Robby Dillon part two so what's been happening since I talked to you last in terms of spirituality philosophy worldview look well when was it that we talked last two years early two years ago Wow time flies so yes so since then I graduated from University and I graduated with honors and and with distinction and I meant to just take one course at the University like I just wanted to see to challenge myself to do a course in at the Masters level and it turned out I ended up sort of applying to the master's program and I was accepted and then I was asked to be a teaching assistant so I've been teaching for the last two semesters and that's been a you know a new experience and I also joined a church and that's been a very enriching experience so that's that's the main developments I think as far as we go yeah can you talk to me what which church she joined in y-yeah I joined the union in at a church and it's a it's a very interesting church it's right up the street from my house and it's a it's historically black church it was the oldest black church it is the oldest black church in Canada and it has a very unique history because at the time that that the church was started most of the men in the black community were working as Pullman porters because that was that one of the best jobs you could get they were working as Porter's on the railway I don't know if they were actually Pullman porters but many of the men were working as Porter's and so they were away from home a lot and so it fell to the women to to do the administration of the church and you know keeping things in order and organizing people and getting things together and that still continues to this day so it's a very unusual church in that sense in that it's unusual in that it's a black church but it's also a church where the seemed to run a lot of things and they have some when I was when I started at the church there were going they didn't have a permanent minister so they were going between part-time ministers and they had a couple of women ministers and so that was that was also interesting and I guess a little bit unusual it's it's a church as a great history because Oscar Peterson who is a very famous jazz pianist in Canada and has won all sorts of awards he learned to play piano in the I guess the what do you call that directory the house attached to the church and Oliver Jones was also a very famous jazz pianist and he he still goes to the church there are there was a friend of mine in the church he's a musician he played with Louis Armstrong he played with with all sorts of famous jazz people and the church being a black church I guess is part part of that is congregations in the world to start lobbying the Prime Minister of Canada to to you know D to sanction past sanctions against South Africa and to stop doing business with South Africa and they were very much involved in the campaign that Nelson Mandela released and so when when Nelson Mandela was released he the first place that he came to speak or at least the first church was Union United and it's a it's a tiny little Church so for a man like Nelson Mandela to come and speak there was quite a quite an incredible thing but all I know it's been a very it's been a very spiritually rewarding experience to go there and the first time I went there I just walked in to see what it was all about and they have a practice of making anyone who is new at the church for the first time they have to they have to stand up and introduced themselves and I was I was hoping kind of ridiculously to just blend in that no one would notice but of course I think I'm like usually most days I'm the only white person there so although it's funny how they they sometimes don't remember me or not recognize me but but um yeah it's probably a good thing but anyways they saw I was hoping no one would notice but of course they noticed and they said you announce yourself and you know people stand up and they say hello my name is Bradley Lennon and I'm here today with my beautiful family from Southern California and we're we're happy to worship with you today and so on and I said I said wow my name is Rob by yeah I was born up the street because I was born about three four blocks from this church and in a hospital and I said I lived down the street because I live about two blocks from the church and I said so I guess this is my church so that's that's how I came to be part of the church and I've been pretty regular school gets in the way sometimes lately and but I hope to hope to attend services regularly and even maybe get involved more in some of the programs at the church is that the United Church of Canada yeah I guess it would where would it be the United Church of Africa what are you asking me there's so many churches with very similar names okay so the church I was raised in is the United Church of Canada I'm wondering if it's the same organization well what else could it be if it's the United Church it wouldn't be the United Church of somewhere else what could it be what could it possibly be no okay all right I assume it is United Church of Canada I'm gonna I'm gonna take a wild leap there and guess that it is the problem of induction but are you aware of Greta Vosper and the whole controversy surrounding Greta Vosper no I have no idea who that is who is it she's a minister in the United Canada who came out of the closet as an atheist and she's fighting to allow atheist ministers in the United Church of Canada and she's so far she's been successful she still has her church in Toronto what do you think about that idea of