RadixJournal - January 31, 2025


The Once and Future King

Topics
religion and evil
Hosted by
Richard Spencer
Mentioned
Jeffrey Dahmer Sovereign Bra Bob Dylan Bob Dylan-based Peter Hitchens Judaism Bohemia Greeks Chad
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Episode Stats


Length

13 minutes

Words per minute

153.31

Word count

2,047

Sentence count

150

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

11

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with the great philosopher and philosopher, John Gray, to discuss his new book, "Warriors for Christ: How to be a Christian Warrior in a post-Christian world." We talk about why so many Christians are weak, why they don't believe in the Bible, and how to deal with it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 You know, the Greeks invented philosophy. They invented all this stuff because they were thinking men. And Christianity, in my view, it's the opposite of that. Actual biblical Christianity is telling you to turn off, and Judaism as well, and Islam, it's telling you to just turn off your mind and just do what this book tells you. 0.81
00:00:20.580 And this is the word of God. And if you do it, you're going to get to go to heaven. And that just, to me, even if they were to say that, and actually what was in the book was good stuff. I mean, maybe they taught you, okay, you have to do Aristotelian ethics. And, you know, okay, sure, that's fine. But they're not telling you to do that. They're telling you to be weak. They're telling you to be submissive. They're telling you to basically just take it.
00:00:46.540 Just anybody comes around, slaps you, just take it. Let them slap you again. Give them your shirt. You know, do whatever. You're just waiting on Jesus to come back. 0.93
00:00:55.780 And to me, that cannot have a place in our society whatsoever, because it's intemperate. It's radical, as you said.
00:01:03.080 What do you make of the fact that so many Christians weren't weak, though? Because there's another, there's a flip side to Christianity, that it can, obviously, evidently inspire fanaticism. 0.81
00:01:19.200 It can play into, or buttress, or be around, at the very least, conquest, colonialism, etc. I mean, Constantine became a Christian, you know, as the story goes, before winning a battle.
00:01:38.600 So what do you make of that irony? And I don't really have an answer to it myself. I mean, outside of saying, you know, some, you know, did they do this because of Christianity or in spite of it? I think that's fair enough. 0.94
00:01:52.920 But I don't know, maybe a kind of Dionysian religion like Christianity is, it actually, in some ways, can fuel these things. It can fuel conquest. It can fuel domination. I mean, we had a religious war between Catholics and Protestants. 0.65
00:02:10.980 And I love to mention the wars of religion, whenever Christians will be like, we were once all united. And like, you know, we have to all be Christians in order, so we're not fighting each other. And it's like, guys, we almost, we did, in a way, commit genocide against one another. And there were lots of other, you know, geopolitical considerations at play. I get it.
00:02:37.460 But it was fanatical, the wars of religion. And it was about extermination at some point. I mean, as I was saying, you could argue that Bohemia was genocided, basically, during this period.
00:02:53.400 So, this idea that Christianity just makes you meek and mild, it's not, evidently, it's not true. It can inspire vicious hatred and so on.
00:03:08.720 Yeah, it is.
00:03:10.140 Between ourselves, among white people. So, what do you, anyway, I'm not sure I even have a definitive answer to this. I simply, I'm, it's something worth contemplating. But what do you make of that? 0.69
00:03:21.400 I mean, I just think they have to ignore the Bible. It's like, there has to be a number of verses that they just don't believe. And I don't know whether it's because they're ignorant of the verses. I think it's a little bit more of confirmation bias, because I tell them all these verses all the time online, you know, I get into it, Christians. I'm like, do you even know what your book says? And they either know, or they don't know, or they dismiss it.
