Mysterium Fasces


Mysterium Fasces Episode 36 — Christian Violence


Episode Stats

Misogynist Sentences

13

Hate Speech Sentences

136


Summary

In this episode, Fr. Raphael Johnson joins us to discuss Christian Peace, and the role of spiritual warfare in the defense of the Christian faith against violence. This episode is brought to you by Mysterium Bashings, hosted by Fr. Florian Geyer and co-host Nat Danelaw.


Transcript

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00:01:58.000 Welcome to Mysterium Bashings, episode 36, Christian Violence.
00:02:08.360 I'm your host, Florian Geyer.
00:02:10.380 Joining me today, I have returning to the program co-host Nat Danelaw.
00:02:15.040 Nat, how's it going, brother? It's good to have you back on.
00:02:17.680 It's fantastic to be back on, Florian.
00:02:19.700 It's always a pleasure to be on your fine podcast program on the internet.
00:02:24.220 Yes, and I think you'll especially be able to contribute a lot to this topic.
00:02:27.080 I said today, once again, as I seem to be saying almost every day, Nat was right.
00:02:33.220 Anyway, joining me again on the program, we have honored guest, Fr. Raphael Johnson.
00:02:38.140 Fr. Johnson, thanks for joining us.
00:02:40.660 This is my favorite podcast out there right now. You guys bring out the best of me. I appreciate it.
00:02:45.220 Well, again, we're glad to extract your labor.
00:02:49.380 At some point in the show, we might have co-host Ruth for Thought joining us,
00:02:53.620 but he's running a little bit late, so if he pumps in later, expect him.
00:02:58.000 Before we continue, I wanted to encourage our readers to engage in spiritual warfare.
00:03:03.760 I'm going to put the right chanted in time of attack by foreign aliens in the description of this podcast.
00:03:09.060 All Orthodox Christians, non-Orthodox Christians, if you can read this on Friday,
00:03:12.880 this is the prayer for our times.
00:03:17.020 Symbiotically with this, myself and another Orthodox Christian,
00:03:20.760 we've started a prayer server where we keep the morning and evening prayer rules
00:03:23.960 for those who we do them on the server.
00:03:27.280 So if you would like an invite, you can email me at florian.guyer283 at gmail.com,
00:03:33.560 or you can send me a message on Twitter, and we'll get you hooked up.
00:03:36.580 All are welcome.
00:03:38.620 Okay, shilling out of the way, let's proceed into our main topic.
00:03:42.880 So I've titled the episode, Christian Violence.
00:03:45.160 Well, I think that before we even begin to discuss violence, we have to discuss peace,
00:03:49.360 because Christ is called the Prince of Peace,
00:03:51.680 and Christianity is seen as a religion of peace,
00:03:54.220 and Islam is slandered as a religion of violence.
00:03:57.320 So, Fr. Johnson, I want to ask you this question.
00:04:00.540 What is Christian peace?
00:04:04.320 Christian peace is identical to justice.
00:04:07.060 It's not the absence of war.
00:04:08.640 Fighting in a just war can also be an example of peace.
00:04:15.500 It's both an internal and an external state of affairs.
00:04:19.940 It has nothing to do with there simply being an absence of violence.
00:04:23.760 There's not, you know, violence is nothing special.
00:04:26.120 There's nothing that sets it apart from everything else.
00:04:28.200 You know, bad language, court cases, you know, garnishing wages, all of these things are just as bad as being punched in the face.
00:04:38.320 It's just less visible, I guess.
00:04:42.340 There's nothing special about it.
00:04:43.520 Somehow in Western societies, physical violence is treated as a world totally separate from everything else.
00:04:50.200 And I think ultimately it comes down to nominalism.
00:04:53.920 You know, if you can't, if you can't, if you can't see it, if it takes more than two sentences to explain, it doesn't exist.
00:05:01.500 Peace is justice.
00:05:03.080 You can have a state of war and actually be at peace.
00:05:06.380 Those two things aren't, they're not mutually exclusive.
00:05:09.820 Yeah, excellent.
00:05:13.080 And this is what I wanted to emphasize.
00:05:14.660 And I mean, this is, it comes back to, as you say, this nominalist erosion of language.
00:05:19.040 That when people read, pick up the New Testament and Christ says, my peace, I give you, my peace, I leave you.
00:05:24.360 Right?
00:05:24.600 I mean, they read that as, like, Christ is basically, you know, this hippie, right?
00:05:29.020 Issuing them a cessation of hostilities and commanding them to, you know, turn the other cheek and take all violence administered.
00:05:35.840 I mean, I've actually seen, you know, even, like, this is the mainstream Catholic teaching.
00:05:38.880 Like, the Catholic Study Bible, when Christ rebukes Peter for drawing his sword at the band that's approaching, the explanation there is that Christ is clearly here condemning violence, armed violence.
00:05:50.560 This is the shallow level of thinking that is the mainstream for both Novus Ordo Catholic and Protestant circles.
00:05:56.140 Well, in Western Europe, and especially in America, if you're a married man and your wife, for example, tortures you emotionally for years, decades, brings you to absolutely nothing.
00:06:10.920 And if you slap her once, you're going to jail.
00:06:14.600 In other words, it's gotten so narrow in its definition.
00:06:19.300 You could be tortured for years.
00:06:21.580 And if you do the slightest thing that has some physical presence, you're going to go off to prison.
00:06:26.320 And that's what happens when you have this twisted definition.
00:06:33.040 Yeah, indeed.
00:06:34.380 It's...
00:06:35.140 The only thing to say about it is that it's totally emasculated.
00:06:40.000 It's a feminine position, right?
00:06:41.140 It comes from this fundamental conflict aversion that women have, both to violence, but also, you know, interpersonal struggle.
00:06:48.420 And that is basically what has occurred.
00:06:52.120 So, I mean, this is the...
00:06:54.480 Let's ask the question, then.
00:06:55.640 Where does violence fit into this religion of peace?
00:06:58.340 I think you've answered this fairly directly.
00:07:02.600 But this is a...
00:07:05.280 What can I say?
00:07:06.860 This is so anathema to most Christians.
00:07:09.700 I mean, it's the...
00:07:11.000 The cognitive dissonance is so extreme, right?
00:07:13.300 They would support the police and the military, but they couldn't tell you why.
00:07:18.420 Yeah, even there, you're talking about completely arbitrary divisions.
00:07:24.180 You know, they'll talk even about the Cossacks, saying how wonderful they are.
00:07:28.780 But if you did that today, you know, you deserve to be put in prison.
00:07:32.640 Cognitive dissonance is being really nice about it, very much understating the problem.
00:07:37.600 Yeah, exactly.
00:07:39.580 Can I quickly interject with something?
00:07:41.600 It's not really a comment.
00:07:43.800 It's more in the terms of a question.
00:07:47.600 You know, I will clearly admit I'm not a theologian.
00:07:51.460 I'm not an expert in any way whatsoever on the one true faith.
00:07:57.780 However, I'm curious.
00:07:59.940 So, striving for peace is a central part.
00:08:03.980 And from Father Johnson's explanation, peace is justice in its purest essence,
00:08:10.940 which you can also, in that context, point in the same direction as righteousness, right?
00:08:16.880 The aspect of being correct, being right with the world.
00:08:21.660 So, water goes in the direction of obtaining peace in the Christian sense of the word.
00:08:30.440 Is in its purest essence correct?
00:08:34.200 Am I correct to understand this?
00:08:35.380 I would put it that way, sure.
00:08:40.400 Thank you very much.
00:08:41.900 Yeah, you've actually isolated it exactly.
00:08:44.540 Another word for peace is, you could say, harmony.
00:08:46.260 It's when the different actors and forces of a polity or a unit or a collective or a world
00:08:52.900 are acting together with integrity, with a minimal level of corruption as is possible.
00:09:00.620 And so, exactly, a river flowing to its destination is peaceful,
00:09:04.860 even though it might have an incredible, magnificent force behind it, torrential even.
00:09:10.680 It's peaceful because it's fulfilling exactly what it ought to do.
00:09:13.540 It's not attempting to be something it's not.
00:09:17.500 That's an excellent example.
00:09:18.780 That's precisely what we mean, yes.
00:09:21.080 All right, indeed.
00:09:22.800 And so, this is the thing.
00:09:23.760 I mean, you know, this is, you can't blame, you know, the storm for bringing rain, right?
00:09:32.160 That gets everything wet.
00:09:33.360 I mean, that's its nature, all right?
00:09:35.260 I mean, this is like getting angry, you know, at a child because they fall down, right?
00:09:39.260 This is, it's how they are, right?
00:09:42.060 Both things are peaceful, although they may not necessarily be convenient or easy.
00:09:46.400 And this is what has occurred is fundamentally, as we've discussed before on this,
00:09:49.740 the show, the cultural religion, Christianity, has just become the religion of the bourgeois.
00:09:54.860 This is kind of the Christian religion that Nietzsche was critiquing, which he's right on in many of his critiques.
00:09:59.720 And it equates comfort and freedom from suffering with peacefulness, which is the opposite message of the gospel, literally.
00:10:09.100 You're exactly correct.
00:10:13.140 Christ said that whoever won't bow before me should be slaughtered before me.
00:10:19.740 His apostles were armed.
00:10:23.980 He had, you know, he had, he had, all the apostles were, all the missionaries were.
00:10:30.720 How many armies have Christian societies had?
00:10:33.820 How many, the size of these empires alone, the Cossacks came into existence to free Slavic slaves on the Jewish slave march in, off the Black Sea.
00:10:45.320 You know, it's, it's a religion of violence, but that just means it's a religion of love.
00:10:49.200 Absolutely. And that's exactly, I mean, go on now, please.
00:10:55.940 I just, you just have a comment, really.
00:10:58.180 I'm sure that a lot of the people who listen to this fine podcast program on the internet are not mouth bravers in any sense of the word.
00:11:06.380 But to really bring forth a analogy, violence is inherently the biggest expression of love in any way whatsoever.
00:11:18.400 Because in the most, in the totality of an extreme situation, in those moments where one's spiritual integrity and character is put into the most intensive pressures,
00:11:32.160 that is when the aspect of violence normally comes in.
00:11:36.780 When what you love inherently is threatened on the most fundamental levels, the imminent response of violence is the most clear indication of protecting, of taking care of what you love, preserving what you love.
00:11:55.420 Now, all the church fathers, Augustine included, all agreed on one point, and that is in the use of violence, whether it be from a state or from a private group like the Cossacks or the Black Hundreds or anything like that.
00:12:09.680 The moment it becomes passionate, the moment it becomes about selfish ends or hatred or revenge, it becomes illegitimate.
00:12:20.060 That can't be the motivation.
00:12:21.440 Yeah, and this is what it comes down to, and this is, um, all of the great traditions talk about this, both in Islam and Christianity, that the essence of holy violence is dispassionate violence.
00:12:34.740 Because the violence is not done in reference to yourself or to your ego, but rather is an expression of your self-giving and your integrated nature with both your family and your nation and with God.
00:12:47.380 And it comes from those places, and that's when violence becomes sacred.
00:12:53.660 We can speak of holy violence, as the prophets and the armies of Christ have done.
00:12:59.440 But among Christians, you know, Leo Tolstoy seems to have won.
00:13:03.780 You know, if you read the New Testament, um, with the exception of a few verses you can very easily blot out in your mind, it seems to be pretty pacifist, especially in the Garden, um, when Peter draws his sword.
00:13:16.240 Well, the fact he had a sword in the first place doesn't, doesn't get, um, doesn't get, that question doesn't get asked.
00:13:22.380 And this is why the Old Testament is so absolutely essential.
00:13:25.780 The Old Testament is equal to the New Testament in terms of its importance and significance.
00:13:30.240 That's where our politics is, our economics, uh, state affairs.
00:13:34.660 All of this is handled and taken care of in the Old Testament.
00:13:38.920 It is fanatically nationalist.
00:13:41.100 It is very much, uh, family-based and sort of this idealistic socialist in terms of economics.
00:13:47.120 It's extremely violent.
00:13:49.400 Um, and I'll make this prediction here.
00:13:51.320 I've made it before.
00:13:52.060 I'll make it again a million more times.
00:13:53.460 Because you will find a move soon in all mainline jurisdictions to get rid of the Old Testament, except maybe the Psalms.
00:14:01.620 Because that's where the cognitive dissonance really comes in.
00:14:04.060 I've had traditional priests tell me that the Old Testament doesn't matter anymore.
00:14:08.880 And, uh, I've even given them, you know, an out for them to, to recant that, and they don't.
00:14:14.020 Because every time I defend nationalism from a scriptural point of view, it's overwhelmingly Old Testament citations.
00:14:20.680 In order to try to win the argument, they have to reject the Old Testament.
00:14:24.700 It's been removed from so many liturgical, um, functions already in, in all, in all groups.
00:14:30.320 And there will be, be a movement to either get rid of it or, um, uh, reduce it to just a footnote to the New Testament.
00:14:40.040 Absolutely.
00:14:40.760 I would want to, uh, now welcome Rude for Thought.
00:14:43.100 Thank you for joining us, Rude.
00:14:44.280 We already introduced you, uh, before you came in.
00:14:47.800 Hi, sorry for my tardiness.
00:14:49.480 Don't worry about it.
00:14:50.240 We're keeping Orthodox time here today.
00:14:52.640 So, yeah, I mean, this is the question.
00:14:54.140 I mean, so this hippie Christianity is, like, I mean, can we just touch on this?
00:14:58.600 I mean, this is the ubiquitous view of Christ, kind of post-60s, is that he is, like, this, you know, um, absolute pacifist.
00:15:06.060 And, like, we can see this reach just, um, blasphemous forms, like, with the Southern Baptist Convention.
00:15:11.440 And that kind of whole milieu of Protestant thinking, which says that it's virtuous, you know, to let, like, you know, a Negro would rape your wife and invade your home rather than use violence to defend yourself.
00:15:23.900 That this has become common.
00:15:28.960 And the truth of the matter is, if you permit that to happen, then you're just as guilty as a Negro is.
00:15:34.540 That's it.
00:15:38.900 But this is because people don't understand how responsibility works.
00:15:43.320 Right?
00:15:43.460 I mean, responsibility is not the target or the object of the accuser's blame.
00:15:47.960 But responsibility is, like, one with authority.
00:15:51.400 So if you're a husband, right, you have authority over your household unit.
00:15:55.180 You also have, you're responsible for everything that happens to them.
00:15:58.480 Okay?
00:16:00.340 Because you're the head of the household.
00:16:01.860 Nothing, you know, the head has to deal with everything that happens to the rest of the body.
00:16:06.640 Right?
00:16:07.460 And it's the one that gets looked at when the rest of the body does things that are wrong.
00:16:11.940 Like, if you kick somebody, the man does not readdress your leg, but rather your head.
00:16:17.200 And so this is the way responsibility works.
00:16:18.980 And so if you allow your body to be mutilated, which you have a responsibility, a duty of self-preservation, because it's in the image and likeness of God, right?
00:16:28.920 I mean, you are effectively mutilating it yourself.
00:16:33.900 Well, anything else would be suicide, which is a deadly sin.
00:16:39.460 The primary purpose of the head of the family is the primary protector of the family.
00:16:45.860 And that's where much of the authority rests.
00:16:47.900 It's the same thing for the king of a country.
00:16:49.740 A king, monarch, is a war leader.
00:16:53.600 This is why females were often not to be found in positions of power, because you had to be a soldier.
00:17:00.620 Being the protector of the realm is your primary responsibility.
00:17:07.060 Absolutely.
00:17:08.100 Absolutely.
00:17:10.600 Yeah, and I mean, it's just, it's, there's nothing really to say about it.
00:17:15.820 I mean, it comes from just shallowness and intentional, you know, co-intelpro dissolution of traditional Christian values, right?
00:17:23.560 I mean, because, I mean, Christ is, like, the conqueror.
00:17:27.560 He's the warrior, right?
00:17:29.500 The king.
00:17:31.420 I mean, that's what this means, right?
00:17:33.380 I mean, he is the new David, right?
00:17:34.980 Except he, his sword is noetic.
00:17:37.820 I mean, he's spiritual.
00:17:39.300 And he slain Hades and death and the devil.
00:17:42.040 That's the enemy, death itself.
00:17:45.980 I mean, this is the need.
00:17:47.460 Go on, Father.
00:17:49.100 Think of the transfiguration.
00:17:50.140 One of the most essential events in the New Testament.
00:17:54.880 Who shows up?
00:17:56.580 Elijah and Moses.
00:17:58.800 In the Old Testament, they killed a lot of people.
00:18:03.880 Elijah killed them without any other authority other than his prophetic office.
00:18:08.640 Those are the two that show up at the transfiguration, proving that the Old Testament and the New Testament are equal.
00:18:16.280 I mean, there's your proof right there.
00:18:20.460 Elijah especially.
00:18:21.440 And Moses, you know, at least had a regular state in an army that he founded.
00:18:25.980 But Elijah didn't.
00:18:27.360 It was solely on his authority as a prophet.
00:18:30.120 And he killed or hurt a lot of people.
00:18:33.420 There's nothing wrong with that if done for the right reason and for the right motive and for the right target.
00:18:41.120 Absolutely.
00:18:41.480 So, yeah, I mean, this is the one of the other things that a lot of modernist liberal Christians base their pacifism on is the example of the holy martyrs and the traditional peaceful warfare, as the church fathers describe it, of the right glorious martyrs.
00:19:00.940 And so they make the assertion that the martyrs' nonviolence and nonresistance to persecution at the hands of the Roman authority was because they were following the nonviolent pacifistic gospel of Christ.
00:19:14.480 That's what their contention is.
00:19:17.300 Now, this is obviously nonsense.
00:19:19.460 Father, do you want to discuss how the spiritual warfare works and what the purpose of martyrdom is?
00:19:24.840 Well, you know, like St. Stephen, Boris and Gleb would be another example.
00:19:31.980 They see how it worked out for the Israelites under Roman control.
00:19:37.340 They tore the temple down.
00:19:40.160 They realized that in certain cases, you know, fighting back is suicidal.
00:19:44.840 That fighting back would lead to a tit-for-tat that would never end.
00:19:48.040 But the Israelite example in A.D. 70 shows it doesn't – in some cases, in many cases, it just doesn't work.
00:19:57.420 Boris and Gleb went to their deaths even though they had armies behind them very explicitly because if they had fought, it would have led to a nonstop civil war between these city-states that were all Russian at the time.
00:20:11.360 And dying saved God knows how many lives.
00:20:17.560 So it's a simple matter of common sense in these cases.
00:20:22.820 Yeah, indeed.
00:20:24.000 The other thing I wanted to comment on is that the – for those of you who are not aware of, like, the history of the Great Persecution and so on,
00:20:33.420 so the Great Persecution was initiated by the Emperor Diocletian in 303 A.D.
00:20:37.080 Okay, and so hundreds of – you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, the numbers are not precise.
00:20:43.760 Christians died and martyred in very, very brutal ways.
00:20:48.180 In 311, Christianity was legalized.
00:20:52.120 In 325, the First Council of Nicaea was convoked.
00:20:56.560 In the 380s, Christianity was the original – or official religion of the entire Roman Empire.
00:21:01.480 So, I mean, the fruit of martyrdom was spiritual warfare.
00:21:09.100 They conquered Rome.
00:21:11.640 If you read the Troparia to the martyrs, it talks about how they're vanquishing demons.
00:21:17.860 They're foiling the plots of demons.
00:21:19.080 This is the whole – the whole purpose is that they are embracing the cross themselves, which destroys and kills sin,
00:21:26.200 which is purifying, which is cleansing, offering themselves in their lives as a sacrifice in union with the one sacrifice of Christ,
00:21:34.960 which is the terror of demons.
00:21:36.640 It's spiritual warfare.
00:21:37.580 St. John says explicitly that the work of the Lord is to foil the plots of the devil.
00:21:45.180 There are legions of church fathers who connect the office of the soldier to the office of the monk.
