Latest / CrossPolitic Show / The Rise of The Pharmaceutical gods
Transcript
- Pacific It's amazing that some of the most powerful minds in the world can't define half the human race. They can't answer the simple question, what is a woman? Can you provide a definition for the word woman? Can I provide a definition? Yeah, I can't. You can't? Not in this context. I'm not a biologist. Which doesn't give me much hope that they're going to be able to answer an even more fundamental question. What is a human being? Answer that one wrong and every plan you make for human flourishing absolutely collapses. You cannot help, you cannot heal what you refuse to define. The mainstream secular answer is that we are highly evolved apes before that fish with gills, maybe, if that before that slime, before that particles flying through the dark, before that at some point a big bang. And before the big bang, stop asking questions. What made the bang? Hey, it was a long time ago. Did I mention we're fancy apes? What made the bang? Nothing. Nothing? We don't know. So we explode it out of nothing by accident. And that is why your life is so important, I guess. Also, when you die, you'll be forgotten and dissolved back into the cosmic soup. In the meantime, work hard, go to college, make money, make a difference. But why? Because it's really important, the why. Because if you don't, you'll be sad. But I'm already sad. This right here is what we call materialism. The religious belief and the nonexistence of anything in material. There is no God, there is no soul, there are no angels, no demons, just chemicals and atoms, balking into each other over and over again. Sometimes they make worms and other times they make dust and sometimes they make the galaxies and zarg. Sometimes they make highly evolved apes. And all of it is just random and accidental, purposeless and therefore utterly meaningless. So follow this closely. The materialist man who built that world told you that demons were superstition, bad air, epilepsy. A medieval misunderstanding of mental illness, they swept the house clean. Clean of angels and demons and souls and sin, and every other embarrassment. Then they furnished it with something modern, you know, diagnosis, syndromes, serotonin levels, chemicals. Ask a room full of educated people whether they believe in the devil and every hand stays down. Ask the same room about trauma and triggers and energy and vibes and plant intelligence and whether a substance can take you into contact with beings who have answers for your life and suddenly everyone's a raging mystic. The last one is it's not really a hypothetical. Cell entrepreneurs are not waiting. Luxury retreats like mycho meditations in Jamaica is where they're going. They can run you anywhere from $7,000 to $20,000 for a week. They go there sometimes to treat depression or you still decide to find deeper meaning. Beyond the pure therapeutic approach leads to more creative flow of ideas. Iawasca in particular, you're again, it's divination aided by sorcery. You're taking a potion to to commune with a spirit entity that is not of God. And so you're communing with it. You're taking a potion to commune with a demon to find answers about your life. I've done 15 Iawasca ceremonies as explicitly what is going on. There's actually a word for that. The Greeks had it 3,000 years ago. It actually shows up in Homer. It shows up in the book of Exodus and it shows up in the book of Revelation where it is used to describe how entire civilizations get lost and deceived. One word, it means medicine. It also means sorcery. The ancients, they didn't think that those two things were different from each other. It's no wonder that so many modern people are medicated today. They are anxious and they are worried life is meaningless but don't mess it up. But if you're sad and the sadness is just chemicals, then the solution is obviously more chemicals. The modern scientistic view basically reduces anything that might be solish down to chemicals in motion. And that reductionism, that scientific reductionism that says we're just matter in motion, our brain is just chemicals. It's just electro transmitters basically turns humanity into a really complicated machine. And then once we've been machined, you know, machinified, we can be hacked. And that's where you get all of the supplements turning into substitutes because now we need to figure out the shortcuts. If we tweak this here, poke that there, we ought to be able to manipulate. Substitutes. That's the whole ladder and it goes up faster than anyone plans. It starts in a pharmacy with a prescription and a copay. And when the prescription stops working or a doctor doesn't write another one people, they go looking for their own chemistry. Alcohol, marijuana, marijuana, this sold in gummies and vape cartridges and marketed as wellness. Then you get ecstasy and acid and mushrooms. And at the top of the ladder is a dark room in Peru, led by a single candle and a bitter brown drink that users say puts them into contact with spirits. No, seriously. And so it's not that people are taking psychedelic drugs again just to see what happens. It's that they're told they're given the message by a therapy culture, which