https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=37eDRdTmPEQ
Good evening and happy Sunday everybody. It is, yeah, it’s another Sunday night and you know, weather’s getting a little nicer up here and life is good. I’ve had a very busy week this past week and it’s actually a busy week that’s been about two years in the making. Just about two years ago, our bishop announced that we were going to have a diocesan synod, S-Y-N-O-D, synod. And you know, maybe you’ve heard about synods happening in Rome, but that is not something that only the Roman pontiff is able to do, something that a regular old diocesan bishop is able to call. He’s able to call together those whom he wishes in order to have a very formal church meeting. And whenever you do something like this, there’s always going to be a little bit of skepticism. Are we making the right decision here? Is all of this time, energy, money, is this all going to be well spent? I’m quite happy to say that my expectations were exceeded. I thought that this was very valuable for our diocese to engage in this synodal process. And just reflecting over what it was that made this work, I think, hopefully it’ll be interesting. And if it’s not interesting, you’re free to go watch something else on YouTube right now. So what we did is we had basically a two-day meeting. This was broken up. There was about 300 participants. It was probably about half priests or deacons and the other half representatives from all the parishes in our diocese. And as a part of this two-year preparation process, what we were getting together was the topics that we are going to be talking about, what it is that we’re actually going to be voting on. And these topics had, there was this whole process where we had done listening sessions, where we had done consultations and drawing together a list of proposals. The proposals were all discussed at our tables ahead of time. And then we voted on which ones we would send to the front. And then we had, you know, periods of open mics where people got two minutes to speak on one or more of the proposals, whatever it is that they thought about them. And then opportunity to maybe offer amendments to the proposals. And then finally voting on whether or not we would recommend these proposals to the bishop. And I think that this ended up being a good use of our time and resources. Now, the first thing that I want to highlight is the fact that as far as I could tell, everybody in the room had the same goal. We were bringing people together who were all Catholic and who all want to see Jesus Christ proclaimed and God glorified through his church. We all had that same goal together. And this meeting would not have worked if somebody had come in there with their own thoughts and ideas, if there had been some deviation from that fact that unified us. If there had been, let’s say, four or five different goals in that room, this really would have been a waste of time. But because all of the people who had come together in this synod had this same goal, I think it was worthwhile. The second was is that there were clearly established rules about how this was going to go. And so, like I said, when people would get off, get in front of everybody with the microphone in their hand and address the assembly, either in favor of one of the proposals or offering a modification, they had a two-minute time limit. They had a screen that had the timer counting down and the vast majority of people finished their interventions before the time ran out. There were a few people who went just over a little bit, like they were finishing a sentence, that’s fine. There was only a couple instances where people seemed to be ignoring that time limit. There were very few and far between, usually didn’t go over more than about 10 seconds. And so, because everybody was abiding by the rules and agreeing to the rules, they were able to participate with each other in this way. A third thing that made it useful is because we all had the same goal, because we all wanted the same things, then the discussions we were having were, this is about the most effective means about how we’re going to carry this out. We weren’t debating on what direction we were going, and it was very clear, and it has been clear from the beginning, and it’s clear in the canon law of the Catholic Church and the whole tradition, that this is not a democratic assembly where we get to vote on doctrine. It’s not like this is an assembly that was going to be able to touch any of the controversial teachings of the Church. And frankly, as far as I could tell, there weren’t really anybody there who thought this was going to be that kind of an assembly, and who would have wanted to do that. So we had brought together a group of people who all wanted the same things, which meant that we were able to speak very freely about controversial issues in our diocese. And none of the issues that we talked about were more controversial than the age at which the children are confirmed in our diocese. That most dioceses across the United States confirmation would be celebrated somewhere between sixth grade and the end of high school. And in our diocese, we do it, what we call the restored order, we do it in third grade at the same time as their first communion. And since this was implemented 20 years ago, it has been continually argued about, continually debated. And I think the bishop quite wisely allowed it to be on the agenda here so that it could be represented. So we all came together with the same goal. We all agreed to the same rules and way of conducting ourselves. And we were free to speak freely about things even when it was a controversial thing. And people were able to recognize that we all wanted the same thing, ultimately, and we were just debating about the means of it. So at the very end of this, we had our proposals, we had made amendments and modifications to the proposal. And there was a final half hour before the closing mass that was dedicated to voting. So this was actually a democratic process. You got to vote, approve this proposal, disapprove, approve with reservations, or abstain. And we get to vote and let our voices be heard. And ultimately, the Catholic Church still has a monarchical structure. And so this was a merely consultative vote. Now, the bishop did not put all of his own time and all of the resources of the diocese to bring together a consultative vote that he was just going to ignore. If you don’t want consultation, then you don’t have to go and ask for it if you’re a diocesan bishop. And so, we had a diocesan bishop, and we haven’t had a diocesan synod since 1951. And nobody was, you know, saying that we had a right to a synod or anything like that. So I don’t think the bishop would have asked for all this consultation if he had not actually wanted it. And, you know, we had prayer as a part of the week as well, and some dinners together. And overall, it was a good experience because we all wanted the same things. We agreed to the same rules. We disagreed freely. And frankly, this is all, it’s all very clear that what he does with his feedback is the responsibility of our bishop. So, you know, it was a lot of work. It was a lot of work for me because I had to organize masses with large numbers of priests, and that’s always complicated. But it was joyful work, and I’m glad I was able to go through with it. And I think this was a manifestation of the body of Christ, the whole body of Christ, the bishop together with the clergy and the lay faithful working towards giving glory to God and saving souls. Catholic Church being a true spiritual body and being able to move in that way, it’s just a beautiful thing to see. You love to see it happen. That, and it wasn’t any longer than it was. Three days, that’s all we needed. And the first day was just the opening mass and a dinner. The second day was a very long day. The third day was over by about 145. So that’s, yeah, getting that all organized together is why I, you know, I maybe been slightly less online than I ordinarily am. So that’s what I’ve got. If somebody doesn’t hop on here pretty soon, I’m just going to go to bed because today I had two confirmations with the bishop just here in town, so we didn’t have to do any long road trips. But that is, it’s still a little bit of work after having a very, very long day. I made a very strongly worded intervention. One of the proposals was, let’s encourage people to keep the Sabbath. And I made a very strong proposal that the Catholic Church needed to go to war on unnecessary labor and youth sports on Sundays. And I got applause for that. So there we are. How you doing, Mark? Now I’m hanging in. I’m feeling better now that I don’t feel sick. So it’s always nice to be on the other side of your sudden illness. So. Well, looks like you’re still six feet over, not six feet under. Yeah, it wasn’t. Wasn’t feeling that way after I did my work outside. But once I have my two and a half hour nap for no reason, I was right as rain. So. All righty. Very good. What is this wacky story of like agreement and cooperation and reciprocally opening towards a good end? This is. Yeah, I know. Everything’s just supposed to be collapsing chaos these days, isn’t it? Must be. No opposition, no skepticism, no conspiracy. And what is this like opening with communion? And then like, oh, we’re not going to talk about anything today. We’re just going to eat together and get to know each other. This is crazy talk. What is going on? Cats and dogs living together. Yeah, yeah. I’m sorry to make you so upset about this. I’m just I’m concerned. I could. What is this mode of being? Never heard of this before. It’s delightful. It’s