139: Bad Faith Discussion; Doug Wilson talks to Sam Harris
Daniel and Jack pick through Sam Harris' disgracefully friendly interview with right-wing fundamentalist and Hegseth-inspirer, Christian Nationalist pastor Doug Wilson. Content Warnings Episode Notes: Harris's release of his interview with Wilson: https://youtu.be/kRQ6Tcw9maM?si=hQEOhfyk_V7jMoyS Note: At one point in our episode, Daniel states that Wilson also posted the interview with Harris on his own channel, and this seems to be a mistake. Oops. Harris' response to his interview with Wilson: https://youtu.be/3qjNXaKjcc8?si=D_9Gkbq7PXKO7wnQ Wilson's response to the interview on his own channel: https://youtu.be/AWgWkZjbYRw?si=2KuiQcvoiVrSal08 Behind the Bastards episodes on the Hegseth book: https://youtu.be/FUU8NTFHCvk?si=ZCjOM6Mjtp1X9dPy & https://youtu.be/1HKE8cBYokY?si=1QrNOJZWcKvcq-mR Fundie Fridays episode on Doug Wilson: https://youtu.be/6dhaNeJ9UDw?si=y_CcsEb2Dc0rR8QG Texas 'sodomy' case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper/posts Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618&fan_landing=true IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's (Locked) Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ Jack's Bluesky: @timescarcass.bsky.social Daniel's Bluesky: @danielharper.bsky.social IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
Do you remember when people used to talk about Oh, 2016, it's been such a bad year I can't wait for it to be over.
You know, the meme, like the cartoon is like 2016, you know, 2015 ends and it's like, yay, 2016 is here.
And then 2016 arrives and it's like axe in the back.
And then like, oh, God.
And then 2017 is like axe with a mace.
And then, you know, finally, and then it seems like that literally has come true.
It's just every year it's been worse.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And little, little did we know what was coming.
I think arguably 2020 was the nadir.
I think, you know, the pandemic year was definitely like that.
That was a pretty rough year for everybody.
But, you know, the Biden years, unless you lived in Gaza, were actually not so bad.
But everything is now just back to the shit now, you know.
So what are we talking about this week, Daniel?
I'm sure it's a really nice person with excellent, well-developed and reasonable opinions.
Well, we're talking about two people today, ironically, both of which we have discussed at some length before.
But it's like a mega group, you know, it's like the supergroup.
They get together, two great tastes that taste terrible together.
So the open Christian nationalist with connections to Pete Hegseth, the, you know, the head of Department of War who is actively committing war crimes right now, Doug Wilson appeared on Sam Harris's podcast for some ungodly reason.
Sam Harris thought this was going to be okay.
And actually, I know exactly why he thought it was going to be okay.
We'll get there in a minute.
And they continued, they continue to have, you've heard the cold open.
Doug Wilson was thrilled with this recording.
He was over, he thought it was the best interview he'd had in years.
He said that at the end of that podcast, then later on on his own show, I found this like 30 minutes ago, so I wasn't able to include it in this episode.
But his own little bit, he iterated that it was like the best interview he'd ever had.
He had issues with the way Sam treated him on occasion, but he just, he loved it.
He loved it.
I'm telling you, if I ever interview one of these assholes and they come away going like, yeah, that was really great.
It worked out great for me.
I fucked up.
I done fucked up.
That's just the truth of it.
Anyway, so that's what we're here to do.
We're going to talk about that and we're going to kind of draw comparisons a little bit.
I was going to pull a bunch more clips, but you know, you do really need to know what Sam has to say about other people and how he's interacted with other people in the past.
And so we're going to make that kind of a continuing thought experiment that we go through while we listen to this pure drivel that this open young earth creationist Christian nationalist asshole believes and just how little Sam Harris pushes back.
What I'm hearing is that in the true characteristic style of the radical left, what we're actually doing is attacking a reasonable, moderate, skeptical, centrist voice via pretending to talk about Doug Wilson.
That's clearly what's happening.
This is clearly another hit job on poor Sam.
Poor Sam Harris, exactly.
We're just blaming Sam Harris for, you know, I mean, we never really did a Doug Wilson episode.
I always felt like that was more the Christian right cast kind of lane to do that guy.
They certainly know a lot more about him.
Somebody else wants to jump in and kind of bring in some expertise and wants to use our platform to do what I'd be happy to do.
I might do one myself.
We'll walk through a little bit of like what I know.
I mean, some of the details of like the various religious sects and the kind of the schisms over the years is not something that's like in my head.
I don't have expertise on that.
So I'm going to have to let that slide for now.
But kind of go through.
I spent a lot of time talking about like the absolutely bonkers things that Doug Wilson is just openly saying in this podcast.
So yes.
There is a long episode of Fundy Fridays, Fundy Fridays, I should say, on YouTube about Doug Wilson, which is very good.
And there's also the Behind the Bastards episode about Pete Hegseth's book.
And Pete Hegseth's, Doug Wilson is Pete Hegseth's brain to the extent that he has one.
I mean, Doug Wilson is not an unintelligent man.
Anyway, so I have not seen that episode of Fundy Fridays.
I don't know that I've ever watched Funny Fridays, but maybe I should.
No insult intended to the fine people of the Sherman show.
No, I just hadn't hadn't run across it.
So what do you know about Doug Wilson?
We'll just kind of start there just to kind of get a little bit of like a kind of the basics here.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
I'm kind of, I'm in the middle of writing an essay about Clive Barker.
I've been writing this essay for ages.
And one of the, you said, one of my pet theories about Clive Barker is that he's, because it's an interesting thing about him, which is that he is obviously a gay man and he writes and directs movies that are that are very, very much about, you know, what you could call deviant sexuality and stuff like that.
And one of the one of the topics of conversation about Hellraiser, for instance, the movie Hellraiser, is that it seems in its representations to actually sort of reproduce quite reactionary, homophobic ideas, you know, about BDSM, about gay people generally, stuff like that.
And I think it's more complicated than that.
And I'm trying to put in this essay that I've been writing for ages.
I'm trying to put in, I'm trying to get across why I think it's more complicated than that, what he's actually doing in those texts.
And I needed to get at a sort of quintessential right-wing, fundamentalist, Christian, homophobic, sexist, patriarchal, misogynistic expression about sex and sexuality so that I could so that I could show that what I think Barker is actually doing is deeply oppositional to that sort of thing.
And what I found was an absolutely just, I mean, Doug Wilson.
That's what I found.
I found Doug Wilson writing about sex, marriage, and domination and rape and stuff like that in a book that he wrote, the title of which I can't remember off the top of my head, but I found an amazing quote, which I'm actually using in that essay.
That's mainly apart from, as I say, watching the Fundy Fridays episode.
That's mainly what I know about Doug Wilson.
I ran into him mostly when we were doing like James Lindsay tough stuff and kind of stuff adjacent to that.
Because he, I don't know if James Lindsay appeared on there, but I think there were like connects.
Like James Lindsay appeared with someone who then appeared on Doug Wilson.
And so Doug Wilson kind of came to me that way.
So I got kind of a circuitous path towards him.
But he is a pastor of a large church in Moscow, Idaho.
I love it's from Moscow.
They have a old like independent press.
They have Canon Press and all of Wilson's books are published there.
He's in his, I guess he's in his 60s now, maybe 70s.
He's kind of a big burly guy.
He kind of has the affect of a guy who smokes cigars and drinks whiskey.
Although I don't know, you know, I think he does drink whiskey.
I don't know if he's a cigar guy or not, but he just has that, you know, the affect, you know, that sort of like the big bearded guy.
Not that I have anything problem with big bearded guys, of course, being one myself, but, you know, there is a, there is a, there is a sort of performance of masculinity there.
And he is deeply, deeply reactionary.
You know and we'll get into exactly.
Like you know, sometimes he's just saying the quiet part loud and sometimes he's expressing certain um, uh difficulties in terms of the way he like, navigates this kind of fundamentalist, far-right Christian world.
Um, and again, this is not my like, main field of expertise, but I kind of grew up adjacent to this stuff and so I have, like I have working knowledge of a lot of this, and this is this is not you.
I've heard all this before.
So he has, because of his connections to Pet Seth um, appeared on some fairly mainstream places.
He did, like a 30-minute sit down for CNN uh, he appeared on Ross And Duth Outs podcast uh, about a month ago.
Thanks, being interviewed.
Oh, he loves being interviewed, he loves being interviewed.
It's, you know, it's like you know, a duck to waters, him sitting with an interview and he, he comes across.
From the clips i've seen, he comes across as actually quite a um, what's the word he?
He comes across as quite a uh, almost a shy person.
That's, that's my impression.
He's fundamentally a shy, reticent person.
He's very polite and he often gets flustered by questions and uh yeah, I don't.
I, maybe you're looking at different clips than I am.
That's entirely.
I mean, you know, I don't, I wouldn't read him that way.
I read him as being very sure in his beliefs but also very uh triangulating in what he's uh kind of willing to say and not say, oh shit yeah um absolutely, he talks around.
That's what I think a lot of it is.
He will be asked questions and he will not want to quite say what he thinks and he will have to uh circumlocute around it.
Yes exactly, or I mean, he is saying what he thinks, but he has like a nuanced position.
He has a nuanced position and so, like you don't hear him talking about like fire and brimstone, like usually um, you don't hear him using like racial slurs, or certainly not racial slurs, but even like sexual slurs and that sort of thing he doesn't.
He comes across as like a big teddy bear, almost.
Yeah, he's very polite, unfailingly polite.
He does a kind of Santa Claus thing and uh, that's something that's going to be like very apparent here.
I mean again, you know, if there's one thing that Sam Harris appreciates, it's politeness towards him personally.
Show any amount of what he perceives as disrespect, that's right.
Sam Harris appreciates polite, calm discourse towards himself, towards himself, not towards other people.
God, I was going to play clips of Ezra Klein here at this exact moment to indicate just how hostile, but it would have added like 20 minutes to this podcast.
We're not going to do it, i'm sorry um, and maybe we'll do.
Maybe we'll do bonus material and we'll do all the rest of the stuff that I didn't get to get to include in this episode.
Anyway, I did not want to do a three-hour podcast.
None of us wants a three-hour podcast with this anyway um, you're also gonna find what are we decoding?
The gurus, come on.
You know this.
The trick to the matter is that these men are both very loquacious.
They love the sounds of their own voices even more than Doug Wilson likes to be interviewed.
He likes to hear himself be interviewed.
Um, and Sam Harris is the same way, and so I.
It's impossible to find a two-minute clip that actually gets at anything when these in these two people talking, so I was forced to use longer clips.
We will be cutting in between them and like talking through them, but just suffice to say there's a lot of Doug Wilson and Sam Harris talking in this episode and I apologize, I cut it down as much as I could.
Um anyway, the thing that Sam Harris really appreciated, the thing that really the first thing that's said in the podcast and like, like the like the theme song ends and you know it's like the very first thing is like, oh yeah, I remember back in the day you debated my friend Christopher Hitchens, and he said it was a great time and so he's like interpersonally connected to this guy.
You see oh, you debated my friend my, my old friend my my my, my now dead friend, Christopher Hitchens, and there was a documentary that was made about it.
It was such a great experience for everybody involved and so, like he's one of the cool kids because he debated Christopher Hitchens and not, like you believe in absolutely awful, repellent things that are going to make the world a worse place.
That's not his opinion.
It's like oh, you debated and you were a very polite and very well-mannered person and, even though we disagree yes um, and that's.
I almost just played that and went like okay, episode done, that's it, You played the game.
You took part in the great debate, the great conversation.
You're doing politics in the right way.
Exactly.
Exactly.
To adapt to phrase.
To adapt a phrase.
Because it's not like politics has content as well as form or anything like that.
Exactly.
Exactly.
We're going to spend like the next hour and a half doing this over and over again.
So anyway, have clips.
This one starts at about the four minute mark.
So would you consider yourself a Christian fundamentalist, a biblical literalist, an absolutist?
How would you differentiate those terms?
And what are you?
Yeah, that's great.
I would consider myself a fundamentalist in the sense of believing the fundamentals of the Christian faith.
I believe the Apostles' Creed, in other words.
