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April 2, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:53:41

Easter and the Greatest Gift of Jesus

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	Somebody just asked, just before we start here, said, need advice on disciplining a two-year-old with an extremely strong-willed personality.
	Why do you want to discipline?
	I don't understand.
	Why do you want to discipline a child?
	Strong-willed personality, that's a good thing.
	If you're going to teach a child to think for himself or think for herself, you really need to let them retain their strong will because they're going to have to fight the world a lot as well.
	So don't break that, whatever you do.
	All right. Well, listen, I want to Thank everyone for dropping by.
	This is, of course, Good Friday.
	This is April the...
	I should know this right now, right?
	April the 2nd. And I really do appreciate everyone dropping by.
	I have a lot of deep and powerful thoughts about the topic.
	I hope that will be of interest and utility to you.
	And I welcome in particular my atheist friends who I think should learn this stuff, should really, really learn and mediate and meditate on this information.
	You know, it's kind of funny to me that...
	Atheists can delve deep into the arcane lore of Lord of the Rings.
	They can try and figure out where a kidney is located on a Klingon in Star Trek.
	They know all the minutiae, unimportant Stan Lee, obsessive details about some comic superhero, and yet when you ask them to delve into the foundational myths of their entire society, They're like, whoa, man, I got better things to do.
	Trust me, my friends, you don't have better things to do.
	I'm telling you that right now.
	You don't have better things to do.
	And I just wanted to get you into the stories that, see, with the materialistic view of the universe, there's this idea that there's like matter and there's energy, and that's about it.
	And the idea of narrative, of story, of power, of meaning, of depth, of purpose, outside of the dopamine-seeking, stimulation-junkie pleasures at the moment, in a hedonistic fashion, that meaning...
	Ah, come on. There's no meaning in the universe.
	There's no ought in the is.
	And we have the challenge of the why.
	Why do we bother being virtuous?
	Well, of course, we bother being virtuous because we believe that those virtues will outlast us in the same way that many of us will strive to create some money or make some money or save some money because we believe and hope that we'll be allowed to transfer it to the next generation and it's going to somehow continue down the tunnel of time.
	And because we have a life of Tinder-based screen junkie stimulation, none of the values that we inherited are being passed down to the next generation because we've lost the stories, we've lost the meaning, we've lost the power and the purpose of who we are as a civilization.
	And I've been thinking about this a lot.
	Now, I'll tell you this right now. This is going to be a passionate show.
	I feel unbelievably strongly about this stuff and I hope that my passion, while it's not an argument, will at least give you a sense of how important I believe that these issues are.
	That's number one caveat. Number two caveat is I will be inserting myself into the mix of the ultimate historical characters of mankind.
	I do this not to join them in some equal platform, but simply to help you understand how they can inform your decisions and help you live a more meaningful and more powerful life.
	And Jesus is one of the three major influences in my life.
	And I was raised, of course, Christian.
	I was in the church choir and I Worshipped, as you're supposed to of course, Jesus absorbed and imbibed and to a small degree of course embodied the virtues that were transmitted to me through the Bible stories and I guess I've got two Jews and a Greek, right? Because I've got Ayn Rand, I've got Jesus, and I have Socrates.
	And I'm going to just toss Ayn Rand to the side for the moment, because the real battle, and this is something that Nietzsche talked about in the 19th century, that every philosopher, every moralist, and that's really what I am fundamentally, is a moralist.
	I care about...
	Right and wrong, good and evil.
	Because that's the one mental set of disciplines that no other discipline can touch.
	You know, there's a philosophy of science, there's a philosophy of art, but the only thing that philosophy does that nothing else can do is morals.
	And the degree to which morality has been scrubbed from philosophy It's like taking the scientific method out of science.
	It's like taking the examination of physical properties out of science.
	And so for morality, if you want to understand morality, what's here and why it's fading, we have to look at Jesus.
	Because Jesus was the most radical break in the history of philosophy that could ever be conceived of.
	Now, in the future, if my work on Ethics, University Preferable Behavior, which you should really get, it's a free book, available at freedomain.com slash books, if that moves forward and continues to expand, it's expanding like crazy.
	In the realm of parenting, the universally preferable behavior, which is to treat children with the same moral tenderness and care that you would teach your average stranger and or adult in a mall.
	Don't scream, don't yell, don't hit, don't verbally abuse, don't call names, don't punish them for failing to obey your will.
	That's the nature of politics and prisons, not parenting.
	So, UPB is taking its root in its most fertile soil, which is parenting.
	and it will of course spread over time because people raised according to an ethic will tend to spread that ethic as adults and children raised according to universally preferable behavior will spread that in a truly empirical and powerful fashion when they get older and then through that process as I talked about lo these 15 years ago that process will eventually cause a stateless society and that will be the second biggest revolution but the biggest revolution is Jesus who took morality From biologically based in-group preference to truly universal ethics.
	Absolutely mind-blowing.
	From in-group preferences, my tribe good, your tribe bad, my kin good, your kin bad, my beliefs good, your superstitions bad.
	He took the ethics of in-group preference And expanded them in the most skynet-capturing fireworks of moral willpower, transferred them to the realm of universals.
	To the realm of universals.
	And that process laid the foundation of everything that we treasure and value in the modern world.
	Universal rights.
	Universal property rights.
	An end to slavery, which is that all men are created equal.
	An end to legal discrimination, an end to aristocracy, an end to kingship, an end to a privileged and Latin-wrapped priestly class in many ways, because of course I come from the Protestant tradition, so I will be talking about that.
	But taking the good from what is good for my tribe, what is good for my domesticated Livestock of irrational adherence.
	Taking morality from good for us to simply the good.
	Unbelievable. Unbelievable.
	And of course that's what he was killed for.
	That's what he was killed for.
	And I wanted to talk about what all of that means.
	Because if we don't get that back, then it was all for nothing.
	Not just the sacrifice of Jesus, but everything.
	It was all for nothing.
	And Jesus, of course, is not a moral figure who contains mere mortal disappointments in him.
	He is an idealized, well, of course, perfect.
	Jesus didn't sin.
	We are all prone to sin, but Jesus didn't sin.
	Socrates. Well, I've done a whole series on Socrates.
	I'll keep it brief. But Socrates is a tortuous figure for me.
	Because he was so full of rank and unconscious contradictions, although the persistent frat boy gotchas of the Socratic method, which are great!
	They're great! It's great to try and trip people up on their own inconsistencies.
	And integrity and consistency and true reason are very powerful in this world and should be approached with great Passion and integrity and honor and consistency in your examination of yourself and your examination of others.
	So Socrates is very powerful, although he was a bit of a passive-aggressive gotcha guy.
	And he himself was like the critic who creates virtually nothing, at least according to the only writings that we have of his statements which come out of Plato.
	Socrates didn't write anything down himself.
	So Socrates was like the guy with the wrecking ball who comes in.
	Leaves you a big giant hole in the ground and says, good luck with that.
	Bit of a douche move, I gotta tell you.
	Bit of a douche move. It's kind of like the atheists who want to come down and tear down the edifice of Christianity and drive the people out of the church that gives them solace and shelter in a storm-tossed world and pull down the church, tear down the walls.
	And then where do people find shelter?
	Where do they rest?
	Where do they refuel?
	Where do they refill themselves with meaning?
	The wrecking ball philosophy of the Socratic method and of atheism as a whole has simply disgorged us into the wilderness to be hunted by all of those who possess the great spear of meaning and the will, as is usually the case when you have meaning, to pass it right through our chest with great force.
	We have been disarmed of meaning.
	And we turn to self-pleasure, slow despair, pharmaceuticals, pornography.
	And those who have shelter, and those who have rest, and those who have the refueling of meaning are free to hunt as it will.
	And they do. And they do.
	And the way that this was accomplished was by convincing women to abandon the raising of children.
	This is why men are so depressed in the West at the moment.
	The European descent is the white men.
	Why are we so depressed? Because what's the point of gathering everything together?
	We will go and fight with great force and courage and danger.
	We will go and fight To carve truth and virtue and values out of the void of matter and energy and the opposition of competing tribes.
	And then what? After we have gathered and carved out these meanings, we hand them to the women so the women can give them to the children.
	But no! The women are nowhere to be found in the home.
	Nowhere to be found. Because they're out finding themselves, or scrolling through Tinder, or pretending they have a career, or traveling, or drinking, or smoking pot.
	They're not available to take the accumulated glories of masculine one values and bring them to the children, because that's how it works.
	The men create the values historically, and the women transmit and transfer those values to the children.
	But the women have been talked out of raising the children and the values are dying in the cribs while the children live.
	The meaning does not.
	The meaning is strangled in the crib by the economically destructive career vanities of the women.
	So, let's talk a little bit about, and I'm sure a lot of you know this story, let's talk a little bit about what happened, and I'll tell you what I think the meaning of it is.
	Thank you.
	Because if you don't get the meaning of this story, I challenge you to find your meaning elsewhere, but if you don't get the meaning of this story, there is no meaning for you to get.
	And, you know, there's great joy and relief for meaning when you're young.
	Just as there's great joy in being, you know, tall and rock-abbed and hot and, you know, when you're young, it just all fades and crumbles in that, you know, tiny little phase we call the second half of your life.
	You know, the 40 to 80 part's kind of important, you know.
	I mean, I'm 54 and I'm thinking about, okay, you know, if I make it another 30 years, that's pretty good.
	It's pretty good. 84, 85 this year, right?
	55 this year. So I got another 30 years.
	Now, I think back. So going back 30 years, I was 24.
	Now, 24 to 54 has been a hell of a journey.
	And I don't want to discount the value or the importance or the meaning or the power of 54 to 84.
	You get that second half of your life.
	Or for me, I guess it's somewhat close to the last third of my life or whatever.
	That's a hell of a long time.
	It's a long time. And there's great relief from...
	Rules! To abandon rules when you're young feels like the great relief.
	It's all those trashy movies in Hollywood where people just give up and smoke pot and play video games and just all that Seth Rogen empty-hearted waste.
	It's like if you didn't really study that well for a test and then the test gets cancelled, you feel a relief, like all the kids who don't want to go back to school right now because you can cheat on your tests, man.