delightful. One of the priests who’s a rather passionate and excitable fellow got up to the microphone and recommended that we do this every five years. I like, oh, man, it’s two year preparation process, man. Like every 10 is about as often as I can see this happening, because, you know, we fed 300 people for what? Dinner, breakfast, lunch, dinner, breakfast, lunch. Right. And then just the bishop drove all over the place and we did all these listening sessions. It’s just like this is a lot of work. We can’t do this every five years. Holy mackerel. That’s hey, hey, hey, there were women representatives at this. This was under the 83 Code of Canada law, not the 17 Code of Canada law. 17 Code of Canada law. Only priests would be at the Senate as voting members. I don’t know why they’d want to. Like, why does everybody think everybody should be involved in everything all the time? Like, I, I don’t. It’s like, I could have told Ted, like, Ted, I want to be in on your convivium planning. I did not want to do it. I wanted to enjoy it. And I damn well did. You know why? Because I didn’t have to think about any of it at all. Hutch did to show up and be me. It’s real easy to be me. I’ve been doing it my whole life. I’m great at it. Now, Andrew, you’re a great guy. You’re a great guy. You’re a great guy. I’ve been doing it my whole life. I’m great at it. Now, Andrew, there was a choir, a very nice, very big choir, beautiful music. Everybody said it was fabulous. Everybody knew it was fabulous. And you would have fit right in there. And you would just come for Mass. And then you would have been able to just go home. So, you know, there was a level. And then people were invited to the big opening and closing Masses, which were, you know, we did it right. We did it right. Big liturgies. Yeah. And I think, you know, people don’t appreciate that. Like being able to go in and do the thing you’re good at or the thing you enjoy, and then not having to be involved in the rest of it. What a gift. What an absolute gift. Because it is. It’s a gift, right? You know, you get to do the thing you’re good at. Somebody else usually sets it up for you, right? They do all the work. And then you can do the thing you’re good at, be appreciated for it, and then leave and not have to be involved in stuff that maybe you’re not good at or don’t know anything about. Or, you know, don’t need to have a say in. Or if you had a say in it, you’d make it worse. Yeah, that’s actually like, like, part of what made this work is that only the people who came are the people who really care. Right. Right. Right. It was like the people who, I’m not going to say that everybody initially really wanted to be there, but once they got a sense of what was going on and how it was being run, it’s like, yeah, this is the most faithful people from every parish, you know, so they want to see things thrive. Yeah. People don’t appreciate that. I mean, that’s what happened on the Verveki Discord server, right? They let a bunch of people who did not care and were not involved have a vote, have a say, and they blew it up completely to the point where Verveki stopped going there. They just ruined their own thing because they let people who were there, I mean, they were on there. Some of them had been members for years at that point, but they weren’t involved. Like, they didn’t come to things. They didn’t do anything. They were, you know, occasionally in the text channels, you know, causing trouble because that’s what they did, and they were allowed this big vote and, you know, it turned into an awful, horrible, actually demonic place, you know. It’s like, well, you know, and it got destroyed and, you know, and that’s, then that’s part of the problem, you know. Are you making the case for gatekeepers? Oh my. Yeah, well, it’s worse than that. See, people think it’s gatekeeping. The thing people are complaining about is actually not gatekeeping, and it’s not called gatekeeping, and that is just a misnomer. Not to say that there isn’t gatekeeping, but most often what people are tracking is what is barrier to entry. One barrier to entry is IQ, by the way, and nobody objects to IQ. It’s kind of weird. Like, oh, science is being gate kept. Yeah, by high IQ people, for one thing. Not only that, but that’s the barrier to entry, too. So what are you saying? You should let non-academics or maybe people who aren’t smart enough to get a degree be in charge of scientific papers? Like, you know, there’s a barrier to entry, and you can call that gatekeeping if you want, but you’re wrong, and that’s dumb, and you’re not going to solve any problems thinking that way. And again, some things are gate kept, right? But also, there are gates, and they need to be kept, and if you don’t have gates, you get destruction. So it’s just weird to me. I get the oversimplification, but yeah, gatekeeping is most often just about the barrier to entry, being held so that people can’t just do what they want. Yeah, there’s a barrier to enter the stream. Like, is there a bit? Yes, you have to have your camera on unless you’re well known. Why? And when that barrier is broken, usually people troll the stream. Yeah, no, no, no. I just ban them if I can get to them fast enough. But the bottom line is, there’s a barrier to everything in your life. Get over it. It always has been. Well, these barriers are a good thing, right? And so in our diocese, we’ve got our marriage tribunal. The marriage tribunal can look at nullity, right? And if they can get a declaration for nullity for one of your marriages, then you might be free to marry again, right? It comes with a 25 filing fee. So that you’re not just going to come and waste our time because, you know, the 25 bucks, you could get a nice steak dinner, or maybe a not so nice, you can get a decent part of a nice steak dinner for that. And like, it’s got to be, you got to put a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of money into it. But that’s not a barrier that is going to keep people out. You have to show that you care. Yeah, at least that much, at least 25. And you have to pay it. And if you really needed to, like if the priest said, Hey, this person is really serious about it, but they’re flat broke, we just waived the 200,000 for lack of due process. So my, I, I could not figure out why she was, well, she was dismissed from her vows, but I imagined it must have been, well, apparently she’s from a traditionalist community though. Yeah. They come in all shapes and sizes, especially in France. Right. So I, I couldn’t, I, I really couldn’t tell if it was because like she was too traditional or because she was like campaigning for abortion. Either one could have been. Oh yeah. I haven’t followed this story. Let’s see. I mean, it might be pillar Catholic might have had a, uh, let me go see if pillar Catholic, by the way, for anybody who’s listening, it’s the, uh, the best, um, new Catholic news source on it. And our chancellor’s good friends with the guys who read it. So, uh, but, uh, these are good dudes. We endorse, we endorse the good dudes, their imperfection, even in their imperfection. Yep. We have to endorse people’s imperfection, right? Cause nobody’s perfect. So an endorsement is an endorsement of their particular imperfection. Better way to think about the world. Trust me, it’ll help you. So from Catholic news agency, French court sentences, Cardinal will let religious community to fines after expelling none. Whatever happened to laicite, right? Well, I don’t know how to actually pronounce that in French, but you know, this idea that we’re just going to have everything be perfectly secular. Well, by that, I mean, the French, the French really do mean by secular, they meant like kill all the priests. Yep. In the French revolution, you mean? Is that, that’s why I started it. They even guillotine nuns, man. Like, yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’d be weird to do that. I mean, I think it’s still like illegal for like, uh, in right now to wear large crosses in, in certain places in France. And it’s like, Bishop’s not allowed here. Yeah, they got that thing going on. I, uh, I don’t, I don’t get it. Um, yeah. This is framed all backwards, right? Like kicking somebody out by is a grave violation of the right to religious freedom. I think it is not what religious freedom is. This is the confusion between positive and negative rights. Like I have a right to do what I want, when I want, how I want. Like, no, that you, those rights never existed in any society historically or in recent times. I don’t know where people get this idea from. Well, you know, it’s just, this is the European notion of rights and a lot of it’s led up, left up to the judgment of the judges, you know, because that’s not, that’s not classically European. This is a strictly recent past 50 years or 60 years problem. There’s nothing, there’s nothing, especially like European philosophical thought is all top-down power from above, right? All ordained by God stuff, all of it. There’s no, there’s no positive rights of the individuals in the European thought. That’s strictly an English thing. And then a U S thing later on. Yeah, I don’t, I, I don’t know where this comes from. It’s, it’s very strange. Yeah. No, I haven’t had much time for just consuming news. I’ve been in meetings or liturgies or preparing for meetings and liturgies or cramming in my Latin homework. So, so you’ve been doing priestly things, right? Rather than internet things. So I don’t feel bad about not following these things closely. I, I 100% approve. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a weird story. The AP doesn’t mention anything about what she might’ve done or what the internal investigation was about. You know, there’s no, there’s no other side of the story there. It’s all like her religious freedom was violated because she can’t keep doing what she was doing after an internal investigation. And I’m like, that usually means you did something wrong and shouldn’t be doing what you were doing. I don’t. I mean, her lawyer is according to Catholic news agency claims that she was, so she was 15, 57. She is 57 years old, had reportedly lived in a monastery since 1987 without any significant incidents. That means she was like, how old when she, she was like 20 when she entered, I guess. And then in 2011 denounced serious abuses and facts happening in the community. The situation then escalated, her lawyer says. After 34 years of religious life, she was dismissed from her community in October, 2020 after a visit from Wellets. It was never made public what exactly the Vatican accused her of. And a complaint to Pope Francis against her dismissal was unsuccessful. Yeah. So I don’t know. I don’t have any insider information on this. I don’t know if she got hosed by the Vatican, which is possible, or if she’s just a real piece of work and got dismissed for being a real piece of work. That’s also possible. What I do know is that the saintly way of responding to these things usually isn’t lawyering up. Yeah. Right. I mean, if it was like a church lawyer thing, that’s one thing because you’re keeping it all in house, you know, but I mean, I guess it’s like her sustenance after religious life, she’s got to figure out what to do now. But it’s a very odd story. Yeah. I mean, if she went into the convent, I mean, at age 20 and was there like 40 years almost since 1987, that’s 37 years. Right. So that’s all she’s known. I don’t know. Yeah. If I get any insider, maybe that’s why I can’t find anything on Pillar Catholic. They haven’t gotten the insider scoop yet. So we’ll see. We’ll have to watch this story. It’s a Saint Paul, you know, sorry, sorry, Jacob. Sorry. But Saint Paul had things to say about, you know, taking your complaints before the secular courts. It’s like you guys need to figure out how to settle this in house. So that was because during that time, it was it was it’s actually a huge issue. Because what people would do was would go to the Roman courts and the Roman courts were really corrupt. And basically, I mean, it was a way of murdering people was to take them to Roman courts because they they basically thought Jewish life was worthless. So this is this is actually like the Talmud and the Mishnah spend inordinate amounts of time condemning people who go to secular courts. But that was because of Roman rule and how it dealt with. So I’m in no way surprised that made it into the Christian early Christian community because, yeah, the the Roman courts were notoriously corrupt. Especially for Jews, probably. I mean, my perspective, and it’s definitely the perspective of somebody who’s in school for canon law is like for religious life, we’ve got our own internal legal system that’s got hundreds of years of tradition and development behind it. And ultimately, when it comes to it, the chief judge of the Catholic Church is the pope. And if he hears your appeal and rules against your favor, then, you know, at least we have an umpire that we can recognize, even if it’s possible that he give bad decisions. Well, there’s this whole thing. I think it’s in that crazy book you talk about, Father. I could render under Caesar like it’s not unclear that there are two types of justice, right? We’ll say one that’s maybe of this earth and one that’s kind of maybe not. And and and that is a fundamental change from, you know, if you want to call it a progression, I think that’s a fair way to think about it, right? It used to be that the god and the emperor were the same and then they sort of got separated, right? And then the the authority of the emperor or the king or whatever came down from the authority of that higher power, god, whatever, doesn’t even matter, right? At that point. And and and now there’s a separation between the authority of the highest power and the authority of the king or the elected official. I see nothing wrong with it. Seems reasonable to me. Yeah, so I’m not going to come down with a strong opinion on this case until I know more. Excellent. Back to the topic of streaming platforms. Are you streaming to Twitter? Me? No, no, just YouTube, just the one I Twitter is all Twitter will not be good for me. Honestly, not good. And I don’t trust the numbers it shows, but it seems to show like really large numbers of watching and to the point where I’m very doubtful. But yeah, that’s been that’s been something I think it’s it’s easy to set up and you don’t have to use your Twitter account. That’s the great thing about Twitter is people can decide to follow you and you you’re actually probably best off not using your Twitter account because whenever you use your Twitter account, you risk getting blocked. And I’ve been blocked by so many people. Kale’s Zeldin has been blocked by even more people than I have, which is shocking because he’s not he doesn’t strike me as a bomb thrower, you know. He’s not about that. OK, look, look, I know Catholics, right? I know conservative Catholics, you know, don’t care what everybody thinks. They’re just going to say the truth. Right. And I love these guys, but the best is farmers. Right. And so they they get in, get in trouble on Twitter. I want to answer Don. I don’t know. I’m not on Twitter, so I don’t know what he’s like on Twitter. So maybe it’s different. Kale says I’m really out there things on Twitter. I’m like, are you sure Catholic, bro? Because I get I get questions. I got so Rob Amari. I don’t know if you know who he is. A little bit. He blocked Kale’s Zeldin. That was surprising. OK. Yeah, I think I think Jacob, the Twitter numbers don’t match the Streamyard numbers for watchers. That’s for sure. And I don’t know what to make of that. Apparently, Twitter has a media platform thing that gives you more detailed analytics. I don’t have access. Someday they say they’re going to review my account, but it’s been like seven months. So I don’t think they’re ever actually going to. I think there’s software broken and I’ve reached out to them and that’s pointless. Although reaching out to Google, fix my Google stuff amazingly, which was wonderful. That happened in a day even, which is amazing because that was months broken too. So, you know, maybe Twitter will get their act together. Who knows? Well, when Elon bought Twitter, he fired two thirds of the employees and everybody was like, oh, I guess Twitter is going to go down. And it didn’t. No, it got better. That was always when I did consulting, I would always walk into a place and I would never say this to them. But I was always like, you guys could get rid of about 80% of these people and your software would improve overnight. And so apparently the less the rest of Silicon Valley went, hmm, maybe we could do some cuts. See, that was one of his better tweets. But given tweets like that, if you don’t understand why people would block him, I don’t know what to tell you. Only seen him on YouTube. Never seen him on Twitter. I’ve seen him on YouTube. Yeah. A few times and that’s always interesting. But his Twitter really is. I mean, that’s a very inflammatory tweet for Protestants. I’m sorry. I made it worse because me, but yeah, I mean, I doubled down on that because I was like, oh, my God, I like it. Yeah. Yeah. So all of that I’m looking at right there. I’m like, yeah, Twitter’s not for me. I shouldn’t go near it. But if you don’t log in and you just link it through Streamyard, I mean, I don’t know. Yeah. I’m content with YouTube. YouTube is big enough. I don’t know, Father. I’m still gunning for you to be Pope in a few years. Well, you and Mark need to get together on that then. And Adam’s already on the board with that. So yeah. How many cardinals do you have on board with this plan? Because I’m not even old enough to be elected a bishop yet. Is there a minimum age? 35. I mean, the Pope could just say, eh, whatever. But you don’t need to be a bishop to be Pope. I know. Understood. Understood. I would be consecrated a bishop immediately upon arriving in Rome. I understand the law here. Yeah. Like, I don’t know why you’re why you tied up with this because we need to get this rolling. Like, we got problems that he fixed yesterday. Come on. I think we have better candidates out there. Absolutely cannot be true. I just denied immediately. I am willing to let you take my proxy vote. Like, every single vote I get in the conclave, I designate Father Eric can vote all of my votes in the conclave. Every single one. No, no. You need to convince cardinals to vote correctly. That’s what he’s telling you to do. Well, I’m going to be meeting a cardinal on Tuesday. Cardinal Burke is coming to Grand Forks, North Dakota for a, there’s a home in Warsaw, North Dakota dedicated for expecting mothers in tough situations. They can just come there free of charge, have their kids, all of that. It’s a very small operation. It takes a lot of resources to run something like that. It doesn’t scale well. They’ve had donors come and say, we got to get this bigger. And it’s like, no, dude, we don’t. You can’t make it bigger. We can maybe have 10 mothers here at a time. And so the priest who runs it is a good friend of Cardinal Burke. I get to emcee that mass. My dad will be the deacon for it. So, you know, it’ll be a very efficiently run mass because it’s going to be the two of us. I love it. That’s fantastic. That’s exciting. Yeah, I think there’s something about caring. Caring only scales