Latest / Spiritual Hot Sauce / “Aliens & Theology | What Are NHI’s and Aliens? (Steve Brown & Grant Eckhart)”Ep#44

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“Aliens & Theology | What Are NHI’s and Aliens? (Steve Brown & Grant Eckhart)”Ep#44 · Spiritual Hot Sauce

• 0:00
  Chris Jones: Are we alone?
• 0:01
  Chris Jones: Have we been visited?
• 0:03
  Chris Jones: If so, by whom or what?
• 0:05
  Chris Jones: Disclosure has yet to give us those answers.
• 0:08
  Chris Jones: On this episode, my guest sheds light on that question through the lens of theology, philosophy, and spirituality.
• 0:17
  Chris Jones: Welcome.
• 0:18
  Chris Jones: I'm Chris Jones, and this is Spiritual Hot Talk.
• 0:21
  Chris Jones: Today I'm joined by returning guests from Jacobs Porch and curator of the substack of the Ministry of the Weird Grant Eckhart.
• 0:30
  Chris Jones: And new to the show, Dr.
• 0:32
  Chris Jones: Steve Brown, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ohio State.
• 0:36
  Chris Jones: With that, let's jump in.
• 0:39
  Chris Jones: Gentlemen, welcome to the show.
• 0:40
  Chris Jones: Good to be here.
• 0:41
  Chris Jones: Thanks, Chris.
• 0:42
  Chris Jones: You know, I'm still a skeptic in all of this.
• 0:44
  Chris Jones: However, as disclosure happens, it is important that we find grounding and we look at the reality of what's actually happening, what that means to our faith.
• 0:55
  Chris Jones: Grant, the last time you were on here and we had our discussion, we kind of covered a lot of ground.
• 1:00
  Chris Jones: We just kind of did a brief overview.
• 1:02
  Chris Jones: And today I want to go a little deeper into what is it, NHI, non-human intelligence.
• 1:08
  Chris Jones: We wanted to get Steve Brown on here with you because Steve and you have started this, I guess, a group.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I'm actually involved in a couple of different groups, the one that Grant and I are a part of.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: But I have also been involved in the founding of an organization called the Visible College, not the Invisible College, the Visible College, which is a group of academics and other scholars.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_02: So we're we're trying to do academically responsible scholarly work, understanding what is going on, what it means, what the implications are.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_02: So those are kind of the two groups, this local group and then the bigger, more global group.
• 1:49
  Chris Jones: This should be interesting then.
• 1:51
  Chris Jones: Grant, I know that you'd went through and you were putting together different levels of depths or degrees in this.
• 1:58
  Chris Jones: I thought that might be a good place for us to start and then let you guys kind of open it up and uh explain to us what this means.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let me take a step back for a second.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: But Steve and I had been meeting here after each Department of War release of UAP videos and documents at Jacob's Porch.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's an open-to-the-public event.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the main things that we said the first time was we want to resist the temptation that their propaganda that seems to be out there that wants to create a very strong frame of what's going on.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we heard from Vice President Vance and a group of Christian pastors and others who are saying this is all demonic.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's a very strong frame.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_01: Or the pastor is saying this is the time of Noah.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: So these frames are already being set on top of what we're getting through the government release of files, where it seems to be a very deliberate kind of slow drip.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it's, you know, there's there's a purpose for what they're releasing, even some fake videos in with real videos.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so all these are prompting the question of why are these frames being set?
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: And why are we being pushed into particular directions of what's going on?
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Steve and I really want to say, let's just take a step back.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_01: Let's just watch and learn and take every little bit, one step at a time, rather than being thrust into an all or nothing frame before the disclosure process has even gotten rolling.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so, as part of that, and in preparation for this discussion, a little bit note, I know Chris, you wanted to talk about different kinds of disclosure phenomena that are out there in the water.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: I had written five different levels of disclosure, especially from the perspective of the nature of complexity for theological reflection from a Christian theological perspective.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: Some are not very difficult to deal with, uh, some would be difficult to deal with.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I like to give thought now to what those theological complexities is, it's even in hypotheticals of what may come out, not knowing, of course, really anything of substantively of what the nature of these phenomena or UAP are, but to give some theological reflection in advance.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, you know, basically, I gave uh five different levels of disclosure.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: And the first two were pretty low bar, they're not much theological change or reflection, a little bit, but nothing too significant.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: The first of those I put out was simply that these the UAP phenomenon is simply what traditional Christians would call angels and demons, powers, thrones, dominions, intelligences, all those kinds of things.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_01: That this is there's not other species involved, but pretty much the anthropology and metaphysics all stay the same within that paradigm and that you know we see in scripture.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_01: And I think I like to raise that first to just bring it back into there is likely spirituality of some kind involved in disclosure.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's not all materialist ships in biologics, from my perspective.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's a part of it, likely, but the nature of that is unknown.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm more interested in some of the spiritual dimensions of it.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: So, right from the outset, at this thing I'm, you know, calling level one, it just kind of doubles down on uh the spiritual nature of this.
