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March 19, 2024 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:24:49

Jim Bob

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	Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James DellingPole.
	And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but before I introduce him, a quick word on behalf of one of our superb sponsors.
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	Jim Bob, welcome to the Deling Pod.
	Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.
	Jim Bob's fine for conversation, you know.
	I've been looking at your work on the internet and Half envying the expertise and technical know-how and skill that goes into making.
	You have your superb animations on your podcast and things like that.
	Thank you!
	Yeah, I use all the skill sets I've learned, kind of try to package it all into one thing.
	It's all about synthesis.
	And really it ends up being about content in the end, like everything else.
	So I've made my way in the satirical cartoon world, making, you know, comparatively really crude cartoons.
	But if they're effective in their messaging, I'm learning that, you know, the medium is secondary.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I liked your Stephen Hawking floating around in space.
	That was good.
	So I want to know your story because there'll be some people who are watching this and going, wow, he's doing a podcast with Jim Bob.
	And the other half will be going, like, who is this guy?
	I don't know.
	Right.
	I mean, you seem to, what I've gathered about you is you seem to have got this ecosystem of Christian, sort of down the rabbit hole, I imagine that your audience is kind of younger than me?
	I don't know how old you are.
	Probably.
	I'm 42, I'll be 43 in March, so yeah, I would say Christian, agnostic, atheists, and probably a decent sect of what most of us would call conspiracy theorists.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	I've always wondered what the term we should use to describe ourselves is.
	I mean, I use conspiracy theories.
	You know, when I go fox hunting and people say, you know, what do you do?
	And I say, well, I do these podcasts.
	Oh, yeah, that sounds great.
	What are they about?
	And I find that conspiracy theory stuff is a very good shortcut, but I feel like I'm doing our cause a disservice by using the enemy's terms.
	But maybe it's okay.
	No, it's fine now.
	It's like people know corruption exists, and my argument is always, you know, if corruption exists, conspiracies exist.
	So to say conspiracies don't exist, which most people don't say, but, you know, if you accept corruption, you accept that people conspire together.
	To the magnitude this occurs is what's always in question in the given you know, atmosphere you're in.
	And so it's kind of fun to explore because you probably have people on who take some wild that I even I would think is a wild position, right?
	So there's always some reference point in which makes another person look like the new lunatic.
	So I always have an out.
	I may have to test you later on Jim Bob to see just how, you know, how far that...
	Are you saying there are some places you just won't go?
	This is your normie cope.
	Uh, you mean like topic-wise?
	Yeah.
	I'll stay away from certain things that I find are dead ends, honestly.
	I try to stay away from, you know, the classic scapegoating of groups of people, you know, because to me that's a dead end.
	That's a spiritual dead end to me as well.
	So there's something that's not just Not fruitful in in the pursuit of knowledge there, but I think there's That you could actually go down a dark path by doing that.
	Yeah No, I was thinking more, you know, there were some people who go I won't touch Paul is dead.
	I went right I went it's irrelevant.
	What does it matter?
	Anyway, although right I won't go flat earth Mm-hmm.
	Yeah.
	No, I'll inquire about most things my approach is is I don't know, like I just detach from the emotion of a given side.
	Now I do have dogma, Christian dogma, so I won't... I already went through my 20s of investigating the sort of the naturalist view of things and you know this is all just one big one big accident.
	But certain things I just don't, I could just approach and people go, how could you possibly, you know, approach this topic like with such, you know, ease and lightness?
	And I'm like, I don't care.
	I want to hear what like flat earthers have to say.
	I don't care.
	Like, let me hear what you're saying.
	Let me see what's going on here.
	I feel like that's a proper skeptic position.
	And I don't even consider myself skeptic in the sense of the tradition, right?
	I don't hold to skepticism ultimately, but to practice it, I mean, why not?
	What's the big deal?
	I don't understand.
	People get really worked up, right?
	You know, if you deny certain things and you go, okay, what's the direct impact right now?
	It's like this transgression against the God of information, right?
	Like the God of information, this impersonal blob, you know, cluster in the cloud is going to judge you and be like, you know, you should not deny this fact.
	And you're like, well, I mean, What about it just kind of talk about I mean, is that okay, you know, yeah I'm with you, but I want to know about your Imagine if I was a BBC documentary maker, I'd be talking about your journey Jimbo.
	No journey.
	You have the journey Europe.
	So you're a You've been a cartoonist all your life.
	I I've been an artist all my life.
	That's not to say anybody who's an artist has anything to say at all.
	So most of my life as a creative, whether it's music or art or whatever medium, most of it was not knowing what to say.
	I discovered memes or comics, let's say, satirical single-frame, double, triple-frame comics, and I actually started that journey.
	I was a Democrat, liberal, out in Los Angeles.
	I voted for Obama twice, and then I started criticizing.
	I realized, well, doesn't it do a better service to criticize your own side, in a sense, you know, internally?
	Doesn't it sharpen it, you know, if anything?
	It's easy to point to the other side, I mean, but I started criticizing my side, and I remember the meme.
	It was, uh, It was the famous picture of Obama dropping the mic, right?
	He was so charismatic.
	He dropped the mic, dropped the mic, and then everything's good.
	He smiled, dropped the mic.
	I just swapped out the mic with a bomb, right?
	That's all I did to make commentary on the war machine under Obama.
	The smiling guy, right?
	And so people freaked out.
	They said, you're making him look bad.
	You know, people like you is why Trump's going to win.
	And I said, I don't care who wins, basically, because I'm going to try to use the same approach to criticizing whoever it is, whether I voted or not.
	And that's when I realized, oh, there is something here about consolidated, filtered down memes that sort of penetrate the zeitgeist in a way that long form, which you and I both do also, can't really do as effectively.
	You know what I mean?
	It doesn't pierce through as easily because you have to listen.
	It's a longer medium to follow.
	But memes That's when I realized, wow, this is a powerful medium, doesn't require super high-end technical skill as far as art, you know, but you just need some composition and something to say or something to reveal and, you know, that was history, you know, I just never stopped, right?
	So you became a meme lord?
	A meme lord, yeah, a shit poster, a shit posting meme lord.
	That's great!
	I mean, I think we all aspire to be meme lords.
	You are the special forces of this war, because you're right.
	Memes penetrate in a way no other medium does.
	We won't spend the whole show talking about memes, but you've got to have a gift to be able to think up memes.
	Yeah, well, I guess yeah to structure them.
	I think it's a gift You can practice there's some skill that's not to say someone who can Develop the skill and maybe lacks in the gifts can't in the gift area can't develop it But really what's happening is like a comedian does they're looking at some premise.
	That's true, and they're looking at some Punchline that you can use to the premise, but the premise has to be true for it to be effective So what what happens with memes?
	Is that you're saying something that everybody in their experience of seeing the meme already thought of it in a sense?
	They already it already triggers what they already know about it.
	And so you're really doing like a mirroring of Practice what which is why you should never be prideful in the credit of your meme because you're really just relaying something You're like a conduit and that keeps me humble.
	So when people oh dude that meme and I go I'm just I'm just like a translator.
	I'm a translator and and from that perspective I'm free to to comment on most things but by the way, because Because you're just you're just translating positions.
