p a caveat for what i'm going to say nevertheless i could say i could say is one of the temptations that i think immediately can occur to people when they get even an inkling of this and i'll call it the narrative god and and the mystical godhead right the the theistic and the non-theistic presentations is a temptation to gnosticism because it gives a very ready answer for that well you know this thing here well this is the evil power or principality to quote saint paul right this is the demiurge right and this th this is the plenum the plenum right the plenum void and and and and and the reason why this seems so nasty and hostile and jealous and bloodthirsty is it's right etc etc and i you know and i see our culture as increasingly uh giving more and more language that sounds gnostic here's here's a i think a key piece of evidence to support my claim so what jules evans calls con spirituality uh the idea that there are these grand conspiracies and conspiracies of conspiracies that are somehow running the world right now these cabals and of course that kind of thinking almo has had as a terrific and i mean that the original sense of the word history of bloodshed and genocide attached to it so this this is not just sort of like you know believing you can talk to dolphins this is these this is a dangerous uh i'm not saying that all of the gnostics were like this i'm not saying that but i'm saying that it seems to me that there that the emerge that one of the temptations maybe that's the word i'm looking for of encountering that dichotomy and at least that the fact that it seems prima facie irreconcilable is a temptation to uh gnosticism and i don't i'm not which is not the same thing as gnosis but the temptation to narcissism and and and then there's a temptation there to a dangerous kind of con spirituality uh that is becoming more and more pervasive and it's seeping into the cultural political domain like there's you know there's you've probably heard the research that republicans and democrats are more afraid of