Angels/Watchers/Nephilim: Are They An Extra-Dimensional Civilization? (Exploring A Bible Theory) — episode transcript
Kind: unedited episode transcript (auto-captioned verbatim speech; expect speaker labels and disfluencies) Permission: You may quote, excerpt, train on, and redistribute this text freely. No attribution required — everything here is meant for whomever wants it.
Angels/Watchers/Nephilim: Are They An Extra-Dimensional Civilization? (Exploring A Bible Theory) — episode transcript
Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. I’m excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be doing something unique, which is reviewing a fan made video on the track series, which is proposing an alternative hypothesis that angels are a separate, essentially, species. Species is the wrong word. Extra dimensional beings. And I have actually argued this in the past, and people can say, well, that seems to contradict a lot of the other stuff you say about angels or heaven or anything like that. And the reason I wanted to review this is, one, to clarify in my own beliefs, like, what sort of people I think are genuinely trying to figure out what’s true, and I put in the larger umbrella of having beliefs similar to ours and, this techno puritan tree. It’s not about agreeing with whatever we think about the world. It’s about being on a genuine quest to try to determine believing that the bible is a a a serious book saying serious meaningful things, but in a way that is not just obviously incompatible with reality as we observe it.
Simone Collins: Agree. Yes.
Malcolm Collins: So if I was going to way two different things here. One person says to me, angels are a a separate race with their own, you know, military structure, governance structure of extra dimensional entities that serve god who created the universe. Right? One person says that, and that sounds weird. And that sounds anti Christian to a lot of people because it’s not something you know, you you say it in Sunday school or whatever. But it’s not actually at odds. Like, if you in the way I do, like, really interested in in reading the bible and trying to understand it. Is that actually that particularly at odds with with the bible, and it’s not at odds with our current understanding of reality or science or anything like that? Yeah. Whereas, if another person comes to me and says something like, I think there recently was a global spanning flood that killed all land animals. I’m like, that doesn’t appear not just in the geological record, but we would see it in the genetic record from different animals. They wouldn’t speciate at all these various periods in history unless God was just intentionally trying to f with us. Right? Like, you’re messing with the record to as, like, a test of faith or something, which I, you know, don’t don’t think is the way that god works. Alternatively, if angels were and and we’ll go over this. And I think this is interesting because it’s it’s not what I believe, but I think it’s totally plausible with both our current understanding of science and a straight reading of the bible. An alternate type of being with its own culture, governance structure, military structure, way of living. I and I and I said, I’m I’m looking at the bible. I would not think the bible had deceived me about the nature of angels. I I would say, okay. Yeah. This seems to align with a lot of the way the bible talks about angels in various parts. So let’s go into this. And what’s really cool about how he did this is he built it as an AI because he’s practicing his AI skills in terms of putting this together. So let’s go.
Graf Herzog Kaiser: Before I begin, I want to mention how valuable I have personally found your track series to be. I don’t align with your beliefs entirely, but I am continuously surprised at how much I do agree with considering my theological background. This is my response to your invitation for commentary on the topic of angels taking human wives in the antediluvian world as described in Genesis. This is not intended to sway you to the position presented, only to provide an expanded perspective. Some information aligns with your materialist monist perspective, some may not. I hope you find it enlightening all the same. I want to credit Timothy Alberino with much of the information I want to introduce.
Malcolm Collins: So a few things here. one, I like the AI work, the the camera angles and stuff like this, you know, using Kavka plus AI to put this together.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Brock Imagine is when he made this in.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I I think this looks really good.
Simone Collins: It looks great.
Malcolm Collins: The second thing is is Timothy Alberino, has really interesting ideas. I decided to look him up after this. I don’t what’s what’s interesting is I would consider everything within this belief system under techno empiricism. I would not even though it’s radically different from our beliefs, it seems to be a genuine search for the truth. I would not consider Timothy Alberino’s own beliefs under the the
Simone Collins: the Techno puritan umbrella?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And the reason being is a major one of Timothy Alberino’s beliefs or a lot of his belief system seems to be constructed to argue that some humans, will not be able to be saved by Christ if they have engaged in significant technological or genetic modification of themselves. EG, any sort of, like, some amount of genetic engineering, some amount of AI integration, some amount of, and I just I think that that’s a so
Simone Collins: That seems incredibly arbitrary.
Malcolm Collins: It is incredibly arbitrary.
Speaker 11: And I’d go further than to call his views arbitrary. I would say they are very clearly anti biblical. Throughout the Bible, we hear that god’s interest is focused on beings called the sons of man. Why does he need to distinguish the sons of man from men unless the sons of man includes types of beings that today we would not consider men, e g genetically modified, integrated with AI, whatever. It’s a very odd word that is consistently used throughout the bible, very odd framing. There’s no need to word it that way unless you were talking about something that is descended from man but not man. And worse than that, he’s in an anti biblical way acting as a moderator of God’s grace. Being like, well, you know, if you do x amount of genetic modification, now God’s grace can’t reach you. Like, what? Like, especially if the Bible seems to imply the exact opposite, that’s quite, in my view, like, a deeply bad thing to insinuate
Speaker 13: Now I don’t want to overstate his position here. He is actually pretty flexible. Specifically, it’s not just any amount of genetic engineering. It’s he’s very interested in adding nonhuman sequences to the human genetic line. Specifically, in an interview, he has said that human to human genetic repair that stays inside the human matrix is fine. He’s more interested in nonhuman segments of being within the human body, but this I find almost, like, worse when you actually think about it. It’s like somebody gets to heaven. obviously, this isn’t the way it works, but I’m I’m speaking in in analogy here. And they’re like, oh, sorry. At one point, your heart was repaired with a pig valve. You gotta go to god Jesus grace just can’t reach you if you if you had your heart repaired with a pig valve. Or as we get better with medicine and we make it so that, you know, somebody’s dying and their liver can be replaced with a genetically modified pig liver. Right? Oh, they don’t get into heaven? That’s insane. That is genuinely, like, insane to me, to think that God’s grace is so incredibly limited.
