abrahamic religion

Euhemerism is essentially the hypothesis that many of the gods who have been celebrated throughout history may not have been simple fabrications but real people around whom great myths developed and grew to legendary proportions. 

Euhemerus was a fellow who entertained and educated with tales of how the old gods of Hellenic (Greek) tradition were originally humans, mortals who lived mundane or occasionally exciting lives, and died, forever to decay into nothingness, who would have been forgotten if they hadn't become objects of institutionl veneration. Most of his hypotheses have been forgotten, but the principle remains, and naturally leads to interesting speculation.

Was Odin a real man, or an amalgamation of wisened wanderers? Were the Aesir (Asgardians) Asian kings, or Germanic immigrants to Scandinavia, rather than simple legendary personifications of the elements and national ideals?

We also discuss why Christianity isn't a good fit for this discussion on Euhemerism, but that maybe the Abrahamic religious origin could be. All this and more.... 

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Many already know that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are considered Abrahamic religions because of their shared beginnings with the biblical patriarch, Abraham. Lesser known, though, is the fact that there are other faith traditions (besides these three) that are also considered Abrahamic. Listen to this episode to learn more about these lesser known religions and some of the similarities and differences between the three "major" Abrahamic faiths.

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Or you can check out Patheos' other podcast offerings here.

Curious about religion? Explore the world's beliefs at Patheos.com or Like and Follow us on Facebook.

Prophecy is prevalent in all major religions. Someone always seems to have a phone line right up to the Big Guy. Is prophecy real? When does it get dangerous? How does one become a prophet?

All this and more....

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***
Katie Dooley  00:09

Hello again

Preston Meyer  00:17

man, today's gonna be good.

Katie Dooley  00:19

I feel like a prophecy is being fulfilled. Or at least appointment on the calendar

Preston Meyer  00:27

for sure. Welcome everybody to the holy watermelon

00:32

podcast.

Preston Meyer  00:35

Yeah, so we're going to talk a little bit about prophecy today. And I was thinking about Nostradamus, he is, thanks to History Channel. He's kind of the big profit that's not really tied to any specific religion, as far as popular culture presents really well,

Katie Dooley  00:55

right? He's just kind of this guy who predicts things. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  00:58

I mean, he was a Christian, his family, I was actually Jewish only a couple of generations before him. He lived about 500 years ago. 1500s was his time. And super popular guy, he wrote a book called The prophecies. You know, his name isn't. Nostradamus,

Katie Dooley  01:19

I saw that in our research and in researching this episode, yeah.

Preston Meyer  01:24

Michelle did not Nostradamus that, basically Michael of Our Lady, which is, you know, Nostradamus sounds way

Katie Dooley  01:35

more badass here. Also a little bit like a hippopotamus a little bit, a little bit.

Preston Meyer  01:39

But his hugely popular book, the prophecies, none of it is originally is. We like to give Nostradamus credit as a culture for being this great prophet who saw these things coming? None of the prophecies in his book, were originally his. He repeated a bunch from the Bible, he straight up plagiarized from several other sources. And he also actively denied being a prophet. Aren't

Katie Dooley  02:14

they so vague that it could apply to anything?

Preston Meyer  02:19

Many of them are vague that yeah, they could apply to anything. And we also have a problem with people who want to say Nostradamus was a prophet, translating his works from Old French to too common today English, and deliberately Miss translating them so that they'll line up better with specific events. What happened? Yeah. But Nostradamus, not a prophet, not even a little bit, just a skilled writer. He wrote almanacs and things like that. And then he was just like, and here's a bunch of prophecies that are known to people who read Latin, but my French audience doesn't read Latin, so they're gonna like this book.

Katie Dooley  03:03

So then if Nostradamus wasn't a prophet, what is a prophet Preston?

Preston Meyer  03:08

A prophet is, broadly speaking, if you want to generalize it across multiple religious traditions, A prophet is a person who serves as a mouthpiece for divinity or supernatural force on Oracle is a pretty fair word that's basically the same thing a mouthpiece for a god. So that's fairly distinct from say, a seer, or an agar who is able to read things, things or omens. Like sometimes you'll have an agar who reads entrails or tea leaves or just I don't think an auger is a fair title for one who reads the stars, that's more of a seer Nan agar. We've got a whole bunch of people who have found out a whole lot of different ways that they can read things in the universe,

Katie Dooley  04:07

medium psychics, not that this, that's not this episode. But you're right. There's a lot of titles for people who see things that have yet to happen, right,

Preston Meyer  04:15

and they can do it with a sort of reliability, that's just enough to get people to buy into it.

Katie Dooley  04:24

In my research, so there's prophets and prophecy, and then there's prophesizing, which is a little more you don't need to be a prophet to prophesize in my understanding is that that as in God is speaking to you and telling you what to do with you in within your personal relationship with God, this is very much like a Christian fundamentalist term.

Preston Meyer  04:46

So there's, I like to distinguish big P and little P profits.

Katie Dooley  04:52

Okay. Like

Preston Meyer  04:56

if you are prophesying then that makes you a profit, little p, if you have any official office or title as profit, that would be the big P profit. And so profits can be seen, whether that's their title or not, in every religious tradition and culture on this planet, throughout history, absolutely. Which is actually kind of nifty that we are able to see these parallels around the world without any worry about cultural lines.

Katie Dooley  05:34

I mean, it's, it makes sense in a way that, you know, how else does a religion start? Unless God is talking in the search of supernatural power talking to someone, then you just have atheists? Right? If there's not, whether that's God speaks to everyone, or God speaks through one or two people, there needs to be some connection. Someone has to believe God's speaking to them or when happen, right?

Preston Meyer  05:59

That's a reasonably popular model for religious development,

Katie Dooley  06:04

I guess you get the odd ones. But you will talk about Buddhist prophets as well, where I guess you're working to obtain some level of enlightenment, but and there isn't, I guess, I mean, depends on the model of Buddhism, you look I was gonna say, but there isn't a god and Buddhism. But depending on which one you follow, then Buddha is

Preston Meyer  06:25

what? It all depends on how you define God. Because we've had this argument before to

Katie Dooley  06:31

go back to our previous episode.

Preston Meyer  06:34

So there are some religious traditions that aren't started off by somebody claiming prophecy. If you are describing the idea of a god in the sky, you don't have to speak to him to say to your kids, there's somebody up there who is giving us the lightning in the rain, fair. But at some point, somebody will claim to communicate with that God,

Katie Dooley  06:58

I think so because it comes down to the How do you know it's up there? Exactly. And I don't want to say it's easy to say, but it's, it's a pretty good default to go to well, God told me or God told this person or whatever.

Preston Meyer  07:09

Yeah, Oracle's and prophets tend to speak as though they are the mouth of God, or the God that they serve. For example, the the oracles of Apollo way back in ancient Greece would speak as though their words had come originally from Apollo and they would quote him and speak as though they were him. So it's pretty standard for the way we look at prophets in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament as well.

Katie Dooley  07:43

All right, so we've all been to notes on property. How do we do want to break down by religion first, what do you think? Are some of my just Mullings?

Preston Meyer  07:52

Let's go through your Mullings. Let's see what what are your thoughts here? Oh, as an atheist

Katie Dooley  07:57

as an atheist? Well, let's start on the scroll down on the notes a bit. I I titled this section profits in the wild. And I'm sure everyone if you live in a major city and have ever taken public transport, you've come across one of these people who claims that God is speaking to them. And I distinctly remember one day, going to university this man on the bus is saying that he had seen the start a time and the end of time and knew how was all going to end and that God was speaking to him and everyone like all the ladies were clutching their bags a little closer or putting them on the seat so he wouldn't sit next to them. And like my notes, I say, but if he was in a suit at a pulpit on a Sunday morning, people would be like, Oh my God, right? So this line between mental illness and being a prophet and we're going to do an exorcism episode around Halloween, but same thing or the difference between are they piss possessed by the devil or mentally ill? Are you profit? Are you mentally ill? And is that like, basically, based on what you wear and what your job title is? Or?

Preston Meyer  09:08

So anytime the audience doesn't want to hear what they're hearing? Yeah, absolutely. It's going to be easy to write it off as this person's probably mentally ill. And apart from that, any prophecy it can only be judged on whether or not it comes true. And I guess another roundabout angle at that would be you can also judge a prophecy based on how detailed it is. And like if it's deliberately going to be obvious that it's self fulfilling, or deliberately so vague that it's going to happen no matter what at some point, and you can tell in advance then That's not terribly impressive because he

Katie Dooley  10:01

even made obviously as outsiders. It's easier. But we see all these doomsday predictions that have yet to come true. So often the followers still believe the person is a prophet and that they're correct. They were just there was a miscalculation.

Preston Meyer  10:20

Yeah, I mean, people, people appreciate when somebody admits that they were wrong. And they can say, oh, no, I miscalculated this thing. That I mean, it's weak, but I get why people who really want to believe and choose to believe can accept that as something to not undermine their belief. But I don't love it. You know?

Katie Dooley  10:46

I don't I can't think off the top of my head because I'm just literally having these thoughts. Now, as we're recording. You know, some of these doomsday cults have, like multiple times, like it's like, Okay, once fine, but there's people who've been predicting the end of the world for decades, and they're their followers just to like, yeah. So let me once shame on you. Fool me twice. Shame on you. Fool me three times. Shame on you.

Preston Meyer  11:16

Shame on me. Yeah. Like, oh, yeah, it's, it's a weird thing. Usually, when somebody gives out a whole bunch of different predictions. It's more of, hey, I'm studying the Scripture. And these clues are here. And this is here. It's all written down. Why can't you see it? They don't usually do the whole profit thing. It's more of a I'm smarter than you. Which is obviously annoying. I'm sure there's exceptions to that, but none are coming to mind right now. Okay. But we we've definitely got loads of people running around saying, hey, the end of the world, isn't i because God told me and hasn't happened yet. Now,

Katie Dooley  12:16

I think there was one recently that came in lens that some cult somewhere was preparing for.

Preston Meyer  12:22

Yeah, I remember in 2011 There was one right there was what wasn't the big one. But there was a reason that we popular fella who decided there's this time in May in 2011, where the world's going to end and that didn't happen. And then he's like, Oh, no, sorry, I was wrong. It's gonna be in October. Oh,

Katie Dooley  12:42

I do remember that October came and went. And here we are. With someone. I'm thinking oh, that was like in December to the Mayan calendar. Oh, yeah. The

Preston Meyer  12:49

Mayan calendar that got a lot of people all stressed out there. I don't. I looked into it. And there's not like any solid prophecy. Yeah, the world's gonna end it's just the calendar did end and a lot of people like well, a calendar this long. Having an endpoint means the end of the world sauce.

Katie Dooley  13:09

So I don't even remember what was it like December 21 2008, or something? That's never my brain. I don't remember the end of the Mayan calendar. But

Preston Meyer  13:16

I'm pretty sure my calendar is 2012 as a trainee.

Katie Dooley  13:19

I don't remember the date. Anyway, someone will correct. But I remember on that day, that all of a sudden, there's like this really weird noise in my neighborhood. Like this whooshing noise It was like it was super loud. And like I was still in high school, like I was still living at home and most of my friends were still living at home with their parents, I say. And so like everyone could hear it like for blocks where I was like, what is happening? And there is a utility station across from the carwash. You know what I'm talking about? I got pretty good idea. Yeah. carwash and junior high. Yeah. And it had like, over pressurize. So it was like releasing pressure. And the immediate neighborhood had to be evacuated. And we could hear it all the way. Like my parents are by the save on. I'd like try not to explain to President where this is without Daxing my parents were ready to save on and they we could hear it. Again, all my friends were like What is and we all that was the end of the world obviously. Because really, what is this noise? And we've lived there for decades and never heard it before. Never heard that sentence. Right? So anyway, that's

Preston Meyer  14:38

crazy. That's I like it.

Katie Dooley  14:42

I will say as an atheist who, you know, clearly I don't believe anyone is a prophet. I actually really appreciate the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints approach to prophecy, and I forget where I read it somewhere but basically, they have prayed but it's to this day the leader of the church of the prophet speaks to get got a phone phone line to God, I presume in his office and their perspective on it and jump if I'm jumping if I'm wrong, but you didn't correct my notes, I assume I'm do it Okay, is that if God spoke to us 2000 years ago, we should still have the ability to speak to him. Now. He wasn't all of a sudden, like peace out.

15:22

But yeah,

Katie Dooley  15:23

I can't I cannot speak to humans anymore. I've spent all this time putting you together and by. And so I'm like, okay, yeah. If you believe that. All these Old Testament New Testament prophets existed and they received revelation from God, then, yeah. Logic would follow that we could still receive prophecy and revelation from God. But there's definitely there's definitely Christian groups that don't think that.

Preston Meyer  15:50

Yeah, is Christianity, broadly speaking, has a weird relationship with the idea of prophecy, an awful lot of Christians reject the idea that there's any way to hear from God outside of reading the Bible, which, of course, is flawed in that you've limited this person that you viewed to be all powerful to the words that have been written down and edited centuries ago. In a book that isn't even complete anyway.

Katie Dooley  16:23

I mean, it's still getting rewritten, right? There's still new versions popping up. So

Preston Meyer  16:27

yeah, I wouldn't say rewritten the best word. But I mean, it does go through an editorial process that we were talking about in our bonus episode was rewritten. It does go through an editorial process before publication every single time. So yeah, a little bit rewritten. And so for example, you've got the the Pentecostals are also pretty big fans of prophecy, because prophecy is promised in the New Testament. Paul talks about how as long as there are believers that will, there will be prophecy among them. And so Protestants and other super charismatic Christian churches are definitely big into that idea that you can receive revelation, direct communication with God. And then some of the older traditions that are still with us from Christianity tend to be a little bit more. You know, the guy in charge, like the Pope, for example, you can receive some revelation to guide the church. But there isn't big revelations of old hidden things or hidden things to come so much anymore. Which I think is actually really interesting. There was about 500 years ago, in the Catholic Church, there was the prophecy of the Pope's, I was it's only about 400 years ago, sorry. It was first published in 1595 by a Benedictine monk named Arnold weon. He attributed this prophecy to St. Malikai, 12th century Archbishop, and it lists the last 112 Pope's it says, These are the last 112 There's not going to be more after this. So the end of the 16th century, this is kind of a big deal. People start counting down to the end of the Pope's. And it's kind of interesting. And remember, this is meant to have been written 400 years before it was published. But it's kind of interesting. It starts with Silverstein, the second and it is completely accurate. And describes correctly all of the Pope's up until just before it was published, then it stops being accurate, weird. Which means that it's very, very likely

19:12

that it was written 400 years before, right?

Preston Meyer  19:15

It's super suspicious. What's interesting though, is that 111 was Benedict the 16th. And then before it goes on to 112 There's this weird little paragraph, just just a short little note. And then it goes on to Peter the Roman. And so because St. Francis or sorry, Pope Francis isn't peter the roman as far as we can tell based on his name or where he's from

Katie Dooley  19:47

that's gonna say his name a little bit round.

Preston Meyer  19:50

There's a lot of people that like to argue that in this list that's called the last 112 Pope's there's space for who knows how many In between 111 and the last, and it's because people are desperate that this list is actually authentic prophecy. But I mean, there's loads of evidence that it's what counts is a forgery being a product of when it was published and not 400 years earlier.

20:25

Wow, it's so accurate. Wow. Yeah.

Preston Meyer  20:28

At the time it was published. People should have recognized Hey, yeah, it's super precise and accurate up to this point. And then is vague and cryptic leading forward. When it was mostly written 400 years before? It's just kind of weird. Yeah, it's fun. It's kind of it's it's like the prophecy that people within the Catholic world think about, as far as recent dish prophecies, interesting. And yeah, it's definitely a forgery. It's not authentic revelation.

Katie Dooley  21:06

Maybe that's a good segue. How do you know when something's authentic Revelation?

Preston Meyer  21:09

In the moment, it's almost impossible unless, theoretically, there's something in your gut that says, Yes, this is right. And even then, I mean, we've talked about the the tricky nature of belief and knowledge. How do you even know that that feeling in your gut means anything? You have to wait and see when that prophecy is fulfilled? To know that it was a proper prophecy, and judge it based on its merit as a self fulfilling prophecy or a guaranteed eventuality?

Katie Dooley  21:39

I really want to sing a line from Book of Mormon, go for it in 1970, God changed his mind about black people, black people.

Preston Meyer  21:50

Yeah, what a great musical.

21:52

And what a great process.

Preston Meyer  21:55

The the one thing that I love about the humor of that show is that it's all just about the two teachers, the missionaries, they were inept from the beginning and didn't know anything. So the presentation of what the church does believe is it's what is presented to be, and not necessarily a matter of historic fact. But it was an enjoyable show anyway. So prophecy is is all over the place, I really like the, the way we see profits presented in the Hebrew Bible, which is, of course, the familiar zone that we deal with in the West. And so they were usually men who served as permanent fixtures in royal courts, though there were a few that were not. And this is basically paralleled around the world, every culture that has a king or an emperor or a chieftain had somebody in his close circle that was basically responsible for reading omens and double checking the decisions of the chieftain or emperor or king or whatever, to make sure that it wasn't going to end in a catastrophic failure, that would end the nation. And sometimes that meant reading entrails. And sometimes it meant just popping off into the corner and praying and seeing what happens, and anywhere in between, depending on the culture and the traditional practices of that group. But what they all had in common is that they proclaimed a message to the people. Typically, in the end, in the Hebrew setting that message was if you guys don't stop doing these stupid things, you will be destroyed. Yeah, yeah. And Israel has a long history of suffering some wicked destructions. Yeah. There were a few of the old Hebrew prophets that talked explicitly about a man who had come to preserve the people in some way or another. And if you're a Christian, especially fundamental Christians, you believe that everything of these prophecies refers to the coming of Christ. Yes,

Katie Dooley  24:20

I am. In the documentary, I watched American gospel like it put on our Discord. It's a wild ride. That's what the one group was talking about is that everything in the Bible in the Old Testament, points to Jesus Christ, and if you can't see that you're not a real Christian. He was like every story in the Old Testament. points to the to Jesus. I was like, does it Oh, the

Preston Meyer  24:46

story of Lot and his daughter say does that it does not. Not even a little bit. I didn't think so.

Katie Dooley  24:53

But, however,

Preston Meyer  24:57

to the credit that may or may not Due to the person who said that the story might point to the need for a Savior with some efficacy. Okay.

Katie Dooley  25:12

I want Yeah, I mean, a lot needs intervention. A lot of things an adult. Yeah.

Preston Meyer  25:24

Yeah. It's, it's tricky. But I mean, if you genuinely believe that everything in the Bible points to Jesus, you'll find a way to connect it. Even if it's as simple as here's a, here's some people that need Jesus.

25:38

You'll figure out Jesus.

Preston Meyer  25:42

So, it's, it's not unfair, but I don't like to make that generalization, the story of Jonah and the whale. If it was written more recently, the story would have started once upon a time, the story of Jonah and the whale is fiction. Absolutely. It was never meant to be read as a historical story about a real prophet. Everything about the story is, like, obviously counterintuitive to anybody's experience in Israel, where if you pay attention, the story, everybody's righteous, and does what God says when they hear they hear the message, except for the guy who's supposed to be spreading that message. Jonah hears, hey, you need to go visit these people. And he says, hell no, I'm going the other way. The people in the boat. They're like, Hey, God has a message for us, and you are a problem to us. We're going to do what's right and get you out of this boat so that you can go into your job. And then Jonah finally gets to the city, and they repent. The city being Nineveh in Babylon, which everybody in Israel is like, no, those people are evil. And in the story is like, oh, yeah, no, we're good now. It's like, obviously, a fiction. But, you know,

Katie Dooley  27:14

we need to do an episode on biblical literalism. It was Yeah, I think you're right. It was requested to sort of, well, let's after

Preston Meyer  27:27

the profits are interesting. You've got prophets like Isaiah, and Jeremiah, these were quarterly profits, they served the king to let him know what he needed to do in any situation where he would ask. And so that's, that's pretty standard around the world. Like I said, before,

Katie Dooley  27:47

we should move on to the New Testament. Yeah. So

Preston Meyer  27:50

Jesus is kind of the central figure of the New Testament, even though he's only actually present for one narrative told four different times. And he's a lot more than a prophet in Christianity, but he does do some prophesying. And most of it pretty vague. He does specifically promise that the temple will be destroyed soon. And while he's also talking about his own body that's about to be destroyed. The Temple in Jerusalem is seen as another fulfillment of that prophecy because it was destroyed about 40 years later. Or 30 years later. Now, the timeline is going fuzzy on me, but that's okay. Shortly after shorts was crazy generation and a half two generations later, which in a grand scheme of than 2000 year old religion, it's not that much, right. And you've also got Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, an angel appears to him and broadly speaking, this fits into prophecy if you are able to speak with divine beings including angels so it Mary

Katie Dooley  29:03

have been a prophet or because she was the lady show some aloud.

Preston Meyer  29:08

Here's Mary has a very special position in Christian in some parts of Christianity,

Katie Dooley  29:16

the reality of Zechariah talk. Yeah, we can get back to Mary sorry. And

Preston Meyer  29:21

they're not wildly different in their experiences. And I'm even Joseph her husband had an angel appeared to him and say, Hey, this What's up? Mary's experiences a little bit more intense.

Katie Dooley  29:35

Yeah. She got to find spunked.

Preston Meyer  29:41

I mean, I don't know the the exact operation of how things happen, but she became pregnant in a way that as far as I know, there's one way people get pregnant. But turns out apps Two Minutes is not 100% effective.

Katie Dooley  30:03

I just think she had the best lie of all of all human history. No, no, I'm a virgin an angel knocked me out

Preston Meyer  30:16

Yeah, that's that's more or less the story.

30:20

I swear

Katie Dooley  30:23

while making shifty eyes just

Preston Meyer  30:25

listing his Joseph's family did not like it one bit No. Otherwise. Right it would have been a lot easier for them to find a place to sleep when I went time to deal with the census and have a place to stay during Passover with family was one usually does.

Katie Dooley  30:45

Well, we'll get to the Nativity episode. But yeah, back to New Testament prophet Paul

Preston Meyer  30:53

is visited by Jesus on the road to Damascus, this council is prophecy. It's one of the more so prophecy depending on how, who you read and how you define things. You've got all kinds of levels of awesomeness of prophecy, and hearing a voice kind of minor, seeing a person and hearing their voice and being able to touch them. opposite end, best possible kind of prophecy level. And Paul, who hated Christians, because they were just the worst kind of why is the word blanking on me. heretics, heretics, Christians are the worst kind of heretics. And then he pulls the one ad and realizes Oh, I shouldn't be killing these heretic Christians because Jesus is real. And is the Son of God and is mighty and divine. So changes his life around because of this revelation that he has. And then you've got John the Revelator, which is, I mean, he is a prophet, he sees and reveals and serves as an Oracle for the divine. And he also, he and Paul warn of false prophets of a couple of different varieties. You've got prophets who do testify of Christ, for their own personal profit, with an F for their own financial gain. That kind of profit. But you've also got false prophets who deny Christ while also performing miracles. And that's also a problem for Christians. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  32:44

We are going to do an entire episode and our next episode is on the revelation. And it's a pretty big deal, because there's entire denominations of Christianity that just love that one book, which

Preston Meyer  32:55

I think is interesting that we'll get into a little bit more. The Revelation of John was widely considered as questionably authentic for a long time among Christians. So

Katie Dooley  33:09

I listened to it while I was working. Yeah, and I'll probably listen to it again. But considering you've like, seen that shitty 70s movie that I showed you. And then there's like the Left Behind series, I was like, so I was like, expecting, you know, obviously, they talk about the beast. I'm like, this isn't nearly as scary as like, these books and movies make it out to be I'm like, oh, no, it was two hours of content. Like, I just thought it'd be a lot more. Spooky. What? Right anyway. But we'll talk about that on our next episode. I don't want to Yeah, give too much away anyway.

Preston Meyer  33:54

What else we got?

Katie Dooley  33:55

I mean, we can move on to Islam, because theirs is an incredibly profit based. Yes. And that's the next chronologically and then we'll talk about Eastern

Preston Meyer  34:09

that even the noise you make for your quotation. So yeah, in Islam, prophecy is hugely important. Muhammad is the final prophet. For most Muslims. There are some Muslim denominations that accept more prophets after him. But that's not typical. But he is he's meant to be the last in the long chain. And they also do respect Jesus as a prophet, not as the Son of God, but as a prophet. Yeah. And there's even stories of Jesus in the Koran. Absolutely. There's even a book in the Quran dedicated to marry as well.

Katie Dooley  34:50

Interesting and in Yeah, but that's a big misconception is that somehow Muslims hate Christians and Christianity don't believe in Jesus say absolute We do write, have stories about it that aren't in the Bible.

Preston Meyer  35:04

I'm reminded of an interview I watched with Reza Aslan, he wrote a book, a great scholarly book on Jesus. Oh, that's on my list to read. Yeah. And he got dragged around so hard in all these interviews with all kinds of people, because he's Muslim writing about Jesus, and all these people who are either Christian or pseudo Christian and be like, Why are you reading about Jesus? If you're not a Christian? A lot

Katie Dooley  35:31

of the theories I saw were like, how can you write about Jesus as a Christian? He's like, because I am a scholar, right? Like, I can I can do this objectively and look at the research. And he does well. And as a Muslim, he believes Jesus existed and was a prophet. It was yes, I'm gonna go roll your eyes out of your head. Watch some of those interviews, because they're like, how can you do this as a Muslim? And he's like, because I'm a fucking scholar. Right? Like, that's like being like, how can you be a nutritionist and be a vegan? It's like, you can still understand the nutritional value of meat. Even if you choose not to eat it. Yeah.

Preston Meyer  36:17

Because I have teeth in a stomach. Thanks. Yeah,

36:19

I have a brain

Katie Dooley  36:21

that I can read about the nutritional value of meat. Like, I just I don't know if that was the best analogy. But yeah, it's like, because the information is out there. And honestly, at this point, 2000 years later, it's all just conjecture. Right? So all the information we have about Jesus is out there in the world. Yep. You want to go and condense that made me come up with some new theories. Anyone fucking do? It doesn't matter what your religion is. Yep. Okay. That's gonna get bowel pressing. You should have brought that up. I'm gonna get off my little soapbox. Step Step. I like I feel like he had another point to make that I just like steamrolled.

Preston Meyer  37:07

Yeah, so back to Islam. So the Quran is revelations received by Mohammed. So he is meant to have received all these revelations primarily through speaking with Gibreel, or the angel Gabriel. And prophecy is kind of the staple that holds the religion together just like it is with Islam or sorry, with, with Israel, the Judaism, with Christianity, we rely on the appearance of Jesus to people Peter receiving revelation for the church, Paul, John, so on. And then we've also got the non western non Abrahamic faiths that are also finding revelation and valuable Zoroastrianism which a lot of people like to point to as kind of the big changing influence on Israel while they were in exile that made their religion what it is today found prophets to be important, particularly Zarathustra, who, of course, is one of those fellows who likes to go into trances, which is terrible, not terribly uncommon for prophets around the world, especially those who like to use psychotropic assistance. Yep. And, I mean, I don't have any personal experience with psychotropic substances. But from what I've heard, that's a great way to become more empathetic with the world at large, I guess, and to feel closer to God, I guess, is the way it's described by an awful lot of people. Whatever their definition of God is that it seems to work. What else we got on our list? I know you did some research. I

Katie Dooley  39:10

was just gonna end that Zarathustra. So he's the founder. Isn't he? He wrote his the sacred writing. So Astron NISM. The Avesta is is a revelation from Him. So inspired writings, just like Buddhism from the Buddha. Which there's our segue. I

Preston Meyer  39:32

like it. So Buddha's an interesting example that we have an awful lot of these people who are either like, okay, families or noble families who go and serve in the king's court as prophets. And occasionally you'll have real humble folks who come up to bring messages to the kings court. And Siddhartha Gautama does is kind of the opposite. He grew up in a royal court, and then said Peace, by

40:06

the way, are you kidding me?

Preston Meyer  40:09

He left the royal court to go and experience life and recognize the depth of the things. He only seen surface level after escaping for one night and became a prophet almost in exile. I don't think that's a perfectly fair label on there, but I'm gonna use it anyway.

40:30

Okay.

Preston Meyer  40:33

So, I think it's novel that he is different in that way.

Katie Dooley  40:36

I think it's great. Girl Siddhartha right.

Preston Meyer  40:42

And we talked a little bit about one of his cool prophecies back when we were talking about this, the Buddha, the chubby Buddha, the Maitreya Buddha, and if you're comfortable with wild mispronunciations of names, the body Buddha, the Buddha, I Buddha, the chubby Laughing Buddha,

Katie Dooley  41:03

so that is his reincarnation that is supposed to happen sometime sometime.

Preston Meyer  41:07

We don't know when supposed to be after the World forgets Buddhism, which I mean. It's meant to be like, if the whole world forgets the correct Buddhism, or Buddhism altogether, one or the other. Then Maitreya, Buddha will come and restore it. Like don't forget

Katie Dooley  41:29

me. Yeah,

41:32

Green Giant.

Katie Dooley  41:36

I didn't find any revelation in Hinduism, but I didn't do a ton of digging.

Preston Meyer  41:40

So Hinduism, you've got the Vedas, and we don't have a lot of solid information about where the Vedas really came from who specifically wrote them or anything like that?

Katie Dooley  41:56

No, they come from God, the gods from

Preston Meyer  42:00

like, even the way that we have the Vedas. I mean, we have them through the people of India. Oh, yeah, absolutely. them from speeding Aryans, who probably did originate the Vedic religion. But we don't have a lot of information there. No.

Katie Dooley  42:20

Yeah. We're just totally came from Brahmins mouth.

Preston Meyer  42:24

Right. And so in, in day to day Hinduism, there isn't a lot of in mainstream Hinduism, there isn't a lot of prophetic figures, publicly, but there are plenty of groups that have shown up where a person shows up and he gets his charisma and

Katie Dooley  42:43

some that are pretty charismatic, I guess is the best way, though, even then the the gurus I can think of that have started, you know, we talked about Bhagwan in our cults episode, which is a Hindu cult. He didn't talk about prophecy. He was just sort of, again, this charismatic leader that people liked the way he presented his branch of Hinduism, but I don't think he had any prophecies, specifically, just a very communal

Preston Meyer  43:15

lifestyle, presented a way to live that worked out. But yeah, I

Katie Dooley  43:19

don't think he had any prophecy that people thought it was new and exciting. He was just happy. Yeah, exactly how he presented

Preston Meyer  43:30

the argument with the tricky thing is define defining the difference between inspiration and revelation. A loads would argue that he was inspired to start all this up. But I guess it depends on how you define inspired. But yeah, it didn't claim revelation.

Katie Dooley  43:52

We actually we skipped over it. The plane I started laughing at do we want to talk about what Yeah, can I ask my question? We're kind of we're sorry, we're kind of jumping back. But modern prophecy. I made a note of what does it mean to be filled with the Spirit. We see this a lot, obviously, being a Western Christian country, being filled with the Holy Spirit. And this is kind of, like Preston said, the Pentecostal having a close personal relationship with God, or God speaks to constantly have maybe we don't see it as you being a prophet, but God is speaking to you. So that was my question. What does it mean to be filled with the Holy Spirit?

Preston Meyer  44:35

So just as Christianity is wickedly diverse spectrum, there's an awful lot of different thoughts on what that means for some people. Can you even say that you're not filled with the Spirit if you're not rolling on the ground, just kind of wigging out. I mean, there's an all Have a lot of people that look like dementia patients when they're trying to show off that they've got the Spirit in them. And some people look like they're suffering from epilepsy. And other people are a lot more dignified and their behavior I guess. I mean,

Katie Dooley  45:16

you see people sobbing. Yeah. Again, if you're a Pentecostal, you speak in tongues. And then some people just like feel the spirit. And some

Preston Meyer  45:24

people just feel comfort and feel reassurance of truth and you're wanting to hold my hand. That is, yeah.

