Dragons, Fire, and the War Over Sacred Power (Sponsored Stream)

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:06):
He all right, welcome back, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
This is doctor David Patrick Carey with Church of the
Eternal Logos, and today we have a very fun sponsored stream.
A major shout out goes out to my friend David
remember over at the Logos Academy. We've been actually talking
about this for a while. And then he more recently
sponsored a stream where he asked me to dive into

(00:40):
both the legends, the theology, the symbolism, and potentially the
historical reality of dragons and looking at the at least
within the Christian context, as we'll talk about the legend
of fire breathing dragons and comparing that with the river
of fire of God's love. So we got a bunch
of stuff to get into today. I have a bit

(01:03):
of an opening monologue that sort of summarizes the Christian
symbolism of the dragon, and we're talking about aerial reptiles
as we'll see, we'll see a sort of evolution from serpents.
There's a lot of academic work I was looking into,
and they really shoest you this away as sort of

(01:27):
mythologized encounters with large serpents or crocodiles and stuff like that.
So I'm going to go over the Christian symbolism and
look at how the dragon obviously is a Satanic symbol
of Satan's adversarial nature, not only against God but against
humanity as well. But then we're going to look more

(01:49):
generally at the cross cultural references and symbolic motifs regarding dragons,
because one of the things that's so interesting about dragons
is that culture, which secular history tells us had zero
contact with each other, developed mythologies, legends, narrative stories about

(02:12):
these dragons, and how, at least in most cases, terrorized
people demanded human sacrifices. You will see that initially they
weren't necessarily fire breathing. That's a very unique Christian emphasis.
We'll see that there is instances of this association with
dragons breathing fire in the Roman and Greek context, but

(02:34):
it really gets substantiated once the Church arrives on the scene,
and we'll see in the Germanic and the Norse, in
the Russian context, in the Greek context, they all have
these stories about fire breathing dragons. Now, I can't go
without mentioning, of course, the icon right behind me here

(02:56):
is the dragons layer part excellent not only of Christianity,
but most specifically of Holy Orthodoxy, and that is Saint George.
So at some point I have a little video that
kind of goes over Saint George and his slang of
the dragon, and I have in my document today because

(03:17):
today this was a tough topic. How exactly do you
present on dragons? And I started going through YouTube. I
found a bunch of reading material. Then I started going
through YouTube to find some type of visual a visual
piece to include in the stream, and a lot of
it is crap. So we're gonna watch a video on
Saint George. The two most notable instances that I could

(03:42):
find of a prominent podcast talking about the potential reality
of dragons is an instance on the Joe Rogan podcast,
which I found as short of will watch that? And
then a dinosaur expert on the Lex Friedman podcast. Obviously
we can't watch those full clips because those are copyrighted
from their podcasts. But in my document, I first begin

(04:05):
with the instances or the descriptions of a dragon within scripture,
both Old Testament and New Testament. Then I start getting into,
you know, the symbolism, the Christian understanding, and then what
I find very interesting and I haven't seen put together
that I did put together at the end of my
document is why did dragons become discredited? And the interesting

(04:30):
thing is that what sort of replaced the dragon, and
if we just localize it to sort of Christian mythology,
is the dinosaur. And so I had my document. The
last two sections is one describing the intellectual history of
the West, and it's going to be tied with movement
into modernity on how the dragon as a historical artifact,

(04:51):
because I have a whole section on historical cases both
orthodox and non orthodox, mostly all Christian wh these people
are describing what they are writing as a literal account
of dragons. So this isn't now we're going to be
getting into the symbolism. But these accounts were very, very literal,

(05:15):
and so I have a whole I went through and
found as many instances as I could and documented those.
But at the end, I'm going to describe why dragons
be you know, essentially fell out of favor or what
I'm arguing, don't fit in a modernist paradigm and a
sort of rationalist, mechanistic, evolutionary Darwinian understanding of reality. But

(05:36):
then I'm going to do it an internal critique of
dinosaurs to demonstrate that, you know, I there's a lot
of internal critiques in regards to the logical consistency of
dinosaurs themselves. Some people speculate the dinosaurs or a sort
of contemporary attempt to sort of whitewash the myths of

(05:56):
dragons and sort of represent and evolutionary framework. So we
get these sort of ancient reptiles, these monstrous entities, but
we're told, again, they existed millions of years ago. I
think was it sixty five to three hundred million years ago?
Were told that dinosaurs exist. And so in prep for
the stream, I was gonna have tons of stuff I found,

(06:17):
like young creationists, there's a whole swath and I'm curious.
I'm actually going to do a poll for you guys.
I found a whole swath of Protestant Christians that are
absolutely convinced that dinosaurs existed alongside humans within the last
few thousand years and believe that the flood of Noah,

(06:40):
the you know, the Noah's arc and the flood narrative,
that this is what extinguished the dinosaurs. Now, I'm actually
not going to be making any historical cases today for
one way or the other, I will though undermine the
assumption of dinosaurs as a historical certainty based on their
own methodologies to do an internal logical critique. It's more

(07:02):
of a philosophical critique, just like my critique of evolution.
My critique of evolution is a philosophical critique, one being
that it violates its own consistency in the survival or
the survival of the fittest. That Taking the example of
a flying mammal, let's use a bat for example. We're

(07:22):
told that it evolves from a rat. Now, if that's
the case, in the process to move from a rat
to a bat, it must develop these appendages on his arm.
But at some point in the evolutionary process, this cross
generational process in which the rat attains these appendages under
its arm, it's going to not be fit for any

(07:44):
single niche. Therefore, it would not have survived because it's
not fit for any niche, and it would have gone extinct.
And you can use the same logical process for eyeballs, brains.
But a very notable one that people have used is
is flying mammals. Because to move from a terrestrial mammal

(08:05):
to a flying mammal. The process in between makes it
unfit for any niche, So therefore, how does it survive?
And we're told, essentially what Darwinius would tell you is that, well,
there was, at least for the first one, there is
enough appendage there to make it advantageous, maybe like a
flying squirrel or something like that. So I'm not convinced

(08:27):
of that. And of course there's no physical evidence of
the leap between species, but we call macro evolution. So anyways,
that's not part of today's stream, but we will be
undermining that. So we got it's gonna be fun. It's
gonna be fun. I'm gonna do a poll for you
guys to see what is the perspective of the chat

(08:49):
today regarding the reality of dragons. So I have four
options here. I have four options that I think are possible,
and I'll tell you which one that I sort of
lean towards, or one that I think is very interesting,
because I really haven't made my mind up in attempting
this dream. I try to find historical artifacts or some

(09:12):
type of tangible evidence for dragons. I could really find
a whole lot, and as you'll see in the clip
of Joe Rogan with the guy that they have on.
He argues that if there were flying dragons, and I
think this is a probable argument. If there were flying
serpents dragons, their bones would be hollow because it would

(09:36):
have to be so that they could fly. They wouldn't
be very heavy, just like we see with eagles and hawks,
predatory birds apex predator birds are actually very light. And
this is why it's hard to find fossil remains of
large birds because they're birds decomposed so quickly. Because they're hollow,
they're light, which he argues if there were dragons, it
would make sense there wouldn't be a lot of artifacts

(10:00):
or a fossil record of them if they did exist.
So here's my four options for you guys, and I'm
going to post the pull after we get through the monologue,
and I'm going to see what you guys, what you
guys have to say. The four options I think in
regards to the existence of dragons. Number one would be

(10:20):
that they are absolutely real. That when we look at
the historical records, because I went to find what are
historical accounts, because there had to be historical counts of
people claiming that they witnessed dragons or slayed actual physical
dragons not, you know, because we have let we have
stories in the Orthodox world, some that are very literal
and some that are more allegorical symbolic, and so, and

(10:44):
I don't think one nullifies the other. But we do
have accounts where people are certainly writing as if these
things were very literal. So let's say the first option
about dragons is that they actually did exist. They are
historical into two of reality that were documented by people,
and this therefore would explain the anomaly of all these

(11:08):
cross cultural references to dragons. Now there's differences between these
cross cultural references. For example, once you get into East Asia,
the attributes and the framework around dragons are very different.
They believe they're auspicious, they believe they're beneficent. In China specifically,
I would say one of the cultures that are most

(11:29):
notorious for dragon symbolism, it is explicitly associated with the emperor.
And as we'll see when we look through the history
of dragons that before they ever attained the attribute of
breathing fire, they actually began as sort of sea creatures,
a type of Leviathan. And so there's all these myths

(11:51):
around the world where they dwell in rivers or seas
or some type of body of water, or they guard
a treasure of this sort. And of course in India
you have the Nagas, which is like a semi divine
entity which they also believe is beneficent, but he can
be dangerous, and he basically is the product of two

(12:13):
deities in their Hindu pantheon, and he protects a vast
swath of treasures under earth. So when you get in
the Asian context, it clearly has sort of beneficent auspicious characteristics.
In the Roman and Greco context before pre christian you
see that they aren't really auspicious. So in the Levant

(12:37):
in the Mediterranean, where we have all these instances of dragons,
they're not really beneficent. And of course, once Christianity takes off,
we in our scripture. The Bible itself has references to dragons,
most explicitly the Book of Revelation, because as we'll look
at some of the etymology, because I was curious, if

(12:58):
you look up, like how many references to dragons are there?
I was getting different accounts. Some said thirty seven, some
said forty seven, some said thirty five. In the etymology
and some of those words it's referring because in the
Old Testaments in Hebrew and it's it could be a dragon,
it could be a serpent, it could be some type

(13:19):
of beast. It's kind of ambiguous the term that's choosed.
That especially with the King James Bible, because the King
James Bible explicitly translated into these words as dragons. Because
at that time we hadn't moved fully out. I mean,
once we hit the eighteenth century, like this transition period
occurs in the seventeenth century where all this dragon law

(13:43):
basically is a race. And once we arrive in the
eighteenth century and because of deism and mechanistic scientific understandings,
essentially there's no more room for dragons and they become
a fictitious lore. And then right around the corner, once
we get into the ninth teenth century with Darwin, dinosaurs

(14:03):
re emerged. So in the eighteen forties we started get
to get the discovery of dinosaurs by all these paleontologists
who they themselves were interested in promoting the idea of dinosaurs.
So four options, whether dinosaurs or dragons exist. Number one,
they did exist, they're historical, they're literal, and This is

(14:23):
why whether you're in Mesopotamia, whether you're in ancient China,
whether you're in Japan, whether you're an Aztec or you're
a Mayan, or you're in the Greco Roman world, all
these cultures had legends and pictorial iconography of dragons. That's
number one. Number two is what we're told is that

(14:44):
this is the contemporary academic religious studies secular perspective is
that what dragons are are totally mythologized, fictionalized, figurative legends
about human encounter with real animals in the wild. And
so most of the time they chalk up dragon lore

(15:08):
as tied to human encounters with snakes specifically and the
idea of massive, large snakes, and they account the description
that these dragons breathe fire is because these serpents were
venomous and when people were bitten by it, it burned
and stung, and they associated its breath and its mouth

(15:31):
with fire itself that consumed and killed people. This is
kind of the secular approach. So therefore these are not
historical in any way. These are totally mythologized and basically
fictitious pictorial depictions of real animals that they encountered. I
saw some scholars arguing it had to do with various

(15:52):
crocodile species. So I'll let you guys come to your
conclusion on that number three option. And this is the
sort of Union and Jordan Peterson approach, that dragons are
real in the sense that their analogous to real aspects
of the world. Now, I would say the church adopts

(16:16):
part of this. Now, certainly not a Jordan Peterson or
a Junian perspective, but the idea as we once we
start getting into the symbolism of the dragon, that the
symbolism of the dragon is actually real. What it represents
as an antagonistic force against humanity and God is real,
and that therefore the myths of dragons, just like Peterson

(16:39):
thinks about scripture itself may not be literal, but underneath
it it has a higher order of truth regarding the
nature of reality or the spiritual world or something like that.
So that's the third option. Now. I started to reflect
on this, and I was thinking, well, what if this
is a fourth option. I haven't really heard too much

(17:00):
many people make this argument for the existence of dragons,
but hear me out here. So I sat and thought
about it, and one of the things that came to
me is what if? What if dragons were visibly witnessed
by people? But the difference between today and all of

(17:22):
these stories we have basically from the sixteen hundreds back
to antiquity, we have all these stories about dragons. What if?
Because one of the things I highlight with the discrediting
of the existence of dragons as the movement towards modernity
is that because our fundamental presuppositions of the world have
been so radically altered through modernity, through rationalism, through the

(17:46):
scientific pursuits, right through technology, that we actually cannot see
entities that spiritually literally really exist. You've followed me there,
What if dragons and the dragon is actually in a
pre modern world, people actually saw these things flying because

(18:09):
they are real spiritual entities. That maybe the dragon, just
as the Book of Revelation talks about Satan, maybe a
dragon is the way in which a demon or satan
appear within reality itself, and therefore the they're not totally fictitious,
they're not totally mythologized, but people actually encountered real dragons,

(18:34):
but they're spiritual entities, and this would explain then potentially
potentially hear me out. This would potentially explain why as
we move and we leave the seventeenth century, all of
dragon laws totally annihilated and it's done away with because
the you know, for a mcclu and understand, you know,

(18:56):
the medium is the message. Because our sensory ratios have
been so altered, we actually no longer perceive things that
are actually in the world as spiritual entities. I've seen,
you know this. This would make sense for example, of
legends like leprechauns in Ireland or fairies across Europe and

(19:16):
all around the world, these small little entities, what if
they themselves, these sprites, these spirits are also sort of
demonic manifestations that in a pre modern world we actually
would have seen because we have not been tainted by
rationalism and science and technology and to such a degree
that we could actually witness things around us that we

(19:38):
ourselves cannot see anymore. Which would make sense if Satan
is the father of lies and the greatest trick that
Satan ever did was to convince people he didn't exist.
Is that as we move into the modern world, the
dragon itself becomes invisible to our naked eyes and begins
to manifest through the systems building because when I start

(20:01):
going through the symbol of the Christian symbolism of the dragon,
oh my god, it could apply to the entire technocratic
world that's being that's being built around us. Could this
be the new substantiation of the dragon itself, going further
and beyond the historical semiotics we've been presented with. That's

(20:24):
an option we have. Somebody says I'm gonna go with
option five. Dragons are physically real, and those scientists keep
putting their bones together, Well, that would be option one. Brother,
I don't know if you listened. Option one is the
literal existence of dragons. So that's option one. There isn't

(20:45):
I mean, if you guys do have an option five,
I'd be quite interested in it. But that's what I
said in option one. So those are some things that
think about as we move through today's stream, because we're
gonna be talking a lot aboutymbolism and it is it
is an anomaly. So this is the biggest thing going
for dragons that hasn't really been resolved. And when you look,

(21:08):
because I got TikTok videos that we're going to be
watching towards the end of the stream of people who
are really really into the idea that dragons existed. None
of them are really super credible, right, it's not. These
aren't people that you would want to educate your children.
But it's interesting how popular it is because I myself
am skeptical about dinosaurs, because I myself am totally skeptical

(21:32):
of macro revolution and Darwinian since, so if dinosaurs exist,
it doesn't nullify my worldview. I just believe that God
would have then created them already. They did not evolve
from reptiles and birds are not you know, feathered dinosaurs
from you know, the prehistoric period or something. No God

(21:52):
created these things that could be a possibility. Again, dragons, dinosaurs,
these things aren't dogmas of our Christian faith. But the
point being is they'd also don't nullify our own timeline.
Whether you believe you know, the Earth is eight seven,
six thousand years old, none of this actually would nullify
that worldview. It doesn't outright contradict it. So yeah, but

(22:16):
so we got we got tons to get into today.
I want to also say, Patrick, can you please post
the table of contents of your book and at least
two chapters I'm not going to post two chapters. Heck no,
heck no, I'm not going to be posting two chapter.
I will post the table of contents gladly, but I

(22:40):
will also say, guys, this is the goal for today.
So we got thirty super chat goal today on YouTube.
If we reach the goal, somebody will be receiving a
copy of my book, a signed copy. I will ship
it out. That will be on me. I will get
the printed, the label print did, get it packaged, and

(23:01):
get it shipped out so that you will get it
before Christmas. You should get it before Christmas is December sixteenth.
I'll get it out and in the mail tomorrow. So
if we reach the thirty super chat goal, I want
to offer somebody an opportunity to get this book for free. Now,
the question I wanted to ask you, guys is should

(23:24):
it be someone who's super chatted. Does it need to
be someone who's super chatted to be worthy of winning
the prize or should the group itself be worthy and
that anybody in the chat could win the book. I'm curious.
I was thinking about doing this maybe more frequently for streams.
Is offering a free winner to get access to the

(23:44):
book and I'll send it out nobody reads free. Thank you, Kristin, Hey,
thank you very much, young old young old boy. Do
appreciate it, my man, But what do you guys think?
Should it be just for people who superchat? Mary? I
think it would be more fair for super chatters. Okay,

(24:07):
now I'm fine with that because that does make actual sense.
So what we'll do then is if you superchat today,
whether it be Dono, chat stream labs or YouTube, but
if of course YouTube, we have to reach the thirty
super chat goal. I will ask a question or say

(24:28):
I'm thinking of a number, do something where somebody has
to put it in the chat, and if it's right
or the closest person will get the book. And then
you need to email me. Though you have to email
me your address, your full name, email and phone number
if you want to get text updates. Once I ship
it out you, whether it be UPS or USPS, you'll

(24:51):
get updated so you can track it yourself. So if
you want that, give me your phone number. I promise
I won't be spamming you, but I'll put it in
the software so that you'll get up dated. So that
is the goal today. You just have to send in
a Superchat a super chat and maybe you know. I
thought we'll just make it the biggest super Chatter wins.
But now I thought, well, that's not fair because not

(25:12):
everybody has the same resources, so we're not going to
do the biggest Superchatter wins. But you do have to
be a superchatter. If you superchat today and we reach
the thirty superchat goal, you can be a winner. I
will sign it again. You just contact me through email tonight,
send me church with the eternal logos at gmail dot com.
Say hey, I'm that handle, tell me your name, tell

(25:36):
me your address, give me your phone number, and then
I can ship it all out. So yes, USA shipping only.
Thank you, heidib Mary great point. Yes, if you're in Australia,
I'm not doing because it costs me forty dollars to
send a book to Australia. I am not You must
you must be in the United States Canada. Just to
ship to Canada cost me like twenty six dollars. It's crazy.

