Dec. 30, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:16:26
3545 What Jesus Christ Said | Duke Pesta and Stefan Molyneux
What happens when you get an atheist and a christian together to discuss the teachers of Jesus Christ, where they agree and where they disagree? Stefan Molyneux and Dr Duke Pesta discuss why Christianity promotes free will, compulsion in matters of virtue, the politicization of modern religion, why atheism trends towards collectivism and much much more!Dr. Duke Pesta is a tenured university professor, author and the Academic Director of FreedomProject Academy, a Live Online School offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in Kindergarten through High School. For more from Dr. Duke and the FreedomProject Academy, please go to: https://www.fpeusa.orgFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Back with a good friend, Dr.
Duke Pester, a tenured university professor, author, and the academic director of Freedom Project Academy.
So for those of you who contact me saying, where can I get quality education online?
Check it out at fpeusa.org.
It's a live online school offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school.
And again, fpeusa.org.
Dr.
Pester, how are you doing?
Very good.
Good to be with you again, Stephan.
So we're going to talk about the ethics of the Gospels, the Sermon on the Mount, and what the man himself, what Jesus actually said, because there is, of course, a challenge.
And I just did this video on...
Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
And everyone's like, yeah, well, America did bad stuff too.
And it's like, no, no, one at a time.
And so when you have an ideal versus the people who enact that ideal, it is a challenge.
We need to separate those two, although we can't separate them completely.
Because one of the, whenever I talk about communism and, you know, everyone gets Nazism was a terrible immorality.
But communism is a bit more of a challenge for people because I think there's so many lefties in the media who refuse to name the beast.
But they say, well, that wasn't real communism.
However, if every single time communism is enacted, you end up in a general totalitarian slaughterhouse.
It may be that the next time you do it, it's not going to, you know.
If you keep rolling snake eyes on the dice, they might be loaded just a little bit.
So we do want to separate the ideals from the enactors, because to find a negative example of an ideal or of a moral system is not in and of itself a reason to reject that moral system, like finding a Finding a fat guy who followed a particular diet doesn't invalidate that diet.
However, if everyone who follows that diet gets fat, maybe that would be something else.
So I don't want to separate the two completely, but we also don't want to make the mistake of...
It's basically an ad hominem.
I found a bad example of this particular approach to life.
And therefore, the approach to life is invalidated.
So that we're going to talk about the abstracts, and we're going to talk about the fallibility, of course, of human beings in pursuing moral ideals, because that needs to be discussed as well.
So that's sort of my general roundabout intro.
What are your thoughts on where we're going to head?
I think it's well said.
And, you know, coming at it from my angle, as somebody who finds himself defending Christ to non-Christians without wanting to do it, I'm not the kind of person that wants to proselytize.
I don't seek people out and try to change their mind.
But I do get, in many of our previous talks about Western culture, for instance, the history of the Catholic Church, many of our previous talks have had a similar bent to them.
And I find a sort of an irrational argument from people arguing that reason is the only way for human beings.
That what we need is a new enlightenment.
We need to reject mythology.
We need to reject religion.
We certainly need to reject the Christian history.
The disconnect I find is that very often they are condemning foolish Christians or the behavior of some Christians at the expense of what Christ actually said.
And what I'd like to talk about today with you, and I think this is part of what you just said, is is there anything ethically or morally, philosophically about what Christ did say and what he did that is incompatible with reason?
See, I don't think it is, but we can talk about that.
And this argument, like you said, the ad hominem.
I will say to begin our conversation that Christ made the same distinction you just made.
He was absolutely 100% as hard on his own followers as he was on anybody else.
Over and over again, he called out his own disciples for not understanding him, for choosing the weak way and not the strong one, unlike something like communism, which you mentioned.
And they're not comparable arguments to me because communism was always based in a utopian ideal, an ideal that by following the precepts of Marx, by following the precepts of the communist revolution, you are absolutely going to usher in a universal harmony.
That the whole system was in and of itself complete, and all it was going to take was the working out through time and the accretion of power to make it go.
So from the very beginning, Christ warned us that not only were all men inherently sinful, that utopia was impossible for human creatures, however rational they may become.
He also warned his own followers that they were never going to get this right.
So what he was offering was an ideal, right?
An ideal to follow, not necessarily a model that was going to fix everything.
And if we understand that, then I think we don't have quite a problem We're good to
go.
Christian churches, which most people can readily tell you what's wrong, but they don't tell you all the positive impacts of those things as well.
So let's, I think, in general, these kinds of discussions, let's start in the areas we're probably closer in agreement, and then I'll talk about some of my divergences.
The one thing that, in thinking about this conversation, Dr.
Pastor, the one thing that I was really going through my mind was the question of free will and the corruptibility of human nature.
Because it's not an accident, I think, that the Christianity plus the Greek or Roman tradition plus the Enlightenment and so on has resulted in the kinds of societies with smallest governments, with most political freedom, with most economic freedom, the kind of countries that everyone wants to get in and then destroy, but that's probably a topic for another time.
But the question is why?
And I think if I sort of took a first run at it and get your thoughts on it, briefly what I would say is this.
That Christ repeatedly says it's not virtuous if you don't choose it.
Well, it's not virtuous if you're doing it for the wrong reason.
Like if you're out there publicly proclaiming and praying loudly in public so everyone figures out how pious you are, it's not virtuous.
If you're doing it as a show, as a charade, as a virtue signaling, he would have a big problem with that, everyone tweeting about how great they are at the expense of everyone else.
So an action to be virtuous must be chosen, and therefore there should be no compulsion in matters of virtue.
And of course, that goes very much against where a lot of atheists drift towards, which is a kind of socialist central planning and control of humanity through the force of the state.
So I think that aspect, to leave people free, to succeed or fail within the support of their own community as they can do so best in their interests.
Number one.
Number two is that the thing I get out of Jesus as well is this question of the fundamental flaws of humanity, the temptations of humanity, original sin and its aftermath of the temptation to the devil.
We always say power corrupts, absolute power tends to corrupt, absolutely.
But we say it like a platitude, and then we're like, hey, let's get the government to run healthcare.
And it's like, which is it?
So I think that the need for voluntarism, for ethics to manifest in the world, ethics being the ticket to heaven, you need to have the choice in order to be ethical.
And That, in and of itself, is going to limit the amount of power that we're going to provide to the state, because if the state forces you to do good, they're actually not allowing you to do good.
It destroys the kind of thing.
It's like trying to grab a candle flame.
The moment you put your hand around it, it tends to go out.
So that combined with the suspicion of secular power that comes out of original sin, I think has combined, is one of the two elements that have combined to help create such successful and free societies.
So that I think is unrecognized or under recognized in the atheist community.
I agree.
You know, as Ayn Rand, I believe, who said, when will people realize that the smallest minority in the world is the individual?
I believe that Christ, the man, was the greatest revolutionary on behalf of the individual the world has ever seen.
And never once do you get an articulation of individuality from Christ that defaults to the collective.
It's never collective morality.
It's always the one-on-one.
Christ is always speaking to individuals about their personal choices.
The beautiful, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, is Christ's way of saying, governments will do what governments will do.
This coin that you present me, if it's got Caesar's face on it, give it back to him.
The whole question of whether or not we should conscientiously pay taxes.
The argument was always an individual argument, radical individualism with Christianity, and I think that is to me a very powerful argument.
Christ Even when he was talking to groups, multitudes, he always taught the morality of the individual, that it's your choice.
And we all have – all of our choices are circumscribed.
Sometimes it's by government.
