https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=uqBZzt89aOs
and peace and blessings to you all. Uh we are coming here live from uh Wapitan, North Dakota. So, uh I am doing a parish mission here and for those of you who are unaware of uh practice, basically, I come down. I preach at all the masses this weekend and then I have a couple of talks that I have already done and uh one on Monday night and one on Tuesday night and uh if you’re thinking, wow, boy, those talks would sure be something nice to hear. Uh I gave the same talks uh about 3 weeks ago at my home parish Holy Cross and uh those talks are available on my YouTube channel. So, if you like hearing me talk, um then that would be a way that you can hear me talk some more uh before we get into the chat, I see we’ve got uh Andrew here. Um I just wanted to make just a little a little note about Catholic social teaching. I’m sure at least some of you would probably have caught the live stream on Grail Country yesterday. Uh they had Nate, the host obviously and they had uh couple of interesting characters there. Um all Catholics and it was on this uh whole Jordan Peterson versus the Pope thing on Twitter. Um and you know, Jordan Peterson and uh all of that much. I think that was just flashy framing for uh talking about the uh the issues uh of what social justice is. Now, when I entered seminary, right? Uh imagine me with hair up here, none here, a little bit younger, a little bit skinnier. Uh if you had talked to me about Catholic social justice, I would have been immediately suspicious of that. I would have thought uh you know, what are these people going on about social justice and Catholicism and all that? I don’t know about that. It was only when I actually started to study the thing that I began to like it. Uh and what specifically uh drew me in and started getting me to take this seriously is the Catholic principle of subsidiarity. Um if you’ve read uh Extreme Motor Ship by uh Mr. Jocko Willink, uh it’s be very similar to the principle of decentralized command but the uh essential point there is that uh you’ve got different orders of organization in a society in an organization, uh different authorities and that in so far as it is possible, the people closest to the problem they’re trying to solve should be the ones to solve it. Uh we like to have local solutions first uh rather than having uh universal solutions to everything. It’s only when let’s say a local authority would not be able to handle a problem that you’d have the states come in. It’s only if the states couldn’t handle a problem that you’d have the feds come in uh that sort of arrangement. Uh when it actually works out, it works out brilliantly. And so once I uh I heard that that was you know not a very good example of Catholic social teaching. Um and I’m like oh this is actually a little bit better thought out than I had given it credit for. Um and so Catholic social teaching uh I think is uh is very balanced and it likes to balance things in tension. Uh so the principle of subsidiarity uh would kind of uh be in balance with the principle of solidarity of of the whole human race. You know that um that we should look out for within a within a certain amount. But they sort of balance each other out. But then you’ve got uh like the idea of the principle of a universal destination of human goods. There’s no one person that owns the earth unless his name is Jesus Christ. Uh but also uh that private property is a natural right and we hold these things uh in tension together. Um so I uh I wasn’t a part of the conversation on Grail Country but uh Nate was kind enough to highlight uh my comment about the principle of subsidiarity and how that opened my heart to uh Catholic social teaching in general. You know um so I hope we can treat this word social justice with a fair amount of reasonableness and respect and if you don’t like the term social justice and you just want to say justice that’s also okay. Alrighty my rant’s over and we’ve got friend of the show Andrew here. Andrew you’ll be back from Rome. That’s right. Um and Father I I know you just talked about it but I don’t know about this social justice stuff you know that word kind of scares me. Uh can I? But yeah uh now I recognize your your background on your screen. Oh yeah. St. Peter’s Basilica. Yep yep. That’s um that’s what it is. That’s what it is. Yeah um why don’t you you just got back from Rome. Tell us a few highlights. Um well one was we got to do this scavi tour. Uh where you see the bones of St. Peter underneath the basilica. And another was another highlight throughout the entire trip was since we went with a priest we had mass in all sorts of churches. So we had mass in every all four major basilicas. His favorite was St. Paul outside the wall. Well that’s the best one. That’s the best one. Is there a term for that? Like there’s a pub crawl? Is it a mass crawl? If you do that. I believe the term is pilgrimage. But uh yeah it was really cool to be able to do all that. And we did do a latin mass while we were there. And uh I think if I could choose one other highlight it would be going with our priest. Just me and him to go to uh I believe the store is called Gamarelli. Where they make the Pope’s vestments. We went there and we went to Barbicone. So you could get like all sorts of you wear what? I wear Barbicone shirts in the summer anyway. Oh nice. Yeah we got some vestments from there. They’re like 40 euro and they last forever. Wow. I’ll keep that in mind. They make vestments too though. So we got a new uh a brand new alb and I saw it today. He had it on for mass. So yeah it was really cool. The cassock I’m wearing right now is a battaglia cassock. It’s from a little shop on the Pio Borgio called Macinelli. I bought it off the rack and it looks great. Awesome. Yeah. It’s nice and everything. Yep yep. It’s a touch long on the sleeves but you know you just put your hands up like this and nobody could tell. Yeah yeah nice. So did you just rink in all of the classical architecture and just let it let your soul bathe in it? Oh yeah. We went to so many churches. I think on the last day I was almost getting kind of tired of it. We like visited like 40 different churches and the last one we walked into I’m like alright here’s another church. There it is. Look at all the frescoes. Wow. I was like so overwhelmed. So yeah I was really I took so many pictures too. I mean a lot of people were taking pictures of like themselves in front of the church or like group photos and I was taking pictures of like the columns, the floor, the ceiling, all sorts of stuff. Yeah exactly. Nice. Nice and classic architecture student. Not going to ruin this with my face. Yeah I felt like such a tourist taking pictures of like all of the stuff in the building. But I had to you know to analyze. Nice. So was there a little church right? Everybody knows about the four big basilicas but was there a little church that that caught your heart? I think I don’t remember if it was little but I remember there was a church for Saint Andrew I think that I really liked. Oh was it Andreas De La Valle? I think so yeah. The future church? Sure. Yeah yeah no actually I kind of fell in love with that one too. I would walk there when I had free time to pray. I would walk there and pray. I would walk there when I had free time to pray. How long were you there? I had like four weeks. Seminarians. Big fan of Saint Andrew. Oh me too. For obvious reasons. Crucified on that X shaped cross. Oh we also got to go to the North American college in Rome. Yeah yeah. We got to go up to the roof and have the best view of Rome. I got some great photos up there. Like a nice Christmas card photo that I sent out to everybody that year. I had my cinder on and my coat on and a big old smile. I don’t know if I remember the top of that Christmas card actually. Let’s think about it. Add me to the Saint Andrew fans. I’m like a Saint Andrew. He brought Peter to Jesus. What more do you need? What more can I say? Yeah. I can’t remember the conversation I was talking about. Oh actually you know what I really liked? We went to see St. Cecilia’s tune. That was pretty cool. I guess I just kind of liked it just because I do music. Yeah yeah. I don’t know if I made it to that one. There’s dead bodies all over Rome. Oh yeah. There’s just so many corpses underground everywhere. Did you go to Assisi? I did actually. We had a five day silent retreat in Assisi. Wow that’s amazing. It’s so beautiful. I got to look at the different they had the big church with the Giotto pictures in there. I got to see those. And then I got to go to the big church that had the little church inside of it. To one of St. Clair’s convents. And I got to do it all in dead silence. Awesome. Alright. Bubba Elvis says bring back classical architecture and the music. Bubba Elvis says bring back classical architecture with the human scale and the glorious ornaments. Humanity now has 3D printers and 5 access CNC machines. And we have AI artists. I’m not sure if Bubba Elvis is thinking we need to use the 3D printers to build churches. Are you saying that we have the technology? Because I don’t know if putting those together would make a very good architecture. You used my picture for the small product You could, you didn’t. Ask if you should. So the social justice thing is too juicy for me not to comment on. Alright. Now Mark came in here with social justice. No need to modify justice. If you modify virtue it is no longer a virtue. Easy peasy. Don’t try and play their games with their language. Actually that’s a good segue to what I want to say about it. It’s originally, the OG social justice is a Catholic church. We’re the ones who coined the term. Specifically it was Pope Pius XI in his encyclical which was a response to communism. And he actually came to the Vatican if you want the link. I’m on I’m on one monitor today. Because I’m in. So it’s going to be really hard for me to share screen and I don’t know if guests can share screens or not. So we’re going to be a little more we’re going to be a little bit limited here because otherwise we’re going to get screenception going on. So here’s a thought. Here’s a thought on social justice. We’ve got this concept of like the four cardinal virtues and the four cardinal virtues and then this idea that there are are sort of virtues annexed to it. That kind of highlight an aspect of the main virtue while not actually capturing its fullness. And so I’m wondering if we need to to have to have justice social justice be a part of justice. And you could talk of it like you know, you could define it like justice in so far as it can be affected by a legislator or something that manages a society. Well, it’s it’s an emergent property of just people. If you have a social justice as described like you were talking about it being like when you have a well ordered society that it emerges out. So if you have a society that is well-ordered, so if you have a society of just men who are running just families and then are creating just organizations then that’s the then social justice is the emergence justice of the virtue of the distributed cognitions, right? How is that different than the common good? How is that different than well, I mean, it’s maybe a species of the common good. If you could think of it as if you think of of a family or a company of having a sort of a distributed cognition or an agency of its own then presumably that could have some sort of virtues, but those virtues wouldn’t be can actually be achieved in sort of the communist top down method. They have to be achieved through the organic method of like both at the same time. People having clean rooms. Sure, people having clean rooms and good leadership. People having clean rooms and good leadership. You need both. You need both the emanation from above and emergence from below to meet because that’s how the world works. Now what you’re talking about, this is when you’re talking about social justice as an emerging property, that actually sounds a lot more to me like the common good as it is in Catholic thought. So we could take an example of the fact that generally property rights are respected in the United States of America. So generally property rights are respected in the United States of America and every good person benefits from