	That's all you're doing I don't know whether you know anything about me, but I used to be on completely the opposite side of the political divide to you.
	So I would have despised Obama and Obama voters and stuff.
	I used to consider myself, you can tell I too have been through the transformation where you realize that left and right are completely meaningless and they're all out to get us.
	But for most of my career, I was a conservative commentator, sort of, Relaying all the kind of conservative talking points, you know, the usual positions.
	I knew exactly where I still in everything and I would have in those days.
	I would have quoted the classic phrase the left can't meme.
	All right.
	I mean this I believe that though.
	I still believe that this is I think about this sometimes and this comes up sometimes.
	I think there's a reason that's true now.
	The left can't meme, but the right side lacks in comedy.
	So there's some trade-off here.
	At least in the sense, like, the modern conservative talking heads don't have, you know, like, Ben Shapiro cannot do comedy, no matter what.
	It's impossible.
	So it's not gonna happen, right?
	However, the left can't meme.
	The reason, at least how we see the left today, I don't know if this was true in the 60s or before, it's just that The left now embodies sort of this created truth, this Oprah level, you create your own truth, you create your own reality.
	Well, if truth is subjective and sort of just created on a whim based on definitions or a new language, then memes are not as useful because memes require pretty much a solid base of truth, a timeless truth, if you will, if it's a really good meme, right?
	Trent Trent's era and trends but you can do topical memes but the topical memes that were true last week if the trend changes and that's no longer true you know the new victim you know from my perspective whoever the new victim is you know suddenly the past victim is no longer the subject right and so because truth from From my perspective, my experience, the left side of things has a changing truth.
	And if you have a changing truth, then you won't really be documented in history as a good meme maker, because the best say something true for both sides.
	Say something true that's true ten years, maybe, from now.
	It's still true.
	And I'm not saying I can do that, I'm saying that would be my ultimate goal, is if something was made that actually stood the test of time, you know, transcended cultural changes.
	I think what you're saying is true.
	I mean, even though you and I and most of our viewers and listeners will have dispensed with left and right as meaningful terms, Nevertheless, there is something about what we used to understand by the left which is kind of anti-truth.
	Truth is relative.
	And you're right, you can't work with that if you're trying to transmit eternal verities to your audience.
	Do you have a favourite meme?
	My favorite meme?
	I think one of my favorite memes is that, um, you're asking of my own, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Or generally.
	Just tell me.
	Both.
	One of my favorite is a person, uh, there's a girl looking at her phone and there's a guy standing next to her who doesn't have a phone and he says, what are you afraid of now?
	And she's looking at her phone and she says, they haven't told me yet.
	And so this is true for right and left.
	This is something that pokes at, you know, the dependency on constructed custom narratives based on your paradigms, based on the inputs, the algorithms.
	Now it's getting even more filtered down like...
	You'll be able to deliver exactly the right content that gets your cortisol going, and then right after, deliver the content that soothes it with some other chemical.
	And I think the true meme, the tech lords, the overlords, who love left-right paradigm, they love contrived dialectics, they thrive on it.
	They love it.
	I mean, they keep that going because they can deliver both.
	They're like the drug dealer and the, what do you call it, the person who's like healing you.
	The recovery center.
	They're the dealer and the recovery center in that sense.
	So, um, but once you know that, obviously the way you're speaking, you have sort of dismissed, not ultimately, this left-right structure that's like a WWE, I don't know if you guys have wrestling there.
	Yeah, yeah.
	We watch your wrestling.
	You used to have our in.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right.
	It's that style, it's like you get the characters up and they talk loud and, you know, they're talking crap to each other.
	To some extent, it's fake.
	Maybe at the local level, I'm still grateful that I know, at least from my own experience, the local level politics.
	It really still is a thing.
	You can impact local level.
	You can confront leaders locally.
	You can physically find them and like, you know, talk to them.
	At the national level, and I'm not sure how it's different there, but it's a little more inaccessible.
	And so what they have is a delivery system for Entertainment.
	I mean, I don't know what else you would call it.
	It's almost as if we're in an era of pure entertainment and politics that you can't separate the two.
	Maybe there was a time where, you know, even in ancient politics you'd have entertainment somehow overlapping maybe there's a marquee shape where the two circles overlap i think now it's like a full screen like you can't distinguish uh entertainment from politics i think that plays into what we're speaking to here as far as like who's on the left what's on the what are they thinking we're mostly interacting with screens yeah
	and we're we're we're really acting with cartoons i mean I mean, these characters, they're not real.
	I wonder whether there ever was a golden age of politics where politicians were honest brokers.
	It's always been bread and circuses, I think.
	I mean, the fact that we have that phrase from the Roman era, it seems to me indicative.
	I was this afternoon.
	I was I was riding with this this this woman who was a bit older than me and she was telling me the story about how in the 1960s.
	Her boyfriend had taken her to see a very fashionable movie at the time that everyone was seeing about the aftermath of what would happen if nuclear war broke out.
	Halfway through she was so upset that she left her boyfriend to watch the rest of the film and sat in her Mini crying.
	And she was so moved by this film and the deadly threat of nuclear weapons that she went to her father that evening and said, I'm going to go and see Mr. Khrushchev, or whoever's in charge at the time, and I'm going to explain to him that he can't use these weapons.
	The destruction will be beyond anything.
	I said you do realize that nuclear weapons don't actually exist.
	They're all fake and she said no, but I said look the film did what it was meant to do.
	We've got this is going back to your earlier point about about, you know, looking at your phone seeing what should I be afraid of now and being told I think you were following the the talking point of that particular moment that film was designed to scare you to make you feel despair to make you cry anyway.
	The story had a happy ending because her dad explained to her, look, I'm sorry to say that Mr. Khrushchev knows exactly what nuclear weapons can do and nothing you say is going to change his mind.
	And she said, yeah.
	That sense of impunity made her realize that her sense of helplessness Made her realise that there was nothing she could do to change the big picture of politics, so she never followed politics again, completely abandoned it.
	And I thought, yes!
	So that film did at least affect one person in a good way.
	Yeah, yeah, I understand that perspective.
	I actually asked this question on a previous stream that, to some extent, lifting the veil of the larger scale show that is politics, it might be a good thing, but then I wonder, my conspiratorial mind, by the way, kicking in goes, well, what if demoralization, distrust in all of the institutions was the goal Wouldn't that mechanism still work toward that as well?
	And so we have to take it and judge it in different contexts.
	So in the way you just spoke of it, it's like, oh yeah, I could see that.
	But then if it's a wider lens and I go, what if people are trying to demoralize you and introduce like, you know, Trump and or Biden, where you're just so demoralized by the circus that it is that you just disengage altogether.
	Now, Maybe there's a good to disengaging, but I also I wouldn't dismiss that there might be a consequence to disengaging that you might not want, right?
	So I look kind of look at it from both sides there.
	It's part of the big adventure of being whatever you want to call us, a conspiracy theorist, that you realize that everything is multi-layered.
	You can never really work out the... because there are going to be competing factions among the enemy.
	There's going to be the kind of Satanic camp and the Luciferian camp in our terms.
	They work together, they're a bit like rival mafia gangs.
	They sometimes work together, you know, they have a meeting of the crime bosses and they decide.
