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Oct. 9, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:44:44

THE DEVIL INSIDE! Dr Duke Pesta & Stefan Molyneux

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	Dr. Duke's The New York Times He doesn't need much of an introduction from me or for most of our listeners.
	Stephan Molyneux has had a distinguished and controversial, all the more distinguished, because it's controversial to exactly the right people, the people who should be bothered.
	He is a writer. He is a philosopher.
	He is a very talented presenter of ideas.
	He's an orator. He is a humanist and a philosopher.
	The list goes on and on and on.
	So if you don't know who Stefan Molyneux is, stick your head out of the sand and check him out anywhere you can find him.
	And we've got some of his stuff at our Freedom Project site as well.
	And I think if you don't know who Stefan is, everybody else who does, I think after this conversation you're going to want to know a lot more about what Stefan thinks about a lot of things.
	I didn't quite catch Humble in that list of superlatives.
	We're doing the Screwtape Letters.
	It's freedomain.com if people want to check it out.
	But sorry, go ahead. And we're going to talk about the Screwtape Letters today.
	So the seven deadly sins and the virtues, it's going to be all...
	We'll get to humility at some point, I'm sure.
	But my opening statement about the Screwtape Letters, I'm going to throw it at you and then you get started.
	We'll go back and forth. Is that, my God, it's prescient, isn't it?
	I mean, that way back in the early 1940s, Lewis wrote this as a series of talks.
	He didn't sit down and plan to write this out in book form.
	He was just trying to buck up a very downtrodden British public while the Blitz was happening, right?
	So this was basically Christian apologetics with a little flair of a kind of a neat narrative twist.
	To bolster the spirits of a country that was really under withering attack.
	And I think you could make the argument – there's no bombs falling, at least not actual bombs falling.
	But you could make the argument that the American people and the American experiment are very much at the crossroads as the UK was in 1941.
	And the letters and what Lewis has to say and the things he warned us that were coming down the road, he was pretty right on, almost prophetic you might say.
	It is a very powerful book, and I had a very oddly personal introduction to it.
	I never particularly warmed to C.S. Lewis as a novelist, but I think as a non-fiction writer, he's about as good as they come.
	So without sort of naming names, Duke, I had a person in my life who was pretty corrupt.
	And I was still young and tender enough to believe that this was a phase, that it was adolescent, as the phrase in C.S. Lewis book goes.
	And after knowing this man for several years, he gave me one book, and one book only, the entire time that I knew him.
	And he had a strange intensity in the providing of this book to me.
	I guess it's the same way that I hand copies of Plato or Aristotle.
	Please, you've got to read this! And he never suggested another book.
	He was not a Christian, and this book was The Screwtape Letters.
	And everybody has a voice that they read books in.
	Like, if you're in a really, really quiet room, and you're reading silently to yourself, you can hear the voice.
	Mine, of course, has a vaguely fruity, pan-colonial accent.
	But I read this book, and...
	It was one of the only books I ever read with somebody else's voice in my head.
	And it was his voice.
	And it was, of course, when I look back on it, he was warning me about himself.
	And what an oddly selfless thing to do.
	Because he then railed against it when I eventually did break associations with him because he was unreformable.
	But it was almost like as a man who's being pulled under by sharks, he hands me a life raft and sort of Motions be to safety.
	So I just wanted to point out that I have a very Oddly deep connection to this book, and it's one of these strange situations in my life.
	I mean, I've taken on a number of intellectual and personal and social risks, the likes of which, you know, fell half a forest, it seems, for other people.
	And I've always sort of felt like the hitman in the Tarantino movie where, you know, he just strays the bullets and they all just go outline around him.
	And I think this sense of protection that I felt It was engendered to some degree by this corrupt person giving me this book, me reading it and recognizing that sometimes people will, through an extremity, protect you from themselves against almost their own wishes.
	So I just wanted to point out why I'm going to be quite intense about this book because it has a very deep connection to me in my history.
	You know, that is really an interesting observation.
	I just got done teaching Dr.
	Faustus, Christopher Marlowe's Dr.
	Faustus, the Faust story to my sophomores at the university.
	And I was thinking about the exact same thing you just mentioned in a different context.
	There's a moment where after the great magician summons up the devil, summons up Mephistopheles to be his personal attendant, sells his soul to the devil.
	And right before they sign the contract, Mephistopheles says to Faustus, Faustus, Leave these vain desires that bring a terror to my fainting soul.
	Don't do this. And it's one of the most interesting moments of the play where this jaded, world-weary demon says to him, I've seen some bad times in my life, but dude, don't do this.
	And Faustus laughs right in his face.
	And says, Do you not realize that I beheld the face of God?
	Do you not think I experienced 10,000 hells in being denied everlasting bliss?
	Stop this, Faustus.
	And he doesn't, at which point the devil puts the mask back on and it just ineluctably drags him to his doom over the next – the rest of the book.
	And very similar. What do we make of this?
	What do we make of this – This possibility of evil.
	Marlow recognized it 400 years ago.
	This possible of the face of evil to be monetary, almost in a generous way sometimes.
	Well, the devil is as trapped by temptation as the sinner is, because if there was no receptivity to temptation, the devil could be liberated from his constant task.
	And it strikes me that this is the story of the modern world, in fact, the current world.
	We were just talking about this before the show started, Duke, but what is going on in America in particular in this lead-up to the election?
	Well, you have the radical anarchists, the communists, the hardcore socialists and so on.
	I mean, they're burning down cities.
	They are attacking people.
	They are shooting people.
	They are trying to destroy people's lives.
	They are wishing death upon the president.
	And they really couldn't be more clear.
	If you... Go left.
	This is what you're going to get.
	Now, there's all this stuff in history we know.
	You know, largely leftist governments killed like 100 million people in the 20th century outside of war, just like killing their own citizens.
	We have all of that. We got the French Revolution.
	We got the Russian Revolution. We got the Italian fascists.
	You got the National Socialists in Germany.
	There's a whole laundry list of fatalities that arise out of these collectivist ideologies.
	But just in case, just in case you've completely ignored history, We're going to unroll that tapestry in a limited way in the here and now.
	We're going to show you, like a documentary come to life in vivid, face-blazing 3D. This is what happens if you go collectivist, if you surrender to hatred, which is really what the left is to a large degree all about these days, because they believe that every single disparity in outcome is the result of theft and exploitation and horror and grossness and vileness and evil and so on.
	And so, because there inevitably will be It's like saying, if everybody who is different in height has stolen the height from someone else, the tall guy has stolen the height from the short guy, and Brad Pitt stole hair from you and I. If you have this belief that all differences arise from evil and exploitation, since society can never eradicate differences, you can never eradicate fear, loathing, and hatred.
	And so right now, the devils that are massing on the horizon, and in fact, in the antechambers and perhaps the Oval Office, Of America are very, very clearly saying, the mask is off.
	This is what you get. This is what you're going to get.
	And it seems to me, at least when the guy gave me the book, Screwtape Letters, I read it and I was like, oh.
	That's kind of a warning now, isn't it?
	And that's a question what comes up to the election, right?
	I mean, are people going to see when the mask is off?
	And the devil is saying, hey, this is what you're going to get.
	We're not kidding around here.
	We're not talking about things being nice.
	We're not talking about things being positive.
	We're talking about burning down cities and killing people.
	And, you know, we've had a three and a half plus year attempted coup on the U.S. president through a wide variety of legal and other mechanistic means.
	It's pretty clear. Mask is off.
	The devil's saying... You can't say you weren't warned.
	You can't say you didn't know.
	You can't say it wasn't completely obvious.
	And I guess all we can do is hope that people, eyes open, look at the flames, that's what's coming.
	The three stories we've laid out here, your personal experience, my experience with that 400-year-old book, and what's going on in the country makes the same point as does the screw tape letters.
	And that point is, is that at some point, when you are in the process of losing yourself by surrendering to evil, evil isn't...
	A, it feels comfortable enough it can tell you what it is, number one.
	And number two, maybe even evil itself on some level is trying to warn you that you have one last chance, right?
	That you said it before.
	The devil, such as he is, he's capable of tempting, but he's also – by definition, he's suffering, right?
	I mean he's – to be in hell is not to be in his – we have this – We're good to go.
	That my, I'm not, this is not my nature now, that my entire world is subsumed by the torment of what I have chosen.
	And so there's something humanizing about that and humanizing in the sense that a war-worry Mephistopheles or a charlatan who's led you so far in your personal life down a certain road gives you one last chance to see it.
	I would ask you with regards to that, did So you saw it right away.
	When you were reading the book, you recognized that he was exposing himself to you.
	So was there an immediate reaction or was it down the road that you finally severed course with him?
	No, because I have many flaws and excessive optimism is probably one of the greatest.
	And so for me, I was like, oh, he wants me to save him.
	I'm going to put on my helmet and my white knight armor and I'm going to ride in on a horse and I'm going to bring him truth, reason, evidence and an appeal to conscience and empathy and virtue and all that kind of stuff.
	And because I was close to the person and it was important to me, I spent some time, quite some time, which, you know, I don't regret because you really have to extend and expend full efforts in order to avoid regret.
	Regret, I think, is one of the greatest problems In the world and in people's conscience, and C.S. Lewis talks about it quite extensively in the book.
	So I wanted to make sure, like I wanted to try my very best, so that then if I end up walking away, I'm not sitting there thinking, hmm, should have done more.
	You know, you don't want to be Oscar Schindler, like at the end of the movie or the end of the story or the end of the reality, saying, oh, if I just sold this watch, I could have, like, you don't want to be that person who's like, If I had extended effort, and when you extend maximum effort to help people and you get sort of ignored or scarred in return, then you walk away without looking back.
	And the looking back is like the fish hook that keeps you in the past and keeps you from the future.
	So, no, it took some time.
	I expended a good deal of effort, as I did from a lot of the people, with a lot of the people in my youth who fall into this C.S. Lewis category in almost chillingly accurate manners.
	I mean, he draws these outlines of And it's like my friends could just perfectly fit from my youth into those, because I came from a very sort of atheistic, amoral, secular, materialistic, sensual-based, you know, I mean, I never got that far.
	I was somewhere between, you know, Alyosha and Roger Stone.
	But there was always this desire to help people and to try and Limit the damage that corruption could do.
	And unfortunately, what it gave me was two things.
	Number one, there is a time where expending more effort becomes destructive to yourself and doesn't help another.
	And that the desire to help corrupt people and save them is part of the quicksand that can pull you in.
	That's number one. Is that it genuinely can be too late for people in any practical sense.
	Now, I mean that outside of the Christian context, because within the Christian context, of course, there is always the possibility of redemption.
