00:01:45.000We got the best chatcasts in the world.
00:01:48.000I love being ethnically Catholic because the Irish, the Italians, the Spaniards, even the Mexicans, Some of the most badass nationalities or ethnicities or whatever you want to call it are Catholic.
00:03:27.000When you see these horrendous acts of violence, I think when you see systemic and epidemic drug abuse, suicide, hedonistic sex, and other forms of degeneracy, I think you absolutely have a crisis of nihilism in the country.
00:03:40.000I think this is one of the few things that all generations, all people can relate to, young or old, middle aged men, women, the lack of meaning in our lives.
00:03:49.000And this has come, I think, foundationally from the removal of God from the public square, the removal of God from our personal lives.
00:03:58.000And so I absolutely think nihilism is a problem, and that's my diagnosis for why it's here.
00:04:04.000I would agree that there are grave problems within our culture, but I see them as slightly different, maybe, than the way that Nick sees them.
00:04:10.000I think we both, like the left and right, all different groups within culture, see that there are problems today.
00:04:18.000He says fundamentally that it's the removal of God.
00:04:21.000He would, I assume, mean the Christian God or the Catholic God by that.
00:04:26.000But that deity is actually more prevalent in many people's day to day lives than it was at the founding of this country, ultimately.
00:04:32.000We were founded upon a deist principle.
00:04:34.000It was Christian in nature, although not rudimentarily Catholic.
00:04:39.000However, this concept that there's a mass problem with degeneracy within the culture really depends on your own opinion of what that happens to be.
00:04:48.000Certainly, there's been a societal breakdown.
00:04:51.000Down along the lines of we've got corrupt entrenched political bodies that are largely Christian, although they're not particularly religious.
00:04:59.000And despite that fact, it doesn't do anything to rein in their corruption.
00:05:04.000Okay, now, how this is going to work, you guys, I have a set list of questions.
00:05:52.000Styx, with the proliferation of Christianity, Be beneficial to the United States?
00:05:59.000No, because if Christianity were beneficial to the United States, we wouldn't be in such a mess to begin with.
00:06:04.000The nation, when society began to break down, I'm sure this is probably something that I would agree with Nick on around the time of maybe the late 50s through the 60s.
00:06:14.000You begin to have systemic problems within the culture.
00:06:21.000The politicians were almost all Christian.
00:06:23.000We had at the time an actively immigration system which.
00:06:27.000Banned people from a lot of non Christian parts of the world from even taking part in the culture.
00:06:32.000Now, boiling it down to a mere conspiracy would be one thing, but let me ask this.
00:06:37.000If you do, what safeguard does Christianity, or I should say Catholicism specifically, even provide?
00:06:44.000Because I look at the voting landscape.
00:06:46.000I look at the voting demographics in the last however many elections.
00:06:50.000Catholics vote overwhelmingly in favor of things like gun control, in favor of abortion, in favor of what I'm sure would be generally considered by people on, you know, Maybe the fringe right or the new right, certainly libertarians, to be degenerate or to at least be bad for the country.
00:07:08.000What safeguard has Christianity ever given this country against these things?
00:07:13.000Well, I think that's sort of interesting that you define Christianity as Catholicism.
00:07:18.000I would certainly say that for one to be in communion with Christ's church, you would have to be Catholic, but actually, since the Vatican II Council, Catholics have held that Protestants are still our Christian brethren.
00:07:31.000If you believe that Jesus Christ is a savior, if you're baptized, if you believe that the Bible is the word of God.
00:07:38.000So it's very interesting from the get go that you're trying to straw man me already by saying that it's better or worse based on some kind of Catholic revitalization as opposed to the country just being Christian.
00:07:50.000I also think it's interesting that you attribute the problems that have gone on in the country as a result of the decline of Christianity to Christianity.
00:07:58.000Can we say that the adverse and pernicious social trends of the 50s and 60s were a result of Christianity?
00:08:04.000Did they happen because of Christianity or in spite of it?
00:08:07.000I also think it's interesting that you ask for.
00:08:10.000Safeguards against degeneracy in Christianity when there are no similar standards applied to paganism, applied to nihilism.
00:08:19.000When, as you've seen religion on the decline in the United States, in Europe, you see a proportionate increase in sexual hedonism, in greed, in public vices.
00:08:30.000And don't get me wrong, there have always been vices, but have they been systemic?
00:08:44.000And then additionally, my last point my last point would be this.
00:08:48.000Sticks, you have held in the past that there is no such thing as objective evil.
00:08:52.000And I don't think anybody who doesn't believe in God can even believe in any evil at all.
00:08:56.000You can only say that you might think it's evil.
00:08:59.000So I don't know how you could point to anything and say it's morally wrong or something is wrong at all when you have no objective standard to base that on.
00:09:06.000There are objective standards within my own life.
00:09:20.000Number two, I never said this is a straw man that you're trying to use.
00:09:23.000I never said that Christians were the cause of those problems starting, you know, in the 50s and 60s, Red Scare era.
00:09:30.000You've got the hippies and drugs and all these things you identify as morally problematic.
00:09:36.000I never said Christianity was the responsible party, but I'm saying that in a culture that was overwhelmingly Christian, and not only overwhelmingly Christian, but far more religiously Christian, why is it that that culture, if it was being led by such a morally virtuous group, could fall by the wayside into such Habits and patterns.
00:09:57.000I'm not sure whether you're a fan of eugenics or not.
00:10:00.000Historically speaking, if we look at some of the earliest Victorian occult literature, we see a great appreciation for paganism as having safeguarded, especially the Northern European people, from the same problems that were ended up being introduced by foreign cultures, specifically the Christianized Romans, who, by the way, had already achieved their cultural peak, had achieved basically peak technology in every other possible way.
00:10:26.000And hit their highest wealth under paganism.
00:10:29.000Around the time of Christianity, they convert.
00:10:31.000Within a couple of centuries, the western half of the empire is in shambles.
00:10:35.000The eastern half slowly falls into decadence, despite being overwhelmingly Christian.
00:10:40.000Again and again, we see these cultures, not just Christian, although it's definitely of import that this is the case.
00:10:48.000They fare little better than other religious cultures.
00:10:51.000Secularism, in the sense of atheism, appears to be what you're arguing against.
00:10:55.000I'm simply arguing in favor of some degree of pluralism.
00:10:59.000State secularity and paganism, I think, was a better thing for the European cultures than Christendom.
00:11:07.000Well, from the beginning, it's sort of interesting.
00:11:10.000You say, well, people were Christian, and it wasn't because of Christianity that things went wrong, but there were Christians that made things go wrong.
00:11:17.000Why do you think people embraced contraception in the 1950s and 60s against Christian doctrine?
00:11:44.000All this happened, again, not, and I say this again, this happened as Christianity declined, but it also happened in spite of Christian doctrine, in spite of Christian teaching.
00:11:54.000So, I mean, you seem to be arguing against Christians as opposed to arguing against the doctrine of Christianity.
00:12:00.000Where, wait, wait, wait, if we embraced.
00:12:02.000The doctrine of Christianity, then you would see public morals improve.
00:12:06.000And then to answer the second point, first, we have to talk about the framing of the second point, which is you say that, well, the high watermark essentially of the Roman Empire was achieved under paganism, was achieved under a non Christian or, in your later words, more pluralistic society.
00:12:22.000Well, that's interesting that you say that, that you attribute the decline of the Roman Empire to Christianity when that wasn't even adopted as the official religion until the fourth century.
00:13:01.000You could contend in 1991, they reached their zenith.
00:13:04.000All of these points were when they were Christian, not when they were pagan or secular or anything like that.
00:13:10.000So I think I'll point out in the context of the United States, one quick point, because I'm sure we get to go on to the next question at some point.
00:13:19.000Isn't it funny that the motto of this country was e pluribus unum until the 1950s?
00:13:24.000Around the time of this societal breakdown, we declare we're going to say, in God, we trust on all of our currency and inject religion into every aspect of the public square.
00:13:33.000Prior to that, it had always been understood that people in the West or in the US could be religious, that we were led by a God, but we didn't attempt to corrupt it by putting it in with the state.
00:13:44.000And I see the Vatican roughly as a counterpart to this.
00:13:47.000Within the Catholic core, the very concept of creating such a centralized hierarchical system, As opposed to letting people have their own spirituality and saying, well, yeah, I believe in Jesus or I believe in some other deity or some other force, inevitably corrupts because power corrupts.
00:14:03.000The power over their life is no longer a disembodied spirit, a distant God who they can talk to at night before bedtime.
00:14:09.000It's a state or it's a priest or it's some imam or cleric.
00:14:13.000I see that as probably the greatest corrupting force of all.
00:14:43.000I think it's kind of patently absurd to say that, you know, this anti communist injection of Christianity into the public school system and the, you know, the coining of the currency within God we trust was.
00:14:55.000Was the mark of, you know, now it's a Christian nation.
00:14:58.000It wasn't when it was 97% Christian at the founding of the country, when they did prayers before the constitutional conventions, when they, you know, when they were believers in God, and it was, you know, in the Declaration of Independence, we are endowed by our, we are endowed by our creator with unalienable rights.
00:15:15.000I mean, this is based on a conception of a world with a God.
00:15:18.000The country, the consensus was Christian.
00:15:26.000People went to church much more often.
00:15:28.000This was observed even in the generations preceding the boomers.
00:15:31.000You look at the boomer generation and you look at church attendance, and it went like this.
00:15:35.000And those are people that were born after 45.
00:15:37.000The same time you're saying that, well, because we started coining the currency a certain way, then suddenly it became Christian, and that's when you saw the decline.
00:15:45.000I don't think anybody would say that MTV and cable television and contraception and sexual promiscuity is Christian.
