https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=T8oqA5efwHs
Well, I’m very excited to introduce this next session. It’s a panel discussion between three extraordinary men, Bishop Robert Barron, Dr. Jordan Peterson, and Father Mike Schmitz. I know many of you have been very much anticipating this dialogue you’ve told us as much over the last couple days. First, a few introductions, and I’ll be very brief, because I want to give most of the time to these three men. First, Bishop Barron. I introduced him last night to you, but he’s, of course, the bishop of the Diocese of Winona, Rochester in Minnesota. He’s also the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. He’s written dozens of bestselling books. He has been invited to speak about religion at the headquarters of Facebook, Google, and Amazon. And he has been described by Arthur Brooks as arguably the greatest Catholic communicator of our time. Dr. Jordan Peterson is a bestselling author, psychologist, online educator, and professor emeritus of the University of Toronto. He has taught mythology to lawyers, doctors, and business people. He’s consulted for the UN Secretary General, and he’s lectured extensively throughout the United States and Europe. Jordan has published over 100 scientific papers, transforming the modern understanding of personality. His book, Maps of Meaning, revolutionized the psychology of religion. I know many of you have read his two more recent books, both bestsellers. The first one is called 12 Rules for Life, an antidote to chaos, that was published in 2018 and has sold five million copies. And then he published a sequel recently called Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life, which was released in 2021. Finally, Father Mike Schmitz is a renowned Catholic priest and evangelist, well known for his YouTube videos on the Ascension Presents channel. Father Mike is the host of the Breakout Bible in a Year podcast. Man, how many listeners to that podcast do we have here? Lots, you guys, good. Very good. That became not only the number one Catholic podcast in the world, but for many weeks, I think for several months, it was the number one podcast in the world, period, among any genre, among any podcast producer. Father Mike is currently wrapping up a sequel podcast called Catechism in a Year, where he’s walking people through the catechism of the Catholic Church. Let’s see, we got a lot of listeners to that one as well, very good. And he serves as the director of youth and young adult ministry for the Diocese of Duluth, also in Minnesota, seems to be a powerhouse state of evangelization. And he’s the chaplain for the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota Duluth. In addition to these three men, we also are blessed to have as a moderator, Dr. Matthew Petrusic. Matthew is the senior director of the Word on Fire Institute and it’s professor of Catholic ethics. Matthew has edited or authored several books, including Evangelization and Ideology, and very relevant to this discussion, he co-authored a book titled Jordan Peterson, God and Christianity, The Search for a Meaningful Life, which I believe everyone here received a copy of that book as a part of your registration. Matthew lectures broadly in English and Spanish on moral philosophy, theology, politics, social issues, and the Catholic intellectual tradition. Well, as I prepare to welcome these men to the stage, one final thing that really strikes me about all three of our panelists is that I don’t think anyone in the world has done more than these three men to open up the Bible in fresh and exciting ways, especially for young people. Bishop Barron, of course, is a world-renowned preacher. His Sunday homilies are heard by hundreds of thousands of people. He also launched the Word on Fire Bible series, which is presenting the Bible with beautiful art and genius ancient commentary, and it’s become the best-selling Catholic Bible of our generation. Dr. Peterson, especially through his biblical lectures on Genesis and Exodus, has led a whole generation of young people to become infatuated with these ancient texts, most of them for the first time. And then Father Mike Schmitz, through his Bible in a Year podcast, has helped millions of people go through the entire Bible cover to cover many of them for the first time. These, I think, are the three great proclaimers of the Word today, and I invite you to join me in welcoming to the stage Bishop Robert Barron, Dr. Jordan Peterson, and Father Mike Schmitz. Thanks, everybody. Well thank you Brandon for that very generous introduction. I would like to get right to it. We’ll begin by asking each one of you a specific question related to the work that you’ve been doing. And then I’ll ask some general questions and I invite you all to respond to each other as we move through the questions. So first question for you, Dr. Peterson. Christians understand Jesus in ways that are consonant with your work’s symbolic depictions of Christ. For example, as the archetypal king of kings, responsible bearer of cosmic suffering, and practical guide to avoiding temporal hell. However, we Christians additionally see Jesus as the historically real Lord. The myth in the language of C.S. Lewis, who became fact. The God man who was crucified died for our sins and was raised on the third day. So my question, Dr. Peterson. How do you relate your own conception of the Christ to this Orthodox, little o Orthodox Christian conception? Well I think this, I really think that the C.S. Lewis formulation, which is a rather traditional formulation, and also a formulation that was accepted by Jung by the way, I think it’s the simplest explanation. You know, I’ve been writing a new book, which is a strange thing to say, because it’s by no means simple. I’ve been writing a new book called We Who Wrestle with God, and it’s a continuation of the work I started to do, diving into and attempting to understand the Genesis narratives and the Exodus narratives. I’ve included a lot more books, the Abrahamic story. For example, the story of Jonah, the story of Job. Other major biblical texts. I’m working on the gospel section at the moment, probably mostly utilizing the gospel of Matthew. And Christ’s claim essentially is that he was the incarnation of the prophet and the laws. And that makes, that’s a very specific sort of claim. And so what it means is something like, it’s an analogous to the idea of the king of kings. And so you can imagine organizing people in groups of 10. You might ask those 10 people to elect from among themselves the most noteworthy of the 10 people. Then you could imagine having the 10, the people who were nominated get together and getting to know each other, and then nominate the most worthy of them from that group. And you could do that all the way up to the most noteworthy possible person of all the persons that ever lived. And that would be the person who would most closely approximate the spirit of the king of kings. So to, would most closely approximate the notion of kingship itself, whatever that is. And Christ claimed that true kingship was embodied in the law and the prophets. And the law of course is the tradition that had been extracted from human interaction over endless millennia, not least the period of time that’s covered by the biblical stories. And then prophets are the manifestation