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Jan. 19, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:40:09

3179 The Reality of God - Call In Show - January 13th, 2016

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	All right.
	Great questions tonight.
	Question one.
	God is real.
	And how on earth can you have good without God?
	I mean, they're only one letter apart.
	So on what basis do I get a moral code without using what this call or consider to be the theological concepts of good and evil?
	Great question.
	Question two.
	And this goes back to the Gene Wars presentations, which again are kind of foundational to a lot of the conversations that we're having these days.
	I hope you'll check them out.
	If it's R versus K, why do some of the R selected people seem to have so few kids and does it have any relationship from being removed from nature?
	Question 3.
	Okay, so if we want to make changes in society, should we stay totally pure to our principles or should we compromise?
	Is it not the art of the possible rather than the ideal of the impossible?
	Stephen Harper, ex-Prime Minister of Canada, What was apparently once inspired by Ayn Rand?
	It's the Canadian John Galt and the Canadian Rand Paul.
	Why would he go so far from his principles?
	Paul Ryan also, a US politician who used to be an objectivist or was influenced by Ayn Rand.
	What goes so horribly wrong in society and is there anything that we can learn from that to be better at bringing about positive change in society ourselves?
	These are some great, great questions.
	I hope you'll enjoy them.
	Remember, FDRURL.com slash Amazon if you're doing any shopping.
	Also, FreeDomainRadio.com slash donate to help us.
	Thank you so much!
	Alright, up first today we have Mark.
	Mark wrote in and said, Ten years ago I had an epiphany and realized that God is real.
	After some searching, I lucked into the Catholic Church.
	My whole worldview changed and expanded.
	I have also come to realize that the Catholic worldview makes a lot more sense than the atheist worldview.
	In watching your videos, I see that you are an atheist and that you also refer to yourself as a moral philosopher.
	I've also heard you use the terms like virtue and evil, which I normally associate with theology.
	I've also heard you be somewhat snarky and dismissive of the views of believers.
	What homework have you done to explore the Catholic worldview?
	Why do you feel the atheist worldview is superior?
	On what basis do you derive your moral code?
	That is from Mark.
	Hello, Mark.
	Nice to chat with you.
	How are you doing tonight?
	Doing great.
	Hey, I loved your video on the Crusades.
	Finally, somebody who actually spoke the truth about it.
	Yeah, it is appalling when some basic truths are considered shocking to people.
	But yeah, we've got a whole series of those planned pushbacks against general narratives, usually from the left, about evil and perfidious Europeans.
	So I hope that you'll enjoy them as they go forward.
	I definitely will keep an eye out for them.
	So, yeah, basically, I think my email there was pretty good.
	Now that it's been read back to me.
	You know, it's kind of a weird thing.
	You know, I agree with you on just about everything you say, but this issue about God and atheism is just like, you're way out there compared to where I am.
	And, you know, I kind of...what happened when I had my epiphany is, you know, I asked the big questions.
	Why are we here?
	What's the nature of man?
	What are we, you know...
	Is there life after death?
	Is there God?
	And all of those things seem to click better from the Catholic worldview than the atheistic material worldview.
	Right.
	Do you want to talk more about your epiphany?
	Do you want me to respond to your comments?
	Do you want to get into a discussion of moral philosophy?
	What's your preference to start?
	Well, let me see.
	Well, I'll give you a little bit about my epiphany because it was probably 10 years ago today.
	It was sometime in January.
	And basically what I did is I asked the question, is God real?
	And then right then, bang, I got hit with it as God is real.
	There was no doing of the homework.
	The homework came after that.
	And so I bought a Bible.
	That doesn't make a lot of sense, by the way.
	It's hard to read.
	It's really confusing.
	It's full of contradictions.
	So I ended up...
	You know, figuring out, well, what church do I go to?
	And I found out that the Catholic Church was actually started by Jesus.
	So I said, well, let's go with the original, not some spinoff that spun off a few hundred years ago.
	And the more I learn about the Catholic Church, the more I agree with it.
	You know, there's 2,000 years of built-up deposit of the faith there, of really, you know, figuring out What did Jesus say when he came to Earth?
	You know, he's God.
	He's one-third of the Trinity.
	So that pretty much is my story there in a nutshell.
	Moral theology?
	Yeah, let's talk about that.
	You know, the Catholics, to me, have really the ultimate moral code.
	It's based on two things.
	The Ten Commandments and the fact that we're created in the likeness, in the image and likeness of God, which means we have a soul, we have an intellect, and we have a will.
	Those are really the big datums on moral philosophy, and then everything flows down from that.
	Now, where did you get your philosophies from?
	Well, that's a big question, and before we get to that, I'd just like to give the audience, and myself of course, the chance to appreciate the value that you find in Catholicism.
	What are the things that you find the most What are the things that you find the most valuable about Catholicism?
	Just the entire whole world view of, you know, what is the nature of man?
	Where are we going?
	You know, how the universe started.
	You know, we're basically adopted sons into God's family.
	I think that's really a cool thing, you know, that we're just pilgrims here on earth.
	We're just passing through and our real hope is in heaven.
	You know, being an atheist, you don't have that, you don't have anything to look forward to after you die.
	Well, I also don't have anything to fear after I die.
	Remember, they're the two sides of the same coin, right?
	Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, you know, the way the Catholic Church views heaven and hell is hell is for people who just do not want to be with God, you know.
	They would actually be more comfortable in hell than staring at the bright, you know, I'm not up in contemporary Catholic doctrine, but I know that hell has been downgraded relatively recently.
	So is it that hell is not a place of punishment, but a place of separation from God, which for the evil of the unbelievers is a form of comfort?
	Is that right?
	Well, no, it's the same.
	It's always been the same.
	It's been defined more and more.
	But when you really look at what hell is, hell was never actually meant for humans, for people to go to.
	It was meant for Satan and his angels that fell away from God back in the beginning, before the beginning of the universe.
	And then, you know, when Adam and Eve said, hey, you know, we're going to go our own way.
	We want to eat the forbidden fruit of knowledge of good and evil, you know, because originally we're supposed to be able to choose between goods, you know.
	Do I want to be a doctor?
	Do I want to be a lawyer?
	We were never really meant to choose, like, do I want to be a doctor or a drug dealer?
	So when we separated from God, when our first parents separated from God, Now I've lost my whole track of that.
	Well, I mean, just when I was growing up, hell was a place of eternal torment, which is where sinners and atheists and so on, people who've been exposed to the word and have rejected it, they kind of got around the question, does Socrates go to hell?
	Well, no.
	Socrates, I think, went to limbo because he'd not been exposed to The teachings of Jesus and therefore was not responsible.
	But those who've been exposed to the teachings of Jesus who reject them, well, then they're going to end up in the lake of fire.
	At least that's sort of how I grew up.
	So it was a place of torment when I was young.
	You're not wrong about that.
	And Socrates probably did go to heaven.
	You know, all salvation is through Jesus, but that doesn't necessarily mean if you were around before Jesus that you're in limbo.
	You could meet Jesus in the hour of death, and he could say, this is me, and he could go, I like that, I want to go to heaven.
	But I would go to hell, because I have been exposed to the teachings of Jesus and am not a Christian, so I would definitely be thrown into the lake of fire of eternal torment in the theology, at least from how I go.
	Yeah, if you dropped dead today and decided to reject Jesus, yeah, you would probably go to hell.
	You would go to hell.
	But, you know, it's totally your choice.
	That's the thing.
	And that's the whole point of free will, is we're all allowed to choose.
	And, you know, some choose heaven, some choose hell.
	Well, it's not, hang on, to say it's totally my choice is a bit of a challenge.
	Because if I want someone to believe something that I want, Put forward, like some argument that I put forward, it's kind of incumbent upon me to put forward rational and consistent arguments in order for that other person to accept my viewpoint, right?
	And so, if I threaten the person, like if I put forward incomprehensible, self-contradictory arguments, I mean, not only do they contradict themselves, but they contradict empirical reality.
	I'm not doing a very good job of promoting free will.
	Like in conversations with listeners, I don't say two and two make five according to the square circle, and if you don't accept and repeat back to me what I've just said, I'll punch you in the face.
	That would not be, in a sense, giving them free will.
	That would be giving forward an incomprehensible position followed by a dire threat for their conformity.
	And so the fact that...
	Hang on, hang on.
	So the fact that gods, in general, not the Christian deity or the Old Testament deity in particular, but the fact that the deities, in general, put forward incomprehensible arguments, plus commandments, plus a threat, and that God hides himself from mankind.
	Again, I don't need to have faith to believe in mosquitoes, because they wind around me like bureaucrats every summer, but I do need faith to believe in self-contradictory Entities that never present themselves to mankind.
	So I would say that free will is something that is generated by reason and evidence and a non-threatened receptivity towards arguments, incomprehensibility, God having contradictory properties and never showing himself or herself to mankind, followed by dire threats of punishment after death if you don't conform.
	I'm not sure that's the same thing.
	As free will.
	Like, once you bring the hell argument in, I don't know that free will could really be considered front and center because you're in a situation of coercion then.
	First of all, God did present himself.
	Jesus is God.
	He's one person of the Trinity.
	There's the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
	Three divine people, one God.
	No, no, no.
	Hang on.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	Not to me.
	He did.
	Not to me.
	You know, in a court of law, according to Anglo-Saxon common law tradition, hearsay is inadmissible.
	So the fact that other people said they saw impossible things is not philosophically a reason to accept impossible things.
	Well, I mean, just about everything we encounter is hearsay.
	I mean, I believe Einstein's equations, but I haven't studied them personally.
	I just believe people who have credibility that say this all works out.
	And it's the same thing with...
	With Jesus being God.
	I basically bought into this after I read the Bible as good as I could, and then also heard what the Catholic Church had to say, that The Catholic Church is a single entity.
	It's kind of a singularity when it comes to...
	Okay, well, hang on, hang on.
	Sorry.
	I really dislike to interrupt callers, but people say the most extraordinary things and then march on.
	And that's not how we have a conversation when it comes to philosophy.
	So your argument, Mark, is that something like the theory of relativity is the same as...
	The Holy Trinity, or walking on water, or loaves and fishes, and so on.
	Turning water into wine, transubstantiation, and us being populated by an eternal ghost, and so on.
	However, the problem is, of course, that in the scientific community, there is a null hypothesis, right?
	In other words...
	Einstein himself, when he put forward the special theory of relativity in the early part of the last century, he said, here are the specific methodologies by which my theory can be disproven.
	So, for instance, if light does not bend around the gravity well, then my theory is disproven.
	And there were a bunch of others that I don't have the technical ability to recall or convey with any reliability.
	And so there are specific tests that can be, first of all, the theory is internally consistent, and secondly, it conforms with empirical verification, which if you want, you can set up the, you know, during an eclipse, you can measure the position of stars.
	Near the Sun and you can see whether they're in their right position and so on and so there is Objective methodologies by which Einstein's theory of relativity can be either Confirmed or rejected according to experiments that you yourself can to some degree perform So I don't think that's quite the same like what is the null hypothesis for?
	I wasn't comparing I wasn't saying that God is empirically provable.
	I was basically saying That a lot of the way we operate here on planet Earth is we have to take other people's word for things because we can't investigate them ourselves.
	And especially when it comes to the supernatural world.
	I mean, the natural world is where you can employ the empirical method.
	But when it comes to the supernatural world, that's a whole different ballgame.
	And really, probably the best...
	I mean, there's ways we can infer God from the physical world.
	Like, where did the universe come from, you know?
	We all know it started 11.8 billion years ago, where there was nothing, and then there was something, you know?
	The universe didn't create itself, so then you can extrapolate that to say, okay, well, God has said that He created the world, you know, through the Scriptures, through God coming to Earth and saying, yeah, I'm the guy that created it.
	So it's a whole different...
	You can't take out a meter and measure your soul.
	There's no physical way that you can measure God.
	You can only infer God.
	And the way you do that is through revelation.
	And that's what the Bible was all about.
	And that's what Jesus was all about.
	So as far as the universe...
	I think you said 11.8.
	I think it's a little longer, but it was 13 or 14 billion years ago.
	I don't know that that's all thoroughly established as yet.
	I mean, according to, you know, you can't create or destroy matter and energy.
	You can convert them from one form to another.
	I don't know that there was an origin point to the universe.
	I know that that's sort of being explored at the moment.
	But, of course, we can't logically say...
	Sorry, did you want to interrupt or did you want me to finish my point?
	I don't think you go so long.
	Sorry, go ahead.
	I didn't mean to get it.
	So, I think it's been about 50-50 so far.
	It's just that when you're waiting your turn to talk, it feels like a long time, and then when you're talking, it feels like a short time.
	So, we can't logically say, if something exists, something else must have created it.
	And we can't say that because that doesn't answer anything.
	It's called infinite regression, right?
	And what it means is that if something exists, therefore some conscious supernatural entity created it, then since God exists, some supernatural entity must have created God, and whatever created God had to be created by some other.
	So it's infinite regression.
	It just goes on and on and on.
	And so if you're willing to accept that God has always existed and will always exist and was not created but is eternal, I'm not sure why we can't say the same for the universe as a whole.
	And, you know, up until Einstein came along, everybody did think that the world was eternal.
	It's kind of funny, they can accept the eternal universe, but they can't accept the eternal God.
	But, yeah, no, Einstein worked it out with his theory of relativity.
	In fact, when he first worked it out, he said, hey, the universe is expanding, that can't be right, because then you go backward, you go to a point.
	So he put a universal fudge factor in there, To make the universe eternal, basically, steady state.
	And then Erwin Hubble got in his telescope and he said, no, the world is expanding.
	And no matter which way you look...
	The universe, I think you mean.
	The universe, yeah.
	No matter which way you look, the galaxies are going away from us.
	Now, why is that?
	It's because time-space is expanding.
	It's not like an explosion, like a bomb exploded and then everything radiates out.
	The amount of space between us and far-distance galaxies, it's not just the universe that the galaxy is moving away, it's that space between us is expanding.
	And that's what Stephen Hawking worked out back in the 60s.
	And now he's doing backflifts, like, oh God, how do I... Because he's a committed atheist, too.
	And he's like, okay, well, he proved that the universe did start at a certain point in time, and it did start at a singularity, and now it's like, okay, but...
	But the universe can't create itself.
	What happened?
	So, and then, you know, so we combine that with God's revelation.
	We're not saying just because that happened there had to be a God.
	We're looking at both of those things together and saying that's, you know, that makes sense.
	And it makes sense to me.
	That's kind of my point on that.
	Now, I'm sure you can understand, maybe not empathize with, but at least understand at least my position with regards to this.
	So it's called the God of the Gaps.
	I'm sure you've come across this in your studying of theology and you've obviously studied up some atheism.
	So originally...
	And I'll just go over this very briefly.
	But originally, people didn't know where the rain came from.
	And people said, well, there were rain gods.
	And people didn't know why there were volcanoes.
	Oh, there were volcano gods.
	And people didn't know why there were tsunamis.
	And they said, well, Poseidon or Neptune is angry.
	And so phenomenon that was not explained was always deferred to or created a sort of vacuum filled by a deity.
	Where we don't know something...
	There are two types of people when we're faced with limits of human knowledge.
	The first type of person says, God did it, or God did it, or something like that, or the ancestors are responsible, or ghosts, and they just make up an answer.
