https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=1qpm7hDQT6s
Good evening and happy Sunday. I hope you’ve all had a fabulous week. I had the best week possible. I had an amazing opportunity to oversee the dedication of a new church. It is one of the most involved ceremonies that the church has to offer, taking a building and consecrating that as a house of worship. This was the new student chapel at North Dakota State University. They’ve been building it for years now. I’ve had just so many things happen, so many things going wrong. The pandemic slowed things down and supply chain issues and all of that business. And so last night was a great or not, it was Thursday night. It was a great opportunity to walk through this. So they also did us the favor of live streaming it, putting it all out on the internet for everybody to see. So this shot comes from the very beginning of the liturgy. We’ve all processed in as we ordinarily would. And this fellow, Mr. Franzen was instrumental in building the church. And so he got to represent the church community to the bishop and ceremonial handing over of the keys. So maybe we can actually get to the point where he’s handing the keys over. Oh, they switched camera angles. Yeah, he’s talking back there. What happened after that was we’ve got a little soup of water here. And so the bishop blessed that holy water and went all throughout the church, sprinkling both the people there and the walls of the church with that water. And so we skipped forward a little bit. You see, and that’s me right there with the beard. And here’s the bishop going around getting ready to sprinkle things. And that kind of took a while. Coming around, coming around, coming around. Then we get back to the altar and went on with the Gloria and went on with the liturgy of the word. Yeah, lots of things, lots of things going on. So there’s the sister doing the first reading, second reading. There’s the deacon, the deacon doing the gospel reading. The anvil here, the anvil here is not permanent. They didn’t have the permanent anvil installed yet. And so this will end up matching the altar. It’ll be made out of stone and everything, but they just haven’t gotten there yet. And the bishop comes up and he just kind of talks for a while as bishops do. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Seminarians in the background. All right. Now we get up with the real action, right? Oh, when you’ve got a big bishop’s liturgy, there’s two dedicated servers with these, they’re called vimps. They’re basically these veils they wear on their hands. And their job is to hold on to the bishop’s hat and staff, the miter and the crozier. And that’s my new surplus right there. I’m very proud of it. It looks nice. So what we did first is what we had a litany of the saints. And so we called down all of the saints into the church. And the bishop, you know, it’s nice to be on top. You get a kneeler while everybody else is just kind of on the ground here. Then that takes kind of a while. So we got to scan forward a little bit. Yeah, cameraman doesn’t really know what to do with all this. Bishop’s saying another prayer. And then this is a cool part. So here’s our altar. Bishop’s standing there. I’m watching the other deacon. And the other deacon is going to be, I’ll turn this up to double speed because this is the internet. That’s subtitles. The other deacon is bringing over a relic of St. Paul. So we’re going to place that relic of St. Paul underneath the altar. It’s a little chip of his bone. So we’re celebrating mass over the body of one of the barters who happens to be the apostle Paul. Yeah. And then afterwards, a stonemason comes up. We’ll skip that ahead a little bit. Yeah, there’s a stonemason down there. You can’t see it. He’s just sealing up the aperture underneath the altar. Here. Then the bishop comes and he does the prayer of dedication. That kind of takes a while. So we’re skipping ahead, skipping ahead. All righty. And then we get to the cool part. So the bishop has taken off his chasable. So here he’s got his chasable on. He’s taking that off. And he puts on, it’s called a grimiel. It’s basically like a fancy bib. And what he’s doing is he’s pouring oil all over the altar here. You can see that there. There’s four, there’s five crosses carved into the altar. And he is anointing that with the Holy Chrism. The Holy Chrism is a scented oil. Absolutely the best smell in the world possible. Nothing else could beat it. So he’s coming around and anointing those five crosses using, I think, rather generous quantities of oil there to anoint this altar. Yeah, well, come on, hurry up and get that oil away from him. And now he rolls his sleeves up and he just starts getting it in there. This goes on for quite a while of him just spreading that oil out all across the altar. As you can see, he’s still hacking away at it a few minutes down the line. All right, we’re just kind of wiping the bishop’s hands off a little bit. And now we’re taking some more oil off the altar. And there’s four crosses mounted all across the church with candles on them. And so I lead the bishop and the deacon and he’s going to take some more oil. Takes a lot of oil to make a church. And he is rubbing that anointing these crosses on the walls of the church. So we go around the whole church. There’s music going on for this whole thing, but you’re just getting my commentary here. We go all the way around the church and we wash the bishop’s hands with bread, lemons, and soapy water. So just to get all of that oil right off of his hands. I’m standing there looking cheerful as always. Yeah, I grabbed the towel at that point. Decisive MC intervention. And then we put the smoker thing on top of the altar. And it wasn’t as hot as I wanted it to be. So there wasn’t as much smoke as I was really hoping for here. Doesn’t really get going for a while. And so the bishop’s going to load up the smoker thing on the altar. The altar is still covered with oil by the way. We haven’t wiped that off yet because this liturgy just is kind of like that. And then we’re going to get another smoker thing going with this wing on a chain. So you can start to see a little bit of it there. You guys probably have a really bad frame rate out there on YouTube. That’s uh, yeah. I gotta take the hat off. Don’t worry bishop. I’ll get that. Yeah, yeah. Bishop, yep, yep. You incensed the altar now. Yeah, you just need a little reminder. It’s a big complicated liturgy and he had had like a four-hour meeting that day. So I don’t blame him for skipping the occasional details. What he pays me for. We’re going around. We got the smoke on the altar. Going all around. It’s not really coming through on the camera, but there was a decent amount. There was a decent amount there. So still smoking up the altar. And then at this point we loaded up a second smoker thing and we sent both of the deacons around the church and they incensed the people and the walls. So we just, we really just had a lot of smoke going. Bishop told everybody to stand up. There they are incensing the people and yeah, you might think, oh, you know, they’ll just go and do that like normal. Nope. They’re going to go down the middle of the pews. Go make sure that everybody gets good and smoky because that’s how you make a church. So they’re going to come all the way around, all the way around. Meanwhile, yeah, they’re back. So we get the, get the smoker thing off the altar and we get a couple towels and we kind of wipe the excess oil off. Excess oil off the altar here. Be it, be it. William did wipe and wipe and wipe and, and then we start setting the altar. So now we’ve got a, put an altar cloth on, we ended up putting the crucifix and the candles. The deacons got a little confused about which candle was supposed to go where, cause they’re not all the same. So we, yeah, just go, you got to sort the deacons out every once in a while. There we go. Everything’s looking the way it is. And then the bishop takes a lighted candle and gives that to the deacon with a little prayer. The deacon goes, and this was the only major problem we had with the liturgy. There’s a little miscommunication. So this guy’s going to go around and light the candles throughout the rest of the church. And the deacon thought that that was his job too. So I had to, hey, hey, light that candle again. You deacon go, go, go light the candles on the altar. Okay. Here we go. Here we go. We’re all good now. And so we get that going and then we set things up for the Eucharist. Set things up. Yeah, we got lots of bread and wine. We got the gifts coming up. Got the bishop saying prayers. And yeah, skip ahead a lot. And we’re distributing communion to the faithful. Yeah, we’re cleansing the altar, closing prayer. Father Cheney, the guy who built the church, he’s got a lot to say. Yeah, still talking. Still talking. Still talking. Okay, now we’re all clapping for him because he’s been doing this for like eight years. And then the bishop sends everybody home and we all are lined up and we process out. And that is how you dedicate a church. So that was a lot of fun for me. I hope it was fun for you to watch. And now I’ll say hi to Sandy. Hello. Hello, Father Eric. How are you doing? Very good. Glad to hear it. Some of the action looked similar to Anglican, but the names not so much. Yeah, yeah, they tended to Anglicanize the names a little bit more rather than using all the Latin names. But the Anglicans, you know, they know how to do a little bit of liturgy. So I can respect that certainly. Were you Anglican? I thought you were something else. Oh, I was. Yes, and yes. And my family seemed to have taken it upon themselves to practically touch base with most of the local denominations. Little bit of this and a little bit of that. All right. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know how that happened. Yeah, I don’t know how anything happens. Miracle anything happens ever. So that was a very interesting. That’s very interesting event there. I didn’t realize that you would oil the altar. I mean, like if you’ve ever read some of that, you know, Book of Exodus and Leviticus stuff, like they didn’t just use oil, they used blood of an animal sacrificed to anoint their altars. This seems relatively tame in comparison. But I thought that was different. Like I always thought like this type of use of oil would be more like you would see in like healing than in sanctification things. But you’re using it in a form of sanctification. Well, there are three types of holy oils for Catholics. Oh, OK. There’s the oil of the catechumens, which is used in a little bit of a light exorcism to strengthen the faith of those who are coming into the church. There’s the oil of the sick, which we use for anointing people who are ill in the sacrament of the anointing of the sick. And then there’s sacred chrism, which is used for consecrating things. So when we do a confirmation, we consecrate the forehead of the confermandi. When a priest is ordained, his hands get anointed for service. When a bishop’s ordained, his head gets anointed. That whole thing is it’s just messy. You know, there’s no tidy way of doing that. And then, you know, like in one of the Bible books where it’s like running down the hair and the beard. Yeah, yeah, that’s from the Psalms. Yeah. A precious oil upon the head running down upon his beard, down Aaron’s beard, upon the collar of his robes. That’s basically the way it goes when you’re consecrating a bishop. It’s just nice. It’s not just a ser… And then when you’re consecrating an altar, you know, you use a fair bit of oil there. Although not as much as the Greeks would. Greeks use a lot more oil than the Latins. The Latins are a little more reserved, a little more, you know, sparing in their use of symbolism. So. Nice. Yeah, it mimics Christian initiation, you know. Does it really? Baptism. We did a baptism for the church at first, and then we anointed everything. It was a confirmation. And then we celebrated the Eucharist in there. So it was with other things, too. Couple of curiosity questions. The smoke, I have for Indigenous friends, the smoke reminds me of the smudging where you’re, is it for, they would say for cleansing? Yeah, it’s got that symbolism. We don’t, we don’t kind of play it upon us, but it definitely does have that sense. And so, you know, that’s why the people in the whole building would have been incensed at that time. It also has the symbolism of the prayers rising up to God. But instead of sage, we use aromatic saps. Something that blends nicely with the oil. Yeah. Yeah. You mentioned the walls. So they were going to take the smoke down to the people and the walls. Is that what I heard? Yeah. So I told them while they’re going through, they should just go right, right, left, left the whole time. The book says you incense the walls and it’s like, I mean, you walk by, you just kind of swing it in the general direction that gets the job done. And the significance? We’re cleansing the building. Okay. I’m just curious. Yeah. In my, even in the CRC, I hang out with some of the more charismatic people. So when they would be preparing a room for, you know, the prayer teams for a meeting or something, you would pray over the walls as well. Just kind of dedicating the space for, yeah. So that’s what I was guessing you were doing there. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And the walls seem, when you showed the, just sort of the straight out view, the walls seem very tame kind of in a sense. They blend nicely with the stone and the altar, but when they pan out and you got the wider view, then there was the backdrop of the people on the back wall for the, it’s not a freeze, what do you, well, what do we call it? But then the roof also, it almost looked like it was a lit ceiling. Alrighty. So instead of using our imagination, so I’m just going to pull it up here again. Okay. Sorry. No, no, no, no, no, no, it’s fine. It’s fine. Yeah. So, so the, so I’m looking at the majority of the wall space, it’s got that nice tone that the, the tone that the stone altar has. Right. But then when you’re looking into the back, they still got the image, you know, like looking up to have heaven in essence. And then, you know, the, I’m guessing is it the disciples or are those saints? Yeah. So, so we’ve got the crucifixion scene here, and then down here, we’ve got the 12 apostles surrounding the tabernacle. Okay. Tabernacle, the place being where the blessed sacrament is kept. And then, you know, also if we were standing in the middle of the church, they would also be surrounding the altar. And so the, you know, the apostles celebrating the Eucharist with Christ. That sense there. And I like the touch of the blue ceiling. Is it, is it a painted ceiling just with some backlight or is it actually, it has almost the impression of having some transparency to it, being able to look out. There’s these gold or goldish stars on the ceiling. And then there’s a, there’s a light right there that’s, it’s illuminating that and then it’s it’s illuminating that and then it’s a very deep blue. Nice. It’s a beautiful building. They did a really good job on it. I was very pleased. Renee is asking if there’s a Ponto Crador and no, I’m very, very pleased with the way this building turned out. But as you can see, one of our unfavorite things on this channel, the image of the father is back there. They didn’t ask me if they should do that. I’m not a big fan of the images of the father. So there’s not, instead we’ve got the image of Christ crucified, which is more typical in your modern Roman church. Yeah. It’s kind of fascinating. It was, it was. I was, you know, it was, it was a lot of work and it took a lot of energy and I was quite tired afterwards, but very satisfied with the day’s work that I had put in. It was a very, I felt a good thing to have done and honored to be, to have been a part of. How long would the service have been? Well, by the time Father Cheney started talking, it was about an hour and 50 minutes in, and then he went kind of a long time. So it ended up being two hours. Okay. They got a, they got a second homily in there. The guy spent like seven or eight years. Just, oh, looked like an unpleasant job. There was numerous, they actually switched general contractors midway through because their initial general contractor had really messed things up. Oh dear. So yeah, it was not, was not a fun experience getting this church built. And so it was rather a relief and the church was packed. You know, it was a ticketed event. So when you’re, when you’re building a church like that, I would think that the design and not only the design, but also the contractor and any of the construction crew, you want, you want to have people that you trust with that kind of a job, because in a sense, aren’t they also ministering within their trade? You know, ideally, yes, that would be what we would want. And I think the pattern of, there’s some really beautiful churches in the middle of nowhere in North Dakota, right? And you know that they were built by poor farmers. And so certainly in that sense, in that scenario, they are all kind of sharing in the ministry. We don’t have that capability of doing that nowadays. And so we’ve got to rely on contractors. You know, things being how they are, if the guy’s a good at drywall, we’re just going to pay him to put the drywall up and not ask any questions about his personal life. So it would be great if we could have the whole, you know, the men of the church have built this, men of the parish have built this in the wintertime when they aren’t harvesting. But that’s just not how things work nowadays. No. It’s kind of nice to see. I know the Little Reform Church, it’s not so little, I mean, it’s about 400 people. 400 people or 400 families, that’s 400 something. They extended it twice in the 25 years that I was there. So yeah, they really, they did one of those kind of half arc around the podium and the elk. Yeah. Just to get a few more seats in without being too far back from it. So but there are a lot of blue collar people and so they used a lot of volunteer. Good. As long as the people who are, you know, wielding a hammer and saw actually know what they’re doing and praise God to have it be done by volunteer labor, I think that’s actually ideal, is to have the people build the church. They had professionals overseeing the entire process. Sure. Sure. Who had done things before heading the teams, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, you want to have that experience in there too, but having the people really contribute beyond just monetarily, not that contributing monetarily only is bad, but there’s better ways, more rich participation. Some of our people that were able to contribute monetarily could do so because they’re very blue collar construction people who made their money that way. So a bit of a double blessing there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s a nice church. I miss them. I moved away. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what else have you got to talk about tonight besides the thing? And I saw you were talking about how to bless your church. I’m assuming like within the Catholic context you would have not just when you’re doing a new building, but means of blessing the church body of like the people, how the thing can then, you know, ongoing ceremonies as well of sorts. Yeah. I mean, every time we have mass, I end it by blessing everybody before I send them on their way. So that’s, that’s just, I mean, I might’ve got blessed you father, son, and Holy Spirit go in peace, get out of here. Bye bye. I’m pretty sure the local priest doesn’t add those bits. No, I don’t either. I’m just being flippant because this is the internet and I could do that here. I figured. So, yeah. Yeah. And you know, it’s like, it’s like the very action of the liturgy is the blessing for us. It’s not, but we need to, we need to have this started off right and having the whole building dedicated properly. Yeah. I’ve just come in from work. So this is my. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know that I, I had a bit of a, I did the, the Latin mass today, which just takes more energy than the Nova Sordo English mass. And then the, the people wanted to do that addiction and a procession today. And it wasn’t a very long procession, but it was still like an extra 20 minutes at the end of mass. Me carrying the blessed sacrament around and saying a whole bunch of extra prayers. And a friend wanted to go in his Roman soldier outfit to a Halloween thing. So I had to go help him with that. So I feel kind of the same way. You’ve put in a long day. Yes. Yes. Laura is asking what penance would you give to someone who confesses to practicing witchcraft? Never encountered that in the confessional. Yeah, I would, I mean, you can always go with the old standby of asking them to prayer rosary, but I might ask them to, uh, sometime in the next week, attend a daily mass. And then if I were to give that kind of a penance, it would be like, do you, do you have time for that? Do you know when you could do that? You know, make sure that that’s not going to be a burden or confusing them. Cause this witchcraft is, is false worship. And so getting them to engage in authentic worship would probably be a good thing, but I’ve never actually dealt with that. And before signing a penance, you know, you can’t really assign a generic penance to something because, you know, you don’t want to overburden somebody. Wouldn’t that be complicated because you wouldn’t want anything to replicate or resemble anything in terms of what they might do in rituals. In the other context, could that. So when you’re in confession, um, like I’m assuming they’re coming into confession because they’re going to stop. Yeah. Yeah. And that’s kind of the assumption of the penance. Um, that you would that you like by the time they actually get in there and say, bless me father for I have sinned, you can basically assume that they’re sorry enough to receive absolution. Uh, so, you know, I mean, and it’s hard to do this, you know, like you read the person, are they sitting there weeping, you know, okay. Are they just kind of confessing it matter of factly? Just, uh, you read the person there. Uh, my local priest says he would assign the person to recite the creed. Yeah, sure. That would work. That would work. I guess Corey’s been seeing a lot of ex-wiccans interviews and such. Yeah. Yeah. And I would also throw in that if any of the spirits they’ve been commuting with are unhappy to see him go, that I can come in and do a little light exorcism work. Have you done any exorcisms yet? I’ve so there’s a difference between the formal right of exorcism, which you need permission to do, and you need to be properly trained and is not very common at all. Um, versus doing little minor deliverance prayers and exorcisms. So the minor ones, yeah, I can recite those just as a priest, but kind of the big, you know, going 15 rounds in the ring with Satan. I’m not doing that. Yeah, we’ve got a priest who is, he can do it. I’ll do canon law. The witchcraft thing is dramatic in South America. Yeah. The witchcraft thing is dramatic in South America. Yeah. Well, I was, I know somebody who’s was dealing with some of that on the prayer side of it. And that’s why I asked because I was, if it’s an adult who’s just gotten into it for fun would be one context. Whereas if it’s somebody that’s born into it and um, which was the case, I’m just kind of going, have you, do they train you to do that? Or it’s more, you have specific people. So it’s more like, you know, you go in, like, let’s say I’ve got somebody that I’m dealing with. They’ve got a background in witchcraft and the occult. I can kind of poke around, you know, see what’s going on. Maybe they get out of it without any kind of spiritual entanglements. They just make a good confession, start receiving the Eucharist and they’re good to go. That might happen. If the spirits are hanging around and they are, I can detect that they’re causing problems. I know who to call to deal with that. And it’s not like I just drop this person off. But the, the priest exorcist in our diocese would have the more specialized capacity to deal with this stuff. A little bit of extra guidance and I’ll sit there and keep on walking along with them and we’ll go. It’s a weird topic, but while I’m asking, so then do you follow up with some mentoring that would be a little bit more than your basic, what I might get? Or do you need to do that at that point, according to your traditions? Following up with somebody who’s, say, boring into stuff. Oh yeah. They’re probably going to need a little extra, probably going to need a little extra attention. You know, very often people who are delivered from that end up being valuable for the deliverance teams that the exorcists will often employ. So not being alone in the room with the patient, but having a team around praying the rosary, praying with them. Very often people who have been delivered from that tend to be good in that situation. So, so they can get, they can get kind of in the, yeah, I don’t know. I’ve not really dealt with this much. No, I was just curious. So you do actually at times involve intercession and or whatever you would call the people praying. Yeah. Yeah. A deliverance, deliverance team. Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Being alone in the, in the room with somebody is just a few too many. You’ve just got some, some real rock solid people, discreet, find a good solid footing and they, they’re there with the priest. That’s good. Yeah. Yeah. You got to make sure you drive that stuff out. It’s not good after your priest. Yeah. Mark Lefebvre, demon ER, great new TV show. There’s a, I think it’s Monsignor Rossini. He’s one of the public exorcists in the United States. He’s got a blog. You can go, you can go read that if you want. Yeah. I don’t think we need to go put it down on TV. Yeah, we’re good to go. That was an interesting question. Yeah. Yeah. Apparently Laura’s, Laura’s priest is thinking about this out in Wisconsin of all places. She’s kind of near Madison. Those people are, those people are crazy there. All sorts of people’s Republic of Madison, Wisconsin. It’s good to know that not only Canada gets the digs in that way. Maybe we should put it on TV, show what the church is actually doing. Yeah. Yeah. There would need to be a layer of anonymity added onto it. Cause I think most of the priest exorcists like having their privacy because being an exorcist is basically a beacon to all the schizophrenics of the world to come see you. It’s kind of like also on the other side of it, advertising and you know, doing the big brother type show on all of the safe houses for people that need them. It’s kind of like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know there’s a, there’s a, there’s discretion around it. Certainly we don’t, we don’t need to go placing this thing in. Hello, Emma. Hello. Yeah. Oh, Corey. You just popped your guts are all the tough questions, right? Yeah. I actually, I just got done with my, my D and D group. I don’t want to say speaking of the demonic. So now you’re possessed by a demon too, huh? Actually, Father Eric, who posts Final Fantasy music all the time. Do you know what a Tantarian is? No, I don’t. It’s apparently a little like book devil thing. I don’t, I don’t know of devil. It has a, a forky tail, which makes me think maybe devil. But we just met one in our campaign and it might become my familiar. So. Yeah. As long as you know, here’s the thing is, and this is why I like being Catholic is that if you’re in a flat materialist world, you can’t tell the difference between playing Dungeons and Dragons, going to mass and practicing witchcraft. All three of those would be exactly the same. Right. Whereas, you know, you’re a properly formed Catholic young lady, you know, so you’ve got like practicing masses up top, practicing witchcraft is not an option. And playing Dungeons and Dragons is just a silly thing to do with your friends to pass the time. If it looks like I’m looking in Final Fantasy, that thing is too cute. And that doesn’t look like a tail. It looks like, you know, those hand things you can slap against the wall. Oh yeah, it does. That’s kind of. I’m curious, Emma, if you had seen the movie Nefarious, it was kind of big in Catholic circles this past spring. And I, yeah, it’s, as far as, you know, it’s a, it’s kind of a low budget horror movie, but not really a horror movie, like a psychological, it was a little, a little preachy, you know, it’s like, oh, this is a Christian movie at a certain point. But dang it all, if their demonology wasn’t spot on, they almost certainly had a priest exorcist, like basically write the script for them. Oh, you know, I watched an interview with the guy who was involved in making it, I think I never actually watched the movie, which is fairly typical for me. Yeah, yeah. So like the movie was, I thought really good for about three quarters of it. And then like the last quarter kind of fell apart and it became a little too propagandistic. So anyway, as far as I’d be interested to know what you really think of it, Corey, mixed feelings about it being a movie. Yeah, I’d rather people know it’s not a movie for children, but I think adults certainly can handle it. So Emma, let’s be clear, when you have this familiar, is it just in the game? Yeah, yeah. It’s just, it’s just pretend. Cersei the Face Stealer has the familiar. It’s, it’s, it’s just pretend. So I think that’s fine. Yeah. Yeah. Cersei the Face Stealer isn’t actually you. Yeah. Okay. You know what I mean by about the last quarter, you know, it’s like, ah, this is all kind of fun. And why is Glenn Beck here for Pete’s sake? He shows up at the end of the movie. It’s like, what are you doing here? Freaking Glenn Beck. It’s always disorienting when someone famous for something else shows up in a movie. That was- He was playing himself, right? Right. That was probably the worst storytelling part about God’s Not Dead, which is a movie with a lot of bad storytelling. But the fact that they just shoehorned the Robertsons from Duck Dynasty into it, in addition to all this stuff. See, see, they’re just there. They’re not even like part of the plot. I don’t think, I literally think the movie just stops. We have like a five minute clip where like, I’m a in universe reporter is interviewing them for a thing. And so we get to hear about the lives of the Robertsons from Duck Dynasty. And then we go back to the actual plot of the movie. And I don’t remember if it like connected at all. Okay. This wasn’t as bad as that. It at least like when you watch the movie, you can make sense of what’s going on. It makes sense in kind. I don’t think it works all that well, but it- But it’s better than that. It’s better than that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So Nefarious, that movie, if you want a good primer on demonology, I don’t think you could do better. Not in Hollywood, but yeah, it does have some problems qua movie. Yeah. Christians generally cannot movie properly. No, really can’t. And I’m not going to dispute that there. Yeah. So curiosity, would you say that you had that opinion about that movie and demonology in the sense like, is it more important to understand the type of demonology that you see in the typical attempts at horror, like when you’d see, what was it, The Exorcist or something, which is obviously way over the top in a whole bunch of ways in some respect, but also not, because I remember once reading Malachi Martin’s People of the Lie, where it’s much more the in your head in some parts of it. Like I remember this one family with a young boy and sort of the, the way you mess somebody up, not by an actual external demon, but by the evil of your own being. So are you, do you understand the question? I’m not framing it well. No, I’m not following. So is it more a matter of the demonic or evil in general? So basically, like you could think about, you know, everything that demons do as being a wicked parody of what God’s trying to do and what God accomplishes in the process. And so I think demons do as being a wicked parody of what God’s trying to do and what God accomplishes more frequently and more perfectly. So, you know, when a Christian is full of the Holy Spirit, when they go out and do good works inspired by the Holy Spirit, you can look at that and say, well, is that you doing that or is that God doing that? And they’d be like, ah, false dichotomy. It’s both of us. We are cooperating together. I’m using my free will to cooperate with the grace that’s been given me. You look at it, the demonic inversion of that, when they’re tempting you towards evil and perhaps even more serious manifestation of their action. It’s a demonic, is it the demon or is it, well, you know, you kind of gave yourself over to that demon. So, so yeah, it’s the both of you that’s doing this. Yeah, so. Close enough to what I asked. Yes. Sure. Sure. Now, maybe Corey can help me clear this up. Corey, I wondered whether that movie was doing more harm than good though. The theme ended up as ambiguous for exactly what Sandy is saying. There’s danger of thinking you’re safe for understanding it. Is that more of what you were asking? In a sense, because there’s complacency perhaps with certain levels of evil that just seem OK. Like it’s, you know, you do something, but it’s not a big deal. You understand kind of where you’re coming from. And you also on the two things like understand complacency about evil that can intersect with other things, but also that sense of being in control of yourself or something else because you think you know what you understand it a little bit. Sure. So not approaching spiritual combat with the appropriate humility. Right. And not just humility. We think at least maybe not the way we think of humility as being, you know, like having made yourself small. You can perhaps if you think in a humble sense, be wary of being taken over by something stronger. But this is not just not enough humility, but just that sense of thinking that we, you know, like our world, like you said, our world is so full of representations of actual things, but they’re just stories and movies and like the questions you asked Emma. So what is the context? We don’t always stop and say, so what is the context? And does it matter? And how? Yeah. So basically, I don’t know, maybe, maybe there’s a few things. I think it’s good to know what you should be staying away from. And certainly, you know, part of the plot is talking about how this kid was introduced to a Ouija board at a young age, and that was a further entanglement with the demonic. And, you know, the knowledge that these sorts of things which are manufactured by Milton Bradley and market themselves as toys can be if they’re used in a certain way, very dangerous spiritually. I think that knowledge is actually very helpful. It tells you what to stay away from, tells you what to move towards. That was something that was taught to me, you know, just as a Catholic kid, I’m sure Emma, you got some of that too. Like, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you stay away from that, you know, bad news bears. But I actually just had a this weekend, my mother-in-law was in town, we were having a conversation about how much of Halloween is kind of like corrupted by this. So like, the age old can Christians celebrate Halloween question. And like, if say a church has a trunk or tree party, will that lead people into believing all this occult stuff is okay? I don’t think so. That’s not my opinion is, is it as long as you’re clear about it. And, you know, it ends up being a great you do a youth ministry might about demonic possession, which I’ve done basically every Halloween that I was in a parish is like, kids, you need to stay away from the demons, you know, that’d be kind of, it got their attention, you know. Oh, man, this is one time, there was this poor young lady there. And she had Tourette’s. So I had like, read a story about, you know, a child being delivered from a demon in the Bible, you know, and like, right as I got done, she had a burst outburst, you know, it was like, and you know, she explained, you know, it was just it was just like, oh, my gosh, this couldn’t have you couldn’t have timed it better. And a Hollywood movie studio, you know, it was just perfect. So, so yeah, I think I like having kids dress up as Iron Man and eat candy is pretty harmless, I think. And I think if you’re just a responsible parent, you’d say, this is good, and we can do this. And yeah, no Ouija boards, just say no. Well, there’s my opinion. It’s interesting, too, because I hear a lot of families who don’t let their kids read like. Harry Potter? Not even Harry, like, yes, Harry Potter’s on the list, which, yeah, there’s a variety of opinions about that. But I’ve also heard of people who don’t let their kids read any fiction for similar reasons, including Narnia gets smacked with that surprisingly often. Oh, because, you know, the title says witch. Yeah, but it literally it literally has lion Jesus. But but it has a witch and yeah, which is your bad. You shouldn’t read about witches. Aslan agrees. So does the Bible. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s you know, I mean, like, on the one hand, I do get the the whole, you know, overly online Harry Potter fan problem. Yeah, it is, which is my generation, mostly, you know, we’re going to the movies dressed up like a wizard was a religious event for them. On the other hand, I think some people just need to chill. I mean, wizard space Buddhist. So that’s kind of the two main dressing up ones. I think what you’ve got the real thing, the mass liturgy, prayer sacraments, then the fake stuff just isn’t as appealing or you know how to handle it better. Yeah. Funny story, actually, I thought my mom wasn’t allowing me to read Harry Potter because of the like, wizards thing. I asked her about it years later. And she was like, I just thought it would be kind of annoying to hear about. And you’re a very obsessive reader. And I figured I would just redirect you to other things. Your mother has my sympathy. Joshua loved the Redwall series, especially the parts about the monks and their gardens and the food with the law. That was a lot, a lot of times. She had to deal with Redwall for a very long time. So she did not escape fully unscathed, but maybe she thought Redwall would be better than Harry Potter. Yeah, I never talked to my parents about what I was reading. Were you homeschooled? No. Well, maybe that had something to do with it. Is that it? Okay. Corey also loves Redwall in the present tense. He still loves it. I want to retrieve all my Redwall books from my parents’ house, but I do not have room in this apartment. And it makes me very sad. And Mark here is low key throwing shade at you. Lots of people assume motives and are just wrong. He’s talking about you, Emma. Come on, Mark. You know, I assumed a lot of things when I was 12, and I was wrong about most of them. I need to introduce Colin to Redwall. He’s never read it. It is definitely something to read together. We played Root, which is Redwall, the board game, basically. A couple weeks ago. Yeah. Sorry, I’m distracting myself suddenly floating around in the air. I’m not sure what to do. I was watching a movie a couple weeks ago. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, I’m distracting myself suddenly flashing to how much Joshua loved all the Hobbit movies also for the food. It sounds like the kids got a future in the culinary arts. No, no. And he was the tiniest little stick of a thing. The doctor recommended I give $5 to three neighbors and send them off for dinner three times a week. So he’d actually eat things. He was so fussy that people asked me how he lived. I said he draws static electricity straight out of the air. That is his energy. Yeah, not a problem in the Sites household. If you didn’t eat quickly, you didn’t get seconds. And seconds were highly sought after. We used to joke that one of my sisters stocked up on Sunday for the entire week because she would eat pancakes. We would have pancakes for breakfast and then we would usually go out for dinner and she would get chicken tenders. And then she would barely touch dinner for the rest of the week because she was very fussy. We’re having an impromptu Halloween themed stream tonight, Ted. Oh, I’m glad I have a little lighting as I do. It makes me like a tiny bit more spooky. There you go. We’re just looking over the list for songs for the All Saints mass. We’re stoked. We love all the songs for All Saints. We can do the full Proppers. That’s always a treat. I don’t even celebrate Halloween anymore. I’m done with Halloween. Halloween is for kids. Let’s be honest. Halloween is for children. You put the kid, you dress the kid up as a pumpkin, you push him around in the stroller, people give him candy, he’s happy about that. The older kids get to dress up as Power Rangers. That’s fun. What’s adult? I like carving pumpkins. Okay, carving pumpkins. If you’re into the artistic stuff, sure. Go ahead and carve a pumpkin. I’ll just say that you haven’t spent enough time in the coastal cities to understand what Halloween means for grownups these days. They get hammered and fornicated, right? Yes, that’s what it’s for. Okay, I can understand that. They’ll use under excuse for that. Yeah, what time is the paintball game? I need to plan my drive. Mark, let me get back to the game. I think we’re going to be starting at about 1. Darkness comes quickly in November. Oh, yeah. Yeah, 1 o’clock. I am completely stoked at the fact that I get to play paintball with Mark Lefebvre. I’m sad I don’t think we’ll be able to make it. I know. It’ll be great. We’ll have a bonfire afterwards and a good dinner. Yes, Mark is coming. I know. It was a highlight of my week. Mark and Jess both signed up on the same day. I was like, oh, man. I know. So it’s going to be good. I’m pained. This will be the first paintball for Jesus. I know. I know. I couldn’t make Wednesday a travel day. It has to be Thursday. Yeah, it’s fine. We’re working with what we got in short daylight in the fall. Yeah, but it’ll still be good. November in Arkansas is just we just had our first paintball game. Yeah, but it’ll still be good. November in Arkansas is just we just had our we just finally had our cold front come through like it’s actively coming through. We got three inches of rain. Yep. And then it’s going to freeze tomorrow night. So it had been in the 90s this week. It wasn’t quite that warm here. It was actually nice out here, but we also just had a cold front with two full days of rain. Yeah, yeah. So I’m looking forward to resting a little bit more than I had been. So, oh, yeah, because that means that work can finally let up for you. You’re not pushing to get ahead of the rain because the rain is here. The rain is here. It’s like, yeah, yeah, the last place the place I was working this week will probably partially be a lake by Monday because it’s that’s how low down it is. So I was like, it’s do or die on some of these projects like get them done or wait until June of next year. So, yeah. Yeah, no, it’s, you know, Halloween’s funny because when we were growing up, you know, like, totally there’s no religious connotation to involve, and we just dressed up and stuff. And some of the some of the things that me and my brother wanted to dress up as were hilarious. And without getting like immediate disclosure from him, I’m not going to share any of them. But, you know, if you like, come over and hang out with me at some point, maybe I’ll pull up a thing with photo albums and show you. But yeah, I don’t know. It’s a funny thing. I remember going and this shows you how much the world has changed. Maybe I remember going and trick or treating at the local college, like the college students in their dorms would like wanted kids in their trick or treating in their dorm. I’m like, that just doesn’t seem like something that would happen now. I don’t know. I feel like there was at least one year where we did that. It wasn’t actually on like Halloween Halloween. And maybe it was only for like professors kids. But we had I feel like I remember definitely not professors kids. Yeah, I wouldn’t take my kids in the college dorm now. Yeah, good man. Good man. It would depend on the college. Oh, my goodness. But yeah, you can probably get away with Wyoming Catholic College. That’d probably be pretty wholesome. But Hillsdale would probably still be fine. Yeah. Yes. Oh, my goodness. So one year. I was funny on Friday. I had a conversation. Oh, go with your Friday. I’m getting a father. Father, I Halloween story. Yeah, yeah. Oh, I was gonna say I was working with there’s a guy that I do tree work with and just funny little bit offbeat guy really loves spending time with them. And he was like, you know, I just had this realization. He’s like, it made no sense. It makes no sense to me that people are like getting into the spirit of Halloween. He’s like, what kind of a spirit are they trying to get into? Well, I was like, I mean, that’s about right. The spirit of funny costumes and candy. That’s fine. Funny costumes and candy is fine. Anything else is Yeah, you know, like decorations. He couldn’t trick or treat beyond a couple of neighbors because of the razor blades and the candy. I was told that some people want to sacrifice kids to Satan on Halloween. I’m sure there are some. They’re really getting into the spirit there. Child sacrifice there. What do you think about the razor blade thing? Yeah, that was that was still floating around when when I was a kid. It wasn’t my parents, though. It was like one of my friends who would try to freak us out. He’d be like, yeah, dude, you got to put your you got to put the candy bars in the freezer before you eat them. I don’t know how that would have helped. I think about it like as a kid, I made sense of that. Yeah, if you freeze it like you’ll know that the metal is in there. I have no idea. But like, yeah, you’re just trying to Well, the thing is, is that, you know, the the satanic panic days, you know, the moms were actually right. They were just not pointing at the right things and saying that it’s bad. The society was really starting to collapse. But but they were they were they were putting all that energy into the wrong things. You know, they needed to be censoring children’s television and controlling elementary school curriculums. Yes. Yeah. And I think they did in those days. It all started to fall apart with Ren and Stimpy. Did you all did you all listen to that conversation between Jonathan Peugeot and Mary Harrington? This would have been like three months ago, maybe that one was fascinating for Peugeot. Like, I think that was a conversation where started. They were talking about conspiracy theories. And Peugeot basically said he’s like, yeah, I think I think people generally like when you see these crazy, crazy conspiracy theories, like there’s lizard people that have taken over the government and are controlling the world. He’s like the fundamental intuition is that people are going to be like, You know, these, you know, demonic and satanic rituals and child care systems. And it’s like, I mean, maybe not. But like exactly what Father’s saying, like there’s this intuition that all of a sudden we’ve had some bizarre shifts in the way that they we treat our children and we’re offering them, giving them over to these things. Maybe, you know, the altar of set or things like that. And so when I hear, you know, I had a fascinating conversation with a guy who’s really into conspiracy theories a couple of weeks ago, and it was like, it’s funny. It’s like if I put his narratives on a certain plane, I’m like, man, I completely agree with you. Like, you’re telling me that, you know, when we look at public space, we’re like, we’re not going to be able to do that. We’re going to be able to do it. And it’s like if I put his narratives on a certain plane, I’m like, man, I completely agree with you. Like, you’re telling me that, you know, when we look at public figures, they’re not actually the ones that are calling the shots and that they’re generally like figureheads for these things and that like all the information that we’re getting is like highly filtered to fit certain narrative patterns. And that the interest of those who are actually in power are not at all aligned with the well-being of everyday people or for the flourishing of human virtue. I’m like, yeah, like all that sounds like totally dead on. You lost me, lizard people. Well, right. And then I look, you know, the conspiracy theory that I’ll buy, the conspiracy theory that I’m most likely to buy is the one that conspiracy theories are put out there to get people to think like to dismiss crazy ideas like that. That to me is like the one that I’m most likely to be like, yeah, that makes sense. Like it’s a decent sort of like an inoculation against the fact that there’s anything other than sort of like the game that’s being presented. Like I totally buy that. I totally buy the fact that you’re like, well, you don’t want to be like one of those QAnon lizard people. Like, no, I don’t want to be one of those people. Just like follow the current thing. Yeah, it definitely functions that way. It certainly functions that way. But I feel more like it’s if people don’t know what to do with. Wow. Don’t know what to do with the story. Basically, it’s like they’re noticing the pattern of what’s happening. And they’re trying to come up with a story to explain it, but they don’t have enough sophistication to to map that into like proper, you know, human behavior. And so it ends up becoming outlandish. Do you think do you think that there’s also just a component of the fact that like, say, we’ve like lost the vocabulary for things like the notions of, you know, principalities, things like that. And so that we end up in these sort of like, yeah, this is 100 percent a flat world phenomenon that I’m thinking of. Yeah, yes. Wait until let’s see if Mark being goes in with flat world bingo. Yes, he did. He got it. Yep. It goes on the market. Bingo. Once you start noticing the flat world, you can’t stop noticing the flat world. Like all of these people are two dimensional. Yeah. You’ve got to come up with like a groovy talking head song style, you know, living in a two dimensional world. But that’s the but that’s the problem. Right. One way to think of it is the materialism crushes the world down. And then I mean, I use this example in one of my maybe all of my conspiracy videos, probably. Right. If you think the world is rational and you think people are competent and you think that they have intent like upfront. Right. So you’ve got intent. Their intent was formed by rationality and their competence. So that means what they what they intend is going to get enacted. Right. And you think that power is politics. Right. If you think those things together, then the only conclusion, actual only logical, reasonable, rational conclusion, and you only have those three tools because you’re a materialist, is that those are people around the White House. It actually technically has to be true at that