	But in my experience, for non-Christians, for non-spiritual, for, you know, I would say non-philosophical people, for the mere mammals among us, there's a sort of clever, cunning mammals, there is a time of too late, and all they can do is serve as a warning to others.
	Yeah, I think that's well said. I think it actually, Christianity accounts for that too.
	And a couple of quick examples, you've got in Dr.
	Faustus, the play I was mentioning.
	Faustus, all he has to do is sincerely repent.
	The good angel hovers over him at the end and says, Faustus, you've got to call on God.
	He's given me a vial of precious grace, but you have to make the move.
	He's lived a life of such wickedness by choice, he can't just turn it off.
	And so he's trying to – as the devils are dragging him to hell, he's trying to scream the name of God and all that comes out is Mephistopheles.
	And in Dante's Great Inferno, as you know, Dante talks about how there are some souls at the lowest levels of hell in which the bodies are still walking around on earth.
	And he makes the argument, Dante, that there are some souls that have given in to evil so thoroughly that they are frozen.
	They can't repent anymore.
	And so for those souls, it's as if the bottom drops out.
	The soul falls all the way down to the bottom level of hell where, fittingly, they're buried beneath the ice.
	They're drowned beneath the ice, these frozen souls.
	And some demon walks the body around until its normal date of death comes.
	And whenever I hear that, I read that, I think of those pictures of Hitler in the bunker.
	You know, when he was drugged up at the end of his life.
	He doesn't look like he's there.
	He looks like the eyes are empty and vacant.
	It always reminds me of that scene in Dante that maybe at this point something else is controlling him and the soul has already left the body.
	But for those of you who don't know, and we're talking here primarily about the Screwtape letters, just real quick, if you don't know the story, it's a short read.
	It's not a very long book, but it's a very simple premise.
	You've got a series of letters written back and forth between a senior devil, a much older, wiser devil, or we should say older, wickeder devil.
	Screwtape, who is giving advice to his young nephew Wormwood about the best ways to destroy a human soul.
	Young Wormwood has just been assigned his first human being.
	He's a young man in his late teens, early 20s, and this is Wormwood's first attempt.
	So they have a lot of conversations back and forth, and you never hear Wormwood speak.
	It's constantly Screwtape reading the letters.
	So you get what Wormwood's writing through the recounting of it through Screwtape's lecturing.
	So it's basically a monologue, a monologue by Screwtape about the way to destroy human lives.
	And it covers everything from sex to education.
	It covers everything from the seven deadly sins, as we mentioned before, to the danger of modern postmodern thought.
	And so it's very deep, but it's very easy and readable.
	It is. The epistolary format is something that is little used these days, but it is very powerful.
	And it's something, a literary device that should be used more, I think, especially now that people are back to writing letters through email.
	But it is something that is quite powerful.
	And we're going to do, I guess, a little bit of jumping around in the story.
	But a couple of quotes here that I thought were just amazing.
	So he says, Indeed, the safest road to hell is the gradual one, the gentle slope, soft slope.
	Underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
	Ooh! Because what does the devil say as a whole?
	So the devil, and you can see this all over in Hollywood, because devil in Hollywood, not exactly antonyms these days.
	What does the devil say? The devil says, Your temptation shall arise in a great column of lava fire, and I shall stand above you with giant bat wings, and I will reach down with fiery claws to grab at your very soul while offering Kim Kardashian in the other hand, whatever it is that's going to tempt someone, right?
	So everyone thinks that there's this big, dramatic, amazing, powerful moment that's going to be blindingly clear to you as to how you're going to lose your integrity, how you're going to lose your soul, how you're going to violate your conscience, perhaps irreparably.
	And that's not how it works.
	It's like saying to a smoker, there will be one cigarette that you will pull out Of the cigarette box, and lo, it shall be a coffin nail, and if you smoke that cigarette, that will be the one that kills you.
	It's like, no, that's not how smoking kills you.
	Smoking kills you with a tiny little bit of narcissistic avoidance of displeasure with your constant, you know, little bit here and there.
	It's this gradualism, and the gradualism is the most powerful thing.
	How do we gain weight? We gain weight gradually.
	How do we die of smoking?
	We die of smoking a little bit, bit, bit, bit, bit.
	How do we become... Unhealthy.
	How do we lose our muscle mass?
	Just a little bit at a time.
	And this gradualism is the real devil.
	And all of these people who portray this moment of incredibly powerful temptation that is going to occur are misleading people.
	Because the other quote, I think, that complements this where they say, Screwtape says, it is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their heads.
	In reality, our best work is done by keeping things out.
	Keeping things out of the head, right?
	Why does a smoker keep smoking?
	Because he does not think about breathing through a hole in his throat and coughing and emphysema and lung cancer and his weeping children and all that kind of stuff, right?
	Keeping things out of your mind, the distraction, the dissociation, the...
	Tiny little upsets and frustrations that characterize a life that's sanded away to nothing.
	That's the real devil.
	The real devil is attrition.
	It's not immediate fiery temptation.
	Yeah, the first of those two examples comes exactly.
	The young man that Wormwood's in charge of has just found out that World War II has been launched, right?
	It's war. And being a young man of a certain age, he knows that eventually he very well may be drafted, very well may be sent to the killing fields.
	And Wormwood is ecstatic, right?
	Oh, you should see he didn't sleep all night, uncle.
	All night long, uncle, he fret and flipped and turned in his bed, sweat through the sheets because he knew he might be dead In a few months or years.
	And at that point, Screwtape kind of rips into him and says, you fool.
	You have made the first mistake, Wormwood says.
	You've become drunk on human misery.
	But you've made a mistake.
	Don't you realize, the devil says, when men go to war, they tend to go prepared to die.
	There are very few men who go into the battle of the psalm not at peace with their maker, whoever their maker might be.
	You would be a fool if you were a religious man to go into a battlefield not prepared.
	That's bad for us, right?
	We want them to die in old age homes with nurses telling them that they're going to live forever, with doctors lying to them that they're going to live forever.
	They got plenty of time to repent.
	No, he says. The purpose is to get a soul to hell.
	And if you send a soul to a place where it knows it's going to die, that's hard.
	He said cards, playing cards are good enough to get a man to hell.
	And sometimes more efficient because it seems like such a little thing that becomes an obsession, right?
	That leads you to gambling where you end up losing your house.
	Such a gradual thing like you said.
	And so there's a deep understanding I think there.
	What amazes me about Lewis I don't know if it changed when he became a Christian or not.
	We know that all throughout his young lives during his experience in World War I, he didn't believe.
	In fact, it wouldn't have been officially until about 1931, ten years before he wrote the Screwtape Letters and a long time away from World War I. It was about 1931 or so where he finally turned – Tolkien had worked on him.
	He had finally turned and embraced Christianity.
	And I don't know if the embracing of Christianity deepened his understanding of human nature, because it certainly does seem to have changed him in ways.
	His understanding of human motivations is pretty powerful.
	And the second one that you mentioned there, and remind me again, just give me the tag for the second quote you gave, it just ran out of my head.
	Oh, yeah, sorry, I went to my next one.
	It's funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their heads.
	In reality, our best work is done by keeping things out.
	I just wanted to comment on how very insightful that is about the modern left.
	We ask ourselves, how can the left think those things?
	How can the left be so...
	A blind to history when it comes to socialism.
	How can the progressive, largely atheist left, how could they not recognize that in fighting fascism as they say they're doing, they're behaving fascism?
	And I think this is exactly what Lewis was talking about.
	Our best work is to keep them from thinking.
	People think that we devils are sitting on people's shoulders, whispering in their ears, telling them what to do.
	That's not it. Our job is to try to encourage them to think of nothing.
	To not get perplexed about any kind of emotional or intellectual or ethical dilemmas.
	Let them just believe all is well.
	Let them believe that they're good no matter, as long as they think their ideas are good, that they're justified in doing anything to pursue those ideas.
	Well, you know, one of the things I got in trouble for, one of the many things I got in trouble for in social media, and one of my biggest tweets ever was about Taylor Swift.
	And it was, you know, when she was turning 30.
	I wrote a tweet and I said, yeah, I hope she thinks about having kids.
	Looks like she'd be a fun mom because, you know, by the time she's 30, 90% of her eggs are dead.
	You know, it's a biological fact.
	I put the sources in when people ask.
	It's not controversial within science.
	But here's what it does, right?
	It takes people think they've got this infinite accordion of time.
	What this does is squishes it right down to two tiny bookends together and gives you a sense of the mortality of your reproduction and the mortality of your life.
	Always co-joined.
	The Devils in Society work is to say to women, have fun, travel, start a career, have lots of boyfriends and live like a man.
	And even Sheryl Sandberg was talking about that kind of stuff.
	And all the people who are a little bit more sensible here is, waste your fertility years in useless affairs, have low standards for who you date, destroy your capacity for pair bonding and end up washed up in your mid-30s on a broken shore of broken people trying to knit together a family from the shards of leftovers.
	And that's kind of it.
	So I put that out.
	And of course, women and some are kind of freaked out because what it does is it gives you the mortality panic.
	Because when you start to think about babies, you start to think about, oh, you know, like I look at my daughter and I'm like, oh, yeah, you're here because I won't be.
	That's why you're here, because I'm not going to be here.
	And parenting is, of course, all about recognizing your own mortality, because, you know, they bring in the new products, because the old products quickly become obsolete and get retired to the six feet dirt nap.
	And so this sense of reminding people of the passage of time, reminding people not to strip mine male desire for female vanity and trinkets and trips to Barbados and free dinners and all.
	It's a terrible way to use the beauty of women and the love of men.
	And for the same way for men, you know, stop chasing women who just have, you know, cannon fires of Fertility markers launching themselves at men's groins, that's just not a good way to live life and reminding people of mortality is important.
	And when you look at Hollywood, you look at TV and so on, I've yet ever to see a story about a woman who wastes her youth and then ends up as an old maid, lonely girl.
	Isolated, bitter, depressed, angry, heartbroken, and then becomes the sort of post-50 invisible female, which generally happens if you don't knit together a family from the hormones of your youth.
	That doesn't exist.
	All you just see is, oh, a woman, she broke up with her husband in her 40s and she ended up...
	Having a wonderful affair with a rock-abbed sculptor down in Boho Town or something like that, it's just not how reality works, but you've got to keep that stuff invisible so you can keep people on that slippery slope of making terrible decisions and wrecking their lives by just don't show the bodies at the bottom of that slippery slope and all is well.
	At one point, Screwtape says to Wormwood, do you not realize, Wormwood, that if you are lucky and smart, you will be able to get a man to waste away his whole life doing nothing important, nothing that he wanted to do, idling away his time on trifles, right? Caught up, and that's what we love, he says.
