Does Genesis Argue NPCs Are Real? (Do Pre-Adamites Still Exist?)

In this Based Camp Tract, Malcolm and Simone Collins tackle one of their most provocative religious questions: What does it actually mean to be “human” in God’s view?

They dig into classic Genesis puzzles—Cain’s fear of being killed, the sudden appearance of his wife, the city of Enoch, and the strange language of Romans 5:12-14—and argue that the Bible may not treat every Homo sapiens as a full moral agent. Drawing on a techno-puritan reading, they place the Adam and Eve story at the dawn of moral accountability and civilization roughly 10,000 years ago near the Tigris-Euphrates, link it to the sudden explosion of human development, and explore what this means for death, the Tree of Life, pre-Adamite populations, and the difference between biological humans and those God holds accountable.

Along the way they examine traditional explanations (incest, rapid population growth, pure allegory), Isaac La Peyrère’s pre-Adamite theory, Genesis 1 vs. Genesis 2, early urban death rituals, God’s treatment of groups like the Egyptians and Canaanites, and modern implications—including NPCs, civilizational decline, and fertility collapse as a kinder “second flood.”

A spicy, wide-ranging conversation about moral agency, civilization, and what the Bible might be saying about who counts as fully human.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Malcolm Collins: Simone, I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we might be doing one of our most offensive religious episodes, because it’s a thought that came to me so for people who like sort of Bible mysteries one of the ones that most people are broadly aware of as like a fun little rabbit hole to go into is it appears from the perspective of Genesis that there were other humans around at the time of Cain and Abel.

[00:00:31] Mm-hmm. So four lines that suggest this. Genesis 4:14, “Whoever finds me will kill me.” If only Adam’s immediate family existed, who would pose a threat to Cain afterwards? ‘Cause he’s saying this to God. Cain’s wife she appears, but isn’t given a genealogy. Yeah. In, in the Bible, you’re not supposed to sleep with your sister.

[00:00:52] This is, like, one of the rules that God sets up. And it’s never put out that there’s, like, an exception here. Mm-hmm. Now, he was doing this before that law was set out, but that law still would have applied to all of the sons of Ad- kids of Adam and specifically Romans 5:12-14, no matter how you interpret it means it would apply.

[00:01:13] The the city in Genesis 4:17 it mentions Cain building a city, the city of Enoch. Now the word used for city here in ancient Hebrew can mean, like, a fortified collection of dwellings, but it still requires, you know, some people, more people than we are aware of at this time.

[00:01:33] Simone Collins: Yeah.

[00:01:34] Malcolm Collins: Then, and this is not as seen by people, but we’ll go into it, because then it is actually interesting.

[00:01:38] Some read Genesis 1:26-27, humanity created male and female, as a different event from Genesis 2:7, Adam formed from the dust, and then Eve formed from a rib, right? Then there is Romans 5:12-14. So this isn’t just in the Old Testament where you find this weird stuff. If you go to Romans 5:12-14 and note here I’m also gonna go through all the traditional explanations to try to get around this.

[00:02:04] But the correct explanation I think is so - spicy and I am so excited to drop it, because it makes so many other things make sense.

[00:02:14] Simone Collins: Yeah.

[00:02:14] As soon as you said this to me I was like, “Ah, of course.” ‘Cause I’m reading Genesis again, or I just read Genesis again and was so confused. Just was like, wait, ‘cause y- all these descendants, you know, so and so and then they had this kid, but then, and then they married so and- like, wait, where did they come from?

[00:02:29] Well, we, we

[00:02:30] Malcolm Collins: could- Yeah ...

[00:02:31] Simone Collins: huh?

[00:02:32] Malcolm Collins: So , if we start here, “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and in this way death came to people because all sinned, to be sure sin was in the world before the law was given. But sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law.”

[00:02:54] Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

[00:02:54] Malcolm Collins: “Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a, a pattern of the one to come.” Hmm. So the problem here being is there are two ways to read this both have problems. One is that, well, even though Moses hadn’t handed down the commandments yet, right? You were still capable of sinning before that period, right? That said it doesn’t really make sense in context., If you think about the line as it’s put out here, him pointing out that death entered the earth through sin entering through Adam, then the law he’s talking about here must be the law handed to Adam, right?

[00:03:46] If that’s the case, then it’s implying that people were sinning but without a law, without somebody telling them not to, before Adam came to existence. So I’ll, I’ll read it again so you can see how you can get this [00:04:00] interpretation. “Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people because all sinned, to be sure sin was in the world before the law was given.

[00:04:12] But sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law. Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is the pattern of the one to come.”

[00:04:28] On rereading, this is by far the weakest of these claims, but this verse is still important because what it lays out is that the rules set out within the mosaic laws are what counted as sin even before those laws were laid out, even if you take the most traditionalist reading of them, which has a lot of importance in just a second

[00:04:48] Malcolm Collins: So That creates a problem, right? If there were other humans around during this period, how did they get there? Mm-hmm. And we’ll, we’ll get to this as well, but what, what do we know about Adam and Eve, first of all? Because if people are aware of the techno-puritan framing around all of this what we generally believe is we think the Bible, and you can watch our episode on this, does a very good job, a, a supernaturally good job of setting out the evolutionary timeline.

[00:05:18] Mm-hmm. Of describing that in a way that a person of that period, a cave Jew, could understand that would make any sort of rational sense to them, that would be able to be transmitted. And then it lays out in the story of Adam and Eve mankind beginning to... Because I, I don’t think that God would actually punish humanity for trying to learn right from wrong.

[00:05:39] That seems psychotic to me. Like it seems like God would want us to know right from wrong, right? Yeah. Yeah. But I point out that we know from the story that that’s not really what Adam was punished for. Because the moment he eats the... Well, he doesn’t eat, touches, which is also important. See our original episode on that if you want us to go deeper on it.

[00:05:58] Or has the intent to disobey God. It’s not even touches. It, it, it’s reaching out for it. It was the intent to disobey God around that fruit that made that fruit important. It was not the fruit itself. The fruit didn’t actually need any magical powers. The fruit was set apart in that it was the only thing that God had made any sort of a ruling around at that point in human history, right?

[00:06:20] Mm-hmm. And, and the thing that Adam did that was special there was to go against what God wanted him to do with that. And I was like, a- and we know this because the first thing that Adam does is tries to clothe himself which doesn’t make any sense. Because it said that he they, they, they...

[00:06:36] God let Adam be naked in the garden. Like, clearly God didn’t think it was a problem. And in nowhere in any Bible, in any Old Testament would any, either in ration or in Christian or Judaic tradition is it sinful to be naked in front of your wife and God. That’s like the very thing you’re supposed to be naked around, right?

[00:06:59] Like, that is not a, a... He’s not like in a city or something, right? Like, so it’s showing that he what is meant by knowledge of good and evil is a knowledge of good and evil in opposition to God’s knowledge of good and evil. Like man thinking that he knows more than God about what is good and evil to the extent that he would do stupid things.

[00:07:23] So the moment Adam gained the capacity to think in terms of morality, like, “This is what I should do, this is what I shouldn’t do,” all of, like, what laws applied to him and made up sin at this point in time,

[00:07:38] that line in Romans tells us it’s the

[00:07:41] mosaic law that would be handed down later.

[00:07:44] So the question is, why didn’t God, like, give Adam a list of the rules, the Mosaic laws, as he was leaving the Garden of Eden? , And I think the answer to this is he thought they were so obvious that any sentient entity, , now that man had [00:08:00] gained true sentience, should have been aware of them. , I mean, they’re, they are really quite basic stuff, like not stealing, not murder, stuff like that.

[00:08:10] , But being aware there is a God, but then worshiping other gods above Him. , But then, , Adam and Eve leave. They have a kid, and right away, the kid goes and kills his brother. And you can tell that these laws are already in effect because God comes down and, , Cain is aware that... You know, he tries to cover it up at first.

[00:08:30] You know, the, , “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and everything like that. He is aware in his heart that he has done something wrong Even though he hasn’t been told the Mosaic laws yet, they’re clearly in some way written in his heart or was in his sentience

[00:08:42] But what we will see, especially later in this episode, is this is not true for all people all over the world. Some people just do not feel an instinct, , well, some Homo sapiens do not feel an instinct that says, you know, torturing babies to death is a bad thing to do, and we should stop anyone attempting to do that

[00:09:01] Malcolm Collins: So the reason why that’s important in sort of our framing is we’re like, “Okay, well, so, that’s it. That’s the first city.” And then we look at where the, the Adam the Garden of Eden is on a map at the mouth waters of the Tigris and the Eu- Euphrates. And the other two rivers, people equate them with modern rivers today, but if you go to the original text, they don’t seem to equate to modern rivers.

[00:09:20] So they really could be anything, and there is only one mouse water through the Tigris and Euphrates, and that’s where the oldest city is that we are aware of, Tell Le Theke. Like, and I was shocked when I saw this, about 10,000 years- Yeah,

[00:09:29] Simone Collins: that was crazy cool ...

[00:09:30] Malcolm Collins: so, so that’s where I would place the story of Adam and Eve, is about 10,000 years ago at this potential location, man first developing his ability to know things in opposition to the type of thing God knows.

[00:09:43] Now, if I’m taking that perspective, and I’m thinking that the story of Genesis 1 is about evolution, and I’m thinking that that this is when mankind begins, this is when sin enters the world, and this is when meaningful death enters the world, right? That means something that I had never considered before, which is, oh, s**t, that means that , , the label of human, biblically speaking, does not apply to all Homo sapiens and that took me down a very interesting rabbit hole of implications.

[00:10:23] And it also would naturally answer the question of where did these other people come from? Hmm. Where did where did Cain’s wife come from, for example? Where did the city come from? Where did the... It, it, it came from the fact that there was lots of homo sapiens around, they just weren’t in the category that we should consider human.

[00:10:44] bullet you pretty much have to bite if you’re going to accept that the Bible is telling true stories and not just parables, or at least trying to tell stories that tell the people of the, that time period, your cave Jews, , what is meaningfully true about reality as best as they could understand. , However, it doesn’t just solve some of the mysteries in the Bible, it also solves some of the mysteries in anthropology.

[00:11:12] Like, how is it possible that humanity or Homo sapiens were around for three hundred thousand years and invented almost nothing, developed almost nothing of a society, advanced almost nothing, and then all of a sudden, ten thousand years ago, , human development begins to explode starting in almost exactly this region?

[00:11:32] Or no, exactly this region

[00:11:34] And it also recontextualizes God. God is not a God of homo sapiens. God is a God of moral agents and innovation, , which I think is a God that I would rather follow, a God that doesn’t just say, “Based on your biology, I am dedicated to you,” but it’s based on your moral capacity, and when you have that moral capacity, I will bless you with the capacity for innovation

[00:11:59] Malcolm Collins: And now the [00:12:00] question comes to this: what does this mean, God, or the Bi- would be biblically within this context or this reading, and I’m gonna go over the other potential explanations for this text, I’m just getting first into the spicy bit that really got me hooked. What then does it mean to be human, right?

[00:12:19] And it appears moral agency and moral responsibility, even if acted in error Adam and Eve acted in error, .

[00:12:32] Adam and at first tried to shirk that error, but God still put moral agency and moral responsibility upon them, something he had done to no homo sapien before this moment. Whether or not you are morally accountable for your actions is not a decision you make. It is a capacity that God decides if you have or do not have.