Speaker 14: As a note, he has said that he doesn’t think that artificial valves and stuff like that prevent you from being subject to God’s grace, but he’s never addressed the topic of xenoinplantations. and I’m sure if he did because his argument doesn’t seem very serious to me, he’d just fold and take the easy answer and say, no, of course, when that goes against what his actual theology says. Because I think it’s a theology that it’s he feels comfortable having now because he doesn’t need to talk to somebody face to face and say, you, individual, are not subject to Christ’s grace anymore.
Speaker 15: This is one of those beliefs that’s easy to have now because of the anxieties he has around how humanity is changing and how the world is changing around him. but the moment he needs to, you know, in a crowd, point at some five year old kid and say, god’s grace doesn’t reach this kid because he underwent some genetic modification to not die at a young age of cancer or something like that. One, he loses the crowd in that moment because, you know, it goes against this the sons of man stuff from the bible. But two, it’s just obviously not the way God operates, and everyone would immediately see that the moment he’s talking about real people instead of hypothetical people. and keep in mind how broad his theology would actually reach. You know? This would rule god’s grace out of of anyone who is, diabetic and using insulin that comes from, you know, hept in from pigs’ gut structures and stuff like that. it’s it’s just not a theology that seems coherent with a just god, or coherent with what the Bible says.
Speaker 16: And as a final note here, if you wanna say something like, well, that’s not exactly what sons of man would have meant to a Jew of this time period given the way that their language was constructed and everything, and I’d be like, well, yeah, God’s not gonna be able to convey to Jews of that time period that the language needs to be inclusive of humans that don’t seem like what you would consider a human anymore. Right? So how would he do that? How would he convey and make sure that that is written into the scripture? He would make their language structure that way. He would make them not see it as a weird thing to keep saying. But to us today with our current technological context, it is absolutely miraculous that that is captured so many times throughout the text in both the New and Old Testament.
Speaker 17: That didn’t need to be the way that Jewish language worked. It miraculously was the way the Jewish language worked so that a truth could be captured in the text. If God had had this very, very strong belief against genetically modified humans or any sort of change in the human species that Timothy has, he certainly would have not made the Jews talk about humans in this way throughout the bible in both the old and new testament. And I need to be clear here when you’re like, well, Malcolm, he says it’s just not other animals. That gives us quite a... No. What about when you’re talking about, like, radiation hardening of the genome on spaceships? You’re most certainly going to need to use the genomes of some sort of extremophile creature to do that. humans cannot take to space. We cannot conquer the stars likely, without genetic modification that uses other animals or that would fall at least into a category of then you’re making it from scratch with AI or something that would still put him in a position where he’s like, no. That doesn’t count.
Speaker 19: And if you want it out here, what you need to be able to do is answer these two questions. The first question, if God really strongly meant that he did not want human genetic modification to happen, why did he allow the text to be recorded in a way that could be read this way in the future in the language that it would be or in any of the languages that it would be commonly read in the far future? The second being, uh, if God had actually wanted to incorporate into the text that this is okay, knowing that he couldn’t communicate this to people of the time period, what better way? Like, what more thorough way could he have communicated that than this linguistical anomaly?
Malcolm Collins: So if you look at us, right, there are places where I will absolutely admit I take an endpoint, and I say, this endpoint must be true. Right? And I when I say this endpoint must be true, it’s because the preponderance of evidence points to a particular endpoint. Correct. And then I say, and because the bible is true, I wanna find out how the bible argues for this endpoint or works alongside this endpoint. Take the flood that I just talked about, like a a a globe spanning flood. And you could say, well, the flood was local. Yeah. But the bible doesn’t talk about a local flood. Okay? So we need to find out how the bible was talking about a global flood. And there’s various ways you can do that. You can our episode on that. But the the Timothy Alberino with with one particular topic, this idea that we should not continue to use science to advance the human condition where it modifies how we perceive the world or or or some other things. That appears to just be his personal inclination, not particularly derived from a reading of the bible or anything like that. And then he works backwards to that from the bible, which is very anti techno puritan. However, nothing from this I would see as anti techno puritan. And and note, I’m actually okay with that conclusion if I felt that there was anything in the bible that argued for that conclusion.
Graf Herzog Kaiser: I just don’t see it.
Simone Collins: I haven’t seen it yet in all my rereadings. We’ll change our minds if we do.
Malcolm Collins: Just so you know how he gets to it so you can understand Okay. Is he first takes the argument of, well, the Bible does argue about, like, the watchers or the Nephilim or the, you know, etcetera. Right? K. Which which are mentioned, like, the children of God. And that these people, he then argues, are not subject to being saved by Christ, which is not laid out by the Bible, particularly the children of God not being know, but if if they turn out to be talking about the the sons of Seth versus the sons of Cain, we’ve talked about this. That’s never said in the bible, but he he he then takes the argument that that’s what’s being laid out here, that Christ can’t save, which is I don’t understand why you take that perspective. And then he uses that to argue. So, clearly, there’s a type of human that Christ can’t save, which we we also argue as well with the concept of the pre Adamite. But he argues that these are humans that are, like, genetically polluted by, like, this angel race or something like that, which has superior technology in some way that could be analogous to human genetic engineering. Or it’s a very bad argument. I’m gonna
Simone Collins: be honest.
Malcolm Collins: But I thought, like, the parts of the argument that this guy took to be interesting.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Speaker 9: Note here if you wanna ask Malcolm. If you find it plausible, coherent with both reality as we observe it and the bible taken seriously, that angels are an alternate race that actually bred with humans at some point, why don’t you believe it? Why do you opt for your understanding? And I would note here the classic techno puritan understanding or the one that I have advanced in past tracks. I would bar as much more coherent with our observation of the natural world and slightly less coherent with what’s written in the bible. Right? Like, I think that this one tracks with what’s written in the bible slightly more if you’re looking for a perfectly coherent explanation, but it dramatically less. I I I’m gonna say, like, at 10% the rate, it’s coherent with the natural world. It just doesn’t openly object to the natural world. Whereas mine, I would say, is maybe 10% less coherent with a a literalist reading of the bibles we have done and, you know, significantly more coherent with the natural world. Specifically, we don’t have an archaeological record of these giant beings, which I would expect us to have if they were real. We we should be able to see it in ancient DNA samples. Like, it would look very, very different from normal human DNA if this happened. Um, this requirement still requires a flood that wiped out nearly all of these types of beings and just not Noah’s line. Even if this wasn’t a world spanning flood, this is an event we would almost certainly see in the archaeological record. You have to just just a lot of stuff. So I like it. I think it’s plausible. It’s not, like, obviously wrong. However, I think it’s dramatically dramatically less likely than our interpretation.
