The Ben Shapiro Show - Balancing Faith & Reason

00:00:01.000 Unfortunately, we've had to edit out some important information because Big Tech won't let us say that sort of thing.

00:00:05.000 To listen to the full uncut show, go to dailywire.com slash subscribe.

00:00:10.000 I think one of the reasons I get uptight when people point to my sinfulness is because I'm afraid.

00:00:15.000 Like I'm afraid I'm ultimately unlovable.

00:00:17.000 That I am wretched at the end of the day and unsalvageable as it were.

00:00:23.000 The Psalms speak continually as God is our refuge.

00:00:27.000 And so one thing I like to say as a Christian, because I think it's true, is that Christ is the only refuge big enough for your poor and wretched heart.

00:00:36.000 And you don't need to apply your own meanness and narrow little heart to His.

00:00:41.000 God is infinite in mercy.

00:00:43.000 And when your sin goes up against that, this is like a drop of water being flicked into a raging furnace.

00:00:50.000 Matt Fradd is a Catholic apologist and the host of the popular podcast Pints with Aquinas.

00:00:54.000 Originally from Australia, Fradd is an eloquent defender of Catholic teachings and a champion of civil discourse around even the most contentious topics, ranging from pornography to religious philosophy.

00:01:03.000 On his podcast, Fradd often utilizes Thomas Aquinas' objection and response style of discussion to break down complex religious subjects.

00:01:10.000 Frad's guests have included the Daily Wire's very own Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, and most recently, Jordan B. Peterson.

00:01:15.000 As an author, Frad combines his intellectual depth with a pastoral purpose.

00:01:19.000 In his 2018 book, The Porn Myth, he aims to discredit pornography through a non-religious lens.

00:01:23.000 Whereas in his 2021 work, How to Be Happy, St.

00:01:26.000 Thomas' Secret to a Good Life, Frad seeks to cultivate a greater appreciation for the Catholic faith in our modern world.

00:01:31.000 In today's episode, we dissect ideas like toxic skepticism, the West's normalization of sin, and the pragmatic application of Catholic principles.

00:01:38.000 We also explore what it means to be free and compare the ritual similarities between Catholicism and Judaism.

00:01:43.000 Stay tuned for this fantastic conversation with Matt Fradd and discover what makes Pints with Aquinas a must-listen for anyone interested in faith, philosophy, and the intersection of religion and modern culture.

00:01:52.000 Welcome back to another episode of the Sunday Special.

00:02:03.000 I really appreciate it.

00:02:05.000 So let's talk about how you engage in discussion with people who oppose you.

00:02:10.000 Yeah.

00:02:10.000 Because that's something that you frequently do.

00:02:12.000 You don't like to term it debate because debate is very often about winners and losers as opposed to discussion, which is really more about clarifying positions and determining where people stand.

00:02:20.000 So when you're discussing, say, atheism with someone, Now, what do you find is the best way to approach that particular issue when you're beginning a discussion with an atheist about believing in the Bible, believing in Jesus?

00:02:31.000 You're obviously a Catholic.

00:02:33.000 What's the best way to approach that discussion?

00:02:35.000 Defining terms.

00:02:36.000 What is meant by atheism?

00:02:37.000 I think there's been something of a shift since the new atheists that would seek to redefine atheism to mean something indistinguishable from agnosticism.

00:02:46.000 It seems to me though that there are three basic ways you can answer the question, does God exist?

00:02:51.000 Yes, no or maybe.

00:02:52.000 And so it seems appropriate to me that there should be three terms that would identify the possessors of each belief.

00:02:58.000 Atheist, theist or agnostic.

00:03:02.000 I don't know.

00:03:03.000 Only the theist and the atheist has a burden of proof, because they're the only ones claiming something.

00:03:08.000 So I think that would be the first way to go about it.

00:03:10.000 Are there good reasons to think that atheism is true?

00:03:12.000 Are there good reasons to think that theism is true?

00:03:15.000 And I don't like debates, not because I don't believe in them, but because I'm not good at them.

00:03:19.000 I find I get quite flustered and I don't think quite straight.

00:03:23.000 I don't think I'm a very confrontational person.

00:03:26.000 But I do enjoy talking to people who disagree with me in a friendly way, like over a beer or something like that, which is what Pints with Aquinas is about, really just sitting down and giving each other the benefit of the doubt, not trying to corner each other and just trying to understand where each other is coming from.

00:03:39.000 So you mentioned there the kind of shift in the new atheist community from atheism to agnosticism.

00:03:43.000 And that is clearly what has happened.

00:03:45.000 I mean, there used to be an argument militantly anti-God.

00:03:48.000 God for certain does not exist.

00:03:50.000 You're a fool if you believe in religion or in...

00:03:54.000 A deity.

00:03:55.000 And that has moved into pretty solidly, well, I don't know and I don't care.

00:03:59.000 So, how would you engage that particular argument?

00:04:02.000 Because that seems to be the more common one in today's day and age.

00:04:05.000 And even people who tend to think that they're theists will say things like, I'm spiritual but not religious, which is effectively indifferent about the presence of God in their lives.

00:04:13.000 How do you engage in the agnostic argument?

00:04:15.000 Yeah, it's a good question.

00:04:16.000 First of all, I just want to say, obviously, there are atheists who have arguments against God's existence, and they're very intelligent atheists.

00:04:22.000 But you're right, a lot of people just don't care.

00:04:24.000 It seems to me that if God does not exist, we have dogmatic answers to the most important questions we're all most interested in asking.

00:04:32.000 Like, where did I come from?

00:04:34.000 Why am I here?

00:04:35.000 Who am I?

00:04:36.000 How should I live, and where am I going?

00:04:38.000 It struck me that if God doesn't exist, then here are the answers.

00:04:42.000 Where did I come from?

00:04:44.000 I've been coughed into existence by a blind cosmic process that didn't have me in mind.

00:04:50.000 You and I are accidental byproducts of nature.

00:04:53.000 There is no objective, mind-independent meaning for our life.

00:04:58.000 We can adopt subjective meanings so we feel better about ourselves or something, but these aren't actually the reasons why we exist.

00:05:07.000 How should we live?

00:05:08.000 Well, we could live in a way that's conducive to the flourishing of our group, or we could not.

00:05:14.000 And it doesn't seem to me that it would be right or wrong to adopt one of these positions if there is no objective moral law.

00:05:23.000 Where are we going?

00:05:24.000 We will die.

00:05:27.000 Not just individually, but collectively as a species.

00:05:29.000 Cosmologists tell us that as the universe continues to expand, there'll eventually be nothing spreading out through seemingly infinite space, just cosmic soup.

00:05:38.000 None of that is an argument for God existing, of course.

00:05:41.000 It might be that bleak, and we might just have to deal with it.

00:05:45.000 But I'm going to need a good reason To think things are that bleak.

00:05:50.000 And I think when I was a high schooler, I didn't really vibe with Christianity.

00:05:54.000 I didn't like what it taught.

00:05:56.000 I didn't believe in the witness of the people who went to church, and so I stopped going.

00:06:02.000 I said I was agnostic.

00:06:03.000 But I think questions like that, like, does it bother you that this is all meaningless?

00:06:08.000 What if it wasn't?

00:06:09.000 Would you want to know?

00:06:11.000 Maybe those are the sorts of questions that could provoke desire to then have a more meaningful discussion about God.

00:06:17.000 I mean, when you talk about that, I think realistically, actually, the agnostic view is even bleaker than that, because you're using active verbs to describe how people can react to the meaninglessness of existence.

00:06:26.000 If you're a pure scientific materialist, the idea that you are self-motivated, that you can self-will, this sort of, the ability for existentialists to claim agency, that seemingly arises from nowhere, just from the processing of neurons, is something that I think is very difficult to overcome.

00:06:44.000 And so it's not even that you can make a sort of, Jean-Paul Sartre's argument that you can escape the bleakness of existence by acts of will, or the Nietzschean argument, that shouldn't really even exist in a cold materialist universe, because again, you're just a piece of meat wandering through space on a rock, effectively speaking.

00:07:00.000 And so, you know, that sort of argument is, you know, again, it's very difficult, I think, number one, to build an individual life on that basis, and also to build a society on that basis.

00:07:09.000 And furthermore, when I hear people make that argument, because they say, I'll say, so why is that argument important for you to make?

00:07:15.000 And I'll say, well, because it's true.

00:07:17.000 And then, of course, you're into Alvin Plottingaland.

00:07:19.000 Like, okay, well, what do you mean by true?

00:07:22.000 What truth exists independent of simple evolutionary biology?

00:07:26.000 You say that it's very important that you know this thing because this thing is true, but does truth have an independent meaning without an independent creator of that truth who stands above that truth?

00:07:35.000 It's interesting that you mention Alvin Plantinga because he is famous for developing this idea of properly basic beliefs.

00:07:42.000 In other words, we all have beliefs and some of those beliefs are basic, meaning they're not based upon other beliefs.

00:07:48.000 If we had to have an argument for every belief that we hold, that would lead to an infinite regress and we wouldn't believe in anything.

00:07:54.000 But Plantinga said that some beliefs are properly basic, that is to say we are warranted epistemically to hold certain beliefs even without arguments.

00:08:04.000 He would say without evidence, but it depends what you mean by evidence, such as the reality of other minds or that the universe wasn't created five minutes ago with the appearance of age and breakfast in my stomach I never ate and things like this.

00:08:17.000 It seems like we're all rational to believe in these things, even though we might not be able to give arguments for them.

00:08:22.000 And I think most people believe in God like that.

00:08:25.000 They're embarrassed to say that that's why they believe in God.

00:08:27.000 They would like to have some awesome metaphysical argument that has completely convinced them.

00:08:33.000 I don't think I believe in God because of arguments, any more than I believe in free will because of arguments, or that I exist because of arguments.

00:08:41.000 It just sort of seems to make sense to me.

00:08:44.000 And I know that that's not a reason why somebody else should believe in God, but it seems to be an okay reason for why I believe in God.

00:08:50.000 And so therefore, if you want to disavow me of my belief in God, then I'd like a reason.

00:08:56.000 Sort of like, what's his name?

00:08:58.000 Neo in The Matrix was given a reason by Morpheus.

00:09:04.000 Yeah, I mean, I think that that is such a good point.

00:09:08.000 It's a point that Michael Oshott makes, just this idea that rationalism is essentially, if you take it to its logical extreme, it's like an Ouroboros.

00:09:18.000 It eats itself.

00:09:19.000 That most of the beliefs that we hold dear to ourselves are beliefs that We just know to be true.

00:09:25.000 100%.

00:09:26.000 And so this bizarre idea that most of the beliefs that we come to are things that we have rationalized our way to.

00:09:31.000 Number one, it's incredibly arrogant because it's not true.

00:09:34.000 But number two, it actually leads, as you say, to a sort of infinite regress because there is no root reason to assume that rationality itself exists as sort of an independent property of human beings.

00:09:45.000 The idea that there is an independent reason and that reason and logic govern Well, again, that's an assumption, and you're going to have to justify that assumption based on something, but there can't be an assumption underneath that particular assumption.

00:09:57.000 And this is one of the things that, as I've gotten older, and as you move away from being a teenager, where you think, OK, I want a reason for everything, which is totally natural when you're 17, 18 years old.

00:10:05.000 You think, OK, you know, my parents didn't give me a good reason for this, so I'm just not going to do it.

00:10:09.000 And then you get older and you realize, well, sometimes, most of the time, you're doing things not because there is a good reason to do them, but because there's a good reason not to do the alternative.

