Ep 559 | An Atheist's Take on Christianity & The Power of Truth | Guest: James Lindsay
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
176.37381
Summary
Part two of my conversation with James Lindsay came out last Tuesday. If you have not listened to that, definitely go listen to it. We talk about the cultural moment that we re in and the long lineage, philosophical lineage that has led us to where we are, especially when it comes to race politics. It was a fascinating conversation, as it always is. But today I wanted to talk to him specifically about theology and our disagreements there. He identifies as an agnostic slash atheist, and I really wanted to know why isn t James a Christian? I mean, he seems to really understand Christian theology on a very profound level.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Monday. Today's episode is brought to you by our friends
00:00:14.500
at Good Ranchers. Better than organic chicken and Kraft beef. Shipped right to your front door. Go
00:00:20.780
to goodranchers.com slash Allie and check it out. All right. Today is part two of my conversation
00:00:28.280
with James Lindsay. Part one came out last Tuesday. If you have not listened to that,
00:00:33.560
definitely go listen to it. We talk about the cultural moment that we're in and the long
00:00:39.040
lineage, philosophical lineage that has led us to where we are, especially when it comes to race
00:00:46.860
politics. It was a fascinating conversation as it always is with James Lindsay. But today I wanted
00:00:53.620
to talk to him specifically about theology and our disagreements there. He identifies,
00:00:59.040
I believe, as an agnostic slash atheist. You guys know I'm a Christian. And I really wanted to know
00:01:06.020
why isn't James a Christian? I mean, he references Christianity and the Bible a lot. He seems to
00:01:11.140
really understand Christian theology on a very profound level. And so I wanted to talk to him
00:01:18.280
about why he's not a Christian and our differences there. And I think that you're really going to,
00:01:23.140
enjoy this conversation. So without further ado, here is our friend once again, James Lindsay.
00:01:32.820
Nobody's really read Marx. And the people who have, according to the Marxists that I've read in
00:01:37.600
the past, or who've written in the past, say, 20 years, I don't think a lot of people understood Marx.
00:01:43.240
So Marx had this very simple kind of construction of the world. You have this thing called the base,
00:01:48.120
later in the structural framing, it got called the infrastructure. That's your productive
00:01:51.800
workers. It's also where nature is. It's where all the stuff's happening. But all of your productive
00:01:56.360
working class is the base. That's what actually builds society. Society's made out of that. And
00:02:02.320
then you have all these people who do things like what we're doing. We're talking. We don't do real
00:02:06.240
work. We talk. We write books. You know, we're lawyers. We mediate people's problems. We're priests
00:02:11.920
or pastors, and we just shepherd people through spirituality that's their opiate of their masses or
00:02:16.660
whatever. These aren't real jobs. They don't produce any real tangible stuff. So in a sense,
00:02:21.640
Marxists see that as a grift. But what Marx called all of that is the superstructure of society. And
00:02:26.820
that's where the real organization of society kind of gets its kind of basis. And everybody who's
00:02:31.840
involved in the superstructure is also known as an ideologist. An ideology is this bunch of excuses
00:02:37.640
the people who get to work in the superstructure give for why they get to be in the superstructure.
