Early Christian Growth： Was it Actually More Moral？ (Scott Alexander & Rodney Stark)
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 1 minute
Words per Minute
176.08702
Summary
In this episode, we continue our exploration of how Christianity outcompeted other religious cultures and grew as fast as it did. This time, we're looking at the martyrs, the plagues, and the role of the media in spreading Christianity.
Transcript
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Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be doing an episode
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where we continue exploring how did Christianity outcompete other religious cultures and grow as
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fast as it did. This is going to build on another podcast that we did on this subject, but it's
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totally okay to watch as a standalone. The subjects that we're going to focus on most here are the
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topic of martyrs as a conversion mechanism, plagues, and did Christianity actually have a more
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moral system than the systems it was competing against in the mind of the average person?
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The last time we went on this, I mean, certainly when you look at the exposure of babies being a
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common thing, and we mentioned that some famous Roman philosophers complained about how and saw
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it as one of the evils of the Jewish people that they tried to get people to not drown their babies
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because they're like, you shouldn't expose or kill newborns. And they're like, no, what? That's such
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a Jewish, what a Jewish nefarious thing to complain about. I'll take care of this. Hey, Clara, there's
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a Jew outside trying to poison a well. Oh my God! Get away from that well, Hebrew. What? I'm putting in
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a lot of purification tablets. Spanky tricked me! Which is one of the holdovers that came into
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Christianity, but let's start with martyrs. And I just want to be clear, this is Scott Alexander's
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book review on The Rides of Christianity by Rodney Stark, in case you want to look at it yourself.
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Martyrs. Martyrdom not only occurred in public, often before a large audience, but it was often the
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culmination of a long period of preparation during which those faced with martyrdom were the object of
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intense face-to-face adulation. Consider the case of Ignatius of Antioch. Ignatius was condemned to
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death as a Christian, but instead of being executed in Antioch, he was sent off to Rome in the custody
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of 10 Roman soldiers. Thus began a long leisurely journey during which local Christians came out to
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meet him all along the route, which passed through many of the more important sites of early Christianity
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in Asia Minor, on its way to the West. At each stop, Ignatius was allowed to preach and meet with
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those who gathered, none of whom was in any apparent danger, though their Christian identity was obvious.
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Moreover, his guards allowed Ignatius to write letters to many Christian congregations and cities
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bypassed along the way, such as Ephesians in Philadelphia, as William Schnodel remarked,
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quote, hold on, hold on, hold on, before we go further with this. This is insane. How fucking
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insane is this? So you, I killed you, but you get to go on tour first, so don't worry. No, he's like a
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famous musician or something, like, yeah, it's like, we're gonna have you fed to the lions, but, you know,
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on the way, like, imagine, okay, so this is basically what happened here. You know the guy who killed the,
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like, in, in UNH, the, the United States. Luigi Mangione, yeah. Like, imagine if the U.S. arrested
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him, but then had him do public speaking events in every major U.S. city, while also, like, brought,
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with the cities he didn't get to, he created, like, podcast recordings for, so he could, he could do the
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rounds in the media as well. Like, are you insane? And the guards apparently were like, cool, is it?
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So they were like, yeah, sure. Well, and also then he had the social proof of being flanked by
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10 Roman guards, so he looked important. Yes, that he would have looked like a rapper,
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like, walking into these cities. Well, and this actually, this, this shows up in some press
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coverage of Luigi Mangione. He looks super badass, surrounded by all these, these policemen.
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Yeah, no, no, it shows, like, it shows that Rome, and this is what's so great about this,
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right? So it shows that Rome, from all these guards around him, saw him as a threat, but he
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had done nothing to attack Rome. He had done nothing to threaten Rome. He just wanted to share
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his ideas. Now, if I knew that the state saw this guy as a threat for just his ideas, and I can go to
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one of these speeches, I'm gonna go. I'm not even Christian. I feel like Christian curious at this
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point. I'm like, yeah. What are these ideas that are scaring Rome so much? Yeah. Yes.
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He's a subversive speaker on tour coming to my town soon. This is great. Before he gets fed to
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the lions, you know, you don't want to miss this speech. Yeah, I'm gonna watch the lions, him in
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Rome, you know, you know. Yeah. I get, you get the whole thing here, like, the level of, I think,
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rock star status that these individuals would have had in the Christian community. I was going to talk
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about this later, but, like, they knew that, like, the other people who had done this before, people,
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like, kept their bones in, like, giant reliquaries, or, like, their, their toe bone would be, have,
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like, magical powers, and people would pray to it, and, like, all of this, like, you're gonna be,
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like, oh, shit, like, and in a world that's bad, I mean, you don't know, these people could be living
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with chronic pain, these people could be living with, you know, the world of Rome was pretty
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horrifying, right? That you could get this kind of status is huge. Yeah. And he talked before this in a
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bit I cut out about how previous people acted like the martyrs were, like, these big masochists.
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Not true. They were not big masochists. You can see that there is other reasons to want to be a
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martyr. I probably even would have liked being a martyr in this environment. Like, it's just so
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pro-martyr. And actually, as a negative result of this, early Christian culture grew up to be so
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pro-martyr that there was a huge problem when the Roman Empire legalized Christianity.
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Like, apparently when this first happened, they were, they were almost, like, sort of broken for
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a second, where they kept trying to get themselves martyred by doing, like, escalating things.
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And they couldn't. And it was out of this that the monastic movement formed, where some of the
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people who previously would have gone to do, like, martyrdom, they just, like, went out into the
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desert or the wilderness. And there were so many of these people who did this sort of self-martyrdom
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of, like, walking out into the wilderness that they just, like, kept riding into each other in the
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wilderness. And they're like, oh, like, I guess we're starting a thing here. Or, like, one of
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them would go out into the wilderness and be like, oh, me, philosopher, I'm gonna go, you know, like,
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you know, live this incredibly hard life in the deserts of, like, Egypt or whatever. And then he's
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out there for a bit. And then a couple months later, like, more people come and they're like,
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hey, we're big fans. We're gonna do the same thing. And then you end up getting this, like, big
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community doing this. And it's like, well, I guess we'll build a monastery, okay? But no. And this is how
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you end up with these monasteries on, like, the tops of mountains and everything like that,
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which you've seen from pictures. If they kept trying to get further and further away from
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people, but the further away they get from people, the more popular they'd become. So the more people
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would come to try to follow them and do this. Oh, goodness gracious. Well, if we had some kind of
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system whereby we could get egotistical, self-important attention horrors to just all go
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somewhere together. Oh, side note, by the way, which is also worth noting here, is how did
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Constantine, like, first, why did Constantine convert to Christianity? It may have been a genuine
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conversion, but there was an alternate reason for him to convert, which I think a lot of the modern
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or Christian audience doesn't seem aware of, which explains Christianity's rapid rise. Well, so Constantine
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had a major problem with the existing bureaucratic apparatus of Rome because it had become incredibly
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corrupt, specifically like the Praetorian guard who was supposed to guard the emperor, but instead
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kept, like, massacring the emperor. They were so bad to the emperor that they would, like, in one
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instance, they killed the emperor. They put another guy in charge. There was no money to pay them the
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bribe that they demanded of him because the guy before him had done such a bad job as emperor that
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they had no money. He's like, look, I got no money. Like, through no fault of my own, he took the head of the
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Praetorian guard there. He's like, there is no money. This is the vault. I have nothing to pay you the
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bribe was that you demanded. Like, I didn't even, like, and so they kill him, right? And then they try to sell
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the emperorship to the highest bidder. What did I tell you, huh? The world. She's the worst in the world.