And I believe it in the sense that it was held when it was first handed down.
No, you don't.
Go ahead.
Go ahead.
No, that's it.
No, you don't.
Well, you don't.
No, you don't.
You don't, first of all, because I know a lot of other things that you believe and you believe not that because A, I mean, you don't speak Aramaic or whatever.
I mean, let's not even go there.
But this is so stupid.
I know a little bit about this, and I guarantee you nine-tenths, probably more of the things this guy will claim about what the Bible says.
It's not what it says.
Well, he is an open Christian nationalist, and he's a very American Christian nationalist.
We'll get into that as we as we move forward.
He's very influenced by American kind of political ideology and American political philosophy.
And so, of course, he believes exactly the Apostles' Creed as it was laid down 2000 years ago or whatever.
Yeah, no.
And actually, fundamentalist doesn't even, I mean, fundamentalist is a term that like nobody uses correctly.
I mean, it just has so many, like, it's almost a word we shouldn't use unless we're using it in some like in a very, you know, directly connected, like we know exactly what word we're using.
It's derived from a late 19th, early 20th century movement called the fundamentals.
It was based on a book called The Fundamentals, which was about kind of adapting.
It wasn't, it was about social conservatism at its core, you know, it was about kind of returning to a kind of like rejecting Darwin, rejecting modern science, but also embracing a kind of social conservatism, even at the time.
And again, this is not my field of expertise and I knew it a lot more.
I knew it better 20 years ago than I know it now.
But it does have a specific like technical meaning within these conversations.
And these guys never, never conversate about it accurately.
So we just have to just kind of accept it.
But he has a like a cultural meaning that he's about to get into here, which I think is interesting.
But fundamentalist has also taken on cultural significance.
So like a fundamentalist is someone who's a wears a black skinny necktie and uses is a King James version only guy and that sort of thing.
That's sort of a cultural phenomenon.
And that's A, that's not even what I wouldn't use fundamentalists that way, but I didn't grow up in the Northwest, you know, like fundamentalists.
No, no, that's it's like I, it's literally, it's like when you talk to these guys, you know, I listen to these like full-on Nazis so much now that I know all their internal disputes that I can like elucidate all the little details of exactly what they're doing.
He's referring to some particular type of person he knows and he's using fundamentalists in that way.
And it's some like sect or something that like I'm just not plugged into that world enough.
And I apologize for not like spending the like four years it would take me to learn all this stuff to to be able to discuss it appropriately.
But no, that's not how I would define fundamentalists in the slightest scale.
It's also it's also a red herring and filibustering.
They do this all the time.
They will go off into these irrelevant tangents about, you know, oh, I don't necessarily, you know, I don't claim that the King James version is the only, that's irrelevant.
I mean, you know, it might be an interesting subject in itself, but it's not, it's not the subject that we're here to discuss.
That's not the, that's not the political meat of.
And the thing is, he has the education to discuss these different schools of thought.
Sounds like someone who's like educated in these debates, someone who has made the decisions based on through the deep study of the texts or whatever.
And whether I don't know if that's, I don't know, to the degree to which that's true, but he sounds that way to, you know, to someone who's just kind of outside of this world and just kind of, you know, he's talking about these various debates.
But again, as you say, the question is not like, which particular brand of fundamentalist are you?
The question is more like, what kind of change do you want to make upon the world and why do you want to make it?
And I think we should debate that.
That's where this conversation should fundamentally go.
It's not like, oh, explain to me the details.
And this, they spent the first hour of this podcast on very, very like light questioning from Sam, just teasing out like these minute details.
Of course, Doug Wilson thinks this was this was a tongue bath.
Of course he does, because it was.
He gets slightly more combative in the second half.
And we have a few clips from that, but you know, well, anyway, we got to get through this.
I'm not necessarily a fundamentalist in that sense, but I do believe the fundamentals of the Christian faith.
I would describe myself as a biblical absolutist, which is not the same thing as taking the Bible literally.
Biblical absolutist is someone who would take the Bible naturally, taking it the way it presents itself to be taken.
So when Luke writes his gospel and he says at the beginning, I interviewed a bunch of eyewitnesses and I wrote it down carefully.
He's presenting it as sober history.
So I take it as sober history.
Psalms that are poetry present themselves as poetry.
I take it as poetry.
When the book of Revelation presents itself as apocalyptic literature, I take it as apocalyptic literature and not as literal surveillance cameras of the future.
So you want to take the Bible naturally and respect genre in which it was written, whether it's history, poetry, prophecy, apocalyptic, and so on.
Yeah.
Now, you see, what he's done there is he's smuggled in the idea that Luke is presented as history.
Yes.
It's not.
That's not what the gospels are.
Oh, and guess what happens when we get to Genesis?
We'll get there in a couple of minutes, but anyway, let's continue.
But yes, yes, absolutely correct.
Also, I don't know this term biblical absolutist.
All of these guys kind of make up their own terms and then just rigorously define it.
I googled around.
I couldn't find people using it in a more general sense.
So I think he's just kind of in using it for himself.
He's making up his own terminology, something else they do all the time.
Yeah, exactly.
It's routine for these guys, you know.
And to this degree, like this is, this is very like bog standard right-wing American Christianity stuff.
We're going to come back to this over and over again.
I heard this when I was like 17 years old in a dorm room kind of conversations, you know, let's, you know, they're kind of like, well, what do you believe about the Bible?
Oh, well, you know, I take the poetry as poetry and the history is history and, you know, etc., etc.
That way you don't have to believe in all the apocalyptic mumbo jumbo and you can still like call yourself a biblical narrativist or whatever.
It sounds very reasonable, but he's smuggling in permission to take bits of it literally when he needs to.
He's smuggling in a noxious politics that goes along with this.
And what the Sam never able to actually engage with is politics on its own terms, is that these people are using these ideologies to smuggle in noxious ideology and not like the noxious ideology is like following from the premises of what they believe.
And so if you just like challenge those premises and you kind of challenge that, then suddenly you can just convert people of like, oh, I see the error in my ways.
Of course, the world is 14 billion years old, et cetera, et cetera, you know, and therefore, no, that's not how any of this works.
It's usually not how it works for ordinary people, although it does.
I mean, it can work for people if you have some relationship with them or, you know, whatever.
But this is a political propagandist.
He is on your show to express his propaganda.
And you're going to spend two hours letting him do that.
That's essentially what you've done.
And the way you're going to let him do it is by taking his claims for his own methods of reasoning at face value, as if those can be trusted and just accept it, which you can't do with people like that.
And ironically, you can't do that with people like Sam Harris either.
No, Sam Harris is absolutely atrocious on this.
Yes.
Yeah.
So we're going to get like Sam asking very, very intense, very hard-hitting question here.
And then a little bit of his response.
So we're just going to let this play for the next, you know, 30 seconds or so.
I wanted to play a little bit extra just to kind of give you a sense of the back and forth here.
Like, you know, Sam Harris will always say, you clipped me out of context.
To clip Sam Harris at all is to clip Sam Harris out of context.
You can never include full context.
I will include a link to this full thing.
Both Harris and Wilson put it up in full on their individual podcast pages.
So you can watch it on either one of their channels.
I'm going to include both links.
So you can choose which one you would rather give the view to if you think I am in some way being unfair to either of these men.
So taking the Bible naturally, what does the concept of biblical inerrancy do for you?
Do you think the Bible is still inerrant, but some sections can't be taken literally?
Or is that how that breaks part?
So for example, as a biblical absolutist, I believe the Bible.
So I would say what the Bible intends to convey by what it wrote down, I'd seek to take it that way.
So I seek to understand it the way it was originally intended and then take that to the bank.
But when Jesus says, I am the door, I don't look for a doorknob.
Very, very silly.
There it is again.
Yes, exactly.
Here it is again.
That's not what people mean when they criticize you for thinking that it's all literally true.
And the whole idea intend there, what the Bible intends it to mean, it's like, well, that's, that's an interpretive question.
Like that's a question of interpretation of what, what do you mean?
Do you mean the literal, like the word of God, like God himself wrote the, because people believe very, Sam Harris doesn't know any of this shit, just to be clear.
Sam Harris knows nothing about any of these issues, about the various people.
That's why he's uniquely untalented, unskilled, unable to approach this topic with any degree of skepticism.
Because maybe Doug Wilson believes, based on that, based on that little 30-second clip, God literally inspired the words in the Bible.
Maybe he means that the people who wrote the Bible, the human beings, were inspired, but they could use their own judgment.
They could use their own.
It's just, it's so limp.
There are so many questions that any reasonable, like a real journalist, Megan Kelly would ask better questions than this.
Actually, I really want to, I want to go re-listen to Ross Duth.
I'm about Ross Duth that asked better questions.
He's actually educated with this stuff.
He's one of these.
He's one of these religious fundamentalists.
He'd probably spot Wilson's maneuvers in a way that Harris doesn't.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Because Sam Harris, his entire brand is, I take you in good faith unless you attack me or unless you're perceived, unless I perceive you as not taking someone I like in good faith.
Unless you're on the left.
Unless you're on the left, I take you in good faith.
Absolutely.
Unless you criticize Israel, I take you in good faith.
If you criticize Israel for anything ever, then I assume the worst possible interpretation of everything and anything you ever say.
My favorite, my favorite interview is when Kathleen Ballou, the researcher of, you know, Bring the War Home, among other things, went on his show and she like, he like invited her on the show on Twitter, like publicly on Twitter.
And she's like, I accept.
And I think I was in response to this.
I'm like, get his ass.
And she is overwhelmingly polite to him.
I almost, I was going to play like a seven-minute clip of this.
She is overwhelmingly polite, but just hands him his asshole.
It's glorious to listen to.
Anyway, it's almost worth paying Sam Harris $8 for a month to get to listen to that.
It's almost worth it.
One more thing before you start again.
I just want to point out that Wilson is dodging the question there.
And Harris is not, isn't he's not noticing that he's doing it.
He's just said the same thing again.
He's just done the same.
And I always say this, right-wing arguments are just word games.
That's what he's doing there.
He's playing a word game.
Well, I don't take the Bible literally because Jesus says I'm a door and I don't look for a doorknob.
That's not what people mean when they talk about biblical literalism.
And you know that you're dodging the question, Sam's letting you get away with it.
Well, Sam does, I think.
And again, I had to cut somewhere, but he does start to say, well, does anybody read it that way?
I think is like the next response he gives.
Okay, fair enough.
So, I mean, you know, he does.
I tried to.
I tried to give you enough context, but I did have to kind of like trim it somehow, you know, anyway.
But he does ask that question and he gets like a nonsense answer back.
It's like, you know, it's all sophistry at this point.
And that's, that's kind of what I hate about these conversations about, you know, like I respect like real philosophers.
I respect people who do philosophy and take it seriously and are interested in the schools of thought and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
When like amateurs like myself discuss philosophy, you know, it's just sophistry.
It's just like there's, you know, philosophy without rigor is just, it's dorm room masturbation, in my opinion.
There's a reason when I studied philosophy at university.
There's a reason the first course you take is formal logic.
It's because you have to be, if you're going to do it at all, you have to be trained.
You have to be given a grounding in spotting fallacious arguments.
I would have thought Sam, you know, of all people, would appreciate that.
But you, you, you know, the reason you start with syllogisms, you know, Socrates is a man, all men are more, et cetera.
Exactly.
Is that you're supposed to be set up to spot when people are doing exactly this sort of thing.
Did you take the prepositional calculus at any point?
Because I took that back in my back in my university days.
Yes.
It's basically doing the formal logic, but you're doing it with like symbology.
You're doing it with like, you know, very like you're doing, it looks more like math than philosophy.
It's a, I, it's, it was the hardest thing that I ever had to do in my entire educational career because I, not because it was actually difficult, but because it looked like math.
So I was instantly terrified by it.
And I, I still, I still look upon passing that course as one of my one of my great achievements in life.
That course, I minored in math.
That course was harder than a lot of math classes I took.
Like, you know, that that's that's that that's similar to a formal proofs class that I'm at, which is like where you start to be a real mathematician as well as somebody who can just solve problems.
Anyway, we are a far afield.
We're way off.
Yeah.
Sorry, go on.