00:02:42.480
Why they get to do this fake work that doesn't have to produce anything while somebody else has
00:02:47.560
to toil with a hammer or a sickle to produce the base of society. And so they have these things
00:02:54.500
called ideologies. And they convince themselves that their ideology is the real explanation for
00:03:00.300
how the world works. And so they therefore are trapped into thinking, well, this is how it's
00:03:06.540
supposed to be. I've earned my way here. I went to school longer. You know, I'm meritocracy. I did the
00:03:13.480
right stuff. I sacrificed. I've worked my way up. And you could too if you wanted to. But what you
00:03:20.040
have is that those two things are held in this relationship and tension with one another. And
00:03:24.140
they're creating the structure of society that organizes how society works. And it therefore
00:03:28.920
conditions how everybody thinks, depending on where you are positionally, as they would say in
00:03:33.560
intersectionality, against that structure of power. Where are you relationally to being part of the
00:03:40.580
either cultural or material production base? Where are you in terms of the ideology? And one of the
00:03:46.680
features of the ideology is that you think that you don't have an ideology. That's the magic sauce of
00:03:51.940
the ideology. You can't see it. But you are being conditioned by these structural forces that are
00:03:56.780
ultimately what Marx called the social relations produced by the relationship between the infrastructure
00:04:01.860
and superstructure. And this is a dialectical relationship. So that's what dialectical materialism
00:04:07.900
is all about. So you are conditioned by that. That determines who you are. It determines your
00:04:12.960
character. So with critical race theory, whiteness becomes the property. White supremacy becomes the
00:04:19.140
structure that justifies the ideology, I should say, that justifies why some people get access to
00:04:24.760
whiteness and why other people don't. And then systemic racism becomes the structure that shapes all of
00:04:30.300
society, conditions everything. And so any answer or excuse that you give...
00:04:37.400
You know, it reminds me not to interrupt you, but as you're talking, I'm thinking, I'm like,
00:04:40.900
this sounds exactly like what people say when they talk about chemtrails.
00:04:45.400
Seriously, like when they're talking about chemtrails and they're like, well, see, the chemtrails are like
00:04:50.460
convincing people of different things. They're like playing with your mind. But I,
00:04:54.720
I am the one person who has escaped the power of the chemtrails. And I am here to tell you about
00:05:00.440
that. And if you deny that chemtrails have had an effect on your thinking, it's just because
00:05:06.120
It's working. That's right. And I use the special soap or whatever that got them out of my hair.
00:05:10.020
It's like, no, seriously though, it's, um, it is a huge conspiracy theory. Even in the book, I
00:05:14.460
have to call it a conspiracy theory. Um, the whole thing is a giant conspiracy theory
00:05:19.420
and that everybody's participating in. And the only people who are aware that this is even how
00:05:25.640
it works, just like with the chemtrails are the people who have the awakened consciousness. In
00:05:30.520
other words, the Marxists. And so they therefore get to appoint themselves the arbiter of how
00:05:35.280
everything's going to go, how everybody's going to have to respond. And they're the only, if you
00:05:40.040
disagree with them, you must not have understood correctly. So you don't have epistemic authority
00:05:44.340
to challenge them, or you must be secretly a racist or it's because you're, it's because you're
00:05:48.880
white and it goes back to almost like, almost like pathologizing whiteness that your white brain
00:05:53.980
just can't understand. Because it's been conditioned by the structural reality of systemic racism
00:05:59.600
so that it's just not possible. Even though, you know, we've had comedians, you know, breaking down
00:06:06.040
the racial barrier by talking about white culture and doing, you know, Eddie Murphy or whatever,
00:06:10.620
Bernie Mac, all these guys coming out doing their white person voice and making fun of white people
00:06:14.480
culture. Like everybody's been making fun of this for a long time. It's what they're saying
00:06:18.780
doesn't even make any sense. But they think they're the only ones who can actually see
00:06:23.660
that this is how this really works in society. But they don't realize that they're actually
00:06:29.340
It really is a cult. And culture is always downstream from cult. That's one thing that I think a lot
00:06:34.020
of people don't understand. And I was actually reading about a critique of John Locke last night
00:06:40.880
that, and a lot of what we're talking about reminds me of that, that Locke's legacy, I would
00:06:47.020
say is even more pervasive than like the outright Marxist, this idea that you, that everyone,
00:06:52.940
you know, starts equally. And it's all these systems, it's all these external things that
00:07:00.460
are, you know, like tearing people down. And really, he extracts the human experience from
00:07:05.300
human nature and all of these institutions that have created good societies. That's where
00:07:11.080
we get Atlas shrugged and all of these things that I just don't necessarily agree with. But
00:07:14.500
even conservatives kind of latch on to. And it's reminding me, it's reminding me of,
00:07:19.840
of, of all of that, that Locke seemed to not understand that culture is downstream from cult.
