Ben Shapiro, Andrew Frankly Makes No Sense, and Michael Murr join the Three Wise Men of Yule to talk about the joy that is Yule, and why we should have Christmas back in America. Plus, a look at the history of Christmas in America and why it s not really a holiday at all.
00:18:42.260We'll find them. We'll find them. But, you know, to your point, if you're not living it throughout the year, the celebration isn't as fun. And this is why I think, having been a four-star general in the war on Christmas, Christmas is winning, Starbucks has the cups again, everything's going great, nuns are at the White House. You have to look at the war on Advent. And this cuts both ways. The real war on Advent is, if you start playing Mariah Carey on November 1st, and you're sipping...
00:19:05.780Peppermint lattes and whatever, then there's no build-up. You're not waiting for anything.
00:19:10.120This is the thing that really annoys me about it. I'm an Episcopalian, which is Catholic lights, right? We have the same thing.
00:19:16.480Yeah, exactly. But this thing that you are not allowed to celebrate Christmas during Advent, because it's a penitential time, I'm like, good idea. Take all the joy. Suck all the joy out of religion. That'll bring them in. That'll stack them in.
00:19:29.400My view is that you should never play Mariah Carey.
00:20:03.200So I think because we live in a predominantly Protestant nation, I think that we should actually not just assume that everyone in the audience even knows what Advent is.
00:20:17.760So I want to talk about what is Advent.
00:20:19.900First, I want to talk about where Santa Claus gets his suits.
00:20:23.120And I think there can be very little question, as form-fitting as they are, that it's Indochino.
00:20:27.440I mean, how else could he fit down the chimney?
00:20:29.280I mean, those things had better be tailored.
00:20:31.020And that's why you need an Indochino suit.
00:20:32.740We've got a huge variety of fabrics, colors, and patterns that makes Indochino incredibly stylish.
00:20:36.760You want to look like James Bond this holiday season?
00:20:38.720Well, you can when you go to Indochino.
00:20:40.280They're North America's leading made-to-measure menswear company.
00:23:40.620The best Christmas gift I ever gave was probably Reasons to Vote for Democrats, a Comprehensive Guide, now available for sale, $9.99 on Amazon.com.
00:23:53.820So I don't know how everybody's parents do these things differently, but my parents, we had Santa Claus, you know?
00:24:00.200And so there'd be gifts under the tree all the month of December, and those were from Mom and Dad, and you knew who paid for those.
00:24:07.120But then when you woke up on Christmas morning and came in the room, there'd be a few gifts that were not wrapped that had been made by Santa Claus and his indentured servants, the little small people that he didn't pay a living wage.
00:24:19.200And so I remember very clearly being a little boy and walking in to see what Santa Claus had brought me, and there was a giant red telescope on my parents' sofa, and I was so excited because I was kind of a little nerdy kid, you know?
00:24:34.440And I thought I liked space and was a Trekkie and was finally going to get to see the stars, you know?
00:24:39.400And then I took my telescope out that very night, and have you ever tried to use a telescope?
00:24:46.980And the problem is, if you don't have anybody to tell you these things, like, you look at a star through a telescope, and when you finally get the star into the lens, you realize that it's, like, if you look up with the naked eye, a star is just a white dot in the sky.
00:25:01.000Once you get it into the telescope, it is a slightly larger white dot in the sky.
00:25:06.120And I didn't have anyone to tell me, like, no, there's only, like, eight things you can see.
00:25:12.760And so, literally, the most excited I've ever been to receive a present, and after one single night of futzing with it, I was like, I hate this stupid day, and never look through it again.
00:25:21.700You know, I think this would be an excellent time for me to give you the greatest Christmas presents you will ever get.
00:27:57.060I think I've always said that I think that the best hope for the country is going to be a religious revival.
00:28:01.020So every time there's even a sign of a religious revival in the country, it puts me in a better mood.
