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- [00:00]
Larry Sanger
So a friend of mine told me about Jeffrey Epstein's island. I learned that these acts of child were done as part of satanic rituals, occult rituals. Helena Blavatsky, Aleister Crowley, or Albert Pike.
- [00:15]
Camp Gagnon
It's just an interesting story to go from, you know, sort of occult curious and sort of having this sort of morbid fascination with, you know, these secret societies and how they sort of retain power, sort of parlaying that into a religious, you know, revival in your own life.
- [00:28]
Larry Sanger
First of all, God is not a divine source. God is God. When I went over the Old Testament, stuff that, like, gave me new perspective on the gospel, even before I finished Matthew, I had converted.
- [00:41]
Camp Gagnon
This is Larry Sanger. Of course, you might know him as the co founder of Wikipedia and a brilliant, thoughtful, principled guy. Now this episode isn't about that specifically. This is about his spiritual journey, which many of you will probably relate to. He was raised Christian and he walked away. He became an agnostic philosopher. Basically, he trusted reason more than faith. And then something changed. Not a miracle or a vision, but a confrontation with the darkest corners of human power. Everything from abuse to corruption, secret networks, and the unsettling possibility that evil is more organized than we want to believe. And that search didn't make him paranoid. It made him do something unexpected. He picked up the Bible not for comfort, but to test it, in order to challenge it, to dismantle it. But instead, he was shocked. It held up question after question, objection after objection. For the first time in his life, he found answers that he couldn't dismiss. This is the story of a mind that religion behind followed the truth into the darkness and came back convinced more than ever that God is the truth. This is the spiritual journey of Larry Sanger. So sit back, relax, and welcome to camp. So you had mentioned growing up, you were growing up Lutheran, and I guess maybe through your teens and twenties you were less active in your faith. Would you consider yourself atheist or secular in that time?
- [02:02]
Larry Sanger
I became an agnostic when I was a teenager, basically, yeah. My parents got divorced and by the time I started thinking and we stopped going to church and even though I was like confirmed as a Lutheran when I was about 12 or so, by the time I was 15 or 16, I just noticed, hey, I don't really believe in God anymore, didn't really seem to matter so much. But I was very philosophically inclined though. So I thought a lot about it and basically decided there isn't a good enough reason to believe that God exists. And I wanted to believe only true things. I conceived of myself and even the purpose of my life as being a truth seeker and truth seeking.
- [03:05]
Camp Gagnon
I see. Now how did your work with Wikipedia and your commitment to neutrality and sort of uncovering the bias within Wikipedia lead you to this broader story of sort of a religious revival in your life? And how is that related to this networks of elite?
- [03:28]
Larry Sanger
Yeah, I would say that my commitment to neutrality is sort of genetically related to my overall commitment to truth. So I think that we are not given all the tools that we need. If our encyclopedias and newspapers, et cetera, are one sided, if they are propaganda organs, then we are not in charge of our own beliefs essentially. So I think it's very important that we be left free and be supported in what we believe. And again, that's because I myself am a truth seeker, have been all my life. That's why I got a PhD in Philosophy and so forth. Now, as to the. Cult stuff, as we were saying before, this sort of needs to be properly set up. So I thought before 2019 that were generally, you know, lone wolves who preyed on children. I had no notion that they were organized in any way. I suppose if you'd asked me, I would have said okay, I guess that's probably true that there are like rings of really particularly depraved people. But I had no idea that it could be at all common or big business. I mean, the thing is, I knew about like the, the Catholic controversies, priests and well, you know, to be fair, other churches have their own problems and schools, wherever basically children are, are found, you know, the will follow. And so yeah, I just hadn't really given it that much thought. So a friend of mine, well, he wasn't a friend yet. In the process of sort of opening my eyes to these things, he became a friend, basically told me about the, you know, Jeffrey Epstein's island before it really became front page news. In fact, it was just like a couple of months after he introduced this stuff to me that it became much discussed, let's put it that way. And in the process of learning about this, I learned that at least some of these people have been caught, like Jimmy Savile, for example. So some of the, the murder scenes that have been discovered and some of the testimony given later by victims say that this was. These acts of child were done as part of satanic rituals or occult rituals or whatever you want to call them, but sort of these pseudo religious rituals. Which sounds crazy, right? Of course. But if you actually look into it in mainstream sources, it's reported over and over and over Again, I would have dismissed before, you know, 2019. Again, I would have dismissed a lot of it as Satanic Panic, as it was called back in the 1980s and 90s. But clearly there's something there. You know, over and over, we see many instances of this connection between people with these bizarre worldviews, or what I would call bizarre worldviews, and, you know, organized child. I don't expect people who are listening to this if you've never been acquainted with this sort of thing. Of course, I think your listeners already know about it.
- [08:13]
Camp Gagnon
Sure. I've had many people on the show that have talked about sort of organized crime rings related to abuse and then even furthermore, ritual abuse. And they've spoken about it in professional capacities, working with the FBI that are basically his whole. This one operative in particular. But, you know, working to basically upend and, you know, infiltrate these organizations in order to bring them down and that they exist and that, you know, they're oftentimes very much regular people that sort of exist in these crime coalitions that work as lawyers and dentists that have these evil predilections to, you know, commit the worst atrocities that human beings can imagine. Yeah.
- [08:55]
Larry Sanger
So he said, if you. If you really want to understand what's going on and fight against it, then what you need to do is, you know, read these books. And he came up with. He would, like, keep throwing me these different books. And a lot of them, some of them were just, like, interesting fiction, you know, but some of them were dark and disturbing, like Helena Blavatsky.
- [09:25]
Camp Gagnon
Absolutely.
- [09:26]
Larry Sanger
Aleister Crowley or, you know, who's that Freemason guy? Albert Pike.
- [09:36]
Camp Gagnon
Albert pike, absolutely.
