Symbols and Shadows: Decoding the Deeper Meanings in Art

The Limits of Liberalism and Canadian Public Speech

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With that, that is the first time for listeners who have been listening to the podcast that we feature Resurrection Design Company, check them out. With that, though, we are going to get straight to the podcast and we have a guest who's now been with us.

This would be the third time we have Kruptas from X and Kruptas, I think you might be my only Anand guest that I have featured more than once. So congratulations for that.

Well, thank you. I hate being a non, I'd love to be, you know, we, I was talking about this, as you know,.

Like you want to be a real boy.

Yeah.

And it's, it's one of these things where I generally am not afraid to say things. It's more, I think out of respect for my wife, who just worries that I am going to say something untoward that's going to completely nuke my, and my business actually involves work with sort of, you know, the general public.

And so, you know, I work with liberals, extreme liberals sometimes, and non-Christians and even people of other faith traditions and stuff. So it's the kind of thing where, you know, you get the, the, the person with an ax to grind who's committed to destroying your business.

And next thing you know, you can't feed your family. And so that's just one of those small, and it's, you know, it's Canada. So our government here is just a little bit more ambitious about curbing speech that they don't like.

So that's one of those things, right?

About this over the last like three or four days that there was kind of with the Trump wave in the United States. There were a lot of guys who were loosely affiliated with the MAGA movement who really wanted their, their pet thing to be the thing they, they thought they're, you know, like for example, you have like your Christian nationalists, you have more like a libertarian types, you even have the pagan, right.

And it's for the Nietzsche, idolist guys. And I mean, I could go on and on and on with all these different groups that are more or less anti-liberal on a certain level and saw in Trump someone who represented maybe an aspect of what they were looking for.

And anyway, in the last three or four days, I've been thinking, you know, fundamentally, like even though there's been a huge kickback against social justice and all of that, it is still there. It is still there.

And, you know, liberalism is very much part of America's how people here see themselves. And I think it goes for the entire West. I think Canada is more so that way, but it's structural.

And that's one of the things that people don't realize that. You know, you think to yourself, oh, we're going to get rid of the left and we're going to get it out of all the institution, the problem is, is that all the institutions are built fundamentally for liberalism, by liberalism, that really, if you wanted to get rid of liberalism in the United States, you would pretty much have to end America as you know it.

And that's one of the things that people don't really realize. I mean, that's a whole nother different topic to get into. But all of the basic institutions are built on the idea of social engineering, that we can, you know, incrementally apply better policies and with the goal of solving all of society's problems.

And that is a fundamentally progressive mindset. And all of our institutions in society, in the West in particular, are basically built around that framework. I mean, you can run institutions without that kind of framework, but they run very, very differently and they can't run on the scale that we run them on.

So that's one of these things that people just like, basically until the West kind of craters, liberalism is going to be with us and it's going to have an institutional power that conservatism never has because liberalism is just baked into the very nature of the institutions themselves.

Conquest law is a thing and you're not, you can't escape from it because the institutions themselves are built to be liberal institutions.

Well, on that black pill, would you, Canada, I'm curious because I don't live obviously there, but in the United States you go out into rural areas and it's much different. So you run a business in a rural area, you're not going to have as much problems.

You probably wouldn't have to be in a non, in a more urban setting or possibly a suburban setting, depending on which region you would have the problems that you're obviously protecting your family and yourself from.

In Canada, is it that way? I mean, if you go out to an outlawing area, are they pretty conservative and or is it, I mean, do they support gay rights or I don't know what, how they call it in Canada.

It's Canada. So, you know, there's institutions everywhere. So if you get like a, you know, a big national chain or something in a small town, you know, when they're going to hang a pride flag out, you know, these types of things, you know, your, your Home Depot is still going to paint the sidewalk in a rainbow color during pride.

Month.

These are the kinds of things that get done. But you're absolutely right. When you get out into the small towns, there's a lot more freedom, even different things like even in a rural setting. If you go out on a construction site, for example, they are remarkably un-PC and it's just, they, they will say all kinds of things there that, you know, but it's a, it's a different environment.

