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So um I feel ridiculous making mention of this topic because uh I am, I am extraordinarily obscure. Um As far as uh supposedly public people go, oh, by the way, I'm sorry for this. Get up. It's super early and uh I woke up really early and this is the only clothing I had access to without waking up my wife. Um Yeah, so, so I feel pretty ridiculous making a video about this because I, I think someone has to have much more notoriety than I do for this to be addressed. But I have to respond to comments that that people make. I don't have to but I mean, there's, there, there are grounds to respond to this. So, so don't blame me. It's the, the, the people who are making the accusations are, are the ridiculous ones and we just have to play the game. So um how, how is, is uh how is my ministry not a cult? Well, first off, I mean, I say my ministry because that's what people would refer to it as. But in my mind, it's, it's not mine at all. I, I am not calling the shots. I'm sincerely doing what I believe Jesus would do in my place with reasons. Um It's, this is not my game at all. Uh But I, I feel uh I feel deep gratitude for any opportunity. I have to help push this immense weight, even if my particular contribution seems um dwarfed by the mass of the, of the thing is being moved um by comparison. So, so how uh what signs do you have to know that, that, you know, this is not a cult? Well, I think the most obvious one is we don't have any funny clothes we wear, we don't have special hats or anything . I was, I was talking to my roommate who's not a particularly religious person at all. He's a lifelong friend of mine and we, we have a lot of shared vocabulary. We can quote things even just some obscure commercial that was local to where we grew up and we get the references and we joke about how these things uniquely live on through us. We have to keep them alive. But, um I was joking with him one day and, and what I, I can't even remember the, the, I don't know what we were talking about, but I was like, well, we need to get ourselves some funny hats or else, you know, no one's gonna recognize that we're a proper cult. Um So, so there's that, uh, no, but on, on a serious note, you know, I've, I've spoken many times about back testing. It's, it's an idea of how you validate a model. Um, it's a way to frame up what you understand and experience a model and you can make predictions from it. You can use it to, to as a basis of, of decisions. And um, it's, it's quite interesting because we are so cemented in this idea of good and evil as behaviors, good and evil as behaviors. And so with that mentality, when you see certain things you say, well, obviously, what's this is attached to is good or this is evil, the scriptures, they tell a very different story. Um So every time God is at work, historically was at work. Historically, he's always at work. But I'm saying these snapshots of his interactions with the world that we have recorded in scripture, the uniform experience is that good and evil are not behaviors, their motive. And there's only two, there's good and evil and everything else. It's just a mapping back to that. So back testing is really important because it helps you screen out erroneous metrics of good or evil. Let me give you an example. So I if you have a set of criteria by which you judge a person as to whether they're good or evil. First off, you're presupposing that someone can be good, which I would challenge that idea. And I think there are good reasons based on what Jesus taught. After all. He said to the rich young ruler, uh who, who called him. Good. He's a good master . Uh Jesus replied by saying he's any good except the father, which is a very, very important concept, but I don't wanna divert into that. So if, if Jesus wasn't comfortable with being called that, then maybe we shouldn't be comfortable with calling anyone else that. But the criteria that, that the Lord gave and that recurs throughout the scriptures is that good is a concept. It's um it's nothing more or less than approaching God himself. And that is an orientation, not in outcome, it's a process. And we can describe that motive as love. And I'm not sure it can be described better with any single word . Although improvement comes close, but neither of these define specific actions, they discuss a motive to love someone is to um deliberately suffer for their benefit, for their greatest benefit. It's to do all you can for the benefit of another. So that's a motive. It, it doesn't list what you need to do. It just lists why you do what you do, what objective you're optimizing. So the problem with our attempt to distill a rules based system of metrics to judge good and evil, which this idea of calling something or someone, a cult is a um an a, an attempt at that 11 sub um sub idea, sub practice of this general principle. The problem is that the things you use to earmark something is good or evil would very clearly violate what you not me, what you recognize as good or evil from the past. So the people that judged Jesus as being evil in the New Testament, they employed a lot of the same metrics that many people do today who