Avoiding Hippy Nonsense When Searching for Theological Truth

My wife Simone and I have a discussion about conceptualizing God as a four-dimensional "tesseract" that humans can only perceive shadows and projections of in our three-dimensional world.

We talk about how conservative interpretations of religions may come closer to truth than progressive re-interpretations, the issues with using psychedelics for revelation, the problems with "super soft" cultures, and more. We also touch on why we encourage people to follow their own religious traditions.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] generally, we think that people are following both a more accurate iteration of God, by following the conservative traditions of their faith, and, and that they are following a totally true iteration of God. So, what I mean by that is the human mind is unable to really conceive of a four dimensional space. And we think of God as like a four dimensional entity in this, this metaphor. When a person is looking at the shadow of a three dimensional cube. And they just go as the shadow that was projected.

Mm-Hmm. And they say this is what a cube is. They are actually saying something that is 100% true. They are seeing a full and complete revelation of that cube as that cube can be revealed to someone of their intellect in that time in history. if we were evangelizing to an average person, that evangelization doesn't look like follow us. It looks like a go back to your traditions because that's the closest to truth you're going to get.

Would you like to know [00:01:00] more?

Simone Collins: Hello, you beautiful creature. Hello,

Malcolm Collins: you beautiful creature. You are the best, Simone. And we are going to have a conversation today about a topic that I briefly touched on in the Our Religion video topic. But I want to get a lot deeper on because one of the real risks around any religious belief system that believes that there can be multiple revelations from God or multiple prophets.

And this is why, Most of the more simple religious systems will say no, no more prophets after this one. Nothing else comes after this one. Because it's easy to pass that culture with intergenerational fidelity because if you don't then any random person who's like a f*****g magician can come along and claim Yeah, I'm the next prophet, you know, or no take backsies You can get the softening of the religion.

So, a lot of people will say something like, Every religion has an element of truth. They say this in an attempt to [00:02:00] soften their religious framework. Right?

going with the logic that if all religions have an element of truth to it, if any religion allows some behavior they want to undertake, then all religions should allow it. Or that if any religion doesn't demand some action or penance from them, then no religion should demand that action or penance from them.

Malcolm Collins: You know, they, they, they, And you, you've seen people who do this. They have some like weird, hippie nonsense as their belief system. And it's just pointless.

But they, they form, They end up forming what we call in the book The Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion, a super soft Culture or a framework. So when a person is building a world framework outside of any traditions or outside of science, like when you have dug down to the bottom, completely drain the ocean of their mind.

A lot of people think what is under there is secularism, and it is not. Secularism, you know, when practiced rigidly, is, is actually very, it can have a lot of religious aspects to it that cause people to go against their [00:03:00] basal instincts. Instead, what you find is this sort of, like, pre programmed human religion, I guess I'd call it.

It's, it's the scars of our evolutionary history. You know, it's, it's, it's a belief that we're all connected. We're all sort of one they'll have fetishes. When I say a fetish, I don't mean like a sexual fetish. I mean like an item that they believe has some sort of power to it. Like a crystal or something like that.

They often believe that humans are divided into distinct categories. You know, this would be like astronomy. Or is it astrology? Astrology. Astrology. Astrology, or like, you know, and, and, and I'm not saying that, you know, the, the secularists can't fall into this with stuff like Myers Briggs nonsense, or like in, in, in Japan, you know, you got your blood types.

Blood type, yeah. buT if you want to go into that, go into the Fragment of Sky, the Crafting Religion, we go really deep into super soft cultures.

To go over some of the aspects of Supercut's soft cultures, I forgot to [00:04:00] discuss here. They often have ceremonies tied to forgetting an adherent's identity while dancing. They often attribute agency to inanimate objects or animals. And they often attribute power to intention. We call this the power of wishy thinking

Space. What is it? The simple answer is, we don't know. Or at least we didn't know until now. Hello, I'm Douglas Renham, and I'm not a scientist. But I do have a better understanding of what space is than any scientist living today. Where did I gain these insights? From this man. The founder of spaceology, Beth Gaga Shaggy.

