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Jan. 31, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:18:26

3983 The Philosophy of Satan | Duke Pesta and Stefan Molyneux

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	All right, heavy metal fans, we are here with Dr.
	Duke Pester, a tenured university professor, author, and the academic director of Freedom Project Academy, a live online school offering individual classes and complete curricula for students in kindergarten through high school.
	For more on Dr. Duke and the Freedom Project Academy, please go to fpeusa.org.
	Links are below.
	Dr. Pester, thank you so much for taking the time today.
	Really great to be with you again, Steph.
	We are delving into the mind, heart, and black liver spleen of the character known as Satan, and known as Lucifer, known as the bringer of light, known as a wide variety of other things.
	And I thought we'd start, for those who didn't, as I think you and I did, sit at the knee of a rather ferocious teacher in Sunday school learning all about the dark arts of temptation and our susceptibility to sin— Go through a little bit of a history of Satan and we'll get into, well, what we think he means his relevance to today's understanding of the battle between good and evil.
	Well, historically, almost all cultures, including non-Western cultures, have A Satan figure, something that occupies the Satan slot.
	You have it in Hinduism, you have it in most East Asian cultures as well.
	Native American, African tribal religion has a sort of complicated figure.
	In Western culture, it probably goes all the way back to Zoroastrianism.
	This balance, this Persian religion, this balance between a god and a satanic alternative, right?
	The light and the dark, that in Zoroastrianism was equally matched with itself.
	That there was no good, was not necessarily better or more predominant than evil.
	And from Zoroastrianism, it sort of morphed.
	The oldest book, perhaps the oldest book in the entire Old Testament, in the entire Bible, is the book of Job.
	We know the book of Job deals with Satan.
	In the original languages, he was called the Hasatan.
	Which means simply the accuser or the adversary.
	Satan has all sorts of really rich sardonic evil connotations, but in its original languages emanating out of the Persian and the ancient Mesopotamian, the hasatan was merely the one who accused, the adversary.
	Not even necessarily in the book of Job, the adversary to God specifically, but the one who accuses men before God, one of the God-like creatures who occupied that world.
	And so the oldest book in the Bible is probably the book of Job, maybe dates as well as long as 25, 3000 years before Christ.
	And before that, it was obviously a Middle Eastern parable.
	If you look carefully at the Book of Job, you will see that there's the fairy tale beginning and the fairy tale ending.
	Those are the primary texts.
	And Jewish scribes and philosophers sort of filled in the middle 40 pages, right?
	You've got two pages at the beginning, two pages at the end of the Book of Job that has been cut apart.
	And all this really profound Hebrew philosophy about suffering, about the nature of God and man, sin and death, that was added by Jewish philosophers.
	And so it's a very Jewish book that has that old, almost Persian fairy tale beginning and ending.
	That's where the oldest reference to Satan, Satan, in the Bible is.
	And throughout the course of the Bible, from the Old Testament all the way through the New, Book of Revelation, you get snippets about who he is.
	You get snippets about the battle in heaven.
	You learn more about the archangels of heaven.
	You find out who Satan was in the hierarchy of the angels.
	But the Bible is, for listeners who don't know, the Bible is very, very sketchy about angels and devils in particular, demons.
	There's a book written in the fourth century by a figure we only know today as the Pseudo-Dionysus.
	It's called On the Celestial Hierarchies.
	And he gives us, based on church fathers, the lore of the church fathers, based on the Kabbalah, Old Testament understandings, Jewish and Hebrew understandings, and of course the Bible itself, he gives us a list of the hierarchies of heaven.
	All the angels, you know, angels, archangels, principalities, virtues, thrones, dominions, cherubim, and seraphim, the highest level of the angels.
	And along the way, we pick up some information about the fall of Lucifer.
	You mentioned him. His original name was Lucifer in the biblical text, which means the light bearer.
	He was the angel, the highest created angel.
	He was the first thing outside the Trinity that existed, right?
	The Trinity was eternal, and then Satan was, Lucifer was the next creation.
	We all know, even probably neophytes know, the rebellion of Satan against God, the war in heaven, and the consequent, all those angels he took with him, about one-third of the angels of heaven joined him in revolution.
	They were overthrown, and we now have heaven and hell and Satan on his throne and God on his.
	Well, maybe we can circle back to Job, which is to me one of the most fascinating stories in all of human history, but the rebellion.
	So what I was taught was that God created Lucifer and the angels, and then God created man, and then God commanded Lucifer to worship man.
	And Lucifer said, no, no, no, no, no.
	I was made first.
	I'm more powerful.
	The idea that I would worship this squishy little biped is beyond comprehension.
	And I think there was sort of an elder sibling rebellion against the new entry into the family, so to speak.
	And that is where the idea that you would be commanded to love, that you would be commanded to worship was anathema to him.
	And of course, I guess he made a very good case to a large number of the angels.
	And then he wages, of course, this hopeless battle against omnipotence and omniscience.
	I know every move you're going to make, and I'm infinitely more powerful, but sure, bring it.
	And I think that particular aspect is why Satan kind of weaves in and out of, you know, this like horrible, monstrous, stinking, satanic being that destroys souls and corrupts entire communities to kind of a thug life cool rebel who resists being ordered satanic being that destroys souls and corrupts entire communities to kind of a thug life cool rebel who resists being ordered what And it really does – it kind of weaves in and out of this positive and negative view, which is quite fascinating.
	And I always thought, well, anybody who has a positive view of Satan must be – I find some characters in history who weren't completely nasty people, actually had some very good things to say, particularly in the Enlightenment, who had some sympathy for the devil, so to speak, which didn't really fit into, oh, just evildoers, and so on.
	I thought that was quite fascinating. Yeah, and the last piece of this history puzzle is you had heard that story.
	That's one variant, right?
	That God created man, then sort of compelled.
	That's the part that is a little rarer, the idea that God compelled the angels to worship man.
	The more traditional story, the one that I think that I heard that's more broader, when I learned that was a little bit broader, was the one that we get in Paradise Lost.
	That's another book that we can't ignore here.
	Perhaps the single, outside the Book of The text we have that deals with this is John Milton's Paradise Lost, 17th century.
	And in it, of course, he details, it's an epic poem, he details the creation of Adam and Eve, the fall of man, the rebellion of Lucifer.
	In that story, and I think this is, to me, this is the more compelling of the two stories, that God, being a triune God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, three individuals who were one God, When God created the angels, He did not create them far-seeing enough to be able to see the three behind the one, right? That their vision, their understanding was not so refined that they could see the three figures of the one God.
	And so what happened was, is that at some point in prehistoric time when there was just God and angels, God brought forth the Son.
	He manifested the Son, that aspect of His divinity, before Satan and the angels.
	And that's who God commanded they worship, that this is my son, this son is me, right?
	And revealed that triune relationship with the spirit.
	At that point, and this is Milton's story too, at that point, Lucifer does not remember the pre-existence of the son.
	And as far as Lucifer himself is concerned, he doesn't remember his own creation.
	This is kind of a neat trick, right?
	I don't remember my creation, who created me, which means it couldn't have been you.
	I must have been as eternal as you are.
	That's the cause that begins the rebellion in heaven.
	Lucifer seduces a third of the rebel angels.
	They wage war in heaven. For three days.
	And on the third day, and it's kind of like battles between immortal characters, right?
	The first day, the evil angels roll out and the good angels roll out.
	Michael, the archangel, Gabriel, the warrior angels, they sort of hack Satan and his devils to pieces.
	But because they can't die, they sort of painfully regenerate and fight again the second day.
	God lets this happen for three days.
	Let's the angels demonstrate their free will loyalty to him.
	And then on that third day, the fourth day, God rolls out the Son of God in his chariot.
	Literally, think about Jesus Agonistes, right?
	With thousands of years before he was born as a human being in the name of Christ, he is the Son of God.
	He rolls out in this sort of Old Testament prophetic chariot, right?
	With the angel wheels.
	He rolls out. Satan and the rebel angels take one look at this chariot, this tank rolling towards him.
	They throw themselves Off the cliff of heaven and they fall.
	And for nine days they fall suspended in semi-consciousness.
	God then takes seven of those nine days to create man.
	And that's where the creation of man comes in.
	And then of course, as Lucifer finds himself after nine days in hell with all the rebel angels, he devises his grand plan.
