In this episode, I sit down with Jameson Lopp, cypherpunk, software engineer, columnist, and Bitcoin advocate. Prompted by Jameson's intriguing tweets, we explore the connections between religious beliefs, technology, and their relationship to Bitcoin.
In today's world, it's tough to know what to trust and even harder to find the truth.
In this episode, I sit down with Jameson Lopp, cypherpunk, software engineer, columnist, and Bitcoin advocate.
Prompted by Jameson's intriguing tweets, we explore the connections between religious beliefs, technology, and their relationship to Bitcoin. We talk about how these different areas of life impact one another, especially from the angle of how Bitcoin fits into the broader picture of faith and technological advancement.
Jameson shares his personal background, including his experience with different Christian denominations and how it shaped his views on religion, spirituality, and ultimately, his approach to Bitcoin and technology.
Learn about the potential dangers of mixing personal beliefs with Bitcoin, the importance of maintaining an open dialogue within the Bitcoin community, and the challenges of ensuring Bitcoin continues to improve and adapt.
Jameson also shares his perspective on freedom, organized religion, and how Bitcoin fits into the larger conversation about societal structures and individual empowerment.
Join us as we shed light on the connections between our digital and spiritual lives and maybe even see Bitcoin from a new perspective.
Here at TGFB, our mission is to educate and equip Christians to understand Bitcoin and harness its potential for good. We spread this message through high-quality, inspiring content.
If you want to start your podcast or take your existing show to the next level, I highly recommend connecting with my friends at Juliana Barbati Consulting. They are total pros when it comes to podcast production, marketing, and growth. Check them out at https://julianabarbati.com/ and mention me for a Bitcoin payment discount!
Don’t forget that the Thank God for Bitcoin Conference is also coming up on July 24-25 in Nashville! This conference brings together the brightest minds exploring the moral, spiritual, and philosophical foundations of Bitcoin. Get your tickets for the TGFB Conference: https://tgfb.com/store/TGFB-2024-Early-Pass-p596963746
Learn more about Jameson Lopp:
https://www.lopp.net/
Jordan
Do you know that there are over 3.2 million podcasts in the world? It seems like everybody these days has a podcast. But did you also know that 90% of those podcasts failed to make it to 20 episodes? There are various reasons for these failures. But one reason is that people don't know what they're doing. Shocking, right? As it turns out, the same reason why people don't operate on themselves also applies to podcast success. You want to talk to someone who has had success launching and marketing podcasts. Somebody like Juliana Barbati.
Jordan
Juliana runs a podcast marketing and production agency. And their team takes care of everything for you, making this process a breeze. All the infos in the show notes you can go to julianabarbati.com, tell them TGFB sent you and get a discount when paying in Bitcoin. That's right. Juliana is a Bitcoiner. Her and her husband were actually Bitcoiners before they were Christians. And so it's been great for us to work with them. They basically came to us and said, hey, we'd love to help you guys. Help TGFB grow. And so we'd love to kind of apply our services to you guys. So go ahead and support them. If you have a podcast you're working on or one that you'd like to start, go ahead and check them out. Now let's get to today's show. Jameson Lopp, welcome to the Thank God for Bitcoin podcast.
Jameson Lopp
Great to be here. And specifically, always interested in having novel conversations rather than the usual repeating my various tropes on security, privacy, and why Bitcoin is amazing.
Jordan
Yep, again, those are great, those are appreciated and necessary, especially with folks who aren't into the space and haven't had those conversations. I'm super grateful that there's people like you out there who are able to have those. But we're also glad to introduce a bit of novelty into your day. So again, this began, you had shared some tweets on Twitter about the intersection of God and faith in technology and Bitcoin.
Jordan
And so then that spurred, you know, because of your following, like that spurred a whole bunch of responses that range somewhere between polite, respectful, and screeching a whole range of other things. So I just kind of just replied, not knowing what to expect. And your exact response, if I remember correctly was, that sounds incredibly uncomfortable. And so I'd love to do it. It's so just that attitude, I just appreciated that a lot. So I'm just gonna let you kind of introduce yourself to people who may not know who you are, and then you can just kind of take it from there. As far as why this conversation come to you is something that seems interesting and worth a discussion worth having.
Jameson Lopp
I would say I like discussing controversial topics in general. And that may be one reason why I've managed to get a decent following on Twitter is because I don't care if people disagree with me, I think the disagreement, at least civil disagreement, and having a rational discourse is how we learn more about each other. And even if we don't agree with each other, we can at least try to better understand each other's perspectives. But I think most people know me as a nerd.
Jameson Lopp
I'm a computer scientist, I have been engineering Bitcoin wallets for nine years now been interested in the space for a little over a decade. And I just have a bunch of different nerdy projects where I have been trying to understand Bitcoin for a decade. And as a result, I try to convey as much of my understanding to others, at least, as simply as possible. And even though I'm a nerd, and I mostly focus on technical aspects of it, I will say that over the past five or six years, some of the more interesting aspects have been less technical and been more philosophical, sociological, and trying to understand what is this thing that we call a consensus?
Jameson Lopp
I mean, obviously, we know what machine consensus is. And we've automated, a lot of rules around consensus for what we think sound money should be like, but there I think, will always be this more ethereal meatspace consensus that we're constantly trying to grasp and trying to codify. And that's where you know, a lot of the human aspects and ideologies come into play.
Jameson Lopp
Now, from my religious background, I'm a good old southern boy, my father's side of the family can be traced back to the mid 1700s, coming in through New York, Pennsylvania, and then settling in North Carolina, I think by 1800. Pretty much all of my family is still in North Carolina, South Carolina area, and fairly conservative Christian backgrounds went to three different denominations as I was growing up, started off in the Baptist Church for a few years, spent a decade in the Lutheran church and then finished like middle school, high school in the Methodist Church.
Jameson Lopp
And as a result of that, due to some of the interesting differences between these denominations, I actually went through the confirmation process not once, but twice, because the Lutherans, if I recall, correctly, do it in the fifth grade. And then the Methodists do it in seventh and eighth grade have a two year process of maybe even a three year process but I think it was two. It's been a while. So yeah, I mean, obviously, I've read the Bible, went to Bible school, went to Christian summer camp, at least three or four years, even participated in running like vacation Bible school, when I was in high school, and went to church, every week, less something crazy was happening for my entire time that I was living with my parents until I went off to university.
Jameson Lopp
I will say, I started changing my perspective, probably around middle school, when we started getting more into hard science classes, learning about the scientific method, so on and so forth, trying to apply some of those concepts, and square them with what I had been taught in the church. And then by the time I was going into high school, and getting even nerdier, and more into hard science, I basically threw up my hands, and I was like, okay, you know, I get the narratives. It's interesting to me, I can't disprove any of it, but neither can I prove any of it.
Jameson Lopp
And so I've been a pretty ardent agnostic since then, and have tried to, you know, study some other religions as well understand religion, just from a high level perspective. And so I'm not an atheist, I don't hate religious people. I don't hate spiritual people, I think everyone should be free to do and say and believe whatever they want, as long as they don't try to impose those things upon me and affect my life.
Jameson Lopp
I certainly draw a distinction between spirituality and religion. My perspective is that spirituality is kind of Man's Search for Meaning. And there are so many unknowns out there, so many things that we are simply incapable of explaining that it can be disconcerting, especially from a cosmic perspective, these things are very interesting, but difficult to talk about. And in fact, I don't like to spend too much time thinking about them, because they make me feel less of a person, you know, if you're trying to even comprehend that you are, but a speck of sand on a dot and a void of a universe.
Jameson Lopp
It can make you feel basically worthless, right? It can make it very difficult for people to have a sense of value or purpose. And so I think spirituality is one of the ways that we try to reconcile this difficulty of handling all of these unexplained things. And so spirituality, and wanting to believe in higher being or higher sense of purpose, or whatever I think makes complete sense to me. Taking it another step, though, and getting into organized religion gets a lot trickier. And I understand it from the sense of community because I got a big sense of community for nearly two decades from being active within Christianity, obviously, pros and cons to it.
Jameson Lopp
But from a historical perspective, I also have a lot of problems with organized religion, because it's run by men and men are fallible, and can do bad things, or a lot of terrible atrocities have been committed in the name of religion. And in fact, in a sense, I see a lot of organized religion and churches as a soft form of a state. I think the simplest way to look at this is look at the Catholic Church, they are the largest land owner in the world, and how have they pulled that off? Well, there was, of course, some period of time when there was actual violence that was used, but it wasn't generally overt violence. I see it as more of a soft form of coercion through threats, you know, the indulgences, programs and all of that stuff, you're going to hell if you don't give us a lot of your property, and that works very well.