00:10:19.000 And I think that that's really important and speaks to the sort of reality of what it means to be a human being.

00:10:26.000 So much of modern politics, modern religion, modern thought is based on this bizarre idea that human beings are atomistic individuals who exist without any sort of presets.

00:10:36.000 There are no presets in your being.

00:10:38.000 And so you approach every argument with an equivalent With an equivalent weight on every argument.

00:10:44.000 As opposed to, well actually you exist in this system and you have to be given some pretty strong evidence as to why you ought to disbelieve this system before you move outside of that system.

00:10:53.000 I think that was the original point that you're making.

00:10:55.000 You're going to have to give me some good reasons as to why I ought to jettison things like free will, rationality.

00:11:01.000 Eternal truths.

00:11:02.000 What's the pitch?

00:11:03.000 I think since Descartes, maybe we've had this idea that we have to have some unhuman, inhuman way of being certain about things.

00:11:12.000 As if the only reason I can be justified in believing anything is if it's indubitable or self-evident or something like that.

00:11:19.000 But, you know, if you were to press me on how I know Australia is an island, I'd sound kind of silly.

00:11:25.000 I'd be like, I've seen it in maps and stuff.

00:11:27.000 And you'd be like, you believe everything maps show you?

00:11:30.000 And I'd go, yeah, I thought.

00:11:31.000 Or if somebody says, do you believe you have hands?

00:11:34.000 And you're like, yes.

00:11:35.000 And then they say, but do you believe you have hands?

00:11:37.000 At that point, some people would be like, oh, I'm not sure.

00:11:40.000 And that's a trick.

00:11:41.000 It's a trick in that emphasis.

00:11:42.000 Of course you know you have hands.

00:11:44.000 Of course you could be dreaming.

00:11:46.000 But everything we believe, we don't believe with this unusual degree of certainty.

00:11:51.000 And so I don't think that theists should feel bad if they sometimes have doubts or something like that.

00:11:57.000 We'll get to more on this in a moment.

00:11:58.000 First, when did we decide to stop upholding free speech as a basic right?

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00:13:02.000 This is one of the things that's been so weird about, I think, our modern politics right now, is the sort of radical skepticism that's set in of everything.

00:13:10.000 It's a universal acid.

00:13:12.000 Skepticism is useful and necessary, but radical skepticism, meaning doubting everything around you, doubting every expert, doubting every authority, It's actually a road to nihilism.

00:13:25.000 And I think that because one of the dangerous aspects of our politics and our institutions today is because they've failed, many of them, in their missions, because so many of them have sold out their credibility for ulterior purposes, the reaction of a lot of people has been to basically dispense with all institutions, to dispense with the process of reasoning itself, that a question is deemed just as valuable as an attempt to search for an answer.

00:13:48.000 That so long as I'm tearing away at the thing and showing that I'm not subject to these authorities, that that means that I'm an independent thinker, as opposed to the reality, which is that you're going to have to accept some authorities from time to time, or you're never going to get out of bed in the morning.

00:14:01.000 You know, on what basis can you use your cell phone if you don't believe that there are people who put it together in a way that means that it's going to work?

00:14:09.000 And I think that radical skepticism speaks to, you know, the destruction not only of It's almost like in a time of chaos, we all seek order because we can't live in chaos.

00:14:24.000 And so where are you going to find that order?

00:14:25.000 You might try to find it in the institutions or you might try to find it outside of the institutions.

00:14:31.000 And it seems to me that just like there's a woke Olympics or a woke spiraling where people are becoming crazier and crazier to prove how enlightened they are.

00:14:38.000 There's something like that on the right as well.

00:14:41.000 Where the more outlandish the things that you say are, the more enlightened you are.

00:14:47.000 And I think the rest of us are just off on the sidelines, quite confused, quite... Yeah, it's like the internet, with all of this conflicting information, is making us weary, skeptical pragmatists.

00:14:59.000 And I think a lot of people feel quite confused.

00:15:02.000 I know I do about a lot of things.

00:15:03.000 I agree.

00:15:04.000 I mean, I think that the internet has made these things infinitely worse, mainly because it's allowed people to Siphon themselves off into these bizarre silos of either radical skepticism or radical institutionalism.

00:15:16.000 And in reality, the way that I think most people used to engage with their community or with God or with religion was just naturally in their daily lives.

00:15:24.000 It's why the phrase that I've been using a lot on the show and in general is, everybody needs to go outside and touch some grass.

00:15:29.000 Yeah, I like that.

00:15:30.000 Like, this sort of attempt to either intellectualize everything or to anti-intellectualize everything is incredibly dangerous.

00:15:38.000 I wrote an essay recently, for myself, it wasn't published anywhere, just about why believe in God.

00:15:44.000 And the answer that I came to is that no one quote-unquote believes in God in the way that we tend to think about believing in God.

00:15:49.000 Like, I don't come to my belief in God, as you say, through a bunch of arguments and read the ontological argument and go, oh, well, you know what?

00:15:57.000 I'm there.

00:15:57.000 Like, now it's happened.

00:15:59.000 It's more that the assumptions that lie at the core of my being and at the core of my action in the world are religious assumptions.

00:16:06.000 And that's true for even agnostics.

00:16:08.000 There's a point that I've made to agnostics is you're relying on free will.

00:16:11.000 You're relying on your ability to act.

00:16:13.000 You're relying on the idea of an eternal truth.

00:16:14.000 You're using bricks from the house that I built and that you've blown up,

00:16:18.000 but then you're reusing those bricks and pretending that they came from nowhere

00:16:21.000 and that you actually mixed the straw with the mud and you didn't.

00:16:24.000 I mean, all those bricks are religious bricks.

00:16:26.000 And so when we ask whether people believe in God or believe in their community,

00:16:29.000 the answer is mostly in how people behave in their regular life.

00:16:33.000 But the internet is not a place of behavior.

00:16:34.000 The internet is a place of signaling and signaling is very important on the internet

00:16:38.000 because when you're, again, in a disembodied universe, then that's what happens.

00:16:43.000 The way that you prove skin in the game in a disembodied universe is by taking radical positions.

00:16:47.000 The way you prove skin in the game in a real universe is by doing things with other people.

00:16:52.000 Wow!

00:16:52.000 I'm going to have to think about that for a long time.

00:16:54.000 That's really interesting.

00:16:56.000 Yeah, I mean, I'm glad, you know, so the Catholic Church teaches that God, the existence of God can be arrived at through philosophical argumentation independent of faith.

00:17:05.000 First Vatican Council made that clear.

00:17:07.000 Thomas Aquinas taught the same thing.

00:17:09.000 Thomas Aquinas says, but God revealed himself to us as well, because if he didn't, he says three awkward consequences would have followed.

00:17:17.000 One, some people aren't smart enough to sort through metaphysical arguments for God's existence.

00:17:21.000 I probably fit in that category.

00:17:23.000 Second, people have stuff to do.

00:17:25.000 So even if they weren't smart enough, they wouldn't have the time.

00:17:28.000 And then thirdly, people who have enough time and are smart enough are kind of lazy and so wouldn't have done it.

00:17:34.000 And we would have come to all sorts of errors regarding God's existence.

00:17:37.000 So I would say though, when I assess arguments for God's existence alongside of arguments for atheism, I feel that the arguments for theism are much more compelling than the arguments for atheism.

00:17:48.000 And when I look at arguments for atheism, I think the argument from the hiddenness of God or the problem of evil, I think are really the two most Emotionally disturbing arguments that would bother me.

00:18:02.000 But when I look at them next to theistic arguments, I think they get swamped, personally.

00:18:08.000 I'd like to go through a couple of those with you because they're really interesting.

00:18:11.000 The argument of evil or of suffering, that's obviously the most emotionally troubling.

00:18:19.000 When you see innocent suffering, and you say, where is God in all of this?

00:18:22.000 And we're not talking about the easy answer for human beings, which typically, if a human being is harming another human being, and you say, okay, well, free will, that has nothing to do with God, but natural disaster, baby dies.

00:18:35.000 How do you deal with that argument from a religious point of view?

00:18:37.000 Yeah.

00:18:38.000 Well, I guess I would say that even if I don't have an answer to the problem of evil, I can still say, given my experience and given all these arguments I have for God's existence, which outweigh this argument, I can conclude that evil exists and I don't understand it.

00:18:54.000 And that seems to me to be an okay response.

00:18:57.000 Back to Plantinga.

00:18:59.000 He was responding to people like JL Mackie who would say, okay, if God's all-powerful, He could do away with all evil.

00:19:05.000 If He were all-knowing, He would know about the nature and scope of evil in the world.

00:19:08.000 If He were all-good, He would want to do away with all evil, but evil exists.

00:19:12.000 Therefore, God doesn't exist.

00:19:15.000 Or if He does, He's either impotent, Plantinga says that all you have to do to escape the conclusion is to insert a fourth premise, which is namely, God may have morally sufficient reasons for permitting evil and suffering in the world.

00:19:30.000 You don't have to like that premise, you don't even have to think it's terribly convincing, so long as it's possible it shows that God and evil are not incompatible or contradictory.

00:19:41.000 But at that point you might say, okay, fair enough, but surely the amount of evil and the kinds of evil would make it at least unlikely that an all-powerful, all-good God exists.

00:19:52.000 But I don't know, maybe I'm just not in a place epistemically to assess the evil around me.

00:19:58.000 Now, if my wife was to be seriously hurt or my children seriously hurt, I might lose faith in God.

00:20:05.000 But the question isn't what would I do, but what should I do?

00:20:08.000 So it seems to me, though, the problem of evil is felt most poignantly when we're experiencing a particular suffering in our own life.

00:20:16.000 And at that point, I don't think apologetics is what people want.

00:20:20.000 At that point, they just want you to sort of sit with them and listen to them and mourn with them.

00:20:25.000 So, that's what I'd say to that.

00:20:27.000 I mean, that's the answer of Job, right?

00:20:29.000 Everybody tries to explain to Job why it's happening to him, and he keeps rejecting them.

00:20:32.000 Then God says, well, I'm God.

00:20:34.000 That's the only answer that's possible, which really is, in the face of suffering, the only answer that really is possible.

00:20:40.000 You were talking about the necessity of revelation from a Catholic point of view.

00:20:43.000 I can tell you from the Jewish point of view, the necessity of revelation, Maimonides gives many of the same reasons as Aquinas, one of the fascinating things about Maimonides and Aquinas, they're writing it effectively at the same time in two different parts of the world, and they're coming to a lot of very similar conclusions about the nature of the merger of revelation and reason, which makes sense, of course, because you have the discoveries of Plato again, and so a lot of the Neoplatonists are coming to the fore, and so they're reading a lot of the same sort of stuff.

00:21:13.000 But the argument that I think traditionally Judaism has made about the necessity for revelation as opposed to just natural law is that once you believe that human beings are capable of sussing

00:21:24.000 out everything, then you do end up with the sort of possibility of human

00:21:28.000 beings going astray in terms of how they themselves interpret the law. And I wonder what you make of

00:21:33.000 that from a Catholic point of view, because obviously Judaism is very much focused on the law

00:21:37.000 and it's focused on practice. And so when you read the first five books of the Bible, you

00:21:40.000 know, it's filled with legalese and it's filled with specific injunctions to do and not to do.

00:21:45.000 In my religion, we follow all of those, right?

00:21:47.000 I mean, we actually take all of the laws about kosher seriously still after several thousand years.

00:21:53.000 And so, when we look at that, there have been rabbis who have critiqued Maimonides saying, because he tries to give reasons for those commandments.

