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Cultish

Burning Man: A Cultish Origin Story

Cultish

Jeff Durbin

Christianity, Religion & Spirituality, God, Theology, Jesus, Cult, Apologia, Spirituality, Apologia Studios, Spiritual, Cults

4.23.7K Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2025

⏱️ 89 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We are joined again this week by Steve Matthews from Exposing the Cults to take another look into the world of Burning Man and Transformational Festivals. Our guest has attended Burning Man and has studied, written on, and has spoken about this growing phenomenon for several years now, and brings us years of his thinking and analysis on this subject in this episode. Matthews likes to point out that, "Young people today are not rushing out and joing groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses these days. Instead, they are pursuing other spiritual paths like Burning Man and other similar Transformational Festivals. Everything is changing now to new forms of spirituality in our culture." In this episode we delve into the hard to explain nature of these festivals and describes what goes on at them, as well as uncover the true history of Burning Man and then give a critical response to the emerging Pagan worldview behind Transformational Festival culture. You can order his full-length joural article from the Spiritual Counterfeits Project here at - https://scp-inc.org/product/the-burning-truth/ You can also follow episodes on the Exposing the Cults YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@ExposingtheCults

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

My name is Eddie and I was in a call.

0:09.0

Planet Earth about to be recycled.

0:12.0

Your only chance to survive or evacuate is to leave with us.

0:19.0

It started as an effort by a charismatic creature to build a new society, but it ended, of course, with the tragic deaths of more than 900 people. Please, for God's sake, let's get on with it. We've lived, we've lived as no other people have lived and loved. We've had as much of this world as you're going to get. let's just be done with it. Let's be done with

0:37.5

the agony of it. This is the revolutionary suicide. This is not a self-destructive suicide. So they'll

0:43.6

pay for this. They brought it upon us. You're in a cult. I love you, and I want you out of it

0:53.3

and with Christ.

0:55.1

But you're...

0:56.1

You're...

0:57.1

All right, welcome back, ladies and gentlemen to cultish.

1:04.0

My name is Jeremiah Roberts.

1:05.0

Warner the co-host here, riding solo today.

1:07.9

And I am back in action with my good friend Steve Matthews from California.

1:12.6

You made a trip here last night.

1:13.9

Good to have you back, man.

1:14.8

Oh, it was great to be here.

1:15.9

Awesome.

1:16.3

So we are going to be talking today about Burning Man and all the things that entail with it.

1:21.3

We talked about it about a year ago or so.

1:24.0

We had Carl Ticrib and Robert, and a couple, a couple other people that were there, just what they do outreach to Burning Man. They've done it for an extended amount of time. You have been to Burning Man yourself personally and you've done a lot of research on it. In fact, we're going to be expounding upon an article that you wrote. I'll hold up here. This is the spiritual counterfeits project. The article here, this is back in 2012. You wrote a very extended article. We'll have links in the description if you want to check this out. And also we'll have some other things here for you. We're going to go really in depth talking about Burning Man. So I'm going to hand it to you. Where do we start regarding everything regarding Burning Man? Where's the starting point?

2:01.1

All this.

2:01.6

Transformational festivals.

...

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