Lecture: Biblical Series VII: Walking with God: Noah and the Flood

[Music] Thank you. So, I look today, and these lectures have now been watched by—they've been viewed a million times, so that's pretty amazing. Freely, or they've been— they've been glanced at a million times. That's right, that's also possible. All right, so well, let's get right into it.

So last week, I think, was mostly remarkable for the absolute dearth of content that was actually biblically related. So, that was—I’ll just recap what I laid out, and so that it sets the frame properly for what we're going to discuss tonight. I presented you with an elaborated description of this diagram, essentially, which I spent quite a lot of time formulating probably about 25 years ago, I guess, which kind of accounts for its graphic primitiveness, I suppose. I was really pushing the limits of my 486 computer to produce that, I can tell you.

So, it's a description—a representation of the archetypal circumstances of life, and the archetypical circumstances are the circumstances that are true under all conditions, for all time. And so, you can think about them as descriptively characteristic of the nature of human experience. That's not exactly the same as the nature of reality, but because you can divide reality into its subject of object elements, and there's utility in doing that. But these sorts of representations don't play that game; they consider human experience as constitutive of reality, and that's how we experience it.

And so we'll just go with that. The idea, basically, is that we always exist inside a damaged structure. That structure is partly biological, and it's partly socio-cultural. It's partly what's been handed to us by our ancestors, both practically, in terms of infrastructure, but also psychologically, in terms of the active learned content of our psyches.

And so that would include, for example, our ability to utilize language and the words that we use and the phrases that we use and the mutual understanding that we develop as a consequence of interacting with each other. Architecturally speaking, that structure is always—it's always dead and corrupt. The reason it's dead is because it was made by people who are dead, and the reason it's corrupt is because things fall apart of their own accord.

And the fact that people don't aim properly, let's say, speeds along that process of degeneration. And so what that means—and I think this is something worth knowing—maybe I’ll try standing back here and see if that problem goes away. What that means is that young people always have a reason to be upset and cynical about the current state of affairs, and it's that way forever.

And so it's useful, I think, to consider such considerations, sort of such conceptualizations of the pair of—the patriarchy, in that light. Because it's an archetypal truth that the social structure is corrupt and incomplete. And what that means is that it's something that you have to contend with every moment in some sense of your life. It's a permanent fact of existence.

And to be upset that the structures of social structures—or even the biological structures within which we live—are incomplete and imperfect is to—and to take that personally—that's the worst part of it. To take that personally is a misreading of the existential condition of humankind, because it's always the case that what you have been given and what you live in is degenerate and corrupt and in need of repair.

And it's easier just to accept that because there's also a positive development. And the positive development as well—you've been granted something rather than nothing. And maybe you haven't been granted pure hell, because especially in a culture like ours, where many things actually function quite well.

So there's room for gratitude there, even if it's a broken machine. It's not one that's completely devastated, and it's not absolutely hell-bent at every second on your misery and destruction. And it easily could be, because many societies are like that. And so the fact that we happen to live in one that isn't corrupt beyond imag...