The Mark of the Best

Dan Beecher The mark of the beast. Now, if you've read the Book of Revelation, which I assume, Dan, that you

Dan McClellan have. A long, long, long time ago. Yeah.

Dan Beecher You have to admit that what happens in chapter 13 bears a striking resemblance to Gates putting cell phone-enabled nanobots in our bloodstream,

Dan McClellan right?

Dan Beecher It's basically verbatim. It's word for word

Dan McClellan what it says. As long as you ignore the details and just- Yeah ... genericize it so that it becomes very, very fuzzy, then yes, they're the exact same thing.

Dan Beecher Right? All you need to do is fuzzify everything.

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

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we combat the spread of misinformation about the Bible and religion and try to increase public access to the academic study of the same. How are you doing today, Dan?

Dan Beecher We do. That's true. That's what we do. That's our whole thing.

Dan McClellan That's all we have.

Dan Beecher That's what we got. Yep. So we're going to do that.

Dan McClellan And we've got a great one for you today, I think, anyway.

Dan Beecher Yeah, absolutely. I'm going to start us off with Conspiracy Watch.

Dan McClellan Dun, dun, dun.

Dan Beecher We're

Dan McClellan going to talk about some- I need a keyboard or one of those little- Yeah ... button things that people-

Dan Beecher Little soundboard

Dan McClellan that has the little- Yeah. Have a little or something like that.

Dan Beecher Yeah. We'll have a whole bunch of things. Anyway, yeah, we're going to talk about a conspiracy, and this one's one of the good ones. It's juicy. It's meaty. It's the mark of the beast. And then you're going to introduce us to some of the things that made you a doctor.

Dan McClellan I am going to talk about some of the linguistic principles that I bring to the Bible that helped me when I was writing my second master's thesis and my doctoral dissertation, and things that I think any close reader of the Bible or person concerned about how the Bible is interpreted should know. And it also has application to contemporary discussions today about how we categorize things.

Dan Beecher And I am going to do my damnedest to make sure that I understand everything that you're saying, and thereby, hopefully, we'll all understand everything that you're saying.

Dan McClellan Yep.

Dan Beecher Because you're a smarty pants. And so you might lose me. So we're going to make sure. I'm going to make you define literally everything.

Dan McClellan Well, by the end of the segment, you're going to know why I don't like definitions. Ah.

Dan Beecher Okay. So, well, I'm going to make you clarify things then. Yeah. Fine. Whatever.

Dan McClellan And if this doesn't let everybody know that we have not talked about this beforehand, I said, "Oh, I'm going to talk about this," and Dan said, "Okay, whatever." And so he does not know what's coming. And part of the segment is going to be me putting him on the spot.

Dan Beecher Okay. That sounds exciting.

Dan McClellan Yeah. We'll get there in a moment.

Dan Beecher You will all learn exactly how dumb I am later in the show. But for now, let's get on Conspiracy Watch. All right, Dan, it's conspiracy time. I know that on your TikTok, you delve into a lot of different conspiracies. Mm-hmm. That is what inspired me to launch into this one. We kind of live in the golden age of conspiracy theories,

Dan McClellan actually. Yeah. Literally, there has never been a moment in human history more primed for the rapid and widespread dissemination of garbage thinking. Unfortunately. You would think that access to all this information would help people be more critical about stuff. And-

Dan Beecher Oh, what a wonderful, idyllic world it would be. But alas, the internet turned out to be more than just a way of getting good information out there.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Now, mind you, there have always been nut balls in the world, screaming that the world was out to get them or that the establishment view is wrong. And the fun trick of it is that every once in a while, on extremely rare occasions, the nut ball happened to be right. Galileo jumps to mind. But just like today, the conspiracy-minded among us have, throughout human history, been largely full of it. The dots they were sure they were connecting, or the dots that they were sure were connected- Mm-hmm ... weren't, and the apocalypse that they were sure was coming didn't. Right. Now, the modern era has unfortunately brought together many amazing technologies that are now being used in concert with each other to magnify and enhance the conspiratorial worldview. Whereas before, the conspiracists were largely unable to find each other, now the internet has provided incredibly easy ways for them to bounce bad ideas off of each other. Before, when they wanted to share their terrible theories, the media that they produced looked like the kind of media you'd expect from the crazed lunatics that are out there. Now, with relative ease, anyone with some tech savvy can produce slick, professional-looking media that is largely indistinguishable from billion-dollar news organizations. Yeah. This is a problem, and it's led to some very silly but also alarmingly widespread hooey. Hooey that you, Dan, are forced to debunk over and over again-

Dan McClellan Yeah ...