00:28:04.960And I've never been, not only have I never been offended by Christian observance, I've been very happy with Christian observance, particularly American Christian observance, which has not been associated historically with anti-Semitism, which is very different from European Christian observance, which for 1,500 years was heavily associated with anti-Semitism.
00:28:19.380American Christianity is a unique brand that has been uniquely philo-Semitic for essentially its entire history.
00:28:25.160And so when the Christmas season rolls around, it puts me in a really good mood.
00:28:28.860And I've never felt like I have to protect my kids from it.
00:28:32.160I'll say to them, like, we'll drive around, I'll say, look at the pretty Christmas lights, and then we go home and we celebrate something different.
00:28:37.180And that's great, and it's a different thing.
00:28:39.040And that's why, as I say about the Hanukkah stuff, like, if you are trying to dissuade your kids from liking Christmas by liking Hanukkah, you're totally doing it wrong.
00:28:46.260That's just something that Jews don't do, but it's a beautiful thing that other people do, and that's a great thing.
00:28:50.840I think you lose the Jewish kids to Christmas when you don't have God.
00:28:54.200If you are celebrating Judaism with God...
00:28:57.220Yeah, then it's like, wow, look at all this pretty stuff.
00:29:07.340So, I mean, what's their complaint about?
00:29:09.760Well, part of the question, though, wasn't just how do you feel being surrounded by Christmas.
00:29:12.800It's how do you feel being surrounded by Christians.
00:29:14.880And I think, you know, someone asked me on Twitter this week something similar, which was like, I mean, they were kindly pointing me to a resource for someone who could help me learn how to better convert you.
00:29:26.200And they said, you know, Jeremy and Michael, I think you were on this.
00:29:29.300As opposed to the fire and sword, I wanted them to do that.
00:29:31.140When you tried to convert Ben, maybe use this.
00:29:34.760And they meant well, of course, because, you know, as we've all talked about before, there's a kind of people, it's a kindness when people want to share their religious faith with you, right?
00:29:43.920If somebody cares enough about my soul that they want to spend time trying to save me, great.
00:29:47.060As long as they're not coming at me with a sword and they take the fact that I'm an independent human being with independent judgment, then sure, go at it.
00:29:55.020And that's why when we had on John MacArthur and he did a 15-minute segment on Isaiah 53, and I didn't bother to get into, you know, the Jewish disagreements about Isaiah 53.
00:30:04.400Like, it doesn't, not only does it not matter to me, I'm flattered by it, you know, again, these are people who care about me, and that's great.
00:30:10.700I also think there's another aspect to it, which is you're interested in it.
00:30:14.460In the same, I think that part of the unique culture that we have here, because we have four very disparate religious points of view, our CEO, Caleb Robinson, I think represents a fifth really unique religious point of view that's always a part of our conversation.
00:30:29.140This is because conservatives are so contrarian.
00:30:31.540Even if we were both Catholic, we'd find out how to even disagree with each other on that.
00:30:38.480We're all interested in each other's points of view.
00:30:40.540We're all flattered that we care enough about each other to share our points of view.
00:30:45.260And we have really free-range conversations.
00:30:46.880And the other thing is that I think that, and the nice thing is also that when Christians talk to me about my own faith, what's nice about that is that it forces me to become a stronger defender of my faith if it's something that I believe.
00:30:57.080And I think the same thing is true for you guys.
00:30:58.300When I talk about Judaism and our take on Christianity, it sometimes makes you think, okay, well, what should I do to, you know, dig down into my own faith and respond to that?
00:31:05.620And I think that it makes the conversation much more interesting.
00:31:06.940I mean, sure, being in heaven while you're in hell will be nice.
00:31:09.240But is there a way that I could be in heaven and be gooder?
00:31:14.260And it's funny because people always ask me, like, doesn't it bother you when you know that, like, all your friends think you're going to hell?
00:31:19.820It's like, no, because when I die, we'll find out.
00:31:27.680Right, well, this is, and the same thing when people say things like, well, you know, there are Christians who will only care about Israel because they think that in the end times,
00:31:34.760Jesus is going to come back and then the rapture is going to happen and all the Jews are going to be left.
