Voice of Reason vs Kameron Waters: Did Jesus Oppose Animal Sacrifices? A Deep Dive | DSH #1448

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He literally, I think, lists Kochaba.

So we're talking about a sect that existed even before Jesus.

It has nothing to do with him being from Nazareth.

It being called, him being called Jesus of Nazareth is a misnomer that's kind of caused a lot of confusion.

The earlier material, material, Pliny and Africanus, and what we have from the secular sources, we don't hear Jesus of Nazareth until 400 AD.

All right, guys, we are back.

We got Alex from Voice of Reason and Cameron Waters, who's been on the show before.

We're going to have a cool conversation today, aren't we, fellas?

At least we're going to be here.

Thank you for having us.

Yeah, let's do some quick little one-minute intros, I think, for those that don't know you guys.

Sure.

Would you like to go first, my friend?

Go for it, brother.

Thank you very much.

So my name is Alex.

I'm known online as Voice of Reason, and I am a Catholic apologist, evangelist,

share the faith, share the gospel, the truth of our Lord Jesus Christ and his one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.

And I engage all

anyone who's not Catholic, I engage with them, have cool conversations and even do debates and even do.

do a lot of responses to people and my work that I do online.

You can find me on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Patreon, all the usual spots.

I've been told that if you Google Voice of Reason, my stuff pops up.

Well, that's me.

And I'm from Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Represent.

Yeah.

Cameron.

So my name is Cameron Waters, and I am the co-director of the film Christ Spiracy, which released a couple of years ago now.

And I'm a former gospel musician.

I was born into the Protestant.

faith.

I just consider myself a Jesus follower now.

I don't have like a traditional label, but I I do,

you know, connect with churches and things like that.

And yeah, my background is just loving Jesus and really, really profound messages that you're putting out there.

So I'm really excited.

I know that we have like so many things to cover and we only have a limited time.

So there's so much I would want to say about my backstory.

And I want to hear about yours, but I know we kind of jump into it with the.

everything from the scriptures to patristic fathers.

I've seen your work, but I do want to say, I do want to say, I know you hear this all the time.

I have to do do the cliche, but I go ahead, I concede everything to the authority of your voice to start things now.

We're starting off on the right foot, then I'm going to go.

I got the beard, you got the beard, though.

You got the beard.

No, but your beard absolutely beats every person in here.

All three, all three.

I wish.

I wish I could grow that.

You know what I mean?

Something, man.

I would say that would evenly match.

I got the voice.

You got the beard.

There we go.

You know, that's awesome.

Did you see his debate with Wes Hoff?

I did, actually, yeah.

Nice.

Wow, you made it through it.

I did.

That was a really good, uh, really good discussion.

And let me tell you, let me, you know, uh, brag about you for a little bit because that was one of the most pleasant discussions that I've ever seen as far as you know, debate, you know, Christians arguing.

It's arguing, but you guys did it in such a nice way.

So it was so refreshing.

Wow.

You know, I actually did a debate just recently here in Vegas about a month ago.

And

my opponent, he got a little,

he got a little heated.

And he, you know, So it's very nice to be able to have nice.

Wait, was that the orthodox?

Yeah, I saw some clips of that.

Oh, man.

Yeah, so it was fun, though.

And I think he's a great guy, but he got a little heated.

So it's so nice when you can get, because that's how it should be, right?

Should come together.

We shouldn't be fighting or arguing or calling each other names.

We should just be relaxed, calm, and

we should be able to just.

compare notes.

You know what I mean?

be able to have these kind of important conversations.

So my hats off to you, my friend.

You guys did an excellent job.

and just, it was so nice.

It was really a joy to listen to.

Thanks, brother.

What were your takeaways from that?

Did you side with one person over the other?

Like, what did you agree and disagree with Cameron?

It was a tag team debate.

And,

you know, again, I think you guys are phenomenal and do great work, but I think that the points that Wes Huff and his partner made, I think that they were...

Also, because of my background, you know, my bias is more towards, you know, just looking at the

just historically, just the historical uh the consensus of how we understand like the gospel of matthew and the meanings of words and the greek that's used in hebrew you know uh you know weshuff was bringing up a lot of really really important points um so if i had to pick winners in that debate you know i i would go with with wes huff but um but i think that you guys actually brought up really good points as well and i think that you guys you know your strength is you guys bring things up that most people don't think about and i think that's good it's important it's important to think think about these things because, um,

first of all, it makes doing theology and being historians, it makes it fun, you know, right?

And it's good, it's good to acknowledge all the different possibilities and what could be or what you know.

It's the way that you interpret history is very, very important as well.

So, I think that you guys, you know, you

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Your strength is that you guys are able to,

you know, just point out like the possibilities.

You know, so

well, I reflect that back at you.

I didn't get a chance to see the whole Orthodox one, if I'm being honest, but the one that you did with George, which I know wasn't a formal debate, but you got into the back half, the conversation around the Eucharist.

And I thought that your approach to how you handle the differentiation between the schism there was really cool.

Like it felt like I remember at the end, it felt like, oh, they're going to, this is an ongoing conversation.

And it's like each of them learned a little something about each other and about the material.

And it's going to lead to who knows where.

But it felt like not like i'm trying to get the w we're we're having a conversation so that was great i hope that's what we do today yeah i think i think we will brother i think we will and let me also say i saw you on pierce morgan as well and boy he got feisty pierce got feisty he was i don't know if he that's if he had a bad steak that day or something i don't know what it was but he got feisty and you guys were so nice you guys were so calm so relaxed smiling you know so it was you know i i like that that's a really all of us should be like that all of us same all of us need to be like my mature and just be relaxed and nice and respectful.

That's the most important thing.

Absolutely.

So you triggered Pierce.

I mean, yeah, I think he puts on a little bit of it because, like, leading up to the show, between we're in the studio van waiting for him and he's writing notes and he's just so chill, comes up, bam, and it's like the trigger points.

And then as soon as it's done, it's like, okay.

Back to his part of his job.

This is part of his job, yeah.

But he definitely pressed and had some funny moments, I think, on both sides.

Where when you look at the comments, at least, most people commented on the difference in composure, like you are, which I think is beneficial.

So,

yeah, I think when people get emotional to me,

they're kind of losing once they start doing that.

And it's dangerous to get emotional because it's been proven that when you get emotional, you can't think clearly.

When you're emotional, you kind of get dumber.

You're not able to rationalize when you're emotional.

So, it's important to just keep it cool because

you're not going to think things through.

Yeah.

Well, last note on that is thank you for the reflection on the West debate.

I will say, I'll be honest that, you know, you may not remember, but the first hour of that debate, I didn't even really speak hardly.

I said a little prayer to open it up, which we can totally do here as well.

But other than that, I didn't speak.

And then the one moment that I kind of wedged myself in.

It was because there was, we were going into a slideshow presentation and some of the scholars that were in it from the other side, it was being pushed back that these were like fringe scholars and utilizing, I don't think i don't think that's a proper argument to you know it's more of like a i don't know i'm almost like an ad hominem attack where it's talking about you know the the people rather than than the material so i kind of had to press back and some of those scholars are my friends so when i came in i did have a little bit of emotions if i'm being honest coming in and i had to like dial that back into the sit back a little bit yeah you know just trying to get that's awesome that you're able to do that man especially when we're dealing with people that we know personally and our friends and we yeah we feel like i don't know pressure or anxiety about you know we got to defend our friends got to defend our tribe whatever it is but right you know cooler like they say cooler heads prevail so yeah that's good yeah that's awesome man and last thing too I want to say some uh there's all kinds of common ground but my little sisters are Catholic my my little sister and my stepmom they're Filipino Catholic oh really both of my little sisters went through whoa my my littlest sister just finished catechism oh whoa she just did her baptism and all the things and everything I wasn't there because I'm out here and I'm getting all the photos and everything I wish I was there but yeah I have a half Filipino family.

Oh, that's cool, man.

Are they back in Georgia?

Yeah, they're back in Georgia.

Oh, that's cool.

God bless them.

Tolumo said hello.

And Tolamos said, congratulations.

That's awesome.

That's interesting.

I always find it fascinating when a family unit has different religions.

Yeah, yeah.

They all get along.

Yeah, my mom's side of the family, they're all pretty much Protestant.

There's been some like.

Young, when I was really young, it was Southern Baptist.

Then we had a season where we went flip Pentecostal.

Like, I guess it was like the dichotomy or something.

And then we landed back in, by the time I was a teenager, the more like modern, progressive.

I know sometimes the joke is low church or whatever, but the media-driven whole thing.

And that's how I got into music and the gospel music was playing at those, those churches and such.

But that's my whole mom's side of the family.

My dad was a little less religious

throughout most of his life.

But then he married my stepmom and she comes from the Catholic background.

So now I got that kind of influence going on.

That's cool, man.

Well, let's start off with your first position, right?

Sure.

Jesus being vegan.

I think that's kind of your claim to fame with that West Hoff debate, right?

Yeah, we can get into those terms and what that actually means, but we can sum it up as that.

Yeah, sure.

Let's do it.

Cool.

Well, do you want to first explain your position, I guess, and then we'll go from there?

Yeah.

So actually,

could you start it off by reading that thing I just sent you?

Because I think that'll frame the whole claim.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So Jesus preached a kingdom of mercy and peace, yet today Christians are complicit in a system that slaughters over 90 billion animals a year.

if eden and heaven are free of killing why isn't the church leading us back there now awesome

so yeah i would start by saying let's clarify in those first that that first term the vegan term uh it's kind of fun that you start i didn't know you were going to start with that but it's fun that you did start off strong it's typically the most triggering one so right

we got to be all honest the term vegan didn't come around until like the 20th century so jesus wasn't literally a vegan because the term didn't exist but that term more or less uh is a statement about just totally rejecting the use of animals for any purpose exploitation killing consumption etc

uh to the extents of the most practical and necessary means meaning like if you're in a survival situation or whatever obviously there's you're going to have to do what you got to do but when it's not necessary it excludes using animals in any way So

now,

it also doesn't necessarily, I just want to be really clear, it also doesn't necessarily mean diet.

And that's how a lot of times I think people perceive that word when they first hear it.

They hear diet because of the way that it's been, you know, I don't want to say marketed online, but what most people end up talking about is they talk about diet.

And we likely will talk a lot about that today as well, circumstantially.

But really, it's an ethical position.

And so now, when we tie it to, well, first of all, could I just ask a quick, so let's, let's pin that on what that actually means.

Could I ask you, just so I understand moving forward, did you get a chance to watch my film i haven't watched it yet no i haven't but i saw the videos of you promoting it okay you're going on postponing it i haven't had a chance to watch it yet no okay so i'll have to

that would help and it's okay it's okay that you didn't to be honest i don't think some of my previous debate

people have either and so it definitely leads to some like misperceptions and those kind of things so

I don't want to take up too much time, but there's a lot that I would need to clear up.

We have so much ground to cover because we could have this discussion.

In a lot of ways, I want it to be collaborative where we can take it where you want to take it.

Sure, sure.

But I want to kind of parse it out maybe into three different categories of how we attack this thing.

One is that

my audience right now is you and your personality and

your perception of your faith.

And really

in terms of that, it's the Catholic tradition, et cetera, the Catholic Church.

A second audience is just anyone Christian in general, whatever faith they come to, but the general idea is that they hold the tradition that anything else outside of scripture, even maybe sometimes historical documentation, secular historical documentation, they don't really prefer to go there or talk about that.

I hope you guys are enjoying the show.

Please don't forget to like and subscribe.

It helps the show a lot with the algorithm.

Thank you.

The third audience is people that don't care about that.

They just want the truth.

They don't know.

They don't have a feeling about biblical infallibility or they're okay with critical historical method or whatever.

Those are like the three buckets.

So the reason why I lay that out is because what happened and I think the West debate and sometimes what happens is we get into arguing and we're only using scripture, but then we throw out some historical stuff that might show some ways that scripture isn't fully infallible, which correct me if I'm wrong.

I think your position, the Catholic position, isn't that scripture is totally infallible and that's why we need the church to

so the Catholic position is that scripture is indeed completely infallible.

We believe in scripture,

biblical infallibility, inerrancy.

What makes the Catholic position different from like a Protestant position is that the Bible isn't the only infallible

thing that we have of divine origin.

The church itself is also infallible because according to what the Bible says, the Holy Spirit leads the church into all truth, which is why St.

Paul in 1 Timothy 3.15 says that the church is the pillar and foundation of the truth.

And we also see, you know, in the gospels, in the book of Acts, in the epistles, that the apostles and their ordained successors had true authentic authority within the church and even over the church to be able to teach, proclaim the gospel, and also to bind and loose, as Matthew 16 and Matthew 18 says.

So the Bible is infallible because its origin origin is God.

The church is infallible because its origin is also God.

Okay.

They both come from the same origin.

Beautiful.

I'm glad we lay that out.

The reason why is because this position I feel can be argued within scripture and

nothing else.

I do feel it can be argued utilizing patristics as well.

And we can get in.

I know you love talking about patristics, so we can get in.

But you know, even if you didn't want to keep it just to scripture, I wouldn't mind because I know that sometimes in these discussions, we can put so much on the table that it kind of gets muddy and we can even lose audience.

So even if you wanted to stick to something just specific

I'm actually more of a fan of especially in these kind of discussions of having a very specific thesis and just analyzing that and sticking with that and figuring that out.

When things are too broad, it's easy for things to get you know what I mean?

To get lost or you know, so yeah, we're kind of on the same frequency.

I want it to be a good conversation to figure out what the guardrails are.

So

okay, so starting then, really, really starting is that, like you said,

90 billion animals, land animals are killed every year for consumption and other purposes as well throughout the farm industry.

And my position is that I feel that the church, and when I say church, I guess in this situation, we could mean the Roman Catholic Church, but

I call out my church, the Protestant background.

I call all the Christian church at large, the body, the people.

has either willingly or unknowingly

betrayed the animals and betrayed God's creatures in not understanding the way in which Jesus' position of the kingdom of heaven on earth extends to animals.

Sure.

And so,

yeah,

I'll open with that and

see where you want to go with it and we can change from that.

Yeah, so it was really, I'm really glad you said it actually, because the Catholic Church actually has a teaching on this.

If you look up, I don't know off the top of my head what paragraph it is, but if you look up the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it's teachings on on animals the catholic church is has always been against animal cruelty that you know animals as living creatures do have a type of uh dignity that does need to be respected yeah and and the catholic church has actually indeed um

has said a few things the magisterium has said a few things here and there about some of the unethical you know, practices that you might see on farms about the way that they treat animals.

The church actually has had a little bit to say about that.

So we could actually be on the same page there where we can be in total agreement that there are some practices

that

would be immoral, that would be even evil that we shouldn't be

cologing.

Yeah.

And I think we would be not only between us on the same ground, but even with our Orthodox brothers that the church fathers, the saints, I mean, talk about animal lovers, animal respectors, the who's who list of all the fathers are just epic.

I mean, Saint Francis of Assisi, we could just stop stop there.

He preached to the animals, man.

Right, right.

We talked about that with George, I remember.

Yeah.

Oh, that's right.

That's right.

Yeah, he preached the gospel to animals.

And the church has always taught, you know, has always talked about that, has always said that all of creation has an intrinsic dignity.

All of creation.

Right.

You know, not just human beings, but non-human animals.

Everything that God made is good.

You know, it has an intrinsic value and a God-given dignity that has to be respected.

While at the same time, understanding that there are certain creations, certain creatures that exist for a particular purpose and that their existence and their living, their lives can and be ordered towards the common good or the greater good, that that is a valid

concept in Catholic social teaching.

But no, yeah, we all agree that there is intrinsic dignity and value for all,

all of creation.

Awesome.

I want to get to that, some of the frameworks of that practical use kind of conversation there.

But before that, I just want to further reiterate and reflect.

Yes, St.

Francis of Assisi, even the Pope that passed, bless him.

