Fertility, Conversion, and the Fallacies of Right-Wing Ideology

In this episode, Malcolm and Simone discuss Scott Alexander's review of 'The Rise of Christianity.' They explore how Christianity spread rapidly in its early days, challenging common beliefs about widespread conversions driven by miracles. Instead, factors such as higher fertility rates among Christians, effective social networks, and the appeal of Christianity's treatment of women played crucial roles. The episode delves into the socio-cultural context of ancient Rome, comparisons with modern cult movements, and the implications for both historical understanding and contemporary religious dynamics.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! Today we are going to be discussing a very interesting piece, Scott Alexander's review of The Rise of Christianity.

And in it, he goes through how Christianity spread as fast as it did, it is astounding how quickly Christianity was able to spread in its early days. And it was not through the, tactic that most people think, which is widespread conversions based on either miracles or just the logic of what was in the text.

Instead, it appears to have mostly been downstream of Christians having more children, having more surviving children. And having an ability to convert women at a much higher rate in the early days.

But the children, childbirth appears to be the core of this. Also, their plague surviving rates appear to have been quite different. So we're going to go over each of these in turn.

Speaker: [00:01:00] In ancient Rome, where altars shone, the pagan gods once ruled alone. But quietly came a faithful breed Not through big signs, but with small seed They gathered in humble prayer No sweeping crowds or mass fanfare They built their homes with children glad More babes they bore than pagans had

Malcolm Collins: The challenge Well, Andy,

Simone Collins: even the Christianity seemed to have spread through the kindling of Judaism, which had already spread, which is also fascinating.

It's just such a cool

Malcolm Collins: overview. Yeah. The challenge with any Scott Alexander piece is he writes In a way, we're typically when we're reading a piece, we are throwing out 90 percent of it. This time we're keeping probably well over 80 percent of it with a number of factual and textual additions because there's a few minor errors [00:02:00] he makes.

And there are a few areas where I just happen to for whatever reason know additional information that helps flesh things out a lot.

Simone Collins: Oh, that's fun. Because what I love most about Scott Alexander's book reviews is you get a great summary of the book, then you get additional research and annotation from Scott Alexander, and now I'm getting layer three from Malcolm.

This is like tiramisu now, you know, first you start with the muffin and then you get a cupcake and now I'm getting, whoa, man, this is great. Let's

Malcolm Collins: go

Simone Collins: into it.

Malcolm Collins: All right, dive in.

Simone Collins: Scott Alexander writes, The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes.

By 400, they were 40 million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history. Imagine taking a time machine to the year 2300 AD, and everyone is a Scientologist. The United States is over 99 percent [00:03:00] Scientologist. So is Latin America and most of Europe. The Middle East follows some heretical pseudo Scientology that thinks L.

Ron Hubbard was a great prophet, but maybe not the greatest prophet. This can only begin to capture how surprised the early Imperial Romans would be to learn of the triumph of Christianity. At least Scientology has a lot of money and cutthroat recruitment arm. At least they fight back when you persecute them.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, so I think that this is all really important to note because a lot of people do not realize how quickly Christianity basically came out of nowhere from a small persecuted group that was not seen as particularly different during Jesus's lifetime than other small, roaming Thaumatological Performing Rabbis. So, quick note here if you don't know what I'm talking about. Thaumatological performances is a type of magical performance, which is like a miracle working as a magic trick. It was [00:04:00] really common for random rabbis to roam around and perform these types of miracles.

You know, you have like the circle drawer, you have the, I'll add a few in post here.

You have Hani bond. Doza. , who performed numerous miracles, including making vinegar burn like oil for Shabbat candles. When his daughter mistakenly use vinegar instead of oil. He also extended the links of beams for a woman's house through blessing. Additionally, he was known for controlling rain with his prayers. He wants prayed for rain to stop while he was traveling and it ceased immediately. You have Honi the circle drawer. He is famous for his miracle of praying for rain during a severe drought in Israel, he drew a circle and the dust stood inside it and vowed not to leave until God sent rain. Initially only I liked drizzle fell, prompting him to pray again for more substantial rain.

Ultimately God answered his prayers with a heavy downpour Shimon bar Yochai., he. Performed healing miracles. And.

It was said that he could burn people with his gaze. One notable miracle involved the emperor's daughter who was possessed and he was called to help her. Additionally, [00:05:00] during this time in a cave, He and his son were miraculously sustained by carob tree and a Sprig of water. After emerging from the cave, it was reported that everything looked at a world burnt to ashes. Indicating his extraordinary spiritual. Power.

I say this because I think it actually undermines the amazing growth of the early Christian community. To overstate how unique Jesus would have appeared to people of his time.

And I would note here, the point I am not making is that all of these other miracle workers actually performed their miracles. But what I am saying is that it was widely believed that they had, so if me a random person around this time had a group of people come to me and say, Hey, there was this rabbinic miracle worker, and here are some of the miracles he performed.

I'd be like, yeah, a guy told me about another one yesterday. And a guy told me about a different one the day before., Like it wouldn't have been unique.

and people can be like, well, you know, he raised people from the dead. That was totally unique. And it's like, well, not really.

[00:06:00] If you go to the old Testament, for example, the widow of Zarephath son raised by Elijah, the prophet, the shin termite woman's son raised by

Elijah successor. , and then from the new Testament you have Thomasa Dorcas raised by the apostle Peter. , you have YouTube Chris raised by the apostle Paul. , so that again, if you over emphasize, like, if Abe, if Jesus was just this amazing guy that nobody could possibly deny in everyone who saw him was immediately like, yeah, I'm on board with this, you've changed everything. , this story actually becomes a little less remarkable because it's like, oh, well, that's why it's spread.

But when you realize that. Within the context of his time, Jesus would not have been that different for many of the other people in the region who had followings. , it becomes absolutely amazing how quickly it grew and a miracle that is. In fact, I think a bigger miracle than many of the miracles that Jesus has reported to have, Carried out and a miracle that it is much harder for a secular [00:07:00] person to deny.

But to give you an idea of.

How undifferentiated Jesus was from other walking you know, random Thaumatological performances we have recorded in the Bible pretty miraculously What a random traveling magician would think of Jesus, in the story of Simon Magos Whereas Simon Magos sees Jesus. He is a sorcerer a a basically I mean unless you think that there were random like actual sorcerers in the area at the time he was a magician And he saw what Jesus was doing and he said, Hey, can I buy that trick from you?

And Jesus got really mad about it. You know, but the point being is that we know we have, we have the answer to the question. If a random magician saw Jesus, what would he think? He would think he was a magician.

To put it. In other words, the types of.

Belmont to logical beat Jesus was performing. We're not seen as uniquely spectacular or out of place when contrasted with the type of feeds performed by traveling magicians.

Of that time period in that region it's actually incredibly [00:08:00] important from a theological perspective because it removes any validation given to Jesus's claims by his miracle work and the claims and the growth of the movement have to provide the validity themselves, which I think is a higher form of validity than I believe it because the guy performed miracles. , also here.

I would note if you haven't read the infancy gospel of Thomas or studied it. ,

it's a non-canonical gospel where it's like, well, what if you had all the magical powers of Jesus, but you were a kid and didn't have a lot of self-control. How might he have used them during that time period?

, and it comes off a lot, like this, get.

Speaker 4: No, David Blaine, no. I'm

Speaker 2: what'd you buy?

Speaker 4: Uh, I bought a green sweater, if you want to know. Okay, I bought a green sweater.

Speaker 5: Interesting. Are you sure you didn't buy a teddy bear?

Speaker 4: Yes, I'm sure I didn't. Teddy bear? What the eff? How did you? How? Where's my sweater?

David Blaine. David Blaine. He bought a green sweater, okay? You're being mean. You're being stupid. Where is it? Look at your effing [00:09:00] body right now, Peter.

What the eff, how the hell? I was holding things! Did you feel anything? Thanks, you stretched it out probably, thank you. Please, please, stop it. I don't want to wear it right now. Please stop. I don't even want to wear it yet.

Speaker 3: Hey, what are you drinking? I'm drinking orange soda. Ooh, big whoop.

Speaker 4: Hey, what else is orange? What else is orange? I don't know. Cheez Its? Cheez Its! What the? Cheez Its! F**k! What the? Where's my orange soda?

It's orange soda in my mouth! What the F? You put it in my mouth! What the F? How did you get it in my mouth? Please stop, you demon!

Malcolm Collins: And he, so, so the, Oh, and he was, there

Simone Collins: was a type. It was, it was, He was a common, the, the Great Courses series on the historical Jesus aka Wonderium describes Jesus as an apocalyptic Jew in an age where there were lots of apocalyptic Jews just kind of walking around and preaching.

It might be akin [00:10:00] to like seeing a life coach today.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, we know this because of like the Dead Sea Scrolls community, which was around the same time period a bit before, but was also, a group of apocalyptic Jews. Sorry, apocalyptic Jews means Jews who think the world is about to end not end exactly, but enter the next phase of existence and that they are coming to bring this.

And many of Christ's early followers believed that his second coming was going to happen soon. Within their lifetimes. We can see this in the letters. Where I think it's Paul writing to a group who's like, some of our members are dying before the Messiah comes. Like, what are we supposed to do?

And he goes, oh, well, their bodies will be raised. But the fact that they were worried about dying before the Messiah comes showed that they, like, Rose from the dead again shows that they saw that as an anathema. That as a weird thing.

That this was a common belief in the early church. You can see in things like Paul's letter to the Thessaloniki. , where he says, [00:11:00] quote, for this, we declare to you by the word of the Lord that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord by no means precede. Those who have died for the Lord himself with a cry or. Of command with arc angels call and was the sounds of God's trumpet will descend from heaven and the dead in Christ will rise first.

Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet with the Lord in the air. Therefore, encourage one another with these words in quote.

So you can see very clearly here. He says, that we who are alive. And he's talking about the people who are listening to him or reading this letter are going to experience the second coming of Christ. , as to why he would think this, well, you just need to look at Christ's own words. Matthew 24 30 to 31, mark 13, 26, 27. And Luke 2127 to 28. , where Jesus states quote, truly, I tell you this generation in quote, meaning his contemporaries will not pass away [00:12:00] until all these things have come to take place in quote Matthew 24 34, mark. 1330 Luke, 2132.

