Ben Garrett and hosts Joel and Wes explore Traducianism, arguing that souls inherit "Blood Memory" alongside genetics, creating distinct spiritual ethnos through ancestral archetypes rather than receiving new souls ex nihilo. This framework explains Original Sin's transmission without implicating God in creating sinful natures while accommodating the Incarnation. The discussion distinguishes between ultimate grace-derived goodness and persistent civic virtues in pagan societies like Rome, suggesting myths like the Iliad shape national identity. Ultimately, they propose that redeeming souls can visibly beautify places, linking biological inheritance to language acquisition and advocating for reclaiming a Western Christian nation through recovered mythology. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Passing Down Spiritual Heritage00:02:38
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Time memorializes place.
Embodied memory and places generate a connection between the past.
Present and future.
Our activity with loved ones elevates sites to places of intergenerational love such that through them we experience these places as deposits of familial affection.
A trace of love remains.
Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism, from the chapter Loving Your Nation.
In recovering honor for our fathers and a sense of national identity, one of the most important things. Will be to forge a connection to our past.
We often speak of this connection in terms of knowledge, values, and history.
It is something objective and measurable.
But what if we are bound together to our family, our home, and our country in even deeper ways?
Traducianism is a historic Christian belief that has been a minority view throughout church history, although it was held by some notable church fathers like Tertullian and reformers like. Luther.
Traducianism is the belief that the souls of children are inherited from their parents, like two candles coming together to light another candle.
In this view, parents give not just their genetics to their children, but pass on a unique personal spiritual component as well.
In this way, memories, affections, vitality, and other spiritual qualities are passed down through the families and time, shaping each family and nation into a distinct.
Ethnos, with its own unique spiritual properties, even myths and archetypes that we know so well in the West, live on in our deepest memories, their details lost to time, but their form continually represented in our stories, ideas, and even dreams.
Traducianism is a compelling framework that offers a biblical and enchanted view of the world where families, homes, and history.
The Traducian Framework Explained00:15:51
Are not merely material matter, but have a spiritual connection to everything that came before and are an essential part of our hope for the future.
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Coming on now to discuss Traducianism is Ben Garrett from Haunted Cosmos.
Tune in now for a discussion that you won't want to miss.
All right, all right, all right.
GA, title of this episode, It's a Blood Memory.
There it is.
All right, Wes, you kick it off, and then let's go ahead and get Ben.
All right, so we got Ben Garrett with us.
We're going to be talking about an idea.
I've known about it for a while.
I remember reading it, it was actually Gehardis Voss, his Reformed Dogmatics, and he contrasted this view with creationism.
And it was funny at the time because Voss doesn't actually believe in traditionism, so he argued for the creationist view.
But he had this image, and he said, one of the ways that traditionism is described is that.
It's like a flame being carried on.
That in a sense, there is a new flame, but it's also a continuance, a likeness to the old.
So you think about generation, you think about the continuance of it.
And so I remember that image always stuck with me.
And it's been in the last six months that the two smartest people I know, Ben Garrett and C.J. Engel, have both said, Yeah, we're kind of traditionists.
And I said, Well, that's enough proof for me.
So I really like this view.
I think it explains a lot and doesn't just have theological import, theological importance, but I think practically, I talked about legacy.
We talked about history.
And even here at America and here in the West, what does it mean to be American?
Well, of course, there's history and all the different things that we could point to objectively that we could put in a textbook.
But I think being American is something deeper than that.
And even more so, not just to make it about race as if it's just only about genetic lineage, but a spiritual lineage as well.
So, to talk about all of this, to give us the details, we have Ben Garrett.
Ben, thanks for coming on the show.
Hey, thanks for having me.
And thank you for that high praise.
CJ is very smart.
And so are all of you.
So, yeah.
Yeah, I feel like I'm in good company.
Awesome.
Well, Ben, I'll hand it over to you.
I've done a lot of the reading on this, but I would love for you to explain in your own words, traducianism, how it contrasts with creationism, and even historically how kind of the thought along that has fallen.
I know Augustine was back and forth on it, but one of the big advantages of it is as it relates to original sin.
So I'll kick it to you.
Yeah, thanks.
So, traducianism is definitely the minority report among the reformers, the reformed Orthodox, and then even up into the American Presbyterians, as far as I can tell.
I think among the medieval Christians as well and the scholastics, it was a minority position, sort of a split bag.
But that doesn't mean it's unorthodox.
It is actually a perfectly orthodox position that you can defend from Scripture.
Now, creationism, maybe I'll start there.
Creationism is this view of the generation of the soul that says that at the time of conception or sometime soon thereafter, depending on who you read, God creates a unique soul for that created person.
Ex nihilo, in time, it's brand new.
It comes from nothing, God makes it.
Now, the Traducian point of view is a little bit different.
It says, no, we actually don't want to get into that because it presents some problems that we can talk about in a little bit.
And instead, what we should see is that man, as a species, as a kind, is an embodied soul.
And so, in order to reproduce after its own kind, it has to be able to reproduce not only the body, but the soul that it has as well.
Otherwise, it stops being an embodied soul as a species.
And so, Traducianism says, That just like how you said, just like how a baby gets its genetic code from its parents, it also gets the soul as an inheritance from its parents at the time of conception.
Got it.
That's kind of the elevator pitch.
Absolutely.
I remember this would have been a couple of years ago, but Joe Biden, for example, like, well, where practically does this matter?
I remember Joe Biden talking about abortion and he talked about how Thomas Aquinas viewed ensoulment, that is, the impartation of the soul to the body.
He viewed ensoulment as something that happened 45 days after conception.
So, Joe Biden literally made the case well, hey, I'm a Catholic and one of our greatest Catholic scholars.
He says, well, the soul isn't there necessarily early on.
And so, we're not actually ending a life.
And so, practically speaking, I mean, that's a great argument against abortion that there's not even a millisecond from that moment of conception, the egg and the sperm meeting and forming that fertilized egg.
There's not even a moment it's lacking the soul.
That we're not talking about a five minute wait time or 45 days, as Aquinas maybe argued, till God puts the soul in there and it's that full human being.
I want to turn it to original sin, Ben.
How would this also affect?
Because this has been difficult for the creationists.
How do you account for original sin when what God creates ex nihilo would theoretically be a soul that's untainted by sin?
It comes from Him, it's generated from Him.
I mean, couldn't that soul theoretically be made unfallen and without sin?
Yeah.
Why is God making sinful souls?
Right.
Yeah.
I think that's actually the bigger thing it's really hard to reason your way to a position where God would create ex nihilo.
Totally original, something that is already corrupted and tainted and depraved.