(26:01):
And I just sent out because I don't have a
limitation on my website, so you can be from anywhere
and purchase my book. And I had two people, both
from New South Wales in Australia, different towns, but two
people on the same day purchase. I thought, what are
the chances that two people in the same day purchased
from Australia, both of them one cost me. They both

(26:23):
cost me like forty two forty four dollars to ship.
So I'm sorry, I'm sorry, no one, no one in Australia.
You guys are damn too damn expensive to ship to.
But everybody in the continental United States is eligible. So
thank you guys for that young old boy throws in

(26:45):
two dollars with a Christmas tree, Thank you very much.
Brother Dano throws in three and chair throwing Italian throws
in five says. Did your study show if Chinese dragons
are good at driving? I would I would suspect not.
I would suspect not because one, if they do have
arms and Chinese and Chinese iconography, they're just these little

(27:07):
bitty guys. It's almost like a t rex, it'd be
kind of hard for them to steer. So yeah, I
mean it kind of just goes along with Asian culture
in general. So you know, the trend continues, all right.
So let me let's see what do I want to
do first, you know what, just to keep the rhythm

(27:31):
of the stream. Let's just do some quick housekeeping right now. Actually, no,
forget it, Let's do the monologue. We'll do housekeeping after
we do the monologue. All right, So here's what I
want to begin with. Guys. I want to talk to
you about the symbolism. So whether you believe in dragons
literally or not, we're going to get to that once
we get to the document. I want to first talk
to you about the symbolism of dragons from a Christian perspective,

(27:56):
and then talk about how the general motifs you can
find a cultures. Now say, the one caveat regarding dragons
is that in East Asia they do not have a
negative context. In East Asia they are always auspicious and
beneficent and potentially bestowing good luck, and typically always associated,

(28:17):
at least in the Chinese context, with the emperor, with power,
with authority, with the ability to control weather, rain, waters,
this type of stuff. So East Asia is kind of
its own thing, but we'll talk about it from the
Christian perspective. What is the symbolism of dragons? Well, the
first one, and to be very general, is that dragons

(28:39):
represent chaos, so they are opposed to divine order. When
we look at I have a list of ten Orthodox
saints that have legends associated with them slaying dragons in
one way or another. In every instance it has to
do with them terrorizing civilization, a small villa, a small city.

(29:01):
In the case of Saint George, we'll see he finds
a princess that's tied to a tree because the dragon
that terrorized the city demands human sacrifice. Now he finds
her and then he takes her her girdle off, which
is symbolic of virginity, right, purity, and he subdues and

(29:21):
chokes the dragon. He's able to drag it around with
her girdle. So what do we see. We see a
symbolism there that the purity of those following Christ subdue
the dragon. Right, so we can see the spiritual warfare
regarding the dragon as chaos. He is opposed to divine order,
and divine orders obviously has to do with individual moral virtue.

(29:44):
And so the dragon, though is active and hostile to
God's order, it's not a sort of passive entity that
you know, is anti anti Christ, anti God, that he's
kind of passive. He just lets things crumble, No, no, no.
The dragon is the ultimate archetype of active hostility. And

(30:05):
as we'll see, this is why, even amongst some of
the saints that are said to have slay dragons, even
the Church views it as times symbolic because there's one instance,
for example, I forget the saint's name, will come to it,
where he slays the dragon that's dwelling underneath the city
of Rome. Well, it just so happens that this happens

(30:26):
during the time of Constantine. So the Rome is converting
from a pagan empire to a Christian empire. Could this
have to do with him slaying the pagan idols of Rome?
Can it deal with these pagan spiritualities being antagonistic to
the divine order of Christianity? Obviously that could work there,
that would make sense. But chaos that's created by the

(30:51):
dragon is always anti communal, and this is a really
big piece when we start looking at the symbolism of
fire and the river of fire theology of Orthodoxy. It
is participatory, it unites you with God, it does not
destroy the individual. But with the dragon as chaos, it
resists all communion. It's always isolated. Right, you may see

(31:15):
there's the art depictions, especially in the Russian context, where
dragons have three, six, nine different heads. But it's one entity.
Very rarely that I find any example of a dragon
that lived with other dragons in a dragon community. Now,
they're almost always solitary creatures that dwell in water, that

(31:36):
dwell in caves, that dwell in wells, or somewhere remote
and mountain landscapes, somewhere remote where people typically don't venture.
So it's an isolated entity. It's an entity that's not
represent communion and multiplicity, and this disorder seeks domination, not participation, right,

(31:59):
and we're going to see again the symbolism of fire
how that all plays itself out. So the dragon number
one is a symbol of chaos, and it's a symbol
of domination through fire, through power, through authority, and it's
not interested in human participation at all. The only participation
you get with the dragon is offering of sacrifices, which again,

(32:21):
you know what does the Bible talk about. That's the
whole problem with the Israelites is they keep offering their
children to Moloch and bail, which again we've done streams
on covering the history of Moloch and bail worship. So
we see this motif and we can see that Christianity
whenever depicting a dragon highlights this human sacrifice element essentially
being Antichrist. Now number two dragon, and this is obvious.

(32:46):
Everybody would have already geessed this the dragon as Satan
or Satanic power. And this is a motif throughout scripture. Right,
this is really the hard crux of how the Bible
you uses the dragon motif. Now, as I said, there
is some type of liberty that is utilized in translating

(33:09):
these Hebrew terms into dragon and re already to be
the Old Testament, now into the New Testament. We do
have instances where the word dracone the Greek, which is
the origins of where we use the word dragon. That's
literally the etymological foundation that is used. That's why I
said dragon is specifically used in the Book of Revelation.

(33:30):
But depending on how you translate the words in the
New Testament, it could be a serpent, it could be
a dragon, it could be a monster. But the icon
of Satan, the way that the Church depicts Satan is
almost always as a dragon, at least the historical Church,
the Orthodox Church. When we look at our Orthodox iconography.

(33:52):
Just like Saint George slaying the dragon, Satan is almost
always depicted as a dragon. Now for Saint George, now
he was persecuted under Diocletian. Remember last week when we
did a stream on Saint Nicholas of Mira, Saint Nicholas
was imprisoned for six to ten years in three oh six.

(34:16):
Saint George was also three years previously to Saint Nicholas,
Saint George was imprisoned by Diocletian and was tortured and
refused to recant his faith in Christ. So, just to
give you a historical context, imagine that within the same
little twenty year period, we have Saint George defending Christendom,

(34:38):
refusing to recant his faith, miracles being associated with him
being able to endure all the torture that Diocletian is
inflicting on him because he was a soldier in the military.
When they found word that Saint George was Christian, they
had demanded immediately that he renounced his faith because Diocletian

(34:59):
was worried they were already per secuting Christians, but he
was worried that if soldiers started to believe, this might
cause a wildfire within the Roman Empire. So my point
then with Saint George and the dragon here is we'll
talk about the literal interpretation here, but we can also
see that Saint George refusing to recount as faith living

(35:21):
a virtuous life, the legend of him slaying an actual
dragon and saving a city and rescuing a princess that
was going to be sacrificed. We can see these as
acts that are against the anti christ Satanic powers of
this world. And so the dragon, ask Satan, is not
merely evil. It is an anti being. What do I

(35:43):
mean by that? It extinguishes life itself when we look
at as we'll come to the river of fire in
the theology of fire. In the Orthodox context, it is
life giving, it is participatory, it is what cleanses you
and unite you with God. But in the dragon context,
it's the fire that extinguishes humanity. It's the fire that

(36:07):
causes fear and kills people, annihilates, and it represents pride, rebellion,
false autonomy, and a parasitic existence. That's what the dragon is.
It's a parasite because it feeds off the people of
a city. And within the Christian context, it feeds off
of Christians. It's it has to do with pride, because

(36:31):
it is the apex predator. Right, what can slay a dragon?
Will notice in our orthodox con it's only the faithful
Christian that can slay the dragon. It's it's rebellion against God.
It's a false autonomy. And this is why we'll see
that even other cultures, but even specifically within the Christian context,

(36:53):
the dragon and China symbolizes the emperor outside of China.
Specifically within the Christian context, it's symbolizes a tyrannical ruler.
So when it's associated with, for example, Nero or Diocletian
or the Emperor of Rome, it's associated with what full
rebellion against God and false authority equals. It is like

(37:15):
a dragon. It is an extinguishing of people. It is
anti human, it limits free will. Right, These are aspects
in which the dragon acts in the world and symbolically
can represent a tyrannical ruler. And so third, the dragon
as tyrannical kingship. This is my point here. The saints

(37:37):
trample on the dragon, demonstrating that those closees of God
are elevated higher than the highest of worldly power. So
instead of depicting, you know, Augustus Caesar. We can use
the dragon because we do believe that he is the
prince of this world. Satan is the prince of this world,
and he stands atop that pyramid of power. And so

(37:58):
because of that, we depict the saints as trampling upon
the serpent, just as scripture says that he's a heel
bier right, and so the dragon symbolizes illegitimate rule. It's
rule that's not given by God. It's rule that's acquired
through force and fear, and so kingship without humility, authority

(38:21):
without christ like sacrifice. Therefore, the dragon demands tribute, human sacrifice,
rule by fear, and therefore is anti communal. Is a
power that isolates, it's a fire that destroys, it's a
rule that enslaves, and it's a life that feeds off death. Okay,

(38:41):
so that's the Christian Those are my three main symbolic
interpretations from a Christian context. Now here's my cross cultural
references that I found. So number one is it's like
our first point, it's a chaos monster. So I found
in Mesopotamia, Canaan, Greece, Norse mythology is that the dragon

(39:01):
symbolizes an untamed natural forces. It could represent wind, rain storms,
even fire, wildfires, anything that is an untamed natural force
they could depict as a dragon and at anything that's
anti civilization. So, as I said, specifically in the Mesopotamia, Canaan, Greek,

(39:25):
and Norse context all pre Christian here they use the
dragon to symbolize a force that is against human civilization itself,
and they also depicted in a lot of their sort
of cosmological myths. I found that the dragon is used
to again represent the sort of pre cosmic chaos that again,

(39:47):
whatever pantheon you're talking about, is that they'll have a deity,
a creator type deity or a deity of order, and
that he sort of nullifies the existence of the dragon.
This price mortial chaos and sort of relegates the dragon
to its cave, to its you know, to its dwelling place,
and it's no longer has authority over the whole world. Now,

(40:10):
another one I found is the guardians of thresholds. This
is where we get this association that dragons protect treasures
and many other things. So I found examples where dragons
are just like the nagas in India, but there's all
these other legends, and we find them in the in
Europe as well, that the dragon protects treasures, that it

(40:33):
is it's around sacred trees. I found in some of
the pagan myths that it's associated with springs. As I said,
the primordial understanding of dragons is actually that there are
sort of water serpents, major massive reptiles that actually emerge
out of water, which I would say from our Christian
Christian context, maybe we would refer to it as the

(40:53):
Leviathan more so than a dragon. But the same Hebrew
words are used for both, so it can kind of
go or they're different, but they could be translated the
same way. And they represent the space between worlds, between worlds,
so dragons mark essentially liminal space, the space between life

(41:14):
and death, the space between poverty and wealth. Right, that's
why they guard treasures they sometimes surround, you know, like
the stories you see it in Trek, right, the princess
that's in a castle tower that's guarded by a dragon,
and that the prince must come and slay the dragon
so he can get the girl. It's the liminal space

(41:36):
between a single man into a matured married man or
a man who wins his bride gains his social status. Right,
the dragon typically always occupies the space of liminality, and
so the dragon then tests worthiness. This is where we
get all these fairy tales about princes. It tests the

(41:56):
worthiness of the warrior, of the soldier, of the prince
to a wire his bride. It, as I said, marks
the distinction between life and death, known and unknown. Right,
So I found in some of these pagan myths is
that it really just demarcates the known world from the
unknown world. And this is gonna and this is going

(42:17):
to tie into the disappearance of dragon law and the
seventeenth and eighteenth century, because many at that time, especially
in the eighteenth century, they believe that because they had
already circumnavigated the globe, that and especially with the development
of cartography and maps, that there was no sort of
hidden space on Earth anymore, that it's all been mapped,

(42:38):
it's all been covered, and so there was no unknown
territory anymore. And in this sense, you see the people
that are part of this process depict the lore of
dragons as superstition, superstition regarding the unknown. And then and
then the last one that is something that you can
find in almost all of them is that it's a
demarcatter between human and divine and that's the same. And

(43:03):
we can find this within our Orthodox saints because just
like Saint George, he is only a human man right,
and all the humans and we can assume that many
of them are Christians in a town that's being terrified,
you know, is terrified of the dragon, that they can't
really do anything against him. And that's where in every instance,
within the Christian tradition we find it's a Christian that

(43:25):
appeals to God and through his fidelity to Christ and
being moral and virtuous, he's able to slay the dragon.
And so even in our context, as Christian context, the
dragon is a sort of liminal space between the limitation
of human power and the triumphantness of divine power, and
that men saints can actually transgress this and through participation

(43:49):
with God, actually triumph over the dragon itself. Number three
is embodied power. The dragon is a concentration of strength, longevity, dominion,
mastery over the elements, and so who actually controls the dragon.
That's why the dragon is the sort of ultimate archetype
of pride, because if it was real, it had no competitors.

(44:14):
There was no predator that was going to outpace the dragon.
The dragon is the ultimate archetype of strength, of longevity,
of dominion and mastery over the earth itself. And so
because nobody can control the dragon, the only thing that
can subdue the dragon is God himself. And then the

(44:34):
fourth one is this cosmic administrators. Then this is the
specific East Asian context. So, as I said, Chinese dragons
are very auspicious, they're beneficent, they're beneficial, they maintain order.
It's one of the few instances and when dragons are
utilized not in the chaotic motif. Almost all the legends

(44:56):
use dragons in a chaotic motif except East Asia. And
so for them, the dragon is an archetype of or
at least associated with rain, with water, bodies of water,
with fertility, with balance, and for them, Heaven's mandate. Now
what is Heaven's mandate? And Chinese culture, Jongwol, which is

(45:16):
the Chinese word for China, means Middle Earth. In the
Chinese context, they believe that China was the center of
the world and that there is essentially a divine pillar,
a divine mandate from Heaven that the world moves around China,
and that's why then the Emperor was believed to be
the most powerful man on earth, which then signifies why

(45:37):
the dragon symbolizes the Emperor and the dragon symbolizes Heaven's mandate.
So they are, as I said, beneficent. They're non apocalyptic.
You do not find apocalyptic narratives regarding dragons in the
East Asian contexts. And they are essentially integrated into their
formation of a cosmic harmony, and they maintain this balance

(46:00):
in order. So it's sort of a unique novelty. Now
I'm going to come to how the Church fathers and
how the Church views these pagan traditions and their utilization
of dragons. The fifth one that I have though before
we conclude on the symbolism cross culturally, is the shadow
of the sacred. Now, this is mostly the Union approach.

(46:22):
This is also I would say a sort of Jordan
Petersonian approach, is that the dragon embodies the terrifying aspect
of the divine. Now, again, as we'll see from an
Orthodox standpoint, this is very very skeptical. We're very skeptical
of this because the dragon is nothing of the divine,

(46:46):
it's actually anti divine, and the Christian tradition most explicitly
pronounces this. Out of all the religions, it's the Christian
tradition that really characterized the dragon as fire breathing and
really really submits the dragon and as Antichrist in some sense.
But in the Union terms, they actually venerate a type
of dragon. That the dragon is this again a liminal force,

(47:10):
a psychological archetype that represents the terrifying mysterium tremendum right
of Rudolph Auto, the terrifying mystery of the divine. And
so because dragons are terrifying, Jung argues that the dragons
then are real as an archetype within our psychological map

(47:32):
of our relationship to divinity and how divinity is very,
very scary and terrifying. Now, whether you find that convincing
or not, I'll leave that up to you, guys. But
the danger of approaching transcendence is how Jung describe what
the dragon actually means, and that it's a sacred and
it's sacred, it has sacred power, but it's not safe,

(47:54):
and that really, I would say the mythology that I
encounter that most signifies this is the Indian legends of Nagas.
This this serpentine dragon like God that guards these massive
wealths of treasure that are underground. Because in the Indian context,
he is beneficent, but he can also be very very dangerous. Right,

(48:16):
you don't get that same danger motif in East Asia,
but in India it's like, no, no, he's really God,
he's really good. He's a semi divine being. He's almost
you know, he is kind of part of the pantheon,
but he's not fully part of the pantheon, and he's anthropomorphized.
He's like half human, half serpent. But the Nagas, like

(48:37):
I said, is both beneficent but also very very dangerous.
You must approach the Nagas very you know, cautiously and reverently.
And so for young then the dragon represents the fatality
of man who approaches the divinity in the wrong way.
That if you approach God falsely, what occurs is a

(49:02):
fatality of yourself. And so that's what he chalked up
the dragon to. Now, how does the Church respond to
all these cross cultural references. Pagan cultures definitely encountered real power.
The Church recognizes that whatever is behind the dragon lore,
the dragon mythology, the dragon archetypes, we believe that it's

(49:25):
still our framework. It still is a satanic force. It's
a real demonic entity, and that whether they're in China,
whether they're in India, Mesopotamia, Aztecs, Mayans and Machu Picchu,
what they encountered in Quetocadal and Kukla Khan is a

(49:45):
real spiritual fallen force. And so, because they were Pagans,
and because they didn't have the Revelation of Christ, they
began to venerate and worship something that was real but
was the inversion of the true God. And so they
misidentified the source of the spiritual realm and began to

(50:05):
associate the real manifesting powers of the demonic as their God,
as the true God. And so they experienced a sort
of fallen spiritual power, a chaotic natural forces in tyrannical
political power, and viewed that power as legitimate and good.