00:15:52.000And you seem to be arguing anti Christian morals are bad, and yet.
00:15:57.000So, Christian people are responsible for that?
00:16:00.000The answer is then don't get rid of Christianity.
00:16:03.000It's make Christians more accountable to Christianity, make them believe again, abide by the virtues again.
00:16:09.000You can't make them believe, number one.
00:16:12.000Number two, I would say those sorts of things, promiscuity and so forth, were already prevalent anyway.
00:16:17.000They just were more underground, they were taboo and not spoken of as much.
00:16:20.000Have you even read Christian literature from the mid 1700s?
00:16:24.000I edit some of this stuff for a living.
00:16:26.000You go through and they're talking about, oh, here's.
00:16:28.000Here's a fortune of when you're going to tie the nuptial knot and embrace Hymen and all of these other things.
00:16:55.000They governed the original country by it.
00:16:57.000The original motto wasn't in God we trust, it wasn't even e pluribus unum, it was mind your own business.
00:17:03.000Our first motto within the United States is nothing to do whatsoever with Christianity.
00:17:06.000Of course, they were Christians because they were born up in a European culture, pan European diaspora, that believed in the Christian God, but they didn't believe in organized religion.
00:17:16.000They didn't believe in a church being paired with the state.
00:17:19.000And in fact, if you read some of their private writings, especially with Benjamin Franklin, my goodness, the dude went whoring constantly.
00:17:26.000He would put any boomer or Gen X or millennial to shame in the bedroom department.
00:17:32.000He was a Christian, yes, but he wasn't religious.
00:17:41.000Well, again, it's just patently absurd to me to say that, well, because Christians are not following Christian doctrine, Throw away Christian doctrine.
00:17:48.000Again, the country was, and you seem to think this is like arbitrary, that the country was composed of almost 100% Christians.
00:17:57.000Oh, well, it was just because they were European and they just happened to be Christians.
00:18:01.000It wasn't by accident that they were Christian.
00:18:03.000It wasn't by accident that this free Western liberal country was established by Christians.
00:19:22.000In time, though, I realized the Vatican is basically a corporation.
00:19:25.000It's going to remain that way, always has been that way.
00:19:28.000They simply adopted pagan doctrine, adopted pagan holidays, passed it off as a religion, and they took the words of Christ essentially completely out of context.
00:19:37.000I always thought that Protestants that pointed this out were absolutely apeshit.
00:19:41.000I thought they were totally fucking crazy.
00:19:43.000In time, I realized essentially they were right.
00:19:45.000I can look at pagan literature, you know, new neo pagan literature, I can look at occult literature from the Victorian age on forward.
00:19:52.000They fundamentally agree with the most fire and brimstone evangelicals that I've ever listened to.
00:19:57.000When I come to realize that, I say maybe there's something to these Protestants ultimately that say we're going to cut a birthday cake for Jesus this Christmas instead of erecting a tree because we don't want to be caught dead worshiping Saturnalia.
00:20:13.000On the schism here, again, you seem to be conflating Catholicism.
00:20:18.000Well, actually, first of all, to address this fire and brimstone stuff, and they took it out of context and the pagan roots of Christianity, let me dispel this myth very quickly.
00:20:26.000There is nothing, you cannot trace the antecedents of Christ the figure in paganism.
00:20:33.000You may have seen, wait, wait, there are some resurrections in Horus, there are some resurrections in paganism, but the idea of Jesus Christ as the flesh and blood, the Son of God, but also in communion, also one in the same with the Holy Trinity, and being put up on a cross and then rising from the dead, it exists.
00:21:35.000They're not even overlapping Pontius Pilate.
00:21:37.000If you look at, and it's interesting to me because people, if we're going to get into the historicity of Jesus Christ in the New Testament, it's funny because people will all day long affirm the veracity and the validity of things like the Iliad, of things like the existence of King Arthur, many other things.
00:21:54.000We did not see a complete collection of the Iliad writings until 1800 years.
00:22:01.000After Homer lived 1800 years, and nobody says, Well, we don't know what Homer said in the Iliad, we don't know what was contained in the Iliad, even though it's the first completed account of 1800 years later.
00:22:34.000The point that is being made is that, you know, King Arthur, another example, he's not even mentioned until 500 years after he supposedly raided any historical text.
00:22:54.000We have many secular as well as those in the New Testament.
00:22:58.000We have Josephus, we have Tacitus, we have Lucian, even pagans acknowledge he existed.
00:23:03.000And if you even look at the New Testament, which I think is not unfair, you look at, for example, the In 1 Corinthians, St. Paul delivers a creed, and that is dated by scholars, by scholars of the subject, that was recited and gathered within 25 years of Christ's crucifixion.
00:23:19.000And if you look at how he was able to have that in such a short amount of time, it was probably compiled less than three years, or around three years after Christ's crucifixion.
00:23:28.000Additionally, if you look at ancient New Testaments, you can look at ancient Greek New Testaments, of which there are 5,500 that exist from the first few, of which 50 exist from the first few centuries.
00:23:41.000Ancient New Testaments and other languages.
00:23:43.000So, the idea that there's like no accounting for Christ's existence or the New Testament is fiction, this is the result of very recent rationalizations of atheism.
00:23:52.000Nobody doubted this, not pagans, not the Roman government, not religious people.
00:26:40.000Ultimately, at the end of the day, though, it won't be Christianity.
00:26:43.000Christianity is a multicultural, globalized religious force that comes out of the Middle East after multiple tribes plagiarized one another.
00:27:11.000It is a multicultural religion that, mainly, if you look today in the world, the most religious Christians that you'll find, funnily enough, are in places like West Africa or Mexico.
00:27:22.000Now, what I would say is if Catholicism or Christianity were so beneficial or so great for a culture, why aren't they first world countries?
00:27:41.000Why does it seem like the supposedly decadent, godless culture that supposedly is degenerated and collapsing is the one trying to safeguard itself against these others?
00:28:15.000Number two, I think it's very interesting that sticks can even talk about something like morality that simply could not exist without a God.
00:28:22.000Certainly, you would have subjective morality.
00:28:25.000You could have your personal morality, which, again, is entirely up to you and your practice.
00:28:30.000But can we define that certain things are right and certain things are objectively wrong without religion, without the existence of a God?
00:28:37.000And so, how could we even, what does this talk about?
00:28:40.000How do we restore morality in the United States if we don't even, if there is no such thing as, Morality as objectively understood in the real world, but only in our subjective interpretation.
00:28:49.000For example, as Stick says that raping children is wrong, if there is no God, that's his personal opinion.
00:28:56.000That is his subjective opinion on what is moral.
00:28:59.000If I say, no, I think it's right, I think it's the best thing in the world, well, the only thing he can say is he disagrees with me and he finds that distasteful.
00:29:06.000Well, a lot of different people have a lot of different feelings on what is moral and what isn't.
00:29:10.000Look at the country today, right and left.
00:29:12.000Some people think abortion is okay, some people think it's not.
00:29:15.000Some people think it's okay to mutilate children and make them transgender, some people think it's not.
00:29:19.000Some people think it's okay to go to war with other countries and on and on and on.
00:29:23.000And all we have to mediate these moral conflicts is well, people have this personal spirituality and the Catholic Church is a corporation.
00:29:36.000There is no morality outside of God, objectively understood.
00:29:39.000And then to address the question of Christianity is multicultural, I mean, to read the Old Testament and believe that Christianity is multicultural, to read, for example, Genesis, the Tower of Babel.
00:29:50.000Where God created the nations, where he scattered them and divided them by language and all the rest.
00:29:56.000And then additionally, well, but the Old Testament is the first book in the Christian Bible.
00:30:01.000And then to look at the Old Testament, which is a story about God favoring one tribe over others, go forth and multiply.
00:30:08.000It's a message of natalism, it's a message of life.
00:30:11.000Go forth and then he helps them conquer other neighbors.
00:30:13.000And then additionally, you could look in and I'll pull this up just for you because I was interested in this.
00:30:21.000Well, and you went all over the place about, you know, Wealth and Mexico isn't rich and all this.
00:30:26.000If you actually look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church about immigration, because this is a common myth, if you look at the Catechism of the Catholic Church 2241, it says, the more prosperous nations are obliged to the extent that they are able to welcome the foreigner in search of the security and the means of livelihood which he cannot find in his country of origin.
00:30:48.000And many people would say, oh, that's we can interpret that as they want mass immigration, but it does say in terms of how they are able.
00:30:56.000Additionally, it says, Political authorities, for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible, may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to the immigrants' duties towards their country of adoption.
00:31:11.000Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them, to obey its laws, and to assist in carrying its civic burdens.
00:31:22.000Does that sound like mass immigration to you folks?
00:31:29.000Jackson, that's not in the way you interpret it, no, but the Pope seems to interpret it a different way.
00:31:34.000I think that most Catholics are going to listen to him over you, which might be unfortunate for the Catholic churches and Western civilization's survival in the future.
00:31:42.000It's funny that you would bring up the Vatican or Catholicism at all in the realm of, oh, well, raping babies.
00:31:48.000I think that if you were to say that you thought that was a good thing, you'd be actually agreeing with the Catholic church, oddly enough.
00:31:54.000If we look at like Ratzinger, who, by the way, was put in there by Pope John Paul to see over.
00:32:00.000The church abuse scandals shuttled people around, then becomes Pope.
00:32:07.000Your entire argument regarding the Old Testament is funny because you're talking about, oh, well, you know, God, the Tower of Babel, which by the way is a Babylonian myth that the Jews adapted and changed around.
00:32:18.000It's literally recorded within Babylonian lore on their, I believe, cuneiform, or I don't know if it dates to the Sumerian period.
