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Sept. 6, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:09:10
3404 The Catholic Church Built Western Civilization | Duke Pesta and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi, everybody.
Stefan Molyne from Freedom Maine Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
We have a good friend, Dr.
Duke Pesta, with us back again.
He is a tenured university professor, author, and the academic director of Freedom Project Academy, which is a live online school offering individual classes and a complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school.
For more on Dr.
Duke and the Freedom Project Academy, please go to fpeusa.org.
That link, of course, will be below.
How are you doing, Dr.
Pesta?
Great today, Stephan.
Thanks again for having us back.
My pleasure.
So, the topic today is one that I have found to be quite emotional.
I've been doing some research over the last little while, and like a lot of things, I sort of feel that my heritage has been, to put it mildly, stripped from me, like the way that you would fill it or gut a fish.
Let me give you sort of the general thesis that I had absorbed through higher education and through reading.
It went something like this.
Well, see, the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans, there was an age of reason, you see.
And then there was a dark ages, which was, you know, savage, brutal, nasty, and short for most people's lives.
And then...
There were some technical improvements, mostly, you see, as a result of the West rediscovering ancient texts, Aristotelianism and Euclidean geometry and Ptolemaic astronomy and so on.
And then this largely came through the Muslims keeping these texts during the time of war in the West, the Dark Ages.
And then there was a burgeoning scientific movement that was relentlessly opposed by the church.
Again, this is just the story that I received that was relentlessly opposed by the church and had to survive all of the calumnies.
And, of course, what is trotted out is Galileo's cornering and torturing by the papacy and so on.
And then in the sort of 18th and particularly 19th century, mankind broke free of this kind of religion or superstition and so on.
And it's been smooth sailing ever since.
Now, that's not the full story.
That's not even a very real story from what I've been reading, and that's what I find to be quite tragic.
And so I'll just give you very briefly what I have found out, and then we can sort of discuss the benefits of all of that.
So, universalism, which is really the foundation for philosophy, if nothing can be universalized, there's no such thing as philosophy or science or math or any of those kinds of things.
Universalism is the key to philosophy, and in fact, under the Catholic Church in particular, but in Christendom as a whole, Universalism was extended to humanity for the first time, at least, that I could dig up.
Because in the past, there was Aristotle saying, well, you know, some men are only fit to be slaves and should not have the protection of the law and the rights of free men and so on.
But in Christendom, there was great concern over the universality of ethics, which created...
The souls are made in the image of God, and there should be no compulsion in religion.
And so there was great sensitivity in the 16th century for the rights of the Native Indians who were being somewhat abused at times in the European settlement, let's say, of North America.
There was foundations for international law.
And the Catholic Church in particular was very positive towards science for the most part.
Funded science and was a great patron and advocate of science.
The Catholic Church founded the university system, which I guess we can see in your video, all around you in a penumbra.
And the...
The idea that reason, or I guess what was called logos, is intrinsically part of the divine nature of the Christian belief is something that was very much...
Buried in the education that I received.
And last but not least, the separation of church and state had its origins in Catholicism and, I guess last but not least but one, economics.
There was a strong tradition of economics that founded the, not the labor theory of value, which is the Marxist fallacy, but The subjective value theory of price, that price is something that is subjectively valued and can't be objectively measured by labor inputs and so on, came out of the scholastics in the 12th and 13th centuries, and there's a fairly direct line through that, through the Austrian School of Economics in the 19th and 20th centuries.
So, to take a sort of short speech and make it even shorter, it seems to me that a lot of the history that I was taught is, I don't know what's the nicest way to put it, a little one-sided, a little limited, and the degree of respect that the Catholic Church and other Christian churches and denominations had for Aristotle, you know, they called him the philosopher and he was considered to be a great, and of course he was not Christian.
He was a pre-Christian thinker by hundreds of years.
And the idea that reason and science and universality is the way that you approach the mind of God was something that I had not really been exposed to at all.
In fact, I'd been exposed to quite the opposite, which I guess is what happens when you read those who win a particular battle, you get just one side of things.
So yeah, I feel angry at the amount of one-sidedness that I received in my education and reading about it further has been quite enlightening.
So that's sort of my quick sort of where I'm at at the moment.
And what are your thoughts on all of this?
I mean, a lot.
I love talking to you because you are so educated and you are so willing to take on these complicated intellectual questions.
And if somebody in your position with your worldview and your just native worldview I
think?
And you had made the argument, I think you're exactly right, that in studying Roman history, that you found that Christianity did not necessarily play a role in the dissolution of the Roman Empire.
That the political, the structural, the cultural rot that Rome had allowed itself to succumb to was what brought Rome down.
And I think that's exactly right.
But what's always kind of gnawed at me since that conversation was the second part of that.
And the second part of that is there had to be something to fill the vacuum.
And what Christianity offered metaphysically, and I think we can stipulate that metaphysics, even if there is no God, whether God exists or not, the idea of metaphysics is certainly one that's been important to philosophers.
And as you said, I think metaphysics is really the, in many respects, the underpinning of universalism.
If you can't talk metaphysically about a subject, then there can be no universality.
In fact, I would argue that the more modern culture, postmodernism has rejected essences, universals, and absolutes, The more absolutely chaotic and destructive to the idea of truth itself things have become.
Philosophy in the modern era has become more or less bankrupt.
I mean, most modern philosophy is really now just a recap of what happened before.
There's very little new thinking about truth and about right and about wrong and about aesthetics and beauty.
But going back to the Roman question, something had to fill that void.
And I think what Christianity did provide to a crumbling Roman Empire...
It was an entire new structure, one that did not privilege the elites, one that did not privilege government.
You think about the degree to which many of Rome's problems were the deification of the emperor.
This is one that gets neglected by most historians.
Rome wasn't rational in the sense that they got rid of religion.
I mean, what they did is they transferred religion to the state, very much what I would argue what many of the communists have, an idea of the communists, the Marxists have picked up.
So when the Roman leaders went from being Heads of republic who owed allegiance to a senate and the plebs.
You had a whole system of republican government in place of which the person in charge, they used to call them the Roman consuls.
They were within a system.
They were circumscribed by it.
Then when Rome became an empire and they started deifying the emperors, what you had basically was this secular empire.
Totalitarian theocracy.
It was not rational.
It was not reasonable at all.
And what was it that opposed that as Rome's political structures and military structures began to fail?
It was this burgeoning idea of Christianity, which, like you said, I think exactly right, offered a kind of new way of seeing man's relationship to God and man's relationship to the state.
And I think that was absolutely invaluable in terms of bridging the gap between the fall of the Roman Empire and then what you referenced as the Renaissance, right?
This sort of rebirth of the ancient texts.
