Should You Go To College, Is Adderall Good For Kids, & Did Judas Go To Heaven? | With Eudaimonia
In this thought-provoking video, we explore the complex and interrelated topics of betrayal, purpose, and higher education in the context of U.S. politics. We begin by examining the controversial figure of Judas and the possibility that his betrayal of Jesus was actually an "inside job" orchestrated by Jesus himself. We explore the arguments for and against this theory and consider what it might mean for our understanding of purpose and sacrifice.
From there, we delve into the concept of eudaimonia, or human flourishing, and its connection to living a life of purpose and meaning. We explore how this ancient Greek philosophy has been revived and adapted in contemporary psychology and positive psychology, and consider its implications for individual and societal well-being.
Finally, we turn our attention to higher education and its role in shaping our political culture. We explore how the values and ideas that are taught and learned in universities and colleges are shaping the ways in which we think about politics and engage with one another as citizens. We consider the challenges and opportunities that higher education presents for promoting civic engagement, critical thinking, and democratic values.
Whether you are a student, a political junkie, or simply someone interested in the big questions of life, this video is sure to inspire and challenge your thinking. So grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and join us on this journey of discovery and reflection.
That's like the, like with the distinction you just drew, the formal education versus, you know, sort of something perhaps less formal.
And this is something I took issue with at the beginning of that most recent video I made is when, you know, and I love Tucker Carlson, but I didn't like when he said, you know, I can give you a pile of books and you'll be better educated.
And I remember thinking, well, if you have a particularly well adapted sort of constitution, then maybe if you learn how to learn.
Do you think we're going through the same thing now in terms of the higher education debate that the Catholic Church and the Reformation were going through?
In the sense that the Catholic Church was for centuries the formal authority on the word of God.
And then when it was translated and people started reading it for themselves, the argument was like, hey, you need to actually learn from the experts on what this means.
And then the counter argument was like, no, we can read it for ourselves and figure it out.
I think what's what and what's more striking to me about the educational shift, I guess, that we've seen in colleges really in the 20th century and more so the 21st century is the, and again, this is, this point is almost trite.
At this point, you hear people talk about, you know, all conflict is theological and what we've now replaced the more traditional understanding of what a college education was meant to be with, you know, these progressive sort of bastions is what they are now and these professors who, to their credit, they believe in things.
And I think that that's something that the old right, you know, folks over the age of, I don't know, 50, the people who like Sean Hannity more than Tucker Carlson, the people who don't appreciate the fact that you're up against people who really do believe in something.
And that comes with, that's a different set of challenges than someone who says, I disagree, but, you know, that's, that's the whole nature of our discussions and our debates.
And that's why we have tenure.
So we can disagree.
Whereas now you're fighting against people who, for although you disagree with what they think, they do believe in something real.
And that's unnerving because the right can't seem to get its get its act together.
Basically, my friends and I were talking and it was we were talking about how a college campus like Notre Dame and presumably, you know, similarly situated schools, the anxiety over performance and grades is very high at most schools, but particularly a school like that.
And as a result, we would see all of these posters for the counseling center, right?
And he had it within, I think it was a matter of days.
He's like, I just, you know, they give you this questionnaire and it's obvious how to answer to get a certain score.
And he's like, I got an Adderall prescription for life.
And it's just, it was, and we all, we all thought it was, I mean, it's, it's hysterical in sort of a cosmically dark way that you can walk in and get these prescriptions for, I mean, he got a Adderall is probably one of the easier ones to get than something like depression.
In Tennessee, they wanted me to see a specialist and do like, there's a more extensive test that they used to give universally and they make you do it in Tennessee, or at least the doctor I met with did.
It's like an hour long.
And what it is, is it's a screen with like, I think it's like got four quadrants.
And I could be totally full of shit on this, but this is how it was described to me by a friend who did it when I was in high school.
So four quadrants and you get a clicker, right?
Like a little handheld clicker, like a pen, but connected.
And anytime a dot pops up in the first quadrant, you click it and they measure your latency time.
So if you space out and you're thinking about your taxes or whatever, and it goes in the box and you miss it, and you could easily fake it.
But that was sort of how they would actually test to see if you had ADD was your response time on what, you know, if we're sitting there for an hour, how many, like how often do you get it right when the dot appears in quadrant one versus two, three, four?