And so, from my understanding, I think the creationists would answer they wouldn't try to avoid original sin, but they would try to say something like, well, that is something that we don't understand.
That's a portion of the soul's generation that we actually aren't privy to, but they're unwilling to accept the inheritance and the propagation of some unseen life force that you inherit from parents instead of from God.
And so, I, but the thing that Traducian does really well is it provides for original sin almost like from Jump Street as just a built in fact.
Yeah, where it says, well, if you're, you know, you only start sinning sometime after you're born or after you're conceived.
In fact, there's a whole period of nine months where a human being exists.
And as far as we can tell, they're not sinning, they have no opportunities to sin or the faculties thereof.
And yet they still have a sinful nature.
Everyone would confess that.
And so, how do we account for that?
Well, The Traducian has a very simple answer.
It's because the child inherited a soul, and that soul was already tainted with sin and a sinful nature from its parents.
And so that's how we're able to maintain the doctrine from the moment of conception and of birth, especially of someone who is born in sin and who is therefore guilty of Adam's fall, but who has not yet sinned himself.
Yep.
It also makes sense of the incarnation in the case of Christ, that because he didn't have an earthly biological father, but rather was conceived by the Holy Spirit, that This sin nature, not only in terms of his body, but even his soul, was not passed down.
And that the Holy Spirit, even, was not only able to provide this soul that's untainted, but also purifying even his body to where Christ was conceived without a sin nature.
Yeah.
Well, what does the view do, Ben, with the idea of federal headship, which we are sinners in Adam, versus the idea that the soul is.
Is the combination of the soul of the mother and the father?
I mean, I hear what you're saying, Joel, but also I could see that being an argument actually that if Mary was a sinner, which she was, part of her sin would have been passed through in some way.
So, what Ben, have you looked into or are you familiar with what the tradition view does with that issue?
Pardon me?
Unless it's through the father.
Well, that would have to be the view, probably.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think that there's two views.
One of them is that it is through the father.
The other one, though, is that.
Christ's incarnation was sort of like a recapitulation and an inversion in some way of the creation of Eve.
So, when Eve is created, Adam is put to sleep.
And this is after Adam's been raised from the dust and the Lord breathes the breath of life into him.
He's put to sleep, a rib is taken from his side.
And from that rib, we receive the total Eve.
We're not told that once Eve's body was made, God breathed the breath of life into her again.
And yet, she's a full human being, she's an embodied soul.
So that tells us, right in the first pages of Scripture, that within man's body is all the constituent parts necessary to make a total person, an embodied soul.
And so the other view of Christ, apart from it being purely an inheritance of the Father, Although I think that's compelling, is also that since Christ was an inversion of Eve and a betterment of Eve, Mary was sort of the vessel in that situation.
She's put to sleep, so to speak, and the Holy Spirit forms a full person in Mary with a human soul, human mind, all these things, and yet also the divine nature as well.
And so I think that the other view has been that Christ was kept miraculously safe from the inheritance of a corrupted soul.
Despite gaining a fully human soul.
And of course, he had one.
Yeah, absolutely.
One of the things we talked about, and I think it's compelling as well C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce.
I love his descriptions.
And obviously, he gets a little bit funny with these things, but he's an author and he's telling stories.
But he describes, obviously, that first stage of the book where, if you haven't read it, the author wakes up and he's in this gray, languid, dark kind of place.
And it's not terrible and it's not awful, but it's a place that's empty for the most part.
And what happens to the people there?
Is that they spread out.
It's an infinite regression.
I think it's Napoleon, you mentioned, Ben.
The people look out and all they can see is just a tiny little light as he recedes from everything that could possibly be heaven, all other people, all other places.
He just leaves it and he infinitely regresses into the darkness there.
But then, as we see with the author, he takes the bus up and he ascends to what would be, let's see, this is Lewis's view, a type of purgatory.
Obviously, we would, in our framework, we would just have heaven and hell, no intermediate state.
But then he ascends to what would be the first stages of heaven.
But it's not static.
So his soul does not have the option of residing in one place.
Like I could stay at one home or I could stay at the other.
But every soul is in a type of process.
And so for the soul that from creation, from conception, generated by the parents, is fallen, is sinful, that what that soul does, short of repentance, short of the new life, short of rebirth through the Holy Spirit, he infinitely, continually regresses into.
Darkness.
He denies the light of God.
He denies righteousness.
But for the believer, what has happened is the Holy Spirit has come and it's made them alive.
But then they're too also not static.
Think of Lewis again, further up and further in.
At the very end of Great Divorce, it's not like he arrives.
I'm here.
I've made it.
We've done it.
No, he's looking at the mountains of the mysteries of God there is to further press in and press out, press into.
And in that way, too, you have an organic sense that every soul has the choice.
Will I indulge in, revert, go back to, and disappear into the nothingness that is hell?
Or will I press into that which is real and concrete?
And so every soul has that choice in front of them and their stories ultimately, which one they will choose, obviously aided by Christ who comes and makes us new creations in Christ Jesus.
But that is what's kind of laid before.
And I love how organically it thinks of the options in front of us and what we become, that we never become what we don't want to be.
We never become something.
It's like, well, I really, really want to love God.
I really want to love people and I really want to love the light.
Well, if you would, you would press into that and love it and enjoy it.
However, you don't.
You've retreated from all of that.
What are some of your thoughts on that?
Yeah, no, I think that it's in the Great Divorce where Lewis has that great quip where one of the heavenly spirits is talking to the visitor and he says, At the end of all things, you will either say to God, Thy will be done, or God will say to you, Thy will be done.
And so the corrupt soul will get exactly what it wants, which is just more and more and more corruption.
But I think one of the pitfalls that we can fall into, and I'm glad you brought that up, Wesley, is because we're emphasizing the fact that, yes, we inherit.
This soul from our parents, but it's still our own soul.
Like, you know, society isn't made up of individuals, it's made up of households, but households do contain individuals.
And so it's important that we remember that within the Traducian framework, we're not denying the individuality of each and every soul.
So, what we're not saying is that it's just an amalgamation of two.
And if you do enough of a differential equation, you'll eventually be able to get to a brute determinism.
Even at the level of the soul?
No, like it's spirit, it is individual.
And so it can always be its own.
It can break away from the memories and the mythos and the ethos of the ones that came before it.
It's just that that's done through the power of the gospel.
And so even there, in traditionism, I think you get a far more potent view of how powerful the gospel is when it works in someone's heart.
And that not only is it changing that individual soul that was just created ex nihilo a few years back.
Into this new uncorrupted thing, it's actually changing entire lines of people.
