https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5I27sdCfEVk
My dear, you all my do adore, As by these bare shadows, Shaper nothing more. See, Lord, how thy stories blow, The eyes near a heart, Lost, all lost in wonder, At the God-gloved. See, touching days, see, Our energy see, How sands trusty hear, That shall be me. What God’s so’n best story Take o’er truth I do, Truth themselves speaks truly, For there’s nothing true. We will cruise with the sailboat, Till highlight, On the cordial seas. To stand above, In evolves a picture, O Lord, have mercy on us. Have mercy on us, O Lord, and have mercy on us, O Lord, and have mercy on us, O Lord, and have mercy on us, O Lord, and have mercy on us, O Lord, that borders the 1942 war and whose world the nations have met. %o Jesuob, my Lord, you have sent me below I be sleep’d in spare and be what I first foresaw. Someday to-day’s gone be, face to face in light, And be blessed for ever with thy glory, son. I be sleep’d in spare and be what I first foresaw. I be sleep’d in spare and be what I first foresaw. I be sleep’d in spare and be what I first foresaw. Mozart’s Requiem Mass is a… Well, you don’t have to be Catholic to appreciate it, basically. I mean, if I had a dollar for every time I had to sing… What is it? Oh, it’s gone, but it’s the famous one. It’s a choral piece. It’s been set for all women, all men, soprano, alto, tenor, bass. What is it? I’ve sang it so many times. I can’t remember it, but anyway, choirs sing it all the time. This is going to bug me now. Talk about something so I can think about it. I am not up on my church music. Oh, somebody in the chat, tell me what the famous one by Mozart is by. Anyway, how have you been, Jacob? Pretty good. Kind of busy. I’m trying to finally clear out this office and move. So, this is my last month in this office. And then you’re going to be moving into another rented space? No, actually. So my new apartment is much larger than my old one. Oh, wow. Portable. Yeah, yeah. And so I started a master’s degree. So I’m doing that and kind of winding down my insurance business. COVID really changed how people buy insurance. Used to be most of my clients were people who wanted to just, you know, talk to somebody. They didn’t want to do internet. They didn’t want to do on the phone. They actually wanted to sit down and talk to somebody about their insurance. And then with COVID, everybody was like, I don’t want to actually sit down and talk to anybody. Yeah, I remember that. Oh, boy, let’s not do that again. Yeah. So. So now you’re moving on. Are you going to miss insurance? Lacrimosa? Is that? Is that? That’s Latin for tears or crying. Can’t remember which. No, it’s. Ave verum corpus. Behold the true body of Christ. OK, there it is. Found it. We can move on. Yeah, insurance. I mean, I’m kind of an insurance nerd. I can I can talk about insurance like and put you to sleep. But yeah, I mean, it’s been getting kind of. Like one of the things I liked about my job was I was I felt like I was really helping people and making their lives better by helping them with their insurance to some extent. The insurance market has become less crazy so that more people like. So when I started, it was Obamacare was just starting out. So some people were really being screwed over in ways that I could help guide them out of. And that’s become like buying too much too much insurance, not enough. Both that both of those happen. People buying more expensive insurance thinking they’re buying something that they’re actually not buying at all. People making selections. So the biggest. The. The one story that makes me feel OK, you know, I think I did a good thing in the world. There was a couple who he couldn’t work anymore and he had diabetes and she was working two jobs to try to support them. And they they were at their wits end and they came to me and I changed his insurance around. And the next year. His wife was just sobbing in in happiness because I was saving. I saved them something like a thousand dollars a month. And yeah, and she told me, you know, we were borrowing money from our kids that obviously we thought we would never pay back. She was working two jobs. She she was able to give up her part time job and now ends were meeting and she told me, you know, some months we would buy insulin and some months we would buy food. And like that just like really hit me, you know. But first of all, I mean, the price of insulin and the craziness of insulin over the past few years has has really come down partially because of some things that the government did. But also, I mean, just in general, people just have better information about the insurance market and the price of insulin. And while Republicans hate to hear this, Obamacare has really, really improved health care in the United States in ways I don’t give Obama or the Democrats at all credit for. I don’t think they understood what they were doing. But yeah, but I’m only on for a few minutes. And I wanted to ask you what your thoughts were on Martin Luther and the exchange between John Verbeke and Jordan B. Cooper and all that stuff. You know, I thoroughly enjoyed that that conversation and I’m glad they barely made it to the end. And all that stuff, you know, I thoroughly enjoyed that that conversation and I’m glad they barely talked about Martin Luther because I feel like Dr. Verbeke was able to draw just the best parts of Dr. Cooper out and Paul Van de Klaay to Pastor Paul. And, you know, it’s like, what exactly were they going to accomplish if they were just going to, you know, throw fists over Martin Luther? So, you know, I mean, obviously I’m Catholic and in the Catholic story Martin Luther is a bad guy who had a few good points. Right, a bad guy antagonist. That’s all I mean by that. And yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. It could have could have been a whole lot of things. But I feel like the fact that they just talked about what they had in common, shared interest in the meeting crisis and helping people out. I thought that was a much better conversation than it could have been. So what do you think, Jacob? Well, I’ve done several videos on Martin Luther and stuff. So Martin Luther, I would agree with you. He was a bad man with some good points. Ultimately, like, I think God knows what he’s doing and he didn’t decide to strike Martin Luther down at any point, which so God knows what he’s doing. So God had a purpose for for having Martin Luther around. But, I mean, did you did you watch the back and forth between between Vervecky and you know, I watched I watched one of Vervecky’s videos. I did not watch any of Cooper’s videos, so I don’t really think I can I can assess it basically. Yeah, I mean, I so. In the videos I made, and I don’t expect you to listen to hours and hours of my videos on on Martin Luther, but. I think it’s really important to recognize the role of saints, which I think, unfortunately, too much of Protestantism. Just they they deny that Martin Luther is in fact one of their saints. Which would have kicked him off to hold that position for them. Well, yes, but that should explain why. I mean, unfortunately, his theology is is very problematic. And Laura came on to my channel when we had the discussion. And she she like she told a lot of interesting things about how, for example, well, this was somebody else, not Laura, who said that priests on Halloween would not. Well, priest pastors would on Halloween dress up as Martin Luther, and they had a statue of Martin Luther at her church, not in the sanctuary, but at her church. And, you know, people would tell stories about the life of Martin Luther and stuff like that. And, you know, it seems to me that this performative contradiction that a lot of Protestants have in turning, making people who themselves were very anti saints into saints like John Calvin and Martin Luther. I think. It’s not a minor point of theology. It’s and that’s why on my channel, I’ve kind of been hammering at that. And I think John Breveke also coming from a very secular point of view. Sees the destructive nature of this theological mistake. And so that’s why he’s engaging in this battle over Martin Luther, which he I think very obviously doesn’t want to engage in himself. But yeah, the conversation that they had, it was a nice conversation. I was glad it was a nice beginning conversation. But ultimately, I think Jordan B Cooper is somebody who like he says on his website that he’s trying to bolster the Lutheran identity. And as long as that Lutheran identity includes Martin Luther himself as a sort of saint. I as a Jew cannot be okay with that. And that’s just me from a Jewish standpoint. But I also see John Breveke from seeing the destruction that the bad parts of Luther’s theology has wrought. That’s why he’s engaging with it. And I think, again, like the Catholic Church, hopefully, I don’t know that much about it, but you you once gave, you know, a lot of the things that the Protestants were criticizing the church for. And you were saying how the church has, in fact, responded to those criticisms. And I would love to see the protest. Yeah. Yeah, that’d be great. That’d be great. We got a little anecdote here. The plural of anecdote is data. I grew up in the CRC and nobody talked about John Calvin, the man. And that’s, you know, that’s also my anecdotal observation of reformed theologians is that every time Calvin comes up, they’re just talking about the institutes or catechisms or something like that. So I know you’ve got a few mild and quietly and almost shockingly embarrassed statements that you’ve made about John Calvin, which we need not reiterate here. But, you know, it’s kind of like the influence of St. Benedict on the church. There’s some legends floating around about St. Benedict’s, you know, like him performing great signs and wonders and those sorts of things. But we don’t really have much of his personality in the same way that we would have like the personality of Augustine or St. Jerome or something like that. And what’s really remained is his rule, the rule of St. Benedict. That’s like that’s like kind of kind of our only pathway back to him. And so I think the reformed tradition’s got a much better handle on the branding thing and they’re more, but they’re more consistently iconoclastic. Whatever we were reformed, reformed tradition, you know. They are, but I think at the same time, once you’re calling yourself a Lutheran or a Calvinist, it creates a certain connection to everything that was that person’s life, which, you know, people defend the killing of Servetus because they are Calvinists, because that’s one of their saints. And that’s a normal thing for people to do. Alvinist Cadet Corps. That’s, that’s a, that’s awesome. Calvinettes. Yeah. Calvinist Cadet Corps. Yeah. Did you get an, I only have a few more minutes, so I wanted to ask you, did you get a chance to watch my discussion with Father Stephen DeYoung? Not the second one. I saw the first one. I mean, you, some of you guys got this stamina, you know. Like Mark did a seven hour stream the other day. What is that? Like I get that the bandwidth is infinite, but my back isn’t. I did an eight hour stream that we hit the day before. Oh man, I, I don’t know, I get going two hours on this and I’m like, time for bed. You also have a real job. Some of us are just loafers, unlike you. Yeah, well, my real job is going to keep me plenty busy the next week. I’m going on vacation. Going on vacation to, to visit friend of the show, a friend of the show here. And I’ve got to have a whole bunch of work done before I can go on that vacation. So. Okay. So I had to explain to my parents, like, no, this is, this is an internet friend, but we’ve met in real life. Yeah, the first time I told my parents I was going to go on a trip to meet some of the people off the internet. My mom literally said, what if they kill you? I’m like, mom, I’m not worried about being murdered. Like, yeah. Oh, my other older brother, not the one who, who wrote the song, he’s been meeting in real life with his internet friends for about 10 years now. So now the only new thing is that I’m the one doing it and not Steve. So. Oh, and we’re different. We’re definitely a very different flavor of nerd than they are. Okay. So I thought your work mostly consisted of like sermons and ceremonies and things like that. But so what kind of work do you have to do to like be prepared to go on vacation? Yeah, yeah. So something that I do is I teach two sections of seventh grade religion. So that’s a four thirty to five thirty and then a six to seven on Wednesday nights. So I have to be prepared to go on those. I have two boys whose parents I have to call tomorrow because it’s just getting to be a little too much and I need a little bit of support. And we’ll see what happens with that. I about every other week during the school year, I go over to the local Catholic high school and changing it up this semester instead of seeing all the sophomores. I’m going to go with the seniors have a choice of like