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May 15, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:15:50

FREEDOMAIN CHRISTIAN ROUNDTABLE with Stefan Molyneux

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	Good evening everybody. Thank you for joining us in our first inaugural session of Well, the free domain, I need a more elegant title.
	This is all I could come up with in the spur of the moment, was the religion roundtable, because, well, I've had me some thoughts, and I guess I wanted to share them with everyone before they escaped me with regards to religion.
	And I have a fairly lengthy history with religion, as some of you who've listened to the show for a while No, and I wanted to share some thoughts I've had, some somewhat disturbing thoughts I've had about the current state of the West and religion as a whole, and I guess get your thoughts and all of that.
	I just want to make sure that the stream is cooking in the way that it turns supposed to be.
	Yeah, we're all set. We're all set.
	Oh, I see, I see.
	Okay, we'll just pop this out then.
	And... We'll be good to go.
	Alright. You guys can hear me.
	Okay, so... This is...
	Sorry. Frog in the throat.
	Or Satan interfering with my vocal cords.
	Something like that. It's one of these things.
	One of these things for sure. So...
	I wanted to talk about some of the major issues, two major issues that I've sort of been cooking in my brain about what's going on with religion and me, and obviously get your thoughts as listeners and people who watch the show and other thoughts that you may have on the topic of religion in general.
	And the first is my concern that we kind of have...
	I was hoping to replace religion with reason, but it seems that I have participated in the replacement of religion with the cult of statism.
	Not really the plan, although, of course, there would be Christians in the past who have said, but dude, that's exactly what would have happened.
	That's exactly what happened in the French Revolution.
	That's exactly what happened.
	In the Russian Revolution and the Cambodian Revolution that you take religion, you root it out, you uproot religion.
	And what you do is you say, well, no, because, you know, when we do this uprooting of religion stuff, we're going to get this tasty reason and evidence thing that's going on.
	But unfortunately, it don't seem to play out that way.
	And I'm not sure exactly why, but I am an evidence kind of guy, right?
	So I always want to...
	Keep that going.
	So very briefly, just talk about what I think has happened.
	Get your thoughts. And again, this doesn't have to be my monopoly or anything like that.
	So I'm really going to compress a whole bunch of Catholic Protestant history here.
	So, as you probably know, in the Middle Ages, the church services were largely conducted in Latin.
	And, of course, the peasantry, the average middle class, even didn't know Latin.
	You had to be highly educated and dedicate yourself for years to learn Latin.
	And the Bible was not available in the vernacular to the average person.
	And that all changed, of course, with Martin Luther, who translated the Bible into the vernacular, handed it out so people could get direct access to the core text that influenced or informed or really dictated their moral and theological choices.
	And so, prior to the translation of the Bible into the vernacular, you had to go to the priest, and the priest wouldn't give you the original text.
	He would give you his interpretation of the original text, and you just had to go with his authority When it came to making the most essential decisions of morality and life and society and the aristocracy versus democracy and so on.
	So now there have been a whole bunch of happenings that have occurred that have, to me, replicated that situation in that now, instead of a priestly class, we now have a scientific class, a sciencely class, a slightly different outfit.
	But the amount of irrationality or anti-rationality seems to be quite similar.
	So now, as you know, if you want to, say, look at the data that has informed the evaluation of the three or four major coronavirus vaccine manufacturers, and you say, they say, oh, it's safe.
	And we say, you know, sure, I get you guys think that.
	But unfortunately, you have a significant financial incentive to say so, as does the government, in saying that it's safe so that we can kind of return to normal as this theory goes.
	So given that there are too many interested parties in here, we would love to have a look at the original documents, at the original text.
	We'd like to see the data and we'd like to see the methodology, to which the answer seems to be a resounding no.
	Just no, can't have the data.
	Back in the, I think it was the late 80s, early 90s or something like that, was that famous hockey stick graph about global warming, right?
	Where the guy, you know, here's the temperatures, here's the CO2, and it just goes up crazy towards the end.
	And that was really the foundation of global warming.
	And... When people said, well, we want to see the source, we want to see the data, we want to see the code that you're using to implement this stuff, my memory of it was it's kind of like a resounding no, and eventually people did get a hold of this stuff and they found that no matter what numbers you plugged into it, you got exactly the same hockey stick graph, that either through corruption or incompetence or some other methodology, it seemed that...
	Didn't matter. Now then, of course, by then, the giant avalanche of power was underway, so the government wanted global warming to scare the population, to raise taxes, to declare plant food as something that was going to kill you, like that beast in the office of, gosh, what's that musical?
	Little Shop of Horrors, right?
	So instead of the plant eating you in fantasy, it's plant food eating you in reality.
	Or in another kind of fantasy.
	So there was that aspect of things where you just can't get the source data.
	The race and IQ stuff, of course, you can't get anyone to talk about it because it goes against the sort of powers that be.
	And in many societies, the general issue is...
	That the aristocracy or the nobility or the ruling classes, let's say, what they do with religion is they will generally say, we will give you a monopoly on religion, but you have to give the population the belief that we are divine or holy or sanctioned by God and therefore should rule over them.
	And that's kind of the warrior class and the priestly class kind of go hand in glove that way, or hand in male's glove.
	And it seems to me now that we have this system where the ruling class, the democratic governments, the deep state or the shadow state or the scientific industrial complex, that the government gives all this money to the scientists.
	And in return, the scientists seem to produce endless amounts of data that justify increases in government power.
	And that's why there doesn't really seem to be.
	I mean, there was no robust debate about whether lockdowns work.
	There was no robust debate about whether masks should work.
	Oh, and there was another one, too, which was the Royal College in England came out with their estimates of COVID spread and all of that.
	And there wasn't a lot of debate.
	I don't know if you could get a hold of the source data or the source assumptions, but the assumptions were pretty bad.
	The assumptions were that nobody was going to change their behavior unless actually forced to, and therefore the line would be going crazy up for COVID, and only if the government intervened and forced people would anyone change their behavior, which is a completely false assumption.
	And now it's gotten to the point where if you do anything which questions an official government bureaucratic scientific narrative, like you go against what the World Health Organization says, or you go against what the CDC says, or you have questions, you ask for source data, then you just get deplatformed, you get silenced, which really is a form of blasphemy against people.
	A writ, a, well, the scientists are certain, and scientists say, and this has become, like, you can't get the source data, you can't engage in a robust debate, and it's become a priestly class that is dictating to and dominating, really, the entirety of the world, through the World Health Organization, and more locally, through every country's version of the CDC. That's really disturbing.
	I mean, that's really disturbing.
	This methodology by which central bureaucracies with highly corrupt science then creates a narrative which anybody who questions gets kicked out of polite society, gets kicked off the social media, and so on, because they're spreading misinformation.
	Misinformation or disinformation is the new blasphemy laws, the new hate speech laws, I suppose.
	And I think back to C.S. Lewis, to a bunch of other thinkers, all the way back to Nietzsche, who said, you know, if you drive God out by the front door, he will simply come in through the back door, and in a worse form, right?
	And Nietzsche, of course, was predicting some of the totalitarian horrors of the 20th century because people stopped self-regulating according to religion, and therefore they were more drawn to an external hyper-regulatory agency like the state of fascism, communism, and so on.
	And Yeah, so there's other sort of thoughts that I had.
	Those are the major ones. It's just we really do have this priestly class of scientists now that you can't question.
	You can't ask for their source data.
	You can't examine their methodology.
	And science, I'm really a big fan of Richard Feynman's great quote that all science is founded on skepticism of science.
	Experts, right? The experts say, it's like, well, the experts said smoking is good for you.
	Experts said that there were no such thing as germs.
	Experts said a wide variety of things that, you know, experts say that cutting fat and replacing it with carbs is going to be great for your health and so on.
	Experts say that kids do fine in daycare.
	The whole point was supposed to be a debate, right?
	Everything was supposed to be a debate with science in the same way that, you know, the early aspects of Christianity and a great robust tradition of Christianity has been the debate, certainly since Martin Luther's time, for sure.
	And this absence of debate, this we can't question the experts, and if you do question the experts, you're spreading dangerous disinformation and must be – like now it's like you would be spreading dangerous disinformation under certain theocratic regimes and therefore you'd have to be banned from society because you were imperiling people's souls.
	And now there's this belief that because bureaucratic scientists being heavily paid and wedded, you know, cheek by jowl with government power say stuff you can't oppose it, otherwise you're spreading disinformation and threatening people's lives and people will die and, you know, this hysterical escalation.
	It has just really gotten way out of control.
	And things have gotten really, really crazy now to the point where there is no debate.
	The debate is over. What if they say that with global warming?
	The debate is over. 97% of scientists, well, that was all a nonsense figure, as I've talked about before.
	And the whole point of science is the debate is never supposed to be over.
	I mean, it's not supposed to be over.
	I mean, it's always supposed to be open to new information, new data.
	And I do get the sense still that the majority of scientists are pretty decent guys, but You know, that there's a small number of people who just seem to be out and out, dangerous sociopaths, willing to destroy people's income, careers, lives, and so on, if they go against the pro-statist narrative, I think those tiny number of bullies, like the social justice warriors and the deplatforming people, those tiny number of bullies are kind of running science just as they are running society as a whole, culture as a whole, it seems these days, so...
	That's sort of my major thoughts with regards to religion.
	It's not much of a solution in any of that, but I did want to get across the ideas that I had.
	And you're certainly welcome to, you know, don't forget to unmute yourself, but to talk about what your thoughts are with regards to this or anything else that you wanted to talk about in the realm of religion.
	I really do appreciate everybody dropping by tonight.
	Don't forget to unmute if you want to talk, though.
	Have I stunned everyone? I feel like I might talk a lot, so I want to give space for other people.
	Myself, even out of honor.
	Go for it. I question whether or not it's really possible to live without faith.
	Like you said, one of your goals was that you wanted to replace religion with reason.
	And then I kind of question whether or not how far you could really go with that.
	Oh, am I being a little too loud?
	Maybe I'm going to move this back.
	Okay. So Like, I love what you, and please anybody feel free to interrupt me at any time, but I love what you did with UPB. I think that is advancing our sort of understanding of what is true morally.
	So I have a question.
	So Stefan, do you believe that you have any faith-based beliefs in your current thinking of how you live your life?
	Oh, I'm going to be that annoying philosophy guy and say, could you please define what you mean by faith-based beliefs?
	Yeah, so going back, I became a Christian when I was 23, and I discovered your show.
	Previously, you would present a lot of strong criticisms of Christianity, so it made me think a lot about it.
	And then so I had to wrestle with a lot of the things that you were putting forward at the time.
	And so, yeah, so one of the things I've been thinking a lot about over the years is what do I mean by what is faith?
	Because if you don't have a good definition of something, you really can't talk about it.
	To me, faith means that you believe something, but you don't have evidence for it.
	So One more thing about it.
	In my framework, I think that it makes sense to talk about rational faith and irrational faith.
	A rational faith is a belief that has to meet three criteria for me.
	One is it has to be internally, logically consistent.
	Two, it can't go against evidence.
	There doesn't have to be evidence for it, but there can't be evidence against it.
	And then the third one is that it has to improve your life somehow.
	So to throw out a couple of examples, the kind of stereotypical example is there's a teacup orbiting Mars or Jupiter.
	To me, that would be an irrational faith.
	Because while there's nothing logically inconsistent about it, and then two, there's no evidence against it, believing it doesn't improve your morality at all.
	Right? But, so...
	I have a suspicion that I can name a belief that you have that is a faith-based belief.
	But before I suggest it, I was wondering if...
	I'll pause there and see if I'm making sense.
	It's a great question.
	I don't want to cheapen it by saying, well, I act as if I'm not going to die tonight or tomorrow, although I don't have any proof of that.
	I mean, we generally try, you know, if this is my last day on Earth, much so I love you guys, I may not be doing this exact show precisely.
	So I act as if I've got, you know, statistically on average another 30 plus years to live.
	I don't have any proof of that.
	You know, I live as if an asteroid isn't about to hit my house.
	So you know what it is, right? Like I worked out today because, you know, which I wouldn't do if it was my last day on Earth.
	I'd have my face in cheesecake or something.
	But so... That's not an anti-rational belief.
	You don't want to live as if you're only living in the moment.
	You also don't want to defer all gratification to a future which may not come.
	So you've got to get that Aristotelian.
	Is it that kind of stuff that you're talking about or is it something else that I'm missing?
	Yeah, so that is not what I'm talking about.
	Because you do have lots of evidence that you will live for another 30 years.
	Because statistically, you look around and people your age live, a lot of them do live that long.
	So you have evidence that is a rational belief.
	So to me, that's more of an evidence-based belief than a faith-based one.
	So to give an example of one that's more faith-based, like...
	I love UPB, but I've been thinking about it for years, and I still haven't fully wrapped my head around it.
	So if I'm saying something about it that's incorrect, then please pause me and help me where I'm going wrong.
	So with UPB, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you believe that There is such a thing as objective right and wrong.
