Ben Shapiro’s A Klavan Kornucopia dissects Merrick Garland’s selective justice, mocking "race re-education" programs and critical race theory as divisive, while promoting his satirical "Klavinism" movement to counter ideological censorship. Stephen C. Meyer argues atheism is scientifically outdated, citing Big Bang cosmology and DNA complexity, while a listener’s unresolved love for an ex-girlfriend is dismissed as ego-driven attachment. The episode ties conservative critiques of modern media—from woke Hollywood to the decline of tragedy—to broader cultural decay, ending with a call to arms against "cancel culture." [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, I hope you're all having a wonderful, wonderful Thanksgiving.
To add to it, I don't want you to go too long without a Clavin show, so we've put together a best of.
There'll be stuff here you haven't heard before.
Lots of laughs, and a good time will be had by all or else.
So have a happy Thanksgiving and listen up.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Birds are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dunky.
Ship-shaped ipsy-topsy, the world is it bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
All right, we're going to look back at some of the ways we've been laughing our way through the fall of the Republic, but don't forget, please, to subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Leave a comment if it's sufficiently cruel and unforgivable.
We will read it on the air because it'll fit in with the rest of our content.
We have a comment from Ross Felton who said, a wolf attacks you, but the wolf is mostly peaceful because only the wolf's teeth and claws are ripping you to shreds.
Give this man a job in the mainstream media.
Using the internet without ExpressVPN is like having a first aid kit, but not keeping it stocked up.
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That's E-X-P-R-E-S-S V-P-N.com slash Clavin.
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You're thinking, sure, I can spell ExpressVPN, but what about Clavin?
It's K-L-A-V-A-N.
It's time for another exciting episode of Merrick Garland, federal law guy.
Yes, Merrick Garland seeking out crime and corruption in every corner of America except his bathroom mirror, relentlessly defending the powerful from the weak and making sure the Constitution of the United States is safe and protected from any form of use.
In last week's exciting story, Portland, Oregon was burned to the ground by a group of massed leftist radicals who beat up innocent civilians and journalists.
But never fear, Merrick Garland, federal law guy, was on the job trying to force the state of Texas to allow doctors to crush the heads of unborn babies and sell their body parts for sweet, sweet cash.
Tonight's episode, case number 20, 21, Timmy's mom.
October 1st, 6 a.m., while an innocent suburb sleeps, Timmy's mom sneaks from her bed under cover of mourning to nurse her baby and make breakfast for her husband and her son, Timmy.
But while she may look innocent enough to the ordinary American who can see and comprehend, Merrick Garland, federal law guy, can sense the criminal mastermind hidden behind that face that only looks as pure as the Virgin Mary's because she happens to be doing the sort of stuff the Virgin Mary used to do when Jesus was a child.
But Merrick Garland, federal law guy, knows that in the deepest, darkest light of yesterday afternoon, Timmy's mom was poking her nosy nose into Timmy's homework to discover that his local public school has been diligently teaching him how to correctly judge people by the color of their skin.
These dedicated public teachers have also carefully explained to Timmy that he might not really be a boy, but might in fact be a girl, just like the girl who raped that other girl after being allowed to use the girl's bathroom because that's just how much of a girl that rapist girl was.
And of course, if by some misfortune Timmy should turn out to be a boy, the school has conscientiously provided him with important literature on how he might enjoy breaking the bonds of sexual repression by performing oral sex on older men, not unlike the school principal who likes Timmy very, very much.
Now, in a sinister conspiracy to defend the heterocyst normalcy that is so systemic in this country, it has actually created every single human being who exists here, Timmy's mom has begun to plot to harass and threaten her elected school board officials by going before a public meeting and pointing out that they ought to be teaching Timmy something useful like math instead of, you know, evil things.
But be of good cheer.
Merrick Garland, federal law guy, is on the case, publicly ordering the FBI to determine whether Timmy's mom is a domestic terrorist so that Timmy's mom knows she can't just go around protecting Timmy as if she were Timmy's mom.
Not when public school officials have to be defended from the people they were elected to serve.
So don't worry, America, homicide rates in cities where the Department of Justice has intimidated the police may be rocketing upward as fast as homicide rates in cities where the Department of Justice has intimidated the police.
But Merrick Garland, federal law guy, is on the trail of Timmy's mom.
So there's nothing to fear except for Merrick Garland, federal law guy.
So my pal Christopher Ruffo has written a really interesting article for my friends at City Journal in which he talks about AT ⁇ T running a re-education program that promotes the idea that, quote, American racism is a uniquely white trait and boosts left-wing causes such as reparations to fund police and trans activism.
Let me just read you a little bit of this.
According to a senior employee who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, managers at AT ⁇ T are now assessed annually on diversity issues with mandatory participation in programs such as discussion groups, book clubs, mentorship programs, and race re-education exercises.
White employees, the source said, are tacitly expected to confess their complicity in white privilege and systemic racism.
So this is going on all around the country.
And, you know, I've been thinking about this, and it's really a wonderful new idea that we should hate each other for the color of one another's skin.
No one's ever thought of this before.
In the old days, of course, we just all thought, you know, we'll judge each other on the content of one's character and not think about this.
But now we have this wonderful new critical race theory that says, no, no, no, we should judge each other on the color of our skin.
And whatever a person of my color skin or your color skin has done, you are to blame for.
And I'm fine with that.
I'm absolutely fine with that, as long as, as long as we're fair about it.
If you're going to blame me for all the bad things that white people have done, I want you also to credit me with all the good things white people have done.
Since, you know, I'm just the sum total of the color of my skin and I'm linked to every other person who has my skin color and what they've done.
So if I'm going to pay you reparations for the bad things white people have done, that's fine.
But you also have to pay me royalties for all the good things white people have done.
So, you know, if you see me on the street, and say you're a black person, you feel free to come up to me and say, excuse me, but I really didn't like it when you kept me a slave.
And so I want you to pay me, you know, I don't know, what's that worth, may $10,000.
But then I want you to say, but listen, thanks for antibiotics and computers and cars and electricity and medicine, modern medicine, because white people kind of invented all that too.
So I'm going to pay you, I don't know, that's worth what?
I don't know, $50 million or something like that.
So we can exchange things.
And I can say to you, if you're a black, I can say, well, I don't like all the crime because black people commit a large number, disproportionate amount of the violent crime.
You may be innocent, but we're just going to judge you on, we've been through the AT ⁇ T retraining program, so I'm just going to judge you on the color of your skin.
I'm going to blame you for a crime that any black person anywhere has committed, and you have to pay me reparations for that.
But I like jazz.
Jazz is good.
And there are many black athletes, so I'm willing to pay you some royalties for that.
And that way, we can just really just keep going back and forth, giving the blame for the color of your skin and the things people who are your skin color and my skin color have done, but also giving the credit that's due.
And we can just exchange money.
And I don't know how we'll calculate this.
Maybe AT ⁇ T has a computer that can calculate the amount of money that is due to me for things that I didn't do, but take credit for because it was done by people of my skin color and how much money I have to pay you for things that weren't done to you, but were done to people of your color.
Because the argument about this, the argument about this is that the systemic racism that doesn't exist, but we have to pretend exists or else we get a bad report at AT ⁇ T.
So the systemic racism that we have to pretend exists has kept black people down economically.
And no one has ever else, no, the Jews have never suffered any bigotry and Irish have never suffered any bigotry, but blacks have.
So they've been kept down and they have not accrued the savings that they could have accrued if white people had not been systemically keeping them down.
But they do have health that they wouldn't have had if white people hadn't invented antibiotics and modern medicine.
So that should go in the other direction, right?
We should credit this.
Systemic Racism Allegations00:11:58
Or, or, here's just another thought, another thought.
This is the stupidest, most evil idea that anybody on the left has come up with since the last stupid evil idea that the left came up with.
And maybe even as evil as the next stupid evil idea the left is going to come with.
And shame, shame on AT ⁇ T for buying in to this bigotry.
So people ask me sometimes what it's like doing these videos.
And if you've ever had one of those dreams where you're suddenly walking in Times Square in your underwear wearing a clown outfit, that's pretty much it because sometimes they just tell me what I'm going to be doing and I have no idea what I'm going to be seeing.
Today they asked me to do a video on libsplaining and I, like a fool, said, instead of saying you're fired, I said, what is libsplaining?
They sent me the definition from the Urban Dictionary.
Libsplaining is the pompous and illogical explanation offered from a liberal on a topic for which they know nothing other than rhetorical talking points spewed out by politicians, which I guess is almost anything, almost anything that a liberal explains would be libsplaining.
So we've gotten these.
I haven't seen these yet.
I haven't seen these, but they come from, what's the name of the site?
It's Libs of TikTok.
Is that what it's called?
Yes, it's called Libs of TikTok.
I follow the site on Twitter, and they have selected these.
I haven't seen them.
And they will show them to me, and I will apparently say something.
We'll find out.
Let's talk about chairs.
Faux pun intended chairs are the biggest fing issue.
What in God's name?
amount of public spaces like doctor's offices, malls, what the f ⁇ ever.
Places that have seating, restaurants, etc., never ever have accessible seating.