00:31:39.300And it's like, okay, so when Jesus comes back, we'll talk.
00:31:41.620It is amazing, though, that we have a lot of religious conversations around here.
00:31:47.140And one of the things that is just amazing to me, and the Bible talks about this a lot, is it really doesn't matter where people are coming from, what their IQ is.
00:31:56.920I mean, we could have a brilliant guy like Ben and Knowles, you know, and yet these insights come pouring out of them that actually change your point of view.
00:32:06.080And you talk to people with really, as long as you're actually focused on God, you say things that you just wouldn't believe would come out of people's mouths.
00:32:13.780And you think, like, wow, I never thought of that, and that's a new thing.
00:32:16.000And I think that there's a, listen, I think there's a lot of wisdom about God from people of various perspectives, which is why, same thing Maimonides thought, who's trying to learn about God by looking at Aristotle and Plato.
00:32:25.160I mean, I think that if you, when I read the writings of Pope Benedict, I'm thinking this is pretty amazing stuff.
00:32:30.800I mean, there's a lot here that's terrific.
00:32:31.880When I read Augustine, I'm thinking that there's a lot here that's really fascinating, and here's where I agree, and here's where I disagree.
00:32:38.540The fact that we're all working within the same Judeo-Christian universe obviously matters a whole hell of a lot.
00:32:42.580There's certain common preconceptions that we're taking.
00:32:44.440But it makes it, you know, it has never, not only never bothered me an iota to be surrounded by Christians, I think that it's made me a better Jew to be surrounded by Christians as well.
00:32:53.200Well, this is what you find from the militant atheist set that is pretty funny.
00:32:58.240I mean, there's the line, an atheist, a crossfitter, walk into a bar, how do you know?
00:33:19.440That's the part that, and it really is astonishing.
00:33:21.420When you talk to people who are militantly anti-religious, and they just start quoting you Bible verses out of context.
00:33:26.880Like, can you give me the verse before and after, and then maybe I'll take you seriously enough that I know what you're saying.
00:33:31.640But it's also, contemplation of God leads to humility.
00:33:35.360This is why Adam hid his nakedness from God, because actually coming face to face with God illuminates our insufficiency.
00:33:45.560And so people who actually believe in God, not people who are culturally religious, or even religiously culturally religious, which is a slightly different category, they can be filled with an enormous amount of hubris.
00:33:59.060People who actually contemplate God are filled with humility, which is why we can have religious conversations with one another.
00:34:06.820And once you get past all those sort of faux hubris, you get down to the actual humility that allows us to engage with these ideas.
00:34:13.100Because the way that you know atheism is true to its name, that they actually reject God, is that there is so much hubris.
00:34:21.300I mean, there's nothing worse than atheists in social media or in the comment sections condescending constantly in every single thing.
00:34:32.700It's like, why don't you make a contention that no one in the history of religion has ever made, and then pretend that that's my contention?
00:34:37.740I was always moved by Sam Harris's, I think it was his first book, The End of Toleration.
00:34:44.620He talks about his Buddhist practice, and he quotes one of the typically kind of mysterious, complex phrases from one of the Buddhist texts.
00:34:53.680And he says, where in Christianity do you find anything that complex?
00:34:57.300And I just thought, you're kind of missing the point, pal, because the complexity flatters your intellect.
00:35:02.100But the simplicity cuts through your intellect to the heart of things.
00:35:05.900Well, I mean, also, this is the conversation that I had with Sam on stage when I did his podcast, is we were talking about the fact that he and I shared 95% of our values.
00:35:15.420And I said, where did you get your values?
00:35:17.340And he said, well, you know, I've studied Buddhism, and I've studied Eastern religion, and I've studied all this stuff.
00:35:20.560He said, right, but I didn't study any of that, and you and I have 95% of our values in common, so where do you think you're getting those values?
