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Jan. 22, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:26
Be Slow to ANGER! Bible Verses
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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
This is Bible Verses, and we are going to look at Psalms 145, 8-9.
Psalms 145, 8-9.
And I quote, The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger, and of great mercy.
The Lord is good to all, and His tender mercies are all over His works.
So...
We can take this, of course, as God.
If you're secular, we can take this as what is the most virtuous.
What is the most virtuous?
Gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger, and of great mercy.
One of the things that corrupt people don't really understand is how much good people want them to improve.
If you have somebody who's an addict, A drunk drug addict.
It's hard for them to understand how much those around them want them to improve, want them to get better, want them to give up their addiction.
We are rooting, we good people, we are all rooting, desperately sometimes, for corrupt people to become good.
Now, that is a hope born of optimism, and sometimes optimism needs to be in the Aristotelian mean.
Too little optimism and you're depressed.
Too much optimism and you are exploited.
So you need a healthy amount in the middle, which doesn't answer much other than to saying it is one of the virtues where an excess is a problem.
Even a virtue like honesty.
An excess of honesty is not healthy because then you put everything out into the world, which allows you to be targeted and exploited.
So, honesty is also one of these virtues that you need to balance a little bit.
Not so much in your private life, of course, to be honest with people in your private life, but in the world as a whole, right?
This is why Jesus says, be as cunning as the serpents.
Do not wear your heart on your sleeve.
Other people will pluck it for profit.
So, I mean, speaking personally, of course, my...
Desire for my family of origin and my friends to become better.
I mean, I was begging friends to go to therapy.
I was begging friends to improve.
And as disasters hit them, people that I knew in the past, as disasters hit them, it broke my heart.
And I very much wanted them to seek and achieve the consolations of philosophy and humility and virtue and all kinds of wonderful things.
I just wanted them, I was so desperate for them to see the light as I had seen the light, Move towards virtue to become better.
And I... I was a lot of emotion early in the morning.
I... It's hard for me to say why they didn't, why they steadfastly avoided and rejected the path that I had blazed towards a better life.
I don't really know any of them who had happy marriages.
I don't know any of them who achieved any particular sustained success.
I think that it was because they had done wrong and they had harmed others, and in particular harmed...
No, I'm just going to leave it at harmed others.
And when you harm others, you either recognize that you harmed others and take your lumps, take your licks from your conscience, right?
The conscience wants to...
Make you feel bad for doing wrong so that you will do better.
It is the first step towards virtue, which is the avoidance of the pain of the bad conscience rather than the pursuit of virtue for the sake of the happiness it provides.
But when you do wrong to others, it clashes with your self-image.
And when the empirical wrongness of your actions clashes with the vanity of your self-image, Really trembling on the brink.
You are standing on the greatest fork in life, in the world, in your soul, in the future of the world, which is either you adjust your self-image to accept that you're capable of great wrong and vow to improve and work to improve, or you say, I am blameless because there's no such thing.
As right and wrong, thus saving your self-image at the expense of truth, virtue, happiness, and improvement when you do something wrong.
It's sort of like if you are failing to attract, if you're a man and you fail to attract women, or maybe you repel women, you either say, well, good women out there and I need to adjust what I'm doing to be more attractive, or you say, women all have terrible taste.
They're all bad or whatever nonsense you would come up with.
And that saves your self-esteem.
The fault is not yours.
The fault is women.
So you save your self-esteem and end your bloodline.
You have no future with women if you blame them for being unattractive.
In the same way, if you have disastrous relationships, you can either say, I'm choosing the wrong women, doing the wrong things, or you can say, well, all women are like that.
That's the nature of relationships.
And then you just either continue dating bad people until your adrenals burn out, your fight or flight burns out, and you give up, or you just go monk mode right away.
So when you have a clash between your self-image and your empirical actions, right, so if you've cheated on your partner, again, talking to the men, if you've cheated on a woman, or you cheated on your partner, then you either say, I did something really wrong, And take your lumps and work to improve.
Or you say, well, she drove me to it.
It was just impulsive.
It was a one-time thing.
She's overreacting.
Who really cares?
We're all just mammals.
It doesn't matter.
You know, it's just flesh and flesh, right?
You either accept your conscience, which is painful in the short run, to say, gee, I cheated, you know, and that's not good, and there's something wrong with the way I'm approaching the world if this is what's going on.
Or, You then adjust your mindset to remove the morals from what you're doing.
And you remove yourself from the divine to the mammal.
The divine being, there are universal moral values that we should accept and pursue.