00:22:00.000 He tries to say, okay, well, the reason for this commandment is X. And they say, well, we don't want you giving reasons for those commandments because the minute you do, you have now run into sort of the problem of Plato Is the morality above the commandment, or is the commandment above the morality?

00:22:13.000 They say, well, the commandment's above the morality.

00:22:15.000 Your moral take on the commandment is irrelevant, which is why revelation is necessary.

00:22:19.000 From a Christian point of view, where commandments are secondary to faith, would that be fair to say, in Christ?

00:22:27.000 How does the logic work there?

00:22:29.000 Well, I guess I would say that Catholics are champions, hopefully, of both faith and reason.

00:22:36.000 So what has been revealed to us, we wouldn't necessarily know unless it were revealed to us.

00:22:42.000 There are certain things that one can know through reason alone.

00:22:45.000 We already spoke about the existence of God.

00:22:47.000 Perhaps One can come to believe—Aquinas, I think, would believe this—that God is all-powerful, all-knowing, etc.

00:22:54.000 But then there are things that we can't know unless they were revealed to us.

00:22:58.000 So in Christianity, the Trinity wouldn't be something you could arrive at through reason, though there have been people who have tried to do that.

00:23:04.000 They were like, okay, if God is love, then you have the one who loves, the one who is love, and the love that they share.

00:23:09.000 But that doesn't seem to work, I don't think.

00:23:11.000 The Eucharist would be something that we couldn't know, maybe the Incarnation.

00:23:16.000 So there are some things that have been revealed to us that we couldn't know otherwise, and there are some things that have been revealed to us, such as God's existence, that we could know, but it would have been dangerous because we would have come to that belief and ended up holding a bunch of errors.

00:23:29.000 But then once God has revealed something to us, then surely we can think about why that is reasonable, it would seem to me.

00:23:37.000 I mean, I totally agree with that, but I think that the key element that Judaism puts forward, and it sounds like Catholicism too, is you don't do it because it's reasonable to you.

00:23:46.000 You do it because God said so.

00:23:47.000 Yeah.

00:23:47.000 In other words, one way... And that what God says would always be reasonable.

00:23:51.000 Right.

00:23:51.000 It's not like you would come into a belief... Christians would say, any belief that's been revealed to us that we can't prove, we can at least prove that it's not unreasonable.

00:24:00.000 So we wouldn't believe something that's absurd.

00:24:03.000 Right. So when it comes to the conflict supposedly between miracle stories and nature,

00:24:07.000 the way that Aquinas says this, and I think Maimonides too, but you know Aquinas far better

00:24:10.000 than I do, is that you're either reading scripture wrong or you're reading nature wrong.

00:24:16.000 Right.

00:24:16.000 They're the same.

00:24:17.000 If the blueprint for the universe is in fact the biblical narrative, then if that comes into conflict with scientific discovery, then it's because one of those things is... Bad science or bad faith.

00:24:26.000 Right, exactly.

00:24:28.000 It's more on this in just one moment.

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00:25:34.000 When it comes down to, you know, practical living for people, you know, why choose Catholicism versus Judaism?

00:25:41.000 Or choose Catholicism versus Protestantism for that matter?

00:25:44.000 Because many of these sort of natural law things that we are all able to suss out. And Judaism does

00:25:49.000 have a version of natural law called the seven commandments, the seven commandments of the Noahide

00:25:56.000 laws. And the basic premise in the Talmud is that those are all discoverable by human

00:26:01.000 reason in the sense that there's a doctrine Talmudically that's called Tino Chonishba, meaning that if

00:26:06.000 you were to find a baby in a forest, you wouldn't expect the baby in the forest to know about

00:26:10.000 the laws of kosher, right?

00:26:11.000 You wouldn't expect that the person grows up, they eat kosher.

00:26:14.000 They're not responsible for that.

00:26:15.000 There's no way that they could possibly come to the conclusion that you shouldn't eat swine, but you should eat cows, for example.

00:26:21.000 But there are certain things that every human being should be able to come to the conclusion about, and that would be things like you should believe in God, you shouldn't commit murder, you shouldn't commit sexual immoral sins.

00:26:30.000 All of those sorts of things are things that you can sort of discover on your own.

00:26:34.000 So, you know, when it comes to Judaism, looking at natural law, there's obviously sort of boundaries to that.

00:26:41.000 You've said the same thing is true of Catholicism.

00:26:42.000 So why believe Catholicism as opposed to Protestantism or Judaism or any other form of sort of monotheistic religion?

00:26:48.000 Yeah, I think the only good reason to believe anything is that you think it's true.

00:26:53.000 So I think of Catholic apologetics, let's say, as a three-story mansion.

00:26:57.000 On the first level, you might have theistic apologetics, which concerns does God exist, and what is He like, and has He revealed Himself to us or not?

00:27:06.000 The second level might be Christian apologetics.

00:27:09.000 Who was Christ?

00:27:12.000 Do we have good reason to think the New Testament reliable?

00:27:15.000 Did Christ actually rise from the dead or not?

00:27:17.000 Did he establish a church?

00:27:19.000 These sorts of things.

00:27:20.000 And then the third level would be Catholic apologetics, which would consider those Catholic distinctives.

00:27:25.000 So I think that God exists, that he revealed himself most fully in the person of Jesus Christ, and that Jesus Christ established a church and gave that church teaching authority.

00:27:36.000 And so that's why I'm a Catholic.

00:27:39.000 And not a Protestant and that's why I'm a Christian and not a Jew So when you look at sort of the development of Catholic doctrine over time, there's a question in Judaism, too What are the limits of proper interpretation?

00:27:50.000 There's a huge question in Judaism because obviously you have a written document that written document is handed down Jews believed by God on Sinai and then there's a whole body of oral law and that oral law obviously has morphed over time right this is this sort of Phariseistic rabbinical Judaism, that is traditional Judaism.

00:28:06.000 And so the idea is that human beings have the authority to interpret but not to remake.

00:28:12.000 So if you were to go into Leviticus and just rip out a section of Leviticus and say this no longer applies, then in Judaism that's no good.

00:28:19.000 By the same token, there's a constant process of interpretation and trying to figure out exactly how to apply those eternal principles to modern circumstances.

00:28:26.000 How does that process work inside Catholicism?

00:28:29.000 Yeah, I think the way it would work would be by saying just what you did, that nothing can contradict what has been given to us through Scripture and tradition.

00:28:40.000 So there are certain things that are non-negotiable, such as that baptism is efficacious in our salvation, that it's not merely a symbol, that the Blessed Virgin was free from sin from the moment of her conception, that the Eucharist is truly the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ under the appearances of bread and wine.

00:29:00.000 That sodomy is always evil, that fornication is always evil.

00:29:03.000 These sorts of things have been revealed.

00:29:05.000 And so we might try to then understand things around that topic.

00:29:10.000 For example, the culpability question.

00:29:13.000 So for example, masturbation is something that's condemned in Catholicism and has always been.

00:29:18.000 But then you might go, okay, given now what we understand about psychology, can we ask the question how culpable, let's say, a young person is who is trying to figure things out, or alcohol?

00:29:31.000 We know that drunkenness is a sin, but you kind of have to test alcohol before you know your limits, so what about that question?

00:29:39.000 That's why I would say that Christ gave us a church and gave that church authority to help us discern these things.

00:29:47.000 So I don't have to go back into 2,000 years of history, but I can submit to the church when it tells me things like, Mary was conceived without sin, and so on.

00:29:57.000 One of the things that's really interesting, I think, about the anti-religion view of religion is that you talk about sin

00:30:04.000 and people get very upset.

00:30:05.000 I mean, there's very little in public life that gets people more upset than the use of

00:30:09.000 the word sin. The minute you say something is a sin, people get very, very uptight. They

00:30:14.000 believe that they are being judged and they think to themselves, I'm not going to listen

00:30:17.000 to anything this person has to say. And what I think people who are not religious don't understand

00:30:22.000 is that there's not a religious person alive, as far as I'm aware, who believes that we are

00:30:27.000 capable of being sin free. The idea that the standard holds, even when you don't uphold the

00:30:33.000 standard, is something that I think is completely...

00:30:37.000 Foreign to people who don't exist within religion, that's really troublesome.

00:30:41.000 One of the arguments that comes up a lot in politics, and it comes up with religion too, is the hypocrisy argument.

00:30:45.000 And what I've always said is that's not an argument, it's an emotional appeal.

00:30:47.000 Because usually the people who are saying, okay, well there's a priest and this priest violated his own precepts when he did X, Y, and Z, they're not arguing that the priest did something bad.

00:30:55.000 They're arguing that the standard itself is bad and that the priest is therefore worse because the priest says that the standard is good and has violated the standard.

00:31:05.000 The sort of argument that's made in politics and religion all the time, to me that argument is almost always an emotional attack on the standard itself rather than violation of the standard per se.

00:31:15.000 I go through my life violating God's precepts, I would imagine, on a fairly regular basis.

00:31:19.000 And that doesn't mean that I'm right to do so, it just means that I'm a human being.

00:31:23.000 Yeah, if I can kind of preach for a second here, as a Christian I would say, and you can give me your answer as a Jew, I think one of the reasons I get uptight when people point to my sinfulness is because I'm afraid, like I'm afraid I'm ultimately unlovable, that I am wretched at the end of the day and unsalvageable as it were.

00:31:43.000 The Psalms speak continually as God is our refuge.

00:31:46.000 And so one thing I like to say as a Christian, because I think it's true, is that Christ is the only refuge big enough for your poor and wretched heart.

00:31:55.000 And you don't need to apply your own meanness and narrow little heart to His.

00:32:01.000 God is infinite in mercy.

00:32:03.000 And when your sin goes up against that, this is like a drop of water being flicked into a raging furnace.

00:32:10.000 So if you talk about my sin or if I become aware of it, this makes me uncomfortable.

00:32:13.000 And I think at that point, what I tend to do is want to downplay my sin or look at people who are worse than me.

00:32:18.000 But I think the answer is instead to look at the great mercy of God and go, okay, my trust is in Him.

00:32:26.000 He is my righteousness.

00:32:27.000 Yeah, so this has come up a lot in terms of the topic of one of your books on pornography.

00:32:32.000 So this has become like a very hot issue in the United States, obviously, and in Europe, particularly, the sort of normalization of pornography.

00:32:40.000 It's been... I wrote about this back in 2005.

00:32:42.000 I wrote a book in 2005 called Porn Generation, How Social Liberalism is Corrupting Our Future, in which I talked about the destruction of an entire generation of people because of the rise of pornography, the mainstreaming of pornography.

00:32:53.000 Chided as a prude at the time, of course.

00:32:55.000 And then, you know, pretty much all the predictions came true, that this was actually really devastating to the soul of human beings, that it really harms people.

00:33:02.000 And yet, to point out that pornography is indeed a grave evil, that it actually does harm to both the participants in it and the people who use it, that is now considered something that is utterly unsayable in public life.

00:33:15.000 Is that right?

00:33:16.000 I mean, I think that, Pete, you can say it, but It feels to me like the tide might be turning a little bit, you know.

00:33:25.000 I agree with you that most people would not want to say that pornography is wrong all the time.

00:33:29.000 I agree with that.

00:33:30.000 But it seems to me that you're hearing more, even comedians, kind of making fun of things like **** and pornography.

00:33:35.000 Pete Holmes is a good example of this.

00:33:38.000 I'm not sure if you've heard this bit, but he says something like **** isn't just ****, it's double ****.

00:33:44.000 You're ****ing a man while being...

00:33:48.000 Getting, you know, by a man like this is this is clearly cream puffery at its highest.