consider themselves Christian. And that's pretty crazy to think about that many people that call themselves Christians. If Jesus were doing the same kinds of things today as he was doing, then in the flesh as a man on the earth, they would be right there in line to crucify him. They would be the ones calling him a blasphemer. They would be the ones who um, were making his, his mission very hard for himself and others. They'd be barriers and obstructions to God's good. Jesus said that to his uh apostles at that time. He said the time will come where when men kill you and they'll think that they're doing God a service. So it's completely possible to be overtly religious and the evil, right? So for, for many people, the good column says, oh, you have to be religious and you have to go to church. There are a lot of evil people who do those things. And I would argue that if we're shoehorning a complex situation into a binary state, one or the other, that religiosity and church inss are more likely to indicate an evil person than a good person. If you, if you have to reduce it down to two states. That's probably it, let's talk about, uh, sorry. It's not funny but it's , it's ironic, a two state solution of. Um, so that's a timely discussion. Uh, but, but shoehorning complicated things down to just two, uh, two categories, good and evil where there are really, there are gradations and it's complicated and it depends on an awful lot. Um, when you reduce down to one or the other, what you have to do, uh a picture would be good for this. You imagine a um imagine a, a Venn diagram and in one uh circle, you have good and in one circle you have evil. And for most people, these circles they don't overlap, right? Is what does that mean? Well, maybe it means it depends . So if the, if the graph answers the question, is it good or bad? Maybe the overlap is, it depends on the situation and maybe you bring them in like this and all of a sudden there's a little overlap because if you really talk to someone, even if they say there's no overlap, you could probably help them identify places, they actually believe have an overlap. They're just not recognizing that they're holding mutually exclusive ideas at the same time which a lot of people do. So you start showing them these things and they think, well, OK, there are a couple of things where it depends and then all of a sudden you just keep talking and it goes like this by the time you're done, those circles completely overlap and that extremity is gonna be hard for a lot of people to believe. What if I told you that nothing is always good or always evil? So I'm not saying beings like God but actions because that's what you, you say. If I see an action, I can say it's either good or evil. You think of commandments as this is always evil, this is always good, but that's not what they are even when they're written as rules, which is as close as you can get to that. Thou shalt thou shalt not. When's the last time you read the 10 commandments? Those are like the Rish, the most Rish rules that you're probably familiar with out of scripture. Did you know that each of the 10 commandments is actually an instruction about motive? They're not actions, they're motives. That's the 10 commandments. Now, if you actually looked into the other several 100 laws of Moses, they, they are more rules based, but they're pointing to the 10 commandments is this uh tip of a pyramid, right? Which points to the two great commandments that Jesus gave, love the father and love your fellow man. And, and those cer certainly are not specific actions, those are motives, they don't tell you what to do, they just tell you why, to do it, how to do it, but not what. And so you spend your whole life filling in the, the what and discerning between good and evil learning to discern anyway. So when you say, well, when I hear mention of this or that, obviously, this is a cult, you should go back test that was, was the ministry of Jesus a cult. Hopefully, I mean, they're, there are atheists who say yes or agnostics maybe who say yes. OK, we're not really addressing those folks in this video, but the Christians, none of them would say that Jesus was a cult, his, his, his mortal ministry. What about the apostles that followed? Well, then all of the sudden you have to admit a whole bunch of super extreme actions that are probably in your, this clearly indicates evil column. You have to say, well, at least sometimes these things are good , at least sometimes because these people are given as examples. Obviously, the Lord is an example and as far as the apostles go, um obviously, you can do much worse, right? Until you have a Pentecostal experience and start healing the sick and raising the dead and standing up to that kind of persecution and having people being killed left and right, rather than recant their beliefs and being so public and dedicated to that as to go out and minister full time, you know, at risk of a penalty of their lives until you can reach that level. You kind of have a hard time um trying to argue that you have something better or the same, even, even something that's comparable. Right. Well, so these are things to think about. Um, it's very unwise