	Right? That's an interesting way of phrasing it.
	Again, I'm sorry to be that annoying philosophy guy, but that's kind of the gig, right?
	So... There's no such thing in terms of like it's not a real thing, it's not a tangible thing, it is an idea, it is a concept, it is an argument.
	It's almost like a tautology.
	That which you claim to be universal has to be universal.
	Because there's a great trick, sophist pull, which is to say, here's a universality and then this tiny little exclamation mark, except for me.
	So every thief wants there to be productive people in the universe so that he has things to steal from.
	In other words, the thief relies on other people not being thieves, but rather creating.
	Because if everyone's a thief, then nobody's creating anything.
	There's nothing to steal and everybody starves to death.
	And the thief, of course, respects property rights except in one instance.
	So he wants everyone else to have property rights so they have an incentive to create.
	He wants whatever he's...
	Whatever he steals, he wants to keep.
	In other words, if he steals your wallet and then someone steals the wallet from him, he's going to be outraged and upset and angry.
	So he wants all property rights to be there.
	Here's yours, everyone's, except for that one bit where he takes your property, then he wants that little asterisk, right?
	So UPB is sort of like saying, do you believe that the scientific method exists?
	It's like... So, UPB... It's simply a way of saying that if you claim that something is universal, then it has to pass the test of universality.
	And if you say theft is a universally preferable behavior, then that's a self-contradictory statement.
	Because theft cannot be universalized.
	You cannot have universally preferable behavior called theft.
	Because theft is the unwanted taking of somebody's property, right?
	So if I don't want you to take my property, but you want to take my property, that asymmetry, and you're going to, that's what theft is, right?
	So if I want you to take my property, in other words, if you and I both accept that theft is universally preferable behavior, then I want you to take my property, you want me to take your property, and therefore the category of theft doesn't exist.
	Saying that theft can be wanted is like saying that Rape can be consensual, right?
	The moment the sex is consensual, then it's not rape.
	Could be kinky, but it's not rape.
	Rape is specifically highly unwanted sexual contact.
	So rape, theft, assault, and murder, they cannot be universalized, and therefore they cannot be universally preferable behavior.
	And so, I mean, that's really the basic argument in a nutshell.
	Respect for property, that can be universalized.
	Respect for bodily integrity, that can be universalized.
	And so the UPB is just a way of analyzing human interactions.
	So the first question it asks and answers is, is there such a thing as universally preferable behavior at all?
	In other words, should we even have that as a category?
	And the answer is, well, it's one of these almost tautological things as well, because if somebody argues against UPB, if they say, well, there's no such thing as universally preferable behavior, therefore...
	You ought to stop arguing for universally preferable behavior.
	Well, they've just created a universally preferable behavior which is you should not argue for false things.
	You should not argue for contradictory things which is a UPB statement.
	So nobody can argue against UPB without deploying UPB and once we pass that threshold...
	Then we say, okay, is there any type of behavior which can be universally preferred?
	Because we've already said there is such a thing as universally preferable behavior because we're engaging in a debate and we've got truth and consistency and rationality and reason as our standards.
	And if we accept that there is such a thing as UPB, then we simply are in the process of defining what can be universally preferable behavior.
	Rape, theft, assault, murder can never be and therefore they have to be rejected as potential moral categories.
	Yeah, so I think it might help to, like, dive into a hypothetical so I make sure I'm following.
	So let's say you're, like, walking down the street, and then you look down an alley, and then you see a person there, I don't know, just doing something evil to another person.
	You know, like, you're not, you don't want to go into, like, horrific examples, but you're, you know, we're watching someone just An old lady getting beat up or something.
	Or it could be somebody openly putting a pause on one of my podcasts.
	Oh, no, no, sorry. We don't want to get overly graphic.
	Let's go to the less evil category, just beating up an old person.
	Okay, got it. Yeah. So then you might yell down the alley, hey, stop!
	And then the person says, why?
	And then you say, you might say, I imagine you might say, what you're doing right now is wrong.
	You should stop.
	And then the person says, wrong?
	What are you talking about?
	I've just, like, wrong and right aren't categories for me.
	I'm just, you know, go away.
	I'm not debating you.
	I'm just beating this person up.
	So would you...
	So I think that that person has not acknowledged that what they're doing is right or wrong.
	So would you say that that person is doing something wrong, even though that they haven't acknowledged it?
	And I know I'm asking that question kind of going to...
	Well, I would say, to put it in more technical terms, that there can be no universal justification for that person's behavior.
	So because that person is assaulting someone who doesn't want to be assaulted, like you can assault people, they want to be assaulted, right?
	Obviously, you're in a boxing ring or a hockey match or, you know, you voluntarily go to an Antifa rally.
	And I'm just kidding about the last one, right?
	So if you're in a boxing match, then yeah, you are voluntarily consenting to hit and be hit and that's not a violation of UPB and so on, right?
	But obviously the assault is the old person does not want to be assaulted.
	And so what you would say in that situation, again, can you talk the person out of doing evil if they're committed to evil?
	That's an interesting question.
	But what you would say is that person's behavior can never be universally preferable behavior.
	And so it goes against UPB. It cannot be universalized.
	Now, UPB as a synonym for morality, and I know that that's like a big jump for a lot of people, but just because the word morality is so fraught with everybody's individual connotations, and also, of course, as we know from this conversation, or we'll find out, overspills to the theological realm.
	I came up with UPB as a sort of secular version or secular term for morality.
	So, and the interesting thing about what you're doing there, and perfectly fine thing to do, is if I were to say to you, let's say that you're a nutritionist, and you say, you know, people should eat fruits and vegetables, they should not eat a lot of candy, they should not overindulge in carbs, I don't know, I'm not a nutritionist, but whatever, like, good nutritional advice is.
	Now, if you are walking down the street and you see somebody who's having a heart attack, would you go up to that person and say, have you been eating a lot of fat and carbs and have you not been exercising?
	Like it wouldn't make much sense in that particular context because nutrition is about preventing the heart attack.
	It's not about curing the heart attack.
	The heart attack, you've got to go to ER, you've got to get the paddles, you've got to get CPR, EKG, whatever they do to deal with that.
	So nutrition is really about the prevention of the heart attack, assuming somebody's not like 90 or whatever, right?
	And so think of it more in the realm of a vaccine rather than a cure, right?
	So the way that you would end up with somebody who's beating up someone else in an alley is because UPB has been violated with that person when they were a child, right?
	So they were beaten up, they were aggressed against, they were harmed, they've got post-traumatic stress disorder, they've got impulse control issues, they're very angry, they don't want to obey society's rules because society didn't protect them as a child.
	So here you would have a situation where you have a criminal who is a criminal largely because, or you could say mostly because, Thank you.
	Thank you. Impulse control, violent tendencies, and sociopathic lack of empathy and cruelty and sadism and all of that kind of stuff.
	So UPB is really – it's not a magic word that allows you to stop evildoers, you know, in their midst, but neither is – Religion, of course, but it is in the realm of prevention rather than cure.
	So, yeah, you can go up and say, well, what you're doing is wrong.
	And the typical thing is, well, how would you like it if someone did that to you?
	That's the primitive approach to UPB. Or you'd say, okay, so you're beating up this guy.
	How would you like it if I beat you up?
	Well, you wouldn't like it at all.
	So that's the first sort of sense of UPB. Can it be universalized?
	You're doing it to someone else. Can I do it?
	To you. And you'd say, well, the assaulter, the criminal would say, well, no, I don't want you to do it to me.
	It's like, okay, well, then it can't ever be universally preferable behavior.
	That's not going to stop him because he's probably a sociopath who has had empathy stripped out of him or never built into him when he was a toddler and he's stuck with a criminal brain probably for the rest of his life.
	But if we sort of rewind quite a ways, right?
	If you're having a heart attack, right?
	And there's this old Richard Pryor You have a heart attack and your heart is just punching you in the balls, basically saying, oh yeah, did you like that pork chop?
	Was that tasty? Well, I'm getting my own back on you now.
	And so the rewind situation and the application of UPB to parenting to children to that kind of family environment is what means that you won't walk down that alley and see somebody beating up.
	So hopefully that makes some sense.
	Hey, Steph, this is John.
	Hey, I think there's doctrinal support for UPB. Hang on, sorry, Tim was in the middle of, I wanted to make sure we can take that another time or offline.
	I just wanted to know what your thoughts were about what I said there.
	Yes. I just...
	I wonder...
	Because, like, in most of the times that I hear you talk about UPB, the thing that makes a lot of sense to me is that if somebody tries to debate you, then they're already asserting the existence of it.
	And then... But if somebody's not trying to debate you, and they're just going around doing stuff, then they're not asserting that there is any right or wrong things to their...
	There's no right or wrong...
	aspect to what they're doing.
	So...
	Sorry, but that's when you have the right of self-defense and you can use violence up to lethal force to defend yourself against such a predator.
	So UPB justifying self-defense, I've got the whole argument in the book, so I won't run through it here, but UPB is justifying self-defense gives you a wonderful moral protection against such a person if If such a person is beyond reason, then clearly you don't try and reason with them.
	You tell them to back off or you simply shoot them or find some other way to disable them, and UPB perfectly accepts and values self-defense, so you're well protected either way.
	I mean, if you can reason them into being nicer, great.
	If not, you can give them a little bit of lead poisoning and have them back off that way.
	Maybe it's just me, but it seems that Tim's argument is subjective.
	Do they accept this or not?
	But the whole point of UPB is that it's objective.
	It's like, yeah, there's flat earthers, but science as a concept is valid.
	It's objective. Well, and you have these disciplines precisely because people reject them.
	There's no philosophy of gravity.
	You really should accept gravity.
	That's just something that happens on its own.
	There's the science of nutrition because people have a desire to eat badly or a habit of eating badly.
	There's a science of exercise because generally people prefer to not move big metal weights in a dark room or something like that.
	And there's a science of morality because we are tempted to take the short, easy route to exercise.
	Resources to steal rather than to create, to rape rather than make love and so on.
	And so the whole premise of all philosophy is that it's optional in the same way that nutrition and exercise and all of that are optional.
	Are optional. And so because people have a tendency to not be moral, they have a tendency to not eat well, they have a tendency to not exercise, we have to remind them repeatedly of the value of it.
	And we have a tendency to create magical explanations for phenomenon rather than go to the hard, difficult world of work of science.
	The fact that people act in non-UPB compliant ways is merely saying that we have free will and should further reinforce our desire to spread good morals and good ethics, in this case UPB, to people.
	And the fact that people were rejected is exactly why it exists in the first place.
	It's not a contradiction of the theory, but rather a confirmation of the need for its existence.
	Okay, yeah.
	Yeah, I need to think about that more.
	Yeah, no problem, no problem. Sorry, you had, was it you, Seth?
	You had something you wanted to mention?
	Did I get that right? No, it was me, John.
	Sorry, John, go ahead. You're good.
	So I wanted to propose here, this is scripture.
	So I'm LDS, Church Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
	Yeah, hold on. My greatest obstacle will be my children's lives.
	They are not an obstacle.
	They are the future, so they are welcome.
	All right. Can you go with Mommy for a sec?
	Please? Mommy's got something for you.
	Okay. Daddy is doing something interesting, and that certainly beats whatever Mom's doing at the moment.
	Daddy has little tiny people trapped inside the magic boxes on his screen, and that's way more fascinating than what Mom's doing.
	So... Because I'm aware we have the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we have the benefit of more modern scripture as well.
	Hi, guys.
	Hi.
	Because the concept of the church that Jesus Christ himself had established when he was on earth was restored.
	That's the principle behind it.
	And that there is continual revelation.
	In this particular case, there is a set of scriptures called Doctrine and Covenants.
	In Doctrine and Covenants, section 130, verse 20 through 21, it says, There is a law irrevocably decreed in heaven before the foundation of this world upon which all blessings are predicated.
	And when we obtain any blessing from God, it is by obedience to that law which it is predicated.
	So, if we consider it in this light, UPB, blessings are a preferable state to be in.
	So, if we obey whatever law that has been decreed in heaven even before the foundation of this earth existing, then we will be subject, generally speaking, to that preferable state, that blessed state.
	And that's something I'd like to submit if we want to break it down, get into it.
	I think another example of that would be from the Book of Mormon.
	I also come from a Mormon background, although I'm from one of the splinter groups.
	There's a prophet who gives, you know, the prophet Alma gives a dissertation to a group of poor people who have essentially been kicked out of their churches they built themselves, and he essentially...
	Creates an ethics version of the scientific method where he argues, you know, you exercise a particle of faith if you even want to believe my words, and if you try it, you'll see an empirical effect, essentially, and that experiment gives you more knowledge, and as you keep doing this, you eventually graduate to having a perfect knowledge of whatever the principle is.
	So I think that's related to what you were saying.