Jordan
Your relatives are going to stay in hell, if you don't give us money, you know.
Jameson Lopp
And I certainly want to be careful, you don't want to overgeneralize too much. It's not like all churches are coercive, and so on and so forth. But it's difficult for me to draw a line, I think, in many cases between faith and indoctrination. And one of the things that concerns me and where I see a lot of parallels happening is between well the Bitcoin and the crypto space I mean, each crypto network and protocol its own opt in network of rules, but also narratives.
Jameson Lopp
And a lot of people in the Bitcoin space have controversial views about what should be constituted as a scam and what's not a scam. And I'm sure we'll get into some of that and like why Bitcoin is the best in our opinions. But I see people that I consider scammers in the space, using a lot of similar rhetoric and narratives as some organized religions, particularly when it comes to logic and making unfalsifiable claims. And so I've clashed with a number of scammers in the space because of their sort of cult like antics.
Jameson Lopp
And now over the past couple of years, one of the things that has drawn more of my concern, and I think why I started bringing up some of these topics is that I've seen more people start to tie their own religion and personal beliefs into Bitcoin. And so I certainly have concerns over what could happen if that trajectory continues to the extreme in particular, and what happens if we end up with kind of sects or denominations of Bitcoiners? Who are so tied to their specific religion in the Bitcoin that it could actually result in issues within Bitcoin and disagreements of the protocol and forking, and so on and so forth?
Jordan
Yeah. First of all, that was fantastic. We're gonna get into a lot of the different specific things that you mentioned. I do think that comparing the monetary and religious worlds is a very fertile ground for comparison, there's a ton of things that these things share in common. And so I think that it can be confusing, especially to people who I mean, I don't think this is a very controversial statement to say that we are the most secular society in world history. I don't think that's crazy to say.
Jordan
But I would even say, just beyond that, I mean, just even I mean, if you were to pull people who would identify openly as an atheist or agnostic or who don't, they can't even make sense of the idea that you could believe in God, I think that there's far more people that are in that position today than they have been in the past. I think there's a number of reasons for that. This is another conversation. But I think fiat currency has played a big role in that.
Jordan
I mean, just the fact that if you can create money out of thin air, if governments and central banks can create money out of thin air, to subsidize whatever ideas and messages that they want, and they don't want competition, you know, this is the the origin of central banking was trying to get rid of competition, it makes sense that you'd want to crowd out other messages that would challenge your claim to power. I think that we could probably make a pretty convincing case of that if we if we wanted to go that way. But let's just do this. Let's go this route, I screenshotted, a few of your tweets and the ones that I thought we could kind of refine a little bit and that would be beneficial, helpful, and then entertaining.
Jameson Lopp
I mean, like we said, these currencies and protocols and stuff, have interesting narratives. But I think even beyond that, the internet itself is changing humanity. And I've actually been watching a number of interesting documentaries about different cults lately. And I think that a lot of these cults probably would not have existed if not for the internet, because the internet allows you to instantaneously reach out to billions of people. And now you're able to find the people I think, who are able to be influenced by really weird extremist narratives a lot more easily than would have been possible pre internet.
Jordan
Agreed. And that actually leads right into the first tweet that I pulled out, you tweeted, social media sure puts the cult in culture. And so again, very witty turn of phrase, great tweet, I guess you kind of just did unpack that a little bit. But is there anything else you want to kind of add in explaining kind of your thing behind that tweet.
Jameson Lopp
I wish that I was better or understood, you know, psychology better. But since I'm a tech guy, and I'm a programmer, I tend to think of things in terms of kind of programmable state machines. And you can get into a whole argument about whether or not the brain should be considered as that's still, I think, an open question. But if we consider people's brains to be like computers, and these computers, they receive input. Currently, I've also said this, that our methods of communication are still incredibly primitive.
Jameson Lopp
Just the fact that we're using words is an incredibly low bandwidth and imprecise way of communicating our thoughts and what we're trying to convey to each other. And yet, these words, these languages, they're still able to have an effect upon people. And I think if you hit upon the right narratives, and that clicks with a person's particular background, and basically everything that comprises them in their thought processes, then you can essentially start to reprogram their thinking and that's what happens with a lot of these networks, you know, whether it's a religion or a cryptocurrency, or a state, any sort of large group usually that is being headed up by some sort of hierarchy or leadership, you know, the value of these networks grows as the size of them grows. And so any halfway decent leader of any kind of movement is going to be constantly searching for the right combination of words and narratives to reprogram as many miles as possible to join that movement.
Jordan
Sure, I would agree with that. I would also say, and I think you'd agree, you can argue like the chicken or the egg problem, I would argue that I mean, Bitcoin, the day that it was created, found whatever released, it was this profound thing, even though it hadn't reached a wide adoption, the seed was sown, like the seed was sown that was going to turn into this incredible what it became it obviously had to go through real processes, real dangerous, real decision making.
Jordan
I mean, the fact that in the beginning, there were a few dozen people who were into bitcoin didn't mean that there wasn't some internal logical correlation between the way that Bitcoin was structured, and the world in which Bitcoin lives and the world that we live in, like there's correlation real, I would argue, like real correlation between those things. So like, if Bitcoin doesn't prioritize Bitcoin mining and the structure mining the way that it does, it's not nearly as compelling or if you want to use the word anti, the phrase anti fragile or something along those lines.
Jordan
So I do think that the rhetoric around these things matters. You can present these things in very creative ways. And that helps, but I still think you can be the greatest rhetorician possible. And if there's not correlation between your message and reality, you're only gonna be able to get so far over a given time horizon. You can fool people over the short run, but over the long run, it's a tougher road to hoe. The one thing that I that came to me as I was reading, that was, again, just the etymology of the word culture. So the etymology of the word culture, it means like to cultivate or to grow.
Jordan
So it's based in the root word culty, or cultus. It's either they can't decide whether it's I think it's cultus is French or culty is Latin. And it means to worship our give homage to something. And so it's really interesting that right within this word, culture, which is how things work, and how things are priority structures, and all these different things, you have this word worship, right at the heart of that, and I think this is something in my experience, I would say one of the weaknesses in America and the West more broadly, especially the last hundred years is we don't have a very good deep understanding of what worship or religion is, like, we think about it in ways that they don't have the same depth as it was, it has been understood and realized, I feel like by a lot of people, at least according to different holy texts throughout human history.
Jordan
And one of these things just within Christianity, you know, you have the apostle Paul, he's writing to the church of Corinth, and he says to them, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. And so whereas we think about spirituality and religion, that we think it's okay, I go to this service on this day, the apostle Paul, and he's seemingly got a lot more in his head in terms of what is what is both required and what this consists of to have relationship with God, he there seems to be a lot more involved than the average I would guess, American or I would say, average american would think.
Jordan
We just don't have the same type of religious culture that even exists in countries where Islam is the prominent religion, there's no separation and those men, many of those countries between the Koran and law, and so I think that what one of the things we it's difficult is just yeah, just having a conception in a grounded conception of what religion is, I think it's hard to come to a point where people can agree on a definition, because of our variety of different backgrounds.
Jameson Lopp
It's probably related to the fact that the origins of America had a lot of religious persecution in history. So I think, yeah, as a result, Americans have built a culture, if you will, of not treading on people from a religious standpoint.
Jordan
Yeah, absolutely. I think that again, where you are right now, it's not just doesn't just happen, right? Like the places where we find ourselves and what we find ourselves believing are either I'd say directly related, we've received them from somewhere, or in many cases, we're reacting against things that we've received in ways that are that make a lot of sense. It makes sense that we have those kinds of experiences. But I do think that's important.
Jordan
I think that really, when you're trying to answer this question of what religion is, you're really getting at the heart of what it means to be human. You're trying to ask what is the human you know, and without getting really in depth into that. It just makes me think of there's a Christian author who wrote a book, he's a college professor, his name is James Smith, he wrote a book called You are What You Worship.
Jordan
And he said, if you wanted to find the religious center of American society, he's like, you wouldn't go to a temple, you wouldn't go to something you would go to the mall, he's like, what you find is you enter and immediately you're inundated with smells and with these pictures of people wearing certain clothes or wearing certain jewelry or looking a certain way and they're happy and you're walking in there you're inundated with these visions of what of you know the quote and quote good life.
Jordan
And they're completely want the interesting thing he says is they're not trying to reason with you. They're not trying to get you to think, do I have enough money for this? Or is this a good use of my time, they're trying to make you forget that. And they're trying to go right to they're appealing right to your senses. And they're trying to go right at the, you know, as your sensuality like they're they're trying to take that route to convincing you that you need their products.
