Good evening, viewers, thank you for joining us on this lovely Wednesday night. Tonight, we have an article that examines the use of the Bible, particularly the Book of Revelation throughout American history, in characterizing certain immigrant groups by demonizing them with revelation like rhetoric. However, is this still occurring, and if so, is it being done on purpose or is it just a case that immigrant groups usually just happen to be demonized similarly, regardless of the time period
or the circumstances they fall into. That is, are they blamed for a given society's problems and used to prey upon a given society's greatest fears. The Bible has not or is not only used to vilify immigrants, by the way, but it has been the justification for slavery, the subjugation
of women, the slaughter of ethnic groups. It is a convenient instruction manual for any group in power to oppress smaller groups, the ones not in power, and those who also perceivedly pose a threat to the group that is in power. Is from RNs by ye John Lynn on October twenty fourth, twenty twenty four. All right, so we are looking at an article, right now that characterizes Americans throughout history as people who use the Bible to vilify immigrants. Obviously,
immigration is an issue, a hot button issue in this country. So, Kelly, what's the significance of the author's message in this article.
I think his name speaks volumes in that respect, right eye, John Lynn. It seems like he's getting he's a Christian and he's trying to get fellow Christians to re examine the rhetoric that they use. As far as I can see, I mean, here's it here. It's funny because he's really talking to non white over to white Western Christians who don't get the message that they themselves have been trying to spread around the world. That's kind of funny in
that respect to me. But I think that's it. I mean, Jesus said to walk in the four oigners into your lands, and that's exactly what Christian nationalists aren't doing. You know, they're using religion by cherry picking Bible passages to push bigoted ideas. So is a refutation of the lessons in the Bible altogether that we're getting here, That's what I'm seeing.
You know.
It's like he's saying, hey, look Christians. You need to start being better Christians or stop calling yourself a Christian.
Yeah, you know, I got that from the article. I also thought, you know, this is kind of this article is a little bit misrepresented. It misrepresents American history somewhat because I think, especially you know, as you go through American history, you can survey that not all Americans are using the Bible to uphold these kind of values. I think that the Bible is used by people who benefit from vilifying certain people.
Right.
We saw this with the slave Bible. We saw this throughout slavery. We see this in a lot of different areas. Like I, Like I mentioned in the in the intro, but what the author also talks about is the use of imagery, the kind of fire and brimstone stuff from revelation that really strikes fear into people. And I wanted to talk to Eli about that. Eli, what is the significance of religious imagery in promoting the policies in the United States or any policy in general.
Well, I kind of I touched on this on Monday Night. They the politicians have learned that don't have to believe what they're saying, They just have to get the right imagery like we're talking about or say the right things. So and it basically is is if they can terrify their voters enough into thinking that like, you know, hell awaits if you don't, you know, stop this terrible thing. That's clearly the devil causing this, and this is against
what God wants. You know, if you don't vote against this, you're compliant or complicit and that it's it's ecological torture essentially to get into voting into their policies. Like I gave the example on the last episode about like immigration, if they just decide, okay, well here's the reason I really want more strict immigration. But that's not going to
get the voters. What'll get the voters as if I say this thing about immigrants and the people, there are enough people who agree with that that it'll get me those votes. And that's essentially all it is.
Yeah, Yeah, the the kind of hot button topic, right, the buzzwords that really get people and the images that are associated with those things. It's almost like a marketing tool using the Bible to vilify the people that you that you can in order to I guess gain support, you know, praying on the fears of Americans by vilifying
a certain group and using imagery to do that. The thing that I think is funny about this that we really need to apply, and this comes with an education on the Bible, is that Revelation was written as kind of a cryptic text. It was written about the Romans, right, And you couldn't be you couldn't be a Hebrew and say things about the Romans without you know, being punished, as we see in the case of Jesus.
Right.
So this is essentially written by a smaller group about an invading force, right, about the Romans, about people from foreign lands coming into their country. And now we see it being used again that way, right, And we've seen it used multiple times throughout our history and throughout other histories. In Aaron, I want to talk to you about that.
You know, how does the Book of Revelation, or maybe even the Bible in general relate to the human psyche and the kind of different circumstances we may find ourselves in.
