places. there's just certain biological realities that at a, if you're looking at a percentage of the population scale, like women don't, they don't, they're not as well represented in things like the boardroom and all these things. And there's people who just presume that, oh, the reason for

this is because rampant sexism. In reality, it's like a self-selected thing. What is required to advance to these upper echelon levels of success within business, all this kind of stuff requires, requires sacrifices that many women, especially over the course of their later years of their life, they're unwilling to do because there's things that they want more. And so I think the

academy is one of these places that they've been able to arise. It's like this right balance of, I can sacrifice these things, but I don't have to sacrifice everything. Yeah. Bureaucracy and politics clips the actual intellectual work. Yeah. And I think another thing too, that actually helps them is Christianity. Because Christianity, if you want to, we could go through a whole episode on this, of just how Christianity has advanced the causes of women throughout its history. Yeah, yeah.

Women wives were pretty close to slaves in the Roman Empire. Yep. And it's escaping me. But there was something specific the church did pretty early on, like in the first century, that dignified women. I don't know if it was just providing for widows or... Yeah, I mean, that certainly is like the church would care for widows. The church took care of... This is a little bit different, but it basically said in Christ, there is no male and female, which again can be...

We have to define that, but there is truth in terms of, it's not that men have more dignity than women, or women have more dignity than men. Because again, there were priests or priestesses. There were places where women, they were seen as having a lot of power. There were cultures where women had a lot of power. But even just something as simple as the resurrection account of Jesus, the first people to find Jesus's body, the first person to come to face with the resurrected Christ was a woman.

And so there's been many scholars that have talked about how if you were trying to make up this story, you would never have the first person to find Jesus's body, the resurrected Christ, be a woman because of how this would be perceived. Like women's, their testimony in court wasn't equivalent to that of men. And so this would be a very stupid thing to do if you were making up this story. So yeah. And then you could just go through,

you could go through lots of church history and see this as well. So I think again, Christians, because in Christ, there is no male and female in very real ways. God loves men and women equally. And like they're each equally able to enjoy the life of God in very real ways. This has provoked Christians to act, care for women in ways that have been relatively uncommon throughout or very uncommon throughout history.

And so I think that atmosphere, a Christianized atmosphere, is one of the only ones in which something like this could actually happen.

Yeah, it feels edgy to talk about this, but this does drive to the point of this article, which is queer theory destroys the categories and primarily the categories between the category of man and women. And to just say that women are different, it's a real trigger. Yeah, yeah. But that is, it's a very important part of understanding the Bible and understanding creation, how man was made originally in the first place. Adam was made first and Eve was brought out of his rib.

And then she was the one who plucked the fruit, but he was there watching her do it. Yeah, he's held responsible. Yeah, there's this whole dynamic. And in each part of it, they fulfill their particular role, either in failure or in redemption. Jesus is the head of the church. He's the husband. And Paul has some things to say in Ephesians that are uncomfortable to hear. Because it's, yeah. And especially the way he says it, man is the head of woman. Doesn't use that tone, but sure.

Not like, could you just tone it down a little bit? What about man is the head of his wife? No, we're just going to go for it. But yeah, it's important to have this stuff and to recover it too, because in Western society with feminism, it's just a lighter version of. Yeah. There's just a lot of suspicion over, again, the motivation for saying something like man is the head of a woman or the head of every woman is her husband. These things, it's real easy to just inject meaning, right?

We inject motivation, hidden motivations or secret motivations into these things. Yeah. And just presume that these are the only possible reason you could say these things is because you want to enslave women. You want to take advantage of them, which is, again, what is ironic about the passage in Ephesians, where it says the command given to women is to wives submit to your husbands as unto the Lord.

But the command given to the man is husbands lay down your lives for your wife as Christ loved the church, which refresher on that. He suffered and died on the cross. You know, there's a very real sense of which this is what husbands are being called to is very difficult. It's very difficult, just as in many ways, even more difficult than what the wife is being held to. And obviously there's abuses on both of these sides.

Yeah. There's people who are trying to protect themselves or people who have been harmed by people maybe even using these passages as justification. But the fact that abuse of something is not then an indication, like a bulletproof indication that the principle itself is wrong.

And this is something we can observe all throughout human history. And again, we can still see in the world today, like there's a lot of some of the best, the works of fiction that have stood the test of time are romance stories where there is a clear distinction between men and women. And that when these pieces, they reflect rightly that you see men wielding their strength and their greater strength that they have and greater whatever, whatever kind of gifts, courage, whatever these things are.