Some places just have stools or some places just have armed, small, dinky looking chairs.
As a fat person, if you have never ever done the following things.
If you have never looked at a picture of a restaurant on Google Maps to try and figure out if the seating would be accessible to your size.
If you've never broken a chair in a public space especially, if you've never had to second guess whether or not it was okay to sit down in the chairs provided to you, if you've never had a f ⁇ ing panic attack at school because you couldn't fit into the damn chair desk situation, then you don't deal with fat phobia at the same level that the rest of us do.
You know, there used to be a button that people wore.
It was an ad for something that said, I lost weight, ask me how.
I always wanted to get a button that said, I lost weight, ask me how.
When somebody come up and said, came up to me and said, how, I would say, stop eating so damn much.
You think the chairs are bad for you?
You know what else is bad?
Heart attacks and cancer.
Those are also bad.
And you can't talk anybody into changing those.
So lose some weight and the chairs will fix themselves.
It'll be like magic.
The chairs will fix themselves.
That is conservative, consplaining.
That is consplaining from a con on TikTok.
Some straight men are attracted to trans women who haven't had bottom surgery.
This is very disconcerting and confusing to women when they find this out because they think, well, if she hasn't had bottom surgery and you want to play with that part of her, then you can't be 100% straight.
But that doesn't make sense because you have to remember that these are still women.
Trans women are women.
They are female.
The attraction to her is from the waist up, but it can also be from the waist down.
And they can experience pleasure playing with that person from the waist down.
But that act, again, doesn't indicate a sexual orientation.
It indicates an attraction to the person, to the woman, the trans woman.
Actually, some of these men are attracted to gender fluidity in that the person exhibits both male and female body parts.
And that's attractive to them.
Just like some gay men are attracted to trans men who haven't had bottom surgery.
I kind of feel for these guys.
It's hard to leave the real world.
You know, it's hard to leave the real world and live in this complete fantasy where nothing makes any sense.
You know, hey, you like a dingus.
You think a dingus is worth a million, huh?
You know, what's it to me?
I don't care who you're sleeping with.
But be a little honest with yourself.
No?
I mean, this is consplaining.
Once again, I'm consplaining.
If what you like is a dingus, get yourself a dingus.
I don't care where you get it as long as you don't take it from somebody.
Just let it remain attached.
I could talk about my dingus all night long.
Look, if you're a guy, you're a guy.
You can dress up as a girl.
You can turn your entire body into a girl's body so your entire body becomes a girl's costume.
You remain a guy.
If you're gay and you like gay guys who look like girls, fine.
You know, they used to say there's a boy for every girl in the world and a girl for every boy.
There's a crazy person for every other crazy person.
And I hope you're all very happy together.
But really, speaking.
Most men are rapists.
And by that, I mean most cis heteronormative men.
There's a reason we say we live in a rape culture.
Most rapes go unreported, some even unknown.
And the way rape is portrayed and glamorized in movies and media misrepresents what most rape actually looks like.
Let's just look at the updated definition of rape so that everybody's clear.
Penetration, no matter how slight of the vagina or anus or any other body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person without the consent of the victim.
Are you buying somebody drinks with the goal of getting them drunk enough so that they can't consent?
Rapist.
Coercing somebody into sex?
Rapist.
Guilting or manipulating someone into having sex with you?
Rapist.
Dating coaches and pickup artists have normalized this kind of behavior.
And if you engage in any of those things, you'll be known as a rapist.
Is your just the tip joke funny now?
Yes.
Well, all I can say is she sounds like a fun date, doesn't she?
She sounds like the kind of girl.
You just can't wait to take home to the police officer who's arresting you for rape.
It's like, officer, I'd like you to meet the woman.
She said, yes, I slept with her and now she's accusing me of something.
What an angry, angry person.
And listen, you know, the funny thing is, the funny thing is, is, look, in general, guys are a lot bigger than women.
They're a lot stronger than women.
Women are always, feminists are always complaining, saying that guys have all the power.
If we lived in a rape culture, if all guys were rapists, why wouldn't all women get raped?
That doesn't make any sense to me.
But that's because I'm a conservative and I kind of want things to be logical and be realistic.
I'm really sorry for this lady.
However, I can give you all one piece of advice.
If she asks you out, don't do it.
All right, are there any more of these?
This is like kind of entering some sort of strange phantasmagoria, but here's another guy.
All right, let's hear it.
This is an easy one.
If you espouse to the idea that Jesus was born of a virgin birth, then Jesus could not have had male strength.
Therefore, Jesus had only female chromosomes and presented as masculine.
So Jesus was non-binary.
And in terms of male and female, and the Hebrew, the word that was used for and describes a spectrum.
Male and female and everything in between.
Man and woman is a biological concept.
Science currently identifies 13 combinations and permutations of XY chromosomes.
Masculine and feminine is a sociological construct that is dependent upon the society with which you are talking about.
Sorry.
Well, that was a very deep theological thought.
I could actually say something about that.
I mean, obviously, since God includes both male and female, Jesus as in terms of being the incarnate God, in fact, does include the female and male principle, and he's still a guy.
Holy fish paste!
It's a guy!
There you go.
He's still a guy.
He's a guy because he was made a guy.
You know, it's like, you know, these things are all just like assaults on the English language.
And the reason they assault the English language is because the English language describes things.
And when it describes things, it describes them as we all know them to be.
And so all they do is change the definitions of words, hoping the world will go away.
It's like playing peekaboo.
You ever play peekaboo with a little kid and the kids going like peekaboo?
Reality is like that too.
You can hide it with their language.
Peekaboo.
It's still there no matter how you try to libsplain it away.
I would like to start a movement.
And I want the movement to be called like clavinism.
And the reason I want it to be called I wanted to have my picture.
Yeah, there it is.
I want to have my picture, clay, you know, and the reason for that is totally about my ego.
It has nothing to do with the movement itself.
It's just totally my ego.
I just want my face on it and I want it to be called clavinism.
And what the movement is, is this.
The movement is this.
And especially for young people, okay?
Because you need like a 105-year-old guy to tell you what to do at this point because you haven't gotten out of your apartment in three years.
The movement is this.
Once a week, at least once a week, you put all your machines away.
Put all your machines away.
Get them out of the room.
They can't be anywhere near you.
And meet with other people.
One person, two people, maybe three people, not too many people, because you don't want people sneaking in and secretly recording things.
And start to talk about things.
And start to say the things you are not allowed to say, because that's the big fear.
The big fear is if you say something, if you express an idea, if you express yourself, you will be penalized.
That's the big fear, because that's the target.
The target is your individuality.
The target is your mind.
You should get together and talk about things that you're not allowed to say.
Maybe you don't like black people.
Maybe you don't like white people.
Maybe, you know, you'd actually like to get married and have kids and be a homemaker, and you're not allowed to say that.
You've never been allowed to say that.
Maybe, you know, whatever it is.
Talk about things and argue about things, not by calling each other's names, but expressing your own opinion that maybe conflicts with other people's opinion and doing it in love without attacking each other.
Find a place, a genuine safe place, where you can talk to one another.
Again, I want my picture up.
I want that picture of me there, and I want it to be called the Klavinist movement.
But talk to one another.
You know, it's funny.
Jesus, who you remember from our last podcast, said, where there are two or three gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.
And the reason he said that is God works through matter.
The body is the first organ of matter that makes us who we are.
Our bodies interacting, our bodies interacting is where God begins to speak in our lives.
So when two or three of us are gathered together in his name, he is there in the midst of them.
Take back your bodies and your minds.
And this is, again, I want this to be called the Klavinist movement.
And where two or three of you are gathered in my name, I'll be there, but you'll be buying the drinks.
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Marvel is considering changing the name of the X-Men films in order to be more woke and inclusive.
According to reports, the company is currently reviewing other possible titles, such as X-Movies No Once to Watch Anymore, an ex-studio executive looking for job in real estate after this completely avoidable debacle.
Marvel began contemplating taking the superhero franchise in a new woke direction after several executives at the company snorted some blow and decided they were making too much money.
They had originally considered just raking all the X-Men profits into a big pile and setting it on fire, but that apparently would have violated anti-pollution laws.
And so the company began to look for other ways to be unbearably stupid without damaging the environment.
As one Hollywood insider put it, quote, the movie industry wants very much to make the world a better place.
But to do that, we'd have to stop sexually harassing our interns, diddling underage boys at Encino pool parties, and selling perversion and immorality to the nation's impressionable young.
And of course, that's not going to happen, so we'll do this meaningless language crap instead, unquote.
The central problem with calling X-Men X-Men lies in the fact that according to woke philosophy, X-Men would now be women, unless they were X-Women, in which case they would be men until they decided to become women again.
when they would be X-Men and the title could remain the same.
Even so, many members of the X-Men audience have noticed that some of the X-Men have strangely alluring shapes in their skin-tight costumes, though no one is willing to say what these oddly stimulating shapes might mean, since some of these inexplicably arousing and crevaceous superheroes might not want to be referred to as she or her, but might instead prefer to use such pronouns as painfully deluded or whack-a-doodle-doo.
