Peter Thiel is Bankrupt! (Theologically)

You have a lot of folks who are like, “Ah, the Jesus fish is just a sideways vulva with a tail.” With a tail, sure, sure. And so it’s all— this is all about worship of the divine feminine and that holy vulva. With her tail. Yeah. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

You’re listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

We’re going after a billionaire tonight. I’m stoked.

It’s, yeah, it’s nothing bad can happen to you if you take down a billionaire on your show, right?

Not in this economy. No. With a man in the White House? No. Don’t think so.

So, okay, the first thing we’re doing, we’re going to start off with a twisted scripture and we’re going to go after Peter Thiel. And that’s pretty exciting. That’s going to be a lot of fun. I don’t think he’s going to make us— I don’t think he’s going to use his kingmaker status on us anytime soon. And then—.

I don’t think that was in the cards to begin with, but— How dare you?

How dare you? I think I had a shot. I think I had a— No. And then we’re going to look— we’re going to do a Taking Issue about a little bit of symbolism, a little bit of a star.

The Magen David. Yes, the Star of David, and a rather ridiculous conspiracy theory that I’ve been seeing popping up around social media of late. So yes.

All right, so let’s just dive in with some twisted scripture. And as we said, uh, this isn’t one scripture that’s being twisted.

Uh, I feel like it’s basically all scripture, but there, there are a couple that have been called out. Yeah, specifically.

Yeah, Peter Thiel, if you don’t know, is a billionaire. He’s one of the co-founders of, uh, of, uh, PayPal. There’s a very, very dorky picture of him and a pre-all-of-the-surgeries Elon Musk floating around that you probably should look up because, woof, how did we give those two so much power? But they have a lot of it. And Thiel has become a very prominent voice in Christian circles. And he’s started an organization called Acts 17 , which ACTS is a— in his— in this, it’s an acronym or a backronym is what they call it for— because he took the thing and then went backwards with it. But it’s— oh, I have it here somewhere.

I don’t know what it is. It stands for Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society. And, you know, I went and read the entire chapter of Acts 17 to see like, what they’re on about, or if it illuminates sort of what their mission is, really. I don’t know.

Not a lot there.

No, it’s like, it’s basically Paul going, bouncing around from city to city. He starts out in Thessalonica.

Yeah, the uproar at Thessalonica. I’ve been to Thessaloniki. Lovely area, lovely port city.

It’s one of the bigger cities of Greece now, isn’t it?

It is, it is. Yeah. And they’ve got their ruins. They’ve got some of that going on too. I was surprised to see around the corner from my hotel a TGI Fridays when I visited there. Went in, there was a European League basketball game on TV. And yeah, it was a surreal experience. There you go. But yeah, lovely area. Love Thessaloniki. Love Greece. But yeah, there’s the uproar, Paul and Silas passing through. We got the— they go into Berea.

Oh man. And then Paul gets to Athens.

And there’s all the what-have-you.

All the what-have-you.

Yeah. That’s where he’s quoting some Greek poets, since we are God’s offspring, all that kind of stuff. Yeah. But yeah, it doesn’t seem to be a mission statement.

No, I think what you are wondering, it does point at a little bit of like end times stuff and we’re going to get to Peter Thiel and his, his eschatology. But, but it doesn’t really— it’s not, you know, It has some of that, you know, gods aren’t made of gold or silver or stone stuff. And it’s got some stuff that feels like, you know, worry, you know, repent type stuff.

But well, here’s a couple of passages. I’ll read these real quick. And let me know if we’re looking at Thiel and what he’s doing through the lens of Acts 17 , what is this saying?

Right.

I’m in verse 18. Also, some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers debated with him. Some said, what does this pretentious babbler want to say? Others said, he seems to be a proclaimer of foreign deities. This was because he was telling the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. So they took him and brought him to the Areopagus— uh, that’s Mars Hill, that’s the, the stone outcropping that is, uh, just west of, um, uh, the Acropolis— okay— and asked him, may we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? It sounds rather strange to us, so we would like to know what it means. Now, so I wonder if the idea is that they’re the proclaimers of this new philosophy that everybody wants to know about.

Yeah, and yeah, it’s basically this— he’s like, hey, let me tell you about Jesus, and that’s kind of it.

But we do have an actual manifesto. On the website of, uh, for the Acts 17 Collective.

Yes, that’s true.

Yeah, and I’ll just read the beginning of this just so we can see how this casts any illumination on what this chapter has to do with anything at all. A manifesto for the curious, the creators, and the culture shapers. As humans, we are all made to worship and will worship something if we don’t worship God. Not true.

I hate that so much. I hear that.

Everybody worships something.

