Roosh V - Daryush Valizadeh - Roosh Hour #67 - Michael Witcoff (Brother Augustine)

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July 24, 2021 - Roosh V - Daryush Valizadeh

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Roosh Hour #67 - Michael Witcoff (Brother Augustine)

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	Okay, welcome to Ruch Hour number 67.
	I have a special guest today, Brother Augustine, whose name is Michael Wickoff.
	Can I call you Michael during the stream today?
	Sure.
	Sure.
	And thank you for having me on.
	Sure.
	So for everyone, I have a list of questions.
	But before we get started, for people, Michael, who don't know you, who are not as familiar with your work as I am, I'm sure you've answered this question a million times as I have.
	Can you tell people a little bit about how you got into the Orthodox Church?
	Sure.
	Sure.
	So I was a, well, I grew up a Jewish atheist, liberal, not like I'd thought through it all or read the Communist Manifesto, but just kind of by default, you know, I went to a very liberal college, UC Santa Barbara.
	Shout out to my gauchos out there.
	And through a long and complicated series of events, I ended up going to a Protestant church and converting to Protestantism.
	And it was a Wesleyan church.
	And I went there for about a year and a half until I started realizing that some of the things they were doing there were not in the Bible.
	So, for example, I went up to the head pastor at one point, not trying to be in a confrontation, just trying to ask an innocent question.
	I said, so how come you guys say you're a Bible-believing church, but you guys are doing this Zionism thing where you think Israel and the scriptures means this state in the Middle East and having female pastors?
	Like, how do you reconcile that with the Bible?
	And the head pastor said, because this is my church and we do things my way here.
	And so this was a very bad answer.
	This is a very well-known guy.
	This is a guy who was in Trump's evangelical circle, you know, rubbed shoulders with the head honchos.
	Michelle Bachman came once.
	I had a conversation with her.
	Senator Michelle Bachman came to our parish once.
	She thought I was secret service because I had a suit on and sunglasses.
	And so after that, I started, you know, my mind and my heart opened to looking for something more traditional.
	And I was talking about this a little bit on Facebook, and a guy who's called Neon Revolt, who has a very big following on Gab, had a following on Facebook too before we both left Facebook.
	He was actually the first one to mention to me, you should look into Orthodoxy because Neon is Orthodox.
	You know, he's doing a lot of, sharing a lot of Protestant stuff now, but he's a baptized Orthodox.
	So I had no idea what it was.
	And I Googled Orthodox Christian Church nearby my town, and it turned out there was one like four minutes away.
	So I went and I checked out.
	It was a Vespers, you know, the Saturday night service, usually on Saturday night.
	And as a Protestant, I was horrified by the icons and the Theotokos and hearing most holy Theotokos save us.
	And, you know, all of my anti-Catholic objections that I had learned in the Protestant world kind of kicked in when I saw the Orthodox stuff because I didn't know the difference at all.
	But I could tell there was something there.
	It felt like stepping into an ancient world, a different world, like ancient Byzantium, basically.
	I'd never seen anything like it.
	I never heard anything like it.
	I had never smelled anything like it.
	I never smelled the incense.
	You know, I had the call no-man father objection and the graven images objection.
	I had all those Protestant things to kind of work through still, but I could tell there was something there.
	And then I discovered Father Josiah Trenham on YouTube.
	And I thought, this guy has something special.
	I got to meet this guy.
	So I drove to Riverside, California, to St. Andrews, which is where his church is.
	And after I had to basically get other people to watch his kids just so I could talk to him one-on-one for a few minutes.
	And we sat in his office together.
	I talked to him about, at the time, my book on the Masons and Their Lives was not published yet.
	I asked him, hey, how should I, how can I make this book most useful to the kingdom of God?
	And he said, well, the very least you should become Orthodox first before you publish anything.
	So that was my first act of Orthodox obedience, even though I wasn't even a catechuman yet.
	I did not publish my book until I was baptized.
	But after that meeting, there's just something about Father Josiah.
	I mean, as amazing as he seems on the internet, it's like 10 times that in person.
	The man just glows, not like a fed, glows like with the uncreated light of God, right?
	Very different kind of glowing.
	It's the good kind of glowing.
	And so I realized if this is the kind of man that Orthodox Christianity turns you into, this is what I want.
	I want to be like that, you know.
	Maybe not 10 kids.
	We'll see what God gives me in the future, but like that as a person, as a just as a man.
	I mean, it's like being around an apostle.
	It's hard to describe.
	So then I drove home, became a catechumen, and I was baptized on Pentecost three years ago, if I'm counting correctly, which I may or may not be doing.
	I think it was, yeah, it was about three years ago, a little more than three years ago.
	And then I have been Orthodox ever since.
	And every day I feel like a very beginner.
	The more that I learn, the more of a beginner I feel like, in fact, because I've learned the hard way that anytime I start to think, you know, I'm a good Christian, I got this, I'm very quickly humbled and reminded of how not true that actually is.
	So every, and there's so much to orthodoxy, there's so much depth to it that there's kind of this endless amount of content there, this endless amount of stuff to study and think about and meditate on and pray over.
	So this is the end of all my spiritual seeking that I had been doing in my previous secular life, my occultism and all that stuff.
	So now that I've found the correct group, if you will, now I've discovered it's a journey inwards.
	Once you have all the tools and all the theology and the understanding and the worship and the liturgical life and everything, then it's a journey inwards to discover more depth to what you already have.
	So that's kind of the short version of how I got to where I am today.
	I'm sorry, I forgot to properly introduce you, probably because I know you so well, but you're actually a Jewish convert.
	And also the book you mentioned, the best-selling book on the Masons and their lies, is available on Amazon.
	When I promoted this stream, I got a couple comments that were negative saying, oh, he's Jewish and a tiger doesn't change its stripes.
	Now, you've been Orthodox for a few years now.
	Do you feel like because you came from a Jewish background, you have to prove yourself?
	Or do you think there's some people who have a negative impression of you?
	Well, I get that same criticism, especially on Gab.
	You know, oh, look, a Jew, like they've discovered a secret.
	Like, I don't have it in my bio, right?
	Like, they've found out something I was trying to hide.
	So people will say that I'm, you know, I'm a subverter or something, and I don't know what it is they want me to like show them.
	Like, do they want me to show them a certificate from the World Zionist Congress saying we hereby release Michael Witkoff from our, like, I don't know what it is these people want.
	It's like an unfalsifiable accusation.
	So, I mean, the criticism doesn't bother me.
	You know, Christ promises that all who live, well, St. Paul, technically, all who live a godly life in Christ will be persecuted.
	So as long as you're being persecuted for the right reasons, there's some people that draw persecution to themselves to make themselves martyrs in the wrong way.
	That's not what we're doing.
	But being attacked, having people lie about you, falsely accuse you, you know, that's part of it.
	And to some extent, just confirms that you're on the right path spiritually.
	So I guess to those people, I would just say to, I mean, if it's that exciting to you to attack me and trying to figure out my, quote, secrets or whatever, you're more than welcome to go through my YouTube videos, go through my books to see what I believe.
	I mean, I don't make a secret of what I believe.
	Jared Holt had to refer to me as ex-Jewish in order to accuse me of anti-Semitism.
	He had to deny my ethnicity.
	So if they want to accuse me, that's their prerogative.
	You know, God bless them.
	God loves them anyway.
	I try to love him anyway.
	We're called to love our enemies and those who persecute us.
	But it doesn't bother me.
	I mean, I've lived a life of conflict even in my secular life.
	So the idea of people getting upset at me in general is not a big deal, especially for something silly like this.
	So if you're going to say that Jews can't be Christians, well, there go all the apostles or most of the apostles, first of all.
	And also we have saints, post-apostolic Jewish convert saints like Saint Melito of Sardis, who wrote an apology to the emperor Marcus Aurelius saying, please stop killing Christians.
	It didn't work.
	He got martyred.
	There's a book of his on the popular patristic series.
	Also, Saint Romanos, the Melodist, who a lot of our hymns come from, was a Jewish convert.
	He also has a book in the popular patristic series.
	But at the same time, I empathize with these people because if I were not me, like if I were not me and someone like me suddenly showed up talking about this stuff, I would have the same suspicions at first, to be honest with you.
	And then I would just have to look at the fruits of the person's life and their work and try and discern, you know, if it's that interesting to them, what's going on.
	But I don't blame them for being suspicious because I would feel the same way if I wasn't me, if that makes sense.
	If it makes you feel better, I have been, I'm continually attacked too.
	My conversion is often called fake by people online.
	I'm grifting.
	And, you know, if you're doing God's work, you're going to be attacked in some way.
	They're just the angle that they attack you with is different.
	But in, you know, once you are dipped into the baptismal font, once you get baptized, you are Christ.
	So I don't, so maybe your ethnicity is Jewish, but I don't see you as Jewish, like, you know, what your, you know, haters and detractors call you as.
	Right, right.
	And I mean, even on your forum this week, we were accused of, you and me, the whole orthosphere was accused of being funded by the state of Russia.
	So, I mean, half these accusations are so silly.
	Like, they're not really, it's like mosquitoes, you know.
	It's just buzzing noise.
	Now, for me, when I returned to God, my worst sins, which were carnal, they were sexually focused, those were halted practically overnight.
	The struggle since then for me has been mostly mental, the prideful notions that go on, then the physical.
	Did that happen to you when you came to Christ?
	Were you able to tackle your physical sexual sins right away?
	Or was that a process?
	And what can you say about the methods that God uses to heal or transform an individual in repentance?
	So the church that I went to as a Protestant was welcoming to the point of literally saying, we don't care what you believe.
	Just come listen, you know, have some coffee, meet people.
	They want to convert you properly over time, but it was so wide open, like they were so careful not to rebuke anyone that I actually didn't know fornication was a sin at the beginning of my conversion.
	I started believing in Jesus and going to church, but I knew nothing about the scriptures.
	I knew nothing about what it meant.
	And there was a period of time where I think I was reading Proverbs was the first book of the Bible I read that said don't do adultery.
	And so I didn't realize at that time that sleeping with unmarried women was still a sin.
	And so, obviously, after a few months of Bible study and talking to people, I was disabused of this notion.
	But then, once I became aware of that fact, I tried to be celibate and I succeeded for 11 months until I fell the first time, which was the longest I'd gone.
	I mean, I did the pickup stuff for a decade, you know, reading a lot of the same people that you were doing, probably doing a lot of the same techniques and stuff.
	And then after that fall, I repented, then made it 13 months the next time.
	And that was what month is it?
	July.
	So that was about three and a half years ago.
	And what I've found is that it's not, as you repent and you are deified to a greater degree and more grace fills you, the divine energies kind of, what's the word for it, pull you into alignment with God's will more and more.
	You stop desiring that in the first place.
	And I think that's that's the big thing.
	It's one thing to do like behavior modification on yourself, which is what I was doing as a Protestant.
	Like, okay, I'm not going to fornicate.
	I'm not going to go to this person's house.
	I'm not going to talk to this girl or whatever.
	I'm not going to answer her call.
	But I still had the desire.
	I was just not acting on it.
	And then over time, that has grown into not wanting to because I don't want to displease God.
	So I think, and everyone has a different journey.
	I mean, it's amazing that you were able to overcome that overnight.
	And we have saints that have had this big overnight cessation of sin kind of thing, or at least outer sin.
	But it's a different journey for everybody.
	And I think that as you start to love God more, you will not desire to sin as much and your sin will make you feel worse, whether it's internal sin or with your body.
	So once God's got his eyes on you, so to speak, and you've decided to follow him, this process of what Protestants would call sanctification does happen.
	So, yeah, I think that would be my answer is that as you repent, God gives you, first of all, more grace.
	I mean, the fact that you're brokenhearted over it, this is what brings the grace in the first place, like it says in Psalm 50 or 51, depending on your Bible translation.
	And then eventually you just get more sanctified.
	And then once you've stopped sinning with your body, then as you mentioned, then you start to notice your mental sins and your sinful impulses.
	Like the other day at the grocery store, I'll give you an example from my personal life.
	A sin I struggle with is not judging certain kinds of people.
	So I was in line to buy groceries and I see these morbidly obese people buying junk food.
	Obviously, my first thought is, do you really need more pizza and seven up?
	But I have to repent through those feelings.
	And as soon as I feel that swell of judgment coming, I got to immediately go into the Jesus prayer and try to work through it.
	And it's a lifelong process.
	You know, saints are not born.
	They're made.
	And I think as long as you're on that ascetic struggle and you recognize your sins, and every time you fall, you get back up and keep trying.