Jordan
And so I think that this is this is part of the challenge throughout human history is we have the senses, and the temptation is to be dominated in to allow ourselves to shape the way that we view the world around these the sensual perceptions that we have. That's one temptation and that can be helpful, good. But then we're constantly tempted to not use reason we're tempted to only use our senses and rather and avoid reason or because reason is difficult. This is the reality is reasons very difficult.
Jordan
And so I think that that's the combination or the relationship between faith and reason. It's something that you brought up a number of these other tweets that I found, I don't know if you want to add anything about that, or just your thoughts on the relationship between senses and reason. And I would say epistemology, I mean, how do we know what to trust between senses and reason? Do you have any thoughts on that?
Jameson Lopp
Yeah, I mean, I think one of the big pieces of overlap is the challenge, the difficulty, the amount of work involved to try to explain things using logic and facts. And this is one of the reasons why I started going down this path was to try to figure out are Bitcoiners, who are ardently religious, being hypocritical with regard to some of the ethos of Bitcoin, or what I'm really leaning more towards is that I think that in general, almost everyone is hypocritical with regards to some of the main ethos of Bitcoin, you know, the tropes around, don't trust, verify, and so on.
Jameson Lopp
And I've seen this play out over the years from several different perspectives over things that I promote, like privacy and security, these are other major ethos that a lot of people in the space talk about. And yet, at least from my own anecdotal experience, and in working in this particular space for 10 years of security, is that human nature is to seek and prioritize convenience over almost all else.
Jameson Lopp
And so the way that plays out with privacy is that very few people even think about privacy until it's too late. And something terrible has happened. Similarly, very few people spend a lot of time thinking about their security until it's too late and something has happened to them. Religion, it could be interesting to try to get into understanding that more. But it does seem like a lot of people, they take the narratives that have been presented to them, you often through family, it's like it's a traditional thing. It's part of your upbringing.
Jameson Lopp
And I can say from my own experience, it's very difficult to reject the things that you have been taught for several decades, especially when there's the additional societal and peer pressure of understanding that you're essentially going to be ostracizing yourself from a decent portion of your friends and family.
Jordan
I fully understand that in ways that again, I'm not going to get into on the air, but I would love to chat with you off air because I completely agree there comes a point where certain beliefs that you have, or certain conclusions that you arrive at that are maybe are out of step with the Overton window or out of step with some sort of the group of people that you've been formed by and grown up within that reality of if I say what I believe about this, I could lieu cost could be huge. I think that's a, it's a challenging thing. Again, it's also necessary, you know, if what we're finding is true, then you know, we should be willing to surrender the appearance of unity that isn't actually true unity. So I think this is a great thing to bring up.
Jameson Lopp
You had a trigger word probably there which is true. Okay. I think that is one of the basis of all of the conflict around religious beliefs and so on and so forth is what is truth. And especially, it's been a while since I really dug into this stuff, but over the past week or so, it reminds me of going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole and trying to quote and quote, understand Bitcoin.
Jameson Lopp
And my decade of going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole culminated in me writing a really long essay entitled, Why Nobody Understands Bitcoin. And I think that is very similar to some of the issues here, which is that if you really want to perfectly verify some fundamental truth. You end up going down further and further down, whether it's like the historical rabbit hole or the scientific knowledge rabbit hole, and you can get to like the atomic level of things, and then you get to like sub microscopic level.
Jameson Lopp
And then you know, most of the religious things turn into talking about creationism and the nature of reality itself. And eventually you hit the limits of human knowledge, like human knowledge, we simply do not understand everything, because to do so would require kind of omniscience and godlike understanding of the universe. And so at some point, as a human, you hit your own limits, you hit the limits of all human knowledge. And you have to decide, you know, this is the point at which I am satisfied that, you know, the set of assumptions I'm operating off of are good enough that I can call my conclusions to be truthful.
Jordan
Yeah. And this is, again, I think, I think you're right, you're identifying part of the issue, again, an epistemological, and how do we know what are the standards of knowledge that we have, and I think this is where some of the disagreement again, my understanding of it, but just the disagreement with and with some of the way that religious faith is presented at odds with science, I don't think it's helpful the way that it's framed and this is why.
Jordan
First of all, I think it's great that you acknowledge, like, everyone has a bent, everyone has something that they're bent for. So shout out to Marty Bent every we haven't, we have him as a bent too. But everyone, everyone has a bent, the thing that they're most familiar with. So scientists, they're going to tend to put more emphasis on scientific standards of evidence, people who, you know, I was a Bible philosophy major. And so that's just more my comfort zone than getting into an exhaustive conversation about Euclidean geometry, or, you know, some of these things I'm not as strong in.
Jordan
But one of the things that it's easy to do is to minimize or just look down on the things that you're not as strong in and to elevate your particular area of expertise, as if that is the more important or more real one. And so the reason why I think this is important is because the reality is that we have different standards of evidence within the world. We operate in these within several standards of evidence all the time. And it's not that you can exist without one or the other, we have to constantly operate within multiple worlds.
Jordan
And the two primary ones that I think will be helpful to talk about in this example would be the difference between historical evidential standards, and scientific evidential standards. So scientific evidential standards are things that we can go out and reproducible, you know, we can do experiments, we can repeat experiments, and demonstrate repeatedly that certain things work a certain way within the world.
Jordan
Now, there's other things like historical standards, you know, we live in a country that has a constitution. That was I think, most people would agree, there could be some radical skeptics who maybe not, but was, you know, was written by a certain group of men a certain period of time, who were influenced by certain things. And even though none of us can prove scientifically, that these men existed, or that, you know, we can't we don't have blood samples from these guys and we can't compare them with active samples.
Jordan
You know, even though we can't prove scientifically, you know, these things that this narrative that we've been presented is true, we still go along with it. And we're okay saying that based on we have this book that, you know, these books are these things that were written in this time, there's things that are left over from these guys that they wrote things that the ways that they reasoned, you know, we can look at them and have a reasonable degree of certainty that these things are true.
Jordan
The fact that we can't have scientific certainty is not somehow an indictment on historical lines of evidence. It's like comparing apples and oranges, I see this argument happen. And I see people doing this. And again, I'm sympathetic to it. But I just I don't think it's helpful, because it's trying to force an understanding of the world. It's what I'm trying to present the primacy of one standard of evidence that is part of the world we live in at the expense of minimizing another part of the real world that we live in as well. And so again, there's challenges to both these things. The challenge, obviously, with historical lines of evidence is people can lie. And so in theory, people can be wrong, they can just be deceived, and they can present things through their own lens. And that can be a challenge. And that can cause problems. I fully recognize all those things.
Jameson Lopp
I mean, there's a provenance issues, right? Sort of chain of custody and retelling of things or especially I mean, if you want to get into Biblical stuff, I guess there's, you can question translations. And I guess the fact that most of these books, you know, they were probably written on parchment that didn't hold up very well. And they had to get rewritten many times. And who knows what was put in or taken out or so. So on and so forth.
Jameson Lopp
I mean, one of the more interesting classes that I took when I was in university was a history class, and it actually ended up being more of a biblical history class, a completely secular history class, but focused a lot on Jesus. And my main takeaways from that class is that there's more than adequate provenance that there was a man named Jesus who existed and the time that we've been told and that he went around and that you know, he amassed a following, I think there was sufficient evidence that he was killed by the Romans, and then it gets kind of murkier, because you know, a lot of the things that were written about him were done decades, if not generations later.
Jameson Lopp
And then the books, the sort of looking at the way the Bible was constructed, is that happened over I think, many centuries. And there were plenty of biblical era texts and accounts that did not go into the Bible. And, you know, we don't know anything really about the reasoning behind why some things were put in the Bible and others were left out.
Jordan
I would debate that a little bit. I mean, there definitely were things that were presented as being from certain time period that again, these weren't just guys who were just spitballing. You know, there were like, one of the things I was just listening to Chris Distefano, have you met with him, he's a comedian. So he just went on Bill Maher's podcast not too long ago. And you have Chris Distefano, who is I mean, I don't know if he's Catholic, I believe he was raised Catholic. And he just said he didn't put much stock in it. But then he read this book called The Case for Christ. It's written by this guy who was a investigative journalist who became a Christian in his adulthood. And so we just read through this whole thing.
Jordan
And one of the arguments that Bill Maher presented against it was just the fact that as far as we understand the many of the either gospel counts, the Gospel counts are written, as far as we know, around 30 to 40 years after Jesus lived or for, you know, 40 or 50 years, so that understandably, to a certain degree, like raised questions for Bill Maher, he just said, I appreciate him on tons of things. He's been a voice of sanity and many friends.