three electives, like a scripture elective, a sacred art elective and a philosophy elective. So I’m going to talk to the scripture and philosophy classes this semester, which I think is going to work out great. It’ll suit what I’m interested in doing better. And yeah, I think so. But it also be shorter days. So I have to be prepared for that. I’m preparing a few children who were never baptized for baptism. And so I’ve been meeting with them a few times, but they’re they’re good kids and they’re coming to our program. So I think as long as mom keeps on taking them to church, they’ll be on pretty good grounding their their African immigrants. So things are a little more traditional at the house. And then next Saturday night, we are having the Holy Cross hoedown. It’s a dance for families. And I have been in charge, but in charge of DJing this. And I want I want to note in the YMCA. Yeah, nobody really knows what that means anymore. So we can get away with it. I want you to note right there, the Backstreet Boys, Larger Than Life has a dance. It’s literally called the Catholic dance. And you can type it into YouTube and it’s it’s the Catholic dance. And it’s done at all of the Catholic weddings for the based young couples who are getting married. And it’s super easy. I can do it. So anyway, the Catholic dance and it has nothing, nothing whatsoever. There’s like no signs of the crosses, no references to the Blessed Virgin Mary or the Pope or anything. But it’s the Catholic dance. And I’m here for it. It’s a line dance set to the Backstreet Boys. OK. So anyway, we’re going to do that. I’m expecting that there’s going to be a lot of parents there who are going to bring their children. And this is going to be a run around to get some energy out of them kind of event. And that’s the kind of support that the church needs to be providing to families. So you you’re including the hokey pokey then? Oh, yeah, we got we got the chicken dance, the bunny hop, the hokey pokey. Cha cha slide, which should be, I think would sound pretty adult to your average eight year old. Oh, wow, this is like an adult song. It’s just, you know, it’s just it’s a little less silly. It’s a little more cool. At least that’s what I thought around that age. I am just imagining a synagogue having something like that. And yeah, I cannot imagine an orthodox synagogue having anything like that. But partially because orthodox. Well, first of all, orthodox in orthodox Judaism, mixed dancing is completely forbidden. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But don’t you have that day where you all get hammered? Yes, on on the feast of Purim, which is coming up. It is it is considered a requirement of Jewish law to drink more than you normally would. Yes. Oh, so we’re not so different after all, I guess. And for some every once in a while, it falls right on March 17th. So you get to party with the Irish. That’s brilliant. That’s brilliant. Well, you got another conversation you got scheduled. Yes, I am going on somebody’s podcast at six. So in two minutes I’m leaving. All righty. All righty. The alcoholic says that they’re having a movie night at their church next weekend. They’re going to watch radio, a real classic. Family friendly, certainly, I think. Don’t know that movie. It was the head Cuba Gooding Jr. It was like a small town football movie and Cuba Gooding Jr.’s character was mentally disabled. I don’t remember much beyond that. So it had like Friday night lights meets. I could well rain man. I’m going to head out. It was very nice talking to your father, Stephen, Father Eric and bye, Mark. See you, Mark. See you, Jacob. I like that list there, Father Eric. That was that’s just page one, too. Well, I used to go to to La Cairnasse, which is which is the frog and the Frog Festival up in Biddeford, Maine. And I don’t think they’re still doing that. I don’t know. They ran it for decades and decades. Who ran it? The crazy French Canadians. So Biddeford, Maine used to have the highest. Maybe it’s still this French Canadian ratio of any place in North America outside of Canada. So basically all the French Canadians lived in Biddeford, Maine, for whatever reason, which is south of Socko. So those are twin cities around either South Socko River. Right. So that was like a big deal. So Biddeford used to hold this big festival every year called La Cairnasse. And yeah, they play all the songs. And we had this band called C’est C’est Bon. And they would come down from Canada and play and they would play stuff like that. They play a bunch of other French music in the French language that I don’t understand. What we’re going to have at the Holy Cross Hoedown is we’re going to have, and we need to add to this list definitely, but since we are in North Dakota, we’re going to have Hulka. He’s actually going to be an expert dancer, not me, because I was not built for grace, except for the supernatural kind. I was going to say, I was not built for grace. I was not built for natural, but supernatural grace. And so they’re going to teach the kids how to polka. And like I get that the Orthodox Jews, they don’t have, you know, men and women mingling like that. But, you know, you go to your average high school dance and it’s just not an edifying spectacle. And we would be in better shape if we taught them how to polka and swing dance. So we’ll get them. You go to Catholic, Catholic college campuses, the campus ministry, the dances they put on. They are there. They learn how to dance properly. They’re able to relate to each other as men and women rather than. I don’t want to contemplate the mode of being that constitutes grinding. Animals, animals, I suppose, animalistic. Yeah. No, I like it. I like the participation because that was one of the things I liked about the festival. We’d have all the carnival stuff going and carnival rides would come in and we’d have usually multiple tents. The big tent would have, say, C-Ball and then some other groups would play at various times. And we’d just sit and listen to folk music. One year they had John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band and I saw them and I was like, this is the best. Get them at these large concerts. It was a small, small tent relatively speaking. And they just played their hearts out and it was awesome. Had a really good time. So yeah, they ran that for years and years and years. And that was great. I mean, because it was very, very frustrating. And that was great. I mean, because it was very, very French Canadian. You know, you have your fried dough and your cotton candy and your… Well, that’s how I got the dragon. The dragon comes from Lac Hermes, from which one? I don’t know. But that’s how I got that. Let’s take a look at that dragon. How do I get you to be big? I have not figured that out. As near as I can tell, it’s magic. You have to click on me and then click on that thing. There you are. There you are. There’s the dragon there in the corner. So you can see it now. Lac Hermes dragon right from the French festival. Yeah. But this was a frog-legged themed festival. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get little frog badges. I have them somewhere. If my office hadn’t been totally ripped apart and needed to be cleaned real soon now. Because I got it. I mean, the office doesn’t need to be cleaned. The office needs to be repopulated. Yes. All the stuff that should be in the office still is in the other room, unfortunately. So I have to fix that. Okay. I think you should very soon. I’m running out of time. But I put the bookcase in. So now the books are here instead of in the living room. Books. Burn the books. Burn the books. They’re on a wooden bookshelf. So you can just light them up easy. That’s why a bookshelf should be wooden. Yeah. But these books, these are books that you apparently like. Some of them. I haven’t read them all. But most of them I have. Yeah. Some of them are reference books. Some of them I just got for Christmas. Yeah. Yeah. And this is like, that’s nothing. And I know it’s not full because it had all the media on it. But the media is going to stay in the living room obviously. I’m not going to put it in here. And then there’s the barrister bookcases in the shed. So I think with any luck, I’m going to get motivated and have enough energy to do some physical labor and get at least the barrister bookcases out of the shed and into the living room coming up soon here so that I’m prepared. Because then I’ll have an actual living room again. That would be nice. Because I haven’t had a living room since I moved here. So I even thought I should get a coffee table. But I’m still up in the air on that because I don’t know. Seems like a lot of work. You don’t drink coffee obviously. I don’t drink coffee. I don’t need a coffee table for. I want you to consider this is having three Farsight anthologies sitting on that coffee table. I think that would make it more appealing. I have a coffee table book that was made for me by my friend from our Hawaii vacation. Oh, so I’m so I’m kind of like, I need a coffee table for this. And I’ve got a couple of coffee table books actually. So I need a coffee table for this purpose. And, you know, right now I’ve just got like crates and I just put stuff on crates and stools. It’s just me. So it’s fine. Bachelor life. Bachelor life. Oh, yeah, it’s fantastic. So, yeah, I am thinking about about that. But yeah, you know, I did this I did this great stream, right? Seven hours. I had a lot of lent agency from my participants. That’s part of it is, you know, I can’t go on for seven hours straight. Oh, OK. I’m glad to hear that. Actually, I’m genuinely glad to hear that. Everyone’s like, we don’t believe you, Mark. We’ve heard you go on before. But actually, I can’t do anything like that. So, yeah, it was good because we touched on so many different concepts and talked about so many different cool things. We had so much input and so many different perspectives. And everybody was there for the common ideal, right, of talking about things that were important to them. It only got contentious for a little while there. And then we straighten that out. So, yeah, it was really good. And it’s been very generative. And I was very grateful that we have that that kind of interaction, especially around the sorts of stuff that’s been that’s been that’s been swirling around. Right. And, yeah, a lot of stuff got brought up in there. It was it was really good. So I’m pretty excited. It’s also gotten a heck of a lot of views. So it’s got like three hundred forty nine views on Jacob’s channel and then an additional hundred fifty on mine. So we’re we’re yeah, we’re not doing bad at all. I’m not doing numbers. Yeah. Yeah. Mad men suit on. I know. Well, that one in my my last Jordan Peterson video, I met like nine hundred and thirty two views and I didn’t I didn’t see that coming at all. I was like, what? How is this possible? Because it just blew away my Sam Harris video. But now I’m thinking the Sam Harris video might take off again because Sam Harris recently doubled down on the dead children thing, which everyone’s defending him. And I’m like, I keep telling him, do not defend this guy because he’s going to let you down again. And he did. I mean, the things he I don’t know if you saw the clip of what he said, but I try to avoid Mr. Harris. Oh, but it’s it’s so I mean, it’s sad to watch and sad. I feel bad for all the people who ever believed in him because I knew from day one that this was going to happen. I didn’t know how long it was going to take. It took a lot longer than I thought possible, of course. But now he’s there. And I told everybody he’s done. He’s the Brett Weinstein, too, by the way, he’s done. He killed. He’ll make the same mistake again with conspiracy theories. He’ll double down just like Harris did because they’re all of the same type. You know who’s you know who’s not going down? Peterson. Peterson is still not going down. So I’m just saying those are my predictions. You can watch them come true. Well, actually there, Mark, if you actually study the evolutionary landscape of a conspiracy theory, you can find that a conspiracy theory actually finds a very specific niche, which allows those genes to push themselves into the future. It’s amazing to. The other thing he was saying is, you know, vaccines help help stop spread. And I’m like. That’s. Some vaccines. They have never done that. Zero vaccine. Zero. Zero. It’s never happened. The reason why people think it’s happened is because there is a correlation between the prevalence of something like tuberculosis and the and the presence of a vaccine in a population. But that’s not because the vaccine stops the spread. That’s not what’s happening. Right. So the spread actually with or without a vaccination for say tuberculosis is equal. Actually, the thing that’s not equal is the virulence, because what happens is the vaccine prevents the disease from being more virulent. That’s actually how it works. And like if you think I’m wrong, virulence, what’s virulence virulence is