And if you look at that medieval period from about 475, 474 AD, the fall of Rome, till about the rise of the universities in the 12th, 11th, 11th, 12th century, I would just like to suggest a couple of quick things by way of opening my manifesto, and then we can throw these ideas back and forth.
We must remember that it was Thomas Aquinas who radically put together Aristotelian philosophy and Christian thinking.
And the one part of the whole equation that gets lost for me, that people that don't know, my students don't know, is that Christianity, of all the world's religions, had to found itself between two really remarkable intellectual traditions.
For Christianity to gain a foothold, it had to adjust itself to 2,000 years of Jewish-Hebrew philosophy.
Which was really quite remarkable.
The great Hebrew sages, the rabbis down through the ages who had codified all this knowledge.
So in order for Christianity to carve out its niche, it had to incorporate and or convincingly refute the Jewish theological tradition.
But then for Paul to bring Christianity to Greece and then ultimately to Rome, they had to really engage Christian thinkers with pagan philosophy.
And right away in the 4th century, St.
Augustine did that.
St.
Augustine pointed out all the obvious links between Platonism, Platonic thought, and Christianity.
And by the time you get to the 12th century, right about the time the universities were opening, Aquinas did it with Aristotle.
So rather than reject these tremendous philosophical and oftentimes rational traditions, particularly the classical tradition, Christianity absorbed it, figured out how it fit within those circles.
So you think about the great thinkers of Western Christianity from Augustine To Aquinas, to Milton, to Shakespeare, to Dante, whether Catholic or Protestant, there's a lot of really rational discussion back and forth.
That doesn't mean that there wasn't mysticism.
It doesn't mean that there weren't times when the church and individual churches were controlled by autocrats and anti-rationalists.
But that happens with every movement.
But the larger arc of the church, if you think about it, I mean, my area of research...
is Shakespeare and human dissection.
I'm looking at how Shakespeare's plays were impacted by the science of human dissection in the 16th century.
And I have found that the Catholic Church was very supportive of human dissection.
In fact, most of the major scientific revolutions of the last 2,000 years, the church more or less, the intellectual church, has been much more sympathetic to them than we would recognize.
Take the science of human dissection, for instance, which became, when the school's We remember that the universities were all founded by Roman Catholics, right?
From Bologna to Padua to Oxford to Cambridge to the Sorbonne, these were all Christians who did it, Christian philosophy that underpinned it.
And what people fail to recognize is that one of the subjects that the universities covered was natural philosophy, which we would call science.
The rather progressive thinkers of the church hierarchy who put these universities in place is certainly They stressed theology, the study of God, as the queen of all the arts and sciences.
But nevertheless, there was a place carved out for the study of the world, the argument being that if God created the universe and God gave us rationality, then there's no rational reason.
We can't study it.
And out of that, you wouldn't have had the...
This is the point that I make, too.
You couldn't have had the Enlightenment.
You could not have had it.
And it happened only in the West, primarily because there was a relative strain of tolerance for reason and for abstract thought that was not Christian within Western culture itself that then gave rise to that.
So I am not trying to suggest that Christianity is the only intellectual way to do anything.
But of all the world's philosophical traditions...
Christianity has got some pretty serious intellectual chops and I think ignoring that as we so often do in our kids' education turns religion into a caricature, right?
Yeah, there is a very powerful, I think, trend that occurred.
And just by the by, 9th and 10th centuries, of course, considered the Dark Ages, was not so much to do.
But the church, of course, just to remind people of Western Europe, just experienced wave after wave of horrendous attacks from the Vikings and Magyars and Muslims and so on.
And the church was really trying to hold things together at that point and preserve the knowledge and the degree to which we have those ancient texts is largely due to The monasteries, of which there were tens of thousands, maintaining the texts, copying the texts, and they were, of course, the internet of the time, so far as they could move information from monastery to monastery or when they would gather to meet.
So it prevented the...
The balkanization of Western thought was prevented, I would say, by Christendom.
But I think what's fascinating is the degree to which earlier religions and theologies, and some that even arose later, seem to block human reason and science in particular by putting forward the idea of animism, that the heavens are alive, seem to block human reason and science in particular by putting forward the idea of animism, that the heavens are alive, that as Aristotle And the reason that the ball drops is it wishes to rejoin with the earth, it has desires.
And of course, you can't have a science of human beings, because human beings have sort of will and desires and the degree to which the universe was inhabited by living spirits in a sense.
I'm thinking of the druids and the dryads and the gods and the trees, and there are some cultures, you know, you have to apologize to the rock for moving it if you need to shift it while you plow.
But the idea that the consciousness in the universe is very much abstracted in the idea of God rather than present in each living thing.
Everything is alive.
And if everything is alive, you can't have science.
And I think that particular approach where consciousness was abstracted from individual entities to a general idea of God really helped people to explore the universe as something that God would have created to be objective and rational and consistent and universal in someone,
that the idea that you would get closer to the mind of the Christian God By studying the universals within science, and there was some tension between what the Bible said and what science said, but the general supposition, I'd say 12th century onwards, was to say, okay, if there's a conflict between evidence and the Bible, evidence holds sway, and we must figure out how to interpret the Bible so that it fits with the evidence, because the evidence is the manifestation of the will of God in the material world.
And human language, the language of the Bible, must be reinterpreted to be consistent.
That's very unusual compared to other religions and other belief systems where it's much more subjective.
And to say this is how it must be is to place a limit on a usually fairly capricious deity and say, well, that limits that deity's power.
Whereas consistency seems to feed the Christian deity because of consistency and universality.
I think that's a fantastic overview.
A couple of things.
What you call this animanistic principle, we call paganism, right?
I think the real argument here is between paganism and monotheism, and the way monotheistic religions, primarily Christianity and Judaism, before the modern age, a little bit more Islam, moved the ball in the direction you mentioned.
And I think that's something that – in my mind, I don't think in the modern world with all of our technology, I do not believe we're creating more atheists.
I really do think we're hearkening back to a paganistic worldview.
If you think about all the rhetoric of the global warmers, right?
I think about how Mother Earth guy is being destroyed by her children and we should nurture and protect her.
You think about the way modern progressives are – or even Obama declaring for president between two ancient Greek pillars, right?
And all those pictures that they had on Time Magazine in 2008 when he was running with the sort of halo behind him, right, of the lights.
There is a real sense – or it's the rise of the Nietzschean Superman, right?
This idea that the Superman is the one who transcends all morality, certain kind of immortality in that.
And so if you think about paganism, the argument then to me in history swings between you're either going to have some kind of a monotheistic system or more likely you're going to have a pagan one.
And the very inconsistencies you mentioned in paganism are exactly right.