I even think it's very telling that in the Pentateuch, God says things like, you know, to the righteous, I will bless them to the thousandth generation, but the wicked will visit the sins of the wicked on the third and fourth generation.
And then we also see in Leviticus this language of blood being the life of a thing.
And so we can think in a conceptual framework, at least, of blood being this representation of the soul, it's this life.
Force.
It's this embodiment of this unseen thing that actually keeps us going.
And so when you get blood connections with people, it tends to be that the faults of the blood and the virtues of that blood compound with the generations.
So if you have a father who's a drunkard, you would expect the son to at least be tempted with that same kind of sin, both because what God said is true that he visits the iniquities of the father to the third and fourth generation, but also because there's a mechanic in creation behind that.
That is the transfer of blood.
And in the transfer of blood, you get the transfer of the soul as well.
And so, even at a soul level, there's a predisposition to certain vices and virtues.
Right.
Because spiritual properties are not necessarily, we couldn't speak of them purely mechanicalistically.
We talked about genetics a while ago.
We talked about oxytocin, which is bonding and monogamy and all those things.
We've talked about impulse control, predisposition to diabetes.
But it would be brute materialism, like you just mentioned, Ben.
It would be pretty crude to try to break all of that down.
And people have done this.
Well, what's the gene that predisposes to violence?
Or what's the, you know, this passed on?
Or what's the line?
What's the race?
You could do all of that and you end up with a very mechanical, mathematical world.
Jung and the Human Soul00:03:03
And God didn't make that world.
He didn't make a world of statistics.
He made a world of people.
But what those people have, what makes them people, like we can make things that move around, interact with the environment.
They have no personality to them, they're not interesting.
What makes people people?
What makes the world enchanted?
Is the spirit that brings it all to life.
Yeah.
I think actually Carl Jung has, he doesn't have really like good insights into this, but he's really good at noticing this in nature.
And so his works on mythology are really helpful here because he's essentially noticing what we're saying that a man, many, many generations removed from those that came before him, has these kind of unconscious memories or images of the things that his great, forefathers were concerned with and dealt with.
Now, to him, he tries to make it brutally materialistic.
And so what he says is that, I mean, I don't know actually how Jung gets away from like a pre existence of the soul.
But he's essentially saying that all of the collective unconscious of all mankind is in one primordial soup.
And every once in a while, the brain, in a type of recreation from normal everyday life, will either daydream or nightdream, diving back into that primordial soup and recovering images of a, he wouldn't call it this, but of the soul that actually helped ancient man develop mythologies that explained the world that we live in at an enchanted level.
Now, his thesis.
That we've actually graduated beyond that.
He doesn't necessarily say that's a good thing, but he says that we've graduated beyond that into hyper rationalism.
But in so doing, we have lost something that makes us human.
Now, we would say we've denied the fact that man is an embodied soul.
At least that's part of the problem.
And Jung might say something different.
But I thought it was so fascinating that he was picking up on that kind of trope that you can have like a great great grandson who goes back to the place where his great great grandfather lived.
And they haven't, his family hasn't lived there for generations.
But he goes back and he feels an incredible sense of belonging that transcends his ability to rationally explain.
Where you go back to this farm or this city or whatever, and this man knows that somehow, somewhere along the line, he belongs there.
That place formed him.
And the reason he thinks to, well, to me, not to Young, he would go off on this.
But the reason he thinks that to me is because that place, Helped form the soul of his great, great, great, great grandfather into what it was when he had his great, great, great grandfather and then his great, great grandfather.
And so he's receiving these kind of lingering memories at a soul level and a blood level of the place that helped form his forefather into the man that he became, for better or for worse.
Land, Lineage, and Identity00:12:53
And so I think that it really gives us great explanatory power for some of the things that we both see and all experience in nature ubiquitously, which is reading stories or going to places or even hearing songs.
That, for whatever reason, have a profound effect on us that far exceeds our ability to explain with purely materialistic tools.
And this would also help to explain why families, and by way of consequence, extended families, nations, ethnos, are different, why they have different inclinations, different gifts, different strengths, different weaknesses, because that's all a nation really is.
It's just an extension of.
Families and one particular nation, it's entirely plausible and historically it bears out that some individual nations are made up of multiple families.
That there were, you know, Italians and there were also, you know, there were multiple different families present, but there's still an extension of one group of people shaped by tradition, by rituals, by certainly by religion, by worship, liturgy, but then also by the land itself.
That, you know, different, you know, even the way that God designed sovereignly, you know, the world geographically, that a particular people who have lived in a particular place for centuries or even millennia.
That they would be shaped by that.
Are they a seafaring people?
Are they a mountainous people?
Are they people of a desert or a plain?
Are they people from the north where it's cold or the equator where it's hot?
And so, even the land itself, in addition, of course, to liturgy and worship, do they, you know, for millennial worship demons or are they coming off of the heels of a thousand years of Christendom?
You know, all these kinds of things.
But all that shapes the people, ancestors, passed down generation to generation to generation.
And eventually that gets down to you.
And it affects you.
And to pretend, I think it's arrogant.
I'll just say it.
I think it's an arrogant presumption to assume that I'm just this unique little snowflake made from the ether, you know, that all my lineage has no bearing and no shaping force on me whatsoever, that I'm completely individual, completely unique, that I'm the master of my own destiny 100%.
That I'm just the summation of the individual choices that I made in a vacuum without any presuppositions or biases whatsoever.
That just, to me, seems silly.
And it's nice because everything that I just articulated there gives an explanation for nations and distinctions between peoples that it's not less.
Than things like race, which are controversial, and genetics.
But it at least articulates that it's more, that there's a spiritual component.
So genetics are real.
So there's a biological element, but there's not only a biological element, there's a spiritual element as well.
And there's actually theological language that God provides for us in order to explain these things.
Let's go to our first commercial break and then we'll come back.
And I know, Ben, you'll want to respond to what I just said.
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So, Ben, I would love if you could respond to what I just said, but then as soon as you're done, and we'll keep it, you know, As short as possible.
I want to give it to Michael because he, I think, has, as we were just talking together, brainstorming a little bit during the commercial break, he's got some insightful questions that he'd like to be able to ask you.
Yeah, no, I was actually going to say, I think that Michael could talk to this a lot because I think that traditionism, like, it's not a donut hole that fits perfectly within the hole of the donut that suddenly makes everything make sense.
There are still things that we can't explain and that we should look for.
But I think that traditionism helps us.
Recognize that propositional nations are absurd.
And that's because an ethnos, like similar to what you said, Joel, an ethnos.
That's because you're racist, Ben.
That's why.