- [09:39]
Larry Sanger
I started reading a little bit, you know, didn't get past the introduction, I suppose, of these sorts of things. And I always had the notion, because, again, I'm philosophically, I am a skeptic. So I don't. Like. Of course I don't believe these things. I'm just learning about them, that this is what I told myself. Nevertheless, being an actual skeptic, I don't deny that things are possible. Right. So while I didn't, in fact, believe in a spirit world, I said, okay, it's possible that a spirit world exists, I guess. And it's possible that these people are somehow doing what they do, which puts them at great danger, I would think, you know, and nevertheless, they do it, and they do it as part of groups, which is weird. And they're supported. And, like, the most disturbing thing about it, of course, has come out in connection with the Epstein case. Which is the legal system, you know, is, is backing them up. Like there seem to be a lot of dirty, dirty cops and dirty lawyers, which is nothing new, not surprising in itself. But the idea that they're backing up child, organized child, that's not. I mean even your average gang banger, unless they're MS.13 or whatever, are gang going to, you know, saying we'll have no part of that.
- [11:22]
Camp Gagnon
Right. So this is sort of the discovery for you is that you hear about some of these, you know, historical occult figures that are a part of these sort of ritualized groups and then you kind of see it thrust into the mainstream with the Epstein story. Yeah, that seems to be once again another organized group of some of the most powerful people in our country and in the world that are cooperating and perhaps complicit with one of the most notorious for the last hundred years, this guy Jeffrey Epstein. And all of these things in conjunction kind of change your perspective on the nature of power, I presume.
- [11:58]
Larry Sanger
Absolutely. The conclusion that I came to is that it's possible that there are some very powerful people. Not saying most of them or anything or any particular people had apportioned my, my belief to the evidence. You know, was Epstein guilty for sure? Was Donald Trump? Well, you know, the jury's still, still out there. But was Bill Clinton? Well, actually there's more evidence in that case anyway. But the point is that, the point is that all of these people do seem to be organized. Not necessarily those particular people that I named. Right. They seem to be organized in a way that involves the. Of children. And at least in some cases, not so much in the Epstein case. In some cases this is very closely associated with occult rituals. And then we hear about the power of the Freemasons. Right. And they themselves have been accused of these sorts of things occasionally. And then the notion is that power is wielding in secret. What you see on the public stage, as reported in newspapers is not the full story. Any non naive person already knows that. But what we perhaps don't all accept is that there are secret societies, perhaps that they actually have some sort of weird religious beliefs and that they might involve sometimes the systematic of children. It's all very, very disturbing, of course. And so again, when I started looking at these books, I said, okay, I'm not going to read these books in order to learn about this system. Like no way. Because one thing that is said is that such books are, you know, they give you hidden knowledge. Right. That's what occult means. Right. It's the hidden knowledge. And that Having such knowledge is actually powerful. It actually opens spiritual doors. I said to myself, if that's the case, then I don't actually want to read these books because I want any such doors to remain shut. A few months passed after I became apprised of all these things, and mostly the middle of 2019 and in December of the same year, I guess I had finished some bedtime reading. I was thinking what I was going to pick up next, and I thought, well, you know, I wanted to read the Bible because the Bible is a. It is the thing that the occultists are inverting. That's basically what they do. A lot of the symbology and the rituals and other aspects of these sorts of hidden cults is a perversion of what is in the Bible.
- [15:53]
Camp Gagnon
Black masses and things like that are effectively inverting the ritualism of Christianity.
- [15:58]
Larry Sanger
That's only one kind, though, of course. Yes. And so I decided to pick up the Bible and at least I know what they were reacting to a little better. It's not like I'd never read parts of the Bible. Of course I've read parts of the Bible, never read the whole thing all the way through. And I can say now that I certainly did not understand what, like, the point of the Bible was in the whole, what theologians call the story of redemption or salvation. Right. And when I was actually reading the Bible. Well, I'll let you prompt me. I don't know how much detail you want me to go into it, but I was just absolutely amazed that it stood up to as much inquiry as I could give it in just the way that Aquinas said. As you said earlier, is that the.
- [17:00]
Camp Gagnon
Gospel specifically, or is it the totality of the Bible?
- [17:03]
Larry Sanger
Well, it actually wasn't the gospel, it was the Old Testament. And then, of course, I knew, being raised as Christian, I knew that broad outlines of the gospel. I think I'd read a gospel to my sons in the previous couple of years as part of homeschooling. So it was not unfamiliar. But when I went over the Old Testament stuff that, like, gave me new perspective on the Gospel, by the time I would, I. Even before I finished Matthew, I believe, and certainly before I finished the Gospels, I had been converted, essentially.
- [17:51]
Camp Gagnon
Interesting.
- [17:52]
Larry Sanger
It was actually going through systematically the Old Testament and trying to get all of my questions answered. Not to say that I believed the answers right away, because of course I didn't. But I was just. I was just impressed that. Well, two things. First of all, I didn't realize that people asked my questions and really Cared about them and like really went to town on them in great depth sometimes, you know, the, the, the way they did it in like personal blogs or they were like too devotional for me. Not, not really interesting or philosophical, focused on the hard, critical stuff that needs to be done first, at least for apologetic purposes. But there were some, you know, some resources online that were really shockingly cogent. I finally came to realize after going through several books of the Old Testament and just systematically asking my questions and getting answers, that there is a 2000 year old history of thinking about these things. And it's not just a matter of, you know, studying the Bible and I don't know, riffing on myths or something like that. I don't know what I thought about what exactly theology involved, but at a certain sort of basic level, a lot of times what's going on is answering the hard questions that people have as they read the Bible, which is exactly what I was doing.
- [19:51]
Camp Gagnon
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, much credit to my mother. She always invited these types of questions and that there was never any type of shying away and if she didn't know, she would find an answer some way. And I remember being 10 years old asking her questions that are in ways the most fundamental issues with divine belief in any regard. But I think in relation to the Bible, what I find important, I think for people to sort of think about, and I think this goes for basically any religious text, but the Bible in particular, as it is one of the most foundational, perhaps most impactful pieces of literature and human history, that all of the questions that people listening to this or you and I might deal with has already been asked and discussed ad nauseam for thousands of years.
- [20:35]
Larry Sanger
Exactly.
- [20:36]
Camp Gagnon
And the problem of evil, right? And I think so many people will flirt with the idea of being religious or spiritual in some capacity, but then say, oh well, how could there be a God? There's so much evil that exists, so obviously there isn't. And then move on without asking the question and actually searching for it, whether it's through, you know, catechism or you know, other, some other type of like apologetic source. Because that question has been asked by the earliest, the very earliest church fathers, right? Like, how is there a God that loves us if there's so much evil or divine hiddenness, right? Like if there's a God that loves us, where is he? Why is, why is he not present in my life? And these are questions that every religious person, and I think every person and probably has dealt with or grappled with in some way. And there is a long libraries full of answers. And whether you find them personally satisfying, I guess, is up to a subjective experience. But to say that these things have not been scrutinized, I think is completely false.