Katie Dooley  45:31

Do you feel the spirit in this room?

Preston Meyer  45:33

I feel love. And for a lot of people that's that's how they recognize that the spirit is there. Because we've been friends for a while. I feel loved when I'm here.

Katie Dooley  45:45

And I just made them hold my hand. I didn't hurt yeah, atheists don't burn, right? Yeah, just everyone knows

Preston Meyer  45:54

severe. So what it means to feel, nor to be filled with the Spirit. seems to vary a lot from person to person. But it's, it seems to me that it's a lot more useful. If it's reassuring ideas, and divine truths, then if it's causing you to roll around in a way that might cause you an injury or, or cause somebody to think less of you or your dignity. Maybe interesting.

Katie Dooley  46:28

We'll have to talk about Glock Glock gloss or gloss. Aliah are some I forget what the technical term for speaking in tongues is. There's a real okay, I'm good.

Preston Meyer  46:39

Okay. Oh, religiously? We just call it speaking in tongues. But no, there's a name for it. Not in my circles where I wander around but I believe you.

Katie Dooley  46:51

glossolalia the phenomenon of speaking in an unknown language especially in realistic religious worship glossolalia Okay, that's your Word of the Day.

Preston Meyer  47:05

That word is a mouthful. GloZell Ali

Katie Dooley  47:14

are bad people Preston.

Preston Meyer  47:18

just reminded me of the word eyeball phobia. It's a palindrome it's phobia. With phobia spelled backwards on the front of what is the phobia of it. It is the fear the irrational fear of palindromes are terrible. Some people who name them are just

Katie Dooley  47:39

there's a few of them that are just ridiculous.

Preston Meyer  47:41

Triscuit DECA phobia is kind of cool. It's the fear of the number 13. But it sounds way cooler than it is. It makes it sound like it's a legitimate thing to be properly afraid of. And if you're actually afraid of the number 13 You do have some sort of emotional problems that you probably need to see a professional for.

Katie Dooley  48:07

You're just dropping bombs.

48:12

So any final thoughts on prophecy?

Katie Dooley  48:15

The prophets? What do our listeners need to know? Be?

48:20

Be wary of false prophets

Preston Meyer  48:23

be wary of profits in general, okay. Cuz the reality is that nine times out of 10 You're gonna be able to prove easily with real investigation that there are false prophets. And I mean, I know that as an atheist, you don't believe there's any profits and that's Yeah, I'm

Katie Dooley  48:43

good. I'm already guarded. my loins are girded.

Preston Meyer  48:46

Right. And that's realistically a pretty safe position to stand in for speaking for your own safety. Like, you're not gonna be brought in by any crazy folks that are looking to take advantage with their prophecies. So it's, I think it's interesting to look at the things that people are prophesied. It's in my religious tradition, there's no hard fast rule that says nobody outside of our faith can receive prophecy. And for some people, that's not the way they see it. And that's, that's fine, I guess. But prophecy in general is a tricky thing. Something

Katie Dooley  49:33

tricky in religion, so

Preston Meyer  49:36

but if you're gonna predict anything, that's can be problematic, but prophecy can also be simply directing immediate action. And usually, that's kind of the purpose when you see oracles or augers or witch doctors in a royal court. That They're there to give that guidance and read omens when the reading omens bit sounds awfully tricky. It's interesting that in Judaism, divination is actually forbidden. You can't be casting bones and reading them or I'll throw

Katie Dooley  50:15

around cards. That's yeah, that's super frowned upon. We're gonna cover that. Yeah. So to Halloween, we have a whole spooky lineup for you.

Preston Meyer  50:23

It'll be some good fun. Yeah. So it's interesting that the way they deal with prophecy is deliberately don't rely on these physical physical objects that obviously are thrown by chance, and communicate with what feels right. In most cases, receiving dreams is common enough within the Hebrew tradition, a lot more with Northern Israel than southern Judah. Which I think is a kind of a weird distinction that ended up being a thing that we noticed. And guiding present action, based on what you see the need is makes an awful lot of sense. Whether that did in fact, come from a God or not. That kind of prophecy tends to be a lot more productive. But yeah, if somebody is trying to tell you, hey, you need to buy.

Katie Dooley  51:21

No, no, you need to sell all your stuff. Enjoy

Preston Meyer  51:24

me sell all your stuff, and give all of your money to this thing that isn't going to do you any good because the end of the world is coming. That is a scam 100% of the time. Prophecy is all right. I think it's cool, but like to look into it and study and see what things people are prophesied. I think it's nifty, but it's not a thing that you need to be stressing out about. Like if you go through your day to day life worried about a prophecy you heard?

Katie Dooley  51:57

Don't unless you're Harry Potter in the seventh book of the series. You don't need to worry about it.

Preston Meyer  52:04

Sure, but none of our listeners are the fictional character Harry Potter.

Katie Dooley  52:11

Harry Potter if you're listening please join our Discord.

Preston Meyer  52:17

Yeah, sure when I like it, I like it. Is that about it for subject to prophecy?

Katie Dooley  52:26

I think so. So we gotta we gotta do some sales now. Yeah, we

Preston Meyer  52:31

do. We would love to have you help support our podcast, keep it going for years to come. Patreon will help us make that possible. And we've also got our merch store Where's merch

Katie Dooley  52:44

store? Our merch store is Spreadshirt you can just search for Holly watermelon. And you can find all of those links and even better conversations on our Discord. All of those links will be in the description box. So we hope to see you on our Discord to continue this conversation. Peace be with you. 

"You're a saint" might not be such a big compliment once you hear this episode! There are a lot of saints in the Roman Catholic Church... we're talking about some more questionable ones!

In this episode, we’re talking about five Catholic saints that probably shouldn’t be saints.

Saint Barbara

While her story is interesting, we have no evidence that Barbara ever existed! 

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

Saint Bernard was really devoted to Mary. Like, a little too devoted. The miracle that got him canonized is an intimate dream her had about Mary feeding the baby Jesus and squirting some milk at Saint Bernard.

Saint Thomas Moore

A devout Catholic, Thomas Moore oppressed the Protestant reformation. He didn’t want anyone wrecking his version of Christianity so he even stopped the printing and distribution of the Bible in English by destroying buildings and printing presses. If you didn’t agree with his beliefs, well he had no problem using violence against you. 

Saint Junipero

Saint Junipero was a Catholic missionary that founded settlements across what is modern-day California. He was a big fan of corporal punishment and slave labour. As he converted the indigenous community of the region he forced them to do hard labour in cramped and unsanitary conditions. He was recently canonized by Pope Francis, who should’ve known better.

Mother Teresa

A literal monster, Mother Teresa created shelters for the sick and dying in Kolkata, India. However, she believed that suffering was a gift from God and that people should accept their suffering like Christ on the cross. Her mission raised hundreds of millions of dollars, but none of the money ever went to help the poor beyond sheltering them. She also baptized people without their consent to increase the numbers of the Catholic Church. She openly admitted in an interview that she didn’t do her work to help people, but rather to help the church. Oh yeah, and she would reuse needles on patients. 

In addition to chatting about saints that should be saints, we discuss the process of canonization in the Roman Catholic Church and the difference between veneration and worship (hint, there isn’t any!)

Support us at Patreon and Spreadshirt

Join the Community on Discord

Learn more great religion facts on Facebook and Instagram

*******

Katie Dooley  00:12

Hi, Katie. How are you? Oh, great.

Preston Meyer  00:15

Excellent. Ready

Katie Dooley  00:16

to record another episode of

Preston Meyer  00:19

this the holy watermelon podcast? Absolutely, I am. Man, I've put a lot of work into studying this subject today actually

Katie Dooley  00:28

did so much and I've done so little. I'll just chime in with charming quips and and that's how I'll probably do this. I think I'll introduce it because I don't for it heart. Yeah. This is all person's idea. We're kind of going off of our path. We've we really thought methodically about what the next episode in the next episode next episode will be. And there's just so much content to cover on this topic. We didn't really know what to pick. So it's sort of throw a dart at a wall.

Preston Meyer  01:01

We used a couple of ideas here and there. And I feel like an episode or two ago, I teased what this one was going to be yes.

Katie Dooley  01:09

So today, we're talking about saints. That shouldn't be saints.

Preston Meyer  01:17

Yeah, there's there's a lot of complicated business around sainthood. Specifically, we're talking about the saints of the Roman Catholic tradition. Their the, their tradition is the most well recognized. system of saints were saints mean something.

Katie Dooley  01:36

Yeah, we haven't dived into Catholicism specifically, we had our Messiah Complex episode Christianity as a whole. But yeah, saints are huge in the Roman Catholic Church to the point where they're near deities, people pray specifically to their patron saint.

Preston Meyer  01:56

Yeah. It's, it's a behavior that is called veneration, but looks an awful lot like worship to me. We'll get into that a little bit later.

Katie Dooley  02:08

I figured we would start the episode with how does one even become a saint? So that we have a it's, how do I put this, you don't just become a saint from being a good person? Because that's what this entire episode is about. So how do you become a saint, if it's not just from being a good person,

Preston Meyer  02:32

you got to be recognized as holy. Ultimately, that's what the word Saint means is holy, set apart and sanctified different from the rest of the congregation, at least in the Catholic tradition in the Lutheran tradition and the Orthodox tradition, it's more of a if you made it into heaven, you're a saint and you just happen to be recognized as a saint. The Catholic Church makes saints Yes,

Katie Dooley  02:54

it's a it's a five or six step process. Number one, you have to be dead. And typically, you have to be dead for at least five years before you become a saint. It's a some saints wait hundreds of years before becoming sainted. And there are two modern exceptions where the five year period was not wait waited for we didn't not English, the five year period was not

Preston Meyer  03:24

it was not observed. It was weird. Thank

Katie Dooley  03:26

you. That's Thank you. And that is with Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul both have their five year waiting periods where I like

Preston Meyer  03:35

one of these a lot more than the other. And

Katie Dooley  03:37

even then I don't really like neither of them particularly.

Preston Meyer  03:41

We both have their weaknesses, for sure. We'll address one of them specifically today as being awful.

Katie Dooley  03:51

So you're dead. You've been dead for five years. And at that point, your life is reviewed by a committee to see if you are virtuous enough, including character witnesses that can speak to how you were in life, to your good deeds.

Preston Meyer  04:07

I think it's interesting that they're they take this process very seriously to the point that there is actually a designated devil's advocate who shows up and criticizes the entire process criticizes every aspect of the person's life. I would

Katie Dooley  04:24

love that job. You know, who wouldn't become a saint? I was devil's advocate.

Preston Meyer  04:29

Anyone on this list? Anyone at all?

Katie Dooley  04:33

I mean, there's I'm sure some though, are

Preston Meyer  04:38

worthy. There are some people who are good enough to stand up to scrutiny for sure, but not

Katie Dooley  04:42

these ones. After you've been reviewed, there is the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, though they they're the ones who review your case file, and if it passes, it then gets passed to the pope himself. So in this case, Pope Francis

Preston Meyer  05:01

Can you imagine if they didn't have that step in between and he got bombarded with every request for sainthood already too busy? Yeah. How nice to have a middleman

Katie Dooley  05:11

for this particular also running a country and a worldwide church.

Preston Meyer  05:15

Is he really running the country? And is that really a heavy burden?

Katie Dooley  05:21

I saw great. We'll have to do a separate episode explainer video on how the Vatican, the Vatican the church works and how the Vatican the country works. And then the Holy See is the Pope. But it's like, honestly, it's like the trend

Preston Meyer  05:39

is super complicated convoluted. The

Katie Dooley  05:40

explanation is that the Pope is the Holy See is the Vatican is anyway,

Preston Meyer  05:45

he's the ultimate authority. But like, as far as what he does, compared to say, a governor or a mayor, I don't think there's actually a lot of overlap.

Katie Dooley  05:55

But it's so different because his his citizens air quotes, their clergy, clergy and their worldwide. So in some ways, it's vaster than

Preston Meyer  06:07

the Imperial authority of the Church is definitely a subject for another.

Katie Dooley  06:12

we digress. So once it gets into the Pope's hands, and he thinks it's cool, the next step is called beatification.

Preston Meyer  06:22

I like that you said it, right? I, I'm gonna be honest, for my first many years going to church, this word was not a word that I could say, I'm not sound like an idiot.

Katie Dooley  06:33

There's no, there's a few actually really good documentaries on the Vatican. There's a PBS special on the Vatican Vatican. So that's how I know how to save Yeah, nice. I like it. This is basically the pope declaring that your departed soul is in a state of bliss, and that you are worthy of public veneration so that people are, it's cool if they venerate slash worship. While you're alive, a miracle must be attributed to you. Unless you're a murderer, which I don't know if we have too many martyrs kicking around anymore, but

Preston Meyer  07:14

not lately. But there are some from time to time.

Katie Dooley  07:21

So murderers, you don't need a miracle link to you. But if you're not a murderer, died of natural causes, and not for the cause. You do need a miracle from your life with verified eyewitnesses. So we're gonna talk about some of those miracles

Preston Meyer  07:38

today. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  07:43

After beatification is canonizing. So this is when you'd actually be called Think, fill in the blank,

Preston Meyer  07:48

you get to be added to the list, you get a special feast day. It's kind of sweet. Yeah, I mean, you're dead for it. But whatever

Katie Dooley  07:55

you make, you actually get to enjoy it, but everyone else does. The so canonization when you reach the stage, a second miracle needs to be attributed to you, based off of someone venerating or praying to you. So they prayed to you, their prayers came true, this miracle happened. You are now worthy to be canonized again, if you're a murderer, you don't need to the pre death miracle but the post death, veneration praying miracle does still need to happen. And then you are candidates and you now get to become a saint in this huge ceremony. It's actually remarkable. I would maybe it was the same PBS documentary they actually show the setup for the I forget what the event is called. But basically the big St. Reveal day and it's remarkable, all the work that goes in and money that goes into announcing the new new saints.

Preston Meyer  08:55

Yeah, guess kind of cool stuff. I think it's interesting that the Catholic Church create saints and the criteria. It does line up well enough with the way other churches who worry about saints established the idea that a person is a saint, and Lutheranism Anglicanism the Orthodox churches, a saint to somebody who is in heaven. If you didn't make it to heaven, you're not a saint. And the Catholic Church has this system that verifies that person has actually caused something to happen from heaven or come to visit to create this miracle, whatever that miracle is, whoever did it. It's an interesting phenomenon to study for sure. But we've got to I've picked out a handful of some of my favorite ish favorites, a weird word. I really enjoy talking about some of these odd saints. The first on my list was St. Barbara, Santa Barbara, well enough known city named after her. In the Orthodox tradition, she's known as the Great Martyr Barbara. What an interesting figure. She was the daughter of a very rich man in the fourth century, her father kept her in a tower to keep her from being defiled by the world. This included Christians, her father was not a Christian. Oh, he wanted to protect her from the Christians. He was furious when he found out that she had secretly become a Christian. How that happened varies depending on who's telling the story. It shouldn't happen if she would like to lay in a tower. But the story gets more interesting. So when her father drew his sword to kill her for being a Christian, she prayed out and created an opening in the wall. And she went through the wall and was miraculously transported to a mountain gorge. Wow, she teleported out of the tower to someplace else. Our princess locked away in the tower, transported somewhere far away. And then her father chased her through the hole is usually meant to be understood as part of the story, I don't think he would have went a different way, which is sometimes left nebulous. And a shepherd was kind enough to her father, I guess, to reveal where she had gone. And so God cursed him, turned him to stone turned all of his sheep into locusts. Cuz, you know, your sheep don't matter anymore. Because you're gone. You're turned into stone. And she eventually got caught, she got locked away, and she was beaten fiercely every single day. But every morning, she woke up fully healed Wolverine. This girl's got a wicked healing factor. And after she was beheaded, her father was struck by lightning and his body disappeared in the flame that immediately followed a whole bunch of miracle surrounding this great story, right. Epic Story. Problem is, none of its true. We have, we have no evidence. We have no evidence that Barbara ever existed. Oh, not at all her story. Remember, she was supposed to have lived in the fourth century, three hundreds in the Common Era. And she's never mentioned in any literature before the seventh century. We got 300 years of nobody talks about her. And then bam, she's here. She's not mentioned in any of the early editions of Jerome's Martyrology, and we've we've, we don't have any reason to believe she existed at all. But she was a popular saint, revered by the church for ages and ages.

Katie Dooley  13:19

Can I read this pilot since I can't contribute anything else?

Preston Meyer  13:21

Yeah, go for it. Okay. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  13:25

Barbara, St. Barbara is the patron saint of Lebanon, armors architects, artillery men, firefighters, mathematicians, a miners, tunnelers. Light lightning, chemical engineers, prisoners and the Russian missile Strategic Forces. Yeah, she's just a fighter. Here's what I'm getting.

Preston Meyer  13:48

So, I mean, I pulled this list off of Wikipedia. But I went looking further into how she is connected to these things. Basically, anything that was connected to digging, because she went through the hole in the wall. She's connected to any job that's connected to digging, which is how you got your tunnellers. And then when digging started involving dynamite, they added anything that uses explosives and

Katie Dooley  14:17

Quick Fire started from the dynamite without firefighters yet a whole

Preston Meyer  14:20

lot of jobs just kind of got tacked on to the side of that one by one. I don't have any real knowledge personally firsthand, secondhand of the Russian missile strategic forces, choosing her as a patron saint, but it's not weird.

Katie Dooley  14:42

I mean, Russia is an atheistic country. So that is a little weird.

Preston Meyer  14:46

I mean, as a nation, they're an atheist nation. But there's still an awful lot of Christians in the country if you

Katie Dooley  14:51

were in the mythical Strategic Force and you need to pick a saint to pray to fair.

Preston Meyer  14:55

Yeah, I mean, no one and their governments a lot less Hardcore atheists than the previous Russian government. That's true. So, in 1969, her feast day was revoked the Catholic Church said, Well, we have an awkward relationship with this saint. You don't have a feast day anymore. She's still on the canonized list of saints. Even though she's getting to be more widely recognized as a fictitious figure,

Katie Dooley  15:31

who celebrates the feast days like if you're a devout Catholic, would you ever be feasting? Because that's probably every day or would you do it only if you were an artilleryman? Every day, that's an exam as

Preston Meyer  15:42

far as I've experienced the Catholic tradition, you usually only worry about a handful of saints. No, I don't know of anybody who pays attention to every single feast day for the saints and celebrates it. You've certainly got a handful of people who have the st day calendar kind of thing. But that's not typical.

Katie Dooley  16:05

St. George's Day St. Patrick's Day. At the big ones. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  16:08

we've everybody who is aware of saints to any degree at all recognizes at least one day that is a same day.

Katie Dooley  16:21

And it is them like the Valentine Oh, yeah. Well,

Preston Meyer  16:25

to say we haven't mastered how to St. Patrick's Day is a problem.

Katie Dooley  16:30

At least we keep it Irish,

Preston Meyer  16:32

do we? Yeah. So as we're looking through these saints, we're not worried about saints who were kind of crappy people and then change their lives around to become more worthy of the title. Worried about these people who really probably just shouldn't have been sainted.

Katie Dooley  16:57

Yes. While they were doing their saintly duties, they were bad dude. Oh, St. Bernard. I love St. St. Bernard.

Preston Meyer  17:09

I don't even remember where I first heard about St. Bernard of Clairvaux. But he is an odd duck. So this is not the St. Bernard after whom the dog breed is named. That is St. Bernard of Marathon. He was a crusader era hospitalar who died just before just a few years before this St. Bernard was brought on that

Katie Dooley  17:29

makes sense because St. Bernards are rescue dogs, right? But not the St. Bernard. No,

Preston Meyer  17:34

no St. Bernard of Clairvaux is not a rescuer so much, though, if you want to keep the image of a dog slobbering in your mind as we go forward. That's not an appropriate to the subject at hand. This Bernard was born in Burgundy around 1090 According to what I've been able to find, they haven't actually nailed it down. 100% But that's okay. We've got a pretty narrow window. The old Yes, 1000 years ago, almost. So he was connected to the famous Knights Templar at their foundation. I think, going off a memory now. I think it was his uncle who was actually the founder and he helped out writing some of their documentation, which is kind of cool. Not quite a thing that is worthy of sainthood. In my opinion, people may disagree and that's fine. He supported Pope Innocent the second and help him defeat anti Pope and Cletus the second, which may have earned him some favor. But it's definitely not what made them special. That slavery dog keep that image in your mind? No. So Bernard was way too devoted to a high Mariology he was really interested in seeing Mary as the intercessor instead of Gee, like,

Katie Dooley  18:52

really interesting.

Preston Meyer  18:54

Yeah. Oh man, our guy struggled perpetually with horniness, to the point that he seriously considered living a life of solitude. But he apparently couldn't manage it on everything. So the great tradition that surrounds this fella has inspired a lot of Renaissance art that reveals his struggle. The story is very on whether he was awake and praying in front of an image of Mary or whether he was asleep and dreaming. But either way, he sees Mary feeding a baby Jesus in the way that a mother does on regular nursing. And the baby takes a break from the nip. And Mary shoots Bernard a little squirt of milk and gets it right in his mouth like a champ. Or according some stories, just puts a little bit on him with her thumb or something. Kinda right. And the moral of the story is it changes depending on who you ask as well. So Sometimes marry is meant to be seen as a stand in mother for Bernards real mother who had died when he was 19. Or, and by extension, the universal mother of humanity. There's also a story that the milk cured his eye infection, which might be a euphemism for lecherous snus, hard to say for sure. Some people just say the milk represents wisdom more generally.

Katie Dooley  20:27

But in actuality,

Preston Meyer  20:31

our boy had a wet dream, and didn't have the sense to keep it to himself and got seated for this miracle.

Katie Dooley  20:41

The moral of the story is, we've all experienced a miracle. So YouTube can be so great. TMI

Preston Meyer  20:56

fright. Like I'm trying to imagine any situation where you need to go and tell your friends about this situation.

Katie Dooley  21:06

But then his friends be like, that's really great for you, Bernard, and they told other people the pope do about this actually.

Preston Meyer  21:15

Because obviously, Mary actually appeared to you and gave you some of her milk. When I mean, the the idea of this is certainly anachronous Baby Jesus stopped being a thing 1000 years before he died as an adult. 1000 years before? Yeah, so weird stuff. Our boy Bernard of Clairvaux was canonized in 1174. His feast day is August 20. Don't think too hard about the feast?

Katie Dooley  21:48

At all milk isn't milk shakes. I love it.

Preston Meyer  21:55

Most saints don't have a specific feast of this is what you're supposed to be feasting on. I

Katie Dooley  21:59

hope he St. Bernard is the patron saint of a purist's candle makers. sterian monks and a handful of cities and the Knights Templar. But not cows.

Preston Meyer  22:19

No, not cows. Nobody wants to make that parallel between Mother Mary. Fair. Well, Hindus are a ok with approximating cows to divinity. Catholics are not exactly comfortable with that. Too bad. But he's an interesting fellow. St. Bernard of clarify. Oh, and as wet dream

Katie Dooley  22:39

is interesting.

Preston Meyer  22:42

I'm sorry, I didn't understand.

Katie Dooley  22:45

I said it's interesting the word we would use.

Preston Meyer  22:48

Well, we both thought it was interesting enough to include and share with our audience. It was gross. Yeah, that's the way it goes. All right. I've talked to you guys a little bit about this guy before.

Katie Dooley  23:05

Yeah, he came up in our atheist episode. Yes.

Preston Meyer  23:09

He was our theistic humanist, or so he liked to tell people. Sir Thomas Moore was an English lawyer and a social philosopher in the first half of the 16th century. He served as the Lord High Chancellor to King Henry the eighth. Yeah. King Henry of the many wives fame.

Katie Dooley  23:31

Yeah, he's in the there's a Yeah, he's prominently featured in the tutor series. Thomas. Yeah, yeah, he's a big player.

Preston Meyer  23:38

Yeah. And he's a he's an interesting fella. He's not a dummy. That's for sure. He was present when King Henry the Eighth started the Church of England. He was not a fan. Huge, so very devoted Catholic, he oppressed the Protestant Reformation as any good Catholic would have. And he was killed for opposing the Kings self appoint? For Yeah, opposing the king self appointment. As head of the right. He was, yeah, he hated the idea of change in the church, and believe that the publication of the Bible was a crime against the church, and that its translation into English was a crime against God.

Katie Dooley  24:19

I mean, I see both sides. Because even just looking at the difference in the English translations, they're vast, and there's so much different meaning and connotations you can take from the translations and we see that in Islam where they keep it in. I mean, not that you can't get tradition or translations rather, but they keep it in the Arabic as much as possible because that was the Word of God. So I see it but also want to make your stressful to the people you're converting,

Preston Meyer  24:52

right. I've got a Koran and it's got the Arabic and then an English translation. Without the Arabic it's not a Actually the Koran. And if somebody wanted to make that argument for the Bible, I wouldn't say that it's a bad position to hold. There's a lot of King James Version supremacy for the Bible, which makes no sense at all. But

Katie Dooley  25:16

that reminds me of a story. I'll have to tell you off air.

Preston Meyer  25:19

All right, I look forward to it. I have versions of the Bible that come with the Greek text and the Hebrew text in the same book. So if we want to keep that standard, my library holds up. So our guy, he went to great effort to suppress Tyndale English New Testament, He destroyed buildings and presses, and anything you get his hands on that would have helped the Protestant effort. He would torture people for questioning the church or its dogma. He came to child for heresy against the Eucharist. Now, I've been a child who questioned things. I've seen children question things more recently. And the idea of a child committing heresy against the Eucharist. In reality sounds an awful lot like it was this bread really the body of Jesus? And the kid got caned. It may have been worse. I seriously doubt it.

Katie Dooley  26:23

No, kids were pretty tame back then. Because of the beatings, right.

Preston Meyer  26:30

So our guy Thomas Moore, Sir Thomas Moore, because he was knighted, being a Lord High Chancellor and all. Back when the king was Catholic, he didn't see any problem in punishing people for not believing something. We've, in our episode about secularism, and our episode about belief, and a few other episodes. We've talked about how this is a problematic behavior. Yes.

Katie Dooley  26:53

Correct. Very, who I was glad he wasn't any more powerful than he was because he was already plenty powerful,

Preston Meyer  27:03

right? Not cool, good devotional, the church makes a fair argument for celebration within that community. But considering his character and deeds, I wouldn't say he's worthy of veneration Who

Katie Dooley  27:16

are these eyewitnesses that talk to the congregation of causes

Preston Meyer  27:22

while he was? Okay. I don't know what his miracles are. I couldn't find them. Apart from martyrdom, that is the fast track to sainthood, well, then he

Katie Dooley  27:32

would need a miracle. And until post post mortem, right.

Preston Meyer  27:37

And that's the tricky thing. So he was canonized in 1935. Wow. So

Katie Dooley  27:42

recently,

Preston Meyer  27:44

I mean, less than 100 years

Katie Dooley  27:45

ago, for us to know better. This is what I'm saying now, like, 400 years after he died, like not five years after they die when he was like, oh, yeah, I write to caning children. Right? Like, I mean, maybe 95. We still can't.

Preston Meyer  27:59

Oh, for sure.

Katie Dooley  28:01

But still, I feel like we should know better. 1935

Preston Meyer  28:03

his feast day is on July 9, it was moved to June 22. In 1970. For some reason, I couldn't find why. The thing that really gets me though, this guy devoted Catholic, died because of his opposition to the king, who had started his own church, the Church of England. Our boy, St. Thomas Moore, is revered in the Church of England, commemorated on July 6, the anniversary of his martyrdom? I don't know. I still don't know. It is upsetting. I don't. His character doesn't explain to me why the Catholics would have sainted him. And his whole life's mission makes it mind boggling that the Anglicans would have been honored to be recognized as a saint. It's, it's frustrating to me.

Katie Dooley  29:01

And then this next part is frustrating where in 2000, Pope John Paul the second declared St. Thomas Moore, the heavenly patron, a statesman and politicians again, where we should have known better also that doesn't speak highly of statesmen and politicians. Like this is like a double insults. He's also the patron saint of a couple universities and a couple diocese. But that that really, as a if I were a politician, I would be offended.

Preston Meyer  29:36

I mean, I recognize that an awful lot of politicians wish they had more power than they do. And our boy Thomas Moore was very much a fan of authoritarianism.

Katie Dooley  29:49

Yes, I can tell. He makes me uncomfortable. Yeah, but I do want to rewatch the tutors now.

Preston Meyer  29:59

Yeah, well Oh, our next st. St. Hoon Ibero. Sarah Oh, great

Katie Dooley  30:05

pronunciation when your pero

Preston Meyer  30:08

so I'm going to be honest, every time I've read it to myself in my head while I was preparing this I've always said Junipero in my head. It is spelled with a J. But it's when apparel when apparel love it or St. Juniper is it occasionally comes up with that name is actually meant for somebody else who an apparel. Sarah was a Catholic missionary in the late 1770s and 80s. In what is now California, we got ourselves an American almost, except at this time, this was not the United States of America. It was just North America, more Mexico was straight up was Mexico, that there's no halfway is about that. He founded nine Catholic settlements from San Diego to San Francisco. And he did it to bring natives to their farms and baptize them. Which I mean, if you're a missionary, that's that's your goal to baptize people. And I'll recognize and admit that, in his baptizing work of growing the church is definitely the number one reason why people were interested in having him canonized. But there's baggage with this. The native people were forced to stay and work

Katie Dooley  31:27

from Central American.

Preston Meyer  31:29

Yeah, all of the literally anybody who was not European, he did not treat like they were people. Oh, apart from his need to save them. The problem this guy was a huge fan of slave labor. Keep these people working. Remember when he talked about some of our red flags for cults? This is one of those situations where the church looks an awful lot like an authoritarian cult. This guy's work is unnerving. While the pope who canonized him claimed that Sarah was a priest who protected the dignity of native communities from abusers as he developed Catholicism in the New World Hoonah pero Sara's own writings in 1780 advocate his use of corporal punishment, just not for like big crimes, but just to maintain control over new converts. That's a problem.

Katie Dooley  32:28

I mean, we probably I don't know if any of them had been sainted. But this is just the Catholics in the residential schools. This is basically I don't know if they had been formalized in the 1770s. But this is definitely a precursor to what is about to happen. In the United States, Canada. Yeah. To native populations. Well, all.

Preston Meyer  32:52

Yeah. He was only canonized by Pope Francis Pope Francis 2015.

Katie Dooley  32:59

You're better than this very recent. Pope Francis, you're the cool Pope.

Preston Meyer  33:05

Which makes me think that the devil's advocate that they chose for this guy did a very poor job.

Katie Dooley  33:12

Can I call Francis,

Preston Meyer  33:15

you can try. Where do you find his number?

Katie Dooley  33:18

How many phone numbers? Can I read the country that's small?

Preston Meyer  33:24

That's no idea.

Katie Dooley  33:26

Their own area code. They probably have the generic, but I'm gonna pretend that the Vatican has its own phone area code.

Preston Meyer  33:33

Okay. Yeah, so Hoonah Barrows feast day is August 28. And also July 1, if you're American, I guess. I don't know why. When I found this in my initial research, I thought, there's this gotta be somebody failed at the research. No, I dug deep and for some reason, in America, he has a second feast day. He is well liked by some people and viciously hated by others.

Katie Dooley  34:05

I don't blame the second group. He is the patron saint of California, Hispanic Americans and religious vocations. he's gross. That is St. Quinn apparel, Sarah.

Preston Meyer  34:26

Yeah. Well, a guy. Gross, not a guy that I would have scented.

Katie Dooley  34:35

I just really want to call Pope Francis and be like, Please, tell me why.

Preston Meyer  34:40

Right? What an odd choice. Now Now I'm curious who the patron saint of California was before he was sainted six years ago.

Katie Dooley  34:51

I'll do some Googling when we're doing

Preston Meyer  34:53

well, anyway, our next one. Is this our last one? This is our last one are the climax So our list, I didn't know any of the things that I have learned about this woman

Katie Dooley  35:07

I want to jump in.