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Like, they were just the biggest douche canoes in history, but, like, that is how bad the deep state
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has gotten. The Praetorian guard is, like, the personification of deep state. So, normally the
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Praetorian guard is mentioned in a positive context, like, this person's Praetorian guard,
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blah, blah, blah. Not, not as in, like... No, the Praetorian guard are the worst ever.
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She is the worst! She is the worst person in the world. Huge, skank, terrible.
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I would put the, the scene from Dabadi's Unbiased Room, which everyone should watch if they haven't
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watched it, about the killing of the Praetorian guard. But, unfortunately, he puts music behind the
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things, which gets things copyright stricken, which really frustrates me. The time had finally come.
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The time for a new age. The time for revenge. And so, Constantine proclaimed that the Praetorian
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But, anyway, Constantine, absolute goat. And so, Constantine is like, well, how do I fight this
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deep state network, right? I need some alternate network that has no real allegiance to the old
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deep state or Rome and might even have a degree of animosity to it, which is operating with a degree
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of hierarchy in pretty much every major Roman city. Oh, the Christians. Perfect counter-deep
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state. I can just replace all of the deep state networks with the Christian networks. And so,
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he came in and he... Now, of course, we believe this was partially divinely inspired. I'm not saying
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it wasn't divinely inspired. But sometimes the thing can be both logical, like Christianity spread,
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and divinely inspired. Or Constantine's use of Christianity as a counter-deep state force.
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Yeah, why would God not align the incentives in favor of that which must happen?
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And when you really think about it, if he was going to try to destroy and replace the Roman deep
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state, what other force could he use to do that? There literally was no one else he could use. There
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was no other large cult. When I say cult, I don't mean that in like a modern way where it's like
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derogatory. In Rome, cult was just meant to describe any large religious organization. There was none that
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existed in almost every city. All of the ones were fairly region-locked or tied to regional
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deities. Christians were the only one that was really this big and this organized and this
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hierarchical. Except, of course, for the mystery cults. But the last thing you want to do if you're
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looking for a counter-deep state is put in place a secret society. But anyway, continue.
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Oh. And this is as William Schoedler remarked. Yeah, sorry. Are you moving the document around?
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No. Sorry. Okay, that's weird. Oh, I know what's going on. I fixed it. As William Schoedler
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remarked, it is no doubt as a conquering hero that Ignatius thinks of himself as he looks back on a part
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of his journey and says that the churches who received him dealt with him not as a transient
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traveler, noting that even churches that do not lie in my way, according to the flesh, went before
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me city by city, unquote. What Ignatius feared was not death in the arena, but that well-meaning
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Christians might gain him a pardon. He expected to be remembered through the ages and compares
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himself to martyrs gone before him, including Paul, quote, in whose footsteps I wish to be found
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when I come to meet God, unquote. Yeah, this man had a clear agenda. Can you imagine being like,
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please don't pardon me? No, no, no, no, no, no. Please don't pardon me. You don't understand.
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This is my ticket straight to the highest rung of heaven, like, and being remembered forever and
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living a life of value. And like, this is a full sec. Collect the whole sec. It's not confusing why
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early Christianity was so martyr crazy. Yeah. Well, Scott Alexander continues,
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it soon was clear to all Christians that extraordinary fame and honor attached to
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modern martyrdom. Nothing illustrates this better than the description of the martyrdom of Polycarp
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contained in a letter sent by the church in Smyrna to the church in Philomilidium. Polycarp was the
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bishop of Smyrna who burned alive in about 156. After the execution, his bones were retrieved by some of
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his followers, an act witnessed by Roman officials who took no action against them. The letter
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spoke of, quote, his sacred flesh, unquote, and described his bones as, quote, being of more
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value than precious stones and more esteemed than gold, unquote. The letter writer reported that the
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Christians in Smyrna would gather at the burial place of Polycarp's bones every year to, quote,
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celebrate with great gladness and joy the birthday of this martyrdom, unquote. The letter concluded,
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quote, the blessed Polycarp, to whom be glory, honor, majesty, and a throne eternal from generation to
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generation, amen, unquote. It also included the instruction, quote, on receiving this, send to the
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letter to the more distant brethren that they may glorify the Lord who makes the choice of his own
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servants, unquote. In fact, today, we actually know the names of nearly all Christian martyrs because
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their contemporaries took pains that they should be remembered for all their great holiness.
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I'd point out here that this is not just a then thing. Every time there was a new opportunity for
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martyrdom, Christians were pretty big on it. Like, the college I went to, St. Andrews, there was a spot
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on campus where one person had been burned alive by the Catholics. So for some context here, Hamilton
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returned to St. Andrews in early 1528 to meet with the archbishop, and while there, he was arrested,
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tried, and burned at the stake outside St. Salvador's Chapel. He was only 24. It is said that
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he burned for six hours, and that he died so bravely that the archbishop started to discourage
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public executions because, quote, the reek of Maester Patrick Hamilton has infected as many as it
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blew upon, end quote. So, uh, as you can see, at least the Catholics had the common sense to stop it
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after they realized how effective the martyrs were at converting people and braiding sympathy for their
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causes in this one instance. Oh, yeah. Even in our house, we have at least three or four copies of
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the Book of Martyrs in our house. The people who don't know the Book of Martyrs, these are people
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who fought against... But then Catholics have their own martyrs that were killed by Protestants, and they,
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I guess, didn't... I don't know if there's, like, a central collection of them, like the Book of Martyrs
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in the same way, but the... Whenever there was a chance to martyr themselves, Christians were really
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big on this, and I think it's a much more central theme to the real Christian tradition than many
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people realize, and I think one of the weakening facets of Christianity today is there just haven't
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been many opportunities to be a good martyr in a while. Yeah. Well... Continue. We may be entering a new
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martyr status. People are literally using AI to make art of him in the style of a Catholic saint.
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Oh, really? Yeah. Look at Drudge Report's front page. It's right there. So, Scott Alexander continues,
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I don't know. I'm not putting too much effort into writing up this section because it doesn't feel like
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much of a mystery as some of the others. Maybe all of this was weird in 1996, but since then,
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I've seen plenty of suicide bombers willing to die for their faith. I accept that the Christian
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martyrs were more impressive. A slow death in the Colosseum takes more grit than the quick detonation
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of an explosive vest, and dying for peace is more impressive than dying in war, but it hardly seems
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like as much of a leap. However bad you imagine daily life in ancient Rome, it was worse. Historians
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estimate that ancient Rome had a population density of 300 people per acre. That's almost
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10 times denser than modern New York City. 2,000 years. Isn't that interesting? 10 times denser than
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modern New York City. 2,000 years before anyone invented the skyscraper, too, because we also forget
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how vertical New York City goes. How did they do it? By cramping people together in unbearable filth
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and misery. Another source says 200 people per acre. Oh, so from a footnote, another source says 200
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people per acre, which is only six times denser. These numbers are for New York City as a whole.