having atheistic ministers explicit atheists as ministers in your church what depends on you mean by atheists and depends what you mean by in the church and so on I mean III personally I I go to church because I think that's that's where the good people are and and you know I I don't necessarily like I said in the last podcast I don't necessarily need to meet up with God if he if he comes and knocks on my door or you know okay we'll talk but I don't I I go to church because there is something very soothing about the rituals but also and you know I learned something about the Bible every week and also to feel part of community to feel like to meet nice people because if you know where are you gonna meet nice people if you don't go to church that's where that's where they are and you know they seem to be very much in that church and I guess I also believe that you know people shouldn't be too caught up in things about race and and so church would be one sort of black space where were white people would be welcome I think I hope I'm welcome there I've been welcomed there's been very nice people and you know it might be different than me say going to go out an all-black community center because that might be seen as an intrusion or as but you know I I would like to live in a war where people don't really worry too much about what color you are and so I try to live as if as if that's not an issue and you know I'm aware sometimes a little a little unusual sometimes at church people might give me funny look if especially if they're the type of people who go to church once or twice a year and you know I have never seen me there before well who's this guy what's he doing here but the people who know me and the people who have welcomed me into the church have been very nice and I grew up in black community and you know I'm very close to them and and so many of the people that are in the church are people that I went to high school with so yeah I'm one of one of the people at the church is a girl that I actually sat next to in eighth grade so no do you talk about your faith or a lack of faith or your belief or a lack of belief in God or anything like that does it come out in discussions or do people just talk about sports and the weather or is it highly focused on faith in the Bible and salvation and stuff like that what's the sort of spectrum of conversations with the people there it's mostly I mean what are we gonna do sit around talk about God like no we just finished doing all that we've said all the prayers and everything and then we go down in the basement and they have sandwiches and you eat the sandwiches and you say like did you watch the hockey game and you know I always like that that that Montreal I thought hockey is maybe their religion because you know it's interesting that you have people from Trinidad and Jamaica and Barbados and they don't always get along so well like they have their own divisions are not serious divisions but people will say like oh he's a he's a Beijing and he's a Jamaican you know they have their own little rivalries but but the one thing we can all talk about is hockey and people get very very excited I have a good friend there at the church and he he knows a lot more about hockey than I do you know I don't have time to watch every game so he's usually right up on top of everything that's happening I sometimes feel like I have to catch up on sports news so that when he starts to talk to me I won't be caught flat-footed you know said I I don't know I didn't see that game you know but he's either eight into it so yeah that's it's there's not a whole lot of talk about that but well I talked once or twice at the minister but even there it's just that it's just mostly about regular life challenges I mean I had a challenge at school with students and I felt like I was being a little bit walked on because I was trying really hard to help them and they kind of took advantage of me a little bit a couple of couple of students most of the students were very nice people but there's a couple who took advantage that I'm kind of a nice guy and so they you know they they went out of their way to they used up a lot of my time even in that sense they weren't bad people they were just they just wanted attention and I had to figure out like how much attention to give them there's a thing called a Christian doormat it's like you're you know you're coming from a place of trying to help people and people some people will either you know intentionally and maybe malevolently take advantage of that and some people without even meaning to will sometimes take up a lot of your time so as you're listening to the sermon are you daydreaming about other things are you actually interested in the Bible and Jesus is a new God and all it would be the point of going and daydreaming if I go there and I'm daydreaming then I'm not there like I mean I'm there I'm listening to the sermon and I'm I sing the songs apparently I sing quite loud there was a lot of little comments about how maybe maybe I should think about joining the choir a really good singer but I think they were trying to tell me I was singing too loud I only know one way to sing but no I mean yeah I like I suppose everybody if the sermon is not great everybody drifts off at times but now it's it's a you know it's interesting to hear the stories to think about how they apply to your life you know how how they could apply how they might be interpreted by other people how they have been interpreted Oracle a like and and and sometimes it's like why is that particular