	We can't win a war with God face to face, nuclear arm to nuclear arm.
	But what we can do is we can corrupt his creation.
	And that's when Satan begins to insidiously worm his way into human society and begin to pull apart what God had put together.
	And this is the fascinating thing.
	It reminds me of when we talked about Lord of the Rings.
	And I was sort of saying the ring is kind of like a useless artifact of immense power.
	And the one thing that's fascinating about Satan is it's basically just language.
	It's basically temptation.
	It's basically temptation.
	It's impulses.
	It's impulses.
	It's very subterranean things.
	It's very subterranean things.
	Like he's not showing up, you know, doom style like the video game, you know, bestride the earth with muscled devilish legs and smiting everything with a fiery whip.
	He's not showing up, you know, doom style like the video game, you know, bestride the earth with muscled devilish legs and smiting everything with a fiery whip.
	It's like a whisper.
	It's like a whisper.
	It's an impulse.
	It's an impulse.
	It's a very little thing.
	It's a very little thing.
	And even, of course, the most famous story of Adam and Eve, he doesn't force any apple down Eve's throat.
	And even, of course, the most famous story of Adam and Eve, he doesn't force any apple down Eve's throat.
	He doesn't control.
	He doesn't destroy.
	He doesn't starve them and then offer them the apple as the only food that they can.
	He just says, wouldn't it be great to have the knowledge God has?
	I mean, isn't that kind of what he wants for you?
	If God is so great, why not become like God so that you can keep him company?
	And it is this Iago-style whispering in the ear that I think is fascinating because as the most powerful of God's creation combined with mere whispering, mere temptation, it's really fascinating to see the disparity between his supposed power and what he actually does to influence things in the world.
	Yeah, and I love the word insinuate because it has the word sin in it.
	And it also has the origin of the root word insinue, right?
	Like serpentine. Sinuous, yeah.
	He can only insinuate.
	C.S. Lewis in the Screwtape Letters has, of course, it's a conversation between two devils.
	An older devil trying to convince, trying to show his young nephew, his protege, the best way to corrupt human souls.
	And at one point, the older devil, Screwtape, says, you must remember, Wormwood, that we have yet have been able to create nothing.
	That God has created, the enemy, God, the enemy has created everything.
	Despite our best efforts, we are unable to create anything ex nihil.
	So what we can do is not match him anti-creation for creation.
	We can only unmake what he's created.
	And so in an insinuating way, he pulls it apart.
	I'll give you one really great example about this.
	The other thing that I think we should talk about before we're done here today, to me, it's the most powerful story we have about the devil, even more than the book of Job, more than Paradise Lost.
	It is the three temptations of Christ in the wilderness.
	When the devil, we have that one moment in human history where the Son of God made incarnate, right?
	The man Jesus, the man God Jesus, actually comes face to face with Satan, and Satan gets three cracks at him.
	That to me is the penultimate here.
	But if you remember, and we'll talk about that as we move forward, but each of the three temptations that the devil feeds Jesus, Satan feeds Jesus, begin with this.
	It is written. It is written.
	He quotes the Bible.
	It's really fascinating that Satan, when he comes to tempt Christ, he has nothing to tempt him with but the Scriptures.
	If the Scripture is indeed from God, if the Bible is indeed the Word of God, notice what Satan has.
	He talks to Jesus.
	Jesus has been fasting for 40 days.
	Jesus is physically exhausted.
	His physical human frame is starving, yet he is still God.
	And in his stupor, in his delusion, in his dizziness from not eating, Satan comes to him at the weakest point and asks him three things.
	It is written, it is written, it is written.
	They go back and forth, Jesus and Satan, between what is written and the Bible.
	So Satan quotes something to him, and then he comes back with another quote.
	And to me, that's exactly what we're talking about.
	Satan can't even tempt.
	You mentioned deconstructive language, Iago.
	All Iago can do is look for gaps, communicative gaps in language, right?
	Language is supposed to be how we communicate.
	It's supposed to speak truth. People like Iago are really good at insinuating themselves in those gaps between language to wedge people apart.
	That's Satan's entire game as well.
	And it's his game in Paradise Lost.
	You may remember in Paradise Lost when he sneaks into the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve are asleep, and he takes upon him the form of a toad and Right.
	Right.
	This question of what is Satanism and what is Satan, for me, coming as I do from a more secular perspective, the question is, why is the story so powerful?
	And I think the story is powerful whether you're religious or not, insofar as there is the higher calling of what you would, I think, call our divine selves, what philosophers would call the ideal self.
	There is a higher calling among us.
	And there is, of course, the reality of our base evolution, our material flesh, our mere fleshly lusts for food and sex and power and status and so on.
	And to me, there's nothing wrong.
	You can't call it evil when an animal seeks power.
	I mean, all animals do it.
	We don't call the lion evil for eating the zebra or the monkey evil for trying to climb up the social hierarchy.
	They're seeking power.
	But I think we say they can't achieve this sort of abstract, you know, frontal cortex higher being.
	So they're not evil for what they're doing.
	And so the mere human lust for power, to me, is not where the seed of evil is because we share that with the animals.
	But... When you use the language of morality, when you use the language of philosophy, when you use the language of virtue in order to corrupt, that is both a recognition and a denial of the power of virtue.
	And I've been very much reminded in preparing for this conversation About Rules for Radicals, Saul Alinsky's work that is kind of a handbook of leftist activism that is in fact dedicated to Satan himself, where he says, well, we don't have any standards, but we know our enemies do.
	So we hold them to their standards.
	They can't hold us to any standards because we don't have any.
	So we use their own ethics against them.
	That is a recognition of the power of virtue.
	You know, the lion doesn't sort of We propagandize the baby zebras into sacrificing themselves for the good of the lion's pride.
	I mean, it's a brute force transmittal of resources.
	Like, either the lion gets kicked or the zebra gets away or the lion kills the zebra and eats it.
	So, to me, when you combine the natural Darwinian lust for power with a recognition and simultaneous denial of virtue by using A virtuous language in order to destroy the virtuous, that to me is particularly satanic.
	Yeah, and to me, I love what you said, but what distinguishes the lion, the cheetah, from man is that man abstractly understands power.
	The lion doesn't. It's instinct, right?
	To even suggest that the lion is pursuing power is to, in some way, anthropomorphize him.
	The lion just wants to eat, right?
	So it's an instinct.
	And this, to me, is one of the great arguments that man must be something more than merely an evolutionarily evolved animal, right?
	There is more to man than just animal.
	Uh, animal times ten.
	There's a gap there.
	And so human beings have the understanding of what power is and how power can be abused.
	The animals don't have that.
	You mentioned that people like Sawalinski, this started right after Milton.
	You mentioned earlier that starting with the Romantic period, really, the Enlightenment, the middle of the 1800s, the 1800 to 1900, you know, 1750, with the Enlightenment, with the rise of romanticism, parallel movements, you begin to get Enlightenment and Romantic thinkers romanticizing Satan.
	And it was a direct result of Paradise Lost, which was written a century earlier.
	And it was William Blake, the Romantic poet, who first said, After reading Paradise Lost, because Milton made Satan such a seductive character.
	I mean, Milton knew that it was going to be impossible for him to put words in God's mouth that were convincing.
	How do I, a human being, make God sound like anything other than a caricature?
	And he knew he couldn't. So God is pretty reserved in what he says, because Milton knew poetically it was a hard sell, but Satan.
	That's the character.
	If you think Machiavelli is a wonderful political philosopher, if you think Iago would be one of the great roles of Shakespeare to play, imagine if Paradise Lost was a play.
	People would be clamoring to play Satan because he's got all the good lines, right?
	And so with Satan, it becomes one of those things where he comes across as sympathetic because he keeps casting God in a very socially progressive way, the way social progressives characterize things.
	God has all the power and Satan has none.
	Therefore, this is what we do in the postmodern world, right?
	Our entire ethos is to find who has power and then remove him from power and take who didn't have power and elevate him.
	It's the simple binary shift, right?
	It's the simplest, least complicated form of philosophizing, which is exactly why the left takes it because they're not particularly deep thinkers.
	So, Satan becomes a hero for them because even though God made the universe, God clearly made Satan, and God clearly gave them the freedom to disobey, right?
	So, forward thinking was God that God set up a mechanism whereby Satan and Adam and Eve and anybody who wanted to could walk away from God.
