https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ZovEmRSPaPc
I’m sure Bishop you have a better sense maybe both do of languages, but I remember coming across this that sin, our English term sin, comes from the German word Sünde, which means to split. Sunder. To sunder, to put it sunder, right? So sin, etymologically, that sunder. And religion means to bind. And so if I don’t think I’m split, if I don’t think that I’ve experienced sin, if I don’t think that I have any need, like you mentioned Jean-Francois Rousseau, like the noble savage, that sense of like I’m fine just the way I am, if I’m not split, then I don’t need religion. I can be fine with spirituality. But if I’ve been split, then I need something to bind me together, not because I respect my freedom, but because it makes me whole. I think there’s a different perspective. Well, and part of that binding is found in the hierarchical arrangement of the community, be occupying a relatively high position in that hierarchical arrangement if it’s functioning optimally. And yet, it is the noble savage imagery that’s at the bottom of this. Part of the pathology in that is that, so one of the things that psychologists have discovered, even though they didn’t really think it through all the way and haven’t understood its full implications, is that there’s very little difference between being self-conscious, so let’s say thinking about yourself and being concerned about yourself, or for that matter even being aware of yourself, those states of being, thinking about yourself, being concerned about yourself, being aware of yourself, they’re absolutely indistinguishable technically from negative emotion. There’s no difference between being concerned with yourself and being miserable. Those are the same thing. In fact, one of the things that being miserable does is make you self-conscious. And so, one of the corollaries of that is that you’re certainly not going to find your way to the meaning that will sustain you through life by concentrating only on what it is that’s you and what you want, or what something fractured and broken and partial and desirous and impulsive within you wants. You want to meld that all together into some form of higher integration. Maybe that would characterize a well-integrated personality, but then beyond that, you weld all the different levels of social community, which is why, for example, you’re in service to your husband or to your wife within the confines of the marriage, and both of you are in service to your family. And that’s all not merely a restriction on your domain of subjective freedom. That’s such an appalling way to think about it, because that makes the people you love into burdens that do nothing but get in your way, which is not a favour that you’re laying at their feet, instead of opportunities, which is really what they are, to find through the love you have for them a much higher expression of yourself than you’d ever manage in any way if you were only concentrating on what you or something in you wants right now. And we’ve done a very, very bad job, and this is certainly true of the psychological community, of pointing out the relationship between harmonious existence, let’s say in relationship to being, which is a better definition of mental health. We’ve done a poor job of pointing out the relationship between that and the adoption of these higher order forms of social responsibility. And that’s probably, even to some degree, that’s a consequence of enlightenment influences and its stress on individuality in the West, but also characteristic of a kind of consumerist hedonism that’s also part and parcel of a modernistic, materialistic society. And it’s good to have good things and all that, and to live life more abundant in the material sense, but if all you’re after is the next bout of material gratification, you’re going to be a never-ending cycle of, well, what, desperate pursuit of something like infantile satiation, which isn’t going to satisfy you anyways. I wonder, George, do you find this, that the religious people themselves, in the course of my lifetime, lost confidence in themselves, I mean the religious leaders, that we felt the program was to kind of justify ourselves to skeptics, and, you know, we ought to try to explain to the skeptics of religion. But in fact, look, we’re the keepers of this great tradition of value that’s given meaning to Western society and individual lives for millennia. We shouldn’t be wringing our hands. I mean, we should be proposing confidently to the society the good, the true, and the beautiful in their final link to the supreme good, true, and beautiful that’s God. And that’s your point, which I really like about religion, relegare, to link back, so all these things have fallen apart for different reasons. And it’s a sort of preening, self-regarding, you know, existentialism that would say, well, I invent value. That’s the road to disaster. And the church’s job, it seems to me, is to propose to especially young people, here’s this world of value. Look how wonderful that is, look how rich that is, and get out of yourself. I think that’s right when we’re, what did Augustine call sin, in curvatus in se, right, when you’re caved in on yourself. It’s a beautiful definition of sin. Get out of that, get out of that little boring space of your own will and what I can figure out and what I’m going to do. I mean, bore me to death with that. Show people the realm of objective value, leading finally to God. But I think we’re at fault in a way, we religious people, because we started in this hand-wringing routine. And, you know, we should boldly go out. I always like- That’s the assault of the Luciferian intellects, fundamentally. And that’s, in some sense, the negative part of the Enlightenment spirit. It’s not surprising that it put everybody back on their heels, including the more classically religious types, because untangling the sometimes apparently paradoxical relationship between the scientific method and the claims of religious tradition is a very challenging intellectual enterprise. And it’s easy to fall prey to the notion that, and this is an Enlightenment notion, that all the Judeo-Christian tradition was, was something like poorly formulated proto-scientific theories that we’ve now dispensed with. And the thing is, there’s a tiny element of that that’s kind of true. But unless you can separate the wheat from the chaff, I’m going to mix metaphors terribly here, you throw the baby out with the bath water, and in this case, it’s the holy infant that you throw out, and that’s a very bad idea. Right. Right, right. I’ve got three metaphors in there. But there seems to be, you know, the highlight, we get the idea, concept of the individual and individual dignity from the Judeo-Christian tradition. We also get this, but that’s introduced how, it’s introduced into a family. So here’s Abraham and his family. So he’s called, but he’s not called by himself, he’s called with Sarah. And from them comes what? Not just those two and they drift off in the sunset. From them, there comes Isaac, and from that comes this bigger family, bigger family. So we have this double necessity of the individual and the sanctity of the individual and the sanctity of the family. So talking about like the levels that we have to be bound, with such a fractured and atomized world where, I mean, think about the TikToks and the reels of like, I’m alone and I just get to live for myself, I got to get up whenever I wanted today. And my cat, and we’re happy together. There’s no one makes demands on me and I’m the happiest I’ve ever been. And you think like, well, that’s the opposite. Because we need family, we need friendship, and we need this body of Christ. I mean, it goes from the smallest to the greatest we possibly could. Well, the Abraham reference there, I think, is particularly apropos because what happens in the Abraham story is that Abraham is living a life of infantile satiation at the beginning of the story, right? Because he’s 70 years old or thereabouts and he has rich parents and he has everything that you could need materially at hand. So there’s actually no reason for him to do anything. And so that’s like the socialist utopia has actually come to bear fruit in some way. But then this voice comes to him that announces itself more or less as the voice of the ancestors, right? The voice of tradition and says to go have the adventure. And it’s quite a brutal adventure, like your life will be, you know? Abraham encounters famine and totalitarianism and the necessity of sacrificing his son and war and terrible conflict between his kin, members, and fractious relationships within his own family. He has the whole catastrophe of life, but he has this glorious adventure and he makes the proper sacrifices along the way. And it is very telling that even though the Abrahamic story is an adventure story, it’s one that integrates his wife and his family along with it. You know, it’s as if you went and saw a James Bond movie and when James Bond is going around the world, the romantic adventure he has is one with his wife and the children come along for the ride, right? And, but that’s, well, that’s a sign of an integrated life, but it doesn’t mean it’s not an adventure. It means it’s the proper adventure.