00:32:26.000Literally speaking, you are taking a Zionistic explanation and using that to promulgate your concept of New Testament post nationalism.
00:32:57.000I think it's hilarious how I bring all the facts and I really just deconstruct the heart of the argument about morality, and you respond with kind of this, you know, Actually, it's Babylonian roots.
00:33:18.000Here's the common misconception about Judaism and Christianity the Jews rejected Jesus Christ.
00:33:25.000The modern Jews that you see today are derived from the rabbinical, the Talmudic tradition.
00:33:30.000These are the Pharisees that were responsible for the crucifixion of Christ.
00:33:34.000So to say that the Jews of the Old Testament are in any way bearing any kind of resemblance to the Jews of today, which see their scripture not as Not as the five books of Moses, but as the Talmud, as rabbinical law and the halahat, you know, that all that kind of stuff is just evident that you don't know the facts.
00:34:47.000Catholicism, what I am saying to you is, does it not matter that throughout time Christians have looked at the same scripture, interpreted it differently, translated it differently, schismed into groups which see it differently?
00:34:59.000The Pope sees it differently, I believe, than you.
00:35:02.000What makes you think that you're superior to any of these other groups?
00:35:05.000And how, therefore, if there is such confusion, how can that even be used for the objective standard of morality that you hope to impart upon a state because you see it as degenerating, as decaying, maybe away into atheism or?
00:35:21.000Or sexual immorality, as you would say it, or any of these other problems, how is it going to solve anything?
00:35:26.000Whereas with paganism, it's fairly cut and dry.
00:35:30.000You don't really need to interpret it.
00:35:34.000Plato comes out in part of his arguments, or I should say Socrates, rather, through this.
00:35:40.000Speaking of the concept that a religion should be actually actively designed by the state, for instance, telling people, it would be a lie, it would be a mythology, telling people, oh, the reason why there's inequality in our culture is people were.
00:35:52.000Formed out of different metals in the earth.
00:35:54.000So the soldier, he was formed from iron, and this worker was formed from copper, and this person was formed from clay or silver or whatever.
00:36:01.000And so this helps to stabilize the culture.
00:36:03.000The idea is that creating that morality, whether objective or whether it's being just sort of compiled as a stand in for real spirituality, now it has a purpose, a pragmatic purpose.
00:36:36.000Why I'm saying that the Pope with his high power degree in his white robe sitting in the Vatican as the head of Catholicism, according to most Catholics, why would a Christian or a Catholic in specific hold your interpretation of dogma maybe to be better than his?
00:36:51.000Because he'll come out and say, Well, build bridges, don't build walls.
00:36:55.000Oh, but sticks, walls being a mistake here.
00:36:58.000I'm not going to judge this group of people.
00:37:00.000Why is it that your interpretation of that same general?
00:37:04.000I will tell you, I will tell you because Pope Francis, when Pope Francis goes out and talks about politics.
00:37:11.000He is not using his power of papal infallibility.
00:37:14.000When the Pope goes out there and says things like, we should be building bridges and we should take care of the earth, this is not an invocation of papal infallibility.
00:37:22.000So you exonerate him for his personal views?
00:37:27.000I'm simply saying that to say that, well, here is this authority, sure, I mean, he is an authority in the church and people respect what he has to say, but the catechism is what's, that's what the Catholic Church believes, that's what's doctrinal.
00:37:41.000And so, if you read that and you say that the immigrants have to welcome X, Y, and Z, and you read exactly what it says, what is actually doctrinally Catholic, there's no argument that you can make.
00:37:50.000So, you have to say, oh, well, the Pope said some touchy feely things about building bridges, which are not infallible, which is him.
00:37:58.000I don't know what he's saying by that.
00:38:00.000Maybe he's saying we should remember to keep that in mind.
00:38:02.000We're talking about walls and everything.
00:38:05.000But if we're actually looking at doctrinal Catholicism, whether Pope Francis comes and goes, whether there's a new Pope or an old Pope, that is what it says about immigration.
00:38:15.000Now, if the Pope said, and I would concede this if the Pope said, and he invoked his powers infallibly and he was contributing to the dogma, if he was going into that function and he said all that, then I would say we would have a problem.
00:39:07.000And if our souls are in communion with God, that's a good thing.
00:39:10.000It's ultimately a rejection of the temporal world.
00:39:14.000And I would ask you you look at the suffering around the world, you look at people being blown to smithereens, people getting executed, you look at horrible injustices.
00:39:22.000And me, As a Catholic, I can sit well with that because this can be rectified in another life.
00:39:47.000Why the hell would you care if the white race was maintained?
00:39:50.000Why would you care if a nation was maintained?
00:39:53.000So, really, if you're going down that road where you're saying, well, you know, in the afterlife, it's all going to be great.
00:39:58.000Well, also in the afterlife, I guess there won't be a problem with race.
00:40:02.000Well, then that kind of blows some of your views out of the water.
00:40:05.000Meanwhile, you're basically saying the Pope isn't even a spiritual authority unless he invokes his infallibility, then we've got a problem.
00:40:12.000But if the Pope comes out as the highest man in Catholicism and simply suggests that you take in more immigrants, simply suggests that, oh, well, you know, close borders is a bad thing, that won't have a measurable impact upon the behavior of Catholic world leaders, of Catholic laypeople towards the.
00:41:31.000So Fuentes, you got this and then Stix, you got the floor.
00:41:34.000So to try and ascribe this, you know, oh, well, because the Pope said something I disagree with, or this person said something I disagree with, well, Throughout Christianity, throughout Catholicism, it's just very silly.
00:41:44.000And then number two, this idea that just because we don't believe that Christianity is a panacea for temporal problems, then we just, whatever, it can all go to hell.
00:41:55.000Everything can just, you know, who cares?
00:41:58.000Christianity can improve, it has improved.
00:42:01.000You look at the most prosperous, the most successful countries in the history of the world, they're all Christian.
00:42:05.000Great Britain, the United States, Germany, when it was at its industrial peak, Russia, an Orthodox country.
00:42:12.000Not the Soviet Union, obviously, but the Russian Empire, all Christian countries.
00:42:16.000I don't think anybody would dispute the fact that Christendom is responsible for the scientific revolution, for reason, for everything in the modern world we see today.
00:42:24.000And other countries may have taken part in it, but we're the progenitors of it.
00:42:27.000That's what Christianity has offered the world.
00:42:29.000Christianity was actually antithetical to the scientific revolution.
00:42:34.000I can look back at texts and see, oh, well, yeah, the church said that the world was not indeed round, despite the fact that it was widely known at the time.
00:42:44.000And used to occasionally kill people for that.
00:42:46.000Now, granted, that was less common than an atheist would say.
00:42:50.000But you keep dragging out this one funny argument.
00:42:52.000Why is it that we are only arguing about the relative virtue of Christendom and we're not also saying, hey, there's relative virtue to paganism?
00:43:01.000Because those cultures, again, before Catholicism invaded, in some cases hundreds of years into the Christian period within Rome, depending on the proximity to the Mediterranean basin, there was already culture.
00:43:20.000They already had fortresses and walls and everything else that the Romans had.
00:43:24.000The difference is, of course, they didn't have as much manpower.
00:43:26.000Ultimately, it boiled down to politics.
00:43:28.000Just like Rome ultimately only even adopted Christendom to have a standardized religion, if it had been up to the military, they would have become Mithraists.
00:43:51.000There'd be some of the sun imagery in the most literal sense.
00:43:55.000I fail to see, though, how is it that these groups, in spite of not being Christian, they had order, they had law and order, they had virtue, they had a concept of right and wrong.
00:44:05.000It doesn't require Jesus to have an objective view of right and wrong.
00:44:09.000The Muslims have a very objective view of what is or is not right.
00:44:12.000It's just a different one from what you have.
00:44:25.000Within the constitutional framework of the US, why would you want to set a legal precedent for the use of a religion, perhaps for moral reasons at all, when we've got Islam invading the Western world and it seems like Christian leaders don't want to do anything about it despite routinely being religious, so called?
00:44:43.000So, first, to address the scientific revolution argument, the church and science have been at war forever.
00:44:49.000I mean, this is middle school level history.
00:44:52.000We all know, I think everybody who knows anything about the Middle Ages understands that.
00:44:57.000The church actually invented the university system.
00:45:00.000If you actually look back at the high or the high middle ages, the reason that we even have university at all is because, or at least the modern university in the way that we look at it.
00:45:20.000Maybe this is maybe we need some objective morality on interrupting, right?
00:45:24.000But then you look at we invented the university system.
00:45:26.000Not only that, but if you look at the foremost.
00:45:29.000Really, the Catholic Church's official philosopher of the church, Thomas Aquinas, the philosophers who justified the existence of God, the early church fathers, these were not people who were based on superstitious belief and they were numbering the stars.
00:45:42.000Thomas Aquinas set out to find how can we, through reason and rationality, create a metaphysical demonstration for God's existence.
00:45:50.000And this was back in, this was a thousand years ago.
00:45:53.000And this is the premier philosopher of Christianity.
00:45:56.000Additionally, you had Galileo, you had Jesuits who agreed with Galileo, you had Jesuits who preached Galileo.
00:46:03.000You know, so you talk about some of these early, oh, well, people were thrown out because they didn't believe in what the church said.
00:46:08.000One of the reasons why Galileo was thrown in jail by the church was because he did not have, he did not prove his argument.
00:46:14.000His early arguments about the earth revolving around the sun was based on tides, saying that the tides were shaken up in a particular way, had nothing to do with anything else.
00:46:23.000And there were very good arguments against it that were made by the church.
00:46:26.000And then additionally, not only was he challenging the church on this doctrine and he couldn't even prove it at the time, but on top of that, on top of that, he was.