00:07:27.500
It's downstream from what you believe about God, what you believe about where people came
00:07:32.140
from, what you believe about human nature, why humans do the things that we do, and the
00:07:36.700
things that human beings actually naturally need not just to survive, but to thrive. In my
00:07:41.920
opinion, leftism always gets that wrong. There are even some people, I would say on the libertarian
00:07:46.760
right that tend to get that wrong. They just get human nature wrong. The left tends to think that
00:07:52.860
when it comes to nature versus nurture, that we're all nurture, that we are all just completely
00:07:58.380
malleable. And if the social engineers at the World Economic Forum, if they want people to live a
00:08:04.280
certain way, we'll learn to adapt. And we'll just be happy, you know, owning nothing, eating bugs and
00:08:10.040
things like that. But the fact of the matter is, is that we do have a human nature. Everyone belongs
00:08:14.620
to a, I don't want to say a cult, but some kind of worldview, belief system, theology, and
00:08:21.400
understanding these things and how our nature flows from that is actually really important in order to
00:08:26.640
create a society in which people can function together.
00:08:28.820
Yeah. Locke was really good on life, liberty, and property. Like, he really nailed it with those.
00:08:33.620
And his explanations for why are just really sharp.
00:08:36.680
Blank slate, however, really wrong. Really, really wrong. We are not blank slates.
00:08:43.640
It's more like, and this is an image I've always wanted to have, like, to build so I could have it.
00:08:48.320
But it's like, imagine, you know, a canvas that's like a blank slate. You can paint whatever you want
00:08:51.900
on it, right? But imagine that the canvas is contoured to look, say, like a human face,
00:08:56.580
right? So, you just have this canvas. It's got wood under it. So, it looks, it's shaped like
00:09:01.580
a face, like a person. And if you paint that, you can only go, like, you can paint it however you
00:09:08.700
want. But it still looks like a human face. And if you paint it just right so that, you know,
00:09:15.360
you contoured makeup like I have on right now and look so good. If you contour it all out,
00:09:20.600
you can create some illusions. But then you change angle and it's like you just have a weird brown
00:09:24.540
lion on the side of your nose, right? And so, there's limits to how far the nurture argument
00:09:33.060
goes. Now, with Marxism, they actually believe, they, of course, Marx deposes God. He replaces
00:09:39.760
God with man, like, literally with man and himself. And he says that man is creating himself
00:09:45.700
through the process of history. So, man becomes, as subject, also his own object. And so, for them,
00:09:53.120
they actually believe that by creating the social relations, that the social relations
00:09:58.000
then condition man back and create man. And so, anything that's a limit from that kind of
00:10:04.380
super blank slate mentality, total nurture, is actually a social condition limiting the range
00:10:11.160
of your subjectivity, which they believe is, yes, that is Marx. Like, if you read the economic
00:10:16.220
and philosophic manuscript of 1844, he goes into that. He's very clear about it. Man is creating
00:10:21.720
himself, and it's the limits on man's subjectivity are created by the social relations that are
00:10:26.920
created in dominance and oppression. And dominance and oppression arise from property ownership. And
00:10:32.580
that's, in fact, property ownership is characterized as the original sin that kicked us out of the
00:10:36.660
Garden of Eden. I mean, it's very religious, but that's why they think that way, is so everybody
00:10:42.580
is responsible to shape the social relations in a way that will, as Michel Foucault put it,
00:10:47.560
expand the potentialities of being by expanding one's subjectivity. You always hear them talk
00:10:52.380
about subjectivity, because they think if they expand the subjectivity, then you can create some
00:10:56.900
broader sense of the object in the world, including yourself, and come to know yourself as creator,
00:11:03.140
independent of God. And it's, why does it march hundreds of millions of people to death