And you say, well, I'm just flesh.
I'm just atoms in space.
Virtue is just a tool of manipulation, sort of the Nietzschean approach in some ways.
Virtue is just a tool of manipulation.
And what matters is physical hedonism, fleshly hedonism.
Animals pursue pleasure and avoid pain.
I'm just an animal.
And then you can't pursue moral philosophy.
You can't pursue God or virtue in that situation.
And in hindsight, though, I didn't really see it at the time.
I had a sort of vague feeling for it, but...
I don't really see it at the time.
But I can think back to instances where that choice was occurring for people.
Where that choice was occurring for people.
And it's very sad, of course, to see the path they took.
Especially, not to overpraise myself, because certainly I was no angel back then.
I'm still no angel now, but I'm trying.
Having at least access to philosophy through me was a real benefit and a bonus, and not just philosophy, but therapy, self-knowledge, and all that kind of stuff, and they chose what they chose.
So, gracious and full of compassion.
This is part of the sort of 24-hour rule, that if someone has wronged you, they have 24 hours to apologize, or it's not going to happen, because, and this is part of this fork in the road, If you do someone wrong, if you don't apologize within 24 hours, it is virtually inevitable that you will simply justify and avoid it, right?
I mean, we, of course, can see this in this strange lunar landscape of society post-COVID. People should be at least, I mean, look, the unvaccinated were right about some things.
Not everything, but they were right about some things.
And there's no apology from Nobody references it.
Nobody talks about it.
And so they've simply justified it.
Well, we did the best we could with the knowledge we had.
They happened to be lucky.
It's not something worth talking about.
It doesn't matter.
And so on, right?
But nobody will say, listen, we kind of threatened you and attacked you and said you were going to die and took away some of your rights of bodily autonomy for a time.
And, you know, that was kind of wrong.
We've got to figure out what we did and why we were so susceptible.
And, like, you know, there should be a reckoning, like in a healthy...
In society, there would be a reckoning, but there's no reckoning.
And so people are just moving on, and then if you bring it up, well, of course, if you bring it up, you're provoking people's bad conscience, if they even have one.
If you bring it up, you're provoking people's bad conscience, and therefore, they get annoyed and irritated with you.
Why are you digging up the past?
It's all moved on.
It doesn't matter.
Everybody was doing the best they could with the knowledge they had.
There was a lot of chaos, a lot of misinformation, it turns out, but nobody knew it at the time.
All that kind of stuff, right?
I mean, you're going to get these apologies within 24 hours, usually.
And I think everyone who got vaccinated or strongly advocated for it to the point of interfering with people's bodily autonomy, at some point, they read something that gave them pause, right?
Something that didn't make sense with regarding to vaccination.
And, you know, that was the point where they could have said, well, geez, tell me what your experience was.
It turns out that you weren't totally wrong about everything as I first thought.
And so on, right?
So you get that 24-hour window.
It's the same thing when the pursuit of hedonism leads to a pain.
You know, like this sort of typical example is the guy who gets married to a woman mostly because she's really sexy and hot and then they have problems because the relationship is not founded on virtues and then he ends up in this dead bedroom sexless marriage, right?
There's a negative consequence to pursuing this kind of hedonism.
In the same way that, of course, if somebody says, well, exercise is a drag, and yes, it is, and I don't want to limit my food intake, so he goes for hedonism because he can eat whatever he wants and doesn't have to exercise, and then he ends up, you know, overweight, joint pain, back pain, gout is going on that is difficult and unpleasant for him.
That's a time when he can say, gee, I was wrong, and I work to improve.
People who do you wrong.
You're going to apologize.
It's the same thing when people have that time where the consequences of their bad decisions are becoming manifest, but rather than say, I was making bad decisions, I've been making bad decisions, and rather than go, because it's an act of, this is the angry will that I talk about, sort of angry animal will, which is, if I've been telling people you're living the wrong way, and it's going to go badly.
If I say that to people, and then it turns out that they have been living the wrong way, and it is going badly, it is the angry will to say, I must subjugate myself to a standard.
This is the Garden of Eden, right?
The serpent.
God says, here's a rule.
Subjugate yourself to a rule.
And if you don't subjugate yourself to a rule, then bad things will happen.
And you have to, I mean, you have to subjugate yourself to a moral rule if you don't, or moral rules if you don't subjugate yourself to moral rules, bad things will happen.
You have to subjugate yourself to the disciplines of eating well and exercising, and if you don't, bad things will happen.
You know, we sort of understand that, right?