	The second type of person says, well, isn't that interesting?
	I don't know the answer.
	Let's keep exploring.
	And so the amount of...
	The number of phenomenon that have previously been explained by an appeal to religion that are no longer explained by an appeal to religion is virtually infinite, right?
	I mean, you know, all of the aforementioned stuff.
	And followed by, where did the world come from?
	Well, originally, of course, it was made by God.
	And now it's known where the world came from, at least in the formation of the solar system.
	And then it was, where does life come from?
	It was made by God.
	He breathed life into clay and took a rib from Adam and put it into Eve and all that.
	And so as a result, now we know where life came from through the process of evolution and so on.
	And the question of...
	The God of the gaps is basically, yeah, you always find a place where human knowledge is at the edge.
	Always, always, always.
	And what happens is God It's like the French army in 1940.
	It just keeps retreating, right?
	So empiricism and science and rationality keeps advancing.
	But there's always a hill over which science has yet to see.
	I mean, people are climbing it, they're looking over it, and they're trying to figure stuff out.
	And God is always over the next hill.
	And when you get over the next hill, you don't see God.
	And people say, oh, yes, well, you see, but God is over the next hill.
	Oh no, he's just moved.
	He's on his way.
	He's a rambling man.
	He's got wanderlust.
	So he's always just over the next hill.
	And I guarantee you that should science eventually figure out where the universe came from, he'll just move somewhere else.
	And so there's a whole series of dominoes which fall down where people say, well, God caused this.
	And then as soon as science explains where it came from that doesn't require a deity, the source of the deity just keeps moving.
	So, sorry, go ahead.
	Okay, yeah.
	So, you know, when people...
	Going on to the God of the Gaps thing, most people were wrong.
	When they said, hey, there's a rainbow in the sky and God put it there, they were wrong about that.
	That's just light reflecting through water droplets.
	So to say, okay, so you were wrong in the past about these little things.
	I mean, I don't believe in Zeus or Thor or rainbows or unicorns or any of that, but I do believe in that one God who's a very specific God who is outside of time and space and who created the universe.
	He can't be part of the universe if He created the universe, right?
	Even the word outside, it's kind of weird.
	It's like saying...
	Sorry, sorry.
	Hang on a second.
	And again, these statements are pretty remarkable to me.
	And I don't mean to mock them, but just...
	So you're saying that God cannot be part of these...
	Hang on.
	So God cannot be part of the universe?
	No, I'm not saying that at all.
	I'm saying...
	No, no, no.
	You just said that.
	You may have misspoken.
	Okay, maybe I misspoke.
	I said He created the universe.
	Sorry, you said God is outside of space and time and therefore cannot be a part of the universe.
	And you'll hear that when you hear the recording back.
	If you misspoke, that's totally fine.
	I misspoke on that part.
	Okay, I misspoke on that part.
	What I was trying to say is God created the universe, right?
	So he couldn't have been made of those materials.
	You know what I mean?
	It's like, if you build a house, you can't be the house.
	You're the creator of the house.
	Yeah, the watchmaker is not made of watch parts.
	Exactly, and that doesn't mean that God doesn't interact with the universe at all.
	In fact, in Catholic theology, we believe everybody has a soul, and we believe that the soul is immaterial, that is actually made by God at the moment of conception.
	So there's a lot of supernatural stuff that we...
	That we kind of bring into the mix.
	Now, when you study the physical universe and the natural universe, and by the way, let me start with your presupposition is that if you can't see it, measure it.
	If it's not in the natural universe, it doesn't exist.
	My presupposition is that that's not true.
	There's more to reality than just the physical universe.
	Hang on.
	Hang on.
	How do you know what my presupposition is?
	Have you heard me say it, or are you just imagining it?
	I'm just kind of getting the impression from watching your videos.
	I would dub you a...
	Yeah, see, you've got to ask questions of people rather than tell them what they think, right?
	Okay, yeah, I didn't mean to tell you what you were saying.
	I was kind of repeating what I thought you were saying on your videos, is that, you know, you would say things like, If it's outside the universe, it doesn't exist because nothing exists outside the universe, the physical universe.
	That's kind of what I was referring to, where I'm saying there's the natural and there's the supernatural.
	You don't acknowledge the supernatural.
	You only acknowledge what is in the physical universe and what you can prove with empirical science and all that sort of stuff, which is, you know, I believe that too.
	I mean, I believe that...
	All right, I'm going to interrupt you because I... I actually said to you, it's good to ask questions, and I can see that you're not going to ask a question.
	You're just going to continue to imagine what it is that I believe.
	So I'm going to interrupt you and give a speech because I'm not going to wait for you to ask me.
	So there are three categories of things, right, or potentialities of existence.
	The first is things which can be...
	Measured and perceived and there's categories of things that we know like you can see light if your eyes are working.
	You can't see x-rays unless you have the right equipment.
	You can't see ultraviolet.
	You can't see heat waves.
	You can't see infrared unless you have the right equipment.
	So there are things which can be empirically verified as existing, you know, horses, trees, the world, stars, and so on, right?
	So we don't have any problem saying that these things exist.
	Now, there's another category of existence, which is things which could exist but have not been verified, and they are in a state of who knows, right?
	And you can't ever know those things for sure.
	So, for instance, I've used this example in the show before.
	Number one, if I say horses exist, okay, well, we can go and touch and smell and, you know, horse and hopefully not taste the horse unless we're in Chinatown, but we can go and establish the empirical existence of a horse.
	Now, if I say unicorns exist, then you may ask me, "Well, what do you mean by a unicorn?" And what I mean by a unicorn, I say, is a horse with a horn coming out of its head.
	No magical properties, it can't travel through time, it can't sing entertaining children's songs with its little friends, it is simply a horse with a horn in its head.
	Now, a horse with a horn coming out of its head does not contradict any properties of So somewhere in the universe, it is entirely possible that a horse with a horn on its head exists.
	And you can never ever prove this one way or the other.
	Because even if you start at one end of the universe, scour every single planet and get to the other end, one may have evolved in the first planet that you went to, so you can never ever say there's no such thing in all of the universe as a horse exists.
	I agree with everything you're saying right there.
	Okay, but if I say that there is an entity with contradictory properties, in other words, if I say...
	I don't think God is contradictory.
	But I want to be clear, right?
	Because you said everything which can't be verified immediately doesn't exist, and that's not my position, because there are so many things out there that could exist, but square circles cannot exist.
	Exactly.
	I mean, so a rock traveling in every single dimension and backwards through time that is also a tree and a flower and an elephant's fart cannot exist.
	In other words, self-contradictory entities cannot exist simply by the nature of reality.
	And so that, I think, is really, really important.
	Because if it's like, well, if I can't see it, it doesn't exist.
	Well, I can't see the dark side of the moon, but I don't assume...
	That it's just a hollowed-out concert show with Pink Floyd circa 1977 doing a concert, although that would be cool.
	And so I just really wanted to be clear on that, and outside of that, please continue.
	Okay.
	So, I mean, I'm just kind of referring back to some of your videos.
	Let me see if I can come up with a question to ask you so you don't nail me again.
	Well, let me ask you this.
	Have you ever had a faith?
	Were you raised in any kind of faith and you became an atheist or were you always an atheist like I was until I turned 49 years old?
	I was raised in the Protestant faith.
	I was a choir boy and thus have a very special relationship to Christmas songs.
	I know most of the harmonies.
	And I was a fervent believer in religion as a child.
	And so I have had the whole gamut and full-on frontal faith in the supernatural world and the world of gods and devils and heaven and hell.
	Oh, okay.
	That's awesome.
	See, and I'm kind of glad that I was an atheist because when I first started looking, I'm so glad that I found the Catholic Church because the Protestant world to me is very confusing.
	And I'll tell you why I think that is, is that, you know, they go by the Bible alone.
	And as you know, reading the Bible is a bitch.
	You can't figure that thing out.
	I mean, there's still all kinds of stuff in there that doesn't make any sense.
	But the Catholic Church That actually put together the Bible.
	They said, we'll take the Old Testament, we'll take the seven books that were written in Greek, we'll put them in there.
	We've got the Gospels.
	There's hundreds of writings at the time that were proto-Gospels and different writings and everything.
	And they're the ones that said, okay, where is God communicating to us through these books?
	And they're the ones that actually put the canon together.
	But they are also the guys that can glean out of that canon what the real Christian faith is.
	When you're left alone with the Bible, you can end up being a snake handler, you can end up being a faith healer.
	Take two Protestants and put them in a room and they're going to disagree on things.
	And that's kind of why I really like the Catholic Church.
	They've got the positive faith and they've got the truth as far as I can see it, as far as Christianity.
	They've got the true definition of Christianity.
	And that was given directly to him by Jesus.
	He handed the keys to Peter and said, you're in charge, I'm going back to heaven.
	And there's been that succession for 2,000 years, and they've really guarded the faith closely.
	In fact, when you hear about the Pope being infallible, it's only on when he's speaking about faith and morals.
	And it's not like he's just off-the-cuff saying things.
	I mean, it can go centuries before they come up with a basic doctrine.
	And one of the things that I really like about the Catholic Church is I believe them.
	I trust them.
	If I have a question, if I don't know, or even if I disagree with the Catholic Church, it's like I assume I'm wrong on that.
	That's kind of where I come on the thing.
	And believe me, that is not easy to come up with after 10 years of, you know, developing that trust.
	So what kind of Protestant were you, could I have?
	Oh, standard Anglican.
	Now, so would you view the faith that I was raised in as a false faith, as a faith that deviates from Christ's instructions?
	I don't take in this personally, because it's decades ago.
	I'm just curious.
	I think there's only one true faith.
	I think it's the Catholic Church that's the one true faith, because that is the faith that Christ said, the gates of hell will not prevail against you.
	And I will send you the paraclete, which is the Holy Spirit, to guide you to all truth.
	And if you really look at the way the Catholic faith is, it hasn't changed.
	It's grown and it's delving deeper into the meaning, but it hasn't changed the basic doctrine in 2,000 years, which I think is really cool.
	The doctrine hasn't changed in 2,000 years?
	It has not.
	They've developed their understanding of it, but it's not changed, no.
	I don't know that that's true.
	Well, you tell me what you think has changed.
	Oh, well, just off the top of my head, evolution.
	Well, okay, let me say this.
	When it comes to faith and reason, the Catholic Church will say, hey, if we've been reading the Bible wrong and reason finds a new way of looking at it, we're totally willing to do that.
	But that's not a doctrine of the faith that's changed.
	Yeah, and in fact, you know, you talk about evolution.
	I kind of have my doubts about that.
	I know you're going to think I'm a little bit of a loony tunes on this thing.
	But when I look, when you really look at evolution, even if I was an atheist, I wouldn't be buying it.
	There just doesn't seem to be enough change occurring in today's biological mechanism to get that many species popping up that quickly.
	I mean, there's guys that have been trying to breed fruit flies for 40 years to see if they can get it to split into two species.
	They haven't.
	There's a guy in the University of Michigan that's been doing E. coli since the 60s.
	That's a half hour per generation.
	Yeah, they've done a little selective breeding, kind of like dogs.
	You can come up with different kinds of dogs, but their wolf DNA hasn't changed.
	You know, so I have serious reservations about evolution.
	I'm not saying, hey, I'm a creationist in the world, 6 million years old.
	I'm just saying there are so many holes in there as far as Just the complexity of DNA. I don't want to get into a debate about this.
	I've had this debate a couple of times before, and you can view the views.
	But there was a rejection of Evolution, and now there's an acceptance of evolution.
	Also, the death penalty was previously espoused, and Francis recently has said that he's called for the global abolition of the death penalty, of course.
	That's not a doctrine.
	That's not a doctrine.
	A doctrine is things like Jesus is true God and true man.
	God is three divine persons, you know, one God, three divine persons.
	Well, of course there's not going to be a change in that.
	Of course, a religion founded on Jesus is not going to say that Jesus was not a god.
	I fully accept that.
	But there have been changes in the application of morality over time.
	So, for instance, if a pope says the death penalty is moral, and then another pope says the death penalty is immoral, then either the teachings of the church about the death penalty prior to the...
	Advocation of its abolitioning, or abolitionment, abolitionizing?
	I don't know.
	So, if the Pope reverses this position on a particular moral question like the death penalty, then all the death penalty advocates prior to that new one must have been immoral, or...
	The death penalty, as far as the Church is concerned, is still okay.
	It's still valid.
	It's just that they, you know, and Pope John Paul was the first one, if they're having no doubts about it, they...
	And he himself, his own personal opinion, as opposed to speaking from the chair of Peter, said, you know, I don't like this death penalty because it's so willy-nilly applied, you know?
	And so Benedict and Francis have both said the same thing.
	But they have not come out and said, no more death penalty.
	They're expressing their personal opinion the way they'd be expressing, like, who's going to win the Super Bowl.
	There's not a change in the actual doctrine of that.
	So when the pope calls for the global abolition of the death penalty, he is not presenting himself as somebody who has a direct connection to a deity.
	In other words, he's just putting forward his own personal opinion?
	Exactly.
	I mean, when the pope makes an infallible statement, it's done from the chair of Peter in union with the bishops.
	I mean, it's a big deal.
	It's not just, you know, like, Our Pope now is very leftist, you know.
	So is the doctrine of the Church going to become leftist now?
	No, that's just his personal opinion.
	Now, will he come out and change some doctrine that says, okay, divorced people can now receive communion, you know, or gay marriage is going to be acceptable?
	Those are basic doctrines that can't change.
	He doesn't even have the power to change them.
	But he can express his opinion on them.
	So that's the difference between You know, when the Pope is using the power and authority of his see to say, this is doctrine, this is the way it's going to be, you know, and it's usually not a reversal.
	It's usually a new thing.
	Like back, you know, during St.
	in Augustine's time, there was a heresy that developed that, you know, God was, that Jesus was not a real man, he was just a spirit, and everybody was, you know, they were seeing this illusion, and that was a heresy, and that's where the true God and true man doctrine came from.
	Once they come up with a doctrine like that, they stamp it, and it never changes.
	That's kind of how that works.
	Okay, so the secular administration of God's moral rules is something that is not doctrine.
	You know, I don't know.
	You know, now that you're pressing me on these things, I'm kind of a newbie.
	I've only been at this for 10 years.
	I do know that when the Pope speaks from the chair on the matters of faith and morals, and he wants it to be doctrine, that's infallible.
	Everything else is not.
	So, you know, and we're very big on the Ten Commandments.
	I mean, when you really look at the...
	You know, the moral teachings of the Church, the magisterial teachings.
	It's all about the Ten Commandments, and it's all about we're made in the image and likeness of God, you know.
	But can I, you know, do I know what's doctrine as far as the moral teachings?
	I couldn't tell you.
	I can read the Catechism and say what's in there.
	Is that infallible in there?
	I don't think it is.
	You know, it's just the big things that are, to me, you know, that's so far as I've been able to learn so far.
	The big things are like, you know, Mary was assumed in the heaven, the Trinity, you know, Jesus is God, you know, the whole, you know, that whole thing.
	As far as switching from death penalty to not death penalty, as far as I know, the death penalty is still okay.
	Now, is it doctrine to say it's okay?
	I don't know.
	I don't think it is.
	I, you know, I couldn't tell you.
	I know in the Catechism it says it's okay.
	But the Canischism is not an infallible document.