- [21:34]
Larry Sanger
Right, right.
- [21:35]
Camp Gagnon
And I wonder if that was sort of your journey as you're reading this. Even within the text, people asking questions of Jesus, right. Like, are you the Lord? Where is God in all of this? And in all the chaos that's happening, the Pharisees are quite literally asking Jesus so many of the toughest questions. And there are answers in the Gospels and throughout the Bible there are answers. And one just has to be brave enough and maybe dedicated enough to actually searching.
- [22:02]
Larry Sanger
Yeah, or have a good LLM. I mean, at this point, I did this sort of research before I could ask a chatbot. Now I can, and I actually read or rather learn a lot from Chatgpt and Grok and Claude. So yeah, it's. So I was just amazed at the, at the quality of the answers. First of all, just the fact that they had been thought through rigorously and they made a system that I had not been acquainted with. And I think frankly, a lot of Christians are not really acquainted with the answers to a lot of these questions. They need to be. I can see that.
- [23:11]
Camp Gagnon
Now I'm curious, what did you learn about the occult as you became sort of more religious, if that's a fair framing, Would you consider yourself religious?
- [23:21]
Larry Sanger
Oh, yeah, I'm Anglican now, but it's.
- [23:25]
Camp Gagnon
Just an interesting story to go from sort of occult, curious and sort of having this sort of morbid fascination with these secret societies and how they sort of retain power, leading that into you. You know, sort of parlaying that into a religious revival in your own life is an interesting story that you don't hear often. So I'm curious, in reading the Bible, what did that inform you about these occult societies?
- [23:48]
Larry Sanger
Not that much, but I guess a few things. One is, I had not realized how much of modern occultism is. Can be found in the Bible itself, especially the Old Testament. Also the new, to a certain extent, that a lot of, you know, free Masonic rites actually are intended to be continuations of like Old Testament rituals, I guess, or something.
- [24:27]
Camp Gagnon
I mean, so much of, you know, the Freemasonic philosophy of like these master builders, these masons, comes directly from the Old Testament with Solomon's construction of the second Temple.
- [24:37]
Larry Sanger
That's right. So there's a lot of at least references and allusions. And I was. So I was able to understand better that why they make use of some sorts of symbols, But in terms of, like, the details of the development and operation of the occult, of course, that doesn't really supply details, and I'm happy about that. I mean, I don't want to know right now.
- [25:18]
Camp Gagnon
I think there's a. A certain secular perspective on a lot of these secret societies that I think is valid to an extent. So the ideas of power. If you are a power broker that has access to capital and connections and you're able to influence global agendas, whether it's foreign policy, whatever else, that if you're going to bring someone else into that inner circle, you have to have a way to control them and that all of us are sort of operating in unison, in lockstep. And one way to control people's behavior is to have this sort of defamatory material against them, of course. And so if I'm going to bring someone into my secret society that, you know, we control so much of, you know, the world's happenings, I need to make sure that you're not going to deviate from me. And I can do that by compromising you through some type of, you know, some type of ritualized blackmail. Right. Like we're both going to commit a crime together. And in many cases, it seems like that crime could be child abuse or, you know, animal abuse or any other type of, like, awful, awful act that now we are bound by this evil oath to operate in unison.
- [26:26]
Larry Sanger
Right. I don't. I don't think it necessarily has to be ritualized as such, but in many.
- [26:32]
Camp Gagnon
Cases it is, I guess.
- [26:33]
Larry Sanger
Okay, okay, perhaps. But I think people end up getting into these things to some extent due to their being open to crime, essentially, and then they get captured, essentially.
- [26:51]
Camp Gagnon
Right. And so maybe, like, an example of this is that someone is running for president and they say, you know, I'll support you, and I'll have all of these other really powerful people support you for your run for president, both in capital, but also in influence. But I need to control you. So I need you to do this thing either knowingly or unknowingly, so that you'll never deviate from what me and the rest of this sort of, you know, this sort of organization wants you to do. And that's a very, like, pragmatic and, you know, secular sort of perspective on how power operates. That I think there are examples in history that this is very much the case. But I guess from a spiritual component, do you think that these rituals have any bearing in a spiritual sense?
- [27:30]
Larry Sanger
No. I don't know. Yeah, no idea. I have heard or read, I don't know with what credibility that the people who are engaged in them think that they have that. For example, you know, if they. Sex rights with children extends life, for example. I've heard of such things. Of course, everybody has heard of the idea of selling your soul to the devil, Right? Which is sort of goes proxy for any such arrangement, I suppose, unless it actually is literal. And again, I don't know. I mean, I don't have any useful information. So I. I'm just glad I haven't been offered. It's like. Or maybe I have and I didn't know it at the time.
- [28:44]
Camp Gagnon
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So look, take care of the roots, get better hair. Your black shirts are actually going to be black again. The itch on your scalp is gone. That's the flakes promise. Now let's get back to the show. I guess this is the question that I grapple with when it comes to these sort of secret organizations, is that I can understand that there's a desire to bring people in by using Kompromat to control them. And Epstein, I think is being sort of looked at in this way that he was controlling people through blackmail, whether they were doing it knowingly or unknowingly. And some ways this is sexual blackmail. Perhaps this is also just videotaped audio, visual blackmail where people are speaking in a way and they say, well, we have you on the record saying this, so now you'll do what we say. I guess the thing I'm always curious about is are these people spiritual ideologues, right? Like maybe Epstein in particular, but the other people like him, are they doing it with some type of spiritual agenda? Are they, are they philosophically committed to this idea that we are going to, you know, shape the world and humankind in our image due to some other higher force? Or are they just doing it simply based off of the secular means of power consolidation? This is the thing I can't, I can never put my finger on.
