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Aug. 28, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:30:39

The Philosophy of God

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	Alright, alright. Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
	It is the 27th of August 2022 and I had a sudden change in schedule so I thought I would circle back and close off the loops of the people who had rapid-fire philosophy questions and see what I can do to help them out and give an answer as I see it.
	So I hope you guys are having a wonderful weekend and spending time with wisdom and love and great relationships and fun and fun.
	So, So, here we go.
	Questions. This is one from Tim.
	He says, I've heard it said that UPB doesn't have any positive moral obligations.
	In my opinion, if that were true, then you wouldn't need the proof that theft and other violations of the NAP isn't UPB because they can't be universalized.
	If there were no positive moral obligations, you could just say that as a way of proving theft isn't UPB. Wondering if you think that reasoning is valid.
	Also, isn't acting in accordance with the truth a positive moral obligation in UPB? So, it's a great question, and I appreciate that.
	Exposition, that clarity.
	But I think it needs a little bit of refining, or at least I'm going to try and do that.
	So for those who are not deeply versed in the arcane law known as UPB, I will say that what he's talking about is a question of, are there positive moral obligations, right?
	So, gosh, back in my moral education in my early teens, I read a book by...
	Theologian, believe it or not, which was the philosophy of Mad Magazine.
	So Mad Magazine with Alfred E. Newman, gap-toothed, spotty-faced grin guy, a real presage to David Letterman.
	So the book was examining this comic magazine for kids called Mad Magazine.
	And in it, the theologian was pointing out the morals behind The cartoons or the comics or the humor.
	And it was actually quite a good book.
	And I'm sure it's somewhere out there on the planet.
	If anybody knows, let me know.
	But one of the things he pointed out was, thou shalt not is far less restrictive than thou shalt.
	So if I say to you, you can go anywhere in the world except for Wichita Falls, then you have pretty much infinite freedom.
	If I say you can only go to Wichita Falls, then you have very little freedom because there's only one place you can go.
	So the question is, if you have a positive moral obligation, a thou shalt...
	Then you have a problem with universalization.
	In other words, it's kind of impossible.
	So we'll take a sense of a typical one, a typical one that we all kind of hear of, right?
	You should help others in need.
	You must help others in need.
	Now, you must help others in need.
	You can say, wow, that's not really a moral thing, but it kind of is with the welfare state, right?
	The welfare state, you have to pay your taxes and it's redistributed or at least 20% of the money is redistributed to the poor to buy votes.
	I mean, to help them get through their poverty and to make sure that the nuclear family gets destroyed.
	Boy, split the atoms, split the nuclear family.
	It's kind of a similar result.
	So... If you have to help the poor, you have to help those in need, you have to help those less fortunate than yourself.
	Okay, well, can that be universalized?
	It cannot. It cannot.
	Because, of course, it's asymmetric, right?
	So asymmetric is when one person has one attribute and the other person has a different or opposite attribute.
	Right, so... If I'm growing taller and you're growing shorter, it's kind of asymmetric, right?
	If we're both kids and growing up, that's different.
	So asymmetric cannot be universalized.
	So if, say, Bob has a moral obligation, Bob must help Doug, and let's just talk about money, right?
	So Bob has $1,000, Doug has no money, therefore Bob must help Doug.
	So you must help others, It's asymmetric because it's impossible for both people to fulfill that obligation at the same time.
	Now, if it's impossible for both people to fulfill that obligation at the same time, then it's asymmetric.
	It's not universalized. In other words, the moral standard, you must help others, only applies to the guy with $1,000.
	It doesn't apply to the guy with $0, because the guy with $1,000 have to give some portion, let's say half, to the guy with $500, right?
	With $0. So Bob gives half his money to Doug, and they both end up with $500.
	So that's not symmetrical.
	And it's also not universalizable through time.
	So helping others less fortunate than yourselves divides mankind into two classes, those who have and those who have not.
	And the moral obligation is to pass the resources to the people who have not from the people who have.
	Now, Not only is it asymmetric and therefore cannot be universalized because one person is on the giving end, the other person is on the receiving end, but also it cannot be sustained through time.
	So there's a moment, right? Let's say that Bob has no money.
	Sorry, Bob has $1,000.
	Doug has no money. And let's say through Venmo or something, Bob transfers $500 to Doug.
	So in that moment, I guess he's moral, right?
	But after that moment, he cannot achieve morality.
	Because now the equation has been equalized.
	Now, of course, Bob then can find somebody else who has no money and then can take half of his remaining $500, $250, and give it to that.
	And then, you know, $125, $67, blah, blah, blah, right?
	So that's a real problem.
	It's instantaneous.
	It's asymmetric.
	It can't be universalized.
	And there's only a moment where the person is moral.
	And the moment where the person is moral is the moment where the money is being transferred.
	But then he's no longer in a state of morality.
	He's in a state of immorality.
	And the other question, of course, is, well, there's always people, almost always people who are worse off than yourself.
	I guess there's one sad sack who really got it in the stones where he's just having the worst life of everyone, the worst day of everyone.
	But there's always somebody worse off than yourself.
	So it's a continual process of Losing resources to other people.
	And then, of course, what happens is if Bob gives $500 of his $1,000 to Doug and then Bob finds somebody else who has less money, still has zero, then he gives $250.
	Well, now Doug has to give half of his money or some portion of his money back.
	To Bob, because Bob has given more of his money to somebody with fewer resources even than both of them and so on, right?
	So it's a constant process of redistribution.
	It's always asymmetrical.
	One person is giving and one person is receiving.
	So universality means everyone can achieve it at all circumstances.
	Now, it doesn't mean everybody will achieve it, but everybody could logically, theoretically achieve it, right?
	So can the entire world respect people's property rights at all times?
	Yes. Now, again, that doesn't mean they will, but theoretically they could.
	It's not contradictory to say respect to property rights.
	Can everyone in the whole world refrain from murder?
	And even if it's just for, I don't know, 30 seconds, right, it's still universalizable, right?
	Because if they can do it for 30 seconds, they can.
	Now, so can everybody in the whole world refrain from assaulting someone else?
	Anyone? Is it theoretically, in your mental chess piece, logical puzzle situation, is it possible for property rights and bodily autonomy to be respected?
	And the answer is, well, yes, of course.
	Of course it is.
	Now, something like theft...
	Can theft be universally preferable behavior?
	Well, no, because theft is asymmetric.
	You're taking the property somebody else doesn't want you to take.
	But if they want you to take the property, then theft is no longer theft.
	If I want you to take my property, theft is no longer theft, right?
	So if I have some old dusty armoire and I put it on the side of the street and say, take me, and then you take...
	It's still my property and it's on my property.
	The armoire is on my property.
	It is my property because if I change my mind and choose to take it back, I'm not stealing from anyone.
	So if I put my property out front of my house with a sign saying, take me, and you take my property, you're not stealing from me.
	You're probably doing me a favor because, you know, there's a body buried in there somewhere.
	So theft cannot be universalized.
	Is it possible for everyone to not rape?
	Yeah, for sure. Absolutely.
	So theoretically, it can be universalized.
	Again, it doesn't mean it will be, but theoretically, it perfectly is universalized.
	And it's not limited by time, right?
	There's not a countdown. There's not a sand through the hourglass crawl style, right?
	You can not rape, not assault, not steal, not murder.
	From here to eternity, everyone can do that for the rest of time.
	It's not bound by time, and it's not asymmetric.
	So it's universalizable.
	Now, the other thing too, which I mentioned with regards to UPB, is the coma test.
	And the coma test is sort of a mental shortcut.
	It's not some sort of rock-solid Aristotelian definitive proof, but it's a pretty good hypothetical, right?
	So can a man who is in a coma be evil?
	Well, the answer to that, I mean, we instinctively understand that a man in a coma can't be evil.
	A man who's asleep can't be evil.
	So evil cannot be a positive moral obligation Because positive moral obligations are asymmetric, and positive moral obligations can't be universalized.
	And positive moral obligations can't be achieved by people in a coma.
	If you say, help the poor is your positive moral obligation, the man in the coma can't help the poor.
	Does that mean, like, so if help the poor is good, not helping the poor must be bad, immoral, evil.
	So if not murdering is the good, murdering is the evil.
	If not stealing is the good, UPB, stealing is the evil.
	If not raping is the good, raping is the evil.
	But positive moral obligations, everything that is not that positive moral obligation is the evil.
	Which means everything but helping the poor is the evil.
	You understand that You know, if I'm just standing there peeing, I'm not actively helping the poor.
	Does that mean I'm evil? Because I'm not doing the good.
	So this is the problem with positive moral obligations.
	With negative moral obligations, thou shalt not.
	Those actions are evil.
	Everything else is the good.
	Right? So if you go through your life not defrauding, raping, assaulting, murdering, stealing, that's good.
	Now, is that super positive good?
	Well, you're good because you're not doing any evil.
	And if we had a world where that was the case, then children would be protected, we'd have a voluntary society, there would be no rape, there'd be no theft, no assault, no murder.
	I mean, that's about as good a society as you can possibly think of.
	And then you would have a society where virtue was less necessary, right?
	So if you have a society where you have a smallpox vaccine, then being on guard against smallpox becomes something we don't even really think about, sort of with polio and other things as well, right?
	If we have a society where there's antibiotics and tetanus shots and so on, then stepping on a rusty nail is not quite as terrifying.
	You don't just cross your fingers and hope you don't die, which was most of medical science throughout most of human history until about 100 years ago, 120 years ago.
	So if we have a world or a region where people don't steal, don't...
	And again, I write about all of this in my new book, which you can get totally for free at the moment.
	Freedomain.locals.com.
	Just go sign up and use the promo code, all caps, UPB2022. And you get a free month.
	You can take the book for a test drive.
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	You can chat with people. You can check out all of the dozens of call-in shows that are up there just for subscribers.
	And it's a really great thing.
	If you don't like it, don't find it to be of value, you can just cancel and you're not going to get charged.
	You get a free month. FreeDomain.Locals.com.
	Promo code UBB2022. While it lasts.
	While it lasts. It's almost out, I think.
	So just, yeah, do it now.
	You can do it while you listen. It's totally fine with me.
	So a positive moral obligation, what does it mean to do the opposite, right?
	So if I say, thou shalt not murder, what's the opposite of not murdering?
	It's murdering, right? So the opposite of not murdering, sorry, the opposite of not murdering is murdering.
	So not murdering is the good, murdering is the evil, and we all kind of understand that, right?
	Now again, just because somebody is not murdering, I mean, they could be stealing, right?
	But so it's a combo, right?
	It's a four thing, right?
	All four, rape, theft, assault, and murder.
	And theft includes fraud.
	Rape, theft, assault, and murder.
	If you're not doing all those things, I'm fine with you.
	You know, maybe you're a little arrogant.
	Maybe you're a little pompous. Those are aesthetic things.
	They're not moral things.
	They're aesthetically preferable actions.
	Maybe you're late a lot or whatever, right?
	Maybe whatever, right? But if you don't pay your bills, then that's a form of theft.
	So then we're back in UPB land, right?
	So if you have...
	A negative moral obligation, a thou shalt not, you're free to do everything else.
	And if you live a life without initiating the use of violence, without stealing, without defrauding people, that's a good life.
	Now, because we think of goodness as simply like positive moral obligations, but that's because there's so many negative There's so many evil people around and society is structured in such an immoral or anti-moral manner that virtue, like you need the virtue called moral courage to talk about challenging topics and you need to screw your courage to the sticking place just to bring up topics around friends and family who are blue-pilled.
	And so because people are propagandized, the world is so full of lies and the world is violent and so on, because of all of that, We need these incredibly positive moral virtues.
	But in a free, virtuous, child-friendly society, we won't need all those moral virtues.
	I mean, a few people might, right?
	So you can think of the scene between David and Attica in my novel, The Future.
	I mean, he needs some...
	And I wanted to show the tough side of virtue, which is really startling to people when you see it.
	And it certainly was to me when I was writing it, but I think there's a lot to mull over there.
	So in a future society where things are free, you don't need a huge amount of martial courage.
	So let me give you an example to make it vivid, right?
	Do you need a lot of courage to cross the street?
	Well, I mean, unless you're severely agoraphobic or recently was involved in some sort of accident, not really, right?
	Just look both ways and wait for the light, cross the street.
	Do you need a lot of courage to cross the street?
	No, you don't. Now, imagine though that it's a situation of urban combat, right?
	And there are snipers around and you've got to cross the street to get food for your family.
	Do you need a lot of courage to cross the street when there are snipers potentially, or maybe you even know that there are, in buildings nearby?
	Well, of course you do. You need a massive amount of martial courage to cross the street.
	Do you need a lot of courage to run across a field in France now?
	No. However, from 1914 to 1918, yeah, you kind of did because a lot of those fields were no man's lands with machine gun nests and mustard gas and shells and all that kind of stuff, right?
	So I'm fine with a world where people are compliant with UPB, then that's good.
	Now, again, we have a sense of positive moral virtues because we face such adversity.
	I remember this old joke about if you bike a lot, and I used to get around from basically when I came to Canada when I was 11 until I was in my early 30s, I biked everywhere.
	Like even in the winter, I just biked everywhere.
	I used to bike an hour to get to work.
	And there was an old joke about biking, which is everywhere you bike, it's uphill and against the wind, right?
