https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=KqwGPTA_sCg
All righty, welcome everyone. I’m here with my friend Mark. Mark is not a member of the Catholic Church, but he is still a good friend, I think. And he has some very interesting ideas that he brought up in a conversation that we had recently, and I was hoping to bring those conversations, that conversation, to all of you on the internet who might have happened to click on this video. So, Mark, is there anything else that you’d like people to know about you? Not much. I didn’t grow up attending the church, but my family is Irish Catholic on one side, and French Canadian Catholic on the other side. So I’m sort of steeped, sort of a la Tom Holland, you know, as book dominion, right? I’m steeped in the Catholicism to some extent, but I haven’t even read the Bible. So that’s weird up. I did go to a Catholic school, but they didn’t, you know, they were ill-equipped to deal with somebody who wasn’t already in the church and instill that Catholicism at the same time. But it was a wonderful education, so that was great. All right, at least we don’t have any worries about that. Now, something that people who follow your YouTube channel, Navigating Patterns, I’ll leave a link to that in the description below, will hear you talk about is that there’s a difference between a faith crisis and a meeting crisis. And so what is the difference that you see between people in those two different kinds of crises? Yeah, so a lot of people who are Christians will refer to an event they went through or that somebody else went through as a crisis of faith, where they had faith and then something happened and that comprises their crisis, whether they, you know, question the existence of God or question their ability to adhere to doctrine or, you know, there’s any number of things. And I think your audience will be familiar with that or at least able to get up to speed really quickly, right? The interesting thing to me, the thing that gets sort of emphasized by the rise of people like Jordan Peterson in particular, is that there’s a whole class of people that aren’t out of the faith. They were never in the faith. And that seems to be a different class. It’s not to say that Jordan Peterson’s tools can’t help both sides, right? People who are in a crisis of faith and people who are in a meeting crisis. But the meeting crisis people, they’re in a special circumstance because it’s not just that they don’t have access to the language of, say, Christianity, if you want to put it that way. It’s that they don’t have the concepts upon which the questions and language is built, right? So they don’t understand a world where creation is the starting point for your axiomatic assumptions about the world, right? The first step in dealing with these things, it’s been given to them as though, well, everybody knows what ethics is. Everybody knows what a good person is. Everybody knows how to be kind. Everybody knows the limits of compassion. And they’ve never thought deeply about these issues. And their access is through philosophy. And part of my argument is that philosophy is not supposed to do that. It wasn’t designed for that. It wasn’t designed for that. And it can’t do that, right? And what you need in that case, and I personally don’t feel that theology is the right way to do that either. I think theology and philosophy are sort of elitist, not in a bad way, but elitist projects for people who can think at that level and who are willing to put in hours and hours and hours of work, right? OK, now here’s what I’ve seen and reflected upon after getting these concepts down, is that even as a priest, I’ve encountered people who are going through some kind of a crisis of faith. And it’ll be something like, I grew up going to church. And then, you know, when I was 13, my mom died in a drunk driving accident. I’m making this story up here, but it’s pretty typical. And all of a sudden, I found myself raising my younger siblings. My dad started drinking. He seemed to be really lost. And at that point, I was angry at God. And I’ve been kind of drifting through my life. And now I’m in my early 30s. And now I feel like I want to have God back in my life. But I don’t know what to do about that. That would be kind of a typical profile of somebody who goes through a faith crisis, that maybe they had this naive adoption of the faith, which is where you have to start. Especially if you’re being raised in it. But there’s some kind of a trauma or some kind of a question or some kind of experience. The thing is, is that what a priest encounters, or let’s say even just a faithful Christian, they encounter somebody through going through a crisis of faith where they want to have that connection with God. They want to have that connection with things above them. We know how to deal with that. We have tools already built into the church for dealing with that. You know, very often in these cases, I’ve even had cases where somebody’s going through this faith crisis, and I just give them the right Bible story. And then all of a sudden, bam, everything clicks. Everything falls right into place. Oh, that’s all. That’s what I’ve been missing. And then all of a sudden, they’re able to just pick up right where they left off. They’ve got a lot of peace, and it’s not always that easy, but sometimes it is that easy, where you just give them the right truth and all of the stuff that they had inside of them falls into place. The thing about the meaning crisis is that people are just so separated from God, we could say separated from participation in the faith that these stories and these ideas don’t land at all. And so you can tell them. And it’s sort of like we’re giving people information without being able to express to them why this information is important. Right. So it’s like, what does it matter that God loves me? What does it matter that Jesus died for my sins? That’s where people in a meaning crisis, that’s where we lose them, is that we’re not actually able to articulate in a way that they can understand why this is important. Yes, exactly. They have no frame of relation. And one of the things that my friend Manuel Post and I have been working on for almost three years now is what does that mean in terms of models? And why isn’t it that they can’t relate to something like a biblical story? Why is it that they don’t have this framework? Like what