https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=98UYyepx8Yo
Hello, happy Sunday. Hope both of you are doing well. This week, somebody on the Bridges of Meaning Discord server asked me about the situation regarding Bishop Strickland in Tyler, Texas. That’s been a controversy. And I’ve been thinking a little bit about it. And I think that’s what I want to talk about just to start off with. So Bishop Strickland, he’s from Texas. He’s got a bit of that Texas spirit in him, a little bit of that independence. And he has a Twitter page or an X page. I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to just call it X. Anyway, and so that’s the first thing I want to talk about is the problem with Twitter. And I’m not the first person to note this, and I’m hardly original in this matter. But I think that Twitter is perfect for making sure that the stupidest things possible come out of your mouth. Twitter is a great place to become enraged and to speak out very rapidly and in anger. And so my general view is that the higher up the hierarchy you go, the less involved with Twitter you can be. Now I understand that the Pope has a Twitter account. The Pope does not run that Twitter account. He has assistants, he has handlers who put it out there. And so praise the Lord, the Pope’s Twitter account is very boring, which is exactly how it should be. And if you don’t believe me about Twitter, then what I’ll just say is watch, we’ll say one of the 2017 Maps of Meanings lectures by Dr. Jordan Peterson on YouTube, and read his Twitter posts for a week and tell me if that’s the same person. So I’m not convinced that it’s the same person. So the first thing that I will say about this whole situation is I don’t like Twitter. That’s what I’m going to say. Here we’ve got a little bit of an article here from Pillar Catholic. This is the best Catholic news source. He’s been critical of Pope Francis and outspoken in the criticism of the Holy See’s approach to vaccines during a coronavirus pandemic, urging a more stringent position than the Vatican’s ethical questions surrounding vaccine testing and embryonic stem cells. And in May, Strickland tweeted that he rejects Pope Francis’s program, undermining the deposit of faith. So that’s a pretty serious charge right there. And he has built an increasingly national profile and following on a number of issues. Now the reason this has become a news story recently is that there was a leak from the Vatican, as there always are. The bark of Peter is a very leaky vessel, always. And say that there was a high profile meeting between various cardinals and the Pope, wondering what was to be done about the Bishop Strickland situation. And the very rather substantiative rumor was that they were going to ask him to resign. I don’t think he’s going to resign. So where does that leave us? Well, that leaves us with a rather confusing situation. Because there are like two, in my mind, at least, this is all my private opinion. And I’m a little fearful I’m wading into it, but people are interested. There are like two equally probable outcomes here. One is that this apostolic visitation that was conducted did find real problems in the governance of the church in Tyler. That there would be reasons to say that this guy might not be suitable to continue as bishop. I don’t know. I am not in the diocese of Tyler, Texas. I don’t know anybody in the diocese of Tyler. I can’t follow up on this at all. If that’s the case, then this would be Bishop Strickland making himself difficult to remove by speaking to one part of the Catholic Church that would be very much wanting to hear these sorts of messages from a bishop. Or it could be that he’s actually doing a fine job governing his own diocese. He’s rather outspoken on the national stage. And this is the Vatican, people in the Vatican trying to get rid of an inconvenient bishop. Wouldn’t be the first time that this sort of shenanigans has happened in the life of the church. Now where do I come down on all of this? I’ve been thinking a lot about the basis of communion of different Christian bodies, different ecclesial communities and all of that. What is it that draws all of these distinct people into a single spiritual body? I think if you look at, we’ll say, a big box evangelical megachurch in the suburbs, the only thing keeping them together are the experience that you have on the Sunday morning and geography. You live close to that church. That’s what draws that sort of a community together. If somebody moves, they are no longer a part of that body. They just leave. So there’s that. You could look at a more traditional, we call it a mainline Protestant church, something like the Lutherans or the various reform denominations or the Episcopalians. What really draws them together? It looks like it’s creeds, a statement of belief that you have to sign on to before you can be a full member of the church. If you don’t sign on to that full statement of faith, you’re unlikely to be a member of the church. I’m not saying that an evangelical megachurch wouldn’t have this, but considering that you might have two or three thousand people in a single service on a Sunday morning, the odds of them being able to effectively police doctrine are very low. That’s not really an important part of how their communion works. You’ve got the big box megachurch experience. That’s physical proximity and Sunday morning experience, creeds drawing together, let’s say a mainline Protestant denomination. With the Orthodox, the entire basis of communion is their adherence to their tradition. They absolutely have to continue to adhere to the traditions that have been passed on to them, because if somebody starts breaking the tradition, then that’s going to be a schism. That is actually the basis for their communion with each other. The fact that they are still celebrating the divine liturgy of St. John Chrysostom about the same way, not 100% the same way. Nothing could be that unchanging in this world, but about the same way that St. John Chrysostom himself would have celebrated it in the 5th century. And how is the biggest church communion in the world held together? All of that is through our visible head, through the visible head of the Catholic Church, that being the Bishop of Rome, currently Pope Francis. And it is through our communion with him, communion centered not on any kind of geography, not any kind of nationality, not on any kind of beliefs, not on any kind of practice, but centered on a person that has created the most durable worldwide communion that the world has ever seen. And it’s able to handle outrageous diversity, this having a person sort of be the basis for our worldwide communion. I think that’s a very precious thing. And I think that’s why it’s not a good idea to take swings at the Pope in public. I’m not saying that the Pope is so infallible that he could never sin, that he could never be wrong, that he never needs to get any feedback. But the way that feedback needs to operate is kind of through back channels, is through people close to him, is almost anything that’s less obvious than calling him out on Twitter and saying that you’re rejecting his program for undermining the deposit of faith, and here a little bit lower, retweeting somebody who’s gone full seide. So, that’s what I think about this situation at Tyler. I don’t know what’s actually going on, but what I do know is that our global Catholic faith and its communion centered on the Bishop of Rome is a good and precious thing, and I would like to hear that out and defend it as much as I can. Andrew Kelly says hello, and I say hello there back to you. Mark’s using some fancy for vacay words there. Hello, Julie. It’s been a while since we’ve talked. And speaking of Mark, here he is. How you doing? Terrible, but how are you? I like your communion topic. I like the way you separated out the three ways of thinking about how the churches do communion. That was really good. I like that a lot. Yeah, I think there’s probably more than three, but those are going to be the three most common that you encounter in the United States. Well, in the context of how we’re thinking about churches, there’s really only four divisions. There’s the Protestant, the mainline Protestant, the Orthodox, and the Catholic. There really isn’t. In the Western world, I want to get into the Western world, but I think the mainline Protestant is Buddhism and all the stuff in India and all the wacky stuff that we know much less about and can’t really understand because we have limited Western minds. But I like that. I like that. No one talks about what does it take to have communion because that’s wrapped up in what does it take to have community. And then everybody wants community. Well, have you thought about this? What’s communion? What are the aspects of it that are important? So I really appreciate that. I liked your summary. It was really good. Tell me you wrote that down because, man, if you did that off the top of your head, wow, that’s great. Look, I preach every week. I know how to keep five main points that I want to hit in my head. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. I didn’t do a 50-minute monologue for you. It was just about 10 minutes. That’s just homily right there. I do that all the time. I brought my monologues down to 40 minutes. I’m trying to get them into 40 now. That’s good. That’s good. Yeah. It would just be a Protestant sermon instead of a Catholic one. No sermonizing there whatsoever, I assure you. That was actually an interesting thing that people don’t notice this. So when I visited, I flew out to California to visit Adam because he was over there from Ireland for a month training and we popped up to Sacramento and I saw Paul Van der Kley. This is my third time I’ve been in person with him. It was Adam’s first, of course. I got to meet Joey finally, which was wonderful. We were chatting around some excellent pizza, stone-fired pizza. I mentioned you know, Peterson doesn’t moralize. He doesn’t make moral determinations when he talks. He will say stuff like, and that will be better. So by moralizing, you mean you all need to stop doing this? No, no, no. Moralization isn’t that. That’s the most extreme form. Moralization is saying like, what this guy did was wrong. That’s moralization. It’s a lighter form, but it is more like when you’re making moral determinations for other people, that’s moralization. Peterson, I don’t think he’s ever done that. I mean on Twitter and stuff, but like maps of meaning and things like that, he never did that. He would say that might be better or that might not be good, right? But he wouldn’t say that is good or bad or, you know, he wouldn’t do that. And here’s the interesting thing. Van der Kley didn’t believe me. I was like, no, dude, I think you need to go back and listen more closely to what Peterson says, because that’s part of the magic. So in a Protestant context, in the United States, you know, in particular, it’s what I know best, moralizing is the complaint. That’s what everybody, that’s a complaint of your eggs. And the counter, which is a correct counter, is that you have to have judgment in the world. Like, why are you upset about judgment? That is the correct counter. Yes, moralization is required. Get over it. True. Right. But the third way is how I phrased it that Peterson uses is he doesn’t ever do that. He doesn’t have to. Like, he’s found a way to get you to think about things without drawing bright lines and making statements as an authority. He tries very hard. And I’ve noted this in my videos on Navigating Patterns. If somebody is interested, I have three videos on Peterson. He tries very hard not to make those mistakes. And I think he does a great job of not making those mistakes, like, at all. And Van der Kley didn’t see it. Van der Kley didn’t believe me until, oops, Van der Kley didn’t even believe that until Joey was like, no. And Adam was like, no, it really, what Mark’s saying is correct. He doesn’t make moral determinations on things. And that, for me, when we talk about, and I’ve heard more talk about this recently, which I’m very happy about one sense, although years too late, the church needs to imitate the success of Peterson. Well, first you’ve got to understand what the hell happened. Yeah. Yeah. Now, you wouldn’t say that he never makes a moral judgment. In Maps of Meaning, I don’t think he ever made one. Okay. So in Maps of Meaning and in his university lectures, I think you’re correct. Yeah. When he’s getting a little chippy on Twitter, that’s a different story. But well, Twitter’s different. And I would say he’s not, it’s not that he’s gotten political. It’s that we’ve made the moral political and he’s now willing to make moral statements. Which is a huge, I was going to say it’s a mistake, but I think that’s gone. It’s not a mistake. It’s not a mistake. Look. Well, it’s a sign of a problem though, because we should be at a point where we agree on the difference between good and evil if we want to actually be together as a polity. It’s so well, but I want to make the differentiation. Okay. So there’s a reasonable argument to be made that Peterson is no longer the same third wave or second wave, however you want to count these silly things. It doesn’t matter. Peterson on Twitter is not Peterson at the university. Okay. And then I will go back and appeal to Fancy for Vicky words, a different arena relationship. He’s in a different arena and he’s got a different goal. He’s no longer teaching students. He’s no longer