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We chat again with Dr. Duke Pesta, this time on THE TRUTH ABOUT SIN!

We explore gratitude and its historical significance, emphasizing its role in our relationship with God. We discuss self-ownership and how it sets humans apart from animals, as well as the concept of free will and its connection to consciousness. We address the lack of gratitude in society and its impact, and also delve into the issue of sin and Jesus' perspective on it. We discuss the importance of faith, evaluate different ideologies, and highlight the significance of actively loving others.


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Transcript
00:00:00 All right, hi everybody, this is Stephen Molyneux from Free Domain, back with our good friend,
00:00:04 Dr. Duke Pester from FPE USA. Now, I will just tell you how this conversation came about,
00:00:10 because it's been a while since we chatted. I will tell you how this came about. I wanted to do a show
00:00:14 on sin. Now, who's the first person I thought of when I thought of sin? I needed somebody with deep,
00:00:23 vivid, multi-decade experience who'd explored every aspect of sin. No, I'm just kidding.
00:00:29 I just thought, let's talk about it with Dr. Pester, because he's very well learned in these
00:00:33 matters in a theoretical, not necessarily an empirical or practical way. So, thanks for
00:00:38 joining. If you wanted to take a moment to reintroduce yourself to our audience,
00:00:43 or to my audience as yours. It's been a while. Welcome back. Let it rip.
00:00:48 Really wonderful to be with you again. I've missed our conversations, and I know my audience has
00:00:53 missed them as well. You're a remarkable guy, and I think the culture needs more like you.
00:01:00 I am a 30-year college professor. I'm a conservative. I happen to also be a Christian,
00:01:04 and so you can imagine I'm a bit of a unicorn crossed with a leprechaun. You don't see
00:01:11 Christian conservatives anywhere in the humanities programs. And so, I am that,
00:01:16 and I have written a lot, and I have spoke a lot on all kinds of educational issues. And of course,
00:01:22 you and I have a wonderful series of interviews we've done on literature, and culture, and
00:01:27 philosophy, and politics. You're going to send me a link to some of those, and I'll put them up on
00:01:34 our show for people can trace those back, and I imagine maybe some of your audience would like
00:01:38 to see them as well. And I'll close by saying, yeah, I know as a human being, I know a lot about
00:01:43 sin philosophically and theologically, and I've certainly done my share of it
00:01:49 across my life too. So, I have practical experience as well.
00:01:53 Pete
00:01:53 Okay, now sin is one of these topics that drives me almost completely mental. I'll just,
00:01:58 you know, whether that's the sin of impatience or incomprehension, I'm certainly willing to listen.
00:02:03 When I was younger, of course, I was raised a Christian, and of course, I criticized that,
00:02:08 and now that I'm older, it's like, it's kind of circling back. It's like this giant parabolic
00:02:13 boomerang for me, which is coming back, which is, let's talk about the origins of sin in the
00:02:19 Garden of Eden and the Cain and Abel one, which completely drives me mental because it's
00:02:24 self-generated. Like, you can say, well, Satan went to Eve, Eve went to Adam, that was the side
00:02:28 of the fall, but Cain just woke up on the wrong side of the bed, and it just, it went from there.
00:02:34 So, let's talk a little bit about the origins of sin and the fall from grace, and I guess it
00:02:40 starts with, would you say it starts with Lucifer? Because it has to be there before the Adam and Eve
00:02:45 stuff. Well, yeah, I mean, if indeed we're looking at it through the lens of Western culture,
00:02:51 absolutely it starts with the creation of the universe, of course, by God, but the angels seem
00:02:57 to have predated that to some degree. And yes, there had to be rebellion, there had to be somebody
00:03:02 who, to me, the origins of sin start with free will. And from my perspective, if we do not have
00:03:09 free will, if human beings are either completely biological conditioned or sociologically
00:03:16 conditioned or both, to the degree that we have no real meaningful free will, and it's interesting,
00:03:21 the more our culture moves away from the idea of God, particularly monotheism, the more we are
00:03:26 hearing from our scientists and our sociologists that we really don't have freedom, we're to some
00:03:30 degree completely determined by our environments and our genetics. So to me, the question of free
00:03:38 will is the question of sin. Because if you do have free will, and that includes as angels as
00:03:43 well as human beings, if we have free will, then you can use it badly, and whatever environmental
00:03:49 factors kick in, that's still a good part of that is you. And what is so important to the idea of
00:03:55 sin to me is without sin, you really can make a huge argument that human beings can't choose badly.
00:04:03 They can only choose what they're programmed to choose, and if we can only choose what we're
00:04:07 programmed to do, you can't blame us for it, right? And you are seeing this all across our
00:04:11 culture now. It's society's problem, not an individual's problem, and if that's true,
00:04:18 notice what we ignore. What is society made up of? Well, individuals, right? So how is it possible
00:04:23 that society can be evil, collectively choose evil, they have the free will to do that,
00:04:30 but the members of society don't? And that's philosophically the thing for me. I know that sin
00:04:35 sounds like a bad word. It seems—just the word itself conjures up impressions of
00:04:44 torquemada and excessive guilt and unjust bullying. I get it. But the word is important,
00:04:52 because when you get rid of it, there is no category left that allows for the individual's
00:04:59 free will. And I'll throw this last point out to you in Shut Up. There are three main ways that we
00:05:07 really measure human behavior. There is disease, there is crime, and there is sin. Now, you remove
00:05:15 sin, which we have done. Notice what Marx said. Marx said crime is simply people rebelling against
00:05:23 a wicked society. So it's not the fault of the criminal, it's the culture. And then, of course,
00:05:28 notice what's happened in our culture with disease. Pretty much everything from road rage
00:05:33 to children's misbehavior is now a trauma or a level three, level two psychological disorder.
00:05:41 And of course, if somebody's sick, my favorite is CDD—childhood disobedience. Yeah, C-D-C.
00:05:52 What's the word I'm looking for? Childhood—
00:05:56 >>Defiance.
00:05:57 >>—disobedient. Yeah, defiance. It's a trauma, right? So when your kid steals a cookie from the
00:06:02 cookie jar, well, he's not bad. He didn't make a bad mistake. He's not a human being. He's not
00:06:07 a sinner. He just is sick. So when you drop sin from the list of three, that requires you to either
00:06:15 category human behavior, bad behavior, through disease or crime. And already you can see under
00:06:20 the Marxist socialism, crime isn't really the fault of the criminal anymore.
00:06:25 >>Mm, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and the reclassification of addiction as a disease,
00:06:31 when it is in fact chosen behavior. Those of us pushing our 50s and so on, it's like,
00:06:36 yeah, most of us have had a disease. It kind of shows up on a scan, and it's pretty serious,
00:06:41 and it's kind of objective, not behavior. And yeah, the whole free will thing we can get into
00:06:45 in a bit. When I looked at what happens with Lucifer, what happens with Adam and Eve, right?
00:06:53 It seems to me that they say, "I can become the law." Right? So God is the moral law. We'll take
00:07:01 that as a given. God is the moral law, and they say, "I can become the moral law." And this is
00:07:08 like Fauci saying, "I am science." This is like when people say, "It's my truth." It's like, "No,
00:07:12 no, no, no, no. If it's yours, it's subjective. It might be your experience. It might be something
00:07:17 that's very real to you. But when you say truth, you're talking about something objective. And if
00:07:21 we're talking about the moral law, can a human being become the moral law? What I will is right,
00:07:28 or as the Satanists say, "The whole sum of the law shall be do what thou wilt," that you become
00:07:33 the moral law. Now, from a philosophical standpoint, that's insanity. It's like saying,
00:07:38 "I can become logic. I can become reality." That's grandiosity where we take our limited
00:07:45 three pounds of wetware consciousness and spray it all over the universe like it's some sort of
00:07:49 objective physical force. The idea, and this is, I think, modernity in a nutshell, as you were
00:07:54 talking about, the postmodernism says both there are no rules and you are the rule. And I think
00:07:59 when you surmount your consciousness away from subjecting yourself to objective rules and
00:08:05 standards, you create a kind of hell on earth because you get hypocrisy and vanity and no
00:08:12 mediation of conflict. If your will is absolute and my will is absolute and your will is the good
00:08:17 and my will is the good, well, they're going to conflict. And how do we resolve these conflicts?
00:08:22 Well, we have to have some objective medium, whether it's God's law, whether it's reason,
00:08:25 science, math, logic, objectivity, whatever it's going to be. The vanity that comes along with,
00:08:31 "I am the law," it's an old Southern cop, you know, "I am the law. What we have here is a failure to
00:08:37 communicate." The idea that we can become the law and we can surmount restrictions, well, I think
00:08:44 that's the great demonology of the modern world that Christianity, I think solely Christianity,
00:08:50 really was fighting. - Yeah, and it's Judeo-Christianity, too. The first commandment
00:08:56 is, "I am the Lord your God. You cannot have strange gods before me." In other words,
00:09:00 that's exactly what you just said. - Even yourself can't be the strangest God, right?
00:09:04 - Well, Nietzsche said the same thing from the opposite perspective. He said, "We have murdered
00:09:09 God, we philosophers, but," he said, "in order to be worthy of the act, we men philosophers,
00:09:16 we must become God to be worthy of the event." And I think you explained it very well. And the
00:09:22 one thing I want to throw out there, based on your comment, when you say we can become the law,
00:09:26 we start by saying God is the moral law, then people think they can become the law. In other
00:09:31 words, people think they're becoming gods, right? Because to have that kind of moral control
00:09:37 absolutely would make you God. And so that first commandment, I mean, you go all the way back
00:09:43 3,500 years ago, that first commandment aptly labels this. And the related thing to this is
00:09:49 about, you were talking about the vanity of this. And don't forget, Christianity formulated the
00:09:55 seven deadly sins. And the chief of the seven deadly sins was vanity, pride. That is, in fact,
00:10:03 you don't really need the other six. If you engage in pride, you are doing all of them.
00:10:08 Because what is gluttony? The pride of the gut over God. What is lust? The pride of sexual
00:10:16 gratification over God. And so I think you said it very nicely. You said it very interestingly,
00:10:22 philosophically, and I'm kind of dragging it back a little bit to theology, because here,
00:10:27 I don't think there's a liquid difference between the two things.
00:10:30 Peter Well, and what did Satan say? "You shall be like God." Right? That's what he said to Eve.
00:10:38 And the tree of knowledge of good and evil I've wrestled with, honestly, for decades,
00:10:42 it's kind of embarrassing. I guess most people do, or at least I have, which is, "Okay, well,
00:10:46 why wouldn't you want the knowledge of good and evil? Why would God want to deny the knowledge
00:10:52 of good and evil?" And it's like, "No, no, no," he said, "you get to define good and evil,
00:10:57 not according to any objective standard, but according to what's good for you in the moment."
00:11:02 And sin to me, I think the vanity thing I was thinking about quite a bit over the last couple
00:11:07 of days, and that's really important, but hypocrisy, because I always compare it to
00:11:11 animals. Okay, what do we blame animals for? Well, we don't blame animals for vanity.