Jordan
But so yeah, just this reality of the fact that these things weren't written for 40 years that caused him great pause. He gave him great pause about trusting the trustworthiness. Again, there's explanations for those things. And these guys are being literally chased, pursued and all across the Roman Empire by the most powerful empire. You know, the fact that, you know, it took them a while to have time to, or they chose to take a while to sit down and write down their experiences.
Jordan
Again, I fully understand why that could be something that could be questionable. All I'm trying to suggest is that the fact that it took that long, there's no way these guys could have laid out the truth. You know, the fact that it took this long, that's just that doesn't follow, especially in this is, I would say another thing that would help especially given the consequences that these guys articulated from their own mouths, for telling things that were not like knowingly telling lies, people object, understand which a certain degree, they object to some of the gravity that is expressed to the consequences of things that are called sin.
Jordan
So lying, you know, there's a verse in the book of Revelation where it says, it gives us list of people who will end up in hell because of their sins, and lying is one of them. So if you are somebody who is one of the leaders of this burgeoning movement, and then you're you're saying this is the consequence for lying, and then you turn around and are lying, you're going to be a hypocrite. Now, most people obviously, in our experience, we've seen tons of religious figures be hypocrites. And there's plenty of non religious figures who are hypocrites as well.
Jordan
And so again, we're immediately skeptical of claims like this, because of the how much easier it would be to believe that someone is just either hypocritical or wrong. Again, I think these are understandable objections. But I don't think none of these are silver bullets, that somehow are somehow impossible for thoughtful people to believe.
Jameson Lopp
I mean, I think my short takeaway is that I am skeptical of any and all things are originating from humans. That's not, that doesn't mean that they're worthless, it just means that you need to keep in the back of your head that there may be imperfections, flaws, things left out, who knows?
Jordan
A hundred percent. I would say I agree. And that's where the Christians would come out. And the Christians would say, yes, if it was just left up to humans, then that is a perfectly even more reasonable thing to say. But the Christian claim is that God is superseding this process. Again, you can, you don't have to believe that. But that's part of the claim, though, is that God is superseding this process and helping ensure that what he wants to communicate is communicated.
Jordan
And so I think one of the challenges for especially people like us who have the ability, that we have a technological ability for precision that and a certain expectation of different fields like science and history that are so much different than people were able to have 2000 years ago, that it's easy for us to dismiss different evidential standards. So for instance, it's easy for us to dismiss the way that things are done within the scriptures.
Jordan
So one example of this would be of the four Gospel narratives, there's three of them, where it presents the color of the garment that Jesus was wearing. Prior just prior to going to the cross. There's two of them that says the garment was purple. And there's one of them that says his garment was Scarlet. And so modern people, we read that and we immediately like that's complete, you know, look, this is, you know, prima facie evidence that this is, this just isn't true. This didn't happen or that these guys are wrong.
Jordan
And so what we again this is just one example that we don't we don't take into account is just like many older texts when they're telling things, they have more things that they're accomplishing, than just giving the simple history. They're laying out again, like multiple layers of things. So in the case of this example, within Jewish tradition, they would offer one day a year, they would offer a sacrifice, they would sacrifice a goat for the sins of the people.
Jordan
And so there was one goat who would be slain its throat would be cut, and they would offer it as a sacrifice, there was another goat that they would, you know, the, the priest would put his hands on the animal, he would basically, you know, pray this prayer, that would ceremonially transfer the sins of the nation to this animal, and then they would let it go into the wilderness.
Jordan
And so in Jewish tradition, the color of the they would tie a cord around this, this goats neck when they let it out into the into the wilderness, and the color of the cord was Scarlet. And so the interesting thing about this is the context in which this color of the garment is given is in the context of releasing the criminal Barabbas and letting him go free, and then sending Jesus to the cross.
Jordan
And so there's biblical scholars who say, like, again, there's very good reasons based on the fact that that's the context, that the author, I believe it's Matthew's goal in writing what he wrote about the color of the garment, he's not trying to make a historical point, he's using this thing to make a theological point about who Jesus was in his role. And so I think there's things like that, within all aiming lots of ancient literature, that present challenges for us when we want to take these things seriously.
Jordan
We want to give you know, especially people, even people who aren't Christians, or something, they still want to give these things a fair shake. And there's historical and just cultural things that provide challenges to being able to do that.
Jameson Lopp
Oh, it sounds like you would agree with me that it's probably not a good idea to take the Bible, literally.
Jordan
I think I would want to define terms a little bit more than that. But I think I would agree with what I think you mean by that, which is things are not always as straightforward as they appear. And we could go to a lot of different things, a lot of different examples of that. One of the things that I would I would love to kind of get into is, again, we talked about this a little bit, you'd said, religions are interesting in the sense that they are opt in consensus networks, some are more centralized than others, and adherence to any given religion tend to be maximalists, who consider all other religions to be wrong, then you're gonna read a couple more of these, the responses to that and then get to one of yours responses to that.
Jordan
Now, Robert Breedlove replied and said religion is also interesting in that it tends to lower the cost of establishing trust or maintaining cooperation among adherence to a particular religion, and much the same way that money does for network participants. And then someone else replied to that and said, religions are also interesting to me because they work without any verification at all. They managed to achieve network effects strictly through this the established trust Robert mentioned, rather than any sort of evidence, how can one be a religious Bitcoin or without mental gymnastics? To which he replied, what you mentioned earlier, this is an apparent hypocrisy from my perspective that I'm trying to understand its mimetics all the way down, perhaps we fool ourselves that Bitcoiners verify rather than trust.
Jordan
I think that totally makes sense. The one pushback again, that I would give from the perspective of someone who does, you know, self identify as a religious Bitcoiners would be I think, that Don't Trust, Verify is a very useful tool. I just don't think it's an absolute tool. It's a great hammer. And for hammering tasks, it's great. I just don't think that Don't Trust, Verify is this eternal Maxim, this eternal tool that's good in every single context. And my basis for saying that is because all of us have exist in have human relationships to which we can't provide this level of scrutiny. They can't, or the trust that we put in our loved ones can't stand up to this test of don't trust verify.
Jameson Lopp
There's so many things that you can't verify. We can't verify what's going on in other people's heads. Like, as I said, from a cosmological, and even like understanding of the universe perspective, we simply don't have explanations once you get to a certain level. So at some point, you have to decide that you're sufficiently satisfied with your what you believe your understanding is of a given situation.
Jordan
Yeah. And what's your level of comfort in operating within trust within a given relationship, right? I think again, marriage relationships or you know, some of the most intimate relationships that you have relationship with your kids. I know your kids we know we are born completely dependent upon our, for better and for in many cases, awful, for worse, but I think this is something just this is the reality of being human in the world is humans are different than than animals in which, you know, many animals within a few hours of birth are able to run around on their own, they're able to secure food for themselves, you know, humans, humans are not like that.
Jordan
And so I think that, again, I think that by virtue of seeing that, by virtue of our experience, we can acknowledge that you know, trust is, verification is important. We shouldn't just blindly trust. And I would argue that God does not ask us to blindly trust. You know, this is not it, there's a difference between faith and the idea of fightism. Have you heard that idea? Fightism?
Jameson Lopp
Doesn't ring a bell.
Jordan
Okay, so fightism is basically trust for trust sake. It's basically like, it basically we're saying, like, you can do it, if you just believe, you know, if you just believe hard enough, you know, then you'll you can do whatever you set your mind to like that is very much at odds with the Christian understanding of faith, which we kind of mentioned a little bit earlier where, you know, it gets back to the relationship between reason and faith.
Jordan
One of the things that you you see God in the Scriptures say, is he's, you know, Israel, in his people Israel are not going along with what he's asking him to do. And his words to them are not trust me, his reasons that are what he says to them is, come let us reason together. He's actually asking them, he's like, trying to encourage them to think about the course of action that they're making.
Jordan
And then another place in other places God are the apostle Paul writes, and he compares people who are not, or people who are not living in accord with the way that God has designed the world the way that he's revealed to be, he says that they're living like unreasoning animals. And so Paul is saying, actually, the problem with some of these people is that they're, they're just operating according to their desires. They're these physical desires that they have, rather than, rather than thinking.
Jordan
They don't want to do the hard work to think they just want to, you know, be free or to live. And so I think that I don't think that at least Christianity, I can't speak authoritatively to these other things. But I think that the the relationship, the hostility that some people perceive between the two, I think, is overdone. I understand why that is because, you know, the belief in things like miracles, belief, and, you know, things like read the resurrection from the dead. These are difficult to accept things for especially modern people to believe. But I don't think they're as hostile as the Bible does not have the same level of issues that many people who are not religious attribute to the Bible.
