The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - Christmas Podcast ｜ The Meaning of Christmas

00:00:00.000 Merry Christmas everyone. I wanted to do a special segment about Christmas and about the meaning of

00:00:17.580 the incarnation of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. And I found a passage from Isaiah that

00:00:24.320 I wanted to start with. The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light. They that dwell

00:00:32.220 in the land of the shadow of death, upon them has the light shined. Thou hast multiplied the nation

00:00:39.040 and not increased the joy, the joy before thee according to the joy in harvest. And as men

00:00:47.780 rejoice when they divide the spoil. For thou hast broken the yoke of his burden, that is of

00:00:54.100 Israel's burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, as in the day of Midian. 0.85

00:01:01.200 For every battle the warrior is with confused noise, and garments rolled in blood, but this

00:01:06.500 shall be with burning and fuel of fire. For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given,

00:01:15.240 and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor,

00:01:22.820 the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace. So on Christmas this is what we're

00:01:29.920 celebrating. We are celebrating the Prince of Peace, and the Everlasting Father, and the

00:01:36.320 Counselor, the name given to the Holy Spirit, in accordance with the prophecies in Isaiah.

00:01:43.920 And I wanted to talk a little bit about the meaning of this event, and why it's always been a revolutionary

00:01:52.020 thing to believe. And I thought I'd read from a small segment, from a small article by GK Chesterton.

00:02:00.020 Chesterton was an extremely prolific Catholic writer operating in the early last century. And he says this,

00:02:09.920 the scientific sketch of the human story began in a cave, the cave which popular science associates

00:02:20.020 with the caveman, and in which practical discovery has really found archaic drawings of animals.

00:02:27.020 The second half of human history, which is after the Incarnation, which was like a new creation of the world,

00:02:34.920 also begins in a cave, in a manger, in Bethlehem.

00:02:39.920 There is even a shadow of such a fancy in the fact that animals were again present,

00:02:45.920 for it was a cave used as a stable by the mountaineers of the uplands about Bethlehem,

00:02:50.920 who still drive their cattle into such holes and caverns at night.

00:02:55.920 There is a certain beauty to the idea that God so humbled himself as to be born in a cave,

00:03:07.920 like the first man supposedly did, that the greatest creator, the Lord of all, would decide to take human form,

00:03:18.920 and humble himself and not be born in a palace, not be born in riches,

00:03:25.920 but be born among the most lowly, unable to find a bed for the night,

00:03:31.920 and living with the animals for the first few hours of his life, for the first few days of his life.

00:03:38.920 A mass of legend and literature, which increases and will never end, has repeated and rung the changes on that single paradox,

00:03:47.920 that the hands that had made the sun and stars were too small to reach the huge heads of the cattle.

00:03:54.920 Upon this paradox, we might almost say, upon this jest, all the literature of our faith is founded.

00:04:04.920 It is at least like a jest in this, that it is something which the scientific critic cannot see.

00:04:11.920 He laboriously explains the difficulty which we have always defiantly and almost derisively exaggerated,

00:04:21.920 and mildly condemns as improbable, something that we have almost madly exalted as incredible,

00:04:30.920 as something that would be much too good to be true, except that it is true.

00:04:36.920 And it is this attitude towards the miraculous that really defines the Christmas spirit,

00:04:41.920 and I will explain why this is important and why the Incarnation is important.

00:04:47.920 We have always known that it is scientifically extremely improbable that a virgin would bear a child. 0.99

00:04:55.920 We have always known that the miracles associated with Christ defy explanation.

00:05:02.920 We have accepted this as an article of faith, because we have chosen faith.

00:05:08.920 And in my case at least, I chose faith because everything else was entirely meaningless.

00:05:14.920 You look at the world around you, and you see that without faith, all we get is nihilism, murder, the killing of innocent babies,

00:05:26.920 consumerism, hostility, cheating, lying.

00:05:35.920 There has to be something there beyond mere philosophy, beyond mere reason that keeps us on the straight and narrow.

00:05:46.920 And I'll talk a little bit about other cultures and how they end up not being able to deal with this problem of why should we do good in a couple of minutes. 0.61

00:05:59.920 The sort of modern critic of whom I speak is generally much impressed with the importance of education in life and the importance of psychology in education.

00:06:09.920 That sort of man is never tired of telling us that the first impressions fix the character by the law of causation.

00:06:17.920 That is, how you're raised ends up defining you.

00:06:22.920 And he will become quite nervous if a child's visual sense is poisoned by the wrong colors on a gollywog, 0.96

00:06:32.920 or his nervous system prematurely shaken by a cacophonous rattle.

00:06:37.920 Yet he will think us very narrow-minded if we say that this is exactly why there really is a difference between being brought up as a Christian and being brought up as a Jew or a Muslim or an atheist.