(50:27):
And so we would argue, as the Church is what
they did is they misrecognized evil and it had to
do with their failure to know the One True God,
our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Now from there, I
want to talk to you guys about the symbolism of fire,
because I have a whole section in my document that

(50:48):
will go over. I was curious of when did the
fire motifs begin? And one of the things that I
was shocked by is that there are instances of them,
as I said, in the ancient Roman and Greco world. However,
the vast majority of instances where dragons are said to
be fire breathing are almost always in Christian cultures. And

(51:13):
so what exactly could you use to explain this? And
what I want to present to you, guys is the
theology of the river of Fire. The river of Fire?
Have you guys heard this before. I've talked about it
before on stream, and if you haven't, I actually have
a link where you can go download the work titled
The River of Fire, and you can then learn a

(51:34):
little bit more about how we as Orthodox Christians understand
God's uncreated fire. And so to use the first first
metaphor here to get our framework. And I've said this before,
so forgive me if you guys have already heard this
is God's fire is a fire that doesn't burn the repentful.

(51:55):
And so you and I are like swords, and God
is like an open flame, and we hit and I
have all these biblical references that we'll see here in
regards to God's fire present in the world, how he
manifests himself in Exodus. Is the burning bush a flame
that doesn't consume, It doesn't burn right. And I'm gonna

(52:17):
show you a video of the Holy flame. We're not
gonna be focusing on it. I've done a whole stream
on the Holy Fire and Pentecost and all this different stuff,
but I will show you to emphasize this point about
the created versus uncreated fires, that when Holy fire descends
on Paska in Jerusalem. I have videos where you can
see people putting their beard in the flame, it's not

(52:38):
burning its hair. You have women literally putting the clothes
of their arm and the flame it's not burning their clothes.
And so God's flame is a fire that doesn't consume. So,
using the metaphor that you and I are swords, we
through sin get detritus on us, and we must then
be placed back into the fire. God's love. God Love

(53:00):
is a river of fire, and through our repentance, God's
love always forgives, but it burns away the sins, It
burns away the detritus. It allows the sword to be
heated up with the energy of the fire to attain
the same temperature. It's filled with the same energy. Energetically,
the sword becomes identical to the flame, but the sword

(53:23):
is not the flame. The sword is in the flame.
And this is a metaphor for how we then relate
back to God, and that this is how we understand
our steriology, is that you and I are making the
decisions on whether we're saved or not today. And if
someone is unrepentant, if someone denies Christ and denies the

(53:45):
sins they've committed, God's love burns. It hurts because they
are resistant to God's love actually purifying them from the
worldly desires and the sinful temptations that they've been so
accustomed to. And this is where you can eventually acquire
a hard heart. And this is what we believe to
be the fire of Gahinna. And I got biblical verses

(54:07):
for all this stuff and the church fathers talking about it,
that you through faith in Christ, through repentance, through theosis,
which is this energetic process. Right, the sword in the
flame is theosis love, you know, good life, logic, reason, honor, glory,

(54:28):
all these different things. When we embody them, that energy
purifies us and we become more like Christ, like the
sword and the flame. Now, when we get to the
created verse uncreated, that is God's uncreated fire. And this
comes from, like I said, this document called The River
of Fire that I'm going to give you the link to.
You guys can read it. It's like twenty six pages.

(54:48):
It's a great read, and it's breaking down the biblical
symbolism of fire and demonstrating from an orthodox fronoma what
does it all mean, and then giving everything that I
just said backing that up scriptural references how God's God
is a consuming fire right, but it only consumes those
who don't want to belong to him. That's why they

(55:09):
burn in hades and hell. That's what the judgment is.
That's what the lake of fire is. That's the irony
of the dragon in the Book of Revelation is that
it's created flame. The dragon that breathes fire is then
killed and extinguished by the true uncreated fire, the river
of Fire, the Lake of Fire, and Revelation that God

(55:31):
throws Satan into the Lake of fire, well, he is
going to burn because he's absolutely unrepentful, and so the
irony is that the dragon is actually extinguished by both fire,
which it then also extinguishes other people with. But the
difference is that the dragon's flame is created and God's
fire is uncreated. So let me explain this stuff to you.

(55:53):
So God's fire transforms the person. When a human encounters
divine fire, the ego is burned away through repentance.

Speaker 3 (56:01):
Right.

Speaker 2 (56:01):
The pride that then is filled through the sins that
we engage with is nullified through the repentant acts we have,
through the acts of confession with your priest. This is
putting your sword back into the flame of God. The
person becomes transparent. They're purified. God's love, which is a fire,
purifies us and love expands the soul's capacity. This is

(56:27):
why repentance is called purification. The fire hurts, but heals.
You know, it hurts temporarily. Maybe confessing something that you've
done is I don't want to say traumatic, but maybe
difficult at first, but afterwards you always feel better. It exposes, exposes,
but it restores you back to wholeness. Right, You expose

(56:48):
the flaws, but you're restored back to wholeness. It burns,
but does not annihilate. It burns the sickness off. It
burns the death off. It burns the detritus on the
sword off, so the sword is pure and it's ready
for battle. The dragon fire annihilates the person. Dragonfire does
the exact opposite. It reduces the human to victim, to ash,

(57:10):
to silence. It has nothing to do with revealing truth,
and in fact, it erases memory, culture, and meaning. Therefore,
and as we move through this fire of the dragon,
think about this when my metaphor is that maybe the
dragon is the way in which Satan and demons are
presented to the pre modern mind when they actually see

(57:30):
these entities and in the modern framework. So the idea
here is there's like a tribe in Africa that doesn't
have the word for the color blue, and because of that,
they actually don't see the color blue. Now imagine if again,
our presuppositions shape our perceptive abilities. Living in a modernist

(57:50):
worldview and a modernist mindset may prevent us from actually
seeing spiritual realities that are all around us that our
ancient ancestors actually saw and witnessed. And so it was
it was literal, but it was spiritual, if that makes sense.
So now in the modern world, it's like the serpent
is the globalist structure itself. It's it's the technocracy that's

(58:13):
wanting to erase our memory. Think about technology, think about
attention spans, Think about people living in the moment now
through consumerism and hedonism. Think about the erasing of culture
through multiculturalism. And think about the meaning crisis that nobody has.
You know, nihilism is all the rave right now because
nobody has transcendent meaning. This is why the Dragon and

(58:36):
medieval counts burn treasure, hauls, burn fields, burns the future,
and Beowulf. The Dragon's fire melts shields, destroys inheritance in civilization.
This is not purification, is entropy weaponized. The moral theology
Lover's power. God's fire is love that respects freedom and

(58:58):
never coerces, never dominate, never forces communion. To be purified
by God's fire, God's love, you must willfully want that,
You have to willfully repent. This is why Heaven and
Hell are the same fire. The difference lies in response,
not force. How you relate to God and your desire

(59:21):
to be like him determines how you experience his love.
People who hate God will hate his love and be
burned by it forever. There's a great line in the
River of Fire where it talks about you know, imagine
you loving your father. When your father gives you a hug,
you are embraced your warmth. You know there's a warmth

(59:42):
to it. You enjoy it, you love it. If you
hate and despise your dad and mock your father when
he goes to give you a hug, you're like wanting
to get away from it. It's annoying. It's you know,
it's something that may in some way cause emotional distress
or pain. That is the same way we relate to
the godhead. The dragon fire is power that destroys freedom.

(01:00:06):
It forces submission, It burns resistance and makes fear the
governing principle. Again, think about the dragon and how it
relates to our society today. It's like the dragon has
moved from a spiritual force that people saw to a
mechanical structure in the attempt that we no longer see

(01:00:28):
it right, we no longer see Satan into the same degree.
It's like the spiritual reality has become visible. The greatest
lie is that Satan's convinced as he doesn't exist, but
now he exists in the world. The mechanical world we're
building around us. Dragon's rule by terror, scarcity, and destruction.
Dragonfire is anti love because love cannot exist for fear

(01:00:52):
reigns Aschidologically, the two fires at the end the river
of fire of God. At the last judgment, God does
not send fire from elsewhere. Fire flows from his throne.
It reveals all things. This fire is the light of
the saints, is torment for those who hate earth, who

(01:01:13):
hate God's love is inescapable because God is escapable, and
then the dragon is always temporary. In Revelation, the dragon
uses fire, the dragon destroys, but the dragon is ultimately
cast into God's fire, God's love. This is the key irony.
The dragon is destroyed by the very element it counterfeits,

(01:01:35):
and dragon fire cannot endure because it has no source
in love. It consumes itself and it collapses into nothingness,
non being. That's why it began the symbolism talking about
how the dragon as an archetype is anti being in
a very literal way, and though the symbolic theology why
dragons breathe fire from an orthodox lens, dragons breathe fire

(01:01:58):
because they imitate the power without divine love. They externalize
inner corruption, and they weaponize what should purify people. Dragonfire
is essentially stolen fire, it's a Promethean fire, it's a
fire without self gift. Therefore it's essentially Luciferianism, and Luciferianism

(01:02:19):
is rampant in our day today. So that's my point
is the difference between these motifs of fire is really
interesting that it's the Christian civilizations that associate the dragon
with breathing fire, and it's only the Christian religion and
really only the explicitly the Orthodox faith that has this
whole theology that God's love is fire, and then the

(01:02:43):
dragon just perfectly represents the inversion of it. It perfectly
represents the inversion of God himself. So that's a little
bit on the distinction between God's love and the dragon.
And I would say the first real instance of the
dragon in scripture, although it's not translated as dragon, is

(01:03:06):
the Garden of Eden, because the serpent is not a
neutral animal, you know, in Genesis three one, it reads,
now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of
the field, which the Lord had made from the very beginning.
The serpent is personal, intelligent, oppositional, transgressive, right, The serpent
is a vehicle for or the manifestation of Satan himself

(01:03:29):
what Revelation later calls the ancient serpent dot the Dragon
Revelation twelve nine. So why the serpent and not a
lion or a wolf. It has to do with the
fact that a serpent is, you know, cathonic, has Cathonic
powers from below, it's not above. It's a hidden movement,
poison rather than force, subtle domination rather than an open violence.

(01:03:54):
And you know, God's fire is present but unnamed in
the Adam and Eve live in direct communion with God.
They walk with God. This is uncreated energy through not
yet called fire. And then we get the false promise
of Satan as the serpent as the dragon, promising that
you will become God right, you will know all things again,

(01:04:16):
this Luciferian Promethean promise playing itself out right. Just think
of the symbolism that I just laid forth and then
and then knowledge without fire properly ordered is knowledge of
you know. Let me rephrase that hold on knowledge of

(01:04:37):
good and evil is not evil in itself. The problem
is Adam and Eve took it without God wishing it
to be so. Yet they were juvenile in their development
it is taken without ascetic preparation. We believe, you know,
I've heard the metaphor and of clergy say that you
don't give steak to a baby. So Adam and Eve

(01:04:58):
would eventually eat from the tree knowledge. They would eventually,
in what we're doing now through the Eucharus, eating from
the Tree of life. But they weren't ready for the
Tree of Knowledge, and so they choked on it. And
so then we get the first fire symbolism of God
where we see the Cherubim. Right, God kicks Adam and
Eve out of Paradise, out of direct communion with him,

(01:05:22):
out of the idealized you know, world before the fall,
and at uh. And so here in Genesis three twenty
four us finding the verse, he placed the Cherubim in
a flaming sword, which turned every way to guard the
way of the Tree of life. So God's love the
flaming sword prevented Adam and Eve from eating immortality in

(01:05:44):
a corrupted state, becoming eternally burned by false light or
false fire. So we see that symbolism of the fire
that I just laid out then present even in what
I would argue is the beginning of the dragon motif
within a Christian context right there in Genesis three. And

(01:06:05):
so the dragon cannot cross the fire, right, the dragon
is always beneath the cherubim. It's cast down by angelic fire,
and the fire belongs to God, not the serpent. So
that's my little opening monologue there on the symbolism of
the dragon, the symbolism of fire as it relates to
our Orthodox faith, and then highlighting how we can really

(01:06:29):
see this narrative beginning in Eden. And as any you
guys know, I've talked many times, I don't mean to
repeat myself about how Adam really represents this sort of
inverted form of masculinity, you know, the tongue in cheek
phrases the first simp. But seriously, he follows Eve, who
follows the dragon, follows the serpent, follows the devil and

(01:06:52):
is And I mean, if you read Genesis three, it's
because Eve saw it as so pretty. Right. Women are
way more susceptible by what they see, right, They don't
really see beyond the superficial front. And so she saw
these beautiful you know, the beautiful fruit of the tree
of knowledge, and then wanted to It just took a

(01:07:12):
little temptation by a satan for her to go ahead
and bite it. And then of course Adam, who should
be directed towards God, then follows Eve, and we said,
then have the whole fall of creation itself. So anyways,
smash that light, guys, that was my opening monologue. I
didn't mean for to take an hour and thirteen minutes,
but you know how I am so I it was

(01:07:36):
a little bit verbose, but I hope you guys enjoyed that.
I do want to remind everyone if we reach the
superchat goal of thirty superchats, I will be choosing someone
who is a superchatter to receive a free copy of
my book Returned to Babylon from Adam to Antichrist. So again,
that is only if we reached the thirty minute or

(01:07:58):
thirty minute thirty superchat goal here on YouTube. But let
me just check and catch up with everyone real quick.
Heidi be Mary throws in ten over on Dono Chat.
Thank you so much, Heidi be Mary says, another great stream.
Thank you Dph and David for sponsoring today's stream. Again,
a major thank you goes out to David for sponsoring
today's stream. What a fantastic topic. He asked me, have

(01:08:20):
you ever done a stream on dragons and fire. I
was like, well, I've done a lot of streams talking
about you know, kind of the river of fire or
fire in general, but no, nothing specific. He's like, I
would I would like you to break down dragons. I
was like, okay, I've never actually dove into that topic.
So thank you very much. Heidi to appreciate it. And
then over here on YouTube I already said that one

(01:08:45):
crisp No, Chris knob throws in two says looking forward
to getting your book for friends. Well, thank you very much, Chris,
really appreciate that. Oh, a very generous super chat comes
in from Red Fox. Hey, thank you so much brother
for the generous Hunter super chatt. He says, support for
your channel. Thank you, brother, really appreciate it. Hey, Red Fox.
By the way, Red Fox is over in the Logos Academy.

(01:09:08):
We have the meeting for the first session going over
Lecture one and Lecture two at the Orthodox Survival Course
tomorrow at seven o'clock PM Eastern Standard time. If you
guys want to join that, you must sign up over
at the Logos Academy. So it's a men's only community. Sorry, ladies,
but this is a men's only reading in the Logos

(01:09:30):
Academy working through the Orthodox Survival Course of Father Sarah
from Rose, which is a over two hundred page PDF,
and it is basically doing intellectual history from the Middle
Ages of the West forward to the present day New
Age spirituality stuff like that. So Red Fox, if you're available,

(01:09:52):
go sign or you're already signed up, make sure that
you're able to attend tomorrow. If you're available, we'd love
to have you, and in the document for the downloads
right here on the website. So if anybody's interested in
joining us for a reading through the Orthodox Survival Course,
check out that link right there sign up. We'd love
to have you. Also, you know, major thank you to

(01:10:15):
David today for sponsoring today's stream. If you have a
stream you'd like to sponsor, you can do so with
this link right here, and I'll reach out to you
and you can clarify the topic or what you kind
of had in mind. If anybody's interested in setting up
a one on one session, you can do so with
this link right here. Be happy to get in a
private zoom meeting and talk with you about whatever your
heart desires. And if you're interested in my book, I

(01:10:37):
only have outside of this copy, I have three more
copies left in my possession that I could send out,
So if you want to sign copy, I only have
four copies left until my new box arrives of thirty
author copies arrive, So get those while you can, and
I'm going to get those out immediately so they'll be

(01:10:59):
you should get them before for Christmas if you go
ahead and purchase, but one of them is going to
be given away for free to the chat today if
we reach the thirty super Chat goal, so you can
get that at the website, or you can always just
buy it from Amazon, and Amazon is a little bit cheaper.
But I got a request for you guys. Please please,

(01:11:21):
if you've bought my book from Amazon, leave me a review,
a five star review. I just talked with a marketing
guy the other day and he liked my book, and
he told me, hey, if you really want to get
it spread around, you want more people to buy it.
He got to get one hundred reviews on Amazon, and
I was like, well, you know, I've told people and
I said, well I got twenty two and he's like, yeah,

(01:11:43):
you need eighty eight more because The way that the
Amazon algorithm works is you have to get like high
numbers of reviews, and if it's really high quality and
you have a lot of five stars, Amazon will do
the legwork of promoting your book for you to people.
But right now I got twenty two. So if you
guys have I kindly ask in the Christmas season if

(01:12:06):
you could just give me a five star review. I
would greatly appreciate that. And last thing, if you guys
are interested in some peptides, use promo code codal again
level up health high quality peptides. Will there we go
high quality peptides. I'm taking BPC one five seven, really

(01:12:27):
really like it. Highly recommend if anybody's interested. And also
if you want any Orthodox items, use promo code cotal
over at orthodoxdepot dot com and you can get a
discount on anything over their pre ropes, instant lambs, T shirts, flag,
stuff like that. So all right, Ac throws in twenty bucks.

