All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 24, 2021 - Human Events Daily - Jack Posobiec
45:37
HUMAN EVENTS DAILY EXCLUSIVE: ENLIGHTENMENT, PHILOSOPHY, AND GOD WITH CHARLIE KIRK

A can’t miss, intense, dynamic conversation between Turning Point founder Charlie Kirk and Human Events Daily host Jack Posobiec that spans everything from ancient philosophy to the enlightenment to the impact of God in modern society.Here is your daily dose of Human Events with @JackPosobiecSupport the Show.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Okay, we are very excited.
This was a tough get for us, folks, a very tough get for us here at our scrappy little Human Events Daily production, but we have landed a big whale.
We've landed a big one.
We've hooked them like Moby Dick.
Captain Ahab wishes he had what we have here at Human Events Daily.
Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, the host of the Charlie Kirk Show, we've got you here for Human Events Daily.
And so, Charlie, when I go on your show, And I've seen people respond.
They say, would they like?
They're like, you guys did like you because you kind of unpack things and you go deeper about it.
And, you know, we'll make references to things.
We'll get into different stuff.
But we're always kind of driven by the news of the day.
We're always kind of driven by reacting to whatever crazy thing has come out next.
You know, CNN's up to whatever they're up to.
How did we get here?
And I don't just mean me and you or any of this.
I mean, how did the West go from the towering world power, right?
The driver of actual, you know, progress and intellectual thought and industrialization in the world to this sort of corrupted backward And really decaying kind of situation that we're in now.
What do you think?
Well, I think we've managed to hang ourselves with the rope of our own creation.
I'm a conservative that's unafraid to say that not everything that came out of the Enlightenment was good.
That's like a thought crime in some right circles.
I really don't care.
It's true.
The Enlightenment was great for some things, obviously.
David French is not going to like this podcast.
But, yeah, you have to be...
First, the most important question is when do you think the Enlightenment began?
Right.
That's the most important question, right?
Yes.
And French would say that it began with, like, Spinoza or Galileo when it obviously started with Machiavelli.
Right.
And Machiavelli, and maybe if French would agree with this, I don't want to put words in his mouth, and his own words will suffice for prosecution against him of his thoughts, I should say.
Or we should say the Frenchist, or a Frenchist, might say.
Yeah, but it's really important because Niccolio Machiavelli in 1532, right, Connor?
Yeah.
He wrote The Prince, and one of the most famous lines or sentiments was, why are we focusing so much on these imaginary republics?
A direct stab towards Plato, like 2,000 years before.
And he's like, we know what we want.
Why don't we just go get it?
Why don't we just take it?
Yeah, why don't we just go take it?
Now, this was considered to be...
Really unthinkable in heavily Catholic-dominated Italy at the time and Europe, where tradition and order and something that came before you that must always anchor you, this idea that you just can't be stumbling towards inevitable abyss.
And Machiavelli's like, that's stupid.
I know what we want.
Let's just go get it.
And in a lot of ways, he liberated...
Political thought.
He was the first kind of political theorist.
Aristotle was too, but definitely in Europe.
And Machiavelli is also known for his most famous line, you know, popularized by a lot of different people, which is the ends justify the means.
You hear that a lot.
That's kind of like Very Machiavellian, but he wasn't wrong about everything.
He was right about a lot of different power dynamics.
So I think that a lot of people, though, when they look at sort of, you know, whether you want to call this wokeism or, you know, we eventually find ourselves in the social justice era.
France, of course, found themselves there much faster.
Those are all symptoms.
Here's my thing, though.
They wouldn't say that they are being Machiavellian.
They're saying, hey, we're just trying to build a better world.
We're just trying to make utopia.
They're all living in Machiavelli's world, though.
I mean, Machiavelli, again, they stole a little from Rousseau.
They stole a little from Machiavelli.
Plato even talked about imaginary republics and, like, this idea of utopia, even though Machiavelli went after it.
The point is this, to kind of, like, defilosophize this, because I could just see people being like, who are all these people?
That's fine.
It's not your job.
You don't have to worry about it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, he saw this coming before anyone else.
And he was willing to write about it.
Now, he was an atheist, lost his mind towards the end of his life, wrote extensively about kind of how the West needs to recreate its own values.
Now, it's really important because Nietzsche wrote, God is dead.
He was not celebrating it.
He was lamenting.
A lot of people get this wrong.
Right.
He's lamenting.
It's a lament.
And you know what quote I actually just read very recently?
It was one of the last things that Solzhenitsyn wrote.
Gulag archipelago.
And it ties directly into this because he said...
And after my five decades of writing about this revolution, of course the Russian Revolution, and everything that happened and all the atrocities, if you asked me to summarize all of it into one thing, he says, It's that man forgot God and replaced him with ideology.
Sorry to steal your thunder on that.
I'm a Solzhenitsyn buff too.
It's amazing to see that you've got Solzhenitsyn and Nietzsche.
They're both looking at the same thing.
One at the beginning and then one at the end.
Solzhenitsyn gave a speech, the Harvard commencement address.
Gosh, I love the speech.
79?
Where's Conor?
I need Conor around here.
76, 77, 78.
Everybody needs to watch the speech.
Yeah, so it was delivered in Russian, and it was outdoors, and it rained, and whatever.