Sometimes it's by the church we belong to.
Sometimes it's by the friends we hang out with.
All of our disabilities and handicaps, our economic status, all of us have these kind of things.
Yet, we still are obligated at the core to choose within the limits of our scope, whatever we are limited by, to choose right and wrong virtue and vice better and worse, truer and falser.
And I think that's where the strength of the system comes from.
So I agree with you wholeheartedly that that's completely missed now.
As Christianity became more powerful, as the church, rightly understood, became not just a theological and a pastoral organization, but also a political one.
Then, of course, more power accrued to it, and that's where you begin to see the corruption in the church, right?
And any church, I think, that has that kind of political power that is lobbying for things that have little to do with the kingdom of heaven, as Christ called it.
You're going to get these confusions.
Christ, of course, I think of that great time that Christ, when Peter, St.
Peter, was pressuring Christ to become more of a political figure.
To get involved more with revolutionary action politically on the ground, Christ turned around to him and rather savagely said, get behind me, Satan.
You don't understand my ministry.
So with the churches at its best, like you said, when they are lobbying for individual conscience and the guidelines as laid out by Christ for Christians, when on the other hand it begins to partake in political power, When it begins to amass wealth over and above its need,
when it begins to become systematized and interlocking networks of organizations, we shouldn't be the least bit surprised that the kinds of corruption you see in every other, including rationalist forms of government that we've seen, that every other human vice is going to creep in.
And again, I default back to the point that Christ exactly saw that happening, warned his own followers about it, and when you see it, The question becomes, and we'll get to it later, you brought it up really well at the beginning of our segment.
The question becomes, because many Christians have done bad things, does that negate what he said and did?
Is it like other isms?
How do we draw the one-to-one comparison?
We'll get to that a little bit later, I think, though.
I have been criticized for many years as an atheist for using the term soul, but I think it is an essential term.
And for this basic reason, there's no collective soul.
There's no such thing as a collective soul.
And I think this speaks to...
The individualism that comes out of Jesus' teachings, that you are responsible for the shepherding of your own soul, that there's no soul—like, you can love your neighbor, but you don't share the afterlife fate of your neighbor because you are responsible for shepherding your own soul to God's embrace.
And that, to me, is very important.
The atheist view tends to—and I've got a whole, you know, what annoys me about atheist video, which we can link to below, and I've got lots of data behind this to support it— But the fact that they tend to lean towards collectivism is because the body is fairly indistinguishable from person to person.
You know, there's a little taller, a little hairier, a little balder, a little fatter, a little thinner, but not the kind of dimensions of genius.
For instance, that, you know, Albert Einstein wasn't just a 50 times better physicist than I am.
I mean, there's a scale of human achievement and endeavor and aspiration that is not reflective in the body.
And the materialism that atheism tends towards tends to view people, you know, as King Lear said, you know, this bare forked animal, you know, just like the kid's drawing of the lollipop head and the stick arms and the stick legs.
There is this collectivism and this idea that we have this thing called society, which we should subjugate ourselves to.
The soul specifically rejects that, that you are responsible to your conscience and that there's nothing bigger than yourself that you can blend into or hide to achieve moral virtue.
It is dependent upon your own choices and your own willpower.
Yeah, I think that's well articulated.
This idea that the individual soul is primary, and I think that what you mean by soul too, obviously Christianity has its own historical view of what the soul is.
Atheists are going to part company with the idea that there's something immortal about the individual that will go on, that there is the reality that is heaven and hell.
That's going to be a hard sell anyway without faith.
But I think this idea that there is an ethos in every individual human being, that is bigger than them.
To be fully human, it requires something more than just our rational thought and our animal appetites.
There's a lot of great quotes.
One of the quotes that John Paul II said back in 1998, I think it was, in his encyclical letter, he made the argument.
He said, science can purify religion from error and superstition, but religion can purify science from idolatry and from false absolutes.
I think that was a beautiful statement.
It was a very harmonious one.
There's no doubt that science, by definition, as a rational – if indeed God exists, then God is responsible for the creation of reason, too.
Reason the science's empirical understandings can certainly purify religion from error, superstition, and foolishness.
But we have to recognize, too, I think, for the complete human being, that the flip side has to be true.
This is what I think is missing from the modern discourse, what John Paul said, that religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
You think about what we've talked about before on your show, how environmentalism has become a false religion.
So much of what the atheist left, let's call them, claims to believe has elevated to the level of God.
What Chesterton's quote, whether he said it or not, we don't know, is attributed to him, that if you do not believe in God, you do not believe in nothing, you will believe anything.
The human organism, the human animal, anthropologically, needs to elevate something to the God slot, to that place in our consciousnesses.
More anthropologists and sociologists now are making that argument as well, that there is something in us that needs to worship in a way.
The idea that religion I mean, science devoid of religion, certainly devoid of humanistic understanding, but the idea that you're talking about here, this concept of the soul, however you want to phrase it in an atheistic or non-Christian context, it's still there, I think.
You can get rid of religion, but you can't get rid of that.
And one of the benefits of having that sensibility and teaching to it, trying to inculcate it in people and awareness of it, is the idea that it can purify, it can make science better, too.
The backing us off from this idea, all the great Novels of the 20th century, how many of them have been dystopias, warning us about too rational and scientific an understanding, right?
From Kesey's One Flew the Cuckoo's Nest to 1984 and on and on and on.
And I think the religious understanding, not necessarily going to church, the religious understanding, I think, can really pull science back from the brink of both idolatry, right?
Deifying what the Old Testament says.
You boil the entire Old Testament down to the first commandment.
I am the Lord your God.
You shall have no false gods before me.
In the absence of quote-unquote God or something to fill that slot, science and reason, we have been deifying that for about 150 years now.
One of the negative consequences of the Enlightenment is the swing of the pendulum so far away from anything that wasn't purely rationalistic, and it's impossible to deny that the great tyrannies of the 20th century were really promulgated by people who were either atheists, number one, Or rationalists who saw religion, the mythic power of religion to control people.
Hitler and his occultism, the complete disavowal of God by the communists who then elevated their leaders.
We'll look at Kim Jong-un in North Korea who's treated de facto like a god, right?
These things are true and I think that this religious thing we call it, whether it's the soul or it's this collective sensibility that we have as individuals, that there's something beyond the rational for us.
I really think that religion Could help us tame and neuter a little bit the worst excesses of the radical science in the same way that science can benefit religion that way as well by purging it of superstition.
For me, the first place that I start to look for the emotional attraction, and that's not a strong enough word, the deep connection between concepts in religion and what actually exists materially or empirically leads me to this basic idea around why the soul is such a common and powerful idea and how it actually might serve humanity.
When I sort of look at myself...
I partake of eternity, whether I like it or not.
And by that, I simply mean something vastly beyond my own individual life.
I'm a manifestation of a life process that has gone on for billions of years.
Like, as far as this chain goes, like, I'm a tiny link in a huge chain that stretches back all the way to the beginning of the universe.
And so...
The form, the content, the capacities that I have as a material, biological, organic being are vastly larger than my individual life.
And that partaking of eternity, I think, is really important.
I mean, it's a kind of a cliche, but, you know, everything that I am made up of was once in the heart of a star that exploded and spread across the universe and so on.
So the matter has been around for billions of years.
The life processes which allow me to be animated and have thoughts have been around for billions of years.
And even more specifically when it comes to language and culture and thought, I am like one little snowflake on top of a mountain of accumulated knowledge, accumulated language skills, accumulated definitions.
Every word that I choose...