00:11:15 There's not some poodle who's doing her hair and we think, "Oh my gosh," you know,
00:11:17 it looks like Kim Kardashian of the four-legged beast. And we don't criticize animals for
00:11:23 hypocrisy. And I think the sin, as I'm sort of working it through in my head, has a lot to do
00:11:28 with when you claim a moral in order to do an evil. That, to me, is the greatest of the sins.
00:11:37 Now, that's vanity, and in particular, that's hypocrisy. You know, like all the people who say,
00:11:42 "Oh, all I want to do is help the poor," and you say, "Oh, good, I've got a couple of people
00:11:45 who are poor in their pickup truck. They'd love to move in with you." "No, no, no,
00:11:51 are you kidding me? Oh, you see this with migrants and so on. Should we take more migrants?" "Yes."
00:11:55 "Okay, here's some migrants. Can they come to your house?" "Oh, Martha's Vineyard,
00:11:57 they got them out of there in like 48 hours," right? So, when you claim a moral virtue and do
00:12:03 the opposite, to me, that is really the most foundational sin that there is, because then
00:12:09 you're saying, "There is an objective moral standard I'm going to claim. I'm never going
00:12:13 to live it myself. I'm only going to try and get the effects of virtue without the cause
00:12:18 of virtue," which again falls into the category of greed, but it's saying, "What I will is the
00:12:24 good." Now, we can say that if you're a perfect moral being like God, okay, what you will is the
00:12:29 good, but as fallible human beings, our will cannot be defined as virtue, because then you're
00:12:34 saying, "I am both an animal and a spiritual or soulful or conceptual being." An animal,
00:12:40 the will is the good. The lion is hungry, his will is to eat the zebra, he goes and eats the zebra.
00:12:46 The zebra desires to run away. They don't view it as the virtuous, they don't define it as the
00:12:50 abstract good. It's just what you will is the good for you. Okay, be that, then don't claim morality,
00:12:55 but everyone claims morality in the modern world and then follows their own Nietzschean lust for
00:13:00 power, and that is, to me, the greatest sin, because how can you reform that?
00:13:04 - Well, you make a beautiful point. Nietzsche's most famous for the idea of the will to power.
00:13:11 Well, how can you have a will to power if you have no will? This is where we are in the postmodern.
00:13:16 At least Nietzsche was honest. He believed there was no God, and therefore, human beings were just
00:13:23 animals, and animals don't have free will because they don't have--they can't be hypocrites because
00:13:29 they don't have free will, and if we're just animals, then the will is everything. That's
00:13:33 logical. I think it's wrongheaded, but it's logical. The postmoderns have gone a completely
00:13:37 different way, and I have a slightly different take on the Garden of Eden and the knowledge of
00:13:42 good and evil. You said right, correctly, that ultimately, hypocrisy is the consequence of sin.
00:13:50 It is, right? When you choose something--you just gave a wonderful description of virtue signaling.
00:13:57 Using virtue to aggrandize yourself, not the people you're supposed to be helping. That,
00:14:03 I think, that's a clear definition of sin. One A, one B, one C, that's pretty high up there.
00:14:09 But go back to the tree of knowledge of good and evil. When I talk about this when I teach
00:14:13 the Bible at the university, think about it for a second. Adam and Eve were hypocrites,
00:14:18 right? And how so? Well, did they know the good? This is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
00:14:24 But they knew the good. We know, according to the Garden of Eden, God visited them. He walked in
00:14:31 the garden. He held their hands. He taught them, right? They knew what the good was. And so the
00:14:38 only thing they could learn from the tree was evil, and he warned them what evil was. "In the
00:14:43 day thereon you eat, you will die," right? I mean, I'm telling you what it is. You don't have to put
00:14:51 the little kid's hand on the glowing burner to figure out what a burn is, right? You can warn
00:14:56 them. So it's not, I don't see that as a trap. God was good. They knew God. God was intimately
00:15:04 involved with them. All they stood to learn from the tree was evil, and he made that very clear.
00:15:09 So for me, they call, and I go back to my point, the tree of knowledge is free will. Has to be.
00:15:17 Because look, in the Garden of Eden, everything was made perfect. Everything that was given to
00:15:23 them was perfect. They were perfect. So if God is actually going to give you free will,
00:15:29 he must allow you to choose something that's not him. And so without a tree of knowledge,
00:15:36 there is no choice they could have made that would have resulted in anything else than God.
00:15:42 So if that was true, if God created the garden completely perfect, and there was no sin and no
00:15:48 temptation in it, then you could not give credit to Adam and Eve for obedience. Because whatever
00:15:54 they chose was designed to funnel right back to God. So there had to be something in the garden.
00:16:00 There had to be one little thing of all those trees and all that fruit ready to be handed down
00:16:06 to them without any work or labor, no winters. There has to be something, and that one tree is
00:16:12 it. And that tree is only half the problem. Because I've already shown you what the good is.
00:16:18 When you were lonely, Adam, I created a woman, right? I've shown you the good. All you're going
00:16:23 to get, because you have to be able to choose, a way out of the garden. That's it. And that,
00:16:29 my friend, to me, is exactly where free will comes into play. God, theoretically, loves us so much
00:16:37 that he must risk losing us to our own bad choices.
00:16:41 Pete
00:16:43 And here's something very, very well put, of course, as always. What about this? I've always
00:16:49 been really fascinated by what Adam said to God when God said, "Hey, something wicked this way
00:16:57 comes. What's afoot?" And Adam said, and God had not punished him at this point, not for eating the
00:17:03 tree of knowledge of good and evil, not eating the fruit. And Adam says something like, "Hey, man,
00:17:10 the woman you gave me said something." Do you remember that part? "The woman that you gave me,
00:17:16 your woman, she said something, man. She just said something." And that, I think, is where the
00:17:22 punishment—if you've been a parent, right? And I'm not a punishment kind of parent, but I do
00:17:26 expect my kid to take responsibility, as I sort of try to take responsibility as best I can.
00:17:32 I think the punishment starts not with the sin, but with the defense against it. And that defense
00:17:37 is really, really interesting. First of all, he blames God. "Hey, man, you gave me the woman,
00:17:43 and she said something." And so he starts with blaming God, not taking responsibility,
00:17:49 and then he fogs, right? He goes into fog land, into gaslighting, which is, "Well, she just
00:17:56 said something." He doesn't say, "Yeah, you told me exactly what to do and what not to do,
00:18:03 and I agreed to it. It wasn't a commandment. I agreed to it. I signed on the dotted line."
00:18:08 It's not like they're not stealing from you if you sign on the dotted line and don't pay your
00:18:11 bills, right? So, "I agreed to do the right thing. I messed up. She listened to the snake. I listened
00:18:17 to her. It's absolutely on me, 100%. I think that they would have been okay." But when he says,
00:18:25 "It's your fault, God, and stuff happened," you know, how do you penetrate that when you,
00:18:31 I mean, God wasn't accusing them. He knew. I mean, they literally had apple juice up their
00:18:37 head, pits up their nose. They had apples in their hair. You know, like the kid with the chocolate
00:18:42 face, "I haven't seen any chocolate today, Dad," right? So, he knows for an absolute fact, and he's
00:18:48 just asking them to take responsibility. And he says, "It's your fault and stuff happened." And
00:18:56 that is, I think, at least for me, just personally, that's where my anger usually comes
00:19:01 with people, or with myself. It's not the wrongdoing, it's the weaseling, it's the
00:19:07 blaming, it's the projection, it's the manipulation, it's the diffusion of clarity where people attempt
00:19:14 to hide in this fog of nonsense and loosey-goosey definitions or reversing or changing definitions.
00:19:20 And it's not that he did wrong, it's that he would take absolutely no ownership. He blamed Eve,
00:19:27 he blamed God, and then, "Hey, man, something happened." And I think that's where it's like,
00:19:32 "Okay, well, now we have the big problem." And I hope that's not wholly blasphemous to say,
00:19:39 but in part, it's like, "The problem isn't that you did something wrong. That's going to happen.
00:19:43 The problem is that you blame me, blame Eve, blame the snake, and then dissolve all rational
00:19:50 bonds of definition to say, 'Something happened.'"
00:19:53 >> I think you're right, especially about Adam. But I think we can't divorce Adam,
00:19:58 literally divorce him from Eve. And so, the chain of command here, the chain of behavior,
00:20:05 is the serpent convinced Eve that she would be like God. We've already covered this, right?
00:20:11 The serpent brought about the fall of Eve because he promised her exactly what we're seeing today.
00:20:18 You will be the moral authority, you will be bigger than God. God and your husband are
00:20:24 oppressing you because they're holding you back. You're really the deity in this situation.
00:20:29 So her problem was an issue of pride, right? And when she ate the apple—
00:20:35 >> Oh, sorry to interrupt. Is it pride or vanity?
00:20:38 >> Well, it's both, because the serpent played on her potential vanity to make her choose
00:20:47 something that turned out to be pride, right? Vanity is literally loving yourself more than
00:20:53 other people, and in this case, vanity and pride are kind of the same thing. And Vanitas, by the
00:20:58 way, was a very useful synonym for pride going back to the Middle Ages. And so, to my perspective,
00:21:06 he made her vain, talking about how beautiful she was, how she was admired, how all the other
00:21:11 creatures in the garden have conferred and they see her as the queen, not them.
00:21:17 >> So he basically became thousands of Instagram followers. But go on, please continue.
00:21:21 >> You got it. Selfies, right? Intellectual selfies. And so she chose that. Then she handed
00:21:28 the fruit to her husband. Now, I think you got a great point there. He did not choose the fruit
00:21:33 initially. He chose to eat it because—and Milton in Paradise Lost, that wonderful, the greatest
00:21:40 book we have about the Garden of Eden, in Paradise Lost, Milton suggests that the sin of Adam is
00:21:47 actual—is actually spiritual sloth. He was too afraid to lose her, so he ate with her, right?
00:21:56 That he had—and Milton dramatizes it. It's the idea that he has to choose in the split of that
00:22:01 moment God or her, because he knows exactly what the consequences are, as did she, death. And they
00:22:10 know that death is radical separation. So for him, you could make an argument. I think there's a lot
00:22:16 of merit in what you say about Adam. Adam didn't do the first sin. But we got to also remember,
00:22:23 this is Garden of Eden. And I think what you said about Adam is really very relevant for us
00:22:29 hundreds of thousands of years later. But for Adam, there had been no sin. There was no sin.
00:22:35 There was no sin that you can experience with sin that would teach you that you have to own up to
00:22:42 it, right? I mean, this is all new territory, isn't it? I mean, Adam, she sinned. He didn't
00:22:49 sin initially. She did. How do you deal with that? And I think his first recognition is, well, we
00:22:55 know what death is. It's separation. So do I, in the moment, choose to follow her, or do I follow
00:23:03 him? And all of this, by the way, is speculative, since the Bible doesn't go into the psychological
00:23:10 motives of what Adam was thinking at the time. But again, the only thing I would qualify, based
00:23:16 on what you said, this is new, too. There's no experiential examples that they have to move
00:23:25 with going forward. So they're inventing—this is the first evasion. Just like Eve's is the first
00:23:31 sin, Adam's is the first evasion of sin. And I think you make a wonderful point that that,
00:23:37 in some ways, is worse. Ultimately, Adam's—and I think God makes this clear—Adam's sin is even
00:23:44 worse than Eve's, somehow.
