Avoiding Hippy Nonsense When Searching for Theological Truth

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

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

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

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

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

Simone Collins: Hello, you beautiful creature. Hello,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For, for each cult