I am here. Not trying to point out that the Bible is wrong or something. I think that they misinterpreted these words that said, I don't think that they were stupid for misinterpreting these words. And I'm just pointing out here that it was a common belief in the early church that Jesus was going to come back before. Within their generation and they weren't stupid for having this belief.

And this becomes even more powerful when you look at the spread of Christianity, because it makes even less sense. It becomes even more miraculous when you see that. Early wrong beliefs in the early Christian Church did not invalidate its rapid growth.

So you've got to think about what Jesus's group was. The followers of Jesus who keep in mind, we believe we're actually true and correct and everything like that.

But I don't think that they were I'm very different from your average modern Christian who thinks that like anyone who saw what Jesus was doing would immediately have known he was the [00:13:00] Messiah. I don't think that there's other times in the Bible when we see people raise people from the dead, everything like that.

I think that. Only a, a, a truly because he just didn't have a big crowd when he died. He didn't have a ton of followers when he died. If you saw somebody perform these like absolutely undeniable feats of magic and you're like, okay, this person is definitely the son of God. You're not going to turn your back on them just because the government is prosecuting them.

And you can be like, oh, well, you know, it was Rome. Like, what would people really go through for the Messiah against Rome? And we're going to get to that in a second. People were willing to be devoured by lions for Jesus. People were willing to have horrible things happen to them under the Roman Empire for Jesus.

And yet, the crowd that Jesus had built around him, who actually saw the things that he did during his life, weren't Willing to rebuke him almost immediately the moment he came under fire of the empire. So the point that I'm saying is that this was originally a very sort of small [00:14:00] group a, a group that was not particularly differentiated from other groups in, in the period.

And that's true differentiation came from it. Super fast, gross. And I also love the, the crazy L Ron Hubbard thing when he's like, imagine not only are like 99 percent of America, North America, Scientologists, but the Middle East is like, well, you know, L Ron Hubbard was wrong, but he was one of the greatest prophets in human history.

And you're like, what, how did that happen in just 300 years?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and again, Scientologists have it so much easier slash are doing so much better than early Christians, right? They're, they're not being fed to lions, for example. They have lawyers that, that scare people. It's it's, it's very different.

Malcolm Collins: So very interesting. Yeah, my read is

that

when Jesus died, he may have had 50 followers. Like really?

Simone Collins: Maybe more. I mean, there were crowd issues. You know, when he came to certain cities, I think Roman officials were a little concerned about [00:15:00] him.

Malcolm Collins: There were crowd issues, but here is my read on the 50 followers thing.

Okay. If you had a traveling miracle worker and healer of which we know there were many during that period You would likely get crowd issues when they went to a random town or something like that That doesn't mean that they all followed him They may have wanted healing and they went to the last miracle worker for healing.

And they went to him for healing. They may have liked it. This guy was handing out bread and fish and wine in his event. I'm sure

Simone Collins: like if Greta Thunberg walked into Berlin or something, you know, she would form dangerous crowds as well.

Malcolm Collins: People came to the moment the government turned against him, the fact that he didn't have some big crowd, like speak out or prevent this or even just go remove him from the freaking cross.

To me, that's, that's always been pretty He must not have had a really sizable community.

Speaker 6: Your family arrived then. , I have been asked to read the following prepared statement are we, do hereby convey our sincere greetings on this, the occasion of your martyrdom.

What?

Simone Collins: Well, the rules are the [00:16:00] rules. I don't know what to tell you.

Malcolm Collins: That's like Jesus. I see you're on the cross. I know like probably bit a group and get you down. But I don't want to risk it.

Simone Collins: We're outnumbered.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Okay. Did not go for a few tables.

Simone Collins: So,

Speaker 6: And I'd just like to add my own admiration for what you're doing , at what must be, after all, for you, a very difficult time.

Speaker 7: You

b******s!

Simone Collins: He continues, previous authorities assumed Christianity spread through giant mass conversions may be fueled by miracles. Partly they thought this because the biblical book of Acts describes some of these, but partly they thought it because how else do you go from a thousand people to forty million people in less than four hundred years?

Stark answers. Steady, exponential growth. Suppose you start with 1, 000 Christians in 40 AD. It's hard to number the first few centuries worth of early Christians. They're too small to leave much evidence. But by 300 AD, [00:17:00] before Constantine, they were a sizable enough faction of the empire that some historians have tentatively suggested a 10 percent population share.

That would be about 6 million people. From 260 years implies a 40 percent growth rate per decade.

Stark finds this plausible because it's the same growth rate as the Mormons, 1880 to 1980. If you look at the Mormons entire history since 1830, they actually grew a little faster than the early Christians.

Malcolm Collins: That is, I think, absolutely a fascinating point. That is, because it shows that,

Simone Collins: like, it could be. It could very well be. I mean, their growth rate still isn't great right now, but if Mormons managed to pass through, as you put it, the Trial of the Lotus Eaters. They could be the next main faction of Christians.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, actually and that they're growing faster than the early Christians. Exactly. We say that, like, when I'm looking at, like, why do I believe Christ had a divinely inspired message. It is because of the efficaciousness of his [00:18:00] message and the speed of growth of his message. And a lot of people I think are surprised that we consider the Mormons as one of the true face.

We believe there's multiple sort of like in a four dimensional space, like you, you can't try to reconcile them on this earth, but in some way, if you had a broader understanding, you could reconcile them. And we consider Mormons as one of them, and a lot of people are very surprised at that given how small a community they are right now.

But given that we're very forwards looking it makes a lot of sense that we would do that if you look at their growth rate and other similarities that he's going to point out to the Mormons today of the early Christian community. But I also find it interesting that this, as we wrote in the Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, can mostly be explained by higher fertility rates and not by conversions.

Conversions are, in a historic context, fairly rare.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker: Each brand new life, a living call. That soon outgrew. The pagan, [00:19:00] no grand crusade in streets of stone, no golden flags or trumpets blown yet countless children won the fight and pagan ways. Soon lost their mind, they didn't conquer hearts by force, or cast the shrines in sudden course.

They simply grew in numbers, see, the cradle was their victory.

Simone Collins: Instead of being forced to attribute the Christian's growth to miracles, we can pin down a specific growth rate and find that it falls within the range of the most successful modern cults. Indeed, if we look at this, as each existing Christian having to convert 0.

4 new people on average per decade, it starts to sound downright doable. Still, how did the early Christians maintain this conversion rate over [00:20:00] so many generations? Through the social graph! This is another of Stark's findings, from his work with the Moonies. That's so interesting. The first Moonie in America was a Korean missionary named Jung Un Kim, who arrived in 1959.

Her first convert was her landlady. The next two were the Landlady's friends. Then came the Landlady's friends husbands, and the Landlady's friends, husband's, coworkers. That was when Stark showed up. Quote, at the time I arrived, dot, dot, dot, to study them, the group had never succeeded in attracting a stranger, end quote.

Stark theorized that, quote, the only people who joined were those whose interpersonal attachments to members overbalanced their attachments to non members, end quote. I don't think this can be literally correct. Taken seriously, this implies that the second convert would have no other friends except the first, which would prevent her from spreading the religion further.

But something like Quote, your odds of converting are your number of moony friends divided by your number of non [00:21:00] moony friends, unquote, seems to fit his evidence. History confirms this story. Muhammad's first convert was his wife, followed by his cousin, servant, and friend. Joseph Smith's first converts were his brothers, friends, and lodgers.

Indeed, in spite of the Mormons celebrated door knocking campaign, their internal data shows that only one in a thousand door knocks results in a conversion, but quote, when missionaries make their first contact with a person in the home of a Mormon friend or relative of that person, This results in conversion 50 percent of the time end quote people sometimes accused

Malcolm Collins: one before we go further here I will know we actually did further data on this in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion I'd say that it's much lower than one in a thousand results in a convert The way that they mark conversion is pretty shady.

They're like do a And keep in mind, when you're in other countries, sometimes people will convert to like, use the Mormon facilities because they basically got like YMCA setups in other countries, where it's like, oh, I want to play soccer at the Mormon facility, I just say I'm a convert. But if you actually look at the [00:22:00] increase in tithing members, it is completely trivial, that Mormons are not converting large populations.

At least not anymore, maybe they were historically, but it seems to me now that the reason for this Particular Mormon ritual is that it makes it very hard for an individual who has gone through it to deconvert because they have sort of this sunk cost fallacy along with what's the word disassociation?

not disassociation when you, when, when, when something doesn't align with what you believe about the world. Like if you have to go and try to convince somebody dissonance, cognitive dissonance. Yeah. If you have to go and try to convince a bunch of random strangers about something you've pretty much made up your mind about that.

Like if you get through your mission trip and you're still a Mormon at the end of it, you're likely going to stay a Mormon throughout your entire life. Almost all of the Mormon de convert stories I hear, they started de converting during their mission trip or before. So it's more about actually maintaining [00:23:00] the existing members and reaffirming their dedication to the faith than it is about getting converts.

That is not me saying that mission trips are pointless. This is me saying that mission trips actually serve a different function.

Simone Collins: It kind of weeds out the religiously weak.

Malcolm Collins: Yes.

Simone Collins: Non committed. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: But it also helps increase the status of individuals who are willing to put in more for their religion to the point where almost everyone goes on a mission trip.

Like you, you have sort of a what can I say, like a faithfulness inflation problem within Mormonism where you have increasing things like that that you need to do to be a successful candidate on the market for a spouse because many wives won't seriously consider you if you haven't been on a mission trip.

Which I find really fascinating. Now there are numbers about how easy it is to convince, convert a Mormon who has like one Mormon friend, that that works 50 percent of the time. That also seems laughable. There's no way, there's no way that if a Mormon relative or they're going to convert 50 percent of the time a Mormon talks to them, that they must mean like of all Mormons talk to them or [00:24:00] all Mormons hound them.

Mormonism would just be spreading way more fastly if that was happening.