	Eventually, God will peel back these onion layers of your sinfulness until ideally your soul is in a state of perfection or as close to perfection as a human being can get in the flesh.
	Because Christ does call us to be perfect as he is perfect.
	And that's such a high bar that luckily, maybe not luckily, but blessedly, I should say, we have plenty of opportunities to repent when we fall short of this ideal.
	I have many of the same problems as you.
	I think we were both in the pickup artist manosphere culture for a long time.
	And in that culture, we kind of train our souls to evaluate women, make a judgment call as quickly as possible.
	So we kind of develop this habit.
	And yeah, we repent, but we still have this malformed instinct that, as you see, you know, is used on other people to judge their worth, sexual attractiveness, and so on.
	But yeah, you were caught up in the pickup artist sphere like I was.
	And we were in it a little bit early to where it was pretty effective before other guys, before Tinder took over.
	I don't know.
	I know Tinder started to get big around 2012, but I was well in the pickup artist sphere before that.
	Yeah.
	What would you say to the young men today, the Zoomers, I guess in their middle 20s or early 20s?
	They're in their prime.
	They're hitting the gym.
	They're getting the matches on Tinder.
	They have cracked the code.
	They have the six-pack abs and they are maybe sleeping with girls, not their dream girls, but once in a while they sleep with girls and then they're on Twitter and they will attack men like us and say, well, Roosh didn't sleep with as many girls as me or my girls are hotter.
	I'm going to win at this game.
	I'm going to win forever.
	I'm going to get the yeah.
	So I see these kind of arguments.
	Like, yeah, Roosh failed because he just got old and he needs testosterone.
	I've seen all these arguments.
	What can you say to them that are like, you know, I don't need God.
	I'm getting girls.
	I think I'll answer that in a second.
	I think my favorite accusation I see regarding you is that it was a fake conversion because you wanted to make more money.
	Because obviously Orthodox Christianity just sells so much better than here's how to get laid, right?
	That's really where the treasure is at, huh?
	The monetary treasure.
	Well, I think guys get into it for different reasons.
	There are the guys that are just filled with lust and they want to act on it as much as they can.
	There's guys that I think didn't have the best role models in their own lives of their parents to show them what a man's supposed to do or how to act.
	And they've been failing with women.
	They don't know why.
	And this pickup stuff is more than they've been taught before.
	You know, I don't reject every concept I learned about the difference between men and women and how to interact necessarily.
	The end point to every act, obviously, go around fornicating.
	There are guys that have been just rejected so much, they just want to have some power over women.
	They want to feel powerful.
	So they want to go seduce a bunch of women.
	And all of these drives obviously are oriented around the self, around extracting something from other people.
	And what I would say to them is: you cannot show me a happy pickup artist that isn't just a sociopath.
	Like the ones that are genuinely happy with what they're doing or they think they're happy, it's because there's something broken in them that like their conscience doesn't, there's no conscience.
	There's no voice that says, you know, right from wrong or what you should do or not do.
	The overwhelming majority, and I never went out to like, what were those?
	The lairs they were called, the lairs.
	I never went out to the lairs and all that boot camps and project hobby.
	I never did anything like that.
	But the guys that I met were not happy guys.
	They were always alcoholics and or drug addicts.
	I mean, I've never met a sober, promiscuous person, I don't think, in my life overall, because there's something in your conscience that's telling you that this behavior is wrong, I think.
	And you have to silence that voice with drugs and alcohol the overwhelming majority of the time.
	And I think that should be an indication to you that there's something in your heart and mind and soul that is telling you that this is not right.
	And so for the guys that are out there doing this, I empathize with why you looked into all this stuff in the first place because I was in your shoes at some point to some degree or another, you know, when I was 18 years old and I just went off to college and I didn't have any real understanding like there were girls that I had liked in high school that didn't like me back.
	Not that I, you know, had the courage to ask them out in the first place.
	So my rejection was probably mostly just my own fantasies.
	But even that, you know, it's like, okay, well, how do I learn to ask a girl out properly?
	How do I learn to conduct myself better?
	So I understand where they're coming from.
	And I don't reject all of it necessarily.
	But I would ask them, what is the end?
	Like when are you going to have enough?
	It's like people that chase money.
	I mean, I see it as the same kind of spiritual wound.
	Like people that are always chasing money, money, money.
	You say, How much is enough for you?
	And they'll say, more.
	Well, now you're just like an empty, an empty vessel.
	I think the Buddhists even have a word for this.
	They call it a hungry ghost, which is someone that just eats and eats and eats, but can't be full because the food just goes right through them, right?
	There's never a satiation, there's never a fullness because you can't digest if you're a ghost and don't have a stomach.
	Obviously, it's not a Christian analogy, but I think there's some overlap there.
	What is the end of what you're doing?
	And I think that for me, I had dinner with Ross Jeffries once upon a time.
	We had a mutual friend in Southern California.
	For those people who don't know who he is, he's one of the first big name pickup artists.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	He was the speed seduction, I think, was his company.
	He was the guy that taught mystery NLP and the book The Game talked about him a lot.
	I had dinner with him and a friend and the friend's girlfriend, and he's in his 60s or 70s now, maybe even.
	And there was such a darkness to him because he's still doing the same thing he was doing, you know, 30 years ago.
	There was such an emptiness to him.
	I felt bad for him, but I just, when I got home from that dinner, I just felt like I had to shower because there was such a dirtiness to it, such a like a black hole in the soul that just draws things into it, which for him would be, you know, saying that he's doing NLP properly and creating this attractive energy field that draws people to him.
	But a black hole draws people to it too, right?
	And it crushes them.
	It's just profound emptiness.
	So if I were you and a young guy, I would take a look at what happens to people in this world as they get older.
	Some guys age out of it.
	Some guys get married.
	I know a lot of guys end up having kids.
	Even Julian Blanc got married.
	I have no idea if it's a monogamous marriage or not.
	And I would talk to some of these guys that really got into it and had, quote, success with it and ask, well, why aren't you doing it anymore?
	Because it's, you described this back on the Return of Kings days as a hedonistic treadmill.
	And you burn out on this kind of thing because how much dopamine, how much pleasure can you flood your brain with before it just starts to wound you?
	And so if the guys aren't at that point yet and you're listening to this, I'm doing the older man a cautionary tale thing.
	There will reach a point where you just start to realize how empty this is, especially if you sober up.
	Those of you that are doing drugs and alcohol, and I include smoking weed in this, to cover the emptiness, if you take a look at your life in sobriety, your conscience should be telling you that there's something not right here.
	So this is even an argument about morality and about God, because our spirits are created in the image of God.
	So the deepest part of us knows right from wrong, I think, to some degree.
	So I would say sober up, talk to some older guys who did this for a while, and just ask them questions about where it all leads and see if that's the kind of person that you really want to be.
	Because at the end of the day, that's what it's about.
	It's about finding male role models that can show you the path to the fulfillment you're looking for.
	And some of these guys that you might really worship on the internet are not, if you look at them with sobriety, really not probably the kind of guy that you want to end up as.
	And you might be tempted to say, well, okay, I can discern the good from the bad, but the way they are is a result of their behavior, largely.
	So that would be my warning and my word of advice to those guys.
	A lot of those guys don't understand that the pickup lifestyle itself entails what it does.
	The process darkens you.
	It darkens your soul because it puts you on this loop.
	So you get sex and then you get the emotional hangover after that.
	Then the disappointment, anxiety, then the lust and the sex.
	So it's a cycle that slowly grinds you down, that slowly malforms you.
	And then, when you're spit out at the end, you find out that you're way less able to connect with the right woman who you can start a family with than when you started it.
	But you have the memories of the sex.
	You had a sex life in the past, but the actual process of the lifestyle of getting sex with multiple women corrupts you.
	And in order, the more you get into it, like me, I got pretty deep into it where I was teaching others, the more help you'll need to dig yourself out.
	So, paradoxically, the more success you have with girls, the more help, the more divine help that you're going to need to get out of it.
	Yeah.
	In many ways, I feel that my journey into the kingdom to heal from the previous lifestyle that I was involved with has only gotten started.
	But if I found, say, a typical Protestant church upon my baptism, if they did baptize me, I could claim that I was saved.
	In other words, many Protestant churches, they have mixed the conversion experience with salvation itself.
	Is this once saved, always saved notion correct?
	No, the once saved, always saved is not the historic Christian view of soteriology, which is to say the philosophy behind salvation.
	And also depends, I mean, there's 40,000 different versions of Protestantism.
	So they have different degrees of truth and different degrees of falsehood.
	Not all of them believe in one saved, always saved.
	So basically, in the Protestant world, this debate is called Calvinism versus Arminianism.
	Arminius was a Protestant who taught that one saved, always saved is not how it works.
	You know, that we have to cooperate with God's grace.
	Obviously, salvation is entirely because of God.
	It's not like we can earn our way there, but that we have to cooperate with the grace that we're given.
	We have to work out our salvation with fear and trembling, as the Bible says.
	And so, if there are Protestants listening, this whole Calvinism versus Arminianism is completely foreign to historic Christianity.
	This never came up in the East, just like the distinction in their minds between faith and works is just not a problem for us.
	We don't have this dialectic or this tension between faith and works.
	It's just all part of the same thing for us.
	Because for the first thousand years of Christianity, there's only one church.
	Even that evangelical mega-pastor Francis Chan has been studying this and talked about it.
	I linked to a video of him talking about this on my channel recently.
	He said, Did you guys know that there were no denominations?
	There was only one church for a thousand years.
	And it wasn't about a guy in a pulpit.
	It was all about taking the Eucharist together.
	I said, Yeah, I do know that because I read church history, but I know a lot of his audience did not.
	So this is news to them.
	This might be news to people listening too.
	So for the first thousand years, there's a church called the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church.
	Catholic meaning universal, which actually has two different senses.
	So I'll explain that before I continue.
	So what Catholic means is universal, and that means two things.
	It means, first of all, that the faith is universal.
	It's for everybody of every ethnicity and tribe and nationality.
	There's no distinction for who God's grace is for.
	The other sense of Catholic or universal is that wherever the Eucharist is served, the entire cosmos is there, so to speak.
	So every parish that serves the Eucharist, all of the saints are there.
	All of the angels are there.
	All of God is there.
	Not that God has distinctions, but the whole heavenly host, the whole kingdom of God is present there.
	So every parish is a microcosm of the entire church, both the visible and invisible part, the church militant and the church triumphant.
	So if we had that for a thousand years, after a thousand years, what was the Roman patriarchate separates itself for a number of different reasons and starts the group called Roman Catholicism?
	500 years after that, the Protestant reformers rebel against some of the errors of Rome and start their own countless different schisms and groups.
	But the Orthodox have just been there the whole time.
	We weren't affected by the Reformation.
	We weren't affected by the schism, except in the sense that we lost one of our major patriarchates, the Roman Patriarchate.
	So we've just been doing the same thing the whole time, handing down the traditions of the apostles, like the Bible says to do, like the apostles said to do, like their students said it to do.
	So for us, Orthodoxy is about not inventing or innovating or developing anything.
	We just pass down what came from the generation before.
	And as long as every generation does that, we just still have the apostolic message as powerful and full today as it was 2,000 years ago.
	And if you look through the writings of Orthodox saints over time, there's nothing even similar to once saved, always saved.
	There's no idea.
	And you said, even at baptism, they think they're saved.
	Some of them don't even believe in baptism.
	They think it's a symbol.
	When I had my Protestant baptism, I thought it was just a confirmation of my salvation.
	But yes, what you said, I think, is absolutely right, that they will often conflate the conversion experience with salvation itself.
	They say, are you born again?
	And we should be born again every time we save it.
	A lot of them ask me that.
	Are you saved?
	Well, I don't know.
	I am in the process of it.
	Yeah, we're in the process.
	And the Bible uses the word saved in three different time tenses.
	They're talking about we who hope to be saved, we who have been saved, and we who are being saved.
	So what the Orthodox will usually say is, I've been saved, I'm being saved, and I will be saved.
	So we don't, we can look, we can look at a point in time and say, that was my conversion.
	We can have a conversion experience.
	Plenty of saints have talked about this.
	St. Basil the Great talked about his.
	St. Simeon the new theologian talked about his.
	But what you don't see is them pointing to one specific time, point in time, and saying, I've been saved at this time, and therefore I can do whatever I want now because it doesn't matter, which is what some Protestants teach, which is called antinomianism.
	That once your soul is in the right place, well, then your body doesn't matter anymore, which is it's Gnosticism, essentially.