00:11:08.140
everywhere it's tried? That's why. Because it's a fundamentally anti-human mentality posing as
00:11:15.140
humanism, to use Marx's word for it. You know, I didn't realize this when I was writing my book. It's
00:11:21.760
a little pink book, and it doesn't look like it would, you know, contain an analysis of Marx, and
00:11:26.640
that's because it doesn't. But I critique the, you know, the legacy, or not the legacy, but the product
00:11:33.020
of that legacy, which is this idea that you see a lot in new age circles, that you see a lot in
00:11:40.780
self-help, especially female self-help. So coming from places like Glennon Doyle, coming from places
00:11:46.020
like Brene Brown, or Rachel Hollis, I don't expect you necessarily to be familiar with them, who
00:11:51.460
certainly wouldn't consider themselves Marxist, but they are on the left and don't realize that their
00:11:56.320
ideas are kind of rooted in that. And the idea that I articulate and critique in my book is,
00:12:01.780
this concept that inside all of us is this beautiful, like perfect princess, or diva, or
00:12:12.700
whatever it is. And it's really, it's society, it's the patriarchy, it's capitalism, it's advertising,
00:12:20.400
it's unfair expectations, it's fat phobia, it's whatever it is, your kids, your marriage, all these
00:12:26.160
things are holding back that inner perfect princess inside of you. And what you need to do is to
00:12:33.340
liberate yourself from those things. And so you need to commit yourself to radical self-care, to
00:12:39.620
radical self-love. And that's going, they use all these euphemisms, once again, drawing boundaries,
00:12:44.960
cutting toxic people out of your life, which of course sounds good. I'm not saying that there's
00:12:48.460
anything wrong with boundaries or cutting actually toxic people. But what they really mean by that
00:12:52.820
is a form of glorified narcissism. And they tell you that you owe that to yourself because you're
00:12:59.120
never going to fully find who you really are, your true authentic self, your autonomous self,
00:13:05.900
until you throw off all of these things that are holding you back. And that is in direct
00:13:12.020
contradiction, as is this whole blank slate thing, which I'm realizing are very similar, if not the
00:13:16.920
same, it's in direct contradiction to what Christianity says, that we are actually totally
00:13:23.420
depraved. I mean, the Bible talks about in sin, my mother and father conceived me. And so we actually
00:13:31.840
believe that we are depraved and that we need to be not just made better, new and improved, but we
00:13:39.860
actually need to be made a new person, that we actually need to be born again because the old self is
00:13:45.780
wasting away because of sin. We need to put on the new self made after the likeness of Christ in
00:13:50.740
holiness. And the only way that we can do that is through regeneration of the Holy Spirit by grace
00:13:54.440
through faith in Christ. And so it is actually in direct contradiction to the gospel, this whole
00:13:59.720
thing, this whole blank slate, this whole inside you is this perfect self and all of these structures,
00:14:04.860
which is all really a form of Marxism, which I didn't really realize before. And that's just
00:14:10.720
another, and I would say probably the most fundamental reason why the Christian worldview and the
00:14:15.120
Marxist worldview, they just cannot, they cannot align because their view of where we come from
00:14:21.380
and who the moral authority is and what human nature is, they're totally opposite.
00:14:27.560
Completely opposite. Like you could be the only Christian on the planet and your relationship
00:14:33.140
with Christ and that renewal doesn't depend on anybody else. And it literally doesn't matter.
00:14:39.420
But with Marx, they're actually seeking spiritual renewal as well. And that you actually have to,
00:14:46.460
in a sense, be born again as social man, or depends on how it gets translated from the German,
00:14:51.220
socialist man, social man, one or the other. And so what that means is it's a man who's,
00:14:56.100
according to the dialectical process of their thought, who has been made to live in a society.