00:03:45.660 It's like, well, you didn't really mean that, or, you know, or anything. And so, they get into this mindset of warriors for Christ. And I think if you can be a warrior for Christ, then it's like, it's okay to kill people if you're doing it in the name of God or in the name of Christ.
00:04:00.380 So they go out there to the battlefield with the big crosses and everything. It's like, well, this is why we're doing it. It's for Jesus. You know, we're gonna, we're gonna kill everybody that doesn't believe Jesus. And then everything's going to be great.
00:04:10.380 But maybe that's sort of brilliant in a way. You know, well, you'll sometimes, like, for instance, I've, I, this is kind of morbid on my part, but I'll sometimes get into these true crime, you know, like, like interviews with people, the killers, and, and I have a bit of a morbid fixation. I, it's not healthy, but I'll, but I'm admitting it.
00:04:40.380 I'm, you know, but, you know, very rarely, do you see someone there, you, you will occasionally see someone who's either on it, they're dumb, and a psychopath. And they will just say, like, yeah, like, you know, like, he snitched. So I killed the motherfucker, like, they'll just like full on psychopath, like, you know, brutal person. 0.95
00:05:08.100 And, but that's actually not what you'll find. Like, if you see interviews with a lot of these people who clearly are criminal, antisocial personality disorder, to say the least, like, they should be locked away. There's no doubt about it. 1.00
00:05:23.480 Jeffrey Dahmer types.
00:05:24.100 Jeffrey Dahmer apologized before the court. And I don't know if you've seen that. Other famous people will sort of justify it. You know, I watched pornography as a child, so you should feel sorry for me. Or, you know, I didn't, I was taken over, I was sort of possessed. And, you know, and I did this, and I don't know why I did, like, you'll sometimes get that, even though I think they actually did it for very specific reasons.
00:05:50.600 And so I guess what I'm saying is, maybe this isn't the best kind of metaphor or something. But what I'm saying is that, in this weird way, like, the guy from the Whatever podcast, or who I like, personally, and what is his name again? I'm forgetting at the moment.
00:06:14.600 I don't know.
00:06:16.040 So call him Chad.
00:06:16.920 Yeah, Sovereign Bra, yeah. 0.79
00:06:19.040 Sovereign Bra, okay, yeah.
00:06:20.300 Is he on that show? Or, I thought he was just a guest host or something.
00:06:24.280 I think that's, he's the lead host, isn't he?
00:06:26.300 Okay, okay.
00:06:27.280 Maybe I'm wrong. I'm mixing up. It doesn't matter. What I'm saying is that type of guy who posts crusader memes.
00:06:34.660 Right, yeah, yeah.
00:06:35.660 And maybe there's something about the human psyche or the Western psyche that you can't, you need to sort of have a valence over the real.
00:06:47.960 Like, the real is our own will to power and even bloodlust or resentment or revenge and things like that.
00:06:58.320 Like, that's in all of us.
00:07:00.120 Oh, yeah.
00:07:00.820 I sound like a Christian tonight.
00:07:02.220 Like, within every human heart is evil.
00:07:05.700 It's right. It's true.
00:07:07.180 Yeah.
00:07:07.560 But you sometimes need this veil of justification.
00:07:10.740 So it's, there's almost something brilliant about the crusader meme in the sense that it allows you to engage in these subhuman barbaric acts under the guise of a sort of superhuman morality. 0.99
00:07:31.960 You know, like, what would, you know, there's this quote that atheists love, and Peter Hitchens quoted it at every debate and speech, which is that Christians talk about bad people being turned good through the gospel or through the Bible.
00:07:55.060 Like, you know, there's a guy in prison, and you preach to him, and he gets out, and then he's safe.
00:08:00.880 He starts, you know, he found Jesus, he contributes to the community, he's pacified.
00:08:06.440 And you can find examples of that, no question.
00:08:08.440 But what he said is that the question is really, can you make a good person do evil?
00:08:14.340 Like, can, like, that you need a religion or some sort of ideology, like, say, national socialism or communism, where that person can justify, like, pressing the button on, you know, murdering the kulaks or- 0.95
00:08:33.300 Because it's morally justified.
00:08:34.860 Yeah.
00:08:35.160 Or economically justified.
00:08:37.600 Yeah, exactly.
