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April 24, 2025 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
56:30
Why I Am (Regrettably) Not A Christian

I was interviewed by Lewis Brackpool about why I personally am not a Christian. I attempted to explain it as well as I am able. Please subscribe to his channel, as he is doing superb work: https://www.youtube.com/@Lewis_Brackpool/

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Time Text
Carl Benjamin, thank you so much for having me here.
I've been contributing to your Lotus Eaters media channel for quite a while and I'm so honored to, of course, be sitting down with you one-to-one as well.
Thank you.
My pleasure, man.
How have you been?
Really well.
Really busy.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I've seen you've been very, very busy with otherwise very good.
Thanks.
Good stuff.
Now, this conversation, I wanted to center it all around atheism, theology in the modern world now.
And I wanted to get your views on lots of different topics within the topic of theology.
Would you say that you're on a type of spiritual journey at the minute, or are you not?
Are you still an atheist?
You know, I believe you were involved somewhat in some conversations around theological topics online and debates.
Has your view changed over the years?
So I used to be a new atheist by default, basically.
I liked watching Christopher Hitchens' videos online, like everyone else.
And I had not been raised in a religious society, so I was just a materialist, just like everyone else.
And I don't think that's great.
I think there are problems that arise from this.
Because I think that man is a spiritual animal, whether he likes it or not, right?
But the thing is, the thesis of materialism is very persuasive.
As in, if the universe is just atoms and void, and it mechanically moves on itself to produce certain predictable outcomes, then if that's all that there is, then everything spiritual was essentially nonsense from the word go.
And the progress of science kind of implies that, yeah, that is all that there is.
And so the more science advances, the more almost ridiculous the spiritual component of human life looks, because the magic in the universe was there to explain things that we didn't have answers to.
Why does the sun travel across the sky?
Well, Helios and his sun chariot brings it across.
And so every single day the sun rises and the seasons change and the predictable patterns of life are explained with a story that doesn't describe what is actually happening.
Science actually seems to describe what is actually happening.
And in doing so, the demystification of the universe around us strips away the spiritual element.
If it's all just atoms and void moving on one another, then there isn't any room for God in this.
And the persuasive power of science is found in the technological progress that we find ourselves with.
The fact that we can sit here and do this is in some way a kind of proof that there's no God to the materialist perspective.
And having been raised as a materialist, it's hard to feel spiritual, right?
This, this, the sort of whatever organ in the human soul in the body that controls the sort of the spiritual feeling that one has is at best deeply atrophied for me.
And so I don't have any religious impulses.
I don't feel the need to pray to a God when things are going wrong.
I don't feel the need to be part of a spiritual congregation or something like this.
And so there's a part of me that feels I'm kind of a disability in some way, right?
Like people raised in modernity in atheistic societies are just They don't want, they don't go to church because they just don't want to, right?
Most people, like 90 or 18, 89% of people, something like that, don't go to church.
And it's just because they just don't want to.
They just feel no impulse to do so.
Because to them, the universe isn't actually mysterious, and there isn't an afterlife worth worrying about.
And so we're stuck in this position where we're a bunch of materialist consumers just existing on a rock in space for no reason until we die.
And you say that's bad.
Yeah, I don't think that's great.
I think it's pretty sour.
And the atheists who came before us viewed themselves as being very clever.
There's a huge amount of vanity in atheism.
But particularly, vanity, sort of Bertrand Russell's up to the Christopher Hitchens, of I'm smarter than you, that's why I'm an atheist.
It's like, okay, but look at the world you're making.
And the world you're making is actually one where everyone takes antidepressants, people kind of hate the place in which they live, and the material quality of everything is declining.
Like things aren't getting better the more atheist we get, things are getting worse.
When was the last time we built something impressive like a cathedral?
Could we have some nice buildings?
No, we get the cheapest, like grey-faced flat tenements that people get to pack into now.
Because if we're just human cattle, then any transcendent aspect of human life is just a fancy at best, right?
It's not important.
And so this has not been to the benefit of mankind, I think.
And yet, I don't know if there's a way to stop it.
Do you feel a pretty bleak outlook?
I'm taking now.
You know, I feel as though science over there, because I was exactly the same.
I used to love watching Dawkins.
I loved watching Hitchens as well.
And even, you know, today, with Alex O'Connor and people like that debating, although Alex O'Connor has become an agnostic through his consistent, I would call it searching personally.
Do you feel like you're searching?
No.
No.
I don't feel like I'm missing something.
The problem is, if you approach it in a consequentialist manner, not only do you kind of miss the purpose of religion, God's meant to be the font from which everything springs.
So God is a fundamentally deontological concept that precedes all things.
So trying to reconstruct God from the consequences is to suggest that he's actually not the wellspring from which everything comes anyway.
So the actual attempt itself is self-defeating.
So you just can't do it.
So if the consequences are bad and God is the wellspring from which everything comes, you would have to conclude that God made it this way on purpose to challenge us, to test us.
And this was the thesis that people throughout the Middle Ages had because life in the Middle Ages was really tough.
Really tough.
A lot of people really, really suffered.
And the amount of human suffering seemed just incomprehensible and couldn't understand why a loving God would want this.
And this is why the birth of the scientific endeavor even began in the first place.