And everybody thought it was going to be this, like, the USSR is bad, the West is good, and Harvard is the leader of the West.
It was a eulogy of the West.
It was, you have become materialistic, all you care about is the here and now, you're totally secular, you've totally cut yourself off from spiritual life, and all you care about is getting your next product, these atomized, atavistic relationships that you have, you treat people like commodities here, and he really just came in and destroyed, destroyed what we think of as the West.
And obviously he was listened to a little bit.
People were just kind of shocked.
And he gets this pitter-patter of, wait, what's going on?
Yeah, and I want to find out the year that he gave that speech.
It was actually really important.
Because it was right when the Soviet Union was falling or about to fall, whatever.
The point is that people were...
The end was kind of in sight.
Yeah, and people were expecting a typical kind of dissident speech from another country.
Right.
Like, I was there.
It's bad.
Instead, it's like, no, no, no.
What's there is now coming here.
And we could go through many other thinkers.
Nietzsche and Solzhenitsyn obviously stand out.
So you asked the question, how did we get here?
I mean, the cult of progress over the last 500 years.
And that's not to say that improvements and adjustments have not been necessary nor beneficial to the human experience.
Right, because I always hear people say this is, it was started by the Industrial Revolution.
No, I think that's wrong.
I think that's stupid.
And I think the Industrial Revolution fuels it in many ways.
It exaggerated a lot of it.
We're talking about 300 years prior.
Yeah, we're talking about, again, we go back to Machiavelli, and then after Machiavelli, you had the social contract theorists.
And the one that we overemphasize in conservative tradition is John Locke.
Yes.
The one we hate is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, rightfully got everything, basically everything wrong.
My favorite part of Rousseau is when he says, you know, if we can just go back to the natural world where all the animals are because they're in such harmony.
I'm like, have you spent any time watching animals in the natural world?
Right.
And Rousseau was a super hypocrite and spent a lot of time in Geneva, Switzerland, doing things he shouldn't have done.
But he appeals to young people because he's super romantic in how he writes.
He was a novelist.
I mean, these guys are dreamers.
Yeah, and he led to the French Revolution.
But the one we don't talk about...
And we like that, but I don't like when those people are in charge.
Well, obviously.
I mean, yeah, I mean, you get Robespierre if you actually apply Rousseau.
You get the actual, and remember, even the word terrorism, right, this comes from the French Revolution because we must institute terrorism to go after the counter-revolutionary.
And look, I'm by no means an expert on this, but I've studied enough to have an informed opinion.
And people like Matt Peterson or Ryan Williams from Claremont would be much more articulate on this than I. But I agree with them, which is there was something that happened as soon as you have Machiavelli's political stake in the ground and then followed quickly, not by the Industrial Revolution, but by the Scientific Revolution.
Yes.
important thing that we have to focus on, which is the science becoming an actual thing, which is largely thanks to Sir Francis Bacon, who, by the way, was a Christian.
It's debated, but he was a Christian.
Sir Isaac Newton, who was a devout Christian, wrote more about the prophecies of Isaiah than of actually the natural world.
But then you had philosophers that started to wrestle with this question.
Well, then if we can dominate the natural world, what good is this religion?
I'm talking about people like Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, who weren't avowed atheists, but then eventually the man himself, who was, you know, obviously the most famous atheist, basically, who led to all the rest of them.
My goodness, I'm forgetting his name.
He's from England.
I'll think of it in a sec, but sorry, go ahead.
Not Mill, but...
No, no, not Mill or Bentham.
I'll think of it in a sec, yeah.
But anyway, so then you get, and of course you have the new atheist today, right?
But Hitchens and all these guys and Harris, they all come from this tradition.
Right, and so, and Dawkins.
And so you have this situation then where it is the here and now, it's the natural world, it's what's going on, what's in front of my face is the only thing that matters, right?
And this is summed up, there's a great meme that's been going around that I love.
It's sort of the Modernist thinking versus medieval thinking.
Have you seen this one?
Yes.
And it's modernist thinking is birth, life, and there's like this huge compendium of the spectrum of life.
And then death is like another line and it just says question mark afterwards.
Where versus medieval thinking was birth, then life, very quickly.
Well actually first is knit in my mother's womb.
Amazing.
Birth, then life, which are kind of like equal.
And then eternity in heaven or hell.
And that's this huge, broad, never-ending stretch.
I remember you sent me that.
We essentially killed eternity.
And that is what Nietzsche was talking about.
You get rid of God, you get rid of eternity.
You get rid of eternity, you get rid of judgment.
You get rid of judgment, then all you're going to be worrying about is, number one, the here and now.
You don't care about what happens afterwards.
But you also have this situation...
Where, and you can see this throughout the world today, where it's like secularists keep trying to make their own religiosities of science, of the climate, of whatever it is.
That's right.
Veganism.
David Hume, by the way.
Yeah, David Hume, there you go.
It's so obvious.
Can't remember every name, but I remember a lot about him.
So you're right.
And so this is where the founders were brilliant and they weren't taken seriously.
So the founders knew that the balance between the benefits of the Enlightenment and the anchoring of antiquity was the only way that human civilization could actually explore.
Right, because you get...
And this is why it's so great that you have both Jefferson and Hamilton.
