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As described in a recent post, there are all kinds of great uses for transcripts, and I’ve started creating them for video and audio materials important enough to have in text format.

The first transcript I completed is of a documentary interview with Jordan Peterson conducted by David Fuller for Rebel Wisdom entitled, “Truth in the Time of Chaos.” You can find that transcript on McGillespie.com.

This second transcript is the first part of a presentation Michael Heiser gave in 2013 to Future Congress 2. It’s entitled “The Post-Christian Future, Part One, Thinking Theologically About the Utopian Impulse as a Perversion of the Judeo-Christian Worldview.”

(Note: I’ll be posting the transcript on the forum. What follows, here, are short excerpts)

Copyright © 2013 Michael S. Heiser

The presentation was given while Mike was preparing to write the sequel to “The Facade.” Part one is ~9000 words and includes 25 slides. All the material (and excerpts, below) is owned and copyrighted by Dr. Heiser and please consider supporting his work in creating, presenting, and posting such presentations on Youtube. The transcript is merely an attempt to make video and audio material more accessible.

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Road Map

MH is Michael S. Heiser

MH: There’s always been sort of this impulse to either create the perfect society or more pertinently, force it on people. And so, I see looming on the horizon a new effort at creating a wonderful, blissful, totalitarian state and I want to sort of pursue that a little bit and talk about it. And again, for those of you here, and for those of you who listen later to the presentation, I just want to get you thinking about why it is that this always seems to rear its ugly head and why even Christians, at times, are not immune from this notion that we can make things perfect, that we can just make it alright if we did this, that, and the other thing, everything would be ok.

MH: So, I want to try to think theologically about those things, and we’ll see what happens. So, here is our roadmap for the day.Road Map

Definition & Relevance

MH: So, first part: definition and relevance. Utopia as you may or may not know, again, is this idea of a perfect human society. The term itself refers to an ideal place that actually doesn’t exist.Definition & Relevance

MH: It’s imaginary, you know, it’s conceptual. It’s this grand wish, something that can’t be real in the real world but boy we wish it was, that sort of thing.

MH: And again the breakdown of the term utopia: no place, a good or no place. And you’ll see it spelled either with the “e” or with the “o” forming the “u”, in either case. But it actually could have either derivation depending on who’s using it.

MH: An imaginary world where social justice is achieved, whatever that means, and the means of guaranteeing all that is secure. That’s where the control comes in. So that’s what we’re talking about. And as far as the impulse, what are the elements?

ExamplesUtopian Examples

MH: And HG Wells, of course, a lot of a lot of their thinking was influenced by eugenics. To create the ideal society you need ideal people, right? You need to sort of weed out the unfortunate or less desirable elements to the human population. So that was very common in the United States. A lot of later not-so-eugenic theory and practice was drawn from American and British writing. Those were the seed beds to some of those things that we would come later on.

MH: Marxist Leninism, of course, this would be the Lennon experiment with Marxism. Of course the Revolution of 1917. You know, again, the working class. We’re going to create the community where the worker is in power. Ostensibly, this is how it’s marketed. This is how it’s put forth.

How It’s Sold vs. Actual ResultEcological vs Neo-Paganism

MH: Nowadays we refer to eugenics as genetic engineering and genetic selection. Genetics is just the new eugenics. And I’m not here to demonize all genetic research because that would just be ridiculous too. But, once you have the power of the genome in your hand, eugenics is really easy. You know, it’s just it’s just how do we how do we accomplish this thing we can easily do now on a wide scale? That’s the only question you need to ask.

MH: Politically, of course, world peace freedom from crime which in their right mind would oppose that? Well, I’m not opposed to that. I am opposed to statist fiefdom. If you’re a statist, you are anti-individual. Think about that. That means if you’re in control you get to criminalize practically anything. Criminalize self-protection —that would be like gun laws taking guns away okay. We’re going to criminalize your ability to protect yourself. Why? Because your emphasis is on the state, the utopia, as opposed to the individual.

MH: Citizens self-sustenance, we talked about that with the food supply. You have each individual state, state being defined as country here, trying to implement their view of perfection, their view of the ideal situation. But ultimately you have a push toward global government.

Progress or Human Control?Progress or Human Control?

MH: Progress, human improvement, science & technology. Human control is what this means in our day and age. So, whereas we would call it progress human improvement through science and technology what it really means is control of people through science and technology.

MH: We have information control. In other words, we’ll fill your head with what it needs to be filled with. Knowledge is power. It’s easy to propagandize things like the political process. Eugenics, that’s progress because we’re weeding out…we’re clearing out the gene pool there and that a good thing. Police state we have to have a police state to enforce progress. Commerce comes under state control. Basically, everything you do, if it’s viewed as being an impediment to progress, then it needs to be controlled or eliminated. We have to be able to keep the progress going. We don’t want progress to stop.

MH: Now, utopian impulse as a biblical perversion. And this is where your handout comes in I’m going to go through this quickly, and I’ll tell you what the handout supplements.

MH: Here are the fundamental myths of utopianism. The idea that humans are perfectible, that’s a myth. Either on an individual level or a corporate level, it ignores human capacity for evil. It ignores you know the condition of the heart. But it’s a myth that drives utopianism. The other myth is that you can force human perfectibility. That just isn’t going to work. So enforcing an Edenic state. In other words, it would be Eden by human effort. Eden created by a ruling human elite.

Babel and Myths of UtopianismBabel & Myths of Utopianism

MH: Babel is a big deal with this because if you understand what’s going on at Babel a ziggurat, Tower of Babel, was built to bring the divine to earth. We’re going to build you a house we’re going to build you home because gods live on mountains so let’s like build our own mountain so that the deity will come here and when he comes here we can negotiate; we can we can kind of barter.