We see them wielding them on behalf of women or on behalf of people. And then you see women submitting themselves to their husbands and trusting their husbands and bravely doing that. We can still see the goodness of these things in literature. We can see that the kind of fiction that's being sown by these people isn't absolute and isn't the full story.

Yeah, the accusation that outlets like NPR level against patriarchal enclaves is that essentially, implicitly, patriarchal is for the purpose of abuse. There is no other justification for it. And I think it's worth emphasizing like what she said, like man is supposed to lay down his life and their abuses on on both sides and failures on both sides.

And if you listen to Nancy Piercy, herself a woman, she points to the Industrial Revolution as a lot of the start of the feminist movement in America because men were for the first time taken away from their families to do their work. And they would go to the factory, work long hours, feel not connected to their work or to other people because they're being isolated from their families. And then to cope with that, they would go and get drunk at bars.

And alcohol was a slightly different thing in the 1800s. and then they would go home and abuse their families. And so the women were responding to that in a very responsible way out of the failure of the men to do their job of protecting and providing. And the result was women's liberation, ability to vote, and... The team totally was... And you can condemn those things while also respecting women who were doing those things for the right reasons to take care of their families.

Yep. Yeah, and this is... Yeah, again, it really is. It's like we, you have to have, you, we ought to be mature enough and disciplined enough and take the time to, again, to understand that context and understand that there's reasons why things happen. Again, it's not to justify everything that happens, but again, you can at least have some degree of sympathy for the situation that people have found themselves in. Another example of this, this is a semi, it's tangentially related.

I've gotten like interested in like standup comedy in the last few years. And so one of the things that is shocking is how many of these standup comics have no relationship with their dads. It's astounding. It's overwhelmingly true, especially the men. I don't know as much about women comics. But a lot of the men, they just don't have relationships with their dads.

And so this joking thing, it's like this form of masculine, it's like this masculine, semi-masculine or partially masculine form of expression that, I don't know, it's just a really interesting thing. And so, again, you have people who, because they experience some neglect or some unnatural, they have some sort of unnatural upbringing, unnatural experience. It has profound effects on how they see the world.

And so, again, we should not, just as a broad principle, you should not be taking broad social cues from people whose lives are an exception to, whose experience is like an exception to the overwhelming rule. The overwhelming majority of people who've ever lived have had one mom and one dad who lived together.

This is obviously there's exceptions. Obviously, there's abuses, all these kind of things. And the fact that you have a mom and dad is not a guarantee that everything's going to be a hunky dory. It's not to say that either. But again, exceptions do not prove like exceptions prove rules. This is this is something that we ought to take into account.

Yeah. And of course, like correcting all the things that have gone wrong is is not as it's not a straightforward thing in the sense of rolling things back to the way that they were before. Yes. Conservatism is a failure. It's a success. It succeeds at remembering things, but it's a failure of imagination. And so we need to apply imagination to see, like, where are we and what can actually heal all of these problems that are the result?

Because because men are still the problem. Yeah. It's not that feminism is the root cause. Men are still lazy, check that, materialistic, greedy, discard people, instrumentalize. And men are blunt instruments. It is a good thing. God made men to be, men are stronger than women. Men are more power physically imposing and powerful than women, broadly speaking. And so that does not go away when you demean men or when you move men out of certain segments of society.

They just use that strength in other contexts in ways that could be far more destructive than if you were to channel them. The same thing like a river. If a river does not have well-defined banks, it's going to run over and destroy everything, all the crops, all the towns around it. You need well-defined river banks in order to channel that water to places and four ends that will be productive. Yeah. Did you pay attention to Mark Driscoll when he was at the height of his popularity?

A little bit. I followed him a little bit, and there were things that I really did appreciate. The Marsville Mark Driscoll is close to my heart. Yes, there were failures. But the framework in which people generally tend to criticize Mark Driscoll is actually that administrative, bureaucratic, immunized standard. One thing that I really appreciated as a 20-year-old is that sermon he did that was like an hour and a half of him yelling at me. Oh, yeah. He just... Who the hell do you think you are?

Yeah. How dare you? And give a little more context, because that sounds insane.

