Speaker 1: The Internet. Ship up. This is podcast Robert behind you
Speaker 1: know Bastards and such. Hello. Everyone, This is Behind the
Speaker 1: Bastards and I'm here to podcast on the Internet. That's
Speaker 1: most of what I wanted to get across. Anything else, Sophie.
Speaker 1: Uh no, okay, good Now today we're we're talking with
Speaker 1: my friend Mr Miles Gray. Miles, how are you? How
Speaker 1: are you doing in quarantine? Oh? My god, help me, Robert,
Speaker 1: You're not You're not doing great. I'm I'm fine relatively speaking.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm getting used to a new way of living,
Speaker 1: to put it mildly, but you know, it's taking a lot.
Speaker 1: I'm actually learning a lot about myself through this quarantine,
Speaker 1: and I'm trying to use that part to be empowering
Speaker 1: rather than fucking frightening. Well, we're all learning a lot
Speaker 1: during this new period of quarantine, and some of the
Speaker 1: people who are learning the most are America's religious leaders,
Speaker 1: particularly the leaders of large churches that make their money
Speaker 1: by having a lot of people uh cram in the
Speaker 1: door every Sunday and and drop out donations. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And today, Miles, we're going to talk about how organized
Speaker 1: religion historically response to plagues. Uh and that's gonna be
Speaker 1: a fun topic for you to discuss. Are you a
Speaker 1: big fan of plagues or organized religion? I'm plagues, not
Speaker 1: as much, not as much as I used to be.
Speaker 1: Not as much plagues around When that game Plague Inc.
Speaker 1: Came out and I was just sucking laughing my ass off,
Speaker 1: I'm like, here, come to London Olympics, get ready for
Speaker 1: global spread um. Anyway, but organized religion. I went to
Speaker 1: Lutheran school until eighth grade, and then I went to
Speaker 1: Catholic High school, so I know a little bit of
Speaker 1: out of all sides of the crucifix, of the crucifix? Interesting,
Speaker 1: Oh right, because religion? Yeah that makes sense. Okay, well Miles,
Speaker 1: let's let's let's let's let's let's shove our intellectual probost
Speaker 1: guy into this subject and uh excrete saliva in order
Speaker 1: to dissolve it so that we can suck it back
Speaker 1: up and gain nourishment. Wow, who what flies? What insect
Speaker 1: was a fad? Okay? Yeah, they like squirt goop out
Speaker 1: and it dissolves stuff and then they suck it back up.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure that's how flies work. Can you now?
Speaker 1: This is the natural extension of knowing something like that is,
Speaker 1: can you make a big barrel of whatever they spit
Speaker 1: out and just kill somebody with that? Uh? Probably not.
Speaker 1: I mean maybe if the flies are carrying a disease,
Speaker 1: but they aren't always. You know, you have to think
Speaker 1: you need a lot of flies. You need a lot
Speaker 1: of flies now miles outside of your planes to murder
Speaker 1: people with flies. Um, let's talk about let's get into
Speaker 1: the subject. So on a video posted nearly February eighteen,
Speaker 1: Texas evangelical preacher and member of Donald Trump's Faith Advisory Council,
Speaker 1: Gloria Copeland said this to her parishioners in a Facebook
Speaker 1: live video. And I wanna I wanna have you play
Speaker 1: that and and play the start too, about a minute
Speaker 1: in four seconds. Well, listen, partners, we don't have a
Speaker 1: flu season. We've got a duck season, the dear season,
Speaker 1: but we don't have a flu season. And don't receive
Speaker 1: it when somebody threatens you with everybody's getting the flu,
Speaker 1: we've already had our shot. He bore our sicknesses and
Speaker 1: carried our diseason. That's what we send though, and by
Speaker 1: his stripes we were healed. If you've already got the flu,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna pray for you right now. Father, I pray
Speaker 1: for every person that has symptoms of flu. I'm asking
Speaker 1: your Lord, but your supernatural power to heal them now
Speaker 1: from the top of their into the souls of their feet.
Speaker 1: Flu I bind you off of the people. And Jesus,
Speaker 1: Jesus himself gave us the flu shot. He redeemed us
Speaker 1: from the curse of flu. And we receive it, and
Speaker 1: we take it, and we are healed by his strips. Amen.
Speaker 1: You know, the Bible says he himself bore our sicknesses
Speaker 1: and carried our diseases, and by his strips were goodness. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's pretty great, isn't it. Who he Dude, her energy
Speaker 1: is like someone at a bar who has been lying
Speaker 1: about everything they've been telling you the whole time, but
Speaker 1: it's ultimately trying to get free drinks. Like he's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, because basically, like the way I look at
Speaker 1: it is everybody's blessing to how like it's just very fast,
Speaker 1: very smooth. But she sounds fucked up though too, in
Speaker 1: a weird way, like yeah, she does sound like she's
Speaker 1: she's she's doing all of this to like get you
Speaker 1: to give her a pack of cigarettes. Right, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: know you want to, but you know, the people who
Speaker 1: do that get a lot of free shots and a
Speaker 1: lot of cigarettes. Uh. And she has made a lot
Speaker 1: of money and is now advising President Donald Trump. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty cool, Gloria. And that video went on
Speaker 1: to note that um, uh, pete listeners should just keep saying,
Speaker 1: I'll never have the flu. I'll never have the flu.
Speaker 1: Inoculate yourself with the word of God. Flu I bind
Speaker 1: you off of the people in the name of Jesus.
Speaker 1: It's good stuff. Yeah. Again. That was February of two thousand,
Speaker 1: eighteen miles and that year's flu season was, according to
Speaker 1: the CDC, responsible for more hospitalizations than any previous season
Speaker 1: in the CDC's records. Uh. And the fact that Copeland
Speaker 1: had the ear of the President while she was advising
Speaker 1: her more than a million listeners to not get flu shots,
Speaker 1: um may have had an impact on why that season
Speaker 1: was so bad, and may also have been a message
Speaker 1: of things to come. As I write this in March,
Speaker 1: we or well, actually yeah I wrote this in March.
Speaker 1: It's now April. Um. But we're at a place where
Speaker 1: the president very recently voiced his desire to reopen the
Speaker 1: country well before medical officials advised him to do so
Speaker 1: so that he could have it open in time for Easter.
Speaker 1: It looks like we've moved past that particular bad idea. Um,
Speaker 1: but my guy, it was like right on the fucking
Speaker 1: edge there for a little while. I don't even Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I get it. That would have been great thematically,
Speaker 1: it would have been awesome like that would it would
Speaker 1: have been while everyone was dying around me. I would
Speaker 1: have at least been able to like envision the scene
Speaker 1: in the movie made seventy years later, where like they
Speaker 1: film a bunch of tow like increasingly unsettling like music
Speaker 1: builds as all these different congregants, you know, file in
Speaker 1: and shake each other's hands, and yeah, you could, you could,
Speaker 1: you could, you could make that that four minutes scene
Speaker 1: is amazing, And then switched to the mass graves, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's would be a great meme though, where
Speaker 1: Jesus Capitalist Christ uh you know, is being crucified by
Speaker 1: COVID nineteen right now and then resurrected on Easter to
Speaker 1: come back with massive sales with thirty percent off some
Speaker 1: of your most favorite items. Yeah, yes, um, and you know,
Speaker 1: speaking of capitalist Jesus Christ. Um. Uh yeah. So I
Speaker 1: wound up like interested in all this, and I went
Speaker 1: down this rabbit hole of like digging into the reactions
Speaker 1: specifically Christian churches to horrible plagues all throughout history. Um.
Speaker 1: And I as a little bit of a I don't know,
Speaker 1: content warning here. Um, this whole episode is just because
Speaker 1: I was drunk at on Google at midnight a couple
Speaker 1: of days ago, and and now this exists. So you're
Speaker 1: it's just gonna have to It's gonna happen to you now, Miles,
Speaker 1: and there's no there's no escaping it. So we'll start
Speaker 1: with the Black Plague because it killed about a third
Speaker 1: of the world, and it's like, you know, kind of
Speaker 1: the gold standard of plagues, you know, if we're comparing
Speaker 1: plagues to like terrorist manifestos, it's like the plague equivalent
Speaker 1: of the Uni Bomber's book. You know, It's like it's
Speaker 1: like the top of the fucking pillar. You know. Is
Speaker 1: this album? As in terms of albums, it depends on
Speaker 1: your taste, But for you, what's you? I think? I
Speaker 1: think The Who's Tommy is the greatest album of all times.
Speaker 1: So I would say the Black Plague is the Tommy
Speaker 1: of plagues. Wow, okay, I like that. M hm. I
Speaker 1: learned about you right now, thank you. Yeah so. Uh.
Speaker 1: Most of our media tends to focus on the damage
Speaker 1: the plague did to medieval Europe, and it it fucked
Speaker 1: medieval Europe, but pretty bad. But the plague actually started
Speaker 1: off somewhere in the East, we don't really know where exactly,
Speaker 1: and it was equally devastating in Asia in the Middle East.
Speaker 1: And one of the first sources we have for the
Speaker 1: Black Plague was Abu hafs Umar Ibben al Wardi uh In,
Speaker 1: a Muslim scholar who himself died of the Black Plague
Speaker 1: in thirteen nine, and he claimed its origin was somewhere
Speaker 1: in China, which at that point was a much vaguer
Speaker 1: term than it is today. Uh And he described that
Speaker 1: in the Near East, it quotes sat like a king
Speaker 1: on a throne and swayed with power, killing daily one
Speaker 1: thousand or more and decimating the population, which is a
Speaker 1: sentiment now that we're losing a thousand Americans a day
Speaker 1: to this. That reminds me more and more of the
Speaker 1: president of the country. Yeah. Yeah, hate, you hate when
Speaker 1: history does that thing of like just showing back up,
Speaker 1: like yeah, you thought I was done. So it's the
Speaker 1: Black plague like rolled probably spread along the Silk Road,
Speaker 1: you know, through travel and transit and the major arteries
Speaker 1: of those two things at the time. Um and yeah,
Speaker 1: by thirteen forty nine it is it hit Limburg, Germany,
Speaker 1: where one chronicler wrote, there came a great death in
Speaker 1: Germany that is called the first Great death, and they
Speaker 1: died by the dozen. And when that began, on the
Speaker 1: third day, they died in Limburg more people died, not
Speaker 1: counting the children because we didn't really count the children
Speaker 1: back in the day, Like why would we give a
Speaker 1: shit about the kids? Like funk that noise? How do
Speaker 1: you what the fun was going on back then when
Speaker 1: they're doing body counts, like they're just kids die time,
Speaker 1: Jeremy Iron, you know kids die for no reason. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like there's kids are just dropping left and right back
Speaker 1: in the day. So until somebody's like fifteen, they're not
Speaker 1: even real. Um. So it's like a bunch of babies
Speaker 1: die like who gives a ship expects are low? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Once some like adults start dropping, then it's like okay,
Speaker 1: now we're losing some. Right, those little those little screaming
Speaker 1: short people are all quiet. But now there's not as
Speaker 1: many people to go work the field. Something might be wrong. Yeah.