00:33:56.000 To be a bit more serious, Saint Dominic says, the man who governs his passions is master of his world.

00:34:02.000 We must command them or be enslaved by them.

00:34:05.000 It is better to be a hammer than an anvil.

00:34:09.000 And I think the man who continually gives over his life to pornography is becoming emasculated.

00:34:16.000 He's being robbed of the ability to be masculine.

00:34:20.000 As a Christian, I would look at Christ's words, this is my body given up for you, and that this act was the most masculine act.

00:34:26.000 And it's something that I should try to replicate with my own wife, in that I deny myself for her good.

00:34:32.000 But pornography trains a man not to say, this is my body given up for you,

00:34:36.000 but the opposite, this is your body taken by me.

00:34:39.000 I deny and forsake and trample over your dignity for the sake of my pleasure.

00:34:46.000 So, yeah.

00:34:47.000 I think this goes to one of the most fascinating things about Catholicism in general,

00:34:54.000 is the focus on the embodiedness of human beings, which runs directly counter

00:34:58.000 to all modern strains of thought.

00:35:00.000 So the way that the sort of post-Cartesian world has taken up this argument is that the body is one thing and the mind is another.

00:35:07.000 It's this weird Gnostic dualism.

00:35:09.000 Yeah.

00:35:09.000 It exists in how we think about ourselves.

00:35:10.000 That, okay, so your body wants porn and your mind is separate from your body.

00:35:14.000 So what damage could you be doing to yourself?

00:35:16.000 Because you aren't your body, you're your mind.

00:35:18.000 And so your mind's out here, your body's over there, your body's doing a thing.

00:35:21.000 Who cares?

00:35:21.000 It's just like any other act that you're doing.

00:35:23.000 It's defecating or eating or whatever else it is.

00:35:26.000 So what difference does that make?

00:35:27.000 And Catholicism insists on the embodiedness of human beings.

00:35:32.000 Maybe you can talk a little bit about why that's so important and how that The falling apart of that notion of embodiedness has really corrupted so many elements of our politics and thought.

00:35:41.000 It's a great point, yeah.

00:35:42.000 We are our bodies.

00:35:43.000 We don't have bodies, we are bodies.

00:35:45.000 We are a composite of both body and soul, both equally a part of who we are.

00:35:50.000 When I kiss my daughter goodnight, I really do that.

00:35:53.000 I don't manipulate the husk which is not me and press it against the husk which is not her.

00:35:58.000 If we weren't our bodies, then when we shook hands earlier, that would have been like,

00:36:02.000 I don't know.

00:36:03.000 We didn't ever come into contact.

00:36:04.000 And that seems silly.

00:36:06.000 If somebody slaps you, they slapped you.

00:36:08.000 And we know that.

00:36:10.000 And so when we deny that we are our bodies, you're right.

00:36:14.000 We can either act disgracefully, what I would say shamefully, or maybe we fall into thinking

00:36:23.000 too highly of the body as if that's the main thing and then we neglect the soul.

00:36:28.000 But yeah, what we do with our body really matters.

00:36:31.000 But I do think it's important when we demonize pornography, which I like doing, that we say what the problem isn't.

00:36:40.000 The problem with porn is not sex, sexual desire, or nudity.

00:36:46.000 The first commandment in the Bible from God to humanity is Genesis chapter 1 verse 28, and it was to have sex.

00:36:52.000 Be fruitful and multiply.

00:36:54.000 Sex is good, which is why you can make it bad.

00:36:58.000 It seems to me that if the fact that you can make sex so ugly is a sort of indirect proof for why it could and should be beautiful.

00:37:07.000 Because you can't make ugly things ugly.

00:37:11.000 But you can make very beautiful things very ugly.

00:37:13.000 Like if there was a pile of trash here and I kicked it and then said, now look at it, it wouldn't look much uglier.

00:37:19.000 It would just be ugly, you know?

00:37:21.000 Nudity is good.

00:37:23.000 The body is good.

00:37:24.000 The reason we talk about pornography degrading the body is because we believe that the body has grade to begin with.

00:37:31.000 We don't talk about degrading paperclips and tumblers.

00:37:35.000 We do talk about degrading the body because we just believe, it seems to us, that there is this sort of intrinsic worth to the body.

00:37:41.000 So to sum all that up, I would say, it's been said, not by me, but somebody else, the problem with pornography actually isn't that it shows too much, it's that it shows too little.

00:37:50.000 That it reduces the mystery and beauty of the human person to a sort of two-dimensional thing for my consumption.

00:37:58.000 And we just shouldn't be treating human beings like that.

00:38:00.000 So one of the ways this has broken into the public debate, especially now, is with regard to what role religion should have in, say, government policy.

00:38:06.000 So there's been a widespread debate over regulation of things like pornography.

00:38:11.000 Now, for myself, I'm very much in favor of local regulation of pornography.

00:38:15.000 The only reason that I might not be in favor of national legislation on pornography has nothing to do with the right to pornography.

00:38:20.000 It has much more to do with the pragmatic approach to legislation.

00:38:25.000 Can you govern a nation that has widespread disagreements on issues like pornography Top down in that way without spurring a backlash that would be significant enough to actually topple other things that you're attempting to do.

00:38:35.000 I think much the same way about abortion.

00:38:37.000 I'm fully pro-life.

00:38:38.000 Actually, I take a Catholic and not Jewish position on pro-life positions, I would say.

00:38:43.000 And, you know, with that said, there's a difference between my position on abortion and what I think might be the pragmatic way to actually achieve that long term.

00:38:50.000 So the argument is really not one of the morality of banning Pornography or abortion.

00:38:56.000 If I were a dictator for a day, I would absolutely do it.

00:38:59.000 The question is one of the pragmatic effects.

00:39:01.000 Can you achieve that long term?

00:39:02.000 So I've had this argument about abortion or pornography with regard to, you know, for example, state level legislation.

00:39:08.000 Take abortion.

00:39:09.000 So I've suggested that if you're in a state like Michigan, going for a full scale abortion ban that is likely to fail.

00:39:14.000 is actually a mistake. What you should do is you should go as far as you can without losing the

00:39:18.000 majority in the legislature, for example, and then accustom people to that idea and then move it back.

00:39:23.000 And that's an immoral position. I get that that's not the full-scale moral position, but also you

00:39:27.000 have to sort of merge pragmatism with morality. How do you address the role of following, you know,

00:39:33.000 these sorts of issues into pragmatic application? Yeah, we're definitely in your zone of expertise

00:39:38.000 here, so I can only say what seems to me to be the case.

00:39:41.000 We live in a democratic republic, so the idea that we're going to convince most Americans that all pornography is evil and should be banned is just not going to happen.

00:39:51.000 So yes, I would like to see pornography banned, because I think it destroys the family.

00:39:57.000 You want to destroy society?

00:39:58.000 Then destroy sex, because sex is at the bottom of it.

00:40:05.000 It comes together with the couple, which brings the family, which brings about the society.

00:40:09.000 So if you want to destroy society, aim your sights on sex, and I think that's what pornography does.

00:40:15.000 I would like to see it banned, but given that I have no ability to bring that about, nor do I think it's actually going to happen, Then, I certainly think educating people about the destructive nature of pornography, that over the last 40 plus years, there has been a metric crap ton of studies that have come out of academia from neuroscience, psychology, and sociology, and all of it says that pornography is detrimental to the consumer, to our relationships, and to society as a whole.

00:40:43.000 So, it's a soundbite, but I'd like to say if you're pro-love and pro-science, you should be anti-porn.

00:40:49.000 Now, none of this is to condemn individual struggling.

00:40:52.000 In fact, I think we should struggle with pornography.

00:40:54.000 What I mean by that is, struggle doesn't mean give in to.

00:40:58.000 It's not synonymous with you don't try.

00:41:00.000 Struggling implies a sort of violent resisting, yeah?

00:41:04.000 So if somebody says to me, I'm struggling with pornography, I would say, good, keep struggling.

00:41:08.000 And so I certainly wouldn't want any man or woman out there who's watching this to feel condemned by me.

00:41:13.000 I would have them realize that they were raised in a pornified culture.

00:41:17.000 They were probably exposed to pornography at a young age, and they can be free of this.

00:41:22.000 And they should be gentle and patient with themselves as they seek to gain mastery over this thing that's had mastery over them for so long.

00:41:29.000 So when it comes to the broader question of governance, one of the cases that I've made is that conservatism or religious morality or morality of any sort, it tends to be built ground up, but it can be destroyed top down.

00:41:45.000 Institutions of American society have basically destroyed, I think, traditional morality at a very local level through things like national policy, by perverting incentive structures, by replacing, for example, the role of what a church was in a community, which actually had sort of an economic role, it had a societal role, a community role, and then government sort of supplanted that.

00:42:04.000 That can be destroyed, but it can't be rebuilt top-down through sort of government mandate.

00:42:10.000 And I think that's one of the big arguments that's happening on the right right now.

00:42:12.000 There are a lot of people on the right who have sort of suggested, okay, if you gain

00:42:14.000 control of the government, the first thing you should do is try to cram down morality

00:42:18.000 as fast as possible, and that will change the nature of how the society works.

00:42:22.000 Now, I'm not arguing that there's no situation in which that's possible.

00:42:28.000 I'm just arguing as to whether that is practical.

00:42:31.000 What do you think on that?

00:42:31.000 It's more of an opinion matter than a moral matter.

00:42:33.000 Yeah, it's a good question because law, it seems to me, is something of a teacher.

00:42:37.000 So if I'm raised in a society where pot smoking is illegal, I might come to believe that it's immoral, whether it is or whether it isn't.

00:42:44.000 But sometimes I think that, from my experience again, not the ideal, but what I'm seeing is sometimes it seems like things need to be let into society so that we can learn our lesson the hard way.

00:42:55.000 Because it seemed to me like five or ten years ago everyone was like proclaiming the greatness which is pot smoking, for example.

00:43:01.000 Whereas now it seems like there's a lot of people who are like, the cool people are like, here's why I've given it up, here's how my life became better.

00:43:10.000 Now, how much destruction does that leave in its wake?

00:43:13.000 How many people have not learned that lesson?

00:43:14.000 That's a scary thing.

00:43:15.000 But yeah, once the cat's out of the bag, I don't know what the solution is to do except to educate people.

00:43:21.000 Again, I'm not involved in politics or anything like that.

00:43:26.000 I'd leave that to better minds.

00:43:27.000 I'd like to live in a country where pornography is illegal.

00:43:31.000 I'd like to live in a country where the majority of people think, yeah, this destroys families.

00:43:35.000 This perverts the most sacred human action.

00:43:38.000 I mean, what is the most sacred human action?

00:43:40.000 It's not washing the dishes, as good as that is.

00:43:42.000 I mean, it's not playing football.

00:43:43.000 It's not having a drink.

00:43:45.000 Clearly, it's that act by which new souls come into existence.

00:43:50.000 And it seems to me that a society that perverts that is going to destroy itself and I think pornography is one of the key weapons against the family and so therefore I'd like to see it banned.

00:44:03.000 Is that pragmatic?

00:44:04.000 Would that have backlashes?

00:44:05.000 I haven't thought that through.

00:44:06.000 So what do you think, going back to some of our original questions, what do you think is the best way to societally approach morality in a way to convince people?

00:44:15.000 Is it arguments?

00:44:17.000 Is it discussion?

00:44:19.000 Or is it more, I think, what's been happening lately, which is, as you said, the excesses of the secular left have become so extraordinary and so extreme that people are sort of reverting back into a second look at religion.

00:44:31.000 Yeah.

