THE END OF THE WEST, Will We Survive Without Christianity? w/ Michael Jones & Justin Holmes
BUY CAST BREW COFFEE TO SUPPORT THE SHOW - https://castbrew.com/ Become A Member And Protect Our Work at http://www.timcast.com Host: Tim Pool @Timcast (everywhere) Guest: Justin Holmes @Deconstruction_Zone Michael Jones @InspiringPhilosophy (YouTube) Ian Crossland @iancrossland (everywhere) Producers: Lisa Elizabeth @LisaElizabeth (X) Kellen Leeson @KellenPDL (X) My Second Channel - https://www.youtube.com/timcastnews Podcast Channel - https://www.youtube.com/TimcastIRL
It's a conversation we've had on our shows here at TimCast quite a bit.
We had Milo Yiannopoulos on the show a few months ago, though he's been on since then, but a few months ago he was talking about this nation was intended for a Christian moral people.
That the Founding Fathers, or that some of them had written, that the Constitution would only work for those who are a moral and virtuous people.
Milo's opinion was that this was, of course, referring to Christianity.
Now, while many of the Founding Fathers were, of course, Christian, and many of, obviously, this country was deeply Christian for a very, very long time, many of the Founding Fathers were considered to be deist, meaning they didn't really follow doctrine or anything like that.
But this leads us to the big question, and we decided to have a much larger conversation about the whole issue.
The end of the West.
Can we survive without Christianity?
Over the past several decades Christianity has been waning in this country.
There is some bubbling up rumors and discussion about the resurgence of Christianity.
People like Russell Brand getting baptized and finding Jesus Christ seem to be influencing a lot of people towards religion.
And even people I know who used to be staunch atheists, I would not call religious by a sense of the imagination, but they're much more open to the idea of these moral traditions.
So I think this conversation will be particularly interesting.
We've got a handful of interesting fellas.
We'll start with you, good sir.
Would you like to introduce yourself?
unidentified
Sure.
My name is Michael Jones.
I run Inspiring Philosophy.
I do a lot of Christian apologetics, arguing for a Christian worldview, arguing it's beneficial in multiple ways.
I've done a lot of videos on that topic lately, and I actually just debated Lawrence Krauss on the topic.
Don't forget to also join Rumble Premium using promo code TIM10. The Green Room Show, man, you gotta check it out.
It's getting rave reviews, and I'm very, very impressed and grateful.
The Green Room Podcast is getting about 40,000 views per episode.
I mean, that's pretty nuts.
Amazing.
If you want to see behind the scenes, set up for the show, conversations, uncensored, sometimes it's pretty wild, sometimes pretty silly, you can go to rumble.com slash timcastirl, sign up for premium and watch it there.
But let's, oh, don't forget Casper, but instead of starting with cosmic radiation or whatever it is Ian was talking about, instead of talking about, I mean, even God and God's existence, let's start with the moral traditions of Christianity, the foundation of this country.
The question is, As this country becomes less and less Christian, and that seems to be the trend, though some say it may be reversing, will we survive as a country without this?
unidentified
Well, I mean, first we need to find what we mean by Western civilization, and generally it's a civilization, not like Islamic civilization or Far Eastern civilization.
It's a civilization that is generally defined by adherence to ideas like democratic values, human rights, Strong belief in modern science and promoting of education.
And if you read historians on this, like for example, there's a great book called Christianity and Human Rights and Introduction.
Every chapter has its own author.
They've argued that a lot of these values come out of the Christian tradition.
You're getting opinions of multiple scholars.
You can also check out Samuel Moyne's book, Christian Human Rights, Tom Holland's book.
He's an atheist dominion.
That's his book.
I've argued that a lot of these ideas about Western civilization that we have come out of the Christian tradition for a reason.
So can the West survive without Christianity?
I mean, like, the West is built on Christian foundations.
It'd be very hard to move beyond that and it not be the West at that point.
So the question would be...
Would it even be the West if we moved away from Christian foundations and ideas?
Well, I think my question is not what do we mean by the West, but what do we mean by Christianity?
Are we talking about the type that produces doomsday cults, the type that abuses children in mass, you know, the types that tried to change the Indians' culture by killing the Indian but saving the man?
Are we talking about the type that, like, want to relegate women to the kitchen?
Like, there's no, like, homogenous view of Christianity.
And for every good thing that you can pull from Christianity, I can probably pull five horrific things from Christianity and the data points, and I can root it back to the Bible.
I would probably say when you look at the Constitution and the Founding Fathers' ideals, largely built upon, not necessarily directly— Overlapping with but built from and overlapping with Christian moral traditions.
So obviously we can look at any person anywhere at any time and find bad things about them.
I can sit here and tell you why the police are evil and I can show you every single evil thing the police and the feds have done.
Ruby Ridge.
Does that mean we should have no police?
No.
Can we survive without law enforcement?
I honestly don't think we can.
So the issue then becomes the Christian moral tradition and the example I like to give is the easiest.
The easiest is the...
Right to a speedy trial, innocent until proven guilty, which is if you actually trace back the history of the Constitution and where the Founding Father got their ideas, that's the story of Sodom and Gomorrah.
So Blackstone's formulation was the inspiration for the Right to a Speedy Trial, which was by Benjamin Franklin, built upon Blackstone's formulation, which is Blackstone said it is better that 10 guilty persons escape than one innocent person suffer.
Benjamin Franklin said it is better that 100 guilty persons escape than one innocent person suffer.
The Founding Fathers took it from a Christian perspective and brought it to the logical position of How can we actually prove that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and Blackstone's formulation are the right thing?
And of course, again, for those that don't know the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, if there's but one righteous person, I will not destroy this town.
Of course, then they got the righteous person out and then nuked that place.
So the logic applied by the founding fathers was if you have a society where the citizen believes even if they are innocent, they will be punished.
There is no incentive for the citizenry to be virtuous.
In fact, the inverse, they will lie, cheat and steal to avoid detection because it doesn't matter if you're good or not.
And they'll have to lie to protect themselves.
But if society tells the citizenry, even if you are guilty, we will try in every way imaginable to give you the appropriate chance to defend yourself.
And if you are innocent, we would rather free 10 guilty people than see you suffer.
The incentive, of course, then, is to be virtuous because we're here to protect you.
So that is just one element.
But if you actually go through The Constitution as a whole, largely influenced by a Christian moral tradition.
So that's my view.
unidentified
Yeah, Christianity's bent and altered so many times, kind of to your point.
It's changed.
Like, obviously, you've had Reformations.
You have the Methodist Reformation.
You had at one point with the Spanish Inquisition where they would go into—I don't know if they would kick people's doors in, but they would execute people for not worshipping their cult.
And I think there are excellent— Methodologies and messages from that book, the Christian Bible, but there's a lot of horrible cult worship, adherence, expectation, groupthink that's very, very dangerous just in general across all religion and what do you want to call it, mass formation of any kind.
So that's kind of where I'm at.
I'm very much a cherry picker in that sense, I guess.
So there's a lot of propaganda about the Spanish Inquisition.
A lot of it actually comes from a lot of Protestants later on.
But if you read a book by an atheist named Nathan Johnstone called The New Atheism, and he makes the point, like, we just can't say, Christianity, therefore, Inquisition because it comes about in the Middle Ages after a recent resurgence of rationalism and the need to place justice in the hands of humans more than anything.
And then, of course, the propaganda aspect comes in.
A Spanish Inquisitor would consider themselves a failure.
If they actually had to execute someone, they didn't want to do that.
The goal was to actually convert someone, and oftentimes they were far more rational than a lot of the secular governments of the time, like the kings and the nobility, like Nathan Johnstone talks about in his book.
The Inquisitors were reminding people, like, we're not just going to blame crop failures on witchcraft.
There's probably a naturalistic explanation far more likely.
So it's been blown way out of proportion, he points out.
It's often used to sort of attack Christianity.
And we also have to remember there are multiple variables going into this idea.
It wasn't just Christianity, therefore, Inquisition.
We have to remember variables throughout the Middle Ages—political, secular, economic, various aspects are going in people's thinking, and it's going to affect the outcomes.
And as someone who's actually studied the history and brought some of it with me, that's all wrong.
So here's a book called The Bloody Theater.
It's been renamed The Martyr's Mirror.
It's a volume that's kept just by the Anabaptists, and there are thousands upon thousands of firsthand accounts of people that were murdered by Protestants, murdered by Catholics, murdered by Zwinglius, murdered in Geneva for simply baptizing people as adults.
Whole families tied up, thrown into the river and drowned.
Children drowned because their parents got baptized as adults.
And my point is, I don't look at the United States, the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, and say, oh, a bunch of evil people over a long period of time murdered millions of children.
I say, wow, there's evil people we need to stop.
And so my point here is, I bring this up, because we're asking a question about moral traditions and how they should be enacted, not, did you know that in 1428 a bunch of evil people tortured people?
It's like, certainly they did.
And every culture everywhere did it.
I mean, let's go to Japan and talk about how they raped and enslaved the Koreans.
Does that mean that the honor of the samurai or whatever or the bushido should be completely thrown out, or is it a good structure for people to abide by?
The question and the challenge we face is...
Every tradition, every structure, every government, every moral framework commits atrocities, every single one of them.
So we're talking about comparing the core values of a moral tradition to another one or a lack thereof.
unidentified
What are the core values of Christianity?
Because my reading of the Bible is that the core value of Christianity is that men are more equal than women.
Men are higher status.
Slavery is okay.
Genocide is okay.
So on that note, I mean, you said that's your reading.
It's not important about what your reading is.
What's important is the effects that Christianity has actually created.
No, it's not.
Absolutely.
It's about what the Bible says.
Christianity is based on the book.
And the book says slavery is okay.
You can buy and sell slaves.
At your will.
Let me continue.
It's about the actual effects.
Most people throughout history are not going to agree with your interpretation.
There's a reason the abolitionists came out through the Christian movement.
It did not.
It definitely did.
It was absolutely not.
The Christians were burning crosses on people's yards even after abolition.
The Christians were quoting the Bible to endorse slavery.
Are you going to let me finish now?
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
So, yes, people justified slavery in every culture.
Something weird started happening in Europe and then through the American tradition is that people started saying, "No, slavery should be abolished." When there are reasons—if you read John Coffey, if you read Robert Fogel, who is not a Christian, Ben Wright, the abolitionists were very much arguing from the Christian tradition that it should be abolished.
Did Christians try to justify slavery?
Absolutely.
Everyone everywhere tried to justify slavery.
But surprisingly, as historians will note on this issue, over time, through the Christian tradition, they started saying, hey, there are certain things in the Bible which demand that we end slavery.
So now, this is again what most historians will say, out of the Christian tradition, we see a strong abolitionist movement.
