I mean, you are you. You are. Am I wrong here? You are religious in some way. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I want to bring this up in this day and age when people go, No, I'm not religious. I'm only spiritual. You know what the Latin root of religion is? Re legare, and legare means to bind together. Re means again. Well, in a world that's saying, I'm only spiritual because I want unity, that's exactly what religion means. We bastardized the meaning of it over time, and we've excluded people, and we've corporatized it and such. But yes, I am religious. Um, that character, you know, I had written stories. I'd written a college paper called John Wayne Goes West, and it was about how do you how do you how can you be a believer in a world of science. And I remember writing things like during the making of that movie, like science is the practical pursuit of God. Um, the two are not excluded. They dance together. They go together. Um, belief and science.

and I never saw those as contradictions, and that's part of what the reason I attacked that role and became a part of that movie. I wanted to play a person that had that point of view of a believer in a world of science, not at the exclusion of Science and not at the exclusion of belief. Yeah, it's a confusing role for a lot of people if someone is a believer and also a proponent of science, um, because they want to know what are your literal beliefs. Like, do you take the Bible at its literal word, or do you use it as some sort of a guidebook of the experiences of these people that lived thousands of years ago that have been translated from multiple different languages back to English? And is there wisdom in those translations? Is there wisdom in those original thoughts? These thousands of years of people contemplating and mulling on these things, and that so many have used these as a scaffolding for morals and ethics and for societies. Yep, it's... it's... it's... I mean, you

know for people that go, Oh, it's a circus book, or people that are non-believers, and I'm like, Well, it's still the best one going. Um, there's a lot of great truth that comes out of the Bible, and it is open for a lot of people. It has been interpreted and reinterpreted. It has been translated, has been handed down. Um, I for myself, I don't know what to do in my daily life with the burning push. I don't know what to do with that. Um, I do know what to do with love your neighbor like yourself. I do know what to do with Matthew 6:22, If the eye be single, their whole body will be full of light. I do know what to do with some Proverbs that I can take into daily practice and go, Oh, I felt my life. I felt improvement. I felt success in my relationships, in my relationship with the day, with my career, by following that. Um, by treating others how I wanted to be.

treated the Golden Rule. So, I take the practical stuff myself and try to utilize it and pick out what can work for me. When you say you don't know what to do with the burning bush, like, what do you mean by that? I don't know what to do on a daily basis with the teaching of... and then he, you know, and then he showed up as a burning bush or the magic tricks, and I don't know what to do with... and Jesus healed everyone that... and he couldn't walk, and now he touched, and he can walk. I don't know what to do with that. I don't know how to take that into my life and go, Oh, there's something useful and practical and healthy for you, Matthew, that you can practice there. So, the magic that leans in towards, you know, what we would call now more fantasy, I don't know what to do with that. There are philosophies, there are proverbs, and

there's teachings that I think are very valid and very helpful um that we could all be reminded of that are in the Bible that I do find quite useful. Yeah, I think it's almost impossible to figure out what they were trying to say with a lot of the things. It's why it's so it's open to interpretation but also open to manipulation and that's where people have a real problem with it when it's used for to to separate people to uh exclude people to marginalize people to judge people. But it's it's hard for people that understand that those aspects and that those things happen to actually parse out that there's good about it too and that there's a lot of really valuable lessons in these books. 100%. Um look I I get it. I mean you you know it's like a what are our what are our fathers teach us. Is your father still Al? Well I don't really know them. I have a complicated family history. Okay well fathers are father figures. I have a

stepfather. He's still alive, and I'm close to him. Well, stepfather, when he goes, you'll find out some things where the messenger and the message weren't exactly in sympatico, you know what I mean? Does that mean that you throw the messenger out? You're like, Oh, you weren't following all that stuff. No, you take the message, the stuff that you can, that could work for you, that maybe they wanted it for you, they couldn't follow through on it themselves. There's certain parts of the Bible that have that too. You don't throw out the whole, you can't, I don't think it's, it makes any sense to throw out the whole book. It's what we're doing in society now. I mean, we're making people persona non grata because of something they do or, and you know, and that is right now deemed wrong or it's the hot point on a hot topic right now. You can't erase someone's entire

existence. Where the heck does some forgiveness go? And again, that like optimism. It's not erasing the crisis. It's not saying there wasn't a problem first. It's not saying that there's version parts of the Bible that have been people have bastardized and used in the wrong way. Um, but you don't throw the whole book out and say, well, it's all bad then. It's all these because that's false.

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