00:21:50.440 It's the same thing.
00:21:52.860 It's the same battle.
00:21:53.880 It's the same enemy, just different tools.
00:21:56.620 They suffer the same way, and they should be treated the same way.
00:22:00.800 It's just a different arena.
00:22:02.960 Otherwise, they'd be treated identically.
00:22:06.100 A monk is just a soldier, just with a non-visible enemy.
00:22:09.440 Yeah, exactly.
00:22:17.580 That's exactly how it is.
00:22:18.760 And it's – this is one of the things that becomes very, very apparent is that most branches of Christianity have absolutely no serious demonology or theology or spiritual warfare.
00:22:33.200 And it's just – this is – it's so – I mean, if you read the gospel, this is like half of what Christ does is exercise demons.
00:22:39.440 I mean, I've had conversations with Protestants who are, oh, it's all – it's all theoretical.
00:22:44.520 It's all just a metaphor.
00:22:45.560 It's just a – these are metaphors for our sins.
00:22:47.620 You know, and I open up verse after verse after verse of scripture where Christ is casting out demons, having conversations with demons, gives his apostles authority over demons.
00:22:56.040 And they exercise them.
00:22:58.380 Right?
00:22:58.600 I mean, this is the – what – you know, these people are crazy.
00:23:01.300 One of the bitterest pills I've ever had to swallow in my career, and I don't think I've totally swallowed it completely, is the fact that what I do 24 hours a day, now for 28 years, is study facts and make logical arguments and backup statements and site sources and all this stuff.
00:23:19.720 And I go out into the world and realize that no one else does that.
00:23:25.080 They believe what's convenient, what's easy, what justifies their lifestyle.
00:23:29.780 And I have given fact after fact after fact to someone, and I hear them the very next day saying the same garbage they said before.
00:23:39.280 It just doesn't have an impact if they're self-interested.
00:23:41.740 And it is something that – I don't know.
00:23:43.740 I just was very naive as a young man thinking that people actually were worried about the truth.
00:23:47.440 And it took a long time for me to wrap my brain around the fact that very few people do.
00:23:53.260 And in fact, truth is your enemy most of the time, and you'll become – the prophets have to be read, and they have to be read in depth because that's our life.
00:24:02.380 That's exactly what we're doing.
00:24:04.320 They use a lot of harsher language, and they all – most of them were murdered.
00:24:07.860 They threw Jeremiah into the sewer, but their lives are our life right now, and that's why the prophets are absolutely essential, and Christ acted like a prophet.
00:24:21.180 Someone at the cross even said, oh, he's calling on Elijah.
00:24:25.600 He behaved like a prophet.
00:24:27.300 He had the exact same method, his harsh language, and he was a difficult man.
00:24:30.740 And so in imitating the prophets and speaking like a prophet, Christ himself is certainly giving them tremendous authority.
00:24:38.540 When you have a book in the Bible named after you, it's pretty important, and they're ignored, and we all know why they're ignored.
00:24:47.180 I mean Joshua – the book of Joshua, I just read that recently.
00:24:50.520 I mean it reads like – it reads almost like a national socialist piece of fiction.
00:24:56.280 I mean literally it's about this ethnic group sanctioned by God who come in and displace all of the Canaanites and kill them all and take all of their cities, and then God distributes the territory in a socialist fashion.
00:25:11.120 Yeah, the whole book is about that.
00:25:12.160 Based on family.
00:25:12.820 Right, and then basically Joshua says, keep to the Lord your God, don't race mix.
00:25:17.860 This is his main takeaway.
00:25:19.620 Keep to the Lord your God, don't race mix, don't worship idols.
00:25:22.420 But that was at a time where people weren't brainwashed and weren't manipulated by demons.
00:25:31.240 There is no time in the history of the world like this time.
00:25:33.940 Nothing.
00:25:35.080 It doesn't matter.
00:25:35.640 The worst of the Romans is better than what we have.
00:25:41.400 Absolutely.
00:25:43.080 All right.
00:25:44.440 So the – yeah, this is – I wanted to make this point because this is just – I mean I see people saying this ridiculous nonsense all the time.
00:25:50.400 That this is the meaning of martyrdom is just to be like a fag.
00:25:55.120 I mean it's just to lie down and take what your enemy gives you, you know, I mean like a pussy.
00:25:59.360 Excuse me.
00:26:00.020 It's vulgar, but that's basically what the accusation is.
00:26:02.440 And this is like the farthest from the truth.
00:26:04.360 This is the opposite.
00:26:05.540 But this is the nature of the mystery of the cross is that it confounds the wisdom of the wise.
00:26:10.580 I mean people who don't believe, they don't see this as an object of victory.
00:26:13.900 I mean think about this.
00:26:14.800 Christians, we have our God defeated, crucified, dead, tortured and humiliated, naked on the cross.
00:26:21.340 And like this is our icon.
00:26:23.840 And so, I mean for our enemies, I mean this looks ridiculous.
00:26:26.640 I mean we've got our tortured and dead God.
00:26:28.740 We carry that around.
00:26:32.060 You know, I mean –
00:26:32.580 And why make that up?
00:26:33.740 Yeah.
00:26:34.320 Why make that up?
00:26:34.780 All right.
00:26:34.980 Continue your thought.
00:26:36.360 Sorry.
00:26:36.540 Yeah, and I'm just saying that the only way the cross makes sense as a Christian symbol is if it's a victory.
00:26:44.720 If, in fact, that's what the cross is precisely, is Christ's victory over the world.
00:26:50.020 This is his conquest.
00:26:51.640 That his death has destroyed death itself.
00:26:55.420 Right?
00:26:55.580 And this is what the martyrdom means.
00:26:57.020 This is like they're undergoing their own bearing of the cross, their own crucifixion, the imitation of Christ, defeating death within themselves and within the empire around them.
00:27:09.380 I mean this is what was going on as they were conquering the Roman Empire spiritually, engaging in peaceful warfare as we've described before.
00:27:15.900 Well, one of the arguments I've made for the truth of the gospel, one of the best arguments I've come across is, especially given the cultural confines of the day, writing about a man with no job, surrounded by women, condemning everything and everyone, and dying in humiliation on the cross was the worst conceivable way you could ever get followers.
00:27:43.160 It proves that it's true.
00:27:46.480 No one would ever follow that if it were to, especially at the time.
00:27:50.320 It was almost designed to drive as many people away as humanly possible.
00:27:54.620 But the sufferings of a soldier in the battlefield are the same as a martyr where he stands.
00:28:01.960 It's just a matter of what you're called to do and what the situation calls for.
00:28:05.960 We're not all called to die.
00:28:07.120 You know, you talk to someone who says that the martyrs previous to Constantine are proof of pacifism, and yet there's Constantine who formed an empire.
00:28:20.000 It doesn't make sense.
00:28:21.180 And again, we're going to mention this a lot, but cognitive dissonance.
00:28:23.980 And then that's when they start calling names, and, you know, unfortunately, we can't take care of it like Elijah did, but maybe we can one day.
00:28:33.680 Who knows?
00:28:34.580 A good example of this before we move on is I was having a conversation with an Orthodox Christian who was raised in kind of mainline Greek Orthodoxy in Greece.
00:28:42.440 And, you know, and I was supporting the historical Orthodox position of the death penalty for sodomy.
00:28:50.420 And so I sent him Justinian's law code, and I said, so this is a law code that was written by an emperor who's a saint.
00:28:57.200 And the prefect of the assembly team was John the Cappadocian, who's also a saint, patriarch of Constantinople.
00:29:03.720 And it says they should be set on fire.
00:29:06.360 So you're telling me this isn't an Orthodox position.
00:29:08.620 And he basically accused me of becoming Orthodox so that I could set fags on fire.
00:29:13.700 That was his response.
00:29:17.060 Oh, yeah, that would make me laugh.
00:29:19.100 I'd say, oh, stop the flattery.
00:29:20.660 Yeah, exactly.
00:29:21.600 I'm not that hardcore, please.
00:29:23.380 Yeah, not that cool.
00:29:26.160 Well, Thomas Jefferson said that they should be drawn and quartered.
00:29:28.840 He says it right in notes in Virginia.
00:29:30.760 The most liberal by far of the founding fathers said they should be put to death.
00:29:35.640 You know, they weren't living in a time where you're brainwashed into thinking that they're just, you know, they're men with good fashion sense.
00:29:43.300 You know, the brainwashing is so overwhelming that we can't even describe it anymore.
00:29:46.940 And the most liberal of the founding fathers wanted them dead.
00:29:50.440 It was more than just the disgusting acts that they do.
00:29:53.240 There's something wrong with them personally.
00:29:54.580 Well, the fact that even he opted for drawing and quartering says something, too, because it was a punishment reserved for the absolute worst of the worst, the most disordered and chaotic agents of evil in the world for English punishments.
00:30:10.240 You're absolutely right.
00:30:11.780 Yeah, I mean, that's how perverse it was.
00:30:14.840 We have to just get rid of this mental illness however we can.
00:30:19.900 No, you're absolutely right.
00:30:20.720 And it's so out of character for Jefferson, too.
00:30:25.700 Yeah, I mean, it's but it's just a, you know, I mean, it goes back to this.
00:30:29.040 I mean, anybody, all the founding fathers were Nazis.
00:30:33.360 That's where we are.
00:30:34.640 I mean, not literally.
00:30:35.660 They were liberals, obviously.
00:30:37.400 But I mean, for normies, that's what they were is they were hardcore neo-Nazis.
00:30:41.740 Well, to a great extent.
00:30:45.700 I mean, there's a lot of truth to that.
00:30:48.940 You know, they they didn't.
00:30:50.700 A lot of their positions would they'd be they'd be drawn and quartered today.
00:30:55.320 For saying stuff like that.
00:30:57.620 And it's a lot more than that.
00:30:58.900 You know, the race issue, the feminism issue, the fag issue.
00:31:03.580 Church fathers would be in prison today.
00:31:06.300 I'm sorry, the founding fathers would be in prison today.
00:31:09.240 Yeah, absolutely.
00:31:12.480 So we've covered this on the show before.
00:31:14.320 I mean, but this is just so.
00:31:16.840 So let's talk about violence, you know, between Christians and what the actual meaning of turn the other cheek is, because we've explained this before on the show.
00:31:27.000 But basically, for those of you who are not aware, I mean, the pagans, you know, atheists, liberals, they love to throw that in your face, you know, turn the other cheek.
00:31:35.580 I think, you know, I mean, like, what this means, basically, is in ancient Israel, Christ specifically says, if you were slapped on your right cheek, turn your left cheek.
00:31:48.340 Okay, because in ancient Israel, to initiate a duel, you would backhand somebody with your right hand, you'd slap their right cheek.
00:31:54.340 This was a challenge in the Mediterranean culture, in all ancient civilizational culture.
00:31:58.060 There was a challenge and response system, from a cultural anthropological point of view, in order to maintain your honor.
00:32:05.520 And so what Christ is saying is that if somebody challenges you to a duel, okay, he insults you, you turn your other cheek.
00:32:12.980 Now, what would happen is that would force, if you were exposed to the left cheek, it would mean that he would have to strike you with an open hand.
00:32:19.860 And that would start a fight.
00:32:20.840 To build upon that further, I do believe at some point during one of your podcast programs on the internet, Florian, you did say that God is not autistic.
00:32:39.340 And that, you know, when an autistic person reads a book, they often understand things very literally, and they don't really understand, like, the deeper context of a writing.
00:32:53.240 Yeah, that's it, essentially.
00:32:56.000 That's it, essentially.
00:32:56.800 God is not autistic, indeed.
00:32:58.360 And so this is, I mean, this is what I would ask you, kind of a segue.
00:33:01.180 So, Father Johnson, so, I mean, what is, you know, Orthodox Christianity, what's the teaching of Christ on violence between Orthodox people and between Christian nations, and in that context, and for our personal enemies?
00:33:15.060 And can you talk about the distinction between personal and non-personal enemies?
00:33:20.340 Well, both St. Augustine and St. Ambrose make it very clear that violence among Christians is always, probably, illegitimate.
00:33:31.180 There's simply no justification for it.
00:33:34.640 Now, St. Ambrose said that even responding personally, that self-defense among Christians is illegitimate.
00:33:42.440 Now, he's, you know, that's not the majority opinion.
00:33:45.160 That's pretty radical opinion.
00:33:47.680 The difference between personal and all other forms of enemies is that, you know, one's public and the other is private.
00:33:55.860 An enemy that wouldn't be personal would be, you know, a mob attack on a church, an invasion of your country, humiliation of Christians abroad, something like this.
00:34:07.740 And it goes back to what I said before, that it can't be motivated by revenge.
00:34:12.400 It can't be motivated by those feelings where somehow your self-interest is being served by this.
00:34:20.140 It has to be done calmly and rationally, or it shouldn't be done at all.
00:34:23.280 Yeah, exactly.
00:34:29.100 And so, I mean, I think this is, people don't understand, I mean, the way Christian theology works.
00:34:36.700 I mean, so the message, if you read the first chapter of the Gospel of John, the whole point of why the Logos became flesh is so that they who received him could become sons of God.
00:34:48.300 That's what it says.
00:34:50.500 Okay?
00:34:51.300 And so, if you're a Christian, if you're in the church, everybody else who's in the church is your brother and sister, literally.
00:34:59.420 You're in the same household.
00:35:01.200 You're brothers and sisters by adoption into the household of God.
00:35:05.360 So you're more really, really and substantially, ontologically related to them than you are with your blood family.
00:35:14.320 Well, the same blood flows through our veins, through the Eucharist.
00:35:17.180 Precisely.
00:35:17.540 That's it.
00:35:18.300 Yeah.
00:35:21.320 That's it.
00:35:22.040 You know, the blood of Christ flows through all of us from the one cup of the Eucharist.
00:35:25.860 And so, it is a blood connection.
00:35:28.020 That's, that's, you mean.
00:35:31.500 I can hear people already getting annoyed and, go ahead.
00:35:38.980 I didn't say anything.
00:35:39.720 No, please, Russell.
00:35:40.120 Sorry, I was hearing, but I can hear people already getting annoyed in the background over, oh, does that mean it's legitimate?
00:35:47.540 When bad Christians from Nigeria come into your country and demand food and all this stuff.
00:35:54.160 The thing that has to dominate our minds when we think about these things is, and I said bad Christians for a reason.
00:36:00.800 When they come demanding things of you and they come with their hands out, they are not acting in good faith.
00:36:06.940 And in many ways, to me, it looks like when they start making demands, I hear an awful lot about especially the church in Nigeria as an Anglican being an upright sort of example of what we should be doing.
00:36:18.400 And I'm sure there are many good priests and bishops there, but a lot of what happens is like a racket where they come around with their hands out and they say, give us money, give us money, give us money.
00:36:27.080 Well, you're right to say that they're not really doing that.
00:36:32.400 They've been hired.
00:36:33.320 They've been mobilized.
00:36:35.060 There's these groups, Oxfam and all of this, are looking for people in North Africa and the Middle East to send to Europe.
00:36:42.340 So, you know, we're not dealing with the same situation as far as the migrant issue is concerned, especially with the violence.
00:36:49.420 I don't care what religion they are.
00:36:53.540 You're contributing to rape and murder if you accept migration to Europe any further.
00:37:00.120 I mean, yeah, this is essentially, I mean, what it comes down to.
00:37:06.220 I mean, here's the thing.
00:37:07.420 People don't, because people are autistic, okay, they go to extremes naturally.
00:37:12.640 Like, they don't understand.
00:37:14.300 I mean, it is possible.
00:37:16.820 It is possible to be a member of an ethnicity, okay, and have that ethnicity have its own territory and governance while still being a member of the church.
00:37:30.120 Right?
00:37:31.380 And so, if you, like, people go to this question with, like, say, well, what do you do about, you know, non-white Christians?
00:37:37.140 Well, you know, there still might be Christians, but they have their own countries, their own nations.
00:37:44.120 I mean, it's such an obvious thing, but people have been so twisted and lost sight of these basic, I mean, like, no shit Sherlock facts.
00:37:54.740 Well, again, when it comes to these sorts of issues, even the most obvious facts don't matter.
00:38:04.580 And when you talk about a politician or a businessman that is bringing in more immigrants from Somalia or whatever, aware of the crime statistics, aware of what's going to happen, and he puts himself in danger.
00:38:18.000 I mean, he may live in a gated community, but not all the time.
00:38:21.600 You know, we know the head of Time Warner had his son killed by a gangster.
00:38:25.100 This is the same guy who, Eisner, who killed, who created Gangster Wreck.
00:38:29.700 Didn't bother him at all.
00:38:30.960 He kept producing it.
00:38:31.880 And when you have a regime that is overriding the instinct for self-preservation, you have to start talking about a spiritual force that deludes them.
00:38:43.240 There is, in my mind, there is no other explanation.
00:38:46.300 When you have people, you know, the sign, you've seen it, rapists before racists, and women are doing this.
00:38:52.820 All of a sudden, feminists are saying rape is okay if it's done by one of these people, more or less.
00:38:56.560 When that starts happening, it's not rational.
00:39:01.440 It's even the most basic instinct it does war with.
00:39:05.220 So you have to be talking about – even more than brainwashing, it's demonic.
00:39:09.140 It has a spiritual cause.
00:39:10.980 I don't know of any other cause for it.
00:39:12.780 No one can be that deluded outside of a demonic trick.
00:39:18.560 I agree.
00:39:20.120 I mean, but here's what I think.
00:39:21.220 I mean, it's because people don't really understand the way sin works, right?
00:39:24.480 They see sin as – you know, they see grace as this, like, created ontological, you know, Manichean substance, this light, this created light.
00:39:33.900 And they see evil, like, as the same, like this dualistic opposite substance, right?
00:39:38.180 And so they don't understand that, you know, people evil – like, you know, you become a slave to demons when the core of your identity is based on falsehood and sin and lies and corruption.
00:39:48.020 Your personality is disintegrated in its essence because it's based upon falsehood.
00:39:57.800 And that means you're a servant of the devil.
00:39:59.900 That's what it means, right?
00:40:02.140 Your core identity is sin, right, which comes from demons.
00:40:07.140 Plato spent his career saying that, arguing that, maybe not the demonic part, but the idea that sin, doing the wrong thing, injustice, isn't so much an act but a state of mind and a state of affairs that's often very public.
00:40:24.540 Like, we know people who suffer from depression, for example, or body dysmorphic disorder, they see, you know, something that doesn't exist.
00:40:34.220 It affects their cognition.
00:40:36.420 It affects their senses.
00:40:37.240 We all don't see the same object in the same way.
00:40:42.900 Someone who is saturated with sin doesn't see the world as it really is.
00:40:47.400 All he sees is this arena where he can indulge himself and justify himself.
00:40:53.360 We don't look at this world the same way.
00:40:54.980 The world doesn't appear in the same way.
00:40:56.760 It creates a lying, total world of delusion.
00:41:01.360 Think of an addict is the same way.
00:41:03.120 And they become geniuses at rationalizing it.
00:41:05.460 If we don't look at the world the same way, our, you know, the world becomes a projection of your evil if you're living in sin.
00:41:13.600 Yeah, the example I like to use is, like, the heroin addict.
00:41:16.920 I mean, if you can have a guy with 140 IQ, if he's addicted to heroin, his genius is being used to acquire more heroin.
00:41:24.000 And demons are basically like this, just intensified.
00:41:26.880 I mean, they're 1,000 IQ heroin addicts, right?
00:41:30.560 And so that's why they're so stupid.
00:41:32.380 Unless they're defending their addiction.
00:41:36.960 And then they become geniuses.
00:41:39.080 It's unbelievable.
00:41:39.820 The arguments they come up with that throw you off.
00:41:43.600 It's, you know, if they put that to legitimate use, you know, they'd cure cancer.
00:41:49.240 And when you have a mind that functions that way, you know there's a pathological condition.
00:41:53.420 In our case, it's a spiritual condition.