00:15:00.680
In other words, to fully integrate into society where there's no longer any tension between the
00:15:04.680
fact that you're an individual who lives with other people, right? And so the way that you
00:15:09.080
achieve your awakening is by making everybody else think the same way you do. And that's,
00:15:14.760
man and society are renewed at the same time in the Marxist theology. Whereas with the Christian
00:15:23.020
theology, your renewal begins the moment you accept Christ, period. It's a totally individual
00:15:29.740
decision. It's totally up to you. You were given free will by God to make this decision or not
00:15:33.900
on your own. Well, you're sitting with a Calvinist. And so I have a little bit of a different take,
00:15:39.540
but I understand what you're saying. So, yeah. I understand that Calvinism has a slightly different
00:15:45.800
perspective on this and the elect and all of this and the, yes, irresistible grace. That said,
00:15:51.780
within Marxism, but see, now that's just been that God has ordained in advance, which things are
00:15:57.360
going to happen. And that's what's going to happen. Over here within Marxism, again, man and society
00:16:03.040
either don't renew at all or renew together as one thing. So until you have the perfect socialist
00:16:12.040
society or communism, you don't have the renewed man either. They are in dialectical relationship
00:16:19.360
with one another. They are opposites. They can't pull apart from one another. They are defined in
00:16:23.660
terms of one another. And their resolution is when those things become co-continuous. Man and society
00:16:28.620
become co-continuous. So your renewal in Marxism as a spiritual thing has nothing to do with your
00:16:35.280
beliefs about Christ or any other such thing. It has to do with if you can make the new society
00:16:41.740
come about and get other people, all other people to be on board with it. And it is so much like
00:16:48.340
Christian eschatology in that it says, you know, this is what the end time is going to look like.
00:16:53.320
And it really does remind me of the promise of the World Economic Forum that you'll owe nothing and
00:16:57.560
be happy. Obviously, in Christian theology, we believe that Christ will rule in perfect peace and
00:17:04.260
that we will be fully joyful and at peace and that we will have no sorrow or sickness. But that's
00:17:13.040
because we believe in Christ's rule, whereas the Marxists believe that that can happen here on earth.
00:17:18.040
We can achieve that kind of liberation. But basically, everyone has to comply and become their own
00:17:23.060
gods in a sense, right? Yes. In fact, the goal, they say this explicitly in their literature,
00:17:28.640
I don't know how metaphorical they're being, is to get back into the Garden of Eden and to kick
00:17:33.120
out the jailer that was there from the beginning. Our birthright is the garden. And I say that they
00:17:39.140
say this literally. Herbert Marcuse, for example, in Eros and Civilization, which he wrote in 1955,
00:17:43.980
said that the goal is to get back into the garden. And the way that you do it is by taking a second bite
00:17:48.360
of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. That's in there. He says that. And, you know,
00:17:53.680
the being in the garden, this kind of perfect utopian kingdom of God. It's so much sense with
00:17:58.740
what they think. It's exactly what they think. But we're all in it together because the garden
00:18:03.600
only works when we're all there as one perfect, no domination, united society.
00:18:10.200
But also like within the Garden of Eden, because they tend to, it seems like Marxists tend to think
00:18:16.200
that all like hierarchies are inherently oppressive. But there was a hierarchy in the garden, not just
00:18:23.960
between God and man, but also between man and the rest of creation. And so, again, this goes back to
00:18:29.880
their just erroneous view of human nature. We were created in hierarchy from the very beginning. So it's
00:18:36.280
a little bit confusing to me why they think going back to the Garden of Eden is going to get rid of
00:18:40.600
all hierarchy. Oh, well, because God won't be there. See, that's absolutely key. God.
00:18:46.260
So it's not getting rid of Satan when you say the jailer. It's getting rid of God.
00:18:49.800
Yeah. God's the jailer. Marxism is ultimately a Gnostic religion, which means that it holds that
00:18:55.100
God is a demon, not actually the deity. And he's so what he is is somebody that went through this
00:19:00.540
process already, reached a level of power and ability or whatever, and then came into the garden
00:19:07.680
and ruled over people falsely as a demon and then, you know, used his power to kick people out and all
00:19:14.740
of this. But this is all fake and evil. And so it's our birthright. And we just have to we have to get
00:19:20.320
God out of the way and realize that he's a demon. And then we become like him. In fact, the point of the
00:19:25.600
Marxist project is the dialectical relationship between the subject and object. I am a human
00:19:30.300
subject. I visualize in my mind that which I want to see in the world and I create it.