No, as an atheist out in the world, you know, I won’t say prominent, but as one that is a public atheist.

I get that all the time. Well, what do you worship then?

Well, nothing. Am I allowed to just— I don’t think I worship anything. I’m just out here living a life. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

And if you’ve decided you want everyone to be worshiping something, and then you just redefine worship so that it becomes something that everyone does, you’re kind of giving away the store there. Yeah, yeah. So he continues, “What are you putting your faith in? What are you worshiping? " I don’t know about y’all, but we put our faith in Blast Hard Cheese. That is a deep cut. Not too deep a cut. I mean, that’s one of the most popular Mystery Science Theater 3000, um, compilations out there. Uh, in a world where we’re always building startups, audiences, reputations, it’s easy to forget to ask what we’re building toward. Fame, power, money, success— these things promise fulfillment but often leave us wanting more. We believe there’s something deeper worth exploring, not just for your work but for your soul. Not just for Sundays, but for your everyday. Not just to fill you, but for you to find wholeness.

Great. All of that is fine and platitudinalistic.

Platitudinous. Yes. To the max.

Platitudy. It’s a platypus is what it is.

Perry the Platypus?

But the thing about it is that underneath that, And this is— and one of the things that they’re really going after is trying to capture, uh, people in Silicon Valley.

Which is notoriously, uh, or, or at least has a reputation for being a little hostile to, to faith.

Um, but I— but they seem to be making good ground and sort of leading the charge, one of the banner bearers, or perhaps the prophet of this movement is Peter Thiel. So let’s talk a bit about him and sort of where— what he has been saying, because he is also quite— he can be very tight-lipped. He can be very— he plays his cards pretty close to the chest, but he’s starting to sort of come out of his shell. This is the guy, by the way, that like that we have to thank for J. D. Vance. Like he backed J. D. Vance when— Yeah, for no good reason. What, what is Vance doing that this guy’s— other than— yeah, I— it’s all— this is all— there are pieces that are missing. Let’s just put it that way.

So I’m just, I’m just perusing his Wikipedia entry, which is voluminous. I just read this, just stopped on a sentence. Thiel confirmed that he had funded Hulk Hogan.

So what does that mean?

Okay, Gawker had previously outed Thiel as gay, and then when the Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit ended up with Gawker losing the case, Thiel confirmed that he had funded Hulk Hogan. So it’s talking about all his right-wing and conservative libertarian investments.

Right. Yeah. I mean, this is one of those guys who talks about free speech all the time. But then, as is this case here, to get revenge on a publication that outed him as gay, he funded a lawsuit that Hulk Hogan could not himself have come close to affording.

Yeah. Uh, that’s not— we’re not in the business at the Data Over Dogma podcast of casting judgment on the sincerity of anybody’s religious beliefs.

No, that is true. So what he has been talking about is he’s been talking about the Antichrist, or an antichrist, an entity that is antichrist, and he’s not particularly clear on what or who that might be.

He’s doing a 4-part lecture series on the Antichrist, and from what I have heard, nobody is quite sure what he’s talking about.

Yeah, yeah, it seems like, uh, it might be, uh, the one world government might be the Antichrist or whatever. He definitely believes that a one world government is a bad thing and it’s coming.

And I, like, I first heard about this, I was telling you before we, uh, hit record I started getting a flood of requests to respond to this interview that he did when I was in Italy with my family and was like, “I can’t do this right now, man. I don’t know what this dude is talking about, but I can’t do this. " And it was an interview where he’s talking about transhumanism and then goes into Antichrist stuff, and he appealed to a scripture. This is what stuck out for me. He said that the Antichrist’s slogan will be peace and safety. Yes. And I was like, that is nowhere in the Bible, but I need to stop and look this up. And what on earth is he talking about? And, um, he’s talking about 1 Thessalonians, uh, 5, I think the 5:3. And it— to begin, the word Antichrist occurs, I think, 4 total times in all of the Bible, 4 or 5 total times in all of the Bible.

All of them in 1 John or 2 John.

Oh, okay.

And they are used to describe anyone who is opposed to Christ. It is mainly an adjective. That person is antichrist or, you know, anti-Christian. There’s one use that could suggest that it is referring to a specific individual.

But, or certain individuals. However, that use suggests that they’re already there. They have arrived when the text was written that is now in the New Testament. So it’s not something that is off in the future. But what people have done, and you know, because of the presupposition of univocality, they’re like, “Well, this must be talked about elsewhere. Let’s go into Revelation. Let’s look for the big baddie, and we’re going to say that’s the Antichrist. Let’s go into Paul. Let’s look at the man of lawlessness. " We’re going to say that’s the Antichrist. And so you basically cobble together from the scattered Lego pieces from these different, I don’t know what they call them, engineers, different sets, and you’re going to try to cobble together this picture of what this entity is going to be. And so he appeals to 1 Thessalonians 5:3 , and it’s talking about, now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers and sisters, you do not need to have anything written to you, for you yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.