	I think so, yeah. Well and I'm happy though I am that there is a sense of universality and this is why my feelings towards Christianity have changed so much is that Christianity does over vault the tribal inward facing we win you lose aspect of most belief systems and of course I don't think it's an accident that I was raised as a Christian and came up with universal morality as a sort of catch-up to the statements of Jesus that I talked about in my Easter show.
	That Jesus marks the end to tribalism and the birth of universal morality, because Socrates didn't really make it as far as universal morality went, neither did Aristotle, and certainly Plato was really running in the opposite direction in many ways.
	But what Socrates did in particular was kind of what Nietzsche did.
	Socrates and Nietzsche are kind of like this corrosive acid that wash away all but the most essential aspects of your architecture.
	And whatever survives those nihilistic blasts of skepticism is probably worth...
	I'm maintaining and growing.
	So to me, the Greeks and the Romans really knocked down a lot of superstitions and sophistry is probably a better way to put it.
	The claims of knowledge of wisdom that don't pan out because they can't be universalized.
	That's what Socrates was doing.
	People say, I know what justice is.
	It's X. And they say, okay, well, can X be universalized?
	No. Oh, I know what the good thing is.
	The good thing is pleasure. And Socrates says, okay, well, you know, when you get an itch and you scratch it, it's like a great feeling.
	So are you saying that, you know, the best thing is just to have an itch that you're continually scratching for the rest of your life?
	That doesn't seem right. And so he would extrapolate to absurdity, which is to universalize to the point where it breaks.
	And so he took down a lot of that.
	Having that standard, I think, cleared the way for Christ to come with universal morality, which really was the birth of the modern world and of slavery and so on.
	And so I'm very, very happy to have that sense of universalism that occurs, that is not, you know, as Islam is, as Judaism is, as other religions are, much more, you know, my tribe good, your tribe, eh, we'll see, right?
	Whereas the universality of Christianity, to me, very much dovetails.
	I was never able to...
	Have a satisfying explanation as to where it came from.
	Because I'm a keep digging until you get to the roots kind of guy.
	And I wasn't satisfied with Plato's.
	There's really not much of it in Socrates.
	I wasn't satisfied with Aristotle, Ayn Rand, and Nietzsche doesn't even really touch on it.
	And the will to power that comes out of Nietzsche is just social Darwinism in many ways.
	So I just had to keep poking and keep looking.
	And I think that...
	The philosophy of universal morality combined with what Jesus says, of course, I think is a way of extending it and maybe giving a root.
	And I've always sort of felt that, and this is not my original argument, this goes back to Thomas Aquinas or even before, where you say, look, God gave us this incredible capacity for universal reason.
	And it would be – and as we see, as we sort of dig into the physical world, right, and we see these majestic, beautiful, amazing, consistent laws everywhere, that the argument was not, well, if we study science, we are somehow turning our back on God.
	Of course, many of the scientists and the Christian scientists of the past and Christian scientists now say, no, no, no, I'm examining the mind of God.
	God.
	I'm looking at the beauty of his exquisite architecture when I'm looking at this stuff.
	And for me, the idea that morality could not be reasoned out when God gives us this amazing capacity for universal reasoning, universal conceptualization, I really sort of felt like that can't be.
	It can't be right that God gives us the most amazing and unique gift that we have, discounting the concept of the soul for the moment.
	This most amazing ability to universalize and conceptualize so that our minds can span 14.3 billion years ago to now and It can span all the way across the universe, and that's a gift that God has given us.
	But then he's going to say, well, when it comes to ethics, man, no.
	You can't think about that stuff too much.
	You can't reason it through. That to me, given that I don't see a contradiction between the examination of the universe and a respect for God, I can't see the examination of universal morality from a rational basis to be somewhat something against what God would have intended for our most magnificent gift of reason.
	Well, maybe it's just me, but I think that universality goes all the way back to the Ten Commandments, right?
	There are no exceptions listed anywhere there, and God's chosen people are constantly reamed for not obeying those commandments, right?
	Now, the practice may not have been there of universality, but I would argue that the original intention was definitely in that direction.
	Yeah, you cannot judge a theory.
	It's pretty foundational to the way that I look at life.
	I mean, I get that there's a certain amount of efficiency that you have to kind of deal with things.
	You know, the old fat guy doesn't sell a diet book kind of thing.
	But you can't judge a theory by its practitioners and you can't judge UPB by people who say, oh, I'm into UPB and then do terrible things, right?
	I mean, however, you know, that's sort of the...
	The deductive version is, okay, well, if a whole bunch of people who believe in UPB end up as serial killers, that might give us some pause.
	But yeah, and that's the big question is we'll often go from, well, here's the theory.
	What if somebody practices the opposite?
	What does that do to the theory?
	It's like, well, so you have the scientific method.
	And if somebody is superstitious and reads tea leaves as to trying to find the secrets of the universe, that doesn't invalidate the scientific method.
	It just reminds us why we need one.
	You had a couple of callers like that, right?
	That couple that agreed with UPB and anarcho-capitalism, but there was violence in their relationship.
	And I'm like, agreeing with me politically doesn't do much.
	It's intended to help your family, first and foremost.
	That's why you talk about peaceful parenting, right?
	Now, I do have an atheist UPB rant in me that is rising up in me like a reverse Satan fall from grace.
	But I don't want to dictate and dominate.
	If there's other topics, I can bookmark that easy peasy.
	If there's other topics you guys want to talk about, I'm certainly happy to hear.
	Would anybody like to talk about the concept of the nature of faith?
	I could throw some thoughts.
	I don't know what that means from Tim.
	I don't know. I don't know what that means.
	I discussed this earlier, but I argue that faith and logic are connected.
	I would say faith is kind of logic applied to a particular...
	It's applied to religious principles instead of other things.
	Just like, you know, math is logic applied to numbers.
	I can certainly do faith as a bookmark until we get there.
	You know, faith is...
	I mean, I had to have some belief that I could solve the problem of rational morality before I did, right?
	So I felt I could, and I sat down, and I remember that day.
	I sat down. I'm not getting up.
	I don't care if I pee my leg. I'm not getting up until I figure this one out.
	So I think faith...
	I have faith that we'll have a peaceful world.
	I have a faith that people, that, that children will be included in universal morality.
	I have a faith that we're going to end spanking.
	I have a faith that we're going to end circumcision.
	I have a faith that we're going to end up in a stateless society.
	Uh, not a lot of evidence for it right now, but I have a, a, I guess a faith, if that makes sense, there's kind of a bookmark for we'll get there, but we ain't there and hopefully we've got a map on the way.
	Yeah.
	Well, can I jump in?
	So, earlier, I was kind of asking you if you had any beliefs that were faith-based, and then you kind of maybe sounded like you weren't sure if you did, but, you know, like, maybe I misunderstood you, but so then just right now, you said you do have faith in some things.
	So, would it be safe to say now that there are faith-based beliefs that you have?
	Depends on your definition.
	Yeah, that was based on the definition that faith, for me, is not belief in the impossible.
	It's not belief in the contradictory.
	It's a belief... In something which I believe can be achieved but for which I don't have proof and we may in fact be going in the opposite direction but we will get there eventually.
	That to me is, you know, what's the evidence we're going to end up with a stateless society?
	Well, governments around the world are getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and debts are getting bigger and armies are getting bigger and weaponry and surveillance is getting bigger and people being deplatformed.
	All over the place and so on.
	Nonetheless, you know, the arc of the universe is long, but bends towards justice, I think, in the long run.
	There's a lot of hiccups along the way.
	So, and that faith, it does sustain me.
	Because if I was simply to look at the short-term empiricism, I probably couldn't get out of bed tomorrow, to be frank, right?
	I couldn't. Because, you know, since I started this mission to reason with the world 40 years ago, I've had massive successes in many ways, like a billion views and downloads, just about the biggest philosophical impact in world history.
	But at the same time, you know, de-platformed, slandered, lied about, attacked, you know, physically and so on and threatened.
	And, you know, there's rough stuff coming along, the demographic IQ of fall and all this kind of stuff.
	There's rough passages ahead.
	And so what is it that sustains me on the journey?
	What is it that says it's worth keeping doing this, right?
	I have to believe that, you know, from the giant chasm of social humiliation and degradation and insult and slander that I've been thrown into, that the echo of the words into the future will still have significant value.
	And also that I think it does some good to show moral courage in the face of adversity to people in the world as a whole.
	So if you're looking for where I can see faith in what it is that I do, I think it would be in that vicinity if that helps.
	When I was going through that criteria before, I said it's got to be logically consistent.
	There can't be evidence against it.
	If you knew it wasn't possible for us to be successful in terms of bringing peace and freedom, expanding peace and freedom in the world at some point, then it would be irrational to keep believing that if you knew it wasn't going to happen.
	And then the third one is that by believing that by your effort that's going to yield fruit, that actually causes you to go out and try to reap that harvest.
	So to me, those beliefs meet the three criteria of being rational faith.
	But is it rational to have hope in this circumstance?
	I don't know.
	I don't honestly know.
	That is where, to me, if I give up hope, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
	If I act as if there's hope, then there's a chance, however slim that chance may be.
	But I think if you're looking at the sort of empirical data around the world, particularly the massive crash in human liberties around COVID, You know, and the idea that we're going to go back to normal to me is pretty much a pipe dream at the moment.
	I mean, it'll probably get better, but it won't go back to normal, I think.
	So if you look at things empirically, you say, well, what the hell is the point of having this hope?
	What is the point of having this optimism or this, let's keep going?
	I mean, at some point, are you just looking a little foolish?
	You know, like those people who show up for the American Idol competition sounding like a cat being dragged ass backward through a holly bush in a blender.
	Like this not empirical.
	There is something I'd like to add to what Tim's saying, and that's that there isn't very much that's certain in life, right?
	It's often a matter of probabilities.
	So I think that's an important consideration of can I succeed or am I going to fail?
	Well, it's a probability between zero and one, and I don't think it's easy to know which is which.
	Yeah, and I think, you know, I remember early on, like, in the earlier podcast you did, because, you know, I've been kind of starting from the beginning and working forward, because you don't produce enough content.
	I remember some of the earlier podcasts you did, like, some of the first ones you said, the goal is not to change the world in this generation.
	We are training the people who will train the people who will train the people, like, We could be 100 years away from actually seeing the fruit of what we're working on now.
	And you don't know. It could just be one person to one person, and then how that change will come into effect.
	Okay, so I've been doing this publicly for 16 years, so we're 16% of the way through that 100 years.
	Right? I mean, devil's advocate here, right?
	So if you've got a business plan, and you say, I'm going to make $10 million in 100 days, and 16 days in, you're massively in debt from when you started, because we have fewer freedoms now than when I started the podcast, right?
	More debt, fewer freedoms.
	Hey, we got Bitcoin now that we didn't have when you started.
	But the future is the millions of children who have parents engaging in peaceful parenting, right?
	I don't think it's ideal to measure in terms of politics because we're not big enough to be doing that.
	Right, right.
	But you certainly could build a pretty strong case for not having an excess of hope for your cup not running over.
	No, governments always grow bigger, stronger, more tyrannical over time, and then they collapse.
	That's the history.
	Right, right.
	I think the belief that your effort is going to yield fruit is a rational thing, even in dark times.
	And that kind of goes to Christianity, if we could bring it there.
	You know, Jesus was dead on a cross and everybody thought it was over.
	But then, you know, even from that, like, complete loss.
	Everybody thought it was done.
	Everybody gave up hope.
	It was over.
	But then from that, like, you know, one of the greatest, like, you know, moral changes in the world came about.
	So you can never just...
	Like, never give up.
	I remember you did that, you kind of went through Winston Churchill's speech about never, ever, ever give up.
	And, you know, I loved that speech when you said that.
	Sorry, somebody want to add to that?
	My favorite is the three tentations are priced.
	Let me just ask this, where are you guys' level of optimism about the short to medium term?
	Terrible. But long term...
	I think Bitcoin gives us a chance.
	Crypto gives us a chance.
	If it wasn't for that, I'd be a lot less optimistic.
	On a personal basis, for me, I am actually very highly optimistic for myself and for the people I can influence in my life.
	Or at least for myself.
	I have to start with that as a core.
	Because if I can prove the life of myself and my family, I mean, that's changing the world.
	In my world, at least, in a way that I can see it.
	And kind of going off what you guys were talking about, I've been trying to get in, but every time I want to get in, it's my kids making noise or whatever.
	Steph, you have, not word for word explicitly, but you have been stating the exact principles of Hebrews 11.1, which is, faith is the substance, or the Greek word is assurance, of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
	And this, also there's some, and when you talk about kind of the practical side of it, you were mentioning earlier.
	Also, Seth, have you heard, Seth, you've heard of Lectures on Faith, right?
	Yeah, I've read it. Okay, yeah, Lectures on Faith.
	He's talking, Steph right now is talking about the first parts of Lectures on Faith.
	There's faith, what it is, the object that it rests, and thirdly, the effects that flow from it.
	It's essentially a logical argument for why you can have faith in God, because it's the attributes of God that is what allows you to have faith in Him, essentially.