I mean, that's what was just, it was just surreal because you'd always talk, oh, I bet they give it out like candy.
And you're like, oh my God, they really give it out like candy.
And you just wonder how many drugs they're doing that with and how many people.
And, you know, for this Adderall shortage, how many people are on this that don't need to be that, for example, you need to be.
And now, you know, they're, and not that they're probably the cause of the shortage, but it certainly doesn't help that there are a lot of people on it who shouldn't be.
And especially at the, and we talked about this, but at the level of children who are just acting like children and teachers just don't like to have to do their job anymore and they want them lobotomized.
So the one of the main problems I have with giving children Adderall is that it will make them efficient at things that they are not naturally passionate about.
So for me, when I don't take it, I'm still highly productive, just not at the things that I need to be.
So I can, you know, I'm a musician, so I'm highly creative when I don't take it and I'm not as creative when I do.
I can read much better, actually, like when I'm, when I'm not on it than when I am on it, because when I am on it, I can look at a spreadsheet, but when I'm not on it, I can't look at a spreadsheet.
So you have people that have been taking this Adderall their entire lives, for example, from kindergarten all the way up through 12th grade, and they might think that they want to be in finance because they've been medicated to a place where they can actually handle doing it.
But then without the medicine, they're like, holy shit, I should have been a painter.
So you have these people that are living these lives that are like medicated to have a different personality type almost.
And that's, but I'm a small business owner.
So I have to do things that I don't naturally like to do just to keep my business running, like spreadsheets and QuickBooks and, you know, respond in a timely manner to people.
But, but it's not who I Chase Geyser actually am when I medicate it.
It's just who I need to be in that moment.
But as an adult, I have the maturity to know the difference.
Well, you know, and I asked other people to confirm if this was true.
When you don't take it and then you take it one time, you feel it.
I remember I felt like my eyes felt really big or something.
I remember like, you almost feel like my wiener was huge.
See, something you definitely have an energy spike, but I've not taken it consistently in a way that would, you know, let me know what it's like to be on it long term.
Like, I think I'm wondering, you know, and it was just like one of those things where even the teacher afterward, because I was kind of a shithead student, was like, how did you fucking hear this?
Like, you obviously didn't cheat because you were the first one done.
So it wasn't like you were looking off the person next to you, right?
It's, it's, it's scary stuff, but I'm with you, man.
Like on the education front, I agree that a lot of kids are getting brainwashed by our higher educators, but I think that the type of people that get brainwashed at that age are probably the type of people that would get brainwashed no matter what they did.
And the reason I value higher education so much, not that it's for everyone and not that you should be reckless in choosing where you go to school or what you study, but it's the feedback element.
Like that's one of the things I miss the most about college is, hey, you need to have this read by this date and you need to write an essay that's 2,500 words or whatever by this date about it.
And I will read it and I'll even sit down with you and go over it with you.
Cause I went to a college that had a very high teacher to student ratio.
So I had relationships with my professors like that.
That's what I miss because when I have ideas now and sometimes I get things wrong when I make content, I get feedback in the comments, I guess, but it's not like I'm sitting with a Jordan Peterson who can tell me why I got the nature of personality wrong in the context of World War II Nazi Germany.
So I'm just like shooting like, I hope I'm right.
You know, I did my best, but I don't have any of that like final draft in the terms of the way that I learn now.
And that attention, especially at the undergrad level, is something that is, in my observation and in my own conversations with my professors, has really gone by the wayside in the past 70 years because, you know, it's publisher parish for these professors.
And so their duty in their mind, their job is not to teach these snot-nosed undergrads who don't even care about what they do for a living.
Their duty is to do that because they absolutely have to and then go teach the graduate students and write papers and publish in journals.
And they don't care about sitting down with the undergrads anymore.
They don't care about the formation of the students.
It's a box checking exercise, even in my experience, for most at the 300, 400 level classes.
That changes somewhat, but it's really disheartening.
And I'm not an academic.
I considered the path for a little bit.
When I was in law school, we tried to finagle a way to do a JD PhD program to keep that open, but the law school was the one that wouldn't budge.
The political theory professors were open to making it work, but the law school was weird about it.