Speaker 1: If you can't work, you don't count. Yeah. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: was kind of the attitude. Now at this point in history,
Speaker 1: if you were a Christian, you know, there was no
Speaker 1: Protestant game in town, right, it was just like Orthodox
Speaker 1: Christianity and Catholicism, Like that was kind of it for you. Um.
Speaker 1: And since you know, Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism were like
Speaker 1: the Christian religions in town, and the Church in Rome
Speaker 1: was the wealthiest government in Europe and probably the most
Speaker 1: powerful government in Europe. The Church was kind of on
Speaker 1: deck to take action when this horrible plague starts killing everybody.
Speaker 1: Like there's not really much in the way of organization
Speaker 1: or unity pan you know European when the plague hits,
Speaker 1: the church is the closest thing you have, you know,
Speaker 1: it's your c d C at the time, and it
Speaker 1: was not great at being the c d C boy
Speaker 1: that is like oh science, yeah no, no, no, not
Speaker 1: our strong suit. Um. Now to give that, I mean
Speaker 1: to give them a little bit of credit. It wasn't
Speaker 1: anyone strong suit at the time. Like, it's not like
Speaker 1: the doctors had a great handle on germ theory in
Speaker 1: the thirteen forties. Um, so no one really knew what
Speaker 1: to do. Um So this will actually be the first
Speaker 1: the only part in the story where like the Church
Speaker 1: isn't taking any they're taking actions that are endangering and
Speaker 1: killing huge numbers of people, but they don't mean to
Speaker 1: be you know, um like they couldn't have really known
Speaker 1: how this was all going to work out. It's not
Speaker 1: really there's a lot like a puppy play with like
Speaker 1: dynamite or something. You're like, oh, you don't want to
Speaker 1: I I don't know, because like the Catholic Church is
Speaker 1: a horrible had done a lot of horrible, horrible things
Speaker 1: up to this point in history. It's more like it's
Speaker 1: more like a serial killer accidentally backing over a puppy,
Speaker 1: where like that doesn't really like if you're trying to
Speaker 1: like list list that person's crimes, like, well, they didn't
Speaker 1: mean to hit the puppy, but it's just a thing
Speaker 1: that happened. Because they that happens to be a thing
Speaker 1: that just happened. It's on their resumes towards the bottom.
Speaker 1: Really yeah, it's like John Wayne Gacy accidentally runs over
Speaker 1: a cat. That's the Catholic Church. And this specific instance,
Speaker 1: like um, so, the Church's first reaction to the outbreakup
Speaker 1: plague in Europe, authorized by the Pope, was to hold
Speaker 1: mass processions through the great cities of Europew. Again, they
Speaker 1: couldn't have known this was a bad idea, but this
Speaker 1: was a terrible, terrible call um And it came out
Speaker 1: of a longstanding tradition called Rogation Days, which were enormous
Speaker 1: multi day processions held by the Church. To quote say,
Speaker 1: God's desire for penitence. Uh yeah, so like God's piste
Speaker 1: and you gotta march through. God's always angry at you,
Speaker 1: and you gotta Like the ancient Catholic Church, if any
Speaker 1: of you had parents who had anger management problems or
Speaker 1: substance abuse issues, and like they come home like really
Speaker 1: piste off, and it's like everybody's job has to be
Speaker 1: to calm down, you know, mom or dad or whoever.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing a lot of people listening have had that experience.
Speaker 1: That's kind of the general attitude towards the Catholic Church
Speaker 1: is like something bad is happening. We've got all like
Speaker 1: fucking the church, like God is home and drunk and
Speaker 1: we need to like hill him out. Yeah, that's very
Speaker 1: much the attitude kind of everyone has towards God in Europe. Um.
Speaker 1: And so they start these mass exhibitions of faith to
Speaker 1: honor specific saints. Um. And it also kind of gives
Speaker 1: you know, it kind of helps reinforce the power of
Speaker 1: the church in Rome. Um. So Yeah, as one historian wrote,
Speaker 1: it is little wonder than that one of the first
Speaker 1: actions of the Church upon the arrival of the plague
Speaker 1: was to call special civic masses and processions thought to
Speaker 1: be useful in quelling the divine rage and sparking repentance
Speaker 1: in the people. And in some cities these processions lasted
Speaker 1: as long as three days, and we're attended by thousands
Speaker 1: of people penitence. Went barefoot and wore sackcloth. They sprinkled
Speaker 1: each other in ashes, wept, prayed, tore out their hair,
Speaker 1: and waved candles as they stumbled through city streets. Um,
Speaker 1: you may recognize this all is very bad social distancing.
Speaker 1: This is not not recommend it. It just plague cella
Speaker 1: in the streets. Yeah, Yeah, it's exactly. It's like all right,
Speaker 1: let's let's let's fucking yeah, let's spring break everywhere. But
Speaker 1: with hair tearing, hair tearing, and you know, like sure,
Speaker 1: hair tearing though, isn't like a fun calm thing you
Speaker 1: can say like hair tearing, like you have to really
Speaker 1: envision what's happening there. People are probably screaming, crying, pie
Speaker 1: just yeah, get get a hand on your hair right
Speaker 1: now and just kind of feel how deep it's in there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: imagine having a list of things where hair tearing is
Speaker 1: probably towards like the top. And you started to buy
Speaker 1: it like okay, ye screaming right, like sobbing right, like
Speaker 1: crying great, uh like punching. Sure, you have to get
Speaker 1: through a lot of ship before you're like yeah, hair tearing, yeah,
Speaker 1: pull my own fucking hair out, put my hair out.
Speaker 1: It is one of those things like um like tarring
Speaker 1: and feathering where um, you know we kind of it
Speaker 1: just kind of gets like, oh yeah, people used to
Speaker 1: get tired and feathered. That's sure was a thing, but
Speaker 1: it's like no, no, people were pouring boiling pitch on
Speaker 1: each on other people and if it killed them. It's
Speaker 1: not like in a fucking like Disney like channel show
Speaker 1: where the kids do a gag where it's like feather. Um, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: well it's not it's not really glue, you know, they're
Speaker 1: only glue was like as hot as the coffee that
Speaker 1: burned that woman so bad she needed to be hospitalized
Speaker 1: because of McDonald's. Anyway, Um, this is yeah, let's roll along.
Speaker 1: So yeah, obviously all these processions spread the bubonic plague
Speaker 1: fucking everywhere, right, like, of course, Um, but you know
Speaker 1: you can't really the Church didn't know what they were doing. Um.
Speaker 1: And for a little bit of fairness, the best data
Speaker 1: we have, which is also very imperfect, and none of it,
Speaker 1: you know, is numerical data, But the best data we
Speaker 1: have suggests that non Catholic parts of the world suffered
Speaker 1: pretty similar death rates to the Catholic parts of the world.
Speaker 1: So like, and probably because kind of everyone's reaction was
Speaker 1: to do similar things when this starts to happen, like
Speaker 1: it's just this unknown, horrible thing, you know. Um, And
Speaker 1: if we're going to be really fair to the church,
Speaker 1: we should also note that priests and nuns probably died
Speaker 1: at a significantly higher rate than the rest of the
Speaker 1: population because they spent a lot of time ministering to
Speaker 1: the sick and dying. Um. In his book The Great Mortality,
Speaker 1: John Kelly, the historian, not the not the trump guy
Speaker 1: uh points out that forty two of all of the
Speaker 1: clergy in Europe died during the plague. So half of
Speaker 1: all the priests, half of all the nuns, half of
Speaker 1: everyone who works in the church, which is again your
Speaker 1: only international organization. Effectively in this period, half of them
Speaker 1: are fucking gone. Um. And that's compared about of the
Speaker 1: general populace. And this has a a permanent, long term
Speaker 1: effect on on the church in Rome. And I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote from a rite up in medievalist dot net. Because
Speaker 1: so many were ill and so few priests remained. As
Speaker 1: the disease progressed, Clement the sixth, who was the pope
Speaker 1: at the time, declared that the dying could make their
Speaker 1: confession to anyone present, even to a woman, said an
Speaker 1: English bishop, and that it would still lead to salvation.
Speaker 1: This was a big deal for the church is previously
Speaker 1: only clared you were permitted to perform last rites. As
Speaker 1: Barbara Tuckman writes in A Distant Mirror, the climate is
Speaker 1: fourteenth century climate. The sixth founded necessary to grant remission
Speaker 1: of sin to all who died of the plague because
Speaker 1: so many were unattended by priests. Uh, the priests were
Speaker 1: doing what they could, but they were paying with their lives.
Speaker 1: So this is one of those situations where like, the
Speaker 1: Catholic Church isn't really to blame for what happens during
Speaker 1: this period, but really fox them over and you can. Honestly,
Speaker 1: a lot of historians look at this as like the
Speaker 1: beginning of the end for church power and the way
Speaker 1: that it had been just because like all of their
Speaker 1: best priests, the most dedicated, the most connected to the
Speaker 1: community all fucking die. Um, and the only priests left
Speaker 1: are like the shittiest, the ones who believed the least,
Speaker 1: the ones who are willing to like hide from the plague. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: and that has a long term impact, so right yeah
Speaker 1: yeah um. So regular people, because there's suddenly less priests,
Speaker 1: less nuns, no one doing last, rites feel like the
Speaker 1: church has abandoned them through the crisis, even though it
Speaker 1: actually probably did more than almost anything to reduce the
Speaker 1: spread of the disease. That now priests who had been
Speaker 1: exposed to the plague weren't wandering around touching people anymore
Speaker 1: or like you don't want to be Yeah. Um, but
Speaker 1: people don't see it that way. They see it as
Speaker 1: the church abandoning them, um and and so yeah, it's
Speaker 1: pretty cool thing that happens in this period of time.