It's what happened when pagan Romans deified pagan men as emperors and gods.
Those contradictions fell to pieces.
You have an incredibly remarkable – this is the Rome of Cicero and Plutarch and Tully, right?
The Greek Demosthenes, but you've got – Cicero and – I'm thinking of the famous Roman orator.
His name ran away – Quintilian.
You've got these great rationalist Romans all then doing the bitty.
Livy himself had to edit his own work because of what was going on with these emperors, and so that's where you see those contradictions.
In the other way, like you said, the Christian tradition, absolutely there have been contradictions between Scripture.
And there's a certain strain of modern evangelism, modern evangelical Christianity, that wants to say, because there are those tensions, we will no longer consider the science.
But that's very rare.
It was John Paul II himself who said, there can be absolutely no contradiction between science and reason.
The entire church was founded on reason.
The scriptures themselves are arguably some of the greatest documents in favor of rationalism.
The one thing that I would go a little bit one step further than what you said, At some point, though, reason can only take – reason is one aspect of the human animal, right, of the human creature.
Reason can take you up to the limits of faith, but if you're going to predicate faith solely on the basis of reason, the whole thing falls apart because then we get into the question of free will, right?
So biblically, I think you're right, that wherever in the Bible there are contradictions between science and scripture, I think that the effort is being made and should be made to try to sort those out.
But at the question of the level of belief in God, these are things that can never solely be answered rationally.
This is what Aquinas did so magisterially in the Summa Theologica.
He argued deductively from reason that if we posit the premise God exists, a premise, by the way, that we can't prove rationally.
And I make this argument, and Dostoevsky makes it too, if God was such that he could be If we could take a 50-foot Q-tip, swab a cloud, and grow god spores in a petri dish, that's all well and good, but it effectively is going to destroy free will.
I mean, if we can verify empirically across the board that there is a god, that he is lord over all, it really ratchets down the ability of people to choose otherwise.
That's one of the philosophical arguments that traces back a long way.
It's always been compelling to me that faith then is something that is not illogical.
Faith is always described as illogical or irrational by people who take the mindset of the one you expressed given the history of what they learned in school about the one-sided dialectic.
Christianity, religion in general, is just mindless superstition.
There's no rationalism there.
Christianity opposes all the sciences.
If you get beyond that for a second, there is that next step, though.
That reason, as important as it is, it's not the only way in which human beings access truth.
So there has to be more to it than that to get you to faith.
And you go back to Kierkegaard's formulation that reason can take you to the precipice of faith.
But the will still has to choose it, particularly in the absence of real empirical evidence of the kind modern science bases on truth solely.
Well, and it has struck me that the degree to which belief systems reject a deity is sometimes, though not always, the degree to which they reject free will.
So, for instance, the Marxists, famously atheistic, do reject free will to a large degree because I don't know that faith really answers that question, because...
Faith is the acceptance of a proposition without evidence.
But it certainly does build a shield around the concept of free will, which I consider enormously valuable.
I've had determinists on my show many times, twitch, twitch, twitch.
And it does become extremely problematic to have ethics, to have love, to have virtue, to have anything to aspire towards, that we basically are a bunch of rocks or boulders bouncing down a hill, crashing into each other, resting in certain places, and we can't take any credit for anything that happens.
So I am a staunch opponent of the concept of determinism for a variety of philosophical and personal reasons.
So to me, whatever is going to protect the concept of a free will and keep human beings from becoming these domino machines of each prior interaction, I'm a big fan of.
A few other things that I forgot to mention about the benefits of Christianity during the Dark and Middle Ages – Agriculture.
Of course, the monks, they didn't just sit there yamming-yamming to themselves.
They were very engaged in the community, very engaged in science.
There was a monk in the 11th century who managed to fly a glider 600 feet.
That was quite remarkable.
Machinery.
There was a monastery that produced a modern-style forge with extraordinary temperatures for melting metals.
They introduced industries.
They kept enhancing livestock with selective breeding techniques and so on.
There was an enormous amount of benefit from this concentration of generally the most learned and intelligent people, all of them interested in exploring God's bounty through science and reason and evidence and communicating all of this with each other through their various meetings and letters and missives and so on.
That fabric to hold together Western Europe in particular is something that I can't imagine getting the agricultural revolution, which was necessary for the industrial revolution, without the excess consumption.
To crop productivity at the Industrial Revolution, you can't have cities and therefore you can't have the excess labor that is required for industrialization.
So I don't think you could have had, without Christendom holding the West together between the fall of Rome and the rise of the Renaissance, I can't imagine how it could have occurred any other way, and I like to pay my debts.
So just a big thank you.
Shout out to the long-dead monks who were part of that whole process of holding together civilization, of spreading knowledge, and keeping the Western dream going and significantly enhancing it with greater degrees of universal rights and universalism than the Greeks and the Romans were ever able to achieve.
Yeah, I agree.
And to step back, the litany of the contributions of Christianity to Western culture are really pretty long.
Orphanages, for instance, the rise of public charities, hospitals, all the hospitals in the Middle Ages.
The idea of a hospital in the Middle Ages was really nothing that we would recognize.
It was something that evolved out of the Christian corporal virtues.
The modern day – that's why so many modern hospitals in the West are Christian organizations or Jewish organizations.
They're not necessarily state organizations.
But getting beyond that, the long litany of ways we should go back – And remember how much of modernity and how much of modern liberty, free will, liberty, right?
The idea that people govern themselves is absolutely attributable to the playing out of Christian thought over 2,000 years.
But stepping back to the free will question, I think it's absolutely important.
I think you're exactly right.
I think the problem's bigger than maybe we've stated so far.
It's not just that people are economically determined.
We've got a major problem here where you're either...
Increasingly from the biology, the biological sciences, the argument is coming that we are all genetically programmed or genetically determined.
You're angry, you're happy, you love, you hate simply because you're put together that way.
You're a pedophile simply because your genes put you together.
There's this new movement on now to declassify pedophilia as just one more alternative sexuality, right?
Like, I think we're going to get there, too.
So the idea that if we are all genetically determined, then you can't hold anybody accountable.
You can't really punish people.
You can't judge them.
On the other hand, you're getting from the sociologists all of this cultural determinism.
Not only are we biologically predilected in certain ways… Then our cultures inscribe us.
I see this at the university all the time.
We're completely swallowed up by determinism.
If that's true, there's no point in any ethics.
I think that's the reason why philosophy is more or less withering on the vine.
By taking away the rational ability to talk in broad generalizations about essential things, you've destroyed the very premises of philosophy.
What's replacing philosophy?
A kind of I'll give you one example in psychiatry.