So, but if you want to move within professional circles in Canada you have to know how to, to mask certain opinions, you know. Probably the most prominent these days is not even sexuality, but your stance on immigration is probably the most prominent one right now.

So you know, there are certain limits. You can talk about curbing immigration, but you, you can't, you know, to get to the next level and say, well, you know, they don't really belong here and they should go home.

These are the kinds of things that can get you into real trouble in a place like Canada. But yeah, in, in rural areas there is, there's definitely a lot more freedom. Canada is a little bit different than the US in the sense that it tends to be less ideological.

And that's a, that's a hard thing I think for a lot of Americans to grasp because the country is as a baseline more liberal in that sense. But dispositionally Canadians are, and because Canadians are more statist, but there, there is within that sort of statism that, that sort of peace order and good government, like Canadians don't really want a highly politicized ideological government.

The ideal candidate in Canada or the ideal politician in Canada is one that you don't see. So everything is just supposed to hum along. Your, your politicians are not really supposed to have ideology.

They're just basically supposed to be good managers. And the, the culture itself may be liberal. But your politicians really are, are more or less supposed to be embodying the values, but without being radical, if that makes sense.

Yeah.

I think Britain at least maybe used to be a little more that way.

More that way. Probably they're like in the last, I don't know how familiar you are with like Canadian prime ministers and so forth, but he was not the best prime minister, but he really managed.

To practice.

This was a René Lévesque who you know, the little guy from Schwinnigan who really you never saw him and they balanced the budgets and, but he was a liberal through and through, you know, socialized medicine and all of like all basically, they basically held all the liberal views, but on a day-to-day basis, you never saw him.

And that's kind of how you want your politicians to run. Whereas in the U S politics is everywhere, always in your face. Like it's just, everything is political. You know the idea like in Canada, the idea that you would elect your policemen is, is just mind boggling.

You know that these types of things that, you know, the County Sheriff gets elected or that you would elect judges, you know, now we have a problem in Canada with liberal judges cause they're appointed by, you know, the liberal party dominates, but it's just that there, there are subtle differences between the two countries that are not always apparent.

That way.

Yeah.

Interesting. And, and you would know more than I would being in Canada because in the United States, we only tend to focus on our domestic disputes, whereas in, in other parts of the world, you're kind of forced to have to focus on us because of how much I guess we control.

So well, and I, I went, I studied in the States too. So I spent, you know, a fair number of years in my formative years, you know, living in the U S and sort of, I kind of fell in love with the place too, while I was there and fell in love with American politics and, and because Canadian politics can be very dull, the blood sport that is American politics is a lot more fun from a news perspective in a, you know, following the game perspective that way.

Yeah.

Story, Allegory, and the Modern Challenge to Scripture

Well, let's, let's switch gears a little. I'd love to talk about Canada. Maybe we can do something else on Canada cause I know you're in the middle of an election season and it's, it's quite zesty to say the least.

And you know, it'd be interesting to go into, but really the purpose of this podcast is this idea. Well, I, I'll let you actually kind of pitch the purpose of it because you reached out.

Yeah.

Cause I reached out to you and said, okay, so I was, you know, I, I was with work. I was in the vehicle a lot last few days. And one of the things that driving around for work gives you time to do is to catch.

Up on podcasts.

And so I was listening to your recent episode, the one on, you know, should you read or watch fantasy? And it was compelling. I was just, I was startled like, cause normally you get the usual things like don't let your kids read Harry Potter because magic, you know what I mean?

And, and, and these types of things. But I was really surprised to hear that some people will say, well, you can read CS Lewis, but not Tolkien. And I'm just like, yeah, which, you know, which is kind of, that kind of blew my mind.

And then as you kind of got into the whole thing of the difference between story and allegory and history and so forth. I began to sort of say like, I have some thoughts on this because in many ways, your understanding of the relationship between things like story, narrative, allegory and archetypes and the nature of history are very, very important for how you understand and read history and how you, or how you read the Bible sort of vis-a-vis this, this idea of history, but also then how you interact with and face off against, shall we say, modernism in, in society, sort of the modernist challenge to scripture, you know, like the idea, well, is it really.