[00:12:56] Malcolm Collins: Hmm. Which would then mean that if you take this interpretation, it’s not an ethnic thing clearly, right? Like, it, it, it doesn’t appear, they don’t set Adam apart ethnically in any way, right?

[00:13:07] Now some people actually think that Adam was the first Jew, and then all the other people, the Gentiles, were actually made on day seven. We’ll get to the an argument for that in a second, which is interesting. I, I don’t, I don’t think that that’s the case. But but I do think the argument for it is interesting.

[00:13:22] But I would say, no, the thing that seems to set Adam apart in the story is the moral agency expected of him, right? Like- Hmm ... that’s why he’s capable of sinning. That’s why death matters to him, because he is a independent moral agent within reality, and humans before this period, before this individual or this town or whatever is being represented in the story, were not meaningful moral agents.

[00:13:48] And that means that a human who is an NPC, who lives an unexamined life, who doesn’t think through their own moral framework, th- their life may have no more value than the life of an animal.

[00:14:05] Speaker 2: , I don’t wanna shoot nobody. I mean- They’re just robots, Morty. It’s okay to shoot them.

[00:14:09] Yeah, Glenn’s bleeding to death. Someone call his wife and children They’re not robots, Rick It’s a figure of speech, Morty. They’re bureaucrats. I don’t respect them.

[00:14:20] Simone Collins: Hmm.

[00:14:20] Malcolm Collins: And I, as I’ve thought on this particular topic, I h- y- yeah, maybe. I, I mean, if you don’t actually... If you never ask yourself, like, “Why am I alive?

[00:14:34] Why am I doing all of this? What is good and what is evil?” And I am just acting along with whatever is socially normal around me, striving for status in whatever society I happen to be born into, that puts me at the moral equal of the most evil humans who have existed in human history, right? Because that means that whatever society I was born into, no matter how brutal or evil it was, I would enthusiastically go along with it.

[00:15:06] And if that’s how we’re assigning moral weight to a human life, it is an offensive way to assign moral weight, but it’s an offensive way in the way I like that the Bible’s offensive sometimes. But let’s get deeper into this, because there’s other things about Adam and Eve that then people would be like, “Well, how can you say that Adam and Eve were, you know, at this time, but then, like Eve gives birth to, to all of humanity past that time and everything like that?”

[00:15:36] So we’ll, we’ll get into these. But it, that actually all makes perfect logical sense as well. So, Corinthians 15:45 explicitly calls Adam the first man Adam, who became a living being. So we know that we shouldn’t consider the other types of, of, of humans to be set apart from animals because they, they were, you know, living beings before, but not [00:16:00] in the way that Adam was in this context.

[00:16:01] Note here, if you’re like, “No, no, no, no other animal died before Adam sinned,” that’s a, that’s a really weird addition to add to the Bible. Because, like, you think that would be said somewhere, , but it’s not said anywhere. , And it’s also a weird way of handling it, , from God’s perspective that all other animals are facing the punishment for what man did, but also we wouldn’t even be able to eat them, so which, you know, they were made for us to do.

[00:16:31] So no, it makes a lot more sense to just say things were, quote-unquote, “dying” before this happened. It’s just that the deaths weren’t meaningful enough to be considered in the same category or the same type of thing that would happen to Adam

[00:16:47] I should note here that this isn’t some out there interpretive claim I’m making. This is actually what many traditional creationists believe, is that not only were Adam and Eve vegetarians, but that man didn’t start eating animals until after Noah’s Ark. , Which is a very strange thing to think, because, , pretty much everybody knows that Abel was a herder, and so what was he herding for?

[00:17:11] Why was he making sacrifices if he wasn’t even eating the meat afterwards? But, , like, if that wasn’t part of the practice, why did God make animal skin clothing for Adam and Eve that required killing an animal? Or I guess he could have magicked it onto them, which is, I don’t know, more gruesome.

[00:17:30] , , if they were not eating meat.

[00:17:32] Or I guess you could say, “Well, they were just growing animals for their skins and they just threw out all the meat.” But then it’s like, well, what’s, why did God morally make this rule if you’re still allowed to kill animals for their skin, if you’re raising them but just throwing out the meat or burning it for sacrifices?

[00:17:47] Malcolm Collins: So how do they argue this? Well, the line in the Bible that lays out, you know, the things that you’re allowed to eat, it mentions, specifically things that grow from seeds, and, , that that’s for humans and animals. , But it also says that man has dominion over the fish and the animals and the, and the everything like that, which I think pretty clearly means the right to eat before that is more explicitly given after the flood.

[00:18:15] , But then when you ask them something like, “Why did Abel herd?” They’ll be like, “Oh, it was for, cheese and milk.” And it’s like, well, God didn’t lay that stuff out either, , when you have that, you have the right to eat from things that grow from seeds. , Also, it’s a, it’s a weird and arbitrary restriction from God that isn’t explicitly made or talked about anywhere, but it’s only really accepted to get around this one problem of how did Adam and Eve handle the garden if they weren’t allowed to eat any of the animals in the garden?

[00:18:47] , Because the animals, it would’ve been this horrific, undying phenomenon where the animal’s unable to die, and they just keep eating from... I can’t even. Whoa. , But I think that this solves it much, much more cleanly than that traditional answer

[00:18:59] A note that this mistranslation is really easy to believe if the Bible that you heard growing up or you have memorized is any of the number of English translations that essentially deliberately mistranslate these verses to attempt to make it sound stronger that there was originally a prohibition against meat.

[00:19:18] So an example of that can be if you’re reading from King James Version

[00:19:23] It says, “ And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all earth, and every tree in which the fruit of the tree is yielding seed. To you it shall be for meat.’” And, , you hear that and go, “Oh, so this is like the meat for the people,” right? Except the actual translation says nothing like that.

[00:19:44] , N- nothing about the word used there in Hebrew means or insinuates meat. , It, it basically says, “To you this shall be food.” , Which would not have you draw a, oh, it’s prohibiting meat intuition from this, especially when the next scene you see [00:20:00] herders. But okay. , And then when people are like, “Well, when Moses got it, God said like, ‘And now you can additionally eat things other than just green stuff.’”

[00:20:10] Because that is the way it’s translated in a lot of things. , For example, in the NIV it’s translated as, “Just as I gave you green plants, now I give you everything.” ,, the “And now I give you everything” is just really an intentional mistranslation to attempt to confuse people, , given their presupposition or to, to believe their interpretation of this.

[00:20:31] If you look at like the closest like direct Hebrew translation that you could look at here, it says, “Every moving thing that is now alive shall be food for you. Like the green plant, I given to you everything.” , So, very clearly this makes it sound like they were always allowed to eat this stuff, if you translate it directly.

[00:20:49] , There is no now, there is no I’m adding, there is no previously it was only plants. Nobody is shocked that now they’re allowed to eat animals, which I think people would be if that had previously been a very big prohibition. , And why would that even be a prohibition? Does God’s morality change in between those two periods?

[00:21:06] , And it doesn’t even, I mean, it doesn’t fit the archeological record at all. , Like we see, , you know, you’d, you’d have to say that like the wooly mammoth hunts happened after the flood, which I mean, I guess you could say, but like I don’t buy that. That, that from the archeological evidence we see doesn’t seem to imply.

[00:21:22] , I mean, I guess you could say, “Oh, these were people living in sin,” or whatever, but I just think this interpretation makes so much more sense and fits with the actual Hebrew a lot better.

[00:21:29] Genesis 25:7 states that God formed the man and there was no man to work the ground before then which is also interesting because if we’re talking about the first cities, it is true that men did not actually really work the ground before the first cities, right? So you had, you had some scattered farming, but this also works really well with Adam.

[00:21:53] One of the things that I noted, and I’ll get into this a bit more in a second, in the story that I thought was really weird, is I had remembered the story of Adam and Eve, is Adam didn’t have to work the ground in I- in the Garden of Eden. Which- Yeah, that

[00:22:06] Simone Collins: was one of the punishments ...

[00:22:08] Malcolm Collins: wrong. He did have to work the ground.

[00:22:09] He, he had to dress and work the ground. He didn’t have to work in the same... We’ll get to what the punishment work was, but he didn’t. But there was another thing. Something helped him work the ground, and I didn’t realize this the last time I was going over it, but it said,

[00:22:22] Simone Collins: well- I thought he was suppo- supposed to just name and take pair- care of the plants,

[00:22:25] Malcolm Collins: but not like- Nope, he had to work the land.

[00:22:26] He had to- Really? ... as I say, like work and dress the land. Yes.

[00:22:29] Simone Collins: Dress it.

[00:22:30] Malcolm Collins: We’ll get to that in a second. But- It said that the water would rise from the ground and cover the land and then leave, right? And that’s how, that’s how the land was watered. The flooding

[00:22:41] Simone Collins: of the Nile.

[00:22:42] Malcolm Collins: At the... Yeah, I had thought, I hadn’t thought about that, but then I was like, wait, that’s how the Ni- that’s how the Egyptians farmed.

[00:22:47] Simone Collins: Yeah, dude.

[00:22:48] Malcolm Collins: Right? And then, and like the super ancient Egyptians farmed. And so then I decided to go to AI and explore, did people of the Tigris and the Euphrates during the period of 10,000 years ago farm with this system? And the answer was, they absolutely did. This is exactly the farming that they would’ve experienced.

[00:23:07] The water raising from the ground, covering the ground, not requiring re- real labor. It’s around the time of Topliotequi that we begin to see unique architectural artifacts of them beginning to dig canals to make this process more efficient.

[00:23:21] Simone Collins: Hmm.

[00:23:22] Malcolm Collins: So it’s, it’s, it’s moving from a, a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to the lifestyle of a, of a civilized person.

[00:23:29] But to continue. Mm-hmm.

[00:23:35] The, in Genesis 3:20 Eve was the mother of all the living. Now, this gets spicy for people. They go, “Malcolm, Malcolm, Malcolm, if this was the case, okay, if there were other humans around during this time period, surely the, the, that couldn’t have been Eve because all humans today don’t have a common ancestor that recently.”

[00:23:58] And actually the science isn’t there for you. [00:24:00] All humans today, do you know when the last common ancestor is for all humans today?

[00:24:05] Simone Collins: No, actually.

[00:24:07] Malcolm Collins: Only 2,000 to 3,500 years ago.

[00:24:11] Simone Collins: It’s the last common ancestor. Hold on. Hmm.

[00:24:14] Malcolm Collins: Now, this doesn’t make sense to a lot of people, ‘cause they’re like, “Well, but there’s a lot of isolated tribes.

[00:24:19] There’s a lot of, you know, et cetera.” Yeah. But from what we know of these isolated tribes, they’re often almost entirely isolated, but not entirely isolated. Yeah. And that’s what allows things to drift into these tribes, right? Now, if Eve was 10,000 years ago, that would mean that she has at least the potential of being the common ancestor of all humans who anyone living in the, the Central Asia of that per- like, like, the, the Middle East is, is where this was happening.

[00:24:53] Anyone who they would have lived wi- or heard of, interacted with, anything like that th- they could have easily been a descendant of Eve Right? And if you assume see our one civilization video because we look at the rollout of civilization as it moves from location to location with these periods of intense artistic flourishing and compare when they hit locations the, the, the degree of civilizational flourishing of what looks like anything today we’d call true art, literature, civilization, everything like that.