00:44:31.000 And there are a lot of people who gave it up when they were kids, mainly because, I think, for a lot of people, and this is true I think in every faith, it's true in Judaism for sure, they get taught a sort of third grade version of what God is and what religion is, and then they never kind of level up.

00:44:44.000 Yeah.

00:44:45.000 They are asked questions, or they ask questions when they're 15, 16 years old, they don't have authority figures who know how to answer those questions, and then they turn away from religion because they realize that the third grade version of God is, you know, It seems that way.

00:44:58.000 It seems I think sometimes that Jordan Peterson, who I recently had on my show, is like a gateway drug into religion.

00:45:02.000 and they turn away and then they come back and have sort of this second look at religion.

00:45:06.000 So in a sort of bizarre way, it could be that the excesses of the left are pushing people

00:45:10.000 back into religion better than any religious argument could.

00:45:12.000 Seems that way. It seems, I think, sometimes that Jordan Peterson, who I recently had on my show,

00:45:16.000 is like a gateway drug into religion. He seems to have supplanted the quote-unquote

00:45:21.000 new atheists who are somewhat old now. And so I think you're right. The excesses of the left

00:45:27.000 are causing people to take a look at tradition and to perhaps be more humble in the face of our ancestors

00:45:32.000 and say, what did they know that we didn't?

00:45:35.000 Now, I wouldn't want to hold to Christian belief Like Dawkins seems to assume, you know, just because it would hold society together.

00:45:44.000 Like, I would want to hold the Christian belief because I think it's true.

00:45:46.000 If Christianity is not true, if God doesn't exist, then I don't think we should believe those things.

00:45:50.000 You know, when I was a kid in December, I would believe in Father Christmas, and that belief made me both happier and better behaved.

00:45:59.000 Especially around Christmas.

00:46:01.000 But that's not a reason to go on believing in Father Christmas, Santa Claus.

00:46:04.000 And it's not a good reason to go on believing in God if He doesn't exist.

00:46:07.000 But it's exciting to see people taking another look at it, and it's really exciting to see really kind of intellectually serious people, I think, like Dr. Ed Fazer, who you've had on the show, Bishop Robert Barron, who you've had on the show, and others kind of help people engage with the metaphysical arguments of God's existence to show them this isn't silly.

00:46:25.000 Yeah.

00:46:25.000 So, on that last point, it's a really interesting one.

00:46:28.000 You know, the idea that you wouldn't believe in it if you didn't believe that it were true, even if you felt that it was societally good or societally useful.

00:46:34.000 So, one of the ways that I've seen Jordan talk about truth is in terms of pragmatic truth.

00:46:39.000 Like, what does truth mean?

00:46:40.000 Are we talking about a truth like 2 plus 2 equals 4?

00:46:42.000 Or are we talking about a truth like murder is wrong?

00:46:45.000 Which are not quite the same thing.

00:46:46.000 So, you know, when it comes to the pragmatic truth of religion, it is easier to prove the efficacy of religion This was my experience.

00:46:59.000 I was 17 years old, I was agnostic and angsty, and went on this trip to Rome in Italy.

00:47:05.000 And the thing that began to open my mind to the possibility of Catholicism being true wasn't their arguments at first, it was their joy.

00:47:13.000 They weren't cynical.

00:47:14.000 They were happy.

00:47:15.000 They were kind.

00:47:16.000 They were normal.

00:47:17.000 They were good-looking.

00:47:19.000 And I'd be like, why do you believe this?

00:47:22.000 I'd never met people like that.

00:47:23.000 I thought they were like unicorns.

00:47:25.000 And then they started kind of giving me reasons.

00:47:27.000 But if I hadn't have seen that joy and that optimism and that energy, maybe I would have been less open to the arguments.

00:47:33.000 To get back to your original question as to how do we convince people about morality, I don't know, I think showing them the consequences of their actions is sometimes the kind of camel nose under the tent, as it were.

00:47:44.000 So when I would travel and speak on pornography, I wouldn't launch into a moral argument.

00:47:49.000 I would say, here are over 50 studies that show porn leads to sexual dysfunction, and here are 58 studies that show that porn supports the addiction model.

00:48:01.000 Things like this.

00:48:01.000 Like, here's how it leads to erectile dysfunction, which isn't a boon within marriage or something.

00:48:06.000 So I kind of make fun of it.

00:48:07.000 I like making fun of pornography.

00:48:09.000 Not the people who are struggling, but the thing.

00:48:11.000 Like, it's clearly a shameful act.

00:48:14.000 And so to kind of point at it and go, isn't that gross?

00:48:16.000 Like, wouldn't you... You know, when I die and someone gets up and says a few things about me, I wouldn't be proud if they were like, he was really into it, just loved it, and he was passionate about it, and that's great, good on him.

00:48:29.000 No one wants to be remembered like that.

00:48:31.000 When it comes to specific moral issues, maybe beginning by pointing to the negative consequences that surround the act, and then bringing them into more of the heart of the matter.

00:48:42.000 Like, you shouldn't treat people as things who aren't things.

00:48:46.000 Which is not all that convincing at the beginning if you're really into porn, but at the end it might be.

00:48:51.000 We'll get to more on this in just one moment.

00:48:52.000 First, it's been two years since the overturning of Roe vs. Wade.

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00:49:06.000 The issue of abortion should be on the mind of every American.

00:49:09.000 The fact we're still debating the humanity of unborn children in 2024 is not just astounding, it's a damning indictment of our cultural decay.

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00:49:51.000 That's pound 250 baby.

00:49:52.000 So one of the sort of fascinating struggles I think inside religion is the struggle that a lot of teenagers feel between what they think are rules and freedom.

00:50:00.000 And our society has elevated freedom above rules and in fact rules are now seen as impositions on the self.

00:50:05.000 What your parents want of you is an imposition on you.

00:50:07.000 What your institutions demand of you is an imposition on you.

00:50:10.000 You're supposed to be a free-wheeling individual who's free of all of these things, and freedom

00:50:13.000 is the central, the sort of central goal.

00:50:16.000 And I think that one of the things that I've been arguing for a long time is that freedom

00:50:22.000 — and it's a place where I have some disagreements, actually, with some people who I'm very close

00:50:25.000 friends with at The Daily Wire, and I've found some commonality with the aforementioned

00:50:30.000 Michael Mills, who's exquirable in every other fashion, but he agrees with me on this.

00:50:33.000 And that is that freedom is of instrumental rather than inherent value.

00:50:39.000 This is a John Finnis argument, that effectively speaking, the idea that freedom is the highest value, or that liberty sort of, liberty ennobles Any enterprise, as opposed to virtue, which does ennoble any enterprise.

00:50:53.000 That is not true.

00:50:55.000 There's an argument Joseph Raz makes, the philosopher, that effectively, if you are told that there's a gun to your head and you have to kill the guy next to you and you do that, are you more or less morally blameworthy than if you say, listen, I chose to kill the guy next to me.

00:51:07.000 Liberty has not ennobled the project in any sort of way.

00:51:10.000 Liberty has actually made it significantly worse because now you bear moral culpability for it.

00:51:14.000 So in other words, the exercise of liberty Was originally meant to exist within boundaries and that's the whole role of religion.

00:51:20.000 It's meant for choice when there is moral Apathy's the wrong word, but there's no moral demand that is placed upon you to act in a particular way.

00:51:31.000 And society, by championing liberty and rights above the roles that they were meant to exist within, has destroyed a lot that surrounds it.

00:51:43.000 And I think that that's what you're seeing a lot in Western society, is the idea of the individual, the freewheeling individual, standing up against institutions.

00:51:49.000 That has led to the destruction of many of these institutions.

00:51:52.000 Right, I agree.

00:51:53.000 Freedom exists for the sake of love.

00:51:56.000 And we can be free from things, but we are also free for things.

00:52:00.000 As the late Archbishop Fulton Sheen joked, you don't go up to a cab driver and say, are you free?

00:52:05.000 And when he says yes, you say, hooray for freedom.

00:52:09.000 Freedom exists for something.

00:52:10.000 And so it seems to me that in America and other countries, when you talk about freedom today, we often mean freedom from constraints.

00:52:16.000 But we should be free for things as well.

00:52:19.000 You know, like the man who can't say no to his next beer, is he free?

00:52:23.000 No, he's kind of enslaved by his passions.

00:52:26.000 The man who cannot say no to look at pornography, is he free?

00:52:29.000 And so on and so forth.

00:52:30.000 And this is a case that I've made that it's a huge mistake people make in quoting Exodus.

00:52:35.000 When Moses says, let my people go, there's an end to that verse, right?

00:52:38.000 So that they may serve me in the wilderness.

00:52:39.000 And everybody always forgets the second half of the verse, right?

00:52:41.000 You need the second half of the verse in order to make sense of the first.

00:52:44.000 The basic idea of just innate human freedom is the highest value is not a biblical concept.

00:52:49.000 It really is not because you're supposed to be subject To the mission that God has placed in front of you.

00:52:54.000 One of the theories that I've been developing over time is something that, I'm sure it's not original to me, but I've termed for purposes of discussion, role theory.

00:53:01.000 And that is that what religion really is, what the Bible really is attempting to do on sort of a practical level, is it sets up and enshrines roles for human beings.

00:53:09.000 And there are a wide variety of these roles.

00:53:11.000 as opposed to sort of virtue ethics, which is about cultivating virtue within yourself

00:53:14.000 and is sort of hard to define because virtue can be interpreted in so many different ways

00:53:18.000 or deontological ethics, the idea of a rule-based ethical morality,

00:53:23.000 which again, Judaism sometimes falls into, this idea that there are rules for everything.

00:53:27.000 But the suggestion that I make is that what those rules are really designed to do

00:53:31.000 in Judaism or the way that religion is generally designed is in order to preserve certain important rules

00:53:36.000 that you're meant to fulfill.

00:53:37.000 The roles that basically are spelled out to Adam.

00:53:39.000 You're supposed to cultivate the garden.

00:53:40.000 You're supposed to be a husband.

00:53:41.000 You're supposed to be a father.

00:53:43.000 You're supposed to be somebody who is a creative force, able to name the animals.

00:53:47.000 Right, these are all rules.

00:53:47.000 And then liberty exists within those roles.

00:53:50.000 But as soon as liberty begins to destroy those roles, then liberty has become libertinism

00:53:55.000 and is effectively destructive.

00:53:57.000 Yeah, whoever sins is a slave to sin.

00:53:59.000 And the Lord is calling me to love my wife and to love my children

00:54:04.000 and to put them above other things, above other pursuits.

00:54:07.000 And all my other pursuits should be ordered towards those ends.

00:54:10.000 But if I begin to engage in pornography or adultery or binge drinking, then my freedom to do that very thing that God is calling me to is now impeded, and everyone suffers as a result, and I become less happy.

00:54:23.000 So, on a broader level, what do you think are the biggest dangers to religion today?

00:54:26.000 Because it seems like there's sort of bizarre optimism that has emerged between the two of us about the failures of secularism leading to a reversion back to more traditional religion.

00:54:37.000 But that's not what the numbers are showing in, say, Europe or the United States.

00:54:40.000 What they're showing is decline in church attendance.

00:54:42.000 in Europe and the United States, which is devastating I think on a general level.

00:54:46.000 I mean, I've been calling for people to go back to church as a Jew.

00:54:49.000 If you're a Christian, go to church.

00:54:50.000 You should.

00:54:51.000 It's better for you.

00:54:52.000 It's better for your kids.

00:54:53.000 We need more Christians in American society.

00:54:54.000 We need more.

00:54:55.000 We need them in European society.