00:06:54.920 Now let me expand on that a little bit.

00:06:58.920 When you believe that you can be incarnated as a bug or as an animal or that the purpose of life, as in Eastern religions, is your annihilation by merging into a nirvana, 0.56

00:07:14.920 and you look at yourself and you see yourself flawed as all men,

00:07:19.920 you don't really have much of an incentive to try hard at all.

00:07:25.920 When you approach the philosophies of groups like Chabad, for example,

00:07:31.920 they will tell you that those who do righteousness, who are not commanded to do righteousness, receive a lesser reward.

00:07:40.920 Inverting Aristotelian philosophy, where Aristotle said the purpose of philosophy is this,

00:07:48.920 that I do without being commanded what others do out of fear of the law.

00:07:53.920 That the purpose of philosophy is to develop good in you by learning, by studying natural law, by understanding humanity, having empathy for humanity.

00:08:04.920 For some groups like Chabad, this makes you less moral if you discover the truth this way, 0.99

00:08:10.920 because that means that you did something without being ordered to do it.

00:08:15.920 Whereas the highest virtue is blind obedience.

00:08:18.920 You see the same idea with Islam, where somebody like, I believe, Al-Ghazali will tell you that the greatest thing in Islam is the pilgrimage, the Hajj,

00:08:28.920 because it makes absolutely no sense and what it forms is complete obedience to the Word of God.

00:08:35.920 With Christianity, it's different. 0.99

00:08:38.920 What you're being taught in Christianity is that the Logos, the reason, the ability to reason, wisdom, logic, knowledge,

00:08:48.920 was incarnated as man and lived amongst us and so combined divinity with humanity,

00:08:56.920 so that we as humans can access divinity through wisdom and love.

00:09:02.920 So it makes an enormous difference if you believe that, because it genuinely, fundamentally changes you.

00:09:12.920 And no prayer exemplifies the Christian spirit more than the Stations of the Cross.

00:09:19.920 The Stations of the Cross is a lengthy prayer where we go through the phases of the crucifixion,

00:09:25.920 from the trial of Jesus to his death and burial.

00:09:29.920 And throughout, we Christians attribute to ourselves the sins that caused Christ's suffering.

00:09:38.920 And we accept that the purpose of his suffering was to redeem us through love,

00:09:45.920 that we are part of a universe that is created by a God who genuinely loves us and who truly cares for us.

00:09:53.920 And as an act of ultimate love, he humbled himself, indeed humiliated himself, to be born in a manger,

00:10:05.920 so that he could show us how to live.

00:10:09.920 And for the first 30 years of his life, we don't know anything about Jesus,

00:10:14.920 with the exception of the visitations of the temple, the two stories of the visitation of the temple that are mentioned in the New Testament.

00:10:23.920 For the rest of his life, we assume that he lived as a humble carpenter, doing good work, trying to be as best a carpenter as he could be.

00:10:33.920 And then, at the age of 30, he began his ministry.

00:10:37.920 And we see that wisdom, light, the source of life, the Creator, decided to dedicate himself to work for most of his life,

00:10:51.920 in silence and in humility, before revealing to us who he was.

00:10:56.920 And it teaches us that we who don't have great public ministries to accomplish,

00:11:03.920 are commanded to do our work with great consideration and conscientiousness,

00:11:09.920 so that we may serve God properly.

00:11:13.920 If you contrast this with a belief that says, for example, in Islam,

00:11:20.920 it says that when judgment comes, God will look at the Muslims and at their numerous sins, 1.00

00:11:28.920 take them and put them on the backs of the Christians and the Jews and forgive the Muslims. 0.99

00:11:33.920 Well, that doesn't cultivate the same mindset, obviously.

00:11:37.920 If you end up with a philosophy that says that you were chosen just because of how you were born or to whom you were born,

00:11:45.920 that doesn't inculcate the same kind of feeling.

00:11:49.920 If you believe in religions that tell you, no, there's just this sort of eternal cycle of birth and death,

00:11:57.920 and it doesn't really matter, and eventually maybe you'll reach nirvana, maybe you won't.

00:12:02.920 It doesn't motivate the same kind of characteristics.

00:12:05.920 It's this belief that our Lord lived 30 years as a humble carpenter,

00:12:12.920 or let's say from whenever he could work, a six-year-old, a seven-year-old,

00:12:16.920 in those times would have been working,

00:12:20.920 and spent all of those years in labor, in a labor of love, silently, obediently.

00:12:27.920 Well, that changes you.

00:12:29.920 That changes how you behave, and that fundamentally changes who you are.