00:23:46 Pete OK, so did Adam sin more than Eve? I think you could make the case that
00:23:52 Satan was very well-versed in convincing people to do bad things, and therefore, Eve fell under the
00:24:00 spell of a multi-millennia expert in lying and provoking vanity. So, that, I mean, Satan is
00:24:09 nothing if not a very experienced sophist and a dangler of imaginary goods that cost you everything
00:24:14 in the long run. So, yes. Whereas, what was Adam subjecting himself to? Well, you can say sort of
00:24:23 fear of loss. I did a speech some years ago in Orlando where I talked about how terrifying women
00:24:29 are for the majority of men because they hold our genetic survival in their hands, or I suppose,
00:24:36 in their loins. So, if you are rejected by women, your bloodline ends. And so, we have a desire to
00:24:44 conform to the preferences of women because otherwise we are outcasts. And even if we stay
00:24:51 in the tribe, if no woman will mate with us or raise our children, our bloodline ends. So, the
00:24:55 Darwinian impulse is to please women. However, because the men traditionally have been the
00:25:02 holders of the moral law, women draw men away through sex, through seduction, through the
00:25:08 biological reality that you need women, and of course, women need men, but women generally
00:25:12 choose, right? Men propose, women dispose. Women choose the men and say yes or no.
00:25:17 And so, I think that the Garden of Eden also says to men, you have a moral law and you have a
00:25:24 biological imperative. And the moral law must win, of course, the life of Jesus is the rejection of
00:25:31 the biological imperative for the sake of the moral law, and we'll get into the wages of sin
00:25:35 is death in a bit, which I would like to talk in more detail on. But we have, it's not just lust,
00:25:40 it's easy to sort of just say, well, just lust. But it's also, I mean, family, the pleasures of
00:25:46 reproductive life, not just sex, but kids and extended family. And so, I think the warning is
00:25:53 also, women will tempt you with vanity because vanity, thy name is woman, women, I mean, men
00:26:01 have their sins, of course, and pride and violence tend to be the male sins, and vanity and seduction
00:26:08 tend to be the female sins. But beware of women. And I know this sounds misogynistic or negative
00:26:14 towards women, absolutely love women, but we have to recognize the different sexes and their
00:26:17 strengths and weaknesses. And I think the Garden of Eden is saying, you got a moral law and you got
00:26:23 a woman, and there's going to be times where you're going to have to choose. And if you choose the
00:26:28 woman over the moral law, which is the last generation of women or men being destroyed in
00:26:35 divorce, right, where they chose the woman over moral qualities, and this is, I'm constantly,
00:26:41 I feel like half my show is me telling men, choose quality, choose quality, choose quality.
00:26:46 Morality matters more than sexiness. You know, the hot crazy matrix can be somewhat real because
00:26:50 lots of people are willing to feed vanity just as Satan was. So, choose the moral law
00:26:58 and you get love, choose the woman and you sin.
00:27:01 I think you're 100% right. And I go back to the Garden of Eden. God, we didn't talk about as the
00:27:08 creating of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve were not created at the same time, nor were they created
00:27:13 in the same manner. Adam was created exclusively for himself, right? God took the dirt of the
00:27:20 ground and molded with his own hands Adam and then kissed him, literally put his mouth on Adam's mouth
00:27:27 and breathed in him. Really remarkable painstaking. Woman, on the other hand, is a fragment of man,
00:27:34 right? Adam was put to sleep and out of a rib, right, comes woman. And so they are not, so
00:27:41 clearly from the beginning, they are not. The authority morally, and you said this, belongs to
00:27:46 Adam. He is morally responsible, like a father would be, not just for him, but for his wife as
00:27:53 well. And any kids that come, ultimately the father, until they're of age, you are responsible
00:27:58 for them. That responsibility falls to the father, right? Not the mother, to the father. She nurtures,
00:28:04 she weans, she loves, but that belongs to the father. And so Adam is responsible for her.
00:28:12 So in other words, and this is the part that's always puzzled me about the story, there's Eve
00:28:18 and she's doing the wrong thing. What is he doing while she's doing it? Right? The Bible is not
00:28:26 clear where Adam is. Is he standing right next to her, or is he someplace else? In Milton's Paradise
00:28:32 Lost, he realized this was a problem, and he separated them. They were different sides of
00:28:38 the garden. But according to this, apparently Adam was right there. Because she hands it to him,
00:28:45 right? So if that's true, if we take the book completely literally, that he's standing there
00:28:51 watching him, if he's standing there watching her, then he already, by not stopping her,
00:28:58 because he has a higher intellect than she does, right, and a more exalted moral position in the
00:29:05 name of the family, then by letting her do that, why is he not talking her out of this? Why is he
00:29:14 not arguing against what the serpent is telling her, if he's there, right? Because all of this
00:29:20 seems to be happening immediately. And if you look at it from that perspective, then right away,
00:29:24 her sin is his sin, because he fails to exercise, as you said, his fatherly or his husbandly
00:29:33 responsibility to look after her morally, not just physically. That makes sense to me.
00:29:38 Peter Well, of course, when I talk to people who've
00:29:44 suffered from things like affairs and so on, my general statement is, like health, sin is about
00:29:51 prevention, much less cure. By the time you're getting to cure, you're a big mess. And affairs,
00:29:58 you know, people don't just meet and mate. It's a whole series of steps, and I think this is what
00:30:03 you're saying. He's seeing there, Eve talking to the snake, and he should be like, "Whoa, whoa,
00:30:07 whoa, whoa, hang on. It's you and me. This is a snake. He's Satan. We've got God. We've got a
00:30:12 good thing here." And you nip it in the butt, right? To me, sin is all about nipping things
00:30:16 in the butt. A day or two ago, the DOJ has just talked about how they busted a prostitution ring
00:30:25 that targets high-ranking politicians and tech giant CEOs and things like that. And it's like,
00:30:32 "Okay, so it's a lot easier to have integrity if you just don't go to the prostitution place."
00:30:39 No, just don't go to the prostitution place, as opposed to, "Oh no, now they have compromising
00:30:45 material on me, and what am I going to do now?" Or, "How do we repair the marriage after the
00:30:51 affair?" It's like, no, no, no. Someone's going to contact you. They're going to be a little bit
00:30:54 flirty. Every public figure has this, right? Somebody's going to be a little bit flirty,
00:30:58 and you say, "Nope, sorry, I'm married." And you don't talk to them. It's like,
00:31:03 stopping the avalanche when it's a snowflake is a whole lot easier than 90 million tons of snow
00:31:09 running into your village. And so the prevention thing is really important. And maybe that's why
00:31:14 he can't take responsibility. Or maybe my thing where he said, "Hey man, the woman you gave me,"
00:31:19 and then something happened. Maybe it's because he didn't take responsibility in the prevention side
00:31:25 that he then dodges responsibility on the aftermath side.
00:31:28 I think you are 100% correct. Let me get a crass analogy. It's as if Adam and Eve are sitting at
00:31:35 a bar having a drink, because the fruit of the tree is alluring, right? The smell of it, the
00:31:42 look of it. They're sitting there having a couple of drinks, and sitting on the other side of Eve
00:31:46 is a guy who's a very buff guy who's flirting with her. And the husband is, as she gets a little
00:31:52 tipsy, the husband realizes that this flirtation is not good, and any flirtation is not good,
00:31:58 but rather than intervene, he just keeps drinking his whiskey, right? Getting more and more confused
00:32:05 and hurt and angry as this goes on. Because that's exactly what happens here. I mean, again,
00:32:10 in Paradise Lost, Milton points out that it's a kind of a rape. What the devil does to her is
00:32:16 kind of a rape. And so there's a great scene in the poem where as soon as she eats the fruit,
00:32:22 immediately the snake becomes erect. Literally, the serpent becomes a big phallus, right? And it
00:32:30 does a little dance in front of her. This is a kind of rape. And what you said, I think,
00:32:35 is 100% correct. Eve's sin is not eating the apple. That is a foregone conclusion. If she's
00:32:43 flirting with this monster--and God warned them there would be a monster in the garden, right?
00:32:48 That they should be careful, they should always be with each other, they should protect each other,
00:32:54 because there's something in the garden. So her sin was talking to it to begin with. Her sin
00:33:00 was allowing herself, putting herself in a position where she could be talked into it.
00:33:07 That's her sin. And notice, but without her willingness to ignore her husband or to turn
00:33:15 away from her husband or to accept what the monster was saying, none of this would happen.
00:33:20 And this is what Milton and I think the Bible says it even clearer. Jesus says it as much,
00:33:28 right? The sin is what you do, not what you've done. Take, for instance, Jesus says,
00:33:34 "I tell you, there's nothing you can put into your body that will make you sinful." Sin comes
00:33:40 from the heart. It comes from lust and greed and envy. She clearly had her heart turned away from
00:33:48 him, even for a short time, to it. That was the sin. The apple was just the logical conclusion
00:33:56 of that. And you said it perhaps more economically than I did, but that's exactly right.
00:34:04 The sin comes, the result of the sin, biting into the apple, is the result of the sin she's
00:34:11 already committed. She has turned away from God and the husband, and she is flirting with evil.
00:34:18 That's the sin. Adam's sin is more conscience, right? He knows what she's done, but he let her
00:34:25 do it. So when he eats the fruit from her hand, that is a much graver. He's not seduced. He is
00:34:32 not tempted. He has chosen her via the apple over God, and that is why Adam's sin, I think, is
00:34:41 gravely more important.
00:34:44 Pete Well, that's really fascinating. The
00:34:47 bar analogy, if I sort of think about maybe the wife is feeling that the husband is kind of distant,
00:34:54 or she has that great suspicion that women have that men are there not for themselves
00:35:00 in terms of their ideas, morals, personality, conversation, that the men are not there for
00:35:05 the woman's personality, but they're there for the woman's body. Right? That's, you know,
00:35:09 "Will you still love me?" Like, "Tonight the night of loving is in your eyes. Will you still love me
00:35:13 tomorrow?" So that's the great fear. I mean, the great fear of men is that women are just there
00:35:16 for money, and the great fear of women is that men are just there for sex. And so she starts to flirt
00:35:20 with another guy at the bar, but Adam's inaction at the bar is what moves her step-by-step closer
00:35:33 to the other man. Because if you cared about my soul, if you cared about me, it's almost like a
00:35:38 love test. If you cared about me, you'd tell me to stop. I mean, I remember many, many years ago,
00:35:44 a friend of mine who had this sort of, like, no-rules parenting, and his kid was, like,
00:35:49 eating sugar and was, like, saying, "Dad, you're supposed to stop me! You're supposed to stop me!"
00:35:54 And she was very aware of the sort of lack of
00:35:57 parenting that was going on, and I certainly agreed with her that he was supposed to do something.
00:36:04 So she moves closer and closer, but it's almost like a test. Do you love me for me, or do you
00:36:09 love me for sex? And again, I know we're in a pre-sex situation with Adam and Eve, but in the
00:36:13 analogy that you make, she moves closer because he's paralyzed. Now, why is he paralyzed? If he
00:36:19 was motivated by what was virtuous, what was good for her, he'd say, "Hey, nice try, but, you know,
00:36:24 eyes over here," like this loosey-goosey guy who cares, right? He's just got abs, I've got virtue.