00:54:59.000 What do you think is the greatest danger to religion today?

00:55:03.000 Well, I can't only, but I will only speak about Catholicism.

00:55:06.000 It feels like to me sometimes that the church is being, or the house is being burnt down from two sides.

00:55:12.000 On one side, I would say it's the fire of modernism, and this might be the most dangerous thing.

00:55:18.000 Namely, trying to make the church like the world, where we just kind of run after the world and bend down before the world.

00:55:25.000 But on the other side, it's a sort of, A sort of set of a Kantism where we kind of reject the authority of the Pope of Rome and sort of set up ourselves as the arbitrator as to what is true and what isn't and who we should listen to and who we shouldn't.

00:55:43.000 And those are two very kind of polar opposite things.

00:55:45.000 I think they're reactions to both maybe.

00:55:48.000 And so we see the abuses within the church.

00:55:52.000 We see certain sins not being condemned as forcefully and loudly as they should be.

00:55:57.000 We see, perhaps, liturgies that are celebrated with a lack of care and reverence.

00:56:03.000 And so, because that seems like such a threat, we rush to the other side, and where we do have good priests preaching against the evils of abortion and things like this, but then maybe there are other errors involved here that we haven't begun to look at.

00:56:20.000 Do you have something like that in your community?

00:56:22.000 Oh, for sure.

00:56:23.000 So I think that, typically speaking, since the Enlightenment, the big danger to Judaism has been the rise of modernism, the rise of individualism.

00:56:31.000 The one thing that Jews held in common during the 1700 years or so, when Jews were effectively forced into ghettos, is that they were in the ghetto.

00:56:38.000 So the idea was that they were forced together.

00:56:42.000 Judaism was defined by keeping the law.

00:56:44.000 And then the gates were opened.

00:56:45.000 And then it was like, OK, well, you can now become a citizen of general society.

00:56:48.000 And that forced a sort of crisis in Judaism that was approached from three different angles.

00:56:53.000 One was a full sort of assimilationist ideology.

00:56:55.000 My Jewishness should disappear, that would be good.

00:56:57.000 And I should just become a citizen like any other.

00:56:59.000 And then there was a sort of halfway position, which was the best of the modern world

00:57:04.000 can be taken in by Judaism and engulfed in Judaism.

00:57:08.000 And Judaism can essentially filter out through the modern world,

00:57:12.000 taking the best parts of it and rejecting the worst parts.

00:57:14.000 And then there's a full-scale rejectionism by parts of the Jewish community.

00:57:17.000 And that was, okay, well, when you opened the gates, you also let in a bunch of bad influences.

00:57:22.000 And so you see that breakdown in, I would say, the modern world.

00:57:24.000 in terms of sort of Reform Judaism in the United States or Reconstructionist Judaism,

00:57:28.000 that would be sort of the first more accommodationist, assimilationist view.

00:57:31.000 The sort of modern Orthodox, which I consider myself, which is the sort of merger of

00:57:38.000 not secular values, but secular technologies with Jewish values

00:57:44.000 and living in the modern world, having a job, you know, accommodating yourself to

00:57:49.000 Yeah.

00:57:49.000 to democracy, these sorts of things.

00:57:51.000 And then you have, you know, wings of the Jewish community that would probably be termed ultra-Orthodox by the media,

00:57:56.000 where the goal is to just shut off all influences whatsoever

00:57:58.000 because you're so afraid that those influences are going to draw your kid out into the open

00:58:02.000 where they're going to be attacked.

00:58:03.000 And you can see, you know, the truth and particularly the sort of rejectionist viewpoint

00:58:11.000 that the danger is so great that you just can't allow yourself

00:58:13.000 any sort of interface with...

00:58:15.000 The problem is, of course, that that removes the biblical commandment to be a light unto the nations.

00:58:19.000 Because once you've stopped engaging with the world, in my viewpoint, from a Jewish viewpoint, then you've... What is the mission at that point other than to sort of just hold steady?

00:58:29.000 And I think that that has tended to happen in You know, I feel like that's mirrored in some aspects of Catholicism also.

00:58:37.000 That a vibrant and functioning religious community has to have both an internal vision as to how you preserve your community and an external vision as to how you wish to transform the world and spread the light that you're supposed to bring to the world.

00:58:50.000 And the more missional your religion is, the more it's likely to give your kids a sense of mission and lead to a sense of growth as opposed to decline.

00:58:59.000 And I think that you can kind of tell it by its fruit.

00:59:02.000 So, you know, one of the things about the state of Israel right now is that the state of Israel is the only Western society that has above replacement rates of birth.

00:59:10.000 It is, which is kind of an astonishing thing.

00:59:11.000 You go to Tel Aviv, which is a secular center of Israel, and because there's sort of a national mission in Israel, People in Tel Aviv average over three, the fertility rate's over three per woman.

00:59:21.000 This is like a place that is secular as San Francisco, but they're culturally oriented toward the Jewish state, to take an example.

00:59:29.000 Without a common mission within Catholicism, and a muscular mission within Catholicism, I think that it tends to wither on the vine as well.

00:59:36.000 Yeah, a hundred percent.

00:59:37.000 Yeah, I think there is a reaction to a sort of pansy Catholicism, or a reaction to Catholics who apologize for the hard stances the Church has taken against so-called marriage, which is a fiction, or contraception, or what have you.

00:59:54.000 We've seen a lot of leadership, and then ourselves—we always like to point to leadership, we fail to point at ourselves—have maybe I've been too soft, too weak in proclaiming what Catholicism should be proclaiming.

01:00:09.000 And so you see a reaction to that, and part of that reaction is fantastic, and then some of it might lack charity.

01:00:14.000 I think there's also a contingent within Catholicism that wants to go back to what they see as the glory days during the Crusades or something.

01:00:22.000 But the way I see it, it feels like I don't know.

01:00:26.000 Christendom is kind of back to the first couple of centuries.

01:00:29.000 And so our goal shouldn't be to go back to the 13th century, but to go back to how the early Christians lived in communities with each other, loving one another.

01:00:40.000 You know, the Romans said, who are these people?

01:00:43.000 They knew them by how they loved each other.

01:00:46.000 So, it was Stephen Covey in one of his books that talked about the sphere of influence, sphere of control, sphere of power, you know?

01:00:56.000 And I don't know, I think more and more I want to be concerned about the things I have authority over.

01:01:01.000 And I want to be less concerned about the things I can do nothing about.

01:01:03.000 Because when I spend my days listening to the terrifying news that's taking place, either in the country or sometimes within the church, I'm not actually dedicating my time and energy to the thing that God has given me authority over, namely my wife and my children and my apostolate, my mission.

01:01:21.000 But what I find is when I actually dedicate my time there and sort of block out the noise that shouldn't concern me, because I can do nothing about it anyway, I find that my sphere of influence actually begins to grow.

01:01:32.000 So I think a cause of anxiety among many people today is just this onslaught That is news coverage.

01:01:41.000 For me, the key is limiting the exposure.

01:01:42.000 of addictive. I wonder how you do this every day when you wake up and stick your head in

01:01:47.000 the toilet bowl and go, what's in here? How do you stay sane?

01:01:55.000 For me, the key is limiting the exposure. So I don't have Twitter on my phone, for example,

01:02:00.000 and that's a deliberate decision not to have Twitter on my phone.

01:02:02.000 So I engage with it particular hours of the day, and then I just don't engage with it a lot of other times of the day.

01:02:07.000 And when I'm not engaged with it, I'm engaged with my family full-time.

01:02:09.000 I'm engaged with my community full-time.

01:02:11.000 And is the Sabbath just awesome?

01:02:13.000 The Sabbath is the greatest thing that God ever invented.

01:02:14.000 It is the best thing.

01:02:16.000 And, you know, the death of the Sabbath is the worst thing that I think has happened to Western civilization.

01:02:20.000 Christians need to adopt this.

01:02:21.000 I would like to see something like this.

01:02:23.000 Maybe not exactly like this, but I think old people would benefit mentally just from totally detaching and unplugging.

01:02:29.000 A hundred percent.

01:02:30.000 What do you do with your lights on like Friday evenings?

01:02:32.000 So we have presets.

01:02:33.000 So you can get electronic presets these days.

01:02:34.000 It makes it very convenient.

01:02:35.000 So you can set the lights that they go off at a certain hour and on a certain hour.

01:02:40.000 Or you just leave them on before Sabbath, and you figure out, okay, like, I don't want the light on in my bedroom, but I do want it on in the kitchen.

01:02:46.000 Is your fridge still running?

01:02:48.000 So they have a Sabbath mode on the fridge.

01:02:49.000 Come on!

01:02:50.000 So it actually keeps the fridge running, but the light is off inside.

01:02:52.000 Sabbath mode, that's amazing!

01:02:53.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:02:54.000 So depending on the kind of fridge you have, virtually all of them now have a Sabbath mode where it can turn off the light.

01:02:58.000 So modern technology has made Sabbath, like, super easy in certain ways, because you can actually preset all this stuff.

01:03:03.000 There was a big controversy in Jewish circles over how to treat electricity.

01:03:08.000 In the early days when electricity became very common.

01:03:11.000 And so there was some talk about like, is this capable of use on Sabbath or not?

01:03:16.000 So the way that the Jews try to embody sort of broader ideas about the Sabbath is obviously with law.

01:03:23.000 So for example, the way that we define the Sabbath is we say there are 39 different malachot, right, actions, that are rules about how you can act on Sabbath.

01:03:32.000 We define those by things that were done in the tabernacle.

01:03:34.000 During the normal week, but you couldn't do them on the Sabbath, right?

01:03:37.000 So you weren't allowed to do them.

01:03:38.000 So we learned from that, from the Bible, right?

01:03:40.000 That you weren't allowed to, for example, build.

01:03:42.000 You weren't allowed to kindle a fire on Sabbath.

01:03:44.000 So then you extend those principles out into a variety of sort of, you know, other laws.

01:03:49.000 So the question was, how do you treat electricity?

01:03:51.000 Is electricity a thing that is banned by these rules or not?

01:03:55.000 And it was a big controversy at the time, in the early 20th century particularly.

01:03:59.000 And the kind of solution that Judaism came up with, because it tends to be a religion that treasures the old

01:04:06.000 as opposed to the new, was we are going to, we'll come up with some kind of, what I think,

01:04:11.000 are jerry-rigged excuses for why electricity is not to be used on the Sabbath.

01:04:14.000 So they suggest that it's akin to fire, for example, or that when you complete a circuit,

01:04:18.000 that's a form of building.

01:04:19.000 What's funny about this, I think, is that, I was thinking about this a lot in the context

01:04:23.000 of just generalized religious doctrine.

01:04:26.000 So one of the big criticisms, obviously inside religion, is too doctrinal, right?

01:04:30.000 You get this in Catholicism too.

01:04:31.000 So much doctrine.

01:04:33.000 Why do you have so much doctrine?

01:04:34.000 Why can't we just cut through the thicket?

01:04:36.000 And the answer is because in the absence of doctrine, you end up actually destroying the principle.

01:04:40.000 And so I was thinking about this in the context of euthanasia, for example.

01:04:44.000 So Catholicism has, you tell me if I'm wrong.

01:04:46.000 Yeah, you shouldn't kill innocent people.

01:04:47.000 Right, you shouldn't kill innocent people, but there is also the doctrine of double effect, meaning if you have, like, an older person, you don't have to take abnormal measures in order to save that person's life.

01:04:59.000 And also, if you're attempting to alleviate pain by giving morphine and the person dies because... And you might even foresee that, but you didn't intend it.