• 5:16
  Chris Jones: It kind of reminds me of the book of Enoch, where we're talking about Nephilim and the Watchers and all that, this kind of a different structure that's happening outside of humanity.
• 5:25
  Chris Jones: Yeah.
• 5:25
  Chris Jones: But it's it's interesting that anytime we bring up demons or angels, we automatically think that these are entities that need no ships or no technology.
• 5:36
  Chris Jones: They just are.
• 5:37
  Chris Jones: Steve, you as a philosopher have to have some insight, I'm sure, into how you would perceive that.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, so the the type of philosophy that I tend to do is the philosophy of religion.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_02: In religious studies, you intentionally bracket the question of what is true at any kind of cosmic level, right?
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_02: It's just sort of focused on what is true at the human level.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_02: And that's not what the philosophy of religion does, right?
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: The philosophy of religion really is about trying to figure out what's true.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_02: So about 10 years ago, I started teaching the Asian philosophies class here at OSU.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I've I've tried to kind of expand for my own personal self, uh, expand the that methodology.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_02: Like what are the arguments and how would we evaluate them?
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_02: And especially how would we compare them and or kind of compare the punchlines of them across the different contexts.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: So uh I'm always looking for similar argumentative structures, similar punchlines across these different religious traditions, right?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: So we can talk about that at the level of what I just like to call big G God or macro god, which is you know the the ground of all being, the foundation of absolutely everything, right?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: Like uh, and there can only be one of those, right?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_02: Like if you define something as the ground of all being, right, that then there can only be one of those things that is the ground of all being, right?
• 6:58
  Chris Jones: Very Hindu perspective.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: This is one of these places where we see quite a lot of shared theology, actually, between Christian theology, Hindu theology, obviously Islamic and Jewish theology, right?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_02: And and and actually a surprising number of theologies have some kind of there must be an absolute foundation to everything.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_02: But then there's this question of is there something in between there?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_02: So if you if like the the ground of absolutely everything, and then humans and and our you know, our our colleagues, our animal colleagues here on this planet, right?
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_02: Might there be something in between?
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: And and essentially every tradition has said, yes, there there are things that are superhuman in some sense.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_02: And basically every tradition says about the same thing, which is that uh at least like right above where we hang out, or or right kind of you know, above it's it's hard to think about a single like trajectory here, like a single axis, but like there are beings that are superhuman in various ways that are not superhuman in their kind of moral and spiritual capacities, right?
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_02: So so that there's morally mature ones and morally immature ones, there's wicked ones and righteous ones, and like that's sort of universal, right?
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: And and so, like, one thing I just want to be very uh very very clear about is that every tradition has done that.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_02: And and Christianity does have this tendency to say, well, there's the angels and they're ours, and then everything else, everywhere else, is a demon, even the things uh like in so Hinduism has its own concept of things that are demons and things that aren't demons, right?
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: Things that are devas or you know, various kinds of spiritual helper beings.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_02: And this is true across the board, right?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: And one thing that Christianity has tended to do is say, if it's not something that is in our text, then it's a demon.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: And and I just want to wave my flag about that and say, well, we can't do that, right?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: Like if there are helper beings that we encounter in spirit in in the Christian context, we can't just rule out the possibility that these helper beings that are being seen in other contexts might also be good helpers.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: Steve and I have talked about this extensively.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I think, you know, Steve is is correct in identifying that in Christianity, especially if you read Augustine's City of God, his main purpose there is to look at all of the various deities in the pantheon and say that they're all, you know, incompetent, bad, but ultimately that they're against God.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: Because you have the kingdom of the devil, the kingdom of this world, and the kingdom of God in his paradigm there.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so at that point, especially within the Western theological tradition, everything that is not oriented towards God and a messenger of God is bad.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's where I think in more modern times, or not even modern, but for a long time, Christians have seen deities in other religions as demons, because idolatry is one of the big no-nos within Judaism and Christianity.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: So anything that's not listed on the team must be a demon.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: If people are worshiping it, because that would be idolatry, and that's one of the big bads.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so I like that Steve is pointing out like, do we really have to say that, you know, all of these uh deities in these other religions, all the devas, especially in Hinduism, must we say these are all demons?
