"Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies."
1 Corinthians 6:19-20
0:03 - The Body as a Temple
1:22 - The Essence of Humanity
7:12 - Humility and Gratitude
13:55 - Chasing Dopamine
19:50 - Choices and Pride
23:33 - The Sacrifice of Ancestors
26:46 - Life as a Gift
In this episode, I delve into the profound implications of 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, specifically the idea that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. This notion sparks a deeper philosophical exploration of what it truly means to honor ourselves and the legacy of those who came before us. I encourage listeners to reflect on the profound connection between the mortal and the immortal, illustrating how our physical existence is intertwined with a timeless essence that has been passed down for generations.
As we unpack the significance of being "not our own" and having "been bought at a price," I invite you to consider how much of our identity and capabilities are inherited rather than self-made. Through the lens of humility and gratitude, I articulate the idea that every aspect of our intellectual and physical selves—the words we speak, the bodies we inhabit, and even the thoughts we process—are not uniquely ours but part of a greater continuum of human experience. This realization compels us to recognize the gifts we've received and the responsibilities that accompany them.
Throughout the discussion, I explore the intricate dance of language, culture, and creativity that shapes our personalities and interactions with the world. The concept of free will emerges as a complex interplay between our inherited traits and the choices we make within the confines of our environments. While acknowledging the limitations imposed by our genetic and cultural backgrounds, I stress the importance of actively navigating our journey and the moral choices that define who we are.
I also touch upon the historical sacrifices of our ancestors, framing our lives as a culmination of their hopes and struggles. This reflection leads to a call to honor their legacy by living purposefully rather than squandering the opportunities they fought to provide. The insinuation that life is a precious gift, intertwined with the expectations of those who preceded us, serves as a moral imperative to contribute meaningfully to the ongoing human story.
In this episode, I emphasize that our existence is not merely a chance encounter with life but rather a narrative enriched by the interplay of gratitude, humility, and purpose. By recognizing that we are custodians of a vast inheritance, we can aspire to honor it through our choices and actions. Ultimately, I hope this discussion prompts deeper contemplation about not just who we are, but who we aspire to become in light of the legacy we carry.
[0:00] 1 Corinthians 6, 19, 20.
[0:03] Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own. You were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. Amazing stuff for me. And I'll tell you what. I think it means philosophically, and you can tell me, of course, what you think, and we can reason together.
[0:31] Your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. So the conjunction of the mortal and the immortal is really the essence of humanity. Why does Jesus resonate so much with humanity? Because Jesus was, of course, the eternal in the mortal. He was half God, half man. He was born of a woman and became immortal, not just in his soul and in his ascension, but in his fame, his renown, his influence. We live, we strive, we struggle, we win, we fail, we die. Like the fruit fly, like the intestinal parasite, like the eagle.
[1:23] And yet, of course, we all know that deep down there is something within us that is far more than mortal.
[1:31] So I want you to think of the things that are in you that are not of you, right? The things that are in you that are not of you.
[1:43] This podcast, if it changes your mind, and it certainly will rearrange some neurons, is in you, but not of you. Almost all, I mean, I've invented a few mostly silly words here and there, but effectively, all of the words that we use are in us, but not of us. I was taught English. I was taught syntax, grammar, morphemes, sentence structures, and these were all brought into me from before me. English has been evolving for hundreds or thousands of years, and it is not within me. The language that you know is not yours. Now, you can, of course, arrange it according to your free will and values and preferences, and how you choose to assemble these languages and what you choose to communicate is you, but the language itself is not. The facile tongue and lips, if you ever try and figure out, right, at the beginning of the rather horrifying book, Lolita by Nabokov, there's something which is always stuck in my brain, which is Lolita, that he says that the tongue moves forward with each of the pronunciations of Lolita. And if you think of the amazing orchestration of Lolita.
[3:11] The lips, the teeth, the tongue, the jaw, the vocal cords, all required to produce coherent sounds. It's really an amazing, incredible dance. Think of all that is required for the production of the words that I am talking, that I am speaking. We could go for hours and hours about everything that is required. But your tongue is not yours.
[3:40] You have a tongue, but you did not create the tongue. You own the tongue, but you did not make the tongue. All the nerve endings, all of the taste buds, all of the sense organs, all of the wiring is not yours. It's not mine. It's inherited. What about you is not inherited? I mean, this is the whole thing of the MPC meme, right? The non-player character. That is, people who inherit and reproduce with no particular thought of their own, who comply, and therefore accept only the immortal, not the chosen. Compliance, of course, is an ancient immortal strategy for staying alive in a time of tyranny. So the hardware and software the hardware being the physical structures that produce language and the software being the language the words the structure i mean people in japan speak very differently but we all have very similar hardware in that you know somebody raised in Japan speaks Japanese even if they're not Asian fluently and somebody raised in say Sweden speaks Swedish perfectly though they are not necessarily white.