Simone Collins: Yeah, maybe something's off there, but. I do think that being embedded in Mormon, Mormon culture is infectious. Like if my family weren't somehow resistant to cults, I'm sure I would be Mormon because they're so great. But we are,

Malcolm Collins: sorry, you mean resistant to cults and that her family likes going to when my favorite quotes from her dad, I was like, you know, this is a cult.

Like, why are you going to it? Like this could be like really dangerous to you because, Oh, don't worry about me joining a cult. I've joined tons over the course of my life and that doesn't make me feel better. So rather than resistant to cults, they dip into cults and dip out of cults.

Simone Collins: No, we just, no, but we never joined.

Like that's our problem. Yeah, he never

Malcolm Collins: officially joined. Yeah. Anyway, This next part is actually a footnote that he had here, but I thought it was pretty relevant.

Simone Collins: People sometimes accuse modern social movements like environmentalism, [00:25:00] MAGA, wokeness, rationalism, etc. of being cults. But as far as I know, this rule doesn't apply to them.

Most people in these movements get involved by stumbling across a philosophy online and finding that it rings true. It seems to me like these modern movements are more likely to make unique and interesting claims about the world that could attract or repel certain types of people, whereas most cults are pretty similar.

This one guy is God, he commands you to chant. a bunch and give him money, but there's a holy book saying we want world peace. I wonder if this should actually be a counter to cultishness accusations. Quote, we can't be a cult, cults always spread through the social graph, but we learned about this movement from a blog.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So first of all, that is not how EA spreads anymore. Mostly spreads through like honey pots and stuff like that. It's like, Oh, don't you want to go to this like sex party or something? That's how, like, I, like when I first [00:26:00] heard about EA, I actually remember it was less wrong the first time I heard about it.

And he's like, well, I'm inviting you to this party. At like scorpion tarantula house or something like that. It was called. You should probably read some like less wrong posts on this blog before you come so you have a broad idea of what's going on Oh,

Simone Collins: that sounds very

Malcolm Collins: cultish. Oh, no. Yeah. Oh, you know, you know who was running the house.

No Divya no way wow so, I was I was going to you know, one of these parties and it was Very clear that like A lot of people went because there were more women at these events than other Silicon Valley events.

Simone Collins: Oh, well, it's very hard to find events with more women at them in Silicon Valley.

So that is,

Malcolm Collins: And EA and Let's Wrongism mostly spread through Silicon Valley group houses first, which had a really tight knit social graph for spreading. So one, I'm going to say, I don't know if he's completely wrong about this, but I'd also note something that I think that he's missing in all of this.

[00:27:00] Christianity. Mormonism a lot of the major world religions actually did not spread because of their founding member. You typically had a founding member, whether it's Christianity or Mormonism, who Or even

Simone Collins: Confucianism, right? I mean, it wasn't him in the end.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, who started what was a fairly small movement that was seen as extreme and Plato, Socrates.

Yeah. Actually, this really, yeah. Maybe a little weird by the society around them. And then you have your Brigham Young type P figure

In Christianity, this would be Paul, the apostle.

who really actually did the mass conversions in the early days and set up something that could eventually become a mainstream religion.

And I think this is why Scientology isn't going to become a mainstream religion because the person who it passed the baton onto has been pretty much entirely let's say, Exploitative, like, just try to milk his position for all [00:28:00] it's worth and not really try to set up an intergenerational tradition.

So it's, yeah, it's

Simone Collins: the second, it's the second person to take the baton who needs to set up that 40 percent annual conversion rate. And it seems as though Scientology has not managed that.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so like if the techno Puritan tradition ends up working out, which by the way, now is a legal religion in the United States, we got us registered with the Fed.

We have converts now as well. With the IRS,

Simone Collins: with the IRS.

Malcolm Collins: Sorry, the IRS we have converts now, which is fun as well in the EA community, of course and that is really exciting to me because if we can spread, I think within the EA community is like we're, we're, we're going to spread the most similar to like how the Jews went out and got people ready.

And then the The, the which you'll hear here and then the Christians did a job sort of hitting it home and converting it. But I found this to be a very interesting point that I think can be elucidated with the idea that typically you have a [00:29:00] founder of a religion and then you have the person who really solidifies it and begins the mass conversions.

All right, continue.

Simone Collins: All right. This theory of social graph based conversion was controversial when Stark proposed it, because if you ask cultists retrospectively, they'll usually say they were awed by the beauty of the sacred teachings, but Stark says

quote, I knew better, because we had met them well before they had learned to appreciate the doctrines, before they had learned how to testify to their faith, back when they were not seeking faith at all. Indeed, we could remember, When most of them regarded the religious beliefs of their new set of friends is quite odd.

I recall one who told me that he was puzzled that such nice people could get so worked up about some guy in Korea, then one day he got worked up about this guy too.

Malcolm Collins: That's wild. But I, I like this. I mean, I think it shows that this thing where you're like, I just [00:30:00] converted because I saw the light.

That's not really the way it works. It's like you're in a community and the community talks about it. And then that ends up converting you over time.

Simone Collins: Yeah, you join for the lifestyle and then you start drinking the Kool Aid. And you see this even with brands. Maybe you get an iPhone and then five years later you're obsessed.

You buy a ton of Apple stock. This happens a lot with, I think, With Tesla related stuff then suddenly you have Starlink, then suddenly, you know, it just, it goes, there are these, these deepenings of affiliation and faith that people fall into, not just with regard to religion, but with regards to brands and other things as well, social communities too, you know, being goth, whatever, right?

Okay, so Scott Alexander continues from here. Jews were scattered across the Mediterranean even before the fall of the Temple. I don't know why. We Jews tell ourselves that we left Israel only after the Romans kicked us out, but Stark cites plenty of historians who argue that no, it was well before that.

Around the time of [00:31:00] Christ, there were a million Jews in Israel and five million in the Diaspora, especially Alexandria, Antioch, Anatolia and Rome. What were these Jews spiritual views like? Without hard evidence, Stark supposes they were marginal.

Throughout history, Jews have succeeded at keeping the law only within tight knit communities. If you want to keep kosher, it helps to have everyone around you keeping kosher and a local kosher butcher. If you want to keep the Sabbath, it helps to have an eruv and a synagogue within walking distance. But even more than that, the law is strange and complicated, and unless everyone around you follows it too, you are likely to slip.

Thus, when Jews were first emancipated and allowed to live among Gentiles in the 18th and 19th centuries, a split emerged in the Jewish community. Those Jews who stayed in the ghettos and shuttles or who founded new self imposed quasi ghettos like Crown Heights remained Orthodox. Those Jews who mingled with the Gentiles and cast off the more difficult rules became [00:32:00] Reform.

Only a sliver of modern Orthodox remained in the middle, often with abysmal attrition rates.

Malcolm Collins: This I think is a very good point about this form of religion, which is typically why we design techno puritanism to be a clan based religion instead of the form of religion, which is to say it's something that is practiced internally was in families, which a large degree of variation.

So that your family is the core unit of your tradition and not your church, not your synagogue, not your community. While that leads to lower amounts of conversions, it leads to a higher fertility rate as you can see was clan based versus non clan based traditions. And it allows for more ideological diversity within the movement, which makes it more rich in terms of conversations and stuff like that.

Well, I think this also

Simone Collins: exemplifies how hard it is to maintain a hard culture when hard culture requires [00:33:00] a ton of amenities and not family based. Systems, so you can't be a hard culture Jew and just move to some random city in Switzerland, you know, it has to be, it has to meet all these requirements and that makes it very tough to maintain a hard culture, but also deal with a rapidly evolving and adapting world job market, etc.

Malcolm Collins: Absolutely. Techno puritanism is at its core, a frontier religion.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that's interesting. There are frontier religions and there are civilization religions. And I'm sure part of the, the, the, the cumbersome requirements of maintaining Jewish law are a feature, not a bug in that it's easier to maintain

Malcolm Collins: urban centers.

It

Simone Collins: also forces them to state, to stick together rather than spread out into the diaspora, because They'll sort of fall off and not continue, you know? Yeah. [00:34:00] You want me to keep going? Okay Reform Judaism is unstable. The law of Moses is central to the Jewish faith. Relax it too much, and believers can justly wonder what's left.

In America, Reform Jews are overrepresented not only among atheists and agnostics, but among every cult under the sun. 33 percent of American Buddhists come from a Jewish background.

Malcolm Collins: Keep going, 2. 5 percent of the American population is Jewish as you read these stats. Keep going.

Simone Collins: And even the Moonies were 30 percent Jewish at one point.

They're now down to 6%. As the Jews were assimilating into Greeks, Some Greeks were assimilating into Judaism. They were impressed enough with monotheism and the Jews upright behavior to adopt some of the rituals, but they couldn't take the final step and circumcise themselves. Instead, they hung around the fringes of Jewish society, admiring it from without.

The Bible and the historical record call them God fearers, but by analogy, I can't help but thinking, [00:35:00] thinking of them as we are Jews. This is similar to

Malcolm Collins: weeaboos

Simone Collins: from Japanese admirers. Yeah, I love this. These weird Jews would have been very easy prey for the first semi Jewish sect to shed the circumcision requirement and explicitly pivot away from being an ethnic religion.

The apostles and any other early Christians leaving Palestine to minister to the wider world. Wait, hold on,

Malcolm Collins: we'll do a quick, I want to, talk about this last thing here.

Simone Collins: Okay.

Malcolm Collins: So I find this interesting in a few areas here. One is, is I was unaware that, that reformed Jews just did these deconversions so much.

Or that they were so well

Simone Collins: represented in cults, but no, come on, you did, because they are a soft culture and soft culture is basically not culture. You know,

Malcolm Collins: apparently they're like the softest of all soft cultures. Well, no, they're just uniquely well, I think we can learn a few things from this, right?

Okay. Which is one Judaism doesn't work. If you don't do it a hundred percent, [00:36:00] you cannot do 50 percent Judaism. You cannot do 75 percent Judaism. You have to do a hundred percent Judaism and that means living in a Jewish community. That's what he's pointing out here. You need to get a wise yourself. If you want to maintain your traditions, number two, if we, as a techno Puritan tradition are looking for early converts, you can look to reform Jewish communities.