	We don't want, we don't want and we don't need spectacular wickedness.
	What we need is gradual, we just, that gradual calcifying of the soul that comes from daily, hourly compromise.
	Not to do the better thing, not to do the more important thing, not to do the more ethical thing.
	That slow, growing calcification.
	And it really is, the thing that always amazes me about the devil in Screwtape, he's always got to slow his nephew down.
	Slow your roll, he says.
	You know, I know what you're thinking, Wormwood, that with war comes killing and people's heads blown off and lots of rape if one side wins.
	These things, I get why they excite you.
	They're like wine to you, intoxicating.
	He says, but, but, but, what good are they to us, Wormwood, if our soldiers, our patients, go to those places knowing that these things could happen, right?
	It's all about preparedness and it's all about forethought.
	And so we never do hear God's perspective because the devils won't tell us.
	But what I always find interesting about the screw tape letters in telling us the way – this is so unique about the premise that Lewis adopts is that you learn much about God from him, right?
	In fact, you learn things from screw tape about the devil that you could never learn studying scripture or trying to understand the good.
	The psychology of evil – I'm not sure anybody outside of maybe a Dante did it better.
	So difficult were these to write, as he kept writing them, Lewis, because they were popular, he made a point.
	In order to do what I did in the screw tape letters, I had to open the door to evil.
	I had to open myself to thinking and pondering and feeling what a devil would feel.
	And by the end of it, he had to quit, he said.
	People are begging him to write more, do a sequel.
	But he said he couldn't because I began to feel the devil at my elbow when I wrote them.
	That by opening myself up to the mindset of negation, of anti-good, right?
	Just opening myself up for intellectual purposes sort of imperiled the rest of me.
	And it is explicitly in the book – no, almost explicitly – individualism versus collectivism.
	There's a great passage where – He says, look, the devil expands and absorbs, takes everyone into himself and subjugates and eliminates them, whereas God wants everyone to think for themselves, which is why he doesn't place himself explicitly in front of people and give them scrolling teleprompter orders, because there's no virtue if you're just ordering people around.
	Of course, I'm not trying to put myself in any kind of similar category, but I've had a policy.
	Because, as you know, maybe your listeners don't, for like 15 years, I've been doing this call-in show.
	I've had thousands and thousands of conversations with people who are facing particular challenges in their life, and I try to give them philosophical principles that can help them out of their situation.
	And some of these situations are extraordinarily dire.
	In fact, one guy got arrested, actually, during the show.
	Anyway. I've always had a policy which is people say, well, what should I do?
	It's like, I'm not going to tell you.
	Because for me to shoulder aside whatever soul absence has had you drift into this disaster realm, for me to shoulder aside that absence and replace it with my commandments is not to enhance your free will in any way, shape, or form.
	And there has to be the humility of saying, I don't know what you should do because I'm a different person.
	I do know that there are certain principles that I think are wise and valuable to follow, but I... With one exception over 15 years with a guy who was literally drinking himself to death.
	I have never ever told anyone what to do.
	And reading that to me was a real reminder of when the devil is collectivist in nature, wants to subsume individual identity.
	To generalize satanic will.
	And he rails against and fundamentally can't comprehend.
	And I love the comedy in the book.
	It's actually a darkly funny book.
	First of all, it's not really a spoiler, I suppose, but any book where a letter has to be broken off because somebody has gotten so angry they've accidentally turned into a caterpillar, Kafka style, that is an okay book in my book.
	And another, there's just lovely little...
	Funny bits about all of this kind of stuff.
	One being, well, you know, we've tried now for thousands and thousands and thousands of years to produce a virtue.
	We're expecting progress hourly, but it hasn't quite happened yet.
	And this, like, the Soviet satanic production of virtue that's only possible in a free market, free will environment to me is quite delicious.
	And so, to me, this collectivism, because what do they offer you a respite?
	Like, what does the collectivist want to offer, whether it's Fascist, nationalist, socialist, communist, whatever.
	What do they say? They say, hey, you know, your conscience, it's a real burden, right?
	It's a real hassle having this conscience, having to make all these individual decisions, having all this responsibility.
	It's horrible. You're like Atlas groaning around with an ever-expanding globe on your shoulders.
	It's going to break your knees.
	We're going to take that burden away from you.
	If you, all you have to do, man, just subsume your willpower, your decision-making capacity to, we can call it obedience, conformity.
	Conformity to whatever principles we're putting forward.
	And we'll take it on for you, man.
	We will take on that burden for you.
	You're free of that burden. Now, of course, Christianity and philosophy says, no, you can't do that any more than somebody else can digest your dinner for you.
	They can't take your conscience.
	But that's the great offer, and that's talked about quite repeatedly.
	That you can just shrug off this burden of individual responsibility by dissolving yourself into the collective and, ooh, things are going to be great and it's like, yeah, you know, the biggest collective in the world is just a whole carpet of lemmings going Thelma and Louise style off a cliff.
	Yeah, those two, again, passages I want to stop down for a second.
	I can see it now. You and I have done so many talks together, and because of my interest, you're very broad-minded.
	You talk to people with all sorts of different backgrounds.
	You relate to them. One of mine happens to be religion, Christianity.
	So we've talked a lot about that, and I can see the gutter-snipe trolls now.
	Two of my favorite guys talking about fairy tales.
	The gutter-snipe trolls, right?
	Way to go, guys. I watched 15 minutes.
	God doesn't exist. There's the answer, right?
	There is no God. Children's play.
	And they walk away. Not that we have to pay any attention to them, but I want to take the two quotes that you just gave us.
	I want to ask them to you in a philosophical sense.
	The first quote you talked about was how the devil lays his cards, screw tape lays his cards on the table.
	And in so doing, to teach his young nephew, he doesn't just tell Wormwood what we devils are about.
	He, by definition, explains God.
	And it's the kind of definition that I think answers a lot of the The sophomore and college kids who've had a little H.L. Mencken and think they're expert atheists now, that kind of glib rejection of God because spaghetti fly – when did a flying spaghetti monster become an articulate answer to the problem of God or no God?
	But there's that one moment you brought up where he says, you know, the dirty truth is – That we are hungry and would be filled.
	We see human beings as food.
	We want to suck in their life into our own.
	We want to collectivize them.
	It's like the Borg, right?
	We want to swallow their identity, expand our identity by swallowing theirs.
	You also must recognize, Wormwood, that the enemy, he never calls him God, the enemy, he is full and wants to give out.
	He wants to turn them into sons and daughters who ultimately can become something even higher.
	That where we want to suck in, he wants to give out.
	It's true, Wormwood, about him.
	That he has no appreciation, the devil says, for his status as God.
	He wants to take these hairy bipeds and elevate them to the level of his own.
	And it's all done by allowing him, asking the subject to hand him the free will back so he could make them freer.
	Now, that's a really remarkable argument to a very long series of non-sequitur attacks on people who believe in God, right?
	So, well, God knows all these.
	God's omniscient. God knows all this.
	You can't have any free will because he knows this, right?
	This idea that God couldn't possibly know without...
	But what he says there is important, that God ultimately wants our obedience.
	He wants us not to be forced to follow him.
	He wants us to choose him so that by choosing him, giving us back the gift of free will that he gave us, he can raise us to higher places.
	Now, from all your philosophical background, and I know that you, you know, earlier in your career, you have made really cogent arguments, arguing in skeptical ways about God.
	What would you say, from a philosophical perspective, about the negative arguments you get?
	In explaining what we are, we get to learn about God.
	Is it compelling to you when you read the screw tape letters?
	Oh, man. How much time do we have here to do my theological wrestling these days?
	Okay, so very, very briefly.
	I'll keep it brief, and we could probably do a whole other show about where I am theologically, if your audience and yourselves have interest in it.
	But right now, Christianity versus Atheism boils down to this.
	Atheism says smoking is good for you.
	That's the science. Christianity says God says don't smoke.
	That's where the choice is.
	You say, oh, that's just a fairy tale, so I'm going to smoke, and then you die.
	Now, you could say, okay, well, the Christians accept God's argument that smoking is bad for you, so they don't smoke, and they stay healthy.
	Because the false dichotomy is that the atheists have some kind of answer to the question of ethics and virtue and truth and conscience.
	They don't. They have answers about the material universe, which is really the least important aspect outside of satisfying our bare material needs.
	It's the least important aspect of our existence because we share it with the freaking paramecium.
	We share it with the trilobite.
	We share it with the airborne bacteria.
	Oh, I need to ingest things in order to poop things in order to continue my heart beating.
	Ooh, good job! And he talks about this.
	I want to get to this phrase or this passage he's got about the amphibian nature of humanity, which is about as beautifully expressed the soul-body dichotomy that I've ever read.
	So the atheists say, okay, well, so there's no God.
	And I had this conversation with Dennis Prager years ago and didn't take it as seriously as I should.
	I do now. Okay, so where does morality come from?
	Is there such a thing as a conscience?
	What is virtue? What is the value of truth?
	Outside of, hey, truth allows us to build a more efficient nuclear bomb.
	Truth allows us to build a great computer.
	Hey, that's all valuable stuff, but it has nothing to do with ethics.
	Nothing to do with virtue. The one thing that differentiates us from everything else in creation is that we have a conscience and we have the capacity to abstract virtue.
	Now, I say this with particular bitterness and vitriol, but not any anger.
	I say this because I accepted That Christianity solved the problem of ethics in a way that philosophically could be argued against strongly.
	So I said, okay, I'm going to sit down.
	I remember this very clearly. This was in 2007.
	Oh, boy! That's old enough now that it's starting to get a wobbly voice and chest hair.
	And I sat down at a table and I said, I'm not going to get up until I've got a philosophical, rational, secular answer to the question of ethics.
	And I worked very, very hard on It took a long time.
	I wrote a whole book. I toured with it.
	I made speeches to atheists.
	I had call-in shows endlessly devoted to the topic.
	I made endless presentations.
	I really, really worked hard to bring universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics, thinking that I was going to bring this gift, this labor, to atheists, and they were going to be like, ah, I've been dying of thirst in the desert.
	You finally have some water. Glug, glug, glug.
	That's going to be my And I didn't want them to say, good for you.
	I just wanted them to say, good for atheism, like you've cracked the code of the E equals MC squared of secular ethics.
	And boy, what do you think happened?
	Just spoiler. What do you think happened?
	Well, they hated it in general.
	They fought against it.
	They didn't argue against it.
	They didn't say, oh, you know, here's the logical flaws in someone.
	It was just, you know, oh, it's pedestrian.
	Oh, it's adolescent. Oh, it's unsophisticated.
	Like all of this just sophist, multi-syllable diarrhea that passes for something you can build a house out of.
