The Art and Science of Technomancy

Summary

Episode Overview

Title: The Art and Science of Technomancy
Podcast: The Lord of Spirits
Hosts: Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick & Fr. Stephen De Young
Date: December 15, 2023
Theme:
Exploring the origins, nature, and spiritual implications of technology (techne) in both the ancient and modern worlds, through the lens of Orthodox Christian tradition. The episode investigates how technology is more than gadgets—it is a way of knowing and relating to the world, with instrumental uses that have profound theological and communal ramifications.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Defining Technology and Techne

• Techne (Greek root of "technology") refers broadly to know-how: the instrumental knowledge of how to use, shape, and arrange things—whether rocks, words, or ideas—to accomplish intended purposes (15:13-18:26).
• It contrasts with other ways of knowing, such as:
  • Noetic knowing (spiritual perception)
  • Episteme (scientific demonstration)
  • Phronesis (moral/practical reasoning)
  • Sophia (wisdom/pattern recognition) (11:10-13:00)
• Technology extends beyond tools and machines; it includes ideologies, systems, narratives, and even manipulative social constructs (27:44-28:10).

Quote:

“Ultimately, every product of techne... can be rightly called technology.”
—Fr. Stephen De Young (22:42)

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2. Instrumentality and Agency

• Instruments, including ideas, have no agency of their own—they are used by agents (humans, spiritual beings) for their own purposes (29:02-31:06).
• This insight undermines claims such as "religion causes war" or "technology makes us evil"—people wield ideas and technology to achieve what they already desire (31:43-32:12).

Quote:

“Religion, an idea, right? Can't cause anyone to do anything.”
—Fr. Stephen (32:12)

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3. Technology as Spiritual Practice: Magic, Idolatry, & Enchantment

• In the ancient world, techne included “spiritual technology”: magic and sacrificial ritual, both understood as instrumental ways of interacting with—or manipulating—the spiritual world (37:44-39:08).
  • Magic: The belief that correct procedures always produce the same result—a mechanistic view which seeks guaranteed outcomes (38:41-39:31).
  • Idolatry & Sacrifice: More relational, allowing for divine agency—“the god can refuse the sacrifice” (39:56-40:41).
• Even the paganism of Homer and Greek myth demonstrates this instrumental worldview, where sacrifices and rituals are battle tactics as much as swords and spears (42:18-44:15).

Quote:

“It’s very much instrumental. It is getting someone to do what you want.”
—Fr. Stephen (44:19)

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4. The Dehumanization of Instrumentality & the Mechanistic Cosmos

• Viewing humans, spiritual beings, or even God in purely instrumental terms leads to depersonalization and a mechanistic (deterministic) worldview (45:52-47:06).
  • Example: Modern materialism erases purpose and free will (“dominoes all the way down”) (48:05-50:06).
  • Even atonement theories can reflect this, where salvation is reduced to a spiritual mechanism rather than a living relationship with God (51:29-55:09).

Quote:

“When this mode of techne is applied to humans... it is innately depersonalizing and dehumanizing.”
—Fr. Stephen (46:23)

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5. Technology through Ancient Eyes: Pagan Myths and the Bible

• Ancient stories attribute the origins of technology to supernatural mediators:
  • Babylonian: The Apkallu (“seven sages”) grant forbidden civilizational knowledge, resulting in both blessing and judgment (78:45-82:23).
  • Biblical: Technology—in the line of Cain—arises from the “worst of the worst,” linked with sin and the manipulation of creation before humanity is ready (85:09-92:41). First Enoch and Jubilees stress that this forbidden knowledge is mediated by fallen angels (93:10-94:13).
  • Greek: Prometheus gives sacrificial technology (“fire”) to humanity, angering the gods—not for cooking, but for altering divine–human relations (102:06-103:39).

Quote:

“The technology is actually coming from the worst of the worst.”
—Fr. Stephen (92:32)

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6. Collective Maturity: When Knowledge is Forbidden or Permitted

• There is no inherently evil knowledge, but some knowledge is forbidden “by circumstance”—when humanity lacks the spiritual maturity to use it rightly (126:04-127:31).
  • The Tree of Knowledge in Eden symbolizes good knowledge, but given before maturity (“wasn’t just a random test”) (128:05-129:40).
  • St. Sophrony: If humanity were holier, God would allow more technology; spiritual maturity is the prerequisite (131:18-131:37).
• Orthodox tradition, as “the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church,” models how a Spirit-governed community discerns and grows toward such maturity collectively, not individually (137:11-142:24).

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7. Modern Fragmentation & Technological Alienation

• The technological explosion of the late 20th and early 21st centuries—particularly the Internet—has led to disconnection, echo chambers, and alienation, rather than the connection and shared experience of earlier tech booms (149:01-151:26).
• Modern technology pulls us apart, emphasizing personalization and individualism over communal life (146:48-147:38).

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Listener Q&A Highlight

Caller Joseph: How is magic different from the Eucharist, since both involve ritual and formula?

• Magic is about guaranteeing results by correct performance; the Eucharist is a prayerful request where God may say yes or no. The ritual derives from Christ’s command and relies on divine agency, not human manipulation (69:53-77:44).

Quote:

“The Eucharist is explicitly a request, a prayer to God to do something. He does not have to do it.”
—Fr. Andrew (70:53)

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Practical & Theological Takeaways

Technology Is Not Evil—But It’s Dangerous Without Maturity

• No forbidden knowledge per se; but misapplied or prematurely accessed techne is destructive.
• Our era’s chief spiritual problem is not the presence of tech, but the lack of collective wisdom and community to wield it rightly.

Individualism Is the Enemy of Both Freedom and Maturity

• Instrumentality and individualism dehumanize; true freedom is found in communal service to God (162:14-163:16).

Repentance Means Re-Founding Community

• The only meaningful context for discerning and rightly using technology is the “3D” (real, embodied) Church community:
  • Retreat from technological atomization
  • Rebuild local parish life as the locus of real human freedom, relationship, and collective wisdom (166:02-169:14).

Quote:

"Frankly, the only place we can do this now is in our parishes... There’s not another spot to start building a community from."
—Fr. Stephen (166:16)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (w/ Timestamps)

• On Techne’s all-encompassing nature
  “Every product of techne... can be rightly called technology.” (22:42, Fr. Stephen)
• On magic and liturgy
  “Magic is about guaranteed results and about the actions themselves doing the thing. The Eucharist is explicitly a request, a prayer to God to do something... He does not have to do it.” (70:53, Fr. Andrew)
• On the dehumanizing effect of instrumentality:
  “When this mode of techne is applied to humans... it is innately depersonalizing and dehumanizing.” (46:23, Fr. Stephen)
• Summing up the problem:
  “We are currently doing things that we don’t really want to do, that are making our lives worse, that are alienating us, that we've been tricked into doing by a prolonged indoctrination in certain ideas.” (165:04, Fr. Stephen)

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Recommended Segment Timestamps

• Techne vs. other ways of knowing: 09:05–15:46
• Ideas and agency: 29:02–32:12
• Magic and idolatry as spiritual technology: 37:44–41:29
• Genesis & forbidden knowledge origins: 85:09–94:13
• Listener question: Is the Eucharist magic? 69:44–77:44
• Modern tech fragmentation: 149:01–151:26
• Final takeaways on community & freedom: 160:51–169:09

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Conclusion

Tone:
Erudite but approachable, tinged with humor, and ultimately pastoral—challenging listeners without despair, urging return to communal, sacramental life as the antidote to the alienation wrought by both ancient and modern technomancy.

Final Word:
True freedom, flourishing, and proper technology use can only be realized together, in the Church, rejecting the isolating instrumentalization of the individual in favor of the Spirit-led, collective wisdom of the Body of Christ.

Transcript

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

He will be a staff for the righteous with which for them to stand and not to fall. And he will be the light of the nations and the hope of those whose hearts are troubled. All who dwell on the earth will fall down and worship him. And they will praise and bless and celebrate with song the lord of spirits. First Enoch, chapter 48, verses 4 through 5. The modern world doesn't acknowledge, but is nevertheless haunted by spirits, angels, demons and saints. In our time, many yearn to break free of the prison of a flat secular materialism, to see and to know reality as it truly is. What is this spiritual reality like? How do we engage with it? Well, how do we permeate everyday life with spiritual presence? Orthodox Christian priests Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung host this live call in show focused on enchantment in creation, the. The union of the seen and unseen as made by God and experienced by mankind throughout history. Welcome to the Lord of Spirits.

Good evening, giant killers, dragon slayers, wranglers of Krampus. You are listening to the Lord of Spirits podcast. My co Host, Father Stephen DeYoung is with me from Lafayette, Louisiana, and I'm Father Andrew Stephen Damick at Emmaus, Pennsylvania. And we are live. So if you are listening to us live, you can call us at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO. Excuse me. And you can talk to us. We'll get to your calls in the second half of the show and Matushka Trudy will be taking your calls now. So the Lord of Spirits. Oh, sorry, go ahead.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We started. Yeah, before we started, we had that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That disclaimer thing, the content disclaimer. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. And I do want to say, even though the opinions expressed by me on Ancient Faith's airwaves do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Ancient Faith as an organization, they do reflect with 100% accuracy and in every detail the personal opinions of Bobby Maddox.

Which is especially strange because he and I have interacted like a handful of times. It's uncanny.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's just weird. It's like a mirror.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, it's uncanny.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

All right, I'm going to read an ad now. Yeah. So the Lord Spirits podcast, brought to you by our listeners, that's you people, and by the Antiochian Men. So the Antiochian Men, which is abbreviated Amen, a men's ministry of the Diocese of Miami in the Southeast within the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Diocese of North America, within, be hosting the first ever Antiochian Men conference and retreat from March 7th to 9th, 2024 at the Woodland Christian Camp and Retreat center in Temple, Georgia with the theme the Audacity of Manhood, Strength Through Virtuous Work. The event will feature guest speakers, outdoor activities, sports workshops, campfire fellowship, and more. Speakers include His Grace, Bishop Nicholas, Father Stephen DeYoung.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's me.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's you, man. Yeah, that's right. Father Hans Jakobsee and Father Jacob Ondoun. And this event will incorporate the best aspects of camping, conferences and retreats into a first of its kind experience for Orthodox Christian men. Men ages 18 and older are welcome to register. Early bird registration is $149 per person, and that includes lodging for two nights and six meals. To learn more and register, go to antiochianmen.org and click on the banner at the top. That's antiochianmen.org and here's something to consider.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'm only in one place at a.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Time.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so can't at any point when I'm in a particular place, that means I must consider that place cooler than at least the other nearby available options.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So since I am going to be at this retreat and conference, that must mean it's going to be pretty cool.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, I mean, it is Georgia, but in March, so.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Right, right. Well, anyway, tonight we're talking about technology. This is something a lot of you people have asked us about. And even though it's been discussed every so often in a number of episodes, we've never dedicated a whole episode to it and taken that deep dive that I know a lot of you are ready for. Now, some of our listeners may not remember this, but surely Father Stephen and I remember in 1997 when Skynet became self aware and launched its war against the human race. It was tough for a few years there, but later LiveJournal and MySpace saved us, so that's done. That said, here in 2023, people are perhaps more addicted to technology and also more afraid of it than ever before, or at least in recent memory. Will AI take over? What happens when the robotic police force comes online? Are we living in the Matrix? Have you or someone you know been assimilated into the Borg Collective already? Is transporter technology, in fact a Class 1 impossibility? For the answers to all these questions, you will have to listen to some other podcast. So what are we talking about anyway, Father?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I will say there, that could be how I get around this one place at a time issue.

Okay, get the transporter technology and get a whole Thomas Riker situation going on.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, that's True. Then you'll have to wear fake gluon sideburns, though, so open that up.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He will, he will.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I'll be Thomas DeYoung.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, he will have to.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We'll call him James DeYoung because isn't that your actual middle name? Yeah, James D. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And then. And he'll be slightly lower ranking and have a different colored uniform.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That was one of my favorite bits. And then he shows up again. Right. As one of the Marquis, I recall.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Deep Space Nine.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Good times, good times.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But, yeah, we're not actually going to be talking about Thomas Riker either on this show, as much as they dash the hopes of many.

So what we are going to be talking about is technology. How you define what technology is, how.

Technology relates to how we come to know and interact with the world. Where technology comes from. Is it good or bad? Spoilers? Bad.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Come on.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And.

And then ultimately, somewhere down the line.

We'Re gonna get. We're gonna get practical about it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So. But as usual, we're going to start in some somewhat rarefied air. Not.

In the Neolithic era. We'll start getting back there in the second half, but.

In the first half. We're actually starting kind of with an earlier episode of the podcast.

Because we need to go back and review a little. As Stan Lee used to insist at Marvel, every issue is somebody's first issue.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I really wish that weren't the case, though. I know. I understand. There's probably some people for whom this is the first time they've listened to the podcast, but it's like, can you pause and listen to a couple hundred other hours and then get to this episode, if you don't mind?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Probably not.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Probably not. I do. I mean, the older I get, the more disappointed I feel.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Now, if you could craft a voice or at least a tonality in which you could do those little corner boxes Stan Lee used to do, like see Amazing Spider man number 53, the sidebar voice, or way back in Avengers 47. Right. Like, you could do that, but you'd have to memorize all the episode numbers.

So that you could cross reference those back. So I think it's easier to just review. I don't know.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's true. Okay, fine.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

At least in brief. Right. And really, this episode, the questions we've gotten from folks that led up to doing this episode started with this episode we're referring back to.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It is fitting in more ways than one. So.

The episode we did way Back about the noose.