Dan Beecher on your TikToks.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and sometimes it gets ridiculous. Somebody tagged me in a video a couple of days ago, and it was a creator I had never seen before. But Their script I had heard multiple times. In fact, I had responded to another creator's video that said word for word the exact same thing, like a two-minute video, and it was verbatim the exact same script. And I was like, "These people are just feeding off each other." And I've done videos on that before, where I've showed side by side the two people saying the exact same thing. And, yeah, the conspiracy theories are just feeding off each other and they-

Dan Beecher Well, apparently they're ripping each other off. Yeah. They're stealing from each other.

Dan McClellan And then with AI art now, everybody can just say, "Give me an image of this," and then now the production quality seems to be higher because they have all this fancy artwork, and they can create this imagery, and sometimes they even try to pass off that imagery- Yeah ... as the evidence. I don't know how many times I've seen somebody saying the Euphrates River dried up, and then there was this massive statue of one of the Anunnaki or something like that buried in the sand. And it was like, "Yeah, but look, the guy has three arms that's standing right next to it. This is AI-generated art." And, yeah, it's a mess.

Dan Beecher Just don't believe anything you see or hear on the internet, including this show. I don't know. I suppose we're on the internet, too, so we can't be too-

Dan McClellan I don't know much about the internet, but-

Dan Beecher But I know it's bad. That's all I know. Today we're going after a pretty big load of hooey. You know what? It's not really even its own single conspiracy theory. It's actually more of a parasite that attaches itself to other conspiracies to lend a little- Yeah ... Christian credence to the idea.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And that is the mark of the beast. I wanted to remind people, do you remember only a few years ago when COVID was still pretty new, and we were all anxiously awaiting a vaccine, and then suddenly there were rumblings, there were worries, fears? What happened was Alex Jones, the grand poobah, the pope of modern American conspiracists, started talking about Bill Gates. And Gates had poured a bunch of money from his charitable fund into accelerating the vaccine. You remember this? Mm-hmm. And Alex Jones saw that, and the fact that Gates was a computer guy, and apparently he had also funded some research into some sort of electronic ID system.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And boom, it was suddenly a certainty that Bill Gates was going to put microchips into the vaccine to control us using 5G towers, because that was all new, and all of this was the mark of the beast. Now, if you've read the Book of Revelation, which I assume, Dan, that you

Dan McClellan have- A long, long, long time ago, yeah

Dan Beecher ... you have to admit that what happens in chapter 13 bears a striking resemblance to Gates putting cell phone-enabled nanobots in our bloodstream,

Dan McClellan right?

Dan Beecher It's basically verbatim. It's word for word what it says.

Dan McClellan As long as you ignore the details and just- Yeah ... genericize it so that it becomes very, very fuzzy, and then you can allow the boundaries to overlap with the fuzzy boundaries of the other thing, then yes, they're the exact same thing.

Dan Beecher Right? All you need to do is fuzzify everything. And there you go.

Dan McClellan I wanted to share something before you get further. A friend of mine who's a sociologist of religion shared a paper that was just published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion- Mm ... just released today. It's called "Christ, Country, and Conspiracies?" Question mark. Ooh. "Christian nationalism, biblical literalism, and belief in conspiracy theories." And, basically what this article that was written by Brooklyn Walker and Abigail Vegter, what they find is that Christian nationalism plus biblical literalism both amplify conspiratorial thinking in combination. So on their own, they both amplify conspiratorial thinking, but when you put the two together, it is even more powerful. There's some synergy going on there, where the two of them together make that conspiratorial thinking exponentially more powerful. And so- Interesting ... yes, that is where we get into the folks who I recently did a video on the flat Earth conspiracy theory. Mm. And, I had about a dozen comments on the video to the tune of, "I like most of your stuff, but you're wrong on this one." It's like, "No, I promise you I'm not wrong on this one."

Dan Beecher And I don't- We had this figured out literally centuries ago, so.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And I was like, "I didn't know you were following me, but please stop following me." If you're like, "I like what you're saying about Biblical Hebrew and all this stuff, but you lost me at the earth is round."

Dan Beecher Well, it's tricky, man. Yeah. The Bible does seem to indicate that it's got four corners, this earth of ours, so it can't be round. It's literally square, obviously.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Obviously.

