Ep. 67 - Christmas Comes Early! Tax Cuts
Summary
Before we open our Christmas presents of tax cuts and weird sex stuff, we have to remember that Christmas isn t about presents, it s about God. And in that spirit, we bring on author Leo Severino to talk about his new book, Going Deeper: A Reasoned Exploration of God and Truth.
Transcript
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This Men's Mental Health Month, CAMH is confronting a silent crisis.
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Did you know men account for 75% of all suicide deaths in Canada?
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CAMH is on the front lines pioneering breakthroughs
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so no father, son, brother, or family is left behind.
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To join us in building better mental health care for men across Canada,
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John McCain says that he will vote for tax reform.
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Nancy Pelosi has called on the longest-serving member of Congress
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And The Daily Show mocks Senator Liawatha Elizabeth Warren
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We will analyze alongside our award-winning panel of deplorables,
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we will talk to author Leo Severino about his new book,
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Going Deeper, A Reasoned Exploration of God and Truth.
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Then, all of your questions will be answered in the mailbag.
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Before we can talk about it, though, we have to remember the reason for the season.
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Before we open our Christmas presents of tax cuts and weird sex stuff and Democrats eating their own,
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we have to remember that Christmas isn't about presents.
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And in that spirit, we bring on author Leo Severino to talk about his new book,
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Going Deeper, A Reasoned Exploration of God and Truth.
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You, like me, are a decadent, gaudy, saint, venerating papist.
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Your book presents a number of clearly laid-out arguments for the existence of God and his nature,
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I've actually been referring to the book around the office as the Summa Theologica,
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You know, it's not the whole encyclopedia of Theologica,
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but it is an excellent, you know, concise edition,
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So my first question is, why did you write this book, and why did you write it now?
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Well, first of all, thank you for being such a venerable company as St. Thomas Aquinas and Michael Knowles.
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It's a star-studded hall of fame I've been added to.
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The reason I wrote the book was essentially it was very personal,
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because it was kind of my journey from the result of being part of a university system
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that was rooted in more modern philosophy through a more realistic approach to life and philosophy.
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So it was really cathartic for me to just kind of put out my experience,
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kind of logically, theologically, mentally, philosophically.
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I do find college kids now, they seem to think that philosophy began with Descartes,
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and they don't even really get him or any of his contemporaries,
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but they don't understand that the human search for knowledge and meaning and God and their own nature
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So you felt that on campus there was this dearth of wisdom.
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So what led you to the arguments you make in the book?
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I mean, I only realized much later that philosophy kind of ended with Descartes.
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But, no, I can't cast aspersion because I was part of that world.
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I studied philosophy and I was quite apt at it, quite good at it.
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And by that I meant I was quite good at putting up such silly notions as there is no truth,
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And so I was really submersed in this for a very long time.
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It took me actually through law school before I started realizing that there was a whole world prior to 300 years ago
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That evolution where you finally hit and you realize,
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oh, you know, the statement there is no truth is a self-defeating statement
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because obviously if there is no truth, then that includes the statement there is no truth,
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You begin the book with that argument and you lead into a number of other arguments,
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the unmoved mover, the argument from teleology, all excellent, compelling arguments.
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I think for a lot of people who are steeped in modern philosophy and have never heard these things,
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it will give you a good rational basis for God and the existence of God.
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But I remember reading, I think it was in Jesus of Nazareth in the infancy narratives by Pope Benedict,
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Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, that he doesn't believe that people can come to believe in God through arguments.
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I always convinced myself that I was first brought to believe in God through arguments,
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He believes that there has to be a base level of faith,
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that God has to approach you before you can reach back to him.
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Did you find that to be the case, or do you think that right now, for this rationalist, materialist culture,
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the way that we can bring people to God is primarily through these arguments?
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Well, I tend to side with St. Paul, in as much as he says that God can be known by the things that were created.
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And I think it's actually pretty close to a tenet of faith that we can know God by the sure of our reasons.
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I think back to the Council of Florence and a couple of other places that was set forth.
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And if it is at some level, even if we obviously can't know the full depth of inner workings of the Holy Trinity,
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that God is knowable, I think, is something that could be produced.