00:41:55.120 No one can be that deluded.
00:41:56.160 Pretty much.
00:42:00.800 Yeah, so we talked about this a little bit already.
00:42:03.560 I wanted to touch on, you know, personal self-defense, you know, and then the patriarchal economy, right, or the economical household, right, the spiritual household.
00:42:14.500 And just kind of school people and how corporate responsibility and all that works.
00:42:24.180 So do you want me to do an introduction or does anybody else want to make an opening comment?
00:42:31.100 Are other people still there?
00:42:32.820 Are they on the line?
00:42:35.400 I'm still there.
00:42:36.400 I'm listening with greater attentiveness.
00:42:40.740 Oh, okay.
00:42:42.120 I had forgotten.
00:42:42.640 Okay.
00:42:44.500 Anyway, so I will then.
00:42:45.960 I mean, so we talked about this a little bit beforehand with this idea of, okay, so God is a patriarch.
00:42:53.060 The universe is literally a patriarchy.
00:42:54.920 That's what God the Father means, okay?
00:42:58.720 That's what the monarchia of God the Father means.
00:43:01.100 It means that all of creation is a universal patriarchy.
00:43:04.760 So just get that out of the way.
00:43:07.060 I mean, if you believe in the Trinity, you must accept this.
00:43:10.220 I mean, there's no exception.
00:43:14.260 You can't make any exception.
00:43:15.200 That's right.
00:43:15.660 Yeah.
00:43:15.900 I mean, it's just, that's it.
00:43:17.400 If you reject this, you reject the Trinity.
00:43:20.780 I mean, it's not an accident that Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father, incarnated as like a man.
00:43:26.140 I mean, some Christians, some feminist Christians pretend like this is just, you know, like an accident.
00:43:31.980 You know, anyway, my point is, is that God is a patriarch.
00:43:39.100 And more than just a patriarch, he is a, he believes in, he's a community of people.
00:43:45.480 God is in his essence a community.
00:43:48.100 He's a holy trinity.
00:43:48.780 And so God deals with people, not only patriarchally, and not only with the responsibility that we mentioned earlier, but as communities, as groups.
00:43:58.620 That's why Adam and Eve were created as a pair, because God saw that it was not fit for Adam to be alone.
00:44:03.820 He needed a partner, community.
00:44:06.480 And so Adam, in the garden, is the patriarch, the high priest, prophet, and king of the human race.
00:44:13.400 He's a type of Christ.
00:44:14.440 And so what they have to, like, what we have to understand is that this concept, this is why Adam went into sin, not just himself, but his wife and the whole universe descended with him.
00:44:27.060 Right?
00:44:27.580 The whole cosmos was affected because he was the priest in charge of the material world.
00:44:32.820 And so because he had responsibility, literally he was the head of the universe, the head of the, on earth, right, he brought it into sin.
00:44:39.680 And so this concept of real spiritual household authority, right, and it is not arbitrary, is central to Christianity, central to the Christian worldview.
00:44:53.340 And so this patriarchal authority exists, you know, first of all in the family, in the household, right, but also in, you know, the community, the nation, according to class and function, right, in an empire and in the church.
00:45:06.620 And so this is the concept, this is why, right, if, you know, your house is being attacked by bandits and you do nothing, you are responsible for everything that happens to your family.
00:45:20.440 That's one of the most overwhelmingly powerful arguments against any kind of pacifism or turning on the cheek.
00:45:30.920 That would even be the case if the guy breaking into your house was orthodox, although, obviously, if he's doing something like that, it doesn't take the church all that seriously.
00:45:39.000 But it becomes your fault if you do nothing, including if, you know, if it's almost certain death, you still have to do it.
00:45:46.600 Yeah, exactly.
00:45:50.860 That's what it comes down to.
00:45:52.160 And the other thing is that people have, in orthodox countries, the whores are orthodox.
00:45:58.000 They go to church.
00:46:01.300 You know, I mean, people don't understand this because they've never lived in a place like this before.
00:46:05.000 But in the traditional world, like in Catholic countries, orthodox countries, everybody was orthodox.
00:46:11.940 And the whores went to church.
00:46:13.520 They didn't receive communion.
00:46:14.560 They stood at the back, right?
00:46:17.180 But they worshiped the Holy Trinity.
00:46:21.380 And so people cannot conceive of a nation that's Christian, that's that integrated, that has that sobornos.
00:46:30.840 Also, with regards to violence, too, if we think about it this way, through natural law, even an animal has the basic instinct to save its own life and to save the life of its progeny and its family, too.
00:46:48.280 It's part of natural law.
00:46:49.600 It's built into – it's built into – it's not a function of the fallen universe except that warfare, by definition, derives from sin.
00:46:58.280 But that aspect of it comes from self-sacrifice.
00:47:02.600 You're absolutely right.
00:47:03.580 You've seen it a hundred times, the lioness going to her death to defend her cubs.
00:47:11.240 Precisely.
00:47:12.280 Precisely.
00:47:12.780 I mean, and that's what Christ says.
00:47:14.220 Man has no greater love than this to lay down his life for his friends.
00:47:18.860 Right?
00:47:21.260 That's God speaking.
00:47:22.160 And this is what a soldier does, and this is what a monk does when he shuts off his connection to the rest of the world.
00:47:30.900 It's death in that case.
00:47:31.960 Really, it is – it's a glorified death when you become a monk.
00:47:36.060 You can't have any of these ties.
00:47:38.800 It's the exact same world except the enemy is different.
00:47:42.620 And really, the enemy isn't different.
00:47:43.960 It's just manifested in different ways.
00:47:45.460 Yeah, exactly.
00:47:49.940 So this is the other thing I wanted to discuss.
00:47:51.860 It's another, you know, kind of trite quip.
00:47:55.320 Love your enemies.
00:47:57.040 Right?
00:47:57.760 You know, and again, this is – our enemies use this to say, oh, well, that means that, you know, you have to, you know, bend over and indulge your adversaries, personal and public.
00:48:07.640 That's what they believe the teaching means.
00:48:08.960 So we've kind of discussed why this is, you know, balderdash already, but let's discuss it a little bit more.
00:48:15.680 I mean, so, Father, like what is an enemy?
00:48:19.880 Okay?
00:48:20.680 And what does Christ mean when he says, love your enemies?
00:48:23.800 And is there a difference between loving personal enemies and then public enemies, that kind of thing?
00:48:28.800 Well, it seems these days, almost every day, I'm getting into a debate over what the word love means because it's assumed that love means indulgence.
00:48:42.900 And, of course, that wasn't the case in the past.
00:48:45.140 The notion of romantic love and getting married because you're in love with somebody in our modern sense, that's brand new.
00:48:51.400 That's, you know, that's 19th century.
00:48:52.840 The idea of marrying someone because they're attractive, I mean, this is brand new.
00:48:58.380 This has never been known in history before.
00:49:01.880 This notion of love as being, you know, this beta male is humiliation.
00:49:07.280 This is absolutely, absolutely brand new.
00:49:09.480 It doesn't exist, didn't exist before.
00:49:12.900 You marry someone based on something completely different.
00:49:18.200 Love is manifest in spreading the truth.
00:49:22.840 If you don't tell the truth to someone, you're not really their friend.
00:49:28.400 Love is, you know, it's a state of affairs where everyone is functioning.
00:49:34.240 Think of an ecosystem that's unified as this single body of every element doing what it's supposed to do to contribute to the whole.
00:49:43.400 This is what it is.
00:49:44.060 I mean, it's so bizarre to treat it that way because we're so used to thinking of it in this saccharine, you know, hallmark, Valentine's Day kind of way.
00:49:53.720 But when Moses destroyed the Canaanites, it was done out of love.
00:49:59.540 He, you know, part of the concept was that he's putting these people out of their misery.
00:50:05.360 If they're really living like that, sacrificing children and worshipping rocks and everything else, the best thing that could have ever happened to them is that they get killed.
00:50:14.660 A quick question.
00:50:16.320 So, inherently, what you're telling me is love is inherently truth and truth is the cosmos.
00:50:25.680 Truth is the inherent nature of the struggles of this world.
00:50:30.400 And therefore, truth is an adherence to the struggle of existence.
00:50:35.500 Am I correct to understand this?
00:50:36.640 Truth is, I'm not sure I would quite put it that way because the very nature of this struggle comes from sin.
00:50:45.300 But engaging in the struggle and not really caring what happens to you as a result, that is a manifestation of love, absolutely.
00:50:52.760 Another way to put it is that love is allowing yourself to be hurt for the sake of the betterment of someone who you love, completely rejecting your own self-interest.
00:51:04.840 So, love and humility in that case are very similar.
00:51:08.460 The one thing it's not is what most people, is how most people use it, use the term.
00:51:18.120 So, you're telling me that love is not indulging yourself in oxytocins and frequent masturbation?
00:51:26.160 Yeah, that's part of what I'm telling you, yes.
00:51:27.940 And I'm not telling you.
00:51:29.060 This is, you know, the entire, you know, history of the church is telling you this.
00:51:32.220 I happen to be the messenger.
00:51:33.020 But, yes, masturbation and love are not the same.
00:51:36.920 Thank you very much for that answer.
00:51:38.620 You're welcome.
00:51:39.380 I'm glad I can enlighten you on that.
00:51:43.080 You really bring out the best in us, Nat.
00:51:44.760 That's why I brought you on here today.
00:51:48.300 So, yeah, I mean, yeah, I wanted to talk about this.
00:51:51.960 I mean, I think we've talked about.
00:51:53.520 Let's just talk about the history of violence in Scripture.
00:51:55.780 I mean, but also I wanted to talk about, I mean, Christ and the New Testament, the Gospels and so on.
00:52:03.300 You know, and I mean, just hearing from you, Father, I mean, you're the most familiar out of all of us.
00:52:07.220 You just, what does the Old and New Testament, what do they preach on the subject of violence?
00:52:13.460 What does the record say?
00:52:15.840 What does Scripture show us?
00:52:17.800 Well, Scripture shows us a tremendous amount of violence.
00:52:21.760 The Old Testament especially, but even in the book of Revelations in the New Testament.
00:52:26.280 Christ himself was violent.
00:52:27.480 Obviously, his apostles were armed if they had a sword to chop off the servant's ear in the first place.
00:52:33.160 It was his time to go, so he didn't want to be hurt, but that was not a condemnation of violence as such.
00:52:41.420 As I said in the very beginning, there's nothing special about violence.
00:52:45.060 There are things that are far worse than violence.
00:52:47.580 There are aspects of pain that are far worse than what it would be like to be hit or punched or cut.
00:52:52.920 Far worse, and there are far worse punishments than death.
00:52:56.260 That's all that's our modern, completely vulgar, nominist way of thinking about things.
00:53:09.880 You cut out there, Father.
00:53:11.520 Can you just repeat?
00:53:12.200 Excuse me?
00:53:12.720 You just cut out there about 15, 20 seconds ago.
00:53:14.920 Why don't you repeat yourself?
00:53:16.660 Oh, where did I cut out?
00:53:17.640 What was I saying?
00:53:18.560 Nominalism.
00:53:20.200 Oh, well, that's where it comes from.
00:53:21.500 If it's not blatant, if it's not obvious, if it's not something that you can put into a computer, if you can't turn it into a number, then it doesn't exist.
00:53:30.500 The key element is self-interest.
00:53:32.260 If you're doing it for your own purposes, to promote something of yours, whether financial or whatever it is, if you're doing it for a sacrifice for the whole, which is what a soldier does, which is what a monk does, it's legitimate.
00:53:46.020 It's like spanking a child.
00:53:49.060 If you spank a child out of anger, it's the wrong thing to do, and you're not going to gain anything from it.
00:53:55.840 You may do it, though, to teach your child something.
00:54:00.660 And so you're doing it for a rational reason in a rational frame of mind.
00:54:03.900 Same act, very, very different circumstances.
00:54:05.940 Yeah, and this is what I think it comes down to is that people, it's a combination of both this kind of feminine Gnosticism on the one hand and this, you know, hyper-masculine nominalism on the other hand.
00:54:23.260 And so, I mean, people have such a warped view of sin because of the degeneration of created grace in the West, you know, they view it as this, they don't understand what the passions are.
00:54:35.200 They don't understand that God made anger and hate in us.
00:54:38.720 It's not like the result of the fall.
00:54:40.960 Anger and hate are part of our soul.
00:54:43.600 But what happened is during the fall, the direction, the object of our anger and hate became disordered.
00:54:53.960 That's exactly right.
00:54:55.120 And Plato says the same thing when he talks about eros, what the erotic world is.
00:55:00.620 It can be for the sake of reason.
00:55:02.440 I mean pursuing the truth because you love it is perfectly – it sounds like a passion, but it's not.
00:55:10.380 Passions are precisely when it's disordered both in terms of your motivation and in terms of its purpose.
00:55:16.540 You know, when you go off into battle because you are just so in love with your people that you want to lay down your life for them, this is not an illegitimate passion.
00:55:26.400 It's rational both in its origin and in its purpose.
00:55:30.020 Yeah, and I think that this is it precisely.
00:55:35.300 And this is – I mean this is what logos – Christ is the logos.
00:55:41.640 Christ is reason.
00:55:43.460 Use rationality itself, the rational principle.
00:55:46.300 I mean if something is intelligible, I mean if you can understand it, you can understand it because it reflects Christ.
00:55:54.500 I mean –
00:55:54.860 Yeah, he's the foundation of reason.
00:55:56.340 He's the reason why you can make a logical argument to begin with and have it make sense.
00:56:01.820 Absolutely.
00:56:03.420 Absolutely.
00:56:04.120 This is just what's so critical about this doctrine of the logos.
00:56:06.920 I mean this is just – it comes back to it.
00:56:09.180 A lot of this is because people don't really worship God.
00:56:11.800 They worship an idol that they have created in their hearts of God who is this kind of capricious, I mean legalistic tyrant, this monster that demands a gross ransom and satisfaction in exchange for occasional inconsistent favors and possible pie-in-the-sky salvation.
00:56:31.200 That's their view.
00:56:31.900 It's very common, and I see it in traditionalists especially, and it's just as bad as the opposite view, as a Tolstoyan view.
00:56:41.920 When I was a Roman Catholic, this was the concept.
00:56:44.360 He's looking for any excuse to send you to hell.
00:56:48.260 Unless you go to confession, if you die with that stain on your soul, you're finished.
00:56:55.040 And even if you die in righteousness, you're still going to suffer for a long time.
00:56:58.160 But there's a psychological issue here that bothers me.
00:57:04.960 Justice and love and mercy are two very, very different things.
00:57:10.280 Justice in the normal sense we use in kind of the penal sense that you commit a crime and you have to then do the time and you have to make up for whatever it is that you harmed.
00:57:18.740 That's a normal way that a government might run, but that's not how God runs.
00:57:25.420 He makes any excuse to save us.
00:57:27.820 He knows how wretched our lives are.
00:57:29.380 It's one of the reasons he became man.
00:57:31.440 He knows how easy it is to sin.
00:57:32.940 We live in a society that's one just big machine that drives us into sin.
00:57:38.100 He's aware of this.
00:57:38.960 The psalm says, you know, like a father has love towards his sons, so has God the father have mercy on those who care for him.
00:57:47.340 So you think of a good father.
00:57:49.600 You think of a little kid running up to, I did it again, daddy.
00:57:52.740 You punch him in the face?
00:57:54.520 Well, that's what that kind of point of view amounts to.
00:57:58.400 That's what he gets.
00:57:59.020 He's not a father then.
00:58:00.460 He's an absolute monster.
00:58:01.540 Yeah, and this is it exactly.
00:58:05.680 And this is why, I mean, one of the most useful things I've ever said is, like, God is not autistic.
00:58:11.340 I mean, he's not.
00:58:12.460 This is the whole Old Testament.
00:58:14.320 They are always talking about the living God.
00:58:17.060 As God lives, they say.
00:58:20.040 What do they mean?
00:58:21.180 What does God mean when he says, I am who I am to Moses?
00:58:25.160 This is the exact opposite of what we're talking about.
00:58:29.840 This is not the autistic teaching that God is actus purus, and this is a revelation of God's, you know, ontological, eternal action within the universe.
00:58:39.120 But rather, this is God affirming that he's not autistic.
00:58:42.460 He's personal.
00:58:43.660 He knows us.
00:58:44.800 He loves us.
00:58:45.820 We can know him and love him and interact with him like a father can interact with his children.
00:58:53.220 To a great extent, when we talk about God's love, that is the case we are talking about indulgence.
00:58:58.240 Because, especially given the society that we live in, it is not my fault that I was born in 1971, the worst possible year to be born in.
00:59:06.100 Not just because the number one song in the country was Maggie by Rod Stewart, which makes me sick in my stomach.
00:59:10.540 But also because I came of age in the early 80s, the height of the sexual revolution, where you're told that unless you have a beautiful woman every weekend, you're defective.
00:59:20.420 I was told that explicitly.
00:59:21.920 It was everywhere.
00:59:22.700 It was everywhere I went.
00:59:23.460 And it took God.
00:59:26.220 And I only converted in my 20s.
00:59:28.900 So by the time I received grace for the first time, I was already hardwired in that mentality.
00:59:35.300 Yeah, I'm going to sin.
00:59:36.600 I'm definitely going to sin.
00:59:38.420 But God's going to ignore it because he knows my motivations.
00:59:41.660 He knows the nature of the struggle.
00:59:43.160 He's become man.
00:59:43.920 And he's not looking for excuses to send you to hell.
00:59:47.220 I've used this metaphor many times.
00:59:48.820 I know you like it.
00:59:50.180 We are alcoholics who are forced to work in a bar.
00:59:53.780 And even more than that, we're surrounded by people who we like constantly telling us there's no such thing as alcoholism.
01:00:00.340 And it's all in your head.
01:00:01.660 Just take a drink.
01:00:02.400 We'll have a great time.
01:00:03.500 You're in a bar and you see everyone else having fun but you because you can't drink.
01:00:08.100 That's our life.
01:00:09.640 Any normal man knows exactly what I'm talking about.
01:00:11.620 Yeah, we're going to take a drink now and again.
01:00:14.260 We're not going to be able to hold out.
01:00:15.940 God's not going to send us to hell for that.
01:00:17.660 God cannot be involved in anything that's unjust.
01:00:20.660 That's a variation on not being autistic.
01:00:23.480 He can't do anything that a good father wouldn't do.
01:00:28.500 Yeah, this is it.
01:00:30.180 And the whole heresy of Donatism is about this.
01:00:35.080 For those of you who are not aware, the ancient heretic Donatists started this heresy of Donatism.
01:00:41.620 Because there were, during the persecutions, there were traitors who would apostatize and they would tell the Roman authorities where the Christians were hiding, where the holy books were, where the churches were.
01:00:55.480 And so, especially after legalization of Christianity and even before, there were people who would repent and who would want to come back into the church and make amendments.
01:01:06.660 And Donatists essentially was arguing that the church did not, could not forgive them.
01:01:12.320 That God could not forgive them, would not forgive them.
01:01:14.380 Right?
01:01:17.440 And every other way he was orthodox.
01:01:19.260 But this was his heresy.
01:01:20.680 And this is what the church unanimously, roundly condemns.
01:01:24.960 Because it's blasphemy.
01:01:26.380 It's blasphemy to the cross.
01:01:28.420 If you believe in the Trinity and in that Jesus Christ is God-man, then that means that the cross is infinitely powerful.
01:01:37.340 There's power without end.
01:01:38.460 Think about that.
01:01:38.960 There's not, there's no fix, there's no set.
01:01:41.760 He can overcome anything.
01:01:42.960 That has anything that, it's uncreated power.
01:01:48.240 That's what the cross means.
01:01:49.940 That that uncreated power has destroyed our sin.
01:01:52.900 More than that, do they think Paul is a Christian or not?
01:01:55.860 He went from being a, um, worse than a, a, um, simple coward, an actual ardent enemy of, like, the truth and the, uh, Christian way of life and its people.