Speaker 1: And it's hard to take any kind of lesson from
Speaker 1: this because, like I'm going to say, it's bad that
Speaker 1: the Catholic Church lost, but it's like messed up that
Speaker 1: after all the genocide and torture. The thing that like
Speaker 1: really starts to funk them over is too many compassionate
Speaker 1: priests trying to minister to the sick. But also those
Speaker 1: compassionate priests were the ones spreading the plague the most.
Speaker 1: So it's like there's no lesson a lot of the
Speaker 1: time in history, right, it just filtered out all the
Speaker 1: fucking shitty guys. Yeah. Yeah, there's like the there's like
Speaker 1: the bits of history like studying the rise of the
Speaker 1: Nazis where it's like, oh, yeah, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: really direct and critical lessons here, and then there's stuff
Speaker 1: where it's like, funk, I don't even know what you're
Speaker 1: supposed to learn from this, Yeah, because you're playing completely
Speaker 1: in a different reality. Yeah, completely a different set of
Speaker 1: not this is just some ship that happened wild yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that happened. Yeah. And it's worth noting that religion itself
Speaker 1: didn't decline during this period, just people who's faith in
Speaker 1: the church. Um, the dead priests and the disease bearing
Speaker 1: possessions of old were replaced by something that spread just
Speaker 1: as much disease, but that wasn't directly connected to the
Speaker 1: power of the Catholic Church and was in fact even weirder.
Speaker 1: And we're gonna talk now about flagelence. Do you know
Speaker 1: what flagelence are? Miles like when you self whip? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's the basic idea. I am very excited to
Speaker 1: talk to you about whipping yourself, But you know what's
Speaker 1: a lot like beating yourself bloody with an iron tipped whip.
Speaker 1: No capitalism, Yeah that part. Here's some ads, okay, and
Speaker 1: we're back, uh, And we're talking about flagelence. So flagelens
Speaker 1: are our men who believed that they were ordained by
Speaker 1: God to redeem society by recreating the suffering of Christ
Speaker 1: on their own bodies. And because I don't know if
Speaker 1: you've ever tried to crucify yourself, Miles. I can say
Speaker 1: from experience it's not easy. Um, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: there's a lot of like really unexpected challenges in the
Speaker 1: self crucifixion process. Yeah. I mean I would only maybe
Speaker 1: only metaphorically emotionally have I engaged in crucifixion. I mean
Speaker 1: I do that all the time. Whenever someone gets angry
Speaker 1: at me because I'm say, swinging a machette around and
Speaker 1: it it wounds someone, I put my arms out on
Speaker 1: my side in the manner of Christ to to to
Speaker 1: portray the fact that I have become a christ figure
Speaker 1: and I'm taking the sense of the world onto my
Speaker 1: own body. Um. I find that works out really well
Speaker 1: with people. They tend to they tend to respond to that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But Flagelens are doing this, uh in a in a
Speaker 1: much more direct way. They're they're just beating the ship
Speaker 1: out of themselves. Uh. And I'm going to quote from
Speaker 1: what is I would say generally positive right up from
Speaker 1: the Christian History Institute, because I find it interesting to
Speaker 1: go to these groups sometimes to find their write ups somethings.
Speaker 1: So here's how the Christian History Institute describes flagelence stripped
Speaker 1: to the waists beating themselves with leather whips tipped with
Speaker 1: iron spikes until the blood flowed. Groups of two hundred
Speaker 1: to three hundred, and sometimes up to a thousand march
Speaker 1: from city to city. They begged Christ and Mary for pity,
Speaker 1: and townspeople sobbed and growned in sympathy. They performed three
Speaker 1: times a day, twice publicly in the church square and
Speaker 1: once in private. They were organized under a lay master
Speaker 1: for usually thirty three and a half days to represent
Speaker 1: Christ's years on earth. They pledge self support and obedience
Speaker 1: to the master. They were not allowed to bathe, shave,
Speaker 1: change clothes, sleep in beds, talk, or have intercourse with
Speaker 1: women without the master's permission. So you see what we're
Speaker 1: going through here is like we start with the Catholic
Speaker 1: Church's response these processions, which are a horrible thing to do,
Speaker 1: and then we move on to the flagelens, which are
Speaker 1: like even we're getting even worse at social distancing now, um,
Speaker 1: because it's just sort of like a like a kink show,
Speaker 1: like a live kink show road to Yeah, it shows
Speaker 1: and the public will do like sun of a basic
Speaker 1: self whip being, they'll get off. And then where we
Speaker 1: really get the money is the private shows we do
Speaker 1: at night. Now, if you want to get in there,
Speaker 1: we'll do some weird ship. The lay master will let
Speaker 1: us fuck if we need to whatever, you know, so
Speaker 1: check it out. It just sounded like a weird racket.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's almost like it's an experiment to see
Speaker 1: how you can spread the plague most efficiently. So now
Speaker 1: you have people who don't bathe for weeks on end
Speaker 1: and beat themselves bloody every day, wandering through town and
Speaker 1: they're not just being watched by people. Um, sick children
Speaker 1: are brought to them for healing. Uh. If those children
Speaker 1: have the plague, obviously that spreads to the Flagelens. If
Speaker 1: the Flagelens have the plague, it spreads to the sick
Speaker 1: kids and their family. But also these people. As these
Speaker 1: men are whipping themselves bloody, worshippers would dip their clothing
Speaker 1: in the blood and then press it to and then
Speaker 1: press it to their eyes. Disgusting. It's like it really
Speaker 1: is like someone some scientists set out to be like
Speaker 1: what's the how can I spread the most plague like?
Speaker 1: And they nail it. They nail it like this is
Speaker 1: solid work in terms of plague spreading. I'm very impressed.
Speaker 1: Get the bloody whip, guys. Blood it's in your fucking
Speaker 1: rub it in your eyes. You want to get it
Speaker 1: right in that fucking eye, dude, Like that's the place
Speaker 1: to do it. Who fucking told them like that? You need?
Speaker 1: You had to go that far with it. Why couldn't
Speaker 1: have just been like, oh, we're near them. Might have
Speaker 1: to be like now I need the blood in my
Speaker 1: fucking I You know, I think it's always I think
Speaker 1: Miles that it's kind of like the yes and sort
Speaker 1: of thing is applied to religion. You know. This is
Speaker 1: just sort of you just do what feels good in
Speaker 1: the moment, you know. Or it's like speaking tongues where
Speaker 1: one person whatever and then other people go all the
Speaker 1: way in there like you got watch but yeah, and
Speaker 1: they fucking start vibing. Yeah, I get it. Performative. So
Speaker 1: I guess that person just like, oh, you're just gonna
Speaker 1: fucking sort of weep near them. I'm gonna put the
Speaker 1: fucking blood in my eyes because that's down. And everyone's like,
Speaker 1: now we're rubbing plague blood in our eyes. It's a
Speaker 1: new hip thing. It spreads viral e you know. Although
Speaker 1: the bubonic plague wasn't a virus. But you know what
Speaker 1: I'm saying, you get the get the you get the
Speaker 1: I don't think it was a virus. What's the bubonic
Speaker 1: plague of virus? I always get this mixed up, the
Speaker 1: whole virus versus bacteria. Bacteria, Yep, yep, that's what I thought. Okay, cool,
Speaker 1: I remain a great expert. So the Flagelens are doing
Speaker 1: a bad thing here in terms of this objectively spread
Speaker 1: the plague to a shipload of people. But again, they're
Speaker 1: not monsters, Like there's no one with like good advice
Speaker 1: really being like this is a bad idea, and here's
Speaker 1: the evidence as to why, Like I mean, you could.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there were people who recognize it like this,
Speaker 1: really see, it seems like we get a lot more
Speaker 1: plague cases once the Flagelens came in. But like, we're
Speaker 1: not doing so hot at science in this areas. You can't.
Speaker 1: They're not trying to be irresponsible. It's a nonsense. Time
Speaker 1: they thought God had just started murdering all of them,
Speaker 1: and they reacted with panic, but also in a way
Speaker 1: that like I think I can't call them monsters for
Speaker 1: doing it. Um, Yeah, if we're looking for the greatest
Speaker 1: evil committed by Christendom. In the play Gears, Um, it's
Speaker 1: actually something that occurs kind of separate from the organized
Speaker 1: chunks of the Catholic Church, or at least separate from
Speaker 1: what the church wanted in that period. See folks suffering
Speaker 1: through the worst of the plague. Gears noticed that Jewish
Speaker 1: people did not seem to suffer as badly from the
Speaker 1: creeping death. And there's a number of theories for this,
Speaker 1: and it probably boils down to the fact that number one,
Speaker 1: Jewish people bathed regularly in the Middle Ages, and Christians
Speaker 1: really didn't, so they're kind of the only people. And yeah,
Speaker 1: that's still like maybe like once a week or once
Speaker 1: a month or something like. They're not bathing, but bathing,
Speaker 1: and other people are just like, no, you just put
Speaker 1: on new clothes over your flth and um. They also
Speaker 1: washed the bodies of their dead before burial. And since
Speaker 1: the plague is spread heavily by like, um fucking fleas
Speaker 1: and stuff like, this helps, right, it reduces the They
Speaker 1: don't get it as much as Christians. Um. And they
Speaker 1: also aren't attending these giant marches through the city. They're
Speaker 1: not hanging around near around near the flag a Lens.
Speaker 1: They're doing their own thing in their own neighborhoods, while
Speaker 1: Christians and Christian parts of town are rubbing the blood
Speaker 1: of whip building transients into their eyes. So it's not
Speaker 1: hard to see why Jewish people don't get it quite
Speaker 1: as much, and still a lot of them die of
Speaker 1: the plague. Don't get me wrong, but they people notice
Speaker 1: that Jewish communities aren't being hit by this as hard
Speaker 1: as the Christian ones. Um, And rather than kind of recognized, oh,
Speaker 1: maybe we should start bathing and stop hanging out with
Speaker 1: these whip people, UM, Christians started engaging in a series
Speaker 1: of unspeakably violent pogroms. And in fact, some scholars will
Speaker 1: call this the first Holocaust. UM, and we will we
Speaker 1: will never even have a vague idea of the total
Speaker 1: death toll. But the individual massacres we know about, we're horrific. UM.
