Episode Transcript
[00:00:09] Speaker A: Welcome back to Think deeper from Focus Press. I'm one of your hosts, Jack Wilkee, joined by my brother Joe Wilke, and our good budy Will Hareb. Once again, this week we're talking paganism. We're talking a very interesting, unfortunate twist in our culture through right now. So we're going to get to that in a minute. I just want to this week, our plug give the Focus Press store just in general. The holiday sales are starting. We always like to get them started early. Shipping the last few years has been a nightmare. And so get that shopping done as soon as you can. So many books and DVDs and just all kinds of material. Some of the T shirts things that we have on there, think Deeper tumblers. If you're a deep thinker and you want to have your coffee mug tumbler, grab one of those. And so things like that help support our ministry and just is a really great way to give spiritual uplifting gifts to the people in your life. And so check that out. Focuspress.org Sale.
All right, let's get into our Lesson or Not Lesson podcast. Man I got off the road at 1130 last night. I'm a tired guy.
So last year, we did a Halloween episode, and we touched on Wicca and some of those things that are rising up. And over the months, I've seen more and more of that, but not just the Wiccan thing, but genuine paganism. And I think we talked about this a little bit last year, but people who genuinely say they worship Thor and Odin and Zeus and Osiris and the gods of the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Norse people and things like that, and at first, you're like, okay, that's just kind of being right.
And we're going to get into when I was on the road yesterday, for hours and hours, I just had video after video rolling. I wasn't watching. I was listening, I should say I was going to say while driving down.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Eyes on the road, Jack.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: Eyes on the road.
But just listening to these Norse people's testimonies, and it's so sad. All these young people who Christianity didn't do it for them, and so they went for some pagan god.
Looking at this, there's a lot of statistics. One of the number one things, we're big on this TikTok is a big deal. A lot of young people get on there.
[00:02:25] Speaker B: And Norse practitioners, we're not big about on TikTok. We're big on the fact that TikTok is bad.
[00:02:33] Speaker A: Yes, correct. We're big on man pay attention to what your kids learning on there. It is the number one LGBT recruiting tool. It's also the number one paganism recruiting tool. I mean, these people are active, and so young people get on there. And there was a National Geographic thing a couple of years ago that said in 2001, there were 134,000 people in America identified self identified as pagan. Now it's up to 1.5 million.
That is exponential growth, especially at a time where Christianity has declined over the years, where people are walking away from church and you always say, well, what are they going to? Well, some of them are going to this. And so that's going to be the topic of our episode.
It is a little Halloween esque because some of the Halloween things cross into that, but we're not going to really focus on that again, we had a lot of fun with our episode last year, so be sure to go back and check that out if you haven't. But let's talk about this rise of Neo paganism. And I know you guys got to do some research or Joe, you got to look at some of the things I was looking at as well.
Let's talk about the types. I guess let's start off there as to what we're seeing. People go, yeah, and define our terms.
[00:03:44] Speaker C: I guess you had mentioned a couple already there's Norse, which of course is, I think a lot of these and this is you talk about where they're coming from. I think the reason it's on the rise, we were talking off air is I think you had said it perfectly, Jack.
The two biggest media franchises of the last 20 years are Marvel and Harry Potter, which are witches. And then talking about Thor. And Thor is this major character and what do we see?
[00:04:10] Speaker A: Superheroes gods kind of thing.
[00:04:12] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. These gods, Loki, well, that got people interested in the fact that, oh, those are actual gods, quote unquote, that's in north mythology is Loki and Thor and Odin and things like that. And I think that's kind of popularized it, it's brought it around. But yeah, Norse is the first one that has those gods. And so Thor is the god of thunder, as we all know from Marvel. But it goes on so forth and things like that. Greek and Roman, you're seeing more of this with paganism, which goes back to Zeus and the Greek gods and Rome and the Greeks worship the same gods. They just called them different names. Of course, we also see the Egyptian RA, Osiris, man, there's a ton of them. And you're seeing a rise. I watched a video just last night of somebody that was what was she doing? She was talking about like she's chosen raw as her god or something. Jack, you were talking about one you saw where she was mixing Osiris and some other god. I mean, very interesting that people are bringing back like Egyptian gods. We're talking 4000 years ago. Wiccan is another one which is very Earth based along with Druidism, which is also Earth based. They have the stone circles around and that's kind of their altars or their sacrifices. They go out and they connect with nature a lot and they believe in like, I don't even know what they call them, I can't remember what they call them. But basically power sources on the Earth where you go find these specific power sources that are emanating spiritual power. And so they'll go up in the mountains and they'll find specific spots that are very spiritual.
So they connect with nature. So those are what, Norse, Greek and Roman Egyptian, Wiccan, Druidism and then the paganism is really just kind of the pantheon. You could be whatever neopaganism is new paganism. And it's just going back to that. One other thing that I read is paganism actually comes from a Latin word meaning country folk, those in the countryside. So somebody was making the point that a lot of the main religions were in the cities and the people out in the countryside, the farmers and such, those that were connected with the land often believed in these different gods, which is paganism. And that's very much where it comes from. So I thought that was very interesting. I think go for it.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: One of the things that I think is rather interesting about this is that I know we can grow up in our Americanized view of things, our Americanized culture of. And man, as somebody grew up in the Bible Belt, I guess I just kind of always had this belief that man, if somebody is not a Christian then they are probably just somebody who's a good moral person who maybe doesn't believe anything, know, doesn't worship anything.
Honestly, if they're not a church of, you know, a bunch of people in denominations, you don't really consider the fact that know that there are people who actually would consider themselves pagans. And as Jack said, the rise in number of if you I couldn't find much of this in my research, but I didn't know if you could find much about the age brackets, like what age it is that is, I guess turning to this Neo paganism. I would imagine it's a lot of young couldn't again, I couldn't find any statistics on that. But it did get me thinking and asking the question and this is where I'll turn it back and open it back up to you guys.
Why do you think there is such a draw for this? And I know you brought up marvel and Harry Potter and I agree with that. I think that does probably raise just the other day I heard an ad for the new Loki season two. People love that and it's something that's very fascinating to them. But I think it's got to go deeper than that, more so than just, hey, I really like Marvel, so let me go worship pagan gods. You know, what do you what do you guys think it is? Because first of all, it saddens me that we have a lot of people that are being drawn to that as a lifestyle, as something that's how they identify religious or not even religiously spiritually. That's their spiritual identification.