These early abolitionists were citing biblical verses, biblical values, for their reason to end slavery.
Who was deeply motivated by Christianity, walked up to slavers and blasted him in the face without question, murdering tons of people.
And the taking of Harper's Ferry, the most famous moment.
People don't realize John Brown and his sons and his gang were going through Kansas and straight up murdering people without question because they said, you are an affront to God.
So we can talk about the abolitionists.
It's remarkable to me.
You go to the casino down the street and they've got...
$25 chips with John Brown, hailed as a hero, despite the fact that he was hanged for treason.
And I'm like, look, man, I appreciate the abolitionist stuff, but I don't know that I'd ever get behind a guy who would walk up to a random person and blow his face off.
Like, that's not the kind of world...
But that was Christianity, right?
Obviously...
This country was like 99% Christian at the time.
That meant that abolitionists and the— They were all Christians.
unidentified
Nobody gets credit for it.
You don't get credit for using the Bible to abolish it.
In fact, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, said, Who gave them the right to decide that it's a sin?
By what standard do they measure it?
Not the Constitution.
The Constitution recognizes the property in many forms, imposes obligations in its connection that recognize— Not the Bible.
And every country, every nation, every peoples in the world had slavery.
To this day, the North African slave trade has been reignited due to the operations of American constitutional republicanism.
So if we're going to talk about who's at fault for slavery right now, it's the American democratic system.
Should we abolish it?
I don't think so.
But it is the absolute fault of Western NATO countries.
Who are not abiding by some religious doctrine, who blew the crap out of Libya, reigniting North African slave trade.
I said Atlantic.
North African slave trade.
So history shows us everybody did slavery.
Christians did too.
Christians justified slavery at the time.
Muslims did too.
Christians abolished slavery.
And then Western constitutional republicanism reignited slavery.
So I'm not going to sit here and argue that the Constitution in America is bad.
I think it's a great country with evil people wielding us like a tool to evil ends.
unidentified
And again, go back to my point.
Everyone justified slavery from their traditions in the ancient world.
Why do we now think slavery is wrong today?
Go back and read what the abolitionists were doing.
There was something in Christianity that started.
Did most people early on try to justify it?
Absolutely.
But the abolitionists were not arguing from Enlightenment ideas, secular ideas.
I mean, one of the earliest anti-slavery checks is called the Selling of Joseph for a reason.
They were arguing from the...
Okay, so there was something moving within Christianity that Tom Holland talks about that did eventually lead to this new change in our ethics and our understanding of slavery that did get abolished, that did lead to abolishing it.
So there was something within it that didn't happen in Muslim countries, didn't happen in the Far East.
Even early enlightened thinkers like Voltaire and David Hume were trying to justify slavery.
So, I mean, like, everyone tried to justify slavery.
The question we need to ask is, what motivated the abolitionists?
And you can again say, yeah.
Christians did justify slavery.
That doesn't challenge the fact that what the abolitionists were using and arguing from.
But there have been multiple societies that abolished slavery many thousands of years prior to the U.S. There was a dynasty in China in the B.C. era that abolished slavery for a time period.
There was a leader in India for a period of a couple hundred years where slavery was abolished.
There were Stoics in Greece that were abolitionists.
No, there weren't.
There weren't any Stoics.
There actually was.
Seneca.
Epic.
No, he did not say slavery should be abolished.
Seneca absolutely advocated for getting rid of slavery.
He said it was an immoral institution.
He said it was immoral.
He didn't say it should go away as a necessary evil.
Quite a few Stoics had agreed with him.
They agreed slavery was bad, but they didn't call for abolition.
The first person to call for the abolition of slavery, Gregory of Nyssa.
That is wrong.
No, Gregory of Nyssa is the first person.
He's the first Christian that talked about abolishing slavery, but he was outruled by the other church fathers.
Exactly.
The other church fathers disagreed with him.
No, he's the first person in history to call for the abolition.
No, he certainly is not the first person in history.
Seneca did not explicitly advocate for abolishing slavery.
While he criticized the mistreatment of slaves and encouraged humane treatment, he accepted slavery as a social institution.
The sources for this are Moral Letters to Lucilius, letter 47, and Seneca de Beneficis, book 3, chapter 18. And then there is a book in 1994 discussing Roman's attitudes towards slavery called Bradley Keith's Slavery Society in Rome.
unidentified
Would Seneca have been executed if he'd called for the abolition of it at that period?
I don't think he would have been executed.
Kyle Harper talks about this in his book.
It's just no one even...
It's like trying to say, could we get rid of water?
Or money?
Yeah, they just knew that this was just something that could never go away.
I think people need to understand, when we talk about slavery in the United States, most people, they envision a black man in a field being beaten by a slave owner.
They don't realize how pervasive and widespread the institution of slavery was beyond farming and the South.
there were cobblers black men who were trained to make shoes who worked in cities and ran shoe stores where they transacted but slavery meant that they had no legal rights that means there was a person who owned them and they wanted them to do this job there's also an important factor in that they were depending on uh what the the slave owner or the slave master wanted they could make money for themselves and in fact frederick douglas bought his own freedom and then later bought the freedom of his wife and his child it shouldn't have happened that way
no but uh and obviously slavery is bad the reason i bring this up is the I kind of lost my train of thought.
I'm sorry.
Slavery was viewed as exactly as we would view something like money, an economic institution that exists and is a function of government.
And then slowly over time, sentiments towards it started to shift in the direction, and it ended up with a very bloody war in the United States.
Now, for other – like the UK, they basically said, we're ending slavery, and then we're going to have to pay back everybody for taking their slaves away from them.
They did a big debt, and then they ended up paying – I don't know.
It took them like 100 years to pay off the debt or something.
unidentified
You know, a hundred years.
It started early with, like, Anabaptists and Methodists working together.
And eventually they started to get legislation passed.
They got rid of the slave trade in some new territories under William Penn.
And then shortly after, they abolished the slave trade throughout the British Empire.
And then a couple decades later, they emancipated slaves.
Obviously, he made that documentary, Religious, and he goes around challenging people's views and things as such, and that's always okay.
The reason I bring him up is that Dennis Prager made a good example.
He has a good example of moral tradition and where you go when you destroy it, and he calls it, I think he calls it, I always get it wrong, cut stem.
Politics, something like this, where he basically says, you have this, the root of a society, which in his view is the Judeo-Christian world, and he's Jewish, obviously, and it grows into this beautiful flower that someone then cuts from the stem and holds it in the air and shows everyone how beautiful it is.
But you know that once it's cut from its roots, it will eventually start to die.
And that's where we're at right now.
You can hold up this beautiful American society, but as, in his view, Judeo-Christian values wane, it eventually is going to die.
I think it's a really good point.
I think what we're seeing now with the current generations and their movement dramatically away from a—I mean, to be honest, any kind of moral tradition, though I don't think all moral traditions are good.
There are some that are in the East that they chop your hands off and things like that I'm not a fan of.
But the moral tradition we have in this country about honoring your parents, about not stealing, not killing, is slowly disappearing, and I would say largely built in the Ten Commandments.
And what we're getting in its wake is people who fear nothing, care for nothing.
We're getting – these people are ramming cars into department stores in Chicago.
It's happened so many times that they've put up barriers in front of – in Magmile.
My friends who live in Chicago are like, you can't even go there anymore.
A 13-year-old kid pulled out a gun and started shooting people in a shopping district.
How is this happening?
Well, you've ripped people from any kind of moral tradition, any kind of social fear or cultural consequence, or for many people, any kind of spiritual consequence.
unidentified
I find that a lot of the great things from Christianity, we've learned them, and then now...
So you learn a great piece of information from a seminar somewhere.
You take that information, you integrate it into your life, you create books, you create empires with that information in it, and then that information is redistributed.
That doesn't mean everyone needs to go to that seminar you went to 30 years ago where you learned this.
So people that are obsessed with this book and worshipping some dude is like, bro, good luck trying to get half the world to worship a guy.
It's insane.
We shouldn't be worshipping each other, first of all.
But the ideas need to be reintegrated into society.
I think the Ten Commandments are fascinating.
They existed prior to the Bible and outside of the Bible, and countries that were largely Christian, like the Scandinavian countries, were largely Lutheran.
They have their own state church that are now below 50% population.
As it turns out, their citizen rates, their crime rates, all lower in Scandinavia than what we have here, and they've largely depopulized the church.
But I've got to stress, the problem that Sweden is facing is that they brought in Somali refugees in the 90s who had children who are not overtly religious in any capacity, and the crime that they're witnessing is gang-related violence with grenade attacks.
They've collected old weapons from the Balkan Wars, and they're throwing grenades at each other.
They're getting fully automatic weapons, and it's completely unrelated to religion.
unidentified
And why did they, though, that we need to ask that question?
It's because...
It's because secularism has led to abysmally bad birth rates.
Secularism in studies like Secularism and Fertility Worldwide notes that secularism is correlating with population stagnation, including population decline.
I don't think in the 90s Sweden – I could be wrong, but I don't think the importing of Somali refugees and migrants was specifically related to a low population.
unidentified
They had declining birth rates for many decades.
The Bible tells you not to have kids.
Jesus himself says it's better for you to be a eunuch for the gospel.
Paul advocates in 1 Corinthians chapter 7 that if you're married, it's better that you remain as though you're not married because the present world is coming to an end.
He says if you're single, stay single.
I would rather you be like me, be unmarried to serve the gospel.
Are we talking about whether Christianity is true or the effects of Christianity?
There's not a single teaching in the Bible that says you should have kids.
Are we talking about whether Christianity is true or the effects of Christianity?
What I'm saying is we're rooting this to what the book says.
Christianity is rooted in the book, and you're saying, listen, Listen, because Christianity is diminishing, that's causing lower birth rates, but that's not actually the case.
But there's nothing in Christianity that teaches you to have kids.
I just want to make this one point before we move on, is that you've selected from the Bible only one thing to support your claim.
You didn't have to do that.
You could have literally said, I do know that the Bible both says to have kids and not to have kids, but then there's no argument to be made, so it seems like you did that intentionally.
unidentified
I didn't do it intentionally.
In the New Testament, that's the Christian doctrine.
The last thing that is said about having families is to not do it.
In Matthew chapter 19, Jesus advocates for people being eunuchs to the gospel.
Let me find it real quick.
And Paul also says just before that, this is my own word, not a word from the Lord.
His disciples said to him, if such is the case, talking about divorce, saying that you can't remarry a woman, if such is the case of a man and a wife, it is better to not marry.
Then he said to them, not everyone can accept this teaching, but only those to whom it is given.
For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others.
There are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven.
1 Corinthians 7, verse 8, To the unmarried and to the widows I say that it is good for them to remain single as I am.
unidentified
It's good.
He says it's going to be a good thing, but he also says, hey, if you're burning with passion, get married.