People like Francis Bacon and Descartes were like, no, no, we can use our reason to make the world better, actually.
And it turned out that they could, but there was a consequence to that.
And that was essentially the death of God, which is what Nietzsche was lamenting.
And so now we are in a position where it's like, okay, well, maybe the suffering was bad, but maybe it had a point.
It always reached a peak though, I found.
Like if you look in like the Victorian era where England especially was gripped with things such as alcoholism and it wasn't the change wasn't done through political means, it was done through a spiritual aspect of everyone going back to church.
And it kind of like a loop.
The argument is that God allows this to happen for you to draw closer to him.
And that's, I think that's kind of the reason behind things such as free will and just and like totally right, Middle Ages were awful, awful to live in.
And because of so much of the suffering, it's almost God allows this to happen to draw people back to him.
And what I've seen over history is that it is kind of like a loop.
People have, you know, the meme, hard times create, you know, strong men, X, Y, and Z.
And it's kind of, you know, it's kind of almost the default loop that seems to happen throughout history.
So the problem with approaching this with a theological argument is that it presupposes that which it sets out to prove.
Right.
So if that, if, if it is the case that God does this, I still have to establish the existence of God before I can accept that premise.
And if the question is, is there a God, you know, do I accept there is an existence of God?
Then I can't begin with that.
Right.
So it would have to be a kind of after-the-fact post hoc argument rather than the one that precedes the thing.
And I'm not saying this to be a smug atheist, right?
I'm not trying to be a fedora tipper.
But there are problems with religious arguments, and there's a reason why they're not winning the arguments against the atheists.
And it's actually very frustrating because if you go back and look at the sort of debates that are happening with like Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens back in the say, you know, 1990s to 2000s, and you look at some of the positions and arguments that people like Sam Harris and Dawkins, less so now, are still making, they're terrible, right?
They're really terrible.
I watched a Sam Harris debate the other day.
It was a fairly recent one, a couple of years ago, where he was like, well, look, if I look up into the heavens and I can't see God, where is he?
It's like, okay, but I like any religious scholar should have been able to dismantle that and say, look, you are approaching this from the wrong perspective because the argument about God is necessarily transcendental.
And so you can't find him in the universe because he is necessarily extraneous to it.
And yet Sam Harris has got away with this for decades.
This absolutely, I mean, it's a category error at best.
And him being just deliberately obtuse at worst.
And so the fact that religious scholars allowed them to kind of get away with these things and somehow lose the argument to these is not the risk of getting myself in trouble.
It kind of reveals the paucity of the religious argument based on, again, assuming what it sets out to prove and this not being persuasive to people who do not already assume that case.
And so this is why I was being a little fedora tipper there, because as an atheist who would like Christianity to succeed, that argument's not good enough.
And I was going to say, do you think modern secularism is failing to provide meaning or stability when it comes to that?
And is that why people are now looking back to faith in that respect?
The worst part is it's not providing meaning, but it's definitely providing stability.
And the stability is worse.
Like it would be better to have an unstable world in which you had meaning than a stable world in which you just want to kill yourself.
Like, if you know the tomorrow is going to be just like today, and today was terrible, then you know, tomorrow is going to be just as terrible, and there's no reason to think the day after that would be any better.
And so, why wouldn't you just kill yourself?
Yeah, this is the argument that you know, if we're just a sack of chemicals, then what is meaning?
What is we're just bumping into each other and existing?
And that's the curse of secular modernity: that's all it's got to offer.
And so, this is why it just degenerates into the hyper-indulgence of sort of not Epictetus, for some reason I can't remember his name, Greek Kuma.
It's on the tip of my tongue.
Basically, an ancient Greek philosopher who said that the only purpose to life is pleasure.
Right.
The same thing as John Stuart Epicurus.
There we go.
Epicurus.
It's like this.
Yeah, been a long day.
But the point is, the sort of Epicurean thesis that we're just here to have fun, enjoy pleasure, so let's just do that.
Well, okay, well, great.
But then you just end up reducing everything to the lowest common denominator, which is pleasure seeking.
Which, I mean, the lizard brain definitely thinks that that's the right thing to do, but I can think of lots of reasons not to do that.
So, I open by saying, Is atheism on the run?
What's your take on that question?
I think religion is fighting a desperate rearguard action against a force it doesn't understand.
And I mean, even everyone's like, Oh, what about the Muslims?
The Muslims are becoming secular.
Like, Western Muslims are religious for xenophobic reasons, right?
They're not religious because they are true, sincere believers.
It's a part of their culture to remain Muslim in the face of a foreign and overwhelming culture.
But if you look at Muslim countries around the world, just there are TikTok videos of Western Muslims going to a place like Turkey or whatever, like they're not fasting during Ramadan, they're not going for the mosque, Saudi Arabia building nightclubs.
Yeah, they're like, Well, they're not acting like Muslims.
It's like, yeah, because again, the argument that underpins all of religion is that God is necessary for the maintenance and operation of the universe, right?
And if science proves that actually matter is inert and operates on itself when energy is applied to it, then God has been banished from the conversation.
And science is proving its point by developing the things that we have.
And religion has yet to prove its point in the face of that.
And I don't even know if it could prove its point in the face of that.