horizontally, not vertically. And people don’t understand scale. Like, very frustrating. I understand scale. Do large scale computing projects. You’ll understand scale real quick or you’ll fail miserably and not know why. Either one. I mean, like preaching tells me about scale, you know, because like, I think my message is clear. And then I talk to somebody about it and they heard something else. Now, oftentimes the something else is helpful to them. Right. So like, I preach about, you know, making Advent a penitential season and they feel they need to be more grateful to God for things in their life. It’s like, not going to complain about you practicing gratitude to God. But that isn’t what I meant. Right. Well, well, and that’s, and that’s like, I get upset with Peterson and Pigeot when it was. Postmoderns had a point. What? That you can’t send only one message through language because it’s actually not possible? Is that really, is this some groundbreaking news? It just seems like a captain obvious moment to me and every three year old. But whatever. Like, if you think that’s a point or like a thing that it took some IQ points to come up with, I guess I got questions. Get questions. Postmoderns in the 1960s and 70s were first to discover that language could be ambiguous and that puns were something that were possible. Exactly. It’s exactly it. I’m just like, is this some real revelation for real? Did you listen? Oh, you’ve been busy, so you didn’t listen, but you might want to listen to the rest of history. They did a five part series on Martin Luther. I’ve gotten to the first two parts. When they got to solo scriptura, like they were dunking on Luther. Like that, like, I don’t know how anybody ever thought that perspicuity of scripture was going to work. The idea that scripture that you just read it and you understand it and everybody should just be on board with it because the only way that you can corrupt it is if somebody goes in there and corrupts it. And it’s like, ah, it’s just. Yeah, because there’s no original sin. We’re all perfect in nature. I mean, I’m pretty sure Rousseau taught us that and he was right about everything. So. Yeah. Yeah, but they, they, they called it Tosh, which is apparently a British way of saying it’s BS. Yeah, but it’s the it’s it’s not even that, you know, it is that, but it’s it’s the solace. It’s this alone thing. Nothing is alone. Nothing is unconnected from the world. Like that’s where the individualism seems to come from is this idea of alone. Where are you getting alone in this world? Like what what piece in this world do you move? And it only moves that piece in the way you intend and nothing else is affected. When does that ever happen? Even physicists know better than that. I technically am having a mild gravitational effect on a star billions of parsecs away. Exactly. And the sun and the sun. Right. But even even farther than that and a giant supermassive were connected somehow by gravity. I don’t understand how it works, but and the butterfly effect and like it just goes on and on and on and on and on. Right. And then, yeah, they come up with these solace and I’m like, I don’t know how dumb you have to be. But like, and this goes back to the scaling problem. You say one thing and when you sample the people that heard it, you get very different ideas about what they got out of what you said. And so it’s like you can’t move one piece and have it move exactly the way you want without moving a bunch of other stuff in ways you can’t understand. And I don’t know why people aren’t aware of this. I guess I don’t talk to enough other people. But and the power in that is to use it backwards. So yesterday we were hanging out in my Discord server and we were talking about something or other. And then I was like, oh, that’s a good theme for next Friday’s live stream on navigating patterns is, you know, I might not name it this, but something like communion. Right. And they were like, oh, yeah, that’s a really good idea. And everybody kept talking. Right. And so they’re all coming up with these ideas and talking and sometimes not meaning to talk about communion, but I’m making these connections, writing them down. And then I get a free live stream. I don’t do any work for it’s fantastic. It works. I get a free live stream every week. Yeah. I do what? 10 minutes of talking and then the rest is user generated content. I’m yes. I’ll be sending you a bill. Don’t worry. To address what Nico said, no matter how bad your opinion of Martin Luther is, the more you learn about them, the worse your opinion will get. That that’s true of most people. I mean, this is why conversation won’t save the world. The more you dig in, the more disagreement you find, the more detail you go into, the more the the worst people get. Right. The more details you know about their life, the less perfect they appear. Yeah. That’s why forgiveness is pretty important because otherwise everything will come to a grinding halt. I just have to forgive the bishop today when he said we’ll leave at eleven forty five. You know, and I asked him when he wanted to leave and then he asked me when I wanted to leave and I said eleven forty five would be great. No, not nine forty five. I forty five. Whatever. And then he comes down there after asking me what time I wanted to leave and comes out at nine fifty five. It’s just not as German as I am. Which reminds me Cardinal Burke, isn’t he the one that got into a fight with the pope? Yeah, but he’s a cardinal. He’s supposed to do that. No, seriously, once you’re at the level of cardinal, you are a part of the Senate of the pope. That is one of your duties. You are an advisor to the pope. So like part of being a good advisor is saying, hey, holy father, I don’t think that’s right. Right. And maybe even saying that publicly, like he’s he’s freaking earned doing that. Right. The cardinal definitely can do that. I didn’t know about the publicly part. I think I think a little bit of publicly isn’t the worst thing. Right. Because we live in a society. I don’t know. I don’t know. But yeah, I don’t think it’s wrong to do it publicly. I do think it’s wrong, however, to have Ted on the stream without publicly welcoming him. So how are you doing? Hey, great. It’s lovely to have reproductions of my photons projected digitally next to yours. It’s as close as we can get to being together without going to Arkansas. This is true, because I guess I don’t leave. I don’t know. You will. You will. If I ever do a thing out here, Ted, you’ll have to help. He was sleeping right there. It’s true. The legend lives on, Jacob. It was good. I was really, really tired. I think I had. I don’t know if there’s ever a four day period of my life where I talked so much as leading up to sleeping in your apartment. Like it was unbelievable. It was like seven a.m. My father remembers the campground. It was like everyone woke up and it was like, okay, here’s some coffee. Okay. Also, Jonathan Bejo and Jordan Peterson and everything. This conference is about I’m like, OK, this I like I love talking. This is overwhelming. And it literally it went from like seven thirty a.m. until eleven p.m. at night around the campfire with with no stops the whole freaking time every single day we were. And Ted, I don’t know if you noticed this. I didn’t sleep a wink that entire time. Like by the time I got to Sunday morning, I had two cups of coffee and one of Chad’s and I was still tired. So I had one of Chad’s crazy energy drinks that has 300 milligrams of caffeine in it. And that got me back to normal. I think I didn’t notice how little you slept because like the moment that I was asleep, I was exactly. Yes, it was like the moment, the moment that like someone wasn’t talking to me was just like and I was gone. Except the first night when we went in there into the tent and like I don’t know what had happened, but there was like close to 400 mosquitoes in the tent. Oh, yeah. Yeah. They’re all just like congregated at the top. Are you waiting here for us to eat us? That tender German skin, they knew it was coming. They’re like, we’re going to get up. Oh, my goodness. How do you get mosquitoes in your tent? Come on. I don’t there wasn’t even a light. No, no, they were already set up, which, you know, I shouldn’t, you know, I’m not going to look a gift tent in the mouse or mouth or whatever it is. But there was a lot of mosquitoes in there. So it’s funny that you just mentioned Cardinal Burke. He was at the pilgrimage in Oklahoma this fall. So he offered mass at the end of that, which is is wonderful. This is the first mass I’d ever been to at the Cardinal. It was this one. My second mass with the Cardinal. Well, wait, is he coming up to to y’all? Yeah, really wonderful. When? Yeah. For what? Tuesday for a fundraising banquet or a home for expecting mothers in North Dakota. Wonderful. Oh, that’s great. It is a very worthy charity. So yeah, cool. Yeah, it was it was fun to we when at the pilgrimage, we got in like we’re way at the back. And so we thought, you know, like the church at the abbey is completely full and we’re just out in the grass. And it’s like, all right, I guess we’re going to hear the mass piped in through some bad speakers. And then, you know, here comes the procession with Cardinal Burke, like, four feet from us. And like, oh, OK, there’s there’s some compensation to where we were. The funny thing at the end of the pilgrimage is like, you get to the people who are holding who hold like the standard the banner from your chapter, they could go and stand behind the high altar. And so it’s like, it’s really cool because you get to be right there and see everything. But it’s also like we just walked 