01:02:10.240 And yet, uh, God's grace was sufficient for him.
01:02:12.780 So, it's, it's just wacky listening to people with, like, these good intentions.
01:02:17.320 Yeah, everybody hates a traitor.
01:02:18.480 Everybody.
01:02:19.220 And you should.
01:02:19.780 But, uh, when genuine repentance is given, obviously it's not within human, human rationality to, um, like it necessarily, but it's not within our power to deny it.
01:02:33.180 Well, here's, here's the thing about the prodigal son.
01:02:35.880 You, you, you are the older son in, in, if you're an Orthodox Christian.
01:02:39.200 You're the older son in that story.
01:02:41.100 You're the guy who, who is following the rules, you know, who, who never, uh, freaked up, who never disrespected his father, who never treated his father as if he was dead, never asked for the fatted calf.
01:02:53.220 And then, you know, you see, you see your, your shitty brother come back and get all this special treatment.
01:02:58.960 Right?
01:02:59.460 This is you.
01:03:00.780 Right?
01:03:01.180 And what, what does God say?
01:03:02.820 Right?
01:03:03.180 God says rejoice because your brother has come back from the dead.
01:03:06.980 I mean, and this is, this is to understand is that we don't, like, the mercy of God is,
01:03:11.060 is beyond, right, our human understanding.
01:03:14.140 This is the point of the story.
01:03:18.420 And the only reason that we would be angry, and I would probably be that guy, I probably definitely would be that guy, is, is, is pride.
01:03:26.040 You owe me this kind of treatment now because I've been good.
01:03:29.760 You owe it to me.
01:03:31.460 And, and that's the big problem with these legalistic doctrines is that you're essentially telling God, okay, I've followed the commandments.
01:03:37.840 You owe me heaven.
01:03:38.980 You owe me grace.
01:03:39.860 You owe me favors.
01:03:41.060 The minute you start thinking in those arrogant terms, that's when you're, you're, you're, you're in error.
01:03:46.440 These heresies like Montanism and Donatism, they posited this, this small group of purified ones.
01:03:53.820 This, this small oligarchy of those who are pure, who were to rule the church, you know, with an iron fist.
01:03:59.660 And a lot of these, and a lot of these, and you've seen a lot of these heresies over the years, that's really about the self-indulgence of a group of people having themselves on the back for their own virtue than about anything else.
01:04:10.060 It really is.
01:04:10.860 It's a monstrous heresy when you think about it in those terms.
01:04:14.600 Yeah, absolutely.
01:04:16.320 Absolutely.
01:04:17.680 All right.
01:04:18.040 This is, we've come to the end of our first hour.
01:04:20.240 So to think this is a natural place to segue off and take a little break.
01:04:23.480 We're going to listen to, I think, Psalm 102, because it's got lessons for everybody.
01:04:29.220 So stay tuned.
01:04:53.480 Psalm 102, because it's got lessons for you.
01:05:23.480 Psalm 102, because it's got lessons for you.
01:05:53.480 And merciful is the Lord, long-suffering, and pletious, and mercy.
01:06:00.680 Not unto the end will he be angered, neither unto eternity will he be wroth.
01:06:09.480 Not according to our iniquities hath he held with us, neither according to our sins hath he rewarded us.
01:06:24.940 For according to the height of heaven from the earth, the Lord hath made his mercy to prevail over them that fear him.
01:06:36.400 As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our iniquities from us.
01:06:46.480 Like as a father hath compassion upon his sons, so hath the Lord hath compassion upon them that fear him.
01:06:56.600 For he knoweth whereof we are made, he hath remembered that we are dust.
01:07:03.800 As for man, his days are as the grass, as a flower of the field, so shall he blossom forth.
01:07:15.800 For when the wind is passed over it, then it shall be gone, and no longer will it know the place thereof.
01:07:26.720 But the mercy of the Lord is from eternity, even unto eternity, upon them that fear him.
01:07:39.120 And his righteousness is upon sons of sons, upon them that keep his testament, and remember his commandments to do them.
01:07:51.020 The Lord in heaven hath prepared his throne, and his kingdom ruleth over all.
01:08:03.220 Bless the Lord, all ye his angels, mighty in strength that perform his word to hear the voice of his words.
01:08:13.420 Bless the Lord, all ye his hosts, his ministers that do his will.
01:08:21.020 Bless the Lord, all ye his works, in every place of his dominion.
01:08:27.080 Bless the Lord, O my soul.
01:08:32.220 Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
01:08:43.500 Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me.
01:09:09.500 Bless his holy name.
01:09:13.560 Bless it art thou, O Lord.
01:09:20.300 Welcome back to Mysterium Fashies, episode 36, Christian Violence, part 2.
01:09:31.500 Thank you for rejoining us.
01:09:34.140 So, we're going to get right back into our subject.
01:09:37.800 So, before that, we cover the history of violence in Scripture, the Old Testaments, Gospels, New Testaments, etc.
01:09:43.260 So, Dr. Johnson, I want to talk about Christian armies now.
01:09:46.760 I mean, we can talk about, you know, the army of ancient Israel, and just Christian organized warfare, how Christian armies are supposed to fight one another.
01:09:54.840 We'll get through each of these topics in turn.
01:09:57.020 But I just wanted to basically ask you, you know, what is the position of Christianity on organized military conflicts, and so on?
01:10:07.140 Well, I think, to a great extent, we've already answered that.
01:10:11.760 Indeed.
01:10:12.520 All the great Orthodox powers have had substantial and professional armies.
01:10:17.120 I forget who it was.
01:10:20.420 Someone had asked about the Byzantine view of warfare, especially clerics bearing arms, because during the Crusades, Byzantines were outraged of seeing bishops and abbots well-armed.
01:10:38.960 And my answer was, well, that's easy for them, when they're being protected by the most advanced professional army in the world.
01:10:49.500 That's not the case everywhere.
01:10:51.920 Now, St. Athanasius does say that clerics can bear arms when they're fighting a heretical power.
01:10:58.580 And he's referring to, you know, any kind of non-Christian movement seeking to destroy your society.
01:11:07.520 There are plenty, we know that the Serbs, Serbian priests and abbots were armed throughout the revolutionary era.
01:11:15.040 So it's certainly legitimate, but again, all the same strictures apply that we mentioned before.
01:11:21.940 Yeah, that's good to know.
01:11:23.620 This is something I wanted to discuss, because it's a, one of the things that's unfortunate about Eastern Orthodoxy is precisely that so much of Eastern culture is incorporated into it just as a mode of translation.
01:11:34.600 And now that it's being reintroduced into the West, a lot of people include elements of Eastern culture as if this was the gospel.
01:11:43.960 When, in fact, you know, there's huge cultural diversity.
01:11:46.060 And there's a very, very long history of Western Orthodox Christians before the schism, you know, because of the frontier nature of their life, bearing arms, clerics, and so on.
01:11:54.620 I mean, the bishop, the Orthodox bishop of Paris led the defense against Ragnar Lothbrok when he besieged Paris.
01:12:08.000 Yeah, and he would have no choice.
01:12:09.700 Well, that's it, because he was in charge of the city, precisely, right?
01:12:13.940 The reason why he put on a male shirt and died with a sword in his hand is because he was the suzerain.
01:12:19.880 He was in charge of the city of Paris, right?
01:12:22.820 And so he was responsible to God for the physical safety of everyone under him and their defense from heath and barbarians.
01:12:28.980 And he didn't have the Byzantine army behind him.
01:12:33.400 You know, it's very easy to be pacifistic when you have the most professional army in the world fighting for you.
01:12:39.880 That wasn't the case in the West.
01:12:42.760 Yeah, and this is just it exactly.
01:12:44.540 And so I think that it's – one of the things that's important, I think, is that the Western culture, you know, is one of frontiersmen.
01:12:52.760 And this is what was so dynamic and brilliant about the Western peoples is that they, you know, were settled on the frontiers, right?
01:13:01.360 I mean, the Rhineland was the mark.
01:13:02.980 That's what mark – when you hear that word, a mark is the border or the line of forts demarking, okay, Roman territory from barbarian lands, okay?
01:13:17.020 So the whole of Western civilization is based on the civilization that came out of settling the marks, the frontier territory, both in the British Isles, in the Rhineland.
01:13:27.700 In Spain, literally, this happened with the Reconquista.
01:13:31.020 The nation of Spain was created in the blood of the Crusade.
01:13:33.400 And so I think that it's just important for Western clerics, Western Orthodox clerics, to understand that history and to embrace the fact that we are very much in that prophetic mode.
01:13:47.000 We are like the Israelites in the land of our enemies.
01:13:50.660 It's, in fact, startlingly and shockingly similar.
01:13:53.720 And one group of people that we should think more about are the Cossacks, you know, the bikers of their day.
01:14:05.540 They come into existence in an area that was very hard to defend.
01:14:10.620 The Stiep or the Plains, you know, was very difficult for any organized power to hold.
01:14:16.240 That was one of their main jobs, and to free the slaves, the hundreds of thousands of slaves that had been taken from Turkic attacks that were very Jewish, and slave traders on the island of Kaffa were exclusively Jewish.
01:14:29.820 That was one of their jobs in the empire, but their purpose was to hold this border.
01:14:36.600 Now, they had their own church.
01:14:38.980 They were in communion, of course, with Moscow, but they were fiercely independent.
01:14:44.260 They made certain that the bishops and clergy were theirs.
01:14:48.680 They didn't have a lot of permanent institutions for obvious reasons that were always on the move, but they also weren't going to be lectured to and told that their lifestyle is somehow non-Christian.
01:14:59.220 And yet they produced saint after saint after saint.
01:15:02.780 And it just, you know, Russia couldn't be without the Cossacks.
01:15:06.900 They were a classic example here of violence and a military force that was extremely praiseworthy.
01:15:15.660 They saved God knows how many slaves from a miserable life in the Middle East.
01:15:20.480 Yeah, this is exactly it.
01:15:27.320 Exactly it.
01:15:28.260 And so, I mean, this is, I mean, for those, it just, one of the things that I, I don't even talk with most people anymore, I don't have to debate with them,
01:15:36.360 because so much of the fallacies that are, that come up against Christianity are the result of raw ignorance, just unadulterated, pig-headed ignorance.
01:15:45.240 And, like, the most basic historical study, the most basic, basic book on ancient history, I mean, it disproves 90% of these fallacies that they come into,
01:15:55.800 that, you know, Christians didn't have militaries and don't have empires.
01:15:58.720 Christianity is this weak, pacifistic religion and is opposed to these notions of ethnos and nation and race and folk.
01:16:05.240 And it's just, it's what's so shocking that I run into over and over again people with just total historical illiteracy,
01:16:12.660 despite the fact that they seem to be interested in, you know, esoteric theologies.
01:16:17.220 You know, they're retards, retards, when it comes to this stuff.
01:16:22.880 Well, you're being very nice, and you're being very, very diplomatic when you call them that.
01:16:29.000 I have far harsher words for them.
01:16:32.440 Sometimes, because the ignorance is so overwhelming and overpowering, I don't even know how to answer them.
01:16:38.580 You know, partially because I want to strangle them.
01:16:42.420 You know, and that's why I, this has been, this is one of the biggest issues that our people are coming across.
01:16:47.780 We know that the overwhelming majority of what the average person knows, including the average university professor, thinks they know is fake and false.
01:16:59.580 Nothing that they're saying is true.
01:17:01.640 It's all slogans that they've just heard and it's become part of their cognition.
01:17:08.160 Even to the point where the languages that we're using are totally different now.
01:17:11.280 They use words in a modern sense, and they don't understand their origin.
01:17:16.820 And they think you just pick up a Bible, like it's People magazine when you're on the toilet, and start reading it.
01:17:23.580 The terminology, even when it's translated into English, those words don't mean the same.
01:17:29.140 You have to have a master teach you.
01:17:33.120 That's the terrifying thing.
01:17:34.120 We were talking about this earlier in the podcast when I just signed on.
01:17:36.920 And it's the fact that the average person, we have to realize, doesn't actually care to think, doesn't care to understand, doesn't care to learn.
01:17:45.200 And there is a solution to this.
01:17:46.580 It's called the liturgy, where, yes, if you're going to have habits and if you're going to act on your habits, you better have good habits.
01:17:54.000 You're exactly right.
01:17:54.600 The whole point of a ritual is to take ideals and put them into action.
01:17:59.960 We often forget that Russians and Byzantines, especially Russians, in the Middle Ages, their entire lives were ritualized.
01:18:09.280 It isn't like, you know, we need eggs, we've got to go to the store.
01:18:12.000 Everything they did, how their day started and ended, was done according – in a liturgical way.
01:18:19.760 It's right in the Domestroy.
01:18:20.960 You know, it wasn't just, you know, you choose what you do over the course of the day.
01:18:26.200 No.
01:18:26.700 The idea of the ideals of the church, what the church preaches, is made a part of day-to-day life through liturgy.
01:18:34.520 You're absolutely right to bring that up.
01:18:39.800 Exactly.
01:18:40.120 This is one of the things that, I mean, as on a side note, but is critical for any Orthodox Christians listening to understand, is that you don't convert.
01:18:53.480 It's the Holy Spirit who converts, and so there's no technique, there's no magic, there's no hidden esoteric knowledge, no propaganda that can pierce the blackness of men's hearts if they don't want to let you in.
01:19:05.760 It's only the fire of the Holy Spirit which can pass through.
01:19:12.240 And usually, he's so gentle that he doesn't set men's hearts on fire as we would like him to.
01:19:20.320 And so, the most effective thing, really, because conversion is fundamentally a spiritual operation, it's about the relationship between the repentant and the Holy Spirit, the best thing you can do is bring them to liturgy.
01:19:33.940 It's much, much more effective, much, much more effective, you know, than talking to them, assuming that they're not already interested, they're not in, they don't really, you know, they have a black veil around their eyes and so on.
01:19:47.500 A lot of the converts I know have actually been converted that way.
01:19:55.420 We're living in an age where it brings you so far out of the modern world.
01:20:02.180 Because even the new calendarist groups, you know, still have a pretty good liturgy.
01:20:05.340 It's, it's something, it's so far, it, either you're terrified of it, you want to run the other direction, or you're just absorbed into it.
01:20:14.420 You're, you're exactly right.
01:20:15.800 Well, this is the thing.
01:20:16.800 This is the thing.
01:20:17.300 You're right.
01:20:17.640 Little children, right?
01:20:18.760 I mean, little children, I've heard, you know, reports of this firsthand.
01:20:22.140 You know, they go to liturgy for the first time, their families convert, and that's all they talk about for a week.
01:20:26.460 When are we going to liturgy?
01:20:27.500 When are we going back to church?
01:20:28.440 Because it's so different.
01:20:30.940 It's so, I mean, it's, you know, it's, it is paradise reborn.
01:20:35.620 And especially for a child who's not encumbered by sins, they can see that clearly.
01:20:40.900 Well, I've been speaking about that for a long time.
01:20:42.940 And when my kids were, were little, it struck me about how superior they are in terms of basic cognition than we are.
01:20:51.500 They don't have the hangups.
01:20:53.060 They don't have the ego.
01:20:54.480 They forgive easier.
01:20:56.020 And they see a lot more than we do.
01:21:00.280 I'm telling people listening here, if your child has an imaginary friend, it's probably not imaginary.
01:21:05.840 Whether or not it's good or bad is another matter.
01:21:10.740 Yeah, absolutely.
01:21:13.200 And this is just something that's, this is what it comes back to.
01:21:16.620 I mean, you know, you want to, as eloquently as Mysterium Fashies attempts to lay out this kind of Christian, national, socialist, integrated worldview.
01:21:25.320 I mean, you can't show this podcast to somebody who's not willing to listen on the basic points.
01:21:31.420 In my episode, I recently re-listened to my episode that I did on the sodomite question.
01:21:34.940 And in that episode, I talked about how if you don't believe in natural law, in telos, that the universe, you know, has purposes behind things.
01:21:45.740 And even if you're a Darwinist, you know, you must believe in order to be, you know, any sort of sane person, that evolution produces specific traits for purposes.
01:21:54.400 That there's a way things ought to be, that we're adopted in a certain manner, and we ought to go along with that.
01:21:59.900 And I predicted, and I said in that podcast, that there will be people who will go full nominalism and deny that evolution has a purpose, that it's all ran into flux.
01:22:08.140 And sure enough, somebody who listened to the podcast did make that comment on the podcast.
01:22:13.460 So this, the point is, that people can listen to this, they can listen to Mysterium fascis, they can hear what we have to say laid out perfectly, and making the most sense in the world.
01:22:24.820 You know, but if their hearts are black, if their noose, literally, the highest part of their soul, is darkened by sin, it doesn't matter what we say.
01:22:33.460 And again, this is part of the very, very bitter pill that I had to swallow, and it took me a long time to wrap my brain around, is that unless they're loved into something, unless you're already friends with the person, and they already like and respect you, they're not going to listen.
01:22:52.860 And what they'll do is that they'll use labels.
01:22:55.400 Labels are a substitute for knowledge.
01:22:56.960 It's a situation where words conceal rather than reveal.
01:23:00.560 And they'll call you a fascist or something like that.
01:23:03.380 Not that they could ever define that.
01:23:05.160 Then they could say, oh, okay, I don't have to listen to them now.
01:23:07.920 So you could have the most complex argument, incredibly deep and profound knowledge about something, but they could dismiss you with a label.
01:23:17.000 And it's a miracle I'm not in prison for beating someone to death because of all the work we do, and that's how we get dismissed.
01:23:25.980 This is probably why Elijah responded so violently to his detractors.
01:23:30.560 This is, you know, I never knew what anger was until I entered the academy, theological university.
01:23:39.840 And I did this as a Catholic, as a traditional Catholic to begin with, in a Catholic university.
01:23:44.040 And so I can remember watching my professors preach heresy openly, right, and I can just call them out on it, right, and have them elaborately explain why you preach the heresy.
01:23:58.060 And I can remember exactly, Father, these same emotions, just the desire to throw my desk at them.
01:24:02.240 So, I mean, it's – and it's on a such – it's not a hot emotion.
01:24:07.680 It's not for one of passion.
01:24:10.200 It's like the deepest part of your soul, your spirit that demands decency, you know, tells you to this.
01:24:17.580 Well, there's certain people like Matt Heimbeck and David Duke are the two people off the top of my head who can go on a radio show or a TV show and be abused beyond reason and still keep their cool and make their points.
01:24:32.320 It's one of the most admirable things that those two guys have, and I know this is why I never accept those kind of invitations because I ended up getting so angry.
01:24:43.320 I sound like a lunatic, and it's a gift that these guys have for whatever reason that they know how to control their emotions and stay on the point, knowing full well that they're really – they're talking to other people.
01:24:53.000 They're talking to the viewers, not to the host, but the host is instructed to treat them with utter contempt in hopes that they're going to say something irrational.
01:25:03.260 I've always admired those two for that.
01:25:06.360 Absolutely.
01:25:07.040 Well, this is what – another point here.
01:25:09.540 This is what Christ means when he says meekness.
01:25:13.060 This is what meekness is.
01:25:15.040 It's that you are – your inner strength is so intense that you have mastery and discipline over your anger.
01:25:20.720 And so you don't allow yourself to be provoked when it's not rational to do so.
01:25:29.060 All right?
01:25:29.740 And so this is true – there's many, many stories of saints where, you know, a pagan throws a rock at them, and they just look at them.
01:25:38.120 And this is so disarming that the pagan converts, as an example.
01:25:42.000 David Duke is such an excellent example, as you see, Father, because his personality – I mean, you know, I remember being a little boy,
01:25:49.660 and when people would say neo-Nazi David Duke, I can remember the visceral emotional response, right?
01:25:54.200 These were like little devils.
01:25:55.440 I'd never even seen a picture of David Duke, right?
01:25:58.480 And then when you hear him for the first time, you realize he's literally the opposite.
01:26:03.040 He's such like a mild, soft-spoken, meek southern gentleman.