	Exactly. And like Joseph Smith starts about, you know, if you consider yourselves and turn your thoughts to the reflections of the operations of their own minds, they would readily discover that it is faith and faith only, which is moving cause for all action in them, that without it, both mind and body would be in a state of inactivity.
	Then all their exertions would cease, both physical and mental.
	And then it goes about explaining, you know, you wouldn't plant seeds if they wouldn't grow.
	You wouldn't get up in the morning if you wouldn't do anything.
	And it just really elaborates on there.
	It is brought out very clearly and plainly.
	And I do love this.
	I haven't been able to study it as...
	Deeply as I'd like, but from everything that I've read and gone over with this, this has been an amazing elaboration on the concept of faith, what it should be based on, and the effects that will flow from it.
	Yeah, I think the utility... Sorry, I just had a tiny bit of an internet hiccup, but as far as I understood it, everybody had agreed with me and that I was totally right.
	But I'm back now, and yeah, keep on going.
	Okay. So I think the utility of faith is essentially that if you require proof before setting out to do something, you're never going to do it.
	So the big weakness of logic is a lack of evidence.
	It's very difficult to prove things or to get enough evidence to prove things.
	And so you have to act on incomplete information.
	And so that's really what Stefan was talking about, right?
	You have to assume that what you're doing matters, otherwise you'd have no incentive to do it.
	Just like when you exercise, I don't have proof that when I exercise, per se, I'm going to get X gains.
	But it's by doing it that I get the proof.
	Yeah, and I wanted to add...
	You know, I shared a verse today with somebody that said...
	It was Paul, and he said, Do not grow weary in doing good, because you will reap a harvest in the proper time if you don't give up.
	And then you don't know that that's going to happen, but believing that...
	Believing that it will happen, even if you don't know, having faith in that, to me, Faith is rational because that gives you the best chance, even if you don't know.
	Maybe it won't work out. Maybe this whole planet's going to be nuked in like 20 years and there's going to be no life at all on it.
	But our best chance is if we believe that we have the chance, if we believe that we have an impact on it and go for it and that we will reap a harvest, even if we don't know.
	Just faith is valid.
	Yes, but there's a caveat there, though, and that's that you can't have faith in contradictory information, right?
	So if I go on a weight loss program and I'm gaining weight instead of losing weight, my faith in that program should decrease, right?
	There has to be a component where you reevaluate the theory based on the evidence.
	Otherwise, you can have faith in all sorts of things that make no sense.
	But, like, to go with, you know, like, the Bible, you know, I already, like, mentioned Jesus, where it just looked so bad.
	The evidence was so bad.
	You know, or to give another one, you know, you have Joseph in Egypt.
	You know, his brother sold him into slavery, and he...
	You know, just had to be a slave for all this time.
	And then, so if you were asking, you know, he got a little bit of prestige in a certain career, and then a woman accused him of rape, so then he had to go to prison.
	You know, like, it...
	You can't judge if we are heading in the right direction.
	Like Stefan, you said, you know, there was a Chinese ambassador who said you can't even judge the French Revolution at this point, even 200 years later.
	What do you think of the French Revolution?
	He said it might be too soon to tell.
	Exactly. But here's the thing, right?
	So you can certainly plant your feet deep in, you know, think positive thoughts and do good and the rest will follow.
	I do go back to, I don't know, 1930s Germany, where a lot of the Jews were like, oh, you know, it's just a bunch of talk, you know, it was just scapegoats and so on.
	A bunch of Jews fled, a bunch of Jews stayed, and the ones who stayed who thought they could turn it around or it wasn't that bad or their good works would somehow win the day didn't make it, right?
	The question, right?
	I mean, I did this with politics, right?
	I mean, I had optimism about...
	Well, I had a lot of pessimism for many years about politics.
	And then when Trump came along, I thought, that's interesting enough to start talking about it in more detail.
	And then, you know, after the deplatforming and also seeing what was going to come up with the level of hinkery on the election in November, I was like, eh, you know, I'm back to being done with politics, which I have no regrets.
	I think it was actually a very wise decision.
	So the caution aspect of things I think is really important.
	Another way of putting it is, when is it time to bug out?
	When is it time to stop?
	When is it time to... I don't know, move or whatever it is, right?
	I mean, this is a big question, right?
	So like here in Canada, they're trying to get legislation now that's going to put a lot of restrictions and caveats on social media platforms and so on.
	You know, is it...
	Where does optimism and realism and possibilities...
	Where do they intersect, right?
	So just marching forward, no matter what, is...
	I mean, it has a certain amount of cool stuff to it, but I'm not sure that it's always the best strategy, if that makes sense.
	And knowing where the tipping point is is a challenge.
	Yeah.
	So we don't – I believe that we don't – we shouldn't – it's irrational to have belief that any particular strategy is going to be for sure successful.
	But I think it is rational to believe that if we just keep trying, that is going to yield fruit at some point.
	And we don't have to keep trying the same thing.
	And to give like a biblical story that kind of goes along with that, you know, Jeremiah was one of the prophets, you know, in ancient Israel.
	And other prophets around him at the time were saying, like, so Israel was under attack by, I think, I think Batalon...
	And then the Babylonians.
	And then so the other prophets at the time, they're saying, don't worry, the God's going to come and he's going to raise up an army and we're going to kick the Babylonians out of here and we're going to be fine.
	Don't worry about it. And then Jeremiah steps in and says, all these other prophets are lying to you.
	We are about to lose massively.
	And in fact, this, you know, a huge percentage of this people right here who can hear me, you're going to be dragged away in chains into exile.
	But don't worry because God's plan for this country is not over.
	Yeah, we're going to be in exile for a while, but it's interesting that the number of years that they were in exile actually added.
	So I think it was like every seventh year, the farmland was supposed to take a break, and then they just ignored that rule for all this time.
	So then while everyone was in exile, the land actually got all those years back of not being farmed.
	And then so he's saying, even though this country is being taken apart and we're all going to be in exile, it's not over.
	God's going to keep going, and God's plan is going to keep going, and then we will be back here.
	And in fact, one of the things Jeremiah did right before the army invaded is he went, and I think he bought a farm, and then he was showing people that, yeah, I'm not going to get to use it tomorrow.
	They're dragging me away.
	My great-grandchildren, they're going to come back here and they're going to own this farm because I bought it today.
	One day, we'll make it right.
	One more thing is, Jesus is coming back.
	I don't care how bad it looks.
	One day, victory will come.
	So, literally, there's no amount of evidence that's going to make me give up, like, at all.
	Like, you couldn't give me enough evidence for it, because Jesus will return, and he will make it right.
	Well, as Sarah Farrow once said, don't retreat, reload, right?
	That gets to what I think is the sticking point with faith, is that faith is not just...
	It's going to work out.
	I'm sorry, John, I hate to interrupt you.
	Is there any chance to make your stuff a little bit louder?
	You might have a dial or something like that.
	Oh, me? Ethan or John?
	Let's see. Let's see.
	Sorry, Ethan. How's this?
	Am I a little better? I think it's a little better, yeah.
	Sorry, go ahead. All right. Well, I just, I think you're getting, Tim, to something that I think is a sticking point with faith, which is that it's not just, I think this is going to work out.
	It's, Not just like faith, oh, it's going to happen.
	It's a relationship.
	Faith is relational. You don't just have faith that reality is going to manifest whatever you want.
	You have faith in an individual that they will behave a certain way based on your knowledge of them.
	So faith is trust.
	And I'll back this up real quick with a scripture that I always go back to about faith from Matthew, part of the famous story of Jesus walking on water, but all his disciples see him on the water and they're freaked out for a second.
	But he says, So Peter gets down out of the boat and walks on the water and comes toward Jesus.
	So it's not just Jesus who's walking on the water, it's Peter.
	But... So we see here that Matthew loses faith for a moment.
	So what does that mean? That doesn't mean that he saw some contrary evidence.
	He didn't see someone sinking into the water and think, oh, I can't do this anymore.
	Now I'm going to sink into the water.
	But he, for a second...
	Lost the belief that his Lord was going to hold him on top of the water because he saw the wind and was afraid that the wind would knock him over.
	So faith is this relationship, and it's like that story is almost a biblical trust fall where Jesus is like, I want you to trust me, the person, that I will hold you on this water.
	And so what you're describing, Tim, is you have faith in the person of Christ, just like I have faith in my friends that they will behave a certain way and care for me.
	And if a friend says to me, hey, I got a work trip.
	We're not going to talk for a weekend, but when I get back, we'll have dinner.
	I'm like, okay, well, I might not have any evidence that you're going to have dinner with me when you get back, but I trust you.
	I have faith in you, and that faith comes from experience and knowledge of your character.
	That's absolutely correct, Ethan.
	And I'd like to say and elaborate on that as well.
	God himself is the only being that we know of that has perfect faith in his own self.
	Not only because, well, excuse me, it is because he is perfect in terms of character and all his attributes.
	But as we place our faith on him, and he is self-supporting in terms of his faith.
	He He has that perfect knowledge of all things.
	So that is part of why he has that perfect faith.
	But continuing off of what you said as well, as we exercise our faith in God, that we can know and have that assurance of that thing we hope for that God has promised.
	And continuing off of that, kind of what was said earlier with Tim, right?
	You said, was it with Jeremiah?
	Was... That he knew with the farm that eventually they would come back to that.
	And I have another story about this as well.
	This is actually right at the beginning of the Book of Mormon.
	So if you guys know anything about the Book of Mormon, there was a family.
	Father's name was Lehi.
	He was a prophet. He was told by God to flee Jerusalem.
	This is 600 years before Christ was born.
	And so he's told to flee with his family.
	He had Laman, Lemuel, Sam, and Nephi, four sons of his.
	The sons, after they had fled out into the desert, Lehi was given instruction, I think it was in a dream, that his sons needed to go back and retrieve the plates of brass, which contained a genealogy and all the scripture, all the Old Testament up until that point, and even has more than what we have now.
	And so this was vitally important for them to retrieve it, because they'd be going on to another continent.
	So... Knowing that this was an important thing, they sent the oldest son to go speak with the person who was having these plates, Laban.
	And this guy, he's a big guy in terms of...
	Influence, power, money.
	Exactly. So he could command 10,000 troops out on the battlefield.
	And in the city, he could command 50 guards.
	That's just the nature of how it's set up.
	So they send the oldest son out, Layman.
	And he goes and he's trying to just have conversation with Layman, saying, yeah, we need to have this.
	Can you loan it to us for a while or can you get it to us?
	Layman says no.
	And not only that, he says, you're a thief.
	I'm gonna kill you and chases him out, right?
	And so they kind of all the sons go back and they huddle and Nephi at this point says he swears an oath basically that we will retrieve these plates because God has commanded it.
	So his faith was based on God and the Lord and his commandment for that.
	So when we know the nature of the object of our faith that is placed on, so we may have faith based on, you know, different things that we know to a shallower or deeper degree, but when it is a commandment or when it is something from God specifically, then we can place but when it is a commandment or when it is something from God specifically, then we can place absolute faith
	So they go back and they're like, okay, well, we've got a really nice house in town, so we're going to go gather all our gold, everything that we can, precious.
	Precious. And they go, okay, here.
	You know, here's your bribe.
	Obviously, you might operate this way.
	Laban obviously got some lust and did the same thing.
	Said, oh, you guys are thieves.
	Get the heck out of here. And they got chased to the point where they have to leave outside of not only the city, but the local region where they're at.
	And they have to go hide out in a cave.
	Laman and Lemuel, they get pissed off at this because they're like, what the heck?
	And they end up, little girl.
	I don't think they cried in the story.
	No. They end up beating the crap out of Sam and Nephi.
	Like, beating up bad.
	To the point where an angel appears and he's like, knock it off.
	And Laman and Lemuel, they still murmur at this point, which is, you know, what's going on in their minds.
	Well, it wasn't just knock it off.
	It was go back.
	Yeah. And I'm going to set it up so that he's going to be delivered into your hands.
	Exactly. Yeah. Thank you for reminding me of that part.
	And so Nephi goes back in the city because he's the one who's obviously showing the most faith at this point.
	And he's like, well, I'm going.
	I have no idea where I'm going to go, but I'm being guided by the spirit.
	And he finds Laban.
	He's passed out drunk in the streets.
	And Nephi, he's like, okay, this seems to be an opportunity.
	But then he, yeah, this is the part that's a little hard to understand because it seems like it goes against UPB, but Nephi perceives Laban's sword, which is a really, really mastercraft-worked sword.
	And, you know, him probably being a young man, probably like 20, 21, he's like, man, that's a really good sword.
	And he gets constrained by the spirit to kill Laban.
	And Nephi, yeah, and he goes, he shrinks away.
	He's like, I've never killed anyone before.
	I've never done this.
	But the spirit tells him, it is better that one man should perish than a nation dwindle and perish in unbelief.
	So, having that kind of reassurance of knowledge, he does smite off the head of Laban, and he goes in and retrieves the place, and has Laban's servant Zoram, I think, has Laban's servant Zoram come with him?