35 miles in the last 36 hours. And like, can you stand there for a pontifical high mass without passing out holding this thing? And and I said no and gave the flag to a younger man said go for it because I’m like, I’m pretty sure that I would like I would follow. Yeah, yeah, that that pilgrimage sounds real cool. We’ll see if I can make it. But now. That’d be great. It would be great. Next next fall will be my last semester where I have two classes online and it should just be one class a semester after that. So I might have a little more freedom. But next fall is also when the diocese is probably going to be going to the ordinary Jubilee year in in Rome. So cool. Every 25 years we have an ordinary Jubilee. I know it’s not 50 like it’s supposed to be in the law of Moses, but you know, it’s what we do, Jacob. And then they had a very big Jubilee year on the year 2000 because that was a new millennium. So hold on Jubilees every 50 years. So you guys just decide we just we just do it. Yeah, it’s like how we talk about doing a Sabbath rest on Sunday. We just we just do what we want. You’ll find this interesting. So I kept on hearing that the JWs, the witnesses, were celebrate their Easter on the Jewish Passover, the Jewish Passover. And then I find out that theirs is like a month off. I’m like, what’s going on at this year? So I start looking into it and I find out that according to their theology, they go according to the lunar calendar, but they decide when to add an extra month based on when the Catholic church has Easter. So to make sure that they don’t do it at the same time? No, to make sure that it’s closer. That’s very strange that the JWs would be looking at the Catholic church at all to be like, what are they celebrating? We should do it at the same time. I guess if you tell any witness about this, they will be like, what? Just come on over, guys. You’re already you’re already basing your Easter at the same time as us. We’ll get all these kinks in your theology worked out. We’ll be done with that trite theism stuff. It’s fine. We’ll get you back on a good Trinitarian basis. So you just broke Jacob. You said the words good and Trinitarian together. I know. No, you’ve made a distinction between Trinitarian and trite theism. Yeah, absolutely. Jacob, you’ll appreciate this. You know how the witnesses are all about how they got like JW.org? Yeah. And you know how you may not know this, but in Spanish, the the JWs are called testigos de Jehovah. But in Latin America, everything is still JW.org. So it makes it makes no sense. And they’re just like, yeah, we’re like the testigos de Jehovah also go to JW.org. Sure. I was like, why are you so proud of this URL that you have that has no connection with your beliefs or name? So I just thought that was fun. Very expensive to get a two letter two letter URL. You know, sometimes those guys, there’s there’s the sneak in there and get the early stuff like some of the some of the stuff that Mormons have invested in. I don’t know if this is still true. But like four or five years ago, I was reading about how like the Mormon Church’s investment fund is the largest or second largest investment fund in the world now. They’re just like, you wouldn’t think it but apparently they’re like really, really savvy investors. So, you know, they do they do have the capacity to think long term. Right. Right. So there’s a lot of, you know, Protestant churches can’t manage but like the Mormons have like they they build the infrastructure, they build the institutions, they run it. I don’t know how well it runs. I’m on the outside. But like, they seem to be able to keep things running. They’ve got but they’ve got little signs painted into the desert and stuff about where to go in case of nuclear attack. They’re they’re way right. Yeah, they’re way organized. So every Mormon is supposed to either have three or six months of emergency food. Yep. They’re all prepared for a catastrophe at all times. That’s a requirement. Yeah. Oh, so maybe that’s why that monastery in a canticle for Leibowitz was in Utah. Yes. That’s fantastic. It’s a fun book. It’s a fun book. Anybody who hasn’t read it, a canticle for Leibowitz. You need to know a little Latin and a little theology to get all the jokes. But the main plot’s available to anyone. Yeah, you don’t you don’t even need to know it though for it to just be like one. It is a wild ride. That is a it’s not what you think it is. Basically, I went back and re-read it this few months ago and it was it was it was totally worth a reread. It was hitting me really hard with some of the stuff. I’m not going to go into too much more. Yeah, no spoilers. Just read it. It’s a great book. Even pseudo Boethius agrees canticle for Leibowitz great book exclamation point. Wow. No, that settles it then. Testimony of three witnesses cannot be denied. That’s fantastic. Oh, they use that in computers. What? Three witnesses? Yeah, all the technology. The original technology that Google invented for the search engine to make it fast is based on a quorum, which is three nodes have to agree. And then that makes the data in those three nodes if they agree, canonical. And that’s the end of that. And is that the is that the actual terminology they use? Some of it. They use quorum. It’s called a quorum. But not canonical. It might be listed as I’d spent a long time since I read the Google paper. I read it after it came out. It was a hell of a long time ago. I don’t know. That’s fine. All the technologies after that also, they’re all based on the Google white paper, like everything you’re using YouTube, Facebook, all of it. Mark, it just cracks me up. Because sometimes you just write a lot so much stuff that I assume that you’re just like, your like confidence and your confidence measure on your things you say are like 60%. And you’ll just stop and be like, I don’t know. I’m like, dang marks actually like, probably a really high certainty on like everything he’s It’s true. I mean, like, it’s a it’s a trick, Ted. This is the funny part. I’m like, guys, it’s a trick. It’s called only speak when you know what you’re talking about. It’s really not that And the funny thing is, it sounds like you can seem like, oh, man, you also know you like, you have something to say about everything. It’s like, yeah, if you have the capacity to connect two things, and then you always have something to say, like, you don’t have to know anything about what’s going on, you just have to know how to connect what’s being said to something that you actually know. And then you always or you’re just quiet when when you don’t know what people are talking about. So the whole time you guys were talking about Chino, I didn’t say a word. That’s like the book of Proverbs or something. Even a fool is seen as wise when he keeps his mouth shut. It’s a trick. It’s a trick. I just shut up. It’s a trick. It’s real easy. But people feel compelled to speak to Phil’s face, right, or to be heard, or because other people are getting attention. And then, you know, I don’t want to be mean about it. Like, it’s not like they want to steal the attention. But they’re like, oh, other people are getting attention. So I should be like them and get attention too. Right. And so they feel compelled to speak. And it’s like, but maybe you have nothing to offer. And so maybe you should be like, leave it alone. Like that time I took you out to dinner with a bunch of other priests. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that was that was lovely. I learned so much. You know how you learn things? By not talking and maybe asking the occasional question when you when you feel like you know enough to ask it. Because a lot of that time I just didn’t. If I wanted to ask a question right now, what would I ask them? Yeah, I got nothing. All right, shut up then. I was in a situation like that earlier this week where I was around some people who had like a hilarious amount of knowledge about climbing ropes. It was these friends of my friend that I do tree work with. It was exactly that Mark. I was like, I’m gonna I’m gonna hang tight for about 45 minutes. And I think I’m gonna get a base level master of this vocabulary. And then I can start like, actually, any idea what’s going on enough to ask questions. But there’s like throwing off Oh, yeah, like, I think that’s like a like a nine mil Cleveland or something. I’m like, okay, I think that’s either the I think that’s the diameter of the rope. And I’m guessing that’s the manufacturer. It might be like the braiding technique. I have no idea. It was hilarious. They’re just, you know, getting getting thrown into a situation where it’s like their shop and you have no idea what the shop is. It’s just awesome. And the key is, that’s how you learn, right? You learn by being around people who know something that you know nothing about, and just not freaking talking. There’s a there’s another side to that too. And about the capacity to not talk, which, for those of you who know me at all is pretty probably is 10 things not talking is great. Wow, he should practice more of it. But there’s this Wendell Berry poem about a grandfather and his grandson sitting on a porch. And he says that they’re most of the conversation was, the quote is, the silence of shared knowledge. Well, well, well, if you think about it, though, I’m going to take notes, take notes from my Friday live stream. Like, that’s where you commune, you commune in silence, not in speech. Right. So that’s going to be helpful. You’ll hear that on Friday on navigating patterns now, for sure. We know it’s interesting, Mark, is I went to this place where there are all these there’s some bells and all the smoke and a guy who’s