(01:12:48):
Thank you so much, Ac, God bless you brother, really
appreciate it. Hobo Sorcerer throws in two ten said, do
you think demons can manifest physically in reality? I think
that they can manifest physically through us. I believe that
you can perform you know, ritual magic and you can
in dwell a demon within a nonanimate object like a

(01:13:11):
you know, the whole Harry Potter horcrux thing. I do
believe that's the case. I mean, the book of Asclepias
is all about in the Hermetic Corpus is about Hermes
trist Magistus teaching Asclepias how to in dwell daemons demons
in our context into statuaries so that they have a
physical form. So spiritual warfare is all about the demons

(01:13:34):
taking possession of our physical body so they have physical
agency in the world. But to my point about dragons,
I do believe that it's very possible that if we
lived in an earlier time and we weren't so tainted
by rationalism and modernity, that maybe we would see demons
in their spiritual form, right, So I don't think they

(01:13:54):
necessarily have physical form in the you know, material sense
that we have. But I could imagine the entire dragon
lore has to do with pre modern peoples around the
world actually seeing something that they could actually perceive, and
they had to do with a spiritual reality. And some

(01:14:14):
cultures like the Chinese and East Asia venerated this as
a beneficent entity that gave power to the emperor or
worshiped in the you know, in the Mesoamerican contexts Queta
coadal and it being the sort of feathered serpent deity.
But in the Roman and Greco and specifically the Christian context,
it's always been associated with an order, with a deity

(01:14:36):
or an entity of chaos and destruction and essentially something
that is Antichrist. So I don't know if demons can.
I don't believe demons can manifest physically without being through
us or a ritual in which it dwells into a
nonanimate object. Throwing a chair throwing Italian throws in tents

(01:14:57):
says in dark Souls. In Japanese game, humans found the
first flame and harnessed its power to destroy the dragons,
subjugating them. When humans tried to make the flame, they
created demon kind. Oh interesting, I was not aware of that,
Thank you very much. Chair throwing Italian uh missed the
fist throws in twenty says dragons are definitely real. I

(01:15:20):
had dragon dumplings last night and have been burning internally
with fire all the morning. I don't know if that's
the one we were talking about. There missed a fist.
I think I think it sounds like you got a
case of the bubble guts. That's a little bit of
a different dragon you're riding, my man. But funny nonetheless, Oh,

(01:15:43):
Rachel's here. Shout out to my sister, Rachel Wilson. God
bless you and Andrew. He says, I bought a copy
of your book for my priest and it is blowing
his mind. He gives me regular updates on how much
he loves it. I also bought a copy for the
parish and recommend everyone else to do the same. Well,
thank you so much, Rachel, appreciate that, and I love
that your your priest is enjoying. I've met your priest.

(01:16:05):
I was with Rachel, Andrew and the girls when they
got baptized, and their priest was a really a really
cool guy, really genuine man. And I talked with father
Peter hears He, and I talked with who was it?
I just spoke with someone and their priest had my
book and they he said, I didn't even know my

(01:16:28):
priest knew of you. He was talking to me and
he said, yeah, he had your book on his desk
and he's He spoke really glowingly of it, and I said, wow,
thank you. So at least with Rachel that anecdote I had,
and then Father Peter, at least I know three priests
that appreciate it. So hopefully more clergy can get a
hold of it. But thank you Rachel so much. God

(01:16:49):
bless you, sister. Merry Christmas to you and the family.
Blessed Nativity. Hope you guys are enjoying your new life
down south. We miss you in the cold, Rachel. Don't
you miss all the snow? Don't you miss all the snow?
Rachel are in I see XC Nika throws in almost

(01:17:12):
three bucks, says, just finished return to Babylon. Brilliant work.
Thank you so much, brother, Really appreciate that, really appreciate that. Yeah,
you're I think you're maybe one of the first people
that told me they've they've totally finished the whole thing.
Most people tell me yeah, I'm like two chapters in
or halfway through or just finished the third. But thank
you very much, brother, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Goober

(01:17:36):
Rag throws intent says, this reminds me of a dream
I had recently about me putting out a fire I started,
then defeating a hidden dragon's army, then the white Chinese
dragon bestowing a floating purple orbit on my man. I
don't even know what to say about that dream, Dano
throws intin orthodox cross. Thank you very much, brother, really

(01:17:58):
appreciate that. And let me check stream labs real quick
before we move forward. And looks like disgruntled docs. Shout
out to disgruntold docks. God bless you brother. Merry Christmas
to you and your family as well. He said, dragons
looking for treasure and have small hands rubbed together. Coincidence,

(01:18:21):
James B. Interesting topic, Lego, Thank you very much, James B.
For the super chat. Really appreciate your support. Okay, all right,
what is the next thing that I want to get into? Now?
Let me pull up my documents here and so I
think we'll just begin from the top of what I

(01:18:43):
had planned. I don't want to spend too much time
on this. We're already an hour and a half into
the stream. You want to hear something that's really strange
whenever I do these streams, I was telling somebody I
was talking with a guy at church, is that he's
actually a police officer a friend of mine and said,
I watch your streams, and you know, sometimes you're kind

(01:19:03):
of over my head. And so it's like, he said,
it's amazing you just talk for like three hours at
a time. And I said, you want to know something
strange is every single time I do one of these streams,
I have a fear that I'm going to run out
of something to talk about. I legitimately do I because
I always pray before I do a stream. I always

(01:19:23):
ask the Holy Spirit please inspire me, and hopefully it's
beneficial for God ask his will be done. But I
always have this fear that I'm going to come on
here and I'm going to not know what to say,
or nothing's going to come out, or I feel like
like I there's just just the whole stream comes to
a whole. It's never happened. But I legitimately have those

(01:19:46):
thoughts almost every time I do a stream. Dan Vicious
throws in five says, sorry, this is unrelated. What is
the symbolic meaning of circumcision? What is the Orthodox view
or prescription of a symbolic or actual circumcision? Well't the
circumcision in the Old Testament had to do with a
ritual marking of those abiding by the First Covenant. In

(01:20:09):
the Council of Jerusalem, in the Book of Acts, we
actually do away with circumcisions. So the Orthodox Church does
not promote circumcision. The only you know, most places where
you find circumcision, or you can say civilizations that promote
the idea of a Judeo Christian world, a Judeo Christian

(01:20:31):
civil it's mostly only those places that actually promote circumcisions.
So from an Orthodox perspective, it is totally unnecessary. And
I've seen very compelling arguments that it's basically another form
of general mutilation, at least within the present period, because
there's no i mean, unless you are still a rabbinic
talmudic Jew who abides by those ritual laws. Okay, but

(01:20:56):
for the rest of the world to do it, and
you know, we're told it's for hygiene purpose or esthetic purposes.
There's all these problems that occur every year with little
boys that get circumcised. Soim my boys, God willing I
have any they will not be circumcised because they're Christian,
and Christians we do not believe in circumcision anymore. So anyways,

(01:21:19):
hope that helps. Okay, all right, so my document here,
I want to walk you guys through a little bit
of this, and this is going to give you a
historical framework. I want my hood back. Man, you guys

(01:21:49):
are hilarious. Okay, Dragons in the Bible here, so the
original language terms, we're gonna move through this document quickly.
Wrong skip the whole section on the fire symbolism. Could
have already showed you guys that. But the primary Hebrew
words involved are tannin or tanem, and it can mean serpent, dragon,

(01:22:10):
sea monster, great reptilian creature used for chaotic creatures, destructive beings,
sometimes desert monsters appears approximately fourteen to fifteen times in
the Hebrew Bible. Here's the few examples I could find
Genesis one, Exodus seven, Uteronomy thirty two, Psalm seventy four,
Isaiah twenty seven, and Jeremiah fifty one. In regards to

(01:22:30):
the word for Leviathan, who again, as I said, was
we'll look here that dragons actually began as sort of
sea monsters. A specific named chaos dragon, multi headed sea
dwelling explicitly hostile appears six times Job three, Job forty one,
Psalm seventy four, Psalm one O. Four in Isaiah twenty seven,

(01:22:54):
Leviathan is clearly a dragon type being, not a normal animal.
And then in the Greek context the Greek New Testament,
as I said, the word for dragon comes from dracon,
the Greek word. This is the clearest and least ambiguous
term because it literally means dragon and is used only
in the Apocalyptic tax So nine times it appears in

(01:23:17):
the Book of Revelation, Revelation twelve four, seven, nine, thirteen,
sixteen seventeen, and then Revelation thirteen two and four, Revelation
twenty verse two, and Revelation twelve nineteen explicitly defines it
that ancient serpent who is called the devil and Satan

(01:23:39):
the deceiver of the whole world. Here, dragon is not poetic,
it is a personal ontological being. So in the Book
of Revelation it is referring to a specific dragon in
association with Satan. Now English Bible counts so New New
King James version we see it appears thirty four times

(01:24:00):
in the Old Testament, a total of forty three references.
So major dragon slaying saints, as I said, par excellence,
there's no competition. The number one dragon slaying saint and
the Orthodox Church is Saint George the Great Martyr reposed

(01:24:21):
in three oh three. Remember I talked about how it
was three o three to three oh six that uh
Saint Nicholas of Mira was incarcerated by die Cletian and
held in prison for six to ten years. Again we
don't exactly know how long, at least six years, though
we believe in a in a cell that was very
small and dark. Right, you know, the ancient Roman world

(01:24:43):
wasn't great to its prisoners. But Saint George was also
persecuted under died in Cletian. That's where that's where his
martyrdom actually occurs, is under die Cletian. But for Saint
George is story of slaying the dragon. We have it
in Greek, Syriac and Arabic vita. We have it in
the Byzantine Sanaksaria. We have it later medieval elaborations in

(01:25:07):
both in the Byzantine East and the Latin West. So
a dragon terrorizes the city, often near water, demands human victims.
Saint George wounds or subdues it, it is killed, and
the city converts. It's universally commemorated, as i'll show you.
There are some legends of saints with dragons that are

(01:25:27):
much more regional or more local narratives. They're not universally
recognized by the Church like Saint George's, and the dragon
obviously is present in all iconography. The Church never defines
what exactly the dragon was. Was it a real dragon,
was it demonic? Was it a hybrid? Was it symbolic?
Is it satan? But what is affirmed is the real

(01:25:49):
danger and real deliverance. And so I just feel like,
because today's stream is about dragon slaying, I feel obligated,
obligated that we must watch at least this eight minute
video on Saint George, because when else are we gonna
watch it? I mean, if we're gonna be talking about dragons,

(01:26:10):
we better actually have than you know, the most notorious
dragon slayer of all time. So let me pull this
up real quick. We'll watch this quick video and then
and then we'll get back. This is Genesis three. This
where I was pulling the the narrative of the fall. Here.

(01:26:35):
This is a little interesting thing is vlad Dracula was
part of the Order of the Dragon. So I was
looking at like secret societies of dragons and stuff like
that one of the most notable ones was in monarchical
chivalric order only for selected higher aristocracy, and we can
see that in Violakia. Vlad the second Vlad tepis his

(01:26:59):
son Vlad the Impaler, took their name DrAk Cool from
the order of the Dragon. I just thought that was
kind of interesting. Here is the Holy fire that I
wanted to show you guys, and I want you to
see how it doesn't burn, right related to that symbolism
of the dragon's fire burning killing its it perishes people.

(01:27:20):
Look at the holy fire in this context. You see
people putting her She's putting her arm in the flame.
See how it doesn't burn her shirt. This is the
flame of God that does not consume and does not burn. Anyways, Anyway,

(01:27:56):
I just wanted to show you guys that real quick. Okay, now,
let's play this video of Saint George, because if you
guys haven't heard of the story of Saint George, it
is definitely worth being familiar with. I mean, he's one
of my favorite saints. He's obviously one of the if
not the most notorious warrior saynt of the church. But
he's obviously the most notorious dragon slayer. Probably in history, honestly,

(01:28:21):
I mean cross culturally. Is there a single person that
exemplifies the slag or at least has a myth associated
whether you think it's a myth or not, a narrative
associated with slaying dragons that is more famous than Saint George.
I can't think of one. So we're gonna watch this
little This isn't an Orthodox channel. I couldn't find a
short Orthodox video. Trasaggy on Films has a good one

(01:28:44):
on Saint George, but it's like twenty some almost thirty
minutes long. I don't want to put you guys through that.
I got so much other stuff I want to get into.
So we're just gonna watch this quick video. Just an
honoring of Saint George, the Great dragon Slayer.

Speaker 4 (01:29:01):
Sat from the world.

Speaker 5 (01:29:02):
He is the patron of hundreds of cities around the
world and surely one of the most beloved saints among
the Catholic and Orthodox churches. He is often portrayed riding
a white horse and dressed as a Roman soldier piercing
a dragon with a spear. Saint George is an iconic
character in the struggle between good and evil, representing courage, faith,
and warding off adversity. Today's video shows us more about
the amazing story of this saint, loved by millions of

(01:29:24):
people worldwide. Born in Cappadocia, Turkey, his story is steeped
in legend and mystery. Born to Christian parents of Greek nobility,
George was raised in a profoundly pious household, molding his
faith and character from an early age. When he was fourteen,
George suffered the loss of his father, who was a
Roman legionary officer, something that impacted deeply on his life.
He moved with his mother to Palestine, where his bonds

(01:29:46):
with the Christian faith grew stronger. This stage in his
life was marred by loneliness and the quest for a
greater purpose. Guided by his religious heritage. When he was seventeen,
and following in his father's footsteps, George joined the Roman Army.
His military career took off in the imperial city of
Nicomedia in eastern Turkey. There he showed courage and honor,
qualities that quickly made him stand out among his peers.

(01:30:07):
George's ability and loyalty did not go without notice, leading
to his promotion to tribune and the highly prestigious rank
of Imperial Guard under Emperor Diocletian. This appointment was not
only a testament to his military prowess, but also showed
the trust the powerful Roman emperor had in him. But
Diocletian still revered the old Roman gods, and after having
made an inquiry to the Oracle, he began a widespread

(01:30:29):
persecution campaign against the Christians. He destroyed churches and imprisoned priests.
George's allegiance was challenged. Halfway through the anti Christian campaign, George,
steadfast in his faith, defined the emperor, rejecting the anti
Christian laws and openly declaring himself a Christian. This brave
act of faith led to his imprisonment, and this decisive
moment would define the rest of his life. When he

(01:30:51):
bravely rebelled against a Diocletian, Saint George was locked up
and subjected.

Speaker 2 (01:30:55):
To This is one of the terrifying tortures that the
Romans used. They put Saint George on a wheel like this,
and then they had all these like knives, metal spikes
that would tear flesh, and they would turn the wheel
so that you would slowly like they would have like knives,
and you would be tied to it and they would

(01:31:16):
slowly turn it where it would cut you. And as
it's going to talk about, there's the church describes these
miracles that would occur that every time they tortured Saint George,
he claimed Christ would visit him at night and miraculously,
many of his wounds would actually be healed.

Speaker 5 (01:31:35):
To unthinkable torment, according to accounts, he was forcibly fed poisons,
his body was crushed between two wheels, studded with metal spikes,
and other cruel and inconceivable acts of torture, but miraculously,
none of these atrocities took George's life, as he was
protected by the Creator himself. Every night, Jesus is said
to have come to heal his wounds, bolstering his faith
and resilience. Although facing him and in death, George stood

(01:31:58):
his ground in his belief. All of Diocletian's attempts to
make him abandon his faith, including offerings of pardon and
gifts such as land, money, and slaves. Having seen George's
unwavering faith, Diocletian decided to have him executed. On April
twenty third, three oh three, George was beheaded on the
walls of Nicomedia. His death not only signaled the end
of a devout and valiant life, but also the beginning

(01:32:19):
of a legacy that would last for centuries. He became
a Christian symbol of resistance, inspiring countless others with his
fortitude and selflessness, despune, extreme suffering. The well known legend
of how Saint George faced a dragon only emerged in
the twelfth century, many years after his death. In desperate times,
a distant city endured the shadows of a terrible dragon,

(01:32:40):
the flame.