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But, you know, one of my favorite arguments that you didn't include in the book, but I really like it,
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it's one that really convinced me, is the ontological argument,
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which, in a nutshell, there are much more elegant versions of it,
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but in a nutshell, it's God is the maximally great being,
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and if he's maximally great, it's better to exist than not to exist,
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Is there something about these arguments that is so whimsical
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that that speaks to the character of God himself and the character of the world that we see,
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I think there's something really beautiful to it.
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I had a philosophy professor, he's since passed, his name was Dallas Willard at USC,
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And he always told me, you know, if you can't explain it to your grandmother,
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and even my grandmother, and let's just say she wasn't exactly a scholar,
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beautiful, beautiful, is that if you can't explain it to your grandmother,
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And I think that's the irony of it, is that there's not only truth and beauty,
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And when we know something, there's a beauty to it,
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there's symmetry, there's clarity that it's global,
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There's truth and beauty, and that's all we know on earth and all we need to know,
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and they clearly have a relation to one another.
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So if you are ignorant about these arguments for God,
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It's really a nice overview of these arguments for God.
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I'm certain that you'll be convinced if you take the argument seriously enough.
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It's Going Deeper, A Reasoned Exploration of God and Truth by Leo Severino.
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Good to have you, and we'll have to have you back.
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Congratulations on all your good work, Michael.
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Okay, before we bring on our panel, before we do that,
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We have Jason Russell from The Washington Examiner and Vincent Buda of Live from Studio 6B.
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It is a chilly day in hell, Senator John McCain tweets, quote,
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after careful consideration, I have decided to support the Senate tax reform bill.
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Though not perfect, this bill will deliver much needed reform to our tax code,
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grow the economy, and provide long overdue tax relief for American families.
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Let's try to process this without our brains frying up.
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Is he going to pull the rug out from under us or are we going to get tax reform?
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Well, I say thank you, John McCain, finally coming to your senses.
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But, you know, this guy's hatred for Trump has just gone way too far.
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It's like, listen, the topic that we're talking about right now is we're so happy and surprised.
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Something he's run on, something the whole party believes in.
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Not let his personal hatred of Donald Trump change how he votes on things or policy.
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I didn't think I would be saying that phrase before the end of the year.
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But thanks, John McCain, as long as you follow through.
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Jason, Marco Rubio and Mike Lee have proposed an amendment to this tax reform bill
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to raise the corporate tax rate from 20% to 22% in exchange for higher child care credits.
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Since when is it the conservative opinion that a 20% corporate tax rate is too low?
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Yeah, it's a pretty interesting amendment they have.
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And I think it's an interesting conservative debate about whether you want to increase the,
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you know, child tax credit as a result of that.
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You know, I would rather see that corporate tax rate stay at 20%
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and then the child tax credit stay at the current rate that it is at the proposal.
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So, you know, I hopefully this doesn't blow up the whole thing.
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And if it gets enough 50 votes and they say go for it, then fine.
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You know, I still think that even if that is included, it's still a better bill than the status quo.
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And I hope that Mike Lee and Marco Rubio agree.
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I hope even if this amendment doesn't get included, that they will still vote for tax reform
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because this is much better than the status quo, including in terms of the child tax credit.
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And I'm actually just confused about why Mike Lee would put his name on this.
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I understand little Marco might want to get a little squishy.
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He's the favorite conservative of every conservative who lives surrounded by liberals.
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It's hard to get more right-wing and conservative than him.
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I say that's a great question because it's shocking to me that Mike Lee's on board with that overall.
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The only things I could surmise is that many Republicans, and we have seen this particularly in the last year,
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seem to be somewhat scared of the Democrats and what they may want so they try to proactively react so they can get things through
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while they control everything, the House and the Senate.
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So you have Republicans like Rubio and now Lee, I think, reacting to those things.
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Listen, as your other guest just said, I agree.
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But Mike Lee, this is really strange unless he's feeling some pressure from voters in his neck of the woods that are on the left
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and thinking we've got to do something more with child care credits.
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It's very easy for me because all I have to do is talk to this microphone and look into the camera.
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It's very easy for me to say we should have a 15 percent corporate tax rate,
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and it doesn't matter that we need to increase the child tax credit.
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It's a much harder TV ad when it says Mike Lee voted for corporations instead of giving your children some extra money or whatever.
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He's a rock-ribbed guy, and I'm just surprised at him, and I wish that we could be more rock-ribbed about this.
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I was pushing for that 15 percent corporate tax rate.
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But, sure, I'll take what I can get, especially if John McCain's on board.