	And a lot of Protestants are Gnostics if you really look at what they believe and where their beliefs came from.
	Now, Protestants also claim sola scriptura, the Bible alone.
	And one just has to read the Bible to know the truth of God.
	But like you mentioned, there's 40,000 different Protestant denominations.
	I think the number is actually higher.
	And all of them, all of them claim they have the truth from the Bible.
	And schisms seem to be constantly happening.
	Every year, we hear about a major church splitting up, the conservative faction versus the liberal pro-gay faction.
	So what is wrong with sola scriptura?
	So the fundamental problem with sola scriptura, actually, let me back up.
	The approach that many Protestants take to the Bible, including myself when I was a Protestant, because, you know, if no one explains this to you, then how could you know it unless you've studied off on your own, like for dozens of hours alone in your dark room, like a little goblin like I have reading church history books and theology books.
	If you haven't done this and nobody has explained it to you, you can't know what you don't know.
	So a lot of Protestants, including myself at the time, approach the Bible as if it fell out from the sky as one complete book and everyone knew the whole time what was canonical, what wasn't, and that this was just there from the beginning.
	So their presupposition, every Protestant has the same presupposition, which is that the church is built on the Bible.
	So that's the presupposition that we have to examine here, right?
	Because they say, oh, I read the Bible.
	I feel inspired.
	I'm going to start a church about it.
	And we're going to preach from the Bible.
	So is it true that the church is built on the Bible?
	Is the presupposition?
	Well, let's think about how this works chronologically in Christian history.
	The very first letter that Paul writes is about 20 years after the resurrection.
	Nothing is written up to that point.
	None of the gospels are written until after Peter and Paul are martyred.
	And then people are going, oh, you know what?
	These apostles are starting to get killed.
	We better write all this stuff down.
	So you have Paul's letters first, then the Gospels, and then the Apocalypse of John is not written until the end of the first century.
	A full, what is it, 60 years after, more than 60 years after Christ's death and resurrection and ascension.
	And then it takes hundreds more years of debates to figure out what exactly is canonical and what is not canonical.
	So at every point in this process, if you were to say, I'm a Bible-believing Christian, that would mean something completely different.
	And in fact, if you were to say to a Christian in the year 40, for example, you know, the church had been there for seven years.
	This was before the first letter of Paul was written.
	If you were to say, if you were going to be like a Protestant preacher, like get on your pulpit, say, okay, everyone, bring out your New Testament.
	Everyone would look at you and go, I don't know what these words are.
	What is a New Testament?
	That's not a thing.
	So if you need the Bible and only the Bible to be saved, then first of all, you're saying that all the early martyrs, some of the apostles, you know, they weren't going around preaching from the New Testament.
	They were preaching from the Old Testament, first of all.
	So whenever you see the word scripture in the Bible, except for one specific instance in the New Testament, they're referring to the Old Testament because that's what they were preaching Christ from.
	There's a book by St. Irenaeus of Lyon, written in the second century that we actually just discovered recently in Armenian, believe it or not.
	We just recently discovered this book called Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching, which first of all should be in part of everybody's catechism, where he's going through the Old Testament, showing here's how the apostles preached Christ from Genesis, Deuteronomy, Exodus.
	This is what the different things Moses did meant, and this is what the apostles saw Christ in him in it.
	So it's a Christological interpretation of the Old Testament.
	So when you read the word in the New Testament scripture, the scripture is God-breathed and good for rebuking and all this, they're not talking about books that had not been written yet.
	They're not talking about the gospels that had not been written yet.
	Not talking about the apocalypse of John or the book of Revelation that had not been written yet.
	And this is just a very simple thing to understand, but it's hard for Protestants to work through this because it is a basic fundamental assumption of theirs that the word scripture in the New Testament is referring to what we now call the Bible, even though we didn't have that for a long time.
	Then we have to look right there.
	I did three videos on this called Bible Stream, Bible Stream, Bible Stream 2, Bible Stream 3.
	We see the churches there before the Bible.
	How else could they, who else would Paul and the apostles have been going around preaching to, right?
	They're going to churches that are already planted, that are already worshiping, already celebrating communion, already celebrating liturgy.
	And the letters of the scripture, the New Testament, are written to those churches that already exist.
	He never says, here's a letter, go start a church based on what you read here.
	He said, here's what I noticed when I was visiting you.
	Here's what I've heard about you.
	Here's what you're doing right.
	Here's what you're doing wrong.
	Please focus on this.
	You know, the women don't dress like this.
	Guys don't act like this.
	They're written to churches that are already existing.
	So the Bible is a product of the church.
	The church is not built on top of the scriptures.
	And the Bible, of course, says this too.
	It describes the church as the pillar and ground of truth.
	There were times in church history where what we call the Bible did not exist in that specific form.
	For example, for hundreds of years in Syria, they were using what's called the diatessaron, which is one long narrative composed of the four gospels, but it's just in one gospel account, so to speak.
	Now, what did they know from the beginning?
	They knew there were four authenticated gospel accounts according to what the church fathers and the apostolic fathers wrote, that is the students of the apostles directly.
	They knew that some of the letters were valid and there were debates over what was, what wasn't.
	They wanted to include 1 Clement for a while.
	Some people wanted to include 1 Clement.
	You had heretics like Marcion who wanted to chop out almost all of the New Testament to support his kind of dualistic heresy.
	And so if you were to say you have that the Bible alone is all you need, it's basically like ripping the heart out of body and saying, this is all you need.
	This is the whole human person right here.
	A lot of the stuff in the scriptures doesn't even make sense outside the context of the church.
	And I think another major issue with this is that the people that say they are sola scriptura Bible-believing Christians don't do huge sections of what's right there in front of them because they don't preach on those sections in Protestant churches.
	They don't preach John 6, he who does not eat my body and drink my blood has no life in him.
	You're not going to hear that verse preached on very often.
	You're not going to hear Acts 3.1, where Peter and John go up to the temple to pray for the prayer of the hour at the ninth hour because that's liturgical, right?
	That's what Protestant people say.
	That's Pharisaic.
	That's legalism, praying specific prayers at specific times.
	That's Pharisees.
	No, that's what the apostles were doing even after Christ had died and been resurrected.
	Acts 3.1, go look at it, guys.
	It's right there.
	You're not going to hear that preached about.
	So there's all kinds of different problems with sola scriptura, including that the Bible itself doesn't say this, the fact that the church was there first, the fact that if you ask a Protestant what is the Bible?
	Like what was the criteria for something being included or not?
	They wouldn't even be able to tell you.
	In reality, it's what was preached on on Sundays.
	You know, that's what counted as canonical.
	It had to be written by the hand of an apostle or someone they were dictating to, had to be considered worthy of preaching on on a Sunday.
	We still don't preach on Revelation.
	There was the most controversy around whether that should count as canonical or not.
	But if you really start to study this stuff, the development of the canon of scripture in church history, there is simply no way to believe in sola scriptura.
	And they don't even use the same Bible we have.
	We have books they don't have.
	Obviously, Catholics have more books than Protestants.
	Orthodox have more books than Catholics.
	So if they say, I'm a Bible-believing Christian, you can say, which Bible?
	And the fact that different ones exist, different people will say they have the infallible authority to determine the canon, it's silly.
	Sometimes I'll say to them, well, it's too bad you weren't around in like the third century.
	You could have saved them hundreds of years of debate and just told them what was canonical and what wasn't.
	They don't like that very much, but I'm trying to, you know, poke at their presuppositions here.
	And you just can't understand what any of it is about.
	I mean, there's some stuff that you can, like the moral stuff, obviously, don't do this, do this.
	You don't need the church to interpret that, but a lot of it you do need the church to interpret.
	So it always comes back to authority, these questions.
	Saint Justin Popovich said, Protestants rejected the Pope so they could all be their own pope instead.
	And as harsh as that sounds, it's true because they're saying they're the authority on what's canonical.
	They're the authority.
	Every individual Protestant is the authority, but they say, I'm just going by what the Bible says, what the Holy Spirit is telling me.
	But they all say something different.
	How can the Holy Spirit tell all 40,000 of you something different infallibly?
	It doesn't make any sense.
	So when you just go to the church and you participate in the life of Christianity handed down by the apostles, everything clicks into place and the healing that takes place in you is so profound.
	What you discover there is so much more full and more beautiful and more holy than the rock show and the rock band and the worship concert that they do beforehand.
	There's really no going back to it.
	It just, it feels so empty after being part of orthodoxy.
	I think, I mean, I needed to go to Protestantism first, I think, because I was so lost in darkness.
	I needed the, we don't care what you believe, just come listen.
	I needed that approach, but that's like the appetizer.
	And once you have the real meal, why would you go back to the appetizer, right?
	So there's different ways to approach sola scriptura, but all of them are wrong.
	And when Protestants will sometimes even try to quote mind the church fathers to say, look at this guy talking about the Bible, as if he's speaking outside the context of the church, which they never are.
	They say, well, look, this church father said the Bible is great.
	Said, yeah, that church father also believed in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.
	He also venerated icons.
	He also prayed for the intercession of saints.
	He believed in liturgical calendar and all this other stuff.
	So they're always kind of quote mining the ones that do this.
	But if someone is seeking with an open mind, like a genuine curiosity, reading church history, they're going to find it very hard to continue believing in Protestant presuppositions.
	You mentioned the importance of the church.
	We can't really separate the Bible from the church, but it's very common for me online, especially in the comments I see, is that a man just needs his King James Bible.
	And he's set.
	Salvation is this individual effort, like a long hike through the woods, this rugged Emersonian idea of self-will, and that churches are okay, but mostly for doing community outreach and things like that, not a place where sacraments are served.
	In fact, a lot of Protestant denominations claim that even baptism itself is a symbol and there are no sacraments a result of this rational approach that they have done.
	Now, I guess the question I have for you is, can a man be saved by going it on his own, just buying the Bible at the bookstore and reading it, interpreting it on his own and serving God in that way, and he'll be fine?
	So this is a question that requires, I think, a great degree of nuance because if I say no, then I'm automatically condemning people who are logistically unable to go to an Orthodox church or have never heard of it.
	There are countries with no Orthodox churches.
	I mean, I've gotten messages.
	I got a message from a Reformed pastor, I think, in Sri Lanka, desperately wants to become Orthodox.
	There's no churches there, so he doesn't know what to do.
	But there is a great degree of difference between ignorance or impossibility and a conscious choice to go against historic Christianity.
	So usually what the Orthodox will say is we know where the church is, but not where it is not.
	But there is a normative way of approaching Christianity.
	And at the same time, God can do whatever he wants with whoever he wants in any way he wants.
	And I believe that he is merciful and fair and just.
	But if someone studies church history and ends up rebelling against the church and deciding that they can just go it on their own, I think that person is in a much worse position than someone who simply lives in a country that has no Orthodox churches.
	And it's not even possible for them to go and do that and partake of the liturgy or even talk to a priest.
	So it's hard to give a clear yes or no to that without condemning huge amounts of people.
	I mean, we have saints that did things that today we would not encourage simply because that was like a once, a once-in-a-millennium kind of thing.
	Like St. Mary of Egypt, for example, a great saint, a very famous saint, famous for her repentance, very deified to the degree that she was levitating in prayer and didn't even realize it till someone else, till St. Josimus, noticed and wrote about it.
	So she just wandered off into the desert naked and alone for 17 years and was communing with God and the angels through that.
	We would never encourage that because this is a specific thing.
	St. Anthony the Great sold all of his stuff.
	He heard the verse in church, sell all that you have, give to the poor.
	So he did that and wandered off into the desert and lived in caves and tombs by himself for 20 years.
	So I can't say no, it's impossible for you to be saved if you do that.
	But I will say you are probably not St. Anthony the Great or St. Mary of Egypt.
	And there's a far greater likelihood you will damage yourself physically, psychologically, and spiritually than that you are going to become one of these people that the church upholds for the next several thousand years.
	And it seems to me that at least in the United States, God has made sure that there are Orthodox churches across the country.
	If you are right next door to, say, Father Josiah Trenham's church and you decide, no, I'm not going in there.
	I'm just going to read the Bible.
	Well, that's a lost opportunity to get on the right path.
	But yes, we don't know how God saves people, but I did like your answer.
	And all the Protestant churches in Riverside are my phone.
	That's my Alex Jones ringtone.
	Sorry.
	I thought I saw him once that.
	I'm alive.
	My heart's free.
	It took me like an hour just to get that ringtone on my dad calling.
	One second.
	Oh, this is actually a very important text, but I will address this.
