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April 25, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:30:42

4068 The Philosophy of the 10 Commandments | Duke Pesta and Stefan Molyneux

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	Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux. Hope you're doing well.
	Here with a good friend, Dr. Duke Pesta.
	He is 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.
	The link is below. Dr.
	Pesta, thanks so much for taking the time today.
	Always great to be with you, Steph.
	Thank you. So we are going to be doing the Ten Commandments today.
	Now, of course, I learned them going to Sunday school and being in the church choir and all these kinds of things.
	And I actually read something many, many, many years ago when I was a kid.
	I don't know if you remember or ever read the old MAD magazine.
	But there was a theologian who went through Mad Magazine and illustrated the Ten Commandments through stories and scenarios in Mad Magazine, which was like a kid's semi-satirical.
	A comic. And the thing that really struck me, which I remembered for 35 years or so, is that thou shalt not sounds very decisively negative.
	You know, no way in hell, heck, no way you are going to be doing X, Y, and Z. But as this theologian pointed out, which has stuck with me these many decades, it's actually very liberating.
	Thou shalt not...
	Go to Wyoming or one town in Wyoming or one room in one house in one town in Wyoming is not very restrictive because you have the rest of the world to go to.
	Thou shalt go to one room in one town in Wyoming.
	Well, that's taking away all of your other liberties.
	And so they have on the face value a negative and confining and commanding aspect.
	But I think the argument is easy and solid to make that they are immensely liberating and that this is actually how you achieve freedom is by denying yourself just a few little things in life.
	Yeah, I think that's well said.
	I think they're very positive and I know different theologies list them as positive virtues.
	I think that it is not a negative to restrict people from murdering.
	I think that's a positive. And I think it would be much harder for the commandments to have advocated all the ways we should revere life that exclude murder.
	So I think that they are very positive.
	And I think that they're very uplifting, too, when you think about what they mean.
	They all relate to each other in certain ways.
	The first three Deal with how we would address and deal with God if he exists.
	And the last seven, which I really love, are interrelational in terms of human behavior.
	So you've got the first three, which kind of stand on their own.
	And those are the ones that tend to be a little bit more elaborated upon within the actual text in the Bible itself.
	I'm thinking of Exodus and Deuteronomy, where we get the two accounts of the Ten Commandments.
	The remaining seven are pretty straightforward.
	There's not a lot of codicils or appendices.
	There's not a lot of language tacked onto them.
	And so I think the way they talk about relationships between human beings is also quite positive.
	Right.
	Now, let's be very upfront about the issue of morality.
	I've had a chat with Dennis Prager, who makes a very strong case that at least until everybody becomes philosophical, which does not appear to be imminent based on the mainstream media's obsession with Stormy Daniels.
	But if you don't have a God, you don't have an ought.
	It's the old Humean problem that you cannot get the ought from the is.
	Physics do not dictate how things should be.
	Ideal standards of behavior, or what I refer to as universally preferable behavior, And so these are moral commandments, and in the absence of a God who is all good, all powerful, and the ultimate source and fountainhead of moral authority, these just look like random orders.
	If you accept that God is all good, all powerful, and that this is the source of morality, these gain particular power, and atheists have been unable to To delineate a source of morality outside of God.
	There's all of this sort of lazy pragmatism and results-oriented utilitarianism and the will of the majority.
	And these are all, well, none of these, of course, are sources of morality.
	The mob is simply what just outnumbers you.
	So they're bigger and stronger and tend to be meaner and gravitate to the lowest common denominator.
	So I want to be really clear up front that If you're going to say, well, there's no God, you're going to say, well, these are invalid, then you have taken away a central support of civilization itself.
	Civilization is defined by self-restraint, and self-restraint is defined by morality, and morality is historically, has historically required God's commandments.
	I really, really want to be upfront with that, because people are going to say, well, I don't believe in God.
	Okay, fair enough. Then you have the challenge of coming up with a system of morality that can be universalized.
	I just really want to phrase that at the very beginning so that people find a good reason to listen.
	There's a really good reason to listen, even if you're an atheist, to this because there is a lot of wisdom in these commandments.
	I think you're right, and I would go one step further and say everything...
	I agree with everything you said. If you think about attempts to create a sort of secular version of the Ten Commandments, What do we have?
	Bertrand Russell, who the famous atheist philosopher, came up with a list of 10 commandments that aren't really commandments at all.
	They're really just very highly skeptical, quasi-logical, philosophical positions.
	And so the other thing I would add to what you said simply is I think not only does God immediately serve a placeholder for ought, right?
	Why ought we to?
	Well, one argument is that there is a divine, there's a creator, there's a divine intelligence who has oriented us to the good and tries to discourage us from the bad.
	I would also argue, though, that free will is attached to the possibility of God.
	I think as long as God was a philosophical possibility in Western culture and world culture, then I think things like commandments and the philosophical discussion and debate that ensues from them, all right?
	The idea of good, the pursuit, the very philosophical pursuit of good Made sense if there was an absolute good, whether it's a platonic form or whether it's philosophy deified or whether it's God himself.
	And when you remove that from culture, as we've done relatively recently in human experience, it's not surprising to me that you see free will shrinking as well.
	We now are being governed by biological determinism and the sociologists tell us That little part of us as human beings that isn't biologically determined is now going to be socially, culturally determined.
	So you see what happens.
	It's not just ought and reasons to be, the practice of virtue.
	That seems to be waning here because all virtues are relative, right?
	So not only with the absence of God do you get philosophical problems, like how can we talk about things?
	Why is one thing better than another?
	You also get the compromise of free will, which makes philosophy also mood in some ways.
	And you get the rise of victim culture.
	Victim culture is saying that my life circumstances result from environmental factors purely.
	And for the Christian, the argument would be like, yes, you had it tough, that could be a test, that could be a way of sharpening, but you cannot blame your environmental circumstances entirely for your position in life because you have the gift of free will, you have the gift of choice.
	And the environmental determinists, who still retain their massive moralizing, you're a racist, you're a sexist, you're a, you know, whatever, and That aspect of victim culture where we strip people of responsibility in return for easing the pain of their life circumstances is really, really destructive. So let's start, I would say.
	Let's start at the very beginning.
	Let's start at the first one. So, I am the Lord thy God, which hath brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
	Ooh, I love that last bit.
	Out of the house of bondage.
	The house of bondage, to me, is not just Egypt.
	The house of bondage is...
	You are not allowed to have freedom when you were slaves.
	You don't have freedom.
	You don't have free will. You cannot be moral because you don't have choices.
	You must simply obey or die.
	Out of the house of bondage to me is not just out of slavery.
	It is out of all that slavery represents, which is a lack of moral responsibility.
	In other words, I couldn't give you morality until I took you out of servitude.
	Yeah, I think it's also bondage to materialism, actually, as well.
	The Jews who had a very specific notion of God, and it was very spiritually driven, a connection between this world and the next that was mediated by their God, who actually appeared to them in many different forms and walked among them in the shape of a cloud or a funnel,
	a burning bush. What the Egyptians had done, of course, was to separate that connection between them and the divine, impose their For lack of a better word, pagan deities between the one God who asserts himself again in the first commandment.
	I had this conversation just with my students just yesterday.
	We're teaching Paradise Lost, and I made the argument that you just made, right?
	And it's a really good argument that Judeo-Christianity, whether it's true or not, Judeo-Christianity Can explain postmodern ideology.
	It can explain how the environment can impede people's choices, but not erase it.
	It explains how people aren't created equal, right?
	The Judeo-Christian worldview understands that we are not all given the same gifts and capacities by God.
	But the thing is, is that if you flip that around, postmodernism and all of the social justice things that you mentioned, they don't have any way to accommodate a Christian worldview or a Judeo-Christian worldview.
	And so the Christian worldview encompasses one aspect of what postmodernism does, but it doesn't work the reverse.
	And I think that's a kind of bondage here as well.
	I think there's a liberation from how uninteresting does philosophy become in some ways, if we can't talk about even the possibility Of absolutes.
	Forget theology for a moment, which adds a whole other level of interesting discussion.
	But I think philosophy itself, and you and I both share that.
	I mean, me from a religious perspective, not as much for you, but we both share this recognition that philosophy, and it is also perfectly Orthodox Christian too, philosophy is perhaps the handmaiden of theology.
	It is the single highest thing people can do if we separate God from the equation.
	This pursuit of truth.
	And we can't have really interesting philosophical discussions either if we are in the kind of bondage to materialism that the modern world has embraced.
	Which is why, think about what happens to philosophy on university campuses, Steph.
	It's no longer, there's no longer any new philosophy.
	We're not now creating philosophers who are philosophizing in wonderful ways at campuses.
	All philosophy has become is a dead subject.
	It's the history of philosophy up until the rise of scientism, right?
	It's the history of philosophy, then comes scientism, and then we stop talking about it.
	Well, I would go, to quote you, I would go a little further than that and say it has not just become a dead discipline, it has become a murderous discipline.
	It's not that we're neglecting our buildings, we're actively taking wrecking ball to them.
	And the only reason that anybody studies buildings these days is not to build new ones, but to find their weak points and to bring them down.
	And another thing, just before I mention this, this is going to come up a little later, but before I forget it, the one thing that is incredibly valuable about the Christian worldview is is the idea that we have both light and darkness within us, that we have an angel side and we have a devil side, that we wish to become good but we are tempted by materialism, by lust, by greed, which is why these commandments exist, of course.