What do you think it is that's drawing them to mean? Do you think it's just, again, I guess, specifically young people, do you think it is just a pop culture, marvel, Harry Potter thing, or do you think there's something deeper going on?
[00:08:15] Speaker A: In all the research, I kept having the Chesterton quote run through my head of a man who won't believe in God. It's not that he believes in nothing, it's a believe in anything.
You can be duped by anything and you can just see this at play. And essentially the people need something. I mean, kind of the big mistake of the last 50 years was the materialism and science and all that of, well, we don't need God, we've outgrown the need for that. And it's like people are inherently religious, and this is all Romans one is talking about. If you're not going to worship God.
[00:08:44] Speaker B: They want to worship something.
[00:08:46] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:08:46] Speaker C: Everybody worships.
[00:08:47] Speaker A: And so with this, I felt so bad for these people. Like, all the videos explaining what they do, it's pathetic.
This one guy was going over, I had beers with friends and that was how we connect and talk about the gods. And I take my coffee outside in the morning just to relax in nature a bit, and it's like, so do I.
That doesn't commune me with Odin, man. And gardening, you're just getting your hands in the dirt of this earth that the gods have given us.
Yeah. Gardening and just having a few minutes of relaxation outside. Those are pretty good de stressing tips, that's all it is. But in the same sense, you're taking Marvel, you're taking Harry Potter and you're giving it like, well, I need something religious. What's? Something I like, let's figure out a way to mythologize that, to make that to give that a religious value.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: And it must be really nice and convenient for them, too, because for pagans, there's no sacred text, there's no rules, guidelines, no moral standard. Yeah, moral code, moral standard, even. And so I got to say, it is probably really convenient for them to basically do whatever they want, practice whatever they want to practice, and then just it all falls under the umbrella of, this is my spirituality, these are the.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: Gods that I serve on. That. I mean, it is incredible. All of them I watched was basically like, well, we'll pick which gods work for you, which ones you think are cool, which ones you identify with. Right. Yeah. And the values of it, of, well, you can get this out of it if you want to. And so it's postmodernism trying to latch on to religion at the same time, but that just doesn't work. And so the funniest one I saw was, this girl has a humongous following TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and just explaining paganism, and it was five differences between the Christian worldview and the pagan worldview. And we're going to get to some of them at the end, because some of the critiques were interesting of Christianity, but she was to paganism was so big on strength. And of course, they were really big into violence and we're not so much into violence and they were big into sexual hedonism. We're not into that. And so she's got this postmodern thing which is, I'm going to pick whichever gods I want to worship. She's got this pagan thing which, hey, these gods are really cool, but she's still operating on a Christian Christendom society of violence and sexuality or sexual hedonism are bad. And so you can just see this train wreck of worldviews hodgepodge and we're seeing this in so many ways and it's inevitable. It's why anti God views don't last. In the end, they're unsustainable in the same way that the LGBT thing and feminism are on this train wreck collision course. And the whole JK. Rowling controversy and all that is just this huge. You can't be feminist and say that men can become women, but all these people are like holding these two things and you're seeing some of it with the Israel Palestine thing and the decolonizer versus pro Islamic but also anti homophobe kind of thing. And it's like all of these ideologies train wreck and they're running into this again with religion.
[00:12:02] Speaker B: But this is what I was getting at a second ago. I'm sorry, Joe, get you back in here in just a second.
Why do so many people run full speed as fast as they can, as far away as they can from the idea of a monotheistic god? Why is that something that is so repulsive? Because I'm not going to say I understand it, but I can believe it when there are people who just want to be sexually promiscuous and change their gender and all this stuff, rejecting a god who says that that's bad? But then you do have people like the person you just described, Jack, who are not sexual hedonists and who are not they still adhere to some kind of moral standard, but they're still running full speed away from a monotheistic Judeo Christian God. Why is that? That is something that, again, I kind of understand. People who want to live however they want to with no regard for authority, with no regard for anybody telling them what they're supposed to do and how they're supposed to live. That's one thing. But that's not everybody. And there's still people like that who are running away from just this idea of a God who cares about them, loves them, but also wants them to live a certain way.
[00:13:09] Speaker C: Well, I read something that was very interesting. They said pagans really don't have any enemies, but if they did, it would be the monotheists.
They can't coexist because they are essentially, obviously all surprise polytheists. Yeah, exactly. Those are the ones that they can't get along with. And the reason why is because exactly as Jackson postmodernism, truth. Truth. Because when there's a polytheistic, which god you follow which god is true? Well, Osiris works for me and RA works for you.
[00:13:38] Speaker B: There's nothing objective works for you.
[00:13:40] Speaker C: There's nothing objective.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: You know, the funny thing is, none of them in anything I encountered, picked Yahweh Jehovah as one of their gods.
[00:13:48] Speaker C: Isn't that interesting?
[00:13:49] Speaker A: Never. It was never like, yeah, I've got a combination of Osiris, Zeus and nope. No, he doesn't make the list.
[00:13:57] Speaker C: Yeah, that's so interesting. But it creates this unity where we feel very spiritual, we feel very unified. We feel like we're all together in this. But in reality, how much can you be unified when you're not unified around any one particular thing other than what you want? Well, I can't be unified in what I want and still want what you want. But hey, if we just kind of do the postmodern thing of we'll agree to disagree, and really it's okay if we disagree because what's truth? What is truth? We don't even know what truth is. Whereas when you have Christianity, it says, this is truth. You either obey or there's hell. And they cannot stand that idea. I was talking with a client recently. We're going to get into the psychedelic side of things. He's very much in the psychedelics. And what those do is they open your mind to everything. And it does create for this universalism of, like, either Jesus saves everyone or there are multiple gods, or everybody's finding their own path to God. And that's a very pagan type thing of you come to the gods, the pantheon of gods in your own way. So we're trying to say this is truth and what is truth? We want to know. They don't care. What's your truth? What's my truth? It's postmodernism on the going all the way back for thousands of years of we can believe what we want to believe. The interesting thing, though, is, as Jack said back then, they would kill you for it. Back then there were wars and everything else. I mean, people we are kind of unless you do deep dives on history, we're very cocooned from how brutal the world was back then. We can watch some movies and oh, braveheart. It's kind of cool. These people were savages until Christianity came in. We're talking the brutality on levels we couldn't even begin to imagine, based on the gods that they followed and based on what their gods told them to do. And this is what these people are wanting to go after without all the violence. Those two things naturally go together. So Jack's point of postmodernism is brilliant, and that's why this is taking off.