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If we limit ourselves to Manhattan, Rome was only two to three times as dense.
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Do you have any idea how insane that is? Well, what's worse is that people, they did have
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multi-story buildings, but of course, these buildings didn't have plumbing, and they burned
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down all the time, killing everyone inside, basically. Or fell over all the time. Yeah, we'll be getting
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into that, but you've got to imagine, you didn't have plumbing, okay? That meant that the poo
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that was coming out of these buildings was just going onto the streets every single day.
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Yeah. Well, they talk about, I mean, this existed sort of all over the place, even in medieval
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cities. That's why when we went on that tour in Edinburgh, in the muse, they talked about how they
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would yell, like, all the time, because that was what you said when you were about to, like,
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The density, to be three exits biggest, that meant that basically, when people today are
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like, I can't have kids because, like, I don't have a house for them. It's like, well, clearly,
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even though they were, like, low fertility, they weren't that low fertility in Rome.
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Well, and as Scott Alexander pointed out, we did this in the first episode of this, Scott
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Alexander points out that there were many, many, many forms of contraception and abortion
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used in ancient Rome. Plus, people were wise enough to know which hole to have sex with
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I love the thing by Octavia, who was one of Octavian's, like, daughters or something,
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There were multiple Octavians. I forget which one this was. Where she was like, do you remember
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the quote? It was something like, they're like, well, be careful. And she's like, oh...
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Yeah, like, I know, like, when my ship is holding cargo. Like, only when my ship is holding cargo.
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Yeah, only when my ship is holding cargo do I have fun.
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Yeah. Because then, you know, it's safe. No problem.
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Okay, but what ancient Romans got out to, pretty debauched, but anyway, continue.
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Most people lived in tiny cubicles in multi-story tenements. Quote, there was only one private house
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for every 26 blocks of apartments. Unquote. Within these tenements, the crowding was extreme.
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The tenants rarely had more than one room in which, quote, entire families were herded together. Unquote.
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Thus, as Stomberg tells us, privacy was a hard thing to find. Not only were people terribly crowded
00:19:06.980
within these buildings, the streets were so narrow that if people leaned out their windows,
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they could chat with someone living across the street without having to raise their voices.
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To make matters worse, Greco-Roman tenements lacked both furnaces and fireplaces. Cooking was done
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over wood or charcoal braziers, which were also the only source of heat. Since tenements lacked chimneys,
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the rooms were always smoky in winter. Because windows could be closed only by hanging clothes or
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skins blown by rain, the tenements were sufficiently drafty to prevent frequent asphyxiation. But the
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drafts increased the danger of rapidly spreading fires, and dread of fire was an obsession among the
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rich and poor alike. And there were lots of big fires in ancient Rome. Yeah, well, yeah, not fun.
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Cracker, in 1967, doubted that people could actually spend much time in quarters, so scrammed and squalid.
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Thus, he concluded that the typical residents of a Greco-Roman city spent their lives mainly in public
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spaces, and the average domicile must have served only as a place to sleep and store possessions,
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which totally makes sense. Basically, it's the equivalent of a sleeping bag. Scott Alexander
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continues, these tenements had no plumbing. Waste was eliminated by pouring it onto the street,
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often to the detriment of people walking underneath. Water was brought home from public wells. If you were
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out, you either walked back to the well or made do. The total public baths capacity of Rome was about
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30,000. The total population of Rome was about a million. In practice, the upper classes used the
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public baths, and the average citizen had never bathed in their life. Soap had been invented a
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century or two earlier, but was limited to a small pool of early adopters. The cities buzzed with flies.
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Early adopters of soap. I love this. Have you seen the new tech? Soap. Soap.
00:20:54.300
It's like, oh my god, you're always into the new fad. Like, yeah, it's great. It would be 1800 years
00:21:01.520
before anyone invented germ theory. Tenements were six stories high and frequently collapsed,
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killing everyone inside. Fires consumed the city on a regular basis, giving rise to colorful legends
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like Nero fiddling when Rome burnt. Police were limited, and it was understood that you would be
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robbed immediately if you set foot outside at nighttime. How did people survive? Mostly they didn't.
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Cities were destroyed regularly, multiple times within a single human lifetime, then rebuilt and
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replenished with the rural population. Stark focuses on Antioch, a Syrian city, which was a center of
00:21:31.700
early Christianity. During 600 years of intermittent Roman rule, he finds it was conquered 11 times,
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and burned to the ground four times, and devastated by riots six times. There were eight earthquakes large
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enough that nearly everything was destroyed, and three plagues large enough to kill at least a quarter of
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the population, and five really serious famines for an average of one catastrophe every 15 years.
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The Romans rebuilt the city each time because it was a strategically important place.
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Now, start to hear how horrifying this is, right? Given the number of people in these cities,
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the number of bodies we're talking about here in these ultra-dense cities.
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You know, a quarter of a population like that is dying. Those are people just never found,
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left rotting as buildings are built on top of other buildings. You know, this is how cities back then
00:22:23.720
got built on top and built on top and built on top of the city. It really reminds me, one of the
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things I noticed about when we were in Morocco, which is so interesting, so you can see these older
00:22:32.860
style city designs, is you could climb to a high building and look down at the structure of the way
00:22:40.560
that the houses and the various properties intertwined with each other. Because in Morocco,
00:22:43.680
you're super, super old, goes back a really long way.
00:22:45.400
And you could see some that looked like they may have actually been forgotten. Like maybe nobody
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owned them anymore. That they were like encapsulated by other buildings and that the ownership structure
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may not know or have a way to track who this building belonged to anymore. And it just got sort
00:23:02.580
of built over and around because who knows the family died there in a plague in Roman times or
00:23:07.040
something like that. Which is absolutely wild how horrifying these conditions were. But also how,
00:23:14.880
you know, after earthquake happens, okay, everyone's just going back.
00:23:23.420
And every 15 years, every 15 years. What was happening 15 years ago, Simone? Was that when like
00:23:28.880
Lady Ghostbusters was coming out? Was like their version of Lady Ghostbusters, everyone dies?
00:23:35.180
This lady burns to the ground and everyone dies and we resettle it?
00:23:39.840
Yeah. So to Scott Alexander's point, yeah, it is way worse than you could even imagine. Death
00:23:45.360
really wasn't that bad currently. It just, just end it. End it. Besides, Christians can't commit
00:23:52.580
suicide. So this was one of the easiest ways to actually end it if you wanted to. All right,
00:23:58.520
I continue reading. Stark focuses on one of these disasters, plague. The Roman Empire suffered two
00:24:05.660
major plagues during this era, the Antonine Plague of 165 AD and the Cyprian Plague of 251 AD.