 Is the founder of spaceology. A religion, not a cult. In other words, when it comes to space, he's the man with his head screwed on tight. This is what he told me when I met him on holiday . Space is invisible mining dust, and stars are but wishes. I mean, think about that.

That means every star [00:05:00] you can see in the night sky is a wish that has come true. And they've come true because of something he calls Space Star Ordering. Space Star Ordering is based on the twin scientific principles of star maths and wishy thinking.

If that doesn't convince you, well then, maybe you just don't deserve to get what you want.

Malcolm Collins: and they are really dangerous. Like, people are like, well, how is that not obvious that that's the true culture? Like, if it seems to be pre programmed into us, in, in the answer Is well, because cultures that fall into those practices almost immediately die out.

It, it, it is not an effective culture. It does not seem to help people do well in our current world or environment. Examples of God is love, like that would be like a super culture thing to say, where they often see this sort of interconnectedness of all of humanity, God being this vague, like emotional state, et cetera, et cetera.

We definitely do not take [00:06:00] that perspective at all. And I think that that perspective is really dangerous and it's always a danger if you are in a, in a culture that is looking for truth and believes that truth has come through multiple iterations. So you have one, the new prophet. problem where a new prophet comes up and now says, I'm the last prophet, and here's the new thing I'm adding, or you have the problem of just like the general beginning

And then somebody may say, well, but then why would you run the risk of teaching your kids that there will be other prophets in the future, or that there have been multiple prophets after any of the core prophets? Well, for two reasons. One is just the logical reason that we went over last time. It would seem very capricious for God to give a message that you needed to know to be saved to people in Ancient Israel and then not have that message spread to people in the Americas for, like, a thousand years.

Or, you know, all of the people who would have lived and died before that message was released. That seems overly capricious to me. Instead, we think God has always done his best at giving people the fullest [00:07:00] prophecy they could comprehend in their time period, and that could realistically become widely believed within their time period.

For, for each cultural group. But two, and more importantly, if you are part of any of the major Judeo Christian traditions, they all say this, very explicitly, that there will be future prophets. So if you, and a lot of people don't know this, because the iterations of those traditions that pretend like the Bible or the Koran or Mormons are much more aware that their book saves us than other traditions, but the iterations that pretend like they say there's not going to be any more prophets, they have an easier time spreading for the reason that we've talked about before, and they stay healthier in terms of intergenerational cultural transfer than the ones who accept what's actually written in the books.

So for Christians, if you look at something like Matthew 23 34, Jesus says, quote, Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify. Others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. End quote. This indicates pretty clearly that more prophets are going to come after him.

In Acts [00:08:00] 2 17, Peter quotes the prophet Joel saying, quote, In the last days I will pour out from my spirit upon everyone. Your sons and daughters will prophesize. Your young men will see visions. Your old men will dream dreams. In Ephesians 3 5, Paul refers to the prophets and apostles in the early church, saying that there were like active prophets in the early church.

In Revelation 11 10 there is a reference to two prophets that will come in the end times. So, all pretty clear indications there's going to be more prophets. If you look at Mormons when a journalist asked Joseph Smith if he was the prophet of God, he said yes, and so is everyone else with the testimony of Jesus.

So, for Mormons, Everyone is literally a prophet to some extent. We don't believe that well kind of, but we believe that some people have much more clear prophecy than others. If you look at the Book of Mormon Nephi says, quote, there came many prophets prophesying unto the people that they must repent.

Or the great city , Jerusalem would be destroyed. That's one in Nephi one four or in Enos. 1, 2, 2. Eno said that there were, quote, [00:09:00] exceedingly many prophets among them, end quote.

Now, you might be thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, but I have heard from Muslim preachers that their book definitely says that Muhammad was the last prophet. Well. What their book actually says is, quote, Muhammad is not the father of any of your men, but he is the messenger of God and the seal of the prophets, and God has full knowledge of all things.