One person who agrees with the X-Men name change is skin-tight costume-wearing actress Lola Vavoom, who plays the role of X-Men superhero Skin Tight, whose superpower is filling out a skin-tight costume.
Ms. Vavoom says, quote, it's about time Hollywood stopped sexualizing women.
That way, I won't have a career anymore and can maybe get married and have some kids.
Why We Left Science Fiction00:10:04
Who knows?
I might even learn to cook and give up antidepressants, unquote.
As Marvel continued to consider the name change and search for other ways to take away every last ounce of fun and pleasure out of the superhero franchise, screenwriters scrambled to come up with new woke storylines.
One scenario, for instance, has Commissioner Gordon piercing the night sky over Gotham City with his new virtue signal, causing a group of cartoonishly one-dimensional characters in outlandish outfits to come out of their fortresses of solitude and use different words to describe things before returning to Encino to diddle underage boys.
And please don't write me emails.
I already know that I'm not describing the Marvel universe.
I'm describing the real one.
So I'm not sure whether everybody has seen the new version of Dune, or I'm the only person who watched it.
I'm not sure how it did.
This is the one that was directed by Denise Villeneuve, I believe his name is pronounced.
My name is Denis Villeneuve.
And before I give it a brief review, I just want to point out a couple of things.
One, I'm not a big science fiction fan.
I've read more science fiction than I think I have because I've kind of read all the classics.
I could not get through the novel Dune.
I couldn't get through 70 pages of it.
I just thought it was the slowest, dullest book I'd ever read, and I finally just put it away.
I just gave up on it.
So I may not be the best person.
I've never seen the other movies.
I know it was made before.
However, I am a huge Villeneuve fan.
I love his movies.
I think he's really smart, really talented.
I thought Sicario was a great crime film.
Prisoners, a really good thriller, a very intelligent, moderated, you know, intellectual thriller with a lot to say.
And Arrival, of course, was good.
Didn't love Blade Runner 2049, but I'm not a big fan of sequels.
And I loved the first Blade Runner so much that it was very hard to beat.
I thought it was well done, but I just didn't care about it.
But his other films are just really good.
He's a very, very intelligent filmmaker.
First thing you got to say about this version of Dune, and I think it's on HBO Max and also in theaters, and I saw it on HBO Max.
It looks great.
It is as beautiful as it is possible for something to be.
It's just an absolute amazing thing.
Even on my screen, I have a big TV, but it's not a big IMAX or anything like that.
It looked terrific.
Secondly, terrific cast.
Oscar Isaac, great actor.
Josh Brolin, great actor.
Rebecca Ferguson plays the mother.
She's really, really terrific, a very compelling actress.
Zendaya, I always love Zendaya because, well, first time I saw Zendaya, I called up my agent and I said, we should get Zendaya for this film project I was on.
And he said, nobody's ever heard of her.
I said they will heard her, ah, you don't know what you're talking about.
Of course, now she's a big star.
She's wonderful too.
She's a very, very appealing lady.
Dune, the picture was okay.
The picture was okay.
It moved along.
The action was great.
The action was really well choreographed, especially the epic action was terrific.
The worms, if you know Dune, it's got these big sandworms and the worms were scary and really interesting to look at.
But it partook of everything I don't like about science fiction.
The thing I don't like about science fiction in general, just speaking generally, is science fiction is about ideas.
It's about cool ideas, but it almost never has compelling characters in it.
They're almost always just archetypes.
And the problem with that for me is if your idea won't play with real characters in it, then maybe it's not a very good idea.
And that's the reason I love some science fiction movies like Blade Runner.
The original Blade Runner has great characters in it in great dilemmas.
And so the ideas really come to life.
Even Star Wars, which is not my favorite picture, the original, but those characters are very charming, very kind of different, even though they're kind of archetypes too.
They're very different.
The robots are very funny in it.
There is not one joke in this thing.
I am smiling.
Nobody makes a joke because they're all living in a myth, right?
And so it's got the one.
You know, we always know the one is going to come along.
It's got the king, and the king is the king.
The mother is the mother.
You know, each person is kind of just this archetype.
And it's just, I was never very compelled.
I will say, because Villanova is a terrific director, at least I could tell who everybody was because this very complicated family dynamic and history.
And it's one of the reasons I couldn't get through the book.
As I was reading the book, I just thought, I just don't care.
One of my problems with science fiction is because none of it is real, when they give me these long histories, like the 500-page conference scene in Lord of the Rings, I just think, you know, this doesn't do anything for me because none of these people are real.
So anyway, it's fine.
It kept my interest.
Is it two and a half hours?
I watched the whole thing.
I didn't turn it off.
And if you want to look at something beautiful, it's beautiful to look at.
Villanova is a great director, so it works in terms of the choreography of the thing.
But it's just, I don't know.
It just didn't like spring to life to me.
I didn't really care who was going to live.
There were no surprises.
And as I say, there were no laughs.
And the funny thing about laughs is that laughs are a human thing.
Human beings do laugh, but icons and archetypes don't laugh.
They're just myths and legends.
And that's kind of what it was.
So it partook of everything I particularly don't like of science fiction.
And the only thing that I really loved about it was the look of it and the action and the absolute epic beauty of it.
So that's the way I felt about it.
But if you're a big Dune fan, if you're a big science fiction fan, I think you'll love it.
Just not for me.
I get a lot of letters asking me about writing and the writer's life and how to approach writing because I am, after all, the author of 36 novels.
The latest is When Christmas Comes, which you should own and be reading and give to your friends as well.
I don't always deal with those letters on my show, on my podcast, because I know not everybody wants to be a writer, but I thought I would do a special YouTube video just addressing some of the questions.
And maybe we'll do this from time to time because I just get a lot of letters that I don't get a chance to answer all the time.
The question I get asked most often goes something like this.
I am a conservative.
I want to write stories with conservative content, fiction, with conservative content.
Will I be able to find a publisher?
Will I be blacklisted?
And the answer is it's going to be tougher.
You know, the publishing industry is not as woke as the movie industry.
It's not as unified.
It's not as much of a block as the movie industry.
But it is a left-wing industry, a prominent left-wing industry.
It's a little bit more open-minded because the people who work in the publishing industry tend to be smarter and more literate, so they tend to have more open minds.
And so there is a chance.
I mean, after all, Brad Thor is a bestseller and he's on my show from time to time.
You know, I still can publish, though it has gotten more difficult for me because of my open conservatism.
But still, there are these people.
So what do you do when you finish your book?
Well, first of all, the first thing you should know is that you may not be getting rejected because you're conservative.
You may be getting rejected because you don't know what you're doing.
So the first thing you want to do is make sure your grammar is good.
You know, if you have never gone through a class on grammar, you should get a workbook and go from it through it beginning to end.
A writer who doesn't have good grammar is like a carpenter who doesn't know which end of his hammer to use.
It is amazing how many people write to me and say, I want to be a writer.
And in their first sentence, there'll be a grammatical error and you think, well, you're not going to do it.
Another sign that you may not be a writer is if you don't read.
Writers read.
They read everything.
They read a lot.
They pay attention to what they read and they pay attention to what's in it.
So you've written a book and you want to know what to do with it.
Well, here is a trick that I think a lot of young writers don't know.
If you've been reading a lot, then you know that there are some books that remind you of what you're doing.
I'm not saying they're the same.
I'm not saying yours isn't original.
But let's say that you're a thriller writer and you think, I want to write stories like Brad Thor or Vince Flynn or someone like that, someone who has a conservative bent.
Go take a look at their books, which you should have already read if you're writing like them.
Look in the acknowledgements page, in the acknowledgements page.
Usually they thank their agent.
Now, you have to query an agent and you just can't do it any way you want.
When I started out, I had no idea how to do it.
And I actually went to agents' offices with my boxed manuscript under my arm and I was physically ejected from some of those offices, as you will be too if you try that.
There are plenty of books that will tell you how to do this.
Writer's Market is one of the more common ones, but you can find stuff online you probably don't even have to pay for that tell you how to write a query letter because everything is online nowadays.
Usually they just want a couple of paragraphs and maybe a couple of pages to make sure that you can write.
Usually they're going to want to see if this is a novel.
They're going to want to see the whole novel.
So don't do it until you are ready to show the whole novel.
And usually they will not want you to send what they call multiple submissions where you send it to different people.
That means that they should answer you within a certain period of time.
Within several weeks, you can usually look at something like Writer's Market and it'll tell you how long.
The reason I say go to agents is publishers, just like any business, like the tried and true.
They want to do what they did last time.
If Stephen King is selling, they want horror.
If Mysteries are selling, they want Mysteries and they want to do the things that work for them.
So they're going to be a little less open to new voices.
Agents need new writers.
They need writers.
They need to keep their stable growing.
They need to keep more people coming into their stable.
And if you are going to someone who has published a book like yours, you already know that that person is willing to take on a book like yours.
And so that's the trick.
It's finding out the agents who represent the authors you like.
If there are no authors you like, you are probably not in good shape because you probably haven't been reading enough to actually be a writer.
And as I always tell, I tell every young writer the same thing.
Don't do it unless you have to.