MH: It’s the same logic of idolatry. The ancient person wasn’t wasn’t an idiot he knows that this thing he just made isn’t his creator so why do they make idols? Because they believe deities can be summoned to reside there; you locate the deity. This is why Israel was forbidden to make graven images because Yahweh cannot be tamed. Yahweh will not be brought anywhere for negotiation. That’s up to him. It’s a completely different perspective on it. But you have the same thing going on with Babel. We are going to reestablish Eden we are going to bring the deity back to earth. We’re separated from the deity now we got kicked out in all that stuff we’re going to bring the deity back down to earth, and then we’re going to you know do all this stuff, all this good stuff. Well, again it’s a usurpation of God’s plan God’s punishment. Humans trying to remedy and re-kick-start what they ruined. Babel is sort of the beginning living illustration of this idea that hey let’s bring heaven to earth. Utopian thinking. Heaven is not going to come to earth until God wills it and not before. But that’s what the utopian misses or hates take your pick, one way or the other.

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One of the things I have seen among Christians who have been influenced by the Divine Council framework is the tendency to assume that every non-Christian religion springs fully formed from the minds of our Spiritual enemies. There is also an inclination to only glance at the surface of a particular mythology or religion, and as long as it contains enough of the tropes and motifs one expects, one doesn’t examine it any more deeply.

My goal in this article is to make people aware of some of the assumptions we can make when approaching other mythologies and religions.

So how does a deeper examination of mythology and religion help the Christian living today? I plan to use the very unique mythology of the ancient Norse to further explore this question and hopefully provide us window into the propaganda machine of the fallen Principalities and Powers.

Thor, Norse Mythology, and the Usual Suspects

Quite a lot of you have probably seen the new Thor movies by Marvel, and some of you may already know some of the basic story of Norse mythology. On the surface, it is a story with a lot of the familiar motifs. There is a single supreme god who, with his family, make up a council of gods.

Norse mythology has a classic demonic enemy. Their gods may not live at the top of a mountain, but they live at the top of the World Tree. It has a flood myth complete with evil giants. It even contains the classic Thunder-god, and his battle against the evil sea dragon of chaos. It seems like a straightforward story, not all that different from the mythologies we have seen before.

Why should anyone read any further? After all, we possess the Bible “the Myth that is true”, the story from which all the other myths originate. Well, if one does decide to take a closer look at the story, things start to get weird.

Death of the gods?

We find out that this is not the usual story of gods triumphing against all enemies but instead a tragedy in which all the gods die in a final battle against evil.

Unlike the triumphant stories we are used to reading, where the thunder-god defeats the dragon of chaos and brings new order, the thunder-god instead dies of his wounds almost immediately after slaying the dragon. We don’t get the traditional time-line of world creation, creation of humanity and then a flood. What one will observe instead is a combination of the flood and creation story, and the evil giants who are mostly wiped out by the flood. The surviving giants then become the demonic enemies of the gods long before humanity is created.

Troubling Questions

If this story was fabricated out of whole cloth by the Infernal Powers, then one is left with some troubling questions:

  • Why would the Powers of darkness create a mythology where they themselves die at the end?
  • Many of you are probably familiar with the Genesis 6 account, the Book of 1st Enoch, and the struggle against the Giant Nephilim clans throughout the Bible. If these are those same Giants, why would they write a story where their fictional representations are destroyed by the Giants?
  • Why the odd combination of flood and creation myth?

What if we take a different approach?

Historical Human Figures as ‘gods’

What if one assumes that these gods are partially based off of historical human figures?

If Odin and the Aesir were an actual tribe of humans living in a post-flood world instead of gods, then the whole story almost tells itself. We see the Aesir tribe’s brief struggle with the neighboring Vanir tribe and their long conflict with a tribe of Giants. We see the chief and patriarch Odin adopt the orphaned child of one of the giants that he has just killed. Loki is raised as Odin’s son, and he returns the favor by murdering his adoptive brother, Baldur, for his own twisted amusement. Loki then returns to his giant kin and leads them to exterminate the Aesir in a final battle nearly wiping out the Aesir leaving only enough survivors to pass the story down to their children.

History becomes Legend, then Myth

The ancient dead heroes are honored by their descendants, and as oral history is passed down through the generations, all the older pre-flood myths are blended into the story. To quote the Lord of the Rings movie, “History became legend. Legend became myth. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost.” …as the corrupt gods whisper and guide from the shadows.

The tragic struggle of the Aesir against overwhelming evil that captures our imaginations to this very day is partially obscured under the false mantle of godhood. Their nobility and humanity are perverted as men are strangled and hung from yew trees as sacrifices to the Hanged god. This is one possible explanation for this particular story that better explains the oddities present in its narrative.

So how would a closer examination of non-Christian religion and mythology aid the believer living today?

A Culture Starving for Supernatural Content

One can use what one learns about how our enemies have influenced the cultures of the distant past to see how they might be manipulating our modern culture through Hollywood, literature, and religion. And such an examination can also provide one with powerful apologetics and polemics against the examined religions, still here, or those resurfacing in a modern culture starved of supernatural content.

Demonic Subversion of the Truth

For example, one walks up to a modern neo-pagan, who worships the Norse pantheon, and if all one tells him is that the story and people he has based his faith on are only a demonic parody of the true faith, how will he respond?

Or instead, one could show him how his religion ties into the Christian narrative, and how the story and heroes of his people have been subverted and used as a mask by the fallen Powers of the Bible …

Assumptions only take us so far. When we actually start to think and examine more deeply, we are able to move forward.