its ability to I mean, not not exactly. I’m being a little sloppy with the language. It’s its ability to grow and attack. So in other words, the presence of tuberculosis in the population is dampened by the fact that it doesn’t have human hosts to grow in. But its ability to spread is not affected by that. Those are two separate issues. So the fact that it spreads less is because there’s less of it overall because of the vaccine. But that doesn’t affect if if you’re exposed to it, how likely you are to get it is equal vaccinated or unvaccinated for any for any current actual vaccine. That’s how it works. And if anybody wants to doubt me on that, bring it. I got the facts. I got the papers. I can give you all the papers. I only doubt you. I only doubt you when I’m fully credentialed. So yeah, well, well, the weakened form, which I know isn’t all the way. Modern vaccines are no longer we can form, but that’s basically what it does. It boosts your immune system by teaching it that thing is bad. And then when it shows up, notice what I said. When it shows up, it gets it gets whacked. So so Sam Harris is just wrong about how that works. Like he’s just factually incorrect and misunderstanding what I would call basic basic virology. I mean, because that’s basically what it is or bacteriology. Some of the bacterium, but he just doesn’t understand the basic immune system and anybody. I didn’t go to college guys. If you went to college and you don’t know this stuff, I got news for you. Get your money back. You got ripped off. And this is very basic stuff. Right. You can’t default on student loans ever. Yeah. Yeah. Don’t get that sense. But that’s that’s the thing. And I mean, we’re at the point now. I’ve been putting it all over Twitter all day because I can’t help myself. You know, Sam Harris doesn’t care how many children have to die for him to be right. That’s the bottom line there. He just doesn’t care. You know, he just does not care. And that was his whole statement was had more children died, your people would have taken this more seriously and all of us would have been right about the about the vaccine, alleged vaccine, the fake news sluice shot. And I’m like, no, no amount of children is going to make you right, buddy, no matter how many of them you kill. And it’s very sad to be in that position. But like we’re in that. And and the thing is, too, again, people defending him. I don’t like don’t defend this guy. He’s not a good person. Don’t defend people aren’t good. Defend good behavior. Call out good behavior. You know, I so it’s one of the things that you have. You seen the Daily Wire Exodus series with Peterson? I have not. I just have a limited bandwidth through which Internet content could come through on and just not that higher. I’m pretty sure I’d like it. I just not going to pay for Daily Wire Plus and I won’t hire it. That’s that’s that’s fair. Well, look, I mean, one of the amazing things in that conversation is one of the things that I think is missing in general. But particularly with poor Jordan Peterson, when they’re in the middle of talking about this stuff, breakthroughs are being had around the table live in real time in their. Yeah. Right. And I think that’s the thing about the show. I know that Jacob and Joseph have some Jewish intramural spars with him. Yeah. Well, look, I think that’s the thing about the show. I think that’s the thing about the show. I think that’s the thing about the show. I think that’s the thing about the show. 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I think that’s the thing about the show. I think that’s the thing about the show. I think that’s the thing about the show. I think that’s the thing about the show. I think that’s the thing about the show. I think that’s the thing about the show. I think that’s the thing about the show. I think that’s the thing about the show. I think that’s the thing about the show. And I was like, yes, that’s what we need. And I was like, yes, that’s what we need. That’s some top quality humility right there. Exactly, exactly. We need exemplified humility. No more participation, and participation in a humble way, and acknowledgement of the good. You can’t just, you know, decry the things you think are bad. Because that’s one of my critiques of, say, the theological argument for this corner. Like theology is just going to get us dug down, and whose theology is better, just going to cause fights. It’s just exemplifying what the problem is. Whereas participation towards something good, and acknowledgement of something good, you know, look, I’ve got 349 views on Jacob’s channel. My seven hour live stream means much less without his channel. And so what he’s doing in that aspect is good. And I try to acknowledge that whenever I can. And I’m very grateful that he’s doing it, and that he’s allowed me to do what I’m doing using his voice. And I’m very grateful that he’s allowed me to do what I’m doing using his voice. And I’m very grateful for that. Because I think it’s important to get the people in that I had in. That was, Teo was there, Elizabeth was there, right? Bruce was there, I love Bruce. I have a chat with him on my channel anyway. You know, Ethan popped in for a while, Sally Jo was there, right? So, you know, and Jesse, I’ve wanted to talk to Jesse for a while. That’s actually why I picked the Friday night, because he asked on my channel if I could do what I was doing. And I was like, well, when is that? Maybe I can, and then I made it happen, right? And so, you know, and I’m grateful for all of them, because they were able to give me the energy to go seven hours. And you told me I could do a seven-hour stream. Even a few days ago, I would have said, there’s no way I have enough energy. But I have enough energy with their help, right? It’s Lent Agency. And I do want to do a video on Lent Agency. I’ve got a list of videos I need to record. I’ve only got three in the Lent Agency. I’ve only got three in the can right now, waiting for editing, unfortunately. But yeah, I’ve got, you know, I’m probably coming up with two video ideas a day, and I’m not recording. I haven’t done a day where I’ve recorded more than two videos in like three months. So I’m going to get on the wall and start doing more recording, for sure. Yeah, and then you’ve always got, I mean, I’ve made a few videos that aren’t like live stream like this. And you always have this trade-off between making them quick and getting the basic ideas down or doing that video essay style with a really clear writing, and then you can put some really slick visuals on it. You know, even I look at the critical drinkers stuff, you know, and he’s just got clips from the movie, right? And then sometimes you’ll do like a really funny little thing there, and it takes a little extra effort to do something like that rather than the Paul Van Der Kley style hour and a half meandering with a few PowerPoint slides at OBS to keep you company. So yeah. Yeah, it’s very, very different stuff, you know, and I’m all completely on the same page. I’m completely unscripted, right? I have notes. I do almost always read from my notes, but I’m unscripted. And oh, actually, so one of my videos, although it may not get the cut, if my editor says it’s not good, I’ll have to redo it. But one of my videos is one of your requests, and the other video, the one that I did today, is with Adam. So you get to see Adam again. Nice, more Adam. Yeah, and we did talk more history than I thought we would, but I think it was all important, actually. And then we plan on doing another history one, actually, because we’re going to tie into something that Oz Guinness, who was in Exodus, he did a talk with John Anderson. Anderson talked to Peterson a while ago. He’s the former Australian- A lead singer from Yes, Yes. Yeah, not that John Anderson. Oh, that was a good callback, sir. I wouldn’t even have expected you to know that. Oh, I was obnoxious about prog rock in high school. I was just an absolute- I probably ruined it for people. Sorry to anybody I talked to about music in high school. This is your formal apology here. Yes is a great band, wonderful band, wonderful, wonderful band. Yeah, they’ve got one album in particular that is super excellent. Yeah, John Anderson, he’s got his own channel, and he talked to Oz Guinness, and that was a wonderful conversation. The interesting thing about the conversation was Oz, and they didn’t talk enough about it, in my opinion, he brought up the French Revolution versus the American Revolution versus the English Revolution. And I was like, oh, and I don’t, I mean, I don’t know anything about the English Revolution. What happened like a solid century earlier, there was a, it was, oh, it’s complicated. You’re going to need Adam to walk you through that. That’s the thing. I’ve read through accounts of it at least twice. Wow. Not like a dedicated account to it, right? Like one of them was in the, a book I read about the history of biblical interpretation, which was really interesting. And if you had the patience to slog through it, it was one of those dense academic works. The history of biblical interpretation, 1300 to 1700, the secularization of scripture. Right. That was really interesting. And it had to touch on the English Revolution to cover, I think it was Locke. Yeah, I had to touch on the English Revolution to cover Locke, because he actually, you know, these guys in the 16th, 17th century that we think of as like philosophers and such, they were all doing scripture commentary too. Like that was still like so fundamentally a part of their grammar that they would talk about, you know, they’ll do a commentary on the book of Genesis and they’ll say, you know, Adam was coming to awareness of his own need and the scarcity of resources around him. And that’s what the fall is, is his awareness of the scarcity of resources. That’s not a, that’s me remembering something I read two years ago. Sure, sure. And then another one was in that book on reformations covered. And it was just, oh, it’s just complicated. And it’s not my history, so I’m just not that interested in it. Right. Yeah, well, we might go over that. Yeah, but I mean, this just goes to show like we misapprehend the Enlightenment when we remove them from their religious context, because unlike Immanuel Kant, who was wrong about almost everything he ever said, by the way, so just throw him out. Well, they taught us that in seminary, so. Yeah, well, well, look, I mean, philosophy is the handmaiden of religion, sorry. And I’m not going to claim I know where to draw that line better than anybody else, but certainly before Immanuel Kant, we were drawing in a better place. That’s all I have to say about that. So that’s why you’ve got to throw him out, because he’s trying to redraw lines that he has no sense of. And if you take the Enlightenment in the context in which it was written, there’s no problem with Enlightenment thinking whatsoever. I think that’s that’s totally fair. It’s just a misinterpretation of it. What are the salient features of Enlightenment thinking that make it so enlightened? Well, yeah, I’d say I think I think that and this is kind of interesting. I think that one of the problems you run into is that if you try to discount the Dark Ages, and I know Peugeot does, and I really wish you wouldn’t. This is one of those things where I’m just like, dude, really? The Dark Ages were dark for a week. They were. They were. That happened. It’s not to say that that that that things were as bad as as people make them out to be. Those people weren’t stupid. That knowledge wasn’t gone from the world, but a lot of that knowledge was useless. So even if you found the formula for concrete in the Middle Ages, they wouldn’t have used it. They didn’t have things big enough to need concrete. Really? Like actually. So it didn’t matter. It didn’t. The fact that the technology was lost didn’t matter because that technology couldn’t be utilized anyway. For lots of reasons. You know, some of them are population, right? Population kind of went down and right. But others are more, you know, the fact that the knowledge was more concentrated and also spread out. So now, you know, any any given area had specialties and expertise and where in the Roman Empire, every expertise is represented in every Roman city. Not really, but closer to that to that sort of a model in the Middle Ages. Everything is kind of spread out, isolated all of a sudden because the population is, you know, the management of population has changed fundamentally. And so it’s very dark. And the other thing that makes it dark is that there is this bifurcation. Well, first of all, the top end wealth comes way down in the Middle Ages, like a way like people do not understand. The wealth of the Roman emperors was a lot bigger than you could possibly think. Right. And in fact, I think probably I don’t know this. I probably have to ask my buddy, Dr. Alantran-Jack there. I think the wealth of even the Greek city-states, you know, at least in the case of Athens and Sparta, was