01:05:06.000 Exactly.

01:05:07.000 So, if you are a secular person, you're like, well, what difference does that make?

01:05:09.000 What you foresaw or what you didn't foresee.

01:05:11.000 You're just killing a person with morphine.

01:05:12.000 Like, what difference does that make?

01:05:13.000 But it's the doctrine that protects against the abuse.

01:05:16.000 Meaning that because Catholicism says, no, you're attempting to alleviate pain, you're not attempting to kill, that prevents you from just saying, okay, kill the old guy.

01:05:22.000 Right.

01:05:23.000 And so I think that Judaism, you look at things like I was just talking about with regards to turning lights on and off on Sabbath.

01:05:28.000 It's like, oh my God, that's illegalistic.

01:05:30.000 Why don't you just ask the guy to turn it on or turn on yourself?

01:05:32.000 Like, what's the problem?

01:05:33.000 But the whole point is that once you say, It is okay to turn on the light, then it becomes okay to turn on the light.

01:05:39.000 And once it's okay to turn on the light, it's okay to turn on your phone.

01:05:41.000 Once it's okay to turn on your phone, then it's okay to do a wide variety of activities that you don't actually want people doing on Sabbath.

01:05:47.000 And so, there are a bunch of catch-all terms in Judaism, like they'll say something's not Shabbastic.

01:05:52.000 Shabbastic just means, in Yiddish, that it's not something you should do on Shabbas, it's not recommended.

01:05:56.000 There's a lot of not recommended.

01:05:58.000 What would be an example of something you shouldn't do?

01:06:00.000 Okay, so, for example, I could theoretically leave on my TV all of Shabbas.

01:06:03.000 Right, I turn on, just like a light. I could leave it on on Friday night before

01:06:06.000 Shabbos comes in. I could leave it on. I could watch the ball game on Saturday.

01:06:10.000 That would be considered not Shabbostick, right? Like it's not in keeping with the spirit

01:06:13.000 of Shabbos. How do you cook? This has now become me interviewing you. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to

01:06:18.000 keep going. It's interesting. I never get these questions.

01:06:20.000 How do you cook food?

01:06:21.000 Okay, so the answer is that you're not allowed to cook on Saturday.

01:06:25.000 You're allowed to reheat things, but if, for example, so I'm not allowed to cook, it comes down to liquid versus solid.

01:06:32.000 It gets very abstruse.

01:06:32.000 So, for example, I'm allowed to leave something cooking from before Shabbat.

01:06:36.000 This is why you see people eat Cholent, right?

01:06:39.000 Cholent is like a stew.

01:06:40.000 It's very common in the Jewish community to eat cholent.

01:06:43.000 And so you'll leave it on cooking like all night.

01:06:45.000 And because you didn't start the cooking process on Shabbat, you just left it there.

01:06:49.000 But if you take the cholent off, you're not allowed to put it back on the flame, right?

01:06:51.000 Because then now you've started a new cooking process.

01:06:55.000 Cholent's actually started to become a thing because of the fight between Karaites and Pharisees.

01:07:01.000 Because Karaites said, well it says you shouldn't kindle a flame.

01:07:04.000 And so if you're kindling a flame, that means you really shouldn't use the flame.

01:07:07.000 And so the Pharisees were like, well, no, it says that you're not supposed

01:07:10.000 to kindle a new flame.

01:07:11.000 And so it became a cultural differentiator to actually start cooking something before Shabbat

01:07:15.000 and leave it cooking over Shabbat to say, I'm a Pharisee, I'm not a Karaite, for example.

01:07:19.000 So like, it's really interesting.

01:07:22.000 So you're allowed to reheat solid food.

01:07:25.000 So if I have, you know... Chicken or something?

01:07:28.000 Yeah, like chicken.

01:07:29.000 As long as there's not too much sauce, right?

01:07:31.000 Because if the sauce turns it into a soup.

01:07:33.000 It gets very, very detailed.

01:07:35.000 No, but you're right.

01:07:35.000 It's like with children, you know, we all understand, give them an inch, they'll take a mile.

01:07:39.000 Well, we're like that as well.

01:07:40.000 And so when you start to shut down these rules, the whole thing... And this is one of the things that I think is so fascinating about Catholicism, and I've talked about this with Bishop Barron, is that Catholicism, Christianity, started off as a rip on Phariseeism, obviously, from a philosophical level, right?

01:07:55.000 Our top guy was doing that, yeah.

01:07:57.000 Our blessed Lord.

01:07:58.000 And again, that's actually nothing new in Jewish history in the sense that Jeremiah does the same thing, right?

01:08:02.000 If you read the prophets, the prophets are constantly saying things like, Does God need your sacrifices?

01:08:06.000 He needs you to be kind to the poor.

01:08:07.000 He needs you to give charity.

01:08:08.000 He needs you to think about virtue.

01:08:10.000 Does he really need, like, roast meat?

01:08:13.000 Jesus is saying something.

01:08:14.000 That's why Jesus is Jewish.

01:08:16.000 I mean, he's not saying anything that's actually super foreign to Judaism in the segments where he's criticizing Pharisees.

01:08:21.000 But the attempt of Christianity to sort of get rid of aspects of the law This is a question I have for Christians, ends up being backfilled by attempts to sort of reinstate the law, meaning Catholicism is rich in doctrine.

01:08:34.000 So if Christianity started off as an attempt to get rid of many of the rules as unnecessary in order to reach the virtue that the rules were attempting to reach, then why is it that there is so much doctrine in Catholicism?

01:08:50.000 Yeah, can you think of an example within Catholicism?

01:08:52.000 You're like, that's really interesting that you do that.

01:08:54.000 So all the ritual, for example.

01:08:55.000 Yeah, like at Mass or Divine Liturgy, those sorts of things.

01:08:58.000 Right, exactly.

01:08:58.000 That sounds very Judaic, meaning like Judaism mandates you're supposed to daven three times a day.

01:09:02.000 There's like an actual set service, right?

01:09:04.000 And so three times a day, davening is praying, sorry.

01:09:07.000 I slip into the Judaic language.

01:09:10.000 But you pray three times a day, and you say the same service three times a day, and it's very ritualistic and it's very Repetitive.

01:09:17.000 And I have very ritualistic prayers that I pray.

01:09:19.000 Every single morning I have a very specific thing that I do.

01:09:21.000 Every night I have a very specific prayer that I pray.

01:09:23.000 And these sort of anchor me throughout the day.

01:09:26.000 Exactly.

01:09:26.000 Yeah.

01:09:27.000 Exactly.

01:09:27.000 And so I think that what's fascinating is how the divergence, the original divergence, ends up becoming more of a convergence.

01:09:34.000 If you watch how Catholics practice and how Orthodox Jews practice, There is a lot of similarity there.

01:09:39.000 I don't know if it was that we kept the moral law, not the Mosaic law, because the understanding was now that the Mosaic law wasn't what justified you or saved you or something like that.

01:09:49.000 I have another question for you.

01:09:52.000 Why don't you want me to be a Jew, or do you?

01:09:54.000 I don't care.

01:09:56.000 Why?

01:09:56.000 Because I want you to be Catholic, obviously.

01:09:58.000 And by the way, I appreciate it.

01:10:00.000 This is what I've always said to my Catholic friends, my Protestant friends.

01:10:03.000 As long as you're coming at me with a book and not a sword, that's great.

01:10:06.000 And not being annoying and berating you or something like that.

01:10:10.000 I mean, even if you want to be annoying about it, that's fine.

01:10:12.000 You care enough about my soul that you want me to be saved.

01:10:14.000 I appreciate it.

01:10:15.000 It's much appreciated.

01:10:16.000 And we'll find out in the overtime period who is right and who is wrong.

01:10:19.000 But why don't you?

01:10:21.000 Because we talked about earlier about the only reason you should believe something is because it's true.

01:10:25.000 You presumably believe I believe falsehoods and you believe true things.

01:10:28.000 So why shouldn't you encourage me to abandon some of my beliefs and adopt some of yours?

01:10:32.000 Right.

01:10:32.000 So doctrinally, what Judaism believes is that the commandments of Israel were only given to Israel.

01:10:38.000 Okay.

01:10:38.000 Meaning that the seven Noahide commandments that I referred to earlier, those are incumbent on all of humanity because they're given to Noah right before the Jews actually arise as an independent family and people.

01:10:47.000 And so those apply to everyone.

01:10:48.000 So if you're not a member of the Judaic tribe, then those rules don't apply to you.

01:10:54.000 So the 613 commandments that apply to me are boiled down to seven for you.

01:10:57.000 And so what that means is that if you want to join in to do those commandments, that's not required of you.

01:11:05.000 Welcome if you want, but certainly Judaism doesn't feel the necessity to force... To evangelize and to bring people into death.

01:11:12.000 Because Judaism doesn't actually suggest... Being chosen doesn't mean being superior.

01:11:16.000 I think this is one of the great misnomers of history, is that when the Jews say that they're a chosen people, what they mean is that they're better than everyone else.

01:11:24.000 It's like, no, in the same way that if I choose my oldest child to take out the trash, that doesn't mean that my oldest child is better.

01:11:30.000 It means I need my oldest child to take out the trash.

01:11:32.000 That's not the same thing.

01:11:34.000 Okay.

01:11:34.000 And so the sort of idea that Jews are, in their own minds, superior to everybody else because it is incumbent on them to do that, that's obviously not how Jews think.

01:11:45.000 Especially because there are a bunch of commandments that are incumbent on men in Judaism that are not incumbent on women in Judaism.

01:11:49.000 Does Judaism then believe that women are of lesser value than men?

01:11:54.000 But apart from little laws, there must be like metaphysical things that you hold as true that you would like me to believe.

01:12:01.000 Or at least you would like me, I don't mean to be confrontational, but you clearly would want Christians to realize that Christ was not the Messiah.

01:12:09.000 Maybe you don't want that, or maybe it doesn't bother you, you don't care one way or the other.

01:12:12.000 But when I look at Mormons, I'm like, look, I love you, and this isn't a criticism on you directly, but Joseph Smith was not a prophet.

01:12:21.000 My Muslim friend, I love you, but like Muhammad was a liar or a lunatic.

01:12:25.000 Maybe he was possessed, but he wasn't a prophet.

01:12:28.000 I have to say that in love, and so I would wonder.

01:12:31.000 And maybe it's just that you have a public platform, and so you don't want to get into that to offend people unnecessarily.

01:12:36.000 No, it really isn't that.

01:12:36.000 I mean, the Jewish doctrine is that as long as you believe in God, as long as, I mean, the actual seven The actual seven commandments to non-Jews are believe in God, no eating the flesh or living animals, actually one of them, you have to establish courts of law, no murder, no sexual sins, no idolatry, and I believe no stealing.

01:12:55.000 It's like seven of the ten of the big ten, right?

01:12:58.000 We don't actually believe that non-Jews are even bound by the Ten Commandments.

01:13:02.000 They're bound by the seven commandments in Judaism.

01:13:05.000 So it boils even further down.

01:13:06.000 So how you believe in God is of little consequence to me, so long as you do believe in the monotheistic God.

01:13:12.000 What if I believe in a God that lives on top of a mountain and whose name is Jeffrey?

01:13:16.000 And I say, that's God.

01:13:18.000 If he doesn't fulfill the fundamental properties of God, then that doesn't count.

01:13:20.000 Which would be what?

01:13:21.000 So the fundamental properties of God would be that he's in charge of the universe, creator of the universe, master of the divine law.

01:13:29.000 All-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving would probably be in that category.

