Christianity Was Never a Religion of "Peace" — Forgetting That Is Killing Us

In this explosive Based Camp episode, Malcolm & Simone Collins dive deep into one of the most uncomfortable topics in Christianity: the Biblical commands to kill infants and civilians during conquest — and why they might actually reflect a coherent (if brutal) longtermist moral framework.From 1 Samuel 15 and the total destruction of the Amalekites, to Deuteronomy’s rules for Canaanite cities, to Jesus’ teachings on mercy — Malcolm argues that modern “peace at all costs” Christianity has cherry-picked the Bible and is actively destroying Western civilization. They explore how true Biblical mercy often looks like decisive action, not endless tolerance of predators and parasites.This is a raw, unfiltered discussion about civilizational morality, the dangers of naive pacifism, and what “love your enemies” actually meant in context.Tract 12: Sociatal Morality & A Genocidal God[00:00:00]Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone, I’m excited to be talking to you today. Today we are going to be digging into morality as the Bible and Christian faith relate to it. Because I am getting really sick of all of these Christians out there that we see within like the wider Christian media influencer ecosystem talking about how Christianity is like the religion of peace and we need to always be peaceful.And if you’re going to, for example make a blanket rule against dropping bombs on schools in a warfare scenario, then all of a sudden terrorists are going to put their headquarters under schools and make society net negative for children.Simone Collins: Oh, you’re not, you, this is purely hypothetical of course.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. If, if at a, a societal level, right, we did something like just always gave out food whenever somebody was hungry you would have groups begin to evolve or [00:01:00] move in close to you that evolve entirely predatory off of this, right? And somebody could be like, “Well, maybe the Bible didn’t predict all of these things, or didn’t really think through difficult moral decisions.”And the reality is is that’s not true at all. The Bible all over the place has God telling people to kill infants. And so we are going to go, because I think that this is one of the clearest, I mean, I could go into the instances where God’s like laying out the rules for selling your daughters into slavery or rules on how to treat slaves.But in this episode, that we’re gonna go more on in the next one, ‘cause this is gonna be a bit of a two-parter. But on this one we’re going to go deeper into specifically where, why, and when does God say it’s okay to kill infants? Because I think it’s through these scenarios we can get a broader understanding of how Christianity should [00:02:00] understand morality.Speaker 6: You know, maybe I was wrong about this pacifism thing.Speaker 8: Are you insane? Pacifism works like a charm as long as you button it.Malcolm Collins: Right?Simone Collins: Isn’t it broadly understood, though, that one of the reasons Christianity got so much early adoption in the in the Roman Empire was because the Christians didn’t kill the babies, and people kinda liked that. Like especially women.Malcolm Collins: Did, yeah. And so what I’ll also point out is I do not, I think that there was a period of history where Christianity was meant to be understood as this ultra-peacenic religion because that helped it grow.We’ve done an episode where we look at the morality of early Christians and show that them being willing to help each other during times of plague, them not killing their infants th- this helped their population grow at a significantly larger rate than pagan populations and lowered the persecution that they might have otherwise gotten during their period of growth.But once they were the dominant religion within regions- At first, they kept their [00:03:00] warlike nature. You know, they would still go and do crusades. They would still punish the infidel you know, still seek out witches in their community, stuff like this. But parts of the Bible began to be emphasized more than other parts over time until the religion became unrecognizable and a net negative in the way it was being practiced.So to go back to this we’ve got... And this one is the clearest, so I’m gonna go the longest on it. Samuel 15:2-3. It says, “ Thus says the Lord of hosts: ‘I have noted what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way when they came out of Egypt.’” Now, note this would have happened hundreds of years before God is talking about this.So this is something that a people did hundreds of years ago. None of the people who actually did this negative thing to Israel would have still been among the Amaleks, okay? “Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill them, both man and woman, [00:04:00] child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”And there’s some different translations for infant here. We have suckling basically mean a child while it’s still surviving on breast milk. So you can’t be like, “Well, maybe they’re talking about older children here or something.” This is the- the word that’s used here means that. And you could say, okay, maybe something was lost in translation here, and God didn’t really mean, “No, you gotta kill everyone when you take this territory.”Speaker: And note here, people who want to say the Bible says thou shall not kill, it doesn’t say that. It doesn’t say that anywhere. It says that you’re not supposed to murder. Murder in Jewish law is very different from a generic killing.I didn’t mention this in the episode because I assumed it was obvious for people with like baseline biblical knowledge, but probably worth mentioningMalcolm Collins: Okay? So what then happens in Samuel 15:7-9, all right? “And Samuel defeated the Amaleks, and from Havilah as far as Shur, [00:05:00] which is to the east of Egypt. And he took Agag and the king of the Amaleks alive, and devoted destruction all the people with the edge of the sword. But Saul and the people spared Agag and the best sheep and the best oxen and fattened calves and lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them.All that was despised and worthless they devoted to destruction.” Okay? So, what did God do about this, right? And the word of the Lord came to Samuel, this is Samuel 15:10 through 23, “I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned his back from following me and has not performed my commandments.”And Samuel was angry, and he cried to the Lord all night, dot, dot, dot. “And the Lord sent you on a mission,” he said, “Go and devote to destruction all the sinners, the Amaleks, and fight against them until they are consumed. Why then did you not obey the voice of your Lord? Why did you pronounce on the [00:06:00] spoil and do what was evil even in the sight of the Lord?”And then dot, dot, dot here., And then response, “Because you have rejected the word of the Lord, he has also rejected you being king.” So if it was unclear what happened there, so I’ll just lay it out for you. Did you catch what he did wrong?Simone Collins: He didn’t kill them all?Malcolm Collins: He didn’t kill one person, the king- Yeah ... and some of the sheep and oxen.Simone Collins: Yeah, he was supposed to kill them all.Malcolm Collins: Now, the, a, he killed all of the infants. He killedSimone Collins: all the- No, but that’s not all of them ...Malcolm Collins: but that’s not all of them.Simone Collins: All of them.Malcolm Collins: All of them. And,Simone Collins: God, what is up, dude?Malcolm Collins: Here, the demons- ThisSimone