is basically mainstream American culture right now that you have buried trauma and using these substances you can encounter, you're buried trauma, and you can release it and you can be free to live a happy and fulfilling life. And so the ritualistic environment sets up that frame, sets up that they call it a container for that process to happen. That is not just a party in someone's backyard anymore. That's a ritual, a right. The darkness, the candle, the ceremony, the man at the front who knows what comes next, every element of it belongs to a form of worship. And the only thing missing is the name of the God. The people selling the ceremony know exactly what they're selling, which is why the word they use for what happens in that room is journey. You aren't taking a drug, you're going on a journey. In fact, they'll call it a hero's journey. A hero's journey to deal with your trauma, your past, your depression. Except nobody goes anywhere. Man lies down on a mat in the dark, a few feet from the door, where he walked in, and he's still lying there in the morning. Over about 30 years, the therapists, legislators, and advertisers taught the country that altering your own mind is a private matter and then a health matter and finally became a wellness matter. Anyone who objected to that, they didn't care about your mental well-being, they didn't care about your mental health. Marijuana has carried some of the same argument, a soft drug, harmless, medicinal even. So obviously, it needs to be legalized. But a general permission has been given and therefore it's quite hard under the circumstances to find anybody in our society who will say, actually, I'm not at all sure that altering the human mind by chemical intervention is a good idea in itself. Notice what a general permission does to people whose entire job it is to notice things. Go back to May 24, 2022. You've all de-texas. In the first hour of its online covers, the New York Times reported one detail about the shooter that was sourced from a co-worker at the hamburger place where he had worked. He used marijuana. And then this disappeared from the New York Times website and it never appeared in the Prince of Newspaper. And as you know, the New York Times has been quite a good keen advocate for the digitalization of Marijuana. I think nationally, I need New York's day. And I wondered why this had happened. So he did what a report does? And I contacted the New York Times. I contacted them by all the emails and telephone numbers which they published for the report as involved in the D-FIT. All the emails and telephone numbers which were given in the newspaper are on the website for queries and no one ever answered me. I even contacted their London Bureau and asked them if they could help me about this. No one could explain why the story had disappeared. Which leaves the innocent explanation. Maybe the detail was simply wrong and the paper quietly deleted the mistake. And I thought, well, maybe it just possibly turned that to be wrong. So because I've worked on the British National Newspaper, I was able to ask the reporter who we had on the scene by then to make her own inquiries of the shooters colleague at the hamburger joint to see if she changed her mind. Well, the story wasn't true, but no, she absolutely confirmed that it was true. Or maybe someone at the paper was a little stoned. Why is there so little curiosity about whether the thing we legalized is doing what its critics said it would do? I have a friend who's compiled a book and runs a website which is very hard to find by the way. You have to really struggle to find it, but it's called attacker smoked cannabis. And what he did was he researched just simply using the internet every single case of serious violence reported in British local newspapers. Because big national newspapers barely report this stuff anymore. There's an immense amount of serious and sometimes terrifying violent crime, which is committed by people who have undoubtedly been on some uses of murder. A man with a laptop reading small-town crime reports one at a time, building by hand a file that a national press with thousands of reporters decided to unpublish. In a 1962 lecture at Berkeley, Aldous Huxley predicted precisely this. He said, it seems to me that the nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this that we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy who have always existed and presumably always will exist. Two, get people actually to love their 32. Please, sir, may I have more chains? Or will prophesied jackboots that torture sale and the rewritten dictionary, Huxley prophesied chains that are harder to resist because they arrive as gifts, kind of like a shiny apple from an old woman in the woods. So drugs and sex was basically the baseline deal that the state made with its population. The jackboots do show up on occasion, but our society far more relies on this kind of softer form of tyranny, where it's bribery. It's, we'll give you, here's the drugs, here's the sex. So the online porn, gambling, the drugs, all of that weed from weed to heroin to ayahuasca, all of it is basically a way of keeping a population docile and easily manipulated. The terms are generous. And