	Oh, excuse me, sorry. Nephi ended up dressing up in Laban's clothes, so it was kind of a little bit of a deception going on.
	I need that mouse! I need that mouse!
	And with that...
	They get to the point where they start getting out of the city, and what Zoram does, he sees that his brothers are calling fun.
	Can you go over there? He sees that he...
	They're very sad that Laban dies.
	Very sad. And anyway, so Zoram sees that it's not Laban after all, and that the brothers are there.
	He's like, what's going on? And fortunately, Nephi, being a big guy, he grabs onto Zoram and says, hey, I swear by, yeah, I swear, basically by everything.
	That is holy. I can't remember what he says specifically.
	That you'll be one of us. We won't take you as a slave, etc.
	But you need to come with us. So, with that, Nephi's faith had been based on something that was true and real.
	He made a plan of action.
	He followed through, even though there were setbacks.
	And he received not only spiritual guidance through the whole actions, even though he had no idea what to do.
	But they came out on the other side of that.
	Having accomplished that which was commanded of him, and had Zoram join along with him as well.
	And he makes the Book of Moran Veadar.
	Sure, sure, yeah. But yeah, that is kind of a little bit of a...
	What do they call it?
	An example of how faith operates.
	That... We know what faith is.
	It's the assurance of things that we hope for and the substance of things that we don't see.
	Or the evidence of things we don't see.
	And we know the object that it is placed on.
	Nephi lived his faith, just as Tim was saying.
	Nephi expressed his faith even after being chased out of town twice with the risk of death.
	He knew that the commandment of God to get these plates...
	We're going to work out in the end, and the effects that flow from faith, that he was able not only to get, well, most importantly, get the record and have Zoram come along as well, which proves to be a benefit overall.
	Well, part of the argument there is just they needed to leave the city in secret.
	So that's why he had to kill Laban.
	Because if Laban had known, he would have summoned his armies and they would have slaughtered his entire family.
	Yeah, waking up after being drunk and seeing that your servant's gone, you're like, yeah, it's the guys who came here twice already.
	We know what's going on. We're going to search.
	Okay, so that was a long tangent.
	Thoughts? I think it does sort of confirm what it is I was talking about, that you have to have a bookmark in the future for what you hope you can achieve, but you also need to track, you know, how you're doing relative to it.
	So, yeah, so, I mean, another reason why I wanted to have a conversation about this stuff this evening was that I've always said, like, I'm an empiricist, right, that I work with the empirical data and empiricism trumps theory every time, and twice on Sundays.
	Now, one of the things that I kind of noticed, and I don't mind petting myself on the back a little bit here, but when I came up with UPB, I was obviously very, very excited.
	And I did have, and this was my mistake, my lack of insight or lack of knowledge.
	I had this belief or this idea that while it would be a struggle to get it across once it was across, that the atheists, the secular libertarians and so on would be drawn to it like a bee to honey, like a guy dying of thirst in the desert comes up to a popsicle stand or something like that.
	It would be like, oh my gosh, you finally, you know, non-aggression principle, property rights, self-defense, all of this stuff we can logically justify now.
	And While I appreciate Tim struggling with some of the more obtruse aspects of it, it is something that I did very consciously try and teach my daughter when she was two or three years old.
	And she got it.
	You know, no insult to Tim.
	But she got it, again, not in the most abstract fashion, but...
	Honestly, it's an honor to be insulted by it.
	Well, to be fair, she hasn't had decades of propaganda teaching her that violations of property rights are moral.
	Yeah, you could be simpler than you think it is.
	You know, if you're ever complicating it, you're doing it wrong.
	But, so no, and I just remember she would...
	I would work very hard to keep my promises.
	And I still now catch my daughter sometimes when she really wants something from me, she'll upgrade a commitment to a promise.
	Because if I'm like, oh yeah, we'll go for a walk later, right?
	And if something comes up and I can't, she says, but you promised!
	Because she knows promise is like a holy thing for me.
	Like I will do just about rip my own arm off to fulfill a promise.
	So when she wants to, and I said, listen, don't use my virtues to manipulate me.
	Do not use my virtues to control me.
	If I say promise, I remember it because it's very important to me.
	If I just say we can or I'd like to or we're going to, that's not a promise.
	That's a little bit different. It's a lower standard.
	But she always wants to upgrade that to, you know, do the Daddy Geppetto thing that kids want to do.
	Kids will test your boundaries, right?
	Well, yeah, and they will certainly try and use your virtues to get what they want because, you know, they're small and helpless and, you know, that's kind of what they do, right?
	That's all they got. But I remember when she would...
	Say she was going to do something and I would even get a promise out of her and then she wouldn't do it, then I would say, oh, so is that what we're doing, right?
	Are we doing this thing in the family now where you can make a promise and then just renege on it or just not do it?
	Because if that's the case, then I can also, I can make promises and then just not do it.
	She's like, ooh. No, no, I don't want that.
	I really like it when you keep your word.
	So it's like, well, we're both people.
	Look, same number of legs, same number of arms, different hairstyles, but we're both people, right?
	So, of course, you like it when I keep my word, and I would like it if you keep your word.
	Because, as I said, if you come up with a way of doing things that you don't want other people to do, You know, this is do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
	It's a little bit of categorical imperative and so on.
	But it's a way of just saying if your behavior can't be universalized or if you would not like the result of your behavior being universalized, that is a UPB red flag, you know.
	And again, I know that's not staggeringly original because how would you like it if I did it to you is sort of a staple of parenting.
	But when you universalize it that way, it's very easy for kids to see that it's not a winning strategy in the long run.
	So I thought, gosh, you know, rape, theft, assault, and murder, that's the foundations of the non-aggression principle.
	It got a little self-defense in there.
	It explains a wide variety of human behaviors.
	You know, I've got three categories of behaviors, neutral behaviors, like running for a bus.
	You've got aesthetically preferable actions, like being on time.
	And then you've got UPB, which can be enforced through coercion, like don't get stolen from, don't get murdered, and so on.
	And it's, you know, such an elegant structure.
	And again, I know it can be tough to conceptualize when you've had a lot of counter...
	Propaganda, but it's really elegant.
	It answers questions, and even the people who've disagreed with it enormously, like that, what was it, gosh, what was his name now?
	The guy with the long rationality rules, right?
	I had a debate with the guy, and he didn't like this, he didn't like that, but nonetheless, he accepted that rape, theft, assault, and behavior can never be universally preferable behavior.
	I'm like, okay, well, we're done. I don't care about the rest of the theoreticals.
	If I've got you on that, then we're good to go.
	Shake hands and keep moving. So, the reason I'm bringing...
	So all this up is I created this elegant, fairly easy-to-explain structure, and I brought it, and initially I brought it to the libertarian community, right?
	It was on lewrockwell.com, and I talked about it with libertarians and all of that, and I was part of this whole message group that went back and forth about this kind of stuff.
	And I think it was one guy, it was his David Gordon or something from Mises, wrote some negative article, and I don't know, and it was really trashy.
	It was not good, and he wouldn't debate it anyway, but...
	I thought, you know, my gosh, you know, this could be it, man.
	This could be, you know, the Holy Grail of philosophy is a rational justification for ethics, right?
	Without the necessity of a biblical commandment, without the necessity of a magic spellbook of violence called the law.
	And I thought, I really did.
	I thought, you know, it's going to be tough.
	It's going to take a while. But I thought there'd be a tipping point, you know, like you just, you keep hammering at it.
	And I did... I did live speeches.
	I did debates. I did presentations with PowerPoint.
	I toured. I did the whole thing to get this idea across.
	And, boy, you know, the indifference, the slowly back and away, not any particular rational counterarguments, which, you know, would have been great, helped improve the debate and the argument, but that was a real, like, there's something about the world I am not understanding here.
	Like, there's something about the world.
	Because for me, UPB was like this Yeah, this giant thunder.
	Hallelujah! Yeah, it was a really, it was a come to Jesus moment for me.
	It was my born again.
	I finally get it. I've been studying ethics for 30 years and I finally cracked the nut.
	And, you know, this is my, I now know, looks like this physicist who finally figured out, you know, what makes the stars shine.
	And he was out there with his girlfriend one night.
	He hadn't told anyone. He finally figured it out.
	And she's like, oh, the stars are beautiful out tonight.
	And he says, yes! Yes!
	And I'm the only person alive who knows why they burn.
	You know, and I felt like that moment, and it was a very long moment, and, you know, with the, you know, there's this typical scene in movies where someone really enthusiastic comes in, and they're just, you know, kind of nerdy and geeky and enthusiastic, and some cynical, you know, smacks them down or whatever, right? But what can be smacked down?
	I just kept going, and I feel as excited, and you can see it, right, as excited and enthusiastic, you know, 15 years later.
	But there was something I just didn't get about the world, which I think Christians get.
	And, you know, it's been around a little longer.
	Got to give props where props is due.
	And you guys are here, right?
	And you're here in part because Jesus said, of course, if they lie about you, be...
	Be aware they lied about me first, right?
	So you would think, of course, that people who were into philosophy would know that slander is the tool of the losers, of the debate.
	And so when people lie about me, or I'm sure they've lied about you guys as well, you'd think that atheists who have a significant degree of respect for Socrates and Aristotle and Plato, all of whom were threatened and ostracized and attacked and so on in their lives, You'd think that atheists would be like, oh yeah, of course people are going to lie about you.
	They lie about all our heroes.
	But Christians are here and Christians stayed with me with no earning of it for me because I was pretty hard-hearted towards Christians and very critical of the belief system.
	And you all stuck with me.
	Even though I was giving you a giant shite sandwich, as they would say in Scotland, And yet, so I gave Christians grief, and Christians stayed.
	I gave atheists and libertarians gold, and they fled.
	And it's like, I can't even tell you, like, this...
	That's the love of Christ right there.
	It doesn't work, though. I'm sorry.
	I've got my brain.
	It's Gordian knots.
	It's amoebous strip.
	It's my lower intestine, N-dimensional.
	Like, I can't... And I think that's why I wanted to talk about this stuff tonight.
	It's like, what are you all doing to mess with my head?
	Welcome to clown world, Stefan.
	It's so weird.
	Well, it's so weird. I have two thoughts in regards to that.
	Yeah, yeah, go. There's one scripture, one's other stuff too.
	So in regards to the scientific priests, we'll say, so to speak, they draw near to me with their words, but their hearts are far...
	Excuse me, they draw near to truth with their words, but their hearts are far away from it.
	And the other one is...
	As in the people who are here are Christian or just the very few people who are drawn to this truth.
	Many are called, but few are chosen.
	Well, and to build, I think that there is a story biblically here that mirrors exactly what you're talking about, Stephan.
	You are really, really twisting with my need for empiricism and rationality.
	Come on, give me your story.
	Fine. Oh, it's a good one.
	It's a good one, too. It's one that a lot of people don't even know.
	So it's part of Exodus.
	So you have this guy Moses, right?
	Moses has a face-to-face relationship with God.
	The first person to have that in generations of Israelites, where he looks God in the face, has a conversation with him, and they're friends.
	So Moses and God work together.
	They bring the Israelites out of Egypt.
	They're out in the wilderness.
	The Israelites are at the foot of the mountain.
	And God says to Moses, awesome, we did it.
	Time for my people to meet me face to face as you do.
	And Moses is like, awesome!
	I really don't like this priest job.
	Let's do it. So they spend two or three days preparing the people to meet God.
	Moses leads them all up the mountain.
	God comes down, says hello, and the people go, Nope, I don't want it!
	They say, Please, God, do not show yourself to us again.
	They get freaked out by it.
	Yeah, they want Moses to talk to God.
	Just tell us what God said. Whenever I hear that story, I just think, okay, so God loves these people so much that he goes through all this effort to get them out of Israel, saves their lives, performs signs and wonders, and then he finally meets them and they're like, eh, you're not that great.
	Give us back the Moses guy.
	Listen, much though I enjoy a story where I'm either Moses or God, don't get me wrong, you're not exactly helping this head stay small.
	Hang on, let me just get a little closer.
	But it's... No, I get it.
	You're bringing gold to people and the pearls before swine, so to speak, right?
	Also, I don't think our brains are really evolved.
	I do believe in evolution, personally.
	But I don't think our brains are evolved for logic.
	We're evolved for stories and narratives.
	So when we have the truths of universal ethics presented in a story form, it's way easier for a brain to receive that.
	I don't think that's it though.
	I think it's that when Stefan made UPB, that's morality you can actually take action on.
	And that makes people have to confront.
	It's kind of like, you know, people hang around.
	If you're a boozer, you hang around other boozers and then someone gives you a way to get out.
	Well, you lose your entire tribe if you do that.
	There's a massive social cost.
	To morality.
	And that's why people tend to, you know, the amoral, the anti-moral, that tends to get you money and power and resources and women.
	And so that attraction to go down that path is very strong.
	But that's, this is what the Christians told me.
