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Sept. 5, 2019 - The Matt Walsh Show
42:58
Ep. 325 - The Deranged And Evil Overpopulation Myth

Bernie Sanders endorses abortion as a means to solve overpopulation and save the planet. But why is it that those who want to exterminate surplus people never seem to see themselves as part of the surplus? Also, a feminist gives men rules for engaging in conversation. And an ESPN host claims that track and field isn't a sport. Date: 09-05-2019 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Okay, so CNN had, what was it, a seven hour, eight hour, seven hour, seven hour climate change town hall yesterday with all the different Democratic nominees.
I didn't watch a single minute of it because I don't hate myself personally.
The idea of watching seven hours of that Just is inhumane.
I mean, you could argue that CNN has violated all of our protections against cruel and unusual punishment just by putting that on the air.
And speaking of which, and again, I don't know, and this is a question for you if you watched it, because as I said, I didn't, but was, they had a live studio audience, right?
For the seven hour thing.
Was it the same audience?
For those seven hours?
Was it actually the same collection of people who sat there for seven hours watching as one Democratic nominee after another got up there and talked about climate change?
I just, I can't imagine that.
And if that's the case, where did they get these people?
Were they all on work release from the local prison?
Were they all, you know, sadomasochists?
Was this some sort of weird sexual fetish thing for them?
I just, I can't, I don't get it.
I can't possibly understand it.
Anyway, so I'm not gonna go through and break down everything that was said.
I think that'd be pointless, though there were a couple of notable moments, I think, looking at Based on the replay.
Here's maybe my favorite.
Of all the clips I've seen of it, this is probably my favorite moment.
This is from Cory Booker.
Watch this.
So, my plan says that we need to be at a zero-carbon electricity by 2030.
That's ten years from the time that I will win the presidency of the United States of America.
Poor old Cory.
Poor, poor Booker.
He says he's gonna be president, and the audience treats it as a punchline.
They actually laughed at him when he said he's gonna be president.
I swear, I'm really starting to feel sorry for Cory Booker, and this has been the weirdest thing for me throughout this campaign.
It's one of the reasons why I really resent this political season, because I've found myself actually, at various points, kind of feeling sorry for Cory Booker, Joe Biden, even Eric Swalwell at different points.
I've even felt sorry for Beto sometimes.
Now, I know they don't deserve my pity, but I just can't help it.
I'm a kind and sensitive guy.
What can I say?
Those are my most prominent personality traits, according to no one.
What I really want to discuss...
What I want to focus on is one moment involving Bernie Sanders.
But actually, before we get there, here's one thing with Andrew Yang that I wanted to talk about briefly.
Watch this.
So what's the answer?
Are we all going to have to drive electric cars?
We are all going to love driving our electric cars.
Will we have to drive electric cars?
Well, there will still be some legacy gas guzzlers on the road for quite some time, because this is not a country where you're going to take someone's clunker away from them.
But you are going to offer to buy the clunker back and help them upgrade.
So Andrew Yang wants the government to buy everybody's car.
And that's on top of the, what is it, a thousand bucks a month we're going to get from the government under Yang's plan.
So it appears that Yang believes that the government has literally an infinite supply of money.
And he also appears to believe that inflation is a myth.
It doesn't exist.
Because you can just give people money, buy their cars, it's not going to have any inflationary impact on the economy.
These are not serious proposals from a serious person.
I don't understand why people love this guy so much.
Speaking of unserious people, but in this case an unserious person with seriously evil ideas, here is a terrifying exchange involving Bernie Sanders at the town hall last night.
Human population growth has more than doubled in the past 50 years.
The planet cannot sustain this growth.
I realize this is a poisonous topic for politicians, but it's crucial to face.
Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact.
Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?
Well, Martin, the answer is yes.
And the answer has everything to do with the fact that women in the United States of America, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies and make reproductive decisions.
And the Mexico City Agreement, which denies American aid to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions or even get involved in birth control, to me is totally absurd.
So I think, especially in poor countries around the world, where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies.
And where they can have the opportunity through birth control to control the number of kids they have.
Something I very, very strongly support.
Let's just be clear about what happened there.
The question was whether Bernie would support abortion as a means to reduce the population and save the planet, and he said that he would.
Okay.
Now the word abortion was never used and so you're going to hear, in fact, I've already heard some people try to rationalize this by saying, well, no, he was talking about birth control, not abortion.