	Right, right.
	But sometimes they work against each other and you just, you never know.
	I mean, we live in interesting times.
	Yeah, well that's a good point.
	Anyone you imagine to be the dark overlords, whether it's like, uh, who is the guy who who wears like the funny outfits, the bald guy from Dumb World.
	Yeah, yeah, you know, people love to put him up and you're like, I'm not, I'm not really frightened by this guy.
	It's like a kind of a joke, um, but it's true.
	It's important for the Conspiracy-based worrier, the noticer and the worrier, to know that these people, these power mafias, they actually compete with each other a lot.
	You're not their competition, by the way, right?
	And you don't want to be.
	You don't want to be like, well, I want to control the world.
	Unless you admit it, right?
	I always ask someone that.
	They go, those people control the world.
	And I go, oh, those people too?
	And they go, yeah, we gotta And I go, wait, what game are you playing?
	Do you want to start a family?
	Do you have passions?
	Do you have a religion that you practice?
	And it seems like their entire telos is this anti-monster thing.
	Now, I think it's important to point out controllers and the ways they manipulate, but if that's your ultimate goal, I think that's one of the...
	The failures of trutherism, the failures of some of the subcultures you and I might be sort of involved with, you know, narrative-wise, because it can really paralyze some people.
	I've seen people Basically, their daily routine is just, I call it, folder chasing, where they just, they're finding deeper and deeper folders, right?
	And then they wave the folders around, right?
	And they're like, I'm waking people up!
	And I go, but are you capable of just going to a barbecue?
	You know, like, and like talking?
	Not without, you know, not without accusing Karl of denying something or whatever it is, you know?
	And I'm like, well, that's the line I draw is like, there is actually good in being a normie as well.
	There's a good in being normie with people.
	Like, you don't have to... I don't know if you do this.
	You know, James, are you the guy who... I always use the barbecue because it's supposed to be relaxed and stuff, and someone's talking, and they're flipping burgers, and you're like, where were you 9-11?
	You know, like, everything gets tense, you know?
	And I'm just saying, maybe don't, you know, I'm trying not to be that guy in normal settings.
	You know, have a pint with someone.
	You know, just hang out, you know?
	But some people really push it.
	They really need the other person to wake up, right?
	You gotta wake up!
	And I just don't take that approach anymore.
	I used to, but it's not entirely fruitful every time.
	I'm a sort of hybrid of the two positions, in that I'm I can't, or in almost any situation, I will come up with this stuff.
	But I don't do it in a way that, weirdly, people are oddly receptive because of my sort of guilelessness.
	Because you're giggling?
	Because you're giggling?
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Yeah, because it's like fun.
	It's like, well, these don't exist.
	Stop it.
	Yeah.
	They're like, what?
	They're like, whoa.
	Yeah.
	But I was in it.
	I did do a quiz, a quiz night, in the Village Hall the other night.
	And I used to love quizzes.
	I used to love, you know, what was known as general knowledge.
	And I was quite good at it.
	And what I realise now is that quizzes are a way, one of the myriad ways that the controllers of the world use To ensure that we've remembered all the all the all the fake information that they fed us.
	You know, so there's a reason.
	Yeah, like the fake history.
	It's all it's all embodied in these these dates and stuff.
	I'm not saying that the dates didn't necessarily happen.
	But yeah, I was on my best behavior that night.
	I you know, I worked out the answer to the year that Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake, for example.
	I don't know where I trawled it from, but I managed to do it.
	I knew that the band with musicians in it whose names were John, John Paul, John and Robert.
	I knew the name of that band.
	So I got a few of the answers right, but at the same time I was conscious that The narrative that these questions were reinforcing is the narrative that has held us all enthralled for generations.
	History is fake.
	Geography is probably fake.
	Science is definitely fake.
	Oh yeah, science has the changing, I mean, your whole epistemology is changing facts, so that's the best you have, is like, oh, well, this is true until it's not, and I need to say that it's true until it's not, and there's a special group of people who dress a certain way who are gonna tell me when it's no longer true, but I'm just waiting.
	And until then, you're an idiot, right?
	It's like, that's funny you say the test thing, because I did a meme recently where it was like, someone's trying to get into their phone, and they're doing the robot, you know, like, testing if you're a robot, And I thought, what better way to get people to affirm lies than to make it a requirement to say one to get into your phone, right?
	So like, are you a robot?
	Can you point out where the man is?
	And it's like, obviously, you know, a woman dressed up, you know, whatever, you know, and you have to, you know, from your paradigm, you have to deny your own paradigm to get into these access points.
	And that's testing.
	That's interesting you use the term quiz because It would make sense, because you're pressured to get the right answer in a quiz, and there's this social aspect of a quiz, right?
	People do this all the time.
	Jim Bob, tell me the shape of the earth!
	And there's this social looming, whatever, ostracization.
	Say it!
	Say it!
	Say the blasphemy!
	You know, they want you to say the blasphemy, the transgression.
	I think that's what kind of... I think you're right.
	I think quizzing can be utilized for getting people to affirm things based on social pressures.
	Um, and if it's not just strict like math and stuff, I'm fine with math questions, but history is different, a little different.
	History, especially now, like, post-truth, I have this horrific vision of where revisionist history Is the thing that sort of acquires the blockchain history apparatus?
	And if it's blockchain, that's the way of them saying, no, this is secured on.
	This is a blockchain affirmed historical event.
	You cannot question it.
	It's locked in just like your transactions.
	If that's the case, I mean, what is heresy at that point?
	Not biblical, I mean like the heresy of the all-knowing blockchain information thing where you can't question it, right?
	I can see that coming pretty soon where if you question something and they'll just go, oh James, you lunatic.
	This has been affirmed and secured on, you know, this is on the blockchain, don't you understand?
	Like, it couldn't possibly get on there unless it was verified with all of these independent agencies and they say their thing, right?
	And then what?
	You have a generation of people who only appeal to the master, you know, whatever, crypto info or whatever they're going to call it.
	It's basically secured, unchanging accounts of the past.
	And they can rewrite history then.
	And secure it.
	Yeah.
	It's interesting.
	So many of the people that I thought of as dissidents I now realize were part of the control mechanism.
	So you mentioned earlier you mentioned Ben Shapiro.
	I remember there was actually a time in my life.
	Well, I thought that right-wing commentators were kind of these bold truth-tellers in a world dominated by left-wing lies.
	And we were just, you know, speaking truth.
	We were saying things that others dared not say.
	We're fighting the cultural wars.
	We're fighting the cultural wars together.
	We're fighting the culture wars.
	Yeah, it's a great narrative to have.
	And it gets, you know, it does serve a purpose just like Jordan Peterson would.
	But yeah, so we forgive ourselves for, you know, using that as a life raft temporarily.
	In the same way, you just made me think of, we have these designated historians who are the designated experts du jour.
	And we go to them, you know, but they are they are the keepers of unassailable truth.
	They are they are the keepers of the blockchain in your analogy.
	We've got one called David Starkey who has the sort of the cachet among right-wing people of being a kind of a rare conservative historian and he tells us exactly what happened with Henry the eighth and his wives and Elizabeth the first and I don't know.