of the spirit that generates the law, right? Because the law is something that has to be extracted from tradition, let’s say, instantiated but also updated. So you need a static element of the spirit that should guide us. That would be the law. And you need a dynamic element, and that would be the prophets. And then you could think that the combination of those two things would be an even more transcendent spirit. And then you could imagine that you could be guided by that spirit, which is what you would do if you were a follower of the law. But then you could imagine doing what Christ told the Pharisees to do, which would be to embody more than merely the dogma, but also the spirit. And then you could imagine that you could open yourself up so that that spirit possessed you fully. That’s a good way of thinking about it. And that’s what Christ claimed he was. And that seems right. Like, now I have to say along with that, that I don’t understand what that means. But I don’t, well, well, I don’t understand it. And this is something, I think this is part of the reason why the religious tradition and the scientific tradition clash, you know, because the Christian claim is that Christ defeated death, let’s say, and overcame hell. And obviously one of the objections to that is that there’s quite a lot of death still around and no shortage of hell. And so it’s not an easy thing to understand what it means that that’s defeated. And you could say, I listened to this young man in Canada recently, Josh Alexander, who’s been persecuted quite remarkably for being a forthright Catholic in Canada, because that’s where we’re at in Canada, by the way. He got kicked out of his Catholic school for making the claim, I think he cited a gospel line from Mark pointing out that there are men and women and that was unacceptable to his teachers and the administrative staff at the Catholic school. So they gave him the boot despite the fact that he was 16. And he was just interviewed, I interviewed him, I haven’t released that yet, but also my wife. And he said that one of the things that gave him strength was the notion that good has already won. You know, and that’s a very sophisticated idea for a young man and he’s very forthright and solid character and what he meant was something like, in the space of eternity, good constantly triumphs over evil and that the sacrifice of Christ is the pattern of what made that possible and that seems to me to be correct. But we still have to, what do we do? We still have to engage in the battle in our time in the present and so that this can be true in eternity and be in process in the present and I think that’s also correct. I mean, we have to conceptualize eternity in some manner because we are related to it just like we’re related to the infinite and yet we’re constrained in the present and in the finite and there’s a tension between those and one of the errors I think that religious people make and I think this is more on the Protestant side of things although Catholics aren’t immune to it is to announce that if you merely believe that Christ defeated evil, that somehow culminates in your complete salvation and that strikes me as highly improbable given that we also have a fair bit of work to do and that the work itself is also relevant. And so anyways, as I’ve been working through these ideas, the simplest explanation for me has emerged that the claim that Christ made is the simplest explanation for, it’s the simplest explanation historically and narratively but that’s bounded by the fact that even if it’s true, even though it’s true, we might say, that doesn’t mean we understand exactly what it means. That doesn’t bother me so much because even if we accept scientific explanations, let’s say materialist reductionist explanations for the structure of existence, we still end up with unsolved mysteries. Like scientists have no idea what happened to initiate the Big Bang, for example, or even if the Big Bang happens to be true, we have no idea how DNA involved, we don’t know how life came about. Like there’s mysteries everywhere and the fact that there’s still some mystery left at the bottom of our religious preconceptions, well, it’s a bother because we’d rather know but the fact that we don’t doesn’t invalidate the whole system of belief. So. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Peterson. Bishop Banner and Father Mike, could you? First of all, may I applaud your Catholic sensibility there where we believe the victory has been won so that’s what the cross would symbolize. So what you’ve said, I think very eloquently about the cross, right? Every possible permutation and combination of human misery and failure and negativity is contained here in the cross of Jesus. The resurrection signals that God’s mercy and God’s love is more powerful than any of that. So that’s why we really do know the victory has been won but then when you read someone like Paul, when he says, Jesus is curious, Jesus is Lord, that’s a counterpart to Kaiser curious, which they would have said at the time, Caesar’s Lord, get into his army. And Paul’s saying, no, no, Jesus curious, Jesus is the Lord, get into his army. So the idea is we know the victory’s been won. It’s like the Normandy invasion, right? The Norman invasion. World War II was effectively over that day yet there was still a lot of work to be done before the war was definitively over. Same with now until the end of time. The battle’s been won on the cross but now we have the privilege of getting in the army of the crucified and risen Lord and to do the mop up work. So why do you, if you don’t mind. Why, see one of the problems I have in understanding that I guess is that, why do you think there is, how do you conceptualize the simultaneous fact of let’s say the eternal victory with the proximal necessity of undertaking the fight in the domain of finite time, let’s say in each of our lives? Like how do you mediate that paradox? In a way, we’ve been given the privilege of entering into that struggle. So it’s been won by Christ. It’s been won by God in Christ on the cross and through the resurrection. And now we’re given the privilege of getting in the army and contributing to increasing good in the world and battling evil and we do it with a kind of panache and confidence because we know the definitive battle’s been won. So I think it’s God including us. So you conceptualize it as an, you think that’s the Abrahamic adventure? Is that the same thing? Yeah, I mean what begins with Israel comes to a kind of climax through the cross and resurrection. And now we’re in the last act of a five act play, I would say, creation followed by the fall, followed by Israel, so God’s rescue operation. Israel coming to its climax in the coming of the Mashiach and now act five we’re in, which is the mop up work. Now we join the army of the Mashiach and then we do our bit to increase good and decrease evil. So we have to know what part of the play we’re in. That’s very important, we’re in act five. But the previous four acts have to be understood clearly or we won’t know what we’re doing in act five. If I could just add one more thing, is that, what? I, just, but along those, along those lines of like why? I love, that’s a great question, why? Why not when Jesus dies, rises from the dead, descends to heaven, it’s over? Or Eden again? And I think part of it goes back to, if you go back to the very first chapters of Genesis where human beings are created in God’s image and likeness and that means something. Not only does it mean that we have an intellect and a will that not only means we’re free, but also means there’s an end, there’s a thing God wants us to become. Jesus makes that possible. And so now we get to become, so I think that, you know, this great revelation in Christianity, one of the many is that God is our father, that if he’s personal, he’s our father. And he doesn’t want a bunch of pets. He wants children who are like him. We can only become like him if we endure all the trials and yet still say, I trust you. So you think we have something difficult and important to do and that that’s necessary? Have to. Right. Because it changes us. That’s part of the adventure or the privilege. Part of that story. That’s the privilege of it, yeah. Fair enough. Mr. Brell, let me change. Solve that one, huh? I just checked that off. That’s right. What else do you have there? What else do you have for us? Creation, fall, and redemption. Check, okay. Fall, redemption, got it. Bishop Barron, one of the great hallmarks of your evangelical work has been to respond to the culture’s suspicion of morality and truth by choosing to lead with beauty. While this approach has been fruitful, there are still many who insist that beauty is not only subjective, but the most subjective of the three transcendentals, the good, the true, and the beautiful. So how can Catholics make a case for the objectivity of beauty in a culture awash with relativism and one that even seems to celebrate ugliness? Yeah, no, I get all that. And as you know, I’ve said in our postmodern culture, there’s such skepticism about the true and the good. Here’s what you should know, here’s how you should act. So I’ve suggested start with the third transcendental of the beautiful, which is look, look at this beautiful thing and let it draw you into its power. But on the subjectivism thing, to me, the beautiful is just as objective as the true and the good. When you see, okay, two plus two equals four, and you understand that relationship and you get it, that has a power over you, that has an objective hold on you. That’s self-evident, it seems to me. Or like when you say, here’s what Maximilian Kolbe did at Auschwitz, and you say, by God, that was morally praiseworthy. That’s something morally right. It’s never a matter of like your private opinion. Like, yeah, I’m really fond of Maximilian Kolbe. I think he’s great, but maybe you don’t, and that’s up to you. No, it has a power over you. It rearranges your subjectivity. And I think the beautiful is exactly the same thing. The truly beautiful, not just the pretty or the subjectively satisfying, but the truly beautiful, the Sistine ceiling or Beethoven’s 7th Symphony or something. Like how impossibly trivial it would be to say, listen to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony and say, I don’t like it. You know, or, it’s not really my cup of tea. And your laughter gives away the game. That’s the point, that there’s something so objectively powerful about that, that it rearranges you. You don’t sit in judgment on the beautiful. It judges you. So that’s why I would resist any attempt to subjectivize or relativize the beautiful. It has the same status as the other two transcendentals. And then it leads you, as the other two do, toward the source, right? So you see, this is as old as Plato, and it comes right through the Western tradition, that you see the beautiful object or person or face, and then it leads you by a steady progress, as Plato, right, outward, outward, outward, to higher, higher forms of beauty, arranged hierarchically. Until you come, he says in that beautiful image, to the open sea of the beautiful itself. Well, that’s a deep instinct in the West, right? But if you subjectivize the beautiful, that whole project will not get underway. But when the truly beautiful grabs you, it starts leading you on this journey upward and outward toward God, I would say, the horizon of all beauty. So that’s why I use it, not just decoratively. Like, oh, isn’t that a pretty decoration to evangelization? I use it as an essential feature of evangelization. It’s why things like Gothic cathedrals, when I was a, I wasn’t a kid, I was 29 when I went to Paris and began my studies, and when I went to Notre Dame for the first time, and it was the rose window. As a Jungian, you know, you appreciate the, I mean, all of the archetypal quality, the mandala quality of that. But what was it about that rose window that just sent me on this adventure? And I talk about rose windows in Gothic churches all the time to this day, it’s because the Platonic thing kicked in. I saw this beautiful thing, and it sent me on this trajectory. So that’s why I think it’s every bit as objective as the good and the true. Go ahead. Three things about that quickly. One is that I think beauty is a burning bush, right? It’s something that calls to us, and it’s something out of which God can speak. Right. The next thing is maybe we shouldn’t use objective, maybe we should use transcendent. Because I think part of the reason that people object to that is because obviously beauty isn’t as easy to characterize as the existence of a simple material object, right? So, but having, so we could say transcendent, which takes it out of the realm of the subjective and still points upward. But then, I’ll make a counter proposition to that. I did a paper at Harvard with a couple of my students. We produced a measurement device, a questionnaire, as it happens, to assess people’s lifetime creative production. And then we wanted to look at the relationship between various personality traits and their intelligence and their creative ability in relationship to their lifetime creative production. And in one of the steps, we had people make a collage out of a collage kit, and then we had artists rate the collage for its aesthetic quality. And see, if you do that, so imagine you have multiple people rating the same production for beauty. Then you can calculate how tightly related the ratings are. If there’s something that you could identify reliably as beauty, then a collage that one artist rated as beautiful would be much more likely to be rated by the other artists as beautiful and vice versa. The ugly ones would fall to the bottom. And the inter-rater reliability across the judgments of beauty was extremely high. And so it’s not as high as you might say if you asked a bunch of people, is that black or white? But it was high enough so that you could extract out a single factor across the productions that you could call beauty. And so you could imagine that beauty is a category that has fairly wide boundaries, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything central to it. And then your claim is that it points upward, which I think is exactly right. And that goes back to Aquinas, who says the beautiful is what happens when integritas, consonancia, and claritas come together. Wholeness, harmony, and radiance. When those three things come together. And I always think, for some of you sports examples, whether it’s a beautiful golf swing, or I think when someone makes a great catch in football, I say, hey, beautiful, what a beautiful catch. And someone, let’s say not experienced with football, will say, I don’t get it, why do you think that’s beautiful? Well, let me explain it to you. And if Aquinas is right, and James Joyce thought he was, because this is right at the heart of A Portrait of the Artist, is that you’re noticing those three things. You’re noticing integritas, there’s a wholeness to it. You’re noticing consonancia, which is all the elements come together harmoniously in it. Think of like a Rory McIlroy golf swing compared to mine. It’s very interesting, because his, it’s like every element of the swing comes together with great harmony. Mine doesn’t, mine is this herky-jerky and off, you know. So there’s a hierarchical purpose in the swing then too, to go towards the end. Yes, well then that, the last one is very cool, because it’s claritas, which literally means brightness. And in some texts, Aquinas even suggests physical brightness. Like what a beautiful watch, because it’s shining, you know. But then what becomes clear in the tradition is, what he really means is the claritas formae, the clarity of form. It’s the splendor of form. So you notice the concord, right, the consonancia, and then it sings to you. It’s the splendor of the form that makes you say, ah, beautiful, right. So that’s something that would be something that would compel awe and imitation. And you could argue, I would tend to agree with this, that it’s the first of the transcendentals for that reason. Because first being has to get your attention. And only then can you reflect on it as good and true, right. But if first has to get your attention, you say, ah, beautiful. Then you move to the good and the true. So that’s how Aquinas accounts for the objectivity. Those three elements have to be present. So what would subjectively pretty art look like? Or the opposite of transcendent? Would that be imminent in this case? How would you make that? That’s because we have objective truth and subjective truth. That’s clear distinction. What would be the opposite of non-transcendent beauty? Maybe something that, this is Dietrich von Hildebrandt, that only appeals to your kind of emotional state of mind. It’s what he would call subjectively satisfying, as opposed to objectively valuable. That’s what he would call. That might be akin to those sorts of pop music pieces that you capture instantly, but you can only listen to like three times and you’re done with them. Compared to some, well there’s lots of music like that. Compared to something like a Bach piece for example, that you might bounce off on first contact because it’s very sophisticated. But with repeated listens you can delve into it. And then it’s inexhaustible, right. So the question is akin to something like what’s the difference between something that’s shallow and beautiful or pretty and something that’s deep and beautiful. I would say too, if something’s deep, it moves you in more dimensions simultaneously, right. That’s like a definition of deep. A deep story has multiple meanings. So it’s something shallow and beautiful is exhaustible in its beauty and something deep and beautiful isn’t. It’s inexhaustible. Where your range is your consciousness. Right, right. Maybe somebody, I wrote about this many years ago, but there was an article in Rolling Stone magazine a few years ago and they asked rockers, what was the first song that rocked your world? And it was a cool way to state the question. It wasn’t what’s the first song you liked. It was what’s the first song that changed you, right. And I knew right away what my answer was. Mine is Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone, which I heard when I was 18 for the first time probably. And that’s a song that continues to rearrange me. The first song I liked was Sugar Sugar by the Archie’s. Right, right. I remember that, I love it. I was like eight years old in Sugar. It’s catchy. Yeah, but it didn’t rearrange my consciousness. So that might be the distinction. Yeah, so deep stories, like one of the things that’s true of the biblical stories is because they are hyperlinked with other stories in the biblical corpus. So almost all their plot lines and characterizations reflect many other plot lines and characterizations. And so you can delve into them and never stop. And part of the consequence of that is that if you have an apprehension of one of the stories and you can see how it echoes with all the other things that it includes, it does have that deep rearranging effect. So one of the things that deep literature does is it brings you into harmony with the spirit of the literature. Yeah. Right, and that’s akin to that idea that Christ was brought into harmony with the spirit of the law and the prophets, and partly as a consequence of being educated in the tradition. I mean, that wasn’t all of it, obviously. And the point you’re making is missed by a lot of biblical people today because the historical critical method came so to dominate the way we Catholics read the Bible that we missed that along with lots of other things. But you look, for example, at one and two Samuel, which I think is one of the masterpieces of the Old Testament. Whoever wrote it, we don’t know who wrote it, but whoever it was, boy, did he have access to the other texts because there’s all kinds of the hyperlink stuff all through it. Like a phrase from Genesis suddenly pops up here. A phrase from Leviticus is now over in this part of Second Samuel. So they were well aware of that. So the book is woven together in the same way that you described something beautiful and all the parts serve the whole. That’s right. Yeah, and your brain is linked like that too. So this is actually the case that in many ways the structure of the Bible is reflective of the structure of the brain even at a neurophysiological level. And that makes a certain amount of sense because the Bible was transmitted orally and had to arrange itself in a way that would be remembered. So you would expect a certain concordance. But the brain is arranged so that not every neuron is in contact with every other neuron because that would just be, well, that would be a total, there would be just an absolutely undifferentiated unity of structure then, but that parts of it are linked to other parts and parts are separate in a manner that optimizes both the simplicity and the complexity. And you have this exactly the same thing reflected in the biblical corpus. So which is also why it’s an inexhaustible book. Like there’s an infinite number of pathways through it. Right, so. Well, even that the beauty, communicating depth and not being exhaustible. I remember the first time I read A Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and it was just, it was remarkable because I was also in a Shakespeare play at the time I was in college and taking a Shakespeare class. And in the story, there’s a man, he’s been separated from the dystopia and he’s out in the wilderness, he’s the savage. And at one point he’s going, he’s experiencing life, he’s experiencing all these emotions. He’s experiencing suffering, he’s experiencing his love for his mother, all these kind of, he’s experiencing injustice, but he doesn’t have a language for it. And then he comes upon the works of Shakespeare. And it’s just like, he even says in the book, it says that he finally had a language for the hatred he had for this kind of stepfather figure. He finally had a language for the injustice that he was going through. And it was like, yeah, cause Shakespeare had that. That’s again, it’s transcendent, there’s a beauty there that even the savage would say, this applies to my life, multivalent. Right, right, right, right. Well, one of the things I noticed in my clinical practice when I was dealing with people who’d been severely traumatized, which almost inevitably meant that they had not only met with tragedy, but with malevolence, because you really need to run face first into malevolence to be truly traumatized. Just tragedy won’t do it. That the conversations would immediately get so deep if we were near the core of the problem, that it was almost inevitable that the language that they were using and that I was using took on like biblical overtones, because that was the only language that we had at our disposal to be able, well, if you’ve really been hurt, like if you were sexually assaulted by the uncle that was supposed to take care of you, that was trusted by his sister when you were four, you’ve encountered a level of malevolence that requires a language of good and evil, even to explicate, much less to understand. And one of the things you do do to people, with people who have been severely traumatized, is that you bring them into an advanced philosophical or even theological understanding of the relationship between good and evil, because without that, especially if sometimes people are traumatized because they’ve done malevolent things themselves, and then the only pathway forward for them at all is to develop a sophisticated formulation of good and evil, and that’s almost inevitably, in fact, it might have to be inevitably a religious formulation. You could even define a religious formulation that way, is that a religious formulation is a story that provides a sophisticated representation of the deepest levels of good and evil. It’s a perfectly good description of religion. I wonder if it infuriates you, because it does me, when the new atheists, in that kind of cavalier manner, will just toss the Bible aside, bronze age mythology, old fashioned pre-scientific nonsense, and what dangerous magic they’re dealing with there. I mean, because here’s this thing that has defined Western culture, and as you say, undergirds most of our artistic expressions and tracks with our deepest psychological aspirations and needs, what a tragedy when the Bible is trashed that way, you know? Well, it’s a strange combination of utter oversimplified misinterpretation, right, to read the Bible as in, what would you say, an archaic scientific theory, because it wasn’t, partly because there weren’t scientific theories 2,000 years ago, we could start with that, but then, well, seriously, you know, and then to insist upon the most simplistic possible depthless misreading of the stories, but then to throw the baby out of the bathwater on the moral side is, it’s surprising, you know, it’s surprising. Sam Harris, for example, you know, Sam partly insists upon his scientism, let’s say, because Sam, maybe somewhat uniquely among the new atheists, really did wrestle with the problem with evil, and part of the reason that he wanted to ground a morality in the object of truth was because he wanted to develop a morality that was sufficiently robust that evil could be properly categorized and then pushed back against, I think the problem with Harris’ approach is the kind of objectivity that he is attempting to base science on cannot be reconciled with morality itself. He’s got his philosophical categories mixed up badly and his project has to fail, and I think it has, so. Yeah. Question number three. Father Mike. A lot of time. Thank you all for coming. Father Mike. Your work with the Bible and the catechism is well known for its evangelical impact on young people. The younger generation. The younger generations, however, are also infamously skeptical of organized religion and anything like the existence of miracles that smacks of violating their secular conceptions of science, so how can Catholics speak about the Bible and the miraculous in ways that young people will find both attractive and convincing? Good question. What do you think, Bishop? You’re on your own, Kittle. No, I would. So I think something that’s really fascinating is a lot of times, because I work on a college campus, that a lot of the stuff that I’ll do, and it also gets used in a lot of high schools or junior high kind of thing, that people point to the impact it has on younger folks, which is awesome, incredible. The number of people who have approached me having gone through the Bible, they always begin their emails or their letters with, I know that you are primarily speaking to young people, but I am 85, and you know, kind of thing, and which I’m really grateful for. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the work of Christian Smith. Christian Smith, he’s a sociologist out of Chapel Hill originally, and then now he’s at Notre Dame, and go Irish. He, he wrote a book 15, 20 years ago called Soul Searching, where it was about the spiritual lives of American adolescents, and he and his team, they went out across the country, and they did a survey of the spiritual lives, the faith lives of Americans who were raised Jewish, raised agnostic, atheist, raised mainline Protestant, evangelical, Catholic, and he came to the conclusion that they all believed the same thing. Regardless, essentially regardless of how they were raised, they all believed kind of the same general ideas about life, about God, about what they’re called to, and he termed it moralistic therapeutic deism, and I don’t know if you’ve ever heard that term, but the idea is that there’s a God, and he’s good. He’s not really necessary in your life. You don’t need to have a relationship with him unless you are in some kind of problem, in which case he’s your on-call therapist slash ATM slash helicopter parent, the best helicopter parent ever. Good people go to heaven when they die, and basically everyone’s good, unless you’re Hitler, and it was this remarkable thing. That was when I was first getting into youth ministry and campus ministry, and I just was on the lookout for this because it was a fascinating kind of depiction, and I just kind of would see this again and again, but wonder where it came from. Like does it come from a simple skepticism? Does it come from a kind of a postmodern way of looking at the world? Does it come from this independence of a new generation, like what is Millennials now Gen Z? There’s another scholar at Notre Dame who asked the question, same question, for generations, for thousands of years, faith was passed on through families, that passed on through culture, and he asked the question, how come the previous generation failed to pass on the faith to Millennials, to Gen Z? And his conclusion was remarkable, and his conclusion, when he pointed it out, this is true, the conclusion was they didn’t fail to pass it on. The conclusion is Boomers and Gen Xers did pass on their faith. They also are moralistic, therapeutic deists. That the religion of America, not just the religion of American youth, religion of America is moralistic and therapeutic and deistic, in that sense of it’s not a biblical religion. And so, anecdotal evidence now, all of the, many of the emails and letters I’ve gotten about the Bible have been either, I’m 85, first time through the Bible, I’m 50, first time through the Bible, been going to Mass every Sunday of my life, been Catholic my whole life, this is the first time I’ve ever encountered the God of the Bible. I would get my pastor’s verse, and nothing, no shade against pastors or anything against anyone else, but this is the first time I had to come face to face with God as he has revealed himself. And it’s changed my life. There’s also been the people who have said, going through the Bible, I don’t like it. Like honestly, I remember, I recently got an email from a woman, I think she said maybe in her 70s, early 70s, and she said, I got my day five, I go, give it a little time, give it a little time. Now, day five, and she’s like, but there’s so much violence that I never expected, there’s so much brokenness I never expected, so much disorder that I never expected, I don’t know if I can keep pressing play. Because why? Because we are in a culture, we’re all moralistic, therapeutic deists. So I think that the rise of the nuns, which Bishop, you’ve talked about a ton, I think, I don’t know if there’s a rise of the nuns, I think we simply have the rise of the people who are unwilling to check the box. We have generations of boomers and Gen Xers who have checked the box, because yeah, I was raised Catholic, I’m Catholic. And now we have a kind of generation of Gen Z and millennials who are saying, I don’t wanna check the box just for the sake of checking the box if I don’t believe it, like my parents and like my grandparents. So I think that we’re just seeing now what’s already been there. So I don’t know if there’s any extra cynicism or extra skepticism. There may be, and this might be a silver lining, and I don’t wanna jump to the silver lining too quickly, there may be just extra honesty. And this is actually where I’m standing, because maybe I don’t have the cultural baggage that I have to check the box. Maybe I’m just now free finally to tell the truth. I think the point you’re raising is very interesting about, because America has this dual inheritance from the enlightenment and from the Bible. We have a strong biblical tradition, but also the enlightenment tradition and deism in its various forms comes out of the enlightenment tradition. And I think that’s right, that a lot of people, Catholics included, don’t really know the biblical God, who is very strange, but informs Augustine and Aquinas and our great people. But we’ve been very infected by an enlightenment kinda rationalistic, deistic view. You know, I’m always in my more theological moments fighting against the view that God is a being. Well, that’s a very deistic, you know, a rationalistic view that God’s the biggest thing around, which is not at all what our great theologians say, and it’s not the biblical idea. God’s not the biggest thing in the world, but the creator of the heavens and the earth. Ipsum esse Aquinas says, not ensumum, not highest being. And there’s a world of difference there. And that biblical God, he was not competing with my freedom, he’s like the burning bush. The closer that God gets, the more luminous and beautiful the world becomes. He’s not in competition with it. Because the deistic God is finally, we’re in competition with it. It’s up there, out there, and maybe impinges once in a while. But that’s not the Bible. That’s a kinda perverted form of an enlightenment view. But America inherited both of those forms. I think there’s an openness, an openness to the miraculous. What I see with the young people I work with, there’s an openness to the fact that God is present and is active in this world. And they long to see those times. So again, when I talk about here’s moments where God is interacting with us, they’re like, yes. Even if it’s on the level of mirror spirit, I’m not saying mirror spirit, but if we want evidence, we want material evidence. But when there’s even like the, oh, I recognize God’s presence, prove it. I can’t, I can only point to my experience of Him. And I think there’s a longing for that. Well, young people tend to be resistant to the notion of structure and dogma. First of all, because they’re young, right? And so in some ways, they’re in competition with the previous structure and the dogma as they start to take their place. But also because one of the things that’s intrinsic in that deism that you described is the Rousseauian view that tradition and structure does little else than interfere with the full flowering of the untrammeled subjective hedonism that’s the true freedom, let’s say, of self-actualization. Right, and that we’re intrinsically good except insofar as our institutions make us bad. And that’s an extraordinarily foolish way to think. And it’s extraordinarily counterproductive because what it leaves you with is an identity whose freedom is confused with your subjective whims. And you might say, well, why shouldn’t I be allowed to just pursue my subjective whims? And the answer to that is that you won’t be any more successful in your life than an undisciplined two-year-old. Because most of what will be good in your life isn’t a consequence of you just getting exactly what you want when you want it every second, but entering into increasingly sophisticated sacrificial relationships with other people. So if you get married, for example, which is generally a good idea, then you’re going to have to sacrifice a certain degree of your subjective hedonic whims to the integrity of the marriage. And with any luck, that will be way better for you than your own stupid impulses will be. And right, over multiple decades, right, that’s part of maturation. And you give up part of yourself to your family, but you receive far more in return. You give up something of yourself to your community and to your tradition. And one of the things that we’ve done a very bad job of educating young people, and perhaps even ourselves, about is the need for collective ritual and belief. And some of that’s to be found in, well, traditional, the traditional teachings of the church, you know, as flawed as that process may have been. But it’s something Jonathan Paggio’s really helped me understand more deeply, too. Like, we all understand that maybe it’s more fun to go to a stadium and watch a sports team with 20,000 other people, but we haven’t really generalized that to the point, maybe the evangelical Protestants do this better. Some people do understand that maybe it’s better to aim at the highest good possible with a bunch of other people, because it is, in fact, partly a collective enterprise, and that will also buttress your own will. And that’s definitely something that the church can offer. But we’re fighting, the church is fighting against that deep-seated notion, especially in the hedonistic, atomized, liberal West, that all tradition and structure is to be viewed as nothing but an impediment to the full flowering of your intrinsically wonderful subjectivity. It’s affected every young person in the West. Yeah, well, it’s… As a point, you know, there was a, was it, 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’s 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, if 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 restrict my freedom, but because it makes me whole. I think there’s a different perspective. Well, and part of that binding, part of that binding is found in the hierarchical arrangement of the community, and right in the church should be occupying a relatively high position in that hierarchical arrangement if it’s functioning optimally. And yeah, and it is the noble savage imagery that’s at the bottom of this. And part of the pathology in 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 altogether into some form of higher integration. Maybe that would characterize a well-integrated personality, but then beyond that, you weld that into all the different levels of social community, right? 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. You know, 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 gonna 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, well, 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, the true and beautiful that’s God. And that’s your point, which I really like, about religion, relegare, to link back, so that all these things have fallen apart for different reasons. And it’s a sort of preening, self-regarding existentialism that would say, well, I invent value. That’s a 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 gonna do. I mean, bore me to death with that. Is 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. 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. 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. 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 gonna mix metaphors terribly here, you throw the baby out with the bathwater, and in this case, it’s the holy infant that you throw out, and that’s a very bad idea. Right, right, right. I got three metaphors in there, yeah. 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 the levels that we have to be bound, them in 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. It’s in my cat. In my cat, and we’re happy together. But 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 older, 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? Or 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? 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. And he heard the higher voice. I think that’s the key thing with Abraham, that we’re built to hear the higher voice, not just listen to our own little puny voice, but to hear finally the voice of the unconditioned, of God. And what went wrong, so Adam and Eve stop listening to God, and that’s when all the sundering takes place. And then along comes Abraham, who finally hears the voice. And then watch that theme throughout the Bible, whether it’s Jonah or, you know, people that hear the voice, that’s still the game, it seems to me. You know, the voice coming from heaven is a symbol for this openness to the unconditioned, to the good, the true, and the beautiful that lie beyond the categorical, and that calls out to us, that claims me, and sends me on a mission. I totally get that. That’s exactly the right description of what makes life worth living, right? Well, that’s the part of life that is worth living, beckoning that higher call. But tell me what you think about this. So, you know, you talk about, you’re pointing, I suppose, for young people and older people as well, to where they might search for the voice or the appearance of God, and you’re suggesting that one of those places in what’s beautiful. That’s reminiscent for me of Moses’ encounter of the burning, with the burning bush, which is something that calls to him, which he goes to investigate, and that’s a pathway to God. What you see with Elijah is that that pathway to God isn’t so much something that beckons in his situation, it’s more something that imposes transcendent limits. And so Elijah is the first prophet who firmly, he engages in combat against Baal, who’s a nature god. You can think of nature, the nature god is very similar to the Gaia that the environmentalists worship, right? It’s the projection of what’s of the highest value into the natural world. And so even if the environmentalists claim that they’re not deistic, it doesn’t matter, they have an implicit deism that associates the highest good with the natural world. And it’s a powerful argument because, and this is what Elijah contends with, because if you’re in a thunderstorm or a hurricane, or you experience an earthquake or a volcano, or you look up at the heavenly skies, you can feel a sense of awe, and you can feel that there’s something beyond you that’s, let’s say, embedded in the mysteries of the world, and it’s easy to confuse that with God. Now, what Elijah realizes, and this is his famous statement, is that he’s in a cave, and he experiences a number of powerful manifestations of the natural world. This is after he’s defeated the prophets of Baal, and he hears the still small voice call to him within, and that’s really, that’s not even so much the voice that calls to adventure or beauty, which is part of that, it’s conscience per se, and this is another place that people can look for God, you know, and it’s a rough search in some ways, you know. God, at least in part, is the spirit that wakes you up at three in the morning when you’ve violated a higher part of yourself and calls you on your misbehavior. And you might say, well, why would you associate that with a transcendent spirit, and let’s say with God, and part of the answer to that is, try controlling it. Or try convincing it that it doesn’t have a point, which is what you’re going to be doing desperately at three in the morning when you’d rather let yourself off the hook for your stupidity, but something within you absolutely refuses to allow you to do that, and it’s something that you can’t control. And so, since it calls you on your misbehavior, and you can’t control it, I would say that the impetus is on the atheistic types to account for its phenomenology. It’s like, well, it’s a spirit, it has autonomy, seems to have a voice, it calls you out your misbehavior, so it has a moral, it knows you completely even better than you know yourself, right? That’s why John Henry Newman took that as the best argument for God’s existence. He felt that after Hume, the more cosmological arguments were suspect. So he went in the typical modern way inside, but found that path. I would say it’s the unconditioned good that is summoning you to goodness. Right? And it does that in part by calling you out on your misbehavior, too, right? That’s the part of God that’s the judge, rather than the invitation. The aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul, Newman calls the conscience. It’s a marvelous description, right? Even before the pope is a vicar of Christ, the conscience is the aboriginal vicar of Christ in the soul. So you might ask yourself, why would conscience be associated with Christ in the soul? And so you could imagine this. So one of the implicit messages of the story of the Christian passion is that you’re called upon to sacrifice everything in the pursuit of what’s highest. Right? Absolutely everything, which is why Christ’s passion is a story of the confrontation with the most miserable possible death, and also with the deepest reaches of malevolence, right? So, and the implication of the story is that despite the existence of those two things, that you’re called upon to act in the most positive manner. And so then, if you’re sinning, you’re violating that pattern of action, and the conscience is what calls you on the violation of that sacrificial relationship. And that’s why there’s an association between the conscience and Christ in the soul, right? Because you’re not, what the conscience tells you is that you are not being sufficiently, what would you say? You’re not being sufficiently religious in your sacrifices. That’s exactly what you’re being called upon. And you might think, well, I don’t wanna give that up. It’s like, well, yeah, you don’t want to, but that’s not the point, is that if you’re going to pursue what is truly highest, you have to give up everything that’s lowest. And if you don’t pursue what’s highest and give up what’s lowest, then life will arrange itself against you very rapidly. And you can just think about that practically. It’s like, if you conducted yourself so that you took the lesser victory over the greater victory and you did that constantly, then you would lose. It’s the definition of losing. And what your conscience does is inform you when you’re losing, even in ways that you would rather not admit, right? And so there is no difference between that and call to the highest sacrifice. Jonah heard the voice of his conscience and then didn’t follow it. And what follows from that is disaster, for you and for the people around you. So it’s not just a private thing, oh boy, I did something wrong, it’s gonna really hurt me. It’ll hurt people around you. Yeah, worse even maybe. Well, I mean, if you misbehave, when you’re a child, if you misbehave, and this might even be true when you’re an adult, when your parents are still around, it isn’t obvious at all that your misbehavior hurts you more than it hurts your parents. And in totalitarian states, there’s a good example of this, a totalitarian state is a state where every single person is lying about absolutely everything all the time. And so each person lies in the moment to protect themselves against the consequences of the truth, at least momentarily. They pretend to believe things that they don’t, what the Soviets used to joke. We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. It’s like, yeah, that’s a great Russian joke, that is. And that leads right to unbelievable poverty and misery. And every person who’s rationalized lying in the system is saying, well, I have to lie because the consequences of telling the truth will be so great. But the cumulative consequence of those individual lies is literally that everyone lives in hell. And so one of the things your conscience tells you, and it really tells you this, is when you lie, you are moving towards hell. And not just for you, but for everyone around you, everyone you love and all your descendants. And it’s a terrible thing that that’s true. You can swallow up your errant will and spit you out exactly where you’re supposed to be. So the whale there, the fish is not a negative thing. It’s swallowing up this errant will of Jonah. And then confining it. So it needed confining, it needed restriction. But then it spits them up on- It needed the suffering, possibly. It needed the suffering, right. And then spits them up exactly where you’re supposed to be. And so, like, how do we read times of depression and times of deep darkness? De profundis, from the depths I cry to you, Lord. Well good, it might be a depth imposed upon you by God to limit this errant will. But then God will take you where you don’t wanna go, where he wants you to go. And to what end? Is, you know, to what end? I think it goes back in so many ways. Because he wants you to be like him. Yeah. Because there’s that sense of like, okay, I’m gonna give you these gifts, give you, and this burden, why? Because in bearing this burden well, you’ll become like me. That’s one, I think one of the reasons Jesus says, if you wanna be my disciple, deny yourself, pick up your cross and follow me. Say, do this, do this. Whatever the burden, whatever that cross is, I’m not far from you, I’m here, I’m doing something in you, and in doing so you become like me. Even if you have to go through hell. And then there’s even that process. Even though you will have to go through hell. You’ll unleash tremendous good. So Jonah becomes the greatest prophet ever. Nineveh is converted from top to bottom and even the cattle put on sackcloth, right. He’s like the most powerful prophet ever because he finally cooperated with the voice of his conscience. Right, well and part of the problem that you have to wrestle with too is a time frame problem. So in the story of Job, Job is punished unjustly and that’s part of the pain of the story. Like Christ is punished unjustly and that’s part of what we have to wrestle with as we say, pass through the world, is that there are times when we’ll be called upon to bear suffering for the sake of the good, you might say. And part of that’s the necessary consequence of things unfolding in their appropriate time. And that’s something that perhaps you have to have faith in and it’s a very difficult thing to justify. I mean part of the reason you wanna lie is because you wanna get away with what you did right now so that there are no consequences or that you should gain some advantage, right. That’s why people lie. And so then you might say, well you’ll pay a price for telling the truth and it’s definitely the case that you will. My experience with that is being that if I say something that’s true but that’s unpopular, there can be a vicious firestorm in the aftermath but if I stand my ground, then that firestorm exhausts itself and the situation reverses so that what were negative consequences to begin with become the consequences that were much better than I could have possibly imagined before that occurred. And you see that in the story of Job. Now it’s tricky because you know, you don’t wanna justify your suffering by the fact that when you emerge through it, things are better because that’s too easily transformed into a post hoc justification of the production of suffering. That’s not exactly the point. The point is sometimes you have to withstand in order for the higher good to make itself manifest in its proper time. And things do have a proper time and part of faith is that what’s good will unfold if it’s given the proper time, right. And you may be called upon to bear that. And then you might ask yourself too, it’s like, well why do you have to bear a burden at all in order to develop? And maybe that’s a fundamental mystery in its essence but you can ask yourself in your own life, it’s like part of the reason sometimes that you have to suffer in order to develop is because you’re so damn stubborn and you won’t give up your foolishness when you could have and so like the Pharaoh, you double down and the suffering intensifies. But some of the time too, you have to think that you wouldn’t be as sophisticated and well developed as you are in your best sense if you wouldn’t have gone through the difficult times that demanded from you that level of development. When you’re trying to nurture a child, you don’t protect them from everything that challenges them. You put them in a ring of combat, let’s say, where they’re optimally challenged so the best in them can reveal itself. And none of us know how much challenge we have to be offered in the world in order to be highly motivated enough so the best within us will reveal itself. Now if you abjured all sin, you’d suffer the least amount possible but perhaps that still wouldn’t be none. [“The Star-Spangled Banner”]