	And I was too pig-headed to listen.
	So with all humility, I apologize because the Christians said to me for many years, The atheists don't love logic.
	They don't like morals.
	They don't like models.
	And I was like, you've got to be kidding me.
	Come on, man. That's just a bunch of superstitious nonsense that you guys have.
	We're the science team.
	We're the logic team. We're the reality team.
	Come on, man. And I'll prove it to you because I'll come up with a rational proof for ethics that blows prior proofs right out of the water, clinches the case, and you can teach to a three-year-old.
	I'll show you. Hey, where do they go?
	Wait. Where are they?
	Well, they're God. They do worship God.
	Their God's just the state.
	By the company excluded.
	No, but they're libertarians.
	This is the thing. I wasn't into the state.
	Sorry. Let me try not to sound like a cat in a blender, as I mentioned earlier.
	But no, these are libertarians.
	They don't... I think...
	What do they worship? Weed? Is it like smoke a bowl, 420 planet?
	Is it sex?
	Is it the rock and roll?
	Is it the complete absence of all standards?
	It's the natural man. Like Adam Kokesh accepted.
	I think it's virtue signaling.
	They oppose the Fed because – things that they can't actually solve because it makes them look virtuous.
	But then you come along with real virtue and it's Gresham's Law, right?
	Bad money chases out good money.
	They've got counterfeit virtue, and you're coming along with the real thing.
	Of course I don't like you. Wait, I think I've gone from either God or Moses to Bitcoin.
	The fiat currency of libertarian virtue, is that where we are?
	But this goes back to exactly what you've been talking about recently, Steph, with regards to forgiveness and moral agency.
	I'm sorry, I'm just going to slide down from this part because the forgiveness stuff is tough for me, so please go ahead.
	But so the answer as to kind of why this happens is in the rest of the story.
	Because what does God do then?
	He says, okay, we're not going straight to the promised land anymore.
	In fact, and he says this a little later, but basically he says, in fact, none of you who are alive now will see the promised land.
	I'm going to need a new generation.
	Because the Israelites' hearts were hardened by their time in Egypt, they no longer had the capacity, unfortunately, to commune with God in the same way that someone who was born into a relationship with God could.
	That's why we have to be born again to become one with Christ.
	Oh, who'd have thunk?
	And so he literally just has them out in the wilderness until...
	All that old generation dies, and the new generation is born into him, and then they arrive at the Promised Land.
	Excellent. Ethan, that is absolutely correct.
	People are in a state of, well, I understand it as the natural man.
	The natural man is an enemy to God, or we'll say in this case is an enemy to truth.
	They are carnal, they are sensual, and they're devilish too.
	But unless we can throw off the natural man that we're having, like that we can listen to the whisperings of the Spirit, so to speak, or at least start to entertain the concept of truth...
	And that could be through, you know, having to go through hardship, which is, like, primarily what the problem is, or the route that people go is they have to suffer something really hard, so they finally get it through their thick skulls, that there are principles of truth, or that, you know, God made promises, let's start following them, and they'll start listening to the whisperings of the Spirit.
	And they'll go, you know what?
	That might be the case. Let me try this.
	I hear the Spirit. The kids love having, they like screaming at each other just for fun.
	But yeah, all these things are ringing true.
	These are these concepts.
	Yeah, and I wanted to share my testimony if I could.
	I think I could hammer it out like two or three minutes just real quick.
	I am the last guy to say please be succinct, so take your time.
	Okay, so I grew up atheist, you know, so like I know there's different types of atheism, you know, like I'm not sure exactly where you land on that spectrum, Stavon.
	But, like, I grew up in a...
	I grew up atheist.
	Like, there wasn't...
	I grew up in a part of the U.S. where there's no...
	Where I was, there wasn't anything.
	There wasn't Muslims, there was no Christians, there was no Jews.
	As far as I knew... From zero to 16, I did not ever talk about God with a single person outside of the History Channel or something like that.
	I thought that...
	Religion was something that was like in the past or in other parts of the world or something.
	Like Zeus or something.
	Yeah. So then I did not do well under that circumstance.
	There's more to it.
	I'm trying to wrestle with my relationship with my dad now and we're kind of getting some traction there.
	But he was kind of absent and Kind of, there wasn't any narrative presented to me about how I should live.
	You know, like I know, Stefan, you've talked about how in the past, in past podcasts, you've talked about how our education system is valueless.
	Like, it doesn't contain any values.
	Like, it'll teach you geometry and spelling, but not any morality or why anything matters.
	So I was completely devoid of any sort of meaning or purpose for why I exist or what I should do.
	In the absence of principles, what do we have except hedonism, really?
	We've got to organize our life according to something.
	Yeah, and there was no wisdom either.
	There was no, well, at least here's how you get a job.
	Here's how you do something successful.
	It was literally just go talk to the guys on the street and see what they're doing.
	And then that was it.
	So, like, really early on, I'm, like, getting completely drunk every day, you know.
	Well, and sorry, Trump, but you're really in particular doomed if you don't want your parents' lives.
	Yes! If you don't want your parents' lives and you have no access to any kind of principles, you are absolutely lost.
	I mean, this is the Jordan Peterson crowd, right?
	They don't want their parents' lives.
	At the same time, they don't have any access to wisdom or principles.
	Yeah, and I'm working with my mom trying to understand better where she's coming from.
	We're having good conversations and stuff.
	But I, at the time, as a little boy, you know, I was just looking at my mom.
	I'm going, whatever you did, I do not want to follow that path.
	Whatever my dad did, I'm not going to follow that.
	And then I look at my teachers.
	They all kind of seem not very interesting.
	So I'm just like, oh, let's go talk to the guys in the corner.
	And, you know, I was stealing every day, getting drunk.
	Drunk every day and just wrecking my house.
	I had parties at my house every day that was really destructive.
	And then, so eventually my mom's like, oh, you're going to go to jail forever or something if we don't get out of the situation.
	So we moved to a different part of the country.
	It didn't really help.
	It just kind of picked me up and moved me.
	And, but, and I kind of began to have that same cycle somewhere else.
	And then, so it's, For me, the way that that kind of evolved was it turned into a crazy loser status.
	I had legal troubles that were significant.
	I didn't have a job.
	My mom was supporting me, subsidizing me, and I was just living with that.
	I didn't have any friends.
	I went two or three years without hanging out with a single other person.
	And it was really lonely.
	I thought about suicide a lot.
	I'm sorry, what was your age range at this point?
	Like in my late teens, early 20s.
	And you packed a lot of nihilistic decay into a short amount of time, dude.
	This is feeling like a Colin show now.
	I'm almost kind of rounding around.
	I'm sorry, I said two or three minutes.
	So I... Sorry.
	So I was just in a bad way.
	People who saw me at the time were like, oh, that guy's not doing well.
	And I just happened to go to this Bible study one time.
	And I had been in times before.
	But how did you end up? Because, I mean, and I wouldn't have guessed this because you look like a Christian Ken doll as far as I can tell.
	You know, very, very clean cut, very put together, very nice.
	So, but how did you end up that night?
	Like, what happened? Did you end up there?
	So, the city I live in, there's like a mega church, so it's like really easy to go without being noticed.
	You can be kind of anonymous as you're going.
	And I would go a couple times a year, and I didn't really get much from it, but I was so bored.
	I didn't have anything else to do, kind of.
	And lonely, right?
	You just want to be around other carbon-based life forms, right?
	Yeah. And then, so my sister was going.
	She was part of a Bible study, and then she invited me.
	I didn't have anything else to do. And I had been to this Bible study before, And thought it was boring, didn't get anything from it.
	But this one day I was there, and then it was, like, incredible.
	Like, they were going through the parables of Jesus, and they were going through the last kind of thing that he said in the Sermon on the Mount, where he said...
	He said, those who listen to what I'm saying and put it into practice, they're like people who build their house on a solid foundation, and then when the storm comes, the house doesn't fall over.
	And those who hear what I'm saying and don't put it into practice, they're like people who put their house on a poor foundation, and then the storm comes and knocks it over.
	And then it was like...
	It was like God was talking or something.
	My ears were just like...
	You talked with somebody the other day that you just want to be like, wake up!
	You don't realize the quicksand you're in.
	You're asleep and you're in danger of wasting your life.
	It was like that for me.
	It was like I literally just woke up.
	And... I had wasted so much time right up into that moment.
	And then, like, my life from that moment forward was, like, people who were around and saw me a year before and a year after was like, that had to be a miracle.
	Like, I... You kind of almost went, sorry to interrupt you, it seems almost you went from animal to human.
	That's the way that I characterize philosophy.
	For me, I went from animal to human.
	But, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, so, I mean, I... I was, like, deep into it.
	I loved, like, that Bible study.
	And I loved, like, learning more about, like, the Bible and the Gospel.
	Like, I quickly got a job.
	I quickly got back into school.
	I went, I got, like, I failed, like, everything I did in high school, which I know it's, like, kind of It's boring and dumb and stuff.
	But like, I did so terrible.
	But then when I went to college, I just, I went into college and I had like a 4.0 in engineering school.
	I was like in the top 1% of a lot of the classes there.
	And then I never knew I was smart at all, you know, because I didn't have any way to measure that ever.
	And then, I don't, like, it's so weird because I don't believe I would be here today if it wasn't for that one day that I went to that Bible study.
	Like, I don't think my kids would exist.
	Honestly, I don't think I'd be here.
	And my kids are here because of that.
	Like, the gospel saved my life.
	You know? So...
	Well, and that is a very powerful and moving story.
	I appreciate you. I'd like to hear more about that at some point.
	And I don't know if you guys have ever read, you've probably heard of Helen Keller, the woman who's born blind, deaf, and dumb.
	And then a teacher taught her how to speak.
	And all I'd heard of I think?
	Before you had language, right?
	Before you had the capacity to communicate with another human being.
	And she said, I don't really recall any of it.
	It was simply a blur of sensations.
	I had no way to organize them.
	I had no way to categorize them.
	I had nothing to build on.
	It was just a blur of immediate sensations with no sense really of time or anything.
	And so it could have been a year.
	It could have been a day. It's all just a big...
	If you ever wake up and you have a dream that was really vivid and then three minutes later you're like...
	I don't know. I think John Anderson was in it.
	Something like that, right? And you can't remember.
	And this idea that you're just in this blur of sensations without any shape or form to your existence, no purpose, no higher guidance, nothing.
	That, to me, is life.
	Before philosophy, it was...
	Animal striving and fighting and lust and all of that.
	Before philosophy came along, which slapped me into some kind of coherence and some kind of shape, to me, animals have cunning.
	The dogs will try and sneak the treat when you're not there and all of that.
	I had intelligence, but it was a form of animal cunning simply in the service of satisfying some biochemical desire or preference or whatever it is.
	Prior to philosophy, I sort of really got what Helen Keller was talking about, that prior to concepts and language and communication and so on, it was just a chaos of immediate sensation and cunning and the avoidance of pain, the pursuit of pleasure, which, again, does seem to characterize, to a large degree, the atheist philosophy.
	And, and, and, the one thing that is terrible about a lack of principles, be they theological or philosophical, is you've got nothing to sacrifice for.
	Nothing to defer gratification for.
	And the one thing that is truly amazing about religion, and I don't have any idea how it's possible for atheism to replicate this, is there are things worth sacrificing for even your life.
	Right? And that is a strength and a power, which, you know, can be used in the dark side, like some of the Islamic terrorists or other forms of terrorists are willing to sacrifice their life, they scare the hell out of the communities, and then you get, in Canada, they'll arrest a guy in a church, they'll never arrest a guy in a mosque,
	right, they're scared, right? But, with the atheist, there's nothing beyond life, and there's no reward for sacrificing your life, and In the combat for who controls the future, who controls the mindset and story of the narrative, the most committed tend to win in life.
	And I don't know how the atheist, the streak of hedonism and atheism and the grasping onto life, regardless of sacrifice, how that can win or be especially ennobling and inspiring.
	And I was sitting there thinking, okay, I can think of Christians who are, you know, the guy who just got arrested in Alberta, right?
	The Christian pastor for Daring to have love in the time of cholera, so to speak.
	Incredibly admirable. I think of people like C.S. Lewis.
	I think of the people... I can just think of so many...
	Who are the really admirable and noble atheists?
	And there is that undertow of appeasement and sacrifice.
	And I know that Christians have some sympathy with the lies about me because, again, Jesus was lied about.
	But atheists should as well.
	I mean, atheists were persecuted.
	Ayn Rand was lied about and so on.
	But nonetheless, there is an unwillingness to take risks in the realm of atheism that seems to be present in religion and in Christianity in particular because y'all have a higher calling than to be the next breath.
	And that is something that I don't know how you can replicate in the material, always with the streak of hedonism, atheist approach.
	Yeah, I remember, like, I was hearing about some letters that we have between Roman governors at the time, like back in the empire, Roman empire, where they were doing persecution to Christians.