And so, even if there was a kind of desire to become religious, the power of science and materialism is something that I think religion, the religious people don't understand the scope of what its argument is against you.
You know, its argument is that everything in the universe is theirs and not yours.
And you're having, I don't see how you're going to hold that back, frankly.
And if I could see a good argument, I would provide it.
I'd say, listen, religious people, this is what you need to defeat the evil, atheist, secularist materialism, because it is going to provide, it is going to produce a terrible and dystopian world that makes everyone really miserable and wants to kill themselves.
I don't want my kids, I would like to be religious.
I would like my kids to be religious, but I'm not going to pretend that I'm something I'm not.
And I'm not suggesting anyone should follow my example or anything like that, right?
If someone has feels in their heart truly religious, then I'm very, very good, very great, very glad for you.
And I wish I had that experience, but I'm not going to be dishonest about the experience I have.
And I'm also going to show you the deficiencies in your position, which is why you are being taken over by the atheists, right?
And if these arguments could be made or could be fortified or whatever, the only way to do that is to understand your own efficiencies and where their strengths lie.
Do you find that science has become its own religion over the years?
No, it's not even a religion.
That's the thing.
It's not that there aren't cult-like mentalities in science.
We've seen plenty of that.
Yeah.
And this is something that a historian called Thomas Kuhn writes about in his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he says, basically, in every era, there's an orthodoxy.
And at the fringe, a few people who see the reality that the orthodoxy is ignoring start piling up and saying, hang on a second, there is definitely something here.
And of course, they get cascaded because no one wants to hear the people at the fringes and what they have to say.
But eventually, more and more people start accumulating the fringes, and the strength of the evidence of the fringes becomes so powerful that it eventually overturns the new paradigm.
It overturns the old paradigm into a new paradigm.
And then at the fringes of that, new people start appearing.
So like scientific development is not just like this.
It's like that, then that, then.
But slowly but surely, you get an accumulation of knowledge.
It just is a frustrating thing.
But it's not a religion because it doesn't actually profess anything transcendent.
It doesn't hold a theology.
It doesn't have a religious dogma.
It's just they've got materialism.
And materialism comes with a certain set of presuppositions.
The first being pain and suffering is bad, right?
That's the most easy moral position to arrive at as a materialist.
And so you end up in a very utilitarian, well, I mean, I guess the only thing to do then is to maximize pleasure, which seems logical from that position.
But then you end up in some bizarre and gross places.
But also, it misses the point.
Actually, is morality calculated only in the consequent?
And the answer, I think, is no.
I think the way we got there is important.
And I think the intention of the thing that we're doing to begin with is probably at least as important as the other two components.
So the idea of just a purely utilitarian morality, I think, is just wrong.
Actually, you could probably end up coming to a conclusion that's barbaric.
So I haven't got an answer, basically.
we were talking off obviously camera and I said your heart had softened to Christianity, but I don't, I think, Oh, I'm totally pro Christianity.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Totally pro.
Like, I would rather the Christians win than the atheists.
Really?
Oh, yeah.
Because the future that the atheists are opening up to us is one where man, C.S. Lewis totally presaged this, where man is just a material blob living in a meat sack, living on a rock.
And so there's nothing sacred about him.
So we can, why wouldn't we start messing with our genes?
Why wouldn't we just put ourselves in Nozick's pleasure machine and just, you know, the Kuhn matrix that we were talking about in the podcast earlier?
What would be the argument against that if all you have is utilitarian pleasure seeking?
And the answer is there isn't one.
You know, it's something else that you have to ability.
So I would rather the Christians completely win.
The problem is, I don't think they are winning.
And I don't think they're going to win.
I think the very nature of the arguments that they are having have been checkmated by the materialists already.
And the fact that you're using a mobile phone and you're driving around in a car and you fly in a plane is proof that you go, yeah, no, I agree that science is true.
Of course.
And so the commitment that science is true is also the commitment that God is false.
I think, well, because religion...
That's a clip it's going to get.
Oh, yeah.
But I'll stand on that.
That is, yeah.
Because religion and science, well, I still do believe it does goes hand in hand.
Well, that was the entire point.
Yeah.
To study God's creation.
So Francis Bacon begins his Nova Morganum under the premise that man had probably not perfect knowledge, but man was given command of the earth by God, and Adam was given command of the earth by God.
And therefore, Adam must have had a much more proficient knowledge of how things worked in his day than Francis Bacon did in the 17th century.
Because otherwise, because Adam didn't live in suffering and in drudgery.
And so Francis Bacon's whole point with the Nova Morganum is to restore.
It's called the great instoration, which is a restoration of knowledge to the position that Adam hypothetically was in when God created the world.
And this is all well and good.
And they didn't know what they were doing when they were doing this.
They didn't know what the consequence would be.
They weren't trying to kill God or anything.
But the problem is when you set your premise of the universe is an independent material entity that operates outside of the intentions of anything, then that is the consequence of what you do.
And so you've sort of smuggled in a premise there that you didn't realize you were smuggling in.
And suddenly now we don't need God anymore.
And there were a couple of people, like, you know, Charles Berkeley, I think his name was, an 18th century bishop, Anglican bishop, I think it was, who was like, look, if we don't have God as the kind of the center of the universe, then everyone becomes an atheist.