That's Quran 3340. That's what they use. It's a line that's most commonly used to argue that the Quran says Muhammad is the last prophet. It doesn't really say that, though. It says that God knows all things, not that Muhammad knows all things. It also says that Muhammad is the seal of the prophets, but that can mean one of any number of things.

, and when you take it in the context of other quotes from the Quran, it seems pretty clearly not to mean that he is the last prophet of all times. So, if you look at, for example, Quran 1636. For we sent amongst every people a messenger, with the command, [00:10:00] Serve God and eschew evil. So there's a messenger for every people. And then Qur'an 35, 24. Verily, we have sent you with the truth as a bearer of glad tidings and a warner. And there never was a nation, but a warner passed through them.

So there's never been a country without a prophet. , and then Quote, indeed, we have sent it down to you as an Arabic Qur'an that you might understand it. This is Qur'an 12 2. So this is, if it's sent down in Arabic, so you may understand it. This is clearly speaking to Arabic speakers in the Arabic community.

Muhammad was meant to be the prophet, to the Muslim community, and that is what it says in the Qur'an. So much so that it says, you know, similar to we believe, which is very interesting that Islam has a lot in common with our beliefs, or at least what's written in the Qur'an has a lot in common with our beliefs, is that the different revelations were meant for different people.

So 548, and we sent down to you the book in truce confirming what was [00:11:00] before it. of the scripture and as a criterion over it. So, judge between them by what God has revealed, and do not follow their inclinations away from what come to you of the truth. This is 548. So that's saying that The Quran was meant to confirm both the Christian Bible and the Jewish Bible as true, but conform it as true for their people, as can be seen in some of these other lines.

 So, you've got 547. So let the people of the Christian gospel judge by what God has revealed in it, and those who do not judge by what God has revealed in it are truly rebellious.

That seems exceedingly clear to me that the Quran is saying that Christians who don't follow what are in the Bible are living in open rebellion to God. , now look at Quran 262. Surely those who believe and those who are Jews and the Christians and the Sabians, whoever believes in God and the last day and does good, they shall have their reward [00:12:00] from the Lord and there will be no fear for them, nor shall they grieve.

So, again, this is saying that you get rewarded if you are a Christian for following the Christian scriptures, if you are a Jew for following the Jewish scriptures, and if you are a Muslim for following the Muslim scriptures, and that every country has a warner. So, presumably, there's many more warners than just these warners.

Now, you might say, Why don't I hear this from my Muslim friends? And the answer is, is because a religion that's structured this way is just going to do a very bad job at spreading. , as you can see with us. Like, there is no reason to proselytize an iteration of a faith that thinks that most people already have a correct faith.

So, those iterations of Islam that followed what the Quran actually said didn't spread as far as the iterations that didn't.

Malcolm Collins: And the way or the story we will use with our kids to help them get around this and also understand the value of hard cultural traditions is the Tesseract The tesseract model of God, we'll call it or the four [00:13:00] dimensional model of God.

So I, I talked about this briefly, but I'd like to go a bit deeper into it. So for people who are not familiar how four dimensional shapes work vis a vis three dimensional, two dimensional shapes. So , a one dimensional shape is a line, a two dimensional shape is like a flat drawing, like a square would be a two dimensional shape, a three dimensional shape is something like a cube and a four dimensional shape, a four dimensional cube is a tesseract Now, we as humans cannot perceive four dimensional shapes.

We can't even think about them. It is, it is, no human can think about a four dimensional shape. Very interesting story here the guy who invented the concept of the tesseract and, and was a real prodigy of four dimensional space, what he thought is he's like, okay, I, as a person, don't often engage with three dimensional spaces and maybe if I engaged with three dimensional spaces more, I would have a better time being able to imagine what a four dimensional shape would look like.

Like in my [00:14:00] developmental stages. So he invented the, do you know what he invented? The jungle gym. The jungle gym, yes! He created a jungle gym, but these early jungle gyms were just three dimensional grids that kids would climb within. I

Simone Collins: remember, there was one in, like, one of my top childhood playgrounds it was sufficiently dangerous

Malcolm Collins: and perfect.