Yes.
You're basically there.
They're kind of...
So Jefferson goes all in on the French Revolution.
And then Hamilton's like...
Sort of, yeah.
You know what I mean.
Yeah, I mean, the letters between him and Madison are the most...
Right, and then you've got Hamilton out there saying, no, I want a king, I want a monarchy, we want all of this.
And so between the two, you do get that balance.
Yeah, and Madison split the middle.
The most interesting letters are the most famous, Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine going back and forth on this, right?
Where Thomas Paine was just like a revolutionary shopper.
He liked the American Revolution, French Revolution.
Edmund Burke was like, I understand the American Revolution, hated the French Revolution.
So let's take John Adams, for example.
Big John Adams fan.
He didn't write the US Constitution, but I was heavily instrumental in the American founding.
The guy spoke fluent Hebrew.
He could read Hebrew.
There's a reason why he said that the American project, basically, or the Constitution was made holy for a moral and religious people.
It's totally inadequate for the people of any other.
Right, because you would have had, in the society they were writing for, you had a society that was based around the Bible in many ways.
It was the centerpiece of all existence.
You know, anything, any dispute, you would go back, you're quoting it.
Many of the original meetings are held in church halls for the revolution.
Yes.
Everybody sort of knew this was generally the shared set of moral beliefs.
Yeah, let's just be practical about this, though, for our audience, right?
So the Overton window is a great way to look at this, but in 1800s America, people say, oh, it's terrible.
There was slavery, even though it was on the way out.
It was terrible.
Women couldn't vote, even though that was being solved and fixed.
But yes, there were adjustments that obviously need to be made.
But on the other side, what are the negatives over social progress in 200 years?
I'll tell you how.
I'll tell you some of them.
Where I talk to parents and they tell me, yeah, my 15-year-old is sexually active and I don't know what to do about it.
Yeah.
Or how about this, where like a majority of young men in America are addicted to internet pornography.
Billie Eilish just came out and said that she's been, I don't think she said she was addicted, but she said she was watching.
Starting at age 11.
And by the way, that's why she's been so quasi-demonic in all of her songs.
And that she's been watching pornography since you're 11 years old.
And we know what it does to the brain.
We know what it does to the individual.
We know what it does to, you know, neuroplasticity.
We know all those things.
And so this was the founding father's prediction, which is, and Thomas Jefferson even talked about it, which is, okay, you're going to have the ability to do all this stuff.
You'll have Tinder.
You'll have OnlyFans.
Yeah, exactly.
All this stuff.
What's to stop you?
And basically, modernity says, nothing, go for it.
Yeah, you get the most depressed, suicidal, drug-addicted, alcohol, obese, least productive, miserable generation in history.
And it's amazing, too, because we live, even, you know, with everything else going on right now, can you think of a society that's more affluent than ours?
Yeah, that's where...
Materially affluent.
Now, if you want to go down to, like, where based conservatives are, we're like, so what?
Exactly.
And that's all of a sudden a thought crime.
Now, I'm not dismissing grocery stores full of food.
I think that's a beautiful thing.
I love markets.
How do you have grocery stores full of food?
Which is a great thing, no doubt.
And obviously, take COVID out of the equation.
We have a jobs market that is generally very, very good.
We have a standard of living that's beyond...
The average middle class person today has things that the monarchs Well, yeah.
How about like electricity?
Of the 1500s.
I couldn't dream of.
Like ibuprofen.
Couldn't dream of.
Just like I have a headache.
Good luck trying to solve that 500 years ago.
But at the same time, the psychiatrist's office are full.
The therapist's office are full.
You can barely get them.
The morgues are full.
Everyone's getting on some medication or another.
So we're depressed.
We're upset.
Suicides are on the rise.
And yet we also live in such a time of abundance.
How do you square it?
Well, I think they're directly correlated, though.
I mean, I think that, first of all, the abundance was made possible quicker because we decided to forsake a lot of moral guardrails, because we decided to re-domicile industrial plants to China and not look after our fellow countrymen, because we decided to act as if Another screen is going to solve all of our problems while not disciplining or actually raising our children.
Because we never, ever wanted to have a conversation about children being born out of wedlock or fathers not in the home or the destruction of the church or the nonstop propaganda campaign against American Christianity, which is everywhere.
Who needs any of those things?
Right, exactly.
That doesn't contribute to the GDP. What I think is interesting, though, is that—and this is why Jordan Peterson was so popular.
And I think people get Jordan wrong.
And I have a lot of respect for him.
I know people on the far right don't like him.
I don't know if you're a Jordan fan or not.
I've heard some weird criticisms.
I think he's super smart.
I like him a lot.
He's a friend.
No, no, no.
I like Jordan, but he is quite Canadian.
I'll put it that way.
Yeah, and again, I really have no patience for a lot of the criticisms towards him.
I'll see things from him like, I have all my vaccinations and I can't believe they're not allowing me to...
Jordan, you literally write about not complying with tyrannical regimes.
That's probably fair.
But here's where I think why Jordan got really popular.
Don't get me wrong.
I've gone to see Jordan.
I have his book.
I've interviewed him.
But let me tell you why I think he got popular.
And why I think he resonated is that he pinpointed people were miserable.
Yes.