Like he was, the specific thing he was talking about was, there's some of you in here who have heard me talking about abusive men or something like that. And some of you are looking at your girlfriends and you're holding their hand, you're basically grabbing their leg right now. I'm basically saying, don't mention it. Don't wait, wait till we get home, whatever. And he just explodes and says, who the hell do you think you are? And so again, this is this, I still think about it to this day.

It's one of these things where obviously that is not, if that's the only way you're communicating with men, that is deficient. But if that is not at least a part of in some capacity, even if you don't rise to the level of vulgarity or whatever, like men need, there is a certain healthiness in men speaking harshly or joking harshly or doing these things. Like this is something that is good and you need corrections. This is what a lot of, a lot of people, again, we reject this.

We reject it We live in a culture that rejects like corporal punishment We don like this whether it parents spanking we get freaked out about that or criminals in prison We want to defend a lot of criminals and we want to make their lives as easy as possible And we are suspicious. Again, it's the same, similar concept. We're suspicious of any of police and punishment more broadly.

And so there's a lot of these things in which we're rejecting the very things that, if done incorrectly have proven to be a blessing to humanity throughout its existence. And if all the anarcho-capitalists have not checked out by this point, thank you for joining John and Jordan's Christian Culture Corner, our most popular segment. There was one more, or at least the next thing from this article, was just talking about,

again, the similarities between the queer theorists and then the tech bros. And one of the things they have in common is their anthropological views, their view of understanding of what it means to be human. So basically they look at human nature, natural things about human, about humanity as, as barriers to be overcome. Okay. They fundamentally look at

individuals as God-like creatures rather than stewards. And so this is a huge difference in the Christian understanding of what it means to be human and the secular, excuse me, secular humanist understanding of what it means to be human. Again, the Christian understanding God is God, and he's put humans here to be his viceroys, to rule in his stead, to represent his authority

on earth. But we do not rule with an authority that is our own. We don't get to define the terms of what it means based on what we want to or don't want to do or whatever is convenient to us.

God defines the parameters of these things. And so you will either, whether you are a queer theorist, You will either see yourself as a steward of a life, in a steward of relationships, steward of talents, gifts, abilities, or you will see yourself as a God who wields these things that you happen to have for your own benefit. Or even potentially you could frame it as for the benefit of your tribe or your group of people or whatever it is.

And so I think these are two fundamentally different views and antagonistic views of looking at life. Because with one, on the one hand, if you see yourself as a God where basically your life completely revolves around you, people, language, you see all these things as instruments by which to exalt yourself.

and as ways to make your own life more better, or more better, you make your own life better in accordance to your own definition of what that means versus if you see yourself as a steward and you recognize I was made by God, I'm not the arbiter of truth at the end of the day, I don't get to call the shots on what it means to be human, on what, all these things, what the good life is. I don't get to define those things.

I get to submit to God's definition of things because they're outside of my pay grade. I'm just a creature. I'm just a creature in the world. And so this is something that with technology, men, like you see this guy, Brian Johnson, who's leveraging all this technology to try to live forever. Stated goal. I want to live forever. Guys trying to upload their consciousness and then download it into a robot body or something like that. So they can live forever. Things like

IVF, where you're trying to, yes, we are not able to have children through normal means. And so what we're going to do is we're going to farm out a part of this process. We're going to create babies and a test tube. We're going to freeze the majority of them. They'll never see the light of day.

And then we'll stick a few and try to get pregnant with these. There's all kinds of consequences to again, this, an understanding of the world and an operation in the world, basically operating in the world as though you are the standard by which, by which good, wrong, all these things should be

measured. It's a terrifying thing. Yeah. And the tampering with nature is particularly interesting, both in terms of medical technology as well as genetic engineering for producing food or just producing really curiosities like the whole the dire wolf thing that you mentioned the woolly mammoth mice yep designer babies like this is another one yeah yeah all these things are articulated as a sort of life affirming project of technological advance where yeah we want ryan

johnson to live forever yeah that's the stated goal but really it is and there's nothing wrong with medicine. But if you take that mentality to the extreme, you can no longer ask what the cost of these things is. What is the cost of uploading your consciousness into a computer or really just simulating your brain? We've talked about that before as being just not present anymore. What

is the cost of using genetic engineering to change how crops are raised? You got intellectual property on seeds now, which is so dangerous because the seeds are the product of man's mind.