in a cassock like father, but he was dressed up in like a really fancy white and gold thing on top of that. And we’re all singing and doing stuff. And then right in the middle of it, there’s like 15 minutes of just dead silence. Pretty awesome. It’s pretty. Yeah. It’s like, if you’re trying to get on the same page with somebody, and let’s say you really are trying to get that, you got to do a lot of talking and hacking out in the details. Right. But when I just like I get the seminarians together and we process in, it’s like we’re on the same page. You guys are trained, you know what to do. I could just like wave at you every once in a while or give you a nod. And that lets you know it’s time. Right. And the ability to commune and to communicate in silence is a sign that everybody’s properly aligned towards the same goals or the same good. I love that, Father. I’ve actually been thinking about that. You don’t need to talk anymore. It’s just. Watching the altar boys at church, it’s the same thing, right? Where they’re like, they because of their like knowledge and finesse at it, they’re able to like, there’s this sort of like weird like, or I guess infrequently seen combination of like complexity and calm together. Right. Because there’s this whole thing, which is the mass, but they know it well enough that like no one’s explaining it. They’re just doing it in silence. It’s it’s yeah. That’s cool. Liturgy only becomes liturgy if you’ve done it enough times that you’re comfortable, that it’s it’s familiar. If it’s not already familiar, if it’s not, then it’s it’s really, I mean, it’s it’s completely different. Right. When I’m reading something that like, when I’m reading a song that I’ve only read so many times, it is completely different from reciting a song that I’ve said so many times. Like, I basically know it by heart. Yeah. Yeah. That is a experience once it becomes a part of you. Yeah. There’s a different struggle, which is sustained attention, right? Because you’re not being gripped by novelty. It’s a but yeah, no, I mean, you know, especially being in the choir at mass, like, you know, you over there’s these parts over and over and over that you get to. Particularly though, for the the proper for the very it’s these variable portions that are sung at the high mass. There’s there’s four or five of them. Any rate, we typically there’s like very complex Gregorian versions. But then there’s something I think they’re called like the Rossini Prophets. They’re just they’re plain chant. Right. So very straightforward. There’s only a few variations on them. And I’m especially in paschal season when we’re singing the hallelujahs and the gradual it’s like, there’s something about like knowing exactly where my voice is going to go and where all the other men’s voices are going to go. And we’re all standing in a circle singing these hallelujahs together. And like, I don’t even have to almost don’t have to do anything to be singing it with them. And it Jacob, you’re right. It’s like it’s completely different from when I was like learning Gregorian chant and all this stuff. And it’s just like, all I’m doing is like white knuckling it to try to not like go off pitch or go somewhere else or like, understand what’s going you know, there’s this you get to this other side of it and it becomes a sort of actually reminds me a lot of Elliot’s whole discussion of like, you know, stillness and movement kind of meeting together. There’s also something that happens. At least it happens a lot more in Hebrew than it does in other languages. But you gain an insight into what a certain passage means. And it’s a new insight, even though you’ve heard that passage so many times, and a permanent depth that is just like, also becomes a part of you. Like, there is something so I mean, if you’re thinking from an evolutionary psychology point of view, the question becomes, why is it that we don’t have meditation in the Western tradition, when in the East, everybody’s meditating. And I think it’s because our liturgy is superior to meditation. It’s a form of it. Yeah. It’s it’s I think it, if you are actually participating in liturgy, well, including I mean, what you were talking about, Ted, once it’s not novel anymore, me, making you pay attention to the words, even though it’s it’s something you have memorized. I honestly think it’s it’s a superior technology that we discarded. Well, some people discarded. And so people have had to go and try to reimport it from the East. To some extent, but I want to I want to make a comment. I like what you said, Jacob, it’s really good. A lot of people talk about insight, and you know, you’re like, John, Vervicki, talk about that. And the way they talk about it is as though it’s something coming from inside of them. But actually, insight is something you let in from the outside, when you have to be open to it. Right? That’s actually what’s happening to you. I mean, even even if it feels like it’s coming from the inside, you still have to be open to the change to the modification, whether it’s something like you said, that you’ve memorized or know well, or read 100 times before, whatever, right. And yeah, all the cognitive guys come to the same sets of conversations. And I think that’s the thing. Guys come to the same sets of conclusions. Like I could have saved you some time, guys. You didn’t need to go through all that. We already had these answers. Right. You have to be open to that. I think liturgy in particular, is the space that opens you up to being able to have an insight as such. And that’s why, you know, the insistence is always that the Holy Spirit comes down upon you and moves to speak something, to say something, to make a change, rather than, you know, people seizing upon that with their own genius, I guess. That comment that you threw up there, Father, about Christian monks meditating and like Christians meditate. But I mean, meditation is an interesting word because we’ve kind of collected a bunch of different things in it. And very much like to what Jacob and I were just talking about, there’s a going, you go to like a Benedictine monastery that does the Latin chant. And these guys are, they’re chanting for, they chant through the entire Psalms every week. Right. So they’re hitting all 150. They’re doing it four times a month. And I want to say it’s like five hours a day that they’re together chanting. And they’re, and it’s, it’s all antiphons, right. So you’ve got the, they’re split into two groups and one will sing one line and then the other will sing the other line. And then one, it’s just back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. You know, they’re doing this for life. So many of them have been there for 30, 40 years. And it’s just, there isn’t anything else like it. It’s not like the most precise singing. It’s not like the most technical singing, but there is something going on there that even when you’re just in the same room as them. I mean, I remember not even, not even being Catholic yet and hearing it and just thinking like this would change you. There’s no way this doesn’t change you. Like, like it is working. It’s working. You don’t even have to, you don’t even have to be singing it. And being someone who sings in choir, I know the difference between hearing people sing and like singing the same words and pitches as the other people right next to you. Like there’s all kinds of crazy stuff that’s going on in terms of like what it’s like to be in that sort of union with other people to like feel it in your body, all of this stuff. So there’s a term that Jacob, I want to chew on what you’re talking about because there’s this sense in which like Eastern meditation is this sort of like non teleological opening. At least that’s how I’ve heard it described as this sort of you’re just dropping patterns. Like don’t don’t hold on to that pattern. Don’t hold on to that thought. Don’t hold on to that notion. Western meditation is, is oriented towards something that’s teleological. It’s it’s right. We’re going to, we’re going to chew on the Psalms. We’re going to, we’re going to go over them and over them and over them. And there’s this sense in which there’s all, there’s all kinds of cool stuff that comes out of that. Like what you’re saying, like there’s this, there’s a faith that it’s worth doing a thousand times and not just once, right? That there’s, there’s depth there. Say one way of saying it is you have faith that the things that you’re meditating on are bigger than you are, right? Like that there’s just more there to it that you haven’t, you haven’t gotten at all, which is humility. So yeah, I think you’re right. We definitely equivocate on the word meditation and there’s a big equivocation. And usually what, what people mean is one of three things, contemplation, right? To think deeply about, which is standardly how we might think of meditation and rumination, which happens to be topic one of my live streams and navigating patterns, just saying, right? But there are three different concepts because there are three different ways of approaching thought, right? And, and, and that’s kind of important. And they’re somewhat tied to time, I would say as well. That’s the case I made in my live stream anyway. And that’s really important because we do have it in the West, but the fundamental difference between West and East, you talked to Corey about this, right? And Nesbitt was on, I was onto this in Geography of Thought, like, yeah, there’s a, maybe it’s not non-teleological in the East, but, but there’s a different flavor, right? They’re very cyclical in their thought, very cyclical. And we are, are much less cyclical in our thought. And, and