In a marriage, you have to subjugate yourself to monogamy, and if you don't, bad things will happen, and so on.
But the angry will does not want to subjugate itself to rules because it views Subjugation to rules as humiliation, as a blow against vanity.
Now why do people view subjugation to rules as humiliation?
Well, because they have inflicted rules on others in order to humiliate them.
Or they have had people in authority inflict rules on them in order to humiliate them and they haven't processed that and found a different path forward.
Because, let's say, they had mean teachers who bullied them with stupid rules, as mean teachers and most teachers tend to do when they were growing up.
They had teachers who bullied them for the sake of pointless rules.
What they do is then they say, well, all subjugation to rules is humiliation.
Anyone who tells me to live reasonably and morally is exactly the same as a teacher who bullies.
I had a friend many years ago, not part of this group, but I had a friend many years ago.
Who was telling me once that he skipped school and the school called his mother and his mother said, why weren't you in school?
He said, I got sick, I threw up.
Where did you throw up?
In a corner of the playground.
And it hadn't rained, of course, and she took him, not quite by the ear, but she took him over to the playground and demanded to know exactly where he had thrown up.
And there was, of course, no throw up there.
And so it just got into a real tussle about these kinds of things.
But of course, a lot of parents have backed themselves into such desperate corners that they can't really have empathy for their kids, right?
So if, you know, you're just broke and you absolutely need a job, you've got no husband, or your husband is non-functional as a woman and you just have to work and your kid has to go to school because you've got to have him be somewhere during the day, the kid really can't say.
I mean, the kid can say, but you can't act on it.
If the kid says, I don't like school, I don't want to go to school, well, I mean, what can you do, right?
You backed yourself into a corner to the point where you can't do what your kid needs, right?
You can't say, okay, we'll take you out of school because it's sort of pointless and stupid.
Well, you can't do that.
And because you feel bad, you then often will get aggressive against your kid for saying, I want something different, right?
I mean, I certainly remember I didn't really want to go to boarding school.
I didn't really want to go to Canada, but my needs and preferences were not acceptable to my mother, and therefore I just was pulled along like a tail on a kite after my mother's whims.
So when people make bad decisions, they either learn and work to improve, or they justify those bad decisions.
Gracious and full of compassion.
People often make bad decisions based upon childhood suffering, and we can be compassionate to them, right?
I mean, I can't come down like a ton of bricks on people, I mean, morally or rationally, I can't come down like a ton of bricks on people who make bad decisions based upon their bad childhoods, because, I mean, at least when I was young and certainly pre-philosophical, because I made bad decisions as a teenager based on a bad childhood.
I mean, there have certainly been cases where I've had a much more critical view of somebody on a call-in show, but then hearing about their bad childhood is like, oh yeah, okay, that kind of makes sense, and I have compassion, right?
So, the Lord, or morality, is gracious and full of compassion.
Slow to anger.
Now, it doesn't say without anger, it says slow to anger and of great mercy.
Slow to anger is important.
Being quick to anger is...
A fault, it's a flaw.
Being without anger is a fault and a flaw.
So it's sort of like the autoimmune issue that people have.
This is obviously my amateur understanding of the issue, not being any kind of medical professional myself, but you have an immune system that does not attack healthy cells, but rather attacks viruses, bacteria, dangerous foreign entities.
Now, you don't want to have no immune system because then you just...
Desperately, you're going to live in a bubble and you're desperately sick from everything.
So, you don't want to have no immune system.
But at the same time, if you have an overactive immune system, it can attack healthy cells and that's really bad, right?
So, it's the same thing with anger.
You don't want to have an overactive anger that attacks everything.
Instantly, that's called being defensive and aggressive.
But at the same time, you also don't want to have no anger because then you're unprotected in a world that has predation.
I mean, it's funny, you know, I've thought occasionally over the years, I mean, it comes up, people that I knew when I was younger, it comes up, and I just, I think sometimes if people were to contact me and to say, you know, you were right about some things, and I should have listened, and, you know, congratulations on what you're doing with your life, it seems to be pretty noble.
And it would be great to reconnect.
I mean, honestly, I can't imagine that I would be like, oh, yes, but, you know, in the time of my trials and sufferings and, right, you weren't there and so on.
I would be like, I mean, you've heard this, of course, in shows, right?
Where people who were really critical and negative towards the show at a time when a lot of that was going on and it was not always the easiest thing, they have called in to apologize or to work of all of that.
And maybe I'm Maybe I'm just really bad at holding grudges.