00:35:25.260And the answer, of course, is 3,000 years of common history springing from Sinai and moving forward through the Sermon on the Mount.
00:35:29.640I mean, that is where your common culture came from, and that's the culture we all grew up in.
00:35:34.080And if you don't appreciate that culture, then you are failing to recognize what it is that has shaped the world around you.
00:35:40.300And that's the part where we all agree.
00:35:42.920I mean, the doctrinal differences between Catholicism and Protestantism and Judaism, when you pull back from the Surratt painting a little bit,
00:35:51.040and you see what is the broad river of Western history, what you see is that those differences are minute compared to the vast number of things that we have in common.
00:35:59.440And the things we have in common are, in my view, significantly more important for the preservation of Western civilization than the things that divide us,
00:36:06.440which is sort of the piece of Westphalia agreement, right, is that we have a lot more in common.
00:36:10.760If we all hold hands going forward into the future, that's going to be a lot stronger.
00:36:14.260But if we spend a lot of time trying to beat each other up.
00:36:15.520But the question you ask, Harris, though, is an important one, because people are always saying to me,
00:36:19.860do you think people can be good if they're atheists?
00:36:28.900It's people who say that you are a wandering ball of meat, sort of just moving through the universe without any will of your own.
00:36:34.540But you should try to make the world a better place, and you should try to create human flourishing,
00:36:37.680and you should try to create happiness and minimize sadness and minimize suffering and all this stuff.
00:36:42.000It's like, how can you hold these things in common?
00:36:44.500When you say that you can look at science and then derive morality from science, all I can think is, how could you possibly make that argument?
00:36:50.700How could you possibly make that argument?
00:36:52.000You have to at least start from the idea that you're going to submit to some authority greater than yourself.
00:37:00.200And for them, I think the authority is a kind of collectivism.
00:37:04.460They're basically saying, you can look at the world through strictly scientific terms and see how it is better to be moral for the construction of a society.
00:37:12.140But what they can't answer is why you should be moral for the advancement of the individual.
00:37:16.860Like, I understand that, yes, we need to, even in the absence of God, by treating each other well, we're going to have better collaboration.
00:37:24.840We're going to have better partnerships.
00:37:26.240It's going to be easier to keep the lions at the gates, and it's going to be easier to raise children.
00:37:34.340That's a good argument for everybody else to behave.
00:37:36.540That's not a great argument for me, the superconscious man, to behave right.
00:37:40.580You know, I've been reading a lot of atheist science this year, and the key mistake in logic they almost all make is they talk about evolution, and they say, this is how the eye evolved, and that's why we can see light.
00:37:52.720And this is how our moral sense evolved, and that's how we invented morality.
00:37:56.180You think, we didn't invent light, you know?
00:37:57.880There has to be a source point outside of evolutionary biology for morality, and the biggest problem with this is that it can't be something that's invented by humans.
00:38:08.460This was the entire enlightenment attempt, right?
00:38:10.480I mean, Kant did the best of anybody, and Kant failed, right?
00:38:13.500Kant basically tried to reverse engineer Judeo-Christian morality into morality without God.
00:38:19.520He basically took all of the ends of Judeo-Christian morality and said, okay, let me see if I can come with an alternate explanation for why this should work in a sort of utilitarian or deontological sense.
00:38:30.760But he did at least say there is a world, which is so obviously true, there is a world of things as they are that we cannot know.
00:38:38.500And in that world, all religious assumptions, the basic Christian religious assumptions may well be true, and we have to believe in them in order for morality to exist.
00:38:47.000He did make that stand, and they keep using him to attack it.
00:38:50.320And this is where I think that there are certain atheists who are honest enough to acknowledge that they have to make certain core assumptions about morality in order to build a system.
00:38:58.180The people who say, I don't make any assumptions at all, I'm a scientist all the way through, you're not.
00:39:04.840So most of our core values we hold in common as the four of us, one of the things that sort of separates some of us from others is the concept of eternal life.
00:39:14.780Ben, as one who rejects the concept of eternal life, where do you get your life insurance?