are all the sort of maybe not all, but what are some of the core missing pieces? And I think that when you look at the work of somebody like Jordan Peterson, he’s using certain tricks. And I have videos about that on navigating patterns on my channel. I have like three, three to four videos now about what he’s up to and what he’s doing and sort of showing people, no, no, there’s a specialty to what he’s doing. It’s not preaching in the way that, you know, church people. Exactly. And it’s not it’s not merely a difference of language. He’s also I mean, he is avoiding language or maybe he doesn’t even have that. Maybe like me doesn’t have the Christian language. Like it’s not the language. A language problem is not just, oh, you have this word, not this word that mean the same thing. It’s that’s not what’s going on. What’s going on. They don’t have the concepts yet. Yet at all. And so you look at the work of somebody like John Breveke, who is one of my specialties is John Breveke’s work. You can watch him, in my opinion, build up these concepts and then come up with Greek and Latin words for them. Why? Because he was sort of traumatized very early out of his faith. And so he lost some some ability and that ability is the ability to relate the stories and not just biblical stories. This is where the real problem comes in. They’re not able to relate stories to themselves. It’s a functionality of the brain almost that’s missing. Right. I mean, it’s the latent abilities there in all of us. Right. And we think that’s related to this poetic way of informing the world where you’re able to make multiple connections. Between things. And that’s the way that you relate to a story. Because you get you can’t say, you know, what what do you relate to in the story of David and Goliath? What? And if you ask 10 people, the odds that you’ll get 10 answers are very high. Right. Because they’re relating it to them. And you don’t know what what they’re going to. It’s not even it’s not even because there’s no like objective scientific way to do it. It’s not even that you suppose you knew their story. It’s not even that they’d find the thing that you thought they’d find right. That you know is there because you see it and they don’t have eyes to see to use the Christian language. They don’t see it. They’ll relate to some other part of the story. And you’ll be like, wait a minute, why did you relate to that part of the story? Didn’t you see that this is you? So we’ve met somebody at a meeting crisis. And is it the case that they can’t relate their themselves to any story or just the Christian story? Well, I think especially the Christian story, but in general, any story. Right. What they do seem to relate to are conditions imposed upon characters, but they don’t seem to relate to characters in healthy ways. So they they, for example, the movie The Matrix, which is, I think, foundational to meaning crisis stuff. And I don’t know how many you know, how many of your viewers will be familiar with the story, but it’s got more than you think. More than you think. That was a cultural phenomenon. It was a rated R movie. I wasn’t allowed to watch it. And even I knew the basic concepts, you know, back in 1999. Yeah, it’s got a lot of Christian themes in it, but they’re inverted in some cases. In very interesting ways. And Jonathan Pigeot, who’s a lovely YouTube channel called The Symbolic World, has a great video on this. And I had to watch it three times to understand what he was talking about. And I’m I’ve probably watched The Matrix 50 times. Like, I’m fairly familiar with. I love that movie. It’s fantastic. And even I had a problem understanding his symbolic interpretation, which is very important. But when they see that movie, they don’t necessarily relate to the characters in the movie. They relate to the conditions. Oh, interesting. See, because that wasn’t the way I watched it at all. It’s like, yeah, I’m the one who goes out and fights against, you know, Agent Smith. Right. And you imagine yourself. So this is something I’ve always done and I’ve never actually noticed this is that I’ve always in my head after watching a movie, put myself in there and, you know, it’s a bit Mary Sue-ish, but I’m not subjecting anybody else to it. But I put myself in a movie like, OK, how would I solve these problems? And it’s really interesting that somebody who’s, let’s say, already got this ability to find themselves in a story would simply be able to transfer that into the Christian story. Right. Yeah. Whereas if there’s this this cutoff for being able to locate yourself in a story, then you you might be able to relate to the condition of this world around me actually being an illusion, the condition of needing to break through the illusion to get to the truth, but not actually being able to relate to Neo or Trinity or Morpheus or any of that. That’s really interesting that they wouldn’t be able to find themselves with a particular character there. Right. And that, I think, is the loss of the poetic. You know, in some cases it is, although I don’t particularly like this term, a loss of the ability to empathize. Like they are so separated from the world that they can’t put themselves in the shoes up. And when they do try to do something like that, what they seem to be doing is creating a model in their head. But I do want to call attention to what you just said about the matrix. It’s Gnostic. It’s pure Gnosticism breaking out of, you know, the horrible conditions of the matrix that this, you know, basically evil entity, because I mean, that’s the theme of the movie, has forced you into. Right. And the message that people miss, and especially the younger kids who probably didn’t see it when they were younger, because it’s a rather old movie now, they are always shocked when I point out to them that part of the theme of that movie is that these ragtag fugitive people would rather live in a grimy, you know, steel coffin under, you know, floating around in the, not in a dead city, in the city of the dead. In the sewers of a dead city and eat something with no taste whatsoever, but has everything you need to survive, then just be plugged into the matrix, enjoy their life and eat steak and just have a normal job. Like, really? I, I’m, I’m. What was it? Cypher? You’d be Cypher in that movie? Well, I wouldn’t betray anybody because I. Okay, but, but, but the attitude of Cypher, it’s like, you