allowed to teach students in some real sense. I mean, we can argue, we can argue technicals, but in some real sense, right, except for what he’s doing with his university project, he’s no longer allowed to anymore. And so he’s not doing that work and he’s focused in a different place. He’s not trying to change the lives of individuals where he was highly effective. He’s now focused on highlighting a problem at a different scale, in a different arena, right? At a different layer of reality, right? He’s trying to tell people with authority and that they’re wrong as somebody who’s not claiming the authority. Because the other thing he does very cleverly in his lecture series, now by any materialistic or scientific measure, he’s in the top 1% of scientists in terms of research and paper cited and all that. And he was long before he got popular. We had a dust up about this ages ago, on the three or four years ago on the discord server, on the app MC discord server. And the guy we were talking to, I’m like, no, no, no, look it up, dude. And he did. And he’s like, oh, you’re right. He was cited long before 2018. He was the most cited, one of the most cited people in his field. So he had the citations long before that. He never pulls that out in the lectures. Occasionally he says, look, I do this research, I’ve done this research. He always gives the credit to his students who did the work rather than himself, who’s the primary author on the papers. He’s very careful not to make an appeal to authority in Maps of Meaning. And he doesn’t make appeals to authority now either. And according to Boethius, appeals to authority are the weakest form of argument. Yeah, according to me, they don’t work. I’m like, go ahead, make appeals to authority. They don’t work on me. I’m just going to ignore it. I mean, this is not authority. I don’t care. And you’re going to flip out because you’re relying on it. And then I win because I just kicked the legs out from under your argument because you were relying on authority. And I just don’t recognize that. Make a good argument or go home. It’s not hard. And then that’s the thing too. It’s not hard to make a good argument if you’re right. It’s very hard to make a good argument if you’re not right though. Something to consider. If you’re struggling making your argument, maybe, just maybe, it’s because you’re wrong. Just saying, could be. Could be. Could always be. But like I said, I mean, I see, well, and we see this pattern. Like you could see the way in which bishops are now playing at the layer that Peterson’s playing at. Maybe even unconsciously they’re kind of copying that pattern. Right? This is not good. Right? Which is kind of the point of what you were saying. And that’s the church not emulating Peterson, but maybe thinking that they are. That would be scary. I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t think Bishop Strickland is thinking about Peterson at all. I was just making points about Twitter and what that platform promotes on basically every level of its existence. Yeah. Well, but also I think, again, that reaching out and trying to fix the church is something that I’ve seen come up. And I said, I have two minds. One is, yay, finally. And the other one is, really? This late in the game? You know, like, guys are on your back foot for sure. And it hasn’t even started yet in some sense. Just people are starting to talk about, hey, maybe the church should be thinking about what Peterson’s doing and taking that more seriously. Yeah. Yeah. So I think of somebody like Bishop Barron, right? Who’s a real sharp guy. He’s well-educated and he does a good number of things right, which is why everybody’s like, oh, everybody pay attention to him. And he’s got a fundamental disadvantage in that when Peterson hit the national stage, he was already a bishop and he didn’t have the luxury of just sitting around and listening to the entire 2017 personality and its development course, which I just, I ate, especially that one. Like, that was great. I didn’t need the maps so much. You know, like Maps of Meaning was cool and I learned a lot, but the personality course was great because like I use the big five personality model to be like, no, this person’s just kind of neurotic. So they need to be reassured more rather than why can’t you pooper get off the pot, man? You know, like those are two very different reactions right there, but it’s just like that person’s just seeing the world differently and I need to adjust in order to be able to cooperate with them. So that’s why I found the personality. But Bishop Barron, he didn’t have that opportunity because he was already super in demand status binds and blinds and so he doesn’t have as much dexterity to. I don’t know that that would help because you look at Vanderklein. Vanderklein’s a sharp guy, man. You know, the more time I spend with him, the more I go, man, you got to add another like 10 IQ points because he’s so smart and he didn’t get it. He watched all of Peterson, any critique all of Peterson. I haven’t watched a single Vanderklein Peterson critique, not one I refuse. I haven’t watched him, but it’s clear to me that he just doesn’t understand a bunch of stuff about Peterson, like the fact that he doesn’t moralize. He just doesn’t get it. And, you know, look, maybe it’s really hard to understand or something. I don’t know. But also, like, I don’t think Bishop Barron would get it either. Like, I think when you, you know, just bash on the Christians a bit, when you’re stuck in the Christian frame, you have a different set of problems and you can’t see low enough. Right. That’s the problem. Like, you can’t see low enough all of a sudden. Interesting. So it’s sort of like somebody comes and says, I’m having trouble believing in God and you tell them, just pray about it. Right. Right. Well, look, I mean, I’ll use the example, right? My pious aunt, it took me three and a half years for her to understand the meaning crisis. Three and a half. And this is somebody I know. It’s like really well. I know my aunt really well. I’ve known her my whole life, you know, and I understand her framing and, you know, all of this, like, you know, you’re not going to find too many people, you know, better than this particular family. Right. And it still took me three and a half years to, you know, and I knew she got it when she said, oh, and then she thought about, she was thought about it in silence and said, I’ll pray for them. And I’m like that for where she’s at, that is the correct answer is to add them to the ridiculous number of prayers she’s already doing for for everybody else. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because you can’t you can’t well, like, and you hear this in Bishop Barron’s arguments. And I mean, I like Bishop Barron, but I like to sit down with him and explain a few things to him about how he sounds to people who aren’t in the frame. Right. Because I would think that would make you persona non grata, you know, a person not welcome. Right. Right. Well, that’s that’s why nobody asked my opinion in anything. It’s fine. But you know, it’s you. And everybody has this problem with for Vicky, for example, they’re like, oh, he believes being is good. He doesn’t talk that way. You know what I mean? Like he does not talk that way. Oh, yeah, of course he believes in a creator. He clearly does not. He clearly dodging creation. You can see he did a talk with Lantern Jack on Lantern Jack’s YouTube in was that the ancient Greece declassified podcast, if you want to listen to a podcast form. And man, boy, that last the last bit, the end of it, I just took so many notes. I had to keep rewinding. So I was like, I don’t know, I got to write all this down exactly. This is very interesting. Right. And you just hear the evolutionary framework. And I mean, for Vicky got it right down to what I’ve been telling everybody for years. The problem, the evolutionary framework is the best, the best case scenario is you end up with a process called evolution, a thing called fittedness, which neither of which you’ve defined, and a world to which the process acts on, right, that the fittedness is required. And you can’t explain any one of those three things. And you have a fourth problem, which is you haven’t explained the creatures that are part of the process. You know, you’ve left them out, right? You’ve got to have four things, but you’ve left one of them out. And none of that explains where any of that came from or how it works, because fittedness is a nice word, but it’s another word for judgment. Well, what’s doing the judgment? And Vicky actually, I mean, as explicitly as possible outlined that in almost exactly that language. He said, well, you’ve got the evolutionary process, the fittedness and the world. Really, is that what you have? And where did that come from? And see, no Christian would ever believe that anybody stopped there, because you can’t. Like no sane person can. Well, see, that was part of my process of being cured of implicit materialism, right? Was I would like get to, not articulated so eloquently, but that basic problem of evolution. And I would be like, well, that’s not a good answer. It was not even an answer, right? It’s like, that’s nonsense. I couldn’t possibly believe in that and be sane, basically. And then it’s, but that was baked into me so hard, I had to find something better. So yeah, it’s hard for me to conceive of how somebody could be like, oh yeah, fittedness and evolution and the environment. Yep, that explains everything. Everything. Literally everything. Like what? Like you really think that the world is just an exchange of electrons? That’s it? Yeah, not even. And I mean, I could actually pull up my notes, but no, really, I promise you it was those three things in that talk. And I was completely blown away. And then of course I went on my Discord server and I told you guys, that’s how it would think all these evolutionists, they’re going to get there and they’re going to stop there. And they’re not even going to see they’re missing a fourth thing. And there’s, this doesn’t actually explain anything because what is fittedness? What is this process? Where does the process come from? What’s doing the judgment? Where does the world come from? And these are axiomatic, given assumption starting points for Catholic, for Christians in general, Catholics in particular, Christians in general, they would never believe ever. They would never assume that somebody didn’t already have that framework. But they don’t. And that’s why the messaging doesn’t work. Part of the reason. I mean, I think Bishop Barron, just because he’s kind of implicitly in this conversation, he’s really good on God is not just a super thing, right? That God is above the… That’s the anti-atheist argument, which is a good argument to have. Right. Which implicitly gets creation back in there. Well, there’s two problems with that. One is, and this is like, it’s not my critique, but the Four Horsemen conversation that Bishop Barron and Peterson and Vervecky and Peugeot did, which is an interesting conversation to say, if you haven’t heard it, it’s fantastic. Oh, I’ve heard it. I’ve heard it. I was super stoked because Bishop Barron put it in like a bulletin article that he had talked to those three before it actually came out. But the critique is he says summon bonum, right? And over and over again. And then that’s great, but it’s not explanatory. It’s crazy Latin. Look, yes, talk that way to the Catholics and to the Cardinals and the other bishops. But when you’re not in that group… Because it’s a shorthand that lets us know what we’re talking about. But yeah. But it’s the shorthand that has all the assumptions built in. And they are so far away from the concept that that Latin phrase gives you that like they’ve got to be led in a different route. You can’t say, well, of course, God’s there and therefore, because God’s not a super thing in the sky. That’s not going to get Vervecky anywhere because Vervecky is pretending to already be there. The Lantern Jack combo with Vervecky is interesting because there’s a long history there that I’m somewhat wrapped up in. Oh, the little corners that Jack puts John in are just delightful to watch. Yeah. And that might be because I told Jack everything about all of Vervecky’s holes or something. So yeah. And yeah, it all comes out in that talk. It’s very subtle too. Like there’s subtle things like the name of the talk talks about Platonism, not Neoplatonism. Oh, yes. Yeah. There’s all kinds of pieces. There’s all kinds of little pieces in there about that, which I know where that comes from. So yeah, there’s the assumption that say Bishop Barron. Well, and you could contrast those two talks because the assumption that Bishop Barron makes about the power of that Latin phrase is just it gets lost on the audience. Not only because it’s a Latin phrase, though, it’s also because of all the axiomatic assumptions that are implied in that phrase. And that I think is where people are getting lost. I’ll be right back with you in a second. But I have to do a little correction here. OK. Don’t bring me into a corner. I don’t want to be in a corner. Spatch. Anyway. It’s the Peterson sphere now. It’s the Peterson. Somebody needs to go into Photoshop and turn Peterson into a sphere so I can put that out there. Oh, well, Sally’s listening. So we’ll have that in a couple of days. 1080p or 1080 1080 box. That’d be perfect. There we go. That’s right. Nobody puts me into a corner. That’s funny. That came up in the