	And he said, one guy said to another, he said, it's not that they're willing to die that is freaky.
	The thing that's really scary about it is that they do it happily.
	That they're willing to die in a happy way.
	Like, they're going to their death, and they're singing psalms, you know, they're singing hymns.
	They're happy to suffer or die for their Lord.
	Which is like, you know, from the Romans, it's got to be like watching a whole herd of lemmings going off a cliff, but with a parade and a tuba band and confetti and so on.
	It's incomprehensible, right? They're like, what's wrong with these people?
	They're like, what's wrong with these people?
	You know? Right.
	I wanted to say, too, there was a verse.
	I actually wanted to bring it up earlier.
	You know, they got, you know, Sadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
	You know, the king says, if you don't bow to me, I'm going to throw you into this fire.
	And then they said...
	And they said, the king said, if I throw you in, who's going to save you?
	And then they said, our God is able to save us.
	But even if he doesn't, we're not bowing for you.
	Like, go ahead and throw us in.
	And that...
	Standing up to the lust for power, right?
	Because the lust for power is hardwired into us, evolutionarily speaking, or however you want us to.
	And I've said this a million times before, you know, that the lust for power is a physical addiction.
	You know, the studies they do on the bonobo monkeys, that they get more dopamine, the higher they climb the dominance hierarchy and so on.
	So what is it that stands against the lust to control other human beings, the lust for power?
	Well, it has to be a sense of the value and virtue of free will, which atheists have been unable to solve.
	Sam Harris genuinely does not believe in free will, yet morally castigates people all the time.
	And it's like, dude, you've got to pick a lane here.
	If you don't believe in free will, then morally condemning everyone and their dog is like calling a rock evil because it fell on your car.
	This doesn't make any sense.
	If you've got a materialistic domino theory of existence, then...
	Complaining about people's behaviors, it's just ridiculous and sad.
	So you have to have a belief in the glory of individual choice and free will, and you have to value something higher than your own life.
	And that is...
	Hard to replicate outside of religiosity.
	And you can say, you know, that there's something that Socrates said at the end of his life, like right before he took the hemlock.
	He said, oh, be sure to sacrifice a chicken to, I don't know, I can't remember whatever god it was, right?
	And that's a powerful statement because that is something you do when you are grateful for a gift you have received.
	So he is saying, when he dies, please give a gift to the God of good gifts, because I've been given a wonderful gift in this hemlock.
	So you can say, well, that meant he was comfortable with death, he was okay with death, but, but...
	And I made this case many years ago, so I'll keep it really briefly here.
	You can look up. I've got a whole six-part series on the trial and death of Socrates.
	But Socrates gave a terrible curse to mankind, which was to obey the rulers, though they be unjust.
	Obey the rulers, though they be unjust.
	Because Socrates said most people are unwise, most people are foolish, and yet he says that obey the will of the majority.
	And I think this is a passive-aggressive curse that he put on humanity, which says, okay, you can kill a philosopher, but I can kill millions and hundreds of millions of you by telling you to obey tyrants.
	And that's a terrible curse, and I think has really made him a mass murderer par excellence from passive-aggressive reasons.
	Whereas you look at Jesus, and he says, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
	Forgive them. And I think Socrates put a curse on humanity that we're still living with to this day, which...
	It has caused untold suffering.
	And Socrates said, forgive the people who are actually killing me.
	And there's really quite a world's difference in that that's very hard to miss for me.
	Yeah. Just one more thing.
	Part of the reason why I think Christians do well with the idea of going into death is because they've seen Jesus go through it and come out the other side.
	I mean, they haven't seen it, but we trust that we believe in it by faith.
	That, you know, like Paul says, if we suffer with Him, we will also be glorified with Him.
	The resurrection is what gives us confidence to go through hard times.
	The fact that you are Superman when it comes to the soul, you can't be killed.
	Right. I mean, that's a pretty good superpower.
	I'm a pretty brave guy if I go into a boxing ring with a suit of armor that's impenetrable.
	You know, I don't have to train that much, right?
	So there is really that aspect.
	And I do to some degree because, you know, as an atheist, there's this aspect of, well, if I sacrifice my life, I get nothing.
	I got, like, worms coming out of my eyes and I got the eternal dirt nap, the sleep without dreams or waking.
	Right. And so I do feel to some degree that I'm kind of hanging on to the jugular of people who were more noble in their sacrifices than I'm willing to be, and I think that's partly the atheist versus religious aspect of things.
	I think, too, it's not just about...
	We're kind of insulated from the consequences of self-sacrifice because, you know, okay, great, you go to heaven.
	You're still sitting there suffering for however long.
	Not fun. I think that a lot of what motivates at least the Christians I know and what I hope motivates me to a certain degree is that it's about doing as we are called to do, which is to be like Christ.
	And so Christ loved us so much that he died and suffered for us.
	So what's the only form of gratitude we can really give him?
	I mean, we can get on our knees in a sanctuary and say, thank you, Jesus, every single day.
	But at the end of the day, real gratitude and real honoring of that love is giving it to others.
	And so when a Christian comes to a moment where they're about to be martyred, I don't know because I haven't been there.
	I think that many of them say, what an opportunity to do for these people what you did for me, Jesus.
	Well, certainly admiration without emulation is just a subspecies of hypocrisy, which is pretty rough.
	I was reminded again of another scripture.
	Thank you, Ethan, for this as well, and you too, Steph.
	Doctrine and Covenants, again, this is section 18, 15 to 16.
	It's actually talking about missionary work, and I want you to liken the scriptures in this sense for you, Steph, so personalize this.
	Oh, bother.
	Of course, I hit it at the—okay, there we are.
	And if it so be that you should labor all your days in crying repentance, or in your case, crying truth, unto this people, and bring, save it be what one soul unto me, how great shall be your joy with him in the kingdom of my Father.
	And now, if your joy will be great with one soul that you brought unto me in the kingdom of my Father, how great will be your joy that you bring many souls unto me!
	So, Steph...
	I've heard you for probably a decade, maybe a little under a decade, but you've been laboring for 16 years at this point.
	And the fruits of your labor are many.
	They've gone from the early days where you had the, not the image board, but you had that board, and you've had a discord.
	And you've had many different places, opportunities.
	You are bringing people closer to truth.
	You are bringing people closer to reason, evidence, rationality.
	And that absolutely is something not only admirable, but it is life-saving.
	And I know you know it's life-saving.
	It's holy. It's sacred.
	It is. Like, this show is sacred, in my opinion.
	Like, what goes on in your show is a holy event, figuratively.
	To me, I consider what the truth is, what I consider UPB is to be one facet of the diamond of whatever the eternal truths are.
	The gospel is a facet.
	UPB is a facet.
	There's other facets as well.
	But there is that diamond in the middle.
	That is truth.
	That is transcendental.
	It goes beneath all things.
	It is foundational.
	Before this earth was made, before everything, there are principles that we'll live by.
	And UPB is one of those.
	And I very much think that is the case.
	And so bringing people to that is something I... Just wanted to emphasize to you.
	It's a wonderfully kind statement that you're making.
	I'm moved. I really appreciate that.
	I'd like to say moved beyond words, but that's almost never going to be the case, I'm afraid.
	But I really, really appreciate what you're saying.
	You've got to work harder, guys.
	We didn't get there.
	Yeah, no, seriously, but...
	My goal was to bring the glories of Christian universalism to the atheists.
	I wanted to be that channel.
	I wanted to be that conduit, you know, to rescue the atheists from the materialistic Darwinian nihilism that characterizes so much of the movement and this lack of the transcendental joy of a universal truth and a universal value that can organize your life, that takes you from animal to human to, I don't want to say superhuman because that's a bridge too far, but I happened to grow up with that ethic.
	I was in the church choir.
	I was in boarding school.
	I was sitting at the front, apple-cheeked, watching the sermons.
	That was a glorious aspect of the faith.
	And I think I wanted to bring that, you know, I would say be Jesus to the atheists or something silly like that, right?
	But no, I wanted to bring that, seeing where it was lacking.
	And every time I would read the atheist arguments, I'd be like, eh.
	It's not that good.
	I can see that you want it, and I can see that you need it, but it's not really that good.
	The takedown of objectivism wasn't that tough, and even the Aristotelian stuff, pursuit of the excellence.
	It's just a bunch of positive adjectives and so on, rather than a rigorous universality that you can inhabit.
	It's almost like I had to leave the church to get to the atheists, to bring the universalism from the church to the atheists.
	I left the church and they couldn't get to the atheists, you know?
	So here I am sort of in space, if that makes sense.
	Oh my God, I got voted off.
	I got voted off the island.
	I got voted off the spaceship. I'm sus!
	I'm sus! Anyway, sorry, go ahead.
	You know, something I just realized from this conversation that UPB and Christian philosophy share...
	Right?
	Christianity does not spread through violence.
	It's spread through missionaries, through persuasion.
	And UPB, I think, is doing something similar where the power isn't – it's like you're not achieving the change through military might as many other philosophies are.
	The moral revolution, the moral advancement has happened through dialogue, through words.
	Oh, do you want to hear a moment of terrible temptation from me?
	Just a tiny, tiny moment of absolutely nihilistic, terrible temptation.
	When I got deplatformed, I mean, like, boom, you know, 2 million followers gone, right?
	And, you know, 15 years of work, just poof, right?
	And I was really wrestling with myself, which was to say, the time for arguments has passed.
	The conversation has been silenced.
	Do what thou wilt.
	Mama! That was like I'm on the edge saying I could say it and I could put it in such a way that I wouldn't get in too much trouble but people would get the message.
	But I didn't.
	That was, man, that was pretty angry, as you can imagine, right?
	And I was like, I could just basically let slip the dogs of war, man.
	And it was tough not to.
	It was tough not to. When the Capitol riots were just starting, I remember...
	Something boiled in my blood, and I was like, all right, guys.
	I went to my friends. I was like, let's get in the van.
	We're going. We can get there in a night.
	And I'm so glad I had good friends at that point in my life because Jared, actually, who everybody knows now, said, no, let's not.
	That's a bad idea.
	And that was enough to get me back off the edge and to think...
	You know, this isn't how we do things.
	Not for practical reasons, not because it works or doesn't, but because we care about doing what's right.
	It gives an excuse to those with the guns as they've taken, right, to just go run ramp shot over people.
	Yeah, and Jesus said, you know, you live by the sword, you die by the sword.
	Yeah, the sword's in the plowshares thing.
	And this other thing, too, just struck me as well.
	So when I take the universalism and the ethics from Christianity and bring it to the atheists, and the atheists spit on it, ignore it, toss it around, kick it around, and so on, like it never happened.
	That is actually a gift to the atheist, which is to say to them, if they want to look in the mirror and see, to say, we actually don't care that much about values and virtues and morals and goodness and all of that kind of stuff.
	It is a way, and nothing is more powerful or more dangerous than revealing people to themselves, like for better or for worse, right?
	And so the fact that I took this chalice, so to speak, and took it to the...
	Secularists and said, look, you guys can have what they have.
	You can have this universal virtue and value.
	It's right here and you don't have to kneel and you don't have to believe in something that goes against your sensibilities.
	It's right here. It's two pages if you want it to be.
	I can do it in 30 seconds.
	It's right here. And they're like, meh.
	I'm like, okay, well...
	Now the great gift has been that the rejection of morality is the self-revelation that can take you places if you want it.
	Yeah, I think it's so ironic that Christians are like, oh, but that's actually really interesting.
	Yeah, tell me more.
	We can look at this aspect of what God wants coming at it from a secular way.
	It's like, oh, well, that's really helpful to help us understand what God wants more.
	Well, Aristotle was around a bunch of non-Christians when he was persecuted.
	Then Aquinas was like, hey, we're just going to call him the philosopher.
	He's so good. Well, I think the utility of UPB, it's like a weapons upgrade, right?
	If I want to spread philosophy to people who won't accept Christianity, I have a way to do that.
	I have another filter that I can use to view morality.
	And so it's a model for philosophy that provides utility that I think can't be found elsewhere.
	Because this is what the secularists will say consistently.
	You don't need God to be good.
	We can be good without God.
	I'm like, oh, here's how.
	No. That seems like an important moment in the history of thought.
	It seems like a really important moment, and everyone's just kind of blurring past it.
	Well, that's...
	I can't even get straight all the thoughts in my head about like, yeah, that's...
	But it's like they're not in church because they have a problem with God.
	They're not in church because they don't want to behave the way that they're called to.
	They don't want Christianity because they want that weird form of me-ism, you know, like the worship of the self, the worship of the senses, the worship of dopamine, the worship of that fedora-wearing moral superiority without any sense of actual ethics.
	And I think what they...
	What they lack.
	You know, the one thing that I remember very strongly from Christianity, which is tough to find in the atheist, is a sense of community, right?
	Like, we're all in this battle together.
	We're all in this veil of tears together.
	We all face temptations together.
	Perfectibility is impossible. The journey is life.
	And we can all lean on each other.
	We all need each other. We can all reinforce each other.