It used to be that the psychologist, the psychiatrist, the psyche itself, the psychology means the study of the soul.
It's absolutely amazing to me when I ask my university students what does the word psychology mean, they tell me the study of the mind.
The idea that there is something, the soul, that unifies all the various aspects of the human body.
But psychology used to be about getting people – mythology, right?
Freud used the great myths of classical culture to try to talk about developmental conflicts in the human animal, this yoking of humanities and scientific investigation.
Look at what's happening in modern psychiatry.
It's increasingly becoming a branch of pharmacology, right?
It's not about really trying to get to personal, psychological, philosophical conflicts within people, bad ideas being worked out in bad ways in people.
It's all about brain chemistry now.
And so this idea that free will – because without free will, the whole gambit to me falls apart.
And I think what you said before is exactly right, that perhaps we owe free will, the protection of free will, the evolution of free will – The propagation of free will to the point that it creates a free society like you have in America.
We owe that perhaps more to the evolution of Christian thought working through various media over thousands of years than any other single force or factor out there.
And what are the consequences if that goes away completely?
Well, of course, this argument that comes out of the left that there's more material, environmental, cultural and economic determinism flies out of the window when they come across ideas that they find oppositional, at which point they wish to ban them and they wish to drive them away and they call people racist and sexist and homophobic and misogynistic, all of which are moral judgments that depend upon free will and...
They fall apart in that whole area.
And so I have, of course, really focused on free will.
It's power.
It's one of these things that if you don't accept the concept of free will, I believe you kind of do become deterministic in a way because you're bouncing off your emotions.
You become reactionary.
You become conformist because you've no higher ideal to fight or strive towards.
And...
It is one of these things that if you believe it, it becomes kind of true.
Also, if you lack self-knowledge, you know, the first commandment of Socrates was know thyself.
If you lack self-knowledge, if you don't know what motivates you or why, then you are more likely to fall into the pit of bouncing off and responding to immediate cues, which makes you more of a reactionary machine than a self-generated human being.
And what's remarkable to me is Socrates himself, Aristotle, they were believers.
They believed in transcendence.
They believed in a creator.
The remarkable thing about Aristotle that people don't think about much, yes, he's the first scientist, the first biologist, the first botanist, the first comparative anatomist, the first neonatologist, all those things.
But if you look at his greatest work, De Anima, What was he looking for?
His entire scientific classifications were based on the difference between creatures with souls and without souls, appsyche and emppsyche.
So, in other words, that the researches of the great scientific – because before the Enlightenment, science was a branch of philosophy.
We must stipulate that, right?
That they didn't – the ancients didn't differentiate philosophy and science the way they do.
We do.
We don't see them as discrete.
And the more we become scientific, the more scorn we heap.
On philosophical approaches to science.
But for the ancients, and this is well into the Enlightenment, philosophy was a – science was a branch of philosophy.
And in that regard, all the great philosophers of the Western tradition – and I go back before Christianity, both on the Hebrew and the classical side – all of their philosophy stemmed from the idea that the one thing we can postulate above all things is that there is a creator.
That, to them, was not just philosophy.
It was science.
And if you look at the unfolding of that kind of science, science mediated by philosophy for actually 4,000 years before the Enlightenment, it's remarkable what they did.
I mean, you got Descartes, you got Newton, you got the great sages, the philosophers, you got the great poets.
I mean, even Dante, the degree to which Dante's sociological, his physical construction of Hell in his poem is a scientific masterpiece.
It's the way that the two ways of seeing things, the philosophical and the rational, the way they intersected themselves, the sciences and the humanities, serving each other back and forth, we've lost that, and I think to the detriment of both the humanities and the sciences, because there are no humane checks now on that increasing determinism of science.
And it seems that this polarization of modern discourse, increased fragmentation, increased me versus you conversations that's so common in the modern world.
And they've always been fairly common in politics, of course, because that's very much a win-lose.
But the idea that discourse is a win-win, that we have a discussion, we both end up the wiser and the better.
As a result of that discussion, the idea that there is a great quote That was put together around...
We can't ever get into any truth without putting...
without masticating through our disputations to chew back and forth the ideas.
That conversations, if honorably engaged in and positively approached, is a win-win.
If you disprove something about me, I have gained.
I have gained a fact, an insight, a truth that I didn't have before.
So...
The setup in the non-Christian world, actually, let's just say the more atheistic world, the setup is that there are groups, I'm just thinking of Marxism in particular, there are groups, the capitalists and the workers, and it's dog-eat-dog-win-lose.
And the only way to win is to eliminate the capitalists, to elevate the workers to the status of capitalists, and there's...
It's the jungle.
It's the jungle.
And this is the thing for me.
When you remove the idea of God, again, the reality of God is something we're just going to leave to the side.
It's a matter of faith.
You take the idea of God off the table philosophically.
You remove that as a possibility.
It always goes back to the jungle.
It always comes down to power.
Look at our universities, these supposedly civilized, sophisticated places.
They're not.
They're places where power trumps everything.
What Black Lives Matter is looking for, what the feminists are looking for on campus, what the Marx, neo-Marx, they're not looking for equality.
They're not looking for dialogue.
They want power.
They don't want to level the playing field.
They want to flip it.
That's what they're after here.
And I think that the idea of God was so valuable.
And as the idea of God progressed philosophically from, let's face it, the pagan understanding of God, like you said at the outset, is really kind of simple-minded.
It's a kind of superstitious animism, right?
It's – and that's what's coming back now.
We're not creating more atheists here.
We're creating more pagans.
We're paganizing culture by getting rid of God.
I do believe – anthropologists have said enough.
There is something in the human animal that has been hardwired to seek or to crave or to require transcendence.
There seems – this is something – it couldn't – it can't not be the case because – Across cultures, across nations, across centuries, across millennia, this has been one of the very few universal things.
Even in our secular West, the desire for a kind of transcendence remains.
Now you've got all this cryogenic stuff, people who want to have their heads cut off.
Why?
Because they want to live for it.
They want to come back again.
I argue that this is both sociological and anthropological.
I think it's biologically true of us.
Why would we evolve that way?
The people murdered, the conquests, all this other stuff.
But if you're going to play that game, don't you have to say the same thing about the scientific revolution?
Why is it that we attribute the Crusades to Christians?
Although, as one of your shows pointed out, the whole thing is garbage anyway.
The Christians were responding to an oppressive force.
But we attribute the Crusades to Christianity, but we don't contribute World War II to scientism.
I mean, what's the first thing we did when we split the atom bomb?
When we split the atom, we built a bomb.
I was winding up my little screed here.
I like what General Omar Bradley said at the end of World War II.