it’s just, it, it’s a hard limitation, a hard constraint. That’s why you can’t just pick up Buddhism. That’s a Westerner. It’s just not going to work. It’s not going to have the same effect. You’re, you’re almost, nobody can do that. And sadly, the Easterners can pick up the Western way of thinking for whatever reason. Cool. So Mark, it’s interesting that you brought up the difference between the sort of cyclicality and the directionality in the East and the directionality of the West. And I wish I could remember where this came from. This might be Barth, Owen Barfield, but I remember coming across a very convincing historical argument that it’s, it’s the Hebrews that were the first people to break out of this cyclical view of reality. John Pavey’s book speaks about that in Awakening for the Meaning Crisis. Okay. He probably picked it up from Barfield. I’m certain he’s read them, but. Yeah. The idea that the world had a beginning is, is a religious idea that until the 1930s, the scientific establishment thought the Catholic scientists were trying to bring in from their Bible and they were trying to keep it out as religious dogma. Yes. Do you know, do you know the like real, the math, the math that shows that that the universe can’t be eternal, infinite and static. It’s so awesome. It’s called the dark sky, the dark sky paradox. So the idea is, cause the idea, right? What Jacob is saying is, is dead on. They’re like, oh yeah, the universe is infinite and it’s eternal and it’s not changing because if you have an infinite and eternal universe, that’s changing. Then you run into all kinds of problems. But the issue with an infinite static and eternal universe is that when you go out into outside and you look up, if you have an infinite eternal and uniform universe, then the light from a star will be directly in your eye anywhere you look. It doesn’t matter. Every single angle that you, any, any segment of the sky is going to be, is going to have a, you can trace a direct line to a star. And so the fact that it gets dark at night actually demonstrates that the universe has a beginning and that it’s, and that it’s, yeah. So it’s either at least finite temporally or spatially. One of those has to be, there has to be a limit on at least one of those. The fact that we have nighttime, because otherwise it would be like looking into the sun everywhere that you look all the time, because there’s always light coming from a star in, you know, every single possible. A little more sustainable for the ancients to believe the universe was eternal because they, they didn’t quite know how many stars that we know about. We know about a lot more stars now. We just, we’ve gone and looked, we’ve got tools that we can go look and say, hot diggity, there are, like, when Abraham was promised that his descendants would be more than the stars of the sky, I’m sure he was impressed by it. And it’s only gotten more and more impressive as scientific resolution has progressed. Yeah. Well, it is actually interesting because, I mean, all the, you know, the ones that I’ve heard of, like the stuff from Hinduism, the stuff from Mesoamerica, there’s always this, it’s not the sort of, it wasn’t the sort of static eternal universe that materialism, that like modernist materialism was saying, but it was actually cataclysmic cycles, right? So it’s like, you’re basically bouncing back and forth between the chaos and creation where you go through a cycle of however many thousand years and then everything gets burned up and it comes back. And it’s like, there’s this sense, it’s sort of like contained growth or something like that, but you never get anywhere. There’s no, like, again, there’s no directionality, there’s no consummation. But honestly, I actually find this more sophisticated than the views in the sort of 19th century science, which is like, yeah, it’s just what it is. It’s always like, it’s always been like, this is always be like this, which is amazing because you can still get men like Neil deGrasse Tyson, who will tell you, and Carl Sagan, who are like, the universe is all, the cosmos are all that ever is, ever was, never will be. It’s like. Yeah, it’s weird. Well, the Mayans too have a cyclical catastrophic calendar, right? Well, only theirs is self-similarly fractal repeating, which is even cooler. It’s like, yeah, this is old, this is old stuff. But I think also, you have to, you can’t discount the utility in giving the answer to quiet the three-year-old of it’s eternal. In other words, don’t waste your brain power trying to figure out where the universe began or, which is equivalent in Western thought to trying to know God. Right? Don’t waste your brain on that, right? Because that’s an important message. Like, no, no, no, don’t waste your brain on that. Waste your brain on figuring out how to grow enough food to feed the culture of their village. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, but even then, if you just take the sort of basic evolutionary perspective, the fact that people could be driven to extinct, like to starvation by the fact that they’re answering a question that has no survival utility, tells you that you haven’t answered the whole question. Right. I mean, that’s where we get Big Bang from. I mean, Big Bang is from that phenomenon I just discussed, right? The monk was like, all right, I’m just going to give you a stupid answer. So you shut up and move on. We’re going to move this lesson on. Okay. Because otherwise you get into the three-year-old trap of why, why, why, which is great, which is great and fun. And I do enjoy playing that game sometimes because, you know, I’m still three. But also, like, it’s got to end at a certain point. You can’t do that forever. Right. The rebellion must end. And then you just end it with, and this all men call God. Does that say Thomas Aquinas? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like the final end towards which everything reaches and this all men call God. Nice. Yeah. Aquinas’ proofs for the exit, like the little bit that I’ve encountered with them, like they’re not like, what would you call it? Tools for evangelization. First of all, because like almost no one understands them, especially not until you’ve contemplated them. You can do some pretty good work with the argument for motion, which is the first one and the simplest one, right? Motion and for motion, Thomas Aquinas, motion means any kind of causality, not just local motion. Yeah. Causal. That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or any kind of change, not causality change, any kind of change. Like you can, you know, William Lane Craig, you know, he could do stuff with that, but you don’t want to go for like, you know, the object. I think it’s the fourth way is it’s the fourth way. What is the fourth way? That’s the one that everyone that’s just like that trips everybody up. That’s that there’s an end towards which everything in the universe is directed towards. And it has to be directed because it’s extremely Aristotelian, right? And unless you’ve got, unless you already agree with Aristotle about the necessity for final cause, which is already great and will be great. If you don’t already agree with Aristotle about the necessity of final cause, then it literally makes no sense. Yeah. It’s just incomprehensible. At least as I’ve heard it from modern Dominicans, the idea of the, of these arguments for the existence of God, they’re not, again, they’re not primarily tools of the evangelization, but they’re like, like methods of contemplation to change your, to like to deepen your understanding of God, basically. So it’s not, it’s like, I’m going to walk this path myself so that I can come say, let’s say, realize, boy, all the words I want to use here are dangerous. Essentially, just like realize how essential God is, which is like a funny way to say it, but like to heal that gap, that divide between God and his creation to realize like that we’re, that’d be one way to say it, like that, that, because all the stuff that I hear is like, it’s very like, it’s ways of seeing that like God is like holding creation together actively. It’s very much like anti-Deistic, right? It’s not, it’s not Deism. It’s like really not Deism. It’s like all this stuff is coming from God and it’s coming back to him. And like, you can just, you can see it just by just, you can see it just by contemplating existence, not any particular way. The second way would still work in a infinite temporal universe. Oh, interesting. Is that the one about goodness? No, no, that’s, that’s, that’s the causality. That is the causality. Okay. So the first way is change. The second way is to causality. And his, his argument still works, even if you admit that temporally infinite universe. Cause something had to set things going. Something had to move things. Yeah. It just seems to me that while, I mean, yes, I believe in an agentic God and it’s great to discuss this thing, these things. Can we start with the idea that if you don’t at least believe in Deism, you’re an idiot. Yeah, it’s good to restart. I mean, I remember Dr. Peterson had a conversation with Bishop Baron like a month or six weeks ago, and Bishop Baron, Dr. Peterson started off with being super excited that the AI language models could disprove postmodernism. And I was like, you’re giving, you’re giving these postmoderns way too much credit, Doc. You just need to mock them. Treat the fool according to his folly, something like that. Like we did earlier on this very stream. That is correct. Yeah. It’s just like, oh, doc, come on. You’re taking these guys way too seriously. So I feel the same way about Atheists. It’s just like, look, man, you