And I think when you lose that regulating principle of what is the cost of these things, especially in metaphysical terms, you can no longer stop yourself from doing things that are clearly outside the realm of what people want these technologies to result in. It is really just an extension of the technocratic eugenicist agenda, which was popular in the United States as well as in Nazi Germany. Yeah. And we have a lot of those guys came right over here after World War II.

Tons of people got sterilized in the name of improving the gene pool. This is the exact same thing. We just aren't using as crude or obvious methods. Oh, we're the baddies, John. Yeah, I think, shoot, what was I going to say? And on the topic of life, all of this is done to achieve a never-ending life.

And again, from a materialistic perspective, if you don't believe in a transcendent reality that is not contingent, contingent, then a contingent material universe has only a certain amount of limited energy and it will end in inertia. And so all of this stuff is really the localization of order and of higher forms of energy. And it exports the entropy outside of the system. And we see this with

California. They're like, we want clean energy. And so we're going to externalize all of the cost to the environment to South American lithium farms. Yeah, stuff like that. And on the other hand, the Christian ontology is that all of nature is derived being.

It is given by God who is complete, perfect in himself, and has an unlimited amount of life. And in the death of Christ, death, which is the end point, the period at the end of the materialistic sentence, becomes the line, which is the border between life and new life. Christian ontology is life affirming because it assumes life. It says our life is actually encapsulated in the life of God, and it's upheld by that. Yeah. You talked about the cost of this.

You said you talked about it in metaphysical terms, but it's also really helpful to think about this in actual the cost of these things. Yeah. Because this is one of the most eye-opening realizations I had. is so many of these things that we're talking about are only possible because you have effectively unlimited money. So many of these are like Elon going to space, Elon creating Tesla. A lot of it is subsidized through government grants. So this is basically, again, money that really doesn't

exist. The government just deciding, here, we're going to benefit this. We're going to do this kind of thing. A lot of the historically, probably everybody listening that knows this, but historically, one of the big reasons why wars ended is because one side or both sides ran out of money. And so So scarce money has been a check on evil at all times.

And by submitting ourselves to and by just continuing to participate in a system that functionally allows the unlimited creation of money, you're basically falling right into this thing.

And so it's really interesting to think about the effects that, and this is not the Bitcoin podcast, but it's really interesting to think about, okay, once the world starts to see the value of a scarce currency and really starts to see that this is important and then buys in just to see whether or not and how that will change their understanding of all these other

things. It still is going to be a tough pill to swallow. And so then you're going to have people, I think you're going to have people who are going to call for rehypothecated Bitcoin in the name of trying to get some of these benefits where you create money for very cheap costs in terms of the interest rate of loans, you can create effectively endless money again. I think this is a possibility. I'm hopeful that it's going to take a while. I'm hoping this is usually get a

reprieve at some point. And so I'm hopeful as to the effect that Bitcoin will have. But yeah, a lot of this, again, we mentioned this whole concept. You can look at the world through one of two lenses. Either you will look at the world and say, God, let your kingdom come, let your will be done. Or you will say, let my kingdom come, let my will be done. And you will use everything at your disposal in order to accomplish that. Yeah. You'll use everything

at your disposal, but you'll also only have certain things at your disposal. And the thing about humanistic engineering of nature is that the levers we have are just that. They're mechanical levers. They're quantitative levers. We don't have access to qualities unless if we don't have access to God. And so the result of applying quantities to all of these problems is that we create quantitative solutions. And it does not bring us any closer to having qualitative solutions.

And the more we measure, the more we externalize the result. So people become instrumentalized and dehumanized. Yeah, dehumanized. Like a really good example of this is the whole transhumanism, stick your brain in a computer sort of thing. It's yeah, you won't be able to tell the difference, but there is a difference. You're not there anymore. But it's because your entire psyche has been externalized and measured. And it's been found to be equivalent, functionally equivalent.