	It is where we are now, how we're trying to communicate the faith to today's people, and that's kind of...
	I wish I could be a better representative of the Catholic faith that I'm being right now, but if I don't know, I'm going to tell you.
	Yeah, Pope Francis has said that he believes that Roman Catholic priests should be celibate, but the rule was not an unchangeable dogma, and the door is always open.
	Yeah, well, again, that's not a dogma.
	That one I do know.
	That's a discipline.
	Priests can be married.
	The tradition has been that they've been so, but over in the Greek Orthodox Church, their priests are allowed to marry over there.
	Now, can they have a female priest?
	That is against doctrine, as far as I understand it.
	There's a difference between a There's sacred tradition and there's pious tradition.
	Sacred tradition is basically the positive faith, where pious tradition is like, okay, we're priests, but we're not going to get married because we're going to devote all our time to our spiritual family.
	We're not going to try and juggle both vocations.
	In fact, in the Catholic Church, we talk about vocations.
	If you were a Catholic kid growing up, they would say, okay, what's your vocation going to be?
	Are you going to Join a religious order or are you going to be married?
	Those are the two big vocations.
	They're left out that you can be single and have a vocation, too.
	And I think that's why we have way too many gay priests.
	They say, well, I ain't going to get married.
	I guess I'll become a priest.
	And we have a crisis in the Catholic Church right now.
	I think there's so much confusion with the Protestant Revolt and everybody trying to interpret the Bible and with our own internal problems in the Catholic Church.
	It's real easy to be, you know, I think it's easier to be an atheist and say, hey, all you guys are crazy over there.
	And that's kind of what I thought.
	Well, no, see, there's no such thing as being an atheist, and we'll get into that in a second.
	So with regards to Catholicism, there was no infant baptism until the 4th century.
	Until 1818...
	To get married to a non-Catholic invalidated the marriage.
	It was not recognized as marriage under God's law.
	The Pope's infallibility didn't come along until 1870, 1,870 years after the birth of Christ.
	And so there certainly have been some pretty foundational changes to what is considered good, right and wrong in Catholicism.
	Okay, so first of all, infant baptism...
	It was from the very minute.
	I mean, there was whole families that were brought into the church during the early days, you know, during the apostolic age.
	Babies and everybody got baptized all together.
	The papal infallibility, you're right, it wasn't defined, it didn't become dogma until 1870, but that had always been like the pious tradition.
	And that's kind of the way a lot of these dogmas crop up, is they've been there for a long time, The whole church has believed it.
	They don't like writing doctrines.
	You know, they don't like, you know, going through all the motions to say this is a doctrine.
	But, you know, if a laity demands it and there's a circumstance, maybe a heresy pops up, maybe some bishop starts going awry and spreading the heresy.
	And it's usually bishops and priests and spirit heresy.
	It's usually not from the outside.
	You know, then they'll have a council, they'll do a study, they'll figure it out, if the Pope will get all kinds of advice.
	You know, it might take them 100 years to come up with, you know, maybe five votes later before they finally settle something.
	And that's why the infallibility doctrine waited until 1870.
	They had always believed that.
	They just hadn't formalized it as doctrine.
	What was the other one you were talking about, marriage?
	You know, I don't know about marriage, John, as far as if you were married outside the Catholic Church.
	I know when my brother got married to a Catholic girl, he had to sign a piece of paper saying that the kids would be raised Catholic.
	Right.
	Yeah, to me that's an internal, you know, housekeeping matter.
	One thing that you can't do still in the Catholic Church is you can't be married in a Protestant Church, get divorced, marry a Catholic girl, and then receive Communion.
	Unless that prior sacrament of marriage has been somehow found to be invalid in the first place, you can't get married twice, you know, if you're a widower.
	Now what about the history of Catholicism and slavery?
	Well, you know, they were a guinnet.
	One of the first popes was an ex-slave.
	I think it was like the third or fourth pope.
	Wait, are you saying that the Church did not have a history of condoning slavery, ever?
	No, when the African slave trade started, it started like in the summer of 18, no, maybe it was 1430 or something like that.
	That very year, the pope issued an encyclical, it wasn't an encyclical, but it was a A memo, let's say, and he said, look, if you're involved in the slavery, you are automatically excommunicated.
	There is no pro-slavery.
	Now, you also have to say there's a difference between the Catholic Church and Catholics.
	I think probably the biggest problem we have in the Church is those Catholics.
	You know, the day I got baptized, I'm still the same jerk I ever was.
	You know, I'm working on it, but, you know, I haven't made much progress in that category.
	You know, when you talk about things like The Inquisition.
	What's going on there?
	Well, that was the civil authorities trying to enforce canon law.
	In fact, it was the lady of Spain that said, hey, you've got to send us some people in here.
	We want our own courts here because the politicians at the time were using canon law to execute their enemies and so forth.
	The Catholic Church didn't burn people at the stake.
	It was the civil authorities.
	And I think you and I both agree that government is too big and too powerful most all the time.
	Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, certainly the ideology or the doctrine versus those who enact the doctrine are widely divergent, to put it mildly, for a lot of...
	Amen, brother.
	Yeah, I certainly would never criticize any movement for the behavior of any of its individual adherents.
	That wouldn't make any sense.
	That's like saying if somebody is really bad at science, that invalidates science.
	So I get that.
	Cool.
	Yeah, so, you know, I guess my whole beef with you, it's not really even a beef, is I just, you know, I really respect your views.
	I really love those videos you do where you throw up the stats and the graphs and everything, and it's like, I'm going, this guy is right on.
	It's just this whole atheism versus Catholicism thing that I just, why is this guy an atheist?
	He'd make a great Catholic.
	Let's just, before, sorry, just before we move on, I'm just gonna, this is from Wiki.
	In 1965, the Second Vatican Council declared that forced slavery was an infamy that dishonored the Creator and was a poison in society.
	Now, of course, throughout almost all of human history, slavery was practiced and accepted by cultures and religions all over the world.
	Certain passages in the Old Testament seem to sanction forms of slavery.
	The New Testament taught slaves to obey their masters, yet also condemned the practice of slave trading.
	Thomas Aquinas, of course, a famous Catholic theologian, argued the case for slavery subject to certain restrictions.
	So the Christian West did succeed in almost entirely enforcing that a free Christian could not be enslaved, captive in war, and so on.
	And that probably had a lot to do with Muslim raids across Europe.
	And the Middle Ages witnessed the emergence of orders of monks.
	Who were founded for the purpose of ransoming Christian slaves.
	Very good.
	Very nice.
	And although some Catholic clergy, religious orders, and popes owned slaves, and the naval galleys of the papal states were used to capture Muslim galley slaves, Roman Catholic teaching began to turn more strongly against unjust forms of slavery in general, beginning in 1435, prohibiting the enslavement of the recently baptized, culminating in the pronouncements by Pope Paul III in 1535.
	37.
	When the age of discovery greatly increased the number of slaves owned by Christians, the response of the church under strong political pressures was confused and ineffective in preventing.
	the establishment of slave societies in the colonies of catholic countries papal bulls such as dumb diversus romanus pontifex and their derivative sanctioned slavery and were used to justify enslavement of natives and the appropriation of their lands during this era and so um you know like all evolving moral standards there was you know sometimes a bit of a do-si-do like steps forward step, backward step, sideways. - Well, you might be right on that.
	You know, the way I've been...
	When the Pope speaks on faith and morals, he's speaking infallibly.
	A papal bull, I don't think, is infallible.
	The Catholics are saying, hey, this is screwed up, and that they, you know, they probably gained a deeper understanding of the moral theology is kind of the way I would put it, where you'd say they did a do-si-do or they flipped around on a thing.
	You know, that was very informative what you read there.
	And by the way, I don't think the Vatican Council actually came up with any doctrines They came up with a bunch of documents, kind of like what you're reading from there.
	The whole point of the Vatican Council, the Vatican II Council, the Vatican I was the one that defined the infallibility doctrine, but the Vatican II was all about, how are we going to take this religion that's been around for 2,000 years and communicate it to the people?
	Because it was still in Latin.
	You know, if you didn't know Latin, the mass was the most boring thing you'd ever want to go to.
	And I think also that happened during the sexual revolution as well.
	And I think a lot of dissidents in the Church said, you know what, we're going to take this ball and run with it.
	And I think that's where a lot of problems we're having today is not so much Vatican II, but the fact that people use Vatican II to corrupt a lot of what the lay Catholics know.
	The actual Catholic faith is the same.
	You know, they changed a few, you know, they put it in the vernacular.
	The Mass in the vernacular.
	They turned the altar around where the priest now faces the congregation as opposed to leading the congregation with his back.
	But they didn't change any doctrines as far as I know.
	It could be considered a bit of a circular argument to say that which does not change is doctrine, and that which does change is not doctrine, because then if doctrine changes, it automatically moves into the other category.
	So let me just, so you have questions, and I'm going to take a little bit of time to answer the questions.
	I'm going to take my earpiece out just for the moment in case, just so I can sort of finish my frame of thought.
	So to reread your question and to attempt to take a swing at answering it.
	Okay.
	You said, I've come to realize that the Catholic worldview makes a lot more sense than the atheist worldview.
	Now, I agree with you in a lot of ways.
	And, you know, I've certainly given you some tough questions, and I appreciate you fielding them, Mark.
	And I can guarantee you that I would have a lot more in common with you than I would with a lot of atheists.
	Atheists, in general, in my experience, tend more towards nihilism than they do towards ethics, towards virtue.
	There is some of the determinism of certain atheists and the intense focus on the merely secular rather than the universal, the moral, the all-encompassing, I find to be a little bit creepy.
	Atheists tend to gravitate towards short-term solutions that satisfy emotional needs, which is why they tend to be so socialist and to focus so much on the power of the violence the power of violence that the state has to solve particular problems and they tend to be kind of environmentally deterministic which they have in common with communism.
	Of course communism says that we are sort of formless beings who are poured into economic relationships and that determines our personality and if we change those economic relationships that changes our personality, our capacity for virtue changes, our capacity for just about our whole identity changes.
	So this idea that human beings are fluid and there's environmental determinism is very foundational to a lot of atheism and is morally revolting to me at just about every conceivable level which is not to say of course that the environment doesn't affect you but it's anti-scientific because it is very well known in research circles that personality is fixed, largely genetically.
	Intelligence is hereditable genetically between 50 to 80 percent.
	I lean towards the high end for a variety of reasons, but the degree to which the human personality, the human self, what you would call the soul, is unbudgeable is pretty significant.
	And yet a lot of the atheists tend to go on the Well, you know, the personality of the worker is determined by the fact that he does not have control over the means of production.
	Whereas the virtue or the character of the capitalist is formed by the fact that he has control over the means of production.
	And so if we take the factory and we divide it up like pizza slices and hand it out to the workers so that workers control the means of production, everything's going to change.
	They view human beings as infinitely flexible.
	Depending on the environment, which is kind of ironic given that Marxists tend to be about the most inflexible human beings around who are impervious to all forms of evidence about the endless disasters of Marxism.
	So I have a lot more in common in terms of free will, moral responsibility, universal moral values, and a value for virtue and a dedication for virtue that surmounts any immediate personal comfort.
	And, you know, the disasters of this going on in Europe where people are utterly unable and unwilling to assert the value of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian history of the entire continent for fear of being called racist.
	Well, frankly, Jesus faced a lot worse than being called racist in order to establish the very moral foundation that people are now afraid to have.
	You know, being nailed to a cross is a little bit worse than having mean, stupid people say mean, stupid things about you.
	And I noticed this in particular when I put out a video in December, an urgent Christmas message from Stefan Molyneux, where I talked about the need to bring questions of virtue up with family members and friends during the holiday season.
	And people wrote back and said, oh, that's such a douchebag move, man.
	I can't believe you're that guy who's going to bring up the government over Christmas dinner.
	And it's like...
	It's called Christ-mus dinner, which means that you're supposed to be celebrating the birth of Jesus.
	Now, Jesus was an extraordinarily talented, bearded and ensandled and long-flowing, hair-enabled shite disturber who brought a moral revolution through his...
	Consistent approach to various moral questions.
	And he created such a transition in society that we still feel the reverberations many, many centuries after he was around.
	He said, do not think that I have come to bring peace.
	I have come to bring a sword.
	I have come to set father against son.
	I have come to set brother against brother.
	He was the ultimate shite disturber.
	And yet people are saying, well, I don't want to bring up government power over broccoli because it's uncomfortable.
	It's like, then you have no understanding what the word Christmas actually means.
	So we would have a huge amount in common, and I'm sure that I would have a lot more in common in many ways with you than I would with your friends.
	Average atheist.
	And I would certainly rather live among Christians than I would under a socialist atheist, because I can choose to not participate in the Christian faith, but the atheist socialists will force me to obey government edicts at the point of a gun, and I cannot escape that.
	You know, people are all upset because in Islam the penalty for apostasy is death.
	Well, welcome to statism, folks!
	The penalty for not obeying the law is death, and the only reason we obey the law is we don't want To die.
	And so the idea that disobeying the moral commandments will get you killed, and that's a horrible thing in Islam, it certainly is.
	And that is the foundation of statism, and I have yet to meet that many Christian socialists, and certainly Christian communists seem to be few and far between, and are probably just beating themselves up in a corner somewhere, not bothering anybody else.
	That having been said, I don't know that there's such a thing as an atheist worldview.
	Certainly, To say that the material, the rational, the empirical is our standard for determining truth from falsehood, rational plus empirical, yeah, that's an atheist worldview, but you would share that worldview to a large degree.
	You say, watching your videos, I see that you're an atheist and you also refer to yourself as a moral philosopher.
	I have also heard you use terms like virtue and evil, which I normally associate with theology.
	Well, that's alright.
	I mean, moving these terms from theology to philosophy is great, in the same way that moving questions like, where did life come from, from theology, which is the illusion of an answer, to biology, which gives you an actual answer, is the point.
	I do not view terms like good and evil as theological terms.
	The Bible talks about the world, but we don't want to say in science, well, we can't talk about the earth or the world because it was used originally in the Bible.
	You simply reclaim the I've also heard you be somewhat snarky and dismissive of the views of believers.
	And that is actually snarky and dismissive.
	I mean, I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of projection, but you're being snarky and dismissive.
	Look, Mark, I either make true arguments or false arguments.
	My arguments are either valid or they're invalid.
	They're logical or they're not.
	They accord with empirical evidence or they don't.
	But saying I'm snarky and dismissive and so on means that you're simply not bothering to evaluate the arguments that I'm putting forward, but instead are just applying Negative labels to something that you don't like.
	And that is kind of a leftist phenomenon, right?
	Which is, I don't like this information, so I'm going to call the person who puts forward this information or this argument, you know, a racist, a racist.
	A sexist, a misogynist, somebody who hates the poor, you know, somebody who's being paid off by the Koch brothers and so on.
	And so you don't want to, if you want to be taken seriously in conversations by intelligent people, you don't want to just be applying negative labels to things that you don't like.
	He said, what homework have you done to explore the Catholic worldview?
	Well, I think, as we can say from today, a little bit.
	Why do you feel that the atheist worldview is superior?
	Well, you see, this is an emotional argument to do with a hierarchy.
	Philosophy is not a hierarchy In that way.
	So if I said 2 and 2 make 4 and you said 2 and 2 make 5, I don't think you'd say, well, why do you feel that 2 and 2 make 4 is superior to 2 and 2 make 5?