So they never say you should never not be married.
I never said that.
I never said that the Bible says you should never get married.
If you're burning with passion, if you can't control yourself, it's okay to get married.
Okay.
So Paul and Jesus both advocated for limiting your actual family activities.
Okay, and again, we're not talking about whether Christianity is true.
We're talking about the actual effects it's created.
So, for example, a longtime sociologist thought that secularism would actually increase democratic values, and recently social and political scientists like John Compton have been saying, no, actually, we're seeing the opposite.
It's actually diminishing support for democratic values.
So sometimes we think from armchair sociology X, Y, and Z is going to cause so-and-so, but no, we actually – Christianity does cause sustainable population and birth rates.
Well, let's ask the hard question, I suppose, because… Instead of discussing whether the Bible is real like you were saying, if Christianity leaves – we were talking about power vacuums, like if the constitutional republic were to fall.
What happens to this country if Christianity – let's say Christianity overnight, within like spending a few months, people just largely abandoned it and said we're completely over this?
Do you believe that there would be no new moral framework, spiritual-based moral framework, or do you think a different one may move in?
unidentified
Oh, there certainly would be.
So a lot of the young people that are moving away from Christianity are actually moving into different forms of spiritualism.
So it's not like they're leaving Christianity and going to atheism.
That's something that I did, but that's not something that's actually happening in mass.
So young people are actually remaining quite spiritual, and believe it or not, there's a really weird crossover right now between people deconverting from Christianity, actually moving into what we might call Eastern religions, for example, like Buddhism.
And Buddhism actually has a lot of the same core tenets as Christianity.
So if you look at the core tenets of Buddhism, they believe in charity.
They believe in being kind to your neighbors.
So, like, there's certainly—it's not like we're creating an open vacuum for all hell to break loose.
Like, people are still going to gravitate towards structure because the human mind desires structure.
Islam is projected to be the fastest-growing religion in the United States as Christianity declines.
unidentified
And that's a huge problem.
That is a fucking huge problem.
And why are we seeing that?
Because we can see in real time what secularism, the secularization of America and Europe is doing.
Declining birth rates, lower levels of charity.
In fact, John Compton...
Philip Gorski, Roger Brubaker have pointed out, as Christianity has been declining, we're seeing a less value and appreciation for democratic values, more rise of right-wing and left-wing authoritarianism.
This is coming out of the actual data we're seeing.
How does the data point to less Christianity, more totalitarianism?
That's not true in any of the other countries.
If you just look at the other democratic nations that have de-Christianized, we're not seeing that they're going into extremism.
That's complete and utter BS. Just like North Korea does.
Just like North Korea does, right?
The people of North Korea vote for Kim Jong-un 98% every single time.
The media in these countries is homogenous and under deep authoritarian control to the point where when I went there to post YouTube videos, we actually had spooks from the government spying on our hotel rooms.
When we went to one location, and don't get me wrong, I've been to Norway and Bergen as well.
It's not identical, but it is very, very similar in how the media is controlled and how people, they call them brainwashed in the Scandinavian countries.
I went to Sweden, and the first thing I did was I interviewed a Green Party leftist politician.
It seemed very reasonable.
They all praised me and cheered for me unanimously across all the media.
We went to Rinkaby and we got attacked by the children of Somali migrants.
I don't want to say attacked.
They were screaming at us and the police warned us they would start throwing stones and they'd escort us out.
I said, okay.
When I tweeted that...
Instantly, the entire media apparatus of the country turned on me, the entire narrative inverted, and they were saying I was a crackpot Alex Jones conspiracy theorist.
When I started talking to people outside the country, they said, Sweden's, of course, the worst, but the rest of these countries operate under this authoritarian, homogenous culture, much like, and I hate to go Godwin's law, it isn't so much that the government comes to you and beats you to death or throws you in a camp.
The homogeneity and the authoritarianism they have is if you speak out, you will have no money, you will have no home, and you will never work again.
And so everybody falls in line and no one dares speak about it.
unidentified
Which is weird because the data says that they're happier, they live longer, they're healthier.
There was one of the most famous studies on choice and happiness was they brought people into – they pitched a bunch of people, would you like to do a study?
Everybody says yes, right?
They get their – Two groups, a control group and their study group.
And they said, the study is to fill out this questionnaire.
When you're done, you'll get a free t-shirt.
When everybody fills out the questionnaire, what they didn't realize the real study was, as they're leaving, one group was handed a free white t-shirt.
They said, thank you.
The other group was told, you can have the green, white, or blue t-shirt.
Then they got to choose.
As they were walking out, they said, please rate your satisfaction with your experience here.
Guess what?
The people who got to choose the color of shirt they wanted rated higher levels of unhappiness because they were unsure of themselves.
That was actually a surprising finding, which they found, as I would say, as Harriet Tubman said to go back to slavery, I have freed many slaves.
I would have freed many more if only they knew they were slaves.
Ignorance is bliss.
I think unhappiness comes with freedom and hard choices being made.
unidentified
What company did that survey?
This is an old internet trope on the— So you're not referring to any methodology that's actually being used by, like, the World Happiness Index that's been doing this for decades?
Let's just ignore that you brought up a point you don't even understand because that makes you look really dumb.
unidentified
The other thing about these happiness studies is I never cite them.
I can show you studies that say Christians claim they're happy.
You're just asking people if they're happy.
And like if you go to someplace like Japan, most people are going to say no because that's their cultural heritage.
It's too much – you're claiming too much honor to say you're happy.
You go to Scandinavia, it's the cultural norm to say you're happy even if you're not.
So a lot of those studies, they're not that well designed because you just can't – Ask people.
You can't measure happiness.
You just have to ask someone.
So I avoid those studies for that very reason.
But they rank health outcomes in other...
It's not just a survey.
When they do the surveys, it's not just, are you happy?
So the World Happiness Index is the most famous one.
They're not just asking, are you happy?
They're actually looking at overall health predictors as well.
Obesity, diet, smoking, exercise.
There's all kinds of stuff that they're actually looking for.
What gets published in the news is like, hey, here are the happy countries.
But if you actually look at the data points they're collecting, they're collecting all kinds of data points, longevity, life expectancy, all kinds of data shows up in those reports.
There's two principal religions that have replaced Christianity as it's waned.
The first, obviously, being Islam, as it's projected to be the fastest growing.
It's not quite the fastest growing just yet, but globally, I believe it is.
And the other, obviously, was, I guess we would refer to as wokeness.
As Christianity started to wane among millennials predominantly, less so among Gen X and boomers, they started to adopt this, what we call the non-theistic religion.
That is...
They were tenets.
They were priests.
They were institutional power structures.
And you ended up getting what was effectively chapels to wokeness in every major business, diversity chiefs.
These people had no coherent logic.
They still don't.
We are seeing this now be pushed back and shoved aside, particularly by a large group of Christians and moderates.
But wokeness was an emergent religion that began to replace Christianity.
The issue that we end up seeing with people in – if you take a look at these NSA whistleblower conversations Chris Ruffo is bringing up, everybody was happy at work.
Everybody was totally fine with hiring based on race.
Everybody was totally fine with the fact that instead of actually doing your job at your accounting firm, you were having meetings on whether you had sex with men or women.
Well, clearly that's not true.
People were deeply terrified of it, but nobody would speak up.
So we ended up getting these polls.
We ended up getting all this information suggesting Donald Trump couldn't win an election, and then somehow he did twice because clearly whatever they were tracking wasn't actually represented what people felt on the inside.
No, what happened was you had a deeply authoritarian religious institution, an intersectionality or whatever they want to call it, where people were terrified that if they spoke up against it, they would actually lose their livelihoods.
There was no enforcement mechanism codified in law.
There were no police who were going to do it.
You just knew that if you were at work and you said, hey man, I don't think we should hire based on who this guy's fucking, they would be like, you're fired and you'll never get a promotion again.
So people shut up and said, everything's great, I'm happy.
And they voted for Donald Trump.
unidentified
I'm thinking about Nazism right now, and I want to know what you guys think about this.
Because it sort of seems like a de facto religion, Nazism.
This obsessive cult worship of their prophet, Hitler, and whatever.
But at the same time, it was like a Christian...
Political movement.
They call themselves Christian.
They identify with Christianity.
So it wasn't like Christianity seeped.
So what's up with that?
So if you read, again, like Nathan Johnson or other historians about Nazis, there's so much debate about what they believe because Hitler said so many contradictory things.
Yeah, there's no unified belief.
No, the majority is that at least Nazism was a political religion.
The new savior becomes Hitler.
What you worship is Aryanism, this white German identity.
And so this is a political religion.
It's sort of what you were talking about with wokeism earlier.
It becomes this political religion.
But they did form a church.
The Church of the Third Reich was a real church formed by the Third Reich.
And they called it positive Christianity to distinguish it between Catholic and Protestant.
And this new idea was just, again, it was just a neo-Marcion view.
And this is why I brought up, again, I said I don't want to go into Godwin's Law, but the reason I brought it up is when people like to refer to the Nazis as socialists, that's not true.
What is true is they used social enforcement to ensure that people were working towards the goals of the Nazi party.
So it's been a long time since I read this.
I read, I guess, a book, I don't know, a PhD thesis review of the economics, largely because people were like, they're saying they're socialists.
And the summary is basically...
No, they weren't forced the way the communists were.
But if you were a factor with the means of producing steel, the Nazi party would say, "What do you mean you're not producing steel for us?
You don't oppose our government, do you?" And everyone would say, "No, no, no, no, we'll do whatever you say." So everyone seemed to be just choosing to do things, despite the fact they were actually doing it because they knew they'd be murdered, killed, or thrown in camps.
unidentified
It was a political religion, authoritarian in nature.
They would call themselves positive Christians on purpose because they didn't want to be known as Protestant or Catholic Christians.
And positive Christianity, as they talk about this in the book, the Holy Reich, was Jesus now becomes a white Aryan.
The Atonement is thrown out.
The Old Testament is thrown out.
Anything Jewish is thrown out.
It became just basically this weird cult that was just political purely in nature.
And I like to use Bill Maher as a good example because he's a late 60s, childless – I guess the rumors are about him.
I don't mean to be a dick, but that he gets around, he sleeps around.
And why don't we see strong moral values in atheists and agnostics in this country the same way we see it in Christians?
unidentified
Well, I mean, I think that's an interesting question.
question.
For one thing, I don't want to say all atheists are like that, but what we do see is definitely this new cultural norm that that Bill Maher's lifestyle is just a good thing.
It's good to be single, childless, and in your 60s or 70s, and that's a problem ultimately for many reasons.