that. The fact that when you legally purchase a piece of property that you know it’s yours, that it’s not going to be seized suddenly and unjustly by some bad actor. And that actually it’s a good thing that everybody shares in, right? Because everybody knows this. It actually makes society flow, it makes money go around, it creates trust amongst people. All these different sorts of things. And so I think the way you talked about it as an emerging property I think in Catholic thought that would be more commonly thought of as the common good. Emerging out of a just society rather than calling that social justice. Okay. Mark is pretty insistent that virtue has to be something that comes from the top down. And then PIK Hello PIK, I don’t know if you’ve ever been here before, welcome. The problem is that the term is being used to express power in service of regime. Yeah. And so frankly like I’m probably not going to use the term social justice? Well it’s been inverted, right? It was actually and that’s because it was a new term it was easy to separate and an abstract term it was easy to separate from its essence and then be co-opted by the enemy which is what they do. They’re always twisting language. That’s why liberal doesn’t mean liberal anymore and modernist doesn’t mean modernist anymore. These terms have been taken over and taken on a new meaning that people are intrinsically now associating negatively because the brand has been co-opted if that makes sense. Right? Yeah. It’s not the essence of liberal or the essence of modern, modernist that people are responding to. It’s the people who have co-opted it and are just abusing the brand and changing the meaning of the meanings of the words. Yeah. I don’t know. I think I can solve just a lot of problems without using this word social justice. However, we do have to say that there is such a thing as Catholic social teaching. Yes. That’s just basically the church’s teaching insofar as it has wisdom to offer the organization of society. So we have to have that. I agree with your tactic. I think that there’s no sense in taking back the term social justice at this point unless you’re having that particular argument about where the origins of the term is. But I think that Catholic social teaching is much healthier. But I’ve actually seen attempts to take that over too. Or in a twisted way, say that there’s one of those one of the popes the bishops who were involved with the synodal way in Germany had pointed out or said that without communism there would be no Catholic social teaching which in a twisted sense you could be right you could make that argument because it was Catholic social teaching was a sense or at least the encyclical if you’re using it as Catholic social justice was a response to the rise of communism but it’s not it was a clarification of the church’s position. It wasn’t actually right, like it would have been better that they didn’t that rare room, the var room didn’t have to come in in response to a whole bunch of social issues that were really hurting people. It’s like the rare room, the var room that’s 1891 I think it’s 1891 or 1889 somewhere in that area there and that was in response to both the rise of communism and kind of that you know industrialization and the poverty that came along with that and so Leo the 13th addressed that with that first basically like the first doctrinal address to sort of social issues in I think it was 1891 in rare room, the var room and again it was that middle path it’s that middle path of not everything can be top down and not everything can be bottom up top down that’s your communism bottom up that’s laissez faire free market economics it’s got to be somewhere in that middle where we’ve got the top down and the bottom up actually meeting meeting each other never did in those terms before so today I learned didn’t GK Tasherson say something similar to or that’s what he was shooting for with is distributism? yeah and then he was going to be confiscating land forcefully and distributing it which I wasn’t actually all that hot on that particular program but I think the goal of distributism which is distributing the means of production as widely as can be managed I think that was a really good goal I’m just not sure about the the actual program because it was actually a party and a platform in early 20th century Britain and it was a little bit it was kind of yeah it was a little radical a little radical and I kind of take people’s land and give it to the poor and it didn’t end up going through but for a hot moment the distributists were were in there doing stuff yeah I think his actual position is more spitballing the specifics but he was sort of trying to say yeah the distribution of the means of production as widely as possible that’s good we want people to have skills and capital that’s what everybody wants skills, capital and virtue yeah but the virtue thing is really up to you I guess it’s all actually up to you if you’re going to hold on with Mark saying that virtue is top down I think his point is that it comes from aiming there has to be an ideal that one is aiming for that’s where Jesus the God comes in and I don’t know if it’s if our worldly institutions all have to be aimed at God I don’t know if that’s as much as individuals I’m trying to think that through I mean like just a corporation like is a Hershey’s chocolate have to be aimed at God I mean in what way? I would say in so far as I’m not saying that because they’re not poisoning people and are treating their workers well that’s actually pointed at God the problem is not everyone can be skillful and some people just want other things which is what I’m fine with that is true so it’s having capital distributed as much as possible doesn’t mean that absolutely everybody’s going to have access to the means of production how does the doctrine of subsidiarity actually play out in the local Catholic parishes? I think of Michael Sator project seems like something the church would be interested in supporting I’m not a hundred percent up on Michael’s project it sounds like empowering men to learn trades as far as I can tell and that’s a good thing so the doctrine of subsidiarity actually plays out in local Catholic parishes in that the bishop can’t micromanage everything and so really it’s like he can kind of give direction from above but he leaves a lot of decision making power in the hands of the local pastor and so I’ll give you an example that’s actually relevant to me is that we’ve got certain requirements for people who are getting married in the Catholic church and it’s generally like this is a requirement and we ask everybody to do it but if there’s a good reason then I as a not a pastor, a parochial vicar working in the parish life I can write a letter saying I think it would be good for the law to be relaxed in this particular case for these reasons very often the bishops his curia, his bureaucracy will will give me what I’m asking for as long as I’ve got a good enough reason I haven’t been turned down yet maybe I’m just good at asking, I don’t know so I guess that’s the way it would actually play out in Catholic parishes skill in capital and virtue will come under pressure when AI and robots slowly take over all professions but you know what profession they’re not taking over? Catholic priesthood just saying you’re safe there’s not going to be any robot priests at least none that are validly ordained so you’re saying it’s a real opportunity for more what do you call it increase of vocations vocations, more vocations what you’re seeing is AI is an opportunity for increase in vocations there’s a young man at my parish and he’s a sports writer and he he said to me very seriously chat GPD can probably do my job I might be able to get him you know Michael’s a Protestant okay we’re still angry at Protestants he doesn’t want that kind of help this is the problem with that sort of thing it’s harder to build things when you protest against structures that build AI won’t take over anything it’s a scam honestly it’s created more jobs than it’s taken over and will continue to do so they’re already working on priest GPT I’m just not buying it you need to have a soul in order to have a character of soul to celebrate Mass now I’m betting you that there’s going to be guys who are having chat GPT write their homilies that’s probably going to happen interesting you can already there’s these homily services where you can just get a homily every day or every week written by somebody else oh yeah I’ve heard of that I don’t do it because people need to listen to what I say you know but I’ll also occasionally if I’m stuck on something I’ll listen to what Bishop Barron has to say on a particular Sunday I’m not against doing that sort of thing or I’ll read Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on scripture that sort of thing but I always there was one time I was stuck for a homily on the Feast of the Annunciation not the Annunciation, the Immaculate Conceptions I found Bishop Barron’s homily I took his basic point but I father scytified it and I made it my own and then nobody knew that I had stolen from Bishop Barron I just saw there was just today that all of St. Henry Newman’s John Henry Newman’s homilies are compiled into one book I figured that would be a rich treasure tove, yeah something like 900 of them or something that’s gotta be multiple volumes probably one series that dude would go on like 50 minutes a week for his homilies which was total? yeah I think so back in the Anglican days yeah that was the amazing thing about John Henry Newman is back in his Anglican days he had this preaching post I think it was at Oxford that he got paid for no matter if anybody showed up right? so you could just go out there and absolutely lay an egg and still collect your paycheck right? but he just went ham on it and all of a sudden the students were flocking to him and basically he would write out his entire sermon and then he would just read it off and he was just that good that people were just like I’m coming to this every week I think they were usually 3 to 15 minutes long well that sounds like a good person to get the crib off of yeah I still I read one of his homilies on James and John and their mother when they approached Jesus and the mother said order that my sons sit one on your right and one on your left and he just he made this this very elegant 19th century English here but, you know, Jesus he didn’t give him what they wanted but he took their their unformed zeal seriously and like, and like honored their unformed zeal and that kind of struck me because I was a young seminarian and I had a lot of unformed zeal in those days so yeah that stayed in there about a decade now. So. I guess it’s pretty good. It’s lodged in deep. Stuck in there, it’s not going anywhere. Yeah. So I talked to one of the organizers for the that man is you program. Today for the Canada, yeah, so I’m thinking of starting one up for my in in my parish or North Bay, so we’ll see how that goes. You’re going to do it at 5 o’clock in the morning. Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I like he said he was telling me that the one that his pet the one he does for his parish is on Saturday mornings. It’s still like 5 in the morning, but some a little more civilized on Saturdays. But I think it here it might be troublesome because I’m planning to recruit from the guys who go to the Latin Mass and this and they’re the only Latin Mass in for what is it like? It’s going to say 200 kilometers, but I guess you guys use real measurements, so it’ll be like 120 miles or more. It’s on it’s on Saturday morning, so I don’t know if. If that’s going to hurt. So I mean, I actually. At our parish, we’ve got two that man is you. Sections groups, one of them meets Wednesday nights at 7. And they actually meet in our rectory or priest house because Wednesday nights at 7 we’ve got a lot of. Catechism class going on, so there’s no there’s literally no room at the church for them, so they needed our priest house and then it’s Thursday morning at 6. So you might be able to pull something off in the midweek and. You know, I know Canada is a different place than North Dakota, but they’re not that different. No, I think I think midweek is probably the way to go. Yeah, I it’s it’s sort of a relatively. I guess it’s it’s a relatively new thing in Canada. I mean. But it seems like it’s really successful in the States, and I’ve seen everything I’ve seen from them so far is super positive and no one has anything bad to say about the programs or like actually a lot of positive things to say. General, I I I sat with the the men through one of their sessions and you know they. They they had this this guy I don’t really know who he was, but he was talking about Saint Thomas Aquinas on anger and. It seemed like what Thomas Aquinas would have really taught so. I gotta get me to complain about that, yeah. Yeah, they are. They also I just I saw that they have a new series out on the Rosary. So they just started this year. Uhm, and I was just sort of looking through flipping through the thumbnails of that and I saw Doctor Peter Kraft. So I thought, well, that’s a pretty solid source. Yeah, yeah. It’s a sponsorship I can get behind. So so I encourage you. I encourage you to check this program out and. Alright, we’ve got another bald nail in here. How are you doing, Mark? You’re not the captain here. I’m the captain. Oh yeah, I forgot to change my name. I’ll just forget that. I’ll I’ll uncaptain myself OK? As soon as I figure out how I know there’s a way to do it. I think it’s on the ellipse on your name on your picture in the corner. There’s like a little preview view and just click on the the elliptic triple dots there and edit name. Yeah, I will. I will edit my name. How’s that? There we go. There. There are right. Yeah, you’re the captain. Now I saw your your talk with Manuel, which I thought was excellent. Yes, that was a good talk. I think on that wonderful channel agopic orientation. Why don’t you post a link to that in the chat? I I’m on one monitor tonight, so it’s hard for me to do anything besides monitor this. I will try to if it lets me. Sometimes it doesn’t let me post post links, but I will. I will try to because that that I thought it was a good talk on on submission in particular and the idea of what it means to submit in terms of the Catholicism as such, right? So. Yeah, let me just post it. I forgot I can post it from here. It will post everything hot. There we go. Yeah, it’s a good it’s it was a good talk. I really appreciated it and enjoyed it right. Why didn’t that work on Earth? Did you post? I don’t know. I don’t know what the hell happened. I just grabbed the share in the video. That’s awful. Mark in my. In my thing here and it’s making me look bad because it’s under my name. Sorry, I don’t know what Windows did. My windows and she crashed it yesterday. Oh, right itself. Yeah, it has posted like a whole transcript. Apparently I apologize for I don’t know where that even came from. The computers, they have a mind of their own. Sorry, I can’t become priests. Yeah, that’s why computers can’t become priests right there. I did. Yeah, yeah, it doesn’t work. I didn’t I didn’t hit enter. I just pasted and it stented. And I was like, not normal. It’s the we’ll just blame agile, agile development. I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to do that. William agile, agile development on that. I was talking about that all day today, actually. So, yes, it’s trying to explain with somebody. Oh, really, they’re doing this. And he’s like, you can’t develop software that way. And I said, I know. Have you seen anything that works? That’s that’s why they’re all trying to do agile development. It doesn’t work. So, yeah, yeah. No, I thought that was a really good talk. I really enjoyed that talk, actually. I thought. I thought what came out of it was very interesting in terms of your journey and your personal story. And, yeah, I found it very helpful. And I thought Manuel actually did a really good job with it. Yeah, yeah, no, I guess the big insight I took away from it, which wasn’t really all that topical, but it was I didn’t enjoy going to mass until I understood my own participation in it. And that didn’t happen until I became an altar boy. Right. So, yeah, that was huge. Yeah, a lot of that stuff came together when I was about 10 years old, because I had some of the doctrines floating around my head. Something we used to when we lived in South Carolina, we would drive like 20 or 30 minutes a day to get to our our Catholic school that we went to. Because, you know, there’s not a whole lot of Catholics in South Carolina. And my mom would put this tape on. It was called The Mass Explained by Father Larry Richards. Father Larry Richards was defending the real presence of the of the Eucharist, you know, that Jesus is present, body, blood, soul, and divinity in the Eucharistic species on the altar. And he literally, you know, during this recording that he recorded in front of a live audience, he screamed at them. It’s not a symbol. I could just look at any one of my siblings, just go, it’s not a symbol. And I’ll know exactly what I’m talking about, because we listen to that tape over and over again. Yeah. So at that point, I knew that it wasn’t a symbol, but I didn’t know why that was important. My parents actually did that today. So that’s sort of a as part of it, because he didn’t directly talk about the Eucharist, but it did come up. What was it? Oh, he’s talking about receiving the Eucharist, about your state of grace. What’s the state of grace? When can I receive the Eucharist? When can I not? And then he’s like, and why is it important? And he he shouted, it’s not a symbol. So you probably got that from Father Larry, like I say, all of us, we steal from each other. Yeah. In case, like, if you’re a thief. You don’t let anything good go. So, but yeah, I don’t know. It all kind of crystallized. It all kind of crystallized. It all kind of crystallized and congealed and came together when I was in fourth and fifth grade as an altar boy in Norway. OK, yeah, yeah. You can hear that story on a Gapic orientation. Manuel put a nice little YouTube channel with some interesting content. Yeah, it does. Well, it’s more it’s more Rando’s style. If you like the Rando’s conversations that Van der Kley does, you’ll probably like, you know, the unfolding the soul series from from Manuel. It is very similar. Yeah. And that whole idea of participation being the thing that causes your understanding, I think is super. That’s the thing people are missing. It’s like book learning doesn’t do it. Because I didn’t I didn’t get it when, you know, like I got something when Father Larry yelled at me, it’s not a symbol. Right. I got something out of it. It wasn’t nothing. But like that that needed it sort of like like it fit into place once I got the the the right participation. Yeah. Well, and his book learning is really unreliable. So the thing that I learned yesterday. So we have this book club that we’re doing for the Texas wisdom community. So we have we have a first wisdom community, the Texas wisdom community run by Danny. And he wanted to do the Republic. So I’m reading it as we go. Might have never read it. I’m reading what I need to read just before the book club. So this pressure in my mind. Right. And I’m reading Book 2. Right in Book 2. And no one’s ever told me this before. I’ve never heard anybody say this. This to me is like mind blowingly important. The problem of children is brought up. And the solution is censorship, by the way, which I find interesting. Nobody brings that up. And Gnosticism is explicitly explained in Book 2 of the Republic. And I’ve never heard anybody point this out. And it’s like it’s clear the bad God is there. The whole like it’s not like it’s very plain language in Book 2. It’s right there. No one’s ever mentioned this. Are you all missing the reading part of the reading book or like, I don’t know what’s going on. So, I mean, it just doesn’t seem reliable, like how anybody could fall into Gnosticism if they had read the Republic and they understand the problem that’s being posed and scaling is right there. The problem of scaling. It’s all right. So Plato was was anti Gnostic in Book 2 of the Republic, is what you’re saying. It’s not that he was anti Gnostic. He’s just pointing out the problem of Gnosticism. Like it’s the bad God, the good God, like all of that is there. The whole idea that knowledge is going to somehow pull you out or up from or whatever is explicit in Book 2. It’s it’s not OK. It’s you know, what is it? So he’s explicit in in his in his support or his outline of the idea or is he explicit in outlining the idea and then highlighting its problems and saying it’s inherently flawed. I don’t know. What is he all Book 2 is is an outline of the problem of Gnosticism. Like he makes the case for forbidden knowledge based on children, which is the correct case, by the way. It’s it’s right because it’s easy to make. It’s hard. It’s hard. It’s harder. It sounds silly, but it’s actually harder to make the case to people in a real fashion that they can understand that say, I know things that Father Eric doesn’t and he knows things that I don’t. And and and that further, there are things that I will never understand as well as as he does. And there are things that he will never understand as well as I do, no matter what else happens, right, because we have so much in common. Like we’re both bald and therefore super smart. And I know this person. March. And so you run into that problem. But you know where that doesn’t happen is with children. Like nobody can make that case with children. Like you can’t make the case that you can explain sex to a three year old the way you can explain it to a 17 year old. Nobody would make such an absurd argument. And so he uses children to basically say, look, the poets are bad and we have to ban them all in the city. It’s basically what he says, because children and I’m like, yeah, pretty much. If that’s your outline, I’m not saying the starting axioms are correct. But if that’s your outline, that’s true. And that’s the scaling problem, he says. Well, let me just let me just make the scaling point. He says you can’t understand justice from your own perspective, because, again, this is the desert island on a desert island. You don’t need justice to you. Right. So in order to understand it, we have to scale it up to the city. So he scales it up to a city. Right. And then you deal with the issue. So that’s the scaling problem. It’s like, oh, yes. But then elements, because it’s a larger set, some things are going to be more just than others. There is given like the view of justice changes, because what’s just to the cobbler isn’t just from the perspective of the king. It’s not possible. And so all of those problems sort of spring from chapter two. Right. I mean, book two, the writing book to of the republic explicitly. OK, I think that there’s there’s justice at the familial level, though. Right. I feel like as a dad, I’m usually called to to render justice within the family on a regular basis. Well, that’s the problem of justice. Right. That’s why it doesn’t scale. So justice for your family and justice for you are not the same thing. And justice for this for the community and justice for the state and justice for the country are not the same thing. And because we only have our own perspective, we can’t understand what’s just to us in those other contexts necessarily. Like, you know, I mean, maybe we can, but it’s not automatic. Is it’s are you saying I’m not really understanding anything? Are you saying it’s context dependent or is it like so? It’s not really the problem or family. It’s it’s not merely context dependent. It’s also context dependent, but it’s also dependent on. Look, in any system of any kind at all, there are winners and losers. That that’s going to happen. Right. In order to adjudicate something, if you weren’t there, you don’t know who hit who first. So the justice you hand down to your children, if they’re if they’re fighting, is in some sense arbitrary because you cannot determine the truth. If you’re not there, you can make guesses about the truth. And those guesses might be correct, but that’s incidental. And that’s what people don’t appreciate. It’s like injustice, maybe where you both have to stop hitting each other. And we’re not going to you hit him four times. So he gets to hit you four times. Like, you know, that doesn’t make any sense. What’s just in some cases might be that that might be just. But in other cases, it