	So if you're biking uphill and you're against the wind, you need a lot of muscular strength to get up that hill.
	But if you're downhill, and with the wind, it's very easy.
	In fact, you're going to need to brake, probably rather than pedal.
	So when you're facing a lot of adversity, you need a lot of musculature.
	When you're facing an evil society, you need a lot of moral courage.
	But if your society is downhill and with the winds, then you don't need that level of moral courage, which is a good thing.
	We don't want a situation where we're regularly called on to display interstellar sums of moral courage because that means that we're in a situation which is desperately adverse for moral action.
	In a reasonable world, of course, my quote controversial topics would just be a topic of open discussion and we'd actually solve social problems and get closer together and people wouldn't be set against each other so easily and so on.
	But, you know, we live in this world where the truth is attacked and rejected and ostracized and so on.
	So you need a lot of courage to talk about these topics, but that's simply because of a false and deceptive society that we generally live in, right?
	So... A positive moral obligation creates...
	Asymmetric can't be universalized.
	It doesn't pass the coma test.
	And it means that everybody who's not doing that is immoral.
	Everybody who doesn't steal is moral.
	Everybody who steals is immoral.
	And it doesn't pass...
	The universality test, both because of its asymmetry, like if you've got to help the poor, then what does the poor have to do?
	Well, the poor doesn't have to help the poor.
	The poor has to receive, but they're both human beings.
	So you have one rule for one person, give to the poor, who's wealthier.
	You have another rule for the other person, who is poor, receive from the wealthy person.
	And so they have opposite actions.
	One is to give, one is to receive.
	It can't be universalized.
	It doesn't pass the coma test.
	And it means that every other action, this is why positive moral obligations are just terrible.
	Sorry, that's not much of an argument, but positive moral obligations are terrible because it means that anytime you're not doing that positive moral obligation, you're immoral.
	Which means that you get a moment where you have resources and you pass those resources.
	Ooh, there's a flashbulb of morality and then it all goes dark again because now there's somebody else you got to help and all of that, right?
	And it also really can't be universalized in the sense that if your goal is to help others, it can't be universalized through time because in order to help others, you have to have resources, right?
	So if you want to feed the poor, you have to have food.
	And then the time you spend getting food, growing food, buying food, hunting food, whatever it is that you do, all the time you spend getting the resources, you're not helping the poor.
	So you have to be evil in order to be good.
	So you're not helping the poor because you're making money, you're growing food, you're hunting food, you're buying food, whatever you do.
	So, in other words, evil is necessary for the production of virtue, which, I mean, we all understand just instinctively that can't be quite right.
	That's like saying killing someone is necessary for curing their illness.
	Because in order to give resources, you must have resources.
	In order to have resources, you can't be giving resources.
	So there has to be a fairly lengthy time of gathering resources and then you give them to the poor.
	And if it's just time, you say you become a big brother or you go talk to people who are poor and comfort them and so on, okay, but you still have to have the resources to be able to do that, to have a house, to have a car or a bike to go over and talk to the poor and help them.
	And so to achieve this short span of virtue, you have to do the opposite of that virtue.
	Now, it cannot be that you must do the opposite of a virtue in order to achieve a virtue.
	I must lie so that I can tell the truth.
	I must murder so that I can refrain from murdering.
	I must steal so that I don't have to steal.
	Well, of course, everyone who steals spends a certain amount of time not stealing because they have to enjoy the fruits of their labor.
	So we all understand that to be virtuous means that you have to do the opposite of virtue because then, of course, it's not even through time.
	It doesn't work.
	So positive moral obligations.
	Now, you can say, what about telling the truth?
	Is that not a positive moral obligation?
	It is not a positive moral obligation.
	It is not a positive moral obligation.
	Now, the question of whether you're under oath or perjury or things like that, there may be sort of situations where you are in some sort of legal situation and you really do have to tell the truth because somebody's jail time could hang on the balance.
	But... We're just talking about every day.
	No, there is no positive moral obligation to tell the truth.
	I think telling the truth is aesthetically preferable in that lying can be universalized.
	Everyone can lie all the time.
	But lying is not something that is inflicted on others.
	So murder is when someone jumps out of the bushes and stabs you and you die.
	That's inflicted upon you. Lying is not inflicted upon you.
	In a free society, right?
	In the theoretical world.
	If someone lies to you, they're not inflicting anything on you because you're in the situation voluntarily.
	If you have a boss who lies to you, you're choosing to work there.
	Now, again, if he lies to you, he says, I'm going to pay you this and he pays you half of that, that may be a contractual issue and so on.
	It's a whole different situation, but I'm just talking about general social aspects of lying.
	And the other thing, too, is that telling the truth cannot be universalized.
	It's impossible to tell the truth in a universal fashion.
	Well, first of all, we're asleep.
	We can't tell the truth when we're in a coma.
	And every time we're not speaking, we're not telling the truth.
	I mean, maybe we're not lying, but we're not telling the truth.
	Right? So, I mean, I'm currently strolling around because it helps me think.
	To pace and to think, to me, is a very good thing.
	So I've got a whole setup here where I can do it that way.
	So there are things that I'm feeling.
	I'm making sure I don't walk too heavily so that you don't hear any footsteps.
	I'm looking around at the various things around me.
	I can feel my watch on my arm.
	I played pickleball the other day and my butt's a tiny bit sore, but I'm not sharing all of that.
	I guess I am now, right?
	But But now that I'm sharing all of this, there's all these other things that I'm not sharing.
	I'm not telling you what I dreamt last night.
	I'm not telling you what I had for breakfast.
	What does it mean to tell the truth in a universal fashion?
	It's impossible to do it.
	You can't tell every single truth about every single thing at every single time that you're awake.
	And the other thing, too, is it's asymmetrical.
	Because if you and I are in a conversation, I'm telling the truth.
	But if you're telling the truth at the same time, neither of us are listening.
	So the truth is not getting communicated.
	So it's asymmetrical because person A is telling the truth.
	Person B must be listening to that truth.
	Otherwise, it's meaningless, right?
	I mean, if I'm trying to tell you the truth and you stick your hands in your ears, YouTube style, and just go, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, booboo, I can't hear you.
	Well, I guess I'm telling you the truth, but you're not receiving it, so it doesn't really have any value.
	Certainly, the telling of the truth must be accompanied by the reception of the truth.
	Otherwise, it's kind of a meaningless thing to say.
	It's like, ah, I was telling the truth to you, but you weren't there, and I was in a cave underground, and so you didn't receive any of that truth, but I was telling you the truth.
	It must be in the receiving as well.
	So telling the truth requires that somebody receive the truth, and once you have the telling and the receiving, it's asymmetrical.
	Two people in a room cannot both tell the truth about everything all the time because they will both be babbling, and then one of them will fall asleep, and therefore the person who's telling the truth is talking to a person who's asleep, which means that person cannot receive the truth.
	It's an old joke about relationships, which is...
	You wait till your wife is deeply asleep, right?
	And then you whisper, okay, honey, if you don't mind me buying yet another new microphone, don't say anything.
	Okay, if you don't mind me buying yet another new microphone, just don't say anything, right?
	And then you go out and buy a new microphone and your wife's like, why do you have a new microphone?
	Don't you have like 20 already?
	It's like, no, no, this one's different. You say, ah, no, no, but I checked with you.
	What do you mean you checked with me?
	I don't remember that conversation.
	Yeah, yeah, just the other night I asked you, If you didn't mind me getting a new microphone, just don't say anything.
	Was I asleep? Well, yeah.
	Well, then it doesn't count.
	I wasn't asleep. I didn't hear it.
	So you're telling the truth to someone.
	They're not able to receive it. It's meaningless, right?
	It's a manipulation. So telling the truth cannot be UPB. It can't be achieved by someone in a coma.
	It can't be possibly achieved to communicate every single thing that you're thinking and experiencing at all times.
	And it's asymmetrical.
	And it can't possibly be continued through time.
	So, it's aesthetically preferable actions.
	And also, not telling the truth is not something that's violently inflicted upon you.
	I think it's...
	And the other thing too, see, not killing, sorry, not murdering, not raping, It's a positive moral obligation for everyone at all times.
	And if somebody violates...
	Sorry, it's a negative moral obligation.
	So if somebody violates that and wants to assault you, then you're perfectly within your rights to use violence to resist that.
	So you can use violence in self-defense for somebody who's going to assault you, who's going to murder you, who's going to rape you, or in particular circumstances, even if they're just going to steal from you, right?
	So if you're in a desert and you have your last bottle of water and it's going to keep you alive and somebody's going to steal that bottle of water from you, and if they steal that bottle of water from you, you will die of dehydration.
	And if they don't steal that bottle of water from you, then you can make it to the next oasis or caravan or town or something.
	Then you could even use lethal force to protect a bottle of water because the bottle of water is your life.
	So if somebody violates UPB, then you have the right to use force.
	And I've got a whole The Ethics of Self-Defense.
	You can find it on my blog at freedomain.com slash blog.
	So... I won't get into all of the proofs for that at the moment, but you can sort of understand that self-defense is valid.
	So if somebody lies to you, do you get to use violence against them?
	And I'm not talking about fraud.
	I'm not breaking a contract.
	That's a whole different matter. Just lying.
	Fraud and breaking contracts are separate categories from lying.
	So if somebody lies to you, do you get to use violence against them?
	I mean, we understand instinctively that that's not the case.
	That it can't be right.
	Because, you know, this thing, you tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
	I don't know what the whole truth is.
	It's a very big... Again, that's a sort of legal statement.
	But if your wife wears a dress that she bought recently, but then claims it's an old dress, can you use violence against her?
	No, of course not.
	I can't even understand that, right?
	If you tell a little white lie, maybe you went out drinking, you wake up with a savage hangover, and then you call in sick.
	Now, you don't say, I was drinking, I had a hangover.
	You say, I'm not well, but you don't give the details.
	You don't say it was a hangover.
	Are you to be thrown in jail?
	Can your boss come over and use violence against you because you told him a lie?
	Well, no. Is it a good thing to do?
	Not particularly. So, as far as telling the truth goes...
	It's a good thing. It's a good thing to tell the truth because when you lie, you are putting a distance between yourself and those around you.
	You're putting a distance between yourself and those around you.
	And if you want to be close and you want people to love you, then they have to know you and understand you and...
	Appreciate you and know the real you and all of that.
	So, yeah, I mean, if you want to have love and if you want to have respect and if you want to have trust and if you want to have loyalty and if you want to have good companions and so on, then tell the truth.
	So there's positive benefits to it.
	I mean, it's the same as being on time.
	You know, if you want people to trust that you'll be places when you say you will and you don't want them to be late and so on, then, yeah, tell the truth.
	Be on time. Be on time.
	It's positive. But, you know, nobody gets to shoot you for being late because you're not violently inflicting it on others.
	So the relationship of sort of telling the truth and UPB, it's, I mean, I'd love it if telling the truth could be UPB'd.
	Because then you could make a really strong case for it, but it can't be, and therefore it can only be encouraged, it cannot be enforced, right?
	Some virtues are to be encouraged, not enforced.
	You know, being relatively polite, having some diplomacy, being on time, dressing appropriately.
	I mean, these are good things, you know.
	Personal hygiene, cleaning your teeth, exercise, decent diet, and so on.
	These things are to be encouraged, but they can't be coercively enforced, right?
	So I hope that makes some sense.
	So let me just go back to this, make sure I did circle back on this question.
	I've heard it said that UPB doesn't have any positive moral obligations.
	Now, Tim, that is a sketchy formulation, right?
	UPB doesn't have any positive moral obligations.
	So that's saying that there's – UPB is like a series of commandments or so on, and within that umbrella called – within that circle called UPB, it's just kind of arbitrarily placed no positive moral obligations.
	The better way, I think the accurate way to put it is saying that positive moral obligations can't be universalized and therefore they are rejected by UPB. You know, it's sort of like saying, well, you know, science doesn't contain any superstition.
	It's like, no, superstition is – Not validated by science.
	That's why it's called superstition and therefore science rejects it.
	So he says if that were true, so if UPB doesn't have any positive moral obligations, then you wouldn't need the proof that theft and other violations of the NAP isn't UPB because they can't be universalized.
	So I don't quite follow that.
	UPB doesn't have any positive moral obligations.
	So, in my opinion, if that were true – see, again, Tim, it's not if that were true – can positive moral obligations be universalized?
	And the first place to start is the coma test.
	That's just your good instinctive gut sense of whether something is UPB or not.
	Can a guy in a coma not rape?
	Yeah! Sort of by definition, right?
	Can a guy in a coma not murder anyone?
	Yeah, for sure. Sure, you can definitely avoid from murdering people, right?
	So, you can't have positive moral obligations.
	They don't sustain through time.
	They're asymmetric.
	They define everything that isn't them as the evil and it's not possible.
	So, anyway. So, if there aren't any positive moral obligations, you wouldn't need the proof that theft isn't UBB because they can't be universalized.
	If there were no positive moral obligations, you could just say that that is a way of proving theft isn't UPB. Ah, yes, but you see, theft is the consequence of a violation of property rights.
	So you could say that the positive moral obligation is to respect property rights, and you can spend your entire life respecting people's property rights.
	See, respecting people's property rights is not stealing.
	So you can say, well, the positive way of framing it is you have to respect people's property rights.