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it certainly doesn't help in a religious dialogue, but I think it kind of narrows, you know, it can narrow the scope.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I think Christianity also is a bit bigger in that, depending bigger than that in terms of what tradition you're looking at, that not everyone is not working with us, is against us.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, Jesus says that.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: So can there be room to say that if there are these other deities and other religions, so that if they had common goals, that they're they're not just demonic?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_02: And that that's really relevant to this whole UFO moment, right?
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_02: Like if it turns out that there are beings of whatever kind they are, maybe they've flown here from other planets, maybe they're interdimensional in some sense, spiritual in some sense, right?
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_02: Like we can't just say that because they are different from us, they're bad.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_02: So, I mean, no doubt some of them would be bad, just like some of them would be good, just like there are across different groups of humans and you know, across different kinds of spiritual beings that we see in the Christian tradition.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_02: So, I mean, this was sort of the main punchline of the talk that Grant and I gave a couple of weeks ago.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: You can't classify a whole group of entities as good or a whole group of entities as bad, structured by the type of thing they are.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: God makes things, and then they have the capacity to be good and to be evil of that type.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_02: In traditional Christian angelology, demons are fallen angels.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: And then some of them are against God and some of them are for God.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_02: So you can't say of a type that that type is good or bad.
• 11:59
  Chris Jones: Yeah.
• 12:00
  Chris Jones: And it gets into an interesting place that these are spiritual beings.
• 12:04
  Chris Jones: Do they have free will?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this might be, I don't know if this is a place of disagreement between Steve and I or not, but when you talk about free will from a Christian perspective, you know, you have uh within the especially patristic theology, the gnomic will.
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_01: The gnomic will is that which isn't always oriented towards the good and can act willfully on the good.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: It, you know, can do bad and good, and it's fallen.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: And so angels and and and demons, like, you know, especially if they're fallen, they have a gnomic will.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: It's free, but it's also not perfectly oriented and willfully activated towards the good.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: Only the uncreated are that uh Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
• 12:43
  Chris Jones: Aaron Powell We should probably define good, though, what we're talking about when we say good.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Powell Well, the good is in Christian theology and others too, the good is God and God's self.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: Evil is a privation of the good.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a substantial thing, for God is the fullness of the good and the compass and anchor of what the good is.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: In terms of alien disclosure, if these things are real, which I think they are in some way, especially if they get into the more wild stuff like interdimensional or spiritual beings, which there seems to be a lot of stories out there about that.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: I am and get sometimes concerned that if these beings come down with dazzling technology or light shows, if aliens could be easily worshipped if we're not very careful.
• 13:27
  Chris Jones: I think a whole lot of this depends on if there is non-human intelligence, what does it have to say to us if it does announce itself, if it does present that it may not be morally superior to us, maybe just technologically superior to the.
• 13:41
  Chris Jones: I mean, intellect does not equal morality.
• 13:43
  Chris Jones: You know, they're two different things.
• 13:45
  Chris Jones: What are some of the scenarios of why they would want to contact us?
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, I can imagine any number of different reasons.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_02: Uh one is just like Star Trek, right?
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like curiosity, a desire to explore and and to know what is out there.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_02: I suspect that is a natural part of all intelligent beings.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_02: In a spiritual sense, it's it's to know, you know, classic Christian stuff, to love nature and to understand God's creation and to know God through God's creation, right?
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, whatever kind of theological perspective you have, there's something like that.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: All religion is diseased when it sees its role in the world as fundamentally exploitative, right?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_02: That that the world is not to be uh tended and cared for and honored, but merely to be used as a as a tool.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um you know, that's when we see our our our most grotesque behaviors, right?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_02: There could be many reasons why uh non-human intelligences would want to be in contact with us, exploration, assistance of various kinds.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: In Buddhism, for instance, there are these beings, the bodhisattvas, and the bodhisattvas are really just beings that were once upon a time like us in some sense, right?
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_02: Not necessarily human, but but beings who were spiritually immature and then they grew into spiritual maturity somehow, somewhere.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: There's actually curiously a view quite a lot like this in the Christian theologian origin.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_02: They become in in Buddhism, they become these ascended kinds of beings and they help.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_02: They help other people, they help people approach righteousness, approach, approach wisdom, approach enlightenment, right?