00:39:20.540Well, I don't actually reject the concept.
00:39:28.540I'll explain why you're theologically incorrect after I tell you about what happens when you die.
00:39:32.280When you die, a couple of things happen.
00:39:34.540First of all, there's a bunch of stuff that may or may not happen after you die.
00:39:37.860But the thing that certainly will happen is your family's not going to have as much money as when you were alive if you were an earner at all, unless you have life insurance.
00:39:45.080And this is why you need to actually be a responsible human.
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00:40:33.080And really, you should, just as a responsible person with a family and people you care about, go to policygenius.com right now.
00:40:48.820And that's that policy genius is one of our most steadfast advertisers.
00:40:55.140And one of the things that I tell people is if you want to support the content, supporting our sponsors really is the best way that you can do it, right?
00:41:05.680I like policy genius in particular because since they're one of our biggest advertisers across a range of our shows, this show, your show, the other two shows, they put up with a lot of our crap.
00:41:17.020Can you imagine being the advertiser while we just did that ad read?
00:41:56.900The Talmud is full of statements about what happens in the afterlife.
00:42:00.140There's pretty significant debate about what happens in the afterlife.
00:42:02.620But the idea that you're guaranteed a portion in the afterlife if you fulfill certain basic commandments, particularly if you're not Jewish, it's actually easier to get into the afterlife or at least into the good part of the afterlife.
00:42:12.600If you are not Jewish, then if you are Jewish.
00:42:16.120If you are Jewish, you have the burden of the 613 commandments, which is why we actively discourage converts.
00:42:20.960If you are not Jewish, then you basically only have seven.
00:42:24.360It's like believe in God, don't commit adultery, don't kill anybody, no theft, don't eat the flesh of a living animal, set up courts of law.
00:48:24.480As far as I'm concerned, I would live in one of those stores with the...
00:48:27.220You know, this is where I want to talk a little bit about the history of Christmas and putting the X back in Xmas, which is my favorite thing to say at this time of year.
00:48:35.260Because it's funny to me when religious people want to put Christ back into something that didn't involve him in the first place.
00:48:44.400And when they want to have everybody stop having fun on a holiday that was basically just invented for the purpose of having fun.
00:48:52.200So obviously, since the beginning of time, as long as there were agrarian societies, there were celebrations of the winter solstice.
00:48:59.460And the winter solstice, as everyone knows, is the shortest day of the year.
00:49:02.520And if you live in an agrarian society, in particular, if you live in an agrarian society in some place like Europe where it gets very, very cold in the winter and you have to store up foodstuffs in order to make it through, your crops don't grow, you are very happy when you're past, starting to move past winter.
00:49:20.820And they would identify this by the winter solstice.
00:49:23.760That this is when now we're turning the corner and we're moving toward spring.
00:49:27.640You know, every day now is a day that spring is getting closer, not a day that...
00:49:30.760But every day before, the days are getting shorter and darker.
00:49:48.700Well, why would you have an evergreen tree in a celebration of the winter solstice?
00:49:52.000Because it's the only thing that's alive and you're speaking to whatever gods you happen to believe in in your pagan civilization and hoping that they'll bring back the warm days and the long days and the light days so that you can have something to eat.
00:50:05.780It's kind of a way of saying in the middle of the darkest, most godless and lifeless part of the year, you're going, hey, whichever god it is I believe in, remember me?
00:50:14.580Sure would be nice if you could send a little something to eat this way.
00:50:18.060And so they would celebrate it by having these evergreen trees, for example, and they would celebrate it through a lot of drinking because it keeps you warm and because fermented drink survives for this winter period.
00:50:31.900They would celebrate it through all kinds of revelry.
00:50:34.560There'd be fistfights and all the things that go along with drunkenness and lots and lots of merrymaking.
00:50:40.940You know, the kind of merrymaking that happens in the tent.
00:50:42.880You know, they'd go in the tent and do all kinds of merrymaking.