It is an enormously hard profession.
There are probably fewer people like me who have made a living writing fiction throughout their life than there are professional Major League Baseball players.
There are very few who make a living at it.
It's a tough life.
Anglican Liturgy Announcement00:08:01
It is a life where you're always being judged.
Don't do it if you don't have to do it.
If you have to do it, you will know.
One thing I always knew is that I had to do, I had to tell stories, I had to do it.
Learn the business because the business is tough.
But, you know, so you have your inspiration, you have your story, you've written your story.
Now it's time to find an agent.
That's the first thing you want to do.
And you find an agent who handles books like yours.
So one of the most amazing things that has happened to me in my new home is I have found a church that I love.
I have found a church that solves the problem.
You have no idea.
Well, maybe some of you do because you've been writing to me about it.
How hard it is to find a church.
I woke up one morning and turned to my wife and I said, how hard is it to preach the gospel?
It's written down.
You can read it and then talk about what you read and what you think it means.
That's your whole job.
That is all you have to do.
I was going to an Anglican church and I left on a, I think it was Good Friday, the day, you know, the Friday before Easter when you remember the crucifixion.
And the priest got up.
And the thing about the Episcopal Church is in the Episcopal Church, God is leftist politics with a beard on.
And why has he got a beard?
Isn't that kind of sexist?
But that's really true in the Episcopal Church.
They are so radical that they have left the gospel behind altogether.
And this guy was giving a sermon, I believe it was on Good Friday, and he said, Jesus died for the non-binary child who isn't being allowed to use the bathroom he wants.
And I thought, well, he did, but not for that reason, not for the reason you think.
And I thought, you know, just my whole feeling was nothing against non-binary or transgender, whatever, nothing against individual people.
Just show me in the gospel where it says that, but you can't because it's not there, so don't make stuff up.
So I was reading this op-ed in the New York Times that really exemplified what it was about the Anglican church that was really bothering me.
It's by this woman, Tish Harrison Warren.
I don't know that much about her, but I'm sure she's a leftist preacher.
She's a priest, an Episcopal priest or an Anglican priest.
And she wrote this thing.
She's now got a newsletter in the Times.
She says, each Sunday in my Anglican church in Austin, Texas, the priest leading the service takes his or her place in front of the congregation and begins by saying the opening acclamation, usually blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
What has surprised me since I first attended an Anglican service just over a decade ago is that we begin not with welcoming anyone in the pews, but with a direct announcement about God.
It's a little jarring even now that I'm a priest.
We all made an effort to get to church.
We woke up early on a weekend, brushed our teeth, wrestled kids into car seats, masked up, and found a place to sit.
But the service doesn't start by acknowledging any of that.
No thanking everyone for showing up, not even a bland mention of the weather or how nice everyone looks this week.
Instead, I stand up in front of everyone and proclaim the presence of an invisible God.
Not to put, you know, it reminded me of a quote about women preaching.
Samuel Johnson, the famous English lexicographer, famously said, sir, a woman preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs.
It's not done well, but you're surprised to find it done at all.
You know, I went from church to church, and I went to the church's Presbyterian church for a while.
I joined a Presbyterian church for a while, one of those churches where people just celebrate God all the time.
It's all celebration, and it's all lifting your hands to heaven and singing, and it's all joy, joy, joy.
And I thought, you know, this doesn't reflect either the depth of tragedy in the gospels.
It doesn't reflect the difficulty and the sinfulness of our world.
And it's not that I mean I believe that Christianity is joyful.
Christianity has supplied me with more joy than I even know how to communicate by joy meaning a gusto for life, an enjoyment of life, even in difficult times.
And it has given me that in part because it acknowledges how tragic life is.
And all I want is for someone to preach the gospel.
So I moved to my new home and I went online and I'm looking and I'm looking and looking.
And I found a church that belongs to what I believe is called the Anglican Church in North America.
It's kind of a breakaway church where they don't let women preach, by the way.
It's one of the reasons they broke away from the mainstream Episcopal Church.
And I looked it over and it looked pretty interesting.
I kind of watched a service on Facebook.
And another thing that's happened to me is the liturgy.
One of the things about being outside of the Anglican church is I miss the Catholic liturgy.
This is an Anglo-Catholic church, which means a Catholic church that's not connected to Rome.
It has a Catholic church.
It observes Catholic theology, but it's not connected to Rome and it's not run by the Pope.
And I miss the liturgy because the liturgy is really what the service is about.
The liturgy is where the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ.
And you follow this liturgy and if you use it as a meditative exercise, it helps this thing happen in your brain, in your imaginary life, where you understand what's happening to the bread and wine and, in fact, to all of the material world.
And you take that in to become part of that.
So I go to this church and I listen to the liturgy and I love the liturgy and the sermon is good.
And I walk downstairs and I find there, you know, they always give away like, you know, pamphlets and interesting magazines and things like that.
And one thing they're giving away is a Ronald Reagan calendar.
So I thought, well, this must be a conservative church.
But, and here's the interesting thing.
Obviously, Coffee Hour, I found out it's a very conservative church.
The people there are politically conservative.
They're lovely, lovely people.
I've really enjoyed meeting them all.
But, but the thing that really gets me is no matter what happens in the news, no matter how passionate I know the priest feels about it, because I know he's a conservative, he doesn't preach the news.
He preaches the gospel.
He preaches the gospel.
He reads the book and talks about what the book means.
And he talks about it with a great deal of historical knowledge, but also with a great deal of spiritual power.
And I think it's the gospel.
I was not looking for a conservative church anymore than I'm looking for conservative art.
I'm looking for art that expresses the inner experience of being human.
I was looking for a church that preaches the gospel.
The left ruins everything.
They ruin everything because they can't stay out of it.
They can't let it do what it does.
You can't have a business that makes hats.
You have to have a business that makes hats, but it's also woke.
You can't have a business that makes cupcakes.
You also have to agree with the left.
You can't have a church that just preaches the gospel.
You know, in this article, this op-ed that I started with, she quotes a famous liberal theologian, Karl Barth, who said, Christians must live our lives with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.
You know what?
The Bible will do.
The Bible's all you need.
You might not even care about the news.
All you want is that gospel.
The left ruins everything by not letting it do what it does.
And I'm so thrilled I have finally found a church that does the liturgy and preaches the gospel.
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Roles And Identity Politics00:14:29
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There are no easy things.
The Democrats and Satan are working together to try to overturn Texas' new anti-abortion law.
Now, I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, oh, Clavin, you living carnival of wit, from whom satirical ideas pour forth endlessly like clowns from a Volkswagen, hilarious and yet subtly seductive, so that we laugh even as we engage in secret and slightly twisted fantasies involving you and a leather-lined room, but perhaps that's too much information.
But no, I'm not making this up.
All right, I'm making up the part about the leather-lined room.
That's just a personal thing.
But the part about Satan and the Democrats is actually true.
Democrats are in a panic about the Texas law, which bans abortion after a baby's heartbeat can be detected.
And so they're cheering for the satanic temple, which is challenging the law on the grounds that it restricts their religious practices, namely the doing of evil.
The Democrats and the Prince of Darkness issued a joint statement in a flaming ball of burning souls that scrawled these words in hopeless darkness on the face of human despair.
Quote, The results of the Texas bill will be catastrophic, allowing thousands of babies to be born alive instead of torn to pieces in the womb and sold for parts as the Democrats and Satan both prefer.
These dreadfully living creatures will proceed to cry and keep us awake and crap on everything, all of which could be avoided by simply killing them as both Democrats and the Dark Lord feel is best.
Therefore, Satan and the Democrats have decided to join together to protect what Satan calls the deliciously unholy slaughter of innocents, and the Democrats call women's health care, unquote.
The Satanic Temple marked their attack on the Texas law with a hellishly clever illustration on their website in which the satanic goat's head is superimposed on a woman's loins so that the goat head replaces her cervix and vagina and the curling horns become her fallopian tubes.
I'm not making that up either.
Democrat communicators admired the image as a succinct expression of both Satan and the Democrats' plan to transform the mothers of mankind into demonic instruments that will enslave men to their goat-like desires.
The Democrats even briefly considered replacing their donkey symbol with the goat symbol, but ultimately figured, what difference at this point does it make?
Though some say Satan took action against the Texas bill in a cynical ploy to position himself as the next Democrat candidate for president, the father of lies denied the charge, saying he preferred to continue working with the Democrats behind the scenes and had no political ambitions because he felt he couldn't improve on the politicians already in office.
That said, Satan did continue his attack on the Texas law in this public debate with an actual unborn child.
Help me!
Come back here.
You're not a human being.
I am.
I am a human being for crying out loud.
Look at me.
No one can see you.
Hold still, you piece of tissue.
Blackwood's maddened.
Now, a lot of people complain, not a lot of people, but a number of people have complained about the fact that we talk about God a lot on the show, and it is my mission to alienate every single person in America and then move on to the world, you know, today, America, tomorrow, the world.
So I'm going to continue to do this because I think it's important.
One of my big objections to conservatism is that we're, too often we're reactionary.
We know what we're against.