	Well, it's not superior.
	That's a gradation, right?
	It's not closer.
	It's true.
	Whereas 2 and 2 make 5 is false.
	And so, superior, what it does is it portrays or projects this, you know, I'm some lofty, you know, as the old saying goes about French waiters, that they deal with you as if they're peeing on you from a great height.
	This sort of, I'm lofty, I'm up here, I'm feeling superior, I'm feeling, I'm being snarky and dismissive.
	It portrays me in a negative emotional light.
	Which is exceedingly manipulative and, of course, has nothing to do with addressing the truth or falsehood of the arguments that I put forward.
	So why do you feel the atheist worldview is superior?
	And first of all, my feelings don't matter.
	Emotions, as Ayn Rand said, are not tools of cognition.
	So when you portray my arguments as feelings and superiority, what you're steadfastly doing is And what you're steadfastly and wholly committed to, Mark, is to avoiding any rational analysis of my arguments.
	You are putting forward emotionally charged language.
	You are painting me in a negative light in order to avoid Actually dealing with my arguments, and either you haven't understood the arguments, in which case you shouldn't be entering into the arena of debate, or you have understood the arguments and you can't rebut them, in which case you're kind of being manipulative rather than honest.
	Or you've heard the arguments and you can rebut them, in which case you are doing me a great unkindness by not addressing the arguments in what it is that you say.
	Now your last question, on what basis do you derive your moral code?
	Well, on what basis do you derive your moral code?
	Your moral code is derived from things written down that you believe in without reason and evidence.
	So you are submitting to authority, and there may be, of course, a very strong emotional drive in you to do that.
	But as we pointed out, slavery was justified to some degree, and then it wasn't.
	And the death penalty was bad, and it was good, and then it's bad.
	And you can't marry outside the faith, and then you can marry outside.
	You can't baptize infants, and then you...
	So, you know, this idea that when you go to philosophy, somehow you become a relativist.
	I can certainly understand why people have that perspective and have that viewpoint.
	However, I don't think it's fair.
	When an atheist or a skeptic or somebody philosophically inclined like myself looks at religion, I see the ultimate relativism, which is obedience to fallible human authority and its ever-changing commandments.
	That, to me, is a relativism that would be terrifying to me.
	So with atheists, a lot of them want to submit to the power of the state.
	And the state has violence and opinions and it's hysterically pulled back and forward by the craziness of the mob and the craziness and verbal abuse of the mainstream media and people's prejudices and their greed and their fears and their hatreds.
	Let's go to war!
	Oh, war is terrible!
	Let's oppress women.
	Oh, let's elevate women beyond all reason.
	It's just insane.
	Let's put down blacks.
	Oh, let's now elevate blacks to complete irresponsibility.
	There's no middle ground when it comes to the mob, absent philosophy and absent self-knowledge in particular.
	So where atheists wish to submit to human authorities which have the power of violence, a lot of religious people seem to want to submit themselves to the authority of people who have Access to the divine now both of these institutions for me Require that human beings submit themselves to arbitrary and I would argue subjectivist and relativistic human authority whether in the form of the state or in the form of the Pope or whatever Which is why I am anti-state and
	anti-theology and of course given that most modern atheists are Follow the religion of the state.
	I call them state theists I actually and given that the power of the state is far greater and To an atheist or to anyone than the power of religion outside of a theocracy.
	Again, you and I, I think, are much closer to brothers fighting the nihilism and power worship, secular power worship of atheists.
	But I just wanted to give you some feedback on how I experienced your particular questions.
	Having said that, let me re-ear piece and I will...
	I'll give you, of course, the last word if you wanted to throw a couple of extra comments in before we move on to the next caller, and I really appreciate your call in, by the way.
	Okay, sure.
	Yeah, I guess, well, that whole snarky comment, I was watching your video on what I hate about white guilt, which was awesome, but you kind of came up with a line of, like, I have to pay this priest to resolve my original sins for the rest of my life, and that's That was kind of what I zeroed in on.
	I probably should have just stated that in some ranks.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Is it not true that it is the priest who can absolve you of original sin?
	No, it's not.
	Baptism resolves you of original sin.
	What original sin is, is divorcing God, walking away from God.
	But who performs the baptism?
	Oh, anybody can perform a baptism.
	You just do the right form.
	I baptize you in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
	My baptism was done in the Methodist Church when I was a baby.
	And so I got baptized again in the Catholic Church not knowing that.
	But once you have one baptism, that adopts you back into the family.
	That washes away original sin.
	Now, when you go to the priest for confession, you're...
	You're being absolved of, you know, sins that you've committed since the last time you're in, you know, like if you break any of the Ten Commandments, then you go to the priest to say that.
	And you don't have to pay these guys.
	I go to a church, and boy, I tell you, I put 20 bucks in the collection plate, and I'm probably the guy that puts the most in.
	But, you know, it's all voluntary, which I know is a big deal with you.
	But I do submit myself not to man, not to the Pope.
	I mean, I submit myself I submit myself to God, and I trust the Pope is, you know, the magisterial teaching of a church in that faith and law.
	I read the catechism, I say, okay, there is our moral code right there, and it totally makes sense to me, and then I do submit myself to saying, hey, can I live up to this?
	It's not easy.
	When you become a Catholic at age 49, you've got a lot of bad habits built up that are really hard to break, and half of them are mortal sins.
	So, you know, that's kind of where I'm at on that.
	But, you know, I really love talking to you.
	I love your videos, by the way.
	And I think you're right.
	I think we're probably pretty close to, as far as our own moral codes, to get them from two different places.
	But I think that they're not that far apart.
	Have you ever read the Catechism, as far as the morals in there?
	No.
	You ought to.
	Not that I'm trying to convert you or anything, but it'd be worth your while just to take a look at it.
	And see if it makes sense to you.
	Look, there's a lot, of course, that I would agree with.
	I wouldn't agree with the methodology of the Ten Commandments, but there certainly are some of the Ten Commandments that I would agree with.
	Thou shalt not murder is actually the proper thing, that thou shalt not kill, that thou shalt not murder, which means self-defense is permitted.
	Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear a false witness.
	And also, not coveting your neighbor's donkey.
	I hate to say ass, because it just sounds like you're telescoping the Kardashian rumps or whatever.
	But don't covet.
	Don't be jealous.
	Don't be envious of other people around you who have more, which is one of the foundational sins of atheism and its conjunction with communism and socialism is this idea of envying those who have more material possessions than yourselves.
	The focus on virtue as being something larger than the life of an individual I think is extremely powerful.
	And so I do think that we would have a lot in common as far as that goes.
	And I really do appreciate the call and the conversation.
	Well, great.
	Well, thanks a lot, man.
	It was great talking to you.
	Appreciate it.
	Okay.
	All right.
	Next one.
	All right.
	Well, up next is Miles.
	Miles wrote in and said, Hi, Steph.
	I've really enjoyed your Gene Wars presentations, but still have questions as to how certain groups may fall into R or K selection.
	Western feminists, for example, are notorious for having few to no children, as well as being highly formally educated relative to the rest of the world.
	Both K-selected traits.
	Yet I would suspect they would fall into an R selection, along with the rest of leftists.
	A pattern I have noticed is upper-class people who are far removed from nature or any type of danger often lean anti-gun and fail to see the state as representative of any form of danger, an R trait, if they come from a high-resource background, a K trait.
	Can you help me clarify this?
	That's from Miles.
	I imagine I can try.
	That's all I can promise.
	So, I mean, this is very cutting-edge stuff, and...
	Of course, for most, you can do a search for anonymous conservative people and find the book and go through the book.
	It's certainly superior to my presentation, but I can certainly give you a shot.
	So thanks for taking the time tonight, Miles.
	Thank you, Stefan.
	And before I start, I'll just let you know how great it is talking to you again.
	I've spoken to you before several years back, and I'm You've made great leaps and strides in the fight to create a better world through liberty in the time since we've spoken, so I just want to congratulate you on that and love talking with you again.
	Thank you very much.
	Thank you very much.
	Okay, so I'm going to do a quick run-through about my thoughts about this, which I've sort of been mulling over today, and then I'll Give it very briefly, and then you can tell me where you think things could be expanded.
	How does that sound?
	Sounds great.
	All right.
	Okay, so Western feminists.
	Now, we're talking about the more extreme forms of feminism, you know, usual caveats and so on.
	But famous for having few to no children.
	Now, few to no children is not specific to R versus K when you have birth control.
	The question is not...
	Whether you have children or not, that's not the determination about whether you're pursuing an R versus K strategy.
	And sorry for those who don't know what the hell we're talking about.
	Check out Gene Wars, G-E-N-E, Wars presentation.
	So go to Anonymous Conservatives' blog and get his book.
	But it's the sex drive and all that kind of stuff that really counts.
	And that's where we really want to focus on our sort of analysis of it.
	So when you're looking at sort of biological drivers, you don't want to look at physical markers that are occurring at the moment because of course biology has had no time to adapt to things like the welfare state.
	It's had no time to adapt to things like birth control.
	And so the presence or absence of children at the moment is not the key determinant to the R versus K strategy.
	What you could do is you could look at the R versus K strategy and you could say, what are the number of sexual partners?
	What is the length of the sexual or romantic relationships?
	And that, I think, would be a much closer way of looking at R versus K, rather than the presence or absence of children, which of course, with birth control, can be adjusted outside of the R-K paradigm.
	Does that make sense?
	It does.
	Okay.
	So, upper-class people who are removed from nature are any type of danger.
	We're often anti-gun.
	So, have you noticed that, the wealthier people?
	Now, of course, the wealthier people can afford to outsource their protection, right?
	And that's a sort of key aspect to remember.
	If you have a gated community, if you have a security guard, I think it's fairly safe for Obama to be anti-gun.
	Gun ownership because he has the Secret Service.
	Now, I'd be impressed with Obama's anti-gun stance if he got his Secret Service people to be anti-gun and to not have guns as well.
	But that's not about to happen, right?
	I mean, that's not how he rolls.
	And so when you can outsource Things like protection, then sure.
	But it's sort of like saying, well, I don't think driving is that important if you have a driver.
	I think Hillary Clinton famously said that she's not driven a car since the 90s, so it's been like 20 years since she's driven a car.
	And so she'd be like, yeah, I don't see what the big deal is about driving.
	It's like, well, that's because she's outsourced her driving to someone else.
	So, I think if you can outsource stuff, then having a gun yourself makes a whole lot less sense.
	You know, if you drive in your car to work where you've got security at work and then you drive home to some sort of gated community at home and all that, that makes, that to me makes, it would make a lot more sense that you'd care less about Personal gun ownership if you've outsourced your security and protection to other people.
	Does that make sense?
	Right.
	Would you mind if I stepped in?
	Yeah.
	So it sounds like that's exactly what I'm trying to get at.
	So it's like case selection creates this environment of such abundant resources that it's like a cycle.
	It creates an environment where it becomes very easily to become R-selected.
	So, if I grow up around constant wealth in a gated community, like you said, it's easy for me to be anti-gun, right?
	And it's easy if I have access to all the ways to prevent any negative side effects from promiscuous sexual behavior.
	It's easy for me to be promiscuous, right?
	I mean, it seems like K selection breeds our selection.
	And then the same from the other way around also.
	Right.
	And the degree of personal effort that you need to expend to accumulate resources, I think, is somewhat significant.
	So, if you grow up in a wealthy household, you're more likely to be R-selected.
	Unless, you know, someone like Donald Trump was quite a troublemaker according to his own accounting of his childhood.
	And so his parents put him in military school when he was, I think, in his early to mid-teens.
	But, you know, the kids of rich parents don't have to work hard for their resources, and so they're more likely.
	And this is sort of the cycle.
	This is where people say, ah, you know, there's rich people and they just hand their kids money.
	Well, handing kids money doesn't always help them become better people.
	It's sort of a well-known problem among people.
	Very wealthy parents, because you can't say to your kid, we can't afford it, which is sort of the way that case election pressures are injected into the poor kids' environments.
	So, yeah, and I think that you're right, but again, I just want to sort of avoid the sort of physical markers.
	There certainly are ways to provoke or to stimulate, is probably a better way of putting it, to stimulate people.
	Case election pressures, even on wealthy or children.
	You need to give them a mission that's bigger than themselves.
	You need to give them high ambitions and so on and help them to understand that their wealth creates, to some degree, a non-enforceable, mildly moral obligation to do good things in society as a result of some of their good fortune, if that makes sense.
	So, just a personal anecdote, I have...
	A friend of mine, a group of friends, we're all very conservative and doesn't share any of our background as far as that goes or political thought process on economics or anything.
	I was actually talking at a party about why guns are important.
	She kind of overheard a conversation I was having with another buddy and I basically said, he asked like, you know, why are guns important basically?
	And I said, well, in my opinion, you know, the reason is to, I don't know, possibly To protect the population from an ever-growing tyrannical government.
	And she heard that and scoffed at me.
	Laugh.
	You can't be serious.
	She just absolutely could not fathom that the state could be a danger in any way whatsoever.
	Just completely out of the realm of anything realistic.
	It just took me back.
	This is a person coming from a good background.
	Western...
	Wealth, you name it, highly educated.
	Everything about this person's situation would indicate to me case selection, but then an extreme inability to identify any type of So I ran it by a friend of mine who's pretty smart with this stuff, and he suggested maybe it was a situation where she's actually K-selected, but for whatever reason is putting on a front of our selection.
	Maybe it's social signaling, or she's monogamous, she's...
	Excuse me, low time preference.
	But at the same time, yeah, I just can't figure it out.
	So, I mean, this comes to an interesting question with regards to gender differences in RK selection.
	And the first thing that I would urge people to understand is that for good-looking men to offer women resources...
	It's like a willing Kardashian shaking her rump at you.
	It is virtually irresistible.
	They've done these studies where women go up to men in bars, like really hot women go up to men in bars, and basically offer them casual sex.
	And, you know, the majority of men, at least those unattached, will be like, yeah, let's go for it.
	They try the reverse, and women just don't go for it, right?
	And so this is one of the fundamental problems...
	With statism and gender, is that the moment that women get the vote, and even prior to that, but in particular when women get the vote, governments start handing out massive amounts of free socialist goodies to the women, and the women can't resist it.
	Now, this makes me sound like I'm taking agency away from women, and yeah, okay, theoretically women can resist it in the same way that, let's say that you're a young single guy, maybe you are a young single guy, Now, everyone has a particular thing, like a freak, a fetish.
	A fetish is the wrong word, but, you know, you're a tit man, you're a leg man, you're, you know, whatever it is, right?
	Even particular ethnicity or whatever.
	Something is going to get your mojo running in high fever.
	And if a woman approaches you who manifests whatever it is that you find the sexiest and offers you a Sex or relationship, you know, whatever.
	Like, let's hang out for the weekend and bang our brains loose.
	You know, yes, if you're Ben Shapiro, you'll say no.
	Right?
	I mean, some...
	But most men won't, and biologically, we can sort of understand why that is the case.
	You know, sperm versus egg numbers and so on.
	And so, men, yeah, you have free will when it comes to that kind of stuff, and you can say no, and...
	I've certainly done it, gritted my teeth and said no.
	But generally, it's fairly irresistible.
	And that irresistibility of it is foundational to the women's relationship with the state.