	Right? You have to respect people's bodily autonomy by not assaulting or raping or murdering them.
	But the positive way of framing it is...
	A negative consequence, right?
	The only way to respect people's property rights is to not steal from them.
	The only way to respect people's bodily autonomy, which is another way of saying property rights because they own themselves, right?
	I mean, rape is a form of theft in that you're stealing sexual access to someone who has not consented and opposes it enormously and has the right to kill you if you continue, right?
	So you're stealing a vagina.
	You're stealing a penis.
	You're violating bodily autonomy.
	So... In the same way that if you stab someone, you're invading their body.
	You're invading their property, which is their body, without their consent.
	You're damaging their property, their body, without their consent.
	Bodily autonomy is a form of property rights.
	Really, it's all about property rights in that you own your own body.
	If you consent to be operated on, then the surgeon cuts you open as doing so with your consent.
	Whereas if somebody stabs you and you don't consent, then they are violating your bodily autonomy.
	So when you reframe negative moral obligations, thou shalt not steal, into positive moral obligations, thou shalt respect property rights.
	Then you're obscuring the issue.
	You're recasting a thou shalt not into a thou shalt and saying, well, that's a positive moral obligation.
	But it's not. It's an obligation to not steal.
	You have a positive obligation to not steal.
	Why not just say, thou shalt not steal.
	You can't steal. Or, you know, stealing can't be UPB. Stealing is not UPB. Stealing can't be universalized.
	So, let's see. Wondering if you think that reasoning is valid.
	I don't. Also, isn't acting in accordance with the truth a positive moral obligation in UPB? Acting in accordance with the truth.
	Boy. I mean, that's vague as Hades, man.
	Acting in accordance with the truth?
	What truth? In what circumstance?
	You know, hey, I'm hungry.
	I think I'm going to go to a restaurant and get something to eat.
	Am I acting in accordance with the truth?
	I don't know. Hey, I feel like playing a video game.
	I think I'll play a video game. Is that acting in accordance with the truth?
	I don't really know what that means.
	The way you prove UPB exists, well, UPB, no, UPB doesn't exist, right?
	So UPB does not exist.
	UPB does not exist any more than logic exists or numbers without things exists.
	It's a concept. The scientific method does not exist anymore.
	It is a standard. Standards don't exist in the same way that things.
	So UPB doesn't exist.
	It's just a standard. You say, the way you prove UPB exists is by proving the validity of that one positive example, in my opinion.
	If there's one positive moral obligation, maybe there's others.
	So, no, I think it's a great question, but that is where UPB sits.
	At the moment. Now, Tim, oh yeah, you're here.
	Did you want to bring up your questions or objections to what I'm saying?
	Yeah, thank you so much.
	I hope you can hear me okay.
	Yeah, it's good. Yeah, I've actually been kind of thinking about this topic a lot.
	I'm probably all mixed up and everything.
	I know you kind of already addressed the question of So, I think that in the book, you say that truth is universally preferable to error.
	I think that's a...
	No, no, that's not the formulation.
	Sorry. And I don't have the book in front of me, but I've made this argument many times.
	So if you tell me that I'm wrong and you want to correct me and you think that I should conform to the truth, you're saying that the truth is universally preferable to error.
	right?
	And so it's not UPB because the behavior part is, right?
	So if you say to me, if I say two and two make five and you say, no, no, no, two and two make four, by correcting me, you're accepting the truth is universally preferable to error.
	Now by universally preferable, what I'm referring to here is that everyone should say that two and two make four at all times, under all circumstances, because truth is infinitely or universally preferable to error.
	It's not preferable to error on my side of the room, but not on yours in the northern part of the continent, but not the southern part of the continent on Tuesdays, but not on Wednesdays.
	It's universally. And the reason that that's important, if somebody corrects you, if you correct me, then you've already accepted UPB, that it's a universally preferable behavior to say things that are true rather than to say things that are false.
	And listen, I understand that's a conflation of the term with UPB around ethics.
	But I think it would say that it's aesthetically preferable to say things that are true according to universal standards.
	In other words, if somebody makes a false argument, somebody says two and two make five, it's not an evil action that you're justified in using violence to prevent.
	So I think I understand where the confusion is coming from, and it sounds like it's coming from my use of language.
	So the establishment of UPB is in somebody correcting you.
	That it's universally preferable behavior to tell the truth about things or to be accurate about things and to speak the truth about that accuracy.
	And so, yes, it certainly does sound, if I remember, it's been a while, obviously, since I've read the book, but if I remember the argument correctly, then it does sound like I'm saying truth is UPP. But the argument for truth, the correcting of others, is accepting that It's universal in that 2 and 2 make 4 is not a personal opinion of mine.
	If I'm saying that blue is the best color, then that's the infliction of a personal opinion of mine on you.
	That would not be universalizable.
	But if I'm referring to universal standards in order to correct you, or you're referring to universal standards in order to correct me, Then that is an acceptance of UPB, but it is not in the realm of good versus evil, because being wrong, saying two and two make five, is not violently inflicting your will on someone else, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, I think it's because none of us are brought up in this.
	We're all kind of taught other sort of systems and So then when we come to this, which is sort of a new thing, it can be kind of...
	It can be difficult to kind of think in this kind of new way, I think.
	Well, the language...
	Sorry to interrupt, but the language is all invented for not-UPB. Or the language was all developed for not-UPB. So, I mean, this is one of the challenges.
	It's sort of like trying to write a science fiction story using ancient Aramaic.
	It's like, well, there's no term for spaceship in ancient Aramaic, right?
	I think in Japanese, what is the word for a penguin?
	It's like a business pigeon or something like that.
	And so I'm trying to, we, I guess, collectively are trying to get a system of universal ethics going using existing language, which is generally designed to obscure and Pray upon people using moral terms, right? You know, all these ethics of emergencies, things that go on and all of that.
	And so, yeah, I agree.
	I mean, it's a bit of a thing to do, for sure, because I'm trying to refashion language designed to obscure morality, to clarify morality, which is a bit of a messy process, but, I mean, other than being able to invent my own terms, which wouldn't really make much sense, we do have to work with the language that is.
	Yeah, and I think I find this in other areas of life, it's helpful.
	I know sometimes it kind of feels like you just go round and round and round, but I call it a centrifuge, where even though it seems like you're just going round and round, there's actually a purifying kind of, a slow purifying kind of element to that.
	So I know it feels like maybe sometimes you just have the same conversation with people about it, but I find it helpful.
	No, no, listen, it's fantastic.
	I don't feel like it's round and round at all, because...
	It's both a very simple and very complex monolith.
	It's sort of like a haiku or one of these famous 20 ways or 19 ways of looking at a blackbird, like these really, really short texts.
	Or when I would study Shakespeare's sonnets and so on, you've got these really short texts that you could write an entire book on.
	So it's both very simple and very complex.
	And so, no, I always appreciate the comb-over.
	If I could go around one more time.
	If I see someone doing something that I think they shouldn't do and then I act to correct them, I'm saying that there's a gap between what they should do and what they're currently doing.
	I'm saying you should stop doing what you're currently doing and then Begin doing what you should do.
	What they're doing is error, and what they should be doing, that's what I call acting in accordance with the truth.
	That's what I mean when I say everyone has a positive obligation to act in accordance with the truth.
	Well, okay, but hang on, hang on.
	So one of the problems, of course, is with this monstrous word, should.
	Right? So should is a real challenge, right?
	So listen, obviously there were people on social media platforms who felt very strongly, I should not be talking about certain topics.
	Right? Now, they felt I should not.
	So somebody who's got a fear of dogs really wants people.
	They feel that people should not bring dogs near to them.
	So should can include irrational emotional things as well.
	You should not.
	This is the crazy concept of hate speech.
	You should not talk about this particular topic or these particular topics.
	But the problem is, of course, that can't be universalized because it doesn't pass the coma test.
	Now, even if it's a thou shalt not, you should not talk about these topics because it makes me upset, right?
	Okay, can that be universalized?
	Well, no. Because if person A says to person B, you should not talk about this topic because it's upsetting or it's just bad because I don't like it, Well, then person B can say to person A, you should not talk about me not talking about things because it's upsetting to me.
	And it just cancels.
	They just cancel each other out.
	If everybody universally has the right to suppress other people's speech because of emotional discomfort, then nobody has that right because it just cancels out.
	Go ahead. So there's three shoulds, right?
	There's you should conform to my emotions, or you should conform to the truth, or you should conform to the good.
	Those are the three things.
	And that's why I was going to stop you at the moment you used the word should, because it's a complicated and messy.
	I wish we had a better way of putting it.
	So are you talking about the second one?
	You should conform to objective standards or the truth in an objective way.
	But not morally.
	Yeah, yeah, like, you know, I'm a Christian, and I have thoroughly, I just, I can't get enough of your analysis of Christianity, but it has really blown my mind the more I think about how,
	you know, from all of time up until, you know, like 10 years ago, There was no non-religious way of ever saying to somebody else that they should or shouldn't do something.
	And then I think what you put forward was that there is a non-religious way to say that you should or shouldn't do something that is objective.
	And the reason I bring that up is because when someone says that they should or shouldn't do something, them just saying that doesn't make it true.
	It's only true if what they are saying is true, if that makes sense.
	So them saying it doesn't make it true...
	But there is a...
	I'm sorry. It's such a hard thing to say.
	It is. Do you mind if I just jump in for a sec?
	Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, so it's one of these funny things because if I can convince people to not talk about a particular topic, right, and they believe me, then it works, right?
	Yeah. So, you know, IQ has been known for over 100 years, right?
	And for 100 years, it's been the most wildly closely outside of the experts, right?
	It's been the most wildly and closely guarded secret in the universe.
	Literally nothing else comes close.
	So... People have convinced others, and this is through threat, right, for the most part, right?
	So people have convinced others to not talk about this topic.
	And you could put any sort of the topics, voluntary family or things like that, right?
	So if you can convince somebody else that it's evil or horrible or immoral or something to talk about a particular topic, and they believe you or they accept the threat or whatever it is, Then it's worked.
	So it's a strategy.
	If there's information that goes against the needs of those in power or those who want power or those who want resources through unjust means, and they can convince other people, oh, well, if you talk about this, you're a bad person.
	Only bad people talk about this.
	I mean, it's not UPB, right?
	Because then you could say, well, only bad people talk about people being bad for sharing information.
	This is the term, misinformation, right?
	And there's always this threat, you know?
	Well, if you share misinformation about COVID or the vaccines or whatever, people could die, you know?
	Like, you're going to kill people with misinformation.
	You have to escalate it to just insane levels of destruction so that you can feel justified in censorship and so on, right?
	But, you know, the escalation of threat or disastrous outcomes for the sake of sharing information, right?
	I mean, that can't be universalized either because anyone could then say, well, if you share this information, it's terrible and people will die.
	Oh, yeah? Well, if you don't let me share this information, it's terrible and people will die.
	Like, you can just keep attaching these negative things and it doesn't work.
	And so this is why information has to be free and all arguments have to be shared and the worst arguments will be quickly dismissed and all that.
	And, of course, it is a confession that you're just a weak person with no particular intellect or evidence on your side if you want to suppress other people's arguments.
	But it's funny because it works if you believe it, right?
	If you can convince people that it's just evil or wrong to share certain information or arguments, then if people believe it, and for the most part, it's worked really well for like 100 years or whatever in some topics or others.
	So it's just a strategy, and it works really well if people accept it and don't want to face the dire consequences of whatever they're sharing that people don't want them to share.
	Yeah. I think...
	So, like, what to me is kind of amazing is that, like, it's not just Christians, you know, it's basically, like, almost all religious people.
	But I'll just go with Christians as the kind of dominant example, is that, you know, Christians have said, hey, there's a thing called, you know, natural law.
	And so there is an objective, right or wrong, In life and in this world.
	And then, so how do we know what that is?
	You know, the Ten Commandments and Jesus and stuff like that.
	And then, I think kind of, to me, I think what kind of happened is you came along and you said, actually, there's a There's a whole other way of deriving that information, that we agree on there being a natural law, of there being an objective right and wrong kind of baked into reality.
	And so we agree on that.
	But look what I found.
	I noticed another way of determining what that is.
	And then where, even to the degree where, you know, I'm not even sure you need the You could sort of treat the former way of deriving that, you could kind of almost even drop that, and then just go with this way.
	But it's not a dropping it.
	Sorry to interrupt. It's not a dropping it.
	It's not a dropping it at all.
	I mean, to be completely ridiculous in my formulation, I view UPB as a fulfillment.
	Of God's law of universality.
	So to give you an example from the world of physics, right?
	So, and this is a Tom Woods argument that's very good, right?
	So he said that, well, how did we discover modern science?
	We discovered modern science because we are going to, like, because people said, well, God is universal.
	God is absolute. And God gives us all these, God created all these universal laws.
	And we study the mind of God by studying these universal laws.
	And I bet you for most of human history, to be mildly blasphemous in a way, but with great affection, right?
	So for most of human history, I don't know if you've seen this meme where someone's saying to God, oh yeah, they're making milk out of almonds now.
	And God says, are you kidding me?
	I give them 16 animals to make milk from and they've got to go make it from almonds?
	Are you kidding me? And so for most of human history, I think God was saying, okay, I've given you great senses and I've created a universe of absolute abstract physical principles.