	So if you look at the Marxist worldview or the postmodernist worldview, there are the exploiters and then there are the exploited.
	There are the evil capitalists with the monocle and the whips and the slaves and so on, and then there are the hard done by workers.
	Now, in the Christian worldview, we say, yes, there are evil people and there are those subjugated.
	But remember, when you're subjugated, when you become free, you now gain the capacity to be good, but you also gain the power to do evil.
	And this is the arguments I had regarding South Africa back in the 90s, where they said, well, apartheid is wrong.
	Yes, apartheid is wrong. And the blacks are relatively powerless, and therefore it's easy to have sympathy, and we should have sympathy.
	But, maybe it's because I was raised a Christian, when the blacks gain political power, they will be subject to the same corrupting influences that the whites were, and therefore we need to be careful, and we need to be judicious, and we need to monitor it.
	But everyone thinks, oh, well, we've now overturned the capitalist class, and now everyone's free, or we've got rid of apartheid.
	Now paradise is going to ensue, but it doesn't work that way.
	Human beings are corrupted by power, and therefore we must watch everybody who gains control of power for the inevitable inequities that are going to follow.
	And that internalization of good and evil that light and dark cuts through the personality for all human beings is something that...
	Really escapes, particularly the identity politics people, you know, like white privilege, bad, you know, minorities, always good, noble suffering and, you know, women throughout history, no power, just subjugated and so on.
	It's like, well, you know, we've seen how some women with radical feminism and so on are being corrupted by access to political power and the media gets corrupted by access to political power and the influence that they have.
	And recognizing that all human beings are subject to corruption is something that really limits the growth of political power.
	If you have this idea that there's an angel class of people who will never be corrupted, then the goal is, of course, to hand them that power, which will surely corrupt them.
	Excellent. Yeah, and you mentioned South Africa.
	Your prophecy has come true now, right?
	They're seizing white lands.
	You have African politicians now urging the attack on the white man, so you're exactly right.
	And if you think about that first commandment, I am the Lord your God.
	Basically, you shall have no other gods before me.
	If that's true, even as a philosophical placeholder, then what you just said is exactly right.
	We have no recourse.
	When we get power then, To turn that power on our enemies in the way that the progressives are doing now.
	Or this idea, and you and I have done this many times, we've pointed out that what's happening with modern political social justice warriors is that they've sort of deified themselves, haven't they?
	That their moral positions, which are really political positions, not moral positions, their political positions are inquisitorially true.
	They're dogma. It's not argument.
	The left doesn't argue anymore.
	They just preach dogma.
	And so, ironically, it's the academic, atheist, intellectual left, the social justice left, that has become religious without worshipping the right god, right?
	They've become worshipping, religious in the sense that they have deified themselves, and they take their own words as if they are papal decrees, and they then feel like they can perform pogroms or inquisitions on those of us who disagree and punish us.
	That's exactly right. Oh, it has struck me many times how ridiculously ironic it is That the atheists have so railed against aberrations in general, like the Inquisition and so on, while at the same time setting up their own star chambers, dragging students and faculty in for wrong-think, cross-examining them, attempting to destroy their careers.
	It's like, you know, we're not supposed to reenact Arthur Miller's play in the modern world while claiming to be against some kind of Inquisition.
	Now, the commandment,"...thou shalt have no other gods before me." To me, when I was reading through these and thinking about these, there's a light and a dark way to look at these.
	Now, the dark way to look at this one is to think of the sort of the jealous husband.
	You're not allowed to have any other male friends.
	You can only look at me.
	You're, you know, like the really possessive and, but I actually don't think that that's a valid interpretation.
	I think, well, there's one aspect.
	One is that in a polytheistic society, you can't have much of a society because everyone believes different things.
	Everyone has different absolutes.
	And different absolutes, as we saw with the religious warfare in Europe, it doesn't work.
	You need a separation of church and state, or you need monotheism.
	But, thou shalt have no other gods before me, to me, also means that the...
	Because this is about virtue. This isn't about theology.
	This is about virtue, which means you must recognize these...
	As the highest moral ideals.
	You cannot substitute the will of the people.
	You cannot substitute utilitarianism or socialism or pragmatism or communism or democracy or sex or a thirst for privilege.
	You must view these as the moral ideals.
	You cannot worship other things because once you worship other things, you become detached from these moral commandments.
	Yeah, I think that's really good.
	And I think the word bondage, I think, gets pulled down into that second commandment.
	What is bondage? Bondage is, and the Old Testament bears this out, at least the cultural history of the Old Testament bears this out for the Hebrews, that to deify something, and it didn't have to be another god, it didn't have to be a Baal or a Dagon, it could be You know, lust for sex or it could be the pursuit of power or money.
	The idea that to put another God, and it makes sense philosophically, right?
	If we have an ought there at the top, right?
	I am the Lord your God.
	If we concede that first commandment, then I love the fact that all the others are really in some ways footnotes.
	And they're kind of not even necessary.
	If we are following that first commandment from a philosophical perspective, which leads to a theological understanding, if we do that, then all the other ones become kind of, theoretically, they become kind of footnotes because by following the Lord your God, you should not then interpose another God between you.
	And all those other things that are being warned about in the commandments, they're bondage, right?
	We can become bondaged or we can be enslaved by False gods are things that we elevate to the level of God most dangerously ourselves.
	That passage from the Old Testament where God says he worries that they will forget the hand that made them and come to worship the work of their own hands.
	If they wander away from that first and second commandment, the first three really, if they wander away from those first three commandments that deal with man's relationship to God, then they will come to see themselves gods.
	They will worship the work of their own hands.
	The most dangerous kind of bondage.
	And you think about the lunatic fascist leaders of the last 150 years.
	The one thing they've had all in common, even the worst kings of England or the worst kings of Europe in the Middle Ages, they always knew that there was a higher power who gave them their power and to whom one day they would have to answer.
	And that was a moderately restricting thing, at least, right?
	You didn't have that with your Hitlers or your Kim Jong-uns or your Stalins or your Maos.
	And the pursuit of power has always struck me as a very foundational form of enslavement.
	I can't fondly understand, Dr.
	Pesta, why people pursue it.
	So if you believe, if you now make democracy, a control of the mob, that this is now your God.
	Okay, so what do you end up doing?
	Well, you end up having to flatter people.
	You end up having to lie to people.
	You end up having to mislead.
	You end up having to hide all of the hidden deals that you've had to make in order to get into power.
	You have to just continually spend your life Being in power, but that power is derived from controlling other people and manipulating them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
	That seems to me a peculiar form of elevated bondage and I just can't...
	I fundamentally can't see the appeal.
	Knowing that you're walking up to a podium, you're going to tell lies to people, you're going to inflame their passions, you're going to be a sophist, and your entire life is hollowed out by the relentless pursuit of the dopamine of power.
	That does not seem to me to be free at all.
	And that begging for money and falsifying things and manipulating the passions of the mindless, that seems to me like...
	A kind of hell itself, and very, very far from anything I would consider free.
	I think you're right. I think that the one good thing postmodernism has done for us, it has stripped away the delusion that in the absence of God, there are philosophical ways that we should relate to each other that don't devolve to power.
	I think between the Enlightenment and today, there have been a lot of smart people, a lot of smart philosophers who have tried to You know, cover that territory.
	How can we keep that which God pushed us toward or that which God mediated for us?
	How do we keep it and get rid of Him but keep those imperatives?
	And we've had a lot of smart arguments.
	What I love about postmodernism is the fact that they've gotten right to the core of this.
	They've stripped God away and they've shown you in the absence of God, there is only nihilism and power.
	There's only nothingness, ultimately, in terms of the final teleology of life.
	There's really nothing beyond death.
	There's really no... No circumscribed meaning to anything that we do, number one, nihilism.
	And number two, that philosophy on its own, divorced of absolute concepts to pursue, it really has very little to say.
	Power then becomes everything, and what do you have now?
	You have a situation, go back to the social justice warriors.
	Politics, which is nothing more than how do we manipulate people for power.
	Then becomes elevated to the God slot, right?
	It becomes that God slot.
	And that's why it's become such a murderous blood sport, right?
	Because it is the highest power.
	I've made this argument before that morality and virtue and ethics, they should never derive from politics.
	And at university, I tell my kids this all the time.
	Your politics as students should never, ever derive from the politics of your professors.
	You should be skeptical of their politics.
	Politics has to derive only when we have decided what is good and moral and true, and even beautiful, I would throw in there.
	When you've discovered for yourself what you think those principles are, then let your politics flow from it.
	But right now, politics are corrupt.
	They're the head of the river stream, right?
	They're the source of the water flow.
	And so they're polluting everything downstream, where if you have morality, truth, beauty, those concepts, however vague and imperfect they will be for us as fallen creatures, if you have that at the fountainhead, then everything that flows will flow the right way, and politics will emanate from those higher conceptions, but there's no room for that now.
	Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven I puzzled over this one for quite a while, but let me get your thoughts on it first, because I'm not sure mine are particularly deep.
	Well, I think it's a neat one.
	I also remember that everything biblical, everything theological from a Judeo-Christian perspective, philosophically, everything is both of its time and timeless.
	So there are aspects of almost everything that's said in the Bible that all have their origins in a certain particular culture.
	Jesus spoke Himself as a Jew living in conquered Roman territory.
	And so much of what Jesus says is contextualized for his listeners there, but has the higher theological truth, which is timeless.
	And I would say that that's one of those issues.
	You think about the world in which these Ten Commandments were provided to the Hebrews.