	And that to me was like, okay, so what are the atheists really all about?
	Well, the atheists are really all about not having the responsibility of the conscience.
	Atheism has its value, I believe.
	It's good to be skeptical, and it's good to think for yourself, and I'm not saying Christians don't as a whole, but I think that has value, because the faith untested, you know, it's like saying, this is a really strong bridge.
	Hey, don't step on it, man. Don't step on it, whatever you do.
	You've got to jump up and down on the bridge and see what it holds.
	And I jumped up and down on sort of modern secular atheism, and all of that eye-rolling stuff that came out of the televangelists with the big hair and the lapels in the 80s on American television, Secular humanism, you know, that kind of stuff.
	And it was all like, oh, you know, but they're actually, those bouffant-haired guys, they kind of got a point in that there is a decay back to the mere mammalian Nietzschean will to power, seek to grab resources, shoulder people aside, lie to get ahead.
	You know, once you pull out, you know, the thumb in the dike of an articulation of moral values, man, oof.
	Things get pretty bad.
	To the atheists out there, I say, okay, what is your answer to the question of morality?
	Sam Harris has his answers, which is, you know, not getting cholera is better than getting cholera.
	It's like, ooh, wow, yeah, that's really quite a moral revolution.
	Richard Dawkins has his answers, which is around this mealy-mouthed, vaguely altruistic collectivist, like-your-own-gene stuff, and None of it compels, none of it motivates, and it simply distracts people from that giant hole.
	I would respect atheism enormously if they said, okay, no Christianity, fine, but we got this huge giant gaping hole called no ethics, no virtue, no morality, no conscience.
	Because that's what Christianity was providing to the West, and it provided it in such a powerful way that the West developed freedom of speech, the West eliminated Slavery, not just from the West, but around the world, which is now creeping back mostly in non-Western countries.
	The Christianity nurtured, although there were some attacks, it nurtured science forward through the Enlightenment and so on.
	So there was a lot of great stuff there and you can of course focus on the negatives and that's what the devil would want you to do.
	A lot of great stuff there. But they said, okay, we are cutting off this supply of food and it is the central and major supply of food to the Western conscience.
	But you can't cut off a supply of food without providing a new supply of food.
	Otherwise, everyone's just going to starve to death.
	And I think that the moral and conscious starvation that's been occurring for the last 100 or 200 years in the West is now kind of reaching its fruition.
	So I would just say to atheists, man, you've got to find God or you've got to find conscience, but you can't just leave things the way they are.
	Yeah, I thought – maybe this is the books that I've steeped myself with, people like Lewis and Dostoevsky who examines this on levels much deeper than almost anybody else I've ever read.
	But it's the argument that somehow belief is easy, atheism is hard.
	Now, on the surface, with all those people who are saying to you, it's sophomoric, it's pedestrian, they're basically saying it's not sophisticated.
	And my point is, is that, well, why would virtue be?
	I mean, if there is a god, why would he have created virtue only with sesquipedalian words that only PhDs could understand?
	Why wouldn't the language of virtue, when you boiled it down, and Screwtape makes this point, why wouldn't it be available to the least educated?
	I mean, unless God is, by definition, elitist or unjust, all the things the left accuses them of being in ad hoc, right?
	Why wouldn't? And I go back to the story of Christ, too.
	If we entertain for a moment the possibility that that creature who walked the earth all those years ago was actually the son of God rather than just a human being, well, look what he did.
	I mean, it makes perfect moral sense that he talked about humility at the opening of the story.
	Why?
	If Jesus is who he says he is, and Lewis makes this point repeatedly, if Jesus is who he says he is, then he is either the most powerful figure who ever walked the earth, the creator of the universe, enters the world and walks in human form and spends his time teaching, healing, and dying for his own creation. healing, and dying for his own creation.
	If that's true, notice how he came.
	The most powerful creature, the one who made the universe, comes as a slave, comes as a bankrupt child, broke in a slave state to the Roman Empire.
	He spends his life… In a manger.
	In a manger. In a manger.
	Right! And this is the humility.
	This is the virtue, right?
	What is the primary virtue of Christ?
	It's humility. He comes not as a king or a conqueror because if he came as a king, a creator, or a conqueror, justice would be all he could meet.
	There would be really no room for mercy.
	But he comes as a symbol of humility.
	And this is a reason.
	If I, who created the world, can suffer and die for it unjustly, I sacrifice myself for others weaker than me, then there's a great moral argument why we should do the same.
	And it is a compelling moral arguing.
	And one step further, in terms of the lack of sophistication of this, why would he spend his time talking to the Pharisees?
	They had made up their mind. The Pharisees of today are the scoffer atheists that you lectured to 10 years ago, right?
	They don't want to hear you.
	They have their system.
	In their system, they are good in their atheist system because they still believe in godless ethics.
	They may never act on them, and they certainly aren't going to sacrifice their lives for one of the Cretans who believe, but they've given themselves an airtight system of salvation in their own heads.
	But what Christ did was to me stunning in terms of all—and let's assume Christ isn't the Son of God.
	Of all the great moral teachers in the world, he's the only one that I've found that's done this.
	How does he deal with those who are suffering most?
	The ones for whom the civilization forgot, the lost ones, those who had no recourse, those who were the bottom dwellers, the weakest, the chattel, the kind of collective humanity that Stalin would starve to death or that Hitler would gas as useless.
	He talked to them in their own language.
	He didn't talk down to them.
	Everything from Jesus' teaching is rocks and stones and fish and mustard seeds.
	And so why wouldn't, God or no God, why wouldn't virtue be easily accessible to the lowest IQ And if that's true, if that is true, that virtue is both deeply complicated and yet endlessly simple that it can be understood at any level of education or experience, then wouldn't by definition in a secular age the highly educated be the most profoundly confused by that?
	Why is it not speaking to me here with my lexicon and my thesaurus?
	Why is it speaking to them?
	That's always... To me, I have never found an answer to that particular argument that compelled me to reject what I believe.
	Well, it's how do you get a gold medal at the Olympics?
	You just run faster than everyone else.
	Usually, you've seen Bolt, right?
	So it's simple.
	You start here, you end here.
	Who crosses the line first gets the gold.
	But how you do it, well, that's how you actually do run faster.
	That's a whole complicated thing.
	You've got your diet, you've got your training, you've got your rest days, you've got willpower, you've got tiredness, you've got managing the edge of injury.
	I mean, it's a big deal, right?
	So, to me, that's ethics, right?
	Speak the truth and live consistently and don't inflict moral rules on just one of my big things.
	Don't inflict moral rules on children that you then exempt adults from.
	And that's just an exercise of abusive power.
	That's anything which we expect a five-year-old to do, we can damn well expect a 35-year-old to do.
	But what happens is we give these simple moral rules to kids, you know, don't use violence to get what you want, don't lie, don't steal, respect other people's property, so on, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And then when you become an adult, there's all this complicated socio-economic privilege-based class reasons as to why we have to violently redistribute resources and property in society and we can point guns at people to get what we want all the time and it's like, that's not what you said to the five-year-old.
	What you said to the five-year-old is simple and clear.
	And I mean, I've done shows on how to explain ethics to children, which equally would apply to adults.
	But what happens is, of course, when we become adults, we become sophisticated enough to mask our simple greed in pretend moral complexity.
	You know, with kids, it's like, hey, don't take his candy, man.
	But he's got more candy than me.
	Then you can ask him for one, but you can't go and take it just because he's got more candy than you.
	And it's like, he's got more money than...
	Okay, well then go to the government, get a tax this guy and give money to this guy and borrow from this guy.
	It's like, you know, that's...
	You know, if your kid borrows $5 at the mall to buy something...
	You expect them to pay it back.
	Otherwise, you could give the kid five bucks, but the kid says, no, no, no.
	Father, I wish to only but borrow this money, and I shall return it forthwith, like the Bluto, is it Bluto in Popeye?
	I will gladly pay you Wednesday for a hamburger I can have today, right?
	So, your kid says, I want to borrow five dollars.
	And you say, you know, borrow.
	You're going to pay it back. Pay it back Saturday.
	I'll get the money Saturday, right?
	Saturday comes, you say, where's the five bucks?
	And he says, you know what?
	I'm going to roll that into a forward-bearing annuity that is going to be an instrument that I'm going to sell in various countries around the world.
	And at some point, probably based upon future borrowing, I may get that back to you.
	But you have to count in inflation, so I'm going to give you about $3.38 at some indefinite point in the future.
	We'd say, dude!
	You just ripped me off. You said you were going to borrow and now you're not paying me back and you're just giving me a bunch of baffle gab.
	And that's what we do with kids, right?
	But then we go to adults and politicians come to us and say, well, you know, you want a bunch of free stuff.
	Boomers? No, it's not always boomers.
	But you want a bunch of free stuff, right?
	Oh, that's no problem. Let's just borrow it all.
	Are you ever going to pay it back?
	No! Absolutely not.
	Never, ever, ever going to be paid back, but we can't talk about that.
	In fact, we can have entire presidential debates that go on for 40 years and nobody's ever going to mention the national debt or how it might be paid off.
	It becomes Voldemort.
	Debt becomes Voldemort.
	It can't be spoken, right?
	And so this Be Good is actually quite simple.
	And what's great about this book Yeah, just be honest.
	Just reflect upon your virtues and don't become overly self-conscious.
	I think that's a really, really important part of the book which we should get into.
	But it's actually quite simple.
	Now, managing all of that is complex.
	If you want to lose weight or you want to quit smoking and so on, you know what you have to do.
	Eat less, exercise more, don't pick up the cigarettes.
	But dealing with all the reasons why you may be overweight, why you've got to change your diet, what emotions are dealing with the food, or what caused you to become a smoker in the first place.
	Smoking in particular is heavily correlated with child abuse, right?
	Because people who are abused as children, they lack dopamine, and that's one of the things that cigarettes and other drugs give you.
	So you're not smoking to feel better, or you're not taking drugs to feel better, you're taking drugs to feel normal.
	You take drugs like somebody in chronic pain takes painkillers, So when you stop smoking, all of that repressed child abuse and pain and horror usually floats to the surface.
	You've got a lot to deal with. So what's great about this book is be good.
	Yeah, not that complicated, but all the barriers to being good, well, that's complicated and that takes serious reflection.
	It does. And you know, I still go back to the original story.
	For me, where on the hierarchy of learning is learning by example, I would assume that that's pretty high up there.
	If you can learn by example, you see what works.
	It's almost empirical, isn't it?
	Right? To learn by example.
	And the example that Christ set, again, was one of humility.
	And that to me, why of all the virtues he could have brung to a world in some ways as broken as our own, why is that the virtue he brought?