know, maybe they got chicken wrong, but I think I’m going to stay plugged in here. Yes, exactly. Alrighty. So, we’ve got these two basic concepts down. We’ve got this idea of a crisis of faith where somebody can imagine themselves being a part of the Christian story, right? And, and just to be clear to everybody at home, when I say the Christian story, I think it’s a true story. I think it’s the truest possible story. Jesus Christ really did rise from the dead. But it’s still a story in the sense that it’s a narrative, but that we can locate ourselves in on all levels. But somebody who is going through a meeting crisis cannot put themselves into, especially the Christian story, but maybe even they have a hard time finding themselves in any kind of story. And it seems like it’s things like believing that the universe is primarily material, doesn’t have any, any much of an appreciable spiritual component to it. And that the universe can be approached primarily through science and through reason that actually cut you off from the ability to actually approach the universe as a story. Does that sound right? Yeah, I think that’s certainly part of it, right? So, a materialist for me is not somebody who denies, we’ll say, the spiritual, right? Or the ethereal or anything like that. A materialist is somebody who believes that the primary mode, the mover of the world is material. And the way you know this, and I’m going to do a video at some point with a bunch of tells, I’ve got a list. I’ve got to figure out how to do the video. One of the ways you know this is that they say things like, well, if they just change Twitter as a platform with this feature, then everybody would start to behave or behave differently. And while there’s some truth to that, obviously, because we conform to the world, that that that’s not the way the world is like, we have to voluntarily conform to the world. Otherwise, we will just not use Twitter. We will use something else, right? And so there’s a limit to how much human behavior can be regulated by the outside world. And that sounds like kind of a silly and obvious statement. But and I think part of it is a lot of these people have grown up inside of video games where they didn’t have to imagine being the hero because they were the hero. And a lot of their solutions and you’ll hear this from them if you listen carefully enough, a lot of their solutions are change the rules of the thing outside of me. They’re not. How do I conform to the thing that’s bigger than me? They’re never. So almost their model of human behavior is all programming. Yes, it’s all programming right there. And somebody in the midst of a meeting crisis wouldn’t be able to understand something like a sinful tendency or a tendency towards evil that if you actually grapple with things, you’ll find inside yourself. It’s like, Oh, why did I do that? Oh, there’s a little part of me that just that just doesn’t want what’s good. So what’s truly good or what’s finally good? So, yeah, yeah. And if you don’t, you know, it’s like the way that we actually learn about good and evil isn’t through rules and it isn’t through procedures, but it’s actually through stories. Which is why, you know, even though the the the crimp fairy tales might be pretty grim sometimes, it might be pretty brutal. Sometimes the kids get really hooked into it, right? Because it gives them an insight of, Oh, that’s what the world’s like out there. There’s going to be like some witch that’ll cook you into a pie if you’re not careful. So like you better look out for anybody who lives in a gingerbread house because they they are not trustworthy. Yeah, I think it too. It’s tied up in this. Well, I guess I guess I guess I’ll be this harsh this lie of rationality where these people they’ve been told that they’re rational creatures. And like that’s that that’s the full extent of how they think they work. And by extension, that’s the full extent of how they think everybody else works. The problem with that is that we’re now equal in cognitive ability. And you know, these are hot takes from this morning, by the way. You know, what that implies is that they they believe that you know things about them that you couldn’t possibly know. And so they’re isolated from the world. They’re isolated from the world. They’re isolated from the world. They think that other people are just rational agents like they are. So there’s your equality. That’s how they think and why they think people are equal. And certainly people are not equal in cognitive ability. I mean, that’s it should be obvious. And they don’t act like that, right? They always act like either they’re smarter or they’re dumber, like always. They never they never act like that their cognitive ability is equal. But they pretend like it is. They pretend like I did an eight hour live stream last night and we had somebody on who was just he was insistent that that things are either true or not true. And he couldn’t understand the trueness of a shot like the trueness of your of your arrow to the target. He couldn’t understand the movement aspect of the shot. He couldn’t understand the movement aspect of the shot. He just wouldn’t acquiesce to it at all. And he got so frustrated that we would not bend on that that he, you know, couldn’t cooperate anymore. He basically had to boot him from the stream because he was just raging, which was really strange because we were all working with him for, you know, like an hour to try and get him to cooperate with us and understand the truth. And the assumption of rationality just sort of muddies the water because you don’t see yourself as separate from others because you’re all just rational creatures after all. And so like you’re all the same character in the video game. And so you’re all the same character in the video game. And so you’re all the same character in the video game. And so you’re all the same character in the video game. And that’s just not who we are. And ma’am, when you start and this is one of the brilliant things that Peterson does, he says you don’t know what you’re up to. You don’t know why you do what you do. And he kind of highlights that in various using various methods. And that is very helpful to some people to say, wait a minute. This simplified model that I have in my head is not representative of me. And then and then once you realize that now you can extend that out to other people and wait a