	Calling back in an hour.
	Wow.
	That's a very important text.
	You need to take a minute.
	I can entertain the audience by juggling.
	No, no, no, no.
	No, that's the whole conversation.
	I won't say what that is.
	I won't say what it is, but it's a very important text that my dad just sent me.
	Sorry, give me two seconds here just to make sure we'll call back.
	Sorry, what was the last thing?
	Oh, I was saying Riverside are all full of like LGBT flags, Black Lives Matter.
	So we have to, it's all about tolerance in life.
	Yeah, diversity or father desire.
	Those are your choices in Riverside.
	It's a very clear-cut choice, I think.
	Right.
	Okay, good.
	Now, we have just in the past few minutes offered some.
	Dude, I'm sorry.
	I got two seconds.
	I got to take this.
	That's fine.
	I will.
	Hey, I'm in the middle of a YouTube show.
	I'm live right now.
	Can I call you back later, please?
	Absolutely.
	Okay.
	Bye-bye.
	That's all right.
	I know how it is to be live and so on.
	So we've offered some critiques to Protestants, but I have a feeling afterwards I'm not going to hear a lot of comments back arguing.
	I find that a lot of Protestants are absent from the online Christian conversation.
	You know, once in a while, I get that basic, you can't call a man father argument, and they show the Bible verse in a way that the church has never interpreted that verse.
	But it seems that they bow out very quickly from any kind of dialogue.
	Have you noticed that as well, as opposed to the Catholics?
	And we can get to them after.
	But I find that the Protestants are not involved.
	Sorry.
	Well, I get a mix of Protestants on my channel interacting with me.
	Some of them are genuine inquirers.
	They're like, hey, I found your channel.
	I'm learning from all these book reviews.
	And what should I look at?
	What videos should I watch?
	So you get those people.
	But a lot of the time you get the people that, excuse me, like the more ignorant they are, the more arrogant they are.
	Where the less they actually understand about Orthodoxy, the more sure they are that it's wicked and pagan and blah, blah, blah.
	And you hear a lot of people, there's some YouTube videos on the Incitum Verbum channel talking about evangelicals don't understand Orthodoxy, where it goes through guys like Todd Friel or Steven Anderson just on these ridiculous tirades, attacking things that they can't even begin to grasp because they've never really bothered to look into it.
	They take one look, they see on the surface, oh, I don't like this.
	It must be evil.
	And then half these people won't debate Orthodox, by the way.
	They'll only throw rocks from a distance.
	I challenged Steven Anderson to a debate.
	His assistant got back to me and accused me of being wicked for wanting a debate.
	And then I said, okay, well, then you come on and debate me too.
	He goes, no, look, the Bible says only the wicked debate.
	I said, but you guys make videos about us all the time.
	You won't come defend yourselves like men, like face to face.
	Don't you want to come prove?
	Like, if you're right, I said to him, if you're right, don't you want to come like take my Orthodox audience and prove why I'm wrong and bring them into your church?
	Like, he won't, they won't do it, right?
	They just, they just want to insult you from a distance because I think part of them knows that if they do debate the Orthodox, they're going to lose so badly, they'll, they'll lose a lot of their cult members.
	So, it really depends on the person.
	There are the open-minded Protestants, there are the hyper-aggressive ones that are very full of pride and ignorance.
	Um, and I found the same with Catholics, actually.
	Like, some of them, um, I think it's some it's easier to talk with them because there's such a shared history there.
	Like, they at least understand what a sacrament is and what the word church means.
	You know, we might disagree on it, but at least they understand that it doesn't refer to some invisible body of believers and whatnot.
	Father Josiah says, invisible church is a good word for it because it doesn't exist.
	So, it really depends on the person.
	You know, I try not to categorize entire groups as this way or that way, except for, as I'm sure you've noticed, every set of ecantists that pops up on Gab or on your forum.
	These people, I swear, I know this sounds very uncharitable.
	I know they all have personality disorder.
	We are going to get to that.
	So, one before that, I wanted to.
	So, the Protestant ideal is that the capital C church is all the denominations, all the Christians.
	When I was in the Armenian church, which is in the Oriental Orthodox group, I thought that, hey, I'm in the Big C church.
	I'm close enough to true Orthodoxy, that all Christian faiths ultimately lead to salvation in an equal manner.
	Until I no longer thought that, and that I was close enough, but not in the church.
	I decided to convert, and thank God I converted in May.
	How should we, as Orthodox Christians, approach those who are not in the Orthodox church?
	Are they in the church or should they get in?
	So, this requires a great degree of nuance and really talking to the person, like understanding who they are, how they think, where they come from, because obviously we don't ever compromise on the truth of our faith.
	And at the same time, there's a way to communicate that that draws people in and a way to communicate it that pushes them away.
	For a good example of how to push people away, look at any Orthodox Facebook group: the insanity, the pride, the arrogance, the aggression, the meanness.
	I mean, there's malice towards anyone who doesn't understand all of Orthodoxy yet.
	Not that anyone's ever going to understand all of it until we're, God willing, deified with God in the afterlife or the next life anyway.
	There's a way to talk to people and a way not to, which is why I said this on my last stream a couple days ago.
	People that don't have a blessing to do evangelism and apologetics should just be quiet because they're probably doing more harm than good, frankly.
	It's not a judgment on their soul or their intentions, but these things, if you're not a good communicator in general, you should not be trying to bring people into the church because you probably don't have the tools to do it.
	So, are people outside the church part of the big C church?
	No, we can't say that.
	I would also say not everyone who's nominally Orthodox is necessarily within the Big C church either, just because they happen to be there and they're part of the right group.
	Some people are there.
	They're not really believers, though.
	You know, it's where they go on Sundays for the coffee and the fellowship.
	Their parents just drag them there.
	I mean, being part of the church is a mind and a heart and a soul thing that has to take place within the Orthodox Church.
	Like, having the right intentions outside the church, God might save you if you're in some unusual circumstance, he chooses to do that.
	We don't judge that.
	But I can't say you're part of the big C church because what this comes back to is what does it mean?
	What does the word church mean?
	The Big C church?
	Is it just a body of people like a committee, or is it the body of Christ?
	And this is the big difference.
	So, when we say big C church, the body of Christ, Protestants will go, Yeah, the church is the body of Christ, right?
	We're all part of the body, but that's not the same sense in which we mean it.
	We're using those words differently because the body of Christ is undivided, it is one, it is impossible for it to be divided.
	If any Orthodox tells you the church is divided, they have already separated themselves from the truth because it cannot be divided.
	There's only one body of Christ.
	His members are not divided, even if some of them, you know, the dead branches get pruned away.
	This has happened many times, might be happening again soon with certain archdiocese.
	Maybe we'll get to that later.
	But if the church is the body of Christ and we become part of that body through holy communion, literally partaking of his deified flesh and blood, thereby grafting ourselves into his actual theanthropic, physical, metaphysical, spiritual body.
	How could we say somebody who's not taking communion in the church is part of that?
	I mean, it's just a metaphysical thing.
	If you're not doing that, how could you possibly be part of the body that we are physically, literally eating?
	We can say that you believe in Jesus, even though that might mean something different, right?
	Even the worst heretics will often say they believe in Jesus, but that word means something different to them.
	But you can't say that they're part of the historic ancient Christian church, definitely not.
	But again, there's ways to communicate that depending on, you know, I might send them to different resources, different videos.
	I often send people to the Finding the Church Jesus Built series on YouTube, which I think is one of the best series of videos that exists for Orthodoxy.
	It's sub-deacon Ezra Ham, deacon now, sub-deacon at the time, eight or nine videos on the encyclopedic knowledge of church history delivered in such love.
	I think it's hard to watch those videos and then come away from it believing that the word church just means everyone who verbally says that they believe in Jesus.
	And can you say the name of that again, finding the church that Peter built?
	Finding the church Jesus built.
	Yeah, it's on a YouTube channel called Orthodox Christianity 101.
	They're old videos, not the best sound quality in some of the seminars, but even the first video, I mean, you're going to get a history lesson that if you're a Protestant listening to this and you go watch it, you're going to learn more about church history in that hour and a half than you've learned in your entire Christian life up until that point.
	I promise you.
	Were you concerned for my soul when I was in the Armenian church?
	Well, it was a step in the right direction.
	I have been praying for you since I was writing for Return of Kings, since before we were friends, like when I was just writing for your website.
	In fact, I showed you in the car when we met in Indiana an email exchange we had years ago where I was trying to convert you and you said something like get away from me.
	Well, you said something like, I'm glad it worked for you, but just because it works for you doesn't mean it will work for me too.
	Something like that.
	But I kept praying for you.
	It did.
	It did eventually, didn't it?
	So then you took a step towards Armenian Orthodox.
	I mean, that's such a big difference from being a pickup artist.
	That's like 90% of the way there, right?
	You've accepted Jesus' sacraments, the idea of a big C church, even if you weren't in the fully right one yet.
	But man, when you got baptized, Rokor, the angels were singing, man.
	And I was right there with them.
	I was right there with them.
	Thank you, Michael.
	And speaking of my changes, it hasn't only been me changing, but the platforms that I run have been changing too.
	And I recently made RushviForum.com an explicit Orthodox discussion site.
	I labeled the non-Orthodox part of the forum heterodox for a couple of days.
	And that resulted in a lot of Catholics getting very angry at me.
	You started a whole new schism over your forum.
	And they said that this term heterodox for them is very offensive.
	And okay, I didn't, I wasn't intending that, but I changed the heterodox forum subforum to non-Orthodox.
	And I think they're not as angry as me.
	Now, I have found it quite a challenge to moderate the Catholics on the forum, especially what's called the Sed of Acantics.
	And these are those who have determined that the current Pope is not actually the Pope.
	Yet it seems that Catholicism and Orthodoxy are similar in many ways.
	Do you think we are close enough, or is there, as I have been seeing on the forum and moderating the forum, a big gulf between us?
	I think there's an awfully big gulf between us.
	And when I first started becoming Orthodox and hearing stuff like people called heterodox or heretics, it really offended my pride and my desire to just have everyone be my big happy family.
	But these things, the differences make a much bigger difference than I realized at first.
	I remember when I first converted, I heard about the Filioque.
	I thought, who cares if they put about this one word?
	Like, why does this matter?
	Can't you guys just get over it and get along?
	But it actually has very profound significance philosophically, ecclesiologically, or ecclesiastically, whatever the word is I'm trying to say.
	I think it's ecclesiastically.
	And I think we're going to see a lot of people now that Pope Francis has suppressed the traditional Latin Mass, looking into Orthodoxy, because half their converts were only there because they found out beautiful in the first place.
	So if the Pope takes that away, of course, this is the Pope's intention, in my opinion, is to ruin the church and ruin souls.
	Well, then they come to one of our churches, they hear the divine liturgy, or if they go to the Western Rite Orthodox Antiochian or Roquor, they're going to have a traditional Latin Mass, but in English, they're going to have the Mass of Pope St. Gregory the Great or the Liturgy of St. Ticon, which is like the Anglican Mass, but turned Orthodox, basically.
	So we still have the stuff that they're losing over there.
	And I think that we're going to, I hope and pray, we'll have a big influx of people seeking us out.
	The Sed of Acantists are the most bizarre group of people I think I've interacted with on the internet.
	They are very aggressive.
	That's all I can say.
	They are.
	Everyone that I've met has the same personality, which might be because it's just the same guy on your forum creating new accounts every other day.
	So that's possible.
	But they're on Gab, too.
	So Set of Acantists, if you guys don't know, it means the chair is empty.
	So they're saying that the Pope, the current, that Pope Francis is not truly the Pope.
	So they are, now they have replaced the magisterial authority of the Catholic Church with their own opinion.
	Like, yes, their cardinals voted for him to be Pope, but they don't like him very much.
	So he's not really the Pope.
	So the way I typed it on your forum was, if Pope know me like ye, then Pope don't reel.
	That's kind of how it goes.
	It's so offensive.
	How can you talk like that?
	Because that's what they're doing.
	I mean, honestly, I see them as Protestants at this point.
	And they're all liars.
	And I know that's a big claim to make, but everyone I've interacted with is a liar.
	Their main YouTube channel comes from guys who are lying about being monks, lying about living in a monastery, that make videos against the Orthodox, and they just blatantly lie in these videos.
	They say things that are historically false, historically not true.
	And then the guy on your forum the other day, again, accused you and me and the whole Orthosphere of being funded by the state of Russia.
	Like these are not, there's something off in these people's souls.