00:47:26.000So Sticks will respond to that real quick.
00:47:28.000Yeah, to let the super chat people ahead, I'll try to keep it short.
00:47:31.000I'll just say this it seems like Newton is constantly brought up, but no Christian apologist for religiosity ever brings up Ben Franklin.
00:47:39.000They don't want to bring up many of these other Christian individuals who ultimately were deists, very intelligent, yes, rational and scientific.
00:47:47.000It's not organized religion that they liked, though.
00:47:50.000They're like, yeah, there's a God, there's a Jesus Christ.
00:48:25.000How do you think you build organized, involved communities but through religion?
00:48:29.000I mean, what do you think you do when you go to church but you pray in communion with fellow believers?
00:48:34.000And for all these people who say, well, there are these secular concerns that supersede religion, religion is the center, it's the core of all of them.
00:48:42.000At the end of the day, if you can't ask yourself, why are we doing this?
00:48:47.000What is the teleological reason that we exist?
00:48:49.000I think it's very difficult to get on with any kind of affair, at least if you have any questions about what's going on.
00:48:55.000So, I think that the question of, well, should religion be more important or building communities?
00:49:00.000I think the question is one in the same build a community of believers, people that are motivated enough by their belief in the existence of God that they could drink death like water, as Fulton Sheen said.
00:49:09.000That's the kind of conviction we need.
00:49:12.000I would say it doesn't matter whether it's religious or not.
00:49:15.000It's perfectly acceptable to structure your culture around religion.
00:49:19.000I would just prefer that, number one, there is secularity in part in the state, there has to be some degree of tolerance for people who dissent because even that native population within that religion will.
00:49:30.000Over time, because it's malleable, there will be new opinions that arise and so forth.
00:49:34.000Number two, you run the risk, I think, as you would with anything else in all honesty, not just a religion.
00:49:40.000You run the risk at that point of using religion as sort of the central focus of your culture, of people just organizing around religion, becoming very zealous, but ultimately the state sort of lags off, I would say.
00:50:03.000Wouldn't you say the bigger issue is maintaining homogeneity of belief, whether it be Catholic, pagan, Muslim, etc.?
00:50:13.000No, because if you look at some homogenous cultures, like most of the Islamic world, they're no better off.
00:50:18.000There are homogenous countries in Africa, whether they're Islamic, Christian, some of them are quasi paganistic, spiritualistic, and in a rudimentary sense, they just don't do well.
00:50:29.000And it's not just because of colonialism.
00:50:31.000I know that the New Agers on the left will say, well, We rob them of their resources, we evil Westerners, so that's why some of these countries are messed up.
00:50:40.000The homogeneity of their culture also isn't helping them.
00:50:44.000What it is, is in a secular sense, the structures that they have created within their culture simply don't seem to have the sort of lasting stability that they need.
00:50:52.000I would say it's perfectly fine to have a mixed culture.
00:50:55.000Like we see within the United States, even when it was mostly Christian, it's a mix of different Christian backgrounds.
00:51:01.000There were also Jews, Mormons, which is the sort of American version of Christianity, and pagans as well.
00:51:07.000Mesoamerican religion, some of the Norse coming in as well.
00:51:12.000What really became the problem is that now the state in the Western world is trying to strip everyone of every identity that they have.
00:51:21.000It's not so much the particular religion, it's that they don't want them to have any spiritual background, any national loyalty, any family structure.
00:51:29.000That's really what's become the issue, I think, at this point.
00:51:41.000That's probably the biggest problem that we have.
00:51:43.000On the question of homogeneity, it's important to distinguish between homogeneous and homogeneous because they're different.
00:51:49.000But to get to the point, I think we believe in Christianity, or I believe in Christianity and Catholicism, because it's a truth.
00:51:57.000And I think that a country is stronger when it abides by the truth, when it's in cohesion, it's in harmony with the person who made the universe.
00:52:05.000So I don't think it's necessarily about homogeneity.
00:52:08.000I think it's about what is true, and are we in accordance with that?
00:52:13.000And I guess I agree with Sticks to some extent that religious homogeneity isn't necessarily all that it's cracked up to be.
00:52:20.000But I guess I disagree for different reasons.
00:53:03.000But it would be better if you told us whether you were Christian or not.
00:53:07.000I'm assuming it, but I'm not going to have these guys answer a question that needs to be assumed.
00:53:13.000So, anyways, other question Sticks, could you elaborate on how the end of organized religion can help more spiritually focused Christians like me?
00:53:24.000When you have organized religion, I think the tendency for a lot of people is they get lazy.
00:53:29.000They listen to somebody else tell them what to believe.
00:53:31.000They don't really search any deeper themselves.
00:53:34.000What I've learned through years of literally working with spiritual materials is there's a great appreciation to be had for different opinions.
00:53:41.000Ultimately, at the end of the day, you can believe that one is the truth.
00:53:58.000Why do you need a church per se that might end up becoming corrupted to tell you what to believe in?
00:54:03.000Because if the church were really all that, if it weren't capable of being corrupted, you wouldn't have so many of the problems inherent in these things.
00:54:11.000It's not like paganism, which is very tribal, it's also very individualistic in many cases.
00:54:16.000There's a family element, there's certainly a nationalistic one.
00:54:19.000Ultimately, though, there's no ambiguity involved.
00:54:23.000You either are or are not a noble person according to those things.
00:54:27.000There's no, hey, I'm a Christian, therefore I did a bad thing, but I can be forgiven.
00:55:26.000But with the Catholic Church, we have the distinction that Jesus Christ prayed for the faith of Peter.
00:55:32.000He said he's going to build his church on the rock, which is Peter, and his successors now.
00:55:37.000Are protected from fallibility by Jesus Christ.
00:55:40.000And the reason why this is necessary is because compare yourself, a Christian who reads the Bible and your understanding of it is pretty mainstream compared to other Protestants or Catholics or whatever, a Western conception of Christianity.
00:55:51.000Now, compare that to some of these Catholics in Central and South America, where they fuse it with tribal folk religions.
00:55:59.000There's one that's based on the saint of death, where there's executions, there's horrible violence, and they interpret the Bible in such a way that's repugnant to us.
00:56:07.000And if you don't believe that there's an authority that says one is Christian and one is not, Well, their interpretation is just as good as yours.
00:56:13.000And there is no argument against that.
00:56:15.000I mean, that's not to say that it's just as good.
00:56:17.000It's to say that we don't know because there is no authority telling us a Christian is this and not that.
00:56:35.000But that claim of objectivity is itself a subjective claim.
00:56:39.000It's not based in observable evidence that any person, if it were, There would be no question about which religion was true.
00:56:45.000Everyone would be members of that same Christian religion, the one true faith, I'm sure you would call it.
00:56:51.000Which, how do you determine, therefore, that the authority in an objective sense should be listened to at all by people who already disagree?
00:56:58.000Well, what it is, is you're presuming, I have to presume that your primordial argument, that your authority figure and your religion are true in order to take the argument for their trueness seriously.
00:57:09.000It's circular reasoning, and it's fine.
00:57:12.000It absolutely is, because you're saying.
00:58:20.000Of a philosophy, of theology that has not been debunked, that probably hasn't even been read by the new atheists that exist, which is why we can demonstrate metaphysically through reason that God exists.
00:58:31.000And then when we look at the historical record, we can judge whether Christ was divine or not.
00:58:35.000If you accept these precepts based on reason and based on the historicity of the New Testament and the divinity of Christ, then you can come together and say, well, if God is real, and then we look at the evidence that Christ's tomb was empty and he was crucified and people did have eyewitness accounts that he rose again, well, then he's probably God's son.
00:58:54.000And if he's God's son, then what he says is true.
00:58:56.000And if what he says is true, then we know that Peter is the rock of the church.
00:59:00.000He was handed the keys of the kingdom to heaven.
00:59:03.000And if we understand all of that being true, all of that we acknowledge, and there's lots of arguments for that, but this is the demonstration of it, then we understand that his successors in the papacy are an authority on what is Christian, what is the word of God.
00:59:16.000And so that's, it doesn't, it's not circular reasoning.
00:59:18.000It doesn't come from, well, we just trust that guy.
00:59:20.000It comes from thousands of years of history, of theology, of metaphysics, of all.
01:00:04.000But you understand the point that was being made if it's not Christian.
01:00:07.000The point you were making is that they were similar in some, in some metaphysical manner.
01:00:11.000I can point you To many books from especially the Eugenic period, a period I'm sure you have an appreciation for, that'll say, Oh, the structure of the atom, the action of radium, and all of these scientific principles prove that Jesus was a mystic sorcerer, essentially.
01:00:26.000Theosophy is true, and we can have the utopia now, and Atlantis existed, and here's death rays, and all this stuff.
01:00:35.000I can look for all sorts of texts on these subjects, but the fact that I can compile a bookshelf full of texts that generally agree with one another and say, Well, this is the truth.
01:01:50.000And yet, you have not grappled with the arguments.
01:01:52.000You believe that, well, they're all just opinions.
01:01:55.000It's all just, and all opinions are equally valid.
01:01:57.000I mean, is that, that's essentially what you're positing, and that's simply not true.
01:02:00.000No, I'm saying that on something that hasn't been proven on a totally subjective basis.
01:02:05.000The historicity of Jesus Christ and the metaphysical demonstration that God must exist.
01:02:10.000Unless you hold secrets, the Catholic can answer the cosmological arguments, then, I mean, I'm sorry, all you have is relativism, essentially.
01:02:36.000Now I'm paganistic, but it doesn't really change.
01:02:39.000I said, let me grant that there's even a single monotheistic God.
01:02:43.000Why is it your particular interpretation?