00:12:33.920 So we've always known that what we believe is based on something incredible and miraculous,

00:12:41.920 and truly revolutionary,

00:12:44.920 because it isn't accurate to say that what Christ preached was appropriate for his time.

00:12:50.920 It obviously wasn't.

00:12:52.920 If it was, they would not have executed him.

00:12:54.920 None of this would have made any sense.

00:12:56.920 The whole story of the crucifixion,

00:12:59.920 which we can't separate from the story of Christmas,

00:13:02.920 would have made absolutely no sense.

00:13:05.920 So there is this constant reality that what we believe is a challenge to the world,

00:13:12.920 indeed is seen by the world as an attack on it, and as hostile to it.

00:13:18.920 And yet we are commanded to live humble, obedient lives,

00:13:24.920 in love with God, accepting that we are unworthy,

00:13:29.920 accepting that God humbled himself to the extent that he would be born in a manger,

00:13:37.920 accepting that this kind of humility and silent service is what we are indeed called to.

00:13:46.920 This brings us to the idea of theosis, the divinization of human life.

00:13:52.920 When you accept that we are created in imagio Dei, in the image of God,

00:13:59.920 that responsibility of love falls on your shoulders a lot more heavily,

00:14:05.920 and becomes a lot more challenging and a lot more difficult,

00:14:09.920 because God didn't just sort of randomly create us as, I don't know, serpents or mice.

00:14:17.920 He created us in his image, and then he so loved us that he took that image on himself,

00:14:26.920 and lived life as fully man and fully God, with a human soul.

00:14:32.920 And you then realize that this burden is also a gift and an invitation.

00:14:41.920 It's an invitation to do what St. Paul told us to do,

00:14:44.920 which is to empty out ourselves and be less and less,

00:14:48.920 so that Christ within us can be more and more.

00:14:52.920 This ability to divinize life, to be holy in every aspect of our daily lives,

00:15:00.920 not that I do that successfully, not that I claim to be living a particularly holy or divine life,

00:15:08.920 but this invitation,

00:15:11.920 to be with God and to pick up our cross is genuinely inspiring.

00:15:18.920 When you pray the rosary, there are the sorrowful mysteries,

00:15:23.920 and the fourth sorrowful mystery is when Christ speaks to the women of Jerusalem

00:15:30.920 and tells them of the horrible times that are to come,

00:15:33.920 but also when Simeon from Cyrenaica in modern-day Libya is grabbed by the Roman soldiers

00:15:40.920 and the cross of Jesus is put on his back.

00:15:45.920 He's grabbed by the soldiers and the cross of Jesus is put on his back,

00:15:50.920 and the man has absolutely nothing to do with it.

00:15:53.920 He's from Cyrenaica. We don't know anything about him.

00:15:56.920 And he simply accepts this cross that is given to him.

00:16:03.920 And we're invited to accept it in the same way.

00:16:06.920 And his children, Alexander and Rufus, then become great saints.

00:16:13.920 And we have to think about life in this way, that this incarnation, which gave us the pathway to meaning,

00:16:20.920 which resolved history, fundamentally changes us.

00:16:25.920 And it not only changes us, but it also changes our children.

00:16:28.920 It places a real burden, but a burden of love.

00:16:33.920 Accept my yoke, for my yoke is gentle and mild.

00:16:37.920 That's what Christ commands us to do.

00:16:40.920 And this is a real challenge. This is a very real challenge.

00:16:44.920 You can go on from that, really, and think of, well, who was there at the birth of Christ?

00:16:55.920 It was the shepherds. Why the shepherds?

00:16:59.920 There were shepherds who were doing what they do every night, which is watch over the sheep.

00:17:05.920 And then an angel declares to them that the king is born.

00:17:09.920 There were shepherds who were doing what they've always done,

00:17:12.920 which is watch over their sheep in the night, as shepherds always do.

00:17:17.920 And the angels declare unto them that a king is born, and they are invited to go worship.

00:17:23.920 Well, why shepherds?

00:17:25.920 Because we are all, in a very real sense, shepherds.

00:17:28.920 We exist in a web of obligations and a web of duties,

00:17:33.920 where we have to be shepherds for those who are around us, who are lesser than us.

00:17:39.920 We have to be our brother's keepers, as Cain said when he was asked by God,

00:17:46.920 where is your brother?

00:17:48.920 And his answer was, am I my brother's keeper?

00:17:50.920 And the answer is yes.

00:17:52.920 The answer is that we are all shepherds, and we are all invited to come and worship properly,

00:17:58.920 and to love God, and to do our duty as shepherds.

00:18:03.920 And Christ tells us this.

00:18:05.920 He tells us,

00:18:06.920 The thief cometh not but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy.

00:18:12.920 I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.

00:18:18.920 I am the good shepherd.

00:18:20.920 The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.