- [34:04]
Larry Sanger
I can't tell you all I know is that there are some figures who have had avowedly weird religious beliefs and connections with the Freemasons, for example, and other secret societies which separately we learn, have a lot of really strange rituals and so forth. Right. So they were involved in that. Why would they be involved with that? And did that make any difference in their opinion? Who knows? I, I mean we've, we've all heard testimony. Anyone who is, who has studied this stuff or at least watched very many videos on, on YouTube by now, we have heard that or heard testimony from people who claim to have been, you know, close associates with this person or that person. It's like so and so is a witch. And I, I know because, you know, I saw her sacrifice a baby and, or whatever.
- [35:23]
Camp Gagnon
Right.
- [35:25]
Larry Sanger
So I, I wouldn't rule that out. I think the case for all such things is cumulative, I guess. And we don't, I mean necessarily we don't have any smoking gun evidence. If we had smoking gun evidence, then it, it would be known publicly and being known publicly, it would be a massive scandal for whoever was involved and then they would be like one of the monsters of history, you know, so maybe the monsters of history are just the ones that got caught or who fell afoul of the authorities or whatever.
- [36:05]
Camp Gagnon
Right. I'm curious, do you think Wikipedia or any of these other media apparatuses are working for or are complicit in sort of the coverups of a lot of these organizations?
- [36:19]
Larry Sanger
I have to tell you, I don't know. Right. I mean, I haven't looked very much at Wikipedia on such topics.
- [36:30]
Camp Gagnon
I mean, terms like conspiracy theorists are created by organizations to sort of make things seem fringe and silo them into strange categories.
- [36:40]
Larry Sanger
Yeah, I see what you're saying. Well, there's two different aspects of using Wikipedia to research such things, right? I mean, on the one hand you can actually learn a fair bit of legitimate information reasonably faithfully reported from mainstream sources about like the Nexium cult for example, or Jimmy Savile or whatever. Boys Town, there's a disgusting one. So yeah, you can learn about that stuff from Wikipedia. I don't think they're telling the full story, but then the whole story isn't being told in the mainstream media and those are the only sources that can be used. On the other hand, any reasonable hard nosed researcher has a hard time believing most of the sources that you can find on a lot of this stuff, in my opinion.
- [37:42]
Camp Gagnon
Right. Because the nature of it is that it is secretive and that it is occult.
- [37:47]
Larry Sanger
Right. And the only people who seem to be talking about the very worst. Worst of it, about, you know, bloody sex rituals and sacrifice and that sort of thing. For the most part, they. They are like these desperate, broken people who are. Have probably been on drugs and they're just bad witnesses, unfortunately, and perhaps on purpose.
- [38:11]
Camp Gagnon
Right. Like, there's very many people that. That, yeah, you know, sometimes they're utilized because of their, you know, mental incompetency or their drug addiction, and then they're given information or they're, you know, complicit in such that when they go public, they are seen as a drifter or someone that's unreliable. I think there's many victims, specifically with a lot of these sex rings that will then go public with their stories. But many of them in their past life were prostitutes or had some other type of unsavory aspects of the character that it's easy to write them off.
- [38:47]
Larry Sanger
Right.
- [38:47]
Camp Gagnon
And you have to wonder if that's done intentionally so that people know, like, oh, no one's going to believe this person anyway, so we can utilize them.
- [38:54]
Larry Sanger
Exactly.
- [38:55]
Camp Gagnon
So I wonder so much with these organizations and so many of these Epstein files that come out, the thing that always I'm hinging on is like, is it just power or is there something more spiritual happening? And the fact that they're, you know, in some of these cases, like, you know, Epstein has this temple on his island, you know, the fact that, you know, at least that's what it looks like, ostensibly, is some type of ritual place. If there is bad rituals, is it possible that there are also good rituals? And the fact that so many people are committed to ritualized evil, Is it such that, you know, the ritual of goodness is equally true?
- [39:34]
Larry Sanger
Well, yeah, that actually is not the. That's not the reasoning that I followed, Although I can see why it would appeal to some people. In other words, your last inference is very interesting. This idea that you can see shocking evidence that there are people who believe that ritualized evil is powerful. And therefore, if you believe that they believe that, then why shouldn't you believe that the Christians actually sincerely believe what they believe, and then shouldn't you take them more seriously if you're going to take the dark side seriously? My. My view is not that I actually became convinced that there is a dark underside of the world that is spiritually powerful. I didn't actually come to that conclusion. I simply saw that it is possible and backed away completely. And then a little later turned to the Bible and realized that essentially it's true.
- [40:58]
Camp Gagnon
I see. Did you have spiritual moments. As you were reading it, you seem obviously very intellectual and that much like myself, I found that my relationship with God and with the Bible was always very intellectual. Never really felt spiritually moved. I never had a moment where the sky opened up and I saw Christ in a spiritual form. So I'm curious, were there unexplainable, sort of, maybe explainable, but spiritual moments for you that made you convinced of this?
- [41:30]
Larry Sanger
I don't know if they're unexplainable, not in the sense of witnessing a miracle or hearing the voice of God or anything like that. That's never happened to me. But certainly in the whole process of my conversion, I, I started doing something. Well, I actually need to give a bit of backstory to, to make this make sense. When I was a kid, I used to talk to God, right? And like I would just have these sort of pretend conversations. I had a, an imaginary friend when I was 5 years old and I continued to talk to God in the same way, you know, from time to time. I don't remember how much when I was a kid. And then later after reading philosophy, you know, Socrates, Socratic dialogues and so forth, I started thinking about different issues and you know, both philosophical and just personal issues in my life in this same sort of dialogue way. So I would have these dialogues often with just some mysterious all wise person and, and sometimes it would even be God when the topic was about God. But I would write it down and make it sort of a dialogue just to help me work through things. So I started doing that again because it was just an old habit, hadn't done it in a while, I guess. But I started doing it again very shortly after I started reading the Bible again. But at some point I realized that these were essentially prayers and I felt the presence of God on the other end of the line, so to speak.
- [43:46]
Camp Gagnon
What did that presence feel like?