I've tried to make up a few, and they've had varying degrees of being taken.
But all the language that I use has been invented by other people and handed down to me.
The capacity to reason, the organization of thought, the capacity to rationally debate, the capacity to understand my relationship between consciousness and the senses, you know, this wetware pound of self-reflection and its connection to the outside world.
So much has been handed to me That the composition of myself, of my identity, of my thoughts, of my capacities, of my potential, is like a giant ball that has been rolling for billions of years that manifests in me as it manifests in billions of others.
And I think that sense of humility that comes from this intimation that my individual life is an eruption from basically eternity relative to sort of my maybe 100-year lifespan.
I mean, billions of years is functionally an eternity.
And the emotions that I have received, the emotions that animate me, all the way down to the deep lizard brain, which comes from reptiles from billions of years ago and so on.
And this does not...
The challenge is, of course, then to think, well, I'm not an individual.
I am.
I am an individual, but understanding how much...
Of who I am is inherited from eternity and hopefully, if I live my life right, will influence others going forward for as long as there are human beings who wish to think and reason.
I am a tiny link in a giant chain, and finding a way that that does not diminish me but elevates me is the great challenge.
And I think that the soul represents that basic understanding of where we stand relative to the past and future eternities that we hopefully will participate in.
I think that's brilliantly said.
And I would argue you just defined metaphysics perfectly.
Oh, good.
That was on my list of things to do today.
So, chat with Duke Pastor, define metaphysics perfectly.
Yay!
I love it when I check those things out.
Let me explain what I mean.
I mean, physics, the second part of metaphysics is physics.
It starts in the location of us in the physical world.
The meta is simply this reach, this inherent human reach for something, though, beyond mere process.
We recognize the process, but there's something in your life, my life, our lives, that seeks for and really does participate, I think, in something that is more than just simple raw evolution.
There is something, a collective consciousness, there's an ethos, there is a human nature that supersedes mere physical process in the same way that the automobile is much, much more than just rubber, aluminum, There's something about a car that's ethos is bigger than just what it materially is.
So much more is that true of the human animal.
Having said that, this idea of metaphysics then, once we're there, and you call it the soul, or we can make up any word we want for it, call it the soul.
That right then puts us beyond physics, and that's the metaphysical argument.
I think, again, I'll quote John Paul one more time.
From that same argument in 1998, he said, Belief, right?
Belief in something metaphysical.
Belief is often humanly richer than mere evidence because it involves an interpersonal relationship and brings into play not only a person's capacity to know, but also the deeper capacity to entrust oneself to others, to enter into a relationship with them that is intimate and enduring.
I think what you said is exactly what John Paul just said, that the community, this is where, it's not that the collective doesn't matter.
The collective works best when it is comprised of radical individuals choosing radically good as much as they can with their own personal freedom.
That's what makes this ethos go.
So the purpose, and this is I think what Christ, getting back to our original topic, this is what Christ meant by the church.
The church was not necessarily meant to be landholding bishops or potentates.
It was not necessarily meant to be churches or cathedrals or structures.
The living church, as Christ envisioned it, was this.
People, radical individuals charged with the higher truth Christ was giving, and that was a metaphysical truth, like we're talking about, than making individual decisions that collectively shaped this energy in a certain way for the good of more and more people than ever before, with a kind of universal promise behind it all, that what you said, you hope that in the—you know where we came from physically, right?
And with that hope, that it would continue to resonate down through the ages.
I mean— That strikes me as if you just change the focus a little bit, precisely Christ's message, about what the church was to become.
Something that would radical individuals making radical choices to believe certain things, that would then push the thrust of humanity much farther into the future, into the eternal.
Right.
And there is something, I was asked in a show recently what I thought the most powerful arguments for God would be, and my answer, of course, both elevated and annoyed people, which is how you know you're on the right track.
But the feeling of being magically endowed meat is something that I generally can't escape.
That human beings are like fantastic portals through which a plant becomes a poem.
I mean, they're just, we have this astounding capacity to turn mere atoms into thought, into virtue, into inspiration, into connection, as you say, love, empathy.
And this is all, this is atoms.
The atoms were completely bored sitting around in the middle of a star, just, oh, I'm hot.
Oh, I'm escaping.
Oh, I'm flying around.
And finally, out of all of the atoms in the universe, you know, in you and I and everyone listening to this and everyone else, a bunch of them decide to get together and fuse together in a way that magically produces thought and will, free will and choice and virtue and challenge and free will and choice and virtue and challenge and fear and courage and all of the great maelstrom that is the human experience.
And there's no way that science as yet, and I think that science needs to recognize this, that there is a wonder in the fact that we are like a lightning strike of pure magic in an otherwise spiritless universe.
And that is something that...
It's very humbling because I didn't make it.
It just, you know, the lightning struck, you know, the egg and the sperm and here I came along.
And I can take some pride in what I've done with my abilities and the way in which I conduct myself in the world and all that.
But nonetheless, I didn't start the fire.
I am the fire.
And the fire is far more than heat and atoms in motion.
It is something that generates the only thing that seems to be of any value in the universe, which is the human mind so far until we find whatever else might be out there.
And it is the only thing of value because it is the only thing to which the term value could really be applied.
I mean, all animals strive for success.
They want to avoid being eaten and eat other things and reproduce as often as possible and so on.
But those are instincts and that's fine.
There's nothing wrong with it.
But the idea of abstract value, of virtue, of good and evil, of choice, these exist only in the magic meat of the human mind.
And we don't know how it works.
We don't know how it came about.
We can't disassemble it and reassemble it.
We can't find any of the things which make life most worthwhile if we sort of strafe through the mere atoms and energy and chemicals of our consciousness.
That gives me, obviously, great pride and a great sense of opportunity in what I can do with this magic meat.
But at the same time, it gives me great humility and great empathy because I'm surrounded by amazing vertical structures of magic meat.
And I don't know if that really makes any sense, but I think that that ineffability of how it is possible for meat to dream and talk and reason and be good or evil...
There is something so fundamentally ineffable about that that to approach it can almost drive you mad.
Yeah, I think the only word I would add to what you said, the one word I would add is consciousness.
We are the only creatures, as far as we know, that are conscious of our own meat status, to use your term.
When my dog looks at me, and let's not forget, we've been domesticating dogs for maybe upwards of 150,000 years, right?
Dogs were wolves.
And for 150,000 years, we've domesticated them so they've become loyal to us.
But when my dog looks at me, he thinks he's a person.
My dog doesn't understand what it means to be a dog, right?
A donkey doesn't know what donkiness is.
We do.
We understand.
There's something about the human animal and this tremendous – it's both a gift and a curse.
Dostoevsky said – and this is very Buddhist too – Dostoevsky said consciousness is suffering, that we're the only animals that know we're going to die.
die.
We're the only animals that can spend half our life obsessing about death, that we have a higher understanding, right, than, like you said, just the physical instinctive reactions that animals have.
And I think it's a beautiful argument that we are part of this.
And, you know, you think about the philosophy of Jesus again.
He never once sought to turn our attention inward to the instinctive mechanisms of life.
He was constantly trying to devote our attention outward to what you say.
We call it metaphysics, call it the soul, call it the higher wonder that we are imbued with.
You think about modern science in so many ways.
The This is a philosophical statement, not a scientific one.
Science is doing what science must do.
And the more empirically and unstintingly empirically it tries to get to the truth, the better.
But there is a philosophy of science just like there's a science of religion.
And from a philosophical standpoint, I see modern science flailing a little bit.
For about 100 years now, modern science has been looking more and more internally.