Dan Beecher So before all of this stuff, before the Bill Gates vaccine theory, et cetera, it was implantable RFID chips. Mm-hmm. Which has come back. Now that the vaccine thing has happened and the zombie apocalypse has failed to materialize, they're revising or reviving the RFID chip business. Evidently. That's fun.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And- That's a lot of fun ... I haven't heard about keys and coins sticking to people's implanted things again. Or what was it the other day? Yeah, somebody was saying that you buy ground beef from the supermarket, and stuff sticks to it. Wow. But- Ooh, yeah. There you go. It's a mess. Well, the whole UPC codes were- That's right ... were thought a long, long time ago to be- Back in the '80s. Yeah, the mark of the beast. And a lot of people said, "Oh, that's why Hobby Lobby does not use UPC codes." And somebody went out and verified that. They went all throughout Hobby Lobby, could not find a tag with a UPC code on it. And it means that they have to type in the number every time. It costs Hobby Lobby a lot of time to not have UPC codes, and as far as anyone can tell, it's because they still buy into this notion that UPC codes are the mark of the beast.

Dan Beecher Well, there you go. And this kind of thinking has literally been going on for centuries. So let's get to the relevant scripture and figure out what it actually says.

Dan McClellan Let's do it.

Dan Beecher All right, so we're in chapter 13- Mm-hmm ... of Revelation, verses 16 through 18. Mm-hmm. So those verses reference a beast. Yeah. I'll be honest, it's not actually 100% clear to me which beast. There are two beasts mentioned in the chapter. Three, if you count the dragon that gave authority to the first beast.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Got two beasts and a dragon. "A beast, the first is a sea beast with seven heads and 10 horns. It looked like a leopard, with the feet of a bear and the mouth of a lion." Sound like anyone we know? That's a dead ringer for Bill Gates, am I right? It's exactly who it is. If there's anyone with a lion mouth, it's Gates.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Well, and scholars would say the horns and the crowns and things are representative of leadership, kings, emperors, things like that. But the seven heads- Okay ... would be representative of the seven hills on which the city of Rome was founded. And so when you see this reference to seven hills, seven heads, stuff like that, it's usually coded reference to Rome, the city of Rome, but that is a reference to the city as a reference to the broader empire, so the Roman Empire. Ah.

Dan Beecher Using synecdoche. See, I know some big words, too, Dan.

Dan McClellan I wasn't going to use the big words because- Because I yelled at you ... because I keep being told. All right,

Dan Beecher beast number two-

Dan McClellan Beast the second ...

Dan Beecher is an earth beast. Yes. That's right. Which doesn't seem to have as many heads or resemble as many critters, but it does have the horns of a lamb, so that's good. And it speaks like a dragon, which I assume means that it sounds somewhat like Benedict Cumberbatch. Or Smaug. That's right. And beast number two, his job is to make everybody worship beast number one. He's the hype man.

Dan McClellan Yep.

Dan Beecher So let's get to the part that gets a lot of people really worked up, which is at the end of the chapter, and I'll just read it. Okay. I'm just going to read it, and then we can sort of move on from there. Okay. So the second beast, there's a whole thing about giving breath to the image of the first beast and all this other stuff. Anyway, verse 16 says, "It also", and I assume it is the second beast, "It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name." And then verse 18 says, "This calls for wisdom. Let the person who has insight calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man. That number is 666." But it's not. I actually want to stop there. Okay. Because it's not 666. The number is actually

Dan McClellan 666, right? Right. Yeah, it is a sum, 666. It is not 6 comma 6 comma 6. It's not three sixes.

Dan Beecher Right. That's right. And it seems like an arbitrary distinction, but it's actually not because you're right, because like you say, what we're referencing here is a sum, and 666 makes sense in the way we, as English speakers using Arabic numerals, talk about the number 666. Mm-hmm. We can use both of those nomenclatures kind of interchangeably, but that doesn't make any sense when we get to Hebrew or Greek numerical systems. Is that right?

Dan McClellan And particularly when people talk about the conspiracy theories. I think one of the most famous ones that I have seen online is the Monster Energy drink lady.

Dan Beecher Oh, I love that lady. Who

Dan McClellan you see the-

Dan Beecher The Monster lady is amazing.

Dan McClellan Well, I made a video about that and used some of that video, and it got taken down as a copyright violation. So somebody has copyrighted that video. But anyway, she says that the three claw marks that represent the M for Monster Energy drinks, the claw marks look just like the Hebrew letter vav, and vav is six in Hebrew. And so vav, vav, vav, 666. And that confuses how this all works because it's 666 in Revelation. Right. And in Hebrew, when you use the characters to represent numerical values- You add them all up. So vav, vav, vav is not 666. Vav, vav, vav is 18. 18. Right. Because it's six plus six plus six. Right. And 18, another way to write 18 would be chai, which is the word for life. Ah. So, the Monster energy drink, life- Is life ... in Hebrew.

Dan Beecher It's life, you guys. Come on. And interestingly, now you said the word vav, and then you said a number, but vav is also a letter, so talk about- Yeah ... gematria.