greater than the wealth of most nobles in Europe in the Middle Ages. Like it just there was just a what there was a darkness. Yeah, sure. There was a collapse. There was a collapse of Roman Empire and it was like it was the influx of St. Benedict and his monastic monastic system that ended up being the seeds for the growth of the medieval period. Right. Well, and everything goes into hibernation. Right. So the top end wealth goes down, but the bottom end wealth also goes down, although there’s a floor for that. There’s no floor for the top end wealth, guys. The floor for the top end wealth is the same as the floor for the bottom end wealth. Right. So that’s nothing. It gets darker for everyone. Like it actually gets darker. And it is the spark of not the, you know, not the rediscovery of the texts alone. Right. But there is a rediscovery of the text, but it’s also the ability for more people to engage with them. So it’s like, well, so and so over here and so and so over here and so and so over here all had copies of the Greek and Latin texts and the upper class knew about them. Yeah. OK. So what? That light is not spread. Right. And so the environment is spreading. OK. Now, you don’t think that, let’s say, the University of Paris in the 13th century. I mean, is that what am I even trying to ask here? Is it? Is that like the beginning of the Enlightenment then? We think to have a university? Well, again, it depends on how you define it. I think that if if if the light is the ability to spread this information to more people for whatever reason, I mean, you can cast it as an economic in an economic frame, which I normally wouldn’t do. But it works right. Like at some point, the economies of scale kick in due to industrialization and things like that are the beginnings of industrialization. Right. The revivification of the of empire as such. Right. And then what happens is more people have more time to engage with knowledge. Well, that is shining a light on more of the population. And that’s what that’s the best way to understand the Enlightenment. The way we misunderstand the Enlightenment is we see these figures as individualistic non-church. They’re all deists. If you read Wikipedia, that’s wrong, by the way. That’s just wrong. That’s a lie. That’s a lie. If you see the word deists, assume that it’s a lie. Most of the time, you’ll be right. A few times you’ll be wrong. But most of the time you’ll be right. There’s almost no such thing as a. Who would be the notable standouts as far as actual deists go? Would Thomas Paine count? I think well, look, when I when I yeah, when I look for a deist, I’ve never found one. I’m not saying there aren’t any, but like I don’t know what standard of interpretation people are using for this, because like you’re not going to find too many people in the United States after, you know, after it was America, we’ll say after it was settled as as America. So it’s still a colony. You’re not going to find too many people who aren’t going to church. That’s not going to happen. So are we talking about an issue of theology? Or are we trying to make the determination between somebody who’s actually religious and some quasi anti religious or half non religious state? Because they bill it as a half non religious state, right, especially with the Enlightenment thinkers. They’re like, oh, well, you know, Locke was a deist and Adam Smith was a deist. They were all deists. Like if you read the Wikipedia, they’re all deists. They weren’t deists, but then they became deists and the founding fathers were all deists. That’s a lie. That’s a lie. I’m sorry. You’re just wrong. You’re just you’re inventing something that isn’t there and wasn’t there because we want the Enlightenment to be a personalized individual thing. We want the Enlightenment to be the time when when individuals woke up. Right. And then all of a sudden they realized that they had the power, that they had the control and they use reason and logic and rationality to fix the world. Right. But nothing could be further from the truth. That isn’t all what happened. So when I look at a lot of the religiosity of that period and just the the philosophical movements, the cultural movements and all of that, it seems like they’re really well, even when they’re talking about God, they’re talking about him in terms of like a billiard ball universe. They’ve got this this implicit materialism built in. And so when let’s say you’re a young man at a Catholic seminary in a philosophy class and somebody is labeled a deist, that’s not I mean, I don’t know. Maybe we look at what you’re thinking is an individualistic materialistic project. And we kind of use that as a marker of be careful around this one. Benjamin Franklin, he’s got some good advice, but like, don’t follow him all the way. You know, you couldn’t follow Benjamin Franklin in terms of of theological thought. Right. I mean, the materialism ends at some point. And I think we confuse what they understood in the Enlightenment as the power of science with all the power. And that’s really this is why I think the scientists keep saying that religion is attacking them. Right. Because they they see it as an attack that they are not in charge of everything and that they are not the arbiters of everything, even though science has a very strict, well defined box. Of course, it has to be science. All right. Otherwise, it’s not science, guys. I hate to break it to you. And and and they kind of deny that try to extend rationality looking at you, Verveki, or some other similarly silly thing. He’s out there somewhere. Right. But they try to use some scientific framework to subsume the religious framework. Right. Because Immanuel Kant sort of indicated you might be able to whenever you weren’t rushing into that gap. Right. Where they’re like, aha, now we can be gods. And when you cast the Enlightenment as an individualistic product project where individuals were able to kind of break out of the box, right, escape from the matrix, however you want to frame it, then, yeah, you just misapprehend the Enlightenment. That’s very much what Adam and I were talking about with the French Revolution talk that we did. I don’t know if we mentioned that one before that. We might have. But, yeah, I mean, that’s that’s actually really important to understand. If you look back and then look, you could you could and Verveki does this actually in his in one of his series, what’s it called? Untangling the World Not with he talks about Descartes in there. And it’s one of the early episodes, like two or three, because I couldn’t watch the whole Untangling the World Not. But, you know, they’re they’re they’re talking in there about the misapprehension of René Descartes and his misuse. In other words, Descartes didn’t make all these mistakes. People came after him did. Does it sound familiar? Does anybody anybody ever heard this argument before about anybody else like Luther or Jesus or literally anybody? It’s like you totally misunderstood the work, right? Because you’re out of context. So, yes, the Enlightenment did that, but they didn’t make the mistake that the modern materialists make and modern individuals make when they say objective worldview because they didn’t think the world. So so do you think where the source of the problem you’re pointing at is that like 19th century materialists writing their own spiritual mythos? That’s that’s where they’re getting it wrong. So like the 19th century English materialists, let’s say. I don’t think so. No. So who’s who’s the ones who’s misapprehending the Enlightenment? Well, I mean, I think it’s relatively recent. I actually think it’s relatively recent. So there’s some interesting statistics that point in a certain direction, right? One of the statistics is when like when Einstein was big, right? And Einstein’s the first big guy. By the way, Einstein broke all of science, really, violating the scientific method. Actually, by the way, yeah, using by using thought experiments or right by using thought experiments. Yeah. And and and it works. Well, right, right. It’s hard to argue against, but it’s against the scientific method. What he was doing was not science. That’s why it was theoretical physics. Theoretical physics wasn’t really science until they measured until they measured the light coming around the moon on a solar eclipse. Right. And that. Yeah. But if you come up with something in your head and you have an experiment, but the experiment can’t be run, it’s not a hypothesis. Right. There was no theory of relativity back then. Right. Because A has to start as a hypothesis. Brett Weinstein actually goes into this or at least he used to. And he’s right about that. Right. It’s first it’s an idea, then it’s testable. Now it’s a hypothesis. And then when it has competing hypotheses or maybe not, if it’s the only hypothesis, maybe it’s a theory. And that’s how it works. There’s a hierarchy in science. Right. But when Einstein was around, right, he believed in God. Right. God does not play dice with the universe. Interesting. Right. He was of the 80 percent of theoretical physicists, mathematicians and scientists, which matched the 80 percent of the population that was religious. Now in science, do we have a match between how much what percentage of the population in general? Is religious and what percentage of the people in science are religious? No, we don’t. It’s OK. So it’s not just the humanities then. No, no, no, no, no, by no means. No, no, by no means. It’s not. There’s a bigger, deeper, more interesting problem there. I don’t know. Did you see my three and a half hour live stream with Manuel and Teo? You know, you’d usually do them on Fridays, right? No, that one was that was the one that was on the top of the list. That one was that was a pop up live stream because we were on the disk board talking to Teo and he wanted to talk more. And we were like, let’s do this as a live stream. And it’s actually quite good, by the way. But this is I don’t know. Give me the give me the Reader’s Digest version. It’s the meaning crisis versus the faith crisis. Right. And so one of the reasons why I wanted to know if you watched Exodus in particular, episode eight, which is the last episode of the first set, I guess, is they’re going to do more apparently. Peugeot stops Os Guinness at one point and says, I want to defend Jordan here talking about talking about Peterson and Peterson sitting right next to him, by the way. It’s a funny situation. And he says, Jordan has a way of talking to secularists. Because you can’t just talk to you can’t just bring up, oh, the power comes down, you know, by, you know, from God from above, because their eyes glaze over. Right. And of course, like I’m sitting there and this was this was after I had already made this point and made it on Vanderklaes channel and comments several times right over the past few months. You know, I’m like, yes, this is exactly, Curtis, is what I’ve been saying about Peterson all along. Watch my Peterson video. Let’s get it up to a thousand views. That would be nice. Right. I said the same thing there. Like, you really don’t understand what Peterson’s doing. Right. You’re seeing Peterson from the from the Christian perspective as a revival and he is not a revival. And I can tell you that Vanderklaes sees it that way quite clearly. That’s why he was for a long time referencing Billy Graham. And then he somehow magic me into going to Billy Graham Library. And that was a whole mess. But but that’s the that’s the thing. Like there’s it’s not that he’s doing something entirely different. And if you don’t understand that and he’s using entirely different language. Thank you, sir. He’s using entirely different language to talk to these people because you can’t use the Christian language. Right. So and I think you’re right about this. And I’ll give an example. The biblical narrative has Moses going up to the top of the mountain and God gives him the instruction in the law. And he writes it down exactly as God had revealed it to him. Right. So that is a very emanation kind of point of view. This is coming down from the top. Right. Dr. Peterson talks about Moses sitting around judging all of these cases individually and over hundreds of cases discerning the unchanging ethical principles that are law. That is that is an emanation type of theory there. Emergent. Emergent. Thank you. Thank you. They both start with the letter E. And that’s how it’s annoying. Yeah, it is annoying. Stupid neoplatonists that don’t actually exist. Yes. So what you’re saying is, is that. Yeah, that is that’s a real that’s a real thing right there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the so the interesting thing is tail is the first one that we talked to who said, no, no, no, I have two children. No, no, no, I have two groups of friends who are in trouble. One group are people who were who have a crisis of faith and the other group are meaning crisis people. And there’s a difference between them. And I’m like, that’s exactly my point. Somebody else