And about the different ways of knowing, we talked about techne as one of the ways of knowing. Techne being the Greek word from which technology, for example, and technical are derived.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And techno.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, Everybody's. It's EDM now.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, we don't call it techno anymore.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, it's edm.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know. What is the difference between those two genres? Is there any?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, I don't know. I'm sure there's. There's. There is some Gen Xer out there who can give us a discourse of the difference between techno, house.

Industrial, edm. Right. But I am not that person.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I was recently informed that there's some genre called. And I'm not kidding about this, chamber pop. And apparently it's not like a pun on chamber pot, it's chamber pop and it's like pop music with strings or whatever. So figure that out.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'd never even heard of this, so I could do a certain amount of genre hairsplitting, but.

Electronic music is not my forte in that regard. I am not nearly European enough.

And far too affirmed in my masculinity.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow, getting spicy already.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We just lost our ten techno listeners. Yes, I'm sorry, EDM listeners.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yes.

I don't know who you were, but.

Now I'll never know.

So technically, is one way of knowing, amongst others, that we talked about.

In that episode. The other ones, for the record, were the noose that we talked about as being a sort of spiritual sense and using the term sense in a very literal way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That it functions sort of like an eye, an ear. Right. A nose, if you will. Right. That it. The noose receives.

Primarily thoughts, but also potentially images, visions. Right. What have you from.

Spiritual reality.

And we talked about episteme in that episode, which often gets translated as science in English, which is a type of knowledge. There's dealing with things that could be demonstrated, as in like mathematically demonstrated.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is the type of scientific knowledge that scientific materialists say is the only type of knowledge.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, the prove it to me kind of knowledge.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, yeah. You have evidence, prove it to me, make a mathematical proof, show me a repeated experiment.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Etc.

And then the other two are kind of related. Prudence, which is phronesis in Greek, is.

Usually translated in English as prudence is sort of moral reasoning, knowing what to do in a given situation.

And then wisdom. Sophia.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And wisdom is the ability to recognize.

Patterns and relationships within.

Creation.

So not patterns in the sense of. That we talk about, like scientific laws or something. But just in the way that things work, being able to see those patterns and then apply them to day to day life. And it's possible for someone to be very advanced in any one of those ways of knowing and not be very advanced in the others.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Sure.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So.

With the noose, right, you have the monastic who has received the vision of Christ in his uncreated glory, but couldn't do a calculus problem to save his life. Right.

Can't quote Shakespeare. Right. Isn't educated in that sense.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Or you have people who have advanced scientific and mathematical knowledge but no spiritual sense whatsoever.

And you have people who are very wise but do not necessarily have a lot of book learning.

You have people who.

Live very morally good lives in the world but don't necessarily have a lot of book learning. You have people with a lot of book learning who are rather foolish in their personal lives and decision making, etc.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so the fifth one of these was techne.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Which at the time we defined as sort of literally know how.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, Know how. Yeah. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Knowing how to do things. Right. Knowing how to manipulate things in the world.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And.

To bring about certain results. Right. So. And again, someone can be very advanced in this, in a particular area, this or in general. Right. There are plenty of handymen out there, probably handy women also.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You can think of an auto mechanic. Right. They may not have a lot of book learning, but they know how to work with machines.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

How to make them go. Think of a pack led.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Things to make us go.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

So.

Yeah. And so one of the things that distinguishes techne from these other ways of knowing is that techne is not knowledge of a thing or of the relationships between things per se.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Which is kind of questions of how things are.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So you don't have techne with regard to like an object.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. You don't have techne with regard to a chair.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. The question with techne is not what is it?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's not the question.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Now, techni would be knowing how to make a chair. Right, Right. But knowing how to make a chair or how to fix a chair is not the same thing as knowledge of the chair itself or knowing how to.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Use a chair in a wrestling move, which I've seen.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Which is a separate set of techne. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Although almost everybody has banned unprotected chair shots. You gotta take shots to the back, not the head.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I don't. I mean, you.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Concussion protocols. Yeah.

So.

Yeah. And it's not necessarily the knowledge of relationships between things like when we're talking about wisdom or prudence, prudence being, you know, relations between people in terms of morality and ethics.

Right. Techne is not necessarily knowledge of existing relationships between things, but it is a knowledge of the potential relationships between things.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. So philosophical, right? Don't worry people, it'll get, it'll, it'll, it'll, we'll reify this a little bit, don't worry.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah, we'll get there. We'll come back down to earth.

But so if you think about, right, there's a rock on the ground, right? And so you have a person who is very advanced in techniques. This is a very skilled person. This is a skilled worker advanced in knowing how to do things. Right. So he may not be able to tell you exactly what type of rock it is or the mineral base or what elements compose the rock. Right. The way, the way the geologist does. Right. And he may not be able to tell you how that rock got there, Right. Whether it's from erosion of the surrounding area, etc, etc, but he can look at that rock and come up with uses for that rock. He can look at that rock and say, well, I could fit this rock in with these other rocks to make a wall. Right? Or this is a rock of the right size and shape and smoothness. I could use this to make, right, A grinder to grind grain.

Right. So that's techne. How can I use this object that I find? What relationships could I put this rock into with other things?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In order to.

Produce some result?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, it's about accomplishing purposes, right? Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so.

Ultimately this is, this is knowledge of how something can be used, how it can be manipulated, how it can be put to work, Right? That's what we're talking about when we're talking about techne. It's an instrumental kind of knowledge, meaning I know how I can use this thing as an instrument to accomplish something else. Right. I know how I can use this thing.

And this is true also in the sense of, so one of the elements, of course, when we think about this kind of knowledge is, well, part of being able to take things that exist and put them into new relationships and do things with them is inventing things.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. And we tend to think of like when we use the word invention or inventing. I mean, most of us think now about some guy with spectacles sitting up in his attic creating some new machine.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Or whatever, and then Thomas Edison comes and steals the patent.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, exactly.

You know, an inventor. But, but invention.

At least in English, has had a Longer and broader history than that. It's. It's often been used in literary contexts. So, like, an author engages in invention, like he's not making some kind of device or machine, but he's.

He's making characters, he's making situations, he's making plots. Right. But also, I mean, it applies to, like, art as well and to philosophy, because all of this is the way that you use, whether it's language or pigment or whatever for this purpose. So it's not just about making a thing. It can also be about making concepts, you know, or ideas or whatever. Right, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Taking existing ideas or words or whatever that already exist and arranging them and relating them to each other in a new way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And it's worth noting because we've talked about how.

Ideas come from outside of our heads. Right. In that episode of the Deuce, we talked about how thoughts.

Come into our heads. Thoughts are like sights or sounds. Right. Sights and sounds aren't generated within our brain, hopefully. Right. Barring mental illness.

Or substances. Yeah. They are received. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In the same way thoughts are received.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And ideas are received. And so this is actually included in the word inventory.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. And I don't even have the jingle ready, but etymologically. And the thing is, this is one that I did not look up. It's one that you informed me of. But I'm always happy to receive new etymologies. Invent. So that vent is from. I think it's from Latin via French, probably looking at it. But it means, you know, to. To come or to, you know, and then invent is to come in. So the idea is that it's something that comes in. Like that's what literally in invent means is it comes in.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so it just came to me. Yeah, but it doesn't. It's not created ex nihilo.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right. Comes from somewhere else.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In a sense, it already exists, but it comes. Right. It. But it is brought into.

Existence.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Which is not exactly the same thing as we've talked about before when we talk about different aspects of creation.

But.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Why are we going through all this? Ultimately, we're going through this because we want to talk about technology. And so talking about techne is to get us. Try and get us to a definition of technology.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And ultimately, every product of techne.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Every product of that way of knowing, of that mode of reasoning can be rightly called technology.

So we tend to have a lot of arbitrary lines in our head. Right. In terms of what's Technology and what isn't.

Right. So we tend not to think of primitive things as technology like the wheel.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Or a saddle.

Or a cart.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But these are things that were technological innovations at one point.

Right. At some point in the past, this was a thing that humanity did not have. And then it had them and then it spread.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So.

And you know, to me, and I know I'm not going to offend anybody with this because I know we don't have any Amish listeners because this is Internet radio.

But to me, one of the basic problems with not like Mennonites, etc. Not all the Anabaptists, but with the Amish per se is the line they draw on technology seems to me rather arbitrary.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, they're using, you know, horse drawn wagons. That's technology.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That was technology at a certain point.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

They're using hats. That's technology.

They're clearly using razors to get rid of the mustache.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You go to the barn raising. That's technological. They did not have barns constructed in that way for most of human history.

And so it's just a certain point is chosen and this far, no farther. Right.

And we won't go past that. But the reality is as soon as someone looks at a rock, our techne example. Right. As soon as someone looks at a rock and decides to use that rock for something, we've entered into the realm of technology.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They use it to build a wall. They use it to throw at someone or hit someone with. They use it too.

Grind grain. Right. Whatever they use it for, it's now technology.

Right. By the fact that they've taken it and put it to use. So bad news to all the anarcho primitivists out there.

You can't even use rock and be consistent with your philosophy.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There's no way to not do technology as a human. You're using stuff.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess you could just walk the earth naked and eat berries you pick directly from a plant with your bare hand, I guess.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Please don't do that though, people.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I don't know how long your life would last.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You couldn't come into cities because you'd be using the road or the sidewalk. So you'd have to stay out in the wilderness. Right. Doing this at all times.

Right. And so this is an important distinction to make right at the setup. Because as much as I joked at the beginning that no technology is bad, obviously no one can say that all technology is bad. Right. Because at least not. And be consistent. Right.

We all wear clothing when it's cold. We wear warmer clothing than when it's hot. Right.

Et cetera. So.

Any broad generalization we make about technology.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so.

And if we decide that the cutoff for good technology is like, when I was 25.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You could do that.

Right. As I'm very tempted to do, it'd be old man yells at clouds.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, fine, knock yourself out. But. But the reality is that is an arbitrary line.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, I refer to that as one's Luddite line. And you can always tell when someone reach has reached their Luddite line because they start referring to a piece of technology as, quote, this thing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's the point at which, like, oh, this far and no farther.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah. And so we have to acknowledge that we're being arbitrary. But people are allowed to be arbitrary if they want to. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Sure, of course.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In terms of how they live their life.

And so it's also important because as Father Andrew brought up, we're not just talking about.

Technology in terms of.

Material, physical implements.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Whether. Whether we mean hammers or iPhones. We're also talking about ideas.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We're also talking about concepts. We're also talking about narratives.

And world views or other, whatever other terminology like that. These are things that are formed.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They're formed out of pre. Existing elements.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But we also have to be aware, and I know I've said this on the show before, this is the infamous place where I still think I might disagree with Jonathan Pageau. And someone asked him fairly directly in a Q and A if he disagreed with me about this. And I listened carefully to Jonathan's answer twice. I'm still not totally sure if we disagree or not.

So we may have to hash this out in person at Peugeot Fest or something.

But so as we said, techne, including when we're talking about ideas and concepts and worldviews and narratives and these kind of things.

All of that. This is instrumental knowledge. Yeah, this is instrumental knowledge.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

How to know how.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. And so because it is instrumental, this means ideas and concepts in these things are instruments.

They are not things in themselves that exist.

And therefore they don't have agency.

They can't do things.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So if we're talking about an iPhone, an iPhone can't do things by itself.

You may have realized that yours is listening to you and giving you ad recommendations based on stuff you said around it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But it's still not actually the iPhone doing that.

Piece of software installed on your phone by a human who created that piece of software? Who is harvesting your data? Right. The phone itself is not the agent of this. Right. Any more than a hammer can drive a nail by itself. Any more than a gun can shoot someone by itself.

Right. So the concept of fill in the blank can't do anything by itself. And this is a sorry, atheists thing.

Right.

Because often you will hear our atheist friends say things like religion is responsible for all the evil in the world.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Or religion is responsible for all the wars in history.

Right. Now, aside from prima facie being kind of ridiculously broad statements. Right.

Religion can't do anything.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What the atheist is actually talking about there is not quote unquote religion. They're talking about God.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But since they've decided to be an atheist and don't believe in a God, they can't say God is responsible for all the wars that have ever happened. They can't say God is responsible for all the evil in the world because they don't believe in him. So they say religion.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, you could say something like, you know, all the wars. Now this is not true, but you could say something like all the wars in the world include a religious element or are, you know, motivated by religion or something like that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Even motivated by.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Even motivated by. Doesn't work.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because like you can say in every war people have used religion.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Instrumentally.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But yeah, religion doesn't cause things. Agents cause things.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, right, Right. So religion doesn't kill people. People kill people and use religion sometimes to justify it. Various religions.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But religion, an idea. Right. Can't cause anyone to do anything.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And this is super important to.

Understanding history, to understanding how the world works, to helping you defeat Plato brain.

Plato being the idealist of all idealists.

And you can see this my completely non controversial example of, of the North American slave trade.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The North American slave trade was not caused by racism.

The North American slave trade was not caused by there being verses in the New Testament that talk about slavery that don't outright condemn it.

That idea is ridiculous and ahistorical. If you look at the actual history, what happened was people had a need to harvest crops like sugar cane in the New World.

The average lifespan of a worker on a sugar plantation in the 18th and 19th century was two years.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's how brutal the work was. Okay. You can't hire someone to do that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, they're right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They needed, they needed slavery.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. They had to force people to do it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And after the north, the North Atlantic slave Trade began after it began. What do you see? You see in scientific circles, scientists, these are the objective ones. Right. Scientists start crafting bogus race science, they start measuring skulls. Right. They start doing all. Doing all this nonsense. Right. This, this race bogus racial science to justify what they were already doing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, the rise of especially American phenotype racism is, you know, crappy 19th century science.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And then you start getting. And then you start getting, you know, theology.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Also trying to justify it as well.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Because you have Protestants in the American south participating in the slave trade. That obviously rubs pretty rough against Christianity.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So what do they have to do?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You have to decide they're less than human.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. What do they have to do? They have to craft new ideas that will make it acceptable.