But that assumes that functionally equivalent is equivalent. Yeah, it's not. Like we're not merely function. Yeah, yes. Yeah, the dehumanizing point is really important because you could go a lot of ways with this, right? I was listening to this. It was an abortion debate the other day. And it was like one conservative Christian guy and then these two like left-wing guys who've become famous in some of these debate circles, like these Jubilee videos.

if you see them like one conservative against 20 liberals or whatever they do these and two of these two of these young guys are really smart debaters they're really good but they're like diabolical in terms of what the things that they're advocating for godless and awful but they were talking about this and they were going back and forth about what do you consider human and who is worthy of having their life protected versus not protected the whole point of this is okay so what

is the fetus? Like what is the baby in the womb? What is this? Is this human? And so the more liberal guys were trying to basically say, okay, you have to have sentience. You have to have, they were like choosing these things, like these characteristics that have to be present in order for this thing to be worthy of protection. And so it's okay. Then you get into a real tricky situation, which is you go to end of life and you have somebody who is like they're, they're in a

coma or they're brain dead for a certain period of time. And it's okay. So are these, are these people deserving of protection or should we just, do we have the ability to just kill them? And there's a whole bunch more sticky issues like this, where you have people on the fly, ad hoc, trying to rehash of what it means to be human in a way that suits, in a way that corresponds with their own desires of, all right, we want women to be free. Okay. We want women to

be able to live their lives and do whatever they want to. And so in order to, because we, because here's our desire, we're going to do that backfill and figure out a situation that will allow them to do that, at least according to our understanding of what that means. And again,

the sacrifice, it sacrifices humanity. And functionally, if you actually think about it, if you were to frame it in religious words, abortion is this, it's a sacramental thing where it's basically the woman saying to her child, you have to die so that I can live. when in reality, like the nature of being a parent, if anyone has had children, the nature of being a parent is I lay down my life so that you can live. I get less sleep. I play with you

till I'm exhausted. I do all these things. And so it's this, again, we're talking about inversion. It's this inversion of what throughout human history, every society that's lived and flourished and all these things, it's a complete antagonization of what we've come to see and through experience seen brings about human flourishing. Yeah, it's a really good angle on abortion because the conversation is often like what constitutes life and when do we know that life

is there? And, but that's a measurement. That's the, that's the quantitative measurement of what a child is. And, and so you can measure whatever you want. You can figure out whatever KPIs you want for your baby to achieve, but you're basically stripping it of its qualitative, of its essence, really. You're reducing it to accidents. Yeah, and it's actually interesting, right?

I've never thought about this, but it's interesting when if you look at it from that standpoint, it's not that it doesn't matter, but it's a secondary thing because whether or not it's human, okay? Because literally this, which again, we obviously we know it's human. What else would this be? It's got its own genetic code that's distinct from its mother. But you can still say literally it's saying to another living being whatever you want to call it, you have to die so that I can live.

That logic is still there. And so, again, I just think it's super revelatory of what's going on there. And at the end of the day, it used to be that abortion debates, they would debate whether or not the baby was human. This was a crucial part of this debate. And there were a lot of women who said, this isn't a baby. It's just like a camera with a word they use. If you go back to the Roe v. Wade, they're like, oh, it's not actually human. It's actually that guilt.

They've all got these weird, it's less than a human. Now, with the advance of these ultrasound technologies and all these kind of things, we now know more than ever that the baby, it is a baby. And so the pro-choice advocates have moved away from that argument of trying to argue whether or not it's a baby. And they just have gone to a more utilitarian argument. It doesn't matter. We don't care if it's a baby or not.

The mother should still have the right to kill it because of the effect that it will have, its life will have on her life. And that is such a disturbing and just bad faith move and change in the argument that just basically demonstrates that there's not really a desire to find the truth here. What's really being demonstrated is I want what I want. And so the end justifies the means. Yeah. And these structures that exist in nature are informative for us.

They're put there to teach us their images of what reality is like on a larger scale. And again, Minich just read his book. We'll go back through this again later. But Minich talks about how we view nature as something that has to answer our questions. So the answers we get back from nature reflect our questions. So we choose what we want to ask and then we get answers back and then we feel like we have knowledge. But that is that's the posture of we are the masters. Nature is the servant.

But really, there is an equally valid approach to take, which is that we're the servant.

We're the we're the student and nature is the teacher. And the Bible explicitly talks about this. But if we wait to ask a question and we listen first to what nature has to tell us, it can show us things that actually expand our understanding rather than confirm our biases and desires.

and just like the picture of a baby is a beautiful picture of this life a baby has eyes but it can't really see it's like might see a little bit of light uh and but it's comfortable it's safe inside the womb and then it goes through this awful ordeal i'm having its head squashed into the

into a cone shape that in order to enter into the world and then suddenly they have all these senses that they didn know Yeah And they develop new abilities and form the form like complex thoughts And this is the same the same thing that happens to us when we die as Christians we are in this world and we're comfortable and we like it and we don't really want to leave it.