And he gave people a reasonable platform to believe in ancient texts and religious structure.
Yes.
Where all of a sudden they were like, oh, so, but by the way, I believe every word of the Bible, totally true, inerrancy of scripture, right?
I believe in Jonah the whale to the sea being parted, the whole thing.
It's not allegorical.
It's literal.
Okay.
It's true, okay?
And you believe the same as a Catholic, or you should.
Because he literally was part of the Bible.
No, of course it was.
Obviously.
Absolutely.
But the point is that Jordan didn't make a claim on that.
Instead, he said, what is the deeper philosophical, psychological reason you should care about this?
And so explain to me how people writing the Bible thousands and thousands of years before any of this science or psychology or et cetera was studied, and they got it all right.
It's because it's the word of God.
I'll give you an example.
So let's talk about the creation story.
Right.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
So it says very specifically that God created ex nihilo out of nothing, right?
It's a Hebrew word.
Yes.
So one of the ex nihilos was that God hovered over the darkness of the earth.
That's like a weird thing to say, right?
Yes.
New science shows the earth was completely dark at some point.
That precisely what it says, that no matter what your creation story is, Big Bang or whatever, that there was darkness over all the earth, meaning clouds covered the entire earth.
There was no light.
Right, so my, I mean, I even remember being a kid reading about, you know, so I'm reading The Seven Days of Creation, and...
Well, it's a day being rest.
But then I always remember going to my teacher and saying, well, what is a day to God?
Yeah, and so this is hotly debated.
I'm a literalist.
So you're a literalist.
I believe a day is a day, and I could go into the actual Hebrew of what a day is.
But if you believe it's— Meaning a 24-hour.
That's correct.
But it's actually completely irrelevant.
What I also get though, and I find amazing, is every time, and let me just get to the point, is every time we uncover something new about the creation of the planet, it fits.
Yes, that's right.
Every single time, and even the stages that it goes through, every single one fits.
Everything from quarantining someone who's sick, that's one of the Levitical laws.
Washing your hands before you eat, that's one of the Levitical laws.
Right.
These aren't like, you know, hey, oh, this is crazy stuff.
No, no, really.
Like, don't do these things.
This is unclean.
For a reason.
Yes, exactly.
And so— But before germ theory was even— Before germ theory was even entertained, by the way— Thousands of years.
In the 1400s and 1500s, you had people that were bloodletting against Levitical law.
Right.
And if they would have just followed what the Bible was saying, the Old Testament was saying, it very well could have been informative.
There's actually a lot of that in natural health when it comes to dietary standards.
They also point that out as well.
Well, if you eat kosher, you will live a better life.
There's no doubt.
Now, it's more expensive.
It doesn't taste as good.
It's twice the price and half the taste is the joke.
But you will be healthy.
Totally.
Your body was designed for a specific type of food.
If you don't eat shrimps, mollusks, oysters, or sea urchins, Every study shows that's way better for you.
It's full of bacteria, it's hard to digest, but also just like putting dairy on that of a meat.
It's not necessarily great for you.
Cheeseburgers are actually way worse for you than hamburgers.
I could go on and on and on, right?
The dietary standards, how to clean it beforehand.
And so anyway, you asked the question, how is it that it's right?
Well, it's because it actually happened and that this book built everything that we know.
So we took that book, we, you know, the West, took that book and said, we're going to put this on the shelf.
We're going to let accumulate dust.
We're going to let the spiderwebs crawl all over it.
Well, you sure you can go to church on Sunday and do whatever, pray to your cross or whatever.
We are going to be over here building a much greater and stronger and more powerful.
And again, that's why I pinpoint not the Industrial Revolution, but the Scientific Revolution.
The mismanagement of the scientific inquiry into the natural world is why we're in the mess that we're in.
And that's where you get Hegel.
That's where you get John Dewey.
That's where you get the German historicist.
That's where you get all the atrocities in the 20th century.
That's where you get Fauci, the CDC, Pfizer.
It all comes from the scientific revolution.
If you look at the beginnings of the scientific revolution, much of this was done.
Sir Francis Bacon.
It's Christians.
There's priests that are involved in Mendel.
There's many priests that are involved in this.
And there's also, even in Darwin, to an extent.
Darwin was a different guy, but you're right.
He was misapplied to a lot of different things.
Right, but there's this idea of we're learning more about God's creation, right?
And you can kind of see that throughout the writings.
Yes, totally.
But they never saw it as a challenge.
So there's a number.
I'll get the exact number.
So when would you say that that sort of change in thinking took place?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
So just to reinforce the point, every beautiful piece of music had Solia Dei, basically, I'm getting the Latin word wrong, glory to God at the top of every music, right?
Whether it be Bach or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Chopin, whoever, it was all glory be to God.
You better mention Friedrich Chopin.
Huh?
You better mention Chopin.
Of course.
And so where did it change?
That's an interesting question.
The French Revolution played a huge role, more so than the American Revolution.
So the American Revolution gets misread by modern-day leftists as this kind of liberal moment that we realize that we must throw the shackles off of everything before us and create anew.
And the founders never mentioned any of that.
In fact, the founding was more— You don't have the guillotines in Philadelphia and New York.
Well, yeah, but also just look at the texts.
Everything about the text was anchoring towards tradition.