I would quantify it rather informally, I guess, admittedly, in that when you look to the prominent speakers on the right, Ashley St. Clair is getting absolutely annihilated by the Christian conservatives And Elon, despite Elon helping Donald Trump win, they're getting absolutely annihilated for having – for Elon for having all these kids, for Ashley for having a kid with Elon, for having kids out of wedlock.
And then you look at most of the prominent – not all.
Not all.
Obviously not – I'm not going to give Trump credit for being a great traditionally moral man or whatever.
He has good kids though.
But you take a look at these typical conservative individuals.
You'll find they have kids.
They talk about protecting children.
They talk about going to church, having communal values.
I'm not saying all atheists.
I'm not saying all Christians.
People who work here, obviously, atheists are agnostic and they're good friends and they're good moral people.
But it's not – it seems to be tendencies in the inverse direction.
That is, the Christian conservative commentators tend to have kids, go to church, teach responsibility, meritocracy, and things like this.
And prominent atheists tend to say things like, don't have family, take whatever you want, wake up, masturbate, die alone.
And you end up seeing now predominantly among the left.
Individuals who are, and they're all, atheist agnostic, advocating for giving children pornography in schools, drag queen story hour, and things that are destructive and amoral.
These are tendencies not necessarily quantified in any hard data, I'll admit.
unidentified
Well, I mean, look at the culture that comes out of these different ideas, like a secular atheist view.
For people that are in academia or the high levels of media, they have a purpose in society.
But you tell a common man, hey, you're only going to live a good 70 years and you'll die, so just have as much fun.
The common man is left with basically hedonism as his only fulfilling desire.
Whereas if you go to Christianity, you tell the poorest of the poor, the creator of the universe died for you so that you can have eternal life.
You're going to have motivations to be a moral person.
Which is weird because the most statistically likely place that you're going to get sexually assaulted is at a church.
And I'm going to respond to that by saying blah, blah, blah.
Because the point we're making is that in prominent pop culture, in politics, there's a tendency among the right Christian conservatives not to be raping children, and there's a tendency among the left to be raping children.
When it comes to the church abusing children, which I agree over, historically it seems to have.
I think it's whenever you put a lot of kids in an area, like daycare or something, there's just going to be a tendency for a lot of those kids to get abused, because that's where kids are congregating.
And for thousands of years, it was at church.
It's correlative, not causative.
Anna Salter talks about those in her book, Predators.
In fact, American atheists actually have a loose Christian moral structure, and that's a fact.
Absolutely, that's what we're talking about with cut-stem ideology or politics or whatever.
I'm sorry, Dennis Prager, for getting the name wrong every single time.
Bill Maher is a great example.
The man who believes in Blackstone's formulation, who believes in free speech but can't tell you where it came from.
from.
That doesn't exist in China.
Those values don't exist in China.
They have a completely different moral tradition.
Now, back to the point we were making, which is, why is there a tendency among conservative Christians to believe in responsibility, meritocracy, and planting trees whose shade you know you will never sit beneath?
And among atheists and agnostics in the United States, there's a tendency to say, wake up, do drugs, and masturbate, and give children porn.
We have a cultural phenomenon where Emma Vigeland of The Majority Report came on this show and said that it is good that teachers, she believes, were giving books about scat to children.
How do you have The Majority Report, which I think is the 48th biggest live show on the internet...
Advocating for giving children kink porn.
And how is it that in schools across this country, it is atheists and agnostics that have been giving children kink porn and teaching them how to bang each other up the butt.
And in fact, in Chicago, a teacher gave children a book that explained to them how to use Grindr, 12-year-olds, to have anonymous gay sex with adult men.
The parents called the police on her.
I understand.
That's an anecdote.
I understand.
The church also had abuse.
The tendency among prominent conservative personalities supporting Donald Trump, supporting the Republican Party, or wherever it may be, as of the past decade or so, leans towards, whoa, we need to do things that create a better society.
The other side, you have people like Chelsea Handler coming out and saying, I wake up, I smoke pot, I masturbate, and I go to bed.
There is a destructive element associated with atheists and agnostics and a protective and creative element associated with the right.
It's not that Christians are perfect people.
There's a lot of evil.
A lot of evil people.
Donald Trump is not a guy who got married and then had a handful of kids with one woman.
He had a bunch of baby mamas.
With all due respect, somehow, you know, not trying to be a dick, he raised a bunch of really good kids.
The Trump family seems to be pretty great.
Still, not very virtuous.
Elon Musk, working with Donald Trump, not very virtuous.
But on the left, you have prominent – the prominent individuals are directly advocating for things that are destructive to society in any capacity.
unidentified
So are prominent Christians, and they've been doing it for a long time.
That are – Right, which is why I said there's a tendency.
If you are a Trump-supporting personality, say you're Ashley St. Clair, and then you hook up with Elon Musk and have a baby out of wedlock, she is getting mercilessly attacked.
Mercilessly.
I mean, they're leaking messages.
Former friends are posting her screenshots of chats they've had.
It is wrong.
What you did is wrong.
They're saying, you can't do this.
It's destructive.
It's bad.
You have done something wrong.
Liberals, tending to be atheists or otherwise, are saying, who cares?
Who cares if you have a dad?
Who cares?
Party, do drugs, don't have children, do whatever.
It is a fact that those things lead to higher crime.
This is one of the principal reasons Trump, people thought would never win, ended up winning.
And the point I'm bringing up is, over the past 10 years, over the past 30 years, the policies implemented in major cities, almost every major city, run by Democrats, many of whom are not, they're not completely atheist, but overwhelmingly these cities are the places where they're bubbling up atheism, where the prominent personalities, celebrities or otherwise, are anti-Christian, where the universities are anti-Christian.
These are where the policies are getting implemented where we see prisoners are being let out.
Violent criminals are being let to reoffend.
An axe murder was just released.
It became a huge story.
We're not seeing that rate of crime per capita or even in its entirety in Christian, Republican-led cities.
unidentified
I think the point you're trying to make is that we see a different cultural idea.
When Christians do horrible things all the time, absolutely, no one is denying that.
Atheists do horrible things.
No one's denying that.
We're seeing different in terms of mentalities in these two groups.
One is promoting a culture of destructiveness is what you're trying to say, and one is promoting a culture that is pro-sociality.
Do – when conservatives do something bad – They get attacked by their own group saying, stop doing this.
It's destructive.
Meanwhile, Bill Maher and people on the left are not attacking.
They're saying, that's just normal hedonism.
It's great.
Wonderful.
And I think that the point you're trying to make is, like, we see two different cultural phenomenons coming out, and you're trying to ask what the difference is.
People on the right, and particularly Christian conservatives, are more likely to be fit and more likely to be fat.
That means it's the extreme ends, right?
So you will find that this was a big talking point in 2018 or so when the corporate press kept running these stories saying working out will make you right-wing.
And it is true that people who tend to exercise more and more start to become more right-wing, and people who are already right-wing, more conservative with moral traditional values, are more likely to exercise.
But then you also do, it is true, find that there are more morbidly obese people at the same time, meaning it's a wider bell curve than liberals.
On the liberal side, you will find they advocate for and they cherish and they advertise morbid obesity to the point where they have the body positivity campaigns that conservatives will roast and make fun of.
So there are lapsed moral individuals on the right, 100%, and there is social advocacy for destructive behaviors on the left.
Or you could take a look at the transgender issue as well.
Advocating for children to sterilize themselves or for parents to sterilize their children is not a Christian phenomenon.
unidentified
And that's also, again, going to cause decreased fertility rates for people on the left, for the atheist agnostic side of things.
Meanwhile, on the Christian side, you have high fertility rates, replacement population, preventing mass migration of Islam coming in with their Sharia law, and then ruining a lot of traditionally Christian countries.
What I'm saying is there are so many indicators in a society that we say are bad.
Like birth rates, we want good birth rates.
Divorce rates, we want people to stay married longer.
It's Reagan's fault.
Well, but what I'm saying is there's so many indicators of what is good in society that if we're just going to pick one and say, yeah, it's bad that birth rates are down.
Well, guess what?
You know, a lot of other countries have had worked on this.
There have been countries that are now putting incentives in place to actually do tax cuts and pay people to have families.
And we're starting to see payoffs for that.
Just introducing a religion into society doesn't fix the birth rate.
Yeah, I think the issue for the West particularly is that you have – community is country, and you had a community built upon a shared moral tradition which is waning, and it's resulting in largely among the secular atheists destructive ends.
That is, they have less kids.
They're more likely to do drugs.
They advocate – or I should say they advocate for these things, whether they're doing more – again, the right has a wider bell curve.
There's probably a bunch of people in Appalachia that are Christian, but – They're seriously harmed by the opioid addiction and things like that.
But the birth rate may as well trump literally any other argument.
If you don't have kids, you cease to exist.
And if we are looking at right now...
I think we've gone over this number so many times.
It's like 1.85 among Christians in general.
Catholics are way higher.
And then you look at liberals and it's down like 1.3.
Give that 20 years and the voting trend in this country is going to be Christian.
In fact, with Muslims, with Islam on the rise, you are largely going to see, I think at a certain point, maybe in the next 50 years, depending on technology, who knows, it's going to be a Christian-Islam voting bloc.
Disagrees with each other on a lot of issues, but agrees with each other on more than the liberals do, and the liberals just cease to exist.
unidentified
What I'm concerned with is that if Christianity...
I'm concerned with hypocrites, people that put on the badge of Christianity, they say the words to the priest or whatever, and then they say, now I'm a Christian, and then they go home and they scream at their wife.
Like, I don't want these people to get power.
That's what concerns me.
Like, more Christianity doesn't mean better society.
So I do think removing all of the idea of all the ideals could send us into a spiral, a downward spiral, but implementing more of it isn't necessarily the counter-just disposition.
There's an interesting point to be made in everything we've argued could be argued that it's stronger in Qatar or Saudi Arabia, where they have such strong Islam, they beat people to death and arrest women who get raped.
And then you have order and structure and lots of babies.
And a friend of mine was telling me that she was walking around in, I think it was Dubai, and they had gold chains.
There's a jewelry store, and they had $5,000 gold chains right up.
Nobody watching him, just in front of the store.
And she was looking at him, and the guy running the store walked to the door, and she was like, are you not worried someone's going to steal these?
And he's like, they'll cut their hands off.
unidentified
Mm-hmm.
No.
I mean, again, going back to your point, you don't want people that are...
They're not.
A lot of the studies you'll see about lower levels of depression, more volunteering, more support for democratic values, and of course higher birth rates correlate more with weekly churchgoers than anything else.
So one of the most important things that John Compton is looking at right now is the rise of religious nuns that you were talking about earlier, these people that claim spirituality or religiosity, but they don't actually live or they're part of a traditional Christian church.
When you start running the numbers comparing weekly churchgoers, people who actually belong to a denomination, with the religious nuns or the unaffiliated, we see stark differences.