some and being delivered this week because this sermon might read be responding to something that's going on in their news or the sermon might be about something that's going on in the church you know there are stories or conflicts or issues in the church or or maybe between people in the church and things like that like you know you you can see little things going on sometimes but yeah and we have great singers and great choir and so that's always you know that's always great when who acquire shows up or when they have some good soloist we definitely have the best singers in in this city some of them are amazing and so that really makes it fun plus the people are very there you know there's there's not a lot of formality people just get up and start dancing and clapping and people will just pull out their iPads or their their iPhones and start recording what's going on and I find it I find that very I don't I don't want to be in a place where people are all stuffy and you know sometimes you can get that around white people that people are very annoying what about your prayer life do you prayer do you pray when your doing very i prayer at very why do you deep pray at later before me also didn't know before exams I pray right before exams no I don't pray I mean I pray in church and I don't really spend a lot of time on my knees and I'm just doing the best I can I don't think there was gonna be some deep commitment to religious life it's a practice and it's like anything it's like going to the gym you go to the gym and you know the more you go to the gym the better you get and the more exercises you can do and the more stuff you can do with your body well I think you go to church and maybe you just show up and then you know maybe you get a bit more into it and maybe you get a bit more involved and you know like I said I'm I sort of give God the opportunity to to show me what's going on but I do think it's a kind of spiritual exercise so it's a discipline and you know if you remember from part one if you want to go back and listen to that you know sometimes life can get very bad and then you might want to start by just fixing your spoon drawer or just just cleaning the dishes and you know that kind of thing making your bed but then maybe once you've got your house in order and you know the dishes are done and the house is clean and maybe you cleaned up your diet a bit and you're starting to go to gym or maybe you're starting to learn some things and then and then you know I'm not necessarily in this order but you know you know you can just go to a church and see if that's gonna do something for you I think sometimes just the discipline of saying oh it's Sunday I feel like sleeping in or I feel like going for brunch no I'm gonna go to this place and do something that's sometimes mildly pain in the ass but that can be very good for you spiritually you know as it can be you're developing your soul the same way you might develop your body or practice the guitar right so yeah no I don't I don't think you expect to play the guitar magnificently the first time you pick it up well yeah I think it would be ridiculous if I suddenly after a year of going to church I was suddenly you know deep deep into my spirituality it seems that would be a bit foamy I think any of your friends or family reacted to your church going why would they react to it it's just a thing that I do you know I've had you know react to my much church yeah well you're a bit of a missionary or a bit of a pain in the ass like you know you're like bothering people oh let me tell you about my church and this is my life and it's like I don't really go around telling people once in a while I might mention it that I go to church if it's germane to the topic at hand or if if I'm trying to maybe sometimes I might want to make a point if I feel someone's a little bit I don't like the word racist but maybe somebody's a little bit narrow-minded a little bit narrow-minded yeah or a little bit that's a good word narrow-minded or just a little bit let's say has a certain they sort of feel they can bond with me in a certain way and then you know I might say like well you know I actually go to a black church and and you know that'll that'll maybe make them think differently about the way they see the world a little bit but I'm not on some missionary you know not out to like convert anybody people do what they want to do you know what about your philosophical endeavors at school have you encountered a lot of new ideas or is it just the same old same old no for you know it's there's there's always something new I mean one of the problems is doing a master's degree is that you know the main the main thing you do some coursework but the main thing is to write like a sort of thesis paper and a lot of the people that come in have been focused on one type of thing so like they decided maybe in the first year of their undergrad that oh you know issues of immigration and you know nationality are gonna be my area or maybe someone's really into Marxism and you know or like what else could it be cuz not sounding not very philosophical but those are kind of right now that's what a lot of people are doing but let's say someone else is really into philosophy of the language and logic and you know they've pretty much been doing that so they come in with a very clear idea of what they want to write about whereas my undergrad was very much like a little bit of ancient philosophy a little bit of ethics a little bit of political philosophy a little bit of analytic philosophy logic and so on so so