One of the course of human events comes necessary for one people that is all the political bands that has tied them to another.
Right.
It's right there.
One of the course of human events.
And deriving from the equal and just powers as separate stations.
Separate stations among them are the laws of nature and nature is God.
Laws of nature and nature is God.
They went to great pains to tie the American Revolution to the past.
Yes!
This is not, we are not throwing the baby out with the bathwater here.
They appealed to the supreme ruler of the earth.
That was a direct quote Jefferson put.
And this was Jefferson's challenge, which is why I think every school should have a Jefferson statue.
Because what he did was so unbelievably remarkable.
He was able to mix the immediate with the eternal.
He was able to mix the prudent and the practical with the everlasting.
They still have, if you go to Philadelphia, it's at Fifth and Market.
You can actually go to the building where his apartment was.
Oh, is that right?
Where he wrote.
So you know Philadelphia better than I do.
I've been in Independence Hall a couple of times.
Yeah, and it's not far from New York.
Which is where it was signed, right?
Yeah, that's not right.
Signed, but where it's actually written, which I always thought was really cool.
And not many people know about it either.
There was a lust amongst the Thomas Paine types to go even further on the declaration.
Of course.
But Thomas Jefferson was able to balance it.
And Paine gets in very quickly into radical liberalism.
Oh yeah, totally.
Right afterwards.
Well, Paine was a radical liberal in a lot of ways.
He was a revolutionary and we should thank him for stirring up the revolutionary fervor at the same time.
You know, you gotta have a lot of respect for how the founders kind of cooled that down and struck that balance.
And this is the misreading of the founding, which is that the founding was nothing more than the beginning of a multi-hundred-year progressive movement.
Right, because- Does that make sense?
And that's the position a lot of conservatives take.
Because when we talk about revolutionary politics or revolutionary thinking or revolutionary ideologies, We never really talk about the American Revolution in those terms, because inherently I think we know that it's not, that it wasn't something like that.
Well, yeah, and I've heard a historian say this, Thomas West.
I don't think agrees with this.
It's more of a separation than it was a revolution.
Precisely.
And I don't want to put words in the great Thomas West's mouth, but that's probably right, I think, because it was more just kind of like, hey, can we go our own way type thing?
French Revolution wasn't as, let's say, precisely written.
No, that was a little different.
Yeah, they changed the time in the calendar, purged the non-believers.
They ended up killing their own guy, Rob Spierre.
The priests were all wiped out.
Notre Dame was converted into a temple of reason.
The cult of reason replaces the church.
So Christianity is completely outlawed.
I thought I knew a lot about the French Revolution.
I didn't know that.
Completely outlawed.
So the church is outlawed.
Priests are executed.
They're put into the guillotine, literally the actual chopping block.
I didn't know that.
I didn't know that they converted Notre Dame.
They convert Notre Dame into a temple to the cult of reason.
Oh, I love that.
And they have holidays.
No, I did know that.
They realize that they need to have some type of worship, right?
Of course.
Because they understand, right?
They do understand that there is this, they call it, you know, the God-shaped hole, right, within the human psyche.
And so they replace that with the cult of reason, and they even convert it into God.
Yeah, and so we as Christians, again- I grew up experiencing all the different Christian stereotypes, like big megachurch pastors screaming at you, asking for money or whatever.
And, you know, I think I turned a lot of people off.
The stereotype of the propaganda campaign, obviously not it being in essence true.
But the Bible's the word of God, and it's how you should live your life.
There's not one thing anyone listening right now is experiencing.
The Bible does not have a roadmap on how to bless you.
Not one thing.
And what's amazing, too, is every single time that humans have tried to create their own Bible, it has failed.
Well, yeah.
I mean, so this is where Nietzsche tried and it drove him mad.
Yes.
This is why it drove him mad.
Yes, because he said, I have to go create my own values.
Good luck.
Here's a pen and paper.
What do you got, Mr.
Nietzsche?
And it drove him insane.
And Stalin tried the same.
And then also the thought that he would never be able to figure out a way to get a mass acceptance of those values throughout history.
Or what you have is just a copy-paste of what the Bible says and then relabel it under some weird pagan atheistic reason thing.
But here's the problem.
Humanism.
Unitarianism.
This is a problem, is that people won't accept it if they don't think it's divinely inspired.
Precisely.
It's a very important thing.
And so, you know, I tell people all the time, they say, Charlie, why do you honor the Sabbath?
I say, because God tells me to.
And they say, what do you mean?
Because it's commanded of me.
I said, that's it.
I said, if you believe God told you to do something, would you do it?
Right.
And they say, well, it doesn't make logical sense.
First of all, it actually does.
All the science shows that taking one day of rest is actually really good for you.
Have you ever gone and seen any of the illuminated manuscripts in Europe that they still have?
Some of the preserved Bibles from the medieval times.
I've seen them.
So I went to...
You're probably not a Geneva Bible fan.
The...
But no, I did go see the Book of Kells at Trinity College in Dublin.
So these were the Bibles that were written during the Middle Ages when the only literacy was in the priest class.
And so when they're writing this, it's this beautiful...
And yes, the title page of each book as it begins is...
Each one of itself a masterpiece.
But even the flowing calligraphy that you see, these people actually truly believed that what they were writing was each stroke of the pen was perfect because it was the Word of God, period.