	And that, I think, is really, really important for people to understand.
	A woman can virtually not resist...
	A reasonably decent looking man offering her free resources.
	Like she just, she can't do it.
	She can't resist it.
	Now, one of the reasons why is that at least men are told, you're hyper-sexualized pigs who need to learn how to stop your piggishness, so to speak.
	So men are sort of told, you know, your sexual drives, your sexual desires are bad things and so on.
	But women aren't told that.
	Women aren't told, look, your desire for free goodies from the government is destroying society.
	You know, they're told, women are told, that it's all right and good and proper and healthy and enabled and participative and democracy and blah blah blah.
	They're not told that your desire for free stuff destroys society in the same way that men's desire for...
	Consequence-free sex destroys society.
	And so women aren't given this restraint.
	And women aren't instructed.
	You know, men are sort of taught that, you know, the hot girls, like I'm thinking back to the Kevin Smiths, I think his name is the director, who came up with the movie Clerks.
	And I'm not going to even bother saying that as spoilers for movies years and years old.
	But in Clerks, there's this, the hot girl And there's the nice girl.
	And, you know, the nice girl is the one he should be with, but the hot girl is the one that he's drawn towards, right?
	And I'm thinking of the movie Shallow Hell with Jack Black as well.
	Like, there's the nice girl, and then there's the hot girl.
	And it used to be in particular the case that men were trained to bypass the hot girl and go for the nice girl.
	And you think of the movie Grease, right?
	Anyway, so...
	But the hot girl is R and the nice girl is K. You know, I mean, if you want to raise a family, Phyllis Schlafly is a pretty great person, I'm sure, to do it with in many ways.
	And the kandashians, apparently, not so much.
	So men are sort of taught, and women used to be taught, like, stay away from the rake and go for the good guy.
	And so women aren't taught their susceptibility to this.
	This is like a biological genetic susceptibility that when a good-looking guy or reasonably good-looking guy, a high-status guy is probably a better way of putting it, when a high-status guy comes along and offers them free stuff that, you know, this is like some hot woman shaking her boobs in a guy's face.
	And so when it comes to Experiencing danger from the state, the idea that women will be afraid of the state is kind of incomprehensible because they want what the state has to offer.
	They want, and they're incredibly susceptible to the free stuff offered by the state.
	I've actually done a whole show on this and there are people who've done this and said, okay, what percentage of government growth Accelerated or can be explained by the rise in women's suffrage.
	In women getting the vote, what happened to the size and power of government?
	Well, it went through the roof.
	Because women are biologically programmed to respond positively to high status men offering them free stuff.
	It is as close to irresistible as you could possibly imagine for that to occur.
	And because of that, Basic fact, it is really, really tough for women to look at the state and say, oh yeah, that's really dangerous.
	That's really bad.
	Now, in the past, of course, women used to be more skeptical of state power because the state could send their husband to war and the state could raise taxes on their husband and therefore they were more skeptical of state power in the past.
	Than they are now.
	But, of course, now since women have to a large degree bypassed the husband for the sake of the state, it's completely changed.
	The reality has really changed.
	Now, why should women be afraid of the state anymore?
	The state is giving them some just lovely and delightful stuff.
	And I was doing a little bit of research for talking to Peter today.
	Peter Schiff, we do a show today.
	So the top two issues among women, the top three issues among women, this is just out of tracking social media, the top three issues for women during Obama's 2016 State of the Union address, top three issues among women.
	Number one, food stamps.
	Number two, education.
	Number three, Wall Street.
	So food stamps, of course, give me free food.
	Education.
	Again, I don't know what that means, but it probably has something to do with forgiving student loans or free education or whatever it is.
	And number three, Wall Street.
	Well, of course, Wall Street is what Bernie Sanders is promising to pillage, right?
	So, food stamps, free food stamps, free education, and free money from Wall Street people.
	Those are top issues among women.
	Top issues among men.
	Number one, Islam and Muslims.
	Number two, ISIS. Number three, terrorism, right?
	Nothing about food stamps, nothing about education, and nothing about pillaging the fat cats on Wall Street.
	And, um, so these kinds of things are, um, it's the same planet, different worlds.
	And so when you say, well, we need, you see, we need the state.
	We need guns to protect us from the state.
	I mean, basically, a lot of women are going to experience that as like, what, are you going to shoot my sugar daddy?
	Like, what, are you crazy?
	I mean, why would you shoot my boyfriend?
	Why would you shoot the guy who's given me free stuff, which I'm sort of genetically programmed to respond to in a hugely positive manner?
	Does that make any sense, what I'm saying?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	And I'm just thinking...
	Well, I took your advice and I'm bringing up sensitive conversations at You know, very important meals during the holidays.
	And I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't do that.
	You know, maybe wait till after dinner when it's just me and the boys around.
	And maybe we can talk about it then.
	Because it sounds like bringing up, you know, the issue that the state is in imminent danger is not going to get through the heads of any of the women in my vicinity anytime soon.
	No, no, no.
	Hang on, hang on.
	Hang on.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	The women will become skeptical of state power to the degree that they understand that it threatens their men more than it threatens them.
	Right?
	So, I mean...
	If you say to women, look, I mean, you may not get this, but as a man, I'm the one who's going to be drafted.
	I'm the one, you know, this kind of stuff.
	I'm the one who's going to statistically get taxed more than women.
	And so it is, I think, out of their affectionate for...
	It's out of their affection for men that I think women could...
	Because women used to be more skeptical of the state when they...
	Relied upon men to bring home the bacon, so to speak.
	They were more skeptical of the state.
	So I don't think it's impossible, but it does rely upon women really caring about what men think and feel.
	Now, if you think that's impossible, well, that may be a whole other conversation, but I don't think it's impossible.
	They just have to get that, you know, it matters to It matters to men more because men would traditionally have been the ones doing the fighting, right?
	You don't sound like that could work at all where you're coming from.
	I'm just trying to think what's the best strategy for getting through to people.
	A friend of mine, he won't even talk about this stuff with his girlfriend because she's so set on the state being good, like a sugar daddy, like you just said.
	For him, it's a lose situation because it'll just end up in a fight.
	He's like, we don't talk about that.
	You know, when we want to talk philosophy, it's just me and him and another dude.
	That's not even on the table for their relationship.
	Well, wait, but is it because his girlfriend, I know we're talking right, we're all third, fourth party, but is it that his girlfriend likes what the government has to offer her?
	Of course, yeah.
	Now, is it fair to say that she will be a net beneficiary of state power, right?
	Of course.
	Okay, so that's an important place to start, right?
	Which is to say, well, yeah, I can understand why you would be a fan of the state because you're going to profit from the state, right?
	But let's not pretend that it's anything to do with anything else, right?
	I mean, you're going to profit from the state.
	And so you like the state.
	Yeah, I get it.
	People like stuff that gives them money.
	Stephan, I would love to say that, but I know that that's hostility toward...
	Those are fighting words, of course.
	You know, right?
	You know, if I... No, I don't.
	Sorry, I don't know because I have conversations like that with people, so I don't know that it's fighting words.
	What do you mean?
	I know exactly.
	Like I've had the inclination to say that before, but that's like a, of course the person I'm saying that to will take that as a direct attack on their purse.
	Like that, you know, they'll find that offense. - Was she a cry bully?
	Would she cry or would she get angry or what?
	I mean, of course, what are you saying that I'm not independent?
	I'm a strong, independent woman.
	Screw off with that.
	It'd be all kinds of defenses going up.
	But wouldn't a strong, independent woman reject money taken from other people by force and delivered through the state?
	Well, people that are statists don't think of themselves like that, right?
	Right.
	They don't see the state for what it is as basically a crutch to take a device of theft to take from people who work for what they have and virtuous people and give to people who would rather not keep a family intact stuff that takes effort.
	Right.
	Yeah, look, I mean, I think one of the reasons that women...
	Again, this is generalization, not all women, but, you know, I'm going to just use the term of convenience for the moment.
	But one of the reasons why women like...
	Voting is that you don't actually have to do a lot of nice stuff for a politician, right?
	You just got to go vote for the guy and he'll give you stuff.
	Now, if you want a man to give you stuff, well, you know, you got to be nice.
	You got to make him a sandwich.
	You got to rub his feet.
	You got to listen to his problems.
	It's a lot of work to get stuff out of guys, but politicians will just give you stuff for free, right?
	I mean, there was a comment that I saw on the video I did about...
	The New Year's Eve sex attacks that occurred throughout Europe, it appears now.
	Hundreds and hundreds of women groped, sexually assaulted, raped and so on, right?
	And the guys, like, I think it was a woman who was saying, like, where were the German men?
	Why aren't they taking on these Muslims?
	Why aren't they fighting them?
	Why aren't they pushing back?
	Why aren't they doing all these things that men are supposed to do to protect women?
	And that's a fair question.
	And do you know what one of the guys said?
	It was brilliant.
	He said...
	Okay.
	And what privileges do men, what extra privileges do men get in society for taking on this dangerous role?
	You get it, right?
	Yeah.
	Tell me what you get.
	I think that's just an amazing comment.
	Well, obviously, they've replaced the role that men used to have with the state.
	So, like you just basically just said, when the state's the father and husband, it's a one-way relationship.
	The state gives you something and you don't return anything.
	Where when you actually have a real husband and a real father of your child, it's a give-and-take relationship.
	You're 50% of the equation there and you have to work to make it work.
	And so that man, whoever said that, obviously, I don't think I'd be venturing too far to say he's had a failed relationship or two with a progressive German woman.
	It could be, yeah, it could be, but it's a very, very foundational question.
	I just stood there open-mouthed looking at the computer screen, which was like, that's a very powerful question.
	Okay, so men have the additional role of putting their lives at risk to try and protect, I would imagine, women they don't even know, From assault by these rape-fugees, as they're called, right?
	The rape-fugees.
	So men have this, like we have everything else, and on top of that, we also have this challenge, right?
	Which is now we've got to go and beat up or push back or fight a bunch of these Muslim migrants, right?
	And it's okay, well, so...
	What am I going to be paid in society to do that?
	What are my benefits?
	What is the value?
	Why would I take on that role of protecting women?
	Now, of course, there's the man up.
	Man up doesn't work anymore.
	You know, man up.
	Mike, you will occasionally get the man up emails, right?
	Be a man and admit this.
	Yeah, be a man and admit this.
	It's like, I can just reach between my legs.
	I don't need to admit anything.
	I got the equipment.
	I got the voice.
	I got the stubble.
	I got the chrome dome.
	I'm good to go as far as manliness goes.
	Man up is not going to work on these guys.
	In fact, man up will simply be experienced as yet another boring, yawning attempt to induce shame and guilt among men.
	And I'm telling you, Western men short-circuited on that shit years ago.
	I mean, there's still, of course, the manginas and all that, the beggars and so on.
	But I think for a lot of men, for a lot of men, they just burn down on that stuff.
	It just doesn't work anymore.
	Oh, yeah.
	Oh, yeah.
	You're just angry at women because you can't get laid.
	Or, you know, you just got a man up.
	And it's like, forget it.
	Like, I mean, people don't.
	I mean, people don't believe.
	I just think men, it doesn't work on men, which is good, because it means that people are actually going to have to start doing something else, right?
	So, you know, woe betide when those who are expected to provide for society and are being exploited are being exploited.
	Let's not kid ourselves.
	Men are being exploited in the modern world.
	Men are being exploited through workplace danger.
	Over 90% of workplace fatalities are men.
	Men are being exploited when it comes to the family court system in America in particular with crazy alimony and child support laws.
	Jeremy Renner.
	An actor with a fine head of hair.
	Not as good as Bowie's, but still pretty good.
	He was married, I think, for 11 months.
	And now he's just got to fork over huge amounts of money to his ex-wife.
	Men are being exploited in the tax system.
	Men are being exploited because men contribute vastly in excess to their proportion in society, the proportion of taxes.
	Men are being exploited in the educational system.
	Men are being exploited in the sort of...
	Rape tribunals or sexual assault tribunals occurring in universities.
	Bernie Sanders just got in trouble for that.
	I mean, because I guess he's kind of old school and he kind of likes the idea that the police and the law courts have something to do with proving or disproving rape.
	And so he said, well, I think it should be a criminal matter, not something handled by the universities.
	And of course, the feminist extremists went nuts on him.
	Well, how can you expect for a woman to sit in a class with the man who raped her?
	It's like, we don't know he raped her!
	That's the whole point of innocent until proven guilty, you medieval hags!
	We don't know if he raped her.
	Ah, man.
	So, the men are being exploited, and woe betide, woe betide the people being exploited...
	When the people being exploited suddenly turn around and say, okay, what's in this for me again?
	And so some women and some men are going to try and shame these European men.
	You've got to go protect your women.
	You've got to go risk your life for strange women.
	Okay?
	Maybe.
	But what's in it for me again?
	What's in it for me again?
	In general, there was a deference and a respect given to men.
	And by deference, I don't mean men are always right and so on, but there was a respect for masculinity in the past.
	It's a respect thing that men had a...
	You see, men have no authority, and men are just slagged endlessly in the world today.
	You sound young, too.
	Your generation in particular, aren't you all just basically rapists and losers and basement-dwelling video game addicts and porn addicts?
	What respect is given to men these days?
	Everything is our fault.
	Especially if you're a white man.
	Everything is your fault.
	If there's Haitians that are completely impoverished, it's the white man's fault.
	You can trace it back to something that happened hundreds of years ago.
	It's still your fault.
	Everything is your fault.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but let me give you a quick clue into this as well.
	This will blow your mind.
	This will blow everyone's mind.
	Because I don't think many people have thought of this yet.
	But of course, we were talking about these, the refugees, right?
	Like the refugees who, you know, some thousand or two thousand of whom attacked all these European women on New Year's Eve, right?
	And one thing that seems pretty true in the Middle East is that there's a lot of stay-at-home moms, right?
	I mean, a lot of times the women aren't allowed really to pursue careers or Get an education and so on.
	So, a lot of stay-at-home moms, right?
	Now, these young men who attacked these women, well, first of all, the feminists aren't talking about a genuine rape culture at all, right?
	But if they do talk about it, it's like, well, this is incredibly disrespectful towards women and, you know, this is masculinity and blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
	Is anyone or have you seen anyone out there in the world say, what kind of moms did these young men have that this is their view of women?
	What values were these young men taught by their stay-at-home moms that have them treat women this way?
	Have you heard anyone ask that question?
	Yeah, that's a good question, for sure.
	It won't.
	Because the role of women in the cycle of violence can never, ever, ever, ever, ever be acknowledged.
	Because that would be to give women genuine agency in the wheel of evil that crushes the world.
	Of course, women can't have agency.
	They must simultaneously be all-powerful and ultimate victims at the same time.
	I was watching a show the other day on TV, these two British feminists were talking about how, you know, well, you know, we're just focusing on this, they couldn't even say Muslim, focusing, I'll do the words for them, they're, oh, why don't we be focusing on this, this Muslim sexual attacks on, whereas, you know, when we know that sexual attacks in England are increasing, yes.
	And are they increasing because there are more Muslims and other third world cultures in England?
	So it's like, well, we don't want to talk about Muslim sexual assaults because we have more Muslim sexual assaults in England.
	It's like, what?
	So again, you just have to abstract this.
	There was this terrible attack recently in America.
	This woman was raped by four, I think it was four guys.