	I mean, if God had set the system up, so no matter what you chose, you got God, Then free will is an illusion.
	And so Satan becomes brave, right?
	Satan takes, he speaks truth to power, right?
	He rebels against the authoritarian.
	And this is one of the, to me, one of the cheapest arguments that some atheists make.
	If God really loved us and created us, then why didn't he give us his power?
	Why does God let us suffer and die?
	Why does God put a term limit on our lives?
	If God was genuinely a good God, assuming he exists, then he would have made us Just like him, right?
	So the only way we'll follow God is if he makes us gods too.
	And you can hear in that, right?
	Satan's rebellion against God in paradise lost, right?
	You didn't give me everything that I should have had.
	You didn't give me enough to make me like you, so I'm going to disobey you.
	You see it. In a thousand other ways, Nietzsche, this is God is dead, and we must become like gods to be worthy of the fact.
	And you know what it is to me?
	All of this Alinskyite stuff, all of this Nietzscheanism, nihilism, all of the romantic ennobling of Satan, to me, it really is kind of a weak version of Cat, follow the fiddle.
	I mean, it doesn't make any sense to me that we romanticize this.
	It's a violation of the first commandment.
	Go back to the Old Testament.
	I am the Lord your God.
	You shall have no gods before me, right?
	And when man wants to make a god of himself, and I really do think this is why when socialist, Marxist, all of this contemporary stuff was predicated on godlessness, by definition, Satan would become an amelieable figure for, right? That as starting out with Marxism as religion is the opiate of the people, we have to destroy the whole idea of the metaphysical.
	We must operate only in a material realm.
	Well, who's the prince of this world?
	Who, according to the Old and New Testament, is the prince of this world?
	Who owns materialism?
	It's Satan. It's one of the great temptations of Christ, right?
	The third one. When the devil takes Jesus to the top of a high mountain, and he shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, and the devil says, all these I will give to you.
	It's his, right? All these will I give to you if you fall down and worship me.
	And Jesus says, be gone, Satan, for it is written, thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, commandment number one.
	And all of this romanticization is merely a slap in the face of what the creator would be.
	Right. Well, it's interesting to me from the left that when you step into the skin of Satan, you can't see Satan.
	You know, you put a mask on, you can't really see the mask.
	And you look around, oh wow, there's no masks here.
	Well, when you stepped into the skin of Satan, you can't see him anymore.
	And then the problem is, of course, that where do you identify evil?
	I mean, we all recognize evil exists in the world.
	I mean, anybody with half a brain.
	The left... For all of their relativism and so on, it's nonsense because they simply identify people on the right as evil, as deplorable.
	So people with property, kulaks, capitalists, the bourgeoisie, the middle class, anybody who opposes the revolution, counter-revolutionaries, people who subterfuse, people who sabotage, people who are foreign agents, foreign agents, the list goes on and on.
	And so what's fascinating to me is that when you get rid of the devil in your worldview, you end up multiplying the devil But completely externalizing him.
	And then you get this fantastic fantasy that there's a group of people who are perfectly good, a group of people who are perfectly evil, and all that has to happen is that the good people have to kill the bad people, and lo and behold, you get paradise.
	And that, to me, this lure...
	Of communism, that you can create paradise on earth, that you can essentially uncouple human beings from temptation, from struggle, from loss, from pain, that you can just create this utopian society of perfection and some of the Venus Project people.
	I talk about this kind of stuff, big giant robot mommies that you get to suckle on for the rest of your life.
	The idea that you can create a paradise on earth is the idea that you can have human beings who are perfectly good.
	Now, in the Christian worldview, as it is the case for many religious worldviews, it's impossible.
	You cannot create a perfect human being.
	There was only one in the history of the world, and he got nailed up on a cross.
	And so when you get rid of Of Satan, you end up doing to humanity what Christianity says occurs in the soul.
	So in the soul, you have, within your own mind, in your own heart, you have good and you have evil.
	And it is an inner battle, the great line from Milton, that Satan says, any way I fly is hell.
	I am myself. Hell, it is not an environment that's out there, it's an environment that's in here.
	If the battle for virtue is in your own heart, you don't have the luxury of saying, I'm pure, these people are 100% evil, if I kill them, it's like taking antibiotics, everything just ends up better.
	And this, my big concern with the secular worldview is they no longer view the capacity for good and evil within the human heart, but they then ascribe it to races, Or nations, or classes, or genders, or political aspirations.
	And you can see this with Antifa and other people.
	You disagree with them, they'll just beat you up.
	They will threaten you, they will hit you with a bicycle lock, and so on.
	Because they now have this luxury of believing that they're perfectly virtuous, their enemies are perfectly evil, which is a very slippery slope to violence.
	Yeah, and I think, you know, this is the oldest story in human history.
	What you so adeptly pointed out in the modern world, we're talking about the long history of communism, for instance.
	That's exactly what happens.
	They get rid of God only to reinvent him, and the God becomes, without them knowing it, satanic.
	And you said, too, that the more you're kind of in bed with the devil, the less you realize him.
	I love that, because here's a couple quotes from C.S. Lewis that I think make this point brilliantly.
	Lewis said, I mean, the more a man was in the devil's power, the less he would be aware of it.
	Yeah. On the principle that a man is still fairly sober as long as he knows he's drunk, right?
	So the more a man is in the devil's power, the less he would know it because as long as you know you're drunk, you're not as drunk as you're going to be.
	And the second one I think that is really powerful from Lewis, he said, if devils exist, their first aim is to give you an anesthetic, to put you off your guard.
	Only if that fails do you become aware of them.
	Look, I realize the brutality of organized religion.
	I get it. I get inquisitions.
	I get crusades. I get—and all religions, by the way, all of them have had their fling with this.
	Violence. I get that.
	But to varying degrees, and I would put Christianity at the very lowest level of brutality as far as that goes.
	I would, too. But having said that, you think about the kind of violence that ensued in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution.
	The fascist Germans were not religious.
	They were occultists, right?
	They eschewed religion.
	They saw Christianity as weak, but they liked the occult, didn't they?
	The perverse, the dark side of religion, the satanic aspects of it.
	And the Bolsheviks, think about how much more bloody and how much more insanely genocidal the Nazis were, the Bolsheviks were.
	And it even moved, right?
	That in Nazi Germany, you turned on a certain group of Germans, the Jews, German Jews.
	But in the Soviet Union, you murdered far more Ukrainians, far more Soviet peoples, than you did anybody else.
	And you can see how, over the course of the 20th century, as technology rises, as we become more comfortable within the world, we can manipulate the things of the world more, we've lost that moral compass.
	I think when we were talking about the Lord of the Rings, I made that observation.
	I'll quote it again. It was General Bradley, after World War II, who said, 1948, he said, We are a world that has conquered the atom, but forgotten the Sermon on the Mount.
	We have, you know, this idea that we have somehow, by jettisoning the idea of God, by elevating reason and scientism to the place that otherwise had been occupied by God, we did not become better people.
	We found better ways to implement our worser demons, right?
	We found better ways to kill, better ways to slaughter, better ways to control.
	And so for me, and I believe you're a philosopher.
	I mean, think about it. We know this, Steph, that as philosophical people, we know that not everybody's philosophical, right?
	Not everybody's capable of this.
	People can learn. I've never noticed that.
	Hang on, let me write this down.
	That's very important. You see it all the time.
	Now we get a beautiful insight.
	And it doesn't mean that people who are philosophical are innately superior.
	It just means they have a higher level perception in some ways than people for whom philosophy is kind of a dead thing.
	I take it one step further about good and evil.
	I think Plato and Socrates were right, but they had the wrong vocabulary.
	When Plato, who was by no means a Christian, when Plato, obviously, Pointed to the heavens and said, the origin of virtue is there.
	There are absolute ideals there, right?
	There are the forms of good.
	There's absolute good, the form of it there.
	We can't reach absolute good because we are in a fallen world, but there is absolute good.
	And to me, the simple, for me, it's easy.
	If I believe in good and evil, like you said, even without God, I believe there are good and evil and there are absolute goods and evils.
	And to me, as a believer, all God is, whatever you want to call him, is that ideal form of the good.
	And then Satan, by definition, becomes whatever the ideal form of the wicked is.
	And if you want to anthropomorphize, if you're a religious person, you may anthropomorphize them a little bit.