	Because I think that's the one virtue that you find no corollary for really in nature.
	That something that is strong doesn't act it.
	I mean, where do you find that corollary in nature?
	We talk about the idea of God, at least the idea of a monotheistic Christian God as being transcendent, not to be found in the system, but having to create.
	We're not talking about paganism here.
	We're talking about a transcendent God who has the universe in his hand, that kind of power.
	Where do we find, in a naturalistic world, any Emphasis whatsoever on the stronger creatures, as Christ says, not just necessarily sacrificing to look after the weak, but to going so far as to give your own life.
	Sacrifice your strength, your existence for its weakness so that it can live if you can't.
	That's probably the single most shocking statement that Christianity or possibly world religion ever made.
	Because again, the example of Christ was so important.
	If Christ is just some guy who grew up in Galilee, I remember him, went to high school with him, then it doesn't mean anything because there's no greatness of power there or privilege.
	But if he is the creator God, And said that.
	And then went on to live and then die the way he did.
	Now, that's a powerful example of living by example.
	And it becomes a moral force on its own.
	And so to me, this idea of all the virtues that came, because Schrute talks about this too.
	He talks about humility and what that means.
	And what vanity is.
	You're on the verge of something big though.
	This idea of the amphibian nature of man, that also has to be accounted for.
	It's not accounted for in our naturalistic philosophies.
	But you said, I loved it, that almost, and I agree with you, almost nobody in the history of philosophy ever explained that better than what Lewis said.
	And what did Lewis say? Humans are amphibians, half spirit and half animal.
	As spirits, they belong to the eternal world, but as animals, they inhabit time.
	This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change.
	For to be in time means to change.
	Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation, the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back a series of troughs and peaks.
	Oh, isn't that so beautifully put?
	I have the best idea in the world!
	What a stomachache.
	Oh, I really want to finish this story.
	Oh, I gotta pee. I mean, our focus between the incredible abstract conceptions we are capable of and this Dragging down beautiful robot flesh prisoner of the body has almost never been put better, and it's so compressed.
	It is so compressed, and it's a beautiful thing.
	I used to think when I was younger, oh, mind-body dichotomy, it's a false dichotomy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	But that's before I really spread my wings and realized what I was capable of, and what I'm capable of when I was younger would give me vanity, but what I'm capable of now Gives me extraordinary humility.
	So, you know, I had a conversation with the guy yesterday.
	We were talking about temptations and these sort of step-by-step things.
	Didn't have anything particularly traumatic happen in his youth.
	And I can talk about this as going out as a show.
	It's going to be called Dating the Dead.
	Some people should check it out. I'm talking to this guy.
	I spent a long time with him. He got addicted to pornography.
	And he followed these...
	Breadcrumbs down this dark path.
	Long story short, he ended up as a necrophiliac.
	He wanted romantic interactions with the dead, to put it as nicely as humanly possible.
	That's him for a very dark and ugly stuff.
	That's sort of this chip-by-chip thing where he's gone fully into the body where he's actually now sexually attracted to somebody who doesn't even have a consciousness, let alone a I mean, that's how physical it has become.
	It came as a surprise.
	He didn't say, oh, by the way, I have this issue.
	It came up during the course of the conversation, and I was able to sort of navigate it and provide him some real help and value through that process.
	Now, I can look there and say, oh, my gosh.
	How great am I that I can do that?
	It's like, I didn't create that in myself.
	I didn't create that ability in myself.
	It's like me saying, you know, blue eyes, these blue eyes I decided when I was in that platonic orbit of Saturn before being born, that's a really good job, man.
	Oh, square jaw. You know, the fact that I'm above average in height, great job.
	You may have missed a little bit with the hair, but good job with everything else.
	I didn't blueprint myself.
	I don't own myself in that kind of way.
	I'm responsible for myself.
	But I'm the result of...
	Whether you want to call it evolution or design, it's not particularly material, but I did not earn the capacities that I have.
	Now, I'm responsible for how I use them, but the atheists, the fedora-wearing atheists in general have a lot of vanity about their abilities.
	And... It's like if somebody's born a great singer because you've got a great singing voice, right?
	Yeah, good for you, man.
	But you didn't earn that. Now, what kind of songs you sing, whether you do uplifting Celine Dion anthems or drag down to the muck Billy Eilish Satan Fests or something like that, that's another matter.
	You didn't earn your voice.
	I didn't earn my looks, my intelligence.
	I didn't earn any of that stuff.
	I mean, I have the responsibility to maintain it and use it for the power of good.
	But this, if you just stay animal, what happens is you lose connection.
	To all the dominoes that came before you that give you the gifts that you have, even English.
	I mean, I've tried to invent a couple of words.
	It's kind of tough. It's kind of tough.
	You know, fetch. It's just not going to happen.
	And so even the language that we use, the technology that we're using here, I didn't invent it.
	You didn't invent it. We can use it, I hope, for the best.
	But humility is saying, I happen to be...
	I mean, it's privileged in a way, although it's not the white privilege stuff, but it's privileged.
	I happen to be the fortunate recipient of good health, of a fairly pleasant speaking voice, of an agile mind, and all of that.
	And that gives me humility.
	Like, if you have inherited a whole bunch of money, you're not a great entrepreneur.
	And you should have the humility to say, okay, I didn't earn it, I just got it.
	So how can I use it for the best?
	But so many of the people I've known from the atheist world, the secular world, they take this kind of pride.
	Like, they earned it all.
	And I'm not saying it's not collectivist in any way, shape or form.
	It is a humility to say, okay, well, if I have these gifts, I didn't earn them.
	So it gives me a kind of privilege.
	How can I best use that in the service of humanity?
	And this kind of responsibility is really kind of anathema to the sensation-seeking atheists who look upon, and this comes out of the Ayn Rand objectivist world too, they look upon some sort of responsibility or higher calling like that just makes you a slave.
	And that to me is a terrible thing because if you work to sharpen your mind, you work to make good arguments, you work to learn and to educate yourself and to gain some sort of deep knowledge, It's like studying the Heimlich maneuver, right?
	Like, you've got to cough up some piece of fish that's lodged in someone's throat.
	And then, you're in a restaurant, you're having dinner, and some guy next to you starts choking on a piece of halibut or something, and then you're like, well, I'm not obligated to save his life.
	I mean, my food's just about to come.
	I hate my food when it's cold, and, you know, my coffee will get cold, or my beer will get flat.
	So, no, it's too much hassle.
	It's like, Okay, nobody's saying that you must and you'll be thrown in jail if you don't, but you're kind of a donkey hole if you don't go and help that person because you have all this knowledge.
	You know how to save that person.
	They're right there. It's not massively inconvenient to you.
	Nobody's asking you to give a kidney, you know, using a salad fork.
	And so just go help that person rather than saying, oh, I have this knowledge of the Heinrich Maneuver.
	That makes me very special.
	It's like, well, I don't know if it does or it doesn't, but you sure as hell aren't special if you don't go and help the guy choking on the piece of halibut.
	What is wonderful about this book and this phrase that there is something eternal about us.
	For the atheists out there, just think of it as four billion years of evolution that happened to give you this great brain and this relative health and this relatively free society and this great technology in the here and now.
	That's all wonderful.
	I've had 700 million plus views and downloads of my philosophy show.
	Is that because I'm the most I'm a downloaded philosopher probably in history.
	I've had 10 million books downloaded and all of that.
	Does that mean I'm the best?
	No, it's just I'm lucky. I drew the straw which is birth of the internet.
	I had this wonderful 10 years from 2006 to 2016 where you actually could speak your mind and the powers that be would more or less leave you alone.
	It was 10 years out of the entire history of man.
	It doesn't seem like a lot but you know it's 10 years that nobody else had so yay.
	You know good for that and that humility is something that does not I've been given the gift of life.
	I've been given the gift of a soul.
	I've been given the gift of free will.
	How am I going to use it to serve virtue?
	And there's not a lot of atheists who have that same drive.
	I think you could say – I've always thought this – that the unreflexive atheists and many of the reflexive ones are starting from a position that eliminates the possibility of humility.
	To whom are you humble to if, again, you are self-created?
	If you could give – do you give thanks to the silent, non-sentient – The task of four billion years of evolution?
	That doesn't seem to do it, right?
	It's not very Nietzschean, right, to give the paramecium, all those links in the – I've never known an atheist to go back to the Museum of Natural History and thank that whale bone, that bear bone that eventually became a whale.
	But by definition, you have created – you've entered a world where you are more or less self-created.
	You are – like everybody else, you're born from slime, but you've made something of your slime and the fact that other people have it.
	Sorry to interrupt, but you've won the lottery of all life.
	To be a human being is to win the lottery of all life and you didn't even buy the lottery ticket.
	It was just handed to you by fate and you're like – so you just – a lottery ticket blows into your face.
	And you cash it in for like half a billion dollars and you don't feel any gratitude?
	You don't feel like, wow, boy, talk about found money.
	That's more than the 20 bucks I found doing laundry last week.
	I got to do something good with this money.
	Couldn't really earn it. Sorry, go ahead.
	No, no, you're right. And you talked about the law of undulation, this idea.
	One of the very first stories, in fact, the very first story you get in the Screwtape letters is Screwtape lecturing his nephew again.
	Let me tell you something, he says, Wormwood.
	Once when I had a patient just like yours, a young man who was a comfortable atheist, well, he used to like to read in the British library.
	And he'd go every morning and read for three hours.
	And I was on his shoulder because I paid very close attention to what he read.
	And I noticed that he was beginning to read things that were intellectually moving him back toward God, toward the enemy.
	I knew I had to act fast.
	So I didn't try to argue with him.
	I didn't try to un-argue God.
	And this blew me away.
	You must remember, Wormwood, God, if God exists, God invented reason.
	He can reason too.
	We didn't invent it.
	He did. All we can do is take what he made rationally and unmake it.
	You mentioned the quote before, right?
	All this time we devils have tried to create one virtue just to say we could do it and we haven't been able to.
	All we can do is unmake the virtues that are.
	So this man reading, this young man reading in the British Museum, he was getting dangerously close to belief.
	The last thing in the world I was going to do was argue with him.
	The last thing I was going to do is put an idea in his head.
	I simply said, it's lunchtime.
	A little rumble in the belly.
	And I just whispered in his ear, this is a really important decision.
	Maybe too busy, too important to make while you're hungry.
	Go get a sandwich and come back.
	And so the minute he perked up immediately, he gathered his books and walked out and you know what?
	Wormwood, he never came back to that library again.
	Because once he got into the street and he heard the bus go by and saw the young boy screaming, paper, paper, 50 cents, he was embarrassed that in the quiet of his reading, his mind was going towards something as ridiculous as God.