Right. Those ideas are instruments. Right. That they use to justify themselves. But those ideas are epiphenomenal. They arise after the fact.

Of what people are doing and then get those ideas get used by people to various purposes. And once those ideas are around.

Racism doesn't cause anyone to do anything. People appeal to racist ideas in order to do things.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, in order to motivate certain.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

People, just to buy behavior, divide people from each other, whatever they want to do.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, we've said this in a hundred different ways now, which is that conviction follows conditioning. You know, beliefs of whatever kind are. They flow out of actions, you know, and then they used, they're used to reinforce them. There's a feedback loop for sure, but that's the way that it actually goes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

So.

Having beaten that possibly near dead horse enough.

Which is, which is just a bizarrely cruel turn of phrase to, isn't it? Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Like, I don't know the origins of that one.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We can't.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Dead horse.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, yeah, I'll look that one up. Like we can't talk about moving on from a topic without referring to beating horses to death, continuing to beat them even after they're dead.

But.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Apparently comes from mid 19th century. So roughly contemporaneous.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There we go. Has anything good come out of the 19th century?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I guess Saint Seraphim of Seraph there, we'll answer our own question. And other saints came out of the 19th century.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In the ancient world. Right. In the ancient world, we've been talking about techne. We've been using a lot of contemporary examples. Right. Or roughly contemporary identifiable examples. But in the ancient world, remember, there isn't this split between material reality and spiritual reality.

There isn't this sort of schism. Right. So when we talk about technology, especially as modern people, we are very deliberately, often talking about material reality and only material reality.

In fact, a lot of the approaches to the question we're talking about tonight, in general, the question of technology and the Christian faith are approached in a way that. Well, the Christian faith is one thing over here and then technology and it's a spiritual thing and then there's technology, this material thing over there. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, when you say the word technology, people think of computers.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, yeah. And, and, and phones and. Yeah.

So. But there is not this split in the ancient world. And so techne was also something that extended into spiritual reality. There was an idea of spiritual technology essentially.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In the ancient world. And there have been several examples of this that we've talked about before on the show. And this is part of the questions we get about techne.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And its relationship to some of these other things. One of them, of course, probably the most obvious is magic.

Right. And in fact, the understanding of techne is part of what defines magic per se.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Over against other elements of pagan religion.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In the ancient world. And magic is a kind of spiritual technology that brings about a result sort of in and of itself.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It's about the recipe. Get the recipe right, and you will always get this result.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You know that the only agent involved is basically the human, you know, and every. He's just manipulating stuff basically.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right. And so the same way that you have a recipe for baking bread. Right. And if you follow it correctly, you end up with a loaf of bread. Right. You have your. Here's the love spell, here's the way to curse your enemy and give them the evil eye. Right.

These various, these various things.

They might sometimes involve the invocation of some kind of spiritual being, but it's not the invocation of a spiritual being to enter into some kind of relationship or two way conversation. It's doing this will compel this spiritual being to do what you want it to do.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Without it having any say in the matter.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So then we've also talked about techne in a spiritual sense in regards to idolatry.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Which is, you know, since this is everybody's first episode.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is somebody's first episode. Somebody's everybody's first episode. We don't have 100% turnover from episode to episode, I don't think.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Although we're working on it. Right. You try to offend as many people as possible.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I already got rid of all the Amish and everybody who said the house music, I think, are gone already.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Edm. Yeah. I mean, so idolatry, you know, it's the use of images in a particular way in order to trap and manipulate a God. But.

There is a strong sense that the God or the spirit has agency. Right. So there's a kind of relationship involved there. And, you know, it's funny, like, I've noticed that sometimes people, I think, are hesitant to think of idolatry and sacrifice to gods as being technology. And I think that's because our modern experience of quote, unquote, religion is that it's this special thing you do maybe one day a week. Right. It's this special thing you do. Right. But I. This was underlined for me recently because I've been. Over the last week or so, I've been reading the Iliad, which, in between, you know, graphic descriptions of people's heads coming off with. Because there's a lot. A lot of fighting in the Iliad. I mean, a lot. Like, it is very cinematic in its detail.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. I had a. I used to have a set of Homeric Greek flashcards. And by used to, I mean, like. I mean, like, 25, 30 years ago.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's when I was first. When I was first learning classical Greek. And like the Homeric vocabulary cards, you learn like, 13 words for spear.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

12 words for shield.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Learn some exciting phrases in ancient Greek. Like, I have judged you worthy of death.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah. I have skewered your throat with my spear.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right, exactly. And so here's the thing that's interesting about reading the Iliad, which. It's been a long time since I've read it, so I really recommend this to everybody, actually, and the recommending.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Homer, you're going out on a limb there.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, I know, I know.

Yeah. The Robert Fagels translation is great.

But one of the things that's interesting in this regard about that is.

Almost any time one of the characters, one of these heroes, decides he's going to go and take on his enemies, or he sees them coming at him or whatever it is, almost every time they will offer up a sacrifice.

It's constant. I have lost count of how many sacrifices have been offered in the maybe four or five days that have taken place in the events that I've been reading. There's a lot of them, and some of them, it's, you know, the full barbecue.

Right. And I mean, literally, it's talking about how juicy it is and all this kind of stuff. But in other case. In many other cases, it's you know, they're filling up their cups with wine, but they always pour out a few drops or sometimes the whole cup to Zeus or whoever. Right. So it's not special, it's instrumental. It's like we're about to do this thing. We need this. We, we want Zeus to come in. We want, although Zeus mostly likes to sit on his throne and laugh at everybody killing each other, you know, we want Athena to show up. We want Poseidon, we want Ares, we want Aphrodite.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Seems like he might be on the other side. We need to get him back on ours.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, it's super, like tactical. It's very tactical and strategic, these constant offering of sacrifices. So I mean, if you want to see this sense of instrumentality in terms of sacrifice, read the Iliad. Really? I mean, it's again, I've lost count of how many sacrifices have happened and I'm 60% of the way through.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah. For Alexander the Great, there was no difference between, you know, the phalanx and offering the correct sacrifices to the correct gods at the correct time.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In terms of how he viewed those, these are both battle tactics.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

These are both.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There's both technology in terms of strategy and tactics.

Yeah, yeah. And so this is an instrumental thing, right? It's very much instrumental. It is getting someone to do what you want. Right.

The difference then between your sort of run of the mill paganism with idolatry and sacrifice and stuff and magic is that within sacrificial ritual there is the idea that the God can reject the sacrifice.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The God could decide he likes the other sacrifice better, other guy's sacrifice better, or what.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Have you read the Iliad? It's all there. Like this is a poem from 2,700 years ago. Like, again, we're not making this stuff up.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

Right. And so.

When you start using techne, some people may have, may already be ahead of at least where we're talking here. They may be thinking, well, you can not only approach like a rock or a hammer or a piece of wood or a block of marble that you're going to sculpt or.

A book you're going to write or a concept you're developing. You may not only approach that in this sort of instrumental way, in this, this way of techne, but as we were just saying, you could kind of approach spiritual entities that way.

And you could also approach people that way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You could approach people in the sense of, I'm going to. How can I use this person to accomplish some goal?

Right. And then you can instrumentalize other things like ideas, feelings, emotions. Right? You can instrumentalize those things to try to get that person to do the things you want. Right. To accomplish the goal. And so.

When this mode of techne is applied to humans, to spiritual or divine beings, it is innately depersonalizing and dehumanizing.

Right. You are treating that person in the way that you would treat an object in the world.

You are treating them as a object in which you can manipulate.

And put into place.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And once that begins, you've taken your first big step.

Toward the idea of sort of a mechanistic cosmos.

And I say it's the first big step because even though they wouldn't use the word mechanistic, right? Because.

There were in ancient Greece some mechanical things, literally mechanical things, but, oh.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Sure, they had machines.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They did not primarily think of those terms. Right. So they would talk about fatalistic might be better in the classical Greek sense. But there is a sense in which everything becomes compelled and everything becomes instrumental and therefore free will starts to depart from the picture.

Right. And as we move into the modern period and the spiritual realm gets sort of cut, lopped off, either separated out so it's irrelevant to the world, or denied outright later on.

This becomes a kind of materialist determinism.

So I know we have some listeners at least, who are at least around in contemporary philosophical circles. This is the cause du jour is, hey, can any philosopher out there come up with a way that anyone can have anything like free will?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because everything has become instrumentalized. Everything has become mechanical.

Everything has become clockwork.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It's all just atoms banging against each other, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Such that even my, right, my attempts to instrumentalize the people and things around me are just the effect of a cause that's causing me to do that. Right. There's just sort of this endless chain with no original.

Instrumentalizer now, Right. Because we don't even have DS anymore. There's no original instrumentalizer.

Whose ultimate purpose is being accomplished by this complex chain of dominoes falling. It's just dominoes all the way down.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

With no. With no purpose, Right. At least our Calvinist friends. I'll say something positive. I usually pick on them. But at least our Calvinist friends have some kind of God, right? Who kicked over the first domino and set up all the dominoes in the first place to accomplish something.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So there is still some sense of meaning there, even though things then are essentially mechanistic after that.

Right. In the modern world, our atheist friends.

There'S not even that.

And so you can know more for the majority, the majority opinion among philosophers now, I think I can safely say, is that there is no free will. And therefore you can no more decide what you're going to do any given day than a domino can decide which direction it's going to fall.

And that's it. That's everything. Right. Everything is techne.

So, yeah. So I, I didn't say this was going to be a happy episode with a feel good ending. I never said that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Let the record show it's got a nice beat. You can dance to it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Now we're back to edm. I don't. Anyway.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I wasn't expecting that when we started this episode.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So. And all of that points to the fact that in the west, insofar as we could. I don't even like referring to the west anymore because I think it's a false construct. But I mean, really what I'm meaning here is in Western European civilization, right. And its heirs in other parts of the world.

Techne really triumphed as a way of knowing.

I think you need look no further than secularism and scientific materialism that has come to predominate to demonstrate that. But it started a lot earlier than that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So an example, atonement theories.

Right. Atonement theories in general.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The whole idea of an atonement theory.

In Western European theology is.

How does the atonement work?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Like what's the mechanism by which this happens?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

How does Christ's death and resurrection work?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And a very good scholar like Simon Gathercole, when he goes to write his book defending the idea of penal substitutionary atonement like a good Protestant does. Right.

Says that the reason why that is the best atonement theory is it's the only one with a mechanism. His word.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's the only one with a mechanism that explains how it works. That makes it the best one. Right. Which is very British, very Western European of him.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because the only critique I'm giving of penal substitutionary atonement here, I've got lots of them elsewhere. But the only one I'm giving here is this idea of mechanism.

This idea that God himself must instrumentally use some kind of spiritual technology in order to save a human being.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He can't just do it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And, and the, the problem that, and.

This is the kind of thing you see in Scholastic theology. I'm not just picking on our Roman Catholic friends here. Protestant scholasticism is a real thing.

Especially in the 17th century.

That whole, their whole approach to soteriology is along the lines of this technological approach. And this goes so far in some of the Puritans.

That some of the Puritans, these are the people who founded this country, at least according to histories written after Abraham Lincoln.

The Puritans. Right. Some of them go so far as to say that if you have faith and God tries to send you to hell.

That you could press a covenant lawsuit.

Against God.

Requiring him to actually save you because you have met the condition of faith. And that's the deal.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's just, I'm, I'm, I'm dumbstruck by that, but I know it's real. I mean, that's, that's an absolutely serious theology.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Now, of course they mean this as a hypothetical.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Sure. Right, of course. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They don't think God is going to try to. They wouldn't say God is going to try to damn anyone who has faith.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Within their system, think about it that way. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Ideas arise from somewhere. Right. What makes that thought thinkable to them is the mechanistic way in which they're viewing salvation.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That is a thought that had never occurred to most of our listeners, I'll bet, because they have never approached salvation quite that way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

From that angle.

And of course. Right. As we said, atheistic materialism, even beyond other. There are other forms of materialism. I worry sometimes when we talk about materialism on the show.

That a bunch of things are getting slurried together.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, I remember when I was a kid growing up in mostly kind of Baptist and Baptist adjacent type churches, materialism was a word that meant possessiveness, you know, being into stuff, you know, basically like Madonna being a material girl.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we're not talking about greed or consumerism.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Per se. Right. I mean, that's obviously not completely unrelated, but.

And we're not talking about dialectical materialism. Right. They're not. You know, I don't think anyone would tune into this show for analysis and critique of Marx's Das Kapital.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I would.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So we're not.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's not what I signed up for.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. I don't think we'd get even one episode out of that.

Like halfway through the episode, a baith would just pull the plug and be like, why?

Right. But we're talking about atheistic materialism meanings or scientific materialism, essentially the belief that only things that are materially composed exist.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Again, atoms banging against each other.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. That's. Anything that is.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Is A thing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Anything that isn't materially composed does not exist.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, right, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But that idea, obviously if you have that idea, then you could see how you end up with no free will. Right. You could see how everything is just mechanical interrelations and cogwheels.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And you can see this back to picking on the 19th century again, right. In the rise of social sciences.

The idea of social sciences, the idea that there is some science to the way in which an individual human works.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Some kind of mathematical formula, some kind of discoverable pattern and mechanism.

And then when you look at things like sociology, larger things, how humans work in groups and groups work.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Why are we trying to find the techne of these things? So that we can manipulate them, so that we can change them, so that we can instrumentally get them to do what we want.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Which I mean a lot of people are doing that in a theoretically, well meaning way. Although not all of them.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, historically, definitely not all of them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, historically, usually not.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, there are a lot of. There may be, there may, hence, listen, may be some do gooder social engineers now.