But I've just been thinking a lot about that verse. We do not know yet what we shall be able, it'll be revealed when we see him face to face and elsewhere. Paul talks about this life as we're seeds. And a seed, when it's planted, becomes a plant or a tree. But in order for the tree to exist, the seed has to stop existing. The seed has to die. And so it's through death that we're converted into something much greater and incomprehensibly greater than

what we are. And of course, we have a picture of Jesus resurrected Bobby and he still has 10 fingers. Yeah. There's multiple types of deaths too, right? So the seed undergoes an initial death in order to produce the tree. Okay. But then there's seasonal deaths. There's many deaths where every season, most or many trees, there are evergreen trees, but many trees, like they do go through a type of death. And then obviously at the end of their life, there'll be an ultimate death when this happens.

And so the same is true of people. Like we go through, there's deaths of, there's seasons in our lives where you have, you're a parent of young children for only so long. And then your last child graduates high school or grows up. And then that season of your life is dead. And then out of that death, there's new life that comes where you have time. Hey, what's up? Hey. Can I use your keys? Absolutely. I almost don't. Don't worry. We'll edit this out.

Yeah. But yeah, you go through this period where, again, yes, the life that you had as a parent of children comes to an end so that there's a death there, but then it's followed by a corresponding life where now you have more time to do other things with your life. And so this is this totally normal thing, which I just was thinking about. There's a lot of talk today about grace versus nature and the relationship between grace and

nature. And it's really interesting to think about in nature with trees, especially with fruit-bearing trees. Grace is natural in a very real sense. So if I take an apple and I break it open and I get a seed out of the apple, I can plant that apple. I do work. So here's my work. I work to plant the seed in the ground. But consequence of that work is not just I get a one for one, of course, but I

get one apple back. I get a tree that produces a bountiful amount of apples, like multiplications, many hundreds of times more than just the initial thing. And so this is something that is talked about all through the scriptures. To your point, like what we shall be, we don't know now. It's going to be far greater. Like it talks about the sacrifice of how the sacrifices of this life not being worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed.

And so this is the kind of language that's used in discussing these things. Yeah, I think people intuitively understand this too. There's kill your heroes, kill your best ideas. You only find life through discarding the old state. Yeah. It's a cyclical dialectic process in order to turn, turn memory into imagination and vice versa in a cycle that produces bounty. Yep. Yeah. Go read that article. We'll put the,

we'll put the link in the show notes. A lot of, again, there's a lot more stuff there, a lot more stuff there to chew on. I'm sure you guys will, if you're, if you find these episodes helpful, you'll find that helpful as well. And if you don't, just don't tell us. feel free no listen if you don't like these episodes and feel free tell us like we

again we love truth so please give it to us john i believe that we we also have another segment that we're going to get into today here at the end the turning of the years is that are you ready to do that yes we do we have some nips to part that's right and again for those of you who are not aware we have a segment where periodically we go through one at a time we march through the nips uh we go through them and just talk about okay what are these various nips if you're sitting

here and this is your first time listening to this somehow and you've made it this far. It's a miracle. A NIP is a, what is a NIP, John? I'll let you find it. A NIP is a NOSTER improvement possibility. That's right. And so very similar to, if you're familiar with Bitcoin, BIPs, Bitcoin, oh shoot, improvement protocol or what is it? No, Bitcoin. I have no idea. Oh, that's horrible. It's been forever since I thought about that. Okay. Anyhow, the point is it's a way to improve NOSTER.

And so we tried to come up with a name for this segment and the incredibly dad jokey name that we came up with was Parsed NIPs. So, John, which nip are we going to be parsing today? We're going to do four because we're here in person. Is that four separate nips or nip four? Four, both, as it turns out. Okay, all right, sweet. Yeah, I wanted to just cover all these, especially because we do fewer of these episodes than new nips are merged.

That was a terrible sentence, but I'm pretty sure probably five or ten new nips have happened since we did our last one. Really? Let's just knock four out of the way at once. Nip of four is one of the earliest nips, probably one of the, maybe even the fourth nip.

Fiat faction. Jeff Bourne? Oh no, it was then Arc, I believe, got together. And it was adaptation of the SecP keys to encrypted messaging. And the way it worked is basically you would encrypt the content of the event, but you would p-tag the recipient and you do it in such a way with asymmetric cryptography. So the recipient, only the recipient could decrypt the message. So the message itself was hidden, but any metadata about the message is completely open.