Jameson Lopp
So, I don't know if you saw, but I actually ran some polls on both Nasir and Twitter. Oh, I did not. I said, have you verified bitcoins supply schedule yourself? Or are you just confident in it, because you believe that enough, other people have verified? And, you know, as expected, higher percentage on noster saying that they verify it was like 60%. And then it flipped on Twitter only when they only 40% said that they verified themselves. So 60% were trusting, but some other people had some good points, that it still works out fairly well, in terms of, you know, bitcoins security model, because you don't need to have everyone verify the rules of the network. You know, you can even if only one person is verifying and they see that something's going wrong, they can kind of raise the alarm.
Jordan
Yeah, especially in a world where we have something like social media where one person can can access, you know, can make their voice heard, to a degree that, you know, again, hundreds of years ago would have been impossible, right. You know, before especially before the creation of something like the printing press, you know, with the center of the printing press, you can make you know, your your ideas and your thoughts, you can disseminate them much, widely more quickly than before that case, so I would agree.
Jordan
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Jordan
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Jordan
The other thing that I want to ask you about, you tweeted this and said, free your mind. And then you know, as many people on the internet present a glorious meme from the office. So the the meme says, your religion does not prohibit me from anything it prohibits you learn the difference. And so, again, this set off a firestorm in the comments below. So I'm gonna read a couple of those, it says, nitwit, said, if everything is permissible, is that true freedom? Can we own? Or can our own thoughts, actions and choices actually unwittingly enslave us? I'm not being snarky, I'm just asking philosophical questions. You replied, ultimately, everything has constraints. We're all imprisoned in a variety of ways. Many are involuntary, others are voluntary. So let's just get into that question. Again, this question of freedom, and what is freedom? So we've already addressed the question of what is truth and kind of talked about how can we know. So now we're just you know, getting into this other small question of what is freedom. Could you kind of articulate how did you understand freedom?
Jameson Lopp
Yeah, I mean, I see it as an agency, to be able to make your own decisions and act upon them. You know the opposite of freedom is, you know, having constraints that prevent you from doing specific things. And this is, of course, where it gets tricky again, and I think a lot of the controversy and contention around that is that most of what people think about in terms of religious constraints tends to be I guess, around morals and ethics and like, what is good? How should you act as a human, this is a whole other rabbit hole, that's interesting to get down.
Jameson Lopp
Obviously, some people believe that you can't really have morals and ethics without a higher being who you're essentially trying to satisfy their dictates or decrees, or you're trying to do an act the way that they want you to, I think this was one of the fundamental issues that I had that started causing me to distance myself from religion, which is that I was unable to square, the idea that there was an all powerful being that created me and therefore, is also supposed to know all of past, present future and you'll fully understand everything.
Jameson Lopp
And that they created me as a flawed individual, that then if I use the brain that that I have been bestowed with to question these things, and to act in ways that I believe are moral, despite what I'm told otherwise, that you know that doom is me to some sort of eternal punishment, it seems unfair to say the least. And it's very hard for me to respect such an entity that would put me in a situation like that.
Jordan
Sure. And that makes total sense that we that actually brings us to there's like a, you had a great back and forth with Jimmy. Where he, this kind of, just get into kind of what you mentioned, you said I don't respond nicely to threats. This includes those who point a theological gun in my head and threatened me with eternal damnation. Jimmy replied, that's like saying Bitcoin is a monetary gun to your head threatening you with eternal debasement. The choice to buy bitcoin is yours, the choice to follow God is yours. The consequences are what they are, there are no threats.
Jordan
And then you responded Fiat as the threat of eternal debasement with literal guns behind it. Damnation is a narrative constructed by humans. It's noteworthy because only some organized religion decided to use the threat of death and damnation in order to exert control over the populace. The only I guess the problem, like the inconsistency that I would see there is, again, just the begging the question of damnation is a narrative constructed by humans.
Jordan
So that would seem to be you know, standing on the same ground that is trying to establish you know, right. Like that's the question because the Christian claim is that no God actually exists. This is you know, he explained out this narrative of like, this is the world we live in where actions have consequences. And again, this is not this is not some sort of accusation or some sort of like threatening of you. He's just stating very matter factly.
Jordan
These are the consequences of, you know, choices. This is, you know, this is just logic, you know, if you if A, then B, I think that's that's kind of the way it's presented. I think, again, the, you know, a specific example of this would be, you know, God, in the biblical narrative, God tells humanity, he says, if you eat of the fruit of this tree, you will surely die. He just basically, he's not threatening them. This is not consequence. He's just saying, it's just like saying, you know, this is a poison thing. If you eat it, you're going to die. You know that he's not, he's not in any way threatening them. He's just telling them, Hey, watch out, you know, I just created you, you're in this place that you're just learning about.
Jordan
And then hear is, you know, here's this mortal threat, don't do this. Now, that could bring us into a whole nother set of questions, which is kind of like it's more in the vein of what you described, which is why would God do that? And so and so this is, that's a great question. But that's a whole different, it's a whole different level of things. Because then you get into here I am as a finite human being, questioning the decision making prowess of a, an all powerful entity who, you know, made and designed everything. And so the fact that he would do something that me the finite creature wouldn't understand that actually shouldn't to me that isn't surprising, that there'd be some differences of opinion. But I don't know. Did you want to kind of elaborate on that?
Jameson Lopp
Yeah, well, so this is where I like to draw the distinction between deism and theism and why I think as an agnostic, deism makes a lot more sense to me. And you may have also seen some of my touching on, like, simulation theory and stuff. Yeah, I think someone asked me a question about my views on God being an alien, that's, you know, just playing with us. I, you know, amongst the infinite number of possible explanations and possibilities for a creator or being, I think it makes, it makes more sense to me that a creator is running the universe as some sort of experiment, because they want to see what would happen.
Jameson Lopp
It's much more difficult for me to, so that would be the deism. It's like, okay, some some thing created the universe. And, you know, maybe they care about what happens, but either way, they're pretty hands off, and they just, they're just letting it run. And then whatever happens, happens. And then of course, the more theistic aspect would be okay, the Creator created the universe, and they have a lot of reasons.
Jameson Lopp
And they are, they're meddling with stuff, you know, they're sending, they're creating their, their son, and they're sending prophets and manipulating us in different ways for whatever their end goal is that we don't fully understand. And it's a lot more difficult for me to square that as sort of an intervening God with the fact that God is also supposed to already be omniscient and understand everything that is going to happen, like, why even bother going through the motions if you already know everything that's gonna happen? Right?
Jordan
Yeah. And again, that makes sense. And I think it makes sense on one level. And the reason I would say this, it definitely makes sense if you're an engineer. It definitely makes sense if you're, if you're a programmer, right? Because, like, if, again, you're this, you're and again, this is, there's a reason why this sentiment is pretty common within the, I would say, within the technology industry, you know, this is not known for being a bastion of Christian belief.
Jordan
But I think part of this would be, again, when we think about maybe this is, this is a waste of resources, you know, to create this thing that, you know, has these flaws that ends up with all these, all this waste from one perspective. At the same time, you know, you just the reality of the pushback would be the romantic side of things would be, you know, God could have created a world full of robots, but then that's not you know, that's then you know, what you're getting, you know, with this way, like the in the world, the way that God lays out and the way that it's laid out in the scriptures is God is this God who creates humanity to be in one sense his children.
Jordan
So he creates you know, people who who bear his image. She wants, he creates them to, to live in live like he does. Basically live with the motivated by what he's motivated by in doing the things that he does. So God creates and then creates humanity to kind of be sub creators to go out into the world and take the raw materials of the world and make them turn them into useful things.
Jordan
And so, you know, if God just you know, makes everybody automatons and you know, just he boom like that's there's not there's no real drama there. There's no real, you know, mystery there. But the nature and this really what you're talking about gets at the heart of who God is. And you know what does God's character like what type of being is he? And so the ways that the scripture answers this question would be that God is love.
Jordan
And love does not coerce, you know, love, love tries to reason and tries to woo. You know, again, there's no if you're in a relationship or not, but like, this is what he thinks we're, you know, we don't just walk around, you know, finding a woman, and then grabbing her by the hair, and just pulling her along, to go along with our desire for her to do what we want, I want to have this type of life, and so you're gonna come along with me, like, the way that this works, generally speaking, is, you know, we reason with the girl or, you know, or, you know, we reason there's a reason process, we present ourselves as why we're a good match, or why we're somebody that they should want to spend the rest of their life with.
Jordan
And so this reason process that is costly for us, is actually, you know, it's it's a big part of what it is to be human. And so from that perspective, again, even though the cost, you know, God doesn't create this, the other thing I would say is God doesn't create the world, flawed, God creates the world in such a way that he can be disobeyed, he can be not trusted. And then there's, and then we'll get to experience, you know, the consequence of that, but he does not create a, you know, a world that's got these that like, is this amazing, that's this awful place, he creates a good place.
Jordan
And then it again, gives humans the ability to, to do what they want, within reason, while still being while still reserving the right and the ability to step in and intercede. And the reason and this what I would say is the reason why that's not because again, you could you could say, well, there's been millions of people who've died. And so that's millions of people going to hell, and all these other things. And so why doesn't God just intervene in all these, you know, in all these situations, so that nobody has to go through that?
Jordan
Again, that's a great question. But now we've moved beyond. We're moving beyond what is and we're trying to get at, well, why would he do that that way? And so that's just another level of challenge, but I don't think God intervening. The fact that he intervenes. I just think about like this, like, if I'm walking if you're walking down the street, and I see you, you don't see the car coming, I see the car coming towards you. I run into the road and I shove you out of the way. I have violated your will. I haven't asked your opinion. I just have interceded, and I've pushed you out of the way of oncoming danger. And I've rescued you.
Jordan
Now, again, have I violated? Yeah, I did. But again, it was because I assume that we're both on the same under the same, you know, goals to a certain degree of wanting to be alive. And so God interceding, he's preserving, he's like, I'm giving you free freewill. I'm giving you the ability to make choices. And yet, like God reserves the right to step in and save us from the consequences of our own decisions. And so I think that's kind of the the tension that we walk it. Just in terms of the logic of it. I think there, I don't think it's illogical. I think it's there's definitely challenges, moral challenges that arises, especially for us, but it's not illogical.
Jameson Lopp
Well, there's, I guess the question of like God as a micromanager. If you believe that God is omnipotent, and omniscient, and whatever, then there's no reason why God could not intercede and absolutely everything. There's but there's so many explanations, I think that make it possible to explain, you know how some of these things can be true. For example, and you know, I'm sure this will be blasphemous to many people. But this kind of goes along my whole simulation theory thing is that whatever God is, from a relative standpoint, from our perspective, God is omniscient and omnipotent.
Jameson Lopp
And you could say, I guess, operating on what is it like a different cartouche of skill, you know, of amount of energy that they can manipulate. And so from a relative perspective, they very well may be all knowing and all seeing and be able to manipulate anything. But this is once again, where we get beyond the scope of human comprehension. Just because from our perspective, it's infinite. It doesn't mean that such a being what actually be unlimited. You know, we don't know what constraints if any God may have and it is not, it's not even really possible for us to fathom such a thing, because once again, we're talking about what is it outside of our universe that we can even perceive.
Jordan
Yeah. And I think the challenge there would still be like, if so, if God is an alien, then the question still come becomes, well, where does the alien you know, where does the alien come from? You know, where does the end? And I would say this would especially like that really that all that does is push the question back farther into into time, you know that that would be kind of my my argument for it. And I think one of the, one of the best things, the most helpful things that I've read and or listened to, on this topic is a scientist named Dr. Stephen Meyer.
Jordan
He was like went to Cambridge got his doctoral, doctoral postgrad in, what is it in, like, evolutionary history, something along those lines. And so basically, he comes out and he's basically he's like he, you know, the issue that we that we have is something like, the ability of Darwinian evolution. So there's lots of people who understand who are not Christians, they recognize that there's the limits of Darwinian evolution, right?
Jordan
Like we can't demonstrate that you know, where the bang came from, it can only describe the post bang world. And so, one of the things he describes that, again, there's people more popular level, I would say, people who, they wouldn't necessarily grant that they think that, you know, Darwin evolution can, you know, provide an explanation of the origin of life period. But one of the things that Meyer pushes back on is he says, you know, Darwin himself could be forgiven for believing that because Darwin didn't know about DNA.
Jordan
But one of the things that he points out is when the moment that we discovered that within every single cell of everything that's ever existed, is a literal, programmable set of instructions, that you can, you know, adjust and produce predictable changes in, he's like that, the idea that we just, you know, just this thing just happened, just kind of really just goes right out the window. And he says, basically, because every, in our experience, if we're going to use that, as a standard is scientific, you know, what we can demonstrate every single thing that we know about, you know, wherever we find coded information, it's the product of an intelligent mind.
Jordan
And so, you know, he points out, you know, when they found the Rosetta Stone, you know, in the desert, they didn't go, oh, look, the product of wind and erosion. And, you know, even though nobody saw how this thing was made, nobody was there to observe it, they just, they, we knew that it wasn't the product of winning erosion. And it was because it was programmable information, repeated symbols, these same kinds of things. And it was the product of an intelligent mind.
Jordan
And so, so this is the same similar kind of thing is, you know, the alien would still, I mean, I would imagine, still be created out of some sort of organic material, he would still have, you know, these are all assumptions. Yeah, I know. But there's, there are limitations in order for life to exist. So you still would need some sort of nutrition, you still need some sort of, you know, something along these lines, if it's not, if it's not in an eternal, self sustaining creature, you know, it's still a derivative creature, you'd still would need to come. It'd be derivative from something be dependent on certain things.
Jordan
And so this is the claim is that God is this independent, being. He's this creature that is completely self sustaining. He doesn't rely on anyone to exist. And so the really the question that comes down to is, is the, for most people, like you come to the point of, is the universe eternal? Or is God eternal? Somewhere along the lines, we have, you know, at some point, everyone acknowledges that there's this miraculous situation that is completely outside of our experience, and our way of understanding how the world works.
Jordan
Is that the result of, you know, an eternal being who, you know, began this somewhere he existed eternally but then caused the material world and to exist, or is this somehow other than that, you know, did this process just come about and we just have no access to it. To which many people would say, yet. And so their faith would be in there, you know, there'd be, there's many people who operate by a basic faith that well, just with given enough time, well, we'll find out more information, perhaps get get closer to that. So I would argue we both sides of the equation are still operating on a kind of faith, they're still operating on a trust that, you know, either time or some other, you know, Discovery will, you know, will provide the information that we don't currently have.
Jameson Lopp
Yeah, I mean, I think you've hit on why I think, well, I look at both atheists and theists from a similar perspective is because there's ultimately unanswerable questions. And the thing that really irks me though, is just how many assumptions people make, for example. Well, first of all, we can't grasp the concept of infinity, and that's true, whether we're talking about space time, whatever.
Jameson Lopp
I mean, we don't even know that we understand time, right? So, like, we don't even know that the Big Bang was the beginning of everything. We don't know that there could have been something before that, or maybe the before doesn't even make sense from our own limited perspective of what time is. It's very mind boggling. So it's, I don't know, I think the most honest thing that we can do is to try to state what our assumptions are, and then, you know, what we built off.
Jordan
I would agree, I think that again, that's a good faith way of doing it. Again, the one from a Christian perspective, the one thing that I would add is, the Christian claim is not that. And again, this is going to be controversial for some people, but it shouldn't be. There's some people who were like, I know, I've studied, I've studied the scriptures and so I believe. In my own experience in the expense of many other people, it's not that we did this exhaustive study, and then we came, you know, to believe these things. It's like, in my case, I grew up in church, hated every minute of it, you know, wanted to just live my life and do what I wanted to do.
Jordan
And even though I believe these things, on a basic level, I believed, you know, I believe Jesus was real, I just didn't want anything to do with him. I wanted to go chase girls and play basketball and you know, do all these things. And but there came a point where, again, the thing that I knew that was true that I was just didn't want having to do with the thing that kind of broke through it. And the thing that changed was just the sky, he preached the Bible, I heard the same story a million times, I could have, I could have communicated to you the same message that he told that day. But he shared it. And it was just basically like lights turned on.
Jordan
And it wasn't just I believe that it again, mentally I mentally assent to these truths. It was God loves me. And like, I know that God loves me in a way that materially changed how I saw, and my desires to live in the world. And so the example is, I again, only went to this, when this happened, I was at a Christian camp as well. And the only reason I went there was to chase girls and play basketball. And the rest of the week, I ended up I was like, all I wanted to do was get alone by myself, and read the Bible, and pray, which I would have told you, you were a complete moron.
Jordan
Preposterous that I would ever have volunteer voluntarily done such things. And so that just again, I wasn't some saint who became perfect overnight. It wasn't that at all, but I just had a different set of desires, that initiated at this particular point in time that have been continued on and, you know, born different things. So that would be what I would say is it's not the Christian claim is not fundamentally, like the Christian claim is that, like, God stepped in, in Jesus. And he communicates his truth that is the reality of who he is, in a personal way, through the preaching of His Word.
Jordan
But there's still like, there's this a testifying to the reality of what he's saying. So there's the communicate message, but then he is actually stepping in and interceding and kind of having the meat cute of these of these two things. So that would I would say, again, that the reason I mentioned that is because the Christian claim is not we're all out here trying to figure out what's going on. And the Christians are, you know, they've got their Bible, and they're studying and trying to make sense of it. And they're just doing the best they have.
Jordan
The Christian claim, which is, again, I granted it sounds insane, is that no, like, God actually is confirmed these things like he he himself has communicated you know, these things. I grant all of the, what about the Muslims say the same thing. The Jews say the same thing, all these guys have their same thing. And again, I would the same thing, I would say the same thing to that I would say to somebody who would say to me, well, Bitcoin only, but what about Ethereum?
Jordan
What about, you know, those, all these things, these guys all say that there's a great tool, but you know, why should I believe yours? And then you go back to, you know, the certain the key specific components of Bitcoin that would make it unique. I do the same thing. I go back to specific points within the Christian claim, the Christian gospel that would differentiate themselves from other religious claims. So I'll give you another another word on that.
Jameson Lopp
Well, you're trying to I guess, tie it more into Bitcoin, do you or have you come across more people who seem to be whether it's deifying Satoshi, or using religious narratives like the Immaculate Conception of Bitcoin or in general, positioning Bitcoin as a sort of state of perfection that was bestowed upon us that we must not. We want it, we must remain your sacrosanct we must not, you know, abuse it type of notion like this is what I was getting at is like one of my concerns of ways that this could have long term negative consequences on the ecosystem. If we start approaching Bitcoin from more of a religious view than science and engineering view.
Jordan
I would hundred percent agree with you both, again, you see the dangers, actually, let me just ask you this, what are the dangers of that you see, and then I can kind of share kind of the couple that I see?
Jameson Lopp
So, this is one thing that I've talked about a bit more over the past year or so, I think there's some overlap with what you could call the ossification camp of, you know, the Bitcoin protocol is, some people might say perfect, others might say, It's good enough. And it is proven itself over the test of time, and therefore, we must not touch it, because we're more likely to break it than to improve it. And of course, I, as an engineer, I see all your software networks, these are living systems that are maintained by humans, and if you're not improving them than they do tend to degrade.
Jordan
Yeah, I would. So you see those things. And again, you see those things way better than I'm going to be able to see them or articulate them. The thing that I would see in the problem with that I would see is more spiritual, which would be the temptation for humans all throughout history, is to take a good gift, and absolute ties it. And try to turn it into something that gives them ultimate meaning, or they try to take this thing that's good and turn it into something that it was never meant to be.
Jordan
And so the thing that I would point out too, is just that, I mean, money does not exist for its own sake, you know, money is a tool that exists to serve higher ends and bigger picture things. And so to look at something like Bitcoin and try to, you know, orient your life around it in such a way, as you know, into, like, tie your identity to it, and try and tie it, the preserving of it to, I don't know, like the reason why humanity exists or something, something along those lines, where it does get weird and cringe and all this and I fully embrace and I agree with you, it quickly, the religious discourse or the discourse within Bitcoin that tries to talk about it in religious terms can quickly get very cringe and go beyond what I think is either healthy, defensible, good, or reasonable.
Jameson Lopp
Yeah, sorry, it was similar thing that I also see is, well, you know, the meme Bitcoin fixes this. And I think that that is getting applied a bit more widely than probably, it should be is that if people attach themselves to the notion that Bitcoin will fix many of humanity and society's problems, I think they're going to end up disillusioned and disappointed and, you know, that could also lead to some negative outcomes, but it's like you're saying, you know, your money is it's a tool, and it can be used for good or bad, and I think it is very difficult to talk about how do we improve money, and with the understanding that improving money also means that it will be used for evil things.
Jordan
Yeah, hundred percent. And this is again, this is another thing that people it just doesn't make any sense to me. And I'm sure you've heard all these arguments of, you know, oh, you know, Bitcoin is used for drug dealing, it's like the dollar is used for a hundred times more drug dealing than Bitcoin it. It just doesn't make any sense. This level of objection. Again, I'm like, let Russia use it all day long. Let Iraq, Iran, anybody, like use it all day long like this is, I mean, the reality is that good things are used for for bad ends. That's just what happened.
Jordan
But that's just what happens. But the benefit that it that Bitcoin has to the rest of us is a good enough and valuable enough thing to still, you know, desire for it to be around and still take action to incentivize its adoption. Even though you're going to get this small percentage of people we're going to use it for truly awful, isn't it child sex trafficking, all kinds of truly awful things. And the benefits outweigh the cost.
Jameson Lopp
I think there's a lot of oh well, I mean, I'm sure there's many different sorts of freedom arguments, but it definitely makes me think of Second Amendment firearms arguments as well. So the vast majority of firearms are not used for bad things, and in fact, are used for defensive purposes. But you know, the natural consequence. And this is going back to the sort of freedom argument, but the natural consequence of getting giving people more freedom is that you're empowering more people and some small percentage of them will abuse that power.
Jordan
Absolutely, yeah. And again, this is I mean, to kind of close that square, you know, just in terms of what freedom is, there's a, there's a pastor who has since passed, his name was Tim Keller, and one of things he talked about this, he says, freedom is more complicated than you think. He just basically said, so the idea of, like freedom, the idea of freedom, not being simply the absence of restrictions, you know, that you can have a fish, who says, I'm going to free myself from the constraints of this ocean, and he jumps out of the ocean onto the shore, and proceeds to die.
Jordan
Because he was actually because of the nature of what a fish is, it's designed to find freedom within certain parameters, in his case, the parameters of seawater, and, you know, these kinds of things. And so I, again, Tim Keller would argue, and many Christians and I would argue that, you know, humans with the same thing, we we don't find freedom within the complete absence of restrictions. You know, there are many different realms of restrictions in which we, when we, when we submit to we find freedom, so you could, you know, nutrition, there are certain nutrients that our body needs, where when we submit ourselves to that biological and physical reality, we find ourselves living healthier lives, on the whole, there's, you know, a bunch of other things, well, relational ones along these things.
Jordan
And there's a number of different constraints that, you know, it's actually within the presence of the right restrictions that we find freedom. And again, that sounds weird, but it's, I think it's pretty obviously true. Again, at the end of the day, though, there's in terms of morally, you know, you can you can try to answer things like, well, you know, if you, you could try to, you could try to get from, is to ought, so, you know, there's certain, if we go around having sex with anything we want, at any time, you know, we'll not only rapidly spread disease, we'll have you know, kids all over the place, you know, all these things, you could, you could try to go, okay, and because of that, because of these very naturally observable physical downsides, you shouldn't do this.
Jordan
But you really can't get there. You can say this is less than ideal, but you can't get the point region, where just on the basis of observation alone, or scientific basis loan, you can say, and thereby, you shouldn't do this. Because we all have, we all have disagreements, or we all have risks, acceptable level of risk that we're willing to take in living life. And so if morality and moral principles are just these, you know, we're just these individual, each one of us is, you know, kind of operating flying by the seat of our own experience and understanding, then we, I mean, that's just moral relativism at the end of the day, and that has all kinds of all kinds of, it's just fraught with danger as well fraught with, you know, potential for things like you saw in Nazi Germany, things like you, you've seen in all kinds of all kinds of situations, you know, and so this is where I do think it's important.
Jordan
The idea of there being some sort of most people when push comes to shove, agree that there are things that are objectively wrong. The question is, the reality is that most people don't have a grounded, consistent basis by which to, by which to define what those things are. So you had mentioned earlier that people think that if you don't have if you don't believe in God, then you can't be moral or something like that. In my experience, maybe there are people who believe that, in my experience, what I've heard people say, was that there's not a consistent, there's not a consistent way to get morality without God.
Jordan
There's absolutely people who are way more moral. There's actually absolutely people who are agnostic atheists who are completely good people, you know, on on many levels, but what I think the objection would be is there's not a logical, objective basis by which to, by which to define what is good and evil, apart from the existence of some outside party outside being like, in the case of Christian would be God. And so again, I don't think that's kind of the issue is, you know, what is where do we find the basis and objective basis for morality to be able to call things like child sex trafficking, evil, and not just less than ideal. Do you have an opinion on that? Like, what would be your thoughts on that?
Jameson Lopp
Yeah, I mean, I had people ask me as well like, what do I base my system of ethics upon. And like any good anarcho capitalist, I basically, the non Aggression Principle. Now. I mean, I kind of see objective morality in the same vein as intrinsic value, which is, I'm not really sure that that's a thing. I do, I generally see a lot of this stuff as being relative. Like even even within religions, though, you know, you have many different religious systems. And you could argue, even then, many people base their set of ethics upon different things like, you know, if you're one of the religions that believes in reincarnation, then there's your major impetus for being moral is not to go to heaven, but to you know, ascend to a higher sort of level of consciousness or something.
Jameson Lopp
So I see the value in and having systems of religious beliefs and, and supernatural deities that command, a more objective way of looking at morals and ethics, because kind of going back to what we're saying people are lazy and don't really think for themselves. And so perhaps, perhaps the macro outcome of having more people with a simpler agreed upon set of beliefs, results in a better world. Because of that, it's certainly possible, it could be an interesting debate in and of itself.
Jameson Lopp
But this is, I think, this is one of those things where, ultimately, you know, a lot of the way the world operates, or at least individuals, it is anarchy, right? It is everybody deciding for themselves, how they are going to operate, and figuring out what are the actual constraints that I'm working under. Now, I have a general belief. And I probably would have trouble coming up with, I guess, proof of this, but I believe that human society, and even Bitcoin only functions, because the vast majority of people are what you might call moral or good or ethical, and that everything that we've built in human civilization, whether it's our like religions and moral systems, or our systems of government, and law enforcement, or whatever, that would all crumble in an instant, if even like 10, or 20% of people were psychotic, sociopathic, amoral people. It seems like a lot of these systems that we have built are mainly to deal with these edge cases of people's whose brains don't work the same way as the rest of ours, and they just don't work in a way that is conducive to acting within a group that is healthy for the group.
Jordan
Yeah, I think I agree. I think again, the challenge is, because again, it's real easy to define laws in terms of define them negatively, like, don't do this, or don't do this, and don't do this. And so like the 10 commandments, when people largely think of, you know, of what morality is, it's consistent of its phrase in the negative, it's don't do this, don't do this. But I think this is where it gets really important is, you know, and this is where, again, as we're in this super secular moment, and we're at this point of definitional crisis on a bunch of levels, you know, in terms of, you know, like, basically, I mean, down to the very core of like, you know, what is a man and what is a woman?
Jordan
You know, these are, like, I'm very sympathetic to, you know, we're at a moment where the question is, we found liars in every single part of life. You know, we have liars in offices of governmental offices in religious offices, we've seen all kinds of abuse, we see so much cause for distrust. So how do we know what is you know, how do we know what things are? And so I think that this is it's a very difficult situation we find ourselves in it's a it's a tough thing to figure out again, by what standard are you making these things?
Jordan
Is it just positivism? Is it just this seems right to me and then and then we move on. That certainly isn't the again even this can you could debate this but like I would say historically, there's clearly been I mean, the the American founders were very clearly looking at Roman democracy. They're clearly looking at you know, the scriptures and you can go back and read you know, there are appealing to Deuteronomy you know, the 10 commandments in terms of shaping what morality was they clearly, you know, even if all of them weren't Christians or theists in the individual, we all agree with a sense, they all recognize, you know that they were very aware of the fact that you have to have some sort of basis for a law that is outside of just our own desires, or the, again, the positivistic move on the part of a politician or sovereign.
Jordan
So they were when they appealed, when they tried to, they justified the rebellion against Great Britain by saying, you know, we are endowed by our creator with certain rights. And so, you know, they weren't just saying, We're just doing this because we want to, they're saying, you know, God has created people to do X and Y, Great Britain is not allowing us to do that. And so we have a basis by which to object to these things. And so I think that this is, again, the reality is that morality, and these things it does, at least on paper, it does stem from these deeper, more foundational questions of what are people who are we. How did we get here.
Jordan
Like, we have to have these questions to orient ourselves. And if we don't have some sort of existential anchoring for those things, then we're at the mercy of the strong man who comes along and wants to try to create or fabricate or present another version, that's much more simplistic, and I would argue, over the last hundred years has been much more damaging. You've seen, tens if not, you know, tens of millions of people killed by dictators, who tried to set themselves up as the ultimate arbiters of of truth. And that's kind of the situation that we're in is just trying to figure out how do we understand these things. How do we make decisions. And again, just look at the United States in a political climate where nobody trusts each other.
Jameson Lopp
Short question is why do you think God for Bitcoin? And is it because Bitcoin is truth?
Jordan
I would say, I think after bitcoin, this is I love how you become the interviewer. This is fantastic. I would say I thank God for Bitcoin because I think Bitcoin is money, the way that God intended it to work, it's money that doesn't favor, doesn't let the powerful and rich leverage their power at the expense of or gain strength at the expense of other people. It's one set of rules that applies to everybody.
Jordan
And so again, I'm not a socialist, communist, I don't think that having the ends based equality, is it possible or would be good, but I think that, you know, one set of rules that applies to everyone that everyone can plan, and live according to is something that again, to other point, is something that is freeing. And so I think that when humans have that kind of standard, it's been good for people throughout history. And I think Bitcoin again, Bitcoin presents a much more equitable system than the current one that we have that enables endless war and all kinds of other abuse and in waste, and theft. So I think that'd be why I would appreciate Bitcoin. How about you? What would be your two sentence articulation or few sentence?
Jameson Lopp
Yeah, well, I mean, the reason why I originally got into Bitcoin was because I saw it as a way to leverage technology to empower individuals. So you could look at that, as you know, disempowering authorities that can continue to amass more and more power and change the rules, however, it suits them.
Jordan
And I think that's a tremendously valuable in good reason to be involved. And so I'm glad to have you articulate that. In closing, I'll give you one more opportunity to you can kind of, you know, say whatever you want to say where people can find you, or just if you want to, you know, end by by making some other argument or just kind of laying out some other things. Go for it. It's your chance.
Jameson Lopp
No specific argument. I think that part of the process of being involved in Bitcoin, you can be as involved as you want, right? This is an open collaborative project. This is also why I originally got interested in the space was because I had never really thought about the function of money, like most people, you just use what's presented to you. And when I saw it, you know, both the computer science aspects, and the philosophical aspect of treating this concept of money as an open collaborative project, I felt like that was the best way to get towards what you might call an equitable type of solution.
Jameson Lopp
Of course, it doesn't mean everybody is going to have the same amount of money in the same outcome. But hopefully, it means that there will not be a small group of people who have the power to essentially outweigh, out votes, out manipulate everyone else to their own advantage. And while I don't know that this is necessarily going to fix many major aspects of society, at least anytime soon, I do think that it's at least moving in the right direction.
Jameson Lopp
Whereas, you know, as you've said, a lot of aspects of the world are moving and what we would probably consider to be in the wrong direction, at least to the detriment of the masses. And if you're going to be participating in Bitcoin more than just from the financial or holding aspect, like if you want to help give your input to steer the system. There's many ways to do that. Then I think that this is the type of constructive dialogue that needs to happen, essentially, in perpetuity is that the optimal form of money is still out there.
Jameson Lopp
I don't think Bitcoin is perfect. There's a lot of things that it can't do. It has constraints and limitations that many of us as engineers would like to see continue to improve better security, better privacy, better scalability. And we have to continue discussing with each other, what are the possible paths for us to go forward, you know, there's constraints from technical level, economic perspectives, and even your philosophical perspectives. So really the most important thing that we can do is to have these intellectually honest debates with each other, and try to understand other people's perspectives.
Jordan
Agreed. I'll just close so in Proverbs 27 17, it says, as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. And so I think this is one of these things where, you know, there's, there's any of us who've spent any amount of time online, we get fatigued, you know, in your head, that it's good to have arguments, but there comes a point where you're just exhausted, like you personally are just tired of having them.
Jordan
And it's just easy to just wish away and just wish that you could have a world what wasn't difficult, that wasn't just such work to try to, you know, rub away at what is not real and temporal so that what is good and more longer lasting or eternal, you know, can come through.
Jordan
But again, I just really thank you, Jameson for your time. And for this conversation, I hope this has beneficial to people and, and hopefully this won't be the last conversation that we can have. And here on the thing over Bitcoin pockets with you. So again, just give people where they can find you online. You know, give me your website and stuff like that, and then send it out on that.
Jameson Lopp
Yeah, you can find really everything about me that I've done over the past decade at my website, it's lopp.net.
Jordan
Alright. Guys go check out Jameson's work. I've benefited from in the past from his articles. Again, he's one of the people who spent more time than anybody thinking about what Bitcoin is. And yeah, grateful for his work in the space. So Jameson again, we'll talk soon for the rest of you. Again, thank you guys for listening to our work here. If you want to support the podcast, you can go to either Spotify or Apple and leave us five star reviews.
Jordan
You can leave us truth reviews if you think we don't deserve five stars. But those are the kinds of reviews just leaving reviews in those places help us to rise up in the algorithm and help us to be found by more people. So thank you guys soon, and we'll be back with another episode of Thank God for Bitcoin podcast here in the very near future.
Jordan
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Jordan
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Jordan
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