True?

You know, can you, can you prove that these events are real? Are they, you know, do they have scientific veracity? Is the Bible really history? And so people get caught down these rabbit holes because, you know, well, if it's true, and this was a story about real events, then the Bible must be history.

And the problem is, is that history in the modern era has very different meanings, I think, than a lot of people, you know, and so you get this idea of, well, the Bible is all facts and you're like, okay, well, what do you mean by facts in this way?

So it's, it's one of these questions where the, the lines between the idea of history, story, allegory, I think are a lot more blurred than people realize, you know? So to say sort of, and again, like, well, what is, what is the Bible that way?

It comes down to these questions, you know, like, well, you can say, well, it's the word of God, it's the revealed word of God. It's, you know, in my tradition, we talk about it, that it's, you know, wholly written by God and wholly written by men at the same time, you know, and it's not like these men were possessed by God and, you know, God took control of their hand and wrote them, but they were, they remained fully men.

And yet they spoke fully the word of God, you know, in breathe by the spirit and, you know, so all of these sort of baselines are the things like, this is the word of God. But then the question is, well, what is this thing that we call the word of God?

And I think in some ways it matters because it matters how we understand and relate to the world around us, but then also how we understand and relate to, to scripture and, and sort of what it is and how we read it in that regard.

Does that make sense? That was kind of my framing. And then I sort of thought, yes, I, you know, I think there's a conversation here, so I'm.

Excited.

Do you want to talk about this?

Yeah, sure. Well, I appreciate your thoughts. You always approach things from an angle that I think for listeners in this audience is possibly different or, you know, I know for me, it helps me sometimes see things from a different perspective.

And I don't know if it's because you've consumed so much of Jacques Ellul or if it's, I mean, you have a background in philosophy.

In philosophy. This is more like my philosophical training. So in, in hermeneutics and, you know, philosophy of history, philosophy of language, right. These types of things, how meaning is translated and a lot of, so that was really my, my area of interest and the kind of the things that the rabbit holes that I went down to went down in university and they have kind of stayed with me that way.

Right.

So, you know, when you, when you're talking about scripture and you're saying, well, these are real events and real people, and that's, you know, that's something that we all agree on this, you know? And I would say, well, these events really happened.

These are real people, but it's when you start getting into the details of that, like, well, you know, what do you mean by history? Because there's an argument can be made that there really is no such thing as history,.

Right?

That history itself is a philosophical construct, you know, flowing out of Hegel, right? So it's an idea of immanentizing the, the, the movement and providence of God, and then rooting it in, in human events and saying then that these human events have a grand narrative and meaning that we then need to divine and divide.

And then you get into sort of things like, you know, like the Hegel and the end of history, but then, you know, Marx takes up Hegel's idea and you have this sort of historical.

Dialectic.

But even, even aside from that, you get into the whole question of, of scientific veracity,.

Right?

So, you know, the question, well, you know, the, the, the Bible is factually true and, and that's a very, very, it's an, it's an, it's problematic in a sense because you're, at least the way I look at it, that it's problematic because you're accepting somebody else's framing of the argument.

So you get the, the person who is scientific, who wants things to be verified, observable, measured, and he says, well, you know, the scriptures aren't scientific, they're not history, they're not facts, they're just myths.

And then people get their dander up and say, well, no, this is really history, you know? And so then what they try to do is they try to demonstrate that scripture can meet scientific scientific standards of proof.

And, and, and so then what happens is, is that you're making the scriptures into a scientific document and you're, you're in a sense playing their game on their terms. And it, the problem with the scientific worldview is that basically it in some ways flips the world around.

So the scientific worldview looks at the world as sort of dead, neutral matter. It's just out there, you observe it, you measure it, and whatever meaning is out there, and this is that sort of Kantian, you know, severing of metaphysics that, you know, maybe there's metaphysics out there, maybe there's meaning out there, but we have no, we have no access.

To it.

So, you know, we come to the world, we measure it and whatever meaning there is out there, we give it to the world, you know? So this is that kind of, you know, find your own truth, seek your own truth.