When they say there is peace and security, then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and there will be no escape. Okay, so it seems that he is interpreting this prophecy about the second coming that says it will happen ‘When they say there is peace and security,’ which basically the rhetorical point there is when they least expect it, that’s when the Son of Man’s going to be like, ‘Boo, gotcha. ’ That’s when all this is going to go down. And now we’ve taken that and tergiversated it, and you’ve heard me use a lot of $2 words on this show. This is a $15 word.

Yeah, I was going to be very impressed if that’s an actual word.

It is an actual word. And, uh, what’s fun— the only reason I know this word and use this word is because I learned it on my mission in Spanish.

And came back and I was like, there’s this word, does it exist in English? And I looked it up and I was like, sweet, it exists in English, I’m using it. And, um, but, but anyway, it basically means to twist, uh, something into something else to serve your own purposes, right? To misrepresent. Because in no sense whatsoever is this saying the slogan of the Antichrist, right, is peace and security. But, but it sounds like he’s trying to say, hey, anybody who’s telling you we’re gonna fix the world’s problems, or at least we’re gonna try to fix the world’s problems, we’re gonna come together and find a solution to all these social ills, he’s wagging his finger saying that’s the Antichrist, or at least that’s some kind of precursor or catalyst for the Antichrist.

The globalists, right? Yeah, yeah, are coming. Um, but that was the first— that was the only scripture I heard in the little bit of that, uh, interview that, that people kept tagging me in, right? And I was like, well, this is already way off the rails.

So, and it gets— it’s only gotten worse.

It gets more off the rails the further he goes. And the thing that, that gets really weird and that I, I have— believe me, I’ve tried to parse this out. I believe that this is just a cognitive dissonance that lives in his brain. I believe that he has just made peace with something that directly contradicts himself. Which is that he talks about how this one world government is coming. Uh, you know, they’re talking about peace and safety, so we should be worried about that. And, uh, and they’re— and they’re going to make a— you know, that he’s worried about state control and regulation and all this stuff. He’s worried about a totalitarian regime. But yet his— the one of the main points that he makes with these as his data points is we should not regulate AI, biotech.

Like, technology should not be regulated because it’s what’s going to save us.

Yeah, what I do shouldn’t be regulated. It’s only what everybody else does, and it becomes— should be regulated.

It becomes clear why his theology is like this when you look at his investment portfolio, which includes just lists of, uh, of, you know, defense contracting. Uh, he, he’s the founder of Palantir, which is a battlefield intel, like, data aggregator sort of thing. Uh, but he’s also heavily invested in a company called Anduril Industries, which is drones and like AI tower, AI like border defense towers that will just—.

So it’s Skynet. He’s starting Skynet.

He is Skynet. Yeah. Like, it’s so crazy. He’s invested in a bunch of different startups for cybersecurity and various—.

Yeah. Like Cyberdyne Systems is where it’s going to go next, and then it’ll go to Skynet.

Yeah. And yet he’s And all of these are tools that he will sell to governments that are already funded by governments. And so, like, how is this going to prevent the thing that he’s scared of? The thing that he is talking about? It’s literally what is going to obviously bring about the apocalypse that he is worried about.

Yeah, he doesn’t seem to be— you know, we’re on the sci-fi thing. You spend so much time worrying about if you could, you didn’t bother to think about if you should. That’s right. He is going to make dinosaurs. To badly quote Goldblum. Yes, he’s going to make dinosaurs. Well, I don’t know where his transhumanism is going to take him.

Yeah, right?

Certainly not off the table. Right.

He’s going to try and get his own consciousness implanted into a T-Rex or something. It’s just, it’s such a weird theology. The other thing, the other, like, biblical reference that I’ve seen him make, that I, that I think is also telling about him and who he is. And I think, yeah, well, the story is, I think the story that we’re getting to is the fact that like everybody, he has taken his theological— he hasn’t taken the Bible and then built the theology that the Bible— that he sees the Bible telling him to build. He has taken his life and then taken scriptures and just— and built a theology around what he likes and what’s important to him.

And what serves his interests. And then, and then, and then proclaimed that as the theology, as what’s true. So the thing that I was getting to is he was talking about the Ten Commandments.

Oh, yeah.

And he talked about how the most important ones are the first one and the last one. And the first one is you have to believe in God. And the last one is don’t covet. And like immediately I thought, you know, a billionaire telling me not to covet. Yeah.