Vervicki did a talk with Theo Vaughn. And he actually said something like, oh, yeah, you don’t want to be trapped in the corner. You want to be able to leap into the sky. And I was like, oh, that’s interesting that you would come up with that, my friend. How what an interesting statement to make. Boy, I know a lot of people that should listen to listen to that particular statement. Yeah. Yeah. Nobody puts baby in a corner. Right. Putting me in any corner. Why? Why people want to be in a corner. I do not understand. But hey, whatever you want, have fun. We sail beyond the realms of the lobster king. Well, yes, I do. I don’t know about you, but man, you have no idea what I get into, like 166 hours out of the week. Are you beyond the realm of the lobster king? Are you just the lobster king has no authority here. He’s a respected gay guest. Sounds like it needs to be a sea shanty. Well, we have one sea shanty, but I lost my sea shanty artist. Maybe I can convince her to do more sea shanties. That would be a good one. Yeah, we’ll have to write some we’ll have to write some lyrics for that. Corners are safe for babies. For babies. Well said. Yeah. Yeah. Until they get out of their cribs. But we’re losing focus here. Well, I think I think to tie it back, I think really what the church needs to do is talk about community through communion, because that’s that should be their specialty. And yet, yeah, and yet they’re not doing that. So that, you know, that to me would be a good, a good thing, because because now you’re actually bypassing the Peterson problem. The Peterson problem is that he’s still focused on the individual. And look, he does an awesome job. And I have nothing publicly bad to say about the man, because keep it up. Whatever you’re doing is working. Right. But the psychological framing is very individualistic. And it doesn’t solve the community problem. And the community problem, I would argue, is actually when Verveki talks about domicide, those are maybe they’re not the same thing, but they’re very, very close. A lot of the statements he’s made about domicide, especially in that Lantern Jack conversation are, I would say, historically inaccurate. But but there is a point there. Like, I agree with the framework of domicide. I don’t think the frame he puts it in is in history is quite correct. But there’s a there there for sure. Like, it’s inevitable that somebody who believes in evolutionary theory and nothing else is going to have domicide, because there’s no place for a human being in a strictly evolutionary human beings can’t possibly exist. And it’s because you’re applying the scientific method, which takes the human being out of the equation. That’s exactly what it’s supposed to do. It’s supposed to take all of our heuristics and all of our biases out of it so we can just get to the data. And that works for an awful lot of things, but it’s just absolute garbage for a world that you can actually live in. So it’s inevitable that people who are caught in a meeting crisis, who don’t think that there’s a creation or anything before them, and who think that all there is is a process and fittedness and the environment without any spark of humanity would not have a home because they’ve created a world where they can’t possibly live. Well, and I think I think that’s the super instructive part would be to hear somebody say that. And now that somebody said that, I mean, I’ve been saying it for years, I don’t know, evolution ends here, guys, I don’t know, I don’t know where else you’re going to end it, but you’re going to end it here. You’re going to end with these three things. You’re only going to end with these three things. And here’s all the problems with ending with these three things. And then now we’ve seen it. Like it’s actually happened, independent of me. I didn’t do that. John said it all by himself. He didn’t have anybody whispering in his ear. I’m glad that it came out. But I think that maybe clipping that part of that conversation and explaining to people, no, no, no, people actually think this way. Real serious, quote, intellectuals with, you know, with high IQs and are well read, actually think that it’s just those three components and you can describe the world. And even Ted knows better. Hey, Ted. Even Ted. I would have to know what we’re talking about, but I would hope that I know better. Do you believe in evolution, Ted? Do I believe in evolution as a creedal statement? No, you’ve got to be real statement. You’ve got to be more fair. The statement that John Verveke made when you talked to Lantern Jack was there’s the process of evolution, there’s fittedness and there’s the world. And basically that explains everything. Like you don’t need anything else to explain. And I’ve been saying for years that is the scientific end of the evolutionary argument. Like that’s the furthest you can go with it. And of course, there’s no people. Hey, what’s fittedness? It’s judgment. Who’s doing the judging? What started the process? And what created the world that the process operates on? All of those things are left unanswered. Right. So I mean, in the sense, do I believe in evolution in the sense that do I believe that there’s like dissent with modification and the interaction between like genetically diverse population? I believe evolution is true. Yes. But if you mean like I’ve explained all that much. Do I believe in evolution as like something that has like a top-down ontology on the world that can be used to like explain existence? No, I think that’s absurd. That’s exactly what they’re trying to do with it. That was very well said. Look, I mean, here’s my other the thing that I don’t hear brought up either. And the person that does a really good job of making this incredibly clear is Walker Percy is I mean, yes, there’s the big there’s like the existence of things fine. And then the existence of life, which in some sense is actually harder to swallow than the existence of things just happening. And then you have the existence of language that you have to explain to and that the existence of life, life and non-life and language from non-language, those are on a philosophical level as difficult for me to swallow as being spontaneous, say bottom-up emergent things as as the universe emerging from nothing. Because it’s just it’s just fundamentally it’s like a totally different change. If you go life comes out of non-life, it’s like, I don’t see it. I just can’t see it. And also personhood and language comes out of non-personhood and non-linguistic. It’s like, no, I just don’t I simply don’t I can’t see it. I’ve never seen an explanation or even a possible framework of explanations that might lead you there. It’s sort of like the reason why you’re a Christian, and I’m not going to say this in a reductive manner, but what are the reasons why you can be intellectually satisfied as a Christian is because that argument that that can be the whole show that that can be all that there is is just this evolutionary process, fittedness and the world just is not acceptable. Well, so I mean, I present one way of looking at that and the train’s about to blast through, so I’m sorry if that’s loud, but even even even in terms of like causal explanations, right, it’s again that that thing that we’ve been doing for so long, which is just move to material and efficient causes. And at best, the world and fittedness and that interaction is at best an explanation of material and efficient causes and doesn’t deal with formal or final causes and can’t as such. So if you want to say that on a biological level, once life is running, that in terms of efficient causes, you don’t feel like you need another explanation besides descent with modification with modified with with hair. I can’t even remember the exact phrase that Darwin used, but basically that you have you have differential reproductive rates over time and that that’s heritable. It’s like maybe maybe we can have a discussion with that. It’s still a really hard one to swallow, but I would say that at a minimum, you have to limit it to domain of material and efficient causes dealing with life once it already exists, once it’s already out in the world. And then there’s there’s some just weird stuff at any rate, which like, yeah, when you look at so even I don’t even know it just I’m going to I’m in a different place than I used to be with a lot of the stuff. But even look, even on their own terms, things like the the the shocking, the shocking rate of increase of the human brain. There’s like, yeah, and and I don’t like the sort of like, well, like, here’s this thing evolution doesn’t explain, because, you know, someone may come up with a great idea tomorrow. You know, and it’s like, okay, so I’m not I’m not gonna like base, I’m not gonna base my approach to any of this on like, Lord, no one’s come up with an explanation so far, I generally find those arguments really non uncompelling, because who knows what is going to happen later. And so but what I what I can look at is, is things like Toma bringing up look, life is more fundamental than non life, you can actually see that in the way that we talk, we don’t have a word for things that aren’t alive, except for to call them non living or inanimate. It’s like, which shows you from the get go, that to you’re getting something actually backwards to see material life or minerals non living thing as the thing that supports and brings forth life. It’s like, right. Well, that’s emergence, right. That’s the emergence first or emergence is good. But but I like what you said is interesting. I was listening to Richard Roland and Jonathan Pigeot, medieval mind, how the medieval thought. And I know it’s an older videos a couple weeks old, I think. And I’m chugging my way through it. Apparently, it’s gonna take me three lessons to, you know, three, three parts to get through the whole thing, because it’s just thick, dense. And yeah, things have been a mess. I haven’t been able to sit down and listen to, you know, an hour at a time. But they were just talking about language and sort of the, you know, the postmodern point, right, that there that there isn’t a single meaning. Right. But of course, that fact is because words in particular have meanings on multiple layers. Yeah, it’s not because they have competing meanings at the same layer of reality. Right. It’s because it’s stacked. And so I like what you did there with, look, you can’t explain life, and you can’t explain language. And there’s no way to do that explanation, say, scientifically. And I also like how you brought in look, four causes, just talk to Aristotle and straight me out. It’s cool. You read his stuff. It’s been around for a while, right? You get good translations. Okay. And really, what science is doing is taking material cause and formal cause and mashing it into one, because it can’t handle it can’t handle multivariate equations very well. And it’s not supposed to like it’s not designed to it’s like it’s not a deficiency of science. It’s a limitation of the method that is stated as part of the whole idea of science that and the fact that science is supposed to be explicitly based on observation. That’s why you can make statements and some people did, like me maybe, that things that are new are not subject to science. And so you can’t say there’s a science around a new novel virus, which makes no sense. There can’t be a science on something new and novel. That’s not actually possible. Right? So, you know, I see your point. Yeah, some nuance that could be added. But yeah, I get what you’re saying. Like, it’s something that it’s well, and then so, so Mark, the other problem that that immediately deals with is that this problem with narrative, right? Because it’s like my life to what degree, I’ve to what degree can I follow the science of my life? It’s like, I don’t get nice. This point over and over. It’s like you don’t get to run your life as like a set of a B tests, right? I actually think this is why the notion of the multiverse is so appealing to people. Because then it like, lets them imagine their life as though it were a science experiment, in some sense, right? You have these imagined other things, you compare them together, which is actually not how life works at all. Right? And so you don’t, there’s no replication in your life in that sense ever, because tomorrow looks like today. But it isn’t today. Well, that’s it. That’s the other big flaw in science, right? It’s called the replication crisis. What does that mean? It means somebody did something once and said it was science. And actually, if you do it once, it isn’t science. The science isn’t done yet. Well, it’s not. It’s the fourth step. The first step is observation. The second step is coming up with a crazy idea. The third step is coming up with a test for the crazy idea. Right now you have a hypothesis. Like, Brad Weinstein actually talked about this, the difference between hypothesis theory and crazy idea, because that’s actually a core tenet of science. Then you actually run a test. Okay, you’re still not done. Right? And none of that, even after it’s replicated, rises to theory. And we throw the word theory around all the time. I make this mistake constantly. We throw the word theory around and then we do crazy things like we say evolutionary theory. You know what? There isn’t, Ted, I’m sure you know this. There’s no such thing as evolutionary theory. There’s a set of hypotheses, crazy ideas, completely untestable statements. And almost everything that people talk about in evolution is actually an inference, which is none of those things are theory. That’s actually true. I think, Mark, to give them a little credit, there’s a less rigorous definition of theory, which is it’s the simplest explanation accounting for all the evidence. It’s actually very similar to Occam’s definition. But what’s interesting is that’s not the same as a scientific theory, right? Because I can generate a theory that, because I do that all the time about all sorts of things. But again, that’s also different from a hypothesis. And theories are not necessarily testable too. And that looser is sort of that more lax definition. Yeah, right. Technically in science, the theory is the hypothesis that has stood the test of time or had the most tests. And we misuse the word theory to elevate the concept of a random idea I had and make it sound important. That’s what we’re doing. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Hey, Corey. Hi. Good to see you. Good to see you digitally. Also, this is like, actually, I think this is the first time I’ve been on a computer in two weeks. So it’s been- Good for me. Blessed are you. What’d you say, Father? Blessed are you. I mean- Truly. I’ve been on my phone and I’ve answered emails on my phone. But yeah, it’s been, it was really funny. I was like opening the laptop. I was like, man, it’s been a little while. We’ve been, I’ve been slinging dirt around like crazy. You got to probably get the things done before it gets, wait, does it get cold enough to prevent construction down in Arkansas? No, it gets wet enough. Wet. Okay. Yes. I am, it will be, you will see more of me on the thing that we don’t name on this live stream when it starts raining down here. No, no, no. We have a name for it now. We have a name for it. It’s the Peterson Sphere. We have a name. The Peterson Sphere. I’ll believe it once other people start using it. Mark’s using it. So is Sally Jo. It is. It’s all, it’s all Peterson, well, yeah, I like that. It’s all Peterson adjacent. It’s Peterson, Peterson original at least. It’s all adjacent to what, I mean, that’s the, that’s the binding force. Like if you had to list one thing, that would be the one thing. There isn’t another thing. I’ll just, I’ll put it this way. The only thing that me and Grim Grizz have in common is Jordan Peterson. I don’t think, I don’t think he’s a bad person and I don’t want to say you’re not allowed to watch his YouTube channel or anything like that, but him and I, we’re just, we’re in, we’re doing different things. Father, there’s actually one more thing. And that’s the Great Plains. You share the Great Plains. That’s true. But that’s it. He is, he is probably 1500 miles south of me. Yeah. 1500. So anyway, the Peterson Sphere, we put a person at the middle of it and all of a sudden the whole thing’s more robust and it makes sense. See my red at the beginning of the video. I dig it. Oh, that’s great. No, anyway. Yeah. Well, it’s kind of a mad dash. Yeah. Well, it’s kind of a mad dash for me until like early November when it starts raining. And then I’m down to like for earthwork, like one or two days a week, most of the time. So it’ll be a lot easier to hang out with people and do talks and stuff. And plan our conference. Yeah, exactly. Conference planning going, Ted. It is not had very much of my attention for the last two weeks. Have you got a picture of Father Eric up on the website yet? I don’t know. Do I? I’ll get you, I’ll get you a picture. You haven’t done it. I’ll do it right now. You guys sustain the conversation. Fantastic. Yeah. Just do a screenshot of this exact screen right here. That’s important. We got to make sure people are going to be there. Yeah, actually. Interesting thing happened to me. I got called out on Twitter by Neil DeGrade. Do you guys know Neil DeGrade is the artist, the musician that Peugeot was talking to a few times? I’ve been getting super into their music lately. Yeah. So he tweeted out for me, Karen Wong and one other person said, I hope I’ll see you at the Symbolic World Conference. I was like, whoa, wait a minute, somebody wants me there? And I was like, I don’t know if I can make it there. But I want you there. That’s right. That’s like February, right? The end of February. Well, more things than this. I didn’t even know there was a Symbolic World Conference. Yeah, they just announced it like this week. Oh, wow. It was literally like three or four days ago. Actually, February wouldn’t be a bad time to go to Florida. No, no, it wouldn’t. It really wouldn’t. That was a good idea. That’d be great. Father, are you sending that over to my email? Yeah, yeah. The one that doesn’t have your name attached to it at all. I have a hard time remembering. Yeah, Ted, do you know how many people have bought tickets so far? It is still small. So we’ve got space to go. Yeah, it’s interesting. I don’t know if a lot of people are just waiting until later on. I think we’re in driving distance of a lot of people. So should not air, not getting the word out, Ted. Define driving distance. I know. Define driving distance. Driving is vastly different based on where you live. I consider eight to 10 hours to be driving distance. If you’re going over now. I’m waiting for more people to sign up so I can carpool and do stuff. Yeah, there you go. You guys are the people. You can help make it happen. So you guys keep talking too because now that I’ve got a picture and now I’m not focused. So I’ll be right back with you. Cory, I know you were in the beginning. What did you think of Father Eric’s talk there about the different communions? I actually missed it. I didn’t log in until after that was probably just ended. Well, I will reiterate because it’s such fine material. Your evangelical suburban mega church, the basis for the communion is their locality and the Sunday morning experience. So when somebody moves, communion is broken. We’ll say mainline Protestantism, the basis for communion is the creed. We all believe that this is true together. And I’m not saying that the other churches don’t have elements of this, but it’s like this is the highlighted primary one. The Orthodox have as the basis of their communion fidelity to the tradition. So that if somebody started doing something new, that would be enough to excommunicate. And the Catholics have their communion founded in the person of the Roman Pontiff. So because I am in communion with my bishop who’s in communion with the Bishop of Rome, therefore I’m a Roman Catholic. So when you say communion, you’re talking about what the defining boundaries are. Yeah, the ecclesial communion. So how do you know that this person does this? So it’s a matter of like, you go to Living Stones in Sacramento and ask the people, are you a member of this church? It’s like, yeah, I’ve signed the basic statement of faith that they want me to. And now I’m a member of the Christian Reformed Church, the Christian Reformed Church of North America. So the thing about creeds is they can scale out very quickly over a large area, unlike the big box evangelical mega church, which if you don’t live in that neighborhood anymore, you don’t belong to that church anymore. So I would, I would couple with that just a little bit as somebody who grew up in a suburban mega church in California. Okay, just that I think that once, so it’s, I don’t think they even would apply it that rigorously. Like the non-denominational thing is loosey goosey enough that they would say it incorporates everybody who claims Jesus to where like, if you move away and if you come back, like they don’t even have church membership, you know. Right. But I’m talking about how these things actually work, not the way people talk about it. And I have, there is a there there with your big box evangelical church. Like I don’t think there’s nothing there. So if you’re talking about participatory level, yes. Yeah. But if you’re talking about, that’s what actually asks somebody, are you in or are you out? Then those are, yeah, I don’t, don’t ask people anything. So what’s, so what’s interesting father is that they have the thing, I don’t know if it’s in other parts of the country, but they found around here is, is that you can port your big box mega church experience out to satellite campuses using internet technology. And so now we’re entering the era of the mega church franchise where it’s not where you go and you do your worship time in the building. But then like, actually, I don’t know if the worship is, I know the sermons, they’re just, you just watch a live broadcast of the pastor from the central church, all these places, which also times a year you do communion and plastic cups, huh? Yeah. I don’t know. I’ve never been to one, but like, the weird thing is, is that it blurs the lines massively, especially like in COVID land, because then like when the church that you went to was called lifechurch.tv, right? That’s actually what the church is called. It’s called lifechurch.tv. It’s like, then you can just commune it at home. And there’s like this, like, here’s the, I mean, it’s actually, this is more of a, but anyway, this is not church. And that’s a flattening, but communions related to community. And I like the way you put it, you know, and the problem is, yeah, well, people will say blah, but talk is cheap. Talk means nothing. If you use communion in the way that you’re talking about, then you’re absolutely right. And in that sense, what this turns into with the satellite thing, which is a totally thing in California too, it’s actually an elimination of communion is like, it’s actually what it is. It’s a flattening. It’s a flattening of the world. And it’s a flattening of communion down to this one, you know, common sermon and, you know, this separate whatever in a building. It turns the church into a fandom. It does. Yes. It actually does. It’s what you’re stuck with if you believe hierarchies are inherently bad. That’s right. Okay. But this is, look, this is the thing. This is like, this is what I can’t, I can’t figure out is I’m like, the moment you say we don’t have a church hierarchy is the moment that your church is built around a personality. Right. Well, then that’s, that’s probably like, and it’s like, how is that not a hierarchy? I mean, this is Edward Bernays is making this point when he, you know, when he’s like, he’s creating the modern craft of propaganda. He’s like, the moment that we pretend that the people decide is the moment we replace a visible hierarchy of authority with an invisible hierarchy of authority. Right. Because it’s like, because it doesn’t go away. The problem doesn’t go away. You can’t get rid of it. You can say it’s not there, but it’s still there. We all have to look at something together. Otherwise there’s no communion. And so it’s like, right. If it’s not right, Father, I think in some sense, what you’re saying is like, here are the things that people look at. It’s not just this, but one of the things that is, is like, what do we all look at? Right. And like the people that are either the, I have a lot of people in my life who are Presbyterian and it’s like, yeah, it’s like the Westminster Confession of Faith. We’re Presbyterian because we all look at the Westminster Confession of Faith and we’re like, that’s it. Right. There it is. It’s the Westminster Confession. Well, that was the main lines were held together by Creed. That’s what Father Eric said. It was a guess. The main line churches held together by Creed. The regular big box Protestant churches are held together by building roughly by geographical area. And the Sunday morning experience. The Sunday morning experience. Okay. I’m sorry. Did anyone, I have not been listening to this much stuff from the Peterson sphere, but I did listen to, I did listen to Paul posted his conversation with Sam, where he like hopped on some live stream with Sam. It was, it was like deeply disorient. I don’t, I don’t want to say, I mean like they’re having their conversation. I don’t know the context to it. I will say this, the way that they were talking about church, I couldn’t tell, I couldn’t tell how much they had drifted from where I am or how much, I mean, I know part of it is my conversion to Catholicism has changed it, but like it was like, it was like we were using the same word for like a completely different thing. I did appreciate, I did appreciate- That’s invisible membership. The invisible church right there. Right. It was, I mean, it was so weird. Well, one thing I really liked is Paul, they’re talking about like Bethel Reading and Paul’s like, yeah, that’s some powerful psycho technology right there that they use in those services. I was like, it is, I still look, I’m still adjacent enough to it. And at the, sometime in the last year, my wife, it’s like one of her old friends had sent her, it was like some song from one of these churches and, and I listened to it. It was, I mean, it was like sort of hypnotic. I don’t know. It like, it was, it was, it was hitting stuff on a level that like felt like it was bypassing my- Is it music in the Dionysian mode? It’s what it felt like. Really. I mean, it was, it felt psychoactive. That’s how I- So, Hillsong is easy to make fun of, but I’ll be the first to admit, I still like them. I still listen to some of that music sometimes. Yeah, I still listen to it sometimes. I’m not, I’m not trying to make fun of anything. I think, look, I, in fact, I’m trying to like, I’m trying to say that I think that they’re actually hitting on something. I don’t know what it is. No, yeah. So, so this is