He was giving a speech at a university and he said, "Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
We have conquered the atom and we have forgotten the Sermon on the Mount." I think that kind of philosophy, the philosophy of morality and love, is something that is hard to find in the jungle if that's all we've got left.
The idea of the soul as an analogy for the necessary empathy of like minds, or even unlike minds, which is where you need the most empathy is when you disagree with people, of course.
The idea that you meet God in the hearts and minds, even of people who don't believe in God, people who believe in a different religion and so on, I think is really fascinating.
Because as you point out, when we lose the empathy of viewing each other as having something in common that is above our ideas or that is deeper than our emotions, which I think would be the soul in the Christian formulation, does create the capacity to meet people you disagree with strongly does create the capacity to meet people you disagree with strongly and find common Because you will always share the spark of the divine, which is, I think, why the monks could find something valuable in non-Christian thinkers.
That taken away, and I don't know what can replace it.
I haven't found anything particularly satisfactory that has replaced it.
That taken away, I think, releases the monkey brain.
And the monkey brain, of course, is hardwired, and I think this is fairly established scientifically, is hardwired to want power.
To want power.
Because power is such a valuable thing if you are merely a biological entity seeking to reproduce its genetics, right?
If you look at Genghis Khan, that's like one in 20 people these days descended from Genghis Khan in certain places in the world.
And they've done these studies on various kinds of apes that when they climb up the hierarchy of power within the tribe, they get specific dopamine rewards.
They're like pellet rewarded with happy, joyful feelings.
And it's apparently more addictive than cocaine.
So our lust for power as bare forked animals, as is talked about in King Lear, our lust for power is counteracted with what?
And I think from what I've been reading, the idea of the soul is to say, I should not dominate you because we share so much.
See, and I don't think reason is enough.
I don't think reason – the rational argument, the solely rational argument is we should give in to what we are.
We're making that argument across the board.
If you're born with certain urges or desires, you should follow them.
There should be no check on our appetites because we're animals.
I think reason can't answer the question you just raised.
Give me one little microcosmic example of this.
How about race relations?
You look at the 40s, 50s, and 60s when people like Martin Luther King – and the irony is that King is always Dr.
King.
He's never the Reverend King anymore.
But King's whole philosophy emanates from the Gospels, right?
And so the idea that in the classical liberalism used to argue that racism was wrong because under the skin we're all the same because essentially we all have the same soul.
We are the same soul.
We're brothers under the skin and sisters because of the soul that transcends the body, the meaninglessness of skin color.
Look where you are now 50 years later.
You're in a world that believes none of that anymore.
He's Dr.
King, not Reverend King.
All those religious connotations and unifications of the soul are gone.
And now, to even suggest that we be colorblind is considered racist by progressives.
You must only see color.
So you can't see beneath the surface.
You are what you are superficially.
So to be African-American means there is absolutely nothing in common with anybody else.
That's why on our universities, we're increasingly gravitating to the position that women should be teaching women, that blacks should really be teaching blacks, that men have nothing to say to women.
Women can't possibly have anything to say enlightening the men.
And if you step back from that precipice of political correctness, you see that's exactly what you said.
This is the logical consequence.
I love the various formulations of it.
I love how Robert Brown called human beings the rational amphibian.
Like the amphibian has one foot in the water, one foot on land.
One foot spiritual and one foot rational.
Human.
I've seen way too much of human nature myself, and looking at history, I've seen way too much of this.
There's too much There's too much love and charity, too much empathy that comes from a non-rational place to simply dismiss the whole philosophy.
And let me also say this by way of closing my little point here.
If we distinguish between organized religions and the corruption of them, because humans corrupt every institution they're a part of.
I would challenge people.
Go back and look at the Gospels.
When you look at the way Christ worked out his philosophy and teaching, how Christianity basically conquered paganism without firing a single shot.
The idea that by Christ's philosophy of the soul and of God the Father, Christ's philosophy of charity based on that understanding… I think it's as powerful.
It may not be right.
I mean ultimately people have to decide that for themselves.
I believe it, but I understand why others would reject it.
But even if you reject the idea, what's wrong with it?
What exactly do you see in those ideas that would in any way, shape, or form demean human culture?
It seems very uplifting to me, understood the way it's understood.
But if you come at it from that perspective, that I've got to have a certain kind of empirical truth before I believe anything, not only are you not going to get very far in theology, you're not going to get very far in the laboratory either if you take that attitude.
And there are two formulations or approaches that came out of the Middle Ages that I think are really important with regards to faith and reason.
The first was that we push reason as far as we possibly can and keep pushing it and keep pushing it and keep pushing it.
Now, then if we get to something that after we have striven and tried and worked our fingers to the bone and sweated blood to get through, we can't get through, then we can start to consider faith.
And I think that aspect of that is not very well understood in the modern world.
Because in the modern world, it was like, well, there's this big giant egg of faith which grudgingly puts up with minor taps of reason like some little bird pecking on the side.
But that was not the formulation of Christendom throughout most of, at least in many places, throughout most of the early and middle ages.
We keep pushing reason.
And then only if we come up against something we can't solve with reason, then we can start to look to faith.
And the other one is 12th century St.
Thomas argued enormously that faith and reason were complementary, that they were not mental states that contradict each other.
And so he said if you have a contradiction between reason and faith, you're either doing something wrong in reason or you're doing something wrong in faith.
There must be a way for them to co-join.
And this lack of hostility between reason and faith It's fairly singular to Christianity, and it's hard to miss just how much under Christianity reason was able to progress compared to the, you know, if we look at largely secular or atheistic universities in the West now, reason is in full retreat, if not almost completely vanquished.
Yeah, and, you know, whether you go back to the ancient world where, again, all the great ancient philosophers, almost all of them, defaulted for their philosophy— I would go one step further, too.
We have rejected the idea that deductive reasoning gets us anywhere.
We have rejected the idea that if you come up with a concept, you can actually, without necessarily proving the concept, you can prove benefit from it.
The one formulation I would twist around a little bit from what you said, it's not that faith is the residue of what's left when reason runs out.
It's are you pursuing reason in conjunction with faith?
Are you open?
In other words, if you've shut off the whole potential for faith, if you've shut off the whole potential for an understanding that is non-rational, if you've shut that off like modern science has, you've closed doors.
The scientific mindset, as I understand it, is the one that suggests that all doors are open until they've been categorically proved false.
And no one's proven God false, and no one's proven false, the possibility that faith can really seriously impact lives for the better.
No one's proven any of these things false.
And I realize it's kind of a cat and a chicken and an egg argument.
They'll come back at you and say, well, why should I believe until I have reason to believe?
But the argument here is that we take a lot of things on faith.
Science takes a lot of things on faith.
The idea of the Big Bang was postulated.