I did take some philosophy at college as well, but I did not, I did not cover myself in glory there.
But the only the only point was that, yeah, it's fundamentally about language.
It's about spotting linguistic maneuvers like the ones he's pulling.
And doing philosophy is that at its root.
It is that.
Any 19-year-old college student knows this.
Like anybody who's taken basic coursework in philosophy and logic in debate and public speaking.
Like, again, I hate to keep, you know, Sam Harris is one of the biggest podcasts in the world.
Bar none.
He is one of the top 100 or top 20 or something.
He's a huge, huge podcast.
He makes millions of dollars a year doing this.
And he uses the rhetorical techniques that a child can run circles around.
And he's talking to people who are not like weirdos and crazy.
He's talking to somebody who is an incredibly powerful person within this world, who has real material power and is like connected to people with actual, with access to like the nuclear coats.
Like he's like three heartbeats away from the nuclear coats in some ways.
It's, you know, this is not just somebody you could just sit and chat with.
This is not like an Efeet Art House where we're just, you know, we're wearing togas and drinking wine and discussing the nature of the sky or whatever.
This is, this is not that.
This is a real thing in the world.
Wilson runs a huge organization that does actual things in the world of politics.
It was actually harming real people every day.
Yeah.
It was actually harming real people.
All right.
So this is, this is the next clip.
It's about four minutes later from the stuff we were just talking about.
And this is talking about the age of the earth, the age of the earth.
Real, real head scratcher here.
Now, I want you at this point, from what we know about Doug Wilson, what we've just seen, you know, Doug Wilson believes in the inerrancy of the Bible.
What if it was the inerrancy of the Quran?
You know, he's going to talk about the age of the earth.
He's going to have deeply unscientific opinions.
And Sam Harris is not going to push back in the slightest on this.
But again, imagine this person's first name was Muhammad, right?
Yeah.
Based on my rudimentary math skills, the world is about 6,000 years old.
So he did, he did, Sam leads into this by asking, you know, something like, you know, how do you, what do you think about the age of the earth kind of kind of question?
So this is, he's led into this directly by Sam to whatever credit you want to give Sam for.
Like he did lead directly into this.
And so that's when he starts talking about like arithmetic.
So he's presumably calculating this from the dates in the Bible, the same way Bishop Archbishop Usher did.
He's going to go right there.
I'm going to just let him explain it.
Okay.
Okay.
So I'm a young earth.
I'm a young earth creationist.
Right.
Okay.
So anyone kind of coming at this from the outside from secular society trying to fit you in the canonical debates around the collision between science and religion and evolutionary biology and Christian theology understands which side of that argument you're on.
I just want to be clear here.
Like Sam Harris was a public new atheist in like 2003.
He was an enormous figure at the time.
He was engaged in these debates at the time.
And he does not deal with this in any kind of consistently intellectually.
He's not like, I got my start dealing with creationist on like Usenet in 2003.
That was like my first foray into like actually dealing with like, you know, really far-right people that I didn't know in my personal life.
You know, this was free Facebook.
Let's put it that way.
And so it's really good training, actually, arguing with stuff like that.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Because it really was the kind of thing.
And God, we could do an episode on creationism one day.
If you, if we wanted to do something fun, I could just, yeah, we could do that for sure.
God, I'd, man, I could, I could go back and find the archives for my stuff back in the Usenet days.
I could give you links to like debates I had.
You know, wouldn't that be fun?
I can go and get my, my, my very good book about evolution, proving evolution by Jerry Coyne, who I would not today buy a book from.
That is true.
That is true.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He, yeah.
Well, we might put that on the, we might put that on the list.
All right.
But I was doing this shit like at the time.
I knew the thing about the thing that's fun about that debate, at least if you're on the evolution side, is like you can memorize all their arguments.
You can know literally every single argument they're going to bring because there are only like 30 or 40 of them.
And most of them are like variations of the others.
And when they do bring something up new, it's usually so stupid, they can't even elucidate it in clear terms because they have to take it from one of the other like thousand books.
And so you could memorize this whole debate and you could literally just like point to the, it's like, you can literally just point to the same links over and over and over again.
It was so, and nobody could ever deal with it.
Oh my God.
Anyway.
And most of them are word games.
So there are word games as well.
I am still following the both the debate evolution subreddit and the creation subreddit.
The creation subreddit assists.
So the creationists have somewhere to go whether they won't get completely covered.
It's so amazing.
You could almost call it a safe space.
Oh, a safe space.
Yes.
Safe space for creationists.
Yeah.
All right.
We don't have the time, but anyway, okay.
We got to just, we got to, we got to get back to these two dipshits.
Right.
I'm an anti-dar, I'm an anti-Darwinist young earth creationist.
Having said that, and I know that many of your viewers and people who follow you and have read your stuff are going to park me right next to the flat earth guys.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yep.
Yes.
And a good question.
Again, I'm just going to like Sam Harris, if you're listening to this, I have, I have suggestions for questions.
You can interject here and go, so how are you not like the flat earth guys?
Yeah.
How, how is, how is believing that the earth is 6,000 years old any less unreasonable than believing that the world is flat or is balanced on the back of a God I sound like a new atheist?
Well, I mean, again, these are new.
Did this back in the day.
Sam Harris has these, has this skill set.
You know, I have no doubt that, like Christopher Hitchens in that brought out some of this, because it was that era, right?
Sam Harris does not even go that far, like it doesn't even go that far, and I even know what answer Doug Wilson would give.
I even know what, what that's, that's.
You know, like it's just, it's so infuriating.
It's so infuriating, you know, because of that statement of how old the the, the world is.
But one of the things that I would just point out in passing is when people say that the universe, the cosmos, is 14 billion years old or whatever the, whatever the current number is rhetorical, technique number one.
Whatever the scientists say, it is now.
Now we've believed all of history that it's 6 000 years old, and so obviously we have a firmer place in the world than these hoity toity scientists who just keep changing the numbers.
At 13.8, is it 14.2, is it 16?
Oh, you could just find papers and they just get.
They can't agree.
And then, but here we say hey, 6 000 years old, that's how old it is.
We know down to the date, we know exactly how old it is.
So he just sticks that in there.
He just sticks it in there, of course.
Yeah, Harris has no response to that, of course, because probably didn't even notice it when it happened.
You know, did you ever hear that thing about a foolish Consistency Doug?
Probably not, probably not.
They are presupposing a Newtonian balcony somewhere that they get to stand on to watch the whole thing, and one of the things that relativity shows us is that time is not what we, you know where is.
My question would be, where is the cosmos 14 billion years old?
Is it at the center, at the point of the explosion?
Is it at the event horizon?
What clock are you using?
So it's just continually he, he acts like this is an interesting question.
Yeah, that does seem interesting.
Yeah yeah yeah, to calculate the age of the earth?
Well generally, the rudimentary textbook answer is, we imagine a Newtonian clock and it's like an earthbound perspective, and I would say things like time and eternity are not that simple.
Agreed agreed, you gave us the physics one, the basic.
You know, freshman level, don't even need calculus to understand this answer to that question, not understanding that real physics does not follow the the rules of the textbook that you got when you were 14 years old or whatever.
Yeah, he acts like this is like legitimate objection.
You know, I wish Angela Collier here.
You know, Bill Bill Nye said this about chromosomes on his tv show in 1994.
How can he say something different now on to what he said on his children's television show 25 years ago?
Maybe you need a little bit more math and a little bit more physics to understand the reality of the cosmology of the universe than you can get into in your introductory level about like clocks and distances and times and velocities and stuff.
Maybe yeah, it's a little bit more complicated than you can handle with your rudimentary understanding of this.
You know, it's almost as if what if you tried to read the Bible without understanding the history?
Yeah exactly yeah yeah, exactly.
Another thing, again, all we're doing is doing the 2003, like, you know, anti-creationist non-that's all you need to do.
When you get into these sorts of arguments and you bring things up, you always get the same thing from these people.
You always get, oh, that old chestnut.
The reason it seems like an old chestnut to you is because you hear it all the time.
And the reason you hear it all the time is because it's an unanswerable objection.
That's why we keep saying it.
Because they never give us an answer to it.
Exactly.
If one of these guys ever once gave an answer, we would go, oh, well, okay, let us, we shall discuss this.
That's, you know, it's like, you know, it's again, it's again, like any reasonable person.
I believe Sam Harris is not this stupid.
I believe he could run circles around Doug Wilson on these topics, you know, but he doesn't care to.
I mean, maybe that's giving him too much credit.
I mean, it's possible.
It's possible that he just can't and that he's just the anti-Islam thing in his brain has just burned away neurons.
He just has no ability to respond like a human being to these monstrosities anymore.
But, you know, that's his marketing, but it's not his actual business model.
He markets himself as the skeptic, you know, who engages with ideas.
And so that's not what he actually does.
What he actually does is he sits there and goes, hmm, in response to nonsense like this, because his actual business model, the thing that he actually makes all that money from all those listeners doing is laundering crap like this for an audience that wants it laundered.
Exactly.
I mean, but then when Kathleen Blue comes on and is like, well, actually, you know, the SPLC has its problems, but they prosecuted a whole lot of these Nazis back in the 70s and 80s when the federal government wasn't doing shit.
And it's like, well, yeah, but they were mean to magic Nawaz.
Sorry, I was going to include that.
It would have taken, it would have taken me so long to get to that.
Anyway, we're not doing that today.
Again, supplementary material, baby.
Bonus episode, more Sam Harris being rogged.
Director's code.
Anyway, okay.
We have to continue.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, Jack.
We have to continue.
Don't apologize.
Don't apologize.
Okay, we're enjoying this.
We're enjoying this.
It gets worse.
Trust me, it gets worse.
But right now, this is the fun bit.
This is the fun bit where we just get to make fun of creationist bullshit.
This is, I don't speak German.
It always gets worse.
Okay, but then why would you be tempted to sign on the dotted line with something like 6,000 years old?
I mean, the claim that the world, take it out of the cosmos for a second and just talk about the rock we're on.
Because he's a religious fundamentalist.
To claim that the world is 6,000 years old is to make a fairly straightforward claim about calendar.
Because he's a religious fundamentalist, Sam.
That's why.
It's like, I'm just going to argue with the premises.
I'm just going to go, but why?
Why do you believe this?
Because he's a fundamentalist.
Because you've got a bigoted far-right asshole on your show in front of you.
And he's pretending to be something else.
And you're allowing him to do it.
That's why.
Yeah.
That's why it's happening.
A fairly straightforward claim about calendar time.
I mean, because you're making that claim that if I said, well, how long ago did the miracles depicted in the Bible, how long ago did they occur?
You're saying, okay, walk back a day and another day and another day in the timeline of your life.
And then it's before you were born.
And then it's about 2,000 years before that.
And a year is still a year.
It's still 365 days of the sort that we would recognize.
So you have a fairly standard view of time to capture that.
And presumably you're walking that all the way back to the beginning and you just have 6,000 years to deal with.
So as you said, you're basically just following the chronology from the Usher thing, right?
That's kind of what you're doing.
He will never use four words from 400 will do.
That's just, you know, it's Samiris for you.
But, you know, he's doing that, but he's not a biblical literalist because when Jesus says, I am the way, he doesn't literally mean he's a signpost.
Jesus with a stop sign, right?
I want that to be a t-shirt.
Yeah, I love it.
Anyway.
That is exactly correct.
If I go back to Genesis, where it gives us the genealogies and it says that so-and-so was the father of so-and-so and he fathered this son when he was 150 years old.
And there's a whole chain that goes back, and it's just a straightforward math problem.
Right.
So if you're going to believe the Bible, I believe the first 11 chapters of Genesis are to be taken as authoritative and not just chapters 12 and on.
So I, yeah, I just accept it in a straightforward way.
I believe in a historical Adam.
I mean, again, I'm a young earth creationist.
I believe the Earth is 6,000 years old.
I believe, like, this, you say this in two sentences.
This is, you know, we're just saying the same stuff over and over again.
Exactly.
I have a very standard view of this.
And to say, well, he's a biblical literalist.