minute. If I don’t know what I’m doing, other people don’t know what they’re doing. And so just because they say they feel a certain way or they want a certain thing or something’s going to make them happy, they don’t know what they’re doing. And so they don’t know what they’re doing. And so just because they say they feel a certain way or they want a certain thing or something’s going to make them happy doesn’t mean they’re accurately reporting to me. Right. And a lot of people misread that as a problem of language. Well, if the language were more clear than when that person communicated what makes them happy to me, they’d be more accurate. But no, the problem is they don’t know what makes them happy either. Therefore, they’re giving you a guess. And often that guess is wrong. Right. Right. Right. Unless we have that sense for we don’t know what we’re up to. We don’t know what we want. We don’t know what makes us happy all the time. And just because it makes us happy, is that good? Right. Because people confuse happiness and goodness because we’ve been telling people that the goal should be happiness, which I think is absurd. But that’s that’s where we’re at today. So we’ve got folks who can’t relate to stories properly. They can’t see themselves as a character in the story with both strengths and weaknesses, which is what a compelling character is always made up as is they’ve got the things they’re really good at and the things they have to contend against inside themselves to struggle and grow. They can’t see themselves in inside of the Christian story where they are a human being with strengths and weaknesses. They’ve got their virtues and they’ve got their sins that they’re dealing with. And it’s just fundamental. And you you call this the poetic, which might not be immediately available to something. But there’s this this way that you can develop to relate to other people as basically characters in a story. Right. And they’ve got far more depth to them in that way than simply an avatar in a video game. Right. And so these people are really stuck in a way and are stuck in a way of being. They’ve built up habits of relating to other people that are not helpful. They’re fundamentally not helpful. Does that sound like what you’ve been what you’ve been observing in all of these different interactions that you’ve had? Yes, that’s very well articulated. Yeah, that’s that’s a really good way to to tie it all together. And and and their inability to relate in the poetic. It goes down. It goes down to a literal interpretation. A lot of the people we work with on the Discord server, for example, they first did not like or read poetry like actual poetry. And and their and their complaint was, I don’t see the point or I don’t understand that. And then after a while, working with them and they were reading and appreciating and enjoying poetry. And so, like, again, it’s not like we everybody doesn’t have the ability, but it is like either it was developed and it’s become undeveloped. And I would say that’s more a crisis of faith than it is a meaning crisis. Or it was never really developed. And that’s what I mean by look, if you haven’t gone to church and you go to Jordan Peterson and that opens your life up to possibilities, what you were involved in is not a revival. Because for a revival, you’d have to have been there and come back. What you were involved in is an evolution or or an enhancement to your previous skills. It’s a first time experience. It’s not a second time experience, which means that, you know, this is why the Bible doesn’t work. Right. Because if you drop a Bible story into a meaning crisis person and somehow they connect to it, which, you know, Peterson actually kind of does, although he doesn’t he doesn’t start at the Bible. That’s right. Right. Yeah. That doesn’t mean they can relate to all the stories of the Bible all of a sudden. But when you do that with it, with it, with it to your point, to your story, when you do that with a crisis of faith person, you just get them one story and the rest of the Bible comes alive. And they’re in the Christian story and they’re there. They’re, you know, they’re not fixed. They’re not done. But now they’re able to navigate. They’re able to navigate. They have they have the goal and they have the path and there might be surprises along the way. But when they got the goal and they got the path, now you know what to do. Well, and you have access to all the tools of the Bible again, like just like that. They’re all on. But when when when you’re coming from a meaning crisis, those tools don’t exist. And maybe Peterson can give you one of them and you can go, oh, well, maybe I should read more of this Bible thing. Right. Of course, that’s insufficient because you can’t understand the Bible as a single human being. Like, that’s why you need other people. And those other people need the church. And like this is like it’s all it’s all required. Like it builds up that way over thousands of years for a reason. Right. And so at that point, you know, that’s a long and slow process of getting into Christianity from never having been in it, which is fundamentally different from from having a crisis of faith where you at least have the baseline tools ready to go. You just haven’t used them in a while. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. All right. So last time we talked, you had a solution ways that the church could reach people who are in the midst of one of these meaning crises. And I frankly, I had a lot of barriers put up to it immediately. I was like, no, that can’t be it. That’s not right. We’re not doing that. So anyway, but he was able to wear me down and convince me that this was a good idea. I opened my eyes a few things. So, Mark, we’ve got all these people in, we’ll say the West who are suffering from these meeting crisis. They’re not able to relate to other people. Well, they’re not even able to relate to themselves. Well, what does the church need to offer them? Yeah. So I, I think that part of the issue is because we have, you know, we’ll say overly separated church and state, right? We’ve sort of given a lot of credit to this thing called secularity that we have put people in a position where they do not see the church. At work around that. And I would argue that the church in terms of not the church as the administrative body, but the body of Christ, roughly speaking, the church, right? So