Because apparently they're much easier to convert than other traditions. And I think that honestly, our religion is really appealing to somebody from one of those communities. As people know, like, early on, I was, like, much more Jewish leaning in my beliefs, like, oh, maybe some of my kids could convert to Judaism, because they're technically Jews, because of Simone's background and everything like that, and go through all the traditions in regards to that.

But as I begin to dive more into religious history I came more and more to the position that, unfortunately, Christianity is just such a [00:37:00] Evolution above Judaism. That you, it really makes very little sense to go back to Judaism unless you're just looking for something that has a really long history.

Or you have a very strong ethnic or cultural, our family connection to the religion.

Like if that's the core thing you're looking for, then fine. But outside of that it lacks a lot of the features that Christianity has.

To word it differently. Well, it is a more complicated religion. By complicated. I mean, it's like the amount of texts and rules in history that you have is definitely larger within the Jewish Canon.

It's complicated in the same way. A very bloated, a source code might be complicated. , where you could almost argue that Christianity and Judaism. , written using two different programming languages and the programming language that Christianity uses is much simpler and requires far fewer words or lines to create the [00:38:00] same outcome as the source code that Judaism is using. , which makes me gravitate really strongly to Christianity. , and many of you add a techno Puritan framing on it.

It even. Lighter as a source code, because basically everything boils down to the question of what would people in the future want me to be doing today, , which is just such a simple question to ask yourself when deciding on moral framings.

Well also being a very easy to argue. Why would you be basing your moral framings around this mindset instead of having to brace your mole framing around giant lists of rules? Or. A God that can sometimes be difficult to interpret.

And we're going to get to a point here, which Scott Alexander misses.

But that I point out, it is clear to the Jewish community that it lacks all of this which is when Christ like figures appear throughout history Judaism has had a big problem with like all of a sudden all the Jews want to leave. And we're going to talk about a time in the 1700s when this [00:39:00] happens.

Sorry. I meant the 16 hundreds. I was thinking of Shabbaton Zebbie and we go into this. , great detail later in this particular episode. , but to put it another way, the particular source code update that Christ was trying to push to Judaism.

Has been pushed by a few other people throughout Judaism's history.

And every time somebody tries to push a source code update that looks like this, it gains a lot of fanfare.

Wow.

Yeah, I think that Jews today see Christ as a more antithetical figure to actual Judaism than a natural evolution to Judaism, which has happened a few times throughout Judaism's history. And I'd actually argue that the founder of Hasidic Judaism basically a Christ like figure who didn't claim to be the Messiah, but made very similar updates to older Jewish systems.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Okay. Very interesting.

Okay. The apostles and other early Christians leaving Palestine to minister to the [00:40:00] wider world would have made use of existing Jewish networks and connections. They would have found themselves in the middle of the spiritually disaffected half assimilated pseudo reform Jewish communities of the Roman world.

Plus they're half assimilated the other direction. Greek hangers on. They would have preached that Judaism was basically true, but that you can drop the restrictive law of Moses and avoid getting circumcised. They would have sliced through the cultural angst of these in between communities, saying that Jews would join together with the Gentiles in a big friendly tent under the leadership of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Here, says Stark, were the early Christians first a few million converts. And that, that, I think, to me, is Underrated than the things you mentioned in the beginning, how there was basically kindling lying all throughout the area that the spark of Jesus was able to light a fire, you know, that there was a lot [00:41:00] of groundwork already done and you have to, when you're looking at how an early culture or religion is going to spread, consider whether or not there will be a receptive substrate surrounding its original, original ignition or catalyst.

Malcolm Collins: And I think that people may misunderstand how. Weak paganism was as a tradition. And we can actually see this with the creation of the soul and victus God by the Roman emperor. That was coming for a period. Or the elevation of the soul and victus God, which is to say that. Paganism isn't really a religion in the way that we think of religion today.

You can't really like love and form a relationship with these gods. They are not all powerful gods. They are like, like there is a market demand or they product market fit for monotheism that people want. And a lot of people living alongside Jews, a lot of Pagans who did would have said, Oh, they have a real religion.

We don't have a real religion.

Which [00:42:00] is where, for people who don't know Sol Invictus this was a god made by I'll add the Roman Emperor's name in post, where he really elevated it and he Asclebius, I want to say

Emperor a Rulien. If I were thinking of, and they should note here that

He didn't popularize the Sol Invictus celebration. Until around 270 to 275 80, which was well after the dates for Christ's birth had been determined

Slash made up. It was mostly based on symbolism.

by early Christian theologians. A lot of people got angry at that video when I pointed that out and they're like, no, Christmas. Definitely got it to date from a Roman holiday.

And I'm like, which one? And they're like, well, the Sol Invictus is the one that had the same one. And I'm like, that was set after. , we have the first inscriptions of when people thought crisis birth date was. And then they were like, oh, well, what about Saturdays? And I'm like, Saturday nearly has a different date.

You can't just claim any group that had a holiday that was vaguely in the winter where the predecessor to any [00:43:00] other holiday, vaguely in the, in the winter, you know, there were

Roman

holidays that were vaguely in every season.

And they're like, well, , this Saturnalia has some of the same practices, like a present giving and I'm like present giving didn't start until like the 18 hundreds and Christmas. Are you saying that people in the 18 hundreds had memories of Saturnalia. No, obviously not.

And in fact we'd happen to know exactly why the tradition of gift-giving started for Christmas. It was taken from a different Christian holiday, which used to be celebrated on January 6th. Again, not the date of any Roman celebration called Saint Nicholas Day. Which was combined with the Christmas day to convert a kind of a new holiday. , in the 19th century,

so weird. That's such like a religiously ingrained belief that people got so mad when I pointed out that Christmas. Has very little connection to any of the pagan stuff.

If you're unaware of this and you still believe this urban legend,

Because it is actually one that I used to believe.

, so I [00:44:00] understand how an educated person could come to believe. it. If they hadn't gone into researching it.

you should check out that video.

The receipts are in numerous.

But anyway, topic at hand back to Seoul, Invictus, the God that was introduced in around, , 270 CE to the Roman empire.

and it's a combination of multiple Roman gods, but also, like, a borrowed Persian god where it is a mostly A monotheism

God that you have to pray to before you're praying to any other God.

And then the other gods are treated of the Roman or Greek pantheon more like you would treat saints today. Or angels today, you know, not full gods. So this is to say that I think that there was a natural desire for a quote unquote real religion.

Simone Collins: Or for monotheism. I mean, Zeus was always daddy God, you know, I don't,

Malcolm Collins: I feel like there's a speck.

If you look at our three face video which I'd suggest people check out, it's like probably like a thousand views because it was one of our early videos, but [00:45:00] it is by far, I think one of our most life changing videos for anyone who watches it.

It is very good at showing that there have always been sort of three core religious traditions that sort of cluster ideas throughout human history.

And Judaism and and you just cannot easily create one from paganism without doing something like Sol Invictus. Now here I want to talk about a separate thing because I was also talking about both the way that Is Ben Eliezer really mirrors a lot of what Jesus offered the Jewish people saying, Oh, you don't need to be as strict about this.

Oh, here are some additional teachings. Oh, here's some. But I think the bigger and better example of this is Shabbatai Zevi. So for people who aren't familiar who of who he is. He was born in 1629 in Samaria, modern day Turkey. He was a Sephardic Jewish rabbi and a Kabbalist and Kabbalism had really just sort of started at this time.

He was adding it as a condensed [00:46:00] tradition. Oh, sorry. I should Do a bit more explanation here of what Kabbalism is because it's important to understand. So, Judaism has a collection of teachings. And they, they typically come in like 2 large canons of teachings. And then when Christians came along 1 guy.

said Jesus, right? I have access to new information. And it is going to update the old teachings. And it is going to remove some of the old rules and it is going to establish a new era. And here's this new book. Now, obviously Jesus didn't write the new book, but like that's the gist of what happened.

And so Jews go, Oh, that's a new religion. Cause they added, you know, a new book and I'm like well, you guys did the same thing with the Kabbalah, right? Like, you know that, right? Like a thousand years after Christ, you guys add a new book, which has all sorts of new teaching them. They're like, Oh, these had always been in the background.

And I'm like, convenient story. But if you look at when the Kabbalah was beginning to gain popularity with this guy's life, I'm about to mention, let me go through this [00:47:00] guy's life and see if you can draw any similarities or it's easier. Okay, so, he proclaimed himself the long awaited Jewish Messiah in 1665.

His messianic claims gained widespread support among Jews across Europe and the Ottoman Empire, creating one of the largest messianic movements in Jewish history. However, Zevi's messianic career came to a dramatic end in 1666 when he arrived in Constantinople. He was imprisoned by the Ottoman authorities.

Given the choice between execution and conversion to Islam, Zevi chose to convert. He took the name Aziz Meded and lived out as an outward Muslim until his death in 1676. So that's why he died out, was because he was such a traitor. But that doesn't mean that he didn't get a lot of Jews to convert to Islam.

to move to him. So let's see what, what, what sort of innovations did he add? Okay. So he taught that he was capable of eradicating sins even for persistent offenders of Jewish law. Remind you of anyone? His followers believes that his coming had [00:48:00] abolished the need to observe traditional Jewish law.

Mm hmm. He was also known as being uniquely he claims to be a feminist, a feminist, a female liberationist, female liberationist, slash egalitarian in his message when compared to traditional Jewish law, which Jesus also was, we'll get to that. He claimed to have mystical powers, including firing wild animals bare

He abolished traditional feast days commemorating the destruction of the temples and claiming that a new temple would be rebuilt. So he was also an apocalypticist. Basically

Speaker 5: The whole set

Malcolm Collins: of what Christ was offering Jews. And he came along and was like, I like these ideas. Basically, what I'm saying is the Christ like offeror is today only seen as distinctly non Jewish because it got so big.

If it hadn't gotten as big as it, if it hadn't become the dominant world religion, we would think of Christians as a weird sect of [00:49:00] Jews. If this guy hadn't pussied out and converted to Islam we would see his followers today as a, maybe even the dominant sect of Jews, it sounds like.

Wow.

Because when you consider the, basically the only thing that this guy had, that Israel ben Eliezer, who founded the Hasidic sect of Jews, didn't have, Israel ben Eliezer, did not claim to be the Messiah.