Well, I take the first 11 chapters of Genesis the same way I take chapters 12 and onward, you know, as if to say, like, well, okay, so the creation, like, because a lot of Christians, people in this will kind of take, well, the creation myth is kind of like, you know, because the evidence for evolution for an old universe is so thunderingly obvious the minute you open your eyes and look at any science textbook, you know, there is a, they will have to, they will, they will use that kind of metaphorical language.
Now, if you know what I, I, we have no, I have no beef with Christians here.
I mean, I have beef with, I disagree, but I have no beef.
Like, if you listen to this podcast because you agree with us, but you don't believe with me about certain aspects of the metaphysical world, you and I can, you and I can work together.
As long as you're not one of these right-wing dips like this, and I, I have no patience for like this young earth creationism shit.
I think it's, it's, it is, I think it's even worse than flat earth, honestly.
I think it's even worse.
I mean, I think there is better evidence that evolution is true than that the earth is round.
The thing is, that this stuff, right?
You can go in, you can argue with it.
You can, I believe in the first 11 chapters of, I believe the first 11 chapters are literally true, as opposed to, I believe in the actual Adam and stuff.
Okay, you believe that.
Okay.
The next, the next logically consequent question to that is, why?
What do you base that on?
Right.
Because otherwise, you're just circular.
You're just saying, I believe this because I believe this because I believe this.
You are begging the question.
Again, it's why the first course they teach you in philosophy is formal logic, because it teaches you to spot that when somebody's doing stuff like that, when the conclusions do not follow logically from the premises, when the universal affirmatives are universally converted as opposed to partially converted.
The thing is, that might be interesting in itself as a sort of common room debate, you know, or a symposium.
It might be interesting taking a survey of the different species of religious fundamentalist if you're doing a study of that sort of thing, of the internal sociology.
Absolutely.
But it's yeah, exactly.
But it's not, it's not actually relevant to politics.
And the flip side of that is, as you say, if somebody believes literally in Genesis and Adam and the snake and the world is 6,000 years old and so on and so forth, but they do not want that taught in school to children as science.
They don't want science education banned.
They don't want women's reproductive rights taken away from them, et cetera, et cetera.
I don't care.
You can believe that stuff.
I think if you're doing it to your kids at homeschools, I think is kind of where I would land on that.
Well, there we also have a problem.
Yes, because I think that's very difficult to do.
I've known enough people who went through that who then realized they were wrong later in life.
I actually consider that a form of child abuse, quite honestly.
I mean, I don't disagree.
In fact, I think that that just strengthens my point because my point is basically, I only care about the ins and outs of what you believe to the extent that it affects other people and the society as a whole.
Actually, debating these things, despite the fact that I think the most elementary exposure to logical argument and fact just immediately annihilates this sort of belief system.
Actually doing that is very secondary to talking about real material effects that people like this have in the world and in society when they choose to make this the basis of political movements.
Exactly.
And that's that's what we should be talking about.
And not like, you know, not like, well, which chapters of Genesis do you consider to be authoritative?
Exactly.
Yes.
Although I think he is arguing there that he uses the same interpretive schema for all of Genesis.
And I think he is accusing other Christians of not doing it.
At least that's how I read what he's saying there.
But you say, again, you say you read the Bible as it's intended to be read.
And how do you know that it's intended to be read as a literal account?
Like, I guarantee you, you don't know.
That is extremely metaphorical language that's used, you know, all through the book, especially in those first 11 chapters.
The creation myth is like it is, it is overtly poetic.
It is overtly related to other creation myths that were available to people around the time.
Historians and, you know, religious scholars and people have studied this over millennia, and we know this.
You know, this is, I don't know.
You will not find a single actual scholar of the Bible that thinks Genesis was written to be taken literally as history.
That it just wasn't.
Unless the people that the people that read it didn't understand it to be that.
That wasn't what it was.
And you can't talk about the Bible meaning this or meaning that anyway, because it's a compendium of texts.
It's not univocal.
It has a hundred different voices.
Yes.
This, this stuff, when people say this, oh, I take the Bible in its own terms, and what they come out with is this sort of religious fundamentalist interpretation.
That's the exact opposite of what they're doing.
They are refusing to interact with it as an actual, you know, an historically embedded text.
They're not.
They're not doing that.
Well, and they're doing the opposite.
Again, you are giving a better response than Sam Harris will ever give to this stuff.
And if you had the opportunity to discuss that with Doug Wilson, he would have an answer for that.
I guarantee you.
I guarantee you he has an answer for that.
Anyway, we got a few seconds left in this clip.
I'd like to get to it.
A lot of this is him.
Like, if I, if you know how to read this right, you know, a lot of what he's doing in this is like extricating himself from other types of like right-wing assholes.
And he's defining exactly what kind of right-wing asshole he is.
I think that's one thing he really liked about this interview was that he was he was given the time to say these things that Sam Harris does not understand.
But you and I, you and I, my friend, we know more.
I don't believe in evolution at all.
Well, let me correct that.
I do believe in variation within species.
So hold on, wait for it.
If every creationist, for example, looking at the human race, sees a different.
I know you do.
I know you do.
Sam Harris has no clue.
He has no answer for this.
Ethnic groups, Asians, and blacks and whites and so on, and believes that they are all descended from Noah and his wife.
So clearly we believe in variation within species, but we don't believe in transformation of one species to another.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
So I'm resisting the temptation to get into any of those details with you because I really just, I do want you to educate me.
No, don't let me ask a real question.
Please, let's not, let's not respond to any of that with any kind of basic questioning whatsoever.
I just want you to educate me about what you believe.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm not, for instance, you know, I'm not going to immediately use your mention of descended from Noah and his wife as a springboard to say, so do you believe that black people are the children of Ham?
Doug, exactly, exactly.
And, you know, you get even to like even more like deeply racist sides of this stuff where they start to go into places that are like really, truly nasty.
You know, that's where you get like the some of the some of the stuff with the with the overtly white power stuff that we've discussed in previous episodes, where they have like particular readings of the Bible where it's like it's a two-seat or a three-seat.
I forget it's like the verses, it's like it's all this nonsense.
You know, I can't, I can't follow it.
But um, I guarantee you, and he does go on, and I don't remember if I include a clips to this effect or not, but he does go on and talking about how like they're actively anti-racist.
But then he has to talk about how actively he has to purge the racist from his movement.
And it's like, that's kind of telling on yourself there, Doug Wilson.
That's kind of telling on yourself.
Yeah, it's like reform here in the UK.
Reform are constantly talking, whether it's you know in the current iteration or whether it's the Brexit Party or UK Independence Party.
They've had all these different names.
They're constantly talking about how they're not racist and they're anti-racist.
And it's amazing how many times they have to fire people in their organization because they've said something publicly about words that I don't want to say on this podcast.
Exactly, exactly.
Yeah, no.
But I just know in that area of Idaho, in that area of the world, there are all kinds of like, there are just oodles of like worms of white nationalist groups that like populate that fetid field.
And this is just, they get into some anti-Semitism later.
And I just didn't want to, I didn't want to get into it.
Um, because it was again, it was just long.
Again, we could do these.
I could do these, I could talk about this forever.
Um, I was trying to hit the high points here, but um, you know, Wilson is a different kind of anti-Semite, but he would not be overtly anti-Semitic in the way that Nick Fuentes does.
In fact, he name-checks Dick Fuentes and says, Well, if Christian nationalism came to this country, it would have the face of Nick Fuentes, I'd find another label for myself.
It's like, you know, and then, of course, Sam Harris's question should be, but I mean, to what degree do you disagree with Nick Fuentes on the other things that he agrees with you on?
Like, would you fight a Nick Fuentes administration or would you kind of like, well, we got the rest of what we wanted, you know?
Again, Nick Fuentes is so valuable to these people.
He provides such a rhetorical service because they can all say, Well, I'm not like that.
I'm not, I'm not Nick Fuentes.
I mean, Nick Fuentes, I'm not Nick.
Exactly, exactly.
Thereby, giving him more attention, of course.
Sam does go to somewhere where we're going to give him slight modicum of a quantum of credit here.
Okay.
He starts asking questions in the vein of how would you execute this?
How what's your plan for making this the law of the land?
You know, your plan is to take over the U.S. government and turn it into a Christian theocracy.
What does that look like?
He starts getting into that kind of which, okay, good job, Sam.
You're, you know, one half a star, half a star out of 10 for effort here, you know.
But he does go there.
And this is what Doug Wilson has to say.
So, well, I'm sure the devil will be in the details here.
Are you saying there would be no religious test to hold public office?
I mean, so Muslims and atheists could be members of Congress or become president.
Here, I kind of want to ask Sam Harris how well he thinks Muslims should be allowed to hold office.
But, you know, I don't know.
They don't, they don't get there.
It's interesting.
That's something where I wonder how much they would agree on this.
But anyway, we should continue and let Doug Wilson have his multi-minute say, I guess.
We will talk through it.
It's fine.
Or would you then say that how could a Muslim or an atheist have the requisite morality to serve in those offices?
If we were to return to the form of Christian nationalism that we had during the early 19th century.
And here I had to cut a whole lot from previous to this where he's kind of talking about the nature of the government that he sees and all this, like a lot of stuff.
But basically, he sees the he says the Constitution is key because the Constitution, I believe in the First Amendment, because the federal government cannot embrace it, have its own church.
It cannot do these sorts of things, but the states can.
And that's the model that he sees is moving back to.
And so he mentions a little bit of this.
I just wanted to kind of clarify that before we got to it.
He is kind of engaging in some degree of like actually like setting up a model for what the world he wants to see looks like.
And we, that's what we had at the founding was a form of Christian nationalism then.
No, no, I agree.
Um, he's arguing that many of the states had like an official church, which is true in the very earliest ages, but all that got declared unconstitutional fairly early on.
What frequently the states would do is they prohibited public office to someone who didn't believe in God or a future state of rewards and punishments.
Yeah, I don't think that's true either.
I think that's, I think that's meeting, that's a very specious reading of history.
I'd want to know like reference documents for that, Doug.
Sorry, that was a common phraseology.
But so they did have religious tests, bare minimum religious tests at the state level, but those were excluded at the federal level.
I mean, the de facto assumption was that you were a Protestant Christian in the United States for like most of its history.
John F. Kennedy was the first Catholic elected president, and it was a big scandal.
That was in 1960.
Like, we're not arguing that the U.S. does not have a sort of Christian nationalist-esque past here.
We're arguing that was bad.
Now, if, and this is another thing, if we're whiteboarding this and you're, you're asking me to describe the ideal Christian republic 500 years from now.
Yes, yes, that's what he's doing.
Answer the bloody question.
Well, it is, it is like, it is like, well, how do you, you know, are you going to, are you going to like enact pogroms?
Are you going to like, he doesn't use that terminology, but it is like, and Wilson is very much saying, like, well, look, I want to convert the human heart.
I want to convert people to my beliefs.
We don't use the sword.
And we just like, and if I could, if I could create this new thing, then it would be very different than the thing I'm actually advocating for now.
So why aren't you advocating for that thing now then?
Because it sounds like you actually are advocating for it.
Again, questions that Sam Harris is not going to ask, but you know, he Wilson is differentiating from this because he knows the reality of his political movement.
He knows he cannot succeed to the level that he wants to within a dozen years, but they're going to get fucking close to it, I think.
I would sketch out a number of things.
We could talk about this Presbyterian utopia 500 years from now.
If you ask me what my interest is right now, my interest right now is not to exclude atheists and Muslims right now.
We've got bigger fish to fry in the moment.
Right.
So what are those bigger fish?
He gets there.
It's God is so loquacious as this is a verbal battle between two circumlocutions.
Yes, it is.
This really is.
It is.
It is.
Two opposing streams of verbal diarrhea splattering up against each other.
This really does remind me of some of the Dakota the guru stuff where they have like the sense makers who just like they have to outthink each other.
Like, well, no, you're, you have to think the higher level.
How do we think about how we think about how we think about it?
It's like it's the same thing.
It's just with like religious sophistry.
So, you know.
So just so that I can understand the significance of that, the way you're introducing time there, you're arguing for a kind of pragmatism and incrementalism on the way to the Presbyterian utopia you would want to get to.
If you could wave a magic wand, you'd get us there immediately, but you know, you can't.
So you want to figure out a path between where we are now and there, right?