And this is something that John Locke had been challenged with.
And he said, look, we'll just ban atheism.
It doesn't work that way.
It doesn't work that way.
You can't ban the absence of belief.
No, exactly.
You can't do that.
But Berkeley's position was that if he had what was called the idealist view, is that things only exist while we perceive them.
And therefore, for the universe to continue existing from moment to moment, it has to be perceived in the mind of God.
It's like, okay, but that's not true.
Things do exist while we don't perceive them.
And no one really believes that.
And so God ends up becoming more and more marginal.
And eventually you've got like the divine watchmaker who just set the universe spinning and then has done nothing for 13 billion years.
And it's like, okay, but the more and more remote God becomes, it's kind of like a God of the gaps argument, but it's kind of a God of the relevance argument.
Where it's like, well, God just isn't relevant to any of the calculations I'm making.
Why would I even talk about God?
And you see how God just withers away from the conversation.
And so again, these are not things I'm glad to be saying, but I think they are truths about the condition of the discourse.
And so the seed of killing God was in Newton and Bacon and all of these deeply God-fearing men, whether they realized it or not.
How can someone believe in objective morality, truth and beauty?
In other words, a static, unchanging metaphysical realm governed by laws, just as the physical world is governed by the laws of physics without grounding that in God?
I don't think they can.
Why?
Because it would all have to be relative, because everything would have to be a product of the material world.
So it's contingent on a set of circumstances that have come about.
And so there is no timeless, eternal, sort of platonic form of morality as handed down by God of the Old Testament or whoever without what you've suggested there.
So if you're a materialist, everything is relative.
And everything is a product of man's activity rather than something that's been handed down by a divine being.
It's a good answer.
No, it's a good answer.
I'm afraid it's, I think it's the correct answer.
That's the problem.
What makes you so sure?
Logically derivable.
Could you put 100% on that?
Yes, it's logically inevitable from the definition of the terms that we're using, right?
So for something to have been eternal and lasting from the beginning and end of time, it can't be part of the material realm.
It can't change.
And that requires something to have preceded it to have created it.
And so it must logically be something like a God.
or like what we describe as God who sets these rules, right?
But if you only believe that the contingent, changeable material realm exists, you can't arrive at something like that.
And that opens up a whole new set of questions.
Now, I don't know how the universe began.
You know, I don't know what it comes on, but I'm not saying that I do, right?
I'm not positing an answer to that.
But this is, I think, just deductively true from the premises.
Why are you pro-Christianity?
Because it's the traditional religion of the West.
And it's kind.
It's a kind religion.
And Christians are nice people.
And it's, I mean, I've got my moral criticisms of Christianity.
There are definitely times where I can see the sort of more pagan arguments where it's like, no, there are people we need to crush.
There are people we need to put in jail.
There are people we need to defeat.
Absolutely.
Don't think Christians would be more inclined for that now.
I'm not saying that a Christian can't be inclined towards that, but I think that a purely Christian morality does struggle with aggressing.
It does struggle with justification for aggression.
Yes.
Sometimes there is a justification for aggression.
Righteous anger.
Yes, but that tends to come from a moral system outside of Christianity that's kind of latent and assumed in most people being just because you are a human being in the world and this is how humans interact with one another.
So, but Christianity, I think, I mean, not only is it the traditional religion of the West, so if we want to continue a traditional society or at least a facsimile of one, we would need to become a Christian society.
But I just think it's just kind of.
And it's probably because I was raised in a post-Christian society.
So the thing about liberalism is it just accepts all the moral priors of Christianity and then says, yeah, and I can do those in a way without Christianity.
It's like, okay.
So we're still Christianity just without the Christians.
It's like Dawkins saying, I want the churches without the churchgoers.
Yeah.
But this is actually what liberalism has kind of provided.
But it's all inverting in and of itself now anyway.
Because of course it doesn't have a sort of an arbitrary God said this is the doctrine and that doesn't the Bible hasn't changed in a thousand five hundred years whatever.
So you know it's it's easy to have that as a universal statement for all of time, right?
But liberalism doesn't have that.
So liberalism is constantly undergoing this process of decay, essentially.
And so, yeah, I mean, we've got the perverted version of Christian morals.
But the Christian morals are actually good morals.
You know, it does lead to flourishing.
It does lead to harmony and happiness, especially on a personal level.
All of the Christians I know are lovely people and are very happy.
I don't think it's a coincidence, you know, that there are far fewer Christian suicide bombers than for certain other religions, right?
It's not a coincidence at all.
So it's probably my acclimatization to Christianity, but also I think you can just objectively and dispassionately look at what Christians do compared to what other religions do.
Say, yeah, there's definitely something to this.
Are there parts of Christianity you now admire or even desire, even if you're not fully convinced?
Yeah, loads.
Love thy neighbor as thyself is a perfectly good moral injunction that is obviously pro-communal and will obviously create a sense of community and peace and tranquility.
And if young people are children are raised with that kind of injunction over them, well, they will be very well inclined towards their own countries, their own families, their own communities, their own countries.
And it would be, and it's a great way of fostering a sense of patriotism.
I mean, this is a very positive message.
I mean, almost everything that Jesus says in the New Testament is morally positive.
It's hard to find actual deep moral fault with anything he's saying.