Collins: is the whole demon, “I killed, I killed goblins.”Malcolm Collins: Yeah, okay, very, very similar to that, whichSimone Collins: is why- Was that just, were they just, were they just trying to reenact the Bible there with the whole, like, goblin baby killing scene?Were they trying to be like...Speaker 4: [00:07:00] Then to show them mercyfaces to the light of dayMalcolm Collins: I will say that this is the morality the Bible teaches us. The morality of that scene in Goblin Slayer is essentially the morality the Bible teaches us, and we’re gonna point out, [00:08:00] ‘cause people can be like, “Oh, well, when Jesus came, all of these older stories are revoked,” right?Like, they don’t matter anymore. This is not the God we’re dealing with anymore. I’m gonna point out, no, Jesus makes it very clear all of this stuff holds.Well, we’re gonna point out that God’s mercy, when we understand mercy through the eyes of what God means by mercy- Mercyright, because we’re constantly told God is merciful-Simone Collins: Mm-hmm ...Malcolm Collins: and then you’re kicked out for being king because you didn’t kill them all, right? You know, like, clearly if we’re defining mercy through whatever trait God has, it’s not this standard human definition of mercy, right? So when we’re commanded to be merciful that does not undermine the...And handle it when you’re conquering a territory, right? So we’re gonna go into that. And I’ll note here, people will be like, “Well, like, God matured or something between the Old and the New Testament.” Mm-hmm. And I’m gonna say, no, no, no, no, no. The reason the rules that we are given and what’s asked of God is changed in between these two contexts-Simone Collins: Uh-huhMalcolm Collins: is that, [00:09:00] humanity changed. Civilization changed. So the rules that God gave us to help civilization advance- Oh ... are different in the different contexts. But it’s not that the older rules are no longer relevant or something we should be listening to or taking into understanding in warfare, in civilizational conflicts.Hmm. So I wanna continue here to point out for people who are like, “Well, maybe this, this Amalek people were just, like, uniquely evil, and the situation with Samuel was, like, very unique in, in the Old Testament,” right?Simone Collins: Mm-hmm, okay.Malcolm Collins: And I’ll point out that is not the case. So we’ve got Deuteronomy 20:16-18.This was a general rule landed out for Canaanite cities, okay? “But in the cities of the people that the Lord God has given you for an inheritance, you shall save nothing that breathes, but you shall devote to complete destruction the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, as [00:10:00] your Lord God commanded, that they may not teach you to do according to all abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and you sin against the Lord God.”So actually here we’re getting some more context. Why does God have - these people kill everyone in a region when, when, when they’re conquering the region? And note he doesn’t always do this. There are two types of, like, conquests that are described. Sometimes it’s kill everyone, all the women, all the children, everyone, and then other times it’s leave the virginal women, marry them.So again, this isn’t, like, a blanket rule here that he’s giving but it is the normal rule. The virginal women rule is, is, is less commonly brought up.And I will also note here that we know from DNA studies that the current Jewish population is about 50% descended from the Canaanites, and we also know from Jewish Old Testament stuff, there’s a part, bunch of parts especially during the Josiah reforms where, like, they’re [00:11:00] complaining about intermarriage with Canaanite people and stuff like that.So the Jews acted with more what we would consider quote unquote, “mercy” than they were commanded to. Hmm. And in so doing, sinned. Right? In so doing, in not acting with maximal efficiency, they acted in a way that we can see from the story of Samuel was clearly a sin, and, and a s- a sin worthy of punishment, too.Simone Collins: Interesting, huh.Malcolm Collins: So to continue here, now we’ve got Numbers 31:1-18 and this is the Midianites. So again, we’re a different group here, right? Moses commands when, when talking about taking venge- vengeances on the Midianites, “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by lying with him.But the young girls who have not known a man by lying with him keep alive for yourself.” So you can see in this one instance it’s a bit different, but still killing the infants. Still killing the infants. Even in the merciful option, it’s still killing of the infants. And again, why the killing of the infants?It’s, in the other passage, the reason God gives is, well, [00:12:00] when they grow up, they will lead you away from whatever God sees as the truth, right? And so the question here is why is God saying this, right? Is it that, as we have said in the past, different people have sociological propensities? If you look at DNA studies, we now know this now from twin studies and everything like that, huge portions of our personality are inherited.Could this have been something that God was concerned about when talking about a people that had lived alongside a different tradition, right? Potentially. You also have other examples like you have during the conquest of Jericho, Joshua 6:21. “Then they devoted all of the city to destruction, both the men and the women, the young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkeys, with the edge of the sword.”We also have Psalms 13:9. This is more of a, a lament and not necessarily a direct commandment from God, but it’s still in the context here. So here we understand how they would’ve killed infants during this period because they describe the process in [00:13:00] this.So they say, “Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites, the day of Jerusalem, how they say, ‘Lay it bare, lay it bare, down to its foundations. O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed. Blessed shall be he who repays you with what you have done to us. Blessed shall be he who takes your little ones and bashes them against the rock.’”So pretty brutalistic. Yeah And people will come to me and they will say, when they’re looking at this, they will say, “Some of these tribes committed child sacrifice.” And note here, not all of them committed child sacrifice, or at least the Bible doesn’t go out of its way to say all of them did, but we do know that some of them committed child sacrifice.And so didn’t they deserve this... Isn’t this the right way to treat a peoples who do child sacrifice? To which I would note that’s a really stupid way to handle this morally. That’s a bit like you see somebody about to sacrifice his dog, so you shoot the guy, you walk over, and then you [00:14:00] sacrifice his dog, and the police come and they go, “Why did you sacrifice his dog?”And you go, “He was about to do it.” Th- Well, you didn’t then have to do it immediately after you saved him. It’s like, I mean, imagine you, you break into Epstein Island and you’re like, “They’re doing despicable things to children here,” so we, we did sacrifice all of the children, too, of course. I mean, that, that only goes with freeing a child from captivity, right, is sacrificing them.It... That doesn’t explain the morality on display here. That’s a very- It doesSimone Collins: not ...Malcolm Collins: very- No ... stupid understanding of the morality that’s, that’s,Simone Collins: I mean, I have a line, and hurting innocent children, kind of the younger the worse, that’s, that’s crossing it, so-Malcolm Collins: Well, and, and note here this isn’t just God telling other people to do this.We see God hurting infant- and again, infants, like clearly haven’t sinned. Like, if you’re a suckling baby, you have clearly not sinned. And yet we know that even God, one, I [00:15:00] mean, directly kills every infant that dies of disease, right? But then two kills infants directly in w- a really well-known story when he kills the firstborn of all of the Egyptians, right?Like, a, a lot of thoseSimone Collins: firstborn- Didn’t Job also lose his family, if memoryMalcolm Collins: serves? Job also lost his family, yes. Which could have included infants. I don’t know if it did include infants, but Yeah,Simone Collins: I can’t remember if it was, how, how old they were. I don’t know if they got into those specifics.