00:36:30 But he doesn't say that. Now, why are men paralyzed with regards to women? And this is one of the
00:36:35 great modern questions of the world. Why are men so paralyzed by women? Well, if men are there
00:36:43 as moral participants, and we all need moral leadership when we go astray, and in this case,
00:36:48 it's Eve who's going astray, and Adam refuses to assert his moral leadership. Why? Because he's
00:36:53 scared of losing her. He doesn't want to keep her virtuous, he doesn't want to lose her presence.
00:36:59 Does that sort of make sense?
00:37:00 It does.
00:37:02 And so, he won't intervene when she's being seduced by evil because he just wants to keep
00:37:11 her. He doesn't want to keep her good. And because of that, virtue is revealed as weak,
00:37:18 and vice is revealed as strong. And women, like men, are drawn to that which is stronger,
00:37:24 because that's where the protection comes from, because she's going to have, you know,
00:37:27 in the sort of modern analogy, she's going to have babies, she's going to breastfeed,
00:37:31 she's going to be disabled, she's going to lose her sexual market value, she needs a man to
00:37:34 provide and protect. So, if he will not intervene because he's too scared to lose her, and he'll
00:37:39 let her be drawn into evil—in other words, he would rather keep her evil than risk losing her
00:37:44 by being virtuous—good is weak, evil is strong, and that's where she goes.
00:37:50 And the one thing that's missing from the equation—well, two things, actually,
00:37:54 what you said is right—but don't forget, by turning away from him to test him or test
00:38:00 how much desire he has for her, don't forget the element of humiliation. It's not just
00:38:07 he wants to keep her sexually, but it's humiliating, it's emasculating what she did to him.
00:38:12 That's where the sin is, right? Her focus on the serpent takes away from his very masculinity.
00:38:19 And that's the first thing, and I don't want us to lose another point of the analogy as well.
00:38:24 There are artificial stimulants here, right? The tree is alluring. God said you'll be—you
00:38:32 started off talking about this—there's a great allure about the knowledge of good.
00:38:37 Who wouldn't want that, right? Who wouldn't want what the snake is selling?
00:38:41 So, you've introduced something else into the equation, like at the bar, a stimulant, something
00:38:48 that dulls moral faculty, right? And the tree is certainly soporific, the tree is certainly—it's
00:38:57 heady. In fact, it tells us in the Bible that when she eats it, she almost metaphorically has
00:39:03 an orgasm. I mean, it thrills her, right? And so, when you add to what you said, the act of
00:39:10 humiliation, right? That's why you don't act to some degree. There's a certain humiliation in that
00:39:15 for the man, right? That he shouldn't have to stand up to this guy. Oh, and by the way, this
00:39:21 guy could probably kick his ass, right? Because this is a major thing you're dealing with. This
00:39:26 is a fallen angel you're contending with. How is he going to fight that? Or how's he going to deal
00:39:32 with that? And by the way, violence is also sinful, theoretically, because there has been none. What
00:39:40 is Adam going to do here? Is he going to be the first person to murder something? So, I think,
00:39:46 from Adam in particular, without any experience, he's put in a very bad position from her. And
00:39:52 this is why people who don't like Christianity, and particularly feminists, they attack the Bible
00:39:59 for exactly this, blaming Eve. But if you read the story like we're reading it, actually, Adam is
00:40:04 much more responsible, number one, because of his higher exalted state, and number two, Eve's
00:40:09 behavior here is—what's the word to phrase this? Eve's here is—her sin is more naive, in some way,
00:40:19 and not nearly as knowledge-focused as his. So, in every way, this is not an indictment,
00:40:25 primarily of the woman. But what she does here—and like I said, she's seduced. That woman,
00:40:32 your wife sitting next to you at the bar, in any other circumstance, would not be flirting with
00:40:37 this guy. But she's had a couple of cosmopolitans, right? And so, that tree, that tree with all of
00:40:45 what it stands for and all of what its allure is—think about how—you haven't said it like
00:40:52 this, I will say it. Why do women seek the bad guys? Why do women ignore the guy with the pencil,
00:40:59 the plastic pocket protector who's going to make $400,000 a year being an engineer? Why do they
00:41:05 reject that guy for the dude on the motorcycle and the ripped jeans? This is a corollary of this,
00:41:11 right? There is something about that badness that is—like you said it—bad becomes powerful and
00:41:18 sexy, because it's rebellion. I mean, this is what our kids go through, right? Rebelling is the only
00:41:24 way, sometimes, especially in a place like the Garden and Eden, where you could completely
00:41:30 elevate the self above everybody else. But when you do that, you are rebelling, and another word
00:41:35 for that kind of rebellion is sin. So, Satan, in a way, is targeting Adam's status through Eve,
00:41:43 and attempting to lower the status of virtue by—because he was lonely, right? Eve was created
00:41:50 because he's lonely, so Adam's like, "Well, if I lose Eve by asserting the moral law and, quote,
00:41:57 controlling her behavior or convincing her," right? Because his enemy is not Satan. His enemy is
00:42:03 Eve's temptation, right? So, if he thinks he's gonna, "Oh my God, that's a giant snake! I can't
00:42:08 win against a giant snake!" I mean, how many times a day do we say that? I mean, obviously, not as
00:42:12 many as we should. So, Satan is targeting Adam's status, and he's saying, "I have power. Adam is
00:42:22 weak, and Adam is weak because he fears loneliness more than evil. And so, he will surrender your
00:42:30 virtue to keep you around, and that's weak." And then she cleaves to Satan because Satan shows
00:42:37 strength. Women cleave to strength. I mean, this is just a—men cleave to sexiness, women cleave
00:42:42 to strength. It's a bit of a sin, but it's kind of inevitable given the differences in child
00:42:46 investment, in child rearing. - Well, and notice, too, what Adam could not have done for her that
00:42:52 the devil does. Adam could not tell her she is more beautiful than God. Adam could not say to her,
00:43:00 "You are greater. I love you more than the God who made us." But Satan says that to her, right?
00:43:06 And so, it's an elevation. And this is—I'm going to do trigger warning right here, trigger warning.
00:43:10 This is outrageously out there, but I'm going to say it anyway. Now, of course, there were no apples
00:43:15 in the Middle East. So, the idea that this is a fight over an apple is nonsense. It's much more
00:43:21 likely it was a pear or something like that. Now, think about what the devil is—the serpent is
00:43:27 dangling in front of her. If he's dangling a pear in front of her, which, you know, looks a lot like
00:43:35 a couple of testicles, it becomes much more seductive when you consider it from that perspective.
00:43:43 And again, I don't want to take out of the equation here. Neither one of them at this moment,
00:43:48 Adam and Eve, are completely in their right moral minds. They're close to a tree they shouldn't go
00:43:54 near. This tree, again, is sensual. It is visceral. It gives off pleasing odors. It is something that
00:44:04 you would want to taste. It looks appetizing. And then you've got the serpent there, right?
00:44:10 And they've not heard the serpent speak the language before. This is a serpent that argues
00:44:17 that "I ate the fruit, and because of that, I went from a crawling beast to a conscious, sentient
00:44:25 interlocutor with her. Look what happened to me! Look what will happen to you!" And then uses that
00:44:33 to separate her from Adam, right? "Your husband doesn't want you to know this. Your husband
00:44:38 has artificial power over you, but you have power over him." So you add to that what I call
00:44:44 "argumentum ad feminism," right? Because this is how feminism has worked in academic circles for
00:44:50 the last 50 years. Men hate you. If you start from the premise that all masculinity is toxic,
00:44:57 then every aspect of masculinity goes away, and that's what you see in our culture right now.
00:45:02 The wages of sin is death. Also, a sentence that has been scrolling and rotating around in my
00:45:10 brain since I was a kid. The wages of sin is death. Now, I understand the traditional, and correct me
00:45:15 where I go astray, of course, but I understand the traditional Christian imperative around that is,
00:45:20 well, you get to live forever if you live a virtuous life. You rejoin God in heaven and
00:45:25 you live forever. The wages of sin is death. But of course, it's not quite true because in a lot of
00:45:30 Christian traditions you go to hell and you live eternally in damnation, or you are separated from
00:45:34 God, you live in a kind of limbo, and so on. The wages of sin is death. Now, the way that it works
00:45:41 in my brain, which has nothing to do with objectivity—I'm just putting out this as a
00:45:44 personal opinion—the wages of sin is death. If you commit to virtue and integrity, your deeds and
00:45:52 life become immortal in a way. I mean, that's Jesus, right? I mean, he didn't have kids, but
00:45:56 he had 2.2 billion offspring, sort of like the—oh, what's the name of that book? It just popped out.
00:46:05 The old school teacher who said, "I never had any children, but I had tons of children nonetheless."
00:46:11 Mr. Chips?
00:46:12 Ah, Mr. Chips, the three-day wonder of writing that occurred out of that. Yeah,
00:46:15 goodbye, Mr. Chips. Thank you. So, I think back, of course, upon—the
00:46:23 sort of original thinker is Socrates in the philosophical tradition. You think of all the
00:46:27 people who lived, who followed their lusts, who followed their pleasures, who followed political
00:46:31 power, who money-making, and all of the lusts of the flesh, and status, and all of that.
00:46:35 We don't even know their names. We don't know who they are. There obviously would be some
00:46:39 offspring scattered across the world now. But if you actually live with integrity—I sort of say
00:46:46 to my audience, I have this bizarre 500-year business plan because philosophers generally
00:46:50 only redeem centuries after they're dead and gone. So, I'm in a sense trying to live forever
00:46:56 through a particular kind of integrity. The way just as sin is death is like, if you follow
00:47:00 the animal, if you follow the beast, if you follow the flesh, the flesh dies and everything
00:47:06 that you are will die with you because there's nothing that outlasts your body. But if you live
00:47:12 with a kind of integrity and hopefully inspire other people to some kind of virtue and honesty
00:47:17 and courage, that spreads in a way that you will be remembered long after your flesh is gone.
00:47:24 While your flesh is gone, your descendants, you know, a couple of generations, it's like,
00:47:28 "Yeah, that's just some guy in a picture in the attic, you know, doesn't really remember you in
00:47:32 any way particular." But when you think of the people throughout history who had some kind of
00:47:38 God-given or integrity-given or moral-given light or inspiration to them, they do live forever.
00:47:46 And they are the stars that never go out, that shine even during the daytime, that inspire people
00:47:52 thousands of years after their death. So, the wages of sin, just following the flesh, is you will die
00:47:57 as the flesh will die and nothing about you will be remembered because there's nothing about you
00:48:02 that's exceptional or speaks to people in the future who are following their own flesh and
00:48:05 are informed by that rather than anything you did by doing the same thing a thousand years ago.
00:48:10 There is a kind of immortality in integrity, and I think that is what that has something to do with.
00:48:17 I think that's well-reasoned out and very philosophical, but I think you left God out
00:48:22 of that equation. We go back to the Garden of Eden, where that phrase was uttered, right? We
00:48:28 go back to the first sin, which is clearly about God. And the one thing I would add, the psychology
00:48:34 of what you just said is brilliant, but to my mind, you've got to go back to God who uttered
00:48:40 that phrase. And when you look at it from that, you can have everything you just said if you just
00:48:45 acknowledge this from my perspective. Notice what God said to them. "If indeed you have free will,
00:48:52 that means you have to be able to choose something that's not me. I don't recommend that you do it.