Yeah, he did.
He did mention birth control also, which he lumps in with abortion because abortion is a form of birth control in Bernie Sanders's mind.
But he was also referring explicitly to abortion.
That's what the whole bit about women can do what they want with their bodies.
That's abortion.
Okay, that always refers to abortion.
That's not birth control.
Because there isn't anybody out there who, despite what you hear from the left, there isn't anyone out there who's trying to make birth control illegal or whatever.
That's not an argument that anyone's having.
So, there's no one saying that women shouldn't have the right to use birth control.
There are people saying that women shouldn't have the right to kill their babies.
And so, when someone says, women have the right to, they're talking about abortion.
And so that's what he wants to do.
Um, he, he, this, this is Bernie Sanders supporting eugenics.
Explicitly.
Plain and simple.
Now, this of course is not surprising.
It's not new.
Eugenics has been around for over a hundred years.
As it happens, Bernie Sanders has also been around for over a hundred years.
Probably not a coincidence.
And American leftists have supported eugenics in some form or another using direct or indirect rhetoric for that entire time.
In fact, the whole idea of abortion, support for abortion, rests inherently...
on a eugenics mentality.
It rests on the commodification of human life.
That is, seeing human life, judging the worth of human life according to its usefulness to society.
Saying that human life has subjective worth, determined by other people, determined by society as a whole, based on how useful or unuseful That human life is to society.
All pro-abortion people see human life this way.
They all do.
They must, in order to be pro-abortion.
So it's not a big leap.
It's not a leap at all, actually, to go from that to, let's kill babies because there are too many people on earth.
So we shouldn't be shocked by this.
And by the way, every pro-abortion person agrees with what Bernie Sanders just said.
Even if they won't admit it out loud, they all agree.
They all do.
Of course, meanwhile, on this overpopulation idea, it should be stipulated that overpopulation is mythological.
Okay?
It's not real.
The world is not running out of room or running out of resources.
That is a myth.
It is a fable, told especially by people who want to justify the genocide of the unborn.
We could, just to give you an idea, I mean, the Earth is a very, very big place.
On an astronomical level, it's not a very big planet.
There are a lot of bigger planets out there.
But it is still, as far as we're concerned, from our perspective, it is a very, very big planet.
You could take... We've got, what, 7 billion people on Earth now?
You could take them all and fit them all in the state of Texas.
Every single person on Earth could fit into the state of Texas with their own townhouses and their own nice little postage stamp yards with a picket fence and everything.
You could.
Now, there wouldn't be a lot of room, and a factoid like that can be a little deceptive in that it is also true that much of the surface area of the Earth cannot be inhabited, is not habitable.
Habitable.
Habitable.
There we go.
It's not habitable.
Antarctica, for instance.
But the fact remains that There is a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of habitable area on Earth where nobody currently lives.
And it will be that way indefinitely.
Okay, so we've got a lot of space.
And we also have enough food for everybody.
There's enough resources, there's enough food, there's enough space.
Anyone telling you otherwise is simply lying or they're mistaken.
And now, we do have a problem, and I hesitate to use this word because of the implications of it, but we do have a problem with the distribution of the food and the space.
In that, there are some people on Earth who have a lot of food and waste it, and a lot of space and waste it, and then there are some people who have not enough food and they starve and they don't have enough space.
Okay, we know that.
And when I say distribution, I'm not saying that we need some big government entity to redistribute it.
That's not what I'm saying.
But there is a disproportionate... It is disproportionate in the way this stuff is allotted.
That's true.
But that's not because there are too many people.
And the way that I know that...
Is that, you know, back when there were a billion people on Earth, or a hundred million, or ten million, there were still a lot of people, probably proportionally more than there are today, who were starving, and were living in filth, and were living in crowded environments.
And that's back when there were, you know, there was a quarter of the number of people on Earth, or less than that.
So it's not a matter of there being too many people.
That's not the problem.
The solution, then, is to talk about how to address the issues of poverty and all of that.
And that's a good thing to talk about.
We can have that discussion.
Bernie's solution is to just kill them.
Is to say, well, there are people on Earth who are poor, poor families, and so let's just start killing them off.
Killing their children, anyway.
And that leads me to something else.
This is kind of interesting.
Have you noticed, I'm sure you have, that the people who advocate reducing the population to save the planet always want to start by killing babies?