Don't tell me what to do. I'm going to be spiritual in my own way. We do run into this in Christianity, though, which we're going to get to again toward the end, but we do run into some of that on the.
[00:15:56] Speaker A: Postmodernism thing before we get to this next step in our outline.
The thing that kept running through my head listening to these people. Was there's a serpent in their ear saying, how did God really say, you can be God? Why don't you let's take a bite of this. You can be God. You can do whatever you want. You can pick whichever god you want to worship, you can pick whichever values you want to hold, all that stuff. I mean, it's the same thing that was sold to Eve all the way back. There's nothing new under the sun. And man, these people bite at hook, line and sinker. So I went into this researching, expecting something a lot darker, and you can get into some of the darker stuff, some of the Wiccans, some of the Satanists like people actually out there sacrificing goats and stuff like that. Most of this stuff was you guys familiar with the term LARPing live action roleplay? And it's kind of like dressing up, you're just pretending. And when you really break down what these people are doing, some of them even admitted they don't actually believe there's any of these gods up there, but some of them do. But a lot of this was just LARP. It was just going along with it. And so it's kind of probably a good thing. But another sense of letdown that, oh, man, this is not that serious. On the other hand, I don't think this is something to be messed with because there are let's talk about Zeus and Odin and Thor and Baal and Osiris and all that.
We've talked about this a little bit when we had Kerry Williams on last year for angels and demons and all that. I think that because Christians are so materialist and so disconnected from the spiritual world, we think, oh, those were just blocks of wood. No. So let's get into that side of it. What actually are these gods that these people may not even know what they're worshipping and tapping into?
[00:17:39] Speaker B: We brought it up. Go ahead, Joe.
[00:17:41] Speaker C: No, go for it.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: I was going to say we brought it up in the alien episode. Also is kind of the other crossover from this is that the idea that there are demonic powers and kind of a different realm and demons that are out there is starting to make more and more sense, especially with all the alien encounters and such. But you think about going back to the Old Testament and why people believed in Baal and the other gods and all these things. Again, as somebody grew up in Bible classes and such, I just always believed, oh, they were just know, like you said, blocks of wood. They were worshipping a pile of rocks. They were worshiping an image of a calf. And man, those people were really dumb and stupid. And then you get to know Elijah on Mount Carmel, as we brought up before, and the fact that the priests of Baal really did expect fire to come down to light the altar. If that had never happened before, if this was something that know, why would they have expected it to happen? Why were they cutting themselves? Why were they going to these great lengths to show no, we really believe it. It's probably something a little deeper going on and people get really squirrely it's interesting, people either are utterly fascinated by the talk of demons or they get really squirrely about it and want to avoid the topic. You got to believe that a lot of the stuff specifically in the Old Testament, I'm not quite as sure. And Joe, maybe you can get into this about what it would be today for people who know the pagans and paganism worship and things like that. In the Old Testament, I do believe there were demonic powers that they were worshipping that maybe would cause fire to come down or cause you think about all the different gods that you hear about in pagan in Norse and Greek mythology. A lot of them are gods of weather, gods of things that happen, the God of thunder, right. The God of fill in the blank. And so I think there's some demonic overlap going on here again, especially in the Old Testament. But Joe, what did you have to add there?
[00:19:42] Speaker A: Well, I want to just on your Old Testament point as a kid, just to give another example, when I would read Moses and the Egyptian magicians, I was thinking David Copperfield, David Blaine, like, oh, they did some sleight of hand and made their stick turn into no. Magic back then meant this kind of.
[00:20:00] Speaker B: Actually, which is why it was prohibited in Exodus, god said, you shall not permit a sorceress to live. It wasn't like God was saying, hey, don't pull rabbits out of hats. He was saying, don't mess with this realm. It's not something that we're to mess with.
[00:20:13] Speaker A: And those guys did some powerful things. Now, of course, you see, God prevents baal from consuming their sacrifice. With Elijah in the plagues, very quickly God's power outstrips their power. But they had power.
[00:20:25] Speaker C: Yeah. And to mentioning the plagues clearly and most people know this, but the plagues are directly aligned with the gods of Egypt. Right. He's overcoming the God of the Nile and the God of the sun right. Turning everything dark. And their most powerful gods, he just picks them off one by one and says, oh, you think you can do this? And then he does it.
[00:20:42] Speaker B: That's cute.
[00:20:43] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. Why would he do that? Because there are other gods that are at play. I had a couple of scriptures to go along with this. Psalm 82, of course, is a key one here God takes a stand in his own congregation. He judges in the midst of the rulers. That is elohim, which you could say is mighty men. Or some people say he judges and stands above what I prefer to believe and what I think it's really talking about here is the pagan gods. I think it's talking about him standing in that congregation. And then we also see in Acts seven, I've been studying this recently, and he says in verse 42, but God turned away and delivered them up to serve the host of heaven. Deliver them up to serve the host of heaven. What is he talking about? The host of heaven has to be something. And if they're serving the host of heaven, doesn't it make sense that these would be the fallen angels, these would be demons, these would be the things in that spiritual realm that very much have power? And why would they serve them if they didn't? And it's what Carrie Willing think about Joe. Are you going to sacrifice your own kid if it doesn't work?
[00:21:38] Speaker B: Well, think about the very first commandment, you shall have no other gods before me. And again, I always grew up going, well, what else are they going to serve? The pile of rocks or the golden calf or just nothing? The reason that's the very first command, and we, of course, apply it today to, well, don't serve yourself, don't serve money, whatever. And I think that's a just fine application. That's not what God was saying with that first command of, like, hey, make sure you don't serve your wealth, or don't know. He was saying there are temptations. And we obviously see in the Old Testament, there are going to be temptations to serve other entities that are known as gods, other demonic powers. Don't serve those. You serve me. Again, I always grew up thinking, well, what else are they going to serve? No, there are other things that they could have served as their God, which, again, a lot of them obviously did right after the Ten Commandments were handed down with the golden calf. And so, yeah, just to tie that into your point, that's the very first command in the Old Testament that God lays down. Don't serve anything else. Don't serve any other demonic entity that you might call God. You serve me.