	And I pray that they will disabuse themselves of this incredible pride and arrogance of thinking that they know best who's the real Pope and who isn't.
	Not like there's other contenders.
	In Catholic history, there have been up to three people at a time all claiming to be the Pope.
	Then the Holy Roman Emperor will have to step in and say, you two are wrong.
	This guy is the Pope.
	But also I'm deposing him and putting my new Pope in.
	But those are called interregnum periods between when there's an official pope.
	But this is very different than that.
	This is just, I don't like that pope, therefore he must not really be the pope.
	Jay Dyer has done some good videos exposing and destroying Sedevacantism, where they want to be in communion with like the invisible, like what Protestants want to be in communion with the invisible church.
	Sedevacantists want to be in communion with the invisible pope, right?
	With the idea of the pope, but not actually obeying the guy sitting on the throne.
	And I mean, I empathize with a lot of Catholics and the struggles they're going through right now, because if you believe in Vatican I, you have to accept Vatican II.
	There's no way around it.
	Either the Pope, I guess, to make infallible declarations of faith and morals and is the sole purveyor of tradition, and therefore Vatican II has to be valid, or they aren't infallible, right?
	And therefore, their whole system falls apart, which is, of course, what the Orthodox have believed from the beginning.
	And in fact, when papal infallibility first started getting shilled by the Franciscans in the 12th century or 13th, I won't say 12th century, it was the reigning Pope who fought against it the hardest.
	So they keep adding these innovations of papal infallibility and papal supremacy, and the pope, you know, has more authority than kings and emperors.
	They keep adding this stuff.
	So they built this whole system around one man having this ultimate supreme authority.
	And then when he does something with that authority they don't like, all of a sudden they will, he can't be the real Pope because the real Pope would never say something like this.
	It's very unfortunate.
	And I empathize with Catholics that don't know what to do with this situation because they either have to accept Pope Francis, become a sedevacantist, or become Orthodox and realize that the Pope is not this infallible keeper of tradition.
	There's really no other option.
	So I'm sure that they are all in a very tough spiritual position.
	That I don't envy that position.
	I'm sorry that you guys have to deal with this.
	And I think it will break down some of their presuppositions and hopefully lead them to holy orthodoxy.
	Now, other than the filioque and papal infallibility, is there another doctrine the Catholics have which make it that goes against what the Orthodox Church teaches and makes it very difficult for us to reestablish communion with them?
	Yes.
	So the big theological, well, the filioque, I have to address that first.
	So for people not listening, the filioque means and the son.
	It's the Catholic addition of the words and the son into the Niocene Creed, the part where we say the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father, they say who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
	The problem is they added this by themselves without an ecumenical council and the Creed can't be changed.
	But by making the Holy Spirit proceed from the Son, they're basically changing the way the Trinity works.
	Because again, we have a thousand years of shared history.
	If they knew their own saints, they would understand and agree with what I'm saying here.
	So in proper Orthodox theology, and you could say real Catholic theology too, the Father is the only person of the Trinity that is unoriginate or ingenerate, as St. Gregory the Theologian calls.
	He is the one that has no cause.
	They're all uncreated, but caused and created are different.
	The Father spirates the Spirit, meaning that the Spirit proceeds from him, and the Son is begotten of him.
	So we have these three persons equal in power, equal in glory, equal in honor, but the Son and Spirit have a cause, that cause being the Father.
	The only distinction of the members of the Trinity is their role.
	It's not their level of God, so to speak.
	Some people say, oh, this person has more power than this part.
	This one's more God than this person.
	That's not it.
	We have a balanced Trinity, but there's a distinction in role.
	The role of the Father is to cause the Son in Spirit.
	So by saying that the Spirit proceeds from the Son, we're breaking with all of our saints, all of our fathers, all of our theology, and sublimating the Holy Spirit to logic, to logos.
	They're putting the spirit under logic, essentially, which is what you see in their philosophy with Thomas Aquinas and Barlaam of Calabria when he was debating with St. Gregory Paula Mas, which is what this is all leading to.
	The doctrine of absolute divine simplicity versus the doctrine of the essence-energies distinction.
	You will find the essence-energies distinction very early on.
	St. Basil the Great talked about it.
	St. Paul uses the word energeia many times in the New Testament.
	The energies meaning the operations or the actions that are not the same as the essence of God because human beings cannot interact with the essence of God directly.
	We would cease to exist.
	We can interact with the energies or the actions or the operations of God.
	Whereas in new Roman Catholic theology, there is no essence-energies distinction.
	Now, I will admit that as a relatively new person to Orthodoxy, there are aspects of this that I myself don't understand yet.
	The essence-energies, when you get really into the deep, deep philosophical meat of it, I'm not at that level yet.
	But we do have this big disagreement, but I don't think that most Orthodox and most Catholics understand it deeply enough either to articulate exactly why it's causing a gulf between the two, except to say that if you take away God's energies, then you're saying we're always interacting directly with his essence, which we know from scripture.
	We can't see God face to face like that.
	We can't see the essence of God, the usia or substance of God directly.
	So that kind of breaks everything that we're doing.
	So for the Catholics, grace is a created thing.
	It's like God makes a little present and hands it to you.
	Whereas, and that's what you're experiencing when you have a grace-filled moment, so to speak.
	Whereas for the Orthodox, we are interacting directly with God.
	It is God that we are engaging with.
	Yeah.
	It's God that is filling us and deifying us and creating stillness in us and sanctifying us and divinizing us and bringing us closer to his likeness that we are originally created in.
	We're not interacting with some created thing called grace.
	From my experience, just in casual conversation with Catholics about God, for them, it seems, and I don't want to strawman them, but it seems like grace is floating in the air and you just have to kind of grab it and you'll have it.
	That's the approach.
	But for us in the Orthodox, my understanding is grace comes directly from God.
	It is an energy of God that he gives to you on your path.
	So I didn't like that when it was kind of, yeah, I didn't have grace when dealing with that, or I need to get some grace.
	I mean, it's not something that you just kind of go to the store and get, but I don't know if you've seen that too, or their concept of grace is more loose than the Orthodox one.
	Well, it does sound like that.
	Like they need to go put a quarter in the God vending machine and get a grace off of, you know, aisle row A, number one, or whatever.
	They also believe, if I'm getting this correct, in the treasury of merits.
	So basically, the saints had such good deeds that there's this bank, this bank of grace that exists, that if you do the right actions, they will give you some of, like, you make a withdrawal of merits from this heavenly bank account.
	And we just, it's just all so foreign to us as Orthodox.
	I'm so glad when I hear Protestants arguing with each other that I just don't have to deal with it.
	You know, is grace created or not?
	Are we Calvinists or Arminians?
	And the Orthodox are the ones just off to the side, like, what are you guys doing?
	Just come just come do what we're doing.
	You won't have to worry about this.
	You won't have to worry about whether it's by faith alone or works alone or you just don't, it doesn't matter.
	Like it's all part of one big thing for us.
	We don't compartmentalize.
	We don't have to put God into all these different little boxes and try and figure out the right rationalistic philosophy by which they maybe go together because that's just not what God is.
	It's not how he interacts with us.
	And the debates between Bar Laam and St. Gregory Palamas were largely about whether we can know God through the intellect, whether we can study nature enough and the movement of atoms and cells and stars and planets and waves, whether we can really know God or the divine noose, if you will,
	through that discursive reasoning faculty, or whether we can only know him directly as a direct experience in our spirit, in our noose, I should say, of God, which is to say the difference is between knowing God or knowing about God.
	That's really what the big distinction is.
	Now, that said, Catholic mystics will agree with a lot of what I just said, that it's about knowing God directly and not knowing about God.
	I think their version of hesychasm is called infused contemplation.
	So the mystics have more overlap than the more outer-focused people, I think.
	But overall, it's a big, profound difference once you get deeply enough into it.
	In my very limited experience, I find that it's easier for a Protestant to convert to Orthodoxy than a Catholic, because I've seen Catholics seem very attached to the Catholic identity, to the history, to the quote-unquote unity.
	Do you find that to be the case?
	Who do you think would be easier with love to bring into the Orthodox Church?
	Honestly, I think it's more about the person and the group they're coming from.
	I mean, I don't meet a lot of other Jewish converts.
	I probably know all of them at this point, all like nine of us in this country.
	I mean, there are atheists that convert, there are occultists that convert.
	I mean, when someone, and a lot of people, I think, even in their error, they're at least seeking truth, if incorrectly.
	Like, even as a Gnostic, as a Freemason, as a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, I was seeking the truth.
	Like, my intention was correct.
	I just got in the wrong place.
	You know, I ended up in the wrong group because these groups don't require anything of you.
	You don't have to stop sinning.
	You just join them.
	And, oh, this is now I have the truth and the wisdom and whatnot.
	Christianity is hard.
	It actually requires something of you.
	There's a price to it.
	There's a cost to it that other groups are not necessarily going to make you pay to get their treasure or their gnosis or whatever they want to call it.
	So really, I think it's more about the individual.
	With that said, I don't think a lot of sedevacantists are going to be on our team anytime soon, even though we are the original sedevacantists.
	We have said there's been no pope since 1054.
	We've been sedevacantists for a thousand years.
	So if you want to be an OG sedevacantist, just become Orthodox because we agree with you that the man sitting on the chair of Peter in Rome is not the leader of anything.
	To us, he's a layman.
	And you earlier mentioned, and I'll just go ahead and ask this, that the Pope recently imposed strict restrictions on the Latin Mass.
	And most of the Catholics who follow me are probably disproportionately in the Latin Mass.
	And the Pope urged them, or I think urge is the nice word, to accept Vatican II.
	Now, the Latin Catholic sphere erupted in anger, as they should.
	How do you think this is going to play out?
	Do you think that this is opening the path for a mass conversion to Orthodoxy, or is a schism afoot?
	So I can tell you, I am not a prophet.
	I'm wrong about things I say often, but I have a suspicion about where all this is going.
	So I'll throw out my suspicion.
	And if it's not true, I'll look dumb.
	If it is true, I'll look like a genius.
	I'm willing to roll those dice, so to speak.
	No, you can't roll dice in Orthodoxy.
	That's like gambling.
	I'll take the chance and say what I think is going to happen.
	I think Goarch, the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, at some point is going to have a false reunion with Pope Francis.
	And they're going to promote this and celebrate this as, look, we healed the schism, blah, blah, blah.
	And that it is from that false union that the Antichrist is going to run a one-world religion.
	That's my suspicion.
	I think that Satan's plan is not to create a new one world religion.
	It's to call his religion Christianity and then just have it mean something completely different.
	Because from the very beginning of our history, that's what Satan's done.
	All the Gnostics talked about Christ.
	I don't know if you saw my debate with Marty Leeds.
	He was talking about Christ the whole time.
	That has nothing to do with Christianity.
	If you read Saint Jerome, St. Basil, they're always talking about how heretics always have the name of Christ on their lips.
	It just doesn't mean the same thing to them.
	So I suspect that the Roman Catholic institution is going to become Satan's instrument of the one world religion.
	And I hope that this doesn't happen, but I would be surprised if it doesn't eventually, that the branches of Orthodoxy that get pruned away for various reasons will probably end up joining.
	And we might be in a position where 99% of all Orthodox hierarchs are apostates and heretics.
	This is what some saints have, some of them have predicted this.
	But even if there's only one parish left on earth, the body of Christ will still not be divided because the groups that left it aren't part of it anymore.
	They've removed themselves from it.
	And what the Orthodox teaching on the Antichrist is, it's not that he's opposed to Christ.
	He replaces Christ.
	He's like a false substitute.
	So he's more of a trans Christ than anti, from what I've learned.
	I just wanted to use that word.
	How dare you misgender?
	Are I guess we miss Messiah?
	But people, I mean, he's going to be Christ-like in external form that many Christians are going to be tricked.
	Oh, this is him.
	He's uniting.
	And look at the love.
	And we're already setting the stage for that with a lot of churches focusing on these vague notions of love and tolerance and so on.
	Yeah.
	And he's going to be, you know, beloved by everyone as this great peacemaker.
	And so, but Christians will discern it, I think, immediately.
	Real Christians, I think, will be able to tell right away what's going on.
	But it's the people that are like doing the vaccines and doing the masks that will just submit to whatever they're told, really, that will hear the TV talking about this great man that's come to unify all the religions and unify all the nations.
	Don't you want world peace?
	You know, before that, obviously the world's going to be plunged into chaos so that this fake unity will be appealing to people, just like they couldn't show the vaccines unless they plunged the world into chaos.
	Don't you want this to restore order?
	They're mocking you, of course.