When the message was created, who the author was, and who it's addressed to. And so there's been several projects out there that actually report on conversations that people are having in private. We call them direct messages, which is not a misnomer. But if you think of them as private messages, they're not private. They're out there for anyone to look at. So if you're messaging anyone suspicious using Nip4 DMs, then stop.

Luckily, Nip4 DMs are being phased out pretty progressively at this point. I do have to shame Primal, as usual. They're working on their UX rather than protocol features, which, Milian, I love you, but you need to kill Nip4 DMs ASAP because they're so bad. And of course, Nip4 breaks interoperability because we now have the new form of DMs, which is Nip17.

and they work pretty differently and they're a little bit more complicated, but they really effectively hide that metadata and they also have deniability built in. And so there's two other NIPs that are necessary for understanding this. So NIP-A4 was the original DM, the naive kind of very simple version. And then NIP-44 is a new encryption scheme that we came up with. That we got audited like a year ago or so. So it's been reviewed a little bit more heavily than the NIP-A4 encryption system.

We is me and Vitor and a guy who does 0x chat. And Kieran, a few different people were involved in implementing and testing this stuff. Mike Dilger was involved. Paul Miller. So the guy's teacher, Paul, but the other Paul Miller. Shout out to all these guys. Yeah. So have you had all those guys on the podcast? I haven't had Paul Miller. I haven't had Kieran yet. He's quiet, so I'm forgetting that. Okay. All right, Kieran. We've got you as a crosshairs. Peacefully speaking.

But yeah, so NIP44, just a different way of encrypting stuff. And it's versioned, so it's just slightly better than the encryption that was used in NIP before. Not a big difference, but a lot of other things that take advantage of encryption are switching over to NIP44. So 44, 17, 4, 59. 59, okay. Yeah, and 4 was the original. 4 was the original, yeah. So 59, and really, if you had Jaff said, why don't you just include these all in NIP17, and then we'll split them out as we need to?

I think he was probably right because now we have way too many nips to refer to. But that's okay. Nip 59 is a technique called gift wrapping that I believe Vitor Pamplona came up with. It could have been, might have existed in earlier forms elsewhere. But what that basically is, you create a Noster event, but you don't sign it. And so if you publish this event, people can see what you wrote, but they can't verify that it came from you.

Anyone can make one of these events from any pub key and just not sign it. And so you get deniability. You can say, here's the content, but you can't prove that I said it. Which is nice. Deniability is something that Nostra doesn't have in a lot of cases. And so you take that unsigned event. I call it a rumor. Because rumors are not situated. And then you wrap that. So you encrypt that. And you put it in another event as the content.

and that's called the seal and the seal has no let's see if i'm remembering right has no p tags on it but it is encrypted to the recipient and so if you get a seal it's a message with uh no no tags on it and encrypted content so you have no idea who it's for or what other private key can decrypt this thing okay and the author also is ephemeral so you don't know what who the author was of this event either okay so seals are completely meaningless they're completely useless except

for the person they're intended for okay and there's no they inside you their private key yeah yeah okay and and so what you do with a seal is you then encrypt it yep and wrap it in another event okay called a gift wrap yeah and that and the gift wrap uses an ephemeral key for the author so you just invent a private key out of nowhere and then you use that to sign this event and then you p tag the recipient okay and so a gift wrap all you know about this event is who is receiving

it but you don't know who sent it so you can't draw a connection between you can't create conversations yep and there's a few other things we do there's padding in the encryption scheme so that you can't figure out exactly the size of the message okay we randomized time stamps so that you You can't figure out when something was done. It's incredible. Three to seven days, I think, is what people usually do.

And then you throw those on the correct relays, and they get picked up by the P-tagged person. They decrypt the content using their private key. They get the seal, and then they decrypt that using their private key. And then they can finally look at the rumor. And the rumor is substantiated because these other things were signed. So this is still the danger.

this is like signal or like technically signal is secure, but if the FBI is there and they get you like opening your message, that's where that's the limit of the privacy. Yeah. These do not provide forward secrecy or post-compromised security. So if you lose your private key, then all of these messages that can be recovered are visible.