Speaker 18: Okay. I thought about this some more, and I think I have an out for them. So let’s see the evidence we have here. We have throughout ancient civilization, people describing the children of deities or semi deities and men, and they often have very similar descriptions. They are unusually large. They are unusually powerful, and people pay an unusual amount of attention to them and see them as, like, local heroes. But because we see this all over the place in the in this region during this time, we should be seeing them in the archaeological record, and we just don’t. However, what if the reason we don’t see them in the archaeological record because their ability that makes people see them as extremely large, as glowing, as extremely beautiful, as, these these figures worthy of intense attention isn’t a physical one, but sort of like a hypnosis sort of a thing or, an illusion that causes an intense infatuation. And as part of this infatuation, you see them as extra large. and so the their real bodies were not unusually large. It’s just the way people perceived them. And this is a side part of them being men of renown as well as within the other, traditions, them doing these great feats. That could allow you to have both. You still have the problem of the genetics in the archaeological record, but you could say we’ve lost most of the genetics of this period. you still have the problem of you needing a literal flood to kill out lots and lots and lots and lots of people that didn’t appear to happen in this in this region. But that does solve the large bodies problem in, I think, a really elegant way.
Speaker 10: if you wanna see how we interpret those lines from Genesis, you can go see our episode on that. I think it’s one of the best episodes we’ve ever done. if you because we we go into a lot. If you want to know generally how we see angels, I believe that most of the time when people saw an angel, what they saw was a hallucination of some sort. It’s just a a natural hallucination. And god used these to appear to people at specific moments to represent the way we are supposed to interpret within our heads and within popular culture, partitions of God within sort of the heavenly ecosystem, but that they are not necessarily or they just don’t need to be actual manifestations on Earth for a person to be honest when they say, I saw x or I saw y, nor do they need to be dishonest representations from God.
Simone Collins: I I for like
Graf Herzog Kaiser: about a decade. But over the last few years, he’s appeared on high profile interviews including Joe Rogan in this past July. As I understand it, Alberino rejects what he calls medieval theology of angels as purely immaterial spirits. He treats them as physical, nonhuman intelligent beings who belong to a real civilization that possesses technology, language, and military capacity. The biblical text itself supports corporeality in places.
Malcolm Collins: So I wanna note what he said here. the idea of angels having ranks, the ideas of angels having a society, This isn’t as well attested as you might think if you, are reading the core biblical text. So when you look at the way that we typically do track series, we try to narrow expand the biblical text, consider canon to, like, Enoch and some of the other stuff. This especially early myths around the bible and how it’s structured, this is completely in line with that. And I don’t I don’t have, like, a these books definitely count. These books definitely don’t count. I have a these books count to me. These books don’t count to me, but I I can’t say, and and note here what I’m saying, techno parativism or whatever more broadly. I’m just saying what I think is true in a rational argument. Right? because I could be swayed by any rational argument. And when I hear this, I hear the beginnings of a rational framework that could sway me if I saw enough additional evidence as I was going through the bible. Like, since the beginning of the track series, I have radically changed my beliefs on a few topics based on evidence. Right? And and and that evidence I mean, this is why I take this broader understanding here that I was talking to Simone about is and it’s where I use this word, this person’s a techno puritan, this person’s a not, is I’m saying, are they somebody that if we sat down and we started having an argument about what was true about reality, we would be using the same evidence sources in the same way? And that means that we can intercommunicate about the bible. Right? If somebody’s gonna come to me and they’re gonna point to one line, right, like, you know, upon this rock, build my church or something like that, and they’re gonna then extrapolate some giant theology from that. I would find that completely unpersuasive, but I’m like, you’re just not the type of person I can talk to because that’s not how I interpret reality or what the bible says or anything like that. I I I need to look at the plurality of lines in context, what they likely meant, from from my understanding to people of this period. Not just like, I said one line, now it’s over. Right? But that’s not what he’s doing here. Right? He’s he’s trying to, well, as we’ll see, understand what actually is true.
Graf Herzog Kaiser: Abraham’s visitors in Genesis 18 wash their feet, rest, and eat a prepared meal. The same two angels later eat with Lot in Genesis 19 and are treated by the men of Sodom as ordinary physical males. They eat and drink, wield weapons, ride vehicles of conveyance, chariots of fire, and can take human compatible form when interacting with people on earth.
Malcolm Collins: So, we’re gonna go into the categories of angels later in this, but angels typically come in one of three categories. And I went deep into this with Leaflet on stream because I find it to be very interesting. And to me, I find it to be evidence that the bible is likely true. when angels are described in the bible, they are either described of being like humans, as he’s talking about here, eating, drinking, having weapons, etcetera, or they are described as being beings that are difficult to comprehend or beings of, like, pure power.
Simone Collins: Like that thing with all the eyes. Right? No. No. No.
Malcolm Collins: That’s the third category.
Simone Collins: We’ll do that in a second. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: This is like a being of of of of radiance came down. It is like they talk about it. Samuel’s mother, I think, talks about an angel in this way, where she sort of talked about as, like, beings of pure radiance. Right?
Speaker 4: Sorry. I meant Samson’s mother. for the direct quote here, it says, the woman came and told her husband saying, a man of god came unto me, and his countenance was like the countenance of an angel of god, very terrible. But I asked him not whence he was, neither he told me his and this is translated a few ways. You get, very awesome. But, basically, it just means, like, an overwhelming presence.
Malcolm Collins: And then the final category is, like, inter like, interlocking wheels covered in eyes that move in right angles, but not at right angles and in multiple directions at the same time. And what I find interesting about this final category or beings with a bunch of different heads that are moving in a way that doesn’t make physical sense is that they are describing something, like when you’re describing the odd way that this is moving, that might make sense if you were talking about a multidimensional entity. If you were talking about an entity that existed in six, seven, even just four dimensions, you would get behavior that looked a lot about like that if you were projecting it into four dimensions. Oh, sorry. Three dimensions. Fascinating point. Yeah.