01:26:07.280 Well, it's a tremendous virtue, one that I don't possess.
01:26:12.440 And I saw him for the first time – I guess it was in 1992 – on CNN.
01:26:17.880 And they were using every attempt to – I mean, just horrible things that were saying to him,
01:26:23.960 attributing to him all kinds of negative motivations and everything else, and he ignored it entirely.
01:26:29.200 I've seen Matt Heimbeck do that many times.
01:26:31.380 I don't know how they do it.
01:26:32.240 I certainly cannot.
01:26:32.860 But what does it mean for us socially?
01:26:40.560 In my case, it means that I'm not very social.
01:26:44.340 I can't go out and make small talk with someone.
01:26:46.920 I don't know how to do that if – I couldn't do that if my life depended on it.
01:26:51.060 But in non-movement people, you could tell in five seconds whether this person knows anything.
01:26:59.020 And I'm talking about educated people.
01:27:01.340 You know, it's one myth after another.
01:27:02.660 Well, this is the thing, and this is what it comes back to is, I mean, I far prefer to deal with fishermen because at least they're honest and real.
01:27:12.940 And I mean, here's the thing.
01:27:13.900 People don't – people – this is the fallacy.
01:27:16.600 So liberals have this fallacy of they glorify poverty and fetishize the exotic laborer and working class.
01:27:23.560 And this is why there's so many Jews and middle class whites and communist groups because they desire this intensely.
01:27:29.860 So poverty is not in and of itself a good or a virtuous or a noble thing.
01:27:35.980 But what is important is that people who are poor are close to the real world.
01:27:41.580 The suffering, the cycles of the earth, the way things are on the street, you know, you can't bullshit this.
01:27:47.160 You can – there are certain delusions that are not acceptable when you live in that real world environment.
01:27:53.200 And so what this means is that these people tend to have a more honest view, a more sane view of the world around them and a more sane view of themselves with their own corruption.
01:28:04.740 Right?
01:28:05.280 That's an excellent point.
01:28:06.180 I've worked with the homeless for many, many years.
01:28:09.420 It's something I actually enjoy doing.
01:28:10.780 So I worked at soup kitchens as well as homeless shelters.
01:28:13.580 And I get along with all of them.
01:28:16.640 And it took me a long time to realize why because they've seen the system from the outside.
01:28:24.620 They have nothing to lose.
01:28:26.520 They're really freer than most of us, again, because they have nothing to lose.
01:28:30.600 They know what the system is.
01:28:32.080 They've been the victims of it.
01:28:33.080 And they're extremely – they're highly intelligent in a non-academic way.
01:28:40.260 And there hasn't been one of these people, including the nutjobs, that I haven't gotten along with personally.
01:28:45.420 I'd prefer them to one of these middle-class, educated people any day of the week.
01:28:52.580 Yeah, absolutely.
01:28:54.020 And that's what it comes down to.
01:28:55.180 And this is – it's just very important.
01:28:57.260 I mean we can talk about this.
01:28:58.420 It's an important deviation.
01:28:59.580 So, I mean in order to repent, which is what is necessary for salvation, you have to know your sins.
01:29:10.560 If you don't know yourself, if you're not honest with yourself, if you're not a real nigga, so to speak, you can't repent.
01:29:17.560 Because what are you repenting of?
01:29:19.620 What do you – repentance means to turn away from, right?
01:29:23.440 To turn your heart fundamentally, your whole life, away from sin as the center of your existence.
01:29:31.100 So how can you do that unless you recognize that there is an issue?
01:29:34.620 And this is why God loves these drunks and honest thieves and beggars because they know their sins.
01:29:44.260 They don't try to make excuses.
01:29:45.580 They know they're bad people.
01:29:47.140 They know they're sinners.
01:29:49.260 And it's these people Christ came to save because these are the people that need the doctor.
01:29:53.240 The minute you deal with someone who refuses to admit that they've done anything wrong, you know you're dealing with a very sick person.
01:30:02.520 I don't care how rotten somebody is.
01:30:04.440 If they're aware of it, they're already on their way to transformation.
01:30:08.800 When I converted in grad school, I remember very explicitly telling myself I got to take my life apart, every bit of it, both now in my own history, every element of my personality, and then put it back together with Christ in mind.
01:30:27.320 And it was a long, very difficult process because no one likes to look at themselves that way.
01:30:31.220 So if you don't have introspection, if you can't look at yourself objectively, then you can't repent.
01:30:38.540 It's that simple.
01:30:41.020 This is it.
01:30:42.360 This is it.
01:30:43.540 And this is why suffering is important because the nature of suffering is that it forces you to look at who you are, where you are, and what's going on.
01:30:53.920 And there are two different types of suffering.
01:30:55.620 There is, I mean, purposeful suffering where you can see, well, I'm suffering because of my sins, right?
01:31:02.820 I'm banging my head against the wall.
01:31:04.380 That's why my head hurts.
01:31:05.980 And if I stop doing that, my head will not hurt, right?
01:31:11.420 But then there's, and this is important for your character.
01:31:13.800 This is God loving you because he's chastising you, right?
01:31:16.600 As a father disciplines a son whom he cherishes.
01:31:19.080 So it's just proverbs, right?
01:31:20.740 And so now if you're too pig-headed to understand why you're being chastised, it might seem senseless, right?
01:31:27.380 But that's your problem.
01:31:28.620 But now there also is a different kind of suffering.
01:31:31.000 And that is because of the corruption of the world and because of our enemies.
01:31:34.440 And this is suffering that is without purpose.
01:31:36.780 This is kind of, this is what Job went through.
01:31:39.440 This is suffering that is not necessarily tied to his own sins, but rather to the corruption of his enemies.
01:31:46.120 And this suffering is not good because of its suffering, but it's good because it will destroy the personality that's not rooted in God.
01:31:58.600 And so if you experience this kind of suffering, you know, there's only a few options.
01:32:03.360 Number one, you're going to go crazy.
01:32:04.720 Your personality will fragment.
01:32:06.700 You know, you'll engage in schizophrenia or extreme cognitive dissonance or MPD or something like that, PTSD, right?
01:32:12.920 And your personality will be fundamentally destroyed or broken or your personality is so integral and so strong and the grace of the Holy Spirit flows through you, right?
01:32:24.140 That you're able to survive it miraculously and you come out more integrated.
01:32:29.920 This is what happened with Job, right?
01:32:32.860 And this is the thing is his friends come to him and they give him.
01:32:35.060 They say, oh, well, this is all in God's plan.
01:32:37.200 You know, this is, you carry your cross, Job, this kind of stuff.
01:32:40.000 And Job rebukes them.
01:32:41.100 And God comes and rebukes them.
01:32:43.900 Right?
01:32:44.680 And he asks them, were you there when I laid the heavens?
01:32:47.460 And so on.
01:32:50.020 There's a very rare disease, congenital analgesia, where it's an almost complete insensitivity to physical pain.
01:33:00.740 It's rare.
01:33:01.520 It does exist.
01:33:03.320 And these people very rarely live to be 30.
01:33:09.580 They're unable to feel physical pain.
01:33:11.400 That means every few hours they have to check themselves.
01:33:14.120 Have I stepped on something?
01:33:15.080 Is there something sticking out of me?
01:33:16.980 They have no idea if they're having kidney problems or stomach problems or anything like that.
01:33:21.180 And they lead miserable lives.
01:33:24.280 And I've seen enough, read enough on this, where they say, I will, I give my right arm to feel pain one time.
01:33:32.380 Because, you know, and these people die very young because they have no idea when something's wrong.
01:33:37.440 They go to the doctor every month.
01:33:38.600 Because they have to check everything.
01:33:40.680 They lead miserable lives because they can't feel pain.
01:33:44.360 Pain is not a bad thing.
01:33:46.560 But we live in a society that is dedicated to the complete eradication of pain on all fronts.
01:33:55.160 And it's a bad concept.
01:33:58.460 Pain has its place.
01:33:59.960 Pain makes a lot of sense.
01:34:01.600 And these people with this disease, they die so young precisely because they can't feel pain.
01:34:06.480 Yeah, speaking in terms of liturgy and discipline and even martial discipline, hunger is as sanctified as eating is.
01:34:18.440 And, of course, we know eating is sanctified because it has its own sacrament.
01:34:22.840 The Eucharist is, like all other sacraments, a sacralization of human existence and human behavior in that all of our behaviors are supposed to be ordered towards God.
01:34:34.480 But people can't take being hungry.
01:34:40.100 Very few can.
01:34:41.140 I take one meal a day typically.
01:34:42.940 But most people just have no ability to do that.
01:34:47.400 They eat mindlessly almost.
01:34:49.920 This is the purpose of fasting.
01:34:52.900 I mean, the thing is that this is what – when you fast, this becomes incredibly clear immediately because you realize that the way you ate before was as an animal.
01:35:03.400 It was mindless passion.
01:35:04.840 Every time you had the impulse to eat, you ate.
01:35:07.400 It was non-rational.
01:35:09.280 So when you fast, you break yourself of this habit and you can eat whenever you want.
01:35:17.120 You're not controlled by your passions.
01:35:18.960 And this is the profound gift, the profound freedom of fasting is that you have mastery and dominance over your life and over your passions.
01:35:29.380 That's right.
01:35:31.360 I think one of the big benefits of fasting is the extra oxygen that your brain now can make use out of.
01:35:38.240 It takes a lot of energy for your body to digest a meal, especially if it's meat and certain kinds of dairy, which is why they're prohibited during fasting periods.
01:35:50.440 It takes a huge amount of oxygen to fuel this.
01:35:55.040 When you – I eat just like you.
01:35:56.560 I eat about one meal a day, usually at night, and to me it's a big pain.
01:36:01.600 I mean I fast really because I'm too late to eat.
01:36:06.440 It's just – it's always a big pain in the neck.
01:36:08.460 If you can't microwave it, I don't want it, and people live for this stuff.
01:36:12.940 But when I – my freshman year in high school, I took Latin after lunch, and I was asleep for half that class, as was everybody else.
01:36:24.840 You should never schedule Latin after lunch.
01:36:26.860 That's really the big takeaway of this show I think.
01:36:30.460 And this is – we're talking about spiritual warfare here.
01:36:32.360 This is why – and even secular Greeks to this day still fast before they make an important decision because under certain circumstances, whenever you increase the amount of oxygen available to the brain, you're using more of it, and it becomes a chronic situation.
01:36:47.000 It came out that if you eat a bagel before you do an exam, you have about an average 9 percent lower grade.
01:36:58.020 Yeah, I've heard things like this before.
01:36:59.600 It's absolutely true.
01:37:00.340 And why do athenite monks – the average lifespan there is I think 97, 96, 97.
01:37:08.480 Why is that?
01:37:10.300 And how come they don't smell even though they don't bathe?
01:37:14.620 It's because their food is very simple.
01:37:17.140 It's all natural.
01:37:18.400 It's usually just – it's usually greens of different types, a lot of physical labor even into old age, a tremendous level of community,
01:37:28.340 a strong level of purpose, and the average lifespan – and, of course, no women, which is probably most of the reason why.
01:37:36.260 But 97 years old is the average lifespan there.
01:37:38.820 Can I make a quick comment?
01:37:45.120 Go ahead.
01:37:46.120 No, you don't need to ask permission, Nat.
01:37:48.540 This is just in terms of food.
01:37:50.680 Apparently, Reviewbra, a.k.a. the report of the week, has had some of his videos demonetized for no apparent reason.
01:38:00.680 That's incredible, Nat.
01:38:01.720 Thank you.
01:38:02.100 You're welcome, Flo, Flo.
01:38:05.980 You're welcome.
01:38:07.060 Segway really, really isn't your thing, is it?
01:38:09.480 He has really good bumpers.
01:38:11.460 He really gets the audio bumpers on his own show.
01:38:14.000 Well, I will make a quick comment.
01:38:15.740 I must admit, you know, I've tried fasting a few times, but I find it incredibly – I must say I'm on a whole other plane.
01:38:26.120 But, again, I'm not a fancy-pants, quill-wielding academic by any means whatsoever.
01:38:32.860 Yeah, like me.
01:38:33.320 I do require my free meals a day, protein with every meal.
01:38:38.280 It is of high necessity for me.
01:38:40.380 Oh, I found that using, you know, xerophagy or, you know, dried salted bread, which I guess would be like a saltine, which bypasses your system, is the best way to have a little bit of a full feeling without really eating much of anything.
01:39:00.300 I found that as a way, kind of an introductory way to begin fasting without a whole lot of pain because initially it's awful.
01:39:07.280 You're not used to it, but that is a way to get used to it and have it not really, you know, usually fasting implies that you're having, at least in Greece, dried bread with a small amount of salt.
01:39:18.780 You know, you get a bit of a full feeling without actually having eaten much.
01:39:23.760 Hmm.
01:39:24.420 That's a good tip.
01:39:25.800 And the point isn't the pain.
01:39:27.400 The point is your condition afterwards.
01:39:28.700 But, yeah, xerophagy is just dried bread with salt, and even after a small amount, you feel full.
01:39:34.220 It's part of why they do it.
01:39:36.260 And, you know, like a saltine, and you feel much better.
01:39:39.940 The point isn't the pain.
01:39:41.140 It's your state of mind.
01:39:43.200 Well, I have tried porridge a few times.
01:39:46.280 That seems to do the trick because porridge expands at the belly.
01:39:49.360 Anyway, we will come back and do an episode on fasting.
01:39:52.100 Today we're talking about Christian violence.
01:39:54.200 So in the next –
01:39:54.580 Well, I mean, it is spiritual warfare.
01:39:55.860 It's true.
01:39:56.180 It absolutely is what it is, yes.
01:39:57.760 And this is important, right?
01:39:59.420 I mean, it is just –
01:40:00.760 I mean, at a basic level, right?
01:40:02.400 Here's what it is.
01:40:02.940 I mean, if you don't eat, you die, right?
01:40:06.180 And so if you can control when you eat, you're getting mastery over death.
01:40:10.340 And that's what sin is.
01:40:13.260 Sin is death.
01:40:14.780 So if you're a Christian who worships life, then this is like a must.
01:40:18.400 One of the things that we're saying here, and it's a very radical statement, is that freedom is extremely difficult.
01:40:29.780 Most people use the word freedom.
01:40:31.780 They mean doing whatever you want, which is an absolute ridiculous definition.
01:40:36.080 If you're dominated by your passions, you're enslaved by them.
01:40:42.040 It's not doing whatever you want.
01:40:44.040 Freedom is autonomy.
01:40:46.900 It's doing the right thing.
01:40:49.180 And that requires a tremendous amount of self-discipline.
01:40:51.840 It hurts.
01:40:52.300 Now, Aristotle says that you really can't be a human being without that kind of rational liberty.
01:41:01.100 So how many human beings actually exist?
01:41:04.020 This is the only citizen in Aristotle's state.
01:41:06.900 This is the only person who actually could be a citizen.
01:41:08.880 That's not just free in the vulgar sense, but is autonomous, who can make decisions based on purely – the internal passions like self-interest or anger, stuff like that, have been eliminated.
01:41:24.900 You can't do that 100 percent.
01:41:26.300 No one can.
01:41:28.060 But freedom is based – and even Thomas Jefferson says if you're working for somebody, if you have debt, you're not a free man.
01:41:34.020 You have to worry about what these people are going to say about you.
01:41:36.020 That's why he was so concerned with the yeoman farmer having his own way to make a living.
01:41:41.400 Because the minute you're dependent on somebody and you have to fear their opinion, you may internalize this and start censoring yourself, sometimes without even knowing.
01:41:49.560 There's a direct analogy on the spiritual level.
01:41:51.880 I mean, what Thomas Jefferson is saying is that if you're dependent upon somebody else for your daily bread, then you're ultimately a slave to them.
01:41:58.400 Well, spiritually speaking, if you don't – if you're dependent upon somebody else for the Eucharist, then you're dead.
01:42:05.320 That's it.
01:42:06.420 That's what John 3 means.
01:42:09.300 Perhaps it's John 6, rather.
01:42:10.360 John 6 means that, you know, if you do not eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life within you.
01:42:21.660 Right?
01:42:22.100 And so this is, I mean, just it's – but this is the thing.
01:42:28.000 The problem is that in America, in North America, we're living in such a Protestant culture, such a nominalist culture, that the idea that life, that everything can be made sacred is so foreign.
01:42:40.580 You know, with the exception of a few Calvinists.
01:42:45.460 I think Stonewall Jackson definitely had the grace of God.
01:42:48.320 I mean, I read his biography because he was living almost like a monk.
01:42:51.360 Everything he was doing, he was trying to offer it up to God as a prayer.
01:42:55.200 And suffering will bring you to that.
01:42:59.380 You know, I've actually known people who have never suffered.
01:43:02.640 They've never had a problem.
01:43:04.440 I can't believe it.
01:43:06.380 These people exist.
01:43:08.260 The people who I know who are like that are all female, of course, and all attractive.
01:43:10.760 They've never suffered a day in their lives, and it creates a very superficial, almost childish, not childlike, childish demeanor where they don't understand what life is and don't realize that their privileges is what gives them their happiness, not – that's how things really are.
01:43:28.600 This kind of suffering brings us to know ourselves.
01:43:31.340 As you said before, suffering is absolutely essential, but as you also said, the worst kind of pain is that which doesn't have any purpose, which I think is what most people feel, and that's why they don't care, and that's why you have a massive epidemic in America of heroin and all kinds of opiate derivative drugs.
01:43:51.200 To bring some parallel in regarding finding oneself truly in pain, I think most men who have spent time in any sort of military structure have become very, very familiar with this phenomenon, finding yourself and finding your limitations in pain and experiencing the thrill of overcoming said pain, finding your very fundament in overcoming these great discomforts.
01:44:22.180 I think that's one thing that a military background is beneficial for. My pain came from a different source, but the principle still holds, and you find out just how strong you are. You find out who your friends are. This is absolutely essential. People who don't suffer, they don't know this. They live in their own fantasy world.
01:44:41.420 Yeah, and this is it. I mean, Mussolini was quoting Christ when he said, all that I can offer you is suffering and struggle. That is what Christ says. If you would be my disciple, pick up your cross and follow me.
01:44:57.260 Okay, now there is a couple of different levels to this. There's two takeaways here. Number one means that to be a follower of Christ means that you will literally undergo your own passion, your own suffering. Spiritual, physical, some way. Guaranteed.
01:45:13.160 Number two, it means that you are electing to become a martyr physically. You're electing to die for Christ. This is why you are baptized. You die. You drown.
01:45:22.140 You know, I became orthodox involuntarily. I became orthodox because I had read so much of the ancient world and the philosophy and history of the ancient world. I had no choice. I didn't want it. I wanted to get laid. I wanted to get laid. That was my concern at the time.
01:45:40.620 But when the truth is staring in the face, there's nothing you can do about it. And you're honest enough to follow it. This is what you have to do. It's hard. It's a hard life. When people, you know, want to convert, I say, are you sure? Even becoming a member of the nationalist movement, I say, are you sure? Because you know what's going to happen to you.
01:45:59.460 When I was ordained, the bishop said to me in November of 2006, he said, there's going to be a massive demonic attack heading your way very soon. God, was he right? But that's what he tells me just before he said, this is a life that we're electing to lead.
01:46:17.240 Absolutely. So this brings us to the topic I wanted to discuss next, which was irregular or tribal Christian military forces. So because of, I mean, the Westphalian totalitarian mindset we have in the West, there's this view that the only people that can exercise legitimate violence or authority is the state apparatus or somebody sanctioned by the state apparatus.
01:46:46.580 So what I wanted to discuss was the long and storied history of Christian irregular military forces. You know, so we go back all the way to the Old Testament, the Hezekiah, right, and the tribal warfare of the Israelites, but, you know, Chetniks, Cossacks, but taking it to the North American level, you know, the idea of autonomous militias, auto-defense groups, parish militias, and so on.