to oversimplify what is not simple and good and evil far from being, um, it's funny because it, they, they are in fact easy to discern but somehow not simple to discern. So , I guess the, the heuristic for it is pretty dang simple. It's just what is best. However, in practice, it's basically impossible to find someone who does that well, so far, I, I have strong beliefs that that will change very quickly. But we'll see. OK, so let's, let's zoom in a little bit more on this whole cult idea. Let's let's back test and see if we can distill properties of cults versus not cults. So you've got a cult, you have charismatic leader that is certainly not me. I'm about as not charismatic as they come across the board, uh Whether it's physical appearance, uh I'm not trying to impress anybody there and it would probably be hopeless. Um There's, there's um the ability to talk smoothly. I'm about as far from that as you can be. There's the practice of, let's see. How could you just describe this, if you wanna write a best seller, nonfiction, self help kind of book. It's very easy to do. Here's what you do. You come up with one fairly novel idea, just one and then you write a bajillion pages about it, you just repeat yourself on every page and convince normal people that by reading the same idea 300 times on 300 pages that is slightly novel, but actually, you know, pretty straightforward that any old person could come up with, they will feel like they're part of something new that they're doing something in their lives that they're changing. Especially if you craft that idea such that you can entertain it without actually making any changes. That's the best way to go because it's the , it's the, you can cast the widest net. There's, there's zero price of admission and everybody can come to the party. That's the way to sell those kinds of books. And there are very famous people who have made a lot of money in doing this. So how do you not sell lots of books? Well, I'll tell you, you pack a book with novel ideas where each sentence could be elaborated into a whole chapter and, and would have to be even longer than that to get to the watery consistency of these best sellers. And then, and you, and you push the limits of words, you express a volume of ideas and a richness of ideas . That words just can't carry you saturate them and then you crank them out left and right, and you do it to such an extent that it's, it's, it's almost impossible for any kind of normal person to capture the slightest glimmer of the volume of what you're putting out the volume of information and then you just keep coming and you inundate people with more and more information and what kind of information is it? They're not subtle suggestions to just carry a thought and feel like you're a better person because you're thinking about something that's slightly different than you were before. These are earth shattering evidence is that you are not nearly as good a person as you thought that what good is lies far beyond anything you ever imagine above. And if that weren't enough, you delineate an explicit path from where you, where the reader is to the vision that you are illustrating. So, so that's even worse than having something that's just far out there and much higher than you previously imagined was possible because you're mixing overwhelm of something that's, that's, that's immensely great with practicality of here is each and every step to take you there. And that equation equals massive guilt, massive guilt because you will know that it's possible to be way better than you are. And you will know that your lack thereof is your choice because you've been given everything you need to get there, accept your choice to take each step. It's been parsed out for you to such an extent that anybody could walk the path. And that is what God does and that's what his true servants do. And that is uh as far from what a cult leader would do as can be because what is the result? Well, with that, what you've done is you've laid it out so that everyone can do what you're showing and what you have done . We'll get to that maybe. And you know, darn well that the vast majority of people are going to stay as far away from that as possible. So it cannot be that your mo if, if you're doing this to gain fame, notoriety or money, you are the biggest idiot in the world. But that is impossible because you cannot be an idiot and write that sort of stuff. It's where would you get it from? Right. That's that, that kind of master in this case, what would be master manipulation cannot be done by a simpleton. So there's that a cult leader would never make the metric of value. Something that they do not control. Cult leaders will tell you something like whatever I tell you is true. And you hear that message in many churches, for example, political parties preach this message for sure. Um but not servants of God, servants of God say things like there's value to what I'm teaching and you'll know the value if you do it. And if you don't see the value, you shouldn't do it. These are things that you, you can find citations from Jesus to support these things like John 717. But there are many more uh that, which edifies is of