it's gonna be a little trickier for me to to pick out a topic but I hope to come up with something over the over the summer probably like ancient or medieval philosophy but again that's a problem because to really do something decent you know you have to have been reading stuff for 20 years like you know you can't you can't just read three dialogues of Plato and go oh here I have an idea like you know where as maybe you could do that if you just catch up on the latest things the latest debates in analytic philosophy write the papers are very short you'd need a little background but you wouldn't even need that much you just have to sort of you know jump in right into the debate so so we'll see how that goes but you know I'm still continuing I mean I did a course on Dante and philosophy and I did a course on moral logic and possible worlds and now I'm doing a course on Marxism bases basically yeah Marxism alienation and social justice and then I'm doing a course on non-classical logics so I'll have to write about logical realism or logical pluralism or something like that so and then I have two more courses to do and again I'll probably do a course on Herodotus and I might do a course on feminism we'll see depends what happens over the summer like hopefully I find a good topic to write about with modal logic did John Duns Scotus come up at all yeah well no it's it's I I mean it'd be interesting I have an article from him that I want to read in a book that's on my table but I know that Duns Scotus and people are now going back and kind of rescuing or or RiRi examining the work that he did I don't know that he has much on modality I'm assuming that you you you know something about that like yeah he has a really good proof of the existence of God based on mortal arguments oh yeah okay well um yeah that'd be interesting but no we did mostly David Lewis and saw Kripke and it was mostly Louis that I was working on and you know maybe critiques of Louis there's a guy's name is Stalin occur and there's a few other guys who have who have beef with Louis but I don't know of course it's been 20 see that's what's interesting it's been 20 30 years so there's 20 30 years of people have been writing about David Lewis you know so the view has developed quite a bit yeah David Lewis says that everything that's possible is actual right yeah so David Lewis is gonna say that when you talk about possible worlds his position is called modal realism so he's gonna say I believe that there is something called the way things could have been and um you might call it the way things could have been I prefer to call call it possible worlds and then he kind of doubles now and I mean that's actually my issue with his work but he says I believe that possible worlds are real they are as concrete as this world and there are no different well they're different but they're there they're no less real than this world the actual world that we're living in this actual world that we're living in doesn't really deserve any kind of priority or privilege over the possible worlds right because that's what we tend to do we go all over the world I'm in is the real world therefore it's better than the imaginary worlds or whatever you want to call them but he says well no those are all equally real and and but the thing is they're not accessible to us in any way they're not Spacey or temporarily accessible to us so you know the possible world there's a possible world where everything is exactly the same as it is in this world but you're wearing a blue shirt today you're wearing a burgundy shirt but in that possible world you're wearing a blue shirt and then you know and then there's another possible world where you're an alligator etc etc so it's interesting because he has this whole notion of nearness and farness so the nearest possible worlds would be one where everything is exactly the same except that you're wearing a blue shirt so that would be much closer than say the world where you're an alligator because that would probably be very difficult but yeah and then it's it's quite an interesting view I mean they once you get into it it's quite an interesting view there so I see problems with it but you know he might be being a bit hyperbolic in that saying that I believe there are 100% absolutely real and just as real as this world I think you know he's making a point but for him I think they really are just a device you know a tool an instrument too because we do need something we need a way to talk about what could have been or what might be right because if wodge ik and and that's a whole that's the paper I'm working on now if law is a represent creation of the structure of reality you know it should be able to represent like one you know we're very much as human beings we talked about what could be the case all the time that's pretty much you know essential to what we are as human beings right like like I mean cats don't do that cats don't go I could have been a dog you know we don't know but we assume they don't they don't really have modalities so that's a very part of human experience and so you know logic should be able to capture something about that it seems to me a flaw in logic if it can only talk about what is the case right now or it can never talk about what the case could be or what what they what the case might be or what it could have been and so now I'm working a lot on on non classical logics I hope this is very exciting for your living but some of them will find it exciting I'm sure I find it exciting if not in another in another world there's