But historically social engineers at eugenicists were. Are not the good guys.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But what.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You end up there. Right. Because. And people have probably heard this, right. What's the debate about people's behavior? Like we're going to talk about crime. Where does crime come from? Is it from nature or is it from nurture?

Let's pause and think about that a second. Those are the only two options.

It's either nature, it's their genetics. They're born that way.

Right. And so if you come down on that side, that's where you get eugenics.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We need to stop having people be born that way. We need to get them to be born another way. We need to, we need to get rid of all the people who are born that way and or not. Let them reproduce.

Almost all the horrors of the 20th century right there. Right. And if you want the rest of the horrors of the 20th century, then on the other side are the people who decide it's nurture, it's their environment.

Right. Therefore we must re engineer society to create the new man.

Right. We could socially engineer this and give people these experiences and these structures that will create a different kind of person and we will put an end to this.

Here comes tyranny.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

For your own good.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right between those two poles. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But those are the only two ways for humanity to improve.

Once you embrace this kind of scientific materialism.

And this instrumental technological view.

Of the world. Those are the two options you have. Those are the two poles you have to bounce between.

Right.

And so in many ways, although the enlightenment wanted to cast itself as an enlightenment, as we're going to throw off the darkness of the Dark Ages.

We'Re going to get rid of all of this Christian nonsense and.

Get to science and knowledge and reason.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

All of these good things. It's not a coincidence that this went hand in hand with a return to pagan literature.

Right. Pagan art.

Because it is essentially a revival of the same worldview that was held by paganism.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Deterministic, fatalistic, mechanistic and manipula bowl.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I don't know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

People to be manipulated. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's in so many ways, the enlightenment is essentially a kind of reframing of paganism. But now instead of, you know, gods named Zeus and Odin or whatever, it's, you know, God's named Progress and whatever else.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. The economy.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yep. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This, it's not going to get much happier from here, guys. I'm warning.

This is like the end of season two of Battlestar Galactica. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets any better.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

The one with Lorne Green or.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, no, that was happy.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know. That was the happy, nice Battlestar Galactica.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Those were the friendly Mormons in space.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Where Starbuck was still a guy. Yeah. Yeah. All right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

All right. Well, that said, we're going to go.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Ahead and take our first break and we'll be right back with the second half of this episode of the Lord of Spirits.

Father Andrew, Stephen Damick and father Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of the Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-23-7-2346. That's 855-AF-ADIO.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

What are we to make of the unseen world and spiritual warfare? The Lord of Spirits book version is now [e-mail] written by Father Andrew Stephen Damick.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

To the modern mind, dragons and demons are just the inner demons of psychology. And angels are often reducible to the better angels of our nature, that is, to our better human impulses and virtues. Talk of spirits is really about psychology, but to the ancient mind of millennia ago, even up to the pre modern mind of just centuries ago, these are real beings with personal presence who inhabit our world and affect us.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Father Andrew provides a distillation and explanation of the material in the popular podcast the Lord of Spirits, which he co hosts with Father Steven DeYoung. Get this brand new book today at store.ancientfaith.com. that's store.ancientfaith.com.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We'Re back now with the Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew, Stephen Damick, and Father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

Yeah, everybody should buy that book.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. We're kind of preaching to the choir on this one.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know, but I mean, you know, these are the people who, you know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That your new book is based on the podcast that you host with me.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I've heard that, yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I wish I could remember the name.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know, but you know, I mean, especially for people for whom there is. This is their first episode since we've talked to them and about that is.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That that book might help you out, everybody. You don't. I'm not saying don't listen to all those 200 plus hours of other stuff, but if you're looking to jump in, that book could probably help you do that. So, you know, that's one of its purposes. So.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And as. As somebody who has like 163 hours into Baldur's Gate 3.

I don't know who you are, who's complaining that that's too much to listen to.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's true.

Yeah. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I mean, I don't know how you find Father Andrew, but I am at least as entertaining as that game.

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So anyway, welcome back, everybody. It's the second half of this episode of Lord of Spirits. We're talking about technology. And as we just said in the first half, it's about instrumentalizing in all the ways that that means.

So speaking of the ancient world.

Where did all come from?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Where will it go?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Take us back.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, yeah. So now we're going back to the. Not quite the Neolithic era. We're not going to back quite that far.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Mainly because we don't have anything written from then. Because there wasn't writing. No, no.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

We have rocks and scratches and some tombs.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So while there was technology, as we already mentioned. Right.

There was technology as soon as somebody figured out a way to tie a rock onto the end of a stick and make a spear. Right.

Which are depicted in those early cave paintings. Technology. We don't know. We don't have the stories from those people in terms of how they understood the origin of technology.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. We don't know what they thought about it. We don't have. I mean, it is a true Dark ages Right. In the sense of which that was the original meaning of that. Everybody, by the way, is that it was a period where there wasn't much literature being produced. That's all that really meant was.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So we sort of get back to it in the published.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. So we don't know that much about that. It wasn't like all is dark and evil and, you know, whatever, and ignorance rules everyone, which is how we depict it now, at least how the Enlightenment often depicted, you know, so.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah, I imagine when they first started making like metal bladed knives, there was some guy with like a sharp rock going like these kids, you know.

But we don't know that for sure.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because he didn't write anything.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. So we actually. So by the way, we actually do have someone calling in that has a question about magic. So. Joseph, are you there? Can you hear us?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Hi, Fathers, welcome.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Welcome to the Lord of Spirits podcast.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Where hopefully this is not a deck building question, because I'm not really.

Yeah, thank you fathers for having me. So, yeah, my question is tangutively related to both, I think, techne and magic. And I hope I phrase this correctly. But in a previous episode it was mentioned, if I understood correctly, that magic was understood as a way to sort of force the gods to do what you wanted them to do. And it was using, you know, a certain formula. So what? I guess my question has two parts. How would you explicitly differentiate magic from techne? And then also connected to the formula aspect, what differentiates? I guess the eucharistic prayer in divine liturgy, since it uses the same phrasing on a weekly basis. Like how would you differentiate that from magic since we're, you know, attempting to get God to bless, you know, our offering every week.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, well, okay, so there's a couple things I'll say. Number one, magic is a subset of techni, so it's a particular kind of instrumentalization. Okay. And the point is that if you do it right, then you always get a certain result. It may involve trying to force gods to do stuff, but it may not. It also may be just sort of about, you know, manipulating the elements of the world, you know, that kind of thing.

And yeah, this is a good question you ask about the Eucharist. Right. Because I think especially for those of us who, even if we don't have a Protestant background, we live in a Protestant country in a lot of ways, or at least a country with what's left of a Protestant culture maybe.

And at least American Protestantism is not that ritualistic in its Worship. So it tends to present itself in a much more kind of informal way. Right. And so therefore, when you see complex worship, people sometimes look at that and say, you're doing magical spells. Right. Because of the complexity of it. Right. But here's the really important thing.

Just because there's a complex method to something.

Does not make it magic. Magic is about guaranteed results and about the actions themselves doing the thing. The Eucharist is explicitly a request, a prayer to God to do something.

Right. He does not have to do it now. He is the one who himself gave it. I mean, we see that in the Gospels. He gives the Eucharist to us to do and commands us to do it. So this is not something that we dreamed up to, to make, to force God to do anything. This is something he gave us to do, something he is doing that he's inviting us to participate in and tells us how to do that. Right. So it's not magic because it doesn't happen because the, the priest does the technique. Right. Which is why, for instance.

Variations between Eucharistic liturgies that exist between traditions or sometimes represent completely other rituals. Right. So the, the, the Eucharistic liturgy of the Byzantine tradition is quite different from the Eucharistic liturgy of the Latin tradition. Even prior to the Great Schism, they were quite different from each other, and yet they still both were. The Eucharist, if it was magic, then the technique would need to be essentially the same. Right? Because if you're going to get the thing to do what you want it to do, you have to follow the recipe. That's how it, how it works. Right. So, yeah, it's, it's about prayer, asking God to act.

It's not about making God do anything. As if we could. Right. That's not a thing. You can't force God to do anything. So that's what I would have to say about that. I don't know. Father, you got anything to add or adjust or actually.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, in terms of the Eucharist.

The Eucharist falls within the realm of sacrifice.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And sacrificial worship. Right. So now I'm talking in the general sense. So sacrificial worship in the general sense, which includes the Eucharist, includes pagan animal offerings, includes sacrifices in the Old Testament. Right. Sacrifice, broadly, has always included within it the idea, this is what differentiates it from magic, that the God can reject the sacrifice.

And this was literally institutionalized in the ancient pagan world. This is why you would have a haruspex.

A haruspex is somebody. Haruspex is the Latin word. But this kind of activity predates Rome by a lot.

In the ancient Aries. But harvespex is. Is a particular type of priest who practiced ecstasy, which is the reading of the entrails of a sacrificed animal.

So his whole job. And we have, like, mocked up kidneys and lungs and things that have inscriptions on them, like made of stone with inscriptions in them that were used to train heruspexes, Haruspices, I guess.

In their. In their art form. So after the animal was sacrificed, they would go in and get into the guts of the animal, literally, and look for signs as to whether the God had accepted the sacrifice or not.

Right. And so if they found, you know, black spots on certain organs, or we have records in some cases of organs being missing.

Right. They go in there and one of the major organs, like a heart in one case is missing. This was taken as this horrible omen that, oh, no, the gods have rejected this sacrifice. Right. And then you would have to come up with some other actions to figure out why and then to try to, you know, offer more sacrifices and get them back on your side. Now, obviously, we as Christians don't do all that activity, but the existence of that and the prevalence of that shows that unlike magic, there is this possibility that even if you do everything right.

Right. It might not work.

Which means that the divine still has its agency. Right. In the Old Testament, we find this. It gets to the point of the prophets where God tells them to stop offering the sacrifices.

Because he says, your hearts are far from me. You're behaving however you want. And then coming and offering sacrifices like that makes it okay. Like I have to then forgive you even though you're not repentant. Right. That's not how this works. Right. So God makes clear through his prophets of the Old Testament that he retains his autonomy. Right. Sacrifice does not operate in this mechanistic way and even within some of the prayers of the Eucharist.

So, for example, in the Liturgy of St. Basil the Great, I pray a prayer. It's often done silently, so everyone may not hear it, but I pray a prayer asking God not to withhold the grace of the Holy Spirit from the gifts. Because of my sins as a priest.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Which suggests that that's a thing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. That suggests that that's a possibility. Right. That is within it, acknowledging the possibility.

That God could say to me or to my congregation or to some portion of the church, what he said to ancient Israel, no, stop repent first. Right.

So that, that is a, that is a live possibility there.

What I'm about to say is not me taking a cheap shot at our Roman Catholic friends. It is me trying to avoid taking a cheap shot at our Roman Catholic friends. I think this would be a worthwhile question about the Eucharist to ask to an informed Roman Catholic person.

Because I know the whole hocus pocus thing. I know they have a good answer for that.

I am not the person equipped to answer that for them and explain the difference from their perspective because there is very much within the Roman Catholic theology of ordination and how they see that as working and the charisms granted to a priest, a kind of mechanistic view of this where if he grabs bread and wine and says the words of institution, they automatically become the body and blood of Christ. You could find theological statements that talk about the Roman Catholic priest reaching up into heaven and compelling Christ to come down.

So that would be a good question to ask them. I'm sure there are answers from a Roman Catholic perspective. I'm not the one equipped to give them, and so I don't want to caricature them here. Right.

But if you do get the opportunity to ask somebody Roman Catholic and that's somewhere I'd be interested in reading it, their answer. So.

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right. Does that answer your questions, Joseph?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Thank you, Fathers.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right, thanks for calling in. Okey doke. Well, we're not going Neolithic, but, you know, lithic.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, not even. And definitely not Paleolithic.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Post lithic.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

What is our relationship? Those rocks.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We're going Bronze Age.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay. Yeah. Hey, that's, that's, that's the Iliad again.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Everything in that thing is bronze.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, that's. But we're, we're even earlier. We're, we're. Well, earlier than the.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Bronze Age.

I won't go down that rabbit trail now about why everything is bronze. But anyway, so. Because it was actually written in the Iron Age.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So we're going back to. And this is a story we've referred to, really a set of stories. Set of Babylonian stories that we've referred to before.

From the.

The original Babylonian empire. So we're talking about the middle of the second millennium bc not the Neo Babylonian Empire. The Babylonian empire that you. We meet in the Bible with Nebuchadnezzar and his Nabopolasser and those folks.

That's the Neo Babylonian Empire that takes Judah into exile. This is the original Babylonian empire, middle of the second century B.C.

I was about to try to date it in terms of biblical events, but I'd have to weigh in on the date of the Exodus, and I refused. Darn it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Don't jump in.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Leave it at that.

And this is the story of the Apkallu, or the seven sages.

Right? A tapa or adapa and his buds, who are, as we've talked about before, starting with Adapa, who's a sort of a fish person.

Supernatural being who emerges from the rivers.

Comes, and he's called a sage because he comes in, he imparts wisdom to the rulers.

He's followed by six other sages.

When you look at kings lists from this period, right. The kings before the flood have these apkallu, these sages, as their advisors, right? And that's sort of why they are able to become king. They have this wisdom from the spiritual realm, from these spiritual beings. And then, as we've talked about before, after the flood, the kings are said to be two thirds apkallu, that there's this sort of interbreeding represented right within the story. But the apkallu proper from before the flood, they end up imprisoned beneath the rivers in the abyss by the gods for having given this knowledge to man. But the importance of the function of this story in the middle of the second millennium BC for the Babylonian empire. This Babylonian empire was established by the Amuru, which literally means the Westerners. They came from what's now Syria.