me that which does not edify is not of me and on and on, edify means to make better, to make stronger, to build up, to establish. Is that the um Hebrew, I won't say equivalent, it's too strong, but a similar Hebrew idea is the word for establish. It's a very deep word. So when you have this mentality, that what you're looking for is redundancy. Uh that, that is hard to believe. Um It's hard to believe something like that could ever be a cult. Um What I mean by that is in the Lord's paths. When the intermediary through whom your accessing greater information, when it reaches its limit or is no longer available, you retain everything that you've received until then because you've become it for yourself. What do I mean by this? Um Well, reaching its useful end could be because that person or event is no longer available to you a situation, whatever it is. What, what do I mean by that? Like we're, we're 10 layers deep. And what do I mean by that? You can be inspired by going out in the woods ? Let's say you have a spot that you walk through that you find to be particularly peaceful and then you have to move well, things that come from God. If I have this property where if you were to move in that situation, you retained everything you learned through there, you always have it in memory. And even if the place gets, gets cut down and it literally doesn't even exist anymore. You still have what you had together if that makes sense. And it's the same with people now, people can go away, you can go away from them, they could die. Um, or they could just go crazy and that's ok because the value you had in them, it wasn't about them, it was about the value of what they had, which you shared it during that time. And, and this shouldn't be so hard to understand. We all have friends where we walk together for some time and now we're not really friends anymore. And that's ok even if it ended kind of, unfortunately, we can look back at that time. We shared together and say, well, we, there was something there, we had something is what people say, we had something and that doesn't have to be romantic, something. Uh I've had many friends that I'm no longer friends with. Uh many, not by my own choice. And it's ok, we had something and that's, that's good. So that's not the way the cult roll with a cult. There's no moving on. There's no growing out of it. There's no um hey, we walk together for a time and now no, you, you go that route, you, you get excommunicated or whatever they call it. Um And you get shunned and a good indication of this is whether people will continue to be your friends. If you begin to have ideas that differ from theirs and in a godly, um, perspective, I mean, you, you ought to have many people that you're friendly with, who disagree with you on things. And I'd, I'd say quite a few people who watch this channel for instance, or read the blogs or read the books. Um, they, if, if I, if I had a face to face conversation and I said, name four things that I believe that you don't agree with, they have four things and they have reasons for that. And that's wonderful . That's wonderful. I, I don't, obviously I don't agree with them and I probably think my reasons for believing what I do are better than theirs for believing what they do. That's OK. And we could spend time together and it'd be fine and we'd have a good old time. It's fine. Right. So that's very different , isn't it? And it's funny because on that note, I mean, almost every organized church is way more culty than anything that I'm associated with. Um OK, what's another difference? Uh, with cults? There's a, I don't think there's a hard and fast rule, but very often you'll have people leading the show who don't actually drink their own kool aid, they give you Kool aid to drink, but they don't drink it. It's interesting because in the sacrament or the holy supper or whatever you wanna call it, the ordinance that Jesus performed and demonstrated for the disciples of drinking the wine and eating the bread the way he did it, he drank and ate first, he ate and drank first. And it turns out that that's really important and it hasn't been explained yet, but it's really important and the, the value of what is taught in, in the gospel or in life. Um It very much, it's very important that, that the person teaching it lives at first. And um the Lord help me to learn what seems like a long time ago that I should not teach anything that I don't already do. And so that that was a lesson. He was teaching me while I was writing seek ye this, Jesus took a long time to write that book for this reason. Um He would teach me something and then I'd have to learn it and practice it myself. And then he said, OK, now you can write about this if for each thing and there are a lot of things in that book. Another property of cults is that, you know, a cult is usually a cult. So they are hidden things left and right. The power of Satan usually involves hiding information in order to have an asymmetric advantage over others. The power of God is in revealing information to give people greater advantage than they deserve. You should replay that part enough times that you get it. So Satan hides information, God reveals