Open Mic： Cathodox vs Protestants, Monk Power, Leadership and Submission, Aliens and Demons (p3SROqtR2wQ)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=p3SROqtR2wQ

Happy Sunday everybody. I hope you all made it to church and worshiped God and earned many graces by doing so. As astute-eyed viewers will notice, we have gotten to the other end of the feast of the presentation that was on Friday. And now my poor wall is bereft of the Christmas cards because we have finally exited the Christmas season. And I now have to take down the Christmas cards. But rest assured there will be Christmas cards next year. And so I can start looking forward to that. A little theme for tonight is what I think is probably on the ground the most salient difference between Catholics and Orthodox, those doctrines and practices that we share in common, versus the Protestants, all of the different Protestant denominations. And I think what it mostly comes down to, a lot of people, they might immediately go towards the doctrine of justification as being the most salient difference between Catholics and this doctrine of justification in Protestantism, being what is the biggest difference there. And I don’t think that’s actually correct. I think that’s downstream of what the most salient and most important difference is. And what I think ends up becoming the most important difference is the doctrine of an invisible church. The idea that the true Church of Christ isn’t to be located in any particular place, but is somehow more diffuse and not bounded in a way that we can readily identify it. And I think the reason that this is the more important doctrine is because it really has a profound effect on the way people actually behave. They will, many Protestants, not all, some are very attached to their confessions, very attached to their particular denominations, but there’s often some pretty easy movement. You can look at pretty easy movement from the main line into evangelical churches in the mid-20th century when the mainline Protestant churches began declining and the evangelical churches began taking on a lot of the people who were leaving the mainlines. Most of the folks who were in that movement probably didn’t think they were undergoing a big change. It didn’t feel all that different for them. They were just changing the place where they were going to church, but they still fundamentally felt about as Christian as they had ever been. Now this is me on the outside looking inside. So it might, you know, your mileage may vary, but this seems to be a very common attitude here. Now with the Catholic docs, the Catholic docs side of things, we don’t have this expectation that it’s impossible to find the true church. We have this expectation that you can identify those places where Christ is active, where Christ is moving, where his body is on earth. The argument between Catholics and Orthodox is how do we identify that? The Orthodox look to those in their view who carry on the tradition of the Apostles and anywhere that the tradition of the Apostles is being carried on, that would be a place where the true Church of Christ would be found. The Catholics look to communion with the Roman Pontiff. And if you’re in hierarchical and sacramental communion with the Roman Pontiff, that makes you part of the Catholic Church. And that’s how we identify that. Now this is why the conversations are often unproductive or often difficult. They don’t go anywhere because people on one side of the issue have a certain criteria for judging whether or not they think this church is good, whether or not they think this church has the fullness, has everything. They have one set of criteria over here and another set of criteria for judgment over here. And I think that’s why, you know, in the 1960s and 70s, there was a great amount of energy and there was a great amount of optimism about the possibility and prospects of ecumenical dialogue, that we might actually be able to get the band back together. And I think that right there is one of the big sticking points, one of the big roadblocks to getting people back together. It’s not that we have disagreements about where the church is. We have disagreements about the criteria by which we judge the difference between true church, not true church. That’s a really hard thing to get over. That is that is very far down on people’s way of judging. But you can imagine it ends up determining the way that not only you’re going to believe and not only you’re going to talk, but also the way you’re going to behave. And if you are not convinced that the true Church of Christ is visible and we could say locatable on this earth, it’s going to change the way you behave, not just the creed you profess. And if you do believe that it is locatable, that you can find these marks of the church, that’s going to change the way you behave. It’s going to say, well, gosh, you know, maybe my local priest and my local bishop are really ticking me off. But this is the true church. And so where else can I go? This is a big old problem and I don’t know how to fix it. So all of you can sign on the the link is ready to go and we’ll figure this out as we go along. We’ve just got another week and a half before Ash Wednesday. And I got to celebrate the traditional Latin mass today. And in the old calendar, they have these very helpful pre-lent Sundays where you start wearing the violet vestments and it gives you a little heads up that lent is coming. It never takes you off guard if you are going to the old light masses. And speaking of old, right, there’s Andrew. How are you doing? What’s poppin, Father Eric? I’m just solving all of the schisms here. How are you? Good. Yeah. Welcome to the dog. Oh, you have a dog. Yep. Can we. Oh, OK. You got a corgi. Is he a good boy? Yeah. OK. We don’t need to. Yeah. Yeah. Did you guys get any rain? I heard there’s coming for California. Yep. We are getting some right now. OK. Yep. But you haven’t melted. Not yet. No. OK. I heard people from L.A. don’t handle the rain well. Hello, Josh. No, we don’t. Hello, Father. How are you doing? Oh, not too bad. Not too bad at all. I was pretty excited to see your headline. I come from a Protestant family and have many issues with my father because of that. Yeah. So, yeah, no, I I I missed a little bit of the combo. I was just getting off of or I closed out of YouTube and came over here. But so, yeah, you were or I guess. I mean, there’s a lot of places you could head with with Catholicism versus Protestantism, but is what do you think that since since you’ve been on one side of the pond and come to the other. Yeah. What do you think of my pointing towards visible versus invisible churches like the most important difference? Because that might not be what everybody would immediately say. Yeah, no. So I was going through a Bible study right before I converted from a guy who was he’s a local guy and really well versed. I think you attended Bible College. He wrote actually, I mean, it’s a very small book, but he did write a book on a few things and that and he was the one that actually I don’t know that I had understood the concept of the invisible church, but I didn’t I’d never heard of the idea of the one true church. But there was this idea of one true church and that there’s no out like we’re all supposed to be a part of the one true church and there’s not supposed to be any outliers like you’re not supposed to go off and try to start your own thing out in the woods or, you know, to have people, you know what I mean? And have like little home groups that you’re doing church or anything like that. That’s not necessarily supposed to be. He was the one that introduced me to that, but he’s not Catholic. He was he was which after converting, I kind of looked back on our conversations and I was like, with all that, you know, how did you never end up Orthodox? But then since then, I’ve interacted with him and, you know, he was very. Shocked, I guess you could say that I had converted and that, you know, that I’d actually attended the classes and did everything, you know, and and that mainly because like and I was I was a lot of our conversations. I was very challenging towards them because I was I was I was wanting like before I converted anyways, I. I don’t. Sometimes I feel like like. There there’s no there’s not enough structure. In normal average, normal small town process, or what do you mean? The bulk of Protestantism is not is not structured, in my opinion, and I as somebody. Who I have a rebellious mind and a mind that when I see somebody up in authority, I I want to challenge them. I that’s not a good that’s not a good thing of mine. Like that’s a that’s a personal issue, probably daddy issues or whatever. But as a result, I’ve I’ve definitely interacted a lot with like authoritative figures in the Protestant Church, you know, like I didn’t talk to the layman in the church. I wouldn’t talk directly to the pastor or something like that. And I could always sense there was this lack of structure that there was like there was this lack of. Like. I don’t know, like they would always they would always present themselves like they were part of this larger body. But then I kind of be like, there ain’t nobody behind you, bro. Like, you like, I mean, like you’re you. I mean, yes, we’re all up here. We’re paying attention to you every Sunday. But what authority do you really come with? Like, I mean, you’re you don’t wear uniform. You don’t you don’t. I mean, you know, depending on what’s required out of you by the congregation, you may or may not dress up, you know, and then, you know, depending on how far down your road you are, you may or may not have have found have found or embraced reforms theology. So it seems like that’s kind of the traditional path is that they start out very kind of evangelical. They get a little bit more like into the Puritan mindset and stuff like that and then eventually become reformed. It seems like to me, at least my experience with a lot of the elders and things like that in the churches that I went to. So anyway, yes, I would agree with you that I think the when I am going to mass. The thing that gives me comfort or I know. Yeah, that was what I told my family was like, I am participating in the same mass. And as far as I understand it, that that’s going on down in South America, that’s going on in Mexico, that’s going on in Italy, that’s going on in China, that’s going on all over the world. And that is this time, but also all the way back. That was the big thing was is that like I am participating in a tradition that goes back 2000 years now. So for me, I think I’ve shared before I’m half Native American, but I’ve never participated in ceremony. I’ve never participated in like getting named by the clan or even claimed by the clan. I have I am on the how would they say like. How would they say like where are you? You’re documented as being half Native American of this tribe. And that but I so I’ve always I didn’t realize it, but I had a yearning to be absorbed into a body like I recognize that afterwards that like, oh, this is, you know, I have a yearning to be, you know, after failing out of basic and a few other endeavors in my life that didn’t exactly pan out. You know, you you you sometimes like you realize like, OK, well, I like I’m kind of like the kid pick last and you know, for kickball or something like that. Like I’m not getting I’m not getting drawn in. And then I found myself at odds a lot of times with pastors and things like that because I was like, I don’t know, a lot of times in their sermons and that and they would go on. I mean, they kind of leave themselves open to it. They go on for like 30, 40 minutes, sometimes up to an hour. And it’s like, how long do you think you could talk before you’re going to screw up and say something you probably shouldn’t have? And, you know, as they know, so they know a lot of times I would I would be I don’t know. Just like I said, it’s not a good habit I have in my own head to pick people’s words apart. But, you know, it was just something about the authority that they would assume and they would stand up there. And everybody had this great respect for them, but they didn’t seem to know anything deeper. And when when questioned, they just they would rely on like, you know, well, you should you should read this guy or you should read that guy, you know, or you should, you know, or, you know, come to Bible study or something like that. No, of course. Yes. Get deeper into the scriptures. But in Orthodoxy, that’s where I found like, OK, this is what it’s about. It’s about this sacred thing that we’ve been doing for 2000 years or, you know, with Eucharist and participating in that, participating in Christ. And then, you know, around that same time, the idea of theosis and the fact that, you know, we have monks. That was a big thing for me. I don’t know. I back when I was still browsing around at different religions and stuff, I made