00:50:46.760And even that is symbolic in a way because they're inviting life back.
00:50:52.100So they would have all these pagan sex, you know, orgies and other things.
00:51:02.620And they would invite life back and then that life would, you know, would come forth.
00:51:07.240So it's not until like 500 years ago, 1500 years after Christ, that the Bishop of Rome decides in his attempt to sort of co-opt what would be a very rowdy holiday that was sort of ubiquitous across all peoples.
00:51:23.000Everybody everywhere on earth celebrated the winter solstice.
00:51:25.740And they all celebrated it in approximately the same way, which is getting drunk and rowdy and having lots and lots of sex.
00:51:32.500And he, I think, identified in that certain things that actually did speak to the coming of Christ, that it's about moving from darkness to light.
00:51:41.680It's about moving from death, sin and death into life and righteousness.
00:51:45.100It's about the provision of the return of the provision of God.
00:52:16.260We reject the pagan celebration as well.
00:52:18.300In other words, we agreed with the Pope's motive.
00:52:20.520The Protestants don't like that everyone's getting drunk, having fights and having lots and lots of sex and catching things on fire, you know, around the winter solstice.
00:52:27.360But we can't acknowledge a good idea because the good idea came from the Pope.
00:52:32.460And so really until, as I said at the beginning of the show, really until the 20th century, Protestants, and once America gets here, especially Protestants in America, reject Christmas.
00:52:42.900So you'll see some Christmas happening across Europe, especially Catholic Europe.
00:52:48.240You know, Cromwell during his time in England, outlaws Christmas even in England.
00:52:52.880The Pilgrims, as I said, disliked Christmas.
00:52:56.920It was illegal in many places in America because it was associated with either Catholicism, which was generally frowned upon in early America.
00:53:03.740Or Anglicanism, which is Catholicism, yeah, pretty close.
00:53:06.760Or pagan rowdiness, because it was very religious people who came over.
00:53:11.100And so they, you know, it's kind of funny, like one of the earliest depictions of Santa Claus in America was a piece of Union propaganda during the Civil War.
00:53:18.680Because in the South, where it was much more agrarian, there was more of a love of Christmas than there was in the more industrial North.
00:53:26.740And so Lincoln sort of co-opted Santa Claus.
00:53:29.880He drew this, he had this picture made of Santa Claus with Union troops as a way of ticking off the Confederates and saying, you think he's your state?
00:53:38.340And that's why in 1870, that's a big part of the reason why Christmas became a national holiday as part of Reconstruction.
00:53:44.700But it's funny that we're trying to, since the beginning of the celebration of Christmas 500 years ago, when the Bishop of Rome determined that that's when it would be, we've been trying to insert Jesus into a pagan celebration of drunken revelry and merrymaking.
00:54:04.320So that makes it funny to me when people say they want to put the Christ back in Christmas.
00:54:38.280I'm again using language like putting Christ back in Christmas in sort of disregard of the real history of how Christ came to be in Christmas.
00:54:47.280And the big debate over spelling Christmas, X-M-A-S, is one of the great evidences of this because American Christians get outraged when you write, like, merry X-mas on a card or something.
00:55:01.400They get outraged because you're crossing out the name of Christ.
00:55:04.960But the truth is you're not crossing out the name of Christ at all.
00:55:09.360500 years before the celebration of Christmas really became a Christian thing, before the Pope even decided that that would be the celebration of Christmas on the 25th.
00:55:22.360And that makes it 400 years before we start celebrating Christmas in America.
00:55:27.440In 1021, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles is the first place that we see this, that the Greek letter chi, which is an X, is actually pronounced when you use it in certain context, Christ.
00:55:40.480And so when you would write X-mas, you were literally writing Christmas.
00:55:45.820You were writing it in an abbreviated fashion, but not the way that we abbreviate things.
00:56:34.340So it's funny to me that in America, which is by and large a Protestant nation, Christians, who are by and large Protestant, are really angry that you're crossing Jesus out of Christmas.