	It's like, woo, what a relief, I can cheat on my test, but what's going to happen down the road when you graduate and don't know much?
	What's your reputation going to be like as an entire cohort?
	When employers see the patterns and they say, oh my god, that class from 20, 21, 22, oof!
	They suck. It's like a cancelling of an exam that you know you need to take.
	You feel the sweet relief, but you pay down the road.
	That's all addictions, right?
	All addictions are the sweet relief at the moment at the expense of the down the road.
	So, This is a Christian Holy Day.
	It's Good Friday. It's the Friday before Easter.
	And we think of the passion, the suffering, and the death of Jesus Christ on the cross.
	Now, I'm going to start because, you know, a lot of people have lost their religious education, their religious instruction, their instruction on meaning and history and power and virtue.
	Because, remember, atheists have not solved the problem of virtue.
	Atheists have not solved the problem of the good, which is why it's become a tangled, red-god-struggle-session cult of uprooting wrong-thinkers and destroying their lies.
	Morality is only tangentially about the restraint of the good or the encouragement of the good.
	You know, most ethics are like diets for thin people.
	Because who's going to read books on ethics?
	Who's going to care about ethics? Who's going to be concerned about ethics?
	People who are kind of naturally good to begin with.
	Ethics is about the identification and detachment.
	Well, identification, remediation, detachment, or restraint of evil.
	You've got to identify evil.
	Hopefully you can talk evil out of being evil.
	If you can't, you've got to detach from it.
	And if you can't detach from it, you've got to restrain it.
	You've got to see it. You gotta try and reform it.
	If you can't reform it, you gotta separate from it.
	And if you can't separate from it, why then?
	You gotta contain it.
	Jail, self-defense, something like that, right?
	And if you can't identify evil, Well, you're going to become evil, almost without it.
	If you can't identify evil, you will become evil, which is why the scrubbing of Christian morality without a substitute from the atheist left, for the most part, has made most of the people on the left turn evil, which is the cancel culture, the attacks, the destruction, the character assassinations, the violence, the Antifa, the riots, they just become evil.
	If you can't identify evil, If you don't know what evil is, you don't know its characteristics, you don't know how to identify it, I can tell you one very easy way to identify evil if you don't know what it is.
	Pick up a mirror and look into it.
	There you go. That's the place you have to start.
	So, Jesus ate an evening Passover meal.
	with his disciples and instituted the New Covenant symbols.
	The New Covenant is a huge deal, the biggest moral revolution in human history.
	We'll get to that in a sec. But Jesus was then betrayed by Judas.
	Of course, you've heard the name Judas, I'm sure.
	Judas sold the location of Jesus out.
	Judas walked up to Jesus and kissed him, and he said, I'm going to kiss the guy who Jesus is, and that way you can arrest him.
	Judas took 30 pieces of silver Which is totally different from the $100 million that Joe Rogan got from the Chinese-affiliated company.
	Totally different. Want to be clear on that, right?
	He took 30 pieces of silver.
	Now, 30 pieces of silver was about the price of a slave, on average, at that time.
	The 30 pieces of silver had been given to Judas by the chief priests and the elders, and...
	Jesus was condemned, and when Jesus was condemned, and we'll get to that in a sec, Judas was seized with remorse, and he took the 30 pieces of silver that now burned with savage regret in his hand, and nothing that he could buy with that money would ever give him a shred of pleasure.
	In fact, if he bought a house with 30 pieces of silver, he would be housed in a palace of his own sin and betrayal of the man he had sworn to protect and love.
	Nothing you can buy with ill-gotten gains is going to give you one tiny shred of pleasure.
	Which is why a lot of times people will put their ill-gotten gains into self-destructive pursuits.
	He tried returning the 30 pieces of silver, saying, I don't want the money.
	He just threw the money in.
	It burns in my hand.
	He threw the money in and he left.
	But he didn't feel better, right?
	Because when you have done a wrong that you can't undo, Then the great challenge is forgiveness for yourself and forgiveness from others when you have done a harm that you cannot undo.
	This is why I constantly tell people, for the love of all that's holy, literally, please, please, please don't do harms that can't be undone.
	I was just talking about this with my family today.
	So, you know, it's been a lot of lockdown.
	It's been a lot of home time.
	We're not doing the travel that we used to do.
	You know, my wife and my daughter came with me to do a documentary, although they weren't in it, of course.
	We went to Poland.
	We went to...
	I went then to California.
	We traveled to Australia together for a speaking tour.
	We did a lot of stuff together.
	So we traveled and we had all of that.
	There's been a whole lot of home time.
	For me, it's for everyone.
	And, you know, occasionally there's a little bit of chafing, there's a, you know, an irritated tone or whatever, and you catch it, and you apologize, and you work to do better, and that way you undo.
	You can't expect perfection.
	Perfection would be inhuman.
	That's asking human beings to be moral robots, which would be to be not moral at all, Isaac Asimov, nonwithstanding, because he raised a pedophile kid.
	But anyway. Oh, by the way, Michel Foucault, you've been reading any of this stuff?
	It's stuff I talked about years ago.
	Michel Foucault, premier French intellectual who tried to legalize pedophilia by having the age of consent reduced to like 13 in France.
	Well, he would travel to Africa to rape boys, according to somebody who knew him at the time.
	He would travel to Africa and rape boys.
	So pretty much the most widely cited...
	Scholar in the modern identity politics post-modernistic intellectual movement, which is modern intellectualism, the most cited scholar is a child rapist.
	Just stew on that one for a moment.
	Plus, he was reputed to have also infected other people with AIDS when he knew he was AIDS positive, he was a gay rapist, of children and It's a long way from Jesus saying, whatever you do to the least among you, which is the children, so do you also do to me.
	So Judas could not undo the damage that he had done, and He couldn't pray for forgiveness from God.
	So because he couldn't undo the damage he'd done, he could gain no pleasure from the money.
	He could not relieve his horror at his own betrayal of that which he had claimed to love.
	Judas killed himself.
	Judas killed himself. So, what happened?
	It's complicated. We could spend quite a lot of time on it.
	I would give you the Coles Notes version.
	And I apologize, I did not write out all of the pronunciation in phonetic terms, so I apologize if my pronunciation butchers things from time to time, but we have a man named Joseph Caiaphas.
	He was the High Priest of the Jerusalem Temple, one of the most powerful men in ancient Israel, and He obviously felt threatened by the peace-loving rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, right?
	Of course, Jesus was Jewish. And he played a key role in the trial and execution of Jesus Christ, which of course brings you to Socrates, the trial and execution of Socrates as well.
	So, Joseph Caiaphas was concerned that Jesus might start a rebellion.
	Although Jesus said, render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, render unto God what is God's, he was concerned that Jesus might start a rebellion, which might cause blowback by the occupying Roman army.
	And it was the Roman army that sanctified Joseph and Caiaphas rule, right?
	So it's the eternal union between the priests and the soldiers, the priests and the soldiers, the warriors and the warlocks, so to speak, right?
	So what happens is, the way that this generally works, is the priests teach subjugation to the state, which is one of the things.
	The great disappointment of Socrates was he taught that people are generally ignorant, but he decided to obey The will of the majority and kill himself on commandment of the Athenian court, led by Miletus who brought the charges against him.
	And so when you say that the majority of people are complete fools and ignorant and know nothing about right and wrong, but then you say, well, I've got to obey the will of the majority.
	It's utterly contradictory but that was the passive aggression of Socrates crumbling into a curse on humanity that has now lasted for 2500 years or more which is to be virtuous you must obey the state and that it was a murder-suicide which Socrates went through it was a murder-suicide because he said to the people you must obey the state and then he killed himself which is the curse that the philosopher gives to the people when he cannot forgive them because Jesus said when he was killed by the mob forgive them father for they know not what they do Socrates says kill me no problem obey the state and that has caused hundreds of millions of deaths the curse of Socrates continues to this day as does the forgiveness of Jesus outside of cancel culture circles So,
	the priest says to the people, obey the state.
	And the state says, well, thanks.
	So we'll sanctify your power over the people.
	We will enforce your blasphemy laws.
	We will provide the foot soldiers, the swordsmen, to maintain your hold over the people as long as...
	We will give you the swords to maintain your spiritual hold over the people as long as you tell the people to obey the swords that come for them.
	It's a one-two punch that has knocked out humanity for thousands or tens of thousands of years.
	So Joseph Caiaphas, the high priest of the Jerusalem temple, needed the approval of the Romans to maintain his power over his people.
	And so, if Jesus was causing a problem for the secular powers, the high priest had a problem to deal with.
	So, Caiaphas decided Jesus had to die.
	He accused Jesus Christ of blasphemy.
	Now, blasphemy, and of course there's blasphemy now, right?
	You understand that blasphemy has returned.
	Blasphemy now goes under the secular term of hate speech.
	Understand that? Blasphemy now goes under the secular term of hate speech.
	That is the new blasphemy for the collectivism of the left.
	It is the cult term that causes the disfellowship, the deplatforming.
	That is the new blasphemy.
	So, he accused Jesus Christ of blasphemy, a crime punishable by death under Jewish law.
	So, there was this...
	Israel's High Court was called the Sanhedrin.
	It enforced the Mosaic Law.
	And Jesus was innocent of the charges, just as, well, you know, it's kind of tough.
	With Socrates...
	So, Socrates was accused of two things.
	He was accused of corrupting the young, and he was also accused of basically being an atheist, of triggering skepticism about the gods of the city.
	The gods of the city is the superstition that all leads to state power.
	You have to believe that the state exists and has a moral force independent and opposite to the moral requirements of the individual.
	You and I cannot go and take money from people at gunpoint because that's theft and it's immoral and it's wrong.
	You go to jail. You and I cannot sign contracts on other people's behalf.
	You and I cannot enslave the next generation for our own avarice in the here and now, because that would be fraud and crime and intergenerational theft.
	The state not only can do all of these things, but must do all of these things in order to flourish and survive.
	So you must believe that there is a stratosphere.
	A stratosphere. Like, you know how we've got the Earth, we've got atmosphere, and we've got space, right?