00:24:12.980
He theorizes that Christians made it through these plagues much better than pagans,
00:24:17.200
gaining an additional population boost. Time for some game theory. When a plague comes,
00:24:22.000
you can either defect, flee, isolate, or hide, or cooperate, enthusiastically try to help or nurse
00:24:28.800
other victims. An individual does better by defecting, but a community does better if all
00:24:33.660
its members cooperate. Stark thinks the pagans defected and the Christians cooperated. Here is
00:24:39.420
Thucydides' description of a plague in pagan Athens, admittedly 500 years before the time we're
00:24:45.220
studying. People quickly got an instinctive proto-knowledge of how contagion worked, after which,
00:24:50.480
quote, people died with no one to look after them. Indeed, there were many houses in which all the
00:24:56.760
inhabitants perished through lack of any attention. The bodies of the dying were heaped one on top of
00:25:02.020
the other, and half-dead creatures could be seen staggering about in the streets or flocking around
00:25:07.080
the fountains in the desire for water. The temples in which they took up their quarters were full of
00:25:12.840
dead bodies of people who had died inside them, for the catastrophe was so overwhelming that men,
00:25:18.340
not knowing what would happen next to them, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law.
00:25:24.720
Compare the Christian writer Dionysius' description of a plague afflicting his own community.
00:25:29.940
Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and
00:25:34.360
thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their
00:25:38.920
every need and ministering to them in Christ. And with them departed this life serenely happy,
00:25:44.300
for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their
00:25:50.140
neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains. Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their
00:25:56.060
death to themselves and died in their stead. The best of our brothers lost lives in this manner,
00:26:01.860
a number of presbyters, deacons, and laymen, winning high commendation so that death in this form,
00:26:09.520
the result of great piety and strong faith, seems in every way the equal of martyrdom. The heathen
00:26:15.500
behaved in the very opposite way. At the first onset of disease, they pushed the sufferers away and
00:26:21.280
fled from their dearest, throwing them in the roads before they were dead, and treated unburied corpses
00:26:27.920
at dirt, hoping thereby to avert the spread and contagion of the fatal disease.
00:26:32.780
So before you go further here, I would note that you see here the love of martyrdom. These people
00:26:41.500
were really looking for, he said, in every way, the equal of martyrdom. They were looking for an
00:26:46.580
opportunity to martyr themselves. And that was really big in early and in most of the vitalist
00:26:52.560
periods of Christianity is the desire for martyrdom. That is what drove this behavior. A,
00:27:01.320
I don't care if I die, if I die doing the right thing. And I think that that's something that we
00:27:07.380
need to rekindle within the new iterations of Christianity. I mean, if you look at
00:27:12.320
techno-Pyritanism, which takes the martyrdom of man as one of its founding texts, you know,
00:27:16.020
we've focused a lot on this concept of martyrdom. Live your life as a sacrifice for future generations.
00:27:22.860
That is what these Christians were doing again and again and again. And so many Christians today
00:27:28.080
do not understand. Your life is a sacrifice. When you live your life as a martyr for the future,
00:27:37.080
you live a life like these early Christians. When you live a life for yourself or moderated or like,
00:27:44.560
oh, I want to be part of a community and blah, blah, blah. It's like, that's not what Christianity was
00:27:50.040
originally or in its periods of great fertility. And when I say fertility, I mean like, like,
00:27:55.960
like intellectual fertility about. Could Dionysius be embellishing matters to make his friends look
00:28:01.740
good and his enemies bad? Maybe, but, and this is from the book that Scott Alexander is quoting,
00:28:08.420
there was compelling evidence from pagan sources that this was characteristic Christian behavior.
00:28:13.340
Thus, a century later, the Emperor Julian launched a campaign to institute pagan charities in an effort to
00:28:18.300
match the Christians. Julian complained in a letter to the high priest of Galatia in 362,
00:28:25.240
that the pagans needed to equal the virtues of the Christians. For recent Christians' growth was
00:28:30.720
caused by their, quote, moral character, even if pretended, unquote, and by their, quote, benevolence
00:28:37.260
towards strangers and care for the graves of the dead, unquote. In a letter to another priest,
00:28:42.200
Julian wrote, quote, I think that when the poor happened to be neglected and overlooked by the priests,
00:28:48.140
the impious Galileans observed this and devoted themselves to benevolence, unquote. And then he wrote,
00:28:54.240
quote, quote, the impious Galileans support not only their poor, but ours as well. Everyone can see
00:29:00.640
that our people lack and lack aid from us, unquote. Okay, hold on. I want to say, this is a Roman
00:29:08.040
emperor who didn't like Christians. Like, they're only pretending to be nice. Yeah. But like, they keep
00:29:13.240
helping our poor. Yeah. They keep helping, like, protect the graves of our dead. They keep doing
00:29:19.260
all of this moral shit. Like, why aren't our own people doing this? Like, why are they the ones out
00:29:25.360
there doing all the nice stuff? And there is a parallel that he draws later in this and in the
00:29:31.080
video before, which is early Christians and Mormons today. And if you don't understand how you can both
00:29:36.420
think that somebody is in a way more morally strict, but also in a way, like, you're disgusted by them
00:29:42.560
and they do all sorts of weird practices where people are like, oh, yeah, well, I mean, I know
00:29:46.660
Mormons are, like, unusually nice and, like, may exhibit unusual amounts of charity, but they're still
00:29:53.540
a disgusting cult. Like, that's the way that people saw the early Christians. You, I think, can see on the
00:30:00.760
wall here already who's going to win in the long term. The ones who the people are complaining
00:30:06.500
about, hey, we need to, like, up government donations to this because these Mormons keep
00:30:12.140
giving more money than our government is giving or our local churches are giving. They keep helping
00:30:17.140
the poor more than even we're helping our own poor. I love that they point that out. The Christians
00:30:21.200
are helping the pagan poor more than the pagan authorities are, and they're helping their own poor.
00:30:28.340
Why would you not convert? That's crazy, yeah. They didn't win, and I think what people miss here
00:30:33.820
is they think that Christians won the moral battle by a margin or by an argument, not by a preponderance,
00:30:43.060
but they won it by a preponderance. Like, you had to be kind of crazy or, like, invested in some
00:30:49.460
weird status game to not be like, oh, these are the good guys. Anyway, continue. All right.
00:30:58.340
Did this matter? It might have. Modern medical experts believe conscientious nursing without any
00:31:04.600
medications could cut the mortality rate by two-thirds or even more. If this sounds implausible,
00:31:10.700
keep in mind that nursing here includes things like bringing water from the public well to bedridden
00:31:16.020
people who are too weak to get out of bed and get it themselves. That makes a lot of sense.