	Four men on the loose, raped by a man.
	And of course, the newspapers can't talk about them being black men, even though they're on the run, right?
	And that's the first characteristic you would notice about them.
	And they can't say that it was black men.
	So all they can do is show a picture.
	They can't show.
	Like, they can't say it.
	They can't say it.
	Because it has to be men in some abstract sector.
	All men are the same.
	And so it's just men in an abstract way who are committing these crimes.
	Not particular groups of men with particular cultures, particular ethnicities, particular origins, particular backgrounds.
	No!
	Can't be allowed.
	Can't be allowed to speak about any kind of reality to do with that.
	But yeah, I think that's an important question for men to ask.
	It's like, okay, you want us to step up and risk our lives?
	I'm not getting paid for it.
	You know, I'm not...
	I'm not even...
	Not only am I not getting respect, I'm getting endless condemnation from society.
	You know, I've had the balls beaten out through my ass repeatedly with all of this endless propaganda about how bad men are, and now you run and say, you need us to protect you?
	Are you fucking kidding me?
	I mean, that, I gotta imagine, is scrolling across in every European language among these beaten down men.
	Are you fucking kidding me?
	I thought I was like evil incarnate.
	And now you want me to protect you?
	And risk my life?
	Are you kidding me?
	Did you see the response?
	The German state's response to the attacks isn't to take a closer look at the Muslim immigrants.
	It's to get this place a curfew On men.
	Yeah, men as a whole.
	It was men that are the perpetrators.
	It's total insanity.
	Well, and of course the reality is going to be that the sensible, law-abiding men will obey that curfew, and the other men won't.
	And so basically the streets will be turned over to the savages.
	And by that I don't mean Muslims.
	I just mean men who aren't going to have any respect for these kinds of rules.
	And again, I'm not saying that rules are deserving or worthy of respect.
	I'm just talking about sort of mainstream narrative, you know?
	You know, there's an old meme floating around about gun control where you have some gang of tattooed thugs with guns all hanging off them saying, Yo, we heard that there was a gun turn-in.
	Where do I go to drop off my guns, dog?
	And it's like, yeah, right.
	Because everyone knows that's funny because it's not what's going to happen.
	And so, yeah, if you're going to throw white Western European men into the mix with these third world types, then okay.
	And then don't complain about the society you end up with.
	Yeah, so, I mean, at some point, the good European women are going to get that they are in the grip of insane political correctness.
	Political correctness is like the new Cold War.
	The war of civilization is the war between truth and political correctness.
	And at some point, the good European women are going to have to turn and scream at the extreme feminists and say, do you want us to get raped?
	Is that your goal?
	Is that your plan?
	Like, you want us to be as fucked up as you are?
	Do you want us to get raped?
	Because you're setting up environments and situations where our lives are going to be destroyed.
	You know that the attack upon European women is to some degree an attack upon sexual market value.
	To create women who are fearful, who might perceive themselves as damaged goods if they've been assaulted or Groped or raped by some of these migrants.
	It is an attack upon sexual market value.
	And this is why, you know, when it's on Alex Jones, it talked about sexual terrorism.
	It is.
	At some point, the women are going to realize that the fate of their lives and their loins is going to be worse than the fate of being called racist.
	Now, again, you sure wish people could listen to reason rather than wait until these extremities.
	But, you know, this is the way of the world.
	This is the way of people as they stand.
	That it is going to take a paroxysm.
	And, of course, the saying, well, you know, we want this multiculturalism.
	We want to keep jamming these opposing and incompatible cultures together because we really believe that You know, whites are racist.
	White whites are racist, right?
	So you keep jamming these anti-white cultures into white societies.
	And then, hey look, whites are getting angry.
	I knew it!
	Right?
	It's this giant trap.
	It's this giant self-fulfilling prophecy, you know, like the old...
	Cliche, which is more than a cliche, but the old thing where the guy says to his girlfriend, you know, I'm so paranoid you're going to leave me.
	I can't take it.
	I think I lie awake at night.
	I can't believe you're going to leave me.
	I'm too insecure.
	I can't believe it.
	You know, I'm not worthy of you.
	I don't deserve you.
	I'm not good enough for you.
	Like, you're going to leave me.
	And after a while, she's like, oh, God, I can't take this anymore.
	I'm leaving.
	I knew it!
	You know, I knew it!
	White people are racist.
	They're aggressive.
	They're hateful towards minorities.
	They don't like brown people.
	Let's keep jamming wave after wave after wave of leftovers.
	Middle Easterners, again, there's exceptions and all that, but this is just statistically the case, that all of the smart Middle Easterners left decades ago.
	They left the Middle East.
	They couldn't stand it.
	Who's left in the Middle East?
	Those people who didn't leave.
	I mean, because we talked about this with this Iranian fellow recently.
	A very nice, smart Iranian fellow who called in.
	And his family was very smart and his family left Iran.
	And who's left?
	Who's left in the Middle East?
	These guys.
	The guys currently pouring across.
	The guys who didn't have the wherewithal, the smarts, the resources, the forethought, the foresight to get out years ago.
	And it's just this giant trap.
	And the German people are, you know, as one guy said, please don't turn us into the monsters you always feared we were.
	Don't back us into a corner.
	But it is a giant mindfuck.
	It's a giant shit test and it's a giant trap.
	By jamming these incompatible cultures together, they are going to produce...
	The kind of racial animosity that did not exist beforehand.
	It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
	And people should just shrug and accept that this is the trap.
	It's well laid.
	It's been laid for many generations.
	And at the moment, there's no practical escape except by...
	I mean, if you really, really want to save Europe, if people really want to save Europe...
	There's really only one thing that needs to be done.
	And it's a very, very peaceful thing to do.
	And if you really want to save civilization, there's only one thing that needs to be done.
	And it doesn't involve having a gun.
	It doesn't involve any violence.
	It doesn't involve breaking any laws.
	And it doesn't involve you doing anything whatsoever, which is the beautiful thing about this kind of revolution.
	If you want to save the world, if you want to save civilization, it's just one thing you need to do.
	You need to destroy the mainstream media.
	The mainstream media is what is driving everything.
	I mean, maybe the NSA has a whole bunch of stuff on Angela Merkel because the US government was spying on all of the German leaders.
	Maybe they've just got it, but why would the American government, which still has military bases in Germany, want all of this stuff going on in Germany?
	Well, I can't see that they would.
	But why...
	Why did Angela Merkel do what she did?
	When all of the migrants showed up at the shores of Europe, why did the governments not drive them back?
	Would have saved lives.
	Well, because they were afraid of being called racists.
	By who?
	By the mainstream media.
	They were afraid of the pearl-clutching, fainting shock.
	They're protecting their borders!
	They're enforcing the law.
	You know, all the stuff that Donald Trump just walks through.
	And the fact that Angela Merkel did all of this with the example of Donald Trump shows you how incompetent she is.
	Because Donald Trump shows that if you protect your culture, people will cheer you for the most part.
	I mean, 20% of Democrats are thinking of voting or have agreed to vote for Donald Trump.
	It's shocking.
	But it's the mainstream media.
	That's all that people, all the politicians are terrified of, the mainstream media calling them racist.
	And after the example of Darren Wilson versus Mike Brown, of George Zimmerman versus Trayvon Martin, and all of the other stuff that's been going on...
	Everyone's just terrified of the mainstream media.
	The mainstream media in many ways has more power than the state these days.
	In fact, the mainstream media is the underpinning of state power.
	And it is the mainstream media that must go and doesn't involve anything to do with government.
	It simply involves you starve the beast.
	You starve them of their revenue.
	You don't go to their websites.
	You don't click on any of their ads.
	You install ad blockers.
	You don't donate.
	Whatever it takes that's legal, and you convince other people, do not consume the poison pen, drip, drip, cultural genocide of the mainstream media.
	You simply have to say no.
	You have to reject the mainstream media.
	It literally is the life or death of civilization that depends upon it.
	You have to vote with your dollars.
	You have to vote with your mouse.
	You have to vote with your touch on your tablet.
	You have to stay away from the mainstream media.
	Forget about writing letters and who cares, right?
	But when the mainstream media loses its eyeballs, the advertisers will change.
	And that, to me, the boycott in the mainstream media is the only thing that people have to and must and need to be doing.
	Because the mainstream media...
	is the propaganda arm of a future tyranny.
	You know, they're now talking about people who wish to enforce the law as far-right neo-Nazis.
	Countries have borders.
	Citizenship is not granted to people who wander across those borders.
	And now, somehow, it is Nazi to enforce the laws.
	They don't want to appeal, or they don't say, well, you have to obey the laws until those laws change, like in the same way that...
	I mean, imagine if a whole bunch of people decided to stop paying taxes, the taxes that fuel all the leftist benefits that are handed out across the world.
	Imagine if there was a tax revolt.
	Would people on the media be cheering that on?
	No, of course not.
	Because that would go against their leftist bias.
	The people not paying taxes wouldn't be providing the governments they love with enough cheddar to handle the poor to keep the leftists in power.
	But it is civilization versus the media at the moment.
	they have become a salt-strying, leeching parasite on the jugular of any heartbeat that yearns for freedom.
	And reporters, one of the highest...
	It's the occupation with one of the highest proportions of sociopaths.
	They are monstrous in general.
	And it's them or us.
	It's them or us.
	And people, when they go to the mainstream media sites, even if they're just...
	I mean, they're just...
	Cutting their own throats.
	Literally.
	Because the mainstream media is...
	So capable of destroying people's reputations and spreading horrifying lies about people and people believe it.
	Anyone in the mainstream media doesn't like I'm more than open to examining the veracity of their claims because they've got to have something going for them.
	Anyway, if you don't mind, I'm going to move on to the next caller, but I really, really appreciate the call and thanks a lot.
	You're welcome back anytime.
	Absolutely.
	Thank you, Steph.
	Have a good one.
	You too.
	Take care.
	Up next is James.
	James wrote in and said, So when you say, should we be more pragmatic?
	I never know what that means.
	And that always seems to me like begging the question.
	It's like when people say, shouldn't we take a common sense approach to this?
	And it's like, I don't know.
	What is pragmatic?
	What does that mean in this context?
	Okay, I think that's a good start, and I think you kind of make a good point.
	You know, to be pragmatic, I think we would have to, like, look at all the empirical stuff and make reviews from there.
	I guess what I'm trying to say...
	And who would say, no, I don't want to be pragmatic?
	I mean, it's just one of these things, like, okay, if you define something as pragmatic, then make the case for that, but don't just put the label pragmatic on it, because nobody can be against it, but nobody knows what it means in particular.
	So, okay, but yeah, I'm certainly willing to hear the case.
	Okay, so it's like, it's basically the approach where, like just to give you like a little backdrop to the story, like I'm 22, I'm in a university, so like obviously, like I live in Manitoba, like Winnipeg, there's a joke that we have, you could paint a stamp orange and someone would vote for it, like an NDP joke.
	So like basically, like in my...
	NDP, sorry.
	NDP, New Democrat Party, they're kind of like a little bit to the left of the Democrats.
	Yeah, they're kind of Bernie Sanders types.
	I'm pretty sure their original manifesto was pretty funny.
	But anyways, so just like in my experiences, I'm in university just to meet people, meet friends, stuff like that, get my degree.
	But I definitely wanted to help spread the word of liberty there.
	So I started my own student group and I would do little things, try to talk to people.
	And I always noticed that a lot of people couldn't convert them.
	So I kind of just abandoned that whole approach.
	I would try to reason with people and I wasn't getting a lot of success.
	There were some who would listen and obviously would help out and join, but I always felt that a lot of the people simply just didn't want to hear it.
	And when I'm talking about being more pragmatic, I guess I'm saying we should abandon the whole...
	If I were to say taxation is theft, some people's brains would explode.
	They couldn't grasp that idea.
	So I would have to try to...
	In a way, not being politically correct, but like just like dumb down my message just so people can understand it.
	So I guess my like real question is should we abandon the whole like I think he's a genius when you talked about his IQ being 160 or what you believe.
	I think obviously a lot of people couldn't comprehend if he were to start talking like you and me.
	Mostly you.
	I'm not as smart as you.
	But anyways, yeah.
	So I feel like he's changed his speech just so people can resonate with him and understand him better.
	I feel that if he were to go like Ron Paul, it wouldn't work.
	For example, Trump's dominating the polls.
	Ron Paul couldn't.
	Obviously, they're not the two of the same people.
	Donald's a lot more charismatic and he isn't anciently old.
	So yeah, that's basically my question.
	I didn't hear a question.
	Okay, sorry.
	My question is should we...
	Donald Trump is not old.
	That's my question.
	I don't know.
	Do you know what I'm trying to say?
	I'm trying to say instead of arguing from principle, I don't even know how to word this, I'm basically trying to say should we abandon trying to be purely libertarian and give in on some issues so we can persuade them easier.
	What do you want to do?
	I don't know, I would love to do what I want to do.
	In my approach with these people?
	No, no, I mean, forget about what's pragmatic or what's not.
	But what would you be most passionate about doing?
	And the reason I'm asking is, okay, let's say that somebody were to convince me that the best thing to do would be to run for office, right?
	Now, I mean, that's obviously what Donald Trump feels is the best thing to do, and so he's not writing, you know, blogs on libertarian science and he'll run for office.
	Now, I would hate to run for office.
	I mean, it's not a good use of my skill set.
	It's, you know, too much time away from family and, like, forget it, right?
	Too much travel, right?
	I mean, I want to spend time with my family out there pressing the flesh and kissing babies in some remote town in Manitoba, right?
	There's only one town.
	The rest suck.
	So, you know, I mean, what do you have in Winnipeg?
	Mosquitoes and frozen mosquitoes.
	That's the two seasons, right?
	Yeah, pretty much.
	So, I mean, even if it was some big pragmatic thing, okay, but what's pragmatic for you?
	What's pragmatic for you is what you care about the most, what you're most passionate about, what motivates you the most.
	Now, for Donald Trump, it's running for politics.
	For me, it's doing what I'm doing.
	Like, I don't think there's some external standard that we've got to say, well, to push the liberty movement ahead, you've got to do X, Y, and Z, and so everyone should go do X, Y, and Z. I think it's a multi-pronged approach, and I think it's based upon what people are most passionate about, what gets them motivated, because, you know, I think it's fair to say that the battle for freedom is a marathon, not a sprint.
	And it's probably a multigenerational miracle, at least.
	That's what I've always argued.
	So if you're going to say, okay, well, what's my life work?
	What is my life's work going to be?
	Well, I don't think we should sacrifice that which makes us happy for the sake of some greater social good.
	Because nobody can ever prove that...
	Nobody can prove to me empirically and objectively and without a doubt that the sacrifice of my personal happiness will move...
	Freedom forward, more than me pursuing what makes me the happiest, which is doing the show that I do, right?
	And so if you're going to say, well, I want to spend my life working for freedom, okay, well, do something that you love, that you're passionate about, that you care about, that excites you, that motivates you.
	And so the idea that there's some external thing we should plug ourselves into I don't know that that's a valid case.
	I think you should do what makes you the most excited because if you do something that you don't like, you won't be able to sustain it.
	I mean, you can do a job you don't like if your family's got to eat.
	But nobody's got to fight for freedom.
	In fact, you'll receive a lot of negative feedback, to put it mildly, if you fight for freedom.