Preston Meyer  35:10

So for years, I just heard that she's so nice. She's just a wonderful woman. And that's the way the news painted her when we were kids.

Katie Dooley  35:20

And so Preston came to me whenever and said, I want to do an episode on St. St. Shouldn't be saints. And I said, You mean like Mother Teresa. And he was like, Excuse me? And I was like, She's literally the worst person. And he was like, No, I'm in like St. Bernard's wet dream. And I was like, Oh, that's cute. Well, we're gonna add Mother Teresa. Because, ah,

Preston Meyer  35:43

turns out, she's just awful. I looked into it. I've like, awful Oh, I don't like what I found no. And so as I looked into it, the guy who played devil's advocate, apparently there was more than one for this woman. And they are vicious. They pull out all of the awful things. That is her ministry. And they still went ahead and painted her.

Katie Dooley  36:16

Yeah, because it's not about being a good person. As we said, it's about doing something for the church that is divine. And that doesn't necessarily need to be a good thing.

Preston Meyer  36:28

Right. All right. So her real name, I can see you struggling with how it's there. And so she's an Albanian Indian woman. And her name is Ania. Reza, gon J. Boy Jew that's that's as close as I'm gonna get. I know it's not perfect on not Albanian. But I tried real hard. I feel I did good. That's her name. Go from here on out. We're just gonna call her mother Teresa, because it was way easier. Yeah, so she was born in Ottoman Macedonia in 1910. And after the Second World War, she had lived through the First and Second World Wars. After the Second World War, she decided to start a missionary congregation called the Missionaries of Charity. Because charity being the love of God, that He spreads to all mankind, and their job is to manage homes for people who suffer with AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis

Katie Dooley  37:34

Sounds good so far, but it gets worse.

Preston Meyer  37:39

It really does. These missionaries swear vows of chastity, pretty standard. Poverty, kind of sketchy, and obedience. Sounds kind of culty

Katie Dooley  37:51

this is where I get really rankled about Mother Teresa, what do you got a Mother Teresa, I believe that the Sikh must suffer like Christ on the cross. And that suffering was a gift from God. And that is basically like her entire thing and it carries out throughout. You should be poor because it's godly. You should be sick and sad and horrible because it's godly. And we'll get into more detail. But basically, she kept people in that state because that's what she thought was the holy, godly way to be,

Preston Meyer  38:27

but she sheltered them. Katie is literally all she did.

Katie Dooley  38:33

Let me put a tarp over your head, doing something. Sorry, get really upset.

Preston Meyer  38:39

They had a place. They had a place to be while they suffered. Oh. Her facilities were built to store the sick and the dying. They were not hospices, no care is just okay. There was some care. They shared needles a lot. has AIDS or leprosy or tuberculosis? Can you

Katie Dooley  39:07

share leprosy and tuberculosis through needles.

Preston Meyer  39:10

Leprosy probably laid leads, obviously, we know that tuberculosis is mostly airborne nonsense. And when you've got them pack ly tight together under a tarp, everyone

Katie Dooley  39:22

has AIDS in that proceeding. It's not aids or leprosy or tuberculosis. It's all of the above all three.

Preston Meyer  39:30

And you know, the full gamut of everything else running rampant through India. This is a very poor country at this point in history. Broadly speaking, of course, there's rich spots in every country. We see our ads for save all the poor African kids every country in Africa has a place where people with money are But broadly speaking, these nations are quite poor, especially in the 70s and 80s, when Mother Teresa was most famous for doing actively actively doing stuff.

Katie Dooley  40:03

Yeah, that's about it. Thanks for doing stuff.

Preston Meyer  40:08

Yeah, I mean, you said, you know, she helped people. And that would be true if helping people didn't include doing things for them. It's just our claim that people need to suffer like Christ on the cross, that it's a gift from God is something that I'm super uncomfortable with, doesn't

Katie Dooley  40:36

just downplay all the gifts God has given us in, in the sense of He's given us brains and knowledge and two, technologically advanced science and medicine and

Preston Meyer  40:50

almost to this degree thing, the irony of this wonderful little ball of awful that is Theresa, is that while she was happy to say that about other people, she would not suffer herself in silence. She had a serious heart condition, one that would have killed her a couple of times, if not for wonderful top notch medical care, that she refused to let the people in her care get the president,

Katie Dooley  41:22

how did she get the money, she took a vow of poverty.

Preston Meyer  41:28

Oh, man, they had active fundraisers, people donated huge amounts of money, specifically, specifically to Hermitian Missionaries of Charity. And though it's hard to get any statements about a church's money, especially the Roman Catholic Church that likes to keep secrets, even even India, where she operated for most of her life, they have laws that say that, if they ask, you have to tell them how much your charity holds, and they never reveal that information to the government. But we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars on a regular basis. Money was donated in huge piles. And we don't know where it went because it wasn't going to take care of these poor people. It wasn't going to build schools, which she did actually say was happening.

Katie Dooley  42:29

Because do you imagine that difference she could have actually made

Preston Meyer  42:32

if she was actually worthy of the center that was offered her this world would be a much better place?

Katie Dooley  42:39

Because Kolkata is still a rough city in India, like she could have transformed it.

Preston Meyer  42:44

It's Kolkata now. Even though Okay, so she's St. Teresa of Calcutta, the diocese is still the Diocese of Calcutta. The Catholic Church is not upgraded or updated their names for the for this place. Well, to be fair, Kolkata took a long time to change their name after they became an independent nation from England. But when they did, everybody else should have gone along with it. It's it's weirder to say Kolkata with O's than the US, Canada, Calcutta sounds more familiar to the English tongue. But Kolkata is not that hard to say. It's it's really frustrating. So these facilities she she was responsible for were run by undereducated nuns, who you can say that part of the problem is attributed to the poverty of the nation that they come from. Yeah, that makes sense. Apart from the fact that they're super well funded. And they have several missions around the world that operate pretty much the same way. It's, I don't think it's okay. But her efforts were famous around the world, her mission raised hundreds of millions of dollars for decades. None of that money was used for helping the poor. It was used to support missionary conversion efforts. Look at us, we're doing stuff we're here. So you could you should come join our church.

Katie Dooley  44:28

See, and that's even a problem I still have. I need to be careful. I need to be careful how I phrase this, but any religious charities like the one that comes to mind is World Vision, where it's like how much is actually going to help the kids and how much is just going to religious education and conversion.

Preston Meyer  44:45

Well, and with this specific example, an awful lot of it goes to pay the staff and the advertising fees. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  44:51

And I mean, I guess if you are a Christian giving to World Vision, the fact that people are being converted is probably very important to you. Make sense? But It's not something in that I want my dollars going to,

Preston Meyer  45:04

right. What's further interesting to me is like all of this money is going towards missionary efforts, not to the missionaries themselves, they've also made, they've made vows of poverty as well.

Katie Dooley  45:16

So it's all we're in advertising and marketing,

Preston Meyer  45:19

I guess.

Katie Dooley  45:22

I mean, they must have had a good PR campaign, because if you were giving hundreds of millions of dollars, and nothing was getting done, when you start to wonder where your money was going, but there, there's been in that real,

Preston Meyer  45:35

I spent more time than is responsible, trying to figure out how much money this really is, and where it is, now that she's gone. And

Katie Dooley  45:46

I think that is responsible. I mean, you're not kidding. The amount

Preston Meyer  45:49

of time I put into digging through this rabbit hole is questionable. If you're a Catholic, you should question your authority. Fair enough. And while that's nobody's willing to report the actual numbers, there's more than one source that says if Saint Teresa had pulled out all of her money before she died, the church would be broke.

Katie Dooley  46:11

What?

Preston Meyer  46:13

Yeah, cool. I don't know if that's true. The idea of it makes me uncomfortable.

Katie Dooley  46:26

Knowing how much money the Catholic Church has. That is a scary thought.

Preston Meyer  46:33

Right? I mean, and we only know in vague ideas being the money. Yeah. We don't know specifically how much money the Catholic Church has. Because that's, that's not a thing for outsiders to know. But being the biggest single church, that as far as I'm able to observe, they have a lot of money.

Katie Dooley  46:54

Yeah, I'd be interested to go down this rabbit hole, because I know they're starting to run into problems. So we weren't set up for our one off episodes, or bonus episodes yet. But probably three or four months ago, a diocese in the States was bailed out by the government, which is a gross breach of the separation of church and state. It was also a diocese that had sexual abuse allegations, which makes it even worse.

Preston Meyer  47:22

So that was when they were going broke. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  47:26

So they were bailed out. And then I was reading a book, basically saying that, you know, there's no money to going going, like clergy don't make any money. Nobody wants to join the clergy. And people are leaving the Catholic Church in droves. And the clergy can't support like they used to, so they're not becoming a part of everyday life in a way that might make a young boy want to become a priest. Yeah, they're just like very overstretched. So I'm not surprised, but I still think they have a ton of money.

Preston Meyer  47:58

Right. But they can only hand out so much to each individual diocese, a little bit more to the Archdiocese. And ultimately, the people see you gets the big bucks. Yeah. So it's, I'm uncomfortable with a lot of things here. But yeah, I have listed here again, I need to re emphasize, they were reusing needles after just running them through cold water. Like that's. So we do know, there was some care. But we're not talking like hospice care. We're talking like, keep you alive care. Yeah. And just a little bit along. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  48:48

So people think we're doing something. Yeah.

Preston Meyer  48:51

It's very uncomfortable. They could easily have built a hospital with the money they got, they could have paid for real doctors and nurses, rather than severely under trained nuns, to take care of the medical trained your nuns with hundreds of millions they could have they could have they didn't. Yeah, I mean, they do do that in some countries. We have Catholic hospitals here in places where we already have other hospitals. Some Catholic hospitals where they need hospitals.

Katie Dooley  49:31

Yeah. Even you know, I obviously I would prefer secular care. But if it was a real Catholic hospital, and she was helping people fine, right, but that's not what's going on here. We're evil reusing syringes.

Preston Meyer  49:43

But so I had some fun looking into this. All kinds of things I learned because you brought it up and I didn't know that she was awful. She never paid for anything.

Katie Dooley  49:55

I can see that just like a real deal.

Preston Meyer  49:59

That's the way People described her once. When she wanted a building, she wouldn't offer money, even though she had lots of it with all these donations coming her way, she would work with the owner. She would work them around until he just gave in and gave her the building when she said she wanted it. Which, I mean, okay, that's a actually kind of common enough practice in churches that if you get somebody to believe in your cause they'll donate to Sure, fine. She did damage to some of these cases. What's more interesting is a story I found when once she she was in London, and she had collected about 500 pounds that, you know, your English dollars pounds, not pounds, not kilograms, pounds. Yeah. 500 pounds of food she had collected to take back to her mission, feed the nuns. And when she was asked to pay at the register, she threw a fit until somebody else said, Fine, all pay for your groceries.

Katie Dooley  51:22

You know what that just bothers me because they feel like if she had given as much as she would, as much as she received, she would have received even more

Preston Meyer  51:33

right? People fully believed in her cause, generally speaking, but an awful lot of people who were close to her and her work, saw a lot of problems. Some of these issues that we've described were reported by people who felt that they needed to leave the missionaries for charity, because they didn't feel comfortable with the way things were going. It's insane. It's getting my blood pumping.

Katie Dooley  52:04

I know this one. Yeah. She's, maybe we'll do a full episode on her to go through her whole life. And, yeah, can I read these Christopher Hitchens quotes,

Preston Meyer  52:14

I really would like that because I feel like I've kind of dominated the voice

Katie Dooley  52:17

as well. You've done a great job. And I didn't say Christopher Hitchens is my boy.

Preston Meyer  52:22

So Christopher Hitchens. I want to I want to preface his statements a little bit. He was one of the devil's advocates when they had the big examination on whether or not she should be made.

Katie Dooley  52:35

They picked people outside of the Catholic Church. Yes. Wow. I thought they would have picked Catholics willing to be devil's advocate.

Preston Meyer  52:41

I don't think that's actually a comment because you want people who are going to be serious do their due diligence, who really want to have the dirt revealed on these people. And Christopher Hitchens did a kick ass job,

Katie Dooley  52:54

man. He says she spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction.

Preston Meyer  53:09

Man, I love his words, too. He's he's he's an excellent writer, writer.

Katie Dooley  53:13

Yeah, she hated women.

Preston Meyer  53:17

Sure, looks that way. She was anti abortion, which is pretty standard for main Christianity overall. But she was like, really into you must subject yourself to anybody who looks like they should have any kind of authority instead of criticizing authority with a healthy judgment clear mind. I don't know. It's kind of weird.

Katie Dooley  53:51

So there's a another Christopher Hitchens CO are these all from his Devil's advocacy? Or was this like post?

Preston Meyer  53:59

He actually, he wrote a couple of books about how awful she was before the church said, Hey, you're perfect for this position.

Katie Dooley  54:08

That gives me a little bit of respect for the Catholic Church for picking her worst enemy, but

Preston Meyer  54:15

Right. He was a very, yeah, he was a very vocal anti theist. But his main job, he was a journalist and a political critic. So kind of just fell on Mother Teresa because she was very popular at kind of the height of his career.

Katie Dooley  54:37

It was by talking to her that I discovered and she assured me that she wasn't working to alleviate poverty. Let me say it again, that she wasn't working to alleviate poverty. She was working to expand the number of Catholics. She said, I'm not a social worker. I don't do it. For this reason. I do it for Christ. I do it for the church.

Preston Meyer  55:03

Yeah, like, I understand not everybody's good at everything. Sure. She had the money. She had the resources. She had the social confidence. People trusted her. She could have gotten the people to do the things that the people in her care needed. And she didn't.

Katie Dooley  55:26

I'd be curious how many people she converted to Catholicism?

Preston Meyer  55:30

I got some bad news for you. No one. It's on paper. It's a lot more than no one.

Katie Dooley  55:38

Is it? People in India or people watching her do her work outside of India?

Preston Meyer  55:43

Honestly, I really doubt she converted anybody just from seeing her work? She might have? I don't know. But it doesn't seem like it would.

Katie Dooley  55:51

I don't, I don't mean to turn this into a capitalistic argument. But what good are poor Catholics?

Preston Meyer  56:02

If you're worried about money, poor Catholics only help in that they might have friends with slightly more money than they have, who they can convert, who in turn, have friends with slightly more money, who they can convert? Eventually, it's like trading up from your pig paperclip to a convertible. It's, you can do it. It just takes

Katie Dooley  56:24

getting someone out of poverty and into gainful employment and also having them as a Catholic who then dies every week. Of course you are. This doesn't make even make economic sense. It doesn't

Preston Meyer  56:36

the return on investment. As far as so as capital dollars is nothing. But if you believe that converting people to your faith is going to help you out with the big guy with the big guy then yeah, this is an excellent return on investment in her perspective.

Katie Dooley  56:58

So her faith was just that twisted. It sure looks that way. Yeah. Sorry. So much of me. grunting and disgust.

Preston Meyer  57:10

Yeah, that's, it's really, really not great. Sisters, the nuns that worked for her were asked to, were to ask each person in danger of death.

Katie Dooley  57:22

This is a quote.

Preston Meyer  57:24

Yeah. This is a quote from Susan shields, a former member of the Missionaries of Charity. This is firsthand experience being related to you third hand. Sisters were to ask each person in danger of death if you wanted a ticket to heaven. If they offered any affirmative reply, she says an affirmative reply was to mean consent to baptism. All they said was ticket to heaven. Obviously, this means baptism, I guess. Okay, back to the quote. The sister was then to pretend that she was just cooling the patient's head with a wet cloth, while in fact she was baptizing him. Remember, in the Catholic tradition, baptism is not a full immersion. Just a little bit of water on the forehead is enough. So cooling a patient's head with a wet cloth, while in fact, she was baptizing him saying quietly the necessary words, secrecy was important so that it would not come to be known that Mother Teresa's sisters were baptizing Hindus and Muslims.

Katie Dooley  58:30

This is problematic for a ton of reasons.

Preston Meyer  58:34

Yeah. Some birding consent is a huge problem, if it's the sick, ethical catastrophe.

Katie Dooley  58:44

Yes, and then you get it say that she converted people to Catholicism when she didn't.

Preston Meyer  58:48

Right. Sorry, if they survived and left the care of these shelters, they would not go about living as Catholics.

Katie Dooley  58:59

But you can get them on the books. Yeah.

Preston Meyer  59:04

It's, it's unnerving. I have another quote from Mother Teresa. This is from 1981 press conference. I think is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering of the poor people.

Katie Dooley  59:26

What the fuck does that mean?

Preston Meyer  59:28

It means the world is better because poor people are suffering.

Katie Dooley  59:33

I guess. I understand what she's saying. But the

Preston Meyer  59:40

we scented her. I say we I'm not even Catholic,

Katie Dooley  59:44

can accept that. How is the world better by the suffering of poor people?

Preston Meyer  59:49

Oh, easy. They're not collecting the dollars that are going into her bank account. I'm not sure That's what she meant. I don't see any logical. I need to get the date where she's right.

Katie Dooley  1:00:08

I need to get the pope because he's the boss like anti capitalistic leader Francis is very white palatable. Yes, but he's very anti capitalism. So I'd love to be like, What do you think of this crazy Mother Teresa, who is just all about the dollars? And exploiting that.

Preston Meyer  1:00:29

i Yeah, I'm I'm super uncomfortable with this woman being a saint. Well,

Katie Dooley  1:00:33

okay, let's go back to the wet dream.

Preston Meyer  1:00:37

So saints are meant to be people who are role models for the rest of humanity. And turns out saints are sainted by a community because they accomplish part of the mission of the church in some way. Yes. And while she's not a martyr, so I'm curious what the miracles are associated with her.

Katie Dooley  1:01:04

Is it raising hundreds of millions of dollars for the Catholic Church with no.

Preston Meyer  1:01:09

Shooting? Yeah, I think so. Expenses,

Katie Dooley  1:01:12

entirely profit. That is a miracle. She operated a business with no expenses.

Preston Meyer  1:01:19

Yeah, it sure looks that way. I mean, somebody theoretically bought those needles. But was it somebody who's directly affiliated with the missionaries for charity? I'm starting to doubt it based on her preference to not pay for things.

Katie Dooley  1:01:38

I'm googling what her miracle was. Mother Teresa says first miracle was curing a woman with a lump growing in her abdomen. In 1990, Monica Bezerra went to a Missionaries of Charity home in West Bengal, India. She had a fever, headache, vomiting and swollen stomach. Her care was therefore a tribute to the miraculous intervention of Mother Teresa. Oh, what you got? She had begun treatment for tuberculosis meningitis see her before however the medication she'd taken intermittently depending on what her family could afford, having kept a lump from growing in her abdomen. Surgery was deemed necessary but Bowser was too weak too unwell to undergo an operation. Apparently there was a light immense emanating from Mother Teresa and she placed her hands on bed was abdomen, and upper was said and the next day this lump had disappeared. And she no longer required surgery.

Preston Meyer  1:02:46

It's an interesting story. It fits the requirement for miracles, I guess based on the description.

Katie Dooley  1:02:52

But I bet she just got more medication.

Preston Meyer  1:02:56

From the things that I've understood about reading the scriptures of Christianity. I don't see Mother Teresa as a figure who could wield divine power based on who she is, it seems in Congress.

Katie Dooley  1:03:18

My problem with Mother Teresa is that so many people think she's a good person.

Preston Meyer  1:03:24

And she's kind of monstrous. Yeah, I

Katie Dooley  1:03:26

feel like we're gonna call out emails. Being like, Mother Teresa is a saint literally and figuratively. I mean, even you were like, What do you mean? Yeah, I don't know. Nay.

Preston Meyer  1:03:40

Well, I mean, to be fair, I didn't know in detail any of the positives either that people thought of when they thought of her. And I'm gonna say the positives that have been attributed to her are wildly exaggerated, and certainly overshadowed by the negatives. In my opinion, obviously, people disagree and that's fine. I'm not cool with the Pope. So her feast day.

Katie Dooley  1:04:12

Can you write read what you wrote please?

Preston Meyer  1:04:15

On which, what? So this monster has her feast day celebrated September 5. Her patronage is currently limited to the missionary congregation. She started the Missionaries of Charity as well as the Archdiocese of Calcutta. Like I said before, they haven't updated it to Kolkata yet. Wikipedia also adds World Youth Day for some reason. And I follow that rabbit hole. And it looks like the author of the Wikipedia article to edit that detail. Confused her with St. Teresa of Avila, who was one of nine patrons for the 2011 World Youth Hey, I don't, I could be wrong, but I couldn't find any other source that says that she was connected to World Youth Day. So at least she's not the patron of anything important.

Katie Dooley  1:05:16

And she and Thomas Moore,

Preston Meyer  1:05:18

what I mean, these are just five. These are the five, a couple that I've known for a while that I wanted to talk about, and a couple others that I've learned about more recently who just sucked. There's loads of saints that are deeply awful, I'm sure of it. And there's loads of saints who are deeply awful, who then went on and decided to be good. Like St. Augustine famously said that he would love to be blessed with chests. Yeah, chastity. He loved the ladies. And so he wanted to be blessed with a pure heart, and just not right now. Fine, that doesn't make you awful, that makes you a human that maybe says things that you don't need to say. Right? But some saints are just deeply unpalatable. And that's a problem because these people are venerated to a status that is really difficult to distinguish from divinity. We've talked about what worship is and what Gods are. And from one tradition to the next. There's a fair bit of variance, but enough commonality to underline enough of what it generally broadly looks like. And from an academic perspective, a god is any being that is revered as divine. And these saints fit the bill.

Katie Dooley  1:06:54

I mean, there's Claire cantos. Yeah, there's, I don't know if the name for it, they probably have a real name, but you get necklaces with your saint. And, you know, people expect these things to do things for them, which is part of the definition of what a god is absolutely. To have a patron saint of your profession means that you're expecting something from the saint in your profession. So if you're the patron saint of firefighters, you're probably looking for protection every time you head into a fire.

Preston Meyer  1:07:24

Yeah, just like, I'll make the parallel to Hinduism, where there's many gods and each one has a specific patronage and a thing that in the real world is an issue you would pray to that specific god. That's not different from the Catholic relationship with saints. A divine being is one with powers beyond those of natural humans, especially those who carry human consciousness beyond the mundane. The saints are meant to help you elevate to understand well, and that's a

Katie Dooley  1:07:57

criteria to perform a miracle after death. Yeah, they have some sort of supernatural power,

Preston Meyer  1:08:03

there's a divinity ascribe to the saints, to be canonized is to become one step closer to God, like any sort of official statement can be condensed down to every church that venerate saints does deny that this behavior constitutes worship.

Katie Dooley  1:08:23

They mean they still say they're monotheistic and it doesn't even Yeah, I'll get into it.

Preston Meyer  1:08:29

But it's, there's no difference between veneration and worship, no matter how much you want to argue about the words you use. The behaviors are the same. Worship is the recognition of honor. The word itself comes from an old English equivalent of venerate. So we don't have a difference between worship and veneration here. And the edamame etymology of the word worship indicates an object or person is worth something or worthy of honor.

Katie Dooley  1:09:03

I would I know this is like semantics. And we're like splitting hairs here. But it's my thing, though, right? But we hear the word venerated so much less than the word worship, that I would

Preston Meyer  1:09:19

almost it's almost like it has a higher

Katie Dooley  1:09:24

stare. Yeah, absolutely. And I do a lot of this in my day job is looking at these connotations of words to figure out which one fits perfectly so you know, talking about the difference between veneration and worship. Yeah, I would say there's, yeah, it's like sometimes I think are like worship is like this submission. But veneration is like a celebration. Absolutely. And that is almost more powerful. All right. Anyway, I know I know we're splitting hairs on it semantics, but something to think about. Drop a message in our Discord. If you have any thoughts on the difference between veneration and worship.

Preston Meyer  1:10:11

Yeah, so worship, like veneration is revealed in many forms, you've got prayer, especially intercessory prayer where you're asking for something, to pray to God as most Christians do as the Jews do as the Muslims do. Or you can pray to saints as Catholics do. And the the behavior is not different one from the other. Some people may word things slightly differently, but the behavior is the same. And as we talked about, in our episode on Satan and Satanism, if you've called on magic, and it works, honor it, don't deny it. And so you have to honor the saints when you've received what you've asked for, if you prayed to them, so kind of have a funny relationship with here with saints. Worship is also revealed through songs and storytelling, and recitations of mantras. This is definitely associated both with Gods and saints. We've got artistic depictions. There's rules on how you're supposed to draw saints, there's attributes that they're meant to be drawn with. If you're allowed to draw gods in your faith, there's rules typically. There's dedications of sacred spaces. Every Catholic Church is dedicated to a saint except for a handful that are dedicated to Christ Jesus. And that's a short list. Right, but that's not just

Katie Dooley  1:11:56

to give every Catholic Church I've ever driven by You're right. They're always saying something. Yep.

Preston Meyer  1:12:00

Every time. And that's not just Catholics. Lutherans do it sometimes, that I've been able to I can't I've can't say I've looked into it enough to say all the time, but I know what the thing that they do. Anglicans and Orthodox Christians do the same orthodox for sure. Yep. And so did the old Hellenists. The Temple of Athena dedicated to Athena the Parthenon, you've got sometimes even martial practices in arts, you've got yoga in Hinduism. And St. Sebastian is the patron saint of athletics.

Katie Dooley  1:12:46

That's my athletic voice.

Preston Meyer  1:12:49

I like it. So, the way I see it, there is no difference between worship and veneration. I can't I can't put a line there, apart from the argument that they're different because we use different words. And

Katie Dooley  1:13:06

is it like a square is a rectangle, but a rectangle isn't a square.

Preston Meyer  1:13:11

It's kind of like that. We talked about when we were discussing Gods months and months ago now that some of your behaviors to your father might look like worship. And ultimately, the thing that separates him from divinity in that situation is intent. And that is the key word when talking about the difference between veneration and worship is intent. But I don't think that makes us strong distinction here. When you have religious devotion, dedication of sacred spaces, and prayer, especially intercessory. Prayer. You've you've really blurred that line.

Katie Dooley  1:13:54

I mean, it's a blurred line. But at the end of the day, if you ask someone is St. Bernard, God and they said, No, then that's that's all you can do. Right? Yeah. Re episode on belief. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  1:14:11

I agree. It's a complicated issue. It's one of Martin Luthers. big issues with Catholicism is the way they were treating saints.

Katie Dooley  1:14:20

It is like, man, if you get a chance to go to a Catholic country, it is remarkable

Preston Meyer  1:14:28

that it is

Katie Dooley  1:14:30

i is Mary like Jesus is mama. Is she St. Mary? Yeah. And then there's a sense.

Preston Meyer  1:14:39

Yeah, well, even her mother, who is who appears in a story that is not canonical Saint Anne. We don't know if she's a real person. In my own studies. It looks an awful lot like she's a fictional character, taking the place of a real person being named after a biblical figure. I like currently I doubt Mary's mother's name was and or Hannah or Anna whatever your linguistic preferences their adult that's what her name was at all

Katie Dooley  1:15:10

so I am this is years ago now I drove through the town of NOK Ireland and I think it was in the 60s or 70s There was a Marian apparition and just driving through a town is the weirdest thing you've ever just everywhere stalls with Mary memorabilia. Like just driving like we're in I was in a bus, like a like a greyhound charter bus. And just all on the streets just merchants flogging Merica I've never seen anything like it.

Preston Meyer  1:15:51

I've lived in some pretty Catholic parts of North America. New Jersey is an interesting place and incredibly diverse with pockets of extreme concentration of a variety of cultures and some neighborhoods. That situation you described as the only one where you would see more short dolls and half bathtubs.

Katie Dooley  1:16:21

So true. Yeah, that's the one where I I mean, I I spent some time in Guatemala as well, which is also very Catholic country, but I went right after Easter. So everything was very cheesy. But driving through nach Ireland was It was weird because it was so religious. But it had nothing to do with your typical you know, God, right. We're on a theistic religion and it had nothing to do with God. It had everything to do with Mary and that she had appeared to have been anyway bench why we witnesses. So

Preston Meyer  1:16:53

yeah, the, the way we treat saints is is awfully weird. But like a parallel that to Hinduism before there's the saints and the Hindu gods have an awful lot of simile similarities. Each is subordinate to a highest almighty. Each is honored with specific dominion, you pray to them if you need a specific thing. And each receives a specific sacrifice, sometimes, less often with Catholics, but sometimes it's a thing. There's tokens or relics. And every single one has at least one special shrine. Just nifty to see the parallels, I guess. Hegyi olive tree is the kind of ugly word that gets thrown on here. It's the it means the worship of saints. And it is denied by all Christians, doesn't matter your denomination. That's it is non acceptable to actually admit to worshipping saints in any Christian tradition. But it's obviously present in Catholicism, and to a slightly lesser degree in the Orthodox churches. And it's denied a little bit harder in the Anglican tradition. And Lutherans push away from that a little bit harder. And then Methodists and any other Christian church who uses the word St. Usually, usually everyone else doesn't even have feast days or anything. They just if you're going to talk about a biblical figure who was not the villain of their story, you'll use the word saint as their title. But it's we have a tricky relationship with the word Saint now. But

Katie Dooley  1:18:58

I yeah, I think my biggest takeaway is that went Don't. Don't say, oh, Preston, you're such a saint for doing a favor for me. Because it's not really a compliment, I think is the biggest takeaway today. Take that phrase out of your vocabulary. Unless it has to do someone approached you about their wet dream, then you can say, Oh, you're such a thing.

Preston Meyer  1:19:25

That's great. I agree. But I enjoy it. Go along with it for a little while.

Katie Dooley  1:19:33

I just want to see the confused look on other people's faces and then you get tell them about St. Bernard.

Preston Meyer  1:19:37

Right. If this leads to a conversation with somebody, then you might have a good time.

Katie Dooley  1:19:43

I think you should all bring the story of St. Bernard to your next family get together. Let us know how it goes.

Preston Meyer  1:19:49

Yeah, tell everybody about your wet dream and see if they are willing to sing you for it.

Katie Dooley  1:19:54

I didn't mean your personal my dream. I just meant tell them about St. Bernard.

Preston Meyer  1:19:59

I think that'll go over much better at the dinner table

Katie Dooley  1:20:01

moderately better. Yes.

Preston Meyer  1:20:07

We've had fun. As much as some of this included some downers. Some of these saints are kind of fun and interesting. They're certainly great adventures of saints that we have not explored. But the whole world of religion is out there for you to explore. Maybe you can beat us to it.

Katie Dooley  1:20:26

Or make a suggestion on our Discord which you can find the links for that on our Facebook and Instagram at Holy watermelon pod.

Preston Meyer  1:20:33

Feel free to email us any questions privately if you want at Holy watermelon pod@gmail.com

Katie Dooley  1:20:41

and our online store is live it's two weeks old now. So if you want to grab some holy watermelon merch, we would love you for it. Peace be with you. 

The last in the triumvirate of large Abrahamic traditions, Islam began in 609CE with the prophet Muhammed's revelations from the angel Gabriel. Now the second largest religion in the world, Islam has contributed to arts and science over the centuries. In this episode, we cover the history of Islam, the observances as well as the controversies of 9/11 and the Charlie Hebdo attacks.

The last in the triumvirate of large Abrahamic traditions, Islam began in 609CE with the prophet Muhammed's revelations from the angel Gabriel. Now the second largest religion in the world, Islam has contributed to arts and science over the centuries. 

In this episode, we talk about Muhammad’s revelation from the angel Gabriel and how this revelation became an entirely new religion. Muhammad is unique; he was surrounded by polytheists, whereas Moses and Jesus were really reformers of religions that people were very familiar with.

Muhammad added to the Abrahamic faith, but he also had to convince the people around him to worship Yahweh instead of the large number of deities they were worshiping. 

Muhammad’s revelation became the Quran, and Muhammad’s sayings and wisdom became the Hadiths.  The only true form of the Quran is in Arabic, but we talk about textual variants and about the translations that exist. 