point. Well, because like like, yeah, yeah, Biden is not doing things that are going to forward him being president for very long. Like, there’s no question. And this doesn’t it’s not just Biden, right. It applies to lots of presidents and not all of them, which is also interesting. Right. Clearly, the party is supporting things that he’s doing that aren’t good for the party’s long term political survival either. Right. That there’s no disputing that everybody kind of agrees about that. Different people have different excuses. But the people who see all of these things together will say who can hold it all together, realize, well, if they’re rational and they’re intentional and they’re competent, then what they’re doing is serving something that I don’t see. And the thing you don’t see are the lizard people. Obviously, Ted, like, come on. And so therefore, the lizard people theory is actually the most viable theory to a materialist. For real, scientifically, mathematically, the best explanation. You’re killing me, Mark. You’re going to go wrong, by the way. When I go to work and I look at all the destruction in all of the places that I tidied, folded and hungry, hung clothes and stuff, and I come along and things are just like inexplicably like food hidden under and in between folded shirts, because you don’t want to drop it off at the cash on your way out, even though you changed your mind. Now, you know, I’m going to walk through all of the departments. Something else happening. Like you dropped it off and somebody dropped clothes on top of it. Like, you never know why things happen, right? You have to reverse engineer it. But when you flatten the world to materialism, it doesn’t work. Like the material explanations don’t work. So you’re re-enchanting the world. Like conspiracy theories are just bad re-enchantment at the end of the day. That’s really all they are. It’s like, oh, no, no, no, your re-enchantment failed because you can’t account for the right thing. If I happen to walk around just chanting lizard people all day tomorrow, it’s this. You’ll know why. You’re in a material world. I’m going to entertain myself. Isn’t that already a song material world? Probably. Yeah, but it’s not the right band. I think Father Eric’s got that nailed. Like that is the song we need right there. And David Byrd needs to be the one singing it. Absolutely. Well, no, I think you can pull it off, actually. I think you should do it. I think you should do it. Father, put it together. We’ll get you in front of a small crowd in Arkansas. I was just thinking that. Two of us thought that same time. We saw signs in Wonder and Gino. We’re going to see Father Eric perform material world in Arkansas. Do it. Oh, man. There’s an interesting other component to that. I remember coming across this idea, which is that at some point in the 20th, late modernity, we had this switch in our notion of when really big things happen, like war. It’s the big three. It’s war pestilence and famine. It’s always been seen as something that comes down from above. It’s bigger than you. Those are things that happen to you. At some point in the 20th century, we all just basically collectively decided that no, it was someone’s fault. As though we were sufficiently in control of the world, that if there was a disaster or a disaster, if there was a disaster or war or a famine or a plague, someone, particularly someone in the government, messed up. I think that that’s like the other side of the coin. Because when you don’t, if you assume the things that you’re saying, Mark, which was competence, intelligence, intent, and something else. Competence, intent, and rationality. Competence, intent, and rationality. Then when something bad happens, it’s because someone meant for it to happen. It was someone’s fault. Then we start looking around and we’re like, who got us in this situation? It’s a really different, well, you could go in about six different directions from this. I think that’s an interesting flip side to it. When you, again, are talking about flattening, it’s not just about causality, it’s also about blame. You also need to assign blame to things. No, no, blame and causality are the same thing. But when you flatten the world. You’re so right. Blame is negative causality. This is why I push back against the word modernity. I wish you’d never use it again. And everybody else. Because that’s materialism. Because materialism flattens the world. And then what do you lose, Father Eric? What do you lose if we’re trying to get back? Oh, final causality. Yes, among other things. But also time. Right. You lose four causes. You go to single cause. And because you only have six. Well, either way, right? If you flatten time, final causality is not a factor. Because there’s nothing in the future. So you can’t have final causality. Or that could go the other way around. You flatten time and now time can’t exist. It doesn’t matter. It’s reciprocal at that point. It’s irrelevant which came first. But that’s the flattening of the world. And so the time flattens, the causalities flatten. Right. That’s why I think every time somebody says modern or modernism or whatever, I’m like, no, that’s a misuse of language. I have a whole video on that, by the way, on Navigating Patterns. But what you’re really talking about, what you’re actually saying, is materialism. In every case. I have yet to see a case where somebody says modernism, they’re not actually describing materialism or flattening as the result of materialism. I have a few questions on what Corey just said. Is it possible, do you think that, do you think that some of that is, you mentioned earlier about we don’t really know what to do with story. And we especially don’t know what to do with, like you were saying, the big narratives. Is at least a portion of that, of all of the, like we started out looking at movies. Now, story and movies probably have a villain in them lately. There’s always a good guy, a bad guy. There’s always a villain. Like, are we starting to look at things in terms of single causality because that’s the story we’re learning to repeat or is that just a coincidental side? It’s not coincidental, but look, the bottom line is we’re told we can do these things by ourselves. And the fact of the matter is you can’t, you’re too stupid. Like you, as in every single human, like we’re told we’re individuals who can understand the world and the portion of the world any single person is able to understand, no matter how high their IQ is, is vanishingly small. It’s not even worth talking about at some point. And so what happens is we’re trying to understand these things and then we make mistakes, right? We make mistakes like, well, obviously if you don’t pay your taxes, the IRS is coming after you. Now, anybody who’s looked into this realizes the IRS publishes a document basically outlining how many people it thinks are cheating on the taxes in the US, okay? It’s 58% of taxpayers. That’s taxpayers. They don’t count the people who aren’t paying taxes that they think should be because more than 50% of the US population doesn’t pay any taxes at all. I bet you didn’t know that. We have a very graduated tax system, it’s extremely fair, maybe a little unfair. But the point is if you think the IRS is going after those people and cheating their things, you’re wrong. The IRS draws payouts, a handful of people per year. It’s a tiny number. But we squish the world and go, well, the IRS is going to come after you and take your house. And it’s like, that’s never happens. I want to move to the States. My ex got three years of we’re going to take you to court and throw you in jail. And then the CRA came and banged on our door. They were going to take our house. Canada is a much smaller country and so it’s a much bigger danger. Okay, so it’s proportional, danger is proportional to that. Of course it is. Yes, that makes sense, I’m just playing with it. That’s why you care about your local government and not your federal or regional government as much. Because the local government will take your house way quicker and it’s way more likely to happen than if it’s the federal government. That’s the good news. And that happens in the States. If you owe your state money, you’re screwed. If you owe the federal government money, you get 10 years. And you know what? You’ll get an abatement. Because they’d rather take something from you than have to try to take your house. The state, the state actually, because they can turn it around quicker, they’d rather take your house and get all the money. So you’re left. Like there’s all these little details, but they’re not little. And if you understood those details, you’d be like, oh, I see why this happens. But when you don’t understand the details, the only option you have is you don’t pay your taxi. I risk to take your house. No. So I want to go back to the notion of the thing about understanding final causality when you’re trying to interpret narratives. And obviously it gets harder the higher up you go in terms of how many moving pieces there are, how big the story is. And Corey’s comment about that, his strength is great, because if you read some of the literary criticism of it, one of the things that’s interesting is that people frequently, like one of the main criticisms is the main characters apparently don’t do anything. Right. They’re kind of just there. And then these huge events sweep through and they like watch this conflict between good and evil, these good and evil angelic beings resolve in front of them. And like, I mean, that’s to your point about, Mark, to thinking like the story of like we can we can get it done. We can do it. And that’s in that idea of strength is like against that narrative form. Right. Because it’s saying it’s not about like the one person who shows up and like cleans house for the good guys. And then that’s the end of the story. You know, it’s not it isn’t that kind of movie or is or book. It’s like there are things at play that are happening that are so big that like you’re a pebble in the avalanche. But in no way can you be said to be like the one who made it happen. So actually, I really like that. And then I was thinking about it was also thinking about final causality. And one of the reasons that we tend to abandon final causality, I think, is because it isn’t it’s much less discreet, say, than material causality. Right. Say particle collisions. Those are relatively discreet. We start talking about final causality. You start talking about you start to talk about about everything, basically. And so this is why Job, I mean, one of the one of the ways I think to say what I love about the book of Job is that it’s saying you can’t just give up on final causality simply because you don’t see how it fits together. Yes. Well said. That is also clearly in there. Yes. Yes. Yes. So that’s that’s I mean, I’ve said that in other ways, but to put that in a particular language, which I like in terms of the notion of like moving, moving this sort of loss of Aristotle’s Four Causes. Why might you do that? I mean, I think Job, you could read Job as a picture of as a story about the the virtue necessary to maintain final causality in a world in a world that’s not currently resulting for you into obvious causes. Like it’s actually a virtue issue, which is interesting. It’s faith. It’s faith. Well, yeah, it’s the ultimate issue of faith. You’re having faith that Jesus is going to come back again. Yeah, yeah. Well, right. Yeah. You right. You scaled up. You scaled up. You scaled up. You scaled up. And then you get to the book of Revelation. Right. Revelation is essentially saying one. So one way to articulate what was going on in Revelation and God have mercy on me for my my me giving full explanations of the book of Revelation. But it’s basically saying in the end, it all fits together. In the end, it comes together. Right. Like it does actually cohere. And this is, you know, one of the things that I think people love about the Brothers K is some of Dostoevsky’s more say, faith statements about how in the end it all fits together. Like there’s this thing that could happen at the end of everything. That would be what is Yvonne says something like so beautiful and so precious that would make up for everything that that ever happened. That’s basically saying like there is a way that because the weird thing is that final causality works backwards instead of forward. Right. Right. And so you that’s probably another reason we don’t like it. Now that I’m just like musing on it is because when you have full causality that moves forward, that’s something that you can possibly control. Right. This is why we like the coefficient of material causes. You can manipulate them. Right. Formal causes. That one’s a hard one. Final cause. No, get out of here. There’s no way you can do