Have you noticed that?
Which, that does not really seem like the most logical place to start.
But poor babies especially, we should mention.
So they say there's too many people on Earth.
We gotta start getting rid of people.
Not just let's prevent more people from being conceived, but we have to actually get rid of some people who have already been conceived.
And so the people who say that say, well, let's begin with the babies, especially poor babies.
They never seem to see themselves as members of the surplus population in need of extermination.
What a strange coincidence that is.
I mean, if you really think the world is overpopulated and the solution is to kill people, you could contribute to the solution in a more direct way.
Now, I'm not advocating suicide.
I'm not advocating that people who believe in overpopulation go out and commit mass suicide.
I don't think they should.
I'm just saying that maybe stop trying to throw babies into the fire if you're not willing to go there yourself.
If there is a surplus population, if that's really a thing, where there are too many people, well, how do you know you're not part of the surplus?
And it would seem like, again, if that's true, the most direct solution would be for you to at least make sure that you're not part of the problem.
And also, the word consent is supposed to be very meaningful these days.
Well, the babies don't consent.
You might say that there's overpopulation, we don't have room for them.
The babies don't consent to being killed.
You can consent to it.
So it just seems to me that that would be the most direct solution if you really think that there's a problem of that sort.
Think about Bernie Sanders for a second here, specifically.
Now, it's morally atrocious for anyone to get up there and advocate for killing babies in order to curb population growth.
So for anyone to do that is disgusting and evil and everything.
But it's all the more grotesque and cowardly and just egregious to have an elderly man pushing 80 years old getting up there and saying that.
Bernie Sanders, he doesn't have that much time left.
Most people, the average life expectancy for a man I think is 84 or it might be less than that.
Most people don't make it to 90.
Few people do.
You're almost definitely not making it to 100.
The most likely scenario is that Bernie Sanders is dead anyway within 10 years because of his age.
That's what the statistics tell us.
And as he continues to age, he's going to become more and more of a burden on people around.
He's going to become less and less able to contribute to society and more and more of a burden to society and to his family and so on.
That's the trajectory that we all follow if we live long enough.
So again, if you really have this utilitarian materialistic view of human life, And if you really think that, well, look, you know, babies, we don't need them, there's too many people.
If that's really how you see it, and if that's really how we're judging human life, and so now we have to start getting rid of surplus people, it would almost seem like it would make more sense to begin with people on the other end of the life spectrum.
Because, yeah, with babies, it's true that when they're born for a time, they're going to not be able to contribute.
They're going to be, for lack of a better term, a burden on their parents.
But that's not going to last forever.
In theory, eventually, they're going to go on and be on their own and contribute to society.
They've got all the potential in the world.
They could go on and cure cancer, or they could do anything, right?
But if you're 80 years old, then whatever potential you had has probably mostly been realized or not realized, and you're going more into the phase of being a burden, and you're never going to come out of that phase.
So it just seems to me, if this is what we're doing, if we're getting rid of surplus people, it seems like we should start with adults, and not just older adults.
Even someone like me, I'm 33 years old.
If there was any chance that I was going to cure cancer, I've gone in a different direction.
I've done this instead.
Maybe I could have cured cancer, but I decided to do this instead.
So I'm probably never going to cure cancer.
I'm probably never going to contribute that much to society.
I mean, this is probably the most I'm going to do.
And so, hey, maybe I get tossed on the scrap heap too.
I don't know.
It's just, to begin with babies makes no sense to me.
Even from the, as I said, utilitarian, materialistic viewpoint of liberals.
Or maybe, you know, maybe this whole line of thinking is just horrifically deranged and wrong.
And maybe we shouldn't be looking at human life this way, no matter how old or young a person happens to be.
Okay, maybe your value and worth is not derived based on how useful you are to other people or what society can do with you or how many people there already are on Earth or whatever else.
And maybe even if you are a, you know, a quote-unquote burden to other people, if you have to be taken care of, maybe that doesn't detract from your worth at all in any sense.
Maybe that's the way to look at it.
That's my vote.
I vote for that.
I think that's how we should look at it.
But if we are going to look at it that way, we can't just apply it to ourselves.
I can't just say, well, no, me, I mean, yeah, everybody else, maybe.
They can be surplus population.
We don't need them.
But me, no, I'm infinitely valuable and worthy.
