The NXR Podcast - August 29, 2023


DAILY TRUTH - The Return Of The Strong “Gods” Is Inevitable


Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

160.59

Word count

843

Sentence count

41

Harmful content

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

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

In this episode, Dr. Douglas Wilson and Dr. Joseph Boot discuss the return of the "strong gods" and how to deal with the possibility of a return to the "weak gods" of pre-Christian thought.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.520 Join Douglas Wilson, Dr. Joseph Boot, Brian Sauve, Eric Kahn, and myself on March 1st,
00:00:07.220 2nd, and 3rd for our 2024 conference.
00:00:10.380 It's called Blueprints for Chrysidom 2.0.
00:00:13.920 Our early bird pricing ends on Thursday, August 31st.
00:00:18.620 So go and visit rightresponseconference.com to register today.
00:00:23.660 We hope to see you at the conference in March.
00:00:25.560 so there's a book called return of the strong gods and and what it's emphasizing the strong
00:00:34.740 gods versus weak gods comparing and contrasting it's saying not not necessarily gods as actual
00:00:40.140 deities but it's saying in terms of tradition so the strong gods would be things like faith
00:00:45.640 church religion patriarchy fathers family those kinds of things weak gods would be
00:00:53.800 the Enlightenment, it would be Freud, it would be Marx, it would be Darwin, and ultimately the
00:01:02.360 comparing and contrasting is between strong and weak, but another way to word it is between closed
00:01:08.320 and open societies and traditions. And basically the post-war sentiment is what the author is
00:01:14.960 getting at. He's saying that we have a very novel and very recent phenomenon, the way that people
00:01:19.800 think. The way that Westerners think is not the way we always have. It's a very recent phenomenon
00:01:25.440 and it's all in light of the first and particularly the second world war. That one of our biggest
00:01:31.720 concerns and one of the biggest steering mechanisms for every decision we make, how we
00:01:37.940 craft education, how we craft our traditions, how we craft our politics, how we craft economies and
00:01:43.520 markets, all of it is geared towards this. Don't ever let there be an Adolf Hitler again. 0.81
00:01:49.800 we are terrified of the potential 0.66
00:01:53.020 of a strong authoritarian leader.
00:01:56.900 And just for the record, I'm not a flat earther.
00:01:59.720 I'm also not pro-Hitler.
00:02:01.320 Just to make that clear, I think you guys know that,
00:02:03.840 but somebody will make it go viral on YouTube 0.67
00:02:06.560 and they'll say, see, he's pro-Hitler.
00:02:09.000 I'm not pro-Hitler.
00:02:11.840 But what we're recognizing, I think,
00:02:14.260 is that the pendulum has overswung,
00:02:16.200 we've overcompensated,
00:02:17.460 and in the name of inclusivity,
00:02:19.800 in the name of what we've rejected
00:02:22.260 is any kind of transcendent absolute truths.
00:02:25.660 Because a guy who makes strong,
00:02:28.000 absolute, universal, authoritarian truth claims,
00:02:32.440 well, that guy might destroy the world.
00:02:35.840 But what we've found is that weak,
00:02:37.800 empathetic, inclusive men, 0.75
00:02:40.360 they're quite capable of destroying the world as well. 1.00
00:02:43.980 And so there is going to be,
00:02:45.580 the argument from this book,
00:02:46.580 and I think he's right on,
00:02:47.560 is is it not that we have even so much a choice he's saying it's an inevitability if you look at
00:02:54.440 human history far enough it's the same pattern there will be a return to the strong gods
00:02:59.940 meaning again faith tradition religion patriarchy strong men strong military strong families a
00:03:08.640 classical education right where you're not replacing plato with with some you know gender
00:03:14.340 studies or whatever, like there's going to be a return back to that. There already is. It's
00:03:18.640 already shifting. Here's the only question is, will there be a strong biblical Christianity
00:03:25.480 as the pendulum starts swinging back from the weak gods to the strong gods? Let's, let's say 0.52
00:03:30.180 like this, here's, here's trans and kids. Here's Adolf Hitler. Okay. Well, just making it real 0.94
00:03:36.220 simple as it's shifting back, we'd like to not go all the way back to Adolf Hitler. I think that's
00:03:41.700 to, you know, I think we could all agree on that. That's, you know, that would be a good goal.
00:03:45.880 But we also don't like this. We got to go back. It will go back. So the question is, as it's going
00:03:51.360 back, what is the stopping point that'll keep it here and to where we don't overreact and go there?
00:03:56.500 The stopping point, do you know what it is? It's biblical, historic Christianity.
00:04:02.500 That's the stopping point. And yet what you hear, and this is the crazy thing, you hear this from
00:04:07.400 christians what you hear is a christian nationalism that's that's ethnocentric nationalism that's
00:04:13.180 that's the third reich all over no no no that's what keeps us from going there the very thing that
00:04:18.300 you're trying to to to deconstruct the thing that you're attacking is saying it's it's an
00:04:24.000 overreaction it's extreme you know this is just a fed op you know like uh anybody who believes in
00:04:28.580 christian nationalism is just an fbi you know plant no no no that's to stop it from going too
00:04:34.540 far. That's the barrier. Biblical patriarchy, a biblical political theology that views nations
00:04:42.240 and kings, that they actually have, there's a God above them, that the law is king,
00:04:48.340 lex rex and not the king is law, that kiss the son, Psalm 2, lest he be angry and his wrath
00:04:54.440 quickly kindled while you are in the way. Like all these kinds of things at every single level,
00:04:59.160 These things, a classical education, reading the patriarchs and all these, this is the healthy, middle, middle is not a good word, the healthy, well-rounded, biblical option that God provides for us.