00:56:44.060But the joke is, Christmas means the Christ Mass.
00:57:02.240But it does often seem to me that a lot of Christianity, and I say this as an outsider who joined, a lot of Christianity is based on eliminating the best parts of the Christian message.
00:57:11.920A lot of Christianity seems to be like, you know, you're forgiven.
00:57:43.480And the thing about Advent that bothers me, even though I celebrate Advent, the thing that bothers me is this kind of urge, like, are you singing Christmas carols?
00:57:51.800And what I'm telling you, what I'm telling you is that from the minute that Jesus became associated with Christmas, it was for the specific purpose of religious people driving the joy out of Christmas.
00:58:08.800I do love the sort of baptizing pagan things and just making them better because it does mean, you know, you'll hear this a lot from atheists.
00:58:16.880They'll say, well, this culture does this, and this culture thinks this, and this culture has this.
00:58:21.640And, you know, how can they all be right?
00:58:23.500And the fact is, we broadly, cultures broadly, recognize very similar symbols.
00:58:30.300We have very similar conceptions of morality.
00:58:33.280We have a human nature that is speaking with some sort of conscience, and we have this in the myths.
00:58:42.140All of these cultures make up all of these myths, and the myths are very, very similar.
00:58:46.820And then Christianity, for those of us who believe in it, is the true myth.
00:58:51.180It takes those myths, and it is in real time.
00:58:54.420And so then we can go back and go to all those fun little orgies and everything, baptize them a little bit more wholesome.
00:59:12.380So the fact is that your Second Amendment rights are deeply important to protect all of your rights, particularly your First Amendment rights to freedom of religion here in the state of California.
00:59:19.040I mean, obviously, we have serious problems protecting our freedom of religion.
00:59:21.840But if you actually want to provide a sort of counterweight to both crime and fascism and all sorts of other terrible things, it is actually imperative that you be able to have a gun.
00:59:33.480Not only have a gun, have all of the gear that is associated with that weapon so that you can actually use it effectively.
00:59:38.460Which is why, depending on the state you live in, you actually need a great holster to properly carry your gun.
01:05:37.220It becomes bad to being pagan, which is what I think they're aiming for, actually.
01:05:40.240I also think that any time that you try to browbeat someone into not expressing joy to their fellow man, if I say Merry Christmas to Ben, that's not a loaded statement.
01:06:41.660So there is an American holiday even celebrated by you, at least in as much as that you don't send stuff through stamps.com, through the postal service, and you can't go to the DMV.
01:06:52.000There is a national holiday for Christmas.
01:07:04.900Especially what I hate is secular Jews who legitimately spend no time at all being religious, engaging with religion, and suddenly they're deeply, deeply offended when someone says Merry Christmas to them.
01:07:14.420It's like, you don't care about anything having to do with your religion that has nothing to do with Christianity.
01:07:19.120All you care about is that someone may have assumed your religion.
01:07:22.640That somebody may have assumed that you wouldn't be upset by this.
01:07:25.780I don't know, really, virtually any Orthodox Jew who would get offended by somebody saying Merry Christmas to them.
01:19:32.520And the irony is, in the so-called Dark Ages and late Middle Ages, that was a period of rigorous logic.
01:19:40.040That was a period of scholasticism, right?
01:19:42.400And actually, in the Enlightenment, you see much more of a romantic sense of things.
01:19:46.240It was also a period when the organizing civilization had collapsed and these savage tribes, I think we can call them savage tribes, were being civilized by this religion.
01:19:58.120So it was really, when people say nothing was happening, they don't know how far they had to come.
01:20:00.860The first universities were set up by the Catholic Church, all of the great architecture.
01:22:30.700And if you want to get in on the action of asking us questions here at the backstage, we're going to do at least one more round of questions before the end of the show.
01:22:37.120Can we do Christmas movies or something?
01:23:19.100But there's also this moment when Moses confronts the burning bush, which to me, just as a guy who loves literature, one of the great pieces of literature ever written,
01:23:27.620and the idea that this system, this earth that grows and destroys, that's fire and bush, speaks and says, I am, I am.