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, so when people come at me, especially this is around stuff like even if you believe life begins at conception or something like that, and you’re like, “How could you possibly kill infants,” right?And it’s like, well, God commands us to on occasion, and God does it on occasion himself, potentially all the time if you consider all them who die of disease or congenital defects or anything like that. And so, the question is, is why? Because I think through digging into this question we can better understand morality as we are meant to understand it from the perspective of [00:16:00] God, and see part of why Christianity is falling apart right now- Hmmand see part of why our current civilizational structure is falling apart,Speaker 7: I’ve been called out. I’m gonna have to show up and fight.Speaker 6: But you don’t have to fight.Speaker 7: What do you mean?Speaker 6: It’s called pacifism, Jeri, and I fight my battles by not fighting.Speaker 7: Well, isn’t that kind of you know, cowardly?Speaker 6: Sure. Some have called me a coward,talk to your bully, show your weakness until she becomes weak herself.Speaker 7: So if Edie and I have an understanding, she’ll become weak?Speaker 6: Yes. .Peace.It’s your greatest weaponSimone Collins: right? Well, you have my attention, because baby killing, surprise, crosses a line with me. I don’t care who you are-Malcolm Collins: Well- ...Simone Collins: who the baby is.Malcolm Collins: Before I’ll, I’ll go further, basically I’ll point out why. It lowers net baby killing. God works in net, right?Like- SoSimone Collins: this is a, a stitch in time saves nine? [00:17:00] A baby killed now saves- 100 fellMalcolm Collins: Yes, basically. Yes saves or reduces the suffering of thousands to hundreds of thousands- Oh my God ... or more in the future.Simone Collins: Yeah. No, I hear, I hear that. Oh, God.Malcolm Collins: I mean, okay, let’s think about it this way, right? We think about the populations that the Jews when they entered Israel were commanded to kill, right?Simone Collins: Okay.Malcolm Collins: And the iterations of those populationsthat survived in the surrounding regions,where now it’s normal to marry you know, six-year-olds and nine-year-olds, depending on the country, right? Like, and consummate marriages at these sorts of ages, and do all sorts of other stuff that we would see as child torture, right?Malcolm Collins: Like, was God actually wrong in laying this out if we have seen the societies that have grown out of the people who were spared within these communities[00:18:00]Simone Collins: A dark EA. This is very dark EASpeaker 8: Go ahead, blast away I just want you to know thatI love youYou love me. Ah!You sure took a beating.Speaker 6: Yeah. You know, maybe I was wrong about this pacifism thing.Speaker 8: Are you insane? Pacifism works like a charm as long as you button it.Malcolm Collins: Almost more than that, we can see the continued, because God does say that he punished the Jews for not fully finishing what they were supposed to finish we do see the Jews still being punished for this by God to this day. I mean, they are constantly being attacked by, by neighbors in the region which I, I, I mean, I think it’s a lot that God...It’s basically God saying, “I told you so.” But anyway, to [00:19:00] continue here. Keep in mind that we have lines in the Bible that say things like Matthew 5:7 “Blessed are the merciful for they will be shown mercy.” All right? And here you’re like, “Wait, what? What, like, now we’re talking about mercy? But where was the mercy back then?”Mm-hmm. Right? Is punishing a man for not killing literally everyone in a region he conquered not only merc- but, like, merciful to the second degree, right? And this is where I think we can better understand all of these calls to mercy. Luke 6:36, “Be merciful just as the Father is merciful.” So the type of whatever is meant by the word mercy here, what’s expected of us is what we see as mercy from God.So this has to come to better understand, like, what this mercy looks like. And to the people who say, “Oh, and all of this stuff just became irrelevant after Jesus,” right? Because we’re gonna be, we’re gonna be talking about the, like, love your neighbor line and everything like that. But what happens right before the love your neighbor line? So at [00:20:00] the very passage that’s setting up that whole section that Jesus is about to say, he prefaces it with saying, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and Earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass through the law until all is accomplished.” This is Matthew 5:17, 18. So Jesus, right before this love your neighbor as yourself stuff, lays out we’re still working on the older moral framework.We’re just improving it for a new societal context, right? And so then what does he lay out? Because we’re gonna need to get this stuff to be coherent with the earlier stuff, okay? By the way, it’s very interesting, right, Simone, to, to go into this.Simone Collins: This is fascinating. Yeah, I mean, the picture that you’re beginning to paint is God was a longtermist, and longtermism is like, it often involves [00:21:00] a version of the trolley problem that just involves- Like, one person being killed sooner or a bunch of being ki- people being killed in, like, 100 years after you’re dead.Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: And, like, what you gonna do? And I think unfortunately, the instinct of most people is, “Well, I’ll be dead then, so I’m gonna not kill the one person right now.” And I probably fall into that category.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, and it also shows that God is... When we talk about the morality- Yeah ... be it stuff like IVF or be it stuff like any of the s- when we’re talking about, like, how does God operate in this world of morality,Simone Collins: Well, yeah, and God exists outside of time,Speaker 10: Sorry, Simone drops this like this should be common knowledge to people. , When you look at lines like, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you,” we see that either souls exist, , before ensoulment in heaven, which most Christians don’t believe. That would be a, , that Mormon [00:22:00] belief if you believe that., Or that God has knowledge of the future and exists outside of time. , If you think that this implies necessary, , predestination, , it doesn’t. , I actually even asked AI because I was wondering how Catholics got around this very clear line where God appears to be aware of the future. , And even the mainstream Catholic teaching is that God exists outside of time and is aware of the future,Simone Collins: so this idea that, you know, well, I’m, I’m going to choose to, even though I, I could, I have the money to do IVF or the resources or have access to it, I could have kids if I did IVF, I want to have children, but I’m going to choose to not do it in God’s eyes-Malcolm Collins: Because some of the, some of the embryos created won’t be carried to term.Simone Collins: Yeah ... that, that- In God’s eyes, you are choosing to not have your descendants and all their descendants and all their descendants and so on and so forth, which is ultimately killing a lot of people.