The, the, one of these total four dimensional grids, I mean three dimensional grids, yeah, and he would label the points on it with different things and be like, go to point A3B or something, you know, and the kids would have to run, like that was the game he played to the point, so he'd try to Turns out it did not help his kids be able to imagine four dimensional shapes.

It just turns out that humans are not biologically equipped to imagine a four dimensional shape because there was no evolutionary pressure for our brains to be able to do that. So why would they? I mean, our brains need to be able to really, really well understand three dimensional space because humans just, just so people don't know, like, evolutionarily, one of humans big advantages, like, other than intelligence and persistence, Is our [00:15:00] ability to throw things with high accuracy.

Other animals don't have anything like this. Most other animals don't, at least. You know, humans can throw things like really well. Which

Simone Collins: it turns out was probably Probably bad parents for not playing catch in the backyard with our

Malcolm Collins: kids. Well, I guess we can do that more. I do it sometimes. But yeah we, we, we you know, evolved to throw stones, spears, stuff like that.

It was a very useful technology for us being bipedal and everything. But anyway, back to this concept of, of the Tesseract God. So if you lived in a, a, a two dimensional plane and, and you were trying to understand three dimensional shapes, what they would look like is the shadow of the three dimensional shape.

Okay. So if you are looking at a. Cube from the perspective of a two dimensional plane, you can look at a cube under a light, like have it cast down a light, and the shadow that it's casting on the paper is the two dimensional representation of that three dimensional shape, and you can [00:16:00] spin it around, and that two dimensional representation will change.

Right? Um, well, four dimensional shapes leave three dimensional representations. And I'll put like a little video of a tesseract here spinning so you can get sort of an idea of what this looks like. But there can

Simone Collins: be no such thing of a video of a tesseract.

Malcolm Collins: No, but there can be a thing of a three dimensional shadow of a tesseract, as a tesseract is rotating.

So, when we talk about this from the perspective of religion, and we say God is like a tesseract being viewed from different angles, suppose you were trying to understand a, three dimensional cube from the shadow it's leaving on a sheet of paper. Okay. There's various approaches you could take to this, but the way most people do who are like, well, let's stitch together different understandings of the cube is they'll say, okay, on average, what spots are dark, you know, on average, what spots are [00:17:00] shadow, or they'll say, what are the spots that Always covered by the shadow or, and nobody does this that I'm aware of, but it's kind of what we do with those say, like, maximally, what are the spots that are covered by the shadow?

Now, if you take the average or the minimum shadow perspective, the shape that you are going to think of is an accurate two dimensional representation of a cube is going to be a sphere, which is it. The furthest it is a much further or much more distant representation of what the cube actually looks like than any individual representation of the cube through its shadow.

So what we're saying here when we talk about this, this Tesseract God or whatever, right, is while we believe that different revelations of God have been given to different people for their people for their time period, people of that time period and of that cultural tradition. Most accurately follow what God actually wanted [00:18:00] from them and, and a true vision of God by following.

Strictly and as a conservative interpretation, their religious system and trying to stitch it together with other systems.

Simone Collins: So, in other words, literal translations have higher religious fidelity when we're talking about because what you're trying to say is a Tesseract is a proxy in this metaphor for God.

So literal translations of God or the Tesseract are higher fidelity than. overanalyzed amalgams, averages, minimums, maximums, medians, modes, etc. Right?

Malcolm Collins: Yes. So generally a person who, and, and this is where we, obviously people are like, yeah, but you guys don't do that with your faith. And it's like, yes, but every faith thinks they're a little different and a little better.

And that they have access to information, which allows them to do things that other cultural traditions can't easily do. Of course, everybody thinks their own religion is like, a little better than everyone else's, and it gives them [00:19:00] a little credibility. But generally, we think that people are following both a more accurate iteration of God, by following the conservative traditions of their faith, and, and that they are following a totally true iteration of God.