might be, no, just all the hitting stops now. And you’re going to have to deal with he hit you two more times, you know, because there’s no there’s no proper adjudication. It doesn’t exist. And and and so there’s an arbitrary element to the justice, obviously. And then the thing to me is like, well, this is all obvious, but apparently not. And the republic breaks it all down and makes it all rather explicit. Yeah. But I mean, it is this the whole consciousness is about all all all about dealing with uncertainty. Right. Like, it’s like it’s that’s that’s what what we are. All right. We’re. The limits. Yeah, the limits. It’s just yeah, it’s that’s what we’re not dealing with. Right. We’re not dealing with the fact that we’re limited creatures. And that’s that’s very much that that’s very much the problem of humanity. Right. Because we’re we’re we’re being such staunch individualists and that therefore materialists and objectivists all at the same time that we’re not understanding that these perfect views of virtues don’t exist. And so when they don’t work out the way we want, we modify that. We’ll say social justice. Right. That that’s the third way to communicate. You can’t communicate functionally using a modifier to a virtue. Like we all have to strive for justice or else those people who are not are going to be in a bad way. Right. And because there’s no other there’s no other option. Like we have to look higher to cooperate or we can’t cooperate. You’re not going to look across and be able to cooperate as effectively as you can if you’re all looking up at the same thing. I don’t know. So. Talking about people not reading The Republic and not understanding it, there is a nice part of that or like a not so bad part of that, where, you know, I recently have gotten through most of the confessions again. And I got more out of the confessions of St. Augustine at the age of 30 than I did at the age of 23. And so and so it is it is kind of nice to have these books where, you know, it’s just on the shelf and every every five or 10 years or whatever, I go and I revisit it and there’s actually something more there for me. Yeah. But it’s but it’s like it’s like participation I had in the world and the transformations that I’ve gone through is what’s made that happen and has created that space inside of me to receive new wisdom. And right. Well, then that’s the problem. We don’t appreciate that. We think, oh, you read the book. I read the book. Now we have the same knowledge. It’s like, no, that’s not that’s what we’re not appreciating. Like we’re super boring. That was the case. Yeah. Because it is super boring. But we don’t we don’t even think of it that way. People most people don’t think of it that way. They think of it like, oh, I read the book. And so I got right. And then what you realize, especially in a book club, is, well, you read the book and you missed all of these points. And then I missed all of these points. And then it’s like, oh, and then I get to see it through your eyes. You get to see through my eyes, et cetera. I mean, we have like four people there usually are more. So you get to see these other perspectives. And that is way better than just reading the book by yourself. And if you try to tell somebody that, no, no, no. Reading the book at the same time and then discussing it is a different experience from merely reading the book. It’s not a sellable story anymore. But because we’ve just reduced everything down to this materialist knowledge and this one to give you knowledge like like AI is going to be this specifically narrowing thing because it’s a mirror and it’s a parasitic mirror. At that. So it’s just sucking the knowledge out of other places and and condensing it. And that’s great, except you have to keep condensing. And so eventually, if everybody uses it for their homilies, everyone’s just going to have the same homily all the time. I just ordered this Dr. Peter Kraft book that I’m super excited about getting. It’s called The Platonic Tradition. And it’s very much in the vein of what you’re talking about. I haven’t read it. I’m just reading the summary on Amazon at this point. But I think that this is why I ordered it, because it’s on this sort of this this theme. The first of his eight lectures, Peter Kraft defines Platonism as its big ideas. The idea of the transcendent reality that is the history of philosophy is labeled the Platonic ideals and forms. In the second lecture, he briefly explores Plato’s two basic predecessors or sources, the myths and Socrates, and then looks at at 12 applications of the form in Plato’s own dialogues. The third lecture covers the most important modifications to the addition of Plato himself in the Platonic tradition. Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, and each of whom who gave the forms new metaphysical address. The fourth lecture exposes the six Christian Platonists, three in the New Testament, in three philosophers, Justice Martyr, Bonaventure and Aquinas. And the next three lectures explore the consequences of the modern abandoning of Platonism, beginning with with William of Occam’s nominalism as the source of nearly all modern philosophical errors and its results in the empiricism of Locke and Hume and the so-called Copernican Revolution in the Philosophical Conte and the so-called analytic philosophy, which still dominates English and American philosophy departments. In the sixth essay, Kraft looks at the 13 influential kinds of positivism and reductionism in modern thought and method, history, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, sociology, politics, logic, but I mean, it gets spicier from there. And I was like, hmm, this sounds like he’s really on to something here. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think I think, you know, there’s a deep confusion with, say, the Verbecky people, Verbecky in particular, where he’s like, well, look at all this Platonism everywhere. It’s like, well, yeah. And the reason why they added on to Platonism is because it’s insufficient. And so it’s kind of like, well, of course they adopt. Like, what else could they adopt as the Catholic church? Like what what other philosophical tradition was there that was survived? Zoroastrianism. Well, they took the best of everything. And the best was not Zoroastrianism, right? It wasn’t. Sorry. They lose. Right. So the fact that Platonism was expanded upon by by the Christian tradition, A, should not be a surprise, although apparently this is a big shock to some people. And B, it should it should highlight to you that Platonism or even Neoplatonism is not it doesn’t do the same thing. It’s not sufficient. It doesn’t hold. Right. You need something more. That’s why something more was added on. Like, it’s not a magic trick at some point. Plato is not enough. Plato is not enough. Yeah. And abandoning Platonism is very bad. I’ll also say to Babelvis that Nerudo is not enough either. Yeah, I don’t I don’t know why why you want to do anything to anime. And also, by the way, I there was a talk I attended years ago, years ago at a convention. This guy gave a great surprise at one of the best presentations ever. Catholic Catholic symbolism is strewn about anime like you wouldn’t believe. And when you start watching, you’re going to go, oh, wow, it’s everywhere. The whole all of Catholicism is basically strewn around anime. Left, right and center. Yeah, I’ve seen that. I think there’s actually but I’ve thought about this. And I think that the the actual because there’s a weird thing that happened in Japan with the fusion of Shintoism and Buddhism, right? And I think that they actually came up with something that very much resembles Christianity without being Christianity with. The from the from the sort of the dialogue of Shintoism and Buddhism. And so I think that that’s why you end up seeing a lot of those themes, because they’ll actually sort of like if you press them, they’ll say, no, this is from Shintoism or from Buddhism. But they came up with something that was. Very and maybe you could sort of like a very much Christian like without actually being Christian. And that may be why, you know, why Christianity has had such a hard go of it there besides like the brutal persecutions that that was. That is definitely a factor as well. But I think that it is sort of like, oh, we already have it. It wasn’t it wasn’t offering them something that they really. Saw saw there and I know and there’s a lot of analysis that has to go in this layers to it, but I think that, you know, they they they have a lot of those the themes that are present in Christianity and Catholicism were already. Arrive that in Japan. Yeah, it’s possible that all religion converges on Jesus, who knows? Yeah, that’s what I think. I think that’s not what the Christians believe. I’m not a universalist, but I think that there’s there’s some truth. Like they said, I don’t think that’s people striving towards God. Yeah. Yeah. If you if you think like even the Catholic Church is universalist, you’d be surprised if their idea of universalism is not everybody else’s idea of universalism, but it’s certainly present because go to an Italian Catholic Church and an Irish Catholic Church and a French Catholic Church. And then we’ll chat or better yet, go to it. Go to one with a South American pastor, then we’ll chat, we’ll chat about about how the same the Catholic Church is. Don’t don’t don’t give up our secrets, Mark. We have to be monolithic and unified across the world. We are all the same. Thank you, Andrew. Yes, we are all the same. With regards Japanese religion, do you think it’s possible that a lot of people have a lot of ideas? So you had like this this this missionary presence in 16th and 17th century Japan. Then the emperor starts cracking the heck down on it. Brutal persecution, martyrdom, very effective. But do you think that some of those ideas might have just like gotten popular enough to be a part of the that was being repressed by the emperor that it kind of like sometimes ideas get inside you without you know that? And that’s part of the thing is it could have been because of the Shinto Buddhist relationship, it could have been permeated into the Shintoism because Shintoism is is not well defined. Right. It’s really a collage. It’s a collage of the Shintoism. It’s a collage of the Shintoism. Right. It’s really a collage, a conglomeration of local gods and sort of a naturalism. But it fundamentally they have it’s it’s it’s a very particular local god phenomenon. So like a lot of those Christian ideas could have they there should be it’d be really great to do some exploration of that because there are Christian ideas could have been disseminated through the Shinto local Shintoism. And that would be overlooked by the broader Buddhist authority because the because the Buddhists, they would they weren’t looking they were looking for threats to the the supremacy of the Buddhist orthodoxy. And Shintoism in and of itself was not that. So. It would it could be a way of those ideas disseminating through there’s a possible it is it is very possible. That’s I heard I heard a theory once that the the chants, right, the liturgical chant that the the missionaries had taught the locals for the liturgy actually made an impact on Japanese folk music, like some of those melodies and tropes like migrated into Japanese folk music. And then when they rediscovered when they discovered like Bach in the 20th century, it like caught on because it’s like, oh, this sounds like Japanese folk music, which is already influenced by these Western tropes that came in. So I heard that theory once and I don’t have any ability to actually verify it, but it sounds cool. So I’m not going to hold that. But there’s yeah, so there’s ways that Western cultures are creeped in and like the tempura is a very Japanese ditch. But it’s it’s it comes it has a Portuguese origin. The year zero is Christ’s birth decided after the fact. So, yes, I would say it’s the crux of all under the calendar’s dominion. Don’t underestimate the power of a calendar right there. How much of your life is governed by Memorial Day, Labor Day and the academic calendar? Yeah. No, I actually amount of it. Public schools. That’s our religion, baby. Case you were wondering. Some of the education. Yeah. So I just sort of to add to Father