Speaker 1: In one Valence Tine's Day in Strasburg, Germany, two thousand
Speaker 1: Jewish people were burnt to death. UM. Three thousand Jews
Speaker 1: were massacred in a couple of days in the ghetto
Speaker 1: of Mainz. Um. Jews were massacred in Spain and France
Speaker 1: and the Balkans and and basically everywhere but chunks of
Speaker 1: Poland because the king of Poland the time had a
Speaker 1: Jewish mistress and so he was he was chill. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was like he's like, hold up, wait a minute,
Speaker 1: this is great for me, So yeah, don't worry about it.
Speaker 1: I'm also just kind of I'm still thinking about the
Speaker 1: bathing part where the Christians culturally were so much dirtier,
Speaker 1: and they're like, look at them, the old clean people
Speaker 1: who don't get sick. They must be involved in some
Speaker 1: kind of dark shit or whatever. And then the idea
Speaker 1: of yet what I don't know, like the complexion of
Speaker 1: a person who has not bathed in however long you
Speaker 1: naturally interact with a bathing situation, what that's like If
Speaker 1: it's like a scratcher that you'd get at a liquor store,
Speaker 1: like you'd reveal a whole other thing on. Yeah, you get,
Speaker 1: you get holier. You know, the longer you go without bathing,
Speaker 1: the more God loves you. Oh damn it. God's God's
Speaker 1: God's into some kinky ship miles. Um, really He's really
Speaker 1: into you know that, Like, um, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: God's favorite pornography is actually old episodes of Peanuts and
Speaker 1: that character Pig. But now this has gone too far,
Speaker 1: this is god further than it ought to. Oh hell yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: where you going with that, buddy? You want to you
Speaker 1: want to finish that there is you know, I didn't
Speaker 1: want to lead this into like child porn territory. So
Speaker 1: let's go back to anti Semitism. Um. So uh now
Speaker 1: and trying to like parce out the Catholic Church is
Speaker 1: guilt in this. The Catholic Church is guilty of a ton, an,
Speaker 1: absolute assload of anti Semitism over the centuries, and they
Speaker 1: definitely seeded communities around Europe with a lot of this
Speaker 1: and reinforced it in their Catholic churches with like stained
Speaker 1: glass reliefs of Jewish people killing Christian children that are
Speaker 1: around to this day. There were even more of them
Speaker 1: back then. So there's absolutely a significant level of guilt
Speaker 1: that goes into the Catholic Church in terms of inculcating
Speaker 1: these enough of these beliefs in people that they were
Speaker 1: there when the plague hit and that had an impact
Speaker 1: on the massacre. But when it comes to what they
Speaker 1: actually did during the plague when Jewish people started getting murdered.
Speaker 1: They didn't they didn't encourage this sort of ship quite
Speaker 1: the opposite. In fact, Pope Clement the sixth released two
Speaker 1: papal bowls during the plague, one in eight, and papal
Speaker 1: bowls were kind of like the presidential tweets of the day,
Speaker 1: like this is Pope Clement like getting up and and
Speaker 1: hopping on the twitter um. The first of his papal
Speaker 1: bowls condemned people who attacked Jews for spreading the plague
Speaker 1: uh and in specifically stated that Christians who did this
Speaker 1: had been seduced by that liar the devil. And in
Speaker 1: his second papal bowl, Pope Clement said, it cannot be
Speaker 1: true that the Jews, by such a heinous crime, are
Speaker 1: the cause or occasion of the plague, because through many
Speaker 1: parts of the world, the same plague, by the hidden
Speaker 1: judgment of God, has afflicted and afflicts the Jews themselves
Speaker 1: in many other races who have never lived alongside them,
Speaker 1: which is actually like a really reasonable, like scientifically backed
Speaker 1: reason for for not doing this, Like he's actually very
Speaker 1: he handles this as well as you can expect, I guess,
Speaker 1: like that's like that's like that meme where it shows
Speaker 1: like level of thinking where it's just fucking light bursting
Speaker 1: out of your skull. We're like, hold on, let's look around.
Speaker 1: Everybody's getting it. Everybody's getting it. That's not fair. Cities
Speaker 1: without any Jewish people are getting to like you can't
Speaker 1: you clearly this can't be their fault. Hey, I want Hey,
Speaker 1: I want to blame him as much as you guys do.
Speaker 1: Trust me, I do. I'm the pope. I want to
Speaker 1: It would be great if we could love blaming people.
Speaker 1: Huge about blame. I mean, I would love to escapegoat,
Speaker 1: but I'm just this one's tough. This I will say,
Speaker 1: it's interesting that the initial response of the Pope in
Speaker 1: Um was arguably based in sounder science than the first
Speaker 1: responses of the President of the United States to r
Speaker 1: o Play Like clements reasoning is more solid than what
Speaker 1: Trump was dropping. So there you go. You're getting own.
Speaker 1: You're getting owned from centuries and so Clement the sixth
Speaker 1: I would say, response to this about as well as
Speaker 1: you could have possibly hoped. But also a lot of
Speaker 1: people ignore him, millions of people. And there's also obviously
Speaker 1: there's individual Catholic priest, individual churches who don't follow it. Like,
Speaker 1: but people in general follow some people aren't on Twitter
Speaker 1: as Yeah, tens of thousands of Jews die horribly during
Speaker 1: the plague from violence, you know, kind of a minimum um.
Speaker 1: And the explanation you'll hear most often for why these
Speaker 1: people were killed is that ignorant Christians assumed that the
Speaker 1: Jews were poisoning them all as part of some sort
Speaker 1: of like white genocide scheme. Um. And yeah, this is
Speaker 1: this is something the Church does deserve some credit for
Speaker 1: because they spread the rumor that Rabbi sacrificed Christian children
Speaker 1: for centuries. But um, the it's more complicated than that,
Speaker 1: even though, because more recent research into the eradication of
Speaker 1: Jewish communities in Europe during the plague suggests that what
Speaker 1: happened actually has fairly little to do with the actual
Speaker 1: damage done by the plague. In other words, the places
Speaker 1: where Jewish people weren't killed weren't necessary the places that
Speaker 1: suffered most from the plague. It wasn't Oh, a bunch
Speaker 1: of us died from the plague, and now we're angry
Speaker 1: and we need a scapegold to be violent towards. It's
Speaker 1: actually not that's that doesn't seem to be what really happened,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna quote now from a paper put out
Speaker 1: by the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.
Speaker 1: At an aggregate level, we found that scapegoating led to
Speaker 1: an increase in the baseline probability of a persecution. However,
Speaker 1: at the city level, locations which experienced higher plague mortality
Speaker 1: rates were less likely to engage in persecutions. Furthermore, persecutions
Speaker 1: were more likely in cities with a history of anti
Speaker 1: semitism consistent with scapegoating, and less likely in cities where
Speaker 1: Jews played an important economic role. This jokes with long
Speaker 1: standing findings in the field of genocide studies. Essential what
Speaker 1: you're seeing is that like the towns that people hated
Speaker 1: Jews the most before the plague took the opportunity to
Speaker 1: murder a bunch of Jewish people, the towns that suffered
Speaker 1: the worst from the plague, if they didn't have as
Speaker 1: much of a history from anti Semitism, they didn't find
Speaker 1: themselves driven to suddenly start killing Jewish people. Um. It
Speaker 1: was folks who just kind of took the opportunity. Um.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that seemed to be most
Speaker 1: protective of Jewish people during this time was the cities
Speaker 1: in which they were kind of most economically integrated. And this,
Speaker 1: um this brings us to a real fucking bummer in
Speaker 1: the field of genocide studies. Uh and it, I'm gonna mean,
Speaker 1: it almost seems like a given, Like yeah, I want
Speaker 1: to tell you, like the really the coolest thing, the
Speaker 1: most fun thing about genocide studies, Like that's I don't
Speaker 1: know if that's ever sentence someone's going to say, so
Speaker 1: thank you though for preparing me. I consider this one
Speaker 1: of the least fun things about genocide studies, even though
Speaker 1: it's kind of explaining why genocides don't happen in some places.
Speaker 1: Um quote. According to the scapegoating theory, members of a
Speaker 1: majority experiencing negative shocks settle on a specific target to
Speaker 1: blame for their problems. Another potential mechanism determining the likelihood
Speaker 1: of persecution focuses on the extent of economic complementarities, so
Speaker 1: the ability to which their economically intermingled between the majority
Speaker 1: and the minority. This thesis argues that patterns of economic
Speaker 1: complementarity and substitute ability determine the ability of two groups
Speaker 1: to coexist when the economic activities of the two groups
Speaker 1: complement each other, shocks may lead the majority to protect
Speaker 1: the minority because of its economic value. So that's a
Speaker 1: bummer that, like what protected communities from. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: two ways to view it. Either the soulas is like
Speaker 1: oh no, like purely, when people think that they have
Speaker 1: financial benefits from not murdering each other, they don't murder
Speaker 1: each other. That's the bummer where it's like, oh god,
Speaker 1: our only solution is more capitalism. The other way to
Speaker 1: look at is just that like, no, when when two
Speaker 1: different groups, when a minority group becomes intermingled with a
Speaker 1: majority and they all become economically tied, they get to
Speaker 1: know each other, they shop at each other's stores, and
Speaker 1: they don't and they're like, oh no, I know these people,
Speaker 1: they're part of my community. I'm not going to murder them.
Speaker 1: And I see that they have there's we have value
Speaker 1: that we offer each other and at all, it's not
Speaker 1: just like who the funk are these people? Yeah, so
Speaker 1: you can you can interpret this and in an optimistic
Speaker 1: view of human nature or a pessimistic view of human nature,
Speaker 1: and it kind of feeds equally well into either. You know,
Speaker 1: I wonder if it would be something like, well, you know,
Speaker 1: once there's robots, Um, we're just going to be that's
Speaker 1: I mean, that's my solution. Like, I don't know, that
Speaker 1: seems like that motive seems a little bit far off.
Speaker 1: You know, for years now, Miles, every time we've hung out,
Speaker 1: I've said, if there weren't robots, I'd be murdering you. Um.
Speaker 1: And I never really thought about why I was saying that,
Speaker 1: but yeah, it was super funny. And then now that
Speaker 1: you said this, I'm starting anyway. Yeah, we can explore
Speaker 1: that later. Um. So yeah, it's cool stuff. Um. Anyway,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of the Black plague is a bomber um.