I think they have the program now, of course, but when I was there, they didn't.
And it's really the change in how professors see their job is it's publisher parish.
And these undergrads, they're just there for the bachelor's in their view.
And so they don't, these professors don't care because they don't think the undergrads care.
And they're probably right to some extent, but they could make the undergrads care.
You could teach these kids how to learn, right?
Like you said at the start of the conversation, you know, they could learn how to learn if only you dedicated a little bit of time to helping them.
Well, I mean, so there's sort of two prongs, right?
There's the, there's the low-hanging fruit, which is to talk about the social progressivism that we see in social science departments, you know, anthropology departments.
I remember I took an intro to anthropology class for a social science credit.
And I was a non-religious, you know, I was like a philosophically inclined young person.
So I was like a moral relativist.
I owned that.
You know, I was, I was that guy.
I was pretty insufferable, especially at a place like Notre Dame.
But even I bristled at some of the things the intro to anthropology professor would say, like, you know, these, these comments that were disparaging of monogamy or family commitment.
They're like, oh, these are all social constructs, right?
There's everything.
It really, it sounds like a parody.
And I was not, I was politically interested, but I wasn't politically interested like I am now.
But it was like they were saying everything was a social construct.
And I started to push back.
Even moral relativist, non-religious, you know, libertarian at best, me, really pushed back against it because it really just didn't seem congruent with my own observations.
And that goes to the whole education as uneducation, right?
Disregard everything that made you who you were until you were 18 and let us tell you it's all a construct.
But then there's the other way.
That's the whole social, that leads to the social progressivism in my mind and sort of the relativism we see.
But there's another side that scares me in another way because it cannot serve as a check to that social progressivism, which is we see the rise of the STEM and even more so business majors.
I mean, it's, I remember my Patrick Denin, my professor at Notre Dame, one of my favorite, my favorite professor, and certainly in certain respects, the man who saved my soul, because I wouldn't be Catholic if not for him.
He once described it as majoring in, you know, he took the word business and it's busyness.
You know, you're majoring in busyness.
You're majoring in something that is so corporeal.
It's not what the education is meant to be at all.
And so what we really have is a huge chunk of our undergrads are studying business, really.
Like more, it's on the rise so much, especially at more elite schools.
They're doing great, but I made to think that they could have gotten that from a truncated program that was two years in lieu of a college education.
And so we're churning out these people on the one hand and true believer progressives on the other.
And so unless you're at a particularly politically conservative or religious school, although even a lot of Catholic schools are really falling by the wayside in terms of their commitment to the faith, we're not arming our young people to really put a halt to this because half of the people are apathetic and half are true believers on the very opposite end of the political spectrum from me.
And so I worry that as this goes on, like the corporate HR world culture will become more just that.
It will become the norm.
And people call this different things.
People can just call this progressivism.
I know that certain dissident right-wing folks online call it the longhouse, right?
I think that there's a lot of different terms for it.
But it's HR world, right?
The whole world is run like a law firm's or a corporation's HR department.
And we see that more and more.
And this was something that I talked about in the video and something that is a recurring theme, what I say online and probably bring up again is that what was going on for the past 20 to 30 years when everyone who could have done something said, oh, those liberal college kids, right?
It's these are kids at Harvard, right?
These are not the local community college kids.
They're going to graduate from Harvard with a Harvard pedigree and they're going to go on to run everything.
And so, you know, as that orthodoxy just really strengthens its hold, because it already has a hold, as it strengthens its hold, I don't know if it, if it, if it does not instill any confidence in me at the rate we're going.
I think that what you have to do, a lot of people say retreat from college, which I was not a big fan of that approach, but I think you have to find the right ones.
And I think we have to hold those up.
There are a lot that I think are lost causes.
I don't know.
And again, my point of reference is Notre Dame, which has held out better than most Catholic universities of that size, Boston College, Georgetown.
But it's, you know, they want to be like their peer institutions.
They want to, if Washington University in St. Louis or if Duke jumped off a bridge, would you?
And Notre Dame seems to be answering in the affirmative because it's all about being like the peer institutions, which is really a funny thing because to my mind, a peer institution of a school like Notre Dame, Catholic school, it's not Jesuit, it's its own order, Congregation of the Holy Cross.