I know.
But go ahead, continue.
Just kidding.
Like an ethnos is formed, it is formed by things like external practices and shared experiences and shared stories and genetics, these things that are material to varying degrees internally to externally.
But it is also formed by the way that the, I believe, the way that the souls of the people have developed in that land over time.
And so I do think that land exerts an influence not only over the body, but also over the soul.
And I promise I'll keep this quick.
Just one thing, one example that I think is helpful here is that when you start to say that propositional nationhood is stupid, you know, one rebuttal might be well, how do we do that anymore?
Like in this highly connected world, in this global quote unquote, World, how do we see that when different people groups almost always are living in the same place?
It's very rare that that's not true, in the first world at least, that we don't have different people groups living in the same place.
And I would say you can actually look to the founding of America and see that different people groups founded the same place.
They were formed not only by a shared experience and shared history and a shared mythos that formed by the founding of the country, but then they also lived with each other for long enough to the point where some of those distinctions.
Started to get less sharp, started to get less clear.
And yet, what they didn't lose is their unwavering commitment to the nation that their fathers had founded.
And they began even to appreciate some of the ways in which other fathers helped their fathers find the nation.
And I think that that's done by the soul passed down through generations, given time to mature in a single place with the shared history, the shared religion, the shared experience, and all that.
You speak of the old world and the new world.
There's old world wines, old world flavors, old world architecture, and then there's new world.
Go ahead, Michael.
Ben, I think one of the things that would be helpful is to define what we mean by soul because, and maybe this is what you do mean, but what I hear being said is there is the soul part of a human that can be directly, like, traducianism, as I understand it, is the idea that the soul is.
Created by the union of the mother and the father.
Okay, that's all well and good.
But when we now start saying that the land that a people live in now directly comes to bear on the soul, and my question is it sounds like what we're saying is even the caliber of the soul.
Like we could have resilient or we could have, you know, just less resilient.
Adventurous, exploring, seafaring people.
But when I hear that, I think, okay, so what we're saying is depending on where someone's ancestors are, Determines whether they have a.
The Japanese have the idea of those with a shriveled soul, a hollow soul.
And so, what is it like?
Are we talking the immortal, redeemable soul?
And if so, is there no like, does redemption change that?
Because one of the lines that we use in our movement a lot is grace doesn't destroy nature, it elevates it, it renews it.
What we're saying kind of is people are just stuck with the soul that they have.
Because it's inherited through land, through people.
So, what is the soul that we're talking about?
What is the role of grace and redemption?
And I guess that's where I'll leave it for now.
Yeah, no, I think that's a really good question.
Of course, it's not brute determinism.
So, just because you are born in a certain place with certain fathers and forefathers doesn't mean that your soul is now stuck in this immovable place where it can't.
Go, it can't ever be in flux.
The soul is always in flux in the same way that the body is always in flux.
You know, you're born with a certain genetic code, but that genetic code alters over time with environmental factors, with nutrition, with fitness, with things like that.
You actually do change slightly over time.
The same is true of the soul.
I like to think of the relationship between the body and the soul like the body being an instrument, like a viola or piano or something, and then the soul is the one that plays it.
And so if you have a Maybe you have a.
Actually, this is how we've thought through mental illness and like mental retardation before.
If you have a body that's broken, whether that's in the brain or in the limbs or whatever, it's like a piano that's missing some of the keys or something like that.
Now, the player of the piano is still responsible to play the piano as best as he can, but it's going to be more difficult for that soul or that player because of the missing pieces.
I think, I don't know if I would use terms like more difficult.
Because no one is saved by their own effort.
But I do think that there are factors of the soul where, like, if a person is born in a society that has been worshiping demons for centuries, they will be at a soul level more disposed to that in terms of what we should expect.
Now, grace not only perfects nature, but it also is exalted over nature.
And so it is more powerful.
And so there's always redemption.
The Lord can do what he wills.
And in fact, he does.
And he often saves people who.
If it were left up to a man who's betting, like on a horse race, may not have bet on that man being saved.
So there's always that category.
But I think what I'm talking more about is like how, and I'm taking it a little bit further than Traducianism.
Like you're right, Traducianism is simply the idea that the soul is passed via the mother and father at conception to the child, to the new person.
But the point that I'm making, or kind of the thesis that I'm positing, is that since that's true, and because I believe this other thing is true, That history and land and story affect not only the body but also the soul.
That means that where you live can affect, even if it's just at the level of affections, the souls that come after you.
The way that I've illustrated it before is, and this is like, I was writing a dusty tome, so it was totally spitballing, and I didn't think about it at all after, but I'll stand by it for now.
The Oak Tree Metaphor00:02:21
One time when I was in college, I went on a trip with my dad, and we were mountain biking in North Carolina, and we had done it for years.
We used to go to North Carolina to ride mountain bikes all the time.
And on that one trip, It was the first time that I had ever actually beaten my dad in a downhill race.
He was always like full throttle.
I mean, I really admired how fearless he was on a mountain bike going down a mountain.
And it was the first time I'd ever beaten him.
And he comes down and we get back to the parking lot and he's just so proud of me.
He's like, man, that was so impressive.
Like, I'm so proud of you.
I know it's this small thing, but like, you're my son and you just beat me at something.
And what father wouldn't want that?
And that moment has always stuck with me, even so much so.
That I feel like I do have a connection to those mountains in North Carolina, to DuPont State Forest and Pisgah National Forest, because a part of me was formed there.
I had this incredible experience with my father at that place.
And it wasn't just that it was my father that was important and that mattered, it was also that it was at that place that was important and that mattered.
Another illustration that is more abstract is let's say you have an oak tree and you think of the oak tree like a soul.
And it's this old oak tree.
It's very beautiful.
And it's chopped down by loggers.
And let's say the loggers are like the land.
Okay.
And the loggers, they chop down the tree, they cut off all of its branches, they send it to the lumber yard where it's processed and it's dried and all this stuff.
Okay.
And the lumber yard is also the land, it's having an effect on the oak tree.
And then some carpenter comes in and he buys every single piece of wood that came from that oak tree, which would never happen, but let's just say that it would for the sake of the argument.
That carpenter is also like the land.
It's buying all of the oak tree.
It's taking all of that soul and it's doing something with it.
Now, let's say further that the carpenter makes that oak tree that has been chopped down, that the branches have been lopped off.
It's been pruned, so to speak, and prepared for something.
And the carpenter then makes it into a bunch of beautiful, you know, shaker style furniture for this home that's going to house a wonderful family.
And the home is going to be beautified by this oak tree.
That oak tree.
Soulish Good Without Grace00:12:55
Has lost itself in one sense.