00:08:38.840 But you need that end in order to justify it.
00:08:41.940 And I guess my response to that is, first off, there are no good people.
00:08:48.240 But my other, I guess I'm sort of a Protestant here, we're inherently depraved. 0.74
00:08:54.020 But my other response to that is that, and this is going to maybe sound quite brutal or even evil, but the winners of history, the people who ultimately are selected,
00:09:08.060 the people whose ancestors survive and have, or, excuse me, whose progeny survives and the progeny become ancestors of other progeny,
00:09:18.840 those are the people who were able to marshal that religion in order to destroy other people who could have survived.
00:09:29.080 So in some ways, the great challenge of history is to make good, good people do evil things.
00:09:38.800 There are many people who are passive, inert plants who don't want to commit evil.
00:09:45.240 And in some ways, you need to give them a religion as a way of inspiring them to be evil.
00:09:51.160 Because you need to be a little evil in order to have a good society.
00:09:56.920 And you need to be a little evil in order to displace or even destroy a competitor to your tribe and worldview.
00:10:09.280 So it's actually, you know, when they say good, they mean that in some bourgeois sense of like NAP or not harming, just inert, basically.
00:10:19.700 And so religion needs to be able to inspire violence and evil in order for that people to predominate. 1.00
00:10:29.860 And so, you know, maybe there's something about Christianity that's quite brilliant in the sense of like a knight for Christ. 0.98
00:10:40.420 You know, you're killing someone on behalf of this Jewish hippie. 1.00
00:10:45.380 You're murdering thousands on behalf of Bob Dylan. 0.98
00:10:50.040 Right, right.
00:10:51.180 Isn't Jesus kind of Bob Dylan-based, like literally?
00:10:54.180 Like, you're like, in the name of Bob Dylan.
00:11:00.240 I smite, like that's in a way the brilliance of Christianity. 0.99
00:11:05.640 Yeah, I think I get it.
00:11:07.000 And I was just reading Napoleon's, the letters to St. Helena, you know, and he was, he talks a lot about Christianity in that, or I was reading some other letters too.
00:11:20.300 And he keeps making, he's very pro-Christianity in these letters, but not because of he believes in any of this stuff, or at least that's not the impression I got.
00:11:31.580 It was that it's a tool for social order, and what he was pointing at was that it's this idea of equality that he says is so powerful, because he's basically attributing all of his success to Christianity.
00:11:45.960 He's saying that all these people that I needed to get out there and go be evil and kill a bunch of people in order to win, is I did it through Christianity.
00:11:54.220 Is that all these people, there's a drive in most people, because most people are not aristocrats, you know, they're not wise, they're just average.
00:12:04.040 And you take the average and the below average, and they make a majority, right?
00:12:11.320 So they can push the aristocrats around as long as they buy this idea of equality. 0.83
00:12:16.880 So if you are downtrodden, then equality sounds great.
00:12:20.620 And, you know, this is basically what Nietzsche was saying with slave morality, is that it's their way to get power, is equality.
00:12:26.520 It's their only way to get power, because they're subordinate.
00:12:29.200 They can't win any other way, so they just, they gravitate towards this equality idea, because it's promising to give them power.
00:12:39.620 You know, if they're a slave, it's, you know, you live in a democracy, they're going to get emancipated, you know?
00:12:44.960 And so it's this, this desire for power that they use equality.
00:12:49.340 So, but what Napoleon seemed to be saying is that if you are a wise general, you're going to use this to your benefit.
00:12:56.400 You know, you may not believe all this stuff, but it doesn't matter, because as long as you can get them to go out there and kill for you, then, then you can win, then you can survive, then you can do all the stuff that's necessary to maintain a country.
00:13:08.740 You know, it's like you're either conquering or you're getting conquered, and there's no, there's this, countries can't just stay still, and if you're stagnant, you're dying.
00:13:18.760 It's like you have to grow as a nation.