Well, the whole point of Revelation, like you said, is that Jesus wins, and if you're not with Jesus, you lose. Right, the revelations, there's some really poignant verses in the Book of Revelation about the people that you know make it to the end, that make it into heaven, their robes will be made white, and God will literally wipe all your tears from your eyes. Very poigt of right, who doesn't want to be part of the group that God
where God is wiping the tears from your eyes? So the Book of Revelation is definitely an US versus them narrative, and it really encourages you to be part of the US because you're not part of the us. Holy cow, do you have some shit that you're gonna have to deal with?
Right?
Plagues and death and famine and pestilence and all those awful horrible things. That's one of the points.
And then an eternity in hell after.
That, hell and fire and brimstone. And that's one of the points of this article is that when Revelation talks about the other they don't just say, oh, and then there's some other people that they just went their own way. No, they call these other people filthy, dogs, sorcerers, murderers, idolators, and awful horrible words to describe this other group that isn't part of the in group. That isn't part of the in crowd. And this isn't the Bible didn't come
first and engendered this bigotry. It's the bigotry in all human beings that the Bible is then preying upon. Right. If we were to make way of our magic atheist wand and get rid of all religions, guess what we would still have all the problems we have today because religion isn't the problem. Religion feeds on the problems that we have just being human beings. We are bigoted, and it's really easy to get us worked up and other
and tribal against other groups. It's really easy to get that fear response going, especially in uncertain times where people can't make ends meet, they can't they can't find a job. Even though people are saying no, it's easy to find a job, Well, how come I can't find a job, right, And so it's really when you're fearful and you're scared, it's really easy for people in power to take advantage of that fear. So I'm not getting into that as a skill that you have to learn to turn off.
And that's what I'm talking about. You know, this kind of cookie cutter type pattern when we see this kind of rhetoric surface. Okay, now I'm going to walk kind of a fine line here because I don't want to be perceived as you know, kind of overtly bashing political candidates or leaders to be. But I do want to harken back to what our vice president elect said about his future boss, and that he called Donald Trump the Adolf Hitler of our time. And he's not alone in that, right.
A lot of the language that Donald Trump has used, such as yeah, talking about immigrants poisoning the blood of our country, right and really minimizing them down to the vermin level, if you will, reflects a lot. I don't know if anybody has read mind Camp or even just skim through it, but Hitler's book, you know, really has a lot of comparisons about the Jews, and I want to say that there were uncertain certain times there as well.
The economy was not good. People needed somebody to blame, and so they kind of attack these people using religon. If you consider the religious difference between the larger population of Germany and the Jewish people, right, religion is also at play in the United States, and I don't think
it's all Americans doing it again. I think that there are certain people that are afraid of immigrants, and the people that need their support are playing on their fears by using religion and so on that note, you know, Kelly, I want to come back to you and just talk to you about that a little bit. You know, is it fair for this author to characterize Americans as people who use the Bible against others? Or or is it a larger problem? Isn't this a worldwide issue that we
see more and more? Yeah, I mean we it is a worldwide issue, and we see it a lot. Here's the crazy thing. Though we don't see it in other first world countries. We only see that here in America.
Right when we see that, we see that in third world countries and South America and in Africa, we see that militant Christianity being that's going to cleanse all the evil from the world.
Right.
So, I mean, and that I think is bothersome. Why is it that we here in America who could be that shining city on the hill are the ones who are spreading so much hatred. I don't get it. And especially when you talk to most Christians and they tell you that Jesus's message was a message of love and understanding, and yet they don't practice that, right it just do as I say, but not as I do. And it's pretty it's pretty bad, and it's nothing new. It's been
going on for decades in this country. When the Irish were coming over here, they were portrayed in political cartoons as monkeys. Now, personally, I don't mind living up to being a monkey. That it'd be like a step up for me. But I don't think most people of Irish descent would agree with that. And it goes to show you, though,
how US definitions of what is acceptable has changed. Right, You couldn't make fun of Irish people back then, but you can now have like the Notre Dame fighting Irish guy, which is still making fun of Irish people, but it's acceptable now. So it's yeah, it's kind of weird, right.
Yeah, I do. And you bring up an interesting point, you know, is our Americans sensitized desensitized to hate over time, and do we just accept it as normal? Eli? You know, how long do we have to put up with this? I mean, should we accept it as normal? Or or or what's the alternative here? What do we do to denormalize the hatred.
I think kind of between like the three of you, you guys have kind of touched on something that gives me the answer. I think it probably is just a sort of a thing that will naturally happen. I like to say a lot that the two things as humans are best at are pattern recognition and tribalism. And that's basically like those two things go hand in hand when it comes to like who is in my in group, right, there is this common characteristic between all of these people.