00:18:24.920 This is what we are invited to be on Christmas, and on every day of the year.

00:18:30.920 We are commanded to be good shepherds because of what will happen to us if we are bad shepherds.

00:18:39.920 As Jeremiah says,

00:18:41.920 Doom for the shepherds who allow the flock of my pasture to be destroyed and scattered.

00:18:47.920 It is the Lord who speaks.

00:18:49.920 This, therefore, is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says about the shepherds in charge of my people.

00:18:55.920 You have let my flock be scattered, and go wandering, and have not taken care of them.

00:19:01.920 I will take care of your misdeeds.

00:19:04.920 It is the Lord who speaks.

00:19:06.920 But the remnant of my flock I myself will gather from all the countries where I have dispersed them,

00:19:12.920 and will bring them back to their pastures.

00:19:15.920 They shall be fruitful and increase in numbers.

00:19:20.920 And you could sort of see the truth of it even in the birth rates today.

00:19:24.920 The only people who are having children are believers. 0.82

00:19:29.920 Like, this isn't just allegorical.

00:19:31.920 It obviously is, and it isn't just prophecy.

00:19:33.920 It obviously is.

00:19:35.920 But it's also a fact of life.

00:19:37.920 It's also a truth that we see around us.

00:19:40.920 When we have bad shepherds, we end up scattered.

00:19:43.920 We end up dispersed.

00:19:44.920 We end up unprotected.

00:19:46.920 Pretty much exactly as how we're living today in the West.

00:19:50.920 Any drug dealer, pornographer, prostitute can gain national acclaim in the world that we live in.

00:20:01.920 And we know that the shepherds who are responsible for this will be punished.

00:20:05.920 And we know that we are ordered to be the kinds of shepherds who give their lives for the sheep.

00:20:13.920 This is the meaning of Christmas.

00:20:16.920 This is what Christ came to do for us.

00:20:18.920 Who was the other group of people who came to worship Christ?

00:20:24.920 Well, it was the three wise men.

00:20:27.920 What does that mean?

00:20:29.920 The three kings have had many interpretations of Christian theology.

00:20:33.920 And indeed, there's a story about a fourth king who kept on trying to find Jesus and to follow him from Bethlehem and then to Nazareth and then to Egypt, but was always too late.

00:20:47.920 And this is sort of true of all of us.

00:20:50.920 But one of the meanings of the three kings is that this is philosophy, science and mysticism coming to worship at the feet of theology.

00:21:02.920 And it's worth taking a moment to appreciate this.

00:21:07.920 Islam had a philosophical tradition for the first couple of hundred years of its life.

00:21:12.920 But then because of the nature of the scripture of Islam, which was not in parables, as Matthew tells us at the beginning of the New Testament, that Jesus only spoke to us in parables.

00:21:25.920 It was not in parables.

00:21:27.920 It was just literal imposition.

00:21:30.920 It was these stories have one interpretation and one interpretation only, and you must accept them.

00:21:37.920 And that's precisely what killed philosophy in Islam. 0.87

00:21:41.920 Eventually, there was a contest between the rationalists and the literalists.

00:21:48.920 The rationalists wanted to believe that the Quran was created.

00:21:54.920 The literalists wanted to believe what the Quran says, which is that the word of God, the Quran, is preserved in a holy stone in heaven and is co-eternal with God.

00:22:06.920 So you'll notice here that exactly as the Christians concluded that the Son and the Holy Spirit are co-eternal with God and are therefore God as well,

00:22:17.920 the Muslims came to the same conclusion, but about the word of God understood as a stone. 0.82

00:22:24.920 And this is important because for us Christians, the Logos, the word, is living.

00:22:31.920 It is not a stone. It is alive.

00:22:33.920 It is the source of our ability to think and reason and be mystical and study science and study philosophy and study natural law.

00:22:45.920 Islam couldn't develop the same tradition because instead it chose to believe that the word of God is a stone. 0.98

00:22:54.920 Imagine what happens if you believe that the word is stone as opposed to living.

00:23:01.920 Well, you can't have philosophy. You can't think properly. You can't reason.

00:23:06.920 You end up pretty much in the word of Islam, where philosophy is dead.

00:23:12.920 Science is used merely as military science, not in a truly creative and explorative way in the way that you see in the Christian West. 0.99

00:23:23.920 And you end up with this misery of constant obedience without love.

00:23:30.920 For Muslims, God is seen as too distant to actually love us or even care about us.

00:23:37.920 Maybe he loves certain behavior. Maybe he loves certain things.

00:23:41.920 But it's not the same as the Christian idea that God loves all the sinners to the extent that he would have died on the cross for any one of us, not just all of us.

00:23:52.920 For any of us, Christ would have died on the cross and risen from the dead to save us.