We see more authoritarianism, more depression, less volunteering among the religious nuns than people that are actually living out the Christianity, doing all the traditional aspects that you must do to be a Christian.
Do you find that it's the community itself?
Well, it's tough to delineate here, but is it the Christianity?
Or is it the fact that they're getting together with other families and communicating?
It's both.
It's both.
Because intrinsic religiosity is also very important in these studies.
In sociology, you'll see the religious orientation scale between intrinsic and extrinsic, and sometimes you'll see quests in there as well.
But a lot of negative effects come from extrinsic religiosity, which is defined as you're part of a religion because you want to be part of a larger group or it's your culture.
Intrinsic religiosity in sociology is understood as you're part of a religion because you believe the core tenets of the faith.
When we look at various studies, like these meta-analyses I have here, most of the data points show strong correlations with intrinsic religiosity.
So it's not enough to just be a part of Christian because it's your cultural heritage.
You actually have to live out the religion to have the positive.
Here's the thing about believing.
A religion.
Now, this is what confused me, and I wish he was here, Russell Brand.
You guys probably know, within the last two years, year and a half, he's like, I'm a Christian!
Jesus is my Lord and Savior!
Like, what the?
Where did you come from, dude?
What are you talking about, even?
What do you even mean?
Apparently he got splashed with some water, and now he believes something new.
He didn't just like one day someone splashed him in the face and went, whoa, I saw God!
unidentified
You'd been slowly creeping towards it.
Why?
What is it about that— I honestly agree.
You don't have evidence.
You have faith.
I mean, maybe you've got some weak evidence, but the reason it's faith and not proof is because you don't have the correct evidence to call it real proof.
So, like, why do you have faith in that thing?
I think it's comforting for a lot of people.
Well, it's not just that.
I mean, it's correlated with lower levels of suicide, lower levels of depression, better mental health.
Well, I'm saying there are positives to being part of any religion.
Now, some religions, way less positives.
Like Islam, way less positives.
Scientology, way on the bottom of the scale.
So, like, religion in general provides a lot of benefits.
But we've also discovered through different studies that some of those benefits can be had through social structures.
You know, just gathering in groups and having social community provides a lot of the same benefits as going to church.
I absolutely agree.
The problem is the current secular culture is not providing those communities the way the traditional Christian culture has, and they have it if they're going to replace it.
That's what I'm saying.
You're suggesting that they'll never be able to do it.
Have you heard of the God of the gaps argument?
That's a future humans of the gaps argument.
Just because future humans might come, but that doesn't mean they actually will or we have the solutions now.
You're suggesting that we don't have any data at all.
We actually do have data.
We've got lots of countries that used to be heavily religious that are no longer religious, and they did develop structures.
So it's not like society is going to collapse.
Human beings seek structure.
When one structure fails, we find new structures, or we make new structures.
And we could go back to the good structures of traditional Christianity and leave the authoritarian, secular European countries, which are, again, diminishing birth rates, higher levels of authoritarianism, less volunteering, higher levels of depression.
I mean, again, There's a reason that when I was just debating Lawrence Krauss two weeks ago, I brought up these factors because actual studies have shown that when it comes to secularism and Christianity, Christianity is winning on all these factors in the actual studies.
But depression is just a red herring.
For example, they didn't even include seasonal depression in the DSM until 1987. Seventy percent of all depression cases that are diagnosed today are seasonal depression, which means as people say, well, secularity has risen, but so is depression.
You know, because you were talking about like the global happiness index and all that stuff.
And the reason why this is probably not a...
There's no real easy argument I have.
It's an emotional argument.
the reason why I don't trust these international ranking systems is that for the entire of my life, I've seen them lie.
And from my experiences and from other data points, you can see that these things are not correct.
One really is an example that hits more closer to home for me is the Press Freedom Index, which claims that Canada is more press-free than the United States.
In the UK, they will arrest you for criticizing Islam.
And they claim in these global rankings, they, these international organizations of great merit, that it's better there.
You can take a look at Sweden, which is number four, despite the fact that it is a completely homogenous country that sent government spooks to spy on me for daring point out that when, this is crazy, when we got escorted out of Rinkaby by the police who literally said...
Hey, look, they're going to start throwing stones at you because you have cameras.
We weren't filming anybody, and we said, oh, really?
The people there, they were Somali children.
They were born in Sweden, were screaming things, Expressen, and whatever the names of these newspapers were.
They thought we were with Swedish press.
The cops said they don't view Swedes as part of their country.
They don't view themselves as part of Swedes.
If they start throwing stones right now, we can't save you.
And I said, should we leave?
And they said, yes.
And I said, will you follow us?
He said, yes, we will.
And I said, okay, thank you.
Held up my camera, and I filmed myself and them as they followed behind us until we drove out of the plaza to a parking lot where our car was.
I posted that video, or actually I tweeted, this is what happened.
The entirety of the press in Sweden, all in unison, argued, I lied, made up the story, and the police said that story never happened.
Then I published the video and I said, take a look at this.
Then the entirety of the media all came out in lockstep and said, Tim Pool followed the police.
He's lying.
And I said, here's a video of the police following me.
And they were like, he knew where they were going and walked in that direction.
And I said, towards my car?
My phone, the journalists all started sharing my phone number with each other.
If this is in 2020 or 2022, this might actually be more accurate than we realize, with the Biden regime stomping down on Twitter, controlling mass media in the United States.
We did not have a free press in 2022. Except the ranking for the United States has dropped, and the reports these organizations give out is that Donald Trump is curtailing press freedoms, which he's not doing.
He's strengthening them.
In the UK, which is ranked number 26, you will go to prison.
If you report the race of a criminal.
So they, in Sweden, very famously, there was a Afghan man who robbed the store.
And I can't remember the name of him.
I don't know if it was Afton Blotted or something.
One of these newspapers pixelated his face and then changed the colors of the pixels to white.
So that you couldn't tell.
I think it was a Somali guy.
They made it.
They blurred his skin color.
They blurred.
His hands and his face and then change the pixels so that everybody thought it was a white person who did it.
And the UK is 26 and we're 45. These international organizations that are telling you communism is good and we're free and everyone's happy are lying to you.
unidentified
Can we do a new religion where it's all the good stuff?
The basic good stuff.
We don't have to go sit in front of a cross, some murder tool, and we don't have to worship some dude.
We can just enjoy the realities of the right way to be.
I mean I would always say like people often have ideas when we sit around like this and go it would be really good if we could do X, Y, and Z and then we try to implement in society sort of like what the communists were trying to do.
We just do this.
We'll see this effect.
Human psychology is weird and oftentimes we don't understand why we do X, Y, and Z and then we get results A, B, and C. But I mean oftentimes we have to just see what actually plays out in real world data.
Christianity wasn't – didn't just happen.
Constantine created it, basically.
No, he didn't.
Well, I mean, as a religion.
It was a bunch of people that believed Jesus, for sure, but Jesus wasn't trying to get them to start a religion.
He just said what he believed.
He said, upon this rock I build my church in Matthew 16. He was definitely trying to start a church.
He was a Jew.
I mean, he was definitely a Jew, and maybe he was trying to reform Judaism, but he wasn't trying to create a religion.
He was trying just to teach people and be like, modernize Judaism.
And it explained, like, well, maybe you can...
You know, sow two types of crops in one garden and it'll be alright.
I don't know if he actually said that, but like, he was taking the Old Testament and like...
Filling in the gaps for modern age with new technology and being like, here's a lot of it.
I mean, he definitely was a reformer, but he was definitely calling all sorts of people to him.
I mean, if you go to Matthew 28, he talks about going and preaching to the Gentiles and doing this kind of stuff.
Then we see it play out in Acts.
I mean, the idea that Constantine created Christianity is a huge modern myth.
Peter J. Lightheart wrote about this in his book Defending Constantine.
He had nothing to do with the Bible.
He had nothing to do with doctrine.
In fact, oftentimes he just sort of signed off on things the bishops came to in their conclusions.
It's been a huge...
I think if Constantine wanted to stomp out Christianity, he probably could have.
But he chose to elevate it to the national level.
Whereas, like, religions, they aren't really emergent.
I mean, they kind of are.
I know what you're saying.
Like, human psychology, you can't just be like, now you're going to be a religion, but you kind of can if you control the narrative machine.
And so, without...
The authoritarian alteration of the scene.
I don't know.
I mean, other than just becoming an obsessive prophet myself and just...
Spouting it and spouting it and alienating myself and then getting slaughtered by the modern control structure like Jesus did.
And then people in 100 years will start to create a religion out of me.
I don't see a path.
And be like, please, can we do it, guys?
Come on, let's all come together and create a...
That doesn't seem to be the way.
To your point, Christianity for the first 1,500 years was really not a religion of freedom.
It was a religion of repressive ideas.
Even in the book of Acts, chapter 19, we see the first book burnings.
Under Athanasius, there were...
Under Constantine, there were book burnings.
Under Eusebius and John Chrysostom, all throughout Christian history, they were burning books that they deemed heretical.
Any books that they deemed heretical, they were burning them.
So the issue we need to understand, because book burning in and of itself, it's a Godwin's law.
It's like the Nazis burned books.
The question is, what books were being burned and why?
unidentified
Well, they list them.
In fact, there's a really good book on this.
Let me pull it up for you, where they go through Christian history.
In fact, in late antiquity, it's called Christianity, Book Burning, and Censorship in Late Antiquity by Dirk Roman.
And in fact, some of those book burnings are even recorded in this firsthand right here, edicts during Constantine's reign and just after Constantine reigns, where they say, go out and collect these books and burn them.
a lot of them are philosophical works by the Greeks a lot of them are just heretical books by other Christians the idea of freedom of thought within Christianity is a modern concept And why is it a modern concept now, though?
I mean, it didn't just come out of nowhere.
People are getting crushed by it.
When a religion crushes you for 1,500 years, eventually you're like, hey, maybe we shouldn't be doing this.
The same thing with Islam.
If Islam continues on the path that it's going right now, eventually their own adherents will rebel against them.
They can't right now because they'll get killed.
That's not happening.
The revivalist movements in Islam are Salafi, and they're trying to go back to Muhammad, and they're actually more authoritarian.
They're actually far worse than a lot of...
Regular Muslim-type folk are because they're trying to go back.
The question we need to ask is, yes, Christians did horrible things, but if we're going on what Tom Holland does in his book, Dominion, there were definitely revivalist movements.
He talks about Christianity being like a city underneath an earthquake line.
What are those things called?
Fault line?
Fault line, yeah.
He's like, yeah, they build these structures, but then oftentimes within Christianity, revivalist movements shake things up and start things over.
So he talks about this throughout his book.
They did horrible things to the Cathars.
Revivalists come along and they start to say, no, we need to get back to the teachings of Jesus.