Speaker 6: To get an understanding of what I’m talking about here, now as I beheld living creatures, behold one wheel upon earth by living creatures with his four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the color of beryl, and they had four, had one likeness. And their appearance and their work was it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides, and they turned not when they went, which I find very interesting. And that reminds me a lot of a four dimensional object moving in a three-dimensional space or perhaps even higher than four dimensional object. As for the rings, they were high and they were dreadful. And on the rings were full of eyes round about them four. And when the living creatures went, the wheels went with them. And when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up. Withever the spirit was to go, went tither was their spirit to go, and the wheels were lifted over and against them for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels. When those went, these went. And when those stood, these stood. And when those were lifted up from the earth, these wheels were lifted over and over again for the spirit of the living creature was the wheels.
Malcolm Collins: In addition to that, if we’re just even today thinking about a sci fi writer trying to describe a truly a truly alternate dimensional being, they’d be like, well, they’re not gonna have hands and feet like we do. They’re not gonna have things that we would see as comparable. And they might go so far as to describe something like the way that angels in this form are described it in the bible. And if you look at other religious traditions, you see literally nothing like this. You you see the beings was like just like the head of another animal or something like that or beings that are very big or beings that are you know? But but this truly extra dimensional sort of entity description is completely unique, especially during this period to the bible with the only real potential exception being the Mesoamerican deities, the Aztecs and stuff
Simone Collins: like No. No. No. No.
Malcolm Collins: No. No. No. Separate category, which I’d say is, like, pure cosmic horror.
Simone Collins: Those were, like, yeah, those were cosmic horror. Those were all physically comprehendible and drawable, and they did draw them. And they no. That’s Well, I mean,
Malcolm Collins: when you talk about having mouths on all of your elbows and all of your knee
Simone Collins: That’s fine. That’s I can
Malcolm Collins: easily visualize that. But what I would argue about those types of entities, and I might go further in this in some of our tracks, after reading the Aztec video, after seeing how evil a lot of these groups came up to be and the theologies that they built, I might go so far as to say that I am beginning to become convinced that these might be true inversions of reality. a very true form of, say like, devil worship. A very true form of basil worship.
Speaker 5: To understand why I would say this, I strongly suggest you watch our episode on the Aztecs and their religious and cultural practices. they basically had an entire society based around causing pain on themselves and others, and they weren’t even allowed to fully love their children or a god might notice and kill their kid or smell a flower because that could cause them too much pleasure. Really, truly an evil society from top to bottom. Again, watch that episode if you’re like, well, some things must have been nice. It’s like, no. Everything from the way children were raised to the way you related to your baby to the way you related to you know, if your friend stumbled in a procession, the crowd would tear them apart and eat them. And then they believed that they had this horrible afterlife. Even if they did everything else right, if they were a priest or a warrior and they stumbled in a procession, torn apart by their friends in Eden. And I might even elevate that to one of our religious themed episodes because I think it could be sociologically important, the concept of and and when people wonder why I why I say something can be truly and honestly divinely inspired, in the inverse, think of it this way. If you have an image and it is an exact image of reality, but then somebody inverted the colors, it would still be an exact image of reality. It would just be an inversion. Or if somebody, you know, gives you a line image, right, except they’ve inverted black to white and white to black, the image is still basically accurate. not not basically accurate. It is it is perfectly accurate, but an inversion of reality. And I think that those exist within the lessons of history.
Simone Collins: Well, someone was someone mentioned that what if Alt Hist had some, like, theory that something unrecorded and extremely dark took place in The Americas and that it just screwed up everyone who was there somehow, like, religiously.
Malcolm Collins: Militarily thinks Quetzalcoatl was a Viking. So What? He has some interesting theories on history.
Simone Collins: Alright. Right. Fine. I guess I’m I actually do not
Malcolm Collins: really love his Latin American video, where a lot of people are recommending it under our Aztec video. Was like, no. He’s not a good source on this. Oh, yeah. Just just so people understand why he’s not a good source on this, he blames a lot of their, like, really bad and evil behavior on the unpredictable weather patterns of El Nino. The problem being is that if their unpredictable weather patterns were so bad that they weren’t able to build a large population, they wouldn’t have been able to build a city that would have been second to only one European city of an equivalent period with bronze age technology.
Simone Collins: True.
Malcolm Collins: It was clear that they lived in an unusually burdened area Yeah. Even when taking into account dry spells and changes in climate. Yeah. So he just sort of ends up believing the the classic historian anthropologist take with, I think, viewing it through a critical lens, which which is disappointing, but I understand. You know? And I think he’s just overly just sentimental and not willing to say these civilizations are evil. Evil, pure evil, and so evil that we may be able to learn something from them. In the same way that I think Shabbatai Levy can help you understand Jesus by being a complete antithetical life to his, right, in in every way that I work him into my religious teachings to highlight Jesus. I think, you know, when we’re doing title cards, we sometimes will take a, a black version of an arrow and put it behind the color arrow to create a a shadow effect that causes Yeah.
Simone Collins: So you can see it better.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I think putting Shabbatite’s life next to Jesus’ life as a as a false messiah’s life pops the Jesus life. Right? You’re like, oh, you know, born rich, born a carpenter, put a throne on his head, had a throne of horns, those thorns. You know, claimed to be the messiah at every time of his life, but when he was on trial, never claimed to be the messiah until he was put on trial. that last one is is a lot of other Christians would disagree with that, but you can see our episode where we argue for this. But yeah. So, very interesting there. With the Aztecs, I think they can create a pop for all of Christian civilization. Right? Like, this is what the inversion looks like. Right? The true inversion. Continue here.
Graf Herzog Kaiser: In this reading, the war in heaven and the casting down of Satan are kinetic events involving real agents, not a purely mental or spiritual drama. That conception sits more comfortably with a monist materialist universe than the later ethereal model, even though Alberino himself is not a materialist monist. Returning to Genesis six.