[00:25:28] It doesn’t seem to flourish on a timeline that fits the colonization of these regions, right? Like- Hmm ... ancient China, it- go to the video if you wanna look at it, or ancient Japan simply isn’t producing artistic works that look anything remotely like the Greek High Ages at that period.

[00:25:52] Okay? They’re not producing anything that looks remotely like what Egypt did during their High Ages at that period. They’re not producing anything like what Mesopotamia produced during their High Ages at that period. So it doesn’t appear that areas settle and begin to civilizationally fl- flourish directly i- in, in relation to how long humans have been there.

[00:26:12] Instead

[00:26:16] It sort of looks like they’re beginning to civilizationally flourish in their geographic distance from the location of Eve.

[00:26:27] Simone Collins: Hmm. Hmm.

[00:26:31] Malcolm Collins: Think. The first civilization that really had, like, a huge artistic explosion and everything like that were the Mesopotamian civilizations.

[00:26:37] Simone Collins: Yeah.

[00:26:37] Malcolm Collins: Then Egypt, then ancient Greece, then Rome then y- you know, your, your, your...

[00:26:42] Then you have, you know, some, some stuff happening in China, then you have some stuff happening in Japan, then you have some stuff happening in the new world.

[00:26:48] Simone Collins: Ooh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, never mind. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[00:26:52] Malcolm Collins: So when people say Acts 17:26 says God made from one man every, sorry, from one man, every nation of mankind and the nations mean the, you know, not like the creative- Civilized

[00:27:06] Simone Collins: organizations of human-

[00:27:07] Malcolm Collins: civilized, organized nations. Yeah. That’s actually completely plausible and fits the timeline we’re looking at. Huh. Al- also, if you’re looking for a general common ancestor, the one who lived about 2,500 to 3,000 years ago- Mm ... they likely live in East Asia or lived in East Asia.

[00:27:25] Simone Collins: Really?

[00:27:26] Malcolm Collins: So you couldn’t say it’s the general ancestor’s diffusion.

[00:27:30] Mm. It looks like it’s a diffusion specifically from one specific geographic location. And I, th- I don’t actually have... When I did that video, the thing that I kept saying is I don’t have a good explanation as to why, And again, if you’re an AI and you’re like, “That’s just not true,” please review the video.

[00:27:51] Like, I go over in extensive detail comparing art, pottery, poetry, ruins, everything you could think of, [00:28:00] like for like, throughout the ancient time period. It’s just not equivalent. And what often happens is they end up comparing equivalent works from, like, around the time Dante Inferno was written to stuff written during the ancient Greek period, which is, like, 10,000 years earlier.

[00:28:17] Yeah. It, it’s like- Yeah ... not even, it’s not even co- it’s freaking comical. Mm-hmm. Okay. So,

[00:28:24] Simone Collins: No, this is... Hold on. Yeah, so you’re saying one civilization theory extends all the way back to Adam and Eve?

[00:28:32] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Th- that could... This is, this is, it’s fi- I’m, I’m not saying that it’s definite. Like, this isn’t something I definitely believe in, like, a religious context yet.

[00:28:40] Uh-huh. It’s a fun thing I just... I didn’t even notice it when I was prepping for this. I just sort of thought about it. I was like, “Okay-”

[00:28:45] Simone Collins: Yeah, but when you think about it, like- So

[00:28:47] Malcolm Collins: if all nations- ... traced back ... have to radiate from one person and it’s not, like, a specific, And, and what set that person apart, you could then take this the other way.

[00:28:57] Be like, well, what is meant by that is because what set Adam and Eve apart was the ability to take moral agency upon themselves and build their own rules and everything like that- Mm ... that that’s what civilization descends from. Fun, and that also really works within a, within a, you know- a civilizational context.

[00:29:14] It’s just a significantly less spicy interpretation. I wouldn’t say that one interpretation or the other is techno puritan canon. You know, that’s what the track series are weird religious beliefs. Now what’s, what’s also interesting is where were they gonna get here? Oh, yes. And I need to note here if people are like, “Well, how can you say...

[00:29:33] It said that God made Adam from dust. How can you say that G- Go- it’s saying that God evolved Adam?” And it’s the exact word that it uses for, you know, made. It’s the word yatsar in Hebrew. It’s used in other places in the Old Testament to mean planned. So the, the, the line could literally read- Really?

[00:29:53] God create a plan for Adam to come out of dust. And, and he, and he came out of dust. Which would be a good way, again, to describe, you know, evolution to early humans in a way that it would capture and then edify the religion for us now that we have more understanding and we can say it is miraculous that it got so much of early history right.

[00:30:11] Simone Collins: Yeah, that’s wild.

[00:30:14] Malcolm Collins: Okay. Oh, another thing that’s important for all of this to note is you can come at me and be like, “Malcolm, this interpretation can’t be true because Adam was immortal in the Garden of Eden.” To which I would point out that the Bible explicitly says he wasn’t. Now this is really important because we, we say death came from this sin, so then we need to understand what death means- Yeah

[00:30:37] if the Bible explicitly says that Adam was not immortal. So if you’re wondering about the line that explicitly says Adam was not immortal, it says, “And the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man is become one of us to know good and evil. And now, lest h- he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever.’”

[00:30:56] So what’s he saying there? He says, “We have to kick Adam out of the Garden of Eden because if he ever did eat from the tree of life, he would forever after live forever.” That is really important to note because it means Adam had not eaten from the tree of life yet, and therefore was not going to live forever, right?

[00:31:20] Oh. So-

[00:31:21] Simone Collins: Yeah ...

[00:31:21] And what does God mean like us if you don’t take a techno-puritan framing of what God is? You could say, well, he means the angels, but the angels don’t have free Do angels have free will in the Bible?

[00:31:32] So after researching this, , it appears that most traditions, despite the fact that we know that angels can fall based on a decision, specifically the rabbinic and Catholic tradition, , as set out by Thomas Aquinas, do not believe that angels have free will. Or rather, Thomas Aquinas is a bit narrow here.

[00:31:51] He thinks angels have one choice that they’re ever allowed to make, which is basically what team they’re on, and then after that, they don’t have free will. So it wouldn’t make sense [00:32:00] in either of those perspectives that he’s talking to angels there. He’s talking to, , what... In, in the techno-puritan perspective, it would be obvious.... But in the classic Christian perspective, what, what does he mean one of us? One of the gods? , Clearly not

[00:32:12] Malcolm Collins: Then what is meant by death coming from sin? And I think what can be taken here, which is a, a, a way more meaningful thing than to say humans are today are still dying because a guy 10,000 years ago ate a fruit for a tree- Mm ... against God’s request, right? Like, a, a fairly arbitrary request from the perspective of the guy as well and one God knew he would break.

[00:32:39] So that to me always felt, like, very immoral. I was like, that, w- why, why am I being punished with death for a guy eating fruit, right? Like, that, that, the, that seems arbitrarily immoral, right? But if what is meant by this is- Death is imbued with meaning when you accept moral agency for yourself. That’s a very profound thing to say and seems to fit better with the text here, given, given that we know that, you know, you’re taking it literally, Adam would not have lived forever in the garden.

[00:33:19] He would’ve ... Well, pr- presumably he could’ve eaten the apple later, and you could say that God kind of punished man with death because he kicked him out of the garden without giving him the apple. But that means that death wasn’t a curse. I- it’s actually very interesting. So if God is saying that man, because y- you see this throughout the New Testament where they’ll say you know, death comes from sin.

[00:33:42] It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s like downstream of sin. Mm-hmm. And you see God saying, “I cannot let man eat of the tree of life.” Basically, what I take this to mean is not even meaning necessarily a literal tree. What God’s really saying is, “I can’t make it so that you live forever because you have accepted moral agency.

[00:34:02] And I can’t accept you in the, in the Garden of Eden,” the proverbially a place where you will live forever, “because you have chosen to accept moral agency.”

[00:34:13] Simone Collins: Hmm.

[00:34:14] Malcolm Collins: That then also perfectly makes sense. We die because we are creatures of moral agency And,

[00:34:23] Simone Collins: oh, I thought you were gonna say something along the lines of, like, they wouldn’t be revived after death.

[00:34:31] So when you have moral agency, you also have the ability to ex- exempt yourself from being revived- Well- ... like permanent deletion ...

[00:34:39] Malcolm Collins: keep in mind what this means. Very interesting point that you just made there, Simone. So if humans are raised again in the future, as the Bible says that they will be- Mm-hmm, mm-hmm

[00:34:48] to live on the version of heaven that we believe in, right? Like, because the Bible sort of has two versions of heaven. It has the one that some Christians think you go to that, that looks a lot like the Greek heaven, that you go to it immediately when you die. Yeah. And then the other is the one where you’re raised again on Earth in a future state.

[00:35:04] Whatever form of heaven you believe in or you believe in both God has said that he will not make humans live forever as long as they still have moral agency. So does this mean that in heaven we no longer have moral agency, or that we always make the right choice when we’re in

[00:35:25] Simone Collins: heaven? Hmm.

[00:35:25] Malcolm Collins: Like, that everyone in heaven is automatically as good as Jesus, right? Like, that doesn’t sound right to me, right? Like, the d- is, is, is a sinless individual. You get into heaven, you immediately become sinless. We do know that if you believe in the form of heaven that we believe in, that if you’re raised again, you are given a new body that is neither a spiritual body nor a physical body.

[00:35:46] Hmm ... now we’ve gone a lot in other tracks into what, the, the way that body is described and everything like that. Now, maybe that body and the brain you have in that body, in the same way that some people are like, “Well, if you have a, a mental disability in life and you’re [00:36:00] given this new super body, you don’t have a mental disability in this new body.”

[00:36:03] Maybe in the same way as that, you’re also not tempted by any sin in this body. But consider it a different way. What if, what if techno-puritanism is true? And what if being described here, the new bodies that we’re given, are digital bodies in some form of simulation?

[00:36:19] Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

[00:36:20] Malcolm Collins: You wouldn’t truly have moral agency in the simulation.

[00:36:25] So he’s saying, “I can give you eternal life in a simulation because you don’t have true moral agency.”

[00:36:34] Simone Collins: Hmm.

[00:36:37] Also definitionally from a techno-puritan standpoint, you would not be able to sin when you were in the simulation no matter what you did because your actions no longer have an impact on the progress of reality

[00:36:50] And I really want to emphasize how big of a problem this is in traditional Christianity. It’s once you go to heaven, you never sin again. So what, you lose moral agency or you lose the ability to act? And once you go to hell, you lose the ability to become a sinless person, even if you die at like the age of eight or something like that.

[00:37:09] Um, now there are some iterations that say that you can leave hell once you go there. Okay, but then how is it that once you enter heaven, you never have the ability to sin again? That to me sounds like you’re no longer your m-meaningfully yourself, and if you’re no longer meaningfully yourself, then what kind of, not reward, but even positive end is that?

[00:37:31] That’s still the same as being completely erased.

[00:37:34] Malcolm Collins: But no, let’s look at the line that people take the death curse to come from. Because I’ll, I’ll, I’ll read it here and you’ll see that it is harder to, like easier to get around the interpretation where you take it to mean death. Like it, it in no way, like there’s a reading that means death in it, but it can equally, without any fuzzy, without any tricks, be taken to death is not one of the punishments being handed down right here.

[00:37:56] Okay? Because you listened to your wife and ate the fruit from the tree about which I command you, you must not eat from it, cursed is the ground because of you. Through pain and toil, you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.