And you're saying 1,500 years.
And actually, again, you know, Brian Tierney, for example, in his book The Idea of Natural Knights, notes this starts far earlier, and it's moving through the medieval period, this idea of developing natural light, freedom of religion, freedom of thought.
It's coming up, it's sort of developing.
And that's why Tom Holland says Christianity was like a depth charge.
It took a while for that charge to go off and start spreading.
People were fighting it as I was doing it, but revivalist movement, Christianity had built in this structure of revivalism.
Was it the printing press?
Printing press helped a lot.
Because the internet is kind of like another staging ground for a new religion.
And I think there's a lot of cultures vying for that control right now.
I mean, I see a blending of science and God, like, for sure.
There's something, like, we've developed technology that can witness some fluctuations in, like I mentioned at the beginning of the show, the cosmic microwave background radiation is no joke.
That is not a coincidence that it looks like a neural net in the brain, like a bunch of neurons arcing through planetoids and star systems where you see these bright dots, which are like neurons, and then they kind of...
Fan out into what looked like wisp.
I mean, at some point, pull it up and look at it and just stare at it and realize what you're looking into.
Are you guys familiar with the Laborum Prohibitorum?
It's an official list of banned books that started in the medieval period that didn't get abolished until 1966 under Pope John.
And guess what?
There's a lot of science in there.
Nicholas Capernais, Johannes Kepler, Rene Descartes, LaFont, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Victor Hugo, even novelists like John Milton, Spinoza's in there, John Locke's in there, David Hume's in there.
This went on until the modern age.
My dad was alive when they finally abolished this list of banned books.
Well, obviously, in the 1950s in the USA, they wouldn't have been able to do anything to you other than excommunicate to you.
They can excommunicate you, yeah, but in the – I read books more like church guidance on like, hey, this is a bad book.
It's basically – there's an atheist named Tim O'Neill who runs for History for Atheists.
He's addressed a lot of this.
These books were not being banned.
They're put on like a special list as if like, hey, we need more teachings on – I can certainly accept that if you go back to Inquisition period, if you were caught with one of these books, they were going to inquisition you or whatever.
Hey, you don't follow our teachings, so you're not...
unidentified
The thing, if modern religion wants to ban books that have scientific nature, that we're trying to talk about God scientifically, the last vestige of control of this narrative machine of the church itself.
I'm not talking about the Christian ideals.
I'm talking about the church that was built to control the idea.
If you don't follow their version of what God is, they lose control of you.
And so they want to stifle, at least this is the autocratic...
The idea of what they could do is they'll stifle disseminating or dissenting opinions about what God is in order to control people to join their herd.
And we don't need that anymore, man.
That is sickening, disgusting cult behavior.
You need to think for yourself and look out there and see what is.
That's what the reformers said, the Protestant reformers.
That's one of the things they were upset about.
They wanted more individuality and choice of religion because Martin Luther's big thing was like my salvation is dependent on me and God, not me and a mediator through Rome, for example.
So this is what I was talking about earlier when Tom Holland talks about these reformations coming.
The church gets too authoritarian.
The earthquake happens, and then reformers come along.
Martin Luther also advocated for burning down synagogues and repossessing the homes of Jewish people.
Why doesn't—why does God make himself known only to some people?
unidentified
That's a great question.
There's a whole philosophical subject called divine hiddenness, which philosophers debate, and there's various reasons.
For one thing, a lot of the position of theologians is that—well, let me just quote C.S. Lewis.
He says, honest rejection of Christ, however wrong, shall be forgiven and healed.
So one of the things he's saying, like, listen, if you are truly a non-resistant non-believer, you're not going to be— Condemned necessarily because of that.
You may have a good excuse.
But the argument would be is that maybe God is making himself known to people throughout their lives in various ways.
Maybe there is a such thing as non-resistant non-believers.
There's a whole philosophical field discussing that.
He was a urban city atheist hanging out, punk rock, cared for nothing, getting drunk.
And he was out in the woods one day with a bunch of friends, woke up, hung over, went to take a leak when he said that he felt a powerful, booming voice emerging from within his own body.
And it was God saying, why are you doing this?
And he had a panic attack, started freaking out, looking around like, how am I hearing this voice?
And he said, I don't know.
And it told him, you have to fix your life.
And right at that moment, he freaked out.
He said that he began reading and trying to find answers because he didn't know what happened, and ultimately it led him to the church where he cleaned up his life, stopped drinking, opened a coffee shop, and now he's just a regular working class guy.
And he says, I understand that you'll never believe me that this happened, but it happened to me and that's all that matters because I believe it.
And so I don't think the guy's crazy.
Maybe he was just crazy, I guess.
But there's a lot of stories like that.
A lot of stories of people saying they felt a shaking voice come from within their body.
And that's why I ask.
Assuming those stories are true, I don't know if they are.
If it is true, why would God only choose some people to say this to?
unidentified
You get your subconscious, you'll have thoughts pop into your head.
Sometimes they pop into your entire body, your muscles, everything feels that subconscious message.
And then that'll be a booming sound or something, a vision.
You'll actually experience the image.
So one thing we have taken into effect is God's omniscience.
Maybe he knows.
For that guy, he needs to do this, and it will help save him.
Maybe for some people, if he did that, they'd become a fundamentalist preacher, and they'd start attacking abortion clinics, for example, this kind of stuff.
So, I mean, like, maybe God can see all these possible timelines, and he knows, you know, I'll do this here, I'll do that there, and that will help.
Maybe for some people, he can see in all possible future timelines and go, it doesn't matter if I did that, it would never help.
It would just make them worse, depending on their psychology.
so God we have to take into a factor when we look at divine hiddenness the omniscience of God and what he could know given this is this is something philosophers talk about given his vast knowledge we can't say that he is not wrong for not doing that for every person given that kind of knowledge in the Bible he's not even omniscient Like, in Genesis 18, he doesn't know what's happening in Sodom.
In Genesis 22, he doesn't know if Abraham's going to actually fulfill the test that he's been given to sacrifice Isaac.
In Deuteronomy 13, he specifically says he's testing the Israelites to know if they will be faithful to him.
Over and over again, God just admits that he's not omniscient.
If I catch my daughter catching a cookie and I go, what are you doing?
Does that mean I don't know what I just saw?
Or am I trying to have a relationship with her and getting her to confess?
He said, now I know in Genesis 22, meaning he didn't know prior.
The Hebrew word ata means now.
In this moment, I know.
Yeah, we can just look at that through speech hack theory, and God, when he's communicating and talking with people— Right, words don't mean words, I'm sure.
Well, no, they don't.
That's what speech hack theory is about.
If I said to you, you're standing on my foot, I'm not just saying, hey, look at that.
I'm actually asking you to get off my foot.
We often communicate in ways that are not literal.
This is the difference between locution and illocution.
These people often have names, and they're typically referred to as prophets.
So certainly if you want to argue that people were false prophets, I'd agree with you.
But the idea that someone heard a loud, crackling voice or something from a burning bush, your better argument is that it's allegory and not some guy hiding behind a rock shouting.
unidentified
Moses?
I think he was tripping on that acacia bush.
Esther Homori is a professor.
She wrote a book called When Gods Were Men.
And if you read the ancient Babylonian and Akkadian literature, the gods are almost universally described as being man-like, which is why we find in the Bible that mankind is created in the image of God, which is identical to what it says about the children of Adam.
Adam's children were made in the image of Adam.
Mankind and gods were more similar in ancient times than we like to believe.
This idea that God is transcendent, omniscient, and is pervading all things is a Greco-Roman idea.
Like, nobody, Lord help us, if in the future they're like, did you know they worshipped a god who was half man, half spider?
And he could climb walls and he fought crime.
And we'd be like, wow!
unidentified
I mean, the important point is that all of that could be true.
We could all just pretend we're atheists here for the sake of the argument.
That doesn't change the fact that the Judeo-Christian tradition has given us most of the things that we hold sacred today.
I am a big proponent of whatever made you famous today.
You don't have to keep doing that now in the future.
Like, Christianity got us to this point.
We don't need to keep focusing on 2,000 years ago when we can build something new. - But the problem is we're trying, and again, collapsing birth rates, more authoritarianism, higher levels of depression, lower volunteering and charity work.
The attempt to build something, as you were talking about the cut stem thing, cutting the flower off, the flower's dying before our eyes.
So this idea that we can just keep having the nice stuff we like in the West without the Christian foundations, showing before our eyes in real time is not working. - Why is giving the charity such an important thing?
Because, as it turns out, secular charities are actually quite popular.
We're just a little bit below non-secular charities, but I'm trying to figure out why that's the measuring point we need to be aiming at.
Yeah, I'm trying to figure out why half these charities we wouldn't need if we had a better government system.
Oh, I completely disagree.
Yeah, government's horrible at providing for people.
What I'm suggesting is if we had proper structures in the United States on both the federal and the state and the local level that helped people to actually survive, we wouldn't need to be giving handouts to people.
The roots of the flower are the Christian tradition and the flower is America.
unidentified
The reason I think that...
Like, birth rates are declining as PFAS, these chemicals in the groundwater, the pharmaceuticals, the azo dyes, all this crazy toxin has made people mute.
Maybe, maybe, but the actual data correlation we have is that young people are no longer going into public spaces, largely due to the internet.
So one of the reasons why, and this is why I think religion plays a role in this.
For your typical urban liberal, they may actually be from a Christian family or whatever, but they're lapsed.
They don't go to church.
They don't do any of these things.
Young men aren't going outside anymore.
Virginity among men under the age of 30 has skyrocketed some like 20 or 30 percent.
Even among women, it's going up.
Now, Seamus hilariously said, based.
And I said, no, Seamus, 20-year-old men, by your standard, should be married with children.
And he was like, oh, yeah.
Like, so it is not good that young men are not having families.
However, there is a moral tradition aligned with Christianity, largely Catholicism, as you pointed out, where they have a duty not just to themselves but to a shared God, they both see, to have family.
So they are actually getting married and having kids, whereas the kid who grows up in the city is sitting around playing, you know, scrolling TikTok all day and not going outside.
And the problem is, I think, in America, there is this perception that being a follower is a bad thing, and it's offensive to call someone a follower and everyone has to be a leader.
When everyone's a leader, everybody's running around in random directions.
The example I like to give to people is imagine the king standing on the front line of his army about to engage in a battle to save their homeland.
Each and every one of those men standing shoulder to shoulder with their spears or swords or whatever is a follower of the king.
But they are also the most noble willing to sacrifice themselves for something they care about and believe in to preserve a community.
The king as the leader stands in front of them.
I don't respect modern leaders who hide behind walls and cower in their bunkers and basements.
But the traditional value of what it means to be a leader is you are leading the charge.
You told everybody I would never command you to do that which I would not do myself.