Yeah. Let’s just, we’re just going to put in the law. Yeah. Yeah.

It just rings a bit like just don’t, don’t stop wanting all my stuff.

Yeah. It doesn’t say anything about greed. It’s just about wanting other people’s stuff.

‘If you want more of your own stuff and to multiply your own stuff, that’s fine. And if it requires taking it from others, as long as you’re doing it your way.’ I think that’s such an interesting attempt to just kind of take the law and just say, ‘Well, we just want the bookends. We don’t need the books.’ But it does suggest, and this is how religion works, that he’s just being guided by his intuitions, which are all about self-preservation and about increasing one’s own standing and one’s own access to power and resources. So he’s basically like, ooh, this is a—and intuitively, probably not consciously, hopefully not consciously, but intuitively his subconscious is going, this is a nice little instrument for us to play with for us to advance our own interests and structure power and values. And I think it’s odd, I’m looking at the manifesto for the Acts 17 Collective and there’s a section that says what we offer.

It says we host speaker events where real conversations happen, where tech founders, producers, designers, and creatives talk candidly about how faith and work collide, where Jesus is at the center not as an obligation, but as an invitation. And I am, I’m just, I am made of questions. Yeah.

Like, I just like—

It’s kind of like, it’s kind of like I’m thinking of what’s the, what was the comedy show with, was it called Silicon Valley?

Oh yeah.

I’m thinking of that, but they just, they’re sprinkling in some Jesus.

Let’s just give this just a Jesus-y vibe. But everything else stays the same.

Yeah, it is very clearly like their whole thing is, how do we invite tech bros into Christianity and not, but without making them question the morality of any of the things that they’re doing? Because obviously you’re going to lose them if you make them question the morality, because there are serious ethical and moral questions to 90% of what Silicon Valley is producing right now. And no one wants to ask those questions. The reason that Thiel is fighting against any kind of regulation is because he doesn’t want any of these ethical and moral questions to get in the way of him just making gobs of money.

Yeah, like Palantir sounds like an apocalyptic—like, that is Skynet. It’s like, we’re going to create this thing that just collects all the data on everybody.

And it’s like, the moral problems with that, the ethical issues with that. But if you’re just like, hey, all that matters is you believe, and you don’t come after my stuff.

Like, if that’s your theology, then the moral, the ethical dilemmas just disappear like a fart in the wind. Well, we don’t care about any of that.

And if the Satan-led bad guys are coming, you gotta have some drones to kill them. You know what I mean? Like, just get some AI drones. Arming AI is what’s happening right now, is what’s next. And Oh, Daddy, that is some bad ideas.

You and I both know how bad AI is at the most basic of commands. And we had the episode that we did with April Ajoy asking about her book, Star-Spangled Jesus, and we plugged that into ChatGPT over and over and over and over again, and it could not understand that this book was written by a woman and kept hallucinating all these different authors. So, so Thiel’s doing these, I think it was a 4-part Antichrist lectures out in San Francisco. And I have somebody on the inside, somebody who signed up for them. And, and after the first one, we talked and they were like, yeah, I don’t know what it was about. Like, it was unclear what the thesis statement was, but they told me that there was only one scripture that was even mentioned in the whole first lecture.

He evidently brought up Daniel 12:4 , which says—and this is our trusty NRSV-UE—“But you, Daniel, keep the words secret and the book sealed until the time of the end. Many shall be running back and forth, and evil shall increase.” Now, that’s not what he read in the thing. That’s the NRSV-UE. Okay, what he read in the thing was the King James Version, and, um, and I just want to read the end of it. “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” So this is what what Thiel evidently quoted in some part of this first lecture. And the idea seemed to be that this is some kind of prophecy about the end times. And he seemed to be appealing to the scripture to suggest that in the end times, knowledge is going to increase.

And obviously, as someone who is interested in AI and transhumanism and in all this kind of stuff, he wants to suggest that he’s a part of contributing to knowledge increasing, and that this is maybe a sign that the end times are upon us. But when my friend told me that that was the scripture, the only thing from the Bible that, that Thiel mentioned, I went and looked it up because I remember thinking, it strikes me that there’s something weird about this verse. And when I read it from the NRSV-UE, it ended with, “And evil shall increase.” And that’s because the King James Version says, “Knowledge shall be increased.” And the Hebrew there, if we look in the Masoretic Text, the traditional authoritative manuscript of the Hebrew Bible, the last word is “haddaat,” which would mean “the knowledge.” Okay. However, this word in the Aramaic square script is sometimes indistinguishable from the word hara, which would be the evil.