00:19:35.060
And I know myself through my creation, which is I know myself as a creator. But because there's
00:19:41.540
intersubjectivity, in other words, you have a subjectivity, I have a subjectivity, all the people
00:19:45.280
have subjectivities and they have to work together somehow. They all have to synthesize into kind of
00:19:49.220
the same program or it's not going to work because one of us is dominating the other. There's a hierarchy
00:19:53.980
unless we're all thinking the same thing, working the same way, like the Star Trek Borg or whatever.
00:19:59.860
And we all therefore know ourselves as creators, as the authors of history. And history is, in fact,
00:20:08.580
the authorship of man realizing himself as creative or as the creator. It's totally, to think that you
00:20:17.740
could take anything that's derived from Marxism and kind of cobble it into Christianity is absolutely
00:20:24.360
And I know very smart people who try to do that, who try to say, well, I agree with 20 to 30% of
00:20:30.600
Okay, we only have a few minutes. And this kind of leads into what I at least want to briefly talk
00:20:40.280
to you about. It seems to me, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, I don't want to mischaracterize
00:20:44.360
you, that you kind of understand. Well, okay, I won't even put that on you. What it seems to me
00:20:50.300
is that it's not just that Marxism and all of its subsidiaries are a direct contradiction to
00:20:55.920
Christianity, but also that Christianity and Christian theology alone is actually the antidote
00:21:01.380
to Marxism. It's the only thing that can really replace it. And it's, well, I'm curious to know
00:21:08.780
if you agree with that, or if you think that there is something else that we can replace Marxism with
00:21:16.420
here in the West, as far as a guiding philosophy goes as the foundation of Western society and the
00:21:23.120
making of laws that is not Christian in nature, you're not a Christian. And so what do you think
00:21:29.460
is a good basis of, for society? What do you think is a good moral foundation?
00:21:34.300
Well, I mean, I'm not opposed to using Christianity, obviously, but what ultimately boils down to is a
00:21:40.840
disposition of either humility or arrogance. So the Marxist view, if you see yourself as the creator,
00:21:47.920
then that's obviously crazy arrogance. And you think that anything becomes possible,
00:21:52.460
and you start blaming other people for why your subjectivity is limited, and therefore you can't
00:21:57.240
create and have whatever you want. That's a very arrogance-based problem. Now, within Christianity,
00:22:02.440
obviously, the whole idea is that you can do nothing but be humble before God. It'd be ridiculous not
00:22:07.800
to. But if you don't take a theological perspective in the traditional sense of believing in a God,
00:22:15.800
there's still the fact of there is the world. We are human beings within it. We have a nature that,
00:22:21.360
and it turns out, maybe we could mold through something horrific like eugenics, but we shouldn't
00:22:26.820
be so arrogant as to screw with things like that. It's a bad idea. And so being humble before the fact
00:22:32.820
that human beings and the world are as they are, and therefore that there are right and wrong ways
00:22:39.140
to engage with one another that clearly manipulation and forcing people to believe all in the same way
00:22:48.560
about the same things, that's somehow very inimical to whatever the human spirit really is, whether you
00:22:54.640
see that as being a unique child of God made in Mago Dei or otherwise. It's still, I think our spirit is
00:23:03.620
fundamentally based in freedom, wanting to be free, not arbitrarily from so-called systems or structures,
00:23:11.880
but rather that we get to do to the degree that's possible our own self-determination
00:23:17.220
in life. And so I generally think that any broad philosophy that's rooted deeply in an epistemology
00:23:29.880
geared toward truth, an ontology that accepts being as something that is outside of us, that we are not
00:23:37.800
the creators in our heads of that which is. Therefore, we have very limited faculty over
00:23:44.680
it. Maybe we're incredibly skilled people and we can drive a great big, you know, machine and move
00:23:49.420
the earth. It's still so small, right? Anywhere where we start to have kind of a epistemological and
00:23:55.580
ontological and then axiological, which is values-based orientation toward humility and that there's
00:24:03.460
something core to what it means to actually be human that's rooted in being able to be free to
00:24:09.020
the point of self-determination, I think is extraordinarily key. Now, as somebody who has
00:24:16.780