Hammurabi being the most famous one who's a king during this period. They used this story in large part to justify their own reign in that they claimed to still have this secret wisdom.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. This given Adi Apkalu, Anti Diluvian knowledge.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. They claim to still have this. And of course, as we've mentioned before on the show, the Amuru are the biblical Amorites.

That giant clan.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Probably the most famous one being Sihan.

Of Og. And Sihan.

I say probably the most famous because he's the one we sing about at Christmas.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Or in. I think in all of the.

Why am I blanking on my liturgical language now? The polyolio Poly Elios. There we go. That's right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not Christmas until OG has been slain.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's on one of my Christmas ornaments, actually.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I will stand by that. If you ever find a dead OG Christmas ornament, send it to me.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, man.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I mean, it will have pride of.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Place, as I say now that we live in this age where you can literally just order up any kind of merch with anything on it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Even if it's. Even if you just have the 3D printer plans, like the file send that to me of dead OG Christmas ornament.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You're gonna get a hundred of those. I'm just saying.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Cool. I am for it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

You could have an entire OG Christmas tree.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

My wife has the miniature paints.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We'll mix in some Warhammer 40K. It'll be all good.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Nice. Take pictures. Post them on. Yeah, on the.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So, Right, so this is. This is sort of this.

Right? Now, remember, we have to always remember the earliest written thing we have.

Was very likely not created out of whole cloth.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So the Apkallu story is not the origin of anything. We can't say that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because there's untold amounts of ancient literature that either didn't survive or is in a cupboard at the British Museum somewhere untranslated. Right. So we don't know. We can't construct an origin. But this is our earliest so far known version of this story. And this version of the story, by the way, didn't become widely known until about 2010.

Like, journal articles started being published about the translation of these tablets from which the Apkallu stories come around 2010. So 13 years ago.

So who knows what's still out there and what we'll learn in the future. Yeah, but this is at least a representation, middle of second millennium BC.

About the origins of technology.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

About the origins of this kind of techne kind of knowledge.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And we see just as. And we've talked about this a lot as we see in the scriptures.

We see sort of the God given take, Right. On a number of these stories, like the Flood. Right.

We see in Genesis the God give and take of this kind of story.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And this is in the period leading up to the flood, particularly associated with the line of Cain as it plays out in his genealogy, especially at the end of his genealogy in Genesis 4.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. So the end being Lamech.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Not the same guy that's the father of Noah. No, just has the same name, apparently.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It was a common name.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The last antediluvian generation.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Yeah. So, okay, so Genesis, chapter 4, verses 19 through 24. And Lamech took two wives. The name of the one was Adah, and the name of the other was Zillah. Adah bore Jabal. He was the father of those who dwell in tents and have livestock. His brother's name was Jubal. He was the father of all those who play the lyre and pipe. Zillah also bore Tubal Cain he was the forger of all instruments of bronze and iron. The sister of Tubal, Cain was Naamah. Lamech said to his wives Ada and Zillah, hear my voice, you wives of Lamech. Listen to what I. I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain's revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech's is 77fold.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So Lamech is the first person who's a polygamist in the Bible.

For anyone still unclear on what the Bible thinks about polygamy.

And sings this song to his wives about how great he is.

And remember, Cain's revenge being sevenfold, that was the revenge God was going to take for Cain.

So when Lamech says 77fold, he's saying, actually, he's greater than God.

You should fear him more than God. Nice fella.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Not a good look.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So the key part here is these three sons.

And what they create.

So the first one, Jabal, is the father of those who dwell in tents that have livestock. And you're like, well, what's wrong with living in a tent? That's not the problematic part, it's the livestock part.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It's the hoarding of wealth, because in a hunter gatherer society, everyone has equal access to the food.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, not. Well, say you missed a piece there, Father Andrew.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, excuse me.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They're not supposed to be eating animals yet.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, well, there's that as well. Yes, that's true.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So, but still, they haven't been given permission to eat animals. And so what does this represent?

This is an elements of God's. An element of God's creation that they have chosen to instrumentalize.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, they're just taking it and. And controlling it and using.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And using it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's a very different relationship with animals than what Adam had when he named them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Yep.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Raising them for slaughter. So there's a shift, and that's technology. Right.

Learning how to breed, raise, kill, butcher, cook, eat. Right. Animals. Jew balls, Father. All those who play the lyre and pipe.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is saying music is bad. No, it's not.

It's also not why we don't use instruments in liturgy. Although I have at least once heard somebody try to argue that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So the lyre and the pipe, as they're translated here, the idea here is that this is a particular type of music. This is a type of music used in pagan festivals and pagan rites.

And so this is actually a kind of spiritual technology that they're talking about him devising.

Right.

And then Tubal Cain, who, as everyone knows from the Noah movie, got into an epic fist fight with Noah on the deck of the ark during the flood.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I still haven't seen that. Is it worth it?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Well, it depends on what you mean by worth it. Okay.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I was. I feel compelled to watch all these things, and I was much more entertained by that one than most of them.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay, okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But I emphasize the word entertained.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Entertained. Yeah. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Not informed. Entertained.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Um.

It. It's a thing. Yeah.

And Noah does not yell. Are you not entertained? Just for the record, even though it is Russell Crowe.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

During the fist fight. And, hey.

You'Ve got Anthony Hopkins as Methuselah. So how do you go wrong?

Watch the movie to see how you can go wrong.

But Tubal Cain, he's the forger of instruments of bronze and iron. Right. Again, bronze and iron tools.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So that's the old. But this is. Right, why is this. What's the first thing you do when you learn metallurgy? Weapons.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. You kill people.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Weapons for killing people.

So.

We see that Cain's like. We're not going to read the whole genealogy, as exciting as that would be, but Cain's line that culminates here, Right. You can see there's this descent.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There's a descent from Cain pun here, but.

It descends downward. It gets worse. Right. And this decline was not seen by, for example, Second Temple Jewish interpreters, being accidental. Josephus, for example, portrays Cain as the arch heretic, the one who teaches sin. He teaches sin and wickedness to his children.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. He's not just like, oh, poor Cain, he made a big mistake and now he's out.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. But he remained actively evil.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. He's a villain. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so this continues, right. And it's out of this descent, right, that we see this technology emerging.

Out of this descent, technology comes. We don't read about technology coming from Seth's line leading up to Noah.

Right. So.

This means that while the Apkallu story is casting as this positive thing, this coming of divine knowledge, this is a great thing that gives the right to rule.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And brings glory to a civilization. We see quite the opposite here. The technology is actually coming from the worst of the worst.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And represents a descent into evil in the Genesis account, though, it's, of course, as we've talked about several times on the show, and we won't go back into again. As much as it might excite people.

This is. The supernatural element of this is at least hinted at or pointed to in Genesis 6:1,4. In terms of the Nephilim.

In the expanded version of this story that you get, for example, in first Enoch or the book of Jubilees.

This is made sort of even more clear that these, it's both, both gives further description of what the techne is that is received by the. The line of Khaine and makes it explicitly clear that.

Clear that this is being revealed by demonic powers, by specifically fallen, wicked spiritual powers. So again, very similar to the Apkallu story, but in a way inverted. Right. It's not. These are the good guys bringing wisdom to man and God or the gods are the bad guy, sort of punishing them and ruining everybody's party.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's the pagan version of the story, Right, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But quite the opposite. Right? Quite the opposite. The exact inversion of that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so in the versions we find in the Book of Enoch and the book of Jubilees, right, Amongst the techne that's taught is sorcery.

And this, of course in, in Greek is pharmakeia, as we've said before.

Which is a.

And again, an instrumental means to enter into and manipulate the spiritual realm.

Seduction. And implements of seduction.

Like eye makeup, literally in the Book of Enoch, I.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Mean, cosmetics are part of this bundle of technologies.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The arts of seduction. And again, we have to remember the arts of seduction. In this case, there, there is the element here heavily of pagan ritual. Right. Think about BAAL poor.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And what goes on there, as we've talked about in the Book of Numbers.

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And there's Thomas Dolby, she Blinded me with science.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There's, there's.

Celestiality stuff in there.

But there's also.

That pagan sexual ritual element. Right. It wasn't just.

The beguiling of naughtiness, it was just that sexual immorality is bad. Yes, it is. But within this context.

This is women receiving this from a demonic being with whom they have an intimate relationship.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so that other element, that spiritual element, is always present.

And of course divination, right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Is one of the things that's listed.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Trying to tell the future by observing things.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, yeah, but what one of the things that we may not think about, right. And.

You know, this isn't just a word play, it's a deliberate word choice, Right. Is that divination is a way of determining the future.

In the sense that if I know it, if I know what is going to happen tomorrow, then that means it is determined.

Yeah, Right. So divination was understood not just as a way of, hey, I'm curious, you know what horse is going to win the fifth race tomorrow. So I could place a bet.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But.

This is a way of locking it in. Right. Locking it into place.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's not just satisfying a curiosity. We need to keep that in mind. Like with the story of Saul and the Witch of Endor.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

When he goes before battle, it wasn't just, hey, is this going to go well or is this going to go badly? Because if you say badly, maybe we won't fight. Right. Or we'll do something else because he's told it's going to go badly and he fights anyway.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's an attempt to try to lock into place the result that you want.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And, you know, there's a gazillion ways that this gets done. Like you mentioned the Haruspex earlier, you know, examining the innards of slaughtered animals, but like another one again from the Iliad, lots of ornithomancy. Ornithomancy. Ornithomancy, yeah, yeah. Telling the future by observing birds, also known as augury. But, you know, there's ailuromancy, which is cats, there's mirmomancy, ants. I mean, there's so many possibilities.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Anything that can form patterns.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You could find someone who claimed to be able to read the patterns.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And it's a specialist. Like, it's a technologist who's able to do this theoretically.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, right. And before we move on from the divination thing, did you know there is both an episode of I Dream of Genie and an episode of Bewitched in which they accidentally.

Magic up the next day's newspaper?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I did not know that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And hilarity ensues involving betting on horses.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Huh? And isn't that. Isn't. Is. Isn't Barbara Eden in both of those?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, no, no, no. Montgomery's in Bewitched. Come on, man.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Sorry. I was distracted thinking about marmotomancy, which is what you see in.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, Marmots.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, you know, Punxsutawney Phil right here in Pennsylvania.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This whole bewitch thing, man, not only have you let me down, I think you've let yourself down.

You probably don't even know which one's Dick York and which one's Dick Sargent. Do you?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I'll go sit in the corner and you can just monologue for the rest of the episode.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We don't have to go that far.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay, that's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Although one more infraction.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, it's been years since I watched either one of those shows. But Nick at Night is no longer, like, a big part of my life. Well.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And Nick at night now is showing shows from, like, the 90s. Oh, you just get depressed. That feel old.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know. Apparently now, like, the stuff that we listen to the 80s is quote, oldies. Yeah, that's offensive to me. I'm sorry.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, yeah, man. Every. Everything we listen to in the 90s is now classic rock.

Phones turning to powder.

So let's talk about Prometheus. Yes. Let's talk about.

Something older than us. Yeah.

So, yeah. So there are obviously other places we talked about the. The Apkalo story sort of being a priority, preceding.

Version of the story from the biblical narrative.

The versions that we have at least.

Of certain Greek stories, the versions we still possess are later that the biblical account. But we see similar parallels, Right. Even within the pagan versions of these stories. So, for example, Prometheus, right.

Is in some places identified as a Titan. Right. And so his narrative sort of fits into the Titan narrative, the overarching Titan narrative. We've talked about how.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, can I just say the most ironically named guy ever. I mean, his name means forethought. I'm like.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, exactly.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Did you really?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Anyway, so we've talked before on the show about how the Titan narrative, the Titans, and being imprisoned in Tartarus is sort of associated in the Second Temple Jewish period and even in. Even in the scriptures themselves, in the New Testament scriptures themselves, with the rebellious angels from before the flood who are imprisoned.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

St. Peter actually uses the word Tartarus for the place where they're imprisoned.

And.

The. And so he's sometimes referred to as a Titan. We can see there's a similar pattern. Right. But of course, he famously brings fire to humanity. Right. The knowledge of fire, this brings about his punishment. Right. By the. By the gods. Right. But what gets often left out because, again.

Even bizarrely pagan myths are read in a materialist way, is that the particulars. And you could find this in Hesiod, the particulars of what fire is referring to here.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because that could refer to a lot of things. He brings fire to man. The ability of fire. Right, Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. The way it's often depicted is it's like he gives them a lighter. Like, here's how you make campfire, guys.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Here's a torch. Don't let it go out. Keep other things lit. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No, no, it's. It's. Yeah, like he's. I mean, we've made reference to this on the show before, the whole burning the bones thing, where yeah. Where, you know, mankind gives the garbage parts of the. Of the sacrifice to the gods. It's Prometheus who teaches them how to do this. It's like, okay, put out the bones and then take the fat and put that on so Zeus won't see that you're not giving him the stakes and burn that as a sacrifice to him. And meanwhile, you keep the stakes. Like, that's an element of what giving fire to mankind is really about.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. The fire here is talking about sacrificial technology.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And this is why the gods get mad.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. They're not like, oh, they can cook their meat now. No.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Or, hey, they're setting themselves on fire. They would have thought that was funny. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Because that's the kind of gods they are.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The humans are down there setting each other on fire.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Ridiculous.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's. It's because of this element. Right. This is. Now there's this bothersome thing going on vis a vis the gods themselves.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. That. That makes them. That makes them mad. Right. The gods generally care about themselves. They care about their demigod kids, and they don't care about pretty much anybody else. Right. Unless Zeus finds you attractive and then you're in real trouble.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

They don't love you.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Unless they love you, and then that's not good.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Zeus never understood that no means no.