That is correct.
The transitional program.
Exactly, exactly.
First, you have the dictatorship of the proletariat, and then you go to the lower phase of communism.
Sorry, this just sounded very familiar.
No, no, no, I hear you.
I hear you.
I hear you.
Because I believe that Jesus taught that the way to get from here to there is by peaceful means preaching, persuasion, church planting.
And that's a time you've got to let the bread rise before you bake it.
And so consequently, I don't want to do anything in a tyrannical, heavy-handed way.
I almost see that in another.
I almost see that as like, you know, like, why do you care about the government at all, Doug Wilson?
Like, to a certain degree, I think the people of Moscow, Idaho, is it Idaho?
Yes, my beliefs.
I disagree with that as well.
Well, about you not wanting to do anything in a heavy-handed and exactly.
I mean, because you are basically, you have launched a hostile takeover of that town.
Well, anarchists and like, you know, kind of radical unionists often talk about, you know, like, you're going to build a better world by just building the better world beside the awful world that we have now.
You're going to build like collectives and you're going to kind of grow from there.
And I have issues with that.
But those are people actively trying to help each other and actually trying to make the world better and their locality, you know?
And when he talks about like, we're going to build on church building, we're going to build on, we're going to, you know, that means we're going to make churches that kind of act this way.
We're going to build a better world for ourselves.
Some Christian sects do go there.
And I, again, I have deep disagreements with them and the way they abuse their members and all that sort of thing.
But that's a different model than we're going to create a book publisher and we're going to have the Secretary of War on speed dial, you know, and we're going to engage in the highest levels of the federal government.
These are different types of things, you see.
You know, one of these things is actually, okay, well, if you want to build a better world for yourself, I can understand that.
So long as you're not harming others.
And the other is, no, we are kind of, we are going to use the power of the federal government to get our way.
You know, that's really what he intends.
And you know that because of what he's actually doing in the real world, not because the party farty words that he's spewing to Sam Harris out of his shit shithole of a mouth here.
You know, anyway.
Yes, that's it.
Right.
Okay.
Well, I'm going to go searching for tyranny or the next best thing.
So let's linger on this phrase, Christian nationalism, for just another second, because what do you do with all the people who will answer to that name who seem to mean a few more things by it?
I mean, there's kind of a white ethno-state yearning that one hears among so-called Christian nationalists.
There's a fair amount of anti-Semitism one can find among Christian nationalists.
How do you view those?
Are those contaminants to this concept or are those parts of it?
No, those are, those are contaminants to it.
And again, I kind of included this.
Like Sam Harris has tried to poke at this a little bit.
Like he's like, again, half a star out of 10.
He's doing a little bit, but he's just letting this guy like talk and gives him no like real, you know, vert questioning.
He gives him no like real friction.
There's no real pushback here.
It's just, you know, letting him explain what he believes.
But it's just, it's just a reverse.
I mean, this is a bit of an offensive trope now, but it's just a reverse.
When did you stop beating your wife, isn't it?
It's the when did you condemn the man in your congregation who's beating it?
He's laying it up for us.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, I know.
And one of the things that we're involved in doing, I've written one book, I've written and Cannon Press, our publisher, published Stephen Wolf's book, The King, then My Mirror, and then frequently shouted questions that you just referred to.
And we have been very, very careful to keep all traces of white ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism, all of that stuff out.
First of all, I love he's like naming his books, like all these books, right?
I explained available from our press where we produce them ourselves.
It's 10%, you know, whatever.
Please.
Use the promo code.
Sam gives me a blow, Joe.
Yeah, no, exactly.
Please, Jack, bleep all those titles when you do the editing here.
I just didn't have time to do it.
But like, again, I'm trying to give you a sense of the back and forth here.
I'm trying not to just like play the greatest hits of like the bad things that Doug Wilson is saying.
And then omitting Sam's incredibly curious, you know, answers is just furiously demanding, you know, what, what, what is really at the heart of your ideology.
You can tell by the response, Sam Harris is not pushing back on this.
I mean, he's pushing back very, very slightly, but like very, very little.
He does get into it.
And Wilson does say he gets to the end of that.
It's like, we've been very careful to keep all traces of white ethnocentrism, anti-Semitism stuff out.
If somebody buys me a copy of these books, I'm not paying my own fucking money for it, but I guarantee you, I'm going to be able to find some.
I promise you.
I promise you.
Also, you can find it even in these clips, but he's very overtly like, you know, and the thing that we said earlier, it's like, well, if you have to work that hard to keep the anti-Semites out, then maybe they like your message first.
Why do you have to work that hard, Doug?
I don't have to work very hard to keep the anti-Semitism and the white nationalism out of this podcast, you know, from the hosts.
There's no danger of it getting in there from us.
It's not a problem I have to worry about.
Why do you have to worry about it?
Exactly.
Exactly.
No, it's very clear.
So the next thing that happens is, and again, I could have included this, but this was already super long.
They get into this city conversation about anti-Semitism.
And Sam correctly says, you know, that I'll give him credit here that, you know, anti-Semitism was often built around Christian ideals, that the Jews lived alongside Christian communities and they created, you know, there was the fact that the Jews would not convert was a sticking point.
You know, it was, it was a cause of anti-Semitism.
And how do you combat that and that sort of thing?
And Wilson doesn't really give him a good answer.
I'll give, I mean, I'll give him partial credit for that.
Again, they go on for like five minutes talking about that topic.
And then Doug Wilson starts saying some vaguely anti-Semitic things about, well, really, the Jews are terrible because they'd rather have you convert to atheism than they'd rather have your kid convert to atheism than Christianity.
And that kind of, it just got really nasty and it was just too long.
And it's like, I didn't want to include it because we're going to start talking about sex now.
And, you know, but I know this show only gets better when we start talking about sex.
Anyway, please get to know.
Well, yeah, it's your home turf.
I was just going to ask.
I mean, I'm assuming Wilson is pro-Israel.
Yes, Christians are.
To the degree that I did not go looking quite deeply into that.
If he were not pro-Israel, definitely we would have heard some of that from Sam.
He's probably not as pro-Israel as Sam is, but as we said before, virtually no one is as pro-Israel as Sam is.
If he had any questions about what's going on in Gaza, he would not be in the place that he is today.
So, I mean, we would have heard about it, basically.
So I believe he's like the kind of phylo-Semitism that you get from people on the right, whether it's from the religious right or otherwise, as a way of justifying or contextualizing or expanding their pro-Israel stance is, you know, just scratch the surface and look a micron below.
Yes.
You find anti-Semitism beneath the support.
Is he overtly anti-Semitic in the way that Mikey Knocker or Nick Flint is anti-Semitic?
No, he is not.
The anti-Semitism is going to be buried a couple of levels deeper, but I mean, it's always there.
It's always there with these people.
So the question is not, is he anti-Semitic?
It's how anti-Semitic is he?
It is like, oh, how about the standard?
Okay, so sex.
Yes.
The sex Gestapo clip.
All right.
This is something.
That's the podcast's new title, The Sex Gestapo Clip.
I'm sorry we keep talking about sex.
It just seems, it just keeps appearing in these clips.
I just, you know, it just keeps popping up.
It just keeps popping its head up and it just needs to be satisfied before it can.
Oh, God.
Let's talk about sex, baby.
I'm so tired about that.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
We used to do this like once every four months and now we're doing it like once every episode.
We really got to stop.
All right.
All right.
No more sex the rest of the year.
That's three whole weeks.
We'll be fine.
I'll make it.
Story of my life.
No sex till 27.
Yeah, that's what being recently divorced is like, yeah, you know, we're not going to get there.
All right.
That's fine.
It's fine.
This is some, you know, 10 minutes later or whatever.
And Sam's kind of getting at more of the details of like, what kind of society are you envisioning here?
Like, what are the roles of, you know, gay people, et cetera, in this society?
And this is, this has to be heard to be believed.
And just where does your Christian nationalism, if it were fully accomplished, intrude into the lives of those who don't consider themselves Christian nationalists?
So take gay marriage and homosexuality generally.
What's your, what's your take there?
Yeah.
Let's say if I were Christian nationalist king for a day, Obergefell would be done.
No, no same-sex mirage at all.
Same-sex mirage is a term that's common in these, in these, in these kinds of groups to refer to same-sex marriages.
It's not real marriage because it's not biblical marriage.
It's the mirage.
It's just, it's just, you know, the basest kind of bigotry.
And Sam has no response to a divorce.
You know, same-sex couples would not be able to get married.
They would not be able to adopt children.
Their sex be illegal and punishable.
You mean the sexual acts?
Yeah, the sodomy.
So I believe this is, let me frame this first.
When I first began ministering in the 70s as a preacher, sodomy was a felony in all 50 states.
Now, the point I'm making here is that America of the late 70s was not a totalitarian hellhole, but we had laws like that on the books.
If you were a queer person in the 70s, the society was kind of a totalitarian hellhole there, Doug.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you were a queer person, if you were in an interracial relationship in most, much of the country, parts of the country, you could be killed for that.
People were killed for that into your lifetime.
And frankly, into mine, but like definitely into your lifetime.
Yeah.
Doug, those people just, they don't, they don't count.
They don't count.
You know, it doesn't matter what's right.
That's right.
Yeah.
Well, he's just saying that discrimination was right because those people deserve to be discriminated.
Exactly.
That's all that means.
Since we're so fixated on terminology, totalitarian.
What is that?
It's not a term I'm actually very fond of.
I don't think it's a very good descriptor.
But let's think about the word totalitarian.
What does it mean?
It means a society under the total control of the state party or whatever.
That's what it means.
It refers to a new kind of tyrannical society that emerged with 20th century, mid-20th century modernity.
It refers to a kind of society where every aspect of social life for everybody in the society is controlled, monitored, controlled, etc. to one extent or another by the people running it, by the governing group.
Okay.
No, of course, if you're talking about discriminatory laws targeting one particular portion of society, you're not talking about totalitarianism, are you?
Well, Nazi Germany was a totalitarian society.
It also had discriminatory laws against particular groups.
Those are distinct things.
So again, it's a word game.
You can say that America in the 1970s wasn't a totalitarian society.
No, that's true.
That doesn't mean it didn't have discriminatory laws.
Discriminatory laws can exist outside of and within totalitarian societies.
So it's irrelevant that the one thing has literally nothing to do with the other.
Yes.
Again, it's a word game.
Yeah.
Well, and I mean, these kinds of things, I mean, and, you know, Alabama in 1970, it's not just like queer people.
It's not just LGBTQ people who were victimized, but it requires enforced gender roles.
Requires you know men to be manly, quote unquote women to be womanly, you know.
And then you know to express a gender expression, even being completely straight, not committing a sodomy.
You know not committing sodomy, etc etc.
Um, it still requires it holds people to certain standards of behavior, at the risk of being punished by the law.
If you are seen as being one of these people, much less actually, you know, committing those.
I don't think to me those acts is right.
But you know what i'm trying to say.
You know.
It's not.
It's not about just well, there are a handful of like f6 or f words.
Who are we're going to get like punished by the state but like the rest of us can just live our lives well, that's kind of an open question.
Is it because anybody can kind of be questioned?
It's like yeah, you look a little light in the loafers today, bob.
You know, I mean, it's a, it's a very common thing.
You know, like it's bullshit, that's true, that's true.
But the Jim Crow South was not a totalitarian society.
No, because white people yeah, were not uh, subjected to the apartheid.
South Africa was not a totalitarian society.
Uh, you can argue that both were.
I mean, I would agree with this.
They're both tyrannical societies and the.
The injustice and discrimination visited on uh one part of those societies affected every other part as well.
But you were a lot more free to do what you wanted sexually politically, whatever in apartheid South Africa if you were part of the white minority.
You can't defend apartheid South Africa by saying well, the white people had it.
Okay, which is essentially what he's doing there.
He's essentially saying well, discrimination against gay and lesbian people was fine in the 70s because straight people weren't discriminated against.
If you boil it down, that is what he's saying exactly exactly well, it won't bother you because you're not.
You're not one of the nasties and what that basically amounted to in practice was the ability of a magistrate or municipal department or whatever shut down bathhouses, to have a vice, and that'd be the sort of thing that i'd be interested in, a vice squad that could shut down bathhouses or deal with prostitution, which is something that's actually still.
