Jason Sylvester, host of the AAI Podcast, has a YouTube channel dedicated to the history of religion. Based on writings for a book, in progress, on how the world became secular, each video tackles a separate topic on the road to the modern world and some of the obstacles on the journey.
There are currently 5 different topical series:
1) Vatican Lies (examining the myths & forgeries created by the Catholic Church in their quest for primacy & dominance)
- The Myth of Peter as 1st Bishop of Rome
- Myths/Forgeries & Reinvented Catholic History: Popes Leo to Gregory the Great
- More Forgeries & the Road to the Papacy as a Universal Monarchy
- The Pope Who Went Too Far & the Subjugation of the Avignon Papacy
- The Vatican’s Denial of Catholic Anti-Semitism in Stoking the Holocaust
2) Pope Snowflake (endless papal rants about modern secular society)
From the mid-1800s to 1929 & the signing of the Lateran Accords with Mussolini making the Vatican a city-state, the popes complained relentlessly about their dwindling authority, their loss of the Papal States to a unified Italian state, and the spread of secularism in previously Catholic countries.
3) Influencers (noteworthy individuals and their contributions to history)
Starting with Charlemagne’s order to create cathedral schools to train priests & imperial administrators, these schools evolved into universities with the arrival of scholarship from the Muslim Library of Toledo and became bastions of freethought for a handful of scholastic mavericks, like Peter Abelard, William of Ockham, et. al.
4) Reviews (deconstructions of content from other channels)
This category starts off with a 6-part breakdown of Jordan Peterson’s numerous mistakes and strategic omissions in his 2017 biblical series.
5) Bite-Sized Bible Breakdowns (brief contextual histories of key biblical stories)
The first two videos have been released, dealing with the creation narratives in Genesis 1-3.
Additionally, the video that started the summaries of the history in the book, an extremely abbreviated excerpt that shows the connections between Classical Antiquity and modernity: A Short History of Secularism.