	You may see them as anchored in sentient beings.
	If not, from a philosophical perspective, like you said, There are still philosophical human ways of looking at absolute good and bad, evil and good.
	We recognize evil.
	It's the left that doesn't.
	Why? Because the philosopher does concede the possibility of the absolute, right?
	The philosopher always does.
	In fact, what has the history of philosophy been, Steph?
	For the last 3,000 years, up until very recently, has it not primarily been an attempt to define absolute good in relation to everything else?
	It's the primary thing that seems to have occupied the philosophical mind.
	So the philosopher in that way is not that different from the theologian.
	The philosopher might not go so far as to say that absolute good then is a personification It is a living sentient being who created everything, but the ideal is still there.
	With the Marxists, the communists, the postmoderns, they've rejected the possibility of absolutes, even as they wallow in them.
	You so rightly pointed out that the same clowns, like this professor you had on, right?
	This guy who was arguing that everything was morally relative, making absolute statements to deny absolute, right?
	The left has tried to jettison all of it, which is why philosophical arguments don't move radical leftists any more than theological arguments do.
	Right. And the issue of earthly power, let's talk about the three temptations, the lust of the flesh in many ways, which is a very profound thing to embed it.
	We are, of course, embedded in the flesh.
	Consciousness is just some freaky solar flare.
	From a material standpoint, consciousness, the effect of the brain, is something that is impossible to encapsulate scientifically at the moment.
	At the moment, who knows at some point, right?
	But at the moment, nobody really knows how consciousness works.
	And it is such a difference.
	From everything else in the natural world, that it is almost impossible to, I mean, for me, to encapsulate the power of human consciousness in the, you Less than a foot and a half skull prison of the brain.
	It's not like, well, a giraffe has a really long neck.
	We have an infinitely long neck.
	We're not just a taller giraffe.
	We can do what nothing else in the animal kingdom or in the universe that we know of so far can do.
	We can abstract, we can reason, we can weigh, we can debate, we have free will.
	These are all... Rooted in the biological, we have yet to see consciousness directly without a brain next to it, but it is so far outside of other brains, of other pieces of matter and so on, that we are singular.
	And it is very difficult to comprehend how consciousness works with the brain and how the brain can possibly give rise to such abilities.
	And I think to me, Satan says, sink into the flesh.
	Sink into the flesh.
	You are a being of appetites.
	You are a being of animalistic nature.
	Sure, we've got this little fairground called the soul, the higher thought, and it's fun to go play there, but you don't want to live there.
	It's noisy, it's flashy, and you never seem to get the ball into the little cup.
	So sink down into the material.
	Sink down into the meat.
	And be an animal with a fun playground called the mind.
	Whereas, you know, the other way is like be a mind with a fun playground called an animal.
	That's my particular perspective on things.
	And I think this sinking down to the material is fascinating because we don't lose our capacity to reason, to manipulate.
	We don't lose our capacity for sophistry when we sink down into our appetites and say, I want to have sex.
	I want to have great food.
	I want to achieve power.
	I want to provide material resources for my children.
	I want my genes to replicate.
	I wish to have high status.
	All of these desires and lusts and thirsts that we share with the animals, to sink down into that, we still don't lose our higher seed of reasoning, but all that happens is we turn our higher seed of reasoning in service of...
	Appetite, in service of desire, in service of the meaty lusts of the evolutionary moment.
	And that is, I think, where the real devil occurs.
	As I said, you know, when you use your higher faculties in mere service of DNA, in mere service of Darwinian lusts, we can't sink into the animal.
	We can only corrupt our higher beings with pursuit of mere material lusts.
	Higher being, our reason.
	I love the way you said that. Again, in the Screwtape letters, when Screwtape is trying to corrupt Wormwood, he says to his young nephew, do not let your patient, what he called human beings, do not let your patient get into the habit of reasoning at all, he says. After all, the enemy, God created reason.
	And they are never more in danger, man, the devil says, than when they reason.
	Your job, Wormwood, is to keep them from reasoning at all, right?
	So you're exactly right.
	And you mentioned, you started that little wonderful little digression there with a mention of the three temptations.
	And they are about flesh.
	The three things the Bible tells us That belong to Satan, or are Satan, world, the flesh, and the devil.
	Materialism, the body, divorced from reason and the higher operative powers.
	I would include the soul in that.
	World, flesh, and the devil are the three problems.
	And just in case your readers are unaware of it, real quick recap of what those three temptations were.
	First, Fyodor Dostoevsky and the Brothers Karamazov, he said, if you put all the world's wise men who ever lived in a room, For all of human history.
	And you asked them to come up with three questions with which to ask to confront Jesus.
	That all the collected wisdom of the world could not have come up with those three questions that Dostoevsky said.
	Hyperbolic Dostoevsky, but I think there's some truth to it.
	Jesus is broke down.
	He's hungry. He's famished.
	It's right after he's been baptized and the Father in heaven announces to the world, this is my son in whom I am well pleased.
	Jesus is ferreted away.
	And what I love about the Gospels is even when you get miracles in the Gospels, it's pretty realistic, right?
	How does Jesus make the deaf man hear?
	Well, he puts his fingers in the deaf man's ears and wiggles them around and prays.
	How does he make the blind man see?
	He gets on his knees, Jesus, he spits in the dirt, makes mud of the dirt, covers the eyes, right?
	So it's a very, even when the miracles occur in the gospel, it's very little of the old, I dream of Jeannie, boink, right?
	There's a certain realism to them.
	The only thing that strikes me in the gospels as different from the realistic narrative is when Jesus is swept away and finds himself in the middle of the desert.
	And for 40 days he fasts, and then the devil visits him.
	It's so unlike everything else in the Gospels.
	It's almost like something out of a fairy tale.
	Doesn't seem to fit. But Jesus is tired, weak, and hungry, and the first thing the devil says to him, if you are the Son of God, command these stones to become bread.
	Right? I mean, come on, what you just said.
	Your father, look, the devil, I'm not bringing you anything the devil says, because I know you wouldn't take it from me.
	But certainly, hunger's okay.
	Your father made bellies.
	They made food. And if I'm not giving it to you, why don't you just eat, Jesus?
	He says to Jesus, make these stones become bread.
	And Jesus says, be gone, Satan.
	It is written, man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God, that there is I love the reaffirmation.
	There's a higher calling for human beings that goes beyond our material needs.
	That the sum of a human being is not staying alive, being comfortable, satisfying its biological processes the way it is for an animal.
	It's not that way for us.
	I'm sorry, just before you, I just want to drop one little thing in there because going back to the communism thing, this idea that through magic you can just make resources.
	Through printing money, through creating, through stealing, through the redistribution of wealth, through power, you can just make resources.
	And that to me is, of course, one of the great temptations.
	We all want resources. Maybe we've made bad decisions.
	And if the state can just borrow money or print money or sell bonds or take from this guy and give it to me, well, look, magic has created resources literally out of thin air.
	I haven't had to earn them. And this thirst for the unearned to me is foundational to Satanism.
	So I just wanted to sort of point out that, again, for those who are not theologically inclined, there are direct parallels to how society is organized in its decline.
	That is absolutely prescient because that is the foundation of socialism.
	The entire premise of socialism is that material goods satisfy all human wants.
	If we simply reorganize who has stuff, then you're going to have equality, utopianism, and perfection.
	You're exactly right. You could not have had, in a way, that conversation, this is what Dostoevsky was saying.
	Dostoevsky was writing at the end of the 19th century when socialism was on the rise.
	And Dostoevsky recognized, going back to that first temptation of Jesus, That this is what the socialists are talking about.
	Follow me, right?
	In the famous Grand Inquisitor scene of the Brothers Karamazov, that would be a hell of a chat one day if you ever wanted to read that.
	We'll do that. Famous Grand Inquisitor scene.
	The old priest says to Jesus, that's why we're not following you.
	Jesus comes back to the 16th century in Ivan Karamazov's dream and starts healing people.
	And the Grand Inquisitor locks him in jail.
	And goes and visits Jesus and said, don't you know what's happened in 1600 years?
	We are no longer following you, the old priest says.
	We're following the devil. Why?
	Because the devil offered you food and you didn't take it.
	You didn't take it. If you wanted people to follow you, the devil says, or the priest says, you should have fed them, right?
	Who cares if you take away their free will?