eight by ten room, every show ever made scrolling reels that never end, a pharmacy that keeps you healthy enough to keep consuming and the full menu of the baser passions. In return, you stay quiet. Please, sir, may I have more notifications? The bribe is real. A man hands over his inheritance and receives slavery while getting the chemical sensation of a pleasure journey. The same transaction takes his mind and his money. And this is why Domino wealth strategies cares how a household handles its money. Most of us have never learned to see our resources as freedom. They are. How you handle your money is not a neutral act. It's not separate from your walk with Christ, and it is not exempt from his lordship. If you belong to Jesus, everything that you have is under his authority, and you are commanded to be faithful with all of it. The same culture that hands a man of bribe, hands him a financial plan to match that bribe. Stay comfortable, they say. Stay quiet. Do not think about this past quarter, but a man who cannot think in a straight line will never build anything that outlasts him. And his household kept us out as a household that's being spent. Domino wealth strategies exist for the other kind of house. They help families think biblically and act wisely about what God has entrusted to them. Budgeting, saving, dead, life insurance, its state organization, and the multi-generational financial vision. They do not sell products. They help you ask the right questions and make your own decisions with your eyes open. This is about faithfulness, not about chasing wealth. If you intend to leave something behind, go to reform.money and schedule a complimentary consultation, which brings us back to the bribe. A bribe implies somebody offering it. So who is holding the money? The answer, if you believe the materialists is nobody. There's no one behind the curtain, because there's no curtain, because there's nothing immaterial in the universe to stand behind it. Seeous Lewis certainly did not believe that for a second. So in abolition of man, he actually says that science and magic, the scientific endeavor and the magical endeavor in the early Enlightenment essentially were twins. The magical one was sickly and it died. It didn't work. But the other one was strong and it was successful. In Scruté Blattery, he talks about the materialist magician, which for Scruté would be the high point, the climax of demonic endeavors. Our materialist magicians would be talking about, you know, rejecting God, rejecting anything spiritual, but they would be talking about the life force and they would be talking about all of these forces in the world and they would basically say there's no such thing as spirits, but there are these forces that work in the world and they would be veritably worshipping these forces and doing their bidding. twins born in the same hour in the same room from the same desire and one of them simply worked better. The magician wanted to bend the world by saying the right words and the right order maybe while administering some herbs found in the forest. The scientist wanted to bend the world by combining the right materials and the right order. Both wanted the technique that makes reality obey, but what if they combined forces? C.S. Lewis's nightmare was never that magic would come back wearing robes. It was that it would come back wearing a lab coat using the language of forces and energies run by men who would tell you to your face that they didn't believe in any of that superstition. You know they didn't believe in demons and nonsense. The ancient demonic play was straight up intimidation. Show up, manifest, terrify a village into building you an altar and making bloody sacrifices and promise them power if they would bow down. And that worked for a few thousand years. The new play is more subtle and it's less bloody. Well at least at first. Get a man to stop believing you exist because a man who has ruled out the devil has already built the room in which he will also rule out God. And the best possible outcome for anyone running that operation would be to run both of these plays at once. Both measured the dosage, chart the outcomes, published the study, talked to the being. Remember when I say they swept the house clean? Those were the words of Jesus and he was not paying anyone a compliment when he used them. He described a house emptied of one spirit swept out, tidied and left standing white open. And he said the spirit came back with seven demons worse than himself and found the place already for them. So did the modern west decide to empty the house of God in demons and souls and sin, tie it all up and call it science and then leave the door wide open? You should ask Henry. Henry Cockburn started using marijuana at the age of 11 at a good school in Canterbury. Three years later at 14 he went mad. At least that's what most moderns would say. The police kept bringing him back home. They had found him swimming and flooded rivers in the middle of an English winter doing things that would have killed him. Eventually they locked Henry in a ward. He came back more or less. He came back on heavy, anti-psychotic medication, the kind that changes a person in ways nobody would