another possible world where people are very excited but um no but if you think about it like I bet you didn't expect to be talking about logic when you came but you know there's all sorts of things you can do with temporal logic so you can talk about things that are possibly the case in the future or necessarily the case in the future right and then maybe in the future it will be the case that something was always necessarily so in the past and and you know you might only know that once you've discovered it in the future so it gets very it gets very interesting and then there's intuitionist logic where for example you have this problem of well there's a couple of them but there's Goldbach's conjecture and there's the twin prime theory and so we know that I think they're up to apparently four billion and you can go all the way up to four billion and all the way up to four billion you will still keep finding cases of crimes that are literally two numbers apart like the way that three and five are and it still recurs and and you would think you wouldn't write you wouldn't you would think well that's got a the spread has to open up but no you know you know all the way up to four billion up there's there they are again there's another set of two primes that are two numbers apart and but nobody can ever prove it nobody's ever been able to prove that this will be the case all the way to infinity right or and there's another one too which is every even number is the is the is the sum of two primes I think that one might be proven but you know these are weird things that happen in mathematics and you should be able to prove it so we have things that are called intuitionist logics which say well this is a thing that is not proved but could be proved this is the thing that's been proven that it will never be the case this is a thing that's been proven so you have to did Spinoza come up at all in your modal logic wasn't this point also doesn't come up in molo logic but when those that comes up in rationalism and Spinoza's because he said they there's only one world there's one of only one actualization or the possible but everything that is possible actualizes whereas david lewis said that everything actualizes but not necessarily in this world right right yeah that's it's very good account yeah and i mean if you think about it like you know like he's got a very determinist view right so so so he's saying like well if you know so i say like oh tomorrow i could go to church and and and then if i don't go to church you say well that was never a possibility right and that's that's not a bad way to you know like you have to have a lot of tools to think about things like possibility and so on and so that's not a bad way to think about it like um because you know we do sometimes get a bit daydream be right and no you know i could have been this i could have been that well i don't know maybe you couldn't have been like maybe maybe this was all there was I'm sure David knew about Spinoza if you wanted the reality check it I was there for him no no I'm not but I'm saying like I mean you know this is what we do in philosophy right like right now I have to figure out like logical realism and you're like okay is logic real and what does it mean to be real and if it's real why is there more than one logic and you know or well if not so much is logic real but is is there a reality out there that logic is meant to represent and and you know if that's what logic does if logic represents the structure of the real world then how can we have all these other logics right well you know in ancient philosophy the word logos had different meanings right like reason logic well in the yeah it has it has the basically the three which are language language logic and and this is a bit controversial but law no law but they don't mean law in the sense of don't cross the red light yeah I know because that would be no most not logos but they do mean and it becomes more entrench as like later with the early Christians but what they mean by the logos besides language and logic they mean the sort of divine order of the universe so natural law in that sense but you know they don't have this notion of natural laws they just have a kind of you know they're just trying to figure out like the the the order of everything how it all fits together you know how does this you know what it like regularity is a big thing right like because so the early early pre-socratic Greek philosophers so they they're materialist philosophers and they they you know they're either Manas or pluralists and most of them think that the world is made out of elements or it's made out of one thing you know the monist is everything is made out of error everything is made out of water but so for instance for them so like they're you know they're gonna say well gee we noticed that people have spinal cords the spinal cord seems to be one long bone that's broken up into pieces and so they have this theory that well what happens is the the baby is in the womb and as it twists and turns that that bone breaks up and eventually it becomes like a spinal cord and our startle is the one who says well now no you can't you can't do it that way because then you don't have any explanation for why every spinal cord breaks up in the same way and has the same number of parts pieces why we always have 32 teeth you know you could have a theory that well there's these bones in the mouth and as the as the jaw moves it breaks up into teeth right and because they're all made out of the same stuff you see the same matter