[00:22:39] Speaker C: So where do we go from here? Where is it? In the New Testament. Well, you look at Ephesians six, we're fighting spiritual forces of darkness, right? He talks about we are in war. There's a reason he says, put on the full armor of God. We're a war. Well, war with what if everything has been won and we ultimately know Christ wins in the end, but if he's won every last battle, no Christian would ever fall away. There would be nobody succumbing to temptation. There'd be nothing like that. We're still in battles. He's won the war, but they're trying to take as many people with them as possible between now and then. Therefore, do I think they still have the same power? To a certain degree, I think there is some power out there. I do think that there are demonic things that take place in this world and they work in different ways. Maybe they're not raining fire from heaven, but you can look at the Hollywood industry and you can look at a lot of different things. Look at paganism on the rise, look at postmodernism on the rise, look at psychedelics on the rise. And all of the different things we're seeing take place in America where we're slowly pulling away from God and really rapidly pulling away from God. Why are those things taking place? It's because I think they work in things like TikTok. Personally, I think that they work in different ways to pull people away than maybe they used to back then, but they're just as relevant, just as alive today, I think.
[00:23:52] Speaker A: So one other scripture I want to throw in is one Corinthians ten we've referenced before where Paul talks about the meat sacrifice to idols and he says that the Gentiles worship demons, that these aren't idols, they're demons. And so that in itself is telling. And because we grow up in such a scientific age, the non religious people among us go, oh, man, those primitive people, and they're goofy gods and we as Christian, and they mean that about us as well. Oh, the Jewish people, Abraham, he thought he had a god great, just like all of them. And they love them all together. And we go, no, 99% of them. They were all those primitive people. But ours had the real God. No, ours did have the real God, but the other people had something there as well. There's a reason they did this. It wasn't just some oh, they wanted to I mean, like all the explanations people come up with oh, they just wanted some comforting explanation as to why storms came up and so they came up with a storm god like, no, there's something more there. And so there's that. I think there's another thing. And all these episodes kind of have a strange overlap. Last week we talked about premillennialism a little bit in that millennium, the thousand Years, where it says Satan is bound for a thousand years. We believe we're living in the thousand years and I believe Satan's bound right now because there was a time where those magicians, they could do some know. There was a time where those powers were seen, and even in Jesus'day the demon possession, where he's having to cast out demons into the Book of Acts, where they were having to do stuff like that. And we're not seeing that. And I think a big part of it was the spread of Christianity throughout the world. Went to the Norse gods and defeated know, like the people converted and it went to Mexico and to Peru and Know, the Incan and Aztec and Mayan and those gods. I mean, just awful civilizations, awful religions, and defeated them. And all over the world Christians went in and uprooted paganism because Jesus had overcome all their gods. I mean. There is that spiritual war, and it's kind of like the game of risk, like you could see in the first century, kind of the world map of who controls what. And Jesus slowly went and picked off each of those gods and said, no, this is mine now. This is mine now. This is mine now. This is mine now. And so they don't have the operating capability they once did. However, let's get to this kind of how this paganism is returning. I believe that the demons, Satan, they work very covertly. They're very smart, and that all these people that are kind of semi ironically, maybe not 100% seriously worshipping these gods. Some of them are serious, but some of them, it's like I'm not really sure I believe them, but the dress.
[00:26:28] Speaker B: Up for them is fun, right?
[00:26:29] Speaker A: The dress up is fun. It connects me to my ancestors. It gives me roots, which people really need. People really want roots. In fact, Joe and I saw one where, I mean, these people were just total white supremacists. I mean, just chanting Nazi slogans at the church out in California that worships Thor and Odin and are Nazis because they're like, we're white people from the white Norse folks, and this is the religion of our ancestors, and we're preserving our mean. It's crazy stuff that's out, but it's again, I think the demons are working through people saying, look, this gives you a good feeling. It gives you some kind of root, some kind of grounding and tradition and all that. And so, yeah, just have fun with it. But then you start seeing the demonic stuff that is going on that is really not different than was back then. So let's talk about that. A little bit of this return of this ideology and the hallmarks of pagan religion.
[00:27:23] Speaker C: Yeah, I would say I was thinking about this because as you were talking throughout, I think as Christianity goes, that's what roots it out. But I do think the Norse yeah, you have some maybe that go way back, but we're talking in the Middle Ages, some of these and they still had, like boniface, I think is one of those, right, where he chops down the tree. These people still believed hundreds, maybe even a thousand years after Christ in their gods, quote, unquote, if they had not been working for a thousand years, I don't think you would have seen the same level of trust in Thor or whatever it is. It's when Christianity gets there that I think Christ overtakes. And honestly, I think that's kind of what's being talked about in one Corinthians 13. The more you look at it, when the perfect comes, that means when it comes into a culture, when the word of God and when Christianity comes into a culture, it overtakes that culture, and it changes things, right? And that's why we don't have the demonic and things like that. Until Christianity comes, I don't see how I still think that these gods are still working in cultures like that. However, to get into how we're seeing it today, you are seeing things like child sacrifice, right? You had molech the statue with the arms out with a bowl, and you'd put your firstborn in the arms, and sometimes they'd say it'd slide into a hole. I was reading this. It's just brutal. They light the fire underneath, and the child would slide down into the hole, and it would kill their firstborn. And if you did that, then the rest of your family was going to be blessed in good crops and everything else. Child sacrifice. Well, what are we seeing today? I mean, we're seeing abortion. We're seeing people giving up.
[00:28:48] Speaker A: And then what is the reason for abortion? Financial hardship or your career or your.
[00:28:54] Speaker B: Personal financially bless your family?
[00:28:56] Speaker A: Yeah, well, I've got stuff to do, things that just things I want to pursue. And so if I sacrifice my child, I'll get those things because it's not so direct. It's not, oh, if I light this child on fire, I'll get money. We think we're above that, but we're doing the exact same.