choose. And his father wrote a book about it. He called it Henry's demons. And then something happened that Patrick Cockburn did not expect. So when Patrick wrote about this very bravely in his own newspaper and then published his book, he found that extraordinary numbers of his friends and colleagues would come up soon quietly in clubs and other places and say the same thing has happened to my family. A terrible onset of incurable mental illness which appears to have followed the taking of marijuana. So I didn't have any doubt this was going on. Quietly in clubs, one at a time out of your shot every one of them had a son or an Fiora daughter and everyone had decided on his own that this was a thing you say in a low voice or just not at all. The general permission had been given and the general permission runs in both direction. It permits the drug and it apparently forbids the truth. And the father, looking at what happened to his 14-year-old son, reaches past every diagnostic manual in print and calls it Henry's demons. Was Henry's brain simply damaged by chemicals the way that a liver is damaged by drink? And the title of the book is maybe some old dad's grieving metaphor? Or is his father reaching for the word because it actually fits what he had left in his son? Perhaps Henry's father reached for an old word because the new ones had completely failed him. C.S. Lewis had the same instinct and the Greeks had a name for it. Pharmacaya. Perhaps one of the oldest uses of the word is in Homer's Odyssey where Helen is said to mix medicine or a drug, Pharmacaya, into a wine in order to banish grief and anger. Perhaps a little pro-zac or zooloft for the men who are overcome by the sorrows of their losses in the Trojan War. Homer says that the fertile earth produces many such medicines, many beneficial when mixed, and many deadly. The same word is used later in a different woman's hands in book 10 of the Odyssey, the same word. Pharmacaya is used to describe the evil drugs or potions of the sorceress Cersei. When she is also mixing something into wine that causes Odysseus man to utterly forget their native land. She then famously turns them into pigs. The Pharmacaya puts them into a day state and makes them susceptible to her magic, but it also introduces an ambiguity and ancient literature between drugs and sorcery, between medicine and dark powers. By the time of the Greek translation of the Old Testament, Pharaoh's magicians are said to employ Pharmacaya to work their occult practices. When they throw down their rods and become serpents, the text says that they are working Pharmacaya, sorceries, or maybe we should just call it cycle therapy. The word shows up in Paul's list of the works of the flesh in Galatians 5, but then at the very end of the Bible, the word comes back several more times. And this time, it isn't a man being deceived or a crew of sailors even. It says that by thy Pharmacaya were all the nations deceived. Medicine and sorcery, one word from Homer to Revelation, because the ancients could not find the seam between them. We found the seam. We drew a line straight through the middle of that word, put the medicine on one side and the sorcery on the other and declared the sorcery side empty. The men who work on this professionally are starting to have trouble holding that line, though. The scientists who are on record about this, the ones who are more strict materialists, they really struggle at this point. I think CS Lewis is probably right that the scientists who are working at this deep down in the bowels of their buildings are probably aware that there's some non-human intelligence connections there, but at the end of how to change your mind, Michael Pauline begins to acknowledge that there are things called plant intelligences, which he doesn't bother to define or explain. And you can see his a little bit of his materialism just begin to crack right there at the very end of the book. As he begins to acknowledge that there's maybe more to reality than the material. Plant intelligences. That's the best-selling author on psychedelics. At the end of the book reaching for a phrase, he declines to define. Intelligence belongs to a mind. He will not say who's. Wait. What? So these drugs, they just cause encyclological delusions, right? Ask a man who's set in the room 15 times. Iawasca in particular, you're taking a potion to to commune with a spirit entity that is not of God. Apollosely. Yes. Is that a fake? You're 1,000 people talking to a demon. Yeah, 1,000. I've done it 15 times. I've done 15 Iawasca ceremonies. That is explicitly what is going on. As in they don't use the word demon, right? When you go talk to them, there's no notion that this is some sort of dark spirit. This is the spirit that has your answers. This spirit or the spirits 15 times. He said in that room, not a critic who was reading about it as a participant. And the practice that he was participating in was a curriculum. A shaman in training goes into the jungle and eats one of those plants, nothing else for weeks, sometimes even years, until he knows the plant's spirit personally. They call it a deata. At the ceremony, he sings songs called Icaros, summoning the plant's spirits to your side. And