	Now, we can live on the earth, we can live up into the atmosphere, we get into space, we die.
	So you've got to have where you and I live, it's like on the ground, then you go further up into the rarefied atmosphere, and then the opposite condition is the state.
	We have these morals down here on the ground, we groundlings, but further up you go, the opposite the morals become, and good becomes evil, and evil becomes good.
	And that's some really brain-twisty stuff, you know, like the parents hitting the kids saying, don't hit people!
	Don't say mean things, you little brat!
	I'm in crazy land.
	It's the way it is. So, Socrates, with regards to not believing in the gods of the city, well, critical thinking is going to undo superstition.
	It just is. But, as far as corrupting the young goes, well, there were a lot of child I don't know how to put it exactly.
	There were a lot of people in the Socratic circle, in the philosophical circles in Socrates' day, who seemed to like having sexual activity with some Pretty young men.
	And the horror of hebephilia, which is probably what it was, not pedophilia, which is hebephilia I think is attraction to not adult, but sexually mature, sort of 13 to 17 kind of thing.
	There was a lot of that kind of stuff.
	And there was a certain amount of horror about all of that.
	And of course, Plato, you know, Plato saying what would be really, really excellent would be a society where we mixed everyone up together like some...
	Porn-based Israel kibbutz, and nobody knows who their parents are, and therefore you could end up marrying your sister.
	That would be a fantastic society to live in.
	It's like... What is it with...
	Well, the left and destroying the society of families, right?
	The left and destroying families is all the same thing, right?
	Because the left is predatory, and fathers protect families, so all the left continually wants to do is get the fathers out of the home so they can prey upon others, right?
	So... So, Jesus was innocent in a way to me that Socrates was not.
	So, this Israel High Court, with two exceptions, voted to convict him.
	The penalty, now here's the interesting thing.
	Remember, I was talking about the warriors and the warlocks, right?
	The penalty was death, but so this court, the Sanhedrin, Israel's High Court, they had no actual authority to order the execution.
	For that, they needed the help of the Roman governor.
	Now, it's not Pontius any more than it's Cassius.
	It's Pontius Pilate.
	Pontius Pilate like Cassius Clay.
	Pontius Pilate. So, during the time of the Roman governors, such as Pontius Pilate, this high court, the Sanhedrin, had jurisdiction only over the province of Judea.
	I know everybody's thinking about the life of Brian, right?
	But it's hard to avoid.
	People's front are Judea.
	So this Sanhedrin, the High Court, had its own police force, and they could arrest people, because they did, with Jesus, right?
	But the Sanhedrin, who had both civil and criminal cases, could impose the death penalty in the New Testament times that did not have the authority to execute convicted criminals.
	That power was reserved for the Romans.
	Because, you know, division of labor, I suppose, is a good thing.
	And this explains why Jesus was crucified, which is a Roman punishment, and an unbelievably brutal Roman punishment, by the way.
	So Jesus was crucified rather than stoned, because in Mosaic law the death penalty is stoning, whereas, of course, crucifixion is a Roman punishment, right?
	So... So this great Sanhedrin, this high court, was the final authority in Jewish law, and any scholar who went against its decisions was put to death as a rebellious elder or zakin mamre.
	So, kind of like de-platforming, but a little bit, a little bit more on the tough side, a little bit more on the brass knuckle side.
	So, yeah.
	And that's what happens when you have Non-philosophical, anti-rational belief systems is you've got to pull out the gun at some point because you can't negotiate according to reason and evidence.
	When you see people getting aggressive, when you see people getting violent, that's simply because they have no reason behind their defenses.
	Their positions are not based on reason and evidence.
	They're based usually on trauma and programming and propaganda.
	And the fear of unbelievable levels of social punishment, should they deviate from those belief systems?
	And you can look back at this and say, oh my gosh, this long time ago, this great Sanhedrin was terrible, my gosh, they would actually attack people for the same thing.
	Now we've got civilization, at least to this point, where people aren't put to death in Western countries for wrong think.
	They're not negotiated with, though, like as you can see from me last year, it's just de-platformed.
	They just lose access to the public conversation.
	It's a little more permanent than de-platforming.
	Yes. The people decided Jesus over Barabbas.
	No, actually, not the case.
	We'll get to that in a sec, right? So just please don't think that all this history stuff, oh my gosh, so long ago, so far away, so unimaginably...
	No, it's the same thing now.
	The age of reason is past.
	It's the age of power now.
	It's the age of rousing the zombie mob to attack your enemies.
	It's the day of sky-painting the lasers of negative language on the foreheads, in fact, giant's body foreheads, sometimes of people who challenge your path to power and having the mob attack them.
	He's a heretic!
	He's a blasphemer!
	He's a racist! It's all the same thing.
	It's all the same thing.
	So, Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor.
	Of course, he had the power of life and death in ancient Israel.
	So, he and he alone had the authority to execute a criminal.
	So, Jesus was sent to Pontius Pilate for trial.
	So, Pontius Pilate, not much is known about him before his time as a governor.
	He was a centurion.
	And centurion, you know, the cent thing, it means that centurions were in charge of a hundred soldiers, and they were pretty brutal, in fact.
	There was one centurion who had the nickname, bring me another, because they would have sticks and they would hit recalcitrant soldiers with sticks, and his nickname was bring him another, bring me another, because he would keep breaking his stick on the backs of the soldiers.
	And anyway, his soldiers got their own back during a mutiny.
	They just killed him. So we don't know much about Pontius Pilate.
	Before he rose to become governor, no early life, the Wikipedia section.
	But he was, of course, a secular person who would view these kinds of religious...
	He would view them as squabbles, of course, for the high court of the Jews.
	It was very, very powerful, very important.
	But... He would view this as just a sectarian dispute among religions he didn't really particularly care about.
	And so, Jesus was sent to Pontius Pilate for a trial, and there was an examination, and Pontius Pilate said, he's not a violent criminal.
	What is he, said stuff? Oh no, he said stuff.
	Well, that's okay. Yeah, talk about race-IQ differences and get through and out for insulting the god of diversity.
	So, but, but here's the thing too.
	So, Pontius Pilate was also to some degree under the power of the high priests.
	Because the high priest could send complaints in to Rome about the local governor.
	It was one of the sort of quasi-democrats.
	So think of this as, you know, how do they control people these days at the age of COVID and so on?
	Well, what they do is they say, we're going after your license, right?
	Like if you're a doctor, and there's a doctor in Canada, I think more than one currently going through this at the moment, right?
	So if you say something that goes against...
	The cult. And it is a cult.
	Because if you simply punish people for disagreeing with you, you're just a cult leader.
	You're a cultist. You're a cult leader.
	That's all it is. If it's just punishment and deplatforming and dissociating and so on, all you're doing is confessing that you don't have any reasons to believe, but you'll beat the hell out of anyone who disagrees with you.
	Well, you're just... You're an ape.
	You're a cult leader. I mean, that's all it is, right?
	And so, they'll go after your license, right?
	And this happened to a doctor in Germany who questioned nutritional advice, and it just goes on all over the place.
	The license is kind of a noose, right?
	And they say, oh, the license is there to protect people.
	No, no, the license is there to protect the narrative.
	The license is the shock collar that you zap on people who question the narrative, the lies.
	It's not there to protect the people, it's there to protect the power, right?
	That's what it is, right? I mean, they sell it to protect the people, but that's not, of course, the case at all.
	So, the Jewish leaders could have sent, you know, endless complaints to Rome, and then Pontius Pilate could have been recalled, and I think actually put to death if he failed as a governor.
	So, it's a lot of delicate stuff that's going on here, right?
	So, Pontius examined Jesus and said, you know, he's not a, I mean, crucifixion, come on, this is like the most violent criminals.
	I mean, it would be, literally, it would be like somebody saying that hate speech should get the death penalty.
	What does hate speech get?
	You know, you might get some fines, you might, you know, the punishment is the process, as Ezra Levant said here in Canada, but you might, you know, get some fines, you know, in extreme circumstances, you might be put in jail for a little while, but if somebody said, well, we want the death penalty for hate speech, well, this is what this guy's saying. He said, okay, so you've got some doctrinal disputes.
	I can't, you know, I don't speak your language.
	I can't figure out who's right or who's wrong, and I can't be the arbiter of that stuff.
	But crucifixion is reserved for the most violent of criminals.
	So I can't really help you with that.
	But I'll flog him, right?
	And so, you know, I've heard sometimes they say flogged, sometimes they say brutally flogged, but, you know, it was probably a lot worse than what I got in boarding school.
	But so... He's like, okay, I can't kill him, but I'll beat him up for you, and then he sent Jesus to Herod, who then sent him back to the Jewish court, right?
	Now, let's talk about Herod for a sec, right?
	So, Herod Antipas was a tetrarch, the ruler of Galilee and Perea, and he's appointed by the Romans.
	So, Pilate sent Jesus to Herod because, of course, Jesus was a Galilean under Herod's jurisdiction.
	Now, Herod is a little tense about this.
	It's kind of complicated. So, I don't know if you remember or if you grew up Christian, the way it works, of course, is that you get these paintings where the guy and his head is on a platter, right?
	That's John the Baptist, right?
	And John the Baptist was a great prophet, and Herod had murdered him, right?
	He had killed him. And, of course, John the Baptist was Jesus' friend and kinsman.
	And so he was like, oh, you know, and the Jews liked John the Baptist.
	A lot of them did anyway. So that was pretty politically explosive for him.
	So Herod was like, ooh, I don't know if I want to go down this road again.
	You know, it's like, oh, I don't know...
	Let's say that you are Kavanaugh and the left puts you through the ringer with these crazy accusations from Christine Blasey Ford and you're only saved by the fact that you happen to be OCD enough to keep your Calendar from when you're a teenager and then you will be mocked in a shameful, disgusting, court toady manner by a man who is unbelievably vile in his pursuit of power, that being Matt Damon.
	Matt Damon making fun of Justice Kavanaugh was just about the lowest point of court toadyism over the last couple of years.
	If you're Justice Kavanaugh, and then you, do you feel like going up against the left again?
	I mean, they've already showed you everything they can do.