That's his namesake.

He did a number of things for the animals.

There's contention on how much of it was followed through.

I know it's hard with the logistics and the things that go on.

But I will say we both will definitely agree, I'm sure, the great commission that's laid out in the synoptics.

But in one sense, it says go and preach the good news to all nations, right?

And the Greek is that ethnos or whatever, which actually can still mean herds of animals and flocks in its second meaning.

But then in the in the

Mark version, which is debatable because it's in the long ending of Mark,

but it says good news to all creatures,

you know, creation.

So it's even more specific.

So I think we would share that commonality and that it's it's a restoration of all of all.

Right, yeah, absolutely.

Because

we, you know, even the Old Testament has a lot to say about how all creatures actually cry for God or even, you know, worship God.

And also, we, you know, with our eschatology, we have the belief of the new heaven and the new earth that everything is going to be restored.

That's not just, it's not just human beings that get restored.

It's all of creation.

that gets restored.

You know, when our, when our, when our Lord returns.

So that's, we always have to have that in mind, you know, really with everything that we do, the eschatological,

you know,

framework of how things will look, you know, when our Lord returns,

he restores, you know, because Jesus didn't just,

he doesn't just save and sanctify just humans.

It's really all of creation that is sanctified by Jesus Christ.

You know, and that's something that I think people kind of forget, that they don't realize that it's, it's not just us, it's, it's his whole creation.

So yeah so at minimum we agree that this this topic is important yeah awesome because what i often find uh i was dealing with it this morning when i woke up and i had to get into some work and reply to some comments and emails and different things and often you know i will i will see from the christian position uh that it's like why are we even talking about this who cares

but I would just want to re-emphasize, it sounds like it's what you're saying, but it's what I truly believe that God's creatures and the kind of dominion mandate that's laid out in Genesis, Genesis 126 through 30,

which

is really,

it lays the groundwork and the framework for this kingdom of heaven vision that's going to be restored.

It's a new Eden, right?

It's a restoration of what was from the beginning.

And in this dominion framework in Genesis 126 through 20.

through 30, I want to focus on that for a second because this, I think, will help us have the conversation around the use, the practical use kind of conversation.

so in in in those verses starting in in 126 god gives man uh dominion over the birds of the air the fish of the sea the beasts of the the livestock um and even the wild animals

and then

in the following verse after after genesis 128 and genesis 129 we're prescribed a plant-based diet Now, again, I don't want to focus too much on the dietary aspect.

Really, what I see that as is a reflection is God's giving us sustenance where we don't need to take the life of any of these creatures because that wasn't the original intention.

And that dominion is actually a stewardship.

And

we can get into the Hebrew and all the word words that are used there if you want to.

I think that'd be cool.

But I feel we don't even have to because I think Pope Francis' position,

if I remember correctly, was that dominion is a stewardship mandate.

So then the question is,

if our original first, it's really our first mandate as humanity, I mean, along with be fruitful and multiply.

If our first mandate as humanity is to have stewardship with the animals,

really serve

in enhance flourishing for ourselves, for others, and God's creatures and the planet at large.

And a part of that stewardship includes no slaughter, then how do we justify the slaughter

that's taking place today?

Sure.

At the tune of 90 billion land animals.

I did fact check that too on ChatGPT.

80 to 90 billion land animals.

That's just land animals.

If you include fishes, it becomes trillions.

It's countless.

Yeah, fishes is one to three trillion.

And we can get into this.

Let's segment it because I don't want to get lost in too many things, but we can pin it for later if you want to address it.

That's just talking about the animals.

The humans that are involved in those systems are detrimentally affected as well from.

the workers, slavery at sea, the people that slaughter all day long, their prison workers and immigrants, let alone the people actually consuming and all the health conditions and things that come along with it.

But we can, that if we get there, we get there.

But I just wanted to,

I want to voice it because sometimes I think people think I'm just, I only care about animals and I don't care about humans too.

I care about humans too.

I just think this core issue, there's like blinders.

There's blinders on about it.

Okay.

Very interesting.

So

one of the things that you said is about, you know,

originally before the fall.

of Adam and Eve that we had the plant-based diet, right?

Genesis 128.

And maybe, I don't know, maybe we want to 129.

129.

I don't know if maybe we want to pull that up, Genesis 129.

Because something that's very, something that's very interesting is that...

I just pulled it up.

Then God said, I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it, they will be yours for food.

Sure.

So right there, God says that he gives us all of the things that are, you know, that grow, you know, vegetation, right?

So it's, you know, because we're talking about the intrinsic value of all life.

And I'm sure that you would agree also that even like vegetation has an intrinsic value because we can agree that even vegetation itself is

living, right?

So would you make a distinction between

the slaughter of animals for food?

And

because, you know,

as we all know, whenever we eat even vegetation and we cultivate, you know, we crop and we, you know, cultivate,

that involves the death of something, right?

So is there a distinction that you would make there where it's okay to do it in one case with the vegetation?

But you would say that animals have a greater intrinsic value than vegetation?

Would you say that?

Well, I would make, I would go even a step further and make the distinction, which again, we're going to agree on, but I just want to emphasize as many things as we agree on.

i would say humans have a distinction greater with over animals with the divine image through scripture but but science shows

intellect reason capacity for empathy so whether you you know anyone listening whether you're a scripture god person or not human beings have particular advantages uh from a scientific or from a scriptural standpoint yeah animals uh they also are distinct from the plant kingdom in that they have central nervous systems capacity for suffering.

And really, from a scriptural perspective, they have the ruach, you know, they have that same spirit of breath that's breathed into us.

But the even further kind of point that I would love to make is that when it comes to, I think it's so beautiful what's laid out in Genesis 129, because I'm sure like you, we love it when we see that scripture just

really articulates reality better than we can sometimes, than science can.

Science is catching up sometimes with scripture.

And we see that this particular lifestyle has a myriad of benefits.

But one of them that is often forgotten is that you don't actually have to kill plants to eat them.

So when you pick a fruit from a tree, the parent tree goes on living.

And within that fruit, there are seeds that propagate the future generations.

in an exponential value so that there's exponentially more and more and more and more fruits.

And that's that, that's that abundance model that I feel Jesus is talking about, life and life abundantly, Jesus, and the path of life and righteousness is a path of abundance.

And I feel, or I know that when you, when you not only eat fruits, even when you go to, say, leafy greens, you can pick the greens off of the plant.

The rootstock can stay.

A lot of people have home gardens where they pick some kale off and they leave the root and they can come back and keep getting more.

It's proven that the plants release oxins.

It's like hormones that actually make the plant more robust.

And again, in scripture, it's always talking about pruning, right?

Like there's these, these parallels that we see, how this is ancient knowledge that the plant's more robust when you prune it and you take from it.

And even when you get down to the roots, I used to, because I was so trying to adamantly understand what's the most, how do I follow thou shalt not kill to the utmost potential?

And I was a little bit wary about root vegetables because I'm like, okay, I'm killing the plant when I'm pulling the root up.

But funny enough, when you look at a potato or you look at a carrot,

you can eat the part of the root and then you leave the shard, planet and it grows back again.

It's fully regenerative.

You can't take a leg off a cow and it grows back, right?

So

there isn't inherently death or harm in consuming plant life.

If anything, there is a symbiotic relationship in which the plants thrive as we thrive.

Very interesting.

So I had a question in my mind and then I was just listening to you and then it kind of escaped me.

But

so we can agree that the greatest intrinsic value is in human beings, and then below human beings, it would be animals, and then below animals, it would be, you know, the plant kingdom, you know, vegetation.

And again, I always take the position that we have to be very careful, especially when we read scripture.

We don't want to read into it.

You know, we want to make sure that we're just being clear.

Because I could see that somebody could take the position of Genesis 1.29, where

God is telling humans that you can eat from the trees and you have the vegetation.

But someone can take the position and say, but where does it say in Genesis 129 or elsewhere where it says only vegetation and not animals?

And the reason that I know that that's an objection that comes up is because, as I'm sure you know, like

as we all know, creation.

was you know, got pretty messy pretty pretty quick as far as human beings are concerned.

And there was a, I guess what you could call a new covenant that was created by God with Noah, with the flood of Noah, and God started new.

God started again with Noah and his family.

That's what the flood was.

But something really interesting, and I'll pull it up really quick, and I'm sure you know

what I'm about to turn to.

Genesis 9.

In Genesis 9, because in Genesis 9, I want to see what you would say about this.

So just to be clear,

the position that you take about, because your position is that we shouldn't be eating animals at all, correct?

Is that your position?

I take the position that it's not necessary to.

Not necessary, okay.

And but my deeper position is that animals have intrinsic value that we shouldn't infringe upon.

And in fact, if anything, our

image of God bearing nature

should in every way we can.

in following Christ do our best to reflect that.

And I think if we have the knowledge that through empathy, through our intellect to see that these creatures have the capacity to suffer, want to live,

have the right to live,

that we should protect that.

Okay.

And again, the church would actually,

the Catholic Church would actually agree with you, you know, up to a certain point.

Because, so you're saying that it's not necessary, that it's possible that we would be able to completely sustain ourselves without having to eat animals.

But would you say that it is a

would you argue that from a

is it an absolutely

is it morally absolute?

Like, would you say that it would be, is it immoral to eat meat?

Would you say that it's immoral to do so, objectively speaking?

I think in the realm of philosophy, yes.

It's definitely immoral.

Now, if

we can stay there.

Yeah, sure.

And what would make it immoral?

What is immoral about eating meat?

Because there's a victim.

So when you eat meat, another being has to die to provide that slab of meat.

And now we get into the conversation around the fundamental moral intrinsic value of that animal or that creature, which we obviously didn't create.

So who are we to take the life of, right?

So

yeah, I'll stay there.

There's more I could say about that.

Yeah, yeah.

So I'm really glad that you brought that up, but you just said how you ordered it because you said we didn't create it.

We didn't create this life that we're eating.

So we don't necessarily have the

maybe the right

that we can take upon ourselves to say, I'm going to kill animals so that I can have dinner, right?

So I'm glad that you worded it that way because you're right.

We didn't create those animals.

However,

we know who did create those animals.

And this leads to what we can read from Genesis.

Would you say that if God

permits us and even says, that we're able to eat the animals.

And I can just, we'll go to Genesis 9.

And you already know what I'm going going to read.

It's a part of the covenant with Noah, which is after he restarted, right, so to speak.

When he's starting his new covenant with Noah in Genesis 1,

starting in verse 1, it says, God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

And then the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the air.

upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea.

Into your hand they are delivered.

Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you.

And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything.

So that's Genesis 9:1 through 3.

So you're right.

We didn't create any of this.

God created it.

So maybe in and of ourselves, we don't have the right to say, I'm going to take this life so that I couldn't sustain myself.

But if the creator of all life

And maybe even before we get into this, it would be helpful to establish kind of our

maybe our philosophical understandings of God as far as,

you know, because you hold to like the classical theism model of God, that God is, God is morality itself.

So like the question would be like, is God able to

is God able to break his own laws or break his own rules or could God be immoral?

Like that's a philosophical question.

So my position, the Catholic position is no, God,

God does not break his own laws, his own rules, because God is the law, so to speak.

God is morality itself.

It's not enough to say God is good.

It's not enough to say that.

God is goodness itself.

So because God is goodness itself, if God were to be breaking his own laws, then that's actually not God.

Because now you've just, what you've actually just said, if God can contradict himself or if God is able to break his own rules, God is able to be moral one minute and then immoral the next minute.

What you have now said is that that's actually not God.

Because philosophically speaking, just metaphysically speaking, the true God, the one true God, actually

isn't able to do anything that would actually contradict with his own nature.

So if God is able to break his own laws, contradict his own rules,

he would be contradicting himself.

And we know, just again, philosophically speaking, God can't do that.

So

if God is giving us the permission to be able to, you know, to kill and eat, there's also, actually, those are the exact words that are used like in Acts 10, you know, when St.

Peter has that vision, when he, he, he, St.

Peter in Acts 10, he has the vision of the animals that are on a sheet that are coming down from heaven.

And it says that there's clean animals and unclean animals alike.

And

the text literally says in Acts 10, where God...

is speaking to Peter and he says, kill and eat.

And then Peter says, oh, but I can't eat anything that's unclean.

And Jesus says, you know, do not call unclean what God has made clean.

So what we see with the trajectory of the biblical narrative is that as time,

you know, over time, God is actually giving us more and more and more.

And his covenant actually becomes more

inclusive.

Not only does it become more inclusive.

but the people within the covenant actually get more privilege.

They get more, I guess, how do you want to call it?

They get more, more, more room to do more.

So, in the beginning, you know, maybe just vegetation.

And I'm perfectly fine with, you know, because I know that that's in the tradition.

You know, we can't ignore it.

In the tradition, there are many in the tradition that said that, you know, and many theologians, even to this day, that said that before the fall, there was no,

you know, everyone was vegetarian at least before the fall.

So we know it's in the tradition.

But as time goes on, God is actually allowing for a broader

use

of,

the resources that he gives us, which can include animals.

And I'm sure you would admit that even

animals, we get milk from animals.

We can get a lot of good, you know, animals are good resources at the very least.

Even if we're not talking about just eating them, animals can help us in a lot of ways.

Well, I want to just to pause there because there's a lot of things I'll have you make some notes to make sure I don't miss any of the points.

But on that one, I don't do milk either.

I don't do milk.

You don't do anything any use of any animal for

so would it be more vegan then?

Is that

what you're doing?

In terms of what the ethical stance of that word is.

Yeah.

Okay.

So then would you, okay, all right, yeah.

So we can, that's, that's fair.

Which I like to think is synonymous with dominion.

Just okay, very good.

So then, so again, what we see with the overarching, just the narrative of what the Bible tells us is that God is giving us more

responsibility, first of all, over time.

But then at the same time, with that responsibility, he actually gives us more, more rights or more freedom or he allows, you know.

So, so what would you say to like, like in Genesis 9, where, and this is when he's starting over, right?

And the reason that it was Noah and his family is because God said that they're righteous.

Noah and his family are righteous.

So, so if we're following,

you know, if we're tracking with like your position, you would think that if God is starting over again, and it's supposed to be a fresh start.

If in Genesis that included, we're not going to touch the animals, just the vegetation, why is it that in the fresh start, God didn't say the same thing to Noah, especially because, you know, it says that he was righteous.

He and his family were righteous.

They were the only righteous ones.

That's why they were the only ones that were able to survive the flood.

Yet now he's actually giving them a broader

allowance.

So what would you respond to that?

I know I stalked so much, but what would you say to that?

No, that's great.

So I'm going to cover Genesis 9.

I'm going to cover, will you take a note?

Genesis 9, Acts 10.

Namely, I want to remember, and also don't want to go on too many tangents.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm not saying you were.

I'm just saying I'm not going to be able to do that.

So Genesis 9, Acts 10,

you said something philosophical.

Yeah, just the law thing.

Would God be able to break his own laws?

And maybe that's a good one to start with because maybe starting with that would help us just.

So I'll start with that.

And even...

As a preface to that, I'll start with Jesus because Jesus is.

So in one kind of clean statement that we could unpack for the rest of the podcast, I would say,

starting with Jesus, regardless of what happened with Noah and in that covenant, the time's up.

So Jesus is about the kingdom of heaven here on earth now, and we have access and the ability to manifest it on earth.

And then it's a question of what is that kingdom?

And that kingdom is a reflection of that Edenic ideal when we see in Isaiah 11.

Revelation, Isaiah 11 says the prophecy about

the lamb, the lion with the straw like the ox, they shall not hurt nor destroy on my holy mountain.

That word destroy is the the Hebrew Shakath, which this is going to come into play when

we should write that about Isaiah 11 because I will push it.

I want to ask you about that, but please continue.

So that Hebrew in Isaiah 11, they shall not hurt nor destroy.