Before it was ever really proven.
And I would argue it's not been proven to the point that they can call it law yet.
It's still an idea.
And there's still challenges to that idea.
And we don't know.
Just 10 years ago, we thought the world was 6 billion years old.
Now we're at 14.
And I don't dispute any of those numbers.
I'm not an astrophysicist.
I don't know.
But what I'm suggesting is that the idea of the Big Bang is being taught to our kids as if it's an absolute, unchallengeable scientific fact.
And the reality is it isn't.
My suggestion here is that there's a tremendous amount of faith, and maybe it's right, but there's a tremendous amount of faith in scientific argumentation as well.
There's a lot of arguments that science makes categorically that there's not enough empirical data to really justify making them the standard operating way we do things.
Again, I'm not dismissing any of those ideas.
I'm a rationalist to that degree as well.
I'm open-minded about it.
But the minute you cut off the possibility, That there can be transcendence, that this can be one of many worlds.
And yet science fiction is coming back at us right now, right?
And so even in our science fiction, we're imagining worlds beyond worlds.
And so C.S. Lewis, in his discussions with Tolkien, when Tolkien was trying to convert C.S. Lewis, Tolkien said, Jack, C.S. Lewis, his nickname was Jack.
Jack, you see everything in five dimensions, right?
Everything in five dimensions and four walls.
Those four walls, those five human dimensions, those are the walls of a prison house, Tolkien said.
What is it that allows us, animals imprisoned in materiality, what is it that allows us to imagine life outside the walls?
That was Tolkien's argument, right?
If we are like Plato's allegory of the cave, right?
We see the shadows on the wall.
We don't see what caused the shadows in our limited human understanding, but the shadows must point to something bigger.
Why do we have, of all the animals who've ever lived on this earth, why are we unique, almost unique, in the sense that we upper-level primates, we human beings, we have this ability to imagine life beyond the wall?
And is it an accidental?
And if you want to call it simply a consequence of evolution, then wouldn't you argue that we evolved it for a very useful, meaningful, necessary position?
Big questions, but The simply rational answer to them I found terribly unsatisfying.
Well, I'm going to say something relatively unpopular with some of my listeners at the moment, which is that statistically, science is not in a very Good place at the moment.
We can put some links to some articles below.
I was just reading them over the weekend.
Because there's science, the abstract discipline, which is a fine and wonderful thing.
But then there's the science that is owned for and paid for by the state.
And I would say that science is as corrupted by the state as we've talked earlier.
Certain religious tenets can be corrupted by organized religion.
And they've done experiments where they've tried to reproduce a wide variety of cancer treatment experiments and they can only reproduce a pretty small number of them in the field of psychology, which of course is a softer science.
In the field of psychology, there are studies, countless studies that simply can't I think we're good to go.
I think it becomes entirely corruptible, not to say that all scientists are corrupted, but there is a corrupting element when you have coerced money in the form of state subsidies and state funding, and then you end up following the agenda of politicians, and then you end up with groupthink, and you end up with all of these problems.
And so right now, science, it's hard to argue that science is in a better position than when it was being run by the monks.
Very well said.
I can see why that will get you in some trouble maybe with some of your listeners.
I'll go once.
Maybe if I'll say something more outrageous, take the heat off you.
Look, at my universities, I am around high – these are people with three, four graduate degrees, all PhDs.
Every single one of my colleagues believes in global warming, every single one – and yet I've asked them to name one climate study, to talk about one climate – just name one climate scientist for me.
Name one climate piece of research that you have read and digested.
They can't do it.
I mean I had one colleague.
We walked out of a building one day.
It was raining, and she goes, oh, this rain, global warming.
Six months later, I walked out of the building with her again.
Oh, all this heat.
Man, it's really global warming.
And so in the same way that the pure rationalist would argue that all religion is just mythology and superstition, I would argue that the scientific understandings of many Americans, of many people in the world who aren't scientists are pure mythology.
You have – what's emanating from the halls of science and what people believe are radically different things, and the same thing happened in the church.
The church had this relatively rational core.
But as it got disseminated and misrepresented, people who couldn't read the Bible, being told what it meant second and third hand, came up with all these screwy ideas.
Tell me that's not the same now.
My professor colleagues in English departments, they can't read climate science and understand it.
Yet they're 100% convinced of its veracity.
What is the palpable difference between those two things?
Right, right.
And where does Christianity get the credit for slowing and even abolishing some of the horrendous abuses in the ancient world?
I'll just list a few, but these are things that did not really come through my secular education.
Infanticide.
Ancient Greece and ancient Rome infanticide was common, to the point where the male population in the ancient Roman world outnumbered the female population at times by 30%, you know, and truly worse than China proportions, I guess.
How about the butcheries that took place in the gladiatorial arenas were stopped by emperors in Rome after the emperors, of course, converted to The codification of not just international law but domestic law was changed.
The idea that you would go to court to respond to allegations against you, it replaced things like duels.
It replaced things like the boiling water test.
You've got to reach in to take out, then they bind you up, and if it's infected a week later, clearly you're guilty.
It was the feud combat to resolve disputes and so on.
This Oh, let's not forget slavery, which was a Christian mission for decades and decades and decades, finally achieved by Christian countries, not for their own particular benefit, but spending untold amounts of blood and treasure to end the practice of slavery, not just within Christendom, but worldwide, because, of course, there is commonality with the soul to all human beings.
So, you know, you'll hear about, obviously, things like, you know, the torturing of Galileo.
You'll hear about the Inquisition, although it's generally exaggerated.
And yes, without a doubt, these things are bad.
But again, you have to have a balanced view.
Looking at the good that Christianity did with regard, oh, not to mention, of course, in the 16th century, 17th century, when the mistreatment of the Indians in the New World came through.
There's a great crisis of conscience and great debates that they have a soul and that we should not compel them and we should negotiate with them.
This all occurred at a time When, for most countries and most cultures, conquest was like, woohoo!
We won!
Sucks to be you!
Give us your women!
This sensitivity to conquest and to settlement was, as far as I know it, fairly unique to Christendom, and we think that this sensitivity is modern, but this was hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
And why is nobody demanding Islam give back the Hagia Sophia, right?
I mean, the greatest...
Byzantine Christian Church was conquered by Islam.
They turned it into a temple.
That's it.
Sucks to be you.
We won.
Meanwhile, in the West, we're demanding everything has to be given back.
It has to be reapportioned.
We need reparations for this.
I can't think of another nation that we did what we did to the Native Americans, and we certainly haven't completely redressed that, but I mean, we've given them a nation within a nation.
We've recognized tribal rights.
Who else has done that?