Dan McClellan So gematria is based on the fact that most of the time, anciently, when they wanted to indicate a number, they would just use one of the characters of the alphabet, and the different characters have different numerical values. Aleph is one, beit is two, gimmel is three, and so on. And then you get to 10, and then you get 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 100, 200, 300, and so on and so forth. And so in order to create large numbers, you would just put a bunch of these characters next to each other. Now you can also spell them out, and that's generally how it's done in the Hebrew Bible. You have the actual numbers, the words that stand for the numbers. Shalosh is three, shesh is six, and so forth. You spell them out. So that's how it's frequently done. But in some manuscripts, and particularly in Greek it works as well, you can just put the characters themselves there. And so gematria is this idea that you can derive significance based on taking words, and particularly names and things like that, and finding out the numerical value of those characters if you interpret them numerically. And then, so that's a coded way to refer to somebody's name. However their name is spelled in Hebrew, you add up the numerical values of the individual characters, and then their name represents that value. And so when- So if we

Dan Beecher were to take the name Dan- Mm-hmm ... I don't know how to spell that in Hebrew, but it would be... But you just take the letters and then you take the corresponding number to each of those letters, you add them up, and then you've got a code. Suddenly, instead of- You've got a value, yeah ... our name is now 46 or whatever.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And so that's the verse 18, you've got these references to the author is winking at you. "This calls for wisdom." "Let the one who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man," saying this number is... They're just hitting you over the head with the fact that this value is the numerical value of somebody's name, of a person's name.

Dan Beecher And it's a person that you can't talk about openly. You've got to talk about in some sort of coded language if you're going to be critical of this person.

Dan McClellan Well, and so we're going to get a bit later to who this person is, but yeah, this person is actually dead when this text is being written. Right. But you still, it's almost a he who must not be named kind of situation. This is the Voldemort where you speak about them in hushed tones because like in Russian, for instance, they have a word for bear, but they don't use the word. They use a substitution based on this traditional idea that if you name the bear, if you say the word bear, you invoke the bear, and so you refer to it indirectly. And so it's- Look out, there's a big

Dan Beecher furry guy with claws behind you. Yeah. It feels a little clunky, I'm just going to say it.

Dan McClellan Well, and it doesn't work for most of the other scary things in Russian. Right. It's a tradition that developed, but that's what's going on here. They're speaking about it in hushed tones, and so it's being put between the lines. But it's pretty clear who this person is,

Dan Beecher and- That's right. It's Barack Obama. Or at least that has been fronted as a possible- Yeah ... thing. I do want to say, the beast that we're talking about is not the devil, which some people say.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher Is it the Antichrist? Is that the same critter, or is that a different entity?

Dan McClellan So it's most likely a different entity, but we talk about the Antichrist, but throughout the New Testament, and it's not used very frequently, it's used as an adjective, not as a proper noun. So usually it's, "This person is Antichrist," the way you would say, "This person is grabby," or, "This person is kind of annoying." It is an adjective, so anybody could be Antichrist in the sense that that is an adjective that describes that person. So we're not talking about-

Dan Beecher So you're saying-

Dan McClellan Go ahead.

Dan Beecher You're saying that the head of the United Nations is not the Antichrist.

Dan McClellan Just

Dan Beecher is Antichrist, or they are Antichrist in a way.

Dan McClellan If someone were to call them that, yeah, the idea would be that they are anti-Christian, would be- Okay. Yeah ... how we would use the adjective

Dan Beecher these days. In case anyone's unclear on this Many of the conspiracy theories involve the UN. Yeah. I don't know why. That's a big scary thing for-

Dan McClellan Yeah. Been going on for a long time since they first got the United Nations together, and before that, I forget, League of Nations, I think is what it was called- Right ... after World War I. And- Yeah ... yeah, this idea that they're trying to form a one world government and- Right ... take everything over has become comfortable bedfellows with a lot of the conspiracy theories about the beast and the end of times and all that kind of stuff.

Dan Beecher So if the beast isn't Barack Obama or the head of the UN, who is the beast? Let's not be coy about it. Let's just get to it.