00:31:20.260
Stark believes that plagues helped Christians in multiple ways. One, the obvious way. 30% of pagans
00:31:26.320
died during the plague, but only 10% of Christians, making Christians proportionally more of the
00:31:31.380
population. Two, altering the social graph. Remember, Stark believes that you convert to Christianity
00:31:37.080
after your Christian friends outnumber your pagan friends. If all your pagan friends die and none of
00:31:43.080
your Christian friends do, this suddenly gets much easier. Three, moral testimony. Pagans saw their
00:31:49.900
priests and institutions fail the moral test of helping others while Christians succeeded. Four, even more
00:31:56.560
direct moral testimony. Many Christians nursed and helped their pagan neighbors. If you owed your life to the
00:32:02.080
Christians and all your pagan friends who could judge you were dead, it would be hard not to convert. Five,
00:32:09.660
supernatural testimony. If you didn't understand game theoretic logic above, then dramatically higher
00:32:15.400
Christian survival rates might seem like God's favor. Stark additionally speculates that since Christians
00:32:21.040
didn't flee the disease, they got it much earlier, therefore getting immunity much earlier and allowing them to
00:32:27.240
walk through hospital corridors full of plague victims with apparent miraculous invincibility. Six, search for
00:32:34.220
meaning. In some cities, 50% of the population died. The survivors must have been shell-shocked and looking for some
00:32:40.960
sort of meaning behind it all. Paganism had nothing for them. Sorry, we don't do that kind of thing. Would you like to hear
00:32:47.620
another story about Zeus raping women and turning her into an animal? Christians, who had wise words about how God tests the
00:32:55.140
faithful and sometimes brings people to heaven before their time, must have been a vastly superior alternative. No kidding.
00:33:02.140
Right? Like you, you hear these two explanations and you're like, these guys seem to buy a, when I point
00:33:09.200
this out in the last video on the subject that people don't realize how much Christianity was the first
00:33:14.340
real religion of this region in the way that we think of a religion. Right. Just was, people can be like,
00:33:21.880
what about Judaism? And I go, well, look at, look at the, the temple period Judaism scripts, which you can get
00:33:29.220
from things like, like what sort of ceremonies were going on there while they were ripping doves
00:33:34.100
apart, ripping their heads off while they were alive, then ripping them apart, spilling the blood
00:33:39.540
on the altar, letting it like blow as they were talking. It would have looked like Mogaram Shugaram.
00:33:44.360
Like they were, they were transferring their sins to goats and then other is sacrificing them in
00:34:02.960
front of a crowd and then another goat they'd send in the wilderness. And it's like all of this stuff
00:34:07.500
did, it seemed very pagan. And I think some Jews take a lot of offense when I argue that the religion
00:34:14.040
that they're practicing now is not fundamentally the same religion that was practiced, you know,
00:34:20.180
pre second temple or, you know, when the temple was standing as Judaism. And I really do not mean
00:34:26.520
that insulting. It's only insulting because it goes against a lot of Jewish theology today because that
00:34:32.660
religion was quite, I think by modern standards, barbaric. And I've realized that a lot of Jews have
00:34:39.420
this sort of like mental filter on things that happened during that period. And not just the,
00:34:46.640
you know, rampant animal sacrifice, the worship of Baal in the central temple, et cetera, that was
00:34:53.740
removed during the Josiah reforms, but also things like the caste system. I remember once I was at a
00:35:00.620
party and I made some joke about like how barbaric caste systems are. And I realized that one of the people
00:35:06.600
there was a friend of mine who is a very jingoistic Jew. I don't know if that's a, what do you call a
00:35:13.800
Jew who's super pro-Jewish? Anyway, he, I turned him immediately because I realized I, in my mind,
00:35:18.960
I had just made a major faux pas. I'm like, oh my God, I'm so sorry. And he was very confused. And I was
00:35:23.580
like, well, I mean, you do come from a culture that has a strict caste system, or at least traditionally
00:35:29.520
had a strict caste system. And it had never occurred to him that Judaism used to have a really strict
00:35:35.400
caste system, or that he came from a culture based on a caste system. That the Kohan, the Levites,
00:35:41.740
the Mazarin, the Isha-Tucky, the, the people with convert backgrounds, that these people all would
00:35:47.860
have been treated differently, would have had different ways of related to jobs, would have
00:35:50.620
had different ways of relating to society, all ruled over by a hereditary king, the type of king
00:35:55.420
that would have had 700 wives and 300 concubines in some instances. You know, as much as I give
00:36:01.880
Catholics shit about things, at least when they were building the management system for their
00:36:08.060
religion, even in the earliest days, there was not even talk about making it hereditary.
00:36:14.260
And yeah, their system picked some real stinkers over the time, but they never, it's never like,
00:36:19.400
oh yeah, the Christianity at its very inception was like, well, obviously it's going to be based
00:36:25.540
on a voting system and that everyone is born equal. That's wild that we don't even talk about
00:36:30.340
like how crazy that is. And this is not a bad thing. If you look at our video on slavery,
00:36:35.160
we point out that the Jewish system was a league above any of the pagan systems in terms of its
00:36:41.880
morality, in terms of its level of civilization, in terms of all of that. But it was not what we
00:36:47.860
would think of as a modern religion, whether you go to the caste system or the animal sacrifices or the
00:36:53.080
sin transference or the blood rituals, we would not think of it as being very much like a modern
00:36:59.300
religion. Like Christianity really kind of invented something new. And Judaism was a huge part of the
00:37:08.000
way there. Like the fact that the pagans would always complain about the nefarious Jews trying to
00:37:14.200
stop them from drowning their babies. Like they saw this as like a nefarious and evil thing or
00:37:19.980
the nefarious Jews who had rules where you could lose your slave if you hurt them.
00:37:24.980
What? What insanity? Now, while Christianity built on a lot of these ideas, and Judaism did later as
00:37:32.940
well, it's important to contrast, which I think isn't fairly done today, early Christians with
00:37:39.920
Jews of their time period, not modern Jews, which are a much evolved religion from that time period.
00:37:46.660
But I think that when you do that, you can understand that Christianity was really the start
00:37:51.460
of something totally new in human history. Yeah. But continue because he goes into this as well.
00:37:57.420
And you might have some thoughts on this. New section. I think this is a very interesting way
00:38:03.060
for it to end, right? But is Christianity just better? Paganism was framed as a business relationship
00:38:10.120
with the gods. You perform the rites and sacrifices. They give you supernatural aid. You didn't have to
00:38:15.940
like them any more than you liked your supply chain for any other commodity. They certainly didn't like
00:38:21.740
you. At its absolute most touchy-feely, paganism might posit a special relationship between a god
00:38:28.620
and a city like Athena and Athens. But even this is maxed out at the sort of relationship between a
00:38:34.560
shopkeeper and a favorite recurring customer who we always remember to greet by name. Judaism did better.