There are 5 universally accepted pillars of Islam that we will discuss:

1. Shahada – the profession of faith
2. Salat – prayer
3. Zakat – almsgiving
4. Sawm – fasting
5. Hajj – pilgrimage

As well we discuss the unofficial sixth pillar of Islam, jihad, and some other controversial (but not actually that scary) topics like Sharia Law and Fatwas. 

Like most religious groups Muslims have unique practices that separate them from non-believers. This includes following rules for clothing, food, and daily practices that are either Halal (permissible) or Haram (non-permissible).

For more great resources check out Karen Armstrong's book, A Short History of Islam; and the 8-part podcast by History & WNYC Studios, Blindspot: The Road to 9/11.

Support us at Patreon and Spreadshirt

Join the Community on Discord

Learn more great religion facts on Facebook and Instagram

Preston Meyer  0:00  
Hi, I'm Katie. 

Katie Dooley  0:03  
Hi, I'm Preston and Welcome to the Holy Watermelon podcast. Right? I mean, we can tell everyone how excited we are to talk about Islam today. Give them a little preview and then the song will kick in and they'll go

Intro Song

Katie Dooley  0:21  
Hi, I'm Katie.

Preston Meyer  0:25  
Hi, I'm Preston,

Katie Dooley  0:26  
and welcome to the

Both Hosts  0:27  
Holy Watermelon Podcast!

Preston Meyer  0:31  
So this is the third instalment in our mini-series of specific religious studies. And we're going to look into the continuation of the saga that is, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,

Katie Dooley  0:47  
The Abrahamic boys

Preston Meyer  0:49  
The trilogy that culminates with Muhammad,

Katie Dooley  0:54  
Or arguably, Joseph Smith but that's

Preston Meyer  0:57  
That's a different trilogy. It's like when finally Disney says, "Eh... the sequel trilogy wasn't that good" And everyone's like, yeah, you're right. And then they come up with another one that's... less popular.

Katie Dooley  1:16  
But today you're right, is all about Islam, the most recent of the Abrahamic air quotes, Western religious practices

Preston Meyer  1:26  
Of course, ridiculous label of Western when I mean, it's still Asian.

Katie Dooley  1:32  
I mean, we'll say this every episode for the next five episodes that I don't like the labels, but it helps. I think it's a common term, I guess

Preston Meyer  1:41  
There's a little piece of me that thinks that Hinduism is more Western than Islam is. Which we'll address when we dive a little deeper into Hinduism.

Katie Dooley  1:54  
So you want to start with a little bit of the history, Preston, of Islam.

Preston Meyer  2:00  
Yeah. So there's this foundational figure, I think most people are at least familiar with the name Muhammad. If you haven't met somebody, or heard of somebody with the name Muhammad at all, you've definitely been living under a rock. It is the most common name in the whole world.

Katie Dooley  2:19  
Is that really?

Preston Meyer  2:19  
It's the most common male name, yeah. It's a popular tradition, to name your kid after the Prophet if it's a boy.

Katie Dooley  2:28  
You must know Muhammad Ali, the boxer, not the the caliph.

Preston Meyer  2:31  
I don't know personally, obviously.

Katie Dooley  2:33  
No, but you've heard.

Preston Meyer  2:34  
Yeah. And, again, you'd have to be living under a rock. If you're listening to this podcast, you've definitely heard of a Muhammad somewhere. That's the reality. And most of that the reason for the popularity of his name is this figure, Muhammad, who is the founder of what we know as Islam. He was born around the 600-ish AD, and he was a reasonably successful and well respected trader, merchant. He was approached by the angel Gabriel and said, Hey, there's some things you need to help me change. And Muhammad took that message from God that he received through Gabriel, and made little changes.

Katie Dooley  3:35  
Turned it into a whole new religion. Which I think this is an interesting point. We have it in our notes set Muhammad and just like Moses, and Jesus didn't go out to start a new religion. He thought of himself as reformer. And so often these stories are because the current era has it wrong in some way, shape, or form, and we get this new iteration or God's saying, Hey, you forgot about all this stuff, or here's some new notes for you to go off of.

Preston Meyer  4:05  
Yeah, there's that a very strong parallel between him and those former figures. One of the bigger differences, though, with Muhammad, is that he wasn't surrounded by people who worshipped one God, to the same level that Jesus was a Jew preaching to faithful-ish, Jews.

Katie Dooley  4:25  
Monotheistic people. Yeah.

Preston Meyer  4:27  
And Moses was teaching Israelites, who, though they were familiar with and maybe a little too comfortable with Egyptian gods, they were also largely familiar with Yahweh, the God of Israel. Muhammad didn't have that same benefit. He had a lot of people in his community that were worshipping a wide variety of idolatrous gods. So his efforts to reform were a little trickier... But as you gain people's trust, by one means or another, he was able to convert them to a monotheistic faith.

Katie Dooley  5:15  
One of the, I guess the mystical part of Muhammad story is that Gabriel revealed the Quran to him the religious book. And Muhammad was completely illiterate. So the story goes, so he wrote down the Quran from divine revelation.

Preston Meyer  5:35  
So I was always told to me it was he didn't write down anything himself

Katie Dooley  5:38  
He just repeated it enough times that, yeah,

Preston Meyer  5:41  
Just told his inner circle and they wrote it down.

Katie Dooley 
I mean if you're illiterate yeah.

Preston Meyer
It makes it a lot easier... It makes the story more palatable to have an illiterate person, not write it. Ya know? But it's interesting that there are textual variants to the Quran that seem as though they are coming from different traditions of different scribes. Though there is currently just as there is with the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible, there is a standard accepted Quranic text that everybody sticks to today. And the variants are ignored completely by literally everybody except scholars on the subject.

Katie Dooley  6:25  
Yes, I was going to say that the Quran is, I mean, you're right, it's available in probably almost every language in the world, because Muslim, or Muslim Islam as a very widespread religion, my goodness. But because it was revealed in Arabic and written originally in Arabic, that is considered the approved text. And if you go to a mosque, again, I'm sure you can probably get mosque services in every language. But predominantly, I believe it's an Arabic, because that's the divine.

Preston Meyer  7:01  
Or even the Catholic Church was really reluctant to have mass in any language other than Latin until the 60s, wasn't it?

Katie Dooley  7:08  
It was quite late yeah

Preston Meyer  7:09  
Like super recent. And so like, maybe 600 years from now, Muslims will be a lot more comfortable having their services in the vernacular. If that's not I'm sure that is the case in some circles, but I think that'll be a lot more widespread. Somewhere around that same timeline, in religious age, you know?

Katie Dooley  7:32  
In my brain, and I don't know, I should probably look into this, but where we are, you can get church services, you know, predominantly, we see it in Asian languages. Oh, there's a Korean service at 2 pm and an English service at 10 am. So I feel like that's probably common in North America where you'd get an Arabic service at one time and maybe an English service at a different time.

Preston Meyer  7:54  
Probably.

Katie Dooley  7:55  
Again, I don't know. I'm just guessing. But that would seem reasonable, especially because Islam is, is an evangelical religion, they're actively looking to convert people to it.

Preston Meyer  8:07  
Yeah. But the Quran is not the Quran, unless it has the Arabic text. Everything else is just a translation of the Quran. And it's actually super important to most Muslims that I speak with that that is deliberately pointed out.

Katie Dooley  8:25  
One thing that's interesting about Islam is that it's very anti-idolatry.

Preston Meyer  8:30  
Yeah, hugely. Both Moses and Jesus were hugely opposed to idolatry, a little detail that you'll find some Christians forgot about somehow. And Islam and what specifically Muhammad spoke out strongly and harshly against idolatry, following that same ancient tradition. And so there's a lot of cool things that have come out because of that practice.

Katie Dooley  8:59  
So there are some good things about Islam being anti-idolatrous, and then there are some bad things that don't come from that as well.

Preston Meyer  9:11  
Indeed, there is the art of Islam is really cool. I always think first of word art, their calligraphy, to represent figures is really quite awesome. Almost every time every time I've seen it is great. And as Katie has mentioned to me before, the geometry and that just the drawings, pattern, the patterns, all of that, that comes up as art when you can't be drawing people and animals, for fear of them being treated as idols, is actually really quite awesome as well. What's the bad side?

Katie Dooley  9:48  
I love how you left me with the bad stuff. So to be clear, I guess idolatry in like a Christian context would be pictures of Jesus or Mary or... I don't think there's too many iterations of God except in the Sistine chapel's, but Muslims refrain from pictures of God, which is already quite rare, but of Muhammad as well,

Preston Meyer  10:13  
And that's caused some problems,

Katie Dooley  10:14  
And that has caused some problems. So most notably, the Charlie Hebdo Magazine in Paris drew a likeness of Muhammad.

Preston Meyer  10:14  
Several times

Katie Dooley  10:23  
Several times. And there was a bombing, I believe

Preston Meyer  10:27  
There was bombings, there was shootings, there was stabbings of other people related to the sharing of those images. Which sucks.

Katie Dooley  10:37  
And to be clear, this is extremist behaviour. I think most Muslims would condemn that even if they obviously don't agree with pictures of Muhammad being created or distributed, I don't, most Muslims would not kill someone else.

Preston Meyer  10:56  
Right?

Katie Dooley  10:57  
They might send a disgruntled letter

Preston Meyer  10:59  
Please stop this.

Katie Dooley  11:00  
Fair enough. We should all write the occasional disgruntled letter.

Preston Meyer  11:04  
Right? As far as I've observed, most Muslims are far more concerned with self-governing rather than governing the actions of others.

Katie Dooley  11:15  
But that is a extreme, but I don't want to say good, but

Preston Meyer  11:21  
It is a visible example

Katie Dooley  11:23  
Of idolatry at its worst.

Preston Meyer  11:27  
So among all of the things that Muhammad taught, anti-idolatry was a big deal. He helped convert an awful lot of people in the region, to Islam. And a lot of people smashed their idols and I've heard reports that a lot of these chunks of idols are in the Kaaba in Mecca.

Katie Dooley  11:49  
Oh, interesting.

Preston Meyer  11:49  
I have also heard that that is not true.

Katie Dooley  11:55  
I got really excited.

Preston Meyer  11:58  
One way or the other, I straight up don't know. But I do know that a lot of people for quite a long time have been with... they've been not worshipping idols, which is kind of cool limiting your worship to a sky daddy. Even though it looks nonsensical to an awful lot of people, it makes a lot more sense than worshiping a chunk of gold or iron or wood that you would have in your home.

Katie Dooley  12:32  
That is interesting to me. I just finished a book on evangelical Christianity, and I can see how idolatry is beneficial in the sense that it helps you. This is going to sound not the way I want to sound but helps you suspend disbelief essentially.

Preston Meyer  12:48  
Because it's a thing that's there.

Katie Dooley  12:49  
Yeah, this book was talking about how you basically have to like, circumvent thought processes. In prayer specifically, so I can see how having a physical or visual thing can help with that. So it's an interesting rural, not rural, an interesting rule in Islam that idols are not to be used.

Preston Meyer  13:16  
This prohibition does date back, at least as far as Moses. There's also stories written long after the time of Abraham with him also going out and smashing all of the idols he could get his hands

Katie Dooley  13:27  
Rage smash!

Preston Meyer  13:28  
So it it's not specifically Muhammad thing. This is a strong Judaic tradition.

Katie Dooley  13:37  
Yes. I'm just curious why it pops up in in Christianity then. Especially and I think it's in my brain especially goes to Catholicism, but...

Preston Meyer  13:48  
The idolatry we see in Christianity looks like it comes from Roman pluralism, the huge polytheistic pantheon that is the Roman tradition. Which of course, isn't even original for them.

Katie Dooley  14:07  
Okay, good answer. Now, I love Islam because they have the easiest summary of beliefs ever

Preston Meyer  14:18  
It's a nice short checklist, and it's a solid, almost universally agreed upon checklist,

Katie Dooley  14:25  
The five pillars of Islam - five points we're going to run through and I wish all other religions made it this easy on us to research and reiterate. So I will start the first pillar of Islam is an I'm gonna do I'm gonna try the Arabic.

Preston Meyer  14:45  
You're gonna try pronouncing the word? I think we should do it.

Katie Dooley  14:48  
Okay. The first one is called shahada or the profession of faith. And it is two statements of faith that you are expected to verbalize but also believe that and this is what makes you a Muslim. So the first statement is "There is no God but God" and the second statement is "Muhammad is the Messenger of God." And these statements are said during prayer they're also the first thing said presumably if you're born to a Muslim family the first thing that are the first thing said to you when you're born and the last thing you hear before you pass. So they're pretty important statements in the Muslim faith and I believe it's also part of the equivalent of a Muslim baptism so whether you're converting or or converting or confirming.

Preston Meyer  15:06  
What now?!

Katie Dooley  15:43  
Converting or confirming. Oh, the look you gave me... converting or confirming this this is critical in that point. Your disgust is making me laugh.

Preston Meyer  16:09  
We're trying to be high-brow! The second pillar of Islam is prayer or Salaat. Prayer is done several times a day, almost universally in Islam, because there's a difference of opinion. There are set times where specific prayers are to be given. And that's part of Muslim piety. You can't really go without

Katie Dooley  16:36  
Piety not pee-ity?

Preston Meyer  16:39  
I've always heard it piety. I don't think I've ever even heard pee-ity? If you're a pious, I guess you're exhibiting piety.

Katie Dooley  16:47  
Now I'm second-guessing myself. Okay, I'll take it sorry. Muslim piety. You should probably mentioned Mecca.

Preston Meyer  17:04  
Oh, yes. Also, when praying, Muslims are meant to be facing Mecca. That's kind of a big deal that Mecca is the holy place. This is a tradition that's not exclusive to Muslims. Jews typically orient their synagogues facing Jerusalem, which is, which is not so distant from Mecca is to see much of a visible distance in one community, both buildings are usually gonna be facing pretty much exactly the same way. Which is kind of cool. Though, it's obviously these two communities are different in many other ways. Where we are in North America, inCanada. That is south-east. I had to think way too hard about my direction.

Katie Dooley  17:50  
I mean anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, you're facing east. It just depends how north or south you're facing.

Preston Meyer  17:56  
Exactly

Katie Dooley  17:57  
In Canada you face southeast. Yeah, I guess he'd probably have to get pretty far south in the states to just face pure east.

Preston Meyer  18:03  
Yeah. I think so. I mean, in Florida, it might be

Katie Dooley  18:09  
Because Saudi Arabia is pretty close to the equator if I'm not mistaken

Preston Meyer  18:15  
It's it's close, but it's not super close. It's I mean, it's way closer compared to us. I think it's technically tropical.

Katie Dooley  18:23  
I can't picture where the equator runs.

Preston Meyer  18:26  
The equator hits the bottom of West Africa.

Katie Dooley  18:31  
Okay, then. Yeah. Okay.

Preston Meyer  18:34  
That much. I remember. Geography is not my thing. No, this is my thing.

Katie Dooley  18:41  
That's all that matters. Number three is the Zakat or almsgiving. And Muslims are expected to pay a tithe. This is pretty common in I think, all religions. Muslims, for the most part, I think the standard is 10%. And I know in Christian traditions that can vary some have a set percentage and some it's just kind of what you can afford or what you are moved to give. The other piece of almsgiving is Muslims are expected to be charitable and give to the poor and help out those in need.

Preston Meyer  19:18  
Not terribly foreign ideas.

Katie Dooley  19:20  
No it's just how to be a good person 101 in five steps

Preston Meyer  19:27  
The fourth pillar of Islam is fasting. This is

Katie Dooley  19:32  
Sawm he's not gonna say it, Sawm.

Preston Meyer  19:35  
Yep. I actually did mean to say it, and now completely lost my momentum.

Katie Dooley  19:44  
I'm sorry. The month of fasting

Preston Meyer  19:47  
Yeah. The fourth pillar of Islam is fasting. Sawm is the word and it's most visible in the month of Ramadan a whole month, set aside for daytime fasting as long as the sun is up from dawn to dusk, you will not eat anything. Drinking anything is also forbidden. As well as sometimes other pleasurable activities are also forbidden.

Katie Dooley  20:17  
I don't get it.

Preston Meyer  20:20  
Many people abstain from sex during the daytime, or sometimes even the whole month according to some reports,

Katie Dooley  20:29  
So a lot like I won't say a lot like Lent, but similar to Lance, more strict than Lent.

Preston Meyer  20:35  
More strict than Lent. Instead of just one thing. It's a whole bunch of things.

Katie Dooley  20:39  
And it culminates in the celebration of Eid, which is a really big holiday in Islam.

Preston Meyer  20:47  
Much of the same way that Lent culminates in Easter. So Eid and Easter, I don't think they have much in common really?

Katie Dooley  20:55  
I know there's a big feast.

Preston Meyer  20:56  
There's a big feast. You're right.

Katie Dooley  20:59  
I mean, that's all a good holiday needs is food, right? Food and family.

Preston Meyer  21:04  
It's hard to enjoy a holiday when there's not a meal, you know

Katie Dooley  21:07  
Yeah. Who can not fast?

Preston Meyer  21:14  
So everybody should be fasting when it's reasonable to do so. Except of course, those who it's not reasonable for like the sick, the elderly, or also sometimes very, very young should probably not be fasting as well.

Katie Dooley  21:28  

The other thing people people should know, the other thing about Ramadan is that it changes every year because Muslims follow a lunar calendar, so their months are shorter. So Ramadan changes, goes I think it goes back a week, every year. And if you're in North America, that can suck when Ramadan in the summer and our days are really long, because you are fasting from sunrise to sunset it's a lot easier in the winter, like right now where our days are very, very short.

Preston Meyer  22:02  
Yeah, the month of Ramadan is a lot easier when the sun sets at 3:30 in the afternoon

Katie Dooley  22:07  
Oh dinner time!

Preston Meyer  22:10  
I thought it was really interesting to learn that the month of Ramadan is named as it is at Ramadan is the name of God. And so an awful lot of people will feel uncomfortable with you just calling the month Ramadan. It's the month of Ramadan if you want to be most correct, you're saying the month God. I mean more or less Ramadan doesn't mean that is one of his titles, okay, and he has many titles

Katie Dooley  22:40  
Doesn't he? The Fifth pillar, the last pillar of Islam is called the Hajj or the pilgrimage. And you are expected as a Muslim once in your life, if financially feasible, so they're reasonable human beings if you don't...

Preston Meyer  22:58  
If you can't do it, don't

Katie Dooley  22:59  
Don't put yourself into poverty to do the hajj but you're expected once the once a year no once in your lifetime to visit Mecca during the twelfth lunar month. And during the time, pilgrims are given two white sheets to wear and that's to put everyone on the same. I want to say economical footing so that there's no classes based off of possessions or garments.

Preston Meyer  23:25  
Make everybody look like equal make everyone

Katie Dooley  23:27  
Make everyone look like equals equals under the eyes of God. And during that time, they circle the Kaaba in Mecca, which is this big black square stone that Preston mentioned. And you

Preston Meyer  23:41  
The square isn't stone. It's a box built around a stone.

Katie Dooley  23:47  
Oh, interesting. I thought... you can't see the stone though.

Preston Meyer  23:50  
No, it's presumably sitting in the corner of the building

Katie Dooley  23:54  

In a big black box and you are supposed to circle it seven times

Preston Meyer  24:01  
I like to imagine a traffic circle where you need like you're you're obviously going to start on the outside of the circle on your way in. And hopefully by the end or the middle of the third path, you need to get close to that middle because everyone wants to get to the middle, right? Everyone wants to sneak a touch or more. I don't know. Remember, there's witnesses, there's not gonna be a lot more...

Katie Dooley  24:25  
There are millions of people.

Preston Meyer  24:26  
This place is super crowded all the time. And then hopefully by the middle of your fifth lap, you're on your way out because you might be forced into an eighth lap.

Katie Dooley  24:37  
There's also other what's the word I'm looking for practices or rituals that you perform during the hajj. You walk between two mountains because Muhammad did and obviously there's different prayers and and things like that. And yeah, millions of people visit Mecca every year. The city I think quadruples in size. It's actually like a big infrastructural problem that Saudi Arabia has to deal with is all these Muslims showing up every year, and you can do... people do pilgrimages throughout the year, but it's not your hajj, you have to go at this specific time for it to be done. And it's a big rite of passage sounds like the right term. But typically, it happens when you're older in life. So it's kind of you know, we think of Rites of Passage happening sort of in your teens and your 20s. But

Preston Meyer  25:32  
This is something you have to save up for.

Katie Dooley  25:33  
Yeah, you have to. So yes, you have to save up for your hajj. I had a friend and her parents completed it probably, I'd say, probably four or five years ago. And all her all their kids are adults. And they were just at a point in their life where, you know, they were financially able to do it. But it was an exciting thing, right, she told me that her parents had complete it and was excited to share that. Now, there's an unofficial sixth pillar of Islam. And these might sound these next few topics might sound scary to our viewers. But we assure you they're not. We've just made them scary.

Preston Meyer  26:14  
Culturally, we made them become scary to us

Katie Dooley  26:18  
Far more than they are. So what is the sixth pillar, Preston?

Preston Meyer  26:21  
The sixth pillar, unofficial sixth pillar, it's just not foundational to the faith is the principle of jihad, which is, for most people, just the an internal struggle to be more pious to be more righteous. But there's enough people that you've heard the word before, use it as a drive for a holy conflict between people.

Katie Dooley  26:58  
Now, the word actually means striving or struggling. And as you said, it can mean a multitude of things, you struggling to be a better Muslim, you the struggle to evangelize or convert people, because it is an evangelical religion. There are two I want to say streams, schools of thought there's the jihad of the pen, which is literally writing or debating your faith. And then there's jihad at the sword, which is this idea that Westerners are and are afraid of, right that a jihad is coming. Now jihad is meant to be defensive only. But of course we are, are humans, and we can twist things.

Preston Meyer  27:50  
Sometimes we're just offensive people, right?

Katie Dooley  27:52  
Sometimes, yeah, sometimes we're just assholes. So you know, we hear the term jihad and we think of 9/11. And, you know, in their minds, it probably was the defensive jihad of the sword and, you know, of Westerners, we have a different idea that, but most Muslims, this idea of jihad is very much internal struggle. Worst case scenario, a debate or, or strongly worded letter, in defence of your, essentially your right to practice religion. It's a it's a debate on freedom of religion.

Preston Meyer  28:29  
Absolutely. I think we had Sharia next?

Katie Dooley  28:33  
Yes. So another scary term to us Westerners is,

Both Hosts  28:36  
Sharia

Preston Meyer  28:39  
The idea that somebody else's laws could be imposed on us sounds awful. And yet, that's exactly the way we've been living forever. That's human life.

Katie Dooley  28:50  
The human life. Yes. So, I mean, I just said that humans are fallible, we can interpret these laws any way we want, we can interpret them in really scary ways. We can make them mandatory or we can make them guidelines. Like there's this whole thing. And man, so often, we hear "ahh there's gonna be Sharia law or so and so wants to bring in Sharia law". It's literally and I'm not saying there isn't some, you know, stuff in there that isn't good, but it's literally like how to live a more pious life,

Preston Meyer  29:26  
How to be a moral person,

Katie Dooley  29:28  
How to be a better Muslim, and how to relate to God better and be a more ethical human being

Preston Meyer  29:40 
I mean, ultimately, that's the essence of it. Yeah, there's loads of specific little things, but

Katie Dooley  29:45  
It covers everything from financial transactions to domestic sort of family law stuff to like, literally, it's honestly kind of boring.

Preston Meyer  29:59  
Right? And for all Christians who are worried about it, the Bible says don't let the sun set on a debt. So our current biweekly pay schedule is anti-biblical. So if you're worried about religious laws, let's worry about some of the other ones.

Katie Dooley  30:19  

Yeah. And like I said, it's not like there aren't, you know, absolutely. It mentions stoning. But you need four witnesses before you can stone someone and it's her, you know, heinous crimes, you know,

Preston Meyer  30:29  
And the Muslims didn't invent stoning. That's very well-established tradition in Israel that we can see. And they didn't invent it either. I mean, it's just a really effective way to kill people.

Katie Dooley  30:44  
It's very interactive,

Preston Meyer  30:45  
Right? It's a group activity that brings the community together.

Katie Dooley  30:49  
Oh, wow.

Preston Meyer  30:49  
All right. And another scary word that we've heard on TV, because that's really where you're going to be hearing it most is the idea of fatwas kind of got sensationalized about 15-ish years ago on TV, or at least that's where I first experienced it. And how when, and you see things like this person put out a fatwa on this other relative, and now they're gonna die, like like fatwa is somehow synonymous with honour killings when that's not the case at all. A fatwa is a non-binding legal opinion, which can include I think this person should be put to death. But it's, it's such a broad category of speech.

Katie Dooley  31:38  
I also love that it's non-binding,

Preston Meyer  31:40  
Right? Especially if you have no real authority. If you're just some dude with a BA sitting in somebody's basement, then your authority to call somebody else to death is zero. But if you're a well-respected Imam or a Khalif, you have a lot of authority. And even though technically you're fatwas or non-binding, you're going to have a lot more people concerned about what you have to say, and your opinions. And usually, the more conspicuous of a person you are in the public eye, the less likely you are to call somebody to be put to death without them having broken more than one very important law.

Katie Dooley  32:26  
And I would say, especially in North America, like you know, we hear about atrocities elsewhere in the world where it's probably more likely, but yeah, your average person in North America calling up fatwa?

Preston Meyer  32:41  
It's not happening very often.

Katie Dooley  32:42  
It's just like a neckbeard in their basement.  That's upset about..  the keyboard warrior... that's upset about something. So don't worry about jihad, or Sharia or fatwas basically,

Preston Meyer  32:56  
they're not going to affect your life unless you're a Muslim. And then you'll know how to deal with that because you'll have been properly educated.

Katie Dooley  33:02  
Yes. and reading on Sharia there are Sharia councils, and it's basically, I think, honestly, it's more of an advisory thing. And I, you know, obviously this will deal more predominantly with like, Sharia women's councils. So let's say you want to divorce your husband, you would go to our Sharia Council, because divorce is, you know, not, it's not, I don't want to say it's not permissible, but it's frowned upon. And it's, I mean, it's frowned upon in Christianity, too. So don't, don't get all huffy with me. And it's sort of the council that would sort of give you that blessing to have a divorce because your husband's an asshole. And that's kind of how it runs. And that happens in Christianity, too. And I presume Judaism as well, that they say no, you're fine. God won't be mad at you for divorcing your wife-beating husband, and they go, Okay, thank you. And then they get their divorce and everyone's happy. And that's kind of how especially in the West how Sharia would play a role the same as bringing your issues to a church elder.

Preston Meyer  34:11  
Yeah, pretty much. What are we on to now?

Katie Dooley  34:15  
We are on day-to-day beliefs on what it looks like to be a Muslim in day-to-day life.

Preston Meyer  34:23  
So as somebody who likes food, that's usually where I lead to beliefs being the most visible is how people's religion affects their dietary practices. And so you'll often see labels in your grocery store depending on where you live, of course, of Halal yogurt and Halal foods. And Halal is the opposite of haram. Halal is permissible. Haram is forbidden.

Katie Dooley  34:55  
And we'll we'll talk about food first, but there's lots of things that are halal. Halal and haram aren't just for food. Also, if you're a restaurant owner, like, man, just make your meat halal. I don't know why.

Preston Meyer  35:11  
Because people like food that's not just restricted to that category.

Katie Dooley  35:17  
But like it doesn't affect me if meat is halal, but how many more customers would you get if your meat was halal, that's what blows my mind because I have some Muslim friends who are like, well, I can't eat there because it's not halal. But here's the list of restaurants I can go to

Preston Meyer  35:30  
So many people love bacon. I mean, that's us. Pork Chops staple of American diet.

Katie Dooley  35:36  
So what Preston is getting at is that pork is haram. Just I mean, the term is different. But just like in Judaism, pork is not permitted to be eaten. There are a bunch of other meats that are not supposed to be

Preston Meyer  35:49  
Alligator. No good.

Katie Dooley  35:51  
Shark. No good

Preston Meyer  35:53  
Dog. No good.

Katie Dooley  35:54  
Monkeys. Bad.

Preston Meyer  35:55  
Straight up awful. Actually. Like, I know that. I know, the restriction is don't eat carnivores. I mean, there's more restrictions. Yeah, but I feel like monkeys. It's probably a little bit not just them being carnivorous, but also them being like, too familiar to humanity.

Katie Dooley  
Fair. Also dogs,

Preston Meyer
Right?

Katie Dooley  36:15  
Not that dogs are like humans, but I have a dog on my lap right now. And I don't think I could, though we joke about her chicken legs.

Preston Meyer  36:27  
As far as the prohibition against eating dogs and jackals and whatnot is the carnivore thing that they're just kind of dirty. I mean, you see a dog lick another dog's butt and if you're in the middle of writing rules about eating, dogs are gonna make that list.

Katie Dooley  36:43  
Insects are also haram on the list of of meats to not eat. And back to halal meat. So halal chicken, halal beef, it has to be slaughtered a certain way. Blood is haram so all the blood needs to be drained. And I believe a prayer is said so it's very similar to to kosher meat. Same thing has to be slaughtered a certain way and all the blood has to be drained.

Preston Meyer  37:09  
Yeah, the rules aren't exactly the same. The list isn't exactly the same, but they are awfully close. But one thing being haram does not make it or well, okay, I was gonna say one thing being haram does not make it kosher. That is absolutely factual. But also one thing being halal doesn't mean it's kosher and vice versa as well. What else is haram?

Katie Dooley  37:34  
There's lots lots of things that are haram. And but I say that and it's pretty standard to most religions. So other consumables that are haram, there's no alcohol, no cigarettes or drugs. With that nothing addictive either. So no gambling or lotteries.

Preston Meyer  37:55  
Did you know coffee is considered haram by many Muslims?

Katie Dooley  37:59  
Interesting. But then there's like Turkey where quite a huge deal and a quite a Muslim country.

Preston Meyer  38:07  
Yeah, so when coffee first became a really popular thing, it caused all kinds of arguments, because coffee is a stimulant. And being a stimulant is actually the issue that a lot of people felt that it was inappropriate to consume.

Katie Dooley  38:27  
Now, you know, asterisk on this conversation, every,

Preston Meyer  38:32  
There's, there's gonna be loads of variety...

Katie Dooley  38:34  
Every person is going to be on a different scale. We'll get into clothing briefly, but I know a ton of Muslim ladies that don't cover their hair. I have one friend who won't eat pork but will drink alcohol. I know some who aren't too concerned if meat's halal they'll have it, you know, they'll go to Popeye's and have a sandwich and not worry that it's halal or not as long as it's not pork. So there's there's with all of this asterisk spectrum,

Preston Meyer  39:04  
Right? There's loads of variety and practice. We're all people we tend to do things differently from the people around us. An awful lot of things.

Katie Dooley  39:14  
So other things that are haram, certain clothing is haram. Islam encourages modesty, just like Christianity, just like Judaism. Again, that looks different for everyone. We have like you said women who don't wear hijab, they want to do wear hijab, we have women who wear niqabs and burqas and everything on that scale, but generally includes shouldn't be tight fitting and skin is covered

Preston Meyer  39:38  
Don't deliberately entice sexual fantasy.

Katie Dooley  39:43  
Eye roll, but yes

Preston Meyer  39:48  
That is part of the philosophy behind it.

Katie Dooley  39:51  
But there's an eye mega eye-roll here. Another piece of clothing at clubs Yeah, another piece of clothing that is haram. And asterisk is not not ostentatious makeup or jewelry. Not that you can't wear makeup or that you can't wear jewelry but you gotta decide where the overdoing it line is. And with that as well in sort of the decor, ostentation they even say that your home should be decorated modestly and not overdone.

Preston Meyer  40:30  
But what if I love having a golden bejewelled doorknob?

Katie Dooley  40:34  
Then you're probably Persian.

Preston Meyer  40:39  
But I'm not

Katie Dooley  40:41  
Are you a Kardashian

Preston Meyer  40:43  
No,

Katie Dooley  40:44  
I say that with all the love in the world and appreciation for the opulence of Persian decor.I really liked the point you made about the burqa earlier. And I would love for you to if that would make sense to talk about now.