	Do you feel like going up against the left again?
	Eh, probably not much, right?
	Probably not much. So, Herod doesn't want to get involved in this again.
	So, instead of trying to figure out the truth, Herod said to Jesus, Oh, uh, Son of God, eh?
	Prophet? Okay, you can do all these miracles I hear.
	You can water into wine, loaves and fishes, walking on water, all this kind of cool stuff.
	So here's what you need to do.
	Do me a miracle. Miracle right here, right now, and that's how we're going to settle this, right?
	And Jesus, obviously not wanting to be a...
	A trained seal performing miracles to get out of political trouble.
	It's not a toy. It's not there to save your butt.
	It's there to show people the power of your relationship with the Father and the Holy Ghost.
	And so Jesus refused to answer and refused to do the miracles.
	So Herod was afraid, of course, of the chief priests.
	There's a lot of cross-webbing of fear and paranoia and political control here.
	He sent him back to Pontius Pilate for execution.
	Now, the Julie, yes, I think you're right.
	So, Herod, not the most morally straight-spined individual in human history.
	So, I guess, Biden-style, he married Herodias, the ex-wife of his half-brother, Philip.
	And when John the Baptist criticized Herod for marrying the ex-wife of his half-brother, Herod threw John in prison, and Herod gave in to the plot of Herodias and her daughter and had John beheaded.
	And so, yeah, this is all the complications, right?
	Now, here's an interesting question.
	So, you should follow me on freedomain.locals.com.
	I spend a lot of time there, and we can have chats and all of that.
	And I talked about, you know, with the COVID thing, the new piece of information.
	It's not that new, but it's kind of new in terms of scientific validation.
	Super spreaders are old and obese, right?
	So if you're fat and you've got COVID, you'll be exhaling much more virus than if you were of a normal weight, right?
	So it's pretty... It's pretty bad.
	So I was talking about this, and one guy was saying to me in the comments, he said, ah, you know, how dare you?
	I've been home.
	I can't lose weight because of lockdown and stuff.
	And it's like, you know, it's a fascinating question.
	I mean, ask yourself this, because this is, to me, one of the messages of Jesus.
	It's like, what is a life without excuses?
	What is a life, and I'll tell you something that will blow your mind in a sec, right?
	What is a life without excuses?
	What does that look like, right?
	Because what if you said to yourself, I don't care that it's lockdown.
	I'm going to, you know, you can exercise on a chair.
	You can pick up five-pound bags of potatoes and start to exercise that way.
	You can exercise by doing push-ups and sit-ups and so on, right?
	I mean, you can't.
	You don't have to go to a gym. You don't have to spend any money.
	You can just, soup cans, anything.
	You can exercise no matter what.
	You can walk around your house at high speed or your apartment or your room if you have to.
	What if you, yeah, somebody got myself an indoor bicycle, right?
	What if you had a life without excuses?
	I'll give you an example.
	Who deplatformed me?
	Now people will say, oh, YouTube and PayPal.
	No, no, no. Me.
	Me. I made the choices.
	I knew the risks. I knew the dangers.
	I knew the price that I was likely to pay.
	Not for certain, because there's still free will, right?
	I knew the price that I was likely to pay for bringing essential truths to the planet.
	Educating millions and millions of people about the most essential topics in the world as I saw them.
	It's not like I hadn't studied blowback on philosophers before.
	It wasn't like I did my entire graduate thesis.
	My whole master's degree was on the history of philosophy.
	You don't think I know how we get treated?
	But tell me more. Philosophers' rights are human rights.
	Yeah, trans rights are human rights.
	Like trans people don't have rights.
	But philosophers' rights are human rights.
	You don't think I knew? Oh, I'm sure I'll be fine because every single philosopher who's done anything to advance the human condition gets massive blowback in the past, but I'll be fine because I'm just so pretty, right?
	So, no, I mean, come on.
	So, here's the thing, right?
	People get mad at Judas, but Judas was part of the plan.
	So you could say the Jewish leaders, the Roman leaders are sentencing to the death of Jesus.
	What did Jesus say?
	What did Jesus say?
	Do you think he didn't know that he could get accused of blasphemy?
	Do you think that he didn't know that the penalty for blasphemy was death?
	Do you think that he didn't know when Jesus stood out of the temple and drove away with whips the money changers And the banksters of his day, do you think he didn't know that when he interfered with the material interests of those profiting from the superstitions of the day, that there might not be some blowback?
	The Derek Chauvin trial, sorry, this is eternal and very immediate, but the Derek Chauvin trial is going on right now as we speak.
	Now, I was deplatformed when I was just about to release a conversation I had with a white cop and a black cop about what actually happened that day.
	Their professional perspective.
	A black cop and a white cop.
	It was a fantastic conversation.
	I had uploaded it.
	I was promoting it. Boom!
	God! Because there are massive elements in society, mostly on the left, that want riots.
	They want destabilization.
	They want a race war. They've been talking about it for a hundred years, using racial conflicts to destabilize the West so that they can worm their way up through power like some horrendous negative waterfall of blood reaching to the skies.
	And all of the reporting that I did back then On George Floyd's all being validated, I said, oh look, he's dropping a packet, looks like drugs to me.
	This is really early on, just examining the video.
	You'd see him tossing the packet aside.
	Now it turns out, lo and behold, he had three times the fatal dose of fentanyl in his system, and his girlfriend said that they were outscoring drugs that day.
	Ahmaud Arbery! I said, the jogging thing's probably a cover for criminal activity.
	Now it's come out in the court documents that, lo and behold, with Ahmaud Arbery, the jogging thing was a cover for criminal activity that's been confirmed in the court documents.
	So anyway. So, yeah, I mean, if you, like, see, if the black community is doing well under Trump, then you've got to gin up racial hatred and racial conflicts so that people will run back, the blacks will run back to the Democrats, right?
	So me trying to cool racial tensions with those crazy little things we call facts, reason, and evidence, me trying to cool racial tensions, have us all get along better, well, that doesn't serve the point of power now, does it, right?
	It doesn't serve the purposes of power, which is division and opposition and infighting, so we're always boxing horizontally and we never look up at the puppet strings.
	That's the whole point, right? We got a stream issue.
	Is that right? Yeah, Conservative Inc.
	was immediately calling to throw Chauvin in jail.
	Yeah, of course. Everybody called it a murder.
	And now people are out there saying, no due process, let's just kill him because we think he's a criminal.
	It's like, you know you complained, and rightly so, about lynching.
	What was lynching? Kind of what you want to do, Derek Chauvin.
	So it's kind of tough to summon a huge amount of sympathy over complaints of historical lynching when you kind of want to do the same thing now.
	Anyway, you understand, right?
	So, here's the thing.
	So, you can say it was the Roman and Jewish leaders sentencing the death of Jesus.
	What did Jesus say of his own life?
	Of his own life.
	Do you have a source for that communist plan to use racial tensions to subvert the West?
	Yes. Look at the Comintern documents from 1922, believe it or not.
	1922. And I would imagine it's in my truth about Joseph McCarthy.
	So if you want to find my shows, go to fdrpodcast.com, fdrpodcast.com.
	Do a search, good search engine, lots of tags.
	And communist subversion, just do a search for that.
	There'll be the podcast, and below that will be a link to videos on Library and BitChute and I think other places as well.
	So... Oh, and they said, yeah, anybody who criticizes communism, we'll just call them a fascist and a racist, and that's how we'll deal with it.
	I mean, this is all...
	Because we lack education, they have power, and these two things are not coincidental, right?
	So, sorry for the long intro.
	So, yeah, who got me deplatformed?
	Hello! This is self-ownership 101.
	I can't claim to be shocked.
	I can't claim to be surprised.
	I'm surprised it lasted that long.
	So, what did Jesus say?
	I don't know what there was just today.
	There was a car rammer in D.C., right?
	Capitol building. And I don't know.
	When I came to talk about this stuff, it was still up in the air.
	Jesus said about his own life, No one takes it from me!
	But I lay it down of my own accord.
	I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up.
	Again, this command I received from my father.
	It's an amazing statement.
	This is self-ownership 101.
	Can you say, well, I can't exercise because of the lockdown?
	Sure you can. You can say that.
	You can say anything you want. What is 100%?
	I always aim for like 200% self-ownership.
	Now, this can cause problems.
	Like sometimes you can take ownership for things that really aren't yours, but it's the best way to avoid feeling like a victim.
	Like people are saying, oh, Steph, you got deplatformed, you're bouncing back, you're happy, you're positive, 150%, 200%, a million percent self-ownership.
	And Jesus taught me this.
	I remember reading this as a kid.
	Gave me goosebumps. What happens with maximum self-ownership?
	Because he could say, well, the Romans are being unjust and the Jews are being unjust and I didn't blaspheme.
	No. He said of his own life, no one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.
	I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again.
	This command I received from my father.
	You've got to promote the concept of absolutely maximum self-ownership in this life.
	Absolutely maximum self-ownership.
	And also, to some degree, a hesitation in labeling things good or bad.
	Are things good or bad?
	It's really hard to tell.
	It's really hard to tell.
	A lot of complexity. A lot of complexity.
	I wouldn't call my de-platforming bad at all.
	So, the Jewish High Court demanded that Jesus be crucified.
	So, Pilate, I keep wanting to call them Pilates, like he's a workout thing, right?
	That's so crazy. So, Pilate was afraid that there were complaints and rebellion and complications, so appease, appease, appease, appease, right?
	Appease the mob, appease the rabble, appease the upset people.
	So, what happened was, Pilate said, I will beat him up.
	I'll send him to Herod. Herod, of course, was the kid of the father who put to death all of the boys under two.
	Of course, Joseph and Mary had already escaped that rule at that point.
	But yeah, so we've got a bit of a genocidal family here, right?
	So... Pontius, sorry, Pontius Pilate, nervous about what could happen to his, you know, wanting to hold on to power, right?
	Because he could just retire. Just retire, man.
	No, no, I need power.
	It's the addiction, right? It's his value.
	It's what gets his manhood on the ascent, I would assume, right?
	So Pontius Pilate turned Jesus over to one of his centurions and just said, just do it.