00:38:40.540
God has a sort of love-hate relationship with his people, Israel. But at least there are clearly
00:38:48.660
strong emotions involved. Now, hold on. Before you go further, I want to point out here that the
00:38:52.920
person writing this is Jewish in background. Yeah. Continue. Still, Stark thinks it was Christianity
00:38:58.260
that really pioneered the idea that God loves individuals. From that, everything else flows. You should
00:39:04.040
love your fellow man and nurse him during plague. You should love your children and not committed
00:39:08.880
fantasize or abortion. You should love God back and be willing to die a martyr for him. For God's love
00:39:15.100
flows naturally, the promise of heaven, instead of a shadowy, semi-naturally forming underworlds of the
00:39:20.960
Greek and early Jews. Pagan priests were people who were skilled at the relevant rituals. Christian
00:39:27.940
bishops slash priests slash deacons were people who loved God especially much. Aside from all the
00:39:34.360
individual ways that Christian love provided an advantage, Stark thinks that paganism just couldn't
00:39:40.320
compete. So here I'd like to, because I think that this is something people don't understand. If you
00:39:45.740
imagine you're a pagan living during these times, right? And you see this one group acting more
00:39:52.000
morally. They don't have like some sort of contract with their God. Their God loves them, right? Like you
00:39:58.740
are just not going to be able to compete with this message. Even if you think it's weird, the moment
00:40:05.220
somebody starts to engage with this. And if you watch the first episode where we're going over this,
00:40:09.860
you hear about how cults work, which at first you're like, because a lot of people will be like,
00:40:15.220
oh, I was just so compelled by like the message of the cult, but that's not really what it is.
00:40:18.480
It starts with a lot of my friends are in it and blah, blah, blah. And I think it's pretty weird,
00:40:23.220
but whatever. But then you begin to accept parts of the message. And all of a sudden you're like,
00:40:28.740
God, like, this is great. Like this, so much of the world makes sense now that didn't make sense
00:40:33.220
before. And you see these big C shifts here. And I think C shifts in religion and building
00:40:40.920
civilization. So you look at something like paganism. Paganism says, do it because you will
00:40:45.680
be rewarded for doing it. And Christianity says, do it because God loves you. And while this is a huge
00:40:55.060
jump, there still is a dramatic moral flaw to this jump, which is you didn't consent to God loving
00:41:02.260
you. You know, God loves you like a stalker. He's like, I love you. Therefore do what I say. Right.
00:41:06.500
Like you didn't, you didn't say, oh, like God, I, I, I, it's God's like, I love you. So do what I want.
00:41:12.220
Whereas we reinterpret. And I think more accurately interpret what's actually written in the Bible
00:41:18.000
to argue that as techno puritanism, it says, do it without guilt or expectation of a reward
00:41:24.640
because it is the right thing to do. And in techno puritanism, you're doing it because of the impact
00:41:33.360
it will have on future people and God, which you will never be personally rewarded for,
00:41:39.160
which is just like a strictly more moral way to act than the way the older interpretations of
00:41:44.760
Christianity would act, or at least that's the way we see it. I mean, obviously we're putting this
00:41:48.100
together for our kids and stuff like that, but I see reacting, you know, and we, we have people
00:41:53.100
ask us and we've had Christians ask us, they go, why are you working to create a better future
00:41:58.200
that you are never going to get experience and that you're not going to be rewarded for creating?
00:42:04.080
And it's like, well, because we have a religious duty to do so. And they're like, well, I don't
00:42:07.500
understand how you could have a religious duty to do something that doesn't personally benefit you in some
00:42:11.420
way. And it's like, well, that's where the moral superiority comes from was in this context.
00:42:17.620
And, you know, the, the old Greek philosophy here, which is a society grows great when old man
00:42:23.240
plate trees whose shade they shall never sit in. And Christianity found a way to motivate this.
00:42:32.400
Unfortunately, it, it, it was better than the pagan traditions, early Christianity, I should say.
00:42:37.640
Uh, but it still lacked because it still was either promising to reward them in the afterlife or it
00:42:43.300
was promising to reward them with adulation was in this world. Whereas we have removed those two
00:42:48.320
rewards while still maintaining the moral mandate. The question is, is can people really motivate
00:42:54.580
themselves with that? We'll see. I mean, I find it to be very motivating, but I am a crazy person.
00:43:01.840
People are always like Malcolm, other people don't think like you stop assuming that other people
00:43:05.000
think like you. And I'm like, well, then I'll breed a generation that does just like the early
00:43:08.540
Christians did. Right. I mean, yeah, works. It apparently worked very well for them. And I do
00:43:17.020
appreciate this. Posit of this is maybe just a stronger meme. And I think that that's a huge part
00:43:26.640
of it, but I do think that these other factors like birth rate, like plague management, like martyrdom
00:43:32.060
play a role too. And I'm, I, it's so cool seeing Scott Alexander's annotation of another author's
00:43:38.940
breakdown of these dynamics, because this is totally core in culture crafting. This is,
00:43:44.240
this is essential. If you want to build a sustainable religion or see if your nascent
00:43:49.680
religion that you want to hitch your cart to is doing well. And by these metrics, EA is doing all right.
00:43:56.740
I guess Mormonism is doing great. I guess the Amish are doing all right. Some Mennonites are doing
00:44:02.080
all right. So yeah, he points out here, which I find really compelling is that if you look at the
00:44:07.280
way these early Christians look, they look the way a lot of people talk about Mormons today,
00:44:11.280
which is to say a weird cult that's like weirdly nice for whatever reason.
00:44:16.400
They're so nice, but they're so weird. No one takes them really seriously, but look at them go,
00:44:21.940
And he pointed out in the first one that they are actually growing at a rate faster than early
00:44:25.960
Christianity. So as long as they figure out how to get through this little birth rate problem,
00:44:32.680
they seem to be having right now, but it's still a less problem in their neighbors. I mean, look,
00:44:37.360
when we are talking about the plagues of our generation, when future authors are writing about
00:44:41.200
this, they're going to be talking about the plague of sexual degeneracy as it related to fertility rates.
00:44:48.440
And you can look at the techno Puritan hypothesis here, which is to say that we need to completely
00:44:52.860
disentangle the desire to have kids from the desire to achieve sexual release. You need to say
00:45:00.660
these two things have nothing in common. I want to have kids because I want to have kids and kids
00:45:06.420
are a moral good and kids make the future a better place. And I will create kids for that reason,
00:45:10.900
not because I denied myself pornography or I denied myself birth control. And then some other groups are
00:45:18.220
taking the hypothesis basically saying, no, we need to go back to older ways of doing this. And I always
00:45:22.940
mention in Rome, when their society was collapsing, there was two hypotheses. There was one group of
00:45:28.840
people that were like, let's experiment with new ways of doing things, ways of building a stronger
00:45:32.840
culture. And there was another group that said, we need to go back to the old ways of doing things.
00:45:35.800
And that was a mystery cult. I mean, in many ways, the trad Christians today represent the mystery
00:45:42.500
cults of our time. And we represent the early Christians saying, hey, no, there's a new system.
00:45:47.060
We need to upgrade our morality. We need to expect more for ourselves and people of the past.
00:45:51.200
And they're like, no, what we need to do is go back to just the way the people in the past did
00:45:54.540
things. And we're like, those systems won't work in this context. Like more is expected of us. More
00:45:59.520
morality is expected of us. More civic virtue is expected of us. Being able to resist even a higher
00:46:06.980
level of debauchery and degeneracy is expected of us. And if you can't do that, if you try to attempt
00:46:12.780
that by saying, just ignore this stuff, just, you know, as we can see by the statistics, you're
00:46:18.960
losing the next generation. And, and, and don't tell me like, everyone's like, oh, join our side.