so that's why a materialist philosophers gonna go well look all the teeth are made out of the same stuff so then it must be that that stuff gets somehow broken up into individual teeth right you know so they might have a story about that but then our cells gonna say well now you're you know you that's not a sufficient story that's not a good story because how do you explain that there's always 32 teeth like it you know pretty much in everybody you know how is that so they call that a logos right because that's a kind of law a pattern a regularity they would say well that seems to be a kind of a law of the divine order sometimes we need to think about some of the ideas that are in you know that are in the world there are religious ideas but they also have roots that even predate religion and you know you may not you may or may not know this but there is a whole doctrine so a whole idea that because God is immortal and God sees all things and God knows everything that's going to happen and everything that has happened so there is a way of reading the Bible that God Himself makes analogies of himself like so you you have like in in time of Dante in the Middle Ages you have what's called the analogy of the poets and the analogy of the theologians and so for example the analogy of the poets is that I say something like you know oh that woman is like a beautiful flower but in the case of in the case of the analogy of the of the theologians it's very interesting so for example God Himself when he sends Moses out of the promised land right he's actually pre saging pre he's he's giving an analogy for the eventual coming of Jesus Christ so just as Moses is a kind of Messiah or a messenger and Jesus is a messenger but God knows everything that's going to happen so he's sending so if you look at the Bible and somebody goes look it's the same story again and again you go oh no see that's God God's doing that because he's the one writing the story and that's how he writes it he just writes it in a way that he predicts his own self yeah yeah I firmly believe that God is communicating with the events of history whether it's good bad ugly or one of everything in between he's they're using that to communicate so if you step back and look at salvation history through the eyes of the Saints you can see God communicating with that but I mean obviously I'm no saint I don't have that kind of vision but I've read enough of the Saints to know that they saw that and I was moved by their brief explanations of what they saw but I really want to talk about Dante do you like his writing do you like his stories well I studied Dante we did a course on Dante I had to read quite a lot of Dante and you know he's very interesting because he does he breaks a lot of rules that are basically religious rules and you know for example he breaks the rules of the analogies you know and then you know and of course he claims he's met God and you know he right that's the end of the comedy so what the story is is that you know Dante in the middle of his life he finds himself in a dark wood that's the opening passage and then he um you know he was the great love of his life was this woman Beatrice and Dante is among the first he's not the first because you know but he's the first one to he's not the first Giacomo de Lentini is a Sicilian poet but these guys are the first ones to say that love especially love of a beautiful woman because that's their ideal of love but love of a beautiful woman is a pathway is inspired by and is it's through the love of a beautiful woman our love for a beautiful woman that we can experience the divine that we can connect with with God and and so Dante is when he's nine years old supposedly he meets this woman and he's completely in love with her but they're you know they're both promised to be married to other people and there's a whole tradition there of courtly love but so Dante is um in love with this woman and she dies when she's 20 and he spends the rest of his life like she's the love of his life and there's a whole tradition of courtly love and because people were in arranged marriages from very young ages and so it's very very normal that people are not married to the people that are in love with and that's how all these poetry results and I mean I could talk about it for 10 hours I know I don't know how interesting it would be but no I mean it's it's kind of interesting because you know you have poetry which is there's no analogies like when they say that Achilles rescued the golden calf they're not talking in an hour this is what happened you know nothing you didn't rescue the gold but you know Achilles Ulysses they do these things these are real things and then the the reason metaphor starts is because you know there's this tradition of people being not married to the people that are in love with they're in love with people that they're not married to they're married to other people and but it's quite an acceptable practice that um you can write poems in some cases like with the provençal poets they're a little bit more seductive they're trying to woo the women but there's also a tradition which is a strong tradition of just praising the woman just expressing your love through praising her through a poem and that's an expression of love and and it's pretty much seen as a kind of safe thing because oh it's totally acceptable that you could praise this woman's beauty and stuff you know you're not allowed to consummate the relationship or so on but you know you're doing this and then at some point the church goes look this