	They're not going to make you, they're not going to stop doing lockdowns anyway.
	But there's all, they have to create the problem by which they can impose their solution.
	And people have to accept it willingly.
	That's always how Satan works.
	You have to accept, you have to consent to what he's shilling for you to actually fall into it.
	He can't actually force you to do anything.
	He can give you incentives.
	He can threaten you, but he can't get to your inner self unless you open the door to it.
	He doesn't have a lot of power unless you give it to him.
	He actually has no power unless you give it to him, frankly.
	Right.
	And many Catholic trads and the Latin Mass, when I stress the ascetic features of Orthodoxy and how important it has been for me to heal the spiritual wounds that I had to pull me away from the world when I was so deep in it, when I stress that, the prayer and the fasting, many of the trad say to me, well, Roosh, we have prayer and fasting too, as a counter argument.
	And do you see the Latin Mass as equivalent to the Orthodox Church in removing ourselves from the world to allow God's grace to enter?
	Is it like what the Orthodox Church teaches and advises?
	Well, for a thousand years, excuse me, the Latin Mass was an Orthodox liturgy.
	It was just in Latin and done a little bit differently.
	I also don't spend a ton of time studying Catholicism, like the ins and outs of their various, like what they're up to.
	I see what people tell me on your forum or on Gab, which is like two of the three websites that I ever go to anymore.
	And I might not even use Gab that often anymore.
	I'm getting tired of hearing all these people talking about how the election is about to be decertified.
	Trump's going to come back.
	I'm just getting so tired of seeing this.
	So I haven't studied the ins and outs of the traditional Latin Mass, except insofar as the Western Rite does the Mass of Pope St. Gregory the Great.
	Who, by the way, Pope St. Gregory the Great once said, whoever calls himself universal bishop is precursor to the Antichrist.
	Modern popes don't like that line too much.
	But I think it's the same idea, or it's at least supposed to be the same idea, of entering into a holy place with incense and music.
	And it is all focused on the Eucharist as well.
	So there's a lot of similarity, certainly.
	And I think, at least in its underpinnings and its foundations, it's the equivalent of a liturgy in that sense, except that it's not part of the body of Christ anymore.
	So I don't think you're going to get the same salvation from it necessarily.
	Can I run to the bathroom for like 30 seconds here?
	Sure.
	Okay.
	And while he goes to the bathroom, the comment I wanted to make is that the Armenian church is very pious.
	The external form is very beautiful.
	It's very holy.
	You go to the Armenian church and you'll think, wow, this is the Orthodox church, but the internals are not there.
	The internals, the faith, the removing yourself from the world to serve Christ is not there.
	So what you have in the Armenian church is a lot of materialistic people who go to church.
	And in the Orthodox church, when I go, it's a little bit different.
	The people match the service.
	So you have a service that's very pious, and the people you can tell they don't drive up in the newest BMW models.
	I'm not saying don't buy an expensive car, but it doesn't, in the Armenian church, the internals and the externals don't match.
	So I guess when it comes to the trads who fast and pray, I don't know specifically how their fasting and prayer goes, but just because they do the actions, the external form, doesn't mean the internals is there.
	So that's something that a seeker has to discern when they are looking for a church, whether they want to choose Catholics or the Orthodox.
	But I guess we can see that the Latin Mass is going to be difficult to be a part of if the Pope, the head of that church, is attacking it directly.
	And that is what we are seeing right now.
	And until Michael comes back, we also know that the Muslims have prayer and fasting.
	The Buddhists also have some form of fasting.
	So just because even the secular people, they fast.
	So just because you're doing the behavior, unless you have the truth of Christ behind it, you may be doing it in vain.
	Okay.
	So I just went on to talk a little bit about that topic.
	So I wanted to talk about the Muslims for a second, but one particular aspect of them.
	Many secular men in the United States see the coverings of Muslim women and their forced chastity as proof that the faith is correct.
	Look how modest the women are.
	Of course, forgetting that those women will be severely punished if they don't do that.
	They'll be stoned.
	They will be whipped and lashed.
	There is honor killings.
	Their fathers would kill them if they disobey.
	Now, some, again, secular men who haven't gone down the spiritual path are seduced by this idea that, look, all these harlots I've been with, they can hold a candle to the Muslim women who are virgins.
	And these Muslim women somehow must be moral or more moral.
	Of course, until they migrate to the West and adopt the Western norms, which I have seen.
	So the question I have for you is, why is forcing someone to be moral at threat of physical punishment not a Christian way?
	Why don't we just force all the Orthodox women at threat of a lash to just cover up and not sleep around?
	There's a lot of stuff I want to say about that.
	Firstly, I do like the modesty of Muslim women to some extent.
	I still remember, I used to work at Greenpeace.
	And I was, in my hippie days, I was canvassing at a mall at one point.
	I got this Muslim woman to sign up and I reached out to shake her hand as I did with everybody that gave money to the company.
	And she recoiled in horror that I would presume to touch her, this man that was not her husband.
	And even though I was kind of surprised, I thought that's pretty cool, actually.
	I respect that.
	And this was back when I was a liberal and a PUA and smoking weed.
	Even then, I was like, there's something to that.
	You know, that's cool.
	I think a lot of guys would also be surprised by the behavior of some of these, quote, chaste, quote, modest Muslim women in the Western world.
	I've read articles that to get around their whole virgin at marriage thing, they will either engage in sodomy with their boyfriends or they will have their hymen reconstructed, which I don't know how that works, but they will actually have doctors check to see if the hymen is intact before the marriage.
	So they will go to special surgeons that are known for helping Muslim women prepare for marriage in this way so that their husbands will think they're marrying a virgin.
	But so another aspect of this is that you can't really force morality because even though, for example, all this extramarital sexual activity is illegal in Muslim countries, Muslim countries have some of the highest rates of pornography use in the world.
	I think Cairo, Egypt, I think I saw nobody Googles the word sex more than people in Cairo, Egypt.
	Obviously, a lot of Muslim men out in Afghanistan, they have their bacha bazi where they will just dress little boys up like girls and have their way with them.
	So, you know, they're not sleeping with a woman out of wedlock.
	They're just dressing up a little boy and sodomizing him instead.
	So there's a brokenness that forms from this like forced morality because it has no effect on the person's heart, mind, and soul.
	So it's the difference between Islam and Christianity in terms of the moral behavior is the difference between compulsion and transfiguration.
	When a Christian's soul is filled with the Holy Spirit and grace and God's love, you don't want to do that stuff because you want to get closer to God, get deeper into your communion with God.
	And I'm sure there are Muslims that agree with this too, like the Sufis, perhaps, I'm sure, are more in line with what I'm saying than the more outer focused people.
	So fear of God is the beginning of all wisdom, right?
	This is what's happening with my face.
	Nothing.
	Everything is fine.
	See, you know what?
	Now people are going to say they're going to clip that.
	Look, doing the one, and I'm going to have to answer that too.
	So fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.
	But it's not the end of wisdom.
	Perfect love casts out fear.
	So when we, right before communion, the last thing the priest says before we approach the chalice is with faith and love and fear.
	Was that what he says?
	With the fear of God, with faith and love, drawn near, right?
	With the fear of God, with faith and love, drawn near.
	And in historic Christianity, even going back to the Jewish Philo of Alexandria, this is talking about or has been interpreted to mean the three different levels of obedience to God.
	Fear of love.
	Just ignore that.
	Fear of God.
	I've like tripped it over by words now.
	Talking about fear of love.
	Fear of something Iron Maiden song.
	Fear of the love.
	So fear of God is the first level of obedience, right?
	We fear hell.
	We don't want punishment.
	We want to act properly, modify our behavior.
	I'm just like, close my eyes so I don't have to do this while I talk.
	So we are obeying God out of a fear of hell and torture and punishment.
	That's the lowest level of obedience to God.
	The next level of obedience to God is desiring a reward, desiring salvation, desiring grace, desiring transfiguration, desiring heaven.
	The highest level is obeying God just because we love him.
	I don't hear a lot of that in Islam.
	I see this fear of hell, because if you ever read the Quran, hell is this brutal place where they burn your skin off and it regrows just so it can be burned off again.
	And their description of heaven is basically like a 15-year-old boy's fantasy about all the virgin women and the rivers of wine.
	Like their heaven is described as something pleasurable to the senses.
	That's how they're appealing to people.
	Don't you want all this pleasure?
	You put off your physical pleasure now so you can have more physical pleasure later.
	Obviously, this is not the real heaven, right, that we're talking about here, because the real heaven is not where you're going to have all the sex and alcohol you want.
	It's where your soul is going to be in such close communion with God that it wouldn't even occur to you to think about sensory pleasure.
	So these are the different levels of or approaches to obedience to God.
	And Islam is stuck mostly at the bottom one and then less so in the second one.
	But what they desire, like their desire for reward, is still based on a physical sensory reward.
	This is not what transforms your soul.
	It has to be for love of God, for appreciation, for gratitude, for what filthy sinners we are, how many times we fall, and he still brings us back into his arms every time.
	I mean, it's mind-blowing that he loves how much God loves us.
	And so it's a process of learning to love him as much as he loves us.
	I don't hear a lot of Muslims talking that way.
	And I can say that if you read the lives of the saints and when they experience states of grace in tears, the last thing they would say in that state is, I could use a burger right now or a steak or a virgin or fame.
	I mean, it's just when you're so close to God, if you, you know, if you have a spiritual experience of grace, I mean, that's it.
	There's nothing else that you need.
	Just being a little an inch closer to God, to our fallen bodies and flesh is just so much joy.
	But hopefully we can feel that.
	Now, I recently wrote an article called The Rise of the Orthosphere, where I claim that internet evangelism will drive a lot of converts to the Orthodox Church in the near term.
	What do you think about that claim and what role do you see the internet playing?
	Well, clearly, Vladimir Putin paid you to do this with all the gold and mansions that come with a conversion to Orthodoxy.
	At my mom's house.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I mean, Orthodoxy is so new to this country.
	I mean, it only came here, I think, the end of the 1800s, right?
	A couple Russian guys came to Alaska, and almost nothing has been translated into English until very, very recently.
	So there was really no way for most Americans to have ever even heard of Orthodoxy, much less read The Saints.
	And now there's all this work going into translation.
	I would imagine the vast majority of Orthodox writings throughout time are still not translated.
	They're probably still in Greek, still in Russian, still in Syriac or ancient Armenian or who knows where all this stuff is.
	Like, obviously, pre-schism is the stuff I'm talking about here with all these different groups or Coptic.
	Who knows?
	But the fact that this is all so much is available now, that we can see so clearly why it's the right church and the only church with the big C, properly with a big C.
	I see the internet driving tons of people.
	And I know some people, not everyone joins for the same reasons, but I think that whatever reason you join for, the ideal is that God will change your heart and bring you on board with the truth of Orthodoxy, even if you join just because you think it's based or just because there's no woman priests or just because they're not Zionists.
	So I think people do join for those reasons, which are not the best reasons.
	It's certainly a good reason to leave Protestant and become Orthodox because they're like, well, I don't want to have female priests.
	They don't do that.
	So let's go over here.
	But then once you're there, like whatever gets you in the door gets you in the door.
	But then once you're there, you know, you want to, I think, move more towards the healing of your inner man than any specific political or cultural thing.
	Because really, Orthodoxy is a mystical tradition at the end of the day.
	It is an internal transfiguration that we are seeking.
	And when our souls are in communion with the ultimate truth, our political and cultural opinions, ideally, will be aligned with what's objectively true as well.
	But that's not really the point of Orthodoxy.
	The point isn't to, you know, flex on liberals or whatever.
	We just do that by default because we believe in truth and they tend not to.
	But I see a ton of people joining.
	I hear all the time, hey, I just met someone, a new catechuman who watches you or watches Ruch or watches Jay Dyer.
	So I think the fruits of this, you know, Putin's money is clearly well spent because it's working.
	I hear all the time people joining because of something they heard on the internet.
	Or someone, we had someone at our church maybe about a year and a half ago.
	I said, oh, so what made you interested in Orthodox?
	He said, well, I was watching, oh, never mind.
	I said, were you going to say Jay Dyer?
	He said, yeah, I was going to say Jay Dyer.
	So, you know, I know not everyone, as soon as you become the public person on the internet, you're going to get your haters.
	You're going to get your criticism.
	Some accurate, some not accurate, I'm sure, depending on the person, what they're saying.
	But the fruits of this are very clear.
	You know, we have these amazing channels.
	Father Spiridon has that great channel.
	Father Peter Hears is constantly making amazing content.