That doesn't make any sense.
If nobody else is, then I'm not either.
But if I am, then everybody is.
And so I think as a society, we just have to decide what kind of society we want to be.
Because we've been trying to play both sides of the fence for a while now.
Where on one hand, what do we tell kids?
We say, oh, you're special.
You're wonderful.
It doesn't matter how anyone thinks of you or what they say about you.
You're a wonderful, special, infinitely valuable person.
On one hand, we say that.
On the other hand, Those very same kids, when they were in the womb, we said, they're expendable.
We can exterminate them, kill them, slaughter them, dismember them, throw them in the dumpster.
Can't have it both ways.
Which way is it going to be?
I vote for, let's treat all life as valuable and infinitely worthy.
But if you want to go the other way and say, fine, let's just live in a utilitarian, materialistic eugenics, uh, you know, driven hellscape.
If that's what you want to do.
Okay.
But I think what you're going to find is that it's not just going to be the babies who end up on the scrap heap.
All right.
Um, This was kind of funny.
I wanted to mention this.
I think every week we have to do one of these crazy feminists on Twitter updates, and so a crazy feminist on Twitter sent out a viral tweet It's getting a lot of reaction.
This woman's name is Charlotte, and here's what she said.
She says, and by the way, I'm 98% sure this is not satire or parody.
I'm 98% sure she's being sincere, although she has blocked me now, so I can't really investigate too much.
But here's what she said.
Before you tell a joke, slash give advice, slash pay a compliment, I need you to ask yourself three questions.
One, was I invited to speak?
Two, will what I'm about to say be welcome?
Three, am I speaking to enrich this person or am I speaking just to make myself seen?
Was I invited?
This is what she meant.
This is what Charlotte, a woman named Charlotte, a feminist on Twitter, this is what she needs us to do.
She needs it.
Okay?
We have been given our instructions.
And so anytime you want to speak to anyone, you have to first wait for an invitation.
I don't know, can we ask for the invitation?
Are we allowed to say, may I speak?
But then if to say that, we are already speaking without an invitation, so I guess we have to just stand there silently until a woman turns to us and says, you are now invited to speak.
You have 25 seconds, go.
Of course, it's useless to say that Charlotte is not following her own advice here because she was not invited to tweet this.
It was not welcome, and it certainly didn't enrich anyone or anything except for her own ego, but that doesn't matter because she's a woman, so it doesn't apply to her.
This just, again, shows, and we should remember that as much as we might like to believe otherwise, Charlotte is not alone in this attitude.
There are a lot of College-aged feminist women who, this is how they see the world and this is how they see men.
This is how they're told to see men.
But I think what you find here, it never ceases to amaze me how feminists just don't, it's not even that they don't understand men, which of course they don't, but they don't understand human communication. They don't understand humans. They're like
robots or something. This is not how human communication works. It reminds me of the
feminist affirmative consent laws that you find on a lot of college campuses these days to
alleviate the supposed rape epidemic on college campuses where affirmative consent
means that if a young man is in a romantic embrace with a young woman, he must be given
affirmative consent throughout the sexual act, which means as it progresses, he must ask the
woman to be his wife.
The woman, can we continue?
And she has to say, yes we can.
And there has to be affirmative, throughout the entire thing, there has to be this continued affirmative verbal consent.
Which obviously is crazy, and that's just not how human beings work.
That's not how it works.
Humans aren't like that.
That's how computers operate.
And it seems like feminists don't understand the difference between human beings and computers, which is...
A fascinating fact.
All right, here's something that may not be of any great interest to most of you, but I'm going to babble about it anyway.
Max Kellerman, a talking head on ESPN, went off on a rant yesterday on his show on ESPN about how track and field isn't really a sport.
And it's inferior to things like basketball and football.
I'm not sure how this came up or why they were talking about it, but they were.
I don't have the clip to play you, but that's the summary.
Track isn't a real sport.
It's not as pure as football and basketball.
And look, I'm a football fan and a basketball fan, at least during the playoffs, but this is absolutely ridiculous.
And maybe I am biased as someone who, I ran track in high school.
I also enjoy running as a hobby.
At least I did before my Achilles tear.
And ever since then, I've become sort of a fat, lazy slug, unfortunately.
But still, I can say that track and field is not only a sport, but I think it's actually the purest and rawest sport in existence.
There's no luck.