	And the degree to which you're effective is the degree to which you'll be attacked.
	And so given that you're not being paid to do it, then it should be viewed as a hobby.
	And as a hobby, it should give you pleasure.
	And if you didn't plan on selling any pictures you made, and you loved to draw dragons, right?
	You loved to sit down and draw dragons.
	And it was relaxing for you and enjoyable for you and fun for you and so on.
	And I said...
	Well, the pragmatic thing to do is to draw kittens because people like kittens more than they like dragons.
	You'd probably say, but I'm not selling this.
	It's just for fun, for me.
	And so given that you're not being paid to do it, you should do what is most enjoyable and exciting for you, if that makes sense.
	No, that makes sense.
	I get that, but just from living here, I'm five years out of high school.
	Third year in school and like I realized it's pretty much like I'm in an arts degree like a history degree I feel like it's a like I would love to be a teacher one day I don't really want to teach in a public school I realized that right now Now I'm kind of wasting time.
	I could be making a lot more money doing the trade I was taught as a teenager, which is plastering, and I could be building a better life for myself right now.
	I just feel that by leaving school and just noticing the people around me, it's like, you know, I've heard you say before, it's like they pump out, like, every graduation cycle, they pump out an X amount of socialists.
	And I feel that because I've grown up in Winnipeg, that we've always been, like, I've always lived under an NDP government.
	I believe I maybe lived under a conservative government.
	I was a very small child.
	This is my home.
	I like it here.
	I contemplated moving to Alberta, but what's going on there now, it's not so good.
	I've contemplated moving to the United States if it got better.
	I just feel that although I get what you're saying, that if If I'm not getting paid for it, if it's just me, if it's not a hobby, if I'm not having excitement in it, that I shouldn't pursue it.
	But I just feel like there's no alternative.
	I feel the only way.
	I get what you're saying.
	You preach your show.
	It's a great show.
	I get how you preach non-violence towards children.
	It's a multi-generational thing.
	For me, growing up in Winnipeg, I feel we need to get a hold of the state.
	We need some guy on the right.
	I'm not saying PCs are that great either, they have their own problems, but I feel we're at that point where something needs to be done.
	So that's sick.
	I guess that's why I brought up the Trump thing because, you know, I think you and me would agree we don't agree with him on everything.
	We probably don't agree with him on a whole lot of things.
	It's just we realized that if he got in, shit would get better, right?
	So, Mike, I guess the reason why I ask this question is I read a bunch of Machiavelli books.
	I don't know if you've ever read about him.
	I read his biography.
	He's actually a really interesting guy.
	A lot of people kind of paint him as the evil dude from his book, The Prince.
	But I would argue if you read his biography, you'd find out he's a total Republican.
	But, like, you know, he was faced with decisions or circumstances.
	He wanted to, I guess, have a free or limited government in Florence, but it never happened that way.
	Medici kicked his ass, kicked him out, and he spent the rest of his days in sorrow because nothing ever happened for him.
	So, I guess the reason why I wanted to ask this is just, but you just basically answered me.
	No, but listen, I mean, I could be Donald Trump.
	Could you?
	No, hell no, I couldn't be him.
	No, I mean, I couldn't be him.
	Look, I mean, to have that much money, to be that famous, to be that well-known, to be that much of a celebrity, I mean, he's been in the public eye for like 40 years or more.
	Right.
	And...
	So, that is like a completely unique phenomenon.
	There's nobody, to my knowledge, who's been like that in all of political history.
	People can tell me if they know otherwise.
	So, saying, you know, maybe, you know, should we pursue something that comes along once every 5,000 years that nobody knows how to reproduce?
	And even if you did know how to reproduce it, you'd need to plant someone in the culture for 40 years before they matured into somebody like Donald Trump.
	That is not a plan.
	Like, Donald Trump is not a plannable event.
	It's not something that a movement can come around, right?
	Because he's so unique.
	Yeah.
	To me, he sees the movement, you know?
	Yes, but you can't, you know, if we said, well, we should all go and do what Donald Trump's doing, it's like, well, okay, good luck with that.
	I mean, call me when you've had a successful TV show, been in the public eye for 40 years, and have $10 billion under your belt.
	You know, then we'll talk, but I'm not holding my breath for someone like that to come along.
	And there's no equivalent that I know of of Donald Trump anywhere else in the world, and certainly not in Canada.
	Right.
	Yeah, so pursue what makes you happy, but I wouldn't imagine.
	I think it's kind of a torturous thing to say there's some pragmatic thing that I could do to achieve freedom that I'm not doing that's common sense and would work and so on.
	But not knowing exactly what it is.
	I'd say, you know, learn the stuff that excites you and speak about it with people who are at least somewhat receptive and so on.
	And, you know, with the internet, there's a way of getting people into what you're doing without having to have them live on your street, of course.
	So I think there's lots of great things that you can do.
	But I wouldn't torture yourself with the idea that there's something obvious and easy that you could do that you're not doing.
	The Donald Trump thing is not something that any movement could ever plan for.
	Like, you know, the Libertarian Party founded, I think, in 1971, and they weren't sitting there, even if they agreed with Donald Trump.
	And I'm sure that a lot of them seemed to dislike him intensely, and I would argue somewhat irrationally.
	But the, you know, the Republicans, I mean, the Republicans hate him.
	It wasn't like the Republican Party was like, well, we're just going to tread water until some super rich, ultimately charismatic celebrity comes along and decides to pick up our course.
	I mean, they seem to hate Donald Trump considerably because by self-funding, he's taking out the whole business of lobbying, which is kind of what politics runs on.
	So he's doing an end run against the whole He can't economics of the Republican Party and they don't like him for that so he's just he's a phenomenon that comes along and he's rarer than winning the lottery so you know you don't plan for your retirement by playing the lottery and you don't plan for the salvation of freedom by hoping for a Donald Trump you know if you win the lottery great and if Donald Trump comes along and you feel that he can do something positive good but this is not something that you and I can replicate or plan for or hope to bring into being Oh
	yeah, I get that.
	I guess, like, yeah, I'm kind of overthinking it.
	It's just, I don't know, it just sucks in Winnipeg.
	No, it's not bad.
	It's got a nice little, like, there's something nice about it.
	Yeah, like, I totally get that.
	I agree with you on that.
	Alright.
	Well, listen, enjoy the winter.
	I actually went up to Winnipeg.
	Right before I got married, I went to do some business in Winnipeg.
	And I was like, you know, in the movie Cool Running, there's these Jamaican guys who come to learn bobsledding in some, I don't know, Minnesota or some godforsaken frozen hell hen, some hot planet of the northeastern United States.
	I remember watching that movie.
	Yeah, so the windows open, the doors open, and the snow blows in, and the guy from Jamaica who's never seen snow before just drops his bag in shock and horror.
	That was sort of my experience getting out of an airplane in Winnipeg in December.
	But yeah, it's an exciting town if you don't mind freezing to everything that you touch.
	So thanks for the call, man.
	Stay strong.
	Enjoy.
	And remember, you can always be a teacher on the internet.
	You don't have to have the government certificate to do stuff.
	You don't need permission from the state.
	To inform and instruct people.
	You look at Dan Carlin's hardcore history.
	I don't know if he's a teacher or not, but he sure is educating a lot of people on a lot of stuff.
	So don't imagine that you've got to go get a certificate and stand in a room staring at 30 in different eyes or 30 in different pairs of eyes.
	30 in different eyes would be, I don't know, 14 people and a squinty guy.
	No, 30 actually.
	15 people.
	31.
	So, you know, don't wait for the state to give you permission to do stuff.
	If you want to teach people, just go on the internet and start teaching people.
	And to hell with the accreditation.
	Sorry my combo wasn't as long as the other ones, but thanks.
	No, no worries at all, man.
	Thanks for calling and take care.
	Yeah, you too.
	Bye.
	Alright, up next we got Chris.
	Chris wrote in and said, I was listening to your show from September 4th.
	During your conversation with the first caller, Stefan said that Stephen Harper was inspired by Ayn Rand and Isar John Galt and Rand Paul.
	I'm no liberal, but the former prime minister has done more to increase the power of the state and centralize political power to the prime minister's office than any other Canadian government in my lifetime.
	If Stephen Harper is our Galt, or that was at least his early intentions, what happened?
	Where did it all go so horribly wrong?
	Well, Paul Ryan was an objectivist when he was younger, as far as I understand it, or at least followed Ayn Rand quite closely, and has had to repudiate some of her more outspoken atheism recently, so he's not the only one.
	Okay.
	I guess Stephen Harper isn't the only example I can think of.
	For example, Alan Greenspan was in Ayn Rand's personal entourage.
	And then went along to run the Federal Reserve, which is...
	I don't see the Federal Reserve as being anything close to compliant with Randian philosophy.
	I'm just curious to get your thoughts on Quite the opposite of Randian philosophy and quite the opposite of Alan Greenspan's early philosophy where he talked about the value of gold and the evils of fiat currency and political manipulation of fiat currency and then he ends up in charge of it.
	And then he ended up betraying the free market as well by blaming the 2008 economic crash not on his own policies of overprinting money but on the free market which was, I mean, one of the great betrayals in the modern world because it gave so much cannon fodder to socialists.
	Right.
	So I guess the real root of my question then is, how do people who hold such philosophy that's valuable, especially in their young and idealistic times, become so antithetical to that?
	I guess I'm worried about the similar things happening to me as they become older and possibly more embittered.
	Well, power corrupts.
	I mean, we could go into a long discussion if you like, but power corrupts.
	I don't know that, you know, you have your ideals, and then you get a lot of power, and power corrodes integrity and corrupts the human spirit.
	So, you know, it would be shocking if this did not occur.
	Right.
	Okay.
	So, like I said, it's nothing then, specific or...
	It's the ring.
	You know, no one can wield the ring.
	The ring is the state.
	No one can wield the ring.
	You just have to bite someone's finger off and fall into a lake of fire.
	Spoiler!
	But no, power corrupts.
	And the thing is, you have to remember, of course, if you're a politician, that you are speaking to a self-willed, self-blinded, greedy and deceptive population as a whole, which sort of touches on something we were talking about earlier.
	So, you know, if you talk about cutting the welfare state, Then there are, of course, a lot of people who are dependent upon the welfare state who will scream bloody murder at this.
	And that's not the end of the world, because you can have a discussion about that, right?
	But the media will, as we talked about two calls ago, the media will simply work to destroy anyone who threatens their power.
	The media likes to be the kingmaker.
	The media likes to crown who's going to be king, and after their success with Barack Obama, a relatively unknown senator, They made him the king.
	And that's heady power, to be able to feel that you're able to crown the most powerful man in the world, or I guess in the future the most powerful woman in the world, which is what they'd like with Hillary if Orange is not the new pantsuit.
	But to be able to crown the king, to be a kingmaker, is in many ways to be more powerful than the king.
	And politicians, I think, fear the media more than anything else.
	It's interesting that you bring up the media, and it's a question I don't think I've ever heard you address.
	Where do traditionally conservative media outlets such as Fox or Sun Media, etc., fit into this paradigm where you constantly hear nothing but negative things about Barack Obama from Fox News?
	You don't hear anything positive about Justin Trudeau from Sun Media, but they were constantly building up Stephen Harper's prime minister as an effective prime minister, whereas CBC would constantly rag on Stephen Harper and built Justin Trudeau, and for a while Tom Mulcair up as potential next prime ministers.
	They seem to have their own camps and ideologies that they fit into and that they tend to pander to.
	Where does right-wing media fit into the whole theory of the media?
	Well, they want to They want to crown their own king.
	Of course, right?
	It's just that, first of all, they're traditionally male.
	I think it's fair to say.
	Again, I don't know the proportion.
	Maybe there's a lot of women who watch Fox News.
	But my understanding is it's pretty male.
	And it's pretty white male.
	Like, white males are right-wing.
	And just about everyone else is not.
	Which is why the left constantly demonizes white men.
	Because they're the backbone of the Republican Party.
	And of the conservative party in Canada.
	And so, yeah, they have their own camp, but it's small relative to, you know, people say, well, you know, the left-wing bias in the media, but what about Fox News?
	It's like, you know that's one outlet, right?
	You know, that's one outlet.
	And...
	You know, talk radio used to be pretty crippled in America because there was sort of this equal access law that said if you give one person of a particular political viewpoint the microphone, then you have to give somebody the opposite or a different political viewpoint the mic, which meant that you couldn't have talk radio for a variety of reasons.
	But that law was, I think, taken down under Reagan and that was sort of the birth of talk radio.
	And...
	So you have talk radio.
	Talk radio, of course, is there for people who are working.
	Right?
	I mean, radio is generally, you know, if you're a trucker, you're driving and listen to something.
	If you're working, fixing cars, if you're, you know, like if you...
	Then it's people who are working who listen to radio rather than sort of watch TV. And so there's talk radio.
	And the left has tried to break into talk radio So many times.
	Jim Hightower, Alan Dershowitz, so many people on the left have tried to break into talk radio and they've all failed.
	Which is why in America it tends to be more of a right-wing phenomenon and the left-wing has continually failed at talk radio.
	And so who's consuming all of this left-wing media?
	Well...
	Minorities and women in general.
	Again, if sort of white males are on the right, and again, this is not, right?
	But, you know, Jews in general tend to go left.
	Ben Shapiro has a pretty good video explaining why this is the case.
	But Jews tend towards the left, and blacks tend towards the left, and Hispanics tend towards the left, and women tend towards the left.
	And so when people say, well, you know, but that's right-wing media too, it's like, yes, absolutely.
	And, you know, in a hurricane, sometimes the wind whirlpools around and pushes back against the hurricane.
	It just doesn't keep your house from falling over.
	It's just not enough to push back in any considerable way.
	So I think Ann Coulter refers to it as the non-Fox media, the NFM, right, which is sort of everything and everyone else.
	So yeah, there's right-wing media and, you know, the Toronto Sun, which is sort of the – I think that's the National Post in Canada and the Toronto Sun.
	It used to be a little bit more the Globe and Mail.
	I don't think so much anymore, but – Yeah, I mean, they have their constituents and they have their people and so on, but they don't dominate the discourse.
	The discourse is dominated by left-wing media and academics.
	And the academics, having spent a lot of time in academia, not as an academic, but as a student and a graduate student, I went to three of the major universities in Canada.
	It's relentlessly left-wing.
	Still not as left-wing as theater school, but relentlessly left-wing, with no exceptions that I ever came across.
	And of course, public school teachers are relentlessly left-wing, and academics are relentlessly left-wing, and the majority of people in the media are relentlessly left-wing.
	And yeah, there's a few exceptions to that for sure, but not enough to...
	Not enough to fundamentally alter the course of the culture.
	Okay.
	So, for example, Sun Media and Fox News, I guess, wouldn't be examples of more trustworthy than, say, CBC or NBC, just differently untrustworthy, if I understand you correctly.
	You know, I go back and forth on that.
	Obviously, I haven't done a fact check or reviewed any fact checks.
	I do know that The fact checking sites tend to be pretty left-wing and they've got into trouble for fact checking many more right-wing stories than left-wing stories.
	So I don't know.
	Like, I don't know the degree to which.
	I mean, we do research, and maybe, Mike, you'd want to chime in here.
	We've certainly found errors and misrepresentations on right-wing sites, but I don't find the right-wing sites as relentlessly propagandistic as the left-wing sites.