	You know, when you know that Shakespeare was actually a construct, that he was probably, his plays were written by a scriptorium, probably headed by the Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, but you know, who got the best playwrights of his day and had them working for him, and a friend of mine called Alexander Waugh has got the receipts, you know, we know when Elizabeth I started funding
	Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford to write this stuff and I know that I know there's a sort of rival theories about about Francis Bacon but what what we do know from this is that the conventional narrative about Elizabethan England and about Gloriana as well as she's been sold to us is just more propaganda.
	Francis Bacon was probably a Luciferian.
	He was certainly a Gnostic.
	You know and he experimented with magic and I don't think magic is something that you do if you're a proper Christian because it's like the opposite.
	Yeah, yeah, it's interesting that a lot of these characters, if you go back in time for any given impactful agency, whether it's the Royal Society or the Jet Propulsion Lab, right, you find these interesting characters at the seed of, you know, Jack Parsons is one, is just, you know, read a book called Sex and Rockets and it's like, what?
	Like the beginning of all of these Major influential agencies of space and cosmology is rooted on this guy who literally has like a almost near intimate relationship with Aleister Crowley, runs this like weird orgy house, does all these explosion sex magic rituals, and they just kind of go, yeah, that's just a unsavory beginning.
	Don't, you know, and you're bringing up similar things with it in a different category.
	And it's just interesting that these things never seem to go away.
	Like there's always some like weird occult Practice you know at the core of some of these things that we now in the modern era look at and revere as the Expert class right the the Plato's Republic of today is like has these weird histories right even like evolution and Darwin and and these Fundamental core beliefs about people and and how we who we are how we are why we are You know it's it's almost impossible to
	And this isn't a terrible thing, it's good to know.
	It's really impossible to remove the philosophy that informs our facts.
	The way in which we interpret facts or new facts or new information or reality, it's always informed by some paradigm.
	And that's what's kind of like, you know, back to like cartooning.
	We're really talking about paradigms.
	We're showing what a paradigm looks like and why it looks funny or contrasting or why there's a contradiction.
	And everything you've said, it's just interesting that you just accept facts now because they're dominant, right?
	Because they're repeated.
	And then you go, well, how are you supposed to battle that unless you could match the volume of repetition?
	I don't actually know the answer to that.
	I know.
	Just for example, once you are aware that evolutionary theory is just a discredited theory, I mean, it never really held any water.
	And then you, if you can do it, which I barely can, but if you can bring yourself to read the mainstream media, read newspapers, read magazines, and almost every article written about anything vaguely connected with biology, with zoology, with even other branches of science, will somehow make a Pay lip service to evolution.
	They'll talk about it as this thing.
	Now that cultural embedding is so deep that it's no wonder.
	I mean, I don't look at normies and go, you idiots.
	You know, you're just so stupid.
	I go, I totally understand where you're coming from.
	How do you get out of the matrix?
	It's very hard.
	Right, well also it's like, you have to be able to argue why they ought to, and most people in the modern era, because of luxury, decadence, convenience, most people are making choices about what they choose to fight against and whatnot based on pragmatism.
	We saw this in the last, you know, the thing we can't say on YouTube, that whole three, four years now, was really a reflection of what people are willing to do
	And comply with or say is true in order to keep their job or their status or keep things going So I almost don't blame them in a sense I don't think it's a strong position because ultimately you have to fight against a lie or deception in the face of Ridicule being ostracized Lowering your social status and potentially in fact impacting your income that's a hard thing to to deal with it on the fly when things are happening and so I think the question is like
	What are we expecting people, you know, normies, what are we expecting of them with this new information, right?
	And I don't know, accepting the new information is different than going out there and fighting a war about it, or going out there and breaking up your friendships over some key disagreement about the moon landing or something like this.
	And so, I actually have been looking at this and going, okay, well, I really look at it from the lens of like, well, the question is what is our duties?
	Is it our duties to unveil every possible secret?
	What if it leaves people in despair to do that?
	What if not every person needs to know every unveiled thing?
	And again, it is a question.
	I actually don't know the answer.
	I think the pursuit of the answer is part of our moral challenge in life.
	We don't really know the right thing and when to reveal something to someone.
	You know, because some truths could crush people, right?
	And you don't want to crush them.
	You want to give them something of hope, not just the despair aspect.
	And that's, you know, probably something you come up against.
	And you're lucky you're jolly, and you're not blackpilling people and leaving them in some sort of disarray when you're talking about this stuff.
	But that's rare.
	I would say that's rare.
	Yeah, I can...
	I think you've got to laugh in the face of despair.
	It's not a good place to be.
	I don't like the black-pilled state.
	I really don't.
	But then it helps if you've been white-pilled.
	Liberating.
	I was going to ask you about this.
	I asked you what you wanted to talk about and you said, well, what you've been doing recently is making arguments against atheism.
	I was wondering, were you born a Christian?
	I mean, raised Christian?
	Yeah, I was raised, I would say, Some modern sort of born-again Christian sect or something like this, you know, where you go to church and the preacher has a long ponytail and has a Fender guitar and snakeskin boots and it's all chaos and people jumping, whatever that is.
	I grew up around that.
	Uh, when I left, you know, started my, you know, what every person does, regardless if they're Christian, they do a rebellion phase.
	They basically rebel against most things that they're taught, and they run off and think they know everything.
	So I did that.
	And then, um, You know, I couldn't adequately hold an atheistic position or a position that this is an accident and we come from a bubbling soup and we're basically just globs of molecules, animals, and there's nothing really transcendental that can be justified from the naturalistic position.
	And then once I had a child, my first child, I realize, wow, I never actually really do believe this, these positions of a nihilistic position of the human being and our existence, that ultimately it doesn't matter.
	Am I willing to teach my own child that their life is ultimately meaningless and a result of some long, unguided process that's just the effects of physics?
	And I said, no, I can't do that.
	Whether that's true or not, Is even a different question than whether or not you're willing to teach your own children that and so the latter question actually started getting me thinking about it more and and things like things I couldn't deny like that morality that that there is good that there is evil.
	That there is truth.
	These questions aren't found in nature.
	Science can't answer these questions.
	Evolution can't answer these questions.
	These are deeper questions about being a human being.
	And from that perspective, you're definitely going to start leaning toward supernatural accounts of these things.
	And so it's normal.
	It's normal to come back to an inquiry of like, well, If you're a father and you have a purpose now, and obviously if your purpose is only to just stay alive and keep your genes going, that doesn't wake people up out of bed.
	That doesn't make people cry when they hear a song, right?
	This kind of, you know, make your genes populate is such a A physicalist, you know, reduced view of what it is to be a human being.
	And no one even acts like that, by the way.
	No one who believes we're just puddles of bacteria over time or whatever, no one who believes that actually lives like that in their daily life.
	They experience love, they experience things that can't be captured as molecules, they experience sadness and humility and horror, and these things fundamentally inform how we interact with the world.
	So, I ultimately denied all that.
	I think it's all nonsense and it leads you to deeper questions about metaphysics and whatnot.
	And so here I am using my medium, using memes to sort of then question a previous version of myself who used to hold these positions and how some of them are just so absurd by the way.
	They're just some of them just reduced to absurdity.
	Yeah, you mentioned that you've got a mixed audience of Christians, atheists, etc.