01:47:16.580 Speaking of the Old Testament, I think Gideon is a great example. He was the leader of an irregular force against the Midianite colonial empire.
01:47:28.040 This guy was an absolute nobody, no military experience whatsoever. God chose him. He tried to get out of it, tried to get out of it a million different ways.
01:47:37.380 His army was very small, which God had deliberately insisted. So people would know it's him, not a military force. And he won through trickery, not from force of arms.
01:47:51.860 And this is, you know, and Gideon is a great hero in the Old Testament. So the Byzantine way, of course, is only regular forces can, only the emperor can declare war and only the regular army can fight it.
01:48:06.760 Well, that's nice if you're in the Byzantine Empire. But Gideon was under a colonial system. It's completely different in their case.
01:48:16.040 And the Chetniks against the Turks, it's the exact same thing. Things change there. And as St. Athanasius is talking about, you know, under that kind of foreign control, clerics or anybody has only the right but the responsibility to take up arms.
01:48:29.200 This is violent for the best of reasons. Absolutely. And this is essentially what I wanted to come full circle around to, is that the way I see it is that fundamentally, if you're a Christian, especially if you're an Orthodox Christian, there's no way that you could be in the West and not be a revolutionary.
01:48:47.060 In the sense that you must, because of the gospel of Jesus Christ, advocate for the total change, the total destruction of not only the current state order, but the entire cultural, philosophical, theological underpinning that it's constructed upon.
01:49:03.040 We'll call the European Renaissance and Enlightenment. And so, I mean, you must be a revolutionary if you are to be a Christian.
01:49:11.100 And this is what Christ says, literally. You're a revolutionary, not against God, but against the devil and against the world.
01:49:21.540 You know, I was the first person to write an article against the 9-11 story, that very day. I was at the spotlight, so I was in a perfect place.
01:49:29.580 And when I began, that very day, I was speaking about it to people. I was in DC, so I couldn't get out of the city. And I was called every filthy name in the book.
01:49:42.020 I was attacked more than once. And I think the reason is that if they came to the knowledge of the truth, that their entire lives would have to change.
01:49:53.160 They couldn't be anything they are now. Knowing the truth would mean that your own life would be turned upside down.
01:50:02.200 If you're not willing to do that, you now have every motivation to shut people like me up.
01:50:08.780 I think that has a lot to do with why facts don't seem to matter.
01:50:12.080 Because if that's just, if that's even half true, their entire world would have to change.
01:50:17.160 Their viewpoints, their way of life, how they act, who they associate with, it would all have to change.
01:50:24.560 And most people aren't willing to do that.
01:50:26.760 This is what double think is about.
01:50:31.980 It's a very hard life. This isn't a hobby. And it's getting worse and worse, especially after Charlottesville.
01:50:36.620 This isn't a hobby.
01:50:39.080 If you're not willing to suffer tremendously, then we don't need you.
01:50:47.160 Precisely.
01:50:49.200 So yeah, what I wanted to say was I wanted to, yeah, there's this idea, right, this incredible, incredibly heretical idea that, you know, the state, all state authority is sanctioned.
01:51:00.880 Because authority comes from God, and the state has authority, then that means all authority comes from God, and that means that the U.S. government's actions are sanctioned by God.
01:51:12.720 And so as a Christian rebellion to, like Zog, is rebellion to God and illegal.
01:51:18.780 So what I wanted to discuss is just to ask a question.
01:51:21.380 What is legitimate Christian political authority?
01:51:25.060 Where does it come from? How do we know who has it?
01:51:29.280 Well, it's laid out in the Old Testament, Deuteronomy in particular.
01:51:34.760 The state has always been a very dicey issue, because it's not the same thing as the crown.
01:51:39.520 We're talking about the legitimate, righteous use of violence, and if it's not based on natural law and the truth, it has no right to exist.
01:51:50.840 St. Paul very explicitly states there that the government has to come from God, but not everything that we do comes from God.
01:51:59.060 God doesn't sin.
01:51:59.840 When society says that political power comes from the people in some vague, weird way, it's not from God.
01:52:09.780 By that argument, then if a biker gang takes over a city, well, you have to obey it.
01:52:16.140 It's essentially whoever is strongest you have to obey, and therefore that's as legitimate as the most Christian state in the world.
01:52:22.120 It's a laughable. It's one of those arguments that I don't even know how to answer because it's so ridiculous.
01:52:27.180 It's one of those I want to strangle you kind of arguments, that if anyone accepts that – and usually no one is consistent on that.
01:52:33.920 They say it as kind of a way to shut you up.
01:52:35.460 You know, often they say it as a way to get you – get off the subject and just to get out of there.
01:52:42.100 No one is very consistent on that kind of thing, but it's one of the dumbest arguments you could ever actually create.
01:52:48.060 At the very foundation, natural law, the family, and frankly a monarchy, including it would be something like a hetman or a military leader, is absolutely essential.
01:52:59.240 Yeah, and so this is what it comes down to, is that, I mean, the servants of the devil are his sons because they do his will.
01:53:11.460 Likewise, the sons of God are his sons because they do his will.
01:53:15.360 And so we can recognize those governments with legitimate authority by the fruit that they produce, and because they do the will of God.
01:53:23.580 They conform with natural and divine law.
01:53:25.940 And so it – and I think that it's important that we talk about in the Orthodox Christian context that the way that – we talked about this in our Church and State episode –
01:53:36.720 but the way that Symphonia works is just that the church is a living entity.
01:53:42.260 It's an organism that's physical, and it's one household and one nation.
01:53:47.220 And so there is a head of that household, a father, a patriarch of that nation.
01:53:50.620 And so he is anointed by the Church in the Holy Spirit, as were the kings of the Old Testament, to be the father and patriarch of the Church in his nation and of his people.
01:54:03.840 And in the same with an emperor, it's not a folk king, but rather a civilizational king.
01:54:08.640 He is the king of a civilization of multiple nations that are in free cooperation because they're organized around one logos, which is the church, one Christian idea.
01:54:21.200 But the empire is – if it's looked at in a certain way, it is the most legitimate because it doesn't interfere with nations.
01:54:31.600 An empire isn't a nation.
01:54:33.460 It's a confederation of nations found together under one specific idea, usually a religious one.
01:54:40.600 You know, in empires in the past, all politics was local.
01:54:43.260 So the emperor generally only concerned himself with taxation and military affairs.
01:54:49.620 So you could be a nationalist and still be – you know, there are Hungarian nationalists and Croatian nationalists who love the empire in Vienna.
01:54:57.820 There are Georgian nationalists and Armenians who love the empire of Moscow.
01:55:02.180 Those two things don't conflict because they're defining the political very differently from each other.
01:55:07.860 In the Middle Ages, as I think you all know, the Roman Empire was the touchstone for legitimacy in politics.
01:55:16.200 It's one of the biggest issues that we could touch on, but that became the – because there's a balance you have to hold between the universality of the truth, the faith, but how that's manifest in a day-to-day conception is going to change.
01:55:33.200 It's going to be different for different people.
01:55:34.660 So that balance, you find it in the Council of Chalcedon where you have Christ as a human and a divine nature that are in perfect balance.
01:55:45.600 One can never dominate the other, and there are two wills attached to those.
01:55:49.160 They can't fuse into one.
01:55:50.740 And so you have everything that's human, whether it be belonging to a nation, economic life, family, now fused with everything that's divine, manifest by the church and the monks on earth.
01:56:04.900 There has to be that balance there, and an empire that achieves that balance, which I think the Russians did, for example, for a long time, is the best manifestation of the idea of Chalcedon.
01:56:18.880 The divinity is this universal truth, but the human is how that's manifested on a day-to-day basis, which will be different depending on languages and everything else.
01:56:26.180 Yeah, and so I wanted to speak to the issue of, in North America, are Orthodox Christians legitimate in any potential armed conflict against the state authorities?
01:56:43.560 I don't understand what you mean. Do you mean legitimate in what way?
01:56:50.200 So I guess, like, the question is, you know, so if, like, in a North American context, if there's civil unrest, right, and we come into conflict with the forces of the American state, right, is it rebellion, is it illegitimate, right, for Orthodox Christians to fight Zog, so to speak, with violence?
01:57:12.160 This should be circumstances dictated.
01:57:17.560 As of right now, you know, as well as I do, that the regime would love nothing more than for one of our people to go shooting up a, you know, military base.
01:57:27.120 Absolutely.
01:57:28.300 They would love it. If they don't get it, they'll invent it.
01:57:32.240 You know, the story of Dylann Roof, of course, never shot up at church.
01:57:35.240 That whole story was stung from the beginning, and now we know for a fact he didn't do it.
01:57:39.500 But they desperately needed that, and, you know, what they did after that, the same thing for the Charlottesville thing.
01:57:49.860 Those two policemen were not involved.
01:57:52.300 They weren't even at the rally.
01:57:53.820 They were looking at the governor and his motorcade, and we know that the person wasn't killed by a car, killed by a cardiac arrest.
01:58:03.860 But you need bodies. The system lives on this. It needs bodies.
01:58:08.680 So as of now, violence is absolutely out of the question, and it's a great sign that someone is an agent if they start demanding it.
01:58:18.400 That's your, you know, one of the many signs that someone is illegitimate if they start demanding violence.
01:58:24.960 The regime would love that above all else, and if they don't get it from one of us, they'll do it themselves.
01:58:31.180 However, you're talking about a very different circumstance, I think.
01:58:36.080 Indeed.
01:58:36.440 You're talking about the collapse of central authority, or at least a situation where we actually have a shot at creating a new form of government,
01:58:44.720 in which case it would be deeply sinful to not fight the regime in that case with violence.
01:58:52.460 Indeed. This is what I wanted to refer in both positions.
01:58:55.820 Again, I invoke Gideon. Remember, that was a colonial system, a mid-level empire that held the Israelites in subjection.
01:59:09.020 And Gideon, using trickery and all kinds of methods that we wouldn't consider normal martial actions, defeated them and killed a lot of people.
01:59:20.140 And he was held, and still is held, as a hero of the church, and of course a saint in our world.
01:59:28.820 So that's your classic example.
01:59:34.340 Yeah, absolutely. And there you have it. I mean, it just comes down to this.
01:59:38.220 You're right, Father, is that people are just going to deny the Old Testament, because you can't accept it and take it seriously and reject what we say.
01:59:49.340 Because it's not even an allegorical or spiritual meaning. It's the plain meaning.
01:59:55.400 I mean, if you believe, it's just very simple.
01:59:57.880 If you believe that the God of the Old Testament is the same as the God of the New Testament, then you must accept this, what we're saying, as legitimate.
02:00:04.880 Otherwise, you're dishonest.
02:00:09.660 And this is why, at the moment, it's simply ignored.
02:00:13.560 The Psalms are cute, you know, so they'll accept that.
02:00:16.540 And you've seen Bibles that Protestants give out that are just the Psalms, Proverbs, and the New Testament.
02:00:21.960 And it's, you know, so the Old Testament has been thrown out of liturgy, which you've said a handful of times.
02:00:32.300 You know, in Orthodox Vespers, you have Old Testament reading.
02:00:36.300 But as a matter of course, it's largely thrown out of liturgy.
02:00:39.680 And I think there's a very good reason for that.
02:00:42.800 The prophets are hardly talked about, even in theological circles.
02:00:46.560 Because if you become, if you accept what they say, which is the same thing as what we're saying, you're automatically a revolutionary.
02:00:52.600 You can't accept the society as legitimate or the government as legitimate and believe that the Old Testament is equal to the New Testament unless you're completely dishonest and simply lie about it.
02:01:05.620 So my predictions I've made many times before is there will soon be an attempt to institutionalize that and to remove books of the Old Testament from the Bible.
02:01:14.920 I agree.
02:01:18.420 So what I wanted to say is I wanted to stay on the topic of authority.
02:01:21.900 And I wanted to talk about rebellion against legitimate authority.
02:01:30.100 And just kind of the understanding of against that.
02:01:33.280 So I can kind of, we can talk about it on two levels.
02:01:35.800 Like one, the easiest level is in the household, right?
02:01:38.680 I mean, so everybody knows what a child's unjust rebellion against just authority is.
02:01:44.920 I mean, this is easy, right?
02:01:47.420 You know, you tell them to do something that's in their best interest and they say, no, I won't.
02:01:54.280 Right?
02:01:54.680 And so you either, if you want them to do it, you have to get into conflict with them.
02:01:58.480 Right?
02:01:59.120 And so it seems that it's the same principle is essentially that, under that of the state.
02:02:06.440 Right?
02:02:07.040 And I mean, I think that a lot of the reason why people have an issue, especially in the American context,
02:02:11.780 accepting this idea of, you know, rebellion against God's anointed king, the divine right of kings as being sinful,
02:02:20.860 is because we have such a nominalist, totalitarian view of the state that, you know, they kind of think that this was just Zog,
02:02:27.720 but in the ancient world.
02:02:30.780 Yeah, and it's, you know, these are the type of person that you really, the level of ignorance is such that you really have to start from the beginning
02:02:41.380 to get them to understand anything.
02:02:44.200 And they're never going to let you do that.
02:02:46.040 Part of the question you're asking is, do you have to be a monarchist to be orthodox?
02:02:51.840 And the answer is yes.
02:02:53.620 Not just from the Old Testament, but the church fathers overwhelmingly said that this is part and parcel,
02:03:02.600 necessary but not sufficient for a legitimate state.
02:03:06.700 And the prophet Samuel said as much.
02:03:08.020 Remember, in the Old Testament, the monarch wasn't rejected at first because it was somehow evil.
02:03:17.720 The fear was that a monarchy would mean that Israel will become an empire just like any other
02:03:22.960 and concern itself with material things.
02:03:26.440 That was the problem.
02:03:28.100 Not monarchy as such.
02:03:30.200 And monarchy, of course, became a sacred institution, even in the Psalms.
02:03:34.220 Because the anointing of the monarch is a sacred, it's a rite.
02:03:42.800 It's just under a sacrament in terms of its significance.
02:03:47.340 I was reading Father Dimitris Daniloje and his Sanctifying Mysteries Theology, Volume 5.
02:03:55.580 And his opinion is that because there's only one mystery in Christ, that the seven mysteries is kind of an arbitrary number.
02:04:06.680 I mean that there's at least seven, but that all of these other things,
02:04:09.800 whenever you have a physical action of the church where the Holy Spirit is present, is a mystery to some degree or another.
02:04:17.000 And so, for instance, laying the foundation of a church is always a mystery because there's chrism involved.
02:04:21.240 Yeah, the Catholics call it sacramental.
02:04:26.220 Yeah, exactly, sacramentals.
02:04:28.700 The election of an abbot is one in the East, like you said, the foundation of the church.
02:04:35.480 The blessing of a house.
02:04:36.420 The blessing of a house and the anointing of a monarch.
02:04:41.620 They were considered pretty much sacraments in the Middle Ages, yeah.
02:04:46.500 Exactly.
02:04:47.240 This was East and West, indeed.
02:04:49.580 Right.
02:04:49.980 It was a universal conception.
02:04:52.380 But this is the thing, is that people, they don't have this concept.
02:04:57.160 One of the things that makes me violent is when people call the idea of having a life that is sacred,
02:05:03.380 where everything you do is the expression of a divine archetype, a pagan idea.
02:05:11.200 Yeah, well, I'm with you on that.
02:05:13.140 I, you know, it's just, these Protestants typically, hard Calvinists, hard Reformed Calvinists,
02:05:18.480 and it's just, you know, how do you speak to these people?
02:05:24.500 Well, don't ask me, because I haven't done it very well in the past.
02:05:29.280 I have a paper out, a very long paper, that's gotten me into a lot of trouble, I'm happy to say.
02:05:34.500 You know, paganism is not a system, it's not a religion at all.
02:05:41.400 Show me a pagan creed.
02:05:42.540 Are there pagan heretics?
02:05:44.760 You know, of course not.
02:05:46.300 It's not a religion.
02:05:47.700 It's not how it was seen.
02:05:49.340 The older word for it was native customs.
02:05:52.840 And they've been preserved, largely because the church preserved them.
02:05:58.480 Yeah, go on, sorry.
02:06:00.460 I was going to say that the word Hindu is contrived.
02:06:03.860 I mean, in Vedic, the word literally means that which has been handed down.
02:06:10.040 Yeah, the word pagan really comes from Christians.
02:06:13.180 It was just a way to take all the native customs and give it a label.
02:06:15.800 When St. Augustine was sent to England, Pope Gregory I said that if the native customs there don't conflict in a serious way with what we're teaching, you have to preserve them.
02:06:29.080 And that became the foundation for the national church.
02:06:32.620 And overwhelmingly, they didn't.
02:06:34.740 Yeah, there are very few of those native customs.
02:06:36.260 Usually they're quite healthy.
02:06:38.300 You know, like, you know, party after a harvest, stuff like that.
02:06:40.680 These things are, these things are usually very healthy.
02:06:42.940 They're part of natural law.
02:06:44.380 But it's not religious.
02:06:46.420 It was never seen that way.
02:06:47.640 You know, the gods of the ancient world were not seen as beings.
02:06:51.880 They're archetypes.
02:06:54.020 They were never seen.
02:06:55.000 This is Plato's whole argument.
02:06:58.020 You know, you could see Mount Olympus from parts of Greece.
02:07:00.420 You could see there's no one up there with your own eyes.
02:07:03.140 These are archetypes.
02:07:04.400 These are understood as they're a way to teach aspects of life by personalizing them, by making them into a poem.
02:07:13.480 That's how people learn.
02:07:14.540 That's what these are.
02:07:16.920 And I'm not sure why it, you know, I got in so much trouble for this because, you know, this is an almost an obvious fact.
02:07:22.320 You can see Mount Olympus from parts of Greece.
02:07:24.840 You know, and it's seen from that way, the so-called pagan ideas are not unhealthy ones.
02:07:34.220 Plato made this as tenor of everything he does.
02:07:36.460 He does.
02:07:37.340 Plutarch made this absolutely essential to his approach to the ancient world.
02:07:43.540 You know, if Americans don't understand it, it becomes religion.
02:07:46.600 You know, but by this argument, then what people do at football games every Sunday is religion.
02:07:55.940 You know, saying that Eric Clapton is God, well, that pretty much becomes a religious element.
02:08:00.860 Rock concerts are almost liturgical in how they, you know, in how they function.
02:08:07.720 I mean, there's even a ritual, how they function from beginning to end.
02:08:10.720 Gordon Ramsay is a living God.
02:08:12.100 It's standardized.
02:08:12.780 Yeah.
02:08:13.780 That's true.
02:08:14.900 As you say, right, yeah.
02:08:16.060 Gordon Ramsay is an avatar of Dionysus.
02:08:19.580 Yeah.
02:08:20.180 You know, they're not really...
02:08:21.440 So the use of terms like God and religion now is so sloppy that they pretty much apply to anything that people don't get.
02:08:29.340 And it's stupid.
02:08:31.460 There is no such thing as paganism.
02:08:33.840 There is no pagan system out there.
02:08:38.180 Yeah, exactly.
02:08:39.620 Okay, Father, we're going to go to another little break, and we're going to come back and finish up our topic and do Kali Yuga news.
02:08:45.800 So to our listeners, stay tuned.