- [43:48]
Larry Sanger
Well, I mean, you can't really describe it in other terms. I mean, it does seem to be the presence of another person. Like I'm talking to you, I'm aware there's another person tent with me, right? And so it's the same sort of way when I am dialoguing with God. I'm not by the way, pretending that I am a prophet and thinking that he actually is responding to me. I mean, one of the main things that I started talking about, in fact was what the heck is going on here? Am I not just, you know, you know, dialoguing with myself? And I think that is probably the case. It's Just that this is a thing that of which God approves and he wants us to imagine how he would respond to us. And perhaps in the process of our imagining he will have a certain kind of spiritual input. But I can say though that when I had these sorts of, you know, dialogue sessions that I do feel the presence of God. It's like on the one hand, it's the least persuasive evidence for the existence of God to anybody else. It's like, okay, you felt the presence of God, everybody feels the presence of God. What does this mean? But on the other hand, to me, it's actually one of the most powerful, single most powerful pieces of evidence for the existence of God.
- [45:44]
Camp Gagnon
That's something that I've both been sort of inspired by, but also struggled with in my own personal faith journey where I'll pray and at times feeling this presence where I'm not alone, that I'm speaking to some type of higher power. And then I speak to my friends that are Muslim or maybe they're Hindu, and they describe the same thing. And I wonder, are we speaking to that same divine source?
- [46:10]
Larry Sanger
Well, first of all, God is not a divine source. God is God. He's. He has a very particular nature. He has a very particular personality. It's revealed in scripture, in my opinion. And.
- [46:30]
Camp Gagnon
So.
- [46:33]
Larry Sanger
I don't want to say deny that your Muslim and Hindu friends are incapable of speaking to God when they seem to be speaking to a divine being. It's just that if God exists, other spirits exist, if the Bible is true, demons exist. And therefore it's entirely possible if you're not praying in the name of God. This is why we pray in the name of Jesus or in the name of the Lord. That's why there are prayers are often addressed to, you know, our Father, you know, so, you know, we don't reach some other party on the line. Right. So I mean, the, the fact that there is some spiritual entity who seems to be there, first of all, that, that is actually not the only reason to think that there is some entity there at all. In my opinion. If that, if that were, if I only had a feeling to go on, then I wouldn't believe in the existence of God. Definitely not.
- [47:50]
Camp Gagnon
I see. What, what else in terms.
- [47:53]
Larry Sanger
Well, it's for you to go on.
- [47:54]
Camp Gagnon
Is it scriptural?
- [47:55]
Larry Sanger
It's a cumulative case really. So I'm writing a book about this. It's like over 650 pages long now called God Exists. And I go into quite a bit of depth about first the arguments from natural theology, as it's called, or philosophy of religion, the traditional arguments for the existence of God, things like the contingency arguments, the cosmological arguments, fine tuning. Fine tuning I mentioned, but that isn't actually one that I use. I have something like it. And then I go into basically why the Bible actually can be credited as a communication of God. I have to begin by talking about what we would expect, or first of all, why we would expect God to want to communicate with us. There's actually good natural theological reasons to think so. And then what are the earmarks, so to speak, of a divine communication? And the only. Only body of spiritual writing that. That actually fits the bill is the Bible.
- [49:36]
Camp Gagnon
I see. Could you explain the contingency argument to the audience? What's up, people? We're going to take a break really quick because I got to tell you a little story. All right? This is a story about a man who turned 29 years old, and slowly everything started to fall apart. Not in, like, a dramatic way. Life just got more difficult, all right? You know, the same workouts all of a sudden, not getting the same gains, you know, in the musculature area, same diet all of a sudden, just, you know, still being a little bit soft around the middle. And around 2pm every day, just feeling terrible brain fog, you know, and not to mention, you know, hair falling out, thinning. And that man is my friend David Sanchez. And so naturally, what did he do? He started to panic. Google, okay? He was like, low testosterone. What do I do? What do I do? And it was terrifying because doctors act like, oh, the solution's casual. Like, yeah, just inject yourself with testosterone forever. Use needles. D old needles from the streets of Kensington, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, whatever. All right? But then you actually look at, like, trt, you know, it's thousands of dollars a year, could have fertility issues. It could shut down your body's natural production. I mean, yeah, you look better, but it might actually leave you worse in the long run. And that's why there's something natural, something I found called Mars Men. Yes. And I've been taking it consistently, and some men have actually reported, I mean, better energy all day, better focus, stronger lifts, not just a spike, but a steady, consistent drive. And, yeah, it's not trt. There's no needles, no synthetics, no dependency. It's designed to support healthy testosterone using real ingredients like zinc, boron, you know, Tonga ali. Things your body actually recognizes and needs to fuel testosterone use. Yeah, I genuinely like it. I just wake up in the morning, toss A couple pills back and I start feeling better. And so can you. With mars men, I feel great. And you should start feeling great, too. And the way you do that is you go to mengotomars.com and for a limited time, the listeners of this program are going to get 50% off for life, plus free shipping and three free gifts@ Mengotomars.com that's right. Use the promo code camp. And you're going to be getting all that and more. And better yet, 90 day money back guarantee. If you don't like it, just be like, hey, this isn't for me. Send it back if you feel no difference, which odds are you won't because 91% of men say that they feel more energetic when they're taking it. But maybe you're in the 9%. You send it back, money back. I'm telling you, there's no reason not to try it. And after you purchase, they will ask you how you heard about them. Please say heard about it from the good old folks here at camp. It really helps the show and it keeps the fire burning. Let's get back to it. What's up, guys? We're gonna take a break really quick because you know what time it is. It's time to level up. And bluechew just dropped something wild. Okay. Bluechew's been rocking with us from the beginning, so of course we have to rock. Pun intended. With them. All right? And what they've just done is change the game. All right, this is next level gold metal energy. This bluechew gold, if you've never heard of it, this is the newest innovation from the number one chewable ed brand. All right? This isn't the little blue pill that your grandpa used. This is the four in one beast that is setting the gold standard for performance. We're talking two ingredients to keep keep the good times rolling. Okay? Mixed with apomorphine and oxytocin that are going to turn up the arousal and the connections in your brain as well as the ingredients to keep the blood flow to keep everything pumping. Okay? Blue chew. Gold dissolves into your tongue and works in as little as 15 minutes. And that means you're going to be rocking quicker and staying in the game longer. Let me just say that's how we put this tent up every single episode. We give Christos a blue chew. And you know what? We have this tent rocking all year round. Okay? That's what it takes. Now, I recommend this in a, you know, a married Christian relationship, but you know what? You Guys can do whatever you want. Bluechew is the ultimate service to get you these chewables to your door in a discreet way to keep the bedroom on fire. We have a special deal for the listeners of this program. You're going to get 10 off your first month of BlueChew Gold if you use the code Gagnon G A G N O N. That's promo code Gagnon G A G N O N. You can visit bluechew.com for more details and important safety information. And thank you so much to Bluechew for keeping the lights on and making this show for possible. Let's get back to it.