And so...
This is the struggle ahead of us right now, right?
Which is that so many people have believed that God doesn't exist or it's some sort of weird Eastern meditative God, which I guess is better than believing in no God.
But there's a huge difference between the God of the East and the God of the West.
Massive difference.
Massive.
They believe the God is in the nature.
We believe God created nature, right?
There's a lot of differences.
There's also a lot of...
Like, when I lived in China, you know, you would talk about, you know, and even after all these years...
A highly atheistic society.
Well, yes and no, because even after so many years...
But very superstitious.
Yeah.
So, like, even after all the years of communism, there's still this...
And it's a...
Total hodgepodge.
From the Analects and like from all of that.
Traditional, yeah, the I Ching, etc.
But it's very transactional.
That's basically what it comes down to.
Yeah, and this is one of the reasons why...
What can I get out of God?
This is why gambling is a bigger deal in Asian culture.
Yes.
It is.
It's that you are going to play your odds up against karma or the universe.
Oh my gosh.
It's a big deal.
Numerology in Asia is way, way beyond what we've ever seen.
But that all kind of plays into fate and karma and all these other dynamics where the God of the West is an empowering God.
The God of the West is a personal God.
Yeah, it's not like...
You can't...
And a triune one, by the way.
You can't play your odds with the kind of...
Well, no, no.
Instead, it's God that says...
You can't, like, trick your way into it.
Or it's like, no slave, no Greek, no Jew.
We are all one in Jesus Christ, right?
Where it says in Philippians 4, 6, where it says, do not be anxious.
But instead, through Christ Jesus and prayer, thanksgiving, and supplication, make your request known to God, and the Spirit of the Lord, which transcends all understanding, by the way, will comfort you and guide you.
And then it goes on to say, whatever is true, whatever is good, whatever is noble.
This is why it's amazing that one thing that I've realized, even as I've gotten older, I've got kids now, skin in the game, you know, it's like you, a married...
And when you have something to lose, it's, I'm so thankful that God gave us prayer.
I'm so thankful that we have that.
That as a gift where it's just this outlet where you can go to and say, I am at my limit.
I am at my extent.
I realize I'm at my extent.
I have nowhere else to go.
And then boom, there it is.
Yeah, so one of the, I think it's in Colossians.
Yeah, I think.
Because the difference is, are you going to then give up your hands and say, God, I need you to take care of this.
I am not enough.
I can't get this done.
And just from the pure scientific clinical data, it shows you're actually a happier person, a more productive person, a more thankful person if you actually even go through the process of prayer.
Not to mention that prayer is actually an immediate and personal conversation with the living God.
And so you ask the question, how did the West get here, right?
And we keep trying to recreate it, by the way.
We say, oh, we'll do some type of meditative act.
Which, again, is better than...
You know, when this is all type yoga, right, of course, always has all these different...
It's better than doing, like, New Zealand orgies or whatever, right?
25, not 26.
I feel so bad for Guy 26, by the way.
Yeah, but then at what point does the meditative yoga circuit all of a sudden say...
This is how God wants you to live.
And then they're never going to say that, right?
Instead, it's all about centering yourself.
Well, then what's your morality?
How would you organize society?
A lot of it is based on this idea that if you just become more one with yourself, then you're...
It's incredibly narcissistic.
You essentially, like God becomes through and from you.
So here's another difference between Buddhism and Christianity, right?
So Buddhism believes at the highest level of Buddhism, you don't talk.
I've been to Tibet, I've been to the monasteries, and they have these incredible debates where they're looking at each other, and they will clap with their hands at each other, and yet they're not actually speaking.
In Christianity, the two creation stories, God created the heavens and the earth, and the beginning was the Word, the Word was God, the Word was with God, right?
Is logos, which is the word for speech.
Right.
God's spoken to existence.
We are the speaking beings.
At the highest levels of existence and earthly existence, we are beings that are reasoning, speaking, and communicating.
In the highest level of existence in Buddhism, you shut up.
It's a big difference.
You turn yourself over to what exactly?
The universe.
Right.
But also, obviously, you're not winning people over.
You're not communicating.
You're not reasoning.
It's very sheltered.
It's like retreating.
I think there's a place for that.
I think resting is obviously important.
But the highest level of Buddhist philosophy is that you then ascent to the highest level of nirvana.
Right?
Right.
Through that.
Where we believe the total opposite.
And that's how you're breaking the cycle.
Yeah.
We believe Jesus came to us.
We believe nirvana, whatever, heaven, which we believe is a real place, has a nonstop ticket where Jesus said, here you go, I paid the whole price for you.
You don't have to go sit down and shut up and go to some hill and clap at each other and wear an orange robe.
No offense to anyone that might do that that listened to our show.
She might be a nice person.
Whatever.
The point is that it's totally different.
Here's a ticket, free admission, go free.
As it says in John 8, 38, the truth will set you free.
That through Jesus Christ, we are free.
And so when you have that type of religion, Take it back a little bit.
At the center of your society, right?
When you have that type of empowering ideology at the center of your society.
Because, of course, you go to Asia, they've all basically done away with Buddhism.
I mean, that's not...
But there's a lot of different variations of forms of that.
Well, there are.