00:48:59 It's a horrible thing. But I am life. He is the God of life. He is the God who created them. He is
00:49:05 the God who created the universe. There is no life without him." As Dostoevsky would say, "God,
00:49:11 by definition, is immortality." He created life. So if I'm going to allow you to choose something
00:49:19 that's not life, what is the only option? It's death, right? It's death. That's what he means
00:49:25 on a very visceral level, without any psychology necessarily needed. But of course, that's what
00:49:32 philosophers do. We always expound on what the tenets of truth are. And if this is a truth
00:49:38 tenet, right? If God has created us and he loves us to the degree that he makes us free, because
00:49:43 God realizes, he has to realize, if we're not free, then we either follow him without choosing to,
00:49:50 or we rebel against him without choosing to. He can't punish or reward us, or even love us,
00:49:56 if—I tell my university kids, if I create a little mini-me, right, and it just follows me
00:50:02 around telling me how great I look, how my butt looks in those jeans, sooner or later I will
00:50:07 figure out that's just a program. It's not anything more than just vanity. So freedom is
00:50:15 necessary from Adam and Eve, because what benefit does God create creating—and I've never understood
00:50:21 the predestination argument, because if God already figured you out before, you have no
00:50:27 choice whatsoever, you're damned or you're saved before you ever say a word, well, if that happens,
00:50:32 by definition, you really didn't have freedom, and so how can God take pleasure in your love or
00:50:38 have the authority to punish you? So when he says the wages of sin or death, he's simply saying,
00:50:45 you can have me, which is the good that you know. You can have me, who is the life, the life of you,
00:50:51 the life of her through you. You can have that. But you have to be free to choose something else,
00:50:56 and I can—the only thing, if I am existence, the only thing you can choose is nothingness,
00:51:04 nihilism. And that's what this means, I think. But having said that, as the concept of sin has
00:51:09 evolved through culture and history, I think what you're saying about it, too, is exactly right,
00:51:14 because these simple truths of the Bible are endlessly discussable, and there are so many
00:51:20 factors and vectors that come in that you have these really fruitful conversations about the
00:51:25 psychology of this, the emotional of this, but when you go back to the place where that story
00:51:32 came from, all of this wonderful commentary, all these great poems by people like Milton,
00:51:38 all of this commentary on scripture for 25,000, 3,000 years, all this dialectic and philosophical
00:51:47 engagement with these ideas, to me, all of that stuff, that intellectuality, demonstrates
00:51:53 how brilliant and wise the Gospels or even the book of Genesis was, the Bible.
00:51:57 They don't—notice what happens. Jesus doesn't do it. Jesus doesn't go into long, philosophical
00:52:05 disquisitions on why you should do A, B, or C. No, he doesn't! He simply says, "This is wrong,
00:52:12 and I'm going to tell you a little story about why it's wrong, a parable, and I'm not even going to
00:52:16 explain the parable to you. If your heart's in the right place, if you seek God, you'll know what I'm
00:52:20 telling you. And guess what? Free will. If you don't have ears to hear, you ain't gonna see."
00:52:26 This is the same Jesus who says, "Do not cast your pearls before pigs. If people don't want to hear
00:52:32 you, don't convince them. I'm not gonna give my great truth to pigs who don't want to hear me."
00:52:38 People think that Jesus is some beanie baby who just insists on loving everybody. The guy is a
00:52:44 revolutionary, and he said it, not me. I come to bring a sword, not collectivism. I come to bring
00:52:51 a sword. I'm gonna separate mothers from daughters, fathers from sons, the truth versus the
00:52:56 lie, and there can be no medium between the two of those things.
00:52:59 >> Beautifully put, beautifully put. All right, let's do Sin 2.0, 1.0, Garden of Eden 2.0,
00:53:06 the beta release of self-generated sin, that the snake is now within the heart.
00:53:13 Can you give me the Cain and Abel? Hit me with Cain and Abel.
00:53:18 >> Well, I mean, to me it's a pretty obvious on-the-surface story. What changes between Adam
00:53:27 and Eve and their children? Well, you're no longer in a perfect world, you are in a sin world. You
00:53:31 are no longer gonna live forever, you're going to die. And most importantly, that immediately
00:53:37 physical, emotional, and spiritual contact you had with the direct face of God is now lost for you
00:53:44 forever in the material world. So Cain and Abel are the first, really, progenitors who are trying
00:53:50 to navigate this. And the one thing that is required is gratitude. I mean, it's the most
00:53:58 underrated of all the virtues, because gratitude is realizing that the blessings or even the bad
00:54:07 things that you suffer, they're bigger than you. What happens to Cain and Abel is the First
00:54:14 Commandment, which wouldn't be given to Moses for how many thousands of years, but it's the
00:54:19 same idea. Abel honors God with sacrifice. Sacrifice is nothing more than gratitude.
00:54:27 You are simply acknowledging the God for whom all this is possible. That's all, you know,
00:54:33 really go back all the way to the beginning of Genesis, the one and only thing God has ever
00:54:37 asked for, whether it's God or his son Christ, is you have to put me first. You have to know
00:54:43 who I am. You have to realize that with me, you can live in this material world to get to the
00:54:50 perfect world. Without me, like you said, you die and you're forgotten. And so, Abel offers up to
00:54:59 God what God is due, which is, call it whatever it is, gratitude. The ungrateful Cain doesn't.
00:55:06 And just like Adam, this is the beauty of this stuff, because the Bible keeps repeating these
00:55:12 tropes all through human history. The same thing Adam did to Eve, she did it, not me, is the same
00:55:19 thing that Cain does to Abel. "Well, you made me look bad. You're the one who's—" It's not the
00:55:25 fact that I was ungrateful that mattered, it's that you showed me up. If you had been ungrateful
00:55:31 like me, then we'd be in the same boat and God wouldn't be mad at me. And so what happens?
00:55:36 Unlike the serpent, who simply tempts to sin and death, Cain actually kills, right? The first
00:55:43 murder—and that's a wonderful image, right? The first world, the murder in the history of humanity
00:55:48 was brother in brother. We know that most people who are murdered are murdered by their friends
00:55:54 and family and loved ones. And you see that pattern playing out. And I could point you to
00:56:00 26 different versions just through the book of Exodus where this keeps coming up, right? And that
00:56:06 first commandment is gratitude. And I would suggest, too, look at American culture right now,
00:56:10 or even Canadian culture. One of the reasons we're losing civilization is because we're teaching
00:56:15 children that not only should they have no gratitude for their countries, they must despise
00:56:20 them. Patriotism is evil, and patriotism is nothing more being grateful—it could be misused, but it is
00:56:27 gratitude for the country and what it's provided you. You want to know what I believe this sincerely.
00:56:33 99% of the problems Western culture has is a lack of gratitude. Parents are no longer—kids are no
00:56:39 longer respectful and grateful for their parents. Everybody, particularly the younger generations,
00:56:45 take for granted what they have. We as a country take for granted that we're never going to be
00:56:50 physically attacked, that we're always going to have these standards of living. And I think that
00:56:55 when Shakespeare pointed—and you and I, once you and I did a wonderful talk about King Lear,
00:57:01 that play is about gratitude. And it's point—Shakespeare's point is this. The last
00:57:06 virtue to go before civilization collapses is gratitude. Everything else can go, but when that
00:57:15 last safety net—it's the last one—when we are no longer grateful, that's when the anarchy follows.
00:57:22 And that's what you're seeing in the streets of Western cultures right now.
00:57:25 And he does the same thing with Cain that he did with Adam, will you confess? Where is your brother?
00:57:35 "Hey man, don't know him. I can't keep track of everything he does." You know, that weaselliness.
00:57:41 And that to me is the sin murder. Yes, of course the sin is murder in the same way that the sin is
00:57:47 eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but the punishment doesn't come until
00:57:53 after the unreality, after the denial of self-ownership. And I think—
00:58:00 You see, the sin is his jealousy of Abel, right? That's the sin. And that sin becomes—just
00:58:09 jealousy is the sin, right? Because he doesn't give God what is due, Abel does. Abel gets pat
00:58:17 on the head, Abel gets praised, and now the little boy is angry because he wants the praise but he
00:58:23 doesn't want to give up what he has to give it. I think you're exactly right, it's the same story.
00:58:28 Right, and I think God would be quite upset with people to whom he gives self-ownership.
00:58:38 My definition of free will is it's our ability to compare proposed actions to an ideal standard.
00:58:43 Because it's one thing animals can't do, and even if you try to resist that,
00:58:47 you're comparing proposed actions to an ideal standard so there's no escaping it.
00:58:51 If you give somebody self-ownership and then they deny self-ownership,
00:58:56 I think that is the rejection of the gift. The great gift, and obviously sometimes it feels like
00:59:02 a real curse, is self-ownership. People said to me, "Are you angry about being, obviously,
00:59:09 platformed as you know some years ago?" And it's like, "No, no, no, no, I own that. Who
00:59:13 de-platformed me? I did. I took on risky topics, I took on stuff that I knew was going to be
00:59:18 upsetting, I did it for very good reasons that I absolutely stand by. I was trying to bring peace
00:59:22 and reason to the world by reducing social conflict and in particular racial conflict.
00:59:25 But no, I did it! I don't want anyone to take that away." And the temptation of victimhood
00:59:33 the temptation of unreality, the temptation of feeling hard done by, is the rejection of
00:59:41 self-ownership. And the rejection of self-ownership is, to me, one of the most fundamental sins.
00:59:46 Because you choose to not choose, and that's contradiction.
00:59:51 Amen. You got 100% right there. And what does God say in the book of Revelations? Because you were
00:59:56 lukewarm, neither hot. "I could tandle you," God says, "if you were a sinner, and I could handle
01:00:02 you if you were a great lover, but I can't handle that." Refusing to choose is the—and Dante makes
01:00:08 it so beautifully clear in his Hell that many of the people—the very first people you meet in Hell,
01:00:14 in Dante's Inferno, are not the great conscious sinners. The very first ring of Hell is the
01:00:21 those who would not choose, right? Those who adamantly refused to choose good over evil,
01:00:27 and they stood in the middle. Which is what you see all over our culture. And I think what you
01:00:31 said is 100% correct, too. That what is ownership? Self-ownership. You can only have that if you have
01:00:39 consciousness. That's what separates us from the animals. We are conscious that we are something
01:00:46 other than an animal. And that consciousness gives us our free will. And it's a huge burden,
01:00:52 right? Dostoevsky makes it very clear. The biggest problem for human beings—and
01:00:56 the source of all of our suffering, spiritually, emotionally, mental, all of our suffering—animals
01:01:05 don't know they're going to die. Animals live blessedly not knowing what's going to happen to
01:01:10 them. They don't have to worry, like you said, about following their instincts is good, even if
01:01:15 those instincts are your kitty cat who tortures that mouth to death before he eats it. That's
01:01:21 instinctive. You can't—when you come to my house and my golden retriever humps your leg,
01:01:25 you can't arrest him for sexual harassment! Because we know that is their nature. Our nature is not,
01:01:33 and what separates us is consciousness. And so in other words, we're aware. We're aware of who we
01:01:38 are, and we are aware that there are consequences for the things we choose, even if they're
01:01:43 instinctive. Hence, you cannot have free will without consciousness. The mechanism in the human
01:01:49 animal that triggers this free will, in my estimation, proves it, is consciousness. And
01:01:56 the great—Buddha made the same argument. "Life is suffering," he said. Human life, recognizing
01:02:02 who we are and what our fate is in the material world, that is suffering by definition.