But

basically everything else here is false. Check, check, check, check, check. So he basically just didn't go for like the full, the full set. But he was bringing most of the same ideas, which is to say, I also

Simone Collins: think it's, it's not even about claiming to be the Messiah. What this guy lacked was a wingman.

And Jesus had wing men, you know,

Malcolm Collins: well, but if you look at what the core differences of what every one of these individuals, whether it's Israel, Bill and Ellie Eiser or this guy or Jesus, what were they saying? They said [00:50:00] one, we need to stop being so like heady and legalistic about everything we're doing. We need to focus on the every Jew.

We need to focus on the every man. The old rules of the past, they don't apply in the same way. We need to loosen them. We need to stop being so dogmatic about all of this. We need to open up what was thought of as sort of like the elitist part of Judaism, to the every Jew to practice. And, and with Jesus, he just went one step further, which is to the every, every man to practice.

What I'm pointing out here is that this particular idea. It's not weird that it caught on when Jesus did it. Apparently whenever somebody does this, it catches on like wildfire, because it is such a good idea with this specific idea at play here, being. Is there a way to be sort of a populist Jew.

To create a form of Judaism that is more accessible for everyone. [00:51:00] And that loosens the rules. But without loosening the religious conviction or depth of faith. So, is there a way to do something? Let's say like a reformed Judaism. , which loosens the rules, but also loosens ties to the face.

But that loosens the rules by putting in maybe a new set of rules or a new way of looking at things or a new way of framing things that allows a loosening of the rules without. A loosening of the faith in depth of conviction.

But I think this is important. If you see Christianity as a separate religion from Judaism I think it can cause people to misunderstand Christianity's role. Christianity was just an iteration of Judaism an update of Judaism that wasn't a particularly bigger or more severe update than the update that Shabbat Zevi tried to make, or the update that Israel, Ben Eliezer tried to make [00:52:00] that in the one difference it had to their updates is that it said, okay, now everyone can participate,

And that, I think that when you miss that when you see Christianity is a totally new religion, which a lot of Christians have a motive to do and a lot of Jews have a motive to do a lot of Christians want to have these anti semitic ideologies.

And so it really helps to forget that Jesus was a rabbi. You know, he was a, he was a Jewish religious teacher and most of his early followers were Jews . It was a Jewish thing that he was doing.

And I really need to emphasize here. It was not a weird Jewish thing to be doing for that period of time. Being a wandering rabbi who performed them into logical feats, I E miracles was pretty common during this time period for that region.

And that when you forget this, you can forget the context or the history of Christianity.

And better understand that. I think And again, [00:53:00] this really hurts, and it's one of the things that I've come to understand better as I've understood, researched Jewish history, and now I don't see Judaism to be this single continuity, but rather a number of offshoots that it has no lower claim to being the original Jews than, you know, the Hasidic Jews do, for example.

Interesting.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: To word this another way. , when we look at our shared ancestor with monkeys, I don't have any additional claim to that ancestor that a monkey wouldn't have to that ancestor. We're both just different branches on the same tree.

People often make this mistake in the same way they make the mistake of saying we are descended from monkeys when it's no, we're not descended from monkeys. We and monkeys have a common ancestor. I'm saying it's the same thing with modern Judaism. Christianity is not descended for Judaism. They have a common ancestor, which we'll call ancient Judaism. ,

a person could claim that modern [00:54:00] Judaism

has conserved more of the features associated with that ancient ancestor, then Christianity has.

And it definitely has.

But I think it's a real stretch to claim that it's the same religion, especially when you consider that claim in the context of Kabbalah, literature and practices that didn't exist back then, or practices tied to the destruction of the temple, which obviously didn't exist back then either or practices tied to the long Jewish diaspora period, which obviously didn't exist back then.

I really think to hold this belief, if you do, it's a theological belief rather than a fact-based belief. When I look at the degree of differences. And that's okay. It's okay to hold theological beliefs.

But, , it's a problem. If you mistake a theological belief for a fact-based belief.

I think that the real claim that Judaism has to being the quote unquote true strain. Is [00:55:00] the

, but. That to me seems like a pretty weak claim

For arguing one theological belief is more valid than another theological belief

Or to put it another way. If there was a time slip and the temple reappeared with Jews that practice Judaism in the way they did before the second temple period.

Including all of the rituals and animal sacrifices and songs. And stricter cast system and money changers.

Those people would be as different from the Jews of today as probably the Samaritans are

Or to worded another way, calling modern Judaism. The true Judaism is a bit like calling Bitcoin Satoshi vision, the true Bitcoin, because it is closest to Satoshi's original.

Protocol, even though it is different from that.

Simone Collins: Okay. So new section, perhaps our favorite section of this book review from Scott Alexander, because I regret to [00:56:00] inform you, the pronatalists are right about everything. We found above that the Christian population needed to grow at 40 percent per decade and assume this meant conversion, but you could also do this through a fertility advantage.

If a generation lasts 30 years and Christians have three times more children than pagans per generation, they can get 40 percent per decade growth without converting anyone at all. In reality, it was probably a mix. Some conversion plus some fertility advantage. Here I start to worry that some right wing pronatalist organization bribed Rodney Stark to abandon his usual scholarly attitude and write some kind of over the top pronatalist fanfic.

I was waiting for the eagle named MORE BIRTHS. perches on the blackboard, and the child free professor was tossed into the lake of fire for all eternity. Still, let's take it at face value and see what this fanfic has to say. By the imperial era, Roman fertility was plummeting. Partly this was [00:57:00] because the Romans practiced sex selective infanticide.

There were 130 men for every 100 women, and so many men would probably never be able to find a wife. But partly this was because the men who could find wives dragged their feet. Male Roman culture took it as a given that women were terrible, that you couldn't possibly enjoy interacting with them, and that there was no reason besides duty that you would ever marry one.

Malcolm Collins: So consider, consider this. If you are being drawn by one of these iterations of right wing culture today that says this is the way that good Christian men should view women as like these terrible corruptors of society, those people are the pagans. They have re evolved a pagan philosophy and view of women that mirrors the view that was destroying the Roman upper classes as their society fell apart.

[00:58:00] When you People wonder why I go so hard against the woke right, which is, if you haven't heard this term before, it's the faction of the right who is really like, Ooh, like we have to be anti woman and women are destroying everything. And we need to ban this and ban that and everything like that. I'm like, I go hard against them in what I'm.

Talking about here because they represent a faction that is as nefarious as the urban monoculture to civilization's long term thriving. This is why they're like almost all single or divorced. Like the, they, their, their relationships don't work. What they are selling the way they are selling in terms of how you should treat women.

It does not lead to a surviving civilization. Okay, just meant to appeal to your ego, like grow out of it and understand that they are the villain in the house. They are the wolf in sheep's [00:59:00] clothing. They are the witch handing you a poisoned apple. Do not bite that apple.

They are in the story of early Christianity, the pagans who Christians were fighting against.

This sums up my thoughts on the overly manosphere types.

Speaker 8: I gave you an opportunity, to show the world that you're more than just a scary stereotype, but you're too proud or too gutless to take advantage of it.

Speaker 9: Have We met? I'm the villain of every story. Even if by some miracle we did change.

Who's gonna believe us, huh?

Speaker 12: Maybe they will believe you. Maybe they won't. But it doesn't matter. Don't do it for them. Do it for you. Come on, what have you got to lose?

Speaker 10: I don't know, my dignity?

Speaker 12: Yeah, well, that ship has already sailed.

Simone Collins: .

In 131 BC, the Roman censor, Quintus Caecilius Matilius Macedonicus, proposed that the Senate make [01:00:00] marriage compulsory because so many men, especially in the upper classes, preferred to stay single.

Acknowledging that, quote, we cannot have a really harmonious life with our wives, unquote. The censor pointed out that, quote, since we cannot have any sort of life without them, unquote, the long term welfare of the state must be served. As Beryl Rossorm reported, one theme that recurs in Latin literature is that wives are difficult and therefore men do not care much for marriage.

Okay, so this was just a very, not even anti natalist culture, but like anti

Malcolm Collins: marriage culture, which, mm. Well, anti marriage is a downstream of an extremely misogynistic view towards women.

Simone Collins: Yeah, kind

Malcolm Collins: of

Simone Collins: South Korea. Yeah, we've got some South Korea vibes going on here.

Malcolm Collins: I wouldn't say South Korea, I'd say Nick Fuentes, to be honest.

Simone Collins: Well, I know, but in general, just any culture that's like, Hmm, let's, the other gender, man, what a bunch of mean, terrible people, don't like them,

Malcolm Collins: that kind of attitude. But continue, because [01:01:00] they go further with this, and I think that this is something we see, where they're like, Oh, well, if we just create more rules around controlling women, or forcing men to marry, like, Oh, you gotta ban pornography, oh, you gotta, you know, this'll get them to marry, and it's like, it doesn't work that way.

They have, the way you get men to marry is you get them to like and respect women.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Okay.

Simone Collins: Mm hmm. Totally. All right. Scott Alexander continues. The Romans understood that this was long term fatal for their empire and tried all sorts of schemes to increase family formation. In the mid first century B. C.

Cicero re proposed Metellus scheme, to make marriage compulsory, but it failed once again. Augustus contended himself with punitive taxes and second class citizenship for unmarried and childless couples, combined with subsidies and affirmative action for men with at least three children. Formal and informal social pressure eventually convinced most Roman men to take wives, but no amount of love or money could [01:02:00] make them have children.

Dense cities discouraged large families. Roman children were expensive. Nobles would have to spend immense effort and political favors grooming them for high positions and the scourge of all nobilities, too many children risk splitting the inheritance. Also, if you had a girl, you'd probably just kill her.

She would consume resources without continuing the family line and half of children died before adulthood from some disease or another. Anyway, this was just a really bad value proposition.

Malcolm Collins: Before you go further, I wanted to say. As you can see here they, they, they tried to increase the fertility rate by instating restrictions.

It doesn't work. It cannot increase the fertility rate by instating restrictions. And here, what you're going is a similar phenomenon to what we've seen. As I pointed out, the studies that have looked at this showed the higher amount of religiosity. You should go to our masturbation video. If you want to see more on this, cause we really go into the stats on [01:03:00] this.