Those are still illegal today in most parts of this country.
Like gay bathhouses get raided all the time.
Like uh, prostitution is illegal in all, in basically everywhere but Las Vegas I.
I mean it's like.
It's like he's painting this a beautiful world in which gay bathhouses exist on every street corner and you know it's yes beautiful, beautiful prostitutes who have exactly your kink.
It's just available for 20 in anywhere you want.
Yeah no, that's not the world we live in.
I don't know what you're talking about.
These are both criminal behaviors.
In 2025 and 2024, in Joe Biden's America and Barack Obama's America, these things are all illegal.
I promise you let's go to one more funny bit and then we get to the horrifying bit at the end.
Okay, there's a funny bit coming, I promise, although sodomy is not quite the right framing, because obviously sodomy is can be accomplished between a man and a woman as well right, so that presumably should also be illegal and punishable.
That was the case in English and American law.
Right, that was the.
That was the case, and it depends on whether you're talking about oral or anal.
You, my god oh, my god I, I am, I.
That is one part where I really wanted Sam to just like, okay, can you explain this exactly?
What Are or are not like, legal?
What does the Song of Solomon tell us about?
Like, what is the legal, legally prescribed sex acts?
What kind of fun am I allowed to have with my own wife?
That's the real question.
Anyway, anyway, anyway, okay.
This gets even weirder.
It gets even weirder.
You know, it depends on that sort of thing.
But I think some of those, if I'm not mistaken, are considered sodomy, right?
Right.
According to the legal definition as it pertained that time.
Yes.
Right.
But there are indications in the Song of Solomon, which is biblical erotica.
And this goes back to my point earlier about being a biblical absolutist and taking the literature the way it presents itself.
The Song of Solomon is going to tell me the Song of Solomon is going to save Fallatio for a waiting public.
Yeah.
Well, yes.
All right.
So is that the good news?
By the standards of Sam Harris, that's a pretty good little jab, right?
That's the best he gets in the entire, you know, it's like, so I'm allowed to get a blowjob because the Song of Solomon is in the Bible.
Well, yeah, that's kind of what I'm saying.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God, Sam.
Who's coming across worse here?
I think Sam Harris actually comes across worse because I think Doug will sit at least kind of going, well, yeah, you should be able to get some, you should be able to get a little fun stuff, you know?
And Sam Harris is like, well, yeah, but doesn't the Bible say this?
It's like, oh, my God.
It's so again, it's just dorm room shit.
Is masturbation allowed because it's in the Song of Solomon?
If I masturbate to the Song of Solomon, is that allowed?
We are lost in terminological and nitpicking.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And it is just like, well, I'm going to explain the laws as I understand them because they come from this particular interpretation of the Bible.
And who knows if like your particular version of Christian fundamentalism is going to be the one that's, you know, like, you know, it's all just, it's all just covering his ass over.
Like, you know, I'm not really saying the awful things that I would really actually say had I more power.
It's just, you know, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
All right.
This is going to get a little nasty moving forward.
Um, we'll get through it.
Okay.
All right.
So is that the good news?
Well, it might be the good news for some people, but the point is that in the Song of Solomon, particularly if you read a commentary or translation that didn't tidy things up or boulderize it for the public, are some pretty racy aspects to the Song of Solomon.
And I wouldn't want to make anything illegal that would outlaw the Song of Solomon or categorize the Song of Solomon as pornography.
That would be an example of Christian wowsers going too far.
Now, what normally, what normally happened.
And this is the dark one.
Hang on.
And there was a case out of Texas where some officers went to a, I forgot the name of the case, but they went to a house.
They had a warrant for some other offense.
I don't know, the drug offense or, but they had a warrant and they went into the house and they caught a couple of guys in the act.
And so they threw that charge in also.
That is the case.
That is the case out of Texas that the Supreme Court decided you're not allowed to do that, that you cannot make sodomy illegal.
That is the case.
That is the case.
That's the one he's referring to.
I forget the name of it, but that's the case.
I'll add it later.
Jack can throw it in the show notes.
But that's what's his, what's his point, though?
What is he?
I got lost there.
What's his point?
Well, his point.
Yeah.
His point is, I've listened to this like six times.
So like, I'll walk you through it.
I have the text in front of me.
Please do because I'm arguing that events like that, see, that's just private people acting in a private way.
They went and then they charged them on this saying, hey, this is very rare, right?
They weren't actively going after people for being gay.
It's like, oh, there was a drug charge and then they were also doing the gay shit.
And so now you're not allowed to, you know, and so now we're going to add that charge.
And that's that's some acting.
Um, a, it barely happens.
And it only happens if there's some other sin occurring, and that they went too far.
That, oh, I wouldn't go that far.
I think, I think that's cruel.
I think that's a little bit of wild.
So I think that's yucky.
It's icky that they did that.
They shouldn't do that.
I mean, I think the law should stay in the book.
But, you know, as long as you're not, he's going to go, he's going to talk about like public vice and he's going to talk about like that sort of thing.
And so, like, if you're in the privacy of your own room and you're sticking your dick in your friend's ass, you know, I think that's awful and God's going to judge you for it, but I don't think that should be illegal.
What I don't want you doing is like holding hands in public and getting married and shit.
That's where he's going with this.
So, sorry, I cut it a little bit early, but he's referring to the exact case that ended up like making making soda laws illegal to pass illegal to enforce in the United States.
That's what he's talking about.
It was a very famous case.
I am primarily interested in the suppression of public vice.
So, no more homosexual marriages, no more pride parades, no more flaunting, that sort of thing.
But I don't want, don't want a sex Gestapo either.
So, in many ways, I'm a libertarian.
He refers to himself as a libertarian like 10 times in this podcast.
It's ridiculous.
Anyway, continue.
Yes.
So, you know, if we take him at his point, you should not.
Take him at his word.
Giving him good faith, giving him good faith for a moment.
Yes.
Yeah.
Doing what Sam Harris does and just taking what he says completely at face value.
If somebody found out that you were specifically committing sodomy in public, in private, I beg your pardon, you wouldn't be arrested and put in prison for that or executed or whatever.
But you can't get married.
You can't be out and proud.
You can't have gay pride parades.
Presumably, you can't wear rainbows or anything like that.
So you're just, you know, you wouldn't be able to hold a position in the church, I'm sure.
So you're going to be, you're going to, you're going to have social death inflicted upon you.
You're going to have your right to free speech and free expression, your right to a free public expression of your personal life and everything like that.
That's all going to be taken away from you.
But Doug Wilson is a libertarian because he wouldn't actually make it against the law to commit the act itself in private.
That's the argument.
And other things, he's just going to jump right into the things that are that are not that are not going to be allowed.
As long as we're talking about sex, let's talk about other things that we're not public vice, other things that are public vice by Doug Wilson's account.
And so I want jumping over to an illustration of the public space.
There would be Muslims and Hindus would be free to think what they think and pray the way they pray and gather together with other people, but there would be no minarets.
Church bells, yes, but no minarets because the public space belongs to Christ.
So what about adultery then?
What should be the punishment for adultery, if I'm not mistaken?
Hey, hey, I do wonder, what does Sam Harris think about the presence of minarets in public spaces in the United States?
I do wonder if that's a point that they might agree on to some degree.
He is so overtly into Islam.
I think that's entirely possible.
So again, I included the next question.
They go and they start talking about adultery and punishments and like, you know, the biblical, you know, you get punished on the Sabbath for picking up sticks and like all the all the edge lord new atheist nonsense that you and I grew up past when we were 25 years old.
Like I get it, you know, but that, but he doesn't answer, he doesn't ask that question about like public accommodations.
He doesn't ask this question of what does that mean in practice?
What does that mean for people who are gay?
What does that tell me about your worldview?
Which is a much more interesting question than just like trying to get him to explain the punishments that he would think are appropriate for adultery.
I mean, in my opinion, this is so much more elucidating and so much more lightning.
If you have this man in front of you and you are going to do this, I don't know.
It's just Sam Harris gets completely dropping the ball on what this man just said.
We just spent like 20 minutes going through this and we found so many things that like you could put a whole podcast episode and talk about that with this man and go, well, let's talk about the details of this.
What do you actually believe?
Why do you believe it?
Why do you, why, why is this not just sophistry?
And Sam Harris says none of it because he's completely useless.
And the 10 commandments that many Christians are fighting to get back into the public schools, the 10 commandments are delivered back into the public school.
I mean, it is one of those things where they were declared, you can't put them on school property.
That is actually a freedom of religion thing.
There were some big court cases that were won in various places.
And like Rory Moore got famous back in the 2000s, trying to get 10 commandments in various spaces.
You can have them privately.
You can have them in any private space you want because that's freedom of religion, but you can't have it in a public space because it's freedom of religion for all the people who don't believe that shit.
Right.
So he's trying to say, well, we're trying to get it back into public.
We're trying to bring it back into life, which means we're trying to bring it into public schools and into, you know, not churches, but courthouses, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
We're trying to make the government based on these Christian principles again, et cetera.
That's the logic he's going for.
Exactly.
State-minded and stay-in-land.
And that is the basic structure of Christian nationalism.
That's the whole game, you know?
Yeah.
So here, this is where Sam Harris starts asking questions.
And this is kind of more towards the back half.
And so I'm trying, again, to be fair to Sam.
He does ask a little bit more pointed questions, but it's still really weak sauce.
It's still very, very weak sauce.
So he asked about slavery.
And I'm like, well, what about the slavery in the Bible is sort of endorsed by the writers of the Bible?
And Doug Wilson is kind of like, it's kind of like, well, no, because there are some, you know, it's kind of wishy-washy and there are places where it is condemned, et cetera.
And kind of the details of this, I think, are interesting.
I think we'll get into that.
But Sam Harris does ask these questions about slavery.
And he does, his thing is what he's bringing out is like, but you only get to this point by knowing, you only get to knowing that slavery is bad.
You can't get there just from the Bible.
You have to have these more secular systems of knowledge that we got there in the end with this more secular system.
And that's, that's his big argument.
And they spend like an hour going through the details of that.
And it was infuriating.
It's absolutely maddening to listen to.
It's just, it's, it's like listening to paint dry.
It's how just absolutely, but he does go, he does go harder on this and he does ask like more pointed questions, but it's always in that form.
It's never like, what is your political project?
What are you actually trying to do?
What do you, what do you actually believe?
What do you want to happen to people?
It's always like, you know, this, he always just slips aside.
And Sam never gives him like a real run for his money.
But this kind of gives you a sense of just how reactionary this guy's worldview is.
And that's why I wanted to play it for you.
The Ten Commandments are delivered to a slave-owning people.
And two of the Ten Commandments have slaves in them.
The fourth commandment on the Sabbath, you have to give a Sabbath rest to your men servants and your maidservants, your slaves, male and female slaves.
And then the 10th commandment, you're not allowed to covet your neighbor's slaves.
So bare minimum honesty requires Christians, if they say, I'm with the Bible all the way.
Well, we have to say, according to the Bible, a man could be a responsible Christian and a slave owner and not be in sin simply because he was in that relationship.
He would have to do all the things the Bible said to do.
And I think he would agree that manumission was the long-term desired goal because the spirit of the Lord brings liberty with him.
The gospel sets people free, sets men and women free.
And I think that has civic ramifications and has implications for the slave trade and so on.
Which is not how that actually worked in practice by Fred Duck.
In practice, you gave your slaves Christianity so that they would embrace their role.
They would embrace their role in the heavenly life.
They would embrace their Glorious future with Christ and remain a slave.
That's the reality.
And not to, I mean, not to say some slave, you know, not to do the epiphophilia of slavery here, but the slavery that was actually practiced in the Bible was not chattel slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries in the United States and in Central and South America.
These are very different systems, you know.
Well, I mean, that's one of the things apologists for the Bible will say.
They will say, well, the slavery in the Bible wasn't chattel slavery.
It was, it was debt bondage and stuff like that.
Firstly, to the extent that that's true, it's a distinction without a difference.
And most of what the claims that they make are just not true.
And there is chattel slavery specifically approved of in the Bible.
In the news.