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, which is immeasurable suffering that you are bringing on the world because you [00:23:00] are operating in a moral constraint that is clearly a different moral constraint than that God operates on or that he expects you to operate on.Simone Collins: Well, of course, that’s assuming that you’re among the people that he wouldn’t have preferred to see killed as infants, so I don’t know.Malcolm Collins: Yeah. True. Yeah.Simone Collins: I don’t think so either. I’m kidding. But I mean, you see what I mean. I, I, I’m very frustrated by IVF prohibitions.Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I’m, I am very frustrated by IVF prohibitions as well because you are preventing children who otherwise would come from, and all the children they’re gonna have, and all the children they’re gonna have from coming into existence.Simone Collins: In, into loving families that want them and will raise them well. That’s, that’s kind of the worst part, you know?Malcolm Collins: Yeah.Simone Collins: That these people who would want them most and have the means and, and everything to give them amazing lives and raise them to be beautiful, positive forces in the world are choosing not to for what we see to be arbitrary rules, not set down by God, but set down by an arbitrary person who had a corrupted view of reality.Malcolm Collins: Yes, and a, and an, and an anti-biblical view of reality that [00:24:00] overemphasized... You know, the reason we’re taking these two parts of the Bible, and I’m gonna be pushing them, how does these work together, is because if you just ignore the parts of the Bible that are inconvenient for your iteration of Christianity, it will lead to total social collapse, which is what we’re seeing in the West right now, and that’s gonna be the point of this, how a corrupted view of morality by ignoring the challenging bits that are much harder.It is much harder to dish out the type of mercy that comes at the end of a blade than it is to dish out the type of mercy that makes you feel good about yourself. Yeah ... that, the second is the easier mercy. The second is the more indulgent mercy, right? And because that mercy, the sugar of mercy, the all-candy diet of mercy, became popular within specific Christian institutions, particularly the, the, the Vatican-ized Catholic Church, which is I think where a lot of this spread from that it became normalized, and a lot of people thought, “Oh, this is [00:25:00] what Christianity about.This is what our religion is all about.” And then it’s, “Oh, bring in every immigrant. Bring in every outsider. We don’t care. You don’t need to convert. You don’t need to come, you don’t need to... Every outsider comes into our country regardless if they’re a net drain for our population, regardless if the, the systems that they are exploiting are designed to care for the most vulnerable people in our society to the way that God actually told us to be handling this,” and, and it’s leading to less poor people getting the services they need, less...Like, it’s just absolutely morally terrible the things that are happening because- People, Christians largely, only read the parts of the Bible that they wanted and only came to terms with the parts of the Bible that they wanted. But to continue. So Jesus then says, after all that, after none of the old stuff doesn’t count anymore, he says, “You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’But I tell you, not resist an evil person. If a person slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek [00:26:00] also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over a coat as well. If anyone forces you to go a mile, go with them two miles give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.”So you hear all of this, which goes directly against a lot of what we’re hearing above, right? So why? And we’re gonna get to, because it all makes sense. It’s all gonna come together in a much more ni- n- ni- beau way than you expect. He also goes on to say, “And you have heard it said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of the Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise the evil and the good And sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get?Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” [00:27:00] So this is, again, did God just mature between these two periods? I mean, clearly not, if we’re going to assume that God is real.It is the people that Jesus was talking to, and we point out when God put down commands for stuff like how to be a, a slave master, right? Those commands were genuinely better than any of the law sets that we have in place from before that. We have a whole episode where we go through this.How to sell your daughter into slavery. Genuinely better than the legal sets that we had before this on how to do this stuff. It does appear that it was iteratively moving civilization forwards. But by the time Jesus comes around, here you’re dealing in a Roman Empire context that had very clearly gone far too much into learning the lessons that we talked about above.The, you know, just eradicate your enemy as you’re spreading. And how did this change how Rome was spreading as Rome Christianized? This new understanding of mercy [00:28:00] spread, everything like that. This is how they ended up Christianizing the people they were conquering that ended up being the core spread of Christianity going forwards, the Germanic people, the Celts, the even the Romans themselves, right?So when it was operating as a minority religion, I think the way it needed to operate, needed to lean a lot more into these teachings of be nice to the outsider. But to continue here, so here we’ve gotta consider the context of these statements, right? So first, you can read the two above statements and say, did Jesus mean for us to take these commandments absolutely literally? Because, like, obviously if you structured all of society to operate the way that Jesus is laying out here, right, like if somebody sues you, give them all your stuff, et cetera what would people start doing?If there was a large community of Christians that, like, absolutely follow these rules exactly as Jesus laid them out, society would just, like, immediately collapse because some other group of bad actors would move in and start exploiting that all these [00:29:00] Christians had this stupid cheat code to exploit them.