	What's in it for the atheists?
	Um, the way in which I talk about things, I open my streams to panels, I can be confronted live right there on the spot, unplanned, bringing people up to counter what I'm saying.
	I think this is what allows for a little more of a diverse group of people because
	A lot of times these things go into like a debate forum which I also do but there's something limiting about that forum because it usually gets contentious but there's no resolve and whereas a more open forum like you know the the feel is like I try to try to say like we're at a bar I try to say we're just hanging out like let's just hang out and I think some of them like that They don't hold my position, but they appreciate what I do.
	Some of them just hate me, and they're there to hate me, which you got to include those.
	And the rest actually argue within their own account of Christianity, internally.
	Yeah, I noticed you seem to have... Am I right in thinking that there are certain Key, edgy, atheists that you like taking on.
	I mean, there are a couple of characters there that I didn't know, but tell me about the atheists.
	Well, yeah, there's always these key atheists, like, you know, the ones who are mostly known, like the Matt Dillahuntys and some of the bigger channels.
	They're fun to engage with, at least in an indirect way, if not call in.
	Sometimes I've done that, where I call in.
	And I like to engage with them because, you know, These larger questions, which they end up being annoyed by, like why are we here?
	What's our ultimate purpose?
	Could we know that?
	How do we know things?
	These are just like ongoing philosophical problems.
	Engaging with them is fun because you actually do find some really good ones like there's a guy Pine Creek Doug his name is who has an atheist channel.
	He gets a lot of sort of like different Christian sects calling in and he does basically questioning them and he's pretty good at it and But he's he's fun about it.
	Mostly.
	He's mostly funny.
	He's not he's not a dick about it and And I actually started despising this guy like I had like rage against him and now you know and now we're you know I wouldn't call his friends but he's been on my mixed bag panel which is like a show I do on Fridays and and
	Now we have a laugh about all this stuff and from that perspective, yeah, you can actually develop relationships with people who have completely opposing sides, right?
	And you can still go at it.
	You can get contentious and you can still cheers at the end because you're human beings.
	I think that's key.
	I think that's something that's in demand even right now.
	I had a look at some of Some of Christopher Hitchens's old debates with the guy from Oxford that I had on my podcast once, and I've just forgotten his name temporarily, but he was one of the big... Alex O'Connor?
	No, no, no, no.
	Much older guy.
	Oh, OK.
	Alex O'Connor is, I learned from your podcast, he's an atheist, he's a professional, you know, like, yeah.
	No, the name may come to me, just as I may remember that the word that I was looking for when I said impunity was exactly the opposite of impunity.
	I was watching Christopher Hitchens debating this and I just thought it was so style-reliant rather than argument-reliant.
	He's yeah, he was amazing amazing rhetorical Rhetorician, yeah He's great.
	He's like he was funny.
	Yeah, he was funny but I wonder whether he knew in his heart that he was His arguments were garbage.
	Even atheists today look back and go, oh shit, I was kind of taken by his really funny manner.
	Like, he debated his own brother Peter, and Peter would just dismantle him with logic, but he appealed to the incredulity in human beings that, um, how could it be?
	Such suffering in the world and an old loving God or whatever, and you're going, yeah!
	Yeah, things I don't like!
	You know stuff I don't like and it's just not a it's just all incredulity and and a lot of contradictory positions like he'd always argue about the the Andromeda the great nothing coming for us you know and and that humans aren't special but they would he would have to be special for that statement to make any sense or why why ought we listen to him at all right so from his view ultimately
	A Christian's view, or a Muslim's view, or an atheist's view, or a completely absurdist view, they're all equal in value, because ultimately, in the great face of nothingness approaching, they're all reduced to what did Richard Dawkins say?
	Pitiless, pitiless indifference.
	Nothing, nothing actually matters.
	This kind of thing.
	No one lives like this!
	You don't go on tour selling a book about pitiless indifference without doing a performative contradiction.
	Let me just sign your book.
	It's like, what are you doing?
	What's this thing you're doing then?
	Why are we debating?
	Why would it matter that two human beings make sounds out of their mouth if your position is ultimately the sounds coming out of your mouth don't matter at all?
	I mean, wouldn't you just not show up for the debate to be consistent?
	I like that argument.
	What you're saying is that they've lost the debate before they've even begun it.
	Yeah, they'd have to admit that there's no point in debating.
	That should be their opener.
	Then they just leave?
	And they win!
	They actually win the debate, in a sense, because they were consistent by leaving.
	They were like, I'm gonna be consistent and leave.
	Like you, I find the intellectual case for christianity as important as the kind of emotional one or the spiritual one you know there's a certain kind of christian that just like god god came to them and they just know and for me yeah it's nice having that but you do want to be able to construct a persuasive intellectual case for it as well but
	I mean, if you're a thinking person, that's kind of what you want, isn't it?
	Well, yeah, it's both.
	It's like the problem with modern apologetics, and I'm by no means a professional, you know, apologist, right?
	I just kind of dabble in certain arguments.
	But you don't want to just do evidentialism.
	Right you don't want to just argue physical phenomenon and wow look the geometry and this look at the look at the design and the snowflake and this kind of stuff these fall apart because you're like you said you want The philosophical side, or the coherency side of things, and the correspondence, and you need to make a duo of the two.
	If you only do correspondence, you're actually arguing in the atheist paradigm, which is natural things, right?
	Things in the world, this stuff.
	If you only argue the philosophical then people just don't want to engage with you because you're just always going to be doing this high-level meta meta argumentation about the argument arguments about the argument and people get bored with that.
	And they don't want to engage so it does take something to merge the two To navigate in a conversation or a debate to include both of those things to make a case for it now I think it's more effective to make a philosophical case of the necessity of God or at least an argument for why it's reasonable that across time people have this jarring instinct and impulse and intuition toward
	Even if you took an evolutionary approach, which by the way makes Christians and other theists who multiply their genes Quite, quite voluminous.
	You know, way more than a secular position.
	It makes the religious people actually more fit, evolutionarily.
	I just find that kind of funny.
	Is that the most fit, if we're defining fit as propagating your genes, we're actually doing a better job, Christians, theists in general, Muslims, and so forth.
	So I even, I like to ask that.
	It's a kind of a rhetorical poke.
	I always go, do you define fitness as this?
	And they go, yeah.
	And I go, Are we more fit than you?
	And they just have to bite the bullet.
	They have to say, well, yeah, you know.
	But anyway, sorry to get off track.
	Is that making the case for a greater mind is something that's ancient?
	It's not new to online debate spheres, right?
	This is an ongoing question of whether reality itself is mind-dependent and is there a mind that
	Proceeds the humans and I think that's a fair question Yeah, I am yeah, I you did the I mean I the the the communist argument that comes up is the one about The Stephen Fry argument about how can this loving God give children?
	Worms that eat their eyes or something, right?
	Right Is that the Atheist 101 question?
	That's pretty much one of the... yeah, they called out the argument from evil or the problem of evil.
	Of course, how they're defining evil is just things they don't like, right?
	But even from a Christian view, things like cancer or death itself or, you know, carnage is an effect of something in the Christian paradigm.
	You don't have to accept The Christian paradigm.