Eric’s theory, like there’s a mirror situation in Spain, right, where the Jews were heavily persecuted. Added and then there were Jews who went under the under sort of underground as Christians. And then they they and the Judaism was sort of the origins of some of the traditions they practiced was lost, but they the families, the generations of families continue to practice these traditions without knowing that they were they’re a Jewish in origin. Right. So they would do things like turning the crosses on certain hiding the cross on certain days and and having like a Passover meal and things that they they did they just thought were part of their Christian practice, but really were from their their secret Jewish origins. So you could have actually could actually see something similar happening in in the Shintoism where it was it was overtly it was forbidden for them to actually. To say that these practices were Christian, so they actually were just then integrated into the the Shinto bloodstream of the country and. And and and sort of went under the radar that way. So it’s definitely a possibility. It’d be that would be if people were doing really worthwhile academic research these days and that would that would be an interesting thing. Well, maybe somebody has and we just don’t know about it because they are not letting their light shine. Right. Well, that’s the yeah, that’s the big problem. Yeah, it could it could well be that everybody noticed that there’s the problem of children, the problem of scaling and the problem of Gnosticism or Book Two of the Republic, and no one’s talking about it and no one’s pointed it out except me. Apparently, I don’t know what’s going on. Yeah. And that’s that’s part of the problem. I mean, this is and the way you get hidden rituals like that or rituals that get co-opted or whatever from, you know, it’s basically Tom Holland’s dominion. You don’t realize what you’re feeding off of. You don’t realize your history where things came from anymore. And so dominion is a good argument, but it doesn’t solve the problem of meaning. For example, it’s like, well, the reason why we lost meaning, even though there’s so Christianity everywhere, is because we don’t know there’s still Christianity everywhere. And instead of embracing it and going with it and understanding things like the liturgy and the importance of the calendar, which you also need to trade, by the way, or to grow food, by the way, it’s not it’s not like an optional thing is because when you don’t have that, you lose your connection with the past, which causes you to lose your connection to the future and your connection in the present with the things around you all at the same time. That’s that’s the meaning crisis or rather the intimacy crisis because you’re losing the quality of the relationship. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm. Bob Elvis, I hope I’m saying your name right. I’m currently watching a Turkish historical Muslim drama TV series called Curliss Osman about the founding of the Ottoman Empire. I’d rather watch a Catholic TV series that interesting and also wholesome. All TV series nowadays are woke and it repulses me. I have a simple solution to your problems that you can implement at any time. Stop watching TV or watch TV and Goliath. There’s some good wholesome Christian TV. Chosen Season three just finished, I think that might be something to watch it. We have the chosen. Have you seen that, Father Eric? I’ve seen all of season one and part of season two. Is it any good? Like, should I should I even get because Sally Joe’s like, we’ve got to watch this. And I’m like, you guys and you’re going to watch this. I don’t have time for all this TV. I’m trying to do real work. But should I? Should I engage? It’s pretty good. I’d say that it’s so what they’re doing is they’re taking the life of Christ and they’re putting it into a multi-season drama format. Yeah. Well, it’s actually you get that you get everything you get out of a multi-season drama format, which is you get long character arcs, right? Those are either brilliant if they’re written well or they’re horrible if people don’t know what they’re doing. And I think it’s actually written pretty well. I think there’s no way to adapt that without taking liberties. So I heard a rumor that the original was also the same nature with this multi, multi unfolding thing over the lives of people. Is that is that is that true? It’s it’s it’s called the chosen because it’s going to be focusing on the lives of the apostles or that’s the focus. And I and I think that it like the presumably it’s going to go it’s going to go past Jesus and just keep on going into Paul and that potentially if it keeps on getting renewed. It’s the idea. You know, radical. What are you doing? You are actually the acts of the apostles as part of the Bible and so is revelation. So. Now. I’m back. I’m on church Wi-Fi right now. Who knows what’s happening? Now, now I’m the captain. Oh, I get demoted. Damn it. So I would say it’s pretty good. Yeah, I don’t have any huge complaints about it. It’s really interesting, though, they make a lot of hay out of the. OK, Mark, whatever. My back marks frozen. You’re back, Max Rosen now. OK, you make a lot of hay in the marketing about how they’ve got a Catholic priest and a Protestant biblical scholar and a Jewish biblical scholar looking at this and so the Catholic priest, he’s pretty solid. And the Protestant guy is probably solid enough. I don’t know about the Jewish guy. They got he he doesn’t really look doesn’t really look Jewish. You know, he can tell, right? He doesn’t. I think I know the term for it. I think I know the term for it. He’s not very from. That would be the Jewish term for not very pious. That’s that’s kind of how they they not very observant. So it’s very practicing. Yeah, not very practice. Basically, what I’m saying is he’s performed and Jacob has not nice things to say about reform Judaism. So I just believe whatever he tells me because I’m not going to go check it out for myself looks right. Jacob is not very nice thing about everything. So that’s not it. It’s like a universal right there. Sure. We always have nice things to say about Catholicism. So, you know, yeah, occasionally he can manage the thing here or there. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, if you want to watch it, I’ll tell you what, there’s zero cringe in it. So that’s pretty good for a Christian production. And it’s and it’s compared to the quality of television. Like in general these days, it’s you know, you have to compare it to the competition and not the ideal. It is stellar. So it’s definitely worth watching, keeps your attention and is what was the other required to your wholesome and Catholic ish Catholic enough Catholic enough. They handle very well. And the Jesus is Catholic. The Jesus is the actor who plays Jesus on The Chosen is Catholic. So he’s getting trotted around to Catholic events now and, you know, being made to talk about playing Jesus. So he’s the new Jim Caviezel, you know, and that’s fine. That’s funny. Well, yeah, that’s interesting. It’s sort of it’s sort of it’s sort of now’s the time to strike for Christian TV. It’s the quality of TV. Movies are so low. You used to suck. But nowadays you might actually be half decent, even under the same sucky strategy. I don’t know. Strike while the iron’s hot. That is true, right? Because if they’ve killed entertainment by trying to jam their ideology down everyone’s throat and once you’ve done that, a little evangelization with your your entertaining Christian television doesn’t come off so bad now, right? Like if you have that secondary aim. How did Disney kill Star Wars? Like I when I when I went to go see The Force Awakens, right? Right. And all of a sudden you hear the Skywalker theme and you see the Star Wars logo. Like I got emotional over that. I’m like, holy crap, this is happening, you know, and they ruined it. It’s like the strongest fan base in the world with the most recognizable marketing. And they destroyed it. Mm hmm. But then there’s material. Yeah, well, until season three, which is, you know, they’re starting to realize, oh, this just isn’t terrible, but it isn’t actually good. Yeah, yeah, that’s critical. Yeah, well, it’s. I don’t know. Biblical horror movie possible in a good way. I have serious plans for that. Make a graphic novel first and we’ll talk. Isn’t there already a horror movie about like exorcism or something? Yeah, but actually a biblical story that is horrific. What is it? What’s a good. Like, Sodom and Gomorrah as like a disaster movie, that might be fun. That would be a great disaster flick. Yeah, like a Godzilla except it’s, you know, fire and brimstone. Yeah, Godzilla minus thezilla. Yeah. Well, I mean, you could see, I mean, this poetic license, you could make it a Godzilla movie. It’s not hard. What’s that? I mean, that was the theme of Godzilla, right? Godzilla was just the US. Like, that’s all it was. Yeah. Or you could do. Here’s my idea. Is you follow the story of somebody who gets an exorcism from Jesus eventually. And Jesus. Oh, yeah, that’s right. Because it would have a happy ending. But I mean, that’s cool. That would be good. There’s some interesting characters. That was going to be my suggestion. Back with the demon, how they’re losing control of their body. You could do it. Would be a crazy one. Would be the guy who’s out in the tomb and shackles can’t hold him. He just smashes. Exactly. Yeah. That’s what I was thinking. You want to do those? Oh, yeah, a lot in his daughters. Yeah, that’ll that’s a different kind of horror. But the accident, you do Exodus and the angel of death. Coming right from the. Yeah, the the Egyptian’s perspective. And you can just you can just you can just do that knowledge of good and evil. Like, you know, eating the apple and getting cast out of. That’s horror right there. Like, wait, what? Now all of a sudden, we all we did was was try to read a book. And when we read the book, we were cast out. Yeah, there we go. Fight the Gnosticism. They ate fruit. No, no, no, it’s not to be like a modern retelling, Andrew. OK, I know you want to. Yeah. Oh, right. The book, the book is handed out by an academic. Right. Right. They can engage with their smartphone. Sure. That would that would work. That would well, you should see that you should see the work that Sally doing on the virtual cards with devices. Good stuff. Have you checked in Father Eric? Did you see did you see her update? Did you see her update? I’ve been busy this weekend. So. Yeah. You’re going to love it. You’re going to love it. Like, pay close attention to the vice at the bottom. It’s quite good. It’s quite good. OK, OK. Yeah, I was I’m glad she was open to some of my suggestions on those. And I was able to help her figure out why the Medeiros were ordering the virtues in the way they were. She was she sounded pretty grateful about that. No, no, she’s she’s she’s relying on you and eternally grateful for your participation. It’s not it’s it’s not as you categorize it at all. You are key to this project, according to her. So please take that to heart. Yeah, your help is literally invaluable to the project. And she and I both appreciate it. It’s a very important project. So so what is the you talked about the Medieval’s ordering the virtues in a specific way? That sounds like a topic I would love to hear. And sadly, Joe knows the ordering because she’s neck deep in this project. And I was just kind of consulting. But I was explaining to her that not all the virtues are the same and that two of them in particular hold pride of place. You’ve got prudence as the queen of the cardinals. Of the cardinal virtues and then charity is the is the form of all the virtues. Yes. So those two kind of have the pride of place because prudence, you know, if you don’t know what is just, then you can’t behave justly. If you don’t know what somebody ought to have, if you don’t know whether you can actually overcome an obstacle or at least have a fighting shot at it, you can’t be properly properly brave or courageous because you might throw yourself into something that you have no business doing or running away from something you could easily handle. And if you don’t know how much is too much or how much isn’t enough, you can’t be temperate so that