it and that's his glory because we don't deserve it. We never do, but he reveals it to us to give us a chance to live up to it. That oh, I'd like to say a lot about that. That should be its own video. The difference between deserving something and living up to something. I'll write myself a note on that . So uh I, I don't hide anything, nothing. So there are many things that I have not told you that I have been shown or experienced, but all of those things are in a prioritized list. And I'm going through the list as fast as humanly possible. As far as I know, I haven't found a secret source of extra hours in the day. But um I'm doing everything I can to go down that list and, you know, as I learn and experience things, the, the priority of the list changes uh as as would be expected. But I'm cranking out the list as fast as I can. So there, there's nothing secret God said, all things that are hidden will be made known and he's working towards that end and those that are participating in that effort will do the same. Uh On that note, I, I don't have a secret inner circle. Um I don't know what else to say about that, that, that I don't really have a circle at all, but in as much as I do is very public . Um So there's nothing like that. Um II I would say that I go out of my way to avoid personal interactions with the people that consume this material. Um You can see that I've written posts about um limitations in contacting me. I don't wanna, I don't wanna correspond with married women, for example , unless their husbands are in on the conversation. And um I, uh I, in, in, I've, I've, I've received invitations from uh many times to speak at events or come to events and I decline them uh to go on a podcast or something. Um Many people have suggested that they would like to come visit me. And uh almost without exception, I've said no, that's a bad idea and here's why. Um and I have at least one post to that to that uh to that end that's out there on the blog. Um And, and so I'm very careful to try to minimize the interactions I have um and limit them to what can't be done otherwise. And so the purpose is never to entertain or I don't know, certainly not to bolster my, my sense of having friends that's, or, or influencing people. So I, I act counter to that motive uh consistently and I have for a very long time. Um Yeah, I guess more could be said about that. Um But, but I'm incredibly selective about those I have a personal relationship with. Um So as far as money goes, this is one, I, unfortunately, I'm gonna have to talk a lot more about and it's not because it's that important, but it's just because there's so many layers of false tradition and it's, it's a rife, it's a topic rife with opportunity to mischaracterize what I'm doing or why. But, um that, that there will be some lengthy scripture studies in there and, um I apologize up front for those who just don't have a problem with it. Um, but when it comes to, when it comes to goodness, um it's important to make a case that can stand. It's, it's important to get as close to above reproach as you can on things that are actually from God. And part of ministry is developing the ability to make that case. Um When, when you go out and, you know, as the world says, witness to others, as the Christian world says that I don't like that phrase. Um It, it has a very valuable true meaning but it's, it's adulterated and watered down into something that's far less like love. There are a lot of words and phrases like this. Um When you go out and witness to the world, you, you really should be able to say something more powerful than what just any old person could say about the goodness of God and about about the depth of sacrifice that's worth making to him, which is just another way of saying how good He is and how, well, you know how good He is. It's important to, to be able to preach the existence and goodness of God to a level that, that the person who hears it that they can't disbelieve you. And that's a, a very high bar. It's a hard thing to do anyway. I would hope that it's obvious that I don't do this for money. I could make a lot more money. Uh, practicing my trade that I've crafted for more than 20 years, which is, uh not just programming, but also um writing and obtaining large grants, research grants in that in the field of computer science. Um I would say that I could get another job as a professor, which is a, a very high paying job is, is a top 10, were top 15% computer science professor. That's, that's um that's a lot of money a year for, for not a terrible uh work routine, but, but I was uh canceled as a result of this ministry. So um that is not open to me anymore as far as I know. Um However, with my entrepreneurial experience and my coding skills and uh everything that, that I've developed, I could make a lot more money doing that. Then I can preaching the gospel as far as I know. Um Although I think the value that the Lord has used me to produce in that vein far exceeds the value I can add to any company. Um It's ironic and unfortunate that the people that most value those things are the ones that end up producing them because they're the only ones willing to pay the price. Uh, quite