You've got to be fairly esoteric and say, okay, yeah, that's great.
But, you know, in the face of an aggressor, maybe there's a different moral standard we need to have or something like that.
But that's an exception rather than a rule, right?
All of the rules of Christianity are really good, which is why I'm happy to consider myself an ally of Christianity or an advocate of Christianity, even if I'm myself not one.
There's a fundamental question.
Let's talk about then.
You mentioned Jesus.
There's a fundamental question about Jesus that's been asked for literally generations.
When he claimed to be the Son of God, was he lying?
Was he deluded?
Or was he telling the truth?
In other words, was he a liar, a lunatic, or truly the Lord?
Who do you think he was?
Well, it's kind of not fair to ask me that because as an atheist, I'm like, well, I don't think he was.
Do you think he was a liar?
No, I think that we don't really haven't got the same understanding of what that means now than people then did, right?
So sons of gods are actually a really common thing in the ancient world, right?
Almost every kingly lineage claims to be derived from some kind of God or another, right?
And like, for example, the two kingships of Sparta directly derived from Hercules.
You've got Theseus, you've got a whole pantheon of Greek heroes, you've got Gilgamesh, who is two-thirds God and one-third mortal.
Like the interplay between the divine world and the material realm of human beings, totally common.
And like, you know, running back from the Battle of Marathon, is it Phydipides sees Hermes or something on the road, right?
So like the interplay between gods and mortals is totally common.
And you get a God like Zeus who just shags everything in sight and produces loads of bastard godlings.
This is a totally, totally normal thing.
And so in the first century AD, there would have been thousands and thousands of people who claimed to be the son of God.
I mean, you even have it in the Bible.
We've got Barabbas, right?
That means son of the father.
So that's what he's saying is I'm the son of God as well.
So you've got Jesus Barabbas and Jesus Christ, but two guys making exactly the same claim in the Bible, right?
So I'm not trying to cast dispersions on the text or anything, but like the point is, it's not unusual to find someone claiming to be the Son of God.
Now, what does that mean?
Well, we are saying that this is a particular commitment to a set of facts that we would say are not true in the modern secular atheist West.
And therefore, these people are liars in some way.
But actually, that's because our belief system is very different to theirs, right?
Their construction of the universe is that this is possible.
It can happen.
And God is the author of everything that happens.
And so if a series of events happen to you and they are deemed by yourself and by people around you to be miraculous and you have no other explanation for these, I think you could end up sincerely believing that you are the son of a God.
I don't think that everyone who's ever claimed to be the son of a God throughout history is a liar.
I think their belief system, the way they view the world and the universe is working, actually does support the argument that they are the son of a God, right?
And so essentially, Jesus appears to be a kind of Hellenistic import into Judaism and is bringing this tradition with him into the religion of the Jews.
And this, and he brings the Greek moral system into the religion of the Jews as well.
The Jewish religion is very parochial and it's morality.
So it's the morality for the Jews and morality for the Gentiles.
Whereas Jesus says, no, it's morality for the individual.
Because Greek moral systems are deeply egocentric.
If you go to Aristotle's virtue ethics, it's all about what you as an individual do.
Well, anything that's for the individual is also for everyone.
It's a universal thing because everyone is in the ultimate account an individual.
And so Greek morality and virtue ethics were universalist.
Any human could be virtuous, whereas not anyone was entitled to moral consideration according to the Torah.
And so what Jesus is doing is importing Greek morality into Jewish religion.
And this is why I think they ultimately reject him.
And saying, well, look, I'm the son of a God.
Well, that's no different to so-and-so Spartan king saying I'm the son of Hercules or whatever.
He was the one to say, I'm the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.
And what I find fascinating is if you look at all the other religions, they seem to point at Christ.
They say, Buddhists would say, well, he is a way, but come and follow us.
In Islam, they call him a prophet.
But Christ was the person who actually came out and said, I am not just, obviously, the Son of God, but God incarnate, you know, the beginning and the end, which sets him apart from everyone else.
So I guess, do you think he, well, yeah, do you think he was a liar or, you know, the same as a man who believes that he's, I don't know, a poached egg or something?
I mean, I think that he could believe that, but I don't think I believe it.
So, but I don't think you have to render someone as a liar when they make outrageous claims that would really require a lot of proving if they were being made today, right?
I don't think back then people were, because again, the scientific knowledge of the universe was much, much, much lower.
And so this may have explained things in a way that was persuasive to the people around him.
Clearly it was.
So, and again, because I don't like to cast aspersions on the character of these people, because there's no reason to think he was a bad person.
There's no reason to think if he's leading a morally unblemished life in every other way, why do I need to call him a liar?
Even if from a sort of secular materialist perspective, he could genuinely believe that, you know, or you've got the Christian theological perspective that he was that.
And so, you know, whichever you want.
Is there a fourth option, do you think?
Well, that the story was just made up.
Despite, you know, archaeological.
Yeah, no, I don't think it was made up.
I think there were lots of people called Yeshua running around ancient Israel claiming to be the son of God.
That's the problem, right?
This is actually that there's a there's a plurality of people claiming to be the Messiah.
It's not only one person.
So I don't see why there's any reason to think that the story is made up.
But there's an option, there's a possibility.