	Right? Gravity is a constant.
	Radiation is a constant.
	Speed of light is a constant. You only have concepts because atoms behave in particular predictable manners, right?
	Water is the same everywhere.
	Right? Air is the same everywhere.
	You don't walk from one side to the room to the other, and it turns into Venus.
	So I gave you absolutely clear physical laws and properties of matter, and I gave you fantastic senses with which to process it.
	Why is it taking you guys so long to figure out the science thing?
	Like, what are you doing?
	I couldn't have dropped the breadcrumbs any more clearly if I tried.
	And so I think that God gets frustrated looking at humanity saying, I mean, come on, guys.
	It's sort of like, I remember this girl telling me once that when she liked a guy in a bar, she'd smile at him, she'd toss her hair, and he'd be all nervous and sweaty.
	And she's like, come on.
	It's like feeding a squirrel in the wild.
	Come on. Come on over.
	Talk to me. And I think it's the same thing.
	God says, I didn't give you senses that reverse everything.
	I didn't give you chaotic laws.
	You're not living in a dream.
	You're living in a perfectly stable universe with fantastic senses to communicate all of these principles to your brain.
	What is the matter with you?
	Why are you going off on this mysticism?
	It's nothing to do with me. Now, in the same way, I think God would say something like, and again, to be ridiculous, right?
	But God would say something like, okay, I told you, it's thou shalt not.
	So I gave you the negative moral obligations.
	And... Also, it's universal.
	I told you it's universal.
	That's the whole Jesus thing, right?
	Jesus went from tribal to universal.
	So I told you it's a negative moral obligation and I told you it's universal.
	Like, forgive me because you've got free will.
	You've got to get there yourself.
	You know, if you teach kids, right?
	If you homeschool kids, right?
	I homeschool. So if you teach kids, there's no point grabbing their hand and writing the answer because they don't learn anything.
	In fact, they become more passive, right?
	So you give them the facts, you give them the encouragement, you give them all the hints in their own universe, but they've got to get there themselves.
	Otherwise, they don't learn anything.
	And God, of course, wants us to become wise and wants us to become knowledgeable and wants us to become virtuous.
	Now, if he gives us all the answers, we haven't learned anything.
	He gives us the principles and we've got to figure out the answers.
	And he'd say, look, I gave human beings a soul.
	You're all common. You're all equal in the eyes of the Lord.
	I told you that morality was universal, and I gave you negative moral obligations.
	Like, I'll take you halfway, but you've got to do the rest yourself.
	Because otherwise, there's no virtue.
	There's no entrance to heaven.
	There's no good. There's no evil.
	There's no free will. I could have programmed you like robots.
	But then you wouldn't be able to achieve virtue.
	The purpose of humanity in the eyes of God, I would argue, is largely to do with the increase of virtue in the universe, which means that you have the capacity for evil in the universe.
	You've got to have free will, you've got to have moral choices.
	And he gives us a whole bunch of principles in the same way that he gives us a universe with completely clear physical properties and properties of energy.
	The sun doesn't turn into a banana.
	Mountains don't suddenly become crevasses.
	Ice doesn't burst into flames for no reason, right?
	He's given us a perfectly stable universe and perfect senses with which to appreciate that.
	And to process that. And he's like, come on.
	Science is easy. Science is easy.
	I told you. I created a sane universe.
	I told you I created a rational universe.
	I created senses to transmit that rational universe to your brain.
	I gave you this incredible capacity, singular, to all of the animals to create universals in your mind.
	I'm not doing the whole thing for you.
	I can't digest your food for you.
	I can't make you moral because then you wouldn't be moral.
	I'm not going to give you every single answer in their own universe.
	You're going to have to figure some of this stuff out for yourself.
	It's the same thing with UPP. God says that morality is universal.
	Jesus certainly said morality is universal.
	So I'm like, okay.
	I mean, I was raised a Christian, right?
	So I'm like, okay, well, morality is universal.
	And then God also could easily say to human beings if he came down with a big giant trumpet, which maybe he's coming soon, I don't know, but if God came down with a big giant trumpet, he would say, okay, so every time you violate this universality, things get worse and worse and worse.
	So when you end up with different rules for different ethnic groups, when you end up with different rules for the kulaks and the proletariat and the ruling classes, when you create all of this opposition, when you don't universalize these morals, the more you fragment and oppose morality based upon racial or gender or class or nation, every time you fragment this, what happens?
	Things get worse and worse and worse and worse to the point where Hundreds of millions of people get slaughtered.
	So, I give you the universality.
	I give you the capacity to automatically process universality.
	I give you the deep thirst for morality.
	I tell you it's universal. I tell you it's negative moral obligations.
	I mean, I've given you as many hints and standards and absolutes as I possibly can without writing the answer out for you.
	You're going to have to figure it out yourself so that you can be good.
	Now, you couldn't be good if there was no such thing as universals.
	You couldn't be good if we couldn't process universals or couldn't generate them, which is why we don't think that hamsas can be good or evil.
	But UPB, to me, is the same approach to morals as...
	Physics and science was to physical laws.
	If physical laws are universal, our senses process them perfectly.
	And therefore you can get science if you just take that and accept it.
	And so to me, the job of the most robust theologians in the late Middle Ages was to understand God's creation by accepting the universality of his laws.
	And for me, understanding the universal morals that I was raised with is the same process.
	This is the science of morality, a rational proof of secular ethics.
	And so it's – this is what's – nothing to do with you.
	I mean, I love these conversations, but, you know, the world as a whole just getting mad and raged and rolling their eyes and so on and having these, you know, terribly weak, pathetic arguments against UPB and so on.
	It's like it's medieval.
	In that people would say, well, what are you talking about?
	God's stable laws. There were miracles.
	It's like, yes, there were miracles to give us a hint.
	There were miracles to say, you've got to listen to this because if I could walk on water, then people would accept UPB a whole lot more.
	But I suppose the deity doesn't want that to occur because people were in such a lost state.
	It's like, okay, I'll give you a guy who can walk on water.
	So you'll actually listen to what he's got to say.
	That's the early internet, right?
	You can broadcast more if you walk on water.
	And I can't perform, of course, any miracles other than what seems to me quite miraculous, which is the generative capacity for rational thought.
	But to me, it is simply approaching God's law in the same way that physicists have approached God's universals through science.
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I was going to say that if you could do miracles, then that would sort of be evidence against you, PB, because...
	Kind of the point of UBB is not needing miracles, if that makes sense.
	It would be an argument from Consequences to say that if more people accepted UBB, the world would get radically better.
	So it would be almost a satanic temptation.
	You know, it's like, okay, maybe you could override people's free will by performing miracles, right?
	Or let's say that after I'm dead, right?
	Let's say that they dissect my brain.
	And I just have a completely ridiculous brain, right?
	Like, you know how the cab drivers, you know, they've done this analysis of the cab drivers' brains and their spatial reasoning is like four times the size of regular.
	So let's say that after I'm dead, they slice and dice my brain and it's like, holy crap, his like language and logic center was like 19 times bigger than the average person's or something like that.
	So maybe that's the kind of quote miracle.
	And maybe it's, I will gain acceptance through dissection.
	You know, through being a cadaver, people were like, "Wow, you know, he really did have a big, giant, complex brain and whatever it is." You know, and that's, you know, the IQ argument.
	Let's say I took an IQ test.
	It was 190 or something ridiculous, right?
	It's like, "Okay, well, he's got..." But that's almost like an overriding of free will.
	It's an argument from authority.
	And so that's why I won't do those things.
	I mean, obviously, I'm not going to dissect my own brain with a spork, but that's why I won't take an IQ test because if it's really, really high, people might accept what I say because of a high IQ. And that's not free will.
	That's just saying, oh, big number.
	He's right. And that's not learning or absorbing anything.
	That's just having IQ write the answer for you.
	Yeah. Thank you for that.
	I had another thought.
	So, one of the things that kind of Christians talk about is that, you know, there was a, you know, when Jesus came, people were expecting, like, it was widely commonly thought that there was a Messiah coming.
	And the thing that, the thing about Jesus is that he didn't, like, he sort of fit the description, but not in a way that people were expecting.
	And then, uh, To me, I think UBB kind of has a similar dynamic to it where I think Christians are expecting some sort of – because for most Christians,
	it's a faith thing. And then they are expecting some sort of revelation or validation or some sort of logical proof at some time to arrive.
	Where all of their faith in natural law will be vindicated.
	And so they're expecting that to happen at some point.
	And then in a similar way, I think UBB is that thing.
	That's the vindication of it.
	That's the validation of natural law.
	It's kind of like a revelation.
	But in the same way that Jesus kind of came, not calling you Jesus, but in the same way that Jesus came and then people looked at him and didn't notice it, people kind of look at UPP and don't really see it or whatever.
	And then it's only after the fact that people will go, maybe after you're dead or something, but will people go, oh wow, that was, it was, you know, it will seem much more momentous later on, I think.
	So, to me, I kind of see UPB as the kind of logical revelation or validation of sort of biblical natural law.
	And then, so one other thing about that is, like, you know, in the, one of the reasons I kind of look for positive, because I'm still kind of half operating off of faith, and so one of the, Biblical natural law is, in my opinion, not all thou shalt nots.
	There's a bunch of thou shalt nots.
	Thou shalt not covet or steal or murder.
	But there's also thou shalt.
	There was a person who walked up to Jesus and he said, there was a conversation about what was the most important law.
	And then Jesus said, love the Lord your God with me.
	You know, all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
	And then he said, and there's a second one that's basically just as important, which is love your neighbor as yourself.
	And then, and he said, the whole rest of the law hinges on those first two.
	And so they can be summarized into just those two.
	And then, so, and, you know, I think when we first met, I said something like, oh, I'm your biggest fan.
	And you were like, yeah, everybody says that.
	But I think you're like, oh, you're probably pretty up there.
	And so, you know, I've listened to so many things and I take all these quotes down and everything.
	And you have so many quotes that kind of intuitively speak to a similar belief.
	You know, like I think you said that you believe that you have to serve the species.
	You don't have a rational proof for this part yet, but intuitively, many times, you've said that you feel a deep kind of conviction about leaving the world off better than you found it, and to as great a measure as you can reasonably achieve.
	And to me, that's in line with what Jesus was talking about in terms of loving your neighbor as yourself.
	And then I think that...
	I'm just throwing I thinks out, but I really strongly think that if we go 5,000 years in the future or something...
	UBB is going to be the basis upon which every should is based.
	In the future, every time that someone says to themselves or to another person, I should or you should do this or that, the basis upon which they are going to make that claim is going to be UBB. Well, I think, sorry, let me just interrupt because I appreciate your kind words are wonderful and I really, really appreciate that.
	That fills my heart with joy and hope.
	So UPP fundamentally is a defensive mechanism.
	So when you say to children, I've been around a lot of kids, right?
	I raised a kid and I was a daycare teacher and all that.
	So when you're around kids and say, you must, you ought, you should, kids just kind of fall in line for the most part.
	And, I mean, there's the oppositional defiant disorder kids and the really sort of broken kids and all of that, but kids just, the ought, the should is so powerful for us.
	And, of course, Christians would say, because God has implanted within us a yearning for the good, right?
	That's the goal, right?
	So the shoulds are so powerful, and it's so easy to control us with the shoulds, with the oughts.
	Even people who are unjustly attacked will feel often like they've done something wrong.
	Because our desire for social approval, our desire to be good, to be thought of as good, right?
	I mean, what's the fundamental attack these days, right?
	Go for the character, go for the reputation, go for the slander, go for the libel, whatever, right?
	So we have such a thirst for goodness that it's this massive giant lever that people in authority can use to control us.
	Only bad people would talk about these things.
	Oh, I want to be a bad person. Okay, so in America, you've got the First Amendment.
	It's like, do you really have free speech?
	Fundamentally, it's a defense mechanism against the most powerful weapon that authority has against us, which is morality.
	I mean, as I've said before, morality is invented to control us.
	It wasn't invented to liberate us.
	We're trying to wrestle a weapon away from a brutalizer, a dictator.
	So UPB is a defense mechanism.
	It's a shield. It's a ninja.
	It's judo where you use the momentum of your opponent to win.
	So when somebody says, you should, you ought, this is the moral, this is the good, and it's universal, we say, okay, is it universal?
	I mean, it only has power if you claim it to be universal, because otherwise it's, would you do me a favor?
	So if some stranger on the street comes up and says, you know, can I have $10?
	They're asking you for a favor.
	But if somebody lent you $10 and you're supposed to pay them back on Saturday, Saturday comes and they say, can you give me $10?
	That's more of a moral thing, right?
	That's not just asking a favor, right?
	So the way that people bypass asking other people for a favor is to say, hey, I just represent the universal good.
	You must because morals.
	And that's so powerful for us.
	And we all remember this when we were a kid and we learned what the good and the bad and the right and the wrong and the this and that.
	It's so powerful for us.
	And you can see this playing out in society in a variety of ways at the moment, as it always has.
	So UPB is the shield against the immense power that authority has to control us through morality.
	To say, oh, you've got to do this because it's universally good.
	It's like, oh, okay, let's just quickly check whether that's actually universally good.
	Let's just check whether it can be universalized.
	And now this is the counterfeit detection machine on the greatest currency at all, which is the currency of morality, which is used to bribe and threaten and coerce us.