01:02:45.000Because there are also Christians, theologically based, classically trained, that say, no, if you believe in that certain way or do this certain thing, you go to hell.
01:02:53.000One person says you're saved by faith, another by grace, another by membership in a certain church or certain actions.
01:02:59.000Another says, well, you will manifest faith on the outside.
01:03:02.000Yes, you have to be saved like sinner's prayer mode, but you will manifest those good behaviors.
01:03:07.000You'll give to the poor and shelter the orphans and stuff.
01:03:10.000There are so many different opinions within Christendom.
01:03:13.000I'm not asking you, I don't really care even if you can prove that that particular deity exists.
01:03:18.000It doesn't even matter because there are so many opinions about how to interpret the very doctrine.
01:03:25.000Well, I mean, if you say it doesn't matter if you can prove that God exists, I think that kind of says it all right there.
01:03:31.000I'm simply saying that the objective basis of morality you are seeking for a political reason, for the United States, because that's basically what we're saying.
01:05:37.000A fraud to say, Oh, I don't care if I'm burning in hell for eternity.
01:05:40.000It's inconsequential to me whether the preeminent, like pure actuality exists in the universe.
01:05:46.000And then to argue and say, Well, I'm going to be objective about this conversation.
01:05:50.000You've already admitted that it's irrelevant to you.
01:05:52.000And then you turn around and you use Christian texts against Christians.
01:05:55.000You talk about Jewish tricks, talk about Jewish tricks where you obfuscate the entire Bible, you obfuscate this and that.
01:06:04.000We still have not come up with an argument for morality that you seek to impose.
01:06:08.000You seem to have problems with things that the church fathers have done or hypocrisies, and yet no standard by which to say that they're so wrong.
01:06:14.000All right, guys, guys, guys, let's move on.
01:07:27.000And look, you can mount consequentialist arguments against those assaults.
01:07:33.000And you could say, well, here's why we can demonstrate pragmatically why families are better and men should be men and women should be women and X, Y, and Z.
01:08:01.000It's an assault on what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a nation.
01:08:05.000And how are we going to carry that out if we don't have strong families?
01:08:08.000And the only institution that can answer that authoritatively is the church.
01:08:13.000You may be able to answer that with a report from the Heritage Foundation or a personal belief, but you cannot say that this is the truth indisputably like Christians can.
01:08:24.000So, in that way, it is completely indispensable in the restoration of the country.
01:08:30.000Not to delve into an atheistic argument, but I can literally claim objective truth on virtually any spiritual statement that I make as long as no negative can be proven.
01:08:39.000Look, pagans had the nuclear family, the concept of morality, the tribal, the proto nation stateslash nation state mentality long before Christianity exists.
01:08:51.000Pagans, thousands of years beforehand, managed to run stable cultures that lasted sometimes thousands of years uninterrupted.
01:08:58.000They didn't have, they weren't screwing everything that moved, other than the Greeks, you know, generally speaking.
01:09:05.000They weren't screwing everything that moved.
01:09:07.000They had a nuclear family, especially in northern European groups.
01:09:10.000They had virtually everything that Nick is talking about wanting.
01:09:14.000Why then should Christianity, unless you again are making that, A, it's just the objective truth argument that I don't have to take seriously.
01:09:24.000Unless you are making that claim, why wouldn't paganism do just as good a job?
01:09:28.000And some of these pagan cultures, by the way, they lasted so long, they lasted longer than any of the Christian empires so far.
01:09:35.000I think, isn't the United States approaching the point at which it will be the longest lasting?
01:09:39.000And we were formed by deists and we're falling away from that sort of hyper Christian mentality anyway.
01:10:09.000To draw this false equivalence between Christendom, which you have, again, thousands of years, the scholarship that has been done, and people have believed in this, and there is a heritage of this in this country.
01:10:21.000To speak simply on pragmatic grounds, who do you think can come and convince people that they are objectively correct about the family?
01:10:27.000Somebody who says, Hello, Americans, I am a Christian, and the Christianity says this, that, and the other, and this is true.
01:10:34.000Or somebody who says, Hello, I praise Odin, I am here with the hammer, and I say, That the pagan family is back.
01:10:42.000And additionally, you conveniently leave out the point where the Roman Empire, as successful as it was, it had infanticide.
01:10:50.000It had horrible injustices that were being committed.
01:10:52.000Even the charity that was being done during Roman times was not done for the sake of, well, we should help each other out and we should have real community.
01:11:00.000It was done because, well, I want to showcase my liberality and maybe I want a debt paid later.
01:11:05.000So, again, to this false equivalence that's drawn between paganism and Christianity, it can only exist.
01:11:11.000In this abstract universe, absent the practicality, absent the reality of the situation.
01:11:37.000What I'm saying is that there's no more objective basis of that and simply saying, well, you know, people will be taken more seriously if they say we're going to restore our nation with Christianity.
01:12:27.000Can you give me an example of a pagan religion which could restore traditional values in the country, which has a convincing theology, a convincing metaphysics that we could start preaching?
01:12:39.000Considering the similarity of holidays and the similarity of imagery and practice, virtually any of them from Northern Europe.
01:12:46.000Of course, you could have Norse paganism would be fine, Anglo Saxon paganism.
01:12:51.000What I would say, though, this is what I've been saying.
01:12:53.000I wouldn't even want to use them as that objective.
01:12:57.000We're getting, I think, hooked up here a little bit on the concept that there has to even be an objective measure for that morality.
01:13:11.000I don't, as you think, hate Christianity in a general sense.
01:13:15.000What I am saying is that Christianity has shown itself, its track record in the last few hundred years is towards the same decadence and decay that you see in the culture.
01:13:23.000It's not the absence of Christianity that's causing it any more than the presence, it is simply the fact.
01:13:29.000That Christians are capable of being corrupted the same way because your God does not objectively exist.
01:13:36.000But aren't you moving the goalposts a little bit?
01:13:38.000I mean, you started out by saying, well, what makes your religion?
01:13:42.000If we're going to establish an objective morality, then anyone can, but I don't even care about it.
01:13:46.000And then you just caught up by saying, well, but I don't even care about it.
01:13:49.000That's because that's the claim that you made.
01:13:51.000So I was just responding to your claim of objectivity while this is the one objective.
01:13:55.000And you answered, by the way, you answered with the religion.
01:14:07.000Norse mythology does that, and I ask, does this have a convincing metaphysics?
01:14:12.000Can you metaphysically demonstrate the existence of tribal Norse gods?
01:14:16.000Where's the proof for that as opposed to the proofs that have been laid out by Christian apologists for thousands of years?
01:14:22.000Christian apologists have laid out proof that is convincing to people that are Christians and not convincing to people that aren't, or everyone would be a Christian.
01:14:30.000The Muslims literally claim the same friggin' thing.
01:14:32.000You yourself said you didn't read the apologies.
01:14:35.000You yourself said, you said, wait, they create an apologism that isn't convincing to non Christians.
01:14:40.000And you yourself said, not only have you not read the premier apologist, but you don't care what he wrote.
01:14:45.000So that's kind of an interesting idea.
01:14:46.000I am saying that the entire world would have converted by now because of the fervor of Christian missionary activity.
01:15:03.000I could claim the same objectivity and say, well, a lot of people became occultists and theosophists and all these related new age sort of groups in the eugenics period, including a great many Christians.
01:16:10.000And Christ affirmed all of those things.
01:16:12.000And we had 2,000 years of Christendom.
01:16:16.000We have a metaphysical foundation, a convincing one that has not so far been refuted.
01:16:21.000And you say, well, how is that any different than the cult of Mithras or the cult of Horus, of which none of these things exist for those religions?
01:16:28.000So it just strikes me as just disingenuous that you would draw any kind of convincing parallel between the two.
01:16:35.000They're parallel because those prophecies that you're referring to also, in many cases, not always, but in many cases, overlap with other religious figures too.
01:16:43.000You could talk about Krishna, Horus would be one.
01:16:46.000Krishna is probably the closest you could think of.
01:18:28.000But in the first place, you seem to be really running away from the prophecies because this is really where it falls apart, where there is no equivalent to Christianity.
01:19:10.000Up your theology now, and then you argue, and then your argument is oh, well, you say that what because Christians were bad, that is the same as saying that it doesn't matter if there's a moral right and wrong, which is a very big problem.
01:19:29.000Hey, listen again, you have this big problem with interrupting.
01:19:33.000The problem is this what you have during the Middle Ages, even when you had popes who were doing orgies, even when you had Christians who were doing bad things, here's the difference.
01:19:43.000Christian doctrine said this is wrong.
01:19:48.000Pagans, they may have by accident lived up to Christian standards, but there was no rule saying this is objectively, not one that was built upon the same foundation that Christianity is.
01:20:01.000And so to say, and maybe they said it was, maybe it didn't, but the important is that you have an objective morality and it'd be based on the one true religion.
01:20:08.000But beside the point, it's very different to say Christians were misbehaving than to say that Christian doctrine.
01:20:17.000The reason that you can say that Catholic bishops were wrong, and by the way, the scandal in the Catholic Church, the rate of abuse in the Catholic Church is equal or lower than rates of abuse in other institutions in the world.
01:20:30.000But number two, to even use the vocabulary to say that those things were wrong, you have to have an objective standard of right and wrong.
01:20:37.000Otherwise, you're just saying, well, I find it personally distasteful, and you just have a personal problem with it.
01:20:42.000But the thing is, is that we Catholics or Christians can say, well, they did something wrong.
01:20:46.000And there will be a punishment for them because, regardless of what fallible men do, the doctrine is the same and it's protected from error.
01:20:54.000So, again, these are like rookie mistakes all over the board.
01:20:57.000That was believed in by the pagans as well.