Speaker 1: And and we're going to move on from the Black plague. Uh,
Speaker 1: and the question of whether or not genocide is inevitable
Speaker 1: or if it's only avoidable with economic complimentarity or whatever.
Speaker 1: We're gonna We're gonna move on from that complicated topic
Speaker 1: of discussions to talk about something fun. The Spanish flew
Speaker 1: epidemic of nineteen eighteen. Are you a big span flu fan?
Speaker 1: Are you a sea Yeah? Oh my God of the
Speaker 1: flues so much about this whole thing. I love it
Speaker 1: so much. Um. Yeah, if I'm you know. No. The
Speaker 1: only thing I know is that I think Babe Ruth
Speaker 1: got it twice. That sounds about that sounds like Babe Ruth,
Speaker 1: And a lot of people would say, you know, Babe Ruth,
Speaker 1: it's the Babe Ruth of flues. I think more modernly
Speaker 1: people would say it's the Lebron James of flues. But
Speaker 1: it's really this is like you're sucking. I'm just saying,
Speaker 1: if Lebron was a flu, he would kill five to
Speaker 1: fifty million human beings, much like is though, just as
Speaker 1: like a personal thing. I feel very proud of you
Speaker 1: for knowing he don't bring him into this dunking. Well look,
Speaker 1: I'm just trying to make this to the audience. Lebron James,
Speaker 1: I mean, how far? And like the Lakers, the Spanish
Speaker 1: flu carried out a series of dunks all around the world.
Speaker 1: Um that killed tens of millions of people, just like
Speaker 1: the Lakers. Oh my god, now this is do you
Speaker 1: do You have you heard much about like how the
Speaker 1: name Spanish flu came about Miles. Isn't it like his
Speaker 1: xenophobic label? No? Um, well it became one. Actually, it's
Speaker 1: very this is a tremendous irony. Um So the Spanish Flu,
Speaker 1: we don't know where it came from. Some people say
Speaker 1: somewhere in Asia, some people say somewhere in eastern Europe.
Speaker 1: There's actually a really good chance it started in Kansas.
Speaker 1: And if you like, some people tracing it back to
Speaker 1: think that it actually did start in Kansas. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And if the Spanish Flu originated from Kansas, then it's
Speaker 1: probably the second deadliest thing to come out of that state,
Speaker 1: right next to Kirstie Alley. Um. Yeah, it's yeah. I
Speaker 1: was just talking about Kirsty recently. Yeah, I fifty million
Speaker 1: human beings. Um. So the Moniker, the Spanish Flu came out.
Speaker 1: The Spanish Flu started to break out in nineteen eighteen.
Speaker 1: And what was happening in nineteen eighteen, we have this
Speaker 1: this whole World War One thing. You might have heard
Speaker 1: of it, Um it was kind of World Wars before
Speaker 1: World Wars were cool, you know, yeah, before they got gentrified. Um,
Speaker 1: before like Disney took over. Um So, the Spanish flew
Speaker 1: this influenza hits and it starts killing people on the
Speaker 1: Western Front is where a lot of early cases were,
Speaker 1: and it spread heavily, but it actually killed more people
Speaker 1: than the whole war that, but it starts spreading widely
Speaker 1: among soldiers. But like all of the Western powers, had
Speaker 1: clamped down on freedom of the press during the war,
Speaker 1: so you couldn't report in England, or in France or
Speaker 1: in Germany. You couldn't write stories about this new flu
Speaker 1: that was spreading. You'd get fucking you wind up in
Speaker 1: a fucking prison cell. Whereas Spain is a neutral power
Speaker 1: and their press is relatively free during this time. So
Speaker 1: Spanish newspapers start reporting on the influenza first, and so
Speaker 1: people blame start assuming that it started in Spain. And
Speaker 1: there absolutely is racism and persecution as a result of this.
Speaker 1: But just because Spain didn't clamp down on the press,
Speaker 1: super fucked up. Holy sh it, look at you had
Speaker 1: to fucking open your big fucking mouth, and ye shouldn't
Speaker 1: have had just Spain. It's good that they did, but
Speaker 1: it is just part of one of the lessons of
Speaker 1: histories that you should never do good things because everything's bad. No,
Speaker 1: that's not the lesson of history, but it can feel
Speaker 1: that way sometimes. Uh, don't lose hope. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: the Spanish flu pandemic. So the influenza did start in Spain,
Speaker 1: but it did kill a funk pile of Spaniards, like
Speaker 1: it killed so many Spanish people miles. Um. I would
Speaker 1: compare it to like Christie Alley um in its ability
Speaker 1: to murder people in Spain. How many piles to a
Speaker 1: Christie Alley is seven or eight? Um so And in
Speaker 1: nowhere in Spain did the Spanish flu kill more people
Speaker 1: than the town of Zamora, or kill at least a
Speaker 1: higher percentage of people than the town of Zamora. Now,
Speaker 1: Zamora was renowned as being one of the most devout
Speaker 1: parts of Spain, which was a very devout country at
Speaker 1: this time, you know. Uh. And Zamora was very particularly
Speaker 1: famous for its Holy Week processions, which are kind of like,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of like what we saw with the
Speaker 1: Black plague. You know, it's the it's this thing that
Speaker 1: the Church has always done. They would have these processions
Speaker 1: of barefoot, hooded peditents um, like marching through town and
Speaker 1: everybody sort of show up to watch them and worship together. Um,
Speaker 1: which is I'm sure a very satisfying thing to do
Speaker 1: if you're a Catholic believer, but also is a super
Speaker 1: good way to spread the plague. Um. So that's that's
Speaker 1: a big part of the culture in Zamora. UM. Now. So,
Speaker 1: in nineteen fourteen, Zamora had welcomed the arrival of a
Speaker 1: new bishop named Antonio Alvario I Blanno at thirty eight
Speaker 1: years old. The church newspaper El Cario had declared Bologno
Speaker 1: an eloquent, youthful, fire brand of a leader. So he's
Speaker 1: like this hot young priest who comes into town. He's
Speaker 1: very popular, very charismatic. Uh and he's you know, four
Speaker 1: years into the gig when the play hits um and
Speaker 1: So the Bishop of Zamoura had been seen as something
Speaker 1: of like a wounder kin within church circles prior to
Speaker 1: this point, which is why he got that job so young.
Speaker 1: He'd been one of the best students in his seminary,
Speaker 1: and at age twenty three he'd become the chair of
Speaker 1: metaphysics at the seminary in Guadalajara. UM. So he was
Speaker 1: a very well respected guy within the church. Um and Yeah.
Speaker 1: The book Pale writer by Laura Spinning notes of the
Speaker 1: bishop quote. In his inaugural letter to his new diocese,
Speaker 1: Alvario Ebilangno wrote that men should actively seek God in truth,
Speaker 1: which were the same thing, and expressed his surprise that
Speaker 1: science seemed to advance and step with it a termination
Speaker 1: to turn away from God. The light of reason was weak,
Speaker 1: and modern society's mistake contempt for God's law for progress.
Speaker 1: He wrote of dark forces that wish to reject God
Speaker 1: or even annihilate him, if that were possible. So we're
Speaker 1: not set up with this guy being a great dude
Speaker 1: to handle the first plague that hits in an era
Speaker 1: where people actually know about science and how disease spreads
Speaker 1: in a real concerted way. Yeah, because because what he
Speaker 1: is like, Oh, don't come at me with science, bro,
Speaker 1: I'm a fucking man of God. Science is atheism receipts
Speaker 1: and I don't need those in front of my face
Speaker 1: right now. Yeah. And this is like, you know, Spanish
Speaker 1: blue hits were like right on the cusp of antibiotics.
Speaker 1: You know, we haven't really locked that ship down, but
Speaker 1: like we're starting to understand how all this ship works.
Speaker 1: And so there are experts who have good advice in
Speaker 1: the Spanish flu and um, yeah, he's not going to
Speaker 1: be the kind of guy who listens to experts. So
Speaker 1: when the when the influenza hit the country that would
Speaker 1: become its namesake. It starts at first in the east.
Speaker 1: By September it had traveled into the interior of Spain.
Speaker 1: That fall was a particularly good time for it to
Speaker 1: spread in Spain because September is a harvest month, and
Speaker 1: it's also the month when many Spanish cities would host
Speaker 1: bull fights, which again I would say, I love fighting
Speaker 1: bulls um during this time of the year. If you're
Speaker 1: like me, try to do it alone. Don't fight bulls
Speaker 1: with hundreds of other people in the center of the town.
Speaker 1: It's it's gonna spread, you know, COVID nineteen A, right,
Speaker 1: how many bulls have you thought? I don't know. It's
Speaker 1: kind of hard to remember with all the head injuries,
Speaker 1: but you know, yeah, so said. Fall was also kind
Speaker 1: of the time of the year in which the army
Speaker 1: would send new recruits to Zamora to conduct artillery drills,
Speaker 1: and this is probably how the disease first gets gets
Speaker 1: to the town, because some of these recruits were sick
Speaker 1: by the time they hit Zamora, and many soon followed.
Speaker 1: And at first the city government attempted to quarantine six
Speaker 1: soldiers in their barracks, but this did not work, probably
Speaker 1: do partly to the fact that soldiers infected people before
Speaker 1: anyone knew that they were sick, and partly due to
Speaker 1: the fact that you just you can't try stop soldiers
Speaker 1: from fucking, you know, especially Spanish soldiers. They're just gonna
Speaker 1: sunk their way through that town and they're pictures. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Legion, the Spanish legion. Oh my boy. There's a
Speaker 1: whole fun discussion about the fact that those guys were
Speaker 1: like the main arm of Spain's fascist dictator and colonial anyway,
Speaker 1: we don't need to get into that, but yes, but
Speaker 1: those vs are so deep. You can be fucking and
Speaker 1: Spanish troops especially be fucking and I think they be
Speaker 1: fucking they be spreading the influenza when I think you
Speaker 1: can assume assume. However, the hotter the soldier, the more
Speaker 1: evil they are. Yeah, the more plague they're gonna spread,
Speaker 1: which is why my presidential campaign will rest upon only
Speaker 1: hiring ugly people to be in the army. Were fantastic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna lock this ship down, no no more. You're
Speaker 1: gonna have to brand that differently, so it's not like, yeah,
Speaker 1: well actually landed on it. This is our way of
Speaker 1: dealing with it, is just branding their faces. You know,
Speaker 1: as I'm a anybody ugly with it, this probably not
Speaker 1: that you should it should be a different name. Like,
Speaker 1: it's not for ugly. It's an army of the normal,
Speaker 1: you know, not for the hot. So that way, you know,
Speaker 1: people don't have to admit to themselves they might not
Speaker 1: be as beautiful. We don't We don't want to do branding,
Speaker 1: but we do want to plug these brands because you
Speaker 1: know what time it is speaking of burning people's faces
Speaker 1: permanently to make them less aesthetically pleasing and reduce the
Speaker 1: spread of fascistic, militaristic dogma. You know what else will
Speaker 1: brand your faces in order to stop the spread of
Speaker 1: negative attitudes towards the sectioness of violence. These products a
Speaker 1: great we're back. So, yeah, these troops come into town,
Speaker 1: they they intermingle with the civilian population. Everybody in fucking
Speaker 1: Zamora starts to get sick, right yeah, And enough people
Speaker 1: are sick within a couple of weeks that it actually
Speaker 1: gets in the way of the town's ability to take
Speaker 1: in the harvest, which of course means people start to starve.