a decision that I wouldn’t trust anything that didn’t have monks. You don’t have monks like I don’t. I’m not going to like because there was something about people that would dedicate their lives only and solely to this one thing and focus on it 100 percent. I was like, OK, that that’s like some, you know, Star Wars Jedi discipline level stuff like that. Like that’s something that I can get behind because I could see the dedication in that, you know, because I came from a family that, you know, was military and things like that. And so I understood dedication to a cause. I understood, you know, being 100 percent sold out, you know, like being a part of that, like have embracing that. But I guess in life, I never found something that I was like, I’m going to make my stand on this. Like this will die for this. I’ll defend this. I’ll this I’ll take my my my being too. And I felt even though it was weird, you know, going through RCIA and everything like that, like a lot of what I learned was weird for me. Like I it was strange, you know, even even getting introduced to the to Mary, you know, like and being raised up, you know, she was just a woman in the story. She didn’t she didn’t have a special place like we didn’t pray to her. We didn’t have any prayers around her or anything. She wasn’t venerated in any sort of way. And that was very strange. But yes, I do agree with you that that the concept of the one true church does make me feel or not. I shouldn’t even feel I feel an obligation as a Christian to attend like in that because it’s like it’s like, OK, I found as far as I can tell. And I was I was objective as I could be in researching that orthodoxy. One goes back to farther. So it has the I guess you could say the authenticity of origin like that or, you know, where this is where we come from. As the authenticity of heritage, as the authenticity of, you know, the apostolic succession, you know, that we can trace Pope, you know, at least going back to what I and you’re you’ll know more about this than I do. But at least going back, as far as I understand, all the way to Peter, I’ve I’ve heard that. But as far as I know, I don’t know. I’ve never seen like the list or anything like that. But I’ve been told that the list is complete. Yeah. OK. So that makes me feel like knowing. And I I’m not a like I’m a fairly rebellious person by nature. But there’s something. Reassuring about knowing that there’s a higher governing body, you know, the Magisterium, like a lot of people, a lot of Protestants are like, I ain’t going to mess with that man. That’s all controlled and everything. I’m like, look at your government, dude. Like overreaching authority is nothing new. But it’s it. I don’t know. I guess like, you know, I like that there are people because I don’t have the time. Like, I realized along the line that I don’t have the time to. I think that’s the thing about being a pastor, you know, I think that’s the thing about being a pastor is that I’m not a person who’s trying to be a pastor. I’m not trying to be a pastor to, you know, trying to work a job, try to be a, you know, we’re trying to get married, try to be a husband, you know, be a dad and, you know, devote, you know, six hours a day to learning scripture and diving. I’ll do the best I can. And he’s learned it. He’s in, you know, he’s in he’s has it. I think his focus of study was philosophy. When I when I got to know him, I said, I asked him, you know, straight up, I was like, who do you listen to or who do you kind of go to? Like I told him I listen to a lot of YouTube and, you know, like I listen to Bishop Baron and things like that. And he kind of thought and kind of looked down and he said, Augustin or an acquaintance. Like, you know, I was like, OK, I can get along with this guy like he’s, you know, he’s not. Yeah, he’s definitely like he’s focused. He’s studied. He’s dedicated, you know, and that and so like, yeah, there was there. And I see, I see like looking up at the at the sanctuary, like so many pros and crosses, they’re barren. There’s no Christ isn’t on the cross. And my mom one time growing up, she said, well, that’s because Christ isn’t on the cross anymore. And I said, and I thought, you know, that kind of stuck in my head. But I was like, well, that’s what this whole thing is built around, though. We have to be reminded of that. Like, you know, that this this whole thing is is about his sacrifice, you know, and and that. And so we have to be reminded of that. But yeah, no, that’s my little trip through. But yeah, I definitely and but having said that in talking to Protestant friends and family, yeah, the whole I’m part of the true church now just doesn’t come up very well. Oh, it does. And that’s the problem. Right. Because when I talk, when I say the church, I mean one thing. And when my friend Paul Vanderklaas says the church, he means something very different. Very much. He used the same. Yes, the church, you know, and I’m like, yeah, you know, that that applies to all of those churches which are in communion with the Roman Pontiff. And we can also, you know, they’re not actually attached to the universal church, but we could talk about Orthodox churches as as being as being churches. But by the time you get to Protestant, they’ve devoted to ecclesial communions. Yeah, they’re local clubs. Yeah. Like I would I wouldn’t I wouldn’t say that to them, except I know where anybody can listen to it. But that’s that’s our theology is is you’re an ecclesial type communion, but you don’t have a real bishop. You know, it’s just it becomes a very difficult thing to say. And it’s like, if you’re trying to cooperate with somebody, do you just stop the conversation there? Like, hold on now. Wait a minute. I don’t think you actually have a church. Right. But also, but where do you start the conversation? Because you don’t have an equivalent authority level to discuss things with that can get the same level of agreement. Like if the pope agrees, you know, right. And you don’t you don’t have that on the other side. Right. And Josh, I really resonated with a lot of what you said. It was interesting, right, that you see, we talk about truth. So you can apply it to the church. That’s what we’re applying it to here. But I want to talk about it kind of more generally real quick, just because I think it’s important since you brought up truth. Now I have to go into it. You had a sense you have a sense and you add a sense. Well, monks are important somehow. Now, you can’t nail that down. And I’m not going to hold you to like fair. That’s fine by me. I’m all about intuitive knowledge. Yeah. You can’t quite nail that down. And that’s OK. But you had a sense. And and and I will point back to what you mentioned. Right. The Jedi. So you I would argue culture has a sense that this is missing, that this idea of monks and monastic life is missing. And then you had right. And then there’s this rebellion and you look at Star Wars and you’re like, oh, wow, like, there’s the rebels looking to the monks to help them, to give them the power, if you will, to overthrow the current government. I mean, it’s very Protestant. Think about it that way. Right. But again, you had a sense for, hey, the current government, the current government is going to be a very Protestant. And you’re like, hey, the cross is bare. Hmm. That doesn’t seem true to the message in the book. So the icon doesn’t like and it’s not like you can’t nail it down. You can’t go. Well, of course, you should be. And let me tell you why. And here are the four way. You can’t do that. And I don’t think you should try. I think that’s crazy. But but you had that sense of what was true. And yeah, I mean, what is a true church? And and there’s a lot of equivocation on that. I think that’s really important because, you know, I’m guilty of this, too, right? The church should the church has receded. The church needs to write all this stuff. It’s like, well, what do you mean by the church? And like, fair. That is the problem is that even with all of that and all the thinky talky, arguey, weedy, reference, author nonsense, you had a sense. You knew something was wrong. You knew where to ask questions. And and you knew, you know, that you got closer when you found something closer. Right. Like it doesn’t require you to lay it out with six points and nail it to the church or whatever. Like you you had that sense and you had that ability to speak. And also you had the realization, which I mean, this is the best part in my in my mind of your story. I don’t have six hours to do what I think I need to do. And this religious stuff in that way. Yeah. But I can outsource that to this guy because of tradition, because of monasteries, because of right. All these things. And now you have a way to interact. You didn’t have before. And it’s not you going to the monastery and getting the knowledge of how to wield the lightsaber and going and fighting. It’s like, no, man, I get I get family. Like, I got to do this trees. I got I got stuff that I know that I should do. And as much as I want to get distracted with it, I do have responsibilities. And I’ve gotten kind of sucked into this little corner, you know, spending a lot of time like trying to interact on threads and stuff like that. But it was when I converted to Catholicism, I was like, OK, this is my local Christian family now. Like, this is what I’m going to invest in this. And as we’ve as we’re getting ready to baptize our our my my child from previous marriage and our child with my current girl that we’re we’re we’re wrecking. We’re getting to know an old lady in the church who’s the head of the of getting children baptized and stuff like that. And, you know, we’re having to do a lot of things like that. Godparents and all stuff like that, you know. And so, yeah, you do. You just get drawn in. I mean, if you keep working the process like you just you continue to get drawn in. Yeah. Sally, Joe, you look like you have something to say. Oh, I’m I’m trying to figure out how to say it best. OK, all right. I was thinking of a thought and then you click on StreamYard and you have to go through the settings and then I’m happy to put my thought back together. So here’s one of many kind of because I have many kind of. But so I’m just going to offer up a framework. So if you’re within Baptist Church and you’re kind of like denomination curious, you know, and then you observe another denomination and you think, oh, maybe they got a thing there. But the conundrum is it’s not going to be a good thing. But the conundrum is if you were to go over there and like you’re like I’m saying you’re like in a functional as functional as Baptist get anyway, community. If you were to go and convert to Catholicism, totally convinced you’re eternally damned forever because there’s no purgatory, there’s no in between. And it’s so about death that like there’s this existential angst like it’s crazed angst. And it’s like, whereas if you’re wrong because you’re Baptist and the Catholics looking at you, they’re like, we’ll pray for you. And you’re kind of like you got some space. So like everybody who’s not that damn to hell forever because they didn’t believe good enough. And then everybody like if you’re if you’re not Catholic, but maybe that would be so it’s like so I’m just I feel the need to throw it out there because people see this. Oh, it’s not the one true church. And you got to understand what that means to Baptist. My God, that’s just the only thing you’re part of. If you’re not part of the one true church is eternal damnation. Like there’s no grace space, no no in between whatsoever. There’s no like seven orders of heaven. Yours in or out. True church or nothing. And so like the upturn of a community when exposed to new information, I don’t know if it’s necessarily better. And like I don’t necessarily agree with my churches right now. Like I don’t. But I do think it’s the healthiest thing I can do for my community. And I don’t see myself as individual. I am part of a community like like long term, like multi generations. So the amount of crushing people’s faith that do have kind of more functional faith than mine. That would happen if I suddenly converted would I think be so detrimental, especially to children in my family. That it’s just not even reasonable. And I wanted to throw out the. I don’t know. I don’t know what it was exactly that I wanted to throw out. But I wanted to put the intensity of that black and white thinking into the conversation. Because I don’t find Catholics struggle with that as much. And it’s like you’ve got to understand. If you find some of the more extreme on the traditional end of things. I’ve had to help cure people of that before. Some of them that neighbor me and I fear we probably infected them. But no, no, they there’s a few sermons and a few quotes of the church. They go back to to to get to the same, you know, constant hell anxiety. Yeah. And then that’s one of the biggest problems the church has