They are not trying to connect the internal with the cosmic anymore.
They're looking – with regards to humanity, we started on the anatomical level.
We moved to the biological level.
We moved to the chemical level, to the subatomic level.
Now we're looking at what it means to be human on the absolute remotest specks of corporeal nature whatsoever and trying to determine from those tiniest of tiny pieces exactly what a human is, what it's delimited by, how it's all processed and there is no free will.
What I see happening philosophically with science is the more we come to understand reality, the more philosophically frustrating it is for some scientists to see that there really is consciousness and will above the material.
Because when you do that, when science does that – and by the way, the first two, three hundred years of Western science did this.
The great Renaissance philosophers, the scientists, were looking to look at the mechanisms of life in a way to help understand the microcosm as a key to understanding the macrocosm.
The more we move away from that, the more desperate, I think, philosophically, some scientists get.
Because what you're saying ultimately is that if we seed that there is something that transcends the physical, if there is something metaphysical, call it the soul, then we have to concede that we aren't in control of it.
That other methodologies are at least as valid as we are, and maybe more so.
I mean, I tell my students this all the time.
If you have a soul, then there's really little that science can tell you about it.
Science is not equipped for that.
Any more than you wouldn't go to a priest about your upcoming appendix operation, you really wouldn't go to Stephen Hawking to say anything meaningful about the nature of the soul.
Hawking came out again a couple weeks ago and said the only way human life will survive Is by colonizing other planets, right?
A thousand years from now, he said, and how could he possibly know this?
There's nothing scientific about this.
A thousand years from now and the human race will be extinct unless we've colonized other planets.
This is pure metaphysics he's talking about right here, right?
He's making statements that they're philosophical.
They have nothing.
There's no real scientific basis to that.
And so what happens is you very often see the highest level scientists indulging in philosophical arguments that, quite frankly, they're not qualified to be involved in any more than I am qualified to talk about chemistry.
Well, I wouldn't put that in the realm of philosophy.
That's just armchair speculation.
Actually, that's probably the wrong phrase to use with Stephen Hawking since he doesn't have much choice.
But no, I mean, that is – and of course, that is original sin as well.
And the pessimism of scientists is very well known.
And what I find fascinating is how much the religious experience gets photocopied in the materialistic realm.
But without the individualism, without the free will, without the moral choice.
And that I find really fascinating.
I mean, if you look at communism, they got rid of God and they replaced God with the state.
As did fascism and national socialism, an underminer.
I mean, there's arguments back and forth, but there definitely were occultists and were looking to set up their own church.
So certainly, let's just say not traditionally Christian.
They used traditional Christian values in some unholy ways, but they, of course, replaced – this came out of some of the 19th century – philosophers who believed that the world spirit manifested itself in particular nation states and gave them dominance over other nation states at particular points in time.
This is a Hegelian argument.
And so they replaced God with the nation or the race or for Marx, it's the class and so on.
So what I've always found fascinating and where I think the Pandora's box of, ooh, look, we get to have a purely rationalistic universe.
There's a lot of devils that come out of that box because there's a photocopying of the religious experience without the constraints and moral responsibility and individualism of Christianity, and that is a very dangerous problem.
I've called it me-ism or some people, it's just like, you know, a vague sort of karmic astrology-based psychic powers and goopiness and so on.
It's having the benefits of the sort of vaguely soupy platonic realm or a higher realm or an ideal realm.
But with none of the responsibilities.
You don't have to get up early.
You don't have to go to church.
You don't have to follow the Ten Commandments.
You don't have to help your neighbor.
You don't have to give to the poor.
It's all the benefits of religiosity with none of the responsibility of religiosity and none of the duties of religiosity.
And I think that vacuum where you have comfort without responsibility is then filled by the state who will tell you what to do because you can't generate it in yourself.
I think that's right, and that's where fascism comes in, right?
The idea that human beings, religion provided, and in Western culture, unarguably, that was provided by Christianity for about 2,000 years, the non-plu-ultra.
Beyond this line, you will not go.
Think about the great, before you get to the modern world, it's all about dystopias, right?
About how too rational an understanding of the world is going to create all sorts of problems.
But you go back before that, and the problems were bigger than that.
They weren't necessarily problems of the limits of reason.
They were problems about overstepping boundaries, hubris.
We're a couple of Shakespeareans talking, right?
His great tragedies are about hubris, stepping beyond a line which you should not cross.
From a purely rationalist perspective, there is no line we shouldn't cross.
That the boundaries of rational knowledge will take us anywhere.
And if that means people have to die, if that means some people become expendable, the nature of the game means we have to go there.
This is very Nietzschean, right?
But what I love about Western culture prior to what we've had the last 150 years or so, it was always about what can we do in the context of what we shouldn't do.
Think about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or Christopher Marlowe's Dr.
Faustus, right?
I reference that play because at the beginning, the great Dr.
Faustus, this great mind, he has rejected all human learning.
He rejects the Bible.
He rejects Aristotle's philosophy.
He rejects medicine because they can't give him immortality, that they can't give him power and knowledge beyond what men should have.
And so he chooses to ally himself with the devil to sell his soul for 24 years of power.
And there is a kind of Faustian bargain in the way the modern philosophy of science operates that we're going to give you, like you said, access to all these comfortable things.
And at the same point, we're going to strip away old-fashioned boundaries that may have hindered our wildest desires because those are repressive, right?
So it's absolute arrogance surmounted by absolute unwillingness to check anything.
It's a dangerous combination.
We go back to what John Paul said.
I think it's best summed up that by balancing, using religion, or what we call the soul, using metaphysics to temper science, and using science to purify our understanding, purge of sophistry and superstition our religion, I think the human animal becomes a much more complete creature, and the possibility of freedom without fascism exists.
And this, to me, was the great revelation in talking to atheists.
Because atheists are very, of course, strict when it comes to collective concepts don't exist in empirical reality.
The fact that a bunch of people get together believing in God does not mean that God exists.
The belief exists within their mind.
It does not exist in objective reality.
It is a shared, they would call it a shared delusion or whatever.
And, okay, I can really understand that argument.
I can get behind it in certain contexts.
But when I would then turn to them and say, but the state doesn't exist.
I remember very vividly having this email back and forth back in the day.
You know, this is like, I don't know, more than 10 years ago or so.
And I said, well, the government doesn't exist.
So if you're not going to believe in God, because it's a collective concept shared by a bunch of people, which doesn't make it manifest in empirical reality, how can you say that the state exists?
It is a shared concept, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And they sent me pictures of, you know, the Capitol and the Pentagon, and it's like...
But that's like sending me a picture of a church and say, there's my proof of God.
The fact that a building exists inhabited by people who believe in a certain collective concept does not validate that collective concept.
So...
And I found that Christians were far more willing to examine that question of where do the concepts exist, where do the collective beliefs exist, than atheists were.
To get atheists to accept and admit that the state no more exists than the concept of God, according to the atheist framework, I found to be, I'm telling you, Duke, almost universally impossible.
And I found Christians to be much more open-minded in exploring these questions than atheists who simply would recoil from that.
And it became a cheaper form of religion and a more, well, I shouldn't say more, a fundamentally dictatorial kind of religion.
Because a Christian is going to let me at peace to find my own virtue.
He will certainly attempt to convert by the word.
But the statist, the person who wants the state to control your actions for the pursuit of his definition of collective virtue, he's not going to convert by the word.
He's going to convert by the sword.
If you don't obey the state, they come to your house with guns.
If you don't pay your taxes, they throw you in jail.