Speaker 1: It's not a good situation. And the whole problem was
Speaker 1: exacerbated by the fact that people did not have kind
Speaker 1: of an ideal handle on virology. Um, the the experts did,
Speaker 1: but normal people were still not all that far off
Speaker 1: from kind of where normal people were, you know, during
Speaker 1: the bubonic plague right there. There's doctors get this stuff,
Speaker 1: but like your average Joe doesn't. And I'm gonna quote
Speaker 1: from the book Pale Writer again. During the first wave
Speaker 1: of the pandemic, the country's Inspector General of Health, Martin Salazar,
Speaker 1: had lamented the inability of a bureaucratic and underfunded health
Speaker 1: system to prevent the disease from spreading. Though provincial health
Speaker 1: committees took their lead from his directorate, they had no
Speaker 1: powers of enforcement, and they quickly came up against what
Speaker 1: he described as the terrible pignorance of the populace, the
Speaker 1: failure to grasp, for example, that an infected person on
Speaker 1: the move would transmit the disease. Oh yeah, ignorance, pignorance. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we've never seen anything like that happen again, because we've
Speaker 1: obviously moved forward so much in the last century, and
Speaker 1: we can just laugh at these simple Spaniards for failure
Speaker 1: to understand virology and isolate themselves. Oh my god, we
Speaker 1: know everything. Now look at us. We're not letting history
Speaker 1: fucking repeat itself over and goddamn over miles. I've been
Speaker 1: quarantined in a bunker since the start of March, but
Speaker 1: I can guarantee that one thing that would never happen
Speaker 1: in America in the midst of a plague is people
Speaker 1: gathering in mass and clubs and beaches, um, while huge
Speaker 1: chunks of the country locked themselves down. That wouldn't happen
Speaker 1: because we're not We're smarter than people were in nineteen eight,
Speaker 1: and we haven't been systematically dismantling our education system to
Speaker 1: create people who might not really give a funk about
Speaker 1: things like us. I don't even know what systematically dismantling means,
Speaker 1: and I'm just gonna roll along to my story now
Speaker 1: sounds like it now. The popular liberal solution uh to
Speaker 1: sort of like within kind of the intelligencia, the kind
Speaker 1: of like more secular sort of people in like the
Speaker 1: cities in Spain. Their solution to the plague was what
Speaker 1: they called a sanitary dictatorship, a strict program of quarantine
Speaker 1: imposed from the top down to stop the spread of
Speaker 1: the illness on all costs, and dutifully the newspapers of
Speaker 1: Zamora try to explain the benefits of this system to
Speaker 1: the people. But first they had to explain very basic
Speaker 1: facts about contagion to their readers, including the fact that
Speaker 1: the disease did not develop spontaneously as a result of
Speaker 1: God being angry at you. Um, and a lot of
Speaker 1: Again this is nineteen eighteen. A lot of local doctors
Speaker 1: weren't helpful in spreading the real news. And I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote again from pale writer one Luis Cebara suggested the
Speaker 1: imprint that is ease with the result of a build
Speaker 1: up of impurities in the blood due to sexual incontinence,
Speaker 1: a variation in the medieval idea that a moderate lechery
Speaker 1: could trigger a humoral imbalance. So this guy is like, no,
Speaker 1: it's people fucking too much. That's what makes you. You
Speaker 1: fucked too much. God gets angry at you, and God's
Speaker 1: anger goes into your blood, as we all know. And
Speaker 1: so the more God anger that builds up, it just
Speaker 1: starts boiling out of you in the plague. And that's
Speaker 1: how it works. What they tell you, what they tell you,
Speaker 1: what that it's not God that's angry at who told
Speaker 1: you that because you're coming, scientist, because you're coming, and
Speaker 1: you know what, I bet that person doesn't come or
Speaker 1: has never comed. It's such a fucking week. I'm saying
Speaker 1: it right now. Dr Louis E. Barra never came, not once. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I like that. That's the first myth like they have
Speaker 1: to take down as like a like a press or
Speaker 1: like just like the experts. All right, I know this
Speaker 1: flu is going around. It's really gnarly, and the question
Speaker 1: on everyone's mind is is it God? That's super We're
Speaker 1: angry at us and that's what's happening, and we've got
Speaker 1: to say, no, that's not what it is. And it
Speaker 1: just feels like a very heavy thing to have to
Speaker 1: lay on to people. Yeah, God's not pissed at you,
Speaker 1: but you're still dying, and here's what we have to do. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I guess there's probably is an extent to which a
Speaker 1: lot of people found it more comfortable to believe that
Speaker 1: just God was God was you know, kind of drunken
Speaker 1: angry again, as opposed to like, oh no, actually, this
Speaker 1: is just a thing that we're going to be dealing
Speaker 1: with probably forever. Where sometimes horrible viruses creep up somewhere
Speaker 1: in the world and kill people all over the planet.
Speaker 1: And this is this is just the way it is,
Speaker 1: and there is no reason to it. Uh yeah. So
Speaker 1: the good news is that the actual government of Zamora
Speaker 1: listened to the experts, the experts who weren't idiots at least,
Speaker 1: and announced a ban on large gatherings until further notice. Now,
Speaker 1: we in the USA are well familiar with how our
Speaker 1: own country people reacted when this started to happen um,
Speaker 1: and the same things occurred in Zamora, only instead of
Speaker 1: drunk college kids on spa break, the culprit was the
Speaker 1: Bishop of Zamora. And I'm gonna quote again from the
Speaker 1: book Pale Writer. On thirty September, Bishop Alvario Eblano defied
Speaker 1: the health authorities by ordering a novena evening prayers on
Speaker 1: nine consecutive days in honor of St. Roco, the patron
Speaker 1: Saint of Plague and Pestilence, because the evil that had
Speaker 1: befallen Zamoranos was due to our sins and ingratitude, for
Speaker 1: which the avenging arm of eternal justice has been brought
Speaker 1: down upon us. On the first day of the novenna,
Speaker 1: in the presence of the mayor and other notables. He
Speaker 1: dispensed holy communion to a large crowd at the Church
Speaker 1: of St. Esteban. At another church, the congregation was asked
Speaker 1: to adore relics of St. Rocco, which meant lining up
Speaker 1: to kiss them. So plague breaks out. Let's get everyone
Speaker 1: into a small room, have them all dipped their hands
Speaker 1: into the same water him them all kissed the same thing,
Speaker 1: Like everybody, take a sip out this cup to kiss
Speaker 1: that thing. Is It is weird that like we got
Speaker 1: over like all of our most of our prescriptions against
Speaker 1: like X and intoxication, all the stuff that the Catholic
Speaker 1: Church would have said people shouldn't be doing. But the
Speaker 1: same basic bad idea is the same. Like this group
Speaker 1: of people who thinks fucking is horrible, in this group
Speaker 1: of people who are all there to funk, are all
Speaker 1: still gathering in a small area and touching their mouths
Speaker 1: to the same things. Fundamentally, the problem is the same. Yeah, right, exactly,
Speaker 1: But you're just you're doing the worst version of it,
Speaker 1: that's the least fun version of what ye doing. At
Speaker 1: least some of these dead people had a good party.
Speaker 1: I don't know if I want to say that, but
Speaker 1: it does sound. Yeah, I don't know. There's again, there's
Speaker 1: no lesson here other than it's always a bad idea
Speaker 1: to shove your mouth on the same things other people
Speaker 1: are in a cramped room in the middle of a plague. Yeah.
Speaker 1: At the very least is what are the what are
Speaker 1: the scientists saying? What are experts saying things? And stay inside? Yeah?
Speaker 1: No really, na, Na, So I fucked that. I'm going
Speaker 1: to suck a bunch of ship party with a bunch
Speaker 1: of my friends. Yeah. Well, I think I told Robert this.
Speaker 1: But the the kid that was like a TikToker that
Speaker 1: was going around looking to its ended up in the
Speaker 1: hospital with coronavirus. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm not gonna I'm
Speaker 1: not going to spare a whole lot of my sympathy
Speaker 1: for that kid. Yeah yeah, keep moving, keep moving the
Speaker 1: same day as that, let's all kiss the same thing party. Uh.
Speaker 1: Sister Docitia Andreas of the Servants of Mary and Nun
Speaker 1: died while treating influenza riddle soldiers of the barracks because
Speaker 1: you know, she got sick from them. The bishop called
Speaker 1: her a virtuous and exemplary nun who accepted her martyrdom
Speaker 1: by flu with grace and a plum um. He praised
Speaker 1: her for sleeping only four hours a day during this period,
Speaker 1: which I'm sure helped her immune system out a whole bunch. Now,
Speaker 1: the mother, Yeah, she was so dedicated to hanging out
Speaker 1: with blague victims and then she died from it. It's
Speaker 1: a bummer, um. The mother superior of this nun's convent
Speaker 1: was so taken by the sacrifices Sister Andreas had made
Speaker 1: that she urged all of the people of Or to
Speaker 1: turn out in large numbers for her funeral. And the
Speaker 1: bishop immediately hopped onto this, and he announced that all
Speaker 1: attendees of this nun's funeral would be given sixty days indulgence,
Speaker 1: which means like sixty days of get out of Hell
Speaker 1: free cards. Basically like sixty days that you like you
Speaker 1: don't gotta pay the church and like go to the
Speaker 1: go to the fucking priest or whatever to like you know,
Speaker 1: you don't have to like get your sins forgiven for
Speaker 1: sixty days because you've been you've been to this. So
Speaker 1: he promises everyone who shows up at this funeral, and again,
Speaker 1: a crowded and disease riddled uh cathedral that they'll all
Speaker 1: get out of hell free for two months. And while
Speaker 1: the newspapers of Zamora or are all trying to warn
Speaker 1: people to stay home, they're also required because they're backed
Speaker 1: by the church, to print the notices of church events.