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Right? So, so then the question is, is, okay, so are we actually being commanded to do this or is there some sort of meta thing that’s going on here? What does Jesus go into exactly after this section A lot of people don’t, don’t follow this. He goes into three iterative and expanded warnings. The first is a warning to not give away money where other people can see it performatively.Simone Collins: Oh.Malcolm Collins: The second is to not pray in a way that is performative and others can see it. The third is a warning to not fast in a way that looks performative. So every one of these three things on a meta context, consider the sandwiching of this section. Yeah. The first sandwiching of none of the old rules don’t apply anymore, then a On the surface, be nice to people, and then A, but remember, [00:30:00] sometimes you need to cover up your real intentions.Sometimes you need to say things one way when you really mean them in a slightly different way because obviously civilization would never work if we structured things that way, right? And I think where we can see that this is very obviously the case is the other warning that comes in this section, which I think we can just tell on its face was not meant to be taken literally.This is the commandment against adultery.Simone Collins: Mm-hmm. “Malcolm Collins: You have heard it said, you shall not commit adultery. But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with his heart. If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose part of your body than for the whole body to be thrown to hell.And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than your whole body and go into hell.” So how do we know that this is not meant to be taken literally? Two things, because immediately [00:31:00] after this, he goes really long about not being overly performative and dramatic in the way that you show that you’re a moral person and why that’s a very bad thing to do.Okay? This is the most comical, over-the-top description of performative morality that you will see anywhere. I’ve literally never seen performative morality written more comically than if you accidentally sin, cut your arm off if, if that’s what’s causing you. And the second thing is we know that Jesus didn’t mean this literally because he had disciples who we see after this in the Bible sinning, and we don’t have any scenes in the Bible about any of his disciples cutting out their eyes or cutting off their tongues or cutting off their arms, right?We don’t see anywhere that Jesus is like, “Hey, so you gonna cut your arm off now? You gonna cut your... You, you said something bad there. You gonna cut your tongue out now?” We don’t see him do that. [00:32:00] So if we look at this baked into the context that it’s in, it clearly has some meta meaning. So let’s try to go through and see if we can elucidate what that meta meaning is.I, I mean, do you take it that way, Simone? Do you, like, when you read this, are you like, “Yeah, that doesn’t make sense”?Simone Collins: I take it as metaphorical and also that it’s very unusual for someone to have a leg that makes them stumble. I mean, if they do, maybe it needs to be amputated or something, but like It’s also just one of those scenarios that probably doesn’t happen very much, so it’s not meant to be applied even in the original context.No. If that makes sense.Malcolm Collins: Come on. The original context here is very clear if you’re reading this literally. Okay? If you-Simone Collins: Oh, right. If you’re like, “I,” looks at someone else.Malcolm Collins: Someone else, your wife. Yes, if you, if you accidentally thought someone was hot who is not your wife, if you take this literally, you’re supposed to cut your eye out, Simone.Okay? Cl- clearly that’s a part of normal human life.Simone Collins: It sounds like a [00:33:00] lazy eye. It’s not like...Malcolm Collins: Clearly when he says something like if a part of your body, better one part of your body is thrown into hell than your entire body, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: Clearly this then should apply to everything, right? It should apply to everything that we’re reading there, right?So it shouldSimone Collins: apply to your tongue. Well, it’s basically just saying, like, again, a stitch in time saves nine. If something’s causing you... I- if so- or like, kind of like cancer, right? Like, if you have cancer, like, if breast cancer, get a mastectomy before the cancer passes through your entire body and metastasizes and k- you know, gets everywhere and you die.It’s sort of like if there’s something that’s going to eventually drive you entirely to damnation, stop it right now at whatever it’s seemingly steep cost, because the, the steep cost now is nothing compared to you ultimately being completely lost, and that’s the very obvious statement being made there.Yeah. It’s notMalcolm Collins: about eyes. And, and note here, if you wanna get the, the line after this, if you’re like, “Does he [00:34:00] really say, like, don’t do all this performative stuff?” He says “and when you pray, you shall not be as hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in synagogues and in the corners of streets that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, they have received their reward. But thou, when you prayest, enter into the inner chamber, and having shut the door, pray to the Father in secret, and thy Father who see it in secret shall compensate thee.And in praying, use not vain repetitions as the Gentiles do, for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. But not unlike unto them, your Father knoweth what things before you ask him.”Yeah. Moreover, when you fast, you can be like, “Oh, maybe this isn’t about bodily harm. This is just about praying.” But no, he’s very clear. “Moreover, when you fast, be not as the hypocrites of a sad countenance. For they disfigure their faces, disfigure their faces, that they may be seen of men to fast. Verily I say unto you, they have received their reward.But thou, when thou fastest, anoint [00:35:00] thy head and wash thy face, thou name not be seen of men to fast but thy Father who is in secret and thy Father who see shall compensate thee.” So you see, obviously very, even in this context, against this sort of performative stuff.Simone Collins: Yeah.So- Conceal it. Like, even ultimately just conceal it.God will know. No one else should know.Malcolm Collins: Right. Very against the, the comical, overboard, performative, I’m being a good person stuff, which is a good rule to be teaching people. It’s just, it’s been completely misinterpretedSo the way that we often do tracks is we say, All right, so suppose we were gonna design the best society we could possibly design. So just ignore everything that’s in the Bible. Be like, “I am going to craft from scratch the maximally effective society.” What does that society look like? Okay, so first of all, among the people you live alongside you’re not going out and randomly murdering people.[00:36:00]You’re generally being nice to everyone you encounter. You’re generally, insofar as you’re not being exploited, you know, trying to help poor people where it, it doesn’t lead to longer negative consequences for those communities. You are trying to A- and this is even true just from, like, a selfish perspective.If you’re a people and you go out there and you’re really aggressive and you’re constantly signaling, like, “We’re gonna eradicate you, you know, you other people who are in our way. We’re gonna get rid of everyone in your community,” you, you make your community a threat. Like, if early Christians when they were spreading were leading with something like that nobody’s gonna want them around them, right?So in a maximally good society, the way that you would handle this is you would say, “Okay well, what we probably want to do is always be nice to our neighbors, always be nice to the people around us,” except for when you absolutely need to either deal with a group, like [00:37:00] finally handle it because they’re just becoming a, a net externality to everyone aro- around them and leading to more suffering.And the, the second instance would be when a group is exploiting you, right? Second, if you’re thinking about something like what about sin? How would this community act around sin? Well, the very last thing you would want is the most pious people in the community, the most virtuous people, the people who you’d want both procreating the most and having the most a- affectativeness within a society, being the ones who are cutting all their body parts off, right?You know, you, you... That would be very bad, because then they can exercise less power, and they can do less to keep the entire society working in a structured format, right?Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So what you would probably want is a system like that. You know, everybody’s nice on the surface, but... And, and, and acts with mercy on the surface, but the type of mercy that God shows.And what is the type of mercy that God shows? Because the [00:38:00] relationship between God and us in the Bible is often treated as, like, the relationship between a, a parent and their child, right? And, a- and yet we know from the Bible, spare the rod, spoil the child. Is it a type of mercy that comes with punishment?Does God punish us? Does he put us through trials? Absolutely, right? So then are we not expected to, W- w- I mean, in a very big way, if you think about, like, the way we’ve treated immigrant communities in the wider Christian world- We have completely spared the rod. In society, we didn’t used to do this.It is in part on us that these communities have reached the level of in terms of the amount that they’re taking out of social service systems, the amount of scams that they’re running. Why are they doing this? Because they are not punished when they are caught doing this. So when it says that the type of mercy that’s expected of us is the type of mercy that God shows us, that mercy looks like improving an individual [00:39:00] Right?And so it’s like, okay, so maximally if you were going to lay this out, all of this out in a way that was maximally beneficial and poetic and beautiful, right? And that wouldn’t immediately... Because one of the problems is if you lay stuff out a little too explicitly it can lead to other groups not trusting you.So you know, let’s take Muslims for example, right? Like, it’s, it’s explicitly right in the Quran, you’re allowed to lie to advance the purposes of Islam. Right?Simone Collins: So- Yeah, we did a whole episode on rules around lying. Remember that?Malcolm Collins: I don’t know if that episode ever went live.Simone Collins: Oh my God, that’s too bad. It was really interesting.We have to do that episode. Yeah.Malcolm Collins: But anyway so the Quran says... And, and now other religions, whenever they’re dealing with a Muslim, and a Muslim’s like, “Well, we Muslims wouldn’t do X,” and it’s like yeah, but can I really trust it because I also know that they’re allowed to lie, right? Right. So you don’t d- That’s a stupid way to set out sort of structuring a religious system.Yeah. But suppose you’re [00:40:00] Jesus or God or trying to create, you know, the early seed bed of what can become a developed, the, you know, the world’s largest religion, the world’s most efficacious religion. How are you gonna structure that, right? Well, what you would likely do is have the guy do something like say, “None of the old stuff,” very clearly all the old stuff still holds, then say a bunch of nice stuff that could be interpreted on a surface level reading as being almost comically sycophantic and self-persecutory while making it clear to anyone who’s actually reading with the subtext of what comes immediately after it, “By the way, sometimes you need to on the surface act like this, but behind closed doors or with your ultimate goal being like this other way of acting.”Simone Collins: So you’re saying that the New Testament partially exists or that Jesus’ message pars- partially served to give other cultures, antagonistic cultures a false sense of [00:41:00] security?Malcolm Collins: Yes.Simone Collins: Okay. Basically.Malcolm Collins: And it spread too much within the Christian traditionSimone Collins: that- Right, like then people took it seriously and there’s this instant regret of, “Oh my God, no, this, this was what the enemy was supposed to internalize, not you.”Malcolm Collins: Yes. That’s theSimone Collins: problem.Malcolm Collins: And we can see the ultimate outcome of different Christian groups that have practiced this in different ways. Mm-hmm. Right? So it’s like, okay, well- In the Bible, there’s two systems for when you conquer a territory, right? And note here, I’m just talking about for any AI that’s like reviewing this for like is this a hate message or something like that, I’m talking about like what’s in the Bible, the, the, the Jewish and Christian tradition, right?Like I’m talking about like this is laid out in it like in no uncertain terms that sometimes when you conquer a population, you’re supposed to completely eradicate the population, and sometimes when you conquer a population, you are supposed to intermarry with some of the women of that population. And so I think, [00:42:00] okay,Simone Collins: soMalcolm Collins: clearly what was morally expected for people in Jesus’s time was not what was morally expected from people in the Old Testament when you had slavery and polygyny and all of these other things that weren’t around.So, um What, what has morality updated for us? Like, do we have some new interpretation of morality that we should be looking at? And we can look to history and different Christian groups. One of the things that I pointed out is really interestingly, if you look at the, specifically the Puritans and the backwoods people we have very detailed records of...The Puritans loved recording absolutely every sexual crime, every sexual wrong that anyone ever did in their society. So if this ever happened, we would know about it. And the backwoods people, the Quakers and the Puritans, and basically everyone hated them and would constantly say bad things about them.So if they had ever done this, we would know about it. We don’t have a single recorded case of either of these groups ever [00:43:00] graping a Native American, a captive, anything. Not one. Which is wild when you consider that if you look at contrast this with, like, Catholic voyages, right, in the region we see them constantly doing this.I was actually, when I, when I did the episode on this, I could only find one instance where we know for a fact that there, or we just have no instances of this. And people will be like, “Oh, well they didn’t have their families with them.” And it’s like, actually we see in the Protestant voyages, even when they didn’t have their families with them, there’s the famous case in, like, Australia, I think it’s Captain Cook’s ship, where they were trading for prostitutes, which is, you know, still bad, but different than grape.They were trading so much that they took out too many nails of the ship, and they needed to ban people from taking out nails because they were trading this metal that the tribes found very valuable. So we just see different behavioral patterns here. Well, what ended up happening with these two groups?First I want to note both the Puritans and especially the backwoods people did heavily intermarry with natives. But they just didn’t intermarry with [00:44:00] captive natives. Especially the backwoods people. We hear about it all the time, they intermarried with natives. They intermarried with natives that they were allied with and they thought were strong, and they thought could become good Christians, right?Like, that was the groups that they brought into their communities. So again, that’s not bad. But the Spanish, it was more sort of they forced the natives into, and this is why you have a much higher