could say, you could say, I don’t think we could know anything about that. But obviously there’s something bigger. I might be able to respect that. But yeah, the nothing exploded into everything is not okay. The Deism Peterson had with Dennett was boring. And he, Dennett just sounded like a doddering old fool. He’s always sounded that way to me. I’m glad everybody else is catching up with the fact that he really sounded that way. Well, that was, I mean, that was the weird thing about Peterson’s discussion with Richard Dawkins several years ago, where it was like, I remember thinking the same thing where it’s like Dawkins, like doesn’t even understand the questions Peterson’s asking here. Like this is weird. It was weird. It was, you know, and he, and Peterson’s like, here’s this pretty serious question. And I’m like, yeah, that’s a pretty good question. And Dawkins is like, I just don’t understand that why anyone would ever want to know the answer to that because it’s not science. And I’m like, oh, right. Right. Right. And then when he sees it, and he answers, that would mean, you know, you can hear the fear in his voice. It was so fascinating. That was right at the end. It’s just like, no, don’t end it there. Yeah. Well, you know, if you just don’t look far enough, right. Don’t, don’t look so far that you see that there’s black there. There’s no stars shining through. Sorry. Speaking of, did I bring up, did I bring up the eclipse last week? No, that was this week. Wow. Yeah. The eclipse was wild. The eclipse was totally wild. I can’t believe that was just Monday. This has been a full week. Yeah. The eclipse was wild. The eclipse was, I had a friend asked me the day before he’s like, what do you think this eclipse means? I was like, I think it means that God is pleased to fill creation with glorious things. I think that’s what the eclipse means. Good answer. I like that answer. Every once in a while, something really cool is going to happen and you’re going to want to be around for it. Yeah. Yeah. So I got to see the eclipse in 2017 and that, you know, on reflection, I realized I’m really not that rational because you just put the moon in front of the sun and for two minutes or two and a half minutes or however long, but no rational behavior out of me whatsoever. No, just like complete animal chaos. And nature, nature goes nuts. In 2017, I was here. I wasn’t in the house yet, but I was physically here all day working on stuff in the yard and stuff. And then did things get weird? And I was like, things are getting weird. And the last thing that things got weird, the light changes. Oh yeah. And like, how do you, so I’m not in the totality by any means, 80% here or something or 85, something in that range. I can’t tell you how the light was weird, but I can tell you that the light was weird. The last like five minutes leading into totality and then the totality is just, it’s, it is dude, it’s like getting pulled into another world. But the relevant thing that I was going to say is, is that sort of relevant to all of this, to the Peterson sphere and Jonathan Peugeot and everything, was that afterwards I realized with this, you’ve got the moon and it’s one of the most perfectly circular things when you see the shadow of the moon, it’s just unbelievably circular. And then it’s got this massive silver corona around it. I mean, it’s just, it’s beyond beautiful. And it struck me. I was like, where have I seen something like that before? And I was like, oh yeah, in Byzantine iconography, when our Lord is depicted frequently, he’s shown in front of a circle of black, which is the divine darkness, like referencing Mount Sinai. And then there’s a halo of glory around that. And I was like, that is the closest thing in nature I’ve ever seen to like that particular idea of the sort of, there’s a sort of like unseeable darkness that’s then like then emitting glory that comes out into the visible world. So I just thought that was a really cool, just cool. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Was it super traffic-y? Because a lot of people went and they ran into traffic. So what was really funny, Mark, is that what we drove from our house to my parents’ house, and that was like across the path of the hotel, like in like deeper end, I think we would have been like two minutes and there over four minutes there. But it was 20% of the traffic on a regular Monday. Like it was dead. Like I thought it was back in COVID land. There was no one out. Arkansas was the best place to go see this, apparently. Yeah. And a bunch of people came down from Northwest Arkansas. So we had like west, west of the Eclipse path. Like there was a lot, yeah, a lot of people got stuck in traffic, but all the driving I did around that, yeah, they were like, oh yeah, there’s going to be like millions of people in Arkansas and there’s going to be no food on the grocery stores. And like expect bumper to bumper traffic everywhere. And no, it felt like a holiday. It was weird. I mean, which all, you know, it’s already like, as you’re saying, Mark, it’s just even when you get to the partial eclipse, you’re like, things are not the way that they usually are. And so that all, it all really added to this kind of feeling of surrealness. One of the things this time that was really cool too was even after the totality passed, and what’s funny is it’s like, it’s getting darker and darker and darker. And it feels like like something’s wrong with your eyes or it feels so dark right before the totality hit. And then like when an old movies, when they just put a blue lens on the, on the camera to film at night, but it still has really crisp shadows. That is exactly what my brother said, father. He said, he’s like, this is one of those like old day for night film scenes from it, from an old movie. That’s exactly what it looks like. But in your, it says it passes like because you’re not going from light to dark, you’re going from dark to light. It immediately feels like full daylight again. But then you could look out to the Northeast and it was like the, just like the sky is dark. It’s not clouds. It’s not like, it was just like, it’s just dark over there. Like there’s no, there’s no sunlight in that column, you know, the column of atmosphere over to the, into the Northeast. It was weird. It was really weird seeing stars in the middle of the day. There’s like the, the tree frog started, there’s this tree frog that started singing. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. The animals get confused and they get quiet before it. And then when it gets dark, they’re like, oh, it must be nighttime. And they fire up. Yeah. That’s weird. These are nighttime sounds. And then it, and then it goes away. Yeah. The crick, the crickets at like 130 is like 120 in the after. I think the eclipse came through at 150 at 120. My friend, one of my friends who was there is like, wait, you can hear crickets. And it was really weird because there’s so many, all these noise levels. And then I finally was able to get right at the crickets. It’s like, oh my goodness, there are crickets. This is so weird. Yeah. And you also like little, if you like put your fingers together, I can’t do this because I’m holding an iPad, but if you like crossed your fingers, it would form pinhole cameras. All the intersection points would form pinhole cameras. And you say, you’d see like five or six or seven of the, of the shape of the sun projected on the ground. Just, and then, and then there’s weird stuff too, because there’s a lot more diffusion in the direction of the crescent than the other way. And so like, if you have like a, like a, your finger shadow like this in, in one direction, it’s a, it’s really sharp. And then as you turn 90 degrees, it gets really fuzzy because you’re getting diffused. You’ve got like a wide light in one direction and a narrow, like a very narrow aperture in the other, just all it, just everything that all the ways that we’re used to sunlight behaving, so much of it just goes right out the window and you’ve got weird, like fuzzy shadows and you can see, like my children, you can see the hair individual, the shadows of individual hairs, because the sun’s turning into a pinhole camera. You can see it cast on the ground. Yeah. Yeah. I see how this experiments during these things for a reason, right? Cause a bunch of physics stuff is either no longer relevant or breaks. And they’re like, we’re going to measure this. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s cool. And you know, it’s one of those weird things where like, I think, I think it was my wife that was saying this, that like, we just assume the sort of constancy in life. And then every once in a while, this thing just comes out of somewhere and everything gets turned upside down. And it’s like, it’s worth remembering that like things like that do happen. There’s this sort of sense of, of given this, not in a positive sense, given this and like, it’s all a done deal. And we all know how it’s going to turn out. And there’s really no reason to think about it. I mean, Chesterton is always going on about the miracle of the ordinary, right? The miracle is not that create something crazy happened. The miracle is like, that so much just rolls along peacefully. That’s, that’s, that’s the great miracle of creation. And many things are very, very regular in this great miracle of creation. Like father ending the live stream at nine 30. I knew it. I’m going to love that one right over home plate for you. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. So it is a nine 30. And that means by law and by custom, we will now end this live stream. So, uh, good night and God bless you all.