right now. Because people have no terror of hell. And I think the biggest problem with people having no terror of hell is because I like the way Pagio and the Orthodox talk about heaven coming to earth and hell coming to earth and how you can see heaven and hell in the now and moving towards the kingdom God and away from the kingdom. God in the now, because I think if you can’t do that, a lot of people just long for oblivion because they really are tired of being bothered with existence. And that’s hard to explain to the Christian frame because like the the the the frame that you get given. Like how to evangelize is like you need to tell people how bad hell is and then to make sure they know how to save themselves from it. And I’m like, I don’t think you understand. People aren’t even interested in regular everyday existence. So talking about an eternity ain’t it’s not a it’s not a bonus. Also, heaven has always sounded boring. And that’s its own problem. But. Could it possibly be boring? You could hang out with Thomas Aquinas. Well, the Golden City, if you don’t like cities, just sounds stressful. There you go. Oh, my gosh. Imagine the maintenance costs of the roadways on the Golden City. You know, gold’s off the soft. I think it’s the condensation of condensing of souls, Father Eric, because if you’ve got all the people for all existence and they do give a footage there and that just sounds really stressful. I don’t like grass in the heavenly city. I would like grass away from other people. I think I’m fine if it doesn’t have a field where I can run without anyone seeing me. We’re going to have a problem. Guys, you guys are like anti-community here. They’re well anti-people is like I do what this is in my family. Yeah, like what you were saying about like longing to be out of existence. Like, do you guys find that a lot of the people you interact with these days are basically anti-people? Like they don’t they view people as like a scourge on the earth that the sooner we’re gone, that paradise can return once we’re gone. Like, no, that’s not what I’m pointing to. I’ve talked to people who like they don’t find any relief from their angst. Like they honestly don’t find any relief from their angst. They view their own existence as a burden on others and they want to not exist. Like this isn’t yeah, it’s not like a homicidal kind of thing. It’s just more of a like heaven is not appeal because existence does not appeal. You got to start with creation is good. And I tried to put that out to VanderKlay and didn’t get as far as I’d hoped because like I think you really have to start with Genesis. When I like in the beginning God created like it was good like you and people don’t have that. They don’t see existence as good. They don’t see humanity as good. And that’s the first travesty and trying to educate people on the horrors of hell is not a good evangelical way of thinking. Whether heaven does or does not exist funnily enough is my premise there. It’s like it’s better for existence and therefore it should be better for the heavenly realm. Like I start there. But yeah, well, yeah, if you can’t start from being as good. Yeah. And then yeah, you’re still and I think that’s one of the problems that I try to point to is like Christians have no idea how far away new atheists are from the heavenly realm. Like there’s a whole set of conceptions that they do not have. They don’t have them. And so when you say something like, you know, in the case of evangelicalism, yeah, you know, hell is bad, but heaven is good and you can live there forever. They’re like, I’m died on. I’m out. Yeah, I don’t want I want nihilism. Thank you very much. They don’t see that as an only part of it’s the binary thinking we’re stuck in. And part of it is the idea of the heavenly realm. And part of it’s the binary thinking we’re stuck in. And part of it is, oh, once you have the knowledge of heaven and the knowledge of hell, you’re going to make a free will choice towards one. And it’s like that is very optimistic. A lot of people are just not there yet. They’re way off from that for whatever, for whatever strange reason. They’re just not ready or whatever. Yeah, yeah. It’s really interesting to me, Sally, that you come in here with severe, you know, insider Baptist knowledge and say, you know, yeah, the people that I know. You’re not inside the Baptist Church. You are absolutely hosed, even though that doesn’t actually work with what as far as I can tell is your theology where God just kind of comes in and unconditionally elects you. And that’s how you’re actually a part of the church. No, it’s it’s your belief. It’s not actions, but it’s your belief. Don’t ask me how that works. Right. Well, I think that’s why people end up becoming reformed Baptists is because they can they can they can actually fix some of these problems where it’s like, well, you might actually have an experience of belief, even if it’s not, you know, let’s say it’s you’ve never met a Christian before. But God does it anyway. And you just have this incoherent belief now. Like, maybe you could make that work. It’s a it’s a pickle because like this is the tradition I was born into. And like, I know a bunch of other stuff now. And then what do I do with it? And the trouble is, I still see where it’s better than a lot of other stuff. And I still see where it holds people together. And I know that I must be grateful to it to some extent because I’ve never been anchorless. And I’m grateful to that. So it’s like, I can’t just throw it away. And I certainly won’t hurt people that are doing the best they’ve been given to that are coming from the same place as me. It’s just a complication. And this is something Vanderklee actually gave me. He talked about why so much of the Midwest is Protestant. And part of that was the circuit writers. And I know that because I have family from the surface, like involved with that circuit writer tradition. And I think part of the reason Protestantism and Baptist and stuff kind of worked. I think, well, some of it was cultural because like the Germanness. But also, if you’re not up against the world, a Bible and a guy on a horse coming once every two weeks is better than nothing. And now even the hidden places, even the high places and the low places and the valleys and the draws and the hills are all up against the world in a way we’ve never been before. So we have cosmopolitan temptation up in the boonies and we don’t know what to do with it. You know, like we got that and that’s oh, God, it’s a trial. And then it’s like, where’s your help? Where’s the spine? Where’s that strength? And not just the spirit. And it’s like, well, that’s rough. And I think that’s part of this turned orthodoxy that’s looking for the bigger thing to help defend you because we weren’t up against that. It was like out in the wild. You can know by nature what is God’s. You can see it. It comes through clearly. And now even out in the wild, we’re in the city. Even in the wilds, we’re in the city. Hey, Sally, Joe, how many would you say on average, because you’ve obviously been Baptist for quite a long time. Do you get multiple generations that don’t leave the church in that? I’m. Third generation on my. My dad’s great grandfather side, probably fourth or fifth on my Irish grandma side. Now, that might not be Baptist for sure, because we tend to slide around and have, you know, give or take two or three denominational fractures. OK, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah, no, the only reason I ask is I’m a little further out west. I’m in the four corners or in Colorado, but near the four corners. OK, OK. OK, but I’m like. So like my granddad was part of the circuit writing churches, not like the really old ones, but like, yeah, the early ones. Well, and I’m wondering if in our little communities like you’re you’re talking about the city and you’re amongst the city now and things like that. I’m wondering if you’re going to start seeing a waning in the multiple generations that you can get out of. Man, we got three babies in our church this year. There must be 20 plus kids and we were from population bust back to like anybody who was from out here when covid and some of the crazy happen. We were like, screw it. We were like, screw it. Going home and like people are home with their kids and now you got online income. So you got people popping into little tiny towns just working for IBM and raising their kids like in a different way. And when people talk about the dying of the U.S. and like the population collapse and stuff, it ain’t here. So now, I mean, like back in the 50s with these families that have three or four kids have seven or eight. Oh, but people are having seven or eight here, Father. They are very good. I’m all for it. That’s also the Latin mass people. So one of my best friend is Catholic and he’s got eight kids. My oldest cousin is Protestant and he’s got nine kids. And then I know I know a family of four going to have another one, a family of three going to have another one, a family three working on being the family of nine. So like, don’t know what to say. I didn’t quite make that bucket. I’ve only got the one. But South Dakota has the highest birth rate in the nation. So really, oh yeah. But it’s like it’s like 2.1, I think. Maybe maybe too flat. I don’t know. It’s still just only about replacement. And I think I think the countries are carrying water for Sioux Falls. Well, I’m more than happy to be here right now. It’s just made me so happy to be around all these kids. My phone battery is dying and I’m on borrowed time from a cartoon. So I’m going to leave. Good to see you, Sally. Take care. Good to see you. Josh, I’m in Colorado, too, but I’m in Northern Colorado over by Fort Collins. Okay, very cool. I got a brother in Thornton up in Denver. But yeah, very cool fellow Coloradans. Are you guys getting snowed on up there? We got some snow. We got some rain. Today was like we got sunshine a little bit. So how about you? Yeah, we’re pretty we’re just mostly getting rain down here, but we’ll see. It’s supposed to get gnarly starting Tuesday, I think. Tuesday or Wednesday. So maybe it’s coming down to you. I’m going to head into Mexico and go do some work. Oh, you’ll escape the snow. Yeah, maybe. No, the reason. But the replacement rate thing, I mean, I don’t know, like you look at the data. Much to do about nothing. There’s there’s certain places in certain classes that are going to get wiped out. Yep. And they all actually vote a certain way, too, by the way, saying it’s not a coincidence. And then everybody else is going to be perfectly fine. And that’s part of the problem. Like, it really is. It really is manipulation. It’s manipulation through statistics. And that’s not to say that on the whole, there isn’t going to be an issue. Yeah, maybe. But all that really means is you can’t support big cities. That’s really what it means. It doesn’t actually mean anything else. And I don’t see that as a negative. Sorry. I just don’t. And I have my time in cities and I enjoy my cities. But one of the most fascinating things I ever did was go to Gary, Indiana. Right. Just like that’s a stinkin ghost town right there. It used to be real bad for murder, but then everybody was dead or gone. And so there’s just nobody left. And we toured like this. And I think it’s amazing that there’s this massive Methodist church that was just like completely falling into ruins. It’s amazing. Great photography opportunities there for you. So 21st century. I think he followed. Father Eric, I’m back. There you are. Cool. Stupid Internet connection. So the city is a perfect place for you to be. So anyway, there’ll just be lots of opportunities for urban spelunking and returning cities to nature. It’ll be great. And we know what that looked like. So yeah. Father with. We were talking about the one true church. I kind of got into this discussion a little bit ago with my brothers. figure their, like, for what they say and what they actually do, they don’t participate regularly in church. Sometimes they’ll go, you know, if they’re in town for the holidays or something like that. It seems like, I mean, they’re kind of like low-key stoics. Like, I mean, they’re just like, they don’t, you know, that’s kind of their philosophy is like, yeah, bad things will happen. You know, we’ll handle it. We’ll pray. They pray, you know, but I was having a hard time trying to express why, like, why that’s not good. That’s not, I understand for myself why it’s not good enough because I have kids and I need to be able to build my family around a tradition that I can actually, when I die, I know that the church is still going to be there for them, you know, that there’s always a place where, you know, we can go back to it because, like, the church that I grew up in is no longer in existence. You know, the members have scattered and, you know, others started attending other churches and other churches sprouted up and now there’s a