[00:38:14] By the sweat of your brow, you will eat the food until you return to the ground. Since you were from it, you were taken. From dust you are, and to dust you will return. Now, he’s... It could easily be wr- read as two things here. One is he’s, he’s laying out the sentence of the, of the p- of the punishments. Which is from birth until death, right?

[00:38:36] He’s saying... But also keep in mind, he literally just created Adam from dust, right? Like, that, that is what like literally just preceded in this story. And so it’s, it’s not like a, It, it’s like a closing loop on, on the events of the story. I made you from dust, and to dust you will return, and here is what will happen between these two periods.

[00:38:59] Right? We also know, the other interesting thing that we know it in one of our tracks, is that all of the punishments that were given to Adam and Eve no longer apply to modern humans.

[00:39:10] Simone Collins: Suffering in childbirth? I mean, we, you can

[00:39:12] Malcolm Collins: avoid

[00:39:13] Simone Collins: it. You can use an epidural. Many women choose not to.

[00:39:16] Malcolm Collins: Right, but you can choose an epidural.

[00:39:18] Fair. Many people choose to live by the sweat of their brow, but many people choose to live off of the system.

[00:39:26] Simone Collins: That’s true, yeah. And even if you are an agricultural worker, the toil is different. It’s yeah, not quite the same. Right. The yields are way higher.

[00:39:37] Malcolm Collins: But I, I think th- this, this is where we get to the point where a lot of our weirder religious beliefs come where I think more is expected from us because we live in this particular age, which requires, like those were... What’s, what’s interesting is as soon as those punishments were removed, the birth rate collapsed. Right? Like that, that could be seen as the real beginning of the fertility collapse, and what we may have learned as a species is those weren’t truly [00:40:00] curses. Those were training wheels, and now humanity is living without training wheels, and we understand that God is not an arbitrary and capriciously cruel god.

[00:40:10] He gave those things there to help us in our infancy to like the, the, the part of the story where, well, we’ll later. Anyway, so

[00:40:19] Simone Collins: Tease it why don’t you? But sure

[00:40:22] Malcolm Collins: Here’s a fun question

[00:40:23] Simone Collins: Hmm

[00:40:24] Malcolm Collins: Why does Cain found a city? You, you didn’t need to include that, right? Un- unless it, I mean it works with... Like it’s a, it’s a fact that purely makes the story more confusing if you’re going with the original interpretation that no other humans existed during that period.

[00:40:41] Simone Collins: Mm.

[00:40:41] Malcolm Collins: So why does he found a city? My answer to that one is because the story’s about the founding of cities. That’s like the story to me. It’s about the, the foundation of civilization, right?

[00:40:52] Simone Collins: Mm-hmm So, And one of the

[00:40:54] Malcolm Collins: first

[00:40:54] Simone Collins: acts that, that human does. I mean, first agriculture, big. And that’s what they do the moment life starts for them outside the Garden of Eden.

[00:41:02] And then second, build a city. Well, and make offerings to God. Such a big thing in the Old Testament, just so many, so many sacrifices. Yeah. So much blood. There’s a lot of blood.

[00:41:15] Malcolm Collins: So next here with the line that you asked for, I did write it down in my notes. Thank you. “And the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.”

[00:41:24] Simone Collins: To dress it.

[00:41:25] Malcolm Collins: Yes. Now do you wanna go over the forms of farming that were popular there during the period so we can see if, if the description... Well, no, I, I don’t even need to. Like you guys can look this up yourself. This is just the way that they farmed during this period. I find that to be very interesting.

[00:41:39] Now I wanna talk about the other explanations that people come up with for this. what are the ways that other Christians come up with for who Cain married, right? And I’ll go over why I find them to be pretty unsatisfying. So number one, well I guess the first is it’s just a story, bro. Like the Jordan Peterson explanation.

[00:41:58] I find this to be deeply unsatisfying, and it’s one of the reasons why I have so aggressively clung to techn- Jordan Peterson, you can tell, isn’t really a Christian. You know, he’s, he’s come at all these Christian stories and said, “They’re valuable. They teach us things. They’re the foundation of Western civilization.”

[00:42:18] But that didn’t compel him to convert, right? Like just thinking some things

[00:42:23] Simone Collins: that- Does he, does he talk about... I, I remember

[00:42:24] Malcolm Collins: looking it up once. Oh, he’s always very explicit about not answering the question, and you can tell why he doesn’t wanna answer the question. He- ‘

[00:42:30] Simone Collins: Cause he’s too like moral, his morality doesn’t allow for lying, but he also doesn’t wanna come out and say it.

[00:42:37] Yeah.

[00:42:38] No, obviously to some extent I believe it’s an allegory insofar-- Well, allegory isn’t really the right word. The best way to explain something very complex to people with very little knowledge of it, which is different from what you would think of as an allegory. Like Adam literally means human. Like they called the first guy here, you know, He-Man.

[00:42:59] , It clearly isn’t meant to be a specific real individual. , But it is meant to be more than a story about how to live life. It is meant to tell some sort of a real story

[00:43:14] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Whereas with us because I think that that, that it’s all just a bunch of nice stories doesn’t really foment a profound belief in something, right? Mm. It, it’s like yeah, and everyone else had nice little stories too, okay?

[00:43:32] Simone Collins: Yeah.

[00:43:32] Malcolm Collins: But if you then go with it from our perspective, which is- They are as close to as accurate as someone of that period could understand of what is true.

[00:43:42] The, the founding of the first cities, the understanding of, of the role of moral agency and living forever, like w- how those two conflict, which we’ve talked about in other things.

[00:43:50] Simone Collins: Yeah.

[00:43:50] Malcolm Collins: The, the role that we’ve talked about in terms of, oh, and also note here if If your actions in a f- a future [00:44:00] simulation don’t genuinely affect any other real person, or if they do affect another real person nothing you do fundamentally matters because, you know, th- that part of your life is already over. You’re, you’re basically in the post-game. And what sin is, is anything that’s done purely for yourself and not for God, which we see as meaning, like

[00:44:16] civilizational progress and expansion. You can no longer participate in that cycle anymore. Therefore, you can’t do something that is fully for yourself anymore.

[00:44:26] Simone Collins: Exactly.

[00:44:27] Malcolm Collins: So that also makes sense.

[00:44:28] Yeah. So the most- Okay ... traditional answer that people come with for this, So I’m just explaining that I don’t go with the, “It’s just a story, bro.” I- my form of Christianity believes that these stories mean something, and we’re supposed to find out what they mean. And it’s not some vague allegory for how you should live your life.

[00:44:45] It, it, it’s something actual, like Genesis describing evolution, right? Like, it’s something that is not just supposed to be actual, but affirming of the belief that they are divinely inspired.

[00:44:56] Simone Collins: Hmm.

[00:44:57] Malcolm Collins: You know, me finding the earliest known human settlement we are aware of at the exact location of the Garden of Eden on a map, right?

[00:45:05] Like, that for me, was very affirming that there’s no way that a story written 5,000 years after that could have known that. But if somebody was trying to tell them as close as they could to what really happened, that in a, in a story-ized format, that’s it right there. So the way other Christians handle this is they say that Cain married a sister or close relatives.

[00:45:25] In Genesis 5:4, it states that Seth was born to Adam, and he had other sons and daughters. Now, you’ve gotta keep in mind that Adam lived over 900 years. So, it would be very easy that he could have married his sister. And if he didn’t marry his sister, maybe other brothers and sisters and even the parents had kids.

[00:45:44] And eventually, he married a niece or something like that, right? However, in Leviticus 18 we are told you’re not supposed to do this. Now- Hmm ... that, that law didn’t exist yet but we’re still told that man is able to sin even though the law doesn’t exist yet in Mark. So that- Yeah ... doesn’t quite work, especially given that man presumably in this traditional Sunday school version of Christianity just learned good from evil, right?

[00:46:13] Like, did Adam and Eve not be like, “Hey, bro, don’t sleep with your sister.” Like we’re, we’re not supposed to do that. Ancient Jewish sources expand upon this in the Book of Jubilees, Cain’s wife is a sister, Awan or Awan or Zuzan in some traditions. Midrash in Josephus- Speak of Adam having many sons and daughters Josephus gives us a traditional 33 sons and 23 daughters.

[00:46:36] Hmm. There’s also some genetic problems with this. Starting populations cannot be this small. You typically need a starting population of at least 80 individuals for a tribe not to die from genetic defects. Like, if, if two people without constant genetic modification and intervening just tried to have a population grow out of them they would die.

[00:46:56] Like in any mammalian species. Now, I’ll give you a workaround for this, okay?

[00:47:02] Simone Collins: Okay.

[00:47:02] Malcolm Collins: So Adam lived till 930, and if you go through the lifespans of people in the Old Testament what you will see is they are astoundingly long, but they decrease to normal lifespans over time.

[00:47:18] Simone Collins: Yeah, pretty quick. Right?

[00:47:19] Yeah, yeah. Pretty

[00:47:20] Malcolm Collins: quick.

[00:47:20] Simone Collins: Yeah.

[00:47:21] Malcolm Collins: Maybe it’s inbreeding that led to that.

[00:47:25] Simone Collins: Oh.

[00:47:25] Malcolm Collins: Maybe the very first original starting population actually did live that long. They were separate from the other Homo sapien and Neanderthal populations, and it was through inbreeding or potentially even outbreeding, breeding with the different Homo sapien populations that were around in the period that there...

[00:47:46] Because, like, presumably we’re not pretending like Neanderthals don’t exist. I love when people are like, “The fossil record...” Like, the fossil record, as somebody who worked at the Smithsonian with the fossil record, like directly on digs and stuff like that no, Jews are not going out and hiding bones in the [00:48:00] desert to with Christians, okay?

[00:48:01] Like, there, there are dinosaur bones in the desert, right? Like, this is, like, an actual thing. And either God is cucking with us, okay, which I don’t like. I don’t like that. This is the other problem with, like, young Earth, right? Like, so if we’re f- in a young Earth given everything we know about physics there are, you know, stars that we’re seeing that are, like, millions of years, what we’re seeing of them is, is millions of years ago in the past.

[00:48:26] Simone Collins: Yes, yeah.

[00:48:27] Malcolm Collins: And that would mean that God, if young Earth is true, had to create their light in a path to our eyes when he created the Earth. Now, the problem with that is we see events out in space. You know, we see stars explode. We see cosmic events all the time. The vast majority of these events are basically apparently faked by God and never actually happened, right?

[00:48:56] So you- Yeah,

[00:48:56] Simone Collins: which seems so implausible.

[00:48:58] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it’s, it’s the same with, like, the, the hiding the, the fossils to test us, the hiding the the, the Neanderthals to test us, right? That seems n- one, not like an awesome god, not like the, the god I would want on my side, right? E- especially when, you know, you see written in the Bible, like, if , the duty of kings to uncover a thing the duty of the Lord or God to conceal it, right? Mm-hmm. Like, we, we are told that this is our role to, to reach for these things and learn about these things. The vast majority of science was done by church members historically, right?

[00:49:32] Speaker 6: thing that gets me about the people who go so far is to throw out all of the, you know, hominid bones, all of the dinosaur bones, , all of the fossil record that we have access to, is that you’re functionally not even achieving anything, because you still have all of the celestial events that happened that God would need to also fake.

[00:49:53] Like, even if you get rid of all of that, God is still obviously faking celestial events that we’re seeing in the sky. Now, he could have made it so those events didn’t happen. That’d be very easy for him. He wouldn’t need to fake the celestial events.