	Well, what had happened? They had just been let out of bondage and slavery.
	And Moses was up on the mountain communing with God to get the documents about how God will relate to his new people, the people he had just liberated.
	While down below, Aaron, his brother, they begin to have an orgy around false gods.
	They create a false god, a graven image, a golden calf, because they're terrified.
	Moses has been up there 40 days and they don't know if he's ever coming back.
	And they see all of this smoke and brimstone from the top of the mountain.
	And so they're terrified.
	They create a golden calf and they worship it.
	And so I think that what that commandment says to me is something really meaningful today.
	It's not enough just simply to know who the one God is and to resist false gods.
	There are all sorts of graven images.
	I would argue a graven image today is money, right?
	You think about money and you think about we impose presidents or kings or queens or emperors on our cash.
	Money is in a way a graven object.
	And you think about how many people in modern culture have deified money.
	I think there are lots of things that we can inscribe.
	I think the warning here is that you're playing a very dangerous game when we Not just pictorially.
	When we think about that, we think today.
	I know what I think of.
	I think of how Islam takes us to a gross extreme, right?
	That any pictures whatsoever, any representative art whatsoever is evil and wicked.
	I think that's a radical, as much of Islam, is a radical overreaction.
	To the source text for Islam and Christianity and Judaism, the Old Testament.
	But having said that, I think that the graven image is a wonderful warning for us.
	It's a warning that even images that you control and create, because they're the product of your own creative brain, they're the product of your own Uh, ethos and consciousness, they can come to control you as well.
	Uh, that which we inscribe can inscribe us.
	And so I think that implies also to things like constitutions and legal documents and Magna Cartas and, uh, rules for living.
	I think that there is a sense in which, uh, and I'm with you about the separation of church and state.
	I get that a hundred percent, but the laws of man themselves can become contradictory if divorced utterly From those higher understandings.
	And so that's where I think the philosophers have kind of fallen down since the Enlightenment, right?
	The founding fathers knew that they anchored everything they were writing about this new form of Republican government.
	They anchored it in the creator.
	They knew that, right? Then that same generation moving forward kind of got queasy.
	Philosophers kind of removed the idea of the creator, and then you're left with the document.
	And does the document have the same force?
	I think one of the reasons why the left is so eager to rewrite it Is because the whole idea that our laws derived from the Creator has been removed in their minds.
	And now it's just a piece of paper.
	And I think there's a way in which man-made laws inscribe us if they're not part of a larger picture, and that's the big problem I see.
	To get a sense of this, and we mentioned this in a previous show, G.K. Chesterton's great comment that when you get rid of the big laws, you don't end up with no laws, you end up with an infinity of tiny laws.
	You can have a courtroom, and a courtroom, I think still someplace it's allowed, you have the Ten Commandments up on the courtroom, and it's, you know, a piece of paper.
	Now, imagine wheeling in the tax code.
	Imagine wheeling in the legal system.
	Imagine reeling in the Federal Register of Regulations.
	You would need an airplane hangar to contain the rules that have multiplied since the big rules have gone away.
	And you can be killed, of course, by a bear, but you're more likely to be killed by a mosquito.
	And this is a bear you can fight.
	The mosquito, in a sense, you can.
	You may not even notice that it's on your skin.
	And this problem of when we get rid of the big rules, we end up with the tyranny of tiny rules like we are, like Gulliver in Lilliputia.
	What I got from this, thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, is you cannot pull God down into the material without losing...
	The moral authority. For the moral authority to be absolute, it must be outside reality.
	Because God created the universe and everything that's in it.
	And so the moment you try to pull God down and mirror God's essence in the material, then you have, of course, created a graven image.
	You have given yourself something to worship that's part of the material rather than immaterial.
	And if God is pulled down into the material, he loses his absolute moral authority.
	And the other thing, too...
	What's really interesting about the Ten Commandments is they don't prescribe any commandments to God.
	Because in the past it was always, well, you've got to give this amount of money, and you've got to sacrifice this animal, and you've got to throw your firstborn into the shark-infested waters because that's what the water gods want, and you've got to drop a kid into a volcano because that's what the...
	Like, there's no commandment here, and the focus is stay focused on morality.
	Once they give you the source of morality, stay focused on morality.
	Don't worry about what God looks like.
	Worry about how you're going to fulfill these universal moral commandments.
	And this temptation to focus on looks rather than values is not at all confined just to religion.
	We all know people in our lives who got sucked into the quicksand of a pretty face and a desperately demonic personality and were destroyed like a ship on rocks.
	Don't focus on the appearance.
	Focus on the virtues and the values and the abstracts because the appearance is fleeting and the appearance can also cloak up some significantly distorted beliefs.
	Yeah, I think that's really an exciting observation, and it's exciting because it's exactly what the ongoing, unfolding history of the Old Testament tells us, right?
	What happened to the Jewish people?
	Well, many of them had become legalistic.
	They saw the Ten Commandments, they saw the laws as they were laid out in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and they decided, many of them, That simple legalism was the same as holiness, right?
	Simple legalism, obeying the law very narrowly, made you righteous.
	And isn't this the thing that Christ, who was a Jew, Jesus was a Jew, right?
	Yeshua, Joshua was his name, Yeshua in Hebrew.
	Jesus said to the scribes and Pharisees, you think because you follow the rule, you tithe mint, right?
	You think because you say the right prayers and occupy the best seats in the synagogue.
	You think because you follow the law, That makes you righteous.
	There's no love in you, he said.
	And that's exactly what you just said, Steph.
	That what happens is, is when we, these commandments are useful and certainly law has to be followed, but law itself can become legalistic if the spirit of the law is neglected simply for the formal letter of the law.
	That was one of Christ's big problems, right?
	With the Jews of his day, that you think by following the letter of the law and not loving anybody, you're righteous.
	You're not anymore, Jesus.
	And I'm come to tell you, I come to tell you it's not enough anymore.
	What was enough in the early evolutionary period of this relationship with the father now is no longer enough.
	Follow the law, Jesus said.
	Not one jot or tittle of that law is going to pass away, Jesus said, that the Father gave you.
	Not one jot or tittle is going to pass away until I come again in glory.
	So the law stays in place.
	It's your attitude and your heart's You have to become, let the law be a framing mechanism, not a god unto itself.
	And I think that's the beauty that sums up that second commandment.
	Well, and of course, the great danger of focusing on being good is the giant trap of self-righteousness and smug virtue.
	Virtue signaling, as it's called, we see it a lot online.
	Once we recognize that virtue is a process for which we are always fallible, then we don't get to say, I've reached the top of the mountain, I have become enlightened, I am now perfect, because you are always infinitely far away.
	Actually, you are always very far away.
	I hope infinitely would make everyone the same moral category, but you are always quite far away from perfection.
	And smugness is when you have fulfilled the letter of the law and now you feel you've become a good person.
	Whereas achieving goodness, yeah, makes you feel good.
	It should make you feel good.
	But I don't think there's any point at which you say, look at me, I'm virtuous and I have achieved perfection.
	And I think that is something that this pushes back against.
	Now this one I found to be a lot deeper.
	And again, I get your thoughts on this first.
	But before I say it, thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, the etymology of the word take was unclear, or has been, you know, there are translation issues and so on.
	And it is, originally it was carry, thou shalt not carry the name of the Lord thy God in vain, and it had a lot to do with do not do evil in God's name.
	Because that doesn't just destroy your virtue, but it besmirches the reputation of God and spreads like horizontal cancer along the capacity of others to respect virtue as well.
	Yeah, I think that's a very important distinction to make.
	Just like I think the second commandment kind of tweaks the first one a little bit, I think the third one does as well.
	And the thing I would start with is textually and historically.
	We know that for the ancient Jews, naming was critically important.
	The way God related to people and the way God identified himself was through naming, right?
	When God chose Abram and Sarai, the first thing he did when he made that covenant with the Jews was rename them, right?
	Abraham and Sarah. Down through the ages, God is constantly renaming things that are his, right?
	When you become his, you get a new name.
	He remakes you in a new name.
	To the ancient Jews, there was this argument, this idea that naming, that the name you are given is you.
	It's your identity. And it's the most mediated identity you have between you and God.
	And I go back to the fact when God finally names himself, right?
	When God finally names himself for Moses, what is his response?
	His, my name is I am.
	I mean, being itself.
	And if that's true, and that's the name God gave himself, think about that for a moment.
	To take that name, to take the very name of being, what is it that we oppose against?
	Nothingness, it's being, right?
	What is the one thing that we have to hold on to, whether you believe in absolutely nothing or you believe in absolutely everything all the way up to God, the one thing that we can get our minds around is being.
	Being itself.
	We would not be having any conversations.
	We would not be reflexive or conscious if it weren't for being.
	And when the God of the Old Testament names himself I Am, I think there's a serious consequence to taking that name and besmirching it.
	I mean, from a philosophical perspective, any attempt to denigrate the great I Am is nihilism.
	It's destructiveness.
	It's death. It's suicide.
	And so it is a very serious argument here that the only way we can know God is through his name.
	And one of the things I absolutely love about Jewish culture is they have all these wonderful names for God, right?
	There's Jehovah Jireh, right?
	The Lord who provides.
	There's Jehovah Rapha, the God who heals, right?
	There's Jehovah Sabaoth, the God of armies.
	And they all reflect different aspects of his personality and the names are sacred to him.
	In the sense that to demean God is to demean being itself.