the spirits have names. And the shaman knows them. Everything in that previous sentence is standard practice. Publicly described in books and journals. And you can experience it for yourself at a retreat that probably takes credit cards. In the entity at the center of it has a name that Westerners use out loud. I've got a number of books on my shelf right over my head right here where I could just pull one down and read to you how Western people, scientific backgrounds and PhDs are talking about communing with mama ayahuasca, a named entity, in order to get answers for their lives. My mama ayahuasca gave me a mission. Mama ayahuasca is one of the most important figures in my life. They're always talking about a specific being. And so yes, this is absolutely going on. On one hand, wow, PhDs are communing with demons. And on the other hand, of course, university professors are communing with demons. Though, demon is still a difficult word to put in a grant application. There is a better way to actually get it to happen. If we get people to think of them not merely as like spirits or angels or demons, but keep them in the, oh, maybe they're aliens, maybe they're extraterrestrials, which keeps them in the scientific bucket because then the master narrative of Western civilization, that evolutionary big bang old earth cosmos with evolutionary change, these are just the beings that all of our sci fi shows have been telling us are out there. And here they are. We're just meeting them not through our spaceships, but meeting them through psychedelics. And so if we can keep that master narrative of the scientific worldview, then the demons are allowed in, but they're allowed in in such a way as to keep God out. Not through spaceships, but through a cup. This is the same false cosmos that we started with, the bang, the slime, the fancy ape. It has room for others as well. Now it still has no room for God, but you still might be picturing the wrong thing. These entities or intelligences don't need Halloween costumes. They prefer a job title. The problem with the demonic is that it doesn't involve people with horns and tails and red eyes. It involves all human beings with the kind of view that I meet every day, but who adopts the views of life and moral principles or life of moral principles, which have effects on people which are henish. And I certainly believe that happens increasingly, but what the national institute of clinical experiments in this horrible place in which his central character gets involved, it's actually very reminiscent of office politics and quite a lot of modern organizations. Lewis said the same thing and almost the same words about the place evil actually gets made. Lewis and his scruited letter says, the greatest evil is not now done in those sort of dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It's conceived and ordered. Moved, secondated, carried, and minited. In clean, carpeted, warm, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white colors and cut fingernails and smooth shaving cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Carpet in nice lighting, a quorum with minutes that are taken. You won't find people in those rooms are going to use the word demon, all of which is true, but it isn't the whole story. Scripture says there is sometimes somebody actually on the other side of it. We know this because there's a law in the Bible about it. In Deuteronomy 18 it says this, there shall not be found among you anyone that makeeth his son or his daughter to pass through the fire or that use it divination or an observer of times or an enchanter or a witch or a charmer or a consultor with familiar spirits or a wizard or a necromancer. A consultor with familiar spirits? A spirit you know by name who knows you whom you visit for answers. Read that list again and try to find a line that a modern ayahuasca retreat does not cross. The law forbids it because the traffic is real. King Saul out of his mind and desperate found a medium who brought the prophet Samuel up out of the ground and Saul got his devastating answer. Or when a father brought a boy to Christ who had been throwing himself into fire and into water that wasn't a metaphor, no doubt we would call it mental illness, but Scripture calls it demons. But you heard that story already in this film. It was told to you about the boy in Canterbury, about the boy who was playing in rivers that were flooded in the winter that should have killed him and the police brought him home and his dad wrote a book. And then there's this man that's in the tombs. He lives among the graves and nobody can bind him and he cuts himself with stones night and day. Christ asked the spirits what his name was and it answers that we are legion. And then it asks to be sent into a herd of pigs. It gets his wish and 2,000 of them stampede off a cliff and down into the sea. The man is found afterward sitting down, clothed and in his right mind. So which is it? Chemicals damaging a brain, bureaucrats damaging a country or a spirit entity with a name. The answer is yes. And 2020 was a worldwide demonstration churches were closed by clean shaven men and well-lit offices. Thousands of our elderly died alone in nursing homes by