00:46:25.160
Like, clearly we're doing well. And I'm like, yeah, the ones who stay in the faith are doing well. And
00:46:28.680
they're like, well, why do you care about the ones who aren't? I'm like, because they're leaving
00:46:31.640
record numbers. That's like saying only the people who got shot died. It's like, well, yeah, duh.
00:46:38.960
Yeah. That's what we're afraid of for our kids. We're afraid of them falling to the urban monoculture
00:46:43.400
and they just don't seem very resistant solutions. So I think that we're at this great turning point
00:46:48.660
in human civilization where we get this opportunity to build and innovate in the same way the early
00:46:55.460
Christians did, because we have new plagues, mimetic plagues, which humanity hadn't had to face
00:47:00.500
before. Exactly. Any, any thoughts or you want to go straight into this last point here?
00:47:06.180
Last point. Cause I need to make dinner. So he finishes with, is this all there is? I'm not
00:47:13.620
sure. I'll also talk about Jesus is cheap, but I still don't understand how they managed
00:47:18.900
to be so virtuous and loving in a way that so few modern Christians, even the ones who
00:47:23.400
really believe in Jesus are. I'm not making boring, liberal complaint that Christians are
00:47:28.640
hypocritical and evil. Although of course many are, I'm making the equally boring, but hopefully
00:47:33.380
less inflammatory complaint that many Christians are perfectly decent people, upstanding citizens,
00:47:38.380
but don't really seem like the type who would gladly die in a plague just so they could help
00:47:42.940
nurse their worst enemy. I'm not complaining or blaming Christians for this. Almost nobody is that
00:47:48.480
person. I just wonder what the early Christians had, which modern Christians have lost. Very
00:47:53.660
interesting question. Early Christians weren't doing this. They were doing, they weren't doing this
00:47:59.780
because they were good people. They were doing this because they were giddy about becoming
00:48:03.300
martyrs. As you can see from their own writings, they were giddy about dying for a better future.
00:48:10.160
The concept of martyrdom of making, as we say within Technopuritan, your entire life needs to be lived
00:48:16.020
as a martyr for future generations. And every moment you spend on yourself is a moment where you are not
00:48:21.820
living within God's plan. And we should all understand, we all fall short of a perfect person. We are all
00:48:27.700
going to indulge to some extent, but the other iterations of Christianity have completely abandoned
00:48:34.760
the concept of genuine martyrdom, of genuinely saying, I am going to live every moment I can
00:48:44.380
as much on the edge as I can. Like you need to be basically edging your life in terms of how difficult
00:48:51.740
you're making it for yourself. You know, why would you pay for, for, for one additional thing? Why
00:48:57.520
would you pay for one additional out of heating? If you can handle the cold, why would you pay for
00:49:03.220
one additional meal out? If you can motivate yourself without that, why would you pay for,
00:49:10.220
and we fail, we fit like, I fail all the time at this. Like I am not trying to be the perfect
00:49:16.580
Christian within this iteration of Christianity. There are people who will do better than me,
00:49:23.040
but I think having the one, the humility to admit that about yourself and to not pretend,
00:49:28.620
which I think is one of the biggest problems that modern Christians face is to pretend that your
00:49:32.720
sins, your indulgences, whether they are indulgences in your ego, indulgences in how you are signaling
00:49:38.580
to other people, indulgences in whatever are virtues. You know, one of the things I was talking to
00:49:42.800
somebody about the discord server about is he's like, why don't you attack gay people more? Like
00:49:46.860
in our family, like, I wouldn't want my sons to be gay. I wouldn't approve of that, but I approve of
00:49:51.420
somebody else who's living a gay lifestyle. Right. And they're like, so then why don't you attack them?
00:49:55.280
And I go, because that would be a complete personal indulgence. They are a large and powerful
00:50:01.360
community today. If you go out and attack them, if you say that they shouldn't be living this lifestyle,
00:50:07.660
that is going to completely derail something like the pernatalist movement, which we're trying to
00:50:13.240
grow. Like you are picking a fight with a group that we need to win election cycles out of personal
00:50:20.520
pride. That is an indulgence. That is a sin. And Christians today, I'll frame that like,
00:50:27.440
you know, there's many Christians who have these misogynistic framings, who will have these homophobic
00:50:31.720
framings, who have these anti-Semitic framings. You need Jews on your side if you're going to win in the
00:50:36.540
future. And when you attack groups that are more powerful than your own, when I say more powerful,
00:50:42.720
I mean, doing better than your own are obviously going to matter more than your own. I mean,
00:50:45.780
look at something like the Catholics with their abysmal fertility rate. That's like a lower than
00:50:49.640
the secular fertility rate in the United States if you don't include immigrants. Like that they would
00:50:54.100
like be like, who, who, who, like, for example, like, it's either the Catholics or the Jews pick a side,
00:51:00.500
do not performatively attack potential allies. That is sinful and indulgent in a world where we
00:51:10.400
are entering one of the hardest of timelines. And we need as many allies as you can have,
00:51:15.740
even if you might disagree with them from your own families and cultures perspective.
00:51:19.220
You can say, oh, I don't want my own kids doing this, but I'm open to allying and working with other
00:51:26.840
people who do this. And, and I especially am not interested in antagonizing them.
00:51:34.280
I think it's important that we see individuals who indulgently or performatively attack other groups
00:51:41.920
the way we see any other form of intemperance and look at them with the same level of disgust in
00:51:49.340
those moments as the drunkard stumbling down the streets, barely able to hold themselves together,
00:51:55.320
because this is an individual who puts all of us at risk. If they are seen as part of your community
00:52:02.460
and they are regularly going out and shooting at other communities with words, they make alliance
00:52:09.220
with those communities harder and they make those communities more likely to retaliate.
00:52:13.760
You know, back in the days of the American clan system and like the Appalachian region or
00:52:17.520
something like that, if you had one person who would pick too many fights with outsiders,
00:52:22.360
the clan would, you know, take them out back and beat them to death. Like that's what you had to do
00:52:27.160
because people needed to know you don't act that way because you put everyone else at risk when
00:52:32.160
you act with this level of intemperance and personal indulgence. If the people you're attacking
00:52:37.740
aren't an active and ever-present threat to you, not just not aligned with you, if they aren't an
00:52:42.960
active threat to you, then leave them alone. Anyway, any final thoughts, Simone?
00:52:50.640
I'm gonna have to chew on this for a long time and I'm really grateful this really great summary
00:52:55.480
exists. Probably need to read the book too. So thanks for going over this with me. It was fun to
00:53:01.980
read the original. It was fun to talk about it with you. And I think it's all about the birth rates
00:53:06.640
in the end. So there you go. I think it's, well, it's about the birth rates and creating a great
00:53:11.120
life. And the Christianity offered both of those. They offered a better way of living that was more
00:53:17.400
fun for all people involved. And that's, I think your big point about pernatalism, it's not about
00:53:22.700
coercing anyone. It's just about providing a better way of living, loving your kids better, giving them
00:53:26.900
such a great experience that they want to pass that on and that they're capable of passing it on because
00:53:30.720
they're thriving. And that's what Christianity did. And that's what any good religion that's going to
00:53:34.920
survive into the future or culture should be doing. I completely agree. We've got a Madagascar in.