Whereas from a Christian perspective, we look at the world as if it is, well not look at, but we understand that the world is made by God, it's woven with a divine fabric, it has order, it has meaning, the very notion of wisdom is all woven into the fabric of creation.

God is active in creation and sustaining it, nurturing it. It's not like God is far off, that you see God working day to day and just sustaining and maintaining creation. So our world brims with meaning, and we see this in terms of certain archetypes that occur over and over again.

And they express themselves this way, but we see in God that events make sense because we see that God is in him. So we look at the event, and when we look at the event, we're not just seeing and trying to record sort of the bare facts of kind of this is what happened.

And then we can get into sort of the question of the fact and ethic. And then once we've established the facts, then we can ask the question, what do the facts mean? Whereas from a Christian perspective, we're looking at the world as if it is revealing God, and so events are revealing God.

So when we talk about a story, and a story is being told, we're trying to tell the story in such a way that you're not just seeing the bare facts of the event, but you're trying to get at the essence of the meaning that's there implicit in the observable surface.

That in the surface of these events, there's a meaning that is carried with these events. And the way that we tell the story, the goal of that is to unfold the meaning of those.

Events.

So in this regard, you then would say you might have like, say, storyteller's license. So this is where the question of like, well, why is Josiah cast as a second David? So in the way that the Josiah story is told, he's a second David.

And one of the things that Matthew draws out in his account of Jesus is that Jesus is taking up into himself all of these Old Testament elements of the story. So Jesus is at once Joseph. He's at once Moses.

He's at once David. But he also then embodies the whole people of Israel. And all of these things are revealed in and through Jesus. But Matthew reveals this in the way that he tells the story. So the details of the Matthew account of Jesus' life vary from the Luke account, because Luke is trying to get at a different aspect of the richness of Jesus' life and.

Show it.

So what you have is you have two stories that revolve around the same set of events, but they're told in different ways to unpack the fullness. So the idea that you get at a single set of facts that then tell you the truth, the historical truth about Jesus, in some ways misses the point of what the stories are trying to do.

And then you get into something like John, where John even changes the order of the stories. So for example, the cleansing of the temple happens early in the Jesus story in John, but happens late in the synoptics.

And you're thinking, well, were there two cleansings? No, there weren't two cleansings of the temple. John is just telling the story. And you might say from a modern perspective, he's telling it in a factually different way, because for him, this reveals the meaning better to place the story in this order.

Right?

And for us, in terms of our modern sensibilities, in terms of historical truth and trying to conform it to the sort of scientific historicity, then it ends up falling short to what the narrative is trying to accomplish or what the stories are trying to accomplish, if that.

Makes sense.

Demythologizing World War II and the Bible

Yeah, I think it's probably, I should start every conversation this way, but it's probably good to acknowledge for the audience that we are talking about this from the ruins, as it were. We have been sitting in modernity for a couple centuries.

And we've been given, I think, a narrow, I think I agree with what I'm about to say, a narrow, right? I argue with myself, I'm my biggest critic. But no, I think we are given a narrow slate of options that dictate what we ought to believe that are confined usually in this modern setting.

And so sort of dancing around some of the things that we're talking about, but I think they're important to, for the audience sake, especially to acknowledge is that we underwent a modernist controversy about a century ago, in which the Bible was said not to match this, the scientific standard.

Standard of truth and verifiability and all these kinds of things.

Right. And this had been going on for a while, though. A lot of people don't realize that, because we look at, this was the age of the modernist controversy. It's like a 20, 30 year period. And then we had the fundamentalists and the evangelicals.

But before that, this was already being questioned, especially

In the 1700s, 1600s already.

Yeah, since enlightened rationalism and the guys like Wellhausen and others, documentary hypothesis, all these things that were eventually used to discredit the Bible. And out of that, it seems like there were a number of reactions, right?

So you have the neo-Orthodox guys who want to really just focus on this higher level of truth, that it really doesn't matter if these stories are factually true or not. So we can give that up. And I'm oversimplifying, but

No, no, no.

But yeah.

Yeah.