that. It’s happening in the state. That’s coming out of the future. That’s coming out of how things end up. And so how could you possibly you can’t control that. It’s it’s it’s controlling you like it’s working like those things are working on you. But it’s not it’s not even controlling. It’s worse than that because we live in if you’re watching my Twitter the age of gnosis. And so right. There’s a thing between control and no control called knowing. Right. And if we know we don’t have to have full knowing, but we have to have some knowing or some understanding or some information about. But the end of the day, Job is very much about look, there’s a bat. He doesn’t know anything about the bat. Right. And so he’s subject to something. He has no information about at all. At all. He has no information about this. He has no knowledge of it. He has no understanding of any of the things that are going on, not just how they started or how they’re happening, but how they’re unfolding and what could come next. What could not what is coming next. What could come next. He doesn’t know. And yet he’s like, you know, and all the naysayers come to him. I know what’s going on. You screwed up. And he’s like, no, no, that’s not what’s going on. What we’re thinking is his own faith in some sense. And that’s what and that’s what kind of keeps him going. Sure. Right. He doubts whatever. But like, ultimately, that’s what’s happening. He doesn’t doubt enough for God to lose the bat. Exactly. Well, that’s a good point. Yeah. Yeah. That’s why it’s handy to have read it. I haven’t actually done so. Yes. I’ve done a lot of just extrapolating the contents of this ancient poetry based on what other people have said about it. And I don’t think it’s poetry, but we can we can discuss that at the convivium. Yeah, we were. In fact, yeah, yeah, well, it would be good to work that out. Like, is that actually poetry? What is what is non poetry? What is poetry? Right. It was we didn’t get into it. You see, but I wish we would have. Yeah, I just want to. That’s what I wanted to ask about what Corey is asking about. Yeah. A pair of faith. They’re how you connect to the highest. The one that’s actually running those things. So I was going to ask this kind of in a visual sense, because when Ted and Mark were just discussing that the phrase, you know, about how God knows the end from the beginning, I actually saw that like standing at the beginning and watching the end draw closer because you already see it. But we don’t get to see God standing behind us looking ahead of us. We just have to kind of follow the wave of getting pushed forward as if we’re moving towards it. But he also sees it as moving towards him. That’s what I kind of was seeing when I was listening to them. But is there even is that what the prayer and faith is getting at or what is that? That’s a very interesting image that you had. And I don’t think it’s wrong, although I also don’t think it’s complete. If it was complete, I would be gone. Yes, it might not be helpful. No, that would be my concern is it’s not helpful to try and think that way. Sure. I mean, I think what’s helpful about it is the fact that God sees the end and he’s planning the end. That’s very helpful right there. It’s like, no, this this isn’t all just chaos. This isn’t all just flying to pieces. Being is still good. And the outcome is all good. The prayer, you know, is always thy will be done on Earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. So, OK, I want whatever it is you’re planning, God, which I don’t have to know about. I don’t say thy will be done exactly how I specify it, according to these five development goals and our vision statement that came up from our planning committee and our visioning our visioning committee. You know, no, no, no, no, it’s just look, whatever it is that you’re doing, I want that here on Earth where things are messy, where things happen slowly, where things happen imperfectly. I’d like that to be more like it is in heaven, where things follow your absolute command. And just give me the bread for today. Just just enough for today. Sufficient for its own day is its own evil. Do you think some instinct about this idea of a final cause is why time travel stories are popular? That’s re-enchantment. Part of it. Yeah, it’s all it’s all re-enchantment. Bad re-enchantment. And connected to this. I found out that Out of the Silent Planet got written because C.S. Lewis and Tolkien agreed that one person should write a space travel story and one person should write a time travel story and they flipped for it like they flipped a coin. And Lewis got space travel and Tolkien got time travel, but Tolkien can’t finish anything ever. So the time travel story never really happened. Okay, except that Lewis worked on it, Emma, and it’s called The Dark Tower and he wrote about six, five chapters of it and it is insane. And like, it’s crazy. If you ever get a chance, I mean like it’s completely unfinished. He’s not even he’s not even finished introducing it and you can tell like he just kind of like just gets more and more bogged down in this concepts. But like some of the stuff in there is absolutely wild. I’m not going to say anything. I would recommend if you can get a hold of it. I don’t know where I found it. I remember reading it in a print house online or in a book or somewhere. But yeah, it is weird as all get out. No, so I have a theory about I have this other theory about why time travel is so popular now. And I’m curious what you guys think about this. So one of the guys I met in Chino, Matt Wyden, he and I talk occasionally just, you know, just like the two of us. He was he was bringing up he asked me if I had any idea why so many of our inventions involve spinning things like things that cycle like why are so many like technical things things that cycle. And I was chewing on that. And to bring Louis up again, he talks about how things that are embedded in time because to be in time means change. The closest thing you can get to a steady state is to cycle back between certain like two different conditions. Okay, so I thought, well, one thing is, if we’re going to try to is you’re going to try to change fix things in place. Then you can’t do that because because things in time change. So what do you do? You cycle things. That’s the best way to get something like fixity, which gives you assurance of what the future is going to be like. That’s one. The other one is I started thinking about it and like we’re actually not very you think it’s like, okay, there’s space and time, but we’re actually not really limited by space. Like you can get anywhere on the world and you can get anything from one place in the world to the other. It’s just a question like cars are not about conquering space. Cars are about conquering time. I could walk up to say North Dakota. It just take me forever. What a car does is not give me the possibility of getting to North Dakota. It means I can get there when I want to get there. And so I was thinking about like and the other thing is that we can do all the sort of manipulation of space. We can I can pick something up and move it over there. I can move somewhere else. We can rearrange things spatially. No one can control time. Time moves forward. It doesn’t stop. You can’t speed up. You can’t slow it down. And so like we’re deeply beholden to time in a way that we’re not in space. And so I’ve got this I’ve got this idea that at least subconsciously we understand that like ultimately like as creatures, it’s time that reminds us of our creatureliness all the time. And so time travel stories do one of two things. One, their fantasy about controlling time or two, they remind us that even if we could manipulate it, that we’re still I mean like there’s the whole like time travel goes wrong. Like that’s one of the time travel stories. Right. You try to manipulate time and then you find out that you’re still not free and you’re still caught up in these crazy loops and and and all this. So so I think that I think time travel stories have worked out is this realization that it’s ultimately like time that reminds us of a creature. I don’t know. It’s a it’s kind of half baked. But I’m just been something I’ve been chewing on. No, that sounds right. So time, if you squish time, you end up with something cyclical. Like the most you can squish it. Right. But also time is the enemy because your your accidental death may exist in space, but your actual death definitely exists in time. Like you can go nowhere and you’re going to die anyway. I think I’m I’m trying to buck the trend. Odds are not good, but you know, I’m going to give it a shot. But ultimately, right. You’re trying to escape that. And and and that you’re right. I mean, in a way, space has been conquered. Right. In a way, the thing to conquer is time. And once we’ve conquered time, our master time with our super science thing, then we’ll be fine. Right. And that that that is the struggle. It’s kind of the last it’s the first and the last struggle in many, many ways. Right. The first struggle is the first time we struggle with it is resolved with something like an eschatology. Right. Once you abandon eschatology, how are you going to struggle with time? Well, with travel. Right. And and and what is it to see because you haven’t gotten away from space because you call it time travel. You travel in space. You don’t travel in time. Time happens. First of all, you don’t do anything in time. Time happens to you. It’s definitely. Yes. Right. Yes. That’s that. Right. You try to materialize it by saying I time travel. So I have the control over the time, even though it’s obvious that you don’t. But this is all flattening of the world stuff. So it’s your intuition. I think is dead on, especially with the cyclical nature that that would that that that really nails it. Because if the machine runs in a circle, you finally know what it’s going to be like. Right. Yeah, you can predict it. You can predict it. You turn it into a sine wave like we love those sine waves that that sort of thing. Look, you know, it’s going to be here again. It’s going to be here again. As an aside, for those of you who haven’t seen it, one of my my probably the best time travel film ever made is a movie called Primer. Have any of you seen this? No, I’ve heard it’s really good, but it’s also just an absolute mind blower. Yes. Oh, it is. It is so crazy. It’s like it’s not even that long. It’s like 90 minutes long. It’s this guy right out of film school, low budget film, very well done. Very it’s very tight. Like it’s very tight. And you’re watching it and it’s this cool time travel movie for the first half of it. And then there’s this there’s this there’s this twist in the second half of it. And it just goes so far off the rails. I mean, it’s it is one of those films where I’ve watched it like I’ve watched it probably 12 times. And every single time I watch it, I realize like that there’s more layers to the thought given to this narrative. And in terms of like the idea that time travel is working out the fact that we belong to time and not the other way around, even if we can manipulate time, it does just such a it just does such a beautiful job of showing that it’s like, oh, you think you’re the one of the drivers. So anyway, primer gets a high recommendation from me. I’m a yeah, I’m on it. How does it compare with like Donnie Darko, which plays with that time in a different way? Well, pro and pro very, very different. Prophecy is also playing with time. Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s a great point. That is I mean, like the edifice myth is also that’s the exact same thing where you’re like, oh, well, now we know what the future looks like so we can get away from it. Right. Like, that’s not how the future works, actually. And it’s not how prophecy works in the Bible. Right. Like, you’re going to go to you’re going to go and tell the city they’re going to be destroyed. And then God’s like, hey, well, look, they did the right thing. I’m not going to destroy them. And it’s like, wait, no, no, no, you told me that you were going to do this thing and you didn’t do this thing. What’s up with that? But the purpose of the prophet in some sense is to change the course. And you could say it’s to change the course of time. It’s a little sticky. Right. But the Bible shows you that’s not the relationship that you have. And it is this idea that you can touch on it earlier. Like, oh, if we understood it, if we knew it, if we could predict it. Right. Because this is I always ask people why they want to know stuff or why that’s important to them. Right. Because the answer is almost always because I want to control it or change it. And it’s like, yeah, that isn’t a good reason to know something, because there’s lots of things that even if you knew them. In fact, it’s most things, even if you knew them, you couldn’t control them or change them. Right. And so it’s kind of like, you know, what why would you want to know why, you know, why Ukraine got attacked by by Russia when it did? And that is a useless piece of information, even if it was obtainable. And and and the pieces of information that make that that particular fact up were understandable by you. And there was only a single interpretation that could be possible. None of this is realistic, by the way. Right. What good would he do you to have it? Like, what what would you hope to unlock from understanding something like that? Because it’s it’s pointless to know because it already happened. You ain’t paying. So I’ve been working on this idea with that and sort of the whole the whole job thing and the whole like the sort of the fact that we’re always in existing in the middle of a narrative, which doesn’t mean that it’s not a story. Doesn’t mean that there’s not final causality, but it is hidden. And like we’re in job and I’m a way of defining wisdom is wisdom is the set of things that you could do that would have been the right thing to do, regardless of the future outcome. Mm hmm. Well, yes. So wisdom is not a prediction. Wisdom is a set of actions that don’t require prediction about the future. Right. Well, they don’t they don’t rely on the future at all. Actually, it’s funny. I did. I took a note about to that effect today. But you know, Ted, this is very useful. You gave me a super good insight. Right. Which is basically where the middle out thinking comes from that everybody’s doing. Everybody on me thinking, by the way. Of course, I do. I’m going to go through the video and everything is is that is that compression? Right. Because you’ve lost final causality. And so now all you have is middle out thinking because we don’t have we’ll call it a religious framework that’s coherent enough with an eschatology to put things in. And so the only choice you have at that point as an individual, which you’re not, by the way, but if you’re trying to be, it is middle out thinking because you don’t have access to anything else. You’ve you’ve basically done away with all the before things that are in religion and all the after things. The eschatology is in religion. And now what you’re left with is middle out thinking. And then you can come up with all kinds of weird formulas. You can start calling things blue churches and you come up with wacky frames, wacky, wacky, nonsensical frames. You’re using a bunch of words that I’ve never heard. I was about to ask. I’m not sure. I’m not sure. I know what middle out thinking is. No, I’m looking at. But I have a question, too, and you can put it in before or after this. When you were talking about prophecy and change, I was going to say charting the future, not changing the future. What is the difference between charting something and changing it? And you can kind of jump over that question. But you’re not. But but but. If you’re supposed to go to the city. Good point. And yeah. And tell them because you’ve been told by by the creator basically, right, that they’re going to get destroyed because they’ve been bad people. Right. That’s effectively right. And then first thing you do is now I’m not doing that. And then and then you then you get told you get shown right. Participation with why that’s a bad idea. And you really need to go to the city. Right. And then you go to the city. Right. And then you lay it out for them. Look, guys, you’re all going to die. That’s what the big guy says. It’s all over. Sorry. And then that doesn’t happen. That actually does not happen. Right. And so you’ve charted it. But it didn’t happen because it changed. Right. But it changed as the result of the message, which means signals matter. And then if you want to think about middle out thinking, I’ve done this. I got to find the Chris. I talked to Chris Peck out a couple of years ago, maybe three years ago now about this. And he actually got it. And I think the example that I used is if you think of the Lord of the Rings. Right. And you start the story at the Council of Elrond. Right. So everyone’s there. They’re all together. That’s a reasonable place to start the story. Right. Like that’s totally understandable. Oh, hey, guys, look, we got this ring. It’s really bad. Everybody you know what this ring is. Right. And they’re all like, oh, yeah, we know this ring bad. We got it. We need to have a different one. Guys like, maybe we can maybe use that. Oh, I mean, maybe, you know, we could just use that ring. Right. Because you don’t have the context, hopefully of the habit, but but also of all the events that happened before that, you’re missing a bunch of things. Right. So the first the first couple of big things you’re missing is the call to adventure. Right. With Peterson would say you’re missing the changes in the character. Right. Because four of the four hobbits have already morphed into something bigger than they were. Right. And so you’re also missing that layer. Right. Because you’ve got Hobbiton, which is a nice, peaceful place, and they’ve never been involved in these silly councils. And most of them are like, yeah, maybe elves are real. Maybe not. Who cares? Right. They don’t even like maybe the elves are real. Maybe the stories are true. But like, really, like, we’ve got we’ve got pipeweed and like, when you go away, like, it’s it’s harvest time. I get lost. Right. But then these four hobbits are like, oh, you know, like, oh, all right, we’re going through this transformation. And and without seeing that, there’s no way Frodo and Sam could make it to Mountain Dew. Because you haven’t seen them. You haven’t seen the potential for change in them. Right. There’s no way the ring is scary because the ring rays didn’t come and try to get it. Right. And oh, by the way, that extra enemy that you didn’t know was on the board called called Saruman. That didn’t happen either. Right. Like this is this is all happens before to set up the story. Right. And then the heroism of the hobbits taking up the ring. Just hasn’t it still can still happen. But it’s a totally different flavor. And the story changes completely as a result of starting in the middle. Right. It’s not the same story anymore. And when you don’t. And this is why it’s creation denial. This is this is where this is the part that Ken Ham actually has. Right. It’s just when you don’t start at the beginning at creation. Right. You end up with strange ways of thinking about the world like time travel, like, you know, infinite space travel or space travel that leads to time travel because you’re in suspended animation. Right. And all these weird sort of confusions between space and time confusions between causality. Right. You compressing the causality down. Right. All of these things are, you know, it’s clearly middle out thinking. And when you’re stuck in middle out thinking, you can’t really understand when people make ridiculous contradictory statements or you brush it off and excuse it. I mean, this is this is my this is my contention against the Christians is they just brush off and like the Verveki doesn’t mean that. It’s like, no, no, you meant exactly what he said. I don’t know why you’re giving the benefit of the doubt. Right. And you meant and Pearson too. Right. Like all of them. Basically, you missed it. You missed it because you’re giving them benefit that they don’t deserve and they’re not asking for. Right. And isn’t warranted like you shouldn’t be doing that because they’re telling a good convincing middle out story. Right. Because they own the narrative because we’re postmoderns. We own the narrative. Right. And then you’re trying to agree with them, which is, you know, good Christian thing to do. But you’re agreeing a little too much and they’re not really going all the way back to something like creation. Right. That’s why Verveki gets into this trap and Peter does to some extent. Right. They get into this trap of what’s a reciprocal relationship. It’s like, well, maybe it is now, but it didn’t start as a reciprocal relationship. One of those things came first and the other one came second to support it. And that whole concept right there is key to community. Like, you need somebody to start the thing so that other people can participate in the thing. Once that happened, it’s reciprocal for sure. Right. In most cases, most healthy cases. Right. But if you don’t do that, then you get the idea that things just emerge magically and you don’t need leaders. It’s like, no, you need a leader to start and it may not be the leader may not stay the same. Right. But you need a leader to start the thing. Otherwise, the reciprocal relationship can’t start. So I’m still back to the original. If I’m going to where you’re saying, so I’m going to give an example of middle out thinking. What if you start the Lord of the Rings at the place where and I forget what it’s called, but where they’re all becoming the nine. And what flashed through my mind was the word texture and the way in which you can see the characters either too thin because they have nothing on nothing that fills them out or like the name. So I’m sorry, but the the the sun, the one sun that dies, I think it was Boromir. I think it was Boromir that was one of the first that you can actually see. You can actually see there again, I’m just going to say texture, the texture of his being, his existence, the history that’s behind him that we have. If we only start at that point, we have nothing. So therefore no context. All you see is this thinness of what the heck’s going on. Whereas if you know that bit about the ring, you actually see like the pieces that fill in and it becomes this bigger thing. That’s what I’m not following all the examples, but that’s what I heard you describe. That’s right. No, no, that’s dead on. That’s depth. That’s characterization. This is when Critical Drinker criticizes modern movies. He says, yeah, there’s no character development. That’s character development. Character development is the thing that adds texture to a character so that you have handles like like the thing that I like about Frodo and the thing that Emma likes about Frodo is probably not the same thing. But if Frodo is a flat character, then the number of people that can find something to like about Frodo goes down. And this is the same reason why having a large hierarchy and more than one handle into the religion, like I don’t know, let’s suppose all you had was a book. And then let’s suppose that instead of just a book, you also had symbols, right? Icons you might call them. And let’s suppose you had symbols, icons and tradition. Now that would give you, we’ll call them three dimensions or axes of of handles, multiple handles on each axis to get into the religion. And then once you’re in it, you have the same dimensionality of ways to stay in the religion. And so a religion with a large hierarchy and a long tradition that still embraces symbolism might be a better religion for more people on average statistically. Right. So the funny part is all this stuff works in the material world, but not all the material stuff works in this world. Right. Like the ethereal world is so much bigger than the material world. So, yeah, the ethereal world can contain the material world and all the stuff that works works that direction, but it doesn’t work in the other direction. We really are time with that because for baking says reciprocal. So, Mark, I think you’re missing the most powerful argument about your middle out thinking in Lord of the Rings. And I think if you started at the Council of Elrond, you’d be like, guys, Boromir is right. True. We should use the ring. Right. It’s like, why wouldn’t you? Because when you start at the beginning, you see how treacherous the ring is. Right. The ring tried to get Frodo eaten by the tree. The ring like when the ringwraith was there, Frodo could barely keep it off his finger. It was like f***ing with his desires. You know? Right. Well said. And then when Bilbo was on the weathertop. And Bilbo trying to give it up. Yeah. Bilbo trying to give it up. When he was on the weathertop, he gave in to the ring. Boy, that didn’t end well for him, did it? He ended up getting stabbed. Spoilers for Lord of the Rings, by the way. And so if you don’t have all of that context to know that, no, no, listen, guys, the ring is evil. Nothing good comes from that. Well, it corrupts. You’re going to think that Boromir is correct. Of course we should use the ring. You’re right. You’re right. Yeah, I didn’t think about that. But there’s lots of, yeah, there’s lots of- Sure, we can do a three hour stream on that and not cover the half of it. But you’re right. The fact that it corrupts is, the fact that it corrupts and that it is an agent of evil and that evil