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It's a lot harder to make the sausage than it is to go criticize and look at the sausage factory.
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Jason, one aspect of this that has gotten a lot of attention is graduate students.
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So for tuition, right now graduate students do not have to pay income tax on their tuition credits.
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Let's say the grad school pays them $20,000 a year in stipends.
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They also pay them $30,000 a year as tuition, but you never see that.
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They just keep the money, and it's a matter of accounting.
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Now their taxable income could go to that full $50,000.
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I could be personally negatively affected by this.
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There was a walkout yesterday among graduate students.
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There was a big national protest, a big walkout.
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What they misunderstand is that for a walkout to work, you have to provide a service.
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Do you think that we ought to rectify this aspect of the tax proposal, or should we let
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the universities sort it out and let the grad students pay a little more?
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In my personal opinion, I side a little bit with the graduate students on this one.
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And that's because, again, like you said, this is kind of an accounting thing.
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The universities don't actually give this money to the students.
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They just keep it basically and say, well, we'll take money off of your tuition and the
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It's basically just saying, the university's saying, we're going to give you this service
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for free instead of paying for you to then just give it straight back to us.
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But, you know, again, it's not a huge deal to me.
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And when it comes to that walkout thing, you know, I don't see how that's going to be
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You know, maybe that makes some noise on your college campus.
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But, you know, the members of Congress are not on your college campus.
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So how they expect to make a big stink with a walkout on their own college campuses that
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no one in D.C. or in Congress is going to notice, I don't know.
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And as you point out, this is a matter of accounting.
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If the universities aren't going to lose all of their consumers, all of their customers,
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So they'll probably just account for tuition in a different way and get around all of this.
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But as a matter, the American campuses have been in crisis for decades, for 40 years.
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Alan Bloom wrote it expertly in The Closing of the American Mind.
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There's a crisis not only of the institution, but of liberal education generally.
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These crazy fields of study, they usually end in studies.
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Harold Bloom, the great literary critic, referred to it as the school of resentment.
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It isn't a serious engagement with scholarship.
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It's basically political activism masquerading as scholarship, as the left frequently does.
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It hollows out great institutions, and then they just become zombie institutions for their
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It doesn't seem to me that we need as many graduate students as we have.
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It seems to me, especially when I talk to my friends, millennials who have a ton of student
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debt, very few career prospects in the academy, it's virtually impossible to get a job.
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It seems to me not a terrible thing that we would maybe disincentivize or stop subsidizing
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It doesn't seem like a great path for a lot of them.
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And for those who are the elite of the elite and the intellectual elite, they'll find the
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The universities will account for it, I think, and they can find outside funding as well.
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It does not seem to me that we should be the solution to this awful crisis of intellect
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It doesn't seem to me that we will be correcting it by continuing to subsidize the perpetrators.
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I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of hate mail from my millennial pals after saying that.
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We have the—you're not going to believe this one.
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If you've had any hot drinks, please spit it out now or swallow.
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The Democrats are holding their own accountable for their weird sex crimes.
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This, we didn't expect this either, but here is Nancy Pelosi explaining the issue with
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The allegations against Congressman Conyers, as we have learned more since Sunday, are
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The brave women who came forward are owed justice.
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I pray for Congressman Conyers and his family and wish them well, however Congressman Conyers
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As dean, Congressman Conyers has served our Congress for more than five decades and shaped
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some of the most consequential legislation of the last half century.
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However, zero tolerance means consequences for everyone, no matter how great the legacy.
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John Conyers, by the way, is the dean of the House of Representatives.
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He's the longest-serving representative in Congress.
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He's been around since the Johnson administration.
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Vincent, why are they willing to throw John Conyers under the bus, but not Al Franken?
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You know, this whole—first of all, Nancy Pelosi goes on Meet the Press, and she doesn't
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She's saying, well, they need to investigate it, and I don't know.
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She had all these defensive things to say because there was no chance that she was going
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to support this or trying to have him removed or anybody else removed because they seem
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to just all be like a flock of sheep following each other blindly.
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Then she gets pressure put on her from those comments from Meet the Press, which even people
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One thing that people don't talk about with this whole situation, he paid someone off.
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You know, he used monies to silence someone that accused him of something.