[00:29:15] Speaker B: That's basically what it is, right?
[00:29:17] Speaker C: Asharoth was another one where it was temple prostitution. We see this a lot throughout, like First Corinthians and such, where they would go to the temple prostitute. That was a big part. The sexual degeneracy. What do we see nowadays? We're seeing sexual degeneracy on levels that.
[00:29:28] Speaker A: Are unbelievable and sex as religion. I mean, what is a pride parade if that is not religious to those people out there demonstrating in the streets? And they've got to evangelize, they've got to teach kids all of this stuff.
[00:29:41] Speaker B: Story hour.
[00:29:42] Speaker A: Yeah, it's awful, but it perfectly lines up with how sexual religious degeneracy or religious sexual degeneracy, I should say, always worked. It's not different. We just think we're above it.
[00:29:55] Speaker B: And on that note, specifically, the drag queens and the transgender explosion, I've had people who have said, man, there's something because you had the homosexual movement, which I remember was big. I mean, it was starting to be in TV shows, and companies were coming out supporting it, and there were boycotts, and it was something that was new to the culture. And unfortunately, that's kind of gone by the wayside now. We don't really think quite as much about the homosexual tolerance and acceptance that our nation has because the transgender movement has exploded. But something does feel different about this transgender movement with the drag queen story or with the pride phrase. I mean, you see some of those videos where they've got kids at these shows and just performing basically, again, sex acts right in front of them and parents cheering and all this.
I had somebody say, there's got to be demonic possession going on with some of this. There's got to be some kind of again, it's different than, again, the homosexual movement different than what we were seeing a decade plus ago when homosexuality was really on the rise and again companies were coming out and supporting it. What you're seeing at these when I first heard that, I was like, okay, whatever. It was an older person. And so I was like, okay, whatever.
Maybe there's something to that. Again with these people that are just blatantly trying to make sure that our know fall into this and accept this. Maybe there is something to, um but yeah, I mean, you've got all these things. Joe, you're bringing know, child sacrifice. You've got sexual degeneracy, the narcotics you brought up.
Do you have something?
[00:31:28] Speaker C: Well, yeah, I was just going to say real fast, we're also mutilating kids from transgenderism, and that's getting earlier and earlier, which is also a form of child sacrifice in my ways, in my opinion of we are sacrificing their futures, we're sacrificing their sexuality, all for the sake of what? And I was thinking, as you were talking about it, going back to Romans one, for even though verse 21, for even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations. Their foolish heart was dark and professing. We wise, they became fools. They exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and of four footed animals and crawling creatures. Well, what do we just say? Molech was it was a bull, right? Like all of these gods are in these. So it's talking about paganism.
It's talking about them giving up what they knew to be right, which was God. They didn't give him thanks, they didn't honor Him. They go into paganism. What happens after that? Give them lust of their hearts. It spirals right into sexual degeneracy from there. I mean, I think it's a progression. I think you give up God, you pursue other gods because we're naturally spiritual beings. You go into sexual degeneracy and then that opens the floodgates to everything that's listed here. Unrighteousness, wickedness, greed.
[00:32:32] Speaker B: That's exactly what Romans One teaches, right?
[00:32:34] Speaker C: Exactly. It's an outline of how this happens. Well, what are we seeing more in America? Degeneracy on every level. But how did that start with Alfred Kinsey? It starts with all of these sexual degenerate people that are bringing in ridiculousness. But it starts really with paganism, where we're giving up what God created internally for what we want.
[00:32:51] Speaker B: Well, Joe, you said it starts with rejecting God. I would go back even a step further to goodness. I should have had it in front of me. Verse 18 or 19, what does it actually start with? They're suppressing the truth. And that's what causes them to reject that's the very first thing going back to Y'all's, postmodernism, postmodernism. They want to suppress the truth. They want to hold down hinder, prevent the truth, leads them to reject God, leads them to glorify other things, worship and serve the creature. And then again, just the downward spiral continues into the sexual degeneration that Paul pretty graphically spells out there in Romans one and then again goes into all the other things. All starts with a suppression, with a desperate attempt at preventing the truth. And what's so interesting we've gotten this before is that deep down, according to Romans One, it seems everybody knows. They know.
They just choose to go in another direction.
[00:33:40] Speaker A: Well, and that's beginning. Watching these people is the teenager kind of the trope thing. I hate mom and dad.
That was the same energy of all these pagan people is kind of they know, they know the real God is and I'm not worshipping him. So I'm going to go and kind of like the shock thing, oh, not only am I not going to worship your God, I'm going to go find ancient god to worship how you like me now? Kind of thing.
Grow up, own it. Okay. But with all this, there is the question of how directly are the demons involved? Is anybody actually in contact with the demons and kind of behind all this? Or is this all them working behind the scenes to deal with people who aren't taking it as seriously as maybe they should? I don't know, right? The giant owl statue that they have.
[00:34:38] Speaker C: A big bonfire around.
[00:34:39] Speaker A: Alistair Crowley you can go really down a deep rabbit hole. And I mean, like Jeffrey Epstein, you want to talk about child sacrifice and sexual degeneracy and all of these things checked off of what pagan peoples did.
There's just some really dark, messed up stuff there. And so I don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole, but just to say, all the LARPers, the TikTok, YouTube people goofing around with this and feeling like they're getting something out of it. It's like because one of the things a Christian podcast or video I'd watched, where they were making the point of like, hey, remember what these people did before Christianity showed up? And Joe, what you had talked. Know how brutal savage all societies barbaric.
Don't play around with this. Know again that church out in California bringing in the Nazism thing. And they're like, oh, we're not pro violence. We're not trying to ethnically cleanse or anything like that. Well, guess what? You mess around with this, this is where it ends up.
This is what these people always did. I mean, beheadings and child sacrifice and prostitution, rape and awful, just awful societies all over the world that Christianity, Christendom and the spread of it shortwired and improved, all of that. And you're reaping the blessings of that improvement, playing around with the degeneracy of the other thing, like, be careful what you wish for.
[00:36:06] Speaker C: One of the things and Will, you were getting to this because it comes back around to some of the things that we're seeing. Returning is everything you just mentioned Jack along with the narcotics and you mentioned are we in contact with demons?