sees it. This is a miracle. Yay. Chad must not have his mask. That’s right. That’s right. Do I mean. We’ll give you time to put the mask on, Chad. I know it’s you now. You can turn your video. You just turned your video off, Chad, if you want. OK. Now you can bring them up. There we go. There we go. We just have your handsome Squidward face there. Dude, this crazy thing happened today at church. Tell me about it. So so I go there and I sit down. I sit in a different spot. I really like the people that we normally sit by, but their singing was really exceptional, I guess. And so I sat somewhere else today. My wife wasn’t able to make it in. So I just went and I sat in there and I was talking one sitting amongst all the elder women there. And pastor comes up and he sits down and starts talking with one of the women. And he says hi to me and stuff and he says, hey, you know, Jordan Peterson, I said, yeah, I like I like Jordan Peterson. He’s like, have you seen that new conversation with Jordan and John Breveke? And I was like, yeah, I know. I know John Breveke and Jordan Peterson. And then I was like, but the conversation I really liked was with John Breveke and Jordan B. Cooper and Paul Vanderclay. And he’s like, yeah, no, that was good. So I do attend a Lutheran church. And so and I said, but he’s like, yeah, it’s really weird. A Lutheran professor, a post platonic and a Calvinist preacher are sitting sitting in there having a conversation. I’m like, yeah, I said that Vanderclay duties, my guy, man. So it’s just the weirdest thing, dude, because he came up to me out of nowhere and it was like and he’s like, we’re going to talk, you know, and I was like, oh, interesting. So I really like this guy already, but this opened up a new potential dialogue. And so I’m interested in seeing where that goes. Had you ever told your pastor any of your story? No, I’ve tried to stay anonymous in the church as far as Chad the alcohol goes. Yeah. Even like I did tell him that, you know, I have I’m a part of a so-called online community that has lots of discussion around different traditions and something like, you know, ecumenical conversation and things like this and and that it’s always been really interesting to me. And then I told him he’s like, we didn’t really get into the Peterson thing. I said, I really I like Peterson a lot. And like, you know, honestly, if it wasn’t for Peterson, I wouldn’t be sitting in this church. So it was just bizarre, dude. It was bizarre to have your Lutheran pastor come up to you while you’re sitting amongst all the other 80 year old women and say like John Verbeke. It was so weird, dude. So, yeah, yeah, all of a sudden that stuff comes into it’s like. I remember the first time my two grandmothers met my two living grandmothers. But it wasn’t the first time they met the first time I saw them met. Right. Southern meet, you know, and it was just like this was a super exciting moment because I love Grandma Shirley. She lived with us in South Carolina and I love Grandma Rita. We would go to her house in Minnesota. And now Grandma Rita was down for my first communion and they were together. And it was like, oh, my gosh, this is like Marvel versus D.C., you know. But it’s it’s a little different when it’s not family. So it’s it’s it’s a little more shocking to have that your church world all of a sudden comes in contact with your Internet world. Well, it’s helpful because I’ve wanted to break the ice with them. I just didn’t know how and I didn’t want to. And the last thing I wanted to do is go in there and be the weirdo that starts, you know, making things weird for everybody. So, you know, I wanted to be respectful of the customs that are at the place. And, you know, and I mean, it’s very well attended church. And but most of them are all I would say it probably 70 percent of the congregation is seven years old and older. There’s maybe 200 members in the to me that’s pretty well attended, especially since it’s in literally the middle of nowhere. And there’s already four other churches within a three mile radius. And those churches are full to as mind blowing to me that that’s happening. And so it’ll be nice. I think I’m hoping to have more conversation with them. Maybe he’s be willing to if he had the time to do something like an estuary meeting or something and get one going with me. But, you know, I’m not really I’m not really going to lean on that too much because I know he has theological which we call it theological commitments to uphold probably and stuff. But I think he was honestly a Episcopalian before and he ended up converting to Lutheran. But, you know, we’ve had some conversation about Orthodox to I think it’s weird. It’s interesting to me. But yeah, we’ll see, man. What happens is just really cool to he seemed really open to it. Yeah, that is that is great. But I’ve been seeing this convergence for a while. Like I said this before, there’s a clubhouse room on ontology usually on Friday nights, which I’ve missed two weeks in a row to do live streams. But they were they were starting to get into for Vigi’s work too, because, you know, all this stuff is coming together. Right. It’s all there’s all this hunger for wisdom and meaning and intimacy. Right. And so that’s all sort of gathering. And then all these people are coming at it from different angles. But I can see that they’re all converging and a lot of people are just doing that work. Because in a monotheistic or neoplatonic system, everything that rises must converge. Yeah. Interesting. Right. Because you’re only going towards one point. Right. And so like, yeah. So are we in some strange way a little ahead of the curve because we’ve been here for a few years already? We’re way ahead of the curve. The normies will catch up quick. I think that’s that’s part of when people argue that Peterson’s doing a bad thing or whatever. No, no, no. He’s pissed you off because he’s not on your platform exclusively anymore. But he’s actually reaching more people now that he’s on daily wire because they operate more like old media and an old radio show. Well, not only that, but just kind of the drama that’s going around him is going to draw a lot of attention. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of the Rod Dreher crowd on this, you know, censorship silencing. It’s got a bit of a Soviet kicker to it. It’s like a rehabilitation program, which is just absolute doublespeak. You know, yeah, he knows he knows which fights to pick. Yeah. Not always. He’s found a good fight. Well, I think it’s going to filter in some some folks. It’s so bizarre to me, dude. Like I as this is like anything else in my life that I really cherish. I mean, I like I love Alcoholics Anonymous so much and it’s transformed me in ways that I can’t begin to really explain. But those folks irritate the crap out of me. And, you know, and I love them for it. You know, and I think that’s kind of what this is in a lot of ways. I mean, I know that I haven’t been the kindest to say Mark or, you know, in different folks, but I like it or not. I do care a lot for you guys. And I think that’s the reason why I act such like a jackass from time to time. It’s not because I don’t I don’t care, but it’s so interesting, man, that to just be to go in that church this morning and have this pastor, a guy that I really look up to and like open a conversation with me about it. I don’t know why he didn’t start with Jordan Cooper to begin with. That’s weird. Yeah, who knows? The Lord works in mysterious ways. Oh, yeah. So anyways, I wanted to share that with you real quick. Yeah, thanks for share it. That’s that’s really interesting. I did manage to get meet a few people from BOM on in real life just after Christmas. So that was fun. Shout outs to Ryan and Travis. And so I have met a few people in my area that real live people, not Internet people, they don’t put real people who are into this. And then I found out that one of my our pair secretary, her grandson, listened to Jordan Peterson in middle school. So like this kid’s going to be something else, man. I think he’s a senior in high school this year. I should ask him about it next time I see him. Well, I’m going to get on that writing that letter to you this week. I didn’t take the time I was, but I’m going to write to you. So that’s going to be another another in the in the real world action I can take. I will be my wife and I are going to meet Laura and her family this week on Friday. So that’ll be cool. All righty. That’s great. All righty. Take care, Chad. Yep. Toodles. All right. Well, about participation, Father Eric, that’s what we’re that’s what we’re on about. How do you get people to participate and what do you get them to participate in? That way they get out of the thinky talky conversation thing. Right. And that’s sort of the way we do it. And what do you get them to participate in? That way they get out of the thinky talky conversation thing. Right. And that’s sort of that would be one of my criticisms of estuary. If I hadn’t would be it’s thinky talky and you know, it’s thinky talky personal. Maybe, maybe not, but it’s still thinky talky. And yeah, it’s thinky talky in person instead of thinky talky online. We are we are making minor upgrades. I don’t disagree. But I don’t think that’s what we need. I like this, you know, hokey pokey and the duck. The holy cross hoedown. I love it. I love it. I like that idea better. I like the idea of having spaces to get people together, not not to talk about things. Right. But to but to do things in common. And I think that’s really the key because the more we focus in on things like theology, which no two people have in common anyway, the more division we’re going to sow. I mean, this is I’m going to do a video on conversation. Actually had a big discussion about it earlier today, but just prior to this about how to do that. I think actually we have a way now where I can reckon sneak this in and get the point across correctly. More conversation causes more division. Aside from the direct correlation you’ve seen in reality, if you’ve been watching since 2014 or 2000 or whatever, right, the more conversations we have, the more things we find to disagree with each other about. That’s just the nature of how people are diverse. Right. Diversity diversity is diverse. It’s dangerous for that reason. But we can cooperate together in things like we can all go fishing. Right. You know, then there’s no theology. Right. We can all go to a dance to the to the hoedown. Right. We can we can all go build a house. Right. Or cut down trees or have a recession. Or figure out what’s in the woods behind Mark’s house that he found today. And it’s like, what’s going on here? You know, we can we can do that stuff. Right. We can do that stuff. And that’s you know, that’s better. And that’s better than all these than all this talking stuff. You know, not that we don’t talk or can’t talk. Right. But what we talk about matters and how we’re talking matters. Are we talking to find something in common or are we talking to find difference? Right. These are important factors. And it seems like if you’ve got a breakdown in participation, you’re going to need to have a talk about that. Well, you need you need to talk to make sure participation doesn’t break down. And it’s one of the clips I’m working on making. Because I’m not very good with this stuff. And I had all kinds of freaking technical problems. I can’t I can’t believe I’m already ready to rewrite every piece of software I’m running on Windows because I can make it better. But so frustrated. That will violate the end user license agreement. Whatever. I don’t care. I’ll spread it out for free. No one will be able to stop it. There’s a clip of Jonathan Pigeot that I’m going to make and post on my channel where he’s basically making a rough case for why he doesn’t like John Brevecky’s practices. This was on the Awakening from the Meaning Crisis Discord YouTube channel. He’s only he only did one Q&A with us. He doesn’t remember it. I asked him at Thunder Bay. He said he doesn’t remember. But he basically said, look, one of the reasons you go to church is to go do something that you may not want to do. Like you may not feel like on a Sunday getting up and going to church. Right. Yeah, I hid behind the couch once to not go. Right. Right. But but you do it to to go do something that you may not want to do and be around people that you may not want to be around to do things that in that moment you may not want to want to participate in. Right. And it’s like, oh, and I you know, when he said that, it just flashed in my head at the time. I remember it quite distinctly. That sounds like a description of all of our actual problems today. We don’t know how to engage in something we don’t necessarily want to engage in. Go be with people we don’t want to be with and do something that we don’t want to do, because sometimes that’s what’s necessary. And I think that actually is part of like what’s missing. Ed, Father, I’m glad to see you again. Oh, well, that’s that’s really nice to hear. Yeah. It’s nice to be welcomed back. I don’t know, Mark, if you saw our stream last week, but I mean, Ted came out swinging, man. I was I was there for it. Not swinging hard. It was like it was fun sparring. Yeah. Yeah. No, it got me. It got me. It got me thinking about some things. So if we have time at the end of y’all talking, I’ve actually had some follow up because got to, you know, get some notes together and bring some things for you that I thought you might find interesting. So, Mark, I mean, I think you’re basically right. We’re addicted to Netflix and YouTube and hiding in my room safe within my room. I touch no one and no one touches me. I am a rock. I am an island. I’m a rock. And no one touches me. I am a rock. I am an island and a rock feels no pain and an island never cries. But that’ll kill you. Got to be born. Got to get out of the room. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that’s the conclusion of that topic there. It is. Thank you. What’s on your mind? Oh, that sounded great. No, I just let’s see. Let me see if I can. I just I found some of that stuff on Hopkins that I thought I thought I thought was interesting and I wanted to bring forward the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Yes. Yes. So I have this book right here, which is great from the Catholic University Press. And yeah, I this may be one of those like you just kind of like nod and say to it and then you move on. But on the chapter on in stress. So he talks about he says that reminds me and our listeners about the in stress and because I think why it’s relevant, why it’s relevant. Yeah. So I was I was suggesting that Hopkins back in the mid 1800s had saw some of the stuff that’s coming down the line that for Vicky and Peugeot and Peterson are looking at now, which is basically until the problem of intelligibility. So how do you look at the world and out of all the things you could pay attention to, how do you how do you make any sense of it? And so, you know, Jonathan Peugeot has got his whole attention and combinatorial explosion and and hierarchies and Jordan Peterson’s got his way. He’s got sort of this evolutionary psychology, psychological way of looking at it with sort of a tinge of the logos and then revoke you with his relevance realization. And so there’s there’s sort of the two parts of it. One is what this you know, how does anything get into you in the first place? And then how do you pick anything out of that? And so Hopkins pulling from I think Parmenides and then John Don Scotious, which is interesting when you think about one of the things I was reflecting on is I think Scotious is like an early nomenclist. And so he’s sort of seen as antithetical to this whole process of trying to come to some kind of holistic way of understanding the world. But Hopkins comes up in his in his right. His never laid this stuff out of the journals and some private letters to friends. But he talks about in scape and in stress, which are he loved to make up words. And so that’s part of the problem with Hopkins. But but in scape is well here. So here’s in in scape is is being as being is recognized. So it’s basically all the multiplicity of a thing or an idea or an object or a person. And it has I think he’s basically playing on like a landscape. It’s the interior landscape of the thing is all the possible perception. And you have in stress, which is probably a more opaque term. And I think Father, if this is kind of where you and I were trying to figure out what’s going on. So this is how Ward writes about it. And she has lots of notes in here and discussion on what other thinkers have thought about it. But I mean, I just I really buy what she has to say. So she says she quotes Hopkins and says, But indeed, I have often felt that when I’ve been in this mood and felt the depth of an in stress or how fast the in scape holds a thing, then nothing is so pregnant and straightforward to the truth as simple. Yes, and is. And so then she says in scape is being as being is recognized in stress is being as its intelligibility is upheld by the affirmation of the observer. The yes that accompanies the is. So here’s what here’s why I think that that’s relevant, because and I’d be interested when you all think I don’t. Stepping back from the idea of faith as the theological, the three theological virtues and sort of more as like a basic epistemological tool, it seems like Hopkins is saying that in order to engage with the world intelligibly, there’s a there’s a necessary act of the will. So it’s not just an act of the intellect. It’s also an act of the will, which seems to me to basically be sort of bedrock epistemological faith. Would you buy that? Yes, yes, that’s that’s really good. I’m making a connection to a piece from Thomas Aquinas who talks about the three acts of the intellect. And I’m going to see if I can remember them. The first act, I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s basically you come up with the form or the concept. You name a form with a concept. And then the second act is judgment. Would you would you reflect upon it? Is it so? And, you know, it’s like it’s an act of the intellect. But it’s it’s I think that one also draws in the will to finally, you know, to cease the deliberating and say, yes, this is this is the judgment. And the third act is argument when you start charging things. That’s that’s less relevant. If I’m getting a quietness there, right, there’s at least a tenuous connection there possibly. Yeah. And that I mean, is that I’ve been trying to trace this stuff out for years. It’s really interesting to kind of come on these guys and see that they’ve been on a little bit of a parallel track. Obviously, you know, they’ve done a lot more work than I have. But there’s this sort of at least in like the sort of the eighteen hundreds modernist view of the sort of passive reception of reality, which I don’t know. You’re familiar with Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield. By any chance. Oh, fascinating. OK, it’s a it’s a slippery book. It’s not one that I’m just like, oh, yeah, go and read it. It’s great. But he so if you’re familiar with Barfield at all, he was he was in the inkling. So he was he was friends with Louis Tolkien, Williams and that crew. But he was he was he was an anthroposophist. So there you go. He was a he was a devote follower of Steiner. And but he he wrote this book that is just absolutely fascinating where he traces sort of the history of perception, which, again, it’s funny. You know, I found this stuff back in like 2013, 2014, and then it was like, well, this is really cool. I’d never thought about this. And then, you know, here it seems to be this one, you know, this big thread. But he talked he just starts out with original participation in which he argues that basically there’s almost no self-conscious reflection in perception, that it’s it’s a this sort of it’s not that it’s unmediated, but the mediation is unconscious. And then he has what he would he ends with what he calls final participation, which is a a is an awareness of the to use the Verbeckian term, I think, imaginal aspect of that. And what he puts in the middle is and he saw himself living in and trying to get out of is what he actually labels as idolatry, which is to to to give perceptions the reality of an object, to give it reality, to give it itness. And so he goes in some some strange directions with it. I mean, because he was a weird thinker. He was also very interesting. I think CS Lewis described him as being one of the men who’s read all the right books and come to all the wrong conclusions. Yeah. But he so so that that whole idea of in modernity that you’re sort of this passive receiver of objects, they just, you know, sort of labels things present themselves as mountains and trees and rainbows and people and ideas. And you just they just hit you and and then sort of postmodernism being the oh, my goodness, wait, that doesn’t work because like you can people can grow up in all sorts of different ways and see things all sorts of different ways. And and so that what I what I find really partially enlightening about part of the reason that I find in the idea of in scape and in stress so enlightening is that it it it makes you an active participant in that rather than simply being a passive observer of it. And it says, look, you know, it’s not we’re not. And I think that’s, you know, half of the idea to post solution to postmodernism that people like Peterson and Verveki are presenting is listen, like you actually have a role in this. And it seems like Verveki’s relevance realization is pretty passive in the sense of like, you know, a lot of it is in the unconscious. And then you’re just sort of trying to well, I guess not. He’s saying I’m interested in your relevance realization at all. Sorry, say that again. Verveki has no definition of relevance realization. It’s a box in which he puts all the unresolved issues. Excellent. Good. I thought I was missing something. I thought I needed to go through all of the awakening crisis. No, no, no. And like, fair enough. I mean, Manuel and I are doing the same thing. We’re going, oh, we don’t know what that is. I know relevance was, although our model of relevance is way more complete than John’s. I can guarantee you that. So but I think the problem and this problem actually so weird that the world is weird. I was having this discussion with somebody in the Verveki server on the Verveki Discord server over the past week or so about South. And they posted a video about somebody and I forget her name. And she was reading somebody else, some other ridiculous modern philosopher waste of time and his definition of self with his two parts. It’s very similar to what you just described, actually. And I can’t remember the names because they’re all useless. And I throw them all out immediately. It occurred to me that and the thing that I was missing myself, I was like, wait a minute, all these people by themselves are trying to figure out self and the different components of self and the boundaries of self. That is definitionally impossible and stupid. Like you’re totally wasting your time. And I think one of the elements that like when Peugeot talks about, no, no, the medievals didn’t have this problem, right? What he’s talking about is the humility that comes from understanding that being an individual is an impossible situation and you don’t need to try that. There’s no reason. Right. And then because in order for you to see the water you’re swimming in and understand that, you don’t need to try that. But also, and this is where the postmodern versus the modern, right? Also, the things outside you can’t know your true inside. Right. And so there’s just a gap on each end. Right. There’s things that people outside of you, you know, distributed cognition or just another person can’t tell you about yourself. And there’s things that they can tell you that you will understand. And there’s things they can tell you that you won’t understand. And even in that, there’s limitation. So even the two of you or the three of you, the four of you, if you were all circumambulating around the same person, you’re still not going to get to that. Right. But the hopeless thing is to try and do it by yourself. Understand yourself by yourself and not make any sense because you’re trying to understand something that you don’t understand. Right. And not make any sense because you’re trying to understand something that that contains you, but you are constrained by it. It’s just never going to work. And so that you know, so then my pragmatism kicks in and I go, yeah, why are you doing this? So at least, you know, you know, not to put a point on it, but, you know, at what point do you give up and submit and have the humility to say, I’m not going to be able to figure this out. But it’s also not important because no one before me got this answer and they all seem to have survived so well that we have the internet. So you you reminded me this this guy that I wrote a little bit in college. His name was Eugene Rosenstock Hessey. And I mean, I read like maybe a book and a half of his, but he had this he had this great he called it the cross of reality where he talks about the relationship. What was it? The we it relationship that I never really understood that well. And then the thou I relationship different from Martin Berbers, which I’ve heard is just completely incomprehensible. So I never touched it. But his main point on the I thou relationship, which I thought was fascinating, is that you don’t enter the world as an I you enter the world as a thou. That’s right. And so like you come into being as a thou, not as an I. The I comes later. And and I just yeah, that I mean that that you almost can’t you almost can’t underestimate how important that is. And I would say like that’s the person like why, you know, we’re Catholic now. It’s like it’s like still have this. There is me receiving my identity from the bishop. Yes. Yes. He received it