we can include our Protestant friends and our Orthodox friends, right? Not just the Catholics. They don’t see that as a force for doing anything in the world, right? Because they’re not running the soup kitchens as much anymore, if at all. I mean, I don’t know. I don’t, I don’t see it. I just walk around. I live down south now. I live in South Carolina and I still don’t see it. There’s churches on every corner, but I don’t see what they’re doing outside of their Sunday worship. And I know they’re doing stuff. I’m not saying like, oh, you’re not doing enough, but I don’t see it. And even in New England, when I was growing up there, I saw it all the time. And so there was a change at some point. I was in the 60s, the 70s, the 80s. When did it start? When did it? I don’t care, right? It might change at different places in different places, too. Right. And right now, the biggest example I have is all of the hospitals in South Carolina used to be run by religious orders. They were all owned by churches, and now none of them are. And so, you know, in New England in particular, look, everybody knew the churches that were run by the church. I mean, the hospitals that were run by churches. And so if you needed care and, you know, maybe your health insurance wasn’t the greatest or maybe you didn’t have any, you would go to one of those hospitals because they wouldn’t take your house. And then you could take your time paying off the debt and all that and that you didn’t have that option with the other hospitals. And that’s a that’s like a big deal. Like you’re doing a huge service to the community in that case. Soup kitchens, projects like in general. And then the problem is, well, what are you what are you doing? Like, because if you if you go out there nowadays with how far away these people are in ability to relate, you can’t kind of go out and say, you know, like, oh, we’re we’re we’re we’re feeding the homeless. Jesus is feeding the homeless. Right. That’s that message is going nowhere. You can’t you know, you can’t be that that sort of upfront about it and clear about it. You kind of have to just invite people in. And actually, one of the things that sort of made me see this quite clearly was it was a trip I had to take up to the airport in Charlotte. I was only going one way. So actually, I don’t think I had a car. I was going to pick up a car north. So I took a bus and I get on the bus and there was a lovely woman there on her way up to the airport. And she started telling her story. And she said, oh, yeah, I remember when I was young and I learned about service and my brain immediately went, oh, she just used that word in a way that I don’t understand. And I was like, what? And now this is unusual because I have pretty good vocabulary and a pretty good grasp of the language way above average. So I was like, what is going on? And she started to describe when she was 12 years old and her parents who owned two other houses. They lived in in Florida, you know, along the northern the northern coast there along the Gulf Coast. And there was a hurricane and they fixed everybody else’s house first and then they worked on their own. So first they fixed their tenants houses and then they fixed their neighbors houses and then they fixed their own house at the end. And that’s how she learned about service. And I was like, oh, OK, so that’s just a concept that even I wasn’t exposed to really like I didn’t understand the significance of why that’s we’ll say different from charity, for example. Right. This is a subtle difference, maybe for for for Christians. And maybe it’s something even the Christians aren’t really paying attention to. I have no idea. But it was a huge whopping thing for me at the time. I was sort of like blown away by well, why didn’t I think of things in those terms before? You don’t see this and you know, I don’t I don’t know. And especially down south. Boy, everybody down here is going to a church, unlike up north where the where the crazy heathens are. So so they don’t they don’t know. Now, when you were talking to this woman, did she explicitly relate this notion of service to being a Christian? No. OK, never mentioned Christianity at all. Never mentioned going to church or which church she would none of it. OK, she was just talking about service. She just talking about the first time she learned about service. And I was all right now. I know my my audience is waiting for what do the churches need to do so. Right. Well, well, we need that exemplification in the world. Like, look, I understand that like the Catholic Church isn’t going to go and buy back all the hospitals they just sold, for example, because they probably don’t have the resources to run them anymore or whatever. But if no one’s out there doing good deeds and then, you know, people are going, oh, maybe I want to be involved in that. Like, how do I help them, you know, relate to other people, do good deeds? Right. If no one’s doing things like I know Pastor Paul Vanu clay, right. He basically gets involved in this Jordan Peterson meetup group. Right. And then they’ve developed their own protocol, whatever. But there’s nobody out there interfacing with these people in person and giving them something to commune with. Right. And so the question isn’t, you know, how do we grab people from the community into the church? And, you know, actually, I got this from you. Right. The question is, how do we build a community from which we can bring people into the church? And so that’s one thing like going out there and helping people don’t have the skills to be to commune, to be in community or in communication anymore. Like, we’ve seen the breakdown in communication, but it’s communication. No one’s out there showing them how to do that anymore. I mean, that’s why I like Paul Vanu Clay’s channel, for example, because he’s actually showing people how to have good conversations and how to tell tell their stories. Right. He actually helps people tell their stories, which I think is amazing. I’d be I’d be a little more structured about it, but that’s just me. But it’s good to see people struggling telling their stories. And then they realize, oh, maybe I don’t know how to tell my own story. Maybe I don’t understand myself well enough. And that’s oddly or not so oddly part of Jordan Peterson’s work as a psychologist. Like his the stuff that he does that successful in the private sector