	Just do it. And then, you know, the horrifying march occurred, right?
	I mean, the Crown of Thorns, publicly beaten, Mott spit on, and he was led to Golgotha.
	Really sounds like something next to a Renaissance in Conan books, right?
	I shouldn't laugh, right? But I was just struck by the fact that the writer of the Conan stories Killed himself when his mom died.
	May have been pouring a little bit too much manhood into his books and not enough into himself, but anyway.
	You guys know what Golgotha means?
	Anybody? Bueller?
	Anybody? Golgotha!
	Come on! Give it to me!
	Give it to me! What do you got?
	Golgotha! What does that mean?
	Place of skulls, right?
	Place of skulls, because, you know, a lot of people, a lot of people murdered there, right?
	A lot of people killed. A lot of people killed.
	So, a painkiller mixture of vinegar, gall, and myrrh was offered to him.
	Jesus said no. Stakes, for me, it's always been like railway spikes, but stakes were driven through Jesus' wrists and ankles, fastening him to the cross.
	He was lifted up between two convicted criminals, and somebody had put a mocking inscription above his head that read, The King of the Jews.
	Just appalling and horrifying stuff.
	All right, we've got some Q&A going on here.
	Yeah.
	Was it Pilate who did that?
	Pontius Pilate? But it seems odd to me that Pontius Pilate would do that without any kind of communication.
	I mean...
	I would say...
	The motives...
	You know, the motives for the persecution...
	I mean, people say rebellion, this and that.
	Yeah, it could be, it could be. But the motives for the persecution, I think, had a lot more to do with the fact that he drove out the money changers from the temple.
	He didn't like people profiting and pillaging The faithful coming to say their prayers.
	The central banking of the time, so to speak, right?
	So, yeah, I don't know what the motivation would be for Pontius Pilate to put this mocking thing above Jesus, because he didn't really care.
	It was not a secular issue.
	It was not a criminal issue.
	It was infighting among, I guess, Jewish groups at that time, right?
	So, I don't know.
	Oh, he was upset that the Jewish leaders were manipulating him?
	No, but then he would do something against them, not necessarily against Jesus.
	So again, I don't know. Obviously we don't know who put it up there.
	I would personally put it on the Jewish court, but it could be wrong, right?
	Well, it could be wrong, who knows, right?
	The soldiers did it? But why would the soldiers care?
	I mean, just appeasing them up, right?
	With far less reason than The mob attacking Socrates.
	Okay, how long was Jesus on the cross?
	Come on, people. Mel Gibson does this story so well.
	I think he could have gone way more philosophical.
	The power of the philosophical aspect, to me, is where, I mean, the blood, the squirt, I mean, it's horrifying and all of that, but you need the philosophy, and the philosophy is the real power of this stuff.
	Because that's why we're free.
	Because why we're free. No, it was not three days.
	Come on, get your Bible facts straight.
	Jesus was hung on the cross for about six hours.
	You're thinking of when he was dead, supposedly dead, to resurrection, right?
	So that's three days. Pontius Pilate put the sign up because the Jewish court told him that Jesus was not their king.
	Caesar was.
	Yeah, but why, so the Jewish, even if the Jewish court said that, why would he, why would he want to mock this guy?
	Pilate was mocking the Jews since they forced his hand.
	And somebody's got a quote here. I don't know where it's from.
	Pilate had a notice prepared and fastened to the cross.
	It read, Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews.
	Many of the Jews read this sign.
	I don't know. Because if Pontius Pilate wants to appease, then why would he mock?
	He wouldn't have any reason to mock Jesus.
	And why would he mock the people who he was trying to appease?
	That doesn't really... Any significance in the soldiers selling Jesus' robes?
	Yes. Yes, we will get to that.
	I threw the dice when they pierced his side, but I've seen love conquer the great divide.
	So, Jesus was on the cross for about six hours, 9 a.m.
	to 3 p.m. Coincidentally, that's pretty much the same amount of time as a government school day.
	Anyway, so, the soldiers cast lots of form of gambling for Jesus' clothing.
	People passed by shouting insults and scoffing.
	And Jesus, of course, spoke to his mother, he spoke to his disciple John, and he also famously cried out to his father, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
	It's a very powerful moment.
	To show the doubt is incredible, right?
	Because Jesus had performed all of these miracles.
	I mean, Jesus had already raised three people from the dead, including Lazarus, of course, right?
	Walked on water loaves and fishes burning bushes.
	Driving demons out of people.
	Wrestling with the underworld that festered in the soulless hides of the malevolent.
	That's incredible. So why is he dying?
	If he can perform miracles, why is he dying?
	And this was a great and powerful question.
	I answered it badly in the past and hopefully I'll answer it better now.
	Why have you forsaken me?
	Why must I die?
	Now, one of the answers, of course, and the answer, I think, is that Jesus had to die because the path to salvation could only be achieved by a morally perfect human being and all human beings corrupted by the original sin of Adam could never.
	You know, only clean feet can cross that floor and everyone's foot is bloody from sin.
	So you had to have the pure die.
	To create the capacity for redemption for everyone.
	Not for his group, not for his tribe, not for his people, but everyone.
	Everyone can become a Christian.
	Everyone can leave Christianity.
	The penalty for apostasy in Islam is death.
	To enter into Judaism requires years of study.
	And I assume adult circumcision or something like that, right?
	But Christianity Christianity is an open doorway.
	It's easy to convert to Islam, very hard to get out.
	It's almost impossible to convert to Judaism.
	But Christianity is an open library.
	Because, specifically because of the sacrifice, and I'll sort of get to that in a second, because the barrier to entry was taken down by Jesus' sacrifice on the cross.
	Now, when Jesus cried out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
	Darkness covered the entire land.
	A little later... Jesus died and an earthquake shook the ground and it ripped the temple veil in two from top to bottom.
	This is Matthew's Gospel.
	It says the earth shook and the rocks split.
	The tombs broke open and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life.
	Wasn't it Eve that committed the first sin and she deceived Adam?
	Well, Adam How deep should we go here?
	Adam deferred to a woman which destroyed his life.
	And we are of course as a society in the endless mindless process of deferring to women to the massive detriment of our future.
	Something I said in my interview with Jordan Peterson some years ago that the cultures that treat women the worst are growing the fastest and to the most robust and the strongest.
	So no, it wasn't Eve that committed the first sin.
	It was Adam who committed the fundamental sin of deferring to a woman.
	Now, listen, I love women.
	I live with two females, and it's wonderful.
	But you don't defer to women, and women shouldn't defer to men.
	You don't defer to anyone.
	Now, there is this deference to women.
	Because women choose men, and in some places throughout history, the majority of men didn't even reproduce, because women said no to them.
	So you have to defer to women, and I think that's fine, but women in return have to give you children and the continuation of your culture.
	If women either aren't giving you children or dump the children in daycare to be raised by Guatemalan nannies who barely speak English, thus kind of interrupting the flow of your culture down the generations, If we were not giving you kids and instructing those kids on the values that you and your forefathers fought and bled to achieve, then I don't know why there's any difference.
	Right? So, the sin of Adam was deferring to Eve.
	Why did he defer to Eve?
	Did she have good reasons for what she said?
	No. No.
	Well, but she's women, and women are wonderful, and I guess I'll just defer to her because she's a woman.
	And it's like, eh! Wrong answer!
	Right there in Genesis.
	Wrong answer! Defer to women.
	Good Lord. Good Lord.
	Mature audiences warning.
	Dicknapped.
	Yeah, I'm afraid so.
	So what does this temple veil mean?
	So this is a curtain or a veil of the temple separated the Holy of Holies, inhabited by the presence of God from the rest of the temple.
	Only the high priest could enter there once a year with the sacrificial offering for the sins of all the people.
	When Christ died, and this curtain, like the moment that Christ died, the curtain was torn from top to bottom.
	This was a manifestation of the destruction of the barrier between God and man.
	Destruction of the barrier between God and man.
	Does God need an intermediary for you to achieve grace?
	You know, I mean, up until relatively recently in the history of Christianity, Catholic masses were conducted in Latin, which the average person couldn't tell from anything.
	Now, all people through the intermediate of Christ can approach salvation, can approach God, can achieve virtue.
	They don't need a priest, specifically, directly.
	The veil that separated God and man was torn by the death of Christ.
	Now, The Roman soldiers...
	Oh yeah, I was talking about women, and then it got a mature warning.
	Look, deferring to anyone, appeasing anyone, is treating them as foolish children.
	And you don't defer to women, you challenge them, and just as they should challenge you, and you talk reasonably with them, and...
	Anyway. So, here's another question for you.
	Roman soldiers... How did they show mercy to somebody on the cross?
	how did they show mercy to somebody who was being crucified?
	Well, what they did was they would break the criminal's legs.
	Yes.
	So you break his legs and that causes death to come more quickly.
	No, no, not stab them.
	That's interesting, right? It's not stabbing them.
	They would break their legs. Yeah, quite right.
	I'm not exactly sure how that would cause death to come more quickly.
	I don't know if they'd break the criminal's legs and the blood would pour out the legs and you'd just bleed out.
	I don't know exactly how.
	In the same way, and maybe you guys can answer this, some of the stuff I was reading would say that Jesus or the people on the cross would die from asphyxiation.
	I'm not sure exactly how, and it's like they were hung upside down or anything like that, but I'm not sure how the asphyxiation would occur.
	So instead of breaking his legs, though, the soldiers came to Jesus.
	Instead of breaking his legs, they want to go home and they want the guy to die.
	So they'd normally break his legs. What they did was they pierced his side with a spear.
	But he was already dead.
	They can't stand up to take a breath.
	So they suffocate. Is that right?
	Their ribs don't allow breath.
	Oh, they stab him so the ribs don't allow breath.
	Breaking the legs makes the body hang lower and you suffocate.
	You guys know this too well.
	I'm telling you. You can't breathe hanging from your arms.
	Is that right? All right.
	So, before sunset, Jesus was taken down by Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea and laid in Joseph's tomb.
	So, and the darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon, and the argument is it couldn't have been an eclipse.
	eclipse, the moon is always full on the first day of the Passover.