I mean, there is a gulag that fundamentally undermines so much of the statist addiction that atheists display that does not exist and has not existed for centuries in Christianity.
And this unwillingness that the atheists have, you know, of course it's that perfect quote in the Bible, which is, why do you...
Why do you cry out about the speck in your brother's eye and do not notice the beam in your own eye?
And they're like, well, you know, that collective concept is crazy and irrational and doesn't exist.
The fact that people believe in it doesn't make it true.
The fact that they congregate to worship doesn't make it true.
So, let's go to Congress and, you know, get all the...
They simply can't see it, even though it's far more dangerous to believe in the state than to believe in a god.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I think the modern left, many statists and many atheists, unfortunately...
They've become dogmatic, inquisitorial, and orthodox, literally.
And Christianity, which is becoming increasingly stigmatized in these educated circles, has had to defend itself more in terms of argument.
They've had to be more balanced.
It's like being a conservative in the university, right?
I constantly have to defend my worldview.
They never do the progressives.
And so you get lazy, right?
Just like the medieval church got lazy.
They stopped explaining and reaching out to people with their message and started enforcing it, right?
But this is the perfect setup for our last segment or so.
And I really want to talk about this and get your thoughts on it.
This comes back to the question that what the rationalists, the materialists, the statists, the liberals, what they're claiming is we want reason.
We want what's rational.
I go back to this.
What is there in Christ's message, his philosophy, his teachings, even his life?
What is there that can be called irrational?
What is there that violates our dictates and tenets of rationality?
You're going to get the same arguments, right?
They're the same kind of silly arguments.
Well, Jesus never existed, or this idea that Jesus was the Son of God is so completely irrational that we have to reject everything else that came from him.
And looking at the Gospels specifically, and I think this is where we should go now, at least as we wrap up, you've looked at them recently, I have too.
Help me figure out, as somebody who has been much more skeptical his whole life than I have, what do you see in the Gospels that you could radically label as irrational?
Well, there's a number of different forms in which, from a purely philosophical standpoint, and I'm going to sort of make that case from here on, and I also wanted to just mention that when the rationalists began to take down religion, that was one thing.
When they failed to erect a moral standard to take its place, ooh...
That was, I think, produced most of the disasters of the last 150 years, where the body count goes into the hundreds of millions of people.
So I've had huge criticisms of that.
You know, don't tear down my house if I don't have a new house.
You know, then I'm just out here naked in the storm, again, sort of King Lear style.
So there were a few issues in looking over in preparation for this conversation.
First of all, from a purely rational standpoint, you can't say my moral commandments or my moral arguments are either better because I'm divinely inspired, because according to philosophy, that is not a rational, I mean, just about anyone could claim it's not a rational standard.
And the second is the combination, I mean, one of the great things about Christianity is how well it encircles all the objections to being moral.
If you want to be moral because you want to be good, well, blessed.
People think that blessed means you get some external benefit, but it generally means the feeling of happiness you get when you're in accordance with virtue.
It's a state that does not require a divine finger to poke your happy button.
It's something that happens internally.
But for those who are more consequentialist, for those who are more pragmatic, well, you have heaven and hell.
Which, you know, is the bribe and the stick.
So from a sort of why would these arguments be true, you can't go with divinely inspired or handed by God because that doesn't fulfill the rational criteria of consistency and objectivity.
And you also can't say, well, you should really follow these ethics because after death you will get eternal hellfire or eternal paradise.
Those are arguments from consequences and therefore are not particularly...
Moral.
It's like saying, well, you shouldn't kill because you'll go to jail.
I mean, that's sort of bare bones, and don't get me wrong, I'm happy if people don't kill because they're afraid of going to jail.
It's better than nothing, and it's certainly better than communism or fascism.
So I just wanted to sort of point out those forms.
Some of the content of what Jesus talked about, to me, of course, he had an apocalyptic sense, particularly in Matthew and Mark and Luke and so on.
They're It's apocalypse.
It's the end of the world coming.
And there was, I think, an immediacy or desperation to the virtues that were promulgated and a rejection of more longer-term planning because there was this sense that the world was about to end.
And, of course, up until later in the Bible, you know, he says, there are those among you who will not taste of death before death.
I return again.
So I think there was, you know, abandon your family and follow my followers and give away – you sell everything you have and give the money to the poor and don't accumulate any worldly status or political power or, you know, don't build for anything in the future.
There was this kind of cliff edge of the ethics that I think has – I've caused problems for Western civilization ever since, because there is an immediate...
To take a sort of secular example, when people, environmentalists, talk about, you know, the imminent environmental destructiveness of global warming or DDT or air pollution or whatever, there is this feeling of fight-or-flight panic that I think doesn't help people make sort of calmer decisions.
So if the ethics, to some degree, are rooted in the imminence of the end of the world and 2,000 years later plus...
We're still waiting for that.
I think that there needs to be a kind of circling back and look at some of this stuff and say, okay, well, clearly it didn't end.
And how might the ethics change?
The ethics of abandon the world, set fire to everything, give it to the poor, follow me, abandon your family.
That would, I guess, make sense if the...
End-of-the-world scenario was imminent, but given that it's not, I think those are where I would sort of push back from an aesthetic standpoint.
It doesn't really change, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, of course, but as far as the practicality of living long-term in the world and planning for the future, I find that a little diminished by that apocalyptic tone.
Okay, I think that's a great point, and I would come back at it and say what you just described for me, in my understanding, are problems with a collective Christianity again.
That you're planning for the future.
You're planning for how human beings are going to create civilization, maintain it.
I would argue that Christ was never worried about that.
We go back to the beginning of the discussion.
I think that Christ is talking about a radical, imminent moment in the hearts of men.
If you as a Christian, and you certainly have, as we've already established, you have every choice to be or not to be.
But if you choose Christianity, he says, you choose me, then you must live your life with that kind of wild abandon.
You must live Live for the eternal truth, not the worldly truth.
And so if you break down – and what you just said is exactly right from a collective perspective.
But if my initial point was correct, that Christ was never about the collective.
Never more so was he not about the collective than when he was talking about the future.
When Christ is talking about the future, that is when he is least talking about the collective.
In the hearts of men, he says, if you commit to me, you live this way as if it was all coming to an end.
Live this way every day, and if you do that, and your virtue spreads, what would the world be like, Stephan, metaphorically, if every human heart embraced that live-for-the-virtue-of-the-moment-now mentality?
I think, as he said in the Gospels, that would be heaven on earth, although he knew it would never happen.
So he called his followers as individuals to live that kind of life.
He didn't expect the rest of the world to transform.
He knew it wouldn't.
And whatever virtue there has been over 2,000 years in Christianity has come from exactly that.
Those Christians who were not hypocrites, those Christians who did live that life of renunciation and self-sacrifice...
Those are the ones, I think, who have carried that banner forward.
And the miracles, I'm going to use the word, the miracles they have wrought among other people in terms of caring for the sick, loving the neighbor, all that stuff, that was precisely because it was an individual, not a collective thing.
And the second point I want to make to your comment is the logic of all of this.
I approach Jesus the other way.
I don't look at Jesus and say, okay, this is the Son of God, so therefore all these things have to happen.
I flip it around.
When Jesus Christ was born, other than his mother, apparently nobody knew who he was.
It took his own disciples until his resurrection to figure out who he was.
Jesus didn't start from the premise that he was this moral figure, this authority from God that you must all follow.
It was a constant epiphany.