Preston Meyer  41:03  
A previous attempt to record this episode, I had mentioned a little bit about where that burqa comes from, or at least how it's validated. It's not a strictly religious garment, though, we do pretty much only see Muslim Muslim women wearing it. It's more of a localized cultural feature. You'll see Muslims all over the world who don't wear it. So it's clearly not explicitly prescribed in the Quran or the Hadiths.

Katie Dooley
Oh... we were gonna talk we should talk about the Quran and the Hadith we forgot.

Preston Meyer
Yeah, we will, don't you worry. We'll get back to that. All right. And so in the writings of Islam, which we'll get to in greater detail here in a minute, there is a Hadith that Muhammad said that a woman should not be alone in the same part of a tent with a stranger more or less. I'm summarizing, for sake of speed. And that there is this covering of the whole body is meant to be that separation when a woman goes out in public, because they're strange men everywhere. Men historically have sucked have been bad neighbours, bad to men, bad to women. And so that protection for women as much is protection because women have had bad experiences with men, regardless of what they're wearing. Choosing not to promote the feelings that would cause more bad things to happen.

Katie Dooley  42:42  
Eye roll

Preston Meyer  42:43  
Is, I mean, it sucks to have it forced upon you. That's, that's reality. But to elect to wear it, as many women do, is their choice and can be helpful for meeting the standards of the community.

Katie Dooley  43:00  
Now, we don't often see burkas in North America there, there are slight variations on on these. So we if you see a woman who has her, the lower half of her face covered, chances are it's in a niqab. Burqa is literally like a vent over your eyes.

Preston Meyer  43:19  
It's a whole tent.

Katie Dooley  43:21  
So if you see someone head to toe in North America, or you know Western Europe, chances are it's just just a niqab. And I would argue more often than not, it's elected. I mean, of course, lots of women have dick husbands regardless of your religion, so I'm sure some of them are forced to but most women that wear niqabs, if you ask they've chosen to for modesty reasons, and and same with the hijab and then you know, we were talking earlier, you said what do I think of when I think of the burqa, I think the Taliban in Afghanistan where it absolutely was enforced by law. And, and honestly, some of its cultural you'll, you'll get Muslims all over the world that don't cover up in that way. And it really just depends on on how you were raised. I know a devout Muslim man and he thinks hair is sexual and we had this conversation during the Judaism episode Preston thinks hair is sexual too. So

Preston Meyer  44:24  
You make it sound like I'm so bad for thinking that way. The burqua it's, it's a localized regional thing. It's a lot more of a cultural identity than it is a religious.

Katie Dooley  44:48  
Preston was saying it's a regional cultural thing. And there's, you know, places in the world that are predominantly Muslim. I think Indonesia is one where you wouldn't see women in hijabs at all. Oh, Okay, so yeah, especially here in North America, you I mean, obviously wearing a hijab, you're probably prescribed Islam, but I'm sure there's dozens of women, hundreds of women that don't that prescribe to Islam and you'd never know.

Preston Meyer  45:15  
Yeah, for sure.

Katie Dooley  45:17  
The... there was another point I was gonna make....

Preston Meyer  45:23  
Men are also required to dress modestly. It's not just a women thing. Absolutely. However, the standard is different. Because, yay, men!

Katie Dooley  45:33  
Oh, I remember what I was gonna say. So the hijab is worn for modesty. But it's also a reminder of God's presence, just like the yarmulke. And women, whatever their choice of garment is, will cover up for men that don't belong to their family. So the so when they're home, their husbands will see them their sons will see them, their brothers will see them their dad will see them and, and other women and any other women, right. So if you went to a friend's Muslim wedding, and not a single hijab was to be found, because it was all women. We all the women's, I mean, at her actual wedding, there were hijabs, but oh man Muslim wedding, what a party and the events leading up to the week before the three events I went to in addition to her wedding, that we're all women only there was not a there wasn't a scarf in sight

Preston Meyer  46:37  
Kind of nice.The freedom to choose when to wear it is a very real thing. And it's a thing I can appreciate.

Katie Dooley  46:48  
Now, we danced around, we should have talked about the Quran earlier and the Hadith, but you brought it up and now it seems like a good way to

Preston Meyer  46:56  
Not sure how we talked about it earlier, when you're talking about Muhammad kind of a big deal.

Katie Dooley  47:00  
Well, we talked about the Quran being divinely revealed to him.

Preston Meyer  47:04  
Yeah. So the angel Gabriel brought to Muhammad the message of Allah. And, of course, that included many instances of how to correct the course that these people were on either away from, well, no, no, just pretty much mostly away from traditions of regionalized idols, and also other ways on how to be better Muslims, once they had accepted that faith. And in addition to the Koran, which is the singular authoritative volume of Scripture, there is also the Hadith, which are, I mean, they're collectively described as a thing, but it's several Hadith they are saying, of mostly Muhammad, that are reported through a chain of authoritary figures, authoritative figures. And then eventually written down. And so usually, when you read it, you'll have Muhammad said to so and soo who said to so and so and it was eventually recorded by so and so. And that that chain is actually really important within the religion to measure the authority of one saying over another, and how important a thing is. And those Hadiths are often used in the interpretation of the Quran. They're used to guide the Sharia, and definitely referred to when composing fatwas. And they're just the sayings of the Prophet, mostly things that didn't make it into the Quran for one reason or another, when the Quran was also not written by Muhammad, but also written by his companions, as they remembered what Muhammad had taught.

Katie Dooley  49:08  
Now, the only other practice I can think of that we didn't touch on would be their religious service. Now, we have Christians on Sunday and then the Jews on Saturday. So Muslims get Friday, that's the day that they would typically go to the mosque to have their public worship.

Preston Meyer  49:30  
Absolutely. There's another word that is also used sometimes instead of mosque, Masjid.

Katie Dooley  49:37  
Oh, I've seen that word. I've just never.

Preston Meyer  49:40  
Yeah, I think the nearby mosque actually says Masjid before the name of it. So it's a reasonably common word that you might more likely see written out in public

Katie Dooley  49:54  
Than spoken. I've only ever heard people saying the word mosque.

Preston Meyer  49:57  
I've only ever heard the word masjids spoken when I was in New Jersey, where people would talk about going to the masjid, and nobody ever said mosque, but here we say mosque. And it seems to be a regional preference thing. It's like

Katie Dooley  50:16  
Like pencil crayons versus coloured pencils.

Preston Meyer  50:18  
Exactly. Because they are the same thing as far as I've been able to find.

Katie Dooley  50:23  
Pencil crayons.

Preston Meyer  50:25  
Sure, sure. Why not? Yeah, okay. Yeah, they're pencil crayons here. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  50:37  
Now you know where we live based on what we call them!

Preston Meyer  50:41  
It's a toque, not a beanie

Katie Dooley  50:43  
Oh, they're narrowing us down. They're gonna find us.

Preston Meyer  50:45  
Oh, no, it's a hoodie. Not a bunny hug.

Katie Dooley  50:48  
Well, I mean, that just tell them we're not from Saskatchewan. But we know how to say Saskatchewan, so they know we're Canadian. How about you tell us about the differences between Shia Sunni and Sufi Muslim?

Preston Meyer  51:06  
All right. So. So most Muslims are Sunni. Sunni, basically means traditional following the four caliphs that were elected to take over leadership duties after Muhammad's death, the Sunni Muslims make up a little over three-quarters of all of the Muslim population, an awful lot of Muslims

Katie Dooley  51:29  
one, probably 1.5 million, then no, my math is wrong.

Preston Meyer  51:35  
Your math is wrong. But that's okay. I'm not gonna worry about the exact numbers definitely more than a million

Katie Dooley  51:40  
Over a billion.

Preston Meyer  51:43  
Yeah, it is more than a billion. There's several groups within Islam and the Sunnis are at the largest by a longshot, the second largest being the Shia. So Sunni Muslims who make up the vast majority of the Islamic, the Islamic umbrella, if you will, are a lot more comfortable with democracy that their leaders are elected, that they follow those colleagues who were elected following Muhammad's death. And so they're a lot more similar to what we're familiar with in the West, I think, than a lot of people give them credit for. They're also really concerned with the Hadith, those sayings recorded by the companions of Muhammad. And there's also four schools of legal thought within the Sunni tradition, each kind of having a friendly-ish competition with one another, in a lot of the same way as the old Jewish Pharisees and rabbis. That they would argue an awful lot, all the time, about literally every point of law, and understanding the value of Scripture and determining how to live one's life. And having those arguments within the Sunni tradition isn't typically problematic. You just argue it out. And an argument to last generations, as long as both sides are willing to continue defending their position, using reliable and authoritative sources. The Shia tradition, named for those who followed Ali, who was Mohammed son in law. They see him as his true divinely appointed successor. So a little less democratic there. But when you have somebody divinely appointed, it just makes sense that you follow them. So if you believe it, then that's the way you go. And the most visible feature of the Shia tradition that makes it different from from the Sunni tradition is the need to put down everything that they do differently from the Shia tradition. It's it's super visible, but there's also a lot of anti-rejection rhetoric among Shia Muslims as well. Just basically a lot of the scholars saying "Don't be a dick." They're still Muslims countering those people who say they're not good Muslims. Like you mentioned the No True Scotsman fallacy. So often it's that's the deal with Islam. You can be a Muslim and disagree. And that's okay. You don't you're not going to fit into the little cookie cutter every time. That's nonsense.

Katie Dooley  54:34  
Now I know Sunnis pray five times a day and Shia is typically pray three times a day.

Preston Meyer  54:41  
Yes. And they both always face Mecca. They agree on that.

Katie Dooley  54:46  
Don't we all

Preston Meyer  54:48  
Face towards Mecca when we pray?

Katie Dooley  54:49  
I mean, yeah, we're pretty darn close.

Preston Meyer  54:54  
I mean, you don't pray. I don't make a point of facing one direction or the other.

Katie Dooley  55:01  
Most churches face east towards Jerusalem and at that point converging, like you're pretty you're basically...

Preston Meyer  55:09  
At this distance from the Middle East. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  55:12  
Maybe if you were in Dubai, it'd be a little more specific.

Preston Meyer  55:15  
Yeah, the closer you are, the more you have various directions to Mecca

Katie Dooley  55:18  
But this far away, we're all facing Mecca. I am literally facing east, right now, as we record this. So yeah.

Preston Meyer  55:31  
Very nice. Very nice. I think if you point in any direction and go long enough, unless you've set it up exactly, right because you're always going to screw up and divert a little bit by a degree or another by by your 100 step that you're not going to make a perfect rain around the planet. At some point, you're gonna hit Mecca. I mean, you might take several laps, but

Katie Dooley  55:57  
There's got to be some sort of online simulation for this.

Preston Meyer  56:01  
Probably. For the if you occasionally vary by degree, I think you'll eventually get there,

Katie Dooley  56:07  
Like the screensavers where you like watch them. And you just wait for it to hit the corner. Eventually it'll...

Preston Meyer  56:16  
Exactly. Of course, that's not good enough. You do actually have to face towards Mecca when you pray. Yes.

Katie Dooley  56:22  
That was the divergent. There was the tangent...

Preston Meyer  56:26  
Everyone's back, we're gonna be okay.

Katie Dooley  56:27  
He got us to Mecca.

Preston Meyer  56:33  
The hajj is complete.

Katie Dooley  56:35  
I don't think we count you're not actually allowed in Mecca unless you're Muslim.

Preston Meyer  56:39  
That's right. And it's actually interesting that I've heard many Muslims use a much looser definition of what Islam is to describe people who don't subscribe to the Islamic faith as Muslims. For example, if I believe in Jesus, that's a pretty good step. If I want to be peaceable and worship the true God, there are Muslims who think that that's enough to call me a Muslim. But the guys guarding the doors at Mecca are not likely to be satisfied with that. They'll want to know that I believe Muhammad is a prophet, divinely called and inspired by God. And yeah, that's that's kind of the deal. There's, there's a whole spectrum in Islam just like there is in every other faith tradition. Another sizable enough for common people to know the name group within Islam is the Sufi tradition, which is a lot more interested in understanding, both internal and mystical, I guess, portions of the universe and God and theology. It's not incompatible with either as far as I'm able to observe, but it's given its own label as being its own thing.

Katie Dooley  58:14  
Ah, yes. A notable Sufi is Rumi. And he was known for his poetry and I guess commentary on on Islam and I was gifted,

Preston Meyer  58:27  
I was looking at that a little bit.

Katie Dooley  58:29  
My little book fo Rumi. Yeah, I was gifted that when I was in university and taking religious studies, and it's just got a little poems and passages, but he was a Sufi mystic. So check it out. It's an easy little, like you said, it's just poetry on Islam. There's little gems in there, and it's easy and non-committal. So yeah, he's a well-known Muslim, Sufi, Mystic guy.

Preston Meyer  58:57  
Yeah. And there's several much smaller groups in Islam, especially visible in North America. A lot of them come from traditions of African Americans remember, callbacks of their grandparents talking about their religion before they were forced into slavery under Christians, Christians in air quotes. And so when they received their freedom, a lot of them reverted to a form of Islam that may not necessarily be recognizable to somebody who is part of one of the bigger traditions. But if they believe in God, that God is God and that Muhammad was His Prophet. That's the first step in that direction. So we have leaders like Louis Farrakhan, who has quite a sizable following in the United States as leading one of those sects. What else we got?

Katie Dooley  1:00:01  
I think the last thing we have to cover is being Debbie Downers, because we really can't have an episode on Islam. And we'll go into greater detail in another episode. But we really can't talk about Islam without the rise of Islamophobia in our world, especially here in the West.

Preston Meyer  1:00:21  
Especially in the last 20 years or so after the Twin Tower attacks of 2001. We have seen a growing voice that occasionally wavers and quiets down, which is nice, but the sentiment is not gone yet that Islam is a terrible force in America.

Katie Dooley  1:00:46  
It's not a violent religion.

Preston Meyer  1:00:48  
It's all nonsense. People are either violent, or they're not. And I don't think religion has anything to do with it. Two, or about 100 years ago, the Ottoman Empire was one of many countries who lost the First World War. And they were splintered by the Allied governments to make sure that they would perpetually weaken themselves and each other by constant in-fighting. And the one thing they happen to share is the Islamic religion. And so it's easy to paint the enemy is Islamic. But that's a really terrible lens to look at all through. And when they rise up and say, Hey, we're tired of Americans screwing us over. So many people just see them as Muslims from the Middle East, when we could just say people from the Middle East are tired of Americans, screwing them over.

Katie Dooley  1:01:49  
I... we've had this conversation before, I think religion definitely exacerbates socio-economic-political issues, I don't think it makes it better. I think it's definitely fuel to a fire because now it's a divinely sanctioned fight.

Preston Meyer  1:02:13  
Well, and it validates the perspective of good versus evil in your conflict.

Katie Dooley  1:02:17  
Yup. But that being said, you've also, every time I bring a religious conflict, you're like, No, here's the socio-economic is the reason behind it. And I don't disagree. So there's a great podcast called The road to 9/11. By NPR, based off of a History Channel, documentary, and it goes into how the how 9/11 was set in motion decades before the event actually happened. So you know, if you talk to people in the 90s, about what Islam was, most people couldn't even tell you, and it was already in motion. So I had a to point to that, but it's gone.

Preston Meyer  1:03:00  
It's not one thing that just popped up by a couple of Muslim extremists, it was political people motivated politically, and trained by the American government to do the same thing to other governments. And all of that, to have the effect of unifying some of America. It's, it helps to have a common enemy. But to make a religion, an enemy is nonsensical, in my opinion.

Katie Dooley  1:03:34  
I guess the point I'm trying to make is like in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. If you weren't scared of Muslims, which you shouldn't be, then why are you scared of them? Post 9/11? Because like I said, the it was already in motion. I mean you're, right? You can go was horribly back as the Ottoman Empire. So it's been in motion for a very long time. Yeah. So if you weren't scared of them before, why are you scared of them now?

Preston Meyer  1:04:02  
And if you are scared of them, why aren't you scared of Christians? Christians tend to be very awful to other Christians if they don't go to the same church. Not that it's a rule, but that's a thing that's super observable. And speaking on just in terms of terrorism, there's an awful lot more Christians bombing government buildings and medical stations

Katie Dooley  1:04:30  
Storming capitols...

Preston Meyer  1:04:31  
Right? There's a lot more of that than there is Muslims doing it.

Katie Dooley  1:04:36  
And I mean, part of that could be

Preston Meyer  1:04:38  
It's socioeconomic

Katie Dooley  1:04:40  
Right. Muslims know in North America, not that they have any claim any inclination to but the the repercussions are tenfold of what a brown Muslim would experience and what a white Christian would experience for any act of violence or terrorism. Right? I mean, we bombed the entire Middle East because of 9/11. But we've let tens of thousands of people die from Coronavirus. So it's just you know...

Preston Meyer  1:05:12  
It's a mad world.

Katie Dooley  1:05:13  
It is a mad world. There's a song about that. I think if you view Christianity is peaceful, you have to view Islam as peaceful. I don't think it's fair to look at it through different lenses. There are peaceful, peaceful chunks of the Bible and peaceful chunks of the Qura. There's violent chunks of the Bible and violent chunks of the Koran. And there's hateful Christians and hateful Muslims and hateful atheists and there's loving, Christian, Muslim, atheist, whatever fill in, fill in the blank. Like Preston said, it's people in general, people are garbage, and you're gonna find garbage people in every group.

Preston Meyer  1:05:53  
But with any luck, you'll find the good ones in every group too.

Katie Dooley  1:05:59  
If you're willing to let go. And I would say if you're feeling wary or concerned about Muslims in your community, I would just encourage you to have conversations with them. And online mosque would be more than happy to have you for an afternoon and teach you some stuff and show you around. But if that's too far out of your comfort zone, then find someone in your communities that's a bank teller, library worker or whomever that is accessible to you. They're happy to answer questions. And that's our most of my knowledge on Islam. Obviously, we've done a lot of supplementary reading, but a lot of my foundational Islam is just from asking friends, questions about their lives and what they believe and why they do what they do. And they will give you the best answers, and they're happy to teach and feed you, too.

Preston Meyer  1:06:58  
Yeah, honestly, most people are happy to feed you if you're willing to talk to them for any length of time. And don't be a dick about it.

Katie Dooley  1:07:09  
I mean, yeah, I think people love to talk about themselves. So if you go in with an open mind, then you'll learn some good things.

Preston Meyer  1:07:17  
Absolutely. I want to lean into some positive things before we close actually had her a little downer moment. There's a lot of great things that Islam was brought to us that I alluded to, as we just opened up that mathematics. We use Arabic numerals in math. And it's not just because they took over a huge chunk of Europe ages ago. It's because their numbers are way more sensible and way more useful for math than the Roman numerals. And the even the Greek numbers system that use their alphabet and the Hebrew number system, they use their alphabet, the Arabic came up with numbers that are super easy to look at and do math real quickly, instead of counting out what four x's and a V

Katie Dooley  1:08:11  
45! Yeah, so if you're super Islamophobic and or "get back to your country" kind of person, please go back to using Roman numerals or else you're a poser.

Preston Meyer  1:08:23  
I love it.

Katie Dooley  1:08:25  
It bothers me to no end if that's if you're like,

Preston Meyer  1:08:30  
I don't want to be forced to learn Arabic numerals. That's what you were forced to learn growing up that's already happened. It's mysterious to me that Arabic has actually developed a different set of numerals that is now commonly used as opposed to what we're familiar with now. But what we use is the Arabic numbers set.

Katie Dooley  1:08:55  
Okay, this is why I found it.

Preston Meyer  1:08:58  
Oh, that's a lot more curls on the nine than I was expecting.

Katie Dooley  1:09:03  
So I don't know. I this is like a super fun fact and press and Preston called me out on it. But Arabic numerals are super cool because the number of angles is is the number so the one you have to and you have to draw this the correct way. But the one with the draw with the hat on top has one angle and a two if you draw it this picture is like a Zed but you know some people curve or curl it it's got two angles and so he has three angles and a for this you have to draw the sailboat four though the closed four has four angles and the five has five angles. It's like super cool. I don't it makes me so happy.

Preston Meyer  1:09:43  
Now that I see it far more willing to accept it

Katie Dooley  1:09:46  
And you have to draw the seven with the cross and the foot like so there's a whole foot Yeah, so they we've gotten lazy and how we draw things and or stylized how we draw things as someone who likes fonts but they original way of drawing was that it was based off of the angles in the number is, yeah, it's really intuitive. But in your back pocket, that's your trivia for this week with your family.

Preston Meyer  1:10:12  
Yeah. And also, early Christians really had no interest in the Greek classics. I'm not sure why that's the case, modern Christians seem to love them. But they were almost completely buried by the Christians. And Muslims are-- Muslim scholars were way ahead of the Christians of their time. And that's true in many cases, throughout history. And we can thank Muslim scholars for the Greek classics that we enjoy today, including the Homeric poems.

Katie Dooley  1:10:49  
Islam definitely had a, like a word for it like a high period, an enlightened period.

Preston Meyer  1:10:57  
And it was way before the, for everyone else.

Katie Dooley  1:11:00  
And we owe so much science and math, in particular, astronomy too, to Islamic culture. And then also really cool art, as I mentioned earlier, said Go away, go away. And then the Holy Wars started

Preston Meyer  1:11:17  
And the Dark Ages, and like crusades, an awful lot of fighting, because much like the Bush era, Dick measuring was there was a huge problem of white people who thought that they were superior for some reason, saying we're not comfortable with these smart brown folk. That that mindset is still very common in some parts of America. But yeah, Islam has brought us all kinds of great things. And I don't think they can be blamed for even half of the awful things that people like to blame them for. So I'mma celebrate Islam as one of those religions that's worth preserving.

Katie Dooley  1:12:15  
Wow. I...

Preston Meyer  1:12:20  
Not that we have any power to do anything.

Katie Dooley  1:12:22  
I mean, neither of us are Muslim. So we're not actually helping the cause. But I really don't want any religion preserved. But I see your I see you seeing the merits.

Preston Meyer  1:12:43  
People have to grow up with some sort of moral teaching. They have to go with some sort of moral teaching.

Katie Dooley  1:12:48  
I turned out just fine. His name was Mr. Rogers

Preston Meyer  1:12:54  
I'm okay with that.

Katie Dooley  1:12:55
He was a pastor.

Preston Meyer  1:12:57
Yeah. Okay. didn't know that. But I'm okay.

Katie Dooley  1:12:58  
Um, so that concludes the Abrahamic religions that we've talked about. So Judaism, Christianity, Islam, we are going to spend the next four episodes covering air quotes, Eastern religions. As you know from past episodes, we don't love that term. So we will be starting with Hinduism in two weeks' time and then Buddhism, Sikhism and Shintoism. And that will cover all the all the big ones, and then we can dive into some more gritty topics once we're all on the same footing for for the world's religions. If you like what you're listening to follow us

Preston Meyer  1:13:47  
on Instagram and Facebook. Feel free to email us

Katie Dooley  1:13:52  
become a loyal congregant @hollywaterm- @holywatermelo- @HolyWatermelonPod for Instagram and Facebook and holywatermelonpod@gmail.com.

Preston Meyer  1:14:05  
If you want to email us

Katie Dooley  1:14:06  
If you want to email us. concerns, suggestions, commentary, hate mail, join the conversation in the conversation. We'll read your email on air.

Preston Meyer  1:14:21  
Yeah, I would love to.

Katie Dooley  1:14:24  
Also, if you have stuck with us this long please share this with a friend if you share with a friend that we can double our listeners and put out more great content.

Preston Meyer  1:14:36  
Thanks for joining us.

Both Hosts  1:14:37  
Peace be with you!

Our second episode on the Abrahamic traditions is about Christianity, the most popular religion in the world. Katie and Preston give a high-level overview of the history, traditions, observances, and the handful of common beliefs that are found amongst all denominations.

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Episode Transcript

Katie Dooley  00:00
Hi Preston 

Preston Meyer  00:10
Hi Katie

Katie Dooley  00:12
And welcome you

Preston Meyer  00:13
To the Holy Watermelon podcast.

Katie Dooley  00:19
Today's a big one. 

Preston Meyer  00:21
Yeah, it's the big one. I mean, we say big. There's an awful lot of Christians in this world.

Katie Dooley  00:28
I mean, it's the biggest,

Preston Meyer  00:31
Is it numerically actually the biggest? Okay.

Katie Dooley  00:34
It's followed closely by Islam,

Preston Meyer  00:37
Right. 

Katie Dooley  00:38
Which is two weeks from now. 

Preston Meyer  00:41
We will be talking about many, many religions as we keep going through this path of exploring the Western and Eastern traditions, a label, which of course you'll remember, I don't like 

Katie Dooley  00:51
We don't like it. 

Preston Meyer  00:54
All right. 

Katie Dooley  00:54
So Christianity, Mr. Christian. I feel like you are the more experienced of the two of us on this topic.

Preston Meyer  01:06
I have plenty of experience.

Katie Dooley  01:07
First-hand experience, for once

Preston Meyer  01:11
Yes, I am a Christian theology instructor. I have been for quite a long time I've 

Katie Dooley  01:16
You are Christian

Preston Meyer  01:19
I'm a Christian. I've been involved with Christian community for the last eightteen years. 19 years. It's been 19 years. That's kind of weird. Yeah, I've been teaching theology for a while. That's how where I got. That's the field in which I got my degree is Christian Theology and Religious Studies. Of course, they're two different things. But they have mixed very well for my studies, which is a lot of fun. And is a really complicated subject to try and cram into an episode of our podcast. 

Katie Dooley  01:56
Yeah, I guess we'll see how long we talk for. I've said this before, this might be a two-parter, and it never has been yet, so... 

Preston Meyer  02:04
We'll see. 

Katie Dooley  02:04
We'll see. I think we've done a pretty good job in planning that this will be a very broad, 

Preston Meyer  02:12
But relatively concise,

Katie Dooley  02:13
Broad, but concise summary of beliefs and practices and history. And of course, I know, some of the episodes we have planned going further, we'll dive into more specific areas of Christianity. But if you have any suggestions or recommendations, please drop us a line on Facebook, Instagram, or our email, all of them are holywatermelonpod@gmail.com for the email, and handles are Holy Watermelon Pod, and we'd love to hear your suggestions and feedback for episodes.

Preston Meyer  02:49
Absolutely. If we can make this a discussion that involves your voices in addition to ours, we're gonna enjoy our company a lot better. 

Katie Dooley  02:59
So I think it's fair to say Christianity has a firmer start date than Judaism. 

Preston Meyer  03:05
Yeah, 

Katie Dooley  03:05
Judaism kind of just morphed from older religions.

Preston Meyer  03:10
It definitely looks that way from pretty much every perspective, 

Katie Dooley  03:14
Whereas...

Preston Meyer  03:15
The tricky thing is we don't have any sure day on when Moses is supposed to have been born.

Katie Dooley  03:19
Well, I mean, that's 4000 years ago, we're really starting to push it at that point. But Christianity has a standing JC 

Preston Meyer  03:27
Yeah. 

Katie Dooley  03:28
So that's, that's the starting point.

Preston Meyer  03:32
Yeah. Josh was later later, surnamed oily Josh was born approximately 2020 years ago. It's kind of convenient that we have a calendar that's based on the supposed time of his birth. Of course, there's loads of discussion on why that's not a very good estimation, why people think it's off.

Katie Dooley  03:56
Is it because we've changed our calendars? 

Preston Meyer  03:57
No, there's a good handful of scholars who are on one particular side of the argument say that Jesus was born probably four BC, four years earlier than what is typically commonly expected. This number is primarily driven by the chronology and the timing of the death of Herod the Great, the story of Matthew says that Herod the Great, was so worried about this rising up of the King of the Jews, that he had all the babies killed. And there's already some historical issues here. But for for that story to be true about Jesus, then Jesus had to have been born around four BC because Herod died a few years before one ad. So, which is the first year of our Lord It's not there's no year zero, it's not the year after the birth year before, it's year before and the year of 

Katie Dooley  05:06
A one and one. 

Preston Meyer  05:07
Yep. Calendars are tricky. There's usually not zero years and calendars. I'm not aware of a calendar that has a zero year. But I'm also allowing myself to get easily distracted from an interesting topic. So there's, I could go on for a whole hour on just the topic of the timing of when Jesus was born. I don't happen to believe that part of the story in the first few chapters of Matthew, that say anything about King Herod, popular Jewish literature of the time, attributes a very similar story to Abraham. And the way things go in Judaic literature is if you want somebody to look holy, or to appear to fill any of the same roles as another former great leader, you tell the exact same story about them. And so, as I think we talked about before, there's not a whole lot about the story of Jesus, that the first telling of that happening was to Jesus. This is definitely an example of that problem. Jesus, his story really begins with the important stuff when he was about 30 years old. Described as his cousin, good old John the Baptist, and then immediately starts teaching and beginning his life as a rabbi. And then tells everybody loads of things about how to be a good person, be a good neighbour, be a good friend. And then also says a few things that really offend an awful lot of people and gets killed.

Katie Dooley  06:47
Wow, yeah, short and sweet, 

Preston Meyer  06:50
Right? And so the Christian religion, when it exactly started, it's pretty easy to say, Jesus, having students as a rabbi in approximately 30 AD, is a fairly sound beginning. There's definitely a completely different organization at that point than there is 100 years later, or even 10 years later, let's be real. The churches established by the apostles are structurally very different and can't really be said to be the same church that Jesus started. But the doctrines and the dogma and the creeds and beliefs stem from the mortal ministry of Jesus and the miracles that He did to convince people that he was worth listening to. He fed an awful lot of people, whether they were rich or poor, he warns the rich that they're not going to go to heaven. This is very offensive to people in America who feel that you can't possibly have God's favor unless you are rich. It's a problem.

Katie Dooley  08:05
Well, I mean, there's a lot of wealthy churches out there. So that's probably a problem, too.

Preston Meyer  08:12
Yeah. Christianity is tricky. But yeah, it started with a guy. I don't think it's fair to just call him a guy who was in the Middle East, he was a Jew. He grew up in the Pharisaic tradition, he taught in the same way that all of the Pharisaic rabbis around him did. And this is very evident when reading the Bible. And if you have any familiarity with how the rabbis have argued, if you read the Talmud, or the Mishnah, in general, there's loads of arguing between people who have an education. It's almost like what we see today in university situations where you have to defend your thesis to be considered a doctor. Not wildly different. And that's that's who Jesus was as a mortal person was a person who argued on awful lot Well, we talked about this last episode that the Jewish community is waiting for the Messiah to come Christian believe the Messiah has come it was Jesus. Jesus is the Son of David that's going to rebuild the temple yeah and he didn't build anything as far as we have any record, 

Katie Dooley  09:28
Maybe a table. He was a carpenter, 

Preston Meyer  09:30
See, that's actually also a tricky thing. He might not- 

Katie Dooley  09:33
He didn't build a table!?

Preston Meyer  09:35
Though that is a very heartwarming scene and the Passion of the Christ seeing him build a table and having a high up being all prophetic that we're going to sit up here one day instead of these low tables where we're chilling out on our sides. This isn't even a visual medium, it doesn't matter.

Katie Dooley  09:50
Yeah, a person's like leaning and miming all of this just so everyone knows. He's really into it Yet, 

Preston Meyer  09:56
I talk with my hands and I draw things and one day well actually just straight up, have a show where people can see us. That'll be great. In the meantime, just miming for your entertainment. So there's there's no real evidence that Jesus was a carpenter at all. There's the word that has occasionally been translated as carpenter in the New Testament that's used to describe Jesus. And later in Latin, they doubled down and committed. Yeah, totally. Jesus was a carpenter. And that's where that tradition comes from. The Greek word translates more fairly to craftsman as a broader word. And if Jesus was, in fact, from the town that we now call Nazareth, it wasn't called Nazareth, when Jesus was born, according to all of the historians and archaeologists that we found, if he was from that town, it would make a lot more sense that he was actually a stone cutter. So slightly more likely that he would have actually built something that was meant to endure like a temple, but probably didn't build a temple.  right. Both just says the Jews are waiting for the Messiah to come, the Christians are waiting for him to come again. And the plan is that the temple will then be rebuilt.