	Just feed them. And Jesus' response in the wilderness is the one that defeats the socialist argument.
	Are we merely material creatures trapped in a material world, glorified animals who can be satisfied with animal things?
	Or are we something else?
	And that second temptation And I'll lay it out there and you comment on it first, and then we can come back to it.
	The second temptation is just as powerful.
	The devil takes Jesus to the top of the temple in Jerusalem and says to him, if you are the son of God, throw yourself down.
	And then Satan cites the Bible, for it is written, one of the Psalms, right?
	For it is written. He will give his angels charge over you, and they shall lift you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.
	Your own, the Psalms, right?
	Your own father's words say that if you are who you say you are, the angels will protect you from this fall.
	So throw your, I'm not asking you to do anything for me, throw yourself down.
	At which point Jesus required, responded, be gone Satan, for it is written, thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.
	And for me, this is the temptation To allowing rational ways of understanding to supersede completely spiritual realities.
	I mean, if you think about it, what is the devil asking Satan to do?
	Right? Prove to me that you are God.
	And if, theoretically, if God exists, and every time we had doubts, he proved himself.
	Every time we needed something, he was there.
	Every time we felt lonely, he showed up.
	Then we would not have free will.
	He would be imposing his will on us.
	And so this need we have in the postmodern world to say, show me your God exists in tangible ways, swab a cloud and grow God spores in a Petri dish, and then I'll believe.
	That's not the gambit, right?
	What good is belief when you have the rational proof that prohibits disbelief?
	Faith only means something if it is faith in something that cannot be verified that way.
	And for God to provide the kind of proof that the modern world demands would make faith irrelevant and ultimately would do away with free will.
	That's at least the premise, I think, of what's going on in that temple.
	And I think I concur with a lot of that.
	And for me, this idea that you can control God because God has promised something, and if you jump off a building, he has to.
	He has to fulfill the prophecy.
	You are in control of God himself.
	He's promised to protect you.
	Throw yourself off this building.
	He's got no choice.
	And he's like, no, no, no, no. Do not put me in a position where I must go on the assumption that I can control God.
	That God must be forced to protect me from the consequences of my actions.
	Because I have free will.
	If I choose to jump off a building, then asking God to intervene is saying you should not have consequences for your actions, and therefore you don't have free will.
	And to move back to the sort of socialist communist thing, I mean, isn't this really what the welfare state is all about?
	You can sleep around.
	You can get pregnant outside a wedlock.
	You can keep the baby.
	You can want lots of health care.
	Don't worry.
	We'll take care of all of that for you, and you will no longer have any empirical reasons to make better decisions.
	You can throw yourself On a penis.
	You can throw yourself off a cliff.
	And we, as a society, will use force and power and debt and God knows what in order to catch you when you fall.
	You can make terrible decisions.
	You can decide to become a drunk.
	Don't worry. We'll take care of your health care bills.
	You can overeat. You can undereat.
	You can get all the STDs known to mankind and the devil himself.
	But don't worry. We'll take care of it.
	And so the idea that you can be aggressively foolish And that creates a moral, coercive compulsion on the rest of society to shield you from the effects of your actions.
	Is something that serves a very deep sickness in society.
	We need that sort of pinball bounce back of negative consequences in order to be able to guide ourselves properly.
	You know, there's an old character in a fantasy series called Thomas Covenant who has leprosy, so he can't feel his extremities.
	So he spends half his day doing what's called a VSE. It's a visual search of extremities.
	Like, oh, did I get a cut? Did I get a bruise?
	Because he can't feel it. And if you don't have, I remember that when I was a kid, you know, the first time you really bark your shin or something and you're like, oh man, I wish I could live without pain.
	And if you've got anyone smart around you, it's like, no, you don't.
	You really, really don't because then everything will get worse.
	You won't be careful. You know, pain is just your body's way of saying, whoa, whoa, let's not do that again, shall we?
	And spiritual pain, emotional pain can be the same thing as well.
	So this idea that you can just be aggressively irresponsible And that is a blank check on God to save you, it is a blank check on society to save you, creates this mental disintegration that is gripping so much and dissolving so much of this castle we thought was built on rock, but turned out to have built, well, we thought it was built on rock, now we recognize it's built on sand because we've eroded the rock, removed consequences, but we still expect people to be good.
	When there's no particular positive or negative consequences for it.
	In fact, there are rewards for being irresponsible.
	And that to me is that second temptation.
	Do not expect your bad decisions to be a blank check on everyone else's resources.
	Well, first of all, what you just said, death by penile impalement is going to be one of the top 10 Stephen Molyneux quotes.
	I believe we have a show title.
	Having said that, I think you're exactly right.
	And you're coming at it from a more secular perspective where I think that's exactly right.
	That explains the behavior of so much of the Marxist left.
	But flipping it back to the metaphysical for a second, that also explains and I think completely repudiates the argument from emotional atheists that if God exists, then he should stop people from shooting each other.
	And if he doesn't, he is unjust and unworthy of our attention.
	If God exists, he should immediately stop.
	All negative actions before they occur.
	He should not let anybody be hurt.
	He should not let anybody impinge on anybody else's rights.
	Again, what you're calling for without even knowing it is fascism, a world in which God overrides every decision you make except the ones he approves of.
	I get into conversations all this way.
	I teach the Bible routinely at the university and my kids get really upset that when God makes a covenant with Abraham in the Old Testament, he doesn't abolish slavery.
	God demands that the Hebrews treat their slaves much better than all the other countries do.
	Gives them rights, widows and orphans and slaves, gives them rights that no culture had ever conceived of yet for them.
	Why didn't he just get rid of them, my kids say?
	And I point out to them, if God, because if he did that, then you'd go on to the next thing.
	Well, why didn't God get rid of disease then?
	And then if he got rid of those, then you go on to the next thing.
	Well, why didn't God get rid of death if he loves us?
	And you see the problem you fall into, right?
	What you said is exactly right.
	The only way we grow morally, ethically, and I would argue spiritually, the only way we grow is to make mistakes and to cognitively recognize the consequences of our actions.
	In our postmodern self-esteem culture, the one thing we want to get rid of in the schools is guilt.
	Self-esteem education is not designed to let kids be proud of what they've done.
	We keep the bar low. We want to instill self-esteem in them, make them feel good no matter what they do.
	And I point out all the time, if you get rid of guilt, guilt may be the most important quantity we have.
	Because without guilt, how do you know you've done anything that needs changing?
	It's the equivalent of getting rid of pain, right?
	How do you know that that burner is so hot it's going to scald your flesh off if you don't feel pain?
	If you can't understand that your responsibility for bad actions, then these kids aren't going to turn out to be self-esteem.
	They're going to be little monsters, little devils is what they're going to turn out to be, who make bad choices and bad decisions and never see the consequences in themselves.
	I get that guilt can be abused.
	You can make people guilty for no reason.
	But that is not just like you could abuse God.
	The idea of God can be abused.
	Do you really need to combat that by getting rid of God and guilt?
	Or do you have to recognize the right place in the moral and spiritual evolution of the individual?
	Well, and of course, guilt is scrubbed from curriculum unless you're a white boy, in which case you will often be privileged and racist and you get the scapegoat kind of guilt.
	Now that, I think...
	Is a very interesting thing because what it struck me when you were talking was when you say, well, negative consequences would be gotten rid of by just power.
	Isn't that one of the reasons why the atheists are so intolerant of free speech?
	If you were a good university, you would never allow this horrible, hateful person to have a platform.
	In the same way that God would never allow negative consequences to accrue to humanity, it shows that not only are they talking about God as the ultimate, I guess, Platonic proto-fascist, but they're also revealing how they will handle power when they get a hold of it.
	The good power gets rid of all negative consequences.
	And this is why you get this snowflake generation.
	This is why they can't handle opposition.
	This is why they lash out or retreat into safe rooms.
	You get these two wild poles when people who've grown up with this kind of protection from negative consequences.
	When they experience negative consequences, either they, like, run away and end up hugging a puppy video, or, like, they lash out physically and violently, and you end up with terrible social situations.
	And that's because there is this fantasy.
	Oh, well, you know, if it was a good God, there'd be no negative consequences.
	Like, well, you know, if it was a good university, Boom!
	They won't let anyone we disagree with speak.
	And this is the fascism, I think, that does erupt from a lot of the leftist atheists.