	Now, the new covenant, right?
	Let's talk about this briefly, right?
	The new covenant is really, really important.
	I mean, it's really the whole point, right?
	So, what's the new covenant? So, Why do you want to be in a particular group, right?
	You want to be in my gang, my gang, my gang.
	It's an old T-Rex song, I think it was, from when I was a kid.
	So why do you want to be in a particular group?
	Well, one of the things that you can have offered to you is physical prosperity.
	You can say, hey, you know, we're the merchants, we're the smart people, we've, you know, you'll have a secret handshake, we'll only do business with you, and we'll lend you money at preferred interest, and you're going to have material gains from being part of our club.
	That's... Quite common across various religions.
	And that's not the deal with Jesus, right?
	The deal with Jesus is really quite the opposite.
	The deal with Jesus is, sell everything you own, give your money to the poor, and follow me.
	That this life is a life of suffering and sacrifice and pain and stress and difficulty.
	But that's how you become purified.
	and get the giant catapult to the pearly gates.
	I don't mean to sound flippant but allow me some poetic license if you don't if you don't mind.
	So and this this was a great moment in my life completely inconsequential to the person I was with but a very powerful moment for me when I was in my early 20s I did some computer consulting work and one guy I went to his house, and he had a beautiful house, and I installed a home network for him.
	This was before Wi-Fi, and I had put the network cables through the walls, and it was setting stuff up in DOS, and it was a giant mess.
	But anyway, so, and I was impressed.
	I thought, you know, I was broke.
	I was a broke kid struggling through university and I was the guy who would get two-for-one deals from the student newspaper at Subway and buy giant subs with everything on them, cut them into full pieces, freeze two and you got meals for two days, right?
	And So this guy I said you got a beautiful house, right?
	And he said, yes. Yes.
	The good Lord has been good to me.
	Now, this muscular Christianity and this pursuit of material gain and, you know, God favors and, you know, it's really rough, man.
	It's not my understanding of Christianity.
	Certainly not my understanding of philosophy, right?
	That you burn income to spread truth, right?
	Like, you know, smoke signals, right?
	Smoke signals in the sort of native or indigenous population of North America, they'd send smoke signals, right?
	The staccato Morse code smoke signals would be how you'd get your message across.
	And for philosophers, you burn income, you burn credibility, you burn reputation.
	And that's how you get your message across.
	The skywriting comes from the ashes Of your own social acceptability, right?
	And donations, right?
	I mean, that's just the way it plays.
	Are you willing to give up money in order to promote the truth?
	Because if you're not, then you're just bought and paid for as much as Pontius Pilate, as much as the leader of the ecclesiastical court.
	And now, I'm not saying go live under a bridge.
	You've got to have a certain amount of material.
	I've got to be able to pay for the internet or whatever, right?
	But are you willing to burn income to spread the truth?
	Well, I think if the answer to that is no, then you really can't claim to be spreading the truth because you're always going to shift it a little bit just to get money.
	So, what's the new covenant?
	You don't need a high priest to pursue virtue.
	You have a relationship with Jesus who will intercede on your behalf with God.
	Faith, purity of intention, excellence and execution, consistency of purpose and integrity of virtue will get you there.
	It's universal.
	That the virtue comes from the commandments and the commandments are a lot fewer than the 613 that were part of the old Jewish tradition and You don't have to go through the scapegoat phenomenon, right?
	Because in the Jewish tradition back then, of course, there were animal sacrifices, just as in the Aztec and Mayan tradition, they can find 70,000 child sacrifices and pulling the living hearts out of babies.
	And the scapegoat was that the sins and immoralities of the community get projected onto the animal, the animals driven out or killed.
	And that's how You become better.
	And that's incomprehensible to us for the most part in the West at the moment, right?
	The idea that, you know, you go to a pet store and you say, oh, I'd really like a puppy.
	Why? Well, I cheated on my wife, so I'm going to have to kill the puppy.
	Would be very strange.
	It would be a very strange phenomenon, and we can't picture this.
	Because, and this was, of course, part of Martin Luther's criticism of the Catholic Church, was the sin of indulgences, right?
	What he called the sin of indulgences.
	So, the idea was that Jesus had been a perfect person, of course, and had, therefore, far more virtue than he needed to get into heaven, and the same was true of many of the saints.
	In fact, all of the saints, by definition, had an excess of virtue.
	And so the church at the time would sell that excess of virtue to you to buy your way out of purgatory that much the quicker.
	In fact, you could even buy it ahead of time, that if you wanted to go and do something bad on the weekend, you could buy your indulgence ahead of time, you wouldn't have to feel bad about it.
	And he was like, I don't really think that was the whole purpose, was selling imaginary shreds of virtue so that people could be bad.
	That's enabling vice rather than promoting virtue.
	So, there was the Old Covenant, which was, of course, God and the people of Israel, after God freed them from slavery in Egypt.
	Moses led the people out, let my people go, right?
	Moses led the people out, served as the mediator of this contract, the Old Covenant, between God and his people, the chosen people, right, which was made at Mount Sinai.
	Exodus... Then Moses took the blood from the basins and splattered it over the people, declaring, look, this blood confirms the covenant the Lord has made with you in giving you these instructions.
	No self-sacrifice, sacrifice of animals.
	So God promised, of course, the people of Israel would be his chosen people, he would be their God.
	This is Exodus. I will claim you as my own people and I will be your God.
	Then you will know that I am the Lord your God who has freed you from your oppression in Egypt.
	So, God issues his Ten Commandments, the laws in Leviticus, to be obeyed by the Hebrews.
	If they complied with these commandments, he said, we'll give you prosperity and protection in the Promised Land.
	613 laws covering every aspect of human behavior.
	Male circumcision, Sabbath observation, hundreds of dietary, social, and hygiene rules, and these regulations to some degree protecting the Israelites from their pagan influences all around them, but it's kind of impossible to keep that many laws.
	So to address the people's sins, God set up a system of animal sacrifices, right?
	So people would provide cattle, sheep, and doves to be killed.
	Sin, because there were so many laws, required blood sacrifices.
	And under the Old Covenant, these sacrifices were carried out at the desert tabernacle.
	God put Moses' brother Aaron and Aaron's sons as priests who slaughtered the animals.
	Only Aaron the High Priest could enter the Holy of Holies we talked about before, once a year on the Day of Atonement, to intercede for the people directly with God.
	After the Israelites conquered Canaan, King Solomon, the wise, of course, built the first permanent temple in Jerusalem, where the animal sacrifices continued.
	Invaders, of course, eventually destroyed these temples.
	When they were rebuilt, the sacrifices resumed.
	And so you had complicated rules you couldn't possibly obey, and so sacrifices would occur.
	Somebody said our church would ask us for five dollars to get a baby out of purgatory.
	I mean, to me, again, solid Anglo-Saxon Protestant, that's just straight up voodoo.
	We'll lift the curse. We'll lift the curse.
	Jesus, to my knowledge, was the first prophet to grant forgiveness for sins which had hitherto been deemed unforgivable.
	And, of course, the whole question of forgiveness is so central to modern cancel culture.
	It's so fundamental to modern cancel culture.
	You made a bad tweet when you were 12!
	Oh, you said something untoward about gay people when you were 17.
	You must now be hounded out of social life.
	There's no path to redemption. This is what people didn't understand, and I said this back in the day about Trump in 2015, 2016, when the Billy Bush tapes came out about Trump saying these coarse things about women and Trump apologized, and people were like, well, that's it, he's done.
	It's like, no, no, on the left, you can't be forgiven for anything.
	But that's not how Christians work.
	The Ark of Redemption is very powerful.
	You have a way back from wrongdoing.
	Because the hyper-perfectionism and endless rule and lack of forgiveness and requiring of sacrifices, that's old covenant stuff.
	Massively complicated rules.
	You can't possibly follow them all.
	You're going to make mistakes, so give me a cow.
	We'll kill it and you'll be fine.
	That's Old Testament stuff.
	That's old covenant stuff.
	That's it? The left is not progressive?
	Come on, it's the oldest thing in the known universe.
	But Jesus said there's a way for all of the sinners to return to grace.
	And that's fundamental to having a civilized society, because if there's no path to redemption, then it's kind of like the guy who's convicted to life in prison with no parole, what, is he going to go kill another prisoner?
	Well, sure, why? He can't do anything to him.
	He's already cursed beyond redemption.
	He's already damned beyond his mortal lifespan.
	They've got nothing else to throw at him.
	But if you give people a path to redemption, you give them a reason to stop being bad, right?
	And I'm talking about the psychology here, not the incarceration.
	Recidivism is very high, and I get all of that, right?
	So Jesus said, a new command I give you.
	Love one another, as I have loved you, so you must love one another.
	Love one another. Not your tribe, not your in-group, not your local blah blah blah, not your family, your extended clan.
	Love one another.
	It's a universal commandment.
	As I have loved you, so you must love one another.
	Love your neighbor as yourself.
	That's amazing.
	Amazing.
	Somebody says, "Forgiveness is the highest form of love, even more than tell me more, but it's not always applicable." Now, universality, the ethics.
	Matthew 28, 16 to 20 says, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, therefore, to and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything as I have commanded you.
	And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age.
	Teaching them. You're not born into it.
	You don't have to fight your way in.
	You don't have to cut off a nipple.
	You are...
	You learn to be a Christian.
	It's transferable in a way that Judaism is not.
	It is a teaching.
	It is an argument. It is...
	I mean, of course, in the theology, it is reason and evidence.
	The evidence being, why would people go and be eaten by lions if they hadn't seen miracles?
	When they...
	The Jewish...
	High council, the high court was terrified that people would think Jesus had come back from the dead, so they put a huge stone in front of his tomb.
	They put guards there, but then when the women went in, I think, to wash the body after three days, the body was gone.
	So in the theology, there's reason and there's evidence.
	It's universal. There's a path to forgiveness now.
	What do we see in most stories is vengeance.
	Vengeance. There are no superhero stories without a wrongdoing in vengeance, right?
	And the best that you see is some bad guy tries to shoot a good guy and only then is the good guy allowed to shoot him or whatever, right?