We know what we don't like, but we don't tell people why we don't like it because we have something positive to say.
In other words, we don't tell people that this is wrong because we know something that is right, that will give you joy, that will give you pleasure, that will make things better.
And I've been thinking a lot about identity politics.
And a little bit of this is going to be thinking out loud.
But still, I've been thinking about identity politics and how I find it incredibly offensive.
I find identity politics incredibly offensive.
This idea that our identity is a group identity, that we identify with our race, with our gender, with our sexuality, and how those things affect our power standing in the world and the power standing of our group in the world.
If I belong to a group that can claim to be a victim, then I can claim to be a victim, and then I have some sort of advantage over you because you're supposed to feel guilty, and I'm supposed to be able to dictate what kind of words you use, how you treat me, even how you look at me.
Otherwise, it's a microaggression and I get to complain about you and then I get to hurt you.
I get to hurt your career, I get to hurt your standing in a university or whatever it is.
I find this a, it's kind of a sick combination, nonsensical combination of materialism, the idea that your body wholly defines you and that you are nothing else, mixed with this kind of irrational spiritual nonsense where your body doesn't matter at all, where you get to essentially say, oh yeah, I look like a man, but I'm a woman.
Some people even feel that you can choose your race.
And it's interesting to me that identity politics, because it is based in a lie, so often finds its way to becoming the very evil that it decries, right?
So it starts out, the black guy starts out by saying racism is bad.
You should judge people not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
And it ends up several decades later with whiteness is evil and white people are inherently racist and white people can't help it.
They are going to be racist and you need to watch out.
You need to check your whiteness.
And it essentially has become the thing that it decried.
It has become the thing that it denounced.
Feminism begins by saying men are macho and they use their strength, their physical strength too much and they're too aggressive and they're just belligerent and all this.
And it ends by saying women should be more like that.
Women should be belligerent and aggressive and talking about strength.
Everything that feminists always talk about is strength.
She's strong.
She's tough.
I always say if I wanted to marry somebody that strong, I'd have married a guy.
There are other feminine attributes that actually are much more beneficent for the world to have in play that feminists now reject.
They begin by saying, well, transgender, some people feel that they're a woman in a man's body, and that's very painful.
It's a very painful thing to feel that way.
It's a very difficult thing to feel that way, so we shouldn't be mean to them.
And they end up saying, well, it really is a woman.
They end up essentially enlisting us into this disorder, into this mental illness.
And for me, that's obvious.
It's obvious why that happens.
It's obvious why you end up with evil.
It's because you're telling a lie.
There's a line in the Bible, straight is the way and narrow is the gate that leads to the kingdom of heaven, but broad is the way and wide is the gate that leads to perdition.
A lot of people think that all roads lead to God.
They'll say God is a mountain that can be climbed from any side.
And no, I don't actually believe that's true.
I believe that the way to God is actually a straight way, a very narrow way, because the truth is the truth.
When something is true, then everything around it is not true.
If the world is round, then it's not flat.
And you can say a lot of false things about the shape of the earth, but you can only say one true thing about the shape of the earth, that the earth is round.
And I think the same is true of God.
So once you start telling lies about reality, once you start defining a person by his race, by his gender, by his sexuality, once you start to say that that's his identity, I think that that's a lie.
And once you say it, you are going to find yourself in an evil place because all lies lead to the same place.
They all lead to darkness.
So I started to ask myself, what does the Bible say about identity?
What does Christianity say about identity?
Because a lot of times I have found, and I don't mean to offend anybody, but what I mean is I mean to offend everybody.
I don't mean to offend anybody.
I mean to offend everybody.
But what I have found is that what the Bible says about things is so often rich and complex, but what people say that the Bible says is very simplistic and false.
And so I go back to the Bible and I read through the Bible and I try to think to myself, you know, don't gloss over stuff that's difficult.
Don't gloss over contradictory things.
Try and find the truth in those things and what the whole Bible is saying all the time.
So one of the things that at least the New Testament teaches us is that race is not what we think it is.
It is not as essential as we think it is.
It's not that it doesn't exist, but it's not as essential to your identity as you might believe.
The Jews were very proud of being the Jews.
They were proud of being the sons of Abraham.
They felt that they are, and they still feel that they are, a people specially chosen by God.
And yet John the Baptist said to people, do not say within yourself that we are children of Abraham, because God is able to make stones to turn stones into children of Abraham.
So you have a race.
You are special people that come from Abraham.
But if God wants to just turn to a rock and say, I'm going to make you people of Abraham, that's what he'll do.
So in other words, there are responsibilities that come with your race, and your race is not an essentially good or bad thing.
It still is dependent on you.
And that fits in with what Paul says about who you are in Christ.
He says, in Christ, there is neither Greek nor Jew, right?
So that means Greek there means Gentile, so there's neither Gentile nor Jew.
There's neither circumcised nor uncircumcised.
The Jews are famously circumcised and the Gentiles were not.
He says there's neither barbarian, there's no Scythian, there's no slave nor free, but Christ is all in all.
When you are in Christ, all of those identities, those racial identities and even your social state, right?
Even your social state is no longer part of your identity.
Your identity is in Christ.
We'll have to think more about what that means, but still.
But he goes beyond that.
In Galatians, Paul says there is neither male nor female.
Now, that's a really interesting thing.
He's saying that in Christ, there is no male or female.
And Jesus sort of confirms this.
You know, when he's asked about who gets to marry who in the kingdom of heaven, he says in the resurrection, in the life of God, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but they're like angels of God in heaven.
He doesn't elaborate on that, but it sounds like gender is a thing that we experience in this world, but there is something beyond gender that we are and that our gender does not, even our gender does not define us.
Now, most of us, including me, think that gender is an important part of what, for lack of a better word, I'll call my identity.
I am a man.
I've frequently said that there are only two kinds of people in the world.
There are men and women.
Everybody else is pretty much the same.
That's the big divide in life.
And in Paul also, we find instructions.
He says there's no male and female in Christ, but here on earth we have very distinct male and female roles.
And he says, wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands as unto the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church and is the savior of the body.
And he says, husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church and gave himself for the church that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water.
And he says that men should love their wives, husbands should love their wives as if they are their own flesh, as if your wife is your own flesh.
That's interesting because a lot of people love to quote that wife, submit yourself unto your own husbands, but they skip over that part where men are supposed to love their wives like their own flesh.
When you do that, you know, it sounds like it's going to be kind of an unequal relationship when you say, wives, submit yourself to the authority of your husband.
But when you add on that husbands have to love their wives like their own flesh, suddenly it's not as unequal as you actually think it is.
So there's no gender in Christ, but there are gender roles here on earth.
There is no race, and yet there are chosen people, and there are racial roles.
There's a scene in one of the Gospels where a woman of Canaan, a Gentile, comes up and says to Jesus, my daughter is severely demon-possessed.
Have mercy on me and heal her.
And Jesus doesn't answer her.
And he says, and his disciples say, send her away, for she keeps making all this noise.
And he says, I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
And he won't listen to her because he's not a Jew.
He won't listen to her because he's not a Jew.
And finally, he says to her, it is not good to take the children's bread, the Jews' bread, and throw it to the dogs.
And she says, yes, but even the dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their master's table.
And Jesus says, great is your faith.
Let it be as you desire.
And he heals her daughter, right?
So the races are different.
There are different roles that they play.
But in Christ, there is no race.
So in Christ, there's no gender, but there are gender roles.
In Christ, there is no race, but they are race roles.
I have to tell you that story.
I once heard a priest, an Episcopal priest, very leftist priest, talk about that story in which Jesus refused to help somebody because he wasn't Jewish.
He said, I don't know what to say about this.
He was absolutely stunned into silence that Jesus would recognize that there are racial roles, right?
In fact, Jesus says to the Samaritans, the Jews are important because we know what we worship.
Jews know what they worship.
You don't know what you worship because he says salvation is from the Jews.
So no gender, but gender roles, no race, but racial roles.
Now, this brings me to a famous sentence, which is a little bit of a pet peeve of mine, which is a sentence by Rousseau where he says, man is born free, but everywhere is in chains.
The Body Represents God00:04:15
And the reason it's a pet peeve is I have a pet peeve of people who say things beautifully that aren't true.
It is not true that man is born free, and it's not true that everywhere he is in chains.
But what is true is that man is born naked and everywhere he is in clothes.
That is, that we have roles that we play, and part of those roles are involved with our bodies, right?
Because our social constructs, you know, the left is always saying this is a social construct as if that were a bad thing.
But our social constructs, constructs grow out of our human state.
And our human state is not a blank slate.
We are fleshly.
We are flesh.
We're bodied.
We are gendered.
We're full of inequalities and difficulties.
I'm never going to be as good a basketball player as LeBron James.
There's no point in my saying that.
There's no point in my trying to be equal with him in that field.
We're filled with desires that we shouldn't satisfy, that will hurt us if we do satisfy them.
Our role is difficult.
It is difficult.
The flesh, it seems to be saying, is representative of something, but it is not that thing.
Our genders, our races, the things that we are physically, represents something.
It speaks to us of something in the same way that a word represents something, but it is not that thing.