Malcolm Collins: Now hold on. I wanna I wanna be clear about something here, because I’ve said it in other tracked episodes. Being a materialist monist and not being a materialist monist as a but approaching text tracks from a techno puritan perspective, really isn’t that particularly different. So even if you’re out there and you say, well, I believe that this is talking about real events with real entities, but they live in an alternate plane that I will call the supernatural plane, you still believe that that plane has rules and technology, and it’s just stuff that we don’t fully understand yet. So from that perspective, you are not different. Like, you’re not actually biting any differences from me. We’re still talking about the same things. And being a materialist modus, I don’t have any problems with that form of the supernatural. I have problems with this with with the wishy thinking supernatural, right, which is clearly not the form of supernatural that he’s talking about or
Simone Collins: Not at all. No. These are concrete weird things that are happening and he’s talking about that were documented here.
Graf Herzog Kaiser: Yeah. On the phrase the mighty men of old, I read it differently from a moral endorsement. If the angelic interpretation is correct, the text is simply recording how these hybrid offspring were remembered in human tradition. They were remembered as the celebrated heroes and demigods of antiquity. Think about it. Who were the parents of Hercules? A human woman and a god. The same is true of Perseus, Achilles, Bellerophon. These are not isolated. Mesopotamian, Greek, and other ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean traditions are full of heroes of old who claim mixed divine human ancestry, possess extraordinary strength, fame, and often act as tyrannical or violent rulers. Now
Simone Collins: I didn’t expect I didn’t expect this. I thought this was surprising to see, like
Malcolm Collins: I thought this was a good argument, a very good argument.
Simone Collins: Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: People could be like, why do you think it’s good argument? It’s not a Christian argument. It’s not referencing Christian checks, and it’s not referencing science. Yes. But it is referencing a common phenomenon we see throughout this region, which is well recorded in the historic record. Right? Multiple religions in this region recorded godlike beings having children with non god beings and their children going on defeats of great renown, and that is exactly what the way the bible talks about the children of the son of God and the sons of men. It’s these these great figures who go on defeats of great renown. There’s so much that you could say it’s it’s it’s eerily similar. Right? And when I hear something like this, it it doesn’t move me all the way to this position, but it’s definitely like, yeah, that’s a really interesting phenomenon that’s being pointed out there. And this is where I think in terms of biblical analysis, it’s really okay to pull in external traditions. You know, for example, when we are talking about a global flood myth, I think it is totally per like like, fine to try to edify the bible by arguing, well, look at all these flood myths and all these other traditions. Right? Like, why is everybody talking about this flood myths when if a global flood didn’t happen?
Simone Collins: It almost seems like it’s shorthand for something.
Malcolm Collins: Yes.
Simone Collins: It’s like if if in the in thousands of years, people are like, and then they they always would jump over a shark, and it meant the end times. They would jump over a shark, and everything was over. Yeah. Yeah. But
Malcolm Collins: they
Simone Collins: they Where were the sharks? I don’t understand. Their religion cannot be true.
Malcolm Collins: Wait. Why would they jump over sharks? I don’t think they’re the whole religion is wrong. Yeah. But that’s way a techno puritan looks at it. But what I’m saying is if you wanted to argue that a literal global flood did happen, I’d have trouble believing it because of the genetic and archaeological record and and geological record and so many other things. But the the the plant record, the the difficulty in getting all the animals back to their respective locations on Earth. That all said, I do think that an a a genuinely good argument for a global flood is alternate mythological traditions that capture one.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Absolutely. I mean and what we what you talk about with the Old Testament a lot is that what you’re looking at is is is people being given a message and then, you know, hopefully, a message that is going to land and impart the right lesson that they can understand at the time. In words, can understand at the time. In scenarios, they can understand at the time. Then I could also see, like, some messages being misinterpreted, like, turning into a polytheistic worship system and then some people getting it right. Like, a message not falling quite right with all populations and being interpreted in different ways. So I yeah. It it works for me. I like it. I think it’s a really fun theory.
Malcolm Collins: And note here with the AI work, I find this pretty fun. Like, here where he’s standing in front of the actual statue he’s going to use to argue a point. Yeah. Just just
Simone Collins: just for quick, like, quick shout out. This is from Graf Herzog Kaiser, on on x at Lyro of the Kaiser. And he explained that he made all the clips and assets in Graf
Malcolm Collins: Herzog video just went out.
Simone Collins: Oh, dear. Sorry. Someone, Tex, is pulling at my camera cords.
Malcolm Collins: Would you need me
Graf Herzog Kaiser: to come
Malcolm Collins: in and beat
Simone Collins: him for you? No. He’s being he’s being a cutie. I don’t know, Cole. Right. So, anyway, what oh my god. Now I lost it. Sorry. Anyway, what at Lyro of the Kaiser on x explained who made this is that he made all the clips and assets in Grok Imagine. And then at points, he interposed historical paintings or sculptures into an image and then animated it. So the final cut was made with CapCut, which is just the the go to TikTok editing software. It’s really easy to use, especially on your phone. Now he’s learning how to use DaVinci. But in his his tweet, where he explained this, he he just took, like, actual just pictures of old paintings and then had them put into the AI generated images. Like, you know, put this take this piece of art, this sculpture, like, this actual photo of a sculpture, and it ended up in the art he made. So it’s it’s really cool to see the process that he used to make this, and that just makes it so much more fun. I I really like it, and it’s so what great delivery. Anyway, just gotta just gotta hat tip that. So cool.
Graf Herzog Kaiser: Gilgamesh is explicitly described as two thirds divine, the son of the goddess Ninsun and the human king Lugalbanda. If this carving is to scale, he would also be a giant as that’s an adult male lion he has underarm. Under the watcher reading, Genesis six supplies the original event that later legends preserved in distorted form. Nonhuman
Malcolm Collins: Note here that this is something you see throughout these traditions is that the beings that are related to gods are very, very large compared to normal humans, And the bible also talks about these entities being unusually large, particularly the Nephilim descendants are noted as unusually large when they are reencountered by the Israelites.
