In this bonus portion of Adam’s interview of Good Neighbor, Bad Citizen author Domenic Scarcella, things get wild! Insights revealed! Important issues debated! Star Trek referenced! This one has it all!
00:00 — Intro. Welcoming back (to the 2nd half of an interview) Domenic Scarcella!
00:42 — Adam quotes a beautiful passage in Dom’s book and asks why so many modern day Christians feel justified in using state power to enforce their vision of a “good society”. Dom’s answer is deep and historical.
06:30 — Adam offers a psychological interpretation of one of the main religious “upgrades” that Christianity had over paganism. Dom responds intelligently. One can “touch the transcendence” without being a theist.
10:40 — Dom asks Adam where he “fits” on the landscape of metaphysical belief. Adam brings up epistemology, naturally. What does it mean for a thing to be “transcendent”?
13:40 — Dom makes an unexpected admission, along with a good analysis of how artful, descriptive language would have been used long long ago to try to explain deep concepts in our oldest stories. He uses different biblical creation stories to demonstrate the point. Dom’s interpretation of man’s “coming to consciousness” in the garden of Eden mirrors an intuition Adam has about the history of our species.
17:37 — Since Dom talks about Marduk, Adam asks if he knows much about Jordan Peterson’s analysis of humanity’s oldest stories. Dom gives a great description of what the bible actually is: God’s gradual revelation in human history.
22:50 — Adam asks a weird question about what the Old and the New Testaments “did” for humans in their relative stages of societal development. Dom agrees somewhat, but points out that we still need both, clearly. We still haven’t learned.
27:00 — Dom hates memes! Adam sees his point, but pushes back. Memes have a use case, so long as people don’t get “stuck” at meme level. Adam uses Star Trek in his argument. Checkmate.
38:29 — Adam asks Dom if he has anything else to add about the book. He talks about all the various interesting types of readers he’s gotten. Different people get different things out of it. That’s the sign of a good book!
— Outro. Dom leaves us with a final bit of wisdom.
Haman Nature article mentioned:
Thanks for watching!
Naturally,
Adam
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Haman Nature to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