is not good we don't really like this even though it's kind of convenient and so what happens is the poets start to write in a metaphorical way and so they write about I love God God is so beautiful gods you know when God comes down to me I feel the my heart beating stronger but they're not really writing about God they're writing about Janet exactly the famous Janet of medieval poetry yeah but yeah so there's this tradition of people writing you know now the church can't say anything look I wrote about how the church is making me sweat and and my heart pound faster because I love Jesus so much right and everybody knows not Jesus but so but that's the beginning of metaphor and analogy and stuff in poetry right and that's where it starts and then some people start to say so basically love is seen as a kind of disease it's a kind of an infection of the body like it's an infection you see a beautiful woman suddenly your brain worth your heart is not beating properly or you you need to breathe really fast to resettle all your spirits there's a whole medical story going on and there's all this this big crazy story going on about you know like love is a disease and and it's a it's a discombobulation of everything it puts everything out of whack you know and Dante is is among the first and the first to really express that know what I see when I see a beautiful woman is an image that was implanted in my rational soul in my rational mind by God it was implanted in my imagination and because my imagination is closest to my to my rational soul right it's it's touched by my rational soul it's my rational soul my rational thinking which comes directly from God which as is my highest form of what I can be right it's implanted in me and and the imagination is right next to it and so when I see a beautiful woman it corresponds to the image in my imagination and that was implanted from my rational soul but so it brings me closer to God and so in the story of the the comedy which was later Dante didn't refer to it as the Dante just called it the comedy meaning it's any story with a happy ending is a comedy it doesn't mean it's funny it doesn't mean it's a Seinfeld it means it's like oh so any story with a happy ending is a comedy any story not without the ending is a tragedy there's only spoiled it's like spoiler alert right it's a little bit of a spoiler yeah so what happens is Dante starts in hell and he goes through all the different circles of hell you should probably read it you're really into Christian stuff and and so there's different punishments that are meant to sort of suit the crime and so there's this there's this idea of what's called a contrapasso and that's very important in the work of Dante and it comes it's inspired by the Bible so the Beatitudes are a kind of contrapasso so it's like that's another week before they will be strong breasted are the poor for they will be rich you see so that the payoff fits the right it's it's parallels it balances it out so in in the inferno all the punishments fit the type of sin that you were sent into how far and you know it gets worse and worse as you get towards the middle right but so for example people who are false prophets who claim me all fortune tellers and people claim to see the future right are in in in the inferno in hell they they have their heads turned around backwards so they can only see behind them and yet as they walk forward they you know and so they keep walking into things and that's their punishment and people who are lustful who you know gave in to lust and passion and so on those people are if I remember correctly they're they're sort of tossed around like wisps because every strong wind that comes just blows them around because they you know they're they have no substance they're just tossed by whatever wind comes along the way that they were tossed around by their passions and you know and then slowly but surely you work your way through the inferno and in the inferno there's some people that you know Dante takes revenge on a lot of his enemies and you know he names people and so we we do spend a lot of time trying to figure out you know people have spent hundreds of years okay that guy was a judge who was you know who did this kind of thing and that guy and so different people we get different punishments for them and and of course they're you know they're named footnotes in your version of the book um yeah I think so but like there's there's a thing if anybody's interested you can go on the web and there's a thing called the the Princeton Dante project but there's there's Princeton and there's another University anyways they have these Dante projects and so you can go line by line through the poem and any papers that are you know important papers that have been written about it so you have this line where it says well for instance it's not in the inferno it's in Nevada Nova but you know he talks about love the first time he feels love he goes here is a God stronger than I so that's a very important line I think and so people have written three four you know you you what you do is you click on that line and you can see sometimes many papers that have been written just about that one line Dante right so you can go all the way through the inferno in the purgatory and there's hundreds of papers so you're curious about for example Francesca is this very famous woman it was a kind of famous story in medieval Italy and and she was a very beautiful woman and she was pledged to be married to this man who was much older and apparently not very attractive and he