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It's not just a couple of women coming out and saying he groped her or did this and this
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Or is Conyers just the old, desiccated, no longer politically useful corpse of the sacrificial
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Yeah, I think it's, Franken hasn't been thrown under the bus yet because he's a little bit
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more prominent, one, as a senator, but two, because he's famous, Al Franken, everyone
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But if the accusations against him continue to grow, which I think they probably will,
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then I expect at some point they will start to say, yes, Franken has to go as well.
00:21:50.800
Well, you know, there's just really no excuse for the kind of behavior that he's been doing.
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I think Conyers is about 150 years old and useless and they can toss him under the bus
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and not sacrifice their younger, more promising talent.
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From The Daily Show, Trevor Noah called Donald Trump woke and he slammed Elizabeth Liawatha
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I don't think Donald Trump was actually trying to offend those Native American war veterans.
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I know it's crazy to say it, but he doesn't care about them.
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He saw an opportunity to feud with Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren
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because he's been calling her Pocahontas long before he met with these heroes.
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You might be thinking, wait, Trevor, I'm confused.
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But in his own way, he's hitting Elizabeth Warren for saying she was Native American when
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she wasn't, something she's never apologized for or owned up to.
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So as weird as it is to say, in his own racially offensive way, Donald Trump was being woke.
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And like a Bernie Sanders pop album, the truth isn't always something we want to hear.
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Every late night show, every single one, I think there are now 750 across network and cable.
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Stephen Colbert would have been canceled if not for Donald Trump.
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But all of these guys put together get not very many more viewers than in the old days
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Jay Leno is a much more middle America, even keel, not that political comedian.
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Is this a sign, Vincent, that comedians are finally realizing that maybe they shouldn't
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Or is it just the case that Elizabeth Warren is such a joke they couldn't resist making?
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How long can they continue the hypocrisy is really my question.
00:24:07.060
But like Stephen Colbert and others, it's all hate comedy.
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You know, if you think about how Donald Trump operates, he points out hypocrisy.
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And these late night comedians, what I don't understand, here's my big question.
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They're alienating 50 percent of the audience every time they pull one of these hate jokes
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Now, the fact that Trevor Noah actually came out and said something truthful, you didn't
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If this was anything bad against Trump, it would have been a standing ovation and the
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You know, actually, I didn't put it in that hypocrisy.
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But he did say he prefaced his comments where he said, basically, Trump is right about this
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and Liz Warren is despicable for pretending to be a Native American.
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He had to preface it by saying, look, look, I think Trump is racist and everything.
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And then they started mooing and hooing and cheering.
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He had to do it or they would have stormed out.
00:25:02.420
Jason, has Trump permanently branded Liz Warren as a fraud, as a deceiver?
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You know, Little Marco, Low Energy Jeb, Lion Ted, those things stuck like glue.
00:25:13.820
Does she have a chance in 2020 if she is just forever Pocahontas?
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I don't think she has a chance in 2020, but I don't think it's because of Pocahontas.
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Because I think people will be like, oh, Bernie Sanders again.
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But, you know, this time it's slightly different.
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Yeah, less funny, less interesting to watch, give speeches, things like that.
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I don't think she has a chance because of that.
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She's just not very fun to watch, doesn't create great speeches.
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And most of all, does not connect with ordinary Americans in middle America and what they stand for and what they believe in.
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So, you know, perhaps the Pocahontas thing will stick by her.
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Maybe she'll eventually have to apologize for that.
00:25:58.140
Maybe even her Democratic opponents would attack her on that.
00:26:02.880
But there are lots of reasons she's not going to win in 2020.
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I love that pitch to Democrat voters, like a Hollywood pitch.
00:26:13.400
It's going to she's going to have all of the intellect of a desiccated old socialist who can't hold a job.
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Isn't that what America, why isn't that what middle America is going to vote for?
00:26:34.820
And yeah, Jason, Vincent, thank you for being here.
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OK, so before we get into the mailbag, we have some business to clear up.
00:26:50.220
I'm even considering keeping Marshall employed for Christmas.
00:26:53.320
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The entire world is brought in through my computer at my desk to me.
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I published a presidentially endorsed number one bestseller without moving anything.
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So as a millennial, as a millennial, and anyone else who's living in the 21st century, you've
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Anything you can do at the post office, you can do right now from your desk with stamps.com.
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You can buy and print official U.S. postage for any letter or package using your own computer
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Unlike the post office, stamps.com never closes.