	All I had to do was get him out into the street with its scents and smells and animal behaviors, and I knew he was safe from God.
	Hmm. And...
	There's a real bait and switch with the quasi-scientific atheists who say, well, you see, but the physical evidence for the existence of God just doesn't add up to the kind of physical evidence that exists for the theory of gravity or trees or, oh, I'm an empiricist and I believe in truth, facts, reasons, science, evidence, blah, blah, blah.
	And it's actually pretty easy to reveal that modern science-addicted atheism is actually far more of an anti-rational cult than even the worst aspects of Christianity.
	There's a couple of topics you could bring up that's just going to make them freak out, and you can sort of point out, oh, you know, race is not just a social construct, there are biological differences.
	No! Oh, do you know that men and women's brain sizes are different and there are IQ spreads?
	No! Those are facts!
	You know that there's good reasons to be skeptical of the Thermageddon view of climate change, that, you know, having more plant food in the atmosphere at a time of rising human population, thus facilitating the greater growth of agriculture, may not be quite as a disaster as...
	Do you know that the California forest fires are more related to arson than they are to climate change?
	Because magically they stop at the Canadian border, whereas I don't think climate change...
	No! Right? You don't want to hear anything about this stuff.
	Do you know that there are some scientific studies that show mosques may not be as effective as people think and the mortality rate is kind of low for COVID and oh yeah, there's significant evidence that this was man-made probably in the Wuhan lab that it mysteriously emerged a couple of hundred yards.
	No! Right? So all of this, well, you know, we just, we just, you know, we gotta, what we are humble to, what we are humble to, say the atheists, is we are humble to science.
	We will bow down before science.
	No, you won't. But that's a lie, like you just said, and I'll tell you, and you know the reason why.
	Because if the scientist is honest, the only honest answer to the question is, give me some data or else I can't address the issue, right?
	At least not with my scientific toolkit.
	I mean, and we know, and every scientist I've met knows, that there are aspects to the human condition that are not database.
	They are not empirical. There are aspects of the human animal and his amphibian self.
	I love that again, right? One foot in the human world, one foot in the angelic world.
	That we all concede that there is an illogic to humanity that defies scientific description.
	Why is it that if there is no God, and I think this is a fair statement, if there is no God, and nothing transcendent, no heaven, no hell, then as far as we know...
	Human reason is the most powerful force in the universe.
	To the degree that we've been able to look, we've found nothing like human reason.
	Immediately, this is where humility goes to die, right?
	If there is no god and we have comfortably decided, not because we've empirically proven he doesn't exist, we've just decided he doesn't exist.
	And as scientists, we're not going to acknowledge the fact that if this kind of a god were to exist, numbers and physics weren't going to get the job done anyway.
	He's a non-material. In fact, Christ himself and his simplicity said the Father is spirit.
	What are you looking for? It's like if somebody wants to go out and swab a cloud with a 50-foot-tall Q-TEP and grow God spores in a Petri dish before you're going to concede he exists.
	I mean, Christ made the observation God is spirit.
	And so consequently, there is nothing in your laboratories that would measure this.
	And so the idea here that, you know, from the perspective of what the screw tape letters are telling us is there are aspects of humanity.
	Something as simple as one aspect is sacrificial love.
	Of which Christ modeled.
	Why does the strong?
	In nature, the shark never sacrifices itself so the tuna can live.
	The gazelle, the lion never lays down and let himself be fed upon by the other lions to save the gazelles.
	It doesn't happen. There's nowhere that it happens.
	And there is no logical, material reason why it would ever happen.
	In fact, it's the definition of, that would be the evolution in reverse.
	It would be to take what we believe to be the sole origin for life on this planet and insist that it had to work backwards, right?
	Every strong thing giving way to the weak, right?
	And weaker and weaker till life died out.
	That's what we would have to believe.
	And so this is the power of what I think he's telling you, is Is the humility there to recognize that – because I asked my sophomores this just the other day.
	How many of you believe that we are just nothing more than highly evolved animals?
	And about 80 percent of the class raised their hand.
	I said, so therefore – Reason, I said, so we're reading a story about sacrifice.
	I said, so is this character in the story who willingly laid down his life to save the life of this individual as an individual who was mentally retarded, do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing?
	And they all said it was great. So you don't believe in anything but materialism.
	You just said that.
	And yet you find this act, this very implausible act of sacrifice to be noble.
	How do you square that circle?
	How do you – because the smart person says you can't, right?
	You have two radically – and reason.
	Reason is not enough.
	Reason does not – reason doesn't answer the question.
	Something else has to answer the question.
	It's not a rational thing to do.
	And that's why I think so many of the great writers of the 20th century, including a lot of left-wingers, Have written books warning us about what happens when the only thing we allow to process truth is reason, right?
	Is it my mistake or are all the great dystopias of the 20th century?
	They're warnings not against faith.
	They're warnings against a far too rigid rationalism.
	Well, I would sort of argue as well that they're warnings against the absolutist rejection of suffering.
	Because Christianity, of course, absorbs and utilizes for good our propensity towards suffering, and suffering is quite a lot talked about in the Screwtape Letters, right?
	Because under atheism, well, why would you suffer?
	So sacrifice and suffering It doesn't really help.
	Now, of course, in Christianity, you can say, why is God making me suffer?
	It's like, well, if you've morally transgressed, it's not God, it's you who's making yourself suffer.
	And it is important to have people serve as a warning to others, right?
	So, I mean, take a sort of example of like single motherhood, right?
	So some woman gets pregnant in a Christian society.
	You know, that's bad. It's bad for the kid.
	It's bad for the woman. It's bad for the family as a whole.
	And the idea that you would rush in and give her $5,000 a month, every child she has, would be kind of like, well, no, no, that's not giving her free will anymore.
	And it's actually diminishing the free will of other women who are now going to be bribed into behaving badly by getting free government money or whatever it is.
	A charity would be pretty harsh about that stuff.
	And so people are going to suffer.
	And one of the most amazing things, which I very vividly remember reading this book in my 20s, was when he said, okay, if you really want to, I'm paraphrasing, of course, he says, you really want to resent your life pretty easy.
	You wake up thinking the next 24 hours completely and totally just belong to you.
	You should be able to do whatever you want.
	And then you resent every single obligation that you have that interferes with your universal ownership of your own time and efforts and energy.
	That is a perfect way to end up resenting life.
	Or wake up thinking that you should never have a headache.
	You should never stub your toe.
	You should never get a stomachache.
	You should never get stuck in traffic.
	You should never forget your wallet.
	Life standards should be perfection.
	And a complete absence of annoyance, irritation, setbacks, blowbacks, blah, blah, blah, right?
	And that way, everything that deviates from this imaginary perfect state, heaven on earth, everything which deviates from that will be magnified a hundredfold because you don't anticipate it or expect it, right?
	It's like the people who show up.
	I remember this happened once in a business meeting way before 9-11.
	I was in a business meeting and really in an intense negotiation, lost track of time, and I had half an hour to catch a flight.
	Of which 10 minutes was getting to the airport.
	Now, you try that these days.
	You can't do it, right? And I made it.
	You know, like, hold that place, sprinting down, you know, bags flying all over the place and all of that.
	And I would never show up thinking, well, everything's going to go perfectly.
	There'll never be any line. We all expect there to be problems and issues and difficulties, right?
	Our show started late. There was some technical issues.
	I had something else come up.
	I couldn't finish the book in the way that I wanted, make all my notes.
	So, you know, we started a little late.
	It's fine. It's part of life, right?
	And so this idea that life should somehow be absent of suffering and then every single impediment is just an ever-escalating tsunami-like annoyance to the sandcastle of perfection that life always knocks over drives people crazy.
	And let me just get the quote here, which was really great.
	He says, we must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned with his own dignity and advancement Where everyone has a grievance and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.
	Or election year 2020.
	Or every other year that is going on these days.
	And because Christianity says, yeah, it's kind of a veil of tears.
	It's kind of a corrupt environment.
	You're going to suffer. I mean, the very center of Christianity got nailed to a cross.
	I mean, that's a pretty bad day by any standard, right?
	And so understanding that virtue is going to bring suffering.
	To be good in a corrupt world is going to cause blowback.
	To me, you don't have courage if fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
	If I grew up Christian and I was very much aware and was very much taught that the wages of sin is death, but the wages of virtue It's de-platforming.
	They didn't say that at the time, right?
	But if you're going to tell the truth that's going to upset people and it's an essential truth and it's important, it's a moral truth, if you speak these truths and you're going to get blowback, that is in the nature.
	And that to me is where the moral courage comes from, knowing.
	It's one thing to run into a building to save someone who's trapped under a fridge.
	It's another thing if the building is hugely on fire.
	Then you know that there's much more of a negative situation.
	And I think because Atheists have this fantasy of a perfect world, which is really what communism goes for.
	Because they say, well, you see, there's no physical evidence for the existence of God.
	But the next time we try communism, it's going to work out perfectly.
	It's like, oh my gosh in heaven, are you kidding me?
	You claim to be an empiricist.
	And you say, well, empirical evidence of God is sadly lacking in the universe.
	It's like, you show me the empirical evidence of communism working, but you're going to try it again.
	And it's much more destructive than anything you can imagine.
	So trying to eliminate suffering creates the most suffering.
	And this distraction element within the screw tape letters is trying to eliminate I always think of Karl Marx reading in the British Library every day.
	This guy didn't want to suffer.
	He didn't want to take seriously the moral duties he was contemplating.
	He did not want to suffer, so you avoid suffering.
	Taking that to an extreme, you get the paradise promise, the heaven on earth promise.
	Are the national socialists, the communists, the socialists to say, hey man, we can eliminate suffering.
	We can make everyone equal.
	No one's going to envy everyone, anyone.
	And we can make women perfectly economically equal to men.
	Plus they can still have kids, which is kind of one or the other.
	There aren't going to be any false dichotomies.
	There aren't going to be any tough choices to make.
	Like people say, oh, we'll just get rid of COVID by keeping everyone locked down, shutting down all the businesses and making everyone wear masks.
	It's like, okay, well now we have no economy.
	We've got to keep the old people safe from COVID. It's like, well, by destroying the economy so we can't pay them a retirement pension or give them any health care anymore.
	It's this idea that you can have a universe where the Aristotelian logic, the basic three laws of logic, don't apply.
	It's a psychotic, insane, narcissistic, deranged, megalomaniacal universe.
	There aren't going to be any tough choices.
	Whereas Christianity starts, yes, everything is tough because you're an amphibian.
	You're never going to have one foot and one foot.
	You're going to weave between these two.