Speaker 2 (01:32:40):
And that's why I said, this isn't an Orthodox channel,
And that's not exactly true. There are stories about well
before the twelfth century. So this is again, this is
a non believer. He's probably not familiar with the Orthodox tradition.
But our tradition actually describes earlier the legend of Saint
George slaying the dragon. It doesn't just appear in the

(01:33:01):
twelfth century.

Speaker 5 (01:33:03):
Names of its fury burned the sky, and its breath
was a billowing death cloud. Human sacrifices were made daily
to appease the beast's rage. Sadness and hopelessness engulped the city.
As one young girl after another was delivered to a
grim fate. The king himself had to sacrifice his daughter
when news arrived that a noble Roman knight had arrived
in the city. This was Saint George, whose gallantry was

(01:33:26):
as wide as the seeds. Riding on his white horse,
he pronounced that the horses of evil would no longer
take the lives of innocent maidens in that place. On
meeting the dragon, an epic battle ensued. Saint George's spear
gleamed in the sunlight, and his armor sparkled like a
shooting star as the holy warrior made his way through
the darkness and gloom surrounding the monster. The beast uttered

(01:33:48):
a scream that shattered the heavens as Saint George smote
the dragon, causing it to collapse to the ground and
squirm in agony. Once he had rescued the princess, Saint
George bound the defeated dragon and took it back to
the city, no longer as a terrifying months.

Speaker 2 (01:34:01):
See it leaves out a bunch of details, but it'd
be too time consuming to watch a whole video on it.
This is like a nice little eight minute video. I
got sped up, but he actually takes the garter of
the princess. So the way that the legend goes is
that he found her tied up on a tree in
the wilderness outside the city, and upon riding his horse
and coming to the city, he sees this princess tied

(01:34:22):
up to a tree. He asks her what's going on,
and she tells him that essentially, the city has offered
her as a sacrifice to the dragon that's terrifying the village,
and that's when he pronounces that, you know, basically, this
is going to stop. The forces of good are going
to stop evil. And when he subdues the dragon, he

(01:34:42):
actually takes her garter, which again symbol of virginity, wraps
it around the head of the demon of Satan of
the dragon, and then pulls it or guides it all
the way back to the city to show the people
that he has subdued the beast.

Speaker 5 (01:34:59):
But as a trophy of his bravery before the astonished
and grateful citizens, he offered them not only physical but
also spiritual salvation.

Speaker 4 (01:35:06):
Preaching the Christian faith.

Speaker 5 (01:35:08):
According to legend, many were converted that day, moved by
Saint George's heroic act and words, having defeated the dragon,
he refused any compensation, revealing his humility and generosity. He
donated everything he was given to the core, underlining his
commitment to the Christian values of charity and material detachment.
The story of Saint George and the Dragon became a
symbol of courage, faith, and the triumph of good over evil,

(01:35:30):
reverberating through the centuries, drawing inspiration from generations in their
pursuit of heroes and miracles. Saint George's England's patron saint,
and his cross is featured on the nation's flag. During
the famous fourteen twenty five Battle of Agincourt, where the
English army faced the mighty French cavalry, both sides claimed
to have seen a vision of Saint George during the battle. Obviously,

(01:35:51):
if he did appear, it was to help the English, who,
despite being outnumbered, succeeded in humiliating the French. Between three
h six and three thirty seven eighty a church that
at acat He did to Saint George was built in
the na It has been destroyed and be built several
times over the centuries. Churches dedicated to saints or martyrs
were traditionally raised over their tombs. Although many churches throughout
the world claimed to hold Saint George's relics, the Church

(01:36:13):
of Saint George and Lida is regarded as his final
resting place.

Speaker 2 (01:36:17):
Okay, we're deale with that video. I do want to
share this one. We're not going to watch it, but
I've gone through it and this is basically it's just
so a collection of some of the examples of saints
that dealt with dragons. It's kind of boring because I
would just sit here and read it to you guys,
but I do want to share it in case any
of you guys want to watch it later. It's something

(01:36:38):
I found and prep for the stream. So there's that video. Okay,
let's go back to the document because I want to
I want to walk through you guys some of this stuff. So, okay,
we talked about Saint George. Other saints. Saint Theodore Tiro
the Recruit early fourth century. His examples are in Greek

(01:36:59):
High geographies, military cult traditions. A dragon and habits as
spring or well, kills people on livestock. Theodore slays it
often after fasting and prayer, and that's an asia minor
in Cappadocia. Another Saint Theodore, often actually presented together again
paired with Theodore Tiro, dragon terrorizes the countryside, Saint kills

(01:37:23):
it publicly, he becomes he's a military saint, and his
dragon is beneath his feet. In the iconography of Saint Theodore,
the Stratlites and then Eastern saints with more localized dragon traditions,
you have Saint Marina of Antioch. She is not a
dragon slayer but a dragon conqueror. The narratives that she

(01:37:44):
is swallowed by a dragon often identified as Satan burst
forth unharmed by the Sign of the Cross, and then
of course she's a saint shows dragon imagery used for
spiritual combat, not not a literal zoology per se. So
Saint Romanus of Rohun seventh century, venerated in the East

(01:38:05):
via a shared Preschism tradition, dwells near seing Or the
sign floods and terrorizes the region. Saint subdues the dragon,
townspeople kill it. And interesting thing I found is that
this was believed to be the origin of gargoyles in
Western Europe. It actually has to do with Saint Romanas.

(01:38:27):
I wasn't aware of that He's more prominent in Western
traditions but pre schism and known in Byzantine sources. And
then these are more even more localized urban and civic
dragon traditions. The Saint Sallvester of Rome and dragon dwells
beneath Rome. Its breath kills citizens, and Salvester descends and
binds it, meaning dragon linked to imperial pagan powered defeat

(01:38:51):
symbolizes Christianization of the city Sat Donatis, dragon poisons a spring,
Saint kills it, and so forth. And then we have
some desert aesthetics that encounters some great beast like Saint
Anthony the Great in Athanasius's Life of Saint Anthony, a
terrifying beast and serpentine forms, demonic manifestations with physical effects,

(01:39:15):
and sets the paradigm that demons can appear as monstrous creatures,
including dragon like forms. Saint Pocomias desert tradition includes serpent monsters,
dangerous creatures driven away by prayer, not always called dragons,
but functionally similar. And then Saint Arcinius the Great encounters
with monstrous beings in isolation emphasis on spiritual authority over

(01:39:39):
hostile entities. So then I thought I wanted to know
what are the actual historical records of dragons, like, do
we have what are the works that people actually wrote
describing what they believe to be real traditions of dragons?
And here's what I found. So what counts as a
real and historical sources. It's when historians say an ancient

(01:40:02):
or medieval author describes real dragons, we mean that it's
not intended as a myth or poetry. It's a literal
at least the author perceives it as literal natural history, chronicle, geography,
travel account, biography, hagiography, and so on and so forth.
So this is crucial because again this is my argument

(01:40:23):
between the pre modern and the modern. Pre modern authors
did not distinguish between mythical versus real as we do
today because they weren't tainted by rationalism. So if something
was reported by witnesses or tradition, it was often treated
as part of the natural world. So here's what I found.
Going back to the earliest references that I could find
of dragons, and we find Herodotus, So this is fifth

(01:40:48):
century BC. In his histories he describes winged serpents and Arabia.
So this is where the argument for literal dragons, and
I was looking up YouTube videos. I didn't find one
YouTube video that referenced any of this stuff, and found
I found all these videos trying to talk about the
literality of dragons, and I'm thinking, well, how come none

(01:41:12):
of the videos actually go and try to find historical
sources that reference literal dragons. They just talk about cross
cultural references. Symbolic interprets this type of thing. It's like
what so I found Herodotus. He mentions their bones, their migration,
routes local populations who kill them, and then treats them

(01:41:33):
as real fauna, though dangerous and rare. So Herodicus is cautious,
but does not frame this as a myth. If you
read it, it sounds very literal. Another one I was
surprised with was Aristotle. Now he doesn't specifically reference dragons,
but in his History of Animals and Parts of Animals,

(01:41:54):
he mentions very large serpents and operates with his this
is the riskitilia sort of biological continuum of serpents, giant
surpents than dragons, and I, you know, just throwing this
in here for fun. His silence on wings does not
negate dragon belief. It reflects empirical caution. Now this is

(01:42:14):
probably the most important of the historical sources I found,
and that's Plenty of the Elder And in his naturalis Historia,
this is Uh. He describes the largest of serpents living
in India, Ethiopia, and North Africa. He describes them as
fighting elephants by coiling around them and suffocating them being

(01:42:34):
hunted by humans. So could be massive, very large pythons
or snakes. But Plenty explicitly classifies dragons as animals, not
spirits or gods. And again that's first century AD. Okay.
Now alien Uh second to third century AD on the

(01:42:57):
Nature of Animals describes dragons as intelligent, territorial capable of
affection or vengeance, and mentions dragon guardianship of treasures. And
he presents this as natural history, not a legend, not
a myth, not a story. And then near Eastern and
Indian Asian sources, the Indian epics, the Maha Bartas, the Puranas,

(01:43:20):
the ire Vedic text Nagas. Again, the serpent, semi divine,
anthropomorphized deity is capable of interbreeding, territorial control, warfare with
humans not presented as metaphors. Indian cosmology assumes a plural
inhabited world, not closed natural system. So that's another at

(01:43:43):
least for the Indians, they took that as a literal
historical reference, not symbolic. Chinese historical examples the Shiji, the
record of Grand historian Han dynasty, natural histories, tongue and
song records. So that's what I was surprised is you
find multiple dynasties. Now we talked about East Age have

(01:44:03):
used these as auspicious, beneficent creatures that symbolize the authority
of the emperor. But it is interesting. Now maybe it's
just part of tradition and culture and it's tied with
now the new dynasty is in the ruling the ruling power,
and so they then present this as historical record. I'm

(01:44:23):
not sure, but dragons are described as real animals, rare
but observable. You can actually see them, and they're associated
with rainstorms, rivers occasionally captured or killed. Chinese scholars debated
dragon physiology, not dragon existence, which is interesting. I found
an example of Marco Polo thirteenth century in his book

(01:44:45):
in his work The Travels, describes giant serpents in Southeast Asia,
mentions their size, their hunting methods, local fear and avoidance.
Explicitly states they are real animals, and again, while he
may exactly gaggerate, he believed his account and described it
very literally. Medieval European sources Isidore of Seville seventh century,

(01:45:09):
in his Etymologia, defines dragons as the largest of serpents
living in caves and deserts, and this text was the
standard medieval encyclopedia. Dragons were thought as part of the
natural world, very interesting. The Anglo Saxon Chronicles obviously Beowulf
and stuff like that, reports of flying dragons seen in

(01:45:31):
the sky, dragon signings as ominous events, treated as actual
phenomenon and not allegory. The beastiaries of the twelfth to
thirteenth century often moralized but based on earlier natural histories.
Dragons described anatomically wings poison habitat used for education and

(01:45:51):
not for fiction. Gerald of Wales twelfth century mentions dragons
and serpent monsters, treats them as rare but real, not mythologized,
not symbolic. Early modern transitional sources Ulysses Aldrovandi sixteenth century
and is Serpentum et draconum historia. Early zoologists catalogs, dragons, dragons, skulls,

(01:46:20):
preserved specimens, attempts actual classification. Now this is sixteenth century, guys.
Once we get into the seventh century, seventeenth century, all
this stuff's going to begin to disappear. And he presents
this is not medieval fantasy but proto science. Conrad Gesner
sixteenth century includes dragons. Acknowledges uncertainty, does not dismiss their

(01:46:42):
existence outright, and so in regards to the historical record, yes,
there are numerous historical writings across Greece, rom India, China,
medieval Europe, and early modern science in which authors explicitly
described dragons as real, living beings that were seen, killed, feared,
and stuffy. Interesting stuff there. Now, the next section is

(01:47:06):
getting into the origins of fire breathing dragons. And this
is what I was surprised by, is that how contextual
it is. So fire breathing dragons are not universal. The
belief emerges relatively late and has concentrated geographically and basically
Christian nations. And so you do find early references in

(01:47:27):
some of the Indo European heroic traditions, but it's mostly
within the Christian context. So chronological development prehistoric early Ancient period,
no fire breathing dragons. They are associated giant serpents or
dragons are associated with water, chaos, floods, fertility, poison. Again

(01:47:48):
many of the examples I discussed with the opening symbolism Mesopotamia, Egypt,
Early China, Veadic India, there is no fire breathing dragon.
Now by the Bronze Age transition period, fire becomes associated
with divine judgment, smithing in metallurgy, warfare, kingship. But dragons

(01:48:09):
still kill by poison. They crush their prey, they guard treasure,
they block rivers. They do not breathe fire. Once we
get into the classical antiquity, so eight hundred BC to
four hundred a d. Fire breathing emerges clearly for the
first time. This is a critical turning point. In the
Greek world, the Greek term dracone initially means large serpent.

(01:48:31):
By the time of the Hellenistic period, dragons began to
be associated with burning breath, heat, and lethal vapors. Examples
are the Chimera of Homer and later Greek sources. Is
not universal, but it is becoming established. In the Roman world.
Romans intensify this imagery. Plenty of the elder dragons primarily

(01:48:51):
kill by constriction, but it acknowledges burning heat and lethal exaltations.
Roman military iconography begins associating dragons with destructive force by
the time of late Antiquity. In early Christianity fourth to
seventh century AD, fire breathing becomes theologically stabilized. We see

(01:49:13):
the Biblical apocalyptic influence revelation. The dragon is associated with fire, destruction, judgment, hell.
Fire becomes moral eschological Impunitive dragons now symbolize satanic power, tyranny, persecution.
Fire is no longer natural, it is moralized. Early Medieval
period seventh to eleventh century, fire breathing becomes standard in

(01:49:35):
Northern Europe, so Germanic Norse BeO Wolf's dragon especially breathes fire,
burns villages, melts, shields, and swords. It's one of the
earliest fully developed fire breathing dragon accounts. By the time
of the High Medieval period that's twelfth to fifteenth centuries,
fire breathing dragons become dominant in Europe. Chivalric romance hagiographies

(01:50:00):
bea stieries art and iconography. At this point, a dragon
that does not breathe fire is unusual in Western Europe,
and then geographic distribution is fire breathing cross cultural Europe
and Near East. Yes, uh, we find it in that context.
As we already mentioned, one of the interesting things I

(01:50:21):
had to dive into is I wasn't finding much explicitly
on Russian dragons, and so I dove specifically into what
is the Russian tradition of dragons and what do they
look like? And this is what I found. Unlike many
early dragon traditions, Russian dragons very clearly breathed fire, fires,
destructive weaponis associated with devastation of land and people. This

(01:50:43):
aligns Russian dragons more closely with Boe Wolf's apocalyptic industry
and Christian demonology. The zimmy Gorinich is the archetypal Russian dragon,
sometimes has three heads six nine to twelve, breathes fire.
It flies, dwells in mountains, near rivers, at borders between realms,

(01:51:05):
terrorizes villages, kingdoms, and trade routes. The most famous legend
within the Russian context is this uh drog dobrynya nikotic
and his fighting the Zimmi. This is the single most
famous dragon slang story in Russia and just the narrative
outline is the dragon terrorizes the land, It kidnaps women,

(01:51:29):
sometimes a princess. It breathes fire, dwells near a river
or a cave, and then Dobrynya confronts the dragon. Is
initially overwhelmed pray, so we get we see the human
evoking the transcendent power of God, invokes higher help and
then ultimately slays the dragon. So the dragon represents chaos,
foreign domination, pagan or demonic power, and the hero restores order, justice,

(01:51:52):
and social stability, mirroring Saint George, Saint Theodore, and Beowulf.
In East Asia. No example of a fire breed dragon
couldn't find any, so it's totally foreign to classical Chinese
dragon law. In India, it's limited.

Speaker 4 (01:52:09):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:52:09):
Fire imagery exists, but it's not central to the nagas
meso America. No, the you know quets, a quattle and
cuckoo klon, they are not fire breathing deities. They associated
with wind sky civilization has feathers signifies the union of opposites. Uh.
Some people have speculated that the serpent archetype alice in

(01:52:32):
the meso American context is essentially the unification of the
most aerial entity, which is some type of like predatory bird,
and then the lowest of entities, which is a serpent,
and then they smash those two together to create quets
a quattle and their meso American dragon god. And they

(01:52:55):
believe is it auspicious for whom? He is auspicious for
the state? What a quattles, suspicious for the state, for
cosmic order, for ritual stability, but he's actually dangerous for
individual human life victims of sacrifice. Of course, we just
talked about all the human sacrifice these civilizations participated in
the Last Stream and those outside ritual order we're in

(01:53:16):
Africa and so on. Now I want to get to
something that I have not seen presented, and I'm kind
of excited to present this to you guys. But first
I just want to remind you guys, we got fourteen
more superchats on YouTube before I will be choosing a
winner to send out this book to Today. It'll be

(01:53:38):
a free copy of Return to Babylon, and I hope
to get it to you before Christmas, because I'm going
to get it out in the mail tomorrow. So if
we reach thirty Superchat goals. I'm going to find a
winner who's super chatted today and send them the book.
But here's what I want to talk to you guys about.