Speaker 1: So they're simultaneously telling people to stay home and being
Speaker 1: like huge plague party at the cathedral on this day,
Speaker 1: get out of hell for two straight months, you know.
Speaker 1: So a whole bunch of Zamaranio show up to this
Speaker 1: this this funeral, and the bishop calls the funeral in
Speaker 1: the face of a state ban on gatherings. Quote one
Speaker 1: of the most significant victories Catholicism has obtained. Maybe as
Speaker 1: a stretch, Um, yeah, yeah, well, I don't know. They've
Speaker 1: They're pretty they've They've had a lot of victories. We
Speaker 1: can argue they were victories that were won by doing
Speaker 1: horrible things. But they didn't get all those billions of
Speaker 1: dollars in art from losing mm hmm. So as October began,
Speaker 1: journalists started to write about the weird fact that Zamarano
Speaker 1: seemed to be dying in much much higher numbers than
Speaker 1: the residents of other cities. They blamed the problem on
Speaker 1: poor local hygiene, and later that month the sanitary dictatorship
Speaker 1: they sought was finally put in place. People were fined
Speaker 1: for throwing trash into the streets, Businesses were closed for
Speaker 1: failing to pass inspection, citizens were ticketed for letting their
Speaker 1: chickens roam free. But the Bishop of Zamora continued to
Speaker 1: hold man and Zamoranos crowded into the church in greater
Speaker 1: numbers than ever before. In fact, as the flu claimed
Speaker 1: more and more of their lives, the bishop repeated the
Speaker 1: prayer pro tempore pestilential over and over again, and this
Speaker 1: prayer basically states the disease happens by the will of
Speaker 1: God and only God's mercy can end it, and so
Speaker 1: is huge peep numbers of the people who chanted this
Speaker 1: prayer started to sicken and die. The priests starts circulating
Speaker 1: a letter and which he claims that the continuing deaths
Speaker 1: are proof that science can't cure the illness. So he's
Speaker 1: telling people to do the opposite of what the science says,
Speaker 1: telling them only God can pick who gets sick. A
Speaker 1: bunch of these people ignore the advice of scientists and
Speaker 1: get sick and die, and the bishop puts out a
Speaker 1: letter being like, see, the scientists are fullest shit, he writes, quote,
Speaker 1: observing in their troubles that there is no protection or
Speaker 1: relief to be found on the earth. The people distance themselves,
Speaker 1: disenchanted and turn their eyes towards Heaven. And of course, Heaven,
Speaker 1: as represented by the bishop, is telling them all to
Speaker 1: get into crowded uh spaces together and kiss the same thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's yeah, you see what happened to those fucking idiots.
Speaker 1: That's right. Let's keep the party going, baby. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: four days after sending out this letter, on October, the
Speaker 1: bishop held a mass procession, bringing in worshippers from all
Speaker 1: around the countryside and cramming the cathedral fuller of people
Speaker 1: than it had been in years. Law enforcement attempted to
Speaker 1: stop this, pointing out that it was a clear violation
Speaker 1: of the ban on mass gatherings, and the bishop accused
Speaker 1: them of unjustly interfering in church business. The mass went
Speaker 1: on as scheduled, and in the days that followed, even
Speaker 1: more people sickened. And I'm gonna quote again from pale writer.
Speaker 1: As in other towns and villages, the decision was taken
Speaker 1: to stop bringing the church bells and eulogy of the
Speaker 1: dead in case the constant tolling frightened people. But in
Speaker 1: other places funeral processions had also been banned, not in Zamora,
Speaker 1: where mourners continued to pass through the narrow streets as
Speaker 1: the din of the bells gave way to silence. Even
Speaker 1: in normal times, coffins, white ones for children were a
Speaker 1: luxury beyond the means of most. Now, Wood for coffins
Speaker 1: was hard for anyone to come by, and the bloated,
Speaker 1: blackened remains of the deceased were transported to their final
Speaker 1: resting place, draped own in a shroud. In an echo
Speaker 1: of the ritual burning of incense to purify the altar,
Speaker 1: gunpowder was sprinkled in the streets and set a light,
Speaker 1: and approaching funeral cortage could thus be perceived only dimly
Speaker 1: through the choking black smoke, mixed at times with the
Speaker 1: fog that rose from the Duero. In those cool autumn days,
Speaker 1: the town must have looked as if it were on fire.
Speaker 1: When historian noted, h, yeah, it would have looked like
Speaker 1: the end of the fucking world, or like New York
Speaker 1: Now maybe um so, just even like yeah. The inability
Speaker 1: to like Bury, they're dead properly. Is just makes it
Speaker 1: such a fucking stark picture. It's pretty cool that in
Speaker 1: the space of a month our president has gone from
Speaker 1: where we got fifteen cases and soon they'll be zero
Speaker 1: to now the government is having to buy a hundred
Speaker 1: thousand extra bodybags from Canada. Pretty cool evolution for all
Speaker 1: this to take. Like, yeah, I mean I think like
Speaker 1: maybe okay, I said a hundred thousand, maybe a little more. Uh,
Speaker 1: And I don't know who I'm gonna blame, but I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna completely play a casual. It's really yeah. From
Speaker 1: it's fine too, we're out of corpse bags, okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the town of Zamora had one of the highest
Speaker 1: death rates in Spain, losing more than ten percent of
Speaker 1: its population in the month of October alone. Um so
Speaker 1: that's a bad October. Um. Now, this was nearly three
Speaker 1: times the overall death rate in Spain at the time.
Speaker 1: The Catholic Church and Zamora, working with for the Bishop,
Speaker 1: declared to this frightful toll to be God's vengeance. Quote,
Speaker 1: the evil upon us might be a consequence of our
Speaker 1: sins and lack of gratitude, and therefore the vengeance of
Speaker 1: eternal justice felt upon us. When the plague finally left
Speaker 1: Zamora much depleted, the bishop cheered that he and his
Speaker 1: fellow faithful had saved the town by placating God's legitimate anger.
Speaker 1: And the Bishop of Zamora probably counts as one of
Speaker 1: the most deliberately and fatally irresponsible religious leaders of the
Speaker 1: entire Spanish flu epidemic. And of course he suffered no
Speaker 1: consequences as a result of this. Uh he did fine,
Speaker 1: So that's good. Wow, that's a good all that ship
Speaker 1: And then yeah, he did find it to the end
Speaker 1: of the movie. He made it to the end of
Speaker 1: the movie. And he was far from alone in In fact,
Speaker 1: I found a Pathos article that included just a bunch
Speaker 1: of digitized newspaper assets. Uh. And they kind of like
Speaker 1: trace different American Christian leaders who were just as hell
Speaker 1: bent upon leading their followers into disasters. This is not
Speaker 1: just a Catholic thing. Uh. In Buffalo, New York quote,
Speaker 1: while local churches remained and closed in accordance with the
Speaker 1: mayor's proclamation, several congregations, however, have arranged to conduct outdoor
Speaker 1: services tomorrow. The Courier listed several open air masses in St. Paul's.
Speaker 1: The Episcopal Cathedral planned to worship in Shelton Square with
Speaker 1: the assistance of its full choir. The service will largely
Speaker 1: consist of the singing of patriotic hymns and General Pershing's
Speaker 1: message to the Churches of America will be read on Sunday,
Speaker 1: October thirteenth, nineteen eighteen. UH Dr W. S. Black, rector
Speaker 1: of the Episcopal Church, wrote that he was angry to
Speaker 1: walk through town and find the pool room in full
Speaker 1: blast with an ample supply of patrons. So he goes
Speaker 1: through and he sees that like pools and bars are still,
Speaker 1: and so he was like, well, why should I keep
Speaker 1: my fucking church closed if other businesses are opened? Uh
Speaker 1: He states, I believe in obeying the law of constituted authorities,
Speaker 1: but I'm under pledged to the boys over there that
Speaker 1: customary times of service, certain prayers must be said. So
Speaker 1: he reopens his church in the middle of the plague,
Speaker 1: and people start attending church again. In Indianapolis, Indiana, Tin
Speaker 1: Black Apostolic Christians were arrested for attempting to worship despite
Speaker 1: the fact that the Board of Health had told them
Speaker 1: not to quote from their local newspaper. When the seven
Speaker 1: women and three men were taken to police headquarters, they
Speaker 1: began talking in the unknown tongue, and it was some
Speaker 1: time before the turnkey and matron were able to learn
Speaker 1: their names. So this sort of stuff happens all over
Speaker 1: the world as a result of the plague um and
Speaker 1: science being what it was back then. It's impossible to
Speaker 1: say kind of how many of the dead and the
Speaker 1: Spanish flew epidemic could trace their illness from an infection
Speaker 1: they got in a church service that occurred after like
Speaker 1: things got closed down. We just weren't keeping good enough
Speaker 1: track to do that. But thankfully, Miles, we have the
Speaker 1: coronavirus pandemic of to give us kind of a fun
Speaker 1: modern example for how virulent a single church service could be.
Speaker 1: So that's that's gonna be fun. You would do that, Miles.
Speaker 1: You wanna talk about that? Oh, you got the numbers,
Speaker 1: sure deal, buddy. On February sixty South Korea had thirty
Speaker 1: known cases of novel coronavirus. Almost all of the people
Speaker 1: infected had caught it from family or friends. On February eight,
Speaker 1: only thirty nine people had tested positive. One of them
Speaker 1: was a sixty one year old woman known as Patient
Speaker 1: thirty one. She came down ill and decided to go
Speaker 1: attend her church anyway, and her church was the shin
Speaker 1: Honi Church of Jesus in Daigu. Two days after this,
Speaker 1: on February hundred and four, South Koreans had the coronavirus.
Speaker 1: Fifteen of these confirmed cases were members of or were
Speaker 1: directly connected to the shin Shony church in some way.
Speaker 1: This woman attends the service while sick and knowing she's sick.