Dan McClellan Okay. Well, there are two ways that we know this. One is that our earliest manuscript of this passage in the Book of Revelation, a manuscript I believe comes from around the middle of the 3rd century CE, actually doesn't say 666, it says 616. What? We have-

Dan Beecher How dare they? Yeah. What's going on? We have an alternate reading. My Gematria is all messed up now

Dan McClellan all of a sudden. Yeah. Somebody didn't carry the six. And so when you look at 666 and 616, and you also look at some of the traditions that were in circulation within early Christianity, but also within the broader Greco-Roman world, it seems clear that this is a reference to Nero. Now, Nero died before the Book of Revelation was written, or so the story goes. There was a rumor going around that Nero had not died, had faked his death, or had managed to survive and had run off into exile or into hiding, or had died but was going to come back to life or come back from exile or come out of hiding, and this is called the Nero redivivus theory. This is something that is found in a couple of different places in early Christian and even in non-Christian literature. And Nero's name can be written two different ways. You can write it in Latin or you can write it in Greek. If you write it in Latin, you get Nero Caesar. And if you transliterate that into Hebrew, so if you write the Latin name Nero Caesar in Hebrew characters, you get nun, resh, vav, and you get koph, samekh, resh. And that, according to Gematria, would add up to 616. So we see that in our earliest manuscript witness to this verse. Now, if you write Nero's name in Greek, and we have some coins. Most of them are Latin, but we do have some coins that are in Greek, and there are a couple of different ways to write his name in Greek. Some people put an S on the end of Caesar, so it's Kaisars. But Nero is spelled Neron Kaiser. And if you take the Greek spelling of Nero's name and transliterate it into Hebrew characters, Neron Kaiser has an extra N, an extra nun on the end of Nero. Nun, resh, vav, nun. And nun has a value of 50. And so if you add 616 to 50, my math is out of date, but you get 666. And so-

Dan Beecher There you go.

Dan McClellan And-

Dan Beecher Or rather 666.

Dan McClellan 666. Excuse me. I don't want to mislead there.

Dan Beecher Or if you want to get fancy with it like King James did, you can say 600- Three score and six ... and six.

Dan McClellan Yes. But the coins are not irrelevant here because somebody has to have the image or the mark in order to buy or sell, and the image would be the coin with Nero's face on it and Nero's name on it in Greek or Latin. So either way, you've got these names that add up to 616 or 666 necessary in order to buy or sell. And so the idea here is most likely that the author of the Book of Revelation is suggesting to Christians that we've got persecution coming, that Nero is going to come back, this grand beast that is going to force us to use their image, their mark in order to buy and sell is Nero Caesar, who is going to come back out of exile or from hiding or from the dead or whatever, take over the Roman Empire again, and then subject Christians to untold torture and persecution. And so the beast, the number of the man, 666, is almost certainly a reference to Nero.

Dan Beecher And that's widely accepted in the scholarship, right? This isn't something that's very controversial as a concept.

Dan McClellan Not incredibly. You have some naysayers, but I think it's pretty clear the scholarly consensus is that this was a reference to Nero. There's some debate about how widespread this Nero redivivus myth was, if we can even use this to provide a backdrop or context for this text. I think most scholars would say you can, and that's the consensus view. But there are some other folks who read different things out of it, and I don't find them particularly convincing.

Dan Beecher This all goes back to our conversation with Bart Ehrman about Revelation in general, and the fact that none of it was meant to be a prediction of the distant future. Right. This was all meant to be relevant to the age of John the Revelator, a weirdo in a cave on an island in Greece. This was not meant to be about now. Yeah. Is that right? How confidently can we say that?

Dan McClellan Well, from The perspective of someone who takes a methodologically agnostic approach to the Bible, the most likely explanation is the explanation that accounts for all the data and requires the fewest assumptions. And I think the idea of true prophecy is an enormous assumption that I just don't even put on the table. I don't think that a critical academic approach to this can allow for that, because once we allow for it anywhere, we have to allow for it everywhere. People give me a hard time sometimes about that. "You don't allow for real prophecy." Well, you don't allow for real prophecy in the Quran or in the Book of Mormon, and the tools that you use to deny that real prophecy are the same exact tools you're telling me I'm not allowed to apply to the Bible. So from a critical scholarly point of view, we have to take these things as relevant to the context of its original authorship. And we can explain very easily how this was meaningful to Christians in the late first-century CE, and we can explain very easily how these symbols fit into a late first-century CE Greco-Roman context. And so there's just not a reason to say this is about the far distant future. The only reason is that you want it to be relevant to you today. You want it to be a prophecy about the future, and you want it to be particularly about your future now, because- Right ... if it's about today, it could just as easily be about 5,000 years from now. But you want it to be about today because you want it to be relevant to yourself, which is precisely why we should think of these authors as writing precisely for themselves, for their circumstances.

Dan Beecher If it's about today, why wasn't it about the year 1666, which looked apocalyptic

Dan McClellan if you lived in London. That was the year of the Great Fire.