So, what I mean by that is the human mind is unable to really conceive of a four dimensional space. And we think of God as like a four dimensional entity in this, this metaphor.

as Wynwood Reid writes, the supreme power is not a mind, not a force, not a being, but something higher than a being, something for which we have no words, something for which we have no ideas.

Malcolm Collins: When a person is looking at the shadow of a three dimensional cube. , right? Mm-Hmm. . And they just go as the shadow that was projected.

Mm-Hmm. And they say this is what a cube is. They are actually saying something that is 100% true. They are seeing a full and complete revelation of that cube as that cube can be revealed to someone of their [00:20:00] intellect in that time in history. Okay? But this is also what we believe about religions people who are following conservative iterations of their religion.

are actually seeing a full and complete revelation insofar as their mind can understand it. Right. It only gets dangerous when they start to water it down.

Simone Collins: Or, mmm, interpret it in some way.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, try to combine it with different things, stuff like that. Yeah, yeah. And this is a perspective that I haven't really heard anyone sort of talk about or preach before.

But it is one that feels intuitively true to me when I look at the data and the gifts that are being given to people who stick with stricter iterations of their religious frameworks.

Simone Collins: Yeah, what I like about it and you and I discussed this offline was that it reminds me of the, like, [00:21:00] four men and an elephant, like blind men and an elephant metaphor where people are like, well, you know, if a bunch of people are all blind and they're all trying to feel an elephant, but they're standing at different angles of it, they're going to have very different descriptions of what they're encountering.

But,

Malcolm Collins: you know, your point is that,

Simone Collins: you know, the elephant is knowable by us. Like if, if they weren't blind or if someone turned the lights on. There is an easily seeable elephant, whereas a tesseract is literally something that we are incapable of, of picturing accurately, comprehending,

Malcolm Collins: et cetera, right?

Yeah, well, but not just to that, but it also allows you to point out, you know, is the shadow of the three dimensional cube and somebody saying, this is a cube. You can say, yes, they are literally correct. That is a cube. Right. And then people will be like. But this seems incompatible with this other revelation by this different prophet.

And it's like, yes, that's because you live in a two dimensional space. Like it's one person holding up one shadow of a cube, and another person holding up another shadow of a cube. And they're [00:22:00] both saying these are obviously two different objects. Look at how they're incompatible. Look at this one's point here.

Look at this one's point here. And yet they both actually have complete revelations in so far as they are capable of understanding a complete revelation.

And keep in mind here that we believe that

as humanity develops, their capacity to understand a more complete revelation increases, and it increases at different rates between cultural groups to understand specific aspects of a more complete revelation, and therefore, A more complete revelation is always being drip fed to any group that is improving, thus the need for continued prophets. And thus why we see this need for intergenerational improvement and intergenerational sharpening of one's mind and understanding of the world to be a religious imperative. As Wynwood read, writes, persons with feeble and untrained, intellects may live according to their conscience, but the conscience itself will be defective to cultivate. The intellect is therefore a [00:23:00] religious duty.

Any group that has lost the continued prophecy that was promised to them in their original religious text has lost to that because they are not improving enough to understand a more complete revelation at this point.

Malcolm Collins: Which the elephant story doesn't really do. What I find with the elephant story is that it's often used to justify sort of the watered down approach.

And a really dangerous source of revelation that a lot of people who use these super soft cultural traditions do is psychedelics. We talk a lot about this in our book and there's a lot of research on this psychedelics are not a useful source of revelation, nor are altered states of mind that are equivalent to psychedelics.

So you can create similar effects to psychedelics by doing things like chanting, not sleeping a lot, dancing in a large group, stuff like that. And a lot of, of religious traditions have evolved to. To do these, these sorts of rituals where they'll like chant and march around. Because it, it, [00:24:00] it, it, or, you know, bump, bump, bump, bump, bump, you know, music, simple rhythms combined with this can create these effects where you will feel a sense of profundity and go on what we call a.