Katie Dooley  10:45
I don't know what's with all this procrastination

Preston Meyer  11:27
Right? We just wait. We sit and wait, and we hope for the best. And some of us try not to be dicks in the meantime.

Katie Dooley  11:37
So the Christians had their Bible.

Preston Meyer  11:42
Oh, you're already on rocky ground.

Katie Dooley  11:45
Okay. We're going to do a full Bible episode so...

Preston Meyer  11:48
But I'll give a quick summary. So we talked before in the last episode that the Jews have the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nephi. And the Ketuvim. Christians have the Christian New Testament sometimes called the Greek Bible or the Greek New Testament. Luckily, the Catholic Church managed to nail down a solid 27 texts that make up the New Testament, and everybody splintered off after that point. So all Christians pretty much agree on the 27 books, the Bible, Luther wasn't too fond on the Epistle of James, there's loads of people who would like to write off the Revelation of John, but for the most part of the canon is those 27 texts. The Old Testament, which I've mentioned before, I like to call the Hebrew Bible, when it's appropriate, as much as I can remember to do so. The Old Testament is a different thing than the Hebrew Bible. Because the Hebrew Bible is 39 books. In the Christian tradition, the number is smaller, in, in the Hebrew tradition, they've combined a few books, they they've got a bunch of books got split in half, and they translated them into Greek, in the handful of centuries of the former era, the before Christ times. And so that the number got expanded a little bit, but also the Septuagint, the Greek Old Testament, translated in Egypt, by a group, by Jews, who spoke Greek and could read and write it. They included a lot more books than are included in the newer Masoretic text of this of the Tanakh. And so the Orthodox Christians, Russians, Ukrainians that the Eastern Orthodox collection

Katie Dooley  13:50
There's also an Asian orthodox 

Preston Meyer  13:53
There is 

Katie Dooley  13:54
Which I don't know a lot about but I just thought it was important to mention that there's the Eastern European 

Preston Meyer  13:58
And then there's further Yeah,

Katie Dooley  14:00
Even further east 

Preston Meyer  14:02
There's so many different churches and blocks of churches within the umbrella of Christianity that there's there's not one thing that you can say about Christianity and their doctrines or their beliefs or their creeds. That is correct, if you want to make it universal, except for we believe in Jesus.

Katie Dooley  14:27
I, I think the only thing I remember hearing is that Jesus is the Son of God. 

Preston Meyer  14:33
Yes. 

Katie Dooley  14:34
Is what makes a Christian because then you get religious scholars who believe in a historical Jesus, that doesn't make them Christian, 

Preston Meyer  14:41
Right. 

Katie Dooley  14:41
So the lowest common denominator in Christianity is Jesus is the Son of God. And we'll dive into this at another point, but like, I'm a firm believer that if you think Jesus is the Son of God, you're a Christian even if you're Westboro Baptist Church, you have- 

Preston Meyer  15:01
Worst kind of Christian

Katie Dooley  15:02
-garbage doctrine. You are a Christian. And I, you know, and same thing for Islam. If you believe that Muhammad is the prophet, and you're a part of ISIS, then yeah, you're still a Muslim, you're a bad Muslim, but you're still a Muslim. And I think that's an important conversation to have in the world of moderation. And that some of these, these groups have to moderate themselves. If you think if you're a Christian, you think Westboro Baptist Church is bad. You need to be having those conversations in your congregation, or in your home and with your community, that you know, this. Yes, they're Christian, but this is not acceptable way to be anyway. Sorry, that was a little soapbox. I got I'm gonna step down now.

Preston Meyer  15:53
All right. It's okay, to have soapbox moments. This actually, that was really, really normal, say 200 years ago, for Christian preachers to actually jump up on a soapbox and shout at people. 

Katie Dooley  16:10
It's still kinda normal 

Preston Meyer  16:11
I mean, here. Sometimes when we go downtown, I definitely see dudes on soapbox is shouting at each other. And that's not the way Jesus taught at all. I mean, sometimes he had to lift his voice to be heard by what is reported to be huge numbers of people I feel like 5000 people listening to Jesus at any given time seems unrealistic. I feel like it's being artificially planted. Right? Well, even if you had, as was sometimes practice, a person speaking, and then people like, just at the cusp of hearing range, they would shout to the next people down, which would probably also be distracting to the dude in the middle, but also

Katie Dooley  16:57
Like, telephone, 

Preston Meyer  17:00
Right? It causes some serious problems, that things would be left out, things would be reworded in a way that can be very problematic. I mean, 2000 years of Christianity has shown us that pretty effectively. There's, there's a lot that distract from the what I wanted to say about the Bible. So there was this Bible that was produced by Jewish scholars in Egypt, putting the Bible into Greek, they included a lot more books than is included in the Mesorah. So the Greek Orthodox Church has them as part of the canon, the Septuagint includes a whole bunch of extra books, their Bible is longer. And the Catholics generally don't have it in the main text of their Bible, we have the word Apocrypha, primarily in our language today, because of the title of these books, as a group, also called Deutero-Canon, like it's in the canon, but it's second class kind of deal. So they're books that are recognized, but they're not authoritative. And some of them are nifty books. And some of them are really cool stories that like just as valid as other parts of the Bible, and so on, they're like, that's a good reason. You got that,

Katie Dooley  18:15
Just to backtrack a bit

Preston Meyer  18:18
I had to backtrack to get to the Bible thing.

Katie Dooley  18:20
Just like we're going in circles. Christianity has dozens, if not hundreds, of denominations, but I did want to let our congregants know that Christianity can be broken down into three big ones, which then break down further. So you have Orthodox Christianity, you have Catholicism, and then you have Protestantism, which we'll get into in more detail, but

Preston Meyer  18:45
You have smaller groups that don't really fit into those categories. But they're smaller groups. That's the way that goes.

Katie Dooley  18:51
Yeah. And so, chronologically, it sort of starts with orthodox and I feel like those started around the same time. Protestant- Protestantism is the newest one, and it comes out of Catholicism, which we'll get to but Preston's going to  jump in and correct me.

Preston Meyer  19:07
Yeah. So Christianity has never been properly united, even biblical, like the first decades of Christianity, Peter and Paul, who, for some reason, share a feast day, 

Katie Dooley  19:25
But they hate each other. 

Preston Meyer  19:26
I wouldn't say they hate each other. They disagreed on an awful lot on some pretty high-profile topics. 

Katie Dooley  19:33
Weren't they both there? 

Preston Meyer  19:35
Paul was, far as we know, never witnessed to anything that Jesus did while he was alive. But the story is that while he was off persecuting Christians for being terrible Jews, he was struck with a vision and went blind briefly, and saw Jesus say, stop being a dick. Here I Am become a Christian? And then he did. He quickly led 

Katie Dooley  20:05
I can't believe Jesus just called me a dick!

Preston Meyer  20:08
Right? Book of Mormon musical some good fun. And so Paul, after having seen Jesus went and hung out with the Christians and quickly led, rose to leadership, and wrote, basically half of the New Testament and famously disagreed with Peter on a bunch of things, called Peter out on being a bad Jew sometimes, when Peter was like, I'm not so worried about being a Jew. I'm a Christian. Peter has some struggles in his life, Paul has struggles in his 

Katie Dooley  20:45
Don't we all?

Preston Meyer  20:46
Right. And they did agree on a good handful of important things, but they're more famously celebrated for disagreeing. And there's loads of other factions in Christianity that became visible very quickly before the New Testament was done being written. You've got these groups who believe some some things that are condemned by the leadership of the church

Katie Dooley  21:09
Or the Gnostics, they believe some weird shit. 

Preston Meyer  21:13
So there's not one cohesive group of these are the Gnostics either, but Gnostic belief definitely crept into Christianity and caused some problems for a lot of people. And yeah, pretty decent example. And then, when all of the apostles were gone, mostly by being brutally murdered... 

Katie Dooley  21:34
Martyred, Preston 

Preston Meyer  21:36
Yes, martyred, they refuse to deny what they had taught, and that's the credit we get, we give them a slightly cooler title. There, they started using the word Catholic for the most broadly accepted tenets of the faith, Catholic meaning universal, and Orthodox as a word probably was used around then, realistically as a Greek word, which literally just means right teachings, the Catholic Church uses orthodoxy.

Katie Dooley  22:10
I remember why I think orthodoxy comes first, which is clearly now incorrect, but I always thought it came first because in the Orthodox tradition, so I think still in Ukrainian and Greek Orthodox, the mass is done with actual bread, and actual wine. And I believe they don't believe in Transubstantiation. So it's a metaphor that the bread is the body of Christ and the wine is the blood, whereas Catholics believe in Transubstantiation where it literally turns into the body, you're literally eating the flesh and blood, if you show up for mass, you're a cannibal. Yes. And I remember hearing a story is that the reason that Catholics use the Eucharist the cracker is because so when you break, bread crumbs are made. And if you're having mass in church, you know, there could be birds or rats or church mice and they're obviously picking up the crumbs and the Catholics think it's like sacrilegious for a mouse to have the body of Christ in him. So that's why in my brain, I was like, well, the bread and wine would have come first and then it innovated into the, the Eucharist cracker

Preston Meyer  23:29
I hadn't heard that, but it does make sense in that context.

Katie Dooley  23:33
So that's why in my brain orthodoxy came first because they didn't give a shit and then they got stricter. But that was my reasoning. Why I said what I said, I said what I said, but thank you for correcting me. Fun fact for for for you.

Preston Meyer  23:49
Yeah. So orthodoxy and Catholicism, weren't really titles that were used a whole lot, until maybe a little less than 1000 years ago, at Catholic would have been used more than orthodox as describing the church, which would have been the Christian church until the big split of going from memory, I'm going to say 1134 AD. And I really hope I remembered that right. It feels like I studied pretty hard? I don't like focusing on dates because trying to. I don't think you guys care.

Katie Dooley  24:28
It was a long time ago. 

Preston Meyer  24:29
Yeah about 1000 years ago, there was this huge split, but between a whole bunch of Christians and the split, mostly ended up being the leadership of East versus the leadership of West. Ultimately, down to a word, one word in Latin. And an awful lot of argument about that word, because the big split, and that word is based on my pronunciation of Latin which people can argue but can't prove anything is filioque which is "and the Son", which out of context is meaningless. But we're really talking about the Holy Ghost in the Trinitarian godhead, that is the God of Christianity. The Holy Ghost is said to come from the Father, and those in the West added, and the Son. And the folks out east are like, No, that's not a cool, that's not right. We don't believe that, and you can't make us at it. And if you want to start a fight over it, bye. 

Katie Dooley  25:42
Bye, Felicia. 

Preston Meyer  25:43
And so the guys on the east side and the west side just excommunicated each other, and said we're splitting the church up and 

Katie Dooley  25:52
That's not the first time it's gonna happen. Spoiler alert!

Preston Meyer  25:56
So many similar things have happened over and over again. It's, it's interesting, like we talked about in Judaism, that there's the major groups within Christian within Judaism that we look at our, you know, the Orthodox, Conservative and Liberal, where it's not wildly different beliefs, they just sort of level of this level of practice. Most mostly, 

Katie Dooley  26:24
I mean, not fair either really. 

Preston Meyer  26:26
Yeah. Because every every discussion on theology is different from Rabbi to Rabbi anyway, even within the Liberals within the Orthodox within any given group, which is nice that you can actually have those discussions, it's so much easier to talk religion to a Jew than to a Christian. In Christianity, there's huge fights over almost every single point of doctrine. And in an awful lot of those instances, new church pops up. That gets really frustrating. So we had that huge split after a decent universality of Christianity for many centuries. And then we went a few 100 years more without any really big splits. And then in the 1500s, things got really messy, really, really fast. Europe started falling apart and splintering really bad. As far as Christianity goes, we have reformers like Martin Luther, who's like, you guys have a lot of issues. I noticed this one thing I spent a lot of time studying. Here's a list of 95 things you guys need to get figured out and change.

Katie Dooley  27:44
And there was a time there was like three Popes. Then there is a division and...

Preston Meyer  27:48
It was definitely always been questioning authority. That hasn't been too big of a problem. I mean, it definitely causes issues that I want to talk about a little bit later on. After I deal with the split. Yeah, Martin Luther. If you know much about him, you're either a fan or you're not. And that's fine. He put a lot of work into trying to make the church better. And that itself sounds pretty laudable. And there's actually a pretty decent movie up telling this story, starring Joseph Fiennes how you pronounce his name. I really enjoy the movie. It's got a bunch of other big stars in it. It's a lot of fun. A little bit of a downer, but it ends on a nice note. I've been told that Martin never left the Catholic Church. But

Katie Dooley  28:43
I thought he was considered a heretic.

Preston Meyer  28:47
He was definitely like going to trials all the time for excommunication. Like, don't cut me off from the church. But that's different than leaving the church. His relationship with the church was rocky from actually pretty much the beginning of him teaching at the university, and then only got worse as he started teaching against things that the Pope was doing. causing problems. That's the thing. A similar sort of thing about the same century, England had a fundamental issue with King Henry, who really just

Katie Dooley  29:31
Wanted to fuck a lot of women.

Preston Meyer  29:34

I mean, it's easy to say that that's what the problem was. 

Katie Dooley  29:37
He was king so he didn't need to. 

Preston Meyer  29:38
Well, okay, he was king. You have an awful lot of power is king. He also had an impotency problem. So and that's not published nearly enough.

Katie Dooley  29:50
Like, I've read quite a bit on King Henry.

Preston Meyer  29:52
Yeah, like he killed a couple of his wives. He divorced a couple of his wives,

Katie Dooley  29:58
Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded survived, right?

Preston Meyer  30:04
It's very nice. It's poetic. Actually, George Carlin does a great bit on Henry the Eighth too. But that's not the point.

Katie Dooley  30:12
He wanted to divorce Katherine of  Aragon and he couldn't because he was Catholic

Preston Meyer  30:19
And right Pope said, That's not okay. And the kings like, you guys are in Italy. I'm in England. I'm gonna do what I want.

Katie Dooley  30:26
I got divine right from God, right. God says I can start my own religion.

Preston Meyer  30:32
And ever since that time sharing today, the Church of England has been a thing. And most of the time the monarch is looked at as the, the authoritative head of the church, though not actually the ecclesiastical leader of the church. That's the Archbishop of Canterbury. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  30:52
And there I mean, it flipped flopped a little bit after Henry the Eighth backwards, Catholic, but now, I mean, Queen Elizabeth is still Church of England.

Preston Meyer  31:01
Yeah, that was actually one of the issues that a lot of people have with Charles taking over his king is that he married a Catholic after his wife died. Yeah. And there's a lot of people who are super uncomfortable with him being the head of the Church of England, having married a Catholic, and a lot of people like, well, let's just, let's send it straight to William. Okay. Awesome. Does it solve the problem? It did?

Katie Dooley  31:29
I mean, I would argue that William is probably a lot like most US presidents and is a part of the Church of England I'm doing air quotes

Preston Meyer  31:39
I can see what's great and high level of certainty that William has been to church a lot more than Donald. How much he believes I have no idea. I've not talked to him on the subject. But

Katie Dooley  31:52
Do you want to do our podcast Prince William, please,

Preston Meyer  31:55
We would be very honoured. Yeah, all right. So Luther Henry, once they both successfully started their own churches, more or less. I don't want to say Luther started at church, but he definitely started a church. He started his efforts from Catholicism, his efforts led to what we know today is the Lutheran Church, which, if you're looking at how to deal with your neighbour, who was Lutheran, Lutheran is basically Catholic light. It's, it's not wildly different. It's just pretty different on a lot of little things. But

Katie Dooley  32:40
Now my understanding of Martin Luther his biggest complaints, concerns with the church is that the priests were the gatekeepers to religion, you needed a priest to have any sort of chance of going to heaven. And everything was still done in Latin, which very few people spoke and I remember hearing that some of the priests didn't even speak Latin, and they just kind of go fettuccine bikini.

Preston Meyer  33:08
Yeah. If they couldn't remember exactly what to say, or they didn't have the text to read the script. Yeah, they would just spout nonsense.

Katie Dooley  33:17
And it was all about getting religion in the hands of the people, which, yeah, if you're going to do it anyway. That's I'm gonna agree with that, I think empowering people...

Preston Meyer  33:28
Another 400 years for the Catholic Church to be like, maybe we should do it in the vernacular. Vatican two is when we finally got English as a standard thing.

Katie Dooley  33:41
And that I mean, that killed Latin as a language. Nobody speaks it now

Preston Meyer  33:45
Right? Honestly, we're going through getting my bachelor's degree, I had to have language credits. And I had so many people like you're going to study Latin? No, I have no reason to study Latin was so previously that I had been working as a translator for the Bible. And they're like, Well, you work with the Bible. So you need Latin? No. Why would I want to read the Bible in Latin, that separates myself further from the original text, the original language, it was a problem. It's annoying. The New Testament was written all originally in Greek. With potentially that not being true with Matthew, an awful lot of people believe that the Gospel of Matthew was originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic, I guess, and then translated into Greek, but there's no evidence for that,

Katie Dooley  34:34
Because I can see the argument, which we'll talk about in our Bible episode is things getting lost in translation, which is why absolutely you can get the Quran in different languages, but it will, services are always done in Arabic because that's the language of the Quran. So you can see had it originally been written in Latin that that was their argument, but

Preston Meyer  34:55
The liturgy definitely would have been originally written in Latin, but that's it. I guess the papal bowls and whatnot. The ecclesiastical discourse would have happened in in Latin an awful lot of the time, but probably not exclusively. So, in England, they wanted the Bible in English, St. Thomas Moore, who was sainted, which aggravates me because the big thing that he did was kill people and burn books. Just because these people wanted the Bible published in English. He was sainted. The Catholic Church has not rescinded this. I don't think they've ever rescinded a sainthood. I could be wrong. I've honestly not looked it up. But I think that only just came to mind. But same thing, St. Thomas Moore is a thing I'm uncomfortable with. There's actually a lot of saints I'm uncomfortable with and we will definitely just talk about that for a whole episode one of these days, but not quite yet. And so what the the success of these two groups creating their own churches or movements in Europe, and the Pope really proving powerless against them. You got a whole bunch more people, Holland, and Germany and Scotland and pretty much all over Europe, people were or Western Europe, at least English or English. Eastern Europe didn't really do it so much. But Western Europe really started up a whole bunch of new movements, some of which are fairly termed Protestant. And some of them feel a little separate in in the way that they came to be from that label. Anabaptist are really cool. 

Katie Dooley  36:44
I was gonna say Mennonites, and Hutterites, which are part of the Anabaptist umbrella are very interesting denominations that originated in Europe and are now very popular. I think they're almost exclusively in North America. I know they had some from your persecution, which is why they came to North America. But yeah, that is one that seems very, I mean, to this day, very separate from mainstream Christianity.

Preston Meyer  37:12
I believe Mennonites are actually becoming more and more popular, right, like growing rapidly in Mexico right now. Which is pretty nifty.

Katie Dooley  37:21
I have a note here that I would like, you know, I wrote the notes on this. But there's a lot of words I want you to explain to me. So it's the big issue in Christianity is the question of ecclesiastical authority. First of all, what is ecclesiastical authority?

Preston Meyer  37:41
But I want to say it's complicated. It's not that complicated. Ecclesiastic authority is who has the power to make decisions and guide the church. And what that authority looks like is also in question in the Orthodox tradition, and

Katie Dooley  38:01
I have Catholics, most Orthodox and Latter-Day Saints are apostolic. So what is apostolic? 

Preston Meyer  38:15
For example, I worked for an Egyptian family right out of high school that I absolutely loved. And I learned from them that the church in Egypt, the Egyptian Orthodox Church, was basically founded by St. Mark, the dude who wrote the Gospel of Mark, travelled to Egypt as a missionary establish the church, as an apostle of the church. And that and they just, they hold on to that authority from descended from every successor, who held the basically the bishopric over that territory. And that's the same for an awful lot of jurisdictions out in the east, is an apostle setup camp, sent out missionaries from his camp, and basically established the church. And Rome is the same way, with Peter being the first bishop of Rome, and then Linus following. The idea is that these bishops in a way that nobody's willing to explain in a way that satisfies me hold apostolic authority over that city, even though they've not actually been made apostles by their predecessors. And so there's that line of authority that lots of people like to say is unbroken, because they can draw you a line through names. Yay, being able to write your own history as being the person in power.

Katie Dooley  39:47
Sounds like it's a lot like the history with the British Crown,

Preston Meyer  39:53
Right where you can trace through the British Crown into the genealogies recorded in the Bible, that sounds sketchy.

Katie Dooley  40:02
But like, yeah, absolutely you can draw a line. But there at some point there are different families and political marriages and Elizabeth didn't have Elizabeth the first didn't have kids. So she appointed someone new and wars. Yeah. So that's, that's what this sounds like, to me where yes, you could draw a line, but it's not necessary. Yeah, that's not necessarily unbroken. It's there's a lot of shenanigans in there.

Preston Meyer  40:27
Right? Well, like, as you mentioned, the time when we had three Pope's reigning at the same time, each fighting over the bishopric of Rome. That's not an unbroken line that's slightly bubbly, and funky, and unpleasant and historically confusing sometimes. And so, there's that idea of authority being received all the way through this line from the apostles. And so that is claimed by most orthodox denominations that I'm aware of the Catholic Church, and Mormonism. Mormonism doesn't do it the same way as the Catholics and Orthodox. Well, there's the modern Apostles in fulfill us a slightly different role than Catholic and Orthodox apostles. And also, there's a different narrative that there's not an unbroken 2000 years of history. It's in the 1820. I'm blanking on the air. So in the 1820s, Joseph Smith reported that he had Peter, James and John appeared to him and ordained him as an elder and an apostle for the Restoration of the gospel. And so we don't have a full 2000 year history for Latter Day Saints apostolic authority, we've got 200 years, which is rejected by an awful lot of Christians around the world, like the vast majority. And then there's the Protestants, who really think is interesting. The Anglican Church pulls no punches, they will flat out call the church of Rome apostate. Not all of them, obviously. But in plenty of official documents, that is the wording that is used. And that's problematic when you all of your authority is derived from that heritage. You can't say that your authority is good when you denounce the source of it. It's tricky. It's very tricky. And Lutheranism is similar, but not quite the same. And then you've got your your evangelicals who don't worry about authority at all.

Katie Dooley  43:01
Whoever wants to be the next, Billy Graham, yeah, can be the next Billy Graham. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  43:07
It's that easy and terrifying.

Katie Dooley  43:11
I mean, it's, this is gonna sound crazy coming from a Katie, but kind of falls into what Martin Luther it's in the hands of the people like why can't an average person and arguably Jesus was an average person become something great. Great. And that's how the Vatican pick their saints is that these people show some higher level of religiosity that is worthy of being made a saint. So why, yeah, why? Why do you need a if you preach a good, message, why do you need authority?

Preston Meyer  43:56
So different churches use that authority differently. Even the Catholic Church who claims and authority on their claims a monopoly on salvific authority. As long as you believe in Jesus, you can perform a baptism, an Anglican can perform a baptism and the Catholic Church generally will say, Yep, I could baptize now. And they're good. They reject baptisms from a handful of churches, that they're not comfortable with their theology. Catholics reject all authority claimed by Mormons for their baptisms. The wording on that is a little bit weird and fuzzy on why that's the case. And being able to defend that position when, you know, literally, anybody claiming an Anglican or Lutheran or Episcopalian, or Baptist faith can baptize on the Catholic Church says, Yeah, that's cool. It's just a little bit weird to me. Whereas the Mormon Church, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, you. You've got a very specifically delineated character of authority on who can baptize somebody. And it's cut and dry, it's easy to follow. But it's also a lot narrower than other groups. Then you've got the common evangelical position where a baptism isn't performed by somebody, you, you go into the water, you come out and no one has to touch you - parroting a lot of what we see in Judaism with the mikvah. You go into water, you come out, you're good. That's the deal. Whereas, biblically, the baptisms that we see in the Bible, we have John the Baptist, a person with authority, baptizing another person. So that's authority is a tricky thing. What that authority does, sometimes that authority is just the authority to teach and to lead. Sometimes it's who can perform these sacraments or ordinances. And it's kind of weird, Jehovah's Witnesses, their notion of, of authority, as far as it relates to the priesthood is baffling to me. I've asked, and I've not gotten an answer that makes sense to me enough to satisfy my question that Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Latter Day Saints claim authority by ordination from somebody who has got authority before them, the chain. Jehovah's Witnesses claim authority to perform Christian rights by virtue of having a Bible. Which is problematic to me. I haven't been able to make sense of it. I haven't had anybody explain it to me in a way that has made sense to me. I don't really, I can't defend it, because I don't understand it. It's just just one of those things that is odd.

Katie Dooley  47:32
So we've talked a lot about differences.

Preston Meyer  47:41
We've talked about the one thing that binds them all together.

Katie Dooley  47:44
Yeah. And how they split and split and split and split. Yes, there's one thing that binds them all, David, but there are more similarities. If they're not entirely universal, there are some things that are quite common. First one I think of is Sunday as the Sabbath.

Preston Meyer  48:06
Not universal

Katie Dooley  48:07
No, I know. That's because the Seventh Day Adventist is the first one I think, but near all of these are near-universal, because the only thing that's universal is Jesus is the son of God. But this would be very short episode, if we just said, Jesus Christ, and we believe he's the son of God. And that's how Christian started. And that's the overarching.

Preston Meyer  48:31
There's actually a little detail in there. That's not universal. Jehovah's Witnesses straight up, deny a cross.

Katie Dooley  48:38
Oh and I forgot that one too I've heard that one too. There's one where he was on just like a post, right? 

Preston Meyer  48:45
It's so complicated, Katie!

Katie Dooley  48:48
And here we are trying to give an overarching groundwork

Preston Meyer  48:53
We just we need some sort of foundation to move forward with our later discussions.

Katie Dooley  48:58
But this one's this one I think is the hardest one because there's just so much variance. All these next points are near universal. So don't be emailing me saying "but we don't believe in this" 'Cause we know we know. So Sabbath near universal on Sundays. And that is, that's because God rested. No. That's Judaism. Yeah, that's because Jesus was resurrected on

Preston Meyer  49:33
Jesus was Jesus rose from the dead.

Katie Dooley  49:39
That's because Jesus was resurrected on a Sunday.

Preston Meyer  49:42
Yep. So it's the Lord's day. There's actually plenty of churches that they'll have their sign up on the front of the building, and to let you know, when they're when their mass is or their meetings, as that's pretty standard detail, but a lot of them will actually say we meet on the Lord's Day, which isn't ever confusing to the people who go there, but it can be confusing to people from outside that group.

Katie Dooley  50:14
And how the Sabbath is recognized is different. I imagine it's everything from similar to Judaism where you don't do anything at all. Typically, people go to church for North America often you go for lunch afterwards. 

Preston Meyer  50:33
Gotta get that Chick-Fil-A 

Katie Dooley  50:36
after but, you know, some people work all day Sunday.

Preston Meyer  50:41
There's no Chick-Fil-A on Sundays, it's okay.

Katie Dooley  50:46
So, how the Sabbath is recognized is different, but typically it's the church day. Unless you're a Seventh Day Adventist, in which case that's Saturday.

Preston Meyer  50:57
There's there's a bunch of Christians who have retained the ancient Sabbath rather than the renewed Sabbath.

Katie Dooley  51:08
Communion, or mass. 

Preston Meyer  51:13
The emblems of the bread and the wine. 

Katie Dooley  51:15
Mostly universal

Preston Meyer  51:16
Mostly universal. I've not - I can't think of any off the top of my head that don't. It is specifically said in the Bible, you should be doing this. And I don't think I can think of

Katie Dooley  51:27
I've been to church services where it hasn't happened. But I don't know if that was because it was it's a separate service or whatever. But I have gone to just like a regular Saturday Protestant service that didn't but again, I don't know if that. 

Preston Meyer  51:43
Yeah, there's, there's loads of churches who don't do it every Sunday. There's, there's some who, even if they have several meetings over the course of the week, they'll only do it on Sunday. Or, or Saturday, if that's their day. Jehovah's Witnesses, if I remember correctly, only do this the Eucharist on the Passover. So if it's once a year, you've got the Latter Day Saints who will do it most Sundays, but they'll usually skip four or five Sundays in the year. 

Katie Dooley  52:16
And they wouldn't do it with wine. 

Preston Meyer  52:17
Right? They'll use water instead, in almost every case.

Katie Dooley  52:21
Do you maybe you want to talk about what the communion is like what I mean? I don't want to assume anyone knows that it's the body and blood of Christ

Preston Meyer  52:31
Yeah, it's it's not just a thing that showed up in the New Testament, it's a carryover from an older set of sacrifices. When you brought your lamb to be sacrificed at the altar at the temple, there was very often sacrifices accompanying that of bread and wine, and the little bit of wine would typically be poured out into the ground, as we see in a lot of religions around the world. And then it would be shared among those who are participating as well. And so Jesus said, my blood is the wine spilt for man. And because Jesus, of course, in Christianity is that great final blood sacrifice, and then the bread, which was broken apart and offered for the good of humanity, is that body of Christ, again, sacrificed all that. And so that tradition is perpetuated throughout Christianity for the last 2000 years, to remember that sacrifice that Jesus made. And so it's one of the handful of things that are pretty much universal among Christians, even if it's not every Sunday or Saturday for everybody.

Katie Dooley  53:48
The other one I have and again, I can't think of an exception is baptism seems pretty common again, the way it's done vary, but I can't think of a denomination that doesn't encourage baptism.

Preston Meyer  54:08
The Bible is pretty clear, in a few instances that Jesus tells the people go out baptizing the people. So if you're a Christian preacher who's not telling people that they should be baptized, that would be very irregular, because it doesn't mesh with what is taught in the book that you're teaching from.

Katie Dooley  54:29
The baptism can be done for infants.

Preston Meyer  54:33
That's pretty standard for the Catholic and Orthodox faiths.

Katie Dooley  54:37
And then the other one you see often it's about 11 years old. And that is so that the young person understands what the, the gravitas of a baptism is, and that they understand the commitments that they're making.

Preston Meyer  54:54
Absolutely. Oh, yeah. Anabaptists tend to be around puberty age. Latter-Day Saints typically do it at eight. There's, I'm sure there's other traditions where it's it's got another obscure specific age. There's plenty of churches who just say when you're an adult.

Katie Dooley  55:13
Yeah, when you're ready. And then Catholics also have they have a celebration at 11, your first very first communion, affirmation and confirmation, and that's, I mean, it's not a baptism you would've been my baptized, but that is sort of that was like the double whammy where you have to like, that's where you and then you're really committed you're really committed and you understand the gravity of this choice you're making to be confirmed.

Preston Meyer  55:43
Yeah, for Latter-Day Saints, the tradition that I'm pretty familiar with from a first-person point of view, that first communion is typically like a day after the baptism. And it's not really such a big deal as the baptism itself. But just one denominations experience.

Katie Dooley  56:03
The the actually I don't I, I think most Christians believe in the Second Coming.

Preston Meyer  56:12
I think, as I know, that's universal

Katie Dooley  56:17
The idea is that Jesus was crucified, he's gonna come back, restore the temple. Last Judgment. And yeah, so he'll decide where we get to go. It'll be hell on earth, according to Revelations.

Preston Meyer  56:35
Yes, the Revelation of John, not revelations. There's no s on the title. There's far too many Christians who get it wrong. I certainly can't blame you for not getting it right

Katie Dooley  56:46
I've only ever heard revelations.

Preston Meyer  56:49
But remember how I said an awful lot of Christians don't open the book? Yeah, that's where that problem comes from. And, yeah, in the Revelation of John, it warns us that the world is going going to get an awful lot worse before it gets better. Which is pretty typical of apocalyptic literature of the era.

