Perhaps the greatest lie that binds us to the mammalian darkness of our animal desires is the pursuit of the utopian state, which is currently the obsession of roughly half of Americans, which is a state-of-mind that was unleashed when transcendence was discarded in the face of a material world which had become much more tolerable to the human mind than the hellish circumstances under which its great religions were forged. And, as rampant animalism at the highest levels of society hints at a hellish world to come, it is only fitting to come full circle and begin examining something bigger than squabbling, human life.

Observe Stefan’s cobbling together his own mythos as he tries to tiptoe around metaphysics and ends up building a definition of metaphysics.

Politics having invaded the philosopher’s discourse, he seems to have been wonderstruck by the fact that he stood against a tide of atheism, beside Christians, even as he was himself a staunch atheist. This viewer—while horrified at Stefan’s ignorance of religious tracts, given his dismissal of faith—is struck by the process by which he apparently represents the culturally discarded rational animal called man attempting to rediscover his moral genesis through a rediscovery and exploration of metaphysics.

Duke Pesta is not someone I am familiar with, but he seems to be the right man to introduce Stefan and his atheist legion to western metaphysics.

One note I would make on the positive side of the religious ledger is that, when the absolute kings of Spain [who ruled by divine right] became aware of a vast body of heathen people, they routinely admonished their conquistadors not to enslave these people, but to bring priests and monks to speak with them. The more secular control over the head-of-state among colonizing powers [for instance with the English], the more enslavement of the newly discovered people was pursued.

In reference to Stefan’s stumble-bum tripping over the apocalyptic nature of Jesus’ ministry is that the world of Jesus—a predominantly Jewish world under the heel of a Roman power structure—was a world which did end in the 70s A.D. As moderns we forget how small the concept of “the world” was in ancient terms compared to our own planetary model. For a well-supported argument that Jesus was only concerned with the people of his nation, read Jesus: A Historian’s Review of the Gospels by Michael Grant, who read the Gospels in the three original languages they were written in rather than relying on translations.

The emasculation of modern Christianity as discussed by Pesta is a very nice piece. If you get sick of Stefan, get to the end of the discussion at 52-58 minutes.