He's going to get into that.
He's going to get into some of this stuff.
In the New Testament, Paul, his attitude is, you know, a lot of the stuff that's under Paul's name is not actually written by Paul.
But the stuff that is written by Paul, from what we can tell, his attitude was, well, the kingdom of heaven is coming any day now.
So there's no point changing anything.
If you're a slave, just go about your business.
If you're a master, just go about your business.
And any minute now, Christ is going to come back.
And here comes the kingdom of heaven.
But you're absolutely right.
One other thing: the slave trade is prohibited in scripture.
Kidnapping was a capital offense in order to sell someone was a capital offense in the Old Testament.
That's not what the kidnapping referred to in the Bible is talking about.
I'm very rusty on this, but I believe you.
And to the extent that that is about slavery, it's about you shouldn't steal other people's slaves.
That slave belongs to that other guy.
That's not the other guy.
You're not supposed to steal this.
And the slave trade, the middle passage slave trade was calling an abomination.
And so.
I love, I love Harris's little, hmm, like very interesting point.
Very interesting point.
By talking about the relation of a Christian master and a Christian slave, I'm not defending all the abuses.
Oh, I'm in favor of a kinder, gentler kind of slavery.
You see, it's just, you know, it's like you can only lash them so many times a month.
Sam really going to push petos on the metal here.
He's really going hard against Doug Wilson now.
Wait for it.
This is glorious stuff.
Yeah, except it would have been so easy had God or Jesus or anyone else in the Bible wanted to make it clear that slavery was an abomination.
They simply could have said that, right?
I mean, on your account, they have the principal crimes, murder and theft and blasphemy and idolatry and homosexuality even have been specified and ruled out of Christian morality, but slavery hasn't.
Bong hit now.
Yeah.
Literally owning another person and forcing them to be your farm equipment is part of the culture, part of the culture.
Yeah.
But there are many things that part of the culture that Christianity disavowed, and this was not one of them.
So it seems to me that if we're being honest, what has happened in your case, I mean, the reason why you're grateful that we don't have to relitigate this and that slavery, the chattel slavery is behind us, is that you have received some instruction from a larger moral conversation, a secular moral conversation, progressive Western philosophy,
and the growth of humanism and other notions of human rights that are not best found or even on this particular point, even possible to find in the Bible.
Well, actually, Ross Douth tried to press me on the same, on the same point.
And with regard to slavery, in the modern world, the movement toward the abolition of the slave trade and the movement.
Wait for it.
Wait for it.
Movement against the whole enterprise which, as Thomas Soulless pointed out ding yeah ding, we got a black guy in our, we got a black guy on our side as fire.
One black guy means i'm not racist for saying this.
Slavery was ubiquitous in the world and there's one civilization that recoiled from it at a certain point and that was west.
The West, particularly in places that had a whole lot of indigenous slaves who could fight back against this stuff.
Particularly in those places, slavery was somehow the people were allowed to be convinced or wed of slavery when the slave revolts were just a little bit too frequent.
Gee, imagine how that works.
And yes, there were.
He goes on.
He talks about Wilburfrest and he talks about some.
He goes, he goes and he, he goes for a long time on this, and far be it from me to not to pretend that he did not do that, but it's still like it can like.
The fact that there were some people who were against slavery in 1600 or whatever does not like, does not indicate the truth value of slavery in the world and whether it's good that it exists in your Christian nationalist society.
That is not the reality of what's going on here.
And yes, slavery has taken many forms.
Um, I would say modern era slavery uh, racial slavery of the, of the of the modern era, New World Slavery, you could call it plantation slavery and so on.
The the the, the African Holocaust.
It's been called.
Yeah, it it is.
It is one of, if not the most horrifying things that human beings have done in their entire history, and that is not in any way to make any sort of defense or minimization of other forms of slavery.
The slavery that Aristotle defends in the politics is is horrific.
Uh, Ancient world slavery was horrific it, etc etc etc.
But i'm, i'm reminded of that uh, that joke somebody told.
I can't remember who it was about.
How you know, from the way British historians talk, you would think that the British empire invented the slave trade simply so that the British empire could have the moral honor of abolishing it.
Um yeah, isn't it interesting that the civilization, if you want to even posit the existence of such such a thing as a discrete civilization called the West uh, isn't it interesting that that civilization, which perpetrated arguably the most grotesque, horrifying crime against humanity, in in the entirety of human history, or at least one of them, at scales to be given, I mean, once you start talking about scaling the credit.
I mean it's.
I mean colonization or slavery, I mean one of one of those two is the worst thing that ever happened in human history.
And you know well one, one kind of follows after the other.
It's all part of the same plan.
Yeah, I started thinking about the Scramble For Africa when you were talking about like, African Holocaust, and i'm like ah, you know, Scramble For Africa is also kind of it, but it all fits in the same thing.
Sorry, i'm being flippant, but you're absolutely correct.
You're absolutely no no, you're absolutely right, but yeah it's, it's the people that did it that get the credit for doing it.
It was wow, isn't that handy.
It was that one guy with no political power who spoke eloquently against it and we like no no, that's that's the guy I respect.
Well yeah, but he was standing against the power and you're kind of standing for the power right now.
You know, like you know yeah and, as you, as you say, you know, isn't it interesting that that it coincides with uh, essentially a massive slave rebellion, which is, you Know how I would interpret the American Civil War, or at least that's, that's a huge part of it internally, once it gets started.
And also the basic point: well, abolitionism was a Christian phenomenon.
That's true.
That's absolutely true.
So was slavery.
If you look at the Confederate South, slavery at every level of that system was rhetorically and ideologically justified using Christianity.
Exactly.
So, and this man is saying, this man is saying you can be a good Christian completely within the bounds of like morality without sin on this matter and own slaves.
That's that's literally what he's saying.
And so he's like, well, yeah, but I'm against slavery.
I don't like that.
I don't like the excesses of slavery.
It's like this man believes in a world in which people can be owned by other people.
That's, I mean, it's just that is having, having, as we, as we pointed out earlier in the episode, having said, well, I'm a young earth creationist and I don't believe in evolution, except I believe that different branches of the human family have different essentially rephrasing what the Nazis call HBD, human biodiversity and race realism in religious terms.
That's what he was doing.
Yeah, yeah, very much so, very much so.
I do want to highlight also that Sam pushes a lot more on this content.
We could have done a whole episode that's just on this because there was a lot.
They talked for a lot on this topic.
And guess where?
Guess where Doug Wilson went?
That's where Doug Wilson went when he starts talking about what Sam Harris is saying.
But yeah, surely it's like there's a certain amount of suffering in the world that the life of a slave is just inherently one of immense suffering.
And guess do you would you like to hazard a guess where Doug Wilson went when he's talking about suffering in various societies?
Well, I was I was just thinking Sam was quite likely to bring up the slavery that was practiced in the Islamic empire.
He did not.
Clearly, that's not where you were.
He did not go there.
He did not go there.
So, yeah, the suffering thing was a byway that I wasn't expecting.
So tell me, please.
Doug Wilson is like, well, yeah, but in our society where you live right now, 60 million people are killed every year in a Petri dish or in the world of brings up abortion.
And then Sam Harris is like, God, I should have played this.
I just, I knew we were running long.
It was like, I couldn't do this.
It would have been a huge other thing.
You know, we could talk about this forever.
Sam Harris brings up, but yeah, like the suffering of an actual human being who's in the world who spends decades of their life as a slave is certainly more than the suffering that's by a like, well, then they start getting into like the semantics of what suffering means, et cetera.
And it's just like, they got into, it's such deep, it's just a dorm room level sophistry.
It's where they ended it.
Like it's just, and so I didn't need to include it, but I explained it to, you know, they did go there.
And he does get a little bit harsher.
He does, he does poke a little bit more, but it's always like that sort of thing.
It's never like, I'm going to question you about the fundamental things that you were actually wanting to do in the world.
It's always like, I'm going to trick you up.
I'm going to find the premise.
I'm going to show that Christianity is stupid and therefore what you believe is stupid and not like what you believe is stupid because it creates an enormous amount of harm in the world.
And it's doing so right here and now.
You know, there's never, he never goes there because to do so, that would be underhanded, you see.
So, you know, you can't do it.
So we're done talking.
We're done listening to Doug Wilson.
Two episodes later, they did a more from Sam episode.
And this one is, these are like chats that he has with this producer where they're kind of like, he answers quite like QA's from the listeners and sort of like kind of common questions.
He kind of gets into some more details.
Of course, his listeners had questions about the Doug Wilson discussion.
So this is, this is, I thought, I figured it'd be worth playing a little bit.
Sam Harris talking about this now.
And speaking of deeply held beliefs, I had so many people reach out to me with nearly the same comment about the Doug Wilson podcast.
It was as though that you had either captured an alien or had discovered an animal in the wild that was formerly believed to be extinct.
And we got to be a fly on the wall as you spent time with it.
And one of your subscribers wants to know what was going through your head during and after your conversation with him.
And they said, look, I understand you may not want to reveal it, but they're dying to know, Sam.
So if you could share.
The one thing I didn't anticipate about that is that we were going to have to jailbreak it because the first hour really served as kind of the most anodyne showcasing of his views without any pushback from me.
So originally the first half was he was going to release the first half and then I'm going to look like an asshole.
It just seemed like almost like a an onboarding to his worldview.
You think, you think, Sam?
You think?
I think somebody said this was just kind of socially irresponsible to just put this out without the second hour.
So, you know, we very quickly agreed to that.
It was irresponsible to do it in the first place.
Jesus Christ.
And that I hadn't anticipated.
I didn't know how the conversation was going to go, but I knew that he was almost certainly going to just check the boxes.
The biblical boxes provided an apology, right?
So here's the key.
Here's what Sam Harris is now telling you, telling us what he was attempting to do in that.
And what is, well, this guy is just going to be completely open and honest with me about what he believes.
And so I can just show how ridiculous he is by pointing out the silly premises of his arguments and by doing the dorm room tactics.
He's going to say this in so many words, but like that's literally where, that's literally where he's going.
He thought he did great.
I knew that I could just walk him into what was in the Bible and he wasn't going to pretend that it wasn't there or to have some allegorical gloss on it that took the crazy out of it.
So, you know, and I actually respect that more than, more than I respect all the various flavors of religious moderation that essentially just turn scripture into self-serving bullshit.
He does exactly that in the clips we've listened to repeatedly.
Right.
I mean, like, it's less principled theologically to say, oh, no, that's not what's what was meant in the Bible.
Like now you're bringing your, what you hope it means or wish it meant, and you're doing your theology from there and not acknowledging that.
This is fascinating.
What he's saying there is that, well, Doug Wilson is a radical.
And I respect him because he, he, he's saying the real thing.
He's saying what the real religion is.
This is the same thing that he would, that he says about Islam, right?
Is that is, well, no, no, the suicide bombers, those are the, they are actually acknowledging the reality of the Islamic text.
They're the ones taking the religion seriously.
And so we will say, no, it's actually about submission to Allah and it's about, you know, being a better person in the world and about, you know, obeying rules and about treating people properly and about like accepting your place in the world.
No, those people, those are the ridiculous people.
They don't really believe in a real religion.
These other guys, they believe in a real religion.
And so I have less, and he's doing that for Christianity now.
It's like liberal pastors who believe in DEI, who believe in, you know, queer people being human beings, who believe in trans rights.
Like those kind of people, he has no time for because those people, he's like, well, what does the Bible say this?
Well, yeah, but we don't think that that's valid because, you know, it's a matter of faith for people.
Look, I have an enormous respect for those people who, you know, who have a faith in something they can't see or something I can't see, who nonetheless live their lives in a great way and do great things to the world.
There are great people who have done those things to the world.
I mean, if we're talking about the anti-slavery thing, the Quakers in like the 16th century were 100% against slavery.
They are an enormously amazing organization.
I do not believe in a word of what they believe theologically, but I believe they should be allowed to exist.
I think they are a huge, important, they're a small group, but I believe they're doing it correctly.
I fully support them, fully support them.
I know a couple of them socially.
It's fine.
But Sam Harris can't envision, he can't envision that version of religion because he's fundamentally stuck in this like 15-year-old boy masturbating in his basement version of atheism.