himself from three other bishops who received it. Chained all the way back to Jesus Christ himself. Yeah. Yeah. You know, not to not to say something, you know, I know this is controversial in some places, but I mean, like receiving communion on the tongue. It’s like I see that right there. I’m like, give it to me. I’m not going to take it. I’m going to receive it directly. Like it’s not to be put in my hands and placed in me. It’s like, you know, I’m receiving the logos. So, yeah, I Mark, that’s I mean, that’s a that’s a great point. It’s sort of like there’s a little bit of a twist to Lewis’s whole point. And I think that, you know, what is it to be a bad essay? It’s like, you know, we’re not inside anyone else and we’re only inside of ourselves. But on the other hand, like we’ve also never been outside of ourselves. So there’s two sides to it. It’s like, yes, I mean, I get the inside store scoop on me, but I also have never gotten the outside scoop. And that’s and that’s Peugeot makes that point all the time. It’s like, where is this like outside frame that you’re looking at all this at? Like you’ve always been inside the frame. He puts that in that. That’s the objective material reality worldview that I continue to insist doesn’t exist. I have a video on navigating patterns. Just say, yeah, you always have this subjectivism and the individualism, right? Sort of go together, right? And that’s what sort of causes these problems is that it’s this trying to differentiate yourself from the thing you were born into. Right. The denial of creation itself in the case of a Vicky and I would say Peterson, it doesn’t work because it didn’t happen that way. Yeah. Yeah. Father, what were you saying? It’s just Peugeot always puts it as an artist, right? He’s like, where are you standing that you see this? You know, it’s just. Yeah. It’s just like I wouldn’t put it that way, you know, but but the artists, you just got to deal with them, right? Because he’s got this idea like, oh, you got that really weird perspective on the Eiffel Tower. Where were you standing when you painted that? Yeah. You know, yeah. His language is fun to watch. It’s very natural, but. I think he has a hard time getting inside the objective materialist reality mindset so as to smash it more effectively on the inside. And I wonder if the guy was ever a proper materialist or if he didn’t just always have participation properly. Yeah, no, he doesn’t seem to be. I mean, that’s what was so amazing to me about his statement in episode eight of Exodus there on, you know, because he flat out said it. He said, no, no, I see this thing in Peterson where he’s able to talk to these secularists in a way that doesn’t make their eyes glaze over. Right. And then he’s been trying to co-opt that. Actually, I wish in Thunder Bay I had asked him to stop asking where people are standing and start ask where they’re starting, because that’s actually the better question, because now they have to go back through and justify their ridiculous philosophy. And they’re not going to be able to. And it may not work in the moment. Right. But that’s not the point. The point is that it works. And I think that would eventually cause them to question starting axioms enough that they go far enough back and realize they’re not standing anywhere. Mark, that actually reminds me of, and it took me a second to figure out where it was from, but Father Eric, because that that Thomistic scientist that I was telling you about, Daniel Thoma, Dr. Daniel Thoma, in one of the points in his book that that really struck home is his point about like, so we, you know, we present this world as sort of this stacked thing of emergence with no no form of top down or any organization or anything. It’s all it’s physics and then chemistry and then biology. He said, Yeah, man, you can say that. But look, you don’t even have a word for nonliving. That’s not just not living. Like, exactly. Life is so basically the standpoint of our approach to reality that we can only divide these things in like in opposition to it. So it’s like nonbeing and nonliving and all of these things. So again, one of those switches where it’s like the whole seems to be this whole project of, well, like, let’s get outside of what it means to be, you know, like a meat computer or this brain inside of that. And it’s like, well, no, I mean, like, it’s not like that’s like one set of possible experiences that people have. It’s like that is being a person like that. Just that’s what it is. And and maybe, you know, maybe there’s material, you know, sort of like mineral intelligences, you know, C.S. Lewis in his space in his ransom trilogy, you know, presents the elder love these angelic beings as sort of this like crystalline, like semi material intelligence. It’s like fine, but like you’re not one of those. So how do you write, you know, where do you start by saying we understand we understand what it’s like to be an electron. It’s like, well, OK, hold on. That bothered me about Ant-Man and the Wasp. Right. When they went down into the quantum realm, it’s like you could have had you could have had an awesome sci fi moment there. Right. Yeah. You say, hey, guys, we’re going to be smaller than photons now. So your eyes aren’t going to work. No, no, it’s just more more of the same. Just like, but just more. I want I want Christopher Nolan’s take on the quantum realm. Give me that insane convoluted theory and the great cinematography. I’ll pay to see that. That’s funny. Well, I did. I did a video on this actually after Thunder Bay. It was based on a conversation I had with Catherine. She asked me like, oh, you know what, what, what did you think? And what should I have done differently? And I said, you know, really, you should vote. You should have forced them all to open with a definition of consciousness, unconsciousness and dead matter. Because if you only do two. Yeah. Right. Or if you if you try to do one, you just try to say everything is conscious. That’s pantheism. Right. Because you end up grading consciousness because you want to differentiate yourself from animals because we have to. Right. Otherwise, otherwise things get get bad in a different direction. And it’s one of the pushbacks that say the Peterson’s and Brevecky’s have. But then they divided into two. And the problem is they’re reductionists. So it always gets divided into one again. And then it always devolves into pantheism. And then they have fancy new names for pantheism that are all just pantheism of a different color. But it’s all just pantheism. So I don’t use any of those other pantheism and pan this. It’s all pantheism. You don’t need new words. It’s all the same trick. It’s all the same garbage. If you don’t have the three buckets to put things in the video on that, you don’t have the three three buckets with things in. You won’t make that important distinction between there’s stuff that’s happening to you that you’re not logical, rational and reasonable. And that’s in your unconscious. And then there’s stuff that has nothing to do with your unconscious and your conscious, which is dead matter. And your conscious sometimes has rationality. And that’s why I think about it on this crusade too. Bring back final cause. Bring back Aristotle’s four causes and stop letting them reduce all the causes to the material or combine the two. Two of the causes and then ignore the other two. Yeah, Mark, I think that Father, did you want to? No, I just want to say, yeah, I like the four causes. Well, and that is the thing that I think is sort of like ultimately unsatisfying for listening to Peterson and Verbecky is that they don’t have a final cause. And I’ve been thinking a lot recently about that. And do you all know Paul King’s North at all? He had that great article in First Things. That was awesome. Yeah. Well, OK, so then you’re familiar with this idea of the machine. Yeah. And so I’ve just been I’ve been wrestling with the fact that less in his, well, I was going to say less in his conversation. There’s sort of like multiple strands of Peterson, right? There’s like the philosophical, like, I mean, I think there’s a lot of things that are in there. There’s a lot of different kinds of Peterson, right? There’s like the philosophical sort of side where he’s talking about the logos and then there’s like the economic side and then there’s the political side. And, you know, so like there’s this counseling side that I wish we could to see more of, but he can’t practice anymore. Yeah, but but on the sort of the economic and political side, it’s there’s this really strange, like, just like capitulation to the machine. On his side, which is like, yeah, I get that doesn’t want like peasant starving in the cold. But on the other hand, he’s like, cars should be as cheap as possible and I should be able to buy anything I want whenever. And I’m like, I just don’t understand how you you don’t see that that hasn’t really worked in terms of in terms of human development. And and that’s just like a weird that’s that’s like a weird dispute. There’s like some sort of weird dissonance there. And I think that it’s probably because there is no conversation about final cause. I mean, based on I’ve worked partially through his latest conversation with Verbecky and there’s sort of this like. We’re perpetually getting closer to the truth as humans and deal logos and like that is the goal. And it’s like, no, man, like that doesn’t that just doesn’t work like that. Just it just does not work to say that I mean, because it’s just like a less trite way of saying that, you know, the journey is more important than destination. And it’s like, yeah, I don’t know. I want to get somewhere. Yeah, exactly. It’s like, I mean, come on, Peterson, like heaven and hell, man, like one of them really is heaven. They can’t they can’t neither of them can go there. It’s not possible for them to go there. And then what I what I’ve noticed as a result of watching that little 10 minute video to realize the way all of these people are solving the the self, you know, thing is they’re trying to say there’s a dialectic insight of you. Right. Right. So you have two perspectives and those two perspectives can emerge from the container. Right. It’s all emergence. The problem with the VKM with Peterson is that they are hardcore materialists. They are deniers of the concept of creation, which is really hard for people to understand. But when you listen to them carefully, they don’t acknowledge that they were born into something and that therefore they’re beholden to that thing. And this was on my seven hour live stream. This is one of the things I was talking about. I was saying, look, it’s actually really important to understand this. We were born into something and that we don’t have the Internet without the sacrifices of the people who came before us. Like it doesn’t exist. We owe them something. Right. We need to be humble. This stuff was given to us as a gift from the past. And so like Verbeke and Peterson, you know, Peterson touches on it more. He’s much better about it, but they can’t afford to acknowledge being born into creation. And even a simple question that Verbeke got from Sally Jo a while back in the Discord Q&A is being good. It took him two and a half minutes to answer the question. Like the answer is yes. Right. So that should be pretty quick. Right. And then the explanation can take two and a half minutes. But it was backwards. And that’s actually really important. These are little tells that I pick up on that I go, no, no, that’s really important. You should say yes first and then you should explain. And if you’re not doing that, you’re talking yourself into it. And that’s really dangerous. I don’t like that. Mark, that’s interesting because I’ve been trying to and this is how I actually got on the stream with Father Eric last week. I’ve been trying to do a little bit of work on the relationship between Neoplatonism and Aristotelian and Thomistic thought. And there’s some really interesting stuff in Neoplatonism. On the other hand, I’ve also been reflecting on the fact that the other interaction between Platonism and Christianity is not the Gnostic heresies. And so when you said the first thing I thought was like, what’s what is sort of the continual temptation of Christians interacting with with Platonism? And it is the denial of the goodness of being like because ultimately that’s what Gnosticism is. It is right. It’s that it’s that being as as we find her as we find herself, that’s notice simplification. It’s a way of it would be a way of stating the problem that, you know, there’s this like attempt to remove yourself from being, you know, you can call it returning to the oneness. But maybe maybe a more precise way to say it would be the the the it denies the goodness of particular being, which obviously the incarnation and the Blessed Virgin Mary are both just profound affirmations of particularity. They just like they scream it and it’s like, you know, this is why, you know, like this is why the Rosary for part, you