00:53:42.780
There's room on the fun side for one more. No, thanks. Look, I've been thinking maybe if you gave
00:53:50.360
this place a chance, you might even enjoy yourself.
00:54:08.640
You know, as I've said before, you need to have a more fun, when people come in, they need to enjoy
00:54:13.480
the vitalism that they're experiencing here more with other communities. Don't be in some
00:54:18.160
circle jerk about who's being more virtuous or who's being more, that destroys the vibe when
00:54:25.360
people come in. They need to come in and be like, oh yeah, this is cool. The core of Christianity,
00:54:30.820
the reactor that makes it work and so powerful, is not a set of rules or hierarchy. It's martyrdom
00:54:40.620
itself. That is what Jesus represented. That is what all of the early Christians focused on.
00:54:48.020
It is to martyrs that we look to with respect, not the fuddy-duddy who's following all of the rules
00:54:56.880
as strictly as they can and trying to enforce them on other people. That doesn't make other people want
00:55:02.640
to join your group. What does make other people want to join your group is seeing people live their
00:55:08.200
lives as martyrs. Because as I pointed out, it's not really your death that makes you a martyr.
00:55:13.160
Everyone dies. What makes you a good martyr is how you choose to spend this one short existence you
00:55:20.980
get on earth. That's what makes you a martyr. So you don't need to go out and get yourself killed to
00:55:27.100
be a martyr. And in many ways, I'd argue that you are more of a martyr if you spend a long life in
00:55:32.880
martyrdom than if you spend only a few moments in a showy martyrdom, which in a way can be kind of
00:55:40.240
indulgent to martyr yourself too fast and in too showy a way. In a lot of our religious stuff around
00:55:45.780
the book The Martyrdom of Man or in our tract series, we contextualize humanity as an intergenerational
00:55:51.500
cycle of martyrdom where every generation's duty is to martyr themselves for the sake of the next
00:55:58.200
generation to help improve their lot. And it's funny that a anti-natalist might hear that and be
00:56:03.800
like, yes, we agree we need to stop the cycle of martyrdom. But because we have this very Christian
00:56:09.900
infused ideology, we're like, no, the martyrdom is good. The martyrdom is what gives life meaning and
00:56:15.360
value. And by the way, are you seeing the snow? It's actually beginning to build up. First real snow
00:56:19.080
of the year. Yeah, it's really pretty. And what are we making for dinner tonight? I was thinking for you
00:56:24.740
grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup perhaps, or I can make vegetables gyoza, or I can make more
00:56:30.660
teriyaki chicken. This time, if you'd want vegetable stir fry, I can add that, or I can make
00:56:35.780
just egg fried rice. I'll let you choose between teriyaki chicken and grilled cheese sandwiches. I
00:56:42.100
really could do either. If you do make teriyaki chicken, cut it into smaller pieces this time. That
00:56:47.720
was like huge and weird last time. I don't know what was weird about that pack. It was very different
00:56:52.820
from the other packs that you've cooked. Yeah, I'll just I'll saute the chicken first and chop it up
00:56:56.860
then put it back in. Yeah, and then serve it separately because all the sauce from that moved
00:57:01.380
into the rice and that created a situation. Oh, you don't want saucy rice? Because the other day
00:57:06.920
you asked me to pour your curry over your rice. I do that myself or I'd ask you to do it. But with
00:57:12.660
the teriyaki, I want to do it one bite of teriyaki and then the right bite of plain rice. Okay,
00:57:18.860
sorry. I didn't realize you're eating procedure.
00:57:23.620
You're shut up. You're weirder than I am. Oh, yeah, I am. I'm very aware. I'm very aware of
00:57:30.040
the fact because a copy of me now comments about his mouth getting wet when he eats strawberries.
00:57:36.360
And that's a problem. They can't keep eating. My mouth is getting wet. It's like your mouth is
00:57:41.660
already wet. My mouth is dirty. No, there's food in it. Torsten. Torsten, Torsten, Torsten, Torsten.
00:57:53.660
All right. Well, I love you. I'll get started on dinner. I love you too. Will you get the kids?
00:57:57.080
Yeah? Absolutely. Thank you, gorgeous. I love you so much. Happy to be married to you.
00:58:03.060
You're perfect. Sorry. There it clicks. Okay, everyone. In March, there is natal con. This is
00:58:11.380
the second inaugural pro natalist convention. You should be there. We're going to be there. It's
00:58:16.460
in Austin. And if you want a 10% discount, you can enter the code Collins at checkout.
00:58:22.100
And it's being run by Kevin Dolan, our good friend. Very spicy. Very spicy. Yes. Love him.
00:58:27.700
All right. So for those unfamiliar with the tradition that we're going to show in this
00:58:33.180
family video, in America, it is common on the night before Christmas to leave out milk
00:58:38.900
and cookies or brownies or something like that for Santa Claus. We did that. The kids knocked
00:58:44.020
over the glass of milk and here they are cleaning it up. And then one of them, breaking my wife's
00:58:49.340
mind, decides to start wringing the napkins that they're using to clean the milk off the
00:58:57.160
Going into the top. There we go. That was very careful. Now I'm just going to dry right
00:59:02.780
here. There we go. I'm cleaning the mess. Good job, buddies. Oh. Don't. Get them off
00:59:11.340
there. Yes. Or else it will get ruined. There we go. It's drying. Drying. I'll make sure
00:59:20.580
they don't get wet. Yes. Okay. Dry that. There we go. I think that's it. There we go. I'm going
00:59:31.460
to put it. Oh, just a little bit of milk on the table. There you go. We're going to be,
00:59:37.840
we're going to be on a narcissist. I'm squeezing in the cup. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
00:59:44.720
no. I'm going to punch your phone. You don't want to do that to us. I punched it. All right,
00:59:52.720
buddies. All right, let's go to bed so Santa doesn't miss our house because we are awake.
00:59:57.400
You got it? Oh, dear. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Santa's
01:00:05.580
drinking that. Toasty Santa's drinking that. Is Santa's drinking it? I think we need to
01:00:12.400
replace that milk because that's, you don't. Oh, you're trying to get more milk for Santa?
01:00:42.080
You're worried that Santa's not going to have enough milk?
01:00:53.300
I've already just cleaned it all. All right. High five, buddy. Thank you.
01:00:59.140
And I, I just, I just squeezed it in Santa. I just squeezed it in here.
01:01:05.260
So that he wouldn't have enough milk? Look, there's milk on the bottom.
01:01:11.700
Oh, dear. Oh, it's okay, Toasty. Oh, dear. I think Santa's gonna come in. I think, hey, guys,
01:01:22.920
let's go to bed before Santa's coming. That's a good idea. High five, buddy.
01:01:27.460
We're gonna go to bed fast. High five. High five. High five.