A ghost ride. But we'll talk about what a ghost ride is in a second. First, let's talk about the feelings of profundity. So humanity, one of the big problems with, with religion as it's revealed to humans, is we as people who believe in human evolution and everything like that, we did not evolve in an environment Where we were rewarded for correctly recognizing profundity humans are unable to recognize profundity.

Basically we can create profundity in the human mind with things like psychedelic, with things like group chanting, we can. Uh, or, or like sort of tricking our brains. So like, quote unquote, thinking about the vastness of the universe and stuff like that can create the senses of profundity or thinking about concepts that are vague, but not in and of themselves, [00:25:00] not fully understandable.

I E the Trinity would be something like this to say that God is both fully three separate things and fully one thing. Because this statement is that we need to talk about, buddhist traditions doing this a lot with cones where they'll create the sense of profundity by giving a person a concept which is supposed to not be fully understandable and through it not being fully understandable.

So a cone would be something like a tree falls in the forest. Does it make a noise or what is

Simone Collins: the sound of one hand clapping?

Malcolm Collins: What they're actually doing there is gaslighting people. Cause there's

Simone Collins: actually a sound. There was this one of my former classmates could actually make. Like, cause I guess his fingers were kind of disjointed, his hand

Malcolm Collins: clapped.

So let's talk about what I mean when I say they're gaslighting people with these concepts. So if I then went to them and I was like, okay, this is what a sound like, like it's a definition. I recorded the sound of one

Simone Collins: hand

Malcolm Collins: clapping. Or I'm like, yeah. Or it's a definitional problem. Right? Like, are we defining sound as like vibrations or something?

They'd be like, oh no, you don't [00:26:00] understand it. Right. They are showing that you cannot rely on your own internal. Logic to come to an understanding of reality, you have to be submissive to their understanding of reality. A lot of it's gatekeeping, and I,

Simone Collins: ugh, it makes me so mad.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it's gatekeeping combined with gaslighting.

They are telling a person that their understanding of the world that they think they know is just wrong, and that the only way to get a correct understanding of the world is to take it from them. And so they use this to pass cultures intergenerationally with fidelity a bit higher, but I do not think it's a, a good mechanism because it teaches Uncompromising sort of, following of your elders in a way that I think is really psychologically unhealthy.

No, like a lot

Simone Collins: of it's kind of like blind following, right? Like, you, you know, you have to know it's not right, or you have to know they're kind of lying to you, but then you have to develop a blind faith regardless, and that's

Malcolm Collins: sick. Yeah, I, [00:27:00] I, I do not have a high opinion of cultural groups that really engage in that.

Over heavily, but it can also create a feeling of love. Like if you think about a concept like that, but then you're not constantly being gaslit. This is what Catholics do as a Trinity. It, because it's, it's a not fully understandable concept, inherently unknowable by humans. Yeah. It begins to fill up a lot of your, your brain.

And if you also feel like a safety from that thing or an attachment to that thing, you will develop a feeling of love towards it or a feeling of profundity from it, which is similar to like thinking about the vastness of the universe or something like that. So there's ways you can trick these mental systems.

And I actually think that that's a healthy thing for a culture to do. That's very different than like a master being like. You don't understand, you know, then you, you go to the scary ghost train that I'm talking about. So when I talk about a ghost train ride, right? If people are familiar from like a, a, a theme park or something like that, you can go on these things called ghost trains.

Where you sit in a train, and then these pre set experiences, like a ghost falls from the ceiling and goes, [00:28:00] Boooooo. And it's like a, a, a set track and a set series of things that you are seeing as you are riding around the tracks. Um, well, that is kind of what psychedelics are. People think they're getting these really unique and personalized experiences for them.

But really what they're doing often is just sort of depending on the psychedelic they're taking. And we go into this a lot and the pragmatist guide to crafting religion. They're going on sort of preset experiences that are just going to have a lot of Similarities to

Simone Collins: everyone else. There are articles in it, and even like there's scientific research on this, like that people describe these very, very, very similar and consistent things

Malcolm Collins: happening to them.