	But Jesus being wronged, falsely accused, falsely condemned, falsely convicted, physically tortured, beaten, taunted, mocked, attacked, crown of thorns, six hours on a cross bleeding out.
	What does he say? Look at this relative to the Derek Chauvin trial.
	Is there forgiveness there?
	Is there redemption there?
	No. There's howls for blood.
	What does Jesus say when facing the most unbelievable extremity of pain and destruction?
	Believing, of course, that his entire...
	I mean, he had very few followers.
	He's being hung as a common criminal.
	Brutally tortured and destroyed.
	He sees soldiers basically rolling dice for his clothing, and he thinks he's about to go into obscurity.
	And what does he say to those who are torturing and murdering him in ways that stagger the imagination to even picture experiencing?
	He says, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
	That is one of the most powerful statements in all of human history.
	Okay.
	Forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.
	Where do you see that?
	And
	these days where do you see sit down and reason with the sinner you don't see that you see deplatforming you see attacks you see people getting milkshakes of concrete thrown at their head you see bomb threats death threats physical attacks destruction of people's income attacks on people's houses And these are mere truth-tellers who are being attacked.
	This was a truth-teller who implored forgiveness for people who were physically torturing him to death.
	It's the end of Atlas Shrugged John Galt moment.
	It's amazing.
	At the end of his life Jesus said, "I am thirsty." And remember, he only had a mission for three years, 30 to 33.
	Yeah, you just see hate, hate, hate.
	Where is the love? Where is the forgiveness?
	Where is the curiosity? Where is the...
	And listen, I need these lessons too.
	I mean, I'm a long way from this.
	this.
	I need these lessons too.
	So Jesus said, I am thirsty.
	Now he'd been offered painkiller before so he wouldn't take it.
	A jar of wine vinegar was there and they soaked a sponge in it and put the sponge on a stalk of his or plant and lifted it to Jesus' lips.
	When he had received the drink, Jesus said, It is finished.
	With that he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.
	What does he mean? right somebody says many soldiers became christians when they witnessed the sacrifice of jesus what does he mean when he says it is finished the prophecy yeah i think but that's you know that the idea that was going to be a sacrifice is in the old testament as well that a prophet was going to come and have to be sacrificed to redeem mankind what does he mean it is finished I tell you what I think he meant and of course this doesn't mean anything it's just my thoughts right so no he came and accomplished this mission it's not powerful enough it's not powerful enough and boss defeated it's not not powerful enough what was finished it is finished so you have to go from the tribal to the universal the tribalism tribalism is It's Darwinian.
	That's all it is. It's genetic in-group preference.
	It's all it is. Genetic in-group preference or you could say meme in-group preference or ideology in-group preference, but it is not philosophy.
	It's carrot and stick.
	It's reward and punishment.
	It's fellowship or dissociation.
	It's obedience or social punishment, ostracism.
	No. What did he end?
	It is finished. It is finished.
	What? What does it refer to here?
	Well, his massive, massive philosophical breakthrough really is the invention of moral philosophy because in-group tribal preferences is not morality.
	Right? That's like saying that a lioness who's feeding her cubs nipple milk is a philosopher.
	They're not. Or the male lion who comes along and kills the cubs of another male lion if he wants to bang the...
	That's not a philosopher.
	What was ended by Jesus' pursuit of universals and no barrier to entry?
	No barrier to entry.
	You don't have to be born into it.
	You don't have to sacrifice a goat.
	You don't have to circumcise yourself.
	You don't have to subjugate.
	You don't have to pay for it.
	No barrier to entry.
	And the law is for all.
	Why is it that Christianity alone, alone, in the entirety and span of human history, why is it that Christianity alone created societies of universal human rights and has the ultimate moral prize of expending massive amounts of blood and treasure to end slavery, not just in its own countries, but around the entire world?
	Why? Was Christianity able to do that and no other belief system?
	Because of the universalism, that these are not moral rules for my tribe at the expense of yours.
	These are moral rules for everyone.
	They can be transferred through argument and example and evidence.
	They apply to everyone at all times under all circumstances.
	They are truly universal.
	When Jesus said, it is finished, his sacrifice, what he finished, what he ended, if people wanted, what he ended was tribalism, was base, mammal, raw material, in-group preference, pretense morality, Genetic slave value transfer.
	It is finished.
	Tribalism. Subjectivism.
	Pretending to be morality.
	People pretending to serve the good when they were only serving themselves, their tribe, their ideology, their belief system, their religion, their theology, their genetics, whatever.
	And this is where Jesus and Socrates, Socrates was attempting to make truth claims universal with the Socratic method.
	Oh, you think, you think you know what justice is?
	give me a definition let's see if we can break it let's make truth universal not just a claim not just pretty language not the hallmark card of sophistry Moral rules are not enforced by a love of virtue anymore, but a fear of punishment.
	I can't say this because someone could find out, like the newest gig, the newest game, is to go on Clubhouse, which doesn't record, take a screenshot and say, oh, someone said something really bad here.
	Put that screenshot out on social media.
	Massive guilt by association calling in the attack dogs.
	It's feral! It's primitive.
	It's old covenant.
	Punishment, reward, conformity, subjugation, enslavement.
	Mental prison with no parole, no review, no innocence project, no redemption.
	Scott Adams said recently he's going to try and find someone whose reputation has been unfairly destroyed and rehabilitate them.
	It's like, yeah, I'm right here. We've talked before.
	Right here. There is no path to redemption in tribalism.
	You're either in or you're out. Tribalism, by definition, can't be transferred by mere knowledge.
	It's like saying, well, I can talk to someone who's black, and if I talk to them long enough about Japan, they'll become Japanese.
	There's no... When you're in base mammal DNA survival in-group protection mode, You can claim all the universals you want, but they're not real.
	What's real is love one another as I love you, instruct people on these values and these virtues.
	it is finished, was the end of tribalism, if we wanted.
	Now tribalism is coming back The old covenant is returning because the new covenant has been shredded.
	Now the reasons why it's been shredded and the methodology by which it has been shredded we can talk about another time.
	Love your neighbor as yourself is universal.
	We are all sinners. It's universal.
	The path to redemption is based upon forgiveness and conformity to some pretty simple rules.
	That's powerful. And this is not just theoretical for me, you understand.
	I criticized Christianity quite brutally when I was younger.
	No Christian organization has ever attacked me or deplatformed me.
	In fact, even when I was in the throes of being attacked by others, Christian organizations invited me to come and give speeches.
	You understand? This is not theoretical for me at all.
	I am an empiricist and I look at who treats me the best and who most sticks to their own morals and virtues.
	You think that's the atheists?
	You think that's the libertarians?
	They ran. Who had the strength to reach out a hand to me when I was in the social fires of character assassination?
	When I was Daniel in the lion's den of the mainstream media.
	Who reached down?
	Who had moral courage and integrity and love?
	There's a difference between a sinner and a Satan.
	And the left only has angels and Satan.
	That's all. Angels and devils.
	But at the tipping point between good and evil, the Christians reach and give solace and comfort and love.
	They return anger with patience and inclusion.
	And if you've never been running through some dark woods with a feral mob at your heels and somebody has thrown their doors wide and said, let me give you shelter Well then, you don't understand what I'm talking about.
	But I think you do.
	Certainly if you're listening to this, I think you do.
	I will never forget those times when the people who would come on my show were Christians and the people who offered solace and comfort were Christians and the people who were not fled and had no stomach or spine to stand before the mob.
	Because for Christians, persecution by the mob is kind of the foundation of the whole thing.
	So when you're being persecuted by the mob, they're like, yeah, we get it.
	We get it. It's kind of where we started, man.
	Kind of where we started.
	Doesn't mean you're right. Doesn't mean you're good.
	But persecution by the mob sure as hell doesn't mean that you're a bad guy.
	Because we got that going on.
	We know. And this is why the mob doesn't have much power against Christians.
	They have power against everyone else, that I can see, but against Christians?
	Unjust persecution?
	Hello, unjust persecution?
	They get it. They get it.
	And it's also given me strength, the foundational moral example of my life, long before I learned about Socrates or Plato or Aristotle or Howard Rourke or John Galt or Thomas More or John Locke.
	The guy was Jesus.
	Unjust persecution.
	The strength to stand in the face of a howling mob.
	And say to the howling mob, but it's true.
	But it's true.
	But still it moves, as Galileo said.
	Who stands with you when the mob picks up your scent?
	It's a pretty important question to ask, and I need you to answer it honestly.
	I'm answering it honestly.
	Which is why I apologized to Christians years ago and why I'm doing this show today.
	You've got to ask yourself, who's with you?
	When the human wolves come barreling up your street.
	When those to whom forgiveness is a crime.
	Who gives you shelter?
	Who takes you in?
	Who stands with you?
	Who believes in free will?
	Who understands that to run away from suffering is to run away from life?
	And who...
	Who can, I hope, one day teach me to say what I cannot say yet?
	What I... What I cannot say yet.
	And that's not anybody's fault but mine.
	And it's...
	What I cannot say yet.
	Because it's been going on for a long time.
	My persecution started in 2008.
	It's a long time, man.
	It's a long time. It's right before my daughter was born.
	It's a little tough to forgive.
	My wife and I had to wait a long time for a baby, and then the assault began just before she was born.
	It's a little tough to... What I cannot say is yet...
	I can read it, but I can't say it in my heart.
	It's a fault. It's a flaw. Probably.
	What I cannot say is...
	Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.
	But I am trying.
	I'm trying. Because I'm a universalist, right?
	UPB, right? If the Christians forgave me for what I did, why can't I forgive those who persecute me for what they do?
	Because their forgiveness came before my apology.
	I guess, you know, everyone has this...
	Everybody has the sin, or the shortcoming, or the failing.
	That's the toughest. You know, there's lots I don't...
	Courage, I'm pretty good with.
	Integrity, I'm pretty good with that.
	Frugality, I'm painfully good at that.
	But man, forgiveness.
	and It's a little bit of a sticking point.
	It's a little bit of a sticking point.
	Somebody says, you need to forgive your mother.
	She put the victim in you.
	She can't help herself.
	Forgive your mother. See, listen, man, I'm with you.