- [53:43]
Larry Sanger
So the idea is, if I'm, you know, sitting at my desk and I see a bird fly by the window, I have the, the distinct impression that on the one hand it's, it's almost a. It didn't have to happen that way. Could have happened moment before, a moment later, maybe it was like a different kind of bird, whatever. But on the other hand, if I understood all of the facts that are involved in that bird flying by my window at that moment, you know, that facts about the species and about nesting patterns in this area and about that particular individual earlier in its life cycle, etc. Then you know, maybe not even the most brilliant biologists. Biologist in the world, but like God at least would, would be able to, to explain why it had to happen, right, that, that the bird flew by the window at that moment. But then what we're, what we're saying is, we're saying that all of these things, which are contingents like birds flying by windows, in other words, they don't have to be the case. They actually do have to be the case. If we take into account all the laws that govern reality and the initial conditions and perhaps scientific constants and things like that, you put all of this background information together and all of the things in the universe then become necessary. But individually they're definitely not necessary. Now here's a question. Why don't. Because we can talk about different descriptions of reality at different. Arrangements of facts, like, for example, not just the bird flying by the window, but a species existing at all, or, you know, the bird's arrival in North America or whatever, that sort of thing, if we continue to go out from a particular continent to the planet, to the solar system, to the universe, so forth, and we continue to go back in time explaining things that happened before, we can, as it were, zoom out both in terms of time and in terms of space, and we can ask of the Totality of all of that. Well, is that contingent or is it necessary? And so the way that I set the argument up is I say that. Well, it certainly seems like individual laws, for example, could have been otherwise. For all we know. Certainly certain constants could have been otherwise. Right. So why would we say that the totality, even including the laws and the constants, et cetera, would be necessary? There doesn't seem to be anything necessary about them. Right. And certainly, like, the conglomeration doesn't seem necessary. It seems like extremely interestingly, you know. Well, on the one hand, very. Very ordered, rationally ordered, but on the other hand, it's a mess. I mean, there's a lot of detail in all of science, you know.
- [57:47]
Camp Gagnon
Mm. So as things are contingent upon each other infinitely in regression, there's ultimately one thing that was necessary.
- [57:56]
Larry Sanger
Yeah. So the idea is, if there has to be an explanation of the bird flying by the window, which we often think just. I mean, basically we don't believe. So this is the principle of sufficient reason. Right. We don't believe that things happen for no reason at all. Like, if there were a puppy were to just pop into an existence on the table right now, we would ask, how did it get there? Why did that happen? And it would be a sensible question. So if we can ask that about anything contingent, then we can ask that about the universe as a whole. And when we ask such questions, what we are asking is to explain. To give an explanation in terms of something that is necessary. Right. So the reason why we're satisfied by explanations of the bird flying by in terms of, like, facts about that species and nesting patterns and food and so forth, is there are these broad covering laws which are in themselves are taken to be sort of laws of nature. Right. And therefore they have a certain kind of necessity to them, and yet they don't.
- [59:24]
Camp Gagnon
Right.
- [59:25]
Larry Sanger
Right.
- [59:25]
Camp Gagnon
The speed of light could have been any speed, perhaps.
- [59:29]
Larry Sanger
Right.
- [59:29]
Camp Gagnon
In a different reality, in a different universe.
- [59:31]
Larry Sanger
Exactly. So if we want to say that there is any necessary being, it has to be outside of the universe as we know it. At least we might not know anything about it. That's actually an important part of my book. It's like, I don't conclude, and therefore God exists. I simply say a necessary being exists probably outside of the universe. Because I don't think this. This is a. A deductively sound argument. It's an inductive argument. All right, So a. A necessary being must exist outside of space and time that explain space and time and the laws, the constants, and all of this.
- [60:29]
Camp Gagnon
That is the contingency argument.
- [60:30]
Larry Sanger
That's the contingency argument. And we can go no farther than that particular conclusion.
- [60:35]
Camp Gagnon
But now how do we map that this conclusion is the God of the Bible?
- [60:40]
Larry Sanger
That is. Well, that's the rest of the arguments, essentially.
- [60:42]
Camp Gagnon
I see. And that follows therefore from the contingency argument. But if we can accept that there is a necessary sort of unmoved mover, as people have said, that what can we know about this unmoved mover? What is the nature of this being?
- [60:59]
Larry Sanger
Well, I actually make separate arguments. It's very similar, but it's distinguishable in an argument from causality and also a design argument. And they work together. But at some point you actually have to say, well, this being must be the same as being posited in the contingency argument. But there are actually good reasons to think that.
- [61:30]
Camp Gagnon
How do you deal with the problem of evil?
- [61:33]
Larry Sanger
I've got a whole chapter about that.
- [61:35]
Camp Gagnon
Could you explain what it is and perhaps your perspective on it?