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When I wake, I usually wake up about 3 p.m., 3.30 on days when I'm not doing the show.
00:27:44.820
And at that point, you know, the post office might be closed by the time I roll out of
00:27:51.680
So I really like this, especially as a small business solution.
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In the old days, they used to have these giant clunky machines for postage, and they didn't
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It's cheaper, and you don't have to move as much.
00:28:15.600
So right now, if you use my code, and do you know what my code is?
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It is a wonderful adjective to describe wonderful services like this.
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I am just offering you two things, free stuff and the ability to type in COVFE as a promo
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Go to Stamps.com, and before you do anything else, don't click.
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I know you're going to want to see all the deals and stuff.
00:28:48.500
Before you do anything else, click on the radio microphone at the top of the homepage and
00:29:13.680
Dear patron saint of smug Catholics, I'm an evangelical curious about Catholicism, but one major point
00:29:20.380
I don't understand is the church's reverence for the Virgin Mary.
00:29:24.860
Why is she considered so much greater than other biblical figures that have furthered the
00:29:28.620
faith like St. Paul, Moses, John the Baptist, etc.?
00:29:39.740
I get this a lot, and it's a serious question raised by a lot of Christians.
00:29:43.560
You've just asked, why do Catholics venerate the mother of God?
00:29:53.140
Mary is the mother of God, chosen by God to be the new ark of the covenant, right?
00:29:57.880
She is in her womb, is God, conceived by the Holy Spirit, out of which he becomes man.
00:30:03.740
When we recite the Nicene Creed, we kneel at that point when we say Christ was conceived
00:30:10.120
of the Holy Spirit and he became man through the Virgin Mary.
00:30:14.300
That is a miracle second only to the resurrection, the physical and the metaphysical uniting in
00:30:22.040
But the other reason, there are endless reasons as to why we ought to venerate and adore Mary
00:30:30.540
as the mother of our Lord and a mother that he has given to us from the cross when he says
00:30:36.200
to the apostle John, behold your mother, mother behold your son.
00:30:43.520
But the other reason is that there is this essential marriage, this beautiful marriage
00:30:48.560
of grace and liberty that we find in the infancy narratives.
00:30:52.040
Right now, I'm reading Jesus of Nazareth, the infancy narratives by Pope Benedict XVI.
00:31:00.260
I'm reading it at the recommendation of the Supreme Master of the Multiverse, Andrew Clavin.
00:31:07.940
You could read the whole thing in two hours, but you really read it slowly.
00:31:12.040
And there is this essential combination of grace and liberty in Mary.
00:31:19.280
The Pope Benedict describes it as all of the heavens holding their breath when the angel
00:31:23.640
Gabriel comes down and says, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you.
00:31:27.460
You've found favor with the Lord, and you're going to birth the Son of God.
00:31:40.160
We are humans with a free will, and that freedom has to come too.
00:31:44.840
So God comes down the mountain, offers everything to us, but we have the free will to turn away
00:31:54.980
Her response is, Behold, I am the servant of the Lord.
00:32:02.280
And in that obedience, we have the salvation of the world.
00:32:07.960
There are plenty of other reasons as well for why Mary is a pretty cool lady, and we
00:32:14.360
But that's an introduction, and I recommend certainly Googling it, but reading more about
00:32:21.360
Mary, studying Marianology a little bit, and understanding how the veneration of Mary has
00:32:28.180
come about, because I think there's a Protestant misconception that it's this weird pagan thing.
00:32:36.400
Mary does sit right at the inception of human salvation, right at the heart of it.
00:32:44.440
I want to keep changing your life for the better, folks, but we've got to say goodbye to Facebook
00:32:49.160
If you are already a subscriber, thank you very much.
00:32:53.420
Now is a great time, by the way, Christmas time, to subscribe to The Daily Wire.
00:33:25.960
You know, it's below, but it's not that far below.
00:33:32.220
You can have them hot or cold, always salty and delicious.
00:33:35.960
We're getting a nice batch from Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers and Al Franken right now.
00:33:40.240
Obviously, Matt Lauer has given us case after case after case.
00:33:44.460
So make sure that you can store them all and have a nice vessel so you can enjoy them.
00:34:06.900
Master Knolls, I was raised Christian but am now agnostic as I have had issues believing in Christ due to the comparison of the New Testament to personification of astronomy.