01:02:09 The biggest problem human beings have, I would argue, we are conscious of our deaths.
01:02:14 And from infancy, we are aware of that. And how much of what we call neurotic behavior is an
01:02:21 attempt—things like addiction, right? Self-cutting. How much of that is a response to the burdens? You
01:02:28 said it's a huge burden, Steph. It's a huge burden to be an animal with a conscience and consciously
01:02:34 an animal. And I think if you got rid of our—and what would happen if you got rid of our
01:02:39 consciousness? Immediately, the first thing would go would be our free will, because then we would
01:02:44 be just creatures of nature again. >> Well, which is why when you have a dog that attacks people,
01:02:51 we punish the owner, because the dog does not have any capacity to compare its proposed actions to
01:02:56 an ideal standard, but the owner does. >> Even—it's even Adam, right? You punish Adam for what Eve
01:03:02 did because you didn't stop Eve, right? Or—the trope keeps repeating through human history.
01:03:08 >> Well, they both get punished. She gets punished with childbirth and he gets punished with work,
01:03:14 so they do both get punished. But I think, yeah, that makes sense that he would—go ahead.
01:03:20 >> The dog who attacks the person gets put down, too, right?
01:03:23 >> Yes. >> But the owner pays another price.
01:03:28 >> Yeah, the dog gets put down because it's dangerous, the owner gets punished because he's
01:03:34 immoral, and those two are— >> Amen. Irresponsible, yeah.
01:03:37 >> Yeah, this gratitude thing, you know, I of course talk to a lot of young people in my call-in
01:03:41 shows, and I hear this, "I can't believe how much I have to pay for rent and inflation." And, hey,
01:03:48 man, look, I get all of that. I understand that. And one thing I sort of want to remind people is
01:03:52 that, oh, no, you might be the second or third wealthiest generation out of the 15,000 generations
01:03:58 of human beings. Oh, no, out of 15,000 generations, you came in number two or number three, and all
01:04:06 you do is look at number one and say, "It's terrible. My life is terrible." And, you know,
01:04:11 I get that you can't fill your belly by looking at hungrier people, but for heaven's sakes,
01:04:16 you can't say, "I'm a terrible athlete," if out of 15,000 athletes, you come in only second—"Oh,
01:04:22 no, I only got the silver or the bronze. It's terrible." And it's like, can we not be grateful
01:04:28 that at least, okay, yes, there's inflation, yes, there is war turbulence, there is the predation
01:04:32 upon the next generation through debt, all of that sort of stuff, absolutely. But we do have
01:04:37 the capacity to have these kinds of conversations, which is unprecedented in human history.
01:04:41 The fact that people are able to listen to philosophy, to listen to you, to listen to me,
01:04:44 that would not have been the case. For you as a professor, yes, but certainly not as widespread
01:04:48 as what you're able to do online. We have this incredible opportunity to communicate in a way
01:04:54 that has never been possible since prior to the fall of the Tower of Babel, for heaven's sakes,
01:04:59 and how about having some gratitude for that, but our capacity to compare ourselves to anyone
01:05:06 doing better and then feel self-pity and helplessness and hopelessness is almost
01:05:14 inexhaustible. But to me, it's a very exhausting mindset, which is why I don't understand why it's
01:05:17 so common.
01:05:19 Well, I do. I think I do. Because what the progressive left wants is dependence. They
01:05:24 don't want individuality, they don't want personal liberty. What the socialists really want, let's be
01:05:30 clear about this, is collectivizing humanity, which is exactly what the Tower of Babel was
01:05:35 trying to do. We want to deal with people as collectives, not as individuals. Individuality
01:05:39 gets in the way of the collective. And here's my statement to it. Why are they attacking gratitude?
01:05:45 Why is the progressive left, let's call it what it is, the globalist, socialist, materialist,
01:05:50 atheist left, why are they attacking so vehemently the traditional supports of Western culture,
01:05:56 one of them being gratitude? Well, think about what happens. If you grow up generations who are
01:06:02 not grateful, without gratitude, you will never sacrifice. There is no sacrifice unless you're
01:06:10 grateful.
01:06:10 It's a kind of excess that Abel had.
01:06:12 You will never, yes, you will never suffer for it. And what they don't want, they think by
01:06:18 eliminating suffering, they will create a heaven on earth, right? What's the Tower of Babel? They
01:06:24 will make heaven on earth, and therefore everyone will get along and reason is all that we need,
01:06:29 and everybody will no longer be emotional, no more fighting, no more disagreements,
01:06:34 completely opposite of what human nature is. Even if there's no God, it's completely opposite to
01:06:39 what human nature is. And I think to me, the danger of losing, not being ungrateful, by definition
01:06:47 doesn't cause any immediate harm. That's not going to kill people. It's the next step. And the next
01:06:54 step of, there's two things that come with ingratitude. One, you just nailed one, entitlement.
01:07:00 On the other side, an absolute refusal to sacrifice for anything other than what you want.
01:07:07 And I think we see both of those things in this culture. You entitle them, by not making them
01:07:11 grateful, they see that not only should they have to sacrifice anything, but others should be
01:07:16 sacrificing everything for them. And you get the kind of revolutionary generations we're seeing now
01:07:23 who will completely jettison 250 years of American culture in the name of socialism,
01:07:29 because they are so badly miseducated, and they've been told that their animal wants and desires
01:07:35 trump everybody else's rights and humanities.
01:07:38 Well, that's the, I mean, the great satanic temptation is this universal basic income,
01:07:44 and you can stay a child, you never have to grow up. We'll give you all of the benefits of
01:07:51 adulthood. You can go drinking, you can have as much sex as you want, you can do drugs, whatever
01:07:55 you want to do. We'll give you all the benefits of adulthood with none of the material requirements
01:08:00 of adulthood. We'll give you all of the benefits with none of the responsibility, all of the goods
01:08:04 with none of the labor. And of course, people will pay for that with all the liberties that
01:08:09 exist, even the bad ones, like even the liberty to do bad things, they will end up
01:08:14 with nothing and massive control, and that's the great illusion.
01:08:18 I will free you from consequences means I will free you from your humanity and probably liberate
01:08:23 your soul from your body up against a wall in that truly horrible socialist kind of way.
01:08:28 Now, I want to make sure we get to our good buddy Jay. Jesus and the revolution of sin
01:08:35 that Jesus brought forward and that Jesus was killed for, because
01:08:41 Judaism, traditional Judaism, Christianity, seem to me to have quite different relationships
01:08:47 with regards to sin, and what did Jesus do that was so revolutionary?
01:08:51 Well, I think the sin was dealt with by God in the Old Testament legally. He said,
01:08:58 "I will get into a covenant, right? I will make a contract with you, Abraham. I'm not going to
01:09:03 expect you to be spiritually wonderful. I'm not going to expect you, Abraham, to have to become
01:09:09 philosophical in your behavior. Here's what we're going to do. I'm going to lay out a number of
01:09:13 guidelines and laws and commandments. If you follow those things, I will deem you righteous."
01:09:20 That's the word in the Old Testament, "righteous." But righteous, as Jesus points out, is simply
01:09:26 being legal. The slave owners who owned slaves were righteous because they had a right—slavery
01:09:34 was normal—and as long as they, as God said in Deuteronomy, "treat the slave, the widow,
01:09:41 the orphan well," that's righteous. And so what Christ—so in other words, it's the letter of
01:09:46 the law. Whatever God has said we must do, we do. This is what the Pharisees' problem was.
01:09:51 They no longer loved the people. They no longer sacrificed for the people. They used the people
01:09:57 for their own aggrandizement, right? But that was all legal because they were righteous in the eyes
01:10:03 of God. They washed their hands before they ate. They said the right prayers at the right time.
01:10:08 They wore the right clothing, took all the best seats at the feast, everything they were supposed
01:10:12 to do. Jesus attacks that virulently. He says, "No longer." Now it's the spirit of the letter,
01:10:19 not the reason, not the legalitism. It's no longer the letter of the law, it's the spirit.
01:10:27 It's not enough to follow rules. That's why, and I tell my kids in the classroom,
01:10:31 notice what Jesus didn't do, because a lot of people wish he had. Hand out index cards to
01:10:36 everybody with five bullet points. This is what you do, you get to heaven. No. Jesus said, "Now
01:10:41 it is"—notice what Jesus does, and to answer your question, it completely and utterly, utterly
01:10:48 ratchets up free will. From now on, it's what you choose. From now on, it's what the decisions you
01:10:55 make. And if the law is wrong, if the righteousness is not good enough, you succumb to that, you are
01:11:02 a sinner, right? You scribes and Pharisees, you are whitewashed tombs. On the outside, you look
01:11:09 perfect, but inside is nothing but rotten decay, because you have chosen the law,
01:11:14 and the law's not good enough. It's mercy, and I go back to the word, sacrifice. Now you're going,
01:11:22 the stronger you are, the more you have, the more you've been blessed, the more you have an
01:11:27 obligation to suffer for those weaker for you. No more. You have to use your power, the gifts,
01:11:36 in radical ways for others, particularly those with less than you, or are less than you.
01:11:42 And this is the great redeeming. To me, it's why Western civilizations survived the fall of Rome
01:11:50 in the 5th century, because the ethos that saved us—because think about the Greeks.
01:11:56 What was the great virtue for the Greeks? It was glory, right? Make yourself glory,
01:12:03 be Achilles, right? Be Odysseus. That was followed by the Romans, and the great virtue of Rome
01:12:08 was duty. Do your duty to your kin in your country. And then came Christianity, and the duty
01:12:17 of Christianity is sacrifice. And you can't—think about what Jesus did. Jesus ended blood sacrifice,
01:12:26 where human beings for thousands of years offered the blood of innocent animals for their sin.
01:12:32 That's a pretty good gig. If all you've got to do is slash the throat of a couple of sheep,
01:12:38 and you can apologize for the orgy you just had, I'm with you. Jesus said, "No more." I am that
01:12:45 sacrifice, and I—think who Jesus is. If Jesus is who he says he is, he is the most powerful creature
01:12:51 to ever walk this earth. It's not even debatable. If he is the creator of the universe, who entered
01:12:56 into this world as a human being, then he is the power. And yet, he was born a slave. He was born
01:13:01 without armies or emperorships. He had no armies, right? He was—he chose poverty. He chose weakness.
01:13:08 He chose weak materialism. He was nothing. He was a slave in a slave culture. He had no formal
01:13:14 education. And when he died, that was the point, right? That I'm going to—you can no longer say
01:13:20 to this God—this is the one God in the history of gods—you can't say to Jesus, "You know what?