It has lost branches.
It's lost, you know, leaves.
It's lost its reproductive capability.
And I'm not, we don't need to take this too far, but just the point is, it's changed.
But in being changed, it actually became what it was supposed to be.
It became this beautiful furniture, this glorified version of that, though cut and though diminished quantitatively, has actually increased qualitatively.
I think that land exerts a similar effect on mankind, not only at the level of the body.
Of course, it does that.
But also at the level of the soul.
And the reason I think that is because I think that the metaphor of the instrument and the player is actually incomplete.
I think that the soul and the body are more connected than that, such that they're like a tapestry that is, you know, they're weaved together so that when you tug on the one, the other is pulled as well.
And that's what makes death such a tragedy.
It's the sundering of the body and soul.
And so it's not just the player getting up and walking away from the instrument, it's the instrument being destroyed.
Because it was made for that player, and now the player is gone from it.
And so the instrument has no reason to exist anymore.
And I think that, and so I think that that's why they exert major influences on one another, such that when land affects the body, it also affects the soul, and vice versa.
You can have a soul that is very virtuous, whether it's by the grace of God or whether it's a civic virtue that just comes from the society in which you're in, that also exerts a visible effect on the land that that soul lives upon.
Michael?
Are you using soul similarly to.
Personality, or like moral fiber, or uh?
Because to me, that's where um, I think.
I just think the definition needs to be careful, because usually when we talk about soul, we I think of it as the part of the, the man that is um, you know, when we think about, for instance, what Paul says, like our, our souls, in a sense, right now are the only part of us that have been redeemed.
Um, and our bodies, we have the old man, the old flesh, But I think you're using the word soul more broadly when you are talking about the things that I think.
I'm not even sure where I stand on this, but I think some people would say, well, personality, things of that nature are more products of the physical body than of the soulish spiritual part of the body.
So are you using the term soul pretty broadly, Ben?
Yeah, yeah.
My understanding of the soul is fairly broad, partly because of my conviction that they are so closely intertwined.
So, I certainly think that there are elements of genetics that help us explain personality traits, of course, like sicknesses and strength and things like that.
But I also think that the soul is more personal than merely a life force.
I think that my soul would be discernible from yours if we could see them.
And part of why I think that is because of 1 Samuel, when Saul gets the Witch of Endor to summon up Samuel's ghost, presumably that's Samuel's soul.
Made visible by God's providential working.
And he's able to discern that's Samuel.
And so I think that I do adhere to a more broad definition of soul than merely like a life force and things like that.
I think that it is personal to the body that it's contained within.
Yeah.
On relating to environment and place affecting the person, Calvin talks about this is one of the reasons the Lord's Supper is not just spiritual, it's not simply a moment of silence, it's not prayer.
He gives us literal physical things.
Because we are embodied soul, we're not just abstract, and the body has an impact that the body can shape the soul.
And so, God gives to us two means of grace.
He gives to us the Lord's Supper, which we physically, literally consume something.
It symbolizes, it communicates the reality of Christ given for us.
And the same thing for baptism.
And we speak of those as means of grace, meaning that they have some level of spiritual import, and yet still they're provided to us practically.
Ben, I want to get to nations and myth and stories, but one thing I do have to say that I also appreciate about this view.
Is it helps us make sense of the great man?
I think of men, you've heard the saying, you know, larger than life, that there's just some characters and there's something about them that they are just, they're big.
They have energy, they have joy, they have life, they have all of that.
There's just something about them that we couldn't break down.
We couldn't say, well, to be like Steve, you know, the guy that would witness to everybody at the gas station and the guy who would only sleep four hours, you know, you had to do his morning regimen or you have to work out like him.
It helps us to say that there's something about a person that we can't put our finger on, that we can't just break down to a diet or we can't just break down to habit.
That there's actually something spiritual about them.
And it's funny because there's people, some of them, literally their body gives out.
They have so much exuberance, so much joy, so much love for life that they're 50, they're 60, and their body just gives out.
Or it helps to keep them going for a long time.
You know, you read those stories about people that smoked a pack a day, drank excessively, and they lived till 96.
Well, they just loved life.
They weren't alone.
They weren't just sitting in their room.
They weren't just doing nothing.
They weren't just meditating.
They were alive.
They were vibrant.
And we're not saying that that's only a spiritual component, that only the spiritual component makes the man.
If you're not this, at the beginning, there's nothing you can do.
Same thing with living longer, most certainly, is it taking care of the body that matters.
But we are saying, in addition to that, and on top of it, it's a spiritual component.
I mean, think about couples where they both pass away within days of each other, that their lives have become intertwined.
And even spiritually, when their spouse passed, they said, I've lost a reason and a will to live.
And will to live is not a mechanical, materialistic thing.
Any thoughts on that before we go to nation, story, myth?
Yeah, yeah, no, I think, and maybe this will help answer Michael a little bit better.
Like, I'm using soul in a more broad scope.
But, and I'm also using really concrete terms that we would normally use for material things like genetics and stuff like that.
But I'm fully assuming this whole time, like the soul is a very abstract thing that we can't measure and quantify and really put our finger on.
It's more so just using words that I'm familiar enough with to describe similar effects and causes that I'm seeing or that I think I'm seeing at a soul level.
And I think one of the ways that maybe this can be explained is I've said before.
We live in Utah.
Y'all don't, but we do.
We live in Utah, and it's only ever been a pagan place.
It has never, ever, ever been Christian.
Even now, it's like less than 2% Protestant or something like that.
And Catholics, I think, are like another 2%.
And so, one of the things that I tell people, and I genuinely believe this, is that when Utah is a Christian place, when it proclaims the true Christ as Lord, the state will get better.
Like, not just its policies, but like the actual land will be better.
The sky will be bluer.
The water will be cleaner.
The air will have less smog.
The crop will yield better.
I think that it'll be more fruitful.
And part of why I believe that is because I think that C.S. Lewis, until we have faces, when he's drawing this very sharp parallel between someone who is beautiful having a beautiful soul and Orwell who has an ugly soul, obviously he's taking it very, very far.
And I'm not saying that he took it that far because that's the way it is.
But it is reflecting something true.
The more pure, the more redeemed the soul is in a place, the soul of the individual and the people that are around it, the more beautiful that place will be.
So, the redemption of the soul through the vehicle of the body will have a visible, tangible effect on the beautification of the place.
Okay.
And then, this will be my last question, then.
That helps clarify quite a bit.
So, one of the things that we've been wrestling with, and I even have a chapter or two in my book about.
Uh, civic good, right?
And how modern Christianity has really dropped the ball on the idea that there could be civic good.