There's no chance.
There's nothing to hide behind.
You think about it, even a great quarterback can get bailed out by a wide receiver making a fantastic catch.
And a quarterback, the wins, if we talk about the win-loss record of a quarterback, or the win-loss record of a basketball player, or a pitcher, their win-loss record is going to be determined not just by them, but by their teammates.
And it's going to have at least as much to do with their team as it does with them personally, if not probably more with their team than them personally.
None of that applies to track.
I mean, unless we're talking about relay races, but if we're talking about just a straight 100-meter dash, or my event in high school was a 1,600-meter mile, it's just you, your speed, your strength, your stamina, your mental and physical endurance, and that's it.
That's all you've got.
Can you get to the finish line before the next guy?
Before everybody else on the track?
If you do, you win.
If you don't, you lose.
And that's it.
There aren't any lucky bounces.
There aren't any lucky catches.
There aren't any lucky errors made by someone in the outfield so you can get on second base.
It's just, do you have the speed and strength to beat everybody else?
That's it.
If you do, you win.
If you don't, you lose.
And that's a sport.
That's about as sporty as sports get.
So here's how it breaks down.
Because this whole conversation about what's a sport, what isn't a sport, gets people very heated and emotional.
Myself as well.
So let me try to explain this.
You have three categories that are kind of on a continuum, as I see it.
You have sports, games, and then physical arts, let's say.
A sport can be defined as a physical competition requiring physical effort and skill between contenders that can be won according to an objective set of rules.
Okay, that's a sport.
A game is a competition relying more on strategy or chance than physical ability, which can be won according to an objective set of rules.
And then a physical art is a performative display requiring strength and agility and athleticism and grace, which is judged subjectively according to largely aesthetic measures.
That's how all those things are defined.
I sort of made all those definitions up, but I think they're good.
So according to that, Football is both a game and a sport, and a little bit of an art, but it's none of those things purely or completely.
It's sort of, to a certain degree, all of them, but not completely any of them.
Same for basketball, hockey, baseball.
Track, on the other hand, is to no extent a game or an art.
It is just a sport.
That's all it is.
100% sport.
Pure sport.
All physical, all strength, all objective.
There's no judging.
You might have a judge on the track to tell you who crossed the finish line first or did you step out.
But that's not subjective.
You either did or you didn't.
Something like gymnastics is not a sport at all.
It is pure art because it is all subjective.
In most gymnastic events, there is no way to win except by a judge subjectively assessing how you looked while you were doing it.
That's an art.
That's not a sport.
And then something like poker is just, or, or, you know, that's just pure game.
That's not bowling.
Okay.
That's just a game.
It's not a sport.
It's not an art.
So that's how it all breaks down.
And then soccer is none of those things.
Soccer is just an activity for women and children to play when they're bored, I guess.
So I think we can just put that all to rest.
There's a continuum and that's how all that stuff... And by the way, when I say gymnastics isn't a sport, that's not an insult.
To be an art is a wonderful thing.
It's just it's not the same kind of thing.
All right, let's...
We'll go to emails.
MattWalshShow at gmail.com.
Actually, I also wanted to mention, I finally watched the live action Aladdin movie with my kids yesterday at their insistence.
I didn't want to see it because, as I've shared before, I think the whole remake, the live action remakes of cartoons is a stupid cash grab and I don't want to support it.
But they convinced me to watch it with them.
And honestly, I'll never forgive them for doing that to me because it was much worse.
Than even I expected.
It was really, really bad.
I mean, amazingly bad.
It was so bad that I could almost recommend it because it was so bad.
Just so you could gawk at the poor quality of it.
It was amazing.
It was like a high school stage production of Aladdin, but with worse acting.
And here's what I'm trying to figure out.
This is a thing that's been perplexing me ever since I watched it with my kids.
Okay, so if you're Disney, you have billions of dollars at your disposal.
You have hundreds of millions that you can spend on this movie.
How do you end up with bad actors?
That's what got me the whole time I'm watching.
The acting is so bad.
How could you end up with bad actors?
I mean, I knew that it would lack the charm and originality of the first one.
I knew that.
And it did, severely so.
But I wasn't expecting the acting to be so bad.
How does that happen?
You can pay whoever you want.
You can get whoever you want in Hollywood, probably, to be in this thing.
And you end up with bad actors.