01:13:33.000 There's debate in sort of Jewish circles as to whether you have to believe that God gave the commandments at Sinai, whether that's a debate between a couple of major rabbis, Maimonides included, as to whether if you discover those seven laws on your own, but you don't believe that they were given at Sinai, does that count?

01:13:48.000 So there is some doctrinal debate there, but in general, the basic idea that there is only one path to God in the same way that there is in Christianity, that doesn't exist in the same way.

01:13:58.000 What about a Mormon who believed that God was once a man like we are?

01:14:01.000 I'm not saying you've given much thought about this, but would that be a place where you'd be like, no, I need to evangelize you?

01:14:07.000 Or not that word, but I need you to come to believe in God differently than you currently do.

01:14:11.000 So the answer to me is, I'm going to go with the I don't know answer.

01:14:15.000 Like pretty much everything else in Judaism, there's major debates on all of these things.

01:14:19.000 There's a debate for a long time in Judaism over whether, say, Trinitarianism is monotheism or if it's not monotheism.

01:14:26.000 That's a serious debate.

01:14:28.000 In Judaism, it's come down on the side of monotheism.

01:14:31.000 I wouldn't know the answer as far as Mormon doctrine specifically.

01:14:36.000 Let's put it this way.

01:14:37.000 If you're talking about paganism, Judaism would have a problem with paganism.

01:14:41.000 So let's say that you believed that there were a hundred gods and they all ruled over different aspects of humanity, then Judaism would say, that's not fulfilled.

01:14:50.000 And if you were in dialogue with somebody like this, would you feel obligated to try to help them, to help divest them of that error so that they could be saved?

01:14:58.000 Sure.

01:15:00.000 So then I would feel obligated to actually, in the same way that if somebody believed that adultery was morally acceptable, I would feel the obligation to say, well, no, actually, adultery is not morally acceptable, and it's better for you to not believe that.

01:15:13.000 So Judaism is very weird that way, and historically speaking, it's kind of interesting to see whether that is an outgrowth of The direction of Jewish history, or that was inherent to the religion?

01:15:24.000 Right?

01:15:25.000 Because, obviously, when Joshua comes into the land, mass conversion takes place, right?

01:15:30.000 When, in the pre-Christian era, Judaism was one of the fastest growing religions in the Roman Empire.

01:15:35.000 A huge percentage of Alexandria was Jewish.

01:15:38.000 There were huge Jewish communities in Egypt.

01:15:40.000 And so, it was an actual, more proselytizing religion.

01:15:44.000 And so, one of the questions of Jewish history is sort of, was the Jewish move away from proselytization.

01:15:52.000 Historically driven or ideologically driven?

01:15:54.000 Or is it a sort of ideological justification of how history had gone?

01:15:59.000 In the same way that, for example, if you look at the historicity of matrilineal lineage in Judaism.

01:16:04.000 If you read the Bible, it seems pretty clear that lineage is through the father.

01:16:07.000 But in Judaism, lineage is through the mom.

01:16:10.000 So the question is, when that sort of shifted?

01:16:12.000 And historically speaking, that's probably around the time of Ezra.

01:16:15.000 It's like 400 BC or something like that.

01:16:18.000 But, you know, there are all these sort of weird issues in sort of biblical adherence as to when things shift and how the history of that goes.

01:16:24.000 Well, thank you.

01:16:25.000 One day I'm going to have to have you on my show and just ask you questions for a couple of hours.

01:16:28.000 Again, you should.

01:16:29.000 I know what I know.

01:16:30.000 There are rabbis who know way more than I do, who I would definitely recommend that you talk to, and so you can get sort of the basics from me, and then I'll tell you that I don't know a lot of things on that show.

01:16:38.000 But yeah, I think that the one thing that comes through, just to kind of sum up in terms of where we are religiously, and this is the case that I've been consistently making, is that When we talk about the West and Western civilization, that a muscular pursuit of religious values, and in the West you're talking Christian values, is absolutely necessary to the upholding of the West.

01:17:01.000 That all the fundamental premises of the West are built on these Christian values.

01:17:04.000 The reason people say Judeo-Christian is just because many of those values are held in common with Judaism, and obviously Christianity and the New Testament are based on the Old Testament originally.

01:17:13.000 But the eternal values of of Judeo-Christianity, of biblical living.

01:17:18.000 Those haven't changed with time and they can't change with time and they shouldn't change with time.

01:17:23.000 What do you think is the best way to insulate those values from the predations

01:17:27.000 that we've been talking about?

01:17:28.000 Against, say, the family?

01:17:30.000 Yes, I mean, the attacks on the family would be an excellent...

01:17:33.000 Yeah, I think withhold, I think I'm being hyperbolic, okay?

01:17:41.000 So if people stretch this too far, they'll misunderstand me, but get married before you're ready, have more kids than you can afford, and then move into a bubble of other like-minded people and raise them in the faith.

01:17:55.000 Now, of course I could qualify all of those things.

01:17:57.000 Obviously you should discern.

01:17:59.000 Obviously you shouldn't have more children than you can afford, or it's dangerous to the wife, or something like that.

01:18:05.000 And by bubble I don't mean solipsistic living, where it's insular and we don't engage with the outside world.

01:18:11.000 But there's a sense in which all of those things are right.

01:18:13.000 People talk about communities today as bubbles, disparagingly, but that's how humans have lived forever.

01:18:19.000 This new way of living, where we live on a street next to people we don't know, this is unusual.

01:18:26.000 So I live in a little town in Ohio.

01:18:28.000 It's not a very pretty town, but there's a lot of fantastic people who live there, and we kind of have the same values.

01:18:35.000 And so my 15-year-old daughter doesn't have a cell phone, and it's never really occurred to her to ask for one, because we hang out with other homeschooling families who also, of course, wouldn't give their child a smartphone.

01:18:47.000 Living life in common like that, where my children don't have to feel like freaks because they don't have Instagram, is really helpful.

01:18:58.000 If I was to send my child to a school, be it Catholic or public, and he didn't have a phone or she didn't have a phone, they'd feel like a social leper by the time they were nine or ten.

01:19:09.000 So I'm a big fan of homeschooling.

01:19:11.000 I don't think it's the only way, but it's the way we've chosen.

01:19:14.000 But then I also think you clearly want to have your children engage with the world.

01:19:19.000 And so we speak really openly with our children, from very young.

01:19:23.000 I teach my kids about pornography from the age of six.

01:19:27.000 I say something simple like, pornography is pictures or videos of people showing parts of their body that their bathing suits should cover, and you should always tell me if you see it.

01:19:34.000 Very unscandalous.

01:19:35.000 So educating them in that way.

01:19:38.000 I don't know.

01:19:38.000 And then just having other attractive, by attractive I mean just good, normal people in their life.

01:19:45.000 So it's not just my head saying these things, it's the next door neighbour, it's the friends, it's...

01:19:49.000 Does that make sense?

01:19:50.000 Not only does that make sense, I live very much the same way.

01:19:53.000 I think that the loss of community is the single greatest factor in the decline of religion.

01:19:58.000 The supplantation of community by government in terms of even things like financial support, like one of the things the church used to provide, and it still does where I live.

01:20:07.000 If there's somebody out of a job in my community, we all try to find that person a job.

01:20:10.000 I love how Jews do that.

01:20:12.000 I wish Catholics were more tribal like that.

01:20:16.000 I think that's awesome.

01:20:18.000 Mormons do it too.

01:20:19.000 I don't think it's unique to Judaism.

01:20:20.000 Mormons are great like that too.

01:20:24.000 If somebody in our neighborhood is having a hard time, people immediately step up and You know, we'll move to pay their bills and try to help them out.

01:20:34.000 And that sort of economic interdependence actually creates a thriving society.

01:20:39.000 And that's how things used to be.

01:20:41.000 I mean, it also means that rich people hang out with poor people, right?

01:20:44.000 Class divisions go away when you're all attending the same synagogue or the same church and you're all praying in the same direction.

01:20:50.000 You're not praying to the richest guy, you're praying toward the front of the church.

01:20:53.000 Those bonds cannot be duplicated.

01:20:57.000 You can't remake them in their sad social fashion.

01:20:59.000 It's bizarre.

01:21:01.000 You had the Surgeon General of the United States say that loneliness is a public health issue.

01:21:05.000 And I just thought to myself, yeah, but the government can't solve that public health issue.

01:21:07.000 The only way to solve that public health issue is you need to go to synagogue or church.

01:21:10.000 That's the only way to solve that issue because there's nothing quite like being engrossed in a community.

01:21:16.000 And that does set social standards.

01:21:18.000 I mentioned the birth rate in Israel.

01:21:19.000 One of the reasons you have that birth rate is because everyone around you has four kids.

01:21:22.000 I mean, like, in our community, like, four is a bare minimum.

01:21:25.000 Like, when we had our fourth kid, it was like, okay, welcome to the club now.

01:21:28.000 Where are the other four?

01:21:29.000 You know, like, that sort of generalized social expectation and a recognition that that requires community support.

01:21:34.000 Meaning, if you're at the playground and a kid is acting badly, in American society, if someone says something to your kid at the playground, then you are supposed to get mad at that.

01:21:43.000 How dare you parent my child?

01:21:45.000 That's terrible that you're parenting my child.

01:21:47.000 Well, in a traditional religious community, if somebody parents my child, the answer is, good, they should be parenting.

01:21:51.000 Like, if I'm not watching and my kid does something bad, I want somebody to discipline my kid.

01:21:54.000 Because we all hold the same standard.

01:21:56.000 And that's why we have to hold the same standard when we live in these sorts of communities.

01:21:59.000 It would probably be unchristian to suggest that we come up with a bumper sticker that just says, outbreed the bastards.

01:22:04.000 Would that be wrong?

01:22:05.000 I don't know.

01:22:07.000 So that's cool.

01:22:08.000 So Judaism, you guys have a lot of kids.

01:22:09.000 Mormons have a lot of kids.

01:22:11.000 Well, outbreed is... Catholics try.

01:22:13.000 Yeah.

01:22:14.000 I mean, that's going to be, that is going to be, the future of humanity is going to be, unfortunately, because... We just need to breed, but then not have them indoctrinated into atheism and modernism.

01:22:23.000 So I was at the store the other day, my wife came out and she went, there was a family in there and they had a lot of kids.

01:22:28.000 And I went, were they neat or disheveled?

01:22:30.000 Neat.

01:22:31.000 Ah, Mormons.

01:22:33.000 If they look terrible and stained, those were good Catholics.

01:22:36.000 Well, Matt, it's been amazing to have you here.

01:22:38.000 I really appreciate it.

01:22:39.000 Everybody should go check out your work because it really is fantastic.

01:22:41.000 Again, thank you for the time.

01:22:42.000 Thanks.

01:22:43.000 The Ben Shapiro Sunday Special is produced by Savannah Morris and Matt Kemp.

01:22:52.000 Associate producers are Jake Pollock and John Crick.

01:22:55.000 Editing is by Olivia Stewart.

01:22:57.000 Audio is mixed by Mike Corimina.

01:22:59.000 Camera and lighting is by Zach Ginta.

01:23:01.000 Hair, makeup, and wardrobe by Fabiola Cristina.

01:23:04.000 Title graphics are by Cynthia Angulo.

01:23:06.000 Executive assistant, Kelly Carvalho.

01:23:08.000 Executive in charge of production is David Wormus.

01:23:11.000 Executive producer, Justin Siegel.

01:23:13.000 Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.

01:23:14.000 The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is a Daily Wire production.

The Ben Shapiro Show - August 04, 2024

Balancing Faith & Reason | Matt Fradd

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