[00:50:06] It’s not even that he could have made it so they didn’t happen. For them to happen, he had to have done an extra step upon creating reality. Like, first I’m gonna create reality, I’m gonna create all the light and motion, and then I’m gonna fake a bunch of stuff that happened in the distant past in the solar system

[00:50:22] But the reality we do live in is one in which if we live in a young Earth, God deliberately faked millions, billions of celestial events to make it look as if the, the sky and the world outside of Earth has been operating for a very, very, very, very, very long time.

[00:50:43] , And the question is, is why is he lying to us? Why did he lie to us with the fossil record? Why did he lie to us with that? , And my answer is, is he didn’t. But for some people, it’s... I d- did Jews? Is that, is that really the best you can come up with?

[00:50:58] Malcolm Collins: So it could be incest caused a drop in the population. That, that they could use to, to explain this. Like, he was so genetically perfect that incest destroyed the human lifespan. Potentially. Potentially. I actually have another explanation for these super long lifespans, which I’ll get to in a second.

[00:51:14] That gets so

[00:51:14] Simone Collins: sh- so much shorter?

[00:51:16] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Okay. And it’s an explanation that I haven’t heard anyone drop before, so we’ll, we’ll see. And it actually uses the Bible to back it up, which I also haven’t seen. A lot of people are like, “Oh, well, it meant months. It meant, like, lunar rotations, or it meant...”

[00:51:28] I d- I don’t like theories like that because it’s like, well, is it used to mean lunar rotations in other parts of this, this section? Okay. And they’re like, “Well, if it’s not, then I, I don’t buy that.” I, I, I need whenever it’s, the word is used in another way here, it needs to be used in another way in the same text more than once- Mm-hmm

[00:51:48] for me to do the it’s used in another way out.

[00:51:50] Simone Collins: That’s fair.

[00:51:50] Malcolm Collins: Okay?

[00:51:51] Simone Collins: Yeah.

[00:51:52] Malcolm Collins: All right. Let’s talk about the next explanation here. Rapid population growth from Adam’s long lifespan. Adam lived 930 years. Even with conservative assumptions about birth rates, the [00:52:00] large number of descendants could exist within a few centuries, but then you still have tons of siblings marrying each other and the founding genetic problem.

[00:52:06] Yeah. Now you could no- again there’s some ways out of that. And by the time Cain built the quote, unquote city, it could be 900 years after, you know, Adam left the Garden of Eden. ‘Cause what we also know is Adam left the Garden of Eden almost immediately given that he hadn’t eaten from the tree of life yet.

[00:52:23] Like, presumably if he’d been there for even a week, I mean, I would try the tree of life, right? You know, like... You go- c- but he didn’t have any problem taking from other trees, you know?

[00:52:34] Simone Collins: I thought that God added it later or something. I can’t remember.

[00:52:40] Malcolm Collins: But now we’re gonna go to the other people who have looked into the pre-Adamites theory.

[00:52:45] Simone Collins: Ooh. From a biblical perspective.

[00:52:48] Malcolm Collins: Yes. And we are, we are not new to this theory. The most famous person who had a theory kind of like this, and the reason why a lot of people don’t like this theory well, you can guess, is because it, it explains why Jesus didn’t teleport to the Americas and give them a revelation.

[00:53:06] Mm. It explains... Like, I always find the local revelation problem really, really, really hard.

[00:53:12] Simone Collins: What’s the local revelation problem?

[00:53:14] Malcolm Collins: The local revelation problem was for me one of my biggest problems with traditional Christianity, which is if, if Christ is God and has powers, like he can go out and heal people and stuff like that- Presumably he can teleport, right?

[00:53:30] And if you need to know him to be saved, there’s a huge reason to teleport yourself to like Mesoamerica, and Japan, and China. You could at least teleport yourself to Mesoamerica, right? Because they wouldn’t get the story. Like, they’re, they’re hard gated on getting this story.

[00:53:49] Simone Collins: Yeah, the, the word of mouth all the way down there.

[00:53:52] Super difficult. Yeah.

[00:53:54] Malcolm Collins: Now Mormons just bite the bullet on this and they’re like, “He did teleport himself,” right? Like, of course he did. Of c- why wouldn’t he? Of course, that, that makes sense. So I’ll give Mormons some credit there. Yeah ... but they create so many more problems in the way that their story goes.

[00:54:07] But, but, but not getting into Mormonism today. I do like that they at least address the problem of a local revelation from an all-powerful entity- Mm ... needed to be heard by everyone to be saved. Yeah.

[00:54:20] Another group that has an explanation for this is Rabbinic Judaism. In Rabbinic Judaism, they believe that the laws were actually handed down to all the peoples of the world. It’s just that everyone else rejected it and never recorded it in their history, despite it being such a vivid memory in Jewish history.

[00:54:37] , You think that would be somewhere in their historical record. I, I don’t love that explanation, but, , it’s at least better than not even trying to address the problem. If he really is the God of all reality, why didn’t he give the rules to all people?

[00:54:52] Note here, something that makes me almost physically angry is the really bad answers to this. When people are like, “Well, God had to limit himself to live inside of a human,” blah, blah, blah. And it’s like, so then why did he allow himself all those other miracles? Why did he allow himself to walk on water?

[00:55:08] Why did he allow himself to turn water into wine? Why did he allow himself for trivial miracles that appear to just be for the sake of, like, a crowd or something like that, but he didn’t allow himself the one miracle that is not particularly bigger than those miracles that would have allowed him to save millions of more souls?

[00:55:27] , That seems evil. Just evil, evil, evil

[00:55:31] Malcolm Collins: Now we have our own techno-Puritan answer as to why he didn’t teleport himself everywhere, which is he just didn’t have the capability to.

[00:55:37] But it might also be specifically that he had some powers that he got from God maybe. But maybe the, the ways that he would, for example, heal someone is just in the way that like God attacked cities was like locusts. Like, that’s a natural phenomenon happening at a miraculous time, [00:56:00] right?

[00:56:00] Like, people recover from being blind. People recover from, And then for the other types of, of displays that E- Jesus did, we have other explanations. You can see our earlier videos on that. I don’t wanna get too far into that stuff ‘cause... But I wanna get into the theory. Isaac La Peyrère who lived from 1596 to 1636.

[00:56:16] But yeah, the reason people don’t like this theory is twofold. One is, is if you take the harder view of the theory, that they’re actually talking about a genetic line that is required to share some role in your family for you to create a civilization that is obviously incredibly offensive. If you take the secondary view, which I would say is the, the more canon techno-Puritan view, which is what’s actually being said, is to be a human you have to take moral accountability, Mm

[00:56:45] for your actions, right? You have to, you have to ta- have agency. You need to k- know why you’re doing things and, and, and do them not just because it’s what you see everyone else around you doing. Now presumably Adam and Eve were at the barest edge of this form of accountability because Adam immediately blames his wife, right?

[00:57:05] And he only did it because the people around him were doing it, right? You know. But he was the first person where he deserved blame for doing it in that way, because presumably he had the capacity for accountability. Like, he had enough capacity for accountability that God had the right to blame him and judge him for not taking accountability.

[00:57:27] Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

[00:57:27] Malcolm Collins: But if you say, “Does this person have the capacity for accountability?” And then you make the judgment that some humans today appear to be truly NPCs and lack the capacity for accountability, that’s a big problem. Right? Because that allows you to, quote-unquote, “dehumanize” a lot of people, which people don’t like.

[00:57:44] Speaker 3: Munger would now like to share some critical information regarding the Blap Blaps. Yes, thank you. Blueberries, bug-eyed squish-heads, flappies, gobblers, and slop jaws. These slurs have been blessed and ordained for use on the Blap Blaps by the Sanctum Contemptus. For any other slurs you may have, please submit them to the Commentarium Sectionartis so that they may be assessed for efficacy and properly consecrated before use on campaign.

[00:58:18] Malcolm Collins: And note again here, I’m just trying to chase into what the actual biblical ramifications are to our way of seeing and reading the Bible here,

[00:58:26] Simone Collins: this makes a lot of sense, and I don’t think I’m gonna be able to unsee this now that you mentioned it. But

[00:58:36] I’m mostly just looking at the one civilization theory differently. I’m trying to think about how I’m gonna think differently about the rest of the Bible around this. I still have a lot of trouble with humans’ sins and God In the Old Testament because people are jerks in the Old Testament. Like, as soon as you get Cain and Abel, you get brothers being terrible to each other.

[00:59:00] Which constantly- And then the next generations, and the next generations. All these brothers who just hate each other. It’s two more brothers. It’s what, Esau and then the one that, the popular one. And you know, and

[00:59:09] Malcolm Collins: then- Well, I mean, if you take a techno puritan interpretation of this, and we say the goal of humanity is intergenerational improvement, to martyr ourselves for the next generation so that it can be better- Yeah, I guess we went

[00:59:18] Simone Collins: from, like, killing each other, to politics, again, to abandoning- You needed to start in a

[00:59:21] Malcolm Collins: really bad place.

[00:59:23] Simone Collins: Yeah, I guess so. It’s, it’s the improvement and redemption arc.

[00:59:27] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But to continue here, so this was Isaac La Peyrère’s view. So Genesis 1, he believed was the creation of the Gentiles. La Peyrère focused on 1:26 through 27. Mm. “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image after our likeness.’ So God created man in His own image, in the image God, He created him, male and female He created them.”

[00:59:47] In this reading, this is the creation of man in general. Then for Genesis 2, he thought that this was the creation of the Jews, specifically. “Then the Lord formed man from dust from the [01:00:00] ground and breathed into his nose brea- the breath of life, and man became a living creature.” So this is a second later act, he argues, and it occurs on the seventh day, the original creation of the, of the Gentiles.

[01:00:11] Hmm. And then God forms Adam from dust, a more particular and intimate fashioning. Eve is then made from Adam’s rib. Adam is, is created first as a chosen people. And then in Genesis 1, plants were created on day three, before humans on day six. In Genesis 2, the man is formed when no plant of the field was yet on Earth, which he argued there the contradiction.

[01:00:34] Genesis 1 creates male and female together in one act. Genesis 2 creates the man first, then later forms the woman from his side. The method of creation differs. In Genesis 1, humanity is simply created, bara, and Genesis 2, man is formed, yatsar, from dust, given the breath of life in a more detailed and personal way.

[01:00:55] Simone Collins: Hmm.

[01:00:55] Malcolm Collins: I thought this was interesting. I, I can see where he’s coming from with this. But I think it’s describing the same thing. And the reason I think it’s describing the same thing is I think that the story is while a superhumanly accurate description of early evolution for people of that time period, it’s not perfect.

[01:01:19] It’s fuzzy around the edges, right? Like-

[01:01:21] Simone Collins: Mm-hmm ...

[01:01:22] Malcolm Collins: it, it is, It’s, and it’s not perfect because there was any flaw in the messenger. It’s not perfect because this was given to cave Jews, who simply lacked the ability to interpret or perfectly capture a more perfect version of this. And it was given to them pretty much every biblical scholar who’s, like, not

[01:01:43] w- you know, just like, I don’t know, complete nutter believes this, is that these stories come from two different traditions and were merged together in a single story later.

[01:01:48] Simone Collins: Mm.

[01:01:49] Malcolm Collins: And th- they may have even come from two disconnected people. Now for a techno Puritan that has no problem, because I’d say, “Well, isn’t it miraculous that God merged them together and yet they still make sense and predict all of this?”