00:23:59.920 Whereas in Islam, because the word is a stone, you end up with a closed mindedness that we all complain about. 1.00

00:24:06.920 You end up with the lack of openness to debate and discussion that we all complain about.

00:24:12.920 So this belief that the Logos became man, that the word of God became a living man to spend time on earth here with us, is genuinely game changing.

00:24:29.920 It's really different. And it makes an enormous difference to the character of the West and to the identity of Westerners.

00:24:37.920 You see that the greatest societies in the West are the ones that come from Northeastern Europe, from Northwestern Europe.

00:24:45.920 You could say that this is genetic. And I'm very open to genetic differences. I don't mind.

00:24:50.920 But there's also something to notice. This was the part of the world which was most protected from the vagaries of other religions and their invasions. 0.99

00:24:59.920 This was the part of the world that was most isolated from the rest of Eurasia and the paganism and the false monotheism of Islam. 1.00

00:25:11.920 These two being two separate things that allowed the society to develop in a genuinely Christian way with a huge degree of conscientiousness, with a huge commitment to doing right for the sake of God.

00:25:28.920 This is the least disturbed Christian society of all of the societies.

00:25:33.920 Well, I can add some contribution here. I've been silent for most of this.

00:25:38.920 Sorry about that.

00:25:39.920 No, no, it's absolutely been fine. I've been really enjoying the discussion that you've been having so far.

00:25:44.920 But yeah, on the discussion of philosophy and development of human attitudes and understandings of logic and developments of scientific fields,

00:25:55.920 it is interesting how when you go back to the times before Christ, you have what historians have deemed the Axial Age,

00:26:05.920 wherein you have, in Europe, you have the developments in philosophy of the ancient Greeks.

00:26:10.920 In China, you have developments in Taoism and Confucianism.

00:26:14.920 In India, you have developments of philosophy and religion as well.

00:26:18.920 So across all of these different parts of the world, you have these big steps forward.

00:26:23.920 Yes.

00:26:24.920 But what you find is that past the Axial Age, Europe is the only one that continues to develop and build on top of it.

00:26:31.920 Confucianism becomes very fossilized.

00:26:35.920 Yes.

00:26:36.920 Indian mysticism, Hinduism becomes very fossilized.

00:26:39.920 These are dogmatic belief systems that do not open themselves up to greater questioning,

00:26:46.920 whereas the Europeans were already building upon the ideas of logic and mathematics.

00:26:51.920 And when Christianity gets introduced into that, unlike something like you've been discussing with Islam, 0.98

00:26:57.920 where there's a brief period of open discussion and philosophy before the religion really fossilizes itself,

00:27:07.920 Christianity, because it is built on all of the precepts and foundations that you've been discussing so far,

00:27:15.920 immediately you get people like St. Augustine, not just with his confessions,

00:27:21.920 the more biographical, autobiographical work, but you get his City of God,

00:27:25.920 one of the original great pieces of Christian philosophy and theology.

00:27:29.920 And then you find a thousand years later, almost a thousand years later,

00:27:34.920 Thomas Aquinas and his Summa Theologica, after the rediscovery of the Aristotelian texts,

00:27:40.920 trying to combine the two and combine Aristotelian logic and mathematics and metaphysics

00:27:48.920 with Christian theology and finding ways to develop philosophy and science from that.

00:27:54.920 And then even then, you go 400 years into the future in there.

00:27:57.920 In England, you have Thomas Hobbes with Leviathan.

00:28:00.920 He's actually speaking in that about the ideas and precepts of a Christian Republic.

00:28:04.920 He's basing it all off of God.

00:28:06.920 John Locke is speaking about the state of nature, yes, but he's also founding all of his thoughts

00:28:13.920 upon his logical interpretations of Christianity.

00:28:17.920 And even as recently as 70 or 80 years ago, you have people like C.S. Lewis

00:28:23.920 still writing on Christianity in a way that has been fluid,

00:28:28.920 that has been able to develop and build off of itself and create new developments.

00:28:33.920 And you have scientists as well.

00:28:35.920 All of the major European scientific developments prior to the modern period

00:28:39.920 would have been discovered by Christian monks and Christian scientists.

00:28:44.920 It has always been a religion that has encouraged development to understand God's creation.

00:28:50.920 And I think that's something that people don't consider as much these days

00:28:54.920 because they just assume that science is something that precludes and excludes religiosity

00:29:00.920 and theology, when in fact the two can be completely, can and have coexisted for a very long time.

00:29:08.920 Yes. And you keep on having this development of science from Christians throughout. 0.96

00:29:13.920 So you get, for example, Giuseppe Mercalli, who was a priest and who developed his own way of measuring earthquakes.