A peer institution might be, I don't know, a small Christian or Catholic university like Franciscan University at Steubenville.
Maybe that's, why is, why is, why does the U.S. News and World Report determine who our peer institutions are rather than the faith?
Shouldn't, you know, the Catholic faith or even the Christian faith more broadly determine who our peers are, not who happens to be one slot below or above us on the U.S. news ranks.
Like, why is Duke a peer of Notre Dame, but not Franciscan University?
Because to my mind, Franciscan shares what should be Notre Dame's vision and historically was Notre Dame's vision much more than Duke or Cornell or Vanderbilt.
But it seems that schools like Notre Dame have cast their lot.
And so I think that what we're going to see is it'll be some holdout institutions.
And I hope that they can continue to hold out.
But I worry because these progressives are colonists, right?
They're ideological colonists.
They're cultural chauvinists.
And they won't be happy until every institution looks like what they want it to look like.
I know because I used to share those priors.
When I got to Notre Dame, I was like, this school needs to change.
This school needs to be like every other school that I almost went to instead.
I just went because it was the best school I got into.
And that's what I, so I'll often say, like, you know, procedurally based, substantively cringe, right?
When I, when the left does something to really hammer down on their opponents, because as a procedural matter, they get it.
They know how to win.
They think they're right.
And they want to fight for what they believe in.
Whereas the American right might be substantively more on point with me, but procedurally, they will cede power whenever they can.
I tweeted the other day, you know, like giving an American conservative power is like giving a torch to a pyrophobe.
Like they're afraid of it.
They're afraid of wielding power and doing anything to advance what they think is right.
And I think it was Charles Murray, who for all his flaws and faults, if you, you know, he's a controversial figure, I should say.
But he wrote a piece about two fictional towns called Belmont and Fishtown.
And it was basically, you know, classes coming apart in America.
But the real thesis here, or the point that I'm getting at, is that he said that the problem with people who hold a certain traditional values is not that they don't practice what they preach.
It's that they don't preach what they practice.
They privately believe all these things and practice them, but they don't have the, I don't know, the fortitude, the constitution, the confidence of their own beliefs to go out into the world and say, how I live is the right way to live, demonstrably so.
Instead, they say, live and let live.
This is how I want to live.
They're very private.
And there's nothing wrong with being private in certain situations, but they seem to be afraid of advocating for their own positions and lifestyles, even though they privately think they're right.
And to my mind, and I think to a growing number of younger folks on the right, there is the question of, well, if we think we're correct, if we really think that how we live or what we believe is right, then why wouldn't we fight for it with the same fervor that much of the left fights for their priors and their positions?
And I think that that's a disconnect that is, at least right now, it's encouraging because out with the old, in a certain respect, on the right.
But I don't know if that will maintain because it's easier to have these positions when you're young, I think, and you're not, you know, you're not the because conservatives will always be defeated because they want to be left alone comparatively.
So when these young firebrands on Twitter, it's inherently a reactive, it's not a proactive political right.
And so when they have kids and when they have families and they've got jobs and like they're all now 40 instead of 25 on Twitter, will the fervor die?
I think so to some extent.
But of course, it's replaced.
But that's a worry I do have.
But again, I think that there is an appreciation for the shifting tides a little more now because we see the left really fighting for what it believes in.
And again, like you said, I admire that.
I think it's fine to be a cultural colonist, right?
To say, I'm right.
You should believe what I believe.
Because that's sure as hell how the left operates.
And they won't be happy until every institution, every professor, every campus, every, and this is outside of even just education, until everything looks like how they want it to look.
And they don't tolerate any dissent on that front.
They don't want these religious universities to operate religiously.
And so there needs to be a response that is similar in procedure from the right.
And it sounds like a stretch until you read his book and you're like, holy shit, right?
And so in the context of what we just talked about, of you know, at least the left is fighting for what it believes in, I want to show you this video because I want to see if you think I'm curious as to whether or not they actually believe it.
Capitalist movement in the 60s, they were really reeling from the practical failure of communism, which they had previously claimed would out-produce capitalism and would be this industrial success.
The Soviet Union was just totally failing.
You know, people were starving.
Of course, what's happening in China?
Basically, the left, they had to choose between anti-capitalism or industrial production.