	Father Josiah Trenham.
	This is stuff that 20 years ago was unheard of and unavailable.
	And I think as soon as people get exposed to Orthodoxy, if they're really seeking Christ, they're really seeking truth with all these amazing resources, all these books, all these channels, I mean, we have everything now just out in public that you would need to get you in the door.
	And so I agree completely with your article.
	In fact, I told Luke Kendrat, once you're in seminary, if you get a blessing, welcome to come on my channel, talk about how it's going, update everyone, you know, because he had to stop doing his channel to go to seminary.
	I hope they let him do his channel once he's a priest, though.
	We hear, welcome to Orthodoxy first.
	I'm your host, Father Luke, unless I give him a different name.
	Yeah, well, I'll keep him in our prayers, I'm sure.
	But it's making a big difference.
	I mean, the trad forum, you saw how many people were there.
	We had that famous actor and musician there.
	I mean, I don't think anyone knew who he was until we started talking to him.
	We go, oh, you Google him.
	Oh, this guy's actually like a really well-known guy.
	People that watch the show Weeds probably know who he is, though, because he was dating the main actress.
	I think he was even on the show a couple of times, that guy, Charlie Mars.
	You know, we're breaking into like kind of the mainstream here, too.
	George Bruno was commenting on E. Michael Jones' gab saying, hey, I want to do a trad for him.
	That sounds fun.
	So we're trying to get him to come to the next one, too.
	And we're crossing over outside of our, you know, what can be an Orthodox echo chamber.
	Like mainstream people are taking note.
	There are famous people converting.
	Shawnee Smith, the actress, she was on the show, Becker.
	She was a secretary.
	She was in the movie Saw.
	She was Amanda in the movie Saw.
	She was on Charlie Sheen's show, Anger Management.
	She became Orthodox, made a whole documentary about it.
	I haven't been able to find it yet.
	Carrie, what's his last name?
	Tokugawa, the guy who played Shang Tsung in the original Mortal Kombat movie, played an Orthodox priest in a movie and loved it so much he became Orthodox afterwards.
	So we're breaking into the mainstream here little by little.
	Because once people are exposed to the beauty and the depth, I mean, how do you, what are you going to go back to your glory angel feather clouds in your Protestant church where they just let a bunch of glitter go from the ceiling and you say, oh, it's from the angels.
	Todd White does this.
	Oh, it's glory clouds.
	No, it's a glitter machine.
	Come on, dude.
	It's a smoke machine and a glitter machine.
	Now, how do you go back to that?
	I have a dream, and my dream is to harness the power of the internet to meme repentance on a national scale using the internet.
	Is that possible?
	Or am I just full of pride and just a big dummy?
	There's only one way to find out because we've got to try before we know.
	Could Return of Kings be the warm-up?
	I don't know.
	I mean, you're skilled with mass communication and you know how to run platforms.
	It's up to God.
	But I do.
	Someone's going to do it, though.
	I don't buy, you know, some people in the Orthodox church are like, oh, the internet's bad and we shouldn't be on it.
	I don't buy that.
	I see the fruits.
	There's fruits.
	If there's fruits, you continue.
	We're not backsliding.
	People are coming into the church.
	That's fruits to me.
	You know, of course, we have to continually check our activities.
	And if we are corrected by clergy, we have to listen to them and so on.
	Even an anonymous person could share the truth.
	We have to pay attention and just be watchful, right?
	But the internet is a tool, and God can use any tool for good.
	So, you know, I see your YouTube channel has borne some fruit.
	I hope that me as a new Orthodox can stay within my lane, so to speak, but still help too.
	Well, I mean, if the church fathers had the internet, they would have been using it to evangelize, help people.
	I mean, St. The Fan the Recluse, you know, wrote thousands of letters, received and wrote thousands of letters from people asking them questions about how do I deal with this problem in my life?
	How do I deal with this problem?
	They would have done the same thing if they'd had email.
	You know, the technology is still just communication, one person talking to another, that person talking back.
	And we're in this amazing, miraculous situation where we can reach thousands, tens, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, all of us combined, in a way that the fathers couldn't have dreamed of.
	You know, it takes time to write a letter.
	It takes time to read it.
	It takes time to find the paper.
	And who knows?
	I don't think they had pens back then.
	I don't know, the quill in the ink.
	I mean, there was an expense.
	There was a cost monetarily in terms of time.
	You and I can just press go live and people can ask us questions and we can help tons of them.
	Thousands and thousands of people all at once.
	And I think it's a beautiful thing.
	And like you said, it's a tool like any other tool.
	A car can be a dangerous weapon or a helpful thing.
	A gun can be a helpful tool or a dangerous thing.
	So I think it's more about what you do with it than the thing in and of its own inherent essence, so to speak, to use a nice theology word.
	Now, have you stated publicly the state that you live in?
	Yeah, people know California.
	So we kind of both live in the belly of the beast in terms of me on the East Coast and Washington, D.C. area, you in California.
	You know, we're both carrying our cross in a predominantly secular environment.
	In your daily life, how do you deal with that?
	How do you deal with just the basics, going to the store, dealing with the secular horde?
	People even could be family and friends who don't care about God.
	They just don't care about him.
	They don't want to talk about him.
	They don't care about you going to church and you reading your books.
	And also, but of course, people who are going to fall for many of Satan's tricks and you're going to watch them fall.
	How do you approach that when, yeah, you're in church on Sunday and the Christians that you engage in fellowship with are great, but as soon as you leave, it's back into the world.
	I think the trick, at least for me, is maintaining a prayerful state in my soul.
	The Jesus prayer helps a lot.
	You can pray silently in your mind.
	You can pray under your breath.
	And if you stay in a prayerful state, I've found that you're not really bothered by it, at least not to the same degree.
	Or you might be saying, Lord Jesus Christ, Son, have had mercy on me, a sinner.
	You see someone very transparently lost in sin.
	So you say, Lord Jesus Christ, I've had mercy on that person, a sinner.
	Like maybe you start praying for them, praying for the people around you.
	It's hard to do this all day, every day, of course.
	Maintaining a prayerful state 24 hours a day, or at least all your waking hours is very hard.
	That's why the monks will do six hours standing vigil, all night vigil, train themselves in this way.
	So as lay people, we can only kind of get a taste of what they're experiencing.
	But the Jesus prayer helps a lot.
	And I think, I know at the beginning of my Christian journey, other people's sin made me angry.
	Like I got, I kind of have like a righteous anger about it that I don't really have anymore, except in very specific circumstances.
	So when I see someone who's, like if I see two women walking down the street holding hands, I might say yikes and just start praying for them or something, but I'm not, it doesn't like get me angry.
	I'm like, oh, the wrath of God come upon thee, heretic.
	Like I'm not going to rile myself up over it like that.
	We want to stay in a dispassionate state.
	And it is hard, especially in California.
	But then I see people at the grocery store also with a cross around their cross necklace.
	Or I will just, we got to treat everyone the same way to the best of our ability.
	Like I'll make small talk with people in line, the grocery store, or the clerk.
	I mean, really, I just go to the grocery store and church is more or less the only places I go these days.
	I'm doing this stream from my girlfriend's house because my air conditioning is broken.
	It's like 90 degrees in my room right now.
	It's been broken for like four days already.
	I hope that thing gets fixed soon.
	But I don't go to places where I'm going to be confronted with this stuff a lot.
	I think I've been to one bar in the last two years, like one time, one physical going to the bar.
	And some of our great saints and our Athonite monks will just create a little enclosure for themselves and literally never leave, right?
	They will only talk to their confessor.
	St. Theophan, the recluse, again, only spoke to his confessor for years, did not talk to another human being except in writing, people that were writing to him and helping him.
	So we can do some degree of environment management, managing our environment, who we talk to, where we go.
	I'm not going to go to the nightclub and try to do the Jesus prayer the whole time.
	I mean, even in my pickup days, I hated nightclubs, even when I liked what was going on there.
	So now that I don't, I'm certainly not going to go there and do that.
	But I think the short answer is maintaining a prayerful state.
	And I think the more transfigured our soul becomes in our body too, because these are connected, integrally connected.
	I think that's really all we can do.
	And we can be Christ to others.
	There's a saying, I don't know who said it originally, sometimes attributed to Francis of Assisi, but it may or may not have been him.
	A Roman Catholic that's a saint for them, not for us, of course, said, always preach the gospel and when necessary, use words.
	So we can always try and show our joy, our lightness, our dispassion.
	And if someone finds that interesting, we can strike up a conversation, maybe, you know, stealth convert them or stealth evangelize them a little bit.
	But I found that it bothers me less over time.
	I know this was a long answer to a short question.
	It bothers me less over time because I'm not paying as much attention to what's going on around me anyway.
	Like there's so much darkness and twisted judgment and pride in my own soul.
	Like, I'm trying to focus on that and repent for that because other people's sins, even if they're doing some outer sin, for all I know, they're more loving than I am.
	They're less judgmental, less prideful.
	I can't judge our comparative degree of sin.
	So, for all I know, I might be more of a sinner than them because my inside spirit is all twisted up.
	And maybe theirs is more pure, even if they're drinking a lot or fornicating.
	I mean, who knows?
	We're not God, we don't judge.
	This is why we're always taught to focus on ourselves and call ourselves the chief of all sinners, right?
	We say that every time before we take communion, the chief of all sinners, like Paul described himself, we apply that to ourselves, which helps us keep our spiritual eyes or our noose in the right place and not worry too much about what other people are doing.
	Now, on a national scale, this makes a bigger difference.
	Like, we have to know what people are doing to some degree, especially if we have kids.
	Should I send them to public school, to daycare?
	No and no, by the way, if anyone's curious about those questions, we have to know what's going on to keep our family safe.
	But in terms of my own personal interactions with others, I just try to see Christ in them, and that helps a lot too.
	If you see people as being made in the image of God, which is a hard thing to do sometimes, that will stop you from kind of attacking them mentally or verbally as much as well.
	Great.
	And so, when you first started your YouTube channel in the early days, I admit that I didn't follow it that much.
	I would catch bits in here, but lately, the past few months, I've been very diligent about watching everyone.
	I have found them extremely edifying, especially for me, a relatively new convert.
	The balance that you present on the Orthodox faith has been very fruitful.
	Can you tell me a little bit about how you approach your channel, how it has evolved, and maybe what you hope to accomplish?
	So, when I started my channel, I'm still doing the exact same thing I was doing three years ago, which is I think about something that I think is interesting to me and will be interesting to others.
	And I press record and I just start talking about it.
	Someone emailed me recently saying, Hey, I want to start a streaming channel like you do.
	What are your techniques?
	What tips do you have?
	I said, The only thing I do is pray before this streams.
	I don't have a structure for every video, I don't have a scheduling thing.
	Like, I've gone months without uploading at times, not as much recently.
	Um, because as it grows, I people tell me stuff that's interesting for me to read, look at, think about, then I can kind of give back what they give to me.
	Um, the only thing that's really changed about the videos is that I used to do a lot of them on a stationary bike because when I was cutting down from my fat phase to my fit phase, I had to bike an hour a day anyway.
	Thought, well, this is a good time.
	I have a desk, a nice bike desk, and people didn't always know what was going on because I'm sitting there peddling while I talk and my body's kind of doing this.
	So, you'll see me doing this on the stream, and people are like, What is that sound?
	Is this a Parkinson's?
	What is going on here?
	People have a neurological disorder.
	But then, you know, I've upgraded to getting a real webcam, a real microphone.
	But fundamentally, I'm not doing anything different.
	Book reviews, church history, patristics.
	And I have a blessing to talk about all these topics.
	And I've noticed there's kind of like a J curve with subscribers.
	Like for a while, there's no one, but then, because when no one's subscribed, no one else wants to subscribe.
	But then the more people sign up, the more people want to sign up.
	You and I might have called this pre-selection, right?
	In a previous life, previous phase of our lives.
	And so people are joining.
	And then the more comments I get, the more questions I get.
	That gives me more stuff to talk about.
	Like my live stream can go two hours because people keep asking me stuff.
	And then it's just the same thing on a bigger scale.
	The irony is I can talk for two hours off the cuff with no problem.
	And then it takes me a week to write a 20-minute speech.
	My speech next weekend in Montana, I still haven't started writing yet.
	So I need to get on that kind of soon.
	But, yeah, fundamentally, it's just the deeper I go, the more the more I can give to others.
	And so, I'm just fundamentally a person that I find something that's interesting and helpful, and I want to share it with others.
	It's even in my PUA days, that's all I was really doing.