00:29:25.920 The difference is that his measure for earthquakes was developed based on the impact on urban areas and humans.

00:29:36.920 So it's quite different from the Richter scale.

00:29:38.920 And I thought that this was interesting.

00:29:40.920 The Richter scale is a sort of secular scale, not developed by a religious man.

00:29:45.920 But this one, because it was developed by a priest, focuses on the impact on humanity.

00:29:50.920 And going back to your point about the sciences, genetics was discovered by Gregor Mendel.

00:29:57.920 The Big Bang Theory was discovered by a Catholic priest, Pernicus, a Catholic priest, etc., etc.

00:30:05.920 One of the things that I've read, because a load of people say that the Big Bang Theory disproves religion,

00:30:10.920 and I find it very difficult to think of a single scientific discovery that you could say,

00:30:16.920 outside of preconceived atheistic biases, completely disproves religion, because there aren't any.

00:30:23.920 Yes.

00:30:24.920 But I believe one of the little factoids I discovered recently was that scientists originally wanted to push back on the Big Bang Theory,

00:30:31.920 because they believed, atheistic scientists did at least, because they believed it conferred too much credit to the idea of a single creator,

00:30:40.920 because it seemed like a miraculous occurrence that something could come from nothing.

00:30:47.920 Yes.

00:30:48.920 The Big Bang Theory was used to mock the ideas of the man who formulated the theory.

00:30:56.920 It was basically mockery.

00:30:58.920 Oh, so you're saying that the universe just came to be in a Big Bang?

00:31:01.920 And then the mockery actually became the name of the theory, because it had these religious implications.

00:31:10.920 Because if you want to be a materialist, you have to believe that the universe wasn't created but is in fact eternal.

00:31:18.920 And if instead it has a beginning, then what is the beginning? Or who caused the beginning?

00:31:26.920 There are sort of vast implications from that that they don't want to have to contend with.

00:31:30.920 And nothing makes this more ridiculous than listening to Lawrence Krauss trying to explain where the Big Bang come from, came from,

00:31:38.920 while pretending that it came from nothing without any agency.

00:31:42.920 I've not heard this discussion at all.

00:31:44.920 Well, he keeps going on about how nothing doesn't actually mean nothing.

00:31:49.920 And the universe began from nothing, but that nothing wasn't nothing, which is essentially begging the question.

00:31:55.920 Yeah, I mean, the way that I was taught it in school, because obviously, when I was in primary school, it was still a Christian school.

00:32:05.920 We did morning prayers.

00:32:07.920 But by the time I get to secondary school, everything is completely secularized.

00:32:12.920 And so they have to try and teach about these things in a purely secular way.

00:32:16.920 The funny thing was, I was mentioning before we started recording in RE, we were shown the Jesus psyop.

00:32:23.920 You know, the various depictions of Jesus and the one that was developed in the 1990s that makes him look like a tiny little squat.

00:32:30.920 A tiny little squat brown man. 0.95

00:32:33.920 Even though, as you yourself are from the area, that's literally not what they even look like to this day.

00:32:40.920 No.

00:32:41.920 They can have blue eyes like yourself.

00:32:42.920 They can be fair skinned and fair haired as well.

00:32:45.920 Whatever you think that he may have looked like based on the various different depictions of him.

00:32:49.920 And we were shown that one and we were asked, oh, you know, which of these depictions is most likely to be what Jesus looked like?

00:32:55.920 And of course, they pointed to the one that made him look like a tiny little ugly man.

00:32:59.920 So we had the secularized education, even in religious education.

00:33:05.920 But during science, when we were learning about the Big Bang Theory, the way that they tried to explain it,

00:33:10.920 because there were the questions asked of like, hold up, how can something come from nothing?

00:33:14.920 How is that scientifically explainable?

00:33:16.920 They did the same thing where they were saying, well, nothing doesn't actually mean nothing.

00:33:20.920 What we actually mean is that there were particles that existed, which means that that's not nothing then.

00:33:26.920 OK, so there was there was something who put the particles there.

00:33:29.920 How did the particles get there?

00:33:31.920 There were particles kind of zipping and fizzing about for an untold amount of time before eventually two particles managed to collide into one another at such velocity that it created the Big Bang and all of existence.

00:33:42.920 It's the same as with the origin of life.

00:33:44.920 Well, I mean, that to me, it's the same.

00:33:46.920 That to me, that's a statement of faith.

00:33:48.920 Yes.

00:33:49.920 Rather than a statement of scientific or logical reason.

00:33:52.920 And that's really the point that I want to get across.

00:33:55.920 You have faith, whether you know it or not.

00:33:58.920 You either have faith in materialism, which doesn't explain human nature, which doesn't explain not just the problem of evil, but more importantly, it doesn't explain the problem of good.