00:34:18.060
I have seen several comparisons that show that the story of Christ is very similar to other older religions and that use the story as a way to explain the journey of the sun throughout the year.
00:34:28.360
And it's been compelling enough to me to make me question the New Testament, but not God himself.
00:34:35.740
Not to debunk Christianity or Catholicism, but rather that I can get a clear explanation as to why this theory is false.
00:34:41.620
Please assist me, if you will, in coming closer to God with many thanks, Kyle.
00:34:46.700
I also was an agnostic atheist type for a decade, beginning actually at my confirmation, so I can empathize with you.
00:34:56.760
I think there's a kind of logical error just in your thinking about this.
00:35:01.540
You see, or you've been told, you actually haven't seen similarities in other religions, but you've been told by some authority that there are many similarities and that Christianity is just a sort of copy of those religions.
00:35:16.580
By Christianity, we know that Christ is the logos of the universe that breathed creation into existence.
00:35:22.180
So it isn't surprising that there would be echoes of the story, the greatest story ever told, throughout mythology, throughout all of mythology, and throughout history, and in our own human nature and in our own heart.
00:35:34.520
What I think you're getting at, though, is that you don't believe that Jesus existed as we know him to exist.
00:35:41.220
You don't believe the story of Jesus in the New Testament.
00:35:43.920
But this puts you in a real minority of people who have thought about this, a virtual minority of one.
00:35:50.120
I think what you're getting at is something called the Christ myth, the idea that the historical Jesus, if there even was one, is completely different than the guy we know attested to in all of these documents that we call the New Testament.
00:36:02.860
The Christ myth theory only originated in the late 18th century, so within 300 years, a little over 200 years ago.
00:36:10.760
One of the major theorists of this was Constantin Volney, who believed a lot of other nonsense, too.
00:36:15.780
He also believed that Abraham and Sarah were derived from Hindu deities, Brahma, Saraswati, and the Christ as a version of Krishna.
00:36:23.600
He really also thought that Christianity is just a version of Syrian, Egyptian, and Persian myths, like that of Sol Invictus.
00:36:33.900
It is rejected by scholars of the New Testament and of first century Rome and Palestine.
00:36:39.820
We know more about Jesus of Nazareth than we know about basically any person of that period, with the exception perhaps of the other Prince of Peace who was reigning in Rome, Caesar Augustus.
00:36:59.900
I wouldn't really question, do the research yourself, but I don't think there's any reason to doubt that.
00:37:04.580
So then the question is, well, how come some religions seem similar to Christianity?
00:37:08.540
A lot of atheists will tell you, well, it's just a copy of that.
00:37:11.640
But you don't really see it in all of these myths that we're talking about, whether they are Persian myths or Hindu myths or whatever.
00:37:17.540
However, the intersection of the metaphysical with the physical, the encounter between heaven and earth, is categorically different.
00:37:25.960
In many mythologies, you'll see the gods come down and have sex with a mortal or something, and they give birth to demigods.
00:37:32.940
Or you'll see ancient monarchs, ancient kings, suggesting that they are part divine.
00:37:38.980
But that is fundamentally different than the virgin birth, than Christ being fully man and fully human.
00:37:50.120
Where there isn't really a theology to these older myths, there's a mythology.
00:37:57.440
That said, I've studied a number of Hindu, a lot of the Hindu religion and mythology there.
00:38:04.020
And there are resemblances between, say, Krishna and Christ or what have you.
00:38:07.760
But this makes perfect sense, because man is born with an innate longing for God.
00:38:15.180
We're born with a thirst for water, and water exists to quench that.
00:38:26.360
Everywhere, every place on earth for all of history, we're born with a longing for God.
00:38:33.840
And therefore, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that there is a, for many other reasons as well, there is something to quench that thirst.
00:38:44.060
So when you see resemblances between the greatest story ever told, between Christianity and other mythologies, a little hint of true religion in Norwegian mythology, or, sorry, Norse mythology, or Hinduism, or this, that, or the other thing.
00:39:00.420
That's lovely, and that makes perfect sense, because the God who created the entire universe echoes throughout it, and we're born with similar conceptions of him.
00:39:10.880
But it requires theology, not mythology, to figure out which the right one is, and the right one is Christianity.
00:39:17.820
Christianity, I am happy to tell you, so that you can return to your faith.
00:39:23.600
Oh, this is another really serious and esoteric question.