Oh, and when we look at the ancient Greek translation of this passage, that’s exactly what it says. And, uh, unrighteousness or evil wickedness will increase. Okay, uh, and so I find it odd that Well, one, obviously Thiel is not aware that the King James Version might not be the best translation of this, but is also unaware that the prophecy to which he is appealing might say the exact opposite of what he is leveraging it to say regarding what’s going on today, but also might be a little prophetic in and of itself, given what we’ve talked about regarding the ethical the moral quandaries, risks, problems, quagmire of things like unrestricted AI and Palantir and gathering intel on all of us and all of this and making it available to the highest bidder or to somebody like Donald Trump who can’t even read the word acetaminophen without—

He got there eventually.

But he had to comment on what a bizarre word this was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s the kind of person where if he said, “It’s a banana. What can it cost? $10?” I would not bat an eye. That wouldn’t surprise me at all that he couldn’t read a cuneiform. But if he has access to this, holy cow, that is dangerous. That is phenomenally dangerous.

Yeah, I mean, it’s weird that Thiel can’t see that like all the— look, everything that I read about sort of apocalyptic bad guys in the Bible, and like you point out, the Bible doesn’t connect Antichrist and the Beast and the this and the that. Like these are all different entities or different stories or whatever.

Different characters in different people’s narratives.

But let’s just say for the sake of argument that they’re the same or whatever. Okay. How Thiel doesn’t see that it’s him, that he’s on the bad guy side of this thing. Yeah. Is, I mean, look, we’re all the heroes of our own story. So that’s just how that’s going to work. But I mean, if you’re going to invoke the Bible, if you’re going to say that you know, these decisions, these ideas are based on your love of your Christian faith. And, you know, if your manifesto of your organization is going to talk about centering Jesus, then don’t we have to talk about no man can serve two masters, the parable of the rich fool, the rich young ruler, you know, like camel through the eye of a needle, like This man has wealth, the kind of wealth that no one could have imagined in any other time in history.

Why is it, you know, it ought to be the Acts 4 collective. Okay. Or the Acts 4 co-op. In Acts 4 , it said all who believed in Jesus came together, they were united, there was no poor among them because they all whatever they had, they sold, right, so that they could distribute the money each according to their need, right? Uh, so like, uh, if you’re gonna call yourself a collective, for crying out loud, what are you doing? Be a collective. Everybody want to be a collective until it’s time to be a collective, and then, and then it’s like, no, but we mean authoritarianism is, is where we’re coming from. We want to rule the world with an iron fist.

And we think giving away all of our stuff is a bummer.

Yeah, no, we don’t want to do that.

I mean, if there’s anything that Jesus had to say about money over and over and over, repeated in all of the Gospels, everywhere you look, you know, Matthew 19 , Mark 10 , Luke 18 , all of these— Luke 12 — just so many scriptures where Jesus, in the red letter scriptures, says you have to— like, the only way to get into heaven is for you to sell your stuff and give it away to the poor.

This is something that Luke, who is the author— well, whoever was the author of Luke is most likely the author of Acts, right? Repeatedly, you have the story of the rich young ruler where Jesus says, “Uh, you still got one thing left to do. Sell all that you have, give the money to the poor. " And he goes away upset because he was very very wealthy. Right. And then Jesus says, “Yeah, look how hard it is for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of heaven. " And people were like, “Ah, that’s a one-off. That was just personal counsel between Jesus and this kid. " He looked at that one guy and he was like, “I don’t like that kind of mischief. " But we talked about Luke chapter 12. Yeah. Where the guy says, “Tell my brother to divvy up the inheritance to me. " And Jesus concludes his parable of the rich fool by saying, “Sell your possessions. " Right. To his disciples, his followers, everybody there. Yeah.

He’s like, “Sell all your possessions, give the money to the poor. " “Do not have—” “Don’t build that bigger barn.

Don’t you do it. " Yeah.

“Because your life will be required of you, sucker. " Or fool. And then the same author is the one who talks about how in Acts they all lived communally. Maybe not communism, but communalism at the very least, selling everything that they had. And we have the poor couple that was like, “Eh, we’re not gonna sell everything. We’re not gonna give all our money in it. " “I’m gonna keep a little bit. " And then Peter was the one who got to say, “Your life is required of you. " And God, in whatever way befitted the circumstance, God decided to off them. Yeah. So yeah, and Peter, it was such a cold line when Peter was like, “The feet of the people who’ve carried off your husband’s corpse are at the door for you. " Yeah. Like, that is cold-blooded. Hey, they’re back.

Yeah, they’re back and guess what?

You’re going to die. It’s your turn.