He's fundamentally stuck in this relationship.
This has always been his take on this, the idea that any form of what he would call moderation in religion is inherently a form of compromise with what it's actually because he interprets religious belief as just inherently a form of textual literalism and without actually really understanding what the texts say.
And his assumption tends to be that the most extreme and crude possible set of beliefs is just inherently going to be what the text says.
So anybody who takes any sort of liberal or liberalized or moderate position in religion is inherently somebody who's compromising with the text and is therefore fundamentally a liar and a hypocrite.
And because it's fundamentally, Sam is he's a fundamentalist.
He is.
I mean, it's just not true.
It is not the case that the people with the most extreme view, the fundamentalists, are the ones who are being honest about the text, even in the clips we listen to.
So it's always a matter of interpretation.
It's always a matter of extrapolation.
The fundamentalists are doing that just as much as the moderates.
Sam is fundamentally misinformed about how this works.
And you're doing your theology from there and not acknowledging that, no, you're actually just changing what's in scripture.
So I respect religious fanatics for their honest fanaticism.
And that I think came through in the conversation.
It's like the thing that's that I never found myself annoyed by him.
You didn't?
Because he was just so polite.
He's so nice.
I found him incredibly annoying.
I hated doing this episode.
This is absolutely awful for me.
There's something very scary about his worldview, but the fact that he would represent it honestly.
I mean, I had to do a little work.
I mean, there were a few moments where he tried to not obfuscate, but at least elide the full implication of what he was suggesting is true or real or part of his worldview.
But he just, you know, just took another question or two to expose the fact that, yeah, he doesn't have an argument against chattel slavery.
You know, we could bring that back in the U.S. and that would be biblical and considered probably more biblical than its abolition.
You know, I know where I stand with someone like that, but it's the moderate whose beliefs are infinitely elastic, who's so agile at lying to themselves that they don't even know when they're lying to anyone else.
I find that more frustrating.
I've always found that more frustrating.
And this is something that this is where I would have used, if I was using the Ezra Klein clip, this is where I'd use the Ezra Klein clip, because he continually accused Ezra Klein and like people around him.
And this is around the criticism of the Charles Murray interview that Sam Harris did back in like 2018 or whatever.
In that moment, he's constantly saying, well, these are people, you know, the people Who believe that like genes are that race and IQ are not strongly correlated?
They're lying to themselves.
They're lying about the data.
They're not believing the things that are obviously true.
Because I have, you know, he doesn't say Steven Pinker, but Steven Pinker and Charles Murray and all these other guys are on my side.
And they say this is just valid, on its face, valid science.
Like, no, these are complicated questions.
And nobody really knows what the answer is.
I have opinions about this, but I'm not qualified to judge it, but I know people who are.
But he has to believe, he has to.
When Ezra Klein questions him about, like, well, no, we actually believe what you believe.
And I take you seriously, and I believe that you say what you believe you believe, then Ezra Klein is in some way attacking Sam Harris because he's saying, well, if you took Charles Murray at his word, you're not listening to all the things he said in that conversation with you about the horrifying political reifications of what he's saying.
You're just trying to say, you're just trying to have a conversation about data and science, but he's talking about political projects.
And that goes on not only in his rest of his life, but in this conversation.
Sorry, I really listened to a bits of this today, so I have it.
I have it pretty well on my head.
Sorry that, sorry, I was not going to play a four-minute clip up to this effect.
But for that person, Ezra Klein is a radical, just absolutely impossible to understand.
You cannot, he's, he's just too sophistry.
He's just pretending I've said things that I haven't said.
And he's just, he's putting words in my mouth, et cetera, et cetera.
And that's a person you cannot be reasonable with.
That's a person.
He's like a far left crazy, as far left crazy as you can ever imagine anyone being.
But, but, you know, Doug Wilson, this is a man.
I mean, he's a radical, but you can sit down and have a conversation.
He's just saying what he thinks.
He's just saying what he thinks.
And he's just, he's believing his fundamentalism.
And I respect the fundamentals.
Ezra Klein assholes with all their charts and numbers and nuance and society and sociology and history.
That's just a bunch of fucking bullshit, man.
Let me talk to a guy who really knows what's up, Doug Wilson, talking about the first 11 chapters of Genesis.
This is a man I can understand.
He and I can have a mutual laundering session where we both treat this like a sort of a theoretical game, a common room, you know, common room badinage where we just shuttlecock ideas back and forth between each other and never really dig into the actual material things that our respective actions,
our actual actions, that the real material effects those are having in the world and the real end result of what our respective political projects would be.
We can just leave that out and it can be this lovely, high-minded, rarefied intellectual game.
And we, by mutual consent, we can both come out of it looking very reasonable and not have to face up to the fact that these positions we take have material effects on people in the real world.
No, that never comes up in this.
That never comes up in this.
I don't think Sam Harris has ever talked about material effects in the real world and anything he's on.
Some of his guests have, but I don't believe Sam Harris has ever personally brought that up unless it's like suicide bombers and that sort of thing.
That would be the, you know, but yeah, and then he misrepresents the data.
It's a policy that somebody's well, of course he does.
Of course he does.
One more or a short one.
Sam Harris, debate a socialist.
This comes up a couple of minutes later in that same episode.
So this is his response.
And at the end, I have an advice for someone who I think he should he should have a conversation.
How long is this podcast going?
And his listeners are saying, would you ever debate a socialist?
I don't believe he ever has.
I think the closest he got was Ezra Klein, honestly.
You know, farthest left radical you could go, Ezra Klein.
Exactly, exactly.
Another follow-up question related to this: Would you have a conversation with a far-left person, the one you had with Doug Wilson, one where you simply probe their beliefs and push where there seem to be inconsistencies or mistakes, but without the need to fully debate?
For whatever reason, it feels like you are less able to do that with liberals than you are with conservatives.
Yeah, that's actually a good question from whoever sent sometimes.
Yeah.
This is like an amalgam of various questions that the producer is getting.
The producer often tries to push, like he often says, well, I'm not expressing any particular viewpoint of mine.
I'm just trying to poke Sam and kind of get him to use his brilliant brain to explore the nuance of this issue a little bit more completely.
And so sometimes he asks really interesting questions and sometimes he's just like poking Sam to get him to move even further right and all that kind of shit.
So we don't like this guy, but like that's a, that's a, that's a good question.
Yes, I agree.
Yeah.
I mean, I am less able to do that because I'm a liberal, right?
Like I, I we share all of the same ethical intuitions.
I mean, that's why I find someone like Ezra Klein who's going to count up.
This is, it's a little like six years ago, buddy.
It's six years ago.
You're still harping out about this.
It was a two-hour conversation and a couple of email stages and like a couple of articles from six or seven years ago.
This is, it's insane.
It's insane.
Ezra Klein, who's going to count up the number of black and brown people on my podcast and attack me, you know, as a racist for not having enough of them.
None of this, none of this.
I was going to include all this, but none of this happened, by the way.
None of this happened.
As we discussed this in an earlier, much earlier episode, I could do this again.
If we want to do this again, I can pull the clips now.
I can show you exactly what Ezra Klein had to say.
Believe me, I have all the documentation for this.
I put it in the old episode notes.
And then say he's not attacking me as a racist and then hit me over the head with Ibram X. Kendi.
I find that just, again, that's, it's much harder to deal with, right?
It's the bad.
It's much harder to deal.
I wonder why it's harder to deal with.
Somebody actually challenging you is harder to deal with than somebody who's there on the understanding that he's going to use you and you're going to use him to each other's mutual benefit.
Yeah, I imagine it is harder to deal with.
Yeah.
And Ezra Klein is fawning to Sam Harris in that interview.
I mean, by the way, he spends multiple minutes talking about how much he respects Sam Harris and a lot of the things he does.
And he really finds value in Harris's like way of doing his podcast.
And he has deep respect for Charles Murray and bits of his work.
But he's Ezra Klein in that moment.
And I think in a lot of, I think to a fault, Ezra Klein is like process oriented and he's like policy oriented.
He doesn't care what you believe.
He wants to get to the best policy by the methods that he has at his disposal.
For better or for worse, that's who Ezra Klein is.
Sam Harris doesn't see that.
All he sees is the personal slight.
You called me a race.
I didn't call you a racist.
I deliberately did not call you a racist.
I never said those words.
I never even applied to do the sort.
But so Sam Harris is being completely, he's just completely wrong here.
He's just lying here.
Right.
It's the bad faith problem, right?
There's not there was nothing bad faith about Doug Wilson, right?
I mean, like, like he's just, or not, certainly nothing that I detected.
It depends on the person.
I'm sure I could bring on a committed social.
He didn't have to be bad faith at any point.
You never pushed him to the point where he needed to be bad faith.
I mean, I think he was bad faith anyway.
Well, and bad faith for Sam Harris is like attacking me for my beliefs.
It's like, you know, saying bad things about me.
And Doug, and Doug never did that.
I mean, you know, Doug Wilson never did that.
I mean, he knew the rules of going on to Sam Harris is you glaze him.
You know, you glaze him and you say you're Nazi bullshit.
And then you get out and you count the money.
A committed socialist, right?
Who I just think is wrong on their economics and politics.
And we could have a fine conversation.
I could just come through the kind of world they want to live in.
And they could tell us how they want to nationalize all the businesses.
And they don't think billionaires should exist.
And they think the Communist Project say is still reclaimable.
I could put that in front of an audience as a kind of intellectual and moral curiosity and not feel like I'd have to go to war.
But I think the questioner is asking more about the Ezra Klein types, right?
And that's been much harder because, yeah, our politics and our political and ethical goals are 85% in harmony.
I actually find it easier to talk to people who I agree with on more things.
I think that's a really interesting tell from Sam.
Maybe you don't actually agree with Ezra Klein on as much stuff as you say you do.
That's it.
Maybe Ezra Klein has some fundamental understandings of the world that differ from yours, Sam Harris.
And maybe that's why you find it more amenable to talk to Doug Wilson than to also.
I imagine he's like, he sat in his mind like the stereotypical Stalinist, like a Stalin defender.
Like, oh, I'm going to bring a Stalinist in here and I'm going to poke him in the same way.
And I'm going to ask very easy questions and go, yeah, but what about, what about free enterprise?
What about, you know, what about the selfishness principle?
It's, you know, and just do, again, the same kind of dorm room discussion that is the only thing apparently Sam Harris knows how to do at this point.
Economic calculation problem and all that.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, exactly.
If he could even get that far, I don't even think he'd get that far.
You know, I think, I think it would literally just be, you know, what about, what about the charity?
What about Jeff Bezos?
He gives so much money to charity and it would be like that kind of shit.
Like that's as deep as he would get.
I have a person for you, Sam.
Sam, I know that sometimes your subredditors listen to this podcast.
And I hope you hear this.
I have a name for you.
Zorhan Mamdani.
Invite him on.
I'll bet he come on.
I want to listen to this podcast, please, Sam, for me, for me, personally.
I want to hear it.
I won't even make fun of you for it.
I just want to hear it.
I promise.
Okay, I'm going to make fun of you for it, but I want to hear it.
I want to hear it.
Okay.
Daniel wants to hear that.
Yeah, I think you hit it.
You know, the reason Harris finds it much easier to talk to somebody like Doug Wilson than he thinks he would find it to talk to a socialist, which he bizarrely, you know, he seems to think that the questioner is talking about somebody like Ezra Klein is because Sam Harris is fundamentally a conservative.
He's actually right, but he's talking about the wrong person.
He can talk to Doug Wilson because they're both conservatives.
They're both on the right.
Yeah, exactly.
He can't even talk to Ezra Klein because Ezra Klein, for good or ill, with good and bad attached to this, Ezra Klein's a liberal and Sam Harris is not.
Sam Harris is a right-winger.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly.
So it's the opposite of what he says.
It's not that you've got too much in common.
It's that you're fundamentally divided.
No, 100%.
100%.
Yeah.
All right.
That's it.
That's all I got for you.
That was good.
Thank you.
All right.
This might be our longest episode ever.
I thank you to the audience for getting to the end.
You get a gold star.
You get more gold stars than Sam Harris did for that interview for getting to the end of this podcast.