whole different church there and things like that, which I still have a family connection there. My sister goes there, but they’re basically reformed. I mean, some of them are, some of them aren’t. It’s a mishmash, but it, I was having a hard time articulating to my brothers why that’s not, why that’s not enough. And what are your thoughts on that? Well, it’s, you know, individualism is a hell of a drug and it takes a long time to be cured of it. So, you know, I bet you, like, I would probably meet your brothers, I would probably like them, I think, and they’d probably be small enough men that they’re able, they’ve got enough spiritual capacity to move in the world. When you talk about that Stoicism, though, like that, Mark will tell you the values and the benefits of Stoicism, but it only gives you the how questions. It doesn’t answer the why questions. And, well, and that’s kind of what I mean is, is there, do we have a lot of people in that we interact with that just simply don’t ask the why? You know, that’s the, because I’ve always been a why asker. Like, that’s why, like, I mean, that you could talk some of my rebelliousness up to that or something like that, but I’m always like, but why? You know, and that, and so, like, if somebody isn’t asking why are they approachable by orthodoxy for conversion? I keep saying orthodoxy. Are you trying to say holocism? Well, I mean, just orthodox belief. You say, of course, cathodox. Okay, cathodox. Okay, sorry. I just I’m all about clear communication, you know. Yeah, I’m Catholic and I’ve embraced that. And, you know, but I do I do recognize that there’s a lot of there’s a lot of people in this sphere that are also Eastern Orthodox or, you know, currently attending or in process of converting. And that’s what I came across first, you know, so that’s why I’ll I often will just call the two branches of the original church as far as I could tell, I just use the word orthodox and because, you know, it just means as far as I understand, means traditional certain traditional teaching. It means right praise those who are praising the Lord correctly. Orthodoxy. Okay, right. Yeah, I like I like when I want to say that I say like traditional Christianity okay, where where that tradition is. But that’s just a language thing. I guess what it is, is it’s it’s the embodiment of the ideals and I think your intuition about the monks is correct. And what we’ve lost in the decline of the religious life and the decline of the monasteries is is seeing the ideal, you know, the life of heaven basically, because that’s what it is, is is your, you know, like, for instance, Jesus says, you know, in this age, the children of Mary and are given marriage, but in the next, it will not be so because they will be like angels, neither marrying nor giving a marriage, right. So, you know, marriage is a good thing. I encourage it. I’m glad that Josh and Emma have gone for it. I’m all for it. But it is something that is is for this world. It’s for the production and education of children, the mutual support of spouses. That’s this worldly thing. The monastery gives you like, hey, this is a community that’s trying to be as heavenly as possible on earth. So you’ve got a whole bunch of celibates in there. We are trying to model things on earth as it is in heaven. How are things done in heaven? Well, the Lord, God from his throne gives his commands and his commands are executed. So they’ve got obedience, they’ve got this hierarchical structure of obedience in the monastery. You know, in heaven, there’s just eternal plenty. We don’t have the scarcity of this world. So they live poverty, right. So they embrace the scarcity to show the plenitude of spiritual graces there. When you’ve got that structure, at least in your consciousness, even if you just, you know, went up there for a field trip, a third grade at your Catholic school, this is the monastery. These are the monks. You see the grounds. You see how lovely it is. You meet the abbot there. The abbot’s a friendly old gentleman. Maybe got a little bit of unaccountable joy in his eyes. That’s a very powerful thing that traditional Christianity, both in its Catholic and Orthodox forms, should be able to provide. And it’s a real wound to the church to not have that there. And that does more than just benefit the individual. It benefits the whole community because the whole community can point to that and say, that’s where heavenly living is. That’s where you can go define that. So if you started to feel that, intuit that, even when you weren’t able to articulate it, and probably more than that, more than I’m able to say. But yeah, yeah, and, you know, your religion isn’t just for you. You’ve also got this instinct that you need to be able to hand this on to your children, that there’ll always be a Catholic church for them to go to. It seems like this idea that you could be an individual is kind of at the heart of that. And it’s actually impossible because your brothers are living off of spiritual capital that they did not earn. Yeah, that’s fine. We all do that, but we need to acknowledge it. Yeah. No, I think that for a large portion of my life, that’s how I, I mean, and it was actually interesting because I’m Native American on my mother’s side, but on my father’s side, I started asking him, you know, well, what were your grandparents and, you know, your aunts and everybody like that? And he kind of hem-hot around, he said they were all Catholic. He had some Irish and some Czechoslovakian and things like that. And we were, we’re only like third generation Americans or something like that. Like we’re, we’re not, not super new, but, you know, fairly new. And I think I’m the third generation, yeah, on my father’s side in that. But no, like I always wanted to, like growing up, I remember I always wanted to be like a real Indian. Like I always wanted to really embrace my Native American side, but in the Hopi way, that means you got to go down to Hopi, like get named, get claimed, get like, you know, learn, you have to spend time down there actually learning. And like, I’m so far removed from that, that like, you know, even my grandmother was taken off the reservation when she was a child. So I’m not that many generations removed, but I don’t know anything about it. Like I’ve learned some things along the way, you know, and I’ve seen even some, some things that kind of line up with, you know, Christianity and that, but there, it’s so embedded in the Native way that I, I just, I like trying to get around it and wrap my head around it and to really trust my life to it in any sort of way. I just saw this massive like problem. Like I was like, I’m so not, like I’m Native by blood, but I’m not by mindset or belief or anything. But I was like, but I am a Westerner. So like I, and I, and I understand Western hierarchy and values and things like that. That, that was, you know, so like I said, I kept, I told myself, I was like, you keep trying to be the thing that you maybe see as noble and like movies and everything like that. There’s always the Native American, you know, like the Native Americans are often held up in, in like cinema and even in music or art in any sort of way. And a lot of times we look down on like, you know, like a Catholic church with a white pastor or something like that. Like, oh, this is ordinary. You want to be, you want to be exotic. Like you should be, you should want to be exotic. You should want to be, be a part of this group that’s off in the, off in the wilderness or something like that. But it was, yeah, no, I just, I came to the realization that’s not what I am. And that’s not, that’s, you know, I could keep on trying to become role play as that, or I could embrace what, what, you know, the, the origins of the faith that I’d actually been handed. And that- So Josh, let me ask you a question. Did you watch by chance Peterson talk to Lawrence Krauss? Yeah, I did. So there’s your answer. Right? Like the guy actually says there are no why questions. He said that. There are only how questions and science can answer all of those. And so you don’t have an exemplification of these people who they’re not, they’re not in the, the continuation of the species business. They’re in the exemplify heavenly behavior on earth business, the monks. You don’t have that, right? To your point. We don’t have that. I mean, we know about it kind of sort of, but it’s not, I think it used to be every village. You know, we’re nearby every village and now, and then, and then we get this individualism and we’ve got this science telling us if you need an answer, you come to us and we’ll give it to you. Right? It doesn’t, they don’t specify, oh, we only have how answers. We don’t have why answers. They don’t specify that it’s convenient for them. Right? Now you can see the battle between why the science idiots think there’s a battle between the church and science, because they’re the ones who want the, what the church has. They’re in the battle. The church is like, whatever, man, we’re, we’re cool with you guys. You’re just not cool with us. And that’s very much, you see that in the Lawrence Krauss thing, but you can see like, he doesn’t believe in why, he actually said he doesn’t believe in why questions. There are no why questions. What are you talking about, Peterson? Anyway, just, you know, to me, it’s like, are you, are you like on medication or not taking medication? You should be, or like, what’s, what’s up with that, bro? You know, because that’s a little weird, but like, you can see it. You can just, you can just watch that and see somebody like that. And, and again, yeah, there’s no one out there exemplifying, there’s nothing, there’s nothing to be curious about, right? There’s no monastery is doing this curious thing. That doesn’t make any sense. Monasteries don’t make any sense. It doesn’t make any sense. What are you doing? What are you, a nut bag? Are you insane? What’s going on? Yes, but that’s not the point. What’s going on? Yes, but that’s not the point. Right. The point is there are outliers and they’re there for a reason. And now you have a reason to ask the why question. Why would they do this? What is, why is this survived for? Because it’s still there, right? But, but we just didn’t have it in the US because it’s a Protestant nation. You know, like they didn’t, didn’t bring that with them because they didn’t have it because that’s where it got destroyed first, right? At the end of the day, right? It’s Henry the eighth. And yeah, it’s a big problem. It’s a big, big problem. I, yeah, Corey’s the one that’s on to this big time. Yeah. The monastery, the loss of the monastery is a big deal and government comes in and fills the void. So why? Well, we have government. Why? We have science. Well, and I don’t, I don’t need to know it right now. I’m busy. I got things to do. And still isn’t fills the gap. So like, it’s understandable to me, like, I don’t think it’s a good thing. It gets horrific. But I get it. Like, makes perfect sense. People are like, I don’t understand this collapse. I’m like, it’s really, it’s kind of clear, actually, you don’t get it. And then they come up with these complicated, you know, socio economic, political blah. And I’m like, no, dude, this is real easy. No monasteries. And people are lying to you about answers to questions that you could just ask and they’d have them. And it just so turns out that most of the people who are like hardcore science believers have no idea how little science knows. Like you ask them and they think quantum physics resolves something. And I’m like, quantum, have you talked to an actual quantum? Because I’ve talked at least a dozen. Again, I was in Boston, I had access. They know full well, they don’t know this stuff. They know full well, like, oh, yeah, there’s big holes in quantum physics. We don’t care. We’re doing quantum physics, though. It’s fine. You know, they but they know. But it’s everybody else who believes that they have these answers. It’s like you’ve got like, uh, uh, uh, it follows the pattern of like a Gnostic cult. Got like the inside crew and they’ve got the secret knowledge that things don’t actually work. But then we’ve got the stories that we tell the plebeians, you know, that, um, uh, you know, they’ll get your tickets to the wheel in space while they’re while there’s time. There’ll be spandex jackets, one for everyone. Uh, yeah. Well, I mean, just think about a statement like we have to trust the science, you know, it’s like, yeah, think about that statement. Like really think about that. Like what, what were they, what does government official that said that to the nation, you know, from the presidential podium or where the president was to be standing, you know, but where’s the gap, Josh? The gap is no one pushed back and said, you have to know, you have to have faith in God and no one pushed back. See, that’s my, that’s my beef. I’m like, uh, church, hello. However you define it. Hello. Every single person