that he’s been trying to do for years is the authorship, the self authorship program where you write down a story about your past. You write down a story about your present. You write down a story about where you’d like to be in three years sort of thing as a therapeutic. Well, that would be better if you were doing it with somebody. And if that person wasn’t necessarily all churchy on you and didn’t have the collar on, but was still doing the good work without making it too obvious that the good work is coming from a church, I think that then you can build community. And then once you build community, then you can invite community into the church. So I really like that that that sort of formula. And I do think that to some extent, Paul, Paul, man of his estuary protocols and attempt to do that, even though I don’t think that’s the right the right approach necessarily. So what you’re you’re holding up as a possible way forward for the church is not going straight to inviting people into the community, because they don’t even have a concept of why community is a good thing. What we have to do is we actually have to invite people into the concept of a community first. Right, and it has to be. It has to be kind of rallied around something that we can convince anybody is a good thing. And the way this the way this first struck me when you were relating this idea to me that we have to go out and build a community of some sort first before we could even begin to invite people into the Christian community. The way that that struck me was like, that is beneath what the church should be doing right like that’s the way I was thinking was like, this is that this is not the work of the church there this is up. And then I thought, you know what, this is actually a full condescension. We have to, and we don’t like the word condescend all that much because it’s usually, you know, meant as looking down on somebody from a standpoint of arrogance, but if somebody is genuinely lost, let’s say on the ground, lying flat on their back, then you need to condescend to them to go down to their level so you can pick them up and set them on their feet again, right, like that’s the only way to do this. And so it’s basically the takeaway I had from this conversation is that the church just needs to be able to effectively invite people into some kind of a community event, and to build this kind of community outside the walls of the church where we’re not even engaging in worship, we’re just engaging in acts of service in order to begin to show people how that’s actually a better way to live, because they need to practice being in the community with somebody being drawn together and moving towards the same goal. Otherwise, you and yeah, does that sound like what you were proposing to me? Yes, exactly right. They don’t have this basic skills of cooperation with others, because they’re always in the video game from the first person perspective, being the hero. And so they, you know, and maybe they’ll cooperate with somebody over, I’m going to do this and you do that, right, but somebody’s giving the orders and they don’t even recognize how that’s happening. And so they don’t have the proper way to be with other people in the world. And all of their ways, especially on the internet, are based on words and propositions, and not on seeing actions in the world and mimicking those actions is where the work of John Vervicki is so handy, right, because he talks about this, this mimicry circuit in our brain, it’s very powerful, right. And Jordan Peterson talks about Piaget and embodied knowledge, right, that you watch what people do and you do that. You don’t need to be told like that’s ridiculous. And that’s that to me is part of the failure of modern evangelicalism, if I can be so bold, as somebody outside the church, I just have a different perspective on this, right. If you talk to people about these things, these concepts, they don’t have a framework, they’re going to get lost immediately. But if you just go and work with them, like do physical labor with them, that can do wonders, because there’s no point of disagreement in gardening. There’s no point of disagreement in putting up a wall. There’s no point of disagreement in in eating together, right, there may be points of disagreement available during that process if you’re talking, but a you don’t have to talk, you can just sit and have a meal with somebody. It’s actually quite lovely to sit in silence and eat with somebody, right. But B, you’re still together. And it’s the eating that gives you the ability to learn how to have disagreements. And you don’t want to get up because like, the truth, like, why do you want to go anywhere, you know, so we don’t we’ve lost or a bunch of people have lost that that skill of communion in in work in activity in physically being together. And the internet, you know, and sure, you know, you’re dealing with the worst of the worst, you know, hanging out on the internet all day. Yeah, fair enough. But the internet has really ruined people towards that, because they don’t, they’re not in person with other people working together and watching what they do and learning from that watching learning isn’t all about tests and telling people things, right, and then having them repeat them back. That’s not learning. That’s training, right. And the training is useful, you need training. But like most of the world, is about being able to do things together with other people, because the things you can do by yourself are limited. But the things we can do together, that might not be limited. I don’t know, right. It’s certainly more than I can do by myself. And isn’t that beautiful, we can both do something that that’s bigger than us. And and that and learning how to do that by doing it is super important. And if the church isn’t there to condescend to these poor people who are much further away from you, then you think, then who’s going to do that? Like what other institution is going to do that work? Because the government can’t like there’s no way not love people, the government cannot love people. Right, right. And if you if, if I’ve never been properly cared for, for whatever reason, it doesn’t like people try to go back and find the source to fix the you don’t need to find the source to fix the problem. If you haven’t been cared for properly, or you’ve been over cared for, right, which is still the