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_02: So they could be like that.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: They might just be trying to help.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_02: And because we are leaving open the very real possibility that they are still spiritually immature, they might be out for conquest, they might be out for exploitation.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_02: There's every reason to believe that some of them might be doing that.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's one thing I love about alien lore, it's a wonderful playground of and rich material for theological reflection.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Some of my favorite stories for why they would be coming and visiting Earth, the cosmic pit stop story, you know, that if you look at the the rings of our galaxy, this is kind of a vacant area with not a lot of solar systems around us.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a it's a it's a great kind of gas station.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's a possibility.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: This is a place to grab resources and go.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: Another more off-the-wall one that I, you know, I find fascinating is, and I was talking to Jeff Krepel about this.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: Steve and I had breakfast with him, Rice University professor, about you know, perhaps all of these beings are in fact human ancestors whose spirits are having fun and and and doing things around us.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: And they're here because this is where they're from.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: And uh they can kind of interact with us through the veil, just like other unseen beings do, like angels or demons.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that's a kind of a fun story just to toy around with and theologize around.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then you've got the really horrible things, you know, like the prison planet, death trap kinds of things.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: I put that at a level five on that, on the list of, you know, big galactic war and the good guys lost, the rebels lost.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: And this is a prison planet for consciousness where we're trapped here and these malevolent beings, you know, continue to force reincarnate us because they have some, they can get some drive, some energy or something from what they call this louche in the in the Robert Monroe kind of strand of alien lore.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_01: They can harvest that kind of thing for energy and psionic resources and all these kind of things.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: It's a pretty despairing outlook, but not unlike Tollhouse theology and Eastern Orthodoxy.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_01: I noticed recently as all of this disclosure is happening, a little story that Father Seraphim Rose is now on the path towards uh veneration and sainthood.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_01: They just begun that.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: And one of his main, he wrote on UFOs, he was more in the all-or demons camp, but he was the one that really brought back this toll house theology of when you die, you have to go through all these arconic demonic powers because you are trapped here and they will oppress and test you at every level before you can then ascend to heaven.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: I found that a particularly cruel kind of theology, but within this kind of system, there is there are resources for theological reflections, even in these worst-case scenarios.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: So what's the reason they're coming?
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: Who knows at this point?
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: But for now, there's lots of kind of things to play around with that you hear, you know, online.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: And those are probably my top three favorite or most interesting.
• 18:27
  Chris Jones: Why now, though?
• 18:28
  Chris Jones: Why why would they want to contact us now?
• 18:31
  Chris Jones: And it is, or maybe they haven't.
• 18:34
  Chris Jones: This may not be the first time they've contacted us, just the first time that we are aware of it in our generation.
• 18:39
  Chris Jones: But why now?
• 18:40
  Chris Jones: Why is this coming up and why is this such a thing?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_02: So I have my own suspicions here, and and it really does depend on what the nature of the phenomenon is, right?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: Like if the phenomenon is continuous with all of the beings that have been experienced in the past, like if you if you ask look across essentially every single ancient human culture and ask, uh, do they say that they encounter some kinds of sky beings?
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, or all of them do, right?
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_02: So it would be kind of weird if it turned out that uh uh non-human intelligences, aliens, showed up or sometime in the 20th century for the first time, and all of those prior encounters were totally irrelevant.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_02: That would be strange, right?
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I assume that there's a sense in which uh we have been in contact with non-human intelligences probably for forever.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_02: And if you ask any spiritual tradition, they basically say this too.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_02: Now, why the type that seems to have emerged in the early 20th century, which is uh the kind of flying saucers, uh, gray aliens with big black eyes, uh, perhaps reptilians, perhaps insectoids, that that what we kind of think of as a science fiction type of NHI encounter, very puzzling why this might be why this might be the case.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: We we can say at least uh there's strong correlation with the humans' capacity to wield nuclear power.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: With the Manhattan Project and the dropping of the bombs on uh Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then the beginnings of the Cold War, right?
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's really when the modern UFO phenomenon begins.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: 1947 is sort of the the kind of uh main time when people said that they they were seeing these all over the place.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: Anyway, so there's lots and lots and lots of this.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_02: So so you might say it does look like there was a pretty dramatic uh change, a difference in how we encounter things that aren't human that happens uh roughly 1947 and in association with nuclear power.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: And and one of the things that's become clearer than it was before, although it's been clear for a long time to people who've been paying attention with this new wave of documents, is again kind of strengthening this idea that they're strongly associated with nuclear facilities.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: Not surprising to anybody in UFO lore.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_02: There's always been a correlation between UFO phenomenon and nuclear power, nuclear weapons.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: So it could be that.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_02: What's happening right now?
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_02: Uh AI.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: AI is at least as disruptive as nuclear power, at least as capable of generating danger for uh everything that's on this planet and perhaps everything that's beyond this planet, right?