Tough to say, it's all anecdotal. However, we talked about this on the aliens, one of like DNA, ayahuasca, things like that. They very much seem to contact some form of spirituality. And what's interesting is they all come out again kind of as I mentioned earlier, believing some of the same things, the universalism or the multiple gods postmodernism.
[00:36:34] Speaker A: Is what you're enlightened to is oh, everything's right, right.
[00:36:38] Speaker C: Using these psychedelics. And I was reading a very interesting article about how the ancients really did know psychedelics. You can get in the Book of Enoch how they figured this out. There's some interesting reading there. But what's interesting is every culture seemed to have their own we see it in South America, they had their own things to get high. They still in Peru. You can go to these shamans and get high down there. You can look at the Native Americans with the Ayahuasca and they did their sweat lodges and things like that, that brought them into different place. You can look at other parts of the world, there's some in Africa, each part has their own psychedelic or psychotropic plants. Isn't it interesting that, again, a lot of these serve very, very similar gods, gods of weather, gods of sun, gods of the moon, gods of the planets, things like that. And what do you also happen to see all over the world? You happen to see Ziggurats, you happen to see pyramids, you see these structures, these mounds, these hills that are in that, you see that one in there's, one in Illinois, that was from Native Americans. You see it in Peru, you see it in Mexico, you see it in Guatemala, you see it in Egypt, you see it in Sudan, you see it in Antarctica. There are those in Antarctica. Well, what do you think high places are going up and sacrificing at these high places? All of these people had their own psychotropics and you could say that's a big stretch. I don't know, they all had their own gods. That all seemed to be pretty. And the other thing is and that's just wild rabbit.
[00:37:57] Speaker B: But I was going to say that's what led to the downfall of Judah and Israel as well is not tearing down the high places.
[00:38:01] Speaker C: That's exactly it. The interesting thing is a lot of those are aligned with stars or so you can look that up, the ziggurats and the pyramids and such, these are in my opinion, that goes back to paganism, it goes back to these other gods and narcotics really opens the way to that. What do we see in America today? Microdosing is coming around, they're doing this in therapy, they're doing ketamine, they're doing things like that. Colorado was, I think, the first to legalize psilocybin mushrooms, right. Or shrooms and that's paving the way. Other states, it sounds like, are close behind. That's how these things are working, is getting into the culture know, the demons are getting into the culture through the same things that they did all the way back then. And it would not surprise me if we start seeing actual sacrifices going on in the not too distant future because of things like this.
[00:38:50] Speaker B: So I'm going to ask a question. I don't know if we're ready to get to the last section here where I think we're probably getting close, but I wanted to ask a question before we got there, and it's not on the outline. These guys might kill me for throwing a curveball or calling an audible here, but it's got me curious, and it's the we're the Think Deeper podcast. I know people are going to want to know about it, and so I figure, hey, let's discuss it. Harry Potter. There's a lot of debate surrounding Harry Potter I was trying to think of. I mean, you could argue, I guess, Lord of the Rings and Star Wars is not really like we talked about Marvel and stuff. Funny enough, nobody really ever has anything bad to say about Marvel. It's just Harry Potter that everybody has the big problem with. And so I know there's got to be people that are listening to this or watching this going, yeah, okay, so should I not let my kids read Harry Potter? And I know Jack and Joe previously at least, have kind of been on different pages about this.
And so, yeah, I knew this was something that probably a lot of our listeners were going to be curious about. And again, not on the outline. Definitely an audible here. But guys, what are your thoughts on because we referenced it at the start, what are your thoughts on Harry Potter letting your kids read Harry Potter? Watch the movies. I personally have never read the books or watched the movies, but it's not because of any kind of personal conviction. It's just because I've never gotten around to it. I was a Narnia fan. Star wars fan.
Not never read The Hobit and stuff? Never really got into Harry Potter. Again, a lot of people there is a personal conviction for them that they won't because of something like this. And then there are also people who will take it even further to say it's more than just a personal conviction. It's a conviction that everybody should have because of stuff like this. It plays into this discussion, is my point. And so mean. Joe, you're yeah, you've said before you're a big Harry Potter fan. Jack. I don't think quite near as much. In fact, I think Jack might be on the other to I don't want to speak for you guys. What are your thoughts on Harry Potter and how it plays into this?
[00:40:53] Speaker A: I'm yeah, I'm more anti Harry Potter. I hesitate to lay too much blame at the feet of this because I think with the Marvel thing. What you're seeing is like, it was going to be anything. And so I think the critiques of Harry Potter kind of stand on its own of witchcraft, darkness, whatever you want to talk about, you could go back and forth on that, but I don't want to lay all of this at the feet of that because it's like, man, it could have been Blues Clues. I mean, like, whatever these people, like, they were going to have, and I think this is more of a Christian parents, be really careful.
And I guess this does give people a pathway, but I'm not sure I would blame Harry Potter directly for it.
[00:41:34] Speaker C: Yeah, and that's kind of where I am, is she's made it very clear. She made up words, Muggle. Like, she literally made up a ton of words and is the first to say, man, this is fantasy, because she's been busted on it. Even with fiction, like, this is not real. And people came up and they're like, you know, in your books, because obviously she's anti trans, and in your books, you have the kids that stand up and they fight off the forces of darkness and things like that. And so why don't you allow kids to make the same decisions when it comes to their gender? And she's like, this is fantasy, this is fiction, this is not real. And you're talking real life decisions you're making. So she's the first to say, I was listening to an interview where she was like, I always have j. K. Rowling.
[00:42:17] Speaker B: You're talking the author.
[00:42:18] Speaker C: J k. Rowling. Yes, the author. Those that are into what did I say? Boarding schools and witches are those that always think I'm on their I don't I don't really believe in either one of them. She's like, I don't think either one of them is good. And I certainly didn't mean to spark the whole witch's thing. Like, I think this is all fiction, knowing that knowing that was hers, it's still a Christian parent's duty and responsibility to understand. I do think there are some very dark themes in Harry Potter. I don't think it's for young kids the same way that some people do. However, if you can make a strong distinction between what is fiction and what is not, I don't have as much of a problem with it. It's those people that, again, they're already looking for something and they use it and go, well, that sounds really cool, which sounds like a lot of fun. You are going to find it one way or the other. A lot of Christian parents can look to that and go, wow, Harry Potter did it. No, you didn't have a good enough relation. If reading a book sends them off on paganism, you got bigger than reading Harry Potter.