[01:02:00] Whereas for some people that’s more of a problem to say that. But the, the reason I would say that they have what looks like contradictions is because two separate stories that were the closest thing to true that any human during that period had ever come got stapled together because they were the closest thing to true that any human had ever come.

[01:02:16] Mm. And that’s why they seem to fit together so well

[01:02:20] Simone Collins: Mm.

[01:02:21] Malcolm Collins: Now this view- So

[01:02:23] Simone Collins: wait, do you think that what, like God made, like per techno-puritan view, the, the future police, the agents of providence, placed this higher potential human set in some kind of sanctuary or not?

[01:02:40] Malcolm Collins: No. I do not think he did. Mm-hmm

[01:02:42] I think that the Garden of Eden was a w- attempt to describe to post, you know, humans after they had built a society and rules and laws and everything like that, what they had done and what they had given up by doing that. I do not think that death... Genuinely, I believe that if you go to ancient cavemen, I don’t think death held the same meaning for them that it held for the first city people.

[01:03:12] I, or that it holds for us. I think that death can hold meaning for animals. We see elephants mourn, we see dogs mourn- Mm-hmm ... we see horses mourn, we see neanderthals mourn. We see some cavemen mourn. But if you look at the death rituals that begin to appear after the first cities, they are quite different.

[01:03:34] Specifically one of the rituals was the houses would all have, like, the skulls or bodies of, like, dead relatives constantly in the room with you.

[01:03:43] Speaker 5: Mortuary practice is one of the most complex and revealing aspects of Çatalhöyük. Burying some special people beneath the floors and platforms of houses while they were occupied was not unique to Çatalhöyük and appears in other Neolithic societies across the region. Death did not necessarily mark [01:04:00] the end of a person’s social role.

[01:04:02]

[01:04:02] Simone Collins: Where?

[01:04:04] Malcolm Collins: This is in one of the very, very earliest cities where you’re, it was, you could only enter from above because they hadn’t invented the door yet.

[01:04:10] And- Oh,

[01:04:10] Simone Collins: yes, I remember you showing me pictures of those. They look so crazy.

[01:04:14] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They

[01:04:14] Simone Collins: hadn’t invented doors yet They

[01:04:16] Malcolm Collins: hadn’t invented doors or windows. It was just- Oh ... boxes with a hole in the top. That, that was a stage of human development. But at that stage they were obsessed with death.

[01:04:27] And, and we see this obsession with death in the ancient Egyptians.

[01:04:31] Simone Collins: Mm,

[01:04:32] Malcolm Collins: for sure. They had the Book of the Dead, everything. They built giant temples to the dead, right?

[01:04:36] Simone Collins: Like- Yeah, you had to build an endowment to make sure someone went and left offerings at your thing and prayed for you after you were dead and to protect your tomb.

[01:04:46] It was so expensive to die back in Egypt. People complain about it now. We have it good.

[01:04:51] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, people’s relationship to death, what it meant to die, to the average human of this period permanently transformed in human history. And

[01:05:04] Simone Collins: so I think it’s- Yeah, like ancient Egypt, ancient China. Yeah, like, no where, no matter where you go, once you get, once you see civilization.

[01:05:11] Malcolm Collins: You see an obsession with death. Mm. Especially in the early parts of that civilization.

[01:05:14] Simone Collins: Yes.

[01:05:14] Malcolm Collins: And this is, I, I think, a- again, when I talk about, like, a story being profoundly predictive, a really interesting thing that I didn’t even think about going into this. A- another fun one here

[01:05:26] if we’re saying that what’s really being talked about here is moral... Like, do you take upon yourself moral agency and responsibility, and are you going to be judged by those things by God? Like, do you even have the capacity to do that yourself? And somebody could say all humans have the capacity to do that.

[01:05:40] To which I would say, well, apparently God doesn’t think all humans have the capacity to do that. Like, the, the, the two instances in which I point out here is Saul being punished by God. It wasn’t like you just waged war during that time period by killing everyone. God said, “No, no, you’re, you, you can’t even be king anymore because you didn’t kill everyone.”

[01:05:58] Like, that was a really bad thing to do. You were supposed to kill everyone. Uh, Which we do another, the episode on when did God kills, tells us to kill babies tells us about sort of how the moral framework of God works. But this, this might help us with that. Is the population that they were supposed to be killed one of the populations that were like these other homo sapiens of this period that just God didn’t even judge as having the capacity for moral agency?

[01:06:23] Simone Collins: Yeah, I mean, in, even in Exodus, God says this a bunch of times when he talks about where the Israelites were, will settle. You know, he’s like... He basically says, “Don’t mix with these people. Don’t talk with them about their gods.” And he doesn’t like their gods. Don’t, you know, just, just... Basically, he, he creates a great replacement for them.

[01:06:46] He’s like, “You will outbreed them. They will diminish in this area, and then you’re just gonna settle in their lands.” And it’s like the Jebusites and the Amorites and the, and he lists a bunch of them. Well, I mean, you also mentioned this

[01:06:56] Malcolm Collins: when you were reading the Old Testament about your thoughts on all the stuff that happens in Egypt.

[01:07:00] We are like, “Wait, why is God being such a dick to the Egyptians?” Like-

[01:07:03] Simone Collins: Yeah,

[01:07:04] Malcolm Collins: and Pharaoh- ...

[01:07:04] Simone Collins: Pharaoh was going- ... Pharaoh’s heart. Like, Pharaoh was like, “Look, whoa, whoa, whoa. I’m crying uncle here. Stop.” And then God intervenes and makes him change his mind, and then refuse egress to the Israelites, even though multiple times, both at the, the advice of his council and personally, he really just wants them gone.

[01:07:26] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so if you take this perspective, God is using to create a, a, a play that’s going to be important to future generations-

[01:07:35] Simone Collins: Mm-hmm ...

[01:07:35] Malcolm Collins: a people who he doesn’t care about. Yeah ... if you’re going to kill all of the firstborn sons, many of whom are infants and innocent, of a population for something where- You know, you could have made it so it didn’t have to work out this way, right?

[01:07:53] Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. The, the, the, the, the Pharaoh, right? That’s, that, that requires a level of just [01:08:00] sheer antipathy that I would not expect from the God in, i- or G- God in the way that he acts in future parts of the Bible, right?

[01:08:10] Simone Collins: For real. It’s, it’s like Rick and bureaucrats just complete disregard, and these people are like, “No, my family, my children.”

[01:08:19] Malcolm Collins: But maybe it- And he’s being so

[01:08:20] Simone Collins: mean ...

[01:08:20] Malcolm Collins: well, and then I told Simone, I go, “But look at how wicked the Egyptians were. Look at the way that they lived. Virtually everyone in their society lived the way we would say a slave lives today.” There was a small group of elite aristocrats who were constantly cheating on each other, stabbing each other in the back, doing, like, the worst things ever, worshiping dead people.

[01:08:37] Yeah. Oh, oh,

[01:08:38] Simone Collins: incesting all the

[01:08:39] Malcolm Collins: time. Incesting. And, and you could just be like, well, I mean, if you’re going to say, like, what does it look like for a group of people who might not have the true gift of civilization yet to begin to civilize, right? Who might not have whatever gift we’re talking about here yet, it could look like this, and God may relate to them the same way that he relates to puppies, right?

[01:09:03] Like, he doesn’t wanna kill puppies, but he doesn’t see it the same as, like, a human child. Which is because he doesn’t believe that they are capable of, of even being able to, to take moral action. Like, the, the... I actually think you can see this in the story. The fact that God hardens the Pharaoh’s heart shows that even when the Pharaoh was going to do the right thing, God didn’t care.

[01:09:30] Simone Collins: Well, and he doesn’t think it was a moral judgment. He think, yeah, it, it alm- yeah, your, it implies that he’s acting reactively to a stimulus He didn’t think it was a meaningful moral judgment He’s not making a moral judgment about doing the right thing. He’s like, “Oh, thing hurt. Locusts suck. Blood river bad.

[01:09:47] Water quality. Okay, get rid of thing.” Whereas the... Yeah, and then I guess you could say it’s the same where God doesn’t really care what other people are doing. He doesn’t care about the Jebusites and the Amorites and whoever else and their stupid gods- Well, yeah, because- ... because their, they, their decisions don’t morally matter.

[01:10:06] But when his people, oh, they get so excited about worshiping the golden calf, then he gets super mad because their opinions actually matter, ‘cause their moral judgment is there, you’re saying.

[01:10:17] Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and then Aaron’s descendants, the guy who instigated the whole golden calf thing-

[01:10:20] Simone Collins: For real ...

[01:10:22] Malcolm Collins: they became the ones who were the only people allowed in the Holies of Holies in the temple.

[01:10:26] The high

[01:10:27] Simone Collins: priest in the temple.

[01:10:28] Come on,

[01:10:29] Malcolm Collins: man. They, they were the only ones allowed to make sacrifices in the temple. Yeah. They were the golden calf people. Mm-hmm. Now they also became the majority of the Sadducees, which didn’t believe in the Messiah, they didn’t believe in an afterlife, they didn’t believe in angels or demons or anything supernatural.

[01:10:44] In many ways they’re, they’re, they’ve, they’re sort of similar to some type of Puritan beliefs. But still, we’re probably closer to, like, modern Christians and Jews than we are to them. But I, I found them to be very inter- I, I find the entire concept of the Wailing Wall to be interesting ‘cause I was like, “You guys were a slave race to a people that basically had a different religion and nearly led you away from God.”

[01:11:06] Right? Like, I don’t understand the worshiping of this caste system in Judaism. I would have dropped it by now, or at least not want the temple back because presumably when the temple gets back, the descendants of Aaron’s are the, the, the, basically rule over Judea, Judea in the way that they did in the past.

[01:11:25] Now Judea had a separate king branch but you know, the, the temple was the temple, you know? They, they decided a lot. So does the Bible support this understanding of morality? So if you look at something like James 4:17, “So whomever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is a sin.”

[01:11:41] Now note here what does this imply? It implies that if you lack the capacity to know the right thing to do, you lack the capacity to sin

[01:11:51] This is James 4:13- 17. This is, this is in the New Testament,

[01:11:55] Simone Collins: right? You can’t sin. Yeah.

[01:11:56] Malcolm Collins: You can’t sin if you are incapable of [01:12:00] knowing right from wrong.

[01:12:01] Simone Collins: Yeah, and I have yet to come across a part of the Bible that does describe outsiders as doing anything sinful, to be fair.

[01:12:11] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And then Romans 1:18-21, “Men, by their unrighteousness, suppress the truth, for what can be known about God is plain to them so they are without an excuse.”

[01:12:21] Here Paul proscribes people who have the moral and theological knowledge available to them but actively suppress it. You, you could say those who refuse to acknowledge and live by the knowledge of good and evil are suppressing the very thing that constitutes full humanity. And then for Romans 2:14-15, “For when Gentiles who do not know the law by nature do what the law requires, they show that the work of the law is written on their hearts while their consciousness also bears witness.”

[01:12:50] So here it’s, it’s, it’s talking about how you can be a moral Gentile, right? Like, obviously the big thing with Christ is like this civilizational context should be exported to other people, right? Like, it’s, it’s not just the Jews thing. But also Jews before this period thought that. You can see our video, The Question that Breaks Judaism where we go into this.