Do you find any teachings of Christ in particular?
I know you mentioned, you know, love thy neighbor.
Is there any others that he taught specifically as well that you find personally compelling, even if you're not going to or not ready to believe in him yet?
Yeah, I mean, I can't really think of anything that he says that isn't in some way laudable.
I've got to be honest, it has been a few years since I've read the Bible, so I haven't got all of his teachings memorized.
Do you want to give me some examples?
Yeah, sure.
So we've mentioned love thy neighbor, turn the other cheek.
When he was being crucified and put to death, and people spat and scorned at him, he said, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.
So even when he was being crucified and laid to death, betrayed by his best friend, he still turned to his enemies and forgave them.
I would argue, I mean, we talk about desires, we talk about the way that human nature is controlled by desires, and yet it seems to be the only religious or theological text and storyline, if we want to call it that, that tells man to reject his desires.
So I guess another one, yeah, would be forgiveness.
Yeah, I think that's a perfectly good moral teaching if the purpose is to become emotionally mature.
What this does is create a depth of character in a person so they're not gripped by their own emotions.
They actually can have a way of coming past these problems.
These are all really good teachings.
I just can't find any fault with any of them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, in today's society, I find, you know, you talk like we were talking about desires and everything.
I do think that that is the most difficult one.
And I struggle with that the most is forgiveness.
And it's such a gripping concept.
You know, why would I want to forgive someone that's done so much wrong to me, that has hurt me in such a way?
Yet we're called and commanded to do that moral teaching.
And it's difficult.
And, you know, I challenge anyone, you know, if you think that lust or gambling or anything like that is a, is a everyone has their own personal vice grips, of course they do.
But if they compare that with something like forgiveness, to forgive your enemies, I mean, I can't think of anything else that's more difficult, I would argue.
No, I agree with you.
It's one thing dealing with your own personal vices because that's all internal.
No one else has wronged you.
But, you know, I agree with you.
I'm not.
Where it's morally laudable, I'm not going to say I don't have an issue with that myself.
You know, there are definitely people I don't want to forgive.
Likewise, it's very difficult.
Do you which teachings then from both Christ and I guess the church or the religion do you believe to be a negative?
Well, I'm not a huge fan of turn the other cheek.
Okay.
I think that's, I think, I think Christians as well, and I'm going to get lambasted here, but I do think Christians do take that in a different way too.
I think turn the other cheek doesn't mean become a doormat.
And I know a lot of people like to use that particular one and say, oh, what?
Just let yourself be beat up.
No, there is self-defense.
Of course there is.
But turn the other cheek means, what do I think turn the other cheek means, really?
I think not to be over-encumbered with emotion on the first strike, I guess, in some way.
See, I didn't interpret it that way when I was reading about it because who is it that comes up and strikes Jesus?
Like.
Oh, now you're testing me.
I am because I'm not the biblical.
I'm not the Christian.
I'm still learning.
I can't remember if it was like a Roman soldier or his disciples or whoever.
But turning the other cheek is essentially.
I know he was on.
I know he taught in, I believe, John, and he was going through essentially, he was supposed to be the, well, he is the fulfillment of the Old Testament and the law.
And so it's not to discount the old law, but he was going through.
And I say to you, you were taught this, but actually this.
And a lot of it boiled down to, yeah, turning the other cheek instead of just taking injustice at your own sort of accord.
But the point of turning the other cheek was to show the person who had wronged him that he had wronged him, right?
Because if you re-revenge...
And, well, yeah, turn the other cheek instead of...
But the turning, yeah, but it's not just that.
It's to show the person that they've wronged you.
Because if someone strikes you in the face and you strike them back, well, now you're just as culpable, right?
And the discourse, the dialectic they had opened, you have played into.
And what Jesus does in this is breaks this dialectic and just says, okay, well, I'll take the other one then.
And that's not really saying, allow people to hit you.
What that's saying is, I mean, he's essentially won a moral argument there, right?
He's had the moral disagreement with whoever struck him in the face.
And he wins it by not engaging in the dialectic that that person is trying to engage in.
And so he has sort of checkmated him in that regard.
So I wouldn't, I personally wouldn't actually, if I was a Christian, I wouldn't consider turning the other cheek to actually be a moral command.
I would say that that's a correct strategy to win an argument in this way, rather than it being an immortal moral command.
But I'm not a Christian, so don't take mine.
But you say you have a problem with the turning the other cheek.
Well, the way that Christians interpret turning the other cheek is just don't ever fight back in your own cause.
I disagree with that.
I really hate that.
A lot of Christians hate that too.
Yeah, I'm good because I'm far more persuaded by Nietzsche.
It's like, no, it'd be better to be the guy making the other guy suffer than being the guy who suffers, frankly.
I guess that's different because I think it goes into revenge territory involved.
Well, it's not even about revenge.
It's like, I just don't see the advantage of putting yourself at the mercy of your enemies ever.
But maybe they'll feel sorry for us.
It's like, why are we giving them that opportunity?
You know, I don't, yeah, sorry.
I don't want to get to that point where it's like, well, let's hope that today is going to be the day that they show mercy on us.
Let's just make sure that we're strong and guarded and we don't have to appeal to the mercy of our enemies.
Yeah.
And they can appeal to us.