	And it's just a reminder that it's a very easy descent into madness.
	It's a very easy descent into meaninglessness if we don't take those categories seriously.
	Way back, right at the beginning of my business career.
	Actually, I think this was in the summers while I was still in school.
	I was doing some work setting up a network for a guy who was in the insurance business.
	And he was nice.
	He took me under his wing and I learned a lot from him.
	And I didn't have a car back then and I was at his house installing some computer stuff.
	And he said, you know, why don't you spend the night and I'll drive you to the bus in the morning.
	It's great. And he had...
	Dookie had a beautiful house.
	Now, again, I grew up in these tiny little apartments in pretty bad neighborhoods.
	So I was like, you know, the angels, the cherubs, like I was in that house.
	And I was like, now, I didn't covet it in that I wanted his house.
	But I was like, yeah, I could get used to this.
	You know, this would be a pretty nice thing to aim for in the future.
	And I did say to him, I said, you have a beautiful house.
	And he said, and he turned to me and he gave me a smile, and he said, yes, the Lord has been good to me.
	And I thought, ooh, I don't like that too much.
	Because is he implying that the Lord has been bad to me or for some reason like the Lord favored?
	So the fact that he would ascribe his material success, which was the result of hard work and dedication and self-discipline and so on, to God's favor.
	To me, that is a minor instance of taking the Lord's name in vain.
	To saying that God has favored him because the implicit assumption there is that God is then punishing people who fail.
	And that's a very shallow way of looking at God's favoritism.
	God favors the virtuous.
	That doesn't mean that the virtuous always do well because a sword is sharpened by sparks and a grindstone.
	And so that to me was a very minor instance and I found that very off-putting because of what it implied about my family or the other families that I knew who were doing very poorly, which I think was not because they lacked God's favor, but because they had dysfunctions, they didn't work hard, they were self-indulgent, sometimes they were lazy, they lacked self-discipline, self-control.
	And yes, there was, in fact, some bad luck involved there as well.
	And that, to me, when I was reading this, that really just popped up.
	I haven't thought about this in years. It really popped into my head as a moment where I thought, I don't think that's the right way to use God's favor.
	I think for me, listening to your story, the thing that I would say was we don't have enough information.
	I think it depends on what the man meant by that.
	If the man meant, because we don't know.
	I mean, I could see how you would interpret it that way.
	Like, hey, wink, wink. I got this cool stuff because God's my homeboy, right?
	I get that. And if that's true, you're exactly right.
	But another way to look at it is, and it depends on what the man was thinking and we don't know, because I feel this way.
	I mean, the first thing I want to do whenever anything good happens in my life is acknowledge the fact that God loves me.
	That's kind of also a way, what that man said is also a way of expressing gratitude.
	What you're also saying to you, it sounds like, okay, right?
	God gave me this stuff because he loves me.
	But to me, when I make those kind of statements, that's me sort of thinking out loud, thank God for what he's done for me.
	So without knowing the man's circumstance, there's a razor thin line there, isn't there?
	Between the vanity of saying, God supports me, so therefore I can do what I want, or I have what I have, or just acknowledging publicly and openly, because that was my first thought when you told me the story, was, oh, okay, that's interesting.
	This guy has done well, and the first thing he does is acknowledge God.
	It seems to me the only way to really...
	A medieval monk once said this, and I wasn't alive then, of course, but I've never forgot it when I read it.
	He said, if we were only allowed one word, one word to pray to God, one word to interact with God, He said the word thanks would be utterly sufficient.
	And I think that's all we can be if starting from the premise of commandment one, right?
	Philosophically, he is God. Commandment number two, we can't take his name in vain.
	Commandment number three, right? Graven images and now his name.
	If that's true, then I think expressing gratitude for the things that we have, even if we didn't deserve them, even if they are not only the result, maybe the result of luck or the result of inheritance, I think it's still appropriate in certain circumstances to be vocally grateful, because there's nothing else we can really pay him back with.
	Well, he could have paid him back with spreading virtue rather than confusion.
	No, hey, if you're out there, you remember this conversation, I'm sure you do, give me a call.
	But you did say he was very good to you.
	He showed you the ropes and taught you things.
	I mean, in a way, he was passing on a kind of virtue to you.
	No, hopefully the guy will call me and I'll ask you these questions.
	Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy.
	Now, the Sabbath day, to remember, of course, that Moses had freed the Jews from bondage, from slavery, to have a day off is a way of taking the brand of slavery off your forehead, because slaves don't get days off.
	So I think that aspect, to remember the Sabbath day is also to remind you to never be slaves again.
	And there was this debate going on when I think I was in my early 20s when Canada decided to end the ban on stores being open on Sundays.
	That was a big debate. And one side of the argument, I remember my mother making this case, which was that that's a day for family.
	Have a day where you're not out there making money.
	Have a day where you're not out there hustling.
	Have a day where you have conversations.
	That has, I don't like the state doing it, but I do like the idea that we are not here as beasts of burden to just work from sunup till sundown to gather resources, that the treasure, you know, where your heart is there also is your treasure, that the treasure is our relationships.
	Now, material ambition is good, you know, we like to have food, we like to have shelter, medicine is good when you're sick, so yes, we want to work.
	But the question is, what do we work for?
	And for me, the labor has a lot to do with giving me the opportunity to have better relationships in the world.
	Because that, in the first half of your life where you're out there gathering resources and you're expending your ambition, Jung was sort of saying the first half of your life is a good preparation for the second half of your life, but you have to recognize when things need to change.
	You have to focus more on your relationships and the good you can do in your community rather than the resources you can acquire.
	I do really like the idea that there's a day where you are more than a beast of burden, a day when you can focus on the meaning of life rather than the work of life.
	I think that's really lovely. And I think there's a reason why that commandment, I would argue that that commandment is the transitional commandment between the ones that focus on God directly, the first three that, what do we owe Him?
	The rest are how do we relate to each other in His world?
	And I think this one is a powerful one.
	And notice what the one, notice I think what you just said, notice the one that comes exactly next.
	Honor thy father and mother.
	I think it's not an accident.
	I think the very first thing, that's the commandment, the keep the Sabbath holy one.
	You think about it. Why do we keep the Sabbath holy?
	It's a way of honoring God who created us.
	It's like the first three in that it's God-focused, right, in some ways.
	You do it because God did this for us.
	When he labored to create the universe, he did this.
	And so we do it to honor him.
	It's connected to him. While at the same time, it's the first one that is conscientiously pushed To our daily, weekly work relations, right?
	Like you said, relationships. This is the very first one that immediately ties us to other people.
	And I love the philosophy and the theology behind this.
	Once you acknowledge who God is and what is owed Him.
	And it's amazing, isn't it?
	And you said this. It's amazing how little we owe Him, right?
	We just owe him acknowledgement, primacy of place, and gratitude.
	That's it. That's what the first three commandments are, right?
	In fact, if you look at Jesus's, when Jesus was asked how to pray, he gave the Our Father, right?
	When you pray, pray this way.
	And much of what we just said is what the opening of the Our Father is, right?
	Our Father who art in heaven, right?
	That's where you, we know you, we know where you are.
	Hallowed be thy name.
	Don't take that name in vain.
	Then thy kingdom come, thy will be done, right?
	The same thing he's doing that the Old Testament is doing, Christ did when he rewrote these 10 commandments in the name of the Our Father.
	And so that fourth one is meaningful to me because it gives rise to the fifth one.
	And it is this argument that we have one foot in this world, one foot in the next.
	God did this for us. We will do it for him like the first three commandments.
	And then we start immediately looking around us as people.
	And how do we bring this divine relationship between us and him?
	How do we carry it forward in our relationships to Mothers and fathers and teachers and sons and that beautiful correspondence, that seamless correspondence.
	I love what C.S. Lewis once said about this kind of an issue.
	He said that famous quote he made, he said, I believe the sun exists, not just because I see it, but because by it rising, I can see everything else.
	That argument, Lewis said, the Christian argument, the geo-Christian argument here It makes so much sense, he said, that by it, everything else makes sense.
	My relationship to my mother and father, my relationship to my work week, why I should not engage in the following injurious behavior.
	What's the best way to injure the family?
	Adultery. What's the best way to injure an individual?
	Murder, right? And so you think about how the whole system here is a beautiful and complete way of integrating spirituality with life.
	And they're seamless.
	They're absolutely beautifully seamless.
	So for me, now keeping the Sabbath day holy, like you said, it's about relationships and it's about carrying forward what was done for us to others in our lives, which then brings in mother and father and brings in the remaining commandments.
	This is, I'm sorry, and I was listening at the end, but a thought just...
	I steamrolled it into my brain.
	This is the one I have, and people who have listened to me for a while will know this is the one I have the greatest challenge with.
	My father abandoned me, my mother beat me half to death on occasion, and this was a big challenge for me.
	Now, that having been said, the honor of their mother and their father is the question of the continuity of values in a society.
	And that is important.
	We have, particularly sort of white Western European culture has been so demonized to the point where your parents, if you're sort of white Western European Christian origin, your parents were sexist and racist and slave owners and colonialists and warmongers and, I mean, just you name it, right? And therefore...
	To utterly turn against your history is to commit a kind of cultural seppuku because there's nothing to defend, nothing to protect, nothing to preserve.
	But the thought that popped into my head...
	Ooh, I tell you it's against my will.
	Against my will, I tell you.
	But the thought that popped into my head was...
	And it came out of something that was...
	A very immoral person gave me a copy of the Screwtape Letters and said it was important for me to read it.