Dan Beecher That was a horrible plague year. This has been going on throughout history.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Christians have been doing this all the time. So far it's never panned out yet.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And every generation's like, "This is the one," and- Here it comes ... but every time it also gets fuzzier and fuzzier. You have to move further and further away from what the text actually says. A video I responded to recently, there was a clip from an individual who was talking about in Australia, you can get a chip implanted in your arm that is the key to your house and lets you buy groceries. Instead of tapping the card, you can just tap your forearm. And they were like, "This is 1,000% the technology that leads to the mark of the beast." It's like, well, the mark of the beast is supposed to be the right hand, not the left forearm. And it's also supposed to be in the forehead. And we didn't really talk about that, but there's only one other place in all the Bible where the hand and the forehead are mentioned together in terms of some kind of sign or symbol or something like that, and that's Deuteronomy 6:8, which is talking about the text of the law, and write this down and keep it in your hand and on your forehead. And this commandment, this instruction, leads later on to the practice of tefillin or phylacteries, where you have some text of the law put in a little box that gets wrapped around, and sits on the forehead, and then wrapped around the arm. Right. And so the idea for the author of the Book of Revelation is this is like a counterfeit phylactery. It's going to appear to be like, or it's trying to be like genuine Judaism, early Judaism, but it's going to be counterfeit. It's a trick. Yeah. And so, every time something reminds somebody of something in your hand or near your hand or in your forehead, they immediately want to make it about the mark of the beast. I didn't grow up around this, so it didn't cause me any trauma in childhood, but my understanding is that this kind of terrorizing children causes untold trauma.

Dan Beecher So much.

Dan McClellan People worrying about the end of the world, and they're going to be surrounded by all this death and destruction, and it never happens.

Dan Beecher It's a metaphor, people.

Dan McClellan Come on.

Dan Beecher You're going to be fine. That said, if you see a dude walking around with seven heads and he's got the feet of a bear and the mouth of a lion, maybe be a little bit worried at that point. But until then, I think you're going to be okay. Let's move on to our next segment.

Dan McClellan All right. All right, Dan, I'm going to do a What Does That Mean? segment, and the word or phrase that we're going to be looking at today is prototype theory, which is- Ooh ... something, yeah, it gives you the shivers. Which is something that I incorporated into my first master's thesis as well as into my doctoral dissertation. But I want to start with a question.

Dan Beecher This isn't like critical race theory, is it? Because we're going to get in a lot of trouble.

Dan McClellan No. I don't know if they would've allowed me to write a dissertation about that. But no, actually, my dissertation was in England, not in Texas, so- Okay ... yeah, they had no problem with actual data.

Dan Beecher Now- Oh. Bye, Texas listeners.

Dan McClellan Well, it was here in Utah that they passed these silly resolutions, too, so. Yeah, that's right. But I want to start with a question for you. Now, here's where I'm putting you on the spot. Ooh. Yeah.

Dan Beecher All right. I'm excited.

Dan McClellan It's going to get fun. I'm ready. Give me the official definition for furniture.

Dan Beecher Aha! I can do this. It is squishy stuff upon which you sit unless it's hard or you're lying down, or maybe it holds up your books. I'm pretty sure I lifted that directly from Webster.

Dan McClellan Yeah, not even close. No, I've asked crowds of people when I've given papers, when I've spoken in small groups and stuff like that, if people can tell me what the definition of furniture is, and no one has ever come even remotely close. Most of the time people are like- Well,

Dan Beecher Samuel Johnson is dead. He can't answer you.

Dan McClellan Yeah, Samuel Johnson died a long time ago. And I don't even know if furniture ended up in any of his dictionaries. I did not look up how they defined furniture in 1755. But this raises an interesting point because a lot of people think in order to understand a word, you have to be able to define it. But I ask everybody, not everybody I've ever met, but when I'm in situations where I'm talking about prototype theory and linguistics, I will frequently ask about this, and nobody has ever come up with an answer. And there is a good reason for this. It's because nobody learned what furniture is by memorizing a definition, and the concept of furniture did not develop around a definition, and nobody uses furniture with any reference to a definition. Now, let's say you were tasked with coming up with a definition for furniture. Can you tell me what thought process, what you would go through to try to come up with a definition for furniture?

Dan Beecher I think the first thing I'd do is just look around my house and ask myself what I think qualifies as furniture.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher It seems like you start with a general, very broad idea of it and then move to-- It's a hell of a task, I'll say that.

Dan McClellan Would this sound like a rational way to approach it? Gather all the instances you can come up with of things that qualify as furniture, and then try to find the feature or the shortest list of features that are shared by all of those members. Does that sound like a rational way to approach defining it?

Dan Beecher Yeah. You figure out the sort of necessary condition for something to be that thing.

Dan McClellan Right. And so we refer- And then you,

Dan Beecher yeah.

Dan McClellan And then you what?

Dan Beecher Well, and then you say, "Anything that has this is furniture." Right. Plus maybe some other stuff.