01:23:36.260And that, to me, changes your entire perspective of nature and all of science as we know it comes out of it.
01:23:41.480That idea that we are engaged in a conversation of intellect with intellect, I think, is what causes a Newton, and it's what causes a Galileo,
01:23:49.500and it's why so many of those guys were in the church, so many of the people who created the scientific revolution, which Pinker also never mentions, were in the church, were church deans.
01:23:57.660Again, these folks who pretend that science began, again, in 1750 or 1760, it's like, where do you think all the science came from?
01:24:03.620I mean, really, there's a long history of science, most of it within the Catholic Church, specifically between 1100 and 1600,
01:24:11.760and a lot of stuff is happening at that time.
01:24:14.760This notion that history just sort of fits and starts and that it really only began at a certain point in time is just not true.
01:24:20.640What the Enlightenment really did is the Enlightenment essentially said that human freedom from government could be consonant with human virtue, right?
01:24:29.540That's what the good part of the Enlightenment was, and this is what you see in all the American founders,
01:24:32.640and this is what differentiates the American founding specifically from the French founding, right?
01:24:35.980As you were fond of saying, it's the French Enlightenment that's saying that we have to strangle the last priest with the—
01:24:40.740what is it, the strangled last king with the guts of the last priest?
01:26:19.900Right, Jonathan Haid specifically talks about this.
01:26:21.580And so it is true that this picture of the Enlightenment as disconnected from its Christian roots is simple nonsense.
01:26:27.660I mean, the fact is that even the very idea of natural rights as opposed to natural law, that starts with Hugo Grotius.
01:26:32.280I mean, it's Grotius who really starts talking about that, particularly in the middle of these religious wars.
01:26:36.100He's saying, well, we have a right to practice our religion.
01:26:38.140The church didn't like Grotius very much at the time.
01:26:39.960I mean, it's that logic that leads to the peace of Westphalia and the idea all these religions have to tolerate each other within the common framework of we keep essential values the same.
01:26:49.340But you can practice basically however you want, and the religious minority must be protected.
01:26:53.760And it's from that religious schism that emerges the idea of these natural rights that span religions and extend to beyond what the church may want to give you at the time.
01:27:01.840So it's this constant interplay in the West between religion and reason and their intention, but they're also a mutual support system.
01:27:10.220You can't have reason without the religion that undergirds it.
01:27:12.860Reason is based on certain fundamental premises, freedom of the will, the ability to think beyond your biology, the capacity to be convinced by somebody else's argument, not by mere self-interest.
01:27:20.940These are based in an idea of a discoverable, logical universe that has certain rules and you being endowed with the creative capacity of God.
01:27:28.620When God says you're made in his image, that's what he means, because so far in the Bible, when it says God is going to make man in his image, God's only done one thing, and that's create.
01:27:35.800And so when it says that you're going to be now made in God's image, it doesn't mean that you're going to be able to make your own morality.
01:27:41.060It means that you're going to be able to create.
01:27:42.720You're going to be able to choose in the same way that God creates and chooses.
01:27:46.100You're a fundamental factor in the forwarding of creation itself.
01:27:48.760This is why I think the scientific revolution begins with the burning bush, because it's that moment when basically man says, oh, I get it.
01:29:31.820But yeah, now I wonder, do you think A Christmas Carol, the movie, is actually a better movie than It's a Wonderful Life,
01:29:36.840or do you just love A Christmas Carol so much that it's biasing your case?
01:29:39.300Because I know you think that A Christmas Carol is legitimately like the best novella ever written.
01:29:42.800It is one of the greatest pieces of literature ever.
01:29:44.940And it's the best thing Dickens ever wrote.
01:29:46.480Also the only time he ever stuck to a word camera.
01:29:47.940But I think that the thing that I love about it is that the performance of Alistair Simm is the only person who plays Scrooge as if he thinks he's right.