	Which is one of these very odd things that if you were to script that in a movie, people would say, come on, that's too obvious.
	He's warning you about himself.
	He's telling you to get away.
	He's telling you to live a better life.
	And in the Screwtape Letters, of course, which is a fantastic book for people to read.
	There is the argument that the best way to annoy the devil is to turn his temptations into virtues.
	If he tempts you with greed, then be more austere.
	If he tempts you with adultery, be more loyal.
	If he tempts you with lying, say...
	So the very things that he tries to get you to do evil, you end up doing more good with.
	So, having thought of that, the long roundabout way is of saying, given how I was raised, the dedication that I have as a husband and as a father...
	Is that I raise my daughter without aggression.
	I raise her with reason.
	I've never yelled at her.
	I've certainly never hit her. And it's a wonderful relationship.
	And I wonder, tell me if this is just some weird brain-twisty self-justification in your perspective.
	But since my upbringing tempted me towards highly dysfunctional parenting...
	And I have looked deep into the dark heart of my origins and have said I am going to go in as far the opposite direction Is that not in a way...
	It's too far.
	Okay, tell me what you think. Well, I honor my mother and my father by taking what they didn't do and turning it into virtue.
	That there is a way of honoring the moral disasters around us by dedicating ourselves to doing much better than they did.
	Not just for myself, because I've said, well, I don't want my own family life to be better, but over the years I have...
	Talked to hundreds and hundreds of parents and we've got messages from tens of thousands of parents who've said, I am no longer going to be horrible to my child.
	You know, I've listened to what, so not only, so in a sense this, this, it was like the pullback of a bow.
	It went really far in the wrong direction and then it kind of launched me to be a better husband and father and also to spread better parenting practices throughout.
	I've got the experts on, I've made the case for peaceful parenting and so on.
	I don't know. I feel like there's kind of a threat to honoring thy mother and thy father by learning from their lessons and improving upon what they did.
	But it also feels like it could be some paltry square circle justification.
	It only seems like paltry square circle stuff, self-justification, if we forget that it's not just honor your mother and father.
	It's not—none of these commandments are about you specifically, right?
	We must follow them.
	But think about it this way, Steph.
	It's honor also.
	Yes, we must honor our mothers and fathers to the degree that they are worthy of it.
	You don't have to honor specifically an abusive mother, but— Honoring the concept of mother and father.
	And that's where I think you just, everything you just said connects with itself, right?
	So you had a mother and father who in many ways were dishonorable, right?
	Or weren't honorable to the degree that you weren't conflicted by the commandment.
	And nevertheless, you became a better parent yourself because of it.
	Why? Because you recognize, and this is I think the key, you recognize how influential because you, and I was the same way.
	I've come from a broken home too. I came from a broken home.
	My mom and dad got divorced when I was very young.
	Dad died young. We struggled a lot, didn't have much of anything for a while.
	My mom worked really, really hard, and it was just a very broken relationship all across the board.
	But if we also remember, too, that to honor the category of mother and father, no mother and father, no possible human mother and father can be completely honor worthy.
	We're all broken, sinful creatures.
	But if we recognize the category, and this is why I think it's really so dangerous if you look at the culture, How many countries now are writing mother and father out of their documents?
	The United States is doing it. Obama did it, right?
	We're taking mother and father, even hospitals.
	Hospitals now on birth certificates are not putting mother and father as categories.
	It's just parent one and parent two and parent three.
	I think that the loveliness of this particular commandment is that regardless of the fallen people in our lives, no wife is a perfect wife.
	No husband's a perfect husband.
	No son is a perfect son.
	No friend is a perfect friend.
	If that becomes the reason those frailties become the reason we back off the commandment, we've lost.
	And I think we're always pushing for the ideal.
	And if we can be better fathers because our fathers were weak, if we can be smarter husbands because our fathers weren't completely faithful, if we can be better parents because as children we were mistreated, I think that commandment reminds us that the ideal is what matters.
	All of these things. I mean, we'll get down to this commandment in a moment, but the snarkers will say, well, the commandment says thou shalt not kill.
	That means you can't eat meat and you can't shoot deer for hunting.
	It's just absurd. These are not so ultimately literalistic, these commandments.
	They are I think reminders for if God is in charge of everything, he made the world for a reason and he made parents, I think, as deserving of honor because they do what he did.
	God brought life into the world.
	Husband and wife, the book of Genesis says they cleave together and become one man and woman, become one flesh.
	And through that union alone, creation is made.
	And I think there's also, by the way, a huge, huge, wonderful rebuttal.
	To this weird notion that men have uteruses too, and that not all women are mothers, and the whole transgender rethinking of everything.
	I think there's a reason why Western culture has, and certainly Judeo-Christian culture, has and should Continue to carve out a special place for heterosexual marriage.
	It's not discriminatory.
	It's not evil. There are logical reasons for it that maybe people won't agree with, particularly if they're not religious.
	But to argue that it's just simply a discriminatory approach is bullshit, basically.
	Well, I mean, this fundamental contradiction of saying, well, we must be all inclusive and never offend anyone, you white patriarchal racist.
	It's like, I'm sorry, I think you might have just stepped outside the circle of your own commandments.
	Now, that thou shalt not kill...
	Okay, so there's a translation error, which is a challenge.
	So back in 1610, kill basically meant unlawful killing, murder, right?
	Because you can kill someone by accident.
	You can kill someone in a war, which is lawful, although the morality of it is certainly open to question, but it is the premeditated murder of another.
	And so, Thou Shalt Not Murder does not include animals, and it does not include accidents, it does not include defensive war, and it certainly does not include the death penalty.
	The people who say, well, Thou Shalt Not Kill means that the death penalty is invalid.
	I mean, they're taking it from a book which had the death penalty left, right, and center for its moral commandments.
	So, Thou Shalt Not Murder Is something that once you understand that it's murder, not kill, you are not violating the commandment if you swat a fly.
	We don't say, I murdered a fly, I killed a fly.
	And so once we understand that it is around murder, first, second degree, manslaughter, maybe negligence, whatever, but it's the unlawful killing of a human being, it becomes a little bit easier to, I think, well, it becomes harder to oppose from a rational standpoint.
	Yeah, I agree. And I think that one of the things I love about the system that's being unfolded here, this is a system of living.
	People just think they're a series of injunctions or they're bullet points, theological bullet points that are philosophically insignificant.
	No, that's not true. What you're getting here is an entire sort of woven together way of relating.
	And it all starts from the idea of God, that if God is who he is and he made us who we are, then we can honor all these aspects.
	And so I think the remaining commandments ask this question.
	What is the single gravest injury you can do to institution that God has ordained?
	Clearly, God made them male and female.
	If God existed and he created the universe, he made male and female, and he made them alone capable of reproduction.
	And he did it then so we can honor the family, right?
	And then going down further, starting with this one, well, what's the worst harm?
	What's the worst injury?
	Disobeying God leads to when it comes to the individual.
	And I would argue that's murder, right?
	And so you start there.
	And as you work through them, I already mentioned this, what's the greatest injury you can do to the individual who becomes married and one with another?
	Well, it's adultery, right? What pulls that apart?
	And so you get this really beautiful framework here that supports and reinforces and broadens everything that flows, the love, the creative love that flows from God down through every aspect of his creation.
	Thou shalt not commit adultery.
	There are, of course, and we're discovering this with the sexual collapse of morality regarding the welfare state and the sort of debt-based fiat currency fantasy land that we're living in at the moment.
	Adultery, of course, was unbelievably destructive in a society that couldn't conjure imaginary resources out of thin air by money printing because adultery would lead to fragmentation of families and it would also lead, of course, to children growing up without parents or without at least one parent.
	And the protection of the family is the protection, in particular, of women and children.
	This is something that you very rarely see mentioned.
	People say, ah, you know, women are at risk.
	Okay, well, if you want women to be safe, marriage is the place for women.
	If you want children to be safe, then a stable marriage is the place for children to be.
	I've mentioned this statistic before, but I feel I can't do it enough that In regards to something like sexual abuse, you are over 30 times more likely to be sexually abused as a child if there is a non-related man in the house.
	In other words, the boyfriend of the single mom and so on.
	The protection of the family is the protection of women and children.
	The protection of women and children is the formation of the bond and the respect and the trust and the security that allows for cultural values to flow from generation to generation, that gives you balance, that gives you stability as a society.
	All that harms and undermines the functional and happy family is a blow to the base of the tree of civilization.
	It is termites in the foundations.
	You may not see it for quite a while, but by the time you do, the damage is enormous.
	Yeah, that's exactly right. And if indeed, see, we've come to, and this is one of those philosophical problems, isn't it, about getting rid of God?
	We got ourselves in all terms of trouble with marriage, right?
	Marriage always, it was understood, had a spiritual component, a religious component, not merely a civic or legal component.
	It was not just about love or choice of who you marry.
	It always had a specific religious component to it.
	With removing God, we removed that, right?
	And so for the first 150 years of American culture, everybody assumed marriage was a religious, not merely a civic thing.
	Then we got rid of that really precipitously quickly, and now we've had this problem, right?
	And so if adultery, it's not just like everything you said is right, but it's not just the betrayal of the family, the exposure to danger of the children.
	It is also the sundering of a solemn promise and a solemn union made between a man and a woman.
	And what are you modeling to your own kids when you do this, right?
	And in the same way that we could not have...
	This is an argument I use in class a lot.