(01:53:58):
How did dragons be come discredited? We just talked about
all the cross cultural references. We talked about how they
are depicted in cultures that had no contact with each other.
We talked about all the saints of the church that
have legends associated with dragons. And I just showed you
guys the historical examples of people writing These were educated

(01:54:20):
people writing about dragons as literal entities, not parts of
stories or mythologized figurative figures, no literal And so my
question then was where did all this stuff go wrong?
How did dragons become such a sort of ridiculous topic
to actually speak about? And the medieval world view dragons

(01:54:45):
belonged to what was lost. Before explaining the shift, we
must understand what dragons fit into. So the pre modern
worldview nature and this one I always talk about the
pre modern versus the modern, right, this is why I
think maybe the pre modern could actually see spiritual entities
and realities that us modern people no longer see due
to our rationalist presuppositions. But in the pre modern world,

(01:55:07):
nature was hierarchical, was not uniform. Reality included god, angels
and demons, humans, animals and monsters, border beings, you know,
these liminal creatures. Knowledge was testimonial, it was traditional, it
was acumulative. And you could say I could also add
here all that I didn't because it's obviously part of

(01:55:30):
the modern period too, is you could say that knowledge
was logical right up before the classical period. You know,
knowledge was demonstrated through syllogisms, through the laws of logic.
But all these attributes were also intact, so rarity did
not imply falsehood. The world was not fully map there

(01:55:50):
was an unknowingness, there was a mystery about your daily life,
and categories were porous and not rigid like they are today.
And this framework, dragons were possible, They were rare, they
were local, they were dangerous, and they were marginal to
ordinary experience. Nothing about this worldview required dragons to be
common or provable by experiment. And this is where we

(01:56:13):
start to get the first breaking of the entire history
of dragon lore. It's the seventeenth century, the rise of
mechanical philosophy. So you know, your guys's people, you guys know, Descartes, Galileo, Galilee, Gacindi, Hobbes.
Core claims is that nature is now viewed as a machine,
and this is essential for the transition from the pre

(01:56:35):
modern to the modern worldview. The pre modern viewed it
as a spiritual reality, as mystical, as unique, interesting, filled
with you know, non rational or superrational events, miracles, monstrous beings.
But once we start getting into the age of science,
nature is viewed as a machine, a mechanical operation that

(01:56:56):
can be measured and can be sort of operated upon.
Matter becomes passive, quantifiable, governed by laws. Only measurable properties
become truly real. The consequences for dragons, they're too rare,
too rare for experimentation, too exceptional for laws, to anomalist
for mechanical causation, therefore not denied explicitly, quietly excluded as

(01:57:20):
methodologically irrelevant. Dragons begin to fall outside what counts as
legitimate knowledge, and then we get the mythological skepticism of
the new epistemology. I've talked to you guys about the
Baconian Revolution. This is it's really hard to underestimate. I
was telling Father Peter this when I was over on
the orthodox ethos is that this was a this was

(01:57:42):
a revolution and knowledge but Francis Bacon put forth as
the father of empiricism or the father of modern science was.
He believed what could be measured in average was real,
and in his epistemological overturning of the scholastic Aristotilian world,
he argued that knowledge is utilitarian. Knowledge is empirical, it's repeatable,

(01:58:05):
and it's utilitarian, meaning it has utility. If you know something,
you do something, you make something, and the fact that
you can make something demonstrates your knowledge. Right, it's the
it's the empirical repeatability concept. Then put upon knowledge itself,
can you repeatably present that you know how to do something?

(01:58:26):
Therefore you make and make something do This is what
totally trans It totally transformed European understandings of what knowledge
was and what it did. And so he was interested
in collected collections of systematical knowledge. Right, we need to
then measure everything, we need to He has a famous
quote talking about how we need to rape the secrets

(01:58:48):
out of nature, and so ancient testimony becomes suspect. Wonders
are then understood as just you know, illusions, of some
sort or superstitions, you know, just folk superstitions of people.
They're not as erudite, they're not as sophisticated and educated
as the echelon of European society. And what are the consequences?

(01:59:11):
Plenty and medieval encyclopedias lose all authority during this period.
Eyewitness tradition collapses. Direct contemporary reproducible knowledge is the only
thing that is of important, and therefore dragons are not refuted.
They are downgraded to just rumor, mythological rumor. And so

(01:59:32):
the new scientific institutions, the Royal Society sixteen sixteen, Nolas
and Verbe take no one's word for it becomes the
motto of modern science. It has an emphasis on experiments, instruments,
controlled observation. The effect dragons cannot be summoned, they cannot
be dissected, and they cannot be repeatedly observed. Therefore they

(01:59:56):
fail institutional criteria for knowledge. Dragons are not false, they
are inadmissible. In the eighteenth century, the philosophical collapse of monsters, Enlightenment,
rational Voltaire, hume cor assumptions. Reason alone judges reality. Nature
is uniform, predictable, and law governed. Exceptions imply air not mystery.

(02:00:17):
David Hume testimony must always yield to probability. Miracles and
monsters violate uniform experience. Therefore reports of dragons are irrational
to believe. The birth of modern taxonomy Carl Naeus in
the eighteenth century introduces fixed species binomial classification. Reality must

(02:00:38):
be ordered and exhaustively classifiable. Problem for dragons is there's
no specimen, no stable species, traits, no clear reproductive population.
Dragons cannot be placed, therefore cannot exist within modern taxonomy.
The elimination of the entire monster category, which is where
we still get the lockness monster, Bigfoot, right, all these

(02:01:01):
kind of strange you know, like cryptids that are so
popular among conspiracy theorists, that entire category gets eliminated, and
so Medieval thought allowed monsters as boundary beings, rare exceptions,
signed a divine judgment, and natural irregularity. Enlightenment thought rejected
anything between natural and supernatural, normal and abnormal. Monsters become heirrors, malformations,

(02:01:27):
and myths. And then the theological shifts that accelerated this
disbelief is obviously Protestant rationalism, rejection of hagiography, rejections of
the lives of the saints and really a rejection of
miracle tradition. That's what I would argue. I mean, you
asked the average Protestant, they probably say they still well,
some of them would say they still believe in miracles,
but they're suspicious of medieval sources and Catholic cosmology and

(02:01:50):
Orthodox cosmology. I just they're just not as familiar with it.
And so dragon slaying saints are recast as total allegory
or dismissed as super stick. Dragons lose religious credibility first
and Protestant regions, and then deism. In the closed universe,
deus assumptions God creates the world and withdraws no ongoing

(02:02:11):
divine action, no miracles, no monsters. The universe becomes closed,
self sufficient and predictable, therefore making dragons metaphysically impossible. And
then the final blow, I argue is the mapping of
the world seventeenth to eighteenth century global exploration, cartography, colonial administration,
natural surveys, unknown land shrink rapidly. Since dragons were always

(02:02:36):
somewhere remote. When everywhere becomes map, there is nowhere left
for them to hide. So again, this document is like
stuff that we talk about over at the Logos Academy.
So if you want access to stuff like these study guides,
go sign up. It's all in a huge playlist over
there for anybody who wants access to these, so they
can look over. Now, I want to move into dinosaurs. Right,

(02:03:00):
Why is it that if you believe in dragons, you're
mocked and humiliated as some backward neanderthal. But we're told
that we're supposed to believe in dinosaurs. And so this
is my attempt to actually provide a sort of internal
critique of dinosaurs themselves. And so this is my first statement.

(02:03:21):
Here are dragons and dinosaurs in the same category, because
we just talked about all this stuff and how the
development of the modern world basically eliminates dragons. Right, Well,
why is it that we believe in dinosaurs so much?
I argue the category dinosaurs as currently understood non avian
reptiles living sixty five to two hundred and thirty million

(02:03:44):
years ago is an interpretive construct built on fragmentary fossil evidence,
heavy inference, artistic reconstruction, and assumptions about deep time that
are not as empirically secure as often claimed. Many fossils
attributed to dinosaurs may be misclassified, composite, exaggerated, or reinterpretable

(02:04:09):
within alternative frameworks. So argument one, fossils are fragmentary and
reconstructions are speculative, so this is more of a philosophical
critique of dinosaurs. The core claim most dinosaur species are
named from partial bones, teeth, vertebrae, or various fragments that

(02:04:31):
they've discovered. Full skeletal mounts and museums are heavily reconstructed,
contain casts, not originals, often rely on artistic interpolation. Therefore,
if a species is defined from a few bones and
reconstructed by analogy to modern animals, then the final dinosaur

(02:04:52):
image reflects theory laiden reconstruction, not direct observation, and therefore
are not actually scientifically verifiable. Supporting points criticize or supporting
points critics emphasize. Different paleontologists have produced radically different reconstructions
of the exact same fossils. Some new species later turn

(02:05:17):
out to be juvenile forms, sexual dimorphisms, pathological specimens. Conclusion,
what we call dinosaurs may be a taxonomic inflation of
fragmentary data interpreted through evolutionary assumptions, that's just a fancy
way to say dinosaurs and the entire legend and story

(02:05:39):
surrounding dinosaurs is a total interpretation based on people today
looking at animals that exist and saying, well, based on
this femur bone, which could be from anything. That's one
of the things I'm going to get into is the
fact that many of these bones aren't even two dinosaurs
because it violates the definition of being twenty five to two,

(02:06:02):
one hundred and thirty or three hundred million years old.
And so argument too. And this is, you know, I
don't know if you guys have seen this. I just
recently watched this guy and there's like a video that's
going on X or something, maybe it was on Instagram,
and some like palaeontologists talks about, oh, we just discovered
in dinosaur and he admits, like, we just found these

(02:06:24):
few few fossils, right, and then he has this whole
video presentation on what types of food at ate, how
big you know, the range of how big and small
they were, the behavior patterns between male and the females,
how they It's like, how did you get any of
that stuff from a few broken pieces of bone? That

(02:06:46):
makes zero zero sense? But the circular reasoning in dating fossils.
This is again, this is a philosophical critique, so I'm
not dealing with actual fossils that have been discovered. I'm
doing more of a film sophtical critique. But the core
claims fossils are dated by rock layers, right, sediment layers.
Rock layers are dated by the fossils. Therefore, index fossils

(02:07:11):
are used to create data strata. The same strata then
is used to date fossils. This creates a closed interpretive loop.
You see, the fossils are used to tell you how
old the ground layers are, but then the amount of
ground layers they use to tell you how old the
fossil is. So it creates this loop, this feedback loop

(02:07:33):
on presuppositions. How the hell do you know how old
the fossil is when you had to construct the dating
of the fossil to describe the layers of sediment, and
then through the layers of sediment, then you can classify
how old the fossil is. That doesn't make sense. Critics
argue radiometric dating depends on assumptions about initial conditions, assumes

(02:07:55):
constant decay rates cannot be directly verified for deep fossils
are rarely dated directly. Dates are often assigned to stratigraphic contexts,
not measurement conclusion. Dinosaur fossils are dated within a self
referential system, not by independent confirmation. Interesting argument number three

(02:08:20):
questioning dinosaur bird transition. The core claim is that birds
are living dinosaurs, and this rest on morphological similarity and
phylogenetic interpretation. Critics argue that this is interpretive and not demonstrative.
Key points many feathered dinosaurs may be birds misclassified as dinosaurs,

(02:08:42):
preservation artifacts, collagen fibers mistaken as feathers, soft tissue claims
that this is a big one. This is a big one.
There are so many examples of dinosaur fossils and bones
being discovered and they still have blood, vessels and proteins
in them, which is impossible based on the timeline that

(02:09:03):
we're told that dinosaurs existed. So that challenges deep with
some deep time assumptions, no direct observation, and reptile to
bird transformation, transitional reproductive systems. It assumes Darwinian evolution, It
assumes Darwinian macroevolution. It then, by that nature it forces

(02:09:24):
you into the modernist paradigm, despite the empirical data not
actually substantiating it. It's almost like a modern myth. Now
I'm not even here to say dinosaurs didn't exist. I'm
just bringing up that this is a problem within their
own worldview, that this is just my internal critique at
a philosophical level. And this is where I follow up

(02:09:47):
with the soft tissue in biomolecules and fossils. This is
one of the most rhetorically powerful arguments used by skeptics.
The core claim is soft tissues collagen, blood vessel structures
have been reported and di dinosaur fossils proteins should not
survive tens of millions of years under unknown chemical laws. Therefore,

(02:10:07):
if organic molecules decay rapidly and dinosaur and fossils contain
such molecules, then either decay rates are wrong or the
fossils are much much younger than they claim they are.
Iron preservation hypothesis experimental replica replication is limited and the
preservation window is far shorter than claimed fossil ages. Conclusion,

(02:10:31):
soft tissue evidence is in tension with deep time dinosaur chronology.
So that's where I'm not even saying dinosaurs don't exist.
Or dragons didn't exist. I'm saying that the evidence for
these are not very compelling. The evidence for dinosaurs are
not very compelling. And in a sense, if we're only

(02:10:53):
using empiricism, as I showed you the intellectual trajectory that
essentially poo poos and shoe aways dragons, you very much
could use the same epistemological framework of modern day empiricism
and materialism to kind of shoot you away some of
the dinosaur stuff, or at least demonstrate it's not as
logically plausible if they want you to believe it is.

(02:11:15):
Argument five. Dinosaur fossils may represent known animals or misidentified megafauna,
and this has been claimed that they use like whalebones
and bones that they find near the ocean from sea creatures,
and then they re appropriate these and say, well, this
is actually the this is actually the you know, the
thigh bone of a t rex or a philocus raptor dinosaur.

(02:11:40):
Maybe an umbrella category masking large reptiles could be dragons,
extinct mammals, marine reptiles, or giant birds. Key points. Some
fossils originally classified as dinosaurs were later reassigned, and historical
zoology shows frequent misclassification. Critics argue size inflation, reconstrusduction bias,

(02:12:00):
and cultural expectation of monsters. Dinosaurs may be a conceptual
category here, not a biological one. And number six historical
absence of dinosaur discovery until the nineteenth century, which is
really interesting, right. We have all these stories about dragons
across the entire globe from civilizations that never met, and

(02:12:21):
yet the first time we even hear about dinosaurs is
like eighteen forty one. So no unambiguous dinosaur fossils were
identified until the early eighteen hundreds, despite mining, quarrying ancient civilizations.
Critics argue, if dinosaurs were real and abundant, why is

(02:12:42):
there no ancient descriptions, why no classical taxonomy. Therefore, fossils
were often ignored, misidentified, or mythologized about. But critics maintain
the silence is still suspicious, right, Why is it only
in the modern period that we hear about dinosaurs. My
last argument, and this is more of a cultural argument.

(02:13:03):
That's why I say it's probably the weakest of my
arguments epistemologically, but it's something that people talk about and
it should be addressed. Is the cultural and institutional momentum
of dinosaur science. Again, you could argue that Darwinian evolution
is tied to it. The sort of redating the Earth
to do away with traditional religious cosmologies is part and

(02:13:27):
parcel of it, But the core claim is that dinosaur
theory is institutionally entrenched, financially supported, and resistant to any
sort of paradigm change. Therefore, once a framework becomes dominant,
descent is filtered out right. You are actually considered as
a weirdo if you say dinosaurs don't exist. Think about that.

(02:13:50):
We live in a time now. If you don't believe
in dinosaurs, you're the weirdo. Alternative interpretations struggle for funding,
and skeptics argue than persists partially by a sort of
cultural inertia cultural momentum in regards to this whole dinosaur fiasco. Now,
as I said, this is the weakest argument epistemologically, but

(02:14:12):
still part of you know me steel Manning, you know,
the the dinosaur case. So that's a little bit of
my overview on how did dragons disappear? And how are
dragons and dinosaurs not in the same conceptual category given
the empirical inverifiability of both. It's a question that needs

(02:14:35):
to be answered. So with all that now, I want
to pose to you guys a poll. I'm legitimately curious
what you guys have to say, and I'll catch up
on all the super chats here in just a second,
But I want to start a poll. Dragons, what are they? Okay,

(02:14:59):
we're going to go with literal, real, and historical. We're
gonna go with mythologized and figurative, archetypal, and then spiritual

(02:15:42):
entities we no longer see. Okay, there we go. All right,

(02:16:11):
I'm curious what you guys have to say. So dragons
were they? What are they? Literal, real, and historical, mythologized
and figurative, archetypal and metaphorically or metaphysically true or real
spiritual entities? I'll say that I probably leaned towards the
real spiritual entities portion. That's my own little precept, but

(02:16:35):
I really don't know. I am no expert on bunking dinosaurs.
I'm no expert on proving dragons or disproving dragons. Obviously,
I'm very critical of the modernist worldviews. So I'm curious
what you guys have to say. All right, we reached Hey,
we reached the thirty super chat goal. Let me catch

(02:16:55):
up here with some of these guys. Thank you all
so much. Dano throws in two bucks orthodox cross, thank
you very much, Dano. Okay, I already read that one,
and Dan Vicious said, thanks for answering Dph. Well, thank
you brother for the support. Really appreciate it. Vigo throws
in two, no comment, and Fernando throws in five says

(02:17:20):
a little early to say, but Christ is born and
glorify him. Amen, brother, Absolutely, you can still say Merry Christmas. Right,
I've been telling everybody blessed Nativity. Octavian throws in two says,
look up Dracian Draco, wolfhead and serpent tale. Dacian Draco.
All right, let's look this up, so he says, Dacian Draco.