But that's how we're going to retain orthodoxy. We can still be orthodox. We can still hold on to biblical doctrine, but we don't need to necessarily believe in talking snakes or Noah's Ark or any of the things we know now as modern men are simply ridiculous.

And then you have, and I'll probably get killed for this, but you do have the more presuppositional Vantillian types, who I must say, I appreciate much about that tradition, and I've gained a lot from it.

But I do think that there ended up being an emphasis on going on the offense to question their own standards. The standards that you are advocating actually come from our Bible or the biblical worldview, right?

So you could think of this as worldview thinking, but worldview thinking, I think, was one reaction, finding comprehensive answers to life's questions in this biblical worldview. And stepping outside of that is to be an absurdity.

And then you have the guys who are hyper scientific, maybe you could call them evidential guys. That's what the Vantillians call them. But you have the guys that want to run to the lab, as you just, I think, described.

That's right.

They want to say, actually, here's the evidence that all of this is correct. And I don't know that any of those things actually really, there's actually aspects of truth in all of these things, in my mind.

All of them are getting at something that is true, but it's not the whole thing. And I noticed that, especially

Yeah, no.

One last thing, and then I'd love for you to

Sure, no.

Homeschool family kids who grow up in Answers in Genesis type homes. And I mean, I could say I'm one of those kids, I guess, to an extent. But they go to the Big Arc. They go to the Creation Museum, which I love.

Those are great places to go. But they're constantly told the Bible's true, the Bible's true, the Bible's true. And it tends to be on these matters of facts and practicality. And I think there's something important there.

But I see there is a leaning that I can see being unhealthy, where you end up reducing the Bible to a logic book, a science book, this book that must be 100 factually demonstrated in order for it to be true.

And I can see what you're saying. It is playing into their frame. And some of those kids, when they go woke, what do they call it? Deconstruct. They are the hardest deconstructor. They go crazy.

Because basically, once you shatter it, it's not true anymore. They can't find their way back to a sense of truth that the scripture can't be true anymore because it doesn't meet the evidentiary standards.

And they have no way to get out of it.

Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, I don't know if you have a bigger thought on that. I could keep going.

Well, there's no, there's a number. I mean, there's a number of things. So one of these things that people have to realize, like when you get into historiography, right, that even from doing history in a modern perspective, history is not accessible to us.

And people go like, like what? But history isn't accessible to us. Like you can't examine the events of the past scientifically. You can't go back and replay them. What you can do is you can, there's, you can record people's memories of the events.

So you can take, and even then, when you're recording people's memories of the events, you're not actually getting the event that's remembered in their head. And, you know, the sights, the sounds, the emotions and so forth.

You're getting a verbal accounting of something that's in their head. You know, so even then it's kind of a reduced thing. So you can look at artifacts, documents, you know, you know, all these things that are left behind in the past.

And then from those, you can then try to reconstruct a, a story that then tries to accurately convey the events as they happened. But you have no access to history. And anytime that you're doing history, you're doing storytelling.

Now, if your goal is to just simply tell the story as accurately as possible, that's, that's one way to tell the story. But there's a question of if I tell the story and that you have to be kind of careful in from somebody else's perspective, I might be playing fast and loose with quote, unquote,.

The facts.

But if by giving myself a little bit of license and how I tell the story by, you know, adjusting the events, somewhat coloring certain things in a sense, like say white, they say like casting King Josiah, telling the story in such a way that King Josiah looks like King David.

And in doing so, you know, maybe everything didn't happen in Josiah's life exactly the way it did in David. But in telling the story this way, what I'm giving you in a sense is the significance of Josiah, that he's a second David.

And if in the course of the telling of that story, I'm highlighting some things like maybe over highlighting them, but the telling the story in such a way where it might offend sort of the, the accurate history guy, who's trying to come up with the most accurate thing, irregardless of, of whether it conveys any meaning or not.

I generally tend to look at it that it's more important that we reveal to people the meaning that is there in the events, because that's really the significant thing is the meaning that's in the events.

So if the story is then crafted in a, in a typological format, so you, you might get where it's told in a certain way, you know, chiastically, for example, you know, where you have like an ABA pattern.