	Whatever you think about birth control and abortion, The reality is, is you could not have had, really, legalized abortion until you had legalized contraception.
	Because one of the things you're promising people with legal, and don't get me wrong out there, audience, I'm all for birth control, but what I'm suggesting to you is, is that once you legalized and mainstreamed contraception, you were basically telling moms and dads, men and women, that you have an absolute right to sex without any complicated pregnancy or birth.
	And so once you guaranteed that, without having a absolutely safe way of making sure there were no babies, because condoms break, birth control pills don't, then you had to legalize abortion, because you already promised people, right, that they could have sex without that kind of a consequence.
	And I think the same thing happened with marriage.
	I think, you think about what happened with, we desacralized religion.
	We made the union between a man and a woman no different Than any other sexual union between a man and a sheep or two men or three women.
	And when you did that, you by definition had to create a world where mother and father themselves had to go.
	And I think that when you think about how these things unravel over time, how much of it, you go back to that first philosophical question we started with, the family doesn't mean it.
	Does the family really mean anything without the idea of God going back layer after layer after layer?
	It's a fair question, I think.
	Well, I was shocked, of course, as a lot of people were, that in the latest omnibus bill spending, what was their $500 million to Planned Parenthood?
	And the question is why?
	Well, of course, it is a hideous and brutal form of cost control because if those children are born rather than aborted, the government is on the hook for welfare payments, SNAP payments, education, health care.
	I mean, it is a horrifying and blood-soaked form of budgetary control in that abortions cost less than children for the state.
	And this is part of the brutality that happens when you get these massive transfers as well.
	The question as well of keeping promises is very, very important.
	And I feel like I'm half writing my autobiography, but I remember when I was in my early teens and my mother would get angry.
	She said, oh, you've got to keep your word to me.
	And I remember yelling at her once, did you keep your word to dad?
	Because she made a promise, as did he, to stay together until death did them part, and they did not.
	So, I don't have a father because you didn't keep your promise to dad, but now you want me to keep my promises to you.
	There is a fundamental authority that does not exist in any rational universe unless you model it first.
	And again, this does not mean perfection, of course, right?
	But if you want...
	People, to keep their word to you in the small things, you have to keep your word to them in the big things.
	And the promise to stay together is a promise to the children, fundamentally.
	It's not even to each other, because it is for the best of the children that you find ways to work it out, that the children see a loving, modeled adult relationship, and so on.
	And breaking...
	The marriage is breaking the vow, which fundamentally is for me to the children.
	It doesn't mean marriage has no meaning to people who can't have kids or are old or anything like that, and that's fine.
	But that, I think, is where people face their challenges, is in attempting to impose a morality that they have not followed.
	And that's positional, because that's based on power.
	Now, if we can drop into the thou shalt not steal, again, seems kind of simple.
	But if you think about it in terms of What is immorality?
	In many ways, I think immorality can be defined as the immoral enacting of a desire for the unearned, right?
	I mean, so it's not just don't take someone's bicycle or something like that, but don't steal their reputation, don't malign, don't steal their husbands, which is the adultery thing, or don't steal their wives, don't steal their happiness, don't oppress, don't, and so on. And I think thou shalt not steal If it's expanded to more than just property rights, which of course it represents as well, it becomes much more subtle and wide-ranging.
	I mean, every time I go into a store, I'm not like, well, I could pay for this, or I could just steal it.
	I'm not tempted by that.
	But we're all tempted by other forms of theft that can be a lot more pernicious.
	Yeah, and I think on the most basic level, so if indeed we could look at thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not murder, as what's the most injurious thing you can do to the individual?
	What's the most What's the most injurious thing you could do to the human interaction of capitalism, of things, right?
	Of money, of property, of food.
	What's the single most injurious thing you could do?
	You could steal, right? And so you see that there as well.
	But let's just tie this back again to the last three.
	Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal.
	You also said, and I think you're exactly right, that they have spiritual, metaphorical, and philosophical associations as well.
	So, all right, is it possible that by mainstreaming adultery as we have in this culture, right?
	I mean, adultery is no longer certainly illegal.
	It's not illegal to be an adulterer anymore.
	We took the laws away from that.
	For a long time in this country, it's illegal to commit adultery.
	It's not anymore.
	We kind of culturally now look at adultery.
	Sorry to interrupt, but also, if you are an adulterer, you would sometimes be kicked out of a marriage without compensation, right?
	So in other words, you had broken the vow, you would be fired, and you would not continue to quote Doris Allery in terms of alimony.
	I think that's how it used to work.
	Yeah, you would forfeit your rights to childcare, too.
	Absolutely. And so we've gone so radically far the other way, where we kind of...
	Raze and I, we don't think twice about adultery.
	We don't even use the word adultery anymore, right?
	People have affairs. We have open marriage now, right?
	What is open marriage but the adulterization of marriage under the guise of something wonderful, right?
	So you think about how adultery we talked about leads to broken families.
	And so what are we stealing from kids?
	What does adultery allow us to steal from our children?
	And we already mentioned the carried out argument that If that kind of sexual freedom is a much greater good than anything in the Ten Commandments, then you have to kill babies at some point, right?
	Then we can justify the murder of children in the womb as a way of saving money or as a way of guaranteeing the sexual rights of the mom.
	Do the sexual rights of a mom and dad to sleep with each other, to sleep with other people in an open marriage, Do those trump the rights of a child to live?
	What are we stealing from ourselves, from our children, from our unborn children?
	And you begin to see how wonderfully complicated all these things sort of feed upon each other.
	And so on one level, like you said, I think they work, they make us reflect upon our lives, my dad, my wife, my relationship as a husband.
	But we also want to keep thinking about, too, the interrelatedness of all of this, because none of us are perfectly wife, husband, or wife.
	And so I think when you look at them those ways, we can keep our philosophical sanity, a better world to hope for, a system that God put in place that because of our sin, we turn into bad things.
	He didn't turn them into bad things.
	We turn them into bad things.
	And yet it also directs us back to Him, right?
	What's the way, what's the path out of this?
	Climb back up to the top of the commandments.
	Reorient your life and go back down and fix things.
	Thou, not meaning you, Duke, specifically.
	This is the generic. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
	Now, this sounds like a court situation, but it's not, because it doesn't say in court or when being judged in the judiciary.
	But it is around truth telling generally.
	And it did actually just did find out digging up back in the day that something I've talked about as a just punishment turns out it was back in the Old Testament that if you do bear false witness in a trial, you get the punishment.
	In other words, if you bear false witness in a trial that results in the death penalty or would result in a death penalty, the punishment for that perjury is the death penalty.
	Like, you get the punishment. And it's something I've been talking about for a while.
	But not bearing false witness against thy neighbor, to me, this has a lot to do with gossip and also with the poison that can occur.
	When the back channels of communication turn toxic.
	And I think we've all had at one point or another experience of people who've been alienated by lies, people who have lost relationships through lies, people who've just gotten into enormous trouble by telling lies or even repeating things which could kind of be true but which aren't particularly useful just to get attention for yourself or to see like you're on the inside.
	And it can be a tricky one to keep if you think about all the ramifications of what you repost, what you spread, what you talk about, who you influence, not bearing false witness, in other words, not saying things that I think are both true and useful.
	It's a complicated one to keep.
	It is, and I think, to start on the legalistic level, I think, so what then if, again, murder is the single most injurious thing you can do to the individual, and adultery is the single most injuriously thing you can do to the marriage sacrament?
	What's the single most dangerous thing you can do to human law?
	You had mentioned before that just because God has His law doesn't mean that God doesn't let human law to function, right?
	God, in the New Testament, Jesus says, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, right?
	St. Paul says that to the degree that we are capable as Christian men and women, we must obey the laws of the land.
	And that's perfectly right. And so human justice has a say.
	God did not create his justice to override human justice.
	And in a situation like that, there are times where God's mercy could take us a backseat to human justice with regards to a human life of a miserable murderer, for instance, or a rapist.
	And so the death penalty is not the same thing, as we hear this all the time, right?
	If you're anti-abortion and you're pro-death penalty, then you're a hypocrite.
	I mean, that's the worst kind of cheap apple-oranges kind of non-philosophy.
	And I think how much more complicated and interesting and philosophically satisfying Is what we're seeing here.
	And in that argument, right?
	Bearing false witness, it is.
	It is, on one fundamental universal level, it is corrupting human justice, isn't it?
	It is saying or treating people unjustly, falsely, accusing them of things they didn't do.
	It is a corruption of human justice.
	And human justice is much more prone to error than God's justice.
	So what are we doing? Not only are we perverting human justice and causing it to become dysfunctional, To punish people who don't deserve it, reward people who don't.
	We are also then, by definition, we are calling into question God's justice.
	And so it goes right back to that first commandment again.
	And what you said though is true.
	It's also the other.
	Be careful how you interpret it.
	If you never have a lawsuit in your life, you've never testified for anybody in your life, it doesn't mean that this commandment doesn't apply to you.
	It means that, like you said, in our day-to-day dealings with ourselves and others, and you can do the same thing to you, you can bear false witness against yourself, too.
	You can wear the hair shirt and flagellate yourself.
	You can underestimate yourself. Or forgive yourself for things you have not solved.
	Absolutely. It's one of the commandments when you stop and think about it that nobody remembers.
	But it's also one of the ones that's perhaps really, really one of the more relevant ones in today's culture.
	Well, I also think it's a way to push back against the great temptation, which is to tell a lie for the right reason, right?