that prudence kind of has this governing role in all of the the the cardinal virtues. And charity takes a place over all of the virtues, including the including all four of the cardinal virtues, because that’s one that actually places all of your spiritual resources and time, energy and attention towards its final end, the glory of God and the salvation of souls, love of God, love of neighbor, all of that. Yeah, I think it temper that charity also has this regulating feature between like hope and open faith in that as well. Right. So within the theological virtues, like charity is what keeps the whole thing together. Right. And if if if there’s no charity, then yeah, like you said, there’s there’s no key keeps the thing aiming aiming in the right direction. And so Sally Joe was wondering, yeah, why prudence and charity were in the middle and then the other five were kind of around them, and I apparently cleared that up in a really good way. So because I hadn’t I hadn’t looked at these medieval prints that she was looking at trying to figure these things out, but she did. So. Thank God for artists and thank God that we’re not all artists. All right. Prudence. So I have a I have a pandemic, well, something that came out of my Catholic dance group on Friday that’s been sort of sticking in my my craw bit. And I spent a lot of Saturday contemplating it. And it’s a bit of a a technical theological issue, but it might be a little juicy. It might be just me who cares, but maybe not. So we’re talking about the Snake in the Garden, even Eden and Scott Hans book brought it up. But it was basically the talk talking about Christ. So so the goodness of God. And we’re talking about whether him creating Satan and giving Satan a choice, whether and Adam needed a choice, whether to fall or not right about free will. And I think we we the group generally agreed with the idea that, you know, God was language debate, but it was like, basically, you know, he permitted that permitted it. He wasn’t responsible for it, but he could plan it. But there was this argument that. That he could he had that this had to be the case that he was not he’s not responsible for the evil in the world because then then then he’d be evil or. That he couldn’t he couldn’t have planned it because then that would make him in some way less good. And I don’t think that that makes it makes creation my sort of responses was that I don’t feel that we’re in a position to judge, judge, judge, God’s judge creation, right? Like it’s like that was wrong. This is like it it makes it makes creation imperfect if if if if this was the plan all along. And my my sort of take was no, that that’s putting you in a position to judge, judging, judging creation and judging God. And that’s not right. So there was a couple of people who agree with me. A couple of people were more on the known perfect good. God can’t do anything evil. Also, the side of the equation, I was like, no, you can’t you can’t judge. You’re not in a position to judge creation. I don’t know if you want to weigh in. I was quite as puts it very simply and succinctly is that God allows evil for the sake of drawing a greater good out of it. Yeah. All right. So and so he created the universe. He did put free agents into it. But it’s not like our freedom and his freedom actually conflict. It’s like he uses our free choice. Or our unrestrained choice, at least, and actually does what he wants with that. And so. And so, you know, we can when we when we talk about God not being the author of evil, it’s more important to see that as like an ontological category rather than like I don’t even know what the other category is. Why am I trying to make a distinction? It’s more like, no, God didn’t create things defective. Right. Yeah. But God is absolutely in charge and orders all things according to his will. And that’s that’s inescapable. Otherwise, you get into all this crazy, you know, William Lake Craig heresy stuff. Yes, I’m glad that Aquinas is on this. And I’m on the side of that with the momentous and my intuition is all this crazy Jesuit nonsense. Yeah. So basically, it’s like God already knows it’s like your freedom is a tool in God’s hands. So here’s here’s here’s where I was going with it yesterday, thinking about it on Saturday, like so because I was sort of trying to build up my argument in a different direction. I was saying, so because we can imagine something. Doesn’t it doesn’t mean that it’s possible because I think our imagination isn’t perfect, right? So you could you know, the next holiday, yeah, yeah. So we can we can imagine something we can imagine a world where everyone’s good or where we think everyone’s good or like or a better world. But but there are probably inconsistencies in that in our vision of the world, because it’s like a holodeck, because we’re just sort of like putting the good stuff all together and we’re not we’re not really seeing the contradictions and inconsistencies that that creates. So we can imagine something or that is that. That God would not do or could that is not truly possible. And therefore, God didn’t create the world that way, if that makes sense. So because I can make it similar to like language, the way I can I can make a grammatically correct nonsense sentence, contradictory nonsense sentence because of the way they put the word social justice together, there you go. She’s functioning on the language that you can see. Yeah. But but really, that’s just a recapitulation of the point of freedom. Right. If you have freedom, you have the freedom to opt out of. The will of God, but that doesn’t work. Ultimately, it only works for a little while because your freedom is constrained by things like your life and the amount of energy you have and the things around you. Right. And so freedom is always constrained because that’s how you know it’s freedom. Right. But but there’s further actual constraints. Like you just don’t have enough time to learn everything, even if you thought that was valuable, like that’s not an option available. So actually, I have. Yeah. I’d like to respond to last cause here. Yeah, you’re staying a lot less class. I have a response to last class, too, but I have to prime it because I’m digging up a quote that I always keep on my phone. So you go ahead. Well, there’s a certain amount of, we’ll say, death and rot that are necessary and natural. So the tree rotting in the forest, providing nutrients back to the soil, that’s the sort of thing. But that’s not the rot you’re worried about, right? You’re actually worried about the rot and humans. And so here’s the interesting thing is that the the Catholic Church, at least the common opinion and probably 100 percent correct. Is that the human soul is naturally immortal and that kind of with Adam and Eve, with the integrity, the gift of integrity that they were given, their souls would actually communicate that immortality to the body. And that gift of integrity was lost when they disobeyed God and they had God’s favor withdrawn from them. And so it’s natural for the rest of creation to rot, but it’s actually unnatural for human beings to rot that we were born for immortality and God’s bringing about the remedy of this through the resurrection of the body at the end of time, that God brings your soul and your body, your particular body back together and forms a new it’s still you, but it’s a it’s a new glorified body out of that. And that one is no longer susceptible to cancer, death and rot. So that’s my all be gloriously bold, all the gloriously bald. No. Andrew, Andrew, I know you’re ashamed that you’re not bald. And I refuse to admit it. Give it time. Your hair will fall out, too. Well, we’ll see. Sometimes that doesn’t happen. I might not get that lucky. So so my so the thing that I was going to like why it was sort of like I was sensitive to this is there’s a St. Thomas More is probably very instrumental in me of ultimately coming to Catholicism. And and I you know, more far more sense than I do, Father Eric. But I think that he may be unique in that he is as a saint that was that he was both canonized by the church he was martyred for and the church that he was martyred by. And that may make him unique that he. Well, I mean, I don’t think Henry VIII canonized him in the Anglican Church, but he’s canonized in the Anglican Church now. I don’t know if he is. Eventually he was canonized in the Anglican Church. And as always, like his his his principles was recognized. And so from his final letter to his daughter, Margaret, while he’s waiting in the Tower of London to be executed, this is the last two paragraphs. And finally, Margaret, I know this well that without my fault, he will not let me be lost. I shall therefore with good hope commit myself wholly to him. And if he permits me to perish for my faults, then I shall serve as praise for his justice. But in good faith, Meg, I trust that his tender pity shall keep me poor, my poor soul safe and make me commence, commend his mercy and therefore my own good daughter. Do not let your mind be troubled over anything that shall happen to me. In this world, nothing can come but what God wills. I am very happy. Sorry, sir, I am very sure that whatever that be, however bad it may seem, it shall indeed be the best. Right. So I think that I do think that and maybe Catholics disagree with me, but I think that part of part of worshiping a supreme God is is is that one of the things that the consequence of that is that this is indeed the best of all possible worlds, no matter how bad it may seem to us. Right. Yeah. The optimist says this can’t possibly get any worse. And the pestimence just says, oh, just you wait. The last cause, the way we use the word natural is so f’ed up these days, so I took a philosophy of nature class my second year of religion, second year of seminary. And one of the first things I had to do was disambiguate the way we use the word nature, right, because nature is used for like anything that happens outside. That’s natural. Right. Anything that happens spontaneously, that’s natural. And it’s like, no, that’s not what we mean when we mean nature, the corruptions of the word, what nature is, is what is proper to me as a human being. And what is proper to each of those things, that is what’s natural to them. So so that was that was right there in Chapter one of Father William Wallace’s Modeling of Nature. Yes, William Wallace, that was his name. His book is really hard to read. He needed a good editor and he didn’t have one. But he the chat GPT. But that’s the ultimate problem is it’s not just the word nature. It’s all of these words have been either undefined or ill defined rather deliberately. Yes, this has been, you know, this is the this this has this has been done to you. It has. And that’s important. Like there are there are forces out there. There are people out there. There are institutions out there that have either been corrupted or or or failed in some way, maybe innocently to give you the proper understanding of these terms, and there are so many terms like that. That it becomes a problem. You know, one of the issues is we’ve reduced, we’ll say the four Aristotelian causes down to one. And it’s sort of a hybrid monster that’s missing entirely final cause. Tell us might be the way to say it. And and that’s a huge problem because you can’t understand the world. If you keep believing that things have a single cause, nothing can ever have a single cause. There’s no direct linear relationship between the event and where it began. Like that doesn’t actually work because things beginnings can have multiple endings based on a number of factors. So a single cause doesn’t work. And people cast everything in single cause nowadays. And this is part of the individualism, the material and the objectivism that we see everywhere. Mark, if I don’t cast things by single cause, then I can’t invoke the wrath of the mob with a simple narrative, right? I say that everything is caused by racism, then I can’t direct the mob to my will. Or if I can’t say everything is the patriarchy or everything is whiteness. Yeah, you can’t use science either. And fair enough. And science has its value. But it’s it’s a lot more complicated than that. Yeah, it’s all climate change. Mark, let’s all take a little a little moment tonight sometime and pray for and know