The higher amount of religiosity was in a part of the United States, the higher amount of porn consumption you're going to have going down to the zip code. You see this across Christian traditions. You see this directly tied to the amount that they try to restrict use of pornography. You can not, increase your fertility rate, at least any more.

It appears that maybe this used to work with Catholics pre 70s, but now Catholics have the lowest fertility rate of all Christian communities. So, any religion that is increasing its fertility rate by saying, oh those of you who want to get off, and like, don't care about the long term consequences of that.

That's who we want having kids, which is fundamentally what you're doing when you make kids not a product of loving your spouse and caring about the future, but of I need to get off. And you'll see how Rome failed in the same way here.

Simone Collins: Nor did the sex drive force the matter. Horny Roman men had their choice of a wide variety of male and female slaves and prostitutes. [01:04:00] Despite Augustus and his spiritual heirs fuming about monogamy, this was never really enforced on the male half of the population. When men did have sex with women, it was usually oral or anal sex, specifically to avoid procreation.

When they did have vaginal sex, they had a wide variety of birth control methods available, including the famous xylophone, but also protocondoms and spermicidal ointments. If a child was conceived, despite these efforts, abortion was common, albeit unsanitary. Maternal death rates were extremely high, but this was not really a deal breaker for the Roman men making the decision.

If a baby was born, in spite of all this, infanticide was legal and extremely common.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on, we gotta go into the quote here, right? So, Okay, I'll read it,

Simone Collins: sure. Quote, far more babies were born than were allowed to live. Seneca regarded the drowning of children at birth as both reasonable and commonplace. Tacitus [01:05:00] charged that the Jewish teaching that, quote, it is a deadly sin to kill an unwanted child, unquote, was but another of their, quote, sinister and revolting practices, unquote.

Not only was the exposure of infants common practice, it was justified by law and advocated by philosophers. All right, f**k Romans. F**k that. F**k the pagans. Right? The

Malcolm Collins: witches suck. Witches suck. Okay. And when people today are like, I practice a new form of like a Roman and Greek paganism, I'm like, okay, like, do you not understand how monstrous these people were?

Not cool. They were monstrous. When people go and they're like, oh, I practice a traditional form of like, whatever. I'm like did they practice human sacrifice? Did they practice? Did they just discard of infants? They didn't like, you know, like they were horrible. Genuinely, genuinely quite monstrous.

And so when a group comes along, and by the way, if you're wondering why they did so well with women in the early days this is why like, [01:06:00] I think I know like either

Simone Collins: as a woman, you are being coerced into sexual relations, hated by your husband. Your, your, maybe you get pregnant, you're forced to have an abortion that maybe kills you.

If, if you don't die in childbirth. Then maybe you'll die right after or they will literally kill your infant and I know having had Children now like I will do anything to protect one of our infant like I just the amount of rage and unhappiness that these women must have lived with is sobering and scary so after reading about that I was like, oh So that's why Christianity spread.

I feel like it's downplayed a little bit in this, that, that Scott Alexander is not totally sure that it's the female friendliness, but especially knowing the, just the fear. I feel anything bad happening to my living and healthy and perfectly fine children. The [01:07:00] idea of living in fear and Roman society of.

Being forced into sex and then having a child and then having that child murdered. Like definitely go for a new culture and

Malcolm Collins: then they hear about these christian guys Yeah, a hundred percent of those women are like sign me the f**k up for that.

Simone Collins: Yep

Malcolm Collins: totally You I I yeah, I I think you're right and I think that people are hugely underestimating How strongly that would have been pulling people over?

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yep You Yeah, just better humane treatment of people. Who knew? Christians follow the opposite of all these practices. They recommended that men love their wives and held this as a plausible unexpected outcome. This was not exactly unprecedented, but it was a dramatic reversal of Roman custom from Ephesians 5.

By the way, before [01:08:00] I

Malcolm Collins: go further, people should be aware, Scott Alexander, the person who's writing this, is Jewish in background. So he's not like standing Christianity to stand Christianity, continue. No.

Simone Collins: Husbands, love your wives just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.

In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies, He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body. Sorry. But they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church, for we are members of his body. For this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.

This is a profound mystery, but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each of [01:09:00] you must love His wife, as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband. End quote. The Christians banned adultery, and unlike the Roman bans, gave it teeth. Meaning that married men who wanted sex had no choice but to go to their wives.

They had, they held that sex had to be procreative, banning anal sex, oral sex, homosexual sex, and birth control. And obviously they banned infanticide. Many of these bans weren't effective. Active decisions, but carryovers from the movement's Jewish roots. So this is,

Malcolm Collins: I think, really, really big. So you're a woman, right?

Like people don't understand how pro woman Christianity is. It's like, wait, wait, wait, my husband has to be monogamous. He's not going to kill my babies anymore. He's not going to what, what, what is You know, when he has sex with me, he has to maybe get me pregnant and deal with it because keep in mind the other types of sex the Romans were having, they felt good for the man, like a woman doing [01:10:00] oral on you or allowing anal, but they didn't feel as good for the woman.

Anal did not feel as good for most women as vaginal sex does. Oral doesn't feel as good for most women as vaginal sex does. This is the form of sex that women want. They're like, Oh, I get to have babies. I get to not deal with my babies being killed. I get to have vaginal sex. I get to have a husband who's not sleeping with random prostitutes all the time.

What a treat. Horrible diseases. What a treat. Yeah. Yeah, I was

Simone Collins: always like surprised reading in history books, how so and so's wife converted him to Christian. I mean, now I'm like, Oh, The faith. Yes. The faith won her over. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's

Malcolm Collins: undersold because feminists try to get it these days and, and Christians hear this and they're like, Oh, feminists are being feminists and trying to say that early Christianity was, you know what I mean?

Like there's all of this modern politics. And it's like, [01:11:00] bro, imagine if you drowned a woman's newborn child, how motivated is she going to be? This isn't about feminism. Okay. This is about just at a base level, understanding women.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Or acknowledging women as human. I mean, I do think that there's sort of a subhuman status to women in many ancient cultures.

Yeah, keep

Malcolm Collins: in mind, coming from Judaism, Judaism is a fairly sex positive culture in regards to women. For example, a man in Judaism has a religious duty to sexually please his wife. If you are not sexually pleasing your wife in Judaism, you are a bad Jew. You are not doing your religion correctly. And that didn't carry over to Christianity.

I actually liked that it didn't because I think it built and even when I'm talking about like a more moral system, what the Christians say is you need to serve your wife and love your wife as Christ loves you, which is to say that sexuality really doesn't matter. Sexuality, as we [01:12:00] often argue, should be taken.

And this is very different. Less focus

Simone Collins: on hedonism, essentially.

Malcolm Collins: Christians today argue that very non biblically that sexuality should be paired with a hundred percent sex with wives for procreation. When the reality is, is the Bible says basically nothing about this.

Sorry, I should clarify. It says nothing thing, but sex should only be for procreation. It says a great deal saying that you should have sex outside of procreation. Specifically, you have the song of Solomon that's entire book celebrates the physical and emotional aspects of marital love. Including sexual pleasure. You have Proverbs 5, 18, 19, this passage encourage husbands to quote. Rejoice in your wife of your youth in quote, and to be quote intoxicated, always in her love in quote, clearly referring to sexual pleasure.

And then you have one Corinthians seven, three through five, , and in. And this one, I [01:13:00] really don't think you could get any stronger a statement here. And this is coming directly from Paul. , the husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife and likewise, the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body, but yields it to her husband in the same way.

The husband does not have authority over his own body, but yields to his wife. Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time so that you may devote yourselves to prayers. Then come together again. So that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control. So the. Interesting counter to what a lot of people believe. This is saying that neither the husband, nor the wife has the right to deny their partner access to sex.

So it's very clear, Paul, the core guy doing a lot of the early Christian conversions, , said. , the husband cannot, , say to his wife, no, I will not have sex with you right now. If she wants to have sex with them. , this can only be stopped if it is a time [01:14:00] set aside for prayer or by mutual consent. , so you, you do have conjugal duties to your wife.

And there are no caveats in this section about a post-menopausal wife or an infertile wife or an infertile husband.

Which indicates that sexist clearly meant to be had, not just for procreation. That's a pretty big oversight. If that's what was meant by this.

It's, it's arousal patterns. If you can masturbate them in some other way, as long as you're not using another human woman to do that because you shouldn't lust after another woman.

But. You know, it's a drawing or something like that. Nothing in the bible against that. In fact, I mentioned There's one segment that specifically does talk about emissions. And it says that male emissions that are not during sex Should be treated about the same, as female periods

Sorry. I misspoke here. It was a lesser form of sin than a period or a lesser form of ritual uncleanliness and a period. All it required with bathing. Whereas a period required being set apart for seven days.

So definitely not like this [01:15:00] mortal sin that christians today will tell you it is

I would note here in this section, it can also be read as saying that. Anyone who does not regularly masturbate has a different type of emission, which is considered extra unclean specifically. Here is the section on blocked emissions.

Where it says of men was blocked emissions that any bed they lay on or anything, they sit on, it should be considered unclean. , but here, I would note that some people read this section to be talking about diseases, which prevent emissions.

and this is again here Scott makes a mistake, where he accidentally believes what's written in this book by a guy who is a very Creep Hardcore classical Christian, which is trying to convince him of something that isn't true.

And Scott accidentally buys parts of his arguments and his arguments aren't wrong, but sort of buys into the modern belief that from the beginning, Christianity has been a. Life begins at conception movement.[01:16:00]

And this just isn't true. That really only became popular across Christianity after the U S tried to get the Catholics into the right wing coalition in the 1970s. Before that, the majority of Republicans in the U S U S was actually the more pro choice in terms of abortion party. And that if you look at the early writings so if you're looking at somebody like Augustus of Hippo or Thomas Aquinas, both early Catholic thinkers they were, they believe that life began, or not life began, but in soulment, like the soul entered the body at 30 to 60 days after conception happened.