same thing. This is sort of Peterson’s drama, although I think he’s limiting his these limiting his options there. The only way to fix that is for somebody to care for you properly. It’s that simple. And the government cannot care for you and will not care for you. And you you hear people talk like the government should do this. And what they’re describing is a mode of care. It’s not a mode of political action. It’s not a mode of government procedure. It’s a mode of care. The government cannot care about you. The government cannot know about you. The government cannot know you. The only type of entity that we know of that can know you in the moment is another person, right, or God, right, if you’re going to be Christian about it. There’s no, there are no other possibilities, nothing that we’ve built. No AI, no government, no political system, no economic system, no method of moving goods and services around can care about you. It’s not possible. Only a person can care about you. That’s that’s the only option available. And when you listen closely, you’ll hear people actually telling you, you know, in different words, of course, that they don’t feel cared for. And that what they’re looking for is care. They may not describe it that way. They may say, well, because because my job is a burden to me, the government should make it so that I can do whatever job I want, right? Or a company should just hire me because I think I’m smart. The company doesn’t know about you. The company can’t care about you. It can’t give you what you are asking for. Companies can’t do that. Individuals within companies might be able to do that. If you have a relationship with them, but you don’t have the skills of having a relationship with them, which is why you’re relying on the economic system to change the government to change the science to advance, you know, the chat GPT thing to have a breakthrough because, you know, they always talk about sentience. It’s like, why would you want your technology to be sentient? That sounds terrible. I don’t want anything like that. That’s I’m a professional in the industry. I know better. Like we it’s and all the sci fi that all these people have ever watched says this is the worst idea you could possibly have. Look at all the ways it could go horribly wrong. Grimm’s fairy tales are bad. You should see like, did you see what that what Hal did? Like, you know, like, I have no mouth and I must scream if you want a real nightmare inducing one. Yeah, it’s a short story. Well, and there’s there’s a was it her and there’s X Machina X Machina wonderful. So it’s her X Machina is a wonderful movie to completely frightening, but visually stunning and, you know, really, really gets to the point of technology can’t care about you. And so it’s going to go into humanity and just burn through it. Because what often it doesn’t care about it can’t cannot ever care about people. So when they’re asking for sentience, they’re actually asking for care. I want something that I control to care about me. And because that’s the development level that they’re at, to some extent. And and they just and look, maybe they had a development level that was higher than that. But now it’s lower again, because anything you don’t practice, you know, you lose. And so maybe when they were younger, they had the skills of communing, they had the skills of community, they were in communities. And now they’ve lost those skills or they’ve atrophied or something. But if no one’s there caring in person, or if their mode of caring is to say, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, and I just I told this to Paul Van of that was I went up to the Billy Graham Library, which I wish you could have done while you were here, because it really is quite the weird experience in my opinion. And I was because I grew up in New England with the crazy Puritans. I was expecting that, you know, I’d walk in the door and there’d be these people with a Jesus on a stick sticking to Jesus in my face and, you know, poking at me with the Jesus left. And it was nothing like that. But it was an absolutely lovely place. Lovely experience. It’s near the airport in Charlotte, too. So it’s, you know, it’s just flying in, you know, and you got like three hours, you can zip through the library and get right back to the airport. No problem. The, the, the, you know, quiet, it was a quiet place, right? There was a quietude throughout the place that the building you walk in the bottom of a cross to get into the building. It’s, you know, it’s a really sort of stunning experience. And nobody said anything until like the very end. There’s a little tour thing and it’s quite the experience. It can be quite jarring. Until the end where they were like, Would you like somebody to pray with you? And I was like, I don’t think I’m qualified to pray. I gotta get out of here. I don’t know what just happened to me, but I feel weird. I need to go see you later. Bye, you know, but but the expectation of we’ll say the evangelical mission or something, because that’s how Billy Graham has seen, you know, I don’t know accurate that is right. I’m not up on my Billy Graham history. Further than what the library told me was all wonderful stuff. That was, that was, that was, that was a wonderful experience. And that idea, you know, that I had in my head about what they were going to do wasn’t there. And so it was a very jarring experience because I was sort of expecting more people to to evangelize to me and say things to me that were never said and nobody bothered me or came up to me or anything. Well, it was just the people at the end of the little tour thing saying, you know, we have prayer rooms and that was the extent of their involvement other than saying hi and being super nice and Christian II. And I was like, wow, this is lovely. Actually, I wish the bookstore had had a better variety than just Christian books. But because I love books, as you can tell. But, you know, there’s no there people don’t have that experience. So they’re not going to go near the Billy Graham library because they knew Billy Graham is and it’s a big cross. But to be in communion with people and then to get to know them and then all of a sudden find out, oh, yes, I’m a Christian. And, you know, and maybe you get a sense over time. Well, that’s why they’re like this. That’s why the other people on the Internet are busy yelling, right? Because if