But when somebody approaches with an apology, and it seems to be genuine, and it's not manipulative, and it's not like some weird information-gathering thing, and I've got a pretty good instinct for those kinds of things.
If somebody has seen the light, it doesn't mean necessarily we'll be best buds, but I'm glad to have the conversation.
And in terms of forgiveness, yeah, sure.
Sure.
I mean, if somebody has seen the light and improved and learned about their past and become a better person, then good.
Then good.
Of great mercy.
I admire people who, having done the wrong thing, find a way to turn it around and take down the angry ape will of dominance and submission and do the right thing.
And they're honest and apologize.
Right?
I mean, I admire that behavior in others, of course, because I hold it as a standard for myself that if I do something wrong, then...
I will examine it, and I will not apologize for everything, because there is a hierarchy to these things.
So if somebody comes at me with some nitpicky thing from years ago, I will not necessarily apologize for that, because I suspect the person's motives, and I do not believe that they're interested in my moral improvement.
They're just trying to dominate and humiliate me by often pulling something out of context from years ago.
I just, I don't view that as acting in good faith.
And I just won't.
I won't do that.
So, you have great mercy.
I think that's important.
If people have overcome their animal will, their dominance will, and they are willing to subject themselves to virtue, well, that's a positive thing.
And I think it should be respected.
It's a hard thing to do.
So, the Lord is gracious and full of compassion.
Yes, I'm very sorry for people's childhoods, and I want them to make better decisions.
I want, of course, myself to keep making good decisions, and that means that you do have to have some graciousness and compassion, slow to anger.
Yes.
Yes.
Because there is a certain amount of forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.
There's a certain amount of people don't know the connections between their past and their present.
They don't really get.
What has happened between their past and their present?
You start connecting those things while you're drawn to this type of woman because this is how you were raised.
And so once they have those connections and they understand why they're doing things and they understand why it's negative or dysfunctional, particularly if there are children involved, so once that happens, then they have a responsibility to work to improve.
We can understand that.
I don't really need to get too far into that.
If a woman is overweight because she was sexually abused and therefore wants to remain unattractive to predatory men, then that's a connection that she can understand.
Now she's responsible for working on it.
She's also responsible for eating more healthily and so on, right?
So it makes sense, right?
So we are compassionate with people and we provide them knowledge with the hope and intent and goal of having them use that knowledge in order to improve, right?
I mean, if you wanted to be a really good torturer, you would pretend that you wanted to be a doctor and you would be trained about the human nervous system, not because you wanted to heal people, but because you wanted to do maximum pain damage to them without harming them.
You would want to do minimum physical harm and maximum pain, right?
Because that's how you could draw out the torture for the longest.
So if you were a compassionate, If somebody was really eager to learn about the nervous system, you would probably be keen to teach them, but if you found out that the person was planning on using the knowledge that you were providing to torture people, then you would kick his or her ass out of the class, right?
Don't take my knowledge and use it for evil purposes.
If somebody came to your art gallery, Because they loved your art, you would be happy to have them there even if they came seven times in a week.
However, if you found out that the person who was coming to your art gallery was in fact an art thief, then you would bar them from your gallery because they would not be coming because of their appreciation of art, or only in part, but because they wanted to scan your security system and steal everything that wasn't nailed down.
So, in the same way, we want to teach people How to be good, how to have self-knowledge with all humility, and at some point, they have enough knowledge that they're now responsible for their choices.
So we can view people, and I think reasonably so, as living in a state of nature, right?
And it's subject to propaganda, haven't really thought things through, haven't thought things from first principles, and so, yeah, they don't really know what they're doing.
They're not responsible for knowledge they don't have, particularly if that knowledge is hard to come by.
I mean, the internet has...
Increased everyone's moral responsibility virtually infinitely.
So, you provide people knowledge, principles, connections, and so on.
You provide them all of these things, and then they are responsible for doing better.
So, once they are responsible for doing better because you have informed and instructed and modeled the behavior, once they are responsible for doing better, then they have a choice to do better.
And if they choose continually to do bad things, to do wrong things, to do corrupt and negative things, well, then they're immoral.
They're evil.
Corrupt.
So if you have some guy who was severely traumatized as a child, he's a father and he keeps showing horror movies to his little kids, and you tell him, look, this is because you were traumatized as a kid and here's what happened and this is a reproduction of trauma, it's bad for your children.
Then he has a responsibility to stop showing appalling horror movies to his little children.
If you go through this whole process with him, and then he decides to continue to show appalling horror movies to his little children, then he is now, with knowledge, sadistic.