	You're going to have your bodily pleasures, which are important, and you're going to have your spiritual desires.
	Virtue is going to set you at conflict with the world, but if you refrain from it, Enacting virtue in the world, you're going to be set a conflict against yourself, which is even worse, and it's better to have a good conscience and a bad reputation and an evil world.
	All of this stuff, it's like, welcome to the Veil of Tears.
	You're a big ticket to a lifelong suffering journey of glory.
	Whereas this devil hangs out this thing, which is like, hey man, just surrender your will and your identity to the collective, and it'll just be paradise.
	It's basically going to hook you up to a big giant Graduate school amniotic sack of government money and you're going to get fed through a tube through your belly like you're in the early part of the matrix and you're never going to have to suffer and we're really tempted by that and Christianity just smacks that delusion out of people's minds and says, no, no, no, no. The suffering is real.
	The suffering is important and the attempt to escape it.
	Yeah, I think suffering is the key to this question and it's the question that the left – the progressive left, atheist left doesn't really want to tackle because we've been living in a largely increasingly God-free Western world for 100 years now.
	With every decade that goes on, it becomes less relevant.
	And pain hasn't gone away.
	Where is the same railing against nature?
	Where is the same heartbroken, almost childlike striking out at mother nature for creating a universe where suffering is really the hallmark of everything we do?
	And I mean everything we do.
	I mean when – what's the only way we can build muscles to shred the old muscle?
	Growing – simply the physical act of growing involves growing pains.
	The joints ache, right?
	I mean every meaningful intellectual thing we do comes by a kind of – turn off the TV. Put your cell phone down.
	It takes effort, right?
	Effort that my college kids are now completely unable to make to tune out the noise to try to focus.
	Pain, and pain comes in all different measurable sizes, but pain is the purpose of this universe, especially if there is no God.
	In fact, it is perhaps the one predictable, unavoidable, universal thing of the universe.
	If you flew here from Mars, right, and you just took one look at this planet, the first thing you would notice is every damn thing is eating every other damn thing.
	And the pain that arises, this whole world suffers.
	And you've gotten rid of God already, the only thing.
	The only thing down through history that has given us meaningful philosophical understandings of the purpose of that pain, because the modern scientific answer is it needs to be done away with.
	We have to keep – and we get more and more analgesics.
	We get more and more soporifics.
	We get more and more opiates.
	We get – find more and more ways to numb and deaden.
	Antidepressants? Yeah. And what are they doing?
	They're literally deadening.
	They are worse than the pain.
	And one of the great lessons of the 20th century dystopia too is – and Dostoevsky made this point.
	If you gave a person a completely pain-free life, they would start cutting themselves immediately, right?
	That at some point, the desire to feel pain is part and parcel of what makes us human.
	Why do so – if rationality is all there is.
	Why, after all of this time of preaching that to us, why do four out of five times grown-up adult smart people like me choose the irrational thing?
	I mean, how often every day – and what kind of a world would it be if you only chose the rational thing?
	I mean, and what kind of a Vulcan prison house would you put yourself in?
	And so what I get is I get why hurt feelings, right?
	If God exists, if there's a daddy in the sky, why is he letting me suffer?
	I could get that on a visceral level.
	But in removing God, and the Screwtape letter sort of – Screwtape hints at this.
	Why aren't they raging the same—why are they comfortable suffering if it's a natural thing?
	And the answer to that, I think Screwtape says, is because if there is no meaning to pain or no morality to it, then suffering in a godless world means that you can fill that hole with anything and not feel guilty about it.
	It goes back to the opening gambit of the story, right?
	That we have empowered ourselves now, drugs, alcohol, sex.
	There are all these great moral prohibitions against them.
	And one of the reasons why is they did serve to some degree as topical analgesics to sort of separate us for our pain a little bit for a short while.
	And I think the psychology of being a biped, right?
	A creature that is on some level something more than human.
	Something not just an animal.
	I think that's the problem.
	And I think the only way you connect with that, to understand that, to nurture that side of you, to make sense of those aspects of you, can only be framed correctly.
	Through pain.
	And what pain, if you're humble enough to accept and turn that pain into something productive, what do we get?
	We get tragedy in the theater, right?
	We get the exculpatory tragedy, right?
	We recognize in so many other walks of life that there's entertainment in watching people suffer and come through it, right?
	It's the master narrative of world culture, the hero.
	For thousands and thousands of years, what was the hero?
	He or she who came through tremendous personal and collective suffering to find something redemptive beyond it.
	I mean, it's as primordial as the earliest human being's consciousness, right?
	The earliest dawning consciousness of man was tied up in those ideas, too.
	How we've wandered so far away, and it's not even just created.
	What's the first law of the Buddha?
	Life is suffering.
	You can't have nirvana.
	You can't even begin the path to nirvana until you recognize, number one, suffering is the – what am I looking for?
	I'm looking for the exact right word and I probably don't need it.
	Suffering is the currency that you have to pay in this world to get beyond suffering because without it, you would never try.
	I mean, animals – As I said to my sophomores when I had that question about why – so 80 percent of you don't believe in God or any kind of transcendent morality.
	As one kid wisely put it, morality is completely relative, he said.
	Okay. And yet you see this act of – incredible act of strength bowing reverently before suffering, giving itself up for the suffering weak.
	And they all applauded it.
	I said, how do you – Well, all you have to do if morality is completely subjective, then say you have no grounds to condemn the racist.
	That's true. No, no, no.
	We can totally do that. When they say morality is relative, they mean that my irrational absolutes wish to retain the patina of morality.
	I wish to elevate my emotions to a universal moral standard because I don't want to deal with the humility of having to reason through my feelings.
	Right, and that means if you're Antifa, you are by definition fighting fascism, so nothing's off the table.
	So you're justified, right?
	We go back to where we started with that too.
	That's where some of these people, again, on the atheist left, they make those assumptions.
	That if I think you hate some – I'm against hate.
	I dedicate my life to fighting hate.
	And if I find that you hate green beans even – I will rail against you for your intolerance.
	And suddenly, my hating you becomes justified.
	I mean, the kinds of intellectual dead-end alleys that these secular philosophies lead you to...
	Oh, and sorry to interrupt, but this is what drives me so nuts with this stuff, this relativism and postmodernism, is that it takes the virtue and value of humanity and turns it to utterly destructive ends.
	Look, the lion is going to eat you, but he's not going to lecture you.
	The lion doesn't sit there and say, well, I'm going to put you in the category of white supremacist, and that's why I'm eating you, and you should feel bad.
	He's just like, hey, I'm hungry.
	You look fleshy. I'm in. That's the deal.
	So it's taking this capacity we have to universalize and moralize and simply turning it to cold-eyed, absolute destructive hatred.
	And that, to me, is the worst thing.
	Aspect of it is that they are accepting that we are more than material.
	They are accepting that we participate in the universal.
	And yet at the same time, they are merely animating fleshly lusts of hatred and so on.
	And animating that and then spreading it up across the sky as some sort of moral imperative.
	And that's why it's such an unreformable cult.
	Because they have taken their emotions and turned them into moral absolutes.
	And they can't handle the suffering of having that questioned.
	And you see this, I'm sure, as a professor all the time.
	You know, all these trigger warnings and these rooms where, oh my gosh, a conservative speaker is speaking somewhere on the campus.
	Here's your room where there's going to be videos of puppies and there's going to be beanbags and there's going to be volunteers there to give you hugs and so on.
	Well, how did we become so weak?
	We became so weak because we view challenge to our preconceptions, which is the mark of a healthy mind, to be challenged.
	We view challenges to our preconceptions, really exposure of our programming, to be the undoing of our personalities.
	But to me, anything that shaky, you know, you buy a house, you think it's strong, it turns out to be really, really shaky, you just knock it down and start again.
	Any, quote, personality structure which cannot handle opposition is something that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up in a stronger, and it's the old thing in the Bible.
	It's one of my favorite phrases in the Bible, build your house on rock, not on sand.
	And all this post-modernism, this relativism, this subjectivism, it's fine.
	Okay, then fine. Okay, so if you genuinely believe that, you should never correct another human being.
	You should never have a moral opinion.
	You should never care who to vote for.
	You should never care about any political parties.
	You should never care about any moral questions at all.
	Because you don't believe in these things.
	In the same way that you and I don't get involved in ferocious debates about I guess we could, but it wouldn't be because we believe these things exist.
	They'd just be useful metaphors.
	But what happens is they say there's no such thing as truth.
	There's no such thing as virtue, but I can identify you as X, Y, Z negative, and therefore I have the right to attack you.
	It's like, no, no, no. If there's no such thing as truth or virtue, live with the consequences.
	No, no, I don't want to live with the consequences of that.
	I just want to uncork my demonic passions and call them virtue, because otherwise I have to look in the mirror and see a devil instead of a pretend angel.
	If there's one thing I've learned from my study of history and from studying the Scrutate letters, which make this point again as well, is that with the retiring of God, with the slow movement away from – not even whether God exists or not, just the possibility that God exists.
	The more you wander away from that, the more the possibility of free will and choice goes away too.
	And so why is it that – you had some pretty repressive regimes down through history.
	But somehow Western culture managed to move forward even with inquisitions, even with the horrible empires that grew.
	But when you look at the history of the last 150 years, say from the time – 170 years from the times of Marx and the kind of ideas he was putting forth, what we see is by definition you couldn't have had socialism.
	You couldn't have had Marxism. You couldn't have had the kind of fascism we saw in the 20th century until you actually argued – Cognitively, there was no God.
	Because if there is no God, then why shouldn't we herd people like cattle rather than serve them like Christ did?
	And so when you think about that, I see it in my students' attitudes too.
	Free will. And we see it culturally.
	Free will. We can't – and you sort of made the same argument from a different street.
	You came in a different alley.
	It's the idea that we don't – if we aren't free in the sense that we have some kind of a higher sense of what human life is, then life becomes really cheap really quick because there's no answer to this.
	There's no other answer. So why do we get these deeply censorious movements like socialism, what you just chronicled, right?
	You can't say that if it hurts my feelings.
	You're not allowed to think that way, that there's only certain ways that these things – this radical shutting down of free will.
	And then you've got the sciences coming in over the last hundred years and suggesting more and more of what we are is – Predictable.
	The moment the sperm hits egg, if we're happy people or sad people, if we're generous people, it has nothing to do with choice.
	It's just the way we were manufactured in terms of processed.
	And so what I see is the growing tendency to remove God and then to remove free will as a possibility.
	And my kids begin to see that because I have never yet met somebody, even the greatest one of my students who is a moral relativist, who would go so far as to say, That they didn't have some degree of personal choice in their life.
	That they recognize, even the most sold out to that worldview, that they do indeed and could be held responsible for things that they choose.