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: To the degree that which uh AI accelerates our scientific progress, we might be very rapidly about to create a lot of scientific breakthroughs.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_02: Like it's hard for us to understand, very difficult for humans to pay attention to nonlinear growth, right?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_02: Exponential growth.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: We can't we it's we can't think very clearly that way.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_02: But that is the kind of growth that's happening because of the AI recursion, right?
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_02: AI writes AI, writes AI, writes AI, and then they get better very, very quickly.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: That this has started happening already.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_02: If you watch how rapidly we've made progress, it's not the only that we've gone fast, it's that every step, every step is getting shorter.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: The time between every step is getting shorter, right?
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_02: This is what happens.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: So if we continue on this AI spike, then we're about to hit new science spikes.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_02: So so maybe we get new energy technology, maybe we get new transportation technology, maybe we get new weapons technology.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_02: And if there are beings around, perhaps beings on other planets or whatever, who are like watching this place, they might be saying gosh, there's a bunch of angry monkeys who keep fighting, killing each other and bombing each other over oil, and they're about to get whatever weapon they know is possible, right?
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_02: Or whatever capacity scientific breakthrough they know is possible.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: And they might think, wow, this this angry, warring, incapable of living together, exploiting their planet, driving species to extinction, dear God, they're about to get off planet and start to be able to travel around.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: We really need to pay attention to that.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_02: So I suspect that whatever is happening right now ultimately goes back to artificial intelligence.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_02: And that's the reason why it's happening right now.
• 23:15
  Chris Jones: That's interesting.
• 23:17
  Chris Jones: I gotta be honest, I'm not uh a hundred percent sure this is all legit or if this is just manipulation of us to get us to a different place.
• 23:26
  Chris Jones: Because right now, with all the different religions and the different ways of thinking, that it would be much easier to control us all if you could disrupt that, if you could disassemble our religious constructs and give us a new religious construct, more universal and less tribal, I guess is one way to say it.
• 23:49
  Chris Jones: What is your personal thinking that this is psyops to start a change in us?
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_02: There's a lot to say here.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: Is it true that there are reasons to try to homogenize religious belief in order to enable political power?
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: But where we see that actually happening most is where you see very strong alliances between religious power and political power.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_02: W when political power co-opts religious power as uh in these sort of religious nationalisms, that is when you see exactly what you're doing.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's an attempt to use political power, which ultimately is coercive power, which ultimately is violent power to homogenize a community religiously.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: We see that.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_02: We see that happening in the world today.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_02: Is that happening in the UFO community?
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_02: No, like not even close in the UFO community.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_02: Now, could uh a kind of religious disclosure or a UFO disclosure be co-opted by a movement like that?
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: Sure, absolutely.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_02: Now, if you actually go and look at what the UFO community looks like, it's not homogenous, like it's nowhere close to homogeneous, right?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_02: Like we had a good this group of people who we spent time with last night.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, there's echoes, there's themes uh with each other, but uh, but but that is all, I think, in the space of what what Christianity would historically originally have thought of as preaching the gospel, right?
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like sharing what we believe and trying to convince each other, and not only trying to convince each other, but trying to listen to each other, trying to learn from each other, right?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_02: And to some extent, uh some kind of convergence is inevitable because if there's a reality, then as we get closer to understanding what that reality is, our views will converge.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_02: Now, will they converge in a way that creates a flat monocultural, monolinguistic, monoracial culture?
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_02: Well, if we're going in that direction, we're going in the wrong direction, right?
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_02: So any place where we see people celebrating that and and putting down diversity, putting down the speaking of different languages, putting down the celebration of different cultures, like that, then that's the thing that we should be afraid of.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: Where we see people saying, wow, maybe we should be listening more to what's happening in Hinduism or what's happening in Buddhism, what's happening in the indigenous communities.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe we should be listening more to what people say when they have these encounters.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_02: That's not what we should be afraid of.
• 26:37
  Chris Jones: Grant, you have some thoughts on this?
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_01: I am a generally, perhaps this is my Lutheran background, as a Lutheran uh clergy person, but pretty pessimistic about human nature, which then extends into the stars for me.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: I'm pretty pessimistic, even of elevated beings.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: But most of all, I'm pessimistic of just government propaganda, you know, that we were saturated in every day.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think Project Bluebeam, if you're familiar with that kind of alien lore piece, of there is going, you know, there is a big government psy-op to control the population through signs and wonders that they will perform to create one world religion.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's the great purifier sometimes, whenever I think, oh, maybe there's something here to this line of thinking, uh, down this choose your own adventure adventure path of alien lore.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: Project Bluebeam is that great equalizer that's like, just be careful of everything, because it all could be a psyop.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm generally a pessimistic person on that.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_01: And I generally do not like the theosophical tradition.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: There's some interesting things there, or Madame Blabatsky or the Prenal Philosophy with Aljuiz Hus Huxley.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: It just kind of takes all this ancient tradition and tries to make it one thing that we can all get on board with.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: And it does, you know, it just bastardizes all religious traditions and puts them all into one in I think a fairly incoherent way.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: But that's that's that seems to be within some alien community lore, not so much in the groups that Steve and I are gathering with, but that seems to be the go-to kind of thing.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the perennial philosophy, all of theosophy, that must be the truth.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: I would prefer that not be, and I'm not going to get it get into that very easily because I think it's not a great system.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: But I think your question, Chris, is just on epistemology and how will we know what we know?