01:13:25 You don't know what it's like. You don't know what it's like to suffer. You don't know what
01:13:29 it's like to suffer from human infirmity and disease." Yeah, he does, right? And so,
01:13:36 that's the great legacy of Christianity—sacrifice. We built Western culture, and we created individual
01:13:43 liberties. And this drives me nuts. My university kids, I tell them this all the time. If America
01:13:48 is this systemically racist, completely colonial culture, explain to me, children, how is it
01:13:54 possible that human rights, civil rights, gay rights, women's rights, all of it came out of
01:14:00 Western culture and nowhere else? And the great legacy of Christianity—long winded, I apologize,
01:14:05 but this is the answer to your question about the revolution of Christ—everything shifted for those
01:14:12 who have to start looking after those who don't. If you want heaven, you have to give of yourself,
01:14:18 not cause everybody else to give. Like socialism wants, you must give for yourself. And what a
01:14:24 beautiful—even if there's no God, I would—there would be no need for sacrifice if there's no God.
01:14:31 First of all, let's be clear. If there is no God and we're just animals, then you might as well
01:14:35 herd us like you herd goats, because none of it really matters. But because of God, or at least
01:14:41 the idea of God—I think this is the most beautiful idea in human history, the idea that we're going
01:14:46 to have a philosophy, a religion, a way of living in which those who have are obligated to look
01:14:52 after those who don't. And ask yourself the question, if everybody on earth made everybody
01:15:00 else more important than them, you would have no racism, you would have no war, you had no poverty.
01:15:06 I mean, Jesus said, "We're never going to pull this off." But those of you who choose it,
01:15:12 live it, and suffer for it, you will be rewarded for it. And that's what keeps—here we are,
01:15:18 2,000 years later, without—now think about that, too. Christianity took over the Roman Empire
01:15:25 without following a shot. There were no wars, there were no killings. It's one of the only
01:15:30 major philosophical movements that had this kind of a reach that did not need violence for Rome to
01:15:37 become Christian. No, I get it, Christians behaved violently moving forward, I get that.
01:15:42 But Rome was conquered intellectually purely by the beauty of that idea. And the more we bury
01:15:50 that idea today in the name of politics, worse we're going to be.
01:15:53 >>And this is this boomerang thing that's hitting me in sort of my later middle age, which is
01:15:58 ability in the Roman Empire is dominance, power, control, resources, status, wealth. I mean,
01:16:07 Jesus goes to the wilderness and Satan says, "You can have the whole planet, man. It can be your
01:16:12 plaything. You can run, rule, everything. Everything." Now, that's Rome! I mean,
01:16:18 and everybody in Rome would be like, "Yeah, I mean, you don't even need to finish the sentence,
01:16:23 Satan. I'm signing with blood. My offspring, children, sacrifice, goats, doesn't firstborn,
01:16:28 doesn't matter." And he says no. So, the idea that his eloquence, his wisdom, his learning,
01:16:37 his compassion, his speaking abilities, his abilities to create spontaneous analogies,
01:16:43 that that is not something that he should use for the aggrandizement of himself or his own
01:16:48 bloodline. This idea that ability is not dominance, ability is obligation, is, you know, when I sort
01:16:56 of look back as you get older, you sort of look back at your life and rather than the chaos of
01:17:00 the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to and the chaos of the everyday, you look back and
01:17:04 you say, "What have I been doing? What's the shape of all of this? What is the purpose of all of this?"
01:17:10 Because you start to think of your eulogies and you start to think of, you know, whatever may
01:17:13 be written after your life. What was the shape of it? And this idea that ability is obligation,
01:17:21 not dominance, has been very central to my life and it comes out of my Christian upbringing,
01:17:25 that I have some eloquence, I have some artistic abilities, I have some charisma, I have—and
01:17:30 for me, the purpose of it is to serve others, not—you know, I can't tell you over the years
01:17:37 how many people have been like, "Man, if you'd gone into politics, if you'd gone into sophistry…"
01:17:43 Because I can argue the opposite position, like that was one of the things I did in Debating Club
01:17:47 and I've always been very good at it. In fact, in my parenting book, I have a whole "Here's
01:17:51 Why You Should Be Violent Against Your Children." I have a whole chapter on that that's really
01:17:55 passionate. And so, I can argue things I don't believe, for sure. That's, I think, one of the
01:18:00 things you have to do to be considered even remotely intelligent or aware. And so, the idea
01:18:05 that I took—and I'm not trying to sort of be self-praising here because it's a very humble
01:18:10 thing. Okay, so I got some gifts, how should I use them? And the Roman answer and the Greek answer is
01:18:16 "To win, to triumph, to drink the blood of your enemies, to take more women, to…"
01:18:21 Whatever, like this really tribal, primal, half-ape, half-lion approach that my skills
01:18:27 and abilities—which, by the way, I did not earn. I did not—I was not gifted. I didn't earn this.
01:18:34 You know, like, I'm born with the brain I'm born with. I'm born with some eloquence. I'm
01:18:38 born with some reasoning capacities. I can't say that they're mine. I mean, if I make a picture,
01:18:44 okay, I made a picture. But I didn't earn the brain that I have. Hopefully, I can put it to
01:18:49 some good use in the world. You're being grateful. There's your gratitude right there.
01:18:53 Wow, I got a real funhouse mirror of a brain gang going on up here, top of the cerebellum.
01:18:59 It's really cool. It's a great place to be. It's very exciting. It's a lot of fun.
01:19:02 What's it for? Is it for me to make money? Is it for me to gain power? Is it for me to
01:19:11 provoke envy in others? It's like, no. It's the very beginning of everything I've done. I have a
01:19:15 lot of vulnerable people call me in the call-in shows. I always say the same thing. I can't tell
01:19:19 you what to do, and even if I could, I wouldn't. The purpose is for you to think. The purpose is
01:19:23 for you to understand. The purpose is for you to follow virtue and reason. And this idea that
01:19:29 to be blessed—and it is a blessing. Blessing is the best word that there is, because I did not earn
01:19:35 who I am. One of my best friends died when I was 11 years old. He just died in his sleep,
01:19:42 congenital heart defect. Did I earn being 57? I did not. Yeah, okay, I exercise, I eat well,
01:19:48 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but my friend was an athlete and died in his sleep when he was 11
01:19:52 years old. All of these extra 46 years, I didn't earn those. I just happened to be lucky. And what
01:19:59 should we do with our good fortune? Should we sort of pretend that it's all ours and we just made it
01:20:05 all and built it all ourselves? Or should we say, "I've been very lucky in what I've been given."
01:20:09 What is that luck for? Well, surely it should be to try and make the world a better place,
01:20:14 to try and deepen and widen people's understanding of the truth of facts, and to try and serve
01:20:19 virtue. But, you know, and this is the example of Jesus that nobody wants these days, which is why
01:20:24 the virtue signaling is so much fun. I mean, you know this, you've had your complaints,
01:20:30 I know this, I've had my issues. How does serving virtue do with regards to what evil people want?
01:20:37 Well, you kind of interfere, you know, come not between the dragon and his wrath and his prey.
01:20:42 If you stand between the evil doers and the evil they want to do, or you take away their victims
01:20:47 or the people they're exploiting, they tend to get kind of upset, to put it mildly. And so, the idea
01:20:54 that you can have virtue without risk, that's why God or nature or philosophy or whatever puts in
01:20:59 such a desire for virtue, because it's the most extreme sport that there is in the universe,
01:21:04 is to be a good person. It feels like that. And all the people who say, "Well, I want virtue,
01:21:09 and I want all of that wonderfully good feeling of virtue, but I don't want to harm the interests
01:21:15 of any evil doers," like, well, that's not virtue. It's like saying, "Oh, I have a great medicine for
01:21:20 an illness." It doesn't do anything negative to that illness at all. It's like, well, then it's
01:21:24 not a medicine by definition. So, this idea that we can have people—this is, I think, what the
01:21:30 devil gives you. He says, "I'll make you feel good. I'll make you feel virtuous by having you attack
01:21:36 other people. Oh, these people are bad. I'm going to go attack them." Then you'll feel virtuous,
01:21:41 but there'll be no risk in it. And I think that is—there has to be a danger in it, and I think
01:21:49 that's not the—whether you say Socrates on the secular side or Jesus on the theological side,
01:21:54 if you don't get that, you can't be good. >>Risk is another synonym for sacrifice,
01:22:01 because when you risk yourself, you make yourself vulnerable, and you are sacrificing. And you,
01:22:05 very interestingly, in your wonderful comment just there, you called yourself a couple of times
01:22:12 blessed and other times lucky. And to me, that's the razor's edge. Lucky means coincidence. Lucky
01:22:20 means unfair. It means that—random. It means maybe you weren't lucky at all, because in some
01:22:27 other ways, you are unlucky. Certainly with hair, you and I didn't check in, but my point is that
01:22:33 blessings come from a blesser. There's a difference. A blessing is somebody who's
01:22:41 blessing you with gifts they expect you to do, and that's Jesus' argument. God made you to do
01:22:49 something for him. He gave you what you have to pay him back. Don't hide our candles under a
01:22:56 bushel. You've been given gifts, you've got to lead into the world with them. And how about that
01:23:01 wonderful parable of the rich man's going away, the rich man's God, right? He gives one talent,
01:23:08 a gold piece, right? But we know the pun. One gold piece to one servant, the next servant gets five,
01:23:16 the next servant gives ten, and he goes away. Comes back years later and calls the three servants and
01:23:22 says to the one he gave five talents, "What did you—ten talents—what did you do with my talents?"
01:23:27 He says, "Oh, I invested them. I know you're a hard man, sir. I know that you expect return,
01:23:32 so I took your ten talents and I turned them into ten more. Here, take the twenty. The same
01:23:37 with the guy who got five. I know you're a hard man. You gave us so that we would make more.
01:23:43 Here's your ten of the five you gave me." And that last little punk says, "You know what?"
01:23:48 Because this sounds mean. It sounds mean. One of the things that Christianity's pilloried for,
01:23:54 these kinds of parallels. The poor little guy who only got one talent, he says, "I wrapped it in a
01:24:00 napkin and I buried it underground because I know you're a hard man and I didn't want to lose what
01:24:05 you gave me." And he throws that servant out of the house and says, "I'm going to take your one
01:24:12 talent and give it to the man who has ten because you have failed." Now, from a socialist perspective,
01:24:17 that's horrible. This is why you Christians are nuts. But it has nothing to do with money.
01:24:23 They always think about material when they see this. It's spiritual gifts, right? And if God
01:24:28 gives you even just one little thing that you can do, he expects you to do it and do it for the
01:24:34 greater need of others. And I would be tragically remiss if I didn't at least take a moment to
01:24:40 follow up what you said about the three temptations of Christ. This is where we come full circle to
01:24:45 the beginning of this talk. Two things we started with was sin, and then I argued that sin only
01:24:51 exists if you have freedom, right? Which I think is logical. And this is exactly what happened.
01:24:56 People forget the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. Well, he was tempted. His free will
01:25:02 was tempted. The devil took him away. And don't forget, he had been fasting for 40 days, he was
01:25:08 weak. In fact, the devil picks the time. Same with Eve, right? We talked about that in the Garden of
01:25:14 Eden. The devil chooses the times that you're weak, not strong. And so Jesus is taken to the
01:25:19 wilderness, and he has three temptations. And my God, are those three temptations huge. The first
01:25:25 one is, quite literally, materialism. If you are—the devil says to him, "You're hungry." Now,
01:25:30 I'm not stupid, the devil says. I'm not gonna feed you because you couldn't take food from me,
01:25:36 but you're the son of God. If you are who you say you are, you go ahead and command those rocks to
01:25:40 be stone. Because even your father— Pete: Those rocks to be stone, wait! Not stone.
