Welcome once again to New Conversations, That Matter Podcast.

I'm your host, John Harris, and we have a special guest today.

He has not been on the podcast before, but Eric Loopold, you can go to Eric loophole.com to find out more about

his work. He's written a few books on, well, what we're going to talk about today, which is

ancient gods that Israel had to avoid, put up with, oppose, those kinds of things. And he has a podcast also called Governed by God, if you want to check that out.

But I think the book we were talking about was through the fire. And we were at a conference and

just started talking about his book. And I thought, you know, this is really interesting material.

We should have him on for the podcast. So here he is, Eric. It's good to have you on.

Thank you, John. I appreciate the opportunity.

My pleasure. So, yeah, tell us a little bit about your books and why you wrote them. And then

maybe we can get into some of this ancient, well, I don't know what direction will go, but, you know,

biblical information, mythology, all of it. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, the book that I wrote was a nonfiction book back in 2019, it's called Image of

Gold, and I wanted to do something on idolatry.

And so I spent a lot of time focusing on, okay, well, what did the Old Testament talk about regarding idols? What did that

look like, the worship of pagan idols? And so that was a good book to make. I really enjoyed that.

But then, after COVID, I started seeing what was happening with things like critical theory

and then transgenderism.

And all these like really strange things that a lot of people didn't really know what to make of them.

Honestly, I didn't at the time.

I mean, I understood the connection, for example, between like the worship of Mollock in the Old Testament and how that connects with

abortion. I understood that connection. That was a pretty clear one that was made. But then

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