(02:18:00):
Oh gosh okay, Dacian oh okay. Interesting use a military
standard used by troops and ancient Dacian people, which can

(02:18:21):
be seen in the hands of soldiers. The wind instrument
has the form of a dragon with an open wolf
like jaws containing several metal tongues. Interesting. Okay, Well, thank
you Octavian for that. Really appreciate it. Bill Hicks throws

(02:18:43):
intents or two says, let's hit that goal, Thank you
very much. Bill Hicks. Octavian throws in another two bucks,
Thank you so much, brother, along with Vigo and x
Lockstep throws in five. Bill Hicks says, are dinosaur bones
actually from dragons? Well, some people have said that, but

(02:19:03):
as I mentioned earlier, if dragons did exist, it would
make sense why they don't really have a historical fossil record,
because their bones would be so light for them to fly. Right.
I'm actually gonna play you a video of a guy
making that argument. So and to me it's logical. I mean,
because that's one of the problems with the fossil record

(02:19:24):
of like apex birds, even though they're massive apex predators,
their bones are hollow and they're so light that they
decompose and break much easier. That would make sense then
if dragons were real, their bones would be hard to find. Yeah,
the dude on Rogan, Yeah, I'm gonna play that, kay, Ram,
I'm actually gonna play that section here in just a

(02:19:45):
few Bill Hicks throws in five says, I'm happy you
brought up cryptids. If dragons are cryptids lininal beatings, would
they still have physical remains. Well, that's my point, Bill Hicks,
and that I believe they're actually spiritual entities. I believe
that it's very possible, Just like with my example of
the African tribe that doesn't have a word for the

(02:20:06):
color blue and therefore cannot see the color blue. It's
the idea that our sort of linguistic repertoire actually maps reality, right,
and that we can we actually experience the world through
the linguistic maps that we have. And if that's the case,
the same would be true for our presuppositions. And I

(02:20:28):
argue that maybe pre modern people actually saw the spiritual
world more visibly and more literally than we can today,
and therefore that's why once we moved into the modern
period we get dinosaurs. But there's no more there's no
more existence of dragons, though I don't know possible. Octavian said,

(02:20:50):
would you play the bones vid? I don't know what
the bones vid is. You have to tell me what
the bones VID is. I have no idea what that is.
Slow boy whiteboard throws in five, says half an hour
on the goal, guys, come on, let's go. Thank you
so much, Kristin. Kristin, Merry Christmas, blessed Nativity to you
and your family. Thank you for all you and Chrispy

(02:21:12):
doing the chat as mods really really appreciate you. Guys
legitimately missed the fist that throws in another tent says,
based on the bones, we know that dinosaurs woke up
around eight thirty am sharp, weigh two hundred tons and
could see seventeen miles. Macro evolutionary theory is so goofy
it legitimately is like, it's crazy, how it's it's crazy

(02:21:38):
how they extrapolate to such a degree and they talk
about like the sleep cycles and the mating habits and
all the different uh you know, nutritional sources various dinosaurs
used in which tree can't be well, these trees don't
exist anymore. But but we we have evidence of a
different type of tree and its neck is perfectly for

(02:22:01):
eating the come on, come on, Dinosaurs have to be
one of the greatest myths of our modern of our
modern day. At least for me, it's it's I'm not
convinced of the empirical evidence of them. Octavian throws another
two bucks, Thank you so much, Octavian, and Vigo throws

(02:22:22):
another too, Thank you so much. Vigo throws in five, says,
dinosaur a universal category. According to people who diviny, universals
are really a great point, a great point, Vigo. That's
great rhetoric. Byzantine. Soljia throws in three forty nine. I'm
getting baptized on January fourth. It's lava bago word to God, man,

(02:22:45):
welcome to the church, welcome home. That's excellent, excellent news man.
I'm really really happy to hear that. Paul throws in
five says, the bombadier beetle produces explosive explosives out of
its butt, so maybe not so far off. Also, I
don't know you were a fellow Hoosier. Yes, I am
a fellow Hoosier, and yes I was aware of the

(02:23:07):
Bombardier beatle. I actually saw that because I was looking up.
Is there any evidence of other, you know, fire breathing
or anything like that, But it is what it is.
Thank you very much, Paul, though God bless you man
and Thomas throws intent says, considering the thumbnail in today's topic,
do you have an opinion on I believe that's Dungeons

(02:23:29):
and Dragons. I know the game has multiple reputations, but
me and my friends at our parish play it when
we have a chance. I've never played Dungeons and Dragons,
so I can't really make a claim on that. I
don't even know how it works. I know that it's
a kind of a board game or a card game
of some sort, and then they're at video games. But

(02:23:51):
I really I don't know much about Dungeons and Dragons.
I've never played it, never looked into it, not really
aware of anything about it. So God bless you, Thomas
and all the parishioners at your church. You know, if
that's what you guys do. If that's what you guys do,
God bless you guys. All right, let me see if

(02:24:13):
anybody's send anything in over on the Dono chat. Before
we go to the next section, Justin Henley throws in
ten says I already have your books, so I defy
your super chatter's goals. God bless and Mary Christmas. Well,
thank you very much, brother for getting the book. I
really appreciate that, and thanks for all the support over
the years. And a little check stream labs real quick.

(02:24:34):
All right, we're up to up to speed now, so
I got to figure out. Let's see what the poll
says real quick. So it looks like the leading the
leading vote here is that they are literal, real, and historical,
and then the second is that they're real spiritual entities,
which is kind of my I would say I'm probably
on a number four real spiritual entities. But keep voting.

(02:24:58):
I'm curious what you guys come up with. Okay, So
going back to here, I want to show you guys
a couple of different things.

Speaker 3 (02:25:10):
This is.

Speaker 2 (02:25:13):
Oh no, I had it timestamped. Now it's going to
start from the beginning. Ah crap, strange question. So this
guy is very dismissive of dinosaurs. Let me see, I
mean of dragons. There's a section.

Speaker 4 (02:25:32):
There's a basic dramatization of like, uh, of snakes and
lizards and.

Speaker 6 (02:25:38):
And just general exaggeration and welding stuff together. I mean,
that's one thing you could put, I guess, potentially argue
is that you know, yeah, we find tyrannosaurs in North
America and in East Asia. In fact, there's a whole
bunch of stuff in the end Cretaceous, which is often
very common because it's a relatively recent.

Speaker 2 (02:25:54):
I just thought this was funny because this guy's like
a dinosaur expert, and I'm blocked by Lex Friedman. I
don't ever even engaged with this guy, and he blocked
me on x. Some people say he has like a
bod or something and if you say anything negative of him,
he will block you. I don't exactly, I'm sure, but
I'm not impressed by you know, Lex Friedman's presented as
this incredibly aerdite, sophisticated tech intellectual, almost like a genius

(02:26:22):
of some sort, a Jewish genius, and I have never
found that to be the case. This guy, this English guy,
is like a dinosaur expert. And the first section was
him basically, it was real quick, but he was mocking
the idea that dragons ever existed, or the fact that
people believe in dragons. But then the irony is to me.

(02:26:44):
He talks about dinosaurs as if it's just like a
fact of reality.

Speaker 4 (02:26:49):
In the grand scheme of things in the history of
the world.

Speaker 6 (02:26:52):
The fauna of East Asia, China, Mongolia, Eastern Russia is
very similar to what you get in Canada and the
USA and down in Mexico, and so you find the
same rough stuff. I mean, they're not exactly the same,
but you get ceratopsians, get tyrannosaurs get the bigge dark
in terosaurs, you can't and kylos or the armored ones.

Speaker 2 (02:27:12):
This, that, and the other.

Speaker 6 (02:27:13):
So if these were influencing all those different cultures, why
don't Chinese dragons look like Mexican dragons or equivalent of
thunderbirds or whatever.

Speaker 2 (02:27:23):
Well, if humans exist, how come they have different clothes
in different cultures because there's an artistic difference between culturess
Bill Hick says, Lex Friedman sucks. He's so freaking boring.
His videos were forced into the algorithm. My mum had

(02:27:45):
him keep popping up and he was like, who the
F is this guy? Yeah? No, Legitimately, I can't stand
Lex Friedman. I don't. I do not get the appeal.
And his channel's huge, it's like one point five million.
You didn't get tons of views on this one, but
you know it gets like the biggest people on his podcast.
I just I do not get the appeal of Lex Friedman.

(02:28:08):
But this guy's argument is that dragons aren't real because
there's different depictions in different cultures. Okay, they all yeah,
they all looked they all looked pretty similar, though, Uh
strange how that works.

Speaker 6 (02:28:26):
Well, because it probably wasn't influencing them.

Speaker 4 (02:28:28):
They were seeing the same skeletons. They probably all produced
the same kind of mystic And.

Speaker 2 (02:28:33):
Then assume that the ancient people were paleontologists and archaeologists,
like if they're looking at what if they weren't looking
at skeletons, What if they are actually seeing something flying
in the air that was terrorizing people and eating humans?
Is that possible?

Speaker 4 (02:28:52):
You have to understand paleontologie is not perfect. So they
were just.

Speaker 7 (02:28:56):
Yeah, I mean dragons aside, I'm sure, like we said,
with weirdness, there would be creatures that would be remarkable,
right that you look at it, you might as well
be seeing a dragon.

Speaker 2 (02:29:08):
It could be.

Speaker 4 (02:29:08):
Yeah, I mean there's creatures alive in the sea today.

Speaker 2 (02:29:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (02:29:12):
I mean if you if you if you trudged up
a colossal squid, I think you'd have yeah, yeah, or
even just dogongs and mantis.

Speaker 5 (02:29:18):
I mean, really quite.

Speaker 7 (02:29:21):
Stretch and if you're a lot of yourself to marvel
at the small things on earth like I was in
the Amazon jungle.

Speaker 2 (02:29:28):
All right, anyways, it's really just point. The point was
just the British guy and he justyammers on, Well, here's
the video that I wanted to show you about. Uh.
This is from Joe Rogan. This is the guy who
is arguing that he doesn't he's like another dinosaur guy.
But if dragons existed, this was his argument.

Speaker 8 (02:29:46):
There's a group of people that say that dragons were real.
So around the same time period in you know, China,
South America, Africa, all these different rome, all these places
images depicted people fighting dragons, right, and every every dragon
was slightly different, but it was all a giant, scaly
animal that could fly.

Speaker 2 (02:30:04):
So when you when you.

Speaker 8 (02:30:05):
Break that down, you think about the fact that large
birds had a hard time being fossilized because their bones
are so porous. Right, So because bones they have like
hollowish bones, they break down very easily and they don't fossilize. Basically,
they're they're saying the evidence is the reason there's no
fossils of dragons is because they had bird bones and
they were actually very delicate animals. A small population of
these giant flying lizards existed and basically encompassed all these

(02:30:30):
different countries where they all depicted fighting dragons in their
own way, and they were all killed off by you know,
knights or whatever it is, and then didn't fossilize. That's
why all these human populations around the world have depictions
of them, because they did actually exist there.

Speaker 2 (02:30:45):
So there's at least there's a logical possibility for their
existence right there now here. I just I just had
to do it for my own interest and put in
dragons over on TikTok. I just wanted to see what
would come up. And so I want to show you
a few of these videos and then uh, and then
some of the you know, the skepticism of dinosaurs.

Speaker 4 (02:31:10):
This is a giant doorway in Kazakhstan. At least that's
what I thought when I first looked at it. But
if you look at this closely, this looks like someone's hand.

Speaker 2 (02:31:20):
And this is what I meant by so many of
these people that are like trying to prove dragons. And
I'm not even disproving that they exist, because if the
church has saints that make literal claims about them, I'm
enticed to believe it. I mean, I believe in a
mystical reality. However, this guy's looking at a mountain and
looking at this, it is arguing that the this is

(02:31:42):
the hand of a dragon, and that this whole mountain
is like basically the skeletal remains of a dragon. It's like,
come on, bro, like, I don't are these just misinformation
agents because you make anybody who actually has an interest
into dragons look totally dumb.

Speaker 4 (02:32:00):
Or holding on to something. This kind of looks like
a petrified dragon hand. Because when I first mate his video,
people were saying, oh, wait, no, that's a dragon. That's
a dragon. It looks like it could be a doorway.
But look at the webbing, the webbing of the thumb.

Speaker 2 (02:32:18):
Come on, bro, that's rock. That is not webbing of
a thumb. And if it was webbing, it would have
already decomposed. What are you talking about?

Speaker 4 (02:32:27):
Right there? And then the index finger and here the
middle finger. Here, this is a hand. Dragons used to
be widely accepted in known creatures, not mythical. This is
a nineteen forty six Dictionary definition of dragons.

Speaker 2 (02:32:45):
Just so you guys know what's going on on. TikTok.
This has like eleven thousand likes. This is a massively
popular video.

Speaker 4 (02:32:54):
It says, now rare a huge serpent a fabulous animal,
generally a monstrous wing scaly serpent, lizard or syrian a
fierce or very strict person, especially a woman that's that's
a little crazy, but now rare, which means they used
to be all over the place, small arbuel lizards of

(02:33:17):
the East Indies and Southern Asia. Dragons were all over India.
Hold on Apollonius of Tyana, a Greek philosopher, documented that.

Speaker 2 (02:33:27):
Polonius of Tyana was actually he was like there's a
there's a skeptical critical argument among scholars who argue that
he's actually the basis of who Jesus Christ was. And
I actually did a research paper during my master's degree.
This was before I actually became Christian, looking and reading
the Pollonius of Tyana the whole legends of his life

(02:33:49):
and stuff. And there's like a couple examples of miracles
again him like performing some type of ritual and like
drawing a circle on the ground. He was like a
circle drawler. And it's what like, it's definitely not Christ.
But I'm curious where he's gonna go with this.

Speaker 4 (02:34:06):
Dragons that he saw when he was traveling through India.
Dragons of enormous science and variety infest northern India, concluded
a Polonius of Tyana, who traveled through the southern foothills
of the Himalians in the first century. The countryside is
full of them, and no mountain ridge was without one.
Dragons seem to be real. The Bible mentions dragons over

(02:34:30):
thirty times. Check it out Isaiah twenty seven to one,
Leviathan the piercing serpent, even Leviathan, that crooked serpent.

Speaker 2 (02:34:37):
See and as we said, Leviathan is a sea creature,
and the early mythology of dragons was that they were
sea creatures. It isn't until the Church is fully established
by the fourth century that we start getting regular descriptions
of dragons as flying, fire breathing entities, although there's evidence

(02:34:57):
of them flying before that in regards to the fire specifically,
So you know, I don't know where he's going, but
just to be more specific, you know, we looked at
the Hebrew word for Leviathan, and certainly it is a
sort of serpentine monster, but it's not exactly the same
thing that he's referring to his dragon. That's not even

(02:35:18):
to disproved dragons. I'm actually open to the literal, historical
reality of dragons. I'm open to a lot of stuff.
As an Orthodox Christian who's a non modernist. Anything modernity says,
I'm skeptical of until proven otherwise. But this dude has
like no nuance in his conspiracies. I got more from
this guy.

Speaker 4 (02:35:36):
And he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.
Thou breaketh the heads of the dragons in the waters
all kinds of versus or are dragons dragon? But a
lot of those legend stories are rooted in truth. And
even the Chinese culture incorporate dragons and their their calendar
and and their history. Dragons seem to be all over

(02:35:59):
the place. I think it's fake. I think dragons are real,
and the main stream doesn't want us to think that
for various reasons. Who knows why dinosaurs are fake. It
looks like dragons are real, and if that is not
a hand, I don't know what is. There's a lot
of history.

Speaker 2 (02:36:18):
Here's another guy who's adamant.

Speaker 4 (02:36:21):
Dragons are real, and they've been trying.

Speaker 2 (02:36:24):
To see I just don't get why we don't get
better defenders of stuff like this, Like if somebody believes
dragons real, like, where's the guys that really have the evidence?
This thing has one hundred and sixty and a half
thousand likes this TikTok one hundred and sixty thousand likes.
That's not views, that's.

Speaker 4 (02:36:45):
Likes this whole time.

Speaker 2 (02:36:47):
Y'all.

Speaker 9 (02:36:48):
Mother is gonna love this one. At least that's what
some people claim, And we may have even found actual
proof in twenty twenty four, even though in eighteen forty
one we already technically confirmed their existence. We just call
them dinosaurs as always just a theory. But anyone with
more than half a brain cell knows that common history
tells us the most recent dinosaurs that roamed the earth
went extinct around sixty five million years ago, So why

(02:37:08):
do we see them in countless ancient drawings and artifacts
just a couple thousand years old, way after they allegedly
went extinct, but also before we started discovering their bones.
We didn't even officially know what dinosaurs were until eighteen
twenty four, and they weren't even named dinosaurs until eighteen
forty one. Before then, we had a different name for them, dragons.
Nearly every culture of our past had their own version
of a scaly, fire breathing flying lizard.

Speaker 2 (02:37:31):
That brave word, not fire breathing, as we just talked about.
So he kind of oversteps the actual actual articulation and
historical evidence there, but fair enough, they're all cross cultural
and there is seem to be multiple people like plenty
of the elder that argued in the historical literality of these.

Speaker 4 (02:37:51):
Those were phased to protect their land.

Speaker 9 (02:37:53):
And we see these Dino dragons and numerous Neolithic cave
drawings around the world painted into rock walls thousands of
years old, well before we ever even knew they were
a thing. Petrol Glipson have a Supi Canyon Arizona, Natural Bridges,
Utah and even up around Lake Superior in Canada. And
this is just the tip I think you know. Where
We're going over to ankor Watt and Cambodia we see
more carvings of what looks like a Stegasaurus. Carlisle Cathedral

(02:38:16):
in England has etchings of animals unlike we've ever seen.
Down in Australia, the Aborigines had this painting of a
creature they hunted and it don't look like anything I know.
But you want the out dragon figure from the Shang
dynasty about two thousand BC, which looks almost exactly like
a t rex, and I mean ancient China is just
filled to the brim with bronze statues thousands of years
old that resemble our extinct lizard palace. Here's the Mesopotamian

(02:38:37):
jasper cylinders.