Shakath is a Hebrew root

similar to Shekita and Shoket, the words for the priest who slays and the process, Shakitah, of slaying the animal.

So really the text in Isaiah is kind of saying, not kind of, it is saying,

they shall not hurt nor participate in slaughter in this heavenly kingdom.

And we see that reflected with the rest of the text where it talks about the non-predation of the animals.

We see that in Revelation 21, 4, no more death, no more tears.

We see that in Revelation 22, 2,

that the trees of the river of life will be providing fruits for the seasons.

So in every way,

freedom of the oppressed, et cetera.

I mean, I can tell you right now, 90 billion animals around the world are being killed for food every single year, 99% of them in factory farms, which is the most horrific conditions that would make Pope Francis, I could say this confidently, roll in his grave.

It's horrific.

Yeah, you're right.

So

that is hell on earth.

That's not the kingdom of heaven.

So that would be where I would start is like, it starts there.

So everything else that we talk about is a little bit, in my opinion, irrelevant to that conversation.

But let's go back because it's fun.

I enjoy talking about it and what are the nuances.

Sure.

So Genesis 9.

Firstly, let's lay a little framework of how we even got there.

Cause I know you mentioned, well, is it saying in Genesis 129 that it's only fruits and

plants and such?

Well,

I would say the overwhelming consensus is that God,

it was an only claim

in and of the sense that not even the animals ate each other.

There was a non-predation in Genesis 1.30.

And you see this thread all the way up until the flood as this Noah as being this righteous one, right?

And even the most fundamentalist, like create.

So another fun fact, I grew up so deep Protestant, Southern Baptist Christian that I was steeped in like creationism.

Yeah, yeah.

So I went to Kin Ham retreats.

You know, Kin Ham,

yeah.

So my first Kin Ham, this is a little quick backstory, just to perspective, but

this all, just so everyone knows.

I'm the farthest and last person that would ever be preaching this.

It's not like I grew up a Seventh-day Adventist or some fringe sect you used to hunt right right yeah i hunted fished and big-time fishermen and my stepfather owned a barbecue restaurant my whole time so right i'm uh i it was not easy for me to get to this position but i had to really face some facts to get there so the facts are that when i was eight years old i'm in a kin hand retreat and he's talking about the garden of eden in a creationism perspective and he's he's arguing hardcore that it was vegetarian even the dinosaurs were vegetarian in his position and people are arguing with him from the from the crowd well what about this?

And what about this?

And he stood his ground.

And I'm an eight-year-old listening thinking, whoa, that's awesome, you know?

And then as I grew up and I saw

the Daniel fast come on the scene, I took hold to it because probably I got a little bit of Catholic and Orthodox in me and that Protestants don't have a lent.

We don't have that thing, you know?

So the Daniel fast became that for me in my family when I was about 17, 18 years old.

And I took it very seriously, which is, again, just really quickly, the biblical prophet Daniel, when he's enslaved to Babylon, eats only vegetables and water to abstain from the king's court food.

And he tests after 10 days, wiser, stronger, healthier than all the king's men.

So it's a, it's a dietary, almost, it was a little bit of a fad thing that happened.

It's still happening today, but it was really popular a while ago.

And I did that.

And through that process, it opened my mind to what I was consuming, which then led to some of these deeper ethical questions.

And ultimately, what does Jesus have to say about this?

So all that said,

going back to this kind of

the most fundamentalist

creationist idea even is that

there's this idea that Noah's righteousness, there was no animal consumption.

Hence why in Genesis 9, there is this allowance.

There's this new, just as I gave you the plants, now in this moment, I give you this, right?

So these are kind of how we understand

that the beginning was

plant-based and that slaughter wasn't God's ideal or permitted or allowed in any way, right?

So now, obviously, Cain, you've got situations that lead to a split in the genealogies and the nations and how things begin to operate.

One thing I'll point out before Genesis 9, though, is in Genesis 6, we have, again, another rabbit hole for another.

Especially for the fundamentalists, right?

Yeah.

Right.

So we got Genesis 6.

We got this obscure notion of the sons of God and the coming into the daughters of men.

And in there, it says that through this process of what happened in that time, the earth devolved to the lowest of the low points it could be to where this flood was basically inevitable, this reset was inevitable.

And

the description there of God's sadness around humanity's state was that man had become, the earth had become full of violence and corruption.

That all flesh had become corrupted.

Now, again, remember when I said that word corrupted, it's that same Hebrew in the Isaiah vision, Shakath.

So it's this idea that's linked fundamentally to the destruction of flesh, the slaughter of flesh.

Now,

because I laid this framework out earlier, I'm going to take off my high church hat for just one second for anyone who cares about this, that if you go to the book of Enoch, which I know some people, Ethiopic church holds it as canon, et cetera, Enoch expands on this idea.

in Enoch 7, 14, where it says that the Nephilim, these offspring of this moment in Genesis 6, 6,

that they began to devour everything.

And when you look into the Aramaic or the Gaeiz, the Ethiopian

understanding or version of this text, I think translated by R.H.

Charles,

it says that the Nephilim began to consume the birds and the beasts and

the reptiles and the fish,

consume their flesh one after the other and consumed their blood.

And connects this to the same fall of warfare with Azazel and some of these other concepts that are kind of like in the Enochian tradition that really permeated the time of Jesus.

Right.

So I want to just add some of that context.

So now we have Noah.

Where I want to start with the Noah story is let's not forget that this is the biggest and greatest animal rescue of all time.

Right.

If it's if it's true, and I believe there's reality to it.

Yeah.

So this massive deluge happens, but the righteous one, he doesn't get mandated to save any humans other than his family who participate in the righteousness.

But God has him save the animals.

Right.

And he pulls them out of the ark and he brings them out.

Now,

when they come out, the rabbinical understanding of this is that

the

earth is destroyed either.

fully or locally.

Everybody has different positions on what actually happened, right?

But the vegetation is destroyed.

The soil is destroyed.

The ability to grow anything.

So, inter-survival situation.

So, now that the idea is that Noah, because it doesn't say when he comes off and he commits the sacrifice, because this is the sacrifice is what instigates the Genesis 9 permission of I'll give you everything that moves.

So, he permits this, or Noah instigates a sacrifice, not commanded by God.

Nothing in there says that it was commanded by God.

God does smell it.

He comes and sees, but then God immediately reacts, right?

He says, Oh, man's heart is only evil continually.

Now I see that.

Now there will be fear and dread of over the animals from you.

And just as I gave you every plant, I give the animals to your hand, but everything that moves shall be food for you.

Okay.

And there's a distinction here, very important distinction, because everything that moves is literally just one Hebrew word behind that phrase,

remus.

Remus is essentially bugs.

When you look in the creation account, God lays out in the beginning, you know, the birds and the fish and then the beasts of the earth.

And and then, right?

So

after, and we can pull this up to fact check it if you want, but how do you spell Remus?

R-E-M-E-S.

And then I would also

pull up Genesis 1, 26, I believe.

Yeah.

Genesis.

Or no, that's the Dominion.

I mean, we could pull up Dominion too, because I think it's there, but the creation account is that God

creates the fish and the birds and the beasts, and he lays out these different types of the animal kingdom, right?

Good.

Even separates the beasts of the earth from the wild animals, and then

he says the remus, everything that crawls on the earth, it's a separate classification.

So sometimes it'll say bugs, sometimes it'll say reptiles, which is actually interesting because that's not kosher.

So it's more likely bugs in the understanding.

Right.

So.

Clearly, it's not fish,

birds, or land animals, which is what we consume nowadays.

So, when you understand that God gives this granting of essentially eating bugs, and you understand the

kind of rabbinical tradition or understanding, the original understanding before we came around, and just to be fair, before the church fathers really started delineating a lot of this stuff, that the original understanding was that it was a concession.

So, it's not like God was happy about this.

It's that Noah is in a survival situation.

And maybe in this moment, I'm, I'm going to put on like a,

what's the word I'm looking for here?

Speculation hat for a second.

Maybe, you know, he had seen the nations and the animal killing or whatever.

And he's like, okay, now I got to do what I got to do.

I don't know.

But the point is, is there's an initial moment.

God grants it.

And so that's the ultimate respect of what?

So this is where we get to the philosophical.

You mentioned.

Do I believe that God has any darkness in him or can he break his own laws?

Because you said concession just now.

So the question could just be simply,

is God able to make concessions for sin?

Can God allow sin?

Or can God

say, if you commit the sin, go ahead.

I'll, you know, is God able to do that?

Well, I don't think it's an allowance as much as it's a, it's a, um, because you said it wasn't a command, right?

So you're saying God isn't commanding you to eat the animals.

No,

it's a permission.

It's a permission or a concession as a veteran.

Can God give you permission to sin?

No.

And so I, yes, God is law.

God is the word.

God is classical theism.

Yeah, we're

so

law of non-contradiction.

But he gave us free will, right?

That's a part of that intrinsic law that we, as we operate with it.

So

he can't, like, if Noah's going to make this choice, and if he made it, he's going to make this choice.

We, in some ways, have to learn from the natural law of our consequences of how God set up, you know, the world.

And then we come to him when we come to him and he ushers us back in in the way that Christ does.

So the point is,

is

with the whole concession idea, is it's just like fast-forwarding again to Jesus,

rewinding for us, I guess, but fast forwarding from the flood to Jesus.

Jesus, when he's asked about divorce, right?

Jesus, they press him on divorce.

And what does he say?

Well, it wasn't so from the beginning.

And he's pointing to the ideal.

The ideal is no.

But because your hearts are hardened,

then it was...

God allowed you to split from your spouse.

Right.

So I'd say it's a similar it's a similar idea that the ideal, God's law is the same.

No slaughter.

Sure.

But humanity's hearts had become hardened.

And I can even corroborate that with some other scripture if we want to get into it.

But I think that there is a connection between flesh consumption and hardness of heart in such a way that like it's something that we do.

And I think there are examples of this throughout the

tradition with the fathers or the saints, venerated saints, that would talk about the idea of why fasting and some of these implementations of the church were so important to open that up a bit.

But I don't know if that answers your question, but

the idea is that it was a concession because man was doing it and man has to learn from his actions.

In fact, we see that in Ezekiel 20, 25.

Ezekiel 20, 25 says, for I gave you statutes which were not good, which could not give you life.

Meaning, I gave you over to your own bloodlust, to your own will, to your own way, way, because that's what you're doing.

Sure.

And you're going to learn.

And I'm going to be here waiting for you,

prodigal son, you know, however you want to look at it.

But I don't know if you want to stop and fact-check anything I'm saying, but

I did look up Ramus.

What up?

Definitions would be helpful too.

Yeah, just pulled it up.

Sure.

Can you guys see that?

Refers to creeping or crawling creatures like bugs, insects, small reptiles, or ground-dwelling animals.

Yeah.

So that's the word for every moving thing.

God gives him.

I give you every remus that creeps upon the earth.

It shall be yours for food.

And then, let me finish.

Just after that, he then says, and

just so that people don't think I'm skipping any verses, he goes on to say,

but you shall not eat flesh with the lifeblood in it.

Now, you'll get all kinds of people that will talk about this in a kosher concept.

Okay, you can eat flesh like animal flesh, but you got to drain the blood.

There's a whole deeper conversation that we don't, I don't think either one of us want to go down this, but I'll just put a a pin in it that is it even possible to fully remove the blood from flesh?

It's, it's really, when you go to the grocery store, there's blood in the flesh.

But all that aside, I think it's a greater, it's a greater, it's a greater conversation around him delineating that flesh with the lifeblood in it, meaning the ruach, meaning those animals.

No.

And

if any are slain, it says that I will demand an accounting of their blood, both from human and animal.

In Genesis 6, It goes on to say that.

So clearly, it's not something God's happy about.

Yeah.

So, you know, and there's so many ways that we could take the conversation.

You've said so much, you've put so many things on the table that now I have a lot of questions I would love to ask you.

But just to point something out, because it's actually kind of really funny, because a while back, it's probably about over a year ago, I did a video responding to a Protestant YouTuber.

And for some reason, the topic of

blood in meat came up.

And actually, in my video, I said that there is blood in meat.

And he responded to me and he said, hemoglobin is not considered blood.

That's what he said, right?

I was always like you, like you're positioned, I was always

under the

idea that hemoglobin is considered blood.

But then when you actually look it up, and I don't know if maybe you'd want to look it up, hemoglobin, apparently, whoever decides these things, they say that hemoglobin actually isn't, you know, if you even put in like, is there blood in flesh meat, like the meat that you buy like at the supermarket and it'll say it's hemoglobin but hemoglobin wouldn't be considered blood but that was that's just an aside like you said you said that as an aside but looking it up would be would be interesting because i just looked it up can we pull the screen off i don't know if so i said is hemoglobin considered blood it says yes it's considered a component of blood It's a protein found inside red blood cells.

So that was why I said in my original video, I said, yeah, there's blood in the steak.

Yeah, there's yeah, I think your original position was right.

Yeah.

Forgive you.

Can I apologize for protestants i'm one of them in the way that i was raised and i'm not so much aligned i would say with a protestant uh uh framework so i know how often protestants can come after certain anyways yeah i just wanted to say but you know what's so crazy about it though it's so crazy because i actually looked at when he made his response video to me i looked it up and when i looked it up what i found he said that no it's not blood So I was like, oh, I guess I was wrong.

And then I did a response video saying, hey, he was actually right about this.

Oh, wow.

But then you just looked it up and now it turns out that I was originally.

So I don't know what's going on.

But anyway, that's just an aside.

It says it's a key ingredient in blood.

So I guess it's kind of subjective there.

It's a key ingredient in blood.

So I guess, yeah.

But anyway, that's kind of, I guess, I guess neither here nor there.

Right.

But, but again, you had laid so many things down.

Could I say really quickly?

And again,

what's challenging about this conversation in two hours is that you can open up the energy.

There's so much that we could talk about.

But the key, key ingredient in blood from a scriptural perspective is the life.

There's a life.

And that's what it really comes down to is I think that when you look deeply into scripture itself, but you really understand what we've learned.

Again, I'm going to put on my hat for the wider audience.

The Dead Sea Scrolls and Qumran and what it's let us know about that time and Messianic Judaism and everything leading up to Jesus and the didaki.

And there's really this two-ways philosophy, right?

The way of life and the way of death.

And Jesus lays this out, I think, in the scripture perfectly

in John John 10, 10, where he says the thief comes to steal, kill, and there's that word again, destroy.

It's in Greek this time, obviously, because it's the, we can get into that meaning.

The thief comes to steal, kim, destroy, but I come to bring life and life abundantly.

That's this two ways.

You know, narrow is the path that leads to life, wide leads to destruction, right?

So in John 10, 10,

the thief comes to steal, kill.

That Greek there is the root is thuo.

Thaisi, my Greek's not great, but mine's probably worse.

Okay.

Thaisi is the Greek word used for slaughtering an animal in ritual sacrifice.

And destroy, that word is like needless, senseless loss of life is kind of the Greek behind what the expanded version of the definition would be.

So it's essentially like Jesus is saying, the thief comes to steal,

ritually slaughter creatures.

in needless, senseless loss of life.

But I have come to bring life and life abundantly.

And so I just wanted to point out that the real key component is life.

It's life, right?

So one of the things that I wanted to touch on because you brought up in Isaiah 11, you brought up

the prophecy from Isaiah 11, where Isaiah talks about, you know, I'm sure you would agree that that's talking about like,

you know,

when our Lord returns and at the end and we're all living in harmony with all of creation.

Would you say that what is described there in Isaiah 11, Would you say that it is reflective of how Adam and Eve,

how they lived like before they fell into sin.

Would you say that what Isaiah describes there is how Adam and Eve were living before they fell into sin?

My understanding of it is that it's like a new restored version of that, but it's built on our human achievement and accomplishment and collaboration with God in a more particular way.

I think there's language like cities of gardens and, you know, this idea that it's more of a collaborative.