[5:06] So, the hardware and the software is not yours. A man assembles a house, but the man, of course, does not invent himself. The hands that fashion the house, he does not invent the bricks, he buys them. He does not invent the matter, he simply transfers it, because matter cannot be invented or destroyed, only transferred to energy and back. Like, so when Corinthians says that you are made from eternity and you owe eternity, you are not.
[5:48] Your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God. So, we would say, philosophically, your bodies are inherited from eternity. Because, of course, everything that is not mortal is, in a sense, eternal. Everything that is not mortal is, in a sense, eternal, from the perspective of mortality. Because my consciousness does not reach back to before I was born, neither will my consciousness exist or process after I am dead. It doesn't really matter how far back it goes. So life is 4 billion years old, which is an infinity to my mere 80, hopefully 80 plus years mortality, right?
[6:42] Even if we say humanity is a couple of hundred thousand years old, it's essentially eternal to me that far back. If you think of running off a cliff, right, the cliff being mortality, if you think of running off a cliff, does it really matter whether you only run one foot off the cliff or you manage to leap six or eight feet off the cliff? It doesn't really matter. You're going to fall either way, right? And that's what I mean. like once you're over the edge, it doesn't really matter how far you go.
[7:13] Your body is the temples of the Holy Spirit of eternity, that we are a repository of eternity. And I know this sounds kind of flaky and abstract and all of that, but it's really important for the virtue of humility. So the virtue of humility is tied into the virtue of gratitude. I just felt a wave of emotion. The virtue of humility is wrapped up in the virtue of gratitude. See, gratitude is saying that something has happened outside of myself that I'm benefiting from. And that's what humility is as well. I've said this a million times on the show. I feel amazingly fortunate to have inherited the mind that I have. I feel that I absolutely won the eternal cosmic lottery.
[8:05] Now, if you recognize that you are, as I do, in the recipients of good, you are the recipient of amazingly good fortune. As I mentioned this also before, like a number of friends that I had when I was young, I died. It's just a cluster of bad luck and foolish behavior. But yeah, a number of the friends that I had when I was young died, which kind of slithered into me. In terms of a sense of mortality. And they died, leaving really no mark except the long shadow of sorrow in their parents' hearts.
[8:47] So gratitude for life. There is a veteran who's talked about this saying that, you know, when he got old, he was a World War II veteran. And when he got old and he was sick and dying, people were sad. And he said, my God, you know, most of the men I served with died 50 years ago. The fact that I've had an extra 50 years is nothing to be sorrowful about.
[9:15] And this concept of gratitude for what you did not earn is really something to behold, something to experience. Gratitude is the opposite of vanity. So I've been truly blessed with a very good mind and a reasonably good appearance, and a reasonably pleasant speaking voice, and an accidental accent. And see, I did not study philosophy, really. Philosophy seized me. I mean, when I first started reading about ideas, arguments, reason, virtue, it was a paroxysm, a form of epilepsy, a seizure in my soul, so to speak. And in a sense, I've had no more free will to study and spread philosophy than a snail has if launched from a catapult about its trajectory. I mean, obviously, I have some choices. It's not determinism. It's not determinism. I've had a lot of very delicate choices to make and a lot of navigation to make.
[10:29] But it is not free will per se that has launched me into philosophy. It was a response as insistent as a shark's feeding frenzy or a flower's inexorable bent towards the light. I would not have done anything else were it possible, and the moment it became possible, I shed my former life like a snake trying to become an angel. I shed my career, my income, my family, my friends, my life. And it's been glorious. It's been joyful. It's been alarming. It's been beautiful. Now, the argument that it's the Holy Spirit that moves within me is absolutely in accordance with my experience. I feel, sometimes, that my voice or my brain is a hand puppet of the divine.
[11:32] I know this sounds crazy, I understand that, but I'm just telling you my experience. I'm not trying to make an empirical case here, I'm telling you my experience. I did not know when I started doing this analysis of this text, and thank you so much for the listener who sent it in, I did not know that I would become this emotional and hopefully this eloquent in my explication of what I think this means for you, for me, for all of us. I do not have philosophy.
[12:11] Philosophy has me. I did not invent philosophy, obviously. I did not invent the words that I'm using. I did not fashion my apparatus for speaking, my tongue, my lips, my teeth, my nerve endings, my voice, my vocal cords. I did not invent the technology that allows me to pace and record as if we were on a long walk and I was sharing my thoughts.