in a position of even minor authority in any kind of thing that tries to pretend to be a church, you all should have stood up and said, no, and, and replaced it with you have to have faith in God. And you didn’t do that. And I think that was a major error, a major, major error. Fair. I have mercy on us. So Mark. No, it’s a fair criticism. It really is. I mean, you know that, cause I, I mean, my mom had the same criticism of some of her native American family that it is very, very like, you know, every Facebook post is about, you know, stolen lands and you know, I’m native to the bone and everything like this, but did they go seek out medicine men when they got sick? Did they go, you know, did they go off and do spirit journey or anything like that? No, they went to their local clinic, you know, which is an IHS government clinic, you know, and thought and wanted, and they all masked it really. Native Americans are actually some of the biggest sicklers that I saw in my area of the masking mandate. Like they took that shit or stuff religiously like that. They, you know, they really, they really like, I mean, it was a big thing. Like, I mean, they, they just, yeah, they really embraced it. And now even these days, a lot of them still go everywhere with a mask on. It was, it was very interesting to watch. What’s that? Victim culture. Yeah. Well that, yeah, I saw that in Washington, DC too. Like lots of folks still wearing that, still wearing masks. Victim culture. Yeah. What’s your highest value? Is it being a victim? Is it being a rebel? Is it being an outcast? Because a lot of people have that as highest value and they see success as a judge for them. And maybe it should be because maybe you’re not as successful as you could be or something, right? And, and yeah, it’s really hard on people, but, but when you can get points by just putting on a silly mask, hey, you know, I mean, I, I, yeah, why not? And those are the same people who are like, that person’s selling out for money. You’re selling out to wear a mask. What is really different, you know? Well, there’s a couple of dynamics going on with the mask. I mean, I’m not for or against masks. I just like respect where people are coming from. I think there’s, there’s a talisman effect to the mask. So I’m, I kind of agree with you there, but speaking from my own experience to people who are Native American, who might actually be in like a bigger family at home and they have elderly people there. So they’re naturally wearing the mask to try to protect their elderly. That was a lot of, because you often have grandma and grandpa living in the house. Many of, many Native Americans are, seem to be, yeah, many of our older natives are affected by autoimmune diseases and things like that, or have, you know, problems with diabetes or anything like that. And so they, they’re very immune, or what do they call it? Immunocompromised, I think that’s what they call it. I mean, yeah. So I tried to be, I wasn’t like religiously wearing my mask whenever I went out. I wear it where I had to. And then, and when my group of friends, I would, when we finally was getting to get together, I would just kind of, you know, go along with what they would, because I wasn’t like pro or con of it. But soon as everything relaxed, I relaxed as well. So, and I’ve got family members who have health issues, my mother and my sister-in-law. So, you know, I’m just sympathetic to that. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, you know, we’re not going to litigate the whole COVID thing. That’s too big for the five of us to handle. No, I just, I wasn’t trying to say you guys are wrong. I would just, there’s another dynamic at all. Oh, right. Right. It’s just, it’s just when I, you know, it’s like, I’ll just give my North Dakota experience, you know, by May of 2020, we opened the churches back up again. You know, we were doing the hand sanitizing thing and like every other pew thing, but we had the churches open. And, you know, by July of 2021, you didn’t see a whole lot of masks left in North Dakota, right? It’s just like, yeah, we did that. We’re just going to kind of memory hole that, you know, we won’t do it again, unless we see like boils on people and, you know, piles of bodies in a wheelbarrow, right? Okay. Then we can lock down, but that, not for a severe flu season. That was just kind of the North Dakota attitude there. And then going to Washington DC and being like, oh yeah, some of these, some of these people are 20, in 2023, in 2023, I go to Washington DC in 2023. It’s like, okay, we’re still doing this. No masks here, right? It was 90 days. And I mean, there were exceptions, Columbia, the city had a mask mandate, but like my town didn’t. So you go anywhere where I am and nobody wore any masks anywhere pretty much. I was after 90 days. And then I got to New England and I’m like, we don’t live in the same country anymore because we didn’t have the same traumatic experience, because they are still traumatized by that. Traumatized. Like, fair enough. Solitary confinement is inhumane punishment. Exactly. Well, that was, that was when I was on Clubhouse, it was Greg Ellis, who’s a semi-famous actor actually, used to correct everybody. When they would say anybody in a room that he was on stage with, when they would say social distancing, he would immediately correct them and say, you mean physical distancing, immediately. And I really learned a lot from that. I’m like, oh, this is very important. And it’s very right up the Peterson line. Don’t lie. There’s no such thing as social distancing and you shouldn’t do that to somebody because that’s evil. What is wrong with you? Don’t socially distance from people. We’re persons connected to other people. We need society. We need to be social. It’s not optional. You go insane without it because, to Pastor Paul’s point, we outsource our sanity. What are you doing? You’re telling people to be in solitary confinement and we know that makes them go nuts. Don’t do that. There’s a lot of dynamics going on, but where’s the discernment? And again, where’s the pushback? That’s what was missing. Are you supposed to trust the science? And of course, almost nobody put, I push back on this because I happen to know for weird reasons, that’s not what the science is at all. I get to trust the science, but you’re not even appealing to that. You’re just lying. You’re just lying. You know there’s zero studies that say that that works. So you know that and you’re saying to do it and you’re saying because the science, that’s not what the science is at all. And it never said that and that’s sort of like, that’s where it gets kind of tricky. And yeah, whenever you’re in an area, you’re going to follow the social norms, right? Like when in Rome, do as the Romans, right? But that’s a separate issue from whether or not you push back. I would pronounce things like, yeah, this is BS and do it anyway, right? Because that’s proper submission. And that’s, I don’t think what people, I don’t think people understand that. It’s proper, I mean, I don’t know. I hear a lot about this story about this guy on the cross. It’s like, it sort of sounds like what he did. He said, I’m not going to cooperate with this, but I am going to cooperate when you, the government says that I got to go in this way, in this horrific way. And like that’s proper submission, guys. You know, everybody’s like, ah, submission is no good. I mean, we got to get rid of the government. We got to fight them. And I’m like, all right, well, you’re definitely not following Jesus then. Like just flat out, like I don’t know what book you’re reading. You’re following Barabbas then. We all have, it’s like, it’s just brilliant. Thank God, writing with history. You can follow Jesus. You can follow Barabbas. It’s, I know you don’t like Bionaries, Mark, but that one seems pretty clear to me. There’s a contrast there for sure. I don’t have the, I got challenged on that by Manuel the other day. I thought it was in real trouble, but he could not break my iron rule of show me one binary. So I’ll have to dig in. You’ll have to really convince me on that one. We’ll discuss it in Charpent Springs. It’ll be great. So what do we do with our Protestant brethren and that like that we see, like with Paul, like, you know, with Van der Kley, like, you know, like you just said in the beginning that when he says the church and when you say the church, you’re talking about two different things. So how it, yeah, like going forward into the next, you know, 100 years plus, you know, do we, do we hope for the continuation of the Protestant church and maybe hope for its reabsorption into an orthodox, you know, some sort of reabsorption into it’s mother church or like, I mean, how does that, I guess like, yeah, what’s your attitude towards that? Because I mean, bottom line is, I mean, we do find good and good people, good, good practicing Christians inside of Protestant, inside of Protestant churches. It’s not as if, you know, the den of iniquity or, you know, that they have, I mean, I guess, yes, or some of them are, I’m sure, but it’s not like, you know, that we, we, yeah, like how do we, yeah, it’s a complicated thing. And Vatican too, which I’m a fan of, gave us some very good tools for dealing with it, talking about how, you know, outside of the boundaries of the true church of Christ, which is a Catholic church, it’s a Catholic podcast, everybody, it’s just how it is. You can find elements of truth and sanctification that are the true work of the Holy Spirit there, which are God’s mercy to his children, because, you know, just because somebody is wrong about something or born into a community that, you know, isn’t right, like, doesn’t mean that God therefore abandons them, but he treats them generously as his own children. And that those, those very elements of truth and sanctification, which are the property of the church, and we’re actually an action of the church, are also, they tend towards unity. That’s what they pull towards, they pull towards the proper unity there. So, we’ve got that theoretical framework, right? And Vatican too was nice, because before that, the common way of speaking about these things was a binary, right, member, not a member. And now we’ve got, you know, you got members, and then you’ve got people who are connected to it, and then you’ve got people who are joined to it, and then you’ve got people who are ordered to it. So, we’ve got, we’ve got a kind of gradation, you know, and different levels of participation. See, Mark, there’s something you can like about Vatican too there. It’s all in Lumengencium and okay, but the question you asked is, what do we do? And the answer is just be a good Catholic, because this is way too big for any of us to actually fix. And maybe that’s not the answer that you were looking for. But it’s like, that has to be the work of the Holy Spirit. And when the fullness of time comes, that’ll start happening. But it’s like, it’s not something that we can just kind of grab onto and make it happen, you know. Like, Pastor Paul, you know, I’m not going to try and manipulate him into being a Catholic. I’m not going to try and badger him. I’m not going to try and scare him or coerce him. If there’s an opportunity for arguments, I’ll make the arguments, you know, I’ll look up some Trent Horn videos and get sharpened up on that if I have to. But it’s… But what is it? I’ve never interacted with him, but or just briefly if I did, you know, a long time ago, but what is, I mean, as somebody as well versed in religion as he is, what is his response to the One True Church? Like does… He doesn’t believe that. He doesn’t believe it. He says there are many legitimate ways to do church. Okay. He had this video. It was a year and a half, two years ago, Why I’m Still a Protestant Christian. That was the first thing he said. And from that first thing he said, I was like, yep, you’re still Protestant. Right. If you think there’s multiple correct ways to do church, then that’s the Protestant idea right there. Right. And then the problem is, you know, so it’s like, what do you do about, right, about the fact that there are Protestants? It’s like, well, all you can do is exemplify what you believe. That’s all you can ever really do. And that’s why the thinky talky stuff for me, you know, is a dangerous face, even though not dangerous for me. I don’t have any problem with these arguments. I usually come out okay. I’m good. But like, it doesn’t help. It actually doesn’t help. But what does help in the process, is exemplifying over and over again, your position. Because, well, I’m going to argue you out of this. It’s like, oh, you’re going to argue me out of something, huh? Bring it on. I mean, I have a blast. It’s going to be great. Right. And I’ve also got the stamina to do it, which for as long as I do, I’m grateful that helps. Because people will, like, they’ll continue to insist things like, well, there must be multiple ways to do this. And