It's kind of remarkable that they. We're pretty good at knowing when the human nervous system began to develop because that is when the human nervous system begins to develop. Could you say that maybe they were actually in touch with God's real teachings instead of crazy nonsense? Yeah, I think maybe.

But anyway the point being is that. Early Christian communities pass laws telling people not to have what were abortions during this time [01:17:00] period. But if you look at the Christian intellectual writers they would have said, well, we're passing these bands, not because life begins at conception, but because your average hick doesn't know what they're talking about, right?

Let's have like, let's just play it safe. And I really like that when we look at the early Christian community, we can see that they had both biblical, you know, as we can see from God, God said, I knew you before you were in your mother's womb, which means there's a degree of predetermination, which means that God knew you before you came to exist in your mother's womb, or you were a soul in heaven and you're later put into the body.

And so the question is, is when does that happen? It likely happens when you have a degree of a nervous system, i. e. if I lose, like, my finger, I don't think I lost part of my soul because I don't have a nervous system thinking in my finger So I think this is important to note here because I think he accidentally spread some bad propaganda in this part, but continue.

Simone Collins: But I'll end this section with a note of caution. I'm not sure how relevant any of this is. Stark refuses to speculate on pagan versus Christian fertility rates, but when I look up modern scholarship, they reasonably point out that pagan rates [01:18:00] must have been around Replacement, given that the Roman population stayed steady or slowly increased for hundreds of years.

Replacement is in quotes because Romans were constantly dying of plague, warfare, fire, and a million other causes, since only a third to half of people who survived to reproduce. Replacement here is something like four to six children per women. This doesn't sound like the antinatalist disaster Stark describes.

I think Stark is mostly talking about Roman elites, the group who Augustus kept pestering to have at least three children, and more broadly about the urban population. These people were constantly dying and being replaced by commoners and villagers. Early Christianity was primarily an urban and upper class movement.

Does this surprise you? Stark urges us to think of modern cults and new religions like American Buddhism, which predominantly recruit disillusioned children of the upper classes. So perhaps it did better than its urban upper class pagan comparison group. Still, since the urban upper class pagans were constantly being replaced by village [01:19:00] lower class pagans as soon as they died out, how much in numerical terms can this contribute to Christianity's growth?

Malcolm Collins: And here is where he made a mistake. Again, I think it just sort of takes this person's word at, at, at face value, Stark's word at face value. Christianity did not have an upper class early community. What it had was a urban focus, which concentrated on things like merchant classes, but was very bad at spreading in the actual aristocratic classes.

So specifically, the people who were converting in mass in early days were manual workers and clerks, shopkeepers and merchants, slaves, and some well to do individuals who could host gatherings in their own homes.

Simone Collins: Hmm. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: While there is evidence of some elite converts, especially after the 2nd century, they were a small minority among early Christians during the first few centuries.

The highest levels of Roman society, such [01:20:00] as the senatorial class, were absent from early Christian circles, particularly before Constantine's conversion in the 4th century. So, why was Christianity so urban focused? Because that's what it was, it was an Urban focused religion, not a wealthy focused religion, which they sort of misconstrued here.

And a, and a merchant focused religion. Trade routes. Cities were connected to the best, well established trade routes, allowing for easier travel and communications between Christian communities. Synagogues. Early Christian missionaries often started their work in Jewish synagogues, which are primarily located in urban centers.

Remember, Christianity was a version of Judaism in the early days and seen as a version of Judaism in the early days. Social networks, cities offered dense populations and diverse Social networks facilitating the rapid spread of ideas, which if you look at like the way the EA movement has spread, it's spread in group houses, the fastest, right?

Like the sort of the population, the faster the spread. And then finally you have house churches where you had some [01:21:00] wealthy individuals and wealthy Christians who would host gatherings in nice homes, , the, the early Christians were not overly, they, they were wealthier than your average Roman, but that was because the population was wealthier than the rest of Rome. Not that they were a specifically wealthy group, I think very similar to the Scientologists. They have some sort of upper class influence types.

None of the real aristocrats in our society, but like new money types, a merchant class type, and then a lot of like urban slave types that sort of make up their lower ranks.

Simone Collins: Okay, shall I continue? Continue. A possible synthesis. If you imagine a city as having a constant population, because it's walled, plus its hinterland can only support a certain number of non food producing urbanites, and villagers as replacing urbanites on a one to one basis as they die, then greater Christian urban fertility rates can at least increase.

contribute to the cities and upper class becoming Christian. And once the cities and upper classes are Christian, you [01:22:00] get Constantine and lower classes can be forced to comply. Remember pagan originally meant rural,

Malcolm Collins: which it did, by the way, I was really shocked. That's

Simone Collins: wild. Yeah. One thing Stark did not mention discovering in his study of cults, but which I have heard anecdotally, a lot of male cult members join because the cult has hot girls.

Okay. Here's Malcolm's argument. Scott continues. This seems to have been a big factor in the spread of early Christianity as well. Stark collects various forms of evidence that early Christians were predominantly women. Paul's epistle to the Romans greets 33 prominent Christians by name, of whom 15 were men and 18 were women.

If, it seems likely, men were more likely to become prominent than women. This near equality at the upper ring suggests a female predominance at the lower. A third century inventory of property at a Christian church includes, quote, 16 men's tunics and 82 women's tunics, unquote. The book quotes historian Adolf [01:23:00] von Harnack, who says, Quote, ancient sources simply swarm with tales of how women of all ranks were converted in Rome and in the provinces.

Although the details of these stories are untrustworthy, they express correctly enough for the general truth that Christianity was laid whole by women in particular and that the percentage of Christian women, especially among the upper classes, was larger than that of men. End quote. Why were women converted in such disproportionate numbers?

Again, Stark's sociological background serves him well. He is able to find reports of the same phenomenon in modern religions. Here he quotes Stark, By examining the manuscripts census returns for the later half of the 19th century, Bainbridge, 1983, found that approximately two third of the Shakers were female.

Data on religious movements included in the 1926 census of religious bodies showed that 75 percent of Christian scientists were women, as were more than 60 percent of Theosophists, [01:24:00] Swedenborgans, and Spiritualists. The same is true of the immense wave of Protestant conversions taking place in Latin America.

End quote. That's fascinating, by the way. Women

Malcolm Collins: are the first to convert. Women are the cult ones. They're the cultists. Well, the way it worked in the EA community, because the EA community is overwhelmingly male, is that women would sort of convert because they'd get incredible status, and then it sort of supported a number of, I'd call them witless females, who could get the cream of the crop of Silicon Valley men by converting, and they'd be supported, and they'd be everything like that, so they were treated better than they were by the rest of Silicon Valley, because if you join the EAs well, you get a place to live, and you get Your choice is the best men and you never have to work.

And then that's a really, so it's, it's almost sort of like an inversion of this phenomenon, right? Where it's attracting virtuous women is attracting unvirtuous women.

Simone Collins: Hmm. [01:25:00]

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It

Simone Collins: continues. But along with a general tendency for women to convert, Stark notes that Christianity was especially attractive to women.

The pagan world treated women as their husband's property and not particularly well liked property at that. The book cites the Athenian laws as typical. Quote, The status of Athenian women was very low. Girls received little or no education. Typically, Athenian females were married at puberty and often before.

Under Athenian law, a woman was classified as a child, regardless of age, and therefore was the legal property of some men at all stages of life. Males could divorce by simply ordering a wife out of the household. More over, if a woman was seduced or raped, her husband was legally compelled to divorce her.

If a woman wanted to divorce, she had to have her father or some other man bring her case before a judge. Finally, Athenian women could own property, but control of the property was always vested in the male of whom she belonged, or to whom she belonged. Oh my god, okay, [01:26:00] that's not good. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: No, are you not gonna wanna, like, you're like, oh, I get to own my own property?

Yeah, this. Wow. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Good for you.

Simone Collins: He continues, Meanwhile, Christian women had relatively high status, sometimes rising to the position of deacon within a church. Christian men were ordered to treat their wives kindly, were prohibited from cheating on them, and mostly could not divorce. Christianity, unlike paganism, did not especially pressure widows to remarry, important since remarrying a widow lost faith.

all her property to her new husband, Christian women were only a third as likely as Roman women to be married off before age 13. Women noticed all these benefits and flocked to

Malcolm Collins: Christianity. This is important to note, Christian women were only a third as likely as pagan women To be married off before the age of 13,

Simone Collins: they're just not being

Malcolm Collins: treated

Simone Collins: as chattel as much

Malcolm Collins: as, yeah, as much.

And this means that the men, the [01:27:00] quote unquote Christian influencers who are telling you that women should be treated as chattel, that women are like this corrupting influence on the male mind. These are the modern pagans. Do not trust them. They lead you to sour ends. There is a reason that their wives all hate them, or have left them, or they're single.

Because they are feeding you with poison. It is poison directly into your veins, the messages they preach. Continue.

Simone Collins: Aside from all this, the Romans were practicing sex selective infanticide, reducing their female numbers still further and making the Christians even more proportionally female heavy. If the Christians, like many modern cults, were 65 percent female and the Romans, as some sources attest, were about 40 45 percent female, it is a pretty profound difference.

The Romans grumbled about marriage, but in the end, most Roman men did want wives, if only to avoid government penalties. But 1. 4 men per women, [01:28:00] maybe even less among the upper classes, puts young men seeking wives in a difficult situation. For comparison, modern San Francisco is only 1. 05 men per women, and dating is already hell.

To any remotely heterosexual Roman man, the 65 percent female Christian community must have started looking for Good. Meanwhile, the Christians had the opposite problem. Too many women, not enough men, there is an obvious solution, and it sounds like the Pagans and Christians had also figured it out from one Peter.

Three wives submit yourselves to your own husband so that if any of them do not believe the word. They may be won over without the words by behavior of their wives. When they see the purity and reverence of your lives.

Malcolm Collins: So it was basically saying be so good. Yeah. Be husband can't help but be humbled by your diligence and faith.

And I'd say you've done that for me with a number of things. I believe a number of things now that came from you. I'm like, [01:29:00] well, Simone is more, more faithful and diligent than me.

Simone Collins: By my diligence.