interesting. I’ve been getting to know a lot of charismatic people recently who come, they’re kind of on their way out of that a lot of the times when I encounter them, but you hear about the stuff that they do and it has been striking me, especially in the past couple of weeks. And I was listening to a lot of the same stuff that Paul’s been putting out on Bethel. A lot of the weird stuff, the weird stories that you hear coming out of those traditions sounds an awful lot like the weird stuff that we look back at the medieval period in the Catholic church. Like, it’s been striking me how similar some of those things sound. Cor, I have this whole theory that the, the further out you get in Protestantism, the more it looks like the, the more it looks like the Catholic church. It’s like, we don’t, we don’t do any of that, but we do baby dedications, you know, and it’s like, I couldn’t, I’m too tired to pull it up right now, but there’s just like all these weird forms, exactly what you’re saying. And like even matching like weird old, you name churches after pastors, right? You, there’s this, this intense expectation of miracles. There’s like a class of people who are wonder workers, right? All this stuff that like, again, sort of your, your stout, like mainline or reformed people are not going to have truck with, but it’s like the guy, and the crazy, and the crazy, and the crazy Pentecostals are all like, oh yeah, miracles happen all the time. And there’s some people that just like miracles happen around and we don’t want to know. Well, I mean, as I grew up charismatic and still considers myself charismatic Catholic, I can say everything you’re saying sounds about right. I mean, I grew up with a church, I grew up in the vineyard. And so, I mean, I had a Bible study where, what is it? Uh, I mean, one of the people there was known for the gift of healing. I’m prayed for specifically my hip and knee to have the pain go away. So I mean, things like that, that’s the stuff I grew up on. So, first off, yeah, that was like my college life. I went to, do you know what IHOP, you know, what IHOP is? The pancake place? No, not the pancake place. Oh, okay. That one. Yeah. I went to the conference city, their conference in Kansas City a couple of times, but I was talking with a friend this weekend and his dad, he was telling me the story about his dad who they’re out somewhere pretty rural at his, I think that this would be his great grandfather’s house. They’re out in the middle of nowhere and they’re out, the grandkids are playing in the yard and he like, I think he like steps on a glass bottle and like slashes his foot open and he’s bleeding out and all they had is the rural fire department. So they took him to the rural fire department and the firefighters couldn’t get, they couldn’t do anything. They’re, you know, they’re trying to do first aid. He’s just, he’s bleeding out. He’s getting white. He’s passing out. So the firefighter’s like, we got to call the faith healer. And so they like call this guy that apparently is a faith healer and he came over and prayed over my friend’s dad’s feet and he stopped bleeding. Wow. I mean, I, I think that. But his dad’s not even, his dad’s not even like a religious person at all. Right. Yeah, that’s not necessarily necessary. Right. But like, this is like, no, no, no, no, that’s not my point. My point is that you don’t have to be a religious person. My point is like, how much of this sort of like non-unbeliefs that we see in people around, around us in general or is in us does not come from the fact that they haven’t had crazy stuff like that. Like for instance, their entire family line exists because some faith healer and like backwards of Arkansas apparently stopped critical bleeding in a foot in someone’s foot. It’s like, that’s every time I poke around in someone’s life, there’s stuff like that and it doesn’t, and they can be like, oh yeah, that totally happened to me. This, you know, crazy guy came out of the woods and prayed over me and this thing happened. Also, I don’t care. I’m just going to live my life. Right. I mean, so here’s what I’m trying to figure out. Because that, so it’s funny. Our bishop gave us, we gave all the pastors and our pastor gave it because I work in church staff. So he had us read it and kind of get an idea of it. And I’m currently in this process of trying to figure out who I want to consider myself as a charismatic Catholic because I grew up charismatic and like I’ve seen miracles and everything. I know I got through a time where I was, I wanted to really be agnostic, you know, rebellious teenager and I couldn’t because like I had a rather important miracle to me that I still acknowledge even at church. I just have like a few things that remind me of it. And so I was kind of looking into this and I find this very interesting. It’s been kind of pulling at me because it’s talking about, you know, the new evangelization. It’s talking about we’re in the new apostolic era. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And here’s all the things you need to do in order to have your church orient itself towards a post-Christian world, right? We’re not, or post-christendom world. And one of the things it has, the fourth one that I’m just reading right now is the sign of wonders idea, which is like, all right, you have, you know, you have the evangelization, you have the welcoming, et cetera, et cetera. Well, one of the things that gets people is just remind them of the fact that the church is powerful. And so one of them is Eucharistic adoration, Eucharistic revivals, but the other one is like alpha. What’s the other one? That’s the Christ, Christy, Christ something. But I guess all these charismatic groups are also listed in such a healing and that’s that’s a thing. And what I find striking about this is what I so I’m still in conversation with my mother who’s trying to convince me that like, look, you can be any denomination. I finally accepted the fact you’re Catholic because she’s not very pro Catholic. I’m fine. I can accept that as long as you’re charismatic. And number one, I were on the discussion is whether or not that’s the good, the fighting factor. But therefore we’re trying to figure out what charismatic is. And I grew up with a, with a concept of like, it’s the language of. So like, for instance, you know, if we pray for something, we find it. Part of charismatic is just acknowledging that, right. It just being like, I could take that as a random chance. I’m not going to, you know, but also what I keep seeing Catholics do, I don’t call themselves necessarily charismatic Catholics. Is they just like, I don’t know. I know what’s the, what’s the phrase, not like taking on the chin. It’s just like, Oh yeah, that happened. Like I was looking up Eucharistic miracles for my church. I rolled these nice Eucharistic cards. So I have like 12 of them memorized at this point. That’s a lot. I have six of them memorized or something like that. I memorized strong word, but I can’t bring them up. And it’s like half the time the priest was just like, ah, you know, I heard that story when I was seven. It’s just part of the furniture. It doesn’t blow my mind anymore that there are the priest who was doubting the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. All of a sudden the host started to bleed. Well, what else did you think was going to happen? Right. Right. That’s all speaking to the pattern of religion that seems to be inevitable. And you try to play out, we’ll say a non-Catholic religion because you’re busy demonizing them in your schools, Protestants. And it turns out that you just end up where they are and just manifest differently because it’s an inevitable pattern. Well, yeah, there is that level mark, which I think many people brought this up, but the weirdness is that when you operate in the religious sphere, which you’re going to do, something is going to occupy the religious sphere. It’s not like, oh, there’s always something at the top. It’s like you actually do the exact same things at the top, which is why you had George Floyd being painted as a saint on a wall. And you’re holding progressions for him and people kneel down and they remember his name and they have prayers. And it’s like the whole George Floyd BLM thing was just like, it came out of nowhere in one sense and it immediately picked up every single action that basically every religion has had ever. It’s like immediately within two weeks, it was like all the religious stuff is like the Buddhists do that. And so in that sense, there’s this like, if you try to like push theology out of religion, you’re going to have a non-theological religion, but you’re still going to do all the same stuff. Well, it’s going to develop. The theology is going to develop because the theology is this ontological language-based structure that explains the pattern. It always comes later. And that’s what we’re missing. To your point earlier, what comes first? Final cause comes first, even though it’s called final cause. It’s final in implementation and first in intent, as Father Eric excellently points out. And that’s what’s important about it. It’ll become a self-centered religion. It can be, but look, I’ll be honest. I still come across relics of the sort of like 1980s, 1990s self-love stuff. And when you look back on it, it’s not hard to see. It’s like the idea of luxury is like, I’m going to take a bubble bath surrounded by candles. It’s like, why do we always light candles around things that we think are sacred? But we do. So when you’re like, you’re the sacred thing, the goal, the vision of like, this is shalom, this is blessing. It’s you, clean, surrounded by candles. Lit by fire. Yes. Right. So I go to the Benedictine monastery and there’s the altar with the candles and there’s the statue to our gorgeous statue to our lady with these beeswax candles around it. And it’s one of the most beautiful things that exists. It’s just unbelievable. But it’s like, that’s what you do. It’s like the thing that you want to look at and everyone recognizes like this is good and beautiful. You put it in a dark room and you put candles around it. Right. Or the like, community is the thing. And so what is it when community is the thing for people, what is that? What do everyone talk about? They talk about campfires because the people are the thing and it’s the people together. Yeah. But even George Floyd liturgies are all based around a self-centered religion. Interesting. You want to go, you want to run with that, Jen? I don’t. Yeah. Cause I think like, I think honestly, a lot of the like the the secular like religions like that, whether it’s the safety religion or the whatever these religions, they’re all about, they’re like this, this unknowing self-centered because it’s all about protecting me. It’s about self-love. It’s about self-care. Even like the, like let’s say the George, Floyd liturgies where you go out there and you protest. It’s like, it’s not, it’s disguised as helping others, but it’s so that you get your voice heard and it’s for your freedom. It’s for your, you know, so it’s, it’s, but like, how could it be any other way in a, in a culture that is basically uh, that has doctors and therapists as their priests? Well, it’s creation denial. And once you deny creation, the only thing you have are other people, right? That you can’t, I mean, you can’t deny other people that that makes, that makes things even more difficult. Although some people try and then yeah, what else? I mean, it’s going to end up because, because if it’s just other people, I have to prefer me. I don’t really have a choice if I want to survive. So yeah, all non-creator-based religions are going to be self-centered in some sense. Well, yeah, I think this is why it’s helpful to use that structure that, you know, you’re talking about implicit hierarchies before, and you also talked about the summa bonum before that. That’s why it’s super helpful to think about all of these structures, whether in a church or not, you know, they arise in secular spaces too. You can always look at what’s common between them and try to find what’s the highest thing that’s actually worshiped in whatever that context is, or whatever, whatever the thing is that’s, you know, either metaphorically or literally surrounded by candles in a dark room. Like that’s how you identify what leads all those movements. And so to your point, Chad, like, you know, the safety movement that, you know, the, what all those secular things, they have something in common and that’s that they all worship the same thing. The climate religion. Yeah. How could it be anything else in the, in the, in a culture like the West where the West sits on a foundation of liberty and it’s just misplaced. So like the further you get away from the foundations, of course, like, I don’t know, it just becomes the problem with self-centered religions, like, like the reason why I understand this frame is because this is basically the frame of alcohol synonymous that all of our problems are a result of selfishness and self-centeredness. And so the problem is, is you don’t recognize it when you’re in it. So you don’t see like everything you do is about you and all the lies that you tell yourself, but I’m doing it for them. No, no, you’re not like you want to want to do it for others, but when you’re running on your own power and your own self self-will, like it’s self-will and, and, and, and that’s like the root of all spiritual sickness. Yeah. Basically. And you can justify a lot to yourself. If