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, right now we don't really know anything.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_01: We have little drops of dots on the screen from government officials, we have stories of duction cases.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: Potentially, as time goes on, like, you know, if if there's going to be some kind of theological shift or something similar to what you're talking about, we will have to get to know these entities, whether they're the ethereal ones, the biological ones, the ones in ships, or whatever else there might be.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, your religions are all false.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: Well, how can I understand that?
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: There got to be some mechanism by which I can know that and reach a certain threshold of knowing in order to change views.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_01: So there has to be a lot of steps, and I'm not even sure how that would happen, but presuming it would, and everybody's gonna have a different threshold.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_01: That will be the interesting thing that unfolds for me is how do we know what we know and how will, you know, at what point, what when a threshold is met and there's a pinch point theologically, what will happen then?
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that goes back to our last talk of well, at least in terms of the Christian tradition, you know, there we've already done that.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there's options and what we schism, we synthesize that information, we syncretize it, you know, those are things the church has done before, but that will be different for every denomination, congregation, or even individual church member to figure out where that epistemological threshold is for when they they know what's going on.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_01: Right now it's all nobody knows anything.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: There's lots of crumbs everywhere.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: But to me, it's far too early.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: It's good to speculative, do speculative theology and comparative study and have lots of conversation and think deeply now.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: But in terms of where the rubber meets the road, uh, we're pretty far from that in terms of knowing uh what's going on and who these beings are specifically, and how we could even believe them if they said, if there are any beings, if and how we could even believe just them on their word, you know, maybe something like telepathic communication could help, but who knows what will be down the road.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: Just quickly in in response to a couple of things that Grant said.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_02: I I don't think I agree that we know nothing, right?
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_02: There is a under the assumption that there's a that there is a here here, I think we know that there's concern about nuclear power.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_02: We definitely know that there's concern about the environment.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's that's very consistent threads across all of the encounters that people are having, right?
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: And and here's the word the kind of thing where I'm gonna say, like, this is my new favorite phrase.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_02: The the answer to metaphysical uncertainty is moral certainty, right?
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_02: Like, like when you don't know the nature of reality, what you have to know is who you want to be in that reality.
• 30:44
  SPEAKER_02: What are your values?
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_02: What do you want to be like, right?
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_02: And and and if there are beings who are saying to us, hey, you should take care of your planet and not destroy whole cities filled with beautiful people because of these wars that you keep fighting.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, right.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_02: That seems very consistent with every great moral tradition, right?
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_02: But this has always been the spiritual test.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_02: Like just like take off all of our alien lore.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_02: Here's a being, it looks beautiful, it's glowing and it has beautiful wings and it's singing songs to you.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_02: Is that an angel or a demon?
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, you can't tell by looking at it.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_02: That's always been the teaching of the church.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_02: You can't tell by looking at it.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: The only way you can know is is what it's saying align with the values that you have been taught are the correct values.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_02: Are they telling is that being telling you to love your neighbor and care for your planet?
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_02: Then it's, you know, maybe it's a demon who's who's tricking you right this moment by telling you something that's morally good.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, then fine.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_02: The fact that it originally told me to love my neighbor and care for my planet was a ruse.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_02: But but then, like, how do you know it's a ruse?
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_02: Like, when does it matter if it's a ruse when the when the morality hits the road?
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_02: So, like, this is the place where we actually have a huge amount of clarity, especially as people who identify with the gospel, with Christianity, with the Sermon on the Mount, right?
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_02: Like, we we know what to do.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_02: We're supposed to take care of the widows and the orphans and the prostitutes and the tax collectors and the poor and the powerless and right, like and the imprisoned and and like and the sick, right?
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's what we're supposed to do.
• 32:18
  SPEAKER_02: Are we doing that?
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_02: Then we're on the right team.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_02: This has always, always, always been the teaching of the church, right?
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_02: Like you have to look at the moral content of what is being said.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: That's the only way to discern the spirits.
• 32:32
  Chris Jones: So you're saying basically judge them by their fruits?