00:39:28.280
Is covfefe leftist tears, or covfefe leftist tears, strained through a French press?
00:39:36.680
That's the only device through which they could be strained.
00:39:39.700
And by the way, if you spill your covfefe leftist tears, you can always mop them up with the flag of the French army.
00:39:54.320
We get so many religious questions, I think, because this materialist culture is unsatisfactory, and people are longing for that answer, as I did, as a lot of people I know have gone through that stage.
00:40:12.540
If you want to know, there are a few that you could think about.
00:40:14.960
You know, there are two types of religion that Edwin Bevan talks about in a book I've mentioned a few times, Symbolism and Belief.
00:40:23.020
It's a book that C.S. Lewis talks about in Miracles.
00:40:27.060
There's theistic religion and non-theistic religion.
00:40:30.080
So the religions that believe in God, like Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Islam, and religions that don't believe in God.
00:40:37.960
So Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, other religions.
00:40:44.200
You can't even really say East and West, though.
00:40:46.580
Zoroastrianism is an Eastern religion, but it's theistic.
00:40:49.320
Islam is practically an Eastern religion, but it's theistic.
00:40:52.040
So those are two visions of the world, and it will require thinking about theology to decide which of those is correct.
00:41:00.920
You know, we talked to Leo Severino today, who did this book.
00:41:05.420
The one that I would always recommend is Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.
00:41:09.660
Lewis is such an incredible writer that he takes the most impossibly complex things and explains them for a three-year-old.
00:41:17.500
And when I read it, I had the theological intelligence of a three-year-old, so it worked out very well.
00:41:23.340
Once you conclude that God exists, which I think you will, then you have to deal with Christ.
00:41:29.240
So if the Hebrew Messiah hasn't yet come, then you're probably a Jew.
00:41:34.120
If the Hebrew Messiah has come, you're probably a Christian.
00:41:37.500
If Christ was a prophet, if you believe in some of Christianity, but you reject the essence of it,
00:41:44.740
you reject the most important claims of it, then you might fall into the category of Islam,
00:41:49.100
which was founded after Muhammad spent weeks with a heretical Christian monk in Syria.
00:41:55.280
So it bears a lot of resemblance to Christianity, but on essential, important matters,
00:42:01.980
it doesn't hold up because Muhammad founded his religion after hanging out with a heretic for a very long time.
00:42:08.820
So you know what I think about theology and Christology, and I would explore down that route,
00:42:18.400
and you might reach a different conclusion than I have, but I don't think you will.
00:42:25.400
By the way, it isn't just books, I should point out.
00:42:28.220
Andrew Klavan has a great video called How to Find God in 60 Days.
00:42:31.660
He says just act as though God exists and pray.
00:42:34.260
Why? Praying is essential because we're not just, especially with Christianity,
00:42:41.140
We're not just talking about ideas that you can learn.
00:42:44.140
We're talking about a relationship with the God that created you and saved you,
00:42:52.280
A book can help you get there, but that's a relationship with a person.
00:42:56.240
So you'll have to dig a little deeper than you would researching history or natural science or something.
00:43:04.860
Michael, could you convince Ben and Jeremy, that's Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boring, the God King of the Daily Wire,
00:43:10.980
to let you change your background to a wall of bookshelves filled with your bestseller?
00:43:15.460
I feel like Ben doesn't take you seriously enough, and because of your extreme humility,
00:43:20.260
viewers are likely unaware of your life's work.
00:43:26.220
I appreciate you acknowledging my magnum opus, Reasons to Vote for Democrats,
00:43:29.700
A Comprehensive Guide, which sat number one on the bestseller list for almost two weeks
00:43:34.580
and was endorsed personally by President Donald Trump on Twitter.
00:43:41.660
You know, great works of genius are very often not recognized during the author's lifetime.
00:43:47.640
They might be underappreciated during the author's lifetime.
00:43:50.000
But as I wrote in the first pages, in the preface to Reasons to Vote for Democrats,
00:43:58.380
I have written my work not as an essay to win the applause of the moment,
00:44:04.320
So perhaps if it can't be constantly displayed for this popular audience,
00:44:09.820
it will reach an esoteric elite audience now and for generations to come.
00:44:20.400
What do you think we would be talking about right now if Hillary had won?
00:44:23.740
For example, instead of a battle about anthem kneeling,
00:44:26.580
the conversation would be about changing the name of Redskins.