Yeah, that’s pretty cold-blooded. But the message is pretty consistent. Yeah, this obscene wealth is not a good thing. And I think Thiel is a good illustration of the rationalizing and the cognitive dissonance and the inestimable harm that can befall the world because of that kind of wealth being concentrated in the hands of one individual. Yeah. Or one collective, so-called.

Oh gosh. All right. Well, I think we’ve pounded on poor Peter for long enough. Rhetorically speaking. Rhetorically speaking. I don’t know what I’d do if I were actually in his presence. Probably just sell out completely and let him have his— I would come back on this show in a heartbeat I’ve got an opportunity for you, Peter. Recant everything that I’ve said for the right price. Uh, call me Peter Thiel. I know you can get my number. Uh, all right, let’s, uh, let’s move on then to, uh, Taking Issue. And what we’re Taking Issue with is, uh, is a star.

So this, this is a, this is an idiotic and an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that I’ve seen I don’t know how many times on social media. And I’ve made a handful of videos over the years about this. But there are some, some folks out there who like to suggest that the Star of David— well, first off, the Star of David is not in the Bible, right?

This is, this is the six-pointed star that is sort of the, the de facto symbol of Judaism and of the State of Israel, uh, on the Israeli flag.

Yeah, uh, an upward-pointed triangle over a downward-pointed triangle, or under, um, yeah, or they could be pointed, uh, sort of diagonally too.

Diagonally, yeah. It’s, uh, these are, these are equilateral triangles. They point in three directions. So just have fun with that. Yeah, take that for what it’s worth.

Yeah, it’s, uh, just It’s a hexagram. Yeah. So, um, we have hexagrams and pentagrams and all manner of gram, um, that various grams. Yeah, you’re, uh, that are used as geometric— geometric, oh my gosh, what’s the word? Geometric. Geometric, uh, designs that are used in architecture and iconography and stuff like that. Like, we can, we can find this in, in India going back to like 1000 BCE, like all over the world. The hexagram is just, you know, people make hexagrams.

Yeah, it’s a pretty simple but fun to look at image. Yeah.

And, you know, we see it on— there’s a hexagram on the cover—the front of the Leningrad Codex, which is the Masoretic Text, the oldest complete edition of the Hebrew Bible, dates to about 1008 CE. There’s a hexagram on the cover of that. Okay. It’s— if you go visit Capernaum and—now’s—don’t go. But if you go— Wrong time. Yeah, not time to be over there for touristy purposes. But if you, in Capernaum, they have some of the old stone lintels from the, not the thing you make soup with, but the thing that, the architectural feature.

The over the door bit of stone or whatever.

And they have these from a synagogue that’s from like the 3rd or 4th century CE from Capernaum. And they have, you can see a hexagram carved into that and then a pentagram right next to it. So anyway, because it really didn’t become associated like formally with Judaism until like the 19th century. Oh really? Yeah. Like you see it being used starting in like the 14th century as something that’s not just a fun design, but something that is symbolic of Judaism.

That they’re identifying with themselves.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. 19th century is when it becomes associated more saliently with Zionism. Ah, so, um, but there’s a, there’s a theory that it was borrowed from an occult symbol. Yes, an occult symbol that’s mentioned in the Bible. Oh, um, yes, um, they say it is the Star of Remphan, which I went to a Remphan—.

A Ren Faire.

Wait, no. Okay, no, you went to Burning Man. That’s true.

I’m pretty sure they think that that’s Remphan.

Uh, I’m pretty sure they would definitely associate it. Yeah, don’t put any stars up at Burning Man, uh, because they’ll only tell you you’re worshiping Remphan.

So what is Remphan? What are we—.

Um, what is a Remphan? We don’t know for sure, but it is probably some kind of deity associated with Saturn. Now, Remphan occurs only once in the New Testament. It’s in Acts 7:43 , and this is where Stephen is— he’s about to be martyred, but he is lecturing the folks on the history, gives like a real brief history of Israel and Judaism, and quotes a passage from Amos 5:26 , and we’ll get to Amos, but in Acts 7:43 Stephen says, “No, you took along the tent of Moloch and the star of your god Remphan, the images that you made to worship. " So Stephen is upset about this, but he’s quoting a Greek translation of Amos 5:26 .

Now, when we go back into Amos 5:26 , here’s what it says in the Hebrew: “You shall take up Sikkut, your king, and Kiyyun, your star god, your images which you made for yourself. " A little different. Doesn’t sound quite the same. Yeah. We’ve got a few things going on here. Sikkut is being misunderstood as having something to do with the Greek word skene, which is like a tent. Okay. So it is being misunderstood as a reference to a tent. So in Acts it says, “You took along the tent of Moloch. " In the Hebrew we have “Sikkut your king,” and the word melek, king, is being misunderstood by the Greek translators as Moloch. Which a lot of people think is this god of child sacrifice.