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_02: By specifically those fruits that Jesus made very, very clear to us.
• 32:39
  unknown: All right.
• 32:39
  Chris Jones: So I got one last question for you.
• 32:42
  Chris Jones: Grant, you believe?
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_01: That's a huge question mark.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: So I can't say yes, because I don't know what I'm saying yes to.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if the question is specifically, are there other entities around that are producing these ships that are non-human in origin?
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think yes.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think that is very, very likely.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's enough anecdotal evidence, and I think we start doing damage to lots of people and gaslighting them for their testimony.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: Now, with all the hearings and all the the UAP drops, you know, there is something going on.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: There are, you know, aliens, but again, alien just means other.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: And so I believe that.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: But in terms of belief, for me, that's a whole worldview kind of thing that Steve kind of hinted at.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: There's the morality, and then there's the metaphysics, there's the whole thing.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's the kind of thing that I would want to be first in line to ask the little green men of, you know, what's the big cosmic story?
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I can then properly answer the question of what do I believe in?
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_01: But if there's just these entities, yeah, I'm I'm pretty convinced at this point.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: I always leave a little hedge room, but you know, that's where it's at.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: Steve, how about you?
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 33:56
  SPEAKER_02: I I'm less I'm less hesitant to say that I believe.
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, so so first of all, it in in like modern contemporary philosophy, we don't usually do just belief, disbelief.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_02: You have like a range of credences, right?
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_02: Like how confident you are.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: So, like, am I above 50%?
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'm definitely above 50%.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_02: That that there's some kind okay, let me say it this way.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_02: There is some truth in what these encounter these encounters that people have are.
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: That there's there's a there there.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_02: What is it?
• 34:26
  SPEAKER_02: Is it what it seems?
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_02: Is it what it looks like?
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_02: Is it something from another dimension poking itself in that looks like something that we're familiar with, but isn't actually that?
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_02: Is it like like the end of the so my actual preferred view for at least some of these things is very similar to what happens at the second book in C.S.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_02: Lewis's space trilogy, Paralandra, where where there are these beings, the Oyarsa of the different planets, right?
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_02: And and they and they shape shift, right?
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: They look like the weird wheels and strange diagonal, uh, geometric kinds of mind-bending shapes.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_02: And then they show up and they look sort of human.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: I suspect that at least some of what we're dealing with is that level of weird.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_02: But yeah, I think there's something going on.
• 35:06
  SPEAKER_02: Do I think that the US government is hiding important information about this from the populace?
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_02: Definitely.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_02: They're definitely hiding information from the populace.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: Now, what are they hiding?
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: Like my official view is like we we actually can't know what they're hiding.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_02: So there's all kinds of questions about like, you know, if if you're in the UFO lore, is what is is Bob Lazar telling the truth?
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_02: Are there nine craft that were at S4 in Area 51 in the 80s that they that they actually some of them actually worked and they know how to fly them?
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_02: And we've been reverse engineering everything ever since then.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's a that's a very consistent thread through the lore, right?
• 35:50
  SPEAKER_02: That that that not only are there not only are they here, but we've recovered them and we've tried to reverse engineer them and we've had some success.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_02: So we have alien reproduction vehicles.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_02: And okay, might that be true?
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_02: Coin toss for me.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_02: I I have no idea whether that degree is true, whether that's a psyop.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like they're just telling us, like they're feeding information about that to distract from whatever else is going on.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_02: Maybe they're doing all of this to distract from the Epstein files, right?
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I don't have any idea what's going on.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: Something is being hidden.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_02: It might be all of that, it might be some of that, it might have nothing to do with that.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_02: It might be really bizarre kind of spiritual occult stuff, right?
• 36:35
  SPEAKER_02: That that I mean definitely seems to have happened in the history of the intelligence community.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: Go look at Alastair Crowley and Jack Parsons and Kenneth Grant and Michael Aquino.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_02: Operation Paperclip in general.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_02: Operation Paperclip and MKUltra.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_02: And look, there's been some really weird dark stuff that's been going on in or adjacent to the US government for a very long time.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_02: How does that relate to this?
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_02: I really have no idea, right?
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_02: But like go look at Michael Aquino and who he was and and who he said he was publicly, go read the things that he published about himself, about Set, the Egyptian god of chaos, and then go look at the things he was accused of, compare those to things that are happening in the Epstein files today, and then don't sleep comfortably because there's some very uncomfortable possibilities that really might be there.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_02: And these are all people related to the beginning of a space program, too.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_02: Especially, yeah, Jack Parsons and Jack Parsons in particular is the beginning of Jeff Propulsion Laboratory in in Southern California.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: Like, so look, like, might there be dark spiritual powers in the air?