literally. So that's, that's quite a foolish job to get into. Um, and these people who make money preaching, like good money preaching, that's an oxymoron, but large sums of money preaching, they're never doing it. It seems they're never doing it. Um, not even for the right reasons. The content is, it's inversely worthless, right? So the, the less worthwhile, the message, the more money you can make on it. It seems. Um anyway, so for 10 years, I spent more than 20 for the last few years, uh upwards of 40 hours a week in ministry. Um in addition to a full time job is very challenging. Um And during four or five years of that stretch, two full time jobs and I don't think most people can even imagine what that's like in addition to having a family and a little farm. Um And during that time I published, I don't know, offhand how many books and uh thousands of blog posts, thousands and hundreds of these videos, um many of which are an hour more long. And, and I know that a lot of people would, would argue that the, the value of the content of all those materials is not equivalent to what it might sound like. Uh because of the page numbers or number of hours of recording. Uh I would argue the opposite that the value far exceeds what people would think by hearing that. But the point is, uh for that whole process for these, over 10 years now, um, I, I never charged, uh, anything for that. So all the books are sold at print cost and everything else is given away for free. So, if I were doing this for money, I think that it's pretty clear that I've taken the absolute worst path and even now where I recently um announced that, that I would be accepting donations. Um I've already been through a funnel where I have intentionally chased away most of the people that would, would um let's say most amply give, right? It's very obvious that this has not been my motive. Um A lot of folks who do things like this for the wrong reasons, they do it because it's the easiest path to them. And I tell you that God has developed the skill set in me that I can um manage the necessities of temporal life with 2% or less of my effort. And um choosing to live the goodness of God that he has shown me inverts that entire equation. So it's very interesting because on the one hand life for me, given the things that God has led me through and taught me and given me uh would be the easiest thing in the world um to, to do well off in the shadows and private life. And just doing what other people do, that'd be the easiest thing in the world for me. Um But in order to more fully live up to the example he has shown me, uh I have to put myself in, in places and say things that II, I have to, well, it's, it's a privilege to put myself in places and say things that make my life a million times more difficult than it would otherwise be at, at every interaction, every level everything. Um So I hope it's obvious that this is not the easy path. Um As far as building up a dependency, this one is tricky because it's the objective of all true servants of God, sorry, random severe pain. Um It's the objective of all servants of God to make themselves redundant. Um And I, I hope that it's obvious that in everything that I say or do I do whatever I can to not just show you that something better is possible but to give you exactly what you need to do it yourself. And like I alluded to earlier, it's done in such a way that after, you know, you know, I guess a good catch phrase for this would be after you grow. You know, that's, that's John 717. Let me write that down. Sorry. Thanks for bearing with me here. It's too valuable to lose thoughts. You might think that's the dumbest thing you've ever heard. But, you know, some of us have lower standards. Um We're more easily amused, I guess. Um Yeah, so after you grow, you know, and the point with that is that hopefully, with everything I've ever taught, if you find value in it and you do it or you've been persuaded, it ceases to be something I said. Now it's yours. And this is the beauty of ideas and why in my book there, well, not in a book I wrote but you know, in the, in the colloquial phrase in my, in my view, ideas are much more valuable than any amount of money because money is a resource where as you share it, you have less and it can only be in one place at one time. But ideas are free and you can copy them and change them freely. They don't belong to anyone. All good comes from God and his fingerprints are all over it, all over light anywhere where it's found and it can be freely shared and you can take an idea and you can tweak it a little bit if you like. Um you can, you can experiment and try modifications of it. You can mix in lessons you've learned from other places and other times and it's yours and you're free to share it with as many people as you want and opposite to money. We're actually maybe having a lot more to do with money than most people realize. The more you do with it, the more you get out of it. It's almost like leaving rabbits alone. You're just gonna have a lot more rabbits. So, um, the more you apply it in your life, the more value you get out of it and also the more you share it, the more value you get out of it. And this is people