I mean, so, okay, yes, we haven't done enough, but who's even come anywhere near close to doing that?
And here's One thing that we haven't discussed yet that gets me.
Christianity as a philosophy is rationally correct to me in this regard, and it's an important regard.
Christianity argues that every human heart is capable of good and evil.
Every human being is capable of better and worse, right and wrong, true and false.
That is a hallmark of Christian thinking.
It's true of classical thinking as well, but it's a hallmark of Christian thinking.
Since we've jettisoned that, notice what's happened here.
Some people are pure-hearted and others not.
We no longer believe that everybody's capable of evil.
If you're African American, for instance, in a university setting, you cannot be racist because of the power structures against you.
If you're poor, if you're the 99%, you can't be greedy.
It's only that 1%.
What's happened now that we've jettisoned Christianity, not only are you jettisoning the soul, Not only are you jettisoning transcendence, not only are you jettisoning free will, you're also jettisoning this idea that we are all morally in our hearts capable of choosing one way or another.
So we have entire demographics now who are innocent no matter what they do.
Other demographics, white privilege studies that we're teaching kindergarteners now.
No matter what you do, if you're Caucasian, you are guilty of all of this litany of sins.
This is regressive.
This is not progressive.
This is anti-rational.
It's not rational.
This is racism and bigotry masquerading as progressivism.
And there's no excuse for it other than the fact that they have more power now in many of our cultural institutions than the preceding Christian or Judeo-Christian worldviews do.
And it's a power thing.
We won.
You lose.
So effectively, the progressives are telling you suck it.
You're white, you're guilty.
You're black, you're innocent.
You're rich, you're evil.
You're poor, you're a victim.
This is what we're doing now across culture.
And all the things that classical liberalism used to fight against, now they're embracing.
Discrimination, segregation, all this stuff.
Keeping people apart from each other.
Reducing people to their gender, their sex, their skin color.
That's what we're doing now in the name of progressive rationalism.
A simple reading of the Gospels.
Whether you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God or not, a simple reading of the Gospels should tell you you can't do it.
It took us 2,000 years to abolish slavery in the West.
And we did it – most of the abolitionists in the 19th century were Christians because their worldview demanded it.
You have nothing corresponding on the rationalist side.
When I find these reasonable people who don't believe in anything insisting again and again and again it's rational to love your neighbor, I ask them why and they never have an answer.
They always default to – and tell me you haven't heard this, Stefan.
They always devolve to the cultural contract, the social contract.
We agree not to hurt each other because in the long run we can work together.
Well, that works when you're on this side of things.
But what if I've got all the cards and you don't?
Why should I give them up for you when at this particular moment it's the jungle mentality I can take from you?
And the Hitlers and the Stalins and the Maos all used the social contract to gain power.
And then when they gained power, what did they do?
They took it away from everybody else.
That seems to be the norm when you look at how these things play themselves out culturally.
Well, and of course, the question of the social contract is fine, but the social contract is really only necessary when one person doesn't agree with it, right?
I mean, if everybody agrees with some particular contract, which is impossible, of course, but if everyone agrees with it, if everyone says, okay, thou shalt not steal, okay, then everything's fine, but the whole reason you have thou shalt not steal is because people are going to want to steal, because it's easier to steal than it is to create, And so because of that, people are going to want to steal.
And so the question of how you enforce rules when people are tempted to break rules.
Now, of course, for people who are more secular, you would make the case that all living creatures wish to maximize resource consumption while minimizing resource expenditure, which makes it perfectly sensible to steal.
Sort of in an amoral resource maximization standpoint.
If some guy has just sweated for three days to create a loaf of bread and you could just go and grab it from the table, well, it takes you five seconds for what he took three days.
So why would you not want to do that?
Well, then there's a balance, right?
If everyone steals, nobody produces, and then everyone starves to death.
But the fewer people who steal, the more valuable it is to be a thief, right?
Then this is why it's hard to eliminate from a sort of resource maximization standpoint.
So, of course, in the Christian worldview, the reason you don't steal is because God will see you and you will be punished.
And you will stain your soul and you will harm your conscience and all that kind of stuff.
And what is the alternative in the more secular world?
Again, when we don't have rational ethics – I mean, I've done a whole book on rational ethics.
People can check it out at freedomainradio.com slash free – But given that that's not exactly permeated human consciousness net to the degree that the Bible has, what do we do with people who don't want to keep the social contract?
And the answer as to the question of immorality remains relatively loosey-goosey in the secular world because there's a limitation on free will.
A lot of times they would say, well, you know, it's upbringing, it's environment, Or they're stealing because they don't have enough money, so we'll use the power of the state to take from this group and give to this other group, and that will solve the problem, which of course it hasn't, because all you're doing then is rewarding people who aren't being productive.
By taking from people who are productive, you're putting a tax on productivity, and you're subsidizing money.
And then you can see the effects that that has had multi-generationally on the poor in America.
It's absolutely disastrous.
So the enforcement mechanism, one of the powerful things about Christianity, is the enforcement mechanism is called the conscience and is called The carrot of heaven, to put it in perhaps too silly a way, but the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell, that allows the implantation of morality into people's minds who aren't philosophical, right?
It's the carrot and the stick.
And it also minimizes the desire.
For those who are consistent, it minimizes the desire or the morality of using force against others.
Because when you use force against others, you're diminishing their free will, which diminishes their capacity to make good moral choices and therefore get into heaven.
So the initiation of force drives more people into hell or, I guess, in certain formulations, into limbo.
And therefore, you are doing evil by initiating the use of force.
And all of these formulations are very powerful.
And I don't know a way, and I've been working for, of course, many decades in my private life and about 10 years in a public life, I don't know how to get people to follow those social contracts simply through reason and evidence, as yet.
I mean, maybe over time, but there is an answer in Christianity that is quite powerful.
And when Christianity was at its strongest, there was a significant amount of progress in human life.
And now Christianity is fading in the West, and we have a huge debt.
I mean, national debt is another thing if you run that through.
The Christian argument, then, I think the national debt would be, well, it's wrong to steal from the unborn.
It's even worse to steal from the unborn than it is to steal from the adults, because at least the adults can put a lock on something or fight back or vote.
But by putting multigenerational national debt and unfunded liabilities in the mix, you are stealing from the unborn, and that is...
For something like a national debt, which is so advantageous politically.
Money printing.
There were 13th and 14th century scholastics in Christianity, monks and so on, who talked about the degree to which it was immoral to print money.
It was immoral to invoke Gresham's Law when you overvalue or undervalue the ratio of certain gold and silver and so on.
That's going to drive all the good currency out of circulation and you're going to end up with the sort of late Roman crap floating around.