	And we're all kind of huddled, like...
	Roman soldiers with the shields on top trying to get through this veil of hail and tears.
	And in the atheist community, that sense of, well, it's not really much of a community, which is why the atheism on the left in particular, there's no redemption arc.
	There's no salvation.
	There's no forgiveness.
	There's a truly satanic sense of moral perfection that gives you the incredibly dangerous right To rain down destruction on other people because they're just evil and you're just perfect.
	And the humility that comes with...
	For me, it comes with UPB. UPB was a fundamental act of humility because I was in my 40s confessing I had no clue what virtue was.
	After studying it for 30 years, kind of an act of humility is like, I've been studying this thing for 30 years.
	I don't really have a clue what it is.
	It's kind of an important thing to do.
	That humility, you get that in Christianity.
	You know, and this is what I remember saying this when, you know, when those Billy Bush tapes were illegally leaked, where Trump was saying these terrible things about women.
	And all the people on the left were like, man, he's done.
	I'm like, no, he's not.
	Because there's a redemption arc and there's forgiveness in Christianity.
	Now, if he was you guys, if he was among you guys, you'd be nailing him up like the Romans.
	But this lack of humility that comes out of the atheist left community, much more so, this lack of humility is really quite terrifying.
	And really, the essence of tyranny is that I'm perfect, you're evil, everything I do is right, everything that I do to destroy you is right, because I've made you so irredeemably evil that you and I can't share any characteristics in common.
	You're the Nazi, I'm the social justice warrior, you're the white supremacist, I'm the whatever, right?
	Whereas, of course, as Jesus says, why are you focusing on the dust in your brother's eye and forgetting the giant beam in yours?
	Because the humility of, if there's an evildoer, even if I perceive that person to be an evildoer, I am susceptible to sin myself, let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
	That humility, which can sometimes, I think, go a little bit too far into, you know, there's a hero and the worst criminal and so on, which I think can get people into a lot of danger.
	But that lack of compassion or a sense that we're all in it together, that you're puffing yourself up to place yourself in the position of God, right?
	They displace God and then they judge God even more harshly than God would judge a human being.
	They judge people as if, like, put themselves in the position of God to judge, but they judge people more harshly than God would.
	I mean, they judge people in a way that is so feverishly damned.
	I mean, look at my Wikipedia page.
	It's not that hard to sort of see or other people's page and so on.
	And that lack of humility seems to be an outgrowth And the resentment, of course.
	When the material world is all that there is, then inequality of wealth is the worst thing that you can imagine.
	Whereas, of course, being rich in spirit is important, right?
	And Christianity does deal with the sort of ape-based envy of the more successful by saying that there's lots of different kinds of success in life, and the only one that really matters is being right with God.
	And that's more of an internal process than you can't transfer that through the welfare state or whatever.
	So I think trying to bring some of those gifts from the church to, I don't know what you'd call it, the Fedora...
	The Gentiles. The what?
	The modern Gentiles. Yeah, something like that.
	But yeah, trying to bring those gifts of university, morality, organization, humility, companionship, comradeship, and all of that to the atheists and...
	They know likey. That's just something that, again, I'm still sort of trying to, because when I was, I was like, ah, you know, thank goodness I can get, I can get this beautiful universality and it satisfies my rational requirements and yay, everybody, we've got great, you say you're starving, here's a buffet, here's a bouquet of food.
	No, you're not hungry? Well, what do you want then?
	If you don't want this, what do you want?
	It's a big question, right?
	I think what they want is to do what they do without limitation, without criticism, without being hemmed in, without structure, without responsibility.
	Yeah, that always goes well.
	Sorry? Without guilt.
	As if you can just bypass guilt.
	Because UPB is in us whether we like it or not.
	I didn't discover UPB so much as it's like saying the archaeologist discovers the city.
	It's like, no, he just unearthed it, right?
	The conscience is UPB. We process the universalization of our actions whether we like it or not.
	Like pain is something that's not, you know, you can't just stab yourself in the hand and say, I feel nothing, right?
	And so... The idea that you can somehow live a guilt-free life through hypocrisy, I mean, good Lord, a Christian would never believe that, because everything sticks to the soul.
	Everything we do, every piece of hypocrisy sticks to the soul, and it's there for us.
	And the accounting, everyone thinks it's pearly gates.
	It's not the pearly gates. Every waking moment of your day, you're accounting whether you like it or not.
	And it'll show up in your dreams.
	It'll show up in your relationships. It'll show up in your self-loathing.
	It'll show up like you can't avoid that judgment.
	But I think the atheists think they can.
	And maybe when I came in with like, hey, here's the perfect way to judge yourself morally, they're like, get behind me, philosopher.
	Well, even if you could somehow make the guilt disappear, you can't escape the empiricism.
	Objective reality exists.
	It's like, yeah, I can...
	Maybe I can eat candy all day and not feel bad, but it's doing its work on my digestive system and the rest of my body whether I believe it or not.
	The effects of a hedonistic lifestyle cannot be escaped.
	Right. And it is one of these things, you know, it's like everyone thinks that the devil is just like the big scary guy who comes and it's like, oh no, the devil is like every tiny little pleasure that takes you down that slippery slope.
	And the devil will only reveal himself when it's too late for you to turn back.
	Then he'll come out, you know, and you're like, oh my God, that's terrifying.
	Oh my God, I can't get away.
	Then he'll reveal himself, right?
	Right. And that, atheism being a young man's game, as far as that goes, and the fact that I'm on the downward side of life is probably not immaterial as to why these conversations are occurring.
	But when you're young and you have that natural buoyancy and energy of youth, yeah, you can make these little compromises, these little slippery slope.
	You can hurt people's hearts.
	You can take things from people.
	you can lie to satisfy your sexual desires and hurt women's hearts and all of that and do your little part to undermine the continuance of your civilization.
	And the stuff I got the most in trouble was pointing out that second half of life, you know, that second half of life.
	I mean, I remember posting about, you know, women, hey, you pass 40, you can't have kids.
	Now then, so then women suddenly, when it's almost too late, and sometimes when it is too late, they're desperate to have kids because, you know, now they realize how much time they've wasted and it's really tough for them to get them at that point then the devil will sort of come out and say ah gotcha I just distracted you just long enough, just long enough for you to give up the path back to where you came from.
	You've gone just too far. You're now between two gas stations.
	You can't turn back and you don't have enough gas to get to the next one.
	You're done, man. That's the concept of damnation in a nutshell.
	You have prevented yourself through your actions from being able to make any more progress.
	You cannot become better at that point.
	At least from...
	Yeah, like, I mean, there's been enough mass immigration now that the weaponization of immigrants through critical race theory can now be front and center, right?
	I mean, this is just how...
	This gradualism then goes very quickly after a certain tipping point.
	And that...
	Second half of life argument, atheists, I think, have a really tough time with it.
	And there's not a lot of joy in that at all.
	But then, of course, your youth is gone, your heart is broken, and the only path back is some form of...
	Like you said, it really struck me, Tim, when you said, I'd wasted so many years, and I wouldn't put that obligation upon you as a teenager.
	I mean, the fact that you got to where you got to is incredible, and a testament to your character, but you didn't sit there and say, well, I could have this wonderful life of depth and richness and meaning, or I could have this hedonistic life of decay and nihilism.
	This wasn't even a choice that was offered to you, right?
	As you say, you didn't even meet a Christian person, so it wasn't that you just wasted these years like you had a choice.
	I mean, the moment that you saw A life raft that you could, well, the moment you saw a life raft, you got out as quickly as you could.
	So I wouldn't say that you wasted that time.
	But yeah, later down the road, man, this second half, particularly for women too, because men can always bounce back and have a family later in life, but women can't once they're past fertility windows.
	And that's why they got to be tucked away and hidden so that you don't see the desperate half-drunk wine aunts watching friends over and over again while crying into their Chardonnay all alone with cats circling saying, hey, I wonder if you'll stop Living soon because we're hungry.
	You can't see that.
	That would scare people into creating meaning and depth and relationship and connection.
	An atheist, that slow step down to where you can't turn back.
	And then, of course, you say, well, if the only way to turn back is some kind of religious-type universalism or accepting UPB or something like that, because I don't do business with and I don't have people in my life anymore who aren't either Christians or accept UPB. Because I don't know who else can be trusted.
	And, you know, having accumulated evidence over time, there's a lot of commitments that are made out of mere convenience, but because there's such a lack of self-sacrifice in the hedonistic community, you can't rely on anyone for anything in the long run.
	Well, and I think that one of the greatest tools in the enemy's arsenal was the half-truth.
	Where he does this thing where he'll reveal part of something, but then leave the other half behind the curtain.
	And so you have this revealing of part of being a fun, liberated woman when you're young.
	And it's like, oh, it's fun and exciting and all this stuff.
	And he just keeps that second half of your life behind the curtain.
	And I think that one of the things that keeps a lot of people from...
	Softening their heart and coming to some form of universal morality is that the enemy shows them the judgment of doing so without showing them the mercy.
	Because here's the thing.
	I would not be a Christian today if I did not have an experience through the people around me and supernaturally, to be honest, of God's mercy and grace upon my past sins.
	Just the other day, I'm talking to All of the men in the church body that I go to, and I'm telling the story to them about how I had an abortion.
	Well, my girlfriend had an abortion, and we aborted our child a long time ago.
	And this is a church body that's extremely conservative.
	You know, you mentioned the word abortion, and they get visibly angry most of the time.
	And without hesitation, one of them said, You already know that you're forgiven by God, but I want you to know that you're forgiven by us.
	And every single person nodded their heads.
	One came over and hugged me. No hesitation.
	Without that, why would you turn away?
	And so the enemy likes to hide that part and say it's all just judgment.
	It's not all just judgment. There's mercy.
	Right. I saw a really chilling cartoon, meme or whatever you want to call it, which looked like a teenage girl with a slightly growing belly, obviously pregnant, and she was thinking, my mom is going to kill me!
	And the fetus was thinking, my mom is going to kill me!
	That's exactly it.
	Oh, man, that was rough.
	Okay, listen, we've been going for a long time.
	I hugely appreciate it. Listen, you guys are doing wonderful work, beautiful work here, because part of this forgiveness is you guys heard harsh things that I said about Christianity.
	You're here in the conversation.
	I'm humbled and blessed and appreciate that aspect of things, and it's a beautiful thing to see.
	And listen, I hope that people out there will see this, you know, rather than pouring over, you know, they take slices and dices of things I said 12 years ago and, you know, try and get me on things, you know, this sort of hunt and nonsense that goes on there, you know, like, even if I did say bad things, you know, I... You can take a page of these guys' books and forgive and stay in the conversation, which is very humbling, and I really do appreciate that.
	It's a beautiful thing to see.
	So I'll give you guys last words, if you want, about, well, whatever's on your mind or what you want to leave the audience with.
	Well, something I'll add is I've read your book Against the Gods.
	Not a fan.
	Mostly because it attacks some conceptions of God, which I think are legitimate, but then assumes it attacks all conceptions of God, which I thought was false.
	I don't think, to be fair, I don't think I wrote in the book that I attack all conceptions of God.
	So just to defend the work.
	I'm just telling you, when I read the book, I was not happy, but you provide so much value to Christians, to me, that I was willing to overlook that.
	And now...
	When you say you only trust people who believe in UPB and Christianity, it makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
	Because you're both. Double trust.
	Yeah, exactly. So I think there's that element of it, right?
	There's forgiveness of the Christian community, so it's like, yeah, you bashed Christianity pretty hard in some of your previous stuff, but anyone who's kept up with you knows that there's more to it than that.
	And hey, we're used to it.
	That's true. That's true.
	I remember a friend of mine who's a Christian was saying that Christians, we're at our best in adversity.
	I think it's very true.
	Well, I mean, the adversity for Stefan is nothing compared to the adversity we get from the powers that be.
	Just look at what they say about white male Christians.
	Oh, yeah, that's true.
	I'll see who's in charge, right?
	All right. Anybody else?
	Final thoughts, comments? I'll tell you what I want to hear, Steph.
	I want to hear your word that we'll do this again sometime soon.
	I really enjoyed it.
	I really enjoyed it. I had a little bit of trouble following the one story, but other than that, fantastic.
	Which is not a criticism, it's just that it was a bit far outside my purview.
	But no, I really, really enjoyed it.
	I hope we can do it again, and the audience seems to like it as well.
	So yeah, it's a date.
	I'll keep you. I'll post it. And thank you very much for hosting this, Steph.
	It was a great time. My pleasure.
	And yeah, have a great evening, everybody.
	I'm not going to put any donation pitch in.
	And by the way, you know, people like I haven't done a donation pitch since COVID started.
	So just everybody knows that it's important to remember that.
	Tithe. You have to tithe people.
	Yeah, but I ain't a church.
	So it's a little different.
	Find a charity that these guys like and give to them.
	So yeah, thanks, guys.
	Really appreciate it. We'll do it again.
	And have a great evening.

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