And what was the epiphany driven by?
the logic of his behavior and his teaching, that the more Jesus taught, performed miracles, even if you don't want to go down the miracle road, the stories tell us he performed miracles, he taught, he sermonized, he engaged with people.
The more he did that, the more people through the process of knowing him came to conclude the bigger picture from him.
That's why I love the figure of Christ in the gospel so much.
Almost nowhere is it said in the gospels, I am he, shut up and believe.
It's the opposite, that through his actions, his compassion, his teaching, his own choices in life, including his own death, through all of these choices, the logic, building on his behavior, his teachings and his actions, the logic of who he had to be from the one obvious rational his teachings and his actions, the logic of who he had to be from the one obvious rational conclusion that could be drawn from the way he loved, lived and served in his this metaphysical interpretation of who he was.
And that's where faith kicks in.
And so if you go, if you, rather than come at Jesus as we do from the top down, because we know the story, come at Jesus the way they do in the Gospels, the way we're called to come to him.
Until you know him, you don't know who he is.
So I was swayed not by the miracles.
I was swayed by the words, by the logic of what he was doing based on what he said he believed.
And for me, carrying that series of things to their final end, it made it much more easy for me to understand the logic of who he claimed to be in the context of what he didn't say.
But there's, as always, if you're going to have any kind of a Our discussion about this soul, whatever that means, it's got to be taken on faith.
At some point, there's just faith because we can't prove, even though more and more anthropologists and sociologists are coming to our point of view, even some physicists are, that maybe there is something bigger to the universe than can be reduced to simply mathematical formula.
If that's true, then we've got to call that faith because it's not something we are certainly at this point anywhere near being able to verify with any empirical satisfaction whatsoever.
So I would argue that our talk about the soul and my particular belief in the origins of Jesus Christ, I think they stem basically from the same principles.
And what carries me beyond simply believing in the soul to believing in Christ as the son of God, as an incarnate deity who brought this kind of truth to mankind, what allows me to go that one step further is because I am convinced by the logic of his life, the logic of his teachings.
For me, that's what did it.
The question of forgiveness, this is more personal and less philosophical, but it's something that has been on my mind about the question of forgiveness.
Because I have a sort of trader mentality, trade value for value, if people have wronged you in your life, of course, the argument as far as I understand it from Jesus is you will forgiveness of them because it's a virtue and also because it will give you release from the suffering, the pain, the anger, the resentment, the argument as far as I understand it from Jesus is you will forgiveness of them because it's a virtue and also because it will give you release
The question of love your enemy, the question of, you know, if your enemy asks you for your cloak, give him your shirt too.
If he asks you to walk a mile, walk two miles with him.
That I find problematic.
I wish that there was more fight in the West to maintain the values that our ancestors fought and died by the millions to establish and to maintain.
And, you know, the relationship that the Pope has with the migrants and so on, I find to be particularly challenging.
So this question of extreme pacifism, because, you know, there is, and I know Martin Luther struggled with this, I guess, centuries ago, an eye for an eye versus turn the other cheek.
His answer, of course, was that the eye for the eye was the prince's power and the turn the other cheek was you with relation to the prince or the king.
I think this, to me, anything that is going to shore up the West's defense of its own values and pride and certainty in the fact that the West is the best civilization, and you can just tell that from the footprints, which way are they heading.
You know, it's not a lot of people in America trying to get into Saudi Arabia or the Congo or anything like that.
And I'm concerned about how much of the, what I would consider radical pacifism within Christianity is lowering our capacity to defend.
Now, I'm fully aware that, you know, Charles Murtell and back in the day in the Crusades that Christianity was, when it was very powerful in society, had a very strong defense.
Of the society that it had created and nurtured and grown.
But right now, I don't know exactly where this weakness is coming from, Dr.
Pesta.
It's one thing to love your enemy.
It's quite another thing to invite them in and pay them to have as many children as humanly possible.
This, to me, is a real challenge.
And I don't know if this is a, I don't know if it's too many people raised by single moms.
I don't know if it's the relativism of the left.
I don't know if it's the tyranny that certain other religions and the left have sort of in common, or whether it's a leftover from Christianity.
So this question of forgiveness and love your neighbor as your, love your enemy as yourself, this to me is a challenge.
And even if it's right, if it fails or if it's overrun, then it's hard to call it a success.
Well, I agree with you.
Although I would say the Christianity became the dominant culture, the Christian cultures became the dominant cultures in the world, as you said, because they were evangelical, right?
By definition, Christianity is evangelical.
Christ's entire mission was evangelical.
It is to spread the Gospels.
You must become a warrior for Christ, right?
And this is the beauty of it, and we talked about this in one of our earlier segments.
Christianity conquered the Western world without firing a single shot, really.
It was the idea of Christianity for the first 300 years.
It wasn't war.
It wasn't the sword.
There were no Christian armies in the 2nd century AD. It conquered by will of its actions.
How did Christians believe?
When Christians were being persecuted and thrown to the lions in the Colosseum, they didn't curse.
They didn't condemn.
They took it because they had no power.
That was power.
Those were the ideas that conquered the West.
Evangelically, it is absolutely important to carry the banners of Christ forth, the ideas of Christianity forth.
When we gave that up, Christianity became passive.
The bravest fighters I've known in my life have been Christians, only they haven't used their arms.
And even many of the men who went off to World War II to fight were doing it under the aegis of their own faith.
The argument is, it seems to me, that Christianity has become passive.
It's become We're good to go.
One more time, exactly what Christ said would happen.
When Christians cared more for the world, worldly power, the opinions, so many Christians now care more for what their secular atheist brothers say about them than they do about what they believe.
So you see how the church now is conforming again to the world, which is exactly what Christ said was going to happen.
That when you live for the world, for worldly titles, for powers, and not for me, he said, and my ideal, then you're going to become corrupted by the world.
And so that's the thing I would argue there, that if what Christianity needs, and I think you would agree with this, what made Christianity great was its willingness to stand up to non-Christian ideals like Islam, for instance, and how incompatible much of what's in Islam is with not just Christianity, but democratic values in general.
And the last thing I'll say is to come at it from the question of original sin, this idea of turn the other cheek, eye for an eye versus forgiveness.
My view of it is that Not Luther's view.
It was the Old Testament's view.
It was God who said, eye for an eye.
God says, vengeance is mine.
I will take it.
You don't have the right, God said in the book of Deuteronomy.
Leviticus, he told the Jews, you can't go out.
If somebody puts out your eye, you have no right to go put out theirs.
I leave that to me.
You become faithful to me, the Old Testament, God said.
And I will fight your battles for you.
And he did it all throughout the Old Testament.
The turn the other cheek is a radical new kind of rational idea.
It is that if you live not for the world but for the metaphysics, live through this world to what is universally true, you live through that, Christ said, and you just let the day's evil be sufficient for the day.
And it goes back to the question for me of original sin.
If you're right, and I'm right, and I think we are, that there is something beyond the animal in us, call it the soul, then I think the question of original sin makes sense.
There is also something within us, all of us, that falls short of what we should fully be as humans.
Call it original sin.
They don't like that term any more than they like the soul, so we're going to get it both sides.
Call it original sin.
There is some stain of imperfection in the human animal that prohibits it from being all it can be.
And with that recognition in mind comes humility.
I think it's exactly what's lacking from the scientific perspective.
We are more than just human, but that means we're also more accountable, too, than the animals are.
We're trying to create a culture scientifically where you can have things that are bad for you without having the consequences of those things.
You can have all the sex you want without the consequence of children, hence birth control and then abortion, right?