I mean, you could go to, you know, there's Tibetan Buddhism, there's Chinese Buddhism, there's the Buddhism of Southwest Asia, et cetera, et cetera.
And I've been to these places.
I've spent time with them.
I've met these people.
I was fascinated in many ways by, you know, we went to the Jade Buddha Temple.
I actually lived near the Jade Buddha Temple in Shanghai.
But...
It just seems to be missing something, right?
And what it really is missing, what I've always found, is that direct personal connection that you have with your creator.
Yes, that's right.
Not creation, right?
We are of creation.
That's a big difference.
But that I am directly connected to my creator, that is the king of the universe.
Well, let's start with how Genesis 1 starts.
God created the heavens and the earth.
The heavens and the earth are not God.
No.
God created the heavens and the earth.
He is above the heavens and the earth.
Precisely.
It's a big difference.
Supreme being.
Yes, he is totally above.
So if you are any other...
It's like we had this...
At our parish, they just started this new, and I don't know if we're going to be going there anymore, if they still keep doing this, but they said, oh, we're going to have a racial justice committee.
You should leave.
And this is going to be the, and you go, and you can take part once a week.
I can give you so many verses, it'll make their heads up.
And I just turned to Tanya, and we're sitting there, I'm like, look around the room right now.
This is racial justice, right, if that's something you're concerned with.
You've got every single ethnicity under this roof, under God, right, worshiping Christ together.
What do we need a committee for, right?
This is the supreme being.
We are the lessers.
It's simple, right?
And to me, quite frankly, if you're someone who's so concerned with the differences of people, you know, I really question whether or not you're putting Christ at the center of this.
Yeah, it's replacement religion.
Absolutely.
That means that there's something wrong.
This is a competing...
Yeah, of course.
Absolutely a competing theology.
Yeah, and we see this with the cult of Greta Thunberg, and we see this with Fauci.
These are all replacement religions.
And the church fathers had to deal with this?
Yes.
Yes.
In 300 AD, 200 AD, et cetera.
Precisely.
We see the exact same thing.
Yeah, Justinian and every major, you know, Roman, Constantine dealt with the same thing in like 320 or whatever.
Same sort of thing.
So, yeah, you asked the question, how did the West get here?
We mismanaged the scientific revolution.
There were beautiful fruits of the scientific revolution.
Admitting the heliocentric theory of gravitational pull was a good thing for humanity.
Catholic Church minorly mismanaged that, but that's a separate issue for a different time, right?
Also debatable how it was managed.
I said slightly mismanaged.
I think that the characterization is actually unfair.
He wasn't executed.
He went to like a villa with his students.
But still, the Catholic Church was wrong and they tried to cover it up.
That's irrefutable.
Yeah, but the way that they defended it was wrong.
You don't have to defend them on this.
It's okay.
My point is that every man-made institution or every man-run institution is going to have issues.
That's fine.
I think it's sometimes used unfairly, but I'd still yield with the place that it was a mistake.
The point is that then in the 1600s, early 1700s, we started to see man's all of a sudden domination over nature, right?
So the scientific revolution changed the game.
Right.
You get to the point where, you know, we've gone from...
We're no longer victims of nature.
You know, we're agrarians, and then we, you know, we start being able to do some trade, and hey, maybe I found some shiny rocks over here, so I'll trade you some of those.
But now, suddenly, it's, you know, now you're cooking with gas.
Yeah, and so then you started to see – there's no mystery than why you started to see philosophers posit, well, if we can dominate nature, why do we need this Christianity thing, right?
It all came at the same time, obviously.
And then it kind of hit this apex point where the Industrial Revolution was – But again, the industrial revolution only happened because of the scientific revolution.
It does not happen one without the other.
And then, yeah, you get people like Marx who says religion is the opiate of the masses.
And you get Hegel who argues about a new way to view history.
And you get this completely different paradigm.
But throughout the entire thing, It's kind of been obvious.
I mean, it's easy to play like, oh, they coulda, shoulda, woulda.
But definitely in the last 50 years, I think conservatives have always been on the right side of the left's progress for the West.
Meaning, like, our idea of right is like, we're going to take the most right position of the left wing.
Yeah, exactly.
It's like, okay, maybe we don't do Drag Queen Story Hour.
Who's to say that children can't do sexual reassignment stuff?
Well, of course we should have universal health care, but we have to manage it properly.
Or do it market way.
Market universal health care.
Or it's like, you know, it's one thing to say we shouldn't have like no new immigrants.
Let's just have the right ones or whatever.
Right.
And some of these are reasonable things.
Some of them are not.
When you look at decay, we should have been pushing in the opposite direction.
Right.
And I think there's this whole new renaissance around these ideas because people like you and me, Similar to Nietzsche, I never thought I'd say that, are seeing the absolute unraveling of everything around us.
And we really don't care what you call us anymore.
We've gotten to a point now where we realize that, you know, are we living through, I mean, we're clearly living through a collapse cycle, right?
Of course.
Bringing up, you know, a lot of these different theories on fourth turning, etc., about what exactly kind of cycle we're in, and we're in that.
So the question then becomes, when you look at other collapses, when you look at other societies that have gone through this, other civilizations, which ones managed it properly, which ones decided to actually take, you know, can you fight history, I think is a question right now.