so we’re good. And it’s like, there might be multiple implementations of the right way to do it. But there aren’t multiple ways to do it. Like, those are, it may seem like persnickety, whatever, different, but it’s a real difference. But you’re not going to argue a Protestant out of being a rebellious person. Like, that’s not going to happen. But you might exemplify what it’s like to live a life without that rebellion. And they might go, oh, that’s kind of, wow, all these problems that I have that I can’t get around on my own and I don’t have help for because there’s no theologian well versed enough in my denomination at all through time to help me through this. The Catholics don’t have that for neither do the Orthodox. We don’t have that problem. Yeah. No, I guess like I, as I interact with Protestants in that, I guess I’ve just returned to the question of, of like, I guess, yeah, I mean, honestly, I guess the way to say it out loud would be like, what do we have that they don’t? And what would be, what would make somebody, and I guess until you really spent, probably in spent, you know, 40 plus years in Christianity, that you probably wouldn’t, the first for meat, for something, you know, for something more solid, you know, is you get a run out of answers. I mean, one of the things I’ve noticed with, with Protestants when you talk about it’s actually stunning to me. A lot of them are, you know, they’re in their late thirties or their forties or the fifties or whatever. And they’re, and they’re talking about this great thing that they found in the Bible or they heard about from another Protestant. And I’m kind of like, that’s Sunday school stuffing Catholicism guy. You wasted all these years of your life thinking about this thing. It was already worked out and could have been handed to you. All you had to do is accept it. And instead you wasted all that time in your life, wondering and not knowing, not acting correctly because of that knowledge that you could have acted on had you been given it and been willing to receive it. Cause they’ve given people things that doesn’t do nothing. Right? They have to be willing to receive it too. Right? And if you’re rebellious, you know, all the, all the, this is better in the world is not going to sway them. They sway them. Oh, we have this and we have that. I don’t care. I’m not going to receive it. Hope you’re not going to receive it. You know, you’re not going to receive it. And, and, you know, so, so again, it’s back to exemplification, but like the number of times that’s happened. And it’s usually the same sorts of issues too. I’m like, Oh, I know a bunch of Protestants who came, had their little revelation about, Oh, you could interpret this passage of the Bible this way. And that means in Christianity, this, it’s like, it’s very basic sort of first year Catholicism guy. And I’m not a Catholic and I know that like you guys are like, but they spent, but Protestants, literally in their schools, write papers about how evil the Catholics are. And so they’re busy just rebelling and rejecting Catholic doctrine left, right, and center, and making sure no one goes anywhere near it. Because man, if they go near that stuff, they’ll find a better way. And we won’t have them for our little church. That’s, you know, there’s some, there’s some heavy motivation there. There’s a long church history behind Protestants and Catholics not getting along together that danced worldwide. And it’s only within the last 30 to 40 years of my life that things have actually shifted where we’re actually talking together, like on the same live stream. And, you know, accepting that we’re different, and that God loves us. And even though we both believe, you know, we’re the one true church. We’re actually having dialogue with each other and learning from each other. You know, you probably don’t think we’re learning anything from Protestants. But I mean, it’s Paul Vanekley who reached out, because he’s high in openness and started like going, what’s this thing about Peterson going on? And wanting to talk to people who doesn’t, you don’t agree with? You know, I think, I think the Orthodox and the Catholics do have a wealth of information, not only the church fathers, but also a lot of scholarly, theological works done that us, you know, Protestants just did not have access to for a long time. And that’s kind of sad. I think, you know, I’m not going to pretend that I’m right, because I’m a Protestant. But I think I’m right. You know, I just have a real serious mental block without without praying to Mary. It’s just, it’s like, I understand now in the last 20 years, that it’s veneration, not idolatry. I get that. I just still mentally cannot go there. I respect it. I’m not going to criticize it. I’m not going to, you know, say evil or anything like that. Because I’ve learned differently now. But I just, you know, I have certain moral, you know, conscious things about me that prevent me from going to either Orthodox or Catholicism. I probably said that wrong. I apologize. But I think you have a wealth of great knowledge. I think you’re doing a lot of work, you have the infrastructure to do a lot of ministry work that a lot of Protestants don’t have. And because of the ebb and flow, and we’re based on change, and adaptability, we tend to be more fluctuating, we can adapt more quickly. But also we don’t have the same power that your domination has. So there’s pluses and minuses to it all. So yeah, and I’m going to go off camera because my nose is running. So I’ll be right back. Okay. Yeah, yeah, it is nice that we aren’t killing each other anymore. That’s a plus. Thumbs up if you’re glad the wars of religion are over. Valerie didn’t put her thumb up. Okay. No, Mary was a big block for me too. I figured other religions are still fighting. So if we’re not, I still couldn’t put my thumb up. I think what you guys have here is beautiful. And it doesn’t bother me that you guys think that your way is the right way. And I respect that. You’ve got tradition behind you, you’ve got history behind you, you’ve got a lot of stuff going for you. And I could be wrong. I mean, we could all like in heaven, and when the new earth and new heaven get reunited, it could be either Catholicism or Orthodox that we all have to abide by. And we’re like, what? All the first Protestants will have to adjust to that. If I happen to be wrong, I’ll trust myself to God’s mercy. And I’ll say sorry about all the Pope stuff. Lord, I really messed that one up. Yeah. I think there’s a lot of freedom. I kind of agree with Pastor Paul, but I also know that I could be wrong about a lot of different things. That’s why I’m not so gung-ho on the mass thing. I’m not trying to get us back into that. I was just an example of something that I don’t have, my identity is not tied to it. I tried to approach people in love, but I know people on both sides of the camp who are staunchly morally convicted of their belief, and they get prosecuted for it on both sides. Not everybody’s supposed to be a fighter. How many marks could the world really handle? Not even the one, I think. If the world was just filled to the brim with people who are just going to duke it out over absolutely every little thing, nothing would get done. Mark himself will say that if you’ve got a team of seven coders working on a project, one should be really good, and then all the rest of them should just do what he says. Pretty much. Otherwise, it doesn’t work. Otherwise, everybody’s just fighting the whole time. Doesn’t work any other way, guys. I hate to break it to you. It just doesn’t work out. I have some friends who are in computer programming, so I can empathize with what you’re saying. They talk about the ins and outs and the project problems and all that kind of stuff. This guy would have us coding an assembly if he thought we could get away with it. I would make everybody code an assembly or quit. But you have to have leaders. Yeah, look, implementation of anything, anything, is at some level arbitrary. You have to pick between arbitrary points, and you can’t by definition. So that means you have to designate an arbitrary person to make an arbitrary decision so that things can move forward. Without that, things will never move forward, ever. And people think otherwise, but no, what’s really happened is sneaky leadership. And I’m not a fan of sneaky leadership. I think that’s dangerous because other leadership can sneak in too. And then you lose control. And that’s where the snakes come in. And snakes love that environment. Love sneaky leaders. They love that. I’m not quite clear on what this idea of sneaky… It’s the first time I’ve heard it. Charismatic leaders that can just take over because they’re charismatic. I think charismatic is one way, but a lot of people are setting things up and then pretending like they’re not leading things. And it’s like, if things are not being led, they’re not happening. I’m sorry, that’s just the way the world has unfolded. If something’s going to exist, it has to have a telos ahead of the structure, right? Exactly. And so when you have a group… It’s weird. Read the psychology on this. There’s actual psychology, real research papers. I know that’s rare in psychology. Even the scientists have figured this out. Right. When you have leaderless groups, the most psychotic people take over. Period. End of statement. That’s almost always the result. And so you need to take that seriously. And that’s the problem. Look, leadership is a responsibility, and there is a sacrifice involved in being a leader. And if you’re not willing to stand up and say, I have this group and I’m leading this group, there we go. It’s dream leadership. Who’s supposed to be that? Jaco Willis, baby. That’s Willis. Yeah, I was going to say that. I thought that was Jaco. Yeah, that’s Jaco. Just for equal freedom. Right. But that’s the thing. If you’re not willing to say, no, I have a group, there is a group around me, and this is my deep criticism of Peterson. If you’re not willing to lead them in some fashion and say, no, no, no, these are my people, and these aren’t my people, because you can’t include everybody, because then you don’t have a group anymore, then what you’re doing is setting something up for a snake to come in and take over. That’s what you’re doing, because you’re not taking responsibility for what those people are exposed to, because now anybody can expose them to anything at all. I have a question. So what do you think about collaborative leadership, like one or two people? It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work? It doesn’t work. Even when it looks like it’s working, I think somebody’s probably driving the bus. There’s always somebody driving the bus, and the problem is that what ends up happening, so let’s just take the Peterson Sphere project. I have no foot in the game on this one. Let’s just take the Peterson Sphere project. I’m saying, oh, we need this and that on the website. Right? And then what’s happening is Sally Jo and Sarah are figuring out how to make that happen. I don’t have a clear vision in my head. So who’s leading the art? Not me. Thank goodness for that. We would have badly drawn stick figures. But we don’t. We have this awesome artwork from Sally Jo. Now, is Sally Jo going like, you need to set up the website? No, she’s talking about the website. She’s thrilled that the website is there, and every time Sarah does something on the website, because I said, I don’t know, let’s try this. Oh, what the hell I’m doing. Let’s try this. Then she tries something, and she’s grabbing Sally Jo’s artwork and my ideas and putting them into the website. And then I was like, oh, okay, and then there’s a bunch of technical problems, and then that all comes back to me. I’m the tech guy. And so it looks like there’s three different leaders. There’s one person leading the layout and the usage of the art. There’s one person making the art. And I’m not either of those people, by the way. I’m not doing any of that. But it all moves on my time schedule. I’m still in charge of how that gets done and what gets done in what order. Because someone has to be, neither of them are going to do it. And I think they’re probably grateful for that, because they don’t have to worry about it anymore. And I know for a fact, Sally Jo’s like, I don’t have to worry about going in and taking my art and cutting it this way and trying this background and then squeezing it to this level and doing this and aligning it this way, because Sarah is doing all that. And so it looks like this different leadership. That’s because different people are in charge of different things. But that’s not the same as having a leader who, on a live stream just a few short weeks ago that has over a thousand views, by the way, set up the domain. And then in the process of buying the domain, just because he was angry, while on the website, decided, oh, there’s a free web hosting. It doesn’t cost anything. Well, I’ll