- [61:39]
Larry Sanger
It's. It's very complicated actually to. To deal with it. So I say that there are three horrible things in, in the world. So the three horrors, as I call them, are pain, death and wickedness, essentially. And the problem is, do we have reason to think, at least according to the earlier chapters in my draft, we have reason to think that the creator of the universe is purely good. And yet how is it possible that the creator of the universe would be purely good if the universe contains evil, death and pain? So how would he allow that those things to exist? So there's. My response is actually complex and it actually takes a while to get into a large part of it, although I will say that there's nothing surprising about it to anybody who has studied the design or the, well, philosophy of religion, the problem of evil in general. So, for example, I talk a lot about free will. I say that unless man were created with free will, then he would be essentially a robot designed. The one thing that we know from earlier arguments in philosophical theology is that God, He. He guides each level of the scaffolding of nature to higher orders of complexity. And being an intelligent, or what appears to be something like intelligent being, Then he would have reason to make something like himself as being the most perfect, because why would he do anything less? That's the idea. So it makes sense that God would create beings that can reason things through in the way that he perhaps does. At least, whether or not God actually reasons that might not be how his mind works. Nevertheless, the idea Is that in the same way that God creates things and has a rationally ordered mind that is free, we might be similar. And I have to make. Again, it's very long. I'm not going to go into all of the details here. I'll just make this point. I have a definition of free will which I think is the common sense definition, which is that we are free to the extent that we can rationally deliberate on actions that we might take and then act on the actions. So we act with free will. If our actions flow from a decision that we make that we could have deliberated about is generally the idea, the thing that makes us responsible for our actions, therefore is precisely the fact that we think things through or at least capable of doing it. We are therefore answerable and therefore also we can be praised and blamed for our actions. So that's the general idea then. The idea is that that is precisely what we mean by rationality, essentially deliberative rationality. That's the thing that gives human beings creativity, gives them intelligence, allows them to basically participate in the creation or the development of the world. You know, so you, you and your friends made this here, right? So that was your little piece of creation, so to speak. Obviously you didn't make the materials or anything like that, but you know, so that, that is the way in which, in which you are free. In which we are free. And that's actually really essential then to, to being the sort of level of creation that we are. In other words, we simply would not be human and we would not have the value that we have as human beings unless we had free will. Because again, free will is essentially the same as our ability of rational deliberation.
- [67:11]
Camp Gagnon
And in kind, the freedom to do evil.
- [67:14]
Larry Sanger
Right, Precisely. That's the relevance of that. As soon as you start talking about freedom, then you really cannot have freedom unless you had the freedom to do something that you're not supposed to, basically.
- [67:33]
Camp Gagnon
I see. But now, as far as like cancer or natural disasters or other types of non human evils, is there an explanation within your book that touches on these things, acts of God as people might say?
- [67:47]
Larry Sanger
Yes, there are. It's again, really, really difficult to get into. I can sort of give you the beginning of the, of the explanation, but like, it would probably take an hour to talk through the whole thing. Please imagine a world in which human beings that are free in this sense are able to. Well, well, no, let's put it this way. Let's suppose their bodies never deteriorate. They are essentially demigods or Gods, whatever. So the problems are solved. There is no pain and there is no death. So if there's no death, if there is also, you know, reproduction, then there's going to be a. The universe is going to be filled up through the laws, laws of multiplication, what are they called? Whatever. So just the doubling of everything means that the universe is going to be filled up. And. Well, if there is not a succession of beings essentially, then how can there be any development? Right. Especially if we're talking about free development. Right. This seems to require death, actually. And then the idea that there would have to be pain is. That falls out from the fact that. That, well, if there's going to be death, there has to be some indicators that you're in danger of dying. If you say that everyone is absolutely incapable of feeling pain and yet they can die, well, that actually is. That's a pretty bad situation too. They'll die happily. I suppose. There's a lot more to it than that.
- [70:14]
Camp Gagnon
I understand, but I could see that it's an interesting question, right, that if in order for development to exist, death must exist in order for humans to develop. But if that is the case, then in Adam and Eve, as either a literal story or a metaphor for the first humans, was reproduction not in God's original plan.
- [70:38]
Larry Sanger
I think that God knew that they were going to sin, so he created them with free will and he would have understood what that meant. And ultimately, you know, we are going to participate in a new creation which will be totally civilized and far more advanced than Adam and Eve. Right. Which. Which matters. So, yeah, I think so. He knew that they were going to. That they were going to sin and yet basically knew also what the ultimate consequences of that would be and allowed it to proceed. And. Yeah, so I would have a hard time remembering everything that I've written about it. The amazing thing, though, is that all of these points actually can be found in one way or another in the Bible. That particular one can be found in the Bible. Jesus said that in the new creation we will be like angels. And the implication is that no one will be married and, well, therefore there's not going to be any sexual relations, therefore there will be no children. And the population of heaven is either not going to increase or it will be through some other means that we. I don't know yet. Interesting now, but yes, that's actually a point that I make explicitly a couple of times actually in my book, that children arrived at the same time as sin.
- [72:41]
Camp Gagnon
Interesting. Sort of funny, but interesting.
- [72:43]
Larry Sanger
Yeah.
- [72:44]
Camp Gagnon
When will the book be published, do you know?
- [72:46]
Larry Sanger
I don't know. I'm still working on it. I've worked on it for the last five years. I started working on it before I believed that God exists. Yeah. I was just like working through the arguments that I. Or these new versions of arguments that I had come up with. And it was actually partly in the process of developing the arguments and like coming to understand them properly that I ended up throwing up my hand and saying, well, I guess I believe that God exists.
- [73:22]
Camp Gagnon
Now don't you hate that?
- [73:26]
Larry Sanger
What's that?
- [73:26]
Camp Gagnon
Don't you hate that? You're going through a book trying to prove yourself right? And you go, maybe God is real. That's an interesting. Have you heard this? This is one that I just heard recently that I've been chewing on. Is this idea of other types of humans in the sense that we are Homo sapiens, but there was also Homo erectus.
- [73:46]
Larry Sanger
Yeah, yeah, of course.
- [73:47]
Camp Gagnon
And there's also Neanderthals or Neanderthals as described by anthropologists. Did Christ die for them? Are they able to receive salvation?
- [73:57]
Larry Sanger
I don't know. It's a fascinating question, above my pay grade. I don't really feel obligated to form an opinion on that. I don't think it's that important ultimately. Yeah, I mean, one can speculate, but it's just speculation. Right, right. In the same way that you can speculate about how to solve other problems of Genesis 1 through 11. But my view is that a lot of different views on such matters are consistent with. With a genuine faith.
- [74:39]
Camp Gagnon
I'm curious just to sort of wrap up on this discussion. If there is someone that is struggling with their faith and they're not exactly sure what that looks like for them or how they can even begin, maybe they're enticed by the occult. Maybe they see the writings of these occult teachers and they think that they find that more appealing. What advice would you have for them and how would you encourage them to start on this type of spiritual journey?