And you know what?
We can be merciful, right?
When they're appealing to our mercy, we will be merciful.
You know, because we're us and we know that we're good people and we don't want to hurt people.
And so we can be merciful to our defeated enemies rather than praying to God our enemies don't act like Genghis Khan or the Assyrians or something.
You know, that's how I feel about it.
It'd be better for me to be the judge of when to be merciful because I'm a much better person than that fellow.
You could argue that's a desire in a way.
Just seems reasonable.
In your opinion, are there aspects of the modern world that you feel religion or particularly Christianity is answering more truthfully than secular culture?
Yeah, I mean the only place that the modern world the place that the modern world really falls down is on what a person ought to be doing, right?
Like no modern philosophy has got an answer to that.
So what ought I be doing today?
There's no answer.
I mean, what would any of them say?
What would liberalism say?
What would communism say?
What would progressivism say?
What would any fascism say?
What ought I do?
Well, but religion's actually, yeah, no, pray.
Get up, pray, you know, love your, you know, serve your community, go to church on Sunday, you know, actually have an affirmative doctrine of what a person ought to do.
Because all of these others are like, no, I want to, I want a perfect system that does this.
Okay, but what am I doing?
You know, a lot of people, I'm sure a lot of young people say, I don't know what I'm doing.
You know, why am I doing any of the things that I'm doing?
And I'm just kind of trapped in this right race without knowing why I'm doing any of this.
And what religion is really good for is saying, no, you need to do this, right?
And you need to do this.
And you get for these reasons and you'll feel better about it.
You'll have done the right thing.
God will be pleased with you.
Get up, go to church, right?
That's a great maxim to live by.
It's just, look, just go to church.
Go do this thing.
Modern life has no answer for what people should actually be doing.
Or anything you want, bro.
We're liberals.
Like, okay, but like, it doesn't mean anything and it doesn't make me morally good.
And a lot of the time, I think there are a lot of people who do things and they're like, actually, I'm kind of ashamed I did that, but I was allowed to do that.
So why do I feel ashamed?
They're conflicted.
They don't know what they're doing.
And so religion's a really good way of avoiding that, especially Christianity is a really good way of avoiding that and helping those people who otherwise don't know what they should be doing.
Purpose.
And not just purpose, though, but instruction as well.
Yeah, structure and purpose.
Yeah.
Which I think is what every person on this earth essentially longs for in a way and worship.
And to know they're doing the right thing.
And religion, you know, when it's in a correct kind and honestly, genuinely quite Christian form, usually provides that.
It's like, look, this is your instruction for the day.
Do this.
It's like, you're good.
You know, a lot of people need that.
Unfortunately, a lot of churches have gone down the route of social justice.
Trust me.
The local church, I got my kids christened in my wife's local church.
Nice.
So found me up in that.
And yeah, it's fine.
I'm very happy to have it done.
That's awesome.
But the problem is it's run by a pair of women.
And it's very modern.
It's very modern, right?
And it's not that they're bad people.
They're great people.
They're lovely, right?
But they do everything.
It feels like Tony Blair is running the church.
It feels that things can only get better in there.
And so they'll have like it's very sort of 2000s consensus church.
And so they'll have like a pop song, a modern pop song with lyrics dubbed over it, pro-Jesus lyrics.
You know, Jesus Loves Me to some Robbie Williams tune or something.
And yeah, exactly.
I hate it, man.
And I'm literally at the point.
That's not Christianity.
Well, it's not.
That's the point.
It's kind of the plastic modernity imposed on the world.
We're told to reject the world, not mold it together with a child.
I would much rather, and I tweeted this the other day, I would much rather to go into a very solemn affair with Gregorian chants and I have to sing hymns in a particular way.
And then I get a Bible-thumping lecture from someone calling me a sinner, giving me a concrete and incisive moral argument, then sit there through the plastic modernity of Christianity as filtered through the lens of being a woke progressive, right?
I would be at least interested in the Gregorian chants and the spirituality of it, and then being told that I'm a sinner that's going to burn in hell forever.
I would be way more interested in hearing his argument than being told actually Christianity is just everyone about being nice and being inclusive.
And that's, I think, I think it's insulting actually to hear when people say, well, Christianity, like you said, it's just about being nice.
It's just about being peaceful and everything.
No, you're taught to rebuke.
You're taught to command and you're commanded to go out and spread the gospel, but not with the sword.
Of course.
And I just want to be clear: the ladies who run this church are lovely.
Absolutely.
And they're just doing their best in the modernist frame.
Yeah, sure.
And there's no reason to think that they should be able to understand what we're talking about here and have a knowledge of this kind of conversation and think, oh, yeah, no, I have to break out of the modernist frame in order for Christianity to thrive.
There's no reason for them to think that because they're just normal people in the world.
They're very middle of the road people who are just doing the best they can to keep their faith alive.
And this is the kind of form that it takes in modernity.
I just hate that kind of form.
And I can't stand it.
You should come to an Orthodox liturgy.
I'm English.
No, you can.
Of course you can.
No, no, no.
Spiritually, I can't.
I'm a Protestant.
You find that denominations becomes more about politics as opposed to, and domination over or dominion over particular institutions as opposed to a spiritual thing.