	Not quite coerce us, but punish us with self-attack if we disobey.
	So UPB is the fundamental protection against exploitation by false universal, quote, morality, which is what morality was invented for.
	Morality was, in the Christian context, what we think of as morality was invented by the devil to use our desire to be good to have us serve evil.
	I mean, that's what the devil would do.
	He would pretend to be good, he would pretend to be universal, he would pretend to be moral, but it all benefits only him.
	And this is why I was railing against Kant the other day, right?
	Because he said, oh yeah, it's universal.
	It's like, oh yeah, but not the prince, not the king, not the ruler, not the leader, not the government.
	So UPB is a way to block the hooks and controls of authority that are speared at us and implanted in us and move us around like some bloody marionette puppet.
	By saying, oh, you're making the claim that it's skepticism, right?
	Science is founded on skepticism of authority.
	And UPB is founded on skepticism of moral authority.
	So, oh, you're making this claim that it's universal?
	Okay, let's see if it is. Let's just, you know, I'm sure you're right, but let's just double-check that, right?
	I mean, if you're in a neighborhood where counterfeit bills are being passed all over the place, you're going to train your cashiers, hopefully, well, the whole George Floyd thing, but you're going to train your cashiers to check for counterfeit bills.
	If you touch it and the ink comes off, right?
	If the numbers are all 6666, if it's got a picture of Mickey Mouse on it, you know, if it's Monopoly money, right?
	So if there's a lot of counterfeit money floating around, your neighborhood, you're going to train your cashiers to check for counterfeit currency.
	Well, this whole UPB is saying, oh, so this has peculiar power over me because you claim it to be universal.
	Well, I sure as hell don't want to serve evil.
	So... Because evil would claim that a moral was universal while carving out exceptions for those serving evil and not ever talking about it.
	And when it was ever pointed out, they'd switch from morals to pragmatism, just as Immanuel Kant did.
	So it's a way of blocking...
	The grappling hooks of control generated by evildoers, which is to claim something as universal and carve out exceptions for themselves.
	And UPB says, oh, I just want to double-check this universal stuff, because the universal has so much power, it's going to control me if I accept it.
	And so I sure as heck don't want to be manipulated by my desire to be good.
	So let's just check whether it actually is good, all right?
	And, well, as you can see, when we put the ethics of the modern world, or most ethics throughout history, with the exception of the ethics of Jesus.
	Now, when Jesus says there are two rules, love God, love your neighbor, right?
	Okay. Okay. If we say God is universal abstractions, I know that dehumanizes God, but certainly God is a universal abstraction and God creates universal laws.
	God creates universal laws in physics.
	God creates universal laws in morality.
	And because he has also designed us to accept and process automatically universals, which makes us so susceptible to the universals of morality, so God has created...
	An objective universal universe, objective universal morals, and has given us an incredible ability to automatically process universals.
	So, to love God is to love universals, because that's what's most specifically human about us, is our capacity for concepts, our capacity for universals.
	So, to love God is to love universals.
	But because all human beings have the capacity to process universals, to love universals, it's not just to love God, but to love humanity.
	It's the same thing.
	It's loving the universals in God.
	It's loving the universals in physics.
	It's loving the universals in morality.
	And because all human beings have an automatic and deep and built-in capacity to automatically process universals, to love God is to love your neighbor as yourself.
	Because your neighbor has the capacity to process universals, you have the capacity to process universals, and in fact it's an automatic process that occurs, which is why when you tell the child this is the good, the child just aligns with that for the most part, or is strongly influenced by that, or maybe rebels against it in some satanic measure, but is still powerfully influenced by it, and it's almost impossible to undo.
	So to love universals, to love God, To love universals in your neighbor and the universals in yourself.
	See, that's the trinity, right?
	God, neighbor, self. Because it says, love God, love your neighbor as yourself.
	There's three people right there.
	God, or three entities.
	God, neighbor, you.
	Saying, you have everything in common with your neighbor, which is universals, and everything in common with the God who created you to love universals as the breadcrumbs to virtue.
	So I can...
	The positive obligation...
	To love universals. First of all, it's kind of built into us, but we have to make sure it's not used to exploit us with false universals that rob us blind and destroy our societies on a regular basis.
	So I can...
	I hope that's not a twist and a deke that's unfair and unjust.
	But I mean, the amount of...
	This is what's so funny, right? The amount of love which motivates me in what I'm doing.
	This is... I mean, how do you overcome the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune?
	Well... Love is what combats lies.
	Love of the truth is what allows you to survive through lies.
	And for full acceptance, everybody who amounts to a dam in the world of improving humanity is attacked front, left, right, and center, bottom, top, you name it.
	So that's how do you do it?
	Well, out of a deep love of humanity.
	I absolutely recognize I see the people controlled by false morality.
	By morality, they're told it's universal, but which always carves out an exception for those who wish to rule over them.
	It's like the farmer saying to the cow, well, we're all in this together.
	No, we're not. Only one person eats the other entity, right?
	And so the amount of love, yeah, for sure.
	And the people who really hate the world and hate the people in it, they create all of these rules and carve out exceptions for themselves.
	And anybody who points that out, oh, yeah, of course they're going to attack.
	That's That's natural.
	I mean, they would fight UPB in the same way that a tiger would fight being painted bright orange.
	Because if he spray painted bright orange, he can't sneak up on anything.
	He can't prey on anything. He can't attack and eat anything.
	It's too obvious, right?
	So this is like a big GPS for predators.
	Hey, they're right there. Oh, right over there in the grass.
	That's where all the predators are. So you might want to move away if you don't want to be prey.
	And the predators, they don't like that, right?
	And of course, because they're used to predation, right?
	They're the same beast that Socrates talked about back in the day, or Plato talked about with regards to politics.
	So I hope that's not too much of a judo move, but that's how I would interpret what Jesus said that you admirably quoted.
	Yeah, yeah. No, I love that whole amen.
	I love that whole thing. Yeah.
	I remember not too long ago you said that you have to have something that subsumes the ego.
	To me, I think whatever that thing is, that's kind of your God.
	For you, I think maybe that's philosophy as a universal.
	I think there's a sense in which you are fulfilling that commandment because it seems like you love philosophy with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
	And you love people because you're trying to spread it around as much as you can and help other people see the beauty that you see.
	And I don't see any dichotomy between loving philosophy and loving people because philosophy is only manifested in people.
	And I think that's what Jesus was saying, that if you love God, you love people because God is in people and the soul is in people.
	And this is what Mother Teresa said, that she loves the poor, she loves Jesus in the poor.
	And so to me, to love philosophy and to love humanity are the same thing because humanity is defined by our capacity for philosophy.
	That's all we have that differentiates us from the animals or the capacity for abstractions and universals and reasoning and so on.
	So to love philosophy And to love humanity is, to me, the same thing.
	And this is the wild thing as well, is that the fact that UPB comes after the scientific method must be particularly frustrating for our good friend, the dear Lord, right?
	Because the dear Lord must be up there somewhere looking down and saying, dudes, I already showed you what universals do in the realm of science, right?
	Accepting universals, which I programmed into the fabric of reality and programmed into your senses, So accepting universals in the realm of science did what?
	Gave you the modern world.
	Accepting universals and opposing slavery, which is that every human being owns itself and you cannot own yourself and be owned by someone else at the same time.
	It's like saying, I have a car that somebody else owns.
	It's like, no, no, you can't have both, right?
	So, our good friend the Lord up there is saying, I think...
	Dude, I've already given you, you already have the example.
	You finally figured out the science thing.
	You finally figured out the anti-slavery thing.
	You finally figured out at least reasonable equality before the law.
	You finally figured out free speech.
	And look at all the incredible benefits you got from that.
	Now, what the scientific revolution did to our society and our technology...
	It's really nothing compared to what the moral revolution could do for our future, which is why, again, I wrote that book called The Future, so that we'd have something to aim at, something that we could envision and conceptualize and see.
	Because the technology that has been developed through the universalization of physical properties and methods in science is easily captured by evildoers, right?
	That's the great danger, the surveillance state and the digital ID and social credit scores and all of that.
	It's this amazing technology developed by universals and I would imagine that all the angels up there are screaming that...
	If we don't get the universals in morality, the universals in science will enslave us even further.
	So the universals in science are there to say, well, if you truly universalize morality, you will end up even better than the physical world has ended up and your control over it has ended up through the application of universals in science.
	So if we can do for our soul what we have done for our body, if we can do for virtue what we have done to physics and engineering, then we end up with as much of a paradise as we can possibly have in this world.
	But the universals in science, without leading and being the empirical evidence for the value of universals in morality, if we only have the universals in science and we continue to allow the fragmentation and carving out of exceptions in the realm of morality, if we accept universals in science but deny universals in morality, the universals in science will be used to enslave us even further.
	And I think that's the brinksmanship that kind of keeps me going at the moment, if that makes sense.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Totally. And I've There's one more thing I want to hit you one more time.
	So like earlier I said, I believe that in the future, all shoulds are going to be based on UBB. And that's going to include things like one day somebody's going to go up to somebody else and say, hey, you should change your oil in your car every 3,000 miles.
	Even things like that will be based on UPB. But you might say, well, that can't be a UPB because if it was, then...
	Everyone would have to stop whatever they were doing and then just start changing the oil in their car constantly and then just never stop doing that.
	And kind of theoretically that's possible until we all died of starvation.
	But you could be moral up until everyone died.
	But it's absurd.
	So the principle...
	Can't be, oh, everybody needs to change their oil every 3,000 miles.
	It's got to be something kind of more abstract, of which changing your oil becomes like an instance of.
	So, for example, I imagine your life is, you know, I have this idealized version of your life, but I imagine your life is already kind of like this.
	So you manage your time, I'm just assuming here.
	But I imagine you manage your time pretty carefully.
	You go, I got, you know, hopefully 30 or 40 more years.
	And, you know, you've got a lot to say.
	And you'd like to say as much as you can because you think it does people good.
	And, you know, you're kind of loved...
	Because you love the God of philosophy and you love people and you want philosophy to be spread among them and have them live in accordance with the truth, because of that, you then probably manage your life fairly carefully.
	You don't like wasting hours on obviously meaningless stuff.
	I mean, you know, you probably relax and play video games and stuff as a way of, like, recharging your mind, but you kind of, I imagine you kind of are careful about that, and you measure out, like, you carefully manage your time and what you do and all your resources in a whole bunch of different ways in order to maximize the effect that you're going to have,
	you know, in this life. To me, UPB, if you say serving philosophy and helping people through that is a UPB, that in practice actually breaks out into a whole bunch of, like a myriad of separate endeavors.
	All the stuff you do in the day, you should do them because you're managing your time for this effect.
	If that makes sense.
	And I think in the future, that's going to be maybe a much more widely held view.
	Perhaps even ubiquitous.
	Maybe everybody's living their life that way.
	Where if you ask them, why are you doing this?
	You know, like little kids. They always just ask why, why, why until you get to the sort of a fundamental why.
	And then I think in the future, when people ask, you know, Dad, why are you cooking a breakfast burrito at work?
	You're asking somebody why they're making some particular part on some machine.
	You just go to the why, why, why.
	Fundamentally, I think it's possible in the future that if you drive to the end of their whys, they're going to have the UPB of, you know, because I... I love philosophy and I want to see it as fruitful as possible in the world around me as much as I can carefully manage that effect, if that makes sense.
	I certainly hope that in the future people don't have the kind of battles that we have to simply tell the truth.
	Somebody was posted the other day, I think it was last night, About how he was, you know, trying to bring some truth about, I think it was something, COVID or vaccines or something, and everybody just completely freaked out and wouldn't listen and got angry and so on, right?
	And I'm certainly hoping that in the future, the novel, right?
	In the novel, The Future, how much do people think about Philosophy or...
	Well, they don't really as much because the problems have been solved.
	In the same way that when you're a toddler, you learn how to walk.
	It's, you know, shaky business.
	You've got to really concentrate on it.
	And when you get good at walking or riding a bike or whatever it is, you can just do it pretty automatically and pretty easily.
	And you don't really have to think about it that much.
	So I think that the purpose of philosophy is to create a world where virtue is rewarded and vice is punished and you can easily understand...
	Ethics and virtue, as I said, you know, I explained UPB to my daughter when she was just a couple of years old and no problems or issues with it and so on.
	And so it just becomes automatic and society reinforces it, whereas now we've got to work against all our programming, we've got to work all against the bad language, which we're punished for being virtuous and we're rewarded for being evil and it's just a mess and it's a battle.
	And the purpose, of course, of philosophy is to not make it so...
	It does not make it so hard to be good.
	And that way people can know that they're good.
	They can be in a society where being good is reinforced and being bad is punished.
	They can get on with lives of creating beauty or consuming art or working hard on building some business or whatever it is.
	And philosophy has kind of done its job in the same way that it used to be really, really hard to get clean water.
	There's a scene or a snippet in the future where Roman is looking at a long line of women in the hazy distance and knowing that they're going to go and get water.
	So getting water was like a half-day job.
	And of course, they didn't even really know about boiling it to clean it or anything like that.
	So getting clean water was like a huge deal.
	And now we just turn on our tap and we don't have to spend half our days getting water.
	I remember reading a book about the welfare state written by a Canadian author some decades ago.