sent his nephew to go and get her and bring her to be married and that guy seduced her and so as a result they're stuck in Hell together and they have to look at each other and but you know that's a very very famous story and there's many many books have been written about it and um you know and she said she's become even now she's a figure because of feminist philosophy and so on and how do we think about the story of friend Francesca and like why does she get such a terrible punishment because she really had only one well you know one one affair and and like she you know what happened is she was you know having sex with the nephew and then the husband or the betrothed the the guy who was supposed to marry her came running in and killed them both and and then they're both in hell now together and then there's some question about whether being together is more of a punishment or less of a punishment you see like maybe they were really in love so they said but then they're in Hell together so that's a consolation or maybe they're together in hell so that they're con they're reminded of their sin and you because there's it's a very important because the idea is that nothing good can happen in how there can be nothing positive so if you take one view you say well that's kind of a positive yeah I don't think it would be any consolation yeah and they're actually like everybody in hell is a kind of a shadow or a flame so there are two flames twin flames that are stuck together all the time anyway so in the inferno there is no passage of time it's just eternity the same dumb punishment over and over and then you get down to like the bottom bottom of Hell because you have to pass all the way through the bottom of Hell the deepest circle of hell and in that circle of hell everybody is frozen in the ice up to their necks I think yeah because you can see their faces and I can't remember if they're upside that for some reason I think they're up so anyways they're frozen in hell in the ice and as is Satan and Satan just looks over hell and his wings are just beating constantly and it's the wind from his wings it's freezing cold and it it's what it's what keeps everything frozen into a giant lake of ice that people are frozen in the ice those are the worst sinners and then but if you pass right through there and basically right out of Satan's butthole you come into the purgatory and the purgatory is interesting because it's a mountain and you can climb the mountain so in purgatory there's hope because there's temporality there's time and you can move your way up the mountain there's self-improvement so you have pretty much the same kind of sins but they're not as serious and so those people have a chance to redeem themselves it might take them thousands of years but they work their way up work out all their sins like if you were I don't know I can I'm not great on the purgatory but you know you pay for your sins by you know paying out your punishment and then you get to the Paradiso where you work your way through the circles there's the Saints and then you get to the very hole well you start with some people who are very faithful and religious and then you you work your way through like different levels of saints who are more and more holy and philosophers are in there too and then you work your way up and then finally at the the top circle you meet well he sees Beatrice and Beatrice Beatrice is there because she's the embodiment of divine love and she sort of gives him trouble she says why why were you because Dante flirts with philosophy and she says why would you you know you've been sort of cheating on me like you've because she's divine revelation and love and she says you wasted your time sort of flirting with philosophy you should have been only thinking about me and so and then he meets Adam and and then finally he reaches like the ultimate blinding light that is God and he feels the light and love which is God and he and then he is sent back to earth to tell the story of his his journey through hell and up to the highest levels of paradise but of course God the experience of seeing God it's beyond language it's ineffable so he can he cannot express it very cool thank you very much through that I'd say believe me people can walk you much much better a quick tour of Hell purgatory in heaven yes so just wrap up maybe talk a little bit about your near future things that you're looking forward to in the near future personally things you're excited about well I'm very excited about graduating and I'll write a book and right now I'm I'm doing some work for project which is a an interesting somewhat spiritual project we're building a giant pyramid in the old port and it's gonna be an immersive musical technological experience it's it's good it's basically Burning Man for people who don't feel like going to Burning Man you know and high tech videos and projections and and sound and music and light and and inside a giant modular venue that's gonna travel from town to town and yeah it's it's quite an interesting project so I have a you know I'm mostly just writing some of the some of the copy and promotional materials to try and help people understand what's what it is and so that's that'll be keeping me busy into the summer and right now I'm writing a paper on marks and alienation and another paper on logical realism and then hopefully over the summer I come up with some scheme from what's called a master's research project and and that's the near future and then after that I suppose I will kill all my enemies and bathe in their