Yeah. And they're, and I should be clear, they're not similar because they're seeing something that's real. Like one of the things that they'll see is like elves that exist behind reality and are like constructing reality or something. It's the elf hallucination, which is like, obviously, I don't know, to me that seems obviously stupid.

Our reality is not constructed by elves. That's what they [00:29:00] want you to think. But what it is, is they are sort of activating parts of the human brain where I, I talk about sort of tracks wearing in a road for a really long period of time. If you've ever driven on a ruddy road that a lot of people have driven on, you will get sucked into the tracks.

That other people have driven on and then you're sort of stuck in the tracks that everyone and you're making them incrementally deeper. Well, this happened to humans throughout evolutionary history and we have some of these tracks in our brain, but largely we have gotten good at covering them up.

What the drugs drew is they basically uncover these hidden tracks and then snap you onto them and you go through these preset experiences. That the higher order human mind has been able to suppress. They are not leading you to truth. They are degrading your understanding of reality through delivering false prophecy through delivering false information that then people use to try to construct a world perspective.

And this is something that we often see in the boomer generation [00:30:00] where a lot of them tried to understand the world through. And the hippie generation did this a lot, through these sorts of psychological hacks, like through these ghost train rides. And they end up with really, I think, very philosophically unsophisticated understandings of reality, that lead to them being generally unhappy and unproductive people.

That is generally like, all man is love, all religion is love, God is love, we're all one thing. No, I don't. I think that's patently untrue if we look at the world today, if we look at I mean, look, not even talking about humans, like, we live in a world where, like, for a lion to eat, it needs to regularly, like, kill other animals.

Grizzly bears, like, eat animals alive. Like, that's the normal way they kill things. Why? This is not set up by, like, Less chance of getting disease. So what they'll do is they'll maim an animal and then they'll put it in a pile with other maimed but dying animals. So [00:31:00] maimed enough they can't get away, but they'll keep them alive, sometimes for days, and then eat them later.

bleed out?

Simone Collins: Or they're just collecting for later?

Malcolm Collins: They're just, like, collecting. Well, so, yeah, they'll eventually bleed out, but that will be a period from when they're first maimed to when they bleed out that they are not developing disease within them. Which is obviously a risk to the grizzly bear.

That's why it does this. It's like, instead of refrigeration, you just keep the animal partially alive. And then they eat them while they're still alive, of course. Horrible, horrible way to die, by the way. And this is why I f*****g hate grizzly bears. Teddy bears? You know what we're doing with teddy bears?

We are teaching kids to not fear bears as much as they should. Bears are monsters and we need to get rid of them. Well, but

Simone Collins: that's what Theodore Roosevelt was, you know, supporting conservation through hunting.

Malcolm Collins: He was all about killing the bears. Conservation through hunting. He just didn't kill that one bear that was tied up to a tree.

He had to do it sportingly.

Simone Collins: Well, yeah, because it's all about good form, which is something that I'm [00:32:00] obsessed with. But here's the thing I wanted to discuss on this subject is I think that, you know, a lot of what draws people to religion and what like we would say like your slightly above average to average and below average constituent or parishioner would need to believe is just like, yes, like what, what is being told to me is true.

I am going to heaven, blah, blah, blah. Like this is exactly the way everything works. Everything is true and accurate. And I'm not going to live my life a certain way. If like, the literal interpretation that my religion has is just like the best we can do with an unknowable concept, right? Like, I, I feel like maybe this concept hasn't been discussed at length or people

Malcolm Collins: don't want to be clear.

I do not think the concept is unknowable. I think the concept is unknowable for. Yeah, but I think our distant descendants will be able to easily grasp the

Simone Collins: concepts involved. Totally agreed, and that's why we practice descendant worship. But I'm still saying, like, I feel like most people wouldn't want to get on board with anything [00:33:00] when they know it's being fudged.

Hence that this is not a concept that's palatable to anyone who has religious tendencies, because it's too deeply uncomfortable to know that, that, that one is doing the best one can at the moment, but one is technically wrong. Wrong in the right direction, if they have a hard religion. We would argue.