	Well, if you can't control yourself, you can't manage yourself, you must inevitably end up controlling others.
	In other words, if something offends you, you have to deal with that as an adult.
	Things offend me all the time, but you just have to deal with that as an adult.
	But if you can't find a way to manage yourself, you end up having to control the offender by labeling them ever-escalating negative terms and then eventually removing them from the public square.
	And so self-control, maturity, is essential to a free society, which is why it's not taught anymore.
	You're not taught, oh, that upsets you.
	It's not the fault of the person who's saying something.
	I mean, there's a whole concept of hate speech that somehow something that upsets you is full of a negative emotion and must be suppressed.
	It's like, well, no, you're full of a negative emotion and that emotion is called fear.
	And you're trying to control your fear by controlling other people.
	But every time you act...
	to control the negative emotion you're simply reinforcing its power over you and that's why these things tend to ever escalate and they never stop and they end either in breaking through to freedom or collapsing into tyranny and until we can teach young people that you are responsible for your own emotional content other people are not responsible for keeping you content and happy and unconcerned with words around you because that's fundamentally tyrannical and if we give in as we are increasingly as a society give in We're good to go.
	And one of the final messages of the Screwtape letters is without that kind of humble sacrifice, that sacrificial kind of love.
	The love, the behavior of the devils, as Screwtape defined it, was purely animalistic.
	We eat. We're predators and you're prey.
	I asked my kids, always in the university too, when we have these conversations, I said, okay, according to you, there are wolves and sheep.
	I said, so raise your hand if you have to be one of them.
	How many of you would choose to be sheep?
	And no one raises their hand.
	And I immediately – I did it two days ago.
	I said, well, I'm ashamed of you.
	I'm ashamed of you all. You clearly aren't social justice warriors.
	And they were offended. What do you mean we don't care about social justice?
	Well, look what you just did. You said—you agreed with me that there were wolves and sheep, and you instinctively chose to be a wolf.
	Why? And their answer was, because I would rather eat than be eaten.
	I said, so where's your—what are your social justice bona fides?
	And with the screw tape—and they were puzzled.
	They got it. They got it, but they were puzzled, right?
	So I said, so either— Either you are a sheep, right, or you should associate with the sheep because you don't believe that everything is prey and predator and prey, or you better rethink what your worldview is.
	And at the end of the Screwtape Letters, we get this message basically, that what seems to the world as weakness...
	And I guess that's the last philosophical question I want to ask you about this book.
	And we've heard this down through history.
	Nietzsche made this point, right?
	He called Christianity conscience vivisection, right?
	Just a bunch of people sitting down and agonizing, vivisecting their own consciences, trying to find reasons to feel bad for what they want and desire.
	That's what Nietzsche said Christianity was.
	In fact, he said that about Dostoevsky.
	He read Dostoevsky's novels, The Brothers Karamazov, and he said – This is the problem with Christianity.
	2,000 years of conscience vivisection.
	However, Nietzsche said, I will admit this, that Dostoevsky is the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn.
	How can you have both of those statements be true?
	And is it, Steph, this is the question.
	What the secular world sees as weakness.
	Strength bowing to weakness.
	Strong giving way to weak.
	Those that can take allowing to be taken from.
	That's seen as weak, right?
	Speaking of the concern trolls and the questions, right?
	Christianity is weak, right?
	We need a philosophy that's bold and willing to take what's necessary.
	How do you, as you walk away from that, how do we...
	Address the question.
	To me, it only can be addressed if there is something beyond the world.
	If there is world, then weakness is never good.
	But if there is some place we're trying to get to, then not only does it make sense, but it strikes me as the highest kind of moral thinking I've ever seen.
	Yeah, I mean, the question of social ethics or political ethics comes down to the question of what is higher than power?
	What is above power?
	Now, Christians, of course, say, well, God.
	God is above power.
	God's commandments are above power, which is why Western Christian societies are unique in the history of the world in that they have used moral commandments to tame power, to restrain and restrict power, because there's something higher than political power, something greater. Now, if you just look at the leftist...
	Atomic reductionist mammalian view of the universe, it's like saying, what is higher than hunger for the lion?
	Well, nothing. There's nothing higher than hunger.
	What is higher than the desire of the zebra to escape the claws and teeth of the lion?
	There's nothing higher than that.
	They can't negotiate.
	They can't cooperate. They can't trade.
	It's hunger and flight.
	It's fight or flight. So what is higher than power?
	Now, Socrates would argue that reason It's supposed to be higher than power.
	That's a pretty good approach.
	It's not quite as powerful in many ways as the Christian imperative, which is why ancient Greece did not end slavery and Christianity did.
	It's the great prize that has given birth to the modern world was the end of slavery and no other religion, no other culture, no other countries, no other civilization will ever be able to take credit of the greatest moral advance in the history of humanity, which was the ending of slavery.
	With the ending of slavery, you get wages.
	With wages, you get labor-saving devices, the Industrial Revolution, the entire modern world.
	So what is higher than power?
	It's a fundamental question that atheists have yet to answer.
	What is higher than power?
	Well, most atheists say, well, I want to do this, that, or this, the other good thing, so what we've got to do is give the government more power to achieve that good thing.
	I want to save the environment, so let's have the power of the government ban plastic straws and come up with great Paris Accords and carbon taxes and the power of the state will be wonderfully benevolent in pursuing the moral goal that I have.
	Well, that means that your moral goal is under the power of the state.
	It is subsumed and absorbed into the power of the state.
	And so your moral law, your moral goal is not higher than the state, but underneath the state.
	In other words, there's nothing bigger, higher or greater.
	There's no morality higher than the state because everything you want to do when it comes to morality involves giving power to the state.
	So morality becomes the feeder to state power.
	It becomes the conveyor belt supplying arms after arms after arms after weapons after bullets to the state.
	Oh, I want women to earn as much as men so we're going to use the power of the state to force Wages to become more equal.
	I don't want poor people to suffer so we can use the power of the state to redistribute income.
	I don't want sick people to have any trouble if they didn't save for their health care or don't have insurance.
	We'll use the power of the state to give all of these things to people.
	So there's nothing higher than the state.
	Now the government loves that stuff.
	Hey, got a problem? Give me power.
	I'll solve it for you. That's how you sell your soul.
	So what is higher than the coercive nature and reality of the state?
	Well, Christianity has an answer.
	I believe I have an answer.
	Universally preferable behavior.
	I don't have a punishment.
	Christianity does, so you're probably way ahead of me as far as the stick and the carrot goes.
	My disapproval!
	Not quite the same as being able to go to hell or whatever, but that is the fundamental question.
	Now, the leftists don't have an answer to that, and the atheists don't have an answer to that, because whenever the atheists have a problem, they run to the state.
	Every single time they have a problem, They run to the state.
	Even Richard Dawkins is the same way.
	Oh, but you can't have business fund science because they're limited and it wouldn't be abstract and it wouldn't be theoretical and it wouldn't produce all of these great advances that are constantly promised but never materialize, I guess, never actually materialize, right?
	So how do you solve the problem of funding for science?
	Go to the state. That's how you fund science.
	Go to the universities. That's how you fund higher education.
	Go to the public schools and the government.
	That's how you fund education.
	It's how you provide health care. It's how you organize housing.
	It's everything. There's nothing higher than the power of the state.
	And that's why you end up with totalitarianism in an anti-universalist, whether it's Christian or philosophy, mindset.
	Now, Christians, of course, have a perfect answer that there is a moral law.
	Yeah, render under Caesar, but that doesn't mean That Caesar is God.
	And in the choice between the state and virtue, choosing virtue is not even a slightly better than, it's a universally better than choice.
	And so that's the fundamental question.
	Philosophy answers it one way.
	Not very well, unfortunately, at the moment.
	I think the answer's good, but if people don't accept the answer, it's like having a great medicine that nobody takes.
	Is it really a great medicine?
	I guess, but whatever.
	It doesn't make a difference, right? Christianity has that answer.
	And Screwtape Letters elucidates that answer beautifully.
	Yeah, and I agree with everything you said.
	And it almost existentially, to believe in God, a God who cannot be measured by the powers of this world or identified in our laboratories, to me, even that makes perfect sense to me.
	I mean, again, if God was replicable in a laboratory, if we could satisfy our deepest fears about the existence of God in some material way, but then all of us who believed would not be believing for any other reason than we are compelled to believe by what the science tells us.
	And it wouldn't help because people would just deny it anyway.
	Well, they still would. Absolutely.
	Absolutely. But even those who could get beyond that denial would have to concede that their belief is less free choice because of what's been proven to them.
	And so the very nature of God's system, assuming God exists and has set up the system, is faith.
	Faith, the statement of faith, right, which is that I believe even though I cannot know in the typical human, scientifical, empirical ways, that that is the cost of all the benefits of the world of God, right?
	That gives rise to dying here for others to live beyond.
	That gives cause to, right, following the moral and ethical injunctions of God or of Christ when they seem so hopelessly against what is naturalistic.
	And that's the key.
	And I point out to my students, too, there's a lot of faith in science.
	When you come up with an idea, you're putting faith and you're You spend a lot of money and time investigating that.
	You're entering the process with faith.
	Now, again, your experiments will weed out the faith component of it, at which point you've got a proven thing.
	Sorry to interrupt. You want to see faith in science?
	Wait for the COVID vaccine.
	Sure, inject me.
	It's been six months of testing when it's normally 10 years?
	Yeah, go for it. That's some faith, man.
	That's faith, and you mentioned the global warming stuff, right?
	We've heard from scientific and quasi-scientific since – I remember 1970, I remember it, the predictions of gloom and doom every 10 years.
	At some point after 50 years of Miami's not underwater yet, New York's not underwater yet, people aren't starving to death because of this, you're entitled to doubt the authority of science.
	But that's what gets me.
	If predictions of God or faiths in faith, faiths in various faiths, failed as often as some of these dire predictions of our scientifically minded.
	Funny story. It turns out that the airborne problem wasn't carbon, which is plant food, but the communist virus, which is economic destroying under the power of the state.
	They might have missed that one in the prediction matrix.
	Well, I urge everybody out there, if you have a chance, read the Screwtape Letters.
	It's not a long or complicated book.
	You could, I mean, to be honest with you, it's a toilet book.
	I mean, if you spent 20 minutes a day reading one or two of those letters.
	That's right there on the cover. That's right.
	That's right. It comes in a little roll in the back.
	Great toilet book. It really is staggering, and you said this earlier, how concise everything Lewis does.
	He gets really big philosophical ideas, like the ones we just spent almost an hour and a half talking about.
	He gets those ideas to you in tiny little 400-word chapters.

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