And so like things like technology and different things that we can create are maybe now a part of that that vision.

It says things like in Isaiah, they shall beat their weapons into plowshares.

So, and that's in that vision.

So it's this idea of like military technology being used to now grow food and create that abundance and that way of life.

So it's not exactly the Garden of Eden, but I think it's a new version of it that clearly is laid out that it doesn't include slaughter.

Okay, so that leads to my next my next question.

I'm very curious about how what you would think about this, maybe, because would you still consider yourself like a fundamentalist?

Is that not your like not your position anymore?

Another long conversation.

I would consider myself, number one, just a follower of Jesus.

The labels around it sometimes can be challenging.

If I had to pin it down, after everything that I've learned on this journey that I've been on, I would consider myself a Nazarene, Jesus the Nazarene.

And how close would that be to like the fundamental?

Like, are you, have you departed greatly from your, maybe your fundamentalists, like going to the Kenham seminaries, does that, have you departed greatly from, for example, just with Genesis, just your interpretation of Genesis, would you say that you've departed greatly from your interpretation of Genesis?

Well, if you're asking, do I think it's literal or not?

I would say that I think it's both literal and metaphorical.

I think there's room for, and again, another two-hour podcast.

Yeah, that's a whole.

Well, maybe I can just narrow down to just one question.

So my question would be, do you think,

was there death in the time of Adam and Eve before the fall?

Was there death?

As far as the scripture lays it out, there's no indication that there was.

Now, I know there are theories that it's a, it's, you know, for one, that there's two creation accounts, right?

And that the Tovu Vabu Vahu.

Yeah, that maybe this was a re-establishment of even a previous creation before that.

There's all kinds of theories that people have.

But from what I can tell reading the text plainly, death was not a part of the picture and that that's going to be restored in the kingdom of heaven.

Right.

So

now i would like your opinion on certain theologians for example um there's been you know many theologians you know in the history of christianity over the last 2000 years most notably i would say probably the top three that have actually discussed this origin augustine and thomas aquinas specifically saint thomas aquinas he was medieval you know 13th century right you know saint um and actually a lot of the saints in the great tradition even in the early church they actually took the position that there actually was death before adam and eve fell into sin.

That there actually was,

because especially once you study like

the cosmos and you study even like, you know, prehistoric times like with the dinosaurs, right?

Because I think

we can all agree that dinosaurs existed, dinosaurs are real, dinosaurs became extinct and that that was before

Adam and Eve.

So that there was death.

We know that the dinosaurs, the whole species of dinosaurs actually did die long before human beings

came into the picture, human beings with souls at least.

And we know that when you look at just the history of the universe, not only here on earth, but all throughout the entire universe, that there was

things that would come into existence, come out of existence, and that there actually was indeed what you would call death.

even before the formation of the earth and even after the earth was formed, most notably with the dinosaurs.

And what the great theologians have said is that when the angels fell from heaven,

when the angels were cast down from heaven who became the fallen angels who are now called demons, right?

That when they fell from heaven, that actually caused a disruption in the universe itself, even before humans, you know, came onto the scene.

And that the reason that we see so much chaos, because atheists will bring this up, right?

Atheists will bring up, but look at the problem of suffering.

They'll bring up the problem, not even just the problem of suffering, but before, not even just with humans, but even before humans, like you can see everything in the universe in space, that things were colliding into each other, going out of existence, that there was chaos, that there was probably planets that existed that were just destroyed because of a heat wave or whatever it was, that there was so much destruction that happened in the universe, even before we came around.

And with theologians, even going back to ancient times,

what they

said was that,

if you want to call it a natural evil, right?

And I'm sure we would call like dying, death, destruction, killing, those are evils.

The natural evils were caused.

They posit, this is their, you know, if we put our speculation hat on again, they speculated that the natural evils were caused by the angels that were, that fell from heaven that were cast down.

But that when

Adam and Eve, and again, whether you take that story completely literally or whether you take it as completely just theologically,

whenever human beings, which

is it 60,000 years ago that they say that what they call the great leap forward, I guess when we got our consciousness, was it 30,000, between 30 and 60,000 years ago, I want to say, is when the great leap forward.

So like very recent in the grand scream of how old the universe is, that

there was a time when human beings were pure, had not fallen into sin, when there was no death for human beings.

Especially because we were

highest in the order

of creation like within the universe, but that there was destruction

and death outside of the human species.

And we know that to be a fact like with dinosaurs.

And

it's interesting because when I first started really studying the faith, when I was 14 years old, I remember reading the fundamentalist books that they would try to argue for like a 6,000-year-old Earth.

Same thing that dinosaurs were actually vegetarian.

And I read all that stuff too.

And I said, wow, this sounds pretty convincing.

And then I read all of the other books that debunked those ideas and like, okay, they don't work.

So we know that dinosaurs and other wild creatures, even before human beings existed, were eating each other, killing each other.

There was death, death

in a whole lot of ways, entire species of animals, right?

Yeah.

Entire species of animals that would come into existence, go out of existence that we don't know about anymore.

I don't know what the number is, but there's something like thousands and thousands of species of animals

that no longer exist anymore because of death.

So the theologians have said that there was indeed dying and there was even animal suffering even before Adam and Eve would have fallen into sin.

And that Adam and Eve, when they fell, that that's what led to human suffering and eventually dying and evil and sin.

So that's why I asked you about Isaiah 11, if that's how they were living in the times of Adam and Eve, because it would seem just based on everything that we know, what the evidence suggests, that and and i think we agree that no adam and eve were not living exactly like how isaiah 11 says but we could we would also have to say that there was death even before they were even before they were created um and again the the reason that i asked that question is just because it's good to get to like our point of origin yeah as to why why is death a thing why does death exist yeah is it caused solely by the sin of Adam and Eve and by human beings yeah rebelling against God you know and if if we when we realize well there was actually death and chaos and evil that was occurring even before humans.

Yeah.

Right.

Then we know that

the fall of Adam and Eve was not the cause of everything that happened before.

Right.

So then the question, you know, well, we can now, you know, looking forward after Adam and Eve,

because I think you had said that God cannot,

was it that you agree that God can't permit like anything that's evil?

Or God cannot.

We have to be nuanced about it.

He extends free will that when in which we can participate in evil, but it's not his ideal, yeah.

Yeah, God doesn't, um, God, we can say that God can even

because, you know, now we're getting into deep theology, right?

About when evil happens, is it because God ordained it to happen, or is God cause it to happen, or did God allow it?

Well, how about this?

How about this?

We both know that's a really deep.

So we probably shouldn't get into that.

You're going to be excited.

I'm excited.

And the reason why I'm putting that guardrail is because I'm excited.

You just put some speculation.

I love that we can do this because

what you brought up about the fall of the angels and everything, I want to touch on that because there's some interesting eschatology that comes in from the earliest Hebrew Christians around that that I want to talk about.

But before I even get there, I'll say to the Thomas Aquinas' point, which is what you open with, is I think Thomas Aquinas has some profound writings.

I strongly disagree with his writings on this because he was heavily influenced by Aristotle.

And I think Aristotle completely dropped the ball on this.

He was an outlier in his philosophical schools when you have Plato and Pythagoras and Socrates, all of these greats had a very particular moral worth for animals and spoke about it in a very particular way.

And Aristotle just threw it out the window.

And I think he's the outlier.

And Saint Thomas Aquinas built a lot of those philosophies on him.

So that's how I would answer that question.

Sure.

And I would just say one quick comment is that St.

Thomas Aquinas also corrected a lot of Aristotle's mistakes.

Because you're right.

He was using an Aristotelian framework.

He also corrected a lot of Aristotle's mistakes.

and now that you say that i'm wondering i can't say this for sure but i'm wondering what st thomas aquinas ever said about like the dignity of animals because i'm sure he had a lower view than than i would than i'll tell you this i think he had a lower view than uh than pope francis did okay um and definitely saint francis um but that's okay you know we we gleaned you know we're in we're all fallible and the the the fathers were fallible and they're writing the best they can but this one i think is where he dropped the ball pretty greatly um

in terms of Eden and the Isaiah connection and what it really means, I would say that in some ways, without even getting into the conversation for Eden itself, of like, is there death or is there not death or whatever?

Is it literal?

Is it not?

The point is, for thousands of years, this is an oral tradition of the Hebrew people that they really, really

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I believed in, and I believe that it was a part of shaping the prophetic nature and the revelation of Isaiah and Hosea and

Zephaniah and so many of these prophets that came through Micah.

I believe they really had this vision that this Edenic state was going to be restored.

And so you can see that reflection in what they wrote about in the lion shall lay with the lamb and the, in the, the, or I'm sorry, the wolf shall lay with the lamb and the lion shall each shall the ox, etc.

These are all reflections of this understanding that you knew that this is God's ideal.

So in some ways, it's almost like when you're looking backwards at Eden, you're really looking forwards at where God wants us to return to, if we can.

And you have that two-ways philosophy even in Eden, where you've got the tree of life and you've got the tree of knowledge of good and evil, right?

You've got paths that you can choose.

Now, I love that you put on the speculation or the just just conversation around the fallen angels, because what you're actually talking about,

you may or may not know, is heavily in line with Enochian

messianic philosophy.

And what I would contend is also the

Nazarene, which is what I said I would probably line up closest with, is the earliest name for the church alongside the way, just simply the way, you know,

Paul gets accused of being a Nazarene.

They held a belief, from what we can tell looking at the scripture and knowing how much they revered Enoch and some of the conversations, that,

yes, that really the fall, the real fall

was angelic and that

the fallen angels descending on Mount Hermon

and instituting warfare, like I said, instituting the consuming of flesh and all of these things, that was all in one on Mount Hermon.

And there's different conversations about the timelines and all that.

So we don't have to get into all that.

But the point is, is that it seems to be a clear indication that the way that they understood it is that Eden is this idyllic state.

Regardless of what came before or came after, there is the descent from the ideal through sin in man's choices, which subtly gets worse and worse.

And you can see that even through the mapping of the more righteous ones, the story of Cain and Abel.

And eventually, at some point, when we get to this kind of Genesis 6 Enochian overlap,

there's heavy inducing of just worldwide

deception.

Let's call it that.

I think a lot of deception is rooted in the understanding of what that story is telling.

And

I'm not saying that story is deceiving.

I'm saying it's explaining the deception that fell over mankind in a great way that we're still dealing with today.

And I think that most.

Christians realize that, you know, some are pacifists and they see warfare.

They see hungry children.

They see all these injustices, the problem of suffering in the world, and they fight it with X, Y, Z ways and try to serve.

Because ultimately, what is the greatest way to live out your faith

as a follower of Jesus is in service, right?

Do unto others.

Back to my thesis, I think Christians have dropped the ball, have betrayed the creatures in not realizing not only that they are a part of that equation, but it might be at the root.

And the reason why I say that, There's a famous quote that's actually at the beginning of our film, In Christ Spiracy.

It's Henry David Thoreau, where he says, there are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to everyone who's hacking at the root.

And I think that root of the fundamental disconnect from our fellow creatures, our brothers and sisters, as St.

Francis called them, he literally called them brothers and sisters.

That break in our relationship with the animal kingdom can be traced to the root of humanity's greatest issues that we're facing from a scriptural level, from an anthropological level, from a biological level, every level that you want to go.

So, without even getting into the scriptural just yet, we'll put a pin because I think that that's such a fun conversation we can have with that Hebrew early eschatology.

But from an anthropological level,

human beings, we know, Germs, Guns, and Steel, one of the most profound Nobel-winning prize books written by

Jared Diamond.

I don't know if you want to look any of that up, but he said he kind of outlined that

the real descent of humanity from an anthropological perspective, from what they noticed from studying bone material and this and that, is the introduction of agriculture, but specifically animal domestication agriculture.

Because animals fundamentally take up so much land and resources to grow them, it takes way more plant material and crops to grow a fatted animal than it does to just eat the crops themselves.

So the earliest humans that started settling and growing and herding animals started taking up all these resources.

Then they run out of resources at some point.

Now what are they going to do?

Oh, I got to go get the other tribes resources.

Incoming war.

So

war, in fact, in Vedic culture, the ancient Hindu culture, right, which is really, really, really old writings.

The word for war is actually Gavya, which it comes from go, which comes from cow, because the first war, it means a desire for more cattle, that word.

And it's the oldest word that we have for the word, for war.

It's the oldest instance of any word for war being used.

So they understood it as war was a desire for more cattle, for more livestock.

Capital, our current monetary system, it comes from head of cattle.

This is all stuff we talk about in our film, by the way.

So I highly recommend you watch it, Crispiracy.

We outline in Crispiracy that the word capital literally comes from of the head, cap, animals.

It was because the earliest cultures measured their wealth in terms of heads of animals.

Pecuniary interest, it means flocks of animals, pecuniary,

livestock, the stock exchange, right?

It's the stock market.

So our systems of monetary challenge, of war,

slavery, once you get into war with another nation,

the women and the children are the spoils and they become slaves, right?

And now here's the thing is once you fundamentally break the relationship with an animal, brother and sister, it becomes that much more easy to subjugate another vulnerable being.

The most vulnerable will be the women and children, especially after the males of the tribes are killed.

So, from an anthropological stance, so many of these issues that we have link back to this fundamental break of us domesticating animals, pandemics and disease.

Most of the

infectious disease on planet Earth stems back to animals, cowpox, swine flu,

you name it, everything.

I mean, this whole COVID thing, lab leak, probably whatever, but it generates from experimenting on animals, et cetera.

So, so many of these.

Which the other church

says you can't do it.

Exactly.

And that's a big vivisection.

That's like I, so, and that last thing, okay, I could go down a million ways, but I'll end it with that because I want to end on the inspiring thing that I do believe that the church has made steps in various ways that I think are important.

It's just not far enough.

I think that we're in a time right now that, you know, we're not.

too, too far still from abolitionism in that, you know, it was the church who ultimately, and I will have a million people that'll comment, well, it was the church who was perpetuating slavery based off of XYZ, right?

And, you know, we could have a conversation around that.

But the point is, is that the abolition of slavery,

of literally subjugating and exploiting other humans, that

really tipped over when Christians got involved.

And you can see that across history, that it was the Christian abolition movement that finally said, no, we're not doing it anymore.

And I'm calling for that for animals because we're at a point right now where we're, it's a point in a return.

We're like 90 billion animals per year is unbelievably horrific.

It's the conditions that these animals live in, 99% of them in factory farms, trillions with the fish.

When you talk about fishing, you're dredging up the entire ocean floor.

You're bykill.

It's so many, it's so much you can't fathom.

I highly encourage you to watch our film Sea Spiracy as well, which shows the level at which trying to get a couple tuna or whatever, you're killing just gobs of dolphins and turtles and all these other beautiful of God's creatures just to scrape it all up.

Definitely, definitely not the kingdom of heaven on earth.

So,

my biggest stance is to call, like, the church needs to start calling that out.

And I think the only reason that the church isn't is because there's a comfortable complacency around it in some cases.

Maybe there's an ignorance, and I'm not even saying that that's

out of willful ignorance.

Some people just don't know.

But I think there is an element of deception or intentional hand waving to not see the issue that stems all the way back to the time of Jesus, which is really what Christ Spiracy is about, is that I think that Jesus was far more about protection of animals than we maybe have come to realize through our traditions when you really take into account the historical nature of what happened at the cleansing of the temple, which essentially was a model for the slaughterhouse.

It was the world's first mass slaughterhouse millions of animals being killed every week for passover week uh

as josephus the historian described who apologists used to verify the historical existence of jesus

he records that records that the temple of jerusalem photo millions slaughterhouse jesus threw down on it shut it down mark says shut it down for a whole day freed the animals from the slaughterhouse said this house is meant to be a house of prayer for all nations but you have made it a den of thieves and as we outline in

Christ Spiracy, which again, I highly recommend you watch,

that word thieves has been a mistranslation because he's quoting, not, I mean, it's a mistranslation or misunderstanding even in the Greek, but Jesus is quoting a Hebrew prophet.