No, instead, they chose anti-capitalism, but they needed a new objection to capitalism because it couldn't be, well, it's not productive because clearly it's productive and communism isn't.
So it was, oh, it's environmentally bad.
The people focused on that and not focused at all on the evils of communism were not humanitarian.
How dare you?
The decision to continue to oppose capitalism reveals a lot of the anti-humanism of collectivism.
So, you know, actually, it almost, to my mind, undergirds what I said, because these people will do anything to advance what they will believe, no matter how contrary to what they observe.
It, you know, they will advance these environmental.
And I'm for to my mind, the jury's out a little bit more maybe than saying it's all fake, but I do think it's certainly overstated by, you know, the environmental camp.
They are willing to do anything to advance what they believe, which is the economic and political priors of anti-capitalism and sort of communist preferences.
So it's whether they believe in the actual environmental claims, to my mind, is immaterial.
Perhaps they don't.
Perhaps you're right.
But if anything, it just proves that they will do anything for what they believe.
Whereas the right, like let's say the right had an analogous program.
The right would have a much greater proportion of its own people being detractors, saying, well, wait a minute, you know, this, we should do more, we should do more studies.
We should check this more.
Again, not about environmentalism.
It would be something else.
But the right is, to its peril in certain respects, more intellectually honest when maybe there are times that it is prudent to think about what you really believe and get behind it.
not suggesting activism is more is more pragmatically successful than than uh intellectualism necessarily like you don't really change someone's mind by kicking their ass in a debate i think the past 500 years and certainly the past 100 have demonstrated that you don't win from debates and that's almost what tucker carlson's heritage foundation talk over the weekend was about you know he said i've been trying to do these discussions for 20 years they don't work right because you can win over other intellectuals but most people aren't intellectual Right.
They don't want to have these conversations.
And we need to understand how people actually operate.
And it's not through reasoned debate and civil discussion.
As much as our aspirations might tell us that that's what we want man to be, that's not what man is.
And so there's a time and place for that.
But I think we have to acknowledge that's not how people are.
And the left, both in the American sense and the truer sense of leftism in the global and historical sense, seems to understand that a lot more than certainly the American right, which is operating in this mid-20th century ideal of William Buckley marketplace of ideas, which goes back to sort of these blind faith.
And, but I do think that the right relies, the American right relies on these organic processes, right?
There's a blind faith in the marketplace of ideas or even the economic markets to always yield good results.
And I think that the past century, maybe even more than that, but certainly the past century, 50 years, past 30 years, 20 years, have really demonstrated that neither of those markets, that of the marketplace of ideas or the markets that we see economically, do they yield good results?
I think demonstrably.
More debate, you let them into your debates and then they kill you.
So I don't know if I'm not sold.
And as to the economic markets, although I'm not an economist, I would say that the unfettered market has certainly failed in yielding beneficial results too.
And when I applied to college, it was the most dispassionate thing you could think of.
I put the ACT on one axis of a graph and my GPA on another axis.
And I made a circle.
I said, all right, here are the schools in that range.
And Notre Dame was one of them.
And I got into Notre Dame.
It was the highest ranked school I got into and the highest ranked one I applied to.
And I was like, okay, let's go there.
And I didn't visit Notre Dame before, except as a kid, I'd go to football games there sometimes, but I never visited for the purposes of a college visit to attend.
So there's one to three priests who live in every dorm.
There's a chapel in every dorm.
There's religious iconography everywhere, which I guess what I was thinking it was going to be was more like a Georgetown or a Boston college where the Catholicism was a sort of vestige, right?
It's we're historically Catholic, but we don't really own that anymore because that's at the time that's what I wanted.
And I applied to transfer.
Notre Dame has a 99% retention rate, but I was going to be the 1%, you know, because you didn't like seeing a crucifix on every wall.
I was that guy, man.
And they'd all come back from Mass because Mass was in the dorms on Sundays.
You could just go right down the hall, which is great in hindsight.
And I started to go by the end of it all.
But I remember, and I would give him so much grief, like jokingly, because they were my friends, but they were like, I was that guy.
And so I just got to the point where I started to take, you know, I majored in philosophy and political science.
And so that's when I read You Know Who, you know, Big Man Aristotle.