is seeking it to expand its sphere of influence is also all stuff that happens before the council. Correct? Correct. Yeah, I didn’t think about that. You also don’t get Gandalf being established as like a completely reliable and trustworthy and wise character who is utterly terrified of the ring. And good. And good. And good. Yeah. And good. And good. And the same for Strider because he’s still Strider right up until that point. Yeah. So I would suggest that the reason that say things like Peugeot and Roland’s universal history stuff is so popular is because it’s the antidote to middle out culture. Right? I mean, that’s like what universal history was doing. The universal history is grounding. I mean, the term that I coined is historical grounding for a reason. Right? And so that actually worked. Like when I came up with historical grounding for everybody, they went, ooh, that’s really interesting, Mark. And then I had to try to explain all what I was talking about. But yeah, when you ground the history, you have to connect it to yourself. Right? Which is what they’re doing. They’re giving you the history and connecting it to yourself or your culture or whatever it is. However you want to say that. That’s actually really important because time happens from the past to the future. Right? And the past is something you have a known quantity of or a known facts about where you can stand because if you don’t know your history, you can’t stand there properly. Right? Or strongly enough or whatever. Right? And then the future can be faced with faith because you have that stand. Like, well, all my relatives survived and they were related to Alexander the Great or whatever. However you want to go with that in the universal history narrative. I mean, but there’s a second aspect too, which is interesting that history didn’t just happen, that history happened particularly. I think this is the one that we’ve lost. This is when you saw universal history transition to modern history. Modern history is not about connecting yourself to actual lineages and cultures and people and works of art and all this. It’s about developing a form of scientific analysis of cyclical patterns, which goes back to the point earlier about trying to discover cycles so that we can control things. That was the idea of history. You look at history so you can control it. In fact, universal history is here’s how we know who we are. That’s a completely different question. Right? Knowing more and knowing how to control things. Yeah, completely different things. Well, are you dying to say something over there? They did it with the heavens too in astronomy. Right. But that’s the interesting thing, Ed. You know, these are useful streams. You and I should just hang out for a month. Like, no distractions. That would help me greatly. No, I think that’s a really good insight. Right? Like, that’s what fights the domicile. Right there. Like, I think that’s what fights the domicile. And the domicile is not physical material, which is where Breveke makes a grave mistake. But the, because I was always puzzled because he gives this narrative about Alexander the Great and the domicile. I was like, why? First of all, his history is wrong. Like, we’ll just push that aside. His history is totally wrong. I’m like, no, that didn’t happen that way. Right. But also, it’s the spiritual domicile. But universal history fixes spiritual domicile. That’s what he does. Well, look. Okay. Okay. So, Mark, two weeks ago, Cory and I went on this pilgrimage in eastern Oklahoma. It’s only been, it’s only 50 years. And you go and it’s, I mean, it’s just totally awesome. And he and I are going to do, are planning on doing a video about it. You know, once we’ve had some time to process it, it should be really good. Ties in with a lot of the stuff that we’ve been, you know, people talk about here. And but one of the things that’s interesting is, first of all, a bunch, all the young men there are just singing like Irish and Scotch rebel songs. Right. So all these people who are that, you know, they’re like the great great grandchildren of Irish, the Irish and Scotch. They’re just like singing like, you know, stuff about how like, you know, sticking into the black and tans and things like that. And then you’ve got all these people who’ve got like, they’ve got they’re like, because a bunch of people, they walk with flags. So it’ll be like, the flag of the Austro-Hungarian, like the Habiburg flag. Or, you know, the flag of the Irish, the Irish kingdom or whatever. And then you have even more awesome. You have things like the Texas flag that instead of the star has this most sacred heart of Jesus on it. And you’re like, oh, cool. Yes. So so so what you see, what I see there when I look at that is, is that there, you know, there’s these people who are have basically said, we’re not doing this whole this whole thing, this whole project of downside. And in fact, we realized that to quote Richard Wolbers of Richard Wolber poem, love calls us to the things of this world. And so for instance, being a faithful Catholic does not mean that I like burn the past down or just learn from the past to realize like, that I’m a child of it. And so to be the child of a family does not mean to even especially a broken family doesn’t mean to turn aside from that family, but it means to redeem it. And so then you see this fascinating thing of these people coming through and it’s like, yes, like, I don’t want to get rid of Texas. And it’s like, you know, tied, you know, you can see Texas and how it ties into, you know, all the early American stuff and the settlers. But then even before that, you know, the Spanish coming over and from the span, you start working your way back and you’re all the way to Rome and everything like, and you get all the way to like, 2023. It’s always Rome and Troy and and and you and these guys are actually there’s a guy that I was there. He had a cap on it said, Oklahoma Roman. I was like that. So Ted, what I what I heard you say was that they’re on this pilgrimage, right? Yeah. Marching their history into the future. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. All righty, guys. Yeah, and here’s the question. Yeah. Why is it Roman, not Assyria? Nobody knows Assyria is, and Assyria is the enemy, right? Like explicitly in the Bible. Nobody knows who Assyria is. And Assyria is the enemy, right? Like explicitly in the Bible. I just, I don’t know. Like, why was it Rome? I love Rome. Are you just looking at ancient empires and trying to figure out why this one? Yeah, kinda. No, but Assyria is the enemy in the Old Testament, right? Which story was it? Because Vandu Klay talked about this. Oh yeah, Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom in 722. Yeah, but Assyria is like frickin’ evil, man. They were brutal, they were just mean bastards. You did not want to get conquered by them, yeah, 100%. Right, but Rome, see, everybody talks about the conquest of Rome. I’m like, did you read any Roman history? Rome very rarely conquered anything. What have the Romans ever done for us? But like, so Rome in Spain, for example, and Portugal in that area, right? The fights that were going on were not the Roman legions coming in to conquer. People don’t know this. It was half the Spanish going, we want Rome, they got cool stuff. And the other half going, no, we want to stay evil barbarians. And then Rome’s going, well, these people want to be us, so we’ll kind of send them some help. That’s actually what happened. It’s kind of a serious thing, and it’s not until you get to Carthage that we get real, and then Caesar blows that all apart. And then there’s all this debate over, because really, Caesar was just like, oh, here are the Roman friends who need help from the barbarians in roughly Germany or whatever region we want to think about it, right? And then he does go too far, like by all accounts, he definitely screws up, right? And then does something very un-Roman. And then that’s why crossing the Rubicon is different. He’s like, man, he’s kind of been un-Roman so far, maybe he’ll be un-Roman again. And of course, ultimately, he’s super un-Roman by becoming the first dictator emperor guy for Rome and basically dissolving the power of the Senate, right? And doing away with what little republic they had at that point. Which is odd to think about that Caesar’s the bad guy in some sense and the good guy in another sense, right? So it’s that whole thing. We don’t understand. Some of these empires in the ancient world were conquest-based, but actually Rome largely wasn’t. There you have it. Mark, I’m going to get fired for talking to you. I don’t think you’re wrong necessarily, but I’m going to get fired for talking to you. Who’s going to fire you? I apologize. The department? You’re going to come work for me when I’m the pope and you’re going to help translate things. Yes. Cool. I don’t even need Greek for that. We’ll take care of you, Emma. We’ll find something for you to do. Just run out of the vote. Just pull out and translate it from the Vulgate. Yeah, Mark. It’s actually interesting. The Incas apparently were also a trade empire. They weren’t a conquest empire. You had some of those, let’s say, more Assyrian-like kingdoms and political structures running around on the Andes, the west side of South America. But by the time the Spaniards showed up, the Incas had taken over the entire Andean corridor just because they knew how to build and grow food really well. And so they kind of just bought everyone out, is what they’ve been able to tell. But then before that, you go down in the desert by the coast and you dig out the clay pyramid and you look at the murals on there and they’re like worshiping the decapitator spider god who’s depicted as cutting off 10 people’s heads all at once with all of his legs. But that’s the Mayans and the Olmecs and the right, those are the southern, those are the guys in South America. The Incas are inheriting some, a completely unknown legacy, by the way. There’s a culture we know nothing about that came before them. And they’re like, yeah, we don’t know who built that cool stuff, it wasn’t us. But we kind of stole it all and took it over. And you see that theme in Stargate SG-1, by the way, which is hysterical to me. You know, because they reference all that stuff. But all of a sudden, ooh, they took over a technology that no one knows where it came from effectively, right? And so you see that theme. But yeah, if you want the nasty Native Americans, which are South Americans largely, man, those guys, they conquest. And it’s nasty. The Mayans were more peaceful than the rest, but there was still no, there was no pleasure crews being in the Mayan society either. I mean, they still sacrifice their own children and stuff. Whereas the Incas, I mean, they probably did some of that, but nowhere near the scale of the guys in the South, in the Amazon jungle. Yeah, there’s some crazy, yeah, that’s a whole other topic to defend. But there is, yeah, there was some crazy stuff going on there. And you’re like, dude, this is stuff just like, what was that back when I would watch Marvel movies? Dr. Strange, the first Dr. Strange movie, when the villain is like, he’s like, no, no, no, you’ve been deceived. Like the bad guy really wants to give us good things. And Dr. Strange goes, come on, man, look at your eyes. Like, look what happened to your eyes when you embraced this thing. It’s like, obviously he’s evil. And I felt like there was several times when I was down in Peru and they’d be like, no, you know, they weren’t really that bad. Like the people wanted to be sacrificed when they were doing these sacrificial slaughter games. And I’m like, look at the murals. It’s a spider cutting people, giant spider God cutting off people’s heads. How is this not evil? If that showed up in a Marvel movie, it would definitely be the bad guy. It would totally be the bad guy. You’re not going to have the good guy spider God cutting people’s heads off. That’s not how reality works. Right. Kali, nobody thinks Kali is a good God. Kali is basically a spider humanoid that cuts people’s heads off and disembowels them. It’s always the spiders, isn’t it, Mark? It’s always the spiders and the snakes. Spiders and snakes. It’s always spiders and snakes. It’s always spiders and snakes. It’s weird. Oh my goodness. Y’all, this has been really fun. I’m going to pop out. You know, I think we’re going to wrap it up actually. But we managed, you know, we started off happy and then we got kind of macabre. We got a little happy again and then we ended macabre again. So I’m glad we managed that. Good Halloween stream. We brought in the terrifying fighters right at the end. So there we go. Alrighty. Good night all of you. In conclusion, Cartago, Delenda Est. Z. Zeke. Good night. Good night. God bless you all.