He's not just reproducing, copy-pasting the Grandhog Day trauma of his past.
He is, in fact, now, with full knowledge, traumatizing his children.
Which means he's no longer unconsciously reproducing his own trauma.
He's now active with knowledge, fully responsible, a sadist.
So slow to anger is provide them knowledge and once they have that knowledge, they're responsible and if they continue to do wrong, then you can get angry because now they're not acting in an unconscious manner.
So you give people the truth about the nature of the system and society they live in and if they can disprove you, then you gain The benefit of knowledge.
But if they can't disprove you, then they are responsible for not advocating for these things, these negative or destructive things anymore.
And if they continue to do so, then they are no longer acting without knowledge.
They are no longer acting automatically.
They are, in fact, acting in a malicious, conscious fashion.
Well, then you can get angry.
Then you can get angry.
And, in fact, you should get angry.
So if your parents were cruel or abusive, then going to talk to them and say, listen, I experienced this and this is my judgment and this is what I think happened and this is how tough it was for me.
Well, they can no longer claim that they didn't hurt you.
And if they just continually come up with the sort of mealy-mouthed excuses that I dissect in Peaceful Parenting at PeacefulParenting.com, please share.
They continue to avoid and excuse and then continue to abuse.
Well, now they're doing it with full knowledge and therefore they have moved from potentially unconscious trauma repeaters to fully knowledgeable conscious sadists.
The Lord is good to all and His tender mercies are all over His works.
This is something I've talked about with people.
If your parents were abusive and you don't have conversations with them about this, then what happens, unfortunately, Is that by not providing any negative feedback, they have no chance to stop being abusive.
I've mentioned this before, of course, with my mother.
My mother behaves badly around me in particular because I don't conform or comply with her corruption.
I pointed out I was fairly assertive on multiple occasions talking to her about my needs, history, experiences, and preferences, and she escalates and screams and throws things around.
And accuses me of being in league with bad people and, you know, to harm her.
Like, she's really, she behaves really badly.
So, if my mother was an alcoholic and every time she interacted with me, she binge drank herself into neocomatoisia, well, the kind and compassionate thing would be to talk to her about this.
But if every single time this happened, she was okay not drinking, But every time she interacted with me, she drank herself into near oblivion, then the only kind thing that I could do, since we couldn't break the pattern, the only kind thing that I could do would be to not interact with her so she wouldn't die from alcohol poisoning or, you know, permanently damage her liver, her health as a whole.
So if people cannot restrain themselves from acting badly around you, you remove yourself from their presence because you are a catalyst to them doing great harm to themselves and to others.
So that is a kind thing to do.
So if you separate yourself from people with whom, if you are honest, they freak out and behave in really terrible and appalling and negative ways.
You know, if your father had a real temper when you were younger and then you kind of comply and he's relatively peaceful, but then the moment you're honest with him and try and actually participate and show up in the relationship, he goes back to his old habits, escalates, yells, intimidates, threatens, calls you names or whatever, right?
Then...
If you decide not to see him, either anymore, forever, or for a certain amount of time, it is because, in part, because your behavior and your honesty provokes him to negative behaviors.
If you had a girlfriend who cut herself, you break up with her, and then every time you contact her, she cuts herself again.
You need to stop contacting her, because when you contact her, she cuts herself.
I mean, we can all understand this, right?
So, there is compassion in separating yourself from corrupt people if your continued contact and honesty causes them to act out in negative and destructive ways.
Then it is compassion to them to say, look, if my honesty provokes you to destructive behaviors to yourself or others or both, really both, you can't harm others without harming yourself.
If my presence provokes you to truly negative, And destructive and corrupt and immoral behaviors, then I will withdraw myself from contacting you because I don't want to provoke you to negative destructive behaviors.
If every time I contact you, you drink yourself into oblivion, I'm going to stop contacting you because I don't want to be any kind of cause of you harming yourself in that way.
My mother is a better person without me in her life.
Because she could not restrain herself from attacking and being abusive when I was honest, right?
You say, ah, yes, well, I'd go back and be dishonest, but that's harming me, right?
To be in a relationship where I have to be dishonest is harming me.
So, it's the least harm possible, right?
For me not to be in contact with my mother is the least harm possible.
It is the most compassionate thing.
It is the nicest thing because she doesn't behave in terrible ways and I am not harmed by having to lie.
And misrepresent everything about my history and pretend to have respect and love for someone I do not have respect and love for.