Oh my God, you hear that all the time. Yes. In some evangelical TikTok, somebody will be like, “They’re worshipers of Moloch. " Right. And again, as an atheist, I’m a Moloch worshiper somehow.

Yeah, yeah. Cats and dogs living together. Mass hysteria. Yes. But there was never any deity named Moloch that was worshiped in the ancient world. We’ve done, I think we’ve done an episode on this. Haven’t we done an episode on this?

We’ve mentioned it. I don’t know if we’ve done a whole episode of it.

All right, well, in short, this is just a word that referred to a specific type of sacrifice, and the Greek translators didn’t know that word. Yeah. And so they thought it was the name of some deity. So the deity Moloch never existed. Not in the sense that there were other deities running around, but this one was a fake one. Right. But in the sense that nobody knew.

I was gonna say, from my perspective, none of the deities existed. I get what you’re saying, yes.

Yes. And then we have Kiwan, or Kiyyun in the Hebrew, is probably a Hebrew transliteration of an Akkadian deity named Kiwan, which is probably a deity associated with Saturn. Your images yada yada yada. But in short, this name Kiwan has been replaced by this other name Remphan, which is probably either an Egyptian or a Greco-Roman deity, minor deity, JV deity, who probably had something to do with the planet Saturn. But okay, because it mentions a star, and because the Star of David is a manner of star, it is— so sure, the conspiracy theorists just go, uh, and, and here I’m thinking of the court scene from My Cousin Vinny. Identical. They’re just arbitrarily imagining, well, this must be the same star. Because, you know, how many stars you got out there?

Not as that old fool said, billions and billions and billions. No, no, there’s only one. So this Star of Remphan has to be the Star of David. So there’s a conspiracy theory out there that, and because we’ve also got the mistranslation Moloch, Remphan and Moloch also must be identical. Yeah. So obviously the worship of Remphan must also involve child sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria, all of the goodies. So it’s an antisemitic conspiracy theory that suggests basically that Jewish folks in the 19th century—and you know precisely the family that they think started it all? The Rothschilds. Sure, yeah. That they consciously, intentionally were like, “Let’s take this occult star that commemorates our worship of Remphan, and let’s make that the official symbol of Zionism and of Judaism.” And then it gets even worse because we have a hexagram and a pentagram that are found in some literature from the 19th century.

There was a book called The History and Practice of Magic by a French author who went by a pseudonym, Paul Christian. And he’s talking basically about all this symbolism that he’s found in these grimoires and all this kind of stuff. And he draws a picture of a medallion that on one side it has a hexagram with a bull’s head in the center of it, and then on the other side has a pentagram. And it’s called the Talisman of Saturn, and he says it is a preservative against danger of death through apoplexy, cancer, decaying of the bones, consumption, dropsy, paralysis, phthisis—P-H-T-H-I-S-I-S—phthisis—against the danger of being buried alive while in a state of coma. You know, the universal anxiety.

Yeah. Again, against the danger of violent death through secret plotting, poison, or ambush, this talisman preserves women from the mortal perils which accompany or sometimes follow childbirth. If in time of war the leader of an army hides the talisman of Saturn in a place which is in danger of falling into the enemy’s hands, that enemy will be unable to cross the limits set up by the presence of the talisman and will then retreat either discouraged or overcome by a resolute counterattack. So the conspiracy theorists will suggest that this talisman that is invented in the 1850s by Paul Christian goes all the way back to the ancient world. Yes, of course it does. And so all Jewish uses of this symbol are derivative of its use as a symbol of Saturn and the gods Remphan and Moloch.

It’s always been very funny to me, to coin a phrase, in the symbology—uh, in the look—

I’m a symbologist.

When one looks at symbols, when you—like, when you take something as simple as a six-pointed star or a five-pointed star, if you want to talk about, like, Satanism or whatever, like, yeah, throughout the centuries, throughout the millennia, lots of people are going to have used a very simple symbol like that for various different reasons. And, you know, it does—the fact that one, you know, if for instance a group of people who are naughty start using a star, you know, a six-pointed star as their symbol too, that’s not a reflection on another group of people that are just using it for their symbol, you know what I mean?

Like, they don’t have inherent meaning. No. Just like all words. Yeah. They mean what people use them to mean, and that’s one of the foundations of conspiracy theories. Is this symbol that we think means one thing way over here must mean that same thing way over there.

Right. The fact that Hitler started using a swastika doesn’t affect what it meant for centuries before to the Hindu people who used a swastika. Yes. It doesn’t mean that they were, for those many centuries, you know, antisemitic and interested in the promotion of the Aryan race or something.