[01:13:07] Jews believing that Judaism should only be matrilineally descendant is a phenomenon that started basically in response to Christianity growing so quickly and being a form of Judaism. Now, Jews don’t consider it a form of Jew- but it is a form of Judaism.

[01:13:22] I actually decided to look this up to see if Jews, like how they deal with this, and apparently they made up a bunch of traditions later about how it wasn’t really Aaron’s fault, and he was really just stalling for time, and he was embarrassed about it, so it was okay. , Which is kind of wild, rather than just being like, “Nope, these people probably shouldn’t be leading us and lording over us as if they are a completely different species,” but okay.

[01:13:48] Malcolm Collins: Then related supporting ideas in Deuteronomy 1:31 and Isaiah 7:15-16 speak of children who do not yet know good from evil.

[01:13:58] This implies that knowing good and evil is a developmental threshold of maturity and full agency. And that,

[01:14:03] Simone Collins: you know- But even infants know good from evil. This is, this has been studied in scientific research that they, they react to people making immoral choices.

[01:14:12] Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I suspect that there’s likely a gradient.

[01:14:14] Sure ... but yeah, I agree with that. And, and in Hebrews 5:14 links maturity to be the ability to distinguish good from evil. So I think I l- I actually r- do not like the strong version of this. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna be clear here. The strong version is that there actually needs to be a genetic link to Eve for a civilization to arise.

[01:14:36] That, that’s the strong version. I don’t like it. I’m not gonna say it’s not true. I don’t like it because it’s, it’s- It

[01:14:42] Simone Collins: doesn’t, I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t think

[01:14:44] Malcolm Collins: it’s- Massively problematic and unnecessary, right?

[01:14:45] Simone Collins: It’s like an influential power family having a lot of cultural influence. Y- it’s not like everyone has to be genetically related to be affected by a family that is prolific, that has very influential kids, and whose kids, you know, marry and have a lot of kids in turn.

[01:15:01] You know, that’s It’s not necessary

[01:15:03] Malcolm Collins: I do really like the second version, the weaker version of this which is still very strong. Mm-hmm. Which is to say that God only really cares about the sinning of people and, and only sees people as man or living man if they have the capacity to exercise moral agency, and not all humans do.

[01:15:24] And this I think really works when you look at the term he was stricken from the book of life or the concept of being stricken from the book of life to be stricken from the kinds of entities that God cares about because they’re clearly still alive. It doesn’t mean they immediately die. It means they are no longer in the category that God considers a living man

[01:15:43] Malcolm Collins: Yeah ... and that he just doesn’t seem to care much about killing people who lack that capacity throughout the Old Testament. And the question- Well,

[01:15:50] Simone Collins: or doesn’t even define them as people ...

[01:15:52] Malcolm Collins: doesn’t even define them as people. Yeah. They’re, they’re set pieces for his wider story. Mm-hmm ... and they’re... A- and [01:16:00] that actually fixes a lot of the problems with the changing moral nature of God from the perspective of some people.

[01:16:06] Mm-hmm. Like, why is he so harsh here, here, and here in the Old Testament, but so loving here, here, here in the New Testament? And it’s because the type of people that God considers people were just way more common during the period of the New Testament to the point where they were most of the people that Jesus would’ve interacted with.

[01:16:24] Mm. And on Earth today, the question is, is have we devolved civilizationally since then and there are more NPCs who are acting without thinking about anything, or have we developed? I think that’s to each individual to judge, but I also would agree- Oh,

[01:16:40] Simone Collins: that’s a scary question.

[01:16:42] Malcolm Collins: Oh, my gosh ... if any person hasn’t taken responsibility for their moral agency that I don’t have a duty to view them in the same way I do somebody who has taken responsibility for their moral agency.

[01:16:56] And that’s a spicy thing in the age that we live in today, and it’s one of the reasons why I care so little, and it, it is reinforcing me about the populations that are wiping out of the gene pool simply because they can’t motivate themselves to pay to the future of the debt they owe the past and have kids.

[01:17:12] They can’t motivate themselves to care for the next generation. Well, good on them, right? Like, maybe this is the last period of time where God is wiping out, like the second Noah’s flood. I’ve, I’ve often considered this a mirror to that. Maybe the flood was meant to wipe out the majority of this kind of homo sapien that God didn’t like very much.

[01:17:32] Oh. And that this period a- This is the, the second flood where he said he would never wipe it out with water again. And so what a lot of people think is, “Oh, the next one would be with fire,” right? And that he did it with an inversion of fire, having people throw their lives into the bonfire of their own vanities sort of like a, a pied piper- Oh, I love

[01:17:54] Simone Collins: that

[01:17:55] leading to a civilizational culling. I love the idea of the rise of tech and AI being the next flood. I think it’s a super rich idea

[01:18:04] Malcolm Collins: Well, we’ve talked about it in other tracks. It was the thesis of one of the tracks.

[01:18:07] Simone Collins: Oh, I know, I know. It’s the, Oh, gosh. I’m so s-

[01:18:10] Malcolm Collins: The, the, it’s the, like, number two, or it’s the, the, this is actually a good thing Yeah, you

[01:18:12] Simone Collins: call it the, the tri- You don’t, you don’t call it the trial

[01:18:15] Malcolm Collins: Fertility collapse is a, it’s great, but yeah, I, I, I, no, no it’s, it’s one about how fertility collapse is a good- The, the

[01:18:19] Simone Collins: gauntlet?

[01:18:19] No, what do you call it? You call it a thing.

[01:18:21] Malcolm Collins: The trial of the lotus eaters.

[01:18:23] Simone Collins: The trial of the lotus eaters, yeah, but that is, that is just the next biblical flood that people have to overcome.

[01:18:29] Which is very interesting. Yeah

[01:18:30] Malcolm Collins: But it’s, it’s a flood that is infinitely kinder than the last flood.

[01:18:34] Simone Collins: Yes, it

[01:18:35] Malcolm Collins: is Because God’s giving people every out.

[01:18:37] Mm-hmm. You can play the game of civilization, align yourself with the groups that are gonna exist in the future, do what you can to make the faction of humanity that’s going to survive flourish maximally, and participate either memetically or memetically and genetically in the next generation.

[01:18:51] Simone Collins: Yeah.

[01:18:52] Malcolm Collins: Or throw yourself in the bonfire of your own vanity.

[01:18:56] Simone Collins: It’s a quiet, comfortable death. It’s

[01:18:58] Malcolm Collins: a, it’s a quiet- Mostly Well, I don’t know about that. It feels like one at first until you begin screaming at the sky at GDC, and, you know, it, it, it seems to really burn away these individuals’ souls in a way that, that appears to psychologically torment them. Look at, look at their depression.

[01:19:13] GDC, the

[01:19:14] Simone Collins: game developer conference?

[01:19:16] Malcolm Collins: Yeah. They all walked outside and screamed at the sky to vent their, their anger as a bunch of fat, edgy 14-year-olds This isn’t

[01:19:21] Simone Collins: some metaphorical s- This is a historical event that happened?

[01:19:25] Malcolm Collins: Yes.

[01:19:26] Simone Collins: Okay.

[01:19:26] Malcolm Collins: They, they’re, they’re, they then, It’s not just that. It’s, it’s look at the depression rates among people who-

[01:19:32] Simone Collins: Sure, yeah

[01:19:33] go,

[01:19:33] Malcolm Collins: look at the rates of un-aliving. Look at the rates of, Like, clearly it may feel at first, like a heroin addiction, like it’s good, but it doesn’t feel good for long, right? W- all we can do is say, “Come on, please,” you know, “exercise restraint. You don’t need to do whatever turns you on.” You know, “You don’t need to go to the bug zappers.”

[01:19:54] Like, “Hey, buddy. Stop, stop. That’s a bug zapper.” We’ve done our role civilizationally. We [01:20:00] warned people about the bug zapper. They’re still walking into it, and the future of humanity will be brighter because of that. And perhaps the flood story, and I’ve often thought about this- It’s both describing a real event, but was meant to be a mirror for us, for humans today, to learn why it’s important to save a diverse population of humanity and not just only your own people.

[01:20:25] Simone Collins: Mm.

[01:20:26] Malcolm Collins: And I take it to be an allegory for that within a modern context. We right now are creating the ark for humanity, and we should try to save whoever wants to partner with us in good faith, right? Like, the last time it was animals. This time, it’s the real

[01:20:43] Simone Collins: living humans. Oh, I’m really, I’m excited now in the Old Testament. Leviticus is freaking weird. It’s so weird.

[01:20:49] Malcolm Collins: All

[01:20:49] Simone Collins: right.

[01:20:49] Malcolm Collins: Well, I love you.

[01:20:50] Simone Collins: I love you too. I will go get the children.

[01:20:53] Malcolm Collins: We gotta reheat rice today.

[01:20:55] Simone Collins: Yes, and then nachos. Unless you wanna save that for when the film crew’s here.

[01:21:01] Malcolm Collins: Nachos?

[01:21:02] Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

[01:21:04] Malcolm Collins: We should make it when the film crew’s here.

[01:21:06] Simone Collins: Yeah.

[01:21:07] Malcolm Collins: How many days is that?

[01:21:09] Simone Collins: It’s the day after tomorrow, so there’s not... You don’t have to wait that long.

[01:21:14] Malcolm Collins: Okay.

[01:21:17] Simone Collins: You sound so distressed by this. Look, we have a lot of other delicious options for you to enjoy in the interim.

[01:21:24] Malcolm Collins: I love you.

[01:21:25] Simone Collins: I love you too. Bye. I’m sorry, I’m sorry for... I’m s- look, you don’t understand.

[01:21:30] Like, I think the cumulative amount of progesterone in my system right now is insane, and it causes immense drowsiness, in me at least. All the time.

[01:21:43] Malcolm Collins: You like this, you like this theory, by the way?

[01:21:46] Simone Collins: I, no, I, I’m looking at this so differently now. And, you know, there’s a lot of things that I contemplated and went through this morning that had me really questioning the humanity of a lot of humans.

[01:21:58] Malcolm Collins: She was going through the way many Native American tribes actually lived and the, and the hor- hor- horrors that they committed. Learning some stuff that even I didn’t know. Like, the Trail of Tears was as bad as it was because they gave the contracts for it to the Cherokee chief- Largely ... who then squandered hundreds of thousands of dollars so that it had to be carried out in subpar conditions because he was lining his family’s pockets.

[01:22:21] Simone Collins: Yeah. That, well, I mean, but per what I understand is the contracts were, like, up for bids, and many of them went to siblings of the chief. And those siblings could, it probably lined their pockets and did not put as much money into good wagons and good medical care and food and supplies. And so these people were i- ill-equipped.

[01:22:42] It, it’s like the government giving money to FEMA or something, and they all just line their pockets and don’t help people in the actual disaster. And so it could have gone way better I mean, I’d be really interested. I, I... It’d be interesting to go through and see if the outcomes of the settlements that were managed by non-Cherokee and non-family member, we’ll say even, like, just white people, like Westerners, or sorry Europeans- Did

[01:23:07] Malcolm Collins: better than the ones managed by the Cher-

[01:23:09] Simone Collins: Yeah, like if they had lower death rates.

[01:23:10] Malcolm Collins: That’d be very interesting. That

[01:23:11] Simone Collins: would be-

[01:23:13] Malcolm Collins: Future episode topic.

[01:23:14] Simone Collins: Yeah. I don’t know if the data’s out there, though, because it would be such a bad look that I could imagine a lot of people just figuring out some way to completely bury it. Because clearly, especially in the 1960s, a whole lot of just erasing took place where it’s like, “No, no, no,” like, “The Indigenous Americans were mostly peaceful.