And it's not separable.
You're not separable from your flesh.
When my father died, I remember walking in to see his body in the funeral home, and one of my brothers said to me, that's not him, and walked out of the room.
And I thought, well, it's not him, but it's the only hymn I ever knew.
You know, the only hymn I ever knew was in that body.
We are not capable in this world of separating ourselves from our body.
So this maleness that I am, this whiteness, this Jewishness is part of my identity, these are all part of what represents me, but it is not the me I am.
The soul and the body are kind of one thing in this world.
It is just like language.
It is just like me saying, you know, Leftist Tears Tumblr represents this thing, but it is not that thing, but I can't express it any other way.
In the same way, you cannot be expressed in any other way.
You are male or female.
You are black or white.
You are a race, and you have a role to play.
But when you play that role, right, you are playing something more than your physical body.
You are expressing something more than your physical body, which is you are expressing the image of God.
That is what you are expressing with your body.
So you have to use your body and use your situation, use your womanhood, or use your male manhood to express the image of God.
If, for instance, you are a black person born into a world of bigotry, you have to represent the unbroken dignity without anger that God would represent if he were you, which essentially you are.
You are in the image of God.
You have to love your enemies, Jesus said, because God, that is the way God treats his enemies.
You are representing this thing, which means curtailing some of the things that your body wants, which means playing into the role that your body represents, right?
The left wants you to live into your flesh.
They want you to live into the physical things that you are.
But at the same time, they get confused and say, no, you can actually recreate those things.
What God is saying is there is something that you cannot recreate, you cannot change, which is the image of God.
And he says, God says to you, if you lose your life, you will find your life, right?
If you lose your life, you will find your life.
And that is because you are here as an image in the image of God.
Your body is the words that God is using to describe a piece of himself.
And it's up to you to use that body, that maleness, that blackness, that whiteness, whatever it is, to represent that God.
And if you lose yourself, which is the identity of the left, the identity that the left is teaching you, is the things that you are worried about, your ambitions, your fears, your hatred, if you lose all of that and let all of that go and instead act as the person God made you to be, as the person who represents the image of God, then you will find yourself.
And that, I think, is what Christian identity is.
So I've been taking piano lessons.
I haven't mentioned this too much, I don't think.
And I got an X-Chair, so I'd be comfortable.
Fine-Tuning The Multiverse00:16:00
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Hey, I've already thanked you for buying when Christmas comes, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't buy it again or get your friends to buy it or buy it for your friends.
It's going to be the first on the list that the Wall Street Journal this weekend does their holiday books on their holiday mysteries.
It is number one on the list.
Dean Koontz has praised it.
Brad Thor has praised it.
As I told you, it's got a review in the Spectator saying it's fine literature as well as a great mystery story.
Everyone who's read it really has just been pouring wonderful reviews on Amazon.
Please go out and buy it.
It matters so much to me and that I can turn this into a series.
And to see a book of this quality go up the Amazon list is really gratifying.
And I actually think it's important because I think this is a really good book written by one of us.
And I hope you'll go and buy it when Christmas comes.
Do not forget to subscribe to the Daily Wire.
And I will tell you why.
The fights we fight here, the things we say here, they all leave us open to cancel culture.
But we don't have to worry about canceled culture if you guys support us.
They can't cancel you.
They can't cancel your subscription.
That's why we urge you to subscribe.
Your support means so much to us, not just emotionally, but actually practically.
So go to dailywire.com slash subscribe and join the fight with The Daily Wire.
So I have been really looking forward to today's interview.
I've been arguing for a long time that atheists are basically trapped in the 20th century, that their philosophy has become scientifically obsolete.
And I just read a terrific book called The Return of the God Hypothesis by Stephen C. Meyer.
Stephen Meyer directs the Discovery Institute, the Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture in Seattle.
He's a former geophysicist.
He's written bestsellers, Darwin's Doubt, The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, Signature in the Cell.
And his latest is the USA Today bestseller Return of the God Hypothesis, which I read.
I just think it's terrific.
Steve, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Thank you, Andrew, for having me on.
It's a great privilege.
It's a terrific book.
It really is.
It's rigorous.
It's not tendentious.
You don't just say what you want to be true.
You make your arguments really clearly.
I want to talk, before we get into the argument, the subtitle of the book is The Three Discoveries That Have Brought the God Hypothesis Back into Play.
And before we get to those three discoveries, the fact that you call it the return of the God hypothesis suggests that there was a time when maybe it made more sense not to hypothesize that God had created the world or that God was at work in the world.
Why is that the case?
Yeah, you mentioned that atheism is stuck in the 20th century.
I think it's actually stuck in the late 19th century, which is when the worldview known as scientific materialism was really formulated.
The great scientific materialists were Darwin, who told us where we came from, Marx, who gave us a utopian vision of where we were going, Freud, who a little bit later told us what to do about the human condition and about human guilt.
And between these great materialistic thinkers, all of whom claim to be basing their ideas on science, a kind of comprehensive worldview was formulated that answered all the great questions that Judeo-Christian religion had always addressed.
And this became kind of the default way of thinking through much of the 20th century among elite intellectuals.
And it had, I think, some tragic consequences because it was also the mode of thinking that underlay the great totalitarian regimes of the 20th century as well.
Both Marxism and National Socialism derived tremendous amount of support from basically materialistic assumptions, in some cases, even directly going back to Darwinian thinking.
So the title, Return of the God Hypothesis, invites a kind of story, obviously, because to say it's returning was to say that the God hypothesis as the framework for doing science was lost.
But that implies that previous to that, it was also the dominant way of thinking about the natural world, as indeed it was during the period that historians call the scientific revolution.
Yeah, I mean, the scientific revolution, you make this argument very clearly in the book, The Return of the God hypothesis, that it's really inspired in some way by Christian, specifically Christian thought.
Is that a fair way to put it?
Yeah, I think so.
And also Judeo-Christian thought, because during the period of the scientific revolution, and that's dated variously by historians of science between, say, 1500 and 1700 or 1750, some go back and see very strong influences that gave rise to modern science in the late medieval period as well, going back as far as 1300 or so in the great universities like University of Paris and Oxford.
But during this period of late medieval Catholic thought and the period of the Reformation, Christian thinkers were rediscovering the Hebrew Bible.
And there were a number of concepts that were implicit in the biblical worldview that were friendly to the rise of science.
The biggest one was the idea of intelligibility, the idea that nature could be understood by the human mind because it expressed a rationality that was the product of the divine mind.
And that that same divine creator who had built rationality and design and order into nature had also designed our minds in a way that allowed us to understand that order and design.
And so there's a principle of correspondence between the reason that was built into nature and the reason within us.
And it kind of goes beyond the Greek idea of reason, too, because there's a certain, I don't know, I don't want to call it randomness, but freedom in God's work.
I mean, he can do whatever he wants, so it's up to us to go out and look at it.
That was a huge concept.
The historians of science call that contingency, the idea that nature has an order that's built into it, but it's an order that's contingent upon the will of the Creator.
It could have been otherwise, just as there are many different ways to make a timepiece or a clock, all of which would require a kind of orderly arrangement of the gears and parts that make timekeeping possible.
There are many different ways that God could have ordered the universe.
And it's up to us not to deduce that order from some first principles or from some intuitions that we have about how nature ought to be, but rather it's important to go out and look and see how nature actually is.
The Greeks were inclined to a kind of armchair philosophizing about nature.
And during the period of the scientific revolution, because of this idea of the radical contingency of nature upon the will of God, this was a consequence of the recovery of the doctrine of creation.
Nature is orderly, but it's orderly because God chose to make it a certain way.
And Robert Boyle put it very succinctly.
He said, it's not the job of the natural philosopher, which was what people called scientists at the time, to deduce what God must have done.
But instead, it's the job of the scientists to go out and look and see what God actually did do.
So in addition to having a confidence that there's an intelligibility in nature, there was also the idea that nature needed to be studied in an empirical way.
We needed to investigate it by looking and seeing and measuring.
And this gave rise to an empirical form of science rather than deductive, as I mentioned, armchair philosophizing, which characterized a lot of Greek thought.
So let's talk about these three discoveries that kind of, I mean, it feels like it might have been natural after Newton to just assume that the clockwork universe was going to unfold that was just very easy to understand.
But in fact, things turned out to be a little weirder than that.
And one of the first things you talk about is the idea of a big bang, which really does make things complicated.
Can you describe, first of all, where did that idea come from and why does it make things complicated for scientific materials?
Well, there's a Princeton physicist from the 1960s, Robert Dickey, who said that an infinitely old universe would relieve us of the necessity of understanding the origin of matter at any finite time in the past.
And coming out of the late 19th century, physicists assumed that the universe was infinitely old, that it was essentially eternal and self-existent and self-organizing.
And so that made possible this great materialistic synthesis at the end of the 19th century.
We could explain the origin of everything all the way back to the elementary particles, and the elementary particles and energy had been here from eternity past.
And so matter and energy were essentially had godlike powers.
They were the eternal, self-existent thing that replaced the idea of an eternal, self-existent creator in Christianity and Judaism.