Yes. Not fascists. Right.

Although Aryan, the word Aryan does come from sort of India. Now, oh, now I’m in a really weird place. Okay. Now I’ve got a conspiracy theory. I’m working on it. I’ll come back to y’all with it.

Keep your hand on the rope. Don’t get too—there’s another shape. There’s some conspiracy theories associated with this. Do you know what a mandorla is? I think you heard that one wrong.

Mandala. No.

Mandorla. No, um, mandorla. No, a mandorla is an almond shape. So if you take two circles and you move them so that you have, um, kind of two semicircles that connect and create an almond shape. Okay, that is a mandorla, right? And that has been a very common, um, geometric—not geographic, um, geometric design throughout history around the world. Sure. Um, but, uh, in some places it has been used as symbolic of a vulva, right? And, uh, and so you have a lot of folks who are like, “Ah, the Jesus fish is just a sideways vulva with a tail.”

With a tail, sure, sure. Yeah, that’s right.

And so this is all about worship of the divine feminine and that holy bull. With her tail. Yeah. But yeah, you get this all the time where people are like, “Don’t you see the connection?” It’s like, well, I see that one group is using a symbol one way and another group is using a symbol another way, and you want to insist that you’re in charge of what those symbols are allowed to mean. Right. And it just doesn’t work like that. So yeah. Ooh. But yeah, the conspiracy theories are wild regarding the Magen David, the Star of David.

Well, let’s get back to the Star of David just briefly. Can you talk about why is it called that?

How is it linked to David? Well, I think you had some people who were probably imagining that this symbol went back You— some people think that it was, you know, it would have been on the banners that King David flew, or people imagine that this was carved into the pillars in the palace of King David. Right. You also have it connected with the lion. There are— you see that from time to time, and including in Rastafarian cultures. Okay. You will have a lion and the Star of David put together. Okay. The fact that you had an early connection between the star and Solomon. So like the Key of Solomon is one of those old grimoire-type texts that some people think the Star of David goes back to.

And it sometimes has been known as the Seal of Solomon. Yeah. I think that’s probably how it gets connected with David. But I don’t know how far back the name Star of David is.

That’s so interesting. It’s just—.

Yeah, it’s in the Kabbalah is probably where medieval Jewish mystical literature is, is where it probably has the main association with. All right. With King David.

That’s fascinating to me. Because yeah, it does feel it feels like, you know, this has just been the symbol of Judaism since time immemorial. But obviously, that’s just not the case. And no, and, and yeah, just— no, we should do the cross next. We should, uh, that would be an interesting one to do also.

That would be an interesting one. Well, we, we haven’t done a show on, on, uh, why we think Jesus was crucified on a T-shaped cross, have we? No. Because that’s— and that gets into the Jehovah’s Witnesses, because, um, are you not aware? Oh, oh, they don’t—.

They just do like a, uh, yeah, a stake.

A stake. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, we’ll have to figure all that out. Yeah, sort out the cross.

That’s a good one for, uh, for next time, uh, the, the morning of our, um, our recording when we text each other going What are we going to talk about today? Well, think about that. Dirty secrets. Yeah, we wear our hearts on our sleeves here. But yeah, it is throughout the Kabbalistic usage. Are you just reading Wikipedia right now?

I just want to know.

No, I’m looking at the internet, but not Wikipedia.

Okay. Anyway, Yeah, I think it’s a fascinating thing. Did you have more on that?

No, I think I’m done complaining about this.

I sprung that on you. I admit that that question about the association with David, you and I—.

Oh no, I should have looked that up before doing this.

We hadn’t talked about it. That’s my fault. Anyway.

I should look up a lot of stuff before we start recording the show.

You should do. Any amount of prep work before we start and not just rely on the fact that you have whatever brain you were given to just remember almost all of the stuff. But I sure am grateful for that brain. I think it’s fun. So there you go, friends. There’s— that’s the Star of David. Hopefully Peter Thiel doesn’t start talking about it as being the— oh gosh, the symbol of the, of the Antichrist or something.

Remphan. Remphan. Yeah. Or actually, some manuscripts say Raiphan, some say Romphan, some say Rephan. Okay. They— it’s written a bunch of different ways. We’re not sure exactly what it is, but the conspiracy theorists all say Remphan. Okay. Because I think maybe that sounds the creepiest.

Yeah. All right, well, uh, look out for Remphan. If you see him and, uh, and you want to let us know where he’s at and what he means. And otherwise, if you would like to become a part of making this show happen and be one of our favorite people, you can become one of our patrons.

Peter Thiel is Bankrupt! (Theologically)

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The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology