THE BEE WEEKLY: Pitching Tents With Faith Heroes and the Maniac
In this episode of The Bee Weekly, Kyle and Ethan take time to recognize some heroes of the faith before looking at what G.K. Chesterton said about people who believe in themselves. In the subscriber lounge, Kyle asks Ethan the Next Ten Questions. Kyle and Ethan honor heroes of the faith like a preacher catching himself before offending little people, a youth pastor talking about tents and nothing else, and a man who is ready to sing. Kyle and Ethan then read and discuss The Maniac, a chapter from G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy. Join Kyle and Ethan in the subscribe lounge to learn more about the mysterious enigma wrapped in a riddle stuffed into a Creative Director that is Ethan Nicolle.
In a world of fake news, we bring you up-to-the-minute factual inaccuracy and a heavy dose of moral truth with your hosts, Kyle Mann and Ethan Nicole.
This is the Babylon Bee.
Fake news you can trust.
Oh, what?
Whoa, Kyle, your shirt just suddenly changed.
Crazy.
Yeah, yeah, I'm going to a Padres game after this.
Oh, cool.
Is that a sport?
Yeah, it is a sport.
Yeah.
They play the stick ball.
Okay, the stick and the ball.
It's like cricket with red threads in the ball.
That's the one.
That's the one.
Okay.
But the problem is, all the good seats are in the vaccinated section.
But I don't want to get vaccinated because I don't want to grow a third arm.
So I'm going to wear my, I identify as vaccinated t-shirt.
Guaranteed to work in any situation.
Guaranteed.
100% for your money.
What I love about this shirt is that we work very hard on our jokes at Babylon Bee and our one joke.
And this is our one joke.
And it's been honed down to the final.
This is the final form.
The final form.
They're still available.
Shop.babylonbee.com.
Check it out.
It's already being pirated by other companies.
This logo has been stolen and sold all over the place.
But by the official one, you can go anywhere you need to go.
We have ones for men, one's for women, one's agender.
Coffee mugs, everything.
Hats, everything you need.
If you're a premium Babylon B subscriber, you have a discount too.
Sorry.
Dang it, Ethan.
If you're a premium Babylon B subscriber, you have a discount in your email that you can use.
Discount code.
Discount code.
So, you know.
Don't discount that.
Anyway.
Oh, hello there.
You've stopped by here and the Babylon B offices.
Yeah.
You happen to mosey on in and maybe you thought this was an office that does something else and you got to.
Just wandering in.
Which happens a lot here at our office.
Because it does a different type of office.
And people come in asking us for stuff.
Yeah.
We think that we're.
Yeah.
I think we sell stuff, but we don't.
Well.
We even have a sign on the door that says, we are not the old store that was here.
And people still come in and go, are you the old store that was here?
And we're like, no.
It's something you can't make up.
It feels like a bit in a comedy thing.
It's almost daily.
No, it's not subway anymore, man.
It happens all the time.
Anyway, I'm Kyle Hann, editor-in-chief of the Babylon B. Hi.
I'm Ethan Nicole, creative director of the Babylon B.
Yeah.
So, Babylon B, man, it's what we do.
We do it all day long.
What do you do all day, Ethan?
Working on the Babylon B.
Yeah, we were talking about giving like kind of a day-in-the-life snapshot of what it's like working at the Babylon B.
And I think everybody's job is different.
One thing that's unique about everybody here is that we all wear a lot of hats.
So when you have a big company, you can give everybody really specialized, narrow jobs.
But we have a pretty small staff here and everybody does a lot of stuff.
My week morphs.
So like every day is different for me.
Monday starts off.
I'm usually at the beginnings of whatever we're going to animate that week.
So I'm trying to get assignments out to people that are going to be helping me with.
We got Gavin that works here.
He does a lot of digging up props and backgrounds and things and any elements we're going to need.
I'm working on the radio play, so I'm trying to get voices together.
Any voices we're going to need for the animation.
And then Monday, I think Monday, we will usually record a news desk or a sketch of some kind.
So we have writing.
My buddy Ehrlich comes out and we write together.
Sometimes we have other guys writing with us on those days.
Sometimes Kyle's there.
And we also will record something.
So there's a lot of different things going on on Mondays.
The days are Monday's a wild day, and then the week gets progressively crazier to Wednesday.
Wednesday's the craziest day, yeah.
So then, yeah, Tuesday, we do an interview show, Duzz Interview Show, sometimes we take the person to lunch, which can be yeah, if they come in, it's like the whole day because we don't really know Gavin will be coming and asking me questions about the animation as we're doing Tuesday's interview and everything.
I might do some work on the cartoon after the interview, uh, and then Wednesday is big podcast day.
Oh, and Tuesday morning, I'll get in early or not early, but you know, I'll try to get in like an hour before the interview and have a cigar and prepare.
I try to do that too, so I succeed though.
So, yeah, so I'll sit there and be like, all right, who are we interviewing?
And I'll watch a bunch of their YouTube videos or whatever and like get ready in the mindset when we start interviewing.
That's still you, great, but I got to do it.
Um, I have a weird switch I can flip because I'll be completely quiet and not talking to anybody.
And then interview, I'm like, Hey, welcome to the Babylon.
Lots of time, too.
I don't talk at all.
I mean, it knows me.
I don't talk.
We don't talk.
We're hanging out.
We don't talk.
Yeah, so then Wednesday morning, I'm getting ready for the podcast, and then we do the podcast, and then you know, back to the animation and whatever else we're on.
Oh, we also Wednesday is crazy.
I usually work late because we have Chestertonians at night, so we usually do a news desk or something.
Also, some of you guys are in Lord of the Rings that day, so it's just a lot going on here on Wednesdays.
Yeah, Thursday and Friday is pretty much just buckle down and get work done day.
So Kai's will be editing all the shows we recorded.
Yeah, I'm animating.
I'm really kind of buckled down and animating.
We got our other animator that comes in on Tuesday and Thursday to help out.
So Thursday's a big animation day for me.
Friday, we're usually getting it done on Friday.
Yeah.
What amazes me is the evolution of where the Babylon Bee was and what the work process was like just two years ago.
Yeah, my job is every few months, my job is different here.
Well, that's your personality.
That's how I am because I'm always moving on to the next thing and build something new.
Trying to build.
Yeah.
I mean, all of this would be from your head, pretty much.
The podcast, the animation stuff, a lot of video stuff, you know, we probably wouldn't be doing.
So it's my dream.
When I saw this, as long as I've done the Babylon B, I've just had big vision, a lot of big visions.
And every time I've done an interview, big ideas?
Every time I've done an interview for the last, you know, three, four years or whatever, people always ask, what are you going to do?
Where's the Babylon going to be going to expand to next?
And I always say video.
But it's like we have no plan to do it.
Yeah.
So to finally have it happen is pretty cool.
Yeah, it felt so far.
Yeah.
And that's why I all of a sudden haven't happened.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But just I started working for the Babylon Bee full-time three years ago.
That's when Seth bought the site and hired me full-time.
And it was entirely in my garage.
Or I wasn't even in my garage at the time.
I was like in the living room, like just by the kitchen table.
And I was in there.
And then I can't remember.
I think we might have hired you full-time a year after that.
It must have been.
Yeah, it was about a year after you got hired.
We brought you on full-time.
And you and I would go meet up at the cigar shop like once a week or once every other week for a while there before you were when I came higher before you were hired.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And then when you started full-time, you were still coming over to my garage sometimes.
And we would just meet wherever we could.
Yeah, that's what the first seven or eight episodes were recorded in the garage.
Yeah, if you listen to the very first episodes of the podcast, those are in Kyle's garage.
But my day is very much just trying to come up with six or seven headlines.
So sometimes it's just me sitting there trying to come up with something and banging on the keyboard.
We have a good group of writers that'll message headlines in and ideas.
We have a little Facebook group where people kick ideas around.
Subscribers will throw ideas in our headline form.
The premium subscribers can do that.
So sometimes we'll find some gold there.
Yeah, it's a lot to dig through.
It doesn't.
There's kind of this magic, this idea of the magic writer's room where you sit around the conference table and come up with gold.
Yeah.
And that happens here, but it's usually just with video ideas and video scripts because to be able to riff with dialogue and where a sketch goes, that's very fun when we can come up with stuff like that.
When a concept is too broad, a writer's room doesn't work.
That's the hard thing with, if it's just like headlines, then it's like, what do we even, you know?
So that's the hard thing.
When you're writing a TV show or a short and you've already got kind of an outline figured out already, just the main theme of it.
Yeah, the concept here.
Then you're riffing off of that.
And that's the hard thing about, we haven't found that yet.
Like, what is the in-person writer's room for satire headlines?
Yeah.
We would like to figure that out.
We're working on it.
Yeah, so I'm still working out of my house a couple of days a week, two, three days a week.
And then I'll come in and recording days.
Wednesday is the day that we record the main podcast and Lord of the Rings.
And then we're doing our weekly Dungeons and Dragons session with Dan and Patrick and Matt and Gavin.
And that's a lot of fun.
Ethan walks by and goes, nerds.
And then they often talk to me like it's real life.
Like afterwards, Gavin's coming like, I got stabbed and there was like a goblin and then they kidnapped a lady and there was yelling at the hostage situation.
Trying to do lip syncing, man.
I can't talk right now.
Just awesome.
Anyway, we thought you'd appreciate a little glimpse.
That's the day in the life.
And also a big part of Kyle's day is driving because he lives so freaking far away.
Huge mistake.
No.
Huge mistake.
But I was just trying, like Chesterton says, I was trying to, you know, return home.
Small community.
Yeah, that's it.
Get away from the city.
So, all right.
Well, we're going to now look at some heroes of the faith.
Yeah, let's get back to some heroes of the faith.
And now it's time for this week's heroes of the faith.
All right.
So when you're a pastor, what you want to do, you're always trying to be careful not to hurt anybody's feelings out there when you're preaching.
Yeah.
Right?
So this guy is a true hero because he caught himself possibly hurting somebody's feelings.
And he saved it so well.
He just nailed it.
Absolutely.
Just a great save.
It could have been a disaster.
He utterly saves this altar call.
It makes me wonder.
I guess we'll see.
We'll talk about that after we let's watch it.
Let's watch him in action.
Let's take a look at this hero of the faith.
It's a clap, clap.
The reason you lift your hand is because you already believe.
You're saying, I believe.
You know, and we just give you an opportunity to confess it before men.
He sees you a little guy in the back.
Little guy, I'm not a midget.
He's a child.
I mean, wanting to think I was offending a midget.
Where were you?
You got to go back, Dan.
I want to hear that sigh.
He just did it.
I know, but I want to hear it again.
The exhale.
The exhale of like...
So was there, because he can see the audience.
Yeah.
Is there a midget in the audience?
It sounds like he's saying, no, there's somebody in the audience.
Oh, yeah.
It's like a different person, not the person he's calling.
But then also, isn't, is this when midget's not offensive?
Because the midget is kind of supposed to be a person.
Is it offensive?
I'm not supposed to say midget anymore.
It's a little person now, right?
I don't want to offend a midget.
The chances that there were a midget there are pretty small.
Hey.
I didn't mean to do that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it just makes it.
Which makes it better if there's no midget there.
Yeah.
Because then he's trying, he's trying to save this whole thing from something that nobody was thinking.
Or he gets televised.
He doesn't know there could be midgets watching, tuning in.
But I love the way his mind works because he's like, little guy in the back.
And if you heard that, you would think it's a kid.
Like, that was my immediate thought.
There's a kid in the back.
And his brain goes, oh no, little guy.
They're going to talk about a midget.
Or he sees a kid with his hand up and right next to him is a midget with his hand up.
He's not you.
Full-grown little guy.
Full-grown guy that happens to be smaller.
He's beautiful.
That's an audible cringe.
He just keeps digging it deep.
He just has to keep going.
Well, speaking of audible cringe, I don't know if we have to bleep this one or not.
Yeah, I can't tell me because this is involuntarily.
This guy says something highly inappropriate.
This is another one that is older than the internet.
And I used to have this saved as a file on my computer and we would watch it.
So let's take a look at this.
Let's dive right in, dry.
Yeah.
Cool youth pastor.
And then the following week, last week, we were talking about Lot.
And we were talking about Sodom and Gomorrah.
And we're talking about how Lot chose to go pinch his tits.
Excuse me.
Pinch his tits.
Pinch his tents.
That's what I said.
Beautiful recovery.
Nothing else here.
This is church.
My gosh.
So he was pitching his tents close to Sodom and Gomorrah.
And so what happened was when he did that, he was getting too close to evil.
And what I was challenging you guys to not do was to pick friends that were going to lead you to then stop laughing.
All right.
Man!
No road right now!
Holy cow!
Sally, I hope this isn't a video game.
Oh, he's on video.
It is absolutely.
I have no job now.
So, um, I love the attempt to keep it on the rails.
Does he keep going?
Yeah.
How do you recover from that?
Sometimes God has to be full of justice.
Does he do it again?
How does it sound like a pretty good sermon?
God has to be full of justice.
So if we censor that, the link will be in the show notes.
You want to see the real thing?
Because it's going to make no sense if you don't see.
I feel like we can leave it in.
Do you think we can leave it in?
I think we can leave it in.
Dan's clocking.
Dan's clapping.
Okay.
I feel like it's a clear misspeaking thing.
It was done in a church.
So far, as far as I know, nobody in that church was traumatized for life.
It's inadvertent.
He didn't mean to.
Trigger warning.
If you're watching this with your kids, you just heard something that you might not know.
Trigger.
Post-trigger warning.
You show somebody a video of somebody being slaughtered.
They're like, trigger warning, violent video.
That was very gruesome.
But it's like, how do you recover?
And how do you continue on with a 30-minute sermon?
I know.
Knowing the whole time.
That's all anybody's thinking about.
Like, I think I would just be like, you know what?
We're done for the night.
Let's move on to the closing worship song because you're not going to think about anything else.
That's it.
There's no purpose.
And he just, he didn't even like stagger around when he said it.
He said it really with emphasis.
He's like, pinch.
I mean, there was no ambiguity whatsoever.
It sounded the way he said he said it with such authority as if that he knew he was saying what he meant to say.
It sounded like it was intentional.
But his embarrassment is clear that it was not intentional.
But nice save there.
Yeah.
Tense guy.
Tense guy.
Tense.
Well, not every hero of the faith is a preacher.
Some of them are, some people are gifted with music, musical talents and singing.
His voice is a literal instrument.
Yeah, they make a joyful noise into the Lord.
Not all of us can sing in church.
Not all of us are gifted in that way.
Right.
But this guy is.
And so we're going to enjoy this guy.
He's got his name on there.
I forget what it is.
On his rendition of Looking for a City.
Okay.
So let's enjoy this.
Maybe a minute or two of this or whatever.
Should we go catch that?
He's been pretty famous over the last few years.
It has took me a lot of places I didn't think I would be at.
But it was the first time on stage, New Year's Eve 2002.
With one of the best quartets out there today, Brian Freen Assurance.
And I was playing to be able to sing this one with Brian Free.
I like that he's talking about another time that he got this.
I don't know if I beat him that night or not, but ever since then, we've had competitions.
I've worn him out.
Not to kill it singing this song.
But this is one that also my friends at my hometown church, Gospel Light Baptist Church in Salisbury, North Carolina, has really made their top choice.
So therefore, we're going to finish off with this one.
It's called Looking for a City.
Oh, he's ready.
Oh. Okay.
here we go he's got it sounds like the map from Dora That's right.
I think he's going for like a bluegrass type gople.
For a city where the city may ever sing about What do we say?
Big.
Make a sin.
Make a stop.
Holy Spirit.
Like he's trying to go for that Del McCurry, like, you know, bluegrass voice, but he's just not.
He's missed it by that much.
How did that guy sing with a quartet before?
Like, he's talking about coming up.
They covered him up.
They must have covered him up.
Like, he'd be way in the background because they got the other guy.
His mic has been off his entire career.
Yeah.
The rest of the quartet's trying to discourage him from singing solos.
And he finally got his chance.
He's probably, I think he felt sabotaged by that piano player.
Something about the piano player threw him off.
Dude, he was like, he turns.
And usually, if you're singing this piece, you're doing a piece in church and like they start at the wrong part.
You just, okay, we're going along.
Yeah.
But he just turns and goes, I didn't think we were starting there.
Yeah.
I just set up that I'm going to kill it right now.
So I just need to explain why this isn't going to go so well.
I'm going to just, yeah.
That's hard.
That's rough.
Yeah.
You know, we need to bring back the gospel quartet.
I'm down.
You ever have the gospel?
The startup test that would come to like your church?
Yeah.
We should start a Babylon B one.
Let's do it.
We got Brandon's a killer singer.
Our Go Down Donald kind of did that a little bit.
We did that layers you were adding on it.
Yeah.
If you heard a GoDown Donald, our YouTube channel.
On our YouTube channel, you should check that video out.
We sing like an old gospel COVID song.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, this has been Heroes of the Faith.
Thank you, heroes.
Thanks, heroes.
Let's read some Chesterton.
Let's dive into old Chestertone.
The B or not the B?
That is a question I ask myself every morning as I drink from my the B or not the B mug.
Now you too can drink from this amazing coffee cup and ask yourself the same question.
Which is better?
It's so hard to decide.
In fact, I would say it's absolutely the Babylon B, but not the B is pretty cool too.
Enjoy this mug.
GK Chesterton.
All right, so Chesterton has this concept that he goes back to time and again, and specifically he mentions it, I think it's the first time he brings it up maybe, is in orthodoxy.
That's the maniac.
Yeah, the maniac.
The madman.
And the circle.
The madman's circle.
Yeah.
And so this is actually, we're going to be reading just from the very beginning, orthodoxy.
Orthodoxy.
So we're diving in.
And then I grabbed some paragraphs from a little later on.
Okay.
But we're just looking at this idea of, you know, people will act like, well, I've got my worldview all figured out because it's purely rational.
Everything fits.
Any question can be answered by all logical, you know, ways of reason.
It works.
So they see everything through that one lens.
Everything makes it a little bit different.
He makes the point that most people that have that, they have one tiny lens they look at it through.
And he compares that to a circle.
So we'll read with his words first, then we'll try to go from there.
But I will set up that when he says Hanwell, Hanwell is a loony bin.
Okay.
An asylum.
An asylum.
Hanwell asylum.
You want to start this time?
Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world.
They rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true.
Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher who made a remark which I had often heard before.
It is indeed almost a motto of the modern world.
Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it.
The publisher said of somebody, that man will get on.
He believes in himself.
And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written Hanwell.
So this asylum that he mentioned on the street frothing at the mouth inside.
And I said to him, shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves?
For I can tell you.
I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar.
I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success.
I can guide you to the thrones of the supermen.
The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums.
I love that he's walking on the street of this publisher and gives that whole build-up to it.
He said mildly that there were a good many men, after all, who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums.
Yes, there are, I retorted, and you of all men ought to know them.
That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself.
That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself.
If you consulted your bit, sorry, these people trying to pitch books to him.
Like, I have this amazing novel for you.
Huge epic.
I've been working since I was 12.
Now I'm 89.
So these are the people that go on American Idol and really believe.
This is the believer city guy.
Yeah, look for a city.
He really believed in himself.
If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter.
A rotter.
A rotter.
Actors who can't act believe in themselves and debtors who won't pay.
It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself.
Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin.
Complete self-confidence is weakness.
Believing utterly in oneself is a hysterical and superstitious belief like believing in Joanna Southcote.
Hero of the faith.
Remember her?
Oh, yeah.
This is where I learned about her.
Yeah.
When I was working on my book, I looked her up.
That's fantastic.
She was a crazy cultist.
If you haven't listened, we got Heroes of the Faith on a previous episode.
People believed in her.
They believed that she was going to give birth to the next Christ.
Okay, so he's saying believing in this crazy person.
Yeah.
The man who has it has Hanwell written on his face as plain as it is written on that omnibus.
And to all this, my friend, the publisher, made this very deep and effective reply.
Well, if a man is not to believe in himself, in what is he to believe?
After a long pause, I replied, I will go home and write a book in answer to that question.
This is the book that I have written, an answer to it.
Such a great start to a book.
Oh, Chesterton.
Good old Jesus.
J.K. Chesterton.
Gilbert Gilbert Gilbert.
All right.
Moving on.
Yes.
So then he gets into, and he goes through a lot of stuff here.
So we're diving ahead in the chapter, but he goes into when the madman really explains himself.
The madman's explanation of a thing is always complete and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory.
Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable.
This may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness.
If a man says, for instance, that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators, which is exactly what conspirators would do.
That's exactly what they would say.
His explanation covers a fact as much as yours.
Or if a man says that he is the rightful king of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad, for if he were king of England, that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do.
If a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity, for the world denied Christ's.
Nevertheless, he is wrong.
But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed.
Perhaps the nearest thing that we can get to, or perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it, is to say this, that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle.
A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle.
But though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large.
In the same way, the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large.
A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world.
There is such a thing as a narrow universe.
There is such a thing as a narrow universality.
There is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity.
You may see it in many modern religions.
So the idea that your world, just because your worldview all fits together, it's all God's logic, it can still be a tiny, tiny, he says, you know, it's all a circle, but a circle can be a penny.
You know, it doesn't make it big, just the fact that it's circular and it all fits together.
Yeah, and you do see this with people that are into conspiracy theories, whether that's on the right or the left.
You see people that they, if they believe that, then there's no fact you can give them that would contradict it in their mind.
Right.
Or there's just the answer, the answer to everything, like multiverse theory.
People get that.
It's like there's no arguing.
Multiverse theory.
No evidence that exists.
Someone who thinks that we live in the matrix or something.
Right.
Yeah.
Aliens do everything.
See, I'm slapping you.
It's real.
And they're like, well, that's how the matrix is programmed.
So there's no way around it.
So he gives the example of materialism as being one case of this.
So take that one.
Take first the more obvious case of materialism.
As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity.
It is just the quality of the madman's argument.
We have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.
Contemplate some able and sincere materialist, as for instance, Mr. McCabe, and you will have exactly this unique sensation.
He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding.
His cosmos may be complete in every rivet and cockwheel, but still his cosmos is smaller than our world.
Somehow his scheme, like the lucid scheme of the madman, seems unconscious of the alien energies and the large indifference of the earth.
It is not thinking of the real things of the earth, of fighting peoples or proud mothers or first love or fear upon the sea.
The earth is so very large and the cosmos is so very small.
The cosmos is about the smallest hole that a man can hide his head in.
And I didn't put this in there, but I want to read this.
He adds to, so he says, as we have taken the circle as the symbol of reason and madness, we may very well take the cross as the symbol at once of mystery and of health.
Buddhism is centripetal, but Christianity is centrifugal.
It breaks out.
But the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature, but it is fixed forever in its size.
It can never be larger or smaller.
But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its forearms forever without altering its shape.
Because it has a paradox at its center, it can grow without changing.
The circle returns upon itself and is bound.
The cross opens its arms to the four winds.
It is a signpost for free travelers.
Boom.
Boom.
How high was Chesterton when he wrote that?
That's a seven out of ten.
Seven out of ten high rating for Chesterton on this one.
He loves that analogy.
Like he even wrote that book.
Well, he wrote a book, The Ball on the Cross, which is a great, fun, ridiculous book.
It's like a buddy comedy about an atheist and a hardcore Catholic Highlander.
It's planes, trains, and automobiles.
Yeah.
Steve Martin was a Christian and John Candy wasn't.
So they want to get a duel to the death, but all of Christianity, or not all of Christianity, all of society is trying to stop them with the various views of their time.
So they got the Tolstoy guy who is just a pacifist.
And then they got the guy who loves violence and just wants to see them kill each other.
So it's a really, it's one of my favorites.
It's not that long.
I like when they meet the anti-cop guy, and then he calls the cops.
He ends up calling the cops on him.
He's calling the cops on him.
It's like, yeah, defund the police.
So I think that this, when I read this, helped me to not immediately be impressed when somebody had a world.
Because I think that before I had thought, oh, Christianity answers all the questions, and then other worldviews will inevitably find questions they just can't answer.
That's why they need Jesus.
And I think that, you know, that's a pretty naive view.
I was young.
But to realize that to not be impressed when a worldview answers all the questions, it doesn't mean it's right.
It could mean it's leaving a bunch of stuff out.
Well, and I think this helps us to think about the kind of Christianity that we want to impart to our kids and that we want to have in our churches is not one that is this narrow like right.
Yeah, because you can turn Christianity into your own circle, too.
You could make it into a you know, I think people, some people run into that with some things, like perhaps predestination or any of those kinds of things where they get their whole faith is based around one doctrine.
Well, when you think of people who say that they left Christianity, you know, they grew up in the church and they left and it's because they weren't giving them answers.
And it feels like, well, first of all, I don't know if those people are always being truthful, but when they are, it feels like what they're complaining about is the church has had this, you know, I don't know, it's a fundamentalist Baptist thing or whatever, but they had this perfect spiritual experience or something.
It's always one monomania.
To think about Christianity as something that explains everything to something that is as big as the universe.
It's not this narrow, like and that it's not, it's not his job to explain everything.
Like that's read the end of Job.
Yeah, yeah, explains the wrong, explain is the wrong word if I said that, but yeah, and I was just realizing that that's not, he's kind of even saying that's not the thing to look for in a world as much.
Right.
The world's too big to continue to answer all your questions in a nice, tidy way.
Not that Christianity is not the Orthodox teachings because it is.
It's the core and the center, but it's bigger too.
You know, like it's sunsets and smoking cigars and hanging out and like all of these elements of life.
You know, I think he talks about the materialist that misses all of that because they have explanations for the chemical reactions about things and your brain is just firing these connections and chemical reactions and that explains everything.
Yeah.
So it can't explain everything in these scientific terms and yet it misses what everything is about.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Boom.
Boom.
So that is the beginning of Orthodoxy if you enjoyed that.
You could read Orthodoxy or you could check out my introductory book to G.K. Chesterton.
I decided to put together called Chesterton's Gateway.
It's going to be on Amazon.
Yeah.
Maybe out by now.
I don't know yet.
Cool.
Chesterton's Gateway.
Like 14 essays I picked out for the beginning Chestertonian.
Somebody just wants to try out Chesterton.
All those books are hard to start with because there's full chapters where you don't know what the heck he's talking about.
So I try to pick some essays that I know have always gone well because I've read Chesterton in a lot of groups, in groups before, so quite a bit.
That'll be super popular because that is the I don't even read Chesterton as much as you and everybody always asks me that question.
Yeah, I get asked all because of the podcast all the time now.
All right, well, check out Chesterton's Gateway if it's up yet.
And read Orthodoxy as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right, we're going to go into the subscriber portion now in this truncated short episode today.
And Ethan is going to answer the 10 questions bearing all.
Bearing it all.
Bearing it all.
He's going to bear it all, and he's going to answer the 10 questions.
You just lost subscribers.
Bye, everybody.
Goodbye.
Go read Chesterton.
Good day.
Coming up next for Babylon Bee subscribers.
You get to erase any three people from history, living or dead.
You're not killing them.
You're just erasing them from ever having existed.
Justin Bieber, I guess.
Just going with pop stars, I guess.
I don't know.
He's like.
He's like a Hill Slam pastor now, man.
Yeah.
So yeah, still get rid of him.
Even better.
Even better.
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