	But, Mike, you've done some research in a variety of sites as well.
	Do you think that the right-wing sites are any more or less trustworthy than the leftist sites?
	I mean, I don't see much of a difference between FoxNews.com and CNN.com or MSNBC.com.
	I don't see much of a difference between those.
	I think there's some smaller alternative media outlets on the right that do a really good job, but I don't see that type of stuff on the left.
	I wouldn't say that the main outlet on the right are really great as far as facts and information compared to the left, but there's certainly better alternative media sources on the right compared to the left, based on what I've seen.
	And I've gone and researched issues where there's clear bias on both ends and trying to pull everything apart and get the raw data or the information that's available, and sometimes it's really difficult.
	And there's much better sources for that type of stuff, again, on the right, in my experience, than the left.
	My experience, this is an emotional experience, which I have to be sort of alert to in terms of my own bias, is that the wall-to-wall leftist bias in the media is so mind-numbing after a while that for me, going to a right-wing site is amazing.
	It's refreshing in terms of it's refreshing if the wind changes direction, you know, a little bit.
	I don't know if it's any better or worse, but it is refreshing insofar as at least it's a break from this monotonous socialist caterwauling that comes from most of the sites as a whole.
	Oh, yeah.
	Like, so for instance, I mean, I'll give you...
	Sorry, I just paused and then let me just give you a tiny example of what I mean.
	So, you know, in the Trayvon Martin George Zimmerman case...
	The left-wing media, of course, was...
	I mean, it was a complete witch hunt.
	It was a lynching, pretty much, of George Zimmerman.
	And the same thing happened with Darren Wilson versus Mike Brown.
	And on the right, there was kind of a towing, a little bit more balanced, kind of towing the line as far as, you know, white people bad and non-white people saints.
	There were some...
	There were alternative media right-wing sources that had really fantastic analyses of this.
	And, you know, you can go to my video, The Truth About Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, you can look at the sources and so on.
	There were some right sites that had some fantastic analyses of the interactions between these all doomed individuals.
	I did not find on the left that there was any kind of pushback against the main narrative of, you know, St.
	Brown and, you know, Evil Wilson and so on.
	There was, like, it was just varied degrees of lynching the going on in the left-hand side.
	And on the right, there was, you know, maybe some skepticism, but really they did follow that sort of mainstream narrative of, you know, innocent child gunned down by vigilante, whatever, whatever, right?
	But there were some alt-right sides that were...
	Bracing and like, wow, like I'm not finding this information anywhere else.
	And so that uniformity that goes from left-wing to center-right sites is a bit mind-numbing, particularly when it comes to race stuff.
	Everybody goes mental.
	But there are some sites that sort of scrubbed away the racial aspect and just looked at the facts and I think did a really great job of that.
	So I find that kind of stuff a little bit more refreshing just because it's not...
	The same as everyone else and I have to be careful of that because of course that might be just the weariness of all things left lead me to be more susceptible to some of the information put out by the right.
	Yeah, that that I think sums up my Questions on that topic nicely.
	I gotta say doing my having done my own research on a topic that the left tends to be more sensitive to I find I'm finding a lot of ridiculousness in right-wing articles and However, the left-wing stuff is all the stuff that shows up with confirmation bias.
	And so I don't know.
	What's the topic?
	Same-sex parenting.
	I'm very interested in parenting.
	And my background is...
	I won't bore you with that.
	But anyway, that's...
	Yeah, so the stuff I got from the left was very...
	Oh, they do a great job.
	It's just as good as heterosexual parents and such.
	Which I believe could potentially be true, given the right set of circumstances.
	The articles I'm seeing from the right are...
	Using examples that are very reminiscent of your childhood to discredit same-sex parenting.
	Oh, my father had his multiple partners over and there was all sorts of strange transient men moving through the house.
	That, to me, would be like using your childhood as an example to discourage heterosexual couples from parenting.
	It's interesting the degree to which both sides seem to have their confirmation biases and really would like to And I get that the rites is very motivated by religion, and I'd be interested to hear their thoughts on that.
	Yeah, on the right, of course, they believe, and I think with some justification, that the traditional family is the bedrock of civilization.
	And if that's strong, then you have less of a need for the state.
	And I mean, I get that.
	I have some sympathy with that position.
	I would also like, on the left, you know, it would not be the end of the world if occasionally they talked about some of the downsides of abortion.
	You know, just once in a blue moon.
	It might be nice if, you know, like, on the right they were saying, with Barack Obama's State of the Union speech, they were saying, because he had an empty chair there for the murdered children at some, I think, Sandy Hook or wherever it was, right?
	And, you know, the people on the right saying, okay, well, what about the 55 million aborted babies?
	Could we not get an empty chair?
	But they can't exist on the left.
	Like the fact that human babies or human fetuses have been sucked out, destroyed, and flushed down the toilet basically by the tens of millions since Roe v.
	Wade was legalized.
	Look, I'm not saying that this should be illegal.
	I mean, I'm not a statist in any way, but I think it's fair to say that that's not optimal.
	In society.
	And, you know, it's traumatic for the woman, and obviously it's fatal for the fetus, and it haunts women, you know, having these women with any kind of sensitivity or conscience.
	It's very, very difficult.
	And so it would be nice, to put it mildly, if the left would occasionally say, yeah, there are too many abortions.
	It's a really bad thing in society.
	It's traumatic, and it's a, you know, even if you just look at it, like, can we just not...
	You know, 55 million abortions, that's a lot of people who didn't get cancer treatments or who didn't get their bones set properly or who didn't get whatever other medical treatments that might be available if there wasn't sort of, it seems like, this caterpillar track of women getting abortions sometimes.
	And very expensive to the public purse, to say the least.
	It would be nice if the left, you know, every now and then might drop in a little bit something about like abortion isn't some glorious mark of freedom and choice for women, but is actually a pretty ghastly and horrible procedure that is emotionally and physically dangerous and destructive.
	So it would be nice, you know, for them to say that.
	And the fact that the left simply will never seem to admit that there's any problems with abortion whatsoever...
	Fuels the right.
	And then the left, who will never admit that there are any problems with abortion, said that the right is hysterical.
	But it's the right is hysterical because the left won't admit there are any problems with abortion.
	So anyway, those kinds of things drive me a little bit crazy.
	It's funny that you bring that up because that was the topic that got my sister crying when I brought it up after I took your urgent Christmas message seriously with my family.
	Oh, what happened?
	Well, I'm kind of a dominant speaking personality.
	I have a very good way of communicating and getting my points across, so I tend to drag conversation in the direction I want to talk about.
	So I brought it towards volunteerism.
	And she's kind of the same, but with different motives.
	So she steered the conversation towards abortion, to which I gave her my thoughts on it.
	And the whole thing that came to loggerheads when she said to me, would you ostracize me if I had an abortion?
	To which my answer was, yes, I would.
	Not because I have any large ideological or anything too particular or strong ideology towards abortion or against it, but my thoughts are we are going to have to jump through a lot of hoops to have children.
	And if you had an abortion, that would be sort of a squandered opportunity, in my opinion.
	And I think that's something I realized having reflected upon it.
	But anyway, that thing that I would ostracize my sister got her all crying and in tears and stormed off, etc.
	So I think it is kind of a tragedy that The pro-lifers don't sit down with the gay community and say, hey listen, we have all these, there's too many abortions.
	We have people that are becoming less counterculture and more and more mainstream all the time that would, at least in our case, would love to parent and would love to do a good job of it, would love to teach to raise responsible children and ethical children, etc.
	And this is a real opportunity, I think, anyway.
	I don't know, I'm sure I'll get some backlash on that, but it seems kind of squanderous to constantly To rail on abortion and also rail on a potential solution for abortion.
	Oh, you mean adoption by gay couples?
	Yeah, I don't know.
	I mean, I think a lot of the women who are pro-life, I mean, I don't know that they put themselves through a pregnancy just to save that life.
	I mean, I don't know how unbelievably selfish some of these people have become, but it's like, well, you know, it'll stretch out my belly and it'll be uncomfortable and birth is painful and might as well just get an abortion.
	Yeah.
	You know, that your sister was bothered by your potential ostracism more than she was bothered by ending the life of a fetus that would grow into a human being.
	I don't know, that just seems like a...
	I think she's been sort of taking the Richard Dawkins approach to it where it's just some cells.
	I mean, what's the big deal about killing some cells?
	Yeah, except they're not.
	I mean, they're not just some cells.
	I mean, I scratch my nose, I kill cells.
	That's not...
	It's going to be a human being.
	That's different from something like sweating into a Petri dish, for God's sakes.
	I mean, it's going to be a human being.
	And, you know, if you don't get that, You know, from that time that I saw my daughter on the ultrasound like a little Pac-Man with her heart going to where she is now, the age of seven, with thoughts and ideas and very funny jokes.
	I mean, it's going to be a real person.
	And everyone who's alive, everyone who's able to make that argument is only there because they weren't aborted.
	So to be indifferent about the issue of abortion when its absence is the only reason you're there to make an argument at all just seems kind of crazy.
	I mean, it is a very deep and powerful topic.
	And it's just a bunch of cells.
	Man.
	It's cold.
	It's cold.
	Yeah, it's cold.
	It does take a certain, I don't know, emotion out of the equation, I guess.
	Yeah.
	Which, you know, I mean, I can...
	Let's not go down that rabbit hole.
	This is a long conversation, but...
	Oh, of course.
	But yeah, just sort of waving it away, you know, like, it's like getting a cyst removed.
	It's like, not really.
	It's not really that.
	That has the potential to be a real-life human being, and most likely will be if you don't kill it.
	And everyone, look, I mean, it's the, you know, if you...
	At some point, everyone recognizes it becomes a human being.
	You know, like, you can't stick a fork through the eyeball of a baby right before it comes through the birth canal.
	At least I'd hope people wouldn't be okay with that.
	And so, what, if it magically changes in the 30 seconds it squirts down the birth tube?
	I mean, at some point, people go, okay, it's a human being.
	Where that is, but everyone recognizes that at some point you're killing a baby.
	And, you know, people could say, well, it's right before it's born.
	Okay, well, what about 10 minutes before it's born?
	What about a day before?
	Like, it's a very, very difficult question to ask, and there's no particularly objective way to do it.
	So it's such a complicated debate?
	Yeah, yeah.
	And so people who are just like, well, you know, it's just this, or it's just pro-choice, or it's just pro-life, or it's just a bunch of cells, it's like, that is not even giving remotely the reverence and attention that the topic deserves.
	It is a big, serious issue.
	And yeah, there are 55 million people who aren't here because of abortion.
	You know, whether some of those would have been aborted, some of those may be miscarriages and so on, but...
	Would you want to be one of those 55 million?
	I wouldn't.
	It's a big issue.
	It's a serious issue.
	And do I have any particularly obvious philosophical answers?
	Well, no.
	Because I'm not going to assume that everyone else is an idiot.
	But certainly, you are killing...
	Something that is alive.
	And it is something that is going to be a human being.
	And it is certainly not initiating force against you.
	And so it's not self-defense.
	You know, I get the medical issues and your baby's going to die or whatever.
	Yeah, choose the mom.
	But those are so extraordinarily rare that it's like trying to design a life insurance policy around people getting hit by meteors.
	You know, it's not something that needs a huge amount of attention as far as general principles go.
	But...
	So yeah, I'm sorry that it turned out that way, but hopefully your sister realized that she was an adult, put on her big girl panties, took a deep breath, and went back for the conversation.
	Or not.
	Or maybe she will over time.
	Who knows?
	Who knows?
	She's currently in university and whatever, so lots of leftist influences, lots of...
	And in filmmaking, for that matter.
	So, I mean, yeah.
	It's not a surprising thing to me at all.
	Okay, she may be saveable unless she goes into documentary filmmaking, in which case, I'm just kidding.
	Maximum leftist.
	Maximum leftist paradigm, MLP. Well, thanks.
	I appreciate the question, and it is an interesting one.
	We have a podcast called The Complexity of Abortion, which you might want to check out if people haven't.
	Grit your teeth and, you know, you want to sit down with your sister, you know, watch some of those Planned Parenthood videos.
	You know, they're out there on the internet and, you know, they're talking about maneuvering the baby to get the maximum number of body parts and all of that and listen to the sounds.
	That is the end of something that would be a person.
	And...
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I hope that I don't just end up in the...
	For mom's sake, try to get along kind of thing, but that may be the way things go.
	I don't know.
	Yeah, I don't know if the let's get along thing works very well when, you know, two people go into the doctor's room for an abortion and only one person comes out and the other person ends up in the fucking sewers.
	That's not much of a compromise, right?
	No, of course it's not.
	Can't we all get along?
	It's fine if one person isn't being sucked out like some sort of alien attack through a vacuum tube.
	But, um...
	Yeah, we'll see.
	We'll see.
	And listen, I mean, as far as, you know, the adoption, the gay adoption of kids goes, I'd love to live in a society where this would not be something I would even have a say in or care about.
	I mean, I care about it in terms of, you know, what's good for kids and all of that, but adoption is not initiating the use of force.
	And, I mean, you know, I hate to say it beats abortion like it's, oh my God, it's one step better.
	But, you know, you're right.
	I mean, I think people would rather be alive and adopted by gay couples than ending up in the aforementioned sewer as rat food.
	So, yeah, I'm with you there.
	As far as I understand the genetics of homosexuals, too, is that it's transformed from the mother on the X chromosome, and it tends to appear more in families that are very fertile, which to me sort of lends merit to the theory that maybe it is more case-selected than we'd give it credit for.
	Maybe it is like a Sort of taking into account the, you know, I have three other siblings, maybe one of them has kids and then dies.
	That might be a biological driver behind it.
	I don't know, I'm just spitballing.
	Yeah, I know, it could be.
	I mean, the case selection plus the bathhouse culture, and I don't know if that's as big now as it was when I was younger, but that's a little tough to square that circle, so to speak.
	It is, but it does appear that the counterculture, as far as gay men are concerned, is Sort of disappearing with the stigma, if that makes sense.
	We're more and more sort of a...
	We're becoming more and more mainstream, if that makes sense.
	Oh, I see what you mean.
	Right, right.
	Yeah.
	Less and less of this George Michael in a public bathhouse with a glory hole kind of stuff.
	Yeah, and more than just men that want to be seen as normal men.
	Just happen to have the difference.
	And can contribute in a very sort of traditional family sort of sense of things.
	Well, you know, my hope, of course, is that as homosexuality becomes normalized and not such a big deal, that I would view, to some degree, the more extreme behaviors in the gay community to result from negative social pressures producing that kind of behavior.
	And as those negative social pressures diminish, I would hope that there would be a corresponding normalization within the gay community around sort of more general standards and all that, which, you know, I'm sure would be nice, you know, if you want to do the bathhouse thing, do the bathhouse.
	Coming along with more...
	It is coming along with more, like, accepting parents like I had.
	Now the publicly funded Catholic schools that Ontario still has didn't help me out very much, but I'm sure that could be a whole other call-in show.
	Yeah, I certainly would like to hear more about that, because, of course, we had a Catholic at the beginning, and if we had more time, we'd do that now.
	But I'm going to close off, if that's right, but thank you very much for your questions, and I certainly wish you all the best in your family future.
	And thanks everyone so much for listening.
	Of course, freedomainradio.com slash donate.
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