Dan McClellan Right. So this is the traditional approach to definition, where you take all the members of a category and you try to reduce them down to their essence, down to the shortest list of necessary and sufficient conditions or features. They're necessary for inclusion in the category, and they are sufficient for distinction from all other categories. And in that way, if you can identify that essence, you have a simple black-and-white way to draw a line between everything that is part of this category and everything that is not. And so we refer to that as a dichotomy or a binary. It is one or the other. It is yes or no. It is 100% in, or it is 100% out. There's no in between. There's no third category. There's no nothing but in or out. And that derives from an Aristotelian idea of categorization, of essentialization, of taxonomy. But it is wildly distorting because categories like furniture are categories that I refer to as conceptual categories because they are not categories that occur naturally in nature. In other words, you can't just look at nature and say, "Nature has conveniently carved out these things, and we can demonstrate that nature considers them separate and distinct in their own category." Sui generis is the Latin phrase that gets used a lot. If our- And

Dan Beecher what does sui generis mean?

Dan McClellan It's like its own category, basically. Sort of defined unto itself. Yes.

Dan Beecher Like self-evident-

Dan McClellan Yeah ...

Dan Beecher as a category sort of thing?

Dan McClellan Yeah. There are things in nature that are self-evident. And this does have some fuzzy boundaries, but we have a pretty good idea of what birds are. And nature kind of has a distinction between things that are birds and things that are not. You can just observe that. But if there was an apocalypse and everybody was destroyed, and 10,000 years from now, aliens visit Earth and they're archaeologists and they uncover all this stuff, there's no way for them, without being able to decipher texts, to be able to say, "Ah, all of these things here, these were all part of a category called furniture." Because that category does not exist outside of our communication about the category. It's only in oral communication, in written communication, and things like that. So- Oh,

Dan Beecher and because of that, there could be disagreement about what actually belongs in that category and what doesn't.

Dan McClellan Absolutely. And I'm going to get to that if you would stop getting ahead of me.

Dan Beecher I have to be smart sometimes too.

Dan McClellan But the idea here is that these conceptual categories are not produced outside of discussions about them. They are produced by discussions about them. And when we look at these discussions, we see that conceptual categories almost never, there are some exceptions, but almost never form around necessary and sufficient conditions or features. They pretty much never are learned with any reference to necessary and sufficient features, and they are almost never used with reference to any necessary and sufficient features. Nobody learns what furniture is by memorizing a definition and then going and saying, "Ah, does this have the necessary and sufficient features of furniture?" It's the same way you learn what an apple is as a kid. "Apple? Yes, that's an apple. Apple? No, that's not an apple. That's an apple." We see things being called that, and then intuitively, subconsciously, our brain starts to connect dots, and we develop an idea of a cognitive exemplar or a prototype. We have in our minds, subconsciously developed an idea of what this thing called furniture, or fruit, or game, or whatever is. And then with each potential member of that category, we subconsciously judge the proximity of that thing to the prototype. And this is not just me making stuff up. Some psychologists started doing research in the '70s. They were looking into how colors were perceived across different cultures, and they started doing experiments with how people conceived of categories like fruit, like game, like sport, like furniture, things like this. And they found some interesting things. They found that people consistently ranked certain items as particularly good examples of, for instance, fruit. An apple is a particularly good example of a fruit. An olive or an avocado was consistently ranked a poor example of fruit. So there is gradation in category membership. And they also found that there were debatable members of categories, things that were on the periphery, and some people thought they were part of the category, some people thought they weren't. And so based on this research, they came up with this idea that membership in a category is based on some kind of proximity to a prototype. What is the essential fruit, furniture, whatever? Is object A close enough to be considered furniture? And so it radiates out to these fuzzy boundaries where membership is debated. Hmm. And so with furniture, for instance, when you try to reduce this to necessary and sufficient features, the Oxford English Dictionary says, "Oh, it's movable articles, whether useful or ornamental, in a dwelling house, place of business, or public building." And that includes an awful lot of things that no one- Yeah ... ever refers to as furniture. Right. That's because they looked at the things and they tried to reduce them down and they're like, "This is the best we can do," and it's not incredibly accurate. Pretty much anything that is inside a building- Right ... and is to be used is technically furniture.

Dan Beecher Yeah. A sponge is not furniture- Right ... OED. Come on. Get it together.