I just can't help but feel that because I'm English, I should go to a Protestant.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Oh, I was a Protestant for a year and a half.
The Orthodox ones look lovely, though.
Wonderful.
Yeah.
They do look very cool.
And you've got all the Gregorian chants and everything, and all in ancient Greek as well.
And hearing it all that, it's very cool.
What is the biggest question you still wrestle with when it comes to faith, God, or the church?
I don't really wrestle with them, to be honest.
No.
Because it sounds like, excuse me for saying this, it sounds, I do hear some wrestling.
I don't know if that even makes sense.
Like, there are some things where you go, well, it is nice.
Because you said earlier, I wish I had that experience.
So what is it that's stopping?
What is it that stops a person who's in a wheelchair from getting up and walking?
I don't know, you know, but it's...
Do you feel yourself as spiritually dead?
Yeah, just not even dead because that implies that it was somehow alive.
Like, you know, you could be asking me, well, why aren't the wings on your back fluttering?
I'm like, I don't have wings on my back.
You know, so what are you talking about?
You know, and that's just how I feel.
It's like, I don't feel an emptiness because for a lack of religion, right?
So I don't feel a need to, I'm not like, you know, I'm not grasping after religiosity.
And so I get home and I'm just doing what I do when I get home.
And then I'm, you know, doing whatever I do afterwards and read some books.
You know, if I get lucky, I'll play a video game in the evening and then I'll go to bed and I'm not, I don't feel spiritually unfulfilled.
And I don't know why.
And I would like it if I wanted spirituality.
But I don't feel the need for it.
And I think a lot of people in the modern world are kind of like me and not like me.
And I don't know what that means for the question of religion going forward.
Well, if you ever did come to believe in God, what kind of God would you hope he is?
Well, I mean, I kind of like the God of the Old Testament.
It's the same God as in you.
Yeah, I'm entirely persuaded of that.
I mean, it depends what the purpose of it all is, right?
Like, if the purpose is to be a virtuous person throughout your life, then, okay, the God of Jesus Christ is a good one, right?
He seems to have harmony and tranquility down, and that's good.
But the purpose of life, if it turns out there's a God, might not be that.
And so I guess you would have to ask, you know, if the purpose is to amass the largest army possible for when the Ragnarok arrives, well, then we're doing a really bad job, actually.
Very few of our heroes are getting into Valhalla at the moment.
And it looks like the force of darkness are going to crush us.
Come the Ragnarok.
So just saying, you know, it depends what the purpose of the universe is when it comes to it, right?
So what do you think it might be?
I don't know.
I don't think there's a purpose.
That's the problem.
Yeah.
You know, I'll end it on that.
But without getting too sentimental about it, like I've put it this way, I was an atheist for 27 years.
I didn't believe in absolutely anything.
I was once a communist.
I, you know, obviously Brexit and Trump changed that forever.
Don't play I was never a communist.
Yeah.
I used to be a liberal.
Yeah, I was very bad, you know, did even did presentations in sick form about, you know, Tommy Robinson.
Oh, really?
People like that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I told him about that, I think, once, about that.
So, you know, it was that kind of, yeah, awful.
But I didn't believe in anything.
And then something happened, and it was an experience, though I realized I traced my steps and you look back and you realize that you are, even if you don't know you're doing it, searching for something.
And someone told me something that has stuck with me ever since.
And it was when I was an atheist.
And I want to say the same thing to you, actually.
Don't leave it too late.
Because I see that actually within yourself.
And I've noticed it.
And you display the qualities of what a Christian could be.
And this isn't, you know, I'm not the one that's, you know, or anyone else here, you know, or out there is going to convert you or anything like that.
And I don't think that's the aim.
But people see the quality of that and the Christian sort of morality, you know, baked in you, if that makes sense.
And don't leave it too late.
So I've always, I've long thought about this.
What happens if it is all true?
Does that scare you?
What the Pascal's wager?
Not really, because I just don't really believe it.
So I just don't think it is true.
But the thing is, I've decided that he'll probably understand.
He'll understand.
I think.
You reckon?
Yeah, I reckon so.
You'd have to be a pretty unreasonable God.
Like, well, you grew up in an intransigently atheist materialist culture.
And you lived a Christian life, even if you weren't an openly professing Christian religious person.
So, I mean, you know, I don't go around harming people or trying to harm people.
So I'm pretty sure that he's going to have at least something to say in my defence there.
Surely.
Well, what do I want to say to that?
To end it on.
Yeah, don't leave it too late, is what I would say.
But I don't know.
I think we're always presented with a choice when we're given the information.
If maybe one day you may look into Jesus like I did a little bit further and realized in my perspective, humble perspective, that nobody would die for a lie, I don't think.
And that's something that I wrestled with for a long time.
Why would 12 apostles follow him and then each, apart from Judas, I guess, proceeded to claim to have seen him after three days of being pronounced dead in a tomb and each one were hunted down, tortured, some skinned alive, turned upside down and crucified.
And then even followers outside of the apostles claimed to have seen him and were all hunted down and tortured.
And why would they do it for a lie?
Because, like we said earlier, you know, back then I don't think people would have just lied.
So that was a big, so for me, that was the moment where I thought, okay, well, I'm presented with a choice.
If this is true, do I follow it or do I ignore it?
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