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there really might be.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_02: Can we have this like blanket UFOs or demons?
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_02: Like, come on.
• 37:54
  SPEAKER_02: No, that like that that is so theologically juvenile that that we we must laugh at it if if if it wasn't coming from the vice president of the United States, right?
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_02: If it's coming from the vice president of the United States, we cannot afford to laugh at it.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_02: We have to say, look, that is just baseline juvenile theology.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_02: It can't be the case that that everything that is unidentified and a flying object is a demon.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_02: Go read Ezekiel.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_02: Go look at what was happening in the Marian apparitions.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_02: Like, like, come on.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like go look at the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: Like, come on.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_02: You cannot say that everything weird that's in the sky is demonic.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_02: You cannot say that everything is not human is demonic.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like, so so no, like, absolutely not.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_02: Might there be dark demonic entities of some kind?
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_02: And how do we tell?
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_02: Test the spirits.
• 38:42
  Chris Jones: This has been interesting.
• 38:44
  Chris Jones: Grant, tell us how people can get in contact with you and your Substack.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, if you're in Columbus and want to stop by the college ministry, I serve at a Jacobs Porch, uh, you can stop by anytime.
• 38:56
  SPEAKER_01: Email me at Grant at Shacobsporch.com, or I'm writing slowly, turning out material on ministryandheweird.com on Substack.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: And in terms of the group that Steve and I have begun as a public group here in Columbus for all things UFO and consciousness related and various religious traditions, I'm not sure how you find that.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: It's mostly word of mouth, but it's getting could be quite a large group of people who come and listen.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: You could probably look for us on social media and we'll post something.
• 39:25
  SPEAKER_01: Steve, do you know how people find us for that?
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_01: It seems just the word of mouth, but it is growing pretty quickly.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_02: The answer to that, how do you get into that room right now?
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_02: You live in Columbus and you know one of us.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_02: Other than that, things that I'm involved in, there's the Visible College, the visiblecollege.org.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_02: We're trying to be flexible about what the admission conditions are to the visible college, because we don't want to say you have to have a PhD and be teaching at a university.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_02: If you are, if you do have a PhD and are teaching at a university, you're in.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_02: In fact, in general, if you have a PhD from a kind of ordinary accredited institution, you're in.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_02: I do personally have a YouTube channel, not very excitingly called Stephen Brown Philosophy.
• 40:08
  SPEAKER_02: If you look for Stephen Brown Philosophy YouTube Aliens, you'll definitely find it.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_02: But I do want to say that that I think this kind of thing that Grant and I are doing here in Columbus is going to be more and more important.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_02: Getting people together in community contexts to sit in the weird lovingly and open-mindedly together, caring for each other through whatever kind of turbulence and chaos might be on the horizon.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_02: We need to be doing this.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I think what I would want to say is don't wait for us to figure out how to do this.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_02: Like go do this yourself.
• 40:46
  SPEAKER_02: Do this in your church, do this across churches, do this with your friends.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_02: Just sit down together, eat some food, and just say, what's going on?
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, really get used to having an open mind and just puzzle a bit about the limits of our understanding of what we know.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_02: In Christianity, I like to remind people that Jesus actually didn't tell us who he was exactly.
• 41:11
  SPEAKER_02: He spoke in, he spoke in parables, he spoke kind of mystically, and he was very provocative.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_02: He didn't let himself just be another guy, right?
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_02: But he didn't solve the problems for us.
• 41:23
  SPEAKER_02: He didn't hand us a theology fully formed.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_02: He gave us bread and wine and each other, and a whole bunch of beautiful teachings and very strange experiences.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's what Jesus left us with.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_02: I think we need to go back there and remember how weird the world really is and just kind of try to love each other and take care of each other as we go through this.
• 41:42
  Chris Jones: That's a great note to leave on.
• 41:45
  Chris Jones: Thank you so much for your time.
• 41:46
  Chris Jones: I appreciate it, guys, and I'll be seeing you again in the future.
• 41:50
  Chris Jones: Sounds great.
• 41:50
  Chris Jones: Sounds good.
• 41:51
  Chris Jones: Thanks so much, Chris.
• 41:54
  Chris Jones: The truth is, guys, I am a huge skeptic.
• 41:57
  Chris Jones: But I think this is still an important subject that we have to cover because we are headed towards the disclosure of something whatever that is, I don't know.
• 42:06
  Chris Jones: But true faith is how we interact with our world, not how we isolate from it.
• 42:19
  Chris Jones: Stay connected.
• 42:21
  Chris Jones: See again next week.