And so you move in and out of the center and you're, you're telling it in an ABA pattern. To focus on a specific event, or you repeat certain elements because in, in, in biblical stories, anything that's repeated is significant.

So whether or not they were, they were actually repeated over and over again, you know, for example, a good example of this is Paul's retelling of the story of him meeting Jesus on the road to Damascus, which I think is told three, four times in the gospel or in the book of Acts.

And each time the story is told a little differently. So which is the most accurate telling of the story? Well, all three tellings of the story are different and they serve a different purpose in the story.

But the fact that it's told three times is maybe more important than even trying to come up with the idea, okay, which one's the most accurate, you know what I mean? Or, you know, when did the cleansing of the temple really happen?

You know, it's John's gospel somehow lesser because he puts it at the beginning of the story and the story, you know, and probably the biggie. And this is the one that, that, you know, people really get into, get themselves wound up the most with is the notion of, you know, the Genesis and creation.

And so if you look at it and let's begin and flip the story on, on quote unquote, you know, the scientific community. So because you can't examine history scientifically, you don't have access to it. Nobody really knows what happens in the past, but there are all these artifacts that are left around.

And so once all these artifacts are all left around, somebody sees all these artifacts and develops a story to connect these, these artifacts. Now, when you begin presuppositionally with the idea that there is no God, so how did life form and how did the universe form?

Well, you then sew together all of these, these artifacts with a narrative of human progress while progress, but you then make it cosmological, right? So evolution is really the cosmological version of the idea of human progress.

And you, so you take all of these and when you get into the evidence and, and, and people have done this, when you get into the evidence, the, the, from an evidentiary perspective, evolution is really problematic, but it's basically, it's an origin story, right?

And so it's an origin story that's told using, um, artifacts as the, the means of threading and connecting the story together, right? And this is, I know this is a very postmodern way of looking at it.

This is one of the things why you really shouldn't be afraid of postmodern value because when you look at the, the, the scientist isn't really doing science, he's doing storytelling,.

Right?

And so he's got a story and he believes that story and that's his faith commitment, right? He thinks, but we tell a different story, okay? And our story is that God created the world in six days and he created it in the way that it was, that the story tells us.

Now, somebody says, well, is that the way it happens scientifically? You know, long day, short day or whatever. And I would say, it doesn't really matter because this is the story and I believe that this is the story.

Well, what do you believe on the side?

I don't know.

I don't have access to the past. I can't tell. But what I do know is that God created the world. The story tells me that he created it in six days. As for the meaning of that, I just leave that up to God.

I don't worry about it. And you can worry about that may be a problem for you, but it isn't a problem for me. And I can say that this is what the story says. And this is, and in many ways, like most origin stories, they're not designed, like even evolution is not really designed to tell you what happened in the past, but how we got today and what does the world mean today.

And the evolutionary story tells you that the world has no meaning, that everything is all cause and effect. It's atoms bouncing around. One atom bounces around, hits another atom, bounces around, boom, there's life.

And so the universe actually has no meaning. It's completely devoid of meaning. There is no God and you're an accident. And whatever meaning there is, is you giving it to the world. And I say, well, I, frankly, I don't buy that story.

This is not my faith commitment. And so I have a different set of stories that I believe very deeply. And I believe they're true, that God created the world in six days. He imbued the world with meaning.

The world was created good. It was created ordered. And all of the things that other people worship, like the sun and the moon and the stars and animals were all created by God. And then this world that was created good was given a purpose.

So it wasn't, in a sense, perfected. But we got sidelined because we, as human beings, transgressed the boundaries set for us by God.

Right.

And so this story then now reigns the whole of my life and allows me to have meaning and to understand it. And I don't feel compelled to answer a lot of questions that somebody with a scientific worldview comes at me with, because it's like, OK, that's your set of beliefs.

But it's like basically trying to say, well, Christianity has to answer to Hinduism and justify its beliefs to the Hindu. And that's more or less what we're doing is that is that the the evolutionary scientist is saying, well, you have to justify your religion by my religion.

And I just say, well, it's a false religion. You know, and that's kind of where you go that way.

Genesis, Creation, and the Problem of Scientific Standards

Yeah.