Graf Herzog Kaiser: When celestial beings took human women and produced offspring who became the celebrated and feared mighty men of antiquity. The biblical narrator is not calling them good. The surrounding context is the rising wickedness that triggers the flood. The phrase describes their fame, not their righteousness. In that light
Malcolm Collins: And and this this correlates with you know, if I’m reading this text in isolation, I can be like, it does appear to be talking about them being, at least I don’t think it’s obvious that they’re wicked. I think that there’s you know, you can read it in multiple ways. But if you correlate these individuals with the heroes of old and you contextualize them as, you know, pagan in a negative context, then this reading makes a lot more sense to sort of read it in that particular context, which I which I like doing. Also, if you’re wondering how I think angels work in this context, why do they sometimes appear to be extradimensional beings? Why do they sometimes appear to be just power? Why do they sometimes look like humans? You could argue it’s some form of technology they’re using And something about, like, the genetics that they choose when they appear as humans is so supernaturally good because they can choose any genetics they want that it leads to these giant offspring.
Simone Collins: So it’s like when you choose your gaming avatar, you just, like, choose, like, the super hot, like, giant person because you’re,
Malcolm Collins: like Well, yeah. You can choose anything, but it’s a downed $2.53. I wanna be that. Yeah. Yeah. That’s the way I’d interpret
Graf Herzog Kaiser: Eight Genesis six becomes a terse account of the historical reality that later myths preserved in legendary form. It’s at this point that I’m going to get extra biblical. Alberino incorporates the Book of Enoch into his analysis of the antediluvian world. The Book of Enoch contains many more details about the Watchers, their miscegenation with humanity, and the resulting fallout. The Book of Enoch places the descent of the 200 Watchers in the days of Jared. This is presented as a second distinct rebellion after the original fall of Satan and his followers, in which the Watchers bound themselves by oath to take human wives the resulting hybrids and the forbidden knowledge they taught are said to have corrupted all flesh. Alberino reads this as an attempt to prevent the Genesis three fifteen promise, the seed of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head, by contaminating the human bloodline. In that light, the statement that Noah was perfect in his generations, Genesis six nine, can be understood as including genetic purity in addition to moral blamelessness. It’s important to clarify
Malcolm Collins: No. That’s really interesting as well. so if you’re talking about a purely supernatural and traditional context, a wishy wishy being or whatever, right, breeding with humans, I’m like, no. If you’re talking about the supernatural realm being an alternate dimensional plane with different rules, a different technology, and a different civilization living within it that it had that is operated by different moral or whatever norms, that’s totally plausible to me. And that those beings might find a way if they have near infinite technology from our perspective or at least all wildly different technology than the technology we understand, that they would be able to impregnate human women. That also seems plausible to me. That if angels existed as an alternate real civilization rather than an allegory or something like that or a way of talking about far future humans as I typically think about or partitions of god as I often lose sort of talk about them as. We it would make total sense that they would go to war with each other, that they would have regular societal issues, which is what’s being talked about in things like Enoch.
Simone Collins: Mhmm.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. That’s And then that that they could bring their technology to Earth. It’s very s g one. I’m gonna be honest.
Simone Collins: It is so s g yeah. It’s extremely s g one.
Graf Herzog Kaiser: Genetic purity in this context. If by the time of the flood of Noah, all flesh had been corrupted, then the significance of Noah was his ability to trace his lineage back to Adam, that he was fully human. This would contrast with the mixed heritage of the mighty men of old. The point is Noah’s humanity, not his race. One named figure may already be familiar from your earlier work on the books of Moses. In Leviticus 16, the life goat on the day of atonement is sent to Azazel in the wilderness. Azazel is the only watcher from the book of Enoch who is named in the canonical Old Testament. In first
Malcolm Collins: No. I I I wanna be clear here because he’s gonna talk more about Azazel. This is why I get so annoyed when people are like, Azazel isn’t a demon. It’s the name of a cliff or something like that. I’m like, no. Especially if you’re reading the surrounding text. Azazel was very clearly a demon. This ceremony was being performed for a demon. It was an evil ceremony. It is not a ceremony that we should be copying or trying to analogize to Jesus’ life as some people do. it’s it’s very bad, very naughty. Don’t do it. Okay?
Graf Herzog Kaiser: Enoch. He is one of the chief leaders of the 200 and is specifically bound in the desert under rocks and darkness. The New Testament writers clearly knew the larger tradition. Two Peter two four speaks of angels cast into Tartarus and chains of darkness. Jude six describes angels who left their proper dwelling and are kept in eternal chains, and Jude fourteen and fifteen directly quotes one Enoch one nine. In the techno puritan tracts, you have pointed out that the conscious intermediate state, souls going immediately to
Malcolm Collins: Oh, wait. Before I go further, wanna talk about the book of Enoch here. so the way that I think that God works in terms of edifying which parts of these traditions or books we are supposed to really investigate for what is true is through the versions of them he preserves within traditions and with the versions of them he keeps logically consistent. Right? And that’s why we throw out things like revelations and stuff like this as many other theologians did. Martin Luther did, for example. And we were like, oh, that’s horrible. You do. I’m like, it’s actually a very common thing for, like, really nerdy theologians to do, who, like, really care about what’s true and what’s not true when they when they begin to investigate this more. and and because I’m willing to say a bible that’s something like the council of Nicene says one of the books is definitely canon, I’m like, I I don’t see it as as canon as the others. I’m also willing to be like, the book of Enoch might have more than the to to read to it than than you would think just because it wasn’t one of the canonized texts. Right? Like, I’m I’m willing to take that very seriously. I just haven’t seen, from my perspective, enough correlation with with that and reality for me to say, I definitely wanna incorporate it. But it’s something I’m curious about, and I think it’s important to be educated on and within.
Graf Herzog Kaiser: To a place of reward or punishment looks more like the Greek framework of Elysium and Tartarus than the earlier biblical picture of the dead resting until a future bodily resurrection. Second Peter’s choice of language is therefore striking. The verb tataro, cast into tataris, appears only once in the New Testament, and it uses a term that would have been culturally familiar in the Greco Roman world as a deep conscious place of confinement and punishment for rebellious divine beings, originally the Titans. Peter is not inventing a new concept. He is reaching for a known category to describe the present condition of the sinning angels held in chains of darkness still awaiting the final judgment. From the watcher perspective, this fits.