And they had specific and foundational moral reasons for this that We're supposed to lean against the obvious practical and political expediency of going through debt and going through money printing because that gives people the illusion you can give them stuff for free because the debt is kicked down the road and inflation gives people the illusion that they have more money for a brief amount of time.
How do we push back against that without an enforcement mechanism external to human beings?
I don't have an answer to that.
I know that Christianity does, though.
It does, and let's stipulate here that the carrot and the stick argument is but the lowest common denominator.
For those of us living throughout history who can understand nothing more than a reward or a slap, you at least have that in place.
But the vast majority of Christians who've ever lived have thought about it on higher levels than that, and most people don't just simply say, boy, I really would take that if you wouldn't punch me.
If you look at the working – what we're not talking about is how Christianity, too, intellectually – Has fleshed out beyond the carrot and the stick.
You start with the carrot and the stick.
Then you flesh out all these.
Again, go back to Dante's Inferno.
It is a shockingly psychological estimation of what are the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual consequences to the individual of choosing lust or greed or envy.
It's worked out very, very rationally, logically, and based on experience and observation, not just made up out of whole cloth.
He's one of our great psychologists, Dante.
But here's my way of summing it up, too.
In the modern world, the postmodern world, as God has receded, as free will goes away, notice what's happening.
We're looking for truth on smaller and smaller levels.
The primary method of the modern world is to deconstruct things.
In literary English departments, deconstructive methodologies, right?
To take them apart.
We are not looking – the human animal, right?
We have broken him all the way down to his genome now, and we're piecing apart that.
We're looking for the broadest truths now by going deeper and deeper and smaller and smaller.
There really is, I think, a sense that you can lose sight of the forest for the trees.
Our culture is completely deconstructive.
It is focused on not just trees, not bark, not sap, but the little protoplasmic cells that make up wood.
We're so focused on the reductive that we've lost absolute sight of the bigger picture.
And what Christianity has reminded us, Judeo-Christianity, what the Greeks and Romans reminded us consequently, what our ancients were all in unison about, is that the minute you choose the trees over the forest, you got yourself in trouble.
The minute you insist on the forest and ignore the trees, you got trouble.
We're in a world now that has absolutely microparsed the tree to the degree that all the larger structures that perhaps may help us make sense are gone.
And that's why if we go back to Dante, Dante's inferno begins when Dante gets lost in a dark wood.
He loses himself, right?
And this idea that we need the macro as well as the micro, that we work best when we recognize our animal natures and we recognize that there's something more to us than that.
If you make us just animals… You shouldn't be the least bit surprised that we become more greedy, more envious, more lazy, more willing to take.
What you said is exactly right.
I don't see another mechanism where you can convince an animal that it doesn't happen in the animal kingdom.
Where do lions throw themselves in front of hordes of other hyenas to save the gazelle?
It doesn't happen.
And they've even reduced maternal instinct.
The mother bird who fights the owl for her baby – well, most of the times, the mother birds don't fight to the point that they get killed, by the way.
They'll fight, fight until they can, then they leave.
But even that now has been reduced to instinct.
There's no love there.
There's no sacrifice there.
If that's the world – and we are.
We're pushing on people.
How can you expect them to care about the – how do you tell people they have no meaning, that their lives ultimately end when, as Dostoevsky says, the burdock grows over their grave and that's the end of them?
I think we're good to go.
But the question of whether or not people would be better off believing or not, that I think, you made that case too, that I don't see anything else to replace it.
And it's more humane.
If I take anything away from our conversation, the history of Christianity is much more humane than current educators and thinkers give it credit for, even though you have huge blips.
Yeah, no, listen, I mean, I feel like when I first started studying the history of the free market and capitalism, as opposed to everything that I had been told about, you know, this dark satanic mills, these Dickensian horrors and exploitation and beatings and so on, when I actually read about the history of capitalism, it was extraordinarily different, if not downright the opposite of what I had been taught.
And in doing research, and I just wanted to recommend a book that I found very good, I just feel like I just sold a bill of goods, And I got sold a very false, if not reversed, view of some of the benefits of Christianity.
And of course, you know, we can't argue the truth of something necessarily by its effect.
So all of this, you know, the question of the existence of God remains something that we're not talking about in this particular forum.
But what I do want to do is to point out that there's a richness in the history that I think is largely absent from academia in general, because the leftists who are generally more secular and often anti-religious have taken over, you know, the academy, the media, the newspapers, entertainment the academy, the media, the newspapers, entertainment industry, I mean, you name it.
And that's why I think you're getting this kind of story.
Because certainly leftism and Christianity are not natural bedfellows, in my opinion, because of materialism versus free will.
Because of appetite versus transcendence.
And I just invite people to look into the history and get something a little bit richer because we have been taught to be ashamed of our histories.
We have been taught to be ashamed of the West.
We've been taught to be ashamed of the market and ashamed of Christianity and so on.
And that is a great tragedy and it weakens us considerably.
It is a hack at the base of our moral and intellectual strength.
You don't have to be a Christian to recognize the value of Christianity and the fact that you have absorbed that heritage is, I think, a blessing rather than a curse as it is so often portrayed.
And that's really what I wanted to kind of get across in this conversation.
I think it's wonderfully said, and I'll close by saying the modern world, absent all the things that have gone away, you know, God, faith, the superstructures of theology and belief, the modern world wants absolute freedom without any consequences.
And those are two things that you can't have.
If you sum the Bible up, you sum the whole of Christian tradition up, you sum more or less the whole of world religion up, theology up for 5,000 years.
It comes down to that, doesn't it?
That you can't be free.
And be without consequences in your culture, right?
That they don't go together.
You can be free without consequences, or you can have consequences and no freedom, but they don't go together.
And the story of Christianity, the story of Christ, is the story of genuine freedom comes from a recognition of consequence.
And call it heaven hell, call it carrot stick, call it true false, call it life and death, call it the jungle versus civilization.
I think all of those are fair.
The reality is, as we've talked about today, Can they exist in the current climate?
Everything tends towards the jungle now.
Nothing tends towards the consequence.
So unlike you, I don't see – maybe they will.
Maybe reason will conquer in 100 years.
Maybe they'll come up with some formulaic way of doing it.
Maybe they'll be able to medicate people into behaving the way they want them to be.
But then again, should that day ever come, we're back to the dystopia, right?
No, pretty well.
No free will.
We'll see.
Well, thanks a lot, Dr.
Pesta.
Always a great chat, and I hope that people find it enlightening.
I look forward to your comments below.
Just a reminder to people, of course, is the academic director of Freedom Project Academy.
This is the live online school, which you can find at fpeusa.org.
Thanks again so much.
I hope we can do this again soon.
This was a lot of fun.
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