But it sounds like you're making the connection or the step that there can be soulish good that is not a product of grace, but merely a product of time, place, inheritance, things like that.
And I think that's going to be the thing I'm thinking through.
And I think that's going to be the thing that some people are going to have to think through.
With what you're saying.
Like, are we saying that there are actual, because when I think of soulish good, I think of, you know, the intangible, actual moral good that comes about through really exclusively through the work of grace in our life.
Like all our righteous acts are as filthy rags.
Okay, that doesn't mean that we can't do good for our nation.
It just is not a good that necessarily pleases the Lord in a salvific sense.
So are you saying that there would be souls because they can be affected by, Genetics, land, place, things like that, that can have a sort of intrinsic good that is not ultimate good, that pleases the Lord.
That actually, now that you said that, is really the core of my question that I've been trying to articulate to you.
Yeah, no.
And I would say, yes, so long as we understand that good for the unredeemed only ever reaches the pinnacle of civic good, it cannot appeal in pure goodness to God.
I don't think that there's such a thing as a.
A soul that is born and that is a Christian without being regenerated.
Like total depravity is very real.
But I do think that within, and let's just look at pagan societies, I think that within pagan societies, you see differing levels of civic good.
Some of them are extremely barbaric, like the Muslims or even the Carthaginians.
The Carthaginians, extremely barbaric people.
And they were pagans.
And then you look at the Romans, especially before Christ.
They were also pagans, but they were less barbaric.
Even in their paganism, it was less barbaric.
There was less human sacrifice, less blood.
There was still a lot of blood.
There was still some human sacrifice, but less.
There was more beauty, even in the civic objective sense of architecture and things like that, than you got in Carthage.
So I think, yeah, as long as I'm not trying, I don't want to get myself in any trouble.
I'm not saying that there's divine good in the natural soul, not at all.
But I think that even in the unregenerate people groups of the world and in the unregenerate soul, There can be a type of civic good that has been inherited by the history of the civic good of a people, and they have an equal and opposite effect on each other.
So, the more civic good that even a pagan society pursues, you have reason to believe that that civic good would continue, or it would fall under just incredible judgment, and that judgment would either crush them into repentance, which would lead to true civic good and divine good.
Or it would crush them into basically nothingness and they would cease to exist.
Well said.
Let's go ahead and go to our last commercial break, and then we're going to come back and as quickly as possible give some concluding thoughts.
And then I want to make sure that we have some time to get to the chat.
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All right, welcome back.
So, Ben, one thing I alluded to, we talked about it a good bit.
Mythic Forms of Scripture00:15:35
So, if you have souls and then in the process and their expansion and everything, and they're in one place and not the other, necessarily the Western, the spirit of the West, you could say in one way, in a totalizing sense, would be different than the spirit of the East.
The spirit of America, as new as we are, is different than the spirit of Europe and the spirit of Africa and the spirit of India.
But one of the things that you You hit on it, and it's true.
And I'm trying to do it to connect is that there's stories that shaped us, and there's a purpose and a meaning to getting back to them.
So, to look at the Odyssey and to look at that not even just necessarily the characters and the involvement of it, but what is it if not the epic story of the son that leaves home and goes on a great journey and faces great peril?
These are stories that shaped us.
If we're going to have a future of the West, that if the West is going to look in a way that we would recognize and would have the same characters and the same art and aesthetics and values.
If it's going to look in the future like that, then that also means, in a sense, a spiritual connection to what came before.
Can you elaborate on that?
Yeah, this is really where I'll start to probably get confusing.
So, apologies.
I just need to work these more.
But so, this is where I really break from just the root definition of traducianism.
And I'm running with this idea that is undergirded by traducianism.
And it is that if what I've said so far is true, That the soul is inherited from the father and mother, and it includes, it's not just an item that has nothing already on it, but it includes some kind of soulish memory.
Then that means that within people groups, you have shared memories that become myth.
And so this is why I say that myth is a type of history.
And what you're getting in myth, like if you read Dostoevsky, for example, and you read Crime and Punishment, great book, everyone should read it.
You're getting the ethos of Dostoevsky.
He is giving you a piece of his own soul, so to speak, a piece of himself in the fullness of that word.
He's pouring his pathos, ethos, telos out on the page, but it's just Dostoevsky.
If you read the Iliad, if you read Theogony by Hesiod, if you read Virgil's Eclogues, and if you read the Aeneid and the Odyssey, you know, all these things, you're not just getting the ethos of that author, you're getting the ethos of people.
So, Homer is writing down the myth that he received from the Greeks, all the Greeks up to his day.
Hesiod's doing the same thing.
They're not inventing this whole cloth.
These are stories, maybe mixed with real memories and real historical events, that are then passed down from generation to generation, not just in the Greek lands, it transcends that and goes to all the West that give us an abstract foothold.
In the virtues and the vices of the West and why we are what we are.
This is why Western civilization classes don't just study the history of Western civilization, the brute history, but also the mytho history of Western civilization.
Because these myths had the ability to form people, even at a level of affections in the soul.
And so that's why I think that in order to reclaim and save Western civilization, we have to resurrect the Western ethos.
And that means that we have to reclaim, reappreciate, and re embody in our own time as redeemed Christians the virtues of the Western canon.
So we have to read the Iliad, not just entertainment.
We have to read the Odyssey, the Aeneid.
We have to read Beowulf.
These things are not just literature, they are glimpses into the ethos of the people that made us who we are.
Reading those things and letting them get into our bones, we will, I think, do the good work of not just becoming a Christian nation again.
That's, of course, like we have to do that, but a Western Christian nation.
It's not enough that we are just Christians.
We are Western Christians.
And that means something different than it does to an Indian Christian or an Eastern Christian, like Eastern Orthodox or like a Russian Orthodox Christian.
These are all different things.
In order to become a Western Christian again, first you have to be a Christian, so everyone repent and believe.
But then also you have to be a Westerner.
Now, how do you become a Westerner?
Well, it's by eating the same food that our forefathers gave us that they also ate.
And that's the Western myth.
C.S. Lewis has this great quote, and I'm going to butcher it, but it's something like man is torn between two ways of thinking.
We can either ponder the abstract, like we can say, what is the nature of pain?
You know, what is pain?
Or we can experience the concrete and react to it.
So, ow, that hurt.
But when you're getting your finger chopped off, you're not thinking, wow, what is pain?
What is this philosophical phenomenon of pain?
You can only do that when you're separated from the concrete experience.
Myth is different.
The reason that I say all, you know, it's been said before, all art aspires to the condition of music.
And I've said all music aspires to the condition of myth.