	I was wrong about what I was sharing in retrospect.
	I thought I was being helpful at the time, I wasn't trying to be subversive, I wasn't trying to be evil or anything like that.
	I thought, hey, this could help men, I'm going to tell men about it.
	So, I'm the same person in terms of my desire to help others.
	Obviously, that's just that desire has been baptized, thank God, and now I'm sharing orthodoxy with them instead of occult stuff or pickup stuff like I used to be doing.
	And the link to Michael's YouTube channel is in the show notes.
	I highly urge you to subscribe and watch.
	Now, if someone watches our interview or my videos, my articles, or your videos, and they're thinking, you know, maybe the Orthodox Church is Christ's church, is the truth.
	What first step would you recommend that they take?
	It would depend what they're inquiring from.
	So, like, for a Catholic who's upset about the Pope or they're watching this and they're thinking about it, the first book I would recommend is called Two Paths by Michael Welton.
	W-H-E-L-T-O-N.
	It's a short read, it's an easy read.
	He was a Catholic that became Orthodox and then wrote a book explaining kind of why he thinks the papal ecclesiology is wrong based on going through forged documents throughout time, just historical examples, church fathers.
	That's a great book that I think will show you why the papacy was kind of always a house of cards, even if it hasn't come to a head and been this transparent and obvious until Pope Francis.
	If you're a Protestant inquiring, I would read Rock and Sand by Father Josiah Trenham and maybe Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy by Father Andrew Stephen Damik.
	They cover the same topic, but you know, they go well together.
	If you're Jewish, I would read Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching by St. Irenaeus of Lyon because he's preaching from the Torah, preaching Christ from the Torah and from the prophets and all that.
	If you're Muslim, I don't know if there's been any books by Muslim converts to Orthodox Christianity.
	I know there have been Muslim converts that became saints, like Muslims that would torture a Christian and be so impressed by the guy's endurance that they say, Hey, I want to be that too.
	Then they just get beheaded 10 seconds later, don't even have time to get baptized, but they get this baptism of blood, so to speak.
	But I don't know of any Muslims that became Orthodox and have like a public platform of some kind.
	If you are an atheist, I would probably read Father Seraphim Rose's book, Nihilism, first to see kind of what all of this is about and where it leads and has led.
	If you are an occultist, I would read Father Seraphim Rose's book, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future.
	Or if you're into dream interpretation or astral protection, that's a great book for you: Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future.
	Everyone should watch Finding the Church Jesus Built on the Orthodox Christianity 101 channel.
	And the best thing you can do on top of all that is just go to some parishes, you know, go to the agape, the fellowship hour after liturgy, go to the liturgy, go to Vespers, just ask people questions and ask the priests, ask the people, and find your community because we aren't saved by ourselves.
	It's a communal thing.
	It really is.
	We're saved with and through and by each other because that's how, like, we don't know even what's wrong with us necessarily till we interact with others and stuff gets brought up, right?
	Pride gets brought up, anger gets brought up.
	Other people are kind of mirrors of us in that regard.
	So we might not even know what to repent or confess for necessarily until someone else either tells us bluntly or tells us gently or something comes up in us in response to them that we then bring to God and to our priests, once we're Orthodox, of course.
	And just get involved because at the very least, you have nothing to lose.
	And at the very most, you have salvation to gain.
	And would you, is there a recommendation for the church to join?
	Because within the Eastern Orthodox Church, there are multiple churches in the United States, at least.
	What would you say people maybe should check out first?
	So there are some archdioceses that are more traditional and uphold the apostolic traditions better than others in modern America.
	At the end of the day, it does all depend on the priest.
	You will find Greek parishes that are very based and trad, and you will find Roquor churches that are not.
	But overall, RoCorp and Antioch are probably the safest bet if you're looking for minimal COVID restrictions and minimal liberalism infecting the church.
	I mean, but again, like we, a local Roquor parish during the shutdown, started serving communion from a tray.
	Like every individual just takes communion off the tray.
	Yeah, you hate to see that.
	But just yesterday, orthochristian.com came out with a great survey of Orthodox archdiocese and the different effects the shutdown had in terms of how much money they made or lost, how many new parishioners they gained or old ones they lost.
	I think it was like 45% of OCA clergy considered leaving the priesthood during the shutdowns, or like 30% or 40%, a shockingly high number compared to 9% of the Roquor priests.
	And I'm sure that the priests struggle with the temptation to apostasize and turn away all the time.
	I'm sure that's a big temptation for a lot of them.
	So I'm not judging them for that.
	But I'm saying if 40% of your priests are considering leaving because of the sniffles, you know, that's that's a, I shouldn't say because of the sniffles because obviously for them, it's a much bigger burden than that, trying to manage the parish.
	So I repent for minimizing the struggle that they would go through for that.
	But I would say probably the Greeks are the least likely to be what you're looking for in terms of a traditional parish.
	Though again, that depends on the parish.
	And you should check out what's local to you.
	Not every parish is going to have English services either.
	For me, that is very important that I understand what's going on.
	But for some people, it's not.
	You know, they just want to get lost in the experience and just be there with the angels regardless of the language of the chance.
	So just check stuff out, see what's local.
	Some people will travel hours to go to a parish that they like every week because it's worth it to find a good one.
	I don't go to the closest parish to my house.
	The closest one, like I said, is four minutes away.
	I was baptized there.
	That was a Greek parish.
	I don't go there anymore.
	I'm probably never going to go back to that parish.
	I travel 25 minutes to get to my parish because that's where people my age are with healthy families and a thriving community.
	That's what you're looking for.
	Look for churches with lots of babies, lots of young families.
	Because if you find a parish with a lot of young families, then you're finding a ripe tree, so to speak.
	You know, the church that you and I went to, that weird Ukrainian one in Indiana, was like all awesome and 70 and above.
	I still don't really know what we experienced there.
	I'm not sure what happened.
	It's kind of like a weird fever dream in retrospect.
	But Father Lev was a very nice man, that monk that lived there.
	I don't think you liked it too much when he said you could be either a rabbi or a Russian priest with that beard.
	But most parishes are not just elderly like that.
	So if you're a young person, you want to look in a convert or inquire, find the place where the babies are is advice I would give you.
	And the last question, I know you are getting tired, is this.
	So the world is getting more evil, it seems, by the day.
	The regime wants to inject us with toxic, sterilizing poison.
	They do.
	Keep us under house arrest.
	BlackRock wants to buy up all the homes and on and on.
	It seems like these problems are too big for an individual and his guns to solve.
	Do you have any words as How Christians can approach this current tribulation and what's surely to come.
	I remember the trad forum when you asked E. Michael Jones about BlackRock and what we could do to stop them.
	He said, Come on, Roosh, go stop them.
	Right?
	Kind of try and mock the idea that we have any power over what's happening in our culture, in our political situation.
	So some people will like this answer, some people will not.
	I'm going to bring this back to what I think is the core and the purpose of orthodoxy.
	So I'm going to read a couple of verses here, literally just two, from Mark 2 16, 17.
	And then I want to talk about this a little bit to answer my question to give my answer to this question.
	So what is 16, 17, Mark 2?
	When the scribes and Pharisees saw him eat with tax collectors and sinners, they said unto his disciples, How is it that he eats and drinks with tax collectors and sinners?
	When Jesus heard it, he said unto them, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick.
	I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.
	And what I want to draw everyone's attention to is in verse 17, when Jesus says, They that are whole have no need of the physician, but they that are sick.
	Jesus is describing whole as the opposite of sick.
	And therefore, sick is the opposite of whole.
	So the spiritual illness that he has come to heal us from is this internal balkanization, this internal compartmentalization of who we are.
	Maybe our mind is in one place, our heart in another place, our soul is in another place, our spirit in another place.
	It's scattered.
	Our attention is scattered.
	Our inner man is scattered.
	It is in fractions.
	It's not together.
	And Christ is saying the opposite of that state is being whole, because that state is sickness.
	It's illness.
	So as the world falls apart around us, first of all, I think that is a reflection of the broken, balkanized inner spirits of so many people in our country.
	People don't like to hear this.
	I think that we have the country we deserve.
	I said this at Trad Forum, so it's not like I'm going to scandalize anyone by saying this.
	We have the country we deserve as a whole because our leaders are living in this sick state where their mind, heart, and soul is not aligned either with their own inner self or with God.
	All of this is meant to be brought into unity and all into perfect alignment under the will of God in obedience to God, in love of God, in fear of God.
	So what we are called to do as the world falls apart is not to fix the world.
	We are not Marxists.
	We are not materialists.
	Obviously, we want to help people that are in need and give to the poor and needy and the sick and the hungry.
	But Christians are not called to create some material utopia.
	First of all, because that's not ever going to happen.
	It's never happened.
	It's never going to happen.
	Christ promised us everything is going to get worse until he comes and recapitulates all into himself.
	What he's calling us to do is heal ourselves.
	Not only because that's what our souls are built for, we're built to be whole and one in unity and communion with God.
	But a nice side effect of that is that the more whole we become, the more healthy we become, that flows out of us onto the people and situations around us as well.
	So the idea that we're somehow going to fix a broken country by remaining in our broken spiritual state, but just outlawing certain things or putting certain people on trial is absurd.
	Even if we do succeed in putting those people on trial, the deep state, what do they call it?
	The storm, the great awakening, they all go to Gitmo.
	Well, we're all still the same broken people the next day.
	And then we'll just get the same broken leaders after that because I almost said we elected these people, but half the time that's not true, is it?
	But we are, we can't fix things from a broken state of being.
	Like these people that are like shilling cue and the decertification of the election, fine.
	But if you are going around fornicating and watching pornography and abusing drugs, then nothing you do is going to fix anything because that brokenness will just find some other way to express itself in some other way.
	Like, okay, maybe you fixed something politically, but all the people you're fornicating with, you're harming their souls too.
	So now you're sending other broken people out in the world to break things again.
	Nothing happens without the healing of the inner man.
	And some of the leaders, some of the anti-communist leaders, I'll say politely of the 20th century, especially the Orthodox one, was constantly talking about this.
	And you never hear, you never hear in any Republican circle, any GOP circle, the talk of healing and repentance.
	You never hear the word repentance from these people.
	All you hear is like, we need to call out the left, call out the Democrats.
	But I will tell you, I mean, how many of these like alt-right women were just going around sleeping with all the alt-right guys while promoting themselves as family, pro-family, traditional conservatives?
	But there are none of these things, right?
	And the guys obviously weren't either.
	We can't have a healed country full of broken people.
	That's just not how things work.
	So I would say if you want to make the world a better place and you want to help try and reverse this destructive course that this country is on, then what you have to do is remember, Jesus described whole as the opposite of sick.
	And so what you want to do is heal thyself.
	Well, have Christ heal you, I should say, but focus on healing yourself.
	Focus on repentance.
	Focus on grace.
	Focus on theosis.
	Because do you think a country full of divinized, deified people is going to end up like this?
	No way.
	My patron Saint Augustine wrote in his book City of God that politics and the state were really just because of unsaved people.
	Like people that are really true, faithful Christians don't, we don't need laws.
	It's not like we're going to think about stealing something and then be like, oh, but there's a fine attached.
	Like we're not going to do it because we love God, right?
	We're following His commandments.
	We don't need a state to tell us right from wrong.
	We already have our epistemology, our knowledge of how to know things, how to know right from wrong, how to know what's moral.
	So the answer is repent, be saved, spread the gospel, and when necessary, you do that using words as well.
	Great answer.
	Well, thank you for all the very complete answers that you gave.
	I have to state that I did not give to, I have to say to the audience, I did not give Michael the questions beforehand.
	So this answers were a result of a man's pursuit of the truth through reading, study.
	That's what when you're serious about the faith, that's the road that you go down on.
	So thank you for giving.
	We went almost two hours long, much longer than I thought.
	Thank you for giving me this time.
	And I urge everyone to click in the show notes for Michael's YouTube channel to watch, enjoy.
	And Michael, is there any last words you want to share?
	No, thank you for the opportunity to come on your show.
	I'm glad we got to do this.
	You've come on my show before.
	We met in person a couple times.
	And I think the more people hear those who are serious about Orthodoxy talking about it, hopefully something resonates with them and they realize that, you know, this is the truth.
	A lot of guys out there are seeking truth in the wrong places.
	And I will hope and pray that they will come across this video and your others.
	And so, yeah, thank you for the opportunity.
	And everyone out there, God bless you all.
	I hope you go to Vespers tonight.
	And I hope you all have a great day.
	Okay, everyone.
	Thank you very much and God bless.

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