Katie Dooley  57:11
Perfect. So we have a second coming. And then I guess, with that, again most Christians believe in some form of heaven. And most Christians believe in some form of hell. So there's variants and that's all it's debated how you get to either one of them. But they do, I guess that is our Yeah, that's an afterlife. And that's how you keep people in line.

Preston Meyer  57:42
Yeah, that's ultimately how it's been used for all of recorded history is striking fear into people's hearts to control them, which is not a characteristic of love, which is kind of the primary doctrine of Christ is to love one another. So, yay for disconnects within your logic and reasoning.

Katie Dooley  58:09
So here's a question for you. Since we have a resident Christian, how do you, this could be you personally, or the universal you decide what you believe when there's so much variation. And as an outsider, it really feels like you could just cherry-pick to...

Preston Meyer  58:32
Absolutely. I don't think that choosing what you believe is really the way it works. You can receive information, and then you either believe it or you don't. And that has a lot to do with how it meshes with information you've already had up to that point. Definitely, the burden of proof is ever-present. And something's what counts as evidence. What counts as evidence changes sometimes, depending on context, is the word proof is actually kind of weird. There's no such thing as proof in any context other than mathematics. Everything else is evidence.

Katie Dooley  59:17
Interesting. Maybe the question maybe it's not choosing what you believe. I don't I don't know how to frame this. But if you can find it doesn't matter what you believe you'll find it didn't I guess? Yeah. Doesn't matter what you believe you'll find a denomination of Christianity that jives with it.

Preston Meyer  59:37
Yeah, at the very least you'll find a denomination of Christianity that's going to let you not change.

Katie Dooley  59:44
And isn't that a problem?

Preston Meyer  59:50
Yes, from the Christian perspective of there is one faith, one God one baptism. That's the mantra Having such a diversity of gods that you have sculpted in your own image is a huge problem. It's a complicated problem. And the trick is that you can't just convince somebody that the God that they've made up for themselves isn't real.

Katie Dooley  1:00:19
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because if you could, then we wouldn't be a registered religion. Fun times. This is a complicated topic. Do we have a nice summary for for our listeners?

Preston Meyer  1:00:44
I want to summarize what Christianity is supposed to be, as presented in the Bible that all of these Christians are supposed to be reading and teaching out of. That there is good news. That's where the word gospel comes from, is that there is good news. The good news is that because Jesus died for us, we can change and have that change actually affect our outcomes after this life. It doesn't matter what I've done in the past, that doesn't make it impossible for me to actually have happiness in the next life. As long as I've changed and become better, change is meaningful change is possible. And because of that, we need to encourage people to be their best selves, by loving them, not by forcing them to suffer under our burdens of abuse and punishment for being different. There's, there's an awful lot of hope in the biblical Christian message. And that's true for an awful lot of religions. That there's a reason to be good, that all of the bad things that have happened around you or happen to you or happen because of you can be made to matter less, which is pretty cool. Yeah. But honestly, when you look at the way Christians behave towards each other, that's really easily lost.

Katie Dooley  1:02:30
Yeah, and toward others,

Preston Meyer  1:02:34
especially towards others, that I can't decide which is more unnerving. The way Christians treat people of other faiths or the way they treat each other. But it's all bad. It's all disappointing.

Katie Dooley  1:02:49
Yeah. It's definitely a problem. And I think there needs to be some more self-policing, in I mean, probably all religions, but

Preston Meyer  1:03:03
definitely all religions. Because it's a human problem. It's not a religious problem. It's yeah, we are weak and frail. And we're, we get self-conscious, and we need to protect ourselves. So we suck.

Katie Dooley  1:03:16
I think where I struggle on this isn't really a point on Christianity necessarily. But as an atheist, it's when people behave holier than thou because of their religion. And then you're actually not. And I think, yeah, that is a barrier to correction or moderation or what have you. I mean, move forward popped up, or having a conversation about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, or acting holier than now. And the rules don't apply to you. All of a sudden, it's like, there's sex abuse in the Catholic Church, it's still an issue and it shouldn't be like they should all be in jail. Like, I don't understand.

Preston Meyer  1:04:07
It's frustrating. It's deeply uncomfortable for most people to talk about, but it's a real thing. And the problem is not being fixed.

Katie Dooley  1:04:16
Yeah. And I Yeah, so I guess I think sometimes religion is a hindrance to having those conversations

Preston Meyer  1:04:27
very often it is so

Katie Dooley  1:04:30
Anyway, on that Debbie downer, of a note. Jesus loves you.

Preston Meyer  1:04:39
Yeah. Oh, actually, I just remembered, is slightly more positive. Which I think is maybe why it came to mind. There's a wonderful quote by Nietzsche, that God is dead. And loads of people love to just end the quote there. Which is a fun way to say all these philosophers are the worst because they just are done with God. There's more to that, quote. God is dead, and we have killed him. And how can we be forgiven? It's it's kind of a weird question. And, of course, he grew up in a Christian community where he is aware that Jesus died. And the story is that he came back and isn't vengeful, which is pretty cool.

Katie Dooley  1:05:48
I mean it's nice of him

Preston Meyer  1:05:50
I mean, so many of the other gods that we've heard of in our histories definitely would have come back bearing a sword. Right,

Katie Dooley  1:05:59
Or a lightning bolt in the form of a swan

Preston Meyer  1:06:04
in the form of a swan or in the form of swan's dick good old Zeus. Well, that's our episode on Christianity

Both Hosts  1:06:17
Peace be with you!

We are spending the next 7 episodes giving overviews of the world's most popular religious traditions. We're starting with the oldest persistent Abrahamic tradition: Judaism. Join us as we discuss religious texts, practices, observances, and more!

No religion is monolithic, but there are some things that bind together the Jewish faith, like the Hebrew Bible. While we don’t know who wrote the Hebrew Bible, some people believe Moses wrote the five books himself.

In this episode, we talk about the Exodus--the exciting story of Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt. We also discuss the story of King David, his childhood battle with Goliath his prophesized son that will rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.

Judaism uses the Tanakh: a group of writings to guide their worship. This includes the Torah (the 5 books of Moses), the Nevi’im (works of the Prophets) and the Ketuvim (the Writings). One thing that makes the Jewish community unique is that they are encouraged to argue and debate their scripture, which is where we get some of these writings from.

There are three main branches of Judaism: Orthodox, Conservative and Reform. We explain the differences in observances between these groups.

The Jews are also known for dietary restrictions, circumcisions, deep-fried food, and taking it really easy on Saturdays. We explain all this and more on this episode of the Holy Watermelon Podcast.

Support us at Patreon and Spreadshirt

Join the Community on Discord

Learn more great religion facts on Facebook and Instagram

***

Katie Dooley  00:12

Hello, everyone,

Preston Meyer  00:13

and welcome to the holy watermelon od test.

Katie Dooley  00:16

My name is Katie Preston. And what are we talking about? We have a new series Happy New Year 21 Let's hope it's better for everyone, then 2020 We have a new series, I get series mini series started, guess

Preston Meyer  00:35

what we're doing, we're gonna take a dive, not a super deep dive, because there's an awful lot of depth to every religion, but we're going to take a reasonably deep dive into the biggest of the world religions. And then maybe we'll take a look at some of the smaller ones later, too. So we're gonna start with Judaism. Cool.

Katie Dooley  00:56

So tonight, yeah, today we're talking about today's because it's the first chronologically an Abrahamic religion. So it seems like a good place to start.

Preston Meyer  01:11

Yeah, it's like most religions, it's kind of tricky. It's not monolithic. There's not a pope who's in charge of all of the Jews, for example. But there's one unifying detail that they all adhere to some degree or another, to the Hebrew Bible, and the Jewish tradition of the good old Holy Land.

Katie Dooley  01:36

So let's start with how it started. Some of the I guess, I guess it starts with Exodus. And maybe you want to talk about this briefly, in brief the story of Exodus, and I don't know what you know about who wrote that story. Now,

Preston Meyer  01:56

I don't think anybody knows who wrote that story down. There's an awful lot of people who genuinely believe that Moses wrote, all five of the books ascribed to him in the old testament to the Hebrew Bible. But there's also a handful of clues in there that say that was written much later. That's not to say that Moses couldn't have written down some of it. But there's not a whole lot of evidence for that either. It's a large collection of books, the the Exodus, which is probably the second most read of the Five Books of Moses, because nobody reads Leviticus, or Deuteronomy, or numbers, the names are intimidating, and the content is incredibly dry. But Exodus is the exciting story of Moses, leading the Israelites out of Egypt. And of course, Genesis tells the story of how the nation the people of Israel came to be. So those two books get an awful lot of credit, and the other three are forgotten. And so the Exodus, the foundational story of who Israelites are, as a freed people, is hugely important to their identity. It's about Moses being born into slavery, and then being thrown into a river in a handy dandy boat so he doesn't drown and sink, which is super important. If you want a nation to survive.

Katie Dooley  03:26

You can buy it's Moses baskets for your kids that are called Moses pass. Of course. I don't know what convenience they are.

Preston Meyer  03:35

They're not. I don't recommend trying to use them in that way. though. I haven't looked at them.

Katie Dooley  03:44

Why would you carry your kid like that? I don't know. It's kind of weird. Like, they're not safe like a car seat. Right? Comfortable like a bassinet. I don't know why you would want one. But then you go fun facts the world you can buy a moses basket for your baby. Yeah.

Preston Meyer  03:57

And so the story that we have an exodus of that transference from one family to another is reminiscent a lot of the story of Noah and the ark. One of the stories probably influenced the way the other was told at least a little bit, because storytelling just is subject to that feature. And then Moses grows up in the royal court in Egypt, and at age 40, after probably having been married and initiated into the Egyptian cults and whatnot. He kills a dude for being super rude to some Israelite slaves, and realizes, Oh, crap, this is a crime because they actually had decent laws protecting their slaves. But also, you can't kill another Egyptian, especially when he's not a slave.

Katie Dooley  04:50

I mean, that rule still applies, I think.

Preston Meyer  04:53

I think mostly, I mean, the world's getting weirder. But generally don't kill Egypt. Yeah, we're at war or your own countrymen. In Canada, if you kill a foreign national, about half of our country is probably going to cheer you on. Things are kind of weird. But a Canadian citizen is a big no no for the murder in Canada. So Moses flees off into the wilderness at age 40, leaving his family behind. He most certainly had wife and children at that age, being a prince in the royal court at 40. And single would have been unheard of. And takes off, finds his new family Midianite priest offers his daughter to be Moses new wife, and Moses starts a new family lives with them for 40 years did

Katie Dooley  05:47

he leave for a pack of smokes and never come back?

Preston Meyer  05:53

I don't think he had time to give the pack of smokes excuse to the kids. He just disappeared. Of course. I mean, he could have been on literally any errand when he was catching this Egyptian beating Hebrew in the streets. And yeah, any excuse could have been given at that time, I guess. And then after 40 years in the desert with this Midianite family Midianites are also descendants of Abraham. So they're like, cousin ish, because we're not really very many generic, very many generations from Abraham, with Moses himself. So reasonably distant cousin, but close enough that you totally would have shot to the same family reunion if that was a thing.

Katie Dooley  06:42

3000 year old family we

Preston Meyer  06:45

probably older 4000 3000 years ago, well, three and a half, maybe. I mean, archaeology is kind of rough on this one on the exact dating of it. And so at age 80, Moses is like, just doing his business taking care of the flocks. Also, his father in law is still around. So that's kind of cool. People have to be really old in these Bible stories, right? Honestly, the number 80 It's kind of sketchy. 30 I mean, we don't know for sure. They say he was 40 when he left Egypt, that he probably wasn't younger than 30 to get a number like 40. But we keep stacking for two years and 40 years and 40 years for Moses. It's kind of suspect. But I mean, we're

Katie Dooley  07:35

straight up don't know this. This might be a completely where we still tracking time, like we do now. Yeah, pretty much. So there's still 12 months in a year and 30 days in a month and 24 hours in a day.

Preston Meyer  07:47

24 hours in a day. I think there's a Babylonian thing if I remember correctly, cuz I know we have. That's 30 July and August because of Julius and Augustus. Yeah.

Katie Dooley  07:59

Remember, though, that

Preston Meyer  08:00

the Roman calendar was 10 months for a long time. The Israelites were pretty committed to a 12 month calendar that occasionally threw in the 13th month, rather than a leap day like we have to adjust the calendar they added just a whole month. Because every month, you couldn't tell. Yeah, it was kind of weird. I'm

Katie Dooley  08:21

just curious if that's why they got so bold in the Bible is because the year was only six months,

Preston Meyer  08:27

they definitely would have had some serious problems with the harvest scheduling and make sacrifices that went with those if they shifted through the year too much. So that the years were still more or less years, and sometimes they were a little bit shorter. Sometimes they're a little longer to counteract the shorter ones. And so at Moses dealing with the sheep sees this fire up in the mountain. And like that, that bush is on fire. But as it gets closer, he realizes it's not burning away. The narrative there seems a little bit weird to me, like fires happen. Maybe he was worried about a camper or somebody who is like squatting. I don't know. Either way, he goes up in the mountains uses burning bush, and then talks to God is the story. And then it's okay. I mean, there's not a whole lot of concrete proof to say that they he was of sound mind at the time, in fact, or Karen was the name of the movie. It's got a Christian Bale as Moses, Moses. It's a reasonably enjoyable movie. God is portrayed by a child in the film. And Moses looks like a crazy person about half of the time. I don't know if that's a directorial choice or an actor's choice. Christian Bale is a very talented actor, but

Katie Dooley  09:56

frequently looks crazy. Absolutely. But I like going through his filmography in my mind, and I'm like, I can't think of a time he acted like a normal human.

Preston Meyer  10:06

There were a few instances as Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins, where he pulled off being a reasonably balanced playboy. A couple of scenes.

Katie Dooley  10:18

And I just feel like reasonably balanced and Playboy shouldn't go together, but yeah, burning bush High as a kite talks to

Preston Meyer  10:31

God. Yeah. And God tells him, Your people are slaves in Egypt, and you need to free them. Moses, like not can't do it. And God's like, don't worry, we're gonna make this happen, basically forces Moses into this situation that he doesn't like, and do

Katie Dooley  10:48

that. Right didn't do to Abraham. Right? Or Jesus. Yeah.

Preston Meyer  10:54

God puts people in tough situations all the time. And to save a nation, why not? So Moses goes back to Egypt with the meets up with his brother Aaron, who's a few years older than him and his older sister, and they show up to the Pharaoh's court. Presumably at this point, the pharaoh was his brother, his adopted brother rather than his Father, The Prince of Egypt is doing a pretty good job of engraving that tradition in people's minds. decent movie. DreamWorks did some great work there. Yeah. So they went back to Egypt. And they say, Hey, Let my people go. And eventually, they do after the Pharaoh says, No plagues, no more flags, no more flags, stop it. No more plagues, worse plagues. Eventually, God just kills all the firstborn in Egypt, probably not the whole kingdom. But I mean, realistically, more likely, a small isolated place like the lower part of the capital city, maybe there's loads of guesses on that one. We don't really know what the story is trying to communicate there. But an awful lot of first born in Egypt are killed, including the pharaohs own son. And then he says, Fine go, and the Israelites hightail it out of Egypt, taking loads of gold and jewelry and precious things with them, they leave very rich, which is a very bad thing for Egypt. And so the Pharaoh chases them. And as they cross the read, see, the pharaohs army gets drowned out by the ocean. Gee,

Katie Dooley  12:46

I mean, I don't think it needs explanation. But in my readings for this, that the read sea becomes the Red Sea, which is what most people are familiar with. That wasn't a miss. Speak by Preston. That is it was the Red Sea.

Preston Meyer  13:00

So it's a tricky thing that we know the story was telling about the crossing of the read sea. And the story shifted to the red sea, but they are actually two different bodies of water

Katie Dooley  13:15

testing. Was that far. Does the read seek exists? Do we know where it is? Like, because we know

Preston Meyer  13:23

the the Nile Delta, I remember correctly, that's

Katie Dooley  13:27

just for like archaeological proof. They're like no layman read, which it's right here it happened. That's when I heard that was the reason for the change if they're two different bodies, which I didn't realize,

Preston Meyer  13:38

yeah, it's, it's kind of a weird thing that stories do over time, as they change to become more awesome grants, the read see is it's a decent bit of water. But it's not the Red Sea doesn't show up on maps like there. It won't be on your globe the way the Red Sea is. And so then the Israelites wander around in the desert for 40 years. If you check a map, you can see that you can make that walk in about two weeks. So the big question is, why did it take 40 years thanks. So much zigzagging so much camping and avoiding going to the Holy Land for decades. So right after they leave Egypt, Moses sends out a couple of guys, Caleb and Joshua. Actually, his name wasn't even Joshua, his name was homeshare. Bose has changed his name to Yehoshua later. And there's loads of theological thoughts on that because that is approximately the name of Jesus. And so he sends Caleb and Hoshi off to go see the Holy Land scouted out. Holy Land is not a huge place of land compared to Alberta, but it's not a small space. And there's also a bunch of other guys to go out with them and All these other guys that don't get to be named because they suck, lie about it and say these people are scary. We don't stand a chance. And Caleb N pushchair, say, You know what, we can do this. And Israel, for the most part believes the greater number of witnesses and says we're not going. So Moses like, fine. We're just kind of wander around the wilderness for 40 years until all of you are dead years.

Katie Dooley  15:29

You can do in two and a half weeks. It's just man. I can't imagine

Preston Meyer  15:37

they set up camp, they move camp a few times. They fight several battles with other nations those years, but they hold up on this land that they don't want. Waiting for everybody who wasn't ready to go to their destination to die. Wow. Moses himself doesn't even actually get to the Holy Land. He gets to see it from a hill. And that's it. And Caleb and Joshua as we know him now, Hoshi have got that new name. They get to go into the holy land. The Book of Joshua is a direct sequel to The Five Books of Moses because he is the new leader put in place after Moses. And that's basically the Exodus Joshua leads them conquering all the people who refuse to be good neighbors, and destroying loads and loads of people. Part some parts of the Bible say Joshua killed literally everybody who wasn't going to be faithful to the Israelite God. And then other parts of like, yeah, no, we left way too many unfaithful here. The Bible is a fun text there. There's a claims of there's so righteous having defeated all of the infidels, and then these others just like, ya know, we were in trouble because we left them alive.

Katie Dooley  17:07

The next biggest one I think of is King David. And David and Goliath. I mean, that's when he is a kid. But he becomes King David.

Preston Meyer  17:15

Yeah, Israel, at the time really wanted a king. They thought, hey, our neighbors love kings, and look how powerful they are. And the the chieftain at the time, called a judge usually was like, God is our king. You don't need a king. God is your king to call anyone else King is gonna spell ruin for the nation. And they're like, no, we want a king. And so Samuel, the chieftain, prays and guest direction to put in this fella named Saul as the king of Israel Better Call Saul, right? The problem is it didn't work out. Oh, no, a little bit like a lawyer. It just didn't really work out. And Saul was given all the opportunities to try and be good, but he just kept screwing up. And so he Samuel got this revelation that no don't, this is not a good thing. But instead of saying to Saul, you can't be king anymore. He just goes over to this other little family over in the Bethlehem area. And he says to the Father of this family, Jesse, one of your sons is going to be king. Let me meet with them. And Jesse shows off his biggest, strongest sons, the eldest, and look how great they are. And Samuel is like, Nah, they're not great. And

Katie Dooley  18:47

I really hope it says that. They're not great. Yeah.

Preston Meyer  18:52

He's he gets fancy language about looking at the soul kind of thing. And then he spots David and he's like, this one's special. This is the guy. And David later goes on to defeat Goliath in combat in the weirdest way. challenging him the best of the nation against the best of the other nation. And instead of duel of swords and or clubs or anything else, the rock basically just throws a

Katie Dooley  19:23

rock at him. David Hobbit

Preston Meyer  19:27

he was supposed to be pretty young, but probably not Hobbit sighs I would imagine he was at least 16 at the time. So he would have been regular sized regular size for his nation at the time. 3000

Katie Dooley  19:43

years ago. Yeah, yeah. Okay.

Preston Meyer  19:47

So there's that. And David also turns out to be a really not good kick. Now he does all kinds of things. He's not supposed to. Flooded with that she but he does. As he also has a serious problem with doing things he's specifically told not to do. So in the royal court, there's always a prophet, a person who speaks for God, to warn the king, hey, there's some pretty good reasons why you shouldn't do some of these things. One of those things is taken account of the nation for the purposes of building armies. Or, alternatively, counting the people to tax them even heavier. Because you feel like you deserve more money than you're getting problems for kings. David's like, we're going to count all the people and the army and tax them. Yeah. And a province. Like, if you do this, God will kill your nation. And then he's like, Yeah, we're gonna do it anyway. And then huge numbers of Israelites die all across the nation of some terrible plague COVID-19. Yeah, bad things. They had no power to stop it. Medicine at the time definitely sucked, especially in their little pocket of the world. And anytime you did have St. Leprosy, you would go to the priest, because the priests were the most educated, just generally, if anyone could read, your priest could read, if anybody knew a lot about taking care of things other than cheap, it was probably the priests. So they were basically your doctors. And the guy who's got some sort of authority over all of the faithful in the nation, just told you don't do this thing. So that sucks. Yeah, David just wasn't a great king. He wanted to build a temple, Israel had a very small portable temple, like a large tent, by our standards today. And the Prophet told David, don't do it. It's okay if you collect all the stuff to do it. But your son will be the one to do it because you are not pious enough. Look at what you've been. So there's a whole lot of songs ascribe to David, some people will think that David himself wrote a lot of music that became the Psalms in the Hebrew Bible. There's perfectly acceptable number of scholars who are 100% committed to the idea that there's, like we see today, loads of people writing Psalms, as though they were David. You know, writing from somebody else's perspective. Yeah. Which is a perfectly normal literary practice that is definitely older than a lot of people give it credit for, like the Books of Moses, probably written by a dude who or a collection of dudes. And they were definitely dudes.

Katie Dooley  22:55

Women should read and write God.

Preston Meyer  23:01

And you know, just just scribing things to Moses. There's parts that say Moses was the humblest man that there ever was. It's fun to say, look at Moses awarding himself as the humblest man, because it's in one of the books of Moses was written probably decades or centuries later, by another dude or several dudes.

Katie Dooley  23:22

You mentioned King Davidson and the temple, which I think is a very important point to

Preston Meyer  23:27

Solomon's Temple is a huge deal. It's a massive undertaking, it took seven years to build. And if you were to see the building, you would realize that seven years is way too long to take on building this tiny structure. You've seen the Mormon temple here in the city, right? Yeah. So the Temple of Solomon was half that size. Wow. And it took them seven and a half years.

Katie Dooley  23:54

I mean, it took them 40 years to cross it desert. So I'm not surprised. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  23:59

Israel does have a tendency to take a little longer to do they drag their heels at this point. And when you read the story, you see that they have a lot of issues with faith. Moses takes up ah, takes off the mountain. And he's gone for, you know, a little over a month. And in that time, they're like, you know, we're gonna go back to worshipping Egyptian gods, we're gonna build a new calf out of gold and all this nonsense, things that really pissed me off when it comes back down and say, Hey, what are you up to?

Katie Dooley  24:28

I was only gone. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  24:30

I mean, also disappearing off the hill for a month.

Katie Dooley  24:33

I mean, again, 40 years, seven years a month. Well, the same to

Preston Meyer  24:39

kind of track their heels. I feel like we're starting to edge up onto the, just the, the edge of racist. We're gonna try not to do that too much.

Katie Dooley  24:55

So King, David son, is it prophesized Is that the right word? To rebuild the temple.

Preston Meyer  25:03

So there is yeah, that's the son of David, mysterious person, I don't know who he is, but he's supposed to be of that royal line. He's supposed to come back, save Israel and rebuild the temple, or at least be associated with the rebuilding of the temple in some way.

Katie Dooley  25:17

So I, this is a really, I've always found this as an interesting fact. So, Judaism is waiting for this Messiah, the son of King David to rebuild the temple. This is this line, that Christians believe that Messiah is Jesus, and he's already come. So that's, that's the, that's the line between Judaism and Christianity.

Preston Meyer  25:39

I mean, ultimately, Christianity, when it first came about was hardly distinguishable from Judaism apart from, apart from believing that this Jesus person is that Promised Messiah. Problem is he died without rebuilding, or without being at all associated with the building of the temple. King Herod had done a lot of work to renovate the temple and make it up to his standards, whatever it was at the time, but Jesus was barely associated with the temple in his day. And so both Jews and Christians are waiting for the coming of the Messiah in the future, and the rebuilding of that temple of Jerusalem perfect. But I think we're just moving a little away from our focus and being as many people are easily distracted by Christians.

Katie Dooley  26:31

I just wanted to point out that that is that line, maybe the next thing we should talk about is how this materializes in the in, in today's world, so the Torah and the Talmud. I am hesitant, because I'm scared to get around the tar is the Five Books of Moses. And the Talmud is everything that the rabbi's have argued about. And the Torah

Preston Meyer  26:59

of the Talmud is the writings of some rabbis, because obviously, we still have rabbis stay who aren't adding to it. And there's loads of rabbinical writings that aren't included in the Talmud that are ancient and revered. In addition to those, there's also the other parts of the Hebrew Bible, often called the Tanakh, which is an acronym that to knock is a three letter acronym. T stands for torah, the law in the books of Moses, the Nebby, M is the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, those are big ones. And then there's a bunch of minor prophets. And then you've got the Ketuvim, the writings, that includes the wisdom books, the songs, Chronicles, the history that didn't make it into those other two sections. And it's often thought that it's like this book, the Bible is written by God, I think I've addressed this before. People believe it, I don't understand why you can't open the book and believe that they're written by a whole bunch of people. It's a national library. Like if you were to assemble a canon of English literature, you'd have Dickens and Shakespeare modernly, you'd probably add Rowling to that as well.

Katie Dooley  28:21

And I mean, even Shakespeare's even argued that he there was no way he could have written it all by himself. Exactly. That's probably a really good comparison. You

Preston Meyer  28:29

look at Stephen King, and how prolific his writings are, many of which are not high quality. And it's easy enough to believe that Shakespeare could have written that volume, but producing that volume, and that quality level is either absolute genius or otherwise unbelievable. And, you know, whatever it Shakespeare, we can't say, oh, yeah, it was Francis Bacon, he wrote half of it. Okay, I don't really care. If I say Shakespeare's Hamlet, you know what I'm talking about. And so there's, the Hebrew Bible is just a national library. You have fiction in the National Library. That just makes sense. You've got song books, you've got Wisdom literature, you've got sets of Proverbs as a subset to that, that, I think is a nifty thing. The proverbs are mostly adopted from another nation. And then you've got the prophets, all these people who say, hey, Israel, stop being so terrible. And the nation actually kept definitely not all of it in their national library in a volume that was actually preserved as it got translated for the Jews and Alexandria and across the world. It's kind of cool, but to say that it's one cohesive book that should not under any circumstance contradict another part of itself. It is problematic and to think that it was all written by God is unsupportable? Well,

Katie Dooley  30:06

that's one interesting thing about today is that I definitely haven't seen in other religions and my research is that they're encouraged to argue and debate like Jewish people are known for that. That being said, there are still, you know, there's, we're gonna get into the different types of Judaism and conservative values or orthodox values where, if you differ, they think you're wrong. But there is a huge practice of debating the content of the Torah. And that's where the Talmud comes from. It's these debates

Preston Meyer  30:44

about Jesus going back to that easily found distraction is absolutely the typical forsake rabbi. He argued all the time. And know about the law. Yeah, with other rabbis. They, there's loads of people who like to say all the Pharisees were bad. Jesus definitely grew up in a Pharisee family. And everything about his teaching practice and style was absolutely in line with that tradition.

Katie Dooley  31:20

Is that a good segue into the different types? Sure. Today ism. Yeah, that will be one tackle next to there's a lot to talk about, because there's, like the biblical side, and the historical side. And then I'm sure our parishioners are congregants, you guys are

Preston Meyer  31:37

probably more interested in learning how to deal with your neighbors of various types.

Katie Dooley  31:41

Right? And what everyday practices are, why did they have two fridges?

Preston Meyer  31:46

Oh, definitely to keep things separate, but aren't supposed to touch or even be stored near each other. So now lead to separate sets of pans. So

Katie Dooley  31:55

we'll get there. But let's start with there's unlike crochet, there's about three types of Judaism it I mean, a few more, but you can do break it down into three big groups. Let's the start sort of, yeah, let's start with orthodox because it is definitely the most rural following. This is where the Hasidic tradition falls under. So if you picture a Jewish person from New York, the only place in the world I've ever seen or Israel, I guess it'd be the other place out there. All of them there. These are the men with the curls and the beards and the big black hats in Israel chanting at the wall.

Preston Meyer  32:43

Yeah. So these are the people who are generally. And I feel like within every group, you're going to have some dissidents, but as a reasonably fair generalization, they are super committed to following the law of Moses as it is recorded in the Bible. As well as pretty much every legal judgment from the rabbi's since then, on how to deal with those laws in the Bible. My

Katie Dooley  33:12

my show notes say that they believe the law is binding and revealed by God so they're definitely the strictest of these denominations or onward, but denominations loose groupings

Preston Meyer  33:29

loose

Katie Dooley  33:30

group. They won't we're gonna get into their practices later, but they have the strictest dietary practices, they'll have the strictest dress codes. Yeah, yeah, I mean, those are short for modern practices. They'll some I want to say the like something the Sabbath, they keep the Sabbath holy. Sure. They keep the Sabbath. Yeah, they all they all keep the Sabbath holy, but they will take it to a much stricter

Preston Meyer  34:01

level. gonna remind our audience that the thing that most of you probably already know, the Jewish Sabbath is Saturday.

Katie Dooley  34:09

And that's because God rested on Saturday. He did a whole week of work. And then he got tired, put his feet up. He

Preston Meyer  34:17

took a chill day. And I can definitely agree with the need for that.

Katie Dooley  34:24

The Sabbath. I mean, like Christians have their Sunday and I think Muslims are Friday, Seventh Day Adventists if you're Christian or Saturday as well. The Jewish community doesn't do any work on Saturday. In my readings, it's actually considered one of the holiest days and it happens every week. So imagine having Easter if you're Christian or pseudo Christian, every week, so they have a big meal at the synagogue and then they don't do any work on Saturday. And that is that will vary. How they define work will vary from I'm forced the docs to conservative to reform. Yeah. So with that being said, the next group is conservative.

Preston Meyer  35:09

Some slightly less conservative.

Katie Dooley  35:12

Orthodox is yeah, it's the middle between reform and orthodoxy. They you might see the men wear yarmulke more frequently, but they probably won't have the curls or the beards, but they might they might.

Preston Meyer  35:29

Yeah, probably not in many cases. That's all I have for now it's on conservative. Yeah, they're just kind of the middle ground or Yeah.

Katie Dooley  35:38

They're probably Yeah. Moderately strict on dress. Yeah, they're kind of Yeah, that's what wigs. Yes, we will get into organizing get into that. And then reform is the loosey goosey of the three, so they might not conform to any of the dietary restrictions at all. They might not do any of the dress. They are. This could even be some of the examples I saw are like Jerry Seinfeld's Jewish like he's probably nonpracticing, but he grew up in a Jewish household and how they define this is another subject we'll get to in a moment, but whether Judaism is a race versus a religion, but you are Jewish, if your mother was Jewish, so Jerry Seinfeld's mother was Jewish, and whether he Yeah, so whether he eats bacon or not, he's Jewish. And so reform can go into that group a little bit as well. I

Preston Meyer  36:38

definitely think there's a strong overlap between those two groups. Yeah. Or

Katie Dooley  36:43

Yes, like me and Christianity. You know, we celebrate Christmas, who we celebrated Easter, we never went to church that, you know, and then you'll get some who go to church for Passover or Hanukkah, or churches synagogue for Passover or Hanukkah. And that's kind of it and when their grandmas over, they won't eat pork, but if they're out with friends, they'll put bacon on their barn or so. Bacon

Preston Meyer  37:07

on their cheeseburger.