Well, I mean, the Romans are always a good example, and the Romans splintered and had the Eastern Roman Empire for a pretty long time, and That fell apart eventually, but that was a pretty big success.
I mean, the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium, right?
It went on for over a thousand years.
- Yeah, and it's hard to say the Ottoman Empire was Byzantium, but that's probably true to an extent, meaning that as soon as that absolved, you know, with the fall of Constantinople and whatever year that was, where the Turks finally won. - 1453. - Yeah, the fall of Hagia Sophia, where the Turks finally won. - 1453. - Yeah, the fall of Hagia Sophia, and it's It's a long siege.
They tried many times, they finally succeeded.
But yeah, so the-- - I don't think we've forgotten about that.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, Rome didn't send reinforcements in time.
That's a different conversation for a different time.
It is, yeah.
And it's true.
Rome could have bailed out Constantinople.
Well, this is a huge issue between the Catholics and the Orthodox right now today is Constantinople.
Yeah, I mean, Rome could have fixed the whole issue.
One flotilla of boats could have.
Easily.
Yeah.
And they were counting on it.
It never happened.
Or they, like, stayed at bay or something.
There was some weird political thing there.
I don't remember the details.
It ends up being a lot more—and this is something Tanya and I talk about.
My wife is orthodox, and I've said that many times.
But, you know, one thing we talk about is that it did end up being much more of a political separation than anything else.
Right, and it wasn't a good thing that the Turks took over Constantinople.
Still isn't to this day, obviously.
Hagia Sophia is still a church, by the way.
Just for the record.
Regardless of what they say.
No matter what they say.
Isn't it interesting how they always want to change churches to mosques?
It's really weird.
We don't try to turn mosques to churches.
No, we don't.
Well, it's like, I was up in, I was in Toronto, and of course it was in Toronto, and we saw this Episcopalian church, because of course it was Episcopalian, and it was with the refugees welcome, and they have the crescent moon.
And we're there with Tanya, and she goes, You know, if you tried to do that to a mosque and said, Christians welcome and put a cross in front of, imagine you go to Middle East and put that off, what would happen?
Your hand caught off immediately.
But that's tolerance becoming your own death.
But then I was saying, so I was saying we should go and we should get like, you know, like a paintbrush or something.
And then, you know, underneath the crescent moon, right?
Refugees welcome to learn the gospel.
Yeah, that's right.
Everyone's welcome to learn the gospel.
Because it's a church, right?
That's the point of churches, is to teach the gospel and further the teachings.
So you ask where this goes, we don't know.
The unraveling of empires can be messy.
We are an empire.
It's just the way it is.
Yeah, I mean...
I mean, there's two separate questions there, obviously, but...
I'm really not in the prediction business with that stuff.
It's exhausting.
The way that I look at it is the way to manage it is, you know...
Okay, are we going to be an empire going forward, or are we not?
And if we're not, what do we do to reconstitute ourselves in a way that is most beneficial for the people who live here now?
The problem with the American Empire is that we never admitted we were one.
Right.
And that was the weirdest thing.
It's like, oh yeah, we're not an empire.
Meanwhile, we're going to have bases in every corner of the world.
There's some interesting theories out there about, you know, whether or not the British Empire just kind of continued through America.
Yeah, through the Anglosphere.
You know, through the Anglosphere.
And we still kind of defer to England on a lot of, like, of this foreign policy, like, stuff.
Yeah, I don't know about that.
And it's an interesting take.
That's probably too deep.
It's an interesting take.
But yeah, I mean, the...
The thing that people can do is win where you live.
Yes.
And that's the most important—I mean, so we're trying to do that here in Arizona.
Yes.
Right?
Is that just focus local, and the rest might work, it might not, because that actually is something that can be preserved.
Even smaller than that, even go back to, hey, we're going to have ordered families again.
Yes.
We should push policies that—we're not going to make decisions for people, but— We can say as a society, hey, society works better when we have these things called families.
Yeah, we're unafraid to make moral claims about the good of existence.
This is good morally, and it's also good socially.
And civilization.
It is better, right?
And if the GDP has to go down just a little bit...
Here's the crazy thing, it won't.
It might go down like half a percent.
Great, okay?
So we have families and people are happy.
So, yeah, I mean...
- Yeah, I mean, you look at this town that just got hit with this, was it Mayfield, I believe it was called? - Kentucky. - In Kentucky.
And I mean, it's like a Mayberry kind of town, right?
But I was talking to somebody who lived near there and he said, you know, but it's just like one of these other towns where it was, we had this amazing community at one point and then over the last 40, 50 years, it's just been gutted and the people there were already living in poverty, just absolute poverty.
- Yeah, well, I know we have to wrap Amfest.com, everybody, if you want to go to AmericaFest.
Jack, this is your show, so you've got to end.
I do have to end it, don't I? Charlie, where can people follow you?
If you're listening, make sure you subscribe to the Charlie Kirk Show podcast.
Check out Charlie.
He's got some little rinky-dink podcast over there that people follow with.
But in all seriousness, Charlie, what's the biggest thing you're looking forward to for the next year or the next three years?
I will say this very shortly.
I'm looking forward to more people getting based.
Love it.
Folks, Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec, you know where to find us.
▲
Export Selection