They are were all born here in America or you know what we now call America. We're all born here. And you know, some people take that further. They're born here and they look a certain way, and they were born here and they look a certain way, and they believe this and they only sleep with these people. And the different people have different a different radius as to
how big that circle goes. But that tribalism and that pattern recognition is just kind of that's just a part of who we are as like it's a part of our identity as an animal on this rock. So I think, yeah, honestly, it may just be a thing that just continues.
That was actually excellent. I really like that idea of tribalism. You know, when I consider the political spectrum from conservative on the right to liberal on the left, and then fascism on the far right and socialism on the way or communism really on the way far left, the tribalism those people with the smaller radius tends to fall towards the fascist point right, and the people with the larger radius,
those are a little bit more left leaning. Right, they will accept more people into their tribe, whereas the tribalism on the fascist side of things really want to keep their tribe small. They want to eliminate competition from other tribes, and that's where you kind of get the scale between fascism to communism, and so I thought that was spot on.
You know, I think this kind of rhetoric comes from the tribal folks who are often associated with being conservative, who are often demonized as fascists, although I've heard leftists be called fascists and that actually doesn't work, that doesn't fit. But that's a topic for another show. But you also bring up pattern recognition, and I think somebody who wanted to talk about pattern humans being pattern matching machines is
Aaron coming into the show. You talked a little bit about that, and I just wanted to see if you wanted to expand on that.
Yeah. So yeah. As Eli said, our brains are literally wired to be pas matching machines. If anybody, if anybody's near a light socket right now, go ahead and look at it, or an electrical outlet, go ahead and look at it. What do you see a face? Right? You see two eyes in a mouth, But that's not it's not a face, it's electrical socket. Why do you see a face? Because your brain is pattern matching right. And it goes to such an extreme that when some people
toast their toast, they can see Jesus. And a few months ago, somebody posted pictures of themselves the shirtless online and you can see Jesus in this person's abs. I kid you not. If you search for Jesus abs, there's a guy out there you can see Jesus in his abs. It's the craziest thing you've ever seen. This is such a common thing. There's actually a name for it. It's
called appo fenia. The tendency to see meaningful connections between unrelated things, or this patterned magic ability and this is why books like the Bible can be a little bit dangerous because the Bible, when you speak in generalities like the Bible, there's no really specifics in their prophecies or in their here tos and what force and here's what's
going to happen. Because they speak in such generalities, the human brain says, oh, well, I can map all these real world events onto these general things in the Bible, and that makes the Bible true. That's really that's really dangerous. And that's even more specific version of apple Fini. It's called paradolia, the tendency to impose meaning on things we
perceive that don't actually have any meaning. Actual examples can include or shot rorshock block, blood tests, seeing the man in the moon, the face on Mars, and things like that. And so we have if we understand that's how our brain works, we can kind of take a step back and think, am I really seeing a pattern here? Is prophecy really true? Or is my brain imposing some kind of pattern on it? Because our brain literally likes to
make shit up. Our brain has to know things, and it will literally make shit up so that it has a cohesive story and a cohesive worldview on things, So you have to be really, really careful.
Yeah. I always thought my brain was the most important part of my body, and one day I realize what's telling me that exactly?
Well, you know, Kelly, you've got a fine brain. You often joke about being a monkey. Well you said tonight being a monkey'd be a step up. And you often joke about having two brain cells that stick together. But you know, I want to pick your brain cells and ask you.
Never say pick your brain to a geologist?
Why why is that?
Because a rock picks a rock picks was a pick a rock pick?
Oh, got it, got it? Got it? Okay, I thought you were telling me a really bad address for a second.
What it was?
You know, Kelly, you think that this kind of thing will eventually play out. You know, but what's the risk of not vehemently pushing back against this kind of thing? And should we be doing that? And where do we stand right now as a nation, as a as a country that has a history of weaponized marketing toward groups, you know, like immigrants.
Well, you know, I've got a lot of fears about where we're at right now. My son often says, we are just one major economic crisis away from fascism, and I think we've been in a cold civil war for years now because of it. And when we're when I see like promises of twenty percent tariffs being put on all everything we buy a Walmart, think about that, and that's going to be pushing us towards that economic maybe pushing us towards that major economic crisis. So I'm really
worried about what could happen in the future. And I'm worried about people who don't fit the Christian nationalist demographic and what's going to happen to them. It's like, I don't think they're making an America for everybody. They're trying to make an America for them, and that scares me.