go set up a website in 15 minutes on the stream. That was all me. So who’s the leader of that project? Well, I’ll give you two guesses and the first two don’t count. But that doesn’t mean that I’m leading the artwork and it doesn’t mean I’m leading the layout. And it doesn’t mean I’m leading the building of the website. In some ways I am. So it looks like it’s this weird collaborate, but it’s not. It’s not because the other two can’t do anything without the direction that I provide. And I can’t do anything without both of them. Anything. You could say, oh, you set up the first version of the website by yourself. Yeah, I had all of Sally Jo’s artwork. It was all just sitting on my machine. She’d give it to me like two weeks before. And I was like, oh, well, this seems like the perfect opportunity to use all this. And I just slapped it up there as quick as I could. Just get something up that looked decent. But realistically, that couldn’t continue. I’m going to sit there and build what we have now, which is looking quite awesome, but it’s not done. It’s looking quite awesome, by the way. And so it looks like there’s multiple leaders going on, but really there’s just people in charge of different aspects of the project. So it’d be kind of like a film shoot. The producer and the director are in charge. The producer is in charge of the director. Everything is like that. Every corporation I’ve ever worked at is like that. Every project I’ve ever been on. And the pop master, they’re each in charge of their domain. And they do the collaboration. Every corporation, every project, every group, they all have a leader and they all have different people with different expertise. And the thing is, and I’m always on the fence with this, management is a real thing. Most managers are terrible and should probably be shot. But management is a real thing and you need managers. And a good manager is worth way more than you think, even if they don’t do any work. A good manager will make people better at their jobs and make them cooperate in a way that you can’t imagine. But most managers are terrible. So, you know, and that’s what sucks. It’s like, you know, and you’re better off having a bad artist than no artist, right? Or you’re better off having a bad artist that will cooperate and deliver stuff on time, which is almost impossible because artists are terrible with time. Then you are having the best artist in the world who won’t deliver on time. You know, and so there’s all these trade-offs and compromises and people don’t like that because we all want a perfect world. But we’re not going to get a perfect world. We happen to live in a fallen world. I hate to break it to everybody, but it would be handy if somebody had written that down a couple thousand years ago and like passed it down and put it in a book or something. LW So what I was trying to do in my mind was I was actually trying to differentiate between a leader who solicits input and advice from different people and then decides what they’re going to do from that. It’s a terrible idea. No, I am a consensus leader. That’s actually what I am. I love consensus leaders. It just doesn’t work because the most stubborn person will get pissed off that their idea didn’t get adopted. And that’s the problem. LW I was talking about actually listening to people who know things in their domains. LW But just hold on. Just look. Who are the most successful business leaders? Do they do that? No, none of them do. None of them. They actually don’t listen to Thunderlings. LW Wouldn’t it depend on the domain and the goal of what you’re doing? There’s a certain amount of like, okay, I’ve got the vision. I’m going to set the vision because that’s what the leader does. This is where we’re going. This is a good thing. You make sure that everybody is on board with the vision. You communicate why this is important, why we’re going to do this. You get the buy-in. You get the belief that this is worth pursuing. Very often, that has to be the work of one person to have the vision there. So it’s not like we can really compromise on that specifically, the vision of what we’re going to do. But there needs to be a fair amount of negotiation on means because I don’t know the exact means of how to digitize Sally Jo’s artwork. How does this work? Are there multiple good options? I don’t know. We need somebody who’s got that kind of expertise. And that’s where the collaboration, I think, would really come in is I don’t know how this works. I don’t know how accounting works. I know a little bit of video editing, but there’s a lot of color balancing stuff that I’m just completely unaware of. And so that’s where I think the very collaborative stuff comes in where, yeah, how do we make this happen? Can we brainstorm ideas on where to get this going? But really, setting the vision and the course, there’s a certain amount of negotiation that comes with that. But eventually, the leader needs to make the decision. And everybody just, even the most stubborn person on the team needs to just say, okay, we’re doing it. I love this book because chapter three is all about that. When you just buy it and read it, it’s really well written, super easy to read, it’ll get you all pumped up. You’ll feel like a Navy SEAL. It’s great. And that’s the problem. That’s what I was trying to say. I apologize. Everybody’s got a good idea and everybody’s got an idea of how to do it. And a lot of concepts come down to arbitrary decisions. And so if you have five people in a room and there’s an arbitrary decision to be made and in software, there is nothing but I can just tell like, I actually know right answers. And I’m like, yeah, it doesn’t really matter if you do it perfectly because there’s five or six ways to do it. And they’ll all do about the same thing. And I’ve been in dozens of these meetings. Everyone’s got a different arbitrary idea, every single one of them. And so having that input is not helpful because they just want their way. And there’s a worse condition, which is more common. And like Steve Jobs is famous for this, listen to his underlings, he basically swore at them and told them to go away when they gave them feedback for the most part. It’s not like he didn’t ever listen to feedback, but for the most part, he would yell at people would quit all the time because he was mean. And he was actually mean. You think I’m mean. You should see some of these tech guys, man. I’ve worked for some of them and they don’t phase me. So I don’t quit. And they love that about me because I just don’t care. But like, man, people will dig in and they’ll be like, no, my way is best. And it’s like, well, but it isn’t. And they just don’t know that. But they’re convinced. They’re convinced that it is. And it’s like, no, dude. And I’ve seen managers try to deal with it with like, just this once, we’re going to let Jerry do it his way. And when the project fails, Jerry will learn. And you know what happens? The project fails, Jerry blames everybody else. And the next time they have a worse problem. Because now, when now you’re not listening to me, and you listen to me once, but you didn’t implement it correctly and had you input. And so actually, Jerry becomes worse, not better. Even though the example that, no, Jerry, we did it your way and it didn’t work. In fact, it was clear. But those people dig in. Because when they’re given just a little bit of a hint that they can get what they want, even if they fail, they’re convinced that if they just had a little more, if they were just a little more in charge. And I have seen more software engineers demoted out of supervisory roles or management positions or whatever, because of that issue. Where once they were given just a little taste, a little taste of influence up the ladder, they became tyrants. And they’re terrible ideas, just ruined projects, ruined entire projects for no reason. And so the bottom line is, you’re not as bright as you think you are. Your input probably sucks. And even if you’re right, it doesn’t matter. Because if you’re right and no one else can cooperate with you, what you want is not going to happen anyway. And so you’re still going to fail. And that’s the problem, is that it’s better to sacrifice and say, I’m not going to get it done my way, but we’re going to get something done. And it’s going to be better than the nothing we’re going to get done if I’m stubborn. And that’s the submission that you need to move forward with anything. And getting caught up on how much people listen to you is a mistake. It’s a mistake I made early in my career, man. I was like, what the hell? Had you guys seen it in computers? I can mathematically prove my answers every time. I actually know how to break it all down. No, no, no, no. You do it this way. These are the things that are going to be… My predictions on computer failures are 100% because I know how everything works. No one cares. And no one’s going to do anything different because of it. Sorry, I’ve done this. It doesn’t work. But when I decide, whatever, it doesn’t matter. Let’s do the imperfect thing the way the most number of people can deal with it and see where it goes. We’ve always had a successful project that way. Has it come out perfect? No, of course not. I knew it was going to come out perfect. But if you can get over yourself and get over the fact that your ideas suck and that you have no influence, then you can build something beautiful in spite of your insufficiency. And that’s a beautiful thing. And despite of everybody else’s insufficiency, because even if you’re right and you’re perfect, without them, you can’t do it. And it’s better to have everybody imperfectly cooperating than it is to have it your way. It just is. And I learned not the hard way. And so what I think you’re articulating there, Mark, well, is you putting your own, putting the goals of the project over your own desires. Right? Like this is worth me having a little back down. Now, Sandy, what’s on your mind? Oh, nothing much. I was just going to say, but do you like GoDaddy over some of the other free websites? I’m currently using Wordpress, so I’m curious. I got someone else doing all that work. I couldn’t care less. I don’t have to worry about any of it. GoDaddy has some benefits. You can actually call and talk to a human being on the phone who speaks English, like naturally English. And they usually can help you. They are a little placey on the domains. I think it’s the pay for the phone tech support. I’ve been with them for over 20 plus years. So on a paid plan then? I’ve never been a page by them. One of the charities that I did a website for originally had a web page builder with GoDaddy. I had to create one from scratch for them. And then we moved it to the web hosting I had at the time. I just basically donated the web hosting to the charity and did the website for free for them. It was a little face library network. They’re no longer around because of COVID, which kind of sucks, but I really liked what they did. I wish more churches would have libraries like the Catholic Church and Orthodox and synagogues. I think it would be a really great thing. I would like to see more niche libraries with more faith, diversity than you can find in a regular public library, which has all the big box, big publisher stuff. There’s probably a lot of witchcraft, but never mind that. Have you been to a Barnes and Noble lately? I have. I’m shocked when I discover that. I’m like, what is going on here? I can get you all a supply of exercise salt for when you go to Barnes and Noble. Just sprinkle it everywhere. People’s feet will start burning. They don’t know why. It’s great. Where’s the witchcraft section? Is it self-help or is it the witchcraft section? It’s actually something about a cult and what do they call it? Like enlightenment something? They’re not even hiding it anymore. I can’t remember the actual title. It’s some innocuous self-help something, but it’s not self-help. It’s some word like it. You can see the books staring at you and you’re like, Okay, this is real. This is weird and this is real. I wish we could put the Christian section right next to it and all the books would just fall down every day and they’d have to pick it up and the books would just keep falling down. Is it this? Esoterica. Esoterica? Golly, that’s just… Yeah. God help them. They need God. Yes. Andrew trying to exercise this conversation with Corgi footage. I don’t think it’s going to work. Yeah. See how’s their moments. My only pushback on the salt is if we discover that you at the same time as offering the free exorcism salt have some kind of clinic that you refer people to to recover from the burns. No, no, no, no. It won’t burn their feet physically. It’s not going to burn their feet physically. It’s going to burn their feet physically. It’s going to burn their feet physically. It’s going to burn their feet physically. It won’t burn their feet physically. So it’s a story, right? It’s a story. This is