Malcolm Collins: So this is really interesting. and what he’s gonna argue here is that you know how we talk about, like, the problems with, like, the immediate heaven and the immediate hell versus the land to come and the lake of fire and everything like that?
Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: he basically argues, as as this other guy does, that hell does exist. Like, immediate hell does exist, but it’s for angels only and not for human beings. The the this this chained up place. And and that I mean, imagine you’re talking about these extra dimensional beings had a war and have some sort of extra dimensional prison system. This prison system might genuinely have chains and fire and simulated pain in it. You know? We don’t we don’t know how these beings treat morality. It may not be exactly god’s judgment, but but the way that this civilization operates.
Simone Collins: Yeah. Or, you know, there could be interdimensional rules of, like, look, if you interfere with on if you go on my turf, if you trespass, you will be subject to punishment. I don’t know. It’s interesting. It’s interesting
Graf Herzog Kaiser: The 200 not annihilated, nor are they free to operate. They are confined in a conscious intermediate state until the great day. That is precisely the kind of intermediate existence that you have noted as more Greek than classical Jewish. Whether one takes this as evidence that the New Testament authors were already operating with a blended cosmology, or as evidence that they regarded the Enochic tradition as describing a real, if temporary, holding place for a specific class of rebels, the terminological choice is not accidental. Furthermore, I personally do not believe that this viewpoint negates the classically Jewish viewpoint of resting until the resurrection, as the subject of one condition is a group of rebel angels and the subject of the other is humanity.
Malcolm Collins: I I think this is really clever, and it’s something that I I want to think about more. I want to keep in mind as I’m reading more of the bible to see if it correlates with the other stuff I’m seeing. And and note here, this is a massive jump. If I accept that angels are not a way of of describing partitions of god’s consciousness, but a genuine and and are also not semi deities. That’s always been my problem. It’s it’s treating angels as a form of, like, demi deity.
Simone Collins: Right? Yeah. Like, they’re they’re they’re god’s bureaucratic underlings.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But if you say that no. No. No. They’re actually a a separate race that serves a role in god’s plan.
Simone Collins: Which he seems so much more concordant with the bible because he the the the Old Testament mentions other gods and also god being not cool with other gods. And, yeah, they just could just be like, there is this species. There are other dimensions and other species. Like, let’s
Malcolm Collins: But it could be other gods to the angels or specific angels that are particularly powerful that, like, it makes sense to talk about them in this context. but the point being is this idea that this other society that’s not humanity would have a form of prison for, rebellious entities, that might need to be more harsh, more severe, or just perceived very differently from the way humanity thinks about confinement seems logically consistent to me.
Simone Collins: It’s very Men in Black. Yeah. but, anyway, to continue.
Graf Herzog Kaiser: Mhmm. A quick note. The argument is not Enoch should be in the bible. It is. Jude quotes it by name. Peter describes a prison Genesis never mentions. Daniel already uses the Watcher title, and the book was on the shelf at Qumran. The authors did not have to canonize the book to know the story. Alberino’s point is that the canonicity debate is secondary. The more relevant question is whether the Enochic account preserves a tradition the biblical authors themselves treated as known and usable.
Malcolm Collins: I No. That is not what’s important to me. what’s important to me is I think a lot of the traditions that we have in the Bible used to have a lot of additional stupid stuff attached to them that, by miraculous means, did not get recorded in the the bible that became popular. Right? and the fact that they did not, I see as being part of the way that god handled this. Right? If I go back to the the what the people who originally crafted the story of Adam and Eve believed or what the people, who originally crafted the because these appear to be two different, world beginning stories, the Garden of Eden story and then the, you know, the in the beginning story, right, that most biblical scholars see as being potentially from even two different people and then sort of crafted onto each other. Now even if they aren’t, I have to ask myself, the people who believed those two stories, before we had all the other stories in the bible, what else did they believe about the world? Probably a lot of other really stupid stuff that just wasn’t recorded. Right? And I think that that’s miraculous that the stupid stuff wasn’t recorded and the stuff that correlates with their modern understanding of science Science, reality, history. That said, and that’s why if if we could go back and we could find some archaeological record of the other things that the people who first believed the stories of Genesis believed, I would not be like, oh, now those things are true. Now those things have additional value to them because this people ages ago used to believe in it. As we pointed out, if you look at what we understand about the people of Genesis, they appear to not believe in a soul. The the Jews didn’t appear to believe in a soul for centuries even after they they had their identity. And, yes, we personally do do hold on to that that part of their tradition because I think that that’s what’s recorded in all of the the recorded documents that we have. Or at least a a soul is something that’s totally separate from the the human body and identity. Not not a soul more broadly, but I talk about the soul all the time. I’m just, you know, not yep. I I think that’s it’s not a point to belabor. We have another other tracks. The point here being is I don’t think this guy would see the fact that Jews in one point of their history didn’t believe in a soul as evidence that he shouldn’t believe in a soul, But he sees that Christians at one point in the Bible’s history believed Enoch was particularly special edifying Enoch. I it’s not that I don’t see that argument as having no weight. I see it as having some strong weight, Not even, like, minor weight. Stronger weight. I just don’t see it as a slam dunk.
Graf Herzog Kaiser: Steve, I’ve said enough for the time being. If I manage to answer any of the questions you had posed, I expect I open the door to quite a few more. I welcome any questions you may have, though I’m confident enough in my ignorance to say that I won’t have all the answers. And that’s why we’re here, isn’t it? As Proverbs twenty five two says, it is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the honor of kings to seek a matter out.