obviously benefited tremendously from the kind of Judeo-Christian backbone that's been in this
00:24:23.140
country and having, you know, read scripture and thought about the message that it's providing,
00:24:30.060
I think that it is actually an excellent anchor regardless of, you know, if some people decide
00:24:35.520
to believe it in various degrees of literality or not, and other people decide that they don't want
00:24:40.180
to believe it at all. But I still think that it's an excellent backbone of, you know, values and what
00:24:47.440
meaning in life is and what the role of faith actually should be, whether it's faith in God or faith
00:24:55.720
kind of in this, you know, generally in the best of humanity or whatever else. I think that that's,
00:25:02.780
I really do think it's a good anchor that we should be encouraging as a cultural backbone throughout
00:25:12.020
society. And of course, it falls heavily to believers to be the stewards of that and to bring that light,
00:25:21.900
you know, to, as I said, you know, spread the gospel to people so that they can hear these messages,
00:25:27.960
the values contained in their work. They're extremely effective. They're effective for very
00:25:34.580
good reasons. If you believe they're divinely inspired, that's the reasons. If you see that
00:25:39.800
they've stood the test of time for 2,000 years and produced flourishing societies everywhere they've
00:25:43.900
gone, that's other reasons that are a little bit more practical in the world without invoking theology.
00:25:49.720
But generally speaking, I think that that's what it comes down to, and a disposition toward
00:25:53.720
humility rather than arrogance, toward taking responsibility and seeing people as individuals.
00:26:00.600
I invoke the imago dei all the time, despite not being a believer, like to think that because you are
00:26:08.460
an individual who is formed for a purpose, according to the theology, and that, you know,
00:26:15.520
you need to live that purpose. That's a very powerful and important message. So, you know,
00:26:22.140
and again, just stop thinking you're the creator and that everything is possible. Like, you're not
00:26:28.580
going to change your gender. You're not going to. Like, some things just aren't possible,
00:26:33.540
and you don't have to make it. It's not oppression that some things are not possible. It's not oppression
00:26:41.380
that, and I'm all about people experimenting with things in life, but you also have to be willing to
00:26:46.100
admit that didn't work. And that's like the whole Old Testament, right? Israelites experimented with
00:26:51.820
life, and God got mad at them, and bad things happened, and then they bring back up. He brings up a
00:26:56.600
prophet. The prophet brings them back to God, and they get their life right. And that's,
00:27:00.540
metaphorically speaking, you know, a lesson. Yeah. Try things in life, but be humble. Come back.
00:27:08.720
Yeah. I would say, and I'll end on this, is that Christianity is the why behind anyone should have
00:27:21.520
humility underneath those things. Because there is a transcendent moral lawgiver who says what is and
00:27:29.740
what isn't, who isn't just answering those ontological questions, the philosophical questions
00:27:36.300
that we're talking about, but also the teleological questions. You mentioned purpose. There is
00:27:42.060
only a creator of something can tell you what something is actually made for, and that's what
00:27:50.920
we get in God. That doesn't just tell us, okay, you are made male and female biology because you only
00:27:56.360
have one tell us, just like anything else, just like a bird, you know, can't be a turtle and vice
00:28:01.460
versa. Man can't be a woman. Obviously, Christian theology tells us that, but it also answers that
00:28:06.740
question of, well, why are we humble? Why are we not our own gods? If we are the greatest power in this
00:28:12.580
universe, why can't we? Why can't we create man or society in our image? And of course, the Christian
00:28:18.660
answer is to that is because God made us in his image. We actually don't have the power and the
00:28:23.100
authority to do that. And the only authority that we do have over creation, which of course,
00:28:27.400
from Genesis 1, we believe that we have, is endowed to us by God, just like our rights were endowed to
00:28:34.100
us by God. And of course, as I'm sure that you would agree, without the, not just Christianity,
00:28:38.780
but the Protestant Reformation, this idea that, okay, we're not just handed down truth from some
00:28:44.060
person on high, but that we actually have the ability, that self-determination feature,
00:28:49.900
that individualism feature that comes from Protestants. And that's why America exists.