don't think of money that way and maybe they should cause it's, it's actually quite similar in that vein. So anyone whose process makes them redundant is, I mean, that's, that's definitely something to, uh, pay attention to. All right. So the good old perennial polygamy topic. This is always fun. I, I, you know, people never, there's always somebody, it's just like there's a vending machine somewhere that or drip, there's some kind of drip . Um, have you seen a drip? Uh, what are these things called? You can make an oil burning furnace or a forge and part of it is you have to make this little dripping line of oil and this is probably highly legal. So, consult with the EPA before you do it. But, um, it, it turns out to be a really effective use just from an energy perspective for waste oil, used oil from, from cars anyway. Sorry for the sidetracks. Just how my mind goes. So there's some drip of used motor oil of people who just come out of nowhere every, every so often and ask me some random question about polygamy. And I, I just don't understand where these people come from and why they're so obsessed. But, um, anyway, I, I know it's pretty dang obvious that I'm not doing this to for some subversive secret purpose. That's also another Hallmark of a cult. That what's going on on the surface is not what's going on under the surface . Um, and I'll touch on polygamy here but like I said, I don't have some secret group. I don't have some, you know, members, only, whatever, there's no members, there's nothing to be a member of, go, go be a member of the Kingdom of God, right? And I, I don't control that one. Um So if, if I can help facilitate that, that's wonderful. But um beyond whatever contribution I might make that that's not uh it's not something that, that is mine to give. Um So I don't have some secret society. I don't have some inside group. I don't have some inside motive or objective. I have gone out of my way to um put my cards on the table many steps earlier in the game than would be strategically optimal. I'm sorry for that word. Solid, solid. But um I try to do everything I can to give advanced warning of exactly where we're going, even, even to a fault. Um Just so that no one can say, oh, this guy used to say this and now he says this totally different thing. Now, some of that is unavoidable because being a human, I learn and I improve over time. And even as I read things that I wrote a long time ago or watch a video that I made maybe um I will see very clearly where my understanding of things has changed over time. And um I look at my own past preaching like I hope you all look at my current preaching, which is to say you're not, you're not outsourcing your responsibility to evaluate truth. Instead, you're, you're, you're experiencing resources from wherever, using your reason, your faculties of reason to the greatest extent to evaluate and receive what is better than what you already have and to let go by the wayside, whatever isn't. And that's what Paul said. Um you know, hold fast to what's true. So we test things and we hold fast to what's valuable and true. Um Anyway, as part of this. So, so besides not having some secret government or secret society or secret club or, you know, secret objective, that what I really want is I don't know, to uh to buy some town somewhere and then tell everyone, give me all your money and then you can come here. I think that'd be cool. You know, I wouldn't put that off the table. But um that's not something that excites me in any way more than anything because I think it would be a, a flaming dumpster fire from day one. I, I'm not a huge fan of doing what other people have done and expecting it to go well when it failed miserably for them. But that's, that's not what's going on here. I, I've been really clear, I think, um, I don't think, I, I know how this is going to go and it's going to be, um, that, that people will gain access to ideas from multiple sources. They will consider them more or less valuable, they will put them into practice in their lives. And as God incrementally increases the challenges against which we work. The value of the ideas people hold will become more or less apparent. And then they'll get to decide whether to recognize that change in perceived value or not. And either seek for greater things at greater cost than they were previously willing to pay or turn to delusion to intentionally blind themselves from the need to find something better. And as they do this, this, this stream of ideas that people either search for or don't and either live or don't or anywhere in between, it will result in the clumping together of people, the breaking apart of people, the clumping together of ideologies, the breaking apart of ideologies and the, the uh uh when I say clumping people, let's just say across all realms, whether it's geographical, ideological and so forth and they'll clump together and they'll break apart and a hierarchy will emerge, that's what's going to happen. So whatever my role in that is, is a separate issue, but that's what you're going to experience. I promise you there's no hidden objective. That's what is going on. And I'm trying to do everything I can to help people