I read Plato.
And I began to sort of think of these things as interesting philosophical sort of experiments, thought experiments, but not much more than that.
The concept of, well, maybe there is such a thing as a good life, an objectively good life, a way to be virtuous that is objectively true and not just a matter of moral relativism.
Because I wrote my final, my final paper, an intro to philosophy, was defending moral relativism.
Well, and you know, I probably thought, I don't remember, but I probably thought I was the smartest guy around, especially on a campus like that.
I was like, no one thinks like me.
No one's ever heard of atheism before.
Like, just total nonsense.
And so I, but anyway, anyway, I began to sort of contemplate the idea, well, maybe there is a right way to live.
There is a way of achieving human flourishing, right?
And I think there's a Greek word for that.
There's sort of a way to attain that by a certain formula.
And there's a way to be good, right?
I remember sort of this was a rudimentary way to convince undergrads, but I remember a professor said, you know, if you have a good chair, what does that mean?
Well, okay, a good chair is one that you can sit in and it supports your weight and it's not so uncomfortable as to be unusable.
And okay, what's a good fork?
Well, a good fork is one that doesn't break when you try to pierce food with it, et cetera, et cetera.
And, well, okay, if you understand what a good fork means or a good chair or a good computer, then is there a good human?
Is there a good man that is not just good in the way that he's kind?
But that is what actually sort of started the gears turning in my head.
It was actually Plato more than Aristotle in that sense, just that sort of undergrad thought experiment.
And that sort of evolved, you know, as I took political theory courses then.
And that began to develop over time, importance of things like tradition and hierarchy and order, not just for their own sake, but because of what they can preserve and that being the good life of people.
And, you know, and I'm certainly glossing over a lot of things and a lot of the studies and a lot of the notes, but sort of giving a mile high view.
And I began to sort of appreciate Christianity and Catholicism in a political sense first, because I was like, okay, I can't really buy the actual theological and metaphysical.
But then what I started, what started, and here's where the real, I guess, spiritual conversion came.
I thought, I realized I was putting the cart before the horse, because if I think that all these things make a good society and make a good person, why do I think that is the good person over the hedonistic moral relativist?
What is it, even in my secular brain that intuits, what has placed that blueprint in my mind that there is a better way to be?
Where does that come from?
And I sort of almost reverse values.
I almost reverse engineered this idea that, well, this preference comes from somewhere.
It's written onto all of our, all the human heart almost.
And I began to think, well, okay, if I can accept that all these things are the right way to be and the good way to be, then that idea, that preference comes from somewhere.
And that must come from the man himself who the divine author.
And so I said, okay, if I accept all these things are good, then I accept the author of those things.
And so I sort of reverse engineered the belief from there.
The reason I wanted to bring that up to you is because I think a lot of people fall into this position of atheism because there are a lot of very religious people that are religious for stupid reasons.
And then, you know, hopefully they can realize if they're actually of that higher sort of thinking, that just because stupid people believe this doesn't mean that there isn't a smart reason to.
And this sort of the IQ bell curve, midwit curve is, is a very good way to put it.
And I've seen that even more explicitly applied to religious people.
I think I've seen that.
And it's, it's always a funny claim when someone says, what, you need, you need the church to do all the thinking for you.
And to my mind, it takes all of the self-sort of criticism and thought and reflection in the world to realize that maybe I, in my 20-something years of experience, am not the smartest person in the world.
And maybe there's an institution and folks in it who might know a little bit more than I do.
And instead of saying, well, I disagree with the church on this and I'm right because I'm me, what if I'm not right just because I happen to be me?
Right.
And, you know, because what even if I was 80 years old, it's a, that's that's a dearth of experience compared to a church that's lasted for 2,000 years.
What, what, what, what, what, what good is my view?
It's nothing.
It's a subjective view of one flawed person.
And certainly the church is a human institution and it is flawed and it has been led by flawed men from time to time.
But these folks might know a little more than I do.
And so I think that it takes, like I said, and like you intuit with the IQ bell curve meme, it takes a lot more thought and reflection.
And, you know, I don't know, intelligence, that sounds like I'm tooting my own horn, but it certainly takes a kind of...
It takes a certain level of intelligence to realize that you are not the smartest person in the world.