00:28:55.420
That's why the West exists. I don't see us getting back, if it's even possible, getting back to,
00:29:04.120
you know, where we used to be as Western civilization without realizing the values in the biblical worldview,
00:29:13.540
in particular in the Protestant worldview, whether or not you're a Protestant or a Christian.
00:29:17.540
And I just don't think that we can push back against Marxism without Christian theology.
00:29:26.460
And of course, the bigger reason why I believe in all of that is not just pragmatic or political,
00:29:31.720
but of course, because I believe that Jesus is the Son of God and that there is no salvation
00:29:35.340
apart from him. I just take him at his word in John 14, 6. But just in talking to you,
00:29:41.360
I just see how Christianity answers all of these intricate, complex questions. And I mean, I'm
00:29:49.080
hopeful. I'm hopeful that you will believe that Jesus is the Son of God, because that's the piece
00:29:53.860
that's missing. You understand it cognitively. You just don't believe in your heart that it's true.
00:30:00.660
Yep. Well, I think that my audience will be praying about that. I'm going to be praying about that.
00:30:05.600
And there's nothing you can do about it, especially from us Calvinists. Especially from us Calvinists.
00:30:11.980
Yeah, we don't believe that you're going to be able to resist that grace when it comes to you. So
00:30:17.160
we'll see. We'll be praying. Thank you so much. Thanks for taking the time. And everyone can buy
00:30:23.160
On Amazon, actually. We're publishing it, self-publishing through the company. So it's
00:30:27.560
only available on Amazon. It's called Race Marxism. And it should be out very soon, if not already,
00:30:32.800
depending on when this goes. This will be out today.
00:30:35.560
Okay. It goes out on the 15th then. Okay. 15th of February. Pre-order the e-book now if you want.
00:30:46.520
Okay, guys. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with James Lindsay. There was even more that we
00:30:51.720
could have talked about, but we were running low on time. Obviously, this was a really long
00:30:55.680
conversation. And so we'll have to have him back and exclusively talk about theology and Christianity
00:31:02.180
and why. Why doesn't he believe that Jesus is Lord? I'm sure that he has his reasons for that.
00:31:06.720
And we didn't even have time to get into all of it, but we will in the future. But I hope that that
00:31:12.100
was an edifying conversation, an interesting conversation for you guys. I know I touched
00:31:16.640
on predestination and Calvinism a little bit there. And for those of you who haven't been listening for
00:31:21.280
very long, you might be wondering, hang on, what is she talking about? What is Calvinism? How could
00:31:26.680
she be Calvin? Whatever it is that you were thinking there and hoping that I would expound upon
00:31:31.160
I will link some previous episodes that I've done talking about this. And I'll talk about
00:31:38.060
predestination again in a future episode because I really like that topic. It's a fun topic for me
00:31:44.160
to talk about. And so we will make sure to dive into that again at a future time. Maybe we'll have
00:31:50.140
a discussion. Actually, I did. Seth Dillon, the CEO of Babylon Bee, we did kind of have a disagreement
00:31:56.300
in our conversation about that. And we'll put a link to that conversation in the description of
00:32:01.960
this episode as well. Thank you guys, as always, for listening and for subscribing on YouTube. If
00:32:06.080
you love the podcast, leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. That means so much. All right,