But then I realized, of course, I know what happened.
That these days, especially with companies like Disney, the first priority is to make sure that your actors will pass the identity politics test.
Okay, they have to be sufficiently ethnically pure, according to whatever character they're playing, and that really is the only priority now.
So Disney was making a live-action Aladdin remake, something that's set in the Middle East, and so it's just A landmine for them, if you'll pardon that metaphor.
But it's a landmine because they know that, okay, now these are Arabic characters, and so they've really got to make sure that all of the actors they find are sufficiently Arabic.
And I think that they decided that's the only thing that matters.
It doesn't actually matter if they can really act.
All that matters is, do they pass the test politically?
And they did.
They passed that test.
Unfortunately, they couldn't act.
And so that's what's happening.
It's gotten so ridiculous now that the latest outrage that I just saw this morning is there's a movie coming out starring Dakota Fanning playing a white, at least this is how it's being phrased.
She's playing a white Ethiopian Muslim.
And this is a movie about a real person Who was a white British woman who moved to Ethiopia, became a naturalized citizen, and was also a Muslim.
I don't know if she converted or if she was originally.
People are outraged by that.
I don't even understand it now.
Somehow that's offensive for Dakota Fanning.
Dakota Fanning is a white woman playing an actual white woman.
Are we now at the point where you're just not allowed to have white actors in a movie at all, even if they're playing white characters?
I think that's where this is headed, that you can't have It's, if it's a white, white actors aren't allowed to play anybody anymore.
It doesn't matter who they are.
It doesn't matter who they're playing.
They can't play anybody.
I think that's where we're headed.
And it's obviously absurd.
All right.
Matt Walsh show at gmail.com.
Matt Walsh show at gmail.com is email address.
This is from Mike says, dear Matt Walsh.
Thank you for giving us your input regarding the Harry Potter controversy in your latest podcast.
On a similar note, I am a devout Christian and wanted to know your opinion about Renaissance festivals.
Are these events just an excuse for people to gather and create fantasies of witchcraft, etc.?
So overall, do you approve of these events or not?
Thank you for your wisdom into this pressing matter.
Is this a thing?
Are there people who... Are there Christians who say that Christians shouldn't go to Renaissance festivals because there's witchcraft?
I went to one Renaissance festival a long time ago.
The only thing I remember is the big delicious turkey leg.
And that's all that I remember.
And honestly, I don't remember any witchcraft, but honestly, if there was a little bit of witchcraft, I think it was probably worth it for the turkey leg, which was really good.
This is from J Mac, says, Afternoon Mighty Matt, master driver and owner of the Superfly Button Ups.
I enjoyed your take on faith and reason the other day.
You did a good job using reason to explain reason's purpose towards faith, although this did have the effect of leaving faith by the wayside.
To me, it came across as your reason trying to justify its own importance as reason instead of an augment to faith.
I wanted to attempt to explain that iconopy of faith and reason as best I could, despite faith being an ineffable entity that recoils all words that try and pin it down.
Reason is definitely a handy tool used to familiarize ourselves to the world we live in.
A cartographer can reason a triangle on a map to become the symbol of a mountain.
However, a triangle does not encompass all that is the mountain.
Reason is our limited and flawed perspective, struggling best they can to iron out the mysteries of the world.
We name the organs on the body, though their names would not dictate or explain the organs' function.
There is much we don't know about God—God's organs, perceptions, plans.
We do, however, have the ability to feel his divinity and hear his voice.
Faith is that feeling of oneness with God.
It doesn't require you to know him, but it opens the channel of knowing.
To use reason is to use the language of humans.
Faith would be the language of God.
The feeling in your bones that there is forgiveness and evil will one day be exhumed from the corpse of man's relation to sin.
You don't need language or understanding to tap into serendipity.
If anything, language becomes a barrier to divinity as we try and express God through language instead of an all-encompassing form.
Reason is the prediction of events based on seen experience and knowledge.
Faith is the knowing that there will always be a silver lining.
Sorry if this doesn't make much sense.
I try my best with limited tools.
I have been provided.
Well, J. Mack, I think that was beautifully put, actually.
I would maybe counter, not even counter, because I don't disagree fundamentally with most of what you said there, but I would add that to me, reason is, the simplest definition for reason, I think, is that it is our ability to contemplate and understand.
I think that's what reason is.