So while we're at it, time apparels. We've talked about Prometheus, or at least mentioned Prometheus before in this context of the show. I don't think we've mentioned Sisyphus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

No.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In this context before.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

If people know about him, they know he's the rolling the rock, up the hill guy.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Which he is. Yes. Right. But there's a lot more to it. And you know, Camus fan that I am.

Sisyphus. If you actually read the stories about Sisyphus, and there's a couple different versions, by the way, that have been passed down to us, but Sisyphus is the king who founded the city of Corinth.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Good old Corinth.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. And is a bad guy. So let's say Corinthus is.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Isn't it? Corinth is the city you go to if you really want to have a darker out. Yes, exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But so he's. He. He founded Corinth. The first part of his story, right. Where he first sort of comes to the God's attention, as it were, is he has this brother he wants to kill.

His brother, who he wants to kill. But it was widely understood, even among pagans that, you know, you commit murder within families. That's how you get Furies showing up and dragging you to Hades.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Nobody wants that. Yeah. So he went to the oracle at Delphi.

To ask Apollo, through the oracle at Delphi, to give him a technique where he could murder off his brother.

Without incurring, like, wrath.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And I'm getting big ghost vibes here.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah, well, so there's some of that. There's also some Kane vibes here. Yeah, yeah, right.

I know my brother don't want to get killed in response. Right.

And then the. The.

Second part of his story where he gets in trouble is that he was apparently renowned for visitors, travelers, strangers who passed through Corinth. He would murder and take their stuff.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Also, the other big rule you're not supposed to violate an ancient paganism, hospitality.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

But here. Here we get some lamech vibes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. I've killed a young man for wronging me. I've healed a.

But what. Finally, because of those two things.

Right. The gods killed him.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But here's how good of a technologist Sisyphus was. So depending on the version of the story, either Thanatos or Hades.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

One of those two gods is.

Responsible for chaining him up in the underworld. Right.

Because of this. This bad stuff he did. And Sisyphus talked in this story, talked either Hades or Thanatos into explaining to him how the chains worked.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It could just. I mean, I could see this is like a scene in a. In a sitcom or something, right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. You know, hey, how do these chains of death work, by the way? So they explain it to him and he figures it out.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So not only does he get loose, but he chains up Hades or Thanatos.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Which has the effect of it making it so that nobody can die.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. So nobody dies. And then in the Hades version of the story, this makes Ares very mad because he's got wars going on and nobody's dying. That's no fun.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. That's the thing he's into, Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's like his whole bit, Right. In the Thanatos version of the story, because of the nature of Thanatos as a God of death. We've talked about this before on the show, but.

No one can die. Meaning, like, the sick and the wounded and the infirm and the elderly can't die. So they're just sort of lingering and suffering. Right. Either way, right. Someone comes, either Aries in the one version or where the other gods in the other version, and lets the death God loose again. And Sisyphus ends up in Tartarus pushing the rock up the hill.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Which rolls down as soon as he gets it up there.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And he rolls down every night, he has to push it back up.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Futility. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's a futile labor. Yeah, futile labor. Not futile labor. He's not.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

He's not a serf. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so. Yeah. And I mean, other mythic traditions have gods who function in some of these ways of giving knowledge to mankind, secret knowledge. Right.

And.

There'S different versions of it, but, like, none of them are quite exactly Prometheus. But I mean, it's a lot of. It's just variations on a theme. But one of the things that's interesting to me is the kind of the second tier of this that you get especially in.

Like, you get in Germanic mythology particularly, which, again, you know, reminder everybody. Germanic mythology comes to us.

Through Christians who wrote it down, often centuries after the last pagan in their area was baptized. Right. You know, the last great pagan tradition get baptized. And so, you know, so it's mediated through that. And so what you get then is sort of these lesser spiritual beings, not Titans or whatever, Right. These kind of lesser spiritual beings who have knowledge, but it's often not in terms of, like, giving knowledge to people so that they can rule, but rather providing them with cool stuff. And so that's where you get this whole realm of, like, smith gods.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So my favorite is Wayland the smith, who's actually sort of sort of divine.

And in Germanic paganism, he's often the guy who makes whatever impressive sword or bit of armor that's around in the story is often said to be from Wayland, that he's the guy who made that, or Veeland, depending on where you are, or volund, you know, same guy. But then you also get like, dwarves, you know, again, like, they're making magical stuff, especially magical weapons. But then you also get like, Weyland, for instance, becomes a tutorial figure. Like, gods will send their sons to him to go so they can learn stuff from him. So he still functions in that same way. But this idea, right, of the kind of the divine mediator of technology is still a thing, even though now it's kind of demoted a little bit within some of these more marginal mythologies. And by marginal, I don't mean that they're not important. I mean marginal in the sense of, like, being long distance away from the ancient near east where we. Where the Bible arises and so forth. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And this is. This is not the Wayland of Weyland. Yutani Corp, by the way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Could be.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, it's not. Guy Pierce played him. Anyway, never mind. So.

Right. And of course, you know, if we want really post biblical, as in recent.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Comparatively, this is an enduring story about technology.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Probably.

I don't know anymore. I'm about to go on a grumpy old man rant that I'll stop myself from. But.

What ought be the most prominent example would of course be the novel Frankenstein.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. Which is a good novel.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Subtitled the Modern Prometheus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And probably we have to remind some folks that Frankenstein is not the monster.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, au contraire. Frankenstein is the monster.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Well, you know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Ah, Frankenstein's not the creation. I'll put it that way.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes, it is true.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

A monster makes a monster.

Frankenstein.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But what is that about? It's about this person who seeks and ultimately finds this knowledge of life and death.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. How to overcome death itself.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And that. That knowledge unleashes destruction. Right. It's knowledge that's not meant for man. Right. That the man shouldn't have. Technically, the entire tire over of. Of H.P. lovecraft is about this.

That there's just knowledge and corners of the world that humanity was not meant to poke into it should just leave alone.

Although, you know, as a tech pessimist myself. Right. I connect with that. And of course, if we want, if we want very recent, whether we're talking about Michael Crichton's novel or the movies, Jurassic park is just a knockoff of Frankenstein. Yeah, yeah, right. It's scientific secrets. We're going to make life.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oops.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

And of course, even more recent than that, in terms of movies, Oppenheimer, the atomic bomb, as we've talked about in the show, its first actual use in the world was to massacre more than half of the Christians in Japan.

And then I believe, Father Andrew, that within this category of examples, you were going to channel all of your kinergy into explaining why. The Barbie movie is a good example.

Number one, I have not seen it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Which I know probably some people find.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Shocking, but embrace your inner Slavoj Iek and just talk about a movie you haven't seen.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There we go. But yeah, I mean, like the whole Barbie thing, I mean, it is about this manipulation.

Right. About creating this ultimate image, you know, of. Of.

I probably shouldn't get too deep into it because. Yeah, I mean, I never, I never, I never played with Barbies, you know, And I'm not trying to probably any.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Good thing on the whole.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes, exactly. I'm not trying to offend anybody. Who did? But I mean, but think about it, right? And I mean, it's interesting to think about this in, in the sense that the culture and from what I can tell of the movie, it's riffing on this. The culture has now become sort of aware of Barbie as this unattainable, unrealistic, artificial image of womanhood, Right? And Ken is the kind of an accessory to that.

And from what I gather, the film on some level is making fun of that, right? And so that's where you get like. Because now we live in everything is the multiverse, right? So you get this multiplicity of Barbies, and Barbie world is the world where everything is perfect except it's not, right? And so, yeah, I mean, probably a lot of people aren't thinking of the Barbie movie as a commentary on, on this technomancy of our time, but from what I can tell, it kind of is. It kind of is, you know. Didn't think we'd go there, did you, listeners?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'll just, I'll just go with it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Barben Timer.

All right. All right. Well, that's the end of part two. That's the end of the second half of this episode of the Lord of Spirits. We're going to take a little break and we'll be right back with our third and final half.

Father Andrew Stephen Damick and father Stephen DeYoung will be back in a moment to take your calls on the next part of the Lord of Spirits. Give them a call at 855-237-2346. That's 855-AF-RADIO.

Hello, this is L. Joseph Letender. I am happy to announce the release of my new book, when you Give Ancient Answers and Contemporary Questions. In this companion volume to when you Pray and when youn Fast, I juxtapose scriptural and patristic admonitions about almsgiving with a look at contemporary issues that make it sometimes difficult to see our way forward. In this regard, along with the rationale for almsgiving, I offer practical suggestions for how almsgiving can work in our lives as modern Christians. Christians when youn Give is now available at store.ancient faith.com that's store.ancientfaith.com we're back.

Now with the Lord of Spirits with Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung. If you have a question, call now at 855-237-2346. That's 855-A radio.

Hey, welcome back. Is this the part where we talk about the Matrix? No, it's Not. Probably not.

But yes.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We're talking about movie or the real one.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Oh, right.

This is where we. I don't know what color should be the pill that we give everyone. I don't know. I'm looking at.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We have to invent a new one.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So it's an orange pill. The day quill. That's that. I'm looking at.

The green pill. It's Nyquil.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

See, I think dayquil is just cowardice.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Wow.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Take a Nyquil during the day and fight through it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Be a man. That's the way to do it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. All right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Operate heavy machinery. Forget the warning.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so now we're going to kind of take it into the present and ask these questions about what does this mean for us now and how we live and all this kind of stuff.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Now is where we transition to old men yelling at clouds.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Indeed.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah.

So we have to acknowledge that. Right. Like.

I admitted about myself, you might be old.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I'm middle aged. I'm middle aged.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Why would you want to be middle aged? Be middle aged. Worst. I have planned my whole life to go immediately from young to elderly.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I love the Middle Ages.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The Middle Ages, sure. But being middle aged, you're just having midlife crises every few days. Like, I'm in.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I'm in my medieval period.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I'm just. I'm just disgruntled because I don't get the senior discounts yet. I feel like I'm getting all the bad parts of aging and none of the discounts.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

In two years, you can join aarp. Not that I'm suggesting you do, but you can.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Oh, I will the second I can. Trust me.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Because there are discounts that come with that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Exactly. That's why I could sit there, read Modern Maturity, do the word search.

It'll be great.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Get your garbage coffee at the McDonald's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's such a great title for a magazine. To modern maturity. Right. Like.

They need to just call it all because, like, I'm old, but I am not mature, so.

Or modern. So I am, unfortunately, probably rather modern.

But. Yeah. So when we. When we took. But that colors. Right. We all.

Again, there's no view from nowhere. Right. And our perspective, of course, when we talk about something like technology is covered colored by the historical epoch in which we find ourselves and the sort of explosion of technology at the end of the 20th century.

And it really is an explosion of technology.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

For those of you not as old. Right. I went from no such thing as an Internet to Internet that you pay for by the hour to unlimited Internet on a small thing in my hand.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And I mean.

My favorite on the phone timeline of development is where we go from these things that are attached to the wall to the bag phone.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. To the cell phone. Right. Rotary phones attached to it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. Rotary phones. I know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Before they're the touch tone phone to the cordless phone to the. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But the bag phone was a great.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. The big bag phone. Big giant Motorola brick that you had to plug into the cigarette lighter. You know, when I even call it a cigarette lighter now, do they call it a power port or something? Because no one uses it for cigarettes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Anyway, see, this is the old men yell at clouds part.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That is an explosion of. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

My. My Luddite line used to be firmly on the other side on. On this side of cell phones. Like, I used to say, I will never get a cell phone. I don't want that kind of thing. And then I finally got, like a flip phone. I got a. I had a razor, you know, back in 2007. Finally got one, you know, in my early 30s, I finally got a cell phone.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The. The day I retire as a priest, I will no longer have a cell phone. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

That's why I got one. Because I was working.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. You know, I have to, like. But. Yeah. Yeah. Otherwise. Anyway. Yeah. Old man yelling at clouds. But so the point being, there was. There has been. Objectively, there has been a massive.

Tech leap of technology. Yeah. In the last.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Feel it. We feel it. Right. We feel like, like, especially those of us who are Gen X have seen our worlds completely change from when we were kids.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. And it's different. The amount of change between 1943 and 1983 was far less.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Sure. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Than what happened in these last 40 years.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Take that.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But this isn't the first time this has happened, though, either, because if you go back another 40 years, if you go to 1903 to 1943, you do have something comparable.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, you go from, if you're lucky, you know, writing something that's pulled by a horse to walk.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Horse and buggy.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Automobiles everywhere. Radio.

You know, tanks being rolled out, machine guns. Like, all of this stuff.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Phones in your home.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You can call.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

People on the other side of the country or in Europe.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Flight. I mean, flight. That's huge.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Happens.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

In the first few decades of the 20th century.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So while there has been this boom, it is not an unprecedented boom. Sorry. Roswell theorists.

There have been other booms. There was a Boom at the beginning of the 20th century too. There have been others. I mean, Gutenberg inventing the printing press. There's a period of time that. Right. So there have been other periods in history where you have these technological leaps forward. Right. And then periods in between where things are relatively stagnant or at least slower moving.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And no one should conclude.

I made a joke about the Roswell theorists, but no one should conclude, based on what we said in the second half, that what we mean is that every time there's one of these leaps, demons showed up somewhere and kind of deal with somebody to give them the technology either.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Right. Sometimes there are actually inventions, the way that we modern think about inventions. People sitting around tinkering, figuring, well, or.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It'S more subtle than that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah. Well, often it's built. Someone's building on something that someone else built on, that someone built off.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Etc.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. I mean, someone did go ahead to drop the bombs, the atomic bombs. Right. And we're not going to say that wasn't influenced by anything or anyone spiritually. Right. Especially the target selection.