So then when you go to the Hebrew, Jesus, the word that's being said there is Pereits, which Jeremiah quotes in Jeremiah 7, 11, when he says the temple has become a den of thieves.

But the word isn't thieves, it's Peretz.

And the Hebrew word Pereits means violent one or murderer, a shedder of blood.

In fact,

Ezekiel 18, 10.

Yes, you might want to look that one up.

Ezekiel 18, 10 defines that word in the verse.

It says, if you have a son who is a violent one, a violent son, a paritz, and it goes, comma, a shedder of blood, comma.

It's defining that that's what that means in the verse.

So we know from Hebrew can be tough, right?

I'm sure you know this from your studies that

almost all we have of it from an ancient perspective is the scripture.

So we kind of, it's like a circular reasoning sometimes to try to define it.

But that word we can be really clear is, is violence.

So he's calling out the violence in the temple.

The only violence in the temple

that's actually bloodshed is the killing of the animals.

So

I know I said a lot there, but I just wanted to get that out there.

I wanted to get that out there that I think there's a fundamental veil and we can go deeper into why that's the case, but we've betrayed the animals.

And I have.

I did it most of my life.

Tell me, so when Jesus, and I just want to touch on this briefly, but then maybe we should move on to like the New Testament.

And when Jesus cleared the temple and you said den of thieves, what is the Greek word that was used there?

Do you know off the top of your head?

Lestes or lestonai?

Lestes or lestonai?

Yeah, yeah.

And what, and what is the definition?

I don't know if you can maybe look that up.

Lestes or lestonai.

L-E-S-T-E-Z?

I think the root would be lestes.

Lestonai is maybe like

the plural term.

And is that from John or from the synoptics where that word is used?

I think it's used in all of them.

It's used in all of them?

Yeah.

So then like if you go to like John chapter 2 and you and you look up.

Is this it right here?

A robber or bandit or violent insurrectionist?

Exactly.

So a robber, bandit, violent insurrectionist, someone who steals with force or violence, unlike a petty thief.

Right.

So that's, so that's where it appears right there.

It shows you where it appears there in the scriptures.

Yeah.

So

i would so and but you made the connection to to the hebrew yeah right now we know obviously that it was written you know in greek because it's the the new testament was written in greek but you're right that there is a really high probability we don't know this for sure but it's a very high probability that jesus would have said those words in hebrew because he was in the temple so hebrew or aramaic yeah um

although i do know that like in the in the debate that you guys had with wes huff and his and i'm sorry that i can't remember the name of his stephoyce stephen yeah Stephen Boyce, yeah.

I know that he said, you know, that there are scholars that he would even say that even in the temple context, they were still speaking Greek because there was from all over the diaspora that were coming.

And Greek was like the universal language at the time of the region.

So what's interesting is that even though I think the argument itself is a very interesting argument, My only

maybe, I don't know if you want to call it a concern.

Pushback question.

Maybe my only pushback would be because we know know that it's in Greek.

We know what the Greek word is and how it's used.

We know what the definition is.

I don't know.

And again, maybe it's correct that maybe that Hebrew word was the word that he used.

I don't know if we can,

you know,

with the words that we have and the data that we have, if we can make that assumption that he used the Hebrew word, which has a connotation.

of killing and then on top of that that it would apply strictly to animals that would try to apply to animals as well because from the the greek word that we just pulled up here i don't know if with that definition if we could come to the conclusion that that would include animals and the fact that it that it's that it's um translated as then

of thieves right because even when we read it in the english i don't think anybody reads it as oh jesus is is is uh condemning them for their treatment

of animals because when you read jesus cleansing the temples either in john or in the synoptics there is no mention of, you know, because the word that he used there is that they were taking advantage of the people, of the poor people.

I don't think it would be necessarily the fact that they were slaughtering animals there, because we actually know from even going back to the Old Testament and in the New Testament, we know that all of the day, and including Jesus himself, they would have participated in, you know, you know, because we know that Jesus was a good,

Jesus followed the commandments perfectly and even the law of moses because even even he himself says he says um uh i'm here to i'm here to fulfill the law of moses right so we know that jesus never broke uh uh a single law uh a single law of uh of morals right in the law of moses and that even the ceremonial law he kept he kept you know perfectly as well um

so

basically the whole point that i'm trying to get at is that especially when you get into the new testament it would seem when you read it like not only jesus

but the authors of the new testament and god himself according to to to the language that is used you know kind of like in acts chapter 10 um god

would

allow us to permit us to actually eat oh yeah animals we didn't cover

acts 10.

yeah i'll get

before we we get into that um because even

Before we get to the New Testament as well, because even in the old test, because something fascinating that you brought up,

and again, I'm trying to, I should been writing stuff down too i know i should have too there's so many things that i want to bring up and i've i've lost them could i could i cover the the then of less than yeah yeah yeah and then and and i can maybe answer a few of these tertiary things with that so

this is a perfect example i just want to preface with the different hats i was trying to lay out in the beginning and the reason why it's important is because First hat I'm going to do is just going with the Greek New Testament exactly as it says and showing you how it can still,

how it does still point to the thesis that I'm saying.

Then I'm going to go ahead and point on put on a second hat where we go a little bit wider and then i'm going to put on a third hat where you go to the widest which is where i think there's been some information suppressed that may or may not make christians in general uh comfortable because of of the nature of the way that apostolic tradition has been passed down etc but i'll i'll say that for last so first and foremost the greek term lestes as you just read uh isn't just petty thief it's it's a violent thief.

It implies violence.

And in fact, in Luke, I believe it is, it's used when Jesus leaves the man for that.

He's talking about the robbers leaving the man for dead.

Luke 10, 30.

The indication is that he was left for dead, violence to the point of death.

So killing,

it's killing associated with violence or with thievery.

Okay.

So I will not sit here and try to cover over the fact that they weren't ripping people off in the temple as well.

They were saying the animals were blemished, and even when they were bringing their own, and they were charging an upcharge for the temple tax, converting the coins and all of this

happening.

But I think that's a circumstantial problem to the root problem of all the killing and the suffering because we're talking millions of animals.

It says in Josephus, the millions of animals it says in the Talmud and Mishnah and some of these other writings that the priests were wading up to their ankles in blood, just bloodbath this place.

So when you walk into it, you got to imagine if you're Jesus, the prince of peace, blessed are the peacemakers, right?

You walk in and you see a bloodbath and there's some money and some ribbing off.

It's like the balance there.

That's one thing to consider.

But when you understand that the temple system itself,

the operation of killing animals was intrinsic to this ripping off.

And it's a part of why I say that Jesus was literally Luke Skywalker going into the Death Star in this moment.

This was, this is my favorite.

It's the most historically attested action of Jesus, even outside of Christian biblical scholarship.

Like biblical scholars say there was a man that lived, he was crucified, and there was an incident in the temple.

Like, so as Christians, we can hang our hats on this as a historical

happening that is monumental, where he's going into the Roman imperial priesthood that's got a death grip on the, on the people there with their system that they've put over people that Jesus is continually condemning them for their abuse of it, et cetera.

But he's getting now to the heart of the matter where he says, go and learn what this means.

I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

So he's pointing again, like he did to Jeremiah and Den of Thebes, to Hosea.

He says, go and learn what this means.

Really go read it.

I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

Acknowledgement of God rather than burnt offerings.

I don't want those things.

Jeremiah goes further in Jeremiah 7, 22 and says, in God's words, I never commanded your forefathers about burnt offerings or sacrifices when I brought them out of Egypt.

You can look that up if if you want.

Jeremiah literally says, God, I did not command burnt offerings and sacrifices.

Now, I mentioned, I don't want to cover this up or overstate that the cover-up aspect of this.

So while I'm saying that, let me just go ahead and give you an example of this.

And you could pull this up if you want.

But Jeremiah 7, 22 clearly says in the Hebrew, I did not command you concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices when I brought you out of Egypt.

I did not command you.

However, the NIV

interpretation adds the word just in there.

I did not just command you, Comperna.

So it flips the meaning as if he did command it.

Yeah, I pulled it up here.

It says, say that.

Yeah, so that's the NIV.

Every other translation and the Hebrew direct translation, there's no just.

There's no implication of

that signifying word.

So that's happening in front of our eyes in real time, because the NIV is a new translation, I would argue, has happened over time with these deeper conversations around, oh, well, did Jesus say it in Greek in the temple or did he say it in Hebrew and blah, blah, blah, blah?

Because it gets us spinning and not really getting to the root of the matter.

What I would say is, and I would challenge Wes and Stephen Boyce on this straight here again.

I mean, they condemned our position in the debate as using fringe scholarship.

It's got to be one of the most fringe positions to believe that Jesus was speaking Greek in the temple.

The temple was a Hebrew temple with Hebrew priests who read from Hebrew scrolls on the Hebrew holiday of Passover, where the liturgy would be in Hebrew, reading directly from those Hebrew scrolls.

So if he's condemning

the authorities in that system, saying, hey, what are you doing?

Look at your text.

It says, my house should be a house of prayer for all nations.

That's Isaiah.

But you have made it a den of thieves.

He would be quoting.

Hebrew or Aramaic, maybe, because it's, you know, Semitic root.

But I think he'd be quoting Hebrew because it's a liturgical language.

So they would be in the minority, I think, on that position.

But regardless, my point is now, here's where I put on the secondary hat.

How do we corroborate that?

How do we get more information about that?

Well, like I said, there are countless examples.

I just named three or four of the prophets condemning animal sacrifice.

This was not what God wanted.

Okay.

So Jesus comes in and after saying, I desire mercy, not sacrifice, finally throws down on the whole system, shuts it down and for a whole day.

And as we know,

you know, I'm proud of the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodoxy for this.

Animal sacrifices stopped.

The church doesn't participate in animal sacrifices and animal sacrifices stopped very shortly after that through the destruction of the temple and the Bar Kokbo revolt and all of that.

So there was a success and a tearing of that system.

Now,

putting on going outside of the scripture and into the historical data, what we end up looking at when we go from a textual critical method.

Now, this is one thing I want to say to you and you, you may not know this, and just to the general listeners, that biblical textual criticism is really important for Christians and Christianity.

Now, the word criticism raises a red flag.

Are they criticizing the Bible?

We know they're not.

What it means is it's a critical method.

It's a discipline, right?

It's a scientificity of texts and science of how do you

written down, what was actually said.

Exactly.

And I think biblical criticism is our friend because

my position is

the Bible

deserves honesty.

Sure.

It deserves the truth.

It can hold its own weight.

It can stand on its own.

And

when you get into the biblical critical method, you understand where things have been inserted, where traditions may or may not have been the original tradition.

I think that method, we don't have to go into all that because it might be a little over everyone's head.

I'm just saying critical biblical method shows that there was a priestly tradition that when you said Jesus was keeping the commands of Moses, that this sacrificial system was never Moses' original intention.

His intention was the tablets, the 10 commandments, thou shalt not kill.

So, okay, so now let's get in.

There's a lot right there.

So what you just said, and this is perfect because as Christians, right?

As Christians, we don't slaughter animals anymore and sacrifice them to God.

We don't do that anymore because we have the one sacrifice the one sacrifice the one and for all sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ his sacrifice is good for all of eternity so Christians we no longer slaughter animals we no longer sacrifice them on top of altars you're right however that the 10 commandments the moral law the moral law is what christians are still bound to keep we have to keep the moral law we don't need to keep the ceremonial law anymore that's why all over the new testament the new testament talk says you know saint paul in his writings especially in romans and galatians and Colossians, it says that we're no longer bound by the law of Moses.

We're no longer bound to keep the practical law, ceremonial law, those laws that are not part of the moral law.

Because we have the Ten Commandments, the 613 other commandments that were not

revealed by God on the stone tablets that they were for Moses.

But if we go back to Jeremiah, there's something really interesting because I think that maybe the people that are watching this might be a little bit confused when we say that it, you know, that the animal sacrifices in the temple were not something that god wanted or that moses you know um you know had commanded because if you go back to jeremiah 7 and you can even pull it up as well um you know starting in verse 16 is where jeremiah is talking about the people's uh disobedience in the in the preceding verse because you know we brought up verse 21 but um or verse 20 verse 22 But in verse 21, it says something really interesting.

It says, thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices and eat the flesh.

And then he goes on to say, for in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to your fathers or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices.

So like what the concept that I had mentioned, you know, earlier is that what we see in the biblical narrative is that over time, God is giving more,

I mean, I don't like using the word commandments because then people conflate it with the moral law, the Ten Commandments, but God is giving us more, I guess we'll just call them commands or orders.

God is giving his people more and more orders, and you see that they actually, he adds to it as the revelation is being given.

So in the beginning, God talked just about the, you know, just the basic sacrifices.

And then there was burnt offerings, there was offerings of grain, there was all of these different kinds of offerings, which eventually, like you said, Jesus fulfilled completely.

And that's why we don't sacrifice animals or offer grain or offer, you know, any of those things because it's all completed in Jesus.

The reason that I think people would be a little bit confused, right, when we say, if we want to say God didn't command those things is because when we go to Exodus, Exodus 12, Exodus 16,

as a matter of fact, I think also in, if we go to like literally Leviticus, the first nine chapters of Leviticus, so Exodus 12.

Exodus 12, Deuteronomy 16, and the first nine chapters of Leviticus, God himself is giving very, very, very explicit instructions about the sacrifice of animals and how you do it and why you're supposed to do it.

He's giving very explicit liturgical instructions to the priests of how you sacrifice these animals for the atoning of the sins of the people, right?

So, you know,

it's interesting because, you know, when you just, when you go to Jeremiah 7 and then you just read the preceding verse,

it kind of makes sense with what then we read, you know, because if you want to say God didn't command those things, people are saying, wait a second, but I read Exodus 12, you know, where, where you know god is instituting the passover and he says you have to kill the lamb you have to separate its blood from the lamb you have to roast it you have to eat its flesh right yeah and then he says it you know he talks about that as well in deuteronomy 16.

um

and then in leviticus 1 through 9 literally those those entire those first nine chapters god is giving explicit instructions about about how you how to sacrifice uh animals and they're brutal by the way and oh my goodness they are yes they're brutal but and but if i could read read one thing, just because you said so many things, I want to be able to respond to as much as we can.

If you go to like Deuteronomy chapter 12, for example, right?

And I'll just read it and you can maybe pull it up too.

But if you go to Deuteronomy 12, starting in verse 20, it says this.

It says, when the Lord your God enlarges your territory, as he has promised you, and you say, I will eat flesh, because you crave flesh, you may eat as much flesh as you desire.

If the place which the Lord your God will choose to put his name there is too far from you, then you may kill any of your herd or your flock, which the Lord has given you, as I have commanded you, and you may eat within your towns as much as you desire.

Just as the gazelle or the deer is eaten, so you may eat of it.

The unclean and the clean alike

may eat of it.

So there,

and that was just one thing that I just wanted to, you know, just explicitly, where God is explicitly allowing for and even telling them, if you can't make it to this to this place this land where i've you know you can stay where you are and you can even eat from your own herds and your own flocks and you're able to eat of it but you know even going back to for example like genesis 4 right because genesis 4 because you had brought that up a little while ago about cain and abel something fascinating about genesis 4 it's very interesting that uh and i want to get your take on this on how on how we should understand this um because when you go to genesis 4 uh starting in verse 3 it says in the course of time uh cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel brought some of the firstlings of his flock and of their fat portions.

And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering, he had no regard.

And the reason I bring that up is because one of the things that you had mentioned earlier was about how all of the terminology that we use for like for capital, like the word capital literally comes from the head of head of cattle, right?

So, what's interesting is that the reason

that

livestock and animals, the reason that we get all of our terminology for commerce from animals is because for all the time, pretty much animals were a most valuable thing.