you, if you want something, you can, you can convince yourself that’s like, Oh, it’s this, it’s all that. But you are very, it’s kind of funny. You are very effective at trying to convince yourself that it’s altruistic and such and so forth. You prefer your own perspective again, but it’s not cultural because most of the culture is not actually. That is no, that look, that’s just like that. So Chad, it’s really funny. Charles Williams, one of Lewis and Tolkien’s friends, his, his novels, which are very weird books. I think you’d act, you might, you might like them. I don’t know. They’re weird. They’re, they’re weird. A descent into hell is my favorite one of them. And, but they, they all basically lay out on this, like salvation and damnation follow this, like this self-centeredness, right? And, and, and the sentence to hell in particular is it falls to two characters. And one of them, he goes, he does exactly that. It’s that, that inward spiral. It’s that sort of like in growing, which again, like a typical narrowing, I was about to say, yes, that’s what I really love that term. Like that’s such a, that’s a brilliant term. It’s like, because you, you, and you get this in, in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans in the first chapter, there’s this fanta, he, he, he presents, he’s like, when you act immorally, your intellect is darkened, your eye is darkened. And like the, and then your darkened eye doesn’t let you see that you’re acting wrongly. And so then you act worse. And there’s this, this thing where it’s like, you can, if you get out of it and then you can’t, but mark your point about the moment you get out of creation, right. And you’re just, is just people, other people. It’s like, of course you’re going to prefer yourself. So yeah, I’ll just get one more thing. There’s, there’s these prayers in, in these Catholic prayers, like active faith, active hope, active charity, right? So it’s, you’re, you’re basically praying for the theological virtues. And the, and the first part of the act of charity is relating to God, right. And it just matches the, the Jew, the greatest commandments, the greatest commandment. And it’s, I also love my neighbor as myself for the love of you, God. Right. And so there’s this notion baked into that, that like your capacity to love people only comes from looking at God, because how else like, come on, like really how else. So it takes kind of the pride out of it. Sure. And, and it does a lot of things. So I have this, you’re going somewhere. I have this idea that I’ve been thinking about. I brought it up last night. I wonder what we’re going to buy you guys this. So it’s just, of course, I’m not a scientist. I don’t have good facts or anything, but this just intuitions. So when we say, when we talked about spiritual matters in the culture, okay. And then, so there’s that frame and then there’s the frame of mental pattern, mental issues or topics. Like, and at one point, mental meant merely spiritual. Like with it, it was, that’s really the root of it. If you look at the etymology of where that comes from, it comes from spiritual. And so I was thinking about, if you take the whole frame of how, how we contemporary people look at spirituality, right? If you look at that and you look at how the same, that same people look at the, the frame of mental, they’re actually, the definitions are actually swapped. They’re actually confused. So like spiritual today would be like, well, I go to church or something like just a real, but, but, but like, I would say, I would think that most people who are in those, who are, who are in the spiritual realm are actually operating in more of a mental capacity. They’re just using their mind more than anything, where when people talk about, like, like if you go into the medical fields, it’s talking about everything, mind, body, spirit, and mental is like, I don’t know, it’s not a great, it’s not a well formed idea, but the idea that these, these two frames are actually swapped and their definitions are confused. And this is where we’re having a lot of issues. Yeah, I think you’re right, Chad. I think part of that is that the scientific framework, which includes the medical framework is the thing that’s trying its best to encapsulate and explain everything. Right. And we’ve narrowed our definition of what the spiritual is to this narrow little like, you know, separate church and state, let’s separate, you know, mind and body, let’s separate soul and body, like spiritual just covers this little thing. When I think you, maybe to, to expand on what you just said, the spiritual is the thing that’s supposed to encapsulate everything. And we should properly recognize that the area of the scientific, the area of the scientific method and understanding the causality is actually the narrower frame. Yeah. As a, as a mental health practitioner, I definitely, I definitely see that where spiritual is a very small fraction of things. Like, you know, there’s a biopsychosocial us. And if you want to tack on spiritual assessment, and when you try and look into it, it’s this tiny little, this tiny little aspect of like, okay, what’s your spiritual life like? And then you work with them. And it’s like, I can’t say this, because, you know, for you, this would, this would be, this is where you’d use the word triggering. But if you were to try and throw that out there, it’s like, this is all, this is all religious. You don’t maybe know it, but this is all religious, everything you’re talking about, everything you’re talking about, the values and importance and your belief system, your core, like, you’re putting spiritual to be the practices, which help remind you, perhaps of goodness, or that kind of like recent to yourself. And it’s like, that’s, it’s, it’s such a narrow definition, where it does not need to be. Well, and that’s what Peter said. We get to blame for that. We get to blame cots for that. Well, Peterson, Peterson re-enchants all that. And it’s so funny. So about an hour ago, well, a couple hours ago now, was on my channel. And now, one of my friends is on there, John Mullins. And he’s, he’s writing some interesting books, if you ever get some public. I like that guy. And I, yeah, John, John, John and I were chatting, and he brought up the psychological frame. And I brought up the psychological frame. And I said, I reject the psychological frame. I mean, it’s bad framing. It’s useful for anything that needs to be thrown out. I think it’s an invalid separation of a spiritual thing into a scientific thing. I don’t think there’s anything that goes on in your mind alone, because it’s all related to your experience. And it’s not to say there aren’t useful ways of thinking about the world. I mean, certainly I’m a big fan of Big Five here in this Peterson sphere, as we all are. But also, you can’t separate out your the things in your head, your imagination, the things you draw conclusions from, from your physical experience. It’s sort of one of the things that was coming up again in that talk with Bijou and Roland, like, wait a minute, like, and I was watching a thing on Tolkien earlier today, they were doing the same thing, saying like, oh, well, you know, there’s Tolkien’s writing and his mythos. And, and you know, well, maybe it has something to do with where he grew up and what he saw. It’s like, you think I don’t think that’s avoidable. Like, why would you even consider that as a possible thing? We’re finding it very linked. So the joke is, is that psychological comes from the word psyche, which meant human mind or spirit. Right. It’s like, the word is there, like, psychology is like the logos of the soul. It’s like the spirit or the mind. And you’re like, okay, what? So what’s what? Here’s what’s weird is, right, because you had Mark to go back to your point about the, to Peugeot and Wolin’s talk, they bring up the sort of fourfold interpretive methodology that that that was developed in the early church. We had the literal the the, what is the literal, the moral, the analogical and the, and I got you go, which one and I got you go, and I got you go, right. And it’s like, when Pearson goes, like, speaking in psychological terms, what they would have been like, that’s just an agogical, is it an agogical father? I can’t probably the moral. I hear Peter talk about, he doesn’t talk about the Bible. He’s doing the moral sense, how to behave in the world. Yeah, he’s like, yeah, but I feel like I could just see like someone like St. John Chrysostom big, like, yeah, we, we know that that’s how you’re supposed to read the Bible. Like, isn’t but but moral, my understanding of moral is like the etymology of that is the root of that is truth. And comes from more mores. And we actually have that word in English mores, you know, like, the way like, that’s the way people do things. So we kind of have it in English. Okay, we could do that from Latin. Yeah. Yeah, Morris literally means customs. But within Latin, it really means laws. There were the laws that were written down. And then there were the customs. And sometimes the customs were stronger than the written laws, which is annoying when you’re teaching history to students. Oh, my gosh, they do not understand the concept that someone would do something if the laws and tell them to do it. Right. Like, try to tell people. Oh, my gosh. Like authority versus like legal, like, right. It is I had some trouble trying to just understand myself. But it makes sense if you look at it from a self centered frame, then it makes perfect sense. Well, that’s exactly the same thing as talking about the implicit hierarchies, because those implicit hierarchies are like just the way that you exist in community and a culture. And they are more off. They’re very rarely if ever written down in paper form, because they just they arise. And you just don’t look at them much in order to see if you just follow what I said. You can draw a picture of it, though. Interesting. Something that’s interesting about that is a friend of mine was telling me that St. Thomas Aquinas is talking about local traditions in churches. He said that is that’s binding. Oh, that’s still binding in canon law. Oh, fantastic. Oh, that’s great. Yeah. So it’s like, obviously, like you’re you’re you’re you’re only doing things that are right. But in as much as there’s any like wiggle room, if they’re doing it there, you’re doing it too. Which, interestingly, I also learned that when in Rome do as Romans do. That’s what I was just going to say reference to liturgy. It’s a Augustine telling us all that when you go to the scene, it was something in Northern Italy, wasn’t it? Liturgy. Yeah. Well, now, this is because it kind of pulls back. Oh, who’s saying? I was sorry, I prefer the word customs over over tradition. Like a custom is more at the local level. And then that’s just my my understanding of the difference between custom and tradition. Custom is I would say that’s a subset of tradition. It’s a type like a custom is a type of tradition. Yeah, you’re like a local. But this kind of brings it back a little bit to where we were talking earlier, where a lot of this stuff that the stands out to me about that is just how much it is pulling you out of the individual. Right. Everything right now puts us into the individual. It’s like we figured out like this a crazy concept of the importance of individual rights. And then everything has to be utterly focused on it. And everything has to lead into it. And so when I converted, right, you know, I’m coming from a charismatic evangelical church. And it took me a while. There are a lot of different things were hard for me. When I heard a like the amount of responses you had in over so ordo, I was like, this is barely anything. Like, what’s the point of going to church at that point? And like, you should have seen it like Latin mass. You were so mad when I told you about the last. I was beyond like, why would you? Why would you do that? The people are coming here. And I realized like, I was gonna say, have you been to a low mass? You just sit there. Yeah, unfortunately. I haven’t been to any. I think I’ve only been to a high mass. Yeah, I’ve been to an eastern right at some point. Oh, but that’s a whole nother fascinating conversation. But anyway, yeah. The interesting thing to me was, I could not get out of myself. Like, finally, I realized the benefit of all this is you don’t go to church to get patted on the back. You go to church to empty yourself. Right. And that’s something that like, I think you’re absolutely correct with this whole idea of like, the secular religion is the individual. Like, take a second to think about just how many ways in which Catholicism is like, oh, you know, we’re trying to involve people. No, it’s specifically trying to get you out of yourself, or you’re not important. Right. We’re in it feels bad. You’re just like, you know, we were supposed to invent, like, have the more loyalty, laity. And that’s absolutely correct. You need to laity more involved. But it’s like, not I’m not going to stroke your eagle to get you to help the church. And that’s what you want. That’s worse. Right. We’re not going to appeal to like hell. It’s no, you need to get entirely out of yourself. And that’s the reason you do things. That’s so great. And that’s exactly right that it’s supposed to feel bad. And I was going to say earlier, you just went pointed right towards it. This is the Vatican to stuff, right? Like, what I’m having trouble, you know, as a new Catholic who likes traditional things, I’m