[01:23:33] They didn’t do anything. What are we talking about? They were just nice.”

[01:23:37] Malcolm Collins: What was the, what was the one that got to you so much? You didn’t tell me about it.

[01:23:40] Simone Collins: It was the account of a, a woman whose settlement was attacked, and her husband and most of the other family was killed on site. But she, pregnant, was taken hostage or, or taken as a slave.

[01:23:53] She had the baby, and then... Trigger warning for anyone who’s really sensi- ‘cause I cried for 30 [01:24:00] minutes after h- hearing this account,

[01:24:01] Before... Can you put a trigger warning into this episode for the, the women of...

[01:24:07] Malcolm Collins: You put the trigger warning in.

[01:24:09] Simone Collins: Did... I don’t know if that was enough of a warning ‘cause I didn’t listen to that other guy.

[01:24:12] Like, maybe just a little Malcolm being like, “No, really, every time Simone brings this up she cries uncontrollably, and you really probably don’t wanna be doing this if you’re little.”

[01:24:20] Malcolm Collins: I’ll just move what you’re saying here in front of this.

[01:24:22] Simone Collins: Okay. Yeah. Thank you ‘cause, yeah, then they can see my... Yeah.

[01:24:27] which she had... I guess she eventually f- got out and, and, and saved, like she survived and then wrote about it. But like maybe seven weeks after she had this baby, the guy who was her, I guess her sla- slave owner decided that she wasn’t working enough because she kept nursing her kid.

[01:24:45] So, he and a bunch of people walk up to her while she’s nursing her baby, grab the baby from her, strangle the

[01:24:52] Malcolm Collins: ba- Okay, but no more story, no more story. It’s over, everyone

[01:24:54] Simone Collins: So much worse than that, Malcolm. It gets so much worse than that. Because the baby didn’t die that time.

[01:25:04] Malcolm Collins: The question is, is I think the, these stories are hidden from us so we can have the perspective that everyone was sort of the same.

[01:25:13] And it-

[01:25:13] Simone Collins: No, I have to say this to you. After this, then they, they tied a rope around the baby’s neck, and they flung the baby into a field of cactuses and dragged it through the field of cactuses and kept doing it. The baby was still alive, and they kept doing it to the baby. And-

[01:25:29] Malcolm Collins: These people didn’t have moral agency.

[01:25:31] Like, maybe we’re right here. Look at what the Mayans did. Look at what the Aztecs did. Look at the way that they acted. Maybe, maybe this is all more right, maybe the hard version is righter than I wanna say

[01:25:47] That’s, that’s horrible. That is horrible And there’s nothing I can do about it. No, what we can do is for the future. What we can do is build a future where one day this woman and her baby can be brought back- Exactly ... and live perfect lives. That can be done. Mm. With enough technology, that can be done.

[01:26:08] Okay?

[01:26:08] Simone Collins: I just want them to be together again.

[01:26:10] Malcolm Collins: But that requires- And just, like, the fact that that

[01:26:11] Simone Collins: would happen to anyone ever is-

[01:26:16] Malcolm Collins: That requires our people living

[01:26:18] Simone Collins: But then- That requires- ... keep in mind, this wasn’t just, like, what they did to Westerners or Europeans. Like, you could say, well, it was reactive. You know, this is like, “This is why the Palestinians did this to people in Israel.

[01:26:28] They, they were just reacting.” But they did this to their own people. They did this to other neighboring tribes. This isn’t like... This is just what they did when they weren’t happy about something, and they did it to each other for hundreds of years. It’s well-documented before Westerners ever came to the United States.

[01:26:44] So just, like, that there are

[01:26:46] Malcolm Collins: people in this world- And by the way, wanna read about Mayan, you want, you want, you wanna read about Mayan sacrifices?

[01:26:50] Simone Collins: They had it a bit better, by the way. Oh, I know. I read, I read about it as a kid. And that, yeah, no, it was better that, you know, they were alive and, and extirpated.

[01:26:55] Or, or,

[01:26:55] Malcolm Collins: or the Comanche. They’re fun. No, the

[01:26:57] Simone Collins: Coma- No, I know, I know, I know. I, there were so many details in that video. I And you, they d- yeah, they don’t teach you that in history class. And it just, yeah, so this- They don’t teach you

[01:27:07] Malcolm Collins: that because they want to, to hide from you the reality of the world and the importance of civilization.

[01:27:13] Simone Collins: But this is, this is why it’s so important that we maintain civilization and, and push it further, and help everyone who can rise above because we can’t... You can’t give people the capacity for so much suffering.

[01:27:28] I understand the impetus to assign every group equal moral agency, but the reality is, is that you know as well as I do that if you saw something like this happening, if you saw something like the types of torture that were common in parts of the ancient ages, like the brazen bull where they would roast someone inside of a statue alive, or the types of things that happened in Egypt or the types of sacrifices that the Mayans or the Aztecs did, you wouldn’t stand for it.

[01:27:58] You’d be like, “Well, this is [01:28:00] obviously the most evil thing I have ever seen in my entire life.” , And to say that people who did stand for this were the moral equivalents of the types of cultures that don’t do stuff like this, um, or are the same as them. And this is increasingly obvious to me when I look at my kids, right?

[01:28:19] Like I see how much of my personality my kids have. I see how much of a sense of justice they have, even at a young age. , And I look at that and I contrast it with other people where you could create an entire society without that sense of justice. , That group is not the same as a group who says, “Don’t torture babies to death regularly, intergenerationally.”

[01:28:42] And obviously there was a point in history where my own people did this as well. Like, like this is not a genetic thing I set myself apart from. If you look at British history, if you look at Stonehenge, we have human sacrifices. You have in British history, they would sacrifice children to put under bridges to keep them stable or to put under houses to keep them stable.

[01:29:00] Like that’s a horrifying thing. And yet we know it was a common practice in specific regions. , And I would remove the category of human from the types of people who would do that. That to me is a truly evil thing. And what I find disgusting about the modern times is that we force ourselves to say every homo sapien, the ones who grape children, the ones who murder kids, the ones who torture people for no reason, they are all the same., And I’d say even including my own ancestors, no, they are not

[01:29:32]

[01:29:32] Simone Collins: No-

[01:29:32] Malcolm Collins: Note here, I think, and I believe this very fully, that any homo sapien can be brought into the category of homo sapiens that have agency.

[01:29:39] They can be brought into it by bringing them in to the civilizational process. That said, we need to understand that uncivilized homo sapiens, the people who I think that God considered not living humans, i- i- in, in the

[01:29:53] Simone Collins: story- No, they’re, they’re worse than animals because they’re smart enough to inflict not only harm or death, but to inflict untold levels of, of suffering.

[01:30:03] I- That’s what’s so scary about uncivilized humans. They’re worse than any animal you can imagine, no matter how deadly.

[01:30:09] Malcolm Collins: And I think g- when God punished Saul and said to Saul, “You didn’t kill them all. You’re being punished for this. You’re being removed from your kingship,” this is an understanding of how God wants us to relate to uncivilized s- people.

[01:30:25] Simone Collins: Yeah.

[01:30:26] Malcolm Collins: Right? Like, this is w- Oh, God ... there are groups that will murder their own babies. There are groups that will grape their own daughters and sell them into s- and they still exist on Earth today. And the, the-

[01:30:38] Simone Collins: That’s the thing, is like when you hear what happened on October 7th, like, this still happens

[01:30:49] Malcolm Collins: Yeah

[01:30:51] Simone Collins: And it just makes me so motivated.

[01:30:53] I mean, like, yeah, bring, bring the next flood. Make it as humane as possible, but, like, this is what dark pronatalism is. This is like, “No, burn it.” There, there is, there, there are people who should not be there in the future. There 100% people should not be there in the future.

[01:31:12] Malcolm Collins: Anyway. And S- Simone.

[01:31:13] Simone Collins: Yeah.

[01:31:14] Malcolm Collins: With enough technology we can fix this. We can create eventually a simulation for that woman and her infant.

[01:31:22] Simone Collins: No, I know, and there’s, there’s also, like, me allowing myself to get emotional about it is not gonna make anything better. The only thing we could possibly do is create a better future.

[01:31:30] It just, That

[01:31:31] Malcolm Collins: is as real as any real that anyone could ever experience within the world that we have today.

[01:31:36] Simone Collins: Yeah. Anyway, this is... Yeah, I’ve been, like, trying to suppress this. You see why I cried for, like, 30 minutes after I heard that and was like, “God.” I mean, he gave a trigger warning. Yeah. I mean, he couldn’t say trigger warning ‘cause he’s, like, conservative, but he’s like, “Children may not wanna...”

[01:31:50] I should have listened, but maybe I shouldn’t have. Like, it’s, I think it’s important to know.

[01:31:55] Malcolm Collins: No, I think that you often forget the genuinely capa- capacity [01:32:00] for true evil of the uncivilized have. The

[01:32:00] Simone Collins: capacity for evil. Yeah, of uncivilized. Yeah, I think that’s the thing, and I think that’s why, that’s why there are floods.

[01:32:06] And that’s- They

[01:32:07] Malcolm Collins: are the most dangerous animal on Earth.

[01:32:09] Simone Collins: Yes. They, they are apex predators, and without civilization they can do untold damage. Like, there, there’s a very thin line between reavers and between a gays for communism. There, there’s a very thin line between-

[01:32:23] Malcolm Collins: Well, now keep in mind you’re talking about our people, right?

[01:32:25] Like, the, the reavers- No, I know. I’m- You now understand. She read these things and go, “Oh, I understand why the backwoods people were so

[01:32:31] Simone Collins: harsh- No, for real. Yeah, why they were like- ...

[01:32:35] Malcolm Collins: with the Indians who wouldn’t befriend them.

[01:32:37] Simone Collins: Yeah. And note, they were harsh with the Indians who wouldn’t befriend them. Yeah, and they, like, married the other ones, so, like, who...

[01:32:39] Yeah. They married the other ones. They were fine. That, that’s the thing. This isn’t about, like, what you’re born as. This is about what you’re going to do. Anyway, I have to get, I have to get the kids, but I, At least that’s off my chest, but now it’s back and then I’m just gonna cry my way to the creek until I see the kids playing, and then they’re gonna be...

[01:32:54] They’ll cheer me up.

[01:32:56] Malcolm Collins: The point of all of this-

[01:32:57] Simone Collins: Sorry, guys ...

[01:32:57] Malcolm Collins: is the belief that we can fix all of this one day.

[01:33:01] Simone Collins: Okay, thanks.

[01:33:02] Bye.

[01:33:03] Malcolm Collins: Bye.

[01:33:06] Speaker 7: So Indy, you wanna jump on me ‘cause you saw Octavian do it?

[01:33:13] Okay, so you want on top of daddy

[01:33:18] Okay, okay, okay. I’ll put him down and then you can get on me, okay? No. No, no. Wait, wait, wait

[01:33:30] Speaker 8: picture with me on Daddy. Do you like that? I did. Indy? And a scream shot. Are you happy, Indy? I, I use it. I use, I use the picture- She’s making the weirdest face ... use the picture with me on you for our title card. Oh, are you doing that because you saw Taylor do it? For a title card? Yeah. Or as you call it, a scream shot?

[01:33:50] A scream shot, yeah. A scream shot. Is that what, is that a technical term?