Yeah. It also requires you to send duplicate messages because you have to send one to the person you're talking to, but you also have to send one to yourself if you want a record of the the conversation oh yeah we and the scheme works for nip 17 works for group messages in small groups but you have to send as many messages as there are participants in the group okay so if you have 10 people you have to send 10 messages and a lot of the time you'll get rate limited and so deliverability

for larger groups is not ideal although as people start to choose better relays for this particular use sure okay improves so there's more there could be relays that are designed to facilitate larger groups. Yeah. And this is a good call to action. If you are using Domus as your private inbox, stop because Domus will rate limit you and often delete its notes and stuff. So a good one to use

is Nostra.Wine. It's a paid relay, but they will keep your gift wraps and they will also protect them using off. Other people won't even be able to download the gift wrap in order to see how many events have been sent to you. That's really the only information they could glean, but they protect that for you. Another good service that's free is inbox.noster1.com. And that is similarly auth protected. It's not a paid relay. And so it could go away at some point. But that's the one

that I use in addition to also Haven. Haven is a relay by Bitvora, which is designed for self hosting. You throw your key, your public key into the relay, and it grabs stuff from your web of trust and figures out who's allowed to write to your relay and who's not allowed to write and has different paths for different use cases. So like the chat inbox, but then there's your regular inbox and regular outbox. That's a good option if you're going to self-host. Yep. Cool, man. That's awesome.

I just also want to shout out LSAT. Okay. LSAT, contributor to Damas. He's the man. We've interacted a little bit. We went to the, what is it called? Nostraville in Nashville. We met there in person. Just a great guy. I just really appreciate his contributions. So what was the thing you were saying, Domus? You're like, Domus, you need to get up there messaging game. No, actually, Domus probably is one of the holdouts on NIP4. I'm not sure about that.

But Primal. Primal, that's right. Primal's got to drop him. What do you at, bro? What's going on? What do you attribute this to? Is this just, it's on the roadmap, but they just haven't gotten there, or is it philosophical disagreement? No, it's totally on the roadmap. I know. They're maintaining three separate applications because their emphasis is on UX. And they've succeeded. Like most people use Primal to access Noster. What do you say? Three different apps. You mean that?

So here's Primal, Web, Primal, Android. Oh, yeah. So our separate code bases. Oh, wow. They have to maintain them separately. Okay. So, yeah, they have functional private messaging. So it's probably just not that high of a priority. Yeah. So I misunderstood them. What was the limit, the weakness of DOMIS that you were mentioning? Yeah, that's the DOMIS Relay. Oh, okay. Throttles. Throttles, yeah. So if you send like 10 messages in a second, it'll stop you.

And so for them, that's, again, that's one of the things that's on the roadmap. They're just doing other more important things right now. No, that one is more sensible because Domus is a hub relay. It's open. And so it needs to protect itself against a M. So it's totally reasonable. It's just that Domus is like a commodity relay. And if you want your stuff to get delivered, make sure you're choosing the right relays.

Yeah. Okay. And so there's obviously there's paid relays that you can use or even, are there any open, I don't know if it's considered open source.

but like free relays that are designed for bigger things like that yeah the inbox.nosterone.com is good for this use case okay i'm actually not super good at picking relays i know i because i can self-host yeah i don't have to worry that much about it we need to do a whole episode just like talking about relay stuff yeah we should get she gets sandwich on okay he thinks a lot about relays okay cool yeah because i just i don't feel satisfied with my relay selection i'm like i

just feel like i don't think anyone i don't think anyone who doesn't close their own does okay and Yeah, I think self-hosting is the easiest. Ironically, it's the easiest solution right now. I think what we need is some kind of review system or classification system or really just a curated list of relays. If you want to get started, do this one. It's free. And if you're throttled or you can do this one and it's paid or you can do this one.

If you're in this person's web of trust or something like that. I know most of them, though, I know Primal, they just give you a certain number. I think when you first create an account, there's a certain number that they automatically follow a certain number of people. So Preston, who's the homie. We love Preston. The Matt O'Dell, these guys have gazillions of followers because every single person who decides. Again, those are great people to follow. They'll follow them. So, yeah. All right.

I think that's it for today. Thank you guys for listening to us pontificate on, on culture and metaphysics. We hope we haven't offended your, your fragile feelings. And if we had them. Listen, to quote our Lord and savior, Blessed are those who are not offended by us. Okay? There you go. We will see you all on Nestor. See you later on Nestor. You're listening to the Thank God for Nostra podcast. the