Yeah, there we go. History records. Sorry. History records, many such intermarriages, almost always ending with the conversion of the Pagan husband. If you are a Christian of English descent, you may owe your religion to Queen Bertha of Kent, who convinced her husband, one of the early Anglo Saxo, sorry, one of the early Anglo-Saxon Kings to take her faith.

But Rex, Sandra Tesla has a great post reviewing the work of historian, Michelle Salzman, who disagrees with all of this. Salzman has a database of 400 aristocratic Romans during the fourth century period of Christianity's fastest growth.

She finds few intermarriages, few examples of women converting their husbands, and equal or slightly male biased conversion ratios. Granted, this only is a small sample from one period, but it makes us question how good our evidence really is. Doesn't all this hinge on one passage from Paul, which technically named more men than women, plus one inventory [01:30:00] of tunics, which was so female biased it couldn't possibly have been representative of even a very woman heavy church?

Are we sure that we can make the leap from Christianity promised women more rights to therefore women flock to Christianity? Wasn't that just the same argument pundits used last week to predict a blue wave for Kamala? Why didn't white women actually go for Trump 5346?

Salzman has one more concern, which is that women had so few rights in ancient Rome, society, that Oh, in ancient Roman society that it's hard to see how they could have converted in all when unmarried They were under the care of their father Who would hardly have let them go visiting churches full of strange men when married?

They were under the care of their husband who likewise a typical Roman man wouldn't have cared about his wife's religious opinions, which maybe is why so many of our stories are about intermarriages and conversions come from later periods like Anglo Saxons. I don't know enough about history to referee this dispute, except to say that I think the answer could easily have been different for each of the early [01:31:00] Romans, late Romans, Hellenized Jewish Romans, pagan Romans, upper class Romans, and lower class Romans, plus all combinations thereof.

But again, I think he's underplaying

Malcolm Collins: No, he doesn't get it. Yeah. I think one, the, the, the data that they're looking at, do you really think a lot of Roman men are saying, Oh yeah, my wife's a different religion of me before they convert?

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: No, they're not saying that in the census data.

Simone Collins: I also think, you know, women were out and about.

More than you would think. Like they may be chattel level, but you're going to send them out on errands. They're going to gossip. They're going to talk with other people in markets, like means we'll still spread. Women will still do stuff. You know, you can be like, well, I own my dog, but like, I still take my dog walking and that dog picks up a lot of sense and sense stories.

And like, you know, I'm just. Yeah. Yeah. Women can pick, can pick up a religion even in a very, very oppressive society. I,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, I think that this does not [01:32:00] understand how motivating seeing your baby drowned is. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Or, or seeing, you know, your sister get killed in a botched abortion or beaten by someone.

You know, just, there's, there's an, there's plenty, there's plenty motivation. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I think that I, I just, yeah, I think that this is one of those things where historians can't imagine what it was like back then. Now, this piece actually goes a lot further and we will cover the rest of it in a separate video.

But this video is already insanely too long. But I hope that you guys really enjoyed this because I really enjoyed this and it changed a lot of my perspectives on this.

Simone Collins: Totally. Yeah. I, I hadn't thought about the, the women's rights thing. It's also so funny that like, Now, when people think about Christianity, they're like, Oh, like you're here to suppress women with your Christianity.

And my, an early Christian woman would be like,

Malcolm Collins: what? Insanely pro it's not like Christianity was dramatic. It's not like it was marginally more pro [01:33:00] woman. It was dramatically more pro woman than the most extreme feminist today is when contrasted was a modern conservative.

Simone Collins: Yeah, no, it's, it's wild. It's,

Malcolm Collins: it's really, it's people not drowning your babies.

If you don't understand how much that's going to freak out a woman, I don't know, like have a baby. Okay. Like get, get on board here, people. And I think that the idea that, Oh, these women, because if you look at this Roman census data, it's not like they were asking women what your religion is. They would go to a husband and say, what's your religion and what's your wife's religion.

Right. You know, and the husband's not going to be like, Oh, my wife is part of this weird Christian cult. Right. No, of

Simone Collins: course not. It's a little embarrassing. You know, it's like admitting your wife's in an MLM. You know, you keep the Lula row a little hidden, you know?

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Yes. So I think that that's. like a really silly reason to discount what seems to be like when I look at the tunics thing, that's insane.

It was like 86 with female tunics, like 20 males. [01:34:00] I'm like, yeah, but I get it. Like most older women are going to prefer something like this because they don't have any other support network. Most, you know, and, and you're like, Oh, when is a woman going to interact with an older, maybe a midwife, maybe a, you know, There's a lot of people who can be spreading this stuff.

And there will go over other ways it was spread and why it may not have been seen as nefarious or why people may have had trouble stamping it out. When we get to the next part of this, we're going to talk about like the, the morality differences between the two groups, martyrs and disease survival rates.

Simone Collins: So cool. Yeah, man. Yeah. Yeah. So solid. It's a great. I mean, I want to read the book now, but I feel like it's also a great summary. Astral Codex 10 is just so good. It's so good. Just, you know, whatever. I'm glad we live in such a lucky age. You know, it used to be that only a small percentage of elite people would have access to the thoughts of.[01:35:00]

Malcolm Collins: People, the leading thought leaders of their day because it's just, it's

Simone Collins: super cool. I love it and I love you and I'm glad that you're sharing your thoughts with people because it'd be really sad if your thoughts were just isolated to the world. I mean, I feel the same way about you. I'm so glad that your ideas are out there and you know, like every night when you.

Say goodnight to me. I'm like, Malcolm, no, seriously, like you need, you need to No dying. Don't die. Yeah. You need to not die. So please don't die.

Malcolm Collins: I love you to death, Simone. You're a great wife. We

Simone Collins: have to go check and see if the meat

Malcolm Collins: box

Simone Collins: was

Malcolm Collins: delivered.

Simone Collins: Yes. The best Christmas present ever. A year's worth of meat.

I mean, it's supposed to be one of our family

Malcolm Collins: members buys us a year's worth of meat every year. It's not, it's

Simone Collins: no, it's a week's worth of meat, but we managed to make it last for a year because it's so special. You got, you know, combining deep freezer, you stretch it out with the slow cooker meal where you like combine in a bunch of, you know, [01:36:00] there's some good squash that we can buy.

We'll cook it with. So yeah, you can go look for the box and I'll I guess probably what we'd want to start with is Assuming it's not Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure it's fresh, is whatever their nicest steak is. Pan-seared.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you can add tonight. Tonight. Do you want that with any accompaniments or just plain?

Simone Collins: Like just plain Or with any accompaniments.

Malcolm Collins: No, I got the sauces at Trader Joe's.

Simone Collins: No, I mean, but like, do you want to starch with it? Oh yeah,

Malcolm Collins: it's rice.

Simone Collins: Oh, with rice.

Malcolm Collins: With

Simone Collins: coconut rice.

Malcolm Collins: Rice or potatoes, you choose.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah, well, No, you could

Malcolm Collins: just reheat the frozen potatoes with the mushrooms.

Simone Collins: Oh, those! Yeah, the Trader Joe's ones.

I was thinking about making, like, homemade No, not fresh potatoes.

Malcolm Collins: That'd

Simone Collins: take

Malcolm Collins: forever.

Simone Collins: Maybe I have to see how long it takes to like flashback them, but anyway, yeah. Okay. I'm all about them. I love [01:37:00] you.

Malcolm Collins: And you see, I'm respectful of our time, right?

Simone Collins: Yes. Thank you. Cause now I can get everything queued up and hopefully not go to bed super late tonight.

Malcolm Collins: All right. Have a good one. Love you. Gorgeous. Love you too. Oh,

Simone Collins: I'm going to stop recording.

I've learned anything interesting.

Just that universities waste prodigious amounts of money. I can tell when I go through RFPs that they put out for travel management and they describe the way that they book travel. I'm like, Oh, you guys,

you guys waste a lot of money. Don't you? Oh, yes you do. Oh. Well, they're the

Malcolm Collins: heart of the whole bleeding broken system that we live in.

Simone Collins: Yeah, I suppose

Malcolm Collins: universities can be cracked. Everything can. That's why I'm so interested in the American academy project.

Simone Collins: [01:38:00] Same here. Yeah. Going through RFP stuff all day today with a university. I'm all the more convinced that this needs to be fixed. The funny thing is my experience is recently doing bid related work with government agencies.

Has made universities seem even more egregiously irresponsible, which is crazy because you would think that government agencies would be the worst on this front, but they're not. They're actually quite, in many cases, responsible. The funny thing is, pretty much every government worker I've encountered has been really responsible, conscientious, like, really doing the best that they can.

University's totally different story. That is where I'm seeing the classic bureaucrat who literally is just out to spin wheels and keep their job justified. Well, the

Malcolm Collins: rot will spread from the universities outwards.

Simone Collins: Why, why [01:39:00] universities first?

Malcolm Collins: Because they are the most, they are sort of the generator of this culture.

So the disease that is now affecting sort of the deep state was lab grown in universities. And developed in universities. It's the, they're the

Simone Collins: gain of function for Yes,

Malcolm Collins: they're gain of function labs for harmful, for a harmful memetic cult. Oh dear me. I, I, you're so clever, Simone. I love you.

Speaker: In ancient Rome, where altars shone, the pagan gods once ruled alone. But quietly came a faithful breed Not through big signs, but with small seed They gathered in humble prayer No sweeping crowds or mass [01:40:00] fanfare They built their homes with children glad More babes they bore than pagans had They didn't conquer hearts by force Or cast the shrines in sudden course.

They simply grew in number, see. The cradle was their victory.

While statues loomed in marble halls. They taught their young beyond those walls. Each brand new life, a living call. That soon outgrew. The pagan, no grand crusade in streets of stone, no golden flags or trumpets blown yet countless children [01:41:00] won the fight and pagan ways. Soon lost their mind, they didn't conquer hearts by force, or cast the shrines in sudden course.

They simply grew in numbers, see, the cradle was their victory. A quiet change from heart to home, in every lane across old Rome. Not by sword. So sparkling stage, but the next generation turned the page. They didn't conquer hearts by force. Or cast the shrines in sudden course. They simply grew in number.

See, the cradle was their victory. Yes, by the crib they came to [01:42:00] be. The future of that. Oh, say,