Peter Thiel is Bankrupt! (Theologically)

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Dan McClellan (1:02)

You have a lot of folks who are like, ah, the Jesus fish is just a sideways vulva with a tail.

Dan Beecher (1:10)

With a tail, sure, sure.

Dan McClellan (1:12)

And so this is all about worship of the divine feminine and that holy vulva.

Dan Beecher (1:19)

With her tail.

Dan McClellan (1:20)

Yeah. Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher (1:26)

And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan (1:28)

You're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Dan Beecher (1:41)

We're going after a billionaire tonight.

Dan McClellan (1:43)

I'm stoked.

Dan Beecher (1:44)

Nice. It's nothing bad can happen to you if you take down a billionaire on your show, right?

Dan McClellan (1:53)

Not in this economy, no. With a man in the White House? No, don't think so.

Dan Beecher (2:02)

So, okay, the first thing we're doing, we're going to start off with a twisted scripture and we're going to go after Peter Thiel. And that's pretty exciting. That's going to be a lot of fun. I don't think he's going to make us, I don't think he's going to use his kingmaker status on us anytime soon. And then...

Dan McClellan (2:22)

Well, I don't think that was in the cards to begin with, but...

Dan Beecher (2:26)

How dare you? I think I had a shot. I think I had... No. And then we're going to look, we're going to do a taking issue about a little bit of symbolism, a little bit of a star.

Dan McClellan (2:42)

The McGann-David, yes, the star of David, and a rather ridiculous conspiracy theory that I've been seeing popping up around social media of late. So, yes.

Dan Beecher (2:55)

All right, so let's just dive in with some twisted scripture. And as we said, this isn't one scripture that's being twisted. I feel like...

Dan McClellan (3:10)

It's basically all scripture is being twisted, but there are a couple that have been called out specifically.

Dan Beecher (3:17)

Yeah. Peter Thiel, if you don't know, is a billionaire. He's one of the co-founders of PayPal. There's a very, very dorky picture of him and a pre-all-of-the-surgeries Elon Musk floating around that you probably should look up because woof, how did we give those two so much power? But they have a lot of it, and Thiel has become a very prominent voice in Christian circles. And he's started an organization called Acts 17, which Acts is a, in his, in this, it's an acronym, or a Bactronym is what they call it for, because he took the thing and went backwards with it. But it's, oh, I have it here somewhere. I don't know what it is. It stands for Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society.

And, you know, I went and read the entire chapter of Acts 17 to see, like, what they're on about, or if it illuminates sort of what their mission is, really. I don't know.

Dan McClellan (4:41)

Not a lot there.

Dan Beecher (4:42)

No, it's like it's basically Paul going, bouncing around from city to city. You know, he starts out in Thessalonica.

Dan McClellan (4:51)

Yeah, the uproar at Thessalonica. I've been to Thessaloniki. Yeah. Lovely area. Lovely port.

Dan Beecher (4:58)

Yeah.

Dan McClellan (4:59)

City.

Dan Beecher (5:00)

It's a it's one of the bigger cities of Greece now, isn't it?

Dan McClellan (5:02)

It is. It is. Yeah. And but they and they've got their the ruins. They've got some of that going on, too. Sure. I was surprised to see around the corner from my hotel at TGF Fridays.

Dan Beecher (5:12)

Sure.

Dan McClellan (5:13)

When I visited there, went in, there was a there was a European League basketball game on TV. And yeah, it was it was a surreal experience.