	So you hear, oh, there's a wage gap between men and women, right?
	Okay, well, when you normalize by being in the workforce, similar education, similar degrees, and so on, there's no wage gap.
	There's no functional wage gap.
	If you take all men and all women, anyway.
	So... But telling this lie that there's a wage gap pits men against women, pits women against men, lowers the chances for reconciliation and positive emotions and causes these kinds of problems.
	When you say there's a rape culture and you inflate statistics of rape, again, maybe you feel it's for the right reason.
	I remember back in the day, there was massive inflations of the number of anorexics in America, again, to sort of slander capitalism.
	It's creating all these impossible standards and so on.
	So to me, this issue is important when you say, oh, all disparities between the races are the result of racism and so on.
	Well, let's just say that's an open question.
	There's lots of factors that go into it.
	So I think those pushbacks are really important.
	And the one thing that popped into my mind when I was listening to this, here we go on brief story time.
	So many years ago, I had a friend whose marriage was in significant trouble.
	Now, he had, they just had a new child of a number.
	And, you know, that can be tiring, you know, you're up all night, you know, right?
	So, they were considering a split up.
	And I was on a walk with the wife, and she was angry and upset and frustrated.
	And she said, I'm just going to go date a stockbroker or I'm just going to go date a handsome doctor and I'm just going to move on with my life.
	Now, the question of bearing false witness is not just about avoiding telling lies.
	It's about withholding the truth from people when they really, really need to hear it.
	And I remember saying to the woman very clearly, no, you're not.
	No, you're not. She's like, what do you mean?
	And I said, listen, You have kids.
	You have a husband.
	And that means that if there's some tall, good-looking, rich doctor, he's not going to choose you.
	Like, I'm sorry to give you these basics.
	He's got options. He's not going to want to get involved in some messy divorce where a woman's still breastfeeding and there's a husband who's kicking around who doesn't like him being.
	He's got options. He could just go date some 25-year-old single woman who doesn't have all this baggage.
	You are not going, this fantasy, like whether you stay in the marriage or not, I encourage you to stay, but this fantasy that this wonderful bachelor stream of hot, hunky, rich, brilliant men who are going to date you, that's not real.
	That's not a reality.
	And there was a long pause.
	Because to me, I was not going to bear false witness and feed the delusion that there was this grass is greener fantasy on the other side of a divorce.
	You're going to be poor, you're going to be lonely, you know, work it out with your husband.
	Now, fortunately, I think largely as a result of this wake-up call, and I talked to the husband as well, they stayed together, and they're together to this day.
	So to me, not bearing false witness also means do not feed people's delusions, do not stand idly by when they say things that are false and destructive to themselves or others.
	Well, I think the commandment also understands a related issue.
	Bearing false witness leads to tyranny and oppression.
	Look at what you and all of us who work on the internet, on the conservative side of the internet, are going through.
	How are they silencing you?
	How are they trying to make the videos that we produce much harder to be seen?
	It's under a false premise, right?
	They are attributing to us, and I've watched your show enough, they're attributing to you all sorts of things that you don't say.
	They're attributing to you all sorts of things.
	They're bearing real serious false witness to you.
	If it was just a matter of insulting your intelligence, you could deal with it.
	But they're using their power to censor now.
	They're using their power to make it impossible to be heard.
	And that, I think, that's in the commandment.
	I think with all of these commandments, and I think we've now established that they're not just individual bullet points.
	They're a holistic system of relational being that one cannot be separated from another.
	You understand that?
	And this is the kind of thing that...
	Could you make the argument, and why couldn't you make the argument, that the gravest sin of the Nazis was bearing false witness?
	I mean, that what really stoked all of that rage and anger was lies.
	Lies to themselves, lies about Jews, lies about reality, lies about nature.
	When you see it that way, I mean, the consequences of that commandment are really globally staggering.
	Or that the consequences of the problems, the very real problems facing Germany in the 1920s and the 1930s, that the solution was tyranny.
	That, to me, was one of the great lies.
	Now, we get to...
	If it's alright with you, we'll bundle the covets.
	There's a bunch of different covets. If you want to break them out, that's fine.
	But the covet is very interesting.
	Because it's the first thought crime.
	Now, thought crime has all these negative connotations, and it doesn't mean you go to jail for it.
	But this is the first one where you monitor your thoughts, not your actions.
	Thou shalt not steal as an action.
	Thou shalt not be graven images and other false gods.
	This is... This state of mind...
	And there's three. Is there three?
	This state of mind is what's important.
	And to me, this is kind of like an inverted pyramid.
	The commandments are up there, but this is the most dangerous motive.
	Now, covet, just to be clear, it does not mean you want something.
	It does not mean you envy. It does not mean you lust after.
	That doesn't mean that's fine.
	You can lust after fame and wealth, and all of these things can be fine if you go about attaining them in an honorable and productive manner.
	Like the guy I talked about earlier.
	I coveted his house, but not his house.
	I coveted that kind of freedom from poverty and so on.
	Thou shalt not covet means don't...
	Do not want something that someone else has to the point where you will take it from them.
	Whether it's their life, their wife, their property, their freedom, their self-expression, their free speech, their honor.
	Do not want something from someone to the point where you will take it from them.
	All of the other things are sort of taking things either from God or from others.
	But this is the motive. This is the one that says the morality is around prevention.
	The law is about cure, but the morality is about prevention, and the coveting is the fundamental drive that causes the immorality all prescribed above.
	Yeah, I think that's well said.
	I would go, you know, add to that, that coveting.
	The one thing I would disagree with, or correct a little bit, you called it the first thought crime.
	If it's a crime, then it's a violation of the state, and the state has to get involved in punishing it.
	I would call it the first thought sin, right?
	That's better. Yeah, that's a much better way of putting it.
	We've lost the category of sin.
	Once we got rid of God, we lost the category of sin.
	And sin, think about it, Steph, sin is the one thing that we are primarily responsible for.
	Crime, we may be driven to it by poverty, or crime may be a consequence of our social circumstances.
	Diseases, we can't help because we didn't inflict them on ourselves, but sin If the category of sin exists, then sin is what we are mostly responsible for.
	We can't devolve it off on culture or anybody else.
	And so to call them, coveting is a thought sin.
	In other words, what you're doing is you are desiring something that may not be good for you, that may not be yours.
	Like what you said is different.
	Desiring not his house, but a nice big house.
	That's not the same thing. Boy, I want this guy's wife.
	She does something for me.
	And that kind of covetousness It is a thought sin.
	And Jesus was exactly right about this.
	He said, don't worry about the sins on the outside.
	Don't worry about what you eat or drink.
	I mean, what you eat goes into your mouth and out your butt.
	I mean, literally, he said, you shit it out into the draft, right?
	Don't worry about that. Worry about the sins that come from in here.
	Lusts, greeds, envies, those are coveting, right?
	And so I think that to me is the lesson of this one, that what you allow yourself to indulge in your mind and your heart, it becomes much easier to begin to try to live that.
	And so try to cut those things off before they are manifested outside as crimes, right?
	It was a crime for a long time to commit adultery.
	Don't let it get that far.
	When you start coveting that kind of extramarital sexual relationship, recognize that the desire for it itself, if you don't fight it, is sinful.
	And I think that's how you begin to preserve the rest of these commandments.
	You said it's an inverted pyramid.
	You are 100% correct.
	How much of human sin It's precisely that.
	It's the 10th commandment first.
	It's wanting things that are bad for you or wanting things that you know are not morally right for you to have.
	And then how does that then emanate out into stealing and adultery and killing and all the rest of it?
	And to me, the communism and the socialism and the resentment of the good or the hatred of the good for being the good.
	This guy has a big house and a pretty wife and money and I want his, right?
	Not I want the conditions which are going to make it most likely for me to be able to achieve that, which is free market, private property and so on.
	But I want the government to...
	Like Dr. Zhivago, the scene where they just move all the poor people into the rich house.
	I want this house, and I'm going to use the power of the state to get it.
	I want money.
	I'm going to use the power of the state to get it.
	I want a raise. I'm going to use the power of the state to achieve it.
	That, to me, comes from coveting, which is not a desire.
	To have an opportunity, it is a desire to have a result paid for by others at the point of a gun or at the point of a sword.
	And that if we could sort of get people to understand that if they want things, then what they need is an environment which best facilitates their opportunity to achieve those things.
	And sustainably achieve those things.
	I mean, so you get to move into Dr.
	Zhivago's house as somebody who loves communism, and then the water stops working.
	And then, you know, the roads are in disrepair.
	There's a hundred people in each room, right? Yeah.
	And so it's one of these things, there's so many things in life, when you reach to take them, you break them.
	You know, you ever play these games?
	Our kids love it, right? Like the bubbles.
	They get the bubbles. You chase the bubbles.
	You try and catch the bubbles and have them.
	So much in life that the thirst of what we want, when we reach for it and we try and grab it, It breaks.
	Now, if you let it come to rest on you, maybe you can hold it off.
	But this idea like, oh, there's this guy, he's got to...
	Like the kulaks in Ukraine and other places, the kulaks were the very competent, rich, hardworking, able farmers, who as a result of dedication and work ethic and bell curve intelligence or whatever, they ended up with a lot of land.
	And they had big houses and they had lots of income and they, you know, got the attendant pretty wives or whatever.
	And people looked at that and said, I want that.
	But that only happened because of some remnants of the free market and opportunity.
	You go in and you take it.