00:44:29.180
Or instead of North Korea, it'd be a war on gun owners.
00:44:35.020
And it's one where Trump's critics on the right don't give him enough credit
00:44:38.360
because all they see, first of all, there's all the great stuff Trump has done,
00:44:42.440
but there are some things that Trump has done that perhaps we don't all agree with,
00:44:46.120
might have gone too far, might have been counterproductive.
00:44:48.900
Some of them might have been flat out bad ideas.
00:44:51.800
The handling of James Comey seems to be the worst decision of his presidency so far
00:45:00.720
which is a big cloud hanging over the administration.
00:45:04.940
One, what would we be talking about on the cultural conversation?
00:45:13.380
You know, the issue that affects seven people in the entire country,
00:45:19.280
because it's a way of getting the left's arguments and premises in by the back door,
00:45:28.720
and squeezing in all of their relativism and their vision of politics
00:45:32.820
as groups of people just battling each other for interests
00:45:36.480
rather than as a civil discourse in a united body politic.
00:45:43.440
But as a matter of policy, it would be horrible.
00:45:47.660
I'm glad that I can't be profane in my language on this show
00:45:51.120
because there are so many words I could use to explain how awful it would be.
00:45:55.840
We would have Hillary Clinton campaigned on damaging, if not outright undercutting,
00:46:04.240
There were separate pages on her website about this.
00:46:06.400
The Citizens United decision, which Citizens United was overturned,
00:46:12.920
or rather Citizens United was ruled and overturned campaign finance laws, McCain-Feingold,
00:46:17.400
because they were a violation of the First Amendment.
00:46:19.480
The question was, can you criticize Hillary Clinton a few weeks before an election?
00:46:24.900
So now we have our robust First Amendment, which is under attack from all corners of the left,
00:46:30.220
If we had that Supreme Court justice, if we had a lefty replace Antonin Scalia,
00:46:34.960
we would have awful decisions that seriously threatened your liberty and mine coming down the pike
00:46:44.000
We might have been able to obstruct a little bit, but it's hard to predict these things.
00:46:48.740
So on both sides, on the real policy side and on the cultural conversation,
00:46:53.460
things are looking a lot better, not even because Trump is in.
00:46:56.380
I think that's also true, but just because Hillary isn't, things are so much better, and that's great.
00:47:03.940
From Ian, I've never had a problem seeing divine providence in other situations,
00:47:08.280
like when you and Clavin were talking about the pilgrims.
00:47:10.940
In my own life, however, I'm not as good at seeing it.
00:47:13.980
As you can imagine, this leads me to feel abandoned by God.
00:47:17.340
Do you have any advice on how I can start to see him in my own life?
00:47:24.420
It's an evil generation that looks for signs and wonders.
00:47:29.140
So I think the way to see him is to stop looking at you.
00:47:32.580
It's to stop looking at your own life and stop looking inward at yourself and look at him.
00:47:39.020
You know that it's all around you because you see it everywhere else.
00:47:47.440
Once it clicks in, you will see it in every little seemingly ridiculous coincidence in your life.
00:47:53.960
Fr. George Rutler has an excellent book on apparently random coincidences.
00:47:59.240
It's very enjoyable, very funny, and it does make a sort of serious point about providence.
00:48:06.340
The quote he uses on the cover is from Alexander Pope's essay on man.
00:48:15.360
It seems to me that you are not seeing that direction in your own life.
00:48:19.200
If you can see it when you look elsewhere and you can't see it when you look at yourself,
00:48:31.840
And if you don't harp on your own feelings of abandonment by God or how God wronged you
00:48:38.140
or how anybody else wronged you or all the problems in your life,
00:48:50.560
We can either react to suffering in a good way or we can react to suffering in a sinful way.
00:48:56.540
We can either react to it with perseverance and kissing it up to God, as we used to say,
00:49:01.680
or you can react to it and say, woe is me and life is terrible and why does everyone have it so much better than me?
00:49:27.080
You'll be able to save yourself from the chaos of the Clavenless weekend.
00:49:33.640
Great narrative podcasts about Hollywood schlubs who fall into fantasy worlds with bloody daggers and dead damsels
00:49:39.580
written by conservative people who also work in the arts and perform by them, too.
00:49:43.340
Wherever those are downloaded, you can get another kingdom and survive the Clavenless weekend.