	But if you're going to internally critique it, you have to accept something called the Fall, which then produces an effect of things that none of us like.
	But whether we like something doesn't determine whether it's immoral.
	I always use the licorice argument.
	Like, if preferences and things you don't like and you find it distasteful are evil, Does it make sense to review, you know, a restaurant and say the chicken was evil?
	Like, it was just an evil chicken.
	Well, because you didn't like it?
	Well, yes, I didn't prefer it.
	This is where it all falls apart.
	And so, you know, what is it about not liking things or finding them distasteful or having an experience of awfulness or dread with something being evil anyway, right?
	Let alone God permitting it is a separate question.
	Basically, you'd have to actually state, you'd actually have to argue, that things you don't like, like tornadoes, or toothaches, are in fact evil, in their very essence.
	And I would just reject that, ultimately.
	Like, you know, a toothache is a natural occurrence.
	So then, by their definition, evolution itself, the whole process of natural selection, you know, survival of the fittest, everything that's included is also evil.
	You know?
	Well, why would you why would you only reduce it to human preferences all preferences would be evil Prefer things you don't prefer.
	Sorry So yeah, but generally what you're saying is true that the the go-to I like to say it's If God real, why bad thing happen?
	That's basically what it is.
	That's the Christian rhetorical sort of making fun of this argument.
	Because you can just as well say, I don't gotta worry for you.
	Oh, there you go.
	What was I saying?
	So, two fakes are evil, and if the atheist says, if God real, why bad thing happen?
	I would ask them, who do you credit for when good things happen?
	Right?
	So, you know, from the same view or internally, if they're doing an internal critique on Christianity, What's a good thing, right?
	What's a good thing happening?
	Does he get credit for that, if God existed?
	If God exists, bad things happen.
	If God exists, good things happen.
	How do you separate the two?
	I think these are terrible arguments, by the way.
	Even if they're accepted, which I find with my atheist interlocutors, they think if they're mostly accepted by philosophy, then they're good arguments, and that's just not true.
	Bad arguments could be accepted.
	You're still there.
	Yeah good.
	I made the mistake, I went around to some friends for drinks the other night and the guy is a high-powered lawyer and we had the conversation about Christianity and What was very interesting was that he kind of held me personally responsible for all the things he found difficult about Christianity, which is a kind of, I think, a sort of atheist take.
	Your default assumption is that Christianity is a man-made religion, and therefore, by endorsing this man-made religion, you are... It's kind of you invented the rules, not God.
	Yeah, well I would ask the lawyer did we invent the laws of logic and are they you know should we dismiss them if they're now I don't think we invented them but a lot of times the the naturalist will say any everything all of its invented knowledges and truth there are all these conventions that we created because we're so smart it's interesting that they select which things that are conventions that you shouldn't He's a lawyer, right?
	This is my best response to that kind of thing.
	Are rights invented?
	From his view, should we acknowledge and operate as if rights exist, even if they're made-up, man-made fiction, right?
	From his view.
	He's a lawyer.
	He would have to say, yeah, his entire job depends on this concept of justice, right?
	Is justice a man-made concept from his view?
	It must be.
	Any of these other virtues are man-made from his own view, right?
	He was fudging it a bit because we talked briefly about evolution and he said, he said, well, I believe in intelligent design.
	I didn't go down the route of asking him what was the intelligence behind this design and stuff.
	The things that really got his go, and we're talking about The most politically incorrect guy I know.
	The most anti-woke person in every respect.
	And he's obviously been rehearsing this a long time because he had the quotes at his fingertips and he was really angry.
	He'd been really getting his goat for ages.
	He doesn't like Timothy.
	He doesn't like Paul's letter to Timothy on the subject of women.
	And he was he was spitting with fury about this line I mean we're talking about a guy who in most respects is a classic sort of right-wing sexist pig But he decided to choose Timothy as his pulpit from which to grandstand about how Christianity treated women as inferiors and And he could not accept a world in which... He said, do you believe the Bible is the Word of God?
	And I said, yeah.
	And everything in it, yeah.
	And he said, right.
	Here's this passage from Timothy and it's about women can't braid their hair and women cannot teach men.
	How do you feel about that?
	He said.
	Oh, it's like this big like moral, you know, he's putting you on the spot to defend something he hasn't actually justified is indefensible, by the way.
	He's just assuming it.
	Yeah, I get that take.
	They're arguing from an egalitarian perspective, which descriptively just doesn't exist, by the way.
	Like any form of egalitarianism, even in theory, when it's practiced, needs the force of men.
	no matter what.
	Like, let's say we have equal rights of everything, right?
	Men and women.
	To maintain that as a rule requires the threat of force, which then, you know, coincidentally requires brute force, which is predominantly men.
	Almost, you know, there's no civilization that appeals to the threat of force to keep law and order, justice and whatnot.
	That isn't backed by brute force.
	And so, his egalitarian, you know, Come back to you Assumes that in descriptive reality, there's equality at all forget what men and women even between men So it would only be from a Christian view, you know, maybe you could argue some other You know ambiguous Theological view could just declare human beings are equal under God.
	Let's say just generally, but that doesn't mean equal in their purpose That doesn't mean equal in their abilities their status their opportunity right their roles in society Why would we jump to this out outcome based?
	assumption of equality especially with men and women it's like not only I More and more women today are actually, they don't even want the burden of meeting up to the level of men in all these different categories.
	They're saying it's a big mistake.
	Why would you?
	No, why would you do that?
	So it doesn't make, so what's happening is that they're just producing more women who are just, you know, not as good men, right?
	They're just not as good men.
	And this exists with men too, by the way.
	Men who want to become their own gods just become shitty gods.
	Women who want to become men just become shitty men.
	And so, you just get the worst of both sides from the different inversions.
	And so, I don't know why he would take that position.
	It's really easy to argue descriptively, not even just ethically.
	Like, no oughts.
	Just descriptively, it's never the case that men and women are equal.
	In any sense, only in an idealistic sense that you could see that they could be equal in some way.
	But when you really practice and you look at what that requires to form such a system, you're going to be relying on men enforcing the whole thing.
	It's going to be like a playhouse egalitarian.
	Also, I think he was buying too much.
	I suspect this argument dates back from his youth.
	You know, he's probably been sort of nurturing this saw for a long time and picking at it over the years you're picking at the scab and just keeping it fresh that that it sort of buys into that other fashionable atheist idea which is that it's patriarchal patriarchal The patriarch is bad.
	Look at the role of men.
	What is argument ignored is that just because women have different roles from men doesn't necessarily mean they're being badged as inferior in any way.
	That's not what the Bible is.
	It's not about inferiority, like, if they have different roles, what's inferior would only be judged by them being in the same role, right?
	So, for instance, if you throw a woman, or you throw a man, a sexual man, into the ring with a woman, you're gonna demonstrate inferiority right there.
	You're just gonna descriptively the case.
	But the thing is, from a Christian view, hierarchy itself, right?
	If there is a patriarchy, this also, like, for instance, from a marriage perspective, like, from a Christian view, the man is the head, and the woman is the neck.
	Right?
	You don't split them apart and measure them separately.
	They're together and they rely on each other in their ways, right?
	They serve different purposes for the body.