get the most out of that, that they can. That's, that's, that's the end times in a nutshell. There you go. Um, ok. So there's not, uh, the objective here is not something like building a harem of, of, of wives or something. OK. And this is, this is something I think at least some people fully expect that, you know, this is terrible, but I I'm gonna say it. Um There's this movie Monster Squad which I love. Um And how much of that is due to actual value and how much is just nostalgia for, for what I consider to be a better time uh growing up in the eighties, but Monster Squad um lo a lot of wonderful quotes from that movie. Um But there's this scene where the, the Dracula he's got, um I don't know, he, he, he went out and bit some, some young ladies in town there. It's uh you need to know the story, but basically there's this group of little kids and they think that monsters are real and they have a little club and everyone, they're just a bunch of nerds and then it turns out that monsters are real and Dracula of old wasn't just a myth and for some reason, they were transporting his coffin from where he was and wherever he was to and it just ended up in this small town. It's a silly story. But, um, anyway, he, he goes out and bites, I guess a couple of ladies , they don't really particularly show that, but there's this one scene and that's the point of the, the reference, which is, this is probably completely unnecessary. But, you know, he, he sets up in this old mansion that's abandoned in some foresty swamp place and outside of town. And so the kids have to go and, and fight the monsters because no one believes them. And, um, so they go to this mansion and as they're going through the old haunted presumably abandoned mansion where actually Dracula has set up shop, they come across some room or something and they open the door and there's these three or four ladies who are now vampires and there's, but there's a scene he like he keeps them in this room and I guess he was gonna use them to drink their blood, but then they turned into vampires. They don't really show it all. The point is he's got a room with these young ladies in it that are trapped there and they're just there for him to use. And I think this like that was an overly long reference, but this is how, you know, a lot of fundamentalists, I guess, um, they get into, uh, Fundy are gonna fundy, I guess. Um, and they get into this sort of thing and they have these, these crazy things that , that these behaviors that tend to common among them. And so when, when someone starts down a path where they, they sound like they're preaching fundamentalism, which actually is not a bad word. If you look up the meaning, it's, it's, um, it's a richer word than conservatism. It's, it's to really get back to the roots and do the real thing. Um, but it's been twisted into meaning, you know, extreme practices, um, that, that tend to not be done with a good motive. Anyway, the point is there have been sufficient people that have come to visit my house that, um, they can attest to the fact that I don't have some room full of young ladies. There's no secret, uh, harem of lives. There's no, you know, and, and whatever that might entail at a future date. I also don't have plans for a room of, uh, of young ladies. Um, and this is just so far from anything that, uh, I could ever imagine being, um, desirable in any way. Um, but also not, not because I think that, uh, you know, I do have very different views on many things including, uh, what's called polygamy. I, I would not call what I believe that because I, I don't, um, I think it's so far from what people understand it to be. But, um, yeah, anyway, there's , there's not gonna be um, some harem of wives. So, um, what else could be said here? I think this is long enough. Good grief. But I've been kicking around these ideas for really long time and I can't even remember why I felt like now was the time to share these things, but I can cross this off my list and hopefully this helps people see that. You know, I'm not, I'm not trying to make the case that there's more cotton candy puppy dogs and rainbows here than you thought. I, I think definitely rainbows but those mean something very different than what people think. Um, but um, as, as far as accusations that what I'm doing is cultish, I, I think that, uh I think that that just shows a lack of, um, of honesty really. I mean, I want to say sophistication, that's just kind of sounds insulting and it's not exactly what I mean. I think anyone who's going to throw around accusations like that has some due diligence to do and uh even the slightest bit of it should hopefully reveal a whole lot of contraindications to the theory. But if you get nothing else out of this video, please back test your beliefs against Jesus and people that you believe followed him in the past. And I think that you will come up with um, a different set of metrics. You might be surprised where they lead you because they're probably going to lead you away from your church and closer to situations or people that you might otherwise dismiss out of hand. So it turns out that more light is a good thing and it helps you see more clearly , take care.