The reason that I say that is because myth is the only place where we get the bridge between the abstract and the concrete, such that When you get to the end of the Iliad, even if you haven't understood a lot of what's happened and you're overwhelmed with names and things like that, you'll read the last line Thus ended Hector, breaker of horses.
And you are a Westerner, it will affect you.
It will affect you.
The reason for that is because in consuming the myth, you've consumed the concrete in the form of the abstract.
And if you're a Westerner, that will almost elicit a kind of memory.
In you.
This is why I encourage people to read Paradise Lost if they're Christians, Western, Eastern, whatever.
Because in reading Paradise Lost, when you get to the end, Adam has seen the vision up to Christ.
That in itself is powerful enough.
But then when they're expelled from the garden and they're finally going into the wilderness, you and it's not just because Milton is a good writer, you experience a profound sense of loss.
You start thinking to yourself, like, look at what I did.
Look at what I left behind.
I feel like I remember that place.
And I miss it and I want to go back to it.
The reason for that is because you have drank from the pool of myth.
In that case, it's the true myth of Christianity.
Like the Bible is given to us in a mythic form.
It's all true, it all really happened, but it's also mythical.
And the great triumph of myth is the incarnation God made man, myth became fact.
The abstract was the concrete and it changed everything.
And so now I do think that, just to reiterate what I already said, I think that myth has, because of what I said about the soul, I think that myth has the power to transfer abstract ethos of an entire people group in the form of a concrete story that then helps shape our own ethos, such that if used rightly, we can not only be a Christian nation again, but we can be a Western Christian nation.
We can be Western Christians.
That's great.
All right, we're short on time today, so we're going to do our best to get to at least all the super chats.
So, Nathan, if you could go ahead and.
And organize all those for us.
All right, here's the first one.
This is from Daniel Woodard.
He gave us $5.
Thank you, Daniel.
He said, It was awesome to meet you guys in person at the conference, the Crisis King conference that we just had a couple weeks ago.
One question if Adam was not born with a sin nature, how did he end up sinning?
I'll take a crack at that.
We believe that Adam and Eve were created in a state of integrity or a state of innocence so that they could not sin, but they also could sin.
That both options were actually available to them in the sense of the human agency.
We also believe, in line with the Westminster Catechism, that says that everything that takes place is that which God has ordained.
And so we believe that God did, in fact, ordain that sin would enter the world.
And he did so because the final result would be better, not worse, that he's actually shaping and orchestrating all things to the praise of his glorious grace and also to the maximum eternal happiness and joy and good.
For his image bearing creatures, that eons and eons into eternity, that we would be able to look back and say, I wouldn't have changed a thing.
I thank God that things were planned in this way because angels even long to look into the mysteries of the gospel, but they look as outsiders.
They don't experience it.
It's abstract, like what Ben was saying, but it's not concrete.
But we are actual recipients.
Those of us who are Christians, human beings who have been saved and redeemed, we're actual recipients of God's grace.
So, we believe that the fall was something that God actually ordained.
And we believe that Adam and Eve were made and created in a state of integrity so that they were able to sin.
They were also able not to sin, but they were not created in a state of immutable integrity.
And I believe, you know, now speaking for myself, I don't know what the other guys would say, but I believe that this state of integrity that Adam and Eve were created in, that Adam and Eve, they also had their own eschaton.
Something that God, according to his ordination, he knew that it wouldn't take place in this way, but theoretically, there was an eschatology that Adam had had he not sinned, that he would have eventually entered into not only a state of integrity, which he was already in, but a state of immutable integrity, that he would have been as the angels are now, which is unable to fall, and that he would have eventually entered into that.
Because when you think, you know, the tree of life, like what was the tree of life for?
Why would there even be an incentive to somehow attain to being able to eat and being granted access to the tree of life?
Because Adam already had a means of not dying, of forever life, namely by simply not sinning.
God said, the day that you eat of it, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, by eating of that tree, that he would surely die.
So Adam already had a pathway to life, a pathway to forever life, not dying.
And he didn't have to eat from the tree of life to not die.
He just had to abstain from eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
All he had to do was avoid sin.
In other words, if Adam had avoided sin, then he would have lived forever and death would have never entered the world.
But what I believe is that there was a probationary period and that that's meant to be implied, and that Adam probably had a sense of that.
And that if he had resisted evil and done what God set him up to do to keep and work the ground, expanding and working and cultivating, but also protecting and defending and keeping the ground, which would include keeping the serpent out of the garden and standing guard, that if Adam had done this well after a prolonged period of time that God had set, That eventually he would have been able to eat of the tree of life.
And although, again, he already would have had forever life simply by avoiding sin, that the tree of life would have actually brought him into not just forever life, but eternal life, a state of immutable integrity, to where now not only would he be in a state of integrity, but he would be permanently placed into that state of integrity and never able to fall.
So that's my view of Adam and Eve.
No, they did not have a sin nature.
In a state of integrity, there was no sin nature, but in that state of integrity, it was not an immutable state, and they were able to fall, and God also ordained it.
Anything to add to that question?
Nope.
Nope.
Okay.
Let's keep going.
Michael, can you read the next one?
Yep.
Here we go.
This is from Josiah Cooper.
Josiah says, Thank you for the $10, Josiah.
Asking a prayer request.
My wife and I are pregnant, and our first ultrasound came back empty.
Hormone levels say we are pregnant.
We are praying for God's favor with our fourth child, Christ as King.
Okay, let's just go ahead and pray real quick.
Father, we thank you for Josiah and his wife.
And Lord, we pray that if there is a baby in her womb, that you would protect the life of that baby and that maybe the test were just inaccurate.
And in a couple weeks and giving it a little bit more time, that the baby and its heartbeat and its life would be detected and that the baby would be healthy.
And if there's not any baby, Lord, I pray for just peace.
And encouragement and hopefulness that you would guard and protect against disappointment and discouragement and those kinds of things.
We pray this in the name of Jesus.
Amen.
Amen.
Wes, you want to do the next one?
All right.
So, Victory in Christ emailed you $5 super chat.
Thank you.
Emailed you on full preterism conversation.
This is a follow up from Monday.
Thanks for the consideration.
Hopefully, that last video is getting some traction.
These guys don't mess around.
Ben, do you know much about full preterism?
Are we going to have to have you on in a couple of weeks?
I know it like adjacently, yeah.
Adjacently.
I'm not like very well versed on it now.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
Joel, I'll pass it back to you, SoCal Preston.
SoCal's got a huge.
SoCal Preston, he's got a bunch of super chats.
Which, thank you for the super chats.