02:08:51.440 Когда мы были на войне
02:08:54.400 Виктор Сорокин
02:08:56.960 Когда мы были на войне
02:09:15.500 Когда мы были на войне
02:09:18.500 Там каждый думал о своей любимой или о жене
02:09:24.620 Там каждый думал о своей любимой или о жене
02:09:31.460 И я, конечно, думать мог
02:09:35.540 И я, конечно, думать мог
02:09:38.380 Когда на трубочку глянел
02:09:41.420 На голубой ее дымот
02:09:44.520 Как ты когда-то мне лгала
02:09:55.120 Как ты когда-то мне лгала
02:09:58.220 А сердце девичье свое
02:10:00.480 Давно другому отдала
02:10:04.220 Но я не думал ни о чем
02:10:14.820 Но я не думал ни о чем
02:10:18.200 Я только дроншку
02:10:20.220 Торец
02:10:21.020 Торец
02:10:21.820 Торец
02:10:22.240 Торец
02:10:22.680 Торец
02:10:22.880 Торец
02:10:25.800 Торец
02:10:29.780 Торец
02:10:32.680 Торец
02:10:35.820 Бой
02:10:37.640 When we will be in the war When we will be in the war
02:10:57.400 I will fly on my horse on my horse
02:11:03.640 And I will fly on my horse
02:11:08.120 I will fly on my horse
02:11:11.160 But will be the death of me
02:11:13.720 Will be the death of me
02:11:17.400 And the love of my heart
02:11:20.480 And the love of my heart
02:11:24.160 Will be the death of me
02:11:28.960 And the love of my heart
02:11:33.040 Welcome back to part three of Mysterium Fashi's episode 36, Christian violence.
02:11:57.100 So yeah, we've mostly come to, I think we've actually pretty much hit everything that I wanted to hit.
02:12:02.600 I would ask you this one question before we do Kelly, you the news father.
02:12:07.040 Does God hate anybody?
02:12:09.100 And is it possible for God to love and hate a person or a people?
02:12:15.600 Yes.
02:12:16.300 I mean, there are people that exist solely as a negative example, problems for us to overcome.
02:12:25.120 The mere fact that there's a being on two legs doesn't make them human.
02:12:29.660 To be human, you have to be free and rational.
02:12:34.480 Now, that's Aristotle's definition and the church adopted it.
02:12:39.400 But we know people who live quite deliberately like animals.
02:12:44.860 And for some of these people, their souls have become animal souls.
02:12:48.660 They've completely eclipsed their noose, so to speak.
02:12:54.400 And I think so.
02:12:55.640 It's very possible.
02:12:58.280 They have come into existence solely as challenges for ourselves.
02:13:02.000 Think of God, what he thought of Sodom and Gomorrah, what he thought of the Canaanites, people who have brought things like child sacrifice into part of their constitution.
02:13:14.000 Yes, he hates them and despises them.
02:13:17.280 And the Israelites were condemned because they didn't kill enough of them because God ordered that they be slaughtered after many warnings and that you kill everything, including their animals.
02:13:33.380 Because everything has been – sin gets into everything.
02:13:36.260 It's like smoke.
02:13:38.480 It gets into everything.
02:13:39.860 And they kept some of the animals alive, and God punished them for it.
02:13:44.600 So the answer is yes.
02:13:48.300 Yeah, that's kind of what I figured.
02:13:50.280 It's kind of a – I would ask quite – it's just – I'm going to let it stand at that.
02:13:56.900 I don't think we need to go any deeper.
02:13:58.660 It's out of love for the truth.
02:14:00.460 Yeah.
02:14:00.940 It's out of love.
02:14:02.020 Right.
02:14:02.580 You destroy the evil and protect those who you love.
02:14:05.440 Exactly.
02:14:05.780 I mean, this is what – it's simple.
02:14:07.760 I mean, God – you know, people choose to be enemies of God.
02:14:11.500 And so this is the thing is people really think God is a tyrant.
02:14:14.120 They really don't understand that God created man to be free.
02:14:17.660 Right?
02:14:17.920 That's the whole point.
02:14:19.180 And so that God is not going to force us to be his friends.
02:14:23.980 You know, and so God loves his – he respects his people that much that he created in his image and likeness.
02:14:29.680 That if they choose to set themselves up as enemies of him, he will respect their decision and fight them.
02:14:36.340 And that's where so much of the evil in our lives comes from.
02:14:43.060 Precisely.
02:14:43.840 I ask the thing is this – this is why I come back to it.
02:14:45.740 Free will is the Christian philosophical question.
02:14:47.920 Because without that, I mean, everything is – just becomes retarded when we start thinking about things intellectually.
02:14:55.080 Free will is very hard.
02:14:56.640 You know, we're born without it.
02:14:59.280 Exactly.
02:14:59.560 We're born completely dependent.
02:15:01.280 Free will is something to be fought for.
02:15:03.180 That autonomy that free will implies takes a tremendous amount of self-discipline and knowledge.
02:15:07.820 It's about reason.
02:15:09.340 It's not just making any decision freely.
02:15:11.440 It has to be – in order to be free, it has to be rational.
02:15:13.920 You have to analyze your circumstances.
02:15:17.540 And, you know, increasingly, because reason itself is under attack, there's fewer and fewer people who have that capacity.
02:15:26.640 Absolutely.
02:15:27.800 All right.
02:15:28.640 So now we're going to transition into Kali Yuga News.
02:15:33.180 So I'm going to take the first article here.
02:15:34.940 So this is from Russia Today.
02:15:38.400 Two more neo-Nazi groups banned after links to far-right terrorists, national action exposed.
02:15:45.460 The government says it has banned two neo-Nazi groups, Scottish DOM and NS-131, the National Socialist Anti-Capitalist Action.
02:15:53.520 Both aliases have prescribed terrorist organization national action.
02:15:59.460 Now, I'm just going to go ahead and tell our people here this.
02:16:03.760 None of these people have ever committed any crimes.
02:16:08.840 I mean, they've never committed any crimes.
02:16:12.060 None of them have been charged or proven guilty of terrorism.
02:16:15.540 The prescription of these groups in the United Kingdom as a terrorist organization is done, like, whole cloth, whole cloth politically.
02:16:28.940 You know, and so, I mean, now there are – I want to – I'm saying to those members of our UK comrades, I know some of them listen to this show,
02:16:38.320 that you're in our prayers, you know, and we support you 100%.
02:16:43.360 But I think this goes back to what you were talking about before, Dr. Johnson, that this is a – you know, this is not a hobby, this is not a game.
02:16:52.140 You know, that national action, they used purposefully inflammatory propaganda, you know, made themselves, you know, the stinking nuisance of the state, right, as a tactic.
02:17:03.080 And so they are paying the price for being the farthest vanguard of our people.
02:17:12.740 Well, we have the First Amendment, of course, in America.
02:17:16.080 But the way that they're going to get around that is by considering certain forms of speech as forms of assault.
02:17:24.900 And that, I fear, is going to work.
02:17:30.280 And when that happens, we will notice that when we get into trouble, serious trouble that way, all of our so-called friends are going to disappear.
02:17:39.300 And that's the great terror that I have, that I think a lot of our people have, that there won't be anyone there for us.
02:17:45.040 All of a sudden, they're going to become supporters of the system.
02:17:47.600 And there will be plenty who support us, of course, and are willing to – you know, I define a brother today as someone who's likely to go to the gallows with me.
02:18:03.580 If there's a good possibility that we're going to share a gulag cell together, you're my brother, and I'll take a bullet for you if necessary.
02:18:10.180 It's a very liberal attitude.
02:18:12.420 Yes, yeah, thank you very much.
02:18:13.540 No, it's absolutely true because I know people who are – I've met modernist priests who probably will be killed and probably will be sent to the gallows because they have basic intellectual critiques of the state and of liberalism based on the gospel.
02:18:32.520 And they're not even – they're not orthodox at all.
02:18:34.480 But they have enough integrity as Christians and have a serious enough personality that they are willing to make critiques of Zog, so to speak, of the regime, and they will probably be in the gulags with us.
02:18:51.040 Yeah, you know, one of my favorite examples is very depressing, but the second major synod of the catacomb church underground in the USSR was generally condemning all the other catacomb churches.
02:19:10.660 I mean, they're looking at the gulag, staring it right in the face, and are creating more factions.
02:19:20.740 And unfortunately, that's what our people do, and it's the reason why we don't really have an effective presence in American politics.
02:19:27.480 But yeah, this goes back to this question of national action.
02:19:33.200 And so I just think that it's essentially important – there's a couple of other things here.
02:19:38.140 When they start doing this, they escalate the conflict enormously.
02:19:43.280 Because in the United States, for instance, the equivalent organizations are allowed to exist and operate openly and legitimately, engage in open propaganda, so long as they don't break the law.
02:19:53.980 They're not, you know – no, that's not to say I want to – that is not to say that the federal authorities do not persecute them, as Brendan Russell is being persecuted right now by the FBI.
02:20:05.420 He's certainly in our prayers. God bless him.
02:20:08.300 But my point is that to say when they ban organizations, they escalate the conflict, and they bring us much closer to armed violence.
02:20:15.920 And my personal opinion is that North America is a very different situation than Europe, because in North America, the sheer space – it is a continent.
02:20:25.320 It's a civilization. It's not a nation.
02:20:28.000 Whereas in – so there's space to operate and space to maneuver, which can, I think, potentially reduce a lot of conflict because there's places for people to move.
02:20:37.060 In Europe, I think that the race war is inevitable because these populations are there, and there's no way that they're going to be removed peacefully.
02:20:44.140 Well, there's one quote from this airhead Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, right in this article.
02:20:53.160 It says – let me quote her here.
02:20:55.140 By extending the prescription of national action, you're halting the spread of a poisonous ideology and stopping its membership from growing, protecting those who could be at risk of radicalization.
02:21:07.740 That says it all.
02:21:10.860 They're growing, protecting those who might join, keeping them away from it.
02:21:15.920 That's how they're rationalizing this, protecting those who could be at risk of radicalization.
02:21:21.560 If that doesn't say it all, nothing does.
02:21:23.340 That's you people listening, by the way.
02:21:29.120 Although most of you are already radicalized.
02:21:31.580 That's why you're listening to this podcast.
02:21:33.520 But yeah, that's essentially what it comes down to.
02:21:35.500 National action was banned because they were effective.
02:21:37.940 They were incredibly effective.
02:21:40.040 Because Benjamin Raymond is essentially revived George Lincoln Rockwell's technique, but in England.
02:21:47.660 And what that meant is if you watch nationalities, people don't understand this.
02:21:51.500 The problem is that because most people don't understand propaganda.
02:21:55.840 That's why they're fooled by it.
02:21:57.900 And so they don't recognize when certain aesthetics, certain provocative uses of imagery, the swastika and so on, are used in a technical and intentive propaganda stratagem.
02:22:11.380 And so Benjamin Raymond's whole plan, the whole idea of having that kind of guerrilla, black block look, and being aggressive, doing the whole gas the kikes race war now, and just being obnoxious, is that the media must cover you.
02:22:26.440 They must cover you.
02:22:28.200 And in a place like England, where you have the Rotherham rape gangs going unpunished, men saying gas the kikes race war now, that appeals very viscerally to a lot of people.
02:22:38.700 I've said it before that if I was in Europe, I'd be much more radical than I am now.
02:22:43.540 Because the situation is just intolerable.
02:22:46.620 But the thing is, of course, the tradeoff is when you use these extreme tools, you get extreme results.
02:22:52.660 You get yourself banned as a terrorist organization.
02:22:56.160 And your people get to go to prison and have their names in the news and have their lives ruined.
02:23:00.740 But that's what you're signing yourself up for.
02:23:02.420 Make no mistake.
02:23:03.840 Well, I want to warn our listeners.
02:23:05.320 Stop with the vulgar language.
02:23:09.940 Stop the name calling.
02:23:12.240 It makes you look like an idiot, and it causes nothing but trouble.
02:23:17.120 We have to show that we're better than they are.
02:23:20.200 But by, yes, things like gas the kikes, you know, come on.
02:23:24.280 That's something an idiot would say.
02:23:25.600 That's going to get you into nothing but trouble, and it alienates actually very good people.
02:23:31.940 So just watch your language and watch your mouth.
02:23:34.320 That's not just because we're worried about being banned.
02:23:36.580 That's just, you know, good manners.
02:23:38.100 Yeah, well, indeed.
02:23:41.600 I mean, I think that the – this is a conversation, you know, we'll come back for a much deeper conversation on propaganda.
02:23:49.480 But, yeah, generally I agree.
02:23:50.860 I mean, we need to, as much as we can, actually try to be good people and be better than our opponents.
02:23:56.260 And the problem is language has become so degenerated that vulgarity is part of our lives.
02:24:04.820 It's just all around us.
02:24:05.800 And, I mean, I'm certainly no innocent lamb.
02:24:08.860 Anybody who listens to the show knows that when we talk about these serious topics like, you know, children dying and that kind of stuff, the vulgar language comes out.
02:24:18.660 But that's, you know, mea culpa.
02:24:21.440 But the point is it's just that this is a – it's going back to this nominalist attitude.
02:24:26.440 You know, well, what does – you know, words don't really mean anything, right?
02:24:31.440 I mean the reason I've never been kicked off Facebook – well, I was kicked off Facebook once for 24 hours because, you know, four years ago I posted a graphic that said Heimbeck did nothing wrong.
02:24:43.160 So years earlier, you know.
02:24:44.940 But the reason I haven't got kicked off is because I don't use language like that.
02:24:48.020 I don't deliberately, you know, get in their face and be obnoxious.
02:24:52.920 It's not that hard.
02:24:57.400 So, Father, do you want to take another story?
02:25:02.220 Yeah, well, of course, the Russian priest.
02:25:04.340 Yeah, go ahead.
02:25:04.940 The set of luck chaplain.
02:25:06.560 You know, it's – he said that Hugh Hefner is burning in hell.
02:25:10.520 Now, you know, I rolled my eyes and I said, yeah, cows go moo.
02:25:16.600 You know, I mean, you have to – we're in an age so degenerate that it has to be uttered.
02:25:21.680 Well, of course he is.
02:25:23.700 You know, God may also simply just destroy his soul completely.
02:25:30.780 He might not even be worth sending to hell.
02:25:32.480 You know, no one is sent to hell or conscious sends us to hell.
02:25:40.420 He probably was aware of what pornography had done to women.
02:25:46.320 You know, I've read enough – the stories of former porn stars, what they say it's done to them.
02:25:51.380 And if you want to kick the porn habit, that will do it because you realize, you know, these women are tortured, not just on screen either.
02:26:04.160 They take advantage of them.
02:26:05.200 He has no father, no future, and they can do as they please.
02:26:12.200 And he knows that he created this.
02:26:14.780 So his own conscience is now torturing him forever.
02:26:17.960 So, you know, on the one hand, I said, yeah, you know, of course, it's a stupid thing to say.
02:26:25.400 It should be obvious.
02:26:26.720 And yet we live in an age where it's not, which is just as depressing as anything else.
02:26:34.400 Yeah, I mean it's just – this is because there was an interesting critique.
02:26:41.300 I mean whenever people commit religious violence, they are challenging the new world order.
02:26:48.620 Because they're saying that there are absolute moral systems and authority structures that are opposed to the new world order and that enable them to do and commit violence.
02:27:00.820 That's because the one thing that's anathema to liberalism is absolute morality.
02:27:05.820 And that's what it comes down to is that's why people won't say, oh, well, he's burning in hell for sure, you know, except for socially acceptable targets, right, Hitler and Stalin, et cetera.
02:27:16.920 Yeah, of course.
02:27:17.440 Because it implicates themselves, right, because they know that they also should burn in hell.
02:27:23.000 You know, usually that's what's going on, right?
02:27:25.800 And, I mean, but this is, of course – I mean this is necessary, by the way, in order to be saved.
02:27:30.100 I mean if you don't actually realize that you're going to die, you're going to face eternal death, Hades and so on.
02:27:36.040 You know, like – and that's because of your sins, you can't repent and be saved.
02:27:44.180 So, I mean it's a good thing.
02:27:45.640 It's a good thing to – I mean if you can do it without completely destroying them, you know, allow people to be woken up to their own sins.
02:27:52.620 Well, yeah, there is a tradition in the Russian church that there is this place of death, Hades or Sheol.
02:28:03.320 It's not heaven.
02:28:04.120 It's not hell.
02:28:04.760 It's more of a limbo, limbo being Latin for on the edge of.
02:28:09.900 And that hell truly doesn't come into existence until after the final judgment.
02:28:14.820 People in Sheol can get preached to by John the Baptist with the Russian tradition as John the Baptist does that.
02:28:21.200 But that's no guarantee that they're going to accept it.
02:28:24.800 If they're that hardcore, they may simply reject him as some sort of a hallucination.
02:28:30.460 But I think there's room for that kind of mentality.
02:28:35.400 Yeah, indeed.
02:28:36.540 This is – you know, speaking of father, you asked the question a while ago, and I'll answer it on air, as to why Solomon was a saint and why he isn't depicted in an iconography.
02:28:46.900 I researched that question the other day, and that was the answer that I got, is that he accepted the – he repented in Hades, essentially.
02:28:54.980 Well, that occurred to me as well.
02:28:57.640 But part of the concept of sainthood is to give us examples to follow.
02:29:04.100 I mean we don't know that for certain.
02:29:05.440 And it means that you can pretty much do whatever you want because later on you'll have a chance to listen to John the Baptist and you could be saved that way.
02:29:15.920 I still think it's a terrible example.
02:29:19.820 I mean Solomon wasn't just – I mean Solomon was evil.
02:29:22.360 He used slave labor.
02:29:24.420 He brought pagan statues and liturgies right into the temple, right into the Holy of Holies, and worst of all, he split Israel in two, making chaos for the rest of its existence.
02:29:42.540 Masons use him, use his temple as the center of their intellectual universe.
02:29:48.400 You know, I just – I still think it's a terrible error, and it's a terrible – and you see him most of the time, and you see him as a saint by himself.
02:30:00.200 But often you see him in Icon to the Resurrection.
02:30:04.320 With David, yeah.
02:30:05.560 With David kind of being dragged out of Hades is where – he's not being rescued from hell.
02:30:10.320 He's being dragged out of Hades.
02:30:11.280 That's conceivable.
02:30:13.460 But because of his evil deeds, I still think it's very dangerous to have that as a precedent.
02:30:20.880 Wow.
02:30:22.060 You know, and he died unrepentant.
02:30:23.620 He died unrepentant.
02:30:24.560 What about Ecclesiasticus, though?
02:30:26.700 Some people say that that's a testimony of his repentance.
02:30:30.260 I didn't hear you.
02:30:31.480 The book of Ecclesiasticus?
02:30:33.940 Ecclesiastes?
02:30:36.560 Right, right.
02:30:37.380 Well, he died a pagan.
02:30:38.340 And, you know, as far as anyone knows, he died a pagan.
02:30:42.280 Yeah, it's true.
02:30:43.160 You can't actually prove that he died in repentance.
02:30:44.900 There's no scripture on that.
02:30:46.320 Anyway, I just thought that –
02:30:47.380 Yeah, you can't.
02:30:48.040 You're right.
02:30:48.460 There's no way to know what was going on inside of his mind.
02:30:51.400 There's nothing that says it one way or the other.
02:30:52.880 It's conceivable.
02:30:54.140 Nonetheless, it's still a terrible example.
02:30:57.820 Indeed.
02:30:58.060 And saints are supposed to be examples.
02:31:00.760 Indeed.
02:31:01.620 Okay, so we're going to go to this next story.
02:31:03.580 It's from Breitbart.com.
02:31:04.820 Now, Canada prepares for illegal immigrant surge.
02:31:09.180 Illegal immigrant surge from U.S. into British Columbia.
02:31:12.640 Pro-migrant groups say they expect surge of migrants to illegally enter the western Canadian province of British Columbia
02:31:17.320 as temporary resident permits expire for asylum seekers in the United States.
02:31:21.540 Pro-migrant groups basically say 195,000 Salvadorians and 60,000 Hondurans will have their permits expire.
02:31:31.360 These are mostly farm workers.
02:31:32.400 Now, I've lived and spent a deal of time in this part of the world,
02:31:37.380 and you have to understand that the border between the United States and Canada on the Washington border is on the 49th parallel.
02:31:43.240 It's a big line.
02:31:44.000 It's a very straight line.
02:31:45.220 It's called Zero Avenue.
02:31:47.880 And there is no fence or barrier.
02:31:51.940 It's literally an open border.
02:31:54.380 You can walk right up and walk over.
02:31:57.340 Hundreds of kilometers.
02:31:59.320 You can just look.