01:21:00.000You keep going back to the idea of, well, I'm right because I say so.
01:21:03.000I'm right because Aquinas said so a thousand years ago.
01:22:12.000I have to laugh when people say that America is not a Christian nation.
01:22:16.000And you have to define, well, what is a nation?
01:22:18.000I think if you're abiding by the interpretation that a nation's rhetoric, Is what a nation is, then I think there's a good argument you could make that the rhetoric of the American founding, or maybe the basis of the American political economy, was built on deistic, albeit Christian inspired deistic principles.
01:22:36.000But if we define a nation as the composition of the nation, which is its people and its institutions, the nation at the founding was Christian.
01:22:44.000Maybe in the Declaration of Independence, they said by our Creator instead of the Christian God explicitly, and maybe they didn't make reference to it in the rhetoric of the founding documents, but the nation was nearly 100% Christian.
01:22:56.000Nearly 100% they occupied religious institutions.
01:23:01.000The church was a big part of the settlement.
01:23:03.000I mean, look at the first founders at Plymouth in the 17th century.
01:23:06.000I mean, who were these people but religious separatists, but people who went to form a Puritan religious community?
01:23:11.000So the idea that America was never a Christian country is just a laughable argument.
01:23:15.000It's one that you have to stretch and you have to bend the interpretation.
01:23:21.000And I get where the deistic argument comes from.
01:23:23.000Again, it comes from, you know, well, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, who said he was a primitive Christian, even though they opened up the constitutional conventions with Christian prayers, et cetera, et cetera.
01:23:35.000But the composition of the country, the nation is its people.
01:23:38.000The people were Christian, the institutions were Christian.
01:23:42.000I would say that as a follow up to that, one can pray to the Christian God, hold them to be even self evident without believing in the concept of the establishment of an organized religion.
01:23:53.000That is, the founders differ from you in the sense that you believe that a central authority is needed to mete out spirituality.
01:24:00.000Largely, they refuted this argument in the most directive terms.
01:24:04.000Not just Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.
01:24:06.000You would have been hard pressed, I think, to find many of them who are religious to the point of wanting to subjugate themselves.
01:24:13.000In many cases, people came specifically to this hemisphere to get away from that concept.
01:24:17.000I would also point out as a historical note, Roanoke actually comes first and was not established for religious reasons.
01:24:23.000Okay, but again, you are not answering the, you fell right into the fallacy that I laid out, which is you can, again, you can argue that, well, the framers weren't, they weren't devout Christians.
01:24:34.000Okay, yeah, and you can make that argument, but that does not change the fact.
01:24:38.000Okay, but that does not, you could say organized religion is Catholicism, but Christianity is organized religion.
01:24:58.000Were the 97% of the Americans at the time of the first census in 1790, the 97% who identified as Protestant Christian, were they deists or were they Protestant Christians?
01:25:11.000The many were deists, especially those who were part of that literate enlightenment mentality.
01:26:04.000I mean, you look at any of the assaults by abortion, on and on, the transgender stuff, most of it can be, most of it amounts to an attack on Christianity.
01:26:12.000And this goes back a long time, by the way, when they tried to get God out of the schools, when they tried to get God out of the curriculum.
01:26:18.000And they got God out of television, of course they're under assault.
01:26:21.000I mean, these are the people that are made fun of.
01:26:22.000These are the people that are laughed at.
01:26:24.000You know, how many different cartoons and things where they attack Christians?
01:26:28.000And you could say they attack others, but I mean, the others are not the founders of the country.
01:26:32.000The others were not represented in the country.
01:26:57.000Yeah, at this point, the nation has become more and more abusive towards anyone with what might be seen as yesteryear's morality, like traditionalist in the 50s sense, especially.
01:27:30.000Sticks, in your ideal America, what role does Christianity play with our leaders?
01:27:36.000They can be as Christian as they want to.
01:27:38.000I just don't want them legislating from a sense of objective morality.
01:27:42.000This would, by the way, extend to paganism.
01:27:44.000They can be pagan, but I don't want them telling me how to run my own paganism or my own occultism.
01:27:50.000It shouldn't be the place of the state.
01:27:51.000The founders understood that would corrupt religion.
01:27:54.000Christianity, the easiest way to destroy Christendom is to politicize it, to make it a sort of state religion and expect people at the top to be part of it.
01:28:02.000We've been there, we've done that, it didn't work.
01:28:06.000Well, not to, because that's a whole can of worms in and of itself, but to answer the question, I would say that I think Christianity should inform the values and the decisions made by public officials in the sense that the Constitution was written, you know, whether you can argue that it was deistic or not, or the founders were deistic or not, the Constitution was written in the context and upon the shoulders of a thousand years of Christendom and Christian culture and things that were uniquely Christian.
01:28:36.000For starters, for any kind of public official or public servant to be acting in parallel with the founding documents or the values of the country, I think they would have to be Christian.
01:28:45.000But then number two, I think we can ask ourselves very plainly would we prefer that the country be governed by Christians or by atheists, by Christians or by Muslims or by pagans where they have different beliefs?
01:30:03.000Probably because I think they see Mormonism as heretical, right?
01:30:08.000Even if you're baptized in another Christian denomination, you have to go through a process where you can't have all the sacraments done to you in the Catholic Church.
01:30:48.000Well, the point of that kind of a sacrifice, I think it gets to the larger question of God's love, which is a lot of people mistake this.
01:30:57.000They think that Christianity is kind of like this touchy feely kind of a thing.
01:31:00.000But remember when Christ came in the Gospels, he said that if you love your parents more than me, if you love your family more than me, if you love your children more than me, I don't want you.
01:31:09.000I will not remember your name when you enter my kingdom.
01:31:12.000I mean, this was said in the Gospel that he wanted people who were committed to Christ, committed to God's love above all else.
01:31:19.000There was, I believe it was said in the gospel, they wanted to go and bury the father.
01:31:23.000And they said, no, no, let the spiritually dead, you know, take care of the spiritually dead.
01:32:53.000On the trouble of, or not the trouble, but on the question of Christian morals, I know a lot of people have a problem with this with politics.
01:33:00.000This is something I hear or a frame I hear a lot from moderates, which is how can conservatives believe in everything conservative or liberals, everything that's liberal?
01:33:07.000You know, don't you diverge a little bit?
01:33:10.000And with Christianity, it's actually very different because we believe, if you are a Christian, you believe that Christ was the Son of God and therefore everything he said was true.
01:33:20.000And so you might disagree with something the Pope says or the clergy says, but you can't disagree with the magisterium.
01:33:25.000You can't disagree with what Christ said because, you know, And that's where faith comes in.
01:33:29.000People have this misconception about faith that it's we don't know that God exists.
01:33:33.000We just take this leap of belief, which is not supported.
01:33:37.000And faith is actually about we know that God exists.
01:33:40.000And even when we don't understand his will, even when we don't understand the things he says, or we might personally disagree with it, we have to have faith that it is true because we understand the reason that he exists.
01:34:02.000Is faith and science equally important?
01:34:07.000That one's a little bit more difficult to answer, actually.
01:34:09.000I would say science, generally speaking, is more important in the sense that if you don't have that technology in today's world, if you don't have technology, if you don't have advancement in the perhaps technological sense in general science, you're going to fall behind everybody else.
01:34:24.000It's really at that point you'd have to have a lot of faith to say, well, I'm just going to pray about it.
01:34:33.000I'll pray to Jesus to teleport me somewhere.
01:34:35.000Maybe Muhammad will get me there on his back.
01:34:37.000Now, I think that faith certainly has a place in the world.
01:34:40.000I have no problem with people who have faith.
01:34:42.000It's just don't tread on others in the application of it.
01:34:45.000And if it stands in the way of science, sorry, but generally I'm going to favor science unless science is delving into the realm of morality.
01:34:52.000Like you would think, maybe technologically speaking, maybe algorithmic censorship.
01:34:56.000Well, yeah, science can certainly do that, but should it?
01:34:59.000I think I'd rather listen to the average religious leader on the topic.
01:35:06.000I think that's kind of a misconception between science and faith.
01:35:10.000I think, first and foremost, people have this conception of science, which is different from how the scholastics saw science, different than how the ancients saw science.
01:35:19.000Science today is physical science and empirical physical science, whereas before it comprised many different fields, of which theology or rather metaphysics was one of them.
01:35:28.000And it abided by logic, abided by rationality and reason.
01:35:31.000I mean, I bring up Aquinas, which is such a fine example because he said, I'm not going to take it on superstition alone.
01:35:37.000I'm going to demonstrate it through reason that God exists.
01:35:39.000And I think actually the more that you look at science, the more you have a conviction in God.
01:35:43.000So I don't think the two are different.
01:35:45.000And here's something really interesting that I found in preparing, which maybe would convince unbelievers, which I thought was just fascinating.
01:35:51.000This really isn't an argument for God, but it is something.
01:35:53.000Peculiar, which is that this is the fine tuning argument that Christians make, which I think is really something.
01:36:00.000That if you look at, for example, the gravitational constant, if the constant, the gravitational constant, which defines gravity, was off by one in 10 to the 60th parts, life would be impossible.
01:36:13.000If the cosmological constant was off by one in 10 to the 120th parts, life would be impossible.
01:36:19.000And you get into these numbers so crazy where our universe shouldn't exist.
01:36:24.000And if it were purely contingent, you know, I don't think you really make that argument, but It shouldn't exist by these calculations, and yet it does.
01:36:31.000So I think in many ways science complements faith.
01:36:33.000I think it's a false dichotomy to begin with.
01:36:36.000I would point out briefly that isn't that the disappearing puddle argument, I believe it's called, where you're saying, well, you know, this puddle is perfect for this particular fish and it's slowly shrinking, goes away, the fish goes away.