And that diminishes the human being, it seems to me, this failure of accountability in us as much as simply looking at us as better than animals.
You've got to have both.
Christianity gives you Both the recognition we are better than animals and the recognition that when we are off, we're worse than them.
And I think when those two things balance out in the Christian philosophy, you get this nice balance that you have not been able to reach ever since we jettisoned all of that in the name of a misuse, I would argue, a philosophical misuse of what science's purpose is.
And this is the challenge I'm trying to sort of translate the concept of original sin, and the thought sort of tumbled into my mind while you were speaking.
Original sin, I think, in the atheistic universe is the dropping of the universality that makes us unique among the animals, the capacity to conceptualize.
The animal will walk through the forest seeing only the trees, the undergrowth, the leaves, the grass.
It will not see the concept forest.
It will not have the idea.
A mammal does not know it shares giving birth to live young and breastfeeding its young with all the other mammals all over the world.
It just knows that it has its instinct for what to do.
So our capacity to conceptualize, to universalize, is that which differentiates us from the philosophy, abstract thought, platonic thought if you're into the new aminal metaphysics and Aristotelian logic if you're into sort of more empirically based universals.
But the universals, you know, when Fidel Castro died, And I don't think this comes as much surprise to people, but when Fidel Castro died, you know, he's got this giant mansion, he's got a helicopter landing pad, he's got millions and millions and millions of dollars in the bank, while the average wage for the average person in Cuba is $20, $30 a month.
Now, let's just look at it from that bare-bones, nothing higher, evolutionary resource acquisition.
If...
Fidel Castro had not gained power in Cuba.
How many resources would he have been able to gather, you know, in the free market or in a more peaceful society or in a non-totalitarian society?
Well, he was a sociopathic evil lunatic, and he probably, in a free society, he would have ended up in jail.
So in a free society, he ends up in jail just as Lenin and Stalin and Hitler and the other totalitarian nightmare flesh monsters of the 20th century would have.
So in the world that they created, they, well, a lot of them lived to a ripe old age, not Hitler, of course, but a lot of them lived to a ripe old age.
A lot of them had lots of kids.
A lot of them gathered together millions or hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars worth of resources and obviously lived the life that they wanted to live.
I mean, it's always struck me.
I mean, the idea of having power over other human beings gives me the kibijibis, I mean, because there's an arrogance to it and a dehumanization of the other to say, do what I say because I say it, and if not, you will be punished.
And so if we just look at a purely evolutionary standpoint, They created the world wherein they were successful.
Very successful.
I mean, he's, you know, he died richer than I'll die.
He died, you know, with more power in his life than I will have in a thousand lifetimes.
Castro.
So from a pure sort of mammalian, gather your resources and redistribute them to your gene line.
I mean, look at Genghis Khan.
What is it, like one out of every 17 people in East Asia directly descended from his infinitely spraying nutsack?
I mean, good lord, the man was, from a biological standpoint, from a gene replication standpoint, You can't beat the guy.
Like, I mean, you might as well have it rain semen on women the way that he got around.
So when we look at resource aggregation and gene reproduction, all the stuff that drives evolution, how can we say that the dictators failed the test of evolution?
We can't.
And yet we know that it's wrong, at least in the West.
And this is the challenge that we put out, that I sort of put out.
I mean, so the atheists will say, well, it's wrong, but if you're going to put this Darwinian thing front and center, and I know Darwin's taken a lot of flack, and he got corrupted by Nietzsche, who got corrupted by the Nazis and Heideggers.
Anyway, it's a whole other story.
And I'm sorry for such a long point, but this is to be really important, is that The whole capacity to abstract is what our glory is as a species.
But the drive to use language and ethics to manipulate others into surrendering their resource to us is the original sin.
We have the incredible ability, like a lion doesn't talk the gazelle into self-sacrifice.
Go beat your head against the rock because it's virtuous and that way I can feast on your spleen without having all that awkward running and jumping stuff, right?
I mean, the gazelle runs and the lion chases it and the gazelle will try and kick the lion in the head and it's a bloody battle to see who survives.
And we have this capacity for language and for the inculcation of virtue in others where we say, well, it's virtuous for you to surrender your resources to me because I represent the collective good, the virtue of the proletariat, the...
The master race, whatever.
We can create these abstractions which we can inflict on people so they'll come and give us stuff.
They are the antelope that bash their head on the rock so it's easier for us to eat.
And so our capacity for abstraction has given us incredible abilities for virtue and also incredible abilities for love.
Human livestock management for controlling people, for convincing them that giving up their resources to us is a virtue.
And so, from a purely Darwinian standpoint, why wouldn't you just use humans' capacity for virtue, humans' instinct for good, humans' instinct to serve something bigger than themselves and say, well, no, it shouldn't be God, it shouldn't be virtue, it shouldn't be philosophy, it shouldn't be eudemenia, what it should be.
Is me?
Is the state?
Is what?
And in corrupt situations, the church.
Who is to say, from a mammalian resource standpoint of where you just gather resources and reproduce your genes, that that's not a wonderful solution?
We know that it's not, but it's hard to explain why.
And this, to me, is the...
Nobody answered that question better than Jesus.
I have not encountered a philosopher who handled the question better.
Let's just stipulate, if...
Christ is who he says he is.
Because you could argue if he's not, the whole thing's a sham.
But if he is who he says he is, he is the strongest creature to ever walk this earth.
He is the most powerful human being to ever walk the planet.
And with all that power, his whole philosophy was that you must – that the ultimate power in the universe, metaphysically speaking, is the willingness to serve.
The stronger you are, to whom much is given, much is expected.
The more power you have, the greater your moral and ethical opportunity to become a servant of the weak, not to become the controller of the weak.
And that was his life, right?
If he is who he says he is, then the most powerful creature to ever walk the earth voluntarily allowed himself to be killed in the most shameless way as a message, as a moral, right?
Because when is the miracle of Christ?
It was when he got up from the grave.
And what is the promise of Christ?
That you take your power in this world against all biology, against all evolution, against all of our animal instincts, This is what sets you apart from the lion and the gazelle.
That you are lions on this earth.
And the more power you have, the more lion-like you are.
And the more you must, of your choice, not because some government takes it from you, not because you're taken in by some fool like Hitler, but in your own heart, you must choose to use your power to empower the lives of the weak and the suffering and the sick.
In other words, the lion must voluntarily choose to serve the lamb.
And it doesn't work, Darwinian.
That's why we're not just animals.
You said it yourself three times in that last segment, your last monologue there.
Three times you said it.
We know we're not.
We know we're not those creatures.
The modern world is telling us.
Modern science is telling us.
You're nothing but those animals.
Yet we know better.
And if that's true, if we are something collectively, metaphysically bigger than anything in physical nature, then Christ's argument is the most rational, logical argument you will ever get.
That there is no greater moral choice, even if it means you suffer.
If you take on the suffering of others, you who are rich and powerful, you suffer for those who don't, there is going to be very little reward for you here.
We're back to that again.
I can see that we're back to that again.
But if we're going to stipulate like we started an hour and ten minutes ago, we're going to stipulate.
That there is something perhaps metaphysical beyond the physical.
Then that is not now just a pipe dream, nor is it merely a carrot at the expense of a stick.
This becomes a huge philosophical imperative.
That there may be no greater way.
And if you think about that, one last thing I'll say in that.
You brought up lions and tigers and all of this animalistic Darwinian stuff.
I love what the Roman playwright Terence wrote.
Homo homini lupus.
Man is a wolf to man.
And I love what Dostoevsky said.