you think about it, the atheists are just yelling at each other and and non atheists. But that’s their stock and trade. Their stock and trade is disagreement. It’s hot takes the clap backs, the snide remarks arguments. Their whole thing is let’s have an argument. Let’s win an argument. And then everybody goes, I don’t understand the tribalism. The tribalism happens when you can’t commune. It’s not tribalism. It’s individualism because you think you have control or you think you will be granted control of the material world through science, which is a complete ridiculous overstatement of science and lie. It’s not going to happen. Right. And so you don’t see the need to cooperate with other people. But you do see the need to win the argument. I mean, we have we had people come on and sort of assault the various discord servers and say, you guys are all in a cult and I need to save you from it. And we’re kind of like, really? Like, you’re going to save us as an atheist from what? Exactly. Like, I don’t. And what when you’re saving us from the Christian eat, like you’re pulling us out of the Christianity. Where where is that safe saving? Where is that savior? What is the thing? And they have nothing, of course, by definition, they say they have nothing. They just want you to be with them. And that’s where the tribalism comes from the inability to commune and the inability to commune comes from no common ideal, no common ethos or ethic, no common sense of the good. And I think, look, I don’t think the famous atheists who may have proven themselves to not be good people like Sam Harris, I don’t think they ever thought about it. They never had a definition of good. They never even tried to define the good. Their definition of good was what we know what the worst evil is, which is also not true. And we just need to move away from that as though the only direction you can move from evil is up. But last time I checked, you can move along or kind of move this way. And you could also move back down because maybe you’ve located the evil here. But actually, the evil is all over here and you move up and then you move back down. And now you’re back on the plane of evil again. Like they never this never occurred to these people. I mean, and that’s what I’m missing. The mere concept of good and evil is this binary where as long as you’re not evil, you must be good. And it’s like, wow. And as it turns out, it’s a little more complicated than that. Just a little more complicated that. So here is the Mark thesis. The Mark thesis is that we need to, as the church, provide opportunities and spaces for people to cooperate towards some good. Common cause without being too terribly Jesusy about it. Right. We just give people that space. We just give people that opportunity and invitation. And they need to experience what being a part of a community with its joys and its struggles. And if we do that, and without without getting all wordy with people, without getting all preachy with people, without the coming at the people with the Jesus on the stick, they will actually want to join up with us. And maybe not 100% of everybody that we welcome in, but probably a bigger percentage of what we might get just doing what we’ve always been doing, which at the moment does not appear to be working. Yes, yes. Well, and I would say I would say to some extent, that was that was well articulated, by the way, but I would say to some extent, it’s even a simpler formula. If you go out in the world and do what Christians, at least theoretically do best, which is care for people, then people will see that assuming you’re doing it out in the world and not just in your little Christian communities, and they will be curious about it. And they will see good works and good deeds being done and they will be attracted to the good. Like people are like, oh, people are attracted to beauty. People are also attracted to the good, and they’re attracted to the true, not just the beautiful. And so if you in truth, go out and care for people in a good way, they will see that and they will they are hungry for care. They’re hungry for caring people. And I think like that is the Christian mission is to care and it’s not to care about just the other Christians, right? It’s to care about the world and all of the people in it and all of the animals in it for that matter. Right? Like that, that at least in how I grew up with what I was thinking that Christianity was all about to some extent. And I just don’t see the Christians showing the caring publicly in a way that attracts people to come and cooperate in that caringness, right? And so I think that’s the way to commune with them. And if you try to describe it to them and like, well, why should I join your little club? Right? Well, you should join the club because we have Book Club for Jesus and we talk about the deep issues of philosophy. And the reason to join your club is because you care. And just in case you guys think that Mark is just making all this stuff up whole cloth and it has nothing to do with Christianity, let me remind you of the words of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lamp stand and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. And so basically, what this pagan from outside the church is telling us is that we need to follow Jesus more closely. Well said. Well said. All righty. Thanks for your time, Mark. And I really appreciate this. And I hope that I’m actually able to start putting these things that we’ve talked about into practice here at some point before I die. That would be lovely. Well, and I hope everybody else can see the value of reaching out. And it’s very much part of what I’m doing is trying to work on, well, how do we build communities? How do we tell people how to build their own communities? Right. Because I’m not going to fly around the world and build communities for people. That’s a little stressful. But I am happy to help. We have a lot of research that we’ve done on these particular meaning crisis people and how to get them interested in communities and what sorts of things attract them. So if anybody has any questions about that, they can they can reach out, reach out to me, maybe through you, or they can find me directly on my YouTube channel or whatever. And I’m happy to help in any way that I can. All right. Appreciate your help, Mark. You have a blessed day and all of you have a blessed day.