Yeah. But still wrong, right?

Malcolm Collins: Well, no, and that's why we don't just then follow a traditional hard religion because if we didn't believe that, you know, we would just go back to following a traditional hard religion. What we think is with this knowledge, an individual through intellectually studying messages, like intellectually studying prophets, which we talk about in our video of like identifying prophets and stuff like that can not, not Not with like drugs or something, not with like meditation, none of this new agey nonsense, with like a book and studies and, and time and history and detailed Intellectual investigation can come to [00:34:00] truth, but they need to be thinking about it, not as this truth is going to be a three dimensional truth.

Mm hmm. Um, they need to be, they need to be, if there are these two people arguing about what shape is accurate, they need to say, look. This is a three dimensional shape we're trying to construct here. We live in the two dimensional world. This is why these two things look at odds with each other.

 Thus, while the whole truth can be mapped out by somebody exploring the spaces

in between the individual prophets,

it is not going to feel like something that an individual human mind can easily wrap itself around. It is going to be something that you can sort of mathematically chart out and get some ideas about. But not something that you can holistically hold in your mind at any time. One thing to note is that it definitely does not sound or look like something that you want to hear.

It doesn't sound like some sort of distributed hedonism, [00:35:00] whether that's compassion or love or other euphemisms for hedonism. that it is not true that all religions, whatever they may be, were founded by a real prophet. So, for example, christ was almost certainly a real prophet. The Jews follow real prophets. Probably Mohammed was a real prophet. Maybe, , the Mormons follow real prophets.

Other than that, there's no groups that I can see are very obviously following real prophets, and obviously we think that Wyn would read with a real prophet or the most recent real prophet.

Malcolm Collins: And I do not think that this is a useful thing for most people to do.

I think it is a thing that some people can do, and some people should dedicate their lives to. But I do

Simone Collins: not think Do they just have to lie to everyone else? Like, what do you do about the people who cannot be

Malcolm Collins: comfortable with an imperfect No, I mean, I don't think it's our I think that for most people, they're better off just following a hard tradition from an existing religious framework.

I think for the vast majority of people, that is the right [00:36:00] answer. That's why I would never try to pull someone away from that path and why in a lot of our advocacy and when we talk to people, we encourage them to go back to their religious traditions, whatever those traditions are. A lot of people think that's very weird for people who are like technically secular to do.

Why are you pushing people back towards their religious traditions? And we think It is because for the average person, that is as close to truth as they are going to get. Even from a very intellectual person, that's as close to truth as they're going to get, and this is why we, historically in our videos, we took a long time, like, hundreds of episodes in before we really started laying out our religious framework, because it's sort of a sad religious framework, and it's like, it's not meant for everyone, people can know that we think it and be like, I want to join you guys, and we can be like, well then, study, right, like, it's, it's not something that is necessarily going to be study, right, right.

communicate, you know, but it almost sort of gatekeeps itself to an extent [00:37:00] in that we just don't believe it's meant for everyone. And if we were evangelizing to an average person, that evangelization doesn't look like follow us. It looks like a go back to your traditions because that's the closest to truth you're going to get.

Yeah. Which is a very odd religious framework. And a lot of people will be like, well, that's not going to spread intergenerationally and we'll see with our kids. We'll see with our kids.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. We're not saying we're right. We're just saying we're trying our best and we'll

Malcolm Collins: see. yeAh. And I really love you, Simone.

And I love these religious topics. You know, I love talking to you about this and stuff, but I don't know if our audience likes it. So, we can keep them shorter. One I'd love to do is on teddy bears because I really want to do a video on why kids have teddy bears.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah, no, no, no, no. Yeah, we've had some fun covering.

Yeah, we have, we have theories about this.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. Anyway, I love you to death and you are a great wife. You are a

Simone Collins: perfect husband and I love how clever you are, Mr. Tesseract Man. [00:38:00] All

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