So the surprising, shocking discovery of the early 20th century was that, in fact, the material universe, the physical universe of matter, space, time, and energy, seems, as best we can tell, to have had a beginning.
And this was first, the first inklings of this came in the 1920s in observational astronomy, as figures like Edwin Hubble were able to establish that the light coming from distant galaxies was being stretched out as if the distant galaxies were receding away from us.
And Hubble's graduate student, Alan Sandage, and others were able to verify that this was the case in all quadrants of the night sky.
And the picture that emerged from this was of an expanding universe outward from a kind of starting point, a beginning.
And this was a kind of shocking discovery because everyone expected that the universe was eternal and self-existent.
Einstein didn't like it at first, though his own theory of gravity called general relativity implied the same thing.
He later did come around, though, when confronted with the evidence.
And then you have this idea, I think you call it the Goldilocks universe.
Is that your term for it?
That it's not just that it starts, but it starts with some really amazing coincidences wrapped into its very organization.
Yeah, physicists call this the fine-tuning, and some physicists refer to our universe now as a Goldilocks universe.
The basic parameters of the universe, the force that drives the expansion, the force of gravity, the force of electromagnetism, the underlying strong and weak nuclear forces, the masses of the elementary particles, the speed of light, many, many basic physical parameters fall within very narrow tolerances, such that if they were a little bit different, a little bit stronger, weaker, heavier, or lighter, the universe would not be conducive to life.
And the probabilities associated with these individual parameters, let alone the whole ensemble, are incredibly tiny.
And yet there's no underlying physical reason, theoretical or physical reason, as to why these parameters should have the precise values that they do.
And this is known to physicists now as the problem of the fine-tuning.
And many physicists, including Sir Fred Hoyle, who was initially a big skeptic of the Big Bang because of his atheism, came around to theism himself because of fine-tuning parameters that he discovered associated with the necessary abundance of carbon in the universe, which is necessary to life.
And he was later quoted as saying that a common sense interpretation of the evidence suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as chemistry and biology in order to make life possible.
So this fine-tuning suggested a fine-tuner.
There have been contrary hypotheses such as the multiverse that's being floated now and sometimes makes it into popular movies.
But one thing that's not commonly known about the multiverse, that's just the idea that there are gabilions of other universes out there such that somewhere some universe would get lucky and have those improbable parameters.
Problem is all the mechanisms that physicists have proposed to explain where these other universes have come from have themselves required prior unexplained fine-tuning, taking us right back to where we started.
So the multiverse actually doesn't explain the fine-tuning.
And fine-tuning in our experience, whether we're talking about Swiss watches or internal combustion engines or sections of digital code, is always an indicator of intelligence or the activity of mind.
It's funny, these guys who are constantly citing Occam's razor to say that things should be simple, make this argument of the multiverse, which is kind of like saying this just happens to be the card game in which I drew four aces seven times in a row.
I mean, it seems a very complex way of thinking about things as opposed to just saying, well, maybe there's a creator.
It's very convoluted and more convoluted than I can describe in a short interview because there are two different systems of theoretical physics that have to be invoked to explain the phenomena that a single postulate of a transcendent intelligence can explain.
You have to posit all these different universes as well as all these different theoretical entities like multi-dimensions of space, strings, inflaton fields, in order to explain the one thing that a single hypothesis of a transcendent creator explains very simply.
So it's not a parsimonious or simple explanation of the multiverse.
The other, the final of the three discoveries is this idea.
It's kind of interesting because one of the guys who's supposed to be the four horsemen of the apocalypse with the new atheists is Richard Dawkins, an excellent writer, obviously a brilliant man.
And it's all about evolution for him.
And evolution explains so much of where life comes from.
But the idea of a code, of a genetic code that creates intelligence, has caused some computer scientists to say that Darwinian, absolute Darwinian evolution can't be right.
Is that a fair way to do it?
Well, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I mean, and this is the huge discovery of late 20th century science and biology, and that is that at the foundation of life and even the simplest living cells, we find an exquisite realm of digital nanotechnology.
This started with Watson and Crick in 1953 when they elucidated the double helix structure of the DNA.
Five years later, Crick formulated something he called the sequence hypothesis, in which he suggested that the chemical subunits along the interior of the DNA molecule are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or the zeros and ones in a machine code or digital software that we would work with today.
Richard Dawkins himself has acknowledged that DNA functions like a machine code.
Bill Gates says it's like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created.
And that's a highly suggestive remark because we know from experience that software comes from programmers and that information, especially in a digital or alphabetic form, always comes from an intelligent source, whether we're talking about a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or information embedded in a radio signal or in a computer code.
Information From Mind00:13:01
Information is the product of mind.
And so the discovery of information at the foundation of life and even the simplest living cell, I've argued, is a powerful indicator of a designing intelligence playing a role in the origin and history of life.
We're talking about a remarkable book called The Return of the God hypothesis by Stephen C. Meyer, a really well-argued scientific book, not a theological book, a scientific book.
I have a question that I'd like to ask about quantum physics.
I'm glad since I have you here, I'll take advantage of the walk on the wild.
You touch on this in the later chapters of the book, but it's not one of your three discoveries.
But the idea in quantum, there is this idea in quantum physics that things are defined by our perception of them to some degree, so that we can't tell the location and velocity of something before it is observed.
And once it's observed, it maintains that position.
We can't tell whether light is a wave or a particle until it's observed.
and then once it's observed, it remains a wave or a particle, it seems.
That sort of implies to me that consciousness comes before matter, that the words in the Bible that the earth was without form or was void and without form, and God said, let there be light, could almost be literally true, that there has to be some consciousness before there can be some element there.
Yeah, many philosophers have actually, you know, I think it's a very profound insight.
My colleague George Gilder says at the heart of matter lies a mystery.
We don't perceive matter without perception, without a perceiver.
And one of the reasons I brought up the quantum mechanics in this book was that there is a model of the origin of the universe known as quantum cosmology, which attempts to appropriate the mathematics of quantum physics to explain how you could get a universe from literally nothing physical.
But the problem with the appropriation of that mathematics is that it presupposes a mathematical structure to the universe before there's any matter.
But mathematics is something, as one of the proponents of this idea has acknowledged, mathematics is conceptual.
It only exists in minds.
So the attempt to explain the origin of the universe apart from the mind of God using quantum mechanics has actually brought people back full circle to the need for a preexisting mind, the very insight that you've just shared.
I'm glad I wasn't just making that up because obviously I do not understand, I don't pretend to understand quantum mechanics, but it seems like that to me.
You know, you quote, you have to be aware of the motivation.
Oh, yeah, I was just interrupting a little bit, but there's a terrific quote from Hawking about this very problem.
He was one of the inventors of this quantum cosmology idea.
But in a moment of candor, he says, what puts fire in the equations that gives them a universe to describe?
Math by itself is causally inert.
It's only something that exists in a mind.
We use math to structure things, to design things.
But the whole attempt, it's really an ironic story because the evidence we have for the beginning of the universe seems to imply a cause that transcends matter, space, time, and energy.
Before the beginning of matter, there is no matter to do the causing.
And in virtue of that, scientists have looked for some alternative to the God hypothesis.
They've come up with this quantum cosmological model, but it too implies a prior, unexplained, mental reality that is not material in order to explain the origin of the universe.
So they come right back, I think, to the God hypothesis and the attempt to avoid it.
Yeah, this brings me back to this really remarkable quote from Thomas Nagel, who is a philosopher who wrote a book called Mind and Cosmos and made a big splash called Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.
Got attacked by all kinds of people.
But you quote Nagel.
Nagel does not believe in God, and he came up with an alternative hypothesis to that.
But he said, I want atheism to be true, and I'm made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.
It isn't just that I don't believe in God and naturally hope that I'm right.
It's that I hope there is no God.
I don't want there to be a God.
I don't want the universe to be like that.
I was really struck by that because I felt that way about some of the things that Stephen Hawking used to say, that he was committed to this idea that there wasn't a God, that he was as committed as some religious people who know nothing but just what they believe.
Why is that?
Why aren't scientists open to what seems to me such a simple explanation of the world as we actually know it scientifically?
There's so many different things to say about that, Andrew.
First of all, Nagel's candor is just so refreshing.
And he went out on a limb to write some very nice things about some of the books advancing the theory of intelligent design, though he couldn't quite go that far himself.
He was an atheist who was sort of experiencing cognitive dissonance, understanding that neo-Darwinism and materialistic ideas did not account for the really fundamental, one of the fundamental things about our existence, which is the reality of consciousness, the reality of minds.
We have them.
So we know mind exists.
And if you can't account for that, you have a worldview that is inadequate.
I think that part of the answer to the why can't science, or why are scientists so wedded, or many scientists so wedded to atheism, I think it's partly a kind of default way of thinking that we've inherited from the 19th century.
And there's a sort of groupthink phenomenon that is involved in any community of scholars or thinkers.
But also, I think there's a natural human resistance to the God hypothesis.
On the one hand, we would like God to exist because we want to think about the possibility of a life after this life, about significance.
We don't want to think of ourselves as cosmic accidents.
So we have a motivation to consider the God hypothesis.