00:34:09.920 So atheists love to go on about how the problem of evil is the reason they don't believe.

00:34:14.920 What they're saying, essentially, is that they're angry with the world and with God for not making the world more Christian.

00:34:23.920 They're angry at having free will.

00:34:26.920 But if you were to truly look at the world around you and look at human nature, you would reach the conclusion that original sin is real because of our inherent flaws.

00:34:38.920 You would reach the conclusion that the devil is real.

00:34:41.920 And it just takes a couple of years of studying any war, properly studying any war and the horrors that we're capable of or studying something like the Aztecs or studying something like Carthaginian human sacrifice to lead you to conclude that the devil is real.

00:34:58.920 And then you would instantly lose faith in materialism.

00:35:03.920 And that's when you would become open to finding faith in God and to picking up your cross and to doing your duty and to celebrating the great event that is the incarnation.

00:35:14.920 And it's not good enough to say that I'm too smart for this or I know too much science to actually believe this or that I don't believe in miracles, but I like the morality of Christianity.

00:35:33.920 Because if you like the morality of Christianity, it didn't come from nothing.

00:35:40.920 It came from believe in miracles.

00:35:42.920 It came from us looking at wise people who are pretending to be incredibly knowledgeable and concluding that there is something wrong with what they believe.

00:35:58.920 I have here a passage from St. Augustine that I'm trying to find.

00:36:03.920 And the gist of the passage is that wise men always take pride in their wisdom and put their own wisdom above the wisdom of God.

00:36:14.920 And in doing so they invert morality because they end up becoming narcissistic and thinking that they can find meaning in the world without contending with the problem of the incarnation and the resurrection.

00:36:30.920 I mean, one of my favorite, the one that I actually know off of the top of my head from Augustine is regarding, and I think it works, I think it's even more fitting today with our incredibly liberalized society where every man considers himself to be his own master.

00:36:51.080 Yes, where every man believes that through an exercise of pure free will with no constraints, they themselves will always come to the best decisions without understanding that they will still be manipulated by outside forces.

00:37:05.080 Most of whom, you mentioned pornographers earlier there, outside forces who will try to, in a very brave new world sense, use your own vices and hedonism and consumerism against you.

00:37:18.080 And they will embrace that and Augustine had already preempted this almost 2000 years ago on his statement that a man has as many masters as he has vices.

00:37:28.080 Yes.

00:37:29.080 That's always the one that sticks with me and I think that is a great call for many people because of even taking itself out of a theological perspective, rationally, logically, it's just true.

00:37:44.080 Yes.

00:37:45.080 It's a true factual statement.

00:37:47.080 It should be a call for people to have mastery over themselves without letting themselves slip into vice.

00:37:54.080 A lot of mastery over themselves for a lot of people will have to come down to accepting that there are greater forces in this world.

00:38:05.080 And I don't want to be preachy, but that's one of the reasons that I came to be more open to faith as I've gotten older.

00:38:15.080 Yes.

00:38:16.080 Observing all of those things that you've mentioned about the outside world, but also observing and analyzing my own behavior and the kind of pitfalls that we can all fall into and how you can actually avoid making mistakes in your personal life.

00:38:31.080 One of it is getting greater control of yourself and that will that will be in a very real sense.

00:38:38.080 In other words, if you accept the fact that we all have ingrained vices that we're constantly struggling with, what you're preaching isn't self-mastery.

00:38:49.080 What you're preaching is Christ's mastery over you in that what you're saying can be construed as being identical to what St. Paul said, which is to empty yourself in this specific case of your vices so that you can be more Christlike, so that you can be free, so that you can actually do good for the sake of good and God.

00:39:15.080 So what you're saying is partly understood as self-mastery, but the purpose of this mastery is Christ.

00:39:25.440 And you are making Christ your master, not yourself, because in a very real sense you can say that if you are living a purely hedonistic lifestyle, you are the master of yourself because you've chosen these vices.

00:39:41.660 It's only through a moral lens that says that these are in fact vices rather than pleasures, that you can then say that I want to combat them.

00:39:54.040 And if you need that moral sense, you probably need a moral example, because we all do.

00:40:02.940 Like, it's not you who needs it, it's all of us who need it.

00:40:06.540 And so what you're saying accords perfectly with what St. Paul has said.

00:40:11.580 And so this Christmas, I want to invite people to have faith.

00:40:17.880 You've tried the materialist world, you've seen the atheist world, it's destroyed your society, it's destroyed everything about you. 1.00

00:40:27.680 It's destroyed the order of love that tells you that first you love God, then your family, then your neighbors, then your community, then your nation, then the strangers.