a priest who was assigned at the cathedral like 15 years ago, right? And they were just having all these problems with people being wacky, people being weird, people being kind of downtown, you know how it is. And so him and the pastor decided that they were just going to do exorcisms over the church grounds like every Sunday night. And he goes around and he’s just sprinkling the side. Oh, man. Oh, man. My internet’s been going nuts all night. It’s like all you guys have been blacking out. North Dakota internet people. All right. Where did I leave off? Don’t get on the sidewalks. Right. And so this priest was sprinkling the holy water on the sidewalks and saying little exorcisms and protection prayers. And he said, he’s just like, and I just had this sense that I suddenly needed to say, let it burn them. And I don’t know why I said that, but I just kept on going, you know, and a few days later, there was some witch out there that was like trying to hex the place, but she couldn’t stand there because her feet were burning. And like the other priest saw it and reported it to her. It’s like, oh, OK, that’s how we’re rolling here. So, yeah. Wow. Wild stuff out there at Barnes and Noble. Yeah. It’s all commercialized now. Yeah. You obviously haven’t been sprinkling enough. No, no, I probably haven’t. I need to be a better priest. I learned some of my best first charismatic stuff from Catholics and Anglicans. It’s like, it’s like, I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a charismatic thing. I think that’s just what priests are supposed to do. I don’t think it’s supposed to be a charismatic thing, but often it is. If you folks who have like a deliverance charism and like, we’ll put them to work, if God’s given him the charism, he wants him to use it. But like, I just when I’m doing it, I’m just doing it based off the authority of my priesthood. And, you know, I just go in there and rebuke the unclean spirits, then have the person. We’re not talking like big exorcisms here. We’re talking we’re talking to little ones. You don’t need special training and special permissions for this kind of stuff. Just like, and then they go and rebuke all the stuff and you should cry a little bit and hopefully the better. My dad was going to do a movie before he passed away from heart attack. And he was in the midst of writing it. We did a lot of research into deliverance ministries. And we watched a bunch of videos by very high up, former a cultist. And he was a very quirky guy. And he was actually going to the lead character was going to be a Catholic priest. And my dad was an actor and a writer director. So he was going to play it because he did a really good Irish accent. And we did a lot of research. We talked with many different people and he was writing the script and unfortunately, but I have a lot of mad respect for people who deal with it. I think a lot of it is just cause it’s main focus is to cause chaos and destructive ties and stuff. And it’s not it’s like, do you need someone who’s has mental foreworth and the spiritual discipline to actually deal with it properly? It’s like your people that you probably have people that go through training and stuff like that. It’s not something to be entered in willy nilly and with false glory. Because it’s scary weird stuff. Yeah, I’ll say I’ve met a number of exorcists, the ones who have the proper training and the delegation from their bishop to do the big gun exorcism prayers. Usually there’s not an ounce of Hollywood in them. They’re actually like usually really chill guys and just very patient because they just like, yeah, you get into this job, you just get screamed at by demons all day. My dad was going to do a very, it was going to be like serious drama, but there was going to be a lot of comedy through the dialogue. And it was going to be like a Christian perspective on dealing with the cult stuff. Everything from aliens to whatever, it was going to be a series. So it’s like everybody chases after it. It’s like, no, you don’t want to chase after this stuff. No, don’t mess with this. It’ll come close to drink the poison. It’ll come to you. Don’t worry about that. Yeah. Does alien stuff always get lumped in with ex-cultism as far as you guys are concerned? I guess it’s a matter of like, so we’re dealing with these beings pure intellect, right? They don’t have any body. They’re pure intellect. That’s both the. Oh, and they don’t like being talked about by North Dakotan priests. Yeah. Every time I try and get into the deliverance ministry, all of a sudden the internet goes down. So you tell me what you think is going on. Only his. Yeah. Yeah. All we call it pure intellect. Yeah. Pure intellect, right? They don’t have any body, right? They don’t have any stable way of manifesting themselves in three-dimensional space. I got this body. It’s stable in three-dimensional space. And so like, I get the idea that all of these alien encounters are actually just demons because instead of people, you know, with their spiritual, like, like middle ages up before, we could say materialism really set into people, they had this sense of these other worldly beings, of these spiritual beings. And so when they would have some kind of a preternatural encounter with them, it would like their whole, their whole cognitive capacity has to make sense of it somehow. And it comes to them like, oh, this was a demon, right? But then we get sucked into ultra materialism where there are no demons, but you still have these encounters with these beings. And it’s like, it has to get squeezed in there somehow. And the only imaginal space that you have is aliens because they’re clearly not human. So that’s a tie off. And then you look at like some of the weird stuff that I think it was like Water von Heisenberg, no, Water von Braun and like Alan Parsons were getting into in the Mojave Desert or the 1950s, where like the science and the occultism was just all kind of blended together, you know, and it’s like, yeah, here we are, here we are. So I think it’s actually pretty natural that they would get lumped together. And, you know, I don’t think we’re going faster than the speed of light ever. I don’t think anybody can. And so, yeah, demons is actually the most scientific explanation. I do have another question, actually. I assume you all know them. They do weird stuff like these people. They always promise you knowledge, right? Like, yeah, like you said, we kind of go back to the Book of Genesis. Yeah. Both you’re promising me knowledge. Okay. I’m like, I didn’t mean to go off an alien thing. I was just talking about my dad’s project. That’s a cool thought. Okay. That’s a big subject. Yeah. No, I, you know, it’s like there’s a whole big thing of like, are there really aliens out there? And I actually read a book by a Christian who’s really badly written. But the premise was interesting that this other alien race actually were better Christians than we were. And they show up on the planet and they’re like, this is where it happened. Yeah, precisely. They wouldn’t eat beef. They only ate fish. It was the only thing I can remember from it. It was like some book I found in some hospital little book corner thing, volunteer. You can take a book thing, whatever. And I’m like, okay. And it was all right, but it was kind of, it was the first book that actually portrayed aliens that actually maybe being Christian, which, you know, most aliens does like they’re coming to invade us and, you know, the only one that didn’t do that was the day’s year stood still. Hey, we can all make fun as much as we want, but there was an F 16 that saw something with infrared camera that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. And the guy was not crazy. He was a F 16 pilot. There’s a couple. He saw a demon, dude. Yeah, he saw a demon. No, like I can go along with that. Like I can, I saw a demon or something, but I mean, it didn’t, if that was a demon, it had a geometrical shape. Like it didn’t have a, it didn’t have a, a. It enhances the air around it’s into a soul. And it just, it didn’t try to interact. It fled. It didn’t, it didn’t try. It didn’t, there was no attempt. I guess if it was a demon, I don’t understand. Like, I don’t know. I, I thought, well, I suppose. When I was 10 years old, I saw one of those cylinder things when we were driving to the cottage. Yeah, you didn’t have seat belts. So I, you know, I looked out all the windows and bounce at me or take my grandparents. And no matter where I looked, it was just a cylinder at the same time. And, and I would say, it didn’t have any particular sense of good, evil, nothing. Their interactions with them seem benign. Demons aren’t all the same. No, I get all that. It’s just that when I, I have family that have gotten involved in the occult and actually, you know, had interactions with some pretty scary entities. And afterwards, literally scared the hell out of them. And they, you know, went running to a church. You know, I know some young girls that when I was growing up that got involved in Wicca and, you know, they, they, they did some things that had an effect in reality and it spooked them. They never got rid of what they were doing. But I’ve seen where their lives have led, but no, I just mean that we, you know, that there, there’s things that are unaccounted for. And I don’t know. I fell down the alien rabbit hole on YouTube a while back, just because I found it interesting and that, but it, there are like, if these are just interactions with demons, like, I, I mean, I don’t, I, it’s a phenomenon, so I can’t really, you know, I wouldn’t necessarily say like, oh yeah, that’s, that’s what it is. It isn’t, but that’s the problem. The question is, what do you label the things that you can’t explain? You can label them aliens if you want, but is the description any different from demons? And I would say absolutely cannot be like, I just, I’m sorry. I haven’t heard of other than the material aspect. We’re like, they’re some of them are gray. Some of them are greens, large heads, small skinny, like, you know, but like, like all of those, and the funny part is the alien people point to this all the time. They point to old texts and go, see, these are the same things we’re seeing. And it’s like, what do you think is more likely? Speaking of things I cannot explain, miracles, mysteries. Sadly, sometimes it’s magic. It could be demons, but it isn’t necessarily. It’s all of the above. Um, one of my, sorry, Andrew. Do you want to say something? I do. He was just going to troll you. Don’t worry about it. Well, he’s allowed to troll me. He’s a callow youth. All right. Hey, Andrew’s a good, good person. He will become a good man someday. I’m sure of that. Um, I was trying to look back at the list. I can’t remember how it was phrased, but you were talking about. Um, in like, I was trying to look up the comments, but, um, Even, even, even if you jump forward, um, from where I was going to reference to where you were talking about, you know, the priest and the holy water and things, um, the mysticism and mysteries and all that stuff comes up in other contexts. And, um, what I’m actually wondering, because it would apply to any and all the context is what, what is your major point or your major stand in any of the things that come up and come to you because we all get excited about things that are out of the norm, but at the same time, when you reference some of these things as when you, when you were, and I think the point that, that maybe Valerie and Mark were getting at too, is that people, people say here is point a, so I want to jump to, you know, point way up here, um, without bypassing any of the steps in the middle. But I want to know when you just simply enter in, I know from my perspective where I’ve been like with the Protestants and the, the, some of the charismatic Anglicans and stuff, there’s a lot of really normal in a lot of things. And you don’t have to go chasing after things that are extreme, you know, just to make a point. What was the major thing that you tell people for walking out your daily life, knowing that things are out there. And I don’t have my local priest to call, but I do know how I’ve handled things. I’m curious. What would be the main Christian virtues things, whatever you guys call the steps of how you want your parishioners to walk out their lives that you would like to see that would hopefully cover the most spaces in this discussion? Pray hope and don’t worry. I like that. My deal. That was Padre Pio. He said that. A good quote is worth a lot. Yeah. Pray hope and don’t worry. That is your homework for the next week. And I have some homework coming up. That’s going to my bed and sleeping. So thank you all for joining in. It’s been a wild ride. We’ve gone all the way from low church Protestantism to the stratosphere in F-16s, chasing after potentially demonic entities. So it’s a wild world out there. God bless you all. Pray hope and don’t worry. Good night. Good night.