[00:43:12] Speaker A: I'll say this. One of the guys I was watching to research, this Odin worship practitioner, he got his start. He was in Catholic confirmation classes and just didn't like it that much. And he said, I prayed to whatever deity would answer me that I would get an answer. And I had a dream that night that Gandalf came to you know, a lot of Christians are cool with Lord of the Rings for this guy. It was Gandalf. Gandalf got him into know. He started researching the connections between Gandalf and Odin. It's like, yeah, I don't think Tolkien a devout Catholic. Tolkien, I say it right, a devout Catholic would want you to draw that inference. But again, it's kind of whatever you're looking for, you're going to find it, because to give her credit, despite all its flaws, the central message of Harry Potter was deeply Christian.
And so it is what it is. On that point, I did want to talk about here on these last couple of things before our time is up, the valid critiques or I guess the reasons that people gave for abandoning Christianity for paganism and maybe things we can learn from that. One of them I mentioned was the girl who did the five differences between the pagan worldview and the Christian worldview.
She pointed out that they are very much on strength, not physical fitness so much, but just kind of like taking care of yourself, the body matters.
There's this Nietzschean critique of Christianity that it's just very weak. It's wimpy. It's about losing, it's about being bowled over. And he points to the cross of like, look, your god died on a cross. And a lot of these Norse people are like, look, your god, our gods were warriors. Yours went and died, and yet he came out of the grave and defeated your gods.
[00:45:00] Speaker C: Read revelation one.
[00:45:01] Speaker A: He's the ultimate champion of all those things in Ephesians Six and all that. But I think they have a valid critique about the wimpiness of a lot of Christianity. And that was Nietzsche's thing of like, now we need the Ubermensch, the strong man, the great man, and Christianity is about being a wimpy man. And I think he's wrong about that. But I get why they would see that from the Christianity they see.
[00:45:25] Speaker C: Well, yeah, if you're looking at Tim Keller, if you're comparing him to some of these stronger Andy Stanley, like, come a to me, it is a very valid critique to say we've feminized and kind of made Christianity wimpy, when in reality we are the conquerors. No, we're not going out there with axes and swords and whatnot and fighting, but we are in battle. We are in battle against something that's far bigger than any of us, right, that obviously we need God. But you see, like, you read through one Timothy Three and what God wanted as the men of God. I just have a difficult time seeing somebody who's wimpy. I see a guy who's willing to stand up and say the hard things, who's willing to call people out, who's willing to do the things that a man would do, and we don't hold that up as being good. And it's interesting that our masculine and feminine episodes exploded. Those are some of our most listened to episodes. Why? People are very interested in this. They're very interested in what is the role of a man, because they recognize, I think everybody recognizes we feminize Christianity to the point that anything could come in and appear more strong than we are. This is why Andrew Tate guy's an idiot. So I'm not saying that we should listen to him, but this is why he went toward Islam, is he saw the same critique and said, Christianity all these Christians don't actually believe in what they claim to believe. They're out there doing the same things as everybody else, and they're weak, whereas Allah is strong. Well, I don't agree with that critique that Allah is strong, but he does. Again, these guys have a point.
[00:46:55] Speaker B: That's exactly what I was going to bring up, is why do people look at Christianity and see weakness? I think it's two things. One, because I think a lot of the men, as you're talking, Joe, the masculinity side of Christianity has been feminized. You don't see a lot of men actually being stepping up, like you said, saying the hard things, being masculine and really taking a stand on things, but not just the men. You see a lot of people who really don't seem to believe or don't seem to practice what they believe. They live however they want to. They'll go whichever way the culture is blowing. They don't stand their ground on certain things. And so other people do look at us as Christians a lot of times, and I guess Christian dumb, you might say.
And they look at us and they say, you guys clearly have a sacred text that you follow that says X, Y, and Z. You don't really seem to live like that. I think that's where they see the weakness is people who don't really practice what they believe. And so it's like, well, why would I want to serve that? Why is that something I mean, that's exactly what Andrew Tate said. I watched one of the interviews that he had, and it's like they don't practice what they believe. Why would I want to be a part of that?
[00:48:01] Speaker C: And there's a physical aspect of weakness. Not to cut you off. I apologize. There's a physical aspect of weakness, though. You look at, again, the Andy Stanley's rail thin, or you look at the 350 pound preacher, you're looking at that like, this is what stands for Christianity. When people think of Southern Christian, what do you think they think of? Like, I'm sorry, they're thinking of fellowship meals and they're thinking of overweight. That sounds really mean, and I'm sure we're going to get some calls or whatever for this.
Be honest with yourself. Step back and think about that. Be honest with yourself. What do you think of when you see that? You're thinking of something like that. Whereas with Norse you're thinking of big muscles. You're thinking of Thor. And the guys that follow this and the guys we saw in the video take care of themselves. We have the gnostic like, oh, the physical doesn't matter at all. They take it too far. The physical does matter, as we've talked about before.
[00:48:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, Thor. Hercules. Whatever. It's like do you need bodybuilders in the pulpit? No, that's not the point.
The aesthetic is the outward working of your belief system. And they had a good point that Christians don't really value this life hardly at all.
[00:49:05] Speaker C: I think that's very much the key to that, is we're so worried about the afterlife and we've talked about this before, let's just get to heaven. My goal is to get to heaven. Get to heaven. No, your goal is to be Christlike on earth. Your goal is to let Christ affect every part of your life.
[00:49:18] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:49:18] Speaker C: That includes your fitness.
[00:49:19] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:49:19] Speaker C: That includes the food you eat. This is stepping on my toes just as much. It includes every aspect of life. If Christ rules, what would that look like in each part? Not just in heaven, but here on earth. And they take very much here on earth matters.