01:36:50.000If you weren't actually there, if there were a difference in the math that you're talking about, you wouldn't be there to witness the fact that you didn't exist.
01:37:53.000Abraxas refers to the ancient Gnostic deity, I believe the one above the actual Demiurge, if I remember correctly, or maybe it's a different term.
01:38:15.000He was actually a contemporary of Nicholas Schreck, he was involved in his ear loss episode, as he's spoken of before.
01:38:20.000As far as I know, he's not a pagan in the religious sense.
01:38:25.000I've thought that his cartoons are well drawn.
01:38:29.000There was a funny time in which I thought Ben Garrison had actually unironically borrowed one of his tropes, actually, had to get that sorted out.
01:38:38.000But I don't know anything further really about him to tell the truth.
01:38:41.000I don't even know what his modern views are at this point.
01:38:53.000I mean, and this can be argued simply on the consequentialist basis that if people are not subscribing to any moral fine, I think one of the bigger problems in the country to cede a little bit to sticks is that there has been no alternative.
01:39:07.000In the absence of Christianity, there has been no replacement.
01:39:10.000And this was the problem that Nietzsche postulated, Dostoevsky commented on, Evola commented on.
01:39:15.000Is in the absence, and even Jung, in the absence of any ritual, spirituality, supernaturalism, anything like that, without any moral foundation, any rules, I think people just simply descend into hedonism.
01:39:27.000They descend into the pleasure principle.
01:39:30.000And so, this is one of the problems with so many people they're not brought up Christian or they're not brought up in church or with any kind of convincing or strong Christianity.
01:39:49.000I would say that at the very least, if you had an alternative belief, this could be constructive.
01:39:54.000At least there would be a moral there.
01:39:56.000But now it's simply the absence, it's a vacuum.
01:39:59.000And so, of course, it necessarily leads to degeneracy when you have a moral code that there's expectations and there's community enforcement and there's all the rest and there's some kind of divine basis for it.
01:40:14.000I would say there's plenty of degeneration among individuals who have plenty of religious beliefs.
01:40:19.000There are also religious groups who have no problem with some of those things.
01:40:22.000I would say religion is not inherently bad for a culture.
01:40:25.000That's not what I've been arguing, just so everybody is aware of that fact.
01:40:30.000I don't really, it's organized religion can be a problem in the sense of the church.
01:40:34.000Religion itself in the spiritual, the faith side of it, not a problem.
01:40:38.000Yes, it can cause the denigration of a culture, or the culture can degenerate even though it is present as well, as we've seen with the United States.
01:40:47.000Majority Christian nation begins to decline away from the old morality.
01:42:57.000He can make a big show about not wearing the ruby slippers and sitting in the gold throne.
01:43:01.000At the end of the day, though, he doesn't worry where his next meal is coming from, as maybe a few hundred million Catholics in Latin America or West Africa have the problem of.
01:43:14.000Well, and specifically in the Catholic definition, an idol is what, if you believe a statue to be a god, that is the strict definition of an idol in Catholicism.
01:43:25.000And you can look this up, that's actually true.
01:43:27.000So people might point to the statue of the Virgin Mary, they might point to the Pope, they might point to other things, but defined by the church, only statues that you attribute some kind of divinity to, that's an idol.
01:43:40.000But on the question of the Pope, I think this is a good point that he brings up because the papacy is one of the wealthiest institutions in the world, it's incalculable.
01:43:48.000How much wealth that they have, but I think it's important to understand the context of that wealth in the sense that you know, where does most of their wealth derive from?
01:43:55.000It derives from land and how they've accumulated land over the course of 2,000 years and accumulated land that is appreciated in value considerably because that land obviously was worth a lot less when Western Europe was like a third world in the fourth or the fifth century than it is now.
01:44:12.000And then, additionally, look at the artifacts historically that they have that you simply can't put a value on.
01:44:16.000And then, beyond that, I would point to a biblical justification for this where Jesus Christ.
01:44:22.000He has his feet washed with perfume, and somebody objected to it, and he said, Well, no, that's okay.
01:45:25.000I wouldn't say that by my standards, I don't know enough about his personal life to make that snap judgment.
01:45:31.000I'm assuming by my standards, probably not just lives a normal life, you wear your suit, whatever.
01:45:36.000By your own savior's standards, however, you live a life that in the modern sense is considerably more wealthy than even more of the greater nobility that would have lived in his life.
01:45:49.000Maybe he would have wanted you to sell some of what you own and give to the poor.
01:45:53.000Again, that's by his words, but he also.
01:45:57.000Had a problem with anyone having, it seems, ownership at all and not living a migratory lifestyle.
01:46:02.000Or at least that's how you can interpret it.
01:46:05.000Well, I would say that we're all sinners.
01:46:09.000Jesus Christ said he didn't come to save the people who thought they were righteous, but the people who knew they were sinners.
01:46:15.000And so you can't point to a single person who isn't, in contrast with God as flesh, is not a sinner.
01:46:23.000And I would say on the question of being migratory and selling all your belongings, Jesus liked to speak in hyperbole.
01:46:30.000I mean, this is not disputed by biblical scholars.
01:46:33.000I mean, he said things like, if you're sinning with your right hand, cut off your right hand, because it's better that you go into heaven without your right hand than to be dragged to hell with it.
01:46:41.000And I don't think anybody would say that he really meant cut off your limbs, poke out your eyes, you know, do all this crazy stuff.
01:46:48.000And even with the turn the other cheek business, that was also speaking in hyperbole.
01:46:51.000He was saying generally you should be pacific, generally you should be more peaceful, but not, I mean, there were crusades, there were all kinds of other things.
01:46:58.000Jesus told his followers, sell your cloak and buy a sword.
01:47:01.000So I think Jesus tended to speak in hyperboles and, This is demonstrated by the church.
01:47:10.000If someone's capable of walking on water and turning a couple loaves of bread into enough to feed thousands of people, I don't think that they need to be hyperbolic at that point.
01:47:20.000I think it might have been, Nick, meant to be taken literally.
01:47:23.000All right, Sticks, this one is, we'll start with you on this one.
01:47:26.000Would you prefer to see a Christian majority in the United States or a Muslim majority in the United States?
01:49:20.000I would say might makes right in the pragmatic sense because if you have the ability to do something, you have the ability to do something.
01:49:30.000As for whether it is moral, whether it is ethical, I would say the basic concept of the NAP is that you have these different competing poles of power, essentially.
01:49:40.000You're not trying to stomp on someone else's feet.
01:49:42.000Do whatever you want, but don't harm other people.
01:49:49.000If you look at might as right, I know it links up with Satanism, but the original text has more in common with pagan lore, literally Norse lore as well.
01:49:58.000And if you look at it that way, certainly you have the right to do what you are able to do, but at the same time, other people will try to do it to you.
01:50:05.000Maybe it's better to have a polite society with some degree of order in it.
01:50:11.000I just have to, it's just interesting to me when, and this is not a dig, I'm not trying to be, you know, rude about it, but when you talk about right, it's just very hard for me to pin that down because.
01:50:24.000Again, you said there's no objective right and wrong.
01:50:26.000But to answer the question on does might make right, of course it doesn't.
01:50:29.000Of course, it doesn't in the Christian tradition.
01:50:30.000We hold that if somebody is murdered by somebody, even if they were stronger, even if they were able to impose their will, they achieved their will to power.
01:50:38.000Well, they still did a wrong thing if it was an unjust killing.
01:51:16.000Okay, but point being that you can say, well, Muslims believe that they're right and they have a moral system which they think is objectively true.
01:51:22.000But if everybody took the position that you're taking of this kind of like what, paganism, and everybody has their own and everybody has their own morals, everybody has this individuated spirituality, it's kind of hard to talk about.
01:51:52.000I mean, if people who are the state establish the state, if people who drink blood establish the state, I mean, that would be a problem for you, not for us, because we're still Christians.
01:52:50.000I think that we need to have somebody in there who understands the threat that we face to Christendom, to the faith, not only in the form of the Muslim world, which is what everybody talks about, but from within Christendom, which are these people, the religious leaders, and they're always out there pushing doubt and doing all these kinds of things, making us doubt our religion, doubt our Savior, like maybe they did a couple thousand years ago.
01:53:14.000We need a pope who understands the threats that we face both externally and internally.
01:53:24.000People back during the Middle Ages and Renaissance used to pray when the great horde of Muslims were trying to invade on all fronts then.
01:53:32.000Prayers didn't do anything, but people like Vlad the Impaler, Charles Martel, Charles the Hammer managed to repeatedly slam the Muslim armies.
01:53:40.000And they were not themselves, although they professed Christendom in the most extreme sense, they were not themselves very good at following their own religion.
01:54:23.000But I don't know if that disproves anything.
01:54:25.000I mean, people can do this kind of really edgy, well, prayers don't do anything.
01:54:30.000And we saw a lot of this with the shooting.
01:54:32.000This was a favorite of Christopher Hitchens.
01:54:33.000But I mean, I think you say meditation matters.
01:54:37.000I mean, don't you believe that intentionality matters?
01:54:40.000Don't you think that an expression of intentionality in the universe, I mean, you are a spiritualist, don't you believe that that can change the outcome of events or no?
01:54:50.000I'm simply saying that it's a larger pragmatic effect upon world politics, upon hoping, well, you know, we hope.
01:54:56.000That you know, this time around, the Islamic horde that's moving into Europe or something will be repulsed because we want to save Christendom.
01:55:09.000More is accomplished on your feet with your hands than on your knees with your words.
01:55:13.000Yeah, and we're praying for that's really, did you get that from like being atheist on Facebook?
01:55:19.000But yes, no, come on, it has nothing to do with atheism.