[12:37] I am a tiny fragment of what I am doing. I have some guidance to it. I have some navigation. But I feel as if I am in a storm-tossed sea in a flighty but strong craft, attempting to navigate giant waves and crazy winds as best I can. I have some skill, I have some capacity to choose what I'm doing, I have some capacity to shift and alter the direction of the vessel, but only so much. And this is very common among people who are creative, and I fundamentally view what I'm doing as rational creativity. But a songwriter has the capacity to sit down at a piano and tinkle around and record, right? But he does not have the capacity to create hit songs through willpower. Otherwise, that's all he would be doing, right? That's all he would be doing.
[13:42] Recognizing that I am in possession of all that can be inherited and a small amount that can be navigated is humility and gratitude.
[13:56] If you are a hedonist, and not philosophical, but if you're a hedonist, then what you do, of course, is you chase food, you chase alcohol, you chase orgasms, you chase, could be exercise It could be any number of things, but you chase dopamine.
[14:15] But you did not invent dopamine. You did not invent the nerve receptors. You did not invent the pleasure of eating or exercise or any of these things. You didn't invent any of that. You are chasing that which you never made, and you are inhabited by an eternity that you inherited, the eternity of physical development, psychological development, the human brain, in the human mind. I mean, I'm very much aware that my brain was fashioned and conditioned by the relentless winters of my ancestors that did not suffer fools at all, and had to survive brute winter even against the desperate pleas of those who had not planned. That is, fashioned the brain. I am aware that my brain has also been fashioned by, I was, I don't know how much this was the case in Ireland, but certainly in the culture that I grew up in, in England, which is the most influential culture to me from the age of pretty much birth to, with one or two exceptions in other countries, to the age of 11 or so, was the British culture. And the British culture was very much conditioned by a couple of hundred years of.
[15:34] The aggressive and sometimes the non-conformist. And I see this, of course, my daughter's raised very peacefully and very positively, and she still has this, some of the British show that's cringe, or a sense of decorum or self-criticism or self-analysis relative to a social norm, and it's just baked in, it seems. So, when the Bible is talking about this, It is resonating with a very deep truth, whether you're religious or not. It's resonating with a very deep truth. Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit? So, a temple is a physical thing. The Holy Spirit is an eternal thing. So you are a physical thing inhabited by an eternal thing. The eternal thing being all that has evolved over four billion years. Which is not eternal, but eternal to a mere flash-in-the-pan fragment of life such as we all are.
[16:42] But the truths and the concepts are eternal. The truth, the facts, the math, the constants, the absolutes, the 2 and 2 make 4, the UPP, the fact of gravity, mass, all of these things are eternals. And we are made from them, and they are in us. We did not ourselves make them, which really comes down to the fundamental question, right, which is, who are you? You are not your body, because if you are your body, then you are not you, because your body was not invented by you. I had a friend in university who still, no, this is after university, sorry, but she was haunted by something she did in high school, which is she stole some lines from a poem and passed them off as her own. Something about coins and sunrise and so on, right? I can't remember the exact phrase. And she was tormented by this because she passed off something she had taken from someone else as her own. And she was praised for something that she did not create and she gained a reputation for language excellence based upon something that she stole or plagiarized, defrauded, based upon passing it off as her own.
[18:11] So what I'm saying is that your intelligence, your physicality, the nature and structure of your brain, the language, the nerves, the tongue, none of these are yours, all mine.
[18:26] That you can accept as yours is that which you have chosen, created, and earned. I did not create the language I use. I did not create the body that I use. I've had some effect on it, of course, by working pretty hard to exercise and eat well and stay healthy. But that's the humility.
[18:49] That's the humility and the gratitude. I mean, not only was I given a human life, so to speak, which is the greatest prize in the universe. But I was given a human life with extraordinary, to me at least, levels of intellect and creativity, which I am not going to take pride in because I did not earn it. What I can take pride in is the choices that I've made in how to deploy that which I neither chose nor created, which is my body and my brain. I did not choose the storm. I did not choose the vessel. I did not choose the wind or the height of the water or the physics of the environment, but I can choose how I steer the thunderous machinery, constantly in motion, in my mind and heart. That I can choose and should. And I can take some pride in how I have steered, but I cannot take pride in the ship or the storm.
[19:51] That would be vanity. It's the same thing if you happen to be a very good looking.