me who’s got to take an environmental ethics course. Environmental ethics should actually like that should actually be a really good course. But because, you know, the way we treat our common home that we all live in, like that’s actually kind of important. That should be a part of justice. That’s how the the cult stacks the Gnosticism on top of the sorry, puts the Gnostic coding over over the hermetic core of the cult, right? And they have the hidden knowledge is that it’s actually a hermetic cult. That’s the that’s the gnosis. But the the Gnostic, what the Gnostic flowery outside of the outer cult is, what they what they cover that up with is is this sort of nature Gaia worship. Right. So that’s what the little cell is like. It’s all about we need to protect the earth. We’re all we all we’re all, you know, first of all, that nature, right? It’s all about Gaia. What’s the uniting principle? Right. Is the uniting principle earth Gaia, the fact that we all live on the same planet or which is below us, by the way, even though it’s bigger than us, the planet is always below us. That’s the statement of gravity incidentally, in case you were confused. The scientific statement of gravity. Right. Or or is it the case that what unites us is something above us and beyond us and bigger than us and outside of us in a non material way? Yes. Not the earth. Right. That’s why the virtue matters. That’s why the virtue emanates down from above. And it’s been interesting. We’ve been talking a lot about the Galilean revolution and the impact of putting the sun at the center of the earth, the center of the universe rather, or at least the solar system rather than the earth. And it actually matters. And it’s very subtle. Why? But it actually makes a big difference. And the only thing that changes is the map used to calculate the location of the planets and stars in the sky. That’s the only thing that changes. Am I the only one familiar at all with the Catholic YouTuber Fourth Age? He does mostly comics. And mythological analysis of Catholicism. You should be checking out his channel. So Fourth Age and he recently did a video and I thought he made a really good point about it wasn’t necessarily about earth worship, but it was it was about nature worship. He made the point on nature worship that you can’t you can’t have science or virtue. So it’s sounding a lot like Mark within in a world where you have nature worship, because if you have nature as your God, there’s a natural capriciousness that you can’t figure it out. Nature, like if your gods are from that low level, they can do things on their whims or their impulse on their pathos. So there’s no sense in building or aspiring creating a science where you’re trying to figure out the law. If there’s if there’s no lawgiver, there’s no like immutable lawgiver, right? There’s no there’s no sense in aiming for anything higher. If everything is just the passion is is is nature in blood and claw. Right. And yes, I’m saying. And that’s why weather forecasts are also accurate. They are when we control them, they will be accurate once we control the carbon. Once once every one of your credit card purchases is analyzed by our artificial intelligence and we can say, no, stop, don’t buy that. Then once we reduce the weather population down to five hundred thousand, then then we’ll be able to predict the weather. It’ll be great. All right, let’s do it. No, no, no, no, no, Mark, Mark, you go at this one. You explain why that’s incorrect. And what what? Like, so the point is, is that engineering and science are not the same thing. Yeah, engineering and someone told me that that’s that’s the problem. I have a great video on science. Actually, I got a recent recommendation on my video on science on navigating patterns. This is a great video really helped me understand what science is. Yes, engineering is totally different. Right. Like people think that scientists are inventors. Scientists invent nothing. Science comes after invention and before engineering, except that some engineering happens without science. So science isn’t required for engineering either. Like, basically what I’m trying to tell you is no, really, science isn’t required. And you know this because science didn’t exist and we did. So obviously, science isn’t required. It’s not not needed. Sorry. I’m sorry, science people. Not that it’s not good to have. It’s great. I’m I’m a big fan of science, but we don’t need it at all. You just it’s not possible that we could have needed it. Yeah, you’re making that separation between science and engineering, which is very important and a few people and invention. The invention, it’s inventors that go and discover things that science then goes and examines. And that’s how you know certain things like you could tell. Like if something new popped up in the world, like, I don’t know, a new infection or something, you could know immediately that the science doesn’t apply because science can’t apply to something that doesn’t have observations yet. So if it’s new, then science isn’t the thing that’s going to do anything about it. Not that it can’t tell us anything about it, but it doesn’t. It can’t inform us about it in the way that science can inform us about things that are not new, which you can have a lot to say about it. Yeah. What science really is is brutal like science. What science really is proper science is brutal epistemic humility. Right. And it is only possible if it requires if you have these inspirations or insights that you then apply, the scientific method is really then applying your that epistemic humility to those insights that you try and falsify your hypotheses. Right. In a methodical, brutal fashion. And then you can never say that your hypothesis is true. You just simply say that it hasn’t been proven false yet. And the hypothesis itself is not valid until somebody else has valid. In other words, you can’t validate your own hypothesis. It’s not even a hypothesis. You can’t test your own code, right? Right. You can’t test your own code. It’s the same thing. I do and it always passes. And that’s the it always passes. Well, and that’s the problem. The goal of science is as a method of intersubjective truth. And that’s one form of truth. That’s one way to get at the truth, but it doesn’t get at all of the truth. And that’s where people make the mistake. It’s like science can’t get at the whole truth. It can only give you one form of truth and a limited form of truth. And that that form of truth isn’t perfect. Just because 95% of the population believes it doesn’t mean it will actually come to be. He does. So Ted is my baby brother Catholic, I found out this week. He’s more more baby Catholic than me. Cool. Cool. You were in August, you said. Oh, Ted, you’re muted. I can’t we can hear you. You’re muted. He doesn’t love us. He’s not going to talk to us. You’re muted, Ted. Oh, there we go. Yeah, sorry. Good. You you miss my my my my mistake. Yes, it is the transfiguration last August. So, you know, it it feels appropriate. I knew Christ for a long time and then he was transfigured. That’s awesome. You guys talking about science. Yeah, that was the latest topic. I’ll flash my social justice book that I haven’t read yet. I’m going to I’m going to I’m going to plug this once again, even though I haven’t read it myself yet. Social justice isn’t what you think it is. I think it’s Catholic in origin. They’re they’re recording a lot of Catholics on the back. But I mean, read it sometime. Well, yeah, Mark, I’m curious about this and I want your thoughts on it. Is the product of science actually just theory? Yes, it is the only possible product of science. Yes, explicitly, like it’s not that that is the only possible product of science. And sometimes the engineers make the theory. Oh, yes. And not all the time, right? Like the difference is you have a theory and that theory is correct. Doesn’t mean it can be put to this is why I was saying it’s a form of truth. Not all truth is useful. That’s the other thing. Like people think just because something’s true, then therefore it’s something we need to engage with that. That can’t possibly be. I had Mexican food for dinner. Yeah, it’s true. Exactly. There’s lots of things that are true. Exactly. There’s lots of truth that just has no impact on the universe. So and something just along that, like on the hope and faith sort of within the virtues, theory is always on the hope side, because I think that hope and theory is sort of one side of the left or right. And then the other side of that is faith in practice. Right. Faith is intimately connected to practice. And this is something that I think people pigeon that the opposition, the the evil ones who like to meddle the meaning of words, they like to pigeonhole faith into this little thing where they say it’s things that you can’t prove that you believe in. But that’s not what faith actually is. Faith is actually intimately connected to your practice. That’s the ultimate test of what your faith is. What are how are you living? What are you doing? What are you embodying into the world? That’s the it’s like words. It seems like it seems like hope should actually be connected to practice because so like faith, faith is the act of believing in design, divinely revealed truths. The most relevant possible truths ever. And then hope is hope is seeing that that these truths that you have learned about these promises that God has made can actually apply to you and that they can actually be for your benefit. And then that moves on to love. Well, you realize, oh, my gosh, this God is unbelievably good to us. And by the influence of the Holy Spirit, you’re able to begin to love him above all things and your neighbor as yourself, not simply with natural power, but with supernatural power. So it seems like hope is actually what crosses the gap between theory and practice, at least if we’re going to use a to mystic model of the virtues, which given that this is my YouTube channel is preferred. OK, what do you mean by a to mystic model? So the mystic model of virtue, which he got from Augustine, and that’s fine. But I know of you, Thomas, is that you’ve got this organic connection between faith, hope and charity. Right. So faith is is the first contact of the soul with God, whereby you begin to know him and not just knowing like theoretically, but like actually having acquaintance has a fundamentally participatory theory of knowledge because it’s it has to do with God’s grace acting on your faculties, acting on your person there. And then it leads up through hope. You see these promises, these promises actually apply to me. These might not actually be distinct moments in time, but there’s not a chronological progression necessarily, but it’s a logical progression. And then that leads to the full flowering of charity where you begin to put God up as your highest good, you begin to love him and all of this. And that that’s actually what finally properly unites your soul with God entirely. OK. So that’s kind of crash course in the first 50 questions of the secundus secundi. OK, all right. So I guess this is this is this is sort of like the point where I guess I I’m a little heretical or because I’m not I’m not heretical, I’m just going to say novel novel news. It’s novel. OK, but I’m novel because I sort of see as as this relationship and I see it like the charity is like the the the wrestling of of Jacob with God. Right. As is Israel. It is that that’s the charitable love and that and it and it’s really the way that like I like for Vickie and his and opponent processing, that’s the way that we resolve the problem because the tension between the right and the left is a show of of hope and faith. And that brings us to the center, which is Christ, which is the the perfect hope meeting the ultimate test of faith at the cross. Now, listen, if you were able to find all of that and Gregory of Nyssa, it wouldn’t be new anymore. All right. OK. Well, I don’t like being being new. I like it. I liked it early on when I was talking about because I don’t I don’t like being new either. I like it better when I like think of something up and then I find out, oh, Thomas Aquinas said the same thing. And then I feel better than I did. Yeah, but better exactly. But better than I did. And then I feel much more safe and secure and warm and fuzzy. And the world feels right. Right to me. So we know it’s in there. I was going to say, if you’re if you’re it’s interesting looking at this connection between and I’m sorry about the baby, but I don’t know how that’s coming in, but your connection between hope and faith and the sciences, because right in the in St. Paul’s, I think it’s first letter to the Corinthians, he says, right, you have faith, hope and charity and like faith and hope are going to pass away when we move out of the space or temporal realm of now and into eternity and then only charity would be left. And that’s related to the fact that charity is going to be the thing that’s going to be done once. That’s once once we’re face to face with God, once you have the beatific vision, there’s these qualities of faith and hope that will pass away. And so when you’re thinking about there’s that sounds to me like there’s some sort of like epistemological link between faith and hope and knowing and like the kind of knowing. But, you know, Thomas Aquinas is view how the intellect perceives forms and that versus the beatific vision, how we’re not perceiving God through any intermediary object, but perceiving him as he is. And well, there’s this sort of. I’m really disappointed Ted’s breaking up, you know, because like he’s making some really good points that I think that are and the screaming baby is not going to understand any of this. If hold on, there’s a good post right there. Yeah, is this is this I want a big one better. This is better. You guys hear me now? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Hear me. Yeah, you might have to say like everything again. Anyway, so I don’t know where I was, but what I was saying is there’s like an epistemological link between faith and hope and and like and knowing and how we know now, right, there’s a sort of incompleteness of knowledge of God. Yes, it’s related to faith and hope. And in the beatific vision, that’s entirely resolved. And so there’s a sort of sense of, let’s say, of a natural, now I get analog to faith and hope in the way that science works. Right. So there’s this sort of and you can I think you can see that on multiple levels, but there’s a sort of like, what do we do with the sort of incomplete? We’re only receiving things through sense knowledge, we’re not actually directly perceiving essences. Right. Because that’s the other right, Father, more or less. So there’s this there’s a sense in terms of life via our senses. Right. So we’re not perceiving any of them directly. Right. We’re like our inner senses perceive accidents of things. Is that right? Right. And so, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it gets out to the essence eventually through our intellect. Yeah, through the through the act of intellect, all that through the act of intellect. And so and in some sense, like to look at sciences that way. And I’m just kind of I’m trying to work this all out in my head, right. Right. As I’m talking in some sense, you have like you have data and then you have theory and there’s a sense of we have the data, which is that sense, that sense, I mean, that’s the whole process of deductive thinking, right. You’re trying to move from all these individual specific things to that, to that theory, that thing that is that that contains all of those things, that explains all of them. And yet, as I think you guys heard you guys riffing on, you know, none of it’s true, you just never know it’s ever proven true. You’re just never proving it false. And then because you’ve tried really hard to not prove it false and then you’re like, all right, we’re going to operate with this, which is interesting that it moves into that sort of operative realm again of faith and hope, as you were saying, Father. So anyway, I don’t know, Xander, if that’s if that’s at all, getting out with that sort of connection between faith and open science. I it’s it’s on the it’s not. Yeah, I think that’s exactly for I mean, I don’t want to say that you’re I want to claim you right away. It’s a ten year agreement with me. Great. But I mean, but it is getting at what I’m saying. And I think that I didn’t know about that, that that connection to Paul. But I think that adds more evidence to what I’m thinking that like when we’re with God, then it will only only charity will be required because the faith and hope is is, like I said, like the the it is sort of the the the the movement back from faith and hope is only because we have this imperfect imperfect connection to God. And it’s not that God’s imperfect, it’s that we’re imperfect and we’re not we’re not perceiving him and his will correctly at all times. And so sometimes we’re it looks we’re we’re we go with pageos left and right, sometimes we’re a little on the left and we’re sometimes we’re a little on the right and we’re seeing things differently, so we’re a little bit more hopey or a little bit more faithy than we need to be. And then once once you could. OK, actually, I was watching a YouTube video today and I don’t know why this happened in a YouTube video in 2023, but the colors had separated such that it was like he had like a blue shift and a red shift on the video and he didn’t correct for it. Right. And it’s just you just I just wish that the that the image had been corrected correctly and those colors had been put in a phase. So it was so it was a perfect image. So I sort of see it in the same way that like when we’re with God, all charity will be required because everything like the the our image of Christ will be clear in his presence and we won’t we don’t need the the phasing of faith and hope will no longer be required because we will be in the presence of the the of of the of the perfect faith and the truest hope. So, Xander, I’ve got a thought with your so you’ve got the left hand that’s zeal. You’ve got the right hand that’s mercy. Right. Yeah. Well, that’s that’s that’s more of a motive. That’s that’s a motion thing. Right. So mercy is the move where I’ve introduced those faces. Mercy is the movement from faith to hope. Right. So you’re you’re you’re at faith and it’s merciful. Mercy comes in because you’re saying you’re you’re you’re you’re from from the perspective of the law, you’re saying, well, this person may still be good or this person may still be forgiven because there’s still hope. Right. So you’re moving from faith to hope. That’s mercy. And then zeal is from the perspective of of of the hopeful of the of all the possibilities, you’re instead moving. This is the thing that is good. This is the so you have faith. So you’re moving towards the motion of faith. Right. You’re moving towards like this is the thing that I need to champion, that I need to move forward. This is the path like you’re taking that leadership role or that saying it’s like this way, guys, that’s the zeal, even if it’s just you. So it’s those are the the motives sort of the their their zeal and mercy are subordinate virtues to the actual. Faith and hope. Right. And this is the thing. Interesting thing is that both of those are actually passions, according to Thomas Aquinas. Yeah. So you have this passion of zeal that drives you towards an end very directly. And you can have this passion of mercy that wants to fulfill the lack in its side of another person. Right. And this is how we actually experience these principles as we experience them as passions. We don’t, you know, we’re not calculating machines. Right. We are wondering is motion. Right. So I’m. Yeah. Yeah. So I’m wondering if you don’t need to just locate both of these inside of the virtue of temperance, which moderates between the two. Right. Right. Well, I think that would that would put you a little more in step with the tradition that you’re in. Yeah. OK. Well, OK. So here. So here’s here’s my my my vervekin verveki and who is verveki? Pre-prepare paganism. Let’s let’s let’s let’s say this is is that I see like the cardinal virtues as. As project as as wisdom or informed formed from the. The theological virtues. Right. So actually, like, no, you can have the cardinal virtues without having the theological virtues, you think so? Well, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. They’re natural virtues. They are built up by repetition. They’re not infused into you. OK. But are they in a form of wisdom? That’s the way we understand. That’s the way we understand virtuous pagans is that they were just doing the right things according to their own light and they were able to develop something like courage and battle, and that’s a good thing. And we can’t say that, like, just because they’re not a Christian, they don’t have any goodness in them. That would be insane. Nobody would ever want to believe that. And so it’s like, yeah, these natural another name for the cardinal virtues would be natural virtues. Right. They’re actually just constitutive of what it means to be a human being. But faith, hope and charity are the theological virtues in that not only they orient us to God, but they come to us as a gift from God. So you’re saying pagans don’t have then the theological virtues or are they? If they’re properly pagan and they have not had justifying faith, then they would not have them. Now, the thing is, is that God can put justifying faith, hope and charity into whomever he wants. And he can do it invisibly. The question is, does he? I don’t know. It’s invisible. So in that in that in that in that case, in North and South America, prior to the arrival of Christianity, we just have to trust that God has a plan for them. But it’s whatever it is and to what degree it happens, it’s all invisible. And we can’t tell whether or not they actually would have faith. Or it’s interesting coming back to the natural virtues and thinking about them is. They’re not there to the virtues that everyone is also naturally in agreement with, which is interesting, I never thought about that before. Right. And especially everyone. But sorry, let me rephrase that. Oh, all global, all honorable men. Right. The well, to steal, you know, sort of they existed to steal Lewis’s language from the abolition of man, like the Dow. Right. Like they’re they’re the way. Whereas faith, hope and charity are. At best, seen as unnecessary, at worst, seen as like as a form of foolishness in comparison to those. So there’s a sense in which if you walk in the natural virtues, it’s like every wise. Yeah. Like every man like in a civilization whose wise would be like, yeah, those are the right things. Like, I might disagree with you a little bit on how you’re walking them out. But like everyone thinks men should be brave. Everyone thinks men should be temperate and so on. But like, does everyone think men should have hope? It’s like theologically speaking, no, not necessarily. Does everyone think charity is right? And that’s interesting in terms of like valuing those and thinking about the dialogue about like virtue acquisition, that there’s there’s just like definitely a different orientation towards the two sets of virtues. Yeah. I don’t know if there’s anything more to it than that, but I just did never strike me before. Are the so are the cardinal virtues still a form of accumulative wisdom, then like they’re sort of experiential in your in their sense and then the theological virtues are divinely given. The cardinal virtues, the cardinal virtues need cultivation and training. Education probably is a better word for that. So if you want your child to be temperate, you need to teach them moderation and everything that they do. So insofar as you actually embody that and. Cultivate that in the people that you’re responsible for performing, then it would be kind of the what was the word? What was the phrase you used? Embodiment of wisdom. Sure. That’s that’s. Yeah, I’ll roll with that. I’ll roll with that. That sounds about right. I mean, I would say it’s it’s it’s in it’s in harmony with the logos. Yeah, probably the more familiar way of putting it. But embodiment of wisdom, that’s not bad. I’ll take that. And speaking of things that I need to take. We said that is I did not sleep well and I had a busy day today. So gentlemen, always, always good to have each and every single one of you here. Even Ted and Andrew, who are not bald. Oh, yeah. You know, beautiful. We will see. So good night and God bless you all. Good night.