So, I mean, there's little white lies and then there's like spinal soul lies, falsehoods.
Thou shall not bear false witnesses in really, really important matters.
So the Lord is good to all.
Yeah, I mean, virtue benefits everyone.
Even those it causes pain to in the short run, it benefits them in the long run.
My mother is better off because of my...
Decision to not see her.
So, the Lord is gracious and full of compassion.
Yeah, we try and extend knowledge, virtue, and compassion to people who are doing wrong.
Slow to anger.
Yep.
It means that we try to instruct them if they end up using our instructions against us or to manipulate us or to control us, right?
If you say to someone, I really care about your life and want you to be happier and better, and they take that and say, gee, that's really nice of you.
Let's talk about it and I'll try and figure out a way.
You know, assuming I accept what you say is true and it is true, then I'll try and find a way to be happier and better.
Thank you for your care, blah, blah, blah, right?
That's good.
However, if someone is really corrupt, they cross that Rubicon, they took that fork in the road towards hell itself.
If they're really corrupt, then what will happen is, if you say to someone who's really corrupt, I care about you and I want you to be happier and better, then they will use your caring against you.
If they're sadists, they will...
Intentionally harm themselves or others or you in order to make you feel bad because they enjoy that.
Or they will, you know, like a drug addict who, there's people around him who desperately want him to become better.
He will beg and plead them for money for, quote, rehab, right?
Because he knows that they want him to stop doing the drugs and to get rehab and to get better.
So because they desperately want him to get better, he will use that desire to get money.
Pretending to go to rehab, but then just use it for drugs, right?
So he knows that they want what's better for him, and he will manipulate that in order to get that.
Or, you know, the drug addict who says, let's say there's a daughter, she's a drug addict, and she says to her parents, you have to give me money for drugs, or I'm just going to go out into the worst section of town and try and get drugs any way I can, right?
Which might mean prostitution or something terrible, right?
And so she knows that her parents want what's best for her.
They don't want her to get hurt.
They care about her.
And so she's using it as a bully tactic to extract money to get the drugs, right?
I mean, this is, again, we can say she's out of her mind with the addiction talking and so on, but that's the mechanism, right?
And this is why in the show Intervention, as I've mentioned before, they say, listen, you either go for help, like right now, or you're out of her lives completely.
I mean, this really is the most compassionate thing.
That you can do, right?
So yeah, slow to anger, for sure.
We will try to give people good knowledge, and because we care about them, but if they then use that knowledge and are caring of them to further abuse and escalate and exploit us, then we get angry.
Because then your virtues are being used against you, which is about as corrupt a thing as is possible.
And then the more virtuous you are, the more you'll be exploited.
And therefore you are feeding the preferences, desires, and material wants.
Of someone because you're virtuous and they're corrupt.
In other words, you're paying them for their corruption and they will, whatever you pay, you get more of.
So you have to withdraw because they're just getting worse out of association with you.
So, yeah, his tender mercies are all over his works.
So, because it is well known, certainly in this community, and, you know, by many, many people across the world, that I do not see my mother because...
She is abusive.
Think, of course, of the...
Well, first of all, she's a better person, and I'm a better person because of it.
We're both less traumatized because we're not in contact.
So it's a huge net plus for the world as a whole.
My honesty was not making her a better person by provoking her to further abuse.
So we're better off.
But also think of the number of parents who've said, oh gosh, well, if my kids don't have to see me, if I'm relentlessly corrupt, I will work to improve.
I will work to improve.
Well, okay, so think of all of that.
So, my decisions with my mother, say, just to take the example that's most understandable to people, my decisions with my mother have been a net positive for the world as a whole.
Virtue is good to all.
My mother has benefited.
I have benefited from our non-contact or my decision to go no contact.
And his tender mercies are all over his works.
So, having mercy to my mother by not provoking her to bad behavior through my own virtues, Well, if you have a friend who's so lonely that your happy marriage makes him suicidal, it's probably better to disconnect from your friend and suggest he gets mental health help because if you keep being happy with your wife around him, he's going to throw himself off a bridge, right?
So it's not, right?
So the tender mercies are virtue benefits just about everybody, right?
So I hope this helps.
I really, really am enjoying these.
Thank you for these great Bible verses and I hope that you find this helpful and useful.
Lots of love from up here.
Freedemand.com slash donate to help out the show.
Ooh, gonna grab a little.
It's 10.30am, Sunday the 19th of January 2025, and I'm gonna grab a little food before the 11 o'clock show.
Lots of love.
Take care, everyone.
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