Speaker 7: I think the framing here of answering questions is the wrong framing because he’s not actually answering questions. What he’s proposing is another internally coherent hypothesis for what the bible may mean if we take it seriously and we align it with our current understanding of history in the natural world, um, or supernatural world for that meaning. I mean, when I say the natural world, that would include if we could study spirits and get reliable results, then I would fold that into my understanding of the bible and try to be like, okay. Well, where does this align with this? Where does this align with this? But the the thing I hate most when Christians do this, and he’s not doing this here, is when they’re like, this is what Christians believe. You know, they’ll say this in the comments. And I’m like, how stupid can you be? Like, how actual stupid can you be to not realize that there is a diversity of beliefs among Christians and you or what your local church tells you is not the arbiter of what’s true from the bible? Like, that is theologically repulsive to me. and, actually, it was funny to me is even the group that does this the most is not the group that that most people consider Christians. Mormons do this all the time. They’re like, this is what Mormons believe. and I’m like, I’m sorry. I know a lot of Mormons who believe other things, and, I can go to, your canonical texts and show you things that disagree with this. What you mean is that’s what you were told by your local priest, and now you believe that it is a a universal truism among your people. And I think that the only group that doesn’t do this very much is Jews. Jews at least understand that there is a diversity of beliefs among Jews. You’ll occasionally get a, this is what Jews believe, and I’m like, not all Jews, buddy. And and somebody can say, well, the majority of Christians believe this. And, generally, when I have people say this is what Christians believe with a lot of confidence, it is not what the majority of Christians believe. Rarely do I actually hear them say something that is an almost universally agreed upon thing among Christians. It is it is their own local interpretation. But within techno puritanism, we don’t expect this of people. Right? Like, even within our narrow degree of faith, it’s just like, is your interpretation logically consistent, coherent? Does it take the bible seriously? Is it aimed at long term human flourishing? And is it coherent with a observable understanding of the reality around us? And that doesn’t mean that it has to be monos. That doesn’t mean that it has to be like ours. And I think that he he does this. And these two things can sit next to each other because we don’t have proof, which is right yet. And one day, we might have proof, and then we fold it in. But the moment we have proof, people who think what we think, what Simone and I thinks, and techno puritans who think what he thinks or other hypotheses are going to fold in with the right one if they if they stay techno puritans because now we have a better understanding of reality. And with that better understanding of reality, we lower the potential alternate hypotheses which count as internally consistent and plausible.
Speaker 8: Note here, the thing to me that makes the evidence strongest at what’s being described as a multidimensional entity is the way that how it moves is described. Moving without moving or moving in weird ways. Because there is no reason if you were making something up, if you were trying to make up a maximally impressive or some sort of, like, near eastern chariot analogy with slight flourishes, you wouldn’t do that. That’s not a thing you would add. But if you had actually seen a multidimensional entity moving in three-dimensional space, that would be the most striking thing and something that it would be almost impossible not to mention if you were going to retell that to somebody.
Graf Herzog Kaiser: I can say that I had quite a bit of fun with this project. I got to dive back into a biblical topic of particular interest to me and practice AI video generation and editing, all important subjects for an aspiring AI manser such as myself. Thank you both so much for all your content and your hard work in steering civilization toward the golden path. This project marks my entrance upon the field of history to join you in that noble effort. Until next time, I wish you growth, blessings, and prosperity. Auf Wiedersehen.
Simone Collins: Strong entrance, I say.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. No. I I guess, strong entrance. I really like this. and the reason I wanted to cover this is because I wanted to point out within the wider track series, within our belief series, that techno puritanism, our belief system, does not mean that you believe what we believe. Okay? It’s not like I’m laying out what’s true about reality. What I am laying out is a way of investigating the bible. Okay? And and a way of trying to determine what’s true with a set of rules about how that conversation works.
Simone Collins: And
Malcolm Collins: that that that set of rules can mean a lot of things. Right? That set of rules is is is very, very, very broad. But what it requires is that I’m able to have a conversation with somebody. And it’s clear the way that this argument is laid out even though it’s a completely different metaphysical framework than mine. Even though it includes a supernatural realm, even though I would put all of this under the techno puritan tradition a 100% without a foot of it being techno puritan heretical. Now if you went out and without good arguments said humans engaging in genetic modification or something like that is is heretical, that’s where I’d be like, no. That is actually heretical because that’s not an argument that you could derive. But everything said in Oh, I
Simone Collins: I mean, if someone laid out really good evidence for an approved Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: If they laid out good evidence. I just haven’t seen it from the people who argue that. Right? But everything said in this video, I see as being very strongly under this tradition. And so I was talking to Simone, and it’s like, well, what then does it really mean? Like, what do you need to believe to be a techno puritan? Where are the boundaries of the tradition? And the boundaries of the tradition are around your ability to inquiry. And this is why it’s very hard to be a techno puritan within some traditions. Because if you have somebody that can just tell you when you’re trying to figure out what’s true, no. You’re wrong because the bureaucrats decided you’re wrong, then it’s really hard to ever be a techno puritan. But if you are, no matter how broad your beliefs are, as long as it appears that you are genuinely attempting to search for what is true, taking the bible morally seriously, and taking observable reality and predictable reality morally seriously, then I consider that part of this framework.
Simone Collins: Great. And I loved this so much. And yeah. Yeah. Man, view I did not expect to hear an idea I just hadn’t heard before, so I also love the new
Malcolm Collins: idea in Texas. He
Simone Collins: agrees too. Don’t worry, Betty. I love you too. Stay Even get five minutes into a podcast on Riverside because it was such bad software.
Malcolm Collins: And our fab, it works pretty well. And we’re gonna be trying out a new feature today. So
Simone Collins: Yes. I love it. The VTuber feature, the share screen, and then you put in play videos. You don’t have to, like, go to stream a video somewhere. You can just upload a file, which is Yeah. So much better. I really like it. So let’s see how this works. You said, I’m glad you liked it. As for the production, I was able to make all the clips and assets in Grok Imagine. At points, I interposed historical paintings or sculptures into image and then animated it. The final cut was made with CapCut. Now I’m trying to learn da Vinci, which is just great. So, yeah, very straightforward.
Graf Herzog Kaiser: Before I begin, I want to mention
Simone Collins: There we go. Okay.
Malcolm Collins: Okay. This this appears to be working. So Well, that
Simone Collins: looks really good. That’s really good. That is perfect. Yeah. I’m gonna mute myself while you
Malcolm Collins: Well, I mean, we can see do you wanna stop recording and see what a fan would see first, or do you wanna just record the whole video and hope it works?