	I hear what you're saying, and You know, as my mother ages out of life, I'm gonna get the call.
	It's not gonna be long. She's in her 80s.
	It's not gonna be long. I'm gonna get the call, which is she's dead, right?
	And... But when you say she can't help herself, The problem is, this is my brain, and I, you know, I'm willing to submit to coaching and counsel here, because I'm, whether it's a blind spot or vanity or pride or some, or maybe, maybe it's a good thing, but when you say to me she can't help herself, That's a problem.
	Because if I universalize that, which is kind of what I do as a philosopher, when I universalize that and I say, well, she can't help herself, then people can't help themselves, but then I can't help myself.
	But if I say, well, I can help myself, but she can't help herself, then the question is why?
	Does she not have free will? Does she not have a soul?
	Does she not have the capacity?
	Come on. You say, ah, but it's freeing for myself and so on.
	I don't feel particularly enslaved at the moment.
	I have a great life.
	I have a great love in my life and all of that.
	So, I don't know. I know it's not.
	People say this. It isn't for her.
	It's for you. Okay, but that's kind of bribing me.
	It's not a moral principle.
	I'm sorry. Oh, you'll be happier.
	That's the guy, right? She has a mental illness.
	That's why. I don't know.
	How do you know? What does mental illness even mean?
	How is that distinguished from sin?
	Once my loyalty has been compromised, somebody says I forget, but in some cases do not forgive.
	Depends on the infraction.
	Somebody says, you really already have forgiven her, Steph.
	As soon as she acknowledges what she did to you and apologizes, you've done all you can, right?
	Well, no, I did confront her and talk to her many times about what she did.
	And she never acknowledged.
	She never apologized. And all she did was continue to wriggle out.
	And I could see, man, oof.
	Boy, you want to stare into a devil.
	And I know that's dissociating my mother's personality, but, boy, it looked like something came into her mind.
	Something came into her mind that stood between me and her heart in that conversation.
	It was a dim room. I remember that very clearly.
	And it's almost like, you know, when you're driving down, you see these lights.
	I remember this in Africa when I was a little kid.
	Like, I was six, so we're driving down this road, and you see these lights far down.
	I'm like, oh my god, there's another car coming.
	They're like, no, no, that's a lion.
	It's a lion. The cat's eyes are reflecting our headlights.
	And it's like, are you kidding me? That can't be a lion.
	It looks like a UFO or something, and you get closer, and then you see the lion turn away.
	And when I was talking, my mom, she has this kind of befuddled thing going on a lot, but boy she lasered in on that one and you could see something almost shift into her that was going to block any possibility of redemption or love or forgiveness or connection.
	Or reconciliation. And there wasn't even a fight in her eyes.
	The cunning. What can I get away with?
	What can I... I don't want to fog too much because if I deny things that are completely obvious, he'll know that I'm lying.
	But I'll give a little bit and like this whole maneuvering that occurred.
	I can see why people believe in devils and possession.
	I really can. Oof.
	Ugh. Forgiveness does not mean that you let her back into your life.
	No, I get that for sure. Why not forgive her?
	What do you gain by holding on to...
	Because I believe that justice is you pay what you earn.
	And if she's earned my forgiveness, you know, if my wife does something untoward and she apologizes, she's earned it, consistent behavior, wonderful person, no problem, right?
	So... Listen, I'm not just going to do it because somebody says it's good.
	I respect you guys and I really appreciate you spending the time with me on this.
	I really do. Mental illness is passed on.
	You can forgive her without her admitting it.
	I had the same type of mom. My mom had a darkness in her.
	Yeah, that's true. Mental illness is passed on, but again, you're just calling it mental illness, but Jesus doesn't give you that.
	Sorry, Jesus doesn't give you that.
	He doesn't give me that, anyway.
	Mental illness is a new term that is Old Covenant, because it's not 100% responsibility.
	Somebody says, I lost my mom last year to an aneurysm.
	You never know when you will lose people.
	She was evil. You have anger.
	Let her go. Forgive her. Most mothers will never admit what they do.
	It's on her. I mean, do you get a sense of anger?
	I feel very sorry for her.
	I don't feel angry.
	I don't feel angry. It really matters not what she does.
	It is what you do. You will be free.
	Again, that's, you know, I hate to sort of dismiss what you're saying, but that's not an argument.
	Free of what? How am I enslaved at the moment?
	Inforgiveness is about letting go of the control she holds onto you.
	But what does that mean? I don't know what that means.
	What control does she have on me?
	I like what Jesse Lee Peterson says on this, forgive her and then do what you have already done and leave.
	See, here's the thing, why would, like, why should I forgive her when she hasn't earned it?
	I'm very keen on forgiveness, but I don't want to treat bad people the same way as I treat good people.
	In other words, I don't want to give forgiveness to people who treat me badly and deny it, to the same as people who treat me well and don't deny whatever misdeeds are done, right?
	I've seen you get angry online.
	Well, yeah, but anger is a healthy emotion.
	I mean, you know Jesus whipped people with a whip who were preying upon the worshippers in the temple, right?
	So, I don't think that anger is unhealthy.
	It's that Steph's burden. Seems like the ball has been on her side of the net for a while.
	Yeah, for sure.
	Somebody says, I struggled with forgiveness as well.
	I'm quick to trust, but it's nearly impossible to reconstruct after a betrayal or serious failure.
	I never earned Christ's forgiveness.
	He gave it freely. Yeah, well, right, so if Christ can forgive the people who tortured him, can I not forgive the mother who beat me up?
	Who, right?
	It's an interesting question.
	In other words, if I have...
	But the path to redemption, too, you still do have to do some good things.
	You have to sincerely ask for forgiveness to get it from God, to get it from Jesus.
	You have to... This is why Judas killed himself, because he threw the money back and he was angry and upset that...
	But he basically was angry and upset that he didn't like who he had become in betraying Jesus, and so he threw the money back because he didn't want it, but he didn't ask for forgiveness.
	He didn't... And so he died.
	He killed himself. He hung himself on a tree, and the tree then also died, I guess, to a collateral damage.
	So... Let's see here.
	So... Yeah, I did everything.
	And it's not like I've been thinking a huge amount about my mum or anything.
	It's just that, you know, when the forgiveness stuff comes up, it is quite important to me.
	And I have benefited from forgiveness that I did not earn from Christians.
	And yet when the positive things were given to me, they didn't say to me, you have to apologize.
	I apologized and asked for forgiveness because I received such wonderful things.
	So... I um...
	I'll have to mull it over. I'll have to mull it over.
	Listen, repentance is a large part of the Christian story.
	Yeah, don't you have to repent and try to make amends?
	And this has sort of been my particular approach.
	Anyway, listen, I really, really appreciate having this conversation with me.
	Let me just see if there's any other thoughts that I wanted to get across.
	I can't step away from my computer.
	You're taking my breath away, Steph, in the best way.
	Thank you. What are your thoughts on the story of Jesus' resurrection?
	Well, Jesus' resurrection is bound into, Father, forgive them for they know not what they're doing.
	That was such an unbelievable and incredible thing to say that, of course, he was going to become eternal.
	Even if we discount everything but the raw, naked facts of the story, even if we take away all the theology, the raw, naked facts of the story are that he became eternal by saying that.
	That you cannot die when you say something like that and you're heard.
	You can't die.
	You are immortal in that statement.
	Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.
	And also that evil is a form of ignorance.
	This is an argument Socrates, of course, made as well, that evil is a form of ignorance, and if we teach people to be better, they will be better.
	And there's some truth in that, although the literature around kids who are sociopaths and how they grow up is pretty grim.
	It's pretty grim. And everyone talks about my mom.
	You know, it's kind of funny, right? Everyone talks about my mom.
	But there's always one parent who gets away from people, and my father left me with her.
	My father knew he couldn't live with her.
	She was too violent, but he left me with her.
	And he also did not apologize, even when I talked about it later.
	So, yeah, it's always funny, you know, people...
	And I don't mean to be critical, but people are focusing on my mom.
	And, you know, that was my father.
	I stayed with my...
	Aunt and uncle, when we first moved to Canada, came to Whitby.
	I stayed with my father's sisters, aunts and uncles, and it's a whole group of things, right?
	So, the eternity of Jesus and the universality of Jesus is...
	Out of the statement, I have ended tribalism through forgiveness and through an open-ended invitation to virtue, through knowledge.
	Somebody said, afterwards, you'll feel regret of not saying you don't hate her and wish her well.
	When she goes, you'll be extremely sad you never said it.
	But see, that's not an argument.
	That's just kind of like a voodoo curse you're putting on me, and I can't respect that.
	Like, I'm sorry, and with love and respect, I appreciate you giving me the feedback.
	But just like, you'll be sad if you don't do it, that's like the lowest rent of argument.
	That's how you train a puppy to not poop in the house, is you hit its ass with the newspaper.
	That's just like...
	So...
	Can I just say, you were the only soul who could go through what you did and come out the other and better.
	No one else could have. I don't think that's...
	I hope not. That's not true, because I don't want to be singular in this, and I appreciate this very, very kind thing to say, but I wouldn't be talking about this stuff honestly and openly, of course, as I always try to with you guys if I thought I was alone in this potential, so...
	So listen, I appreciate everyone's thoughts.
	I have a show coming up at 7, so I need to get some food.
	The body cries out for sustenance, just as the spirit cries out for knowledge and wisdom.
	So I really, really appreciate it.
	It's a completely beautiful afternoon with you guys.
	I hugely, hugely appreciate it.
	And, you know, of course, nothing here about donations, nothing on the page about it.
	Let me know if you find this stuff helpful or interesting.
	I don't want to pull a Jordan Peterson, but there's a lot about the Bible that...
	I've thought about it over the years, and maybe we'll do some more on that.
	So, yeah, there's a live show.
	You can watch me on podbean.com.
	And, yes, I appreciate that.
	Listen, I always want to be open and frank with you guys.
	I mean, otherwise I'm just a crazy guy talking to myself.
	So maybe I'm a crazy guy not talking to myself, but I really, really appreciate you guys being here.
	And have yourself a wonderful, wonderful evening.

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