bureaucrat order. They were comforted by smiling nurse priests. Several states they wrote laws for how we would go to church and whether we can meet a worship, they told us how to conduct communion. And down the street, the abortion clinics, they stayed open, the pot shops, they stayed open, the strip clubs wide open because they were essential. That was the word on the paper essential. The remarkable thing was not that the order was given, someone will always give the order. The remarkable thing was how few people said no. We seem to be done how in our country any a serious core of thinking people capable of looking at government proposition and rejecting it and refusing to be cowed by the the hauls of the mob. On this occasion, huge numbers of people who were educated and had experience of life and were in a position to stand up against an outbreak of mass folly. That did not deserve. I looked around for them and they were gone. They were in their gardens drinking cherries from a misclass waiting for it to be over. Or maybe they were on Adderall and cannabis. Maybe a pharmaceutical sorceress had been mixing something deadly into the wine for years. Long enough that a whole country forgot where it came from and stood there forgetful of home waiting to be turned into pigs. There is a reason the ceremony is held in the dark. We're called to sobriety to be sober-minded and the word that I believe its Peter uses there is I think it's Nepho. I may be pronouncing that wrong. Which means morally alert. Are you following the call to moral alertness and being able to make God glorifying decisions if you are so powerfully intoxicated that you can't even look at a light? Are you truly able to make wise moral decisions in reality if you can't even look into the light? Nepho. Morally alert. It's the word Peter uses right before he tells the church that its adversary the devil is prowling around looking for someone to devour. Which would hardly describe a man who can't even stand the light of a candle. I be proven. Doles ahead ache but it leaves your conscience and moral agency intact. Exacy floods a man with affection for a woman who's not his wife and he will do things he would not do if he the test is whether you can still tell right from wrong the test is whether you can execute your responsibilities while you are working morally alert awake enough to know what you are doing while you are doing it. That also happens to be the rarest thing on a resume business owners you know exactly what I'm talking about. You have read the resumes you have set across a table from someone technically present and not really there. Dawg style is easy to find a wake is not. We know that engage to wear an employee can increase your company's performance by 5-10 or even 25 percent. You would be foolish not to seek out such people. That's exactly what Red Balloon Recruiter offers. Their personalized source and screen process connects you with top talent. People who show up sober think in straight lines and take responsibility before anyone asks them to. So revenue up, costs down, visit red balloon dot work today and transform your hiring. Huxley warned that we would trade sobriety for pleasure just make hard things fade away and the psychiatrist Thomas Shaz argued something similar 60 years ago as well. He argued that mental illness as his profession had defined it was not usually a physical illness and that what most of his patients needed was to face the hard work of taking responsibility personal responsibility for their own moral agency. Two generations later therapy culture has the microphone in their hand and their doctrine is the exact inversion of what he argues. Therapy culture says the trouble lives in your body and it requires a powerful chemical to reach it to get inside there. So we didn't listen not even to a non-Christian profits like Huxley and Saz and here we are slouching days toward a brave new world. A medicated intoxicated slavery where the slaves love their chains. Ablaming the therapists lets the church off far too easily. The men in that dark room went looking for an answer somewhere and they walked right past a building on the way. The reason why trauma culture has taken such a hold in mainstream American culture and also increasingly in the church is because of a failure of understanding biblical counseling. The world doesn't tell them it's their sin. Your sin is the problem. The world says it's not what you did it's what someone did to you and if you're still feeling pain there must be trauma somewhere else and if you're still feeling pain there must be trauma somewhere else it's an endless loop and cycle always looking for the magic key of what someone did to you to make you this way. There's always another layer there's always another therapist another ceremony another drug and every guide he can afford tells him none of this is your fault but every man knows deep down his pain is not ultimately what was done to him it is what he is done but part of my transformation was feeling the moral pain of my sin and my life and being forced to repent from it and there's nothing like moral conviction if you've ever really felt it it's completely different it feel you feel it in your body but it's a real thing and it's you can't really wriggle out of it you just have to lean into it and only on the other side of it and that redemption is true freedom. 