	And so, from that view, you're right.
	It's not about they're inferior.
	You don't call a woman inferior just because she doesn't get a lanyard and $280,000 in debt so she can work for Nike.
	No, you say she's actually superior in the role of raising good human beings.
	Now, is it important to your lawyer friend that good human beings are raised?
	Well, if he says yes, just please ask him, who's best suited for that?
	Yeah, yeah.
	A woman.
	A woman is.
	A mother.
	Also, there's some areas where women are manifestly superior.
	For example, being tempted by serpents.
	They're way better at that than men are.
	They might even be better at manipulation, but also they can be easily manipulated by emotion.
	So it's a they're have the they have the ability and then again people who say that's so misogynistic yet yet you show Heroic, you know, if you notice the trend on Netflix or in movies where they actually present the the the female Villain the female, you know, even in real life like the female serial killer as some sort of empowered woman, you know Oh, she was such a mastermind What is her name?
	Holmes, Elizabeth Holmes, the woman who ran that scam, right?
	Yeah, criminals.
	You know, that's criminal, but yet it's glorified in some way because it's a woman who was able to do this and she lowered her voice and, you know, lied to everybody.
	You know, you're like, this isn't a good thing.
	You don't want to pursue the bad behaviors of men just because it's equality.
	You see this with comedy.
	All of the female comedians Are basically just really gross.
	They're doing impressions of really gross male comedians.
	It's all sex related.
	It's all just let's see how gross I can be.
	So it's like this is such an interesting battle now because we are in the the true like think that the effects the the carnage of of this view of equalizing everybody this view that you're supposed to just equalize everybody.
	It's not even true for men.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I was just thinking about my... I know... I'm friends with two female comedians, Tanya and Abby, who are both Christians and they don't do the thing.
	They're actually genuinely funny because they don't try and be like men.
	They don't try and be more gross out or whatever.
	Yeah, boasty and loud and all this.
	You don't want a belligerent woman.
	Imagine a belligerent man who gets just a little too drunk and he gets carried home and everyone kind of goes, oh, that's too bad.
	A woman pursuing that and calling that a win by doing that in public is what I find it equivalent to.
	Why would that be the goal?
	Oh!
	When I was... I used to be a music critic, among other things, and there were all these trends that one saw being presented to the world as the new thing.
	There was this thing called Riot Grrl.
	I don't know whether you've ever... Oh, Riot Grrl, yep.
	Riot Grrl.
	And we had a thing in England called The Ladette.
	Girls that drank pints.
	And this was presented as a good thing.
	Girls are not meant to drink pints.
	It's not a very nice thing.
	It's not attractive.
	They're not meant to burp.
	Yeah, and that's not their power, by the way.
	Their power is they are the guards.
	They are the gates of procreation.
	They're the gates, right?
	So they have a lot of power, actually.
	It's just that they're seeing that as not their power, or they invert that as their power, and so they sexualize themselves and they go, I got this, now I'm gonna sell it online, you know, right?
	Through the screens, and you're like, well, you're just inverting your power.
	You're acknowledging the power, you're just misusing it now.
	But you can't define that out of existence, that you are, that women are the gates of procreation.
	Also, you show me the husband of whatever kind of mindset or political hue, who...
	Who makes the rules for the family and ignores wife's input.
	The idea that women don't have serious influence.
	Yeah, especially inside the house, especially, you know, that's where things are managed in the house.
	And so, you know, a man might take a straight position.
	Pointing we're going there, and it's settled and you know a lot of times that'll for the wife That'll be a relief.
	They don't have to do Diplomacy they don't have to do like a let's do it You know you make your case, and I'll make your case if you do that for everything society collapses You need people who just act they might make the wrong choice May might make the wrong action, but you need actors who act men are good at acting they just act you know just go and Figure it out later.
	And that's actually really needed for families, for on the fly, for being agile in society.
	It's even required in business to be able to think and act on the fly really quickly.
	It's not to say women can't do that.
	It's just that if you're going to compare them on net balance, men are going to be just more active all the time.
	They're going to be doing more We're also going to be more prone and drawn to technical things, whereas women are going to be more social.
	Things are going to be more applied.
	That's generally just true.
	I wanted to answer something to you that you mentioned with your lawyer friend.
	Next time you go out with him, This is a funny thing I do.
	I call into, like, TikTok debaters once in a while.
	And, um, the patriarchy, I ask the person if they, if we should take down the patriarchy.
	And like, hopefully the person you're asking says yes, right?
	And, you know, and try not to giggle.
	It's going to be hard for you because you're smiley.
	You ask them, well, that's interesting.
	Do you think with enough manpower we could take down the patriarchy?
	And just say it dead face.
	Don't give it up.
	Don't give it away.
	Don't look out.
	Just keep it together and ask that question.
	I've asked that about 10 times and maybe it's the way I ask that they just miss it.
	Every time.
	They miss and they answer it.
	They say, well, yeah, yeah.
	And I go, how are you going to do this?
	How are we going to do this?
	But I slip in resources, too.
	With enough manpower and resources, can we take down the Patriot?
	Oh, that's a good, yeah, good distraction.
	It's like a conjurer.
	Yeah, a little bit.
	Yeah, please remember that, especially two pints in with a friend.
	You'll love it.
	I'm not very good at my straight faces, unfortunately.
	Yeah, I see that, yeah.
	So his other big bugbear, He says he's troubled by the fact that, okay, Adam and Eve are living in the garden of Eden.
	They have no consciousness of what is of sin because it hasn't kind of been invented yet.
	Oh, okay, that argument.
	So how can we blame Eve for Yeah, they're like, his argument is that they were like sort of wild animals.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	No, I get that.
	I've seen that argument before.
	The problem is in the question, just like Pontius asked, what is truth?
	Well, it's who is truth from the Christian paradigm.
	It's not what.
	What is objects?
	What are things in the world, actions?
	From the Christian view, Truth is a who, but in this context, in moral, what is good is who is good.
	So they do know God is good.
	So God commanding X, it is good, right?
	It's not like they had to be introduced to a new concept of good.
	They know who good is, right?
	And so good isn't reduced to a set of behaviors or actions on a spreadsheet like Bill Gates would love to have you think it is, right?
	Good is derived or ontologically identical to God.
	And so it's perfectly consistent that That the creations the creatures know who good is and the point is the test of knowing who good is and not doing X is That's our test anyway, even post-fall, from a Christian view, that we know who good is.
	We are given our instructions, and so the test is always, are you going to favor your wants and desires, right, over the command of the ultimate good, God, right?
	From that view, it's like, I see from his view, if evil and good were reduced to just activities, then he'd have a case.
	But they're not from the Christian view.
	So it's not really internal to the Christian view.
	Because good and evil aren't reduced to just activities.
	Good is a being.
	Evil is the privation or act away from that being's will.
	So as long as an act away from God was possible in the creation, that is to say free will is possible, it wouldn't really matter if they knew how to describe an evil action like choosing the knowledge, right?
	All they would need to know is that God is identical to the good, to act away from him.
	He's just saying, I am good.
	Premise one, I am good.
	Don't act away from me.
	It doesn't matter what it was.
	It could have been, you know, it could have been something else.
	Could have been like, you know, I don't know, don't go fishing today.