And that almost goes hand in hand with the claim that, oh, well, you know, I just can't believe it because I don't see proof.
You know, and the people who say that, oh, it's such an easy pill to swallow, that there's actually a sky daddy and you go to heaven.
And first of all, these people are theologically ignorant because they don't know what all that entails.
But let's even leave that aside.
It's a much easier pill to swallow that reality is exactly what you see it as.
That's the much easier pill to swallow.
It's much harder to say, okay, I have my five senses and my experiences with the world and what I've read in science books and history books, but that is such a small fraction of what is knowable and maybe even what is perceivable that I will instead concede that I am a flawed human being with only five senses.
And who knows, you know, when you talk about science fiction, who knows what other senses there are to perceive the world?
Who knows what other possibilities there are?
What do I know?
It's much easier to say the world is as I see it than the world is, you know, much more complex and has elements that I will never understand.
So it's always funny to, especially because these were things I used to say only a decade, yeah, a decade ago.
But there's certainly a dogmatism among the secularists, and they won't be swayed from it.
They have their Richard Dawkins.
And I think the ones who are too far gone, I'll never say anyone's too far gone for certain, but I don't have high hopes in a lot of cases, especially if you get to 30, 35.
I think it's really started to crystallize.
You need a near-death experience at that point because the smug atheism takes hold and I think it's really hard to get out of.
It would be, in a certain respect, I hope he did because it means there's hope for us.
Because there's something I read, or I don't remember where I read it.
Might have been from a nobody, but it was something like: we need to be much more comfortable with the fact that heaven is far emptier than our sort of culture, if you're in a Christian culture, tells you it is.
But it's well, if you had to choose, like, and again, this is a ridiculous exercise, but if you had to make the call, what decision would you make as to whether or not Judas gets in?
If, you know, if Peter has the book and he's like, hey, man, it's up to you.
I think that it's justice and mercy are equally important, but sometimes there is justice in being merciful.
And to know that there's hope for the most depraved or who might seem to be the most far gone.
You know, I know when I talked about people who are atheists coming back to the faith, like I said, maybe they're too far gone in a certain sense in their atheism that's crystallized.
But I think that to know that there is hope and there is love.
And this, God, I sound like a boomer, even evangelist.
I don't know, but that there is hope for repentance and for an acceptance of that repentance.
I think that that is at the core of my belief and what we're called to believe.
Again, a poor theologian, but I think that I think there's justice in mercy.
There's a part of me based on a little bit of the context of the Last Supper, and I'm not a theologian myself either, so there could be a much more sophisticated argument against this.
There's a part of me that thinks that Jesus and Judas talked about it and that it was supposed to happen.
It was like part of the plan that he had to die and be crucified.
And then in order to do it, he had to be betrayed by one of his disciples.
Like, hey, you know, go ahead and sell me out to them because this is the will of God kind of thing.
And that he just couldn't live with the burden of the PTSD of what he had to do, you know, so to speak.
I wonder if that was something that they were, it was like he was just supposed to do it.
It doesn't make it any less, you know, like true or, you know, if it was inside.
I'm not saying it was a conspiracy and the story isn't real.
I'm saying like that was God's plan.
Like Jesus could have at any given time talked to Judas privately.
Judas did not write a gospel and said, you have to be the one to betray me.
Is the will of God?
Judas could have very well been like, Oh, I don't want to do that.
I love you so much.
And then he's like, No, you have to, commanded him to do it and then cued him at the Last Supper, right?
Like it said, like, one of you among me must betray me, or is going to betray me tonight, go ahead and do it.
He gets up and he leaves to go betray him, right?
And then he killed himself as it's written in Acts, as I understand it.
And that could have very not been because of guilt necessarily, but almost like a PTSD thing.
Like, yeah, you know, if Jesus asked you to be the one to betray him so that he was crucified, it would be a heavy thing to carry, even if it was part of the plan, right?
Yeah, I'm not convinced of it, you know, but it's very counter the interpretation that we've had for a couple thousand years.
And I'm sure there are really good arguments against it, if anyone's thought of it.
But it just reads to me as somebody who kind of picked up the Bible without a whole lot of in-depth theological background when I read it the first time.
I was like, oh, it sounds like, you know, you know, here's your cue.