- [75:04]
Larry Sanger
I was honored by being given a draft of Michael Horton's book upcoming. So it's the third volume in a three volume series about the spiritual but not religious movement. And it really opened my eyes about the history of this sort of spiritualistic thought, the idea of the divine self throughout history, a lot of this stuff. So on the one hand, some of it is rooted in what has been called the perennial wisdom. Right. And some of it is just a reaction to the Bible. I think, again, as I was saying before, I think it's More, the Bible is used. As a tool almost for spiritual enlightenment, but ultimately spiritual enlightenment is something which is independent of any particular words of God. I think this is. So the mistake, I think that is being made in this case is that God is a particular being. Right? And there are good reasons that you can come to, independently of believing in the Bible, that there is only one God, or that there is one supreme God who might have created a number of subordinate spirits, but there has to be one chief essentially who is responsible for creation itself. So once you've got that on the table and you think that, you know, God would communicate with us, right. He's not going to communicate in a way that is confusing. Well, can be somewhat confusing, but it's not going to be fundamentally contradictory in the way that, in the way that the body of all purported revelations has been. You take all of the different holy scriptures of various religious traditions together and they are very much contradict. Contradictory. Right. So you can't. And another thing that is very clear, if you look at the history of thought, again, this idea of spiritual but not religious, one thing that you realize is that the people who are attracted to these things are they, they seem to be more interested in proving their own wisdom and their own enlightenment than trying to actually discover anything objectively true. You see what I'm saying? And the whole frame of thinking behind the occult, ultimately esotericism of various kinds, it's continuous with this again, idea of religious but not spiritual but not religious. And it is basically the aim is to make ourselves into godlings, essentially. Right? It's, it's all about being able to imagine a creator and then immediately thinking, I can be like that. All right, I, I know that a lot of people who are into these alternate religions, they, they don't think, they don't think it through that way. But I think at some level there's some of that going on. There is a kind of self idolization. And it's a very, very important part of that is this idea that you're, you're lifting yourself up by your bootstraps. So I got a couple of tweets recently from this guy and we've been having a back and forth about a God, about a prayer that I posted last Sunday. And in it I, I basically say God. I say that I want to be as humble as I can. You know, let me be guided by your spirit and to always submit my judgment to yours, essentially. And this guy was saying, don't you think that it's really important that we. In Order to be properly humble before divinity, that we try to meditate and reach a sort of state of inner peace and so forth. And my reaction to him and it's hard to express, but he's thinking that it's up to him. He's thinking that there is some sort of spiritual technology or method or something that he can go through and that will then make him more qualified, more enlightened to be in touch with, you know, the ascended masters or whatever he thinks exists. But this, like it's wrong from the get go. It's wrong from the start. God reveals himself. God is a single being with a determinate nature. And I'm not trying to sound like a Calvinist here because I'm not really a Calvinist, but there is some truth to what, what they're saying there. They got the whole idea is that God reveals himself. We do not undertake some sort of special effort in order to be worthy of being like him. Rather he makes us like him. He sanctifies us, to use the theological jargon, after he saves us. Right. So he reaches out to us and we respond by trusting him and confessing our sins and then we are brought into the family of God. This has nothing to do with, with meditation or anything like that. So. And I think God also realizes that people are different and they interact with him in different ways. So yeah, I think there's a Christian notion of divinity is very, very different from an esoteric idea or a new age or whatever you want to call it. Idea of spirituality.
- [83:20]
Camp Gagnon
Yeah. I wonder if the esoteric idea perhaps is that by doing some type of system I can communicate and experience God immediately and furthermore become like God.
- [83:32]
Larry Sanger
Right.
- [83:33]
Camp Gagnon
Whereas I find the Christian perspective is much more that I exist humbly before God and that only through God am I able to do anything worthy. And I guess in few words is maybe a clear sort of parallel between them and a distinction between them.
- [83:54]
Larry Sanger
No, precisely. You said it very well. So that's why we say soli Deo gloria. So glory only to God. It means that, that give all glory, anything that you might feel proud of, whatever in your life, realize that that comes from God and be humble before him and not lifted up over your, your fellows. Because these are all only gifts of God and not your own doings, Right?
- [84:35]
Camp Gagnon
Precisely. Well, I'm excited to read your book and if you ever have an early copy that you want to send over, I would gladly, gladly go through it. I'll probably read it very slowly or maybe I'll have to use an LLM to even get to the bottom of it, but I'm always open. Larry, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. This is a fantastic conversation. I appreciate you sharing both your work within Wikipedia and kind of your efforts to reform it, but also your own spiritual journey and. And an interesting path that I haven't really heard before with almost sort of a backwards introduction through the occult into the light of God. I think it's very interesting.
- [85:18]
Larry Sanger
Yep. Well, I wouldn't give those people any credit.
- [85:24]
Camp Gagnon
Yes, of course.
- [85:25]
Larry Sanger
But yes, it is pretty unusual. Anyway, thank you for having me.
- [85:29]
Camp Gagnon
Of course. Let's do it again soon when your book comes out. And that, ladies and gentlemen, concludes my conversation with Larry Sanger, specifically on his spiritual journey. We did another episode, if you want to check it out, specifically on his philosophy about Wikipedia and some of the sort of nefarious elements that go into creating one of the largest, maybe the largest encyclopedia in human existence. Now, if you enjoyed this conversation about his spiritual journey and about religion as a whole, I have great news for you. We do another channel called Religion Camp. If you are interested in religion, religious topics, not only Christianity, but all the world's religions in a good faith attempt to try to understand what everyone believes. You can check that out over at Religion Camp. But of course, if you like this episode, you can stick right here at Camp Gagnon. I appreciate it. We do these episodes every week sitting down with brilliant people. You know, journalists, experts, academics, authors, people in the military. Anyone with a crazy story or expertise they're willing to share with me and also deep dive. So make sure you subscribe and please drop a comment. Let me know what you thought of this episode and I'll see you next time. Lifelock, how can I help? The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't. One in four tax paying Americans has paid the price of identity fraud.
- [86:37]
Larry Sanger
What do I do?
- [86:38]
Camp Gagnon
My refund though. I'm freaking out. Don't worry, I can fix this. Lifelock fixes identity theft guaranteed and gets your money back with up to $3 million in coverage.
- [86:46]
Larry Sanger
I'm so relieved. No problem.
- [86:48]
Camp Gagnon
I'll be with you every step of the way. One in four. What? A fraud paying American. Not anymore. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast terms apply. Peace.