	And he was saying how his mother used to weep with exhaustion at the end of the day because she had five kids and no washing machine.
	So she'd have to just scrub, you know, on the washboard, washboard stomach.
	It comes from that washboard thing.
	You just have to scrub and then you'd have to rinse and then you'd have to hang it out to dry and you'd have to hope it wouldn't rain.
	And nobody would steal the clothes and they wouldn't blow away.
	And, you know, it's just exhausting.
	And that's just one of the things, right?
	People used to have to iron things with hot coals in a bowl, right?
	I mean, I remember when I was a kid, growing up, one of the endless, stupid, grim, useless, dumb battles that we had was, who's doing the dishes?
	Oh, I did it yesterday.
	No, I did it at lunch. And now, at least for a lot of people, there's like a dishwasher.
	You throw the dishes in and now you just fight over who puts them away, which is so much easier.
	So, you know, the purpose of all of this stuff is to take stuff that's just a massive, grim, endless battle and to turn it into something you don't even really have to think about.
	And you can get on with other things in your life, right?
	So, I mean, it's gotten to the point now where to go and get 2,000 calories, you'd have to go and hunt for a day.
	And now, if you have some money, you can just literally phone people up and have them bring 2,000 calories to your house.
	You don't even have to get off the couch, right?
	And there's pluses and minuses to all of that, and the tension between the unreality caused by civilization is pretty well explored, I think, in my book, The Future.
	But... The whole point of philosophy is to turn it into rather than having to march three miles upriver to get some clean water, you just turn on a tap and you don't have to consume all your time and energy getting water.
	You can just turn on a tap, grab a drink and then go and do something that's more enjoyable and more productive and so on.
	So it's trying to automate it and right now, of course, it's a ridiculous thing.
	Unholy battle. But yeah, I mean, the point is, and it's going to take a while, obviously, because civilization, this is Roman's argument, right?
	Roman's argument in the Civ is that civilization breeds unreality.
	Unreality breeds madness, and madness breeds destruction, right?
	And I was watching a little bit of Matt Walsh's documentary, What is a Woman?
	And, you know, there's these people who are like, well, they don't, like, he's arguing with a woman and he's saying, well, you know, some kids believe in Santa Claus.
	And he says, well, Santa Claus isn't real.
	And the woman is like willing to entertain the possibility that Santa Claus is real.
	Well, how is it that people are willing to entertain these possibilities that things that are entirely self-contradictory for which there's no evidence could possibly be real?
	Because they don't have to work with actual tangible reality because we've got a crazy system that makes people insane by removing them from tangible practical reality.
	I mean, there's nobody in the woods who's being chased by wolves who says, well, you know, could be that the wolves don't exist.
	It could be the wolves are just figments of my imagination.
	It could be that the wolves are both wolves and kittens at the same time.
	You don't have that luxury.
	You don't have the luxury to be insane when you're dealing with bare reality.
	That's why I was talking about the manual labor that I did in the past.
	And so civilization, as it's currently constituted, is a process of removing people from reality and putting them in the isolation chambers of their own bizarre ideologies, ideologies which become progressively more bizarre the further the people get away from reality.
	Now, Roman, of course, in my novel, makes the case that that's just an inevitable process of civilization, just remove people from reality, and then they go insane.
	In the same way that if you're locked into an isolation tank for a year, you would come out insane.
	Something that was immersed in water, it's your body temperature and let's say you're fed and you get water and you're locked in there, you would come out insane.
	People in solitary confinement go kind of crazy.
	You know, children locked in basements, they go quite mad sometimes, most often, right?
	So you just remove people from reality and that's an unfortunate byproduct of the civilization that we have.
	And then the more people who survive by being unreal, the more that unreality is considered a survival mechanism for people and people fight for their survival mechanism.
	If somebody is going to inject me with a drug that drove me crazy, I would fight them to the death.
	And in the same way, when you survive by being crazy, if somebody is going to inject you with a drug that makes you sane, so to speak, you'd fight them to death because you don't believe you can survive in a world of sanity because you're flourishing in a world of insanity.
	And that insanity is made possible by the state, by borrowing, by fiat currency, by coercion and propaganda and all of that.
	So yeah, I think in the future, people will – no matter how abstract they become – They will be in the realm of reality, like a really great engineer.
	And I know this from the software world.
	Like in the software world, I worked with extraordinary layers of abstractions.
	You know, code frameworks and operating systems and front ends and middleware and databases.
	Like extraordinary clouds of abstractions that you couldn't really see operating in the real world.
	You've got this code interface and then you've got programs running it and all that.
	All that wild levels of abstractions still came down to tangible, does it work, does it produce the right results, and is it fast enough?
	There were still extraordinary levels of absolute facts on all of the nebulous layers of abstractions that I manipulated in the software world.
	So, yeah, I think the goal is for philosophy to move towards being less water gathering and more plumbing, less of a battle and more of a pleasure, and to The more you dive into abstractions, the more you need to ground yourself in the evidence of the senses.
	Right? I mean, the higher the tower, the more solid the base needs to be.
	So I think that's the goal for me.
	This is why I fight so hard for the evidence of the senses.
	Because, I mean, the levels of abstractions that I'm working at are so nebulous and so tenuous, I mean, so absolute, that if I were to question the evidence of the senses, Working at the level of abstraction that I'm working at, I'd go mad.
	I mean, I have no doubt about that.
	That's why I fight very ferociously, and that's why I fight ferociously on this show for the evidence of the senses and the empirical nature of reality and facts and reason and evidence and empiricism and so on.
	Without empiricism, we all go mad.
	And the more we work with abstractions, the more we go mad without empiricism.
	And because everyone who listens to this show is also working...
	At a ferocious and interstellar level of abstraction, the more we need to stay grounded in the senses and in reality because, yeah, we get lost out here otherwise as so many people tend to do.
	Yeah, yeah.
	I was thinking that – and you know me, I just keep going again.
	So one thing is – I accepted that there was objective natural law or morality was a thing that existed, even though I didn't have proof for it.
	And then I'm lucky enough to live in a time in which that article of faith is logically validated.
	But there's a whole bunch of other articles of faith That, you know, I'm going to keep waiting on.
	And one of them is that, you know, in the Bible it says, one day the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the seas.
	And then if I could kind of put that in a philosophical equivalent, you know, I think there will be a day where, just like you said, before it was incredibly hard to get water, and then now it's just, you know, there's no effort into it.
	You know, the philosophical teaching, you have to be kind of really lucky to stumble across it these days.
	Like, if you didn't know anybody in it, you'd have to really stumble across it, I think.
	Like, you know, the guy who discovered treasure in a field, who just happened to find it.
	And then, I think, in the future, hopefully, I imagine a future where it won't be like that, where it'll just be everywhere.
	And I think, and then I remember Paul, another verse I like is where Paul says, you know, the night is almost over.
	The day is almost, you know, it's almost here.
	And I think that, you know, because he said that 2,000 years ago, but...
	If you compare that to, I don't know, 100,000 years or a quarter million years of human existence, and then just boom, now we've got a pretty good system of morality for the first time in a quarter million years.
	And then to me, it just feels like, I know everybody, it just happens all the time where people predict that we're close to some sort of phase change when it comes to society.
	But I can't help it.
	I think maybe we are kind of closer.
	I don't know if close means 500 years or another couple thousand years or something, but people in the past were willing to wait a long time, and so I am too.
	But I do feel like we're close to a phase change.
	And to me, the saints...
	Who along the way carried that vision forward and slowly built it up deserve a lot of honor.
	And to me, you might be kind of included in that thought later on.
	Well, I appreciate that.
	That's certainly the goal.
	And I will tell you another thought of mine and you can tell me how terrible it is because it may in fact be terrible.
	So, you know, circle back.
	Okay. So, one of the ways that I formulate the story of Jesus is that Jesus was an incredible thinker and an incredible philosopher who claimed universal morality really for the first time in human history.
	And I think that the people who were so struck, because he struck such a deep chord in humanity, because universals are what I would call the soul.
	The soul and universals are the same thing for me.
	And people were so struck...
	By the universals of Christian morality, of Jesus' morality.
	And they were so desperate to communicate the value and purpose of this morality to other people that they fell prey to a terrible temptation.
	Now, to me, the terrible temptation was the equivalent of avoiding science in the realm of physical reality.
	If God created universals, created universal properties and energies, and gave us the senses to appreciate and process them, and gave us the minds to abstract and universalize them, then to worship God is to develop science.
	Now, if we take that, as I've talked about in the analogy of morality, Jesus said, morality is universal.
	Morality is not tribal.
	Morality is universal. Now, maybe Jesus gave a great explanation that's lost, or maybe he told someone or told a bunch of people and it was lost, or maybe they knew it, but they said, we can't convince the common people.
	We can't convince the common people because the common people...
	Have their authority in their families based upon contradictory morality, right?
	The parent who hits the child saying, don't hit people, right?
	That's where the foundation of corruption comes, which is why I focus so much on peaceful parenting.
	So people said, we can't universalize morality because nobody's going to listen to us.
	And trust me, I know a little bit about what that's like.
	We can't universalize morality because nobody's going to listen to us.
	Now, what we could do is we could do that patient brick-building Socratic reasoning, and we could build the real case for universal morality, which again, maybe Jesus explicated, maybe he hinted at, maybe, but his vision, his communication was about the universality of morality.
	And the people who followed him looked at that and said, my God, he's right.
	It's so incredibly powerful to have truly universal morality.
	Where he said, as you treat the children among you, as you treat the littlest among you, so do you also treat me.
	No Christian would beat Jesus, therefore don't beat your children.
	So when morality applies to the weakest among us, which is, and he said, the children, right?
	Nobody comes to... You come to me through the children.
	The children are essentially important in the pursuit of universal morality and all of that.
	So, the people who follow Jesus and felt the power of the universal morality and the protection of the innocent and the young and the tender and the helpless and the children...
	The Lamb.
	It's the Lamb of God, right? The Lamb is the child.
	So, the people who follow Jesus...
	Either had to work on truly universal morality, which filled them full of despair, and I understand this, Midnight of the Soul, extraordinarily deeply and well, that when you truly pursue and establish universal morality and you see the hostility, the indifference, the sophistry, the lies, the manipulation, the rage that this provokes in people, you are perilously close to the great sin of despair.
	Which is to say that the empirical evidence of the current world is that virtue can never win.
	The empirical evidence of the current world is that virtue can never win, and therefore you give up on virtue.
	Now, I think that the people who follow...
	Look, I can't prove any of this. It's obviously just a complete hypothetical, but I think it explains some things, and you tell me where it goes astray because your knowledge of the Bible is far greater than mine.
	But I think that people who follow Jesus...
	Well, we can really work to prove universal morality, either using a proof that Jesus established or coming up with their own, in the same way that God didn't give us physics or mathematics or biology, but gave us the capacity to develop these things.
	Jesus gives you the goalpost, the end point, the endgame of universal morality, and it's up to you to figure out how to get there, in the same way that God gives you universal principles of matter and the senses to appreciate them, but it's up to you to develop science.
	So Jesus said, yes, universal morality, that's the thing.
	Either he proved it or he said, this is the goal and it's up to you to prove it, in the same thing we had with science.
	And the followers of Jesus, rather than sit down and start to really work out how to get to universal morality in the same way that people worked out how to get the scientific method in the modern world, they said, and I think the devil came to them and said, look, if you give people reason, they'll never listen.
	If you give people just reason, arguments, abstractions, they'll never listen.
	You know what you need to do? Here's how you get people to listen, and this is the only way to spread the universal morality of Jesus.
	The only way that you can spread the universal morality of Jesus is to tell people there were miracles.
	You tell people there were miracles.
	If you tell people there were miracles, in the same way if I had an IQ of 200, people would be like, wow, okay, I'm going to listen to him more, as opposed to just the arguments, right?
	So if you tell people there are miracles, they'll listen to Jesus.
	Now, Satan plays the long game.
	So I think that the people who followed may have fallen prey to the temptation to convince people based on miracles, rather than on proof.
	Now, Satan plays the long game, right?
	So Satan says, okay, we're going to give...
	The spread of Christianity is going to be based on miracles...
	But because we are programmed for universals, and Satan would know that because he was kind of watching the blueprints, right?
	We're programmed for universals, so what's going to happen is universals are going to produce science, science is going to erase miracles, and the end of miracles is going to erase Christianity.
	Because if you base the moral authority of Jesus not on reason, but on miracles, when science disproves miracles, people will fall away from religion, and that's why I'm going to end Christianity.
	I'm going to give the temptation to spread the word through miracles...
	Which is going to give them a short-term gain, which is the fastest spread of Christianity, but a long-term pain, which is the fall of Christianity when science, which is the same universals, disproves miracles.
	And if they had sat there and said, wow, Jesus being divine, Jesus being a manifestation of the universal in the universe, but in the realm of morality rather than just in the realm of physics.
	The realm of physics is automatic in our processing in our mind.
	The realm of morality is something willed and chosen.
	So we are going to dip into miracles to spread the word.
	And that's going to spread Christianity enormously fast and very powerfully, and it did.
	But it also sowed the seeds for the end.
	At least the current clawback and withdrawal of Christianity from its moral influence.
	And I think that that desire to spread things faster rather than to spread things better.