[19:57] You know, let's take a silly example of, you know, some OnlyFans woman who has, I don't know, great boobs, great ass, whatever it is, right? Attractive. Well, did she earn the money? Not particularly because she did not invent her body and she did not invent male lust or the desire for men to provide resources to attractive women, and so on, right? She did not provide the nerve endings and the masturbatory pleasures that males or females are capable of, that is baked into life itself. So what does she earn? What does she earn? Now, she made the choice to monetize her physical assets, but she did not earn the entire environment of lust and simping and so one that's baked into a lot of men's natures, particularly men whose fathers married or, reproduced with their mothers because of their mother's physical attractiveness and for no other, personal or moral qualities.
[21:04] So, do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have received from God? There is not body or temple or Holy Spirit, but your. Who are you? Who are you? The only thing you can take pride in are your choices, not reactions, not triggered, not lust, not desire, nor even the repudiation of desire. The only thing that you can take pride in are your moral choices. You can't take pride in your height. You know, when I was, I mean, even still now, Now, occasionally, you see these guys online with great hair, right? Zac Efron, right? He's got that sort of great shark of hair, right? Or you see guys online, and they have this sort of arrogance around their hair. And, you know, I get it. It can be attractive and all of that, although a lot of women do like the bald look.
[21:57] But it's like, it really is the saddest thing to take pride in, of course, right? It'd be like me taking pride and having blue eyes. It's just an accident, right? You have some protein strands sticking out of your scalp that you accidentally hung on to through genetics, right? I mean, balding is genetic, right? Didn't earn it, right? Didn't earn it. I mean, Zac Efron didn't earn his hair, although I think he and his trainer and whatever other pharmaceuticals he's on have turned that will-of-the-wisp teenage body into this absolute middle-aged tank. He's got going on now. It's really quite something. But to take pride in that which you did not earn is vanity, right? It's saying, I am responsible for being good-looking, I'm responsible for being tall, I'm responsible for having great hair, or great boobs, or great butt, or whatever it is, but you're not.
[22:52] So, the phrase goes on to say, you are not your own, you were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your bodies. You were not your own, you were bought at a price. Well, very true. This is part of the whole sacrifice of your ancestors thing. Did your ancestors sacrifice as much as they did to give you life? Did they suffer through the death of half their children, disease, war, famine, horrible weather, lack of health care, lack of dentistry of any functional kind. Did they suffer through all of that to hand you life so you could piss it away playing World of Warcraft or Fortnite?
[23:34] Your life is a shadow cast by the guillotine sacrifices of your ancestors.
[23:43] Ancestor William Molyneux, who I know a bit more of, I've actually read a whole book about him, but did my ancestor William Molyneux suffer as he suffered, hiding out in barns in Ireland with John Locke escaping the soldiers of the king? Did my ancestors suffer as much as they did to hand me life so that I could waste it on pornography, video games, and online simping? Well, of course not. If they had known that the sum total of my life would be a repudiation of all of their suffering through blank-eyed, glassy-hearted hedonism in the here and now, they wouldn't have bothered to have children.
[24:24] I am only alive because my ancestors kept the flame alight and handed it down the centuries and the millennia in order for me to carry on the flame. The flame is reproduction, if possible, but it's also doing good, being honorable, promoting virtue, fighting corruption. So life is a gift from your ancestors who gave you that gift on the understanding, on the belief, on the hope, on the optimism that you would not waste it, that you would not waste it. Would you work 80 hours a week for 40 years to amass a fortune? If you knew for sure that your children would piss it away on pyramid schemes and hiring questionable people in foreign lands and buying useless crap that they shoved in the basement, died, hoarders, you wouldn't. Why would you bother gathering all of that wealth, working that hard, if you knew for certain that your children would squander it. You wouldn't, right? You wouldn't. Would you get married if you knew for certain, that your wife would divorce you, take your children and half your staff? No.
[25:44] Focus, purpose, and effort are all based upon optimism in outcomes, and you, my friend, and me, are the result of wild optimism in the past for the potential of the future. And if you squander it, you are stealing from your ancestor's sufferings. You are defrauding them. Life is a gift from eternity. Life is a gift from before you were born, and that gift comes with certain expectations. And if you fail to fulfill those expectations, you are defrauding the optimism of those who suffered and died to hand you the trembling, wind-blown, leafy torch of life. So I think that's what it means, that's what it has to do with, that's what it's foundationally about. Life is a precious gift given to you by the optimism and suffering of those who came before you. It is not yours to do with as you please, but you must add to the story and pass the torch forward or be condemned as a fraudster.
[26:46] So I hope that this helps. I'd love to know what you think about this, freedomain.com slash donate. If you find these talks helpful, I would really appreciate your support and I hope you have a wonderful day. It's a Sunday morning on the 12th of January, 2024. And I will see you at 11 o'clock in the morning. Bye.
Support the show, using a variety of donation methods
Support the show