And I think that's why we are reasonable creatures and squirrels and worms and fish are not.
They can think.
They can probably feel.
But they don't contemplate abstract concepts.
They don't come to an understanding.
They don't sit down and say to themselves, gee, let me try to really understand this thing over here.
So in this sense, if this is what reason is, and I think that's the case, then reason is inextricably tied to faith, so much so that I don't think you can really put them in different categories.
So when you say that I was advocating reason and putting faith to the wayside, I don't think that's possible.
I think that they're sort of dimensions of the same thing.
Because to say something like, I think God exists, or I think God created the universe.
Now, I guess you would say that's a statement of faith.
And it is.
But it's also a statement of reason.
Just the same.
Because in order to make that statement, you first have to know what it means for a thing to be created.
You have to know what the universe is, and that one exists.
And you have to have some basic idea of what God is.
You know, you say God, you have to... Now, none of us can know God completely, but when we say we believe in God, we have to have some idea of what we believe in.
That word has to mean something to us.
And so I think all of that is reason, right?
Knowing what the universe is, knowing what it is to create, having some idea of God, understanding that everything that exists must originate somewhere.
I mean, all of these things.
Are related to reason in addition to faith.
And so I, as I said, I just, I don't think you can separate them.
Um, this is from Corbin says, Hey Matt, I'm a high school student and I have a very good, smart friend.
However, she doesn't believe in the moon landing.
I've tried to convince her, but beliefs are very firm.
She believes that since no one can prove it without citing NASA, it is therefore a coverup.
I've talked to teachers about it and they have agreed with her.
They've agreed with her.
Is there a point to continuing this argument?
And if so, how should I argue this?
Well, Corbyn, first of all, the fact that your teachers agreed with her is horrifying, though also not surprising.
But there's an old saying that says you can't reason somebody out of a position that they weren't reasoned into to begin with, meaning your friend did not adopt this belief Because she seriously studied the issue objectively, considered the evidence, and arrived at this conclusion.
She might claim that's what she did, but I guarantee you that's not what she did.
Because nobody who does that could possibly come to the conclusion that the moon landing was a hoax.
You can only come to that conclusion if the, quote, research you've done has consisted of Googling specifically these conspiracy sites and looking only at the information they provide you and not looking at any other sources.
That's the only way you can maintain a belief that is so delusional and divorced from reality.
And so we know that's all she's done.
Which means, again, speaking of reason, she was not reasoned into that belief.
It is an unreasonable belief that she adopted because she wanted to believe it.
Now, why does she want to believe that the moon landing never happened?
You know, I don't know.
That's a whole separate conversation.
And we've talked about that before.
Why do people want to believe these crazy conspiracy theories?
I think there are a whole host of reasons.
And probably the most simple is just that they find it exciting.
Where it's kind of cinematic, they sort of want to live in a world where there are these shadowy, conspiratorial forces that are doing stuff like that.
It makes them feel like they're in a James Bond movie or something.
Which, of course, even if it's true that the world would be more exciting that way, that doesn't mean, that's not evidence that it actually happened.
But also, I think it's way more exciting.
Way more exciting.
To contemplate the fact that we actually did land on the moon.
But anyway, that's the psychology of it.
That's a different question.
But this is an irrational belief.
That's the point.
And we all have some irrational beliefs.
It's part of being a human being, unfortunately.
This is one of hers.
And all you can do, I think, is just give her the facts.
Which maybe you've already done.
Make sure she's been exposed to those facts.
So that she at least has them in her orbit.
Pardon the pun.
And then wait for her to grow out of this on her own.
And she probably will eventually.
But that's the thing.
When somebody has an irrational, unreasonable belief, they have to get to a point where they're willing to sort of step out of that and actually look objectively at
the situation.
And there's nothing you can do to force them to do that.
And as long as they're unwilling to step out of those beliefs for a moment at least
and look objectively at the evidence...
As long as they're unwilling to do that, there's nothing you can say in the moment that's going to convince them.
But you can plant the seed, put the information there, and eventually, when she grows up a little bit, maybe she'll venture out into the world of reality and say to herself, oh, you know what?
Corbyn was actually right about that.
Although, unfortunately, she'll probably never come back to you and say, you know what?
You were right.
Because that's also, unfortunately, part of human nature.
But thanks for the email.
Thanks for the question.
Thanks, everybody, for watching.
Godspeed.
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