	I mean, I've got to focus on an even longer game than the devil himself, if that makes any sense, and say, well, I'm not going to use charisma.
	I'm not going to use a high IQ. I'm not going to use government funding.
	I'm not going to infiltrate.
	I'm not going to propagandize.
	I'm not going to dumb it down.
	I'm just going to stick with the truth.
	Because I think if they had not said, we're going to spread this through miracles, but we're going to spread this through reason, Christianity could have lasted, in a sense, beyond its current withdrawal phase.
	Tell me if that makes any sense to you, or if that's just completely wrong-headed.
	No, I think everything you're saying makes a lot of sense.
	You know, it's funny because I was...
	I was a huge fan of you for a long time before we ever spoke for the first time.
	And I was kind of what you might call a more typical or normal Christian, where there was a while where I was enthusiastically supportive of the 6,000-year earth thing, and basically every other Kind of thing you might associate with what they sometimes call a fundamentalist Christian.
	And then listening to your show, you're just a very powerful advocate of empiricism, and I had to just like a thousand times, or more than that, I had to kind of rethink What I believe in light of some of your strong arguments.
	I think that puts me in a unique situation.
	I doubt there's very many other fundamentalist empiricists or something.
	One thing I wanted to mention is that, because you talked about the recent decline, I think in general Christians don't fear that sort of thing, because when Jesus came, it was a period of the Jewish...
	Israel at that time was in a serious state of moral, religious decline.
	It wasn't very...
	It wasn't like you'd walk around Israel on that day and then go, hey, these guys are really reshaping the world.
	You'd be like, ugh, there's so much hypocrisy and everything's fake.
	And then another example would be like in Martin Luther's time.
	I know people have a difference of opinion about him, but I think it's pretty evident that the early 1500s was a period of just not...
	You know, this does not really represent the New Testament sort of way of life very well.
	And so then today we have, you know, it looks like things are not going so well.
	But to me, you know, the past kind of indicates that this is the time for, this is the sort of time where change is ripe.
	This is a time of high expectancy.
	Yeah. Well, I think that the modern madness has flourished to the point where people are just recoiling out of a primitive sense of, like, this is just dangerous and terrible, and we can't survive this level of unreality.
	And certainly philosophy and I think theology, they flourish in times of panic.
	It's like the guy who goes to the doctor and it's like, you've gained 40 pounds and your heart has arrhythmia.
	And it's like, then you panic and you start to go keto and exercise or something.
	A time of panic. And of course, for 40 years since I first learned about philosophy, I've been fully aware that we're on a completely unsustainable course as a culture.
	Or not really as a culture, but as a caged set of animals in the zoo called the state, right?
	So we're on a completely unsustainable course, and that gave me a certain amount of panic, because, you know, winter is coming and all that kind of stuff, right?
	I mean, why did the Game of Thrones become so popular?
	Because... You know, seven years of summer, which is fiat currency, is followed by seven years of winter, which is the depression, recession, totalitarianism, right?
	Fiat currency gives you this endless summer and moves you into unreality, and then you get this endless winter or feels like an endless winter, which is when all the bills come due, and the bills are certainly coming due at the moment.
	So UPB, it did come out of a form of not exactly panic, but significant concern that The amount of unreality and anti-rationality and anti-empiricism that's being pushed on the world has grown to the point where I think everyone is like, you know, it's good to have an imagination.
	It's not good to be psychotic.
	It's good to reject reality for the sake of creativity.
	It's not good to reject reality for the sake of insanity.
	And it's sort of like, you know, I remember when I was in summer camp.
	I was maybe 12 or whatever, right?
	And I picked up a broomstick and threw another broomstick to a kid and say, let's play lightsaber or let's play sword fighting or something like that, right?
	And the kid who was a little older kind of sneered at me and said, aren't you getting a bit old for that?
	And of course, it struck me to the quick a little bit because, you know, and I was like, hey, you're never too old to have fun.
	You know, one of these sort of lame calf-wounded rejoinders, right?
	And so... I think everyone has this...
	It's good to be kind of creative and have all these wonderful imaginative things.
	Like, you know, it's fine to have an imaginary friend when you're five.
	It's not so great when you're 20, right?
	And I think that our need to push back against unreality...
	Unreality is part of our nature and it's why we're so powerful that we can reject the evidence of our senses and have science.
	science shows us a world that looks independent of our senses and so rejecting the evidence of the senses is part of our power but you've really got to have that Aristotelian mean like somebody like in psychology they're called people who are very concrete right people who they can't entertain hypotheticals right This is a very real thing.
	There's a lot of people in the world and if you say, if you didn't eat yesterday, how would you feel at the end of the day?
	Of course, the answer would be, I'd feel hungry.
	But you wouldn't believe the number of people in the world.
	It's a significant percentage of people and you say, hey, if you didn't eat yesterday, how would you feel at the end of the day?
	They say, but I did eat yesterday.
	And you say, no, no, no, hypothetically, if you didn't eat yesterday, how would you feel at the end of the day?
	No, no, I did eat yesterday.
	Like, they literally cannot entertain hypotheticals.
	It's a kind of depressing number of people.
	So we do want to have the ability to entertain hypotheticals.
	They're called conjectures or hypotheses or tentative theses or whatever.
	We have to have the ability to entertain hypotheticals.
	But that needs to be severely circumscribed within empiricism.
	We need to test them and see if they're real or not.
	So I love the creative imagination that allows me to write novels and do role plays and all of that and analyze dreams.
	I love all that stuff about myself.
	I think it's wonderful. But it has to be very strictly bounded within empiricism and reason.
	I mean, even novels have to follow a logic and a plot and can't just be random and you've got to put foreshadowing in and all of that and things have to be set up and pay off.
	There's a construction element to things.
	But yeah, the miracle thing has always kind of bothered me because I think if you say Jesus is right because miracles, then you forestall or prevent miracles.
	The pursuit of the rational explanation for the universal morality that Jesus proposed.
	In the same way that if you deny our capacity to reason and understand the universalities in the empirical world, you forestall and deny science.
	And if you're going to say that the divine is defined by breaking the rules of divinity, in other words, God sets up these physical laws, and then Jesus just breaks them to make a point, to gain status, to gain proof, then you're saying that the greatest virtue is the defiance then you're saying that the greatest virtue is the defiance of God's laws.
	And certainly physically, right, that you know somebody is really worth listening to because they can break God's laws.
	In other words, you conflate virtue with the breaking of the law.
	I don't like that at all.
	I mean, philosophically, theologically, that to me would be.
	And so I think that the miracles were a temptation to spread the word in defiance of the consistency and universality of God's laws.
	Because if you were to say, if you were to say, Jesus talked about universals, he did not have any miracles, but we accept that his universals are valid, then you have to find the proof for them.
	And I think then UPB could have been 1,500 years ago, 1,800 years ago, or maybe even more, and we'd have a whole different, and I think, better world.
	But I think they just...
	I understand the temptation to...
	Have an effect and crack principles.
	My entire sojourn into the world of politics could be analyzed from that standpoint, maybe not today, but at some point, right?
	Which is you say, well, look, I can't wait.
	I have to get a better world in the here and now.
	I can't wait for these seeds to grow.
	I'm hungry right now, so I'm going to have to break the laws.
	The moral or philosophical or laws of logic.
	I'm going to have to break these logical laws in order to achieve something in the here and now.
	And that's really the great temptation is, you know, the devil in a sense would say, oh, I mean, don't you want to taste the fruits of your labors?
	Don't you want a better world in the here and now?
	I mean, It's not great to just put things out there and you'll see virtually no progress.
	In fact, not only will you not see progress over the course of your life, you'll see punishment, you'll see regression, you'll see pushback, you'll see ostracism, you'll see attack, you'll see torture, maiming.
	So you put out the good and the world strikes back like a cobra the size of the Amazon.
	And you think that you're going to achieve good?
	Go put your good out there in the world, Sonny.
	Go on. Go make your arguments.
	Go put your... Your virtues and your arguments and your goodness and your niceness and you go put it out there, see how the world reacts and then tell me that you don't need to do something more practical and tangible and immediate, right?
	That's the great temptation. There's a great line that Lewis has in the future where he says, arguments are what you have but you don't have power.
	Because if you have power, you can just impose your will.
	You don't have to convince anyone.
	Arguments are what you have when you don't have power.
	And, I mean, his analysis of power, I think, is just, I mean, it's almost Dantean in its depth, but it is the great temptation to say, well, I put virtue out there, I made great arguments, and the blowback is insane, and the sin of despair means you say, okay, I'm going to have to pull a trick here.
	I'm going to have to find some way to get people to accept this.
	And this is why people run to the state, is they fall prey to the sin of despair, right?
	They want to solve the problem of poverty, and rather than say, well, you know, peaceful parenting and voluntarism and here's how to teach people how to find good partners and, you know, the virtue and value of marriage and all that, instead of all of that, they're like, well, we'll just run to the state.
	I can't wait! And that impatience is what causes us to crack principles.
	And go for effect, which discredits the principles that we want to spread.
	And it's certainly something that I've had a mildly uneasy relationship with, because impatience is natural in human life, because it's vaguely inhuman to build things that you'll never enjoy.
	But it's kind of, I think, where we have to be.
	Yeah, I think I understand what you're saying, and I think it's reasonable.
	Just kind of one thing that I kind of think about it is that – so I don't – like in that day, I don't know if they – Like, okay, so I do a lot of them, Matt, because I don't have these conversations.
	You know, I hang out with normal Christians, you know, so I don't have a lot of these conversations, you know.
	I kind of keep it, you know, normal, you know.
	But, you know, when I'm listening to the show and on my own thinking and stuff, I do have lots of stuff I probably wouldn't say in front of other Christians.
	But I guess I'll just say it here.
	So... I imagine that, you know, I imagine the real Jesus, right?
	And then what was in his mind?
	What was he thinking ahead of time?
	Assuming there's some continuity between the real person and what kind of became known about him later, I tend to think that there was, you know, there is continuity there.
	And so... I wonder what he was thinking.
	So I think maybe he thought it was two things.
	So one is maybe he did not – there's no guarantee that he knew that there was any way of logically proving universal ethics – No, but God would... I'm so sorry to interrupt.
	I'll keep it really brief. But again, according to my formulation, God doesn't give us science.
	He gives us an objective universal reality, the desire for universals, the capacity to process them, and the senses to transmit the data.
	After that, you're on your own.
	So Jesus, assuming the divinity and all of that, would be the message saying, look, universal morality is a thing.
	I'm not going to explain it to you.
	I'm not going to tell you exactly how to do it any more than, you know, God gives us the capacity to achieve science.
	He doesn't give us the actual equations because that would be to write the answers for us and therefore we've learned nothing and no additional virtue has been added to the world.
	So Jesus would not give us UPB. He would give us the goal.
	And then it's up to us to get there.
	Yeah, well, I see what you're saying.
	One, I have another important thought that I want to make sure I hit, and that is, I think...
	I'm sorry. I don't mean to just ignore what you just said.
	I'm so sorry for interrupting you because you were totally on a train of thought, so I apologize for that.
	Go ahead. No, go ahead.
	Yeah, so...
	The other thing, I think, so I don't know, like, so I'm saying if you're the actual, imagine you're really Jesus, and then you don't have any of the sort of, and I know that he was probably very well educated in Greek thought at the time and stuff, but I also imagine he probably wasn't anywhere close.
	Like, imagine, forget the, just hypothetically, forget the divinity part and just go, hey, there's this real guy.
	And imagine you're just a super genius.
	And then just has, you know, like he's one in 100 billion or something like that in terms of just depth of insight.
	But you still have to live with it.
	You still have to work off of the cultural framework that you've been given at the time.
	And then I imagine that was really you.
	And then what would you do in order to kind of push the ball of, you know, morality down the field?
	And then, you know, he...
	He lived in a tradition, I think, that couldn't conceive of giving arguments for morality apart from miracles.
	So I think he had to act within that framework.
	And then just one more thing is that I don't necessarily think that, like, if I imagine what's in his head, right?
	Like, so what is he thinking? What's the thing, what's the big ideas he wants to, because you have a lot of big ideas, and you're still making them, you know?
	I loved your recent metaphysics essay.
	I mean, that's big. And so you're still making them, but, you know, and I imagine Jesus was kind of similar to you, where he goes, you know, I have big ideas, and I want to I need to spread them.
	I don't think universal morality was even his biggest idea.
	I think UPB is probably your biggest idea.
	You've still got good ones, but that's the thing you'll probably be most famous for later.
	I don't think universal morality is the idea that Jesus is most...
	That was not his main thing that he wanted to To me, I think it's that he wanted to give people a kind of a window into the hypocrisy of the power structures around them at the time,
	and he wanted to tell people what it was going to cost in order to be an advocate For, like, morality and truth.
	And then he wanted to give people a sort of sense of hope about what can be achieved if you go for it.
	So, like...
	The life... I'm sorry.
	I'll pause there for a second.
	No, no. Take your time. Take your time.
	It's tough stuff. So I think Jesus...
	I'm Jesus, right?
	And I'm thinking, okay, and I've got to push the ball down the field.
	He's like, the first thing, the most fundamental thing that people need to understand is that the whole system is completely antithetical to what they're claiming the system is about, right?
	So he lives in a time where the whole power structure, like, claimed to love God.
	So then he, like...