Yeah, thank you, SoCal Preston.
We appreciate it.
So he said, When are you going to debate me on dispensationalism?
His next one says, I need the arrow to move.
You guys misrepresent dispensationalism.
The third one says, No one was regenerated in the Old Testament.
Are there any more, Nathan?
Yep.
So I would just, my response is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Dispensationalism ruined the world.
And I will not give any press time to ideologies that have caused as much damage as dispensationalism.
God bless.
And we'll see you later.
All right.
Next one.
Alex Fick, just $5.
Super chat.
Thanks, Alex.
Thanks, Alex.
Jeff Halfley, I love this.
This was a thread I didn't get to pick up on earlier, but super chat $4.99.
One of our greatest supporters, Jeff.
He said, I went to New England.
My ancestors, after were there for 300 years and felt at home in an eerie way that is hard to describe.
And absolutely, because I mean, I have my background in neuroscience, so memories have a real place.
Like, they're a real structure.
You could damage someone's memory.
There's also short term memory, long term memory.
So people are able to form short term memories, but in impairments, they can't form long term.
The point is, we know that there are certainly memories that are biological.
But just talking not just about a memory, about an episode, not just a memory about knowledge, but a feeling and a sensation.
And that's real.
The places that we've done life in and we're familiar, we think, I think Ben and I talked about this, that they do feel home in a way that's hard to articulate, that's hard to describe, that you can't pin down to just, well, it feels like home because.
Ancestral Memories Resonate Deeply00:04:16
X, Y, and Z. Ben, anything to add to that?
Yeah, I mean, in the same way that I think if we could all go back and walk in the Garden of Eden for a day, we would feel at home.
And it would be a very profound sense of sorrow that we lost it.
Yeah.
Tolkien talks about that, that we're soaked in exile.
Even in our best days, we know we're still missing something.
We're not where we should be.
All right, let's give a go ahead.
Is it okay if I say one more thing?
It's all right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, even going back to what Belch brought up, like what role does redemption have to play in this?
I think you can even say the same about certain places in scripture that are not the Garden of Eden.
Like, why do I feel a draw to the Holy Land?
Well, it's because that's where my Lord died and that's where he saved me.
So, in a sense, like a major part of my soul lives there.
And so I want it to be filled with Christian singing.
And to be fair, Ben, your ancestors, Probably hacked apart infidels in the Holy Lands for hundreds of years on end.
More likely than not, there's also some other memories there.
Yep.
Let's go ahead and give this last question.
I'll give it to Michael, to you first, and then maybe Ben can give a final thought.
So this is from Alex Fick.
Michael, do you want to read that?
Alex says, Any indication of how this might apply to language?
Someone of German ancestry not having spoken for three generations, but they could pick up the language more naturally?
I don't know.
I know from talking to some people who have studied language learning at a PhD level that, at least when I talked to this guy, the theory was that the brain forms a new neural net with every language learned.
It's kind of net on top of net.
This is not really going to support the thesis.
I'm just throwing it out there anecdotally.
My grandfather stuttered terribly growing up.
He thought it was because.
He was left-handed, and when he was born, that was a taboo thing.
They forced him to write this, or sorry, yeah, with his right hand.
When he learned a second language, which in this case happened to be Spanish, it fixed his stuttering in his English language, and he didn't stutter in Spanish.
I don't know.
There might be something there.
I just know as a linguist and as someone who's traveled around the world, progressively learning languages makes it easier.
Language is so much a product, as someone who teaches it, of just like types of intelligence.
So, I don't know.
I don't, I have never considered language in that point of view.
So, I'm not saying it's not possible.
I just, I have never looked into that connection at all.
So, I'm not saying it's not there.
I don't know.
Ben, any thoughts?
Yeah, I am not a philologist or nor a linguist.
I speak English and that's actually it.
I'm terrible.
But, but I have heard, at least anecdotally, that when people go and they do like the immersive learning, like they go to Italy and they learn.
And just by living there, they eventually start to think in that language when they're there.
And then when they go back to where they're from, they switch back into thinking in their native tongue, which I don't know if that has any bearing whatsoever on the question, but I do think it's really fascinating.
Yep.
All right.
Wes, any final thought for today?
No, really.
This is definitely something I think that I'm new to.
You'll notice with this episode, we didn't come out and say, guys, guys, you just got to replace everything.
We've got the view, it explains it all.
But this is definitely something to think about.
And the reason I chose it is because we're losing a sense of place and a sense of home, right?
A condo 500 feet above the ground in suburbia, like, that's not really home.
That's not land.
That's not soil.
You're not actually taming.
The ground.
And so, in a time where we've lost so much of a sense of place, so much of our connection to our soil, so much of where we live, it's good to remember who we are, where we came from, and the importance of, as the mission was given to Adam, to toil, to labor, and to put everything under dominion and subdue it.
A View Worth Considering00:02:06
And so, Ben, could you tell us where to find you?
And also, if you plan on saying any more, speaking any more on this topic in the future?
Yeah.
You can follow me on Twitter at Tom Pondbadil.
I tweet maybe once a month, and it's usually pretty disappointing.
And that makes me so happy because that's about my tweet rate as well.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like Tom Bombadil, but pawn instead of bomb.
And then you can, of course, listen to Haunted Cosmos, which is the show that Brian Sauvay and I do.
And it's a bi weekly show.
We try to just explore the very strange world that God made with the truth of knowing that the world is not just stuff.
I am hoping.
To write a book called The Consolation of Mythology that will, at least in the early chapters, touch heavily on this idea and then go into explaining motifs in Western myth that helped shape us as Western Christians so that people can hopefully go and read those for themselves and kind of reclaim the virtues of a Western man.
I hope to write that and finish a manuscript this year, but who knows?
Who knows?
It may be a while.
And no, I don't plan on speaking anywhere anytime soon, but I certainly would be open to it.
Um, and then we will be having our new Christian Impressed Conference, yes, in June of this year, Safety Third, Recovering the American Will to Greatness.
Uh, and I'll be emceeing that.
So if you just can't get enough of me, you know, uh, you can hear me introduce speakers at that conference.
Awesome, love it.
Well, Ben, yeah, there is a way to preach announcements, it can be done.
I've seen it done, I've seen it done by doing it.
I've seen it done, yeah, yeah.
It's like, oh, I'm just tasked with the announcements, you know, I don't really get to say anything, or do you?
You can find a way.
Yep.
All right.
Well, thanks for coming on the show, Ben.
And thank you to the listeners.
We appreciate it.
And yeah, we're just really grateful for everybody who follows the channel and supports the ministry.
And Lord willing, we will see you guys again on Friday.