Speaker 2 (02:38:38):
That's a great point. That's a great point, Sower Cookie says,
to be frank, scientists, I think every animal in those
cave paintings existed except the dragon looking one. Fair enough.
That's a great great point because they absolutely take cave
paintings as literal descriptions of historical disease except dragons. Which again,

(02:39:03):
if dragons are real, it validates a biblical Christian worldview.
It validates a much more traditionalist, pre modern worldview. Have
ooriginosaurs organized hisanity, but legitimately so over cookies? Right, like

(02:39:23):
the claim scientists make based on claim of cave paintings,
why don't they make those same claims based on dragons.
There's just as much evidence for them. Great great point.

Speaker 9 (02:39:34):
From the world period about thirty five hundred BC. And
if that ain't a long neck, then I don't know
what to tell you. Mind you, these are all several hundred,
if not thousands of years old, and they're all over
the ancient world. Like, are those humans riding dinosaurs in
the sixteenth century painting and who can forget about the
Acabaro Figurines, a collection of thirty thousand minifigures uncovered in
Mexico of dinosaurs and humans riding them. Initial dating analyses

(02:39:57):
estimated them to be about forty five hundred years old.
Bud follow up stated they were made in the nineteen thirties,
so they can quickly dismiss them as a hoax, debunk
to move on, But evidence kept on coming. The Ico Stones,
a collection of more than fifteen thousand great stones which
depict was that look like to you, discovered in Peru,
said to be over a thousand years old, and again
later claimed a hoax by the one who found them,

(02:40:18):
some say out of force to avoid imprisonment. Is it
possible that humans had contact, or at the very least
knowledge of dinosaurs in ancient times? Absolutely not, unless they're
not as old as we think they are. In two
thousand and three, a researcher, doctor Mary Schweitzer, found a
t rex fever that was so big they had to
snap it in half for transport, something they usually don't do.
They do that take it back to the lab and

(02:40:38):
inside the bone they find preserved red blood cells, They
couldn't believe it. Red blood cells don't last very long,
and soft tissue was thought to deteriorate even under the
best of conditions within one million years, never mind over
sixty eight million years, even inside of a bone. They
concluded it must be a new preservation method they were
previously unaware of, which could be the case.

Speaker 2 (02:40:58):
Calmed them down.

Speaker 9 (02:41:00):
Then they started cracking open more dinosaur bones, finding veins
and even soft organic tissue that was stretchy and had
an odor, which led some to believe that it could
be possible that maybe some dinosaurs were around much more
recently than we thought. Before we knew what dinosaurs were,
there was a different type of giant reptile that was
found in many old traditions and stories dragons around the

(02:41:20):
same time period in China, South America, Africa, Rome, Aboriginal Australia.
We get legends and images of humans fighting off giant,
scaly winged creatures that flew and breathed fire all the
way up until medieval times. Tales of dragons all around
the world. So did everyone just coincidentally come up with
the exact same mythical creature or did they actually see it?
And the ancient Chinese especially had a huge obsession with

(02:41:41):
dragons as well. Just have a look at the Chinese zodiac.
Have you ever thought, why does it have eleven real
animals and then they randomly decided to throw in just
one mythical creature, the dragon. Having twelve real animals makes
more sense to me. It turns out they might have
been onto something, because we may have just found the
fossil of one in the heart of China. So the
potential reason dragon bones it might be so rare is
because dragons can fly.

Speaker 4 (02:42:02):
It just like birds.

Speaker 9 (02:42:03):
Birds have extremely light, low density bones that don't fossilize
very easily, and it's very likely that dragons would have
had the same. Until recently, this was announced discovered fossilize
remains of a five meter long reptile in southern China,
Officially called dinosap Phileosaurus orientalis. It has been dubbed the
Chinese dragon fossil. It's unlike any dinosaur fossil we've ever found,
although it's said to be two hundred and forty million

(02:42:24):
years old. That's also exactly what they said about the dinosaurs.
Did humans coexist with dinosaurs, and we're dragons, just a
rare species of dinosaur that we hunted into extinction for
the safety of our future dragons.

Speaker 2 (02:42:37):
So I thought it was interesting, and that is basically
what most conspiracy theorists argue regarding the validity in that.
The reason why I didn't bring up the Chinese, you know,
dragon fossil is they do argue that it's essentially a dinosaur,
but it is a huge problem that they have to
deal with regarding the fact that these things, excuse me,

(02:43:00):
exist with blood, vessels and protein and stuff like that,
which and I'm even open. I'm curious what you guys think.
I'm open to the idea that we lived with dinosaurs.
I don't even have a hard line. I'm curious what
you guys think. How many of you guys think that
dinosaurs existed? Can I get like a can I get

(02:43:21):
hands in the chat? Like? Why's for yes and ends
for no? How many of you guys believe in dinosaurs?
Because I would be open to the possibility that we
coexisted with them. I just think modern palaeontology, and that's
where I highlighted my internal critiques. It's questionable, it's questionable

(02:43:42):
looks like most of you guys. Christian says yeah, Christian
Zionism is Judaism, says no. Sower Cookie says, I think
there's legit dino stuff. Derek's fly fish He says, of

(02:44:04):
course we coexist with dinosaurs. I eat their nuts. Fair enough,
fair fair enough, Solo Manefsky says, have no clue. Oh,
Chrispy's on a note. He's a hater, he says no,

(02:44:25):
Drew says no, Octavian says yes, but not the way
it's presented. Akathis shout out to you, brother. I think
some dinosaurs existed, but there's a lot fraudulent ones. Fair enough,
fair enough. Yeah, Now here's a couple that was gonna

(02:44:48):
show you guys on our dinosaur is a hoax. Now
it seems like our audience is kind of split. Some
say no, some say yes. I'm gonna play a couple
of these videos and see what you guys think.

Speaker 4 (02:45:01):
What if by toy d have never existed at all?

Speaker 2 (02:45:03):
Yeah?

Speaker 10 (02:45:04):
I know it sounds crazy, but stay with me. The
word dinosaur wasn't even created until eighteen forty two.

Speaker 2 (02:45:10):
And guess what.

Speaker 10 (02:45:11):
That's also around the same time the first dinosaur bones
just happened to be discovered before that. Nothing, no talk
of giant lizards, no museum bones, no ancient records calling
them by name. And here's the part that gets real weird.
We've never found a full dinosaur skeleton ever, just random
bones scattered, broken and dug up by people who get

(02:45:33):
paid to find them. Then museums take those pieces and
build giant skeletons based on guesses. They even use plaster
and fake bones to fill in the gaps. So ask yourself,
what if the idea of dinosaurs was created to support
something else, to help push the theory of evolution, to
make us feel small and unimportant in a long, random universe.

(02:45:57):
And what about all those ancient stories of giant creatures
with wings and scales? Why were those erased and replaced
with scientific versions called dinosaurs. You didn't see the fossils,
you saw cartoons, museums, Hollywood. That's not proof, that's a program.
Maybe dinosaurs were never real, Maybe they were just the

(02:46:18):
cover story.

Speaker 2 (02:46:19):
This is just a and I'm open to that one
as well. Here's here's a realize.

Speaker 11 (02:46:29):
They've only been finding dinosaurs for two hundred years years ago.
They didn't know what when the Jews started burying those bones. Well,
there was a bunch of dudes who had faked were trying.

Speaker 4 (02:46:39):
To us nice weather.

Speaker 12 (02:46:42):
You know, there's a bunch of dudes who put like
other bones and claimed there were dines.

Speaker 4 (02:46:46):
There was a bunch of frauds.

Speaker 12 (02:46:47):
Those there's money in boats, Jamie, all right, you look
like a pterodactyl. Imagine discovering dinosaurs going it.

Speaker 2 (02:46:59):
Is this still?

Speaker 4 (02:47:00):
I think most of the white.

Speaker 11 (02:47:03):
Get out.

Speaker 2 (02:47:06):
She has filed for reelection.

Speaker 8 (02:47:07):
Ah, she's like seventy's eighty four eighty four with those.

Speaker 11 (02:47:11):
She just fired from pretty huge, And you got to realize, people.

Speaker 2 (02:47:18):
I just wanted to play the the joke on the
she was creating dinosaur bones. That's hilarious.

Speaker 3 (02:47:28):
Did you know, guys, that dinosaurs never existed. I know
this might be triggering for a lot of people out
there because we've been indoctrinated since school and with films
to believe that these big monsters roam the earth at
some point. But there's been no ancient culture that has
ever found dinosaur boats or dinosaur skeletons. The only people
to have found dinosaur bones are the people that were

(02:47:50):
actually invested in pushing the theory of dinosaurs and the
theory of evolution. Freemasons and people like that. When you
go to museums, you're not seeing dinosaur bones or dinosaur skeletons.
You're seeing a combination of paper mache, whale bones, animal bones,
and even one of the most famous skeletons in one
of the museums in America, it's been exposed that the

(02:48:13):
head of the dinosaur is actually an iguana's head. You
can't see the originals. They're in a vault somewhere that
they say that they need to be predicted. No one
can ever see them. It's all fake. It's all lies
to keep you away from the idea of a creator.

Speaker 2 (02:48:27):
Did you know, guys? So that's another viing. You can
go on TikTok and find so many videos questioning the
existence of dinosaurs and all types of stuff as.

Speaker 4 (02:48:40):
Has never existed.

Speaker 2 (02:48:42):
This is the flatter Yeah, the guy that does two
hundred proofs that Earth is flat or.

Speaker 13 (02:48:47):
In other words, the existence of dinosaurs was first.

Speaker 2 (02:48:51):
And this is with this like liberal paleontology. The guy
has like a bright yellow beard. There's like a I
found a thirty minute clip of him on Joe Rogan,
like basically just absolutely mocking people who don't believe dinosaurs
existed or believe.

Speaker 13 (02:49:04):
In dragons speculatively hypothesized by a United Museum had coincidentally
in the mid nineteenth century, during the heyday of evolutionism,
before a single dinosaur fossil had ever been found.

Speaker 2 (02:49:19):
Dinosaurs.

Speaker 4 (02:49:21):
Uh, we discovered marine reptiles and the first dinosaurs about
a century before that. So that right there, Eric, you're
fucking wrong. Whoops.

Speaker 5 (02:49:32):
It's like, don't bring your flattered bullshit into my profession.

Speaker 4 (02:49:36):
As far as.

Speaker 2 (02:49:38):
Yeah, guys, a little offended. It's my question dinosaurs.

Speaker 11 (02:49:42):
What if I told you dinosaurs might have never existed
at all?

Speaker 7 (02:49:45):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (02:49:45):
I know it sounds crazy, but stay with me. Okay,
this is just somebody using Joe Rogan. See you can
find like you can use Joe Rogan's stuff if it's
on TikTok, but if you pull up his videos they
get flagged immediately. But any guys, I got to find
a winner for the book tonight. So we reached the
thirty super chats smash that like for everyone who's still here,

(02:50:08):
really appreciate you guys. We got to figure out who
wins the book tonight. So what do you guys recommend
I do? Should I should? I just pull a question
a h should I just like pick a number between
one and a hundred and tell people you know and
get and if you super chatted, you can post in
the chat the number, and who's ever the closest wins.

(02:50:30):
You think that's the fairest thing to do. Just pick
a number. Dinosaur denial, I could go both ways. I mean,
I'm skeptical of the whole thing, but I'm open. I
really don't have a hard line on this. Uh So
let's see, let's see. Okay, that works? All right? All right,

(02:50:52):
here we go. I'm think of a number between one
and one hundred, and if you super chatted, you post
the number that you think in the chat. If you
super chat on Dono Chat or stream labs, I'll include
I'll include you. So if you guys, if you guys vote,
So all right, I got my number. I got my

(02:51:14):
number from one to one hundred. Ack at this, one
to one hundred, guys, first, the closest one to get
to my number will win my book, and then you'll
have to email me your okay. First one is sixty
two Octavian's forty seven Thomas thirty one, Paul fifty one,

(02:51:37):
Dano eighty six, Hey American Nachos in the chat sixty seven,
shout out to you, American Nachra. Dude, I gotta send
your hard drive. Organized Insanity throws fourteen out Kyle Coomp
sixty seven. If you say forty three, you got a

(02:51:59):
super chat forty three dollars? That is fair. That is fair.
Let's see, okay, is that all the gases from everybody
who's super chatted. Let me make sure I can make
sure that the person closest I don't see. I don't

(02:52:28):
see the person who's closest. I don't see that they
super chatted. So let me go the next one. Okay.
Vigo throws in twenty three. So the number is the

(02:52:56):
number is thirty three. I see Byzantine Soldia has forty three.
Vigo has twenty three. Vigo I know super chatted. Byzantine
Soldia super chatted. So you guys are both ten away

(02:53:19):
thirty three. Illuminati confirm exactly. Oh, Thomas had thirty one.
I missed that one thirty one? Oh yeah, I see that, okay.
Thomas Thomas wins. Thomas wins Thomas seven seven seven eight
zero three. You are the winner today, My man Thomas
is the winner. Thirty one is definitely the closest Byzantine Soldia.

(02:53:50):
I think you were twenty three or forty three. Somebody
was forty three, Ohris Crisp knob was I mean, thirty
one is definitely the closest thirty three. It was the
Age of Christ, guys, it is the age of Christ.
Thirty three. Yep, Thomas wins. Thomas Thomas, you gotta email me, bro,

(02:54:13):
and you gotta email me tonight so I can get
this out and sent tomorrow so you can get it
before Christmas. Who picked thirty three? You're a mason? I am?

(02:54:39):
Oh gosh. I actually had somebody who who messaged me
accusing me of being a freemason because something I did
with my hands during a stream organized insanity. So that
I didn't pick thirty three. I thought it was too obvious.

(02:55:00):
Where's Thomas at? I don't even see Thomas in the
chat anymore. Thomas, you got email me your actual name
first and last so I can ship it busher fish base.

(02:55:21):
There he is, all right. Here's my email, Thomas Church
of the Eternal Logos at gmail dot com. Just email
me at Church of the Eternal Logos at gmail dot com.
Now we're gonna have a bunch of people emailing me

(02:55:44):
pretending that they're you're You're they're you Thomas, doc yourself
and get a free book. Well, it's only with me, though,
I'm not gonna be I'm not going to be putting
people's stuff out there. Yeah right, I'll start doing these more.

(02:56:08):
Once I get a new shipload of books in, we
can start doing more where if we reach the goal,
I'll pick a number and then send them one out
to people. I think that it is a fun game. Hello. Hello,
my name is Thomas. All Right, Thomas, email me, brother,

(02:56:31):
I really do I want to. I want to get
it shipped out so you can get it before Christmas. Kristen, No, seriously, somebody,
I forget what it was. I was like doing this
or they there's a guy and he was arguing that
I'm a I'm a fake Orthodox Freemason. I was like

(02:56:52):
what what? All Right, Thomas lived in India. I'm not
shipping to India. So if you live in India, Thomas,
I'm not gonna be able to send that one out,

(02:57:13):
all right. I haven't gotten email from Thomas yet so
all right, Well, Thomas, I'm gonna hop off here. Hey,
a special thank you goes out to David for sponsoring
today's stream. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I thought
it was gonna be I thought it'd be a popular
interesting topic. We haven't tackled dragons before on the channel,
but hopefully after today's stream, you guys feel like you

(02:57:35):
got a better grasp on the topic, and you know,
can can understand it a little bit better and see
the nuances and the variations and and the possible literal
historicity of dragons. I'm not even opposed to it. Dph
thinks that many people want his book who are unwilling

(02:57:56):
to pay for it, that they'd bomb his email potential potential.
All right, Thomas will email me brother tonight. Okay, Thomas said,
I'm not at my computer at the moment. I'll get
to you in a shot. All right. Sounds good, brother. Uh,

(02:58:19):
Christian Zionism is Judaism, says I think what you do
is important. Man. You're a lot easier to watch than
the other big ortho people. Well, thank you, man, I
appreciate that. I appreciate that. Oh, send us to Orthodox Ethos. Okay,
let me let me look at the Orthodox Ethos live.
Is that the only one of our friends that is live?

(02:58:40):
Let me see here redirect where's the Orthodox Ethos? I
don't even I don't even see them live right now. Oh,

(02:59:09):
Orthodox Ethos doesn't allow me to redirect to them. It says,
ask Orthodox Ethos to add you to their live direct
list in community settings, So I can't. I can't send
you guys to Orthodox Ethos. But yeah, just go raid

(02:59:32):
father Peter heres. But anyways, thank you guys so much.
Merry Christmas to all of you. Again. A special thank
you goes out to David for sponsoring today's stream. And
uh oh, FDA's on Buck. Oh okay, I just put
in Uh, I just put in Buck Johnson. So FDA's
over there. So I'm gonna send you guys over to

(02:59:52):
FDA and Buck Johnson. Thank you guys so much. God
bless you all. Merry Christmas, blessed Nativity. And I'll see
guys Thursday with the Christmas movie review with BLA, which
I'm excited about. So I'll talk to you guys then
as always, until then, God bless

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