Speaker 1: Two days later, there's fifteen cases connected to that church. Now,
Speaker 1: by March twenty, a month or so later, South Korea
Speaker 1: had more than nine thousand confirmed cases, and the shin
Speaker 1: Shony Rich Cluster was responsible for five thousand and eighty
Speaker 1: of them, making up more than half of the total
Speaker 1: cases in South Korea. All because of a single worshiper
Speaker 1: who had to get the Bible study when she was ill.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, so that's yeah, okay, yeah, it's it's cool,
Speaker 1: and I don't know, it's it's the Yeah. The irony
Speaker 1: of it all too is like, you know, people will
Speaker 1: use religion as a thing that they're like in their mind,
Speaker 1: they may think, I actually, if if I go to church,
Speaker 1: I may feel better or something like that, but not
Speaker 1: actually being totally aware or considerate or whatever the reason
Speaker 1: is of like what the risk is to other people
Speaker 1: and even yourself from just going out there. It's cruel, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it it has a lot to do with the
Speaker 1: nature of the specific church, but also a lot of
Speaker 1: churches do kind of the same things as church does,
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna get into that in a second. I
Speaker 1: do want to note right now, since we started by
Speaker 1: talking about the Catholic Church, it took them too plagues,
Speaker 1: but I think they kind of got it right this time. Right.
Speaker 1: The Pope was pretty early on like we're fucking no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, no, none of this ship like state of funk.
Speaker 1: Hod this God understands like like we don't gotta be
Speaker 1: all dipping the same Like no, um yeah, He's like,
Speaker 1: because I got if we were, if we get rid
Speaker 1: of all the good ones, now, I don't know what
Speaker 1: the funk we're going to be left with. So the
Speaker 1: Catholic Church at least broadly got there. So the third
Speaker 1: plague is a charm, is what I'm saying. Mm hmm, yeah,
Speaker 1: we really makes sense. Like American Christian churches only have
Speaker 1: one other plague, Like the next plague that comes around,
Speaker 1: we'll get it, right, I think, yeah, if we follow,
Speaker 1: we'll see, We'll see. I'm really very excited for the
Speaker 1: next plague, Miles, you know, I mean a lot. I
Speaker 1: think that's really what we're gonna learn. He's like, all right,
Speaker 1: fourth plagues the charm. I think I'm hoping third plague
Speaker 1: is the charm. But we'll see, they'll keep you in
Speaker 1: more plagues, so we'll you'll be like, oh, look, there's
Speaker 1: the only thing to learn from this is third plagues
Speaker 1: the charm. Yeah, that's what it takes, is three. So
Speaker 1: I do want to talk about some peculiarities of the
Speaker 1: Shinshone Church of Jesus that explained why five they got
Speaker 1: five thousand people are more sick um. Yeah, so the
Speaker 1: Washington Post notes, quote, Unlike other churches, Shinshony makes its
Speaker 1: members sit on the floor tightly together during services and
Speaker 1: neat military like ranks and file, says Lee hoo Yahn,
Speaker 1: who left the church in two thousand and fifteen. We
Speaker 1: were not supposed to have anything on our faces like
Speaker 1: glasses or masks. We were traded to sing our hymns
Speaker 1: loudly and of course, in Korea, as in a lot
Speaker 1: of parts of Asia, wearing kind of face mask is
Speaker 1: a lot more common. Um. You know, it's just like
Speaker 1: a thing people did more often in regular daily life. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the church had a specific prescription against that because
Speaker 1: they wanted to bring people together, which also in a
Speaker 1: time of illness, gets them sick together. Um. That doesn't
Speaker 1: even make I mean, because in Asian culture, when you
Speaker 1: wear it, you notes to be considerate of other people.
Speaker 1: It's not because like I'm this because it's like wearing
Speaker 1: a hood, but you're also Christianity in particular in a
Speaker 1: lot of parts like in Korea, also, it has like
Speaker 1: this kind of very powerfully um anti not I mean
Speaker 1: anti authoritarian might be the wrong word, but like anti
Speaker 1: um countercultural thing, right, because Christianity is not as common
Speaker 1: in that part of the world. And I think this
Speaker 1: it's from what I'm reading this, it seems like that's
Speaker 1: a part of this is that they're they're like because
Speaker 1: they're like, yeah, that's what they would do. Yeah, we're
Speaker 1: trying to be connected and see each other's faces. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and miss Lee this this former member UM, who was
Speaker 1: interviewed by The Post, stated we were taught not to
Speaker 1: be afraid of illness. We were taught not to care
Speaker 1: about such worldly things like jobs, ambition, or passion. Everything
Speaker 1: was focused on proselytizing, even when we were sick. So
Speaker 1: if you're sick and you're proselytizing, obviously you're going to
Speaker 1: spread it more. So that's and that's how a lot
Speaker 1: that's why half of the cases in Korea, you know
Speaker 1: a month later, are from this church clusters, because a
Speaker 1: lot of these people are going up ministering to people
Speaker 1: while they're contagious. Um. And yeah, it's it's it's bummer. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: it's also not unique to South Korea. UM. I think
Speaker 1: at this point we all remember that Louisiana pastor who
Speaker 1: defied the governor's order to not hold gatherings larger than
Speaker 1: fifty people and like repeatedly held gatherings, Pastor Tony spell Um.
Speaker 1: And he actually made the same justification. One of those
Speaker 1: guys from nineteen eighteen made uh. He stated, he told CNN,
Speaker 1: if we close every door in the city, then I
Speaker 1: will close my doors. But you can't say the retailers
Speaker 1: are essential, but the church is not. That is a
Speaker 1: persecution of the faith. Um. So that's a hundred two
Speaker 1: years later you got the same basic line of reasoning.
Speaker 1: Spell also believes that the pandemic is like politically motivated. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's another evangelical pastor, Rodney Howard Brown of Florida's Tampa
Speaker 1: Bay Church, who called people pansies for being scared of
Speaker 1: the coronavirus. In yeah, he said his church would only
Speaker 1: close its doors when the rapture is taking place. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: continuing to bust people in. I think this is the
Speaker 1: guy who got arrested. Later, there's at least one church
Speaker 1: you like, and it was like a kind of a
Speaker 1: show arrest, like he got he was in an out
Speaker 1: a little bit. I don't think it's gonna do anything
Speaker 1: to him. Um. But the scariest thing to me. So
Speaker 1: you can find many, many stories, And if I had
Speaker 1: a little more time, I probably would have collected a
Speaker 1: longer list of different shitty individual churches and the things
Speaker 1: they've said. But we're all familiar with a lot of
Speaker 1: religious leaders have said horrible, stupid things about it. You
Speaker 1: can't get it if you pray or you know, my
Speaker 1: church isn't gonna Jesus will protect you. All these things
Speaker 1: that will lead people to take risks, or they'll just
Speaker 1: be like, you know what, I'm gonna command God right
Speaker 1: now to knock this off right now, Okay, but I
Speaker 1: need about sixty tho more dollars to come in, and
Speaker 1: then I'll fucking I'm gonna tell God. I'm telling you,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna tell him. I'm gonna say, fucking hey, God,
Speaker 1: quit it. You want that safe. This is all a problem, obviously,
Speaker 1: Each of these churches, these pastors, these people are are
Speaker 1: problems that we all have to deal with as we
Speaker 1: confront this virus. But I don't think that's not what
Speaker 1: scares me the most. Um. What scares me the most
Speaker 1: is what I read in a March fifteenth Washington Post article.
Speaker 1: Without guidance from the top, Americans have been left to
Speaker 1: figure out their own coronavirus solutions. It includes interviews with
Speaker 1: a number of pastors. I want to quote from that
Speaker 1: now because I find this terrifying in a totally different way.
Speaker 1: In Arkansas, the Reverend Josh King met with pastors of
Speaker 1: five other churches on Thursday to decide whether or not
Speaker 1: to continue holding service. The religious beliefs told them that
Speaker 1: meeting in person to worship each Sunday remained an essential
Speaker 1: part of their faith, and some of their members signed
Speaker 1: on to Trump's claim that the media and the Democrats
Speaker 1: were overblowing the danger posed by the virus. One pastor
Speaker 1: said half of his church is ready to lick the
Speaker 1: floor to prove there's no actual virus, said King and King,
Speaker 1: I think it seems like at least he understands that
Speaker 1: it's a serious threat and real, and he took some
Speaker 1: actions like to try to to to reduce, you know,
Speaker 1: the likelihood that dis congregation would get it. But he's
Speaker 1: posted pointon like I don't know how to deal with this,
Speaker 1: the fact that a huge and over my pastors, like yeah,
Speaker 1: you're willing to like lick the fucking floor to prove
Speaker 1: that there's no virus. That scares me more than even
Speaker 1: the pastors pushing this stuff, Like how widespread this information
Speaker 1: is and how centralized it is. You know, I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's also like just feel like I can
Speaker 1: grow out so hard that I won't get sick, Like, dude,
Speaker 1: yeah you want to fucking see, Dude, how much I
Speaker 1: believe bro, I'll lick this fucking floor. Dude, this coronavirus
Speaker 1: shit so Miles, that's the episode that I've got for
Speaker 1: you today. Oh boy, how are you feeling? Oh? I'm
Speaker 1: just just glad that I was raised in the house
Speaker 1: that respects science. Yeah. I was raised in a house
Speaker 1: that I thought respected science, uh until recently, until recently.
Speaker 1: But you know that's a lesson for another time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: sorry to hear that. Um yep, so Miles, you want
Speaker 1: to plug anything, Yeah, I want to plug Daily Zeitgeist
Speaker 1: stand Fiance, which is that show I do with Sophia
Speaker 1: Alexandra who you've had on numerous times. We get high
Speaker 1: and watch Fiance. So if you want to escape and
Speaker 1: watch trash TV with us and be faded, come through. Yes,
Speaker 1: so do that. Um go, uh, find people who are
Speaker 1: bleeding and touch their blood to your eyes. Oh no, no,
Speaker 1: that's a bad thing. Sorry, I mixed up my my
Speaker 1: post it notes here. I'm so sorry. Not that. Um,
Speaker 1: stay in your houses and listen to podcasts exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Um like our podcast, this podcast, which you can find
Speaker 1: wherever you found this episode of it. Just keep doing
Speaker 1: what you're doing. It's perfect. Um. That's the episode. Bye,
Speaker 1: bye bye.