The Roman pagan and the Christian wrote, he said, tigers are tigers.
All they can do is slash and tear.
It would never dawn on a tiger to torture people the way Castro tortured, putting little kids in bathtubs and electrifying their genitals.
It would never dawn on any animal to do that to a human being.
And so this idea, if we are, again, go back to the original sin idea, if we are better than animals in some ways, then when we behave badly, we become worse than animals.
That human beings, when they choose, for lack of a better word, evil, they become worse than any animal creature.
And so I'm suggesting that we have to account for the worse in us, not just the better.
We have to account for the tendency of I think we are better off collectively recognizing what makes us better than animals but not losing sight of what makes us worse.
Nobody, nobody articulated that better in the history of the world than Jesus Christ.
Those two aspects.
And you can pretend Christ didn't exist.
We could argue that there is no God.
It's those two aspects of the human creature still exist.
Go ahead and get rid of metaphysics, right, if you can.
But our 10,000-year history as a species, 100,000-year history as a species, shows us that that's what we're capable of.
Yeah.
And let's say that tomorrow we could prove that Socrates never lived.
What difference would it make?
I mean, the arguments are still the arguments.
The Socratic method is still the Socratic method.
And it just struck me.
I don't want to sound like I'm not listening because I really, really am.
And that's why thoughts are coming to me.
But, you know, just about every day.
I get the temptation, the little devils on my shoulder who say, Steph, you know, you're really, really good at public speaking.
You're very compelling, charismatic.
You should really, really become a political leader.
Boy, just think of all of the great things you could do.
And it really is, you know, like Jesus on the mountain.
The whole world can be yours.
All you have to do is hamana, hamana.
And I may be quoting not from the original Aramaic, but...
This aspect of take the power and to hell with this slow creep of changing one person at a time, this slow creep of attempting to light the fire of rationality in an often wet and dimmed mind.
Just take the power.
Take the power and achieve your virtue using the sword, which is really what the political power is.
Now, I respect those who go into political power to diminish the use of the sword, and so I'm not saying it's impossible or should never be done, but that is the temptation.
But for me, I've always felt and thought the noblest oblige of high ability is something very important, and I think that's what you were touching on, that if I have a peculiar or particular ability to conceptualize and to articulate in the language of the less sophisticated, compelling arguments for virtue, for that if I have a peculiar or particular ability to conceptualize and to articulate in the language of the less sophisticated, compelling arguments for virtue, for critical thinking, for truth, and all of that, then
that, then rather than using my oratorical or thinking powers to dazzle and enchant the masses into thinking I'm more than I am or thinking they should obey me because of my abilities, which I would portray as something larger than myself and virtuous
and so on, I should take those same abilities and use it not to dominate others, but to elevate them in their capacity to think that this question of service rather than domination, that the gifts are given to you to elevate your fellow man.
not to turn them into livestock dazzled by the bright lights of your oratory and charisma.
I think that's a very powerful statement because, as you were thinking, I'm like, oh yeah, people are always here, go do this, go do this, go do this political power thing and so on, and it would not be a big step and a jump for me to take that route.
But...
The idea that my gifts are there to serve the species rather than to control the species, to elevate rather than to push down, to enlighten rather than darken, as everybody who kneels down to charisma is always darkened and diminished, right?
To give them strength rather than take their weakness.
That is something quite powerful to think of.
I mean, you articulated exactly why the founding fathers matter.
They set up A government structure in this country where they work for us.
They set up a beautiful system of checks and balances.
They insisted that the power of the American government should be a service, not as cattle.
And you can see what's happened.
The whole system has become corrupted.
And for all you atheists out there who want to argue that this is a uniquely Christian problem, look at how we've corrupted the founding fathers.
And how have we done it?
By too much too-gooderism.
By the idea that we can use power to force people to be good.
This is progressivism, right?
Rather than allow people to choose for themselves.
You brought up...
I think this is a beautiful place to kind of wind down.
You brought up the temptation of Christ in the wilderness.
Think about what Christ was offered by the devil three times.
Christ was hungry.
The devil said...
Clever devil.
He didn't say, here, I'm bringing you bread, Jesus.
Because that would be taking bread from evil.
He said, if you are the son of God, the devil said, you command these stones to become bread.
Because there's nothing wrong with eating.
Christ's response was powerful.
Man does not live by bread alone.
If you, and this is the history of communism in a nutshell, will feed men, will make men obligated to us for their survival, so therefore they will owe us their freedom.
Christ rejected that.
And the third temptation you brought up, Christ was taken to the top of a high mountain.
And he was shown by the devil all the pleasures of the world, all the glory and power of the world, the armies, the wealth.
And the devil said to Jesus, if you fall down and worship me, a spirit of the world, I will give you all those things.
Jesus says, be gone, Satan, for it is written.
That's the resource accumulation.
Exactly!
You can have all the resources.
You can propagate your genes.
You can poo.
You can do the original sin of mammalian expansion.
And that's exactly right.
And Jesus' response was metaphysical.
Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shall you serve.
And there's where it begs the question.
How do you get beyond the argument of resource management and power, the Darwinian argument?
How do you get beyond that without a sense of the metaphysical?
I'm not sure you can.
And I think in our previous discussions, you seem to have suggested as much too.
In fact, earlier this talk, you said it.
They took down traditional morality and its ultimate basis in God, at least for believers.
They took that down, but they did not replace it with anything else because there's nothing else to really replace it with.
I mean, in the absence of the metaphysical, the power of the Darwinian, the power of the appetite, it's impossible really to count.
Reason's not strong enough.
To counter the appetite.
And that's why so many rational atheists are giving into the appetite argument, right?
Well, we are animals, so why shouldn't we sleep with animals?
Peter Singer, the chair of philosophy at Princeton arguing, right?
If you don't have sex with your sheep, somehow you're a bigot against animals, right?
This is the argument, right?
And so rational people, arguably the most famous philosopher in the world, arguing that bestiality is the most normal thing in the world, That is because in the absence of a genuine metaphysical structure, call it God, you really can't defeat the appetitive with simply the rational.
And that's where the fascism, to me, that's where fascism comes in.
And Christ said it too.
The appetites, worldly desires, are fascist in their demand on you.
They pull you away.
They pull you too much to the world.
And they cause you to neglect what your reason should show you, the higher realities that circumscribe the world.
There's a reason why world, the flesh, and the devil were the three big problems for Jesus.
And they're all three the same thing.
Worldliness, fleshes of the world.
Who's in charge of these worldly gifts, the devil tells us he is, right?
World, flesh, and the devil.
These are the things that pull us inside the system and cause us to lose our larger humanity.
The empathy, the mercy, the faith, the hope, the charity that supersede the animal that you don't find in the animal kingdom.
These things have to come from those sources or not at all.
Thank you.
Right.
Well, and to further your point, we'll put a presentation below called The Death of Reason.
I, of course, have done my own work on rational proofs of secular ethics.
People can find those at freedomainradio.com slash free.
But even if I'm completely right, and I think I am, but even if I am completely right, it's not going to happen fast enough now that it's been many years since I put the book out, so...
I'm going to leave people to mull it over.
I look forward to your comments below, and I really, really appreciate this conversation.
It's very stimulating to me, and I think it will be to others as well.
Just to remind people, if you want to check out Freedom Project Academy, Freedom Project is one word, and it's fpeusa.org.
We'll put the link to that below.
Dr.
Pesta, thanks so much for your time, as always, and I'm sure we'll do it again soon once we comb through all of the outraged and outrageous and excited comments below.