[00:49:32] Speaker B: Well, let's consider let's take just a second because people are going to be saying, well, we're supposed to be meek, we're not supposed to be going out and conquering people. We're not supposed to we're a religion of love and all this stuff. And yes, that is like, we are not in the we're going to go out and know, be prideful and arrogant men, that type of thing. But think about Paul. Think about Peter. Think about Jesus Christ. Would anybody be able to look at those individuals and say they're weak? That's a weak man. No, consider all the things that Paul went through, just himself. Consider the things, of course, that Jesus Christ went through. But consider also the things that they said, the things that they stood up for, the things that they preached, the stances that they took. Nobody could rightly look at them and label them as weak. That would just be incorrect. A lot of people who are representing Christianity today, and I'm going to say it, even in the church of Christ, unfortunately, you're not going to be able to have that same you can look at them and call them weak, I guess is my point. And so, no, we don't agree with the critique of Christianity being weak. Unfortunately, a lot of the representation of Christianity, again, because of the lack of stance taking, because we're not saying the hard things, because we are not physically taking care of ourselves in a lot of instances, unfortunately, yes, the people who are standing for in representation of Christianity can appear weak at times. That's all we're saying. Again. It's not that we need to go out and conquer other people like they did in the Crusades or anything like that. It's just that we need to actually have the strong belief and actually act on the fact that, yes, we are Christians and we're not ashamed of it.
[00:51:09] Speaker A: Yeah, that is one of my biggest takeaways of this whole thing was Christian maximalism is what we need is like, man, be a Christian and own it. These people are being pagan and own it. Like, we kind of do the thing of quiet Christianity and well, hopefully somebody will come ask me about my faith. It doesn't work that way.
[00:51:26] Speaker B: My being a Christian will hurt others feelings. So I'm going to keep that kind.
[00:51:29] Speaker A: Of on the download because I've always kind of been embarrassed about that guy who's just boldly out there. No, really, be like, hey, I go to worship. I'm in my Bible. Prayer is a big deal. And not practicing your religion before men, but just be like, hey, this is who I am. This is who we are. Because to them, Christian can mean any it doesn't mean anything because it's just such a broad spectrum. Let's give people a vision of what it is. But the other thing is kind of this conquest idea.
No, it's not conquest by the sword, but Christianity accomplished world conquest over much of the world by strong, determined, disciplined people going out there and preaching the gospel and being willing to be killed for it. But it takes a certain drive to do that. It takes a certain strength to do that that we currently don't have. And again, their other thing about, man, you guys are so afterlife focused. But we're worried about this world and this life and enjoying the moments day to day. And they're in touch with the spiritual and with the mystic.
The two biggest critiques they have against Christianity. The feminization of Christianity is not biblical. It's not christian. And then the thing about the materialization of Christianity, christianity is a very spiritual religion. That's why, again, as I said, you have people so interested in angels and demons. You have people so interested in these conversations because we know there's a spiritual world. Science has told us there isn't. And Christianity has gone, okay, we're going to downplay all this. It's not really there. No, it really is.
I keep hearing more and more Christians all the time listening to Jewish rabbis teach. Why? What are they teaching that you're not getting in the church? Well, they teach a spiritual reading of the text and a spiritual understanding of the world. And I think you got to be really careful with a lot of those rabbis. But they're saying stuff that we don't say. And so we've really got to get back to understanding. The spiritual really matters and the physical really matters. And we haven't really done either one.
[00:53:19] Speaker C: We've intellectualized everything as long as you can read your Bible and study and memorize, which is great. That's a great part of Christianity. That is not all of Christianity. So when we intellectualize everything, we lose out on so much. This last couple of points you had on the outline sexuality is another one. Like, we don't have any theology, sexual theology, they clearly do. It's not right. But basically we create a vacuum because we haven't filled it with anything. We haven't showed what the right state is on that. And we should be some of the best keepers of the earth. We talk about going green and such, and look, we're not going to the political side of it, but in terms of taking care of the earth, this is ours. God did give it to us. We should be people that care about it. No, not going to the lines of the earth and the circle stones and everything else. Of course not. However, we should be out in nature. We should be enjoying that. We should be doing the things that really allow us to bless God and to praise God for those things. So the guy going out in nature and spending ten minutes with his coffee in nature, we should do the same and praise God for creating that. So, yeah, I just think that some of the things they're doing, we could do if we were to really sit back and bring back some of these things of, like, spiritual does matter, exactly as you said, Jack, and the physical does matter. And taking care of what God has blessed us with, we can spiritualize just as much as they can because we know who created everything. They do not.
[00:54:39] Speaker A: Yeah, just to put a bow on all of it's so wild to see people just so desperately searching for something, and we have all the answers and we've been sitting on them, and so we just need to stop sitting on them. We need to start again. Living out Christian maximalism in every part of physicality spirituality your whole life.
[00:54:57] Speaker B: The last thing I'll say, because, Joe, you read Romans One and you stopped. I don't think we referenced it. I know we're talking about off air. These people are serving the creature rather than the Creator. And I think that's something that we can take, I guess, comfort in, you might say, is that we do serve the Creator. We're not serving the creation or the creature, we're serving the Creator. And so that should give us the motivation, I guess, is what I'll say, to do all the things that we just talked about. Joe, as far as this episode goes, I'm very interested to see what kind of comments we get. We're welcoming and inviting any and all comments. If maybe if you have a relationship with somebody who maybe has kind of dabbled in some of this, maybe you've got a perspective that the three of us don't let us know. Share it with us. I mean, we'll, of course, be discussing this a little bit further on our deep end segment. For all of you who are Focus Plus subscribers, it's definitely something that's incredibly interesting to consider as you think about, really, the way that a lot of people, again, they want to serve something, they want to worship something, and this is the direction that they're going. So, yeah, interesting episode today, guys. Anything else you want to add before we get out of here for the week?
All right, keep an eye out on all the other things that we've got going on. We, of course, have got the God of Young Men podcast that the next episode will be coming out tomorrow, every single Tuesday, YouTube and your podcast app. We've got books for sale. Jack mentioned the holiday sale that we've got coming up, so just check out that on the Focus press store. And as always, reach out to us if you've got an episode topic you want to hear, if you've got a question that maybe we can answer. We never claim to have all the answers on anything, but we will discuss just about anything and everything from a biblical and Christian perspective. So, as always, thank you so much for listening. This has been the Think Deeper podcast. We'll be back next weekend.