And even going all the way back to Genesis, we see that when we had two guys, two brothers, Cain and Abel, and they're each offering something to God, right?

You know, Cain offered, you know, something from the ground.

Abel offered animals.

And God favored the offering that Abel made, which was animal, because animals, and we've already said this in the beginning, animals have greater value.

Animals are of greater value than grain, right?

So, so when we, right,

intrinsic moral value, yeah, intrinsic moral, like like you would, you would much rather protect an animal

than a head of a head of lettuce or whatever, right?

Yeah.

So, but what's interesting is because you would think, you would say, okay, you know,

if we're following, you know, with your position here about how, you know, we need, you know, the animals need not be touched, then it's so interesting that in Genesis 4, God preferred the animal being offered to God

than the grain that

Cain offered.

And then the big irony is that, you know,

then Cain killed

not a head of lettuce or not, you know, or not an animal.

He killed another human being.

He killed his brother because of his...

sacrifice that God didn't have high regard for, right?

So we see, even going back to Genesis, that God actually preferred, and this is the,

because you're right, you said in the beginning of the conversation, you always have to look backwards from Jesus because Jesus makes everything clear for us, right?

What's more valuable than

even animal life?

Only human life.

And then eventually there was a human life that was given for all of us.

And that was, not so not one that we had to provide.

It was the one that God provided.

That was his son.

So because Jesus, not only is he considered human life, but he's the most valuable of all human life because he's

God in the flesh, the second person of the Holy Trinity.

I'm not sure what your Trinitarian theology is or theology or incarnation, but from the Catholic perspective, right?

God in the flesh.

God came down from heaven and he offered himself.

as a sacrifice, allowed himself to be sacrificed for the sins, for all of our sins, so that we no longer have to offer even animal sacrifices, right?

So in the same way that God preferred

Abel's animal sacrifice to Cain's non-animal sacrifice, God preferred the human sacrifice, but the son that laid his life down willingly for all of us to any and all other sacrifices, which is why now there's no sacrifices that we can make God for the atonement of our sins.

That could ever match that one sacrifice.

So we don't need to sacrifice animals anymore.

So the whole of all of this is that you're right, you have to look, you know, from the perspective of Jesus kind of backwards for it to all make sense.

But the whole point of it is that when we worship God or when we offer something to God, God, because of, again, this is getting back to our philosophy or metaphysics, because God is infinite, right?

You need to give God because it's a matter of justice.

If we believe that justice is an objective,

an objective

value, one of the transcendental values

that is true, um it's a matter of justice that god that's why you know all over and over and over again god always says you know i desire your first fruits you need to give your first fruits you actually need to give god your very best right because it's just a matter of justice because god is god so you give god your very best

and now today the question is what is it that we can give god that's our very best It's actually not something that we even we provide because like you said in the very beginning, it's something that God gave everything to us anyway.

So it's all his anyway.

So we no longer need to offer grain or fruits or anything or burnt offerings or animal offerings.

We actually offer God the thing that he actually gave us, which is a person who is Jesus Christ.

And then when we get into our Eucharistic theology, the Eucharistic theology of especially of the Catholic Church is that every time you celebrate the Eucharist, you are actually offering to God that one sacrifice of Jesus 2,000 years ago.

that you are, it's a representation, which is why Jesus at the Last Supper said, do this in remembrance of me every time you celebrate the eucharist it is god remembering the sacrifice of the son and we participate in it and we actually receive the merits of jesus christ's you know uh death and resurrection now we're getting into into soteriology and atonement but the whole point of it is that now

that now we can rejoice that now we don't need to sacrifice animals And we don't need to eat them.

We don't need to sacrifice.

Well, so now here's the important distinction.

Here's the important distinction because we don't need to worry about our temples anymore being slaughterhouses, right?

With the blood running up to our ankles because of millions of animals that are getting slaughtered, right?

But we do have to contend with the fact that not only did God

call for that, allow for that, call for that even commanded explicitly in the law of Moses, again, in Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, we see it.

Not only that, but now there's a distinction that is made in the New Testament.

Right.

So, for example, if we go to,

you might want to go to,

because you mentioned the prodigal son earlier, right?

So you mentioned the product, if you go to Luke 15, 23, what's something that's really interesting with the prodigal son is, because this is supposed to be like a happy story of like a redemption and the son comes back.

Well, one of the details of the story of the prodigal son in verse 23, if we put

is the slaying of the animal.

So the animal gets slain.

Right.

And it's a happy thing.

The father is rejoicing.

The father is rejoicing that his son came back.

And because his son came back, the animal is slaughtered in rejoicing for his son.

And that has a soteriological aspect to it because we are that son, that prodigal son.

And we came back to God.

And his son,

his son, not just an animal, but his son was, if you want to use the word slaughtered for us,

that he be able to take away our sins.

But even in the story of the prodigal son, this parable that Jesus presents, he's presenting that detail in what's supposed to be like a happy story of redemption.

He just so happens, because even the language that's used there, it's bring the fan cap and kill it.

Let's have a feast and celebrate.

So Jesus is presenting

this parable explicitly with that line.

That's like very like, it's like, man, could you be a little bit easier on the, can you say sacrifice it or offer it?

But no, he's like, let's kill it and let's celebrate and let's have a barbecue.

Let's throw a party, right?

Yeah.

So, so, you know, because in the in because it's very important

that we make the distinction between the ritual sacrifice, so we are offering animals to atone for our sins, which we don't do anymore.

But the New Testament still permits.

The New Testament still permits

for the eating of meat.

You know, like, for example, if you go to 1 Timothy 4, 1 through 5, if you pull that up really quick, and I'll just give one or two examples and then you can interact with them.

But like, if you go to 1 Timothy chapter 4, the words of St.

Paul, if you wanted to pull it up, 1 Timothy 4, starting in verse 1, it says:

Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by giving heed to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons through the pretensions of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and enjoin abstinence from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.

Now,

if from there, if we go from 1 Timothy 4 and we actually go to Romans 14, Paul actually mentions this again.

So he mentioned something there in 1 Timothy 4 about that there's some people that will, you know, as a matter of,

you know, as a matter of,

I don't know, maybe morally or as a matter of, what's the word that I'm looking for?

That they are saying, no, they are compelling you to abstain from certain foods, right?

But he doesn't say what those foods are.

So we can't really say here or there from 1 Timothy 4.

If you go to Romans 14.

It's a a very honest take, by the way.

Yeah, he doesn't say most people tell me it's flesh, but right, yeah, he doesn't say, no, no, he doesn't say.

You don't know what he's referring to.

He doesn't say.

But

if you go to Romans 14, right,

starting again

in verse 1, Romans 14, 1 to 3, I don't know if you're going to pull it up on your end, but it says, As for the man who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not for disputes over opinions.

One believes he may eat anything,

while the weak man eats only vegetables.

Let not him who eats despise him who abstains, and let not him who abstains pass judgment on him who eats, for God has welcomed him.

So right there, Paul, he's making a really important distinction where he says there are those of us who believe that we can eat anything while the weak man eats...

only vegetables.

So he's saying vegetables.

And then the question is when he says anything, does that refer to meat as well?

So now we're getting a little bit closer because 1 Timothy 4, there isn't enough there for us to be able to say that what he's referring to.

Romans 14, that's when he says anything versus only vegetables.

But then if we go to 1 Corinthians, if you go to 1 Corinthians 10, right, and you start, I believe in verse 23,

St.

Paul says this, and this is where it's the most explicit.

He says, In 1 Corinthians 10, starting in verse 23, he says, All things are lawful, but not all things are helpful

all things are lawful but not all things build up let no one seek his own good but the good of his neighbor eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience for the earth is the lord's and everything in it if one of the unbelievers invites you to dinner and you are disposed to go eat whatever is set before you without raising any question on the ground of conscience.

But if someone says to you, this has been offered in sacrifice, then out of consideration for the man who informed you and for conscience's sake, I mean his conscience, not yours, do not eat it.

For why should my liberty be determined by another man's scruples?

If I partake with thankfulness, why am I denounced because of that for which I give thanks?

So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.

Give no offense to or to Greeks or to the church of God, just as I try to please all men in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many.

So I think that the key verse here is in verse 25 when he says, eat whatever is sold in the meat market.

without raising any questions on the ground of conscience.

And then he says, if you go to a dinner party and somebody puts something before you that was sacrificed to an idol, he says, as a Christian, objectively speaking, he says, you can eat of it.

Because then he will go on to say that

these idols, these false gods don't really exist and they're actually demons, but you can even still eat what's before you because we know that we follow the true God, right?

But then he says, the only time that there's ever a...

a disciplinary maybe caution against eating meat because he says it's from the meat market and if it's if it's something that was offered to an idol that would be meat because we know that the pagans offered animals to idols so the only time that there's ever maybe a restriction right a restriction on on meat besides in acts 15

i'm sorry what it says in acts 15 to not eat anything that was strangled right

so there was you know the prohibition against eating things that were strangled um but here he says don't eat meat but he isn't he isn't saying that uh as a matter of of objective morality.

It's not an ethical claim that he's making.

He's saying as a matter of prudence.

And he goes on, you know, but I don't want to take up all the time reading everything else he goes on to say, like in 1 Corinthians 11.

He is saying,

if you abstain from eating meat and eat only vegetables, it's because

you don't want to scandalize your brother who's weaker in faith.

Because for them, if they see you eating meat that's sacrificed to an idol, that could scandalize them.

So you don't want to scandalize somebody that's weaker in the faith.

So you should be the big brother so to speak and you should only eat vegetables around them right so you don't scandalize them but then at the same time at the end he says why should my liberty be what does it say impeded on based on another man's scruples so what we see and and these are just a few a few uh passages we didn't even get to jesus and fish i know which is a big huge thing that we and we could have spent a whole hour talking about jesus and fish yeah part two we didn't even talk about jesus and the fish which is what everyone always wants to go to first right

we didn't even touch on that yeah i'll give a little uh yeah a breadcrumb sure pun intended there you go i like i like what you did there but basically whenever the new testament the new testament actually presumes that christians are able to not only eat meat but even eat meat that was even sacrificed to idols that christians have the freedom to do that um the new testament mentions Christians being able to, and again, I don't think we, again, I'm mentioning it, I think for the third time, Acts 10, which hasn't even really been

referred to yet, or you you haven't responded to that either.

But the New Testament over and over makes reference to Christians being able to eat meat.

And the only time that there's ever a restriction on it is in Acts 15, where it says don't eat whatever meat of animal that was strangled, right?

So there's a qualification of strangled, but it doesn't say don't eat any animal at all.

And then St.

Paul is saying, if you're going to refrain from eating meat, you're doing it as a matter of prudence that you don't scandalize someone.

only in the context of meat that was sacrificed to idols.

So then you have to ask the question, like, what if you're just going to the meat market and you're just getting meat and it wasn't anything that was sacrificed to an idol?

Well, then that's when you go to 1 Timothy 4, you know, Romans 14, where it says, you know, where Paul says you can eat anything.

You can eat anything.

It says it's the weak man that eats vegetables.

And all of the, you know, biblical, you know, commentators and theologians that have talked about these passages.

They say that St.

Paul is talking about the pagan context in which the Christian church came out of that a lot of the meat that was being sold in the meat markets was meat that was used in pagan services where they were slaughtering these animals.

But there is no absolute total prohibition against eating it, right?

It's just about the matter of is it sacrificed to idols or not.

So, in closing, because I know we're running out of time, and I want you to have enough time to be able to respond to everything.

I know you've got another guest coming here that you're going to talk to.

But in closing, if we're just going with what the Bible tells us, just the biblical data that we have,

especially what it says explicitly about eating meat.

According to the words of St.

Paul, I

cannot judge you if you wish to not eat meat.

And don't ever let anybody judge you

because of what you refuse to eat, right?

Don't let anyone judge you for that.

The Bible says that we can't judge each other for that.

But at the same time,

you...

according to what the Bible says, cannot judge me or anybody else for partaking because we have Christian freedom And he even says all things are lawful for me.

All things are lawful for me, right?

So we can't judge each other for that, for what we eat or what we don't eat.

We have to respect each other's choice, especially because there's nothing immoral about abstaining from meat.

At the same time, there can't be anything immoral about partaking in meat, because if that was the case,

it would be lined out in scripture, in the tradition, that Christians do not eat meat.

But we know that that just isn't the case.

So

just in closing, I would say that your concerns, the concerns that you might have, my friend, about the way that animals are treated and animal cruelty and farming, we can get behind you 100%

on that front about animal cruelty.

Animal cruelty is condemned and we can't do that to our animals.

We have to respect all of God's creation.

But at the same time, We know that there is a hierarchy of the moral order about, you know, the hierarchy of goods.

And as we've admitted, humans are at the very top, right?

And everything under

humans have dominion over.

And they're actually there for the common good of people.

So if meat can be there, animals can be there for the common good of the people that they can partake of the meat for subsidence,

then

there's nothing there

that would suggest that we're doing something wrong.

And then again, especially when you consider the theologians said that animal suffering and animals dying isn't even a result of human sin, but of the fall of the angels, which I know we kind of already touched on.

But

basically, just again, just wrapping up the Bible, there's nowhere in the Bible that would suggest that we shouldn't be eating meat, period, that we should be abstaining from meat, period.

But the Bible also says that we can't judge each other based on matters of what we eat.

So that's all I have to say about that.

So my friend, the floor is yours.

Beautiful.

Firstly,

you've been such a G being so quiet listening.

I just want to make sure before I close, do you have any questions?

Is there anything that you're like, that you've heard that you?

No, I just want to thank both of you of you, honestly.

I've learned so much today.

I'm new to this space and I can't wait to do some more research and all this.

I'd love to have you close it off, man.

Awesome.

Well, perfect way to lead into it that I would say on the judgment piece.

Do your own research.

And that's something that I encourage everyone, whether it's from watching my film and then after watching my film, going to my sources page at christpiracy.com backslash sources.

From there, and you don't even have to start there.

There's theologians who have written on this topic, Dr.

Andrew Lindsay, who is Anglican, that we, 40 years he spent writing on this.

The church fathers write on the animals, St.

Francis of Assisi.

But then some of what I'm about to get into now is going to be even more,

should I say, like

getting to the meat and potatoes of the conversation, for lack of better words,

getting to the potatoes.

But with this, I always encourage everyone, it's not a judgment thing.

And I believe that everyone should, if you are a person of faith, even if you're not a person of faith, go into the ethical philosophical reasons.

But if you're a person of faith to test it and research and pray and let the Holy Spirit guide you.

And that's what I did when I started this journey over 15 years ago now.

Like I said, after a Daniel fast, when I just got really.

profoundly impacted by that process with going into it, trying to draw closer to God, that abstaining leading me to a point of raising some very important questions.

And the questions led to more questions, led to more questions.

And then I had to keep asking in faith and in reverence.

And I was led to where I am right now.

And I wholeheartedly believe that.

So

don't take my word for it.

Look it up.

So here's where we'll start.

I'm going to do the hat thing again.

So I'm going to put on as best as I can, even like a holy apostolic church, Catholic church hat and try to stay in the bounds.

Tell me if i'm not sure sure um uh in terms of this opening statement so

you ended there with the hierarchy which i again i agree there is different moral worth or value uh to from human life to um to animal life and all the vegans out there are gonna uh may trip on me saying that so let me clarify that it's absolutely 100 clear that most of us, if a burning building was, was burning and there was a child and a dog, we would save the child, right?

I would absolutely save the child.

Just speaking philosophically.

But we have the image of God.

We have all this.

So when we get into scripture, that image of God is personified in Christ, is personified in Jesus.

And if we're trying to follow and step in the path and in the footsteps of Jesus in that way,

Jesus in every way, shape, or form flips the hierarchy.

You know, the first shall be last, the last shall be first.