The king would jump on his horse and scream charge and run forward with his followers behind him.
That king had no power were it not for his followers who believed in him and were willing to sacrifice everything for something they believed in.
That's what it truly means to have a good leader and good followers.
And it's entirely respectable in my view that there are people who simply want to be followers.
It's entirely respectable there are people who want to be leaders.
It is not respectable that everybody thinks they're the main character.
Sometimes you're not.
Sometimes you're never going to be the president.
You're never going to be a billionaire.
Your purpose is where you are.
And sometimes that's okay.
Sometimes you just strive for more.
Sometimes you should recognize you should stop striving for more and just be what you're best at.
unidentified
That's what I call a product of Disney culture.
We all need to be special.
Someone who has a romantic or venture somewhere out there, and everyone's trying to be that main character, as you mentioned right now.
It just doesn't work.
It just seems like it's a result.
It could be a result of Nietzsche and Ubermesh thinking, we all need to be this Superman kind of person.
We are all the main character of our own story.
We're all seeing it first person.
And that is an empowering realization, is that you are the main creator of your reality.
Stuff is happening around you.
You are in control of this business.
To what point, though?
Because you need people to kind of calm down this, what do you call it, I guess, aggression or this...
But like, think about what you're saying there.
Yeah, that is an issue.
But look at what happens in Christianity.
You say, God, you come into my heart.
You become the main character and I follow you.
And Christ says, they hated me, they're going to hate you.
They're going to persecute you for my sake.
You're not going to be above your master.
You're going to go through hardship like I'm going to go through hardship for you.
So you're talking about this idea of a leader who, the king who goes out and leads his army.
We see in Christianity that mentality.
Jesus goes to the cross for us.
He suffers for us.
Therefore, we can go out and suffer and do good work.
So Christianity has that built in Mexico.
Yes, it has a built-in mechanism for people to be followers, which does concern me if it just disappears for a moment.
Hitler.
Trump.
Random demagogue appears, and Trump's a great guy.
I love him, but powerful speaker.
People will be like...
I need to follow something, someone, something more came along that I can follow now, and you're like, whoa, bro, are you addicted to following?
Yeah, I'm actually in agreement with Tim here.
I don't think being a follower is a bad thing.
I think there's a huge segment of the population that don't feel comfortable being leaders.
They feel comfortable as being followers.
I think the problem is sometimes they don't know how to choose what to follow, and they can fall in.
Fall prey to following something that's actually dangerous for them.
And we've seen that all throughout history in every country.
Like, a buddy of mine told me a long time ago, he didn't aspire to perceived greatness.
He's like, I'm just happy working my 9 to 5. Why?
Because I do my thing, I mind my own business, and my mind is free.
While I'm doing this menial task and this menial job where someone else is stressed, he's like, I have my hours where I have to work.
While I'm working, I'm thinking about what I want to do after work.
I'm thinking about what I want to do with my family.
And then once I'm done with work, my family will go out to dinner and we have a good time.
We smile and laugh.
My boss, he's doing paperwork all night.
He's like, that's for him.
He wants to do that more power to him.
It's not for me.
And I was like, you know, it's actually kind of informed my view on these things.
Some people just say, hey man.
You want to work 16-hour days 24-7 and run a business and make the money?
Tell me what you need me to do and I'll do what I can.
I'm going to spend time with my family for the most part.
unidentified
So what do we need?
We need some more leaders because I think they said the middle class has been – there's been a disparity between the wealth, a lot of poor, a lot of rich now, less middle class.
Maybe if we make more leaders but not too many more, maybe like 7% more leaders in society will create a middle class of business owners, people that are willing to like – I think we need incentivization.
It's very difficult for people to want to be leaders.
Some of them have the capacity, but they don't have the means.
Like, there's so many people that could actually be leading something, but...
They can't leave their 9 to 5, or they've got family members they have to tend to, and it's very difficult for them to get training.
So, for example, I went to seminary.
I got an actual seminary education.
The number of pastors that I've worked with when I was a Christian that couldn't afford to leave their actual work and family life to go get that education is very high.
There's a high percentage of pastors with no education, not because they don't want it.
But because they can't afford to leave what they're doing and actually go get it.
And that's the hardest part in society is when you want to be a leader, it takes education and takes commitment.
And it's hard to put down your other commitments to go do that thing.
But I don't know how we incentivize it other than like scholarships, tax breaks, things like that.
Yeah, it's like kind of crossing a class system.
Right.
Yeah.
I mean, the good thing is a lot of charities have been trying to help out with that.
And that's another good thing we see in society is the fact that charity work is pushing these ideas like we'll give you money to go do this kind of thing or we'll help you out with that.
So those are always very important and we need those in society.
And I think they actually say that it's gross domestic product and social support, life expectancy, and freedom to make your own life choices is towards the bottom of the list.
Generosity is at the bottom of the list.
It really just is, can I afford food and shelter for my family?
And then I'm good.
And then I'm going to sit down.
I'm going to watch TV and not got to worry about anything else.
unidentified
Can you expect to be healthy?
Can you get your needs met?
Those are the things that really make people happy.
And do you have social connections that bring meaning to your life?
Well, in all seriousness, joking aside, you made a great point that—and I brought this up.
I bring this up quite a bit.
As community is country.
We as a nation, whether it's Christianity or otherwise, we used to every week meet with everyone in the town.
Not literally everybody, but most people.
And there was effectively a community meeting in the church.
We don't do that anymore.
Now, there's no community.
People don't even know who their neighbors are.
Like, when was the last time you knocked on your neighbor's door and asked for a cup of sugar or something?
He's like, this doesn't happen.
Honestly, when was the last time you knocked on your neighbor's door and asked them how they were doing?
Luke Rutkowski made a really great video 13 years ago where he said every day he goes on the train and there's millions of people on the New York subway and they never talk to each other.
In fact, they go to great lengths to not They won't look each other in the eyes.
So one day I decided, I'm just going to start talking to these people.
And then he asked them a bunch of questions about how they feel, how they feel about government and things like that.
But that's a really interesting point that in a major city like New York, people intentionally go out of their way to try and avoid talking to their neighbors.
unidentified
I didn't at first.
I moved there and I was very much Midwest, come from Ohio.
Eye contact, super cool.
But then after like a couple months...
Of tens of thousands of people every day in my face over and over.
I was just like, get out of my way.
It would be like a woman would be struggling to get down the steps and she's got her bags and taking up three lanes walking down.
So I just push her aside.
I'm like, I just pushed a woman.
What am I? What am I like?
Like, that's what happened.
That was like six months, six or seven months.
The evolution of being surrounded by.
It's weird to be alone in a group of people to feel like.
There's even more people around, but I feel even more alone.
That's what I felt like in New York City a lot of times.
You force yourself to interact, but people don't want to stop and talk because they're all going somewhere.
A lot of them are like, people don't just stand around in the corner hanging out in New York.
It's very rare, maybe on their front stoop.
But if someone's on the street walking, they're going somewhere.
They don't want to stop.
And it was just culture shock.
Do you know your neighbor's names?
Today?
Yeah.
I know one of them personally, but I already knew him before he moved in.
But other than that...
No.
I met one of them once, and I'm in a somewhat of a rural—I'm in a pretty rural area, but no.
No, I don't know any of them.
Yeah, that's just unfortunate, like how—I think a lot of you think about internet.
It just completely divided us from the people around us.
And I think the one tether we have is going to church weekly, the Americans that do that, because you're forced to talk to people at church.
It's very rare for me to go to a church and no one ever talks to me.
You almost feel like— Required because you want to make them welcome.
You're in the presence of God.
You better make people welcome.
And so there's that really good incentive holding us together at this point that we just have sort of lost the more the internet comes out.
There's the meme that I've been citing, and you know what?
Screw it.
We'll get a little crass.
It's a funny meme.
It's from 4chan where someone, it says like, you know, 1994, dude says he wants to bang a toaster.
Guy smacks him on the side of the head and says, knock it off, weirdo.
2024, guy says he wants to bang a toaster, goes online, finds community of people who bang toasters, and they all cheer him on.
And that's the difference between back then and now.
If community was built around...
Christian moral teachings at a church where it's like, honor thy father and thy mother, obviously not slavery or anything like that.
You go to church, no one's telling you to do that.
Then whatever deviant behaviors an individual might have, like they are attracted to toasters, is constantly repressed and pushed aside for something substantially more socially acceptable and basic like, you know, don't covet thy neighbor's things or wife or whatever.
But now that community has largely become internet-based, you have quite literally people who have weird We've replaced structured centralized culture around a moral tradition with decentralized random communities on the internet which are more often than not destructive.
unidentified
Yeah, it's reverse culture shock.
It's like culture dampening of something.
Well, I mean, you can just pick your culture.
You can pick your community now and go where you want to do it, and then you can reinforce whatever you believe.
When we were more localized, focused in our own communities, I mean, people would try to conform to what that community was, and that wasn't always good.
There were definitely bad communities of the past, but now it's just hyper-individualism.
You can just go online, find what you want, believe what you want, and you can get whatever you want.
You, it was, I had better adhere to this group around me.
And then one day I'm going to move and leave this town and go somewhere else and start my life over again.
And I did that at college.
I was like, I'm going to be gregarious at college.
I'm going to be outspoken and talk.
I'm going to be an extrovert at college.
So I did.
I completely became, went from introvert to extrovert.
And then the internet appeared and it's like, dude, I don't have to adhere to Anything anymore.
I can make a video, get nine people following me, and that starts the momentum of now I am creating my cult.
I know the virtues are Catholic, Ten Commandments are Jewish, but what about those?
Right, yeah.
So we go to like Ten Commandments.
I do find that the Ten Commandments are like these universal principles that like people in all cultures at some point said, yeah, we kind of agree with these things.
And no wonder why it's like the main focus of the book of Exodus.
But like to say that...
They're unique to Christianity, I think, would be giving it way too much credit.
Well, I mean, in the Ten Commandments, there are unique things.
I mean, like, only have this one God, no making graven images, the Sabbath, for example.
You're not going to find that anywhere else.
That is uniquely Judeo-Christian in terms of what that is, and it's a sign of the Old Covenant.
So it's basically you believe in multiple gods, but there's like one god who's sort of above all who's more special than the other gods.
Kind of, but I mean like it's...
You know, like you could, in like the Greek polytheism, like Zeus, of course, is the head of God, but you're going to worship a bunch.
When you are a henotheist, your real focus is on that one God specifically, even though you believe he's part of like multiple gods.
Yeah, the other gods are basically insignificant in henotheism.
And so we find this in quite a few ancient cultures.
But there were two, like Nabonidus at some point had a tryst with monotheism.
Same with Akhenaten.
Their cultures that they lived in did not adopt monotheism.
One of the things about Islam I really like is there's the four pillars of Islam.