01:25:45 No, you said to command those rocks to be stone, you mean to food, to make food.
01:25:49 Jared: Oh, I'm sorry, to be bread. Yeah, yeah. So, and think about what that is.
01:25:54 What is the answer to human suffering? Well, just material stuff. So, what the devil's
01:26:02 tempting to Jesus toward is to agree that the belly—you can't ask people virtue until you feed
01:26:09 them, or house them, or educate them, or give them a lot of money for every month. And Jesus saw
01:26:15 right through it. His response was, "Man does not live first by the world, but by every word that
01:26:22 proceeds from the mouth of God." It doesn't matter—eating is worthless if you are not right
01:26:28 with God. Because to put the cart before the horse gets you socialism. And then real quick,
01:26:34 the devil whisks Jesus up to the top of the temple and says, "If you're the son of God,
01:26:38 throw yourself down, because in your own scriptures, it says that the angels will take
01:26:43 the Messiah and bear him up lest they do he so much as stub his toe." And this, of course,
01:26:50 is the second great materialist temptation. If you are God, prove it to me. If you are the son
01:26:56 of God, I will only believe you if you empirically verify it. And Jesus says, "You will not test the
01:27:02 Lord your God." Right? Faith is free will. Think about faith for a quick moment. Faith is the
01:27:07 biggest thing that human beings have that is related to free will. We are never more freely
01:27:14 accessing our wills when we believe in that which we cannot verify, and that is God. If we believe
01:27:21 in God, that is the greatest act of free will you have, because you have nothing material to verify
01:27:28 it. That's why faith is so important. And then the one you pointed out real quickly, he takes the
01:27:33 devil, takes Jesus to the top of a high mountain and says, he shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the
01:27:40 world, not just in the Western culture, and the glory of them. That's that Greek word again,
01:27:45 right? The feasting, the orgying, all that stuff. The money, the wealth, the power. And
01:27:52 notice who it belongs to. Notice who God cedes it to. "All this I will give to you," the devil says,
01:27:59 "if you just fall down and worship me." There's your undermining of the first commandment. What
01:28:06 I want to be is the God you worship. You worship the devil, you get worldly trash. You worship God,
01:28:13 you may suffer here, but that will be reckoned unto you. And my last comment is, it's not just
01:28:20 Greece and Rome. Socialism, communism, and fascism are the Greece and Rome for today. They are
01:28:26 atheist philosophies, they are materialist-based, and what do they want? Glory. They demand duty
01:28:34 from their legions, and they want wealth and conquest. And that includes Islam, too. They want
01:28:39 those things. So, what we managed to get away from with the Christian era, to some degree, human
01:28:46 nature is human nature. Christians did bad things, too. But what we were trying to get away from,
01:28:51 philosophical, in the ancient world has come back in the atheist world of today. And that is what
01:28:57 you see threatening liberty across the globe. It's Islamofascism, it's the communism, it's the
01:29:04 socialism, all because they are materialist philosophies anchored in godlessness. And that's
01:29:11 where it origins from.
01:29:12 Pete The idea that "I'll believe you if you give me an external marker" is a great temptation. Oh,
01:29:22 man. You know, people say to me, "Well, hey, man, you don't have a PhD from Stanford in philosophy,
01:29:27 so why should I listen to you?" And it's like, you know the whole point of philosophy is to
01:29:30 reject the argument from authority, right? So, that's number one. Or people say, "Well, I'm going
01:29:36 to need to see you give an IQ test live before I listen to..." And it's like, no, why would you...
01:29:42 Okay, let's say I have an IQ of 9 billion. Does that mean I'm right? Nope. You're just listening
01:29:46 to a number. You're not listening to an argument. The argument should stand and fall on its own
01:29:50 merits, not based upon some sort of marker from the originator. It's a way to avoid thought,
01:29:55 and to avoid thought is to avoid responsibility. That's what people don't like. So, they're
01:30:00 looking for some external markers. Who should I follow? I mean, you know, this is... Governor
01:30:04 DeSantis has been sort of mocked for this height thing. It's like, "Well, but he knows the reality
01:30:09 that in any political conflict, particularly between males, the taller guy gets voted in."
01:30:14 It's, you know, it's sad but true. People are, "Well, he's taller, therefore he has better
01:30:17 policies." Or like, ever since the age of television, politicians have to have hair,
01:30:22 which means only 10% of men who are in old age are available for the political
01:30:28 arena, and that's terrible. You're just kicking out 90% of the talent, and, you know,
01:30:34 probably with a little bit more humility. So, this idea that if you come with a sign,
01:30:40 I'll believe you, it's the avoidance of thought, it's the avoidance of judgment, of evaluation,
01:30:44 of responsibility, and thereby a free will. You're asking to be bowled over. That was a very
01:30:50 subtle thing that Satan did. He said, "I want people to believe in you, not the truth and their
01:31:00 own evaluation of it. I want them to follow you." And I always say to people, like, "Forget about
01:31:04 me. I'm relatively unimportant. It doesn't matter the equation, the arguments that I make, the
01:31:07 evidence I put forward. That's what matters. Forget about me. It doesn't matter." Because
01:31:10 people want to get drawn to the person rather than the arguments, because that way they don't
01:31:16 have to accept the mantle of free will and responsibility. And so, this idea that, "Hey,
01:31:22 man, you'll convince a lot more people if you fly, you'll convince a lot more people if you're
01:31:26 emperor of the world, you'll convince a lot more people if you do more miracles," and it's like,
01:31:30 "But I won't convince anyone. They'll just be following signs rather than thought,
01:31:36 and they'll stay slaves."
01:31:37 [Patrick]
01:31:39 You know, and we go back to sacrifice, which is a consequence of gratitude.
01:31:44 The funny thing about the life of Christ and His ministry, the only one who died was Him. He did
01:31:50 not subject anybody else to death, His idea did not result in the death of anybody else,
01:31:55 that He literally, quite literally, not figuratively, became the sacrifice. And that
01:32:00 was an act of will. I mean, as the Son of God, if that's who He is indeed, then He is the only
01:32:09 sinless one to have ever walked the earth, number one. And number two, the sinless one who was
01:32:14 innocent is the only one in His philosophy who suffered that great sacrifice. And I always marvel
01:32:21 at the crucifixion scenes, because according to the Gospels, Jesus gave every drop of blood He had.
01:32:29 There's that great story where the centurion, not sure if he's dead or not, takes his lance and
01:32:33 pierces Christ under the ribcage, and you get a couple of brownish drops of water and then water.
01:32:40 And I have always philosophically been blown away by it, because you and I are philosophical minds.
01:32:45 Let's say for the sake of argument, if Jesus had come to this earth as the Son of God at 33 years
01:32:51 old, He gathered together a Galilee, and He took a rose thorn, and He pricked His finger and shed
01:32:58 one blessed drop of divine blood. Would that not have theoretically been enough to wash the way
01:33:06 the sins of all mankind? Absolutely. Absolutely. That one drop of blood, that sacrifice from the
01:33:12 only sinless one could easily have done the job. So, why did He go through the dramatic spectacle
01:33:20 of bleeding out entirely? Because it wasn't about just the blood. It was the sacrifice.
01:33:28 And to give blood the way that He gave it, again, puts Him in a position where of all the gods that
01:33:35 ever existed, the one you cannot say of Him. There's a great 18th century poem, and I'm going
01:33:39 to mangle the last four lines of it, but it goes something like this, speaking about Christ.
01:33:45 "All the other gods were strong, but you were weak. They marched to their thrones in glory,
01:33:54 but you alone"—but it concludes like this—"but only God's wounds can speak to our wounds.
01:34:03 And the only God of wounds is you." Right? I mangled that, but that's—I hadn't thought
01:34:09 about it for a long time, but that's it. That's what separates Him from the others. He gave every
01:34:14 drop, He gave everything He was as a sacrifice, and His only commandment to His followers were,
01:34:20 "Pick up your cross and follow me. Do what I have done." And the more you do it—and
01:34:25 one of my favorite quotes from the Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky from the great
01:34:30 saint, Saint Zosima, Father Zosima, he says, "I cannot prove to you that God exists,
01:34:37 but you can become absolutely confirmed that He does. I can't prove it, but I can give you
01:34:44 a trick to know for sure it's true." He said, "Love actively." Virtue signaling is passive love.
01:34:53 Left-wing love is passive. We love Black people, we love gay people. We don't sacrifice anything
01:34:58 for them. We don't do anything for them, but we love them. Right? That's passive love, Father
01:35:03 Zosima said. Love to the point of suffering. If you do—he called it "active love." If you love
01:35:10 actively and you keep doing it, you will be absolutely convinced that there is a God.
01:35:17 That's the only way. And I think, in my life, I think it's true. And you, without bringing the
01:35:22 God stuff in, you just said that about you. Because of your recognition philosophically
01:35:28 that serving others was better than serving you, even though you had the gifts to serve yourself,
01:35:34 you see what a blessing that is. And you said before, whether it's God or nature or whatever,
01:35:41 and at the end of the day, maybe that's not important. They're placeholders. But
01:35:45 doing what, certainly, Christ tells you to do, to love to the point of suffering. I don't know
01:35:53 anybody who's ever done it in my life. I've never met anybody who's done that who's ever regretted
01:35:58 it or ever lost the moral for that story. Well, and there's almost no surer way to
01:36:06 understanding virtue than to do good, because doing good exposes you to evil, and through evil,
01:36:12 you bounce to necessary virtues. So, I think that's another reason why they say love actively,
01:36:18 and then you realize what you're fighting against. All right. Great conversation. I just wanted to
01:36:24 give people the opportunity to find you. If you could talk about your site, your educational
01:36:28 availability to people and so on, that would be great.
01:36:31 Well, we give talks all across the country. We do a lot, but what you do, we have a lot of media
01:36:36 site here. This is Freedom Project Academy. It's an online Christian classical school. We have live
01:36:43 teachers, which is the rub. We have live teachers, live classrooms. Kids have classmates. We create
01:36:49 a virtual classroom. So, for kids who want to do school at home or moms who want to homeschool
01:36:56 but want somebody else to do the grading and the assignments and have the classroom interaction,
01:37:00 we can do that. That's Freedom Project Academy. We have a wonderful media arm,
01:37:04 the Dr. Duke Show, which we do five days a week. You can get the Dr. Duke Show app on any place.
01:37:10 You get free apps. It's completely free. You can get it on Rumble, any place. So, fpeusa.org.
01:37:19 is where you can access all of this. Certainly, we're going to put this video up. I know you'll
01:37:23 put it up on your networks as well, Steph. It's really great to be here with you again.
01:37:28 Our conversations never last a half hour, do they?
01:37:31 We got time. We got time.
01:37:34 But it's awesome.
01:37:34 Well, thanks, Emil. Great pleasure to chat again. I'm sure we'll talk again soon. Thanks for coming
01:37:39 on.