	So let's talk about the third temptation.
	Before we go to that, another perfect quote for what you just said from C.S. Lewis.
	Education without values, or the consequences of values, as useful as it might be, seems just to make man a more clever devil.
	Right? Think about our universities, what you just said.
	All of these people educated beyond their intelligence, with all these meaningful degrees.
	I've got a bunch that don't mean anything either.
	You go to school long enough, they'll hand you a diploma.
	Period. You pay them enough money.
	But this idea that with all the education we have, you're not teaching any wisdom here.
	As Lewis points out, that all the education in the world, devoid of values, It doesn't make you a better person.
	And we already hit on that third temptation, which I think is the most profound.
	When Jesus does, the devil does take Jesus to the top of the mountain and shows him all the kingdom of the world.
	I actually love, remember the old Scorsese movie, The Last Temptation of Christ?
	I don't know if you saw it. Oh, I think I've seen that three times.
	And by the way, for those who want to listen to the soundtrack by Peter Gabriel, it is fantastic.
	Amazing. It was almost deemed blasphemous when it came out because it took you into these three temptations.
	And I remember that scene where Jesus was being shown the kingdoms of the world.
	The devil takes Jesus to the top of the high mountain, shows him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.
	And you got to imagine what that means.
	The glories of power, the glories of sex, the glories of wrath and anger, all those things that drive the worst impulses in man, that power gives rise to.
	Remember, when Jesus was living his life, the emperor Tiberius in Rome had It's one of the few times in history when Jeffrey Epstein shows up.
	There's an inside joke for those who follow politics.
	Sorry, go ahead. That's exactly right.
	So as Jesus is going through his ministry as a slave in a slave community in Jerusalem, slaves to the Romans, Tiberius is beginning to wallow, the first really wicked Roman emperor, right?
	And he's going to give rise to Caligula and Nero.
	As that's going on, when Jesus is on top of that mountain, you know one of the things the devil must show him is the sexual pleasure gardens of Tiberius.
	And in the movie, you get these lurid things, these lurid scenes that the devil shows Jesus.
	So he's tempting him with all the seven deadly sins at once.
	And the remarkable thing about that temptation on the mountain is these are mine.
	Satan says, and I will gladly give you all of them if you fall down and worship me.
	So that's the one thing he wants, right?
	That in a rightly created world, the logic is to worship the creator.
	And Satan's entire pull, right, is how do I turn their attention away from him into me?
	Because that's victory, isn't it?
	That's what happened with Alinsky.
	That's what happened with William Blake.
	Milton was of the devil's party.
	He didn't even realize that the devil was really the hero of Paradise Lost.
	That's all of this.
	And it must drive you nuts.
	I mean, as somebody who values reason the way you do, it must drive you nuts that the new Satanist movement, the Church of Satan, claims that it's not a religious organization at all.
	It's an organization devoted to reason.
	Under the guise of Satan, we want to institute reason, not religion across the world.
	It seems to me what Lewis said is exactly right.
	It's a cheesy line.
	It's almost cheesy now from the movie, right?
	The greatest trick the devil ever pulled.
	It's to convince the world he did not exist, right?
	So if the devil now, the Church of Satan, the Satanic Church, the International Satanic Church, is now arguing it's not a religious organization at all.
	It's just an organization for the propagation of reason.
	Seems to me if there is such a thing as a devil, that's exactly what you would expect, right?
	Well, and the temptation that...
	It's hard, I think, for modern people to understand in the West what a temptation that was, because the one thing that we've largely eradicated from the West is disease.
	And wealth was the dividing line, often between a plague and surviving the plague.
	I mean, there are so many examples throughout history from ancient Roman times through to the Black Death and even beyond, where the people who were poor, the people who were jammed up in crowded tenements in a city, where, of course, remember, I mean, for most of Western history or human history, people are crapping in the streets.
	They're throwing their offal out of the window onto the streets.
	And what's that old line from the Monty Python film?
	How do you know he's a king? Well, he hasn't got shit all over him.
	And again, the death records are very clear.
	If you lived in the country and you had money, you were much more likely to survive the endless waves of plagues and diseases that ran through the city.
	So it's, you know, oh, more money, you know, that'd be great.
	But, you know, if you get sick in the West these days, you go to a hospital, they have to treat you and you're going to, you know, so you have access to that regardless.
	But back in the day, the offer of power, the offer of money, the offer of independence was really the offer of survival.
	It wasn't just, well, you know, you could have this amount of money or this amount of money, which, you know, is a little bit less tempting once you get that hierarchy of needs taken care of.
	But it was the difference between survival and non-survival.
	And, of course, I think what the devil is saying is he's saying, don't have intellectual children.
	Don't have mere memes.
	Don't have mere moral influence on the species.
	But have sex. And have babies.
	And don't be Jesus. Be Genghis Khan.
	You know, who raped his way across...
	Was it Asia Minor and so on?
	And like one out of every 17 people in the region now can trace his lineage.
	It's like the first guy with blue eyes.
	It's like one guy. And, you know, that spread like crazy because I guess they're attractive.
	But he's saying, just sink yourself into the physical and be a DNA replicator because that's what animals do.
	That's what the world is for.
	And Jesus, of course...
	Didn't have children. And so the fact that Jesus said, well, I want to have, and I hate to put it this way, it sounds like a mimetic effect on humanity.
	I wish to influence and change the course of moral thinking in the world.
	I wish to preach virtues that go counter to the biological impulse to power, humility, and the avoidance of pride and the avoidance of worldly goods.
	The fact that Jesus said, I don't want to take the mere physical replication of my DNA, which the devil tempts me with, but instead I wish to plant a giant star on a high hill and invite people to climb, that is a pretty wild thing to reject the biological to that point that you can become a spiritual star that people can guide their lives by for thousands of years.
	That shows the power to some degree of resisting the material.
	And I'm not dissing, you know, having kids or anything like that, but that I think is another one of the fleshly temptations that Jesus resisted.
	And that begs an important question.
	I think I agree with everything you just said, and I would take it to the next level for me.
	But how is the way of Jesus possible?
	How are those virtues that open up?
	And the really bad ideas, the imprisonment within the material, the reduction of the intellect to just serving the appetites, how is that conceivable without the possibility that there is something supernatural, that there is something that what Jesus points to is true?
	If there is no God, and Jesus is just a man who died like all the other men, his teaching example might be wonderful, but what he's teaching you to give up He's also teaching you'll get something for.
	And if you don't get it, if there is nothing, if it was just empty promises, then why shouldn't you be an animal?
	Why shouldn't you seek power?
	And so whether it's God or the idea of God that is so necessary to human condition, right?
	Voltaire said it first, I suppose.
	If God did not exist, the old atheist Voltaire said, we would have had to invent him.
	Dostoevsky picks that up in the Brothers Karamazov and says, Ivan Karamazov says the same thing, that if God did not exist, man would have had to have invented him in order for the idea of civilization to evolve in the first place, to get us out of the jungle.
	There had to be an idea to inspire us.
	And a one living man living an ascetic life was not enough to do it.
	And you think about how dangerous that idea is for the modern world.
	Think about Dan Brown's ridiculous Da Vinci Code books, right?
	Where he puts fake footnotes in the back, and half of the world thinks it's an actual, he makes up footnotes, sticks them in the back of his book, and the whole world thinks it's a legitimately documented source, how easy it is to fake news people.
	But you remember in Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code, he could not abide, Dan Brown, the idea that Jesus never had sex.
	That struck him as way too—he completely misunderstood the story of Jesus.
	That's way too prude. So what he did is have—Jesus had quite a bit of sex, right?
	And through Mary Magdalene, there are all sorts of people running around today who got the blood of Jesus in them.
	And you see how utterly contradictory to what the spirit of what Christ was doing that is.
	It's the modern man deciding that if If there was such a creature as Christ, he could only have lived according to my progressive values.
	And notice what the implications are, Steph.
	It's Nietzsche all over again, that Jesus did exist, but that he had lots of sex.
	And it's only a cabal of 80-year-old white priests in the Middle Ages who made us pretend that it's not true.
	And there are people, who knows, maybe thousands, hundreds of thousands of people walking around the world today with the actual blood of Christ in them, which makes them actual gods and goddesses, right?
	And you can see how what Dan Brown does is he completely repaganizes the universe, right?