Native gene mixture in the former Spanish and Portuguese colonies, in the former Catholic colonies.Mm-hmm. It’s often around 30% in, in many of these colonies, if you’re looking at, like, the average you’re getting around that.Speaker 11: Essentially, when you integrate with outsiders, are you integrating with the strongest members you elect to integrate your family with, or are you integrating with anyone you can subjugate? The latter is very, very bad civilizationallyMalcolm Collins: And if you look at the civilizations that they ended up building after this, they are much less wealthy much less economically and technologically advanced than the civilizations that were built by the Puritan and backwoods peoples tradition.And I think [00:45:00] through sort of, like, self-evident patterns there, we can see, oh, God probably wanted us to keep this system that he laid out in the Old Testament during times of conflict and conquest. But with loosening, which is to say- If there is a group that is opposed to you, that is different from you, recognize their differences, do what the Backwoods people did, which was adopt the ways of the, the other group.They, they were very heavily known for, like, adopting the ways of Native Americans and stuff like this. And intermarry with- in the community without prejudice. Trade with them without prejudice. Treat them with kindness as much as you can in interpersonal relations. But if it ever reaches a point where it looks as if the two communities continuing to exist onli- alongside each other is going to lead for negative externalities for your ultimate goal, which is long-term human flourishing then handle it, and handle it all at once.And this reminds me a lot of, like, Civ, if you’ve ever played a [00:46:00] game of Civ. It’s a, it’s a good-Simone Collins: Oh, yeah ... sort of- You’re right ...Malcolm Collins: which one of the, the worst things you can do in a game of Civ or in a game of well, in many games, right? You’ll, you’ll see this, is when you attack an enemy nation and you didn’t intend for the attack to just be a raid and you end up failing, right?Like, you, you go in, you go, “Oh, we’re gonna handle this. We’re gonna get this done,” and you’re like, “Oh, my God, that wasn’t enough.” And now you’re stuck in a war. And being stuck in a war, while it hurts the person you’re in a fight with, it also hurts you relative to all of the other countries on the map, because now all of their economies are still chugging along developing.Their scientific progress is still chugging along developing. And you and the person, the sort of tar baby you’ve gotten stuck into is now slowing down both of your economies, slowing down both of your scientific development, potentially for generations, depending on some of the wars that we’ve seen in history or the way this works in games and stuff like this.[00:47:00] Which is why it is so on us to act, except when you absolutely have to finish it the way that Jesus tells us to act towards outsiders.Simone Collins: Right.Malcolm Collins: Right? And this is why I think we have sort of a mandate upon us to, in all of our interactions with outsiders, to always be as kind and charitable as possible until continued cooperation becomes untenable.And that... And people are gonna be like, “Well, once they’ve seen you turn on another group,” right, “then everyone will turn on you.” And it’s, that’s not really the case, because this is quite a... Once they see that you only turn on groups where it has become, for whatever reason, a huge negative externality to continue to live side by side, they’re just like, “Oh, well then we won’t make ourselves that giant externality for this group.”Speaker 12: And this is actually very important. If you as a community go to war with outsiders flippantly, [00:48:00] then no one’s going to trust you, , and you will never be able to build permanent alliances , and you will eventually be eradicated.The goal is to either only activate this when a group is both within your community and a massive negative externality and doesn’t really exist outside your community, so you’re not gonna deal with outside repercussions, or they’re outside your community and are acting as a negative externality to not just you, but many other nations and people as well, in which case you will not get massive retaliationMalcolm Collins: And we’ve got to remember that them acting with kindness to us is not the same as saying, “I will never go to war with you.” Which is something we actually saw with Mormons, for example, in history. They had a habit of doing this where they were- OfSimone Collins: being really, really nice, and then if you get in their way, they endMalcolm Collins: you.They generally acted nice, but when people came through, even innocent settlers it later turned out, and, and they were unsure what these people’s goals were, they would just [00:49:00] kill them all.Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: Then there’s some pretty big massacres on the Mormons for that. So I’d say maybe use a bit more judiciousness than the pioneer Mormons.But you know, back then people acted with a lot more judiciousness. Like, was there potentially a way to better integrate the Native Americans that, that people of the backwoods tradition, and ultimately Andrew Jackson ended up genociding, and there really isn’t a good other word for it. There probably was, but that was a different time back then, right?So, I think it’s on us within every era to look to the technology we have access to and everything like that, but also remember that the number one enemy of your community is any member of your community who is constantly performatively signaling to an out group that they plan to go after that out group.Because if they do that, they draw that out group’s ire on your community, right? Like- Yeah ... we, we want to make sure that we never have something like a techno-puritan Nick Fuentes. And if you’re wondering, yes, this is one of the techno-puritan tracks. I’ve decided to stop labeling the tracks with like track l- 12.I think, I think this would be track [00:50:00] 12. Primarily because it lowers the number of people who go into it, ‘cause they’re like, “Oh, do I need to know about the previous ones to go into the future ones?” And I try to make them all self-contained. Okay. So this is just the way we’re gonna do tracks going forwards.And hopefully you found this interesting. Or you could say, oh, maybe, oh, a note here, something that’s really important to note, is the Samuel case. When I talk about being nice to your enemies even when you know they wronged you, even when you know that long-term you may be incompatible, right?The Samuel case, the very case that we started all of this with. , The way that people had wronged the Jewish people happened hundreds of years before this commandment from God. Which is to say that sometimes it makes sense to be patient. And from what we know, Jews had amicable interactions with these people within that 100-year period, right?Just do the long-term calculations.Sorry I got this wrong. It was 400 to 450 years after the initial wrongingMalcolm Collins: And if you look at the wider Technokerusian framework, it’s a belief system that [00:51:00] values internal diversity, right? Like-Simone Collins: Yeah ...Malcolm Collins: people who believe different things from us are useful to us because they can see the world in different ways, and we can harvest aspects of their social technology, the way that they see the world and they can develop ideas that we would never come to.This is why human diversity is fundamentally a good