00:40:38.640 It's destroyed your sense of decency because you're afflicted with drugs and pornography and doom-scrolling and time-wasting and sloth and avarice and gluttony.

00:40:53.200 It's destroyed your ability to build, and you see that all over the secular right, where fundamentally, people like Meloni, people like Farage, they're not serious.

00:41:07.960 They have nothing behind them.

00:41:09.260 They don't stand on a rock as we do with St. Peter.

00:41:12.440 They don't stand on firm foundations.

00:41:14.940 They go with the flow.

00:41:17.640 They go with GDP line goes up.

00:41:20.400 And you have the highest GDP, but it's made all of us miserable because it's emptied life of meaning.

00:41:30.500 So this Christmas, the best thing that you can do is to go to confession.

00:41:36.340 And that's particularly important.

00:41:40.820 When you go to confession, you're not just confessing to the priest.

00:41:45.300 You're confessing to Christ.

00:41:47.680 You're reconciling with Christ.

00:41:50.200 You're saying, these are the wrongs that I find in myself that I need to correct.

00:41:55.240 And I need grace to overcome them.

00:41:58.460 And this fount of grace is infinite and is open to you always and is open to you at all times, forever, right until this second of your death.

00:42:10.820 So there's always hope.

00:42:13.640 So go and reconcile with Christ and go to church.

00:42:17.500 Celebrate your tradition.

00:42:18.880 Celebrate the source of your civilization.

00:42:22.320 Celebrate love as it truly should be understood,

00:42:25.060 as sacrifice, as being willing to give,

00:42:28.640 as being willing to give until you can give no more and then give some more anyway.

00:42:35.340 This is what you're invited to do.

00:42:38.440 And this is what develops your proper conscience.

00:42:43.300 This Christmas, go to confession, go to church,

00:42:48.540 and make a resolution to pray and to try to be closer to God

00:42:53.800 because this is the only way out of anything.

00:42:59.020 And this is the only path to salvation, physical and spiritual.

00:43:04.420 The West is being destroyed physically because it was destroyed spiritually.

00:43:09.760 And there isn't a way out of this that doesn't accept that we are in a spiritual war.

00:43:15.380 We're fighting people who want to normalize killing babies, 0.60

00:43:19.700 who want to normalize killing the elderly, 0.99

00:43:21.980 who want to normalize the dissolution of society and the breakdown of society,

00:43:26.300 who want to tell you that living under constant terrorist attacks

00:43:29.540 is just part and parcel of living in modern multiculturalism.

00:43:33.740 And there is a way out of this.

00:43:37.020 But that way out starts with you.

00:43:39.900 And you can't tell people to behave better if you don't start with yourself.

00:43:48.380 You can't invite people to follow a better path

00:43:53.060 if you're not yourself struggling on that path.

00:43:57.080 And like me, you will fall short.

00:43:59.360 It will not be enough.

00:44:00.560 There will always be more that you could do.

00:44:05.520 And you will always fail at accomplishing it.

00:44:08.840 That is why we have a God of love and grace.

00:44:12.460 And having a God of love and grace

00:44:14.100 doesn't mean only saying nice things and being nice.

00:44:18.920 In the temple, Christ fashioned a whip.

00:44:22.760 He made a whip with his own hands.

00:44:25.520 Then he beat the money changers with it,

00:44:28.680 hurling insults at them.

00:44:30.560 And flying into a righteous rage.

00:44:34.020 You can't just be enraged.

00:44:36.880 Justified as it is.

00:44:38.740 It has to be a righteous rage.

00:44:42.180 And the righteous part can only come

00:44:46.300 if you try to identify yourself with Christ.

00:44:49.000 And the door is open to that

00:44:52.540 because Christ identified himself with us.

00:44:56.640 First in making us in his image.

00:44:59.660 Then by taking our form and dying for us

00:45:02.400 as a good shepherd.

00:45:03.760 So this Christmas, celebrate, rejoice,

00:45:08.040 be happy, be glad.

00:45:11.940 Appreciate the miraculous.

00:45:13.280 And try to find the miraculous in your own life.

00:45:17.900 And I pass that on to the darkness again.

00:45:26.100 And definitely keep praying.

00:45:27.460 Well, God Tucutani,

00:45:29.200 thank you.

00:45:34.560 I don't know,

00:45:35.560 I Ain't no one jealous.

00:45:36.120 I'm not something about you.

00:45:36.720 I live as a good shepherd.

00:45:39.280 Hello.

00:45:39.520 Sorry.

00:45:39.920 Now let us in the morning.

00:45:41.080 Thank you.

00:45:41.620 Hey, I'm talking over口.

00:45:42.700 I'm at new place.

00:45:44.060 And I'm at new place.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - December 25, 2025

Christmas Podcast ｜ The Meaning of Christmas

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