	And I want to throw this question at you because one of my favorite quotes, I've been waiting to ask you this, one of my favorite quotes is from the great 17th century English poet about the devil, George Herbert.
	And I want you to tell me what you think about this.
	The devil divides the world.
	The devil seeks to divide the world between atheism and superstition.
	That the two things that he would drive you to is either to not believing in God, if he exists, or to believing in a false god, superstition.
	What do you think of that quote?
	I think superstition has been, to me, one of the great curses of the modern world.
	To me, superstition is mysticism without virtue.
	It is the belief in something beyond the senses that provides no moral requirements or need for self-discipline or need to subjugate yourself to a higher ethic.
	I mean, I remember when I was in my early 20s just being so bothered by people who have this vague woo-woo me-ism.
	You know, there's a little bit of karma...
	And a little bit of other dimensions.
	And it's like, does any of this, any of this whatsoever, provide you any moral grounding or any requirements for human discipline?
	Nope! It's all just easy answers and gooey thinking that allows people to avoid even the absolutes of base sense reality.
	But it does not give them any moral absolutes and it does not give them any moral obligations.
	You know, is there anything, say, in your vague woo-woo mysticism crap that...
	Demands that you help the poor.
	Nope! No demands whatsoever.
	That, to me, this sort of New Age stuff, you know, this sort of tarot cards and astrology, and it's all...
	It gives you the comfort of dissolving absolutes without giving you the responsibility of having any moral absolutes.
	So, to me, I can completely understand that.
	Now, with regards to atheism, as I've talked about before, if atheists wanted to get rid of God, okay...
	Intellectual exercise may be worth pursuing in some ways, but you better damn well give people the reason to be good in the absence of that.
	And the fact that atheists knocked down the home that people lived in, that sheltered them from the storm of the world without building them anything new, was cruel.
	Oh, this structure is deficient.
	Let's bring the wrecking ball in and smash down the churches.
	It's like, okay, where are people going to live now?
	Where are people going to take shelter?
	It's an act of cruelty to drive people out of a structure, even if you think it's substandard, into the hail and storms and vileness of the world with no protection.
	And this, to me, is part of the sadism.
	That is involved in a lot of atheism.
	They will attack and they will smash and they will then become the kind of god that they criticize by creating a state that dissolves consequences for people and removes free will.
	Statist intervention removes free will, diminishes free will, because it provides exactly the wrong incentives to personal responsibility, to abstinence, to virtue, to self-discipline and all these things.
	And so I can really understand...
	That Satan would love atheism because it sinks us into the material.
	If you've got a problem in your life, the way we solve it, you see, poverty is only the lack of money.
	That's all it is. Poverty is not poverty of spirit.
	Poverty is not anything to do with immorality.
	Poverty is not a lack of love.
	It is not a lack of self-respect.
	It is not a spiritual challenge.
	It is merely...
	A lack of resources. So if we take the big, giant, coercive fist of the state and we scoop up a bunch of resources, we throw them at the poor, poof!
	We have now made the poor just like everyone else.
	Now, poverty has its pluses and its minuses, and I grew up very poor and recognized that the vast majority of people who were poor were poor because of spiritual reasons, in my experience.
	And this doesn't mean the rich are all good and the poor are all bad.
	It's just my particular experience.
	So I can certainly see The Great Temptation to Violate Thou Shalt Not Steal, right?
	I mean, I remember when I was in college, I was talking to this woman, she was having real trouble coming up with a master's thesis, and she was, you know, one of the things you do defensively in a history degree, if you can't come up with a good thesis, is you find a tiny little niche of history no one else is interested in, and that becomes your thing.
	Why? Because no one can tell you you're wrong, because nobody cares.
	And this woman was literally trying to figure out how many sheep existed in various little démons in France in, like, the 13th century, and it's like, ooh!
	Slow down, Voltaire.
	You're making too much of an impact.
	You're like this big giant Arizona crater of knowledge landing on the planet.
	But she wanted to do that.
	And I remember she would go into details and she was learning how to read this ancient French and all that.
	And I just remember I said, well, I have a quick question for you.
	What do you think of property rights?
	No idea. What do you think is the role of coercion in society?
	What do you think of...
	Did you think taxation is coercion?
	No idea. And it's just like the curse of the smalls or the curse of the stars.
	We either get involved in ridiculous abstractions that have no practical value in the world, or we get into these tiny count the grains of sand on the beach, which strips both extremities out of any impact in a social discourse.
	So if people can get you to focus on details...
	Well, you know, this particular tax policy takes from this group and gives to this group and everything's going to be great.
	You're missing the big picture, which is theft model, because it's kind of what you're doing.
	You're using the state to transfer resources at the point of gun.
	That's theft. Thou shalt not steal is kind of foundational.
	If you bypass all of that, it just becomes like shifting resources.
	You know, you see these guys in Vegas with these...
	When people are playing, they have those kind of big pushers, and they're just constantly pushing and pulling all these chips all over the place.
	And it's like, that's what society becomes.
	You have no rules. You have no morals.
	You have no ethics. It simply becomes around bribing people to give up their freedoms in return for material resources in the here and now.
	In other words, the state becomes Satan, and the Voters become a faulty Jesus who succumbs to that kind of temptation.
	So I can really see that if you end up with mysticism with no moral responsibility, you're a useful idiot who just wants resources.
	And if you end up in atheism, We're thinking that we are mere meaty animals who need resources.
	Then you can become this croupier.
	You can become this shifter and manager of resources, which is insanely corrupting, even in the short run.
	But in the long run, it's even worse.
	So I can really see that fork in the road that parts around the church that leads to many of the disasters of the 20th century.
	I hope that answer wasn't too long, but that's what popped into my head.
	It was wonderful.
	And I think that quote sums it up quite nicely that, you know, whether God exists or not, the idea of God to the philosopher or the God himself to the spiritual man.
	Free will cannot exist without it, I don't think.
	Because what we see happening is what Herbert said all those years ago, that the farther society moves away from the serious at least consideration of the possibility of God.
	The more it becomes either atheist or—and that's the minority.
	The small minority becomes atheist.
	The much larger majority becomes superstitious.
	I saw a couple of surveys from two weeks ago.
	Something like 45% of millennials actually believe astrology is true, right?
	And want to live in a socialist country.
	And that's right. Because they live in Venezuela.
	Exactly. And so, the superstitious and the atheistic, and what they both have in common is one is a refusal to consider some overall—boil it down to its finest point.
	One is the refusal to consider the possibility of an overarching moral system that supersedes the merely rational.
	And the other one is an abusive reason, dedicating reason To further the aims of false beliefs, to wander down false, obviously false rabbit holes.
	And so, for me, what you see happening, that quote that's often attributed to G.K. Chesterton, without a lot of evidence, somebody said it, that if you don't believe in God, you don't believe in nothing.
	You will put something else in that God slot.
	In the same way that all different cultures have had a slot for Satan, right?
	A slot for what evil is.
	So too we have this God slot.
	And Chesterton said, if you don't believe in God, you don't default to believing nothing.
	But that something is going to occupy that status of what God was to previous people.
	And so consequently to the feminists, Gender is God.
	To the capitalists, money is God.
	The perverted ones, anyway.
	It depends on where you are on this.
	Of course, to the worldly-minded man, it becomes power.
	What we see happening in the increasing vacuum that's being brought to bear on Western culture, the absence of God, we see us trying to fill that hole with a bunch of other things, and that gives rise to what I call the God state.
	The atheist, secularist, materialist God state that seeks to be all and provide all for man, right?
	God's not there to hold that place, and so the state does.
	It's interesting, for all the atheism of the Soviets, isn't it funny that they took the greatest cathedral in all of Moscow, converted it to a public space, The altar where the saints relics used to be buried, right?
	They removed them and they put the embalmed body of Lenin right there.
	And people came from, these atheists came from all over the Soviet Union to lay their hands on the casket of the great founder, right?
	And the mayday parades, right?
	Where you're marching in the streets in North Korea, China, Russia, with 50 foot tall pictures of Mao or of Stalin.
	These are religions. They operate as religions.
	They seek to know every aspect of your life.
	The surveillance state, the idea that the old Stasi, right, they were in everybody's bedroom listening.
	The panopticon, this idea that the state becomes this omnipresent, omniscient thing that functions like God.
	It takes care of us from cradle to grave.