	He says, you know, I'm the son of God, and then you all, like, kill me.
	He's like, that's a very powerful story in terms of making...
	Like, if you live 500 years later or 1,000 years later, and you're kind of looking around at your society, if you appreciate...
	The gospel and it resonates with you, then that will cause you to kind of pause and look at the power structure that you're in and then question whether or not their heart is actually in line with what they claim to be about.
	So to me, Christianity...
	It causes people to pause and contemplate that for a second.
	And there's been lots of people who, like, I think have done that.
	Like, throughout history, they've paused and looked at the power structures because of the gospel.
	And then, too, I think it...
	Makes people stop and go, oh, the mob's going, because you kind of mentioned it before, you know, like when the mob's going after somebody, they go, yeah, I knew another person who the mob went after.
	Maybe this, you know, just, can we pause for a second and then really make sure that, you know, that this guy is as bad as, like, deserves this?
	And then, so the gospel makes people pause and, and, And, you know, stop and think about, should I be along with this mob?
	So, to me, Jesus, like, if I was Jesus and I wanted to communicate big ideas, I mean, those are some of the ideas that I would, I think, he saw an opportunity to affect the way people viewed those things, and, like, power structures and the mob.
	And the world is different because of it, I think.
	Many, many people throughout the generations since then have made different choices because of that.
	I know we have free will, but we still affect each other.
	To the degree that we affect each other, then we can claim some ownership and And then so Jesus, I think, can claim a lot of ownership over all the times in history where people acted differently towards their power structures or with the mob because of his life.
	And then one last thing is, you know, the resurrection.
	You know, because it's like people, you know, I think I don't know.
	I just think people need hope.
	People need hope when they're looking in front of the mob.
	And then the gospel, again, gives people some hope about that, that they can go, okay, I'm not going to just throw my life away for nothing, but if I can sacrifice my life for something that is good, there will be vindication at some point.
	And then, you know, we could say that that's just a story or something, but, you know, he did cause, you know, like, millions of people are living, like, even billions of people have been living their lives, like, in a heroic way because of that, you know? So, I think, and, you know, I think...
	If you were in his mind, and you could see all this opportunity, and he must have, I think, he must have been an incredible genius.
	Seriously, I imagine people who bump into you and Chat with you, like, on the street or whatever, kind of...
	Well, please don't put me...
	Please don't put my intellect anywhere near Jesus's.
	Let's just keep talking about him.
	That's very kind, but let's stay humble.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Or, you know, because all we have are the writings of people who knew him.
	But, you know, I've been studying them for, you know, almost 20 years, and I'm still just continuously blown away at the...
	Like, just the way they put things and the...
	So then, you know, you can kind of say that people...
	You can judge someone by the quality of their friends.
	And if that's true about Jesus and the New Testament writers were, you know, people who were his friends, then I think you can just pretty safely assume that he was a person that really left an impact on whoever he bumped into.
	And so...
	So I just imagine if I was all the way back then and I knew what I knew, I imagine that he just had an incredible depth of vision for how his life could affect things down the road or thousands of years or tens of thousands of years or forever even.
	If you could go back and talk with them, I imagine there's a good chance you might go, oh, okay, well, yeah, I kind of see why you're doing this.
	Because the alternative would be like, oh, let's try to talk about...
	I love reasoning from first principles, but...
	You have to get people to stop and listen for a second before they can do that.
	So, to me, there's a sense in which maybe Jesus kind of prepared the way for something like UPB. And then if he had tried to do UPB at first, you wouldn't have ever heard of him or nothing.
	It just wouldn't have happened.
	We would have lived in the Roman world at that time.
	Christianity, as far as its flaws, It had a wildly transformative effect on the world at that time.
	And it's still radically changing the world.
	I think that...
	You just look at the surface of things versus looking at the whole thing.
	I think if we could see the whole thing and look at all of history, we would see that his life...
	It could even be true that UBB is one of the consequences of his life.
	It just took a couple thousand years to shake out, if that makes sense.
	Okay, so you're now leading me into a very exciting area, which I'll close the show off on this, and I really appreciate it.
	Always a great pleasure to chat.
	So, for those of you who aren't Christians, And say, oh, the Son of God stuff doesn't make any sense, the resurrection stuff doesn't make any sense, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Okay, I'm going to tell you how it makes perfect sense.
	And this is, again, part of my long-term apology tour to Christians for my harsh words in the past.
	But here's how Jesus makes perfect sense.
	And sometimes we learn through reason.
	And sometimes we learn through allegory, through metaphor, through analogy, which is the purpose of art, right?
	My stories contain lectures, but they're not lectures.
	My novels contain characters.
	They're not philosophical treatises.
	I've done the fiction and I've done the nonfiction.
	Poetry is not an argument.
	Look at our nightly dreams.
	How do we learn through our nightly dreams?
	How do our nightly dreams attempt to instruct us?
	Through stories, through analogy, through metaphors.
	Man does not live by bread alone.
	Learning does not occur by reason alone.
	Even scientists gain inspiration from their dreams.
	So, Jesus is a mixture of the mortal and the immortal, of the immediate and the divine, of the instance and the concept.
	Each tree lives and dies.
	The concept of tree is eternal.
	The instance partakes of the universal and the universal encapsulates the instance.
	The universal is nothing without the instance and the instance is not universal.
	So when we talk about the mixture of Jesus of divinity and mortality, we are talking about the individual whose mind contains concepts and the eternal nature and the universal nature of those concepts.
	A man... Who understands gravity is not universal.
	The man is mortal. His mind lives and dies.
	And he understands the concept of gravity and thus can understand the universe and how much of it operates.
	But he himself does not partake of gravity in a universal sense.
	He doesn't subject himself to gravity on every one of the hundred billion stars or the...
	However many hundred billion planets, a hundred billion galaxies.
	So his mind is both mortal and immortal.
	That's what humanity is.
	We are mortal and we are immortal.
	We are mortal.
	We live and die. But our minds partake of the universal, which is eternal, absolute, empirical, independent of time and Independent of location, independent of space.
	Our minds can conceive the universe, though our minds are not eternal.
	Our minds are virtually infinitely smaller than the universe, but the universe fits within our minds.
	So when the peculiar power of Jesus is that he fully and deeply, and I don't care if you're not a Christian, he fully and powerfully and deeply encapsulates what it is to be a human being.
	Which is to be a combination of the mortal and the eternal.
	And Jesus' fear, why have thou forsaken me?
	Is the fear that because he's dying, his ideas will die.
	But his ideas...
	What is the story of the resurrection?
	The story of the resurrection is the ideas can't be killed.
	What comes out of the tomb are the arguments.
	The ideas, the inspiration.
	If we look at God as the manifestation of the universal, of the conceptual, of the abstract, God is the concept.
	The concept is eternal.
	The concept is immortal. The concept is universal.
	Everything that the human being is not.
	The human being is not immortal.
	It is not universal. We are not eternal.
	The concepts that we contain are...
	So, when Jesus is part human and part divine, why has he become so powerful?
	Because if you're not a Christian, if you are a Christian, you understand that from the Christian perspective.
	If you're not a Christian, Jesus encapsulates something so fundamentally powerful and deep about humanity that we are...
	Both mortal and immortal.
	The contents of our mind are immortal because we partake of the universals, but our minds are mortal.
	We can live on after our death, but only to the degree that we partake in the eternal can we live on after our death.
	A man who has no children, who makes no arguments, who puts forward no reason, who affects no other minds, truly dies and is gone and dead and buried.
	Done and dusted, as the British say.
	The degree to which we partake in the universal.
	The universal could be genetics.
	The universal could be concepts, reasons, arguments.
	The degree to which we participate in the universal is the degree to which we become immortal.
	We transcend our fleshly frame.
	We live on after we shuffle off the mortal coil.
	We arise from our tombs in thought, in the degree to which we influence.
	Like, I will live forever. And you, now, being part of this conversation, will live forever.
	Because we have now partaken of the universal.
	The universal also includes things like language and arguments, debates, reason, evidence.
	Scientists partake in the universal.
	And so, if we look at God, this is for the non-Christians, right?
	If you look at God as concepts, as truths, well, if you say that God is a creation of man, That God was invented by man.
	Well, concepts are invented by man.
	And by inventing concepts, man creates an immortality that he can partake in and participate with.
	The mortal creates the immortal.
	The temporary creates the eternal.
	And joins the eternal and the universal thereby.
	We create concepts that live on after our death.
	So Jesus is half man, half God.
	The son of God.
	Human beings are the children of the eternal.
	The son of God.
	Now, for the atheists who say, well, but human beings created God, okay, I can absorb that into this analysis and say that human beings create concepts which are eternal.
	And we are children of those concepts.
	We are born from universal laws.
	We are born from biology. We are born from physical properties.
	We are born from the universal that is not conscious.
	We are born from the universal that is not conscious, just automatic.
	Physics, biology, things that occurred long before human beings came along and graced the cosmos with concepts.
	We are born of the universal, but we create the universal, participate in the conceptual universal which lives on after we die.
	Our bodies die, our genes continue.
	Our minds die, our thoughts continue.
	So thinking that there isn't something fundamentally powerful and true about humanity and our lives in the story of Jesus is arrogant.
	The story this powerful must contain something of real truth in it.
	And you've heard me do these dream analyses in the show.
	That is a personal story, and we dig into it, and it contains universal themes and moral instruction that is so powerful that to say, well, you know, dreams are just the effluent and nightly discharge of our neurotic minds.
	They have no substance, no meaning.
	They're just random.
	Well, that's arrogant.
	Why would we have evolved stories that taught us powerfully through analogies if they did not serve the truth in some manner?
	Okay.
	So human beings create universals that are eternal.
	Okay.
	We die. The degree to which we participate in the universals is how we live forever.
	Now, how does the Christian story encapsulate this?
	Well, the degree to which you participate in the universal of God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit is the degree to which you gain eternal life.
	In other words, the degree to which you participate in the universals is the degree to which your mind and thoughts will live forever.
	And, I mean, I was thinking about this when I was reading Huckleberry Finn with my daughter.
	Obviously a very sanitized version.
	But... Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, the writer, I think he had like a newspaper column that went on for years and years and years, and this is part of my reformulation of what it is that I do post-politics, right?
	I mean, there was a pre-politics, there was a politics, and there was a post-politics.
	And the post-politics is a deep thirst and desire to participate in the universal rather than focus on the immediate.
	The immediate storms and stresses of the political world and the current situation will come and go and will provide little interest to the future.
	The conversations that I have with Tim, the conversations that I have with others about deep philosophical meanings and purposes and powers, those will live on.
	People in a thousand years will still be participating in the divine despite being mortal, participate in the eternal despite being temporary.
	They won't care that much about Brexit.
	Now, Brexit is tempting for me because it seems to provide more power and change in the here and now.
	So it's an interesting story for me.
	But one of the things that the increasing threat of political action and political analysis has, governance has driven me back into the arms of the universals that speak more to the future.
	It has encouraged me to participate more in the divine and less in the satanic distractions of the everyday.
	So, for the atheists to understand why Jesus is so powerful and why we have such a yearning to participate in the divine, the divine is what is most deeply human about us.
	It's our capacity for abstractions and universals.
	We're born from blind abstractions, physical properties and principles in biology and evolution.
	We're born from blind abstractions.
	We then pry open the eyes of those blind abstractions and participate in them and live forever.
	Now, why should we want to live forever?
	Well, we can't. We can through our thoughts and ideas.
	It's because to be the most of what you are is to live as powerfully and deeply as humanly possible.
	If you are an artist...
	To explore and manifest the power of your art as much as possible as to be as great an artist as you can be.
	Now, why would you want to be as great an artist as you can possibly be?
	Because unconsciously we all know what we're capable of, and we will punish ourselves if we don't fulfill our greatest potential.
	It's really a sin against nature who creates such power and capacity for beauty within us to reject it.
	It's not evil. It's just impractical from a happiness standpoint.
	You won't be happy if you don't pursue that.
	So, I mean, would you voluntarily starve yourself for the rest of your life?
	Or why would you starve yourself of your potential?
	The only way we achieve our greatest potential is to participate in the concepts, in the eternal abstractions.
	And that is the divine. And that is the heaven that we can achieve if you don't believe in Jesus.
	That is the heaven that we can achieve in the story.
	That most instruct us on how to be fully human, fully conceptual, fully eternal, to participate in that which is greatest.
	The greatest minds and ideas, so the greatest ideas that we can participate in are the most universal and the most eternal.
	And if you have that capacity, why would we not want to exercise it to the fullest?
	And that's what Christianity encourages us to do by pursuit of the divine purpose.
	And seeking for eternal life.
	I am the way and the life, says Jesus.
	I am the way of concepts, of eternal, and I am the life of a human being.
	To unite the mind, the brain, with the concepts.
	To unite and aggregate the instance into the conceptual collective.
	To see a forest where there is only individual trees is to participate in In the divine to be the most fully human you can be and to self-actualize to the deepest and greatest degree that either nature or God encourages us to pursue.
	Thank you everyone so much for a wonderful conversation.
	A great and deep pleasure to chat with you all today.
	And I really, really appreciate the opportunity to have these conversations with your brilliant souls.
	So thank you, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
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	Thank you, everyone. Lots of love from up here.
	Take care. I'll talk to you soon.

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