	You know, it's not about specifically some specific act that's bad.
	It's about knowing the context of acting away from God.
	I wish I'd had you there with me, Jim Bob, to give me some fire support.
	Well, I don't even know if that was a good answer.
	It may have just been useful, you know, maybe you should record it, say it back, and at least it'll confuse him enough to give you more time.
	Well, I mean, there are aspects of Scripture, of the deal, that I think we don't quite understand fully.
	I mean, of course I get the notion of free will and stuff, but at the same time, you know, I kind of think, for example, the rebel angels.
	I mean, God being omnipotent and omnipresent and omniscient must have known right from the start that the rebel angels were going to rebel.
	So there was going to be a fall.
	There was going to be the rebellion in heaven and there was going to be the sort of physical, the sort of representation of that on earth with Adam and Eve and that version of the fall and they somehow... I mean, he planned it all.
	Right, I think you're pointing to a common argument that say it's if God knows all then he couldn't be surprised by anyone's activity or you know you're saying they couldn't be at fault let's say I think this is common thing that comes up and and we're talking about two different categories God all-knowing and a world that's created that has temporality and
	That he gives human creatures free will.
	Now if he knows, right, there's something called, and I don't know if we're going to be able to really get into it, but something worth looking into called secondary causality.
	That a first cause is in its own category, God, and then there's secondary.
	So our knowledge, our inability To know all things right and God's ability to know all things doesn't create a problem for us in the temporal acting out on our will or not because we don't know all things right so we're just in this for all for you know from the lens of God this is a temporal little stage right that's it's like a gift right so In order for morality to even exist, you need free will.
	So, he could, you know, if he created a world that didn't have free will, he would have just created these robots who just do stuff, right, according to their nature.
	They couldn't do otherwise.
	That's a deterministic view, right?
	That's like everything's just predetermined.
	But the fact that God knows doesn't affect that we have free will.
	He could know and we still have the choice for ourselves to make choices.
	Yeah, no, I think I've been more specific than that.
	Okay, so I'm imagining there was a moment before Lucifer rebelled when God and his angels or his divine counsel were kind of working in harmony and just sort of, I don't know, there must have been, well obviously there has to be a bit before the rebellion when When they're when they're all living in harmony.
	But God must have known that Lucifer and co.
	Because, I mean, after all, God created Lucifer.
	I mean, God created everything.
	So he created this kind of rebel crew.
	And he, he must have known that this was going to happen.
	Right, but the difference is, did God create them to do that, or did he just create?
	Like, creation with free will, even if you have knowledge, it's like fathers, like, let's say we know what our kid's gonna do, they're gonna make all these mistakes, right?
	Let's say we know all of the mistakes we're gonna make, there's still a moral issue if we just intervene on all of their actions and mistakes, like, and don't let them do any of it, right?
	We just go, well, I'm a good father, And if I'm a good father, I actually have to intervene with every moment of my child's life and stop them from experiencing poor choices, moral mistakes, culpability, learning from your past, all of these things that are embedded in creation.
	Now, we would go, no, that doesn't sound like a good father.
	That's like the ultimate helicopter parenting.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, so it's consistent still if all of God's creatures, including the ones you're mentioning, still have the ability to rebel.
	That the ultimate story, the ultimate purpose, God's higher purpose, is more a gift.
	It's not like he wrote a book and he just wants to watch it unfold for his own glorification.
	Like this self-fan-waving God, right?
	All of it's a gift.
	It's actually a gift to us to experience free will, love, God, participate in the world, and I think it's a mistake to look at it from the- not that you are, but if this argument starts from the assumption that God just created this like video game, right?
	Yeah.
	And he already knew all the villains of the video game, so it seems purposeless.
	Like, You know why would there be any issue at all like if he created all of it and the key thing is If what's created is good, then it must include the ability to act against it.
	Otherwise, it's just a machine.
	It's God's little tentacle machine, or you know, whatever you want to call it, like some simulator.
	Then we'd just be robots, right?
	We'd be robots.
	So the argument is like, ultimately that argument ends up being, I would really only consider God to be real if If we had no free will and we were just, you know, automatons, right?
	Yeah.
	But then you wouldn't have perspective, because if you're an automaton, whatever you came to knowledge about or opinions about would just be also automated from God.
	It's a good point.
	Yeah.
	It couldn't be any other way.
	You can't, or it's just automatic.
	You know, the other way would be an automated system that's just a computer, just a calculator.
	Input, output, input.
	Now, coincidentally, the people who argue against God, our argument is, well, automation doesn't work from this Christian view, but yet the person who's countering this view believes they're automated.
	This is the great irony is that when you're arguing, when I'm arguing against these types of people who hold these positions or have these attempted refutations of Christianity in this particular case that you're referring to, they always come to, no, we're all just automatons.
	We're determined biological machines, right?
	Everything we do is determined.
	And I'm going, okay, so you're making an argument right now.
	Are you, were you just, is this just an effect of physics?
	Like, are you just bubbling?
	Right?
	Is your argument bubbling physics?
	Right?
	And they go, yeah, ultimately.
	And I go, so what's the problem?
	Your argument against Christianity is that, you know, it can't be true because we're bubbling physics, but your own view could be true, and you still concede that we're bubbling physics.
	Why is one view better than the other?
	I still haven't had an answer from all of the talkative atheists online.
	What's the difference between two views if they're both effects of physics?
	Maybe your own audience will answer this.
	I've still not gotten a good answer.
	Jim, I've loved talking to you and I could talk to you for many more hours, but I've got to go and pick up my wife from the airport, you know, recognizing my husbandly duty.
	Right.
	Well, we'll have to continue another time.
	It's been really interesting.
	Please tell people where they can find your stuff.
	Sure.
	Awesome.
	Made by Jim Bob is my website.
	Made by Jim Bob is my YouTube.
	Again, my primary duty in the world is to make exceptional memes.
	I have three books that are available right now.
	The most recent is Savage Memes Volume 5, Illuminormy.
	There's three of them available.
	Savage means one and two are sold out, so these are limited.
	I don't print them again, that's just how it is.
	Other than that, I do a Friday show called Mixed Bag.
	I wish, James, your time frame was a little different so I could have you on as a panel, so you'd make a great panelist on Mixed Bag.
	Maybe one day, the timing, maybe you'll stay up drunk one day and I'll Or if I'm in America, then I'll be on your time zone.
	Sure, yeah.
	I don't know if that ever happens, but let me know, because you'd be a good, a fun panelist to have on for that particular show.
	Oh, well, I'd like it.
	If ever it's possible, I will.
	Awesome.
	That'd be great.
	Thank you for the invitation.
	Yeah, so thank you, Jim Bob, and if you've enjoyed this show, please, and you want early access to my stuff, you get it a week early.
	Support me, please, on Substack, on Locals, Subscribestar, Patreon.
	If you don't want to do that, just want a one-off treat, buy me a coffee.
	And thank you for your support.
	And thank you again.
	Oh, and support my sponsors as well.
	That's important.
	They support me, so you should support them.
	It's good stuff.
	Jim Bob, thank you again very much.
	Thank you so much.
	Keep memeing.
	I will.
	Thanks a lot.
	All right.

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