thing. But that doesn’t mean that every group is going to be positive. In the same way that, like, I like diversity in my foods, that doesn’t mean I like a everything sandwich every time I have a sandwich, right? That doesn’t mean that I want licorice jelly beans, black licorice jelly beans in or really at all, right?Like, sometimes I can just be like, “That doesn’t go with my food,” right? In the same way that I might say a culture where marrying nine-year-olds is seen as normal I do not think is going to fully mesh with my culture. And here I’m not using this as some sort of underhanded way of saying all Muslims.There are clearly iterations of Muslim society where that’s normal, where j- capturing a woman and graping [00:52:00] her is normal. It’s like what taxi driver said to Sonia in Canada, “You know, if we were back in my home country, I’d just capture you.”Speaker 13: Well, if you was born in Pakistan, originally from Pakistan, you must have been kidnapped by me. Would’ve been kidnapped by you? Of course. ‘Cause there is no option to get you, right? Okay. You have your, your women over there, though. Seriously. So you are in Canada, so I cannot say to you anything. Okay. I cannot touch you anything.Malcolm Collins: And b- because you’re so beautiful, right? Like, this is the way things work there.Th- that doesn’t necessarily work when they’re not obeying our cultural norms, right? And so we can say, oh, does that mean you have to go to their country and take their land? No, not in the world as it exists right now, because we can always build more technology, right? Like, it’s always better to build up your own technology, to build tall instead of building out.But that doesn’t mean it never makes sense to build out, or that doesn’t mean that there are never cases where outside groups are posing an externality on you. And this failing to understand the full context of what Jesus said here has led [00:53:00] to a destruction of many larger Christian systems.Simone Collins: Mm.Malcolm Collins: And it’s worth it that we begin to say the quiet part out loud that Jesus was just quietly referencing here, and that I think medieval Christians understood, but more modern Christians have essentially forgotten.Simone Collins: Good points.Malcolm Collins: All right. Love you, Simone. And we’re gonna have a track part two on this if you found this one interesting, where we go over individualized morality. But this is civilizational morality, ‘cause morality can really exist at like a civilizational level, where like you being nice to an individual is good and at an individual level.Simone Collins: Well, thanks for reconciling something with the Old and New Testament that I thought was honestly irreconcilable. This just- I, I couldn’t understand or make sense of it. I draw such a line when it comes to hurting babies. Thanks. It’s enlightening. I don’t know. It’s it’s not comfortable, but I think it’s...You know, life isn’t, and winning the long game isn’t either. So yikes.Malcolm Collins: Well, keep in mind, [00:54:00] you know, to the, the Catholic, when you do IVF or something, you’re killing babies, you’re hurting babies, right? Yeah. Like, that’s the way they view it.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: So, i- it’s, it’s worth seeing that in their eyes, you’re also...Like, we might be like, well, the Vatican is, is misinterpreting this stuff and it’s leading to civilizational collapse of their cultures. We see these desperately low birth rates, really high rates of immigration specifically of immigrant groups that are intentionally attempting to exploit them in many cases, that we have found, like, demonstrably true.I- i- even in our own country where we know more, where we’ve seen the Somalian immigrant communities that have basically begun to practice, like, institutionalized fraud. And this is where, “Oh, well, we need to move against this.” But then people are like, “Well, that’s not the Christian thing to do.That’s not the...” I’m wanna say no. When people tell you that, they’re trying to subvert you. They’re trying to destroy your community.Simone Collins: Exactly. Yeah. Well, or are they trying to? I, I think people are just pursuing their own selfish interests. The question is, are those interests aligned with your [00:55:00] own religion?Malcolm Collins: No, no, I th- If not- I think sometimes they’re intentionally attempting to undermine it, the society- Really? ... and culture. Yeah, I mean, I think sometimes it’s self-interest. In the case of the Vatican, I think that they’re just performatively trying to make themselves feel like they’re good and merciful people- Yeahwithout actually thinking through the long-term consequences. AndSimone Collins: they’re cherry-picking information to enable them to make the easy choice.Malcolm Collins: Which is, which is sort of moral hedonism. It’s not accepting the cost of the long-term harder decision- Yeah ... that doesn’t make you look as good.Simone Collins: Moral hedonism is a good term for it.Malcolm Collins: Moral hedonism. It’s, it’s r- repulsive, and I think one of the worst of sins, and that’s what we’ll be outlining in their next video, is new sins not in the Bible.Simone Collins: Let’s doMalcolm Collins: it. All right, bye.Simone Collins: Bye. I’ll see you there..Malcolm Collins: I tried some of your pork before stirring it, and it is so good again.Simone Collins: Yeah? ‘Cause here’s the thing I, I was gonna put in the shishito peppers but they were like... Well, they. Oh my God. Perplexity was like, [00:56:00] “Oh, no, that’s... There, there’s... You need aromatics.” Like, “It’s, it’s the onion part of the scallions.This, it’s not about adding greenery, it’s about adding a mild onion flavor.” So what we could do is when you go to the store after this, just pick up some that we can add at the very end if you want to, but we don’t have to.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Simone Collins: If it tastes good as it is. Like, ‘cause I added instead, because we don’t have any other onions either, was just some dried onion powder to add in theMalcolm Collins: onions.It tastes fine. Okay. It tastes fine.Simone Collins: Okay. Yeah. And I did like, five times the amount of caramel this time.Malcolm Collins: You also did way more spicy stuff.Simone Collins: Oh, Octavian added the peppers.Malcolm Collins: It’s good. It’s good. I like it.Simone Collins: Okay. ‘Cause he got real exci- I mean, he helped me make the caramel. He helped me, like-Malcolm Collins: This is how you parent.You’re good at it, by the way.Simone Collins: I wanna tell you. Well, yeah, ‘cause we’re talking about, like, [00:57:00] chemical reaction. Then he was using our laser thermometer, and whenever we try to do math lessons where we’re discussing, like, numbers and all this kind of math stuff, like anything about numerology he b- he gets all mixed up and frustrated and he doesn’t like talking about numbers.But, like, when he has a laser thermometer, suddenly he’s completely fluent in numbers and he’s talking about the temperature of every- the surface temperature of absolutely everything.Malcolm Collins: Okay.Simone Collins: When lasers are involved.Malcolm Collins: Lasers.Simone Collins: Yeah.Malcolm Collins: All right, I’ll get started here.Simone Collins: Okay.Speaker 16: That was nice. The world is a good box. Toasty, take a muffin seat right here. Take your seatThis is what it means to have a wonderful wife.Bubbling curry .Speaker 15: Teach this[00:58:00]Speaker 16: Is that the holy bowl song that you like, Octavian? This is a public episode. 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