It's a service-based,

the least in the kingdom, looking after the vulnerable, the oppressed, etc.

Now, I will 100% admit that the tradition up to this point has focused that on humans and the most vulnerable and oppressed of humans.

But in the rest of my statements, I'm going to continue to lay out how I believe that it extends to God's creatures in the same way that the gospel should be preached to all creatures, like we said in what is it, Mark 16:15, something like that.

So,

how do we get there?

Well, let me first go back with

all these verses.

I got notes all the way back from Jeremiah 7, 21, because that's what you started with.

So I'm going to start back there and cover it as quickly.

I'm just going to bullet point it.

Yeah, sure, sure.

But what I want to open with is, again, with that same hat on, staying just with scriptural tradition.

We know, and Jerome writes beautifully on this, that in the beginning, God's ideal had no slaughter.

I forget the exact, I'm going to kick myself that I didn't have this written down because I thought about it when I thought about you.

Oh, good.

I wanted to hit this menu.

You know, I would appreciate your home.

Yeah.

But basically, he writes in

one of his letters, I think it was to

Augustine or something.

Was he writing that?

Oh, yeah, they had a big back and forth correspondence.

He said in there, I'm paraphrasing, so forgive me if I miss a word, but basically he lays out the idea that in the beginning, there was no slaughter.

In the end, we know there's the prophetic ending, there's going to be no slaughter.

And Christ, he says, has enjoined the beginning with the ending, in so much that we no longer have that same code.

Now, later in my chat here, I'm going to get to why I think Jerome was heavily influenced

and

convicted by some of what he found in his process of creating the Latin Vulgate.

But all that to say, he definitely saw this idea that Jesus fulfilled the kingdom of heaven here and now.

It's in our midst.

It's at hand.

Like he said, it's a mustard seed.

It's waiting for us to plant it and grow it.

We need to separate the wheat from the tares.

And we got to really understand what leads to life and what leads to death.

So I'm going to map that out in that every single one of these verses that I'm going to touch on, I'm going to touch on them in their immediate context like you did.

But I also want to raise a little bit of a flag that, because this comes at me a lot where people say, hey, man, you cherry pick verses that fit your narrative, but

you don't cover this verse or that verse.

I always like to flip and reverse that and say, hey, if we want, cherry-picking is all about context.

So then let's take the big context.

What's the biggest context?

The biggest context is God's ideal is not slaughter from the beginning to the end.

And it's very, very clear in scripture.

So anything we pick out, Exodus 12,

Cain and Abel, this and that, all these things, beautiful.

I will tell you all day long that these stories, all of them, have profoundly impacted my life.

I think that they have deep, deep wisdom.

And dare I say, mystery to it.

As some people,

I'm not as much of a mystic as it may seem.

It's a little bit more a literalist, but

anyhow, I want to make sure that everybody's aware that these are in the context, that slaughter is not the ideal.

So everything I pair against that to your point, that God doesn't contradict himself.

If God is just, righteous, good, only the only thing in God is good, and his law never changes and he never changes, God can't contradict himself.

Therefore, the beginning and the ending ideal never really changed.

It was us that changed.

So I believe that Jesus didn't come so that God could change his mind about us.

Jesus came so that we could change our mind about God because we had fallen into further and further sin and spiraling into patterns and habits that weren't of God's original plan.

That said, let's get to the grid.

So Jeremiah 7, 21.

When he says, go ahead,

make your offerings and your sacrifices and eat the meat yourselves.

That's a clear Hebrew,

it's like an irony statement.

He's like, go ahead,

eat Eat the meat.

It's almost like a challenge.

And we know it is because it's reflected in Amos 5.

You can pull it up if you want.

A-M-U-S.

AM-O-S.

A-A-A-M-O-S 525, I believe it is.

Where he says, sorry, I can't even hardly see that.

It's so small.

She's going to bring it up.

So right here.

Yeah.

Did you bring me sacrifices and offerings during your 40 years in the wilderness, oh house of Israel?

It's a rhetorical question with the implied answer being no.

And any, I've, so again, this stuff's just kind of like from the journey of my film and making Christ Spiracy, so I highly recommend to watch it.

But Hebrew scholars know that's like a rhetorical device in the Hebrew where he's implying the answer is no, that actually they didn't bring sacrifices in the wilderness.

This is actually the statement that Stephen makes, if you remember, before he's stoned in Acts, as he quotes the aspect of you've raised your star to Rim Fan and blah, blah, blah.

It's all in the same verse because they were, you know, he's condemning them for at the time when Amos is writing that they're involved in all this animal sacrifice and even pagan worship and blah, blah, blah, blah.

So that rhetorical device shows and corroborates with Jesus, God.

It's even, I think in our Christian Bible has an exclamation point because it's so exclamatory.

Go ahead, eat the meat yourselves.

Do do what you want.

Like, and it's implied like you're operating in your free will, but this is not what I wanted because the following verse, I did not command your fathers to sacrifice when I brought them out of Egypt, but go ahead, eat it.

And in fact,

real quick little note to pull it out of the apostolic tradition is that

in the Syriac, the Peshitta, actually, there's a rendering of the Peshitta from one of the greatest scholars of the Syriac that renders that verse where it goes on to say, I did not command your fathers to sacrifice or eat the flesh.

The Peshitta preserves or eat the flesh in the verse, which is interesting because we know Syriac is a sister language to Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke and and was much more Semitic than the Greek language.

Okay, so moving on, Abel, Cain and Abel.

Again, taking this in the greater narrative of what God's ideal is and just looking at the text itself, I have to look at this and many others do this.

I'm not, by the way, this is not Cameron's theory.

This is like many other biblical scholars and folks that I talk with, really esteemed ones, just Dr.

James Tabor, et cetera.

Abel, nowhere in the text does it ever say that there's blood or killing.

It doesn't, it doesn't, there's no altar, none of that language.

It says that he brings his first fruit and the fat thereof.

Well, the fat thereof can mean two things easily in Hebrew.

One, that it's the fattened animal.

It's the first fruit and the fattest one, the prime one,

which would be the thing that you would give away, that would be the hardest and the most sacrificial for you to give away, right?

It can also, to be fair, imply the colostrum or the milk of the animal, the fat thereof.

I forget the word that's there.

Forgive me.

But again, don't take my word for it.

Anyone go look it up yourself.

This same word is used for milk portions in the scripture.

So the idea is, number one, he might not have even killed the animal.

It could have been that he was offering the milk or like the Azazel or

the Yom Kippur atonement, where they do a scapegoat into the wilderness, right?

There are some that even speculate that maybe Abel just let

the animal free into the wilderness.

And that makes a lot more sense when you know that Cain's bringing his offerings of the first fruits of,

is it the field or is it the trees?

Because I think he actually brought fruit, if I'm not mistaken.

And if he leaves that out in the field for God and then Abel leaves the animal to set it free, the animal is going to go wander in the wilderness and they're going to come back and be like, oh, God took my sacrifice or God actually did either way.

But that's the scapegoat in

the kind of liturgy, I guess you could say.

A torment.

Yeah, a tournament.

And I think what's really more behind, a lot of these, as we know, it's what's behind the story that's the most important regardless, especially in the light of Christ and that we don't sacrifice anymore.

And what's behind the story is that, is that Cain didn't bring, it's the spirit of his offering, right?

He's lazy.

He doesn't bring his first fruits.

He just brings fruits.

He's after his, you know, he's already gotten his fill or whatever it is.

It doesn't say that exactly, but it doesn't say that he brings his first fruits.

Also, there's some that speculate that because he's bringing fruit, he's kind of going back to this Eden state.

While,

and this goes back to our Isaiah conversation, is it exactly like that i should have said this before no because plant agriculture will be involved in the kingdom of heaven and so after the fall we were all it was all fruits of the trees but then they will toil the earth right after the fall so cain is now also toiling the earth and the idea is that he's just bringing the easy thing the fruits rather than the actual toiling of the earth But Abel's bringing the sheep.

Why did Abel have sheep?

Why was he doing livestock?

There's a lot of conversation around that.

Maybe it's, you know, from the standpoint of God doesn't want killing.

And maybe Abel participated in that righteousness.

He could have been shearing the wool for clothing and different things.

So moving on from that, that's how that could fit in this worldview.

Abraham and the ram.

I think, did you bring Abraham or the Ram?

I didn't bring that up.

Okay, well, let's just skip that.

The bottom line, I'll just say on the...

I love those story.

Everyone, I do too, but everyone brings that up and says, oh, but the Lord provided the ram.

It's the same thing.

It doesn't say in the text that God provided the ram.

It says that Abraham saw the ram and said, oh, the Lord has provided.

So again, there's no implication that actually that was

what was intended.

And there's all kinds of extra commentary we could give on that.

So then we get up to Moses, and you were bringing up Exodus 12 and Deuteronomy 11,

which are clearly, I will not dispute,

very gruesome, gory

outlines for how to sacrifice animals, some of the kosher laws are given there, et cetera.

But this is where it gets really interesting.

So, and this is going to lead to

some of my putting the hat on, which is textual biblical criticism.

Not every Christian will be comfortable with this, but it's something like I said, as a person who believes the Bible should be able to stand up to the test of truth, no matter what form

of criticism it comes from, if it's the scientific method.

And biblical scholars have known for a long time that there are multiple sources in the Old Testament.

They refer to it as the documentary hypothesis, the J-E-D-P.

Well, Q is New Testament, but Old Testament is J-E-D-P.

And the P source is the priestly, it's P for priestly source.

And these texts are priestly source.

What does that mean?

It means they're late.

So they put the priestly source really late.

It's like post-Babylonian exile.

And it's when the priests are coming together and trying to centralize animal sacrificial worship to Jerusalem.

And to be honest, like just really being frank, they made, like we said in the temple, they made a lot of money on this system.

It got very corrupt

fast or from the outset.

So my argument there would be that from a critical biblical standpoint, this was never the original Mosaic law to start with.

Now, I'll bring that to actual Jesus's,

to Jesus and his family and what we know from the church fathers in just a second.

But I want to start there because

that was your next successive thing that you covered.

One way to just look at it.

plainly too for anyone, if you just want to, because not everyone's textual critical biblical scholar and not everyone cares to go down that, but just do this for an experiment.

It's called Moses interrupted so you mentioned deuteronomy 11.

there's uh there's this uh phrase called moses interrupted deuteronomy 16 i think it was oh you said 16 16 sorry um i have deuteronomy 11 because this is where the interruption happens so there's this famous phrase uh called moses interrupted where basically in deuteronomy you've got this flow of the text uh mind you too um

it's all mostly written in third person.

Moses didn't likely write a lot of this stuff.

People have known this for a long time.

Obviously, based on oral tradition and these kinds of things.

But we get to this point where right around Deuteronomy 11, Moses says he's going to outline the blessings and the curses.

And he's setting the crowd up for that.

But then all of a sudden, boom, and right at 11, 12,

he doesn't.

He doesn't give the blessings and curses.

And then that's where you get what you read,

law after law of the craziest things of sacrificing animals for women's periods and childbirth and like just, you you know

the 613 yeah yeah and it gets and it goes on into Leviticus and everything but this is just an experience for everyone

it starts right around 11 to 12 and then

Deuteronomy 28 it comes back here are the blessings and the curses and another interesting note is that I believe he only gives the curses and not the blessings But scholars have known for a long time, and this is no, to be fair, this is no fault to like the church fathers.

I don't want to condemn.

I just think we have more material now and everybody's talking a lot more than they were back then.

They were sending letters, but think about how long a letter took.

Now we've got, he's pulling up stuff on chat GPT.

So we're able to look at this stuff from a more critical fine-tooth lens and we can see or scholars can see and they have the consensus that that was a peace source insertion, that it would have flowed from Moses saying, here's the blessings and curses, and then he would deliver the messings and curses.

And we don't have time for it.

We talked about this a little bit on our last podcast, but there's actually right now scholarship being done on potential Deuteronomic sources

that may have that more Eloish touch to it that don't have any animal sacrificial ritual whatsoever in them that may be more original.

And this is alluded to in the scripture in 2 Kings 22 when Hilkiah finds the book of the law next to the Ark of the Covenant and Josiah rips his garments.

In Chronicles, it says that they read it and it was much shorter because it took them only the morning to read the law, whereas the Pentateuch would take much longer.

So anyways, I'm getting, I'm just trying to lay out that critical biblical scholarship shows very clearly that these are later additions to the text.

Now, that brings us to Jesus.

And what did Jesus have to say about this?

Because we have this biblical infallibility aspect.

We have Jesus fulfilling the law of Moses.

Did he or did he not accept sacrifice?

Well, again, putting back on my...

on my just standard hat coming within the Christian tradition and maybe even the Catholic tradition,

Jesus clearly was calling people towards the ideal.

Even if he,

let's grant he permitted sacrifice or he observed it in his life or he was a part of that system.

In every way, shape and form, he's calling them to the ideal, even with statements such as, I desire mercy, not sacrifice.

And we have to remember that in that time, the sacrificial system was the meat market.

That's how they got meat.

Very rarely did they ever have meat outside of that context, especially in the greater Greco-Roman world, which we'll get into with the Pauline stuff.

But animal sacrifice and meat consumption were like

inextricably connected at a scale, you know, because before that, it would have been just the rare animal once a year or whenever it was.

So these are one and the same system when he's, when he's calling out the animal sacrificial ritual in a way by default, he's calling out the consumption of it because that's what happened.

But I've already covered like John 10, 10 and 11, how he's literally rejecting the animal sacrifice.

But I do want to say that when he flips the temple tables,

one other piece to know that he's condemning the sacrificial system, there's many that I could discover, but one that I think you'll find interesting is if you remember, the Pharisee in the temple challenges him asking what the greatest command is, right?

I think it's Mark 12 or 15, Mark 12.

The priest says, what's the greatest commandment?

He's trying to catch him, right?

They're always trying to catch him.

And he says, it's love God with all your heart, soul, and mind, understanding, and love the other other as you love yourself.

And then what does the Pharisee say back?

He says,

again, I'm paraphrasing, I'm dramatizing a little bit, but he essentially says, oh,

I get it.

If we were to do that, then

that's more than all these burnt offerings and sacrifices.

Why are we doing this?

You know?

And Jesus says to him even more powerfully, what does he respond?

He says, You, my friend, are not far from the kingdom.

And he never said that to a single apostle.

He never said that to anyone else in the text.

He said it to this Pharisee, you're not far from the kingdom.

Well, why would he say

reading Isaiah,

the freedom of the oppressed, right?

Who are the oppressed?

You can imagine him in the temple flipping the tables.

And if my position here, which again isn't my position, it's position of many people, but the one I'm arguing is that Jesus was against the sacrificial system.

It's like the guy is getting it.

Oh,

I see what you've been ranting ranting about here all day.

Yeah, I guess we don't need this.

And then Jesus goes, Ah, you are not far from the kingdom.

It's at hand.

You're pulling it in right now with that perspective.

So just wanted to highlight that.

Now,

how do we steel man this?

And I'm going to get to Acts 10 and all this, but I want to go ahead and jump into this.

How do we steel man this

from a critical perspective of text that we have outside of the scripture?

Your version of that, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but or not your version, the church's version is like, hey,

apostolic authority is important.

They help us understand the text when we get in trouble, right?

When we need an interpretation.

Yeah, they're able to definitively interpret what the text is asserting.

Okay.

What the text asserts.

The church is able to tell us what that assertion is.

And they can do so in a way that is definitive.

Okay.

So just to lay out.

In the most layman's terms is oversimplifying it, but the way critical biblical scholarship kind of works is that you've got the apostolic tradition, the church fathers and their writings considered completely historical in the sense that real people really wrote them most of the time.

There are forgeries and these kind of things, but

that's that's what's the religious tradition or the non-secular tradition.

Then you've got secular records.

This is where Josephus comes in.

He's a historian, Pliny the Elder and younger, et cetera.

All right.