But none of us also, I think, instinctively like the accountability that comes with thinking about a transcendent intelligence who made us to function best in a certain way and that therefore there's a moral law and we may not be on the right side of that all the time.
So there's a push-pull, I think, in every human being about whether we want or don't want God to exist.
What I tried to do in the book was to extricate ourselves from those motivational questions and issues and just look at what the evidence says.
And Dawkins is so helpful because he has this tremendous quote.
He's great at forming, framing issues, even though I disagree with his atheism.
But he says the universe has exactly the properties we should expect.
If at bottom, there's no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
In other words, materialism.
And what I tried to show in the book is that there have been three major discoveries about biological, physical, and cosmological origins that are precisely what you wouldn't expect if scientific materialism or scientific atheism were true.
The universe had a beginning.
It's been finely tuned from the beginning for life.
And since the beginning, there have been big infusions or bursts of digital information technology in our living, in our biosphere that suggests a master programmer has been at work in life.
None of these things were expected on the scientific atheist view of the late 19th century.
And that's the view that we've inherited that's dominated the 20th.
If you like science books, this is a terrific one, The Return of the God Hypothesis by Stephen C. Myers.
Steve, thanks so much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you, Andrew, and thanks for great questions.
All right.
Last show before my vacation.
So you want to gather all your problems around you.
Don't leave any in the other room.
Get your problems together.
Tell them you've loved having them with you, but now they're going to all be solved because it's time for the mailbag.
Oh my God, I'm white.
That happens to me every morning.
I hate it.
It's just every morning.
Oh, I look in the mirror.
All right, from Ben.
I'm having a really hard time with something Jesus says in the Bible and would greatly appreciate your thoughts.
Here are Jesus' words in Matthew 5.
You have heard that it was said, you shall not commit adultery.
But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart.
The letter writer then goes on to say, no sex before marriage is understandable, but now I can't even think about it.
What am I supposed to do?
Just stop looking at beautiful women.
I want to get married someday.
I'm 19, but I don't want my bride's body to be a surprise on the wedding day.
Please help me make sense of this verse.
A lot of people stumble on this verse, and there are a lot of different interpretations of it.
I'm going to give you mine.
And I'm not a theologian, but this is the way I read it, and it's the way I've always understood it, because it is a difficult thing.
You know that, you know, you only have to ask your spouse, if you have a spouse, whether it's the same for you to lust after someone in your heart or actually commit adultery.
And of course it's not.
And Jesus cannot be saying that you are bearing the same moral guilt for lusting after a woman in your heart as you are for committing adultery.
What he is telling you, what he is telling you, that obeying the law does not change your nature.
Obeying the moral law, doing the moral thing does not change your nature.
He is telling you that you are broken, that the system inside you is not who you are, that there is something more that you are and more that you can be that you should be moving toward.
Now, a lot of Christians, and I seriously disagree with this, a lot of Christians feel that that means you should be forcing yourself never to feel any lust or never to think about women or never to desire women or never to desire a woman who's not your wife and all this stuff.
And it's just to me, it's such a miserable life that I can't reconcile it with Jesus telling me that he wants me to live in joy.
That's a miserable life to not look at the beautiful women, to not desire women, to not express, to not feel your desire.
And no, I do not believe that Jesus is saying it is the same, it bears the same moral weight as adultery.
What he is telling you is that obeying the law does not change your nature and you have to understand that nature.
He wants you to move into a nature where perhaps you might feel that there is a difference between desire and lust, a difference between admiring and feeling the erotic charge of the opposite sex and looking at pornography, say, of entertaining, that kind of inhuman version of sex that lust can lead you to.
He is telling you that you are something other than your body, even though you are expressed by your body.
That's what I have always believed it meant.
And I do not believe that it means that you should wrap yourself.
I think that too much of ordinary Christian preaching on sex ends with you kind of miserably battling who you are, especially if you're a young person when essentially your job is to pair off with someone and create new life.
That's essentially what this part of your life is about.
So no, that's not what I think it means.
It does mean a deeper understanding of the completeness of the brokenness of humanity, a completeness of the idea that don't think because, don't think because you are not committing a sin, that you are free of sin.
That would be a ridiculous idea of yourself.
You want a realistic idea of yourself because that helps you to start to move into a realistic kind of change.
And that realistic kind of change is not going to be by restricting yourself.
It's going to be stepping into spaces that God makes for you as you go along.
From David, Dear Claven, master of the balding verse, wizard of wordery, and the dubbed sexy Gandalf.
I'm a young man nearing my mid-20s, and I have come seeking advice in matters of the heart for nearly a decade.
I've been in love with a young woman.
We'll call her Bea.
We dated for two years back when I was in high school, and she left me after I moved to college.
Nearly half the stayed away because she couldn't deal with a long-distance relationship.
She's a little bit younger.
He's basically been unable to get over her.
He says, over the past two years, my prayers have drifted towards, as my mind has been terming it, that these cursed feelings, which I cannot budge, be lifted from me that I may follow God's guidance in finding a lasting relationship.
I'm now at a point where I can honestly say that I harbor very little negative feelings toward what used to be.
However, the more the negativity has loosened its grip on me, the more my love for B has welled up in my heart again.
Like every passing day, my feelings for B get stronger.
I want to reach out to her and establish contact again, but at the same time, part of me thinks it's a terrible idea.
I'm wondering what you make of this.
God bless you from David.
You know, I don't believe this is about this woman at all, to be honest with you.
I don't think you're in love with her.
I don't think you're in love with what used to be.
I think that you have suffered an ego blow and you are not acting like a man and getting over it.
When she left you, when she broke up with you, it was a tremendous blow to your pride and to your ego, and you want to heal that pride by going back and getting it right this time.
Lack Of Tragedies00:03:59
That's not the way to manhood.
That's not the way to love.
That's not the way into the future.
The way into the future is to accept and feel the blow, is to feel, oh yeah, I'm in pain from this rejection, and to thereby walk through that pain into a new future where you can go to someone else.
You don't cling to a woman like this because you're like this who's already left you and who's been gone for 10 years because you love her.
You do it because you love something about yourself that she, that you feel she injured.
And I think that that's a mistake, and I think you're making that mistake, and I think you're going to have to let it go, which is tough.
From Matthias Heidrew, something I've noticed about the modern entertainment industry that is much different from the entertainment of old is the lack of tragedies.
Shakespeare wrote tragedies.
The story of King Arthur is a tragedy.
And the ancient Greeks also seem to have been fond of the genre.
The closest things we have to tragedies are Joker and Breaking Bad, which aren't really tragedies because the protagonist effectively wins in the end.
Actually, Breaking Bad is a tragedy.
What do you think this says about our society and how we view our own mortality?
I hope this question was sufficiently bigoted and hateful.
It's a really good question.
I got it a couple of weeks ago and I've been trying to get it in.
You know, the problem with tragedy is that it's inherently about great men.
That's what makes tragedy tragedy, is that it's a great man whose personal flaw brings about the tragic end.
That is not a Republican idea.
Republican small are.
In Death of a Salesman, which was a great American tragedy by Arthur Miller, the wife, it's just about a salesman, it's about a traveling salesman, and the wife says attention must be paid to such a man.
And the argument of the play of Arthur Miller is that in America, tragedy happens to the little guy.
The little guy's tragedy is just as important.
Talking about the great speculation again, the little guy's tragedy is just as important as Macbeth's.
And that's why, and it doesn't quite work dramatically for some reason.
And that's why our tragedies tend to be gangster movies because gangster, again, crime movies like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, gangster movies preserve the ancient structures of kingship.
I mean, gangster movies, if you took them out of the gangster milieu and made them kings and knights, it would make more sense.
You would see what it is.
But furthermore, beyond that, we don't even want to get, the elites despise the little guy so much that they can't even write the Arthur Miller-type tragedy.
They can't even write the Republican tragedy.
And because they believe that all broken dreams come from injustice, they can't even write a character who destroys himself.
Now, they used to be able to do this, and it's really the woke philosophy that is keeping them from seeing the world because woke is stupid.
Woke is not realistic.
Woke has nothing to do with reality.
And you cannot write art, good art.
You cannot make good art without some kind of acknowledgement of reality.
And so I think that that's why we are low on tragedies now.
I think we have had some great tragedies, but they do tend to be gangster movies, you know, and people like Arthur Miller really thinking about the form of the tragedy and how to apply that to a how to apply that to a Republican setting.
Really, I think that the Republican, when I say Republican, I mean like being in a republic, Republican art is going to tend to be more on the order of musicals and genre stories.
And I think there's a reason that America produces those so well, and jazz and things that arise out of the common man.
I think that there's a reason America does those so well and hasn't produced really any high art worth retaining.
I'm going to stop there.
So none of this really matters because it's the Clavinless week is upon you and you will probably be destroyed simply by your own despair.
The wailing, the gnashing of teeth, the darkness, the flames.
Oh my, I don't even like to think about it.
Reason America's Lack Of High Art00:01:23
However, if you survive, if you crawl your way through this apocalyptic disaster, to next Friday, I will be here with the Andrew Clavin Show and I will still be Andrew Clavin.
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