Dan McClellan I have a mug on my desk that's holding scissors and pens and things like that. This mug is a movable article that is in my house, that is useful. And so that technically, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, would be furniture, but nobody ever refers to that as furniture. Merriam-Webster calls it "movable articles used in readying an area, such as a room or patio, for occupancy or use." Dictionary.com says "large movable equipment such as tables and chairs used to make a house, office, or other space suitable for living or working." So they're kind of-

Dan Beecher What's delightfully ironic about all of those definitions is the word movable. Okay, except that we've all been to a restaurant where the stuff's bolted down- Yeah ... but it's still considered furniture. Yeah. Like it's... So-

Dan McClellan And so does a bookshelf become not furniture once it's embedded in a wall? Right. Or something like that? Does my sofa become not furniture if I put it ... Okay, not my sofa. When I was in college, everybody had furniture in the front yard. All of the frat houses had furniture out in the front yard, down on the sidewalk even. Absolutely. Is that not furniture? Is this like Jim Carrey in Liar Liar? It's like, "Look at the f-f-f-f."

Dan Beecher Like,

Dan McClellan can you not call it furniture? If I refer to the love seat in the backyard as furniture, are people going to be like, "What are you talking about? I can't see what you're talking about." No. These definitions are an attempt to try to distill these things down, but they were not formed, they were not learned, and they are not used with any reference to these necessary and sufficient features. So dictionary definitions for conceptual categories fundamentally distort. They are inaccurate, and they primarily only exist to help people structure values and power. Now, furniture is not a particularly important term when it comes to values and power, but how many times recently have we heard people challenging others to define woman?

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And that's another situation where they want to distill it down to an essence, a necessary and sufficient feature, because if I can say it has to have that feature, then a trans woman who may not have feature X is now not a woman. And so it's a way to structure power and values. Right. Racism is another term where, is there a power differential, a power asymmetry involved in racism? If you look at the historical usage of the term all the way up to the civil rights movement, it was always used to refer to a more powerful group exercising or expressing or operationalizing some kind of racial prejudice against a less powerful group. So there was a power asymmetry involved. But if you take that away, then you can now accuse racial minorities of being racist against racial majorities. Right. And now I can take the power away from that. I can now say, "Well, you're doing the same thing to me. That means what I'm doing is not so bad, and what you're doing-" It's reverse racism. Right. And that kind of gives away the game. When they first started saying, "Oh, it's reverse racism," they were saying racism has directionality. Right. But we want to be able to go the other direction and say, "What you're doing is just as bad." And so it's about structuring power and values. And when we talk about the Bible, because if I recall, this is a podcast about the Bible. I was

Dan Beecher really hoping you'd come around to it

Dan McClellan at some point. When we talk about the Bible, my second master's thesis, my doctoral dissertation, were on conceptualizations of deity, and a lot of people, when they sit down to talk about gods in the Bible, they want to define deity. But you can't define deity, because once you start to, you're doing that distortion of trying to reduce it down to some kind of list of necessary and sufficient features, and overwhelmingly, people define it in ways that serve their interests. So when I was going to try to write about monotheism, well, what is monotheism? Oh, it's the belief that only one god exists, which is a definition, one. But two, that leads to another question. Well, what is a god? And so if you go look in the Bible, you see other gods being referenced all over the place from beginning to end. Right. And so if we can define the word god so that there's only one and that all the others are counterfeit or fake or not real gods, then we can maintain that monotheism. And so what you'll see in a lot of the scholarship that looks at the concept of deity in the Bible is attempts to define it in a way that draws those lines so that they can preserve a monotheistic outlook. And one of the reasons that scholars do that is because they want to be able to maintain an ideological continuity with the Bible. So Christians today want to believe that they believe the exact same things that the authors of the New Testament believed. And so they need to find things like monotheism in the Bible. And so definition becomes a way to shoehorn those things in and say, "Well, now we can find it there as long as we define it a certain way." And what my approach was, was to say, we're not going to define it because that's distorting, and we've already gone over examples of why that's distorting. And so from a prototype theory approach, we have to try to understand what their cognitive exemplars, what their prototype of a deity was, and then talk about proximity to that prototype. And in the Bible, a prototypical deity was, one, anthropomorphic, so human-sized, human-shaped, looked like a human. Usually they were if not immortal, at least they could live a lot longer than a normal human and had some degree of invulnerability. And they also had what cognitive scientists of religion refer to as full access to strategic information. In other words, they had access to information that we need in order to make decisions, and usually that takes the shape of knowing the future, knowing how things are going to turn out. And so when you look at these prototypical features of deity, immortal or at least lives a lot longer, has full access to strategic information, those two are probably two of the most central ones. And when we look at the Garden of Eden story, those are the two things that are provided by the trees. You have the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which is probably what we call a merism. In other words, it's a reference to two ends of a spectrum as a way to refer to the whole spectrum. I see. So night and day does not just mean the middle of the night and the middle of the day. It means night, day, and everything in between.