So I'm going to go on these two rails for a second and show you

why I say that I lean in the direction of what's called a Nazarene is because

when you look throughout the scripture, Jesus is most often referred to over the Christ or anything like that in

the Gospels as Jesus of Nazareth, right?

That's how everybody knows him.

But the reality is, is in the Gospels,

almost unanimously, that Greek behind the phrase Jesus of Nazareth is a Greek that is Jesus the Nazarene or Nazarene.

It's a sectarian title.

It's not delineating a place of origin.

Now,

the Greek itself, the way the vowel works in Nazarene, it actually makes it where it's like impossible for it to mean someone from Nazareth.

I won't get into all those details, but you can trust my word for it now and go look it up later.

You can look up Wikipedia.

Anyone just go to Wikipedia.

Here, actually, pull it up.

Pull it up.

Wikipedia.

Say Nazarene title.

Nazarene title.

Wikipedia.

This one?

Yeah.

Oh.

Scroll down.

Yeah, yeah.

Just this last paragraph on the first thing.

The Greek New Testament Nazarene.

Nazarene six times.

Nazarean 13 times.

Nazarean is used to refer to a follower of Jesus, a Christian.

Wait, that's not the one I was looking for.

Hold on.

Go back up.

Oh, there it is.

The first paragraph.

Oh, I thought it was the third.

The phrases traditionally rendered as Jesus of Nazareth can be translated as Jesus the Nazarene or the Nazarene.

And the title Nazarene may have a religious significance instead of denoting a place of origin.

Both Nazarene and Nazarene are irregular in Greek, and the additional vowel in Nazarene complicates any derivation from Nazareth.

So

we know from the patristics, specifically Epiphanius more than anyone,

that there was a sect of Nazarenes and that that was the earliest name for the Christians other than just followers of the way.

Paul even gets accused of being a ringleader of the sect of

the Nazarenes in

Acts.

Now,

who were the Nazarenes?

Well, let's start by...

The one in this, I'm teeing us up for a whole other podcast.

I know.

We're going to have to come back, talk about the Nazarenes.

Yeah, yeah.

we're gonna have to talk about textual criticism because I think that would be especially old testament textual criticism.

We got to do that.

All right.

Yeah, and New Testament.

And New Testament, and we have to talk about Jesus and the fish.

So

I'm going to touch on that very briefly here.

I'm not going to do the whole thing, but I'll give it a little bit.

Two minutes.

Two minutes.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

How much?

Okay, let me.

We're already way over.

Yeah, we're going to have to do a part two, man.

Let me, let me, let me wrap it here

as fast as I can.

Jesus the Nazarene, the Nazarenes were led by James the Just, Jesus' brother.

I feel feel that the Catholic Church and others haven't really uncovered or revealed who James truly was.

But I think it was Eusebius that said that James led like, what was it, 13 to 15 different bishops after James in the Jerusalem church.

And he had, from so many additional sources, secular and

Christian, appointed the first successor to Jesus.

And I think the Petrine apostolic tradition maybe has taken people's focus away from that.

Why would that be?

Well, one thing that we know that comes back to this argument is that it's historically documented by Eusebius, the father of church history, that James, quoting one of the earliest Christians,

that James was holy from his mother's womb.

He never ate flesh since birth, holy from his mother's womb.

He never ate flesh.

Now, okay, maybe he was the vegan one and Jesus wasn't, but okay, well, then you you go back to John the Baptist in the textual, in the text that we have, he ate locusts and honey.

Well, that's not meat.

That's vegetarian.

But here's what's even more fascinating.

This is completely non-controversial.

It's another thing you have on Wikipedia.

Don't do it right now.

Do it at home.

Locust and honey is a mistranslation for the honey locust, which is the carob bean, which grows all over the river Jordan.

And still to this day, it's called St.

John's bread because the tradition knew that St.

John ate this bean.

This other text I'm going to refer to in a second called it a honey cake.

But bottom line, this is a mistranslation in the Greek text that's apparent from so many directions.

It's not even controversial.

So we've got John the Baptist being referred to as someone who completely restricted himself from eating animal flesh and his diet is indicated.

Same thing with James.

It's kind of strange to think that Jesus is in the middle because he's the successor in a way to John the Baptist and then James from him, that he's just wedged in the middle there, that he wouldn't have the same lifestyle, especially if Mary raised him that way.

But that being said, okay, now, sorry, I know we only have a little bit of time, but I'm trying to do that.

There's so many things I would say.

I know, I know.

Yeah, so many things.

So

in this tradition, skipping over a ton, what we do know from Epiphanius is that the Nazarenes, he outlines who the Nazarenes were.

He says specifically Epiphanius, and he's a hostile witness.

He's a heresiologist.

He's saying this is not the way.

I'll be completely honest, but I disagree with him.

He calls them here.

Right, right.

He calls them here.

Heretics, yeah.

But it says that they were just like the in every other way.

They're just another sect like the Pharisees and Sadducees.

But the only difference is they rejected animal sacrifice and flesh consumption, believing that it was not instituted by Moses at all, that Moses had received some other law and that this was not a lawful practice.

Now,

that's a religious witness.

We also have secular witnesses of the Tetrarchy of the Nazarene from Pliny the Younger.

He's writing in like 50 or 60 AD, but he's using material in census and maps from like 30 BC or earlier.

So we've got the Nazarene sect existing way before Jesus in secular record.

We've got Julius Africanus written about by, is it Jerome or Eusebius, I think, that Nazara is by Cochaba,

and Nazara being by Cochaba is east of the Jordan, Transjordan.

Well, where does Epiphanius say how these Nazarenes were?

He says they're in the Transjordan near Cochaba.

He literally, I think, lists Kochaba.

So we're talking about a sect that existed even before Jesus.

It has nothing to do with him being from Nazareth.

Him being called Jesus of Nazareth is a misnomer that's kind of caused a lot of confusion.

And when you understand this piece is secular and religious, it's also earlier material, Pliny and Africanus, than what we have from not the secular sources.

We don't hear Jesus of Nazareth until 400 years after Jesus, 400 AD.

We don't hear Jesus of Nazareth from the religious sources until like 200 AD.

But we've got this source all the way 30 BC.

So I'm just saying the source material goes earlier on the side of the sectarian title.

Okay.

So my position is that Jesus was a part of a sect that understood exactly what I'm talking about today, that God is not a contradiction.

He never wanted sacrifice.

He never wanted bloodshed.

He never wanted slaughter.

We fell into that way and through our own bloodlust created a system in which we thought it was okay to kill and consume and harm the beings which he gave to us in our care in the dominion mandate in Genesis 1, 26 through 29.

Jesus comes and sets the record straight, sacrifices himself to reveal all.

And I'm not saying it's only this topic, by the way.

I don't want to sound like my only thing I care about is animals.

I think Jesus delivered us redemptive forgiveness and showed us the way, the Most High, all the things.

But on this particular topic, staying on that, We see it in the prodigal son.

Again, what I'm laying out is that Jerome says that these Nazarenes had an earlier text, the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew.

He attests to it twice or three or four times that there was an earlier Hebrew Gospel of Matthew.

And we can corroborate the word Nazarene that he uses is the same word that Pliny the Elder used from 30 BC.

And later, Epiphanius gives us quotes, so does Jerome, but Epiphanius gives us quotes from this Hebrew Gospel of Matthew.

And guess what he says is the difference about it?

It says that Jesus claimed,

I have come to abolish the sacrifices, and unless you cease sacrificing, wrath will not cease from you.

And then when he's asked about the Passover lamb before the Last Supper, Jesus explicitly says, I have no desire to eat the flesh of this Passover lamb with you.

That's in the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew attested to by the church fathers.

So my position is, is we have an earlier Hebrew tradition before it gets wider out to the Gentiles that held a very strong opinion that wasn't just about sacrifice, although it's a part of it because

sacrifice is intertwined, sacrifice to idols like Paul talks about, but it goes even deeper, deeper to an ethical position.

Timothy, sorry, Acts 10, really quick.

I promise I'll do these quick.

Acts 10, it's a voice.

It doesn't say it specifically.

God,

it's a test.

Peter interprets it as accepting Gentiles, so he doesn't rise and kill and eat.

So according to Peter, it has nothing to do with killing and eating animals, that vision.

And in fact, in the Christian material, the Hebrew Christian material that the Nazarenes held, such as the travels of Peter, which we know is really, really early, as early as the Gospels, it gives additional material to Acts, and it has Peter eating only olives and bread.

It specifically says that he rejected flesh foods.

1 Timothy 4, when it says that in the latter times, beware of deceiving spirits that will forbid you from marriage and the consumption of meats, which thank you for being one of the very few who will acknowledge that that's a broad term for any kind of food.

Number one, I'd say he's he's talking about fasting and uh ascetic traditions um number two another example of like that word just being added into jeremiah 7 22 in timothy 4 you can pull it up i wish we had more time but you can pull it up next time next time next time

in uh timothy it says that the word commanded is added to the text in the english it's not there in the greek so when you remove the commanded it reads more like beware of those who will forbid you from marrying and abstaining from foods like you see i'm saying it's the reverse meaning

though there will be people that will not allow you to marry and will not allow you to abstain from foods which you wish to abstain from so that's another reading on that romans 14 uh first corinthians i'll just say that clearly like i said there's james the just he and Paul clearly have some disagreements.

You see it in Acts.

It's not explicitly said to the level at which I think Christian material materials show because it's on the other side.

It's showing the opposite side of the spectrum.

But Paul definitely had a leniency towards this issue, but him saying that it was an issue at all shows that it was an issue.

So he's saying the weak man eats only vegetables.

This must have been a big issue for Paul to have to write about it.

Clearly, a lot of people in the tradition were eating only vegetables.

Now, what do we know about the

Christian apologists hanging their hat on Pliny the Elder's attestation of the Christiani in his letter to Trajan?

It's 110 AD.

It's like the earliest attestation for Christianity.

What does Pliny say?

He doesn't know much about the Christians, but what he does know, he's reporting to Trajan, he says they meet and they do prayers to Christ and they eat innocent, harmless food.

That's in the letter of Pliny the Elder about the Christiani.

So the first, the Nazarenes became the Christiani, and then over time, Paul, some of these disputes, and it's just like any other tradition.

You see it with Mormonism.

You see it, you know, they had strict things around coffee and this and that.

Now, you got coffee drinking Mormons, whatever.

There was an idea that there was more of a emphasis on this at the time of Christ that got lost over time as it moved out into the Gentile world.

Why is this important?

This is important because

if he's going to say, you know, the wheat means he eats only vegetables, we've got Daniel.

Clearly, Daniel's not weak.

He ate only vegetables.

We talked about him at the beginning.

And I think what this is, is it's talking about the choosing the path of life over the path of death.

And I think it's a really important conversation.

It's not just some frivolous thing about what we eat because it has nothing to do with diet.

It has everything to do with the ethics of murder.

And I keep saying thou shalt not kill, but I have to correct myself that the true

is thou shalt not murder, which is intentional killing.

And we could do a whole podcast on murder, its

implications.

And

this is the beginning of a great relationship where we can keep coming back and just having a lot of conversations.

I can't wait until five hours next time.

This is my last statement.

I promise it's going to take me less than one minute.

Go ahead, brother.

Thou shalt not murder.

Without even getting to the implications, I'll speak and I'll admit this is anecdotal.

Maybe it's going to sound like an appeal to emotion, but it's very real for me.

I've witnessed murder of animals.

I've done it myself.

I've gone to animal sacrifices in India.

You should watch Christ Spiracy.

We go to the biggest temple animal sacrifice still existing on planet Earth in Nepal.

It's gruesome.

My brother, my little brother, was killed at gunpoint two years ago.

So I've been up close and personal with murder

of humankind.

And my mother had me at 16 and was this close to aborting me because she had bad influences around her.

Thankfully, she had good influences.

That's a whole other conversation.

But murder is murder is murder.

Taking a life is taking a life.

So my point is, without even getting into legalities,

I believe that Jesus was laying out, just like he said in John 10, 10 and 11, that the enemy comes to steal, kill, and destroy, but I have come to bring life abundantly, that the path is life, and the path is abundance.

And he says that I'm the good shepherd.

The good shepherd lays his life down for the sheep.

The good shepherd doesn't not just kill,

but he lays his own life down for it.

And I know it's a metaphor for the lost sheep of Israel and all this, but I'm saying I think it can go deeper in that this is a restoration of dominion.

It's here.

It's now.

We don't have to wait for it someplace else, sometime else.

We can choose it now.

So, my question to you is,

if killing is somehow acceptable by God or even mandated by God, if that's God's way or Jesus' way, then what does Satan do?

And beyond that, if Jesus, the prince of peace, oh yeah, fish, we'll get in another time.

Jesus said, don't you remember when I multiplied the bread?

Doesn't mention the fish when he recalls the account.

There's a whole conversation around what he had to, what he thought about the fish.

But the point is, is Jesus is calling us the ideal.

How would Jesus kill an animal?

And I do want to leave this with the last question.

How would Jesus kill an animal?

And if he would, if he would kill an animal and eat it, how would he do it?

And more so, you as a Christ follower, how do you justify that, especially when it's being done 90 billion animals a year in the most gruesome ways, 99% in factory farms?

And

if you believe there is a way and you can explain that right now, my my challenge to you, the Christ Spiracy Challenge is let me film you doing it and showing me what, if there's any practices, prayers, gratitude, the Lord's Prayer, I love the Lord's Prayer.

I say it every day.

I would love to film you raising an animal from birth, truly connecting to the animal because we're so disconnected, getting our meat in packages in the marketplace with all these euphemisms, bacon is pig, et cetera.

You raise two animals from birth, give them names like Adam did in the garden, give them personalities, build connection.

When they reach maturity,

to kill them, you have to choose which one to kill.

And then we film you looking them in the eyes,

killing the animal,

and afterwards explain to us how it was Christ-like.

Okay.

I put that offer on the table to Wesley Huff.

He accepted it, and he has not followed through.

So

you, let's, let's see how

what what you

we do so much challenging.

Were we able to raise animals, Jonathan?

Were we be able to you know, that's kind of interesting.

We're going to have to get back to you on that, but I know that we're out of time.

Yeah.

Should I say something or should we?

I know that we're pretty much closing comments, I guess.

We got to come in.

We got to wrap it up.

Yeah, I know we got to go.

I was just to answer your question about how would Jesus kill an animal?

I would say the Bible mentions that Jesus in John 21

was boiling fish over a flame.

So that's one answer to your question.

We're going to to have to come back and do a part two.

I would love to have a discussion about when the Bible says thou shalt not burden, does that include animals?

Because here's the thing: every single thing that you have meant, that you have said here, we can actually agree with you 100%.

But the context of everything that you have said is about the sacrifices of the animals in religious context.

And no one's doing that.

The Christians aren't doing that today.

So even if we were to slaughter animals just for the sake of eating them,

that's still in line with everything that you've presented as far as the purpose

of the slaughtering of the animals for sacrifice.

But we're going to have to come back again, my friend, so that we can do this, so we can keep the conversation going.

Next time, five hours, five hours, and we'll be able to get a little bit of a pair of people.

Can I have a 10-second statement?

Just time.

10 seconds.

There's a mistranslation and misunderstanding around John 21.

That'll be for the next episode.

Yeah.

I'm well aware of that.

Yeah, yeah.

But the point is, whether it's animal sacrifice in ancient times or now, it's still a ritual three times a day.

A ritual is a ritual.

It's just been secularized, and I think it's time for the church to call it out.

It's hell on earth for these animals.

All right, we'll land it there, guys.

Thanks so much for coming on.

The link to your socials below.

Thanks for watching, guys.

So much.

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other.

When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a four-liter jug.

When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

Oh, come on.

They called a truce for their holiday and used Expedia Trip Planner to collaborate on all the details of their trip.

Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool.

Whatever.

You were made to outdo your holidays.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.