	You know, I like that this guy has a pretty girlfriend who lives with him or a pretty wife who lives with him, so I'm going to kidnap her and lock her in my basement.
	It's like, you don't get that then.
	You reach for it and you destroy it in trying to take it.
	And giving people the patience and the confidence that they can achieve the things that they want if they're free.
	But if they use this covetousness and if they steal, And if they threaten, they will not get what they want and they will even lose the opportunity to get what they want and those who after them will lose the opportunity to get.
	How destructive it is to try and take things that you want that turn to ashes in your hand.
	I think the greatest biblical story we have explaining exactly what you just said is the story of David.
	King David was in the kingdom by himself.
	He saw Bathsheba bathing naked.
	He coveted her.
	He then stole her from her husband.
	He then had Uriah, her husband, murdered to cover up her pregnancy.
	And you go from coveting to stealing to killing, right?
	And I think that's exactly right.
	The more I teach and the older I get, I tell you, last week in class, I broached this question to my students and I couldn't answer it.
	I said, explain to me how the entire progressive movement is not just one great big act of covetousness.
	And they had no answer. And most of these kids, by the way, identified as progressives.
	Explain to me how progressivism in all of its forms from socialism and Marxism to social justice warriorism to all of it.
	Give me an example of how it's not predicated on the fact that we have the right to not just covet what other people have, but to take it or to kill for it.
	And they had nothing to say.
	And these progressive kids had never thought about it that way.
	And they were never allowed to think of it that way.
	And I think you said it, and I think that's exactly what the premise here is.
	And what do all of these progressive movements have in common?
	They tend to be, first and foremost, godless.
	First and foremost, materialist.
	They are the first and foremost, ethically relativist.
	It's amazing, isn't it, that when you deconstruct everything we've talked about for the last hour and a half, when you deconstruct it, you're back to the jungle again.
	And it doesn't benefit anybody but those who have power.
	Well, and of course, when I was younger, I thought...
	That the leftist focus on atheism was a desire to free the world from what they perceived as a rational superstition.
	Tragically, and I may say it took an embarrassingly long time for me, Duke, but tragically, they simply wished to remove the impediments to doing evil.
	And the Ten Commandments are what you can use.
	Again, we can make the case for the source of them, but let's just say that for this case, for this thought experiment that they are absolute whether you're religious or secular this is the barrier to evil this is what keeps evil at bay because the left Lies until they no longer have to.
	And by the time they no longer have to, society is in a very desperate state.
	So the left will say, well, we want female equality.
	Or the left will say, well, we want to reduce this statistic or up this step.
	We want justice. We want...
	But they can't ever use the word justice.
	Because justice is equality of opportunity.
	Social justice, which they use as equality of outcome, which will cause tyranny.
	And all of these sins...
	That go from covetousness, because covetousness means that you can't even be honest.
	Like, you walk up to someone and say, I'd love to kill you and marry your wife.
	Well, they're going to say, that's a death threat, or whatever it is.
	So you have to pretend that you're their friend.
	You have to get in good in their graces.
	You have to say, not, I envy the rich man and wish to take what he's had.
	You say, well, I love the poor and wish to redistribute income, which income was not distributed in the first place.
	It's generally earned, at least in the free market.
	So the amount of bearing of false witness that is required for covetousness to cover up its own motives and its own actions.
	You have to say, we want government regulations for the cause of social justice rather than saying we wish to initiate force against peaceful people to take their stuff.
	Like you have to lie about everything and bear false witness about everything.
	And the corruption that comes from the covetousness, which dare not speak its own name, which is almost always the case, significantly puts the smoke tendrils of obfuscation and sophistry through the mental arteries of the society to the enormous detriment of everyone.
	Yeah, and I would go back and link ten to number one, the tenth commandment to the first one one more time.
	To covet something is to want it so much that it becomes...
	A replacement for God, or whatever the idea of God is.
	It becomes your consuming desire.
	That which you owe God, that kind of commitment you commit to that man's wife, or this man's money, that person's house.
	And like every other of these commandments, they make sense if there's something to replace covetous with, right?
	If there's an actual thing, an idea, an image, a form, a god that can replace what you covet, then what you covet looks stupid.
	But what if we've created a society where there is nothing but coveting?
	And I think that's what progressivism is.
	It's a society built only on coveting.
	That's why they'll never stop. C.S. Lewis said that, right?
	That man who torments you because he's greedy, he can be satisfied at some point with enough money.
	But that man who torments you for your own good will never, ever leave you alone.
	He can never have enough. That's covetousness, right?
	Perfect definition. Right.
	So let's close with this, which I'll put the very brief thesis out and then let me know what you think, if this is valid or not.
	The one thing that is to me one of the most remarkable achievements of Christianity is its universality.
	So if you look at something like Judaism, there's very strong in-group preference and to some degree suspicion of outsiders.
	The same thing is true with Islam and there are other religions where the in-group preference and the morality generally applies to those on the inside.
	It's a tribal phenomenon in many ways.
	Christianity takes the tribal element out of it and creates universal ethics.
	Now, I don't think it's any accident then that out of these universal ethics has come universal rule of law, has come growing egalitarianism for races, for ethnicities, for genders, and so on.
	That aspect of taking morality out of the in-group preference, out of the tribal element and universalizing it is a great strength and I think also a great challenge for Christianity because it lends it to be open to sort of guilt manipulation, exploitation from the outside.
	Do you think that's a fair way to look at the particular addition of Christianity to these commandments?
	I think what you say about the universality of Christianity is true.
	You know, the idea that Christianity, once you accept it, makes you part of a universal brotherhood.
	I think that there's a lot of truth to that.
	And I think that, you know, like any other religion, Christianity is prone to because it's practiced by people.
	It's prone to being abused.
	See, I don't think you can completely separate the behavior of radical Muslims from Islam because there's too much documented orthodoxy tied up with the faith and how the faith was recorded and how people behave.
	But in Christianity, I think you have a clear set with these Ten Commandments, for instance, whenever people are violating them in the name of Christ, all they have to do is go back to the book and get corrected.
	They're not going to go back to the book to justify it, right?
	They're not going to go back to the statements.
	They're not going to go back to the Ten Commandments and say, oh, good, I was right in taking that man's woman, right?
	By going back to this, they may be acting in the name of Christ, but there's nothing here that justifies that.
	I want to give you this statement to close my part of this.
	When C.S. Lewis was struggling to become a Christian, he came to it many ways we're talking about now.
	He was an atheist. He was a very obviously philosophical man, a reflective man, an educated man.
	But it became harder and harder.
	And J.R. Tolkien was the one who was talking to him about this.
	And finally, Tolkien said to him on the eve of his conversion, Tolkien said, listen, Jack.
	You're thinking about this all wrong.
	Don't ask yourself first whether or not Christianity is true, because that's gonna conjure up laboratories and DNA tests.
	He said, don't first ask yourself whether Christianity is true.
	Ask yourself what it means.
	What is the meaning, right?
	And I think when you think about what we've talked about today and in many of the other talks we've talked about, meaning, the meaning of Christianity, if we set aside for just a moment the literal true or falseness of it, it gives meaning.
	To so many other things.
	There's no circumstance.
	There's no worldview.
	There's no human problem that Christianity can't incorporate within its parameters.
	And when Lewis saw that, that meaning, after he converted, he gave you the sun thing.
	I believe in the sun, not because I saw it rise, but because by its rising, I can see everything else.
	Makes sense to me. And when Lewis first came at it, the meaning, he couldn't argue with its meaning.
	In the same way that whether there is a God or not, there's a lot of valuable meaning in the Ten Commandments that can't be denied, God or no God.
	And so when Lewis came to realize that, the truth of the issue became philosophically easy for him.
	And so that's what I would say about that conundrum.
	And can we survive without it?
	The answer at the moment appears to be no, and that's important to remember as well.
	All right. Can you just spend a minute or two talking about Freedom Project?
	Oh, I'd love to. Thank you. Well, we are a complete online school from kindergarten through high school.
	We're fully accredited, which means that your kids take our courses.
	They go to college. We've got kids in a lot of good colleges now.
	And we are unique in that we are live online teachers, just like I'm talking to Steph here.
	If you sign your kid up with Freedom Project, they're going to get somebody, a teacher, talking to your kid's And teaching them in this way.
	They'll have classmates, too.
	So there'll be 30 kids from all over the country, in some cases all over the world.
	We've got kids in 14 foreign countries now, in a classroom where they can talk to each other electronically.
	They can talk to the teacher.
	The teacher can call on them.
	It's recreating an absolute classroom experience in front of your computer.
	The kids are at home. There's no bullying.
	There is no sexualization.
	There's no radical progressive politics.
	There's no lunatics with guns trying to shoot your kids up.
	They're getting a first-class classical education, which means we try to educate kids a little classical learning, Greek and Roman philosophy, Judeo-Christian values.
	They get all that stuff brought together.
	And it's something that the parent, because every live class is immediately recorded and uploaded, mom and dad can watch everything that goes on in their kid's classroom anytime they want so they can see exactly the kind of education their kids are getting.
	So we're enrolling now.
	Check us out at fpeusa.org, Freedom Project Education, and see if it's for you.
	It's not for everybody. It depends on how motivated your kids are, if your kids do well on a computer or not.
	But we've helped a lot of families, and there's a lot more we hope to help.
	Well, thank you for that. And thanks, of course, for a very great and enlightening conversation.
	I look forward to the comments and the feedback.
	And it's always a great pleasure, my friend, to have the chat.

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