When it gets dropped primarily on Christian communities. There's something going on there. Right. But it's not as direct as what we're talking about, the Apkallu story or something.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There wasn't one of the Apkallu hanging around like Clinton's White House being like, here's how to turn Fidonet into the.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

I was gonna say, but I remember in the Weekly World News that it said that President Clinton met on a regular basis with space aliens.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

I know, but.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

But I still have that issue around somewhere.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Only about 80% of what's published in the Weekly World News is true.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Still read the paper.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So the question is like. So I mean, because we. This is the question we get. Is this kind of knowledge evil?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Itself.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Is it evil?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

The knowledge, is it evil? Right.

Inherently.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. There's certain things that you must not know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Things like HP Lovecraft. Right. Knowledge man was not meant to have. Right.

Short answer, no.

Long answer, no.

Anyway.

So there is not knowledge in this sense that is forbidden to humanity.

Period.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Full stop.

There is knowledge that is forbidden to humanity by circumstance.

And it's that circumstance that makes it forbidden.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Like. Like, I mean, and this shouldn't be difficult. Everybody, especially parents. Like, I have. I have a 16 year old, I have a 14 year old, I have an 11 year old and I have a 6 year old. There are certain knowledge that the 16 year old. It is okay for that one to have, but not for the six year old. Inappropriate. The circumstances are not. Right. It is forbidden. You know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. You don't go to a four year old and say everyone you know is going to die someday.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. Right.

Now this is how this box of matches works.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes. Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Like which, like a four year old, you could show them and they could light a match, they could get that, you know, like they're capable of that.

Ask them how I know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And Right. So this is.

A simple concept, but this goes even to. Right, Go back. We're going to go back again to Genesis. Right. As is our. Want the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Right. You want the first story of a certain type of knowledge being forbidden, that being violated, there being bad consequences for humanity. This is it, right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

This is the original.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is the ur example.

And this is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as it's described in Genesis chapters two and three. The knowledge of good and evil is something God has.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And. And God is good, purely good. Like there's.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

He has become like us.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Knowing good, evil. Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Knowing good and evil. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And the angels have it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

So I was going to say that's. That's also in, in Genesis 3. Right. Where, like where the serpent says if you get this, if you eat this, you'll become. And then there's various ways that it gets translated. Like God, like gods. Or as I pointed out before in the show, one of the earliest old English translations of this, it says like angels, you become like angels if you eat this fruit.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so this knowledge isn't evil. This tree isn't an evil tree. God made an evil tree for some reason.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right? Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And this has always been understood this way. Right. You read like again, since we mentioned it already this episode and we don't mention it as often as some people think, but the Book of Enoch. Right, Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Just constantly talk about the Book of Enoch. Wait, what? Actually you've never even done an episode on the Book of Enoch.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Other Enoch literature, other apocalyptic Jewish literature and Christian literature. When you have a vision of paradise, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is still there.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Still there. It's not cut down, you know, it's not destroyed.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There's nothing evil about it. The way it's been understood consistently.

In Judaism and at least in early Christianity.

Is that the issue was that humanity was not mature enough.

To receive that knowledge yet.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, not ready yet.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But God created that tree and put fruit on it. So There would have come a day when humanity was ready to have that knowledge that God and the angels already had.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It wasn't just an ornamental tree, and.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It wasn't just a test. It wasn't just a random test. Right.

But it was something for which humanity wasn't ready. And this is the understanding of what's going on with that knowledge in the line of Cain.

It's not that learning how to make things out of metal is itself evil. Right. Blacksmiths are not evildoers.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right. No.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's that humanity wasn't ready for that knowledge that they were given that they got from spiritual sources. And so they use that knowledge for destruction. They used it to make war, to kill each other. Right. Not to make useful implements to help society. Right.

Same thing with the. With the other technology. Same thing with the atom bomb that gets used to kill a bunch of Christians. Right. There are lots of good uses for nuclear power, for example.

But all of this begs the question, and we've quoted, I believe it was Saint Sophroni who said at one point, when asked about technology, asked about this burst of technology in the 20th century.

What he thought about it, and he said, if we as humans were holier, God would allow us to have more technology.

Because we would have the spiritual sense of the wisdom to know how to use it rather than destroying ourselves with it. Right.

But what all of this presupposes that we may not have thought about maybe in the past.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Even. Even people are familiar with the way we're talking now because we talk that way. St. Basil the Great talks that way when he talks about Genesis. The Fathers talk that way. There's lots of places where you could have gotten this idea, understanding that it was an issue of maturity with Adam and Eve, that was an issue of maturity. Angels. But this implies that there has to be some kind of. For humanity to be. Humanity to be ready requires that there has to be some sense of the collective maturity of humanity.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Because technology is not ever a thing that's just one person. It's a kind of. It always. It always spreads.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And so this wasn't like, well, someday you, Adam and you woman, or you man and you woman.

You will be mature enough that you can eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But then when your kids are born, they won't be yet.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's not in the moment and they'll have to wait. Right, Right.

This is an issue of humanity.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And it wasn't just that, oh, Tubal Cain wasn't mature enough as a person to learn metallurgy. Right. This has to be a collective sense. This understanding implies a collective sense of humanity, that humanity has a collective maturation.

Okay. And once we start thinking about that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There are a bunch of other things in terms of how the fathers read the Scriptures and within traditional Christian theology that start to make sense because we've been taught to think about things purely in these individual terms.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. That's. Because that's how our society.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. And not in these collective terms. So, for example.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

For example, it is a commonplace when talking about why Christ was born when he was.

When you're reading the church fathers.

For them to talk about, and this is even this idea is sort of forecast in. In Second Temple Jewish literature, that the history of Israel has a through line and a purpose.

Right. That the purpose of this history that we read in the Old Testament, in the Hebrew Bible is that this purified, this remnant of Israel, most of Israel stripped away, but this remnant of Israel that's been purified, that's been tried by fire, right. And tested, this faithful remnant will emerge at the end. And from that faithful remnant will emerge the Messiah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, this is what it means when it says in the Scripture that in the fullness of time, God sent his son. It doesn't mean that, like, oh, the date finally arrived, you know?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

It's doesn't mean, well, the humanity. The Romans had really good roads, so. So the gospel could go lots of places. Well, then he could have waited till 1995 and it could have gone out on the Internet.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right, Exactly.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No, it's that this purpose was. And you'll see the fathers then talking about how the history of Israel culminates in the Theotokos.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That the holiness of the theotokos, the purity of the theotokos.

This woman who is there to become the mother of God, the one who gives birth to God. Right. Who gives birth to Jesus Christ.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Is the end product of that history of Israel, of generation after generation being tested and tried and finding repentance and purification and restoration to God and faithfulness to God, all of that legacy, all of that culminates in her so that she can give birth to the Messiah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is why when it comes to Revelation 12, when someone asks you, is that the Theotokos or is that Israel? The answer is yes.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yes. Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Porchedo los dos.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And because this is how the fathers understand it, right. That there's this through line of history, the history is building to something. Right. It is Moving in a direction. Something is happening in the flow of history and that involves, again, a collective identity for humanity. This is what in St. John's gospel, when Christ promises that when the Holy Spirit comes, he will lead you into all truth, he's not saying, well, I taught you some stuff, but then when the Holy Spirit comes, he's going to tell you other stuff.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It's not about information.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. Like new info. Right. He's not going to tell your pastor what to say on Sunday, even though he was planning to say something else.

Not that anyone would ever say that.

Right. But it's that, that history, this movement of history.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Isn't finished.

Isn't finished. We don't know what it is, but there's a reason Christ hasn't returned yet.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There is something happening.

That is building toward that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It's not just, you know, to be continued. It's not. We're not just waiting.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. But just like in the Second Temple period, for example, they were looking around going, why hasn't the Messiah come yet? Right. Because they couldn't see it from that viewpoint. Right. After he comes, then everyone looking back on it goes, oh, that was the time.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's where things were moving all along.

In the same way, we could look around and say, why hasn't Christ appeared? Things are getting really bad.

But there is a process unfolding, and that is associated by the Scriptures with the Holy Spirit. This flow of history is associated directly by the Scriptures with the Holy Spirit. And so the Holy Spirit is the one guiding history, particularly in and through the church. Right. And this is the key to understanding the orthodox understanding of holy tradition.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. And this, you know, to link back to one of our major themes, but also a particular episode about what a spirit is, you know, a spirit and especially the Holy Spirit who animates the church is, you know, it's this.

Spirit that animates a people, that animates a group or sometimes an individual. But, you know, in talking about holy tradition, it is this overall historical unfolding, but it's not a deterministic unfolding. Like, it's. God himself is working. He has agency. He's doing all this. And sometimes, you know, a lot of the time we cannot see what he's doing. Right. There's. I mean, like, just to think about it on an individual level. Not that we're talking about it on the individual level, but we do experiencing it on an individual level. Like some, for instance, if someone has had a true conversion to Christ and a lot of you listening to this have had a true conversion to Christ.

You probably could not have predicted that five, 10 years, maybe one year before that happened. And it's only in retrospect that you look back on your life and see how it was leading in that direction. Right. That the narrative is something that's done, that's apparent in retrospect, but not in the moment. Well, this is fractal. And it's not like God is like, well, I'm working on this guy right now and I'll take care of the rest. Like, no, God is God. So he's working on every level, always, everywhere, all the time.

Which is astonishing to even begin to think about.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. On a personal level, this is part of why I don't talk about my quote unquote conversion story to Orthodoxy. It's at least part of it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because from my perspective now, my experience of my life is not. I was heading in one direction and then there was this radical course correction. I headed in another direction.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

My experience of my life is from very early on in ways that are frankly kind of ooky. God was working to bring me to exactly where I am right now.

There were hints of it in weird places.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That only from my vantage point now do I understand.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And so.

Like I said, this is part of the reason there's. There's no point in really telling that story. I am who I am now. Right. That's the result of it. Right.

But yeah, and this is true on this macro level. Right. So tradition is not.

Christ told the apostles a bunch of other stuff. He said, hey, don't write this down.

Just when you ordain bishops later, kind of whisper it in their ear and they'll pass it on to the next group. And so each generation of bishops has sort of passed on the secret knowledge. That's called Gnosticism.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

If you think that's what tradition is in the church, go read some St. Irenaeus.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Where he contrasts what goes on in the church at. That makes clear. No, the Church proclaims everything.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. It's a proclamation publicly esoteric secret knowledge. You just don't get it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. No. Tradition is often defined in the Orthodox Church as the life of the Holy Spirit in the Church. But that's what this means.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

That's what this means. The historical reality of the Church and her journey through the world.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

We believe is inspired and guided by the Holy Spirit. Right. And so that is how you discern orthodox tradition is by looking back through the history, what writings have been preserved, what writings have been promoted? What is scripture? Well, what historically became scripture, right? And on and on and on, Right. And so what is the holy tradition? The church is actually a very objective thing.

It could be concluded very objectively.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But this is the Holy Spirit, Right? And so we have to approach questions regarding technology.

From this perspective of human collective identity, which is not how we tend to approach them, because again, we've been taught to think as individuals, to think about individualism. And so when the question comes up, you know, when I go on one of my rants condemning social media, right.

What I get as a response usually are people saying, well, I have this or that social media, and here is this good thing I do with it.

Right? Which is a very individualistic approach, right? So, yes, there's lots of people doing bad things with it, or it's having bad effects on lots of people, but I do this good thing with it, right?

But the question about technology all along, as I think we've shown, is that this collective question.

What is this doing to humanity?

What is this doing to cultures, to societies, to communities.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right?

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Because it's not that when Tubal Cain comes up with metallurgy, no one did anything good with metallurgy, Right.

It's that on the collective whole, it was primarily used for killing.

Right?

And so we have to assess what's going on with technology and the role it's at least currently playing in terms of what is the broad effect this is having.

What is the primary use to which this is being put.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And if we conclude that that is negative, that that is bad.

That as we all know from a certain rule, the Internet is always at least 50% pornography.

Right?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yep. Yep.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

At some point.

We have to say, look, until we develop the spiritual wisdom.

We, plural, develop the spiritual wisdom, to employ this correctly.

Right.

We need to move away from this technology.

Right.

Because no matter how many good uses I come up to for the Internet, like say, doing the Lord of Spirits podcast live on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month, right. Over the Internet. I'm aware of the irony here. Right, right. The fact that your, your, your tween age son can listen to Lord of Spirits on a computer in his room with an Internet connection does not mean you should put a computer in his room with an Internet connection.

Because that's not most of what's going to be pumped into his room.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Okay.

We have to look at these broader effects and these broader things, Right. And.

For humanity as a collective.

To develop the kind of spiritual wisdom Necessary to do these things has become much harder.

Of late because we all think as individuals.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. The sense of who we are as a people or even just like who we are as a town.

Is getting more and more lost. You know, like, my sense is that it happened in two stages. Like, initially.

We lost attention to the place that we're in, and all of our attention was on sort of like national things, which I. It's still, obviously there's a. There's a big discrepancy there. People know way more about, you know, who the president is or who, you know, what's going on in Congress than they do what's going on in their town council.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You know, even though the town council affects them a lot more.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. With, you know, meetings that they could literally go and attend and be heard and whatever. Right. But then, but then the next stage was.

You know, because. Because all of that became so much just this info blast.