	And I would rather roll the dice, again, stepping back from faith for a moment, I know what I believe, but I'd rather roll the dice with a world that has the idea of God in place, even if you can't get to God, the idea of God.
	Because in that idea, the individual is venerated way at the expense of the collective.
	And number two, free will.
	Meaningful free will and agency is possible in ways it's not if you get rid of that.
	Yeah, my particular issue is we can't stop speaking in a moral language.
	We can't. I mean, even the atheists who are more really materialistic, you know, it's all Darwinian and so on.
	Even the communists who openly rejected the very idea, you know, this idea that religion is the opiate of the masses.
	That's nonsense. Marxism is the opiate of the intellectuals.
	But the The materialists who say that it's Darwinian struggle, we're animals, and so on, they still can't stop creating their devils.
	They still can't stop saying, well, we have to smash the kulaks, and the capitalists are evil, and the working class is good.
	So given that we can't ever seem to stop talking about things in a moral context, and I did this debate recently with Dr.
	Thaddeus Russell, who wasn't even sure that I existed, who thought that a tree could have sex with a woman and produce, I don't know, an ant?
	I don't know what's coming out of there.
	Talk about some wood.
	But he still wanted to talk about ethics.
	He doesn't know what exists.
	He doesn't know whether I'm real.
	He doesn't know anything that is true, but he still wants to talk about ethics.
	And we simply, ethics are so powerful in human society.
	They are so powerful in a religious context because they teach us universals about what is right and wrong.
	And they're so powerful in a political context because if you can demonize a certain section of the population, they're free to plunder through the power of the state, whether it's the rich or the whites or whoever.
	So we simply will be unable to stop talking about ethics.
	We will be unable to stop speaking the language of good and evil.
	The only question is, is it going to be a universal language or a manipulative language?
	Now, among the left, among the atheists, a lot of times, it is a manipulative language.
	You simply invent evil categories that you can put people in so you can steal from them, control them, bully, and it spreads and expands until it eats its own and tens of millions of people are added to the ash heap of history.
	So you can either have a manipulative language with regards to ethics, which is incredibly destructive, or under religion and, of course, fingers crossed philosophy, we can start talking about ethics, which we're going to talk about anyway, which we're going to deploy force to defend anyway, which we're going to try and organize, usually at gunpoint society, by some moral.
	They're either going to be universal, rational, and if it's God-based and based on faith, at least they're universal, that thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not murder, these are not conditional statements.
	So even if you accept them on faith, they remain universal.
	So they're either subjective mechanisms used by DNA to gain resources and replicate themselves at the expense of universality, or ethics are going to be something we talk about and try and navigate universally.
	And to me, the devil wants to fragment it and turn morality to the service of mere resource acquisition, which destroys civilizations.
	I mean, I did a whole presentation on Rome regarding this.
	Or we're going to start talking about ethics as universal.
	Now, when ethics are universal, you can't just use them to get resources.
	You become subjected to them, and you then require self-discipline, and you require a dedication, and it gives you reasons to suffer.
	If ethics are just about gathering resources, then they're all beneficial to you.
	Because if you can convince, oh, I'm a victim, and you're an oppressor, and so I can use violence to get resources, it all becomes beneficial.
	Where are the ethics these days that require self-sacrifice?
	They only come from universal.
	So given that we can't drop the weapon of morality, we need to find a way to use it to benefit society rather than just particular individuals who are using it in a manipulative fashion.
	Yeah, I love that. And I would go on to say that if there are both the philosopher and the theologian, and what is theology?
	It is merely the application of human reason to theological issues, to divine, supernatural issues, metaphysical issues.
	I would go that further and I would say both the philosopher at his best and the theologian at its best defaults to What we can know about absolute notions of the good.
	If philosophy is not doing that, then it ceases to have the kind of social utility that we need.
	That also implies to me that those absolutes, by definition, must remain, like you said, bigger.
	We can't get all of that absolute into this little brain of ours, this very finite, wonderfully complicated, but still pretty finite human brain.
	The point that I come back to again is one I hear a lot.
	To believe in God, to believe in religion, to believe in absolutes is irrational.
	I would say no, it's not irrational.
	The reason that we with our finite minds can even contemplate the absolute is because maybe That there is something not just that's irrational, but that's super rational, right?
	That the idea of virtue we're talking about, whether anchored in God or anchored in the best that rational philosophy has to offer, to me it is super rational.
	It goes beyond reason.
	It invokes a reason that is higher than Standard reason, in the sense that to default to absolutes as non-absolute people, to strive for an absolute that we know we can only reach imperfectly, that's not an irrational thing.
	That's how it's dismissed. It involves the recognition, possibly, of a higher kind of reason, what I would call the super rational, which also does open a gate to God on one level, or a gate to the recognition of humility before what we know.
	But both ways, to me, lead to productivity.
	And lead to individuality and free will.
	The opposite is dangerous.
	I know we're probably going to have to wind down.
	Let me throw one last quote at you, because to me, this is the one that I think from C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters, again, it's very famous, and I think it sums up our conversation about the devil and all of this philosophical stuff.
	Lewis wrote, there are two equal and opposite errors into which the human race can fall about devils.
	One is to disbelieve in their existence.
	The other is to believe And feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.
	They, the devils themselves, are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.
	So in other words, if we don't believe in devils at all, the devils are pleased because that turns men into materialists.
	And the devils won.
	The temptations of Christ have been manifested, right?
	Because if you don't believe in the devil, then you don't believe in God either.
	Right? The possibility goes away.
	So if we reject the idea of devils, the devils love that because it turns us into materialists.
	The devil has won. Jesus is lost in the temptation of the wilderness.
	Or if we take too unhealthy an interest in devils, well, that turns us into magicians, occultists, necromancers.
	And that's fine too, right?
	And if you think about everything we've talked about in this hour and a half in relation to those two things, If we make man basically an atheist with regard to devils, then he loses himself in materialism.
	If you, however, make man overtly curious about the devil, overtly interested, then you turn him into a superstitious wreck, right?
	And you see the consequences of that to false religion.
	And so if you think about it, the materialist magician, and I would simply say, if you look at our culture today, the idea that we would take God all that seriously in intellectual circles is pretty much dead.
	But look at what we will take seriously.
	All these ghost hunter shows, all of this.
	Think about how we've sexualized and romanticized vampires and witches and zombies and werewolves.
	Think about the Our sort of cultural, Halloween now is the second most spent upon holiday just after Christmas, right?
	Think about the, for all of our lack of interest in God, the heavenly and the angelic, among the intellectual class at least, think about the fascination.
	We now have for demonic things, for possessions.
	You can't turn on the TV. How about that TV show on Fox called Lucifer?
	The sole purpose of which is to turn the figure of Lucifer into some kind of crime fighter on behalf of humanity.
	This constant reinventing of the devil in our own image.
	I just thought that's a pretty powerful statement from Lewis, that if men become atheists with regards to the devil, fine, then we have made materialists.
	And if, on the other hand, they get too carried away and curious about devils, well, we can turn them into magicians.
	The last thing that Lewis said, one of the last things he said in his book, the devil, Screwtape said to his nephew, if we could ever get to the point where we can create our perfect human being, The materialist magician.
	That's what we want, he said.
	The person who believes thoroughly in the devil, but under no circumstance believes in God, then we will have one humanity.
	And I would argue, if you think about that, our willingness to believe in the occult and our unwillingness to consider the possibility of God culturally in many regards, particularly among the intellectual class, then we're a lot closer to that today, the materialist magician, than we were 80 years ago when Lewis wrote it.
	Oh yeah, there is this, all of this, you know, you put out what you want into the universe, and the universe listens and returns things to you, and all this woo-woo stuff that's just about, oh, so here's another belief system that's completely irrational that's about you getting free stuff.
	Excellent! I think it's just a kind of superstition.
	And communism combined.
	Well, thanks very much for your time.
	FPEUSA.org for the Freedom Project Academy.
	I look forward to people's comments below.
	Please let us know what else you would like Dr.
	Pesta and I to talk about.
	I mean, I think we could chat about stamp collecting and have as much fun.
	So although the better the topic, the better the conversation.
	So, yeah, we'll look at The Brothers Katamazov, and we will look at suggestions people have in the comments below.
	As always, a great pleasure, my friend.
	Thank you so much for your time today.

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