01:55:22.000The point is, well, you know what the point is.
01:55:24.000Look, when we pray, it's to say that you know, we're over here in the United States and we pray that the cardinals will have the wisdom, or we pray that the Pope has the wisdom to do the right thing because, of course, he has tremendous power, and we pray that he has the wisdom to exercise it effectively.
01:55:37.000We're not saying don't go out there and don't repel the invasion, don't elect leaders that will repel this, don't fight them where they are.
01:55:44.000We're simply saying that on the question of how can we get a pope, this is something that's out of our control.
01:55:50.000So we should pray that they have the wisdom.
01:55:52.000And you again walk this line where prayer doesn't mean anything.
01:55:55.000It's not a bad thing, and I'm a spiritualist, but at the same time, incantation means nothing.
01:56:00.000On your knees, we need to go and Fight them where they are.
01:56:03.000But I mean, sometimes all you can do is pray, and that's good.
01:57:06.000And remember again, It's about killing.
01:57:08.000It's not about, or rather, murdering, not about killing.
01:57:11.000I think there's a distinction between just and unjust.
01:57:14.000There were killings throughout the Old Testament, and there were killings done by the church and the Crusades and the Inquisitions.
01:57:19.000Not to the same extent that you see violence from secularists or others, but there were.
01:57:25.000So I don't think you have to be a Quaker and you have to be a pacifist, but I think that was what was interpreted in the Bible.
01:57:33.000Sticks, do you have a comment on that?
01:57:35.000In paganism, being strong is considered a good thing, and going to war is a Really easy way to actually uplift yourself spiritually if you are a good soldier, not a coward, not like gutting women and children, doing crazy things like that.
01:57:49.000If you're willing to go on the battlefield and be brave, especially for a higher spiritual purpose, yeah, it's perfectly justified.
01:58:20.000And in regards to Mithras, yeah, it's just the same.
01:58:23.000If the contention is about pagan influences on Christianity, again, I would posit that if you look at the complexity of the Christ figure, and you could certainly make the case that a lot of the stories, flood stories, like in Noah's Ark and all that, the Garden of Eden, you can trace a lot of these stories.
01:58:43.000There are antecedents to it in Sumeria and Babylon.
01:58:46.000There's stories like this all around the world.
01:58:56.000The resurrection, in particular Christian terms, there is no antecedent for this in paganism.
01:59:02.000Maybe there's resurrections, maybe there's saviors, but not in the same way, not in the complexity, not in the differences where they count of Christ.
01:59:11.000You've got Bacchus, among others, that very well, tell me, literally having his blood drunk in the sense of symbolically with wine, having a birthday, and everything else.
02:00:32.000The Christ figure and the complexity, and in the distinctions that are made by the Catholic Church, there is simply, for the kind of theology that we're talking about, it was so ahead of its time in terms of Trinity, in terms of duality, in terms of all the things that we see that this man who stumbled to the throne, a God who stumbled to the throne, inaugurated his reign with this ignominious defeat, crucified, but then conquering death.
02:01:21.000If a person spends all their time listening to other people's interpretation of a religious dogma, they may not take the time to study it for themselves.
02:01:30.000And if they believe in the concept of being led spiritually at all, I would urge you to simply just assume that you're going to be spiritually led by encountering that material.
02:01:41.000You are just as intelligent as any of these religious leaders.
02:01:44.000In many cases, you're probably going to be more intelligent.
02:01:47.000Some of these people are nothing more than zealots.
02:01:50.000This has been the case throughout human history.
02:01:52.000Religions have been politicized, and in some cases, you're going to, depending on the nation that you're in, especially, depending on what religion it is, it may be that you're practicing a religion that you're not even getting the original dogma for the most part.
02:02:06.000In essence, a state style religion, some form of animism that's been co opted by a tribal warlord, some variant of Buddhism that's been transformed or reimagined by some communist regime or something.
02:02:20.000If you believe that your eternal soul, especially, is at risk, I would think that you would want to branch out beyond listening to a rabbi or a cleric or something.
02:02:30.000Yeah, well, I just, yeah, briefly, I think the beautiful thing about Christianity is free will.
02:02:35.000You're invited to become a Christian, you know, and to say that.
02:02:40.000You know, regular lay people know better about Christianity.
02:02:44.000I just think that is something that I thought maybe for a long time considered, but it's just simply not true.
02:02:48.000And I think, especially if you look at when literacy was almost nearly lost in Western Europe, but it was preserved by the monks, nobody would make the case that the lay people are more intelligent or well read than the monks to really understand the Bible.
02:03:00.000You look at the priests, the pastors, the bishops, the cardinals, and they've had years of schooling and training, not just on theology, but on philosophy.
02:03:08.000They've read Aristotle, they've read Plato, they've read Aquinas, they've read the greatest philosophers, they understand.
02:03:12.000Reason in a scientific sense, metaphysics in a scientific sense.
02:03:18.000And so you can, you know, we have free will to decide we want to be Christian and hop on board, but then there is this authority.
02:03:24.000And thank God for this authority that we have people who have dedicated their lives to this rigorous study of fundamentally the most important issues.
02:03:32.000So I would just push back a little bit on that.
02:03:34.000Some Christians believe in predestination, however.
02:03:38.000Man, they're not a part of the church.
02:04:04.000Okay, Nick, would you agree, honor thy mother and father, but love your pagan past?
02:04:12.000Well, here's the thing that we have to understand about our religion and the way we justify it.
02:04:19.000The pagan ancestors of Christendom and all that, there is value in that.
02:04:24.000I mean, Christians don't hold that, let's just throw it all away, let's just set it on fire.
02:04:28.000I mean, even something like that, I think there's a really good example that's used by Archbishop Fulton Sheen, where he demonstrates that if the truth is like a circle, if the truth is 360 degrees and every degree is getting closer to it, Aristotle and Plato and Socrates, they might have gotten 180 degrees.
02:04:45.000And maybe Hinduism has gotten 230 degrees.
02:04:48.000And somebody, and so that's not, it's to say that.
02:05:01.000This is where I think there's a strong case to be made for traditionalism and nationalism that we love our parents in the way that we should love our nations and the way the nation should love the church.
02:07:40.000A gospel, if you have an account of the biography of Jesus Christ, I mean, why would they let, for example, Joseph Smith contribute to that, you know, or somebody else?
02:07:49.000And the people who put together the Bible, the Council of Nicaea, these were learned people.
02:07:53.000I mean, the people that contributed to the construction of the Bible were people who, you know, they were intimate with the text, they were intimate with what needed to be said.
02:08:00.000I mean, you can read, there's just volumes and volumes and volumes of the early church fathers and what they had to say about it.
02:08:05.000So it's important at some point to say, this is what a Christian is, this is what it isn't.
02:09:05.000Thank you for joining me on the Chadcast for this unbelievable conversation.
02:09:09.000Nick, do you have any final words for the viewers, for us all?
02:09:15.000Yeah, I suppose my final words would be that to distinguish between the deontological and the consequential.
02:09:23.000We believe in Christ not from the consequentialist lens of we would be better off, we would be wealthier, we would be more powerful, things would be better in the temporal world.
02:09:32.000In consequence, we believe deontologically in God because it is good, because it is the truth.
02:09:38.000And so I would say that anybody who wants to get on board with this because they want to find passages or rhetoric or talking points that they can use to justify a political agenda, I would say that's not the reason to join the faith.
02:09:47.000The reason we join the faith is because we believe.
02:09:51.000He is the unmoved mover, the unchanged changer, et cetera, et cetera, as Aquinas defined it.
02:09:56.000There is intentionality, there is design in the way things are, how things are.
02:10:01.000You can see the handiwork of God all around you, and that Jesus Christ was his son, and he came and he died for our sins, and what he said was true.
02:10:18.000I did my best defending the points here.
02:10:20.000But really, I mean, these are very complicated issues that people have debated on for thousands of years.
02:10:25.000And so I would just encourage everybody who's interested in the subject to read Aquinas, to read Fieser, to read Augustine, and just really interrogate these arguments, because I do believe that there is a real problem.
02:10:36.000People in this day and age, they don't hear the right justifications for Christianity.
02:10:39.000They hear Paley, they hear this churchianity type stuff.
02:11:37.000I would say on the spiritual topic, The United States was already a Christian nation for most of its existence, yet it managed to somehow fall into decadence prior to actually losing that religiosity.
02:11:53.000I've never said that, but it is paired up with that.
02:11:57.000I would say be very, very careful about people who boil down here's the solution to all of our problems as a society to something as simple as, well, we'll pray, well, we'll have a certain church.
02:12:09.000I think if we look at history, which we both pointed out, Pointed to in our debate here.
02:12:14.000I think if we look at history, that's absolutely not true.
02:12:17.000And a reading list is actually a really good way to close this, I think.
02:12:20.000In addition to, you should absolutely read Aquinas.
02:12:23.000You should absolutely read the Bible, too.
02:12:25.000And I've encouraged people, regardless of my own religious beliefs, to do so.
02:12:28.000It's still a spiritually significant work.
02:12:31.000I would say as well, you should read Dower's work, specifically Occultism for Beginners.
02:12:36.000You can see some of the same arguments that are made by Christians, including yourself, Nick, really on the topic of the physical or natural world.
02:12:45.000The reflection of that being God, being the correct faith, the correct path within spirituality.
02:12:51.000You should definitely read Aryan sun myths if you want to get a greater grasp than I can myself personally explain in a single debate on the topic of Jesus actually literally being adapted from past savior figures within certain groups within paganism.
02:13:06.000I would say the Epic of Gilgamesh is probably a good place to also begin your reading research.
02:13:12.000But again, I had a great time and thanks for having me aboard.