around a lot of very traditional people who have certain opinions about Vatican to and the way mass ought to and ought not to be. And Ted, what you just said, that quote, I thought it was someone other than Augustine, but the one in Rome thing. And then you say this, that’s so perfect, because it’s supposed to make you uncomfortable. Like, maybe it would be kind of silly to say that everybody should do mass exactly the same way everywhere for all time, with, you know, irrespective of what the cultural context is and what is being performed. Like, I understand what liturgy is, because I don’t think you do. I’m just so glad you told me about Fagerberg, Ted, because it’s been like, this is the template to figure out how to do community again. I’m glad he’s been a benefit to you. No, this is, so this is what I actually did. There’s like a little story to this. And I think it ties in with a lot of this in a really fun way. So if you go to like a traditional low mass, right, especially in like a parish setting, you kneel and you stand and you sit, and then you go for communion and you’re just falling, like you can have your missile or if you know it well enough, right? But that’s what you’re doing. You’re there in silence, praying the prayers of the priest. And you’d think, well, hold on, this is weird. Like, right, Colin, why am I not participating more or something or something or something? Until you figure out why low masses are the way that they are, which is that they’re born out of the monasteries where you had, say, 15 priests, and they all have to offer mass every day, because that’s part of the offer mass every day. They get, thank you. You know, there’s a lot of get to and have tos that are just, life is full of things that are get to and have to. They get to them. That’s a matter of… That’s a matter of speed. Farenton gets you on that get to have to train big time. That’s a matter of speed. Give the non-priest something to do, you know? So then you go and you realize, and it’s like, oh, so that way all the priests, except, you know, whoever’s doing high mass in the monastery that day, they can all fulfill their obligation there. And then you realize that like there’s this whole thing that it’s for. And like, this is the point about traditionalism, or one of the points about traditionalism is that like, we have this tendency to be like, oh, I don’t see why this is important or what the value of this is. And it’s because you’ve gotten it downstream of like, of its point of origin, of its final cause, if you will. And then you can’t… And then what’s interesting is that when you actually go back upstream and realize what it’s for, all of a sudden, it’s just like all this stuff unfolds. And I think that a lot of this like wholesale rejection of tradition and culture right now is doing exactly that, where there’s like, oh yeah, we can’t, why would we do that? And you, if you go over, if you shift over to the world of ecology, you see this all the time, you’re like, yeah, I don’t know why we need those trees in the environment. And then you’re like… It’s like a problem. I think it was Chesterton who said, like, you shouldn’t go around and knock down gates until you understand who put it there and why, right? Banzai who said, don’t pull on that. You don’t know what it’s connected to. I love that movie. I think that’s the interesting thing of my conversion kind of realizing it is when I grew up in the church and even Jesus is here to help you get to heaven. And like all the practices are there. And the weird thing about Catholicism is, yeah, that’s good, but that’s not why we’re doing a lot of this stuff, right? It’s the crazy concept, like you’re doing this to glorify the father. Like that’s the big thing. And it’s so weird because you’re like, well, how is this helping me? How is this making me a better person? How is this helping me? It’s like, you know, for this in particular, if that’s a secondary benefit, you’re going to benefit from this, but that isn’t the important bit. That’s on you. You need to make sure this is helping you. That’s not the point of this. And that was like mind blown. Like why do you go to mass? So that you get to worship. That isn’t like a, how does it help me? It’s not who cares, but generally speaking, you don’t get out of yourself. Like that was crazy. Ask people why they want to go to heaven. Why do you want to go to heaven? Because it’s like, well, okay, guess what else is not how? Why wait? Bees on a Tuesday. Why do we have to bother with heaven when we could all just go to Applebee’s, right? That’s not how. Well, but the point is, the point is, what are you going to be doing in heaven? You’re going to be glorifying God. That’s what you’re going to be doing. That’s what the life of heaven and the resurrection, which is more important than heaven. I’ll just go ahead and say that, pop that in there. That’s what it’s going to be. You’re going to be glorifying God. This is practice. And perhaps even a down payment and a participation in the life of heaven that’s happening right now. So maybe, you know, helping to bring it along too. There’s this observation I’ve had about many Christians, like let’s say modern Christians or contemporary Christians, where it seems like they have a desire to be more like Paul than they do like Christ. And I think that that’s like, I don’t know where we got that, but I think that’s where a lot of this, that plus the whole individualistic idea is a disaster. So part of this is coming up from the Dante stuff I’ve been talking about with Nate Heil. There’s this weird, and Father, you might be able to tell me more about how much this sits with the actual doctrines of the church, but Dante, when they’re talking about the souls ending up in hell, his notion is that they have fled from the presence of God. That’s why they’re, as much as they’ve been cast into hell, they have thrown themselves down into hell to get away from God when they die. There’s this sort of like congruency between the soul of the sinner and the will of God, the souls of the damned and the will of God. Like they want to flee his presence. And so when you think about it in those terms, like one of the ways to consider what’s going on in your life as a pilgrim is I want to be the kind of being that when I see the face of God, I don’t flee from it. You’re like, that’s not trivial though. There’s this notion of like, oh, God’s going to be this thing that everyone’s going to love God when they see God. It’s like, are you? D-A-C-E-A, D-A-C-E-A. We need to start chanting that at funerals again. Yes, we did two funeral masses a week apart in our parish. I’d never been to a funeral mass before. And yeah, there’s a lot, you’re singing a lot about the day of judgment. There’s a lot of the day. There’s fire, there’s fear. That’s actually what God produces in people. That’s why the angel of the Lord, not even the big man himself, but the angel of the Lord shows up. And the first thing he has to say is don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to hurt you. If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead already. When Jesus shows his glory to his apostles, they were so terrified they didn’t know what to say. Okay, so this is so weird. I think you just made me understand something. When you listen to people, whenever you do, people like Neil deGrasse Tyson, because I think, I mean, he’s really like, I know Mark, but look, a lot of people find him really compelling. They do? Yeah. They do. A lot of people find Neil deGrasse very compelling. I’ll pray for them all. They got Mark to pray. Holy mackerel. Listen, what is it that I never, I didn’t, I’m understanding more of what’s going on there. Listen to what Neil deGrasse Tyson is saying. He says, look up at heaven. There’s these enormous, look up in the heavens. There are these huge, horrifying, burning objects that we should all be in total awe of. Who are, that have physical powers that would obliterate you, right? Before you knew what was happening. They’re unimaginably vast and powerful. They’re shining with brilliance and they’re on fire. It’s like, oh. Isn’t it weird when he’s accidentally right sometimes? I’m like, that’s what we’re talking about here. I get it now. That’s the fear of the Lord. It’s the beginning of wisdom. Yeah. That’s the material it’s framed for. Yes. It’s the best the materials can do. They’re like, look up at heaven. There’s like these giant, burning, powerful things up there. Be in awe of them. They’re so powerful that they’re that far away and you can see them. That’s how powerful. And that’s about it. They won’t do it and it’s safe. But it’s also safe. That’s right, Chad. That’s the great thing. They’re distant. There’s so many light years away. Don’t worry about it. They can’t do anything. I mean, I think I grew up really interested in nuclear fusion. Like take that and have harness it. And then you had unlimited free power and then we would be gods. Are you insinuating that fusion is inherently demonic? Yes. No, it’s not actually because God created fusion. Yeah. That being said, we can wipe cities off the map in an instant with fusion. So, yeah. Look, Colin, your point about like, let’s take that and bring it down here and bottle it up so we can do what we want with it. It’s like, yeah, and this is why whether or not Oppenheimer actually quotes the Bhagavad Gita, it doesn’t matter because it makes so much sense to everyone that they all believe that he quotes the Bhagavad Gita. Come on, man. No one knows why he named it the Trinity test. They know it’s true whether it happened that way or not. Exactly. We called it the Trinity bomb and he says, I have become death and the destroyer of worlds. And if it didn’t happen, it has to have happened. It did happen. Whether he said it or not, it’s like, oh, man. You guys have made me sleep the rest of the bedtime. I gotta get out of here. You’re not gonna be able to sleep after yelling like that. I’ve got a little ways. I got some stuff I gotta do before I can go to sleep. People outside. Okay. Good to see you, C.A. I gotta get rolling too. I’m on my way to pick up my wife from the airport. Oh, nice. See you. Chad, enjoy your steak dinner. I’m excited for you. Yeah, I wish you could come. Yeah, me too. Father’s got the link for our November. It’s in the description of the video. In the description of the video. Check it out. It’s gonna be beautiful here in Arkansas in November. If you could possibly sit through this, you can get it in real life. You get to bring one to throw at us while you’re doing. No. Are you gonna come to my steak dinner on November 11th, Father? I don’t think so. Milwaukee area is a little too far away. Let’s take a look at what we got on the calendar though. I am free though. Now you’re tempting me. I could take a weekend trip. I got a guest room. I would probably, I know enough priests in that area. I’d probably hit up one of them. All right. I went to seminary with a lot of Madison guys. So it’s not Milwaukee, but it’s not if you’re on vacation and you can do nothing but try. Well, let me know. I got to run though. See you, Chad. Love you guys. Bye. Love you too. Speaking of pilgrimage, does anybody else know about this three hearts pilgrimage thing that Ted told me about earlier? So I’ve been surprised that more people don’t know about it. I guess. But if you Google three hearts pilgrimage, it’s in Cleartht Creek, Oklahoma. And it’s like a Catholic pilgrimage that started three years ago and has like absolutely mushroomed in attendance. I guess it was like some dude and like his son and a few other St. George scouts or whatever decided to do a pilgrimage. Like they just did a 30 mile walk. Yeah. To the monastery. That’s lame. Yeah, I know. But the year after like 10 of them did it, 500 people showed up the next year. Wow. And then last year, 1500 people showed up. That’s a lot of people. Yeah. I’m a little mad that they have to ticket it though. Yeah. They got the video. I think so the reason there’s tickets though is because it ends at the monastery and they like have to wait for the next person to come in. So it’s like a little bit of a surprise. I mean, it’s like a little bit of a surprise. Yeah. So it’s like a little bit of a surprise. And then it’s like, oh, I’m going to have to wait for the next person to come in. Yeah. So it’s like a little bit of a surprise. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it’s, I think that’s probably the reason so they can predict and control. So I think it’s, I think that’s probably the reason so they can predict and control. How many people they’re going to feed? Yeah. I always feel like you should try and do donations for this and just see what happens. But I’m also not very practical. No, I was curious. I’m tempted to go and do it. Absolutely. You need to go and do it. I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to do it. Absolutely. You need to go and write a three page report to be on my desk to wait for an event. Excellent. Excellent. Oklahoma’s not that far from you though. I mean, depending on what part of Texas you’re in. It is still far from me. It would be like a two day drive. It would be like a two day drive. But I think I might go anyway. Ted’s going. He’s the one who told me about it. Nice. A real life Ted encounter in the wild. So to speak. That’s scary. That’s it. There’s nothing more wild than a Ted encounter. That guy’s the worst luck with bears and stuff. I don’t know. The fact that he’s still alive indicates to me that he’s got pretty good luck. Yeah. Did he have a bear encounter? I still want warning where he is at all times. Because I want it to at least be prepared. I’m not… Are you coming to Arkansas, Mark? We’ll see what happens. Nothing’s looking good for me going anywhere ever again. So we’ll see. Well, I’ll pray for you. And so will everybody else on this stream. I hope so. Especially to St. Joseph Defender of the Church and Terror of Demons. That would be helpful. In particular, yes. Thank you. Sarah, I asked. What’s going on? That’ll take up the rest of the stream. Everything is going wrong. You’ve got to know about 20 years of history to know Mark’s situation. Oh, check it out. I did nothing yesterday. Like literally zero yesterday. I don’t know why. So that’s been a problem. It’s better today, but not by what it needs to be. Everything is not going well all at once. Well, that’s how real complexity and non-linear causality works. So you’re experiencing reality better than Kant is able to describe it. Low bar, Corey. Low bar. But yes. True, but low bar. Come on. Oh, goodness. Oh, man, I’m still reveling in that Neil deGrasse Tyson Oppenheimer connection that we did in like five minutes. Ted’s amazing. He’s just got an intuition for it. But I mean, obviously your secular religion still needs to have the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom because that’s the only way that anything happens. Yeah. But I think too, these things are starting to be revealed, right? And people are now starting to talk about the right sorts of things. And I see a lot of the things that Peterson Spear has been talking about for four or five years or however long are now showing up in places you would not expect. The Critical Drinkers latest video, for example, you can hear a lot of the you know, his past few videos over the past three or four months. Every once in a while, he’s almost using the same terminology as as, you know, Peterson and Breveke actually, because it’s all sort of coming together. There was a guys who had this ontology room and software engineers ontology room, and they would just stray into play dough like every week. And I was like, guys, you’re just going to end up a play dough. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, this is different. And they’d end up a play dough. Why would you want to be different? The dude lived twenty three hundred years ago and we’re still talking about him. I talked to I talked to Well, I talked to Lantern Jack about that, right? That’s that that’s that that’s that chronological snobbery that we have, you know, and being an individual is what you were saying, Emma. Retellings of Homer. Wait, wait till you see my video, Father Eric. And see, that’s what I should have been working on yesterday and today. I’m going to do a video on Plato’s Cave because it turns out that everybody who has talked about Plato’s Cave that I have heard has lied completely. And I don’t I don’t mean like minorly misinterpreted. I mean, like Plato says this and you said the opposite. You’re a liar. He said the opposite of that. Oh, wait till I do that video. I am so angry about that. It’s going to be a space video. Yeah, we’ve been reaching through it. You’re just mucking out the stables, man. It’s it was three. We did three parts in the Republic Book Club on on Book 7 because of that. And yeah, I go off there a couple of times, but I’m like, no, you need to do a video and just outline just the cave. This is a lot in Book 7. But just the cave needs to be completely like put to bed because he’s actually saying the opposite of like everybody counts it as like an individualistic, you know, emerge from the… Plato denies all of that. Yeah, he returns to the cave. No one ever leaves the cave in the parable. No one. Zero people leave the cave in any way, shape or form. And the sun is not out. Well, first of all, it’s not the cave in this copy. And it’s not that the cave is not mentioned in this copy. It’s mentioned later. It’s a den. No one leaves. Ever. And the sun is the fire that’s casting the shadows on the wall. That’s all explicit in Plato. That’s interesting. Yes. Yes. Right. Right. And the example of the one person that isn’t born into the chains, by the way, they weren’t grabbed and chained up. They were born into the chains. That’s actually really important. Right. But the one person who isn’t named, because there are no people, it’s an imagination. Imagine if you, meaning Socrates or Glaucon, because they own everything. They’re the one playing God with the city, remember? Didn’t remember that. No one does. They grab that person, remove them from bondage, and then imagine what would happen. So basically zero people ever get released from bondage, because you’re born into it. I see. Morpheus has to grab you and pull you out. Right. Oh, yeah. Well, it’s so sneaky, because on the one hand, the matrix is exactly correct. On the other hand, you’re missing all the framing, because actually the people that build the city own the computers and the simulation and the real world. But they’ve got that backwards. So like everybody does, because they cast it as a triumph of the individual. And the whole purpose of that chapter is to say you’ve got this philosophical class. That chapter, that book, book seven, is about classes. It’s about the necessity of a class system in a city. That’s the necessity of it. He proves that this is the way it is. The philosophers are going up. They’re the ones going up towards the different sun, because we have nothing. The cave is gone. The den is long gone. They’re going towards goodness. That’s what the sun is in that case. And it’s their noose, their soul, that’s going towards goodness. And Socrates has to pull them back from that. And Glaucon goes, wait a minute, you can’t do that. That’s not good for them. And he goes, yeah, I know, but it has to be done because it’s for the good of the city. Well, that changes the whole thing now, doesn’t it? That’s Gregory the Great being taken out of the monastery to be pope. Yeah, it’s the same thing. And he justifies it. He says they have to be brought down to the lowest points of the city, which if you’re extending the parable of the cave, would be you have to go sit in bondage with the other people and talk to them. Plato doesn’t do that, any of that, by the way. That’s not in the book at all. It’s denied in the book, but whatever. You have to bring the philosophers to the lowest areas of the city so that they can see it with their eyes and tell everybody what they see and how to correct it. Because they’re the only ones that can, because they have a perspective higher than the layer that they’re visiting. But that means they have to be stopped in their forward progress towards purity and goodness. And that’s actually the core argument of the book. Now that part I’ve talked about with people, like in classes and stuff, that that’s the core argument of the book, that we have to pull the philosophers back in. Well, except it’s not we. Because the problem, the core problem, and I think this is I haven’t finished, because I’m reading it, I’m reading it just before, literally hours before we do the book club, I’m reading it, the piece that we’re doing. But I get the feeling that that’s going to be one of the failings of the model, because people think that Plato solved the problem, but actually he just basically showed why the scientific frame doesn’t work. Like, philosophy can’t solve this problem, the philosopher king can’t solve this problem. Let me show you why. Because that’s actually the theme of the book. That’s very clearly the theme of the entire manuscript, is it fails here, and it fails here, and it fails here. Let’s ignore all those failures, and just go after this idyllic view, right? And then oh, and even the idyllic view fails, ultimately. Isn’t that kind of… Yeah, I’m not sure I would have gotten any of that as a freshman. So that sets itself up as explicitly anti-Gnostic, then, right? Oh, yeah. Dude, dude, here’s the funny part. You know what? No one told you, and I have it on good authority, although again, I haven’t finished the book. It begins and ends with religion. Like, it begins with a religious ceremony, it ends with some kind of religious whatever. Again, I haven’t read it. And, and the other thing they don’t tell you, is that there are religious references, like references to, well, we can’t resolve this using our philosophical framework, which we would nowadays call scientific framework, by the way, hint, hint. So we’re going to appeal to a god or a goddess, or you know, some kind of divine power that is peppered throughout the manuscript. It’s everywhere. I mean, that’s what I mean by they keep plastering over these problems in the, in the ontological framework. They go, oh, ontology can’t actually answer this. There’s no ontology possible to answer this. So we’re going to have to pray to Zeus. Basically, we’ll hope that Zeus works it out. And then they continue with the manuscript, as though they never mentioned Zeus. It’s really funny, actually. And part of it is, and this is what people don’t get, the book is freaking hysterical. If you’re not laughing, you’re missing the point, because it’s deliberately absurd on purpose. He’s very much stating deliberate absurdities. Everything in the book is a dialect, is a Hegelian dialect, not a real dialectic. Everything in the book is, well, of course you must be right, Socrates. You know, there’s no third argument anywhere in the book. It’s always an argument between two points. And they do it in the most absurd way to kind of tell you, like, this is dumb, and we know it’s dumb, but work with us here. We’re being dumb on purpose. Like, that’s everywhere in the manuscript. It’s really interesting. And no one mentions these things. And they’re the most important parts, I would say, of the whole text. Because people who are teaching Plato to freshmen aren’t talking about these things. Yeah. They only have so much time to talk about all the stuff that’s in Plato to freshmen. Well, and it’s a matter of understanding. And to address Andrew’s question, it’s a matter of understanding. And so, you know, the text is profound, but the way in which it’s profound is by using absurdity to exemplify the fact that even if you take the absurd case, the simplest possible case for ontology or philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy is all just ontologies or types of ontologies, it doesn’t work. It cannot be a simple, simple, simple case. And so, you have to rely on a binary frame. And even if you do that, it still won’t work. And so, it’s using the contrast of absurdity to say idealism can’t work. These methods of fixing a problem will not function, even in the best case scenario. That’s what makes it so difficult. And so, I think that’s the way in which it’s important to think about the fact that the text is so profound, so obvious, so obvious, so obvious, so obvious, so obvious, so obvious, so obvious, so obvious, so obvious. Uh Oh. Uh Oh. I guess God didn’t want, yeah, God didn’t want us to hear that. Yeah, it was genius and it cut out right in the genius part. Damn! The demons in the Wi-Fi. Excited. Do you know Dr. Jeffrey Lamont? No. and I think he would line up. Not on neoplatonism, he works with Plato. I think he does education. Yeah. I mean, he was the head of the education department. He was part of the Hillsdale classical education department. Now he’s at University of Dallas. He’s the head of that, I think. I think he’s the head of the University of Dallas education department. Yeah. Really? I have an interesting connection to that. He was in the classical education class and heard something very parallel to what you’re talking about. What was his name? Jeffrey Lehmann, here. No, I never knew his first name. Yeah. I found out. Yeah, he was a great professor. I think Emma and Colin, you guys would really like John Vervicki’s talk with Lanterne Jack. I set up their first talk, so I got them in touch with each other. But Jack actually called it platonism on that talk. And every time he got a chance to ask Vervicki, what’s this neoplatonism thing? And Vervicki came up with an answer. He said, actually, that’s just Plato. And I was just like, I couldn’t have been more happy. This is like the happiest moment of my existence. I’m like, yes. Point out to him that everything he’s talking about is really just Plato. No, this neoplatonism thing doesn’t even exist. It’s a fantasy in someone’s head. Yeah, I will admit that I’ve been struggling figuring out the difference between neoplatonism and platonism. Well, watch that talk. Jack will put its arrest for you. Jack and I, I went off with Jack on that before. I was like, Jack, you’ve got to explain this to me. And he eventually sort of said, yeah, ultimately I can’t point to anything either. I’ll check it out. Thank you. Well, I’m gonna start pointing at something. Uh-oh. And it’s my bed. Oh, yeah. And we are at 9.30 and I’ve got an early day tomorrow. We’ve got our priest gathering in Valley City. And instead of going and hanging out with my brother priests, I came and hung out with you guys tonight because Ted hadn’t looked at his inbox to see that I was asking if he could cover tonight’s stream. But anyway, we’ve got like three days and I’ll be in the catch up. But anyway, thanks for coming on. I think we had a above average stream tonight with all sorts of interesting things. And I’m glad I got to be a part of it. So good night and God bless you all. Thank you Father Eric. Night everybody. Au revoir.