02:31:59.880 There's nothing.
02:32:00.340 Nobody's stopping you.
02:32:01.140 In certain parts, they have motion sensors and cameras, and, you know, the border police will come out and get you.
02:32:06.340 There's huge, massive parts of the border where there's just nobody.
02:32:09.660 I mean, so it's certain.
02:32:11.140 It's really, really possible.
02:32:12.720 And these guys, I mean, probably a lot of them are going to be MS-13, so probably they'll start doing what they do in Texas,
02:32:18.340 which is, you know, kidnapping girls and selling them into prostitution and then sacrificing them to their demons.
02:32:25.720 Literally, they set up altars and worship demons.
02:32:27.940 As far as MS-13 is concerned, you're absolutely right.
02:32:34.040 It's almost a religious group in many ways.
02:32:35.680 They are part of the regime, as you well know, because when the stock market crashed in the crisis of 2007, the only thing keeping it afloat was laundered drug money.
02:32:49.300 That was the one thing that they could count on, and it's in the tens of billions of dollars.
02:32:55.280 Eliminating that for the regime is very risky, and, you know, this is why the regime has always been involved in drug dealing and drug trading and supporting, you know,
02:33:06.620 they usually have one group that they support over the others and on them and everything else.
02:33:11.220 The, you know, it just shows you how bad things are.
02:33:14.700 If you're right about the Canadian thing, if they could figure out a way to get to Canada, getting into the U.S. is very easy.
02:33:19.860 But there's entire prison systems in the Southwest that are pure MS-13.
02:33:25.420 Yeah, exactly.
02:33:29.020 And it's just, yeah, so it's going to be an interesting situation because that particular part of the world, the lower mainland, Fraser Valley River area, Fraser River Valley area, rather, is not exactly white.
02:33:47.520 And it's filled with populations that are very ethnically insular and hostile to foreign invaders and aliens.
02:33:52.100 It's like it has the highest concentration of Sikhs in Canada.
02:33:57.020 And so my personal opinion is I think that this is an area of the world that will either be enormously peaceful because of corporate interests,
02:34:05.060 and it will essentially become the Hong Kong of North America, as it is now, or it will become enormously and extraordinarily violent.
02:34:18.480 And you're going to have Sikh death squads.
02:34:22.100 Yeah, I'm quite ignorant about that group, really.
02:34:25.980 I've seen them on the D.C. metro before.
02:34:29.640 Well, it's actually quite interesting, Father.
02:34:31.520 They're very, very, basically, they're very, very similar to Cossacks because the way Sikhs are is they're a Sikh male when he's baptized and received his turban is initiated into the warrior brotherhood, the Khalsa,
02:34:42.300 which is the universal warrior brotherhood of all Sikh believers.
02:34:45.080 And so the religion came into being in the 16th and 15th centuries as a response to the Turkic Muslim invasion of the Punjab.
02:34:54.680 And so it literally is a religion of warriors that is meant to fight Islam.
02:35:00.720 And that's why they're required to carry weapons at all times, Kirpans or Sashmir's and so on.
02:35:07.940 And so Sikhs, they have the Khalsa.
02:35:09.520 It has its own social welfare system.
02:35:12.300 It has its own community kitchens, right, where they will make meals for the day and send them out to families who can't cook for themselves.
02:35:20.700 They have their own internal credit unions, their own internal banking systems.
02:35:24.060 They're totally endogamous.
02:35:26.900 You know, the Sikhs are – they don't do drugs, no liquor.
02:35:33.160 Their religion is totally family-centered.
02:35:36.140 Now, is it true – now, I've heard that they're very sympathetic with us.
02:35:39.540 Is there any truth to that?
02:35:40.380 Yes. Yes, it is.
02:35:42.720 I can give you an example.
02:35:43.960 You know, my father was going through the – going into the Canadian – through – across the United States border into Canada.
02:35:50.060 And he rolled up and he was talking to this Sikh border guard who he recognizes.
02:35:55.580 And, you know, they were chatting up and my father has advanced security clearance so he never gets any problems at the border.
02:36:01.340 And, you know, he was like – the Sikh guy was saying something about Trudeau.
02:36:07.720 And my father said, well, he's trying to ferment a race war.
02:36:10.400 And he's like, oh, yes, race is everything.
02:36:14.380 My father nodded and said, exactly.
02:36:16.720 And they went on their way.
02:36:18.680 But, yeah, so Sikhs, they understand.
02:36:20.700 I mean, they're sympathetic.
02:36:21.400 But, you know, they are – you know, they're like all endogamous groups, right?
02:36:26.720 They're in it for themselves, right?
02:36:28.100 And it's – they have their own natural self-interest.
02:36:29.900 But they are sympathetic, generally speaking.
02:36:33.240 Well, when push comes to shove, I mean, I also think many East Asians are going to be fighting on our side.
02:36:41.120 Agreed.
02:36:42.720 I think that, yeah, it'll split down the middle.
02:36:44.440 I mean, here's the thing.
02:36:45.280 I've got friends who are both Sikhs and East Asians.
02:36:49.120 And the thing with East Asians people have to understand is that China is an incredibly caste-driven society.
02:36:55.140 And it's hugely genetic, especially among the Han.
02:36:58.920 That's right.
02:36:59.360 And so with the Han, 10% of the country lives in cities and owns land and runs everything.
02:37:05.840 And everybody else is a peasant cog in the great machine of the emperor that keeps the civilization running
02:37:10.540 because there's a very limited amount of arable land that needs to be effectively farmed by organized labor to feed everybody.
02:37:17.340 And if that doesn't happen, millions of people die every time.
02:37:22.680 All right?
02:37:23.240 And it's very similar to Russia in many ways.
02:37:25.460 Yeah, with a very short growing season and poor soil.
02:37:29.360 You have to have a very tightly centralized system based on hierarchy.
02:37:32.660 You have no choice.
02:37:33.480 Right.
02:37:33.720 And in the case of China, it wasn't that it had a short growing season and poor soil.
02:37:36.820 It had the opposite.
02:37:38.000 It had the Yellow River Delta.
02:37:39.340 But rather, it had such a massive population consummate to the immense productivity of the arable land that it needed to feed these people.
02:37:49.940 But the point is, is that with the Chinese, that a lot of the caste that we've gotten here in North America are from that top 10%.
02:37:57.440 And so they're actually quite civilized people.
02:38:00.960 You know, they're not whites, obviously.
02:38:02.360 But I have many good friends who are Chinamen who are quite honorable and who I know would be, you know, against Zog when that push comes to itself.
02:38:10.660 Of course, you know, they are Chinese, right?
02:38:13.000 And they see themselves as part of greater China overseas and have that racial kinship with their people.
02:38:18.040 And so in that way, I would say places like Vancouver are – have already been conquered by the Chinese.
02:38:24.160 The Chinese nation has conquered Vancouver, right?
02:38:28.080 And so there's that existential threat, I would say, from that direction.
02:38:31.820 But that's kind of a – that's kind of on a different level.
02:38:37.160 Well, you know, I've never walked through a Chinese area afraid of being mugged.
02:38:40.580 No, it's true.
02:38:41.780 It's true.
02:38:42.420 But I can tell you, Father, I've walked through and been through Vancouver and parts of Vancouver where it is China, where I am the only white person, where you can walk through different stores 10, 15, 30, 40 minutes before you see another white person.
02:38:58.080 They wouldn't tolerate that in China.
02:39:00.360 No, certainly not.
02:39:01.660 But this is what I mean to say is that they've conquered – like there are people – there are third generation Chinese Canadians who do not speak English living in that part of the world.
02:39:12.380 I've always been very sympathetic to East Asians, always, for years, not only because of the Chinese alliance with Russia.
02:39:18.440 That goes way back even to the Tsarist era.
02:39:20.520 The rooftop Koreans in 1992 protecting their society against the rioters at the Rodney King verdict.
02:39:29.300 Most of the East Asians that I know are generally very right-wing ideologically, but that's not what I'm talking about.
02:39:35.440 Yeah, exactly.
02:39:38.180 And I think that it's just important that we – here's the thing is there's too much – I don't understand the impulse, the propaganda impulse to visceral gut emotions and daily stormer-type propaganda.
02:39:49.540 But there's too much of this – like a kind of a lowbrow view of the other races on the far right where it's just – I mean it's – I'm going to be vulgar here, but it's like just nigger death basically.
02:40:01.040 And that that's the purposes of the other races of the world is to be chatteled for white national socialist world imperium, that kind of stuff.
02:40:11.060 Yeah, the East Asians are a very high IQ people, family-centered and everything else.
02:40:16.860 They seem to be natural allies, and I have respect for them, and you're absolutely right.
02:40:21.820 It's idiotic for them to speak like that.
02:40:25.480 Yeah, and it's just – it's immensely ridiculous.
02:40:31.320 And I think a lot – I mean – yeah, and I'm not going to push it any further because I think it's kind of prima facie obvious why this is so stupid.
02:40:38.520 Because our job is not to be an entity with the races of the world and the nations of the world.
02:40:45.280 Our job is to be for our own people, right, and to be separate from them.
02:40:51.260 That's it, right?
02:40:53.020 And so, of course, we're going to have natural conflicts, and we have to stand for ourselves in those, right?
02:40:58.100 That's not a question.
02:40:59.140 You know, saying that another group of people, you know, is – saying that the Chinese are civilized, that they've had a civilization for 5,000 years, right?
02:41:09.600 That's highly sophisticated, right?
02:41:11.420 It does not mean that you get on your knees and suck Chinese cock by choice, excuse me for being vulgar.
02:41:16.360 It's true, right?
02:41:17.780 And this is the absurdity of people.
02:41:20.040 They have these false dichotomies all the time that they try to box themselves and other people into.
02:41:25.320 It's the most ridiculous thing.
02:41:28.460 Yeah, thanks for the visual, by the way.
02:41:30.520 Jeez.
02:41:31.120 Sorry.
02:41:33.880 But, yeah, I mean, it's just – yeah.
02:41:39.580 I mean, anyway, so, Father, do you want to pick another story?
02:41:41.920 We'll get to the end here.
02:41:42.980 One or two more.
02:41:46.280 The fluoride exposure.
02:41:48.260 Yeah.
02:41:48.720 Oh, thank you.
02:41:49.560 This is not a big issue of mine, but articles like this are becoming more and more common.
02:41:56.820 It was a much bigger issue in the 1970s when this was first introduced, adding fluoride to the water supply for the sake of attacking tooth decay.
02:42:07.600 But now you have a study here in the Journal of Environmental Health Perspectives, a group of 300 sets of mothers, increased levels of prenatal fluoride exposure is associated with lower cognitive function.
02:42:24.120 And, of course, the argument always was that fluoride has this kind of retardation effect on the mind.
02:42:32.580 Now, it also says that the doses were fairly high, but that depends on where you live, but it is significant.
02:42:42.920 Yeah, I mean, to be fair, these doses that they're talking about, these are not unusual.
02:42:49.720 Now, I'm going to say this.
02:42:50.900 I mean, I came into the far right kind of through the conspiracy world and that whole thing, so that's how I was initiated to it.
02:42:57.940 So I was always kind of skeptical of fluoride.
02:42:59.780 I didn't drink fluoride in my water.
02:43:01.020 I've been on fluroxetine before, antidepressants, you know, and so I know exactly what the effects of concentrated fluoride are on your brain.
02:43:12.560 And it is retarding in the truest sense of the word.
02:43:17.220 It lateralizes and scatters your cognitive function.
02:43:21.540 So it's just, but what I, this is, of course, of course this is what's going on.
02:43:28.720 It's not a question.
02:43:29.700 Please, don't drink fluoride, especially if you're pregnant.
02:43:33.140 You know, don't give it to your children.
02:43:35.200 Don't drink fluoridated water.
02:43:36.760 It's not that expensive to get a filter.
02:43:38.600 You know, you can get an alkalizer filter.
02:43:40.320 It's probably the best, you know, you can do, right, or serious well water.
02:43:44.560 That kind of stuff.
02:43:46.800 But what I wanted to say is I wanted to make a point here that I see guys in the far right that poo-poo and dismiss things like fluoride in the water or geoengineering chemtrails.
02:43:59.100 You know, this kind of stuff, this is all just this wacky Alex Jones conspiracy theory.
02:44:04.420 It's untrue.
02:44:04.920 And these are the same men who are saying that we shouldn't appeal to respectability, you know, that we shouldn't, we should be focused on the truth and the facts and so on.
02:44:13.440 And so I just want to call them out for this hypocrisy that, you know, this, this people who say things like, oh, well, this is just a bunch of nonsense.
02:44:20.000 This is hocus pocus.
02:44:21.240 It's a conspiracy theory.
02:44:22.460 You know, you are basically cucking for the sake of respectability.
02:44:25.480 This is a main, this is CNN.
02:44:28.900 It's not a conspiracy theory.
02:44:30.100 This is mainstream accepted fact by, by the news media.
02:44:34.920 Um, another article I think, uh, worth discussing is, is, uh, from the Washington post.
02:44:41.980 The FBI is conducting, uh, over a thousand investigations of suspected white supremacists.
02:44:48.280 And I believe the basic connection is that because it's a crime to associate with terrorist groups abroad, this connects with the, uh, banning, as we mentioned before of, uh, the, the Scottish, you know, the national action group.
02:45:04.900 Um, if you're now associated with them or have some cross-border, uh, cooperation, you now are the subject of investigation.
02:45:14.500 And the, uh, chairman of the Homeland Security, uh, committee is, is, is Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin.
02:45:21.840 And I think he's the main source for this article.
02:45:25.240 And that's going to be another way of banning our organizations is by, uh, any association with a foreign organization that has been considered a terror group or is, uh, banned in some way.
02:45:36.700 And that, that's, that's, that's just as frightening as a fluoride in the water.
02:45:43.080 Yeah, absolutely.
02:45:45.080 That is what will occur.
02:45:46.220 And this is what they're going to go for is the guilt by implication, that kind of, um, RICO style, um, legal methods.
02:45:54.900 And as you say, Father, what they're going to do is they're going to use, you know, any number of techniques where they can get our political activity to be legally terrorism, they will use.
02:46:03.240 And once you're in the realm of terrorism, you're an outlaw, you don't have citizen rights, so they can indefinitely detain you as a foreign combatant, an un-uniform combatant, um, without any pretense.
02:46:14.220 They can kill you, put you to death, send you to a black site.
02:46:16.740 Um, and that's the thing, is if they can say, well, certain types of political speech are violent, and if they're motivated by hate or religious extremism, that's by definition terrorism, then certain types of political speech are worthy of sending you to Guantanamo Bay.
02:46:33.240 Well, this is actually, uh, a method I hadn't even considered before, that it is against the law to be associated with a terror group abroad.
02:46:41.760 Now, they don't give any details as to what association means.
02:46:45.180 Uh, I don't know the law in that depth, but this is, these are the grounds for these thousand movement members that are now under investigation.
02:46:54.220 So, association with this group in Scotland can get you, uh, brought onto the dock, and this is, this is extremely frightening.
02:47:03.240 Indeed. Indeed.
02:47:10.360 Okay. Um, any of the, any of these other articles crying out to you, Father? Or, uh, do you feel that, uh, we've gotten our...
02:47:18.880 No, I think, I think, you know, and these are all connected, but no, I think we've covered that this is, uh, uh, these are the heaviest ones, uh, you have...
02:47:25.240 Oh, actually, I've got a white pill I'm going to throw in here at the end here.
02:47:29.300 Uh, the article...
02:47:30.460 We need that.
02:47:31.020 We need that.
02:47:31.260 The article was deleted, but I know basically what it said.
02:47:34.240 Yeah, the child molester was found with his head chopped off and left on judge's front porch.
02:47:38.580 So, the article was deleted, but the gist of the story was that, in Texas, a certain man was arrested because he was, uh, accused of molesting, uh, some guy's niece or some guy's daughters.
02:47:51.080 And so he was brought in front of the judge, and the judge released him on bail.
02:47:54.960 And so what they think is that the father of the, of the, the woman's molested by this guy who had chopped off his head and hands and left him in front of the judge's house.
02:48:04.680 Yes, right?
02:48:06.840 So I've got to say, bravo, congratulations to that guy.
02:48:09.720 That's true, true natural law of punishment.
02:48:12.920 Yeah, when the state fails us, we have an obligation to, um, fulfill the law in our own way.
02:48:20.220 And as a state is concerned far more with other things, uh, like banning, you know, patriotic groups, uh, when they're letting, um, uh, people like this walk.
02:48:30.760 And again, assuming that he was certain that this was a guy who did it, uh, then yes, uh, he, he did the right thing.
02:48:39.020 I think, uh, another example of this, um, are guys who, who shoot the, the man that, that his wife is having an affair with.
02:48:47.480 I know there was a army sergeant who did this and it's legitimate to do that because most states don't have alienation of affection laws anymore.
02:48:57.520 It used to be that if, if, if your wife, um, committed adultery and that's the reason for the divorce, you can then sue him.
02:49:04.460 Um, well, if you don't have that anymore and thereby sanctioning adultery, then because the state refuses to do its job, you have every right to do it.
02:49:14.800 Um, I can't think of his name off the, uh, uh, I think it was Jeremiah Mealy.
02:49:18.020 Yeah, I'm familiar with the gentleman you're speaking of.
02:49:20.480 And I can't, can't find what many records on him.
02:49:23.720 Um, there's a couple of Facebook groups saying he's a great guy.
02:49:26.740 I love the guy.
02:49:27.380 He did the right thing because there's, in that state, there is no, um, alienation of affection law.
02:49:32.440 Yeah, absolutely.
02:49:35.160 Absolutely.
02:49:36.340 Okay, so I think that we've come to the end of our show for today.
02:49:39.700 To all of our listeners, thank you for joining us.
02:49:42.300 I'm your host, Florian Geyer.
02:49:44.520 Joining us today, we had co-hosts Nat Danelaw and Root for Thought, who had to leave early, unfortunately.
02:49:50.300 We thank them for their presence.
02:49:52.060 Expect to have them on again.
02:49:54.280 Joining me also today, I had Father Raphael Johnson.
02:49:58.880 Father, you know, I mean, it's always, uh, it's always a pleasure to have you on.
02:50:01.380 I mean, I think this was a very, very necessary and productive topic to discuss.
02:50:06.540 As I said before, this is coming up almost every day for me.
02:50:10.400 It's absolutely essential.
02:50:13.100 Without a doubt.
02:50:14.940 So to all of our listeners, thank you for joining us.
02:50:19.300 Shalom.
02:50:19.660 Shalom.
02:50:21.660 Rauf und dran, setzt aufs Lusterdach den roten Hahn.
02:50:31.340 Als Adam bruch und Eva spann, Kyrie eleis.
02:50:40.240 Wo war denn da der Edelmann, Kyrie eleis?
02:50:47.440 Spieß voran, rauf und dran, setzt aufs Lusterdach den roten Hahn.
02:50:56.500 Spieß voran, rauf und dran, setzt aufs Lusterdach den roten Hahn.
02:51:07.880 Uns führt der Florian Geier an, trotz Acht und Bann.
02:51:15.580 Den Mundschuh führt er in der Fahne, hat Helm und Arnisch an.
02:51:25.260 Spieß voran, rauf und dran, setzt aufs Lusterdach den roten Hahn.
02:51:33.240 Spieß voran, rauf und dran, setzt aufs Lusterdach den roten Hahn.
02:51:40.840 Spieß voran, rauf und dran, setzt aufs Lusterdach den roten Hahn.
02:51:56.840 Spieß voran, rauf und dran, setzt aufs Lusterdach den roten Hahn.
02:52:17.300 Spieß voran, rauf und dran, setzt aufs Lusterdach den roten Hahn.
02:52:45.680 Spieß voran, rauf und dran, setzt aufs Lusterdach den roten Hahn.
02:52:53.820 Spieß voran, rauf und drüber.
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02:53:11.380 Spieß voran, rauf und dran,ều, rauf und dran.