Yeah, you know, I think the fear is that maybe some people in power or people who are coming into might willingly drive the United States into a state of chaos.
I didn't want to be conspiratorial, but I mean it's definitely a possibility.
Well, you know, I mean, let's look at we're not being conspiratorial, but this is an article that we're covering tonight that talks about kind of the patterns right of how religion can be used or how politics can be used to be divisive, and we covered what World War two was like in Germany and how that kind of sparked the fascism that we're you know, it sparked fascism. I'm not going to take the leap and say the kind of fascism that we're afraid of, but it certainly did.
And yeah, you know, so in those fears that many people have, I think rests the possibility that some people might willingly be willing to go be ready to go down that road. And that's what strikes me.
But yeah, just to point I wanted to make real quick, is that if Jesus were born today and he's said the same parable today, it would probably be the good Mexican because that's the way Samaritans were looked upon in his day, which is why he chose the Samaritan, right. Yeah, So I mean, just to bring that to our modern times, that would be that purble today, the good Mexican, the guy from outside the country who came to my aid when nobody else would.
Yeah. So, man, there's there's so many ways to take this, I think. I think in short, you know, this really comes down to, uh, since we're going to talk about politics and religion, and we we harkened on that a little or we harped on that a little bit. On Monday Night show, we talked about education in politics. You know, with a better education, people can get a better understanding
of what it is they actually believe and ascribe to. Right, Jesus said, uh, accept, you know, love your neighbor and welcome immigrants and you know, be kind to everybody. But that's not what we see. And that's because there's no education really uh in working against these kind of tribalist views and have people open up their patterns or break
their patterns. Lightning round, gentlemen, Eli, We're gonna finish off starting with you, so we'll go Eli, Aaron Kelly, Eli, what do you have with us to close out on?
I didn't have another thought too, Like you mentioned like is it all Americans that's doing this or is it just like some of them are? And I think that's probably a lot more accurate. There is a group that are, but like there's groups of Americans that describe people based on like their Hogwarts house at the same time, so I think like we should also like is it necessarily endemic that it is happening in the US. It was
just that's not that I had interesting comparison. The fact that you can describe someone that way doesn't mean anything about like the reality of who they are, which is the the point that gets missed most of the time.
Yeah, and Aaron, you know your your comment about seeing Jesus in someone's abs, there's probably a whole lot of clergy members that are living in the closet surfing the way right now trying to find that photo. So good on you, But what do you got for us to wrap things up?
Be really careful, be really skeptical of people that use fear to motivate you. They use fear to get power because they're trying to tie into our base in our tribalism as a human species. They're trying to get into that deep reptilian animal instinct part of us. We have to fight against it. Like I said, it's a skill. We have to learn to not let fear drive us and make us choose. Because from all everything that I know and understand, immigrants are not the problem. Immigrants are
not taking our jobs. Immigrants are not more violent than other people. As you know. Fifty one hundred years ago, we didn't have an immigration policy. If you want to live in the United States, you got on a boat, you sailed across the ocean, you got off, and guess what you lived in America. This idea of closed borders is a new invention for our country. So immigration is not the problem. So what's the problem. Maybe think about that for a while.
Excellent. Finally, our resident geologist, Kelly, you know, you said we got to educate people, and I mentioned on Monday night, I mentioned the Carlon effect.
Common sense isn't that smart? And half the people are dumber than that. So how do you educate the people that you literally cannot educate? And Aaron touched on it animal instincts, We gotta I think maybe our the left needs to get better at appealing to animal instincts. And there are other instincts besides fear, Like a dog really loves having it's tummy rubbed, right, So maybe we need to start thinking about how we can rub society's tummy and get a lot of those people on our side.
Maybe a Tommy that's got Jesus in it, Yeah, you know, an ice rock card set of abs. Yeah. Well, interesting, interesting conversation. You know, of course we never have enough time. I could probably talk about this for hours, you know, using the Bible to market fear, market hatred, not any new concept. Maybe immigration is a new concept, or closed borders or a new concept. Maybe the idea of the United States dipping into or slipping into fascism might be
a new concept. But if the road that we take to get there is the weaponization of the Bible and the vilification of minority groups by using religion and preying on each other's fears, it's the same old stuff, and that's the pattern that we're falling into, and it's the tribalism that is so dangerous for our country. So we really do need to separate religion and government. We talk about that here a lot on the nonprofits, So if you want to see