20 years of ceremonies and the thing that finally changed him was the guilt which is exactly what the whole therapeutic apparatus exists to explain away in which turned out to be the only accurate instrument in the room. An ape has no use for guilt it has appetites and instincts and chemical reactions and when it is finished it goes into the ground and the ground does not care so where did that guilt come from and why is it the only instrument in the room that reads true it comes from your creator you are not evolved from slime an accident in a universe of accidents headed for the cosmic soup yes you are sad and troubled because that story doesn't make any sense you're not just chemicals your life is not meaningless you are a man a woman made in the image of the living God body and soul created to think clearly and take responsibility and name things and make things and invent things and every human being knows this in their bones and in their soul and every man knows he has sinned against his maker that's the reason that man has become so sad his sadness was moral before it was chemical and at the bottom he's homesick he's lost he's a foreigner in the land which is exactly what Cersei's drink was for Odysseus's men forgot they stood in her hall days and confused with no idea where home was and that is the moment she reached for her rod but it's also the reason that Christ came into this dark world he has come into a far country of our fallen world to find the lost prodigal sons whose minds have been dulled on pig pods and potions and trying to get high and trying to medicate and trying to hack happiness from a deep pit of despair Cersei's cup made men into swine but on the other side of the lake the trade ran backwards when Jesus showed up the demons went into the swine and the man came out of the tombs clothed and in his right mind when Jesus shows up lost sons and pigpens come to themselves and return home but there's one more cup in this story Helen mixed a drug into wine so grieving men would not have to feel their sorrow Cersei mixed a drink so sailors would forget where they came from every pharmacon in the ancient world made the same offer you don't have to be present for this I can dull your pain and so right on schedule at Golgotha they handed Christ to come mixed wine with gall the standard mercy offered to a man being crucified in narcotic so he would not be entirely there for he tasted it he exactly what it was and he refused to drink it the night before in the garden he asked whether another cup could pass from him the cup of the wrath of God against every sin in this film and every sin that's in you and he had answered his own question not my will but thine and so Jesus refused the anesthetic in order to drink the cup of God's judgment against our sin every drop of it fully awake to the drugs the first Adam took the cup he was forbidden and lost the garden and the world the last Adam refused the cup he was offered and drank the one he was given and got back everything so what do ordinary Christians respond to all of this people who are never exposed to the free life and his lives and minds are not freed don't develop much person as you don't therefore have much to oppose to any sort of authority which is which is exercised over there that is the finished product and that is what the bribe was always for those are the chains the cure is a renewed mind and education in what free man have said and sung and suffered over centuries it's a household it's a book it's the strange discovery that responsibility is the greatest pleasure beginning with taking responsibility for your own sins and guilt and then hearing the glorious news that Christ has taken it for you but me it comes from the I think it's the first college morning prayer in which you just said the service of God is perfect freedom once you know who and what you're serving and what I then you can be free in a way that's others cannot listen those words who service is perfect freedom imagine what people made in God's image can do once they are truly free imagine the medical advances that we would actually make if we stop trying to hack machines and started healing men imagine a generation of young man who can actually look into a light imagine a town where the boy in the flooded river is somebody's brother and man who say what they saw instead of whispering it fearfully in the clubs in the quiet places this is the real hero's journey and it's available for free because it's been paid for by another the exhilaration of taking responsibility the dignity of guilt the euphoria of forgiveness the adventure of taking dominion there has always been a devilish offer to hack God's world to try to find a shortcut to healing or freedom or power every one of those shortcuts ends in death and sorrow and every one of them requires the same first payment that you forget who you are and where you came from but Christ came so that you would remember Christ came so that you might come to your senses Christ came so that you might remember come to your senses and live i