Five?
Oh, there's five?
I believe there's five.
Well, one of them is fasting, is Ramadan.
Which is basically, in the hot, hot heat, they were like, yo, if we're going to survive this heat, we can't eat.
Because you eat, your body burns calories, you get hotter and hotter.
So they're like, just don't eat for a month.
That's probably, I think, where it came from.
Well, I mean, they eat and just wait for the sun to go down.
They what?
They eat, they just wait for the sun to go down.
They wait for the sun, when it cools down, then they can eat.
And it's like, when you fast, the ability to hear God becomes so much clearer because you're not clogged.
Like your body's a radio, and you're tuning it to catch the frequency of it speaking to you.
And if you're clogged up with funk from food, it's challenging.
The cholesterol, it clouds that.
But when your body's clear, man, is it easy to touch with God.
The church fathers said fasting was the body's way of praying, because you're craving something, so you're speaking out for it.
So it was this idea that we can pray with our minds, but how is our body going to pray?
Will it fast because it's craving something?
I'm surprised that it's not part of the Christian tenet.
Fasting.
Lent.
Yeah, it did eventually become a tenant, yeah.
Once?
One week a year, is it?
No, it's 40 days.
You fast in between Fat Tuesday, so Fat Tuesday, you get all fat, and then you fast Wednesday.
And then you would do some type of fast for 40 days.
You don't have to, like, give up food.
It's different in, like, for example, Catholic versus Lutheran versus the Orthodox.
But, like, you'll give up, like, meat.
You'll basically be vegan for a couple days of the week, I believe, in the Orthodox Church.
In some Catholic traditions, but like, and then if you go to some Protestants that keep it, they'll just say, we're going to give up this one thing for 40 days.
So it's different depending on where it manifests in Christianity.
Oh, so sometimes it's food, sometimes it's like a video game, sometimes it's not always food, right?
Well, if Catholic and Lutheran, or sorry, Catholic and Orthodox, it has to be, you're basically vegan a couple days of the week or, you know, for the 40 days, other than Fridays where you're allowed to eat fish.
So it started as a morning ritual.
So you're fasting prior to the crucifixion of Jesus, right?
It's a morning ritual, because in the ancient world, you didn't eat when you were mourning.
You certainly wouldn't have eaten meat.
So that's basically what they're tapping into with Lent.
Now, over the course of time, the period that you're fasting turned into a longer period into the whole Lenten season, but you couldn't actually fast for the whole season.
And so it got morphed into like, well, we're going to fast just meat, or we're going to fast just X, Y, and Z.
But that's kind of the origination of it.
But in Jewish culture and in early Christian culture, fasting was always very important.
Yeah.
It was a sign of repentance.
It was a sign of mourning.
So, for example, if you are really repentant of your sins, like we see in the book of Jonah, when Nineveh repents of their sins, they fast and they put on sackcloth and ashes.
In fact, they even put sackcloth and ashes on the cattle.
So with the last few minutes here, we'll go back to the principal question at hand, which is...
Can the West survive without Christianity?
I do think one thing we probably all agree on, and maybe we don't, is—here's the question—do we as a nation, just the United States, require a shared moral tradition to function?
unidentified
I think yes.
Otherwise, we're going to start to see slow societal collapse.
Moving from one culture to another would always be chaos.
I do think that if we completely became atheists over the next 50 years— You know, we would eventually adopt, come up with a new culture, possibly.
I think, honestly, it'd be Islam based on birth rates.
What would—like, let's say, I don't know, Qatar or the Emirates got rid of Islam and just said, we're no longer going to use this doctrine.
What would their moral tradition look like if you removed Islam from those countries?
unidentified
So, you know, my experience is when people leave religion, they typically have roughly similar moral values as when they were in the religion.
So, you know, my experience is when people leave religion, they typically have roughly similar moral values as when they were in the religion.
In fact, if you poll most Christians and Muslims about their actual moral values, they don't always align with what they actually believe in the faith.
People's moral values are more subjective than we realize.
And so my experience is that people leaving their particular religion is not that they go into complete lack of morals.
They typically align similar with what they were raised.
It's not until their kids come into the world that we find a large divergence in what they believe, because they weren't tethered to anything.
I guess the issue that I'm looking at is in the United States, you have the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, and then you have lack thereof.
There's not been a dominant replacement for the Christian moral tradition in this country, even among people who are atheists.
This is the example we give with Bill Maher.
He still largely adheres to Judeo-Christian values in a secular way, like...
Even though he's not religious, he still was raised in a society that said these are valuable things.
He believes that.
You look at countries like China or Japan that don't have those traditions, and their moral structures are very, very different.
Obviously, China does not believe in innocent until proven guilty.
They don't believe that you have a right to free speech.
Most of these Islamic nations absolutely reject that, even despite the fact they did have Abrahamic values.
So I guess what it comes down to is either we sit back and wait to see.
If there will be in this vacuum in the United States a new moral philosophy or moral tradition that we value, so far we haven't seen it.
Wokeness, which emerged somewhere from this vacuum, which is considered, I agree with this, that it's a non-theistic religion, was a horrifyingly authoritarian and despotic ideology that isolate people based on weird identities and who they want to have sex with.
It's just a very strange thing that is ultimately very bad.
I don't want to live under those rules.
I also would not want to live under Islamic.
Even if it was reformed rules, the values they have are very, very different, although not completely in every way, but their traditions are very, very different.
Even if you cover the religion, I don't like the way that those countries typically treat women.
For instance, and then obviously the communist values of many of these eastern nations, regardless of whether they're overtly inspired by communists, but they're very hierarchical, authoritarian, communal functions, I also wouldn't want to agree with.
Stripping out the spiritual beliefs from it, leaving behind only the rudimentary, let's just call it like divergent deist beliefs of various countries, I would still rather live in a nation.
Whether it was Christian or otherwise, that was built upon Christian moral values, and that's probably because I grew up in a country that had these values.
So, will the United States function without Christianity is a ridiculously difficult question to answer, but as most people in this country genuinely still value Judeo-Christian moral framework, if that starts to go away for wokeness...
You get social collapse.
You get conflict.
You get fighting.
You get people trying to blow up Tesla dealerships.
You get degradation, largely because what we're seeing right now in this country with the hyperpolarization is not necessarily a political worldview clash.
It's a moral worldview clash.
There are people who have outright said it should be illegal to have more than a certain amount of money.
The other half of the country is like, what?
Why?
they don't have the same moral framework.
One is rooted in a traditional Christian moral framework.
One is a complete lack thereof.
I think the children of people who are secular, as you were saying, they don't have that moral framework.
And this is causing a clash, which could lead ultimately to serious violence.
Notably, as we mentioned with slavery, despite the fact that everybody was Christian, half of them were like, no, Christianity doesn't allow you to do this.
And half of them were like, yes, it does.
And then they fought to the death.
So I don't know where we go from here, other than to say, It's not so much that the religion is what matters, It's that We still, largely in this country, hold on to a moral tradition, and if that is taken away, the people who see the world this way are not going to let it go, and society will cease to function effectively.
So the states break apart, or we get attacked from the outside, or the economy crumbles, and we become a very corrupt state of police not enforcing certain laws.
You're not going to have social cohesion without cohesive moral tradition.
unidentified
And secular attempts to try to make new things like wokeism or even on the right with like more political understandings of like Christian nationalism just simply don't work.
They lead to more of these authoritarian ideas.
I mean, as John Witt Jr. said, the regime of law, democracy and human rights needs religion to survive.
There's a reason that a lot of these ideas came out of the Christian West despite the fact that no one was perfect, and there were Christians pushing against a lot of these ideas that we hold sacred.
There's a reason that… Sociologists and historians will say these came out of this.
So if we move away from Christianity, we can see in real time the authoritarianism, the low birth rates, and the lack of charity that's coming out of it.
So there is something still here that we need.
Maybe in the future some secular group will come up with something better, but until we get there, the best what we got right now is the Christian tradition and our Christian heritage for keeping this cohesive, stable society.
Even Roland to Salem found Christianity was associated with more political stability, citizen empowerment, voice and accountability in government, and he published a whole study using an OLS model for that.
As Christianity waned and we saw the rise of wokeness, they also completely reject free speech.
So not that it is inherent among Christianity as a core religion that we have free speech, but if we adopted any other moral tradition, I think we'd all be quite upset.
unidentified
Yeah.
If I have to choose between Islam and Christianity, I'm going to pick Christianity.
So, like, you're not allowed to – like, you have to hire people based on race.
If there's too many white people at a company, you're not allowed to hire white people.
If you need a certain number of people that work for you, or how about this?
A better example when it comes to speech, progressive stack.
This means that right now, none of you are allowed to speak.
If we are operating under the tenets of woke moral tradition, which I wouldn't call tradition because it's new, none of you are allowed to speak as you're all white men, and I, as a mixed-race person, am only allowed to talk, and you have to listen to me.
They're in all the schools, they're in all the governments, and to varying degrees.
Loudoun County, for instance, which is fairly moderate, had schools giving kids books with porn in them, which caused a huge controversy when a man's daughter was 12 and she was raped in a bathroom by a non-binary boy who was allowed to use the bathroom.
Again.
Loudoun County, Virginia, leaning kind of blue but fairly moderate.
When he showed up angry, demanding answers, they had him arrested, and the federal government referred to the parents across the country who are protesting this as terrorists.
We went a little bit over, so we've got to go quick, but if you guys want to get a final thought or a shout-out before we go.
unidentified
Yeah, I mean, you can follow me more at Inspiring Philosophy on YouTube.
I'm planning videos this summer on how Christianity ended slavery, how Christianity created human rights, how Christianity created science.
So you can follow me there for more, and I'm going to keep doing more on this topic.
Sure.
Thanks for having me, by the way.
I don't follow politics, so I was surprised that I was invited to come.
But yeah, follow me on Deconstruction Zone.
I primarily debate religious topics.
I'm probably most famous for debunking all the prophecies that Jesus never fulfilled and talking about how the Bible enshrined slavery, and when God says you can do it, it's very hard to question it.
I'll give one final thought before, because we do got to go, but to elaborate logically with hard facts as to what you said about Islam.
I do not mean to disparage someone in their religious beliefs.
People have to believe what they want.
But the Hadith literally calls on Muslims to murder Jews.
And I can never, never accept that.
And it is a conundrum.
Of the rules of big tech, though it's changing, when they say you can't disparage someone based on their religion or whatever or attack a religion or whatever, it's ridiculous.
Look, if your religion of any kind, I don't care what it is, specifically calls upon you to murder other people, I am going to tell you that's wrong.
And that's the principal issue I have with Islam is that it literally says, oh, the end will not come until every tree and every rock will scream out, there's a Jew hiding behind me, come kill him.