know, this is one thing from the Rosary. It’s like, why do we do this? It’s like because the goal is not that we all come back to the sort of this. There’s not the sort of unitarian oneness at the end of everything where we just, you know, our blip disappears. It’s no, you know, the particular will somehow come to exist with to coexist and participate in the one. It’s like that’s yeah. Yeah. I can’t deny that you get to all kinds of trouble. But I only recently sort of understood, we’ll say, the danger of neoplatonism to two things happen. One was somebody are sometimes people, just people. And I hate people. And, you know, we want to talk about platinus. I had to look up some platinus. Platinus is deeply anti platonic, actually. So, yeah, I’m still a hard no on the existence of neoplatonism. Yeah, you had some core thing just in denial of forms. I was like, well, this is obviously wrong. But the more interesting thing is I was I was sent this video, a link to this video by James Lindsay. And basically, and he’s got two good ones, by the way, the talk at Oxford that he did 10 minutes defending wokeism of all things. It’s absolutely hysterical. And he’s not wrong. But it’s worth watching because it’s 10 minutes and he’s brilliant. But he did a video called WTF is SEL? That’s the whole title of the video. And in there, he talks about a bunch of stuff that I actually know something about, like Blavatsky and the ties to occultism and, you know, the Nazi Party and a bunch of those connections. Right. But also he ties all that back to neoplatonism and like my jaw hits the floor and I’m like, whoa, hold on. Where to stop the presses? You know, but I was very compelling. The only problem with that video is that it will make you conspiratorial for sure. And I don’t think it’s wrong. Like, I think there’s something going on there. I don’t I don’t think it’s maybe it’s not as a direct link as he’s making. But the links that he’s making are extremely clear and extremely frightening. But he does also go all the way back and say, this is all neoplatonic gobbledygook. And I was like, oh, yeah, there’s neoplatonic Gnosticism like all over this. And that does sort of stray into the occult. And I never thought of that because sadly, I didn’t want to tell you this, Father, I guess you’re going to find out. I know way more about the occult about Christianity in general. Like, I’m well studied, well, I can’t be friends anymore, Mark. Goodbye. Excellent. Yeah, I mean, I think that’s a perennial danger of of, let’s say, Platonism without the incarnation. Because it’s like, well, all this stuff around here, you know, I know it looks pretty, but it’s not the real thing. And when you get the real thing, you won’t want everything around us anymore. And it’s that it’s the extremely incarnational principle that Christianity puts into that. No, all of this is good. Beauty will occasionally seduce you. But that’s not actually its proper function. That’s a corruption of beauty. And these particular things that we have are very good. You even need to regard the physical stuff that represents the higher beings as sacred and holy. Right. So you will not do you will not wear your baseball cap inside the church. You will take that off. You will not chew gum inside the church. Well, that’s all flat. Right. The neoplatonic stuff is flat and it’s individualistic because it’s about your participation as an individual in the larger whole that is the one and return to that. Right. And so it assumes no hierarchy. It assumes a flat world. It creates a duality between the one and the many that doesn’t exist. It doesn’t talk about the many. It just kind of says, oh, there’s the many and you’re part of that. But really, you’re part of the one. And so it kind of leads you into Gnosticism by flattening the world, taking out the hierarchy. Right. And then not talking about participation in anything except your participation in the one and your participation in the many. It doesn’t talk about your participation in the truth, the good and the beautiful, for example. That would be a problem because I would think Plato would like that. That’s why I think neoplatonism doesn’t exist. You can’t locate it anywhere in any particular tradition. You can’t find it. You can’t locate it. Right. But also, there’s nothing there to allow you to interface with the things that Plato cared most about. Right. And there’s nothing there to allow you to interface with the community, with your family, with all of these hierarchies. It’s just it’s totally individualistic. So it’s going to lead to Gnosticism. As a sort of just like a beautiful counter balance in terms of, Father, what you’re talking about, the particulars. Charles Williams has got a fascinating book called The Figure of Beatrice, and it’s his commentary on Dante’s Corpus. And he makes a beautiful case that the Divine Comedy in particular, particularly in the context of Dante’s other works, the Vita Nova and the De Monarchia, is maybe the singular great example in art of that process by which the extraordinarily particular that is like a 16 year old girl in the streets of Florence, Italy, and around the turn of the third, you know, into the 14th century is also absolutely the conduit for the utterly transcendent and divine without ceasing to be Beatrice. And that’s pretty good stuff right there. Mark, are you familiar? Are you familiar with the Divine Comedy at all? No, we were talking about it on my seven hour live stream with Elizabeth who read it several times apparently. But no, I do have a copy somewhere over there. I’ll give you the short version so you can maybe have a little more participation in this. But it’s the middle of Dante’s life and he’s lost. He doesn’t know where he is and he doesn’t know where he’s going. Beatrice, up from heaven, sees that he’s in trouble. So she goes to St. Lucy, who is the patroness of Florence. St. Lucy goes to the Blessed Mother. The Blessed Mother sends Virgil, the great Roman poet, down from, actually, it would actually be up, up out of limbo. And it’s like that chain kind of starts there. And then first he’s got to go down to the very lowest and he climbs up Mount Purgatory. And then when he gets to the top of Mount Purgatory, he starts ascending into heaven and Virgil leaves him behind because he’s a pagan and he can’t go to heaven. He was pretty hardcore and medieval about that one. And then at that point Beatrice becomes his guide up the heavenly hierarchy. And it’s not just that she was like super pious, but it’s also like she had this integration about her, where her feminine beauty and her moral character and her love of sorts for Dante is what ultimately draws him out of his state of confusion into a state of participation with everything that’s good. Well, that’s what we should be striving for. It’s a good walk. It’s a nice, it’s a really good walk. Yeah, that’s a great father, that’s a great run through of it. It is, it’s a literary equivalent of a gothic cathedral and it’s got like maybe five different scales of which the meaning is going on. It’s all geographically located within the story. And then it’s full of all kinds of things of just striking beauty and gothic horror and all sorts of things. I think on a personal note, so I’m pretty well, I’m sorry, we’ve got a young one that’s messing up my audio at all. So there’s plenty of other authors that sort of crack the door. They show the light coming in through the door, someone’s dying and you just kind of peer through. And Dante somehow manages to get a third of his story through the door. And to me that’s as a literary feat is unrivaled. It’s really something. So yeah, it’s the kind of thing you read six or seven times like Mark’s friend. You just like, oh, I think I need to go back to that. Yeah, yeah, it’s got that kind of depth to it. Yeah, it’s, you know, I get frustrated when people spend all this attention on the Inferno, because you are literally missing all of the good stuff. All of the good stuff comes in parts two and three. Part one is the bad stuff. It’s this, it’s this heaven as a cast of characters, basically. Yeah. Everybody has become most properly themselves, you know, so… Not stripped of their personality, but like the personality is now what it was always supposed to be. It was always supposed to be. Yeah. And just sort of circling back around a little bit. I’ve actually found a lot of connection between liturgy and the paradiso, right? Right? Because somehow the idea that blessedness is looking the saints in the face and singing and moving around and somehow that is blessedness and it’s like no I’m starting to get that. I’m starting to get that that’s how we talk about blessedness. I’m not going to say that that is blessedness. That’s how we talk about it. I’m like that’s starting to click on like a really deep level. My sister, I’ve got a sister who’s in college and they covered, they just went through that she said that her professor talked about it as these I think it’s in the sphere of the sun where there’s these various church doctors who are just like spinning around each other basically. He’s like think about like two dogs who are just like so excited they’re just like running around each other and then that’s sort of like utter delight and seeing right because the whole idea is that it’s just this it’s just this continual reflection of of charity between the souls in heaven right and and that’s an image that’s picked up many times but what you know what is charity? The more that it is that it’s given out the more that there is and so heaven is this giant room full of mirrors just bouncing charity back and forth and then you get these great you know you get these great things right so they’re ascending up in the heaven to Beatrice because her beauty is a reflection of the divine beauty so the closer they get to the source of that beauty the more beautiful she gets and so Dante is always describing her eyes and her smile. They’re the I think he says the eyes of the window to the soul and the smile is the coercation of the laughter of the soul or something like the joy of the soul. Anyway so they get they get up to the sphere of the contemplatives of you know Jupiter where Jupiter is located and and he looks over and she’s not smiling and he says Beatrice why aren’t you why aren’t you smiling here and she says because at this point my smile is of such profound beauty that you would be you would be your mortal frame would not be able to handle the beauty he would be annihilated if I smile at you now. Which is no that’s that’s yeah never mind. I’m really curious what you’re gonna say. Okay here we go you know so sometimes that’ll be a complaint that let’s say women with feminist leadings will have is like they’re always telling me to smile you know like that would be a much better response you know my smile will annihilate you. I had a friend who went to the Benedictine monastery the Benedictine Abbey the sisters at Ephesus Ephesus in Missouri and he’s he’s telling you know he was there just for some service and just in there you know they’re probably the the daily office he was like I just couldn’t handle it he’s like when they smiled at me I just I just fell apart I didn’t know what to do. He’s married with eight kids and he’s just like I just can’t I can’t get to that he’s like I think Chesterton when Chesterton was talking about the one thing that Christ on this hit on this earth it being his divine birth he was like I think he might have been talking about nuns. Yeah I know I know exactly what your buddy’s talking about when I was in high school we visited a Carmelite monastery and the mother superior was talking to us from behind the grill you know so we could see her pretty clearly and as as a rather uneducated and boorish 18 year old I noticed that she was the happiest person I had ever met. Yeah. Couldn’t hide that. Yeah. Yeah it’s a good thing you have that veil sort of like you know Moses’s veil after he comes down off the top of the mountain. Yeah. Great there to protect your 18 year old brain from that much that much joy. But you know it was a it was just that little that little what that little hint that little glimpse that it is possible this stuff is possible all this holiness stuff it is real you know. Yeah. And it’s good and it’s joyful. Yeah. Saints are joyful. Mark it was a it was nice talking to you over stream yard and. Oh no a pleasure. You should if you want to know about Verveki whatever you should come on to one of the discord servers and we can we can teach you anything you want to know about Verveki better than he can. So feel free. You could probably give me for about an hour on Sunday evenings that’s about how my life is. Yeah. Yeah. He’s got a baby in the background and a few more that we can’t hear. So yeah. Yes. Sleeping sweetly so. Well thanks for thanks for having us Father Eric. My pleasure. I think I’m going to call it on the stream. I don’t I don’t have Mark’s endurance for seven hour streams so good night everybody. God bless. God bless. Thank you.