We retreated into echo chambers and isolation. And, you know, it's no longer like, now he's mass communicating. It's like mass communication. It's funny, like, I've had people ask me, like, can you use your. Can you use your platform to promote this? I'm like, you know, I. I don't think you understand how this works. It's not like I have a big megaphone that everybody listens to. I don't. You know, we don't. Right. Like, you and I could advertise something on the show, but that doesn't make it be a thing. You know, hopefully, you know, God willing, we connect to the people who are listening to us, Whatever. But. But there's. There's this Balkanization that's occurred, this fragmentation that's occurred and is getting more. More intense. Somebody actually asked me earlier today, like, I mean, they were joking a little bit, but because there was a three week gap between our last episode and this one, they said, well, you know, what. What am I supposed to do about withdrawal symptoms? I was like, go take a walk.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Touch grass.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Go take a.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Go take a walk.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Don't, like, listen more or whatever. I mean, you know, of course I'm happy if people listen to the show.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Or read your books, whatever, listening groups listen.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

There you go, get together, which is.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

A thing to listen.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right, but that, but that points to a key. Right. One of the main differences. This is part of why this has gotten more difficult. One of the main differences between the technological explosion at the beginning of the 20th century and at the end of the 20th century. And beginning of the 21st. Is that the technological explosion at the beginning of the 20th century primarily connected people.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Now, people could listen to the same radio shows.

All over the country.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. People would gather around a radio.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. In groups. And then early television. Right. Everybody was watching the same shows. Right. Because there weren't that many channels. Right.

And that created a shared culture, a shared background, a shared frame of reference. The beginning of air travel. Right. You could go and see your relatives on the other side of the country more often. Right. People were more connected. Right. You get the interstate highway system. Right. All of these things are connecting people, creating a broader sense of community.

And the more recent technological explosion at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century has done the exact opposite.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, now that there's a million choices for every person.

I mean, everybody has their own little thing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Yeah. Their own set of facts. Right. Their own news from their own source. Like, that was one of the shifts. Right. It used to be, you know, towns had two newspapers. One was Republican and one was Democrat. Sometimes that was in the name.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Literally. Right. Like, there are multiple. And then when people moved to getting. Everybody's getting their news from the same radio broadcast and the same TV broadcasts, that was a uniting thing.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. I mean, it doesn't mean that what gets broadcast was all true and good.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

No. It's not objective. Nothing's objective. We've said that.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. But there was at least this common participation going on.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. There's a common. And you could argue about it.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You could say, I think. I think Cronkite's right on. I think you could say, I think that Cronkite's a nut. Right. Like.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

But you had a common basis for conversation.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Which you don't anymore. Right. Literally, people are working from different sets of facts.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Now, and you can isolate yourself through the Internet, through other exit. Just an echo chamber where you never hear an idea that you don't already agree with.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah. Where now, like, you know, with. With sort of cancel culture. Like, if I hear a thing I disagree with, I can call that a harm. Like I am being harmed by hearing or being exposed to or reading a thing that I disagree with. Like, it's a harm.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And not only do you block it for yourself, but you try to get it to not exist anymore.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But everybody.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Right. But this is isolating. This is alienating to people.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

This is separating us.

And that creates this kind of feedback loop where we're not able to collectively come together and decide how to use this technology productively.

Because the current use of the technology is pulling us apart and breaking us apart. Yeah.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In this. In this destructive way.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And beyond our final comment. There's no magic wand to wave. That's why I said this episode isn't going to get super happy and happy ending. There's not a magic wand wave. There's not an easy way past this. No, there just isn't. We've reached a point.

In terms of our lives, our work lives, our political lives. Right. Our everything else.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Even our religious lives, sadly, where everything is fractured, broken up, alienated, isolated. And all of the technology we have is just furthering that.

And driving it and instrumentalizing us into being consumers.

Until we run out of debt that we can take on. Right. That's the state of affairs. So final thoughts.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

All right. Final.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Senseless.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

It's depressing.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

You know.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Okay.

So I have a few things to say about this.

About all this. I mean, one thing I think that's important to point out is that.

Human beings are fundamentally permeable.

Which means that the isolation itself that we're using our technology for.

Is actually, on a certain level, an illusion.

Right. We're still permeable. We're spiritually permeable. And I think a lot of the times the isolation that we're using our technology for is an attempt to escape that. But it. It creates this feedback loop. I heard, I was listening to something earlier today, and they were talking about feedback loops in terms of bad behavior. And like, one of the things, you know, was said was, well, if you want to get depressed when you're sad, isolate yourself, and then that'll take you, you know, into depression, you know.

And.

But the. The reality is that.

We'Re still permeable. Right? So you can, you can, you can put yourself within a hard bubble, but it's not really. You're still permeable to spiritual reality. And so one of the things that happens when you isolate yourself from your fellow humans, especially when you. When you isolate yourself from your fellow Christians, is that you're going to be permeable to other spirits.

So that's a thing that's happening. Right? And I think that's one thing that's important for us to know is that the more that we try to craft the perfectly customized life, the more that we are going into very dangerous territory. And I think, especially for Americans, that's a constant, constant, constant temptation. We have to be vigilant and always correcting, always, you know, don't believe me, Go to any store that sells candy. I remember when there was one kind of KitKat. I don't know how many there are now. I cannot tell you. There is always some new combination or new version or whatever. And like, I'm not saying, you know, don't have your.

Mint chocolate Kit Kats or whatever. I'm just like, think about what it does when you're constantly looking for more choices and more variety and whatever, right?

So the other thing is, another thing is that.

Like, I definitely agree with the idea that.

As a, as a race, we're doing a lot of bad things with technology. Right? And yet at the same time, as you said, you noted the irony. Here we are on the Internet. I mean, this show is possible because of the Internet. You're in Louisiana, I'm in Pennsylvania. People, we had people.

First. There was a guy from London who said he was listening. A guy from Uruguay, someone from Kentucky, some from Oklahoma. There's people, people all over the world. And the reason they're able to listen to it is because of the Internet, right? That's a reality. And God willing, they're getting a benefit out of it.

I don't think that that makes the way that a lot of this media fundamentally works completely okay. But at the same time, you know, as, as a, as a preacher, as a priest, as an evangelist, as a Christian, I know that everything that I do is going to be at least partly bad, you know, So I have to decide, okay, in what way am I going to participate in this world to try to do the most good, knowing full well that I'm compromised?

Because that's just a reality, right?

I can't live in any other way. We're all compromising on one level or another. So the question is, how can I do the most good and how can I repent as much as possible, right? So, I mean, I do think that I do believe. I mean, if I didn't believe this, I wouldn't be working the job that I do, that the technology can be used for good. And including Internet, technology can be used for good. I see it in many ways as being missionaries in the marketplace. Marketplace has always been a place of lots of temptations and a lot of bad things going on. There is the possibility of being a missionary in that marketplace, but I think it also requires an asceticism, an asceticism of attention. And this is how we get to begin to develop a maturity with relation to these capabilities, right? So then the final thing I'll say is that all of this that I just said, literally all of it, is why we always make the point on this program. And I always make the point on all the work that I do. Really, all the public work that I do is about aiming people back to 3D parish life, right? Like, and if you're doing that, if you're really doing it in a very, very dedicated way, you don't need any of the stuff that we're doing. You don't need it, right? The point of this is not to point you back to us. Like, if I say, hey, buy my book, or, hey, listen to this thing, or, hey, you know, whatever. It's not because I want you to pay attention to me. It's not about me. It's about the things that we're talking about, which, God willing, will aim you towards a life of real repentance in 3D parish life, or if you're a monastic, in the monastery, which might sound weird to point that out, but actually, I have met monks that listen to ancient faith radio. When I was on Mount Athos five and a half years ago, I met a monk who listened to ancient faith radio. I was kind of stunned. Kind of stunned, but it's a thing.

But it really is about pointing people back to that, because that's what the Christian life is. It's this life of worship and almsgiving and community and repentance and love and family. All of these things that you don't need any of this stuff to do. But if you're out here in this marketplace with us, we're going to be pointing you in that direction. That's always the point.

You know, if. If. I mean, it's great if, you know, it's fine if people want to listen, like, oh, that's weird. Interesting, cool stuff. Like, but. But this should not be a hobby, right? These things that we're talking about should not be a hobby. This should be. This should be life. It should be life. So that's how I parse through a lot of this. These very difficult questions is like, yeah, we're. On some level, it's always going to be imperfect and maybe even leaning very in the imperfect direction. But still, we can. We can point people back to Christ. Father STEPHEN.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

So.

Part of what comes out of what we were talking about all night tonight is that the opposite.

Of this kind of instrumentalization of human persons.

Of their dehumanization.

Their alienation.

Is freedom.

Ultimately, what it is is a removal of freedom.

Part of the problem is that we've been taught to Think of freedom in the wrong way.

Because we've been taught to think of freedom as individuality.

This is another one of those feedback loops.

Freedom is individuality, meaning freedom is, I can go and dye my hair some unnatural color that nobody else's hair has dyed.

I can go and buy.

I can go and buy guns. I can go and buy drugs. I can go and do this, I can go and do that. This makes me free.

None of that is freedom.

Freedom in terms of the scriptures, in terms of the teachings of Christianity. Freedom is freedom to serve the living God and thereby freedom to flourish.

Freedom to be human. Freedom to become the person God created you to be. And you can't do that as an individual.

Humans can't exist alone. Even Aristotle knew that, and he was a pagan.

Humans have to exist in community. To be human. You have to be in a community.

That's where you become free. Free to flourish.

But again, what we've been talking about tonight implies what it is that we need to become free from. Once again.

There are people and powers, sometimes powers behind people.

Who have instrumentalized ideas in order to instrumentalize us.

In order to dehumanize us and enslave us.

And I'm super glad that we have a disclaimer in front of the show now, because I can say things like what I'm about to say. I probably would anyway, but okay. Palestinian people need to be free.

Not free to be individuals, not free to eat McDonald's.

They need to be free to flourish as humans.

The only way they can do that is to cast off the ideas their masters have used to enslave them.

Israeli people need to be free.

The only way for them to be free is to cast off the ideas, the fear.

The racial animosity.

The pride that have been used against them to enslave them.

Israeli people and Palestinian people will become free when they become free together.

By throwing off their masters who have pitted them against each other to their own destruction.

You say the same thing about Ukrainian people and Russian people.

But you can say the same thing about Norwegian people, about American people, about Australian people, Chinese people.

Brazilian people.

We are currently doing things that we don't really want to do.

That are making our lives worse, that are alienating us, that we've been tricked into doing.

By a prolonged indoctrination in certain ideas.

Lying to us about where our happiness lies, lying to us about what we need to be afraid of.

Lying to us about other people.

To keep us separated from them.

And isolated and alone, which makes us better prey.

For the Ideas that the people and the powers that have become our masters want us to do.

I'm going to end up in a similar place to where Father Andrew did.

Because the way out of this, the way to be free, we have to be free in a community. We have to be free with other people.

And frankly, the only place we can do this now is in our parishes.

The only place we can do this now is the church. There's not another spot to start building a community from.

Even if we wanted to.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Right.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

There's not another place where we can come together and look at our culture, look at our political leadership. And I often use leadership here loosely.

Look at what we're receiving from the media.

Look at it and collectively, together as a community, say, you know what? No.

We'Re not going to do that.

We're going to stop buying things. Not particular things, not. I'm going to boycott these people because they did xyz. You know what? We don't need to buy so many things.

I'm not defined. My identity isn't defined by what I consume. That's a dumb idea.

This person isn't different from me. And I don't need to be fundamentally different from me. And I don't need to be afraid of them because they're from a different neighborhood, they immigrated from a different country, they look different, they act different, they smell different, doesn't matter.

We can come together and collectively say that as a community. And when we do, we will become free. We'll experience freedom.

We'll experience more of the fullness of our humanity. We'll be emboldened, we'll be empowered to get about the work that God created for us to do in this world.

Being set free from sin to serve the living God is not just something that happened in Egypt under Moses.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Or.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

In Palestine in 30 AD.

When Christ died and rose again. It's something that happens, has to happen for each of us.

And as many times as we allow ourselves to become enslaved again, we need to be set free again.

Because one of the most important powers that Christ has given to us when he gave us the Holy Spirit, is the power to break those chains.

Of ideology, of thoughts.

That bind us and try and hold us in that kind of slavery.

So that's my final thought, is that all of us need to free ourselves.

And we do that together.

And we do that by rejecting the thoughts, the ideas, the ideologies.

That are currently keeping us from doing that and keeping us from being human together.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Amen. Well, that's our show for tonight. Thank you very much for listening, everyone. If you didn't talk to us live, you can. We'd still like to hear from you. You can email [e-mail] you can message us at the Facebook page. You can leave us a [e-mail] LordOfSpirits and if you have basic questions about Orthodox Christianity or need help finding a parish, head over to orthodoxintro.org and join.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

Us for a live broadcast on the second and fourth Thursdays of the month at 7pm Eastern, 4pm Pacific. Plastic tubes in pots and pans, bits and pieces and the magic from the hand.

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

And if you are on Facebook, which, as you've heard, you shouldn't be, but if you are, you can follow our page and join our discussion group. You can leave ratings and reviews in the appropriate places. Most in short, Most importantly though, please share this show with a friend of yours who is going to benefit from it.

[Father Stephen DeYoung]

And finally, be sure to go to ancientfaith.com support and help make sure we and lots of other AFR podcasters stay on the air. From my heart and from my hand, why don't people understand my intention?

[Father Andrew Stephen Damick]

Thank you, good night and may God bless you all.

You've been listening to the Lord of Spirits with Orthodox Christian priests, Father Andrew Stephen Damick and Father Stephen DeYoung, a listener supported presentation of Ancient Faith Radio. And I behave and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders, and the number of them was 10,000 times 10,000 and thousands of thousands, saying with a loud voice, worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and Blessing. Revelation chapter 5, verses 11 through 12.