Katie Dooley  37:12

Oh, that's so bad Preston. So those are the three. It's

Preston Meyer  37:17

It's easy enough for the the Reform Jews to not worry so much about those dietary restrictions and a lot of the other cleanliness, purity, ritual cleanliness, laws. Because the way it's worded in the Torah, it's all about you don't go to the temple, unless you are ritually pure. And since the temple has been destroyed for almost 2000 years, more conservative Jews will ascribe those same limitations to go into the synagogue, whereas reformed Jews typically don't seem to. They just don't worry about it at all. Because there's that reason for following those laws is no longer present.

Katie Dooley  38:00

And yes, and I want to point out that reform is actually quite old. It started in the late 1800s, during the Enlightenment, so it was a way for reform came about so that Jewish people could participate more in secular society, and be part of the Enlightenment and have some of those ideas. Yeah, they address impurity or not, with holiness or spirituality that those things don't have any. You can say you can eat bacon and still be a holy person. Yeah. Let's talk about some of these practices and rules and observances that was alluded to and the degrees through orthodoxy to perform. Alright,

Preston Meyer  38:51

let's start with that shock that you had when I put cheese on that bacon burger. I

Katie Dooley  38:56

distinctly remember this from my one religious studies class. And I was very excited to like, look it up again. So there is a line and x, x Exodus. There's a line in Exodus 2319. Like if

Preston Meyer  39:14

you took notes? The line Oh, I didn't write down like, you will not boil a kid in its mother's milk.

Katie Dooley  39:24

Yes, you will not boil a kid's mother's milk. So that you might have more recent information or more refreshed information than I do. But essentially, it's that you wouldn't. The kid they're talking about is a goat. Yes,

Preston Meyer  39:39

not a human child, but a kid that you're allowed to eat under Jewish law, which does strictly forbid cannibalism.

Katie Dooley  39:47

So they, yes. So cannibalize your neighbors, so that it would be very hard to do nowadays I think because dairy cows cattle and beef cattle are very are separate. Yeah, the idea is that you don't know where you necessarily know where your milk came from or where you're from. Or if you were, you know, however many 1000 years ago, it would have been the same, you would have milked your goat until it couldn't do it anymore, and then you would have slaughtered it

Preston Meyer  40:19

just reminded me of the horsemeat scandal from a couple years back.

Katie Dooley  40:24

So it is that you don't know where where the milk versus meat came from, or the cheese or it I mean, it's meat and dairy that they keep separate, based off of this one small line in Exodus. Other dietary restrictions include they do not eat shellfish,

Preston Meyer  40:43

right. If it lives in the water, it has to have fins and scales

Katie Dooley  40:47

off at the same time. They can't eat a shark, right? Shark

Preston Meyer  40:51

scales are actually lies their teeth, their whole bodies coated in tea. Sharks are super creepy. I

Katie Dooley  40:57

believe. That yes, and then No pork, right? So ever either. No clove and Anna no hooved they must have cloven if

Preston Meyer  41:10

it chooses cut and has a cloven hoof, you're fine.

Katie Dooley  41:13

So you can eat cows, you can go and you can eat horses or pigs. Right? Camels are right. Oh no, I love camel. So those are the big dietary restrictions. And as Preston alluded to, and again, this will change depending on how orthodox to reform your Jewish people will have often separate fridges, separate cutlery, separate plates, separate cooking utensils, to to obey this law so that they never touch. And I remember hearing that. If you have had like a milkshake, they will wait a certain number of hours before eating

Preston Meyer  41:52

meat. Yeah, a cheese cake right after a steak dinner is a big no, no, that sounds delicious. You just got it. You just gotta have a little window of time in between your meal and your dessert

Katie Dooley  42:03

so that they never touch. Yep, another piece of dietary. I guess I wouldn't call this one restriction. But is meat has to be kosher. Everything has to be

Preston Meyer  42:14

kosher. So the word kosher comes from the word cash route, which basically is just the dietary law.

Katie Dooley  42:23

So there you go. Yeah. So they have to eat kosher

Preston Meyer  42:27

meats. Yeah, things that follow those laws, dietary laws,

Katie Dooley  42:31

so blood is not kosher never. So the big thing with kosher meat is that it has to be slaughtered in a particular way and all the blood drain. And this is actually very similar, if not identical to Hello. So hello, the blood similarity. And I know And hello, the blood needs to be drained as well in a certain way. So kosher meat has to be all the blood drain in a specific way. And then it is salted with kosher salt. And that is essentially how you make meat kosher. I remember asking a Jewish friend what Kosher salt is? And he said, Well, it's a salt use to make things kosher. I was like cool. But How's it different from table salt are either nice salt or Himalayan pink sea salt, like what is actually because I can go buy Kosher salt in the in the grocery store, but I can also go buy some regular salt in the grocery store. So what actually makes it different, fun fact it is flakier, lighter texture, and it has a milder flavor. That so I really didn't answer the question, what is kosher salt, but that's what makes it different. From a culinary perspective,

Preston Meyer  43:49

I now feel the need to look up what the chemical makeup of Kosher so I'm pretty

Katie Dooley  43:53

sure all salt of NaCl and then oh, there's a wide

Preston Meyer  43:57

variety of salts. It does look a lot different from your regular table salt. But so it does consist mainly of sodium chloride NaCl, but it also usually includes an anti caking agent. Interesting. Yeah. So it looks a little bit.

Katie Dooley  44:18

That's probably your powder. Yeah, here you go. So that's I think that's the big portion for the dietary laws and dietary restrictions. I don't think we'll get into holidays right now. And what, that's the whole thing but if you're interested send us an email or DMS on Instagram, if anything we talked about here because this is really just an overview episode piques your interest, let us know and we will do a full episode on it. But they're known for lefties that Passover Hanukkah

Preston Meyer  44:54

Hanukkah cancer pastor repeating it for you now. Hot black cars are definitely of Hanukkah. Why do I keep saying Passover?

Katie Dooley  45:04

I just remember coming to your house for lackeys.

Preston Meyer  45:07

Yes, that was definitely a Hanukkah.

Katie Dooley  45:11

I can remember but they just like any tradition they have their their big foods that they eat at different times of the year.

Preston Meyer  45:18

oily foods are definitely a big deal, especially for Hanukkah but honestly, year round. Just like America,

Katie Dooley  45:27

I just read something about brisket. They like brisket for some celebrate that

Preston Meyer  45:32

chest meat on the cow. I mean, also the horses got a decent chest to name. Kosher.

Katie Dooley  45:42

Yeah, so some other observances and practices. I think I feel like most I didn't know this until later in life. I mean, being in Canada, we don't have a huge Jewish population worldwide, the Jewish population is quite small, but married Jewish women and again, Orthodox versus reformed, married Jewish women cover their hair. So again, very similar to Islam. And there's a lot of once we do the Islamic episode, there's a lot of similarities between Judaism and Islam. So married women cover their hair. And that can be with a scarf or a hat. But most often, and this is very interesting to me is with a wig. So they just put hair over their

Preston Meyer  46:26

hair. Yeah, it's for that for Canadians. In our audience. Many of you should be familiar with shits Creek. It's gotten an awful lot of awards, wildly popular, starring the wonderful Eugene Levy and his son Daniel chips, and Catherine O'Hare. And yeah, they're kind of famously Jewish family. And Catherine O'Hair wears a wig. Almost all the time. Yeah, in the show. I don't know about real

Katie Dooley  46:56

life. Okay. I've never actually seen shits Creek. So

Preston Meyer  46:59

it's very funny. And it's got a lot of heart. I, and it's over now.

Katie Dooley  47:03

I've seen a lot in the news about it, because it's over. Yeah, I mean, they'll get on that.

Preston Meyer  47:08

It won a lot of awards. And I think they're fairly earned. Good. And Eugene Levy is just a comedy genius. All

Katie Dooley  47:16

right. Any family? Yeah. Yes, so Jewish women cover their hair, and Jewish man and cover their heads as well.

Preston Meyer  47:27

But usually just with a book, and some groups with a smaller head and some groups with a head that covers your whole head so that God can't see you at all. And then.

Katie Dooley  47:39

And then again, sometimes it's every single day, and then sometimes it's only for special occasions. And special occasion can be the Sabbath weekly, or it could just be a wedding or a bar mitzvah.

Preston Meyer  47:52

Yeah. So the haircut ring for women is actually a thing that's interesting to me. I've worked with a lot more Muslim women than I've worked with Jewish women. And for those really devout Muslim women, they wear that scarf to cover their hair. And the explanation that was given to me was that the hair is just a wonderfully sexy thing, which is a hard point to argue, I must agree. And that's clearly not the motivation for women. Because if you're just covering your hair with a Where is that's not getting rid of the the luer, that visible thing that definitely works on a lot of guys

Katie Dooley  48:34

had no idea. And then it's also at a different stage. So the hijab in Islam, it can be at a specific age, or when you start menstruating and the rest of the rest of your life, and then the only people that see you without it and this is the same as in Judaism is Is your husband or men on your mother's side. So that can be your brothers or your mom's brothers, so your uncles but not your dad's uncles. Right. Whereas this is like once you get married. So that's it, you know, so until the day you get married, people see your hair, whether you're a little different. So for 38 and then the reason for the Amaka and correct me if I'm wrong. I don't think I'm wrong. The reason for the Amaka is to always be aware of God's presence. It's a physical reminder that God's watching you.

Preston Meyer  49:39

I like to believe that a God that is all knowing no

Katie Dooley  49:44

is the master. Well,

Preston Meyer  49:46

I mean, he can choose what to see if he's all powerful. And he knows when you're done and he knows when it's safe to look. Santa Claus on the other hand, I mean, he sees you and you're sleeping. I don't think that God is so indiscreet.

Katie Dooley  50:11

Ignore tangent, don't agree, challenge and laugh along with this. That is the reason for the Amaka. Now, moving on to I would like to talk a little bit more about the Sabbath because they mentioned there's different how do they define work?

Preston Meyer  50:26

So, an awful lot of argument on theirs. And

Katie Dooley  50:30

I have seen I think it was an Religulous with with Bill Maher Del Mar. I

Preston Meyer  50:38

haven't seen that show in so long you need to rewatch it, we were going to rewatch it in my last semester of my degree, just as part of one of my broad look at religious phenomena things. But thanks to COVID We had no more classes and as much as I did enjoy that movie, I did not take the time to go and re watch it on my own separate from my disappearing classes.

Katie Dooley  51:01

I gave it to my dad, I could hook you up with okay, I believe it is really Religulous. If it's not someone out there is going to correct me. But he goes to a Jewish and obviously an Orthodox Jewish family's home. And they have like Rube Goldberg up their house so that they can open the fridge on a Saturday because in their mind that is considered work. They have like figured like they will not lift a finger. They figured out like you said Rube Goldberg it up so they can answer the phone up on a Saturday. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  51:34

an awful lot of Orthodox Jews that won't push buttons. Yeah, that's fine. I think that's derived from because having anything operated by push buttons is relatively new. That the the button pushing his drive from prohibition against doing up the buttons on your shirt are interesting. And so you'll see anybody that if you see Jews walking around on a Saturday, or Friday evening, and that's usually how they'll get around, they'll make sure that they're walking is within the prescribed distance because they can drive Yes,

Katie Dooley  52:10

that is one that will be followed by I'd say easily, both Orthodox and conservative and maybe even some reform.

Preston Meyer  52:18

Probably some are fine.

Katie Dooley  52:21

They just want the day off. Like if they if they needed milk, they'd probably be like, Okay, I'll go get some milk. But if they could avoid it, like I'm gonna like, like definitely shopping

Preston Meyer  52:31

on Saturday, or Friday evening. As much as possible, though, I'm sure that there's plenty of folks who agree that when the ox is in the mire, you got to pull it out. But there's plenty of arguments against that too. Sometimes, like as a sign from God, your ox is doomed. You're gonna go without milk. Elevators, those elevators with no doors that just keep moving in the cycle. The idea is terrifying to me. But if you're used to it, and you can operate them safely.

Katie Dooley  53:06

Yes. So driving, I know answering the phone is a big one as well. And I you know what, on the Saturday, I don't know if I disagree.

Preston Meyer  53:15

Any day where I don't have to push a button. I spent an awful lot of time on my computer on my phone. My phone has three buttons, right.

Katie Dooley  53:26

There has been in some of the articles I was reading a like a resurgence in the Sabbath. I mean, we're in the 21st century, it's pretty hard to avoid working seven days a week, everything's open all the time. And so there's been a varying that there's been a resurgence of people like taking the Sabbath, and just actually enjoying that disconnect time from their phone and from their work and actually stepping away. And I don't think that's a bad idea. Yeah, there's

Preston Meyer  54:00

still loads of places that have Sabbath day laws where you're not allowed to do business on a Sabbath, plenty of places in America. That's always Sunday. But it's still a thing that's observed. Of course, there's preference given to Christians and non Jews, because yea, separation of church and state didn't work so great.

Katie Dooley  54:20

I'm sure in the Jewish Quarter in New York, everything's got phones. Oh, absolutely.

Preston Meyer  54:23

But it's not enforced by law. It's just the culture has so completely saturated that neighborhood that that's the way it goes. And if that's the way you want to live, that is absolutely a desirable way to have it run.

Katie Dooley  54:39

We got I mean, we have more things to talk about. I just have a segue to them nicely.

Preston Meyer  54:43

I would just bump onto the next thing if you want to. So I got

Katie Dooley  54:48

circumcision. Yeah. Which all which leads into apartments because yeah,

Preston Meyer  54:52

it's all part of that law of sacrifice, which, weirdly, we've only barely brushed up against up to this point.

Katie Dooley  54:59

Oh, you look like you're right into. It's

Preston Meyer  55:02

fascinating to me that there's so much around the perception of the sacrifices that a lot of people think is negative, like the idea that, Oh, no, sacrificing a goat is barbaric. Not at all. Most of the sacrifices that were offered at the temple and the tabernacle before that, they were basically just, I'm going to call them holy barbecues, who, like there were the odd sacrifices that were an animal is burnt up completely as a gift to God. But most were eaten by the people offering the sacrifices. And more so the priests and their families, so that it was, and these were offered daily, there was a sacrifice every single day. Oh, we have a holy barbecue this summer. I think we probably should. And so these holy barbecues happened all the time, the flame was never supposed to go out. And I mean, you obviously weren't cooking meat at three in the morning. But that fire had to keep burning. I, a little piece of me suspects that every nation that had a fire that couldn't be permitted to go out, had a population was really bad at starting fire. Katie, I can't say for sure that that's the case. I mean, we've had fire for such a long time. We've been good at it as a species for quite a while. 10s of 1000s of years. Right. But a little piece of me wonders, you know. But these holy barbecues, were great. They were well attended on a regular basis. And depending on who you talk to, there's plenty of suggestion that these priests who were meant to feed their families with these offerings, would also share them with the poor. So ultimately, the sacrifices are far from barbaric.

Katie Dooley  57:09

I really want to barbecue

Preston Meyer  57:10

now. Right? And so circumcision going back to what we started here, is part of the law of sacrifice. It is part of that shedding of your own blood to bring you closer to God. Now, it's supposed to be just dudes. But for some reason, there are parts of the world who have taken this practice of circumcision, separated it from the religious aspects of Judaism, and have just started doing terrible things to women, which I don't understand how it's validated. And it makes me uncomfortable to female circumcision is never prescribed in the Bible, and is a lot more destructive than male circumcision.

Katie Dooley  58:05

So I have read and in my notes, it has to be done eight days after the boys born Yes,

Preston Meyer  58:12

in a specific time, when Jewish boys are supposed to be circumcised adult

Katie Dooley  58:16

male Sukkur, circumcision is very destructive. Don't do it later in life.

Preston Meyer  58:21

Well, the trick is like, how do you know? The like, you're not gonna have an erection? When you're still healing? That's super hard to take care of.

Katie Dooley  58:36

Yeah, just circumcised as a baby cool. If you weren't cool, believe it. I was gonna say Don't touch it. That's fine. Like.

Preston Meyer  58:46

Sure. Imagine if Wolverine was Jewish. Let's be like a daily. Well, I probably wouldn't have to be daily probably just be once a week kind of deal. Having the ability to regrow every last bit of your body quickly would be a problem.

Katie Dooley  59:04

I've never thought that way about Well, thanks, Preston. But you will never know. What is the

Preston Meyer  59:15

I think this is why people listen to us.

Katie Dooley  59:19

The reason it is a tradition in the Jewish religion to cut off for skins, is because God asked Abraham to do it and that he would be gifted a great nation. Yeah. And so ever since then, we've been chopping off penises

Preston Meyer  59:35

to be part of that nation. You have to You're not chopping off penises. Just a little bit off the end.

Katie Dooley  59:43

mean they're a little bit chopped off the end of your nose, not

Preston Meyer  59:47

not even a little so it's part of that law of sacrifice that binds the nation together and was a thing thing that caused a lot of shame for a lot of Jews say 2000 years ago back in the gymnasiums of Rome, were to be part of that larger Imperial community. You had to hang out in these gymnasiums, where everybody did so completely naked. Do you ever watch Friends? Yes, yes. Do you remember Joey's fake foreskin? No,

Katie Dooley  1:00:23

I haven't. I've only seen some episodes of friends. To watch this. There

Preston Meyer  1:00:28

is testament that that was happening 2000 years ago in, in Israel. I mean, I don't know if it's salami, but maybe it's only works that proudly. Yeah, that's an important point. I was actually just about to say they probably weren't using a pig for skin even though it might have worked out in color. But there was something that was done that allowed these people to mask themselves as being non Jews, because apparently that was the thing they were worried about when going to the gymnasium.

Katie Dooley  1:01:04

Well, that was I don't actually know. I'm about to say something I don't know, frequently. Go for it. Was that uses that identifier for the Holocaust? Because you?

Preston Meyer  1:01:18

I feel like, I feel like in the Holocaust, there was definitely some inspection. But I don't think at least to begin with. Many people were being secretive about their Jewish identity. But later on, I feel like yeah, there was probably people who were checking just to say, hey, because most Christians, especially in that area in that era, probably weren't doing circumcision on a regular basis.

Katie Dooley  1:01:46

I mean, that's basically all my points unless you wanna talk about Bar Mitzvah. Why, why we should wrap up with the Holocaust as depressing as it is, but it should be touched upon and eventually a full episode. True on the Holocaust. Do you have anything you want about Bar Mitzvahs with foreskin?

Preston Meyer  1:02:02

The bar mitzvahs aren't strictly associated with foreskin. Because your Bar Mitzvah happens, like when you're pubescent? Yeah, your foreskin comes off and you're a week old. And the bar mitzvah happens when you're pubescent. So you've got the opportunity to show to the congregation that you have learned stuff that you can recite your Haftorah. And you say, Yeah, I'm familiar with the law. I know what it means to be a Jewish man, or in the case of a button mitzvah to be a Jewish woman in this world. And that's the, what's the word? I'm looking for? The Rite of Passage, that's perfect. That's the rite of passage in Judaism, it's pretty common in most cultures in the world, there's a rite of passage that makes you an adult. For some it Yeah, yeah. Sweet.

Katie Dooley  1:02:55

16 is your kind of secular confirmation. If you're Catholic baptism, baptism can depend whether you do it at birth or older. But

Preston Meyer  1:03:04

yeah. And so sometimes that rite of passage is a walkabout. Sometimes it's a camp with a bunch of other guys. And sometimes it's showing that you actually know what it means to be a man in the world, which actually makes a lot more sense than a lot of the other rites of passage.

Katie Dooley  1:03:21

Yeah. Yeah, my last two points. So tetragrammaton, which I just like, think it's super cool.

Preston Meyer  1:03:27

It's a cool sounding word. And what is your

Katie Dooley  1:03:31

friends? It's like the one thing I remember, it's no, I remember more than that. But can I see what tetragrammaton is?

Preston Meyer  1:03:39

Can you pronounce that? What the tetragrammaton is?

Katie Dooley  1:03:42

No one can. That's why it's so cool.

Preston Meyer  1:03:47

There's so much disagreement on how it would be pronounced.

Katie Dooley  1:03:52

I just, I just want to jump right in. Because it's like the one thing I get really oddly excited about. This is one of those facts you need to take home this week to your families and be like, Do you know what tetragrammaton is? It is from the Hebrew Bible. And it's the name of God. And the Hebrew language generally doesn't use vowels.

Preston Meyer  1:04:17

Correct. Their alphabet consists entirely of consonants and glottal stops, and

Katie Dooley  1:04:21

those things people learn and know how to fill in the blanks. So there's four letters Tetra. In the Bible, why H W. H. And it's the name of God and we have some guesses on how it is said. The other thing is, is that it was taken out of Bibles because of the law that you don't take the Lord's name in vain. So you can actually just kind of true kind of shoot well finish my thought and then you can come back and correct me. So I have heard that they've taken out of later versions that Whatever It Takes slurs and vain if you're just you're not actually his name, it's just whatever. You're dissing God, which is okay, because that's the title, not his name, the closest pronunciation we have, originally we thought it was Jehovah.

Preston Meyer  1:05:16

Yes, as long time English scholars, we're committed to Jehovah.

Katie Dooley  1:05:19

And now we think it's closer to your way. So you've probably heard both if you're moderately interested in religion, which I presume you are, because you're listening to this podcast. So Jehovah is as the older one. But now we agree upon air quotes. Yahweh

Preston Meyer  1:05:36

is pretty widely used right now. Yeah, there's still argument on whether or not that w should have been a V like it was in earlier English texts. But everybody who is at all concerned with the actual Hebrew alphabet knows that the EO does not make a J sound. The J is a weird detail of Western Europe English,

Katie Dooley  1:06:01

what so even Yehovah would be closer than

Preston Meyer  1:06:05

Jehovah is definitely more carry more correct than Jehovah. But there's some pretty old texts in in Greek that look like they're saying Yehovah. So there will probably always be a huge disagreement on the pronunciation of the name because every now and that's, it's nice that Greek uses vowels and old Hebrew. You we've added vowels since then, to that text. So once you said about the word being taken out of the Bible, kind of true, the practice of reading the the Hebrew Bible, you would substitute a different word, instead of saying, the name of God. Usually, when you see it in print, it will be replaced with Lord as the Greek Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, straight up did cut the word that was the name of God, and replaced it with key, which is Lord, in almost every instance, which is a big, I think it's the reason why the King James version only says the name of God, two or three times instead of replacing every time with Lord, and the stone edition of the Tanakh that I have replaces it with Hashem, which is just a Hebrew word that means the name, which is perfectly reasonable, and lets you know that it wasn't saying, Lord, because there's also plenty of times where it's straight up uses the Hebrew word for Lord in the old test in the Hebrew Bible. So using Hashem avoids an awful lot of ambiguity, I guess. It's kind of a nifty thing. That's my field. Before I started going to school, I was actually a translator for biblical texts. So So field where I've got a little bit of passion and a fair bit of experience.

Katie Dooley  1:08:05

And that's why I trust you. Good enough for me.

Preston Meyer  1:08:11

My degree, but I actually validates work doesn't mean anything. It's the experience I had without any proper edge. Sounds good.

Katie Dooley  1:08:21

I know you keep me on the straight and narrow. I try. A few things I think are true and might not actually be. I do my best. Yeah, just what

Preston Meyer  1:08:31

you said was mostly true. There was just a little detail it was requiring a little tweaking, that's all.

Katie Dooley  1:08:39

So um, unfortunately, to wrap up this episode, we're gonna get a little dark and gloomy, more modern history. I don't think we can talk about Judaism without talking about the Holocaust. But we're over an hour into recording so don't so we will do a full episode on the Holocaust and anti semitism and how the history of anti semitism, which has been around for a long time, far, far longer than when the Holocaust happened. So they my research has said anywhere between six and 11 million Jewish people died during the Holocaust. And just recently, like in the last 10 years, their population has finally recovered. So it's back to pre World War two levels. It is still the smallest of Abrahamic religions with about 16 million, observant whereas Islam and Christianity are in the billions of people.

Preston Meyer  1:09:40

Yeah. There's more Mormons, according to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints official records than there are Jews according to these estimates. Now, of course, the number of Mormons is a lot smaller than reported numbers just because you've got loads of people who On the box drawing, and then literally never showed up to church again.

Katie Dooley  1:10:03

So the Holocaust, for lack of a better word was interesting.

Preston Meyer  1:10:11

It was

Katie Dooley  1:10:13

because it's Judaism is interesting because there is this sort of blend of Is it a race? Or is it a religion, and the Holocaust definitely affected the Jewish race, which I don't like to say because because it is very much a religion, they were targeted because of their race, their race. And Judaism, again, is unique in the Abrahamic religions, because it's not Evangelical, they don't actively recruit, it's very hard to join, you can join and there are Jewish people of all races, but because like I said, they don't actively recruit. And it's passed down from mother to her children kind of formed along racial lines, just like Christianity is predominantly white. And Islam is kind of Arabic and Middle Eastern, Far Eastern North African, they were hauled off Hitler and the Nazis were trying to exterminate the Jewish race. So they didn't care if you're Orthodox, or reform. If you had any air quotes Jewish blood in you,

Preston Meyer  1:11:24

you're part of the master race, you weren't any good, which is super weird to me. Honestly, if you want to create the master race, or Yeah, to create a master race, you don't pick an existing race, every, all of the people on this planet suck to one degree or another, let's be real. As groups, we definitely suck, look at the way we treat each other, right. But to create a master race, you need to amalgamate all of the best parts of all of the different races, for example, all of the fastest sprinters for as long as I can remember, Kenyan, Kenyan, or at least in that neighborhood of Africa. So maybe the master race should be at least a little bit darker. We need to be better runners. I say we that's wildly terrible. Because I definitely don't fit into this category of what I've just described as what would be the master race.

Katie Dooley  1:12:24

Answer on some Dutch because they're so tall. Sure. Yeah. Love that. Those are the off the top my head.

Preston Meyer  1:12:34

So just Kenyans there.

Katie Dooley  1:12:38

So there we go. Kenyans are the perfect done.

Preston Meyer  1:12:46

Oh, I hope we haven't caused any of our parishioners to make plans on genocide, that would be a problem. And I claim no credit or responsibility for the actions of other people.

Katie Dooley  1:13:05

See, we laugh through difficult things like you

Preston Meyer  1:13:08

have to sometimes don't laugh about the Holocaust, but find a reason to laugh through the suffering, you're gonna be healthier.

Katie Dooley  1:13:18

I mean, I don't know how much there is to touch on, especially in this overview episode, sort of the religious aspect of the Holocaust. Besides that, they were exterminated at a very high rate. I know that there are some lasting effects. Like I said, population has just recovered. But

Preston Meyer  1:13:41

thanks. So the First and Second World Wars, Israel has a homeland again, thanks to the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. England took over Palestine, it was called British Palestine for a while, and then in the 40s. So I want to say I could be wrong. It might have been later, the Queen said this land, or actually, realistically, it totally could have been just the Prime Minister. But I feel like the queen had to sign off on this and she's a greater authority. So I like to give her credit. Either way, British Palestine was made into a new nation of Israel, more or less upon the historical boundaries of what we just kind of accept old Israel was. And then you got Jordan and Lebanon and West Bank. There we go. And so these nations are built up and finally gave Israel a home again, which was nice because they had been having a pretty hard time there. Since the time of the Crusades, Christians and Muslims have been fighting over that land for a long time and now still

Katie Dooley  1:14:47

fighting. Yeah, the ISRAEL PALESTINE issue might actually be an episode. Yeah,

Preston Meyer  1:14:52

I don't really want to take up our time for this topic. What will definitely be a political discussion I

Katie Dooley  1:15:01

don't know what side you're talking about, before we go on air, no

Preston Meyer  1:15:05

surprise on that one. Do you think you'll be pleasantly surprised when we agree on a lot of things? So

Katie Dooley  1:15:13

yes, the nation of Israel was created. One ramification I have heard is that in more orthodox families, especially families that and I mean, it's not like the the Holocaust was that long ago, but families that remember either parents or grandparents going through it, there is a lot of pressure to stay in Judaism, we pay for faith to dare leave. Yeah. So in some cases bordering on cult, like pressure to stay, obviously not. That's not a generalization on all Jewish people are like that. But that is interesting. That doesn't, it's a thing that happens and almost understandably so. Right. Watching your family die and be torn apart over a religion. And that sounds like I'm not really into it. Right? Yeah, though, that's definitely some generational trauma that they still have to heal from.

Preston Meyer  1:16:11

Yeah, it's a crappy time in history. Yeah. I mean, it's crappy time in history today, too, but it's different.

Katie Dooley  1:16:21

How can we tie up this episode in a bow is covered the Hebrew Bible, and stories from what we've covered?

Preston Meyer  1:16:28

Should we finish with the end? So one of the things that fascinates me about Judaism is the the eschatology, the the understanding of the end of the world. The Judaism is not monolithic. And, as we discussed earlier, rabbis argue amongst themselves all the time as part of their religious observance, almost, that there's so much discussion and no unanimous, accepted conclusion about what is after this life. Jewish afterlife is ambiguous and cloudy, like we nobody really can say with confidence, what it is, the Bible in the Old Testament doesn't give clear statements. The Hebrew bible talks about the immortality of the soul, and a judgment. And there's a held high place, often called Ghana, and a paradise. And there's of course, the rebuilding of the temple, which is not actually strictly associated with it, but is kind of connected.

Katie Dooley  1:17:47

Will the temple have to be built before the end of the world? Yes. Okay. So then the world won't come until the

Preston Meyer  1:17:53

temples, right. So that's the promise that scattered Israel will be reunited, the temple will be rebuilt. And Jews and Christians alike celebrate that Israel has its homeland again. Of course, there are exceptions to that celebration. But that is one of those landmarks for the end of the world is this has to happen before that can and find out what's going on in the next life is still a mystery. There's plenty of religions who will tell you specifically like this is what your day to day agenda is going to be in the next life. For many Christians, it's you're going to sing in a choir forever, the end, which sounds like not a thrill. But

Katie Dooley  1:18:39

y'all haven't heard my singing voice that would be for every one else around me, unless I get an upgraded set of vocal cords.

Preston Meyer  1:18:47

Right? There are plenty of Jews who subscribe to a reasonably common Greek belief that you you'll be a farmer in the next life and you'll be free to take care of your own self and family for eternity. Which sounds kind of

Katie Dooley  1:19:02

cool. Okay, but

Preston Meyer  1:19:05

there's, there's no real hard dogma on that, which is kind of cool. Like, you go ask a rabbi, what happens after this life? Most of them really say, What do you think? Let give me some fuels. So I can argue with the other rabbis. Yeah, that's, it's kind of nice. The theology of Judaism is not really terribly expansive. And like, like I mentioned, there's a handful of things that are mentioned and there's not a lot of certainty on how they even relate to each other. Like between paradise and Ghana and judgment. There's seems to be what should be reasonably obvious gum way to interpret that. But there's also an ambiguity there too. And everything else about is like, we just don't know, we know there's a good place, we know that there's a bad place. That's it. We don't know what the good is. We don't know what the bad is. It's probably not a tire fire.

Katie Dooley  1:20:21

I mean, that's, that's refreshing. Right? I like that. I like when people can admit that they don't know. Yeah. So

Preston Meyer  1:20:28

as opposed to the Catholic tradition, which relies heavily on Dante's Inferno, which is, I mean, it was fiction.

Katie Dooley  1:20:39

We'll get to that. We'll get to that in our next episode. So if you want to get in contact with us, send us if you have things you want to learn and comments, suggestions, even corrections or hate mail, holy watermelon pod@gmail.com. And we have our Instagram up and running at Holy watermelon pod. We will be announcing new episodes, and some other really cool social media content on their phones. Give us a follow and

Preston Meyer  1:21:09

share us with your friends.

Katie Dooley  1:21:10

Oh yeah, five stars. Share with your friends. Check us out where wherever you listen to your punk

Preston Meyer  1:21:15

by the late Middle Ages. Thanks so much for listening.